The Unfortunates (13 page)

Yes, he’d been warming up to asking her advice all morning.
How’s the Vargas place?
he’d asked. A house to win back his wife. George came home at just the wrong moment. Now Victor won’t need to tell her outright—she’ll offer her help. They are friends. She imagines Victor’s wife, this woman from New Zealand, getting out of a taxi, an antarctic eye and a red mouth turned up to Victor. She climbs the steps from the sidewalk, Victor at the door to their new home, opening his arms. She forgives Victor for all that came between them in the dark days. Iris even knows the house.
I have a couple of ideas
, she imagines herself saying.
But there’s this one place I want you to see.

11

In the dark, her arm and leg sprawl heavily across his torso. Her breath is loud in sleep. She
is
the best person, not simply the one he happens to love. He trusts her even with the stories in which he is not the hero. He tries not to shift and wake her. Earlier that day, after they’d left the bed, eaten cold spaghetti, swum and watched television and swum again and drunk screwdrivers and cooked a chicken and watched a movie and returned to bed but couldn’t sleep, he found himself describing his life at thirteen to her, and he finds himself waking her now, to tell her the rest of his story, for only Iris understands how awkward and unappealing he felt as a young man, how miserable they were in the house on the Sound, how he came to music. Not George, remember? Edward George. Called Edward. He hated the name—the way his mother would stretch it out into a bossy song of ownership. No one at school would shorten it. To be anything but a boy with the name of an old lord! His grandfather, his namesake, dead sixty years. Edward George knew his grandfather only from the darkly caked oil portrait he avoided as if the man in the black coat might lean out and steal his breath. In the portrait, Edward George senior—Georgie—held a newspaper, his thumb angled toward the date. He looked like a snapping tortoise—yellow, imperious, weary. Razor-eyed, clever but not wise. Like a man who, without ever a sudden motion, got what he wanted by force. A replica of the painting hung at Town Hall in Newport.

Edward George II dreaded Saturday mornings at Booth Hill, the hour of his weekly piano lesson, for the portrait waited opposite the Steinway grand, in a formal parlor of black and white marble, green velvet curtains, and views of the sea. (Until he left for boarding school, George spent weeks in New York City and weekends and summers in Stockport.) His teacher, bony Mr. Foley, kind, and frail as parchment. They spent much of each lesson protecting the piano from themselves: Foley combating fits of allergy and George, a sufferer of anxious nosebleed, widening his eyes at the first drop of blood on the keys. In all, six ancestral portraits watched him play. Edward George’s brother Junius. Junius’s wife, Constance, whose eyes were crossed. John Stepney and Fanny hung in the center: John Stepney with a green squint like George’s, so handsome it couldn’t be a lie. Fanny, warm and solid, with a crinkled bow for a mouth suggesting she thought portrait-sitting funny. CeCe liked to point out the National Women’s Suffrage Association sash in Fanny’s hands. Next to Edward was CeCe herself, in a later, lighter style, as a girl of seven, in a pale blue tunic and a puff-sleeved blouse, sitting at a three-quarter turn, looking out a window.

He didn’t practice much. Disobedience was unlike him; he blamed it on the piano’s location. Usually, he made a great effort in the company of adults, his most common company—obliging a simple arrangement of Mozart’s Sonata in F Major at parties, tooling through the crowd with an ice bucket and tongs. It followed that he was also a child of lonesome vice—a tearer of butterfly wings, an exploder of garden snails, a fearless explorer of the inside of his nose, a bully of cats and babies momentarily unattended, a pounder of fish tanks, a leaver of cultish rock piles and relocated goose shit on driveways, a nighttime weeper, a sufferer of crippling neurasthenic stomachache, a child engaged in regular, silent, pleading prayer. He’d learned to pray at school, his mother being of the conviction that religion was for people willing to trade reason for comfort, who couldn’t handle their affairs in private. He prayed in case his mother erred. He suspected God’s absence might be a deficiency not of the cosmic order but rather of his own little spirit. For fear of being overheard and made fun of, he would bury his face in the damask of the bed and, tasting its dry thread, begin thus: “Hello, God, I don’t think you exist, but if you’re listening right now, I guess you do and I’m sorry for doubting you. Pat called me a phony today. Can you lightning her? Please, please, let me wake up as somebody else. Anybody. I leave it up to you.”

He didn’t dare hope God’s big ear was bent toward him, but he did have the uncanny sensation he was being listened to—through the wall or the door by someone in the house. By Esme, or a ghost—Fanny, maybe, or even Constance, peering out of her picture with gritted mirth. There was something derelict in letting so much desire escape into the world. God or no God, it was hopeless either way. Either his skepticism and his shame had offended everybody in heaven and they’d voted he did not merit reward. Or if he were correct in doubting the possibility of anything so stupid and awesome as guardians with feathered wings and bright light and sitting down to munch on golden cakes with your favorite Heroes from History in chairs built of cloud and a benevolent father who knew all about you, then too his wish would not be granted.

Once he asked CeCe why there wasn’t a picture of her mother on the wall.

“There isn’t one I know of,” she said. Evelyn, nineteen when Cecilia was born and her father fifty-seven: a middle marriage, hasty and brief.

And what about her father’s first wife, Edith, or Gloria, his third?

“In storage,” she answered.

And why wasn’t there a picture of his dad?

“Portraits were out of style by then. Imagine, asking an abstractionist to sit for a portrait! What a suggestion, dear! Walter would’ve hated it. I wish I had. But those are his.” She’d pointed to two tiny indecipherable ink drawings tucked behind a fat wucai vase, low on a display shelf on the opposite wall, and reminded him that if he was lucky, and so far he was lucky indeed, he would grow into a bearing like his grandfather’s, steady as steel.

He did indeed grow into a certain steadiness. He didn’t swear or horse around. Didn’t laugh much. By boarding school, at Choate, forty minutes from weekends at Booth Hill, he stopped laughing altogether. He did not understand that when girls referred to him as “brooding,” it might be to his advantage. For many years they left him to his imagination; weekends home he’d sit on the same damask edge of the mahogany four-poster bed where he used to pray. He kept on the night-light. For practical purposes—in no way did he still believe monsters hung in his shirts behind his closed closet door. In his diary he wrote,
I keep the light on only to write this and also because it is an antique of some historical importance.
The light, a French globe issued during the Crimean War, had been retrofitted with a bulb through a hole in Antarctica. It cast an amber glow in the darkness. From the bed he saw Africa—saw-toothed, divvied by an earlier time, with a misleading proximity to the sideways scrawl of the beautiful word
Persia
. He was hopeful. He was ready. They were ready—a Susan or a Catharine or a Penelope, the choicest girls from school. One would fall into the grass. Once, in Persia-Africa, but usually at the corner of the field-hockey field. He would slay her, excellently. Unless he became distracted, worrying that Esme or another might enter his room, and the reaching hand of Susan or Catharine or Penelope, reaching out of the darkness, the dark grass, a simple thing he wanted, would mangle with the scrubbing hand of Esme. “Wrong!” he would say to the bedpost, and Susan or Catharine or Penelope would dissolve behind the clattering interference like snow-static on the television when a storm hit the wire.

“Edward!” they would cry into the abandoned field-hockey field. “Edward, where are you? Where did you go? I’m all alone! Are you alone too?”

“Yes!” he would call, his hand on the post, his wet eye falling on the globe. “I am!” But he could only picture the dark trees and the grass, not the girl. Staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep, he couldn’t help noting that his thoughts of Susan had led to Esme, and Esme had lead to his mother, and he was doomed.

One Friday evening, he looked across the dinner table at his sister’s sad-horse face. Patricia and his mother weren’t speaking again, typical in Patricia’s fourteenth year, his twelfth. George was used to filling the silence, turning to one and then the other, summarizing notable items from the newspaper or inflated anecdotes of his adventures at school, but that day, after PE, a bruiser named Shelia had grabbed his jaw and jammed a Chinese jack almost down his throat, chanting,
Deadward, Deadward, Deadward!
At dinner, looking into his glass of bluish milk, he decided he did want to die, in the uninformed but certain way twelve-year-olds do. Pat and his mother were fighting about Patricia’s barnyard—in a far corner of the back garden so that no visitor could see or hear, Pat kept potbellied pigs, ducks, two lambs, a snake. Earlier that week, six ducks of a special breed had arrived from North Carolina. CeCe told Patricia they would be the last of any live import. Patricia was soon to transfer to a new high school, farther away, for girls inclined toward misadventure. On their plates that night was duck. Not a back-garden duck, but his mother was making a point. He looked at Patricia’s long horse face, the sparkling-blue eye powder she’d grudgingly been permitted, her crimped hair hanging over the uneaten duck, felt the rough scratch at the back of his throat, and said:

“The sick thing is flying a duck to us inside a plane when a plane is an imitation of a duck.”

“Edward,” his mother said, “have you entered your dark period? No one appreciates sarcasm over food. Could you two coordinate? Patricia, please finish up with your dark period before Edward enters his. I can’t handle both.”

“Mother,” Patricia said. She turned to Edward. “Edward, are you feeling okay? Was school better this week?”

In his diary:
Patricia is my hero. Except when she is a giantshitmonkey
.

“School was fine. School was great. I climbed the rope in gym. I aced my finals. I have a million friends. May I be excused?”

“You had finals?” CeCe asked.

“Liar. They’re not for another month. And he needs a math tutor.”

“It wasn’t a lie. It was a joke.”

“If you knew how to tell a joke, you’d know that wasn’t one,” his sister said.

“Yes,” CeCe said, “you may be excused.”

Edward trudged into the dark garden. He decided to look at the new ducks; maybe there were babies. It would be helpful to have a father at this sort of time. He thought this so often it was like a wheel groove running though the middle of his head, deep and worn and hardened, dividing every other thought he had, making everything more difficult than it needed to be. His mother said Walter was a kind and decent man, but not to be contacted. She said his early work occasionally auctioned at Sotheby’s, which was something to be proud of. He was probably still in Antibes; while the distance between them was sad, it was not an occasion to be sad. Theirs was a lack but not a blight, she concluded. Most children suffered some greater hardship. She shook her head in a way that meant if Walter were to live with them, it would be worse, which George did not understand if the man were so kind and decent and talented.

The ducks honked, butted his shins, begged noisily for grub. There were no babies. His sister’s animals only interested him when he was missing his father, because Patricia, who had a watercolor memory of the man Edward had been too young to know, said it was Walter who’d assembled the petting zoo. He’d taught her to care for the animals and love them and how caring and loving were not the same. She told Edward this one night they were still young enough to be friends. He crept into her room and sat on the edge of the bed and shook her big knuckly feet until she woke and asked her what their dad had been like. In her half sleep she said, “He sang to me and got the animals, other stuff like that.”

“You’re so lucky. Was he great?”

“I think he was. It’s her fault. I don’t remember.”

“Why did he go?”

“I dunno.”

“But you were there. She did it?”

“I heard her say ‘fucking fucks.’”

“No! Mother?”

“Shhh! Yes.” He crawled to the top of the bed and lay his head below her mouth, to hear better. “I was behind the couch. She thought I was outside playing with Nanny. She was at the rolltop. Her face was practically stuck in the cubbies. She was writing something. Then she went to her bedroom for like a week. After that she was in the city, but we stayed here. I missed a month of school. When she got back, she said it would just be us.”

“We missed school? We’ve never missed school!”

“No, I did. You were too little. We went to Esme’s house.”

“Esme’s house? Why did we go there?”

“Mother took me to school in the morning instead of Dad. Esme was with me in the back. But I didn’t stay at school. Mother said something to the teacher and we got back in the car, but Mother got into another car and Esme drove our car home. Mother called us the next day, but then she had to go, because ‘here come the suits.’ I didn’t get it, but they were keeping us out of the news. Big gossip divorce. And I’m not sure, but I think right before he left, Dad switched all my ducks. I know that’s crazy. But we were in the city, and when we came back, they weren’t the same ones. They looked the same, but Maudie, my favorite, didn’t act like Maudie. She snubbed me every time I tried to feed her. And Princess Cassiopeia was tiny and spotty and had been in love with Peter Pan, but then she wasn’t any of those things anymore. For a long time I thought he took the old ducks with him to remember me. Shut up, I was little.”

Edward lay down in the grass. The ducks had given up on a feeding and waddled idly; one bent to groom Edward’s hair but soon realized her mistake and rushed away. He heard Esme call him to dessert several times. Finally she tromped out into the garden, smoothing her apron. Though his eyes were closed, he could hear her shape in her step: solid as a doorstop, one leg dragging a little, the scarred knee hidden under her gray skirt.