“Well, it's what's left of the bulk of my inheritance,” said Dennis, “just about.”
“Pshaw,” I said, opening the front door, although in fact I knew this to be true, “there's oodles left, you can't fool Uncle Hugo. Hellooo,” I trilled. “Anybody hooome?”
A red-haired girl looked up from the couch, where she was
reading to Isabelle. She looked like a lost lamb—or fatted calf, more like—far away from home and ready for slaughter. Her face showed everything she was thinking about me so clearly I could see myself through her eyes as if I were looking into a mirror. The man who'd just burst in had an old-fashioned haircut and a shambolic frame, slightly padded with the aftereffects of many good meals and little exercise but saved from any degree of overweight by a prodigiously fast metabolism. He was handsome in a rakishly dissolute way, I add without false modesty, because what would be the point?
I was not what she'd expected Marie's husband to be, and was not in fact Marie's husband at all, but I hoped I didn't displease her.
“Your father's here,” she told Isabelle, who hadn't looked up from the book or even budged. “I'm Louisa,” she told me. “The au pair.”
“Louisa, what a gorgeous accent you have,” I said. “Rich and pure, the song of my youth. Not that I grew up in Brooklyn, I just wish I had.”
“Right, yeah,” she said, to her credit straight-faced, although she clearly knew I was only spoofing: a lot of men my age hit on every woman they meet to prove they still have it, even when they don't. All the girls her age know that these days, which hampers my game but keeps me on my toes.
“Daddy!” yelled Isabelle as Dennis came in the door, her lips parted in breathy baby excitement. She twisted her curvy little body down from the couch and ran over to him just as he bent and opened his arms. Fatherly, quizzical, broad-shouldered, high-browed Dennis swept her up, and she buried her head in his shoulder, then twisted free, slid down to the floor to wrap her arms around his legs and butt her head against his hipbone. He cradled the crown of her head in his hands and smiled down at her.
“I'm actually not Daddy, I'm Uncle Hugo,” I told Louisa as I came into the living room to sit about eight inches away from her on the couch, a little too close for her liking, but not so close that she could justifiably move away from me without being rude. “Lowest man on the family totem pole.”
“Um,” said Louisa, clearly at something of a loss as to how to take this sudden intimacy and proximity I was imposing on her. “Why lowest?”
I leaned back against the couch cushion, moving almost imperceptibly closer to her in the process. “You see how I was greeted by my younger niece. As the rest of the household reacts to my presence, you'll understand the general drift, if we agree that cries of gladness and affection are indications of a man's popularity in a female household, which I think we can.”
I smiled disarmingly at her, crinkling my eyes around the edges on purpose. I can be very handsome when I put my mind to it, likewise smooth and charming. It's in my genes; I did nothing to earn it and rarely exploit it for this reason. She held my gaze. Her expression was noncommittal, unblinking. “Whatever,” she said skeptically a beat later.
She was no beauty, she was a bit of a chubstein, she was all bottled up with nowhere to spritz, but she hadn't moved away from me; she wasn't fooled, intimidated, or put off And right away I sensed something, a resilient, mature, knowing quality in her that belied her extreme youth. She might be a teenager technically, but I knew that in her soul she was my equal and my contemporary, and I could treat her as such. I may cross the line with her eventually, and in fact, given my itch to push buttons and test limits, it's fairly certain I will, but whatever line there is lies far back in the thickets of adult discourse and not on any shallow plain of teenagehood. Like Carla, she's someone I can talk to. Why I tend to meet my soulmates in the form of teenage girls does not bear examining, except insofar as teenage
girls in many cultures are already considered fully grown. Those cultures may be on to something.
I said to her softly, “Louisa, this seems to be my lucky day.”
She quirked her lips, looked away from me, her cheeks suddenly pink.
“You're a jewel,” I said sincerely, “glowing in the dullness of my brother's house.”
She laughed out loud and shook her head. “Come off it!” she said. Awf “What are you talking about?” Tawking.
“An amazing discovery on an otherwise ordinary day,” I insisted. I was pushing it, of course, but why not? I could tell it wouldn't do any harm, in fact the contrary. She obviously craves ridiculous, playful, even profane flattery, however she may try to deflect or minimize it.
“Hugo,” came Marie's patently disapproving voice from the doorway, regretting my presence rather than greeting me.
I raised my eyebrows at Louisa as if to say, You see? But Louisa was looking anxiously at Marie, clearly dismayed to be caught in an attitude with the unpopular uncle that might be construed as collusion, even flirting. This was, after all, her first week on the job.
“Listen, Dennis,” Marie went on, turning to her husband, “I think Isabelle's coming down with something. Can you make sure she gets to bed early and drinks plenty of fluids? And if she gets really sick will you call me?”
“Of course,” said Dennis.
There were dark circles under Marie's eyes. Her hair was uncombed and flyaway, and she wore an old red sweater with pushed-up sleeves and baggy corduroy trousers. Marie is a beautiful woman, but right then she looked like a Modigliani gone to seed. The air between her and Dennis juddered with hurt feelings and molten rage.
Under cover of the family hubbub—girls gathering
back-packs and bidding their mother goodbye, etc.—I asked Louisa if she'd like to go for a drive to Lovers’ Lane later on tonight, after dark. She said no, of course. However, she laughed at my sleazy audacity, which is very promising.
I'll go back over there tonight and see what's what.
Forty minutes later, as we drove up the driveway to Waverley Evie caught sight of the pumpkin man. “Daddy!” her imperious little dragon-lady voice issued from the back seat. “What's that?”
“His name is Don Luigi,” I answered, even though she hadn't asked me. “He's a tenor, but don't cross him.”
Evie and Isabelle tumbled out of the car and raced to inspect Don Luigi. The pumpkin gangster has slitty eyes, big ears stuck on with toothpicks, and a wide, thick-lipped, toothy grin. His head rides atop a two-inch-diameter, six-foot-tall dowel. He wears some dead ancestor's porkpie hat that Dennis nailed to his head, one of our father's suits stuffed with towels, and a pair of dapper old shoes. His left sleeve is attached to the trousers pocket to make it look as if he's got his hand in there; his right hand, carved out of a small butternut squash, rests on a second, hip-level dowel at the end of the right sleeve, its fingers spread as if he were beseeching everyone who passed by to give him a handout, or singing an aria, or introducing a special guest on a talk show.
“He needs a girlfriend,” said Evie.
“Let's make one for him, then,” Dennis said, his heart obviously singing. They had a project! I've always been able to read my brother's mind. The oppressed always know their oppressors, and conversely are not known by them at all. Now they wouldn't have to go to the fair; making a moll for Don Luigi would be a gas. There were all sorts of old dresses in the closets she could wear, and they could buy a blond wig and put lipstick on her.
“Hey,” Evie said, “you made him, right, Daddy? Not Uncle Hugo.”
“Uncle Hugo donated the hat,” said Dennis dourly. This was a lie: he's always felt stodgily duty-bound to wage an ongoing, fruitless campaign to boost my acceptability with his daughters, although I myself have made no effort whatsoever on that score, and in fact have been hell-bent on being as offensive and weird as possible around them.
“The hat is icky,” said Evie.
Isabelle was touching Don Luigi's hand; Evie stood on his other side, gazing up at his face. He looked like a lowlife with a creepy penchant for little girls. If I had been Dennis I would have yanked them away from him, especially Isabelle, who is an undeniable little sexpot-to-be and therefore a possible target for pedophiles. The very thought of any possible threat in that direction made me itch to thrust an umbrella between Don Luigi's nonexistent ribs.
October 14—I awoke just now, shattered from a pain-spiked dream, to a windy, leaf-blown, coruscating autumn day, sunlight embellishing charcoal clouds and glinting off the cold steel-dark river and the imported French tiles that were once on the roof of Waverley, those priceless two-hundred-year-old pieces of slate that have gradually, over the decades, lost their purchase and are now sliding one by one to plummet into the high, weedy lawn. They catch the sun down there beneath my tower window. The Hudson Valley quivers in this Sabbath-morning light; the sky is a blinding bowl of leaves and birds.
In the end, Dennis and his daughters didn't make a girlfriend for Don Luigi yesterday.
In the end, I did pay a visit to the new au-pair girl.
It was just after nine last night when I pulled up Marie's steep driveway. Evie had let slip that Marie was going out with “a friend” that night. “What friend?” Dennis had wondered wistfully aloud. “Stephanie Fox?”
“I think so,” said Evie, oblivious to her father's yearning.
There was a light on in the kitchen of my brother's house. Aha! My quarry at her solitary supper. I idled there at the top of the driveway for a while, gunning the engine so Louisa would know I was there. Through the side window I watched her get up and leave the safe, well-lighted kitchen. She disappeared from view, then reappeared at the mudroom window, peering (she thought) surreptitiously through the curtains at the driveway, at my beat-up old pickup truck, sitting there with engine and headlights on. Then the driver, whoever he was, tapped the horn twice, beep beep, as if summoning her. But she stayed put: the house was nearly dark, and she must have thought it looked as if no one was home, and anyway, whoever it was could just wait there for a while and then drive away again, because no way was she going out there. She was a mouse cornered by a whisker-twitching alley tom sniffing at the entrance of her hidey-hole, although I have no whiskers and in any case was staying put in the cab of my truck, at least for now. But I sent out psychological antennae to tickle sneakily at her waist and throat, ascertaining by her fluttering pulse and the butterflies in her stomach her determination to wait me out.
She left her post by the door and made her way back through the dark house, sat down again at the table, and picked up her fork. The silhouetted, almost bare treetops shuddered overhead as a gust of wind moved through them. I turned off the engine and slid out of the truck, let the door fall quietly shut behind me. I let myself into the house with a key that has recently come into my possession by dint of rifling through Dennis's pockets and making myself a copy of his. Inside the house, I inhaled the smell
of family life, the commingled sediment of hours-ago coffee, basement mold, musty books, and shampoo steam, the dust embedded in rugs that no vacuuming or broom-beating can ever completely remove, floor wax and laundry detergent and the earth and leaves of houseplants, years of sleep trapped in bedding. The smell gave me an almost metaphysical dread. I slunk through the living room, taking in as I did so the old dark rug, swaybacked armchairs and green sofa, fringed lamps, book-filled shelves, plants, old stone fireplace, scattered toys. Dennis has created a house and childhood for his own children as ordinary and commonplace as ours was extraordinary and bizarre.
At the back of the house I came to the small, cluttered kitchen. On a green-and-white patchwork linoleum floor are an old six-burner cast-iron range, a refrigerator festooned with crayoned artwork, built-in cupboards along the wall by the deep old double sink. Pots of herbs grow on the windowsill. A glass-paned door leads out to a walled-in porch lined with shelves of cans, boxes, jars, a mop in a bucket leaning against the doorway. In the wall to my right was the doorway that led to the spare bedroom, where I was certain Louisa had set up camp and was now, in fact, hiding, waiting to see what I would do next. I could almost hear her heart beating, her stilled breaths as I shambled over to the breakfast nook where she'd just been sitting, looking down at her plate. I ran my finger along her plate and then licked it. Shepherd's pie.
“A little too much salt,” I said bossily “For my tastes anyway. But my palate is highly developed, unlike those of certain people much younger than I am.”
I heard a slight snort and turned to look at her darkened doorway. I pulled a cigarette pack from my jacket pocket, tapped one out, and lit it with the lighter I fished out of the other pocket. I stood smoking for a moment, inhaling, breathing the smoke out through my mouth toward her, as if I were
trying to smoke her out. I saw the gleam of her eyes through the crack in the door. My smoke no doubt insinuated itself into her lungs, as intimately as the way I'd tasted her dinner.
I went into her room, a small, narrow space crowded with a bureau, desk, and chair, a nunlike single bed covered with a quilt. She was shielded by the half-open door, barely hidden from my view. I ran my finger along the top of her bureau, testing for dust.
“Hey!” she yelled.
I turned. The kitchen light was in my eyes; she brandished a thick book as if it were a brick. Her voice was high with fear, but somehow I knew it wasn't real fear; it was the explosively playful fear of a child playing hide-and-go-seek who can hardly contain a shriek before she's found.
“Get the fuck out of here!” she said.
“Louisa!” I said. “What joy. I hardly dared hope to find you here.”
“You broke in,” she said. “Get out.”
“Broke in,” I repeated sorrowfully. “My dear.” I held up my ill-gotten key. “I'm family, Louisa, a member of the clan. I let myself in with my very own key, and I haven't touched a thing, I merely wanted to ascertain that all was well within. And seeing that the house's security is unbreached, I consider this a job well done.”