The Emperor's Children

by Claire Messud

  The church—St. Paul’s, downtown, the church of his childhood, so gratefully fled, its waxy pews and mote-filled air, its smell of damp unchanged in all these years—was much fuller than he had expected. It stood not far off the broad main square, with its stretch of balding turf and decrepit benches, its marble memorial pillar, all grand and abandoned on a scale that ensured the town’s bleakness: impossible not to feel, downtown, all the hope that Watertown had lost. The church, though, persisted, surprisingly full on this day. Not just the kids from the high school, Bootie’s old classmates, and some from the current batch, all of them in their ill-fitting Sunday best, some with parents in tow; not just the teachers, Judy’s faded cohorts, and their families; but unexpected faces from his lost past, Judy’s friend Susan, the redhead, all the way from Kingston, Ontario, and others from Judy’s girlhood circle—Margaret, and Eleanor, once a beauty but now haggard, even craggy, with a wattled neck, and odd little Rose, even smaller in age, with her tiny husband, Vito, who owned the liquor store on the eastern edge of town, inherited from his father, Vito Senior. Vito had been in the same class as Murray, Napoleon-sized, loud-mouthed then, frequently truant, but now he was bald and mournful, his dark Italian eyes pouched and oddly wise. Murray saw a young woman wheel in a chair-bound ancient whom he did not at first recognize as Mrs. Robinson, his mother’s great friend, mother of six, two lost in Vietnam, now surely well into her nineties, her scalp gleaming through her sparse, flossy hair and her ears, stuffed with hearing aids, enormous. He saw, too, the acquaintances of his youth who must have remained Judy’s acquaintances, greeted all these years in the supermarket or at the post office: Lester Holmes and Betty, Ed Bailey and his daughter, it looked like; and Jack Jackson, once almost albino-blond, with whom Murray, as a very young boy, used to catch frogs in the stream near his house.

  Judy stood at the door to the church, all dignity in her widow’s weeds, and greeted everyone by name, as if she were consoling them. “Thank you for coming. Thank you for coming,” she repeated in a whisper, to each. Tom was with the kids outside, letting them run around till the last minute, but Sarah stood alongside her mother, her arms dangling, a hankie in her fist, her black dress like a sack and her face a blur of grief. Murray did not stand with them; he wasn’t invited to. He gave his sister, his niece, each a hug, saw Judy’s lips tighten slightly, like a pulled string, then shepherded Annabel, Marina, the unlikely Julius (what was that boy doing here? How did he come to be of the party?) to a pew at the front on the right. Once they were settled, it was tempting to turn and watch the rest arriving; but he resisted that temptation, too. This was not a peewee hockey game or school play. It was a memorial service.

  Reverend Mansfield, known to some (though not to Murray) as Billy, had baptized Frederick, had confirmed him. As he said—and there seemed to be tears in his eyes; certainly his voice broke—he never expected to bury him. Murray, with, in his knees, the St. Vitus dance occasioned by all religious observance, couldn’t help but think that this was a mistake: Bootie wasn’t being buried. Merely artifacts, to lie in his place. An eponymous, but not actual, Bootie burial.

  Judy spoke next, about the gift of life and a gift for living, with which she claimed—not quite honestly, Murray felt—her son had been blessed. She spoke about his promise, and ambition, about how he had seemed, recently, rather to have lost his way. “But losing your way is part of growing up,” she said—she who, with the exception of college at Binghamton, had lived no farther than Syracuse in all her life, and that for three years in her early twenties; who had so cleaved to the known path that she acknowledged no other—“and you don’t expect to pay for it with your life.” Her bitterness manifest, she tried to refine her thoughts: “God has to have had some purpose,” she said, to which there was a tiny murmur of assent among the congregation. “But I haven’t yet figured out what it is. I know that my Bootie was upright, loving, strong, and destined for great things.” She stood back from the microphone and recomposed herself. “And I want to try to make sure that his spirit lives on in the world.”

  Murray could detect heads nodding around him, congregants in full agreement. But what did she mean? What could it mean to keep his spirit alive? His spirit had been unformed, an embryo, a bean. It made no sense.

  Sarah spoke—reminiscence, largely—and a girl from the school, who had been at Oswego with him, named Ellen something. A schoolteacher friend—was it Joan?—and then the vicar, his hands raised, palms flat, in that type of ecclesiastical gesture that so repelled Murray. It was all he could do to stay in his seat, while silly Billy Mansfield in his long white sheet fussed over the coffin and led some prayers. Marina and Annabel were still; Julius picked his fingernails. Murray was desperate for a cigarette. He hadn’t spoken; Judy didn’t want him to speak. All very sad, of course, but the bottom line was that she was afraid of the truth, and of life itself, as she had ever been: even now, when the very worst had happened—what could be worse than the theft of your child?—she was still afraid, full of it, and full of regret.

  This must not be. Not for him. He’d done his duty, and as soon as this was over, they would go. He’d hoped to speak the truth here, but nobody wanted it, she least of all, she wanted him to lie and say it was his fault, so she’d have someone to blame, so she could understand it. He hadn’t expected his whole past still to be there in this way, intact, like a box unopened for forty-five years, some parts crumbling, of course (Mrs. Robinson’s ears! Vito’s bald pate!), but everything there, a time capsule, the same smells, the same wan light, the same choking sensation in the back of his throat, the same dance in his knee, the instinct for escape so strong it was a taste, a bitter taste. This was what Bootie had felt, too, Murray knew it, suddenly truly could feel it, the need to flee this hideous safety; they had been the same, somehow. And Murray had tried to help, and failed; and for a moment felt he was both of them, that they were one soul, and that what was being buried was Watertown itself, that strange, unrelieved realm of impossibility. So that they might turn again to the wider world: in the face of death, more life, always, more.

  Very few went to the graveyard, perhaps because that was the etiquette, but perhaps because it was a sham. But they went. Standing there, after more prayers, after they lowered the coffin into its cold, dank hole, after flowers and dirt were symbolically thrown (but what was the symbolism, exactly?), Murray hugged his sister tightly, kissed her moist cheek, and looked into her eyes as much as to say he was sorry, not in a guilty way but in the pure way of understanding, genuinely understanding, the depth of her grief, and then he stood aside to watch Annabel, gently whispering, clasping Judy’s formidable arm, the right thing always, thank God for Annabel (though there was no God). And then Marina, in what seemed to him an extraordinary outburst, dissolved in Judy’s embrace, a gush of tears and “I’m so sorry”s as if she herself had plunged a dagger. It was, to him, unseemly, but he had the distinct impression that Judy, with Marina’s hair in her face, with her own tears and nose running, with her gloved hands tightly on Marina’s shaking back—he had the distinct impression that Judy was pleased, somehow fortified, by this.

  While this tiny drama played, Murray noted, the newly ghoulish Julius had turned his back and wandered among the tombstones, his hands clasped behind his back, bending to read the inscriptions and then strolling quietly on. Like a tourist, he was: like a tourist visiting death. Julius’s scarred face was frightening, and his hair looked ridiculous, with its glistening quills; but his long navy cloth coat was rather fine, and at least from behind, gave him an official aspect. Perhaps, then, a representative: sent to the funeral in lieu. In lieu of Ludovic, obviously; but of something more, too. They were all representatives, and tourists, from another world. They could be known simply by their coats.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  Burying the Dead (4)

  You didn’t know, until it happened to you, what it would be like. That you would find yourself in your same apartment, where you’d lived a lo
ng time with everything just so, and that it would look to you like a place you knew only in a nightmare. That the Rothkos would seem to be bleeding off the walls, that the light—so much light—would cut you, that you would find your limbs too heavy to lift, food dry as dust, too dry to eat, that you would be so cold, as cold as if you were dead. And you couldn’t call him, even though he kept calling you, as if he were taunting you, from the other side of a great river—the Styx, was it? He’d left for the land of the living, left you to watch everything burning and crumbling, you could still smell it, all these weeks later, in your sheets and your sofa and no matter how many times you’d washed it, in your hair, too. And you couldn’t answer the phone, not just to him but to anyone, and you couldn’t read, and you tried for a bit but you couldn’t go to work, either. Because what nobody knew or could ever know, of course, was that you’d found your other half, your Platonic completion, and then your self—he’d been her self, although she still didn’t understand how quickly this had happened, and how completely—was wrenched apart, leaving a great suppurating wound, a jagged gape of flesh, that nobody could see and that you couldn’t ever talk about. And the world, in spite of the bigger disasters, or perhaps because of them, stoically kept on, you could see the bustling citizens from the window, and when you were out in the street (only when you had to be), they jostled and butted against you as if not just your wound but you were invisible, as if it would be better all around if you just weren’t there. With which, if anyone had asked, you would heartily have agreed. It was ridiculous. And somehow, after days, or even weeks, of this, and everything hurting so much all the time, and not being able to bear it—who could bear such a thing?—you found yourself at three o’clock in the morning, though you couldn’t have said what day it was, standing on the now-graying white bathmat, in a torn T-shirt and your oldest sweats, cold, because your feet were bare, your sad little toes wriggling like grubs in the rug—it was almost funny; everything was almost funny, but the trouble was that nothing actually was funny anymore—and on the sink before you was a tooth glass full almost to the brim of scotch (his scotch, of course, but he didn’t need it anymore, or wouldn’t come back to claim it, and the fact that you still didn’t like the taste of it was, by this second glass, immaterial).

  She had spent already some time—it was blurry, time—ogling her reflection, wincing at it, examining her pores, the stray hairs of her eyebrows, the lone unplucked whisker beneath her chin. She had bothered to pluck it, too, as if it mattered. She had held her cheek tight to see that it was, as he had once said, like porcelain, not yet wizened or mottled. It was a fine cheek. A fine but useless cheek. How many times had she stood and stared, since childhood, thinking thereby to know herself better, or hoping to find herself suddenly changed, suddenly more beautiful; and how disappointing, even now, to find the same face, meaning and thinking the same things as always, only now without anyone to say or mean them to, a sign with no referent, a mask. She had in front of her on the sink ledge also a small saucer, bereft of its cup (given her by her grandmother, a Spode cup with peonies on it, and long ago shattered), in which she was accumulating pills: sleeping pills, pain pills, her stored medications of several years in addition to more recent ones, pills from bottles and pills popped out of foil blisters, a little pyramid of pills gathered almost unthinkingly, as one part of her mind prepared to take them and another part marveled, in a detached, almost amused way (the same part, perhaps, that saw her toes like grubs), at the triteness of it all, at her absurdity, at the sucker she had allowed herself to be. That part, the detached part, watched the tears welling up in her bloodshot eyes (what ghastly light in this bathroom—she would have to change it, so she could look less ugly), and scoffed, and thought how clearly like a parody of madness this was. Did that make it a parody? Were some, upon their suicides, wholly in the moment? In which case, what did it say of her that she could not still this voice, couldn’t not be watching? And if she couldn’t not watch, then could she actually watch herself do this, could she actually put a pill in her mouth—try it, just one—and swallow it? It seemed she could, though not without a rictus of displeasure; it was still the taste of the scotch, like something intended for cleaning furniture. Could she do it a dozen times? Could she do it the thirty-seven times for all the pills in her saucer? No, she didn’t imagine she could. She looked again at her toes, wriggling balefully, swallowed another pill—just a Tylenol 3, this one, saved from her wisdom teeth three years ago; she could tell because it was a great horse pill, scraped her throat going down—and with it, a huge, gagging gulp of the scotch, and looked at her face and thought how silly it all was, and if anyone could see her, they’d mock her mercilessly, for being fool enough to get into this situation, and having got into it, for behaving this way. If she herself knew she was a fool, then there was no excuse. She drank some more, looked again. Her left eye was too close to her nose. It always had been. She couldn’t fix it. It was her mother’s eye, Randy Minkoff’s eye, with its incipient dark circles, ticking slightly at her through her single-malt haze.

  Her mother. Randy Minkoff. Easily mockable, too, but always bright and brave, and she had surely been through this and more. You couldn’t tell her about it, and you couldn’t guarantee that she would have the sense not to ask—in fact, she would ask, for sure. But could be deflected. And most important, would come. Would come now and take care of you and take you away, and probably drive you crazy, she always drove you crazy, but given that you were driving yourself crazy anyway, that might be no bad thing. She might surprise you. She was surprising even when she was predictable, Randy Minkoff—and she’d been wanting to come and get you, had been wanting you to breathe better air, she’d said, apparently unaware (but who would’ve told her?) that you could hardly breathe at all, that you were barely alive. First she’d worried about the anthrax—it could come on the morning paper, even a few lethal spores—and then she worried about the air. She didn’t think they were telling the truth about its safety—they probably weren’t, but what could you do, and you weren’t down in the heart of it so it wasn’t so bad—and she wanted to save you. Even though she’d never really thought you could be near those towers, she’d not managed to speak to you for two days afterward and had lived the whole thing, drama queen that she was, as though you’d vanished and been resurrected, miraculously, from the ashes, said a lot about how this taught a person what love was—tell that to Frederick Tubb’s mother, poor devastated creature—and she really wanted to help.

  So. So Danielle took another gulp of the Lagavulin for good measure, and carried it with her out of the bathroom to feel safe, and sat on the edge of her bed looking out at the forlorn but already familiar skyline—what had been the shape of it before? The shape of anything? But this was melodrama: her tiresome face, her too-close eye, hadn’t changed at all—and Danielle Minkoff called her mother.

  “Mom,” she said, in a small voice that also seemed to her like a mockery and the truth at the same time, just like those minutes in the bathroom. “Mom,” she said, “I know it’s late but I need you to come.”

  And Randy Minkoff didn’t ask, she just said, “I knew it, baby. I knew things weren’t right,” and Danielle was struck by her mother’s saying “baby,” it seemed so camp, somehow; how could her mother be so camp? Julius would have loved it. And then she was saying, “I’ll be right there, my little girl. I’ll be right there.” And she called back ten minutes later to say there was a plane at seven, and in preparation, Danielle put her fingers down her throat, which was disgusting, and the scotch burned on the way up, and the horse pill came almost intact, but the other pill, whatever it had been, the little one, didn’t come; and then she felt very tired and had to go to sleep—it was such a bleak, blank day, dawning—and when she woke up it was her mother calling from the taxi on her new cell phone to say she’d be there in twenty minutes. Which was time enough to flush the pills and wash the glass, and even though she felt like hell—like death warmed over,
they’d say back in Columbus—to put on some clothes and even wash that tedious face without looking at it.

  And three days later they were on South Beach. Through a friend, Randy called in a favor and got a place in an apartment hotel on the strip, a post-9/11 cancellation, all very swanky—an orange juicer and a bowl of oranges in the kitchen when they arrived, and transparent muslin draped in tropical allusion over the high posts in the bedroom—and their flat was above a restaurant that cranked Bob Marley from eight a.m., the whole experience blinding, turquoise and surreal, and it was as if Danielle were newborn, naked, everything up till now erased. They lay, bare and oiled, on plush hotel towels on the white sand, watched the heavy-bellied midget cruise boats cross the horizon, the undaunted tourists (fewer, perhaps, than other years, but no negligible number) frolic around them, so many tattooed backs and ankles, so many flailing limbs, and Randy, beneath the wide brim of her sunhat, asked, “Will you go back?”

  “Go back?”

  “You don’t have to,” she said. “I don’t see how you can go on living there.”

  “Because?”

  “Because it’s not safe, and you know it. This is just the beginning.”

  “Beginning?”

  “Just the beginning. For New York, especially. All those policemen, the soldiers they sent in—they still couldn’t stop someone really determined. A dirty bomb, that’s what they call it, that’s what people are talking about.”

  “What people?”

  “Oh, snap out of it, Danny. This isn’t a joke. Look, it’s almost torn you apart already. You can—you could come down here, you could live with me for a while.”