Cursed Be the Child

by Mort Castle

  “Hmm?” Selena sensed this was it. Once rapport with a client had been established, there was typically a center to each appointment, something the client wanted to say, needed to bring out, a specific psychic hurt or trauma to lay before the psychologist for healing.

  It was just the way people bring their trouble and pain to a cohalyi, a Romany wise woman; they come in sick in their minds and souls and all they want is magic.

  “So the other day,” Kristin was saying, “my dad tries to give me a surprise hug. He just reaches out and grabs me. It was kinda sweet, you know, because Dad, well, he’s not that way, never was a real huggy person. He was trying so hard! And as soon as he touched me, I couldn’t help it, I started screaming and just couldn’t stop. It was funny, even though it wasn’t. My poor dad jumped back and hit his elbow on the sideboard. And he said ‘Jesus Christ, are you crazy?’ and I was still screaming and I kept saying, ‘You scared me! I’m sorry! You scared me!’ but I think I was really crying because he’s a man and I just felt dirty like shit when he touched me.”

  Kristin fell silent. Her shoulders moved, and Selena wondered if she were weeping. But when Kris turned there were no tears on her face. “Will I ever stop feeling dirty, Selena?”

  “Yes,” Selena said without hesitation.

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  It was a promise Selena Lazone could not keep.

  She spotted it—a space! She turned off Ellis Avenue into the “C” lot by the Court Theater. Parking at the University of Chicago was often impossible, so you took what you could get. Anything under ten miles away from where you wanted to be was a perfect parking spot.

  Selena was outlandishly pleased at her good fortune, parking without hours of driving up, down and around. This was one of life’s little victories that keep us all going.

  With the temperature in the low 60s, the day was beautifully sunny. The soft breeze carried not even a thin promise of forthcoming chilly weather, but autumn had arrived, the leaves turning early and the campus exploding with color.

  It was an invigorating walk to the bookstore. In jeans and a flapping long sleeve, frayed collar shirt, one of David’s castoffs that he wasn’t quite ready to cast off, she felt very young, girlish almost, as though she’d shed her “mature adult responsibility” guise with her tailored suit.

  Yet Selena felt something else, too—disquieting, out-of-place feeling. This time it hit her as she zigzagged around a hand-holding couple, giving them a quick glance. Both of them had book-laden knapsacks. Yuppies? Not hardly. The young man wore unfashionable wire rim glasses; with his shock of unruly hair, he looked like a 1930s socialist labor organizer. The woman was strikingly plain. Her thin lips were pursed as if that was their natural expression. She had the look of a film critic who hadn’t seen a worthwhile movie since Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast.

  What was the young couple discussing on such a fine day?

  University of Chicago students belonged here. They had been bred for the U of C, growing up in homes where Miros and Chagalls hung on walls, where bookcases held signed copies of Dos Passos, Sinclair and Wilder, where the radio was incapable of playing rock and roll or country and western but broadcast only Studs Terkel’s retrospective on the music and politics of Paul Robeson.

  As an undergraduate, Selena had often thought herself a fraud, an impostor. It was still the feeling she could never quite shake whenever she was at the U of C.

  Self-hate? she asked herself, knowing she was thinking like this because of the morning’s session with Kristin Heidmann. But yes, it was indeed self-hate. She despised what she had been—an illiterate nomad and outcast skulking on the edge of civilized society.

  But she had not let herself remain a slave to unthinking genes or tradition. She’d had a vision of what she could be, and she worked to turn her vision into reality.

  And she had.

  And that was that.

  “Enough bullshit,” she quietly scolded herself.

  An hour and a half later, she stepped out of the bookstore. She had purchased three psychology texts, including a new translation of an early Binzwanger, and a reprint of a collection of short stories by John Updike. Now she felt all right. Buying books was always reassuring, reminding her that she was free to acquire any knowledge she sought.

  Chances are David would be in now. She’d call and lure him away from the Blues in Black and White project that seemed to be his 24-plus hours a day obsession. She’d have him meet her at The Woodlawn Tap for a drink or two, and then maybe they’d go somewhere and catch a bite, and then this evening, maybe hear some jazz, and then, late, a little drunk and laughing easily, they could go back home and fuck like crazy. When they’d totally had it, totally, didn’t dare give it another go because their butts would just plain fall off, then they could peer out the living room window and see the moon drifting high and cool and eternal over Lake Michigan, and they would sigh and she would nuzzle his ear and whisper about needs and desires, and maybe, just maybe, he would say for the first time ever, “I love you.”

  Her thoughts were romantic and erotic and silly and nice, so Selena giggled to herself. Then she stopped giggling and stopped walking and stared with eyes she could actually feel straining in their sockets.

  Not more than three yards in front of her, it perched immobile on the lowest limb of an elm tree. Its huge yellow eyes were wise and cruel, horrible and hypnotic.

  Selena stared, and the great horned owl stared back.

  Mulesko chiriklo.

  The owl should not have been out in the daylight hours; it was a nocturnal hunter. The owl should not have been in a crowded urban center; it belonged far to the north, deep in the woods, in the quiet, in the dark.

  But the owl was here because it was not a bird but an omen.

  It was mulesko chiriklo, Selena Lazone thought, the bird of death, and it was a warning sign of death to come, a portent to be seen and understood by the Romany cohalyi, the Gypsy sorceress, Selena Lazone.

  The mulesko chiriklo rose from the limb on its silent pinions and like a feathered nightmare shot straight at her face.

  Then at the very last possible instant, when Selena knew she did not have the control to protect her eyes with even a reflexive blink, the owl shot straight up. It zoomed into the sky and disappeared.

  But not before she heard, or thought she heard, the owl make a sound that was not quite sharp enough to be a screech but that had the perfect cutting edge to be a warning.

  Her plastic bag of books fell, and her knees slammed into the concrete sidewalk. It hurt, but it was a normal hurt, what anyone would feel, and she savored it, kneeling on the walk, laughing and crying, nose running, tears blinding. She ignored the gathering passers-by, even as she hysterically laughed at the crazy show she was putting on for them.

  Selena tried to fill her mind with the pulsing pain in her knees. And she tried hard but unsuccessfully not to think about the warning of the mulesko chiriklo.

  Of revenge. Of wickedness. Of death.

  Of fate and futility.

  And of the diakka.

  — | — | —

  Twenty-Five

  Saturday evening, while Missy was taking her bath, Laura Morgan called to see if Vicki would care to join her tomorrow.

  “No, afraid not,” Vicki said. For a while, at least, church would have to be off-limits. Oh, in her heart of hearts she did want to attend services tomorrow, but she couldn’t—not until she thought she could enter Grove Corner Presbyterian without being embarrassingly tagged as “that woman whose kid had that tantrum.” Then Vicki reminded herself that she was also “that woman who slapped her kid’s face.” She would only feel guilty about that for the rest of her life.

  Sure, Laura understood. Well, how about they get together after church, lunch then, at Laura’s?

  “Fine,” Vicki said, “but we’ll make it my house. The kids can play and we can visit.”

  Visit? Warren interrupted in a Ra
lph Kramden inflected bellow, loud enough so that he was sure Laura heard. He had been getting something to drink from the refrigerator and was eavesdropping on her end of the telephone conversation. Didn’t the two of them get in enough visiting at the flower shop, or was business just so pressing that they had no time for chit or chat?

  Laughing, Vicki told Laura she had to hang up.

  Of course, Warren was welcome to join them tomorrow.

  “Oh, wow! Hey! Yippee! Some fun,” Warren said. “Two women and two little girls. Cackle, cackle.”

  Warren started singing, off-key and loud. Just then, Missy, in her bathrobe, popped into the kitchen. “Dad, why are you singing so goofy?”

  Warren scooped her up, twirled around and around. “Because this is the real me! I am just a goo-goo-goofy guy!”

  Missy laughed. “Dad”—she put her head on his shoulder—“this is not either the real you.”

  Warren stopped his graceless pirouetting and stood still. For the merest fraction of a moment, Vicki thought she saw something distant and strange and frightened on his face.

  Then it was gone. Cradling Missy to him with his left arm, Warren held out the right. Vicki went to him, and, sighing, happily molded into his embrace.

  It was a moment Vicki would remember the rest of her life.

  There was an overnight change in the weather, a common occurrence in the Midwest. The temperature dropped to the low 40s, and a penetratingly damp wind gusted from the north. The sky held the weighty, dismal promise of rain, and gray seemed to permeate the very air.

  After a long spell of splendid days, it was a depressing Sunday.

  But it didn’t depress him, he thought, as he stepped out of the back door. Not Warren Barringer. He felt great.

  Since his farewell to liquor, he had been aware of subtle changes in his psyche.

  The changes had taken place. The metamorphosis of Warren Barringer was fait accompli. Right at this very instant, as he walked toward the Volvo, he knew he was exactly who he was supposed to be.

  He had it all together! It came to him just like that, a jolt of pure understanding—and he for damned sure knew he was all right.

  Zero problems for Warren Barringer. No booze problems. No problems in the hallowed halls of academe. No artistically agonizing writer’s block. No marital hang-ups or hassles.

  There was nothing now that could thwart him or block him, nothing that would not bow to the indomitable will of Warren Barringer. Warren Barringer was totally in control of his own life.

  The feeling was heady.

  But it was cold out, and his short sleeve shirt didn’t make it. He needed something warmer.

  “A jacket,” he told Vicki when he went back into the house. She agreed it was probably a good idea. But he couldn’t find the jacket he wanted in the hall closet or upstairs in the massive walk-in closet in their bedroom. Funny, because he remembered seeing it just the other day.

  “Vicki! Hey, Vick’. Can’t find it,” he told her. ‘Where’d you put it?”

  With a smile she asked him which jacket he was after.

  “Aw, you know. My all-time favorite.”

  Vicki gave him the weirdest look. Then she said, “You’re kidding.”

  “Kidding?”

  “We threw it out,” Vicki said.

  “That jacket?”

  “It was pretty ratty-looking.”

  “Yeah,” Warren said. “Ratty.”

  “Warren, that jacket went into the garbage five years ago.”

  He scratched his head. Vicki put her hands on her hips. “I think I like it better when you just act kind of dippy. When you tease with a straight face like this or act like you’re getting Alzheimer’s or something, I don’t know what to think.” Her voice grew quieter. “It frightens me.”

  Yeah, he did remember the jacket getting pitched. He hadn’t really forgotten—not really.

  Five minutes later, carrying the Sears all-weather car coat they’d bought him last spring, he got into the Volvo and drove off.

  He was no more than a mile away when a light drizzle began. The windshield misted, but he didn’t turn on the wipers right away. He waited, noticing how his view of reality could be altered by motion and water on glass. It was fascinating, seeing the ordinarily sharply angled eight sides of a stop sign seem to soften.

  A stop sign!

  Calmly, he braked. He was in perfect control of the car, the situation, himself. Soft stop signs. He understood how Dali had come to see soft watches, how Scriabin played an F-sharp on the organ and saw green tongues of fire, how poet Edgar Lee Masters could write of a “stone in the sun / trying to turn into jelly.”

  Everything was mutable, capable of transformation. The entire world was alchemy transmutations occurring each moment.

  A horn blared behind him.

  He stepped on the gas and turned on the wipers. The worn rubber blades smeared the windshield. There were 100,000 different, plastic views of the world with each sweep of the wipers!

  The grayish light faded. The dark day grew darker still—and he marveled. Changes, all is changes. Without a thought about where he was going, Warren Barringer drove on into the rain and the dark.

  — | — | —

  Twenty-Six

  Far off, thunder rumbled.

  Up in Missy’s room, Dorothy Morgan asked, “You want to play something?” She’d been to church, so she was wearing an almost new, dark green, long sleeved dress. She had a purse, too, that she’d set down on Missy’s table.

  Standing at the window, in a North Central U sweatshirt and corduroy jeans, Missy watched countless, fat drops of rain ponderously run down the pane. She said, “I don’t know.”

  Dorothy didn’t much feel like playing either. It was weird, nothing she could explain, but all dressed up on a rainy day, a day so wet and dark it felt heavy, it was as though she was supposed to be an adult. Playing was fun, and no way could she see that adults ever had fun, even when they told you they did! Fun just wasn’t what grownups did.

  Like her mom and Missy’s mom, downstairs. Right now, you knew they were sitting and talking and drinking coffee and maybe looking at catalogs or magazines or something, and if you checked on them two hours from now, they’d be doing the same thing. How could you call that fun?

  She moved alongside Missy by the window. “I wish it would stop raining. I get scared when it rains.”

  Missy didn’t pick up on it, so Dorothy had to push. “You want to know why?”

  “I guess.”

  “See each raindrop is a soul. It’s the soul of a person who died and who’s up in heaven with God.”

  No!

  “But when it starts to rain, then all the souls come down. They become raindrops. You know, it’s really creepy to think about all those souls falling on everything.”

  “Don’t say any more, okay?” Missy said.

  “But the soul can only stay for a little visit,” Dorothy continued. “Just until the sun comes out. Then the raindrops dry up and all the souls down here have to fly right back up where they belong.”

  No! I will stay here! I belong here! I need to have life. I need…to live!

  Missy turned her head sharply to glare at Dorothy. “That’s ignorant. It’s a stupid lie.”

  “Well, that’s what Betty Summerfield told me.”

  “She doesn’t know anything,” Missy said. “And she’s fat as a cow, and she smells like cheese!”

  Dorothy couldn’t argue with that, but she said, “Betty Summerfield goes to church every day, just about. And in her church they pray real loud and jump around, and Betty says they know more about God and heaven and hell and everything than anyone who goes to some other church.”

  “They don’t know anything. Neither does smelly Betty. And you don’t either!”

  Dorothy made a nasty face. Then she pointed an accusing, interrogatory finger. “And what do you know, Missy-Sissy? You’re dumb about church and God. I go to church and I listen and I act right. You don�
��t even know how to behave in church. And you don’t know anything about God. And I’ll bet when you die, Missy Barringer…”

  No!

  “You shut up, Dorothy Morgan!”

  “…you will go right to hell and that will teach you!”

  Missy’s face was sickly white, but in her eyes was a sudden pinpoint flash—and Dorothy Morgan was afraid.

  Years later, out of nowhere, Dorothy Morgan would find herself thinking about this moment of intense and chilling fear, about what had been there in Missy’s eyes. She would remember this moment, not what happened a few minutes later. Pain can be forgotten, but terror is always remembered.

  Dorothy Morgan expected Missy to hit her or kick her. She really did. But in that instant of paralytic fright, Dorothy almost hoped it would be a fist or a foot and not something unimaginable and ever so much worse.

  Oh, no, no, no…

  Missy’s lower lip trembled. The menacing spark in her eyes blinked out, washed away by tears. “Dorothy, don’t say things like that. Please don’t…” And then, Missy bleated, “Oh, I don’t want to die.”

  “Aw, Missy, c’mon now…”

  “It’s terrible to die!”

  Yeah, Dorothy agreed, but it wasn’t that thought that made her feel like crying, too. She felt just about as bad as Missy, because she had made Missy feel so awful by saying all that nasty stuff.

  If you did something bad to someone else, then you felt like you were a bad person. That was how it worked. That was because of your conscience. It wasn’t like they showed it on TV cartoons, a joking around, funny-looking tiny dude on your shoulder, but there really was a voice inside you that you could hear.

  And Dorothy Morgan’s voice was telling her: You were mean. You made her cry. You are bad.

  It wasn’t right. Missy was her friend, her very best friend. You don’t hurt friends!