The woman was about to protest.
“I’m happy your boy is all right.”
“You’re all right, Lizzie, my love,” Dustin echoed happily. His father squeezed his shoulders.
“But it was just a coincidence. A very happy coincidence.”
The woman would not be swayed. “Have you looked into his eyes?” she said.
It was a queer comment. “Looked into his eyes? What do you mean?”
The woman smiled. “You haven’t, have you?”
“I . . . I can’t. He’s autistic. They don’t make eye contact.”
“But you saw him just now,” said the woman. “Didn’t you? He may be autistic, but he looked into my eyes. And he showed me.”
“Showed you? Showed you what?” said Dr. Gray, becoming increasingly uncomfortable.
“The stars,” said the woman. “The face of God.”
Things were rapidly devolving into hysteria. Dr. Gray seized Dustin by the hand and led him away. “I’m sorry,” he said over his shoulder. “I’m sorry for . . . I’m glad your son is all right.”
“Wait!” the woman called. “What’s his name? Where do you live?”
That information, thought Dr. Gray, you couldn’t pry from me under torture. He broke into a run, pulling his son behind him.
“What did she mean by that?” Dr. Gray asked aloud as they arrived at home and stepped up onto the porch. “Stars in his eyes.” He laughed an uncomfortable laugh. “Are there stars in your eyes, Dustin?” Dustin didn’t reply. He was slapping the flat of his palm against his forehead in cadence with their footsteps. Step, slap, step, slap.
But something had happened. Dustin had been attentive to the whole tragedy. He had taken a voluntary action. He had spoken complete sentences. Something had happened.
They sat down on the white wicker sofa to the left of the front door, father and son, side by side, the elder lost in his thoughts, the younger apparently lost in thoughtlessness. Suddenly there was a loud thump behind them. A robin had flown into the picture window. It was always happening. How many tiny, feathered corpses had he picked up over the years. Ten? Twenty? Their necks limp and broken. He reached down and picked this one up. It was dead.
He hadn’t imagined Dustin was remotely aware of what had happened, and was surprised when the boy reached out and took the bird. Dr. Gray’s first thought was to snatch it back, to shield his son from yet another glimpse of death, but he saw that, once again, Dustin was attentive, staring at the bird, holding it by the head, letting its body swing limply. The boy was smiling. He cupped the bird’s face between his thumbs. “It’s all right, Lizzie, my love,” he whispered. “You’re going to be all right.”
The bird’s eyes opened. It hung there for a moment, staring in apparent surprise, until Dustin released it, and it flew away.
Dr. Gray ran into the house, the door slamming behind him. He told Nanny to fetch Dustin from the porch. That he would be in his study, not to be disturbed. Of the events of the day, he said nothing. Whatever secrets had been born in that weird, contorted hour, he was determined to keep to himself.
That night, when everyone else was asleep, he went to his son’s room. He often had in the past, though less frequently as time went by. It was the only time he ever saw the strange, distant boy in repose. Watching him there now, still and quiet in the soft glow of the nightlight, with his eyes closed and his favorite stuffed animal tucked under his arm, it was easy to imagine he was a normal, healthy child. He knelt at the bedside and—as he used to do in their early years together, sometimes for many minutes on end for his son was a sound sleeper—stroked Dustin’s fine, golden hair, so like his mother’s.
All afternoon Dr. Gray had been struggling to reconcile what he had seen with what he knew to be impossible and had, at last, confirmed to his own satisfaction that it had all been coincidence.
“Are there stars in your eyes, my boy?” he said softly, with that same, sad-edged hopeless smile that accompanied all his comments to the boy.
He was startled when Dustin awoke. More startled that he was staring directly at him, smiling, with large, unblinking eyes. Stupefied when the boy put his small, soft hands on his cheeks and pulled him so close he could feel the child’s breath. “It’s all right, Lizzie, my love,” Dustin said, his words barely audible. “It’s going to be all right.”
It was the first time Dr. Gray had looked into his son’s eyes. And there were stars there. All the stars of heaven. Every nebula. Every galaxy. Every sparkling impossibility in infinite array displayed more clearly than he had ever seen them in his telescope. But they were different. They were backwards.
Or had be been looking at them backwards all along?
In Which We Say “Good-Bye”
Morning of the last day
Upon awaking in the same room in which he’d begun his residency in the mansion, Rat was not surprised to find himself alone. Alone, that is, in the empirical sense, for no sooner had the residue of his wits coalesced to awareness, than he perceived another Presence in the room. Directing his remark toward a smudge in the immediate atmosphere, he spoke:
“Cummings?”
“Yes, sir?” said the smudge.
Rat studied the anomaly. “Like the virtue of the prom queen on the morning after the ball, there is not much of you remaining.”
“No, sir.”
A silver serving tray floated in the air about midway up the apparition. The same silver salver upon which Cummings had, morning after morning, proffered breakfasts of such comestibles as the island afforded and whereupon, in keeping with that tradition, the final repast currently resided.
“But you are not troubled. You have taken my recent comments re: invisibility to heart and have come to accept that you are simply metamorphosing, in the manner patented by the chrysalis, from one state of being to another.”
“Transmunessing is the term you suggested, sir. I find it not susceptible to improvement.” Invisible hands arranged the breakfast items on a bedside table. “When taken in accompaniment with your suggestion that I am being called to a realm of yet higher service, I find a philosophy—a perspective, if you will—at once eminently probable and altogether appealing.”
“I can deduce nothing else from available evidence,” said Rat breezily, knowing that, for all his butlery aplomb, Cummings had had to grapple with certain difficulties he had imagined as a result of being invisible, which, he thought, was not a trait he would underscore on his curriculum vitae.
There was nothing to suggest that Cummings was nearing an emotional precipice of any sort, but one never knew with butlers. As a breed, they were known to play their cards pretty close to the vest. Who knew what seething cauldrons, what roiling compote of emotional magma lay just beneath so starched, pressed, and pleated an exterior? What extremes of ecstasy and despondency might lurk just beneath the surface, or how delicate a touch on certain sensitive areas might, in season, fissure that tranquil surface and so decorate the precincts with erupted butler? Rat continued, therefore, breezily.
“There are certain patterns, however obtuse, to our peregrinations, Cummings,” he said. “I refer not only to our experience upon this island, but to our lives of shuffling, in general, upon this mortal coil.”
“It seems not unreasonable to suppose that is the case, sir.”
“And equally reasonable to deduce therefrom that your invisibility is a prelude to something else. Something ‘other.’” Rat bracketed the air with his fingers, giving his last word an otherworldly emphasis. “I wish I could be there, wherever ‘there’ is, when you arrive, Cummings, no doubt to be met by legions of foregoing fellow butlers, under butlers, housekeepers, parlor maids, footmen, handymen, tweenies, cooks, scullery maids and an assortment of buxom serving wenches with heaving bodices. The din should be considerable. You must send me a postcard.”
“Which begs the question, if I may sir,” said Cummings, who was finding the flawless decanting of the tea a challenge, given his invisi
bility. “To whom should I direct such an epistle should the opportunity and inclination so present themselves?”
“Oh, that is no mystery,” said Rat, who had not, since awakening, even thought to seek out the mirror for its testimony of his soul’s condition. He knew what he had become and, quite frankly, was eager to get on with it. “And will no doubt become apparent ere the curtain descends upon our little drama.”
He became thoughtful as he sipped the juice. “Nectar,” he editorialized. “Well squeezed, Cummings.”
Cummings, aware that invisibility would obscure the fact, blushed unabashedly, yet of self-satisfaction his perfectly modulated, well-rounded words of reply—proceeding from the base of the diaphragm—betrayed not the slightest hint. “I am pleased you find the beverage satisfactory, sir.”
Another silence ensued, during which Cummings made such little arrangements as he deemed necessary, leaving the Occupant, who had fallen into a brown study, to ruminate.
“I am turning things over in my mind, Cummings,” said Rat at last.
“It is important to aerate the cerebellic soil from time to time, sir. You have discovered something?”
“Merely an observation; this being that the Powers That Be don’t seem to go in for celebration in a big way.”
“Celebration, sir?”
“Yes, Cummings. My recent mention of the festivities likely to attend your arrival in whatever world you’re off to brought to mind rather poignantly the dearth of dancing girls, the blockage of the fountains of joy, if you will; the lack of an enthusiastic populace crowding the avenues waving flags and ribbons with wild abandon at the happy news of my soul’s reclamation.”
“Oh,” said Cummings. “I see, sir. You feel so noteworthy an event should not go unheralded.”
“Just a thought,” said Rat, observing in the room’s decor a remarkable absence of ceremonial bunting, and of confetti, not a trace. “It is of no importance, I’m sure. A deficit of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
“Theologians suggest, sir,” said Cummings reassuringly, “that there is, amongst inhabitants of the heavenly realms, much activity of the kind you suggest at the heartfelt repentance of a lost sinner.”
“I suppose one must take that as read. An article of faith.”
“Yes, sir.”
It was at this juncture the door opened, admitting another entity, to which Rat reacted with some alarm, banishing all thoughts of celebration or lack thereof.
“Cummings, we have amongst us a diminutive female person.”
“Yes, sir. I have noted so.” That Rat felt further explanation should be forthcoming was indicated by a severe arch to his left eyebrow. “She did not come to the island in a conventional manner, sir. In short, I don’t know how she got here. As she either cannot, or chooses not, to speak, I have been unable to ascertain her name. Nor is there any other evidence from which I have been able to deduce her raison d’être.”
Rat, sitting up in bed and, gathering the sheets modestly about him, studied the girl closely. “There’s something familiar about her. You haven’t noticed a pachyderm in the vicinity, by any chance?” He was alluding to an earlier episode of his adventures in which a person of similar composition—another young, black female with forlorn eyes—and an elephant had figured prominently.
“No, sir,” Cummings replied, somewhat bemused at the suggestion.
“No large, pie-shaped indentations in the topsoil?”
“No, sir,” said Cummings, mastering his perplexity only just in time to keep it from creasing his invisible pate.
“No,” said Rat, perusing the exhibit more closely. “No, it is not Bedpinny.”
“Bedpinny, sir?”
“Never mind,” said Rat. “Nevertheless, there is something familiar about her, as I said.”
“I felt so, too, sir, though it is a likeness upon which I cannot place my finger.”
Rat climbed out of bed and, ignoring the first impression that might be suggested by his red silk pajamas, got down on one knee before the girl, who responded by seizing Cummings’ hand, seeming to take in stride that it was invisible and pressing herself into the smudge that he had become.
“She has been following me for days, sir, as I went about my chores.”
As Rat studied her closely, it dawned upon him where he had seen the face before. He leaned back sharply upon his haunches. “Good heavens!”
“You know who she is, sir?”
Rat’s heart was thumping with unaccustomed rigor. “I suspect, Cummings.” He leaned forward, reaching out slowly to take the girl by her fingers. “What’s your name, my love?” he said softly.
The child said nothing.
“Who is she, sir?” Cummings asked. Evidently the question had been much in his mind of late. “I cannot imagine one so young has been brought here for rehabilitation. Yet these are the only type of guests I have . . . entertained.”
“If I surmise aright, Cummings, she is my mother’s granddaughter.”
Cummings performed a quick mental scan of Rat’s genealogical record. “But, you are an only child, sir. Are you not?”
“I am.”
“Then . . .” said Cummings. “Then . . . this is your daughter!” Had he allowed himself more time in which to form a response, this would have been a question. As it was, it was impossible to edit the exclamation point.
“Hence the familiarity,” said Rat. “Notice the distinctive shape of her face,” he said, drawing his thumb gently across the child’s cheek, “the slight, attractive bulge at the crown of the nose, the dignified curve of the chin. These are not racial, but familial traits. Inspect my visage, Cummings. You will perceive the same traits thereon.”
“So I do, sir,” said Cummings, as breathlessly as could be managed by an invisible butler. “And so they are.”
“Her eyes, however, are her mother’s.”
“Her mother’s, sir? You are married?”
“No, Cummings. Nor have I ever been. Nevertheless, of the likelihood that I am the paternal parent of the female unit you see before you there can be no doubt.”
“I see, sir.”
“I’m sure you do,” said Rat, then proceeded to explain. “Like others of my make and model, I once subscribed to the presumption that, because I had the shape of a man, because I had attained those rights society accords as a mark of adulthood, because the juices of life flowed through the plumbing, that I was a man. I dispensed of those juices freely, I regret to say, as if such activities were a testament to my manhood. Such is not the case, Cummings. Manhood is more than plumbing.”
“Significantly, sir.”
“You may write that down. It is an observation worthy of posterity.”
“I shall do so as soon as the necessary implements present themselves, sir.”
Rat squeezed the girl’s fingers lightly and was rewarded with a very slight, hesitant smile. “Her mother, if I am not mistaken, is—or was—a waitress at the IHOP in Poughkeepsie. Note the almond shape to her eyes. Very distinctive.”
“Yes, sir,” said Cummings, who had formed an attachment to the child. “I have noted them. A remarkable feature. You will not take offense, sir, if I suggest she is as cute as a button?”
“By no means, my good man. I concur heartily in the assessment and would amend it thusly: she is cute as a box full of buttons.”
Cummings looked on in respectful silence for some moments as Rat absorbed this new reality. “I may presume, sir,” he said delicately, “that you were not aware a child had resulted from your . . . from your . . .”
“Hadn’t a clue,” said Rat. “Her mother and I did not have what one could describe as a deep and meaningful relationship. We did not keep up correspondence.”
“I understand, sir.”
For a long time Rat and the child studied one another. “I am a father, Cummings.”
“May I congratulate you, sir?” Cummings asked, and he meant it. He was not sure how the notion of fatherhood would sett
le with the Resident.
“You may, Cummings,” Rat replied. There was a softness to his voice and, if Cummings was not mistaken, a certain mistiness about his eyes. “It is no coincidence that the final installment of our little serial had much to do with fatherhood.”
“Indeed, sir?”
“Indeed, Cummings,” said Rat. “It is as if the scribe who churns out these little vignettes, doubtless aware that I had no father, was, in some poor way, attempting to illustrate the finer points of fatherhood in preparation of this eventuality.”
“Most considerate, sir.”
“The child therein was unique.”
“Should not all fathers regard their children as such, sir?”
“They should, Cummings,” Rat concurred, “yet this particular child possessed an extra dimension of uniqueness in that he was autistic.”
“Autistic, sir?”
“A mental condition, Cummings, wherein the wiring of the brain gets crossed.” Not unlike Tomichya, he remembered, whose adventure had more or less inaugurated his residency.
“Ah.”
“A mark of the condition is often the inability to speak, or to speak articulately,” said Rat. He looked at the girl. “You say she hasn’t said anything?”
“No, sir.”
“Do you suppose she’s autistic?”
“I have no medical knowledge, sir. Therefore, should I advance any opinion on the subject, it would be suspect. She has a healthy appetite, at least. I would say, though, that she seems a bright enough young person. While she hasn’t spoken, she takes instruction well, such as when I would ask her to water the oleander or hand me the Digby’s Eminent Statuary Polish. She is most willing to be of service.”
“Therefore, you are doubtless wondering, how could she possibly be my daughter?”
Cummings inhaled to protest.
“Nay, Cummings. ‘tis true. Mine was not the soul of a servant, yet much has happened to remedy that shortcoming.” Now, at last, he looked at the mirror and, surveying the still life of his soul therein, smiled. “I have changed and, if I may be so bold, not for the worse.”
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