The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  I’ve had enough but can’t say so, for you are right: I know. You know.

  * * *

  —

  Wade must be thinking that, if what Bethany has accused Dad of is true, there is much that I’ve been keeping from him, wondering how much of Rachel van Hout is real and how much is not, such as the things I say he makes me feel. If Bethany’s accusations are true, how much of me is false? He may no longer believe that, before him, there was no one else.

  If I endured what Bethany says she did, how could I not be forever changed by it? Perhaps he thinks of Dad when he’s with me and thinks that I do too. How could I not have thoughts of Dad running through my mind when he and I are in bed, when I only seem to lose myself? I told Wade once that it felt “like God” when we made love. It did, but I doubt that he believes it now. He may think it was all an act, and that’s all it ever was.

  My breakdowns and my illnesses, my mania, these diaries—he thinks it’s my dad who makes me scribble in my notepad right in front of him night after night. Dad is what that’s all about, me thinking I can rid myself of him if I get it all down on paper. Or else he thinks the diary is purposeless, a mounting obsession that will put an end to me.

  I wonder if Wade used to think that it was him I was writing about. Does she ever think of me when she’s recording history? Or is it by Her that he believes I’m possessed, by Anne Frank, the dead diarist whose diary, he may think, I’m somehow trying to complete. Small wonder that she’s going mad, the ingenue of such a dad, the tutelage she must have had. He may think me Dad’s protegé in denial, but every time I see Dad smile it sickens me, as the sight of me may sicken Wade.

  I’m putting thoughts into Wade’s head, words into his mouth that may be nothing like the truth. Perhaps he thinks of me even more tenderly than before, just as he would if some disease was slowly stealing me away but leaving him behind, untouched, more in love with me than ever, to ask why fate or God had let someone so young, who bore no blame for anything, suffer so unspeakably? His darling Rachel. The disproportionality, the pitiless disparity of it, a mere child pitted against a man like Him, a mismatch that Wade could not have conceived of until now.

  I hope he prays that I don’t bear those scars, not just for his sake but for mine. Surely he does. But if he suspects that these things, or worse, are true, I hope he believes that I am still and always will be me, my body just as beautiful, my soul inviolable, as sweet as when we met—that nothing can change that.

  But then there is the Shadow She, who roamed the yellow wood before Wade met me. I was already lost in Arellia to expiate another crime of little Rachel Lee. Wade would not be so sure of me if he knew why the Shadow She keeps coming back. Arellia and Claws von Snout, the girl who wears the black peacoat, the things I think and dream about. Do I want my diary as much or more than I want Wade? I don’t know where such thoughts come from. I left him but went back to him. He took me back; I took him here. He looks at me resentfully sometimes, as if I am greedily using up all the words allotted to us by the gods, taking his share as well as mine, hoarding them in my notebooks.

  Wade wants to know what makes me write. He wants to catch what I’ve got, hopes that he’ll come down with it, the van Hout family disease. It doesn’t occur to him that he might be my Muse, because he’s always thought I would be his. I don’t need his inspiration, but it’s starting to seem that, without mine, he’ll never write a single word. The irony will drive him mad—I’ll write and write, and all he’ll ever do is read, the novelist he thought he’d be stifled by a wife who, if she had her way, would never write again. I never show a word to him, or anyone.

  Two books elude him, day and night:

  the one I will not let him read,

  the one I will not let him write.

  He looks at me resentfully,

  as if he could, if not for me,

  write something good, or even great—

  write anything instead of wait

  for inspiration from above

  to free him from the one he loves.

  He sits for hours in that room and tries to write, or thinks of trying, anyway. As he sits and stares at his typewriter, it’s hard to say if anything about his homeland goes through his mind, so preoccupied is he with my strange family, the strangest one of whom is me. He thought he had to get away to see things in perspective. I wonder if, someday, he’ll think he should have got away from me. I hate to hear him sigh in there, the silence of his typewriter—I know he’s come to doubt that he can write.

  “All those hundreds, hundreds of books I read—better to have written one. I’d take one line for every night I spent reading Shakespeare. Perhaps it’s time that I owned up to being whatever in God’s name it is that I’m supposed to be.”

  I chose him, not his vocation, but don’t dare tell him that in case he thinks I am agreeing with his self-assessment.

  It’s been five months since I re-chose him, and I’m writing in Arellian more often than not. If I’m the impediment I suspect I am, what if, one of these days or nights, Wade puts me aside and that book of his comes pouring out at last?

  I hope I never see Wade in Arellia, staring at me accusingly, alone among the yellow leaves. I might end up writing of no one but him while burning candles in my room. For me, he puts aside his dream. He follows me, he lives for me and, in the end, he dies for me, the mad autobiographer who writes the books he planned to write while he watches over her, his blood drained of its ambition. I become his one vocation. To be my minder becomes the main work of his life. The book I take such pains to hide I leave to him when my mind and body fail, but he isn’t able to decode one word of The Arelliad.

  They’re drawn to me, the mad, the dead, but Wade is not yet one of them—

  * * *

  —

  But now I sink deeper into the page and see that Wade is in here with me. I’ve invited him in to show him where I live—Arellia, the yellow leaves forever falling from the trees. I take his hand and lead him about. “See that one in the peacoat, the one in black, the Shadow She—she always stares like that. And look, the Frank sisters are over there, Anne and Margot…”

  The very worst has come to pass—Wade is now among the lost. He leaves me and he goes to them, the Frank sisters, who take him by the hands.

  His eyes tell me and them that he’s never known unbearable, abiding pain. He’ll speak of me when I can’t hear, tell them about the things I did to lure him in.

  The blue sweater I gave him should have been a goodbye kiss. My reappearance at his door was a sad mistake. How could unlucky Wade say no? Arellia—he mustn’t stay. I have to make him leave or find a path to lead him out before von Snout appears.

  How strange it is to see him here among the girls who died when they were young. How tall he is compared to them. Their loyal minder he might be, their guide through Time, through History, a man, at last, among three girls, the only one left in this world.

  Now comes the quickening of time that happens when I start to rhyme, the vertigo…the wind picks up in one great gust, a churning vortex from the west in which the beast conceals himself, the Monster known as Claws von Snout.

  They scream and strike out through the trees, the Frank sisters, the Shadow She. I try to grab Wade’s hand, but he runs away from them and me. I can’t keep up, I never could—I lose him in the yellow wood. I hear him shout, “Where have you gone? Why did you leave? Remember what the sirens said? The sun will rise; they’ll find me dead.”

  * * *

  —

  I hurry into the woods. There’s no sign of Wade, no sign of the Frank sisters or the green-eyed Anne.

  Arellia, before the dawn. The smell of Snout is in the air. He’s still out there, waiting for me and the others. The darkest hour of the night—no light but for the eyes of Snout, two coals of red that flit about like fireflies between the trees. He’s
blustered in like this before. He’s unsure of me, though he’s been tracking my decline, waiting for the perfect moment. If I weaken further, he’ll strike. He growls as if to say, “Not yet. Ten years without a taste of you, so what’s another day or two? It won’t be long; I’ll come for you. I’ll come for you another night.”

  He’ll slink off before the sun comes up, smouldering in spite as he retraces his advance.

  Head bowed, he’ll keep a cold eye out for witnesses of his defeat.

  WADE

  Five days after we’d seen Bethany in the hospital, I went out for an early-morning run. When I got back, Rachel was sitting, slumped, at the kitchen table. She didn’t turn toward me when I reached the top of the stairs.

  “Bethany called,” she said. “She says none of it was true. All of it was a product of what she says was a psychotic break.”

  “She retracted everything?”

  Rachel wore the same look as she had when I told her about Clive’s visit.

  “What did you say to her?” I said.

  Rachel didn’t answer. She looked as if she was weary of trying to think it through, weary, perhaps, of trying to think.

  “Did the doctors really say that it was a psychotic break?” I said.

  “I don’t know what the doctors said,” Rachel said, not looking at me as I sat beside her. “Psychotic breaks are not uncommon among people who are severely depressed.”

  “You had one; now she has one?”

  “I think she believed what she said about Dad. Even if she made it up, I wouldn’t blame her. Considering all that she’s been through and all the drugs that she’s been on over the years.” At last she looked at me and I saw that her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. “She told me that she called Mom and Dad and apologized to them, and they came to the hospital and took her back home, against the advice of her doctor. Home is where she is now.”

  “With him?” I said.

  Rachel shrugged, pushed her chair back on two legs and put her hands behind her head. “That would seem to be the case,” she said, a full stop between each word. “When we spoke, she was in tears the whole time. She kept saying over and over how sorry she was.”

  “Do you really believe that she made it all up?”

  Rachel rocked backward and forward on the kitchen chair. “I didn’t want to press her about it. I just told her I was glad that she was out of hospital. She’s a mess. She may change her story again. Who knows? Maybe she just lost her nerve. I didn’t want to upset her. She doesn’t want any visitors for now. Except for Clive and the DeVrieses.” I looked at her, even more startled.

  “The engagement is on again. She apparently apologized.”

  “And they’re fine with it? Their future daughter-in-law tells their son that her father has abused her since as far back as she can remember. She comes this close to destroying her father’s life and her mother’s and all your lives. And then she changes her mind, retracts everything, just like that. She’s ill, Rachel. That’s the only explanation.”

  Rachel stood. “I’m well aware of how this sounds.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that I don’t know what to think. Do you still think that the accusations against your father make sense?”

  “I’d suggest that you and I go back home if I hadn’t promised Bethany that I’d be here for her. I can’t leave her.”

  “There’s just so much pretending, so much looking the other way. I can’t imagine what it will be like from now on, except that it will be worse.”

  “Then you go home and wait for me,” she said. Her tone was flat, as if she didn’t care if I went home or not.

  “I’d never go back home without you, Rachel,” I insisted. “You know that, don’t you?” She gave no sign of having heard me, but she began to cry. I took her in my arms and kissed the top of her head.

  “Please don’t think that I’m like them, my parents and my sisters,” she said. “I’m not. I don’t know why, but I’m not. Maybe it’s because of you that I’m not. Please don’t lose faith in me.”

  * * *

  —

  As it turned out, Bethany had told Gloria, Max, Carmen and Fritz about her suicide attempt and her brief breakup with Clive, but not about the accusations she had made against her father. All this Rachel revealed to me as we were driving to a gathering at Liesbeek Road. I didn’t think that we should go, but Rachel felt there was no point in staying in Cape Town if she avoided the sister she had come here to support.

  Bethany answered the door when we rang the bell. In jeans and a loose-fitting black sweater, she didn’t look much different than she had at the last such gathering. “I can still do wonders with makeup,” she said to Rachel, “whereas the heel of your left hand is still smudged with ink. Don’t worry. I couldn’t say for sure that anyone but Wade and I even know that you’re left-handed.”

  We were the last to arrive. Without a martini and a cigarette, Bethany seemed not to know what to do with her hands. She didn’t wait for us to come inside so she could close the door behind us, but merely turned her back and walked off.

  Everyone was seated in the front room. “One beer and one wine coming up,” Bethany said. “Grab a chair and I’ll be right back.”

  Everyone but Hans acknowledged our arrival, though no one stood. It was the most tense-looking group of people I had ever seen. Rachel and I sat on separate chairs across the room from her parents, near Gloria and Max. Fritz and Carmen sat cross-legged on the floor just to the left of the loveseat where Clive was sitting, his parents flanking him like Swiss guards. So there we were, two factions in the room, one that knew of the accusations against Hans, and one that didn’t. I assumed that conversation would be even more than the usual minefield.

  I was proven wrong. When Bethany returned with our drinks, she sat on the floor in front of the loveseat, at Clive’s feet, and announced, “No booze for me. I think we all know what that might lead to.” Everyone tried to laugh. I stared at the DeVrieses, who seemed entirely unfazed by our presence or by my prolonged scrutiny of them.

  “I bet they have you on the good stuff now, Bethany,” Fritz said. “They should have had you on it from the start. Those Canadian doctors haven’t got a clue about drugs.”

  “Mom is now the keeper of the pills,” Bethany said. “My personal pusher. She doles them out and makes sure that I take them, and all I have to do in return is eat a handful of raisins for breakfast, a banana for lunch, and a bowl of Special K with skimmed milk for dinner. Makes sense. We mustn’t have Bethany stockpiling pills. And we can’t have a drama queen starving herself to death when there are so many more decorous ways to end it all.”

  “None of this would have happened,” Hans said, “if not for those incompetents in Newfoundland. I never thought I’d say this, but Fritz is right.”

  Bethany stared straight ahead, an odd smile on her face. She raised her hand in the air as if she wanted to ask a question. “I apologize for being so dramatic,” she said, dropping her hand. “But I was never at risk for anything more than a really bad hangover. I have always known my limits. So it wasn’t a real attempt.”

  “Just a cry for help?” Fritz said.

  “Help me, help me,” Carmen said, high on something as usual, her eyes barely open.

  I wanted to blurt out the truth, and I might have, but Myra, as if prompted by my expression, said, “Wade, how is your book coming along?”

  “I don’t think I’ve adjusted to my new surroundings yet,” I said, wishing I’d been able to come up with something more ironic.

  “Well,” Myra said, smiling, “now you know why I found it so hard to write in Newfoundland.”

  I nodded, though she had never said a word to me about finding it hard to write in Newfoundland.

  “You’ll never become adjusted to South Africa,” Fritz said. “I haven’t and I was born here.”

 
“We were all born here except for Dad and Wade and Max and Peter,” Carmen said. “The only men in the room who were born here are Fritz and Clive. And Fritz is the only Afrikaner.”

  “The guest of honour,” Fritz said, looking at me as if at the man he had deposed.

  “You will get used to it, Wade,” Myra said. I thought she meant her family. “It’s a distractingly beautiful country, but, after a while, you’ll stop noticing the scenery and be better able to concentrate.”

  “I wish I could use the beauty of the scenery as my excuse.”

  “The only beauty Wade is distracted by is Rachel,” Fritz said. “He’s not distracted by other things like bigotry, exploitation, slavery and censorship.”

  “So endeth the sermon,” I said.

  “A woman who is always available, that’s what he’s distracted by,” Fritz said. “And they’re not even married.”

  Carmen laughed, dropping her head so that her hair hid her face, her shoulders shaking. I glanced at Rachel, who had turned crimson.

  “I’m glad to see that marriage is working out so well for you and Carmen,” I said to Fritz.

  Bethany got to her feet, walked to the middle of the room and raised both arms over her head. “Announcement. Announcement.” She lowered her arms. “Clive and I have set a date.”

  “Oh, isn’t that marvellous,” Myra said.

  “Absolutely marvellous,” Hans said, moving forward onto the edge of his chair. “I can’t think of better news. So when is the big day? A year or so from now, I suppose.”

  “Well, actually,” Bethany said, “it’s May 17.”

  “Well, that’s about a year,” Myra said.

  “No, I mean May 17 of this year,” Bethany said.

  “But, Bethany,” Hans said, “Myra and I are going to give at least one of our daughters a proper wedding. We have to make plans.”

  “We had a proper wedding in Halifax,” Carmen said, “but you missed it.”