He retreated to the chair and sat there holding his cognac glass very tightly, as if it were a life buoy. He spoke very low, between his teeth. “Maybe I am. Maybe I am. But what you are doing is trying to
eradicate
me, the way you did Anthony and your daughter, Elspeth, isn’t it? Wipe me out. Well, I’m not going to let you do it.”
She drew in breath silently.
“I tell you, lady, I won’t kill myself for you and I won’t go your way. Never!”
Voice of ice: “No. You prefer Edith’s.”
Across the room a glass shattered.
“I should be the one breaking things,” she said nasally, her head full of tears, “since you hit me lower than I hit you. But women always have to do the cleaning up,” she added bitterly, “and that’s quite a deterrent.”
“I will fucking clean it up!” he said savagely, rising, a dark motion in the dim room. The candles flickered, nearly burned out. The air was cold and rank. He lurched past her towards the kitchen and she wanted to grab him, to throw him down and punch him, pummel him, to make him cry the way she was crying inside.
And then she wanted to caress him, to weep outwardly, to say,
Why are we doing this?
He hadn’t forgiven her abandonment of him.
He’d made war on her with no holds barred: atomic weapons, neutron bombs, nerve gas: everything was permitted.
You didn’t do so bad yourself.
He was worse.
So don’t give in at all. Stay stubborn. But certainly don’t give in first, you know how men are, everything is a contest. The one who gives in first gets a demerit on the great chart in the brain, and next time he will be more adamant, expecting your surrender, and the next time more, and more: have you forgotten Anthony? Do you want to participate in creating another such monster? For he will surely, if you give in, later accuse you of participation.
She heard him fumbling in the kitchen, heard something else knocked over.
“Why don’t you turn on the fucking light?” she yelled fiercely and leaped out of her chair and turned on the lamps and blew out the nearly dead candles, and whirled to glare at him as he returned with a broom and dustpan and a bloody rag in his hand.
H
E HAD CUT HIMSELF
. He hadn’t thrown the glass, as she thought, he’d squeezed it and he had a deep cut on the mound of his thumb, and shards of glass stuck into his palm.
He passed her without speaking and crouched on the floor and swept pieces of broken glass into the dustpan. She turned on the electric fire and went into the bathroom for tweezers and peroxide, gauze and tape. Then she made him sit down near the lamp and she knelt beside him, picking out shards of glass with the tweezer. She looked up at him with a strained face as she bandaged his hand.
“See what I mean? Women always end up doing the dishes.”
“The dishes are done,” he said dully.
“Yes, but what about tomorrow’s? You won’t be doing dishes for quite a while with this hand. The extremes you men will go to get out of the dishes!” she tried to joke, tried to laugh, but suddenly collapsed, crying, on the floor, pounding it with her fist. “You see! You see! I knew it! You wanted to hurt me as badly as Anthony ever did and still have me love you! You got your wish! Are you happy?”
He stared at her, then got down on the floor beside her. He held the wrist of her pounding hand, he pulled it towards him. “Hit me,” he said. She pulled her hand back, pulled her body away from his and sat there crying little-girl helpless tears. He sat beside her, not touching her.
“Ah, Dolores, I’m sorry. But you held your own. You were as bad as I was.”
“No, I wasn’t,” she sobbed. “I didn’t accuse you of crippling Edith, just of trying to make me like her. You accused me of eradicating not only Anthony but Elspeth. Elspeth!”
His mouth twisted, he looked gloomily at the floor.
“I didn’t kill Anthony. Anthony killed Anthony! And Anthony killed Elspeth!”
He regarded her quietly. “Anthony died before she did.”
“So? Hands can reach out from the grave and pull you down. She does, still. I know she doesn’t mean to. It’s because I loved her so much….”
“Who?” His face was puzzled, frowning.
“Elspeth. Elspeth.” She choked on the name, like an oyster caught in the throat.
He closed his eyes. She was crying in hawking sobs, she bent her head and laid it on her crossed arms on the floor, her knees drawn up under her as if she were crouching before an Oriental despot.
“Oh, Dolores, I didn’t mean to hurt you. Really. I just wanted … I wanted you to stop judging me. I feel you judge me all the time and it makes me unhappy.”
Dolores pulled herself up and blew her nose. “And what is it you want from me, oh, member of the master race?”
“I want you to love me, of course. Without judgment.”
“You want my will in perfect harmony with yours. You want me inside
your
pie dish,
your
pumpkin shell.”
“There
is
love without judgment.”
“You’re right. It’s Edith’s kind of love.”
He sighed. “Why is it I always get the worst of it in arguments with you?”
“You don’t. It’s just that you can’t accept not winning every one. And you’ll do anything at all to win, anything. But you can’t,” she raised her head and shot him a superior transcendent expression, “you can’t hurt me about Anthony. I’ve been all through that with myself.”
Hated that superior look, that voice. “But I can hurt you with Elspeth.” Mean.
“You motherfucker,” she whispered.
“Oh, if only I had been!” he moaned, and suddenly they were both laughing.
Then he put his arm around her and they sat there on the hard floor and he played with her the way you play with a child, tracing her nose, her cheek, her lips, her ears with his fingers. She settled back in the curve of his body, put her mouth up and kissed his mouth, softly, full-mouthed, not an erotic kiss but a loving one, and took his hand and played with it the way you play with a child’s hand, tracing the veins, the knuckles, the nails.
“Come on,” he said and helped her up and led her to the couch and made her sit down and put cushions behind her and a lap robe over her knees. He went to the kitchen and came back with two fresh glasses of brandy, and a cigar for her.
“I feel like an invalid. Do you do this for Edith?”
“Sometimes.”
“I love you.”
He picked up the dustpan and carried it into the kitchen and emptied it. He came back with a damp cloth and wiped up the floor where the glass had broken and spilled. Then he went to the bathroom and rebandaged his hand—the cut had bled clear through the first bandage. Then he came back and sat beside her on the couch facing her, and sipped his brandy.
She stroked his cheek. “Nice. You’re nice.”
“Tell me about Elspeth,” he said.
“I can’t. Can’t,” she whispered.
“Yes, you can. And I think you want to. Could there possibly still be secrets between us? Can there, now?”
She looked across the room. “She found him. Anthony. She found him in the car. And that’s what he did, you see. He didn’t just kill himself, he killed her. And she was his favorite. Or had been once.”
She went to the garage for her bike. And smelled the exhaust fumes, and went out and turned off the motor, and saw him. But she didn’t cry out. She didn’t come running back into the house for me. She was only twelve, after all. But she didn’t. She came back in and started towards her room, stopped just outside it and sniffed. Stood there sniffing. I was in my room, combing my hair, but I heard it. And recognized it.
I’d heard her sniffing like that once before. It was a few years earlier, the younger kids were away at summer camp, and I was sleeping late. A noise woke me, a slight noise. That happens to mothers, I think. I remember waking up in the middle of the night when Elf was a baby. Elspeth, I mean. I called her little Elf. Learned my lesson. Never called Sydney or Tony
little
anything after that. Anyway, I’d wake up because the room seemed too still. Elf slept in a cradle beside my bed, and usually I was aware of her breathing. But sometimes her breath would get so soft I couldn’t hear it. Sometimes I couldn’t tell even laying my ear next to her face, and I’d have to wake her up. To make sure. Anyway, what I heard was sniffing, and I jumped up because I knew something was wrong. I ran to the hall bathroom, where the noise was, if you can call it a noise. And Elspeth was there, running cold water over her hand and she was sniffing.
She blinked when I entered and said, “Mommy? I didn’t want to wake you up.”
“What is it, darling? What’s wrong?”
“I burned my hand.”
It was terribly red, and covered half her hand.
She had wanted sausages for breakfast and had cooked them as I’d taught her, so that most of the fat drained off. When they were done, she, being a good little girl, had poured the fat off into a can I keep in the refrigerator. The can was nearly full and the sausage grease filled it, so she picked it up to return to the refrigerator, where the fat would harden so I could throw it away. But the can was hot from the hot fat, and her hand shook and the boiling hot fat spilled over the edge, burning her hand.
Elf was a good girl, a very good girl. She didn’t even spill the fat on the floor, or drop the can and scream. She set the can down carefully on the counter top and, her hand screaming with the burn, went quietly to the bathroom to run cold water on her hand. The only sign that she wanted me was that she went to the bathroom to do that. My room was near it. She could have done that in the kitchen. And as she ran water over her hand, she sniffed.
I’ll never forget that sound, it lives, inside my head. Because the whole thing worried me so much. Oh, not the burn. We raced to the hospital emergency room and they made her wait forty-five minutes, I was fuming, but in time they took care of it and it stopped hurting in a couple of days, and it healed fine. No, it wasn’t that.
It was Elspeth I was worried about. She was such a good girl. It seemed unnatural to me. Docile and sweet and helpful and obedient. I was frightened for her, I wondered how she was going to get through life being so goddamned
good.
I felt she would be destroyed if she went on being like that. And I wondered why she was. Why she was worried me as much as the other. I wanted to pick her up and put her back inside my body, to keep her safe.
So, that’s what I heard this day too. Sniffing. Although Elf had changed in the intervening years, she’d become a sullen adolescent, not quite such an Elsie Dinsmore angel. She sulked, she talked back, she forgot to do what she was told, she purposely neglected things sometimes. In other words, she’d become normal.
But the day Anthony moved out, she had instantly reverted to the good girl. It was eerie. Since Anthony had been gone, she was an angel except when he came over for dinner, or to take the kids to lunch on Saturdays. Then she sulked, she made flip nasty cracks, usually to me.
And here she was sniffing again. I put down my comb, I raced out of the room, and there she was, standing in the hall. She was skinny, wearing jeans. Her red-gold hair hung straight down her back, and her eyes were wide open and almost periwinkle. She was standing there looking as if she saw nothing. And sniffing.
I went to her and took her hands. They were small and limp in my hands. “Elf, sweetheart, what is it?”
Sniff.
“Elspeth?”
“Don’t go into the garage, Mommy.”
I thought perhaps she’d seen a rat. There was a pond near us, and sometimes water rats would come up into the garage. But no. It couldn’t be anything like that. My hands were beginning to get as cold as hers.
“Why, sweetheart?”
“Daddy’s in the garage, Mommy,” she quavered and her mouth trembled and tears began to ooze into her eyes, but she did not cry. She stood very still.
And I stood still too, because I knew. Not how he’d done it, I pictured him lying on the garage floor with a bullet hole in his temple, although I should have realized he’d choose an easier way. And I could feel my face changing even as I stood there, feel my mouth curling down the way it still does, carving a bitter line around it, a line that would never leave.
“Not true. You don’t have a bitter line around your mouth.”
“
I
can see it. Just as I can see the scratch marks on your face.”
“I have no scratch marks on my face,” he smiled at her.
“Well,” she sighed, “if you can’t
see…
”
“Go on.”
I stood there petrified, turned into a pillar of something. But I felt hate more than grief. He’d have to know the chances were they’d find him. They were up and out before me, always. They always rode their bikes, which were kept in the garage. And suddenly all the anger I’d felt for him over all the years, all the fury I felt about his tormenting of Tony, his treatment of the girls, his jealousy and possessiveness, his treatment of me—all of it congealed, it hardened and grew larger. It turned into something that was larger than I was, that was maybe even universal. He was going to destroy them in any way he could because that would destroy me. My god! how much can you hate! He didn’t care where his napalm fell, who it destroyed, even his own children, as long as some of it splattered me! Like Roger Jenkins and Mary.
We stood there, the two of us, Elspeth and I, looking at nothing. And Sydney and Tony came tearing down the hall from the kitchen, they were yelling, they were white-faced and their mouths were like broken saucers. I went with them, they were pulling on my hands, yelling, pointing, telling me to call a doctor, and I looked down at his dead body and I wanted to pick up an ax and chop it into tiny pieces, I’ve never felt hate like that, before or since.
Elspeth stayed in the hall. When I came back to phone the police, she was in her room with the door shut. I went in later, when I could. She was lying on the bed, staring. She turned her face away from me, she didn’t want to see me or talk to me.
I don’t think she ever cried.
A
NTHONY ALWAYS LIKED ELF
. When she was a baby, he even played with her once in a while. His way of playing was to lift her up and swing her in the air and down again. He did this until, one Sunday in May, he threw his back out and had to lie flat for days afterwards. He never swung her up again. After that, he didn’t pay much attention to her unless he was taking photographs. He loved to photograph her, well, she was beautiful, always. When Tony was born, and later, Sydney, he still photographed only Elspeth. If the other children are in the picture, they’re on the fringes, the way he’d been once, too. And Tony has that same sad little face Anthony had had. Anthony took movies, and it’s only accidental that Tony or Syd ever make their way onto the screen. It’s all Elspeth. But he stopped taking pictures at some point, and I never did it either, so I have no pictures of Elspeth after about age eleven.