The Open Curtain

R
udd found the letters early one Saturday morning among his dead father’s dead things, kept in five collapsing boxes his mother had been meaning to throw out. He had gone down to the basement for some other reason, but by the time he had trailed his hand down the pocked concrete wall and reached the bottom of the stairs he had forgotten what it was. As he held himself still, gaze flicking about, he noticed, beside the water heater, the boxes. He opened one.

It was filled with clothing packed in thin dry-cleaner’s plastic—things he never remembered his father wearing. He removed three carefully pressed and flattened white shirts, a cardigan, a tie folded once and smoothed along the box’s diagonal, two pairs of creased slacks, a thick woolen sweater, and a tightly rolled black belt.

At the bottom was a 1954 Western States road map, attached to the bottom of the box with yellowed, brittle tape. A route was traced on it in red pencil, from Utah south into Mexico. Removing the tape, he lifted it out.

He had been looking at the map for some time before he noticed the envelopes the map had been hiding. There were three of them: two addressed to his father from an A. Korth, their tops slit open, the other addressed by his father to Miss Anne Korth—posted but marked
Return to Sender,
unopened.

He blew one of the slit envelopes open, removed the single-page letter. It was brittle along the creases; he opened it slowly, smoothing each crease flat with his thumb.

The handwriting was looped and difficult to make out, leaning off-plumb and slightly forward, the ink faded into near illegibility.

Dear Gyle,
it began—his father’s name—

He took up Anne Korth’s second letter, opened the envelope, but found it empty save for a single photograph of a child, four or five years old, awkwardly seated on a photo studio’s blue shag before a mottled screen. He held the image up to the light, tried to see his own face in the photo, but could not.

Setting the photograph aside, he opened the returned letter. Inside was a single three-by-five card, a short typewritten message on it:

His mother had begun to pile the counter’s dishes into the sink. He looked at her back, watched the knitting-needle twitch of her shoulder blades as she turned off the water, began to scrub.

“Mother,” he asked, “who was Anne Korth?”

“When did you come in?” she asked, turning about, her hands dripping and held away from her body. She dried them on a corner of her apron. “Anne who?” she asked.

“Korth.”

“I don’t know any Anne Korth, do I?”

He shrugged.

“What do you have?” she asked. “What are you holding?”

“These?” he said. “Nothing. Old letters.”

“Of your father’s?”

“Yes.”

She held out one chapped hand. “Come on,” she said when he hesitated. “They’re not yours to begin with, are they?”

“I don’t think you should look at them,” he said.

She kept her hand out until he surrendered them. He watched her take the photograph out from one envelope, look at it, put it back. She unfolded the letter from Anne Korth, puzzled through it without comment or response save for a tightening of the lips.

“Well,” she said, after reading the three-by-five card, her voice still strong. “There it is, just as your father said. She was mistaken in the man.”

“But—”

“No buts,” she said. “It’s simple truth.” Putting the letters together, she set them beside the sink. “We know the truth. There’s no reason to speak of this again.”

F
or the moment, he just forgot it. That was the way he had been raised. He had always stood by his mother, obeyed her. He was her only child, she reminded him often, and the man of the house now that his father was gone. She counted on him. His father had become for him no more than a pair of dark shoes, a featureless face, an absence no longer palpable. It did not matter what he had done or been. It made no difference to Rudd’s life.

He grew older, his glasses thickening and beginning to sit too heavily on his nose. He asked his mother for contacts and she said
no, darling,
and pressed her hand to her forehead in a way that made it clear he shouldn’t have asked. Everybody has to make sacrifices, she told him.

He was in junior high and came home two hours before she did. While she was gone, he wasn’t allowed to have friends in the house, not that he had any friends to speak of. He would stay in his room and assemble models and sometimes, out of curiosity, sniff the glue. It made his head ache. Once, some got on his wrist and it burned, his skin quickly blistering as he tried to rub it off first with water then with turpentine. After that, his mother reclaimed the house key. He could either go to the library after school or wait on the porch, but if she found him hoodlumming around, by God he would never hear the end of it.

On Sundays they went to church, his mother sitting beside him through the sacrament service. When it was over, she walked out and down the hall with him, pretending to be friendly and loving though he knew she was simply making sure he went to Sunday school and not out into the fields behind the church, as some of the other boys did, to smoke. In the classroom, he sat on one of the folding gray-brown chairs, tipping on two legs and looking at the words
Edgemont 3rd Ward
stenciled in a hazy orange on
the back of the chair before him, waiting for his classmates to arrive and for the teacher to huff in ten minutes late, loaded with pictures and paraphernalia she had amassed from the church library that seemed to have no connection to the lesson. Her favorite lesson taught that if you listened to the Lord and followed the Commandments you would be blessed. It was bolstered by tales of Church leaders and members who had done good and were blessed. There was something about a boy with a crippled foot and a baseball (she spoke rapturously of the crippled foot), something about obeying your mother and later becoming a prophet. He had learned by this time not to raise his hand and ask, “If people who are good are blessed, why was The Prophet Joseph Smith shot to death?” He knew the answer, which was, “He wasn’t shot to death, he was martyred.” When Robert Talbot, who had loaned him two dollars once at school, was killed when his bike was hit by a car, he posed a similar question, and she answered with, “That poor child will have his reward in Heaven.” Loopholes like that made the whole thing fall apart for him. He wasn’t sure what to do about the two dollars, who should get them. If Robert Talbot were still alive, Rudd would probably never have bothered to pay him back. He spent weeks in his bed alternately feeling guilty and thinking of ways to do good with the two dollars, ensuring his own place in Heaven. Then he forgot about them, went on to borrow other people’s money.

He would spend most of Sunday school tipping his chair back and trying to balance on two legs, clattering down and up, up and down. The other children were nervous and excited, waiting to see if the teacher would tolerate it stoically until the end of class or if she would jerk him out of the chair and pull him by the ear to his mother’s Sunday school class. There, his mother would pinch the skin on the back of his arm and pull him out to the car. “Your father is rolling in his grave,” she would tell him. That was the only time she ever acknowledged his father’s death, and she never did acknowledge it had been suicide. Rudd heard about that from the other children, who had heard their parents whispering about it. A knife was involved, he knew, but little more. “You’re my cross to bear,” his mother would tell him, “A heavy cross.”
Likewise,
he wanted to answer her, but never did.