Gypsies Read online

  The buzz of the telephone ended abruptly and her mother’s voice came crackling out: “Hello?”

  “Mama?”

  There was a brief, cautious silence down the long lines from Pennsylvania.

  “Karen?” Mama said finally. “Is that you? Is everything all right?”

  “I’m with Laura,” Karen said.

  It was bad, of course, blurting it out like that. Her mother could only repeat, “Laura?”

  “Michael and I are with her. She’s here, she’s right here in the room with me.”

  The silence again. “I don’t understand.”

  “Well, it’s too much to explain. Mama, we’re out here in California. In the desert. We’re driving back East.”

  “Back here?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  The phone line stuttered.

  Karen said, “Mama?”

  “Yes…”

  “Mama, is it all right?” Her own voice suddenly high and childish in her ears. “We’ll be a few days, driving, you know … it takes time …”

  “There’s your father.”

  “I know. But it’s all right, isn’t it? You can talk to him?”

  “Well—I will.” Doubtfully. “I’ll try.” Then, “But if there’s something wrong, baby, you know you should tell me.”

  “I can’t do that now.”

  “Is it Gavin?”

  “I’m not with Gavin.”

  “He phoned here, you know. He’s looking for you.”

  That surprised her. “Gavin’s not the problem.”

  “No,” Mama said, “I didn’t think so,” and Karen wondered at the echo of old grief or fear there: had it been inevitable all along, this phone call, the journey back?

  Karen said, “I love you.”

  The telephone crackled with static. “I know you do … I know it.” “Tell Daddy.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “We’ll see you soon, then.” “Yes.”

  The silence was sudden and vast.

  Arizona, New Mexico, then the Rockies and an early threat of snow; the autumn plains. It was past the vacation season and so there was not much traffic on these big interstates, mainly diesel trucks. Nevertheless it was possible to think of this as a vacation. We’re family, Karen thought, and we talk and we act like family now; we sing songs in the car and we eat at the Howard Johnson’s. At times, suspended in the motion of the car, she would feel complete: memoryless and happy.

  But it never lasted.

  They stopped for dinner at a Trailways diner somewhere in Ohio. She was not sure where they were except that they had driven through barren wheat fields for the last hour and a half. Laura picked up a USA Today at the candy counter and carried it into the cafeteria with her. She folded it on the table so that Karen was able to see what she was reading. It was a page-two story on the Detroit murder stats for 1988 and Laura read it twice, frowning so intently that she seemed about to burst into tears. Then she looked up at Karen and said, “It’s not normal!”—as if Karen had been arguing with her. “My Christ! It’s ugly, and it’s worse than that—it’s so fucking unnecessary!”

  The man at the next booth peered up from under his Cleveland Indians cap, blinking. The waitress, passing, neglected to refill their coffee cups.

  Michael looked blankly at his aunt.

  And Karen thought to herself, It’s real, then. We are what we are and the Gray Man is real and he can kill people—children!—and my son, my only son, Michael, is in real danger, and we’re going home, my God, after all these silent years, we really are going home.

  Chapter Nine

  They came over a long wooded ridge and Laura could see the town, then, shouldering up against the Monongahela River, one more fucked-up old mill town, the ancient coke ovens and rolling mills and blast furnaces fouling the air—but not the way they did when times were prosperous—and the slatboard houses and the row houses all built back in the twenties or earlier, when the railroads were making money and the demand was big for rolled steel and bituminous coal.

  The sight of Polger Valley from this height invoked a rush of memory so intense that she pulled the car over to the gravel shoulder, her hands clenched on the wheel. She had never lived here—had left home a month before Mama and Daddy moved from Duquesne—but it was like every other place they had lived; it was like Duquesne and it was like Burleigh; it was like Pittsburgh with its hills and narrow streets. She looked at Karen beside her, Karen with her eyes fixed somewhere off beyond the river. “You drive,” Laura said. “You know the way.” Her sister shrugged.

  Laura walked around the car to the passenger side. Her legs felt hard and tense from driving. It was a cold, late, cloudy afternoon; the ragged hillside maples were spindly and bare. Streetlights blinked on in the distant, empty industrial alleys along the river.

  Climbing back into the car, she glanced at Michael in the rear seat. He was gazing out blankly over the valley, lost in some thought. He had been like this —sullen like this—ever since California.

  She rolled up her window. “Cold back there?”

  He only shrugged.

  Last week, in a hotel room outside Cleveland, Laura had asked him why he was so quiet these last few days. Karen had gone shopping for winter clothes; Michael was sitting on the bed, watching a football game with the sound turned down. He looked up at her briefly, unhappily. “Am I?”

  “Yes. But not just quiet. Pissed-off quiet. So who are you mad at, Michael?”

  He shrugged.

  She said, “At me?”

  “Do I have to talk about it?”

  “No. Of course not. But we’re living in each other’s pockets and there’s no way around that. It might make life easier if you did.”

  He shrugged again. “I just think it’s stupid… all this should have happened before.”

  “All this?”

  “What we’re doing. Where we’re going. What we’re finding out.” He straightened his shoulders. “I mean, you knew what you were. All your life. All three of you did. But nobody ever asked? Nobody said, Where did I come from, what am I? Not until now?”

  He pressed his back against the wall of the hotel room, hugged his knees against himself. Laura said, “We were negligent and we screwed up your life—is that it?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not just mine.”

  “So, Michael, who should we have asked?”

  “Who are you planning to ask?”

  Well, all right, she thought. He was bright and he had a point. But he didn’t really understand. He was fifteen years old and everything seemed too obvious. “You don’t know what it was like back home.”

  “I know, it was rough. But—”

  “Michael, listen to me.” She sat down next to him, and maybe he sensed the seriousness in her voice, because he was quiet again, not sullen now but attentive. She said, “I did ask once. I was maybe five, maybe six years old. I went to Daddy. I showed him what I could do. Made a little window for him. A window into some nice place, a child’s idea of a nice place, a sunny day and, you know, flowers and meadows, and a deer standing there. I meant to find out whether he could do it. I think most of all I wanted to know what I was supposed to do with it, this strange little trick—what was it for?”

  Michael said, “He wouldn’t tell you?”

  “I don’t remember what he said. All I remember is showing him, wanting to ask him. And then I remember lying in bed. There were bruises on my face. Bruises on my arms. Five very clear bruises on my right arm above the elbow, and I knew he’d grabbed me there, that those bruises fit the shape and angle of his fingers.”

  “He beat you,” Michael said.

  “Yes. It sounds terrible, but… yes, that’s the word for it.”

  “That’s sick.” Michael’s outrage was obvious and heartfelt. “You must have hated him for it.”

  “No. I did not.”

  Michael frowned.

  She said, “Do you hate your father? I mean, hey, he walked out on you. Walked ou
t on you and your mom. That’s a pretty big thing. You hate him for it?”

  “No.” Cautiously now. “But that’s different.”

  “Is it? Maybe it’s only a matter of degree.”

  “He never beat me.”

  “Should I have hated Daddy for that? Well, maybe you’re right… maybe I should have. Tim did, at least eventually. But, Michael, I was too young. When you’re five years old you don’t have that kind of hate in you. You forgive. Not because you want to but because you don’t have a choice. Can you understand that? Sometimes you forgive because there’s nothing else you can do.”

  It was more than she had meant to say.

  He looked at her steadily.

  “But now,” he said, “you do have a choice.”

  And there was nothing Laura could say to that— no answer she could think of.

  They pulled up at the house just after dark.

  It was an old row house on a hill that ran down toward the river, and behind it there was a steep wooded slope. The street was called Montpelier and it dead-ended against a chalky cliff.

  This was not the greatest neighborhood. Some of these houses had been mended and repaired; many had not. Once upon a time, Laura thought, this would have been a street full of working people, Poles and Germans, but now, she guessed, most of these folks were laid off from the mills, and there were more than a few black faces peering out from shuttered windows as she parked beside the curb. Down where Montpelier met Riverside there was a big noisy bar; Riverside, a commercial street, was crowded with pawnshops, barred and locked at dusk.

  Odd that her parents had stayed here so long. All my life, she thought, we moved every year, every two years. Sometimes because Daddy got laid off for drinking, sometimes for no discernible reason. Here, finally, they had settled. Maybe because they were alone together at last; maybe because Daddy had finally built up some seniority at the local mill.

  Maybe because we left.

  But now, she thought, we’re home.

  There was a yellow bulb burning over the porch. Karen parallel-parked and Laura unloaded luggage from the trunk. Michael hefted a suitcase in each hand. He regarded the house warily. “So,” he said, “this is it?”

  The screen door creaked open. Mama stepped out into the porch light. Laura’s hands were shaking; she clasped them together in front of her.

  “Yes,” she told her nephew. “This is it.”

  Chapter Ten

  1

  His mother and his aunt shared a second-floor bedroom, but Michael had the third floor of this old house all to himself.

  He liked it up here. His grandparents were too old to climb the stairs, so everything was covered with a fine layer of undisturbed dust, and everything was antique: furniture, he guessed, they had been packing around all their lives. Michael was accustomed to the house in Toronto, a new house full of new things, as if nothing had existed before the year 1985; the Fauves’ third floor was a shocking contrast.

  His grandmother had come up once that first night, gasping on the stairs. She apologized for the clutter. “All this mess,” she said sadly. “When Mama Lucille died we put all her stuff up here. So this is your family, Michael. See? This was your great-grandfather’s rolltop desk. That big old bed belonged to my parents …”

  The bed had sat for so long in this room, and was so massive, that the floorboards had curved around it. His mother aired the sheets and pillowcases for him, but the bed retained a characteristic odor, not unpleasant, of ancient down and ticking, of whole lives lived between its sheets. Sleeping there these last few nights Michael had wished he could make windows into past time as well as across worlds: that he could gaze back down the years and maybe discover the secret of his strangeness. Wished this old bed could talk.

  He spent a lot of time up here. Considering the situation in the house, it was better to be alone. And, anyway, he liked to be by himself. Alone, he could let his thoughts roam freely. Nothing to fear up here, no Gray Man, only these old high corniced rooms with their ripply windowpanes and the winter sky showing through; only the trickle of the water in the radiator grills. Lying here, suspended in down and history, he could allow himself to feel (but faintly, carefully) the rush of secret power in himself, the wheels of possibility spinning in him; to contemplate a step sideways out of Polger Valley and time itself; to wonder whether Aunt Laura’s instincts might not have been correct all those years ago, maybe there was a better world somewhere, a truly better world, and maybe he could reach it: maybe it was only a quarter step away down some hidden axis… maybe it was a door he could learn to open.

  He thought about it often.

  Downstairs, things were different. A week in this house had not inured Michael to all the silence and indignities.

  His grandmother insisted on cooking. Every evening he helped her with the heavy china platters: chicken and gravy, roast beef and potatoes, meat loaf and boiled peas relayed steaming from the tiny kitchen to the dining room. Jeanne Fauve was overweight but not really fat; she was the kind of nervous woman whose metabolism runs fast. She was constantly in motion but the motion was inhibited, no large gestures but a lot of fluttering. Her hands moved like birds; her eyes darted like a bird’s eyes. She wore her hair in white spring curls bound tightly to her head. Michael kind of liked her and he thought she might like him—she would stare thoughtfully at him when she thought he didn’t notice. But if he looked directly at her, her eyes would dart away.

  Tonight Michael helped her carry in a pot roast from the oven. Everything was in place: linen tablecloth, the china, the tarnished silverware. Everybody in their chair except Michael’s grandfather. Michael sat down at the foot of the table. He was hungry and the roast smelled wonderful, but he had learned to be patient. He put his hands in his lap; the mantel clock ticked. His mother whispered something to Aunt Laura.

  Then, finally, Willis Fauve came ambling in from the downstairs bathroom, where he had washed his hands. Willis was not really a large man, Michael thought, but he was a big presence in the room. His forearms were big and he wore polyester pants cinched over his expansive belly and a starched white shirt open at the collar. He had a small face set in a large head, blunt features concentrated around heavy bifocals. He wore his hair in a bristly Marine cut and his thick eyebrows made him seem to be always frowning. Most of the time he was frowning. Certainly he did not ever seem happy.

  Sometimes he would come to the table drunk. Not loudly or conspicuously drunk, but his walk would be unsteady and he would talk more than he normally did: mainly complaints about the neighbors. He would sit opposite Michael, and his acrid breath would waft across the table. Willis Fauve was a beer drinker. Beer, he said, was a food. It had food value.

  Tonight Willis was just detectably drunk. Michael thought of him as “Willis” because he could not imagine calling this man “Grandfather.” Michael was acquainted with grandfathers mainly from TV: kindly, grizzled men in bib overalls. But Willis was not kindly; he was not even friendly. He had made it obvious that he regarded this visit as an intrusion and that he would not be happy until his privacy was restored. Sometimes—if he’d had enough to drink—he would come out and say so.

  Willis sat down wheezing. Without looking at anyone he folded his hands in his lap and closed his eyes. Michael was supposed to do the same, but he kept his eyes open. “Thank you, Lord,” Willis Fauve intoned, “for this food which you have seen fit to set before us. Amen.”

  Michael’s grandmother echoed the “Amen.” Willis began to circulate the pot roast. Michael took modest helpings.

  He felt his grandfather’s attention on him while he ate. He kept his eyes on his plate, worked his knife and fork mechanically. But he felt Willis watching him. His grandmother tried to make some conversation, the shopping she’d done, what the hairdresser had said, but nobody could think of anything to add and the talk ran out of gas. Michael had pretty much cleared his plate and was looking forward to the end of the meal when his grandfather said, t
oo loudly, “You know what I call that shirt?”

  Michael’s shirt, he meant. Michael was wearing a Talking Heads T-shirt he’d carried with him from Toronto. Black T with a red-and-white graphic. Nothing spectacular, but he was moderately proud of the way he looked in it.

  Nobody wanted to answer the question but Willis himself. Willis said brightly, “I call that a fuck shirt.”

  Michael regarded his grandfather with bewilderment.

  “I see these kids,” Willis said. “I drive by the high school every morning. I see the way they dress. You know why they dress like that? It’s like sticking up their middle finger. It’s an insult. It’s ‘fuck you.’ They’re saying that with their clothes.”

  Michael had observed that Willis, who complained about profane language on TV, loosened up in that regard when he was drinking.

  Karen said, “Michael forgot to change before dinner.”

  Michael looked at his mother sharply. She returned the look, a warning: Don’t say anything… not now.

  “A fuck shirt,” Willis repeated.

  “Michael,” Karen said, “go change.” When he didn’t move, she whispered, “Please!”

  He stood up sullenly.

  At the stairs Michael paused a second to look back at the dinner table, at the quiet tableau of the women with their heads contritely bowed, Willis Fauve still regarding him, frowning. They locked gazes briefly.

  It was Willis who looked away. He said to Michael’s mother, “You let him dress like that?”

  Michael moved on up the stairs.

  “A fuck shirt,” Willis marveled, “at my dinner table.”

  But Michael understood the significance of Willis’s complaint. It’s not the shirt, he thought. You know it, I know it. It’s not the shirt you’re afraid of.

  In his room Michael thought about Willis and about the silence at the dinner table.

  This attic room looked out over the rooftops of Polger Valley toward the river and the mill. The mill dominated the valley like a black, crouched animal. The chimney flues were black and smokeless against a hard gray dusk. Michael put his hand to the window and the glass felt icy under his fingers. Snow soon, he thought.