Faithless: Tales of Transgression

by Joyce Carol Oates

  SO IT ENDED. It always ends. But don’t tell me there isn’t happiness. It exists, it’s there. You just have to find it, and you have to keep it, if you can. It won’t last, but it’s there.

  MURDER-TWO

  This, he swore.

  He’d returned to the townhouse on East End Avenue after 11 P.M. and found the front door unlocked and, inside, his mother lying in a pool of squid ink on the hardwood floor at the foot of the stairs. She’d apparently fallen down the steep length of the stairs and broken her neck, judging from her twisted upper body. She’d also been bludgeoned to death, the back of her skull caved in, with one of her own golf clubs, a two-iron, but he hadn’t seemed to see that, immediately.

  Squid ink?—well, the blood had looked black in the dim foyer light. It was a trick his eyes played on his brain sometimes when he’d been studying too hard, getting too little sleep. An optic tic. Meaning you see something clearly, but it registers surreally in the brain as something else. Like in your neurological programming there’s an occasional bleep.

  In the case of Derek Peck, Jr., confronted with the crumpled, lifeless body of his mother, this was an obvious symptom of trauma. Shock, the visceral numbness that blocks immediate grief—the unsayable, the unknowable. He’d last seen his mother, in that same buttercup-yellow quilted satin robe that had given her the look of an upright, bulky Easter toy, early that morning, before he’d left for school. He’d been away all day. And this abrupt, weird transition—from differential calculus to the body on the floor, from the anxiety-driven jokes of his Math Club friends (a hard core of them were meeting late, weekdays, preparing for upcoming SAT exams) to the profound and terrible silence of the townhouse that had seemed to him, even as he’d pushed open the mysteriously unlocked front door, a hostile silence, a silence that vibrated with dread.

  He crouched over the body, staring in disbelief. “Mother? Mother!”

  As if it were he, Derek, who’d done something bad, he the one to be punished.

  He couldn’t catch his breath. Hyperventilating! His heart beating so wildly he almost fainted. Too confused to think Maybe they’re still here? upstairs for in his dazed state he seemed to lack even an animal’s instinct for self-preservation.

  Yes, and he felt to blame, somehow. Hadn’t she instilled in him a reflex of guilt? If something was wrong in the household, it could probably be traced back to him. From the age of thirteen (when his father Derek, Sr., had divorced his mother Lucille, same as divorcing him) he’d been expected by his mother to behave like a second adult in the household, growing tall, lank, and anxious as if to accommodate that expectation, and his sand-colored body hair sprouting, and a fevered grimness about the eyes. Fifty-three percent of Derek’s classmates, girls and boys, at the Mayhew Academy were from “families of divorce” and most agreed that the worst of it is you have to learn to behave like an adult yet at the same time a lesser adult, one deprived of his or her full civil rights. That wasn’t easy even for stoic streetwise Derek Peck with an IQ of, what was it?—158, at age fifteen. (He was seventeen now.) So his precarious adolescent sense of himself was seriously askew: not just his body image (his mother had allowed him to become overweight as a small child; they say that remains with you forever irremediably imprinted in the earliest brain cells) but more crucially his social identity. For one minute she’d be treating him like an infant, calling him her baby, her baby-boy, and the next minute she was hurt, reproachful, accusing him of failing, like his father, to uphold his moral responsibility to her.

  This moral responsibility was a backpack loaded with rocks. He could feel it, first fucking thing in the morning, exerting gravity even before he swung his legs out of bed.

  Crouched over her now badly trembling, shaking as in a cold wind, whispering, “Mommy?—can’t you wake up? Mom-my don’t be—” balking at the word “dead” for it would hurt and incense Lucille like the word “old,” not that she’d been a vain or frivolous or self-conscious woman for Lucille Peck was anything but, a woman of dignity it was said of her admiringly by women who would not have wished to be her and by men who would not have wished to be married to her. Mommy don’t be old! Derek would never have murmured aloud, of course. Though possibly to himself frequently this past year or so seeing her wan, big-boned and brave face in harsh frontal sunshine when they happened to descend the front steps together in the morning, or at that eerie position in the kitchen where the overhead inset lights converged in such a way as to cruelly shadow her face downward, bruising the eye sockets and the soft fleshy tucks in her cheeks. Two summers ago when he’d been away for six weeks at Lake Placid and she’d driven to Kennedy to pick him up, so eager to see him again, and he’d stared appalled at the harsh lines bracketing her mouth and her smile too happy and what he felt was pity, and this too made him feel guilty. You don’t pity your own mother, asshole.

  If he’d come home immediately after school. By 4 P.M. Instead of a quick call from his friend Andy’s across the park, guilty mumbled excuse left on the answering tape Mother? I’m sorry guess I won’t make dinner tonight OK?—Math Club—study group—calculus—don’t wait up for me please. How relieved he’d been, midway in his message she hadn’t picked up the phone.

  Had she been alive, when he’d called? Or already … dead?

  Last time you saw your mother alive, Derek? they’d ask and he’d have to invent for he hadn’t seen her, exactly. No eye contact.

  And what had he said. A rushed schoolday morning, a Thursday. Nothing special about it. No premonition! Cold and windy and winter-glaring and he’d been restless to get out of the house, snatched a Diet Coke from the refrigerator so freezing his teeth ached. A blurred reproachful look of Mother in the kitchen billowing in her buttercup-yellow quilted robe as he’d backed off smiling, ’Bye Mom!

  Sure she’d been hurt, her only son avoiding her. She’d been a lonely woman even in her pride. Even with her activities that meant so much to her: Women’s Art League, East Side Planned Parenthood Volunteers, HealthStyle Fitness Center, tennis and golf in East Hampton in the summer, subscription tickets to Lincoln Center. And her friends: most of them divorced middle-aged women, mothers like herself with high school or college-age kids. Lucille was lonely; how was that his fault?—as if, his senior year in prep school, he’d become a fanatic about grades obsessed with early admission to Harvard, Yale, Brown, Berkeley, just to avoid his mother at that raw, unmediated time of day that was breakfast.

  But, God, how he’d loved her! He had. Planning to make it up to her for sure, SAT scores in the highest percentile he’d take her to the Stanhope for the champagne brunch then across the street to the museum for a mother-son Sunday excursion of a kind they hadn’t had in years.

  How still she was lying. He didn’t dare touch her. His breathing was short, ragged. The squid-inky black beneath her twisted head had seeped and coagulated into the cracks of the floor. Her left arm was flung out in an attitude of exasperated appeal, the sleeve stained with red, her hand lying palm up and the fingers curled like angry talons. He might have noted that her Movado watch was missing, her rings gone except Grandma’s antique opal with the fluted gold setting—the thief, or thieves, hadn’t been able to yank it off her swollen finger? He might have noted that her eyes were rolled up asymmetrically in her head, the right iris nearly vanished and the left leering like a drunken crescent-moon. He might have noted that the back of her skull was smashed soft and pulpy as a melon but there are some things about your mother out of tact and delicacy you don’t acknowledge seeing. Mother’s hair, though—it was her only remaining good feature, she’d said. A pale silvery-brown, slightly coarse, a natural color like Wheaties. The mothers of his classmates all hoped to be youthful and glamorous with bleached or dyed hair but not Lucille Peck, she wasn’t the type. You expected her cheeks to be ruddy without makeup and on her good days they were.

  By this time of night Lucille’s hair should have been dry from the shower of so many hours ago Derek vaguely recalled she’d had
, the upstairs bathroom filled with steam. The mirrors. Shortness of breath! Tickets for some concert or ballet that night at Lincoln Center?—Lucille and a woman friend. But Derek didn’t know about that. Or if he’d known he’d forgotten. Like about the golf club, the two-iron. Which closet? Upstairs, or down? The drawers of Lucille’s bedroom bureau ransacked, his new Macintosh carried from his desk then dropped onto the floor by the doorway as if—what? They’d changed their minds about bothering with it. Looking for quick cash, for drugs. That’s the motive!

  What’s Booger up to, now? What’s going down with Booger, you hear?

  He touched her—at last. Groping for that big artery in the throat—cateroid?—cartoid? Should have been pulsing but wasn’t. And her skin clammy-cool. His hand leaped back as if he’d been burnt.

  Jesus fucking Christ, was it possible—Lucille was dead?

  And he’d be to blame?

  That Booger, man! One wild dude.

  His nostrils flared, his eyes leaked tears. He was in a state of panic, had to get help. It was time! But he wouldn’t have noticed the time, would he?—11:48 P.M. His watch was a sleek black-faced Omega he’d bought with his own cash but he wouldn’t be conscious of the time exactly. By now he’d have dialed 911. Except thinking confused the phone was ripped out? (Was the phone ripped out?) Or one of them, his mother’s killers, waiting in the darkened kitchen by the phone? Waiting to kill him?

  He panicked, he freaked. Running back to the front door stumbling and shouting into the street where a taxi was slowing to let out an elderly couple, neighbors from the adjoining brownstone and they and the driver stared at this chalk-faced grief-stricken boy in an unbuttoned duffel coat, bareheaded, running into the street screaming, “Help us! Help us! Somebody’s killed my mother!”

  EAST SIDE WOMAN KILLED

  ROBBERY BELIEVED MOTIVE

  In a late edition of Friday’s New York Times, the golf club bludgeoning death of Lucille Peck, whom Marina Dyer had known as Lucy Siddons, was prominently featured on the front page of the Metro section. Marina’s quick eye, skimming the page, fastened at once upon the face (middle-aged, fleshy yet unmistakable) of her old Finch classmate.

  “Lucy! No.”

  You understood that this must be a death photo: the positioning on the page, upper center; the celebration of a private individual of no evident civic or cultural significance, or beauty. For Times readers the news value lay in the victim’s address, close by the mayor’s residence. The subtext being, Even here, among the sequestered wealthy, such a brutal fate is possible.

  In a state of shock, though with professional interest, for Marina Dyer was a criminal defense attorney, Marina read the article, continued on an inner page and disappointing in its brevity. It was so familiar as to resemble a ballad. One of us (Caucasian, middle-aged, law-abiding, unarmed) surprised and savagely murdered in the very sanctity of her home; an instrument of class privilege, a golf club, snatched up by the killer as the murder weapon. The intruder or intruders, police said, were probably looking for quick cash, drug money. It was a careless, crude, cruel crime; a “senseless” crime; one of a number of unsolved break-ins on the east side since last September, though it was the first to involve murder. The teenage son of Lucille Peck had returned home to find the front door unlocked and his mother dead, at about 11 P.M., at which time she’d been dead approximately five hours. Neighbors spoke of having heard no unusual sounds from the Peck residence but several did speak of “suspicious” strangers in the neighborhood. Police were “investigating.”

  Poor Lucy!

  Marina noted that her former classmate was forty-four years old, a year (most likely, part of a year) older than Marina; that she’d been divorced since 1991 from Derek Peck, an insurance executive now living in Boston; that she was survived by just the one child, Derek Peck, Jr., a sister, and two brothers. What an end for Lucy Siddons, who shone in Marina’s memory as if beaming with life: unstoppable Lucy, indefatigable Lucy, good-hearted Lucy: Lucy who was twice president of the Finch class of 1970, and a dedicated alumnus: Lucy whom all the girls had admired, if not adored: Lucy who’d been so kind to shy stammering wall-eyed Marina Dyer.

  Though they’d both been living in Manhattan all these years, Marina in a townhouse of her own on West 76th Street, very near Central Park, it had been five years since she’d seen Lucy, at their twentieth class reunion; even longer since the two had spoken together at length, earnestly. Or maybe they never had.

  The son did it, Marina thought, folding up the newspaper. It wasn’t an altogether serious thought but one that suited her professional skepticism.

  Boogerman! Fucking fan-tas-tic.

  Where’d he come from?—the hot molten core of the universe. At the instant of the big bang. Before which there was nothing and after which there would be everything: cosmic cum. For all sentient beings derive from a single source and that source long vanished, extinct.

  The more you contemplated of origins the less you knew. He’d studied Wittgenstein—Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (A photocopied handout for Communication Arts class, the instructor a cool youngish guy with a Princeton Ph.D.) Yet he believed he could recall the circumstances of his birth. In 1978, in Barbados where his parents were vacationing, one week in late December. He was premature by five weeks and lucky to be alive and though Barbados was an accident yet seventeen years later he saw in his dreams a cobalt-blue sky, rows of royal palms shedding their bark like scales, shrieking bright-feathered tropical birds; a fat white moon drooping in the sky like his mother’s big belly, sharks’ dorsal fins cresting the waves like the Death Raiders video game he’d been hooked on in junior high. Wild hurricane-nights kept him from sleeping a normal sleep.

  He was into Metallica, Urge Overkill, Soul Asylum. His heroes were heavy-metal punks who’d never made it to the Top Ten or if they did make it fell right back again. He admired losers who killed themselves ODing like dying’s a joke, one final FUCK YOU! to the world. But he was innocent of doing what they’d claimed he’d done to his mother, for God’s sake. Absolutely unbelieving fucking fantastic, he, Derek Peck, Jr., had been arrested and would be tried for a crime perpetrated upon his own mother he’d loved! Perpetrated by animals (he could guess the color of their skin) who would’ve smashed his skull in, too, like cracking an egg, if he’d walked in that door five hours earlier.