Floating Dragon

by Peter Straub

  Whenever his father and grandfather were in the same room—at the family dinners Clark could not avoid, at any occasion when Monty came into his son’s living quarters—an almost visible atmosphere of dislike frosted the air. At these times Tabby saw his father shrink to a child only slightly older than himself. “Why don’t you like Grandpa?” he asked his father once, when Clark was reading him a bedtime story. “Oh, it’s too complicated for you,” Clark sighed.

  At times, more frequently as he grew closer to five, Tabby heard them fighting.

  Clark and his father argued about the length of Clark’s hair, about Clark’s aspirations as a tennis player (which his father scorned), about Clark’s attitude. Clark and Monty Smithfield normally kept a cool distance from each other, but when Monty decided to harangue his son, they shouted—in the dining room, in both living rooms, in the hallway, on the lawn. These arguments always ended with Clark storming away from his father.

  “What are you going to do?” Monty called out to him after a wrangle Tabby witnessed. “Leave home? You can’t afford to—you couldn’t get another job.”

  Tabby’s face went white—he didn’t understand the words, but he heard the scorn in them. That day he did not speak until dinnertime.

  Clark’s wife and mother were the glue that held the two families in their uneasy harmony: Monty genuinely liked Jean, Tabby’s mother, and Jean and her mother-in-law kept Clark in his job. Maybe if Clark Smithfield had been either a twenty-percent-better tennis player than he was, or a twenty-percent-worse one, the misery in the old house on Mount Avenue would have dissipated. Or if he had been less intransigent, his father less adamant. But Jean and her mother-in-law, thinking that the passage of time would reconcile Clark to his job and Monty to his son, kept the families together. And so they stayed, in their sometimes almost comfortable antagonism. Until the first truly terrible thing that happened to Tabby and his family.

  5

  1975

  The Friedgoods, who appeared to be a model couple, moved to a builder’s colonial in Hampstead in 1975, when Tabby Smithfield was ten years old and living with his father and stepmother in South Florida. As Leo Friedgood was on his way upward into the world he coveted, Clark Smithfield appeared to be running out his meager luck: he had a job as a bartender, quit that to take a job as salesman for Hollinsworth Vitreous, was fired from that when he got drunk on the yacht belonging to the president of the company and vomited on Robert Hollinsworth’s carpet-weave slippers, did another stint tending bar, and took a job as a security guard. He worked nights and nipped from a bottle whenever his round took him back to the security station. Like his first wife, his mother was also dead—Agnes Smithfield had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage one warm May morning as she discussed the installation of a rock garden with the groundsman and her life had fled before her body struck the ground. Monty Smithfield had sold his big house on Mount Avenue and moved with the housekeeper and cook into a house called “Four Hearths” on Hermitage Road, five minutes inland. His end of Hermitage Road was only two wooded hilly blocks from the place the Friedgoods bought.

  Leo was now a division vice-president for Telpro, making nearly fifty thousand dollars a year; he bought his suits at Tripler, grew a thick aggressive mustache and let his hair get long enough to be bushy. Always fleshy, he had put on twenty extra pounds despite a daily mile-long jog, and now—arrogant eyes, dark mustache and unrestrained hair—he had the faintly lawless, buccaneerlike appearance of many a corporate executive who sees himself as a predator in a jungle full of predators.

  In 1975, the first year on Cannon Road in Hampstead, Stony joined New Neighbors, High Minds—a book discussion group—the League of Women Voters and a cooking class, the YMCA, and the library. She would have looked for a job, but Leo did not want her to work. She would have tried to get pregnant, but Leo, whose own childhood was an epic of maternal bullying, became irrational when she tried to discuss it. In the Hampstead Gazette she read an ad for a yoga class and quit the New Neighbors. Soon after, she left High Minds and the League too.

  The Hampstead Gazette came twice weekly. The little tabloid was Stony’s chief source of information about her new town. From it she learned of the Women’s Art League, and joined that, thinking she would meet painters—one of the boys in California had been a painter. And because she wanted to, of course she did. Pat Dobbin was celebrated locally, neither especially good nor bad; he lived alone in a small house in the woods; he did illustrations—these much better than his paintings—to make a living. During one of Leo’s business trips, she attended an Art League dinner with the painter: she was aware that the midge-sized red-haired woman carrying a notebook was Sarah Spry, author of the weekly social column “What Sarah Saw” in the Gazette, but was not prepared to see this item in the next week’s column:

  Sarah Saw: Thistown’s brilliant painter and illustrator PAT DOBBIN (can’t say enough about the boy! Caught his stunning new abstract seascapes at PALMER GALLERY yet?) at the Women’s Art League bash parading in elegant black tie and showing off a lovely mystery woman. Who’s the unknown beauty, Pat? Fess up and tell Sarah.

  When Leo returned from his trip, he read this paragraph and asked, “Did you enjoy the Art League thing Friday night? Too bad I couldn’t have gone with you.” His eyes were bright and ironic.

  6

  November 1970

  Unlike her husband, Jean Smithfield was a careful driver. When she and Clark left their son with his grandparents for an evening, she always insisted on driving home if Clark went over his normal limit of two drinks before dinner and a couple of glasses of wine while they ate. On nights when Clark complained more than usually about his father or reminisced through ancient tennis matches, she drove home even if it meant listening to Clark railing about her relationship with his father. He would say, “You actually like that old buzzard! Do you know what that does to me? Christ, sometimes I think he turns you on—all those pinstripe suits get to you, don’t they? You dig white hair. You don’t have any more loyalty to me than to let the old man’s phony charm get to you.” If Clark were really bad, he’d pass out before they pulled through the gates. “He’ll never get Tabby,” he would mutter. “He’ll never forget I existed and make Tabby into his son. One thing he’ll never do.” Jean did her best to ignore this ranting.

  They usually ate at a French restaurant up toward Patchin on the Post Road. One night in late November in 1970, Jean took a dollar from her bag as they went outside and stationed herself where the valet could see her. “I can drive,” Clark grumped. “Not tonight,” she said, and gave the bill to the boy when he got out of their car. “We ought to have a goddamned Mercedes,” Clark said as he let himself into the passenger seat. “All it takes is money,” she informed him.

  Jean pulled out across the oncoming lane and pointed the car toward Pigeon Lane, the next traffic light.

  “He’s at it again,” Clark muttered. “He wants to send Tabby to the Academy—public school isn’t good enough for his grandson.”

  “You went to the Academy,” Jean said.

  “Because my father could afford it!” Clark screamed. “Don’t you get the point, dammit? I’m Tabby’s father, dammit, and . . .”

  Jean was looking at him and she saw his face go slack as the sentence died away. Clark no longer looked angry or drunk. He looked worried.

  She snapped her head forward and saw a station wagon sliding across the dividing line, coming toward them. Ice, she thought, a patch of . . .

  “Move it!” Clark shouted. And Jean twisted the wheel to the right. Another car which had pulled out of the restaurant just behind them struck her left-rear bumper so hard that Jean’s hands flew off the steering wheel.

  The station wagon, which had been going nearly fifty miles an hour before it struck the slick of ice, slammed straight into her door. Jean Smithfield tried to say “Tabby” before she died, but the door had crushed her chest and she did not have time.

  In the mansion on Mount Avenue, h
er son woke up screaming.

  The nineteen-year-old driver of the station wagon fell out of his car and tried to crawl away across the frozen road. He was bleeding from his scalp. Clark Smithfield, completely unharmed, took one look at his wife and threw up in his lap. Then he got out of the car and fell to his knees. Clark saw the boy who had killed his wife and yelled at him to stop. He struggled to his feet. The boy sat up twenty feet from his ruined car and was covered with snow and black mush that had been snow. Blood dripped from his nose and chin. Clark instantly recognized a fellow drunk. “Animal!” he screamed.

  Tabby was rushing around his bedroom still yelling, feeling blindly for the light switch. He knew where nothing was; he was in an inside-out world. He caromed into his bed, slipped on a rag rug, and his screams went up an octave. Within seconds his grandfather and his nanny were at the door.

  It took the Hampstead police ten minutes to reach the tangle of cars on the Post Road.

  7

  May 17, 1980

  On May 17, 1980, the dragon came to Patchin County—no, did not come, for it had been there all along, but decided to show itself. Richard and Laura Allbee, after twelve years in London, had just arrived at their rented house on Fairytale Lane in Hampstead that noon: they were tired and confused, disoriented after two days in New York, more disoriented by suddenly finding themselves in the situation they had been projecting themselves into for months. Clark Smithfield had moved his wife and son into “Four Hearths,” the old colonial on Hermitage Road, only two weeks earlier, and was already practicing the deception that would ruin his son’s faith in him. A small, pretty woman named Patsy McCloud spent most of the day reading War and Remembrance. And what was Graham Williams, the mortal remains of a writer once notorious, doing? What he did every day in April and May of 1980. He had risen from an odoriferous bed at seven, put clothes on over his pajamas, splashed water in the direction of his face, and sat at his desk and put his head in his hands. When he heard the mailman’s truck outside, he ignored it. Chances were that his mailbox had been cherry-bombed anyhow. After thirty minutes of silent prayer, ha ha, he wrote a sentence. Fifteen minutes later, he decided that it was banal and erased it. That was how Graham Williams customarily spent his waking hours.

  The Allbees were pretending to be happier than they felt, old Williams was pretending to himself that his book could still catch fire, Patsy McCloud pretended that any minute she was going to get up and do something, Clark Smithfield’s pretense was particularly elaborate. Leo Friedgood’s deception was simpler than all of these, for he was not in New York at all, but twenty minutes down I-95 from Hampstead, at a Telpro plant in a small city called Woodville. And his wife had just decided to have another adventure.

  Stony found a parking place in the station lot, went into a lively bar called Franco’s, sat at a table near the bar and opened a book. It took less than fifteen minutes for a man to say, “Do you mind?” and sit down beside her. He was a man she knew, but even though this man was respected in Hampstead, none of the other men in the bar would have met him. His profession kept him from male company. Handsome in a weathered way, professionally discreet, this man was perfect for Stony. Very soon they left the bar, and Stony’s leaf-colored Toyota led the way over the bridge across the Nowhatan River and down the green, already summery streets.

  8

  Christmas 1970

  After Jean Smithfield’s burial on the last day of November 1970, Clark stayed home with Tabby for a solid week, and for once his father did not insist on his going to the office. Neither did he blame Clark for getting too drunk to go to the funeral. “I should have been driving,” Clark said more than once. “I wanted to drive—she wanted to protect me, can you bear it? She wanted to protect me.” After the day of the funeral, he did not take a drink until Christmas.

  For Tabby, the world had become as it was on the night of his mother’s death; inside out, unknown, dark. His grandfather had taken him to the funeral home and let him touch the casket, and when he did, right there in front of Monty and the neighbors and all of his grown-up relatives, something happened to him. He saw. He saw blackness all around him. He knew he was in that box with his mommy. He let out a wail of blind terror and his grandfather snatched him up. “You’re a good boy, sweet Tabby,” his grandfather crooned, pressing him into the soft blue material of his suit. “You’re going to be okay, darling.” Tabby blinked and turned his head away from the coffin. He did not utter a sound during the burial service, and when they got home, he and Monty found Clark passed out on a chair before the television set. Tabby curled into his father’s lap and would not speak or move.

  After those first days Clark Smithfield went to work with his father five days a week until Christmas. He inhabited his office, he signed papers, he read reports. He issued memos and attended meetings. On Saturdays and Sundays he took Tabby downstairs and bounced tennis balls toward him on the concrete floor; Tabby tried to return them with his undersized racket. In the afternoons they took walks up and down the brisk cold length of Mount Avenue. “Mommy’s dead,” Tabby pronounced in his piping child’s voice. “Mommy’s dead, and she’s never coming back because she’s in heaven now.” He pointed a mitten toward the sky. “She’s up there, Daddy.” Clark began to cry again, but this time for his son—for his brave small boy in his blue parka, standing with his mitten in the air and his Snoopy boots on the crusty snow.

  On Christmas Day, Monty announced at dinner that he had another present for Tabby, the best present of all. Sitting at the head of the table, he looked gentle and refined, also proud of himself. “Nobody on earth can give better than a good education,” he said. He sipped his burgundy. “And so I can take great pleasure in telling you all that Mr. Cathcart, the headmaster of Greenbank Academy, has agreed to let our Tabby switch to the kindergarten there as soon as school begins again in January.”

  His wife said, “Bravo.” Clark started to say something but closed his mouth, and Tabby looked confused.

  “You can go to school right across the street,” Monty said. “Doesn’t that sound good, son? And you’ll be going to the same school your father and I both went to.”

  “Good,” Tabby said, looking from his grandfather to his father.

  “Well, I’m glad that’s settled, anyhow,” Clark’s mother said.

  “I don’t want to step on your toes, Clark,” said Monty. “We’ll split the tuition right down the line. But I think I owe it to the boy to give him the best.”

  “You always do,” Clark muttered. After dinner he made himself a drink for the first time since the day of his wife’s funeral.

  9

  May 17, 1980

  Stony waited on her driveway for the man to get out of his car. It was a minute before six, and if Leo had been home, he’d have been parked in front of the television set in the den, papers in his lap, a drink on the table beside him, all warmed for the local New York news.

  The man left his car and glanced at the house. “Nice,” he said. His hair lifted a bit in the mild breeze from the Sound. His eyes seemed kind and empty. He buttoned up his raincoat, though it was neither cold nor raining. “Nobody home,” he said. He came toward Stony over the gravel drive and touched her hand. They kissed.

  10

  January 6, 1971

  At eleven o’clock on January 6, 1971—the day before Tabby was to begin at his new school—Clark Smithfield drove his father’s car through the gates and pulled up in front of the house instead of going around to the garage. He hurried into the house, glanced to both sides, and went up the stairs two at a time.

  He could hear Tabby and the nanny talking in Tabby’s room, and gently pushed the door open. His son gave him a broad hilarious smile. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” he sang out. “A man and a lady were kissing!”

  “What?” he asked the girl.

  “I don’t know, sir. He just said it.”

  “They were kissing, Daddy! Like this!” Tabby pursed his lips and moved his blond head from side
to side. Then he burst into gleeful laughter.

  “Yes,” Clark said. “Emily, you can leave us for a while. I have to take Tabby out for a little bit.”

  “You want me to leave?” she asked, getting up from the toy-strewn floor.

  “Yes, please, that’s fine,” Clark said. “We’ll be gone a couple of hours. Don’t worry about anything.”

  “I won’t,” the girl said. “Give Emily a good-bye kiss, Tabby.” She bent toward him.

  “Kissing, Daddy,” Tabby shouted, and tilted his head to meet Emily’s lips with his own.

  When the nanny had gone, Clark pulled a green bookbag—Tabby’s catch-all—from a shelf and began stuffing it with random toys and books.

  “Hey, don’t do that, Daddy!” Tabby said.

  “We’re just going to take a little trip,” Clark said. “On an airplane. Would you like that? It’s a surprise.”

  “A surprise for Grandpa?” Tabby shouted.

  “A surprise for us.” From Tabby’s closet he pulled a small blue case and threw underwear, socks, shirts, and pants into it. “We’ll need some clothes for you, and then we can go.”

  For ten minutes Tabby supervised the packing of his clothes, making sure that his father put his favorite T-shirts in the case. Tabby put on his own coat, mittens, and stocking hat. Clark took his own suitcase from under his bed. “All right, Tabby,” he said, kneeling before his son. “Now, we’re going to go right downstairs, out the door, and into the car. Just this once, we won’t say good-bye to Emily. Do you understand?”