“Most everything around here has been shot out for years now,” another mother said. “Where did this bear even come from?”
“Exactly,” Francine said.
The eldest mother had the sugar and was so arthritic she had long enjoyed the awe of X-ray technicians. She was half blind too and described herself as dumb as a box of nails, but she knew how to keep on living. Whereas Penny, who wasn’t even forty — she’d had Edward when she was sixteen — died of lung cancer without having ever smoked a cigarette, even in the worst of times.
It was Penny’s death that brought them together, though they weren’t about to take up the task of writing to her boy in prison. Penny had liked to say there was a part in each of us that had never sinned and that was the part of Edward she addressed when she wrote to him. But as the eldest mother pointed out, that was the same part that was never born and will never die. It was thus irrelevant. Better to address a plate with a covered bridge printed on it.
They still thought of themselves as being seven in number even though without Penny it was six. In general they believed that the dead remained around, fulfilling all but the most technical requirements of residency on earth, yet relieved of the banality of daily suffering. In this respect, they could argue, though they never did, that their children’s victims weren’t as bad off as commonly assumed.
Fathers didn’t flock like this, they agreed. Leslie had stuck it out with a father the longest. Their boy, Gordon, had done something terrible, just terrible. And he had been one of those kids who had never caused a bit of trouble. This was scarcely believable given what happened but there was the record, their boy, Gordon’s record, or rather the lack of it. Leslie said that after the trial, the outcome of which was never in doubt, she and the father tended more and more to behave as though they were performing before an audience. Not a sold-out house, to be sure, but a respectable enough number in attendance to ensure that the show wouldn’t close for a while. When the lights dimmed and they were alone, except for the audience, the spectators and listeners, it became all choked poise and memory pieces between them, with the occasional brilliant burst of anger and loathing.
“It essentially became vanity,” Leslie said.
The eldest mother said, “But what can you expect from men? They’re like a virus with a penchant for the heart. They got a special affinity for attacking the heart. You can recover, sure, but the damage is done.”
The fathers, it turned out, had all gone back to work. To a man they had returned to their places of employment. And they were doing all right. I’m doing, they’d say, when asked. Some had remarried. One had had his impulsive vasectomy reversed.
Barbara’s daughter had been dubbed the End of the Dream murderer by the media, for that was what the girl said in the course of her serial rampage.
“It’s only her who knows if she said it,” Barbara argued. “Her saying she said it doesn’t make it so. She was always that kind of kid, saying all kinds of crap and expecting you to believe her.”
“Was she Buddhist,” Leslie asked.
“Jesus no,” Barbara said. “She didn’t even do yoga. She didn’t do nothing until she did.”
“You can be a murderer without being a liar,” the eldest mother said.
None of the mothers had pets. The children had all had pets of one kind or another and homes had to be found for them. There were hundreds of people out there who keenly wanted murderers’ pets and by their very ambition and craving were utterly inappropriate as adopters. Sometimes these pets’ stories ended badly too.
“It takes sixty-three days to make a dog,” the eldest mother said. “Two hundred and seventy days to make a human being, give or take a few.”
The mothers were atypical in that each had brought forth only one child. In their day, two had been the norm. Now three was the new two, whereas one was the old zero.
“People had more interesting thoughts before mass inoculations,” Barbara maintained. “More generous and less damaging thoughts.”
“Who knows what’s in all the inoculations they give the little babies,” Francine said. “Oh, they tell you, but still you don’t know. How could you?”
“Minds used to move like rivers but they don’t want our minds moving like that,” Emily said. “They want to channelize our thinking, and some people can’t tolerate their minds being dammed. They noticed it right away, whereas others never do, and they can’t tolerate it.”
“Damned,” Leslie murmured.
“Exactly,” Francine said.
Francine’s boy had claimed that the family he’d slaughtered would have killed hundreds of people if they’d been left to prosper.
“You mean because they were into making pharmaceuticals or beer?” Barbara asked.
“I’m not defending him, but it could very well have been true.”
“Genuine thinking is rare,” the eldest mother said.
“I saw a sculpture of the river god once,” Leslie said. “It was the most frightening work of art I’ve ever witnessed. Someone blew it up, I heard. It was just too frightening.”
Emily looked at the bottle she was drinking water from. “How can it be pure if it’s enhanced?” she said to no one in particular.
Pam then commenced to tell a story about gods. It was rendered fairly incoherent in her telling but it concerned a group of lost Greek sailors on a fishing boat who happened upon a desolate island where they found an old man in a hut attended by a bedraggled, almost featherless though immense bird and a large old hairless goat whose nipples were nonetheless rosy and whose udders were full of milk.
Yuck, thought Emily.
“It turns out,” said Pam, “to make a long story short, that the decrepit old man was Jupiter, whose reign as supreme ruler of the universe was long past. The goat was his old nurse, Amalthea, who had once suckled him, and the bird was the fearsome eagle who once carried in its claws the god’s devastating thunderbolts. When Jupiter heard from the sailors that any temples that remained were in ruins and then realized that all he remembered had disappeared, he began to sob and the eagle screamed and the old goat bleated, all in the most terrible anguish. The sailors were so frightened that they fled back to their boat. Among the crew was a learned Russian professor of philosophy, and he was the one who told them the old guy was Jupiter and—”
“There just happened to be a learned Russian professor of philosophy on this fishing boat?” Emily said.
“That’s a melancholy story,” Leslie said. “I’m not sure why.”
“Birds are sad,” Francine said. “Remember when Penny was here and she tried to establish a sanctuary for unwanted parrots and the town shut her down? They said there was no permitting process for such a thing. Penny said those birds cried when they were taken off her property. They knew. They knew their last chance had come and gone.”
The mothers were silent.
Then Barbara said, “Well, I don’t know why you told that story about the old god, but the nice thing about it was that he wasn’t alone at the end.”
“What about the one we got now,” Emily asked.
“The one what?”
“The god we got now. Do you think somebody in the future will be telling a story about finding him exiled to some desolate island and crying when he learns that everything he had fashioned and understood has vanished and that he is subject to the same miserable destiny as any created thing?”
“Probably,” someone finally said.
“I feel uneasy even thinking about the river god,” Leslie said. “But it’s gone now, I’ve heard, blown up. They’re not even calling it an act of vandalism.”
“If we lived in Palestine,” Pam said, “and my boy had done there what he’d done here, the Israeli people would have blown up my home.” She imagined herself being allowed to take from it whatever she could carry, though, but maybe not.