Moonchasers and Other Stories

Mother Darkness

The man surprised her. He was black.

Alison had been watching the small filthy house for six mornings now and this was the first time she’d seen him. She hadn’t been able to catch him at seven-thirty or even six-thirty. She’d had to try six o’clock. She brought her camera up and began snapping.

She took four pictures of him just to be sure.

Then she put the car in gear and went to get breakfast.

An hour and a half later, in the restaurant where social workers often met, Peter said, “Oh, he’s balling her all right.”

“God,” Alison Cage said. “Can’t we talk about something else? Please.”

“I know it upsets you. It upsets me. That’s why I’m telling you about it.”

“Can’t you tell somebody else?”

“I’ve tried and nobody’ll listen. Here’s a forty-three-year-old man and he’s screwing his seven-year-old daughter and nobody’ll listen. Jesus.”

Peter Forbes loved dramatic moments and incest was about as dramatic as you could get. Peter was a hold-over hippie. He wore defiantly wrinkled khaki shirts and defiantly torn Lee jeans. He wore his brown hair in a ponytail. In his cubicle back at Social Services was a faded poster of Robert Kennedy. He still smoked a lot of dope. After six glasses of cheap wine at an office party, he’d once told Alison that he thought she was beautiful. He was forty-one years old and something of a joke and Alison both liked and disliked him.

“Talk to Coughlin,” Alison said.

“I’ve talked to Coughlin.”

“Then talk to Friedman.”

“I’ve talked to Friedman, too.”

“And what did they say?”

Peter sneered. “He reminded me about the Skeritt case.”

“Oh.”

“Said I got everybody in the department all bent out of shape about Richard Skeritt and then I couldn’t prove anything about him and his little adopted son.”

“Maybe Skeritt wasn’t molesting him.”

“Yeah. Right.”

Alison sighed and looked out the winter window. A veil of steam covered most of the glass. Beyond it she could see the parking lot filled with men and women scraping their windows and giving each other pushes. A minor ice storm was in progress. It was seven thirty-five and people were hurrying to work. Everybody looked bundled up, like children trundling to school.

Inside the restaurant the air smelled of cooking grease and cigarettes. Cold wind gusted through the front door when somebody opened it, and people stamped snow from their feet as soon as they reached the tile floor. Because this was several blocks north of the black area, the jukebox ran to Hank Williams Jr. and The Judds. Alison despised country western music.

“So how’s it going with you?” Peter said, daubs of egg yolk on his graying bandito mustache.

“Oh. You know.” Blond Alison shrugged. “Still trying to find a better apartment for less money. Still trying to lose five pounds. Still trying to convince myself that there’s really a God.”

“Sounds like you need a Valium.”

The remark was so — Peter. Alison smiled. “You think Valium would do it, huh?”

“It picks me up when I get down where you are.”

“When you get to be thirty-six and you’re alone the way I am, Peter, I think you need more than Valium.”

“I’m alone.”

“But you’re alone in your way. I’m alone in my way.”

“What’s the difference?”

Suddenly she was tired of him and tired of herself, too. “Oh, I don’t know. No difference, I suppose. I was being silly I guess.”

“You look tired.”

“Haven’t been sleeping well.”

“That doctor from the medical examiner’s office been keeping you out late?”

“Doctor?”

“Oh, come on,” Peter said. Sometimes he got possessive in a strange way. Testy. “I know you’ve been seeing him.”

“Doctor Connery, you mean?”

Peter smiled, the egg yolk still on his mustache. “The one with the blue blue eyes, yes.”

“It was strictly business. He just wanted to find out about those infants.”

“The ones who smothered last year?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the big deal? Crib death happens all the time.”

“Yes, but it still needs to be studied.”

Peter smiled his superior smile. “I suppose but—”

“Crib death means that the pathologist couldn’t find anything. No reason that the infant should have stopped breathing — no malfunction or anything, I mean. They just die mysteriously. Doctors want to know why.”

“So what did your new boyfriend have to say about these deaths? I mean, what’s his theory?”

“I’m not going to let you sneak that in there,” she said, laughing despite herself. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

“All right. Then why would he be interested in two deaths that happened a year ago?”

She shrugged and sipped the last of her coffee. “He’s exchanging information with other medical data banks. Seeing if they can’t find a trend in these deaths.”

“Sounds like an excuse to me.”

“An excuse for what?” Alison said.

“To take beautiful blondes out to dinner and have them fall under his sway.” He bared yellow teeth a dentist could work on for hours. He made claws of his hands. “Dracula; Dracula. That’s who Connery really is.”

Alison got pregnant her junior year of college. She got an abortion of course but only after spending a month in the elegant home of her rich parents, “moping” as her father characterized that particular period of time. She did not go back to finish school. She went to California. This was in the late seventies just as discos were dying and AIDS was rising. She spent two celibate years working as a secretary in a record company. James Taylor, who’d stopped in to see a friend of his, asked Alison to go have coffee. She was quite silly during their half hour together, juvenile and giggly, and even years later her face would burn when she thought of how foolish she’d been that day. When she returned home, she lived with her parents, a fact that seemed to embarrass all her high school friends. They were busy and noisy with growing families of their own and here was beautiful quiet Alison inexplicably alone and, worse, celebrating her thirty-first birthday while still living at home.

There was so much sorrow in the world and she could tell no one about it. That’s why so many handsome and eligible men floated in and out of her life. Because they didn’t understand. They weren’t worth knowing, let alone giving herself to in any respect.

She worked for a year and a half in an art gallery. It was what passed for sophisticated in a Midwestern city of this size. Very rich but dull people crowded it constantly, and men both with and without wedding rings pressed her for an hour or two alone.

She would never have known about the income maintenance job if she hadn’t been watching a local talk show one day. Here sat two earnest women about her own age, one white, one black, talking about how they acted as liaisons between poor people and the social services agency. Alison knew immediately that she would like a job like this. She’d spent her whole life so spoiled and pampered and useless. And the art gallery — minor traveling art shows and local ad agency artists puffing themselves up as artistes — was simply an extension of this life.

These women, Alison could tell, knew well the sorrow of the world and the sorrow in her heart.

She went down the next morning to the social services agency and applied. The black woman who took her application weighed at least three hundred and fifty pounds which she’d packed into lime green stretch pants and a flowered polyester blouse with white sweat rings under the arms. She smoked Kool filters at a rate Alison hated to see. Hadn’t this woman heard of lung cancer?

Four people interviewed Alison that day. The last was a prim but handsome white man in a shabby three-piece suit who had on the wall behind him a photo of himself and his wife and a small child who was in some obvious but undefined way retarded. Alison recognized two things about this man immediately: that here was a man who knew the same sorrow as she; and that here was a man painfully smitten with her already. It took him five and a half months but the man eventually found her a job at the agency.

Not until her third week did she realize that maintenance workers were the lowest of the low in social work, looked down upon by bosses and clients alike. What you did was this: you went out to people — usually women — who received various kinds of assistance from various government agencies and you attempted to prove that they were liars and cheats and scoundrels. The more benefits you could deny the people who made up your caseload, the more your bosses liked you. The people in the state house and the people in Washington, D.C., wanted you to allow your people as little as possible. That was the one and only way to keep taxpayers happy. Of course, your clients had a different version of all this. They needed help. And if you wouldn’t give them help, or you tried to take away help you were already giving them, they became vocal. Income maintenance workers were frequently threatened and sometimes punched, stabbed, and shot, men and women alike. The curious thing was that not many of them quit. The pay was slightly better than you got in a factory and the job didn’t require a college degree and you could pretty much set your own hours if you wanted to. So, even given the occasional violence, it was still a pretty good job.

Alison had been an income maintenance worker for nearly three years now.

She sincerely wanted to help.

An hour after leaving Peter in the restaurant, Alison pulled her gray Honda Civic up to the small house where earlier this morning she’d snapped photos of the black man. Her father kept trying to buy her a nicer car but she argued that her clients would just resent her nicer car and that she wouldn’t blame them.

The name of this particular client was Doreen Hayden. Alison had been trying to do a profile of her but Doreen hadn’t exactly cooperated. This was Alison’s second appointment with the woman. She hoped it went better than the first.

After getting out of her car, Alison stood for a time in the middle of the cold, slushy street. Snow sometimes had a way of making even rundown things look beautiful. But somehow it only made this block of tiny, aged houses look worse. Brown frozen dog feces covered the sidewalk. Smashed front windows bore masking tape. Rusted-out cars squatted on small front lawns like obscene animals. And factory soot touched everything, everything. It was nineteen days before Christmas — Alison had just heard this on the radio this morning — but this was a neighborhood where Christmas never came.

Doreen answered the door. Through the screen drifted the oppressive odors of breakfast and cigarettes and dirty diapers. In her stained white sweater and tight red skirt, Doreen still showed signs of the attractive woman she’d been a few years ago until bad food and lack of exercise had added thirty pounds to her fine-boned frame.

The infant in her arms was perhaps four months old. She had a sweet little pink face. Her pink blanket was filthy.

“I got all the kids here,” Doreen said. “You all comin’ in? Gettin’ cold with this door open.”

All the kids, Alison thought. My God, Doreen was actually going to try that scam.

Inside, the hot odors of food and feces were even more oppressive. Alison sat on the edge of a discount-store couch and looked around the room. Not much had changed since her last visit. The old Zenith color TV set — now blaring Bugs Bunny cartoons — still needed some kind of tube. The floor was still an obstacle course of newspapers and empty Pepsi bottles and dirty baby clothes. There was a crucifix on one wall with a piece of faded, drooping palm stuck behind it. Next to it a photo of Bruce Springsteen had been taped to the soiled wallpaper.

“These kids was off visitin’ last time you was here,” Doreen said.

She referred to the two small boys standing to the right of the armchair where she sat holding her infant.

“Off visiting where?” Alison said, keeping her voice calm.

“Grandmother’s.”

“I see.”

“They was stayin’ there for awhile but now they’re back with me so I’m goin’ to need more money from the agency. You know.”

“Maybe the man you have staying here could help you out.” There. She’d said it quickly. With no malice. A plain simple fact.

“Ain’t no man livin’ here.”

“I took a picture of him this morning.”

“No way.”

Alison sighed. “You know you can’t get full payments if you have an adult male staying with you, Doreen.”

“He musta been the garbage man or somethin’. No adult male stayin’ here. None at all.”

Alison had her clipboard out. She noted on the proper lines of the form that a man was staying here. She said, “You borrowed those two boys.”

“What?”

“These two boys here, Doreen. You borrowed them. They’re not yours.”

“No way.”

Alison looked at one of the ragged little boys and said, “Is Doreen your mother?”

The little boy, nervous, glanced over at Doreen and then put his head down.

Alison didn’t want to embarrass or frighten him anymore.

“If I put these two boys down on the claim form and they send out an investigator, it’ll be a lot worse for you, Doreen. They’ll try and get you for fraud.”

“Goddamn you.”

“I’ll write them down here if you want me to. But if they get you for fraud—”

“Shit,” Doreen said. She shook her head and then she looked at the boys. “You two run on home now, all right?”

“Can we take some cookies, Aunt Doreen?”

She grinned at Alison. “They don’t let their Aunt Doreen forget no promises, I’ll tell you that.” She nodded to the kitchen. “You boys go get your cookies and then go out the back door, all right? Oh, but first say good-bye to Alison here.”

Both boys, cute and dear to Alison, smiled at her and then grinned at each other and then ran with heavy feet across the faded linoleum to the kitchen.

“I need more money,” Doreen said. “This little one’s breakin’ me.”

“I’m afraid I got you all I could, Doreen.”

“You gonna tell them about Ernie?”

“Ernie’s the man staying here?”

“Yeah.”

“No. Not since you told me the truth.”

“He’s the father.”

“Of your little girl?”

“Yeah.”

“You think he’ll actually marry you?”

She laughed her cigarette laugh. “Yeah, in about fifty or sixty years.”

The house began to become even smaller to Alison then. This sometimes happened when she was interviewing people. She felt entombed in the anger and despair of the place.

She stared at Doreen and Doreen’s beautiful little girl.

“Could I hold her?” Alison said.

“You serious?”

“Yes.”

“She maybe needs a change. She poops a lot.”

“I don’t mind.”

Doreen shrugged. “Be my guest.”

She got up and brought the infant across to Alison.

Alison perched carefully on the very edge of the couch and received the infant like some sort of divine gift. After a moment the smells of the little girl drifted away and Alison was left holding a very beautiful little child.

Doreen went back and sat in the chair and looked at Alison. “You got any kids?”

“No.”

“Wish you did though, huh?”

“Yes.”

“You married?”

“Not so far.”

“Hell, bet you got guys fallin’ all over themselves for you. You’re beautiful.”

But Alison rarely listened to flattery. Instead she was watching the infant’s sweet white face. “Have you ever looked at her eyes, Doreen?”

“ ’Course I looked at her eyes. She’s my daughter, ain’t she?”

“No. I mean looked really deeply.”

“ ’Course I have.”

“She’s so sad.”

Doreen sighed. “She’s got a reason to be sad. Wouldn’t you be sad growin’ up in a place like this?”

Alison leaned down to the little girl’s face and kissed her tenderly on the forehead. They were like sisters, the little girl and Alison. They knew how sad the world was. They knew how sad their hearts were.

When the time came, when the opportunity appeared, Alison would do the same favor for this little girl she’d done for the two other little girls.

Not even the handsome Doctor Connery had suspected anything. He’d just assumed that the other two girls had died from crib death.

On another visit, someday soon, Alison would make sure that she was alone with the little girl for a few minutes. Then it would be done and the little girl would not have to grow up and know the even greater sadness that awaited her.

“You really ain’t gonna tell them about Ernie livin’ here?”

“I’ve got a picture of him that I can turn in anytime as evidence. But I’ll tell you what, Doreen; you start taking better care of your daughter — changing her diapers more often and feeding her the menu I gave you — and I’ll keep Ernie our secret.”

“Can’t afford to have no more money taken from me,” Doreen said.

“Then you take better care of your daughter,” Alison said, holding the infant out for Doreen to take now. “Because she’s very sad, Doreen. Very very sad.”

Alison kissed the little girl on the forehead once more and then gave her up to her mother.

Soon, little one, Alison thought; soon you won’t be so sad. I promise.