She had screamed for them to stop but no one heard.
Now she screamed again. “Mamma! Mamma! Daddy!”
But what could she tell them or anyone, how could she explain?—her underpants gone, her clothing ripped, her belly and legs smeared with her own sour-smelling blood?
III
And so it came to pass that the only daughter of Thaddeus and Opal Vickery was grievously despoiled, and—wonder of wonders—conceived a child even in her misfortune, and carried it nearly to term: giving birth early one rainy June morning, after eight months of sorrow and some seventeen hours of arduous labor, to an undersized and sickly baby boy later christened Nathanael William (William in honor of the infant’s grandmother’s father, deceased some ten years; Nathanael meaning gift of God); the mother being only sixteen years and one month of age at the time of her parturition.
A dead nature, I have read, aims at nothing; seeks no end. A living nature, however, strives to manifest itself and even to transcend itself and even perhaps—I am shaky on such matters, having had so poor a formal education—to interpret itself. That this violent conception, pregnancy, and birth were aspects of a single coherence, against all odds insisting upon its being, who would dare doubt?—for the mark of Your will was everywhere evidential.
Contemplating the miracle after some three decades, and more, I find myself subject, still, to most upsetting emotions. I do not know, I cannot know, whether the birth of the child Nathanael William was a justification, sanctioned by Your hand, of the violence suffered by the unfortunate girl, in all certainty a virgin at the time of her rapists’ cruelty; I do not know whether the gift of this remarkable child was a sign of Yours that all would be well, and more than well, for the suffering Vickery family—whose lives were irreparably altered, both in a public and in a private sense. This would indicate to my way of thinking that Your gift of Nathanael was a compensation for the earlier outrage, much as Your gifts to Job were signs of Your renewed pleasure in him, his having withstood the torments of Your test upon him. And yet it may be that the extraordinary gift of Nathanael William was intended from the very start—even unto the first days of the Creation.
Before Nathanael was, You are.
AWAITING THE BIRTH of his grandchild, Thaddeus Vickery did not concern himself with such riddles, nor did he rejoice in the imminent miracle. He had had time to contemplate his daughter’s and his family’s misfortune for many sad months, through a gloomy autumn and a protracted, most stormy winter and a chill, rainy spring that advanced and retreated teasingly, and froze the buds on the favored peach tree he had planted just outside his office window some twenty years before in memory of the loss of his second-born child, a boy, who died of a kind of bronchitis when only three weeks old; he had had time to contemplate many things, to plunge through many divers emotions, and to come near to drowning in them, for he was a passionate, readily inflamed man, unused to the heaviness of heart imposed upon him by his daughter’s fate (to him incredible: “It can’t be possible,” Dr. Vickery said time and time again, to others and to himself in the privacy of his office, where he sat by the hour awaiting patients or, very late at night, awaiting a visitation of some kind that would explain the bizarre workings of what was, to him, a soulless yet not malevolent, and fundamentally knowable, universe; “pregnancy under such circumstances, conception itself—It can’t be possible, it can’t be”).
He and Opal had lain sleepless in the lumpy old four-poster bed for innumerable nights, neither speaking because they had already said all there was to say. The disaster could not have happened—not to their sweet, innocent Elsa—not to them. That the child should have been mauled and tormented and raped was hideous enough; that she should have been somehow impregnated was insupportable. “No, it can’t be possible. Simply can’t be possible,” Dr. Vickery muttered. For weeks he lost faith in his own powers of reasoning, in his own sanity, and, what was more grievous, in the powers of reasoning and the sanity of his profession, and of science more generally: for if the universe was merely a jumble of unlikely events, why should one devote one’s spirit to interpreting it? When he sighed loudly and ran his fingers through his graying bushy hair and said for the hundredth time, “It can’t be possible!” his wife said sharply, “It doesn’t matter if it’s possible or not: the fact is, it is.”
The rape and its circumstances were hideous enough, and the subsequent pregnancy, but even more outrageous, in a sense, was the fact that the rapists were never apprehended. Thaddeus was convinced they belonged to one of those dirt-poor, sprawling, inbred, diseased mountain families who lived north of Marsena, whose unfortunate children he sometimes saw (he volunteered his services to the public schools in the district, and from time to time a mother would even bring a child to his office, emaciated, glassy-eyed, already near death—for the mountain people feared and despised doctors and were reconciled to the routine deaths of children), and that the sheriff and his men were simply too cowardly to investigate—though naturally they protested that they had done everything humanly possible and had not yet given up. Ashton was not only convinced that someone from the mountains had committed the crime, but that it was, in a way, directed at him, the men had known him, Ashton Vickery, and wished to hurt and insult him in the cruelest way possible, knowing that the rape of his only sister, whom he loved very much, would drive him mad. And not only that: he believed the sheriff and his men knew the rapists and refused to arrest them, not simply out of cowardice (though the sons of bitches were certainly cowards) but because they sided with the rapists against Ashton and his family. “They think it serves us right!” Ashton said, drunken and aggrieved. “Because we’re Vickerys and Sayers—because we’re better than them—because Pa’s a doctor and Uncle Ewell’s got the store—because of me—They all say it, they’re saying it behind our backs, the bastards, the filthy lying dirt-eating bastards!—saying it serves us right. They don’t give a damn about poor Elsa, they’re maybe saying it serves her right too. Behind our backs they’re saying these things while to our faces they’re always so sorry—the sons of bitches! If I only knew which ones of them to get.”
His parents tried to calm him, tried to reason with him. Neither Thaddeus nor Opal believed the sheriff knew who had committed the crime and was deliberately refraining from arresting them; neither of them wished to believe (Thaddeus the more vehement on the subject) that their friends and neighbors in Marsena, his patients, secretly rejoiced in the Vickerys’ tragedy and went about saying to one another that it served them right. “No, that’s really unacceptable,” Thaddeus said angrily. “I don’t believe that.”
“What the hell do you know about this town, or about people?” Ashton said.
“I know the people of Marsena. I’ve known them for a far longer time than—”
“You don’t know anything,” Ashton said rudely. “Only what you think you should know.”
“Everyone in Marsena is fond of Elsa—you know that. There isn’t a girl sweeter, better-liked—There isn’t—”
“Wasn’t.”
“Everyone has stopped by to ask if there’s anything they can do, and—”
“Stopped by to pick up some gossip,” Ashton said. “Look, Pa: don’t tell me.”
“Don’t tell me,” Thaddeus shouted.
And so they began to argue as they often argued, at the dinner table, while Opal pressed her hands against her ears or rose suddenly and walked away, and they were left alone (since Elsa refused to come downstairs for any meals and spent nearly all that winter in her room, staring out the window, or working indifferently on a quilt, or reading her Bible, or sleeping for long unnatural stretches of time—sometimes as much as fifteen hours a day), shouting at each other, their faces distorted by hatred.
Sometimes Thaddeus and Opal quarreled, sometimes they sat in dignified silence, two aging, distraught, somewhat oversized people whose flesh had begun to melt from their frames unevenly, leaving Opal haggard-faced, her eyes ringed by shadow, and Thaddeu
s even more nervous than usual, his well-worn, familiar clothes now too big for him, so that he resembled one of those vagrants who sometimes passed through Marsena and appeared at the Vickerys’ side door begging for food or money. Much of the time there was simply nothing to say, which was why Thaddeus spent so many hours in his office or was unusually willing to make house calls, even to people who lived miles away; and he had gotten into the habit of remaining in his office late at night, sipping bourbon, playing a form of solitaire he had invented as a medical student desperate for a mindless activity that would calm his thoughts; sometimes reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations or Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, books he had admired very much as an undergraduate thirty years ago at the state university. Sometimes he even played softly on his old ocarina, an instrument from his boyhood, made of terra cotta, producing a gentle, sad, feathery, hollow, melancholy sound not quite music. He blew on it very softly, and not very well. And only when he was fairly drunk.
Of course the issue was, from November until late winter, whether Thaddeus should arrange for his daughter to have an abortion. He believed it was necessary, it was incontestably necessary; though the girl’s life did not appear to be endangered by the pregnancy (for Elsa, despite herself, was in fairly good physical condition: it was chillingly evident that her body did not at all mind being pregnant) it was possible that her mental health was affected. More: she should not have to bear the child of her rapist. It was insupportable, Thaddeus believed. An outrage.
Opal listened and appeared to agree and yet remained silent, her head inclined toward his as if she’d become hard of hearing these past few months, her steady stunned gray gaze never quite meeting his. She was a rather homely woman—agreeably homely most of the time, with a too-long nose, fat cheeks, frizzy mouse-brown hair. Her complexion was lovely, the skin fresh and smooth as a girl’s, but she had gotten in the habit of frowning unconsciously and now there were sharp creases between her eyes and on her forehead that looked unnatural, even disfiguring. The period of her womanhood was over, Thaddeus found himself thinking, without knowing what he meant; the period of her femaleness. Over.
Thaddeus had fallen in love with Opal when he was in his early twenties and she eighteen. Hefty, good-humored, with a loud, frank, artless laugh, she had amazed Thaddeus with her warmth and the good sense of her conversation—had truly amazed him, since at their first meeting he had thought her almost comically unattractive. She was rather graceless, riding a reddish-brown roan mare across her father’s pasture, bareback, or playing a noisy four-hand rondo with one of her girl cousins, or trying to teach Thaddeus a simple box-step dance; but it quickly ceased to matter. In a few weeks he no longer saw her. The surprising thing about Opal Sayer was that he could talk with her as he could talk with few women. He could talk about nearly anything: his studies, his difficulties with his teachers, his setbacks, his hopes, even his erratic feelings about her. Within a year of their meeting he was very much in love. He believed he and Opal Sayer would never come to the end of all they had to tell each other, and he could not anticipate a time when her opinion would not be the first he would seek on any matter. In a sense, nothing was quite real to him until he discussed it with Opal—even his own feelings were inchoate and baffling until she gave them a name. “Oh, you’re just tired,” she might say, putting her hand sympathetically on his shoulder, as another man would, or, “Oh, you’re angry—and you have every right to be angry.” And then again, “Thaddeus, you’re imagining it all: you’re being very childish.”
So they had fallen in love and were married in the Baptist church in Marsena, and when Thaddeus’s residency at a Port Oriskany hospital was finished they moved to Marsena, where, with the help of Opal’s father (it was a measure of Thaddeus’s love for her that he allowed Mr. Sayer to give them a substantial wedding gift—several thousand dollars), they were able to buy one of the handsomest houses in the village, built in the early 1850s. It was three stories high, with a spacious veranda and an impressive portico; it was covered in shingleboard, painted white, with dark green shutters and trim; it had a stained-glass window above the front door and a very attractive bay window looking out onto the long, sloping front yard and the unpaved central street of Marsena. There was a brick walk that led to the street, and a gravel driveway lined with magnificent blue spruce; there was a carriage house; and a small barn; and some twenty acres of land, most of it wooded, some planted in alfalfa and clover. The house had been owned by a man named Crofton, who had owned most of the shares of the Marsena paper mill where Thaddeus’s father had worked for many years—so Thaddeus had thought it fitting that he should buy the Crofton house and populate it with his own children. At the same time he felt rather apprehensive about the move, even before the financial difficulties of the thirties, when a house that size was a considerable burden to maintain. “I’m afraid,” he sometimes told his young wife. “I’m afraid we’ll just move in and we’ll lose it.” Opal waved away his doubts. “You’re being superstitious,” she snorted.
She had an elegant sign made for him, black letters on brass, which swung from a little iron pole set in the front yard. Thaddeus Vickery, M.D. General Medicine.
“Nobody will ever make us leave here,” she said.
Inside, the rooms were rather dark, though spacious and comfortable. Most of the floors were hardwood, there were oak timbers in the ceilings, the kitchen was enormous, with a slate floor and a fieldstone fireplace and an antique harvest table that had been in the Sayer family for over a hundred and fifty years. There was a dry sink planted with philodendron, the only house plant Opal had any luck with. There was a large fieldstone fireplace in the parlor, and yet another in the dark, cozy room that was to be Thaddeus’s office, opening off the foyer but with its own side entrance. (Rare in this part of the world were the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in the room, which had been Crofton’s study.)
As time passed it happened that, without the Vickerys really noticing—for they were both busy, distracted, not very self-conscious people—the house took on a somewhat shabby, rundown look. White shingleboard is very hard to keep up; weeds grow through even the most attractive of gravel driveways, and poke up around the edges of bricks laid for sidewalks; moss takes root and begins to spread on roofs, tiny maples and oaks start to grow in uncleaned gutters. Several of the blue spruce unaccountably sickened and died and were not replaced—Thaddeus never got around to it; the large “silver” mailbox from Sears turned to rust, as did the iron pole from which Thaddeus’s handsome sign swung. Opal had no luck with the roses the Croftons had left, and put in marigolds and nasturtiums and geraniums every year, and tried her hand at gladioli, which grew to surprising heights but bloomed feebly. She went through phases when housework appealed to her, and phases when it did not, and since her husband rarely commented on the condition of the house—rarely noticed it, in fact—there were long stretches of time when the windows needed washing and the hardwood floors needed polishing and the molding was filthy and there were smudged fingerprints everywhere. Once Ashton was born, it became almost impossible to keep things clean: Ashton was a restless, careless, rather destructive child.
The first pregnancy and birth was remarkably free of incident, but the second was a difficult one and the infant, a boy (baptized William Matthew), lived only a few weeks. The loss of the baby brought Thaddeus and Opal closer together but had the effect, also, of breaking their childlike insouciance and their delight in each other: with that death, as Opal put it rather grimly, the honeymoon ended and the business of real life began. At this time Opal was still in her early twenties, big-boned and girlish in a rough way, with a fine healthy complexion and attractive blue eyes, quite pale and finely lashed. Thaddeus, not yet thirty, had begun to discover gray and silver and even bone-white hairs on his head, which sometimes amused him and at other times frightened him. Both realized they were no longer individuals pleased to live together in a large, impressive house, like children given undeserved gifts;
they were married—married people; a wife and a husband. The death of the infant had linked them in a way their wedding had not (for the Baptist ceremony meant nothing to them, the “holiness” of matrimony was absurd), and even the birth of their first son had not. They were irreparably joined, married for life; married for eternity (in which, of course, they did not believe: in which Thaddeus vehemently and scornfully disbelieved). “It looks as if we’re in this together,” Thaddeus had said with faint astonishment at the grave of William Matthew. “It looks as if it’s all very serious . . . Did you know this before? I didn’t.” Opal had squeezed his arm in silence, to indicate she hadn’t known but she knew now.
Yes, Thaddeus found himself thinking from time to time, it was all very serious: life was serious. You woke up and found yourself in it, and then suffered a series of later awakenings that made you realize you could not get out of it; it was no longer your life but life itself, a kind of communal, impersonal life in which you participated. But that was unfair! A kind of trick. Just as loving Opal had led to the trickery of that second birth and that unforgettable death. (Which Thaddeus still could not understand, twenty years later: that is, he could not understand why all his efforts to save the child had failed: and of course he had not wanted an autopsy, neither he nor Opal could have borne the thought of an autopsy performed on that tiny body, which had already suffered so much . . . Only a few weeks before Elsa’s misfortune, some twenty-one years after William’s death, he had happened to walk through an abandoned cemetery in Childwold, a tiny settlement some miles to the west of Marsena, and came across an aged, weathered gravestone that had nearly broken his heart with its crude naïveté:
BYE BYE MAMMA FROM BABY WILLY
MAY 5, 1871—AUGUST 11, 1871.
The grief of his own son’s early death had swept upon him and he found himself weeping for several minutes, bitterly and helplessly.)
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