XIII
Since Clara isn’t there to see what Rainer does, and since Lottie is unconscious, I can only speculate as to what happens next. No doubt Rainer thought of the perfect reply to Clara’s accusations the second the door closed behind her. You know how that is. Maybe he walked around the kitchen, trying to bring his anger under control. Eventually, though, he fetched his books from wherever he concealed them and spread them out onto the kitchen table. Years ago, when they were in Germany, just before the storm broke over Rainer, Lottie saw one of the books. At the time, she didn’t know what she was looking at. It was only in talking to Reverend Mapple that she stumbled across the memory and finally understood its significance. She was spying on her father, peering through the keyhole in his study door for no other reason than that he’d strictly forbidden her and her sisters to disturb him while he was in it with the door shut. Lottie observed him unlock one of his glass-doored bookcases with a key strung on his watch chain. From the bookcase’s highest shelf, he reached down a tall, narrow volume. Bound between plain gray covers, it was secured with a lock, which Rainer opened with a second key on his watch chain. He sat down at his desk, turning back the book’s cover. Lottie swore the room darkened, as if the air in her father’s study had filled with particles of minute blackness, making it difficult for her to distinguish Rainer. Because of this, she couldn’t say for sure if what she saw next was accurate, but the pages of the book appeared to be giving off a black light, dimming her father’s face. Lottie bolted, ran from what she seemed to be seeing, heedless of Rainer hearing her. For the better part of the week that followed, she kept as much distance between herself and Rainer as reasonably possible. When there was no escape, when she had to embrace him, she had all she could do keeping herself from shuddering at the tiny flakes of blackness she could see clinging to his cheek, like the flecks of shaving foam he missed. For years after, she woke gasping from nightmares in which her father looked up from his desk to show her no face, only a black emptiness.
So I imagine Rainer bathing his eyes in the black light that spills off the pages of those books and clots the very air. A few streets over, Clara makes small talk with Italo and Regina, the three of them doing their combined best to talk around the strangeness squatting in their midst like an enormous toad. Lottie tries to escape from the black ocean, where her dreams have returned her. There’s no giant mouth rising to devour her. There’s only the face of her other-self and that unceasing monologue. Sometimes the speech returns to familiar ground — fantasies of her father’s friend, loathing of her sisters — other times, it ranges over new territory — fantasies of her father himself, loathing of her mother. Lottie has never heard anything like this, but it isn’t the shock of the language her other-self spits out that’s so disturbing. It isn’t even the sheer strangeness of confronting another her. What is truly bad, in a way that pumps fresh meaning into that deflated word, returning to it all the force it possessed when her parents used it on her when she was a child — what is bad is that each vile chapter in the other-Lottie’s fantasy of degradation evokes a response in her beyond simple revulsion. Every ugly assertion makes a part of Lottie jump with recognition. She’s no liar, this blank face. She’s telling the truth, giving voice to impulses Lottie hasn’t wanted to be aware she has. She’s tried to make of her soul a garden, so to speak, but the other-her’s words dig into the soil and overturn it, exposing what is wet and wriggling there to the light of day.
Maybe all this sounds kind of naïve to us, kind of dated. We’re much more used to the idea that we’re full of all manner of unpleasant impulses, aren’t we? What Lottie is experiencing, however, is more than just a pious, sheltered girl realizing her own impure thoughts. She’s undergoing a recognition — a recognition of intent so intense it’s for all practical purposes equivalent to having committed the acts themselves. The ground has fallen out from underneath her. She realizes that the words her other-self is saying are coming from her mouth, too. Her mind is becoming brittle, freezing over the way a pond does, her thoughts becoming sluggish, struggling through an increasingly icy medium. Only the horror gripping her seems capable of surviving the cold, moving freely within her. It trundles along like some kind of small, polar beast, tireless, persistent, heedless of the plummeting temperature. Once the process is complete and her mind has frozen, only that small beast will be left, only the horror.
Clara stays away from the house the entire night, refusing Italo and Regina’s offer of their bed in favor of sitting up at their kitchen table when everyone else has turned in for the night, smoking away the hours. From what little I’ve heard of her, she strikes me as a woman prone neither to regret nor worry, but on this night I suspect she must taste a little of both. She must think about the house she was mistress of in the old country, in the days before everything went wrong for her husband. She must think about that old life, and the distance between it and this new one. Does she remember the first time Lottie was sick, truly sick, and she sat up with her? How could she not?
XIV
Returning home with Gretchen and Christina the next morning, Clara is met at the door by Rainer. His face is drawn with exhaustion, but his eyes are alive with a light his wife has not seen in them previously. This light doesn’t seem to radiate from within his eyes so much as to be reflected upon them, as if Rainer is gazing at a source of illumination invisible to everyone else. Clara doesn’t like the look of this light. It isn’t the warm glow of the sun; it’s the cold glare of lightning. Over the course of their marriage, Clara has been afraid of Rainer on one or two occasions, instances when his temper flared so bright she was sure it would push him to violence. In all that time, she’s never been afraid for him, not once, not when he told about his secret studies and the terrible cost they took, not when he walked out the door to begin the work as a stonemason he had absolutely no training or, so far as she could see, no real inclination for. She has faith in her husband, in his fundamental ability, despite a persistent absent-mindedness, to take care of himself. It’s one of Rainer’s qualities she likes the best, the way he encourages confidence in himself. Now, seeing that dead light playing on his eyes, she pictures Rainer as a man promenading in the middle of a thunderstorm, carrying a long metal pole high in his hands as lightning shatters trees around him. The hairs on the back of her neck stand up as Clara trembles at what she may have pushed him to. She might lose not only her daughter, she realizes, she might lose her husband as well. But what else is there to be done? Putting on a brave face, she hustles the girls into the house past their father, telling them to hurry, they’re almost late for school. When they’re inside, she looks into Rainer’s strange eyes and says, “Well? You’ve succeeded?”