The Pagan House Read online

  Lucille crossed her legs and glared in brief contempt at her husband before smiling again at Edgar’s father.

  ‘We got to come to some sort of strategy here,’ Uncle Frank said.

  Uncle Frank’s invitation to conspiracy didn’t interest Edgar’s father, who took another sip of his whisky, leaned back and blew an invisible smoke-ring. ‘Whatever, Frank. You keep me posted. But in the meantime me and my son are hitting the road.’

  ‘He always was an asshole,’ Edgar’s father confided in him, as they climbed into the car and drove off into freedom.

  Edgar had been looking forward so hard to this that maybe the urgency of his hopes had ruined it, he and his father together, two men, Two Guys. Or maybe it was the bad timing of his father’s arrival, just when something was due to begin with Electa, just when he was making his first real discoveries, proving himself as an investigator. In the moment of their greeting, reaching out to find his uncomfortable place in his father’s arms, he had wished his father had come earlier or later or not at all. Maybe that was the treachery that had ruined it. They had been on the road for half a day and he still didn’t know how to instigate its beginning.

  They were on Route 79 West, going past a strip mall, satellite dishes and sports shoes, movie-house, computer store, Italian restaurant, McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, hairdresser’s, furniture warehouse, All Your Pet Supplies, a china shop, bathroom store (Your tush is OUR concern!), department stores, including Two Guys. Edgar liked Two Guys. When he was younger and they were performing similar car journeys to this one, his father would point at the sign and say, ‘Two Guys, just like us,’ and Edgar’s six-year-old heart would swell with pride.

  ‘Two Guys,’ said Edgar.

  ‘Uh?’ said Edgar’s father.

  ‘The store there, Two Guys.’

  Edgar’s father was about to flash his indicator stick. ‘Do we need something from there?’

  ‘Don’t you remember? Two Guys. We used to see it and you used to say …’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘Two Guys … I guess you don’t remember.’

  ‘Sorry Eddie, I guess I don’t.’

  Edgar had not found a way to declare or allude to his capacity, and neither had he yet revealed his new, preferable name, and nor had he shared any of his discoveries, and he felt lost. While he recognized that his father was ahead of him, more worldly wise, more experienced, yet he had finally entered the same manly category, but how was he going to announce this? He needed some clubbable moment, the two of them together, dark-panelled walls, dim light, swirling a root beer around a heavy crystal tumbler—and just breaking off from discussing the baseball scores, or a current sensational murder case, or the twilight of some star, and his father would look over his tinted bifocals as if he had heard the first fore-whisper of the son’s announcement, a smile already starting on his face as if he knew or could anticipate what Edgar was about to say—but they never did have clubbable moments, not like this, not at all. The best he had done was awkwardly to introduce a conversation point. His father would sometimes permit himself to be captured by conversation points, when he would forget to look doubtfully at his Edgar—This, he, is my son? How can that be?—but it was always unpredictable which points or observations or, very occasionally, jokes his father would allow himself to be interested by.

  Or maybe it was all going to happen on the following day, Edgar’s birthday. The two of them had reached a silent understanding that Edgar’s birthday should not be mentioned until it happened, so the surprise that Edgar’s father had planned should not be threatened, but all the same Edgar, impetuous, couldn’t resist sliding towards the topic.

  The car picked up speed after a toll-booth, and Edgar introduced the topic of Judaism. ‘You know when I went to Gary’s bar mitzvah?’

  He saw his father about to repeat the formula he had used so many times over the years, Who’s Gary? or Who’s Herman? or Who’s Rufus?, all of which meant, simply, Who are you? but he stopped himself, repressing the question with a thin-lipped nod, either because he sensed that he might be getting something wrong or else because he was genuinely uninterested in the answer.

  ‘What does it mean, the expression, “Today I become a man”? What’s all that about? Why thirteen? What happens?’

  Instead of reaching the suave understanding that his son was announcing something crucial about himself, declaring himself as part now of the propagating world, no longer innocent, no longer a child—or maybe he was just affecting not to understand, not getting it, maybe he was getting it all too well, maybe he was, impossible thought, embarrassed? could he be?—Edgar’s father waved the whole matter away. ‘Who knows?’ he said, and the subject dropped, a forgotten stone.

  ‘Dad?’

  Dad raised an eyebrow. He had been fiddling with the radio, and the map, which he didn’t let Edgar help with, and patting his chest from time to time in a forlorn kind of way.

  ‘Where does wind come from?’

  Edgar’s father slowly shook his head. ‘What do you mean? It’s an intestinal thing.’

  ‘No. I mean, wind. You know, the weather, breezes and gusts and so forth. Where does it come from?’

  Edgar had an imaginary picture of a cave in the Ural mountains (not that he knew where the Ural mountains were, but the name implied both the Arctic and Valhalla to him) where a young wind was born, blustering out, eager to prove itself, blowing its youthful energies around the world.

  His father merely shook his head, so Edgar tried another.

  ‘What were your favourite albums from when you were young?’

  ‘I don’t know. I liked the Doobie Brothers.’

  ‘What about the Stooges?’

  ‘A little unsophisticated for my tastes. That was more Frank’s territory.’

  The day was just getting worse and worse. Maybe the lesson here was not to ask questions. Edgar couldn’t help himself. ‘Do you believe in the afterlife?’

  Edgar’s father shook his head again in the same impatient, baffled way and said, ‘I don’t know what you want from me.’

  His father looked close to exasperated. Edgar’s company often made his father exasperated. Some knowledge had been all that he had wanted, something passed on from father to son, an inheritance of wisdom. And maybe Edgar’s father felt some of this and was guilty about his response, because he smiled and said, ‘I can tell you one thing. When you’re lighting a cigarette in a wind, the trick is to stand against the breeze. You get me? You stand facing the wind, not away from it. Most people don’t realize that.’

  ‘I don’t smoke,’ Edgar said.

  His father seemed annoyed by this. ‘Well when you do. Just bear it in mind. You hungry?’

  ‘Sure I am,’ Edgar said, even though he wasn’t, but giving what he hoped was the correct response.

  ‘Let’s get ourselves something to eat.’

  They sat in a roadside lounge. His father joked around with the waitress and gave Edgar quarters to put in the silvery rainbow jukebox mounted on the wall, and watched him play with the car key-ring, with the little black sensor button that was meant to open the door lock by remote control but didn’t work any more. His father drank Heineken. Edgar had a root beer.

  Edgar’s father rested his elbow on the table and shook his arm so his silver bracelet slid down from his wrist to his forearm, which was tanned from open windows, open roads. ‘Your mother has done a great job with you.’

  What did this mean? Edgar’s father lowered his tinted glasses to beam a look of dreadful sincerity at him.

  Something about this look told Edgar to shelve his family-united fantasy as being just that. His father would never be in residence with them at his grandmother’s house. They would never drink beers from frosted glasses together at the P-shaped swimming-pool. They would never bat around balls on the snooker table. And, for a reason that he didn’t quite understand yet, Edgar was coming to hate Warren because of this. It was as if Warren had stolen somehow
the good-son stuff, all the nurturing and caring-for. Every cup of tea Warren made for Fay in the English style was another cup of tea that his father had failed to make. Maybe if Warren would just let up for a moment, it would give someone else a chance, someone for whom it was more of a struggle.

  ‘What’s the Blackberry Festival? When is it?’

  ‘Blackberry Festival? It’s something they celebrate back—’ Edgar heard his father very nearly say the word ‘home’, but correct himself ‘—up there. It’s a little before Labor Day. Kind of marks the end of the summer. Couple of weeks away. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Edgar said.

  Their food arrived, Edgar’s steak, his father’s egg-white omelette, brought by the waitress with whom Edgar’s father had struck an immediate rapport, a shared way of being that Edgar jealously despaired of his father ever finding with him. Edgar waited for his father to be finished with the ketchup bottle.

  ‘You want the ketchup?’

  Edgar nodded.

  ‘Sorry, pal. There’s new research shows kids shouldn’t eat ketchup. It’s carcinogenic.’

  Sometimes life was truly desolate. Even the things that Edgar normally took delight in, well-done steaks on large white plates, the metal page mechanism of the tableside jukebox, his father’s hands, gnarled and freckled and capable, the sight of his father’s car through the window of the diner, top carelessly down, its battered red colour putting to shame all the grey and tan sedans, all these things seemed unkind.

  ‘Hey, I’m kidding you!’

  His father reached forward to grab one of Edgar’s hands. The bracelet slid down to the wrist and Edgar’s father withdrew his hand to shake it up again. He winked at Edgar. Edgar tried to wink back but feared he might have muffed it. Generously though, his father, perhaps alarmed at Edgar’s mood—and it was true, Edgar had been close to weeping just now, had felt his throat rawing in preparation for tears, his eyes smarting—didn’t draw attention to Edgar’s performance of blinks and twitches but, almost courteously, nodded.

  ‘You take things too seriously all the time, that’s your problem.’

  ‘Is it?’ Edgar considered this. His father seldom made direct personal remarks or observations so each one had a consequently elevated status. Perhaps Edgar did take things too seriously. He would learn to be more carefree. ‘That’s interesting,’ Edgar said.

  ‘You see? You’re doing it now.’

  Edgar responded with a wry laugh that pleased him with its intimations of mature sophistication, so he performed it again. His father looked at him a little oddly and patted his chest and returned to his omelette. ‘How’s your steak?’ he asked.

  ‘Very good. How’s the omelette?’ said Edgar.

  ‘Good also. Want to try a taste?’

  ‘No. It’s okay.’

  Edgar didn’t like the taste of his father’s omelettes, the tartness of slightly burnt peppers and onion, with the quantity of salt that his father liked to put on all his food, but the fork with some omelette and its grungy filling and a merciful slop of ketchup was coming his way so he reached for the fork but his father wanted to feed him so he dutifully opened his mouth and let it slide in and he hoped his look didn’t show too much distaste and he washed it down with a big gulp of root beer.

  ‘You’ve got to learn to chew. You’ll give yourself indigestion. How do you like it?’

  ‘Good, very good,’ Edgar said. ‘Would you like to try some of my steak? It’s also very good.’

  Already he was cutting a piece of meat and shovelling some ketchup and sweet mustard on top, but his father made a sour expression and shook his head and said, ‘No. Enjoy it.’

  Which made Edgar feel slighted. He was sure that if he were a grown-up then his father would be honour-bound to take a taste of his meat. That somehow it was an expression of relative power inequality of who got to offer food and who had to taste it. He presumed business power lunches were a desperate duel of offered forks and submissive mouths and triumphantly shaken heads as stronger, better men made their inferiors accept, swallow, and praise.

  ‘I’m going to have a coffee. You want something? A milk-shake or something?’

  Edgar indeed wanted a milkshake and his father let him order for himself and Edgar, renewed in companionship, effortlessly dealt with the waitress’s enthusiasm at his accent, and when the milkshake came he used two straws and sucked merrily away at it, and used a long spoon to dig away some of the gloop that had collected along the side of the glass, but the concern hit him, as they walked back into the diner car-park, his father’s hand steering him somewhat uncomfortably by the neck, that maybe he should have ordered a coffee too.

  ‘We’re making good time,’ his father said.

  ‘Good,’ said Edgar.

  ‘We’re in Connecticut now.’

  ‘Oh. Good,’ said Edgar.

  He was losing all conception of place. Everything looked the same to him, the neat, well-mannered towns, the long stretches of highway cut through forest and rock.

  It was good to be in the potential of his father’s fellowship, yet Edgar’s mind kept turning Vailwards; he was needed at the house; he worried for his grandmother in the dangerous air that Frank and Lucille made everyone breathe; he worried for Fay without him there to keep an eye on things. And—a lurch to the belly that brought his forehead into contact with the glove compartment—this was the day he was due to be going to the cinema with Electa. The glamour of his father’s company had pushed that away. She would be standing outside the movie-house, her scorn rising, pretending to be interested in the pictures and names on the film posters as Paul and Husky Marvin gathered themselves to intercede.

  ‘That house is a goldmine,’ his father said.

  ‘What house?’ Edgar looked out of the window, hoping to see a building with miners surrounding it, a campfire, an old man playing a harmonica, everything glimmering and glistening with fresh-dug gold.

  ‘Fay’s house of course. The old spread. The family manse. What I could do with the cash from that, I couldn’t begin to tell you.’

  ‘You’d sell it?’

  ‘What do you expect me to do with it? Live there?’

  It had never occurred to Edgar that anyone might want the house sold. Even in the selfish nakedness of Frank and Lucille’s hunger for it, the house was still occupied by family.

  Images collided in Edgar’s head: Electa outside the cinema—gold-miners occupying the Pagan House—his father and Lucille counting out attaché cases filled with money. He wanted to argue, he wanted to introduce his father to his favourite game. Instead he hiccuped.

  ‘You’re a little weird but you’re a great kid. Your mother’s done a terrific job with you. Want a stick of gum?’

  ‘No. No thank you.’

  Edgar was still hiccuping and in shock and brooding when they pulled off the highway towards the resort.

  It was a gambling place, of course it was. Edgar would have known to expect this if he had allowed himself to expect anything, if he had not deliberately emptied his mind of the future, tried to find a weighty comfort in the immediacy of his father’s presence. Gambling was what made his father come alive.

  ‘I think you’ll like it here. It’s got plenty of facilities for kids,’ his father said.

  An illuminated totem pole stood outside the main entrance. The hotel was set off from the casino, a glass tunnel connecting the two. At the side of the hotel was the children’s so-called fun area, which they passed on their way to the guests’ elevator—two narrow rooms, one with video games, the other with ping-pong and pool tables. A scrawny feral child, wearing multiple rows of braces on his teeth, was playing a basketball video game. He looked at Edgar and warned him away with an unmistakable snarl.

  ‘You see? You’re making friends here already,’ his father said.

  The room was good. Two double beds were separated by a bedside table. A large television set was on the chest of drawers with a remote control and cable guide. The curta
ins were operated by a push button. Black-and-white pastoral scenes of Indians at idyllic work and play decorated the walls.

  On Edgar’s last night as a twelve-year-old he and his father ate room-service dinner companionably together, sitting on their twin beds.

  ‘You grab some shut-eye. I’ll take a little stroll around the place, get acquainted,’ his father said.

  Edgar piled up the plates and aluminium lids of their dinner. Rebelling against an invisible, perhaps non-existent authority, he neither brushed his teeth nor washed his hands and face. He felt desolate. He called his mother.

  ‘I was going to phone you tomorrow, but I didn’t know where you’re staying. Are you having a great time with your father?’

  ‘Terrific,’ Edgar said. He invented a different kind of hotel that he was staying at, with all kinds of friends and activities. He told his mother about the medal he’d won in a fathers-and-sons archery competition but his triumph dissolved when he could hear in her silence the reminder, and self-reproach, that tomorrow was the first of his birthdays that they had spent apart.

  ‘I’ve got to go now. There’s a barbecue dinner by the swimming-pool.’

  ‘Isn’t it rather late for that? Well I suppose it’s your birthday. And your father… Anyway, what’s the telephone number there? I’ll call you tomorrow.’

  Edgar impressed himself by twice reciting the same random string of digits. He told his mother he loved her too and hung up the phone and lay in his bed waiting anxiously for sleep while watching TV with the sound turned down.

  2

  ‘You don’t want breakfast straight away, do you?’

  Hungry Edgar shook his head.

  ‘Let’s go find the fun room.’

  It was only when Edgar and his father parted at the entrance to the glass tunnel, under the sign that announced that no minors were permitted beyond, that Edgar finally realized that there was no birthday surprise; the only question was whether his father had forgotten his birthday or if he had never known it.