A few of them eyed her as she dashed into the building. The doorman stood silent and stiff as he held the door for her.
“Good afternoon,” she said, to no response. She crossed the lobby, blinking in bewilderment. Had she uttered the words aloud or had she just imagined it?
THAT EVENING, the March family sat together at the dinner table. Across from Mrs. March, Jonathan quietly picked at his food. She sneaked glances at him, studying his sunken, dark-rimmed eyes, his reserved demeanor, and concluded that there was simply no way there could be any truth in what the principal had said about him. The word corrupt hung limply inside her like a rotting organ. Maybe, she theorized, grasping at straws, it was Jonathan who had been corrupted. Led to dark acts by a classmate, or by … she looked over at George, who was consuming his meal in noisy gulps. He has corrupted him, she thought. This monster has corrupted my baby.
“Potatoes, dear,” said George, not bothering to look up from his plate.
“Yes, potatoes,” echoed Jonathan.
Mrs. March slid the serving dish toward them, now perceiving, with a sudden electric clarity, the ways in which the two were alike. She had never really considered it before (Jonathan seemed to have sprung, self-formed, bearing no genetic material from either of them), but she saw now a definite likeness—the curve of the forehead, the hairline, the arch of the eyebrows. Their eyes were different, though, and she was relieved—for if they were indeed windows to the soul, it stood to reason that their souls must be quite different. Jonathan’s heavily lashed, big, empty eyes shone in stark contrast to George’s small, piercing, knowing ones. But maybe George’s came from nearsightedness, from years of squinting at his books through his glasses. As a child he may have been just as big-eyed and inexpressive as Jonathan. He had been an unusually intelligent boy, according to his mother. George had always been idolized by his mother. They had developed a special bond, Mrs. March supposed bitterly, after George’s father died. United in their grief. Even though his father, according to George himself, had been strict. Aloof. Perhaps it wasn’t losing him that had traumatized George, Mrs. March suddenly considered. Perhaps, unbeknownst to everyone, George’s father had been abusive. A drunk. Beating young George into submission. She berated George in her mind for hiding his painful past. He must be embarrassed by it, she supposed, or he blamed himself, as many abused children do. Or maybe, maybe George had liked it. She stifled a gasp at the mere thought, and the asparagus she was attempting to swallow caught in her throat. Maybe his father had turned George into a monster, too, and now George was doing the same to Jonathan. Grandfather, father, son: a legacy of monsters.
She stared at George, then at Jonathan. Neither of them acknowledged her. She wondered for a fleeting instant whether she was even there at all. They had asked her for the potatoes, hadn’t they? Wanting to speak—needing to speak, to have them look at her, to confirm her presence—she cleared her throat and said, “Well, Jonathan. Aren’t you going to tell your father what happened at school today?”
Jonathan raised his eyes, his face inscrutable, eyebrows puckering into a frown. George peered at him over his glasses. “Poe?” he said.
“I got suspended,” said Jonathan, looking down at his plate.
George sighed, more in resignation than surprise.
“He did something,” said Mrs. March with a dry mouth, “to a little girl.”
George eyed Jonathan over his glasses. “Well, that simply won’t do. We have taught you how to behave,” he said, his voice stern. “I will not accept this kind of behavior from you. Frankly, I’m disappointed, as is your mother. You know better than this.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” said Jonathan, now with a wisp of regret in his voice. “Alec was daring the other boys to do it—”
“Alec?” said Mrs. March, hope returning as she relished the possibility that Sheila Miller might be going through the same ordeal upstairs. “Was Alec suspended, too?”
Jonathan shook his head, still staring into his plate. “No, he wasn’t even sent to the principal’s office, but it was all his fault—”
George slammed his hand against the table. Mrs. March jumped.
“This is unacceptable!” yelled George. “Suspended at age eight, and not even able to admit responsibility for something you’ve done! This is your fault, and yours only. You better think about this long and hard, Jonathan, and don’t you ever let this happen again.”
Mrs. March watched, bewildered, as the scene unfolded before her eyes. George’s jaw was set, his nostrils flared. The saltshaker lay on its side. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d seen him like this, if ever. George had never been the stern disciplinarian with Jonathan. She imagined a seething George with Sylvia—Sylvia begging for her life, splayed on her bedroom floor, and George, towering over her, telling her that what was about to happen was her own fault, that she had to take responsibility for her actions. For teasing him. For provoking him. Later, as the life seeped from her violated body, she would have used her last breath to beg for mercy a final time while George laughed at her. Mrs. March shuddered at the monstrous tableau she had conjured. Inside her mouth, the lining of her cheeks bled from her chewing.
“Go to your room. You’re finished,” said George. Jonathan rose from his chair and ran out, refusing to look at either of them.
Mrs. March looked sideways at her husband, who carried on with his meal. She watched him cut into an asparagus spear, bit by bit. When he swallowed the last piece, he frowned and said, “Wasn’t it somebody’s birthday today? Your sister’s?”
“No,” she answered. Fearing he’d think she was being curt, she added, “September.”
“Oh, right. Well, it’s somebody’s birthday. Can’t remember whose.”
Sylvia’s, thought Mrs. March.
“Can I have the rest of that?” said George, nodding at her unfinished plate. “If you don’t want it.”
She pushed her plate toward him. He usually enjoyed light dinners, as a heavy meal made him too sluggish to write. Perhaps his anger had awakened a hunger, she thought. Maybe he thrived on it, on sucking the discomfort out of the air, like a bee sucking dew off a petal.
THAT NIGHT, George sat down on the bed as she slept, but it wasn’t George. It was the devil. “I won’t believe anything you say,” she told him. He stroked her cheek with a long yellow fingernail and said, “You have so many demons, my dear.”
“Yes.”
“They’ve found their way in.”
“The exterminator is coming on Monday,” she said. “There’s an infestation, you see.”
“What happened to your ear?” the devil said, tracing her earlobe with the same yellow nail.
“Oh, I burned it, but it’s all right now.”
“Is it?”
She brought her fingers to her earlobe and felt the crust. “Oh,” she said, “that’s funny. I thought it had healed.”
The crackling earlobe came off, like a wobbly tooth from its socket. She offered it to him to examine, and he popped it into his mouth, chewed on it, and swallowed it, which she found rather rude. “Excuse me,” she said loudly, “someone’s calling for me.”
He gave her a curious look. “No one’s calling you,” he said.
“Yes, in the hallway.”
“There’s no one in the hallway.”
Her eyes fluttered open, and she was standing in her bedroom, her hand closed around the doorknob. It was mostly dark, except for the diluted moonlight entering through the poorly drawn curtains and a line of light from the hallway sneaking in under the bedroom door.
Slowly, she turned the knob and opened the bedroom door. There was someone just outside—a dark figure standing in shadows, facing her, motionless. She took a step back, gasping for breath, then squinted as her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Jonathan. He was strangely erect, his large vacant eyes staring past her.
She knelt before him in his open-eyed blindness and shook him. He blinked, startled, and began to cry. She hugged h
im, or rather he hugged her, and as his shaking little body began to settle against hers, she noticed the light on in George’s study. They stood like that for a while, Jonathan and her, hugging each other as she looked at the light under the study door.
Mrs. March spent the next few days jumping in surprise whenever Jonathan appeared, always apparently out of nowhere. She’d then remember his suspension, and she’d try, in her way, to talk to him, but Jonathan, like his mother, wasn’t a natural conversationalist. He often avoided eye contact, but when he did look at her she considered the things the principal had hinted at. How well could one really know an eight-year-old child, she pondered.
Not knowing quite what to do with him, she bought him colored pencils and illustrated books and asked Martha to deliver sandwich- and fruit-laden trays to his bedroom. One morning she took him ice skating at Wollman Rink. It was a cool, clean January day, the azure sky seemingly dyeing the buildings blue.
As she waited for Jonathan to put on his skates, a voice erupted nearby, and when a man, bellowing madly, burst out of the surrounding trees and ran toward her, she froze, clutching her ermine stole. Realizing he was holding his infant son in his arms, growling in play as the child screeched with delight, she smiled at them, heart pounding so violently her ribs felt bruised. It was an effort to collect herself and loosen her grip on the strangled fur as Jonathan wobbled onto the rink.
As she watched him from the sidelines, she recognized a familiar face among the onlookers—the mother of one of Jonathan’s classmates. At first Mrs. March tried to shield herself from the woman, cupping her hand against her forehead as if she were shading her eyes from the sun, but alas, she had been spotted.
“It’s me! Margaret, Margaret Melrose? I’m Peter’s mother.” Squat Margaret was there with her toddler and husband. Mrs. March’s mood lightened at this, for the husband’s weekday appearance at Central Park possibly meant that he had been laid off.
“John took the day off work to spend some time with us,” Margaret said, beaming with pride.
“That’s lovely,” said Mrs. March.
“Is that Jonathan? Why’s he here on a school day?”
“Well,” sighed Mrs. March, “his grandmother is quite ill. He’s rather close to her. I thought I’d give him a few days off school.” She leaned into Margaret and said in a low voice, “We don’t think she’ll make it past Sunday, so”—nodding at Margaret’s gratifying gasp—“this may be the last week he gets with her.”
“Oh, gosh,” said Margaret, looking horrified. “I’m so sorry. How sweet of you to give him this. I’m sure he really appreciates it.”
Mrs. March smiled and lowered her eyes in a show of modesty. She pictured Margaret Melrose welcoming her son home from school that evening, telling him that she’d seen Jonathan at the rink and informing him gravely of the sickly grandmother, trying to impress on her son how important it was that he treat Jonathan kindly over the next few weeks. The son, puzzled, would shyly tell his mother the truth. Perhaps, with any luck, he wouldn’t know the exact reason for Jonathan’s suspension, but children, Mrs. March knew, were cruel gossips and not to be trusted with rumors.
“Where is George?” asked Margaret, brightly shifting the subject. “Working, I expect?”
“Ah. Yes. He’s having an intense publication, what with all the press and everything. You know.”
“I really loved his new book.”
“Oh, I’ve yet to read it,” blurted Mrs. March. She was too exhausted by her previous lie to utter yet another.
“Oh, you should,” said Margaret, winking. “You really, really should.”
You really, really should. Mrs. March studied Margaret’s winter-cracked lips as they formed the words. As Margaret walked back to her family Mrs. March turned to the rink. Everyone had stopped skating. They stood, unblinking, looking at her—not just the skaters but the onlookers as well, had craned their necks to stare at her, locking eyes, one after the other, like the portraits in the museum, refusing to break their gazes. Jonathan, in the center of the rink, smiled at her with all his teeth.
Mrs. March stumbled backward and buried her face in her hands. She breathed loudly in her mint green gloves—where it was dark and soft and safe—until her breath began to sound like that of a stranger.
At the sound of the chirping of birds and the scratching of blades on ice, she removed her hands. The ice rink was as it had been before—bustling and loud, indifferent to her, the background music festive. Overcome with relief, she motioned to get Jonathan’s attention. “It’s time to go home!” she called out.
As they left—Jonathan sulky and refusing to wear his hat—Margaret called out to them, but Mrs. March pretended not to hear.
They made their way through the park, past promenading tourists and amateur watercolorists. Jonathan pointed to a fractured, empty bottle of Veuve Clicquot in a trash can, which Mrs. March warned him not to touch.
Mrs. March sensed, out of the corner of her eye, a shadowy figure following them—standing a few feet away, just out of sight—but every time she turned to look, she spotted no one. She panted, her deepening anxiety slowing her pace like a twisted ankle. She was just being paranoid, she told herself. She had dreaded his return for years, had seeded her subconscious with the expectation that she would bump into him at the grocery store, at the florist’s, anywhere, really. She could still see him sometimes, behind closed eyelids—a dark silhouette, hands in his pockets, standing against the sun.
“Can we come back tomorrow?” asked Jonathan, somewhere below her.
“We’ll see.”
The man had worn a short-sleeved shirt adorned with tiny embroidered tennis rackets. Could she have seen the shirt now, among the trees? Surely he wouldn’t be wearing the same shirt in the cold, she reasoned. Or did he want her to recognize him?
“Can we have hot dogs for dinner?”
“Not tonight, Jonathan.”
“Alec has them all the time.”
Mrs. March flinched at a crunch to her left—twigs breaking under a heavy shoe?—and walked faster, ignoring Jonathan’s complaints as he struggled to keep up.
She had been about thirteen. She didn’t remember much about herself at that age, except for her legs. What a funny thing to remember about oneself, she thought, but there it was. Before puberty altered her shape, a young Mrs. March had long, spindly legs—daddy-longlegs legs. They were especially tan that summer in the south of Spain, coated in a soft blond down. She remembered Cádiz as if she had dreamt it or seen it on a movie screen—bush-topped dunes cupping the beach, loud barefoot men selling shrimp on the shore, and a bitterly crashing sea that glittered. The sound of the waves was constant and inescapable, deep and rough like breathing, and would not quiet, even at night.
In Cádiz the days were long and Mrs. March grew bored and restless. Her parents had traveled over thirty-five hundred miles to discover that they did not in fact much care for the beach. They took the occasional halfhearted walk up and down the shoreline—Mrs. March lagging moodily behind—but spent most days lounging at the pool in silence, sipping margaritas and concealing any trace of enjoyment under large sunglasses. They had urged her to make friends but she was at that age when making friends was tricky, when one wasn’t as uninhibited as a younger child nor welcomed yet among adults, where the rules of etiquette at least guaranteed a minimum politeness. So she spent the majority of her days moping, burdened with a heavy emptiness, taking uneasy dips by herself in the sea, worried about what lurked underneath—not just scales and pincers and stingers, but the evidence of other bathers: stained Band-Aids and warm patches of urine. The wind carried the chatter and intermittent shouts of nearby swimmers. In the afternoons she’d take shelter from the sun in her hotel room, occasionally venturing into the lobby to inspect the books left by other guests on the shelves or to try on the straw hats on the wire display racks in the gift shop. All the television channels in her room were in German, and indeed all the tourists seemed to be German�
��the men sported tight, revealing briefs, and the women had hair so blond it was almost white, and their backs and thighs were painfully pink from the sun, streaked through by bikini-strap tan lines.
At night when the fishing boats emerged, lights blinking across salmon-pink and lavender horizons, she thought she could see a big-breasted figure bobbing up and down in the ocean at an alarming distance from the shore, and every time she would realize, as if for the first time, that it was just a buoy.
She had first seen the man looking at her on the hotel deck (later she concluded that she had actually seen him all over before that, but she had only become aware of it afterwards). The deck overlooked the beach, surrounded by palm trees, their pineapple-skin trunks lit from below. She’d finished her dinner but her parents were still enjoying the buffet, where a group of flamenco musicians sang and clapped as a woman with big hair and a pained expression danced and stamped on the floor. There was laughter and festivity in the air, and the spectacle made her feel as if everyone around her had been drugged or hypnotized into compliance. Her parents had befriended a young married couple and had been drinking merrily with them for days. It irritated her how her mother, usually so cold and distant, could manage to appear friendly enough to make such close friends in less than a week.
Unwilling to make an effort to join in the fun, she had sulked off to the deck, where other guests were smoking and drinking cocktails. She ordered herself a Virgin San Francisco and stood against the handrail sucking on the maraschino cherry when she noticed the man in the shirt with the tiny tennis rackets. He was watching her, his lips pursed into an expression she couldn’t decipher. “Sorry,” she said, and threw the cherry over the handrail into the sand, assuming that he’d found her rude for sucking on it so loudly.
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