O
UR HOUSE DATED FROM
1909
AND STOOD AT A SLANT; IT WAS
rife with charming defects. My son’s favorite pastime, as a child, had been to roll marbles from one end of the living room
to the other. The marbles rumbled quickly across our uneven floorboards, and when they smacked the front door, leaping almost
to the mail slot, Kyle beat his little hands together with delight. It was my job to confiscate his marbles when the game
disturbed his mother’s vocal exercises. He could make me feel criminal, regarding me tragically as I locked the marbles in
a drawer just out of his reach. Now Kyle was sixteen. Molly had taken to calling him “the troubled teen we’re harboring” with
a cagey laugh. Her disappearance was just one in a long series of outrages against him, it seemed. He kept to his basement
bedroom, tapping the keys of the computer that soaked him in a blue glow, while upstairs the keys of the grand piano turned
gray with dust.
Molly hung over our crooked house like an absentee landlord. Commuting from couch to refrigerator to bed, I passed the
grandfather clock an elderly admirer had given her, the mask she’d worn the first time she was in
Aida
, and other humbler manifestations—the notes she’d made herself and stuck to the fridge and the bulletin board:
buy paper towels
,
Sven to ophthalmologist
, and others whose meaning had become cryptic. It was heartbreaking to see her elegant cursive give way to my stiff carpenter’s
hand. I delayed buying paper towels and scheduling the eye appointment so that she would remain there, still pertinent to
our lives. When I finally broke down and bought paper towels, I saved her Post-it in one of the plastic evidence bags, even
as I asked myself what exactly it was evidence of. That she had once been here, doing very banal things like writing grocery
lists? I was equally adamant about the piano practice chart taped to the refrigerator. Kyle had not practiced in months, so
the chart that had once been filled with dutiful
X
s was now a blank grid. A few weeks after the last date had passed, I peeled it off the fridge—the tape was reluctant to give—and
handed it to my son who was drying his hands at the sink. He crumpled it up and threw it away.
“What?” he said, catching my stare. “It’s not like it’s some kind of
holy relic
.”
The cat-mauled armchair was about the only place I felt calm. The chair was the house’s main remnant of our early relationship,
our “spaghetti days” as Molly called them, back when she played roles such as Attendant #2 and Chorus Girl with Braids and
intoned the occasional commercial jingle for money. The old tan chair was large and sturdy enough to support us both if she
climbed over the side and onto my lap, as she often had in the spaghetti days. We bought the chair used and it survived our
squalid apartments. Tolerated for sentimental reasons,
it went into hiding when company came. I had always preferred it to the nicer seating Molly bought later, but now my love
for it was exclusive (my son avoided the living room). I stationed it across from my new friend, the TV, and it was here,
after drifting to sleep one evening, that I woke to encounter her again, near me, mere
feet
from me, singing Marthe in Gounod’s
Faust
on our local public television station. “Molly? Molly?” I cried out, as I had in the dream I’d just woken from, but she continued
singing, in French, of unrelated matters.
On the stairwell that night, I passed the three paintings of my wife. They were unsigned, having appeared in plain brown paper
on our front step a few years back. The anonymous painter worked in the eroticized, hyperprecise style of Balthus. Molly’s
hair was a lurid blaze running through the series. The first painting hung at the foot of the staircase and showed Molly onstage
in a crumbling amphitheater, wearing a toga, her body sturdier than the broken columns surrounding her. Hundreds of identical
men with gray faces, suits, and ties lurked in the audience. These same gray men were imported into the second painting on
the landing. It was a fanciful composition, showing Molly singing in a forest clearing, nude except for strategically curled
flowers and green tendrils. The gray men buzzed around her on tweedy wings. One intrepid, delicate man was on the verge of
flying into her open mouth—which was exaggerated in size and cushioned by her tongue and the vibrating nubs of her vocal cords.
The third painting troubled me the most, in part because it was the last I saw on the way to the bedroom each night. It was
a more restrained and realist interior painting of Molly in her dressing room. She sat before a lightbulb-edged mirror, applying
lipstick. Reflected in the mirror alongside her
was the familiar gray-faced and gray-suited man, but the composition of the painting made it unclear whether he was in fact
looming behind her—or if he was the image she saw when she looked in the mirror.
T
HE DAY AFTER
Kyle finished eleventh grade, we dragged the old Ping-Pong table in from the garage. We broke cobwebs, ragged it off, and
eased it through the front door. Breathing heavily, we lingered in the foyer.
“We can put it by the piano,” Kyle said. “Which I’m quitting.”
“You are not,” I replied, without conviction.
“I sucked,” he said. “You know I sucked.”
We slid the piano stool under the Steinway and moved it against the wall. I unclasped the stiff legs of the Ping-Pong table
and killed a couple of spiders who’d nested, fat with eggs, in the joints. We admired the salvaged table, its boyish incongruity
in the otherwise orderly room, then took up our paddles. Molly had always been in charge of Kyle’s serious pursuits, school
and piano, while the games were left to me. I related to him best as a competitor. My opponent across the table was hooded
and obscure, clad in the same black sweatshirt he’d worn for most of the past year. Faint psoriasis scars lined his cheeks
like the well-worn folds of a favorite letter, leaving a drift of skin flakes across his side of the table.
Our games were tense and silent, the only dialogue a laconic recital of scores and an occasional muttered “nice shot.” The
ball clapped through the house. Kyle had developed an un-hittable return slam since the last time we’d played. There was
a soft malevolence to it, but I didn’t mind losing. A missed ball rolling down the floorboards reminded me of those marbles
Kyle had rolled when he was younger. It must have reminded him too. He must have missed the sound of his mother’s voice scolding
us. When I looked up, the ash white and weightless ball in my palm, I found my opponent bent over the table, the hood drawn
over his face completely.
“Listen, kid,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I couldn’t find your mother.”
“Dad?”
He gave me a look I hadn’t seen since he was a child, when he’d tried to phrase an existential question that was nagging his
mind. It was a look of both doubt and trust—a pinched, imploring look.
“Yes?”
“Don’t call me that,” he said.
“Don’t call you what?”
He sighed. “I ordered pizza on your credit card every night for three weeks.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I took out the boxes.”
I edged past the net, clapped a paternal hand on his shoulder, then withdrew it.
T
HE BROCHURE TURNED
up in our mailbox a few days later. I hardly even noticed its arrival. I could have torn it up right then, brought it to
work and shredded it, unloaded it on our neighbors, but it didn’t occur to me to do any of those things. I didn’t stop Kyle
from seeing it, and it reemerged in the center of the kitchen table, where it stayed, because no one was cleaning.
Greasy thumbprints appeared in the margins, nacho-powdered evidence of Kyle’s close reading. It was nothing to me then, just
another unrequested mailing from a church.
The story, rendered in graphic panels, followed a bewildered teen through a post-Rapture landscape of crashed airplanes and
stalled traffic. The missing were everywhere, the shed skin of their rumpled clothes their only residue on a sidewalk or between
the painted lines of a crosswalk.
He thought none of that God stuff mattered anymore, that he could do what he wanted
. I was on the verge of throwing it away, but for some reason I couldn’t, weakened in my convictions.
The others were redeemed, but he’s still here
. On the pamphlet’s final page, the abandoned teen fell to his knees and cried. “Why didn’t I pay attention in church? Why
did I have premarital sex?” he implausibly exclaimed, while far above the ruined city, smoke gathered to form the features
of a mournful savior. A huge horned beast was rising out of a distant lake. The final caption read,
If only he had opened his heart
.
The return address was a church on the I-99 frontage road, about two miles from our house. I’d been oblivious as I passed
it every night on my way downtown from the office. At that hour, the exit for the church was as invisible to me as the exit
for my own home. On that dusky drive, all I saw was my wife’s face and the imagined face of her abductor, generic as a police
sketch, but as solid as the pavement beneath me and the wheel in my hands.
I
BROUGHT THE BROCHURE TO MY MOTHER THE NEXT TIME
I went to see her at the Traumhaus. I’d been going there three times a week since Molly vanished, the way others might work
out, and I always felt better afterward. There was something enormously consoling about the phrase “assisted living.”
The Traumhaus had been designed by the Austrian émigré architect Klaus Bernhard. This eccentric and irascible man was responsible
for several of Trude’s landmarks, including the notorious Ringstrasse Mall, but the Traumhaus, a late work, was his most widely
admired. It was on the outskirts of Trude. Leaving I-99 at the exit marked
ARCHITECT’S END
, a narrow paved road led you through several acres of pines and birches. At the edge of the property, the home was reflected
in a pond where wooden ducks floated, a lifelike gloss on their feathers. Tricks of light and water made the reflected Traumhaus
appear as a castle, replete with turrets and gargoyles. As you rounded the bend, then, the home’s modernist steel-and-glass
spareness came as a shock. The building seemed to float slightly above the landscape—a
tenuous place, caught between worlds. Bernhard, who hated Trude, modeled the Traumhaus on a sanatorium that had loomed over
his childhood village. But Europe was only in the reflection of the Midwestern pond with its fake ducks. Trude’s most famous
architect wished all his life to be elsewhere.
On some level I knew my mother wouldn’t have many answers for me. She had some insight into single parenthood, but her mind
was going, as they say, though this implies some sort of destination. She was better on the distant past than the recent past—“recent”
being about fifteen years ago. Still, she was the only confidante I had then. I parked in the spacious lot of the Traumhaus,
passed through the automatic doors, and approached the steel staircase. Mirrored on all sides, I climbed with my doppelgangers.
Bernhard gazed down on me through thick-rimmed glasses from his portrait on the landing, a trace of amusement on his lips.
My mother waited over a Scrabble board in the Wittgenstein Lounge. Several framed prints of the letter
S
in plain serif hung around the room. I’d questioned a longtime Traumhaus resident about these prints, and she told me, in
a whisper, that they were the work of the current occupant of the Schreber Suite. An abode of “unfathomable beauty,” she said,
although this was hearsay, because no one had ever been to the fourth floor; there was not even a button for it on the elevators.
The prints were excerpts from memoirs written by the current occupant in the mid-eighties. They were widely studied. As to
what the pages signified, there were competing theories. Some had suggested that the
S
stood for “sensation,” or “senility,” or “suffering.” Others posited that the
S
was simply the first initial of the current occupant’s name. He or she had not been seen
in any of the common areas of the Traumhaus since Bernhard himself had vacated the Schreber Suite in 1983. “Only one thing
is certain,” the woman told me. “This writer has found a language of maximum power, compression, and elegance, which we are
all trying to emulate in our own memoirs, although we inevitably fail.”
My mother wore her best purple blouse and dark lipstick, her silver hair pulled into a bun. She was in great physical shape
at seventy-two, and I sometimes wondered, given my penchant for self-abuse, whether she would outlive me. She hadn’t dressed
up for nothing. A dozen residents waited in Eames chairs as a few stragglers wheeled themselves in to watch. Evenings were
a slow time at the Traumhaus. Harris sat in his usual chair next to her, buttoned up in a three-piece linen suit and a black
beret. Wrinkled didn’t begin to describe Harris’s face. It was grooved, gouged, with two alarming white smears of eyebrow.
This eighty-year-old aspiring silent comedian, who hadn’t uttered a word in four years, was trying to seduce my mother.
“Hello, Sven,” my mother said. “How is Molly?”
“She’s great, Mom,” I replied, wincing. “Busy as always.”
I handed her the brochure. It was something I did, providing stimuli and letting her respond. It often surprised me, what
an object would inspire her to say. The thing—a peach, a pencil sharpener—could get her reminiscing about the distant past,
recalling characters and events from her childhood with a clarity that astonished me. Lately, though, I’d begun to suspect
that these memories were contaminated with fiction, an especially troubling thought when the stories concerned my own early
life. There was, for example, the story of my birth. Her recent retellings were peopled with new characters
and more densely plotted, somehow.
You just didn’t want to come out, you liked it so much in there
, she always began—and it was a good first line—but where did that poker-playing couple from Munich come in? And the friendly
Italian nurse named Carlotta?
She removed her reading glasses from the collar of her blouse. She scrutinized the burning city and the locust clouds, then
glanced at me. My mother had a kind of riflescope of concern, still functioning perfectly well. She fixed me in it.
“Those are Kyle’s fingerprints,” I said. “He was looking at it. But I can’t say how interested he was. Maybe I’m overreacting.”
She flipped a page. “Kyle … I know the name …” She gave a look I call the Bluff, a false dawning recognition. With my mother
it was movement in the brow, indrawn breath, prayerful nodding. Everyone at the Traumhaus did some version of it.
“Your grandson.”
“Of course, forgive me.” She handed back the brochure. I gave her the bag of Scrabble tiles, which she dug into with her eyes
closed. “Don’t cheat, like you used to,” she said.
I wasn’t sure what she was referring to. As usual, I was overmatched. Her vocabulary hadn’t suffered, and she jumped out to
an early fifty point lead. Leaning on his cane, Harris nodded at my mother’s formulations and shook his head at each of mine.
It was a partisan crowd. My mother played her elegant, old-fashioned words to enthusiastic applause. Age having its way with
youth, or relative youth at least—perhaps that’s what they came to see.
After staring at my row of vowels, I played
oil
, which she quickly built into
tawny
and
toil
.
“The man who baptized you had sticky fingers.”
I nodded. I managed
ion
.
“Yes, I remember it now,” she said. “When he shook my hand, his fingers were sticky. He’d just come up from the basement.
You know Lutherans, can’t keep their hands off anything glazed. But you’d think he would wash up, don’t you, before a baptism?
His name was Grundquist, I believe. Some sort of sub-pastor.”
Grundquist was something I could go on, a fact I could take out into the verifiable world.
“Did I ever tell you about the strange thing that happened during your baptism?” she asked. I blushed, but my mother basked
in the attention. Her memoirs were highly regarded in this place; a few of her fellow residents scooted their chairs closer
to listen.
I shook my head. “It’s your turn,” I said.
“This street person came into the church. Right as this Grundquist was reading the rite. He was tall, and he had wild hair,
and a long beard with chunks of things in it. Like he’d just been eating stew with his face too close to the bowl.” A respectful
hush filled the lounge. An attendant paused in the hall, clipboard under her arm. Harris was jotting down my mother’s words
on a legal pad. I saw the man coming through the church doors. Saw the man in my mother’s tale trying to dunk his head in
the baptismal font. “It took two acolytes to restrain him,” she went on. “Your father enjoyed it very much.”
As if to underline her story, she played
brusque
across a double word score. Someone said, “Good heavens.” A crutch dropped, others sighed with delight, and this seemed to
be a response to the game and the story at once. I found myself
parsing my mother’s stories. I kept some details and discarded others. I let the absurd street person with the dirty beard
wander back into the crannies of my mother’s mind, but kept the sub-pastor with the sticky fingers.
Laying
pleb
, I tried another approach. “Let’s say I wanted to get involved with a group of people with questionable beliefs.”
“All right,” she said warily.
“Possibly dangerous beliefs. What would you do?”
She built
despite
off
gourds
and paused until I was about to repeat the question. “Well, Sven,” she said. “That would depend.”
“On what?”
“It would depend,” she said, “on whether I thought they could hurt you.”
Harris nodded supportively, as if she’d stated his exact theory of parenthood. The gentle Harris struck me as a man who’d
once been violent, a guy who had dwindled into his own opposite. Maybe it was the suits, which looked to have been tailored
for a larger, more threatening man.
“What if it wasn’t a question of getting hurt so much?”
I was losing her. She wiped her spectacles as if one final scrub of the glass would make the world clear.
“What if it was a matter of being led astray. Into a kind of delusion. A dubious alternate reality.”
“I’m sorry. Dubious? What was the question now?”
I reached for her hand across the table. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter.”
“I wish I could keep better track of these things,” she said. Her eyes flickered across her rack of letters. “You didn’t cheat
while I was wiping my glasses, right?”
“No, Mom,” I said. “I didn’t cheat.”
Mom looked to Harris. In order to maintain his vow of silence, Harris kept a small green chalkboard dangling around his neck
at all times. He removed a slab of chalk from his coat pocket and, after bobbling it a little for the amusement of the crowd,
scratched out his verdict and turned it to my mother. “He didn’t cheat,” it read, “and I would never lie to you.”
The bag was depleted, but I had drawn good tiles. The letters did not spell out disaster, and there were still some things
I could control. Luckily, I had an
S
. I found
pains
, then
panics
, then searched the board for an opening to deliver my unlikely coup de grace:
escaping
.