The Forms of Water (7 page)

If she could picture Henry doing such a thing, did that make it possible? He might have gotten wind of her plans for Brendan and determined to disrupt them; there was nothing he wouldn't do. She paced the kitchen and meditated silently for a while. Then she wondered guiltily if her inability to keep from imagining Henry engaged in horrible acts might not have caused those acts. Some thread of confusion in her longed for her teeth to fall apart so she could see her dentist; her teeth complied. Maybe a similar thread wanted Henry to act badly so he could be punished for his errors. Maybe she had somehow made him do it?

She directed her attention toward Brendan's Spirit, hoping to locate him. When she found nothing but blankness she telephoned her daughter for advice.

A
T THE HENRIETTA MCGOVERN MUSEUM, WENDY SAT SORTING
dolls. Two huge cases of them stretched down the walls of the room, and at her feet lay another, uncataloged array. Farther down, and in all the rooms upstairs, more cases held lead soldiers, stuffed bears, cloth-bodied dolls with bisque hands and heads, rocking horses, dollhouses, board games, trains—a complete collection of nineteenth-century American toys, overwhelming in their profusion. The toys, as well as the books and china and furniture and costumes and pictures made from dead people's hair, had all come from the jammed rooms of Henrietta McGovern's mansion. She had lived to be ninety, Wendy knew; she had lived alone except for these objects. When she died, it had taken six people five years to sort what was worth keeping from what was not, and then another year to move the crates to the new museum building. Some of the collection had been shelved already, but the storerooms were still full of unopened boxes and each box was full of surprises. Wendy's job, which she'd stumbled into almost by accident, was to sort through and label the contents of the boxes the assistant curator brought to her.

As she pulled dolls from the boxes, she fantasized about her escape. Fall would come, she thought, if she could just survive this summer; and then she'd enter college and be on her own at last. She'd have a room, a roommate, interesting classes. She could live any life she chose. In her closet at home, folded into a pile of sweaters, she had a huge sheet of paper on which she'd written all the rules by which she meant to live. She had a plan, a program, ready to kick into action the minute her real life began. She set aside a blond baby doll and then sank so deeply into her dreams that she hardly paid attention at first when her mother called and told her the news.

“Grunkie?” she said, when her mother's words began to make sense. “Grunkie's gone? How can he be gone?”

Then she heard the manic hum behind her mother's words and realized what was going on. Her mother seldom allowed herself to worry these days, but when she did she pulled out all the stops and could build elaborate conspiracies from the slenderest of threads. The only way to manage her in one of these moods was to let her talk herself out.

He wasn't gone, her mother hypothesized—he and Henry had taken a long walk, and the administrator was hysterical. Or he was gone, and Henry—“You know how your uncle's been. He's been unbalanced. He hasn't been himself”—Henry had kidnapped him to keep him away from the neuro-nutritionist she'd engaged.

Wendy groaned. She'd taken a matched pair of rag dolls from her open box, a boy and a girl dressed in calico with bright button eyes and yellow yarn hair and red floss smiles. She rested these dolls in her lap, one on each thigh. Then she laid her forehead on the desk and placed the phone receiver next to her ear, with the mouthpiece pointed away from her. While her mother spun her theories, Wendy talked to the dolls.

“Blah
-blah-blah-blah,” she whispered to them.
“Blah-
blah.
Blah-
blah.”

The dolls stared back and her mother rambled on. In her lap, Wendy danced the dolls to the rhythm of her mother's words. “Foolish,” she whispered. That was one of the rules on the sheet of paper buried in her closet:
I will not act foolishly.

“What?” her mother said sharply, and Wendy lifted her head from the desk and moved the receiver toward her mouth.

“Nothing.” She brought the dolls up from her lap and laid them down on the desk. “I was just saying it's such a nice day, maybe Uncle Henry took Grunkie out for a picnic.” Every day will be like this, she thought. Once Mom gets Grunkie home.

“You know what's going on with him,” her mother said. “Grunkie hasn't had any appetite in weeks.”

Wendy had forgotten that. But there was surely some reasonable explanation for his absence, something different from her mother's wild theories. “Maybe he just wanted some sun.” She looked into the open box at her feet and saw lead soldiers tangled in wigs made of human hair, kidskin hands splayed across wooden legs. She wondered who had packed the boxes so carelessly.

“Maybe,” her mother said. “You're probably right. They'll show up in an hour or two and won't know what all the fuss was about.”

“Uncle Henry's okay. He's back on his feet, he's got a job.”

“He does,” her mother agreed. “And so do you—you've got things to do and here I'm bothering you with this.”

Wendy turned the calico dolls facedown on her desk. Her mother always turned to her when she had these lapses of pessimism; she spun her fantasies and let Wendy calm her down, and then she apologized until she'd convinced herself she hadn't thought her dark thoughts. But this was the first time she'd called Wendy at work. Wendy wondered if her mother would call her at college. She'd imagined herself cut off completely, except for occasional visits home. She hadn't considered how the phone lines might bind her and her mother like an umbilical cord.

Her mother grew quiet, seemingly reassured. “I have to go now,” Wendy said. “I have to get back to work.”

“Okay,” her mother said. “I'll see you for supper. I'm sure this will all work out. But it's just, you know—I'd feel better if the administrator hadn't said that thing about how Grunkie was down in the room where the keys to the vans are kept, and how he sent the janitor off to fix a whirlpool that wasn't broken. And then how when the janitor came back, Grunkie was gone and later he noticed that so was this set of keys—do you suppose Henry
forced
him somehow?”

“What?” Wendy said. “Did you tell me that before?”

“I don't know. Weren't you listening?”

“I was,” Wendy said. “I am.” She cut her mother off before she could tie up another half hour. “Don't worry. I'm sure everything's fine. I'm going to hang up now.”

Afterward she couldn't concentrate on her work. The kidnapping idea was crazy, she knew, but that bit about Grunkie and the keys to the van, the bit her mother had dropped so late, so casually—that sounded real, and for the first time she wondered if Grunkie might actually be gone. She felt a brief buzz of elation at the idea that Grunkie had slipped through her mother's hands, and in so doing guaranteed her own freedom as well. Then she began to wonder what might have happened to him, and how her mother might respond to the loss of him, and if her own desire not to have him at home had somehow caused his disappearance.
Think a thought and you make it true,
her mother had warned her time and again, and certainly she had wished fiercely enough for her great-uncle not to join them. But that was her mother's twisted thinking, not her own, and she pushed it aside.

Her mother had said that Grunkie was eager to come to them and be Healed, but she knew that couldn't be right: he thought the Church of the New Reason was beyond contempt. He couldn't be Healed in the way her mother had because he didn't accept the same things. And so perhaps he'd fled?

She thought she was considering these possibilities calmly, but when she looked at her hands she saw that each one still held a doll and that the dolls were dancing frantically on the desk. This family, she thought. When am I going to be free?

After she and Win had gone back to live with their mother, their father had told her to call him anytime. “I'm here to help,” he'd said. “If something comes up you can't handle alone.” She hadn't called him often; she had feared that if she asked for help he might take them back. But a handful of times, when she'd been overwhelmed, she'd called and he'd helped her deal with the real problems and dispel the imaginary ones. She called his office now and told him everything, expecting him to laugh and sympathize and dismiss this the way he'd dismissed her mother's other strange imaginings. But he listened to her in silence, and when he spoke his voice was very grave.

“They're gone? Both of them?”

“Well, that's what Mom said the man from St. Benedict's said. But you know Mom, she thinks everyone's conspiring against her. And Uncle Henry would never—”

“Damn,” her father said. “Damn, damn,
damn
—I bet I know just where they've gone. Don't worry, I'll take care of it. I've got to run.”

He hung up, and Wendy stared at the phone as if it had suddenly sprouted fangs and a forked tongue.

I
N THE FIELDS THAT STRETCHED ALONG THE HIGHWAY, CORN WAS
growing, and clover and grass, and purple loosestrife in the hollows. There were red-winged blackbirds perched on fence posts and skimming over the fields, and hawks—Henry saw five of them in as many miles—standing in the trees. Normally he saw nothing when he drove; he drove too fast, he always had, and while his hands steered, he plotted and daydreamed and schemed. He'd always done his best thinking on the road, his mind focused by the humming wheels and the blur of passing scenery. He'd never had Brendan sitting behind him, commenting on everything that passed.

“Look at that hawk!” Brendan said. “What a beauty! To your left, Henry, over there—see where the blackbirds are clustered in the cattails? Woodchuck, in that dip; woodpecker—no, sapsucker; look at that hill, at those trees on the top, those birches; those are juncoes; are those goats? Look, there's the exit for Phelps. We're so close to Coreopsis … Henry?”

“What?” Brendan, back there pointing and naming next to the sleeping dog, made Henry aware of the flowers and trees and hills and clouds. The sights made him aware of his hands, his hands made him aware of the van; his awareness made him wary of the trucks roaring past, which had never bothered him before. His old car, the one the bank had repossessed, had been low and slinky and fast. This van sat so high that the truck winds rattled it, and he overcompensated, veering from right to left. When Brendan pointed out another hawk, chasing a mole through the cropped stubble at the base of the trees, Henry lifted his foot from the gas while he looked. The car behind him honked and passed him angrily.

“Let's get off at the next exit,” Brendan said. “We're so close to Coreopsis, it's hardly out of our way at all. I want to see what you did.”

“You don't,” Henry said. “It's such a mess—I don't want you to see it.”

“I do,” Brendan said. His voice was firm and carried the force of an order. Henry, who had already bent his day toward his uncle's wishes in such an unexpected fashion, bowed and bent a little more.

He paid the toll and turned left on the narrow road that led to Coreopsis. They were forty miles from Rochester and hardly more than that from Syracuse; an easy hour's commute from either city. He had made the trip a hundred times and it puzzled him, still, that his potential customers had found it too long. He drove past Kriner's farm, past the fenced fields dotted with cows and the ring where Cory Kriner taught pigtailed girls how to ride. He drove past the van Normans' dairy farm, past the fields of turnips and corn, into the village of Coreopsis with its red-brick Presbyterian church and the white town hall and the beauty parlor and the string of failing stores, and then he drove out the other side and turned left onto a smaller road and left again onto one still smaller. He stopped at the huge red-and-white sign announcing the failure of his pride.

“Coreopsis Heights,” read the sign. “An Exclusive Community of Executive Homes.” It pained him like a knife in his ribs. Before him lay the curves of his elegant roads and the lots marked off by orange-flagged stakes. Green lawns surrounded the two finished models, with their thermal glass and Jacuzzis and white-finished kitchens, their tall stone fireplaces and airy stairs. Beyond them lay the shells of the others, dotted across the acres of corrugated mud.

Henry's eyes registered the roofs that hadn't been finished, the holes waiting for windows and doors, the empty foundations and piles of lumber and shingles, but these were not what he saw. His mind added all that was missing, and he saw the sewer pipes, the electric cables, the phone wires buried underground. The homes, each different and handsome, the streetlamps with their shapely globes, the driveways lined with green shrubs, the tubs of flowers paired on the steps and the children playing in backyards—the picture was so clear that he couldn't understand how it had failed to materialize.

Anyone might have done it, he thought, surveying the wreckage of his dream. The site had been so promising and the economics had seemed foolproof. The land cost nothing—he and Wiloma had inherited it from their grandparents. The taxes were low, and it had cost so little to tear down the house and the barns, remove the fences, uproot the trees. The survey had gone so smoothly, the design had been so distinctive, the planning board had been so obliging when he'd proposed the subdivision—who could blame him for signing that promissory note? He'd been so sure the project would fly that he'd signed his life away.

The builder had bled him dry and everything had cost too much: road bonds, utilities, building permits, taxes. Still, if he'd sold just a few of the houses, he could have stayed afloat. But the buyers had refused to come. He'd imagined executives from Kodak and Xerox, well-fed men in new cars who'd be willing to drive just a little bit farther to live in this unspoiled countryside and raise their children in this fresh air. He'd thought those men would see how the crumbling village and the ramshackle schools would be transformed. New schools would spring up from the flood of new property taxes; charming shops would open to satisfy the new owners' needs—surely those men could understand that services followed money, money fertilized growth. A little faith, a little vision, and Coreopsis would have been a new place.

But the men hadn't come. Instead, during those bleak Sundays when Henry had paced his model homes, local families had driven up in rusted cars and trucks held together with baling wire. Men whom Henry remembered as boys, the boys with whom he'd gone to school before he fled, had driven up with their wives and children and gawked at Henry's project as if it had been an amusement park.

“How
much do you want for these?” they'd asked.
“How
much?”

When he'd told them—a hundred and a half for the smallest, two twenty for the four-bedroom with two and a half baths; a bargain, a steal, compared with similar houses in the suburbs closer in—they'd laughed. The friendly ones had laughed; the others, the older ones who remembered Henry's grandparents and the farm that had been there for generations, had cursed him and called him names. Those same people had bought everything that was not nailed down at the auction after Da's death.

They had felt sorry for him and Wiloma then. “It's a terrible thing,” they'd murmured, fingering drapes and roasting pans and wooden-handled tools. “Losing both of them so quickly.” As if they'd forgotten that Da and Gran were not Henry and Wiloma's parents; as if they'd forgotten that Henry and Wiloma had already lost their parents and had come to Coreopsis against their will. Those neighbors had sat on the lawn in the cool, bright air and munched sandwiches and cookies while the auctioneer gabbled on the front porch. Vultures, Henry remembered thinking. The men hoarded tools and the women clutched at gravy boats and silverware, driven, as far as Henry could tell, half by lust for a good bargain and half by a sudden, sentimental pity for the two young people they suddenly saw as orphans.

Wiloma had just finished high school that year; Henry had recently married. The neighbors who had never asked how Henry and Wiloma were doing, trapped on a farm with their ancient grandparents; who had looked on placidly while their own children teased the newcomers—suddenly they'd been full of concern. Four different families had offered to buy the farm outright: “Get you out from under those taxes,” they'd said. “Give you a little capital to get started somewhere else.” Even then, Henry had had enough sense to hold on to the land. But those neighbors had proved useful in their own way; the proceeds from the auction had helped set him and Wiloma on their feet.

The place looked hellish now, bulldozed and littered, no longer farm but not yet neighborhood. The fault lay, he thought, with the narrow-minded people who'd failed to recognize his vision. With the bank, which had declined to extend his payments; with the lawyers and accountants who'd persecuted him so relentlessly; with the other developers who'd overbuilt the land nearer the city and caused the market to sag. The idea had been sound—in a few years, someone else would make a killing here. Someone, but not him. The bank owned the land now, as well as the buildings; Wiloma's share as well as his. Wiloma was furious with him.

All this passed through his mind before Brendan said a word. Henry hovered at the sign with his foot on the brake, unable to make himself drive down the roads the bank had stolen. He turned and saw Brendan peering through the windows, one hand flapping and the other on Bongo's neck.

“But where's the house?” Brendan said.

There were houses, or shadows of houses, all around them, but Henry knew what his uncle meant. “We tore it down,” he said. “The house, the barns—everything.”

“It's
gone?”

“Gone,” Henry said, and when he saw the expression on Brendan's face, he felt his loss—not the loss of his project, but the loss of his old home—for the first time. The cool green porch where he and Wiloma had sat, polite and frozen, when Da and Gran had first brought them here; the shadowy dining room, where they'd gagged on unfamiliar food and absorbed Da's bitterness; the barns where they'd done their chores. The pastures where the cows had grazed, the sheds where the tractors and balers loomed, the orchard and the grove of willows by the creek where he'd kissed Sally Kiernan and ground his pelvis against her thighs; the bedrooms in which he and Wiloma had lain, never talking about their dead parents, never sharing their dreams of escape; the parlor off the dining room, where Henry had first met Brendan. And the meadow crowning the small hill, where, long after he and Wiloma had grown and left and married, they'd gathered with their children and spouses a few times each summer, for picnics overlooking the abandoned house. Wendy and Win and Delia and Lise had run through the grass catching fireflies, and he and Kitty and Wiloma and Waldo—this was years ago, before things had gone sour for any of them, and before he'd even thought of Coreopsis Heights—had chattered aimlessly over grilling meat.

Gone, he thought. All of it. And as he continued to look at his uncle's face, he wondered if Coreopsis Heights had not been, all along, simply the only way he could find to destroy the memory of his childhood there. The glee he'd felt when the house had fallen and the bulldozers had taken their first bites from the land had felt justifiable at the time: the thrill of starting a new project, pride in his audacity. Now he wondered if what he'd felt had been only the joy of destruction. All the grief he'd felt for his parents, all his isolation and loneliness; the muddy, complicated mixture of gratitude and revulsion and affection and resentment he'd felt for his grandparents—all those feelings had been swept away by the falling trees and the vanishing fields and the neat, artificial curves of the roads. Perhaps, he thought, the auction hadn't cleansed the place for him as thoroughly as he'd once believed. Perhaps, during those summer picnics, his old life had haunted him more than he'd been willing or able to admit.

But it wasn't like Henry to brood this way, and when Brendan said, “Let me out. I want to get out,” Henry snapped himself back to the present. He stepped down from the driver's seat, slid open the side door, and lowered Brendan's wheelchair to the ground.

Bongo jumped out behind him and then stood sniffing at the mud, and Henry, who felt hungry, reached under the seat and pulled out the paper sack holding the sandwiches he'd bought at the 7-Eleven. Brendan rolled slowly down the smooth black road away from him. Henry had to trot to catch up with his uncle, and when he rested his hand on Brendan's chair and said, “Wait—where are you going? Why don't we find a place to sit and have some lunch?” Bongo, leaping and prancing, snatched the sack from Henry's hand.

“No!” Henry shouted, running after his fleeing dog. “Bongo, goddamnit, Bongo, you come back here!”

But Bongo bolted for the mound of soft dirt surrounding one of the foundations, and while Henry stood gasping, panting for breath, Bongo dug a deep hole and dropped the sack neatly into it. He pushed the dirt over the sack with his nose and then ran back toward Henry, head high, as if he were proud of his foresight.