for his family still alive, for himself, for everyone who knew pain, which meant everyone who wore a human face.
From the journal of Alton Turner Blackwood:
The awkward boy stood on the patio, in the shadow of the big maidenhair tree, which in those days he believed had been named for the two maidens who sat playing cards at the table before him: the beautiful Regina, his aunt, and her even more beautiful daughter, Melissa.
Smug Regina took a wicked pleasure in educating the boy about his family history, which was in part buried in the secret cemetery that he had found in a woodland clearing. So Jillian had given birth to Marjorie, and out of Marjorie had come Regina and Anita, the boy’s own mother, all fathered by Teejay. When Anita and Regina, fraternal twins, were in their turn impregnated, Regina produced Melissa, whose exquisite beauty seemed further proof of Teejay’s insane theory about selective inbreeding. But the boy’s arrival hardly a month later was a dramatic refutation.
Teejay wanted to kill the newborn boy and bury him in the woods—or at least commit him to an institution, but Anita rebelled. If Teejay wanted to continue his experiment with her, if he wanted to father other children with her, he must allow her son to live. And thus the boy’s mother bought his survival.
In the decade following, Regina gave birth to three sons, but Teejay had no interest in sons, who could not bear his children and thereby help him distill his unique genes into a perfect beauty never before known on earth. He smothered them in infancy and buried them in the woods.
“Why do you let him?” the boy demanded.
“What use do I have for sons, either?” Regina asked.
“I mean, why do you let him touch you?”
“It’s what I’ve always known. I’ve known nothing else. It’s his religion, and it’s mine. What do I have if I leave? What do I have if I tell and destroy everything? There’s luxury in Crown Hill, and I’m accustomed to luxury.”
The boy thought that the estate staff must know, but Regina was amused by his naivete. People routinely blinded themselves to truth, she said. Besides, each year, there were a few three-day weekend parties at Crown Hill, and among the houseguests were men who might have seduced a young girl. Teejay’s daughters also traveled with him from time to time, and perhaps he was not a diligent chaperone during those excursions. Teejay had been born at the turn of the century, when midwives attended virtually every birth, and he himself midwifed the births at Crown Hill; no physicians ever saw that the “stillborn” male children were, in fact, smothered in the creche. If a member of the staff became suspicious, he might be retired young with a most generous pension, an irresistibly fat monthly check that made his easy life dependent on his silence. Or perhaps he would leave his position without notice—to trade his handsome room and private bath in the comfortable staff quarters for a new bed and a long sleep in the woodland clearing.
“In the woods,” the boy said. “My mother, your sister.”
“My competition,” said Regina.
Under the maidenhair tree, in the privileged afternoon, in the golden light of a sun swelling toward the horizon as if to burst, the awkward boy stood as though rooted, the ugly boy, towering and rough and shatter-faced, watching the elegant hands of the beautiful women as they dealt and received the cards, moisture beading on their tall glasses of iced tea, lemon slices and leaves of mint, their skin as flawless as that of the bisque-porcelain figurines in the drawing-room display case, and the ugly boy was pierced by a sharp yearning as the women ordered their cards, not yearning for the women but for something he could not name, watching as Melissa put upon the table four threes, one in each suit, and with them won the hand, watching as Regina totaled their scores, the fluid shuffling of the deck, the languid dealing of the cards, their grace and catlike confidence, their glittering eyes as Regina recounted how her sister, the mother of the ugly boy, wound up dead and buried in the wildwood.
47
THE CITY HAD KNOWN SNOW IN OTHER OCTOBERS, BUT USUALLY only flurries, at most two or three inches. The forecast called for this storm to lay down six inches, which would make it one of the deeper snows of October but not a record blizzard.
While the kids were in the library, enduring math with Leonid Sinyavski, John and Nicolette sat in armchairs in his ground-floor study, where the gallery of birthday photographs confronted him with a poignant reminder of all that he might lose. Beyond the window, the sky was invisible now, scattering white petals by the million, and toward the back of the yard, the deodar cedar had begun to robe itself in winter.
Quietly and without excuses, John told Nicky that he was in his second thirty-day leave, that he had been pretending to go to work as usual but instead had undertaken an investigation of a personal nature. As crisply as he would lay out the facts of any case to Nelson Burchard or to an assistant district attorney, he presented them to her, beginning with his first visit to Billy Lucas at the state hospital.
She realized why he had hoped to spare her the worry of all this until he understood the situation as fully as possible, and his secrecy neither offended nor disappointed her. Like all good artists, Nicky could empathize with the fear and anguish of others. Like every great artist who had been able to maintain a human perspective, she didn’t believe that she was the center of the world, to be included in everything first above all others; she lived instead with the conviction that her talent and her success required of her both humility and a generosity of spirit.
And at last he told her the one thing he had withheld from her all these years, the last thing Blackwood had said before John shot him: You’ll be a daddy someday. Then I’ll come back and use your wife and kids harder than I used your slutty sisters here tonight.
“I never told you more than that I shot him. Well … I shot him point-blank in the face. He was dead as he fell. But I stood over him and emptied the gun into his head. I shot him and shot him, Nicky, I shot him until he didn’t have a face at all.”
“Good,” Nicky said. “And good that you didn’t tell me the last thing he said to you. Why should that have been in my head all the lovely months I carried Zach, Naomi, Minnie? I only love you more for sparing me that craziness —until you couldn’t anymore.”
Although John expected her to be understanding, Nicky surprised him by her readiness to accept the possibility of a supernatural threat, but then she stunned him with the revelation that she, too, sensed something uncanny if not malevolent in the house and that she’d had experiences that felt occult in nature. The man glimpsed in the mirror—Kiss me—before it seemed to explode in her face. Perhaps the same man again in the photographic studies for the portrait of the children.
Nicky’s inability to finish that painting, her distressing sense that somehow it had become a study of loss and despair, rocked John so hard that he felt as if some many-legged horror crawled the nape of his neck. When reflexively he reached back to clap the nonexistent insect, he discovered that his hands had gone cold and clammy.
Too disturbed to remain seated, he got up from the chair. He stepped to the window, peering intently at the snow-flocked backyard, half expecting to see some scaled and horned and lantern-eyed demonic beast slouching through the storm, forty-seven days ahead of schedule and hungry for children.
Nicky said, “It’s like the house—or whatever’s in it—has been working damn hard to keep us isolated from one another, playing to our fear—and our love—in just the right way to turn each of us inward.”
He heard her get up from her chair. When she spoke again, she sounded as if she was at the gallery wall, but he didn’t turn toward her. For some reason, the storm increasingly disquieted him, and he didn’t want to look away from it.
“You never read Blackwood’s journal?” she asked.
“No. He was dead. I didn’t want to read his self-justifications, his craziness. I didn’t want to let him even deeper into my head. I don’t know … it would have been like being there in the house again with everyone dead.”
