Werewolves in Their Youth (3 page)

“I know it,” said my mother, looking grave, her voice filled with vandalistic glee. My father was a research chemist for the Food and Drug Administration. He was a small man with a scraggly gray beard and thick spectacles. He wore plaid sports jackets with patches on the elbows, carried his pens in a plastic pocket liner, and went to services every Saturday morning. He held a national ranking in chess (173) and a Canadian patent for a culture medium still widely used in that country, where he had been born and raised. “And he worked very hard on them all.” She hefted the heavy black binder in which my father kept his lab notes and dropped it into a box that had once contained bottles of Captain Morgan rum; there was a leering picture of a pirate on the side. “For years.” The laboratory notebook landed with a crunch of glass, breaking the throats of a dozen Erlenmeyer flasks beneath it. “I’ve asked him many, many times to come over here and pick up his things, Paulie. You know that. He’s had his chance.”

“I know.” On his departure from our house, my father had taken only a plaid valise full of summer clothing and my grandfather’s Russian chess set, whose black pieces had once been fingered by Alexander Alekhine.

“It’s been months now, Paulie,” my mother said. “I’ve got to conclude that he just doesn’t want any of his stuff.”

“I know,” I said.

She surveyed the wreckage of my father’s home laboratory—a little ruefully now, I thought—and then looked at me. “I guess it must seem to you like I’m being kind of mean,” she said. “Eh?”

I didn’t say anything. She held out her hand to me. I grabbed it and tugged her to her feet. She lifted the Captain Morgan carton and stacked it atop a Smirnoff carton filled with commercially prepared reagents in their bottles and jars; there was a further crunch of glass as the upper box settled into the lower. She hoisted the stacked boxes to her hip and jogged them once to get a better grip. One carton remained on the floor beside the workbench. We both looked at it.

“I’ll come back for that one,” my mother said, after a pause. She turned, and started slowly up the stairs.

For a minute I stood there with my hands jammed into my pockets, staring down into the box at my father’s crucible tongs, at his coils of clear plastic tubing, at his stirrers, pipettes, and stopcocks wrapped like taffy in stiff white paper. I knelt down and wrapped my arms around the carton and lowered my face into it and inhaled a clean, rubbery smell like that of a new Band-Aid. Then I lifted the carton and carried it upstairs, through the laundry room, and out into the garage, trying to fight off an unsettling feeling that I was throwing my father away. The rear hatch of our Datsun was raised, and the backseats had been folded forward.

“Thank you, sweetie,” said my mother, gently, as I handed her the last carton. “Now I just have to load up a few more things, and then I’m going to run all this stuff over to Mr. Kappelman’s office.” Mr. Kappelman was my father’s lawyer; my mother’s lawyer was a woman she called Deirdre. “You can just stay here, okay? You don’t have to help me anymore.”

“There’s no room for me anyway,” I said.

Most of the space in the car was already taken up by packed liquor boxes. I could see the fuzzy sleeve of my father’s green angora sweater poking out of one carton, and, through the finger holes in the side of another, I could make out the cracked black spines of his college chemistry texts. Stuffed into the spaces among the boxes and into odd nooks of the car’s interior were my father’s bicycle helmet, his clarinet case, his bust of Paul Morphy, his brass wall barometer, his shoeshine kit, his vaporizer, the panama hat he liked to wear at the beach, the beige plastic bedpan that had come home from the hospital with him after his deviated-septum operation and now held all his razors and combs and the panoply of gleaming instruments he employed to trim the hair that grew from the various features of his face, a grocery bag full of his shoe trees, the Montreal Junior Chess Championship trophy he had won in 1953, his tie rack, his earmuffs, and one Earth shoe. There was barely enough room left in the car for the three boxes my mother and I had dragged up from the basement. I helped her squeeze them into place, audibly doing more damage to their rank-smelling contents, and then my mother put her hands on the edge of the hatch and got ready to slam it.

She said, “Stand clear.” I flinched. I guess I must have shut my eyes; after a second or two I realized that she hadn’t closed the door yet, and when I looked at her again her eyes were scanning my face, darting very quickly back and forth, the way they did when she thought I might have a fever.

“Paul,” she said, “how was school today?”

“Fine.”

“How’s your asthma?”

“Good.”

She took her hands off the lip of the hatch and crouched down in front of me. Her face, I saw, was still buried under the thick layer of beige frosting that she applied to it every morning.

“Paul,” she said. “What’s the matter, honey?”

“Nothing,” I said, turning from her unrecognizable face. “I’ll be right back.” I started away from her.

“Paul—“ She took hold of my arm.

“I have to go to the
bath
room!” I said, twisting free of her. “You look ugly,” I added as I ran back into the house.

I went to the telephone and dialed my father’s number at work. The departmental secretary said that he was down the hall. I said that I would wait. I carried the phone over to the couch, where I had thrown my parka, and took my daily box of Yodels from its hiding place inside the torn orange lining. By the time my father took me off hold I had eaten three of them. This didn’t require all that much time, to be honest.

“Dr. Kovel,” said my father as he came clattering onto the line.

“Dad?”

“Paul. Where are you?”

“Dad, I’m at home. Guess what, Dad? I got expelled from school today.”

“What? What’s this?”

“Yeah, um, I got really mad, and I thought I was a werewolf, and I, um, I bit this girl, you know—Virginia Pease? On the neck. I didn’t break the skin, though,” I added. “And so they expelled me. Can you come over?”

“Paul, I’m at work.”

“I know.”

“What is all this?” His breath blew heavy through the line and made an irritated rattle in the receiver at my ear. “All right, listen, I’ll be there as soon as I can get away, eh?” Now his voice grew thick, as though on the other end of the line, while he held the receiver in the middle of his blank little office in Rockville, Maryland, his face had gone red with embarrassment. “Is your mother there?”

I told him to hold on, and went back out to the garage.

“Mom,” I said, “Dad’s on the phone.” I said these words in a voice so normal and cheerful that it hurt my heart to hear them. “He wants to talk to you.” I smiled the conspiratorial little smile I had so often seen her use on her clients as she hinted that the seller just might be willing to come down. “I think he wants to apologize.”

“Did you
call
him?”

“Oh, uh, yeah. Yes. I had to,” I said, remembering my story. “Because I got expelled from school. I have to go to Special School now. Starting tomorrow, probably.”

My mother put down the hoe she had been trying to squeeze into the back of her car and went, rather unwillingly, I thought, to the phone. Before she stepped into the house she looked back at me with a doubtful smile. I looked away. I stood there, behind her car, gazing in at all my father’s belongings. My mother had said that she planned to take them over to his lawyer’s office, but I didn’t believe her. I believed that she meant to take them to the dump. I hesitated for an instant, then reached in for my father’s laboratory notebook. He had always been more than willing to show me parts of it, whenever I asked him to; and naturally I had taken many furtive looks at its innermost pages when he wasn’t around. But I had never really comprehended its contents, nor the tenor of the experiments he’d been performing down there in our basement over the years, although I had a general sense of disappointment about them, as I did about his whole interest, professional and vocational, in the chemistry of mildews and molds. Yet even if there was nothing of interest in his notes—a likelihood that I still could not fully accept—I nonetheless felt a sudden urge to possess the notebook itself. Perhaps someday I would be able to decipher its cryptic formulae and crabbed script, and thence derive all manner of marvelous pastes of invisibility and mind-control dusts, unheard-of vitamins and deadly fungal poisons and powders that repelled gravity. I reached for the notebook and then decided also to take two of the boxes of laboratory equipment. I knew who would keep them safe for me; I hoped, as I never had before, that he would still want to be my friend.

I peered around the side of the garage, to make sure that my mother wasn’t watching from the front windows, then ran as quickly as I could toward the stand of young maples and pricker bushes that separated us from the Stokeses. The boxes were very heavy, and the shards of glass within them jingled like change. It was dinnertime, and nearly dark, but none of the lights were on in Timothy’s house. I supposed that he had been taken to see Dr. Schachter, and all at once I worried that he would never come home again, that they would just send Timothy straight off to Special School that day. Some people claimed that the little yellow van that sometimes passed us when we were on our way to school in the morning, its windows filled with the blank, cheerful faces of strange boys none of us knew, was the daily bus to Special School; but other people said that you had to go live there forever, like reform school or prison, and get visits from your parents on the weekends.

My mother was calling me. “Pau-aul!” she cried. She was one of those women who have a hard time raising their voices; it always came out sounding hoarse and friendless whenever she called me home. “Paw-lie!”

I hid in the brambles and studied the dark face of Timothy’s house, trying to decide what to do with my father’s things. My arms were growing tired, and I needed to go to the bathroom, and for now, I decided, I would leave the boxes at the basement door. I would come back later to ask Timothy, who on occasion appeared in the avatar of the faithful robot from
Lost in Space,
to guard them for me. Timothy slept in the basement of the Stokeses’ house, under a wall hung from floor to ceiling with his vast arsenal of toy swords and firearms, in a room strewn with dismembered telephones and the bones of imitation skeletons. I tiptoed around the side of the Stokeses’ house and into their weedy backyard. The moon was high and brilliant in the sky by now, and I thought that, after all, it was pretty nearly full. I approached the basement door, keeping an uneasy eye on the shadows in the trees, and the shadows under the Stokeses’ deck, and the shadows gathered on the swings of the creaking jungle gym. Since my last visit, I saw, Timothy had marked the entrance to his labyrinth with two neat pyramids of plastic skulls. My mother’s raspy voice fell silent, and there was only the sound of cars out on the country road, and the ghostly squeak of the swing set and the forlorn crooning of a blind Dalmatian that lived at the bottom of our street. Carelessly I dropped the boxes on the step, between the grinning pyramids, and ran back through the trees toward my house, heart pounding, tearing my clothes on the teeth of the underbrush, certain that something quick and terrible was following me every step of the way.

“I’m home!” I said, coming into the brightness and warmth of our hall. “Here I am.”

“There you are,” said my mother, though she didn’t look all that happy to see me. She laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. It smelled of butyric acid and dextrorotatory sucrose and also very faintly of Canoe. “I just got off the phone with Bob Buterbaugh, Paul. He told me what really happened at school today.” She had yanked her hair free of its ponytail and now it shot out in ragged arcs around her head, tangled like the vanes of a wrecked umbrella. “Do you want to explain yourself to me? Why did you lie?”

“Is Dad coming over?”

“Well, yes, he is, Paul—”

“Great.”

“—because he feels that he really needs to see you, tonight. But the two of you will have to sit outside in the car and talk, or go somewhere else. I’m not going to let him in the house.”

I was astonished. “Why not?”

“Because, Paul, your dad—you know as well as I do—he’s become, well, you know how he’s been lately. I don’t have to tell you.” As if she were angry, she folded her arms, and clenched her jaw. But I could see that she was trying to keep herself from crying. “I have to set some limits.”

“You mean he can’t come over to our house anymore? Ever again?”

There were tears in her eyes. “Ever again,” she said. Once more she crouched before me, and I let her take me in her arms, but I did not return her embrace. In the picture window at the end of the hall I watched her reflection hugging mine. I didn’t want to be comforted on the impending loss of my father. I wanted him not to be lost, and it seemed to me that it would be her fault if he was.

“He said he’s going to collect his things. So I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t get rid of them, eh?” She gave me a poke in the ribs. “He must want them after all. Hey,” she said. “What is it? What’s the matter?” She followed my gaze toward the picture window, where our embracing reflections looked back at us with startled expressions.

“Nothing,” I said. A light had just come on in the Stokeses’ house. “I—I have to go over to Timothy’s. I left something there.”

“What?”

“My Luger,” I said, remembering a toy I had lent to Timothy sometime last summer. “The pink one that squirts.”

“Well, it’s time to eat,” said my mother. “You can go after.”

“But what if Dad comes?”

“Well, what if he does? You can go over to Timothy’s tomorrow. He’s probably not allowed to see anyone anyway.”

In five minutes I bolted my dinner—one of those bizarre conglomerations of bottled tomato sauces, casseroles-in-boxes, and leftover Chinese lunches that were then the national dishes of our disordered and temporizing homeland—and ran out the front door into the night. I was sure that Timothy had found the cartons by now. What if he thought I had meant them for a present and refused to give them back? My father was going to be angry enough about my mother’s treatment of his chemistry things, but it would be worse when he found out that most of them, including his notebook, were missing. I sprinted across our yard as quickly as I could, considering my asthma, and went crashing through the maple trees toward the Stokeses’ house. There was a burst of red light as a thin branch slapped against my left eye, and I cried out, and covered my face, and ran headlong into Timothy Stokes. My chin struck his chest and I sat down hard.