by Peter Straub
“No, sir,” his father said. “If you think about the way I work, you will have to—”
He blew air out of his mouth, still pushing down that coiled spring in his chest. Fee knew that his father hated to be interrupted.
“I see that, sir, but a person on my salary can’t hire a nurse or a housekeeper, and—”
Another loud exhalation.
“Do I have to tell you what goes on in hospitals? The infections, the sheer sloppiness, the . . . I have to keep her at home. I don’t know if you’re aware of this, sir, but there have been very few nights when I have not been able to spend most of my time at the hotel.”
Slowly, as if he had become aware of the oddness of his posture, Fee’s father began straightening up. He pressed his hand into the small of his back. “Sometimes we pray.”
Fee saw the air around his father darken and fill with little white sparkling swirling things that winked and dazzled before they disappeared. Jude saw them, too, and moved deeper beneath the chaise.
“Well, I suppose you are entitled to your own opinion about that,” said his father, “but you are very much mistaken if you feel that my religious beliefs did in any way—
“I dispute that absolutely,” his father said.
“I have already explained that,” his father said. “Almost every night since my wife fell ill, I managed to get to the hotel. I bring an attitude to work with me, sir, of absolute dedication—
“I’m sorry you feel that way, sir,” his father said, “but you are making a very great mistake.
“I mean, you are making a mistake,” his father said. The little white dancing lines spun and winked out in the air like fireworks.
Both Fee and Jude stared raptly from beneath the chaise.
His father gently replaced the receiver, and then set the telephone down on the table. His face was set in the cement of prayer.
Fee looked at the black telephone on its little table between the big chair and the streaky window: the headset like a pair of droopy ears, the round dial. On the matching table, a porcelain fawn nuzzled a porcelain doe.
Heavy footsteps strode toward him. Jude searched warmth against his side. His father came striding in his gleaming shirt with the boxy lines from the dry cleaner’s, his dark trousers, his tacked-down necktie, his shiny shoes. His mustache, two fat commas, seemed like another detachable ornament.
Bob Bandolier bent down, settled his thick white hands beneath Fee’s arms, and pulled him up like a toy. He set him on his feet and frowned down at the child.
Then his father slapped his face and sent him backward against the chaise. Fee was too stunned to cry. When his father struck the other side of his face, his knees went away and he began to slip toward the rug. His cheeks burned. Bob Bandolier leaned down again. Silver light from the window painted a glowing white line on his dark hair. Fee’s breath burned its way past the hot ball in his throat, and he closed his eyes and wailed.
“Do you know why I did that?”
His father’s voice was still as low and reasonable as it had been when he was on the telephone.
Fee shook his head.
“Two reasons. Listen to me, son. Reason number one.” He raised his index finger. “You disobeyed me, and I will always punish disobedience.”
“No,” Fee said.
“I sent you from the room, didn’t I? Did you go out?”
Fee shook his head again, and his father gripped him tightly between his two hands and waited for him to stop sobbing. “I will not be contradicted, is that clear?”
Fee nodded miserably. His father gave a cool kiss to his burning cheek.
“I said there were two reasons, remember?”
Fee nodded.
“Sin is the second reason.” Bob Bandolier’s face moved hugely through the space between them, and his eyes, deep brown with luminous eggshell whites, searched Fee and found his crime. Fee began to cry again. His father held him upright. “The Lord Jesus is very, very angry today, Fielding. He will demand payment, and we must pay.”
When his father talked like this, Fee saw a page from Life magazine, a torn battlefield covered with shell craters, trees burned to charred stumps, and huddled corpses.
“We will pray together,” his father said, and hitched up the legs of his trousers and went down on his knees. “Then we will go in to see your mother.” His father touched one of his shoulders with an index finger and pressed down, trying to push Fee all the way through the floor to the regions of eternal flame. Fee finally realized that his father was telling him to kneel, and he, too, went to his knees.
His father had closed his eyes, and his forehead was full of vertical lines. “Are you going to talk?” Fee said.
“Pray silently, Fee—say the words to yourself.”
He put his hands together before his face and began moving his lips. Fee closed his own eyes and heard Jude dragging her tongue over and over the same spot of fur.
His father said, “Let’s get in there. She’s our job, you know.”
Inside the bedroom, he opened the clothing press and took his suit jacket from a hanger, replaced the hanger, and closed the door of the press. He shoved his arms into the jacket’s sleeves and transformed himself into the more formal and forbidding man Fee knew best. He dipped his knees in front of the bedroom mirror to check the knot in his tie. He swept his hands over the smooth hair at the sides of his head. His eyes in the mirror found Fee’s. “Go to your mother, Fee.”
Until two weeks ago, the double bed had stood on the far end of the rag rug, his mother’s perfume and lotion bottles had stood on the left side of what she called her “vanity table,” her blond wooden chair in front of it. His father now stood there, watching him in the mirror. Up until two weeks ago, the curtains had been open all day, and the bedroom had always seemed full of a warm magic. Fat black Jude spent all day lying in the pool of sunlight that collected in the middle of the rug. Now the curtains stayed shut, and the room smelled of sickness—it reminded Fee of the time his father had brought him to work with him and, giddy with moral outrage, thrust him into a ruined, stinking room. You want to see what people are really like? Slivers of broken glass had covered the floor, and the stuffing foamed out of the slashed sofa, but the worst part had been the smell of the lumps and puddles on the floor. The walls had been streaked with brown. This is their idea of fun, his father had said. Of a good time. Now the rag rug was covered by the old mattress his father had placed on the floor beside the bed. The blond chair in front of the vanity had disappeared, as had the row of little bottles his mother had cherished. Two weeks ago, when everything had changed, Fee had heard his father smashing these bottles, roaring, smashing the chair against the wall. It was as if a monster had burst from his father’s skin to rage back and forth in the bedroom. The next morning, his father said that Mom was sick. Pieces of the chair lay all over the room, and the walls were covered with explosions. The whole room smelled overpoweringly sweet, like heaven with its flowers. Your mother needs to rest. She needs to get better. Fee had dared one glance at her tumbled hair and open mouth. A tiny curl of blood crept from her nose. She’s sick, but we’ll take care of her.
She had not gotten any better. As the perfume explosions had dried on the wall, his father’s shirts and socks and underwear had gradually covered the floor between the old mattress and the bare vanity table, and Fee now walked over the litter of clothing to step on the mattress and approach the bed. The sickroom smell intensified as he came closer to his mother. He was not sure that he could look at his mother’s face—the bruised, puffy mask he had seen the last time his father had let him into the bedroom. He stood on the thin mattress beside the bed, looking at the wisps of brown hair that hung down over the side of the bed. They reached all the way to the black letters stamped on the sheet that read St. Alwyn Hotel. Maybe her hair was still growing. Maybe she was waiting for him to look at her. Maybe she was better—the way she used to be. Fee touched the letters, and let his fingers drift upwa
rd so that his mother’s hair brushed his hand. He could hear breath moving almost soundlessly in his mother’s throat.
“See how good she looks now? She’s looking real good, aren’t you, honey?”
Fee moved his eyes upward. It felt as though his chest and his stomach, everything inside him, swung out of his body and swayed in the air a moment before coming back inside him. Except for a fading yellow bruise that extended from her eye to her hairline, she looked like his mother again. Flecks of dried oatmeal clung to her chin and the sides of her mouth. The fine lines in her cheeks looked like pencil marks. Her mouth hung a little bit open, as if to sip the air, or to beg for more oatmeal.
Fee is five, and he is looking at his mother for the first time since he saw her covered with bruises. His conscious life—the extraordinary life of Fee’s consciousness—has just begun.
He thought for a second that his mother was going to answer. Then he realized that his father had spoken to her as he would speak to Jude, or to a dog in the street. He let his fingertips touch her skin. Unlike her face, his mother’s hands were rough, with enlarged knuckles like knots and callused fingertips that widened out at their ends. The skin on the back of her hand felt cool and peculiarly coarse.
“Sure you are, honey,” said his father behind him. “You’re looking better every day.”
Fee clutched her hand and tried to squeeze some of his own life into her. His mother lay on her bed like a princess frozen by a curse in a fairy tale. A blue vein pulsed in her eyelid. All she could see was black night.
For a second Fee saw night, too, a deep swooning blackness that called to him.
Yes, he thought. Okay. That’s okay.
“We’re here, honey,” his father said.
Fee wondered if he had ever before heard his father call his mother honey.
“That’s your little Fee holding your hand, honey, can’t you feel his love?”
A startling sense of negation—of revulsion—caused Fee to pull back his hands. If his father saw, he did not mind, for he said nothing. Fee saw his mother floating away into the immense sea of blackness inside her.
For a second he forgot to breathe through his mouth, and the stench that rose from the bed assaulted him.
“Didn’t have time to clean her up yet today. I’ll get to it before long—but you know, she could be lying on a bed of silk, it’d be all the same to her.”
Fee wanted to lean forward and put his arms around his mother, but he stepped back.
“We’re none of us doctors and nurses here, Fee.”
For a moment Fee thought there must be more people in the room. Then he realized that his father meant the two of them, and that put into his head an idea of great simplicity and truth.
“Mommy ought to have a doctor,” he said, and risked looking up at his father.
His father leaned over and pulled him by the shoulders, making him move awkwardly backward over the mattress on the floor. Fee braced himself to be struck again, but his father turned him around and faced him with neither the deepening of feeling nor the sparkling of violence that usually preceded a blow.
“If I was three nurses instead of just one man, I could give her a change of sheets twice a day—hell, I could probably wash her hair and brush her teeth for her. But, Fee—” His father’s grip tightened, and the wedges of his fingers drove into Fee’s skin. “Do you think your mother would be happy, away from us?”
The person lying on the bed no longer had anything to do with happiness and unhappiness.
“She could only be happy being here with us, that’s right, Fee, you’re right. She knew you were holding her hand—that’s why she’s going to get better.” He looked up. “Pretty soon, you’re going to be sitting up and sassing back, isn’t that right?”
He wouldn’t allow anybody to sass him back, not ever.
“Let’s pray for her now.”
His father pushed him down to his knees again, then joined him on the blanket. “Our Father who art in heaven,” he said. “Your servant, Anna Bandolier, my wife and this boy’s mother, needs Your help. And so do we. Help us to care for her in her weakness, and we ask You to help her to overcome this weakness. Not a single person on earth is perfect, this poor sick woman included, and maybe we all have strayed in thought and deed from Your ways. Mercy is the best we can hope for, and we sinners know we do not deserve it, amen.”
He lowered his hands and got to his feet. “Now leave the room, Fee.” He removed his jacket and hung it on one of the bedposts and rolled up his sleeves. He tucked his necktie into his shirt. He stopped to give his son a disturbingly concentrated look. “We’re going to take care of her by ourselves, and we don’t want anybody else knowing our business.”
“Yes, sir,” Fee said.
His father jerked his head toward the bedroom door. “You remember what I said.”
2
His father never asked if he wanted to kiss his mom, and he never thought to ask if he could—the pale woman lying on the bed with her eyes closed was not someone you could kiss. She was sailing out into the vast darkness within her a little more every day. She was like a radio station growing fainter and fainter as you drove into the country.
The yellow bruise faded away, and one morning Fee realized that it had vanished altogether. Her cheeks sank inward toward her teeth, drawing a new set of faint pencil lines across her face. One day, five or six days after the bruise had disappeared, Fee saw that the round blue shadows of her temples had collapsed some fraction of an inch inward, like soft ground sinking after a rain.
Fee’s father kept saying that she was getting better, and Fee knew that this was true in a way that his father could not understand and he himself could only barely see. She was getting better because her little boat had sailed a long way into the darkness.
Sometimes Fee held a half-filled glass of water to her lips and let teaspoon-sized sips slide, one after another, into the dry cavern of her mouth. His mother never seemed to swallow these tiny drinks, for the moisture slipped down her throat by itself. He could see it move, quick as a living thing, shining and shivering as it darted into her throat.
Sometimes when his father prayed, Fee found himself examining the nails on his mother’s hand, which grew longer by themselves. At first her fingernails were pink, but in a week, they turned an odd yellowish-white. The moons disappeared. Oddest of all, her long fingernails grew a yellow-brown rind of dirt.
He watched the colors alter in her face. Her lips darkened to brown, and a white fur appeared in the corner of her mouth.
Lord, this woman needs Your mercy. We’re counting on You here, Lord.
When Fee left the bedroom each evening, he could hear his father go about the business of cleaning her up. When his father came out of the room, he carried the reeking ball of dirty sheets downstairs into the basement, his face frozen with distaste.
Mrs. Sunchana from the upstairs apartment washed her family’s things twice a week, on Monday and Wednesday mornings, and never came downstairs at night. Fee’s father put the clean sheets through the wringer and then took the heavy sheets outside to hang them on the two washing lines that were the Bandoliers’.
One night, his father slapped him awake and leaned over him in the dark. Fee, too startled to cry, saw his father’s enormous eyes and the glossy commas of the mustache glaring down at him. His teeth shone. Heat and the odor of alcohol poured from him.
—You think I was put on earth to be your servant. I was not put on earth to be your servant. I could close the door and walk out of here tomorrow and never look back. Don’t kid yourself—I’d be a lot happier if I did.
3
One day Bob Bandolier got a temporary job as desk man at the Hotel Hepton. Fee buffed his father’s black shoes and got the onyx cuff links from the top of the dresser. He pulled on his own clothes and watched his father pop the dry cleaner’s band from around a beautiful stiff white shirt, settle the shirt like armor around his body and squeeze the buttons through t
he holes, coax the cuff links into place, tug his sleeves, knot a lustrous and silvery tie, button his dark suit. His father dipped his knees before the bedroom mirror, brushed back the smooth hair at the sides of his head, used his little finger to rub wax into his perfect mustache, a comb no larger than a thumbnail to coax it through the whiskers.
His father pulled his neat dark topcoat on over the suit, patted his pockets, and gave Fee a dollar. He was to sit on the steps until noon, when he could walk to the Beldame Oriental Theater. A quarter bought him admission, and fifty cents would get him a hot dog, popcorn, and a soft drink; he could see From Dangerous Depths, starring Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino, along with a second feature, the travelogue, previews, and a cartoon; then he was to walk back down Livermore without talking to anybody and wait on the steps until his father came back home to let him in. The movies ended at twenty-five minutes past five, and his father said he would be home before six, so it would not be a long wait.
“We have to make it snappy,” his father said. “You can’t be late for the Hepton, you know.”
Fee went dutifully to the closet just inside the front door, where his jacket and his winter coat hung from hooks screwed in halfway down the door. He reached up dreamily, and his father ripped the jacket off the hook and pushed it into his chest.
Before Fee could figure out the jacket, his father had opened the front door and shoved him out onto the landing. Fee got an arm into a sleeve while his father locked the door. Then he pulled at the jacket, but his other arm would not go into its sleeve.
“Fee, you’re deliberately trying to louse me up,” his father said. He ripped the jacket off his arm, turned it around, and jammed his arms into the sleeves. Then he fought the zipper for a couple of seconds. “You zip it. I have to go. You got your money?”
He was going down the steps and past the rosebushes to the path that went to the sidewalk.
