Poe's Children

by Peter Straub

  Which shows how they don’t understand. Hurt the egg? Why would I hurt the egg? My baby. It’s not my baby’s fault what the father did.

  They all take a step back. Even my husband, which just proves how whatever he was loving it ain’t about me. It was someone he imagined. Someone mean enough to crush my baby just to make a point. I hold the egg real close. I am leaving the hospital. I was not prepared for the photographers.

  CHICKEN WOMEN ESCAPES HOSPITAL WITH EGG!

  EXCLUSIVE PHOTOS

  Well, I thought they were artists or something like that. I was very surprised to learn that he is an insurance salesman. There’s not much I can really tell you for certain. Their house is set back, off the road a bit, and for most of the year it’s well hidden by the foliage. During the winter months I’ve seen it, from a distance. It looks cute, bungalowish. I have a friend who knows somebody who once went to a party there, before they owned it, and she said it was very charming. The only personal experience I have had with either of them was a couple of springs ago when I was at Flormine’s Garden Shop and she was there looking at rose bushes. I remember this so vividly because she was one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. She had purple eyes, quite striking really, pale skin, blond hair, a striking figure. Everyone noticed her. When I look at these photographs, I have a hard time believing this is the same person. What happened to her? She looks quite frightened, doesn’t she? I can’t comment on the egg. I mean it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? I don’t know how she fooled the doctors but of course she didn’t lay that egg. She’s an ordinary woman. And by all appearances she needs help. I wish everyone would forget this nonsense and just get her the help she needs.

  When he came home I had to let him in because sometimes I would get so tired I’d fall asleep and then when I woke up, I was kind of only half on the egg and half off and so I let him in if he promised to sit on it and he goes, “Leda, I love you” but I’ve heard that before and it don’t mean nothing anymore from him. “Leda, please forgive me,” he goes. I say, sit on the egg. I ain’t got the strength to begin forgiving and I don’t know if I ever will. I go upstairs and stare out the window at the garden which is all over-growed now and I think how sorry just ain’t enough.

  We just made love, me and him and he fell asleep like he does, and I thought it would be nice to walk near my roses underneath that pale full moon and I put on my dragonfly kimono, it’s silk and it feels so nice against my skin and it was a beautiful night just a little bit smelling of roses and I thought I was happy and then that swan comes swooping down and for just a moment I thought it was a sign, like of a good thing happening to me ’cause I ain’t never seen a swan in my garden and I ain’t never seen one flying and then it was on top of me. It was much heavier than I ever thought and when it flew into me I fell to the ground and I couldn’t imagine, it was all feathers and wings and claws and beak and I was hitting it and trying to get away and also, at the same time feeling like why would a bird attack me and I didn’t want a hurt it I just wanted out and then, my god, I felt it, you know, and my mind could not, I couldn’t…a swan doing this to me. I hit at it and clawed at it and it bit me and scratched me and the whole time those wings was flapping and…So now people are making jokes about it, about me. I ain’t stupid. I know that. Don’t tell me about some lady I never met who feels sorry for me because she don’t really believe it happened. I don’t give a shit.

  And when my husband keeps saying, sorry, sorry what am I supposed to do with that? This happened to me and it was horrible and when I needed him most he was making three-egg omelets and trying to figure out who I cheated on him with. So, he’s sorry? Well, what’s he gonna do about that? I can’t take care of him. It’s all I can do to take care of myself and my baby.

  Also, one more thing. Since it’s truth time. It did occur to me once or twice to break the egg, I mean in the beginning. What will I do if I hatch a swan? Thanksgiving, I guess. Yeah, sometimes I think like that and don’t gasp and look away from me. I ain’t evil. I’m just a regular woman that something really bad happened to and when it did I learned some things about the world and myself that maybe I’d rather not know. But that don’t change it. I stand at the bedroom window and watch my garden dying. What do I believe in now? I don’t know.

  I don’t know what to do for her. I sit on the egg and remember the good times. Leda laughing. Leda in the garden. Leda dancing. Leda naked. Beautiful, beautiful Leda. Beneath me I feel a movement, hear a sound. I sit very still, listen very carefully. There it is again. “Leda!” I shout. “Leda!” She comes running down the stairs. Where’d she get that robe? I didn’t even know she owned such a thing. Blue terry cloth, stained with coffee. She stares at me with those dark-rimmed eyes, wide with fright. “What?” she says.

  “Baby’s coming,” I whisper and slide off the egg.

  We stand side by side watching the egg shake. I can hardly breathe. A chip of eggshell falls on the quilt. I find myself praying. Just a general sort of plea. Please.

  Please let my baby not be a swan.

  He takes my hand. I let him. It is the first human touch other than the doctors and I don’t feel like they count, since the night when it happened. It feels strange to be touched. I can feel his pulse, his heat. It feels good and strange. Not bad. I just ain’t sure how long I will let it continue.

  We watch the egg tremble and crack and I feel like I am standing at the edge of something big, like the white in my dreams. Everything is here now. All my life. All my love. What comes out of that egg will make me either drown in the white or fly out of it. I want a fly out of it but I ain’t got the strength to do anything about it.

  That’s when I see a tiny fist.

  I pull my hand away from him and cover my mouth. No wings, I pray, please.

  A violet eye!

  I am standing so still in case if I move we fall into a different reality.

  No beak, I think, and just then, like the world was made of what we want, I see the mouth and I start to laugh but I stop because some more eggshell falls off and a second mouth appears right beside the first one and I don’t know what that’s all about.

  Please, I think, please.

  I didn’t know what to think. I’ve been pretty ambivalent about the whole egg thing to be honest. I mean, I only sat on it for her. But as soon as it started hatching I felt excited and then kind of nervous. Like, what’s happening here? Are we going to have a baby bird? How do I feel about that? I didn’t even think about it when I reached over and took her hand. I just did it like we hadn’t been having all this trouble and then I realized we were holding hands and I was so happy about that, it distracted me from the egg for a minute.

  I think we were both relieved to see the little fist. Of course, I knew we weren’t in the clear yet. I mean it was very possible that we were hatching some kind of feathered human, or some such combination.

  Could I love the baby? Yes, this thought occurred to me. Could I love this baby from this horrible act? To be honest, I didn’t know if I could.

  She pulled her hand away. I ached for her immediately. We saw an eye, violet, just like hers, and I thought I could definitely love the baby if it looked like her and then we saw the mouth, and after a moment, another mouth and I thought FREAK. I know I shouldn’t have thought it, but I did. I thought, we are going to have this freak for a child.

  All these images flashed through my mind of me carrying around this two-mouthed baby, of it growing feathers during puberty, long talks about inner beauty. I had it all figured out. That’s when I knew. Even if it had two mouths and feathers, I could love this kid.

  I looked at Leda. It was like something momentous had happened to me and she didn’t even realize it. She stood there in that old blue terry cloth robe, with the coffee stains down the front, her hair all a tangle, her violet eyes circled in fright, her face creased with lines, her hands in fists near her mouth and I wanted to tell her, “Sh, don’t worry. Everything’s going to be all right.
It doesn’t matter how it looks.” But I didn’t say anything because I also finally realized I wasn’t going to teach her anything about love. Not Leda, who carried this thing, and laid it, and took it away from all those cold and curious doctors and brought it home and sat on it and let her own beauty go untended so she could tend to it. I have nothing to teach her. I have much to learn.

  Then I knowed what was happening. When the egg really started to fall apart. Two mouths. Four fists. Four legs. Two heads. And, thank god, two separate beautiful perfect little girl bodies. Two babies, exhausted and crying. I walked over to them and kneel down beside them and then I just brushed the eggshell off and that gooey stuff and one of them had violet eyes, and the other looks like my husband, I realized that on that night I got pregnant twice. Once by my husband and once by that swan and both babies are beautiful in their own way though I got a admit the one that looks kind of like me, from before this all happened, will probably grow to be the greater beauty, and for this reason I hold her a little tighter, ’cause I know how hard it can be to be beautiful.

  My husband bends over and helps brush the eggshell and gooey stuff off and we carry the babies to the couch and I lay down with them and untie my robe and I can hear my husband gasp, whether for pleasure or sorrow I don’t know. My body has changed so much. I lay there, one baby at each breast sucking.

  Oh Leda, will you ever forgive me? Will you trust me with our girls? Will I fail them too? Is this what love means? The horrible burden of the damage we do to each other? If only I could have loved you perfectly. Like a god, instead of a human. Forgive me. Let me love you and the children. Please.

  She smiles for the first time in months, yawns and closes those beautiful eyes, then opens them wide, a frightened expression on her face. She looks at me, but I’m not sure she sees me and she says, “swan” or was it “swine”? I can’t be sure. I am only certain that I love her, that I will always love her. Leda. Always, always Leda. In your terry cloth robe with coffee stains, while the girls nap and you do too, the sun bright on the lines of your face; as you walk to the garden, careful and unsure; as you weed around the roses, Leda, I will always love you, Leda in the dirt, Leda in the sun, Leda shading her eyes and looking up at the horrible memory of what was done to you, always Leda, always.

  In Praise of Folly

  Thomas Tessier

  FOR GWYN HEADLEY AND YVONNE SEELEY

  He drove north in air-conditioned comfort, a road map on the seat beside him, Satie’s piano music rippling pleasantly from the stereo speakers. Thank God for the little things that make human life bearable when summer’s on your neck.

  It was August. The stagnant heat and humidity were so heavy they no longer seemed like atmospheric phenomena, but had assumed a suffocating gelatinous density. People moved slowly if at all, dazed creatures in the depths of a fungal deliquescence.

  It had to be better up in the Adirondacks, cooler and drier. But Roland Turner was not just another vacationer seeking escape. He was on a mission of discovery, he hoped, a one-man expedition in search of a serious folly.

  Roland was one of the very few American members of the Folly Fellowship, an organization based in London that was dedicated to “preserve and promote the enjoyment and awareness of follies…to protect lonely and unloved buildings of little purpose…unusual, intriguing or simply bizarre structures and sites.” Roland first learned about the group two years earlier, when he came across an issue of their quarterly magazine in a Connecticut bookshop. The photographs were fascinating, the text charming and witty.

  A typical English eccentricity, Roland thought at the time, the sort of thing that lasts for a year or two and then dies away as enthusiasm and funds decline. He wrote a letter to ask if the Fellowship was still going, and was surprised to get a reply from the president and editor himself, one Gwyn Headley. Not only was the Fellowship still active, it was thriving, with more than five hundred members worldwide (most of them, naturally, residents of the United Kingdom).

  Roland immediately mailed off a bank draft to cover the cost of membership, a set of back issues of the magazine, a folder of color postcards, and a copy of Headley’s definitive work, Follies: A National Trust Guide (Cape, 1986).

  There was something romantic and mysterious about monuments, castles, and old ruins that had always appealed to Roland. He saw the past in them, and he loved to imagine what life had been like so long ago. Perhaps it was because his own day-to-day existence was placid and humdrum. Roland owned a printing company, a small outfit that produced trade news letters and supermarket fliers for the Westchester County market. Over the years he had worked long and hard to build up a reliable trade, and now he presided over a solid, secure business operation. On the negative side, Roland’s personal life was somewhat threadbare.

  He’d been through a number of brief intimate encounters, but none of them even came close to marriage. Now in his middle age, Roland could take it or leave it. He enjoyed a good book, mainly history or historical fiction, as well as classical music, and he had a special fondness for follies.

  A genuine folly was a building, garden, grotto, or other such architectural construct that had been designed with a deliberate disregard for the normal rules. A folly was something literally “to gasp at,” as Headley put it in his massive tome. Roland had not yet been able to travel to Britain, due to pressure of work, but he had managed to track down a few American follies, such as Holy Land in Waterbury and the Watts Towers in Los Angeles. He’d also visited a fully functional house that had been built out of beer bottles in Virginia, a four-acre Sahara located in the Maine woods, and a home designed as Noah’s ark in the Tennessee hills. American follies tended to lack the air of lost grandeur that was the hallmark of classic British follies, but they often displayed a kind of heroic zaniness that was utterly endearing.

  Roland could only look forward to the time in his life when he would at last be free to spend two or three months journeying around England, Scotland, and Wales, leisurely inspecting some of the remarkable things he could only read about now—such as the rocket ship in Aysgarth, the “house in the clouds” at Thorpeness, Clavell’s Tower, and Portmeirion, not to mention all the splendid follies that could still be found in and around the great city of London itself.

  Follies are the dizzy, demented lacework on the edge of the vast human tapestry, Roland had written in a letter that for some unknown reason Mr. Headley had not yet seen fit to publish in the magazine of the Follies Fellowship. In his spare hours, Roland continued to hone his thoughts and write up notes on the American follies he came across.

  Then, two weeks ago, the message had arrived from London. A “rather spectacular” folly was rumored to exist on the grounds of the old Jorgenson summer cottage in Glen Allen, New York. Would Mr. Turner be able to check it out and report back? If it proved to be a worthwhile site, photographs and notes would be welcome. Roland immediately faxed his answer: “Absolutely.”

  It took a while to find Glen Allen on the map. Apparently a rural village, it was some two hundred miles away, a little north of Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks. Definitely a weekend trek.

  Get up there and find a rustic inn Friday evening, spend Saturday investigating the Jorgenson property, and then drive back down to Rye on Sunday. Roland fled the office at noon, and a few minutes later hit the turnpike.

  As far as anyone knew he was enjoying a short getaway in the countryside. Roland had mentioned his interest in follies to one other person, Patty Brennan, a robust divorcée who had worked for him briefly last year. Roland thought he fancied Patty, but they never got beyond the talking stage.

  “You mean like Coney Island, or Grant’s Tomb,” had been her reaction when he told her about follies.

  “Well, no, not exactly…”

  Perhaps Roland had explained it badly. He decided then and there to keep the world of follies to himself, his little secret. Patty soon fell in love with the man who cleaned the heads of her VCR, and quit to take a positio
n in his business. It was all for the best, Roland convinced himself. When you share something you treasure with another person, it’s no longer quite so special; it inevitably loses a little of its magic aura.

  Roland made fairly good time, but the actual journey clocked in at closer to three hundred miles, so it was a little after six in the evening when he reached Glen Allen. He passed by the Glen Motel on his way into town but found no other accommodation, and eventually circled back to it. A satellite dish, a room full of vending machines, three other cars parked in the lot. Nothing at all like a rustic inn, but it would have to do. Roland went into the office and paid for a room.

  The middle-aged woman on duty took his cash, gave him a key and some brochures about the boating and fishing opportunities in the vicinity.

  “Where’s the best place to eat in town?” Roland asked.

  “Bill’s Friendly Grille, right on Main,” the woman replied. “By the way, there’s an electrical storm supposed to come through tonight. If the power goes out, you’ll find some candles in your closet.”

  “Thanks. I was thinking of taking a look at the Jorgenson estate tomorrow. Is it hard to find?”

  “The Jorgenson estate,” she repeated carefully, as if giving the matter some thought. She was a large woman with bland, empty features. “No, it’s not hard to find but it might be hard to get to. It’s just a couple of miles up the glen, but nobody’s lived there in about thirty years, so the private road’s all overgrown. You’d have to hike some.” Then added, “From what I heard there’s nothing much left to see.”

  “Oh.”

  “Are you in real estate?”

  “No, no, I represent the—well, it’s a British fellowship, you see, and we’re interested in neglected sites of architectural distinction.”

  He was upset with himself for hesitating and then failing to utter the word “folly,” but there was no point in trying to explain it to this woman. As it was, she made a vague sound and appeared to have no interest whatsoever.