Now she looked at me again.
“Get out,” my mother said.
“Nothing would please me more.”
I know she wanted to storm out on that line, but these things never happen cleanly in real life; the dog went to the door with her, overdue as he was to water the flowers on his afternoon constitutional. Slamming the door might well have decapitated Solly, and that would have been a bit much, even for a pissed-off Irish gorgon. So instead of a dramatic “Nothing would please me more,” Margaret’s last living words in the Peacock house were actually a staccato “Go on, go on now, stay here” while Elise, with difficulty, gathered Solly up in her arms, avoiding contact with Margaret’s eyes.
VAMPIRE
Now we go forward two months or so. May in New York City, warm days, cool nights, used to be my favorite month. I liked sleeping with the windows open, I was never bothered by the sounds of traffic or people on the streets, and the bugs weren’t bad if you left the light off. I liked being under a blanket in the cool night air. I was a good sleeper.
That’s why I was so bleary and confused when I heard the coin land in my room. Followed by another coin. Followed by a third. I sat up in time to see the fourth one coming straight at me. It hit me on the chin, but I caught it before it fell into my lap. A silver dollar, which believe me was worth something back then. I looked at the window, and there was nobody there. And then there was.
Margaret.
Pale and sick-looking, wearing a torn, dirty dress.
“Joseph,” she said. “I’ve got money for you.”
She opened her hand and it was true. A whole fistful of silver dollars.
“What are you doing here?” I said, still more confused than frightened. It hadn’t yet occurred to me to wonder what she was standing on. “What’s the money for?”
“For?” she said. “Why, for all the trouble I caused. For being a thief in your house. May I come in?”
“No,” I said.
“Well. That’s too bad,” she said, letting the money fall from her hand to jingle onto the sidewalk below. It must have been thirty dollars.
And then she was gone.
And as soon as she was gone, I wasn’t sure she had ever been there. Except there was a smell in the room. Like something dead in the attic.
I went to the window and shut it. Locked it.
It was a long time before I slept, but I did, at least until I had the nightmare. I dreamed there was a skeleton outside my window, rubbing its bones on the glass. I sat bolt upright, looking at the window, and indeed there was a shape there. I switched on the bedside lamp, almost knocking it over in my haste. You can imagine my relief when I saw that the shape at the window wasn’t a skeleton at all. Just Margaret in a torn dress. The sound I had mistaken for bones on the glass was actually coins; she was playing a game where she used the tips of her fingers to slide coins around against the pane.
“Joey!” she said, smiling. “Come open the window and let me in!”
I shook my head. She mocked me shaking my head, like a mother would do to a stubborn child. “What’d’ye mean, shakin’ your head at me like that? I thought we were friends?”
I just stared at her. Everything was wrong. What the hell was she standing on? I thought about calling my mom.
“Mommy!” she said, one step ahead of me. “You’re a grown man with hair on it and you want your mommy, don’t you? Go get your nasty Jew mommy. Tell her I brought money, she’ll let me in!”
It was when she said “mommy” that I first saw her long, sharp teeth, white at the tips, a dirty yellow-gray near the gums. You never forget the first time you see a vampire’s teeth. I think I pissed myself.
“Go away!” I said.
I heard nails clicking on the wooden floor. Solly heard voices and now he was coming to investigate. People stirring predawn might mean breakfast, or a trip outside, right? He poked his snout around the corner and gave a low, uncertain growl. By the time I looked back, Margaret was gone.
Solly stayed with me till morning. I didn’t sleep again.
* * *
I sleepwalked through school the next day, unable to focus, unable to stop yawning. I nodded off in American History class, although with Mr. Gunderson’s way of stressing seemingly random words when he lectured, this wasn’t unusual. They could have hired that man to test coffee.
“Are we boring you, Mr. Peacock? Would you rather a nap than to hear about the exchange of cannon fire between the Monitor and the Merrimack and the end of the era of sail-powered warships?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Gunderson. I was—”
“Dreaming about Harvard, or Yale, or Brown? You don’t work hard enough to go to those schools. But, no matter to me; I can write a C as quickly as an A, and the world needs tailors, too. Just keep nodding off, Mr. Peacock, and sharpen your shears.”
I had just enough of my mom in me that I wanted to jab my finger at him saying, Do. Not. Interrupt. Me! but that would have gone over like a pig stampede at temple. Not that I went to temple. We practiced Dad’s religion, which meant twice-yearly trips to church and saying “Amen” after Dad thanked Jesus for the pot roast. The whole thing seemed pretty skinny next to the angry Irish bitch-monster outside my window. That looked real. I was going to need professional help.
* * *
“Vampire?” Reverend MacNeil said.
I nodded hesitantly. “Is this some kind of a joke?” I could see in his eyes that mischief or mental illness were the only motives he could imagine for such a question coming from a boy already in high school.
“Did some of the other fellows put you up to this?” he said, rubbing at a pinkish eye under his little round glasses. He was one of those unlucky pale types who always looked allergic to something.
“That’s right, Reverend. They did. I’m very sorry.”
“Who was it?”
“May I have a cross?”
“I beg your pardon.”
“A cross. You know.”
“Joey. This just sounds like more horseplay to me. Besides which, the true cross is in our hearts.”
Tell Margaret McMannis, I thought, but kept it to myself.
I looked around the church to see if there was something crosslike I could make off with, but nothing looked carryable. I was eyeing a wooden cross on the wall, trying to make out how well attached it was—it looked pretty solid—when Reverend MacNeil said, “Joey?” I had forgotten he was there. So I shook his hand good and hard like my dad taught me and set off for the park. They had branches and stuff in the park, and, with a little bit of kite twine, I could make a cross. Then I remembered that my kite had a frame like a cross, and I could skip the park entirely. Then I remembered the reverend rubbing his eye with the hand I shook, so I wiped it on my pants.
Did I mention I wasn’t that smart in 1933? I wasn’t. Maybe the only smart thing I did that year was to tell Margaret she couldn’t come in through my bedroom window. Weird vampire rule, but it absolutely works. Only with somebody’s home, not a business. I’ve tried to defy this little ordinance, we’ve all tried, but you just stand at the entrance and can’t go through. You can’t make yourself do it, like one of those darted lions on Wild Kingdom thinking about getting a good chew going on Marlin Perkins’s face, but he’s paralyzed so he just lies there and pants and looks at him. Last year I conducted a little experiment: I had Cvetko push me into a window I hadn’t been invited through, some little old lady Cvetko had bitten already, a house he was welcome in so he could go in and get me if I got in trouble. He said it was “an exercise in ignorance,” but he was too curious to refuse outright. Damned if I didn’t fall down and scramble back out the window on my hands and knees against my own will.
I didn’t know any of that on this particular evening, but I knew good and well what Margaret was. She was a monster. And she had it in for me. She came back.
Solly was curled up in a ball between my legs. He growled.
It wasn’t all that late, and I hadn’t quite gotten to sleep yet. The kite-frame cross was leaning up against the wall, behind my nightstand.
“Joey, may I please come in?”
I switched on my table lamp.
I shook my head, said “No,” and fumbled the cross awkwardly from behind the nightstand, almost knocking the lamp over. I was having trouble catching my breath, I got light-headed, almost passed out, but I held my bumpkin cross up and tried to think of a picture of Jesus with lambs behind him looking up at the sky. To my surprise, Margaret had a reaction to the cross; she turned away from it, not hissing like in the movies I would see later, but sort of hitching like she was being racked with sobs. Anyway, she moved away from the window. I was tempted to look after her to see if she was gone for real, but I didn’t think it was smart to get close to it—I could just imagine her punching a fist through the glass and grabbing my wrist or something.
I sat there, my heart pounding. “You’ll stop dirtyin’ that cross with your little Jew hand and you’ll open this window for me or else,” I heard her say. I wasn’t sure where she was. “Or else what?” I said, not smarty-pants-like, I really wanted to know what she was going to do to me.
“Or it’ll go worse for you.”
“Worse than what? What do you want?”
“I just want to hold you in my arms, little Joey. Just to squeeze you tight, wee little prince that you are. And I will. Make no mistake about it. Be it tonight, tomorrow, or next month. I got nothing but time now, thanks to you. Open this window and it’ll stop tonight, and it’ll stop with you.”
I had the urge to call for my dad, but what was I going to say? An Irish vampire is threatening me outside my window? No . . . but maybe an Irish thief was plausible.
I got up then, made my way to my parents’ bedroom, tried the doorknob. Locked. I knocked gently. “Dad?”
“What,” he said, almost immediately. They hadn’t been sleeping.
“I think there’s somebody trying to get into the house.”
“What? Are you sure?”
“I think so. An Irishman.”
I realized that sounded flimsy the second it stumbled out of my mouth. I bit my lower lip, looked behind me down the hall to make sure Margaret wasn’t coming. The floor runner, usually cheerful with its Turkish birds or whatever, looked foreboding, like the carpet they roll out for your murder. It seemed to go forever.
“How do you know he’s Irish?”
Good question, Pop.
“Because I think I saw Margaret. I think she wants to get back at us.”
My mom mumbled something low and fast and the springs creaked and the floorboards creaked and then the closet door opened, and I knew what that meant. I tried to peek through the keyhole for a minute, but then I heard Solly yapping. Really barking this time. I glanced back down the hall, and there stood Elise. My heart almost hiccupped out of my mouth.
“Elise,” I stage-whispered, “make sure the . . .”
Doors are locked, I was going to say, but she interrupted me, speaking in a wet slur. “Forgot something,” she said. Was she drunk? Was she drooling?
“Who forgot something?”
“Hurry up, Edwin,” I heard my mom say from behind their door. “They’re in the cigar box.”
Solly stopped barking.
Elise wound up and spoke again, looking toward me rather than at me. “Marg’it. Marg’it forgot. Her necklace.”
I heard the sound of a shotgun shell dropping on the hardwood floor, Mom saying, “Edwin!” Then I saw her. She was in the house. Margaret, looming up just behind Elise. Grinning with those awful teeth.
I tried to say “Dad!” but nothing came out. I held up the cross. Margaret looked away, but whispered something Elise heard. Elise blundered forward, her face almost apologetic, and grabbed the kite-frame cross away from me, snapping it over her knee. For as clumsy as she was, she was fast and strong. I couldn’t stop her, and we made a ruckus.
The key slotted into the door, turned it so it swung inward, revealing my pajama-legged father holding the short, double-barreled shotgun he shot partridges with.
“What’s going on?” my dad said.
Margaret was gone. Just gone. All he saw was a drooly maid with broken sticks in her hand.
“Elise, what is the meaning of this?” my mother said, pushing her back. Elise seemed to come unplugged. She looked at the broken kite frame in her hands as if it had just appeared there. My pop moved past her, drawing back the hammers of the shotgun. He went room to room, clearly meaning to check the whole house.
My mother was running a string of “I want an explanation”s and “Do not ignore me”s at Elise, who seemed completely out of it.
“Be careful,” I yelled to my dad, suddenly wondering if his sixteen-gauge full of birdshot would do any good against the ghoul I had seen. My interjection caused Elise to stir. Though still heavily charmed, she now became aware of me, and she considered me with an offended drunkard’s dawning contempt.
“You look at me when I’m talking to you,” my mother told the back of her head.
That seemed to decide it. Elise, wrinkling up her face like a baby about to have a tantrum, cleared the space between us in two steps and jammed the broken end of the kite into my thigh. Leaned into it. She should have worked the harpoon on a whaling boat. It stuck deep. I leaned against the wall, shocked past speech. My father was downstairs already. My mother, afraid to strike the crazed woman, just stared. As did I. The puncture was only just starting to hurt, and didn’t bleed yet—that would come later.
Regaining some composure, Elise stood up straight, said, “Excuse me,” and walked upstairs, locking herself in her room. When the police came, she was already packed and as ready to check into jail or the looney bin as any college freshman was to move into his dorm. Not that I saw this. I was on my way to the hospital.
* * *
Everybody decent has a guy like Walther in his life: a guy who comes over when you call in the middle of the night. He’s the guy who loans you money and never asks for it back, the guy who tells the cop your kid was with him when he was really getting in trouble; he’s the guy who takes your wife and son to the emergency room. Walther ran Dad’s flagship store on Broadway; he was a big guy, about fifty, had met Teddy Roosevelt, spoke Spanish ’cause he lived in Cuba for a while, made a hell of a pork roast that tasted like garlic and oranges.
“Take them to St. Vincent’s while I wait for the police,” Dad said, and that’s all he had to say. Walther had his hat on before he hung up his phone. When Uncle Walt, as I knew him, showed up, Dad had already put a tourniquet on my leg. My pants were getting all spotty with blood now. Mom was shrieking through the locked door at Elise with one shoe on and one in her hand.
“Go with Walt, Leah,” Dad said, mostly because he didn’t want to hear her anymore. Too bad for me and Uncle Walt. Mom put her shoe on. Walt carried me downstairs. On our street, West 11th, a lady in pearls, a fox fur, and iridescent stockings was passing by with her man-friend, but she went white and said, “Oh, my, oh my” when she saw the stick sticking out of me. I remember trying to smile at her, but the man-friend hurried her along. Walther bundled Mom and me in the back of his car, saying, “Don’t you worry, kid, they’ll fix you right up for Saturday baseball. Wanna stick a’ gum?” I shook my head no. “Shouldn’ta said stick, huh?” He mussed my hair. Whatever Walt drove, I didn’t know cars then, it was a big car that smelled like leather and Cuban puros. I remember that.
Then my mom fixed everything.
“Do
n’t take him to St. Vincent’s. My family uses Beth Israel.”
“Leah, it’s farther.”
“He’s not dying, Walter, and Beth Israel is more sanitary. I read an article.”
Thanks to that article, if there was an article, I was driven to the thirteen-story medical wonder near Stuyvesant Park where Beth Israel had relocated in ’29. A new, sanitary building with first-rate doctors, shiny bowls to catch the blood in, and freshly painted walls uncluttered with pictures of saints.
And not a mother-loving crucifix in sight.
A word about the cross business: They work on vampires if those vampires believe in them. Margaret, like Cvetko, was Catholic as hell, and a cross will turn and maybe burn either one of them. Me? If I’m coming after you and you pull out your rosary, good luck. I can juggle ’em. But for the newly minted vampire Margaret McMannis, formerly of Connemara, Ireland, where the only comforts were High Mass and killing weevils, St. Vincent’s would have been like Fort Knox.
* * *
“So, you made a new friend tonight, did you?” the doctor said, looking things over under the bright light while his nurse snipped open my pants leg and dabbed with her swab. It was really starting to hurt and I whimpered. “There, there,” he said, his tidy mustache sitting on his upper lip, shaved down so it didn’t crowd his nose. A young guy. I thought about him later. I thought they might have shipped him out in the next war where he’d see things that would make him miss his Beth Israel anginas and dog bites and kite sticks in legs.
“That’s right, she stabbed him,” my mother said for the third or fourth time, “like a savage. Just not like a civilized person at all.”
“Well, I’m sure the police will sort that out, Mrs. Peacock, and, with your permission, I’ll sort this out.”
She took the hint and sat down.
He sorted me out pretty well, truth be told; it hurt like a bastard, but he was quick and tidy, got the stick out (boy, did it bleed), made sure the puncture was clear of splinters and swabbed out with disinfectant. Talked to me the whole time. I remember being fascinated with the greenish area between his mustache and his nose, thinking it must take a surgeon to shave a line that neat in a space so small, and I was tempted to try to count the little black follicles there; this guy was hairy, could have grown a big King Solomon beard if he tried.
The Lesser Dead Page 6
