The Pagan House

by David Flusfeder

  Jerome arrived in the mornings, usually with a burnt offering from the Mansion House kitchen. He was not allowed to stay long with Fay. ‘You’ll tire her out,’ Frank and Lucille said. He brought his own sandwiches and flask of coffee, and would happily see out the day gardening until the family was sitting down to supper, when he would walk slowly back across the road, carrying his folding chair, newspaper and picnic bag.

  ‘How you making out, Eddie?’

  ‘Like a bandit, Jerome.’

  Interactions were not so cordial between Jerome and the rest of Fay’s family. Edgar’s father was blatantly and sometimes unkindly amused by Fay’s suitor. Frank and Lucille found no amusement. They fought against his presumption but Jerome was unshiftable. Neither could they give full vent to their loathing of him. He was the executor of Fay’s will and therefore had power. But on Sunday, the third night of the new regime, they attempted what Edgar’s father called their charm offensive.

  ‘You should invite him in,’ said Edgar’s father.

  ‘Go invite him in,’ Frank said to Lucille, as they were about to sit down to a supper of Lucille’s tuna Bolognese. Through the window, Fay’s suitor could be seen packing away the small quantity of garbage he had generated in the course of the day. His folding chair had already been folded.

  ‘You invite him in,’ Lucille said.

  Jerome joined them at the table. He would not eat any of the offered food, calling up for excuses his health, his diet, his digestion. ‘I can only eat from two very specific food groups at a time,’ he said.

  He poured himself a glass of spring water from a bottle in his picnic bag. He did consent to drink the Scotch that Frank offered him.

  ‘I know that Fay is very grateful for …’ Lucille waved a hand to indicate the unlikely things that old people could do for each other.

  ‘I’m caring for a dear, dear friend,’ Jerome said.

  ‘Of course you are,’ said Lucille.

  ‘We understand that,’ said Frank. ‘We all want what’s best for her.’

  ‘I hope that we do,’ said Jerome. ‘That spaghetti looks very interesting.’

  ‘Please say you’ll try some,’ Lucille said.

  ‘My proctologist would never forgive me.’

  ‘Oh ho ho,’ Edgar’s father said.

  Jerome looked down at his whisky glass, which Frank refilled. Paul asked if he might be excused from the table. Lucille smiled at her son and encouraged him to stay a while longer. ‘Paul is a very talented athlete,’ she announced.

  Paul looked neither bored nor surprised to hear this.

  ‘They’ve got a wonderful sport programme at the high school in Onyataka. And Michelle is really very gifted at art and communications. They have a very good art and communications programme also.’

  ‘The school they go to is a jungle,’ Frank said. ‘Metal detector at the gates, can you believe it? Kids in junior high carrying knives, packing heat.’

  ‘I’ve really fallen in love with this neighbourhood, it’s s-special,’ Lucille said.

  ‘The landscape is very pretty,’ Frank said wearily. ‘Wherever I’ve gone I’ve always taken a part of it with me.’

  ‘But I think it’s the people that make a place what it is, don’t you agree?’ Lucille said.

  ‘You planning on moving here?’ Jerome said.

  Lucille made fluttery motions with her hands, like a child signifying snowflakes. ‘Oh we’d love to. But, you know, that’s dependent on so many factors. The children love it here.’

  Michelle giggled behind the damp sleeve of her sweater. Paul amiably spun the salt cellar on its side. Edgar, suddenly furious, wanted something bad to happen to all of them.

  ‘Frank would love us to be closer to his mother.’

  ‘His mother might have other ideas,’ Edgar’s father said.

  Frank scowled. Lucille pretended to find this very funny. ‘Mike’s got a terrific sense of humour.’

  ‘Yeah, he’s a really funny guy,’ Frank said. ‘We need an incentive to come here though. Difficult to ask a family just to up sticks.’

  ‘I guess it is,’ Jerome said.

  Lucille looked admiringly at her surroundings. She gazed out of the window in order to sigh at the beauty on display.

  ‘Blackberry Festival’s coming up soon,’ Jerome said, winking inexplicably at Edgar.

  ‘Want to ask you something, Jerry,’ Frank said.

  ‘Um-hmn?’

  ‘You’re Mom’s friend.’

  ‘Confidant,’ Lucille murmured.

  ‘What do you think might be going to happen to the house, this house, in the event—’

  ‘In the sad, awful event.’

  ‘In the sad, awful event of, you know, when it happens, and God-I-hope-it-doesn’t-and-I’m-sure-it-won’t-for-many-many-years, uh, my mom’s passing?’

  ‘You might want to speak to your mother about that,’ Jerome said.

  ‘Yes,’ Frank said, nodding carefully. ‘That’s right. That’s absolutely right. But—freshen up Jerry’s glass, Mike—you know, I have to say, even before this whole hospital deal, I was worried for Mom, not just, you know what I’m saying, but her mind, or her morale might be the right way of putting it, there’s a kind of morbidity at work, which I don’t want to, to do anything to encourage, if you know what I’m saying.’

  ‘I think I do,’ Jerome said.

  ‘And then this Warren character. It all seems pretty fucked up to me. Excuse my French. I’m glad he’s out of the picture.’

  ‘We can agree on that,’ Jerome said.

  Edgar wondered how Lucille kept her lipstick and mascara intact, no matter what she did with her mouth and eyes. When his mother wore makeup it smeared immediately. Lucille cradled her precious chin on her hand and leaned towards Jerome, resting her breasts on the lip of the table. Her cleavage was low, freckled and lined, and Edgar was seized by the fear that someone, perhaps himself, was about to stick his hand down it.

  ‘We’re talking as friends here. Just friends,’ she said.

  ‘Okay,’ Jerome said. He narrowed his eyes, then widened them, looking for some way to focus his vision. ‘Well what we’re hoping for of course is that the house is donated to the Mansion House Corporation.’

  ‘Right,’ said Frank.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lucille.

  ‘It’s a site of tremendous historical importance, and there are things, exciting things, educationally speaking, that can be done here that can’t be done over at the Mansion House. We could even get some actors in place and turn it into a kind of living museum. Wouldn’t that be a peach of a thing?’

  ‘A peach,’ Lucille said.

  Frank put away the bottle of whisky, which Jerome recognized as his signal to leave.

  ‘You’re a good man, Jerome,’ said Frank.

  ‘We’re so glad she’s got you for a friend,’ said Lucille, her hand on Jerome’s worn sleeve; her radiant eyes, the inviting posture of her body, beamed out admiration and respect and perhaps even love.

  ‘Want you to know,’ Frank said gruffly, his voice cracking with emotion and fellow-feeling, ‘that you should come by whenever you like. We consider you family, isn’t that right, Lucille?’

  ‘Family,’ Lucille said.

  When Jerome had gone, Lucille asked Frank, ‘You don’t think she’d actually leave it to the Mansion House?’

  ‘He’s her executor, he should know.’

  ‘But he said hoping for, so I guess her will must say something else.’

  ‘And he’s trying to persuade her different. Miserable sly fucker.’

  ‘Unlike anyone else, for example.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Whatever you want it to mean. I’m not that tremendously concerned.’

  Lucille sighed and stretched and her blouse lifted away from the waistband of her slacks showing a band of tanned, rounded flesh, and she looked at her husband as if she was daring him to hit her, which was probably what he wanted to do.


  6

  Warren had been keeping her alive; Frank and Lucille were killing her. Fay grew thinner and frailer. Most of the time she slept. Sometimes she sat up in bed to draw the same tentative picture of an empty field. When Edgar visited Fay, and she leaned forward for him to brush her hair down towards the nape of her neck, the sharp stumps of her shoulder-blades looked ready to chrysalize into wings.

  ‘Do they know who burned down the bingo hall?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  Frank claimed to believe that Warren was the arsonist. ‘It’s kind of a coincidence, don’t you think?’ he asked, with tremendous self-satisfaction. ‘Bingo hall burns down. Outsider skips town. Why’d else he go? Tell me he didn’t do it and I’ll call you a liar.’ Frank had gone to the police to report his suspicions, filled out three forms, spoken to two police officers, one of them a detective from Syracuse. Edgar didn’t believe Warren had burned down the bingo hall. He suspected the Indian Fighters: in his imagination he could see them, wearing paper pizza-parlour caps blackened for camouflage, carrying canisters of gasoline from which deadly wet rags protruded for a wick, a trail of fire stretching behind them. His father didn’t care. ‘Shit happens,’ was all he said on the subject.

  ‘Is Warren back yet? Brush my hair some more, please.’

  Edgar brushed her hair. His right arm ached so he used his left, which he feared would become risibly thin by comparison with the over-employed right. ‘Do you think Warren’s coming back?’

  ‘Of course he is,’ she said, in a tone as close to snappish as she had ever used with him. ‘Pass me the mirror please.’ He passed her the hand mirror and she remembered to smile at him in appreciation, before examining her hair from different angles. ‘He’s with his other woman,’ she said, and she looked how Edgar had felt when he first saw Electa with Husky Marvin.

  Edgar’s father was in the living room. He was watching a baseball game on the TV, drinking beer, his feet on the coffee-table. Edgar’s father favoured thin socks, almost transparent where they stretched over the toes and heel. The heels were on a scattered stack of Fay’s Smithsonian magazines, which his father used as coasters, and Edgar was disappointed that neither of his father’s heels was quite inside the rings that his beer cans and whisky glasses had made as targets.

  ‘Hey, come and watch the game with me, buddy!’ his father said awkwardly. He patted the sofa seat beside him, and Edgar sat down and dutifully tried to find some meaning or grace in the game. Occasionally his father would try to point something out to him but his explanations further obscured an already incomprehensible event.

  ‘You see there. Runner’s taking a bigger lead now, pitcher can’t afford to go into the wind-up. First baseman on the bag. Big space to hit into.’

  ‘I’ve just been with Fay.’

  ‘Is that right? And I’d say the hit and run is on as well.’

  Edgar looked optimistically to the screen for some monster truck chewing up the turf as it crushed these bored-looking Latino men in tight breeches, churning up mud as it sped away aiming for the next. Instead, the hitter patted the ball back to the pitcher, who blew gum as he stepped off his mound, turned around and threw the ball to someone else, who caught it and threw it to someone else.

  ‘Or you get a double play. Inning over.’

  ‘Right,’ Edgar said, more emphatically than was appropriate, which made his father give him an odd irked look.

  ‘You want a nut?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  His father yawned, which he always did when the commercial break came on, then sat forward ready for action.

  ‘We’re nearly at the end of the bag,’ he said, turning it upside down over a magazine and picking through the dust for the last whole cashews.

  ‘Maybe we should take a run down to the supermarket,’ Edgar said.

  Edgar liked to go to the supermarket with his father. They had been twice so far. They would drive down in the Cadillac, park the car near to where Doug and Rocky were racing each other inside supermarket carts, and it was Edgar’s job to put the fruit and vegetables into plastic bags and weigh and sticker them. His father had shown him how to twirl the bags into a half-knot and Edgar took to the job with meticulous consideration, until his father would get bored and take over the task himself.

  His father yawned. ‘No. Supplies are good.’

  Their conversation resumed at the next commercial break.

  ‘I’ve just been with Fay,’ Edgar said, although it seemed like hours ago.

  ‘Yeah? I’ll be going up to take a look at her after the game.’

  ‘She said an odd thing.’

  ‘Yeah, well, she does that. She always did, in fact. Kind of out of kilter. Used to embarrass the hell out of the old man. But he was busy elsewhere, if you know what I mean.’ A fatherly primness overcame him and he leaned back and tried to look sentimental. ‘Always the oddest things. I kind of liked them. You know, it’s my contention that when you get old all these things drop away and what you’re left with is the person who was there all the time.’

  ‘Oh.’

  This was as close to philosophy as he had heard his father speak and Edgar wanted to think about it, partly because it sounded like parental wisdom and also because if it meant what he thought it meant then he completely disagreed with it. He intended to make and remake himself over and over again, and when Edgar was old there would be no trace of any of the previous Edgars at all.

  ‘What she say?’ his father asked.

  ‘Who?’

  His father shook his head. ‘When they made you they threw away the mould.’

  Edgar concentrated hard and recollected himself. ‘Oh. Right. Yes. I don’t mean odd in that way. She said she thought Warren was with his other woman.’

  The sight of his father laughing was alarming. His father hooted and he jerked his legs up and down, and when it was over he took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. ‘Oh that’s priceless. Priceless. Warren the fag with his other woman. I love it. Wait till Lucille hears that one.’

  He turned his attention to the game. Edgar tried to entice it back again. He was hoping to invite his father to the Campanile, where he might enlist his father’s charm in the battle to reinstate himself in Electa’s world. At soccer practice she had ignored him in a way that was colder than scorn.

  ‘I thought maybe I’d go get some pizza.’

  His father held out a ten-dollar bill for him to take. ‘Why don’t you do that?’ he said, not unkindly.

  Edgar prepared himself in the bathroom: he was going through the jars of unguents and oils, enjoying the slow selection, the pleasure he was deferring, when Michelle came in, chewing gum noisily, popping it and making it snap. He grabbed a dollop of his uncle’s hair grease and shoved it on top of his head for an alibi.

  ‘What you doing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘You fixing your hair? I can do that for you.’

  She was an agreeable girl and kind-hearted, and it would have been rude to say no. He sat docilely on the edge of the tub. She stood over him, careless of the contact her body made with his. ‘You’ve put a lot of this stuff in.’

  ‘Maybe too much.’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  Her hands were strong. He liked the feel of her fingers on his scalp.

  ‘I do this with my friends all the time. Drink beer and fix each other’s hair till morning. Kind of dumb, I guess. Where you going out to?’

  ‘Nowhere. For a pizza maybe. Nowhere.’

  ‘I like pizza,’ she said, as if this was a rare coincidence. She rubbed his hair vigorously and laughed. ‘The geek look, it suits you. Super-dweeby-nerdo-geek.’

  He was annoyed at this, and because there was none of the formality with Michelle that attended his dealings with other girls, he could just grab for her hair and twist it all around until the results were equally laughable. She shoved against him and giggled and he reached for the tube of gel, which he sque
ezed out in dollops and rubbed it around and pulled her hair into two high spiky towers.

  ‘I like it,’ she said. ‘I should come for a pizza like this.’

  For a moment he considered allowing her to come with him. He imagined arriving at the Campanile, wild-haired, with this smudgy, carefree girl beside him. He could picture Electa’s haughtiness turning to disdain. She didn’t like Michelle; she disapproved of anyone who chose to be in Michelle’s company. Michelle would be oblivious, saying the wrong thing, doing, being the wrong thing. The prospect filled him with consternation. He pulled at his hair to make it more normal and so did she to hers.

  ‘Okay. We ready?’ she said.

  To delay their progress, he pushed through the undergrowth in the garden.

  ‘What you doing?’

  ‘I’ll show you.’

  Except, he couldn’t. The dead bees were still curled together. The body of the cat was gone.

  ‘There used to be a cat here.’

  ‘Why would there be a cat there? Come on, Dweeby, let’s go.’

  On the walk down to Creek, Michelle chattered away. She was telling him about how much she liked it here, and what a nice place it was and how cool it would be to live here, and Edgar dimly heard her mother speaking through her. They were past Stone Park, about to cross the bridge, wet leaves on the sidewalk. Could he faint?—crumple consumptively to the ground, fling out an arm, send her for help before consciousness dripped away and then, when she was gone, run away? He could hide out in the cemetery, sit by the Mary Pagan monument, which was his favourite place in this town. Might he kill her? Roll her body into the creek and bury it beneath stones and silt? Experimentally he lifted his hands towards Michelle’s throat as if in play and she knocked away his arms and bounced on the balls of her feet and asked him if he wanted to wrestle and Edgar said no.