Four Souls

EIGHT. His Comeuppance Polly Elizabeth

THE BOY refused to wean himself and wouldn’t be coaxed onto a bottle or even a cup. He stumbled to his mother and threw himself into her lap. Even yanked at the buttons of her shirt and bawled in fury until she gave in and allowed him to suck. She indulged him, I thought, a bit too long for decency, but that could hardly be helped as he was so adamant. He yelled when she refused him. His roar was of a bullish intensity that filled the house with growling echoes. But when allowed the breast, he closed his eyes, clung to her with sweet trust, and was the picture of such relieved desperation that I could not imagine refusing him myself.

When he was satisfied and when he was rapt in his play, I don’t believe there ever was a prettier or more loving child. Oh, he didn’t like to speak, but why should he? Every need of his was anticipated and then met before it even formed in his mind. He walked and ran and even pulled himself up the stairs at a precocious number of months. His teeth came in and shone like pearls. His hair grew long, we clipped it, then it grew in thicker yet and in summer turned a surprising pale flax color. He wore skirts and gowns. It hurt us when we had to put him in boy pants at the insistence of his father. To watch Fleur dote upon him warmed me. She was sad as I was at each sign of babyhood put away, and if he didn’t speak at two years it concerned us less than it concerned his father. Fleur and I and the boy understood one another to such perfection that words were utterly unnecessary. We could play for hours in the wide sun-filled nursery and in the zoo and parks. That was true happiness. The boy brought it out of us.

During this time, Fleur made a number of day trips that, I was given to understand, had to do with a daughter by a former liaison. The girl now resided in a boarding school, and Fleur was intent on getting her to live with us. Each time Fleur left, I awaited her return with excitement, and told the boy he’d best prepare to have an older sister. But each time the driver pulled the dusty car around the curve of the drive, Fleur sat alone in the backseat. There was no child. She never let me know the entire reason she returned alone, but I understood in time that it had something to do with the girl’s wishes, her pride. And so it was, the boy alone reigned over our little kingdom, and although we tried not to spoil him, it was obvious at last that we had done so. He was a commanding little thing and could get the better of us with a gesture.

One day, as Fleur was tumbling back and forth on the figured carpet of the nursery, laughing with her boy, John James Mauser entered the room. He stood watching the two at their wild play, his face rapt and charmed. Fleur was reserved around him, held herself stiffly and never smiled. It was a mystery to me why Mauser had chosen to marry her, for I’d never seen her give to him one signal of affection. He did not seem to miss it, somehow, but took his pleasure in watching her at times like these — when she was unguarded, unaware that he was watching, entirely natural. She was playful, then. I knew that side of her well. We even shared it. A love of foolishness perhaps only possible with an innocent child.

“Don’t stop,” said Mauser, putting up his hand when Fleur noticed him and froze. It was remarkable how she could suddenly become another person in his presence. She wasn’t cold, exactly, nor did she seem angry or filled with some hidden and resenting energy. She was simply solemn and watchful. She was decorous. Within that room, she raised herself and gave the boy over into my arms. When she walked to Mauser it was with an upright gliding grace that the most polished women in Minneapolis society might envy. She took his arm. A talented mimic, she had quickly perfected her carriage, manners, behavior, by steady observation of other women.

“We must go now,” she said, and as she swept past him, taking his arm, I saw that hot glow in his eyes. It was always there. He burned in the grip of some blandishment. She must know spells, I always thought, for to elicit such devotion one would think she might make some tender movement toward him. Show him some slight mark of love. He had apparently accepted his fate, though, to love unrequited and with a simple, fateless, heat. Whatever spell she laid on him, I wish I knew its verse. Can there be anything quite so remarkable and pure as devotion without recompense, devotion for devotion’s art?

He folded her arm against his breast and they went out, who knows where, to some dinner, and I was left with the boy. I remember that day, it sticks. I cannot forget it. That is because it was the first day I saw something wrong with the child.

John James Mauser II had of course been to doctors, but all had pronounced him normal and even advanced, a credit to a father who sat on the hospital board. It occurs to me now that the doctors may have had suspicions, but that they had perhaps been afraid to speak frankly to one who possessed so much power over them individually and over the institution as a whole. Mauser was the hospital’s primary philanthropic benefactor. Who’d dare tell such a man that his child was damaged, unwhole, fractured in mind? I myself couldn’t do it, and even now I hasten to add that the boy was swift in certain other ways. Alert, he was alert in spirit I know that, though with a stranger he was apt to shut his eyes and become dull and heavy as a stone. I’d always made excuses. I saw what I wanted, doted on it, and disregarded any sign that did not fit.

But on that day, as we played sweetly together on the lion-shaped rug that his mother had bought, he suddenly went absent. He crouched beside me, very still, staring out the window into the empty sky. His blue eyes were just as vacant. He did not see me. He saw nothing, but could not be moved. For one hour, he sat there, me beside him, ever more frantically trying to coax his attention away from the nothingness where he had flown. But he was unswerving. His mouth fell open. His features coarsened into caricature. He was the very picture of idiocy. I cried out, swept him close to me, and then he began to babble. Those sounds, those syllables, those pathetic attempts. They were frightful, then, never mind the hideous they would become.

SWIFT in other ways. I said, didn’t I, that young Mauser who succeeded in breaking my heart on that calm day (where others more adept had failed) was swift in other ways? Well, so he was. The boy could count. By some strange and secret method he assigned to his little world numbers, numerical values, mathematical identities. I think it started with the card playing that Fleur taught him. For he picked it up and soon it was evident that he could make lightning calculations somewhere in his puzzle box of a brain. They played cards — all in all, it was the strangest sight I ever saw. She began by teaching him little simple games, harmless child’s games, but progressed until they immersed themselves daily in those matches, of which I know little, that occupy coarse men at coarse tables and are carried on under clouds of cigar smoke to the tune of clinking shot glasses. I may be too much a creature of social fears, or at any rate of rules and breeding, but I did think it wasn’t right for Fleur to teach the boy every kind of poker and gambler’s trick when he couldn’t yet recite the alphabet.

And yet she loved him to her heart’s end, yes, that could be seen. She did not believe the doctors Mauser took him to weekly, who pronounced the boy a hopeless idiot and cast his father into a depth. She remained as she was with him, cheerful and laughing. She drank her whiskey, but now more secretly I think. The only difference in their play was that mutual and growing passion for cards. John James Mauser, meanwhile, changed. Not that Fleur would have cared to note it. But he did change, he grew still more thoughtful, and where he had always made an outward show of the Roman Catholic faith, a hypocritical nod to the church when it suited his purpose, he now became a true believer. I alone saw this occur in him. No one else thought it remarkable he went to Mass every morning before his coffee was poured. No one else was aware he took daily Eucharist and made a score of confessions every month. I suppose, being who he was, he had a lot to confess. I wonder if he ever got to the bottom of the barrel of his sins?

As he was somewhat more approachable now, and as I had by sheer ubiquity become an accepted person — perhaps an accepted annoyance to Mauser, but nonetheless accepted — I thought to ask him about his fervent adoption of religious practice. To my surprise, he took me seriously, and answered. Perhaps I should have known it was the boy’s affliction that had prompted him.

“You were always aware, I think”—he regarded me with a sharp gaze—“of how I wanted a son. It was a dear wish of mine — it still is,” he amended quietly. “I feel that I am responsible for this one’s lack of…” He struggled. “…his abnormalities… his strangeness. I have come to believe that the boy’s backward traits are a judgment on the man I was.”

This amazing statement was forced out with honesty through pride. For the first time ever, I felt some human quality, a streak of humility, a signal of Mauser’s inner workings and life, that pulled at me. Mauser had avoided me ever since his illness, hating that I’d seen him weak and outside himself in the throes of appalling fits. Now, he seemed to have put aside that old shame. He allowed himself to speak with an exhaustive frankness. Apparently, having had the time to page back through his life, he found evidence all along of the workings of a certain presence.

“An inhuman presence,” he told me carefully. “I hesitate to assign God the tedious task of looking after me, but I’ve come to believe that I’ve been spared death many times in narrow circumstances by something, for something. For some reason.”

I sat alertly. “I would like to hear it.”

“Perhaps it is not for me to understand. If so, may it remain shrouded. But I have been spared, or rescued, or brought back to life, many times. When I was a boy, for instance, I fell through the ice of a deep pond and was known to have been submerged for nearly half an hour before I was dragged out. I came to. I survived that and I was only four years old. When I was a young hooligan I jumped a train but judged wrong and fell beneath it, managed to roll out between the wheels. Don’t know how I did it. Unscathed. And then in my lumbering days a Swede dropped a pine on me. Sure, it should have killed me. But two jagged branches that might have run me through pinned me beneath the trunk, supporting it so that I was merely tapped down a little into the soft duff. I fell off a scaffold once and was caught by the belt and hung there, sixty feet off the ground. I married Placide and on our wedding day the horses spooked and ran straight over me, you remember. Not one hoof mark. Stood and brushed myself off. There was the bullet Fantan took for me in the can of sardines.”

“What?” I said.

“A long story for another time.” He waved that off. “And then there was my long illness after I’d so ridiculously gone to war. I did some terrible things in my younger days and was always surprised and suspicious that luck seemed to reward rather than punish me. But now I think perhaps luck was just saving for my comeuppance. Or that the just desserts that skipped over me were visited upon my son.”

There she is, I thought the next day, watching from a nursery window as Fleur emerged from the car below. His comeuppance. It startled me to think like that, but the fact is, Mauser’s history had made me shiver. It rang true. I have stopped believing in a divine lookout, but Mauser’s luck was striking, or had been, until the grotesque collapse of his illness. And when Fleur cured him, I wondered now, was that a piece of good fortune or was it the beginning of a subterranean justice that now started, one catastrophe and then the next, to bring him down?

His investments began to fail. A lead mine collapsed. Securities he’d thought invulnerable to the world’s flux proved otherwise. A fertilizer plant he’d owned closed and he had to sell off those lands he’d acquired by means underhanded, anyway. He was unnerved, I could see it, uncertain. Even after he came home at night, he closeted himself for hours with his accountant. When he emerged he wore a desperate, foraging look. Still, an edifice of money built as large as Mauser’s, one that withstood all the world’s undoing, doesn’t go all at once. The daily features of life seemed changeless. The household still functioned with its usual extravagance and Mrs. Testor continued her profitable ways with the meats. Fleur’s account at the dress shop was paid and the couple still appeared at social events. With her hair piled high, she still displayed the bold profile and predatory grace of a swooping bird. Mauser, although he cut as fine a figure, wore an increasingly haunted look, though maybe hunted is the better word.

MY LOVE for the boy, and the fact that I’d succeeded in drawing Mauser out on the subject of his religious habits, broke some ice between the two of us. Still, the old animosity I’d felt for his lurking manservant persisted until one day I asked about a detail of conversation that remained odd to me — Mauser’s mention of the can of sardines and the bullet. I then was told the story of the way the two men forged their bond.

We sat together in the breakfast room, in pale light, our coffee on delicate gold-rimmed saucers. I wondered if he might sell them to me when the house went, then quashed my greedy thought. Mauser lighted a small cheroot and began to speak.

“My war starts with a can of sardines, a small can, unworthy of mayhem. I see it sitting in the dim illumination, there on the low table, its wrapper a bright yellow, cheerful, centering the group of men.”

He tapped the cigar. I let him go on, didn’t stop as he waxed thoughtful.

MOLES, human gophers, that’s what we were. Burrowing creatures. I loved the dirt, craved the solid gray promise of it, nosed into the cold black safety, set my shoulders into the swing of the pick, the shovel, or dug with my face when the shelling commenced. Fantan too, here, he can tell you we loved dirt. I don’t care if it was wet or dry or stank of human rot. Life in the trenches fostered adoration of the muck and the shit of survival. Don’t make a face! Queen Polly Elizabeth! I swear you’re a Brit, a throwback, you and your conflagrate them flower beds laid out in rows.

I first got over there. I thought to myself, why, these British, they’re short! They were lean as weasels, too, my God, sunk in the chest and small. I thought they picked out the little ones to live in these dugouts, or maybe they were stunted by island living somehow. Come to find out, it wasn’t any of my theories that held the reason I stood a head at least over even the tallest Englishman. Quite simply, the tallest had been slaughtered first. The British Recruiting Office had been forced to lower their requirements from five foot eight, I believe it was when the war began, to five foot three by the time Lloyd George started the conscription. So there I was, and Fantan, easy targets and easy picking.

“If this goes on,” I said to him one foul afternoon, “think about the future of the English as a breed. The French too, I suspect. Darwin would say it is survival of the measliest. Maybe all of Europe, if it isn’t one big crater, will be composed of miniature, clever, tunneling folk. Of course, there are the women, the fair and stalwart mothers and widows, as the newspapers call them back home. They’ll tower. They’ll lambaste and dominate. They’ll thrive. They’ve not been culled for height or for intelligence yet. They are the ones who will run things.”

Fantan concurred, agreeable then as he is now, although of course very different, my dear. I say you’re British with your flowers because once I got there, moved into the trenches you see, and began to understand what a drunk fool I’d been to recruit myself, the other item that astonished me about the British was their stubborn passion for the civilized bloom. Our first shelter, which we tried absurdly to make comfortable, was actually decorated all around the door with the trained vine of a climbing sweet pea. The girlfriend of some poor poetic cluck had sent the seeds on his request. He was blown to literal pieces before the show of the first bud, so it was left for the rest of us to enjoy the bower. The damn blossoms were enormous, hot pink, lavender, and white, fertilized by human guts.

Oh, you’ve gone pale green, Polly Elizabeth. Your mother wouldn’t have sat still this long. But you feel sorry for me, don’t you, or is it something else? I know you’re sick to the gills of Fantan, of putting up with him. You want to know why I brought him back, of course, and why I won’t let you, any more than I permitted your mother, toss him to the church or the veterans’ ward. You want to know how I won him, or he won me, or we became possessed of each other. Since you can’t ask him, you’re asking me. I’ll answer, too, it’s easy. A can of sardines.

All right, then, another coffee, that will do.

The sardines had got to be a kind of joke in the lulls. There were these times when not much went on beyond the pounding of guns, the sniping, and the occasional man hit north or south of you. There were evenings we sat in the dugout, which we’d banked well and scratched deeper and deeper into the earth and improved, even with a scrap of rug, a crate, a table of sorts, so that we thought our burrow was pretty grand — spacious and well concealed and snug. There were these two men, a couple, mates they called themselves, like Fantan and me. Bert Chiswick and Mr. Dragon were their names. The two thought themselves mighty clever when it came to bridge, which I despise. But we played it with them, had to before they would put themselves out for whist, pinochle, or especially poker, which from his name you might infer my friend Fantan knew a great deal more than a little something.

As a matter of fact, it was how he had made his living in New Orleans, and the reason he joined up with me, the both of us in ardent flight, he from an unsustainable loss, welshing out of a debt, and I from your sister, who had me so far in the hole I didn’t know how I’d get out with her, either. I’m not going to dwell on that, however, don’t purse your lips. Fantan had possession of the can of sardines, something we’d kept circulating there among us, one winning it, then the other, though most times it sat in Fantan’s breast pocket, guarded against theft. There wasn’t much else that we could play for, you see, and the can had a rather nice heft to it by then, a history like the sweet pea vine, a familiarity and weight, like a talisman once you carried it. And indeed, no one had been hit while in possession of the can, that much was true. I can still see it — the worn yellow seal, the fading print. PRINCE OF WALES BRISLINGS IN MUSTARD SAUCE, the small black official-looking seal down in the corner. FISHMONGERS TO THE KING had been torn or rubbed away, but the aura clung. I associated the can with the royals in each suit and imagined the King himself, flapping his linen serviette from its folds, sitting down to a steaming cup of brewed tea one morning, his servant lifting the silver dome away from a Wedgwood plate that held rounds of sweet buttered toast, an egg, poached of course, and one perfect Prince of Wales Brisling with a dollop of its own fishy mustard sauce athwart the tail.

Fantan made his living by his wits and by his looks too, I should add. Women clung to his boots, though I suppose you’re immune to such things, schooled by the redoubtable Hammond of the Ham Bosoms, a polish on you, porcelain finish that wipes clean, resistant to finger marks or any foul smears a man might leave there. But I’ve gone astray again, haven’t I, sister. I do apologize. It was on that cold afternoon, suspecting we would have to prepare for an attack, our gas equipment piled at each of our elbows, that we dealt for the can.

I was its most recent host, but after the game Fantan was the new possessor. We were laughing. I removed it from my breast pocket and just as I passed it over to him the luck ran out of the can. For as I bent to scoop the cards up as well, the can blew straight out of my fingers. Blasted forward by a sniper’s bullet, the can exploded up through Fantan’s chin, slicing his tongue and thereby correcting his speech forever of his frequent obscenities and much else too. That was the beginning of a fierce attack that shot my lungs and scored my nerves — I was no good after seeing Fantan’s mouth shredded by the can. No good after seeing so many other things, Polly Elizabeth, that made his poor wound as nothing. No good, no good, and after raving for some months sent back here. Insisted that Fantan stay with me, forever. Now you know why.

I WAS QUIET. I had put down my coffee. Fantan had come into the room and now we looked at each other steadily. I noticed his brown eyes, the lashes darkened as if by soot. I had never seen him as a man or even known he was intelligent. He wouldn’t speak to me because he knew I despised him and he even affected foolish maneuvers around me, which I now saw were ploys. The two had laughed behind my back at my dismissal, at my prudery, and my sorry treatment of the man was suddenly a feature of livid shame. I believe I went red and caught my breath in and wished to cry.

“No, no,” said Mauser, dropping his hand on mine. His hard brown hand. “Fantan doesn’t hold it against you, now, do you, Fantan?” Through tears, I gazed up at the savior of the father of the boy I thought of, a fancy of mine, as my godchild. Fantan looked down at me with some amusement. He shrugged to show that my approval or disdain was all the same to him, and I began to laugh. So you see, once a person drops the scales of prejudiced certainty and doubts appear, there is no telling how far a heart can open. Even toward Fantan. From outside, there was Mr. Mauser and his rare creature of a wife, his heir, his proud household. A solid construction. Scandalous, perhaps, but wealth fixes that. From within, I saw a poor collection of wrecked knaves and flawed hearts, and where before I’d had to mask such truths, now the honest understanding provided comfort. We had our shortcomings, at least, in common, if not our triumphs.