In the end I might never have made an attempt at that black lacquered door—might have succumbed to the gallows or wherever accused murderers go these days—if I hadn't seen them the following afternoon. I was still in bed. Still expecting the police. I kept picturing overweight officers with their feet on their desks reading pornography and fingering their guns, just waiting for the signal to pounce. I decided that the rotten-leaf odor must be getting to me, so I opened my window, and that's when I noticed them, Henri and Klara, against the iron fence below. Henri had his sleeves rolled up and a blade of grass between his teeth. His self-confidence was palpable. He must have known the police would return soon enough. Klara was huddled next to him, fingers at her temples. Another headache was coming on. I wasn't surprised. He was steadying her, a hand on her shoulder, yet I could already see the impatience in the gesture. He didn't really care about her. He was doing it because it was expected. "Everything will be alright," he said—the emptiest words I could imagine. He didn't even bother to remove the blade of grass. "The important thing right now is to learn all the facts."
She nodded and touched his tattoo.
"You are interested in my tattoo?" he asked, silky smooth.
"It's just . . . Milo had this crazy idea . . ."
Henri smiled. "Just before I moved to southern Vermont, I received a letter from an old friend, an ex-Legionnaire. Saying that a mutual friend, one I was with in Chad, had died. I did this to honor him."
Relief washed over Klara's face. "I'm sorry to have doubted you," she said. "I'm such a fool."
He narrowed his eyes like a watch-maker studying an intricate Rolex. "You are under a great deal of strain."
She shook her head. "I just don't know what to think anymore. Or what to do."
"Listen. What we have created together is beautiful. Even more beautiful than before the sodium nitrate. You see? Out of death comes a new and better life."
She rubbed her eyes and nodded, and for a moment I was taken by the notion that he meant me, that out of my death would come her own blossoming.
"Your vision, the color and harmony in your daffodils, the perennial border on the south side, by the Helen Traubels—these are touches of sheer brilliance," he said.
"Flattery will get you everywhere," she murmured (and this from a woman who hated clichés!). Henri began curling her hair behind her ear. She gave a shiver and hardly moved, but didn't pull away either. "Should we do more?" he said. "Expand the garden here, to the front of the house?"
She nodded.
"We make a fantastic team," he went on. "I do not want it to end."
"Me neither. It's just . . ."
"Shh." He leaned over and kissed her, a furtive, pecking affair, engaged in shyly on her part and with a good deal of flushed awkwardness. "Not here," Klara gasped. A smile cut across her face. She clutched his hand and led him across the grounds, toward the woods where I'd seen Father with that grisly raccoon, and where (the memory came back to me now) I'd once, years earlier, seen him with her.
I tried to bury this memory by staring at my posters of antique cars. But all their bumpers were lips, all their lights Henri's piercing green eyes. I opened my night table's drawer. Is this a dagger which I see before me, / The handle toward my hand? Yes. I snatched it out of its case, an old bayonet I'd found in the basement years before. I knew I wasn't thinking straight, yet I couldn't help myself. I didn't even change clothes. I ran out of the house in my elephant pajamas and slippers. I ran toward the woods, waving the bayonet over my head, yelling nonsense about driving a stake through evil's heart.
They were easy to spot, huddled against a thin white birch, Klara's blouse falling off one shoulder—gently teased down by Henri's fingers.
"Milo? My God, what are you . . . ?"
There was genuine terror in her eyes. But I refused to look at her. I was watching Henri—watching as he whirled around, eyes hooded with excitement, hair falling in his face. "It's you," he said.
"Be careful, Klara," I blurted out through the trees. "He's dangerous."
But he just laughed at me—laughed in his smug smooth way, a bubbling brook of laughter. "I'm not the one with the bayonet."
I looked down. For the first time I saw myself through their eyes: jealous, unhinged, obviously capable of heinous crimes. I knew I'd just made things immeasurably worse. "Sorry," I said.
"Go home," Klara said. "Right now. Before I call the police."
Home. Where was that exactly? I paused at the front door like I'd always done when returning from school, bracing myself for Mother's neglect. Then it came to me. I knew what I had to do. I hurried up to Klara's room, bayonet still in hand. I searched her night stand and dresser and behind her dolls and porcelain figurines. Beneath the bed I rummaged through her old photo boxes and pulled out her white leather jewelry case. I opened it like an accordion and fingered aside the pearls and earrings and her old wedding band and engagement ring. I was about to close it again when I noticed a gap between the inside and outside bottoms. My heartbeat quickened. I picked up the bayonet. I slipped it into the gap and pried. A false bottom. Beneath it was a silver necklace and a dangling brass key. She still had it. I knew she would.
I carefully put everything back together before fetching Father and dragging him to his room. I closed the door behind me. I didn't turn on the light. The room was dim and shadowy. I walked to the base of the ladder. The attic door hovered darkly overhead. I remembered, after the funeral, Klara admonishing me to stay away from it, implying that a museum might be interested in what it contained. Even at the time I could hardly believe that any self-respecting historical institution would be interested in Father. For all his acclaim he was nothing but a glorified hack. Perhaps it was a museum devoted to hacks? I wouldn't have been surprised. After all, America was the land of strange museums—The Tupperware Museum of Historic Food Containers, The Barbie Hall of Fame, The American Sanitary Plumbing Museum. Why not the Museum of Hack Writers too?
I clutched Father in one arm, bayonet still in hand, and began my ascent. One step and I was airborne. Two and I was floating giddily above the objects below. Three and I was like a spacewalker on the loosest of tethers.
By the time I reached the top I could hardly breathe. It felt like I was on the moon. Still I hesitated, wondering if the attic would smell like Father—a peaty odor to turn my stomach—or contain ground-up corpses in the walls (as in Bricklayer, Brickslayer) or rusted man-traps and spring-guns (as in the aptly titled The Man Upstairs). I reached forward and found the lock, felt its rough unused edge. I fit the key inside. It turned easily. The door popped back with a whoosh, as if pulled by an escaping ghost. But no one was there. No smells, no arrows, no man-trap shots. Just an inky blackness pierced by the gleam from a slatted window. I saw myriad shapes—patches of shadow that might be a desk or a bookcase and others like lines of fluttering flags. It wasn't until I reached along the inside wall, found a light switch, and (holding my breath) flipped it up, that I saw what they really were.
There is, I'm sure, a stereotype in all our minds of what the sanctum of a famous horror writer ought to look like. Red velvet chairs, high bookshelves, carved wooden desk with odd "horror writer" ornaments like a skull or a set of old pistols in glass cases—all familiar from many films on the subject. Equally familiar, from the same source, is the lair of the stereotypical serial killer with its walls covered by newspaper cut-outs and photographs of past and future victims.
Once my eyes adjusted to the light from the track of bulbs (only about half of which still worked) that ran along the pointed ceiling's spine, it was some mixture of these two visions that I beheld. What had appeared to be flags turned out to be sheet after sheet of typewritten paper pinned to a clothesline. Beyond it, on the far wall, beneath the slatted window, was Father's desk, on which stood an old manual typewriter with a half-written sheet of paper still lodged inside. The walls on either side
were cut like triangles to follow the sloping roofline and were covered with bookshelves of various heights arranged pyramid-like to match the space. There was also a day bed in one corner and a bronze statuette of a blindfolded woman holding a set of scales—the traditional embodiment of Justice he'd once been given as a prize at a mystery writer's convention.
I pulled Father toward the day bed and managed to wedge him underneath. Then I closed the door. It was the desk that drew me. The desk where Keith had been set down, sung into verse. For a moment I wondered if there were notes, drafts, where Father had planned his return, his metamorphosis into something real. Or perhaps journal entries describing how Keith was somehow haunting him? But no, it wasn't so simple. What I saw was an array of photos in dusty frames. There was an infant Klara; Klara in pigtails; Klara bending into a Christmas tree; Klara in a plaid skirt hugging a notebook, earnestly delivering the high school valedictory, wearing her Harvard graduation cap with that Brazilian hovering beside her.
There was not a single one of me.
I turned away and gazed at the clothesline. On wooden pins hung several sheets of paper with the beginnings of an unfinished novel entitled Halfway to Paradise. I tore them down, reading frantically. The first thing I noticed was that it wasn't in verse. He'd finally decided to write a novel without his trademark gimmick:
Where was he? His hand floated up to his shirt pocket. One thing he loved about Egypt was that everybody smoked. Not like the States, where people were health-crazed and afraid to die. He didn't trust anyone who was afraid to die.
I crumpled this page and tossed it to the ground, certain that Father had been afraid to die when his Volvo plunged over the edge of the ravine, that the terror had finally inflicted its most enthusiastic maker.
The sun was hot. Like a heat lamp. The old woman's black cloak and head covering stuck to her skin. She was pulling sheets and pants from the clothesline and watching the mud hut's door. She'd been doing this too long. She glanced at her Rolex watch.
Finally she saw the girl. Dark, skinny, one of her best. She squeezed out the door, then shut it again. She was wrapped in a grey cloth, much too big. She had to hold it against her body with one hand as she walked. She walked jerkily, knock-kneed. When she was close the old woman gave her the usual look-over and held out a hand. The girl produced a wallet. The woman smiled, tucked the wallet into the folds of her cloak. Then she held out her hand again. The girl gave her a bloody knife. The woman smiled and put the knife away too. Then she held out her hand a third time. This time the girl opened her mouth. At first it was like she was smiling. But then she kept opening it. Blood dripped down her chin and she gagged as a lump of red flesh pressed out, as if she was giving birth. Then the man's kidney dropped into the old woman's hand. It was smooth with bits of darker flesh still stuck to it.
"Very good," said the old woman.
My head began to throb. It had been months since I'd been subjected to Father's imagination, but it seemed like only yesterday. I tossed these pages aside and returned to the desk. I ignored the photos, turning them around as I opened the drawers. There were many more drafts of Father's work—some in verse and some not, some typed and some handwritten in marbled composition books. I threw them all aside. There were other odds and ends—pens, pencils, crumpled packs of Craven cigarettes, a flashlight, a pair of slim binoculars—that I didn't bother with, and several more framed photographs of Klara that I hurled against the wall.
There must be more, I told myself. Private notebooks, diaries. What had Klara been searching for shortly after the accident? I recalled how she'd sneak up here in the middle of the night—the creaking door, footsteps overhead. I peered behind the bookshelves and beneath the day bed. I began opening books and feeling the bottoms of drawers and pressing the cushions on his chair. I walked every square inch of that place, knocking on walls and ceiling beams. But there was nothing—just an empty attic in which a man had dreamed terrible tales. I sat on the day bed, defeated, ready to give up, when I noticed a corner where the wall-to-wall shag carpeting was coming up. It was a little thing, a curl of fabric. Still it made me curious. I approached it and pulled. It came back easily. There was a square of carpeting that was not nailed down. Beneath the carpeting lay a floorboard that didn't match. I tried to pry it loose with the bayonet, only the blade was too big. I had to use his old letter opener with the sea horse handle.
There, in a little well, lay a stack of letters.
I recognized Klara's handwriting at once—her neat slanted print. Many of the envelopes had postmarks spanning the years she was teaching those delinquents in Ohio. But unlike her postcards from that place, these letters were addressed to a post office box in Battenkill near where Marta lived. And many of the letters were not addressed at all—they just said "Father" on the front, evidently to be hand-delivered.
I opened the uppermost one. It was dated May 14, 1999, just a few weeks before her return from teaching.
Father,
It is settled, then. I shall return at the beginning of July. In some ways it gives me such great relief to write that! The weather here is becoming unbearable already. They say that summer is coming earlier and earlier these days because of Global Warming. I do believe it.
I cannot escape feeling like a failure. I will go, but it will be with my tail lodged firmly between my legs. Chancellor Smith has asked me (again!) to reconsider, but I've told him I simply cannot stay. I feel I've done nothing for these poor children. I just don't seem able to form a pedagogical connection to them. They come from such alien worlds. I don't blame them. I shudder to think what has been done to them throughout their lives. It's a wonder they're even alive, the way society treats them. Society! Their own families. It's shameful.
This is why they deserve so much more. They would be better off with someone who understood them and can help them or at least someone with the energy to maintain their interest throughout an hour-long class. I don't seem to have that energy. I'm exhausted all the time. Perhaps I'm too old for this—the younger teachers, the ones right out of college, seem to fare much better.
I'm sorry to be repetitive. I know I've said all this a thousand times. But you seem to be the only one I can talk to. Mother doesn't really say anything in her letters except "Keep a stiff upper lip!" and Milo just wouldn't understand. He's been sending me the strangest letters, you know. Have you spoken to him lately? I suppose not. He's impossible to talk to. He exists in his own little world. His letters aren't really to me, they're to himself—like a one-sided conversation in his head. He keeps telling me all the technical details of his model warships—how many rounds per minute their guns can fire and so forth—and about these battles he's still so obsessed with. Do you know he's learning the name of every American soldier and sailor who died in Pearl Harbor? He says there were only 2,280 of them so it shouldn't be that hard. 2,280! And this is what he does in his spare time? I worry about him. When he was younger this all seemed more natural. All boys are fascinated by war. But now? It keeps getting worse. He needs a friend. Someone, anyone. Do you know he's never had a girlfriend? Never had a real relationship with anyone? I asked him about girls once and he just looked at me as if I'd said something horrible. I wonder if he needs medical help. There are drugs that do miracles these days. Perhaps we should have done this years ago, after what happened when he was small—that terrible incident that haunts me to this day. You see, you aren't the only one to blame for how he is.
I'd be happy to call some doctors myself, only Mother would have to take him to the hospital. Perhaps she can say she wants to buy him a book, then at the last minute make a detour? Or is this too scheming? Would it be better to be honest with him? I only fear that honesty would be lost on someone like him.
Love,
Klara
I spent an entire era staring at those words:
Someone like him.
No one enjoys being referred to
in the third person. Especially in letters. It's like being present at your own funeral. But this was another kind of death altogether—that of the deepest, blackest betrayal. And by whom? The person closest to me in all the world. The one I was trying desperately to protect. I felt like a formaldehyde frog splayed open for dissection, utterly helpless, with steel pins through my limbs and a cold light shining in my eyes, only half-obscuring the clinical smile of the scientist I'd thought to be an ally.
Drugs. She wanted me on drugs. She wanted me to be different than I was, to be altered chemically, because she thought I needed a miracle, otherwise I'd remain monstrously strange and impossible to talk to. Yet isn't that all I've ever wanted? To talk to her? To live in peace and quiet where we can hear each other speak and where we understand what lies unspoken between us? How could she claim I'd never had a real relationship? She and I had lived together nearly all our lives.
My hands shook as I put down the letter. I was tempted to burn it, to burn all the letters, to burn everything—the attic, the house, the woods. Burn it all to cinders and let nature start anew. But would anything be different next time? Or was this just how people were—selfish, untrustworthy, scheming?
And there was more: the awful incident she'd obliquely referred to, the source of some haunting guilt. I didn't want to know what it was, but I had to. There was no longer any turning back. Still I sat there for a time, not reaching for the next letter, letting the future, the past, everything coalesce into a hazy, disconcerting now.
May 21:
Father,
I wasn't blaming you for Milo. Not entirely, anyway. If anyone was responsible, it was me. I am speaking of course about the "incident." Although it occurs to me now that perhaps you never knew. It happened when he was just learning to walk. You and Mother were away at a reading. I was taking care of him. I always had a difficult time with him—he used to scream and scream for no reason, and I'd have to bounce him and rock him and swing him around until he stopped. Was something wrong with him even then? Or did things go wrong only after that night? I was too young to tell. And I couldn't ask. Mother was useless. She seemed afraid of him, like she wasn't sure where he'd come from. And you—you were preoccupied with the children of your mind.
The Garden of Blue Roses Page 15