The Royal Family

by William T. Vollmann

  Domino, seeing now in him the uprolled eyeballs and pale puffy cheeks and slack-hanging lips of Sunflower in her last months of life, feared what she saw, and accordingly attacked it, sneering in her most stinging tone: Henry, don’t you even care what Maj just said? Is that shiteating grin on your face a sufficient response to anything? I think a man should be committed. Whereas you . . .

  He scarcely heard her. He felt so anxious and alone that he almost screamed.

  Beatrice, whose breath was as rotten mucilage oozing and crawling with disease, coughed apologetically into his face and said: Henry, you okay? I doan know, maybe you look so sad . . .

  Yeah, I’m all right, he said heavily.

  And you think you gonna be pregnant, Mama? I get so happy I’m gonna light a candle for you . . .

  I don’t believe it, said Tyler harshly. Somehow I just don’t figure it’s going to happen.

  You know, Henry, I got to say it takes two people to create a child. I doan know my English, but I think society is coming to like thousands of years ago. All of a sudden women, they saying, this is my body, and I know that ’cause I said it too when I had my baby; I swear I didn’t want him. You have to remember though that there are two people involved. I had to get involved!

  Yeah, then where’s the little brat now? said Domino, grinning elfishly as if she had her back up against some wall and were slowly upcurling her tongue at the oncoming cars and licking her lips, back and forth, back and forth, with an intensely mirthful but also lustful expression in her huge-pupiled eyes.

  Yeah, Dom, so maybe I doan be no good. I know that. I’m no good. But Henry he still want to do the good thing, so we should help him. Henry, when your novia she talk about get pregnant, you better believe in case God is listening and think about sending you a baby. You want a baby? Baby gonna take away so much of your pain, Henry. You gotta believe. Please Henry, you—

  Then where the fuck’s your little Mexican brat? screamed Domino, whose soul was itself as lost and sad and grimy up close as the face of Beatrice, whose belief in the Virgin, which meant belief in herself, had been reduced to mere endurance palliated but perhaps by that very token rendered more dangerous and poisonous by the sincere and unmitigated love of her Mama, her Queen as Beatrice’s hair twirled heavily down the sides of her face and she bit her thin, herpid lips to keep herself from tears, her forehead lined, the bridge of her nose doubly lined, and her huge, lost eyeballs mottled like the full moon with its faint mountains and seas.

  Henry, she whispered, it all starts from the fact that when you do those types of practices, you gotta get responsible for your actions. And our Mama Queen, she’s knowing that already. Mama takes responsibility for all of us already.

  Domino said: Did he take responsibility when he knocked up your brother’s wife?

  Hush up now, said the Queen. Ain’t nobody gonna talk to Henry about that. And nobody need to make Bea start cryin’ for nothin’. Domino, when you gonna see how much you hurt yourself with that kind of talk? You—

  But, Maj, don’t you even care that Henry was an asshole to that Oriental whatsher-name? She offed herself, and here’s this jerk walking around scot-free like some rapist who preys on little girls. Don’t you think that Henry ought to pay for what he did? Aren’t you on our side?

  Domino, said the Queen, that’s between Henry and me.

  You don’t understand, Maj. Oh, hell, it’s all so pathetic. Nobody understands. And Beatrice just sits there and blubbers, and Henry’s mad at me, and you’re mad at me when all I did was say the truth.

  See how she manipulates, laughed Strawberry, throwing back her head and fanning her hair across her shoulders as Domino liked to do. —She’s jealous of all the attention Henry gets. She wants to be sad so she can get first in line to be comforted . . .

  With an eagle-like scream of rage, Domino rushed her with her long silver fingernails whirling like airplane propellers, but the weary Queen said: Hush, Domino. C’mere, sweetie. And Domino fled into the Queen’s embrace, nuzzling her armpits like a puppydog.

  It’s so crazy, Tyler muttered, and no one said anything, so he hung his head and cleared his throat and very carefully asked the dark cracked windowpanes of the abandoned meatpacking plant: When will they stop bugging me?

  When you let it go, said the Queen, rocking the sobbing girl. You got to let Irene sink under the earth and turn into grass. That’s what she needs to do now. She wants flowers to come up out of her breast. Don’t hold her back.

  I get it, Maj, he said. But I . . .

  You don’t have to say anything you’re not ready to say, the Queen told him. You know I love you?

  I know it. Are you pregnant?

  I don’t believe so. Not yet.

  Strawberry said: Listen, Henry. I don’t know so much about you and Charlene—

  Irene, he said furiously.

  Irene. And it’s not really my business. But we talk about you all the time, because you’re the only man who ever comes to visit us, aside from Justin, who lives here, and, I mean, good heavens, it’s nice to talk about men once in a while! Gosh, I wish you’d buy us all a drink at the Wonderbar and we could just sit and—

  Tyler shot a quick shy look at her, and, seeing that she was not his enemy, became if anything even more dejected and humiliated. The dead woman would not let him go. And his Queen would never become pregnant, because she herself had prophesized that her purpose on earth would all too soon be fulfilled, the purpose to which she’d been so supremely faithful, and he’d be left alone again as he had been after Irene died, because the Queen had insisted that it must be so. But gradually his own self-pity became as gentle and blurry as Strawberry’s when she got drunk or entered the heroin nods, swaying and doubling and tripling. Didn’t she mean well? Didn’t she? And the Queen sat so silent! Why? Was this supposed to be another ordeal like his obedient worship of the false Irene, something whose bitter uselessness would further hollow out his heart into an ashtray in which Domino or anybody else could stub out cigarettes? But surely Strawberry meant well. She said: My brother was in college with a girlfriend and she, well, she became pregnant. I was always very close to my brother and I was the first to hear. And we celebrated. When I think back on all the champagne we went through! Oh, everybody was so happy, it was all like a dream! They could have had an abortion, I know. But he decided he was going to marry this girl. I don’t know why I’m even telling you this, maybe just because it came into my head just now when Maj was talking about having a child and I . . . God, I could use a drink at the Wonderbar. I could use a motherfucking drink. Anyway, they had a child. He finished college; she didn’t. She always resented it. So the marriage broke up. She broke it up. But he really has a kid that he loves. Maybe his life would have been different if they’d had the abortion. But who’s to judge him? He got his life together. It worked out for him. Most of the time the circumstances just need to be negotiated. How do you grow without conflict and difference?

  Are you saying I don’t want conflict? asked Tyler in a dull, exhausted voice. Are you saying I’m afraid of something? What are you saying?

  Oh, can’t you leave him alone, sighed the Queen. Leave my man alone.

  Beatrice said: Excuse me, Maj. Excuse me, Henry. Excuse me, Strawberry. I have to say something about abortion. Some people they doan believe that at the time of conception the soul enters the body. I do know that doing away with any form of life, it’s not a nice thing.

  Yeah, and how many babies have you killed with your own coat hanger? snarled Domino from the Queen’s arms.

  What’s all this about? said Tyler. What kind of discussion is this? —The eagerness of these women to speak of babies and childbirth, the avidity in their eyes, above all the hope with which they now regarded their Queen, as if her baby would be theirs or would somehow save them, disconcerted him as much as if he’d suddenly realized that he had no soul.

  We just be sharin’ our thoughts with you, that’s all, said Chocolate from the doorwa
y, while Sapphire, rocking back and forth in the corner, whispered: Luh-luh-luh-luh . . .

  I love you, too, he said to the retarded girl, who seemed to be uneasy, like a dog which knows something is wrong when its master begins packing his suitcase. She had sat in the same place all night, watching her mother and her sisters with wide and anxious eyes.

  I want a baby but I can’t, said Strawberry. I had two children they took away an’ put in foster care, and now I don’t know where they are. And my third died in crib death. That’s the one I cry for. And then I got pelvic inflammatory disease, so now I’m sterile.

  | 334 |

  When Irene reached her sophomore year of high school in Westwood, she and four classmates—one Chinese, two Japanese, and one other Korean—secretly if lightheartedly founded what they called the Virgins’ Club. Really it was an excuse to gossip, go out to movies together, and help each other with homework—a particular benefit in Irene’s case, since she was only a B student and had always been even in elementary school when her mother used to punish her for not coming home with perfect grades. The Virgins’ Club met neither regularly nor formally. Nonetheless, its rules had teeth. Each girl swore not to have sex before marriage, and never to wed any man of another race, in order to avoid disappointing her parents, who by immigrating in the first place had left themselves all too susceptible to such affronts. Indeed, when Irene raised her hand to swear the oath, she saw before her her dear mother’s fine face and thin dark arched eyebrows. Their promise, then, emblematized daughterly love, which must remain inseparable from clanishness, and perhaps it reassured those schoolgirls in their warm expectations that the families which they each would surely found would resemble the ones departed, protecting them from futurity, keeping them happily isolated like the emerald rectangle that is Union Square, set into its bezel of brick and concrete. (And here one might also make analogy to the Queen’s court, with its exclusiveness, secrecy and helpfulness.) In Irene’s opinion, it was the Chinese girl who broke her vow first. In her freshman year at San Diego State, defiant in the face of family ostracism and de facto expulsion from the Virgins’ Club, she married a nice boy from Saudi Arabia. One of the Japanese girls dated a white boy in her senior year, and the rumor flitted around the Virgins’ Club (which by that time had become rather too loose-knit, nourished only by increasingly far-flung telephone calls from one member to another) that she had given him everything, but none of the remaining virgins chose to address her silence directly because that would have been rude and because, like Cain, they were not their siblings’ keepers, and above all because the Virgins’ Club was itself mere silliness which, had it been completely immersed in the solvent of sexuality, could have dissolved without repercussions. Both of the Japanese girls did end up marrying Japanese, and the other Korean girl married into a rich Korean family in Brentwood. Irene, of course, ended up with John. The other Korean girl and one of the Japanese girls came to Irene’s wedding. They said that they were very happy for her.

  By then Irene’s brother Steven, who was a software engineer prone, like John, to elegant neckties, had already married a good Korean girl whom he considered slightly beneath him and who gave him a son before her wifehood was a year old—singular fortune for her, because Irene’s mother, who’d thought her frivolously delicate until then, immediately held her precious. The impetus now lay on Irene to conceive, although her parents regretfully understood that John preferred to postpone that beginning; themselves being postponers in the name of self-sacrifice, they accepted in their first-generation American hearts what John had chosen for entirely different ends. Irene kept modestly silent. Although she mentioned her mother and father hardly at all, Tyler afterward wondered whether her understanding with them on this crucial subject of maternity might have anything to do with her suicide. One night in September when the vigs had already arrived in San Francisco and he was sitting alone in his apartment, asking himself when he’d go to worship his Queen, he suddenly visualized Irene picking up the telephone to call Los Angeles and tell her parents that she was pregnant. Her mother would have known the very first instant that Irene was not smiling with pleasure. And how would she and Irene’s father interpret that? Their own natural impulse to be joyous would have been stifled by Irene’s listless, anxious monotone. They would wonder what had occurred between her and John. (I think John is angry at me, Irene had publicly said during that final vacation in Monterey. John, you’re angry, aren’t you? —Tyler had found that very distasteful.) No doubt, since Irene’s parents had never met John’s brother except briefly at the wedding, it would scarcely have occurred to them that there might have been third parties involved. Tyler, imagining that familial conversation and all the subsequent ones for the remaining months of Irene’s life, could hardly keep from groaning. And now she was dead, killed, self- killed, self-murdered. The Queen had made him promise not to forget her. The false Irene was always asking him about her . . .

  I’ve prayed so much for you to get pregnant, Irene’s mother said in Korean. Children are a gift from God.

  Irene made no answer.

  Have you had good dreams? her mother pursued. If so, it’s going to be a boy . . .

  But before the worst had happened, Irene’s womb continuing as yet unripe, her sister’s family came to visit. Steven and Pammy craved a vacation in Mendocino County, so they left their son in San Francisco for the weekend. —Of course! said Irene, brimming with enthusiasm in order to deacidify the impression conveyed by John’s sullenness. —Be a good boy now, Pammy instructed the child. Be obedient to your Auntie Irene and your Uncle John. —Bewildered, with big dark-framed spectacles, he sat playing video games as soundlessly as possible while Irene peeled garlic in the kitchen, wishing for more counter space, a larger refrigerator, and a dishwasher capable of more even results. Her nephew’s presence did not make her uneasy because at that time a child associated with her did not symbolize anything negative to John. Indeed, she smiled a little to herself, dreaming of how it would be when she had her own baby, her dear little soul which she could love without reserve, being no longer dependent on John’s moods for anything. Her smile became almost spitefully triumphant when she considered how plausible it would be when she ignored John as much as he’d ignored her throughout their married life; she could spend all afternoon bathing her baby and then take him out shopping, and when John came home there would be no dinner waiting; they’d have to go out. Of course, John enjoyed dining at restaurants anyhow. When the garlic was all finished, she washed her hands, wondering whether she should drive to the Korean market to buy short ribs, which she could marinate easily and well in vinegar, Coca Cola, sesame oil, and red pepper paste, or whether she could treat the boy to one of those restaurant meals she’d so slyly imagined. If John were too busy to imprison himself in such trivialities, she could always count on Henry to take her, probably to that stretch of Korean markets and restaurants on Geary between Eleventh and Tenth, with their signs in squat Hangul characters and their kiosks for the Korea Times (fifty cents a copy)—a district which would after her death and burial insistently murmur to Tyler of her, like a yellowjacket buzzing inside a seashell. —Laurel Heights, on the other hand, was John’s territory because near the former pioneer cemetery there now stood an unassuming liquor store to which John sometimes drove to buy cask strength Mortlach (eight-year-old, imported by Cadenhead’s for about eighty dollars a bottle). Once Tyler had made his own journey to the grave, who would remember him, and what place would they associate with him? No place, probably; he was nothing and stood for nothing, not even the Tenderloin. He might as well be homeless.

  As it happened, Irene’s self-pitying bitterness proved to be unfounded, on this occasion at least, because John liked his nephew and tried to win him over with presents, remembering how when he and Hank were children their abandoned mother had worked so hard and remained so poor; there’d been many things John had craved then: new clean sneakers like his schoolfellows, T-shirts, a nice watch, a Gree
n Hornet lunchbox. Even now, one of the ways to put John in a good mood (although Celia had not yet learned this, and Irene never would) was to give him toy trains—an infantile transaction, to be sure, but surely John in his own way needed to feel taken care of, his expensive neckties and professional ambition aiming not only at egotism but also at safety and ease. And so he took his nephew downtown to the F.A.O. Schwarz on Stockton and O’Farrell, right on the edge of the Tenderloin, and allowed him to choose a hundred dollars’ worth of toys. The child, however, who actually lacked for nothing, thanks to Steven’s income, remained with John at all times shy and mistrustful. He sensed in his uncle a hardened silence which only a tolerant and perceptive adult could have recognized as something damaged; the child experienced it as stern dislike. The pallor of his uncle’s skin alarmed him, too, and he seemed to give off a strange smell. When he sat on his Auntie Irene’s lap he felt less homesick, believing for as long as she held him that his mother and father would truly return in only one more day, whereas John with his unnerving gift of toys presented an alien distraction, indicative of a plot to make him forget his parents, who if he let them escape from memory for one instant would immediately cease forever to exist. Above all, he perceived in John the desire to possess him, and he would not be possessed. He would not be tricked.

  After they had gone back to Los Angeles, John said: That kid liked you more than he did me.

  Well, what do you expect? said Irene. He ought to like me better. I’m a blood relative. I’m his aunt. You’re just his uncle-in-law.

  We don’t do things that way in my culture, John said. I love my aunt and uncle both the same. It doesn’t matter which one’s the blood relative.

  You mean you hate them both the same, said Irene, waxing her eyebrows. When was the last time you sent them a postcard or called them up?

  That has nothing to do with it.