“No, you wouldn’t give any babies away, would you? How did you keep it quiet? And where was he born—That was when you were at REVELATION, right?”
“Yes,” she said.
Vliet’s turn to close his eyes. He saw a bearded figure, bloodied sword in hand. Christ, he thought. “But this didn’t come out with the rest of the garbage at the trial.”
“Only Orion and Genesis knew.”
“Orion dead, Genesis never speaking.” Vliet nodded.
“Genesis was different then. He helped me.”
“Other people there must’ve seen. Known.”
“The baby was seven months. I never got huge or anything. And Genesis asked me not to tell. He has this thing about collecting secrets. Orion guessed, but he was the only one. Vliet, I feel guilty, so guilty.”
“About what?”
“The baby.”
“Why?”
She stared at him, surprised. “He’s dead.”
“But it’s not your fault, Cricket.” He paused. “Why didn’t you tell Caroline and Gene? They never would’ve thrown you out. They would’ve helped.”
“With a D&C,” she said.
After a moment he said, “I suppose so. Cricket, you should’ve let me in on it.”
“You would’ve helped the same?” She gazed questioningly at him. His eyebrows raised in helpless, hopeless affirmation. “Vliet, you just had finished telling me if I ever mentioned, well, the incident, you wouldn’t be able to look at me. Ever again. And that was one thing I couldn’t stand. Not seeing you. How could I tell you? There was everything to lose.”
She’d been barely sixteen. He took the top cookie from her stack, and centering it carefully on waxed table, inquired, “Why tell me now?”
Her small face was defeated. “I just split with David.” (A beefy, silent type, according to Caroline, and no loss at all.) “I keep going from one to the other. It’s connected with you. When I see you, that finishes everything. With everyone.”
“So this,” he managed a painful smile, “is cold turkey?”
She didn’t answer.
She was giving him a strange, impersonal look, as if she were about to photograph him. With an oink-oink here. She rose, walking around the table. The back of her long yellow skirt was rumpled.
“Cricket, hey, wait. Please.”
She didn’t turn. The door clicked shut.
He sat in a cane-bottomed chair in the Sutherlands’ pretty breakfast room, tapping a filter tip on the table. He didn’t light it. He had crept into a neutral area of self-hypnosis where time means nothing and cold pads the interior-of the skull, protecting the mind. He didn’t dare move. If he moved, there was no way of knowing which direction his brain would jump. A black cateress in uniform opened the door, clinking empties into segmented crates. She glanced curiously at him. He didn’t move.
When, finally, he rejoined the living, the party was over. Mothers zipped children’s jackets. People clustered in the hall, thanking the Sutherlands. Cold air streamed with each opening of the front door. Cricket was pulling on a brownish fur of possible rodent origin.
Cricket, a tiny girl who looked far younger than she was. A freckly girl with a bump-ended nose and yellow hair. In this house were several ladies, his own mother included, who must have looked somewhat similar at the same age. But this one had been involved in a brutal mass murder, had had an illegitimate baby for a day (fantastic telly title, he thought), and slept around. Once she had comforted him. His mother never would have considered sanctioning her body for such purpose. The family called her Cricket-the-hippie-one. Vliet thought of her as Cricket-my-little-cousin-who-loves-me. Now, for the first time, he was recognizing that she existed apart from him and his needs, in her own landscape of barren craters and dangerous, burned-out places. This separate identity made his throat ache with sadness. His fuzzy little mascot gone. Gone forever.
Caroline offered her perfumed cheek for a kiss, Gene gripped his hand. Cricket, lugging an incongruously businesslike camera bag, did not look at him as she slipped into the cold new year.
2
Two nights later, Friday at ten, Vliet stood at the Mathenys’ front door. Gene squinted through the peep. “Oh, it’s you.”
“I find myself in the neighborhood.”
“Where’ve you been the last two days?”
“I called in sick. Didn’t the trucks roll?”
“You never miss. I was worried.”
“But I wasn’t sick. Am I fired?”
Gene laughed. “It’s cold, Vliet. Come on in.”
Yellow forms were spread on the den table. In this house, Vliet was surrogate son, not a guest. Gene went back to work. Caroline, snug in a crimson-velvet caftan, watched a black-and-white movie. “They don’t make ’em like this anymore,” she said, smiling up. “Isn’t Claudette the most?” She pronounced it French-style. Clowdette. “Get yourself something to eat, luv, or drink.”
“Cricket home?”
“In her room. Go cheer her. It must be breaking up with what’s-his-name. But she’s never been like this. A blue funk.”
He hauled himself, arm over arm, up the curving metal, pausing at the dark door. He listened to her even breathing. The room was unheated. Cold penetrated his Norwegian sweater. His pupils adjusted. She was stirring.
“Hi,” he said.
“Mmmm? Vliet?”
“Yes.”
She sat up. She wore a bathrobe. “Thank you,” she said.
“For being here?” he asked.
“I didn’t think you would.”
“Not in character, is it?” he asked, sitting on the end of her single bed. “Got an ashtray?”
“Use that mug.”
It was on the floor, and he put it between his thighs, lighting a cigarette. “Why’re you in bed?”
“I was up at five thirty.”
“Early to bed, early to rise, makes a girl smaller than natural size,” he said. “Cricket, there’s a lot I need to know.”
“About the baby?”
“My son.” He gave a curious, atonal laugh. “I’ve got a few things to tell you.”
She nodded.
“We’re cousins,” he said. “But there’s nothing wrong with the family.”
“I fell. It was raining. Orion wanted me to go to the hospital. With the rain we probably wouldn’t’ve gotten there. Anyway, Genesis didn’t believe in hospitals. Vliet, I knew he didn’t.”
“You’re not in the neighborhood of guilty, Cricket. It was a simple premature birth.”
“Whose fault was that?”
“Mine.” Vliet glanced around the dim room. Neat it wasn’t. Cold it was. “Always sleep with the heat off?”
“In winter I wear my robe.”
“So I see. Cricket, know something? You’re the only girl I ever talk to. More than opening my mouth, that is.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Why?”
“It sounds so lonely.”
“It is.” He set the mug ashtray back on the carpet. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking these two days.”
“Daddy said you weren’t at work. I figured, well, I figured.…”
“That I’d split?”
“Maybe.”
“What? And give up my red-hot career?”
“Where were you?”
“Going crazy,” he said. “Listen, that’s what I wanta explain.”
Instead of explaining, however, he began to weep.
He leaned onto her bed, shaking and gasping. He wept the tears that hadn’t come since Roger’s private funeral. He wept for his twin, for poor, brave Alix, and for his unknown son. Rubbing his fists into his eye sockets, Vliet wept for Alix whom he loved and had been unable to help, he wept for an infant who had arrived on the scene too early. He wept for Cricket who was a sweet slob and lived in a room that smelled of photographic supplies. He wept for his parents who sublimated their miseries through him and therefore never could be let in on what a failure
he was. He wept for his brother, his conscience, now rotting in a hardwood casket with bronze fittings.
He wept, in truth, as we all weep. He wept for himself. Until this hour it had seemed to Vliet that Genesis had him trapped forever in that hot June day with Handel blaring. Now, though, he accepted the unvarnished verity. It wasn’t Genesis who had him trapped.
It was himself.
He wept because, at last, he had accepted his complicity. He had shoved Alix back in the cage. Given a chance, he would have done away with his only begotten son. There were times when he hated his brother, and always he’d envied him. He used people. He used Cricket and used her and used her.
Racked with guilt, Vliet wept into blankets. He could feel her crouching over him, her body warm and soft. He could hear her murmurings in his ear, not words, just comforting sounds.
I don’t need to explain, he thought. She takes on faith. She accepts. I can’t accept me, but she can.
She’ll prevent me from being a hollow man, a straw man, a swindle, a mock turtle. With her I won’t be a tin woodsman without heart or conscience, Vliet thought.
He let Cricket take over where Roger had left off.
3
When Vliet told Cricket the baby’s death had nothing to do with their being cousins, he had been quoting Dr. Bjork, Roger’s old mentor. Bjork should know. The man specialized in genetics, sickle cell and otherwise.
That New Year’s night, after Vliet had left the Sutherlands’, he had driven around the quiet western part of the city. The next two days and two nights, he had branched out, weaving and reweaving through Baldwin Hills, Thousand Oaks, Malibu, Fullerton (where Van Vliet’s Distribution Center No. 3 was), North Hollywood, West Covina, Simi Valley. The megalop loop. He had put well over a thousand miles on the Mercedes. Unable to stay still long enough to eat a meal, he would pause at Van Vliet’s—only Van Vliet’s—tearing open Frito bags with his straight white teeth, munching as he drove one-handed. He had shaved with the Remington Electric that he kept in the glove compartment. He was always on the move. He couldn’t stop. What amazed him was that Cricket’s revelation had been the final straw. He would’ve figured the murder, the trial, Alix’s trips to the country of the mad. But not this. Why this?
He’d had a son.
Thursday afternoon had found him parking on the hilly street between County General Hospital and the USC School of Medicine. Here, in a good-size office that smelled of new paint, sat that elderly genetics miracle man. Bjork. Vliet, pacing between white bookshelves and a window that overlooked a modern court, spewed out the bare story without embellishment or explanation. He spoke as plainly as he could. If he went into emotional responses, there was no knowing how he would react. Bjork’s shining skull nodded from time to time. He requested a medical history of the family. Vliet gave him a reasonably complete one. Bjork said, “We don’t know much about human genetics, you understand. But from what you’ve told me, I’d say you’ve got as good a background as is possible. In my opinion the child was premature, no more.” Wrinkled hands laced. “I can’t tell you how saddened I was about your brother. A great loss. Such a fine young man.”
“Roger, yes,” Vliet said.
Darkness had fallen. Vliet had found his way around the huge, gaudily lit hospital complex, across a bridge, and onto the nearest freeway, the San Bernardino. He had been in Upland, in a self-service station (Ladies, We Serve U), when urgency had overtaken him. Cricket, he had thought, Cricket.
Cricket was inevitable.
Others, of course, do not always see the inevitable as inevitable. Vliet knew it. His gift was oiling difficulties. He set about doing so.
The family—or most of them—were no problem. Vliet, in their minds, was too tall, too elegant for Cricket. That was all. Being first cousins seemed a rather witty quirk. Hadn’t they absorbed a Japanese artist, a handsome and rather sadistically inclined Jewish surgeon, a Communist (Gene)? They were worldly people. And thought so well of themselves that they didn’t consider themselves at all. They took for granted their large, overtaxed houses, their Revillon furs, their handmade sterling, their inherited bijouterie and gems, their Van Vliet noses and stock certificates. If two of them decided to get married, why not? As a matter of fact, there was a delicious fairy-tale aspect here. Look who had snagged their handsome, bewitchingly droll Vliet. Their very own little Cricket-the-hippie-one.
Caroline—Van Vliet to the marrow of her handsome bones—was in seventh heaven. Her child married, and no in-laws to bother anyone!
Em never had been secure like Caroline. She did not take well to the idea.
Early in March, before one of their routine Sunday dinners, Vliet said casually, “Cricket’s coming for dessert. Did I mention we’re getting married?”
The parents laughed, imagining this one of their son’s inexplicable Family-type jokes. Vliet met their eyes candidly. And silence fell in the small, overly neat living room. Em paled. Sheridan reddened, his mouth dropping open. The refrigerator kicked on, noisily.
Em spoke first. “But she’s your cousin!”
“Give us good wishes, Ma, not facts.” Vliet sounded amused at her outcry. And this added to Em’s confusion.
“Cousins don’t marry.” Sheridan had gained weight. Ponderous anger shook his double chin.
“From what I hear, Dad, cousins marry all the time. It’s legal in California. Royalty, I hear, don’t marry anyone else. Or du Ponts.”
“If,” Em hesitated. “If there are children.”
“Ma, what’s this ‘if’?”
“Vliet, we’re serious.” Sheridan straightened. His wife’s Family always had terrified and filled him with baleful envy. Vliet’s offhand explanation, royalty and du Ponts, seemed to Sheridan the ultimate decadence. Now They’re marrying only Themselves, he thought. And coming from the Midwest, he was bitterly disturbed. “The word is incest.”
“Among Catholics,” Vliet agreed. “Maybe we better get a papal dispensation.”
Sheridan’s emotions churned. A staunch anti-Catholic, he was led (as Vliet well knew) into certain interestingly progressive ideologies.
“I have it on the best authority there won’t be a single grandchild with more than one head.”
“Vliet,” Sheridan warned.
“Come on, Ma, Dad. You know you’re crazy about her.”
“Of c-course we are, Vliet.” Em, embarrassed, was positive that Vliet understood the fine points she and Sheridan were trying to get across. Yet she continued in her sober way. “We want what’s best for Cricket as well as you. What if something does h-happen? Could you ever f-forgive yourself if anything went wrong with one of the children?”
Vliet’s expression changed. He looked older, harder. He rose, pouring himself a drink. Sheridan and Em glanced at one another, the sad, knowing look that can only pass between two people bound together more by defeat than anything else. Their lives had been measured out by her bottles and his petty adulteries, their other son’s desertion and death. We better lay off, the look said. After tragedy, parents tend to become lenient. (And, too, Em for a while had suspected Vliet was seeing “her.”) She went into the kitchen and held tight to the sink. When Sheridan came in and put his fleshy arm around her, she did not shake him off.
Gene’s objections were on a profound level. The matter of consanguinity bothered him very little. His wife’s family was in good health, mental and physical as well as financial. He, however, had been the fool bestrewing Van Vliet ledgers with large black figures. He had, in his own mind, betrayed his life. He didn’t care to see Cricket embark on a similar venture. A vacant alliance. He loved Vliet, but that did not prevent him from seeing the younger man for what he was, a charming egotist, a driving and unscrupulous businessman who was lacking in a way that Gene never could quite put a finger on. Gene would, he told himself, far rather have any of Cricket’s quiet, stumbling young men of various races, colors, and religions for a son-in-law.
The wet March Monday after the enga
gement had been thrown casually at him, Gene waited for the rain to stop. He crossed the puddled loading area to the warehouses. He went directly to Vliet’s office. Vliet, on the phone, said, “I’ll get back to you, Dave,” and hung up. “Gene?” he said.
“Why Cricket?” Gene asked.
Vliet sat down, looking at the man in front of his desk. Gene could have called him, could have forced him into the large, awe-invoking presidential office, but that would have been against Gene’s principles. Gene, the boss with ulcers and a liberal’s Achilles heel.
“You must’ve noticed, Gene. We’ve always been fond of one another,” Vliet said.
“Not to marry,” Gene replied, and sat on the cheap Naugahyde. “She’s nothing you look for in a girl. She’s not pretty, my Cricket.”
“That’s not paternal, Gene.”
“I’m her father, I love her. I’m not blind. And you haven’t answered my question.”
“After all these years, you’re not about to play the heavy father, are you, Gene?”
Gene pressed his thumbnail to his lower lip. He was severe with himself. And in his book, interfering with a child’s marriage was despicable. Yet he kept his probing gray eyes on Vliet.
Vliet turned away. “For Christ’s sake, Gene, let it be, let it be.” He spoke harshly. No part of any plan. The words had spilled out.
Gene had known Vliet since he was born, and had seen him in every kind of situation. This was a voice he’d never heard. Whose? A stranger’s, lost, despairing.
Then Vliet was turning, extending his hand with a smile. “Come on, think. You’re getting Dad for a relation.”
Gene gripped his nephew’s extended hand.
Rain had started, harder now. Gene ran around trucks. He was back at his desk, his feet wet, thinking how little he knew of the human heart. That implausible misery in Vliet had been brief. And unforgettable. Gene wished he’d been more tolerant, kinder. Some writer I’d’ve been, he thought, forever reworking material to make myself sound noble and just. He kept a pair of socks here, and he was pulling them on when he realized he was praying. An agnostic’s prayer to his dubious God: If You exist, let her help him, let her be able to help him.
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