Labrador Read online

  “Lamb is supposed to be served pink,” Mama said, “according to Willie. Isn’t that so, sweetheart?”

  You swallowed and patted your mouth daintily with your napkin. “Madame says that Americans always ruin lamb. She says that no one in America knows how to cook.”

  “Oh,” Daddy said, “Madame. Oh well, that’s different.”

  “Nick,” Mama said.

  “Nick,” Daddy mimicked. “Perhaps we should get Madame to move in and cook for us. How does that idea appeal to you, Kathleen?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t,” I said.

  “Too bad.” Daddy picked up his artichoke and, for a minute, I thought he was going to throw it, but he merely regarded it with a look of tragic amusement. “And I was just beginning to get excited by the idea of shelling out fifty bucks every night, so that we could chow down in style.”

  You let your fork fall from your hand, so that it clattered onto your plate. “Maybe I should just leave now,” you said. “Is that what you want?”

  “Of course not, darling,” Mama said. “You know if it were up to me, you’d never leave. I think we’re all a little upset,” she said, staring down the length of the table at Daddy. “Let’s not spoil our last evening together, shall we?”

  The dinner proceeded: we assumed an extremity of politeness in our discourse and manners; we employed the cutlery as if it were the tools of a difficult art form; we chewed exquisitely; we questioned each other about the details of our lives and smiled pleasantly at each reply. Meanwhile, Mama and Daddy sat like children passing an interminable graveyard in a car, holding their breath, on the verge of expiration, wishing.

  Of course, no amount of wishing changed the fact that the next day Madame showed up in her shining car to whisk you off to Boston, where you caught a plane to Philadelphia. It had been at Madame’s urging that you’d finally decided to audition for the Pennsylvania Ballet and, when you were accepted into the corps de ballet, it had been Madame who arranged for you to rent a room in the home of one of her friends, now married to the first clarinet in the Philadelphia Orchestra.

  “Ozzie is a peach,” you wrote to me on the back of a postcard showing the Liberty Bell. “Lucy is okay but more interested in baby Daniel than anything else. I’m meeting lots of people, but mostly I’m glued to the barre. If you don’t come down here for my birthday, I’ll never speak to you again. Love, Willie.”

  I, for my part, was miserable. Amy Gertner had become, over the summer, gorgeous: tan and zaftig, her braces removed, her blond hair drawn back from her noble brow into a tortoiseshell barrette. I would see her at school, lounging against a senior boy’s car in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette and laughing. She was not such a creep that she no longer said hello to me when we passed each other in the halls, or when we happened to find ourselves in the same class—but I had become, there was no doubt about it, a liability.

  When I wasn’t in school, I spent most of my time in the woods, my binoculars around my neck. In the woods I was not tall and ungainly but, rather, soundless and agile, leaping from rock to rock across Stony Brook, sitting crouched on my haunches at the very edge of Heron Pond—a round blue jewel in the center of which the refracted light resolved itself into the shape of a great blue heron. It unfolded its body and took to flight as I watched. When I stood up I could feel that the air was in layers: warm and smelling of algae and frog spawn near the ground; cold and metallic, as if it was about to snow, higher up. By the time I got home it was usually dark, and I hated the heat inside the house and I hated the way my arms and legs banged against the doorjambs when I walked through the downstairs rooms.

  “Don’t forget to take off your boots, Kathleen!” Mama would call out, and then, no matter where I was, I would stop and stoop down, undoing the laces, picking off them the globes of burdock, which I would pack into a ball and toss into the air, whistling to myself. Later I would be scolded for leaving my boots in the middle of the floor.

  You wrote, this time in a letter:

  Dear Kitty,

  I’m assuming the reason I haven’t heard from you is that you were in a car wreck and are in a body cast. Allow me to extend my condolences. I suppose now you won’t be able to come down for my birthday. Oh well, such is life.

  Living with the Brezinskis is not always easy. Lucy seems to think I’m their private built-in baby-sitter. She’s one of those earth-mother types who always look like they know some secret about you. Ozzie, on the other hand, really seems to enjoy my company. Usually we eat breakfast together, while Lucy is off somewhere doing who knows what. Probably taping some of my hairs from the drain in the shower to the head of one of Danny’s stuffed animals.

  We’re putting together a production of the Nutcracker for Christmas. Remember when I danced Clara, back home? This time, believe it or not, I’ll be waltzing with all the other flowers. But Madame tells me I should be honored.

  I have to stop now and try to get some sleep. The kid wakes up at all hours of the night, screaming his head off. I hope you’ve remembered what I told you before I left. All I ever hear from Mom is that everyone’s “fine.”

  Love, Willie.

  It was October: soon it would be your birthday and, with its approach, I knew a general mood of recrimination and atonement once again would sweep through our house like weather. It always did. I was sitting on the porch, rereading your letter, trying to eat an orange as slowly as possible, breaking it up into segments and then removing the membrane, sucking on the tear-shaped sacs of pulp one at a time. Mama and Daddy had gone to the nursing home to visit Nana, and I had been left alone with Mrs. McGuire. I was thinking of what my math teacher had told us: that if you imagine the distance you’re about to cover, and consistently divide that distance in half, then you will never get to your destination. I wondered whether it would be possible to spend the rest of my life eating this orange. I wondered whether, by dedicating my life to that task, I could keep the world from blowing up. To accept that idea, I thought, would be like deciding to believe a lie. According to Daddy, all organized religion was based upon such a premise—it was called faith.

  The day was unusually warm for that time of year, and the smell of rotting apples drifted up from the orchard, where the trees had gone wild, raising knobby fists to hurl their fruit everywhere. Soon the hunters would come, and the cars would drive slowly southwards, the bodies of deer lashed to their trunks—the deer’s eyes were always wide-open, as if even in death great watchfulness was called for, and their tongues lolled out. I thought about how these hunters in their red hats would walk through the woods all around our house, never suspecting what was going on inside, while they raised their rifles to their shoulders, their mouths dry with excitement.

  At the very end of the driveway I saw a black truck pull in, a cloud of dark exhaust uncoiling from its rear end. It proceeded a short distance towards the house, and then stopped. As I watched, a man got out—he stood perfectly still for several seconds, and then began walking up the drive. His carriage was erect and stately, that of the representative of a foreign monarchy; when he got closer I could see that he was actually walking with a cane. From time to time he stopped and looked up at the house. Through the window behind me, propped open with a rock, I could hear the high-pitched and choked sound of Mrs. McGuire’s voice raised in song, like music wrung from a wet sock. If you speak to strangers, she’d told me, they can bewitch you, so that you will spend the rest of your life unable to speak, clucking like a hen or barking like a dog.

  The man stopped when he got to the porch steps. “Hello, there,” he said. “I’m looking for Nicholas Mowbrey.” His voice was thin, although the impression was of a resonance locked within his chest, releasing only a piping echo. He was wearing a parka made out of something like blanket wool, dark blue and embroidered over the pockets with Canada geese; his body looked as if it had been whittled, late at night in the light of the moon, by an absentminded sailor who did not know when to stop.

  “My f
ather isn’t home,” I said.

  The man leaned over, balancing on his cane, and brought his face very close to mine. I could see the hairs in his nose twitching with his breath, and the smell he gave off was thick and smoky, like bacon. “Well, well, well,” he said. Then he straightened back up and reached into his pocket. “How about a Life Saver?” he asked.

  I shook my head and, as I did so, the window behind me flew all the way open and out popped the upper torso of Mrs. McGuire, her expression cunning and delighted. “Who’re you talking to, Kathleen?” she asked. Then she rotated within her frame to confront my seducer. “Whatever you’ve got, we’re not buying,” she said. “Go away before I call the police.”

  The old man stood there, sucking on his candy. “Who’s she?” he asked me.

  “You’re a wicked, wicked man to think you can sweet-talk a poor little child. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were old Malone, the tinker man, cursed by a lifetime of sin to walk this earth, up hill and down, tempting good Christian folk like ourselves with your lying promises. Come in the house, Kathleen.”

  I hesitated, and the old man smiled at me. “It’s all right,” he said. “You might as well do what she says. At least it’ll shut her up.” Then he sat down on the porch and sighed. “Who would’ve thought they’d get so tall?” he said under his breath, wonderingly. I think he was talking about the trees.

  I went inside, where I found Mrs. McGuire engaged in sprinkling salt on the surface of the wood stove in the kitchen. “I only hope it’s not too late,” she said. She put on an oven mitt and began arranging the granules into a pattern: three concentric circles, like a target. “It will be, my darling, as if all the fires of hell are burning right within his evil shoes. He will not be able to move fast enough! Go on,” she urged. “To the window. Tell me what you see.”

  The man was still sitting on the porch, his back very straight, his nut-like head balanced neatly on the thin pole of his neck. Do I have to tell you, Willie, that this was a posture with which I was familiar? I knew who he was. This was Jasper Mowbrey, our famous missing grandfather—I ran into the dining room and checked to make sure. The face in the portrait had more flesh on it, but the eyes were the same: that lucent blue-green which pooled in your own bony sockets, the surface hard and sharp, beneath which glinted bits of mica dust, hanging suspended in layers and layers of lake water. The man in the portrait looked more sure of himself than the man on the porch, but disillusionment was an imperfect disguise—I knew they were the same person.

  I went over and tapped on the window. When he glanced over his shoulder—expectantly, like the dogs tethered by their leashes to parking meters in town—I motioned for him to come inside. “Mrs. McGuire,” I said, “it’s Grandfather.” I went into the kitchen, where she was sticking skewers into a loaf of bread. “The man outside,” I explained, “I figured out who he is.”

  “Kathleen,” she said, “you are just a child.” Then she yanked open the wood-stove door and hurled the loaf into the fire. “It is the Evil One’s greatest talent,” she said, “to take on, in the twinkling of an eye, the appearance of a vanished loved one.” Her conviction was so great that when, moments later, he walked into the room, she began crossing herself over and over, with such rapidity that I saw her hand turn first to liquid, then to gas.

  The romantic sensibility despises the prearranged and is, consequently, despotic. Grandfather walked over to the stove, where the beskewered effigy of himself was in the process of burning down to a lump of black toast, and rubbed his hands together. “I could do with a cup of something hot,” he said, and I felt very strange, as if he’d just stepped from some secret room in the house where he’d been sitting all this time, while we—fools that we were—had thought him dead.

  “Begone!” Mrs. McGuire said, but it was no use. The house was his: the walls and floors and ceilings all shook themselves into wakefulness and, when I went into the pantry to find the tin of Lapsang Souchong—that tea I assumed he would prefer because it smelled just like him—I saw the porcelain duck’s bill swing open from its place on top of the tureen we never used.

  “It’s about time,” the duck head said. “Now, when the men go out at dawn into the marshes, he will be among them. Then I will be just a speck up in the sky, and it will be his shot which will bring me down. I will lie there in the rushes, waiting.”

  “Pride, pride,” said the mug shaped like a man’s head. “If you get eaten, it will be your own fault.”

  The diamonds of glass in the cupboard doors hummed and shone; I grabbed the tin of tea and ran from the pantry, but eyes and mouths were springing open everywhere, clamoring for attention. Grandfather was sitting at the table, his hands folded politely in his lap. Opposite him, her arms crossed, bunching up her dull, tan cardigan, sat Mrs. McGuire. “The water is boiling, Kathleen,” she said, but she kept her eyes fixed on Grandfather’s face, as if to catch it in the moment when its molecules would begin shifting; when the little tips of horns would begin sticking up out of the thick silvery hair on top of his head.

  “Thank you,” Grandfather said, after I handed him the cup of tea. Then he removed the top of the sugar bowl and dumped spoonful after spoonful of sugar into his cup. “I’ve picked up a lot of bad habits,” he said. Mrs. McGuire let out a little snort and he laughed. “But at least,” he said, “I’ve still got all of my own teeth.” How did he know, I wondered, because I had seen those dentures lying on a saucer—the clenched teeth of an invisible watchdog Mrs. McGuire left to guard her territory when she thought she was alone in the house.

  “Willie doesn’t have any cavities,” I said, and Mrs. McGuire reached across the table and stuck me with her finger.

  “Shhh!” she hissed. “We must remain silent now, Kathleen. His craving for power is great, but he cannot take possession of us so long as we remain silent.”

  “You have a brother?”

  “No,” I said, “a sister.” I heard Mrs. McGuire let out a moan, the sound a mummy might make, muffled in cerements. “I told you,” I said. “It’s my grandfather. It’s not the Devil.” I paused; I thought I could hear a showering of skewers against the grate in the wood stove. “See,” I said, “it didn’t work.”

  By the time Mama and Daddy returned, cranky and introverted from the nursing home, Grandfather was snoring softly on the love seat in the west room. I had gone in to look at him when I heard the car pulling up outside—the car doors banged closed, but he was sound asleep; his mouth moving a little, as if he was tasting something very nice. I picked up one of the hundreds of afghans with which Mama had filled our house and I tucked it in around my grandfather’s narrow body. I had already decided that I loved him; my heart flew all around inside me at the sight of the afghan’s pink, scallopped rim, just touching the whiskery skin stretched across his tilted-back jawbone. “I love you,” I whispered and, for a moment, the snoring got louder, as if in response. Then I tiptoed out of the room.

  Once, at a fair, I let go of my balloon on purpose: I watched it being drawn upward into the sky, until it was just a tiny dot of green and, then, nothing. In this way I knew that my relationship to it could never be violated; do you remember how Daddy hit his fist up against his forehead? I thought about keeping Grandfather’s presence a secret, but I knew that the house would give me away.

  At first Daddy didn’t believe me. “It’s not a very funny joke, Kathleen,” he said.

  “I’m not joking.”

  Daddy shook off his shoes and kicked them into a corner of the kitchen. “Listen,” he said, “I just spent the better part of the afternoon trying to convince a senile old lady that the reason she never hears anything from her husband is because he’s dead. Never mind the fact that he supposedly left her to live with some Eskimo.”

  “Your poor nana isn’t very well,” Mama said.

  “He’s asleep in there,” I said, pointing. “Why don’t you go in and see for yourselves?”

  “She asked about you,” Mama said.
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  “Christ, Constance!” Daddy pulled off his sweater, as if he was trying to shed himself of the burden of his own skin; the electrical noise of wool touching hair was like the tearing loose of capillaries. “What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you just tell Kathleen the truth? She doesn’t even recognize me, for crying out loud.”

  “Well,” Mama said, “we did notice that truck at the end of the driveway, Nick.”

  “She thinks I’m her brother Lloyd. Lloyd must’ve died sixty years ago. He got struck by lightning, believe it or not. He was out taking a walk, when zap! That’s the kind of family you come from, Kathleen.”

  “If you don’t believe me,” I said, “why don’t you go look?”

  “Where’s Mrs. McGuire?” Mama asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, and it was true: she had vanished, although I could hear across the ceiling the scraping sound of rearrangement. Was she cleaning, or was she still engaged in the complex mechanisms of exorcism?

  Meanwhile, Daddy left the kitchen and, when he didn’t come back right away, Mama and I followed to see what was going on. We found him standing in the middle of the west room with his long arms hanging at his sides, staring at the dreaming face of his father. I didn’t think we should be watching—whatever the nature was of the transaction taking place, it was private, as if the old man’s presence could call forth, not only from the house itself, but from Daddy’s mute and pinched soul, such soliloquy as I’d heard in the pantry. I grabbed Mama’s hand and tugged. His mouth was opening; language was swimming upwards. But Mama wouldn’t budge.

  “You’re right,” Mama said. “It’s him.” She sounded terrified. It took me years to understand her terror—how in some way Grandfather’s absence was the secret element whereby their marriage achieved its sad balance of guilt and tyranny.

  “He looks so old,” Daddy said. “The last time I saw him, he was standing right here, sharpening his hatchet. The bastard.” Daddy walked up closer and bent down—Grandfather’s eyes were darting back and forth under his closed lids and his legs wiggled a little as if he was dreaming of escape. “I never thought he’d have the guts to show his face here again. Kathleen,” he said, turning to me, “what did he tell you? He must want something. In all these years the only times the bastard’s gotten in touch is when he’s wanted something.”