By Nightfall (6 page)

Before Mizzy, though . . . There was, still is, the big old dormered house beginning to go terminally soggy under the accumulated heat and soak of eighty-plus Richmond summers. There is Cyrus (professor of linguistics, a small, quietly confident man with a head like Cicero’s) and Beverly (pediatrician, brisk and ironic, defiantly indifferent to housekeeping). And there were, are, three lovely daughters: Rosemary, Julianne, and Rebecca, five years apart. Rose was the beauty, solemn, not unfriendly but not available, either; the girl for whom some older boy with a car was always waiting. Julie was less stunning but more easily amused, a one-of-the-guys girl, loud and funny, a champion gymnast, unapologetically sexual. And then there was Rebecca, born famous thanks to her two older sisters; Rebecca, who was small and pale, gamine, the least beautiful but most intelligent; who had the same aloof, guitar-playing boyfriend since the eighth grade; whose girlhood is epitomized (for Peter) by the yearbook photo in which she, wearing the homecoming crown and holding homecoming roses, stands laughing (who knows why, maybe at the absurdity of where she finds herself) in a little sparkly dress, flanked by the two runners-up, the princesses, who smile mightily for the camera, and who are slightly stolid in their beauty, unremarkable, descendants of those sturdy “marriageable” girls in whom Jane Austen was not particularly interested.

And then. When Rebecca was about to graduate from high school, when Julie was in her second year at Barnard and Rose was already thinking of divorce, the Mistake arrived.

Beverly had had her tubes tied years before. She was forty-five; Cyrus was past fifty. Beverly said, “He must have been desperate to be born.” This statement was taken seriously. She was an expert on children, a
doctor
of children, and not prone to romances about them.

Peter had met Mizzy when Rebecca brought him for the first time to Richmond. He was nervous about meeting her family, embarrassed over the putative note of impropriety—wasn’t it a little creepy for a graduate student to date an undergraduate from his seminar, even if he
had
waited until after the semester’s end? Rebecca’s father was a professor, could Peter really and truly believe Rebecca when she assured him that her father didn’t disapprove?

“Just shut
up
,” she told him as the plane descended. “Stop worrying. Right now.”

She had that intoxicating, young-girl certainty; she had that Virginia lilt.
Jest stop warying. Raht now.
She might have been a nurse in a war.

He promised to try.

Then they were off the plane and there was Julie, vital and friendly in a cowgirl way, waiting for them outside the airport in the family’s old Volvo.

And then, there was the house.

The photo Rebecca had shown Peter had prepared him for its decrepit grandeur—its tangles of wisteria and deep, shadowy front porch—but not for the house in situ, not for the shabby wonders of the entire block, one lovely old matronly house after another, some better cared for than others but none done over or restored—it apparently wasn’t that kind of neighborhood; Richmond probably wasn’t that kind of city.

“My God,” Peter said, as they pulled in.

“What?” Julie asked.

“Let’s just say it’s a wonderful life.”

Julie lobbed a quick glance at Rebecca.
Oh, right, one of those very, very clever boys.

In fact, he hadn’t meant to sound cynical, or even particularly clever. Far from it. He was falling in love.

By the end of the weekend, he’d lost count of his infatuations. There was Cyrus’s study—a study!—with its profoundly comfortable swaybacked armchair, in which it seemed you could sit and read forever. There was Beverly’s applauded (if failed) attempt to impress Peter by baking a pie (which was known afterward as “that goddamned inedible pie”). There was the upstairs window through which the girls had escaped at night, the three lordly and lazy old cats, the shelves crowded with books and elderly board games and seashells from Florida and framed, rather haphazard-looking photographs, the faint smells of lavender and mildew and chimney smoke, the wicker porch swing on which someone had left a rain-bloated paperback copy of
Daniel Deronda
.

And there was Mizzy, about to turn four.

No one liked the word “precocious.” There was something doomy about it. But Mizzy, at four, had figured out how to read. He remembered every word he heard spoken in his presence and could, forever after, use the word in a sentence, often as not correctly.

He was a serious and skeptical boy, prone to occasional fits of hilarity, though it was impossible to predict what might or might not strike him as funny. He was pretty, pretty enough, with a high pale forehead and liquid eyes and a precise, delicate mouth—it seemed at the time that he might grow up to be a beautiful princeling or, equally plausibly, a Ludwig of Bavaria, with a great dome of vein-mottled forehead and eyes too full of quivering sensitivity.

And (thank God) he harbored childish affections and inclinations along with his spooky proclivities. He loved Pop Rocks and, with an unsettling devotion, the color blue. He was fascinated by Abraham Lincoln, who Mizzy understood to have been president but who he also insisted had possessed superhuman strength, and the ability to conjure full-grown trees out of barren ground.

That night, in bed (the Taylors, it seemed, just assumed), Peter said to Rebecca, “This is so incredibly lovely.”

“What?”

“All of it. Every single person and object.”

“It’s just my crazy family and my creaky old house.”

She believed that. She wasn’t being coy.

He said, “You have no idea . . .”

“What?”

“How
normal
most families are.”

“Do you think my family is
ab
normal?”

“No. ‘Normal’ isn’t the right word. Prosaic. Standard.”

“I don’t think anyone is
prosaic
. I mean, some people are more
eccentric
than others.”

Milwaukee, Rebecca. Order and sobriety and a devotion to cleanliness that scours out the soul. Decent people doing their best to live decent lives, there’s nothing really to hate them for, they do their jobs and maintain their property and love their children (most of the time); they take family vacations and visit relatives and decorate their houses for the holidays, collect some things and save up for other things; they’re good people (most of them, most of the time), but if you were me, if you were young Pete Harris, you felt the modesty of it eroding you, depopulating you, all those little satisfactions and no big, dangerous ones; no heroism, no genius, no terrible yearning for anything you can’t at least in theory actually have. If you were young lank-haired, pustule-plagued Pete Harris you felt like you were always about to expire from the safety of your life, its obdurate sensibleness, that Protestant love of the unexceptional; the eternal certainty of the faithful that flamboyance and the macabre are not just threatening but—worse—uninteresting.

Is it any wonder Matthew got out of there two days after he graduated from high school, and had sex with half the men in New York?

No, don’t do that, it’s poisonous, it’s wrong, Milwaukee did not kill your brother.

Rebecca said, “If you grew up here, you’d probably feel a little less romantic about it all.”

“Then I want to feel romantic about it all for as long as I can. Mizzy told me the story of Abraham Lincoln, before dinner.”

“He tells everybody the story of Abraham Lincoln.”

“Which he seems to have mixed up with Superman and Johnny Appleseed.”

“I know. He has to make a lot of it up as he goes along. We’re all gone, and Mom is a little, I don’t know. Over it. She loves him to death. But she could barely manage the maternal bit the first time around. When I was little, it was Rose and Julie who read me stories and helped me with my homework and stuff like that.”

“Julie doesn’t like me, does she?”

“What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know. A feeling, I guess.”

“She’s protective, is all. Which is funny. She’s the wild one.”

“She is, huh?”

“Oh, probably not so much anymore. But in high school . . .”

“She was wild.”

“Uh-huh.”

“How wild?”

“I don’t know. Regular wild. She had sex with different boys, that’s all.”

“Tell me a story or two.”

“Is this
turning
you
on
?”

“A little.”

“This is my sister we’re talking about.”

“Just tell me one story.”

“Men are such perverts.”

“And you’re not?”

“Okay, Charlie. One story.”

“Charlie?”

“I have no idea why I called you that.”

“One story, come on.”

She lay on her back with her head cradled in her hands, slim and tomboyish. They were in what the Taylors called the junk room, because it was the only room except Cyrus and Beverly’s that had a double bed. It had once been a guest room but, the Taylors having more use for junk than they did for guests, had long been devoted to storage, with the understanding that the occasional guest could always be installed there, with apologies. At the room’s far end, wan Virginia moonlight partly illuminated a shrouded sewing machine, three pairs of skis, a pile of cardboard cartons marked “Xmas,” and the Taylors’ collection of objects that would be repaired whenever someone had time: an improbably pink bureau missing its drawer pulls, a stack of ancient quilts, a chipped plaster St. Francis meant to stand on a lawn, a mounted marlin (where in the world would that have come from, and why would they want to keep it?), and, sitting on a high shelf, like an extinguished moon, a world globe that would light up just as soon as someone remembered to pick up the special bulb it required. There was more, considerably more, waiting like a troop of souls in purgatory, in the deeper dark beyond the window’s tentative beam.

Some—many—would have found this room disheartening, would in fact have been unnerved by the Taylors’ whole house and the Taylors’ entire lives. Peter was enchanted. Here he was among people too busy (with students, with patients, with books) to keep it all in perfect running order; people who’d rather have lawn parties and game nights than clean the tile grout with a toothbrush (although the Taylors’ grout could, undeniably, have used at least minor attention). Here was the living opposite of his own childhood, all those frozen nights, dinner finished by six thirty and at least another four hours before anyone could reasonably go to bed.

Here was Rebecca, lying next to him. Rebecca who inhabited this house as unthinkingly as a mermaid inhabits a sunken treasure ship.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s see . . . One night, when I was a sophomore . . .”

“And Julie was a senior.”

“Yeah. One night Mom and Dad were out, and I was off with Joe . . .”

“Your boyfriend.”

“Mm-hm. He and I had had a fight . . .”

“Did you and Joe have sex?”

She said, with mock indignity, “We were
in love
.”

“So you did.”

“
Yes.
Starting the summer after freshman year.”

“Did you discuss it with your girlfriends before you slept with your boyfriend?”

“Of course I did. Would you rather hear
that
story?”

“Mm, no. Back to Julie.”

“Okay. Julie thought she had the house to herself. I have no idea what Joe and I had fought about but it seemed huge at the time, I’d stormed off, I thought we were really and truly breaking up and that at sixteen I had already wasted the best years of my life on this moron. And I let myself in and right away, I heard this noise.”

“What kind of noise?”

“Like, this
thumping
. Coming from the garden room. Like somebody stomping his foot.”

“Really?”

“I wasn’t an idiot, I knew what sex sounded like, and if I’d thought I heard Julie having sex with some boy in the garden room, I’d have left her alone.”

“But somebody was stomping a foot in there.”

“I couldn’t tell
what
it was. I didn’t know Julie was even
home
. I think if I hadn’t just had this huge fight with Joe, I might have been scared. But I was so furious. I sort of thought, All right, if you’re an escaped lunatic and you’ve got an axe and you’re sitting in my house stomping your foot, you have no idea who you’re messing with.”

“You investigated.”

“I did.”

“And found?”

“Julie with Beau Baxter, who she’d been dating, and Beau’s best friend, Tom Reeves.”

“What were they doing?”

“They were having sex.”

“All three of them?”

“More like, the two boys with Julie.”

“Details.”

“Are you touching yourself?”

“Maybe.”

“This is so wrong.”

“That’s part of what’s sexy about it.”

“I feel like I’m betraying her.”

“This is making me love Julie, if that makes any difference.”

“If you put a move on my sister . . .”

“Oh, for God’s sake. Just tell me what you saw when you walked into the room.”

“This was a mistake.”

“Okay. Tell me what the thumping was.”

“Hm? Oh. Beau was kicking the floor.”

“Why?”

“He just was.”

“Come on.”

“Okay. Because he was . . . screwing her. From behind. And, I don’t know, I guess when he got excited he was a foot-thumper.”

“Where was the other guy?”

“Guess.”

“Julie was sucking his dick. Right?”

“I’m not saying another word.”

“What did you do?”

“I left.”

“Do you want to make up a version where you stayed?”

“Not for all the money in the world.”

“Were you upset?”

“Yes.”

“Because you saw your sister having group sex.”

“Not just that.”

“What, then?”

“It all seemed so . . . ugly. Joe had been an asshole to me and here was my sister just sort of servicing these two idiots . . .”

“You don’t think they were servicing her?”