by Andre Dubus
She made a cup of tea with honey and lemon and drank it at the dining room table. She reached across her coat for the cigarettes in her purse as her husband turned into the driveway. In the kitchen he set the alarm, two high beeps behind her, then at the dining room door he stopped and said: “How are you?”
She looked over her left shoulder at him.
“Not sober yet. I’ll wait till I am before I go to bed.”
“Good plan.” He came to her, taking off his coat, and leaned over and kissed her goodnight. Walking down the hall he said: “I should do what you’re doing. But I’m wasted.”
She watched him go into the girls’ rooms, then the bedroom at the hall’s end, and close the door. She finished her tea, then left the table and descended two steps into the living room. Last night her husband had brought home two movies because he liked her to have a choice. They had watched the Australian one, Man of Flowers, and she could not recall ever seeing a movie so beautiful. All of its music was from Lucia di Lammermoor and the movie itself achieved the splendid sadness of opera, for the man of the title was unique, bizarre: she could watch it in the way she listened to music, with a sorrow that uplifted her, for it did not demand empathy. The one they had not watched was a horror movie.
She pressed buttons and inserted the cassette, went to the kitchen and turned on flames under the kettle, then in the bathroom brushed her teeth; but as she poured boiling water into her cup she could taste again onions and tahini. She turned out the kitchen light, and those in the living room, and started the movie and settled on the couch with cigarettes and tea.
The woman in the movie was divorced and lived in Southern California with her children: a girl of about fourteen, and a boy and girl who appeared twelve and nine. They had an almost new car and a small good house and no one mentioned money; the mother did some sort of work, in an office with people, but only a few brief scenes showed it, and either because of the long and frightening action in the home or the Scotch the woman had drunk while she listened to Stephen in the kitchen, the work remained unclear.
The television was at one corner of the room and, to its right, the wall was a long window. The blinds were up, and now and then she glanced from the movie to the snow in front of the house: the white slope, and the scattered shapes of young trees, and, farther right, the sharp bank of the driveway. She knew she ought to lower the blinds, use them against the escaping heat and its cost, but she and her husband had built on this hill so they could look at the sky, and the woods and meadow across the road in front of their house, and she did not lower the blinds. But she stood and, watching the movie, lowered those on the left of the television, and covered the wide sliding glass door to the sundeck.
Something no one could see attacked the mother in her home. Its attacks were in the beginning those of a poltergeist: sounds that woke her, and the source of these sounds could only be another presence, or the malfunctioning of her mind; a jewelry box and evening bag exchanged places on her dressing table; doors closed or opened while the air was still; and sometimes there was nothing tangible, but a force the mother felt, usually in her bedroom, always at night.
Stephen had been sober for one month and four days when he heard a voice in his car as he drove alone one night, and in those moments he felt a strong but good presence in the front seat. Perhaps inside his body too. His face and voice as he told her the story made her believe now that it entered him. Probably he said it had. It loved him. He had never felt so loved, and he released himself to it, and then he wept. The flow of tears felt on his cheeks like the final drops of his agony. The presence drew them from him, as first it had drawn from him not only his struggle against drunkenness, but his very struggle to survive: every effort he had made, every strength he had mustered, since his birth, or even conception. He joyfully surrendered himself to the gift he was receiving: he had never been strong and he would never again need the resolve to be.
Watching a close-up of the mother fearfully closing her eyes for another night, the woman began to cry. She flicked and wiped away tears and focused on the dark bedroom and the face finally asleep, then her tears stopped and her throat dried and her heart felt dry too, a heavy vessel of solid sighs, drawn downward by gravity. She touched her cheeks and knew her make-up was unmarred. If her husband should enter the room now, sit beside her and turn on a lamp, he could not know that she had cried. There was much that he did not need to know, and she envied him now, and many other times, or perhaps only longed for his certainty. He loved her and the girls and most of the time—no: enough of the time—his work. He not only expected nothing else but was content not to. She loved him and her daughters and—enough—her work, and she loved herself too. So her husband loved himself, if that meant being generally happy, and able to live without any of the drugs of her friends: liquor, or therapists or shrinks, or trying to prolong their lives with exercise and atrophied sensuality.
But certainly Stephen had always loved himself. How else explain his years of fighting and failing but always fighting, until the night a voice, a something, visited his car. He knew what the voice said. She understood that, in the kitchen where they leaned against the counter and she vaguely saw and heard friends moving, talking, pouring Chablis. But she did not ask him for the words, and he did not offer them. For two years he had not drunk or missed it, and he went to daily mass. He told her of mass and communion in one soft, quick sentence; and though his face did not change color its flesh seemed held by a blush.
The attacks in the movie were vicious now: the thing spoke the mother’s name, cursed her, lifted her and flung her against walls and to the ceiling. Her children ran screaming to her room, to her. No one could help; only one person tried. The psychiatrist did not believe her; or he believed she was alone in her room. The medical doctor and the two scientists at the college did not believe her either. Only one man did, a friend not a lover. He sat with her on the final night, and when the thing attacked he cursed it and leaped at it and it threw him across the room. He was unconscious while, for the first time, it raped her. The children held each other just inside her doorway and cried and could not close or even avert their eyes. In the morning the mother and children got into the car and drove away from the house, and the camera moved back from their faces, the mother’s last, then from a high distance showed the car traversing a landscape of brown and yellow hills. The scene faded, then words appeared on a blue background: The events you have just seen occurred in the lives of a real family. They now live in Texas.
She read the credits then stood and turned off the television and pressed the button to rewind the cassette. Listening to its sound she looked out at the snow. Then she removed the cassette and put it in its case. She sat on the couch and smoked, staring beyond the road at the meadow and trees and stars. She was looking out the window and reaching beside her for another cigarette, when suddenly she knew she was waiting. Quickly she stood and took the ashtray and her teacup to the kitchen.
PART VI
VOICES FROM THE MOON
to my sisters, Kathryn and Beth
IT’S DIVORCE THAT did it, his father had said last night. Those were the first words Richie Stowe remembered when he woke in the summer morning, ten minutes before the six-forty-five that his clock-radio was set for; but the words did not come to him as in memory, as something spoken even in the past of one night, but like other words that so often, in his twelve years, had seemed to wait above his sleeping face so that when he first opened his eyes he would see them like a banner predicting his day: Today is the math test; Howie is going to get you after school … It’s divorce that did it, and he turned off the switch so the radio wouldn’t start, and lay in the breeze of the oscillating fan, a lean suntanned boy in underpants, neither tall nor short, and felt the opening of wounds he had believed were healed, felt again the deep and helpless sorrow, and the anger too because he was twelve and too young for it and had done nothing at all to cause it.
Then he got up, dress
ed in jeans and tee shirt and running shoes, went to his bathroom where a poster of Jim Rice hung behind the toilet, gazed at it while he urinated, studying the strong thighs and arms (in the poster Rice had swung his bat, and was looking up and toward left field), and Richie saw again that moment when Rice had broken his bat without hitting the ball: had checked his swing, and the bat had continued its forward motion, flown out toward first base, leaving Rice holding the handle. This was on television, and Richie had not believed what he had seen until he saw it again, the replay in slow motion.
His bicycle was in his room. He pushed it down the hall, at whose end, opposite his room, was the closed door leading to his father’s bathroom and bedroom. He went out the front door and off the slab of concrete in front of it, mounted, and rode down the blacktop street under a long arch of the green branches of trees. As he pedaled and shifted gears he prayed for his anger to leave him, and for his brother Larry, and Brenda, and his father, but as he prayed he saw them: Larry and Brenda when they were married, sitting at the kitchen table with him and his father, Brenda’s dark skin darker still from summer, her black hair separating at her shoulders, so that some of it rested on the bare flesh above her breasts. The men were watching her: slender and graceful Larry, who acted and danced, his taut face of angles and edges at the jaw and cheekbones, and a point at the nose; and Richie’s father, with Larry’s body twenty-two years older, wiry and quick, the face not rounded but softened over the bones.
Then he was at the church, and he locked his bicycle to a utility pole in front of it and went in, early for the seven o’clock Mass, genuflected then kneeled in an empty pew, and gazed at the crucifix, at the suffering head of Christ, but could not stop seeing what he had not seen last night but imagined as he lay in bed while his father and Larry sat and stood and paced on his ceiling, the floor of the living room. He shut his eyes, saw Larry’s blanched face looking at his father, and saying Marry her? Marry her? and saw his father and Brenda naked in her bed in the apartment she had lived in since the divorce, saw them as he had seen lovemaking in movies, his father on top and Brenda’s dark face, her moans, her cries, seeming more in pain than pleasure. As two altar boys and young Father Oberti entered from the left of the altar, Richie stood, praying Please Jesus Christ Our Lord help me, then said to Him: It will be very hard to be a Catholic in our house.
Knowing it would be hard not only in the today and tomorrow of twelve years old, but even harder as he grew older and had to face the temptations that everyone in the family had succumbed to. Even his mother, living a bicycle ride away in her apartment in Amesbury. Though he had never seen her with a man since his father, or heard her mention the name of one. Everyone in the family living in apartments now: his mother, Larry, Brenda, his sister Carol, older than Larry by a year, in her apartment in Boston, never married so not divorced, but at twenty-six had three times broken up with or lost men who lived with her. So only he and his father lived in the large house that to him was three stories, though his father said it was a split-level, the bedrooms and bathrooms on the first floor, then up a short flight of five steps to the kitchen and dining room and the west sundeck, up five more to the undivided one long room they used as two: at one end his father’s den with a desk, and at the other the living room with the television; outside that long room, past the glass door, was the east sundeck where they kept the hammock and lawn chairs and grill. Now Brenda would move in, and he must keep receiving the Eucharist daily, must move alone and with the strength of the saints through his high school years, past girls, toward the seminary. Hard enough to stay a Catholic, he prayed; even harder to be a good enough one to be a priest.
He was in bed and near sleep last night when he heard the front door open and knew it was Larry, because he had a key still, then he listened to footsteps: Larry’s going up to the kitchen, his father’s overhead, coming from the right, from the den. Richie flung back the top sheet, but did not move his feet to the floor. He was sleepy, already it was past ten o’clock, and five times this summer he had turned off the radio when it woke him, gone back to sleep and missed the weekday Mass and waked at nine or later, a failure for the day that had only begun. He pulled the sheet over his chest, settled into the pillow, and listened to their voices in the kitchen, the popping open of beer cans, and their going upstairs to the living room over his bed. He again pushed the sheet away and this time got up; sleepy or no, he would at least go see him, touch him, at least that. He opened his door and was going up the short flight to the kitchen when he heard Larry: “I don’t believe this.”
Richie stood, his hand on the flat banister. His father’s voice was low, and neither angry nor sad, but tired: “It’s divorce that did it.”
“Whose?”
“Yours. Mine. Fucking divorce. You think I chose her?”
“What am I supposed to think?”
“It just happened. It always just happens.”
“Beautiful. What happened to will?”
“Don’t talk to me about will. Did you will your marriage to end? Did your mother and me? Will is for those bullshit guys to write books about. Out here it’s—”
“—Survival of the quickest, right. Woops, sorry son, out of the way, boy, I’m grabbing your ex-wife.”
“Out here it’s balls and hanging on. I need her, Larry.”
Richie imagined them, facing each other in the room, in the blown air from the window fan, as he had seen them all his life, facing each other in quarrels, their arms bent at their sides, fists clenched, save when they gestured and their arms came up with open hands; they never struck the blow that, always, they seemed prepared for; not even his father, when Larry was a boy. Even as Richie stood in dread on the stairs, his fingers and palm pressing down on the banister as if to achieve even more silence from his rigid body, he knew there would be no hitting tonight. His father was not like any other father he knew: at forty-seven, he was still quick of temper, and fought in bars. Yet he had never struck anyone in the family, not even a spanking: for your kids, he said, the tongue is plenty. Richie backed down the stairs, turned and crept into his room, and softly closed the door.
He stood beneath them and listened for a while, then lay in bed and heard the rest of what came to him through his ceiling when their voices rose, less in anger, it seemed, than in excitement, and his heart beat with it too, and in that beat he recognized another feeling that usually he associated with temptation, with sin, with turning away from Christ: something in him that was aroused, that took pleasure in what he knew, and knew with sadness, to be yet another end of their family.
He prayed against it, incantations of Lord, have mercy, as he prayed now in Mass to overcome his anger, his sorrowful loss, and to both endure and help his family. Father Oberti was approaching the Consecration and Richie waited for the miracle, then watched it, nearly breathless, and prayed My Lord and my God to the white Host elevated in Father Oberti’s hands, and softly struck his breast. Beneath the Host, Father Oberti’s face was upturned and transformed. It was a look Richie noticed only on young priests, and only when they consecrated the bread and wine. In movies he had seen faces like it, men or women gazing at a lover, their lips and eyes seeming near both tears and a murmur of love, but they only resembled what he saw in Father Oberti’s face, and were not at all the same. Now Father Oberti lifted the chalice and Richie imagined being inside of him, feeling what he felt as the wine he held became the Blood of Christ. My Lord and my God, Richie prayed, striking his breast, immersing himself in the longing he felt there in his heart: a longing to consume Christ, to be consumed through Him into the priesthood, to stand some morning purified and adoring in white vestments, and to watch his hands holding bread, then God. His eyes followed the descent of the chalice.
From there the Mass moved quickly forward, and he was able to concentrate on it, to keep memory and imagination from returning to last night and tomorrow, or at least from distracting him. Images of his father and Larry and Brenda collided with his
prayers, but they did not penetrate him as they had before the Consecration. Even when he was a boy of seven and eight, nothing distracted him from the Consecration and the time afterward, until the Mass ended, and he had believed he was better than the other children. Now, at twelve, he knew he had received a gift, with his First Communion or even before, and that he had done nothing to earn it, and he must be ever grateful and humble about it, or risk losing it.
He rose to approach the altar. With clasped hands resting on his stomach, his head bowed, he walked up the aisle behind three white-haired old women. When it was his turn, he stepped to Father Oberti at the head of the aisle, turned his left palm up, with his right under it, as Father Oberti took a Host from the chalice, raised it, said Body of Christ, and Richie said Amen. Father Oberti placed the Host on his palm. He looked at it as he turned to go down the aisle. Then with his right thumb and forefinger he put it in his mouth, let it rest on his tongue, then softly chewed as he walked to the pew. He felt that he embraced the universe, and was in the arms of God.
When the Mass ended he kneeled until everyone had left the church. Then he went up to the altar, genuflected, looked up at Christ on the cross, and went around the altar and into the sacristy. The altar boys were leaving, and Father Oberti was in his white shirt and black pants.
“Richie.”
“Can I talk to you, Father?”
They watched the altar boys go out the door, onto the lawn.
“What is it?”
“My father and Brenda. My brother’s ex-wife? They’re getting married.”
“Oh my. Oh my, Richie, you poor boy.”
Father Oberti sat in a chair and motioned to another, but Richie stood, his eyes moving about the room, sometimes settling on Father Oberti’s, but then he nearly cried, so he looked again at walls and windows and floor, telling it as he both heard and imagined last night.