Mein Vater, mein Vater, und hörest du nicht
was Erlenkönig mir leise verspricht?
She rolled over and readjusted her pillow, and as she did she inadvertently saw the clock on the bedside table: it was two o’clock. Claire was no stranger to insomnia: put to bed too early by her well-meaning mother, she spent many nights thrashing around in bed trying to sleep as a child. Sometimes as she lay awake, rolling back and forth between the sheets, it seemed to her the very sounds of the crickets in the night summoned her to action, to life. She longed to squeeze life as if it were an orange, extracting each last drop of juice. Sleep, that misty interrupter of consciousness, was her enemy, a last resort. Her mind fought its insistent tug as though it were the pull of its relative, death. As a child she bounded out of bed early each morning, eager for experience, but as an adult she found that transition also difficult to bridge. Once she had fallen into the cavern of sleep, the climb back into consciousness was laborious as the departure had been. She dreaded waking up the next morning, and the inevitable fatigue that would hit her in the middle of the day.
The truth was that Claire had recently begun to feel a resentment toward Meredith, and she was feeling guilty about it. She realized that her resentment was born in part from her growing attachment to the girl. She knew, too, that resentments are often deepest toward the people we care about the most, but somehow that did not allay her guilt. Although being in therapy had helped her come to terms with her mother’s sometimes pious altruism, it was creeping into her subconscious again like a weed whose roots had been left in the ground. She once asked her mother if it was boring being stuck in the big house on the lake with no neighbors and two children, and a husband who spent long hours as an associate professor working on a doctoral thesis.
“Oh, no,” was her breezy reply, “I was never bored. I found you fascinating.” Not having children of her own at the time, Claire could only nod and suppose her mother was telling the truth, or some form of it. It must be different when they’re your own, she remembered thinking at the time. Now, with Meredith, she realized the complexity of human relationships extended very much to those between children and adults—and realized also that her mother must have resented her and her brother, at least sometimes. Claire was certain she must have thought of the life she could have had without them. Now her mother was gone, and Claire would never know what she really thought.
Claire realized that her mother had done her best to spare her any guilt, any feeling of being unwanted, but she was sorry that her mother could never speak of these things to her, unable to voice the inevitable regrets that come with any choice. Open a door and another is closed behind you. We each choose our own truths, the codes by which we live, Claire thought, avoiding certain truths as we embrace others. Claire’s mother’s truths were good and noble and generous, and for the most part truly felt, but they were her truths. Claire would have to find her own—and so would Meredith. Meredith’s obsession with detective work was her way of finding palpable, knowable truth: this person is guilty, and that’s the end of it. Such truth, such hard facts, were all well and good, and give a sense of knowledge and control that she evidently desperately needed; but it was the more elusive truth Claire was concerned with—the endless forms of human interaction—which Claire needed to decode. Perhaps this was why she had become an editor; vicariously, through her writers, she might come to know what she needed to know. Like Meredith, her job was the endless search for the criminal: at the end of a mystery, the comforting label of Guilty was pinned upon the murderer like a scarlet letter, letting the rest of humanity sink gratefully into a righteous sense of innocence. Well, I’m not perfect, but at least I’m no murderer; that was the mantra that every reader could recite at the end of a good mystery novel.
Claire got up from the bed, being careful not to wake Robert, and crept down the hall toward Meredith’s room. The door was ajar, and Meredith lay sprawled out on the bed, asleep. Mouth open, her springy red hair spread out all over the pillow, she was an unlovely sight, but as Claire watched her she felt the bond between them tightening, until it wound itself around her heart and she began to forget her life before Meredith entered it. There was so much about the girl that was irritating: her intellectual smugness, her pre-sumptuousness, her air of superiority, but Claire could always see the frightened, abandoned child underneath all of it, and it pulled at her maternal instincts like a magnetic field.
She longed to speak of these things to Robert, to tell him of her uncertainties, but her relationship with him was built on a mutual undeclared pact: that both of them not speak of certain things, not release certain demons. At first she had been grateful to Robert for offering her this relief from the vagaries of her subconscious; she even felt guilty that she needed to speak of dark feelings she thought she had conquered after years of therapy, but after a while she wished that she could talk to Robert. She began to want to redraw the ground rules, to escape the need to “put on a happy face”; her face wasn’t always happy, and she wanted Robert to know that. But when she was around him, she felt somehow that it was childish of her to want more.
Claire sat on the edge of the bed. A flash of lightning suddenly illuminated the trees outside, and Meredith stirred in her sleep.
Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm,
Er fasst ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.
Outside, thunder tore through the sky like the growling of a rabid dog, and lightning ripped across the heavens in jagged streaks, slashing the night in half. Watching from the window, Claire felt the exhilaration that extremes of weather always produced in her. She loved the raw fury of nature. Meredith was like a thunderstorm: furious, rampant, mercurial, and Claire watched her with the same kind of awe, a little afraid, but liberated by her willful power. Meredith rolled over and opened her eyes.
“I’m scared,” she said.
“What are you frightened of?” said Claire.
Meredith shivered.
“I’m . . . I’m afraid of the thunder and lightning.” She leaned her body against Claire, and Claire put her arms around the girl’s thin shoulders.
“It’s all right; there’s nothing to be afraid of. Nothing’s going to hurt you,” she said, stroking her hair until she felt Meredith’s body slowly begin to relax.
Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht?
Den Erlenkönig mit Kron’ und Schweif?
They sat like that for a long time, watching the storm together, until Meredith fell asleep again. Claire pulled the blankets up over her and tiptoed out of the room. A few last thin streaks of lightning lit up the old willow tree, pallid in the white light.
Mein Sohn, mein Sohn, ich seh’ es genau,
Es scheinen die alten Weiden so grau.
Chapter 11
After their return from Hudson, Meredith went back to Connecticut to attend school, and again Claire was restless all week long. On Friday she went into Meredith’s room to straighten it up a bit for her arrival. To say that Meredith was untidy was like saying that Ralph liked to eat: the girl was a virtuoso of untidiness, a maestro of mess. The door to her room had been closed for several days and the room was musty, so Claire stepped over piles of discarded clothes and opened the window. A sudden breeze lifted a pile of papers from the bed and spread them around the room. As Claire knelt down to the pick them up, the top page caught her eye. Feeling guilty but too intrigued to stop herself, she sat on the bed to read it. It was a poem written in Meredith’s sprawling hand:
GOD
You leave us stranded at the shore of our sorrow
You leave us standing at the gate of our grief
You give us pain and ask us to find meaning
You send disaster and expect us to find relief
You toll our death knell and look for thanks
You desert us in our suffering and watch from above
Removed, silent, impassive; you tell us nothing
And then ask for our love
Claire put
down the poem and looked out onto the street. The subtext was all too clear to her: Meredith resented her mother’s death, feeling abandoned by her and by God. The poem was an expression of the girl’s tightly controlled rage, a rage that found limited expression in her overly developed intellect, which she wielded as a shield against feeling. Yes, that was it: Meredith used her intelligence as a defense against the world of feelings, which explained her disdain for her father’s affection; she was afraid to accept it because that, too, might be taken from her someday.
Claire had never realized what a sad child Meredith was. Meredith herself had seen to that, with her sharp, breezy manner and rejection of feelings as sentimentality. Claire felt strongly that the girl had never grieved properly for her mother’s death, that there were many unresolved feelings swarming inside of her all the time. She wondered how she could talk to Meredith about these things, or whether it was wise even to try.
And so when Meredith returned the following weekend, Claire was on the verge of saying something so many times that she finally gave up the idea and decided that Meredith could bring up the subject if she wanted to talk about it.
If she could, Meredith would live on tea and Pepperidge Farm cookies. She and Claire returned from a trip to D’Agostino’s with a six-pack assortment of her favorites: Bordeaux, Orange Milanos, Nantucket, Brussels, Chesapeake, and Lemon Crunch. Claire saw them every morning when she took out her coffee; Meredith had lined them up neatly in the cupboard, a tidy row of sentinels.
Meredith also loved pizza, and she declared that New York pizza was second to none.
“In Connecticut they skimp on the cheese; everyone’s afraid of clogging their arteries.”
When Claire took her to V&Ts, the venerable establishment up by Columbia University that had been open since 1945, Meredith ate an entire small pie by herself.
“Now this is what I call pizza!” she said, a beacon of grease shining on her chin.
For her first night back, though, Claire wanted to make dinner, so she made her mother’s vegetable beef soup recipe, using some leftover beef from the night before. While Meredith sat in the living room reading a true-crime book Claire had bought for her while she was away, Claire worked in the kitchen, rinsing vegetables, cutting lemons, sponging off counters as she went, taking pleasure in the brisk efficiency of her movements. She remembered her mother, her quick long hands chopping carrots for soup, or canning pickles. Her mother was a miracle of motion in the kitchen: smooth, steady, and relentless. She thought of her father, standing in the doorway, arms folded, watching her mother work.
Before her brother was born, Claire felt surrounded by her parents’ love, wrapped securely in the knowledge that she didn’t have to share it with anyone else. She basked in the contentment of being the only focus of her parents’ affection, and remembered resenting the change and her loss of status as only child. Meredith was an only child and likely to remain one, as she once pointed out in the acid tone she always used when speaking of her stepmother:
“At least I don’t have to worry about siblings; Jean Cummings Lawrence may be many things, but she is not a breeder. God forbid she should gain five pounds on that drug-infested body of hers, let alone thirty-five.”
And so Claire and Meredith continued in their little faux-family unit, caught in the fantasy of playing house together. While Claire was chopping vegetables the phone rang and Meredith answered it.
“They hung up on me,” she said, replacing the receiver.
“Yeah, that’s been happening a lot lately,” said Claire.
“Maybe you should tell Detective Jackson about it.”
“Oh, I don’t know . . . I don’t think I should bother him with it. It’s probably nothing.”
“Yeah, but it might be important. I think you should tell him.”
“Okay, maybe I will.”
While Claire was making the soup, Meredith set the table, putting out some candles she brought from Connecticut.
“They don’t sell anything useful in Connecticut,” she said when she gave them to Claire, “only things like candles and scented soap.”
After dinner they watched television together. Meredith especially liked Mystery! on Channel 13, and tonight was part one of a Detective Allyn mystery.
“I just think he’s so dreamy,” she said of Patrick Malahide, the show’s star. Claire looked down at her, lying on her back on the floor—Meredith loved to lie on the floor—toes twitching, knees swaying, fingers fidgeting on the rug. She was all motion, all the time, this girl.
After Detective Allyn the evening news came on. On the news, a bunch of people were waving Confederate flags and singing “Dixie.” The women were middle-aged with thick, hard faces. The men were bearded and fat with beer bellies; some of them wore grey Civil War uniforms. Confederate flags were everywhere: on their cowboy hats, on their sleeves, T-shirts, and belt buckles. Claire half expected one of them to pull down his jeans to reveal a flag tattooed on fleshy white buttocks.
The people sang in tuneless, unlovely voices:
I wish I was in the land of cotton
Old times there are not forgotten
The men wore dreamy half smiles on their bloated white faces, as though remembering their first prom. The women had hard, set jaws and dead eyes, staring straight ahead at an angle away from the camera. The announcer’s voice broke in:
“. . . the town has asked that the group not display the Confederate flag, but a spokesperson for the group says they are ready to take the matter to court if a ban is enforced.” The television reporter was a young Asian woman, and she stood fifty yards or so away from the crooning racists. “The group is also threatening to hold the convention elsewhere next year,” she said. Her carefully painted face was rigid with politeness, a mask of professionalism.
“What group?” said Meredith blandly. “Racists-R-Us? Bigots United? Assholes Anonymous?”
“Meredith!” said Claire reflexively.
“What? That’s what they are, you know—assholes.”
Claire sighed and changed the channel. She didn’t want to look at these people’s faces anymore, didn’t want to hear their singing. They probably thought of themselves as game individualists, survivors in a public-opinion war on free thought, rebels against political correctness. She imagined the women sniffling over Gone with the Wind, the men having an extra beer or two while watching The Deerhunter, getting good and angry at those damn gooks, misty-eyed at the singing of “America the Beautiful” in the final scene.
“Nothing unites like a common enemy,” said Meredith cheerfully from the floor.
Claire sat up on the bed and looked down at her. Meredith was flicking a shoelace back and forth over Ralph’s back. The cat watched the lace, his tail jerking fitfully, ears back. Ralph did not like exercise of any kind, but even he was helpless in the face of the universal Feline String Instinct.
He pounced, clawing and biting the shoelace.
“What did you just say?” said Claire.
“Oh, I said that nothing unites like a common enemy.”
“What did you mean by that?”
Meredith shrugged.
“I was just thinking about those good ol’ boys, and how they might not wave their stupid flags around if there weren’t so many people telling them not to. They get their jollies from annoying the rest of us.”
“Oh, so we’re the common enemy?”
“Right. It helps them define themselves, having something to rail against.”
Meredith was right; it was in part a matter of self-definition. I am not that, therefore I am this. But why did that have to be bad, to be wrong? Why can’t it just be different? Let it go at that; why should the process of self-definition for some people involve dismissing, despising, or destroying everything which was Not Me? And why always dichotomies? Surely the world was wide enough to encompass all of the variations of its citizenry; why hadn’t man’s brain evolved beyond the need for such dangerous simplifications?
/> “Hey, did you see in the paper that there were some FBI agents at the Good Ol’ Boy Roundup?” said Meredith gleefully.
“No.” Claire’s head was beginning to hurt.
“Yeah. They were reprimanded by the FBI, but I’m not surprised.”
“Meredith, it’s past your bedtime.”
Meredith jumped up on the bed, releasing Ralph from the thralldom of the shoelace.
“Aw, come on,” she began. Sometimes Meredith actually sounded like the thirteen-year-old child she was, and when she did, Claire found it startling; she had grown so used to regarding Meredith as a genre unto herself.
“No arguments,” Claire said. “If I let you stay up you’ll just be tired tomorrow.”
“Aw, man,” said Meredith. “I wanted to watch the rest of the news.”
“No, you didn’t,” said Claire. “All that’s left is sports and weather, and you don’t care about either. You just don’t want to go to bed.”
“Well, who ever wants to go to bed?” said Meredith crossly.
Claire had to admit she had a point, though right now she was exhausted.
Chapter 12
Amelia Moore called on Saturday morning and invited Claire over for brunch. Claire asked if she could bring Meredith.
“She’s just here for the weekend,” said Claire. “Then she has to go back to school.”
“Of course you can bring her; she’s a lovely child.”
Claire could not imagine anyone except Amelia ever referring to Meredith as “lovely.”
Claire and Meredith walked up Riverside Drive to 116th Street, where Amelia lived. A few dried, faded leaves skirled around their ankles as they walked, heads bent into the cold, biting wind which blew in from the north. October had given way to November, and the days were growing shorter as the nights got colder.
Who Killed Blanche DuBois? Page 12