The Fate of Mice (11 page)

“It skipped a generation,” I say. It’s a really feeble attempt at a joke, but to my surprise, my father laughs. It occurs to me with a jolt that he doesn’t seem agitated at all. I blink. What was Dr. Noruba talking about? “Dad, Sam and Julie love you. You know that. We all just wanted to do what was best for you—”

“Ah,” Dad says, and he leans closer to me and lowers his voice, and his eyes get even brighter, and his hand’s still on my arm, but now it’s shaking. He talks very fast. His old-man breath, that strange aroma of dentures and mothballs, is hot on my face. “But that’s the thing, Nate. You wanted to do what was best for me, and the people who broke this place open wanted to do what was best for me, but nobody asked
me
what was best for me—”

“Dad,” I tell him, “you were catatonic for a month. Do you remember that? We couldn’t ask you. You couldn’t talk. You had to be given food and water through tubes. And we’d been telling you the truth before that, but you couldn’t handle it. We couldn’t risk that happening again, Dad. I’m so sorry, and I hope you can forgive me, but I couldn’t risk that. I love you too much. I couldn’t stand seeing you like that.”

“Nobody asked me what was best for me,” Dad goes on, even more quickly, as if I haven’t spoken at all. “And that’s just the way it was before, Nate, you see? People doing things supposedly for other people’s good, but really for their own agendas. All of this Change nonsense is a hoax, Nate. It’s a load of crap. People haven’t changed at all.”

I look at his feverish face and glittering eyes, and I realize that Dr. Noruba was wrong. Well, of course. She’s too young to remember the world before the Change. She doesn’t know what any of her patients were like then.

My father isn’t agitated. He’s happy. This is exactly how he used to act, how he used to look, when he’d just uncovered a new conspiracy, when he’d found incontrovertible proof that The Public Had Been Lied To, unassailable evidence that power inevitably corrupted those who held it.

“Maybe you’re right,” I tell him, and I wonder if it’s the truth or another lie. Am I just playing along to keep him happy, or do I really believe that we haven’t changed? I remember the hatred I felt for the terrorists, and it occurs to me that even though crime really has vanished almost entirely, there has to be a reason so many people want to be fake criminals in places like this, even if it’s just a game.

“Of course I’m right,” he says, and he stands up now and starts pacing back and forth very quickly, the same way he used to pace in front of his computer when he was hot on the trail of another cover-up. “Nate. Is this room bugged? Are they listening to us?”

“I honestly don’t know, Dad. Maybe.”

He nods, comes closer to me, grabs me in a bearhug, and whispers into my ear. “We need to find them. The Truth Terrorists. We need to join them. There are other places like this?” I nod, and my father squeezes my neck. “We need to do the same thing at those places.”

We? “Dad, learning the truth has hurt a lot of people. And you just told me that the terrorists were wrong not to ask you what was best for you.”

“Shhh, Nate. Keep your voice down! We will ask. We’ll find a way to ask, somehow. Or do it gradually to watch the effects on the patients. This was the Truth Terrorists’ first project. There’s always room for improvement. We’ll join them so we can show them a better way.”

We? He really does sound crazy now. “Dad—”

“So do you have room for me in this house of yours? The one that keeps burning down and getting flooded and renovated? It must be a mansion by now, with all those renovations.” His eyes twinkle.

“Dad,” I say, not even trying to keep my voice down. “Dad, you can’t come home with us. You couldn’t handle the Change last time. What makes you think you can handle it now?”

He gives me a pitying look. “Nate. Of course I can handle it. Things haven’t changed at all. It’s the same old world of lying and cover-ups, even from my family. I know that now.”

And suddenly I remember one of the statements from the Manifesto.
We, the Truth Terrorists, think we owe you the truth, as long as we present it in a form you recognize, in a shape that’s familiar enough to be safe
. And I remember what Jenny said:
your dad always believed he was living in the middle of a huge conspiracy, and this time he’s actually right
.

I’ve just realized that these Terrorists are geniuses. They’ve done what Jenny and I and all the doctors could never do: they found a way to tell my father the truth in a form he could accept.

He smiles at me. “I’m so relieved, Nate. I feel better than I’ve felt in years. And you’ll help me, won’t you? You keep saying you’ve been doing all this to help me. Now you have a chance to do it for real. Sam and Julie can help, too. And maybe even Jenny, if we can talk her into it. They’re all good researchers, aren’t they?”

I swallow. My father wants me to help him by becoming a co-conspirator. He’s using my family to make his own secret network, a homegrown terrorist cell.
Your father would probably be a Truth Terrorist himself, if he’d been able to adjust
. My smart Jenny.

And I’m on board. He’s won me over. I’m about to become a terrorist. On some level, I think this is really sick. But on another, I feel my fingers and toes tingling, feel the thrill of the hunt, the joy of adrenaline. I realize that I feel better than I’ve felt in years.

“We’ll ask them, Dad. After all, they have to have the chance to decide what’s best for them.”

Dad grins at me, and it occurs to me that my mother must be spinning in her grave. “That’s my boy. Now, how do we break out of here?”

You remember the story. Jo March, tomboy and hoyden, whose only beauty is her long chestnut hair, sells it for twenty-five dollars because her father lies ill in a hospital in Washington. He has not asked for twenty-five dollars, has not asked for anything, but Jo, good nineteenth-century daughter, knows that sacrifices are called for in such situations. Her father has sacrificed his comfortable home life to serve as a Civil War chaplain. Her mother has sacrificed her anger, and the other daughters their ambitions; little Beth will ultimately sacrifice her life. Jo, who does not yet wish to sacrifice her desires, sacrifices her hair instead: walks into a small shop where a small, oily man cuts off her mane and gives her a small roll of bills, which she sends proudly to her father.

Her father does not want it. He never spends the money. When he comes home he tells the assembled family that in all Washington he couldn’t find anything beautiful enough to buy with Jo’s money, and Jo, sitting in the firelight, blushes, her eyes grown dim. Her parents and sisters, watching her, think her proud of her father’s praise; and because she wants to please them, she tries to think so too. Deep down, though, some part of her knows that her sacrifice has been rejected as worthless: too crass, too material, too redolent of the flesh and the body, of the very things good daughters should never exchange for money. Jo’s father does not want her hair or anything her hair has purchased.

She understands all this, bright girl that she is, although she never speaks of it. She grows more hair, and thinks only occasionally of the mane she sold. Dutiful daughter, she learns instead to make approved sacrifices. She stops writing, marries an older man with whom she founds a school, devotes herself to home and family. She never goes to Europe, never has an illicit romance, tastes the forbidden only through the adventures of the rambunctious boys she has raised, who are free to venture into the world. Jo has learned the limits of decorum.

But what of Jo’s hair?

Here is Jo’s hair in the window of the shop where she left it. It has been combed, braided, powdered, oiled, woven fantastically with flowers, a thing for fairyfolk or vain young girls. Along comes just such a young girl, with her even more worldly mother, both of them eager to buy the beauty Jo has so nobly, and with so little effect, sold for a few paltry pieces of paper.

“Look, Mama!” cries our new heroine, pointing at the beautiful plait in the window. “Just the thing for the ball!”

“It will do,” her mother says with a nod, surveying Jo’s hair with eyes used to assessing silks, satins, fine bonbons, the incomes and social standing of potential husbands. For fifty dollars she boys the hair Jo sold for twenty-five, and that night the young girl attaches Jo’s hair to her own thick chestnut locks, just a shade darker than Jo’s, and waltzes ecstatically in a brilliant green silk gown beneath even more brilliant crystal chandeliers. By the end of that year, Jo’s lovely hair has shone in the light from many chandeliers, from the moon in summer rose gardens, from the blinding sun of midday boating expeditions. It has been admired by the cream of society, by fawning servants, and by a most satisfyingly long list of suitors, including the extremely rich, handsome, and dissipated young man upon whom the new owner of Jo’s hair, and her mama, have rested their hopes for lo! these many waltzes.

The same Christmas day that Jo’s father tells her he could find nothing to buy with her hair, the dissipated young man steals his first kiss from the worldly young lady, and strokes the smooth plait of Jo’s hair, little dreaming that it once belonged to a poor clergyman’s daughter. On the day Jo’s sister Meg, to Jo’s great relief, becomes engaged to a poor but honest tutor, Jo’s hair is the central ornament in a costume which, before that evening is out, has been complemented by a dazzling diamond ring beside which even Jo’s hair fades into insignificance.

And now, after a decorous three-year wait, Meg and the tutor decorously marry, as Jo mourns the first break in the circle of sisters. On that same day, the worldly young lady dies in childbirth—we would, of course, never dream of questioning whether the stillborn child was actually her husband’s—and Jo’s hair becomes the stolen property of a servant who carries it off with her into another household. As Jo dismisses the wealthy, dashing neighbor who so desperately wants to marry her, the housemaid who wears Jo’s hair attempts—with far less success—to repulse the dishonorable advances of her gentleman employer. Jo flees her neighbor’s heartbreak by going to New York to write sensation stories; the disgraced housemaid flees to a lying-in home and, after abandoning her baby on the steps of a church, finds herself reduced to acting bit parts in bad melodramas.

Now Jo’s hair smells of greasepaint and cheap gin and the old, tired dust that collects in theaters. Scolded by Professor Bhaer—her destiny, her doom, the only desire she is allowed—for writing immoral trash, Jo resolves to be virtuous and puts away her pen. Little does she suspect that her hair, forever beyond virtue now, lies in a moldy trunk of stage properties a mere mile from the boarding house where, obeying her fate, she met the professor.

She has more important things to worry about. Returning home to her family, she finds the saintly Beth dying a saintly death of tuberculosis. Grieving, Jo dutifully nurses her little sister, who counsels, as Victorian household saints always do, self-abnegation. “Be everything to Father and Mother when I’m gone,” Beth says sweetly, “and if it’s hard to work alone, remember that I don’t forget you, and that you’ll be happier in doing that than writing splendid books or seeing all the world.”

Jo agrees, of course. How could she not? This is her first deathbed scene, and it moves her profoundly. Young as she is, she little guesses how many others there will be, how few things she will ever be able to do for herself if she devotes her life to keeping promises to the dead. Pierced by sorrow, valiantly struggling not to rebel against the drudgery of the life she has promised to lead, she stays at home and learns to dust.

Meanwhile, Jo’s hair has, in a moment of sartorial desperation, been snatched out of its moldy backstage trunk by the woman who will eventually become the most famous diva of the age. As Beth dies, Jo’s hair crosses the Atlantic on a luxury steamer. Jo wears mourning as her hair, adorned with blue gems, disembarks in London. Jo languishes at home, washing dishes and convinced that she is fated to be an old maid, as the actress wearing her hair sets out, in the company of a lord addicted to opium and the perfume of women’s bodies, for the mysterious East. Professor Bhaer miraculously reappears, and proposes to Jo under an umbrella on a gray, pouring afternoon, while Jo’s hair hides demurely beneath a veil in Istanbul.

She marries Friedrich, of course—what choice does she have?—and embarks upon the Plumfield years, raising her sons and other people’s sons, any sons she can find, raising them and teaching them and watching them leave her to marry, to go into business, to go West. Meanwhile, more people die: her mother, Meg’s husband, various prim spinster neighbors. Jo, good Victorian wife, becomes an old hand at deathbed scenes.

Most of them are quite dull. Only one, of the many she must endure through the years, holds any interest for this tale. As Jo’s father lies dying, he gives her back the twenty-five dollars she sent him, so very long ago, when she sold her hair. All these years, he has kept the roll of yellowed bills in a little leather bag. “Spend it on your boys,” he tells her, and weeping, she promises him that she will, just as she promised

Beth so long ago to live for her parents instead of herself.

But Jo doesn’t spend the money on her boys. Instead, for a reason she cannot fully explain even to herself, she chooses not to spend the money at all. She wears the little bag around her neck, where it weighs on her like a millstone. If she were asked, she would say that, like her father, she cannot find anything beautiful enough to buy with the money. She isn’t asked, however. No one notices or cares. Her countless boys have other interests, and Friedrich seems curiously distracted.

As it turns out, he has become infatuated with a local dairymaid, a recent immigrant from Germany who looks like a Valkyrie and makes superb sauerkraut, a skill Jo has never mastered. In due course, Friedrich and his new love run off to Berlin, where they open a restaurant. Jo struggles onward, heroically trying to run Plumfield alone. She acknowledges, although only to herself, a guilty relief when at last the school burns down, sacrificed to the wickedness of a blaspheming boy who insisted on smoking cigars in bed.