Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  It became such a famous story that for a while gum companies put it in their advertising. All of that was long before any of us were born, but the stories were legendary.

  My mother's mystery and my father's heroism and the house itself—Hawthorn—all had stories attached to them.

  Named for the thorny trees that grew wild near the house (although Minnie Wooten was quick to point out whenever she could that in fact they weren't "true hawthorns," whatever that meant), Hawthorn was a rambling old structure—a farmhouse that had grown with a few generation of Raglans, a poor Welsh family turned rich then poor again with my father's generation. Two stories high and simple in one way—for it was as plain as a New England farmhouse could be—it was also eccentric in many ways. It seemed of no particular age or time, for it had elements of various incarnations—from its humble early eighteenth-century beginnings as a stone house of one room right through the creation of its many rooms, and its serpentine curving along the rocky acreage where it grew. The last addition had been the greenhouse, which was under construction for most of my life and still remained unfinished to some extent. It had been intended for my mother.

  Then Hawthorn had begun to fall apart, on bad pasture-land that had lain fallow for decades, edging deep New England woods, beyond which lay the village of Burnley, known more for what it didn't have than what it did, and beyond this, the sea.

  My father's favorite things about the old house, he told us, were the lessons it taught him. "Never let your roof get too leaky, never let the gutters fill with leaves, and always check the gas before you light the pilot." He had once, accidentally, nearly blown up the house because he had not checked the gas first. "Life is like a house. You have to do routine maintenance constantly or else it all just goes down the tubes at once." My main memories of him at home generally were about repairing and fixing things. Or putting up drywall when the old wall near the front staircase had rotted out—I wasn't much help, even though I tried my best to pitch in. My dad had a temper when he worked on the old house. He'd cuss a blue streak if I so much as held a hammer the wrong way or wasn't sure how to change a drill bit. He worked on the plumbing himself, allowing no one to come in and "rob us blind just for changing a washer and unscrewing a bolt." He had an ongoing project of tearing down walls, putting in new insulation, putting the walls back up—as if it were his main occupation. About the only thing he allowed me to do was install locks (I could handle this by the time I was fourteen or so) and carry his toolkit for him. He loved that house, and had worked on the ceiling and floors and walls as if he treasured the place.

  I had left Hawthorn and hoped to never spend more than a weekend there ever again. Not because of unhappy memories, or because of something stupid that I took part in just before I headed off for college, but because of something I did that had cut me off from knowing any peace on the island.

  I fell in love with a girl who would not love me back. A pattern for me, as it turned out.

  Between that event—when I was eighteen—and my mother's abandonment of us when I was a little boy, and yes, the arguments with my father, which never seemed to end, I just had no reason to return.

  I always told anyone who asked—outside of the village—that my mother had died when I was nine.

  3

  I'd make up a story about her awful lingering illness, and how we gathered 'round her bedside, with my sister weeping to bring the angels and my father kissing my mother on the hand. I cribbed the emotion of the scene from the death of Little Nell in Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop, and part from the death of Little Eva from Uncle Tom's Cabin. These were deaths of absolute purity and saintliness, as befitted a beloved family member. There was an intensity to the innocence of those deaths. I wanted to believe it happened that way, too, with Mother beneath a snow-white comforter, her golden hair falling across the tear-stained pillow, the scent of wildflowers and bitter herbs in the air, a small red rose of color in her otherwise pale cheek, and a last clasp of her hand as she gave me motherly wisdom and departed to heaven with one final and wistful sigh.

  But that was a lie.

  Everyone in Burnley knew the truth. Anyone could tell you—in broad daylight on a Wednesday afternoon, you could walk into what might roughly approximate a village and ask any of the children who had just gotten off the school bus. I'm betting they'd know about the Raglans' mother. How she had abandoned her husband and family, and was very much alive and enjoying a different family somewhere in Sao Paulo, Brazil. My mother was, after all, the most exotic creature that Burnley Island had ever seen after the summer was over.

  She ordered perfume from London, from a perfumery that her grandmother had once run, that her great-grandfather had founded in the South of France, and from which she had been disinherited when she purportedly stole several thousand dollars from my grandmother's bank account. (How many times had I been told by people as I grew up that she was a bad woman? That I might turn out just like she had, somehow tainted with her blood?) She had been raised in London, Switzerland, and Majorca, gone to college at Columbia. She had met my father in Burnleyside one summer when visiting a college friend's family there, dropped out of college, and went slumming with him until she ended up pregnant and in love. Her family never spoke to her again. And she never spoke to them. They never spoke to us, the grandchildren, either. They lived in other countries, and were mythological to me—real but not truly to be believed.

  My father had his own share of fame, but without the wealth, so he was her equal in many ways, despite his rough-and-tumble upbringing, as opposed to her refined boarding school years. She had been, without question, the most beautiful woman on the island. I remember her looking like a fairy princess—slender, ethereal, with almond-shaped eyes, and a sloping but elegant nose. She had golden hair—not blond or yellow, but a rich autumn gold that might look sandy blond on her worst days, like creamy toffee on others, and spun gold at her best. She always smelled of vanilla and lime and lavender. I would sit with her while she bathed, and she would tell me tales from the Arabian nights or of how she had stowed away once with a friend on a tramp steamer and had gone to Brazil, her favorite country in the entire world. "I was sixteen and running away," she said, "but it was just for the summer. A wonderful summer of romantic suspense," she added, without explaining any details. My mother had many talents: She played music, sketched on long summer afternoons, read from books, and tried her hand at poetry briefly. I remember her mainly surrounded by candlelight—she was a romantic at heart, and I suppose it's what changed her, that romantic yearning.

  She had mischief in her as well. I discovered this early and was charmed by it—by her misadventures in finding ways of getting to Boston faster than anyone could get there, the way she'd spend money cautiously one minute and then as if nothing were more important than something whimsical she'd just seen—and had to have at any cost. My father adored her, and adored the attention men gave her—he told me that he was proud that his wife was such a prize and yet had chosen him.

  It all ended one night, years ago. December 19th. A red-letter day.

  My mother walked out the door when I was nine years old and told my father that if he loved his kids so much, he could have them. The details: She wore her reddest dress (as small town minds like to recall), she had one of my father's guns for protection in case he tried to force her to stay, and it was very late at night or else very early in the morning. The story went that my father sobbed quietly, gave her his blessing, and told her he would be there with the kids when she got tired of this new man in her life.

  My father was a good man, so said people in Burnley and everyone who had ever heard of him. He told us that our mother loved us very much and left us only because something inside her head had control of her—but he promised he would be there, to take care of us and keep us safe.

  He kept that promise, in his own way.

  He even told us he'd take her back, if she wished to return.

  "But to stand i
n the way of someone's happiness," he told me once, "is the cruelest of impulses. It's as cruel as killing men, in my opinion. Real love sometimes means letting love fly."

  I had a dream soon after my mother left us. When I spoke about it to my brother and sister, when we were young, they told me they had dreams like it, too. In the dream, our mother came home and took each of us up in her arms, embracing and kissing us all over. In the dream, our father hugged us as well. It's only natural for children to want to see their parents reunited, even if those same children know that it's like wishing there were an Easter Bunny, or that birthday candles release some magic when they're blown out. I sometimes wonder if we don't long for precisely what we know in truth we can never have.

  I dreamed about a silver crescent, too, like the moon. Like a crown that our mother would wear when she returned to us from the man she'd run off with so many years ago. The shadow man we'd never known, but who had come into our mother's life and stolen her from us.

  My father had been taken by a different kind of shadow man.

  Viciously.

  "A peculiar ferocity," wrote Harry Withers, who reported for the Burnley Gazette, but whom I knew primarily from the playground of my childhood. "One does not associate this sort of crime with the peaceful island of Burnley, Massachusetts, known primarily for its plover shelter in the wetlands and its role in the Revolutionary War. The bogs and woods and meadows no longer seem benign. The hunt is on for the person or persons who committed this heinous act upon a war hero, upon a father, upon a man who stood for everything that was good in Burnley."

  The first I knew that my father had been tortured in a war was in second grade when that boy I had only just met named Harry Withers taunted me with, "Your daddy's got only one ball! The other got cut off and fed to snakes! Your daddy's a freak!"

  4

  It never occurred to me at that age that just because my father had always been missing two fingers on his right hand, he might have had something happen to him that caused it. Or that other parts of him might be missing as well. Since I was only dimly aware of what balls were at that age, I wasn't sure if it mattered how many my father possessed.

  Harry Withers seemed to think it mattered a hell of a lot. There was something in the nature of both challenge and humiliation for him to say it out on the blacktop during recess. I ended up in a fistfight, which got me to the principal's office, then to the nurse's office, and then a note to my parents about how I'd nearly bitten Harry's ear off.

  I had barely snipped at his ear with my teeth, but it did bleed a lot. I was afraid I'd mutilated Harry, that I'd be thrown in jail for having done it, and that poor one-eared Harry would haunt me forever. As it turned out, Harry's ear would heal within days. Not so my troubled heart. Why did my father have only one ball and eight fingers?

  I went home nearly in tears and angry enough to cuss. I asked my mother what this was all about, after she'd given me the disappointed treatment from reading the principal's note.

  Modest though she was, she had no problem setting me straight on my father's testicular health. This was followed by a bit of birds-and-bees, and how loving, legally wed people lay very close together and then nearly a year later, a baby would be born. Even with my father's condition, apparently he had no problem fathering three children.

  My father, she told me, did indeed have one "testicle, and yes, some bad things happened to him over there," and she took me in the library of our home—a dusty room that had always seemed misshapen to me, packed with shelves and books—and brought down a photo album. She went through my father's childhood, his parents, the war, his capture, the news clippings, and finally said to me, "So two of his fingers are gone, and yes, his testicle was also taken, but it doesn't make him less of a man. You just remember that. There are a lot of men who walk around with no balls whatsoever."

  I learned most of what I knew of my father's heroics by the time I was nine.

  He had fought in a war before I was born. He'd been taken captive for twenty months, had tried to escape from his captors twice, had lost two fingers on his left hand for reasons of which he never spoke, had been decorated a hero, and had returned to the plow as it were—or in his case, returned to his own father's farm, married, and started a family.

  My mother retrieved the articles for me. She substituted them for the comic books I loved to look at. She would show me the old home movies. Daddy getting a medal. Daddy standing beside a helicopter. Daddy meeting some news anchorman. Daddy standing in line with others to meet the president. Daddy and Mommy on their wedding day, with swords and guns and soldiers standing in a halo around them. The glow of heroism surrounded him in all these photographs. I felt better about my father. I loved him even more for being not just a hero to me, but to the world.

  Sometimes, an old-timer from town would see me at the playground in the park and call me over and tell me that I looked just like my father did when he was my age. "Your grandfather wasn't much good, but he made himself a good man in your daddy," someone might say; once I heard the librarian, Mrs. Pollock, tell me that my father had been the most famous man to ever come out of Burnley, and that no one had expected he'd come back to run Hawthorn again or even try and get along when the money ran out.

  "He could've been president or at least a senator, once upon a time," she told me. "That's how famous he was after the war. Not famous like movie stars or rock and roll people. Not that vulgar thing. And not rich. I mean to say famous in the ways that count. And just like you, he got in trouble as a boy sometimes. So don't think that it's the end of the world for you. You can be a hero, just like your father."

  Or I'd hear the story of how my father had managed to save seven men from certain death, or how my father had piloted a helicopter "without knowing nothin' about helicopters but that they spin. And he bombed the hell out of them. He just dropped it all back down on them. And he got his men out."

  My father would rarely speak of the past that existed before meeting my mother, other than to hide the medals of valor in places where my brother and I could not find them. He'd scoff at the idea that he had ever been a hero at all. After my mother ran off, he lived under a terrible burden. He expressed little that wasn't dour or dutiful after that. He gave lessons or lectured; he rarely spoke to me and even more rarely listened. I suppose my mother's abandonment affected all of us, and may have been part of the fog that kept me confused about life and my place in it as I grew into an adult.

  I grew up under the burden of his heroism, and I became less than a model son because I knew I was no hero. My impulses were never heroic ones. I began smoking by the time I was twelve, and when I was seventeen, I'd done all the things teenagers do that they will regret in merely a few years, scarred by such foolishness and disregard for any rule in life. I was the embarrassment of the family when I left it.

  Yet, I could look back on the love and affection of the household; on the way my father would tell me—even at my worst—that he'd done just such a thing when he'd been my age, and it was wrong, but it was not wicked, merely childish.

  His words had the effect of arms around me—it was his way of embracing.

  I took his wise words to heart and knew that despite my missteps in life, my father had gone through many more difficulties than I could dream up, and still, he had done good.

  My mother had been a slightly different story.

  5

  After she left, my father told us that she sometimes called, late at night.

  No matter how much he begged, she would not come back to us. He told us that she wanted to see us. He promised that one day she would come for us, would collect us, but that "now" wasn't the time.

  She sent letters and postcards, as well, but none of them mentioned our names. Notes like: "I want to keep in touch, but the past is so difficult to mull over. Please don't let's keep in touch. I don't want to cause you more pain." She sent a few of these that I saw.

  I assumed my father had been writing her late a
t night, posting his mail without our knowing, begging her to return. "She's got a new life," my father would say at times, and begin to brood. "I would love to tell the three of you that she doesn't love you, but I know she does. This is the hardest thing I've ever said. Even in war, nothing was this hard, but I will say it regardless. You must each overcome this. I can't force your mother to come home. I can't go chase her down if she is with this other man and she claims that this brings her happiness. You've been crying since she left, and you haven't eaten enough, and you all have to stop it now. She is not the woman I married. She's not the mother who brought each of you into this world. She changed. Perhaps she'll change back. But the best we can do is hang tough and get through this. And each of you needs to pitch in and do your share. Accept this, somehow. Accept it now. Life is its own kind of war. You've got to fight it and win it."

  As he spoke, I saw his eyes become glassy and distant. I couldn't look at the sadness in his face, but glanced down at my shoes. Somehow, I felt all of us were to blame. I felt that if I had just been nicer to my mother, she would've stayed. If I hadn't gotten into any trouble, she would've stayed. If I'd said my prayers every morning and night, she probably would still have been with us. I have no doubt that Brooke and Bruno felt the same way.

  "None of you deserves this," he said. "Not one of you."

  And that was all he really spoke about it.

  6

  Now and then, one of us would ask about her. He'd tell us to write a letter and he'd send it. None of us ever wrote a letter, although I started a few, but put them aside. I suppose we accepted the finality on some deep level, regardless of our wants and needs on the surface of things.

  Once she wrote to us all and mentioned a new child. She had a new child. A boy. His name was Steven. That's all she said about him. My father tore the letter up after reading it aloud, tears in his eyes, and held us close. At other times, he went into horrible rages and locked himself in his room for an entire day, screaming, as if at the walls of the house itself.