Eleven (6 page)

“—like a chi-ild!” his mother was saying, laughing, with a glance at him, and Mrs. Badzerkian smiled shrewdly at him with her small, tight mouth.

Victor had been excused, and was sitting across the room with a book on the studio couch. His mother was telling Mrs. Badzerkian
how he had played with the terrapin. Victor frowned down at his book, pretending not to hear. His mother did not like him to open his mouth to her or her guests once he had been excused. But now she was calling him her “lee-tle ba-aby Veec-tor . . .”

He stood up with his finger in the place in his book. “I don’t see why it’s childish to look at a terrapin!” he said, flushing with sudden anger. “They are very interesting animals, they—”

His mother interrupted him with a laugh, but at once the laugh disappeared and she said sternly, “Veector, I thought I had excused you. Isn’t that correct?”

He hesitated, seeing in a flash the scene that was going to take place when Mrs. Badzerkian had left. “Yes, Mama. I’m sorry,” he said. Then he sat down and bent over his book again.

Twenty minutes later, Mrs. Badzerkian left. His mother scolded him for being rude, but it was not a five- or ten-minute scolding of the kind he had expected. It lasted hardly two minutes. She had forgotten to buy heavy cream, and she wanted Victor to go downstairs and get some. Victor put on his grey woollen jacket and went out. He always felt embarrassed and conspicuous in the jacket, because it came just a little bit below his short pants, and he looked as if he had nothing on underneath the coat.

Victor looked around for Frank on the sidewalk, but he didn’t see him. He crossed Third Avenue and went to a delicatessen in the big building that he could see from the living-room window. On his way back, he saw Frank walking along the sidewalk, bouncing a ball. Now Victor went right up to him.

“Hey,” Victor said. “I’ve got a terrapin upstairs.”

“A what?” Frank caught the ball and stopped.

“A terrapin. You know, like a turtle. I’ll bring him down tomorrow morning and show you, if you’re around. He’s pretty big.”

“Yeah?—Why don’t you bring him down now?”

“Because we’re gonna eat now,” said Victor. “See you.” He went into his building. He felt he had achieved something. Frank had looked really interested. Victor wished he could bring the terrapin down now, but his mother never liked him to go out after dark, and it was practically dark now.

When Victor got upstairs, his mother was still in the kitchen. Eggs were boiling and she had put a big pot of water on a back burner. “You took him out again!” Victor said, seeing the terrapin’s box on the counter.

“Yes, I prepare the stew tonight,” said his mother. “That is why I need the cream.”

Victor looked at her. “You’re going to—You have to kill it tonight?”

“Yes, my little one. Tonight.” She jiggled the pot of eggs.

“Mama, can I take him downstairs to show Frank?” Victor asked quickly. “Just for five minutes, Mama. Frank’s down there now.”

“Who is Frank?”

“He’s that fellow you asked me about today. The blond fellow we always see. Please, Mama.”

His mother’s black eyebrows frowned. “Take the terrapène downstairs? Certainly not. Don’t be absurd, my baby! The terrapène is not a toy!”

Victor tried to think of some other lever of persuasion. He had not removed his coat. “You wanted me to get acquainted with Frank—”

“Yes. What has that got to do with a terrapin?”

The water on the back burner began to boil.

“You see, I promised him I’d—” Victor watched his mother lift the terrapin from the box, and as she dropped it into the boiling water, his mouth fell open. “
Mama!
”

“What is this? What is this noise?”

Victor, open-mouthed, stared at the terrapin whose legs were now racing against the steep sides of the pot. The terrapin’s mouth opened, its eyes looked directly at Victor for an instant, its head arched back in torture, the open mouth sank beneath the seething water—and that was the end. Victor blinked. It was dead. He came closer, saw the four legs and the tail stretched out in the water, its head. He looked at his mother.

She was drying her hands on a towel. She glanced at him, then said, “Ugh!” She smelled of her hands, then hung the towel back.

“Did you have to kill him like that?”

“How else? The same way you kill a lobster. Don’t you know that? It doesn’t hurt them.”

He stared at her. When she started to touch him, he stepped back. He thought of the terrapin’s wide open mouth, and his eyes suddenly flooded with tears. Maybe the terrapin had been screaming and it hadn’t been heard over the bubbling of the water. The terrapin had looked at him, wanting him to pull him out, and he hadn’t moved to help him. His mother had tricked him, done it so fast, he couldn’t save him. He stepped back again. “No, don’t touch me!”

His mother slapped his face, hard and quickly.

Victor set his jaw. Then he about-faced and went to the closet and threw his jacket onto a hanger and hung it up. He went into the living-room and fell down on the sofa. He was not crying now,
but his mouth opened against the sofa pillow. Then he remembered the terrapin’s mouth and he closed his lips. The terrapin had suffered, otherwise it would not have moved its legs so terribly fast to get out. Then he wept, soundlessly as the terrapin, his mouth open. He put both hands over his face, so as not to wet the sofa. After a long while, he got up. In the kitchen, his mother was humming, and every few minutes he heard her quick, firm steps as she went about her work. Victor had set his teeth again. He walked slowly to the kitchen doorway.

The terrapin was out on the wooden chopping board, and his mother, after a glance at him, still humming, took a knife and bore down on its blade, cutting off the terrapin’s little nails. Victor half closed his eyes, but he watched steadily. The nails, with bits of skin attached to them, his mother scooped off the board into her palm and dumped into the garbage bag. Then she turned the terrapin onto its back and with the same sharp, pointed knife, she began to cut away the pale bottom shell. The terrapin’s neck was bent sideways. Victor wanted to look away, but still he stared. Now the terrapin’s insides were all exposed, red and white and greenish. Victor did not listen to what his mother was saying, about cooking terrapins in Europe, before he was born. Her voice was gentle and soothing, not at all like what she was doing.

“All right, don’t look at me like that!” she suddenly threw at him, stomping her foot. “What’s the matter with you? Are you crazy? Yes, I think so! You are seeck, you know that?”

Victor could not touch any of his supper, and his mother could not force him to, even though she shook him by the shoulders and threatened to slap him. They had creamed chipped beef on toast.
Victor did not say a word. He felt very remote from his mother, even when she screamed right into his face. He felt very odd, the way he did sometimes when he was sick at his stomach, but he was not sick at his stomach. When they went to bed, he felt afraid of the dark. He saw the terrapin’s face very large, its mouth open, its eyes wide and full of pain. Victor wished he could walk out the window and float, go anywhere he wanted to, disappear, yet be everywhere. He imagined his mother’s hands on his shoulders, jerking him back, if he tried to step out the window. He hated his mother.

He got up and went quietly into the kitchen. The kitchen was absolutely dark, as there was no window, but he put his hand accurately on the knife rack and felt gently for the knife he wanted. He thought of the terrapin, in little pieces now, all mixed up in the sauce of cream and egg yolks and sherry in the pot in the refrigerator.

His mother’s cry was not silent; it seemed to tear his ears off. His second blow was in her body, and then he stabbed her throat again. Only tiredness made him stop, and by then people were trying to bump the door in. Victor at last walked to the door, pulled the chain bolt back, and opened it for them.

He was taken to a large, old building full of nurses and doctors. Victor was very quiet and did everything he was asked to do, and answered the questions they put to him, but only those questions, and since they didn’t ask him anything about a terrapin, he did not bring it up.

WHEN THE FLEET WAS IN AT MOBILE

With the bottle of chloroform in her hand, Geraldine stared at the man asleep on the back porch. She could hear the deep in, short out breaths whistling through the moustache, the way he breathed when he wasn’t going to wake up till high noon. He’d been asleep since he came in at dawn, and she’d never known anything to wake him up in mid-morning when he’d been drinking all night, had she? Now was certainly the time.

She ran in her silk-stockinged feet to the rag drawer below the kitchen cabinets, tore a big rag from a worn-out towel, and then a smaller one. She folded the big rag to a square lump and on second thought wet it at the sink, and after some trouble because her hands had started shaking, tied it in front of her nose and mouth with the cloth belt of the dress she’d just ironed and laid out to wear. Then she got the claw hammer from the tool drawer in case she would need it, and went out on the back porch. She drew the straight chair close to the bed, sat down, and unstoppered the bottle and soaked
the smaller rag. She held the rag over his chest for a few moments, then brought it slowly up toward his nose. Clark didn’t move. But it must be doing something to him, she thought, she could smell it herself, sweet and sick like funeral flowers, like death itself.

Behind her, she heard the whine Red Dog always gave at the crest of a yawn, and his groan as he turned around and lay down in a cooler spot by the side of the house, and she thought: everybody thinks the chloroform is for Red Dog, and there he is out there sleeping, as alive as he’s been in fourteen years.

Clark moved his head up and down as if he were agreeing with her, and her hand, her rigid body, followed his nose like a part of him, and a voice inside her screamed:
I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing this if there were any other way, but he won’t even let me out of the house!

And she thought of Mrs. Trelawney’s nod of approval when she told her she was going to put Red Dog to sleep, because it wasn’t safe for strangers to come around anymore, Red Dog nipping at them with his one eyetooth.

She peered at the pulse in Clark’s temple. It beat at the bottom of a wriggly green vein along his hairline that had always reminded her of a map of the Mississippi River. Then the rag bumped the end of Clark’s nose, he turned his head aside, and still her hand followed the nose as if she couldn’t have dragged it away if she’d wanted to, and perhaps she couldn’t have. But the black eyelashes did not move at all, and she remembered how distinguished she’d once thought Clark looked with the hollows either side of his high thin forehead and the black hair like a wild bush above it, and the black moustache so big it was old-fashioned but suited Clark, like his old-fashioned tailor-made jackets and his square-toed boots.

She looked at the grey alarm clock that had been watching it all from the shelf—for about seven minutes now. How long did it take? She opened the bottle and poured more until it fell cool onto her palm, and held it back under the nose. The pulse still beat, but the breaths were shorter and fainter. Her arm ached so, she looked off through the porch screen and tried to think of something else. A rooster crowed out by the cow barn, like a new day a-dawning, she thought remembering a song; and she counted twenty ticks on the clock, one for each year old she was, and looked at it, and it was twelve minutes now, and when she looked again, the pulse was gone. But she mustn’t be fooled by that, she thought, and looked harder at the hairs in his nostrils that didn’t move and maybe wouldn’t have anyway, but she couldn’t hear anything. Then she stood up, and on second thought set the rag on the black moustache and left it there. She stared at the arm lying out on the sheet and the hand, a well-shaped hand, she’d always thought, for all its hairiness, with the gold band on the little finger that was his mother’s wedding ring, he said, but the very left hand that had hit her many a time nevertheless, and she’d probably felt the ring, too. She stood there several seconds, not knowing why, then she hurried into the kitchen and whipped off her apron and her housedress.

She put on the flowery-printed summer dress she deliberately hadn’t worn much with Clark, because it reminded her of the happiest days at Mobile, tossed the ruffled short sleeves into place with a familiar almost forgotten shake of her shoulders that made her feel practically her old self again, and with the dress still unfastened, ran on tiptoe out on the porch and saw the rag was still lying on his mouth. For good measure, she poured the rest of the bottle on
the rag. And didn’t the claw hammer look silly now? She took the hammer back to the drawer.

When she was all dressed except for make-up, she took the towel from her face, and propped the window of her room as wide as it would go. She stepped back from the dresser mirror, appraising herself anxiously, then stepped forward and put wide arcs of red on the bows of her upper lip, the way she liked it, dropped a cloud of powder on her nose and spread it quickly in all directions. Her cheeks were so curved now, she’d hardly have known herself, she thought, but she wasn’t too plump, just right. She still had that combination everyone said was unique of come-hither plus the bloom of youth, and how many girls had that? How many girls could be proposed to by a minister’s son, which was what had happened to her in Montgomery, and then have a life like she’d had in Mobile, the toast of the fleet? She laughed archly at herself in the mirror, though without making a sound—but who was there to hear her if she did laugh—and jogged her brown-blonde curls superfluously with her palms. She’d curled her hair with the iron this morning after Clark got in, and done as good a job as she’d ever done in her life, though all the while she’d known what she was going to do to Clark. And had she packed the curling iron?

She dragged her old black suitcase from behind the curtain under the sink, and found the curling iron right on top. She went back into the bedroom for her handbag. Her cigarettes. She ran to get the package of Lucky Strikes from beside the soap dish in the kitchen, and for a moment her spaced front teeth bit her underlip, the penciled eyebrows lifted with a deploring quiver, as she gazed for the last time at the red rickrack she’d tacked around the shelf to beautify it,
which had been completely lost on Clark, then she turned and went across the back porch and out.