The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  It was as if she had forgotten that I was the one who suggested the idea in the first place.

  I told her that, once, when Carmen was stoned on something, she had admitted to me that Dad had been driving along the Cape Flats late at night to Fritz’s house and waiting outside in the car with the engine running until she came out. Carmen had been telling Fritz that Dad needed someone to keep him company while he drove around when he couldn’t sleep. She’d been leaving the house in the dead of night, and Dad had been taking her someplace to park and taking her home afterward. She’d been going back to sleep without a word to Fritz.

  “Bethany will go back to them,” I said. “I know she will, long before that baby is born, if it ever is. It will make no difference to Dad that she’s pregnant. Or else it will make a difference to him. He’ll use it against her somehow. I’m sure he already has. Even if she keeps staying at your place, he’ll visit her when you and Max are out of town, or even when you’re not. You have a big house and he’s gotten away with everything for years in smaller ones. He doesn’t want to get any of us pregnant but he’s jealous of any man who does. Imagine being jealous of Clive. But he is.”

  “Could we really do something like this?” Gloria said.

  My heart was going a mile a minute. I told her what I had in mind, but I used so many euphemisms that she had no choice but to do the same. We spoke as if we thought the line was tapped.

  “Do you know someone who does things like that?” she said. “Fritz does.”

  “Do you think you could live with it, Gloria?”

  “I can’t live with the alternative.”

  A week later, I sounded out Carmen and Bethany. Max was still travelling, so we met at Gloria’s house—me, Gloria, Carmen and Bethany. And Fritz—Fritz, to whom Carmen had, a few nights before, told the truth about Dad. My excuse for Wade was that Gloria could use some company because Max was away. We sat around the enormous dining room table. The view through the window of the lights along the shore of the Apostles was so distracting that Gloria drew the drapes. Or perhaps she couldn’t stand the thought that we’d be seen conferring.

  I sat at the head of the table, Gloria on my immediate right, Bethany beside her, Carmen on my left, her head resting on Fritz’s shoulder.

  “The Star Chamber,” Fritz said, grinning at me. I ignored him.

  “Here’s what I think,” I said. “If we turn him in, the police will think we cooked it all up together. Or they’d believe us but blame us. They’d say, ‘If you didn’t want him to do what he did, why didn’t you tell someone about it?’ People would rather blame anyone than blame the father. Girls who have no better sense, wives who won’t put out. Anyone. People don’t understand that, after it’s been through enough, your own mind will turn against you. A lot of people just wouldn’t swallow that this was going on for so long and we said nothing.”

  There was much nodding around the table, everyone looking grim-faced, even Fritz.

  “But this is not going to happen unless we all agree to it, all of us,” I said. “If you’re against it, say so now and we’ll never speak of it again.”

  There was a long silence until Fritz spoke at last.

  “Hans drove out to the Flats just last night,” he said. “We heard the car pull up and saw the lights. I went out and he took off. I’m not always there. Even when I am there, I’m sometimes so out of it I don’t notice when Carmen leaves the house.”

  “Dad stays in the yard for hours if he has to, waiting,” Carmen said. “Sometimes I go out just to get it over with.”

  “There’s nowhere else we can go to live,” Fritz said. “Our life, whatever the rest of you might think of it, is here.”

  “What about Mom?” I said.

  “She’s as bad as him,” Carmen said. “Worse. He’s crazy. What’s her excuse?”

  “This is not about revenge,” Bethany said. “For me, it’s about my baby.”

  Fritz laughed. “Not even a teeny-weeny bit of revenge, Lady MacBethany? I don’t mind saying that I want payback for what he’s done to Carmen.”

  “If we leave Mom out of it,” I said, “she’ll divide her time between the four of us until she dies.” Carmen and Fritz snorted derisively. “The three of us, at least. And you never know, Carmen, when your marital circumstances might change. You might get tired of waiting for the revolution.”

  “Wishful thinking,” Fritz said.

  “I’ve imagined our lives with her still in it,” I said. “Myra van Hout alone because of us. Imagine my children’s lives, your lives and your children’s lives if she was still around, if we had to go back to pretending, for her sake, that he never touched us, if we had to go back to pretending that one million other obviously untrue things were true. We are under her control as much as we are under his. That would continue without him. On the other hand, I can’t bring myself to hurt her. I’ve thought about it and I can’t.”

  “We’ll hurt her by hurting Dad,” Bethany said. “But she doesn’t use us the way he does. We should leave her out of it.”

  “Hans the unknown hero of the Dutch Resistance,” Carmen said.

  “We don’t know what he did or didn’t do during the war,” Gloria said.

  “Oh, come on,” Bethany said, looking to me for support. “I still wake up reciting The Ballad of the Clan van Hout in my head.”

  “Gloria’s right,” I said. “We don’t know and we’ll never know. Not for certain.”

  Fritz frowned and shook his head. “The guy I have in mind—I don’t think he’ll be in unless it’s both of them. Too tricky to pull off otherwise. How you all feel about your mother is irrelevant.”

  “No, it’s not,” Bethany said. She dabbed tears from her eyes with a Kleenex. “I wish there was some other way. It seems hard to believe that there’s not. Were we never a family? I remember times when I was happy.”

  “Children live in the moment,” I said. “That’s why they heal so quickly. For a while, at least.” I, too, remembered times when I was happy. When I was a child, happiness could come on the heels of misery and not be tarnished by it. I saw phantoms of happiness in family photographs and heard them in The Ballad. I also remembered what it was like when the four of us were little girls, waiting for the sound of him getting out of bed or hearing the car in the driveway and his footsteps on the stairs, each of us wondering which room he would visit, which one of us he’d pick that night. There was no pattern. Having been chosen the night before didn’t mean you wouldn’t be chosen again. But I wasn’t a helpless child anymore. I didn’t want to die before my time. I didn’t ever want to lose my mind. As things stood, both seemed definite and imminent.

  “I hate this so much,” Bethany said.

  “So do I,” Carmen said. “But not as much as I hate them.”

  “I don’t hate them. I hate this, having to do this.”

  “You don’t have to lift a finger,” Fritz said.

  “I have a conscience,” Bethany said.

  “It was implanted in your brain when you were too young to resist,” Fritz said. “You know, this is how revolutions start. A handful of people, a cell meeting secretly.”

  “You’re not a revolutionary, Fritz,” Bethany said. “We’re not revolutionaries. This is a conspiracy. You’re not here for Carmen’s sake. You’re here to make money. You’re here because you’re the only person we know who can find someone to do this.”

  Fritz laughed. “Bethany, keep trying to work up the nerve to kill yourself. This is not a country of merciful Canadians. The penalty for murder is not life in prison; it’s death. My fee reflects the fact that I’m the only one who knows the name of the guy we’re hiring.”

  “Sleep lightly,” Bethany said. “You never know when your guy might decide to tie up a loose end.”

  “The four of you would be loose ends too. You and your consciences.”

&n
bsp; “You might keep all the money for yourself and do nothing, Fritz,” I said. “What could we do about it? Or you might try to do it yourself to avoid splitting the money with this man of yours who you say will do it right. He might not even exist.”

  “He exists. And he’ll do it right.”

  “Do it right?” Bethany said. “There’s no way of doing this right.”

  This is how it was—bickering, threats and, threaded through it all, the gradual piecing together of a plot to kill our father, which, as the hours went by, became so detailed and plausible that the squabbling stopped and we stared blank-faced at the table like children who’d been scolded into silence.

  “What we’re planning,” I said at last, “won’t rid us of our memories of him. But there is a way to leave Mom out of this.”

  “Are we agreed that we should?” Gloria said. “Speak up if you’re not.” No one did.

  I took a notepad and a pen out of my purse, opened it and placed it on the table in front of me. “I’ve written some things down, in Arellian, just in case. But there are still some things left to talk about. Things we know about Dad that Fritz’s guy will need to know.”

  “I always knew that that language you invented would come in handy someday,” Fritz said.

  Bethany leaned across the table toward him. “She wants you to swear on your word of honour as a scumbag that you won’t double-cross us.”

  “You’ll have to trust me,” Fritz said.

  “This all sounds so creepy,” Carmen said.

  “She’s right,” Bethany said, shuddering. “Maybe if we didn’t refer to them as Mom and Dad—”

  “Make up your minds now. We do it or we don’t,” Gloria said.

  “Okay, okay,” Bethany said.

  By this point, the only one in the room not crying was Fritz. I asked him to go upstairs so that the four of us could talk.

  As he made for the stairs, he stopped and looked back.

  “The Final Solution,” he said.

  “Never mind him,” Gloria whispered to me.

  Carmen leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. I took her hand and joined hands with Gloria, who took Bethany’s hand as she reached across for Carmen’s. Carmen opened her eyes and looked around at the three of us. I tried to think of something to say.

  * * *

  —

  I made a checklist and went over it countless times, convinced that I had overlooked something. It had to be late enough for Nora to be asleep in the shed. There was no point in trying to make it look like a botched burglary, because my parents’ rundown house with the rusting Ford Cortina in the driveway looked far less promising for a thief than any other house on the street. Also, if Nora or the DeVrieses or Max noticed that something had been taken and it was later found, because it had been sold or imperfectly disposed of, it might be traced back to Fritz’s man.

  After Gloria gave Fritz the money, I made him promise that he would not contact us to let us know that it was done. We would simply wait to hear.

  I chose the day Mom would be away attending the Star of the Sea Convent School’s annual reunion and fundraiser with Theresa DeVries. She’d been looking forward to it since she’d come back to South Africa.

  Early in the afternoon, Gloria and Max went by Liesbeek Road to visit Mom and Dad. Gloria told them she had to go to the bathroom. She did go to the bathroom but, on the way back to the front room, she went to the kitchen and opened the fridge. His glass of Horlicks was there as always, a saucer on top, which she quickly removed. She broke in half four of Bethany’s Valium capsules, poured the powder into the Horlicks and stirred it around. Forty milligrams of Valium. We had to be sure that he was in bed, asleep, and not lying awake as usual, or walking around the house or the backyard, or out prowling in his car.

  I thought often about phoning Fritz to tell him to call it off, to give the money to the man he said he’d hired, and to keep his share and forget about the rest of it. I thought about it, but I didn’t do it.

  From The Ballad of the Clan van Hout

  SCAPEGOAT (1985)

  I know My looked the other way.

  I’ve known it ever since the day

  I came to bed from Carmen’s room,

  my face so flushed, my clothes askew.

  I knew that I had been found out;

  at first I thought She might walk out

  or turn me in or turn me out.

  We made a silent pact that night:

  she’d overlook what wasn’t right

  but we would never speak of it.

  We’d go on as we had before;

  I’d keep it all behind closed doors.

  It binds us like no other thing,

  the meaning of a wedding ring,

  the sacred secret that we share,

  the thing that makes us what we are.

  Why was She not enough for me?

  (Nor was my Glormenethalee

  and others too—I doubt She knows

  how many there have been of those,

  or what became of most of them.)

  I think of when She was so slim,

  when She was young and beautiful,

  not that much older than those girls.

  I couldn’t get enough of Her.

  She tired of my flattery,

  but it was not because of me,

  so I went down the hall to them,

  but they were not enough for me:

  no number was enough, you see.

  I wanted what I couldn’t have;

  sometimes it makes me want to laugh.

  It made me want them all the more,

  for She was just the appetizer,

  my girls my entree for a while,

  but still not quite a bellyful…

  I read this part to Rachel Lee;

  soon after, she abandoned me:

  This is not the Nazi waiter;

  this is something even greater,

  which means it’s even worse for us,

  and that is why we must discuss

  the accusations being made

  by those Without about your dad.

  I drive the streets alone at night,

  get out of bed, turn off the light.

  Oh how I love my nightly drives;

  they let me think about the lives

  of other husbands, other wives.

  I like to watch the girls, of course—

  by ten they’re always out in force.

  I see the girls in twos and threes,

  the girls like you girls used to be,

  and like the ones I used to see

  back home in the Land of Hout

  on sleepless nights when I went out

  and sometimes came home furtively,

  so worried that I would wake My

  or wake you girls that I would stay

  downstairs till you began the day.

  I know I needn’t spell it out;

  you know your father drives about

  because his ulcers keep him up—

  he hardly gets a minute’s sleep.

  It’s better that I leave the house

  than creep around it like a mouse

  and keep the two of you awake—

  a family of insomniacs!

  No movies play around the clock;

  you go to bars, you have to drink.

  The strongest thing I drink is milk—

  sometimes the Horlicks makes me sick!

  So out I go into the night—

  there’s not another soul in sight.

  The bad man must be Hans van Hout

  because the bad are always bald

  an
d most are fifty-four-year-old

  university professors:

  the jails are full of lecturers,

  and vicious intellectuals.

  The worst are the accounting profs

  who scramble up onto the roofs

  and jump on young girls passing by.

  (The ones with gowns know how to fly.)

  Because some crimes have gone unsolved,

  and someone must have been involved,

  they’ve got it narrowed down to this:

  it’s either me or someone else.

  It seems my car is everywhere—

  they saw it here while it was there,

  or going east while headed west—

  almost enough for an arrest.

  It seems I own a magic car

  that goes so fast it disappears.

  It seems that I’m behind the wheel

  of every single vehicle

  on every single city street

  at every moment every night

  and every car looks just like mine.

  It’s all the fault of the police,

  this witch hunt that will never cease.

  They can’t seem to investigate

  the number of a licence plate.

  I never drive it very far

  but they’re obsessed with van Hout’s car.

  More often home than it is not,

  it sits there in the very spot

  I park it in night after night:

  the driveway of the van Hout house—