The Funhouse (12 page)

If she could only be sure that her first, monstrous baby had been the product of Conrad’s rotten, degenerate spermatozoa, if she could just be certain that her own chromosomes were not corrupted, she would be able to lay her fear to rest forever. But of course there was no way she could determine the truth of the matter.

Sometimes she thought that life was too difficult and much too cruel to be worth the effort of living it.

That was why, now, standing in the kitchen on the night of the day that she had learned of Amy’s pregnancy, Ellen tossed down the last of the drink that she had mixed only minutes ago, and she quickly poured another. She had two crutches: liquor and religion. She could not have withstood the past twenty-five years without both of those supports.

Initially, the first year after she left Conrad, religion alone was sufficient to her needs. She had gotten a job as a waitress, had become self-supporting after a rocky start, and had spent most of her spare time in church. She had found that prayer soothed her nerves as well as her spirit, that confession
was
good for the soul, and that a meager Communion wafer taken on the tongue during Mass was far more nourishing than any six-course meal.

At the end of that first year on her own, more than two years after she had run from home to join the carnival and to be with Conrad, she felt fairly good about herself. She still suffered from bad dreams most nights. She was still wrestling with her conscience, trying to make up her mind whether she had sinned terribly or had merely done God’s work when she had killed Victor. But at least, as a hardworking waitress, she had gained a measure of self-respect and independence for the first time in her life. Indeed, she had felt sufficiently self-confident to return home for a visit, intending to patch up her differences with her parents as best she could.

That was when she discovered they had died in her absence. Joseph Giavenetto, her father, was felled by a massive stroke just one month after Ellen ran away from home. Gina, her mother, died less than six months later. It happened that way sometimes—wife and husband taking leave of life within a short time of each other, as if unable to tolerate the separation.

Although Ellen had not been close to her parents, and although Gina’s excessive strictness and religiosity had created a great deal of tension and bitterness between mother and daughter, Ellen had been devastated by the news of their deaths. She was filled with a cold, empty, unfinished feeling. She blamed herself for what had happened to them. Running away as she had done, leaving nothing more than a terse, unpleasant note for her mother, not even saying good-bye to her father—with those actions she might have precipitated her father’s stroke. Perhaps she was too hard on herself, but she wasn’t able to shrug off the yoke of guilt.

Thereafter, her religion was not able to provide her with sufficient comfort, and she augmented the mercy of Jesus with the mercy of the bottle. She drank too much—more this year than last, not so much this year as next year. Only her family was aware of her habit. The churchwomen with whom she worked in charitable causes four days each week would be shocked to discover that the quiet, earnest, industrious, devout Ellen Harper was a different person at night, in her own home; after sunset, behind closed doors, the saint became a lush.

She despised herself for her sinfully excessive fondness for vodka. But without booze she couldn’t sleep; it blocked out the nightmares, and it gave her a few hours of blessed relief from the worries and fears that had been eating her alive for twenty-five years.

She put the bottle of vodka and the quart of orange juice on the kitchen table, pulled out a chair, and sat down. Now, when her drink ran low, she wouldn’t have to get up to freshen it; she would only have to bestir herself when her ice had melted.

For a while she sat in silence, drinking, but then, as she stared at the chair opposite her own, she had a memory-flash of Amy sitting there this morning, looking up, saying, “
I’ve had some morning sickness, I missed my period, I’m really pregnant, I know I am
 . . .” Ellen remembered, far too vividly, how she had struck the girl, how she had shaken her senseless, how she had cursed her. If she closed her eyes she could see herself pulling Amy onto the floor, pushing the girl’s head down to the tiles, screaming like a madwoman, praying at the top of her voice . . .

She shuddered.

My God
, she thought miserably, suddenly pierced by a painfully sharp insight,
I’m like my mother!
I’m exactly like Gina. I’ve cowed my husband just as she cowed hers. I’ve been so strict with my children and so preoccupied with my religion that I’ve built a wall between myself and my family—a wall exactly like the one that
my
mother constructed.

Ellen felt dizzy, but not merely from the vodka. The patterns of history, the familiar circles drawn by repetitive events, startled and dazed her.

She covered her face with her hands, shamed by the new light in which she suddenly saw herself. Her hands were cold.

The kitchen clock sounded like a ticking bomb.

Just like Gina.

Ellen grabbed her drink and took a long swallow of it. The glass chattered against her teeth.

Just like Gina.

She shook her head violently, as if she were determined to cast off that unwelcome thought. She wasn’t as stern and distant and forbidding as her own mother had been. She
wasn’t.
And even if she was, she couldn’t deal with that insight now. With Amy’s pregnancy, Ellen already had too much to worry about. She could deal with only one thing at a time. Amy’s problem had to come first. If some horrible
thing
was growing in the girl’s womb, it had to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible. Maybe then, after the abortion, Ellen would be able to consider her life and decide what she thought of the woman she had allowed herself to become; maybe then she would have the time to reflect on what she had done to her family. But not now. God, please, not now.

She tilted her glass and chugged the rest of her drink as if it were only water. With an unsteady hand she poured a little more orange juice and a lot more vodka.

Most nights she wasn’t really drunk until eleven or twelve o’clock, but tonight, by nine-thirty, Ellen was thoroughly intoxicated. She felt fuzzy, and her tongue was thick. She was floating dreamily. She had attained the pleasant, mindless state of grace that she had desired so strongly.

When she glanced at the kitchen clock and saw that it was nine-thirty, she realized it was Joey’s bedtime. She decided to go upstairs, make sure he said his prayers, tuck him in, kiss him good-night, and tell him a bedtime story. She hadn’t told him any stories in a long, long time. He’d probably like that. He wasn’t too old for bedtime stories, was he? He was still just a baby. A little angel. He had such a sweet, angelic, baby face. Sometimes she loved him so hard that she thought she’d explode. Like now. She was brimming with love for little Joey. She wanted to kiss his sweet face. She wanted to sit on the edge of the bed and tell him a story about elves and princesses. That would be good, so good, just to sit on the edge of the bed with him smiling up at her.

Ellen finished her drink and got to her feet. She stood up too fast, and the room spun around, and she grabbed the edge of the table in order to keep her balance.

Crossing the living room, she bumped into an end table and knocked over a lovely, hand-carved, wooden statue of Jesus, which she had bought a long time ago, in her waitressing days. The statue fell onto the carpet, and although it was only a foot high and not heavy, she fumbled awkwardly with it, trying to retrieve it and set it back where it belonged; her fingers felt like fat sausages and didn’t seem to want to bend the right way.

She wondered fleetingly if the bedtime story was a good idea after all. Maybe she wasn’t up to it. But then she thought of Joey’s sweet face and his cherubic smile, and she went upstairs. The steps were treacherous, but she reached the second-floor hallway without falling.

When she entered the boy’s room, she found that he was already in bed. Only the tiny night-light was burning, a single small bulb in the wall plug, ghostly, moon-pale.

She stopped inside the doorway, listening. He usually snored softly when he slept, but at the moment he was perfectly quiet. Maybe he wasn’t asleep yet.

Swaying with each step, she walked gingerly to the bed and looked down at him. She couldn’t see much in the dim light.

Deciding that he must be asleep, wanting only to plant a kiss on his head, Ellen leaned close—

And a leering, luminous, inhuman face jumped out of the darkness at her, screeching like an angry bird.

She shrieked and staggered backwards. She collided with the dresser, hurting her hip.

In her mind she saw a kaleidoscopic tumble of dark, horrific images:
a bassinet shaken by the fury of its monstrous burden; enormous, green, animal eyes gleaming with hatred; flared, twisted nostrils sniffing, sniffing; a pale, speckled tongue; long and bony fingers reaching for her in the flutter-flash of lightning; claws tearing at her
 . . .

The nightstand light came on, dispelling the awful memories.

Joey was sitting up in bed. “Mama?” he said.

Ellen sagged against the dresser and drew deeply, thirstily of the air that, for a few seconds of eternal duration, she had been unable to draw into her lungs. The thing in the darkness had only been Joey. He was wearing a Halloween mask that had been shaded with phosphorescent paint.

“What the
hell
are you doing?” she demanded, pushing away from the dresser, moving toward the bed.

He quickly pulled off the mask. His eyes were wide. “Mama, I thought you were Amy.”

“Give me that,” she said, snatching the mask out of his hands.

“I put a rubber worm in Amy’s cold cream, and I thought it was her coming to get even with me,” Joey said, urgently explaining himself.

“When are you going to outgrow this kind of stupid thing?” Ellen demanded, her heart still beating rapidly.

“I didn’t know it was you! I didn’t know!”

“This kind of prank is sick,” she said angrily. Her pleasant vodka haze had evaporated. Her dreamy laziness was gone, replaced by nightmare tension. She was still drunk, but the quality of her high had changed from bright to somber, from happy to grim. “Sick,” she said again, looking at the Halloween mask in her hand. “Sick and twisted.”

Joey cowered back against the headboard, gripping the covers with both hands, as if he might throw them aside and leap out of bed and run for all he was worth.

Still quivering from the shock of seeing that grinning, fanged, luminous face leap out of the darkness, Ellen looked around at the other weird items in the boy’s room. Spooky posters hung on the walls: Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster; Bela Lugosi as Dracula; and another horror-movie creature that she couldn’t identify. On the dresser, the desk, and the bookshelves there were monster models—three-dimensional plastic figures that Joey had glued together from kits.

Paul permitted the boy to pursue this macabre hobby, and he insisted it was a common interest among kids Joey’s age. Ellen had never strenuously objected. Although the boy’s fascination with horror and blood worried her, it had seemed like a relatively minor matter, the sort of thing she always conceded to Paul, so that he would feel comfortable about conceding the larger and far more important issues to her.

Now, infuriated by the scare that Joey had given her, upset by the unwanted memories that the prank had resurrected for her, her judgment still distorted by vodka, Ellen threw the mask into the wastebasket. “It’s time I put an end to this nonsense. It’s time you stopped playing around with this creepy junk and started behaving like a normal, healthy boy.” She plucked a couple of monster models from the dresser and dropped them into the wastebasket. She swept up the miniature ghouls and goblins from his desk and put them with the rest of the trash. “In the morning, before you go to school, take down those awful posters and get rid of them. Be careful not to chip the plaster when you pull the staples out of the wall. I’ll get some good, no-nonsense prints to hang in here. You understand?”

He nodded. Fat tears rolled down his cheeks, but he didn’t make a sound.

“And no more of these practical jokes of yours,” Ellen said harshly. “No more rubber spiders. No more phony snakes. No more rubber worms in cold cream jars. Do you hear me?”

He nodded again. He was rigid, sickly white. He appeared to be overreacting to her admonitions. He didn’t look like a boy who was facing his stern mother; he looked more like a boy facing certain death. He looked as if he were convinced that she was going to take him by the throat and kill him.

The terror in Joey’s face jolted Ellen.

I’m just like Gina.

No!
That was unfair.

She was only doing what must be done. The child needed to be disciplined and given guidance. She was merely fulfilling her duty as a parent.

Just like Gina.

She pushed that thought aside.

“Lie down,” she said.

Joey obediently slid under the covers once more.

She went to the nightstand and put her hand on the lamp switch. “Did you say your prayers?”

“Yeah,” he said weakly.

“All of them?”

“Yeah.”

“Tomorrow night you’ll say more prayers than usual.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll say them with you to make sure you don’t miss a word of them.”

“Okay, Mama.”

She switched off the light.

In a small, uncertain voice, he said, “I didn’t know it was you, Mama.”

“Go to sleep.”

“I thought it was Amy.”

Suddenly she wanted to reach down and lift him from the bed and clasp him to her bosom. She wanted to hug him tight and kiss him and tell him everything was all right.

But as she began to lean down toward him, she remembered the Halloween mask. When she had seen that fearsome countenance, she had thought that the demon in Joey had surfaced at last. She had been sure—just for a second or two, but long enough to have her complaisance blasted to bits—that the long-expected transformation had occurred. Now she was afraid that she would lean down and hug him and encounter another sneering troll’s face—except that this time it would be no mask. Maybe this time he would grab her and pull her close, the better to tear out her stomach with his sharp and gleaming claws. The torrent of love washed through her and out of her, leaving a barren wasteland composed of uncertainty and fear. She was afraid of her own child.