Wolf scowled despondently. Somehow he’d not expected his own lather to be so ordinary, so humdrum, in his psychology. You’d think a recovered alcoholic would have gained some mellowness, some dignity. He shrugged.
Terri went on, “Of course I asked for more. It turned out that Tilly knew a local girl in the latter (I mean, high-school) category. A tough, outspoken girl rather like she’d once been herself, I gather. Well, it seems Cassius’ advances were an old story to this girl and to another of her female classmates too—they’d compared notes. She made a sort of joke out of the old man’s attempts at ‘romance,’ as she called them, though they sounded like more. She told Tilly, ‘Mr. Kruger? First he reads poetry to you and talks about nature and tells you how beautiful and young and fresh you are, maybe offers you a drink. Then he carries on about his dead wife and how terribly lonely he is, life over for him and all that. Then if you’re still listening he begins to hint about how he’s been completely impotent for years and years, and how dreadful that is, but you’re so wonderful and if you’d only deign to touch him, if you’d just be a little bit kind, it would only take the tiniest touch, that’s all an old man needs—a tiny touch below the belt— ell, if you fall for that and begin thinking, “A good deed. Why not?” why, then you’ll find him telling you he has to touch you just the tiniest bit to balance things out, to make them right, at the same time he’s clamping down on you with kisses, cutting off your breath, and before you know it he’s got one hand down your blouse… Now I won’t say that all happened to me, Ms. Hoyt, but it’s sure what Mr. Kruger has in mind when he gets romantic and recites poetry and begs for the slightest touch of your beeyootiful fingers.’“
“Oh God,” Wolf sighed, drawing it out. “To see ourselves as others see us.” He shook his head from side to side. “What else? What next? There is something more?”
“There is,” she confirmed, “and it’s the most important part. But I want to get my mind straightened about it first, and that performance wore me out.” And she did look a bit frazzled. “Oh hell,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette and wetting her lips dry with talking, “Let’s screw.”
They did.
Considerably later she sat up in bed, seemed to think for a while, then with a dissatisfied sigh got up, slipped on her robe, lit another cigarette, and came back and sat on the side of the bed smiling at Wolf. The sound of the rain had sunk to a barely audible patter and the wind seemed to have died.
“You know,” she said, “that should have made it easier for me to tell you the rest, but somehow it hasn’t exactly.
“The thing was,” she went on, her voice picking up as she began to reconstruct, “that I’d suddenly realized that repeating to you those things that girl told Tilly that Cassius did to her, or tried to do, was getting me excited, which made me ask myself how much of my indignation at your father was honest. That’s what I wanted to straighten out in my mind, especially when Tilly (and the girl too apparently) seemed to treat it half as a joke, or one quarter at any rate, one of the grotesque indecencies you expect from practically all men, or at least all old men.
“Well, it’s not too clear in my mind yet, the real reasons for my indignation, or at least my being upset. I’ll try to keep it simple. It seems to boil down to two things, and one of them has nothing to do with sex at all. It’s this, I just can’t get out of my mind two or three of the horrible stories your father told in Tommy’s presence. He made them so vivid, he seemed to gloat on them so, as if he were trying to infect that child—and all of us!—with dreads and superstitions. And the way he watched Tommy while he told them. That horrible dream of the burnt-to-ashes Esteban. And especially the way he described your mother’s face coming off the painting and ghosting around the room as a cloud of green paint flakes. I’m sure Tommy’s been thinking about that ever since.”
“You know, that’s true,” Wolf said, sitting up, his face serious. And he told Terri the questions Tommy had asked him at the park about clouds being alive.
“You see,” she said, nodding, as he finished, ‘Tommy’s got flakes on his mind, that horrible vibrating cloud-face of pinky-green flakes. Ugh!” She shivered her revulsion.
“The other thing,” she went on, “is about sex, or at least starts with sex. Now after Tilly told me about that girl, I naturally asked her how soon after your mother’s death Cassius had started to hunt high-school girls, or younger women at any rate. She whooped a little again and told me he’d always been that way, that it sometimes got obvious at those big parties your mother gave, and that she thought Cassius had been attracted to your mother in the first place because she was such a small, slight woman and always stayed somewhat girlish looking. ‘Helen knew about Cassius’ chasing, of course,’ Tilly said. ‘It was one of the things we used to drink about. At first we had both our husbands to rake over the coals. I was the most outspoken, but Helen was more bitter. Then Pat died and there was only Cassius for us to gripe at, mostly for his drunken pawings at parties, his dumb little infatuations with whatever young Muff happened to be handy.’ Wolf, I don’t like to ask you about this, but does that fit at all with your memories of your father’s behavior then?”
He winced but nodded. “Yes, during the last couple of years before I lit out on my own. God, it all seemed to me then so adult-dumb, so infantile and boring, adult garbage you wanted to get shut of.”
Terri continued, ‘Tilly said that after you left, Cassius and Helen made up for a while, but then their battling got still more bitter and more depressing. Twice Helen took too many sleeping pills, or Cassius thought she did, and rushed her the morning after to the hospital to have her stomach pumped out, though Helen didn’t recall overdosing those two times, just that she blacked out. But then there came this Sunday morning when Cassius called up Tilly about ten or so, sounding very small and frightened, but rational-seeming, and begging her to come over, because he thought that Helen was dead, but he wasn’t absolutely sure, and—get this!—he didn’t know either whether he had killed her, or not! Helen’s doctor was coming, he’d already called him, but would Tilly come over?
“She did, of course, and of course got there before the doctor—Sunday mornings!—and found Helen lying peacefully in bed, cold to the touch, and the bedroom a minor mess with unfinished drinks and snacks set around and a couple of empty sleeping pill bottles with their contents, or some of their contents, scattered over the bed and floor, a snowfall of red-and-blue Tuinal capsules. And there was Cassius in bathrobe and slippers softly jittering around like an anxious ghost, keeping himself tranquilized with swallows of beer, and he was telling her over and over this story about how everything had been fine the night before and he’d taken two or three pills, enough with the drinks to knock him out, and then just as he was going under Helen had started this harangue while flourishing a bottle of sleeping pills, and he couldn’t for the life of him remember whether she’d been threatening to commit suicide or just bawling him out, maybe for having taken the pills himself so as not to have to listen to her, and he’d tried to get up and argue with her, stop her from taking the pills if that was what she intended, but the pills he’d taken were too much for him and he simply blacked out.