The Changeling

by Joy Williams

  “I love clowns,” Pearl said to Walker. “They’re like children. They can do anything. They can get away with anything.”

  “You admire children, do you?” Walker asked.

  “I don’t know, I’ve never known any really. I was talking about clowns.”

  Posters were plastered upon posters. She saw the rump of a dappled horse halved by a ring of fire.

  Even then, the thought of having children had depressed her and she sighed. “I suppose you will want us to have a child together, won’t you?” she said.

  Walker put his arm around her. He had looked like a businessman, slightly out of place in his fawn-colored suit, an oversized man, but easeful as he walked, his arm lightly and possessively encircling Pearl’s waist.

  An old, highly varnished motor launch was tied up to the dock. There was a figure in white slouched in the launch. The figure was a boy, dressed in rumpled white pants and a shirt. His hair was white. His eyebrows were thick and white. He was chewing gum and smiling at Pearl in a way she simply hadn’t the means to interpret. Pearl never forgot her bewilderment at the sight of him.

  “This is my nephew, Joe,” said Walker. “Joe is nine. He tries to make a point of never speaking to adults.”

  The boy helped them aboard. He started the engine and then sat in the stern in an elaborate wicker chair. He tipped the chair backward on two legs and steered with one hand while he held the other hand to his tanned cheek. The white light of the water danced in his eyes.

  Pearl could not believe that Joe was only nine. He appeared almost twice that age, as though his efforts at remaining a child had prematurely aged him. Pearl had difficulty in not staring at his obvious erection. Joe seemed unaware of it himself. Children that age couldn’t have erections like that anyway, could they? Perhaps he was just fooling around. Perhaps it was a prop, like they used in the old morality plays.

  The child said nothing. He concentrated upon chewing his gum as though it were his jaws that were powering the boat.

  It was cold, and Joe gave Pearl an orange windbreaker. She was very cold. She had no sense of anticipation. She could not imagine what it would be like there. She had never had much curiosity about things. She regarded this in a way like a gift, like a talent conferred. It had kept her from disappointment, even from sorrow.

  She saw a sliver of moon in the green sky, like a sunrise. She crept beneath Walker’s arm and watched in safety, like an arboreal creature in a midnight nest. As they headed out, the sky turned slowly gray, a creamy silver like the inside of a sea shell. A solitary cormorant flew past them, very close, the color of iron in the fog. Time passed. She felt warmer. The day was utterly without color or warmth, but she began to feel comfortable. She felt oddly illuminated, transilluminated, as though the sun had found a place within her on this journey, yet even as she felt this, the sun turned into something else, quite simple, the knowledge that she could never again be what she had been once.

  The fog lifted in patches, became clouds. On either side of them, she saw the island, green and still. It had taken them almost an hour. Seven miles. It might have been seven years. She supposed it wouldn’t seem so long in the future.

  Joe brought the launch up to within several hundred yards of the shore and then proceeded with some deft, complex maneuvers through rocks into a small cove. It was almost high tide. The rocks were invisible from a distance, but looking over the varnished railings into the water, she could see their messy, jagged tops slide by.

  “What’s the name of your island?” Pearl asked Walker.

  “We never named it,” he said, turning from her for a moment while he lit a cigarette. “On the maps it’s called ‘Hart Island’ and you’ll hear some people in Morgansport refer to it like that, but that has nothing to do with us. They call it that not because of any Revolutionary War type deer tale, but because, I think, the island resembles a heart. From the air, at any rate.” He laughed. “You could say that the house was on the left ventricle.”

  Joe cut the engines and brought the boat up quietly to the dock. The land was absolutely still, and Pearl saw nothing, not even a bird. There were several other vessels tied up to the dock, in all manner of sleekness or disrepair. The tide was still coming in. A brisk wind carried it with a slap against the pilings. Walker helped her out and then helped Joe tie the lines. There was an old Buick parked nearby on the dark, hard sand. They got into it.

  “No showing off now, Joe,” Walker said.

  Pearl and Walker sat in the back of the Buick. The interior was mildewed and there were deep tears in the upholstery. Pearl looked at the boy’s neck as they drove. His profile was flat, averted. His long white hair swirled around his face in the wind. It could have been an old woman driving them. But then her eyes met his in the mirror and they were the eyes of a stern, precocious child. Walker told her that Joe had refashioned the old car himself so that he would be able to drive it. The boy loved to do anything with machines. When he was four, he had been convinced that his real father was an astronaut and he had built a space vehicle for himself which he had then attempted to fly from the roof, breaking his leg in the process.

  Pearl looked amazed at the boy’s smug and reckless profile.

  “Goodness,” she said.

  They drove for long minutes down a road that was little more than a sandy track. She saw other roads branching off and disappearing into tangle. Some of the land had been cleared for pasturage but there were no animals visible. There were a few small wooden pens collapsing into the overgrowth.

  “Do you raise animals here?” she asked.

  “No, that’s from Grandfather Aaron’s day. Great-grandfather Aaron, really. He made his fortune from animals, one way or another. The children will tell you all about him. They’re fascinated by him. I see him as a simple butcher myself. But a lucky man with money.”

  The Buick lurched past a marsh and there was a glimpse of the sea. Among the cattails and spartine grass of the rich, organic shore was a lone tree. High in its branches was a collection of boards, a playhouse.

  “Oh,” Pearl exclaimed. “I used to have one of those. It’s nice here, isn’t it? Islands are nice. They’re a whole other world. I like it.” She lowered her voice so Joe couldn’t hear. “I like it your loving me and bringing me here.”

  The branches of trees crackled and pounded against the car’s sides. From a distance, Pearl heard the sympathetic lament of church bells.

  “Now don’t tell me you have your own chapel on this island too?” she said, feeling lighthearted. “The mainland God isn’t good enough for the Thomases?”

  “That’s just the children playing with the bell on the house,” Walker said.

  Then Joe had taken a sharp corner and the house was before them. The wheels spun in the sand and Pearl’s head was lightly thrown back by the jolt. The sky was blue, a living seething blue. It charged her with energy, memory, a kind of competence. The memory had resulted not from any experience she could recall. It was rather almost chemical, something innate. A memory without an error.

  The car stopped. “Here we are then,” Walker said to Pearl. To the boy, he said, “You can’t drive nails, Joe.”

  Joe shrugged and yawned, exposing the enormous wad of gum in his mouth. Pearl realized that she was sweating. Joe seemed to be looking at her without focusing on her. His eyes were alert and engaging but they just were not looking at anything. Pearl was relieved when he suddenly turned and ran off to join another boy who was just emerging from the house. The boy’s head seemed covered with feathers.

  At the time, the house had seemed more or less familiar to Pearl. Like a seasonal hotel. One to which she had never been taken before, certainly, but recognizable all the same. A rambling three-storied structure with a tightly shingled roof. Several of the rooms had little balconies on which were tattered canvas chairs. The house seemed to have been built at various times with a changing vision, but with all its styles it maintained the carelessness and simplicity that the ric
h sometimes bestow on their homes. The windows were paned with old thick glass and buckled out slightly. The wood was warm and smooth like skin. There were baroque and fanciful embellishments here and there. On the roof was a weather vane of a man shooting a wolf. Separating the first floor from the second was a band of lighter colored, much-embellished wood. Gamboling putti it seemed to Pearl, although she really couldn’t make it out. Wrapped around the house was a wide porch upon which half a dozen children were playing. Some of them didn’t have a stitch on.

  “Walker, Walker,” they cried out happily. For an instant, his name was the only utterance in the bawling Pearl recognized. Then a tiny girl touched Pearl’s arm and lisped, “I swallowed my tooth but the Tooth Fairy gave me a quarter anyway.”

  The girl patted Pearl’s dress. “Do you have anything pretty you’d like to give me?” she asked.

  “Don’t be impolite, Sweet,” Walker said. “This is Pearl. Trip, Peter, Johnny, this is Pearl.”

  The children looked at her with mock gravity.

  “Hello, Pearl,” they said softly.

  Walker opened the door. “I want to show you our rooms,” he said.

  They stepped into a long, wide hallway with a staircase rising at the end.

  “Over here is the library,” Walker said. “We’ll come down here for cocktails later.”

  Pearl looked in and saw a large fireplace with a heavy oak mantel, a scattering of comfortable chairs and red and pink rugs. In the corner two boys were playing a board game. They did not look up.

  From the other side of the hall Pearl smelled bread and could hear a woman singing softly. She followed Walker toward the stairs. The house was warm, almost airless. Even inside, the wood had a smooth velvety look, the wide floor boards almost white with age and scrubbing. Some of the children’s drawings had been framed and hung on the wall, mixed in with two Picasso oils, a Sargent water color, and several Blake drawings.

  “Are those real?” Pearl asked, squinting.

  “The Blakes are copies,” Walker said.

  Christ was blessing little children. Good and bad angels were struggling for a baby.

  The second floor was brighter. It had a slightly gamy smell. The rooms they passed were definitely the warrens of children. Walker told her that many of the children here were the family’s by adoption. His brother, Thomas, was very fond of children. For years he had gathered them, all manner of misfits and foundlings who were raised in a long and indulged childhood with every possible freedom. Thomas encouraged their fantasies. Thomas gave them social graces and intellectual hungers. Thomas had enough money to do as he wished and what he wished was to educate children according to his interests.

  “What are Thomas’s interests?” Pearl asked.

  They had climbed another flight of stairs. Pearl was quite out of breath. She licked her lips still salty from the boat ride. Up above her was a skylight which disclosed a heaven now scratched with red.

  “We’re down this end,” Walker said. “The room has a nice view of the meadow and the sea.”

  Pearl looked over his shoulder through a many-paned window at the ground below. To the west, just before the changing colors of the woods, was a swimming pool. To the north, a sandy cliff, a rocky beach and the sea. Various outbuildings were scattered behind meandering stone walls to the south, including a peculiar little stone house with a sod roof.

  “Pearl,” he said.

  She followed him. His suit was a wonderful golden shade, like the meadow.

  There was a brass bed in the room they entered. Some of the ornamentation on the headboard had been bent or broken. It was a spacious room. Walker’s clothes hung in the closet. His hairbrush lay upon a pine bureau.

  “I love you, Pearl,” he said, smiling at her as though she were a foolish girl and this were all a joke.

  “I . . . why . . . you think I’m just being silly here, don’t you . . . just coming with you to your house.” She tried to feel indignant, even frightened, but she could not. She was happy.

  Walker ran his hand down across her breasts and rubbed her belly through her thin dress. She lay back on the white cotton bedspread, and he lay beside her, moving up her skirt, slipping off her pants. He dropped his big dark head upon her breasts. Pearl giggled. She lapped his ears like a puppy. She whispered her new love words. She loved it that they were dressed, that he covered her not with his nakedness but with the costume of propriety. She touched his belt, his hips, and then she closed her eyes and grasped the headboard, her fingers curling, one with the broken, cold design.

  Later, she lay pressed against his back as he slept. The windows were open to the dark. Pearl could hear a child’s voice rising from the bathroom below.

  “And may we, like the clock,

  Keep a face clean and bright

  With hands ever ready

  To do what is right.”

  Pearl laughed. A clock chimed and Walker woke.

  “Walker,” a child cried from the other side of the door, “Thomas wants to meet Pearl.”

  “Ohh,” Pearl murmured, “perhaps I should just stay up here for a few days until I get used to things. I’m a little slow at meeting people. I . . .”

  “I’m awfully sorry,” Walker said, “did I fail to introduce myself? I’m . . .”

  “Ohh,” Pearl said. She still felt happy. And full and energized after love.

  Down in the library, Walker mixed her a drink from the bar. Pearl was happy with another person’s happiness and daring. Walker handed her a glass and she swallowed her drink immediately. There were no children in the room; just two women and a man. Pearl suddenly felt nervous with another person’s nervousness.

  Walker made the introductions.

  Shelly. My sister.

  Miriam.

  My brother, Thomas.

  “What a beautiful skirt you’re wearing,” Pearl said to Miriam.

  Miriam had a kind and leathery face and a graying braid that went down to her waist.

  “Thank you,” Miriam said.

  Pearl was grateful. She sucked her drink.

  “She makes them,” Shelly said. “People send her scraps of material from everywhere.”

  “Tell us the story behind that common piece of blue there,” Thomas said, pointing to a piece of serge fixed to Miriam’s waistline.

  “That,” Miriam said instantly, “belonged to a young Australian seaman who was granted leave and flown home from Malta to assist his wife who was troubled by a black and white phantom without a head who kept punching her three children.”

  Pearl stared at the skirt. Its harmony was much too disassociative. And it was not beautiful although it was wonderfully done.

  She looked away from the skirt to Thomas. He was a big dark man like Walker. He wore a rather grimy white linen suit and a white shirt. He had seemed like a dark, cold sun to Pearl.

  “And what was that again, Miriam?” he asked, pointing to something quite ordinary, a white thing near the blue.

  “That is from the pillowcase of a suicide.”

  “Goodness,” Pearl protested.

  “You must tell us something about yourself,” Shelly said to Pearl.

  Pearl hadn’t known anything to say about herself. She put her drink on the mantelpiece beside a little wooden sculpture there. There were several wooden carvings, all about four inches high. Nervously, she picked one up.

  No one said anything. There was an enormous silence around her accentuated by the creak of a floor board.

  “What are these things?” Pearl almost screamed, embarrassed. She extended her hand with the carving in it. It was an animal, a wolf. Pearl could see that. She had run her fingernail down its carved spine, where the carved hairs fell to either side. It was quite carefully done and it seemed charged with a sweaty energy in her damp hand. Its eyes and nostrils, the cloven sculpted sign of its sex, its teeth and haunches . . .

  She dropped it on the rug.

  Thomas picked it up and replaced it on the mantel.
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br />   “Aaron carved those, back in the 1800s,” he said. “He made a dozen of them. Wolf, bear, fox, deer . . . the animals he’d killed. In the beginning he was a hunter and a trapper. He knew a lot about animals. He ate them and collected them and skinned them and sold them. Then he began to re-create them.”

  “Did Aaron . . . was he the one who built this house?” Pearl put her empty hand around her drink.

  “He and his wife, Emma. Aaron amassed considerable wealth in his time. That’s why we’re comfortable today. Were you wondering about that?”

  “Oh no,” Pearl said, “I wasn’t . . . no . . .”

  “He started off as a simple trapper but he was too smart for that occupation. The children will tell you though that he stopped killing because the last animal he dispatched spoke to him.”

  Pearl looked at Walker. She giggled. “What did it spoke?” she asked.

  “It said, ‘Why are you looking at me dying? Soon you will be an animal dying, and people will be looking at you.’”

  Pearl said nothing. It seemed reasonable enough.

  “Whatever it was, something changed his attitude. He cleaned himself up and got civilized. He made killings in the market place rather than the woods. Everything he touched was money. No one much liked him but he began to make too much money to be rejected. He bought into banks and railroads and steamboats . . . he was part owner of the Henry Clay, the fastest steamboat on the Hudson until it burned and sank in 1852. It killed over a hundred people and Aaron was charged with manslaughter, but he was acquitted. Aaron was lucky. He was lucky until the day he died.”

  “Oh well,” Pearl said vaguely.

  “In his last years this is what he whittled with,” Thomas said, lifting a short shallow box from behind the animals. He flicked it open with his thumbnail as though his nail were a key, exposing a short knife with a horn handle. The handle was carved with the images of sacrificed animals, a ring of endings, animal biting animal, twisting their way around the handle of the knife, body cavities being opened, throats being slit, vigorous animals, curiously peaceful, falling to their knees.