Absent Company

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  “Kind of appropriate, I think, for Valentine’s Day,” Charlie said.

  “Valentine’s Day?”

  “Yep, it’s Valentine’s Day. What’s the matter, Bobby? Didn’t you send any Valentines out this year?”

  Bobby didn’t say anything.

  “Never cared much for the holiday, myself. The Lupercalia. Did you know that the Romans used to sacrifice animals for it? Now maybe that’s the origin of all those cute little cards with all their bright red ink. I don’t know. Rather romantic, don’t you think? The priests would run through the crowds striking people with bloody thongs of animal hide. Infertile couples would push their way to the front to make sure they were struck—it was supposed to cure them. Then afterwards … well, they tried to make the most of the occasion.”

  Bobby shook his head. “Sounds pretty desperate.”

  “Some people will do almost anything in order to have children, I suppose. To get a little love and affection they think’s going to last. A child’s affection is supposed to last, I suppose.” Charlie frowned a little and looked down at his feet. “The human heart’s a funny thing.”

  And finally, in one of the smaller upstairs rooms, the maid’s bedroom of an earlier age, they discovered what they would forever after refer to as the “bridal shrine”: the walls hung with a variety of wedding dresses of differing ages and quality, several tables laden with wedding invitations, rice packets, bride and groom figurines, and, off in the corner, an expensive-looking bassinet, covered with several layers of brilliant white silk, still waiting for the baby. Bobby felt a pain and bit his lip, tasted blood. “She was married?” he asked.

  “Not that I was ever told.”

  “Children?”

  “Not that I ever heard.”

  Charlie decided to go back downstairs to begin cataloguing the library. He didn’t expect to find much of value—he’d already complained to Bobby that most of it seemed to consist of those “silly Victorian women’s novels” that had been so popular in their time, but were practically worthless now.

  “I’ll pack up the bridal things,” Bobby said.

  Charlie glanced around the room. “Not much we can sell here, except maybe the fancy bassinet. But I’m reluctant to toss out anything which obviously had such obsessive importance for someone. We may have to eventually, of course, but for now let’s just store and catalogue it all.”

  Bobby shared his grandfather’s reluctance; in fact, he found the room difficult to leave. Whoever Alice Collins had been, he felt the heart of her had resided in this room.

  Most of the bridal gowns had a number of layers, giving them a fullness he found oddly disconcerting. They hung along the walls like a collection of headless brides. Some of the necklines and sleeves seemed slightly frayed, yellowed, as if the gowns had been worn several times over the years. He heard Charlie opening the front door downstairs, dragging something outside, and he imagined a succession of headless brides being carried over the threshold by their phantom grooms. He rubbed at his chest, thinking maybe his mind had been affected, now prone to morbid jokes. The draught from downstairs snaked through the room. The bridal gowns rustled; one or two swirled slightly, as if anxious for the “Wedding March” to be played.

  Then the door slammed downstairs and he could smile at himself. He began wrapping the various wedding props in newspaper, carefully, and loading them into boxes.

  He was removing a large, remarkably ornate wedding dress from the wall, when he discovered a small door behind it, hidden by the lacy, voluminous folds.

  It appeared to be some sort of small storage closet, lined with dark shelves. Without thinking he reached into the darkness of one shelf, and felt something hard there. He caught his fingers on the edge of it, and dragged it out into the light. It was a thick and heavy book. A scrapbook. The title, hand-lettered in white ink, said simply “1952”.

  He flipped through the scrapbook quickly. Valentines. Page after page of them, apparently homemade and addressed to “Miss Alice Collins”.

  All the shelves were stacked high with similar-sized scrapbooks, each labelled by year. He slid a few out at random: they all contained similar homemade Valentines. Bobby sat down on the floor with a number of the volumes from a wide range of years and began studying the Valentines in detail. His grandfather enjoyed old scrapbooks, the more personal and eccentric the better. He would love these.

  The early Valentines were all almost identical. Precise hearts had been cut from heavy, pale red construction paper, so perfectly symmetrical that Bobby thought they must have been drawn with drafting tools. Each had been pasted into the exact center of a square of fine white linen paper. One word, “Frederick’, had been carefully written in the bottom right corner, approximately one inch from the edge of the sheet.

  There were sixty such Valentines for each year from 1952 through 1960, five-hundred forty in all. And all of them virtually identical. The only differences were slight gradations in the shade of red, probably because the construction paper from time to time would inevitably come from a different dye batch, or a different brand. And now and then there were slight variations in the weave and finish of the white squares of paper, although they were all very close, as if selected for consistency. Bobby wondered how many paper manufacturers Frederick’s passion had outlasted.

  Subtle changes were evident in the Valentines from 1961: they were slightly larger, less symmetrical, and here and there Bobby detected mistakes in the cutting, with tiny ragged slivers of red projecting out of the outlines of a few of the hearts. Like bloody fur, he thought. In ’62 and ’63 the mistakes increased, the signatures became less neat, more hurried. For ’64 Bobby discovered a volume of over two hundred Valentines—more than four a week!—each slightly different from all the others. Some were quite a bit smaller, some quite a bit larger, the colors brighter, or darker, as if the Valentine had been smoke damaged. On some of them lace had been sloppily—as if hastily—applied. Some of the hearts had begun to distort, with slight bulges here and there. Towards the end of the year Frederick’s signature had become much larger, thicker. Now and then a broad exclamation mark had been appended.

  For ’65 there were only a handful of Valentines, seven or eight. Only two of these were red. For the others Frederick had experimented with green, yellow, blue, black, grey.

  Bobby stared at the final, grey Valentine, pasted in halfway through the scrapbook. All the remaining pages were blank.

  The grey shape was almost unrecognizable as a heart, if indeed a heart was what it had been intended to be. It had a number of wandering curves and angles, with pockets and dead ends that caught at the eye. The soft greyness of the shape tended to blend with the slightly discolored paper, so that, after staring at the Valentine for some time, Bobby was even less sure of its shape.

  The idea of older people indulging themselves in such a game saddened him. The idea of this man sending to his love these increasingly incoherent, desperate love messages, and this woman saving them, disturbed him. They had acted no more rationally than he had over the loss of Joan. They had not healed and they had got no better—they had obviously grown much worse. Examining these books of Valentines made him despair of the possibilities of his own emotional survival.

  The draught had come back into the room. The scrapbook page stirred slightly beneath his hands. He looked back at the Valentine, and it was as if he was looking into it, the grey shape opening up and turning, leaving an impression of arms and legs twisting and untwisting, something embryonic unfolding, an aged face writhing in final pain.

  Bobby looked away. When he gazed back, Frederick’s final Valentine was again pasted and fixed to the page, the colors fading into a pale nothingness. In a few years there’d be no discernible shape at all.

  As he was putting these scrapbooks back on the darkened shelves, Bobby realized there were still more volumes on the shelves on the other sides of the closet, numbering all the way up to the present year. He pulled out the volume for 1966
anxiously.

  The Valentines for ’66 were similar to the ones in the early volumes: simple, single-hearted affairs, but not as precisely cut and pasted. The major difference was that these new Valentines were unsigned.

  1968 and 1969 saw the arrival of some rather badly distorted cards. Hearts with cancerous lumps hanging off the left and right ventricles, hearts with pieces removed, several hearts with holes burned in their middles, stained, chewed, or otherwise marred.

  1970 through 1973 brought hearts in a variety of shapes and sizes, able to express almost every mood and degree of ambivalence imaginable. Some of the hearts had become so distorted they reminded Bobby of exploratory dissections, or perhaps hearts that had been turned inside out, pushed through their own aortas. 1974 brought with it new varieties of paper: shiny, hard materials like dried skin and muscle. Bobby thought of the Roman priests swinging their bloody thongs through the dense crowds of stupefied, infertile citizens.

  In 1975 and 1976 the Valentines had been severely abused: apparently pounded, and slashed with razors, bent and twisted. And still the woman had saved them.

  Bobby pulled the remaining volumes off the shelves, scattering them haphazardly on the floor around him, flipping through them at random, sampling the Valentines, making comparisons, looking for some meaning.

  The Valentines for the current year’s volume were not glued into place, but simply inserted between the heavy black pages of the scrapbook. But upon turning the pages Bobby was able to find the vague traces of glue still adhering to the black surfaces, as if the Valentines, no longer content with being fixed in such a manner, had pulled and twisted themselves off the pages.

  Bobby held the misshapen Valentines delicately between two fingers, reluctant to touch them. They no longer resembled paper constructions, but were more like flattened animal carcasses pressed between the sheets, much like the flattened flower arrangements Alice Collins had framed and hung from her walls as sad decoration.

  Valentines began falling from this last volume at an increasing rate, piling up at Bobby’s feet, soon covering his shoes. Upon exposure to air they seemed somehow more brittle and yet after a few minutes the colors appeared renewed, the paper cracking as the Valentines seemed to expand.

  Bobby held one of the shiny red hearts in his hand, the heart more like dried leather than paper, and watched as it began to swell. Suddenly it felt warm in his hand, and he thought of a heart removed from some small animal while it was still alive. He felt the pain back in his chest again as the tiny heart continued its subtle movements. He thought of Joan. He thought of the loneliness of his mother, Charlie’s almost hermit-like lifestyle, the solitary desperation drawn and cut into these Valentines.

  The draft swept around him, the perfume held in these walls over the years suddenly released and pushing into his lungs, pressing against his heart. He gasped for air, clutching at his chest. He imagined his heart a Valentine, the paper being torn again and again by an angry lover, the red dye staining his lover’s hands.

  Before collapsing he heard Charlie calling his name. His nostrils suddenly filled with the strong scent of copper.

  Dr Mullins tapped Bobby’s chest and smiled. “No heart attack this time, young man. Just a bit of stress, and a lingering flu. A little rest should take care of that. You know,” he said, winking, “a little heartache never killed anyone, no matter what the songs say.”

  “I’ve heard that before,” Bobby said softly. “How did …”

  “You talked a lot in your sleep, young man. About that, and all sorts of crazy things.”

  Bobby looked over at his grandfather. Charlie gave him one of those looks that always meant some variation on “let me do the talking”. “Hey, Jim. Miss Alice Collins. Was she ever married? And did she ever have any children?”

  Dr Mullins looked away, fumbling with some of the pill samples in the top drawer of his desk. He tossed a couple to Bobby. “They called her Miss Alice. Everybody did. As long as I can remember.”

  “We’ve known each other a long time, Jim,” Charlie said. “That just answers my first question. You know I wouldn’t ask unless …”

  Dr Mullins raised his hand with a tired look. “She was always a sick woman. If she had been pregnant, she couldn’t have brought it to term, not alive anyway. She would have required some special help.”

  “Medical help?” Bobby had never seen his grandfather look embarrassed before.

  Dr Mullins nodded. “You going over to Irma Bledsoe’s tonight?”

  “I’ll need to let her know as to our progress today.”

  Dr Mullins smiled. “I thought you might. Careful now, Charlie. She’s got meaner every year. She’s not much like her sister Alice, bless her sweet soul.”

  “I figured as much.” Charlie grabbed his battered felt hat and helped Bobby to his feet. At the door he turned back around to face Dr Mullins. “By the way, Jim. How did Alice Collins die?”

  Dr Mullins shook his head. “Well … heart attack, in fact. Her face had that look … that scared look …” He shook his head. “Heart attack.”

  Charlie nodded and pushed Bobby out the door.

  Mrs. Irma Bledsoe sat impatiently through Charlie’s recounting of the day’s progress. Bobby wasn’t surprised when his grandfather failed to mention Bobby’s blacking out.

  “I really don’t see why you needed to come tell me this,” she said, her mouth twisting around the words. “I expected you to simply do the job and then inform me when it was done, Mr. Goode.”

  Charlie smiled what Bobby knew to be his best ingratiating smile, the smile he used to tell farmers he was about to become the bane of their existence until they permitted him on their property in order to search for Indian relics. “I just wanted to make sure we handled things the way you wanted them, Miz Bledsoe. Like these scrapbooks here.”

  Before she could respond, Charlie had plopped one of the huge scrapbooks across her lap, the pages open to two large, hideously distorted Valentines. Bobby could see that they were of the later, anonymous variety. Mrs. Bledsoe stared at the Valentines, but kept her hands hovering chest-high, away from the pages.

  “I … don’t understand … the meaning …”

  “I suppose it’s a few years since you’ve seen these,” Charlie said, leaning over as if to admire the handiwork of the greetings.

  “My sister kept … these monstrosities?”

  “Every last one, it appears. Gave my grandson here quite a scare.”

  Mrs. Bledsoe turned to Bobby, but Bobby didn’t think she saw him. “I never really cared much for the holiday, myself,” she said quickly. “My husband and I …”

  “Frederick,” Charlie interrupted. Bobby looked at his grandfather. He found he couldn’t move.

  Mrs. Bledsoe looked momentarily confused. “Yes, Frederick. Frederick and I never cared much for the holiday, you see. We always thought it was a holiday for children.”

  Bobby thought about the priests with their bloody thongs, the frenzied crowds, and shuddered. Children.

  “But your sister Alice was different?”

  “Yes, Alice was different. Frederick always said that Alice was different from the rest of our family. She loved all the holidays, but especially Valentine’s.” Bobby thought that Mrs. Bledsoe’s voice had suddenly become noticeably colder.

  “So you didn’t send out Valentines each year? Neither you nor your husband?”

  Mrs. Bledsoe’s knees appeared to suddenly collapse and the scrapbook crashed to the floor. Several crushed Valentines blew out of the pages, spun, and dived into the fireplace. They burned with a foul odor, but Bobby seemed to be the only one who noticed.

  “Of course not,” she replied, looking at Charlie as if he were mad.

  “But your children, Miz Bledsoe,” Charlie said, raising his voice. “Surely you helped them celebrate the day?”

  Bobby thought Mrs. Bledsoe looked oddly relieved. “But there were never any children,” she said swiftly. “We couldn’t have them. Oh, Fred
erick wanted them, surely, but I couldn’t …” She stopped. There was a soft rapping on the front door. “We couldn’t have any. He always had a terrible time accepting that, up until the day he died …” The knocking at the door repeated itself, more loudly this time. Bobby craned his neck, looking towards the front hall. Through the window by the front door he could barely make out someone’s figure bending over slowly, reaching down.

  “The day he died,” Charlie said. Mrs. Bledsoe simply nodded as the knocking at the front door continued. “Which was in the year …”

  “I don’t remember,” Mrs. Bledsoe said.

  “Mid-sixties, I would guess,” Charlie said, leaning closer. “Good time for Valentines, I suppose. All those summers of love, as the long-haired kids, the flower children, used to call them.”

  Bobby watched as a letter dropped through the mail slot and the shadow on the other side of the door disappeared. It’s too late in the evening for mail, he thought, and felt inane.

  “The children …” Mrs. Bledsoe repeated. “But I don’t remember the year.”

  “1965?” Charlie asked. “Yes, perhaps he died in ’65. There were some wonderful Valentines in 1965, Miz Bledsoe. But not as good as the ones in ’66. Do you remember the Valentines people were sending in ’66, Miz Bledsoe?”

  She had stood up. She stared at the front hall, the front door. She stepped over the fallen scrapbook, crinkling a brittle red heart beneath the heel of her shoe. “Yes. Now that you mention it,” she said. “I believe I do.”

  “He sent her Valentines, Miz Bledsoe. He sent them to her year round. And you knew, or found out. And after he died you continued to send her Valentines, but yours were of a very different tone, now weren’t they?”

  She acted as if she hadn’t heard him. She walked out to the front hall.