The Emperor's Children

by Claire Messud

  It filled her with despair, a literal leadening of her limbs, a glazing of the eyes, so that she could barely lift the sheets of paper around her, and certainly couldn’t decipher what was written upon them. She couldn’t speak to anyone about this, about the burden of failure that weighed daily upon her: Danielle would be censorious, then efficient, briskly trying to take over and buck her up; as would her mother, from whose lips the infuriating phrase “Buck up, duckie” had been known, all too often, to fall. To Julius, even if he hadn’t vanished, her situation would be an excuse for pretending, for a round of afternoon martinis, an enjoyable enough remedy but one she knew, from now considerable experience, to be ineffective. And her father: how many times had she tried—or felt as if she had, at least—to speak to him about her mind’s atrophy, about the apparent impossibility of fulfilling her promise, in every sense, with this undertaking? And he didn’t understand, couldn’t or wouldn’t: he was more machine than human, in this regard, for all he loved her. He’d honored every contract of his life; he arrived on time even at events he had no desire to attend. He turned his mind on, like a miner’s lamp, and merely proceeded, doing the necessary until it was done. He’d point to the mess of papers and their scratchings and say, “See? It’s all here, right in front of you. You’ve done all the hard work, now just get on with it!”

  In defiance of which, she went wandering around the apartment. Her mother had gone to bed promptly, expecting an early-morning call, and the lights were few and dim, the air-conditioning a soporific under-hum, faintly Freon-scented, along Marina’s path. She paused longest in the kitchen, where she considered making tea—Danielle, she knew, drank tea every night before bed, and swore by its properties—and decided instead to eat a cookie or two, some French kind Aurora had picked up at the supermarket, made with superior chocolate. She poured some milk to go with the cookies and left the fridge door open while she did so, its narrow, spooky light the only one in the room. She carried her milk with her through the dining room, back to the hallway, along past her room, past her parents’ room—she imagined she could hear her mother breathing, almost snoring, but didn’t stay to listen, feeling vaguely embarrassed at the indignity—and onward, drawn like a moth to the chink of light from her father’s study. Barefoot, she was aware of being quiet as a cat; aware, too, suddenly, of the possibility of cat vomit somewhere on the carpet. Although the Pope had been better lately, eating less but throwing up less too, and with a new hoarseness to her breathing that usually made her easy to track. And yet, in no room so far had Marina heard the token wheezing; nor had she brushed against the furred bone that the Pope had become, all prominent spine and gaunt head.

  Marina paused at the door, peered through the hinges at her father’s back, bent at his computer, and realized she’d already stood here, or almost here, just hours earlier. It was clearly pathetic, to hover on the edge of someone else’s life, like a maid or a dog, and he her father, too. A child with a glass of milk, she might have been six instead of thirty.

  Without a sound, she turned and walked the few steps to the room that would be Frederick’s. Maybe it would be a good thing to have him around for a bit, not merely a distraction but a catalyst. Either that, or the occasion for still more impressive pretense, for letting on that she was an “It” girl (once upon a time, in the Vogue days, she had been, hadn’t she?), with the aura of incipient success as bright around her as a halo, with a book almost written and a host of suitors, a glamorous, if currently somewhat curtailed, adulthood. He was young enough, Fat Freddie, that he might still buy it, might not be able to see through the dazzle of her looks; but she remembered him, too, as saturnine in his plumpness, with eyes that, behind their smeary glasses, seemed to peer all too intently, to see too much. It had been years; who knew? He might not even be fat. And who was he, a college dropout from Oswego, to judge her?

  Efficient as ever, Aurora kept the room aired and dusted and vacuumed. She’d placed a coaster on the dresser, in readiness for a bunch of welcoming flowers (was he a guest who merited flowers? But better, Marina supposed, to stick with tradition), and the bed was made up with fresh sheets, a billowy, crisp white duvet, in the middle of which, like the tufting on a pouf, lay the sunken black button that was the Pope asleep.

  What better place for an aged cat, Marina thought, envying the licensed idleness, the creature’s ability to make herself disappear without leaving the premises and to do nothing without garnering disapproval. She perched at the edge of the pristine bed, placed her empty milk glass on the night table (from which the eagle-eyed Aurora would retrieve it before the guest’s arrival), and reached out to stroke the elegant old curve of the Pope’s curled back.

  It did not at first feel different, although afterward she would say she knew at once. But the warmth of the fur kept her from discerning the chill of the flesh beneath. What she noticed, though, all but simultaneously, were that the Pope failed to twitch beneath her hand, an involuntary wrinkling of the skin intrinsic to the long history of their caresses, and that the room, but for the distant sough of the road noise and the central air, was completely quiet. No rasping, no rattle. No breath at all. And although a part of Marina was not particularly shocked, and registered simply: “Oh, so this is death,” another part of her—the child, she would chide herself—recoiled, and emitted the choked cry that brought her father running.

  “What is it? Why are you in the dark in here?” He cut a disheveled figure, shirt untucked, glasses at the end of his nose, his silver hair rising and feathered like a chick’s, a cigarette rakishly behind his ear.

  “I’m sorry, Daddy—it’s just the Pope. She’s not—I mean, she’s dead.”

  “Oh.”

  The two of them stood side by side without approaching.

  “You’re quite sure?” Murray asked, scratching at the back of his head.

  “Yep. Sure.”

  The cat, a black blot on the duvet, didn’t move.

  “Is your mother asleep?”

  “Hours ago.”

  “Hmm. Worse things could happen than leaving her there for the night, don’t you agree?”

  The idea seemed somehow sacrilegious to Marina, though whether the offense was against the cat or the bed and its imminent occupant, she couldn’t have said. “Don’t dead things, you know, leak?”

  “Not overnight, I wouldn’t think. And it’s pretty cool in here.” Her father seemed unfazed, as if they were discussing a plant, or a book. “I just think your mother’s the one to cope with this. Or Aurora.” He paused. “Unless you want to do it?”

  “Not much.”

  “Didn’t think so. Come on, let’s shut the door. It’ll be as if you never came in here. Why did you come in here, incidentally?”

  “I don’t know. Thinking about Frederick, I guess.”

  “Ah. The boy. The unknown quantity. I called his mother tonight—”

  “Aunt Judy?”

  “She didn’t even know he was coming.”

  “Wow.”

  “So who knows what bedraggled or embattled soul is on his way to us? We’ll see soon enough.” He made as if to return to his study.

  “It doesn’t seem a very good omen, does it?”

  “What?”

  “Having the Pope die on his bed.”

  “The cat was seventeen years old, my poppet.”

  “I know, but—”

  “And you know I don’t believe in omens. And you shouldn’t either. No self-respecting atheist should believe in omens.”

  “No.”

  “Certainly not a pope’s death.”

  “Very funny.”

  He nodded toward the closed bedroom door. “Your mother will deal with that first thing,” he said. “Don’t give it another thought.”

  But Marina, once in her own bed, beneath her own duvet, couldn’t sleep for thinking about it, about the kitten she’d been given (instead of a horse, her parents had joked: more on the scale of their lives) and had marveled over, its spastic st
eps and zealous pounces, its questing tongue upon her hand. She’d abandoned the Pope for college, and for years thereafter of living elsewhere, had taken the cat for granted when she came home to visit, a sleek nudge at her calf, a warm muff on her knees, the broad yawns and the haughty incline of that elegant head. And by the time Marina had come back to live the year before, the cat was an invalid and an eyesore, scrawny, patchy, yowling, and, of course, vomiting, the relentless sour smell of it, and while Marina had occasionally been roused to pity she’d felt largely, with the brutality of the young, contempt for the animal’s diminishing, and revulsion at her habits. A tear or two welled up in Marina’s eyes and moistened her pillowcase, but she couldn’t truthfully have said whether this was born of sorrow for the Pope’s loss, or a sadness for herself at her actual callousness in the face of death, or indeed—and maybe this was the root of it—whether her tears, shed only now, were an indulgence licensed by the Pope but referring, in their quiet woe, to her earlier despair, to the burdens she still had inexorably to confront, while the cat, still and free and cushioned by the finest goose down, by the ironed Irish linen, had found repose.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Bootie Takes New York

  On the second Saturday of May, at nine-fifteen in the morning, Frederick Tubb sat on a bench in Central Park, a mere half block from the street, in the pleasing shade of new maple leaves, with a plastic shopping bag beside him and a book upon his lap. It was War and Peace, now, which he’d decided was indispensable, and upon which he was making every effort to concentrate. But it was hard. On account of the heat, for one: in spite of the morning’s promise of warmth, its faint haze—a humidity that, inside the park, hung with tropical weight beneath the overhanging branches, illuminated by piercing pools of already brutal sunlight—Bootie had reasoned—the way, not so long ago, people reasoned that they should dress for dinner, or for church—that he was now in a major city and ought to dress up because of it. Prickled by sweat, his curls clinging already to his forehead, his glasses slick, he regretted his decision. He wore a checked shirt with a collar and cuffs, albeit unironed and, more recently, untucked, above his faintly grubby khakis. It was either khakis or jeans—he had only two pairs of pants—and he’d thought the former marginally cleaner. He wore sneakers, great white boats upon his feet, because he had, for the time being, nothing else (his dress shoes were still, and perhaps forever, in his Watertown bedroom), but judging from the footwear that passed him along the path, this was perfectly acceptable. The footwear, or rather the people in it, distracted too, a parade of such notable variety and, given the early hour, volume, that it was difficult to keep his eyes turned to the page for more than a brief stretch at a time. He caught tendrils of conversations—“She say she don’t got it, but I know she steal it from me”; “If you’ll just read it, baby, I really think it would change your life”; “You know how to dress, don’t you? So what can I tell you?”—and peered discreetly through his hair to see that often the most animated conversations were telephonic, sometimes even conducted through earpieces along near-invisible wires, so that the speakers, like madmen, gesticulated and emoted wildly apparently to the open air. He marveled silently at the shapes in which New Yorkers came, skinny driven men and women, in work clothes or clinging sportsgear, their veins popping along their rigid necks or at their tiny, taut calves; great, unwieldy creatures of indeterminate sex, pillowed giants rolling and jiggling beneath their loose T-shirts, their glistening faces furrowed by the absorbing administration of locomotion; and every size and shape between; Russian, Chinese, African, Andean faces, all hues and proportions, a medley offered up to his occasional glance that was, to Bootie, his mother’s Unicef calendar—a perennial part of his childhood, pinned to the wall by the kitchen telephone—brought to life.

  A horde of round-limbed Latin children bustled by, squawking, keen for the playground, their mothers—so young, his age perhaps; could they be mothers? But yes—ambling far behind, bent over strollers in which other, smaller bodies lay splayed and snoozing beneath dangles of colorful toys, the women’s voices an undulating river of Spanish, punctuated by calls to the escaping offspring. One of the mothers looked over at Bootie, caught his eye and, in spite of his tentative smile, turned rapidly away.

  Bootie had, in his plastic bag, his thumbed copy of Emerson; a pair of sunglasses bought on the street in Amherst for five dollars; and an old apple juice bottle with a torn label filled with water from the Thwaites’ kitchen tap. He’d considered taking some breakfast with him—Aunt Annabel had told him already several times to feel completely at home—but worried about dirtying dishes, making a mess. He knew himself—his mother always chided him for it—to be one who, however unwittingly, left traces, smears and fingerprints and dirty cups. Better not to touch anything.

  He’d wanted to get up and out before his relatives stirred, before the apartment’s impressive hush—so much more silent, in its hermetic seal, than his mother’s rattling house—was broken. He couldn’t quite bear their bonhomie, the warmth and near indifference of their welcome, the way they assumed (and the very rightness of the assumption rankled) that he was there because he wanted to be assimilated into their lives, to be a part of them. Already, the previous evening, not his first but, given his lateness on Thursday, essentially his first, they’d invited him to join them at a barbecue at a friend’s place. He’d thought they were joking—a barbecue in New York City?—till they explained that it was a penthouse apartment with a wraparound terrace, and the main reason to come along was the fabulous view. He’d been torn; he’d said he was tired and would stay home, but could see in Annabel’s face, in Murray’s, both that they didn’t mind if he preferred to retire with a book, and, more visibly, that they couldn’t fathom the choice. What, then, was the point not only of being in New York but of being in the Thwaites’ New York? So he’d gone, only to be—predictably, unbearably—baffled and flushed at the gathering, his shirt stained first by sweat and then by the red wine he fumblingly spilled on it.

  Annabel, seeing him repeatedly alone on the wide swath of terrace, had taken him in hand, had leaned against the glass barrier (he couldn’t look down) to show him the glorious skyline, its landmarks, the curves and rises of the park so densely green before them, the toylike towers of downtown rising like some child’s fabulous Meccano madness, the glinting river and the ever-pinkening, purpling veil of dusk as it fell over the great sky and the buildings around them. She had the kindness not to seem bored, to evince animation at his comments—he knew them to be banal, and blushed again at this knowledge, blinking fretfully behind his glasses—and even, in a gesture that touched and surprised him, to place her hand on his back when pointing westward across the park to the place where the Thwaites, and now he, too, lived. Even then, he was aware of the sweat on his skin, of the fleshy swell of it, of the possible clamminess of his shirt beneath her fingers, and this shame rendered him stupid and nearly mute.

  While listening to Annabel and surveying the vista, Bootie kept a surreptitious eye on the other Thwaites, on Marina and Murray, as they glided separately and together among the crowd upon the terrace. Murray stood taller than most, his hair brighter in its silver shock, and Bootie could catch, every so often, the phlegmy bass of his laughter, or the amused rise of his voice. He drifted in a near-constant trail of smoke, like thought bubbles, a running conversation of its own. More spritelike, Marina bobbed her head, gangled her delicate limbs as if awkwardness were, among the beauteous, the most graceful affectation. The failing light drew her eyes more brightly, and deepened the red of her lips, so that from afar she seemed to glow like a painted puppet on a stage. He couldn’t help looking, couldn’t help it although he knew she was precisely that, a woman watched, and that such women couldn’t even see him. She glanced over once or twice, seemed, in conversation, to be talking about him, explaining his presence—“My fat cousin from upstate,” he imagined her saying, “it’s not my fault”—which projection made him ever more sulle
n, in addition to his shame, so that by the time they regrouped and withdrew from the party, Bootie, half-sodden, had turned from a benign to a belligerent statue, who, squashed into the aura of Marina’s delectable lemon fragrance in the back of the taxicab, could barely muster a word of gratitude for his hosts.