The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  “You should stop trying to understand a man like Dad. Tornadoes have been known to rip apart an entire town but leave one or two houses unmarked. No one is running this show called life. Anything is possible.”

  I felt that she was patronizing me. “Well,” I said, “I can’t keep something like this from Rachel. There would always be this thing between us, for however long we last.”

  “Telling her won’t make any of it go away. You think that couples shouldn’t keep secrets from each other. That might be true for some secrets, but it’s not true for this one. There are no secrets like this one.”

  “If I don’t tell her, I will lose her, if not right away, then months or years from now. Imagine our kids asking why they only have two grandparents and me thinking, Well, there used to be four, but your aunt did away with two of them.”

  “Don’t joke about it,” she said, pointing her finger. “Don’t you dare make fun of me. Just listen to me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have—I’m sorry.”

  “It will only hurt Rachel if you tell her what I did.”

  I was leaning on a car in a seaside parking lot in Cape Town, South Africa, with my girlfriend’s sister, who had just told me that, with the help of her brother-in-law, she had had her parents killed. I wasn’t as certain as I’d let on to Gloria that Hans had kept his hands off Rachel. Only a tiny measure of certainty had been erased, and yet its erasure made me feel infinitely worse. It was as if I had been monitoring the progress of an egg whose shell had been reduced to a transparent skin, allowing me to see the shadow of the thing inside. I fought down the urge to be sick and struggled to focus on the moment’s primary revelation: the van Houts had been murdered by their oldest daughter.

  Murdered. Was that the right word? The police had said they were killed execution-style. Executed ? Something about the word seemed wrong, in spite of everything I knew.

  Gloria had been watching me struggle. “You don’t understand and you never will,” she said. “No one it hasn’t happened to can understand. If Rachel really can’t remember, or has nothing to remember, then she won’t understand. Maybe Carmen wouldn’t. I don’t know what they’d do. I know almost nothing about Carmen. In a way, I was the odd one out among my sisters. I never got along with them. Half the time, we were at each other’s throats. The other half, we avoided each other.

  “People often say that nothing has been the same for them since this or that. For me, there was no before this and after that. There was always this. Only this. Nothing else.”

  “Gloria,” I said, “all of this just seems insane to me.”

  “It is. It is insane. And now that you’ve been caught up in it, nothing will ever seem the same to you. The world made sense to you for twenty-something years. It has never made sense to me. Even if you broke up with Rachel now, nothing would ever seem the same.”

  “I’m never going to break up with Rachel,” I said, but Gloria went on as if she hadn’t heard me.

  “Do you understand what could result from telling Rachel? Believe me, she is not sorry they are gone. None of us is. If that seems heartless, your imagination is not what you think it is. I don’t know the guy that Fritz hired, what he might think he had to do if word got out about this. That’s why I was so freaked out in the parking lot: I thought we were going to be killed. Don’t you understand, Wade? If you tell Rachel, we could all end up as loose ends that need to be tied.”

  She was crying again. I looked over my shoulder to see if anyone was watching but, as far as I could tell, no one was. She gathered herself and turned to me. “I’m asking you, not as a favour to me, but as a favour to them, don’t tell Rachel or Carmen or Bethany or Max. Don’t tell them what I did, and don’t tell them who helped me. And for God’s sake, don’t tell Fritz that you know what he did. More people could get killed. What my sisters don’t know would hurt them even more than they’ve been hurt already. It was my responsibility to do what I did. As the oldest daughter, I owed it to Bethany, to myself, and, if all the truth were known, I suspect, to a number of others whose last names are not van Hout.”

  “All right, Gloria,” I said, won over more by her fear of what Fritz and the man who had killed her parents might do than anything else. “But I am going to tell Rachel about the mall cops because, when she sees me, she’ll know that something happened. I’m not expecting to get much sleep tonight.”

  “Promise me,” she said. “Promise me that we’ll keep this secret between us.”

  I looked her in the eye. “I promise,” I said. And I meant it.

  “Thank God.” She covered her face with her hands and began to cry so hard her shoulders were heaving. I put my arm around her and she turned and put her arms around my neck and pressed her head sideways against my chest just as Rachel often did. After a few seconds, she pulled away and patted me with both hands.

  “I’ll drop you off at your apartment but I won’t come in. Tell Rachel I said I wanted to get back home and get a swim in before dinner.”

  We got back in the car. She pulled the sun visor down to reveal the small mirror on the back of it. She opened her purse, took out an assortment of cosmetics and arranged them in a row on the dashboard. Then she took a brush from the glove compartment and went to work on her hair, tilting her head away from me, stroking savagely, grimacing. “I should have stayed in the car, out of the wind,” she said through clenched teeth. Then she fixed her face.

  * * *

  —

  Rachel had once told me that Gloria believed that the people who ran the world deserved to run it, that she trusted authority to do the right thing, the best thing, for everyone. How she could maintain such a belief given what her father had done to her, I couldn’t imagine. She had made it sound as if, by arranging the murder of her parents, she had done what any sensible person would do to restore good order to its usual infallibility. But I couldn’t know what Gloria actually thought. She may not have been as remorseless as she seemed. In my worst moments, I would dwell on the fact that his blood ran in her veins, as it did in Rachel’s, and Carmen’s and Bethany’s too. Perhaps it was that portion of Gloria’s blood that was his that made it possible for her to rid the world of him without letting the act destroy her.

  These murders were the kinds of things that happened in potboilers and thrillers, in supermarket tabloids. I had an overwhelming sense of unreality when I thought about what must have happened on Liesbeek Road that night. Gloria and Fritz had negotiated a fee for the murder of her parents. What sum of money was involved? They must have had several conversations over a significant period of time during which one or both of them could have changed their minds but didn’t. They could have stopped short of doing something that would alter them forever—assuming that, when it came to murder, Fritz was as much of a novice as Gloria. Was it as simple as him knowing a guy who knew a guy, or had he known right away who to contact? And who was that person and what did he do, and how did he live between phone calls from people like Fritz?

  The killer had parked in the driveway. The door of the house had been unlocked. He knew the layout. I pictured him moving about like a handyman. He did what he was paid to do. He shot Myra and Hans in the forehead once, left the house and drove away, the spinning of his tires on gravel the only indication of urgency or panic.

  I knew that, in the days that followed, every time I looked at Gloria or someone said her name, I would think of Hans and Myra lying in the darkness of their room. And every moment I spent with Rachel, I would debate telling her what happened to her parents. To keep such a thing hidden from her seemed like an unthinkable betrayal. Gloria paid to have them killed. I couldn’t imagine the effect that sentence would have on Rachel. What if Gloria, soon or years from now, had a change of heart and admitted everything, including her confession to me? Rachel might not forgive me. Out by the Apostles, with her house in sight, Gloria had warned me
about the effect of the truth on her and her sisters, and its effect on me. She had spoken as if I was one of them now, one of the van Houts, marred for life for a reason that no one but Gloria might ever know.

  I also wondered what Gloria would be like if Hans had never laid a hand on her. Bethany had been telling the truth about Hans, about her parents, all along. What would Bethany have been like if Hans had never laid a hand on her? What would Rachel and Carmen have been like?

  When I told Rachel about the close call Gloria and I had had at the shopping mall, she began to cry and hugged me fiercely. She told me how glad she was that we hadn’t been hurt, how precious I was to her and how guilty she felt for having persuaded me to come to South Africa. I was so happy we were leaving, I didn’t think to tell her she had no reason to feel guilty.

  * * *

  —

  Two nights before our departure, I woke to find Rachel sitting on the side of the bed, her hands on the mattress on either side of her. She sounded as if she was talking in her sleep: “We have to keep away from the windows, Papa says, or someone will see us. We have to keep them closed or someone will hear us. He says that one cough could give us away. We mustn’t drop things. We must walk about like mice. I can’t remember all the rules. I hope we don’t get caught but, if we do, I hope it’s not my fault. I hope it’s no one’s fault.”

  She turned and looked at me. “I’m awake,” she said. “Those were my words, not Anne Frank’s. Sometimes I write what I imagine I would have written if I was in her shoes. I should write about myself instead of paraphrasing her.” I turned on my side and rubbed her shoulder.

  She nodded, not in appreciation but as if in agreement with some inner voice. “I hope they died in their sleep,” she said. “I hope they weren’t afraid.”

  From The Ballad of the Clan van Hout

  MANIFESTO (1977)

  (Read only to my Rachel Lee,

  who still has time for poetry,

  if not for other things that she

  withholds, unlike the other three.)

  So many people say it’s wrong

  (but many more just play along).

  They could have caught me long ago

  but they pretended not to know.

  How well I know that knowing look—

  they seem to read me like a book,

  but then, I read them just as well:

  we tell each other we won’t tell.

  They know the signs, I know them too,

  I’ll look the other way if you

  will look the other way for me;

  faced with the opportunity,

  most men would do what I have done.

  Am I supposed to be a monster

  when other men have had their daughters?

  So I have mine, they have theirs too—

  these are the things that real men do.

  The ones who don’t, don’t have the nerve,

  but they’re the ones who disapprove.

  They can’t admit how much they’d like

  what they don’t have the nerve to take,

  so they say, “abomination,”

  and predict the ruination

  of the father and the daughter

  (and the uncle and the brother).

  They’re on the outside, looking in;

  they lack the stomach of most men.

  The streets are full of married women

  who’ve never come to any harm

  though they were loved by their “old man.”

  Those who object don’t know their wives

  were often left unsupervised

  when they were young and pretty things

  who, taken underneath the wings

  of older men, forgot the boys

  who really didn’t have a clue,

  who didn’t know what they should do

  with girls who really wanted to.

  Who says that I’m too old for them?

  What’s old today was young back when

  the Rooster played among the Hens.

  Love that happens in the shadows

  was long ago the status quo,

  the commonly accepted thing—

  no one had to bother hiding.

  The rules are endlessly revised,

  hypocrisy must always thrive;

  nature has to be repressed

  or we’ll be beasts like all the rest.

  The things the Bible says are right

  become forbidden overnight.

  Where love’s concerned, there’s no right age;

  I love my girls—is that depraved?

  In ancient Rome, it was the norm

  to sleep with boys the age of Carm.

  How does what’s right become what’s wrong,

  unless it was so all along,

  in which case, nothing is allowed

  by the new enlightened crowd?

  A vice was virtue yesterday—

  it never goes the other way.

  The truth will change while you’re asleep

  and be a lie when you wake up.

  That fellow Darwin was no fool;

  he knew that nature makes the rules.

  You cannot deny a notion

  that survived by evolution

  or by natural selection.

  The survival of the fittest

  should be the one and only test.

  A need, a want, an urge, a drive

  must never go unsatisfied

  or else the race will not survive.

  I know they’d say that I’m to blame

  for how my girls behave today;

  of course they overlook the drugs—

  they are such prigs, they are so smug.

  They overlook society

  and all of its hypocrisies;

  they overrate psychiatry:

  it can’t explain my Bethany

  or even little Rachel Lee.

  For proof, I know enough to know

  that almost any proof will do

  to prove the thing you want it to.

  The testimony experts give

  (they need their fees, they have to live)

  won’t hold up for very long

  when each side proves the other wrong.

  How much worse would my girls be

  had I not loved them specially?

  Did they get sick because of me,

  or is it that I saved all three?

  How would some expert doctor choose

  if those he almost lost were his?

  Who knows what causes this or that?

  How can they be so sure of it?

  The things my girls watch on TV,

  the violence and sex they see,

  the drugs they get so easily,

  the lyrics of these modern songs—

  no wonder girls like mine go wrong.

  I lie awake in bed sometimes;

  the night goes by in quarter chimes.

  The house is empty but for me;

  the girls are out and so is She.

  The man the cops look for is me—

  She tells Herself: “It cannot be;

  the man who left the house tonight,

  the one for whom the bright porch light

  is always on above the door

  can’t be the one they’re searching for.

  He’ll be Hans when he comes home;

  when he comes home, the four of them

  will still be them, their names the same

  as yesterday, when they stayed in

  and no one wai
ted up for him.

  There is this and only this;

  it has to be this way for us.

  It’s lonely in the house these days:

  I dread the night, I miss the noise,

  the children playing with their toys.

  I stay up late because their dad

  is out there somewhere, on those roads,

  or parked somewhere; he sits and broods

  about the war, about the past,

  about how time goes by so fast.

  I’d like to keep him company

  but he prefers his thoughts to me;

  he misses Glormenethalee.

  He won’t say so but I can tell—

  when it gets dark, he can’t keep still.

  Sometimes I think I might go mad;

  I fret about the years ahead.

  How will he deal with growing old

  when he is forced to stay at home?

  The house will seem more silent still

  when he is here against his will,

  avoiding me from room to room,

  wide-eyed and still remembering

  his boyhood years in Amsterdam,

  the things they must have done to him,

  the things they said they saw him do,

  the things that they accused him of,

  some girl, perhaps, that he once loved…

  I’ll never know what it was like

  to be that boy who rode his bike

  along the streets of Amsterdam

  before the war made him a man.”

  There is nothing in creation

  that defies all explanation.

  You’ve never lived as I’ve had to;

  you think there is a thing called You

  that will not change no matter what,

  your heart, your soul, inviolate.

  You call it this, you call it that,

  it really doesn’t matter what

  you call a thing you haven’t got.

  What is this thing that makes you You?

  It doesn’t matter what you do,

  you’ll never find it anywhere—

  and yet you’re certain that it’s there.