The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2016 (retail) (epub)

  Charles Haverty

  Storm Windows

  BY SEVEN-THIRTY MY FATHER hadn’t come home, so we sat down to dinner without him. My mother didn’t touch hers. She kept very still, her hands folded in her lap, her cranberry-colored dress crowded with the Twelve Days of Christmas—lords-a-leaping, maids-a-milking, geese-a-laying, the works. The saddest thing of all was that my father would miss her in that dress. Now and again, with a swish of silk, she’d step away from the breakfast-room table to stare down the telephone on the kitchen wall, returning silent and stricken, her eyes fixed on the back of his chair. When my sister, Margot, and I had cleaned our plates, she told us to take the dog outside.

  It was Christmas Eve and white beyond the dreams of Irving Berlin. I was eight years old, Margot was six, and I’d stop at nothing to make her laugh. Before dinner we’d made a snowman in the backyard, and now, to amuse her, I endowed him with breasts—massive breasts—so that he became a she, and when her breasts got so heavy they dropped to the ground, I reinforced them with wire croquet wickets and wooden stakes whose rounded tops protruded like nipples. As the breasts grew bigger and bigger, my sister laughed and laughed until Trixie ran around us, barking, churning up a muddy circle in the snow.

  “Stop it, Lionel,” my mother called from the back door. “You’re making her wild.” Coming closer, she saw what I’d done and went back into the house. She emerged carrying a broom. With the glare of the porch lights behind her, she swung hard at those gravity-defying breasts, and I could almost feel the shock run up her arms when she made contact with the wood and wire within; I could see it in her face and her body. She let go of the broom and tore at the breasts with her bare hands. She closed her fists around the stakes, drew them out like daggers, and let them fall at her feet. Breathing hard, she looked at me and said, “You make me sick.”

  When she was back inside, I set about repairing the damage, but the fun had gone out of it. It had become a chore. Soon headlights swept over us. “He’s here,” my sister said, and followed Trixie into the garage attached to the back of the house. I stood still, waiting, until I heard the rise and fall of my mother’s shouting through two layers of window glass. I returned my attention to the snowwoman.

  After a while, my father came out in his shirtsleeves with Trixie close behind. “Your mother’s upset,” he said in his sad, reasonable voice.

  “She’s upset with you.” I wouldn’t look at him.

  “I’d like you to stop that now. Would you please cut it out?”

  I continued restoring the breasts in my workmanlike way.

  “You know what night this is, don’t you?” he asked. “You know who’s watching?”

  I knew there was no Santa Claus, but I didn’t want my father to know I knew—this seemed somehow important to me—so I stepped away from the snowwoman. He looked her up and down and shook his head. “For Christ’s sake, fix that, will you?” Then he turned around and went back to the house.

  The snow had stopped. The only sound was Trixie’s heavy, humid panting as she watched and waited for what I’d do next. I dug into the snowwoman and tossed the snow behind me. Trixie caught it in her mouth, gnashing her teeth in the air. Our big, old house loomed in the dark.

  We’d moved in at the end of August, and my mother, my sister, and I hated the house, each for our own reasons. I hated its oldness. On Long Island our home had been built just for us, whereas this one had been constructed before the First World War. Innumerable strangers had lived in it; some might even have died in it. In my new school, our third-grade teacher, Sister Alexandra, taught us that in the course of a single day, the human body lost almost a million skin cells, that over a year we each shed more than eight pounds of dead skin. “And where do you think it all goes?” She ran a fingertip across the desktop. “Dust,” she said and offered it to the air. “Here’s a little bit of all of us.” I imagined a blizzard of past lives drifting through the rooms. Only my father, who traveled often on business and spent the least amount of time there, loved the house.

  My woolen gloves were wet and heavy, and I dropped them on the ground. Trixie retrieved the left one, brought it to her hiding place under the evergreens planted along the foundation, and tore it to shreds. I scooped snow from the snowwoman’s ravaged torso, packed it dense and smooth, and pelted the side of the house. The icy air seared my lungs, and my hands felt raw, but the solid slap of snowballs against brick was pleasing, and I hurled them harder and higher, until I heard the splash of breaking glass. The back door opened, and my father stepped out onto the porch. He gazed past me up at the lighted window of his bedroom, where my mother appeared in her bathrobe, staring down at him. When the light went out, he said to me, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He didn’t sound angry.

  I stayed out there as long as I could stand it and then went straight to bed without saying good night. When my father checked in on me later, I pretended to be asleep.

  My parents’ door was shut when my sister and I woke the next morning. She padded down the stairs ahead of me. Turning the corner into the living room, she cried, “Trixie ate the baby Jesus!” Under the Christmas tree, the nativity scene was in disarray.

  “No, she didn’t.” I fetched the mangled Christ child, still wet with saliva, from in front of the fireplace. “She just chewed him up, is all.”

  “Smart dog.”

  “What’s so smart about that?” I was distracted. Something was off about the scene, some asymmetrical something.

  “Other dogs would eat a wise man or a shepherd,” she said. “They’re bigger.” She wrapped her arms around the dog’s neck. “But you picked the baby Jesus, didn’t you?” Then glancing up at me, she asked, “How did she know?”

  Colored lights sizzled on the tree. My Christmas stocking hung flaccid and empty from the mantel beside the cornucopia of my sister’s, and suddenly I understood what was wrong. They’d given me no presents, nothing. I remembered the snowwoman, the shattered window, my father’s sad face, and I felt like throwing up, though mostly I felt embarrassed.

  Margot knelt before her pile of presents. More than anything, she’d wanted an Etch A Sketch. She already knew the size, shape, and weight of the box and moved from package to package until she located the right one and began to unwrap it. Without a word, I went to the foyer, put on my boots and corduroy coat, and walked out into the morning and away from that hateful house. With the mutilated Jesus pressed into my palm, I bore this colossal injustice like a cross and might have walked all the way to Calvary had the sidewalks been shoveled and I not been wearing pajamas. At the end of our block, I turned around and went back.

  Inside, the house was silent but for Andy Williams singing “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” From the foyer, I could see my father stretched across the living room floor, his head cradled in my mother’s lap, drawing ragged breaths through bared teeth. I stepped into the room.

  My mother’s face was a mask of anger, a leopard’s face. “Laugh now,” she said. Then, casting a panicked glance at my sleety boots, she shouted, “For God’s sake, take those off!”

  I sank to the carpet beside my sister and did as I was told. Fingers fiddling with the knobs on her Etch A Sketch, Margot said, “Daddy says he can’t breathe.” The gray screen displayed a tangle of fine black scribble, and I sensed that whatever was happening here was my fault.

  My father tried to speak. I scooted closer.

  “Change that,” he said.

  “Change what?” I was trying not to cry.

  “That.” He gestured toward the stereo.

  “Oh, what does it matter?” my mother said.

  “This—” he took a great gulp of air and swiped his hand at Andy Williams. “This can’t be the music I die to.” The word jolted through me.

  “Turn it off,” my mother said.

  “No.” My father slapped the carpet. “I said change it.” Then he looked up at me and said, “ ‘Nessun dorma.’ ”

  “In Englis
h,” my mother wailed, but I knew what he meant, and he knew that I knew. I went to the turntable and replaced The Andy Williams Christmas Album with Favorite Italian Tenor Arias. On the third drop of the tone arm, my father raised his hand.

  “There,” he said, “leave it,” and the aria began. Evenly, the singer sang the phrase “Nessun dorma,” then he sang it again. The tenor went on, his voice building, rising on a tide of music, rising and rising and then breaking, tragic and ecstatic.

  My mother got up to phone for an ambulance, and my father called me to him. “Closer,” he whispered. “I don’t want your sister to hear.” He hadn’t yet shaved but smelled of lime aftershave. Trixie lay beside him. I smoothed her fur with the flat of my hand, not to calm her so much as to calm myself. “Upstairs. My bedroom. The walk-in closet.”

  “What am I looking for?” I didn’t want to stop petting Trixie; it was all that kept me from crying.

  “You’ll see.” He nudged me. “Go.”

  The music swelled, spreading through the house, following me up the carpeted staircase, licking at my heels. It was strange to be inside their bedroom—we weren’t supposed to go in there—and as soon as I entered the closet, I saw the presents, wrapped in paper patterned like my mother’s dress, with tags that read, TO LIONEL, FROM SANTA. Across the room, through the intact window, I saw the jagged hole my snowball had punched through the lower-left corner of the storm window, a many-pointed star against the morning. Relieved I hadn’t broken both windows and let the winter in, I loaded my arms with packages and carried them down to the living room, where my mother was back on the floor with my father. She held herself with the tragic dignity of the president’s widow, back straight, eyes downcast, lashes like wet black petals. One hand played in my father’s hair, the other clenched in a fist, tight as a grenade.

  “That’s not all,” my father said, rising to his feet. “That can’t be all. Fetch the rest.” It took me two more trips up the stairs. “Now, open them.” I unwrapped the smallest one first: a waterproof, shockproof Timex wristwatch with a Twist-o-Flex band. My father sat in his armchair by the window. “Go on.” He watched with an almost cannibalistic intensity as I unwrapped the next present and the next and the next—a junior deluxe chemistry set, the Aurora Thunderjet 500 HO slot car track, the works of Franklin W. Dixon—but I took no pleasure in it, and by the last package, the ambulance had arrived. My father met the paramedics at the door, and though Christmas Mass still lay ahead of us, he welcomed them inside for Belgian waffles made on the waffle iron my mother hadn’t yet unwrapped.

  —

  Thirty-two years later, my wife and I bought our own brick house, a round-shouldered colonial outside Boston even older than the one I’d grown up in. Though it was a stretch for us and needed lots of work, Jane portrayed it as a shared adventure, and I gave in. For her, a child of divorce, the house represented a triumph over the chaos of her youth, whereas all I could feel was a suffocating sense of responsibility; all I could see was a never-ending plague of peeling paint, dripping faucets, buckling shingles, and rotting railings, whose repair fell mostly to Jane. When I was growing up, my father had spared me such chores, performing them himself while I watched from a safe distance. He believed that a man who couldn’t replace a sash cord couldn’t be a real man, and in time, Jane too came to see my neglect of our house as a kind of betrayal.

  It was the night before Halloween, and though it was past their bedtime, I’d promised our girls, Caroline and Vanessa, that we could carve jack-o’-lanterns. As I plunged the knife into the second pumpkin, the whole house went dark. Jane was still at work, and I had no idea what to do, so I called our friend Martin, who arrived within minutes. We’ve known Martin and Claire since Caroline and their daughter, Julia, attended preschool together. A dozen years older than I, Martin was a professor of political science and as handy around the house as my father.

  Flashlight in hand, Martin explained to the three of us how electricity works. “It flows through a pair of wires called a circuit, and each circuit is protected by a circuit breaker. Old houses like yours often have fuses instead.” He went on, chanting the words into the dark like a psalm, like one of my father’s arias, lyrical, rhapsodic, incomprehensible. He disappeared into the basement; my daughters and I stayed at the kitchen table.

  When the lights clicked on, Vanessa, who was five then and has always been afraid of masks and makeup and any manner of disguise, said, “I hate Halloween.” Caroline, who’s six years older than her sister and has never been afraid of anything, asked why. “ ’Cause it’s about death,” Vanessa said, and I laughed to hear her little voice wrapped around that big word. The laugh was still in my throat when my sister phoned to tell me that our father had been taken to the hospital. She recited the litany of symptoms: the chest pains and nausea, the burning sensation in the upper abdomen, the sense of impending doom.

  “Impending doom?” The knife was in my hand. One jack-o’-lantern wore a raggedy gash where its grin belonged; the other had no mouth at all. Between them sat a blue mixing bowl brimming with pulp and seeds and stringy membrane. “Dad said that—impending doom?”

  “What does it matter what he said?”

  “What if it was just something he ate?”

  “Come on, Lionel. This is classic heart attack stuff.”

  Once Martin was gone and Jane was home and the girls were in bed, I called the airlines and packed my suitcase. Before driving me to Logan the next morning, Jane zipped a sober-looking suit into a black vinyl garment bag and laid it across the backseat. I could still feel the slime between my fingers and the pumpkin flesh under my nails.

  As I waited to board the flight from Boston to Chicago, there was an announcement that it would be delayed on account of a malfunctioning toilet in the plane’s rear lavatory, but when at last we boarded, the guy in the seat next to mine leaned in close and said, “Toilet, my ass.”

  “Sorry?”

  “The delay. That was no busted john. Guy died in here.”

  “Died?” I said. “In the bathroom?”

  “Not in the bathroom—in here. On the red-eye from L.A. Heart attack, stroke, whatever. Girl at the counter told me. Took ’em that long to haul him out of here and clean up the mess.”

  I thought of the pumpkin guts sloshing in the blue bowl and of my father, my poor father. It was Halloween, and flight attendants roamed the aisles in witch hats, their faces painted ghoulishly. Vanessa was right: It was about death, all about death, and there was nothing cute about it. On a yellow legal pad, I scribbled notes toward my father’s obituary but found that I could barely trace the outline of his public life; his private life, his real life, remained an even darker mystery.

  When we landed at O’Hare, I rented a car and drove deep into the suburbs. The hospital was new and ungainly, a high-tech purgatory grown up out of a cornfield. I took an elevator to the cardiac care unit, but when I stepped into the room whose number my sister had given me, I found a stranger in the bed. He pressed a button and a nurse appeared. “Can I help you?”

  “Detweiler,” I said and pointed to the whiteboard on the wall behind her, where traces of my father’s name, partially erased, hovered over her shoulder. “Richard Detweiler?” It was hard to breathe. “My father?”

  “Mr. Detweiler’s gone,” she said and turned to scrub the ghost of his name with the heel of her hand. I leaned against the wall and started to cry. “Oh, no,” she said. “He left on his own. Mr. Detweiler’s fine. Really.” She brought her face close to mine and whispered, “I really shouldn’t be telling you this, but it might have been something he ate.”

  Traveling west, away from the hospital and toward the big, old house I grew up in, I felt lightened, reprieved, immortal. Compared to the occluded streets back East, the roads here were straight and wide, and in my mind’s eye I pictured the red rent-a-car as a robust little corpuscle pumping unimpeded through a network of veins and arteries and into the healthy heart of my history. In a couple of weeks,
I’d turn forty. I was home.

  When I pulled into the driveway, my father was standing at the top of a ladder set up high against the house. A stack of storm windows leaned against an oak tree. The bottom of the ladder was planted among the evergreens where our dog, Trixie, used to hide and where her ashes were now buried. High above it all, my father appeared embarrassed.

  I called up to him, “You think this is the best time to be doing this?”

  “It’s late.” He wouldn’t look at me. “Tomorrow’s already November.”

  “But it’s so warm. Wouldn’t you rather—”