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Fiction from Web del SolA Knock at MidnightPatrick Keppel
Stefan Mauer jerked his head out of the water, spluttering, gasping for breath. He gripped the edge of the tub hard, then felt about in the darkness for a towel and rubbed his eyes clear of film. At last he could manage a faint smile--it was after all possible to fall asleep in the bath. Why, he might have drowned! And it would have been his mother's fault; she'd nearly begged him to take this bath, as though somehow it were essential to her being that he experience the luxury of their fine new tub, soaking to the point of eternal languor in its bubbling, whirling jets. She had drawn the water for him, opened a new bar of soap, laid out three layers of brilliant white towels. This same mother would have checked on him in an hour or so, knocking faintly at the door, and then a little louder . . . Stefan? And finally she would have gone to wake his father, and--shriek!--the holiday which had gone so splendidly up to then, the whole Mauer family together once more at the old newly renovated homestead, would be ruined. Stefan's siblings and their excellent, handsome families had all left earlier that day (after their baths), but now they would have to return--the Black Christmas. Years later the tragedy would be a lesson, a warning, to them all: be prosperous, marry young, have many children, keep your religion--and you won't drown in the bathtub.
Oh, but that moral wouldn't sit well with the younger generation of Mauers, Stefan's nieces and nephews, who as they grew into painful adolescence would no doubt feel compelled to idealize him--their brilliant Uncle Stefan, the only relative who would have understood them! For a time they would bristle whenever their parents said anything which even slightly implied that Stefan had had his faults, had a chip on his shoulder, say, or took the world too seriously. "You're all just jealous of him, you're glad he's dead!" they'd scream and storm up to their rooms, then whisper to his ghost when alone, "Please show me how to live--Oh, Uncle Stefan, what would you have done?" On at least one marvelous occasion they'd manage to see him in their dreams, quietly telling them not to worry, they were doing fine. Later they would write moving memoirs of him in their composition classes. But in time they too would begin to forget; one by one they would be pulled back hard into the safe, narrow world they'd been breathing in since birth, would sink deeply into watery reproductions of their parents' lives and freeze over like a pond in winter--all save perhaps one stubborn lamb. Stefan thought he knew already who this would be, his brother Peter's youngest daughter, Stephanie (what a mistake to have fated her thus with this name!), whose first words to her Uncle Stefan when at the age of six she discovered the strange pleasure in family taxonomy were so precisely to the point: "My father never laughs, and you're laughing all the time!" No, Stephanie would never surrender, and so would follow her uncle's tragic course. At every opportunity this young, tormented soul would step outside her family's carefully drawn boundaries--would turn a cold shoulder to profit and property and squander her high marks instead on the tattered academic fringe of the theatre, or some other useless art form; would marry someone the family disapproved of and divorce quietly several years later, childless, and then pare herself down to her books and music and maybe two friends and live like a monk or an alchemist in a grimy corner of a sagging metropolis. And despite it all, this neo-Stefan would insist to the rest of her family that she was happy; her way was less comfortable, more lonely, but (as her siblings would know deep down) more true as well--not an inherited, blueprint life, but a world all of her own making. Nevertheless, thus would she die, suddenly and painfully at the age of thirty-one, in a bloody car accident or jet crash.
Stefan shivered in his steamy bath, groaned into his towel. How could he let himself go on like this? Even in jest, it was childish, absurd--surely by his age people stopped imagining their deaths in this way: Take that, Mauers! Share in my profound content! Besides, perhaps such extreme bitterness wasn't even altogether justified. Certainly he had far less reason than many people to curse his family; in fact, often during his youth (well, yesterday) he'd wished they'd been openly cruel--locked him in dark closets for weeks or plunged him into freezing baths--instead of simply selfish and banal.
Stefan sighed and stood up fast into the chill, so that his eyes went dark with blood rushing to his head, or draining from it--which was it? Quickly, one might almost say desperately, he wrapped himself in a towel, and stood for a long moment listening to the shrill ringing in his ears, feeling the heavy, thumping pulse in his temples. Finally he took a deep breath and allowed himself a smirk. He always felt like this at the end of his visits home, exhausted from trying desperately to fit in on the one hand and to detach himself on the other, presenting a riddle not one of them could solve, least of all himself: I am one of you, yet not at all one of you: Who am I? But this is precisely what was expected of him--the puzzling role he'd been assigned in this absurd family drama. On the plane tomorrow he would be sad and dismal, confused and dazed, but then the following day after a good night's sleep within his own four walls, he would wake to who he really was, and recall what happened here, these petty humiliations, only as a bad dream he would soon forget.
"And then he could enjoy life again," Stefan was ready to add, but suddenly he stopped his toweling and stared into the tub, into the quiet vortex of the draining water. And what was that dream he'd just been having, there, in the bath? Something terrible, he was quite sure, but it eluded him now, fluttered like a moth against dim light, and then was gone. Stefan sighed heavily, shivered off the faint dust the dream had left behind, then pulled on his clothes and wandered into the kitchen to boil some water for tea.
"Peter-Thomas-Mary-Stefan?" his mother called from the living room. She always stuttered through the names of all her children before she landed upon his. It was an annoying habit, and Stefan was slow to respond, as though to punish her. "Stefan!" she called out again, an odd touch of fear in her voice.
"Yes, yes, it's me, I'm here," he answered impatiently.
"What are you doing?"
"Making tea."
"Oh, good!" his mother said happily. "Have some tea." She paused a moment, then added all in a rush, "Well, how about that, huh? What did you think of that?"
Stefan frowned, genuinely confused. "About what?"
"About the bath!" his mother sang. "It's great, isn't it? We feel like we're in a spa. We sit there and look out the window at the view. It's like an inn. That's what the Knapps said when we had them up. You remember the Knapps? We went from room to room, and their mouths just dropped. They said, 'Wow! This is like a country inn!' Isn't it cozy here?"
"Oh, yes," Stefan said, wincing. There was a time, almost ten years ago now, when he'd decided he would help his mother overcome this compulsion to ramble on and on about how happy she was. He would act as her confessor, her refuge in the family, the only one with whom she could throw off her quilt of delusions and admit the truth. They would converse as they never had before, relying upon one another as they would their most trusted friends, perhaps even more so. And at first there were a few startling moments when through his persistent questioning she'd broken down in tears, recalling times, awful scenes, when her father, vice-president of the cement mill that owned the small town they now lived in, came home drunk with or without his women and slapped her mother if she objected, or even if she didn't; and how her mother on her deathbed warned her daughter that she'd have to step in quickly to "rescue" her much younger sister, though from exactly what neither could ever bring themselves to say.
And once the dam had cracked a little wider, Stefan's mother proved willing--even anxious--to let loose a steady stream of reproaches against Stefan's father as well, though first Stefan had had to learn not to be so quick to direct its course. For instance, in one of their early sessions, Stefan's mother began to wonder aloud how on earth she'd ended up with such a man in the first place; after all, everyone in those days knew that she, Rivers White, could have had anyone in town. But then, "for some odd reason," she'd ignored all her suitors from the best families and instead plucked from the earth below a mate who was markedly uneducated and awkward, a mill-worker's son no less. "Well, of course!" Stefan had interjected with a laugh, "you wanted someone as much unlike your father as possible." But after staring back at him for a moment in deep confusion bordering on terror, his mother had simply waved this theory off. "Oh, no, not that! It was just because your father seemed kind and good-hearted," she'd countered automatically--the old, familiar story she'd told hundreds of times.
So from then on Stefan had withheld his analyses; whenever he sensed his mother drawing near the truth, he'd simply bite his tongue and let her drift on further and further, until at last she was simply there. Yes, yes--the plan was to mold Peter Mauer into her ideal man, but apparently she'd underestimated the coarseness of the clay. Although she'd worked diligently to refine his manners and prejudices, he was always an embarrassment at social gatherings, and at home he was often simply vulgar and mean. But this she could have stood had he only proved capable of being a loving father to her children. Not that he was ever cruel, as her father had been, but having been raised with little tenderness in this crude old Mauer farmhouse ("They thought I was spoiled because I wanted them to put in a bathroom!" Stefan's mother often bitterly recalled), he just couldn't comprehend family matters of a delicate or emotional nature. For instance, he left entirely to his wife the burden of worry whenever their children fell ill. "Every one of you nearly died!" Stefan's mother once told him with extreme gravity. "Remember Mary's cyst? Your burst appendix? Oh, but your father--what goes on his head? When it was all over, he'd say, 'See? you made a fuss for nothing!' Oh, it's a wonder I'm not out of my mind," she'd laughed in coda, but by then her eyes had filled with tears, and she'd had to hurry to take it all back: It didn't matter, not a bit of it; at bottom, her father, her husband, were "good men"--they worked hard, they were excellent providers, they were very kind and sweet deep down.
Despite these inevitable retractions, Stefan had thought his mother was making progress; there was even a time, a brief time, when he'd thought perhaps that she was on the very brink of reviving those essential qualities of life--a sense of quiet personal rapture, of rising, inexplicable, wordless joy--which lay smothered beneath the concerns and demands of her two dense layers of family. He'd first noticed this possibility in the last few years of her father's dismal, self-imposed dissipation, during which she alone of the remaining Whites had bothered to care for him. Every weekend, often against the wishes of the Mauers, she visited him in his tiny apartment which he vehemently insisted he was too sick ever to leave, and which, out of superstition or else perversity, he always kept absurdly hot, dim, and bare. For nearly ten years she washed and combed and diapered him like her fifth child, even made a few dutiful attempts at saving his immortal soul from the fires of hell that were licking eagerly at his bedsores, only to be rewarded with ever intensifying curses and, at last, dying words which Stefan always quoted to his theatre class whenever they were discussing one of Strindberg's dark dramas: "Rivers, you blind idiot! The lightswitch is right by the door!"
Even so, at the funeral she had seemed unusually calm and lucid. "Now we'll see," Stefan had thought; he really had had great hopes that she would undergo a sudden metamorphosis--and why not? Such things did happen, if rarely. Indeed, after fitting together a few odd pieces in her recent behavior--that sudden smile that had lit her face as she'd made her way up the stairs alone; that careful, sustained glance out the window--Stefan even believed it possible that she had been consciously looking forward to this day, preparing herself in luxurious secrecy for the ecstatic moment when at last she could step out from behind the dark curtain she'd drawn over her life and thrill in the light to the sound of her own true voice. She had confessed to him once that she'd always dreamed of writing; well, now she would write--yes, she'd write it all down, all those thoughts and experiences too long ignored, a paper reality of her dreams, not for her family, and not for Stefan, (though of course he'd be only too happy to encourage her if she found her first attempts too trying), but for herself alone.
However, in the year since then--what had gone wrong?--she had instead turned in the opposite direction, retreating more deeply than ever under her blanket of delusions. Now she rambled day and night about all the work they'd had done on the old Mauer farmhouse--gutting the humble dwelling as rock-solid and square as its previous owners and transforming it into a great big burgeoning thing right out of Architectural Digest, with the latest in cathedral ceilings and sun rooms, all exploitive of view. This was supposed to be the crowning achievement to her happy life; at last she could live according to those famous folksy lines she and nearly every woman of her generation and class had cross-stitched as a girl: "Let Me Live in My House by the Side of the Road and Be a Friend to Man." This little motto was everywhere in the house, most prominently in a blinding red tapestry that hung down over the balcony above their new living room. Oh, she was relentless; every moment of her day she spent weaving still more evidence into the fabric of her happiness, wrapping it round and round like a silk shroud, and then almost perversely holding it up for all the world to see, no matter how sadly transparent or shabby it actually was. In a couple of weeks she would send Stefan an envelope crammed with snapshots she'd taken during his visit, pictures of him with this brother or that nephew, their backs stiff, their smiles weary and strained. On the reverse she would write for posterity's sake the date and names of the people in the picture, and then a little caption like "This is great!" or "So warm and cozy!" Her life thus labeled, it must be so.
No, she was beyond help now; there was nothing left to do but humor her, as his siblings did, or else ignore her entirely, as his father had done for their entire marriage.
"Stefan?!"
"I said it's very nice," Stefan shouted, his eyes fixed on the slowly reddening coils beneath the teapot. "Very--" he would be damned if he said the word cozy--"very comfortable." And as he knew even this tiny thread was enough for his mother to resume her incessant weaving--she was already going on again about the Knapps--Stefan at once drifted out of the kitchen, out of the conversation, down the hall to the front door.
He stopped in front of the door and stared out through the curtain into the cold darkness, across the narrow road passing just in front of their porch to the dead fields beyond, then back again to the surface of the glass, where his own face was reflected, weary and flushed from his bath. Soon his head began to draw forward in tiny increments, at once eager and reluctant to feel the window's cold sting, but just before it could touch a black glove reached up from below and brushed hard twice against the glass.
Stefan jumped back as though he'd been struck, then slowly leaned in and peered out. On the porch stood a man in a black jacket. He was hunched over and breathing heavily between low incoherent moans, as though drunk. At last, after an immense effort, he managed to pronounce one word: "H-hel-p."
Stefan slowly backed away from the door, drifted through the library to the living room, where his mother sat huddled in her bathrobe, staring blankly at the television. He approached her timidly. "Did you . . . hear anything?"
His mother whirled around in terror. "What?! What?!" Just then the glove scraped once again, louder this time, against the pane.
"There's someone outside," Stefan admitted.
"Oh, my God, who is it?" Stefan's mother cried. She stood up at once and wrapped herself tightly in her robe.
Stefan shook his head. "I don't know . . . Some guy . . ."
"Some guy! Who? We're not expecting anyone at this hour! Oh, God--Come with me, come with me! Don't let him in. We're not letting him in."
Together they sidled into the hallway. Stefan stood in front of her and edged toward the door, peeked out, and flicked on the porchlight.
A horrible sight! The man stood gazing into the harsh floodlight like some grotesque wax figure, his face a bluish mask rivered with blood, the brightest red imaginable. "H-help me-e!" he moaned, his lips freezing at last in a ghastly oval, red and wet. Thin wisps of vapor twisted up and out of his mouth like a slow leak. "S-some-body . . . h-help!"
Stefan withdrew from the door and turned to his mother, who was standing at the other end of the hallway wringing her hands. "It's a man," he said. "He's bleeding."
"Oh, God!" his mother said through her clenched fist. "Don't let him in, we can't let him in. It might be a trick. You know that's how they do it sometimes. They get you to let them in, and then they knock you over the head--What's that?!"
Just then the tea kettle had begun its piercing shriek. All at once Stefan woke from his daze and strode quickly past his mother into the kitchen and turned off the stove. "We've got to help him--"
"No! Don't let him in!" his mother shouted with desperate vehemence. "We can't do anything!"
Stefan snatched up the telephone receiver and waved it at her aggressively. "I'm just dialing 9-1-1!"
"Oh, good--Wait! We don't have 9-1-1."
Stefan scoffed. "Then what's the number for the police?"
His mother bit her fist. "Oh God, I don't know, I don't know!"
"You don't know the number for the police?" Stefan said with cutting indignation. His mother spent her whole life obsessed with her safety, yet she didn't even know the number of the local police, didn't even have it written down by the phone, as most people like her did. Stefan dialed the operator and after being passed along many different channels, finally was connected to the Bethlehem Police. In a faltering voice he described what was happening--there had been an accident, perhaps even a shooting!--and requested an ambulance.
"Where is the man now, Sir?" the young woman's voice at the other end broke in.
"He's on the porch," Stefan said. "We haven't let him in . . . just in case." Stefan thought he heard the woman snickering to herself. After a lengthy pause, she came back on the line to tell him someone would be right over. Stefan thanked her awkwardly, then slowly returned the receiver to its cradle.