Edgar and Lucy Read online

  That this quiet child had come from wolves was something the old woman marveled over. He was like one of those tiny figurines in the gift shops: a boy in a straw hat sitting on the edge of a wishing well, a fragile and lovely apparition made of porcelain. The old woman’s heart used to leap when Frank would toss the infant into the air, practically to the ceiling—or in the yard, high enough to scare the birds from the trees. “Up we go!” Frank would shout—Lucy watching from the sidelines, sipping at something. “Up we go!” The baby smiling, oblivious to the danger. After three or four throws, the old woman was always a nervous wreck. “Stop,” she’d plead. But Frank wouldn’t let up. “Make him stop,” she’d say, turning to Lucy for support. But the girl was of no use. She’d been no more than a child herself back then, and the old woman could see that she loved her husband best when he veered toward danger. Frank turned on all the girl’s lights and made her blind. “I can’t make him stop,” she would say, smiling, shrugging. And it was true, she couldn’t. No one could stop him. Frank had had a mind of his own. Even at five, he’d been his own boss. A terror, really, when she thought about it. His teenage years had practically killed her.

  Lucy had been wild, too—was still wild—there was no denying that. She’d been fuel to Frank’s fire. Her son would have been better off with a cold woman, not with such a burning mess. When she was first going with Frank, the girl always looked like she had a fever, hot from something that raged inside her, a force that seemed half joy and half desperation. Frank had something like this, as well, and the two of them set each other off. Bonnie and Clyde! Passion was good up to a point, but too much of it was asking for trouble. Who’s to say Lucy hadn’t spurred him on? Not intentionally, of course; but with all her natural lustiness and her feverish love for Frank, it made too much seem possible, and then a man was bound to become disappointed. There had been something animal-like about their love, something primitive. Whenever Frank latched on to Lucy’s waist in that seize-the-world way of his, the girl would erupt into a shriek of laughter that disturbed the old woman.

  Florence had never been to the mountaintop of sexual love, as she imagined Frank and Lucy had. Once, in Dr. Faustini’s waiting room, the old woman read an article that suggested the finale was like a great wave, and that a woman could ride it very high indeed. But when Florence had sex with Pio, she always managed to stay on the boat, no matter how furiously her husband rocked her. She refused to go into the water, to lose herself in babbling liquidity. She feared that kind of abandonment. From her locked perspective she’d only seen danger in what Lucy had drawn out of her son. Plus, the girl was younger than Frank by a good five years. And with that red hair, well, who wouldn’t be bewitched?

  Not that she blamed the girl, really. There was no one to blame. That was the only way to look at it, if you wanted to get on with things. The girl was still in the house, after all. The girl was the boy’s mother. And she’d had a hard time, supposedly, as a child. Frank had mentioned something once about the girl’s father not being kind. When Florence had gently pressed her son for more details, Frank had said, “Let’s just leave it at that.”

  Unkind. The old woman shook her head. The word still weighed on her after all these years. She wondered about her own cruelties. Had there been any? Well, kindness wasn’t always the easiest thing in the world. Sometimes it took a lifetime to learn.

  * * *

  Why was his grandmother looking at him so oddly, with her mouth slack and slightly crooked? Edgar was aware of the fact that, sometimes, something popped in old people’s brains, and they just froze, unable to move or speak. He’d seen a “Health Corner” segment on the evening news in which there’d been an interview with a man who’d survived one of these brain pops. The man could only talk out of one side of his mouth, like a bad ventriloquist.

  “You okay, Gramma?”

  The old woman smiled. The little mind reader, he didn’t miss a trick. She slapped her hands against the tops of her thighs, willing her horse into the future. “So. What are you doing in school today? Tell me.”

  The boy lifted the nub of his left shoulder and then let it drop. “Nothing.”

  “You must be doing something.”

  “I have Art.” His eyes went big with the awfulness of this fact.

  “I thought you liked Art,” the old woman said.

  “I like to doodle,” Edgar explained. “I don’t like to draw.”

  “Oh, okay.” She nodded. “What’s the difference?”

  How could he make her understand? It was complicated. He sighed, looked the old woman straight in the eye.

  “She makes us—”

  “She who, the teacher?”

  “Yes. Mrs. Blessum.”

  “That’s her name?”

  “Gramma.”

  “What?”

  “I’m trying to explain.”

  “Sorry, I’ll zip it.” She did the zipper thing across her mouth, which the boy appreciated.

  “She makes us do pictures of things she puts on a table. A teapot, or last week it was two wineglasses and a banana.”

  Edgar waited for his grandmother to respond to this absurdity, but she only murmured through tightly pressed lips.

  “That’s drawing,” the boy continued. “Having to do what’s on the table. Doodling is when you make stuff up.”

  The old woman widened her eyes into fonts of understanding and offered a sympathetic grunt. In truth, she had no idea what the child was talking about. Two wineglasses and a banana? Is that what he’d said? As she watched the boy gesture, so serious to make his point, the world shifted again. An old scene with Frank, in this very kitchen, rushed at her. He, too, had said something incomprehensible. Something about his teeth, about how the teeth inside his mouth were not his, that someone had put them there. At first she’d thought her son was making a joke. But it wasn’t a joke. To Frank, the teeth apparently had been a matter of life or death. He’d grown frantic. Some gesture of Edgar’s, a sharp chopping motion of his hand, was familiar. The old woman’s heart stopped for what seemed like several seconds.

  “You can talk now,” the boy said. What was going on with her today? He didn’t like it when she had trouble breathing.

  “Gramma.”

  “Yes, yes,” she snapped. “I heard you.”

  She was scolding the wrong child. She came to her senses and softened her voice. “You better just do what this Mrs. Blessus—”

  “Bless-um.”

  She tapped the boy’s hand. “You better just do what the teacher says. Why make trouble?”

  Edgar knew his grandmother was right. Besides, he’d be incapable of contradicting Blessum. He was frightened of her. She had wrinkles, oddly, only on one side of her face. She also had long red nails that she tapped on her desk while waiting impatiently for everyone to draw the exact same thing (it was like a drawing factory!). When she finally made her inspections, she’d point a single red nail at your picture and say things like, Why is your banana so big? It makes the wineglasses look like eye cups. This exact criticism had been directed at Edgar. Blessum had no sympathy for interpretation—and what were eye cups anyway?

  “I always do what she says,” said Edgar. And yet, it was torture, torture, having to draw what was in front of you. It was almost worse than having to write about what you did during the summer, or being asked to do a book report. Edgar felt uneasy when forced by adults to look backwards, to give his attention to what he’d already done or seen. Sometimes a teacher would spend hours talking about things that happened hundreds of years before you were even born. Edgar preferred the future. He thought of the old woman’s time machine, and right there, at the breakfast table, he made a deal with himself: were he ever to get his hands on such a device, he would program it only to go forward.

  “You can draw your own things at home,” his grandmother said. “I’ll get you some more of those big pads you like.”

  “Not the real big ones,” Edgar said. Because, once, his gran
dmother had given him an extra-large sketch pad, almost as big as a tabletop, and the boy had felt overwhelmed. His tiny drawings had seemed to float in the middle of a huge white emptiness. Faces and horses and flowers, all looking like they’d just been ejected from a spaceship. He’d felt compelled to draw decorative borders, like fences, to protect them. It never occurred to him to make larger pictures. The pieces of the world, as Edgar saw them, were small and precise. He was, by nature, a miniaturist.

  “The pads I like are about this big.” He showed her with his hands.

  “And the ones I like are about this big,” the old woman replied, placing her hands on both sides of the boy’s head and kissing him. It was true affection, as well as a sly move to change the subject. Because, on second thought, maybe the boy didn’t need any more sketch pads. He spent too much time scribbling as it was. On his bed for hours, with his head down and his pencil scratch-scratch-scratching like a dog with fleas. Too much time alone wasn’t good for anyone. The old woman tried to recall if Frank had been a scribbler. Nothing came to mind. Though, of course, as a child, Frank had always kept his bedroom door shut (half the time it was locked), and so who knew what the hell he’d been doing in there. And back then she hadn’t been a snooper, as she was now. It was a skill Florence picked up late in life.

  * * *

  During the day, when Edgar was at school and Lucy off at work, the old woman cleaned the house—and, really, the only way to do a good job was to go through everything thoroughly. It was inevitable you were going to cross a line into other people’s private realms. People kept messy drawers; someone had to tidy them. But not too much, or there’d be accusations. Sometimes Florence found herself lazily fingering Lucy’s undergarments. The girl had a number of fancy pieces with lacy edits the old woman suspected had little to do with ventilation. The stuff looked cheap, but probably cost an arm and a leg.

  One day, the old woman lifted an unfolded T-shirt, wrongly stored in the top drawer of Lucy’s bedside table, and was confronted by one of those devices shaped like a man’s thing. She stared at it, shocked by its unnecessary realism and vascular detail. Using the T-shirt as protection, she picked it up cautiously, as if touching the thing might arouse it further. When her hands began to shake, she wondered if she’d forgotten to take her blood pressure pills. She allowed no other reason for her unsteadiness. She thrust the device back into the drawer and covered it with the T-shirt. By now her legs were shaking, too. She sat down on Lucy’s bed.

  Did the girl think of Frank when she used it? Or was it simply a nameless appendage, simply pleasure itself, untethered from humanity? Florence put her hand over her mouth, as if the shame and squalor of the world were contagious. There was something wanton, ruthless, about stealing pleasure for yourself alone, without the body of the beloved upon you. No matter that you might no longer love the beloved, or that he might not exist anymore. He was still her husband, he still had his rights—even after death he had them.

  For several weeks after discovering the man-thing, Florence was covertly furious at Lucy and unable to look her in the eye. When she would see the girl leave the house in some provocative getup (the red silk sheath or that glittery gum-wrapper miniskirt), the old woman was beside herself with rage—which only partially diverted her awareness from the obvious hypocrisy. Because, of course, Florence had dressed differently once. When she was younger, she wouldn’t have been caught dead in these shapeless muumuus of her later years.

  Long ago—it seemed another lifetime—Florence had made her own dresses. Brilliant creations modeled after outfits she’d seen in movie magazines. Everyone had remarked on them. She was gifted, all the girls said. Look how she put that one line of beads at a jaunty angle. Look at that marvelous stitching on the padded shoulders, almost like butterfly wings. Would you make one for me, Flo?—how many times had she heard that? Who knows, she might have made a name for herself. House of Florence. She’d had a pipe dream once. Occasionally, she’d made a piece for someone else, selling it for barely enough to cover her expenses. That tarty rich girl, Honey Fasinga, had ordered nearly a dozen, and had been gung-ho to help Florence open a shop. Blond, stick-thin Honey, who seemed to exist in a mysteriously mobile blur of Hollywood mood lighting, had even convinced her terrifyingly mustachioed mafioso father to agree to a loan. But the truth was, Florence had little interest in the marketplace. She was simply a plain girl who wanted the pleasure of a few extra sequins.

  She’d looked good, though. Plus, she’d always worn gloves, which was of course quite stylish—though her real motive had been to cover her ruined hands, boiled red from her job at Consolidated Laundry. When Pio was courting her, he told her she was the best-dressed girl he’d ever seen—and he’d seen the French girls in Paris after the war.

  But once they were married, whenever she would put on one of her creations, he said she looked like a harlot; what would the other husbands think? And so, slowly, over time, she found things less flattering to her figure—and her figure, ignored for so many years, finally packed up and trotted off, leaving her with a body she didn’t recognize, a body that was best covered by a dress that was little more than a tent.

  Yet, when she regarded Lucy in something flattering (too flattering, perhaps), she always noted to herself the difference between the girl’s sartorial impulse and that of her own youth. For Florence, the dresses had been merely skins, they’d had nothing to do with any deeper desires; when she’d put on such dresses, she certainly never planned on taking them off in the presence of a man. But Lucy wore her dresses as if they were nakedness itself. The girl’s body wrapped in fabrics that would no doubt dissolve in the rain or blow off in a stiff breeze. Often the word harlot came to mind, and Florence was nothing if not confused by the shell game of her memory. When clarity descended it came down like law. A widow was a widow, no matter how young. You had to give up certain things. Put out the lights, cut your hair, hang your old skins at the back of the closet.

  Later, in the midst of another deep cleaning, she finds a picture in the girl’s room, hidden under a neat pile of tennis socks. A hazy snapshot, the young lovers in bathing suits, their backs to a wind-pitched sea; Lucy’s hair blowing straight into Frank’s face, their mouths open wide, as if shrieking, and their bodies bent by a laughter so forceful that Florence is tempted to put the photograph to her ear like a seashell. Such a lovely picture of her son—and Lucy had saved it. For this, she forgives the girl all the rest—for a while, at least. She only wishes she had found the photograph in the same drawer as the male appendage—though she stops herself from reflecting on why this should seem proper.

  After the photo, she vowed that she would never snoop again. Only innocently in Edgar’s room, where it was her duty. When she cleaned the boy’s sunny little room that faced the garden, she hunted out not only dust and dirty socks, but demons as well. The sins of the father. Evidence of inappropriate tendencies—or what did they call them now, genes—that might have slipped like an infinitesimal school of fish into the boy’s body. Which is precisely why she regretted having offered to buy the child more of those sketch pads. One afternoon she had paused the vacuum and leaned down to pick one up from beside his bed. She paged through the boy’s fancies—quickly at first, but then with a vague, slow-moving dread. The sketches seemed innocent enough, but the years of Frank’s illness had turned the old woman into a dark magpie, always on the lookout for any bright rumple of strangeness, any flash or glitter of unwholesomeness in the people she loved. Edgar did seem to have a fondness for drawing men with beards. Was that normal? Who did he know with a beard? Florence couldn’t think of anyone. Well, they might not be real men; the boy might have made them up—a thought that offered little relief. On various pages of the pad, there were at least a dozen attempts at the subject, most of them crossed out with distressing, multi-lined Xs. When she came, at last, to a lovely hilly landscape with oversized flowers and a generous sun whose rays stretched all the way to the hills, she allowed herself
to smile. For heaven’s sake, there was nothing to worry about. She knew instinctively that there was only goodness in this child. His thoughts were pure; you could smell it on him. A freshness like white sheets baked in the sun.

  Still, she had to remain vigilant. There were forces that came from beyond the logical, malevolent forces that preyed on the innocent. Frank’s unraveling had had the effect of turning Florence’s mildly superstitious Christianity into something darker, more medieval. Happy children, especially the dreamy ones, were watched and waited for by a ruinous vengefulness that existed below the threshold of the human. She knew this because she had seen it. She had suffered it.

  In this way, her thoughts went back and forth: between worry and faith, between the black buzz of Frank’s illness (an invisible insect still trapped in the house) and the clear bell-tone of Edgar’s purity. At the center of this schism lay the clear understanding that it was her job to keep the boy safe, to stand between him and all things of questionable merit. She felt she had the power to accomplish this because she was now an old woman and free from all cares relating to herself. Her life was lived in service to the child, and in this humility she believed herself invincible. Sometimes her blood surged with such thunderous devotion that all fear disintegrated, as if struck by Zeus’s lightning bolt. Let the boy doodle, she decided magnanimously. His clever little scribbles had nothing to do with Frank. Why, he probably gets his talent from me, she thought, remembering her dresses.

  * * *

  Edgar watched Florence’s face twitch, and wondered if it had something to do with his mother. It often did. Before he’d come downstairs for breakfast, he’d poked his nose into his mother’s bedroom—and though it was much too early for her to be up, she’d already made her bed and left the house.

  * * *

  Actually, Lucy hadn’t made it home yet. She was still with the butcher. As Edgar walked out the front door, heading for school, Lucy opened her eyes for the first time that day. She was wrapped in ham-colored sheets, marred here and there with pale blotches from a careless use of bleach. Lucy noted the damage and wondered if Ron slept with lots of women. Not that it mattered. He’d worn a condom—and the sheets, though blotchy, smelled clean. Lucy slipped out from under the man’s tremendous arm and shimmied over to fetch her cigarettes from the nightstand. She smoked, and felt unexpectedly well. The sex had been good—loud and buoyant—and she could tell, from the only moderate throbbing in her temples, that the hangover would be manageable.