Mortal Fear (40 page)

ERIN> I am the rain.

MAXWELL> Im so glad you came back.

MAXWELL> But its you who are the dry earth, Erin. _I_ am the rain.

ERIN> I think the opposite. But Im not ashamed of need. You may be right.

MAXWELL> Perhaps I am. Ashamed of need, I mean. I have been lonely for so long. Not alone, but lonely.

ERIN> The lot of most people, Im afraid.

MAXWELL> I am not like most people.

ERIN> No one ever thinks they are.

MAXWELL> Soon you will know that I am not.

ERIN> How?

MAXWELL> Today Im going to do something I have never done.

ERIN> What?

MAXWELL> Tell my story. And then you will know.

ERIN> Why do you want to tell me? Because I told you I was beautiful and you believed me?

MAXWELL> Beauty is important, but it is not enough. Look at the actors and actresses on EROS. Their pathetic fantasies are encyclopedias of insecurity. You said things yesterday that intrigued me. The way you spoke of sin and fate. To find beauty married with character and intelligence is very rare. I possess all these, so I know. Many seek to know me, but I reveal nothing. I live within myself. I believe you do the same. Thus I long to know you. I sense something deep in you. But I shall not ask you to reveal it without also revealing myself. I ask only one favor of you. If the things I tell you shock you too much, tell me. In this way shall we know we were meant to go no further.

ERIN> All right.

MAXWELL> And please forgive me if I take liberties with specifics such as places or names.

ERIN> Lie about the little things, but tell the truth about the big things?

MAXWELL> Just so. I must start in a time before you were born. For my destiny began then.

ERIN> Im ready.

MAXWELL> In the latter years of the last century, my paternal grandfather was born into a prominent family in Germany. Call him Rudolf. Rudolf was given a first-class education, and became a distinguished surgeon in Berlin. When he was twenty-five, his parents died in a fire. His elder brother Karl, also a surgeon, was his only surviving relation. Rudolf was a bull of a man, Prussian to his boots, but he married a small, frail woman. She was porcelain pale, with fine features and sea-blue eyes.

When the kaiser began rattling his saber, my grandfather decided to emigrate to America. Karl begged him to remain during what he called the Fatherlands hour of need, but Rudolf took his inheritance and settled his wife in

a large American city and quickly established himself as surgeon to an upper-class clientele. Their first child was a son. Well call him Richard.

Richard was something of a Byronic figure, even as an infant. Hed inherited his mothers slight bones, pale skin, and blue eyes, but his fathers dark hair, intellect, and relentless will. A year later a daughter was born. Catherine. At that time it was discovered that Richard suffered from hemophilia. His condition was controllable, so long as he was protected from traumatic injury, but his handicap completed his Byronic persona.

Early on, Richard showed signs of genius. He was given a peerless education by private tutors, while Catherine received instruction in music and ballet from the age of four. The family led an idyllic existence until 1929. When the stock market crashed, Rudolf lost his fortune overnight. He could still practice medicine, but suddenly it was a means of survival rather than a lucrative hobby. When several friends committed suicide, he fell into severe depression. His behavior became erratic, he practically imprisoned himself and his family in

ERIN> Whats the matter? Are you all right?

MAXWELL> Yes. Its proving harder than I thought to tell the story without giving away too much.

ERIN> What are you afraid of?

MAXWELL> When Im finished, you will understand. Im under a great deal of pressure just now. I am working on a great enterprise. Certain people would like to stop me. They dont understand my work.

ERIN> But you believe I will?

MAXWELL> You might. Im not sure.

ERIN> Ive got to tell you, Im under a lot of strain myself. Almost breakdown level, to be honest. Dont tell me anything you dont want to, but getting it out
might do you some good. I know what it means to keep a secret bottled up for too long.

MAXWELL> If I go on, you must remember something. Knowledge is a burden. It has a price. Remember the Garden of Eden.

ERIN> Dont worry. Id make a very good Eve. Id blame Adam or Satan for picking the apple while I made apple wine for God. This is the kind of conversation I subscribed to EROS for in the first place.

MAXWELL> You actually made me laugh. I shall continue then.

After losing his fortune, Rudolf practically imprisoned his family in their brownstone in the city. He practiced only enough medicine to keep food on the table. The staple of home life was continuing Richards studies, particularly in anatomy and physiology. My grandmother taught Catherine piano on their Bsendorfer. After five long years of depression, both small and capital D, Rudolf locked himself in his study and put a bullet through his brain.

Richard discovered the body. Though but twelve, he became the psychological head of the family. He wrote to Germany for help, and Uncle Karl obliged with money, stating that Richard should use it to return the family to Berlin. But Richard knew that if he did, his uncle would quickly take his fathers place. He convinced his mother they should try to hold on in America. Doling out Karls money like a man rationing water to lifeboat passengers, Richard continued his studies alone, using his fathers magnificent library. He became driven, his solitary goal to regain the status and fortune his father had lost.

Imagine the scene. A shadowy mansion, empty but for three people. A beautiful boy seated at an oil lamp reading
Grays Anatomy
and Aeschylus until his eyes blurred. A senile mother rapping her daughters fingers with a ruler when she made mistakes at her Beethoven, speaking only German, the boy keeping up his sisters English while the mother slept. Their survival was a miracle. The only food was that which Richard could buy cheaply or steal on the
streets, while a city and nation starved outside. Rudolf had taught his son how to manage his hemophilia, how to go to hospitals and clandestinely purchase whole blood, how to give himself transfusions. And the boy did it! He survived! It was within this dark and insular realm that Richard came into his sexual awakening.

Virtually cut off from outside contact, he turned to his younger sister for comfort. Bereaved by the death of her father and by the emotional withdrawal of her mother, Catherine accepted Richards advances, even welcomed them. All the studies tell us incest skyrockets in situations of overcrowding, isolation, or poverty, but I make no excuses. This relationship was a great gift for Richard. His immense powers of concentration were never diverted by petty romances, nor did he risk genetic union with an inferior partner. My grandmother must have known and understood, because the children lived as lovers under that enormous roof, sleeping in the same bed, exploring the limits of physical and spiritual experience.

Have I shocked you, Erin?

ERIN> Id be lying if I said no. But Im fascinated too. Ive never heard anything like this before.

MAXWELL> Its like reading about young gods, isnt it?

ERIN> In a way. But I know whats coming. Richard left Catherine, didnt he?

MAXWELL> Did he? When still quite young, Richard passed the examinations required to enter university. Desperately short of money, he wrote again to Uncle Karl. He blamed Jewish thieves and anti-German persecution for the familys failure to appear in Berlin. War was looming again, and Karl immediately forwarded funds sufficient for a sea passage. Of course Richard used the money to enter university. He became an academic star, his tuition paid by scholarship. And since his hemophilia exempted him from the draft, he was able to accept a scholarship to medical school three years later.

During this time, Catherine had begun meeting men outside the family, but no relationships developed. My grandmother discouraged her, saying that this or that suitor could never measure up to the family standard, which of course meant Richard. For his part, Richard had several outside relationships, with both women and men. But none supplanted Catherine in his heart.

ERIN> I feel sorry for Catherine. She never had a chance to find out what she really wanted.

MAXWELL> She was marked by destiny, Erin. Does that idea make you uncomfortable?

ERIN> Why dont you tell me her destiny first?

MAXWELL> While in medical school, Richard decided for Machiavellian reasons that the time had come to marry, and to marry well. His opportunity arrived in the form of the disgraced daughter of a wealthy professor. I always called her the Gorgon. Pregnant before her first marriage, this woman lost the baby immediately after it, then went through a nasty and public divorce. No longer suitable for men of her own class, she was convinced by her father to give a brilliant medical student a chance. Richard wasted no time. Realizing that his plan would be a shock to his sister, he broke the news gently, stressing his mercenary motives, but to no avail. Catherine was devastated. Over the next two weeks she pleaded madly with him and twice seduced him, telling him that no other woman could ever love or understand him as she did. When he refused to yield, she blurted out that no other woman could ever give him the child she could. Richard ignored her and pushed ahead with his plans.

The day before the wedding, Catherine left the city with all the money Richard had in the world. Worried near to collapse, he told everyone she had gone west to seek relief for fragile lungs. If he had known the truth, he would undoubtedly have followed her. Like a homing bird, Catherine had gone in search of their one blood relative, Uncle Karl. This was
during the war, remember. She traveled first to neutral Spain and befriended members of the German migr community there. With their reluctant assistance, she managed finally to reach Berlin. There, during an air raid, cowering with strangers in the basement of a hospital, she delivered the child she had conceived in America, the child of her brother. It was a son.

That child was me.

ERIN> I dont know what to say.

MAXWELL> Now you understand my special knowledge of incest. I have gone as far as I will for now. I believe I have earned the right to your story. Or at least part of it.

ERIN> Im embarrassed. I dont have a dramatic family saga like yours.

MAXWELL> All family histories are dramatic. Freud showed us that. In some families the struggle merely occurs beneath the surface, like battles under primeval seas.