Blood Music (14 page)

“I guess Mary's finally down,” Zelly said. She was biting her lip. She wanted a cup of hot chocolate.

“I would cry too if my mother hauled me out of my house and took me to Grandma's and stuck me in some playpen and expected me to go to sleep,” said her mother. She put down the purple dress. “What happened, honey?”

Zelly breathed deeply. “I think—of course I don't know, but I think—that Pat may be involved in something pretty terrible.”

“What something, honey?” Her mother's voice was gentle and all-accepting: there had never been any fear or any sin or any monster that she could not understand. In spite of having so many brothers and sisters Zelly had never felt neglected or unloved; her mother's love was a high-powered beam that shown with equal intensity on whatever child it happened to fall. And Zelly was still the baby. “You haven't been at all like yourself lately,” her mother said, running her finger unconsciously over the smooth steel of her sewing scissors, and Zelly felt a child's tears welling up. She looked up from her cup. “Mama, I want a cup of hot chocolate,” she said suddenly. She didn't want to talk about it in the sun room, where there were a thousand fragments of happy memory.

Here in the womblike comfort of the house where she'd grown up, Pat's recent actions seemed less sinister, and more humiliating. The house stood next to the Stevens College campus; most of the other old Victorians had been converted into dorms long ago. Mrs. Thuringen's ten children had grown up in a warren of nineteen rooms; there was a servants' staircase that they'd all thought was secret, there was an old pool table in the attic, there were endless halls and doors and closets to hide in. Every room had three doors, or four, and every room led into every other room or into long, off-white halls. When it rained all the children played hide-and-seek for hours at a time.

Zelly knew every corner. Her favorite place to hide was behind the heavy curtains that hung over the bay windows in the sun room, a bright circular room that faced the backyard on the first floor. Behind the curtains were child-size window seats, where Zelly and her sisters had curled up with books:
Jane Eyre, Half Magic,
the Narnia series. It was a different land behind the curtains, it was every land they read about and it was very far away from the dining room next door or the sewing room or the pantry down the hall. Zelly had overlapping memories, from all the times she'd hidden there, layers of sun and snow and rain together, and the smell of old brocade, looking at motes floating in sun or not able to see at all for the gloom, cold or too hot and sweating, a hundred times, five hundred times, like a chrysalis safe in a cocoon.

She'd shown all her hiding places to Pat one Thanksgiving afternoon, she and two brothers and a sister, flushed and full of turkey and pulling Pat from one insignificant site to another—over here, remember? Under the great old wooden table, behind the northeast-corner door. Until Pat begged off for the football game.

What could she say to her mother? I think Pat is having an affair, or—what? At the table where she'd had five thousand breakfasts. He's got another woman's panties in the closet? To her mother. He tried to strangle me to get his rocks off? The father of her child. The red-brown curtains hung at the windows as they had hung for thirty years. “I'm just tired,” she said.

“That's nonsense,” Mrs. Thuringen said genially, “but you'll either tell me or you won't,” and Zelly felt again the unbearable comfort of this house, the unbridgeable distance she was from it now. She was not a child; she had lost the child's right to unexamined safety.

They went into the kitchen, Mrs. Thuringen carrying her sewing. They were silent as she made the chocolate, one cup for Zelly and one for herself. Zelly stared at the black-and-white linoleum floor until the perfect squares swam out of their boundaries and leaped up toward her eyes. She promised herself she wouldn't cry and took a sip of her chocolate and started to cry.

Mrs. Thuringen busied herself about the stove. If her back were turned maybe that would make it easier for her daughter to speak. “Well,” said Zelly, “at dinner a few weeks ago he said some really disgusting things.” That wasn't where she wanted to start.

“What did he say?”

“He said women are easy to kill.”

“I don't know what to—”

“Well—I did say that if I killed a man I'd use a gun.”

“For heaven's sake, Zelly, sometimes I don't understand you at all.” Mrs. Thuringen sat down and fiddled with her cup. “Actually,” she said ruminatively, “I'd use arsenic.”

“Mama! How Victorian!” Zelly laughed.

“Exactly. Nowadays nobody would be looking for it.” Mrs. Thuringen poured more hot chocolate into her daughter's cup. “Now,” she said, “tell me all about it.”

“There isn't really that much to tell. I think he's just tired out from working so much. You know he's been away a lot of the time—I know he's just starting his own business, but for God's sake, it's been eight months and he hardly brings home a penny.”

“He's got overhead, doesn't he—tools, gas, I don't know. But you can't expect him to be making any money in the first year. I've been waiting for you to ask for another loan for some time now.”

“I was planning on it.”

“And you shall have it. Now, how often does he get home late? Didn't you tell me once he's sometimes gone all night?”

“Not all night. He just gets in late. Maybe once a week. Two, three o'clock.”

“I thought you were saying a couple of weeks ago that it was later.”

“No, not really. He does late calls, and then I think he just drives around or goes to get a beer or something, to calm down. He's awfully worried about taking care of me and the baby.”

“Does he smell different when he gets home?”

“Oh, no, he doesn't really smell like liquor.”

“That's not what I mean. Does he smell like another woman.”

“Oh. No. No, he doesn't. It isn't that, we're fine.” Slim-hipped, younger. Why not just say it?

“I know this is hard to talk about, and it's hard to ask about, too, believe me. But is he treating you badly at all?”

His hands around her neck, the breath stopped. “No. Oh, no. He's just—distant, I guess. He's been kind of inside himself lately.”

“Then maybe he really is just worried about his business.” Zelly was looking at the floor. “But you don't really think so, do you?” her mother asked, reaching over and touching her daughter's hand. “Let me tell you something about your father. This was a long time ago. While he was waiting for the results of his bar exam he used to go play pool three nights a week. It drove me crazy. One night at about midnight I went storming in there expecting to see Arthur with a redhead on each elbow and what was he doing? Setting up a bank shot.”

Zelly and her mother laughed; Zelly's laugh had a glass edge. Mrs. Thuringen stopped laughing and looked into her daughter's face.

“Zelly,” she said gently, “do you think he's having an affair?”

A blonde, a brunette. His eyes above her like the button eyes on a toy. “No.”

“You said that too fast. Are you sure?”

Zelly became aware that she was tearing at the skin of her lip with her teeth. “Mama, who knows? You watch TV or the movies you get the idea every man—
every
man—has an affair. Or is ready to.”

“We're not talking about TV.”

“I am sure. I don't think he is. He's just—”

“Marriages go through phases, honey. I don't know what girls expect today.”

“I found a pair of panties in the closet,” Zelly said abruptly.

“Were they yours?”

“Mama!”

Mrs. Thuringen got up from her seat at the table and went over to the stove again. Zelly thought she didn't want her to see her face.

“Do you remember Alice McDowell? Well, she moved away when you were little. But Alice and I were close friends. Her husband was a lawyer too. He was away from home a lot. She had two little ones at the time—a boy and a girl. The boy was two; the little one was just eight months. Alice started noticing things about her husband—he smelled different some nights. As though he were wearing perfume, or a new aftershave. And he started dressing a little bit different. He kept coming home with new ties. And he stopped wanting her to have dinner waiting. Little things. Well. Her husband had an extensive stamp collection—”

“Like Daddy.”

“Yes. Like Daddy. And one day Alice was looking through his stamp album—I don't remember what she was doing, cleaning the drawer it was in or something—and she found love letters. It was unmistakable—they had a lilac scent, I remember that. And Alice had to decide what to do. She had two small children and a third one on the way.” Mrs. Thuringen was looking at the window but she wasn't seeing the window. “She could have confronted him. She could have left him, I guess. But she didn't do either. She knew in her heart that he loved her. She knew he would come back to her. So she waited.”

“I don't know if I could do that.”

“We were brought up differently in my generation. We thought of men differently. Sometimes I think our way is better—we hurt less because we didn't expect as much of them. So. Alice waited. And after a while her husband started coming home early more often, and he put away the new ties and then one day a year later she screwed up her courage and looked in his stamp album and the letters were gone.”

“But what if he hadn't stopped? What if it just went on?”

“Then she would have had to make a decision.” Zelly thought of her father's stamp album up in the master bedroom, still in the top drawer of his dresser where he'd always kept it. Her father had died when Zelly was seventeen. Her mother gave away his suits and his shoes and his razor but she kept the thick, untidy stamp book just as he had left it.

Her mother was smiling at her. “Have you talked to Pat about any of this?” she asked gently.

“Mama, you know Pat. We don't talk. Our marriage isn't based on what we say, it's based on what we don't say. You know?”

“I know. Your father and I were the same way. I don't understand the mania these days for telling all. A marriage needs its secret places.”

Zelly thought she was going to cry again but she laughed instead. “But sometimes those places get too secret, you know what I mean?”

“Well, of course, if it's gotten to the point that Pat may be having an affair—”

Zelly took a breath and looked away, into her cup. This was hard. “The other day—this was actually almost two weeks ago—Pat came home early, in the middle of the afternoon, and he never does that. And he—wanted to make love and the baby was crying and he—” But the truth would not come:
my husband tried to strangle me.
“There are people who think—who think that if you do certain things it heightens sexual pleasure. And Pat—Pat wanted to—he asked me—he wanted to put his hands around my neck.” There was a long silence and Zelly didn't look up from her cup and when she did, to find her mother looking at her, her mother's face made her want to cry again:
what if I had told her the truth?

“Zelly, honey, I'm sorry—I just never heard of such—that is truly disgusting. It really is beyond the beyond. You must have been scared out of your mind.”

“Oh, no. He didn't do anything. He just talked about it.” She realized she was biting her lip again and stopped.

“But even to talk! It's just so appalling—”

“It's something some people do, I've heard about it. They think it heightens sexual pleasure.”

“Whose?” Zelly couldn't help smiling. “I swear I do not understand anything anymore,” her mother said.

“But Mama, the thing is—” This was the hardest part (slim-hipped, and there would be an orange neon sign blinking outside the window). She wasn't sure what she was going to say until she said it. “I think that was the day after that woman got away from the Slasher.”

Mrs. Thuringen looked at her daughter. There was something—for an instant of an instant, compassion, comprehension, an inner calculation—and she nodded her head very slightly. Then she laughed sadly. “Oh, Zelly. Oh, darling. Tell me.”

“You'll think I'm crazy.”

“I have never thought any one of my children was crazy. Even when Denise joined the Army I didn't—”

“Oh, Mama!” she burst out, “you don't know what I've been thinking! It was much worse than an affair. You're going to think I'm crazy.

“Mama, I was beginning to think Pat was—was—mixed up in something terrible.”

“Darling, I've been meaning to talk to you about how much time you've been spending by yourself. Linda says you haven't called her first since the baby was born.”

“Mama, you know how much work a first baby is.”

“Indeed I do. But you haven't been talking to any of your brothers or sisters, and I never hear you mention any other friends.”

“I do, sometimes. Sometimes—”

“Honey, it doesn't matter. Just tell me everything—and slowly. You never did know how to tell a story.”

“I told you Pat's been gone an awful lot lately. But it's really been since—” she took a deep breath—“since just before the Slasher killings started, in January.” Her mother said nothing, watching, nonjudgmental, over her cup of chocolate. Suddenly Zelly didn't know what else to say; she couldn't find anything in her mind: no single coherent thought, no rock of fact. There was a woman waiting in a motel room, that was all. “And, well, serial killers drive around an awful lot. They cruise their territory. And they drive around aimlessly, living their fantasies and reliving their crimes.” No word or look betrayed any feeling on her mother's face. Zelly swallowed hard and continued. She was aware that she was talking too fast. “Serial killers are never able to support a family because their fantasy lives take up most of their energy. And that night at dinner I was talking about, Pat knew something he couldn't have—shouldn't have known. He knew that the killer strangled his victims before he knifed them. Or he said something like that. I figured it out later. He said he would kill a woman by strangling and then knifing her.” Mrs. Thuringen's eyes were wide. Zelly began to talk faster. “This was before that one woman got away and it was in all the papers. And he said some terrible things about women.”