The Unfortunates: A Novel

by Sophie McManus

  She’s about to tell him what she thinks when something stops her. It is—he hangs his head, waiting. His hair is damp. His forehead shines like an ostrich egg. His brow twitches. He’s ready for her to insult him. The slump of his body, his quivering lip, his flinched emerald eye—already he wears the mark. He’s long made an effort to hide his troubles, her son. How had she convinced herself that stowing away his troubles was as good as curing them? But who wants to believe her child is sick? Who wants to admit she’s traded her child’s ease for her own? She sees how much he needs her to love his music, to love him. Someone must tell him not to stage this opera. But how desperate he is, how unsteady, what an incapable individual he’s become. Someone must believe in him. It’s his mother who must. Her poor boy. His bowed head. How is it possible he does not know what he’s made? This atonal, eugenic braying. How is it possible for the generations to evolve backward? The natural order should be that each generation becomes more enlightened. Her trouble with Lotta, for example—at least, in her better moments, she knows it to be a limitation. She fails, but sometimes she can admit it. She was taught wrong, for that is how they were taught. But that was long ago. By now, she can’t blame anyone but herself. She will never forget her father telling her of a punishment he heard as a young adviser to one of Theodore Roosevelt’s delegates in Haiti: slaves, a century before, rolled downhill in sugar barrels, the barrels’ interiors fitted round with spikes. Her father raised her to a better world than that. She in turn raised George in a world more generous than hers. But is it? Maybe it is not. Maybe it is as terrible as it always was. Had she taught her son anything? He’s meant to pass her, to become more than she—more valiant, kinder, to see more, to invite more of the truth of the world unto himself. To be left behind by one’s child, this is the way it should be. But here, in his libretto, is foolishness, mostly, but evil too. The bit about the black and the white eunuchs, good God. Who are these Gypsies of the future meant to be? And the women! Each scene worse than the last. Her son, reversing the order of progress—a bad seed, a rotten egg, a man of shadow-clung fantasies and hungry, scrabbling fears. She’s failed. Parents fail all the time—she’d be the first to say that most people are mediocre and most people have mediocre children. She’s not romantic about the world. It’s a common failure, and to be forgiven. But this is different. George’s opera, dragging to mind—the year after the war in Naugatuck. Her father decided she might lend her charm to a promotional film. The major manufacturers were all making them, in the style of the U.S. Army reels boosting the war effort. Georgie was considering a step into politics; the film would make good cross-promotion. She’d forgotten it until Annie Mason’s assistant found “Taking a Look at Rubber” on YouTube a few years ago. Annie wanted to post it to the history page of the foundation’s website. CeCe refused. Uncanny, to watch the folksy actor playing a Naugatuck foreman take his grandson through the plant, explaining each stage of production and rubber’s miraculous everyday applications. At the end of their tour, they step out onto Rubber Avenue.

  “What do we have here?” the foreman says, squinting into the sunlight. A crowd of workers and reporters is gathered in front of the plant, actors all.

  “Whatever it is,” his grandson answers, “it looks exciting. Let’s go and see.”

  Here, watching, CeCe had glimpsed herself. Ten years old, sallow and bolt-eyed, on a podium in front of a banner that read THE SOLE OF AMERICA, beside Georgie and his pretty wife of three months, Gloria. CeCe, in a checkered dress with a white collar, her pale hair tidied off her face. She remembers the dress was blue, but she will never be sure.

  “That’s Mr. Somner himself,” the foreman says. “Let’s have a listen.”

  The camera shifts to Georgie. “—this industry, so vital to our noblest endeavors overseas, to the protection of the freedoms and rights of all peoples in all nations. With the fine product we now make here at home on Rubber Avenue, the next generation”—here he gestures with a droll smile to CeCe—“will invent greater than we can dream, for we Americans are as strong as we are flexible—why, just like rubber.”

  She could hardly bear to watch. To recognize his speech’s banality and its lie, a YouTube banner ad for a fitness system beneath. He was promoting synthetic rubber—during the war, Japan was poised to take the pan-Asian fields that supplied the United States with 97 percent of its rubber. The Somner company, along with a dozen others, restored production at their plantations in the Amazon; back in Naugatuck, Somner Industries, as part of a consortium, was commissioned by the government to improve synthetic-rubber production so the United States might never again find itself reliant for an essential commodity on foreign, tropical climates. By 1945, synthetics were so improved that Somner Industries again deserted the Amazonian fields. Deserted too, CeCe knows, were the workers who’d been force-migrated, without their families, and deposited in the jungle to man the trees. Left behind in the dense Amazon after the plantations’ second closings, they died—from malaria and hepatitis and scorpion. Died by panther, died by thirst. The number, unofficially admitted by Brazil and officially denied by Somner Industries, seven thousand.

  “Last,” her father continues, “let’s not forget it’s our young people who know a good thing when they see one. They do badger and needle mother and father for the best, am I right, Cecilia?”

  “Right,” she says. This is her cue. Gloria lets go of her hand. CeCe lifts one foot and the other, showing off the rubber soles on a pair of sneakers—a thick, thumpy kind of shoe until that day she’d only seen other children wear. (The film’s great challenge was avoiding reference to the automobile. Ford would not work with Georgie, and Somner Industries had never broken into private-sector tires. CeCe’s bit had been the answer. At any mention of Ford, her father would quote Henry the Fifth—How he comes o’er us with our wilder days, not measuring what use we made of them.)

  With the camera whirring and the fake reporters’ flashbulbs popping, an actor-reporter calls out, “Now, missy, how would you like to be in charge here someday?” She looks back at her father. They hadn’t gone over this part in the car.

  “How about that,” her father says, smiling at the camera. Gloria smiles too. But CeCe didn’t know the answer. She didn’t know! Then she did.

  “Sir,” she said, her voice high. “No thank you. I’d prefer to have a family.”

  “That’ll be all, boys. We promised a visit to the ice-cream man.”

  They step into the crowd, Georgie shaking hands, working his way to the foreman and his grandson, who, in a final shot, declares that one day he wants to be a rubber man too. At this moment CeCe trips and falls, clumsy in the unfamiliar shoes, shaken by the pop of the flashbulbs and the attention of the crowd, even if it is pretend. Gloria reaches down—not her mother!—and pulls CeCe up, saying, “You all right? We’ll try it again?”

  On the drive back to Booth Hill (not in a Ford, never in a Ford) her father said, “How’d you like that question? I pulled a fast one. Spontaneity. Good answer, Cecilia. You can think on your feet.” Adding, with a burst of laughter: “Even if you can’t stand on ’em!”

  “What about the ice cream,” CeCe answered.

  In her wispy voice, Gloria said, “Dear, let’s do really stop for some. It’s been a long day.”

  And now, here is George’s bent head! She can’t shake the certain, if nonsensical, conviction that if she doesn’t praise him, he’ll fall down dead at her feet like a little bird from a tree. She can’t speak against his work. But his opera mustn’t be staged. He’ll be humiliated. She’ll be humiliated! Her name—his humiliation will make it into the paper. Nasty gossip. He’ll lose his job, if he hasn’t already. She won’t have as easy a time finding him a new one as in the past. Easier when he was young, without so many terminations to his record, without his increasing age and her waning influence. Who on earth are these people working with him to produce this opera? Can they all be so sinister? No. He’s paying them astronomically. That must be
it. It’s why he’s here. He must be desperate. He’s never managed money properly. Not for long. No one will back this monstrosity. Without her help, The Burning Papers—what a stupid name!—won’t see a stage.

  “It’s a masterpiece,” she says.

  “Yes?” The light, breaking over his face. His body, settling.

  “Yes.”

  “Am I relieved! That is good to hear, good to hear!”

  “It is exceptional. But—”

  “And that’s only a recording from rehearsal. Not even proper audio. And Judith was hoarse that day. She—I’m somewhat disappointed in her. But. Can you believe I made that? Can you believe I’ve done all that myself? And! It’s a safe investment. I think, anyway. The arts are doing better than you’d expect. People are still going to the theater. People do take risks! We’ll break even on ticket sales. I’ll pay you back, of course. And that’s only the beginning. After box office, we—”

  “George, I’m very proud of you, but I will not help you. You’re on your own.”

  “What?” He leaps up, his hands in his hair. He doesn’t appear to understand. He sinks back down onto the stool, leaps up again. “But you said it was good.”

  “It is. However, you are a grown man, and if you’ve ruined your affairs, which I suspect you have”—she can barely bring herself to say it. She sets her jaw and hears her own voice, slow and steely, such an effort it takes to keep the pity out!—“you’ll have to find a way to unruin them by yourself.”

  “You won’t—you mean to say this is because I didn’t visit?”

  “Do you know I had pneumonia? I almost died?”

  For the first time she understands it’s true, she had almost died, and quick as lightning what began as a plan to protect her child catches up to her as wrath.

  “Telling your wife you’ve been calling me, that I refuse visitors?”

  “We are from this, from all of this!” George cries, pointing at the table of photos, to a black-and-white photo of John Stepney, the year before he died, standing stiffly on the lawn in front of the immense fortress that was Apollo Court. “And you won’t help me! What’s it good for, then? What’s it for? You’re happy to give it away as long as it isn’t to me! You don’t know anything, you—”

  She has the same feeling as when—Walter, how much money he asked her for, over the years, after their divorce. By letter and long-distance call. She’d wire it to him, two, three times a year. One day, she opened an envelope from Italy. He’d forwarded the bill for a suit. After that she stopped helping him and he disappeared.

  “But, but you have to.”

  “I do not.”

  “You ruin my life,” George cries, “because you like to.”

  “Now when you tell Iris I don’t want visits, it needn’t be a lie.”

  It is the only way she has left to look after him. She’s done what had to be done.

  “I provide for my wife,” he says, a defiant choke in his voice.

  “No, I provide for your wife. I provide for you by letting you forget it.”

  25

  Shitty shirt, shit stuffed animals from the claw arcade, shit white compact cars, old issues of supermarket tabloids (alien babies, diet disasters), fringed purses, crusted bottles of bright nail polish, bright manufactured anything, plastic anything, glass figurines, Disney merch, ballerina music boxes, stadium-concert ticket stubs, mugs with quotables, tracksuits, aluminum cans, cherry pop, cherry anything, scratch-n-win, chips with a neon-orange dust, carnations for special, antifreeze blue, antifreeze green, daisy petals with brown seams bruised into the white, white leather clothes, black leather furniture, limited-edition sports memorabilia, mesh hats, dirt bikes, rabbit’s foot, shamrock, cartoon pop, kitten heels, martini-glass stems shaped like legs, novelty dice, dogs in the yard, dogs tied to the fence in the yard, turds in the yard, no yard, money-grams, cinnamon candles, musk oils, French braids, false idols, bubble gum, boozy booze, Tic Tacs, hair spray, death-by-machine accident, death by sugar, death in the bathtub, acne scars, crooked teeth, bloody noses, cardboard boxes, blood outside the body, garbage on fire, cutting down trees. As far as her mother-in-law is concerned, it is from this catalog of crap Iris was procured, along with her shirt. This, or whatever CeCe’s idea of white trash happens to be. Not that she’s given it much thought. Not that she’s right.

  Iris hurries across the damp lawn. She looks back once, but there’s only the yellow limestone and the sun glinting off CeCe’s closed glass doors. Did you leave your paper umbrella in the car? Blam! The old gal’s in fine form! A sneaky way of calling her cheap. Hey, what’ll it be? Is she cheap, or is she a gold digger? How can she spend too little and cost too much? She continues past the lake, its surface ruffled by the breeze. She climbs the shallow hill around the side of the facility and steps through a strict topiary colonnade, into the garden. She’s on a path of loose, white gravel. The garden is big enough to wander an afternoon. She just might, rather than go back. To calm, she leans in to smell the even tufts of sea lavender, tall as her elbow, filled with bees. As she stomps along the rows, the names come back to her from the learning garden behind the School of Agriculture’s Plant Science Building. Maybe it’s because she’s angry, maybe because she’s escaped, but the flowers teem, unnaturally vivid to her eye, too high and radiant for the beginning of fall. Here are butterscotch dahlias and purple verbena. Pitcher sage, with its fan of sky-blue flowers. She crosses a footbridge over a dry streambed and follows a low stone wall bordered with mottled leopard flower and silver curry plant. Crimson butterfly weed, coral zinnias. Here is clematis, a name she remembers for its ugliness, like a welting disease. Hoping to get lost, feeling a little better, she touches the tops of the flowers, humming with insects. Rain from that morning scatters off their tufted heads. She finds her anger’s been replaced by the strange sense that she’s being followed—not by any person, but by her own gathering dread, a dread she can neither see nor shake. George, lately. The way he moves, the way he speaks.

  She’s come to the end of the garden. A stand of fruit trees, already half-wrapped in plastic for winter. What looks like woods are just behind the fruit trees, though she can faintly hear the highway beyond. She tries to put George out of her mind. Peaceful, to head back down the hill through the woods, though she still isn’t peaceful. She enters a soft grove, pulls some pine needles into her hands. Deutschland astilbe—there’s another name she remembers for its ugliness, though there isn’t any of the ivory firework here. Fear drilled that one into her memory her first day at Booth Hill. She and CeCe were leaned up against the flagstone balustrade of the veranda. CeCe, thin as a latch, pointing a ringed finger at the distant curve of the lawn’s terraced perennial border, cataloging her garden, jabbing left to right as if her gold-laden knuckle were a brush and she were painting the flowers into existence as she went. George had escaped into the cool kitchen for what seemed to be a long time, to relay to Esme his mother’s instructions for sandwiches and a pitcher of tea. Iris, knowing the names, but so stunned by Booth Hill she was only able to offer that her own name was a flower. Like a six-year-old, or a half-wit. And that, she thinks, is pretty much how it’s gone with CeCe ever since.

  Halfway down the slope, she enters a clearing. Three men in tan jumpsuits sit on the ground, their backs against an oak. More like a man and two boys—the boys look sixteen, eighteen, but are taller than their boss, whose stout torso reminds her of an old-fashioned wine jug. Maybe this is Yasser. He snores lightly. His legs are splayed and a pole saw is balanced over his knees. His jumpsuit is dark with sweat at the collar, unbuttoned to the waist. What she can see of the T-shirt underneath reads OSA’S ANDSCAPE AND EE. The boys sit up and stare at her. The younger boy has a runtish, narrow look, his flame-red hair swept over his forehead in a soft bowl. He’s sucking on a silver chain that hangs around his neck. The older one tosses sticks and clumps of dirt, a pale chicken arm swinging from the rolled-up sleeve of his jumpsuit. His wide-set eyes are on her, but lazily,
oddly uncoordinated. The boys sit up and look at each other, momentarily surprised to see her. The younger one lets the chain fall from his mouth, smiles, sticks his tongue between his index and middle fingers and makes several slurping passes in her direction. His friend laughs, but silently, looking to make sure their boss is still asleep.

  Twerpy little shits. What a terrific day! She knows this type of kid. Pea-brained, all defensive posture and slide-eye, their life’s work to make sure everyone knows it’s women, and only women, they like to fuck. Her disapproval—this is how CeCe must feel, all the time.

  The older boy stops laughing. “Hey, where do I know you from?”

  “Great opener,” Iris says. “You’ve done this before.”

  “No seriously. You’re standing like—” He crosses his arms over his chest and leans back. “Wait, I know! You’re on those ads. I’m going south on Route 22, it’s you, right?”

  The younger boy pulls the chain back into his cheek. “Now I think on it, we do see her like six times a day, do we not? Tasty old thing. Selling houses?”

  “You got me.” Sometimes she misses the straightforward rudeness of the bars, of real life. “Have a good one.” She continues down the hill, thinking suddenly of the day she met George. She’d spent part of it wandering the School of Agriculture’s garden. After a swim at the athletic facility, she’d gone out of her way to drive past the kid’s university housing at the edge of campus, a cluster of low houses with aluminum siding, mostly empty for summer, thinking, That’s where we sat on the stoop at night, that’s the tree we studied under. She parked and strolled over to the house, pretending to no one that she was a touring parent or a touring alumna, out to see the pretty trees. His housemate came to the door and waved. She thought they were all gone and could think of nothing to do but walk on over.