Into That Fire

by M. J. Cates

  * * *

  —

  For her twelfth birthday, Imogen’s parents had given her a bicycle. With this, they expected her to ride to her friends’ houses, which she did, and to the local branch library, which she also did. Her carrier could easily hold six to eight books, depending on the ambitions and endurance of their authors, and any extras could be slipped into her satchel. Her father—unusually for his generation—encouraged his daughters to read widely and freely. One of Imogen’s favourite little tricks was to surprise him with a fact of geography or history or science, especially at the dinner table. “Aren’t you a clever girl to know that,” he would say, and turn to his wife for confirmation. “Isn’t she, Rose?” Imogen would flush with pride. Her father, the picture of the noble, knowledgeable male, was a man anyone would be happy to impress.

  Imogen was a gifted student, and her public school teachers twice moved her up a grade, with the result that she was always the youngest in the class. The social repercussions of this were not severe—some mild teasing for being the smallest girl and therefore of little use for team sports. And even this changed after her growth spurt at the age of twelve. She soon became adept at basketball, a favourite among the girls. Of slightly more concern—to her parents, anyway—was that she might be twelve or thirteen but all of her colleagues, as her father referred to them, were fourteen or fifteen. Was she to be granted the same rights and privileges as the older girls?

  On the whole, since she was intellectually so mature, the answer to this was yes, and so her parents allowed her to ride her bike to visit with friends after school, provided she was home for dinner on time. As summer neared and daylight lingered, she was even allowed to go abroad after dinner, provided her homework was done.

  The policy was not outrageously liberal. Her friends, after all, lived in the same neighbourhood so she had no need to travel far on her two trusty wheels. The library, her parents considered, was the limit of their daughter’s personally known world, and they had no reason to imagine Imogen was ever outside the neighbourhood without their knowledge. The only member of the family who was also out and about in the world, albeit a much wider world, was her father. Her mother was too depressed to go out much. Alice was a complete stick who studied law and worked part-time in her father’s office, and her two young sisters were not yet allowed off the property.

  Josiah Lang was gone for two weekends of every month, owing, he said, to certain clients in Detroit—union clients—who could not meet on company time. On those weekends Rose Lang barely stirred from her room.

  Imogen would lie awake on Sunday nights listening for the sound of her father’s return. When eventually he arrived home, she would hear the soft opening and closing of her mother’s door and her tentative steps down the stairs to greet him in the thin, dry voice of the chronically ill. In answer to his wife’s queries about his business in Detroit, he would usually offer no more than, “Too boring, my love. Far too boring to go into.”

  Imogen had lately come across the works of Rudyard Kipling, and was particularly taken with Kim. She admired the characters who knew useful things, such as how machines worked, the names of rivers, or local geography. She resolved not only to ride her bike through every neighbourhood within a fifteen-minute radius, but to memorize, Kim-like, all the street names too.

  Late one Friday afternoon, having completed her homework, and with an entire weekend ahead of her free of responsibilities, she set out on a route that would take her through Washington Heights and Brainerd, into the relatively uncharted (by her) territory of Hometown.

  She found herself in an area of smaller houses, some of them quite rundown, with yards overpopulated with shouting boys. It was late May, and even though it was near dinnertime the sun was still warm on her back and she was glad she’d elected to wear just a thin cardigan over her dress. It always felt like such sweet freedom to finally shed the heavy outerwear of the Chicago winter. You couldn’t help but be happy to be alive and mobile. The air was fresh, a stiff wind having blown the usual soot and stockyard smells away, leaving only the aroma of damp soil and new grass.

  Imogen was humming “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” as she rode along. She had to suddenly brake for a tabby that darted out from a hedge. “Silly cat,” she said sternly, and went right back to humming as she pedalled on.

  Just after she turned off Cicero onto Eighty-Seventh, a plum-coloured taxi passed her and pulled to a stop a hundred yards up the road. Automotive taxis were still a rarity, and Imogen had never imagined anything so exotic as a plum-coloured one. She pedalled a little faster to get a closer look.

  The driver climbed out and unstrapped a tan-coloured suitcase from the rack on the rear. As Imogen neared she committed various other details to memory. Driver: mustard-coloured shirt, black waistcoat, tweed cap. Passenger: tall man not unlike her father with his derby hat, perfect semicircle of moustache, nose of a Roman centurion. He reached into a pocket and handed the driver some money. The driver tipped his cap, got back into his plum-coloured conveyance, and drove away, marring the springtime atmosphere with oily exhaust.

  The passenger picked up his suitcase and pushed open the gate of a picket fence. The gate did not quite latch behind him, and as he turned to push it closed Imogen saw that the man not only resembled her father, he was her father. Over the course of the next half-second several competing emotions vied for dominance in her breast. The first was surprise. Her father was in Detroit—how could he possibly be here at the same time? Imogen was about to cry out to him, when another emotion took hold. This was a subspecies of fear with which she was not familiar and that she would later come to recognize as dread, the dark plunging sensation that something is wrong, deeply threatening, but as yet unknown.

  Thirty yards remained between them. Imogen stopped pedalling and let the bike glide. I’m being silly, she thought, of course nothing’s wrong. She had just decided that she would call out to him, when the front door opened and a little girl came running down the front steps and yelled a word that reverberated over the entire street—over Imogen’s entire world. “Daddy!”

  Imogen’s father set down his suitcase. The girl ran to him and he scooped her up and swung her around, the way he did with Imogen’s younger sisters, the way he used to do with her. He spun with the girl, the two of them seeming to turn as slow as an hour hand.

  In that moment, as she would describe it to herself much later, Imogen existed between two worlds—the one being destroyed before her eyes and some other world yet to come. Even at the age of twelve she had suffered disappointments and heartbreak—the death of her twin sister being the gravest of these—but this was reality itself, her universe and all it contained, undone at a blow.

  She wished—a kind of prayer, really—to go back in time, just by the crucial minute or two that would restore her world. She had wished the same thing when she saw Laura laid out in her red-and-white dress. She remembered the wish that somehow that other world, the one with Laura alive in it, would go on and on and this new one, the one soaked in tears, would never come.

  Imogen was falling between worlds as the little girl ran back along the path and up the steps and into the house, the screen door slamming behind her and the piping little voice calling to someone inside. As her father bent once more to pick up his suitcase and then turned back toward the little gate to fully close it, he caught sight of the strange creature gliding by—open-mouthed, goggle-eyed—his daughter on her bicycle.

  He saw her, and Imogen in turn saw the look of horror on her father’s face, horror that turned instantaneously into guilt—an emotion she had never before recognized on the face of a parent. It had never occurred to her that her parents could be guilty of anything. Guilt was something to which only children were susceptible.

  Her father’s right hand came up from the gate as if to grip her shoulder and hold her back, though she was at least twenty feet away and on a bicycle. Then, as daughter and bike rolled past, the guilt and horror passed
from his face. He pushed the gate shut—Imogen heard the decisive click—and turned back toward the house.

  She rolled a few yards farther. There was no traffic other than a horse and trap half a block away. She looped around and rode back and refused to look toward the offending house and its offending denizens. The tears had not yet come—they would come soon enough—so she could not help but see from the corner of her eye the pretty woman who held open the door and then closed it behind her father as he vanished inside.

  * * *

  —

  Imogen rode home at a slow, wobbly pace, as if the bike, too, were wounded. She went up to her room and pushed the door shut until the latch caught with a soft click. Her eyes were still dry. A part of her stood aside, observing. She had read somewhere of “shock,” how the body when traumatized goes numb, at least for a time, one of Mother Nature’s mercies.

  Her brain shifted gears from numbness into a peculiar state of accountancy. She thought about writing things out as she sometimes did when confused. She even visualized the pen and paper.

  Am I the only one who knows? Her younger sisters, giggly and carefree, were clearly unaware that their father had another family. Alice? Alice might know. Of all the members of the Lang family, excluding the head of it, Alice was the hardest to read. And Mother. Perhaps the long-ago death of her daughter was not the sole cause of her wraithlike existence, the way she had of not being present even when she was. For that was how her husband must make her feel. Someone of no account.

  We’re nothing to him, Imogen said to herself. That is how he is able to have a second family. This provoked another question.

  Which family is primary? Surely the other family was the shadow family, the family you could ignore—after all, he was there only two weekends a month. The thought brought no comfort. The little girl she had witnessed leap into her father’s arms was not more than four years old, at least two years younger than the youngest Lang. Therefore he had gone to them because we were not enough.

  What shall we do about it?

  What do I say to him?

  What if I say something and he chooses the other family over us?

  Faced with these unanswerable questions Imogen sat on the edge of her bed, gripping the counterpane until she heard Alice come home, her keys rattling in the small tray beside the door, her briefcase thudding to the floor beside the coat rack.

  Imogen waited until she heard Alice’s steps reach the landing and turn toward her room, which was at the other end of the house. She threw open her own door and rushed after her. “Alice? Alice, I must speak with you.” The adult phrase was new to Imogen’s lips, and Alice turned to her, one eyebrow raised.

  Alice had her father’s long face, his wide-set eyes that seemed to look past you, his wide cool brow and long nose. Her room was foreign territory to Imogen, who had set foot in it not more than half a dozen times in her entire life. Although Alice was not quite ten years older than Imogen, she had seemed like an adult—solemn and all-knowing—from an early age. And she had nothing of the maternal instinct common in older sisters.

  Imogen did not know how to begin, and realized as she perched on the edge of the window seat that she was afraid of Alice, even though Alice had never been mean to her, indeed barely noticed her. She wondered if Alice found her younger sister equally alien, and decided it wasn’t possible. Alice was the sort of person to whom the inner workings of the world are obvious, and little sisters would be entirely transparent.

  Alice sat at the vanity, unpinning her hair, which was a lovely chestnut colour, long and luxurious. “Well?” she said toward the mirror. “What did you want to tell me?”

  “Well, um…I was out riding my bike,” Imogen began, and faltered.

  “Go on.”

  “I don’t know how to say it. It’s too awful.”

  “Suppose you just say it,” Alice said, dropping pins and clips into cut-glass pots. She allowed her gaze to fall on Imogen again, via the far panel of her reflective triptych. “Don’t worry about how you say it.”

  So Imogen told her. When she got to the part about the little girl calling their father Daddy, tears ran down her face and neck, and speech became impossible.

  Alice opened a drawer in her vanity and took out a neatly folded handkerchief and thrust it toward her. Imogen took it and pressed it to her face, weeping until she had soaked it through.

  Alice picked up a silver-backed brush and started swiping at her hair. “What were you doing on Eighty-Seventh Street and—where did you say? Cicero?”

  Imogen wiped her eyes and blew her nose. She wanted to crawl onto Alice’s lap and curl up there but knew it would not be welcome. “What?”

  “What were you doing way over there? What business had you?”

  “I—I was just riding my bicycle.”

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t stray so far from home next time.”

  Imogen had not known what to expect from Alice, but it was not this.

  “You don’t stay home.”

  “I’m not a little girl. I’m a law student and a working woman.”

  A silence fell. Imogen watched Alice stroke a portion of her hair with the brush. She released it and it cascaded shining over her shoulder and breast.

  “But what is Father doing over there?” Imogen asked. “Why does he have another family? You’re not supposed to have two families. Nobody does.”

  She waited, hoping that Alice would turn to her and assure her it was not true, their father had no second family—what he had was a twin brother. A twin brother he didn’t like to talk about, and that’s why the two families had never met. It even made sense; everyone knew twins ran in families.

  Alice’s silence confirmed her horror.

  “You knew.”

  Alice lowered the brush to her lap and, gripping it in both hands, turned to face Imogen for the first time.

  “Look. I’m sorry you saw what you saw. It would have been infinitely preferable had you never found out.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “She shows up at work sometimes—even with her daughter one time. They pretend she’s a client. What difference does it make? You know what you know and you can’t unknow it. You’re just going to have to live with it.”

  “But why?”

  The quiver in Imogen’s voice sounded piteous even to her own ears.

  “There is no why. Men do what they do and women must endure it.”

  “But no one has two families,” Imogen protested. “Whoever heard of such a thing?”

  “It doesn’t matter who heard of what when, Imogen. Men can do what they want, within the bounds of the law, and the feelings of twelve-year-old girls don’t enter into it. You’re young to learn this but every woman learns it sooner or later, unless they want to hang themselves.”

  “Does Mother know?”

  A curt nod.

  “How do you know she knows?”

  Alice leaned forward and gripped Imogen’s shoulders. She shook her once, twice. “Mother knows. You hear? She knows—and you are not to raise it with her, do you understand? You are not to speak of it.”

  “But how can she—”

  Alice shook her again. “This is grown-up business, Imogen. You are not to discuss it with Mother, with Father, or with anyone. Certainly not with Father.”

  “He has another family,” Imogen wailed.

  “It’s not another family. Father and Mother are married. He is not married to this other woman.”

  “But that girl called him Father,” Imogen said, then corrected herself. “She called him Daddy.”

  “She can call him whatever she wants, but Father is married to Mother and that’s that. He isn’t leaving, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “I wish he would leave.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “I do. I hate him.”

  “No, you don’t. In any case, hating him won’t do any good.” Alice turned back to the vanity. She dabbed something fr
agrant on a handkerchief and wiped her face. “There’s nothing to be done, Imogen. Go and read a book and forget about it.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Are you happy, now that you know? Are you delighted to have this knowledge about your father?”

  “No.”

  “That’s why I didn’t tell you.”

  “You go to work with him. How can you?”

  “I have no intention of justifying myself to you. I work in Father’s law firm and that’s that. Now go and read a book and forget this ever happened. You are not an orphan. Nothing in your life is going to change.”

  * * *

  —

  Imogen noted in the questionnaire that her father’s admirable traits included intelligence and discipline, but restricted her enumeration of less admirable traits to absent-mindedness. For a time, she harboured a good deal of resentment that Dr. Ganz required his young residents to open up their entire lives to him this way. One could not be certain, after all, that his intent was benign, and it felt—perhaps especially to his female students—as if one had been commanded to disrobe by a man who could ponder your nakedness at his leisure. And it could hardly escape the notice of a student of psychiatry that the relationship mirrored that of an analyst to his patients.

  Still, she settled into the Phipps easily enough. In person, Dr. Ganz continued to be welcoming; he even seemed to take a particular interest in her comfort. After rounds, he always managed to find a moment for a personal comment or suggestion. “I thought your remarks on patient so-and-so were well taken,” he might say. “See what you think of Dr. Kempf’s recent papers on paranoia and homosexual panic.”

  His manner was so friendly and unassuming that Imogen was convinced she must be missing some European sense of irony.

  During grand rounds—how she loved that expression, the “rounds” implying the quotidian, the “grand” implying a nobility all the sweeter for being available even to interns as lowly as Imogen Lang—he would stop before a patient and consult a five-by-eight-inch index card handed to him by a stenographer. He would then summarize the patient’s life prior to admission, the presenting problem, and progress to date. If the patients minded this, they gave no sign. It was always done with the utmost courtesy, beginning with a click of the heels and a slight bow. These summaries reminded Imogen of obituaries in their life-encompassing brevity, but also in the equanimity of the doctor’s tone. “Miss Hastings, being highly excited, snatched up a meat cleaver and severed her brother’s hand before she could be subdued,” he might say, with the calm of a geometry teacher describing a theorem, Miss Hastings showing no inclination to disagree. Facts, after all, were facts.