Moonchasers and Other Stories

En Famille

By the time I was eight years old, I’d fallen disconsolately in love with any number of little girls who had absolutely no interest in me. These were little girls I’d met in all the usual places, school, playground, neighborhood.

Only the girl I met at the racetrack took any interest in me. Her name was Wendy and, like me, she was brought to the track three or four times a week by her father, after school in the autumn months, during working hours in the summer.

Ours was one of those impossibly romantic relationships that only a young boy can have (all those nights of kissing pillows while pretending it was her — this accompanied by one of those swelling romantic songs you hear in movies with Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant — how vulnerable and true and beautiful she always was in my mind’s perfect eye). I first saw her the spring of my tenth year, and not until I was fifteen did we even say hello to each other, even though we saw each other at least three times a week. But she was always with me, this girl I thought about constantly, and dreamed of nightly, the melancholy little blonde with the slow sad blue eyes and the quick sad smile.

I knew all about the sadness I saw in her. It was my sadness, too. Our fathers brought us to the track in order to make their gambling more palatable to our mothers. How much of a vice could it be if you took the little one along? The money lost at the track meant rent going unpaid, grocery store credit cut off, the telephone frequently disconnected. It also meant arguing. No matter how deeply I hid in the closet, no matter how many pillows I put over my head, I could still hear them shrieking at each other. Sometimes he hit her. Once he even pushed her down the stairs and she broke her leg. Despite all this, I wanted them to stay together. I was terrified they would split up. I loved them both beyond imagining. Don’t ask me why I loved him so much. I have no idea.

The day we first spoke, the little girl and I, that warm May afternoon in my fifteenth year, a black eye spoiled her very pretty, very pale little face. So he’d finally gotten around to hitting her. My father had gotten around to hitting me years ago. They got so frustrated over their gambling, their inability to stop their gambling, that they grabbed the first person they found and visited all their despair on him.

She was coming up from the seats in the bottom tier where she and her father always sat. I saw her and stepped out into the aisle.

“Hi,” I said after more than six years of us watching each other from afar.

“Hi.”

“I’m sorry about your eye.”

“He was pretty drunk. He doesn’t usually get violent. But it seems to be getting worse lately.” She looked back at her seats. Her father was glaring at us. “I’d better hurry. He wants me to get him a hot dog.”

“I’d like to see you sometime.”

She smiled, sad and sweet with her black eye. “Yeah, me, too.”

I saw her the rest of the summer but we never again got the chance to speak. Nor did we make the opportunity. She was my narcotic. I thought of no one else, wanted no one else. The girls at school had no idea what my home life was like, how old and worn my father’s gambling had made my mother, how anxious and angry it had made me. Only Wendy understood.

Wendy Wendy Wendy. By now, my needs having evolved, she was no longer just the pure dream of a forlorn boy. I wanted her carnally, too. She’d become a beautiful young woman.

Near the end of that summer an unseasonable rainy grayness filled the skies. People at the track took to wearing winter coats. A few races had to be called off. Wendy and her father suddenly vanished.

I looked for them every day, and every night trudged home feeling betrayed and bereft. “Can’t find your little girlfriend?” my father said. He thought it was funny.

Then one night, while I was in my bedroom reading a science fiction magazine, he shouted: “Hey! Get out here! Your girlfriend’s on TV!”

And so she was.

“Police announce an arrest in the murder of Myles Larkin, who was found stabbed to death in his car last night. They have taken Larkin’s only child, sixteen-year-old Wendy, into custody and formally charged her with the murder of her father.”

I went twice to see her but they wouldn’t let me in. Finally, I learned the name of her lawyer, lied that I was a shirttail cousin, and he took me up to the cold concrete visitors’ room on the top floor of city jail.

Even in the drab uniform the prisoners wore, she looked lovely in her bruised and wan way.

“Did he start beating you up again?” I asked.

“No.”

“Did he start beating up your mother?”

“No.”

“Did he lose his job or get you evicted?”

She shook her head. “No. It was just that I couldn’t take it anymore. I mean, he wasn’t losing any more or any less money at the track, it was just I... I snapped. I don’t know how else to explain it. It was like I saw what he’d done to our lives and I... I snapped. That’s all — I just snapped.”

She served seven years in a minimum-security women’s prison upstate during which time my parents were killed in an automobile accident, I finished college, got married, had a child and took up the glamorous and adventurous life of a tax consultant. My wife, Donna, knew about my mental and spiritual ups and downs. Her father had been an abusive alcoholic.

I didn’t see Wendy until twelve years later, when I was sitting at the track with my seven-year-old son. He didn’t always like going to the track with me — my wife didn’t like me going to the track at all — so I’d had to fortify him with the usual comic books, candy and a pair of “genuine” Dodgers sunglasses.

Between races, I happened to look down at the seats Wendy and her father usually took, and there she was. Something about the cock of her head told me it was her.

“Can we go, Dad?” my son, Rob, said. “It’s so boring here.”

Boring? I’d once tried to explain to his mother how good I felt when I was at the track. I was not the miserable, frightened, self-effacing owner of Advent Tax Systems (some system — me and my low-power Radio Shack computer and software). No... when I was at the track I felt strong and purposeful and optimistic, and frightened of nothing at all. I was pure potential — potential for winning the easy cash that was the mark of men who were successful with women, and with their competitors, and with their own swaggering dreams.

“Please, Dad. It’s really boring here. Honest.”

But all I could see, all I could think about, was Wendy. I hadn’t seen her since my one visit to jail. Then I noticed that she, too, had a child with her, a very proper-looking little blond girl whose head was cocked at the odd and fetching angle so favored by her mother.

We saw each other a dozen more times before we spoke.

Then: “I knew I’d see you again someday.”

Wan smile. “All those years I was in prison, I wasn’t so sure.” Her daughter came up to her then and Wendy said: “This is Margaret.”

“Hello, Margaret. Glad to meet you. This is my son, Rob.”

With the great indifference only children can summon, they nodded hellos.

“We just moved back to the city,” Wendy explained. “I thought I’d show Margaret where I used to come with my father.” She mentioned her father so casually, one would never have guessed that she’d murdered the man.

Ten more times we saw each other, children in tow, before our affair began.

April 6 of that year was the first time we ever made love, this in a motel where the sunset was the color of blood in the window, and a woman two rooms away wept inconsolably. I had the brief fantasy that it was my wife in that room.

“Do you know how long I’ve loved you?” she said.

“Oh, God, you don’t know how good it is to hear that.”

“Since I was eight years old.”

“For me, since I was nine.”

“This would destroy my husband if he ever found out.”

“The same with my wife.”

“But I have to be honest.”

“I want you to be honest.”

“I don’t care what it does to him. I just want to be with you.”

In December of that year, my wife, Donna, discovered a lump in her right breast. Two weeks later she received a double masectomy and began chemotherapy.

She lived nine years, and my affair with Wendy extended over the entire time. Early on, both our spouses knew about our relationship. Her husband, an older and primmer man than I might have expected, stopped by my office one day in his new BMW and threatened to destroy my business. He claimed to have great influence in the financial community.

My wife threatened to leave me but she was too weak. She had one of those cancers that did not kill her but that never left her alone, either. She was weak most of the time, staying for days in the bedroom that had become hers, as the guest room had become mine. Whenever she became particularly angry about Wendy, Rob would fling himself at me, screaming how much he hated me, pounding me with fists that became more powerful with each passing year. He hated me for many of the same reasons I’d hated my own father, my ineluctable passion for the track, and the way there was never any security in our lives, the family bank account wholly subject to the whims of the horses that ran that day.

Wendy’s daughter likewise blamed her mother for the alcoholism that had stricken the husband. There was constant talk of divorce but their finances were such that neither of them could quite afford it. Margaret constantly called Wendy a whore, and only lately did Wendy realize that Margaret sincerely meant it.

Two things happened the next year. My wife was finally dragged off into the darkness, and Wendy’s husband crashed his car into a retaining wall and was killed.

Even on the days of the respective funerals, we went to the track.

“He never understood.”

“Neither did she,” I said.

“I mean why I come here.”

“I know.”

“I mean how it makes me feel alive.”

“I know.”

“I mean how nothing else matters.”

“I know.”

“I should’ve been nicer to him, I suppose.”

“I suppose. But we can’t make a life out of blaming ourselves. What’s happened, happened. We have to go on from here.”

“Do you think Rob hates you as much as Margaret hates me?”

“More, probably,” I said. “The way he looks at me sometimes, I think he’ll probably kill me someday.”

But it wasn’t me who was to die.

All during Wendy’s funeral, I kept thinking of those words. Margaret had murdered her mother just as Wendy had killed her father. The press made a lot of this.

All the grief I should have visited upon my dead wife I visited upon my dead lover. I went through months of alcoholic stupor. Clients fell away; rent forced me to move from our nice suburban home to a small apartment in a section of the city that always seemed to be on fire. I didn’t have to worry about Rob anymore. He got enough loans for college and wanted nothing to do with me.

Years and more years, the track the only constant in my life. Many times I tried to contact Rob through the alumni office of his school but it was no use. He’d left word not to give his current address to his father.

There was the hospital and, several times, the detox clinic. There was the church in which I asked for forgiveness, and the born-again rally at which I proclaimed my happiness in the Lord.

And then there was the shelter. Five years I lived there, keeping the place painted and clean for the other residents. The nuns seemed to like me.

My teeth went entirely, and I had to have dentures. The arthritis in my foot got so bad that I could not wear shoes for days at a time. And my eyesight, beyond even the magic of glasses, got so bad that when I watched the horse races on TV, I couldn’t tell which horse was which.

Then one night I got sick and threw up blood and in the morning one of the sisters took me to the hospital where they kept me overnight. In the morning the doctor came in and told me that I had stomach cancer. He gave me five months to live.

There were days when I was happy about my death sentence. Looking back, my life seemed so long and sad, I was glad to have it over with. Then there were days when I sobbed about my death sentence, and hated the God the nuns told me to pray to. I wanted to live to go back to the track again and have a sweet, beautiful winner.

Four months after the doctor’s diagnosis, the nuns put me in bed and I knew I’d never walk on my own again. I thought of Donna, and her death, and how I’d made it all the worse with the track and Wendy.

The weaker I got, the more I thought about Rob. I talked about him to the nuns. And then one day he was there.

He wasn’t alone, either. With him was a very pretty dark-haired woman and a seven-year-old boy who got the best features of both his mother and father.

“Dad, this is Mae and Stephen.”

“Hello, Mae and Stephen. I’ve very glad to meet you. I wish I was better company.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Mae said. “We’re just happy to meet you.”

“I need to go to the bathroom,” Stephen said.

“Why don’t I take him, and give you a few minutes alone with your dad?” Mae said.

And so, after all these years, we were alone and he said, “I still can’t forgive you, Dad.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“I want to. But somehow I can’t.”

I took his hand. “I’m just glad you turned out so well, son. Like your mother and not your father.”

“I loved her very much.”

“I know you did.”

“And you treated her very, very badly.”

All his anger. All these years.

“That’s a beautiful wife and son you’ve got.”

“They’re my whole life, everything that matters to me.”

I started crying; I couldn’t help it. Here at the end I was glad to know he’d done well for himself and his family.

“I love you, Rob.”

“I love you, too, Dad.”

And then he leaned down and kissed me on the cheek and I started crying harder and embarrassed both of us.

Mae and Stephen came back.

“My turn,” Rob said. He patted me on the shoulder. “I’ll be back soon.”

I think he wanted to cry but wanted to go somewhere alone to do it.

“So,” Mae said, “are you comfortable?”

“Oh, very.”

“This seems like a nice place.”

“It is.”

“And the nuns seem very nice, too.”

“Very nice.” I smiled. “I’m just so glad I got to see you two.”

“Same here. I’ve wanted to meet you for years.”

“Well,” I said, smiling. “I’m glad the time finally came.”

Stephen, proper in his white shirt and blue trousers and neatly combed dark hair, said, “I just wish you could go to the track with us sometime, Grandpa.”

She didn’t have to say anything. I saw it all in the quick certain pain that appeared in her lovely gray eyes.

“The race track, you mean?” I said.

“Uh-huh. Dad takes me all the time, doesn’t he, Mom?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, her voice toneless. “All the time.”

She started to say more but then the door opened up and Rob came in and there was no time to talk.

There was no time at all.