by Peter Straub
Pretty, dark-haired Mrs. Sunchana wrapped her arms about herself. “It’s almost seven,” she said. “Why don’t you come upstairs? Have some hot chocolate. Maybe you want a bowl of soup? Vegetables, chicken, good thick soup for you. Delicious. I know, I made it myself.”
Fee’s reason began to slip away beneath the barrage of these seductive words. He saw himself at the Sunchanas’ table, raising a spoon of intoxicating soup to his mouth. Saliva poured into his mouth, and his stomach growled.
By itself, a sob flexed wide black wings in his throat and flew from his mouth.
And then, like salvation, came his father’s voice. “Leave my son alone! Get away from him!” Fee opened his eyes.
Mrs. Sunchana pressed her hands together so tightly her fingers looked flat. Fee saw that she was frightened, and understood that he was safe again—back in the movie of his life.
And here came Bob Bandolier up the walk, his face glowing, his eyes glowing, his mustache riding confidently above his mouth, his coat billowing out behind him.
“Fee was sitting here alone in the cold,” Mrs. Sunchana said.
“You will go upstairs, please, Mrs. Sunchana.”
“I was just trying to help,” persisted Mrs. Sunchana. Only her flattened-out hands betrayed her.
“Well, we don’t need your help,” bellowed Fee’s glorious dad. “Go away and leave us alone.”
“There is no need to give me orders.”
“Shut up!”
“Or to yell at me.”
“LEAVE MY SON ALONE!” Bob Bandolier raised his arms like a madman and stamped his foot. “Go!” He rushed toward the front steps, and Mrs. Sunchana went quickly past Fee into the building.
Bob Bandolier grasped Fee’s hand, yanked him upright, and pulled him through the front door. Fee cried out in pain. Mrs. Sunchana had retreated halfway up the stairs, and her husband’s face hung like a balloon in the cracked-open door to their apartment. In front of their own door, Bob Bandolier let go of Fee’s hand to reach for his key.
“I think you must be crazy,” said Mrs. Sunchana. “I was being nice to your little boy. He was locked out of the house in the cold.”
Bob Bandolier unlocked the door and turned sideways toward her.
“We live right above you, you know,” said Mrs. Sunchana. “We know what you do.”
Fee’s father pushed him into their apartment, and the smell from the bedroom announced itself like the boom of a bass drum. Fee thought that Mrs. Sunchana must have been able to smell it, too.
“And what do I do?” his father asked. His voice was dangerously calm.
Fee knew that his father was smiling.
He heard Mrs. Sunchana move one step up.
“You know what you do. It is not right.”
Her husband whispered her name from the top of the stairs.
“On the contrary,” his father said. “Everything I do, Mrs. Sunchana, is precisely right. Everything I do, I do for a reason.” He moved away from the door, and Mrs. Sunchana went two steps up.
Fee watched his father with absolute admiration. He had won. He had said the brave right things, and the enemy had fled.
Bob Bandolier came scowling toward him.
Fee backed into the living room. His father strode through the doorway and pushed the door shut. He gave Fee one flat, black-eyed glare, removed his topcoat, and hung it carefully in the closet without seeming to notice the smell from the bedroom. He unbuttoned his suit jacket and the top of his shirt and pulled his necktie down a precise half inch.
“I’m going to tell you something very important. You are never to talk to them again, do you hear me? They might try to get information out of you, but if you say one word to those snoops, I’ll whale the stuffing out of you.” He patted Fee’s cheek. “You won’t say anything to them, I know.”
Fee shook his head.
“They think they know things—ten generations of keyhole listeners.”
His father gave his cheek another astounding pat. He snapped his fingers. At the code for cat food, Jude stalked out from beneath the chaise. Fee followed both of them into the kitchen. His father spooned half a can of cat food into Jude’s dish and put the remainder of the can into the refrigerator.
Bob Bandolier was an amazing man, for now he went whirling and dancing across the kitchen floor, startling even Jude. Amazing Bob spun through the living room, not forgetting to smile up at the ceiling and toss a cheery wave to the Sunchanas, clicked open the bedroom door with his hip, and called Hello, honeybunch to his wife. Fee followed, wondering at him. His father supped from a brown bottle of Pforzheimer beer, Millhaven’s own, winked at Sleeping Beauty, and said, Darling, don’t give up yet.
“Here she is, Fee,” his father said. “She knows, she knows, you know she knows.”
Fee nodded: that was right. His mother knew exactly what it was that he himself had forgotten.
“This lady right here, she never doubted.” He kissed her yellow cheek. “Let’s rustle up some grub, what do you say?”
Fee was in the presence of a miracle.
2
After dinner his father washed the dishes, now and then taking a soapy hand from the foam to pick up his beer bottle. Fee marveled at the speed with which his father drank—three long swallows, and the bottle was empty, like a magic trick.
Bob Bandolier filled a plastic bucket with warm tap water, put some dishwashing powder in the bucket, swirled it around with his hand, and dropped in a sponge.
“Well, here goes.” He winked at Fee. “The dirty part of the day. Your mother is one of the decent people in this world, and that’s why we take care of her.” He was swirling the water around in the bucket again, raising a white lather. “Let me tell you something. There’s a guy who is not one of the decent people of the world, who thinks all he has to do is sit behind a desk all day and count his money. He even thinks he knows the hotel business.” Bob Bandolier laughed out loud. “I have a little plan, and we’ll see how fine and dandy Mr. Fine and Dandy really is, when he starts to sweat.” His face was red as an apple.
Fee understood—his father was talking about the St. Alwyn.
He squeezed the sponge twice, and water drizzled into the bucket. “Tonight I’m going to tell you about the blue rose of Dachau. Which was the bottom of the world. That was where you saw the things that are real in this world. You come along while I wash your mother.”
“Not all the way in,” his father said. “You don’t have to see the whole thing, just stay in the door. I just want you to be able to hear me.”
Bob Bandolier put a hand on Fee’s shoulder and showed him where to stand.
“This one’s going to be messy,” he said.
The smell in the bedroom took root in Fee’s nose and invaded the back of his throat. Bob Bandolier set down the bucket, grasped the blanket near his wife’s chin, and flipped it down to the end of the bed.
As the blanket moved, his mother’s arms jerked up and snapped back into place, elbows bent and the hands curled toward the wrists. Beneath the blanket lay a sheet molded around his mother’s body. Watery brown stains covered the parts of the sheet clinging to her waist and hips.
“Anyway,” Bob said, and grabbed the sheet with one hand and walked down the length of the bed, pulling it away from his wife’s body. At the bottom of the bed, he yanked the end of the sheet from under the mattress and carefully wadded it up.
From his place in the doorway, Fee saw the yellow soles of his mother’s feet, from which her long toenails twisted away; the starved undersides of her legs, peaking at her slightly raised knees; her bony thighs, which disappeared like sticks into the big St. Alwyn towel his father had folded around her groin. Once white, this towel was now stained the same watery brown that had leaked through to the sheet. Above the towel was her small swollen belly; two distinct, high-arched rows of ribs; her small flat breasts and brown nipples; shoulders with sunken flesh, from which thin straight bones seemed to want to escape; a lined, deeply h
ollowed neck; and above all these, propped on a pillow in the limp nest of her hair, his mother’s familiar and untroubled face.
“How does stuff still come out, hey, when so damn little goes in? Hold on, honey, we gotta get this thing off of you.”
Dedicated Bob Bandolier tugged at the folds of the wet towel, managing with the use of only two fingers to pull it free, exposing Anna Bandolier’s knifelike hipbones and her astonishingly thick pubic bush—astonishingly, that is, to Fee, who had expected only a smooth pink passage of flesh, like the region between the legs of a doll. Where all the rest of his mother’s skin was the color of yellowing milk, the area uncovered by the towel was a riot of color: milk chocolate flecks and smears distributed over the blazing red of the thighs, and the actual crumbling or shredding of blue and green flesh disappearing into the wound where her buttocks should have been. From this wound surrounded by evaporating flesh came the smell that flooded their apartment.
Fee’s heart froze, and the breath in his lungs turned to ice.
Deep within the hole of ragged flesh that was his mother’s bottom was a stripe of white bone.
His father slid the dripping sponge beneath her arms, over the pubic tangle and the reddish-gray drooping flesh between her legs. After every few passes he squeezed the sponge into the bucket. He dabbed at the enormous bedsores. “This started happening a while ago—figured it would take care of itself long as I kept her clean, but . . . well, I just do what I can do.” He touched the oddly stiff bottom sheet. “See this? Rubber. Sponge it off, it’s good as new. Weren’t for this baby, we’d have gone through a lot of mattresses by now. Right, honey?”
His father knew he was in a movie.
“Get me another sheet and towel from the linen cabinet.”
His father was wiping the rubber sheet with a clean section of the old towel when Fee came back into the bedroom. He dropped the towel on top of the wadded sheet and took the new linen out of Fee’s arms.
“Teamwork, that’s what we got.”
He set the linen on the end of the bed and bent to squeeze out the sponge before lightly, quickly passing it over the rubber sheet.
“I don’t know if I ever told you much about my war,” he said. “You’re old enough now to begin to understand things.”
It seemed to Fee that he had no heartbeat at all. His mouth was a desert. Everything around him, even the dust in the air, saw what he himself was seeing.
“This war was no damn picnic.” Bob Bandolier tilted his wife’s body up to wipe beneath her, and Fee raised his eyes to the top of the bedstead.
Bob wiped the fresh towel over the damp sheet, straightened it out, and turned his wife over onto the towel. Her toenails clicked together.
“But I want to tell you about this one thing I did, and it has to do with roses.” He gave Fee a humorous look. “You know how I feel about roses.”
Fee knew how he felt about roses.
From the bottom of the bed, his father snapped open the clean sheet and sent it sailing over Anna Bandolier’s body. “I was crazy about roses even way back then. But the kind of guy I am, I didn’t just grow them, I got interested in them. I did research.” He tucked the sheet beneath the mattress.
Bob Bandolier smoothed the sheet over his wife’s body, and Fee saw him taking a mental picture of the tunnel behind the St. Alwyn Hotel.
“There’s one kind, one color, of rose no one has ever managed to grow. There has never been a true blue rose. You could call it a Holy Grail.”
He lifted first one arm, then the other, to slide the sheet beneath them.
He moved back to appraise the sheet. He gave it a sharp tug, snapping it into alignment. Then he stepped back again, with the air of a painter stepping back from a finished canvas.
“What it is, is an enzyme. An enzyme controls the color of a rose. Over the years, I’ve managed to teach myself a little bit about enzymes. Basically, an enzyme is a biological catalyst. It speeds up chemical changes without going through any changes itself. Believe it or not, Millhaven, this city right here, is one of the enzyme centers of the world—because of the breweries. You need enzymes to get fermentation, and without fermentation you don’t get beer. When they managed to crystallize an enzyme, they discovered that it was protein.” He pointed at Fee. “Okay so far, but here’s your big problem. Enzymes are picky. They react with only a tiny little group of molecules. Some of them only work with one molecule!”
He pointed the forefinger at the ceiling. “Now, what does that say about roses? It says that you have be a pretty damn good chemist to create your blue rose. Which is the reason that no one has ever done it.” He paused for effect.
“Except for one man. I met him in Germany in 1945, and I saw his rose garden. He had four blue rosebushes in that garden. The ones on the first bush were deep, dark blue, the color of the ink in fountain pens. On the second bush the roses grew a rich navy blue; on the third bush, they were the most beautiful pale blue—the color of a nigger’s Cadillac. All of these roses were beautiful, but the most beautiful roses grew on the fourth bush. They were all the other shades in stripes and feathers, dark blue against that heaven-sky blue, little brush strokes of heaven-sky blue against that velvety black-blue. The man who grew them was the greatest gardener in the history of rose cultivation. And there are two other things you should know about him. He grew these roses in ten square empty feet of ground in a concentration camp during the war. He was a guard there. And the second thing is, I shot him dead.”
He put his hands on his hips. “Let’s go get this lady her dinner, okay? Now that she’s had her bath, my baby’s hungry.”
3
Fee’s father busied himself measuring out dry oatmeal into a saucepan, poured in milk, lit a match, and snapped the gas flame into life. He stood beside the stove, holding a long wooden spoon and another bottle of beer, looking as though a spotlight were trained on him.
“We get this job.” He gave the oatmeal another twirl of the spoon. “It could have been any company, any unit. It didn’t have to be mine, but it was mine. We were going to be the first people into what they called the death camp. I didn’t even know what it meant, death camp, I didn’t know what it was.
“There were some English soldiers that met us there, sort of a share-the-glory, Allied effort. Let the English grab their share. The officers of the camp will surrender to a joint Anglo-American force, and the prisoners will be identified and assisted in their eventual relocation. Meaning, we ship them off after somebody else decides what to do with them. We liberate them. We’re the liberators. What does that mean? Women, music, champagne, right?”
He stirred the oatmeal again, looking down into the saucepan and frowning.
“So we get lined up on the road to the camp. We’re outside this little town on some river. From where we’re standing, I can see a castle, a real castle on a hill over the river, like something out of a movie. There’s us, and there’s the British. There’s photographers, too, from the newsreels and the papers. This is a big deal, because nobody really knows what we’re going to find once we get in. The brass is in front. We start moving in columns toward the camp, and all of a sudden everything looks ugly—even the ground looks ugly. We’re going toward barbed wire and guardhouses, and you know it’s some kind of prison.
“I was wrong about everything, I see that right away. The place is like a factory. Once we go through the gates, we’re on a long straight road, everything right angles, with little wooden buildings in rows. Okay, we’re ready.”
He upturned the pot and spooned oatmeal into a bowl. He added butter, brown sugar, and a dollop of milk. “Perfect. Let’s feed your mother, Fee.”
In radiant humor, he stood beside the bed and raised a spoonful of oatmeal to his wife’s lips. “You have to help me out now, honey, I know you have to be hungry. Here comes some delicious oatmeal—open your mouth.” He pushed the spoon into her mouth and slid it back and forth to dislodge the oatmeal. “Attaway. Getting a little better ev
ery day, aren’t we? Pretty soon we’re going to be up on our feet.”
Fee remembered what his mother’s feet looked like. It was as though a vast dark light surrounded them, a light full of darkness with a greater, deeper darkness all around it, the three of them all alone at its center.
His father slid the spoon from his mother’s mouth. A trace of oatmeal remained in the bottom of the spoon. He filled it again and pushed it between her lips. Fee had not seen his mother swallow. He wondered if she could swallow. His father withdrew the spoon again, and a wad of oatmeal the size of a housefly stuck to his mother’s top lip.
“Right away I noticed this terrible smell. You couldn’t imagine working in a place that smelled that bad. Like a fire in a garbage dump.
“Anyhow, we go marching up this street without seeing anybody, and when we pass this courtyard I see something I can’t figure out at all. At first, I don’t even know what it is. You know what it was? A giant pile of glasses. Eyeglasses! Must be a thousand of them. Creepy. I mean, that’s when I begin to get the idea. They were saving the metal, you did that during the war, but there used to be people that went with those glasses.
“We can see those smokestacks up ahead, big smokestacks on top of the furnaces. We go past buildings that seem like they’re full of old clothes, piles and piles of shirts and jackets . . .”
The spoon went in full and came out half full. Flecks of oatmeal coated his mother’s lips.
“Then we get to the main part of the camp, the barracks, and we see what the people are like. We’re not even marching in step anymore, we’re not marching at all, we’re just moving along, because these are people out in front of these barracks, but you never saw people like this in your life. They’re walking skeletons. Bones and eyes, like monkeys. Big heads and tiny little bodies. You wonder how smart is it to liberate these zombies in the first place. The ones that can talk are whining, whining, whining—man! These people are watching every move we make, and what you think is: They want to eat us alive.