by John Langan
I shouldn't have been surprised when I picked up the phone one Monday morning and heard her voice saying, "You're married?" But I was, so instead of saying, "Why Mother, how nice to hear from you," I said, "Mom?"
"What have you done?"
"What do you mean? I got married."
"Yes, so I see—from a card, Veronica. I found out about my only daughter's marriage—not even about her marriage—I found out she got married, who knows when, to a man I've never heard of, from a card in the mail."
"Things happened kind of fast," I said. "I told you about Roger."
"Not that he was your fiancé."
"I told you we were living together."
"You most certainly did not."
"Yes, I did. It was a couple of phone calls ago."
"You may think you did, but, believe me, if you had told me you were living with a man, I would have remembered."
"Whatever, Mom. I know what I said."
"And I know what you didn't. Well, I guess I'll just have to accept the fact that my daughter got married and I wasn't there. Who is this Robert? Have you known him long? I hope so, if you've been living with him."
"It's Roger," I said, "Roger Croydon. We've been together a couple of years."
"Croydon? What kind of a name is that?"
"I don't know. English, I think."
"You don't know?"
"Mom."
"What does he do?"
"He's a professor at the college."
"I see. Was he your professor?"
"I did take a class with him—"
"And this is how you earned your 'A.'"
"Mom!"
"I'm sorry, it's just—how old is this man?"
"Old enough," I said.
"Why don't you want to tell me?"
"Because it's none of your business."
"Oh, I see—like your getting married was none of my business, apparently."
"Fine. Roger's sixty-four."
"Sixty-four?"
"Uh-huh."
"Veronica, you do realize that's older than I am?"
"Yes, Mom. It doesn't matter."
"Oh, I'm sure. Let me see if I have the details right. Aunt Shirley will love this. You've married your sixty-four-year-old college professor. Is there anything else? Are you pregnant?"
For an instant, I was going to tell her. Why not? It wasn't as if I was going to change the way she had already decided to think of me. Why not go all the way, give her the whole, sordid story? At the last second, though, my, "As a matter of fact, Mom, I am," became, "No, of course not." Not because I was ashamed, but because I wasn't going to use my unborn child as a weapon against its grandmother. I would tell her when my due-date was closer—or, Hell, I could mail her an announcement for that, too. She'd love that.
So maybe sending people—certain people—marriage announcements wasn't the smartest move. After the phone call, I didn't hear from my mother for another six months. If I needed any confirmation of that opinion, I received it when Ted showed up at our front door, furious.
My eggs Benedict were a yellow smear on the plate, my toast a sprinkling of crumbs, and I'd had three cups of decaf and two trips to the bathroom. I'd read all of the paper I cared to, and fiddled with the crossword. I checked my watch. By the time the check came and I paid it, it would be time to fetch Roger. I folded the paper and signaled my waitress.
After our marriage, Roger had no intention of communicating with Ted at all. He assumed Joanne would've passed the information along—not that Roger told her, either. She found out from a friend who knew the Town Clerk the same day we filed for our marriage license. Can you believe it? The joys of living in a small town. Joanne called my apartment that night and left a nasty message on my answering machine. The funny thing was, she accused Roger of getting me pregnant, which was just her trying to be mean, but which was absolutely right. We should've been angry—Roger was, a little—but it was too funny. I thought we should make an effort with Ted, try to reach out to him. I didn't feel like I could call him, not if Roger wouldn't, but sending him a card seemed within the bounds of propriety. I mean, he was as much Roger's son as he was Joanne's, and I didn't see why she should have the monopoly on him. If they could share the house, for God's sake, they could share their child. From everything Roger had told me, Ted sounded like a bright guy—I was sure he'd appreciate the effort.
When I'm wrong, I'm wrong.
Once I walked into town hall, I was directed to the courthouse, where I waited fifteen minutes, until Roger and Ted were led in, then another ten until the judge arrived. Father and son had spent the night in a couple of cells in the back of the police station. Neither looked the better for it. Roger was obviously exhausted—and still furious. So was Ted. I swear, if the cops hadn't been right there, they would have started all over again. At their arraignments, I stood up and spoke to the judge—not the woman who married us; this was a guy, Brace—and did my best to explain everything in a way that pointed most of the blame at myself. I said that Ted's father and I had gotten together under difficult circumstances, which Ted must have found extremely painful. When we were married, I had sent a wedding announcement to Ted as a goodwill gesture. Without any context for my action, though, he had taken it as an insult, which was understandable and which I should have anticipated. Of course he was angry. As for Roger: I hadn't told my husband I was sending the card to his son, so there was no way for him to be prepared when Ted appeared on our doorstep, furious. The situation had spiraled out of control. Roger reacted to his son's anger; the next anyone knew, the police were there. Yes, the two of them had behaved like kids, but it was all a misunderstanding. I put in a pretty good performance, enough so that the judge let them off with a "don't-ever-do-this-again." I always knew I'd make a good lawyer.
On our way to the car, Ted came over to us. I don't know what he was going to say. His face wasn't exactly friendly, but it had lost its previous fury. He caught Roger's arm and said, "Wait."
Roger stopped and said, "Take your hand off me," in a voice as cold as outer space. It was so—different, so dark that I stopped walking, too. I swear, I'd never heard him speak like that before. I'd never heard anyone speak like that. The air froze and crackled around his words. Ted jerked his hand back. Roger went on in that same, absolute zero voice: "Boy, the best part of you dribbled down your mother's leg. You have always been a disappointment to me, from your inability to read even a simple book when you were a child, to the self-indulgence of your adolescence, to the blind surrender to authority that you call a career. You are an embarrassment and a disgrace. Your life has been nothing; it is nothing; it will always be nothing. As of this moment, I am no longer your father; you are no longer my son. I disown you; I cast you from me. All bonds between us are sundered; let our blood no longer be true. And when you die, may you know fitting torment; may you not escape your failure. You are a stranger to me. Good day, sir." Eyes straight ahead, Roger limped toward the car, leaving Ted and me standing there. I went to say something to Ted, but before I could, he spat, "Fine," and stalked away.
It was ridiculous—the whole thing was like a bad joke. Who disowns anyone? If what Roger said wasn't so terrible, if I hadn't heard that arctic voice, I would have laughed the whole thing off. He disowned Ted? Who did he think he was, King Lear? Really. That voice, though. Standing there in the parking lot behind town hall, watching Roger reach the car and lean one arm against it, while Ted strode in the direction of the bus station, I was overcome with fear—not of Roger, but for him. That, and I was angry at him. However ridiculous it was, you don't say that kind of thing to your child. It was the first time I was honestly upset with him. We'd disagreed a lot—we still did, at times—but over piddling stuff. This was serious. I ran to catch up with him. He'd opened the car door, but was still leaning with one hand on the roof. When he turned his face to me, it was gray and he was panting. He said, "Honey, I believe I'm in the middle of a heart attack. Would you please drive me to the hosp
ital?"
My dad had a heart attack; it was what killed him. I recognized the same symptoms in Roger. I wanted to call an ambulance; he refused. "Not in front of the boy." Can you believe that? Ted wasn't in sight anymore. No matter. He insisted no ambulance. Struggling not to panic, I drove Roger to Penrose at roughly a hundred and ten miles an hour. We blew past the state trooper barracks on 299, but it was at exactly the right moment. There was no one out front to see us. All the time, I'm trying to do fifteen things at once. I'm trying to keep the peddle to the floor—because speed is of the essence, right?—both hands on the wheel, both eyes on the road. I'm trying to pass whomever I can as quickly as I can. I'm trying to pay attention to Roger, who's leaning back in his seat with his eyes closed and his mouth open, so that I'm afraid he's dead and have to say, "Roger? Can you hear me?" I'm ready to take one hand off the wheel to poke him when he says, "I hear you." When we hit the Bridge, it's a wonder we don't slide right off.
As it turned out, Roger did have a heart attack—plus three broken ribs, and a bruised hip and kidney. Not to mention bruises and cuts over every square inch of his body. The heart attack wasn't that serious. The cardiologist told me it was, "worse than mild, but not up to medium." Roger didn't want anyone to know about it. While we were waiting in triage, he took my hand and said, "Don't tell anyone."
"About you and Ted?" I said. "Because it's kind of late for that."
"About this," he said, tapping his chest with one finger. I've never liked when people do that, knock on their sternums. It creeps me out—makes you sound as if you're hollow.
Although I didn't see what the big deal was, I respected Roger's wishes. The people I told about him being in the hospital assumed it was due to the fight—which, let's face it, was pretty much true. You think it's coincidence he rolls around on the floor with Ted, beating and getting beaten up by him, and the next thing his heart's saying, "Sorry, no can do"? I stayed with him that first night and the seven more he was there. To start with, he was pretty doped up, so I sat beside his bed, staring at his bruised face. The bruises were red and deep blue, and they streaked his face in a way that made me think of war paint. They made him look fierce, even asleep. I had the urge to hold his hand, to stay in contact with him, but now that the worst danger was past, I kept hearing what he'd said to Ted—which I was already thinking of as Roger's curse on him. "I disown you; I cast you from me." I wanted to laugh at it, but that was harder than you'd expect. I was sure he couldn't have made it up himself. I was certain he was quoting someone. He did that a lot, quoted Dickens or Browning or someone else without telling you he was quoting. It was like his way of saying, "Look how smart I am," and, if you didn't recognize the person he was quoting, "Look how stupid you are." I used to call him on it all the time. For a little while, I did my best to guess the source of his curse. There was enough Dickens I hadn't read for Roger to have plucked it from the pages of one loose, baggy monster or another—oh yeah, there's some pretty fierce stuff in old Charles. Have you read Little Dorrit? There's a line in there: this mother is trying to threaten her son into doing what she wants, and she tells him that if he disappoints her, then when she dies and he kneels in front of her corpse at the wake, it'll bleed. Very pleasant. The curse didn't feel like Dickens, though. It felt more like something you'd read in Faulkner, all that stuff about family and disappointment and doom. I couldn't remember what Faulkner Roger had read. He claimed he read nothing written after 1914, but that was mostly a pose.
The games English majors play, right? Everything's a text, or relates to one. It didn't take too long for me to tire of "whence the curse." Where he'd pulled it from didn't matter. What did was that he'd used it, on his son. Every time I remembered the look on Roger's face as he'd pronounced it—the sound of his voice—I put my hand over my belly. Yes, I believed this child's relationship with Roger was going to be different. Roger was not the same as he had been when Ted was a teenager. He was older, mellower, most importantly, happier. We had a better marriage than he and Joanne; already, that was obvious. We had fun—and you can be sure there's a blank spot under that word in Joanne's dictionary. Things would be better for us—for the three of us. All the same, those words: "I am no longer your father; you are no longer my son."
I never got the chance to find out what kind of father Roger would have been to our child. Late that first night in the hospital, I woke from where I'd fallen asleep sitting beside him with terrible cramps. I knew—even before I was completely awake, I knew. I tried to stand, to reach the call button clipped to Roger's blanket, but the pain took my legs out from underneath me. I fell and lay there on the floor. I couldn't catch my breath; the giant hand squeezing me wouldn't let me. All I could see was the space under Roger's bed. No, I thought, no no no no no. I closed my eyes, tried to fight what was happening. Yes, my body said, and the hand tightened, another round of cramps wracked me. I opened my eyes. They were streaming tears; my nose was running, too. The underside of Roger's bed wavered then blurred. I closed my eyes again as the giant hand contracted tighter. Oh God, I thought. Oh please. I could feel—I could feel things loosening inside me. Things starting to slip away. The sensation was obscene. I opened my eyes—
And instead of Roger's bed, I was looking at a flat surface—at a wall. It was maybe thirty, forty feet from me, much further than the walls of the hospital room. The floor had gone from pale tile to dark hardwood. Despite the pain, I turned my head.
Roger's bed—his room, were gone. I was in a huge, empty space like a church. No, not a church, the design was wrong. This was more like a house if everything inside, all the rooms, the halls, had been removed, and only the outside left. The crazy thing was, even with the agony digging into my belly, I recognized this place. It was the house, Belvedere House, Roger's house.
The scene lost focus as a fresh flood of tears poured into my eyes. It was harder than ever to breathe. I blinked, was still inside the house. Its walls—what I had taken for shadows crowding them I saw were openings, doorways—the interior was honeycombed with them. Inside each one, there was—
A face. Lurking at the verge of each and every doorway was a face so large it filled the space—dozens of enormous faces. Sweat had broken out all over me; now, I started to shake as the pain deepened. The faces were all the same, the nose long-broken, the heavy creases beside the mouth and over the brows, the thick hair that needed cut. Half a hundred copies of Roger's face gazed out at the vacant interior of Belvedere House. Their lips were moving, the space echoing with their vast whisper. In the general murmur, I could pick out individual phrases. "Your life has been nothing; it is nothing; it will always be nothing." "This is ridiculous. You are ridiculous." "What is it you want?" "And when you die, may you know fitting torment; may you not escape your failure." "Anything—take whatever you need."
I was losing my mind. I had to be; it was the only explanation available. This was too vivid to be a dream. The faces—there was something wrong with each of them. Where its eyes should have been, this one had empty sockets. This one's skin was peeling off in large patches, revealing what looked like scales underneath. This one spoke, and blood ran out of its mouth and down its chin. I shut my eyes and thought, Oh God. Oh God. The pain hit a high note, held it. I turned my head to the floor and kept it there, eyes still closed, as my body finished what it had begun.
By the time the night nurse found me and called for help, it was gone, the baby I'd barely started to think of as mine was gone. I felt someone shaking me, heard a voice saying, "Can you hear me?" and opened my eyes to a broad, middle-aged woman's face frowning with concern. I was back in the hospital room. There was a lot of blood. The air was thick with the stink of it; the floor was covered in it; my suit sodden with it. The nurses helped me clean up and found me someone's old sweatsuit. They wanted me to see one of the hospital's doctors—they insisted—but I refused. Yes, I understood the risks they ticked off on their fingers. I told them I'd see my own doctor first thing in the morning. For now, I
didn't want to leave my husband—which wasn't exactly true. Roger had slept through my entire ordeal. He was hooked up to machines that registered his condition. He had a floor full of nurses to look after him. It was—I couldn't stand the thought of going to a doctor and having him tell me I'd had a miscarriage. I knew that was what I'd been through. I knew I'd been pregnant before and wasn't now. To hear it from a doctor, though—to hear it officially—that was too much to deal with. Neither nurse was happy about my decision, and they made me promise, repeatedly, to see my own MD the next day.