Hemlock Grove (35 page)

“Norman, give her to me,” said Pryce.

“You’ll do it?” said Godfrey.

“Norman, let me have her,” said Pryce.

Godfrey was reluctant, but complied.

“You’ll do it now,” said Godfrey.

Pryce waited until his hold was secure before answering.

“No,” he said.

Godfrey was quiet. The crazed inspiration that had sent him on this mission was suddenly and completely extinguished. Other fires went out now too. He eased himself against the wall and slid to the floor.

“She’s too old, Norman,” said Pryce. “What about the baby? I may have a chance with the baby.”

Godfrey addressed his knees. The square fluorescents reflected off the floor down the hall, a long row of molars.

“Fuck the baby,” he said.

Pryce took the bundle into his office and laid it on the floor. He pulled aside the sheet and looked into the face, which had contracted into a mask of the mocking ugliness of death. He called Hemlock Acres and told them to send a car, then came into the hall, locking the door behind him, and sat on the floor next to Godfrey. He inhaled the smell of disinfectant. He had never understood before why people didn’t like that, the way hospitals smell. He had never known before how comfortless it could be.

“I’m sorry, Norman,” said Pryce. “I’m not God.”

*   *   *

Olivia insisted she drive although Roman was what is called holding up. But she knew it was not only deceptive but more dangerous. She knew about holding up. He had at least gotten sleep—she had doctored the vodka with several tablets of Ambien—and she had sat at his bedside like she had months ago during that god-awful business with the little dead lesbian. When he woke she asked where he would like to go and was relieved when he simply said “Peter.” Pryce had phoned her the night before and she had enough on her hands; she wasn’t ready yet for Norman. She had priorities.

As they drove in silence, Olivia debated whether or not to warn him but decided against it. He could only hate the messenger regardless of how much more the messenger loved him than anyone else ever could. There was nothing that could make this easier on him, no matter how much it harrowed her heart to be reduced for the present to chauffeur, bearing him to a destination where he had no suspicion what he would find, what he wouldn’t. He sat next to her, holding up. She reached and touched his face. He flinched; the one thing his inner heart did not want now was to be touched, but she did not remove her hand. A mother has certain rights, and when a person can’t be consoled, sometimes irritation will have to suffice to remind him that you’re here, you are right here. They passed the park and turned down the lane.

As Olivia predicted, when they reached the Rumanceks’ plot the car was gone and the trailer door hung open; they had not bothered to shut the door behind them. They stepped out and Roman looked mildly befuddled as though searching for a puzzle piece that was not in the box. Then his eyes overfilled with sudden awful knowing. The obvious she could not prepare him for: that a Gypsy was a Gypsy was a Gypsy. They will steal the rings off your fingers or the love right out of your heart and leave no more to show for it than a trail of smoke in the night. But she said nothing as the full weight of it came on in, taking admittedly small satisfaction in being, naturally, right. But only very small. How ill matched the boy was for this enemy!—death was one thing, quite involuntary for the most part. But desertion. There was no destroyer of worlds quite to match it. She reached to the small of her back and lightly traced the ridge of her scar through her blouse.

Many years ago Olivia had been a young girl in the land beyond the forests and the uglier of two sisters. Hers was not the kind of lack of beauty that suggested the promise of something unrealized but a drab androgyny that when placed beside her sister’s loveliness was a perverse joke. And the punch line, at the base of her spine and extending about the length of a long thumb: her tail. But she had always been a happy child nonetheless, a gentle spirit who could lose entire afternoons wandering through a valley of sunflowers singing to herself, and much protected by her father and elder sister who believed the heart of the world could not extend charity to so simple and homely a girl.

But their great love could not prevent their fear from coming to pass, and in her thirteenth year Olivia had her first taste of the suffering from which she had been shielded for so long. His name was Dimitri and he was a slave. It was standard at the time for the aristocracy, and no name was older or more vaunted than her father’s, to possess numerous Gypsy slaves, and it was something she had never put any more thought into than their horses or pigs. For it to occur to even so gentle and sensitive a spirit to hold an opinion on the thought of owning people like horses or pigs would have required it to occur to her that Gypsies were in fact people—a notion not even a child could take seriously. But then Dimitri. Which is not to say that the purchase of this slave suddenly clarified the issue of taxonomy but rather complicated it infinitely. Not so much that she realized that Dimitri was a man no different from her father or his friends, but that he was a creature quite unlike any other man or Gypsy she had ever encountered.

Olivia’s father bought Dimitri for the unthinkable sum of two oxen, for which entire families might be purchased. But he was indeed an unparalleled specimen: it was not as if his shoulders or his thighs were near as stalwart as the ruminants for which he was traded, or his mind or beauty of any remark; it was a particular talent famed throughout the mountains that commanded him such a price. For being a member of a race of dance and song, Dimitri had a way with the fiddle to make the devil stomp his feet.

This is a story older than stories. From the first time the little girl who loved songs witnessed the Gypsy slave give a demonstration of his instrument, her tail wagged. Olivia, who along with her sister possessed the finest things of any girl in the land, had never felt the jealous pain in her soul of wanting a thing all her own until seeing through her own watered eyes the fingers on that wooden swan neck. But Dimitri, inconveniently, was no gift for her, nor an extravagance on her father’s behalf for aesthetics as its own justification. Dimitri was her sister’s dowry.

Olivia’s heart was like a hand towel wrung by a strongman. She was devoted to her family and would never have ranked her own happiness of greater import, but with Dimitri it was not a question of happiness so much as the unique breed of misery that is first love, which she no more could have voluntarily abdicated than ceased her own heart through force of will. And so the girl whose gentle spirit had always been as dull as her face did the unprecedented. She defied the law of the land and her blood and she stole him.

Dimitri, who was a genius of young girls’ hearts the same way even the most doltish of musicians are, needed no explanation when his new master’s daughter unlocked his quarters and led him silently through an ancient catacomb that let out in the mountainside with two horses she had left in waiting. They rode all the day and all the night, not resting until they came to a river far away enough that there was no danger of a search party catching up. Dimitri took his unlikely deliverer into his arms and petted her hair on the riverbed. They had hardly exchanged two words except necessarily conveyed instructions the entire flight, but he told her they would have to sleep; much running still awaited them. But sleep was unthinkable! Now that they were here, of course, the process must be commenced of him learning every last little thing about her; no time could be lost in so urgent and comprehensive an undertaking. However, as the toll of the last two nights caught up with her and the Gypsy’s magical hand stroked her she was lulled into the peaceful realization that time in fact stretched ahead of them in an endless meadow full of sunflowers now that she possessed him all to herself.

When she awoke at daybreak to the tittering of tree creepers, Dimitri, both horses, and the rings on her fingers were gone.

Olivia searched the riverbed until she found a piece of slate with an edge like a clamshell. She hitched up her skirt. She looked up and opened her mouth to join the tree creepers with her favorite song but fuck it, fuck songs and where they came from.

When the search party came across her the following day, she lay face forward and unmoving. Her skirt, bunched at her waist, had soaked so much blood it looked from a distance like a bunch of rose petals. One hand was outstretched and in its limp fingers what may have been a pale pickle.

Time passed. And something happened to the girl—the light of innocence in her eyes was lost as the face of unpromising homeliness around it rearranged into one of unpleasant beauty. It took nine months for this transformation to be complete, and at the end of it she looked at the newborn girl-child in her father’s arms through a mask of cruel perfection.

“We will say she is your sister’s,” he said. She was then married, and it would bring dishonor to no one.

“The blood of a slave makes a slave,” said Olivia. “Give it to the swineherd.”

So the child was taken to the swineherd, the old Rumancek, whose low name the tainted bloodline would forever bear, and Olivia informed her father she would be going to the academy in the city, to learn the dramatic arts.

Presently, she stood by as Roman walked shakily to the front door and entered. She waited. There was a hum not far from her ear. Her arm darted and snatched a fat, ambling bumblebee from the air and she mashed it in her palm, dropping it to her feet. She regarded the small pink weal it had left and dug her nail in, scraping the stinger out. She waited. Then it came: from within the trailer the cry of the left-behind. She stood where she was as the cry rose at the immensity and grandeur of this desolation; she waited as the boy’s pathetic howl went on, and on, and her heart howled right along with it.

She was here, she was right here.

*   *   *

A,

For a week he hardly left his room. The silence down the hall, I will always hear it echo. What a trial for even this battleworn heart! Could anything be more selfish than a mother’s love? But how can they be strong if we are not? A satisfactory answer eludes …

He was apathetic to Norman’s release into our custody, or at least the shell that vaguely responds to Norman’s name. Such a pity. I loved the man, make no mistake about that. That sublime bitch of an irony that in the conquest of one heir to the Godfrey dynasty I would fall in love with the other. Unthinkable! So I finally share a roof with father and son. At least what is left of the father. Perhaps in time he will recover; he isn’t made of sugar candy. But at any rate my nights will be less cold. To think, after all this fuss and bother over the years his defection aroused not so much as a moo from his old cow (her late defeat a not insignificant consolation prize; I have had the unique privilege of being around long enough to see all my rivals get ruined or get fat, but I can’t name a single instance more satisfying). And scarcely more reaction from our child than if I’d acquired a new houseplant.

I did not interfere; I sat with his grief with brutal compassion but purpose held. We come from a motherland that has never conquered another, or repelled an invader from either direction, and yet here we stand. We do what is necessary. And it was only a week until his birthday. After all this time, no time at all. A bit arbitrary I suppose to wait until that exact date, but things must have a proper sense of proportion; I have no greater contempt than for those mothers who submit to having the stockings raided on Christmas Eve. And finally the night in question!—I had such butterflies I wouldn’t have been surprised to find my feet lifted from the ground, but as Papa was sure we learned, haste is of the devil, and dutifully I placed Norman in the
extaz
for fear that the program of the evening would physically kill him. (How old were we before mastering the
extaz
? And Roman an adept by seventeen? My hair tingles.) I then knocked on Roman’s door and requested he join me in the attic in several minutes.

Imagine the mise-en-scène! He had not noticed the renovation: the room now bare of furnishing after going untouched all those months, the flicker of ninety-nine black candles in a circle around the altar stone, and atop the stone: the bassinet. The incomprehension in the boy’s eyes, the old—are we possibly so old?—wisdom in his mother’s.

He stood in speechless soliloquy. I held his face in my hands and his eyes with mine and released him, by
extaz
released him from the unknowing it had been necessary to hold him in until this moment. All those secrets, whispers of a dream, now revealed. Finally!—no more secrets: it was time for us to be whole again and I gave him everything at once. How horrendous had been my ordeal—so many years and tears, so many hopes and frustrations for one womb, wasted efforts disposed of with a disconsolate shake—until finally he came! My miracle, swaddled in that luminous red caul that I peeled from his wrinkled skin myself and consumed in one swallow with humblest gratitude. How I could not believe my luck when Shelley too was born with the caul, but in intoxication over my prosperity sautéed with wine and wild mushrooms—only for the child to pay the price for my license. How all those times Roman found me unkind, the wearying old cunt I found myself playing, it was only, always, out of a mother’s love of her most precious treasure (well, perhaps on occasion because of what a little shit he could be). How there was not nor ever had been an “angel,” the fanciful by-product of a terminally birdbrained imagination, nor for that matter had he ever in fact had a cousin—how the Godfrey who supplied his name was not the same who supplied his blood, and that nine months ago Letha Godfrey was visited by her own brother, incapable of managing the dark tides within him. (Boys will be boys!) And here the product of that impetuous union, far from stillborn, lying asleep not ten paces away.

I continued looking into his eyes, smiling in the hope that he would know that no matter how bitter the medicine his mother would be there with a spoonful of sugar to follow. But I’m afraid he rather had the countenance of the cartoon coyote who has just realized he has stepped off a precipitous cliff. In silence, he turned his back to me and sat on the top stair with a creak, listlessly allowing his weight to fall into me and resting his face on my thigh.