A dark house. Creaking floorboards. Movements. There is no need to rehearse the banal melodrama of the act. In the morning the guilt on the faces of both the guilty, as easy to read as a headline. Large, heavy Petya, lithe, shaven-headed Apu, the woman between them like a storm cloud. There’s nothing to explain, she said. It’s what happened. I think you both should go.
And then Petya imprisoned by his fear of the world in his brother’s rented car with darkened windows trembled with humiliated, unmanned fury in the back seat, three hours of silent horror as they drove back to the city. At such moments a man’s thoughts may begin to turn to murder.
Eighteen years after Apu was born the old man had an extramarital involvement and was not careful and a pregnancy resulted which he chose not to have aborted, because, in his opinion, it was always his business to do the choosing. The mother was a poor woman whose identity did not become known (a secretary? a whore?) and in return for a certain financial consideration she gave the child up to be raised as his father’s son, left town, and disappeared from her baby’s story. So like the god Dionysus the child was twice born, once of his mother and then again into his father’s world. Dionysus the god was always an outsider, a god of resurrection and arrival, “the god that comes.” He was also androgynous, “man-womanish.” That this was the pseudonym the youngest child of Nero Golden chose for himself in the classical-renaming game reveals that he knew something about himself before he knew it, so to speak. Though at the time the reasons he gave for his choice were, in the first place, that Dionysus adventured far and wide in India, and indeed the mythical Mount Nysa where he was born might have been located on the subcontinent; and, in the second place, that he was the deity of sensual delight, not only Dionysus but, in his Roman incarnation, also Bacchus, god of wine, disorderliness and ecstasy, all of which—Dionysus Golden said—sounded like fun. However, he soon announced that he preferred not to be known by the divine name in full, and went by the plain, near-anonymous single-letter nickname, “D.”
His integration into the family had been no easy matter. With his half brothers, from the beginning, he had poor relations. All his childhood he had felt excluded. They called him Mowgli and howled comically at the moon. His wolf-mother was some jungle whore; theirs was the mother wolf of Rome. (At this point it seems they had decided to be Romulus and Remus, though Apu later denied this to me, or rather suggested that it had been an idea in D’s head, not his own.) They had already mastered Latin and Greek when D was still learning to talk, and they used these secret languages to banish him from their conversations. They both afterwards denied this, too, but admitted that the way he entered the family, and also the age gap, had created serious difficulties, questions of loyalty and natural affection. Now, as a young man, D Golden when in his brothers’ company alternated between ingratiation and rage. It was plain that he needed to love and be loved; there was a tide of emotion in him that needed to wash over people and he hoped for a returning tide to wash over him. When this kind of passionate reciprocity didn’t happen he snapped and ranted and withdrew. He was twenty-two years old when the family took possession of the Golden house. Sometimes he seemed wise beyond his years. At other times he behaved like a four-year-old child.
When, as a child, he plucked up his courage and asked his father and stepmother about the woman who gave him birth, his father would simply throw up his hands and leave the room. His stepmother would grow angry. “Leave it!” she cried one fateful day. “That was a woman of no consequence. She went away, got sick and died.”
What was it like, to be Mowgli, born of a woman of no consequence, who had been so cruelly cast off by his father and then in the outer darkness had died one of the myriad deaths of the forgotten poor? I heard a shocking story later, from Apu, after the code of silence was broken. There had been a time when the old man’s relationship with their mother was in difficulties. He raged at her and she shouted back. I sat up and paid attention because this was the first time in my conversations with the Goldens that the faceless, nameless woman, Nero’s wife—since ancient times an unlucky thing to be—had walked out onto the stage and opened her mouth; and because, according to the story, Nero had shouted and screamed, and she had screamed and shouted back at him. This was not the Nero I knew, in whom the force of his rage was kept under control, emerging only in the form of self-glorifying bombast.
At any rate: after the explosion the family split into two camps. The older boys took their mother’s side but Dionysus Golden stood firmly by his father and persuaded the patriarch that his wife, Petya and Apu’s mother, was not fit to run the household. Nero summoned his wife and ordered her to surrender the keys; and after that for a time it was D who gave instructions and ordered groceries and decided what food would be cooked in the kitchens. It was a public humiliation, a dishonoring. Her sense of her own honor was profoundly linked to that iron ring, a majestic O three inches in diameter, from which hung maybe twenty keys, large and small, keys to the larder, to cellar strongboxes packed with gold ingots and other arcana of the rich, and to various secret crevices all over the mansion where she concealed only she knew what: old love letters, wedding jewelry, antique shawls. It was the symbol of her domestic authority, and her pride and self-respect hung there along with the keys. She was the mistress of the locks, and without that role she was nothing. Two weeks after she was commanded by her husband to give up the key ring, the deposed lady of the house attempted to take her own life. Pills were swallowed, she was found by Apu and Petya slumped at the foot of the marble stairs, an ambulance came. She was clutching Apu by the wrist and the ambulance men said, please come with us, her holding on to you is important, she’s holding on to life.
In the ambulance the two paramedics played good cop, bad cop.—Stupid bitch scaring your family, you think we have nothing better to do, we have serious things to deal with, real injuries, emergencies that are not self-inflicted, we should just leave you to die.—No the poor thing, don’t be so hard on her, she must be so sad, it’s all right darling, we will look after you, things will get better, every cloud has a silver lining.—To hell with the silver lining, she doesn’t even have a cloud, look at her house, her money, these people think they own us.—Don’t mind him darling, it’s just his way, we are here to take care of you, you’re in good hands now. She was trying to mutter something but Apu couldn’t make out the words. He knew what they were doing, they were trying to keep her from slipping into unconsciousness, and afterwards, after the stomach pump which he had had to watch because of her claw-hand clutching at his wrist, when she was conscious again in a hospital bed, she told him, The only thing I was trying to say in the ambulance was, my child, will you please punch that rude bastard on the nose.
She returned home in a kind of triumph, because of course she was restored to her position as head of the household and the traitor child who was not her child begged for her forgiveness, and she told him she forgave him, but actually she never did, and barely spoke to him again for the rest of her life. Nor did he truly want her forgiveness. She had called his mother a woman of no consequence and deserved everything he had inflicted upon her. After that his brothers slammed emotional doors in his face and told him he was lucky they were not violent men. He swallowed his pride and pleaded for their forgiveness also. It did not come quickly. But as the years passed a reserved cordiality slowly grew up between them, a brevity of interaction that outsiders mistook for inarticulate brotherly love, but was no more than mutual toleration.