The Ice Storm (31 page)

Elena said, almost whispering, not looking him in the eyes at all, looking instead at the fire:

—It wasn't just this free and easy choice, you know. You don't know how it works. Later, I don't know how I make these decisions, how I
made
them. I don't have any skills, and I never did. I'm no worker. I woke up breast-feeding one morning. And I don't feel like there's much dignity in it, that's what I mean. So what am I supposed to do?

Hood got up to poke at the fire.

—So what are you saying? You're saying this was just some arrangement?

—I'm not saying that … I'm saying you're not looking at the other angles.… There are points of view here.

—You were just coerced into this marriage by the social climate and all that: Carl Rogers or Carl Jung or somebody says women of the fifties were coerced into marriage. And they need Virginia Slims or something. And meanwhile I've neglected the family. I'm the neglecter. The villain.

He crouched down low and inserted a balled-up piece of newspaper under the last unconsumed transverse of Duraflame log.

—So you think it's best if you leave, he said.

—That's right, Elena said.

Then:

—Well, this is the era for it, Benjamin said.

Elena said nothing.

Benjamin watched the fire.

Their remorse was peaceful.

—Should we tell the kids now? Is that what you want to do?

He set down the bellows.

—And that reminds me, he said. Where the hell is Paul, anyway?

—What?

—Paul, our son, Paul. Did you call the city to see if he stayed over with his friends?

—I thought you did.

—You mean you.… Oh, great, this is great. This is great.

—Is it my sole responsibility to look after the children? Elena said. It's a holiday weekend—you're here.

—Well, I'm glad I won't have to listen to this shit for the rest of my life, because I couldn't take it. Did you
happen
to talk with Wendy about Paul's plans, whether she knew anything about it?

The answer arrived right then. The drawing room doors—a pair of antique sliding doors whose period feel had once made Benjamin Hood feel good—parted. Wendy entered, like the buried woman breaking the surface of the earth, coming up for air. She looked nothing like the Wendy that Elena remembered, the exasperating and charming little girl who had to be the center of attention. The little girl whom everybody loved, waiters, doormen, conductors, passersby, all of whom had to talk to her. That girl had vanished entirely, and though Elena recognized this apparition, she recognized it from some more distant register of memory. The generations seemed to have collapsed into Wendy, because Wendy looked exactly like Elena's own mother, coming downstairs, her mother frightened by the implications of another long afternoon. Wendy, with her arm stretched out in front of her. Her jeans partly hiked up, partly unzipped, over a black lace garter belt, straps clearly visible, zipped into the zipper. The huffing sobs coming from her daughter like a backward language. Elena heard her mother's cries, heard the ghost of her own mother, and she saw her own place in the ladder of madness and desolation. She felt that she, too, would be locked away, locked into Silver Meadow and visited only on weekends. The two of them encircled their daughter.

—Oh, baby doll, Benjamin said. What the hell. Oh, lord.

Hood saw, with horror, the familiar garter belt.

—It's okay, darling, Elena said to Wendy. And then to her husband:—It's okay, it's just a scratch. This isn't too bad. It'll close up fine. It's not a …

Elena held Wendy's doll body close, and then, reciting incantations known only to mothers, she unhooked the garter belt, the way some teenaged smoothy could undo a complicated support bra backwards in the dark. She fastened up Wendy's pants and set the crusty garment aside.

—Are you sure? Benjamin said. What about tetanus? Shouldn't we …

—Wendy, Elena said. What did you use to do this?

Wendy mumbled:

—Wilkinson double-bonded …

—A new one? A new blade?

Wendy nodded.

—Take better care of those things, Elena said to her husband. Lock them away. And where did you get that … that lingerie?

—Williamses', Wendy said.

She sank to the floor, wilted, and her two parents sat down with her, on the damp, fungal carpet. The garter belt lay aside like some strangely essential family gear. Elena knew all about the rococo ornamentation of grief and so she didn't try to comfort Wendy. Not right away. No hug was going to do the trick now. But Benjamin tried the laying on of hands. Where he had been penurious as a dad before, he suddenly recognized necessity. He wrapped his arms around his daughter. And Elena wasn't impervious to the sight of it. She wasn't impervious to the way embraces were a sort of cardiology. So Wendy lay in her father's arms, asking what happened, what happened to Mike, where was he now, refusing, so far, to be the bearer of his memory. Refusing, therefore, to let him journey away. All these losses were sutured up in Wendy now, like when she and Paul found Benjamin's father in the basement one weekend, when they heard his oddly practical voice calling out to them,
I've lost the use of my legs
. That stroke weekend. Like when Elena's father had died in the spring. All Wendy's losses were one. And so were Elena's, and Benjamin's, and Janey's, and Jim's, and …

—Darling, Elena said. Did Paul happen to call last night?

Between hyperventilating gasps:

—Said he was going to take the last train.

—Trains won't be running, Benjamin mumbled. Can't be.

—Maybe we should drive out to the station anyway, Elena said. Let's just go take a look.

—You don't think you should stay here? With her? What if they.… What if the telephones start working? I could go …

—No, I'd rather.… If there's going to be any trouble. I'd rather.

And then Elena smiled:

—It's got a heater, too. The car.

—Would that be okay? Ben said to Wendy, quietly. Do you think you could come with your mother and me while we drive down there? I'd rather you came with us, sweetheart.

It was almost noon when Benjamin got back with the Firebird. They packed Wendy in, her wrists sleeved in a Handi Wipes, that rag from the convenient plastic container. She had a glass of Tang with her. And a space blanket. The dog was huddled in the back seat. Up against her.

The temperature had dipped again. The unrestrained sun of the morning was gone. They headed down past the Silvermine Arts Guild and the Silvermine Tavern, where a cereal commercial had recently been filmed, and in doing so, they traveled across the latitudes of ancestral New Canaan. Here John Gruelle had first drawn his famous Raggedy Ann; landscape artist D. Putnam Bradley had painted his sweet pastorals; here Hamilton Hamilton had pen-and-inked, and Childe Hassam had gallicized a little verdant scene. Among writers Padraic Colum, Irish-born poet and folklorist, and Robert Flaherty, Arctic explorer, lived here, and William Rose Benét and Maxwell E. Perkins. Perkins, maybe, while editing
Look Homeward, Angel:
“We had a grand winter at New Canaan. Skating on most of the week-ends and hockey, and over New Year's, for three windless days, the whole three-mile lake, a sheet of flexible black ice.”

Over this history they drove, over decomposing Canaan Parish. Before long the Hoods would move. Half of the family would move and the other remain. Maybe in the years that followed, they would spend their weekends, like the Williamses, arranging the complexities of visitation. Benjamin Hood would drop his daughter off or find his daughter waiting in the driveway of her mother's house, in Wilton or Westport or East Haven or Darien. He would see his wife through the rustle of drapery. Benjamin Hood would leave his daughter alone for the afternoon at R-rated films, or he would go with her, exhausted, to the Red Coach Grill or McDonaldland. And Elena would be doing a telemarketing job offering subscriptions to
Club
, or she would have a photocopying job, and she would be secretly dating. Like Benjamin. But they wouldn't be dating the Williamses.

At the train station in New Canaan, that little end-of-the-line train station, they were told that the 11:10 had never made it to Stamford. It had been disabled somewhere around Greenwich.

The three Hoods crowded around the ticket window. Three blossoms on a thorny stem. They barked questions.

—Good news is, said the man at the window, they restored the power not long ago. On the New Haven line. The trains are running now. Probably your boy is in Stamford right now. Catching a taxi.

—If he has any money, Benjamin said.

The two men tried to force a laugh.

So they set off for Stamford, driving slowly. In the midst of all this personal trouble, what did a little history matter? What difference did snapshots make, or bronzed shoes? Who cared about those plastic cubes full of snapshots? History was cheap trophies and misspelled school newspapers, and it was also the end of town meetings in 1969, and it was also the guy in New Canaan who remained a
voluntary slave
for years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and it was the driving off of the Sagamores in the seventeenth century, and the pristine quiet of the region before the first English settlers. History's surveillance was subtle and enduring and its circular shape caught the Hoods, the Nixons, and everyone else. You could pay Arthur Janov to teach you to scream about history, or you could learn prayer or a mantra, or you could write your life down and hope to make peace with it, write it down, or paint it, or turn it into improvisational theater, but that was the best you could probably do. You were stuck.

Fucking family. Feeble and forlorn and floundering and foolish and frustrating and functional and sad, sad. Fucking family. Fiend or foe. Next month: the end of the Fantastic Four. The Fab Four. The Fetishistic Four. Family was all tricks with mirrors. Flimflam. Back through the generations, back forefathers and forefathers and forefathers, it was a mantle he didn't think he could hold up. All flummery. Paul Hood, the flame, the torch, burnt out. Burnt at both ends. He wished he could forget them, wished he could put this trip behind him, wished he was still eating with a bib, making models of stock cars, four on the floor, wished he was back in the arms of some girl. Missed Libbets. On the platform in Stamford. He wanted to run, to flee fathers, forefathers, fornification, femmes fatales, and all that stuff. He wanted to flee friends.

The night had been really, really long. Hours scribbling pictures on a scrap of newspaper he had found under the seat, hours frigid in the dark, really long that night, so long that he was starting to believe the dumb lies he'd told. Starting to believe dumb, little stories about his family. Believing in familiar comforts. Scribbling pictures and writing crumbling sentences. Free-verse trash and quotations from
Thick as a Brick
. Practically hallucinating. He actually believed his family would be waiting for him when he got in. They would be waiting there—while the rapist on the train hotfooted it back to his leopard skin-blanketed, water-bedded crash pad—and they would be terribly concerned and they would hug him and they would think up new nicknames for him and they would drive him directly to the largest possible bowl of shrimp cocktail.

Nah, it wasn't like that. Family values. The Carpenters were family values. And Nixon making Elvis an honorary drug enforcement agent. Family kept the doors open for alcoholism and incest and battery and ignorance; it ensured the passage of racist bullshit and bigotry from one generation to the next. His parents were gene-splicers, genetic engineers, implanting him with the same grim diseases they had suffered. He was a flash fire waiting to happen. He was fucked up and friendless and his chances were about fifty-fifty.

So the train had started moving again sometime around dawn, inching along at a speed no quicker than footsteps. Messing with Paul's unsteady pictures, with the stories he was making up, stories in which he hadn't done all the stupid things he had done in the last twenty-four hours. The train had been reduced to some prior kind of train, a steam engine bearing them through cow country. They arrived in Stamford early in the morning and all these people, all these other losers, asked Paul if he needed a ride, if anyone was going to meet him. All these people talking to him. All this kindness. But he said, no no no, not to worry, and he had been dragging his ass around the train station ever since. He had fought some babyish response to all this, he had pasted a smile on his mouth—yeah, my parents are coming for me. Asked a cabbie if this money, these last few crumpled bills—were enough to take him to New Canaan? Yep, the money was enough, but the roads were impassable. Have to wait till they cleared them off.

Anyway, Paul knew about these long waits. His mother was always late. He wasn't surprised to be reduced to this. He would start walking soon, except that he wouldn't walk home, he would walk back to school. He would walk until he could hitch and then he wouldn't stop until he was way up in the North. He wouldn't stop until he was so far north there were no deciduous trees, until granite bubbled up underneath every lawn. Glacier country.

He moved from the old waiting room with its congregation of bad-luck types, back out onto the platform, up and down the platform, kicked some newspaper vending machines, hoping for spare change. He paid ten cents to get into the pay toilet and washed his face. Back to the waiting room. Back out onto the platform.

He knew that he wouldn't come to a bad end, though, because he knew how comic books ended. They never ended. Comic books never ended. There was always more character development. Always another wrinkle in what had seemed to be unchanging and permanent. Every time the Thing left the F.F. he came back. His pain and rage receded and he was bantering jocosely with Stretcho and Sue and Johnny. He was back. Nobody ever died, at least not forever, and nobody ever disappeared, no quarrel was devastating, no closure was entire. The good moments, when the light outside was just right and everybody agreed—these moments came back again and again. Franklin would be resuscitated. Sue would take Reed back. And Dr. Doom, whose ashes had been scattered in sub-space, would menace them again. He'd impersonate their landlord or their accountant or something.