Cursed Be the Child Page 2

  Gradually she became more brazen. Would Uncle scrub her back when she was in the tub, please? She needed help with her dress; she couldn’t do all the buttons down the back. Please?

  And he knew. Perhaps not from the first but from very near the first. He saw it. The way she gazed at him when she thought he was unaware; the knowledge—the desire—in her eyes, eyes that were too calculating and beckoning to be those of a child.

  He knew. He heard the true meaning that lay under the words she spoke, words that might have passed for guileless prattle had he not listened so keenly.

  And the way she walked, her hips as lazily sensual as a cat’s.

  And the way she pouted, lower lip thrust out, eyes downcast, long lashes veiling mystery and a pledge of wicked passion.

  And even the way she yawned, not an indication of sleepiness but a lewd invitation.

  He had known and had tried to resist, but it was useless.

  She had won.

  Again, he heard her call, tempting him, a siren’s call.

  She was calling him, and he would go to her.

  As he had.

  As he must.

  ««—»»

  She thought she was hungry, but she could not be sure. Her body no longer signaled its wants and needs as it should have. Broken inside, bleeding, her body was attuned solely to imminent death.

  Her mind was not.

  Naked, she lay on her side on a worn, woolen blanket, knees drawn up to ease the sharp, hot pains in her belly and chest. Her blonde hair was insanely tangled, glued to her forehead in spiky bangs by dried blood. She breathed in rasping, whistling sobs; her nose was crushed, lips swollen and crusted with scab as hard and shiny as a beetle’s carapace. A green and purple dome of bruised flesh sealed her left eye shut.

  She wondered how long it had been since she had eaten. She could remember Uncle bringing her food, but she didn’t know when that had been. He’d brought her food and watched her eat, and for a little while it seemed like he wasn’t mad at her anymore because he kept touching her face, calling her “My pretty little girl, so pretty…” But then he got angry, and he hit her and hit her and hit her.

  She thought she heard something, someone moving up above.

  Mama?

  No. She had to tell herself once more that she would never again see Mama.

  Now that her existence was comprised only of times of pain and times when her mind took flight, fleeing pain, she sometimes forgot Mama was gone. Sometimes it was as though Mama were still with her, here to take away the cold, lonely feeling and the hurting and the fear.

  Sing Mama a song, my pretty Lisette, a funny song, one that will make us laugh like we don’t have a worry in the world. Sing, Lisette, s’il vous plait.

  Rufus! Rastus!

  Johnson Brown!

  Whatcha gonna do

  when the rent…

  No, Lisette, that new song, the one about this silly old flu thing everyone’s so afraid of!

  There was a little bird

  An itty-bitty bird

  And his name was Enza!

  But her mama always went away. Mama had to go.

  Mama was dead. She was really, really dead.

  It’s terrible to die! I won’t die! Not ever!

  She heard the click of a door chain, then the sound of a key in a lock, a doorknob turning, the small, sharp screech of hinges, the hush and scrape of leather on wood.

  She turned her head, and her one eye peered toward the stairs. She could not see legs or a face, only the ghostly gray white of the top of his union suit floating down through the blackness.

  Uncle is coming.

  She was afraid but maybe it would be all right now. Maybe he’d take her back upstairs where there was light—she missed the light so very much—and she would never be locked away again and he would never hit her again.

  She would be a good girl, a good, good girl to make Uncle love her.

  Certainly she had tried to be good, but in some way she did not understand, she had failed. Uncle wouldn’t have punished her like this if she had been good.

  Uncle will take care of you, Lisette. Mind your uncle, always do what he says. Love Uncle and he’ll love you back, just like you were his own little girl.

  That’s what Mama had said before she died.

  No! It was her silent shout against the actuality of her mother’s death, against Death itself, against the death filling her up, advancing calmly and inevitably as the blood seeped within her, bypassing channels of life and taking routes through and around torn tissues.

  “What do you want? What do you want now?”

  The voice drifted to her from far away, but Uncle was close, so close she smelled the oily-brown smell of his slippers and his sweat—and a smell that she sensed was death.

  Her tongue felt thick, and she could move her jaw only a little. Her lips were unable to shape a word.

  “I know what you want. Lord God, look at me! You’re still tempting me! Don’t you see? Don’t you know we’re dying?”

  No!

  “We’re dying, and the world is dying, and you’re yet a harlot! Doesn’t it end? Doesn’t it ever end?”

  No!

  He squatted down alongside her. A hot, dry finger stabbed her ribs. “Want Uncle to play a game with you? Want Uncle to touch you?”

  The dim memories came to her, the times when he had touched her and kissed her, kissed her all over in a way that was like some strange kind of playing, a game she didn’t understand but that made her giggle and feel warm and funny, and whatever he wanted her to do, she did, even when it hurt her deep inside. But that never seemed to make Uncle love her. He was almost always angry afterward, accusing her, “You’re going to tell, aren’t you? I know you are. You’ll tell the world. I know. Don’t lie to me.”

  I won’t tell. Never tell. Not anyone. I promise, I promise.

  He never believed her, and he just got angrier and angrier. “You made me do it, you know. You made me.”

  And then he would start hitting her, using his fists on her belly and back and face.

  Uncle said, “Not this time. No!”

  He rolled her onto her back. “Whore! Slut!” His hand covered her face, fingers spread like a wolf spider on top of a robin’s egg. He smashed the back of her head against the floor again and again.

  The bony bowl that held her brain shattered.

  She was dying as he lurched up the stairs.

  No!

  The basement door opened and closed. The key clicked in the lock. The door chain metallically slithered.

  She drew up her left leg and planted her foot flat.

  Her right eye rolled back.

  Her heart stopped.

  She was dead.

  — | — | —

  One: 0 Drom Le Ushalin

  The Way of Shadow

  The vast body of Romany folk stories and myths, orally passed on from generation to generation, is called Darane Swature. Like all classic myths, a swato is a fable that reveals tshatsimo; it tells the truth.

  Long ago, in the old days, the days of ever-golden summer, when the Gypsy caravans traveled the roads, proud horses pulling vurdons as bright and festive as peacocks, Pola Janichka was regarded by the Rom as a gifted narrator of Darane Swature. Scarcely more than a child, she was not yet the Rawnie, the Great Lady who had the magical power to work all manner of draba charm, heal the sick, and even ward off zracnae vila, the malevolent spirits of the air. That came later. For the time being, it was enough for her to be able to relate a swato in a dramatically entertaining and instructive way.

  Late in the evenings, the kumpania would gather around the campfire, and Pola Janichka would tell her swato to the attentive children, their dark eyes gleaming in the firelight, and to the men and the women.

  This is a swato of Pola Janichka:

  “Once some people came to a great lake under the cold, silver light of Chon, our Mother Moon. The lake was still. Not a bubble disturbed it, not a rippl
e. In the center of the lake, the reflection of Chon was a huge white ball.

  “The shore on which the people stood was the end of the Earth. As we all know, the Earth belongs to the living.

  “Beyond the Earth is the realm of the mule, where the dead dwell.

  “But the lake was the Void, a place between the Nation of the Living and the Dead. Here you might find those souls who had not made the great journey anda I thema, beyond the waters.

  “Suddenly, far out in the lake, in the center of the waters, something happened! It was a small splash, the very smallest of splashes, and it made the mirror image of Chon shimmer in its own light. The splash caused so soft a sound that you might have thought it made by a pebble, but that was not what did it.

  “Could it have been the gentle brush of God’s little finger, giving comfort to the dead? Or perhaps was it the breath of Beng, the Old Evil One? Or maybe it was a mulo, the spirit of one of the dead deep in the lake? Ah, who is to say? Not I. I am a simple teller of stories.

  “Now, who among the people on the shore heard this tiny splash? I will tell you. Only those who had ears that could hear very, very well.

  “Then the tiny ripples rolled away from the reflected Chon.

  “And who among the people saw these tiny, fluttering waves? I will tell you. Only those who had eyes that could see very, very well.

  “Then the waves came to the shore and touched it with the softness of the fragile leg of a butterfly upon a flower.

  “And who among the people on the shore felt the waves touch the shore? I will tell you.

  “Those who heard the splash and those who did not hear.

  “Those who saw the waves and those who did not see.

  “All the people on the shore felt the waves from the Void, the lake of the dead who have not passed on.

  “As do we.”

  — | — | —

  One

  She was right on time for her 11:30 Monday morning appointment, and, as soon as she took the chair alongside his desk in the small office, she told him she didn’t understand the assignment.

  “What exactly is it you don’t understand?” he asked. He arched an eyebrow. It seemed funny to him now that he was nearing 40 and his brown hair was receding to give him a marked widow’s peak that his eyebrows were getting bushier.

  “The assignment, you know,” she said.

  That narrowed it down, Warren Barringer thought. The assignment for Lit and Comp 101 was to read Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” and to write a paper showing that Thoreau’s ideas either did or did not apply to the 20th Century. The reading and writing parts obviously were beyond her.

  Damn! Miss—what was her name? Only the second week of September, he hadn’t begun to learn his students’ names. He slipped on his reading glasses and checked the appointment book that lay open on the desk—Miss Luttemeyer, Ellen F. She was typical of the majority of students in his three sections of basic freshman English, typical, as he had to admit, of the students who attended North Central University.

  Established 18 years ago, North Central University, some 50 miles south of Chicago in the middle-class suburb of Lawn Crest, was the product of state and federal misspending and the last gasp of the radical educational optimism that had marked the 1960s. When it first opened the doors of the single, huge, octagonal building that was its College of Arts and Sciences, College of Business, College of Education, College of American Studies, etc., it had two basic admission requirements. A prospective student had to be able to prove he was alive and could somehow manage to pay the tuition. Since then, of course, with the end of the education boom and the realization on the part of accreditation committees that NCU was awarding degrees to people who were not quite critically retarded, things had changed. Still, the students who enrolled in NCU were, by and large, not exactly Harvard, Yale or Brown material.

  And he was stuck with the dregs of the dregs, Warren reflected, the low man on the departmental totem pole. He was new this term, without a dime’s worth of seniority. His doctorate—earned at the University of Iowa’s famed Writers’ Workshop, no less!—and his publications—the three dozen-plus short stories, the two novels, read by perhaps twice that number of people—didn’t mean a goddamned thing.

  Well, that would change, once A Civilized Man was published.

  “So do you think maybe, you know, you could kind of help me,” Miss Luttemeyer was saying.

  He studied her face, as round and expressionless as a cream pie. Help her, he thought, perhaps a brain transplant.

  “Read the essay several times,” he said.

  “I’ll try,” she said, “but I don’t know, a lot of it is, well, kinda confusing.”

  “Just take it slow,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll get it.”

  He pushed his chair back on its rollers and rose. She didn’t get the message; he had to gesture at the door. “Miss Luttemeyer, why don’t you get to work on it and then, when you have a rough draft of your theme, you can bring it in and we’ll take a look together. I’m sure you’ll have fine ideas.”

  Fine ideas? He was sure that if she ever had even one idea it would be a first.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she kept saying as he showed her out.

  “Jesus,” he said, after he’d shut the door. What was he doing here at North Central U, anyway? (Why, Warren, you’re doing your time on the cross, pal, and paying those dues. You know every great American writer has to suffer!)

  Hell, he was being self-pityingly melodramatic, and he knew it. To tell the truth, he was doing all right. Okay, NCU wasn’t Oxford, but he had a job, and there were plenty of Liberal Arts PhDs who couldn’t make that claim. And Missy—he loved that kid, his child. And Vicki—well, she’d stuck with him through the bad times.

  All right, there’d been rough waters, and, he had to admit, he bore much of the responsibility for setting them churning, but his life was on an even keel at last, and there was A Civilized Man. The novel was going well. It would do for him what The World According to Garp had done for John Irving. It would be his new start.

  And as long as he was balancing his personal books, you could add the house to the “Credit” side of the ledger, that old house on Main Street in Grove Corner. Years ago he had read a poem called “Coming Home To A Place You’ve Never Been,” but it had taken that house to teach him just what that title meant.

  Warren took off his glasses, put them in the case and checked his watch. It was nearly noon, and his next class was at two. Time for lunch.

  He’d made the mistake of eating in NCU’s cafeteria once. He didn’t care for eggshell salad sandwiches or coffee that tasted like Mazola oil. He’d go to Milly’s Family Restaurant in Grove Corner—Grove Corner, his home, he thought with a smile—only five miles away. Milly’s had good food, and he liked that he was getting known as a regular. “Hello, Professor, and how are you today? Coffee? Or would you like something from the bar?”

  “Coffee,” was what he always said though he always would have liked something from the bar. But that was a problem that was no longer a problem; he was in control. At night, a drink or two after he’d finished working on the book, when he really needed to unwind, and that was it.

  To get to the faculty parking lot, he had to pass the art gallery on the main floor. First he saw the posters: Photographs by David Greenfield, and then he saw the black and white photographs on the walls, and then he saw David Greenfield.

  You sonofabitch, Warren Barringer thought. There was a heavy weight in his stomach like a boulder. How had he missed hearing that Greenfield would be exhibiting at NCU?

  Encircled by a dozen or so students, a number of which had cameras dangling from their necks, David Greenfield, in blue jeans and a black, short-sleeved knit shirt, stood at the far end of the gallery. Just under six foot tall, he was a lean, dark man with curly black hair; there were deep squint crinkles at the corners of his intense, anthracite eyes.

  He looked like a blow-dried Cla
rk Gable, Warren Barringer thought, Mr. Rhett Butler himself, ready to sweep Scarlett off her feet, up the stairs, and into bed—Scarlett or any other woman. Warren saw Greenfield smile at a young lady who’d apparently asked him a question, a Marlboro man smile without any discoloring tobacco stains on those straight, white teeth to shatter the image.

  Show him what you’re made of, Warren thought.

  He knows what you’re made of—chickenshit, through and through.

  Warren Barringer walked to the far end of the gallery. “Excuse me,” he said, and a young man, interrupted in the middle of a question about backlighting, stepped aside.

  “Warren,” David Greenfield said.

  “Hello, David,” Warren said, and then he held out his hand.

  (And why are you greeting this sonofabitch? Because you’ve got to do the right thing, that’s why. Because if you don’t, because if you do what you want to do, do what you really honest to God feel, that lets the monster out, and then, oh brother, you are really fucked. And so you shake hands and you turn the other cheek and bygones are bygones and the world keeps on spinning.)

  David said, “Are you teaching here?”

  Warren nodded. “First year,” he said. “Assistant professor.”

  “I see,” David said.

  “I read about you over the years,” Warren said. “You seem to be doing well.”

  There had been two full pages in Time magazine’s “Art section” a few years ago. Warren had seen that—two pages in Time, for Christ’s sake! “The mature work of a photographer whose stark simplicity provides memorable insights into all the aspects of the human condition blah-blah-blah.” David Greenfield was likely to attain the prominence of an Ansel Adams or a Diane Arbus.

  David shrugged. “I’m doing all right. I like my work.”

  “Good,” Warren said. There was a long pause. For a moment, Warren was afraid David would say, “And how’s Vicki?” or something like that.

  He didn’t.