Fatal Flaw

by William Lashner

  Her house was not far from here, on the same side of Main Street, and she seemed to be around more and more. We talked about things, nothing much at the first, the high school teams, some small-town gossip. It is amazing, I’ve found, how a little harmless gossip loosens the tongue. We spoke, and I felt echoes of problems deep beneath her veneer, but she didn’t open up and I didn’t push. Sometimes when you push you push away, and I sensed she was looking for something from me, though I couldn’t yet figure out what. I tried to get her interested in some of the youth activities I had begun, a way to keep the young people out of the quarry and involved in a more wholesome setting. Her sister, Roylynn, serious and reserved, was one of the mainstays of our youth group, but Hailey would have none of it, and, to be honest, I could see she wasn’t the type. But I maintained my warm welcome whenever I saw her, and we continued to talk, and slowly the talks turned from the coyly frivolous to the more serious.

  “I don’t believe in God,” she told me one day in this very office. Her legs were slung over the armrests of a chair and she said it as if she meant to shock me, which I thought sweet, in its way. I mean, in our modern world, could anything be less shocking than that?

  “What do you believe in, then?” I asked.

  “Not much,” she said.

  “That’s a problem, isn’t it? If you don’t believe the ground is solid beneath your feet, how do you dare to take a step? And if you don’t believe the air itself won’t poison you, how do you dare to take another breath?”

  “That’s stuff I can see,” she said. “I believe in stuff like that.”

  “But can you, really? Scientists say the surface of the earth is continuing to shift every moment, not to mention the great uncertainties postulated in the quantum theories of physics.” She gave me a blank look, but I continued on. “And how many in this very town have lungs black as tar from breathing air they thought was safe? No, Hailey, it seems the things in which you believe are not so worthy of belief. What does that tell you of that in which you do not believe? Maybe the only things worth belief are those we can’t see with our eyes, but with our hearts. Maybe that’s what makes belief at all special in the first place.”

  She stayed silent for a moment, thinking. You could see her trying to make some sense of the insensible.

  “I suppose one thing I believe in,” she said finally, “is love.”

  “There you are, Hailey,” I said. “And what is love, after all, but the purest manifestation of God’s presence on the surface of the earth.”

  I was pleased with myself at coming up with that. It seemed I had given some semblance of an answer in an area where there are truly only questions, and Hailey, well, she walked out with something like a smile. I felt pleased with myself. But I’ve learned since that self-satisfaction often blinds us to the fact that we are traversing the most treacherous of territories.

  “REMEMBER BEFORE,when you said love is like a piece of God right here on earth?” she said to me a few afternoons later. I was working then in the cemetery, trying to keep it as best I could with what little horticultural talent I had, and she was helping me to yank out the more aggressive weeds.

  “I don’t think you can divide God into pieces like that, Hailey, but I might have said something to that effect, yes.”

  “Does that include any kind of love?”

  A good question, that one, and she asked it with a kind of urgency, as if it had been troubling her over the past few days. I could see the problem right away, the dilemma I had blithely stepped into like a pile of horse dung, but I assumed I could wipe it off my shoes with little fancy blather.

  “I suppose it does. All love is a great gift,” I said carefully. “But how that love is expressed can turn it from something godly to something else.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Well, Hailey, you might love your dog, the emotion might be stronger than you could ever expect and that would be a lovely, godlike thing. Jesus felt great love for all the animals in his kingdom. But you wouldn’t marry your dog, you wouldn’t take vows in a church with a dog, trying to be man and wife in the eyes of the Lord with a canine. That just wouldn’t do. That would be worse than silly, don’t you see?”

  She looked at me for a moment and then said, “You’re talking about sex.”

  “Am I?” I said disingenuously, because I was, absolutely, and Hailey was always too sharp to slip even the most clever bit by. “Well, maybe that’s part of it. But whatever it is we’re talking about, it’s not the love that’s the problem, it is the way it is expressed. Propriety is not just a matter of how to sip tea at some dowager’s house. It is more, far more. It is how to live a life. And there are guides if you need them.”

  “Anne Landers?”

  “Yes, or the Bible.”

  “Please.”

  “Hailey, you know full well where we are and what I am. I even suspect that is exactly why you are here.”

  She didn’t respond, but the posture of her body showed she knew I was right about that.

  “And sometimes,” I continued, “there are things we know from experience, our own experience or that of others we trust enough to listen to. For example, I can tell you true that what might be a sun-dappled love to one might be something else to another.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It is sometimes hard to be sure what we are feeling, really, or what the other is feeling. What might feel like love might be something else, some urgent physical need that seemingly can’t wait, although, of course, science and experience has proven that it can.”

  “You think it’s just lust.”

  “It’s always possible. And when you dress like you dress, it becomes all the more probable, don’t you think?”

  “No, it’s not just that.”

  “Oh, don’t be so sure, sweet Hailey. I’m not totally unaware of the world. I was once a boy myself, you know.”

  She tilted her head at me. “Boys?” she said. “Boys? Oh, no, Reverend, boys don’t worry me.” Then she smiled. “I eat boys like air.”

  I WAS troubled by that last comment, troubled by the whole conversation, to be sure, but that last comment most of all. I realized I had no idea what it was we had been speaking about, and I knew that to be a dangerous thing. Sometimes if you ask too many questions, you scare a child off, but then sometimes if you don’t ask enough questions, you end up talking nonsense. I didn’t know which it was with Hailey, but I felt an unease. “I eat boys like air,” she had said. There was something about that line that tolled familiar. It was like a line from a horror movie, but I couldn’t recall which. So I called a friend of mine, who taught English at a small college in Ohio and who, it seemed, knew every fact about every movie ever made.

  “It’s not from a movie,” my friend told me. “It’s the final line of a poem by Sylvia Plath, although in the original it is men she eats like air.”

  “Plath?” I said. “I don’t think I ever read her.”

  “It’s a girl thing,” she said. “Like Nietzsche is a boy thing.”

  “I never cared much for Nietzsche.”

  “No, I suppose he’s not big among the clergy. So who’s quoting Plath?”

  “Just a young girl who seems to be a bit troubled.”

  “Be careful there, Teddy. Plath is the patron saint of bewitched adolescent girls who find themselves overwhelmed by pain and disillusionment. We just hope they don’t follow her career too closely.”

  “Really. Tell me about her, this Sylvia Plath.”

  “Oh, books have been written. The most important male critics think she’s minor at best, but whole wings of women critics have clutched her to their breasts as an authentic feminine voice struggling free in a male-dominated society. And there’s no doubt about the power in her work. Her father died when she was eight, and that seems to be the major impetus behind all her writing. She cracked up at eighteen, took pills to kill herself, and later wrote a famous book about it called The Bell Jar. Went to Smi
th, then to Cambridge. At a party she famously met a now famous British poet named Ted Hughes. They took one look at each other and they kissed hard—’bang smash on the mouth,’ she wrote in her journal—and she bit his cheek until blood flowed, and that was it.”

  “Oh, my.”

  “Happiness for a time, they married, had children, wrote poetry, made names for themselves. But ultimately he cheated and left her poor with two kids, and she lashed out against him in her work. Many of the women critics blame what happened next on the husband.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Well, there’s a disturbing strain of Holocaust imagery in her poems. She seemed to strongly identify with the Jews marched by the Nazis into the gas chambers. It might be because her father was a German, though certainly no Nazi, having emigrated to America at the century’s turn. Anyway, one night, after her husband had left her, she put out bread and milk for her two children and then stuck her head in a gas oven and killed herself.”

  “My God,” I said.

  “She was thirty.”

  I felt a chill, just then. It wasn’t only that Hailey had quoted a Plath poem, or even the shocking coincidence of both she and Sylvia Plath losing their fathers at age eight, it was something deeper. I sensed a desperation in Hailey, and a sadness, and an urgency, and I suddenly feared where that sad, desperate urgency might lead her. What was it that was eating at her, and would it drive her to some horrible mistake? I hoped she would come in again to talk, so I could maybe calm her or help her. Things would be different if she came in again. I would be more forthright. I would talk to her about Sylvia Plath. I would step in forcefully. I waited for her to come and see me. But she didn’t, as if she was avoiding me, and, for whatever reason, I didn’t go to her. And then I learned, through the normal channels of gossip, that something terrible had happened in the Prouix household.

  IT IS a peculiar thing, sitting by the bedside, chatting amiably about this and that, nothing of any import, chatting oh, so amiably, all the while unsuccessfully trying not to stare at the white bandages that cover a young girl’s wrists. You try to be cheery and funny, you tell stories and both of you laugh, you talk about the exciting events coming up in the near future, and still, all the time, there are those bandages. That’s what it was like for me, sitting beside Roylynn Prouix’s bedside after she was found in the bathtub up to her neck with red-stained water, horizontal gashes on her forearms.

  The house the Prouixs lived in is now owned by the Liptons, and I have since been there many times, and it is pleasant and sunny, but I felt no sun in the house that day. There was a darkness, darker than the familiar black mood of a house visited by tragedy. Mrs. Prouix thanked me for coming and offered me a cup of tea, and I sat with her in mostly silence in the kitchen as she made it and I drank it. She smiled tightly and hugged herself as if she wanted to disappear, and I saw not a spark of life in her eyes. When she talked about her daughter, she spoke softly, in phrases so common they were devoid of meaning. “She’s feeling better now.” “Everything will be all right, I am sure.” “It is so nice when friends come to visit.” “More tea, Reverend, or a cookie?” Mrs. Prouix was unable to confront the fact that her daughter had stood on the precipice between her life and her death and had chosen to step through. Hailey came into the kitchen and joined us, subdued, as if her normal energy had been drawn out of her. I tried to start a conversation with her, but she let all my openings fall to the floor and flop there, like fish in the throes of death. It was awkward, more than that, it was unpleasant and frightening, the way she changed inside that house. And then we heard footsteps, coming up the stoop, heavy footsteps, and something strange occurred when we heard them. Mrs. Prouix seemed to shrink, if that was possible, and Hailey brightened as if a candle inside had been lit.

  He came into the house with his overalls spattered with blood. And however dark the house had felt before he entered, it felt darker still with his presence. I stood, instinctively, pushed to my feet by a strange fear. He yelled something crude before he saw me, and when he did finally spy me, he quieted, as if daunted by my collar. Tall, gaunt, his broad shoulders leaning aggressively forward, his hands curled into near fists, his huge knuckles covered with thick black hairs. Lawrence Cutlip. When he saw me, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stared for a moment before he smiled and called me by my honorific and thanked me for visiting his dear ill niece. There was a chilling warmth, chilling because it came too quickly and without effort and was only almost convincing. I felt the urge to leave, to run, to get away from that house, but I stilled my heart and fought my urges and sat down with him. When he offered a beer, I took it and drank, as did he, straight from the bottle. When, in the course of our conversation, he asked me if I played poker, I lied and said only a little, and he brightened even more and invited me into his game at the local Chrysler dealership, and I accepted with an expression of gratitude. When we talked, we agreed on important civic matters, even when I thought him dead wrong. I even laughed at his jokes, no matter how cruel. And all the time I sensed that the darkness I had felt in that house emanated straight from some black abscess in his heart.

  Why did I stay in that house and let the likes of Larry Cutlip ply his charm on me? Guilt, pure and simple, a guilt that I felt as soon as I had heard the disastrous news about Roylynn and that I still believe was utterly deserved. I had missed what it was that was happening with her, missed it completely. I had been worried about Hailey, pretty, provocative Hailey, with her dazzling smile and suggestive questions, and the whole time I had assumed all was right with her quiet, dutiful sister. But that was blind of me, wasn’t it? They were twins, after all, weren’t they? And what it was that afflicted the one was sure to afflict the other. They expressed it differently, obviously, for reasons of their own, but they were both equally at risk, and I, feeling so proud of my forbearance, still had been seduced by the one to the point that I ignored the other. And so, I suppose you could say it was the guilt that sent me searching for an answer.

  Roylynn was referred by the state to a county home for troubled girls, where she could be watched more closely, and I was glad to have convinced the welfare worker of such a move being necessary. She was well out of danger for the moment, I figured, though Hailey was still in that house, with that man, still in need of saving. And so I set my plan. I would identify the affliction and do all in my power to heal those children, that household, that family. The death of the father was part of it, I was sure, and there was precious little I could do about that. But this other, this Lawrence Cutlip, he was part of it, too, I sensed. Part of the darkness came straight from him, I sensed. And so I would do my scouting on his turf, drink with him, laugh at his jokes, play in his game, and all the time hope to gain a glimpse of what was afflicting those girls.

  I lost in the card game. Larry Cutlip was a gambler, hard-core, who was in it, I could instantly tell, not for the conviviality or the conversation but for the money. He wanted me in the game only as long as I swam like a fish, and so as a fish I swam. But I didn’t lose more than I could afford to lose, I hadn’t put myself through college playing poker against private-school boys without learning my way around a deck of cards. So I played, and I lost, and I kept my eyes narrowed as I watched. And what I saw across the green felt table from me was a glimpse of something evil.

  You look at me aghast, as if I am saying it was Satan sitting across from me, but I tell you a man can be evil without cleft feet and a tail. What is it to be evil in this world? It is to have an unsubmitted will, to swear allegiance to nothing but the inner demons of one’s self, and to use every possible means to bend others to those same demons. Most of the people I see have given themselves over to some other good, to their children, their spouses, their friends or families, their business maybe, or their community or country, their people, their God. You, Mr. Carl, as a lawyer, have submitted your will to the workings of our country’s legal system. You, Detective Breger, have submitted your will to the p
ursuit of justice. Both of you, I assume, have submitted your wills if not to God then to the simple ideal of trying to do the right thing. The submission of will is the start of goodness. Matthew five, verse three: “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

  I spent three years ministering in prisons, I’ve seen bad people up close, psychopaths with no conscience whatsoever, but still, in all my life I think I’ve only met three people with a completely unsubmitted will, three people whom I consider evil. One was the mother of a childhood friend, whose evil I recognized only upon reflection long after the friend had killed himself. One was in the clergy, believe it or not. And one was Lawrence Cutlip. It took me a while to see it, they all cleverly hide it behind a veneer of good intentions, but see it I did, and it sent shivers. Nothing existed to temper his desire. Whatever he wanted was right, whoever opposed him was wrong, everything he did was justified and proper, everything in this universe existed for the purpose of serving him. You could see it in the way he dealt with people, the way he dealt with problems, the way, finally, he dealt the cards. It was subtle, but not too subtle for someone trained to see the flip of the finger and the distinct sound of cards slipped from the bottom of the deck at crucial points in the game.

  Before the father of the twins died, Cutlip had been a worthless drunk, surviving out of garbage cans and by petty thefts. Suddenly, in one tragic accident, he gained a house, a family, a certain amount of money, and still he talked about how he sacrificed his life to raise his sister’s family, how he suffered to raise them right. What he did on the surface seemed righteous, but there is always, in evil people, a desperate attempt to portray themselves as the souls of righteousness. And just as inevitably, whenever a portion of the evil slips from that false cover of propriety, they are quick to angrily blame someone else for the evil deed.