The Uninnocent (7 page)

But for all the heroic qualities attributed him by his devoted mother, Jenny and Cutts's younger brother, Desmond, was as dim-witted as a milking stool. Be that as it may, Cutts did allow him to participate in the various escapades of the neighborhood gang, even though he was younger by several years than most of its members. Lanky, proportioned like the reflection in a funhouse mirror, Desmond stood a head taller than any of the other boys. Gamely, he trailed behind the pack, loping, slouched, knuckles swinging at his sides like a tight row of bantam eggs attached to the fronts of his fists. At his older brother's proprietary bidding, Desmond pursued whatever follies the gang did, but less for the adventure in and of itself than for Cutts's treasured attention. His wildness belied his weakness. He played a willing fool whenever called upon to do so.

If Cutts had his first taste of beer at twelve, or his first cigarette, then Desmond accordingly had his by nine. The tolls of Desmond's adolescence were an arithmetic function based on Cutts's own imperfections, needs, frenzies, to the exclusion of anything else. Desmond himself was not compulsive, but was caught as if in a vacuum that was created in the wake of his brother's will. It was always just ahead of him, drawing him on.

Cutts knew it was for his approbation that Desmond lived. He offered it only when he found it convenient or useful, when it fit into some specific scheme. If it suited Cutts, whenever any or all of the gang were in trouble, Desmond would be delivered up as the collective scapegoat. Out from under Cutts's fickle wing he would come, tacit and willing to atone for some petty theft, a water tower east of the city painted with obscenities, a smashed window, a broken arm or black eye.

In time Desmond had a worse reputation than Cutts, or any of the others. That is why when he broke the code of silence about what had happened to Jenny that one August evening, sunk now with a quarter century of other Augusts into anonymity, no one, not even his mother, believed him.

After that August, Desmond went moody, glum. He exiled himself from the gang of boys. He disappeared for days at a time. He wouldn't speak when spoken to. He died in November, just a few weeks before his eighteenth birthday. No one would ever be quite sure what had occurred. There was no looped belt nailed to a basement crossbeam, nothing as telling as that, no bridge off which he'd hurled himself into a partly frozen river. Nor were there any guns in the house. No, he simply tumbled down the stairs to the cellar floor, opened his head like an overripe melon on a flange where the railing had been detached.

Cutts found him first. Jenny had been putting out bread crumbs on the crunchy snow for late robins and meadowlarks that needed feeding for their migration south. Mr. Beechel Gray, the butcher, took the call from Cutts and passed the phone across the smooth white stone counter to Desmond's mother, who fainted on the sawdust-strewn floor when she was given the news.

The water, loosely cradled in my fingers, cooled my face. I soaked a hand towel under its thin, lazy stream and, hunching forward over the shallow sink while holding my hair up off my shoulder, ran the cold, wet cloth across the nape of my neck. It trickled down my back when I stood up straight. I wrung the towel, folded it, replaced it on the rack to dry. As I did, I caught myself thinking that if I ever had to go to another funeral service it might best be my own, since the three I'd attended—my father's when I was young, Desmond's in my early twenties, and now Mama's, leaving me behind in my new role of middle-aged bachelor lady—left me feeling as depleted and barren as a dead cornstalk in a winter field.

What happened next startled me out of my doldrums. I was surprised to see, reflected in the mirror, Georgia leaning, arms crossed, lightly against the jamb of the bathroom doorway. She was looking at me with an expression indescribably strange. Quizzical. Her puzzled oval face, pretty and punctuated by sharp features, whiter than the veiny marble of the sink, was set off by her black dress and dark hair. She seemed a different person than the Georgia I'd always known, little that I actually knew her.

She smiled, lips tight. “That better?”

I turned off the water and nodded at her mirrored image.

“See? I knew a little cold water would help.”

She remained in the doorway as I straightened my hair, not really knowing what better to do with myself and uncomfortable given that odd look on her face.

“Didn't mean to startle you.”

“Oh, not at all,” I brightly lied, turning to face her with a tight-lipped smile of my own. “Just thought you'd gone downstairs is all. I guess Cutts is still up there in the attic.”

“God knows what's so important he couldn't even change out of his good suit before he had to start rummaging around in all that dust and cobwebs.”

What's he after?
I might have begun, but Georgia made a sign for me to follow her, turned suddenly, and walked down the hallway in the opposite direction of the attic ladder, downstairs to the kitchen in the back of the house. When she turned toward me again, the color in her cheeks and neck had changed. In the haggard afternoon light, whose summer skies were gathering thunderheads in stacks of white and violet and green and gray out all the windows, her face had gone ashen.

“Can we talk for a minute?” she asked, quietly.

“Is it about the house? Because if it is, I won't know what to say, Georgia.” Having literally forgotten her son's existence, Mama had willed me her house and possessions.

“No, no. Something else completely.”

I stood there awkward by the stove, waiting.

“Look. I know it's a bad time, terrible time, to talk about things. But since you—we never see you, and Cutts has got to be back to work day after tomorrow, I just feel I have to talk with you now.”

Georgia sat at the kitchen table on one of the hardwood chairs, and I joined her. The table was still cluttered with bottles of old medicine, handwritten schedules for pill-giving and the administration of shots, as well as a week of dishes I had not been able to bring myself to wash. My sister-in-law looked troubled. She fidgeted with a pack of cigarettes, drew one out, lighted it, and deeply inhaled, as if it were the first breath of air she had ever taken.

“About half a year ago, I don't know how to say this, about five or six months ago, I got a letter—well, not a letter exactly. It was from your mother.”

“Oh?”

How Georgia thought it was possible for Mama to have mailed her a letter, I couldn't guess. Mama, invalided these past few years, and especially so during the grim final months of her life, and who only came out into the sunlight when Reverend Robotham and I carried her down into the back yard and laid her on a clean blanket next to the bed of snapdragons and black-eyed Susans she loved. I listened without questioning.

“Her name was right there on the envelope. Since she addressed it to me, not Cutts, I opened it. But, Jenny, it was the darnedest thing. What was inside wasn't a letter from your mother. It was a kind of document, like a pact, I guess you could say, and all written out longhand on this oatmeal paper?”

The word
paper
traced an upward arc, transformed itself into a question. Georgia hoped that I might by this detail—
oatmeal paper
—be prompted into recognition of something she obviously would rather not have to put into words herself.

I said, “I see.”

“The handwriting was a child's.”

After a long stretch of silence upstairs, Cutts continued with his noisemaking.

I asked Georgia, “Would you care for some sherry? I think I could do with a little myself.” I opened the cabinet door, got out two of Mama's crystal vine-stemmed glasses and the Taylor amontillado that was her favorite, so pale, so tobacco-yellow and strong, and brought them to the table, where, after clearing a space, I set them down. I could hear Cutts banging around at the westernmost corner of the attic, then he went silent again. I knew exactly which barrel-topped trunk he was picking through now. It would take him half an hour to dissect its contents even if, as I suspected, he didn't bother to replace what he'd removed.

“It had to be years old, I knew,” Georgia went on, taking a sip of the amontillado. “The way it almost came into pieces along where it was creased. Anyway, it was a pact—”

The stillness from Cutts's periphery unnerved me more than I thought it might, but I reassured myself, steeled myself, thinking,
Go on, let it happen, whatever happens, let him come down now, let him do us all the
—

“—between Cutts and your brother and—”

“Desmond?”

“Yes, and some other names, too. They'd made this treaty, I guess you could call it. It was, well—but, Jenny, I can't. What I want to ask is, is it true?”

She had put the question to the reflective, circular surface of sherry, stationary on the table before her.

I thought,
What a lovely woman. Worry can sometimes be so becoming in a person
.

That attic where everything was lost. And Father at the time downstairs, sedated. Dr. Farley had gone home, having put his syringe, his morphine, his instruments, back into that black scratched and bubbled leather bag of his. Mama and me the doctor had left to stand by the bed to prop and reprop pillows, smooth the coverlet, gaze into his eyes runny and vacant as an old horse's. Dad not knowing where he was, pushing up with his hands outstretched as if something on the ceiling threatened him, pushing and pushing it away. The deathly farrago of sounds he made so upset his poor wife, my mother, that she had to leave the room not to burst into tears in front of him. The light in the room, color of a peach. Eisenhower making a speech in his simple way on the scratchy radio. Kitchen smells, roast beef and gravy. Early evening. August. Back when.

“Desmond?” Mama hollered. “Dessie? Cutts?” Then she returned to the room, sat down on the bed, its springs complaining. “Go, would you, Jenny, and find those brothers of yours.”

I ran outside into the twilight and down the street toward the places where I knew they might be hanging out. Not in the playground park. The druggist's was empty, its row of stools with mottled vinyl aligned kind of sad somehow before the long counter, Coke taps, pie racks, ketchup bottles, the stainless-steel malted cup—

Not here
… I
know where they are
.

—and the movie posters I loved to stare at while I sat up to the counter drinking my cherry soda, especially the one for
Lifeboat
, Tallulah Bankhead and all those desperate men and women huddled together, waves licking the prow of their doomed boat, and as I stared into an image I myself would easily slip inside, so that it was I who held the red pony's reins in
The Red Pony
. As I ran like the wind back along the uneven concrete slabs of sidewalk, the unforgettable vision of that pony's eyes planted in my father's head by his sickness—pitiful, liquid, pleading—returned to me. Nothing in the world I could do to help him, any more than I could have saved those people in the lifeboat. But I could do what my mother asked, because I knew where Cutts, Des, and the gang were hiding.

Cutts didn't like to see him, see his father now that he was ill. He didn't like to be around anyone who was weak or sick. Besides, my dad and his oldest son never got along. Desmond would want whatever his brother wanted, no doubt, but he too ventured into the master bedroom only when Mama made him, to kiss his cancered father good night, or to say good-bye before taking the bus over to Grand Island to visit Uncle Tune.

When I got back home, I silently entered by the back porch. Mama was still in Father's room. She was reading to him aloud,

“… shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots, and the spirit …”

in a singsong.

Once safely past the half-shut door, up the stairs and down the hallway, I groped for the cord in the growing darkness and could already hear them stirring upstairs in the attic. It was one of their sacred places. I knew I was breaking an unspoken rule, but my mother's request and my own curiosity overrode that concern. A crack of yellow light, excited by shadows, thrown from a candle flame, flickered above me when I pulled down on the cord, releasing the ceiling ladder. The silence that accompanied this broken pattern of light seemed strange, and I had the sensation of being like Alice tipped upside down and dropped heavenward into a dreamy, maybe unfriendly, Wonderland.

I climbed the ladder, eyes fixed on each rung, where foot over foot I placed my weight. I had never been up to the attic before. Why was it they were all so quiet? I wanted to look up but was afraid I'd lose my footing. I was too terrified to scream when hands and arms came down suddenly around my body and I was lifted away free into the near-pitch air, too shocked as I gave in, my legs kicking and wheeling uselessly, these strong, strange fingers that hoisted me by my hair and my dress tight under my neck just starting to tear and my hips and arms into the horrible with hands all over my down in my—

Someone whispered, “No.” Someone hit me.

Crazy old dead bitch, well it's over now. Jesus, what a pigsty. Sixty years and more with never so much as a tatty housecoat fed to the incinerator, never one single burned-out toaster tossed in the trash. Here's a milk carton filled with plaster of paris. Why? Here's a birdcage. Cockatoos, canaries, we never had any. Sight of a bird she'd be covered in hives. Allergic to everything, so was Des. What's it doing here for godsakes? And this tittied mannequin, purse-lipped, bobbed nose, always a faithful mistress to us and how we loved her, so indulgent, how many times did I? Dressed her, undressed her. Crazy kids. Good days, those, the best. Holy place this was for us, secret society, hallowed be thy shame. Wonder did dear old Ma ever wonder. Watch out, the joist. Oh, pint-size bike, tires—the rubber hard, flat. King of hearts, jack of spades, Grandma's canasta cards still there on the rim, too, clothespins over the spokes ready to go snappety-snappety-snap. Crazy. Mueller with his half arm. Rode better than any of us, feet on the butt saddle, remember? How'd he lose it? Never asked. Born that way, was it? That little nipple on the end of the stump, murder at tetherball. Menace to the prudes, freak show. Clem and Jimmy were scared of him, but a lamb he was. Wonder who, what he's sticking it into right now. Nice guy, but whacked. Might be pushing up roses, the Mule might. Skin white as a factory-fresh softball. Those red basset eyes blown straight down the pike from his mater, that sad old shrew, real guzzler. Like a barn, that one was. Me sitting on the Mule's shoulders, moonless night, peeking in at her naked as an elephant, bottle in one hand and fag in the other, sunk back in her armchair watching the black-and-white set. No husband from the word go. Poor old bastard Mueller. There she was, always alone, always the curtains undrawn. She must've known, might have put the Mule up to it. Nuts. Here's the photo albums, won't look. Des. All of them. The old man, won't look. So sour smelling, not sweet like mothballs, but this paper, these books, the mildew. Roof must leak. Somebody's nest, tickertape, little mouse. What we need here is a piece of sharp cheddar, a trap, and ping! Who was it we made eat the mothball soaked in his own piddle? Phineas, was it? Omaha, schoolteacher now. Wouldn't his wife love to know about—