Still we did it. We read them all. I, at least, wasn't aware of having any choice. I also wasn't aware of the virus they contained, the virus of fear. This was the only world I knew, teeming with devils and damnation, creatures that would tear out your stomach and feed on your own last meal. It was a largely unspoken fear, immured in the walls of our loneliness. But I saw it in Klara's eyes, in the way she hurried past empty rooms and avoided shadows, even in the way she began to recoil in self-disgust whenever she was mean to me, afraid of what was coming over her. She read the same books as I.
"I'm scared," I admitted to her one night after Mother went out. I was standing outside my room. She'd just put me to bed and was in front of her own, a hazy figure in the sconce-light. I wasn't sure she'd heard, wasn't sure I'd actually expressed my fear aloud. But then she turned, her face shining like a wax figure's.
"Of what?"
"Everything he's making me read. I'm starting to see things."
"It's all in your mind, Milo."
It was the way she said it, so matter-of-factly, that made me want to scream, or to rush over and never let her go, tell her I knew she felt the same way and that we'd escape this place together. Instead I watched her turn the doorknob and disappear, and then I was conscious of how alone I was in the vast stone gullet of a hallway. It seemed to want to swallow me.
Occasionally, during the light of day, the fog of this oppression would lift and Klara and I would play—laugh and run and forget. Yet even then there was an intensity to her gaze, like she wasn't fully there. She loved mounting little costume dramas among the trees and grounds—anointing me Thomas Cromwell and herself Anne Boleyn. "I am the rightful Queen," she'd insist as she took off through the woods. She dared me to denounce her, but I couldn't, because her happiness seemed so desperate, so fleeting, as we breathed fast and ran even faster.
Of course, like Anne herself, these little plays were doomed; there were days when I might adopt my most Cromwellian pose—a harrumphing scowl, arms akimbo—only to be met with a sigh and a pat on the head. It wasn't just the increasing time she spent on her studies. The age difference (nearly six years) quickly became too great. I remember the final summer before Klara left for college, when Mother unexpectedly announced a trip to the New Jersey shore. It was there that I noticed what Klara had been keeping under wraps: a burgeoning womanhood. She seemed embarrassed by my staring, pulling a towel around herself as we built sandcastles amid the colorful umbrellas and people playing paddle ball and Frisbee and the seagulls squawking and hovering in clusters across the surf. It looked like something out of a 1960s Technicolor film; I half-expected Annette Funicello to leap at me with a song. Klara had a strange weakness for Annette Funicello and those silly go-go beach movies that kept appearing on TV.
"Isn't this wonderful?" Mother announced beneath her own umbrella. She was drunk almost the entire time we were there, lounging on a chaise and sipping champagne from a cooler. Father was curled up in a chair next to her. He looked out-of-place in the sunlight and blue waves and open sand, far from his usual hiding places. He never took off his shirt or pants or shoes, never did anything but stare at us and chew his fingernails. The only thing he ever said was: "nice castle."
Surfacing from memory is like coming up for air. There is that same exhausted relief, the wonder at being alive. Also the same moment of doubt, of whether this is really the dream and that other realm, the murky one of shifting shapes and swaying sunbeams, is the one you inhabit. But no. There was the trireme. I fixed my gaze on it, let it pull me back into the wider world: the glue pot, the desk and all my tools. I told myself: I'm here. I'm fine.
I tried to believe it.
A bird shrieked. It was a small thing, but it jarred me like a scream. I peered through the study's window, at the swaths of trees, hills, rolling clouds. A breeze sent up a great rustling warning from the leaves. I saw a hawk circling over the trees and a pair of squirrels hopping across the low patio wall. Were the squirrels afraid of the hawk? Did hawks eat squirrels? How would these squirrels know? I thought of nature as an all-consuming Passion Play in a language I had no hope of understanding.
At last I heard Klara on the stairs. I raced out of the study, eager to share my brake-wire hallucination and to inquire whether she'd been hearing false accusations too—if that was the source of her unease. Then I saw how she was dressed, in a bright plaid shirt with the collar slightly raised and dark new jeans that hugged her hips. She looked like one of those women who drove Range Rovers and descended on Vermont in the autumn to admire leaves. "You look different," I observed.
"I'll take that as a compliment."
She hardly touched her food, just cupped her tea and held her face to the morning sun. Finally she rose to her feet. That's when I saw them. Mother's earrings. Not the pelicans. The butterflies. I should have known what this meant: transformation, flight, the spreading of fragile wings. "I have a few errands in town this morning," she said.
"Anything in particular?"
"Nothing interesting. Maybe visiting the cemetery."
"I've heard that Father's fans camp out there," I said. "Many of them still don't believe he's dead."
She sighed. "Listen, Milo, will you be alright for a few hours?"
That's when I realized she meant to go without me.
"Can we do another crossword puzzle?" I said, hastily picking up the newspaper. Yesterday's had been about famous literary heroines. We'd worked on it all morning. It had made Klara smile. "My Mrs. Dalloway smile."
"Later, OK? I won't be long."
"But . . ."
She touched my shoulder. "I promise."
I brought our dishes into the kitchen. I never did this. I wanted to remind her how responsible I could be, what a good companion. But she didn't even remark upon it, not even to say thank you. I waited. There was a large knife on the countertop. I began chopping carrots. They were Klara's fingers. She couldn't run errands without fingers, could she?
"I won't be long," she repeated from the entrance hall.
She was already clattering to the door. I threw down the knife and followed, suddenly sorry I'd been chopping off her fingers. I tried to make amends. "I made you something."
"Really?" She was slipping on her shoes.
I began describing one of the trireme's galley slaves, a special figure I'd worked on for days. Special because he was no longer a slave—he'd led a slave mutiny and was now captain of the ship. I hadn't actually made such a figure, but I thought Klara would appreciate the notion because she was always talking about the evils of slavery and its lasting ill effects. I also began, with my foot, nudging a line of my own shoes across the front door—a line she couldn't cross.
"Listen Milo, that's wonderful, really, but could you show it to me when I return?"
Then she did it. She crossed the line.
After Harvard Klara had worked as an editorial assistant on some minor Boston literary magazine best known for typesetting nursery rhymes with surprising line-breaks: Three Blind / Mice See How / They Run. She lived in a cramped apartment on the North End and finally had friends and went to soirees and ate in middling restaurants with artistic pretensions. She even had a husband for a few brief months: a foreigner—Brazilian, I believe—who won her heart with his surprising knowledge of the poetry of John Donne. "Oh my America, my new-found land." How apt that proved.
Mother drove us to the wedding in the Volvo, while Father fiddled with the car radio and I chafed under the requirements of forced cheer. "Can you believe our little Klara is all grown up?" she kept saying. "Making her own decisions?" She dabbed her eyes and distractedly jerked between lanes at fantastic speed. She must have imagined she was on the Autobahn. Even the notorious Boston drivers seemed terrified. She squealed into the parking garage and nearly ran over a man in a wheelchair. "He's got to learn to share the road," she muttered as he flapped his arms like a bird.
By the time Klara returned home she'd lost considerable weight: cheeks pale, hair flecked with gray. It was the first time I realized she'd loved that man. She couldn't bear to talk about him, though. Nor about the literary magazine which had folded, nor the friends who sent fat wedding invitations which she discarded with a bitter flourish. "Nobody in the world recognizes who we really are," she said to me once. "And nobody cares. Do you understand? All we can count on is family. Without family loyalty we're nothing, we're falling through the air without a parachute."
Family loyalty. It was a strange way to express our bond, but I let it go because I could see she wanted to cry. I moved close and a little to one side to offer a comforting shoulder. I was somewhat surprised when she took it. Her hair smelled like a cinnamon wax candle. Some of it hung across her cheek, and I curled it up over her ear and said: "I know exactly how you feel."
It was true. I'd just been to college.
It was a small liberal-arts institution in New Hampshire whose brochure was all Gothic serenity and leafy contemplation, but in truth it was more like Sodom. I watched young men crush beer cans into their mouths, light hair spray on fire, and gleefully terrorize farm animals. I'd requested a single room—I wouldn't have lasted a day with a roommate. Every open door seemed to reveal a half-naked man—they always dressed in full public view—or a woman clutching shards of clothing worn the night before.
I had no idea who first realized I was John Crane's son. Everyone looked at me with eyebrow-raised disbelief, snickering at my blazers and ties. By then I'd begun wearing them willingly, even enthusiastically, as a mark of intelligence—of my superiority to those low-class high school bullies in their hooded sweatshirts and football jerseys and backwoods plaid. I'd imagined that my fellow college students would feel the same way, that we'd enjoy an enlightened chuckle at the slovenly dolts now destined to pump our gas.
I could not have been more wrong.
One of them, a hollow-chested drug addict named Barry, approached me approximately a month after I arrived. I was returning from a lecture on differential calculus when he yanked a copy of Hell's Fury out of the back pocket of his ripped-up jeans. "You're Milo Crane," he said, a knowing gleam infecting his jaundiced eye.
I cringed and kept walking, hoping he was in one of his stupors and would soon forget what he'd just said.
"Dude, I'm like such a fan of your dad."
I fumbled with my room key. "His books are idiotic," I murmured. "Anyone who likes them is an idiot."
"Whoa." He chuckled. "You been to like therapy for that, man?"
I managed to get inside and press my back against the door as he called to a comrade: "Dude, you know who blazer-boy is?" Within days all sorts of people I didn't know began asking what Father was "really like." A few even wanted my autograph. "Go away," I said. "He wasn't my father. My mother slept with the mailman." They didn't believe me. It got worse and worse. I had to make it stop. But how? After trying various techniques, from pretending I was deaf to speaking in a gibberish language of my own invention, I hit upon something so beautifully simple that I wondered why I hadn't thought of it right off. Each morning I'd blacken several of my front teeth with a non-toxic magic marker. Whenever anyone asked about Father I hissed and gave a wide, carnivorous smile. They couldn't run away fast enough.
But there was a cost. I became an object of whispering wonder, a circus freak. I overheard some say that I must have been the inspiration for Father's work. When I gave Barry my black-toothed smile, he laughed and said: "Dude you are so like ‘The Inspiration.'" That name stayed with me all year. One girl was about to pass out in our hallway when she spotted my blazer and asked: "Are you ‘The Inspiration?'" I told her in no uncertain terms that she was intoxicated, and she rolled up her eyes and exclaimed "It's true!" and fell flat on her face at my feet.
There was only one person in college who took an interest in me apart from Father's work. But this person's interest turned out to be the only thing more distasteful. I am speaking of a student in the dormitory named Max, a blond, clear-eyed boy from Munich, Germany. He admired my ties, had a penchant for Parchisi, and also found life in the dormitory insufferable. "These Americans are like animals," he once whispered over a game. "They lack all dignity."
We always played Parchisi on his neatly made bed. What joy it was to have our existences narrowed to the clucking of plastic pieces as they hopped along colored circles and those exhilarating crackling rolls of dice. After a while I hardly remembered where I was. It didn't hurt that Max invariably let me win. "It must be my lucky day," I'd say with an irrepressible smile as I brought my last piece home. He'd just stare at the board for a moment as if confused, then slouch against the wall, letting his long thin hands fall palms-up on the bed, fingers curled as if in transcendental meditation. He wouldn't move until I took one of his hands and began to stroke the palms, the joints, each cold bony knuckle. It took me far too long to discern what all that stroking was about.
"You're too good for me, Milo," he said one afternoon as I rubbed the base of his curved, womanly thumb. "No," I replied. "You just have to concentrate. You try too hard to knock my pieces out when you should be focused on getting your own pieces home instead."
"You don't understand," he said.
"Trust me, I've won almost every time we've played and I know—"
"You don't know anything!"
His hand squeezed mine. When I looked up I saw the moist beginnings of tears. He'd always taken his losses badly, but never like this. I suspected something else, perhaps news from home—I knew his Mutti and Vatti were having financial trouble, their little stationary store near the Marienplatz suffering under the competition of a pen and paper conglomerate.
"Are Mutti and Vatti alright?" I ventured.
He shook his head. "They're fine. It's you. You are the matter."
"Me?"
"Argh!" He banged his head back against the wall with not inconsiderable force.
"Max?"
Before I knew it he'd hooked an arm around my neck and pushed me atop the board. "Max!" Plastic pieces gouged my back. But that wasn't all. I saw his thin lips seeking mine, felt a shuddering bulge against my leg. With a scream I twisted free, grabbed the Parchisi board and struck him repeatedly as he curled up in a ball. I didn't stop until the board was in tatters and Parchisi pieces lay everywhere and Max was a sobbing mess. Then I ran blindly to my room. I was numb; I needed to think. But my next-door neighbor, a beefy footballer, was hosting an all-night party: laughter and hooting and a wall-rattling stereophonic din that lasted until dawn. I spent hours banging my fists and kicking my feet to get him to stop.
I spent the entire summer in a stupefied recovery at home. Aside from a twice-daily bath I was incapable of doing anything other than watching television and staring at my bedroom walls. I remember little of what I watched. There was a popular news item that summer on the local CBS affiliate about a man outside of Brattleboro who was eating, bit by bit, over the course of several months, a bicycle, a motorcycle, and finally his own brand-new jeep. This story kept appearing with updates on the man's progress and photos of his disappearing vehicles. It was supposed to be an inspiring portrayal of the human spirit, but I couldn't help thinking how the man must suffer the most excruciating trips to the toilet.
Mother suspected I'd become seriously ill or had a nervous breakdown. She k
ept asking, before going out each day, if I was well. "Of course I'm well," I always said. Only once did she question my truthfulness. She hadn't gone out for some reason, which made her sensitive to loneliness and failure. We were in the midst of supper, just the two of us, when she trained her sunglasses on me and said: "Milo, you would tell me if school has been too much of a strain on your nerves, wouldn't you?"
"I'm fine."
"There's nothing bothering you?"
I sighed. "There is one thing. It's the quality of my education. That school is for idiots. I could learn just as much through correspondence courses. And think of the money you'd save."
"But money is no problem," she said. "Father's books are doing quite well."
"Even so. Waste not, want not."
She was susceptible to sayings and clichés. She never knew how to respond. So she just nodded and said: "I see." And that was that. There was no further discussion. It helped that she was already beginning to suffer migraines. She spent the next three days in bed beneath cold compresses, and when the inevitable envelopes from the college arrived—invoices for tuition, class enrollment requests—I hid them in my closet and eventually cut them to shreds with her huge art scissors.
I began taking correspondence courses for my undergraduate degree. I only had trouble finding a suitable program. I wanted to study military history and was forced to apply to a so-called "war college" in Georgia. I had to pledge to purchase a uniform and send videotapes of myself parading around according to exacting drill procedures. I set Mother's old Panasonic video recorder on the low patio wall and marched into and out of the frame. It was like making my own history, my own recordings of battle. This helped me tremendously to get over that awful college. Occasionally I'd stage an epic clash, crouching behind the patio wall and lobbing rock grenades with a terribly wounded arm in order to save my beloved comrades. In my secret diary I penned stoic letters from the front lines—usually the trenches of France—to an imaginary girl named Mabel I'd met in the penny arcades of London: Dearest Mabel, I'm awfully lonely in this ditch without you, but the lads and I are doing our best to keep up our fighting spirit. Yesterday I potted five Germans as they tried to sneak through our razor wire. They hang there like scarecrows . . .
The Garden of Blue Roses Page 3
