Jacob's Folly

by Rebecca Miller

  As he turned, a little explosion of light, like a flashbulb, bounced off an aluminum ladder in the corner of the room. The A-frame ladder was on its side, and open, like an arrow pointing toward Leslie. Above it, in the deep shadow of the corner, among several of his father’s old coveralls that hung like deflated figures from hooks in the low ceiling, the face of his father turned toward him, eyes wide and glassy. His father was flying. That’s what Leslie thought for a quarter of a second. Then he realized the man was hanging by his neck from an orange rope that had been looped over one of the rafters, the body pivoting lazily, like a Christmas ornament that twists this way and that way on its branch. Leslie spotted his dragonfly-green Schwinn leaning on the wall behind his dangling progenitor. He inched up to it, grabbed it by the smooth plastic handles, backed it up a foot, then rolled it in an acute semicircle, just avoiding his father’s feet. He walked it, freewheel ticking, across the room, kicked the door open, swung his leg over the saddle, pedaled it as hard as he could out the driveway, sped down the street to Dennis Doyle’s house, and screeched to a halt at the gaggle of kids already assembled at the base of the cul-de-sac. He spent the day with Dennis, Chuck Tolan, and Danny Morano playing James Bond and fighter pilots, every second expecting his mother to arrive in a state of hysteria. He didn’t go home for lunch. He didn’t care if he never ate again. If he could have made the day last forever, he would have. He considered running away. He stayed with his friends till evening sucked all the light out of the little cul-de-sac and the mothers started hollering. His mother called Mrs. Doyle on the phone to tell him to come home for dinner, but there was nothing in the woman’s facial expression to indicate that his mother had mentioned finding her husband hanging in the shed. Leslie rode home and walked into the house, his belly leaden. Dinner was on the table and the girls were already sitting down. Will was washing his hands.

  “Where’s Dad?” Leslie found himself asking.

  “In the shed,” said his mother curtly.

  “Don’t you think he’s hungry?” asked Leslie. He had to get her in there somehow. He couldn’t tell her, not now that he’d waited all day.

  “I don’t want to disturb him when he’s working on his project,” his mother said bitterly. “He’ll come in when he feels up to it.” Leslie tried to eat. He chewed every mouthful until the food was like sludge. The crickets outside seemed to be screaming. He realized the poor man would be stiffening up in that shed all night, plus on top of that he’d be in the doghouse with his wife for staying in there, when really he was just dead.

  “Want me to take him a plate?” he asked in desperation. Evelyn made up a plate in silence and handed it to him, adding dryly, “Make sure to give him our best regards.”

  Leslie walked to the shed, closed his eyes, and prayed. “Please let it not be true,” he murmured. Then he opened the door, shut it, and walked back across the lawn and into the kitchen, still holding the plate of food.

  “Mom,” he said. “You need to go in there.”

  After Evelyn’s shrieks; after the children had come storming into the shed; after Leslie had pushed the children out of the shed; after he had called the police, the ambulance, the relatives; after he’d put the other kids to bed, having magically become the oldest child, unofficially but permanently superseding his older sister Evie, who started sucking her thumb that night and never stopped, her ongoing pupa status manifested by an endless changing of careers into her forties accompanied by serial dating of stunted and puerile men who tended to either have strange sniggering laughs or be married, doughy, and unavailable; after mad Mrs. Bobik had come in wielding a coffee cake which she cut up and ate three pieces of, talking all the while in whining, breathless tones about how mysterious men could be; after he had sat up nearly all night with his grieving, furious mother, transformed from a fairly normal thirteen-year-old kid into the head of a family eviscerated by a man who jumped at his own shadow—Leslie lay in his bed and thought about his birthday present. He knew quite a bit about woodworking, having been trained for years in Senzatimore Marine, helping put the boats back together with his dad on weekends or sometimes after school. Occasionally there was woodwork involved, especially on the older boats, and those were Charlie’s favorites. Leslie knew that you wouldn’t make a model of a battleship like that, with all those interlocking pieces, unless you intended to have it taken apart. The boat was a puzzle.

  Leslie got dressed very quietly and padded out of the house in his slippers. The crickets had gone quiet, though there was a silvery, hissing insect sound rising from the trees. He walked to the shed and turned on the light switch just inside the door. The bare bulb screwed into the ceiling shed a cone of cold blue light on the reshrouded USS New Jersey, leaving the rest of the room in a reddish black penumbra that seemed to radiate menace. The battleship cast a pointed shadow on the concrete floor. Leslie stood in the doorway, unable to move. The familiar little shed now felt electric with dread. Something palpable, like a massive Jell-O cube of negative energy, repelled the boy as he tried to walk into the room. He had to press his way into this force field, conquering his terror step by step. He made himself look only at the boat, avoiding the corner where he had seen his father’s livid face swinging around at him hours earlier. Leslie lifted off the canvas tarp gently and laid it on the ground. The boat was as long as his arm span. From above, it had the shape of a very elegant pointed shoe. Its lines were refined, elongated. The gun turrets and bridge had been made of quarter-inch plywood, glued and sanded. Four helicopters with little metal blades stood at the ready on the flight deck. He imagined all those seconds flowing through his father’s fingertips into this ship, all that time he didn’t spend with his son poured into something that turned out to be for Leslie after all. Leslie felt so bad for resenting his old man.

  The gunwales and the deck all seemed to be glued together, of a piece. He gently pulled at the top of the ship and it came away. Looking inside was a little shocking: the upper floor of the interior was a fully realized replica of a battleship: panels with switches, wheels and gears, all meticulously constructed out of wood. To see the rest of the interior, he dislodged the first interlocking piece of wood on the exterior using his fingers and laid it gently onto the worktable under the window. He decided to only take apart one side of the ship to begin with, and tried to lay all the pieces out in an order that would make sense to him later, so he could put the boat back together. It took him about forty minutes to disassemble the thing. Inside, in mad detail, were three stories of a miniature battleship. A crew of men with hand-sewn uniforms worked in the four engine rooms, lay on gray-blanketed bunks reading tiny whittled books, manned the intricate control panels, ate painted plaster dollhouse food, played chess on minuscule chessboards; still others cooked and cut up little replica vegetables. Leslie noticed a magnifying glass resting amid the debris on his father’s worktable.

  Only one of the rooms had a number on it: 753. Inside, a whittled blond man lay sleeping on the upper bunk. His fair hair was real, and could only have come from the head of Leslie’s baby sister Martha. The blond man’s arm, which was made of wire, dangled in sleep over the side of the top bunk. The seaman in the bunk below, a smaller, dark-haired man, was reaching for the blond, sleeping man’s hand with his own wire arms and hands. Beneath the bottom bunk, Leslie noticed strands of coarse, black hair, a patch of muslin. He drew out a little doll, a tiny woman with painted-on lips, a white face, and real, long, black hair. There was a trickle of red paint drawn down the side of her mouth. Swiftly, fingers shaking, Leslie stuffed the little replica of the woman back under the bottom bunk. He hurriedly replaced every interlocking wooden piece that made up his father’s masterwork, rebuilt the whole boat as quickly as he could. Light was streaming through the windows by the time he was done. He felt something bad had been released by opening the boat. The feeling of menace, which had dissipated while he was working, had returned. He felt his father’s secret in the room without knowing what the secret was.


  Leslie’s slipper dragged a piece of paper along the floor. He bent and picked it up. It was folded over neatly. On the outside was written, Please read, in his father’s careful writing. He didn’t understand how he hadn’t noticed this before. Maybe it had been tucked under the ship and fluttered down to the floor as he removed the pieces. He sat down on the cool concrete and unfolded the piece of paper. His father would explain the secret to him, maybe. He read: Please pack this model with care and send to Hutch Sonderson, 14 Humbolt Street, Dayle, Iowa. And then, inches beneath that, like an afterthought, was scrawled This pains me. Leslie sat as though he had been hit on the head, unable to form a thought, for a long time. Then he heard his mother calling him. He stood up and left the shed.

  Later that morning, he nailed together a sturdy box out of scrap wood left around the shed, lowered the boat into it, and stuffed the box with newspaper to keep the boat steady. He wrote a note with a flat pencil his father had once used to mark measurements on wood: Dear Hutch Sonderson, My father made this for you and then he hanged himself. Sincerely, Leslie Senzatimore. He laid the note on the ship and nailed the box shut. Then he and Chuck Tolan wheeled it to the post office on a flatbed hand truck borrowed from Chuck’s grumpy dad, who was in the moving business. Once they were there, Chuck Tolan helped him lift the box off the hand truck and waited outside while Leslie stood in line, the box at his feet, shoving it forward with his foot as the line grew shorter. When his turn came, he heaved the box up on the counter, paid the considerable postage with his own allowance, left the post office with Chuck Tolan, the two of them riding the hand truck along the sidewalks like a big scooter in total defiance of the menacing Mr. Tolan’s strict admonishments, and tried to forget the thing had ever existed. He managed, for the most part. But now and then, as he grew up, Leslie imagined finding Charlie while he was still alive, wriggling in his noose. He always cut the poor man down, then, with his penknife.

  Leslie never opened the door of the shed again. Nobody did, until Vince McCaffrey married his mother and they turned it into a canned food storage area. McCaffrey was a suburban survivalist, and kept enough canned stew, bottled water, and beans to last several lifetimes in that shed, convinced that once the big war started and all government was a thing of the past, the McCaffreys would need a lot of stew.

  I crouched on Masha’s hat, awash, by some olfactory miracle, in the scent of Leslie’s coffee, and gazed at his recollection. That was a betrayal you wouldn’t get over too fast. Yet there he was, so cheerful, capable, reliable, helpful—I didn’t believe it. There was a gash under all that exemplary maleness, a sucking crater of a wound, like his head had been ripped off and he’d just sewn on a new head. All I wanted to do was introduce him to himself.

  Leslie sat still, arms folded, his deep-set blue-glass eyes staring down at the desk, as the memory evaporated and he returned, slowly, as if drugged, to the present. Segundo, stocky, phlegmatic, knocked on the door. Reflexively, Leslie’s expression changed to interested curiosity, a hint of a smile. He was knee-jerk affable, in the main. Could never stick to a bad mood.

  “Segundo!” he exclaimed, his voice lifted, expectant.

  “I need to show you this joint,” said Segundo softly. Leslie got up and followed Segundo out the door. As he checked the hull of the repaired speedboat in the cavernous hangar, leaving his pathetic memory behind him, I found myself following another chain of occurrence, one unavailable to my strong-jawed host but suddenly, fleetingly, visible to me. Eager for knowledge in all its forms, I hurried down this wormhole and emerged in a battleship, on the Mediterranean, in September 1955.

  Hutch Sonderson sat shirtless, nipples fatly convex from the heat, his chest smooth as a girl’s, strong arms lank at his sides, wheat-colored buzz cut damp with sweat, limpid Caribbean-blue eyes unfocused on the tilting horizon. Charlie Senzatimore, dark, quick-limbed, a fast-talking urban shrimp in comparison to Sonderson’s milky, farm-boy laconism, had fallen in love with Hutch some weeks earlier, but he didn’t know it yet. The tightness in his chest as he watched Hutch space out, the feeling of embarrassed happiness whenever they spoke, he put down to a strangeness that had come over him from being offshore for so long. Three months on the USS New Jersey. The nights were the worst. Lying below Hutch, watching one big, limp hand dangling over the side of the top bunk, long, strong fingers open as if inviting him to hold it—he would never forget the nightly sight of that unattainable hand. For the rest of his life, when Charlie Senzatimore looked back on the disaster that those days were to become for him, he remembered three things: Hutch Sonderson’s hand floating above him, black in the half-light, like an ink stamp; the girl’s round, puffy face dusted with pale powder, her childlike lips tinted red; the body, so small and limp on the bed, limbs twisted randomly like some abandoned doll, strands of dark wet hair stuck to her forehead, her cheeks still hectic, though she had stopped her labored breathing some time before. It had been an accident; there was no doubt about that.

  When she walked him into the room, a breeze puffed out the white muslin curtains like sails, then turned tail and sucked them back out again. A fan circled in the ceiling lazily. The bed was made up with what looked like clean pink sheets. Charlie lay down. The girl sat down beside him. He could hear the wheezing in her chest from where he lay. “You need a doctor,” he said. She smiled at him, uncomprehending. He thought, She’s probably doing this because she needs a doctor. The thought of leaving her some money and running down the stairs crossed his mind. He felt no desire. He was agitated, and fidgeted on the crisp sheets, looking up at the winding fan, trying to think of something that would stimulate his imagination. He didn’t have much experience to review. There had been a few awkward, tooth-clanging kisses with one brush-haired girl at the movies, the tentative cupping of her heavy breast. None of this made him even slightly aroused. Ironically, the only thing that made him interested in sex at that moment was Hutch Sonderson, when the whole point of being in this room with this very young, sick girl was so that he could lose his virginity and stop thinking about Hutch Sonderson. It was a simple equation and one that Charlie felt would work. It had to. If it didn’t he would throw himself into the sea. The girl said something in a whining tone, clawing weakly, insistently, at his T-shirt. She was in a hurry. Her fingers irritated him. She wore a loose-fitting robe. Her hair was long and black. He took a handful of the hair and smelled it, eyes closed. He imagined smelling Hutch’s skin, smooth, salty, warm, sun-baked. The pitch of his desire tossed him at the girl, whose thin, weak frame collapsed beneath him. He could hear her phlegmy breaths as he toiled to maintain his desire. Losing an internal battle, he flipped her over. She cried out, protesting, because perhaps she had not had that done to her, that particular thing, or it wasn’t in her contract, or it cost extra—anyway, she cried out and he muffled her cry, his hand over her mouth, only for a moment it seemed, just long enough, the breath in her lungs gurgling liquidly, like the sound of a straw sucking up the last drops of milk in a glass. The curtains kept puffing into the room and then being sucked out again, as though an enormous being the size of a house were breathing steadily outside the room. When he was done, Charlie took his hand away and she was still. He sat up and she didn’t move. He turned her over. Her mouth looked bruised. She wasn’t breathing. He prodded her, slapped her lightly. He listened to her heart. Nothing. He opened her little wet lips and puffed her full of air. He pounded her narrow, bony chest. He wept in panicked disbelief, kneeling over her. He prayed. But she was gone. It had taken so little to end her life.

  He climbed out the window, shimmied down a drain, made his way through the lane, passing two stylish women laughing, then out onto the Istanbul street, walking as fast as he could without looking suspicious, his U.S. Navy uniform attracting the stares of passersby as it was, until he came to the harbor and the battleship, as long as a city, it seemed. When he got to his berth, there was big, smooth-limbed Sonderson sitting on Charlie’s bottom bunk, his bare feet flat a
gainst the lockers opposite, all golden hair and skin, glowing like Apollo, polishing his boots. His presence dwarfed the cabin. He grinned at Charlie, his teeth white as a picket fence.

  “How was it?” he drawled. Sonderson had declined to come along to the whorehouse; he had a fiancée in Iowa and was going to go straight home and fill her to the brim with his gleaming seed the minute his tour of duty was done. Charlie crawled past Sonderson to lie down on his bunk, inching as close to the wall as possible, his stocking feet nevertheless inches from his bunkmate’s rock-hard ass. Sonderson continued his polishing. He didn’t notice—or didn’t mention—the tears that were coursing from the corners of Charlie’s eyes, past his temples, and wetting the pillow. Hours later, they set out to sea again. Charlie imagined the girl growing cold alone in that room.

  Though Charlie Senzatimore was too frightened to commit suicide that night, cowed by the church’s famous threats of hell meted out to all self-killers, he did manage an internal death. He never told anyone about the little whore’s accidental asphyxiation, or his love for Hutch Sonderson. He served out his time in the Navy, walked off the ship, took eight befuddled years to meet the very tall Evelyn Bresnihan, and started living the life he was supposed to.

  Leslie knew none of this, of course, yet somehow he’d grokked it all.

  In the bleached, impeccable Edelman bathroom, perched on a soap dispenser near the sink, I watched Pearl Edelman help Masha undress for her bath. Pearl, her wig exchanged for a snood, a terry-cloth head covering with a little sack in the back to catch her hair, lowered the straps of Masha’s floor-length jersey dress; it crumpled airily to the floor, followed by her long-sleeved gray shirt, bandage-white brassiere, and cotton child’s underwear. I gazed at her perfect imperfection: rounded, graceful arms, full breasts that grew upward like buds and culminated in rosy nipples. Her hips were smooth, her legs strong, lean, and a little bowlegged. I no longer know if she was beautiful. Probably not—but she had a fluid, animal grace. Her black hair fell down her back in glossy waves. Her great, glittering eyes seemed to take up two-thirds of her face, and made her seem like a tremulous creature, vulnerable and fierce.