You know, don’t you, in the silence of that house now, where still the siege goes on in its drilled routine, with its guards and checks and controls, the man in charge of it, this Sam Truro, has now faced up to the absolute perplexity of his wants, the absolute ignorance of what to ask or do next. He is caught in a gesture made permanent.
Yet today in the rain—I realized it this afternoon as I looked again at the house—one further gesture has occurred to him, what was only potential yesterday when he stripped Angel Vertebrate and made him join the family rituals with his privates exposed. Today it is clear, there in the afternoon as he watches them, his three prisoners drowsily looking at the afternoon soap operas. Once the idea occurs it grows big in his mind. He goes to the television set and switches it off. Hey, Georgette says. Aw Daddy, Roger says, although he had been almost asleep. Angel Vertebrate grunts.
Seems to me now, Truro says, if Angel here has to go around with his clothes off, it’s only fair you do the same, Georgette.
Screw you, she says.
Off with that shirt.
Cut it out. This is going too far.
Already gone too far, Truro says. Just do what I say. Waves his gun at Vertebrate. Come on, Angel, he says. Tell her to get undressed.
He says to tell you to get undressed, Angel Vertebrate says.
When Georgette takes off her shirt she flings it at Truro. Same with the bra, the jeans, the pants. The pants land on the end of the gun. Good thing you didn’t make me mad doing that, he says.
She is mad, sure enough, and she sits down in her chair, breasts and pubic hair in clear view of all three males in the room. She resists the feminine impulse to cover herself with her hands and arms. Sits instead boldly, thrusting her breasts out, as if there were nothing against her will that he could force her to do.
Now, he says. Grab his cock and give him a hard-on. She looks at him with hatred, then turns to Angel Vertebrate and looks only at him.
Why does she obey? In some twist of spite her anger against him and his against her now travel the same track, seeking expression in the same act. Defying him by her obedience she grabs Angel Vertebrate in the designated place and does exactly what she has been told to do. It takes only a moment, then the next command, barked as by a dog: Georgette, lie down on the cot. She leans back, taking care not to release her hold on Vertebrate, her other hand pulled back by the handcuff to the chain. Now, Angel, climb aboard and go to it.
I can’t sir, you’ll have to unlock me first.
He’ll do that, taking care, watching with the gun as always while he undoes the shackle. He steps back and looks.
Watch this, son, he says. You’ll need to know how to do this when you grow up.
He hears his wife’s muffled voice, He’ll never grow up.
Shut up and enjoy, he says.
We’re enjoying, she says. We’re having more fun than you ever had, jackass.
Enjoy it, enjoy it, you don’t enjoy, I’ll kill you. He is screaming. You’re committing adultery, you damn well better enjoy it.
PATRICIA WESTERLY: To Thomas
Dear dead Daddy, hey Daddy,
You suspected something. Talked it over with Mother. Wrote about it. No names named. If it was we you suspected you didn’t say. Should I tell you, now you’re dead?
Take one of those long vacation drives, all day on the Interstate, you and Mother in front, us crowded in back, on we go. The lakeside cabin ahead and motel with swimming pool tonight. The three of us in back—where were Philip and Ann? Summer jobs, college kids, I don’t remember.
Moods change driving across country hour after hour in the haze of high summer. Air conditioning not good enough. In the back seat we slump, sick of games. Restless dog climbs from one lap to another. Why am I in the middle, though oldest of the three? Girl, right? Or to stop my brothers’ slugging match, I don’t remember. Nor which summer it was, though it could only have been when I was seventeen or eighteen and he fourteen or fifteen: 1970 or 1971. George ten or eleven.
You’ll blame me for this, my age edge, supposed to know better. My discontents, all the things that pissed me off. I was in the middle with him on my right sulking about something, slouched down with the blanket in his lap. I was thinking about people who weren’t there, things that weren’t going to happen at the lake. It was either Ted Barney’s summer or Studs Kuhler, can’t remember which. With this new knowledge I had, which I figured nobody in this car knew, giving me an advantage, I thought. So maybe I was in a grouch too, my thoughts off out of the car, anywhere but the car, but I noticed. What I noticed was not just the blanket in his lap but his hands out of sight and a certain movement in the blanket which in my new knowledge (it must have been Studs Kuhler) I figured to yank the blanket off his lap and sure enough there it was. Long and red, which I would not have expected (only a kid with girlish eyelashes, chubby with a lot of growing yet to do), like Studs Kuhler in a state of gross demand. Cut it out, he yelped, grabbing the blanket back. Furious and silent because of the parents humming along quietly up front and George asleep on my other side.
So I played wise grownup, perfectly natural, nothing to be ashamed of, while he blubbered and half cried, saying, I can’t help it. It’s perfectly all right, I said, and, It’s not all right, he said. He had all the shamed old ideas about everything.
I said, The only bad thing is the place. I mean, what are you going to do with it? I haven’t thought that far ahead, he said. Well you better, I said.
I could tell him under the blanket trying to stuff it back. I wasn’t going that far, he said snapping his lips as if I was the disgusting one. You’d better, I said. You’ll be miserable if you don’t. Give me your handkerchief. Is it clean? He was so confused I went my hands under the blanket with him. Let me, I said. I’ll wash it out tonight.
You’re crazy, he said. But he let me and it only took a minute, while he quivered and rolled his eyes, trying so hard to keep his convulsions invisible to you folks up front, I felt sorry for him.
Then he said, How disgusting.
It’s not disgusting, I said. I rolled up the handkerchief.
He was crying. I can’t help it, he said. I don’t do it often.
It’s better if you have somebody else to do it with.
That’s perverse, he said.
Some girl, I mean.
I don’t know any girls.
You don’t?
None who’d do that. I’m too young.
You don’t look too young to me, I said.
What do you know about it?
I told him about Studs Kuhler.
He looked shocked, even more than before. It’s not that big of a deal, I said.
Don’t you believe in marriage?
Marriage is a different issue, I said.
I could see him thinking, looking at me as if he had only just realized.
What’s the matter?
He repeated what he had said, like deliberately: I don’t know any girls.
They’re all around, I said. All you have to do is look.
I’m too shy.
You can overcome that.
I could see the idea in his head a long time before he said it. It came out finally quiet: You’re a girl.
Don’t be ridiculous.
I said it so quickly like bang before I had time to think like slamming the door to keep the rat out and only then, afterwards in the noise of the car, did I feel the silence and absence of thought. He was looking at me with white eyes in terror. I didn’t mean it, he said, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, like he expected to be whipped.
Take it easy. I felt sorry for him. I was also thinking about Studs Kuhler and what I had had to overcome with him, that if I could overcome that I could overcome anything, and I was in the midst of my most violent disgust with the hypocrisy of the world, and I was afraid he was about to grow up into a right wing conventional prig, so I took a breath and said, Would you like me to?
Like you to what? he said, not taking any
chances.
That soft still girlish somewhat plump face, he hadn’t yet acquired the coarse stuffed look he would grow into in his maturity. I was thinking of that red growth sticking out of him like a parasite, and I thought I could educate him. I said, You know.
I don’t know. Like he was going to cry again.
I could do it if you ask.
You could?
Once. To show you what it’s like.
Really?
If you want.
When?
Tonight, my room.
Not tonight.
When we get to the lake. Tell me when you’re ready.
The next two weeks he kept looking at me. I wished I hadn’t suggested it and hoped he’d forget about it and after a while decided to deny it if he came after me, because the more I thought about doing it with him the more repulsive and unnecessary it seemed. He stopped looking at me and avoided my eyes and never did get to the point of mentioning it, so that after a while it was like nothing had happened and in the end nothing did happen except that we were always henceforth a little estranged.
This is in case you wanted to know, in case we were the ones you were thinking of.
DAVID WESTERLY: To Olga his wife
Rain all day is getting me down. Tonight we go to the Funeral Home. I’d rather not, I’ve never seen a dead body live. I’m immature for my twenty-three years.
I write at the dining room table. People reading everywhere, bored by the rain, discouraged by each other, too much time, too many of us. My Uncle Henry is depressed. My Aunt Pat and Uncle William are too polite. My Aunt Ann left for England and my Uncle George has not checked in and my grandmother is said to be furious though I think she’s having the time of her life.
My immediate complaint is I’m banished from the tent by Charlie, whose tent it is. I was going out there after lunch when my brother grabs me. It’s my tent, he says. Okay. Then he says to keep Tommy away, which makes me ask what’s going on.
None your fuckin’ business. So here I am keeping an eye out the window across the backyard near the hedge. The tent flap is on the other side, out of sight. I told Tommy what Charlie said. Oh, he says, that’s so he can be with Greta. Greta, Jesus. So I’m not only banished from the tent but I’m aiding and abetting my brother in dirty work with his sister. I know what he’ll say to that: she’s not his sister. A technicality. A little later I catch Tommy going along the hedge. Where do you think you’re going? If they’re fucking I want to watch, he says. You’d better the hell not, I say. Aw David, it’s a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So now I’m keeping Tommy like a dog on stay in the living room doing puzzles while I write.
My cousin Lucy Realm irks me. You remember her, Aunt Ann’s daughter up Wildcat two years ago? The thick glasses and tumbling black curls. Graduate student in history. They sent me to meet the ferry today and she came with me. We met Uncle Carl and her brother Gerald (her other brother Larry and family are already here). The ferry was late. We’re waiting in the car; the gloomy gray rain in the harbor and no ferry in sight, and she asks me if I noticed the black guy on the plane yesterday. Talking to Tommy and Angela, she says, with the pack. I remembered but I’d forgotten and she says, I guess you don’t want to know who he is. Well sure, I says, I’d be interested to know if it’s a case of your thinking I should. You ought to know, she says, because it’s interesting family information. The interesting information turns out to be that Aunt Pat and Uncle William are getting divorced and the black guy on the plane is Pat’s boyfriend. Came on the same plane and Pat met him. Only she had to pretend not to know him because of Aunt Edna. So says Lucy, and I say, Is that a fact? and it turns out it isn’t a fact, it’s a hypothesis, a reconstruction put together by Lucy on the basis of eager eyes or guilty looks or whatever she imagined she saw there in the airport terminal. Turns out she doesn’t know a damn thing, not about Pat or William or the black stranger, it’s all her imagination looking for sensation, but she’s convinced because it hangs together and there’s no use arguing.
Not only is she imaginative, she’s snooty. She asks me what I think of Beatrice’s kiddie books. Well not being a kiddie any more I had not formed an opinion, and it never occurred to me to have one, but she thought I should. Don’t they embarrass you? she asks. Thumpy Puppy? Milkweed Pussycat? I wonder what’s the harm, they’re just kiddie books, and why should she go out of her way to knock my stepmother who is really a very nice lady (nicer than most in this family with the exception of you), but I can take it. The thing she’s revealing in herself is her desire to put me down. She thinks I don’t know that some people might find Thumpy Puppy and Milkweed Kittypuss nauseating. She thinks she is humiliating me by disclosing to me a world of sophistication I in my parochial family limitations am unaware of and therefore I must be abashed in her presence. That’s a line of thinking I don’t see any point trying to combat.
When finally the ferry appears around the point a big blunt gray shape fuzzy in the rain, she starts grumbling about her brother Gerald. I’ll bet he’s not on it, she says. He won’t be there. You wait and see.
Well why shouldn’t he be on it? I ask. Because he won’t. Because he’s a mess, she says. Because he’s a bum. Why the animus? Don’t ask, she says, just don’t ask. Which arouses my curiosity but also accords with some feeling in me I’m ashamed of, like I never much liked this cousin Gerald, who used to seem spoiled or brattish in contrast to his brother Larry who’s a real nice guy. It was Larry who taught me how to throw a curve, but Gerald was stuck up, center of the world. And he had that body odor problem, did I tell you about that? A kind of small whatchmacallit stink, you notice it when, you’ve been around him a little while or when he comes within a certain range. A certain whiff you wonder where it’s coming and hope it’s not yourself until you realize it correlates with him. He’d wear these big sweaters in Maine where we used to visit, and he’d come and sit down and I’d notice but not for sure until Charlie mentioned it. So he had that problem. But he also had a guitar and was pretty good singing old stuff, folk stuff, labor stuff, which we enjoyed, somewhat making up for the stink. Actually I’m not fair, for I didn’t detect it today. But once a guy gives you a whiff and you notice it, it gets attached to him in your mind more or less forever so that whenever you think of him you remember it and maybe you’ll smell it even when you don’t, which is unfortunate.
Well he did arrive today in spite of his sister. She said he was ruining his life and going to hell, and she had given up on him, but when the boat docked there he was wearing a bright red plaid shirt and carrying a pack and looking just like always, a little truculent and mad in the eyes, and the way she greeted him you wouldn’t know she had given up on him, so I don’t know what the hell was going on.
Right behind him walked off the ferry the relative I admire most. That’s my Uncle Carl, whom you’ve never met. My grandfather’s younger brother, only five years younger but it looks like twenty. He strides off the ramp with his small bag, healthy and rosy-cheeked like a presidential candidate. Smiling over us, his powerful reality wipes out Lucy Realm and Gerald like a bright day. Wholesome and open, no ambiguity here, no hidden motives or dark compulsions. How there folks, he says to us, and though I don’t know how well he remembers us, we’re children in his shade.
My Uncle Carl is a great man. I never realized it until graduate school. He’s the perfect scholar. You could call him an absentminded professor but I don’t care, it’s the devotion I admire, the ability to get entirely into his mind and shut out the world. The perfect civilized man. He’s devoted his entire professional life to the pursuit of a single man, the writer Fisk Purser. Do you know Fisk Purser? An American of the late nineteenth and early twentieth, who wrote poems and tales and articles, famous for a group of stories about the Civil War as well as a set of ghost stories. Uncle Carl edited his letters and his journals and has been working on a definitive biography for thirty years.
Back at the house Lucy Realm whispered, How c
ould he spend his whole life studying somebody else? How servile can you be? Well, too bad. What I admire most in a person is concentration. A great athlete is a model of concentration. So is Uncle Carl in a different way. Some years ago I realized I would never make it to the major leagues. Then I discovered what Uncle Carl does and he became my model.
Tommy has escaped. If he’s out by the tent, it will serve them right.
ANGELA KEY: What to tell her mother
I saw Tommy leave the house without an umbrella but I caught him. Asked where he was going. I twisted his arm and he said Pete Arena. I said he was crazy, and he said Pete Arena went by the house, strolling in the rain like he didn’t realize what house this was.
I reminded him what you said, but he went anyway. What am I supposed to do, stop him by physical force? I went looking for you, but couldn’t find you either. Are you seeing Pete Arena too? If you and Tommy meet, don’t blame me. But if Tommy’s late that’s why. Just thought you ought to know, but someone else can tell you, not me. I don’t tattle.
HENRY WESTERLY: To God
I may be depressed but I am not stupid. You know more than I do. This afternoon as I was coming back from my walk, entering the village, I saw my sister Patty standing in the door of the Harborside Bed and Breakfast. I recognized the maroon jacket. She saw me without realizing I had seen her, whereupon she disappeared inside. When I got to the Harborside I looked in. There was nobody around. The point is, I presume you know where she was going last night when I saw her go out of the house late in the evening just for a walk she said.
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