“You take the large bedroom at the top of the stairs,” he said now, watching Percussion and Woodwinds as they carried a heavy box across the yard toward the separate gabled entrance of the EXPANSIVE MASTER SUITE. “Hell, have the upstairs wing to yourself. Isn’t it nice, sweet, to have a wing? Why shouldn’t we live it up like Kubla Khan for a change? If you go up there, you’ll find a surprise. I think you’ll be pleased. I had to bribe a housewife, a real estate agent, two furniture salesmen, a UPS Head of Operations — now listen, yes, I’m talking to you — if you could go downstairs and aid your compatriot in unpacking the materials for my study, it would be most effective. He seems to have fallen down a rabbit hole.”
Over the years, Dad’s surprises, large and small, had been scholarly in nature, a set of 1999 Lamure-France Encyclopedias of the Physical World translated from the French and unavailable for purchase in the United States. (“All Nobel Prize — winners have a set of these,” Dad said.)
But as I pushed open the bedroom door at the top of the stairs and walked into the large blue-walled room covered in pastoral oil paintings, giant arc windows along the far wall blistered with bubble curtains, I discovered not a rare, underground edition of Wie schafft man ein Meisterwerk, or The Step-by-Step Manual for Crafting Your Magnum Opus (Lint, Steggertt, Cue, 1993), but astonishingly, my old Citizen Kane desk pushed into the corner by the window. It was the real thing: the elephantine, walnut, Renaissance Revival library table I’d had eight years ago at 142 Tellwood Street in Wayne, Oklahoma.
Dad had found the desk at the Lord and Lady Hillier Estate Sale just outside of Tulsa, to which antiques wheeler-and-dealer June Bug, Pattie “Let’s Make a Deal” Lupine, had dragged Dad one stuffy Sunday afternoon. For some reason, when Dad saw the desk (and the five struggling Arnies it took to get it on the auction platform), he saw me and only me presiding over it (though I was only eight with a wingspan less than half its length). He paid a huge, undisclosed amount for it and announced with great flourish that this was “Blue’s Desk,” a desk “worthy of my little Eve of St. Agnes, upon which she will unmask all the Great Ideas.” A week later, two of Dad’s checks bounced, one at a grocery store, another at the university bookstore. I secretly believed it was because he’d paid “way above treasure price” for the desk, according to Let’s Make a Deal, though Dad claimed he’d simply been slapdash with his bookkeeping. “Snubbed a decimal point,” he’d said.
And then, rather anticlimactically, I was only able to unmask Great Ideas in Wayne, because we weren’t able to take the desk with us to Sluder, Florida — something to do with the movers (the falsely advertised You Can Take It With You Moving Co.) being unable to fit it in the van. I shed ferocious tears and called Dad a reptile when we had to leave it, as if it wasn’t just an oversized table with elaborate talon legs and seven drawers requiring seven individual keys, but a black pony I was abandoning in a barn.
Now I hurried back down the TWELVE OAKS STAIRCASE, finding Dad in the basement carefully opening the BUTTERFLIES FRAGILE box containing my mother’s specimen — the six glass display cases she’d been working on when she’d died. When we arrived at a new house, he took hours to mount them, always in his office, always on the wall opposite his desk: thirty-two lined up girls in a petrified beauty pageant. It was why he didn’t like June Bugs — or anyone, for that matter — nosing around his study, because the most devastating aspect of the Lepidoptera was not their color, or the unexpected furriness of the Polyphemus Moth antennae, not even the gloomy feeling you felt whenever you stood in front of something that had once zigzagged madly through the air, now still, wings uncouthly spread, body pinned to a piece of paper in a glass case. It was the presence of my mother within them. As Dad said once, they allowed you to see her face in greater close-up than any photographic likeness (Visual Aid 4.0). I’d always felt too that they held a strange adhesive power, so when a person looked at them, it was difficult to yank his/her gaze away.
VISUAL AID 4.0
“So how do you like it?” he asked cheerfully, lifting out one of the cases, frowning as he inspected the corners.
“It’s perfect,” I said.
“Isn’t it? The perfect surface on which to draft an admissions essay to make any Harvard graybeard shiver in his dress slacks.”
“But how much did it cost for you to buy it again — and then the shipping!”
He glanced at me. “Hasn’t anyone told you it’s blasphemous to ask the price of a gift?”
“How much? In total.”
He stared at me. “Six hundred dollars,” he said with a resigned sigh, and then, returning the case to the box, squeezed my shoulder and moved past me, back up the stairs, shouting at Brass and Woodwinds to speed up the tempo of their last movement.
He was lying. I knew this, not only because his eyes had flicked to the side when he’d said “six hundred” and Fritz Rudolph Scheizer, MD, had written in The Conduct of Rational Creatures (1998) that the cliché of a person’s eyes flicking to the side when he or she lies is “utterly true,” but also because, while surveying the underside of the desk, I’d spotted the tiny red price tag still knotted around the leg in the far corner ($17,000).
I hurried back upstairs, into the foyer where Dad was looking through another box, BOOKS LIBRARY. I felt bewildered — a little upset, too. Dad and I had long put into effect the Sojourner Agreement, the understanding we’d always give each other The Truth “even if she was a beast, frightening and foul smelling.” Over the years, there’d been countless occasions when the average dad would’ve cooked up an elaborate story, just to preserve the Parental Ruse, that they were sexless and morally flawless as Cookie Monsters — like the time Dad disappeared for twenty-four hours and when home, sported the tired yet satisfied look of a ranch hand who’d successfully horsewhispered a touchy Palomino. If I asked for The Truth (and sometimes I chose not to ask), he never let me down — not even when it let me hold his character up to the light and I could see him for what he sometimes was: harsh, scratchy, a few unexpected holes.
I had to confront him. Otherwise, the lie could wear me away (see “Acid Rain on Gargoyles,” Conditions, Eliot, 1999, p. 513). I ran upstairs, removed the price tag and kept it in my pocket for the rest of the day, waiting for the perfect checkmate moment to fling it at him.
But then, just before we left for dinner at Outback Steakhouse, he was in my room examining the desk, and he looked so absurdly cheerful and proud of himself (“I’m good,” he said, animatedly rubbing his hands together like Dick Van Dyke. “Fit for St. Peter, hmm, sweet?”). I couldn’t help but feel that to call him out on this well-intentioned extravagance, to embarrass him, was sort of unnecessary and cruel — not unlike informing Blanche Dubois that her arms looked flabby, her hair dry, and that she was dancing the polka dangerously close to the lamplight.
It was better not to say anything.
The Woman in White