The Monsters of Templeton

by Lauren Groff

  The biologist wiped his forehead, and a rose of moisture bloomed upon his chest. “Well, I don’t know what that means. But maybe. It’s far too early to tell,” he said.

  Then the newscaster said thank you, the camera cut away, and another reporter came on to interview the mayor of our town, a portly fellow with a penchant for ornamental canes and too-short shorts, a man with a voice so stentorious it seemed to boom up from the earth beneath his feet. “We in Templeton,” he was saying, “have always had a myth about a monster that lived in Lake Glimmerglass, Glimmey we called it. For a long time, the stories have scared the bejeepers out of summer campers around their campfires as they spun their yarns above the s’mores and hot dogs, as they sat on the lakeside during those halcyon days of—” and here my mother turned off the television, her hands still truffled with feta cheese.

  “Wilhelmina Sunshine Upton, I said I had something to tell you,” she said.

  “Jesus,” I said. “I’ve been waiting for about three minutes for you to finish your sentence.”

  “Don’t take His name in vain,” she said.

  I sighed. “Vi,” I said. “Just because you believe in all that God stuff doesn’t mean you have to censor me, does it?”

  “My house,” she said. “My rules.” She sat down at the table, bringing with her a waft of cheese and raw meat. “That’s rule number one. Rule number two is that until we pull you out of this mess you’ve gotten yourself into, you’re not just sitting around, moping all day. You hear me?”

  “I hear you,” I muttered. I played with the pollen from a vase of tiger lilies that sat, bold and cloying, on the table.

  “You’re getting yourself a project. Go do some work for NYSHA. I’m sure the Native American Museum would like some more potsherds or something. Dig up stuff, who knows. Or docent. Or get a job at the Baseball Museum. Or wear a nineteenth-century dress and learn the art of broom-making at the Farmers’ Museum. God knows there’s enough history around here to satisfy you until you can go back to Stanford.”

  “Vi,” I said. “I hate disappointing you. I really do. But I really don’t think going back is going to be an option.”

  “We’ll see about that,” she said, and squinted at me. “In the meantime, you’re doing something. Worse comes to worst, you’ll be a candy striper. I’ll make you mop up diarrhea all day. I think I’d like that.” She grinned, and her face looked briefly youthful again. “A little atonement is always good.”

  “I love you, Vi, but I’ll never wipe up diarrhea for you. Ever,” I said.

  “Well, if you’re living with me I’m afraid you’ll have no choice.” She sighed at me, and she rubbed her forehead, her mouth stretched into a down-curved string. “Willie, I just can’t believe this. I can’t. I mean, I wanted so much for you, I wanted you to do all the things I couldn’t ever do because I was never as smart or beautiful as you. I ran away when I was fifteen because my mother tried to send me to finishing school for heaven’s sakes. I tried to do my best. Yet, here we are.”

  “You did beautifully, Vi,” I said, and then found I couldn’t say anything more.

  There was a painful rubbery silence then, when the noise of the crowd down at the park burbled up to the house and a few chirps from the frog-pool began to rise and the grandfather clock ticked and ticked in the dining room. My mother said, “Well, I’d like to hear the full story sometime, when you’re ready to tell me. Maybe I can help. And it is always cathartic to confess one’s sins.”

  I looked down at my hands. I saw a brief flash; the red glow of the tent on my sleeping bag, the whorls of hair on Primus Dwyer’s arm, the empty flask of whiskey. I shuddered. “I don’t think I can tell you, Vi,” I said. “It’s bad. Really bad.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Of course you think that now. It’ll get better. You’ll see.” She patted my hand, leaving cheese flakes on my fingers. “I hate to see you like this, Willie. All your vim gone. All your spice. It makes me so sad.”

  “I know,” I said. “My vim’s frozen into a little ball in the middle of the Alaskan tundra.”

  “Ha,” she said, her face briefly filled with a soft kind of light. “Well, in the meantime, welcome home. Anyway,” she said, taking a deep breath and closing her eyes, “I said I had something to tell you, and I do. I’ve been putting it off for a while now, and perhaps this is not the best time to tell you. But every day I don’t tell you the whole truth is a day I lie to you.” She was clutching her cross in her greasy fingers, and gazing at me with such intensity I felt myself grow hot and nervous.

  “What?” I said. “What is it? Just say it.”

  “Give me a minute, Willie. This is very difficult.”

  “Oh, God,” I said. “Gosh. This is going to be bad, isn’t it.”

  “Well,” she said. “Depends on how you look at it. First I must say that I am sorry, Willie, for having lied to you for such a long time. Are you ready?”

  “No,” I said.

  “All right,” she said. “Here goes. Willie, I lied to you about having three fathers. You only have one, and he lives in Templeton, and he is a prominent citizen, and he has a family of his own. And I don’t know if he knows you’re alive. Well, I’m pretty sure he knows you’re alive, but maybe not his part in…well, the making of you. His role in making you, I mean. I’m pretty sure he has no idea that you’re his child. Just as you have no idea he’s your father. Sperm donor. Whatever.”

  I blinked at her.

  The anxiety drained out of her face, and a slow look of wonder grew across it. “It feels so good,” she said, smiling beatifically, “to tell the Truth at long last.”

  “Oh. My. God,” I said.

  “I warned you,” she said. “His name never in vain. Rule Number One.”

  “Fuck,” I said.

  “Better,” she said.

  “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” I said.

  “I understand,” she said.

  I turned in my chair to face the glass window and look out onto the lake, the hills. Outside, bats swirled and dipped over the pool-pond and a mallard slid into the water from his butt, like an old lady in a green bathing cap out for a crepuscular dip. “Do I know,” I said at last, “do I know this man who is supposed to be my father?”

  My mother considered, then said, “Maybe.” I could hear the suppressed smile in her voice. She was thinking, perhaps, that this was going better than she thought it would.

  I said, “Who is he?”

  “Ah, that,” she said. “That I can’t tell you.”

  I turned back around and glared at her. “Can’t?” I said. “Don’t want to, you mean.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s right. It wouldn’t be fair to him.”

  “Fair?” I said. “Fair?”

  The vase of tiger lilies, when it hit the wall, didn’t shatter as I had expected it to, but rather hit with a thump, and then thumped again on the floor. A little water fell out, but the lilies stayed in the vase. It was not at all the act of destruction I needed. “Wouldn’t be fair?” I thundered at my mother, my knuckles on the table. “Fair?”

  My mother closed her eyes and held the crucifix with two hands. When she opened them again, she was smiling. She said, “There you are, Willie. I knew you were in there somewhere.” She gazed upon me with tenderlovingkindness. There was the stink of burning martyr in the air.

  “Don’t you dare go all saintly on me,” I said. “Don’t you even dare, Vi. You are a terrible, terrible hypocrite. I have a father in Templeton whom I may actually know, and you kept this from me for twenty-eight years. Twenty-eight years, you let me believe I was the product of mad fornication in some orgiastic hippie love-fest? And you’re not telling me now who he is? You have got to be fucking kidding me. And to tell me now of all times. Now, of all times?”

  “I told you I was sorry about that,” she said. Her hands made darting, mothlike motions around the wet loaf of her braid.

  “Vi,” I said. “Didn’t you think? What if I dated his
son? You never knew half of the people I dated in high school. Oh my God. What if I dated him?”

  And my goddamn mother actually had the nerve to laugh. “You never,” she said, “were in the habit of dating old men until you went to college.”

  “You horrible woman,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t resist. It’s not funny. I know. Willie, it’s not that big a deal. I promise.”

  “Who is he?” I said.

  “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Sorry, nope.”

  “What if I guess?”

  “You won’t.”

  “I will.”

  “No,” she said. “And even if you do, I can’t confirm it.”

  “So I do know him,” I said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Give me a clue.”

  “No.”

  “What about the no-lying policy? What about no secrets?”

  “For my own lies. For my own secrets.”

  “Vivienne Goddamn Upton, give me a clue now. Call it penance for your lifelong lying to your only child about her goddamn paternity. Call it an indulgence or Hail Mary or whatever the hell you need to call it.”

  “No. And I’m born-again Baptist, not Catholic,” she said. “And stop saying the Lord’s name in vain.”

  “Give me a goddamn clue now and I’ll stop saying Jesus goddamn Christ’s name in vain forever and goddamn ever.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Okay. One clue. Doesn’t matter, since you’ll never find any documentation, and he only told me once, and it’s just a rumor. So you can have your clue, but it won’t help. So there.”

  “Goddamn Jesus Christ fucking tell me.”

  “All right,” she said. “Know how we’re related to Marmaduke Temple through both the Uptons and the Averells?”

  “Yes, of course,” I said.

  “Well, he claimed he was related to Marmaduke, too. Through some sort of liaison at some point in the past. But I’m not going to tell you what he told me, the details, just that you, Willie Upton, are the product of three lines of ancestry from Marmaduke Temple. Three. It’s pretty amazing.”

  My mother’s face was magenta, and she was panting a bit. There was a long, taut moment between us, and then I watched as her eyes rounded, her mouth pursed, and she slumped back into her chair, watching me, realizing now what she had done. I could feel a smile growing across my face; this secret must have burnt in her for twenty-eight years, must have roiled and rocked my mother with its pressure. I always knew she was prouder about her heritage than she ever would admit. When I was little the thought of her family was a comfort to her, a vital source of her strength, the reason she was able to stay in Templeton. And now, she’d released her secret and was watching it dance like a demon away from her.

  “Uh-oh,” she said. She began to blink rapidly.

  “Oh-ho-ho-ho,” I said back.

  My mother’s hands went a little white around the knuckles. “Willie,” she said. “There is no way you’ll be able to figure it out from that. Right?” she said.

  “Dearest Vivienne,” I said. “You forget that I’m a researcher. It’s what I do.”

  “Please,” she said. “Don’t.”

  “Vi,” I said, “you’re in no position to ask favors of me. At all. Maybe ever again.”

  “Oh, glory,” she said. “You’re not going to let it go, are you?”

  “Stubborn heart,” I said. “Long memory. Bad mix.”

  “Oh, no, no, no. Oh, what have I done?” she said into her cupped hands.

  “Exactly. What have you done? Rather, the question is who, right?” I said. I felt tired. I stretched my arms above my head and, like that, could feel a beating in my belly, a little hungry pulse. “Well, Vi,” I said, “I think I’ve found my project. Rule Number Two, wasn’t it? That I have to have a project? It’s a good one. Difficult, but I’m feeling confident.”

  My mother rose, muttering to herself, and returned to the chicken breasts and the rest of dinner, stealing little worried glances at me from time to time. As she washed the lettuce from the garden, I went out to the porch and stood in the deepening shadows. The moon was apricot above the haunches of the hills and a big band at the country club hooted its music as soft as an owl across the water. All around me Templeton seemed to crouch and hold its breath. There must have been a candlelit vigil of some sort down at the park’s edge by the monster, because the tent was lit by a gentle, living glow. And, as the night gathered and thickened all around me, I imagined the body of the monster floating, ringed by this quiet light, lapped on all sides by the many hungry wavelets.

  6

  The Wolf at the Door

  IT TOOK ME a few hours after dinner to gather the nerve to call Clarissa. I wasn’t afraid of awakening her; she was in San Francisco, and it was not yet dark out there. I wasn’t even afraid that she would be furious with me, which she would be, for what I had done to fall into the terrible dark hole where I found myself. Rather, I was afraid because I had been gone for two months, and there had been no telephones out in the windswept Alaskan wilderness, and though I had had a few beautiful long letters from her, I hadn’t spoken to her all this time. I was afraid because I could always tell immediately from her voice how she was doing, and I didn’t think I could bear to hear if she weren’t doing well that day. If, in her voice, I detected more weakness than should be expected from a sick thirty-year-old girl, I wouldn’t be able to handle it, not in the state I was in. I sat on my bed with the princess telephone in my lap and watched it, unmoving, for a long while.

  CLARISSA AND I had met at our small liberal arts college on the first day of fall semester my freshman year, when I arrived twenty minutes early to the French class I was hoping to get into, on the creaky top floor of an old observatory. I opened the door, to my dismay, into an apparent tête-à-tête between the professor and a girl I imagined was his daughter. She had corkscrew blonde hair and the birdlike bone structure of a dancer, and her clothes were bright and mismatched, reds and pinks and plaids and paisleys, all mixed up. From the door, I believed she was ten, no older. They were speaking together but turned as I came in.

  And then the little girl said in a surprisingly deep and throaty voice, “Holy crap. Scared the pants off me. Well, come on in, and make yourself at home.” The professor grinned at her, tickled.

  It was only when I approached and saw the girl’s quick and mischievous eyes, and the way she held herself, that I knew that she was far older than I had at first imagined. “This is Professor Serget, and I’m Clarissa Evans,” she said. “We were talking about George Sand. A minor writer, in my opinion, but we’re reading Indiana this semester. Yet again,” and she twinkled at the professor, who gave a little chortle. Then Clarissa smiled kindly at me and said, “And you’re a freshman. Come sit next to me and I’ll let you crib my notes.”

  Instead, though, I sat opposite her and scowled. “Willie Upton,” I said as coldly as I could manage. “I’m sure I can hold my own.”

  She nodded and her face lit up. “Aha,” she crowed as the door opened and other students began to trickle in, “spunk! Now that’s what I like to see,” and she winked at me.

  Clarissa’s ideas were excellent but her French reprehensible, and even the professor couldn’t help but swallow a grin when she opened her mouth and in her incongruous voice started attacking something new. When I walked home from the class that day, she walked beside me. We must have looked ridiculous, I with my lanky height and tiny little Clarissa, like an egret striding alongside a chain-smoking parakeet.

  From then on, and even though she was a junior, we did everything together. I took higher-level classes with Clarissa, ate meals at the dining hall with her and her friends, all quick-witted types. I even moved into her suite when one of her dorm mates was kicked out for selling pot. Clarissa amazed me: she could do endless keg stands and quote Nietzsche; she could hike for eight hours without complaint and give
a better manicure than a beautician; she left red lipstick rings around her cigarettes, and scattered the stubs behind her like flower petals. She walked away from nastiness, from gossip, but loved her friends so much she mimicked them endlessly, and you always felt pleased she was making fun of you. She had the worst taste in jokes, was the most puntastic person I’d ever met, had the unique talent to always make me laugh and wince simultaneously; when she at last snagged a guy she liked, Sully Bird, she grinned at me, saying one Bird in the hand, and left me to supply the rest. As the coxswain for the men’s crew team she made herself heard up and down the river, shouting at her boys, “Come on, you bitches, pull,” and, because she was Clarissa, they pulled. They would win for her at Little Threes; they’d place second that year at the Head of the Charles.

  The day I was going back to Templeton for Thanksgiving, I went by Clarissa’s room with my knapsack, ready to leave. I saw her on her bed, reading. Her room was a sty, and there was no evidence of packing. “Clarissa,” I said, “when’re you taking off?”

  She didn’t take her eyes off the page. “I’m not,” she said. “I’m staying here.”

  “You can’t stay here for Thanksgiving,” I said. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Sure I can,” she said. “I like the international foods potluck. Who knew you could have poppadom and lingonberries all at the same time. Delectable.”

  “Good God, girl,” I said. “That’s it. You’re coming back to Templeton with me.”

  It took great force, but in the end, she came. As we drove, I could tell that Clarissa was startled at the traces of poverty and decay in upstate New York, the dying barns like whale ribs sticking out of the frosty ground, the trailers hugging the highway, the ghost towns of battered Victorian houses. I could see she had begun to question her choice of coming to Templeton, picturing cat-piss-soaked couches, probably, and shivering all night from a damp draft from the window. If there was one thing that irritated me about Clarissa, it was her skewed concept of money, that she would spend a hundred dollars on highlights for her hair and only eat Belgian chocolate. And so I encouraged her dismay, telling her that my cousin BillyBob (who didn’t exist) would want to take us out on his snowmobile; explaining that we called my grandmother (who also didn’t exist) Genesee Ginny because she cracked open her first can of beer at nine in the morning and kept up the pace all day, to not worry if she found her passed out somewhere on the floor, just to roll her over so that she’s on her side in case she vomits. All of upstate New York was dying, I told Clarissa. I told her what my friends and I called towns up there: Syracuse was Sorry-excuse. Rochester was Rot-and-fester. Albany was All-banal. Oneonta was Oh-I-don’t-wanna.