by Sean Stewart
A magpie flapped by, squawking, eat! eat! eat! Biscuits, Dante thought. Hot white biscuits, gilded with margarine.
Casting his line into the river with a thin hissing whine, he saw his life writ large: the lowering sky full of dark portents, and shot through with gleams of dreamlike beauty. Slowly he reeled in the lure, filled up and overflowing with the mystery of the river, his hunger and the sullen clouds, memories and the mist; unexpected floods of light.
The lure jerked; snagged; pulled free. The line was heavy. As the lure came up to the surface, Dante saw its barbs swaddled in a rag of rotten cloth. He pulled it dripping from the water, and saw the cloth was tangled around something like a flat stick or splinter. Dante picked it up, turning it over in his fingers. It was small, perhaps an inch long, an? white.
It looked like a human bone.
"And lo," he murmured. "I am become a fisher of Men."
I WOULD FAR RATHER BE IGNORANT THAN WISE IN THE FOREBODING OF EVIL. —AESCHYLUS
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Dante's first chore when he got in was to track down Sarah and find out what she had learned from Mother about Aunt Sophie's long-vanished husband, Pendleton.
Then it was time to deal with the bone.
Starting with the guess that it was part of either a foot or hand, Dante snuck into his father's study and tracked it down with the aid of Gray's Anatomy. It turned out to be the first metacarpal of the upper extremity—the bottom of the thumb. Following Gray's advice to hold the bone with "the carpal extremity upward and the dorsal surface backward," Dante located "the tubercle for the extensor ossis metacarpi pollicis"—which faced right. Thus: the right thumb.
"Aha!" he murmured triumphantly, slowly closing the book. Then he froze, locked in memory as if in ice.
* * *
It was a long, still afternoon and he had wandered into his father's study. Light slanted through a narrow window, making lustrous the dark cherrywood desk and the white skull. Light glinted on the glass cabinet in which Father kept his medicine: rows of dark green bottles, shiny steel implements, the arthritis charms his patients had begun to ask for ("Well, placebos are good medicine too," he had sighed, swiftly knotting bits of willow-bark and colored ribbon as if tying a fly). His funny-looking pre-War baseball glove from high school and an untouched bottle of Courvoisier Five-Star he'd bought on graduation to drink the day he retired. The study was rich with Father's smells: shaving lotion and hair cream, perhaps a faint hint of the finger of whiskey he drank here after dinner each night. Everywhere the dense smoldering aroma of pipe smoke.
Dante liked pipe smoke better than the acrid stink of Aunt Sophie's cigarettes, but it was the scent of fresh tobacco that made him drunk. He loved to sneak into the study and open the second drawer of Father's desk, rooting through thickets of pipe reamers to uncover a glorious treasure: Amphora tobacco, packed in brown plastic pouches that felt and smelled like softest leather. When he found one he would open it like a Christmas present and hold it to his face, breathing its scent into himself until the room went dizzy.
But to get to his father's desk, Dante had to pass the medicine cabinet, its second-lowest shelf a rack of picks and saws and scalpels. And across the room, turned face out on the oak bookshelf, the dreadful Gray's Anatomy. This fat volume of bodies was the chief and lord of Grown-Up Books, full of his father's terrible secrets.
A hundred times he stood hovering in the doorway while Grandfather Clock ticked slowly behind him. Would the lure of the tobacco draw him into his father's terrible world? Or would wiser instincts prevail, and send him away from the dreadful book with the Skinned Man on the cover? His father had caught him once, and made him look into the Book; showed him a picture of the human heart and told him what it did.
That afternoon, sent upstairs for his afternoon nap, Dante had been lying with one arm sprawled over the edge of his bed. It was a hot stuffy summer day. The mattress was shaking with his heartbeat, shaking, thudding against his chest until he jerked his dangling arm back into the bed, terrified his heart would wear out from having to drive the blood up from his hanging hand. Every time he made his heart work he was wearing it out. The ugly lump of muscle his father made him look at in the dreadful Book: the traitor heart that one day would make him die.
* * *
Portrait
From the time we were seven years old, Father took us out once each fall to hunt. He didn't want us to forget where the meat we ate came from; didn't want us to think it grew in bloodless shrink-wrapped packages for our consumption.
This is a picture I took on Thanksgiving morning the year we were both twenty. In the foreground, framed by Father's standing figure on one side and a thin silver birch on the other, you can see Dante's kill, a three-year-old buck. Blood drenches its throat where Dante's bullet hit, and spatters the innocent snow.
Dante is crouching just behind the buck. He is holding his rifle with the walnut stock planted between his knees, and his hands wrapped around the barrel.
It's one of the best black and whites I ever took, so sharp you can see the coils of Dante's breath, and the blood smoking at the buck's throat. You can almost hear the crackle of dead leaves underfoot.
No picture I have of them shows the resemblance between Dante and Father more strikingly. In life, Dante's energy fools you; you get distracted by his restless pacing, his flaring eyebrows, his darting hands. But in the picture he is still. He has taken Father's stillness into himself and you see his hands are Father's careful hands, thicker and more steady than mine. He has Father's gently rolling shoulders, and most of all he has Father's eyes. Without Dante's mobile face and flying brows to distract you, you see the same narrow blue eyes, deadly serious; the same quiet intensity.
Dante refuses to see any similarity between his father and himself. Father must wonder about this. I do. It seemed so obvious to everyone that Dante was destined to be Anton Ratkay's special child, the same way Sarah was her mother's. And yet somehow Dante drifted away: first arguments, then silence, then amiable banter; charming and meaningless and utterly impenetrable.
If you catch Father looking at Dante when he thinks himself unobserved, you can see the bafflement in him. In the depths of those eyes, long since steeled to bitter things, you can see him hurting, wondering when destiny failed and he lost his son. Wondering what he should have done... what he could have done differently.
In the picture Dante looks intently at the dead buck in front of him. There is no shock, no lip-trembling remorse; just the slightest narrowing of his narrow blue eyes and a still intensity in his body as he ponders the thing he has made.
Off to the side, Father is looking at Dante with exactly the same expression.
* * *
"Dante?"
Startled, Dante looked up to see his father standing in the doorway of the study. He scrambled to his feet and tucked Pendleton's thumb bone quickly in his shirt pocket, next to the lure he had meant to return. "Sorry!"
Dr. Ratkay allowed himself a faint smile. "No problem at all." He ambled over and tapped with one finger on Gray's massive Anatomy. "Heavy, isn't it? More than twelve hundred pages, and all the writing extremely small."
They stood side by side. His father hadn't had the grace to go bald yet, Dante noted with a twinge of envy, though since last Christmas his salt-and-pepper hair had become mostly salt. Looking down at the top of his father's head, Dante was struck by how Anton Ratkay had begun to shrink: his shoulders were curling and his chest was thinner. In the bulky brown sweater Aunt Sophie had knit for him he selemed oddly old and frail, as if bundled against a cold only he could feel.
Stooping over his desk, Dr. Ratkay coughed repeatedly—but into his hand, like a gentleman.
"You shouldn't smoke so much."
Father laughed, digging out his trusty briar and a pouch of Amphora. "Your mother says my face is turning into a tobacco leaf: all wrinkled and leathery. I try to tell her it's been pickled in aftershave, but she won't listen."
He tapped the Anatomy with the stem of his pipe. "'Life is short, the art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.' Hippocrates said that. It's still true, every word."
He dropped into the Radetzky swivel chair before his desk. As a rule he preferred to live with the furniture he had inherited from his parents, but he was a pragmatist. A few years after the new contouring synthetics came out, his back had begun to give him problems. Mother convinced him to give the Radetzky a try. "Think of it as research into the effectiveness of a new therapy for back pain," she said crisply. "If it works, you can suggest it to your patients."
"And warn them off the damn things if it doesn't," he'd grumbled, but the argument had been good enough. (And as Mother tartly observed, it hadn't hurt that Radetzky himself was Hungarian on his father's side.)
Ruminatively Dr. Ratkay pulled a fingerful of shredded tobacco from the pouch of Amphora. "Things change in medicine, of course, but not the central thing." Dante raised his eyebrows. "People die," his father answered, with a small rueful smile.
Dante shelved the Book, feeling a stab of pain from his abdomen, like a bad stitch. "I guess they do."
Dr. Ratkay frowned at the pipe mug, puzzled. "Hum. I wonder what happened to—"
Hastily Dante pulled the lure from his shirt pocket. "I took it out yesterday, to fish. I was just going to put it back."
Dr. Ratkay's eyebrows rose. "Quite a catch you made with it, too. That ring." He tamped down his wad of tobacco and struck a match. Shredded leaves flamed, blackened, burned. He sucked pleasurably and exhaled a cloud of blue-gray smoke.
Dante couldn't help grinning. I should get him a Chinese lounging robe, he thought. He would make a perfect scholar-dragon, a gently steaming mandarin lazing amid his hoard of books. Behind the smoke those eyes, still as bright as blue sky in winter.
His father examined him. "You know," he began, releasing the pipe with a small pop and a puff of smoke, "you are the same age now I was when you were born."
They pondered this in silence for a moment, Dante standing awkwardly with his hands in his pockets, his father seated, with his legs crossed and two fingers over the black briarwood bowl of his pipe. "I guess I don't measure up," Dante said lightly. "No wife, no kid, no degree. Hardly a job."
"True," his father conceded with a smile, "but not what I was thinking."
"Enlighten me."
Dr. Ratkay drew on his pipe. He blew a long slow stream of smoke into the air. Where it crossed the sunlight falling through the narrow window, it shone.
"When you have a child," he said at last, "it brings a lot of grief." He held up a hand. "Not the child's fault: at the worst the child brings exhaustion, bad temper... dry-cleaning bills." He shot a glance at Dante, reliving a distant memory. Thoughtfully Dr. Ratkay rubbed his chin. "'Fathers are children for the second time,' as Aristophanes almost said. When you have a child, you see in him yourself as a child. That's part of what you love in him, you see. You love yourself, your younger self. And when you look at him and worry, you do it because you think of all the things you lost, growing up. All the hurt... " He stopped himself, blinked and smiled. "So now, looking at you, you fine, tall, smart young man, I can see all the mistakes I'm going to make with you and your siblings, and your aunt, and my practice, and God knows your mother."
"You? Make mistakes? I thought it was impossible!"
Anton smiled. "I did too, at your age. That was pretty old to be so foolish!"
"Whereas I know I hardly ever do anything right," Dante said. "I must be exceedingly wise."
Anton shook his head, looking sadly at his son through a haze of blue smoke. After a long silence, he said, "No. You're an even bigger fool than I was."
* * *
"Dad seemed a little glum tonight," Sarah remarked to her mother after dinner that evening.
Mother shrugged. Sleeves rolled up to her elbows, she pulled the last few scraps of meat off the turkey's ribs and tossed its skeleton in the garbage. Beside her, Sarah sighed and pulled on an apron, looking over the usual wreckage of dishes Saturday dinner had left in its wake.
"I've never seen your brother carve with such a... scientific interest," Mother remarked.
Sarah started water running in the sink and added a healthy shot of detergent. Aunt Sophie had a deep aversion to dishwashers, which was fine, but as she had retired to her room after dinner, feeling unwell, it left Sarah with a depressing collection to do by hand. "We ought to get the boys in here to help."
Mother laughed. "Jet and Dante did most of the cooking while you snoozed upstairs this afternoon, you lazy thing."
"Yeah, I know." Resigning herself to the inevitable, Sarah rolled up her sleeves and began to scrub. She still felt hungry, but her reflection in the kitchen window told her she had eaten too much.
She hated it.
It was dark now. The lowering clouds had finally made good on their promise; rain creaked and spattered on the kitchen window, running in sudden tear-tracks down the glass. Sarah felt dull and melancholy. Two hours of fitful sleep, snatched in the mid-afternoon, had not made up for the horrors of last night's autopsy. Even Saturday dinner had been subdued: Aunt Sophie grim and moody, Father terse and withdrawn.
Mother clinked and clattered about the kitchen, determinedly cheerful. "When's your next show?"
"Tuesday night at Yuk-Yuks." As Sarah reached to fish another greasy plate out of the dishwater, her eyes involuntarily jumped to the window. Something had moved.
Something had moved outside.
She squinted, trying to see into the rainy night, but it was bright in the kitchen, and the window was crowded with reflections.
Once, years before at a darker time in her life, she had lain in bed in an apartment downtown, listening to the sound of faint screaming, very far away; it had run down her skin in tiny tracks of fear, like cold water. Tonight, straining to see through her own reflection, she felt the same fear sliding coldly down her face.
She leaned forward until her forehead touched the glass, looking through her own reflected eyes. Her heart was racing. Yes—there! Down at the bottom of the wilted garden, not far from the dim bulk of the boathouse.
Wasn't there a child, a little girl, staring up at the lighted window?
Staring in at the warm house from the cold and the rain; a child in jeans and a white T-shirt. A scrap of a girl with water dripping from the brim of a baseball cap.
With a little cry Sarah dropped the plate she had been washing. It smashed as she leapt to the back door, pulled it open, banged through the screen door and ran down the porch steps.
Outside the air was huge and full of night. Sarah faltered and stopped. Cold drops of rain spattered against her face.
Nothing. No one.
She took a few halting steps down through the garden. No one waited for her there. No sad little face reproached her from the shadows beneath the boathouse eaves.
The wind sighed around, her, and the rain wept. Still Sarah walked, heart pounding and pounding in her chest. She did not let herself think. This was not a time for questions. She could only run; into the night, or away from it. Those were her choices. She had made the wrong choice once, eight years before. She knew she couldn't bear to live if she made the wrong choice again.
The clouds stretched on forever; the thin breeze gusted and fell. Down beyond the slowly creaking dock, the dark river rolled on.
"Sarah? Honey—are you all right?"
Her mother stood in the doorway, calling to her. Warm yellow kitchen light spilled across the porch, and it was Sarah, Sarah who now stood, forlorn, in the shadow of the boathouse. From here the house looked unimaginably remote, warm and friendly and utterly inaccessible, having nothing to do with the rain whispering off into eternity around her. Nothing to do with the river, and the rolling darkness that covered everything real.
Soaked and shivering, Sarah watched her mother pick her way down through the garden. "A rabbi, a Baptist preacher, and a Roman Ca
tholic priest are out walking one day when they meet the angel Gabriel," Mrs. Ratkay said, as soon as she was close enough for Sarah to hear.
"The rabbi says, 'Oy! Just who I wanted to see! I have here a list of complaints for you to take to the Master of the Universe.' And he takes out a book about a thousand pages long and gives it to Gabriel, and Gabriel says, 'As you wish.'
"Then the preacher says, 'Hallelujah! Praise be! I need you to take this petition singing the praises of Christ Almighty down to Hell. We're going to shame the devil! As you can see, it's been signed by over a million viewers—uh, that is, members of the congregation.' And he too takes out a book about a thousand pages long, covered in signatures. And Gabriel says, 'Very well.'
Mrs. Ratkay put her arm through her daughter's arm and began to lead her gently up toward the house. "Well, that leaves the priest, who's looking kind of embarrassed. He hems and haws for a while, and shuffles his feet, and runs a finger around his clerical collar, and finally mumbles, 'Thanks for coming,' and stuffs a tiny slip of paper into Gabriel's hand. The angel picks it up and reads it, and a sudden change comes over him. His teeth start to chatter and his knees begin to knock. 'You're crazy!' he says, and dropping the slip of paper he flies shrieking into the night.
"Well, of course the rabbi and the preacher are amazed," Mother continued, guiding Sarah up the porch steps. "They stare at the priest so hard, he finally grins a feeble grin and says, 'A letter from me to the Pope, asking if we could ordain women.'"
Sarah almost smiled. "—And then the rabbi and the preacher also fly shrieking into the night," she whispered.
Gwen Ratkay led her daughter into the kitchen and sat her at the table while she put on a kettle. She took Sarah's hand. "Are you okay? I see little teapots behind your eyes, brewing tears."
Sarah couldn't laugh. It was too dark outside, too dark and cold; and the sad rain dripped and crept over all the earth. "Eight," she whispered.