“Oberman the Creep,” April observed.
“That’s not a nice way to talk about an old man,” Carella said.
“But he is a creep, Daddy.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Carella said.
“Anyway,” Mark said, “I think we should go to his house, and April and me’ll knock on the door…”
“April and I,” Carella corrected.
Mark looked up at his father, wondering whether he should try the joke about, “Oh, are you going to knock on the door too?” and decided in his infinite wisdom that he’d better not risk it, even though it had gone over pretty well once with Miss Rutherford, who taught the third grade at the local elementary school. “April and I,” he said, and smiled at his father angelically, and then beamed at his mother as she continued drawing a black mustache under his nose, and then said, “April and I will knock on Mr. Oberman’s door and yell, ‘Trick or treat,’ and when he opens it, you stick your gun in his face.”
Teddy, who was watching her son’s lips as he talked, shook her head violently, and looked up at her husband. Before Carella could answer, April said, “That’s the stupidest idea I ever heard in my life,” her life to date having consisted of eight years, four months, and ten days.
Mark said, “Shut up, who asked you?” and Teddy scowled at her husband, warning him to put an end to this before it got out of hand, and then grasping both of Mark’s shoulders to turn him toward her so that she could properly finish the job. She was using felt-tipped watercolor markers, and whereas her makeup artistry might not have passed muster with the National Repertory, it looked pretty good to her from where she knelt beside her son. She had enlarged and angled Mark’s eyebrows with the black marker, and had then used green eye shadow on his lids, and the black marker again to draw a sinister, drooping mustache and an evil-looking goatee. Her son was supposed in be Dracula, who did not have either a mustache or a beard, but she thought he looked far too cherubic without them, and had taken artistic license with the Bram Stoker character. She was now using the bright-red marker to paint in a few drops of blood under his lip, and since her back was to Carella, she did not hear him admonish Mark first for his idiotic idea about brandishing a real gun, and next for yelling at his sister. She dotted a last tiny dribble of blood below the other three larger drops, and then rose and stepped back to admire her handiwork.
“How do I look?” Mark asked Carella.
“Horrible.”
“Great!” Mark shouted, and ran out of the room to search for a mirror.
“Make me pretty, Mommy,” April said, looking directly up at her mother. Teddy smiled, and then slowly and carefully moved her fingers in the universal language of the deaf-mute while Carella and the little girl watched.
“She says she doesn’t have to make you pretty,” Carella said. “You are pretty.”
“I could read almost all of it,” April said, and hugged Teddy fiercely. “I’m the Good Princess, you know,” she said to her father.
“That’s true, you are the Good Princess.”
“Are there bad princesses, too?”
Teddy was replacing the caps on the felt-tipped markers to keep them from drying out. She smiled at her daughter, shook her head, reached into her purse for a lipstick tube, and then carried it to where April waited patiently for the touches that would transform her into a true Good Princess. Kneeling before her, Teddy expertly began to apply the lipstick. The two looked remarkably alike, the same brown eyes and black hair, the clearly defined widow’s peak, the long lashes and generous mouth. April wore a long gown and cape fashioned of hunter-green velvet by Fanny, their housekeeper. Teddy wore tight blue jeans and a white T-shirt, her hair falling onto her cheek now as she bent her head, concentrating on the line of April’s mouth. She touched her fingertip to the lipstick and brushed a bit of it onto each of April’s cheeks, blending it, and then reached for the eye shadow she had used on her son, using it more subtly on April’s lids, mindful of the fact that her daughter was not supposed to be a bloodthirsty vampire. Using a mascara brush, she darkened April’s lashes and then turned her to face Carella.
“Beautiful,” Carella said. “Go look at yourself.”
“Am I, Mommy?” April asked and, without waiting for an affirming nod, scurried out of the room.
Fanny came in not a moment later, grinning.
“There’s a horrid little beast rushing all about the kitchen with blood dripping from his mouth,” she said, and then, pretending to notice Carella for the first time even though he’d been home for more than half an hour, added, “Well, it’s himself. And will you be taking the children out for their mischief?”
“I will,” Carella said.
“Mind you’re back by seven, because that’s when the roast’ll be done.”
“I’ll be back by seven,” Carella promised. To Teddy, he said, “I thought you said there were no bad princesses.”
“And what is that supposed to mean?” Fanny asked.
She had come to the Carellas’ more than eight years ago as a one-month gift from Teddy’s father, who had felt his daughter needed at least that much time to rearrange the household after the birth of twins. In those days Fanny’s hair was blue, and she wore a pince-nez, and she weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. The prepaid month had gone by all too quickly, and Carella had regretfully informed her that he could not afford a full-time housekeeper on his meager salary. But Fanny was an indomitable broad who had never had a family of her own, and who rather liked this one. So she told Carella he could pay her whatever he might scrape up for the time being, and she would supplement her income with night jobs, she being a trained nurse and a very strong healthy woman to boot. Carella had flatly refused, and Fanny had put her hands on her hips and said, “Are you going to throw me out into the street, is that it?” and they had argued back and forth, and Fanny had stayed. She was still with them. Her hair was now bleached red, and she wore harlequin glasses with black frames, and her weight was down to a hundred and forty as a result of chasing alter two very lively children. Her influence on the family unit was perhaps best reflected in the speech of the twins. As infants, they’d been alone with her and their mother for much of the day, and since Teddy could not utter a word, much of their language had been patterned after Fanny’s. It was not unusual to hear Mark referring to someone as a lace-curtain, shanty-Irish son of a B, or little April telling a playmate to go scratch her arse. It made life colorful, to say the least.
Fanny stood now with her hands on her ample hips, daring Carella to explain what he meant by his last remark. Carella fixed her with a menacing detective-type stare and said, “I was referring, dear, to the fact that you are sometimes overbearing and raucous and could conceivably be thought of as a bad princess, that is what it’s supposed to mean,” and Fanny burst out laughing.
“How can you live with such a beast?” she asked Teddy, still laughing, and then went out of the room, wagging her head.
“Daddy, are you coming?” Mark shouted.
“Yes, son,” he answered.
He folded Teddy into his arms and kissed her. Then he went out into the living room and took his children one by each hand, and went out into the streets to ring doorbells with them.
Shotgun, 1969
In bed with Teddy that night, holding her close in the dark, the rain lashing the windowpanes, Carella was aware all at once that she was not asleep, and he sat up and turned on the bed lamp and looked at her, puzzled.