by Lauren Groff
“I don’t know,” I said. “It all depends on you.”
“Me?” he said. There was a longer pause, and then I heard the smile in his voice. “You’re not saying,” he said, “that I’m the father?”
“Yes, I am saying exactly that,” I said.
“No, no. I cannot be.”
“There is no one else. It’s impossible. Nobody else.”
“But you’re entirely sure?”
“I’ve only slept with you since December,” I said. “Yes, I’m fucking sure. There’s no one else.”
“Oh, Willie,” said Primus Dwyer heaving out a sigh. “But, you see, it cannot be me. I had a vasectomy many, many years ago, my poor darling. My wife, she never wanted children. I have a sperm count of zero, darling. It cannot be me. It must be someone else.”
“There is no one else,” I said, in a whisper.
“There must be,” he said.
“No,” I said.
“I’m sure if you thought of it, you’d come up with someone. At a party or something, you know. Might have slipped your mind. Now, Willie, I really must go. I shall try to call again. In the meantime, I expect to see you in my office on the first day of school. Will you be fine, darling? Oh, I am sure you will. You’re a tough cookie, as they say. A biscotti! Ha. All right, then. Good-bye, darling.”
“Slipped my mind?” I said, but there was already the click, and he was gone. I took a deep breath. “Slipped my mind?” I said again into the long silence, into the nothing, into the great, terrible, dark nothing buzzing in my ear.
FOR A LONG time, I sat there, tempted to call Clarissa. But every time I lifted the phone off the hook, I had an image of her little body, in bed, exhausted. I couldn’t do it. I climbed the dark stairs and went to my room.
And even though I felt emptied, even though I wanted to weep into my pillow until it was soaked through and gnash my teeth, even though the old ghost was there, in a sweet and tender lilac, I crawled into bed, and opened a book I had brought with me and began to read Jacob’s purplish prose. The writing seemed like the books that held it; crumbly and antique and bearing the stink of centuries. Still, it was compelling. His voice was smooth and kind, and once in a while an observation would ring so true it vibrated like flicked crystal.
That night, Jacob Franklin Temple sang me a lullabye in his queer and convoluted syntax. The ghost ringed around me tighter, squeezing the air in me closer, throbbing me calm. Thus comforted, thus spun back centuries before my wounded heart, I fell asleep sometime before dawn.
THE DINING ROOM was lit like a lantern by the midmorning light when I heard the voices, the urgency in them. I awoke with a start and was out of my bed before I knew what I was doing, and had already started down the stairs when I heard my mother and Reverend Milky arguing. I stopped at the edge of the ancient Persian rug in the dining room to eavesdrop. My mother’s coffee cake was sending out warm feelers into the air, but there was no happiness in the house, not then. When my mother’s voice rose, I moved crab-wise toward the corner cabinet.
As I listened, I picked up the little horse toy from the dining table and held it absently in my hands. My gut had started to cramp again, and I studied the horse to take my mind off the jabs of pain.
My mother’s voice was touched with acid as she said, “John, I notice you don’t have any children. So, really, you don’t know what you’re talking about. So, really, we should change the subject, shouldn’t we.”
“Oh, Vivienne,” said Reverend Milky. “Nothing is gained by running away from this subject. It is dire that we try to save your daught…”
“…right,” said my mother, “but a whole lot is gained by running away from other subjects, like the one I keep bringing up with you but you don’t want to hear. Like, for example, why you can’t seem to muster up the slightest interest in…”
“…Vivienne,” came Milky’s voice, and the oleaginous outline to his voice was gone now. “Don’t begin this again. I am a man of the Word, and my own word, and I cannot until we’re married. I’ve offered a million times. If you’d only agree to…”
“…as you know, John, I don’t believe in…”
“…I understand, though I have to say it’s a real slap in the face. I don’t understand what’s so terribly wrong with me that you don’t want to marr…”
“…and I don’t see what the problem is, John—it’s just a little skin and a few fluids, and…”
“…well, I don’t see how, then, we’re going to solve this little impasse, Vivienne. Sex before marriage is a sin, and as a Christian, you should know this. I love you, but not enough to damn my everlasting soul. Besides, how would I be able to lead my flock if I were not to adhere to the rules I preach?”
My mother sucked in her breath sharply, and let it out with a hiss. “Then I,” said Vi, “don’t see why we are in a relationship at all, John.”
There was a very long silence, and the beam of light dug into the cabinet, catching a bowl of ruby glass and igniting it so it seemed to explode. The silence lasted until the beam moved into an indigo vase and blasted petals of color onto the far wall.
At last, Reverend Milky said in a voice so sad that even I felt a little sorry for him, “Well, Vivienne. If that is what you want, then I find I can’t protest.”
“Okay, then,” said my mother.
“Okay,” said Reverend Milky. “Well, then. Please make sure your daughter reads those pamphlets I brought over.”
“Right,” said Vi. There was a sound of fabric shifting, feet shuffling. I heard the tread across the kitchen and into the mudroom, where Milky was sliding his shoes onto his feet. Then the door to the garage opened and closed and I heard my mother heave one sob, then catch herself, fiercely, before another happened.
I stood there in the dining room, listening to her move around the kitchen for some time, the thwick of her slippers on the tile. I was watching the little horse, glorious now in the moving sun, when my mother shuffled into the dining room and over to me. Her face was red, and her hands bulged.
“Reverend Milky said to give you these pamphlets,” she said. Then she threw the shreds into the air and they spun and fell around me like so much godly confetti.
Jesu, said an orange snippet that fell on my sleeve. oad to salvatio said a pink one that fell on my lip. oves you said a sky blue piece that settled in my hand.
I kissed my mother on the cheek, and she ran her hand over the horse’s little mane. “I’ve always loved that old horsey,” she said, the thin string of her mouth beginning to quiver. She put her head on my shoulder. When she pulled her hand away from the toy, her fingerprint remained on its tiny glass eye, thin as a membrane, round as a spore.
THAT DAY, MY mother’s sadness took a heavy form, as if her hands and feet and head were stuffed with lead shot, and were too weighty for her to lift. I found her staring at nothing in particular, or stroking the iron cross around her neck. She didn’t go to church the next morning, which was Sunday, but I saw her praying everywhere.
I heard her say in a whisper as she went past my room at night, “Save us, Lord…” and she trailed off as she passed. I heard her pray for herself, for me, for the monster. For Glimmey was the Earth’s only good soul, we were told by a smelly, apocalyptic shaman who had begun to camp out in Lakefront Park a week earlier, drawn like a fly by the news of the beast. When I walked by and gave him a dollar on Main Street one day, he snatched my hand, and his fingers were tanned and gnarled as oak twigs. He and Piddle Smalley, the town loco, sat across from each other all day, engaged in a furious battle of glares, Piddle driven even madder by the shaman on his turf; and when the shaman grabbed my hand, Piddle gave a low yowl.
So my mother prayed for Glimmey, and she prayed for the shaman, and she prayed for poor, soaked Piddle Smalley. She prayed for my invisible father, for him to have the strength to understand when I came to him and told him I was his daughter. She prayed for the Lump, that I would be able to have the courage to do what needed to be d
one. She prayed a great deal for me. The night of their blowup, she even prayed for Reverend Milky, that he would unbend a little and learn to freaking relax. She caught me listening to that particular prayer and turned away with the trace of a guilty smile on her face.
My own sorrow was light, ghostly. It kept me reading through the Jacob Franklin Temple canon, through the popular books and onto the obscure ones, trying to escape its damp grasp. When I called Clarissa, she was knee-deep in her own set of books, and her voice had taken on that abstracted, cottony tone she used when she was heavily into something. “Willie,” she said. “Some of this is amazing stuff. Haven’t found anything yet, but I’m kind of digging old JFT. Maybe I’ll do an article on him, or something.” I was glad for her, but after I hung up I punched my pillow when I thought of Primus. Even though had I tried to work up my fury against him on the predawn runs I began taking again, I started to see him everywhere. He was in the fog gently scooping up from the morning lake, in a cup of daisy ribbed with shadow, in the bearlike forms of old-men baseball fans as they walked up and down Main Street, in the vast purple rain clouds that descended on the town, drenching the Running Buds so their shirts were opaque, and their nipples were visible, tender as the snouts of mice. I saw him as my mother and I sat in silence on the back porch, looking at the glimmer of moon on the lake, and eating mint chocolate chip ice cream. His face, imprinted on the far hills. I blinked him away, and said, “Remember when I was little, Vi. All those times when we sat here and ate our sugar-free soy mint chocolate chip. Remember our little mantra?”
And my mother gave a sigh and smiled for the first time since her fight with Reverend Milky. “I remember,” she said, “when we were done, you used to wait for me to put my bowl down and say ‘Ah, now that’s the taste of summer.’ Then you’d laugh hysterically for no reason. I never understood why.”
“Well?” I said.
“Well, what?” she said.
“Say it,” I said.
“No, Willie,” my mother said, standing and lifting my bowl into hers. “It doesn’t make sense. No matter how you act when you’re home, you’re not a little kid anymore.” Then she disappeared inside, and slid the great glass door behind herself.
I used to laugh, I remembered as I sat there alone in the overcast night, because no matter how many tiny changes happened to my body, no matter how many small shifts happened in Templeton, my mother always said the same thing at the same moment, in the same way, with the same great gusto. I found my glee in the fact that she was constant; that, alone in the world, Vi would never, ever change.
23
Richard Temple
MY PARENTS MET General Washington once, when I was a child in arms. My dear mother was young then, happy; my father was at work on his first Templeton, the one in New Jersey. As the noise of the revolution grew near, all the townspeople fled, save my parents, who owned the village and ran the inn.
One day, there came a knock on the door. When my father opened it, General Washington stood on the step. He bowed. My father bowed. The general entered, and he was such a gentleman he did not act surprised when he saw me, though I was hairy as a little monkey, even then. He sang me a lullabye and dandled me on his lap before he retired for the evening. Many years later, in the second Templeton in New York, my father told all who would listen about Washington in a hushed and wondering voice, made more quiet because he was normally so extremely loud. A man who radiated goodness, he said; a great, good man.
But to me the story is only complete when a second tale is told afterward, that of the Hessian Colonel Van Dunop, fighting for England. Like Washington, this colonel knocked, came into the inn. I remember his weasel’s face and his long yellowed nails. Unlike Washington, this fine gentleman did, in fact, startle when he looked upon me. He made a distasteful face, asked my mother to take me away. I was harassing his appetite, he said, waggling his nails in my direction. My father, in his wrath, slipped a little tart emetic in his hare pie. The colonel was so ill that the American rebels easily won the battle the next day.
Years later, after my father’s death, I told my wife, Anna, these two stories, intending to make her laugh. She was brushing her hair before bed, and I was muddling my hand in the blond cascade the way a child dabbles his hand in a pond. She was very large with child then, and even more beautiful to me than she seemed the first time that I, shy as a mole, understood she was angling for me to be her husband. For months, this large, ruddy farmer’s daughter had walked beside me home from church, chattering so gaily I had no need to say a word myself. One day, she laid her hand on my arm, and, with a shock, I understood her intentions. I glanced at her, and she looked flushed and sweet as a poppy. I am not prone to rash action, but I understood my luck, and asked for her hand at that very moment.
That night, a year into our marriage, after I told her the two stories, she turned to me. I could see in the candlelight that there were tears in her eyes, and I started up, fearing she was somehow in pain. But she only put down her hairbrush and took my hand in hers. Oh, Richard, she said. You do know why you tell those stories together, don’t you?
Oh, well, I don’t know, Anna, I said, a little crossly. I had wanted to cause her to laugh; instead, I caused her to cry. Unlike my brother, I was never adept at making others merry. I am sorry I pained you, I said. I imagined the stories were more humorous that way.
She squeezed my hand and smiled at me, dabbing at her eyes. You didn’t pain me, she said. But I know why you tell them so.
Oh, do you? I said to the dear girl, brushing her pretty cheek with my thumb.
Yes, she said. I do. Together, they prove your father did love you. You fear that he did not, Richard, but somewhere deep within you, you know that he did. And someday you will forgive him, you know.
I was struck to the quick. I had never told her that I could not forgive my father; I had never told anyone. I had only ever written it in my journal, and my Anna was far too honorable to have read anything so private. My dear one had somehow divined this fact from my character.
I don’t recall what I next said to Anna, and this is to my great sadness, for that night was one of my last memories of her. In one week’s time, she died in childbirth, and our son passed away only moments after his mother, so small and silent, so blue.
In a quiet moment, when I am perhaps riding between farms for the rent, sometimes the words of Publilius Syrus come to me: Amor animi arbitrio sumitur, non ponitur; we choose to love; we do not choose to cease loving. One of the few bits of knowledge my drunken tutor taught me during my Burlington childhood. It applies, I think, to both Anna and my father, although perhaps in opposite ways. I could never choose to cease loving Anna; she is as deep engraved in my heart as a vein in the rock below the earth. Though I would have chosen to keep my love for my father, I could not.
And I had adored him, deeply. All those years when my father was gone to create Templeton, it was only my mother and me in the house—and the servants, and my gouty, furious grandfather Richard. When my father arrived home as he did once or twice a year, my mother’s gentle, pious world would explode, and it was as if I was now seeing all the colors of a garden when I had only before seen gray.
Richard! he’d shout, handing the reins to the stableboy, Where’s my little baboon? And I, the size of a man at ten years old, would barrel out of the house. He’d throw me up into the air, as if I were nothing, a puppy, and he’d catch me as I fell. When he was home, I hid in the clothespress in my parents’ bedroom and memorized the lineaments of his face as he slept. I followed him like a smaller, hairier shadow of himself.
Those times when he was away, my mother had me sit next to her by the fires at night, and, in great contentment, she spoke of my father. She knitted, I whittled boats and houses from the kindling, and my tutor either snored into his chest or worked endlessly on his epic poem, which took the place of my education. Although sometimes I longed to run outside on the streets of the town, my mother was a simple soul, no
t stupid, but plain in her thoughts and manners, and I was happy enough beside her.
I longed to go up to Templeton, to see the lake my father spoke of with such poetry, to know the natives, to meet old Natty Bumppo, the funny sharpshooting hunter he told so many stories about. I wanted to see the vast beast in the lake, Old Sad Spirit in the tongue of the natives, even though my father scoffed at the myth, saying only women and fools ever saw it. I wanted to sit at my father’s shoulder and learn what he had to teach me. When he was gone, the world seemed grayer, and my quiet mother, with her books and her flowers, with her pregnancies lost or babies too weak for this world, regained her rightful place in my heart. Still, I dreamt of Templeton, at night, the broad, glassy lake, the hills; I wished Templeton into a golden Arcadia, the streets shining with polished stones, the wind singing in the trees, the people plump and fair, like him.
And then one day my father arrived home from Templeton to find my mother incoherent with laudanum, for she had just lost another child, and the doctor wanted to keep her peaceful. My father roared and shook the house, stomping about. He threw the doctor’s hat in his face, and dispatched the servants to pack. For an entire night, I quivered with joy. We were off, then, to Templeton! When it came time to leave, all our goods were packed, and the house was bare, save for my mother’s room. Drugged, hardly able to speak, my mother held her ground, sat in her chair, refused to stand and convey herself to the carriage. At last, in a fury, my father picked her up, chair and all, and hefted her above his head like a queen. All down the staircase, I followed, arms open to catch her if my poor, plain, terrified mother fell. Outside, a crowd had gathered around the train of our goods and people, and there was such hilarity at this sight that my mother buried her head in her apron and sobbed out her shame when my father placed her in her chair, firmly, in the back of the last wagon.
