The Percivals
I
Before the cosmetics, before the addition to the house, the tenants, and the baby, life had plodded along for the Percivals like an old workhorse, and that was how they’d liked it. Charles Percival spent his days drawing get-well cards and dreaming, often napping for long stretches at his board or in the broad, changeless field that ambled far beyond his imagination; and the same was true about Clarissa, his wife, except that the cards she drew were solitaire, and whenever she dreamed it was with her eyes open. Together, they filled their scrupulously shallow lives without friends or family: only with each other and their prayers for constancy. To the few locals who were aware of them, they seemed as dumb animals — aware, yet bereft of reason.
Over the hills and into this valley they had come to live apart from the concrete world and noisy, polluted skies. Charles, particularly, had suffered there: the pace, the pungency, the death of property and privacy to proliferating developments and cameras: the naïve profusion of humanity. He was a fluffy, obdurate little man with a monk’s tonsure and an Irish setter’s nose for anything that might threaten his territory — and in that other world, everything had. Clarissa, the love of his life, his Li’l Love Button (she was even littler, and rounder, than he, and her devotion threaded them) dreamed that he would have been better off if he’d been born before the Industrial Revolution, and in fact often imagined him as an early American farmer knee-deep in mule dung. In the days before their move to the 1840s homestead, each morning before leaving for work, and the instant he returned home, sometimes also at lunch hour and just before bedtime, he had pelted, with fresh garlic and rotten tomatoes, the bus garage that had sprung up behind their former house. He’d imagined himself then as a latter-day Johnny Appleseed, except that his fame would have come in shutting down not just the bus garage, but also every strip mall and big-box store throughout the land. And this war with encroachment had not been limited to grand-scale struggles. Whenever the tribe of kids next door had laughed too much, he’d hurled tomatoes and garlic their way, too; and when the people across the street had shined their Christmas lights into his windows through February, he’d threatened legal action (not against the neighbors, but against the mailman for calling him “uppity”).
Of course Charles was uppity (or rather, anxious, really), and so was Clarissa: She had to be to have lived with him so long. Yet she was also pragmatic: submissive to causes and effects that were outside her realm of understanding and control.
But none of this — the six delinquents next door, the tinsel lights that had kept them up past Presidents’ Day, the abominable buses, and all the other causes of Charles’s divorce from civilization — was relevant to either of them anymore: Their struggles, they believed, had ceased along with their former station. Now all they had to contend with was nature and their blissfully eternal serenity.
Ever since the move Charles exalted in his bubble of contentment, which Clarissa was not sure might rather be of resignation; and as for herself, she accepted her new surroundings because it was his wish that she would. And so she tried to appreciate their limitations in the valley, fearful that if she did not, she would dwell on her own.
Then one gray morning, as she gazed into a puddle from the last night’s squall (they no longer kept mirrors), Clarissa did not recognize herself. It was as if she had come upon another.
As she peered closer, the face became uglier. At first she tapped it with just a forefinger, but soon was kneading and plying it with all the others. She slapped the puddle. What she beheld was not even a lady, but rather, something like that old grouch that had let his garlic and tomato garden overtake theirs: he with the varicose cheeks that had made his face a too-ripe peach, who had cried into the night, “My God, my God, don’t let the Witch come back!” “My God!” thought Clarissa. “What will Charles say?” Into this preoccupation floated a vision of those six adorable children that had once been their neighbors. Considering that Charles had been unable to tolerate them, how could he possibly tolerate a hag?
She must fix herself. But how? Makeup? She had never used the stuff, had never even considered using it. It was...unnatural! And yet, she knew now she must.
Despite enriching her looks, the cosmetics provoked Charles to raise the issue they were supposed to cover up. He had just emerged from their bedroom when he noticed her from behind, stooped over the wood stove and a pan of giblets, and asked if she wasn’t feeling a bit under the weather. Without moving she mumbled, “Of course not” — her rouge usurped by a blush.
He peeked until he found her eyes. “Oh, po-leaze, Clarissa,” he coughed, “the red-light district is back there!” Over her head flew the apron. “What is this stuff,” he pressed on, practically poking it, “the crap they rope you into buying at The Shopping Factor?”
“We sold the TV before the move, Charles,” Clarissa reminded him.
“Someone’s been peddling it around here?”
“Oh, Charles,” she leaped, unveiling, “please, just let me be. I thought it might make me pretty!” She started to cry. “I thought you might like it!”
“You look like a poodle!” he said.
“And who are you, Charles, to—?”
“Me? Who are you, Clarissa? Or, better, what?”
She ran out of the room, wailing.
“Oh come on,” he called after her. “It’s just that I don’t understand! Why, Li’l Love Button? That’s all I’m asking. Why?”
She would never tell him.
***
Weeks passed, during which time the lotions and glosses, the brushes and picks incited more rude gestures and quips such as, “Hmm, tutti-frutti today!” Yet it happened that as Clarissa decided to wean off the stuff, Charles decided he rather liked it. For though he persevered in his belief that the cosmetics did little for her looks, it had happened that they did much for his esteem.
Soon he was doing the things of courtship he had ignored: holding her hand, pinching her cheek, giving her flowers (which he picked in the woods); and added others: filing her corns, making her favorite green-bean pâté, humming folk songs to her under the stars, potting in bunches the cattails from the creek that turned her on,...and, after all the years of her fruitless nudging, abruptly agreed to take walks with her on command. Indeed, by the time winter arrived Charles was so confused by the revivification of adolescent sensations that he worried either something of the profuse landscape or left behind from the autumn’s incessant storms might be corrupting him. And the more he rejoiced in possibilities, the more his life seemed to be changing beyond his control.
By the time spring arrived, neither seemed as he or she had been. First, each appeared to the other to have become more healthful. Ever since the move Clarissa had eschewed meat, and now she did deep knee bends thrice each morning and again at bedtime; and Charles made sure to walk the grounds after napping, and through the last fall had tended a vegetable garden (with particular interest in squash). Second, each appeared to the other to have become somewhat restless, Clarissa having redoubled the housework, for some reason showing especial attention to the great-room; and Charles having become suddenly handy, in the great-room mending the several floorboards they had constantly tripped over, and in the kitchen adding a leaf to the table and also some more counter space. And third, each was gaining weight. Naturally, Charles attributed his sprout to the need to feed his newfound energy; but Clarissa had no reasonable idea what may be causing her own midsection to bloom, except that, “It couldn’t be your pâté, could it?”
***
The pregnancy, of course, was an unequivocal surprise. Almost as troubling was that the homestead did not have another bedroom. How, then, might they adapt the little extra space there was into a nursery? It seemed there was no better alternative than to convert part of the great-room.
And what of baby furnishings, baby clothing, playthings,...?
And how would they manage it all?
Although Charles earned a somewhat regular income from the get-well cards he drew for the stationery store in town, the commissions would not be sufficient to support the needs of a family. It was a blessing that the store’s owner, Henry Cabot, retained Charles’s service at all, there was so little demand for his pictures of humanized animals loitering in thatch hammocks and tree houses. At Cabot’s provocation, Charles started giving a couple of hours a week to knocking on business doors in an effort to boost sales. But soon he was confronting NO SOLICITING signs. Were it not for Cabot’s pleas, patronage, and his own referrals, Charles realized that he and Clarissa would soon be dangling just above the poverty line. As a result, he became even more irascible than usual. Next to him and impending debt, Clarissa seriously contemplated rearranging the great-room for herself.
Then one day it occurred to her how they could solve their money woes. “We’ll add an addition,” she said, “and rent it as an apartment.” And that’s exactly what they did, despite Charles’s concern about the building costs.
But what of tenants? Charles had moved to get away from neighbors.
Yet as it turned out, their first boarders could not have come along at a better time or been nicer people, or so it seemed. They moved in not two weeks after Clarissa delivered: an immigrant couple who, having noticed in the Sunday classifieds the “Mostly Furnished Apartment in a Perfect Setting — Probably the Only Quiet Place Left in the County,” had immediately inquired about it. Clarissa had taken their call the day before her water broke, and had been so impressed with them during this ‘screening’ that she had decided to dispense with further interviews. Their exotic voices, alone, had sounded so true, their inquiries and responses so thoughtful, that in one voluptuous instant she had let their roles reverse: the proposition being theirs.
And yet these people, and the apartment which still needed cleaning and walk-through, and the paperwork to draw up (and which she must notarize before they could take possession), all this seemed superfluous then. For she had just given birth to an eleven-pound baby boy, and he looked absolutely nothing like her or Charles. His hair had not their dark coloring or want, but was rather blonde and ample; his eyes were not the river brown of Charles’s or the moss green of hers, but blue as the afternoon sky; his nose a stunning plateau, straight and perfectly finished on top; ears the petals of delicate flowers;... After further inspection, Clarissa considered the boy’s beauty to be the answer to one of her prayers, and thus did not question it more. But Charles was concerned. To him, the beauty was so incongruous as to be incontrovertibly the result of a mistake — a mistake he must investigate.
At the hospital, he followed the infant to the nursery in order to confront the nurse who had rolled him there. She was a very young lady, though a whole head taller, with cat eyes and a cap so small that Charles summoned her with: “Hey, Beanie!”
She hadn’t heard: the viewing glass between them was too thick.
So Charles yelled. “There’s been a mistake! That child there, it’s not mine!”
The nurse had just planted a thermometer under the infant’s armpit, and stood back up. “Come-uh-round,” she enunciated, her cauliflower lips puckering like a plunger. They met just outside the nursery, near the visitors’ desk, where Charles presently was scolding an orderly.
“Now, now, sir, this is a hospital, sir,” said the nurse.
“I tell you that baby in there is not mine!” he turned.
“Which baby, sir?”
“That one you’ve been sticking. —It’s somebody else’s!”
She rubbed her chin for a moment, then said, “Now, sir, first, let me assure you that we do not ‘stick’ infants; second, that we do not play musical chairs with them, either. Rather,” she continued, with heightened clarity, “we make an accurate record of each and every child the moment she is born, then proceed to manage that record with utmost care and attention. So, you may be certain that that child in there, yes, the one I was just tending to — the one with your name on his wrist and chart — is most definitely, and assuredly, yours.”
Charles was not satisfied. “I’ve read about these flip-flops,” he said. “They happen all the time! It’s a disgrace! Don’t try to fool me with your mumbo-jum—!”
Before he could finish the girl had returned to the nursery, where immediately she found herself marveling at the infant in the context of his father’s offensiveness: this little boy who cooed so calmly among the other babies who screeched and kicked; and, of course, his stirring beauty: the ivory skin and token-size eyes in perfect contrast to the father’s jaundice and peapods.
“Your name is Percival?” she said, returning.
“Yes, P-E-R—”
“Remarkable,” she said. “Even so, that baby is yours.”
Charles kicked the tile floor as an irate baseball manager dirt. In turn, the nurse calmly grabbed a handful of him and dragged it to its original position at the window, where she instructed him to “heel.” Then, returning once more to the nursery, she held up the baby’s wrist and read, ‘PERCIVAL’; and next his chart, ‘PERCIVAL, BOY, 2:08 p.m., November 6, 20—.’ At each phrase, Charles’s head pendulated like an iron bell. “Listen, Homer,” she said finally (and loud enough this time to be heard), “the last thing I needed today was a puss-pimple! Therefore, do me a big favor. Make like an egg. And scramble!” And with this she turned away from him as if he’d never intruded.
“I’ll report this to your supervisor!” he called after her.
“Fine,” she called back, “just did.”
Charles kicked the vinyl wall so hard, he had to hop to Clarissa’s room.
She was propped in her bed, happy in her stupor, no longer swathed in the starched white sheet that had wrapped her belly like a mummy’s, but dressed now, in blue scrubs (which had been put on backwards in error, and from which protruded most of one breast).
“The world’s full of idiots!” said Charles, completely heedless of the protrusion.
Clarissa managed to lift her head enough to toss a smile. “Our son’s not an idiot, Charles,” she slurred.
“Humph!”
She strained to maintain her new position as she studied Charles with some trepidation. She should have known. What on God’s holy earth made him get this way? Why did he cry out at the world so? Why did he make such ridiculous declarations about things he could not control: that should not even matter so? And what was this latest primal dysfunction that demanded her attention now, that it could not wait until she got home? “What’s wrong, Charles?” she said.
“What’s wrong?” (He was shaking.) “Haven’t you seen him, Clarissa? Haven’t you looked at him at all? You’re the one had him!”
“Oh, Charles!” she mumbled. “Oh, yes, and isn’t he just beauty-ful, Charles—!”
“You’re not listening to a word I’m saying, Clarissa!”
The orderly arrived.
“Sir, please keep your voice down,” he said. “Your wife needs her rest.”
“This won’t take a minute,” said Charles.
“I love you, Charles Percival,” moaned Clarissa. “I love our beauty-ful little boy’s big strong papa!”
“Clarissa,” he pursued, in a voice lower now, yet still firm in accentuating earnestness. “Clarissa — there’s been a mistake!”
“Please, sir,” said the orderly.
“You missed what, Charles?”
“No, Clarissa, not ‘miss!’ Mistake! Screw-up, faux pas, whoopsie daisy...they switched our baby!”
“Oh, no, sir, that isn’t possible, sir,” said the orderly.
“Scramble, you little parasite!” said Charles.
“Charles Percival you get a grip-on right now!” said Clarissa, the weight of these last words throwing her back on her pillow.
“Clarissa, we’ve got to do something!” said Charles. “You understand Clarissa?” His hands were doggy-paddling the air. “We’ve got the wrong kid, Clarissa! Doesn’t this mean anything to you? Don’t you understand, Clarissa? Oh the world’s full of idiots!”
***
Charles’s anxiety tormented him all the way home.
During the train ride, on a dark canvas on which no light shone except the stars the babe appeared as a cherub, its eminent wings fluttering with an ethereal brilliance, like the North Star. This image persisted until a lady’s beehive hair erased it. Maniacally, Charles scratched the window until the angel reappeared, and was at ease again — until another intrusion. This time he began to rise but was instantly diminished. For in an aura as bright as the angel’s hovered another, this a giant, his hair of gold nearly buffing the ceiling, and Siren eyes that beamed Charles back to his seat. Never have I seen such a beautiful man! he shivered. Indeed, the giant was an Adonis: the sort of creature Charles had hitherto seen only in marble and movies.
“May I?” asked the great man in stilted English, pointing to the empty seat beside Charles’s. Charles shirked. Except for a tiny overhead reading light, which was flickering like his senses, their space was pitch-dark such that the stranger’s white-white teeth seemed autonomous.
“I Rubin Sevastyano,” he declared, rolling a strip of chewing gum into his mouth. “You vant some?” Charles did not answer. “Come, vy bashful? Ees end of beautiful day, no? Time to, how you say, ‘unvind!’” Charles took the gum strip, but like a tax form. “Yayz, dere, dere,” said the big man, chomping, “dere zu go. Yum!” Then:
“Zu have long day my friend, I see. Zu seek or sometink?”
“I have baby,” mumbled Charles.
The stranger slapped his knees. “Baby! Zu have baby! Well me oh my oh, ees ex’lent news!” he exclaimed, cupping his new friend’s face with his Bunyan hands.
Charles jerked away. “Ve no vant child,” he sneered.
“Vhat’s dis?” said the stranger. “No vay! Zu joke, sure!”
“No joke,” nodded Charles.
“But Ana and me — Ana, ees my vife — ve vant child vedy, vedy much: vedy, vedy long time now!”
“Good vor vou.”
Charles turned again to the window — and now a harrowing thought transfixed him. How much the stranger resembled the boy! How profoundly the same were his eyes, his nose, his mouth, every feature, including the beautiful cleft chin! His throat closed and he yanked up the window. Gray clouds like goblins saturated the sky. As he chugged the cold air, he felt upon his neck the stranger’s breath: sweet and warm.
Sometime later, a conductor was rousing him. Exhausted, Charles had tipped over into the adjacent seat, which, when he came to, he figured the stranger had vacated upon deciding his new friend wasn’t much of a conversationalist.
II
Charles did not see Clarissa and the baby again for the rest of that week and into the next. His patron, Henry Cabot, had asked him to attend a Holiday greeting-card exhibition. Though none of Charles’s cards had merited entry, Cabot had insisted he go, anyway, to promote the line.
Even if his designs had been accepted, Charles would not have enjoyed himself. The terrible Adonis had infused his mind like an insufferable melody: this thought that Clarissa and the stranger—! No! Absurd! And yet, what else could explain the stranger’s uncanny resemblance to the boy, or the peculiar interest he had taken in Charles — or Clarissa’s interest in cosmetics, her desire to add the apartment,...?
His suspicion so consumed Charles that on the first day of the show, shaken by a mistletoe motif of two necking reindeer, he suddenly left to phone her. A tart voice answered: “I’m sorry, but Mrs. Periwinkle is no longer with us.”
“Mrs. Percival,” Charles corrected.
“Oh, you again!” said the nurse. “Hmm... Actually, Mrs. Periwinkle was discharged not five minutes ago. Left with some guy. I figured it was you.” Charles shook the phone. The girl was gone.
The instant Charles arrived home, one nightmare merged to another. For there, standing on his front step, was the stranger! — and he had an arm around Clarissa and the baby, whose golden head he dared stroke with his giant fingers!
Charles ducked behind a bush but fell and yelped. Clarissa, of course recognizing the moan, ran to greet him, and tried hoisting him in such a rush of glee that she pulled muscles in them both. “Oh, Charles, oh, Charles!” she sang giddily through their pain, “Come, Charles, come, I want you to meet our new friends!” she went on, batting berries from her hair. “Rubin, this is my husband, Charles; Charles, this is Rubin Sevastyano. Rubin and his wife, Ana, are our new tenants!”
The two men stared at each other: the bigger with a pumpkin smile, the smaller with a mouth like a mangled zipper.
“Mr. Percival, ees such pleasure—!”
“We’ve met,” Charles turned to Clarissa.
“Vy ees correct!” said the stranger. “Meet udder day at train!”
“Is this true, Charles? Well I don’t know what to say!” beamed Clarissa, a palm pressing her mouth. “Oh I must go and tell Ana!”
As Clarissa skipped into the house, Charles and the Russian watched the latch whip the closed door. Facing each other again in the late-afternoon shadows, each felt as the door at the instant of its thud. For Charles, who would have liked nothing more than to boot the titan to the moon, an awful awkwardness burned his chest. Yet the standoff was worse for the Russian. For he rather liked Charles, and would have liked to say how.
The chest-burn changed to sparks when Charles beheld Ana: her satin black hair, doe eyes, full red mouth, wide shoulders, long muscular legs — the roundest, firmest breasts he’d ever beheld (stretching her blouse into furrows). She was, even more than her husband or the baby, the most beautiful thing Charles had ever seen!
“So, dees da, how zu say, ‘Pa-pa’ Charles ve hear so much about!” she purred, taking her landlord’s hands into her own. “Rubin and I, ve so vedy vedy happy zu geev to us dees!” she continued, throwing back her mane as she acknowledged their new home.
“I like your belt,” said Charles dizzily. Other than his lips, none of him moved.
“Why, Ana made it herself, Charles, didn’t you, Ana?” said Clarissa. “It’s an Old World festival belt, made from the hide of a real sable and sprinkled with onyx!”
Ana yanked the baby from Clarissa’s arms. “Ooo, such on-gel! How zu’s gets so cute?” she swooned. “Zu know, whosoever makes zu does vedy vedy gud job — yayz, yayz he does!” She lifted the child toward the heavens and started singing to him in Russian. Clarissa felt small. Then Charles made her feel worse by whispering a rebuke for not having told him earlier about the tenants.
Feigning ignorance, she said: “Oh, I must show you the wonderful gift Ana and Rubin brought for the baby!” And quickly she skipped into the house. When she’d returned, Charles gazed in wonder at the thing in her hand: a pink quartz cherub perched on teakwood. “They had actually planned to give it to the person who’s helping them with their citizenship,” she beamed. “Yet the moment they saw little Charles, they just had to give it to him instead! Oh, isn’t it just beautiful, Charles?” He just gawked at the figurine. “Well, I guess it’s time we get Charles’s things inside,” she said to her tenants, yanking the baby from Ana.
When Charles entered the house, it was he who felt the stranger: as though he had come upon a place where he was not welcome.
“What’s wrong, Charles?” asked Clarissa.
He proceeded, without answering, into the bathroom.
“I know you Charles, and something’s eating you, Charles!” she called, and, pausing for a response, when none came: “Oh, Charles, please give them a chance, Charles! —Why aren’t we rejoicing, Charles? We should be rejoicing!” Again she waited. But this time all she heard was the toilet flush.
Charles’s belongings remained in the car throughout dinner, and he had no intention of retrieving them afterward, either. The whole time he’d pouted like a child.
Their stalemate continued the rest of the evening; when they retired, they did so separately: Clarissa to the great-room, in the company of her baby and the pink quartz cherub; Charles to their bedroom, where instantly he fell asleep like a pitched marionette.
***
For several days, the Percivals continued to live within themselves as they had that night. Even Clarissa had finally given in, believing that there was nothing meaningful or transforming she might offer, or receive, that would reunite them. Just as Charles believed to be true about himself, she, likewise, believed that presently her only source of ease came from within.
But she took no comfort in their disunion. From its beginning, frustration picked at her like wild children in a circle, at the center of which she begged for understanding — not of how their falling-out might get resolved, but of its cause. Charles had been complicit in the decision to build the addition and welcome tenants: If he had had misgivings, why had he not offered them then? And yet, Clarissa realized that it was not his nature to, for his life was a finely textured act of apathy and withdrawal, of interminable resignations and retreats.
What Clarissa did not know, of course, was the authority Charles felt over her suffering. She would not be able to conceal her sin forever; ultimately, she would have to accept an end to their predicament on his terms: which, of course, meant confession and punishment. This advantage distinguished their suffering. For her, the only really troubling consequence of their separation — aside from his predictable silence in it — was the little stain it had made on their marriage; but for him, it was the terrible fear that the estrangement might kill it. There were moments, even, that Charles wondered whether prolonging the stalemate (which was principally his doing, after all) was not a grave mistake. Yet each time, he would hold firm, having found sanctuary once more in ignorance. And then everything, including right and wrong, would seem simple again, as simple as his lifestyle.
More days passed, and Charles felt no better. He was exhausted; and though once he believed he’d surely discovered Clarissa’s affair with the Russian, he’d grown tired of the hunt.
One day, of a desperate need for companionship, he visited his patron, Henry Cabot. In the midst of their conversation, Cabot made an unlikely transition. He mentioned the tenants.
“You know them?” said Charles.
“Why, yes, Charles,” said Cabot. “Don’t you know, it was Hillary, my niece, who gave them your number.”
“Hillary, who?”
“Surely Clarissa has told you.”
“No.”
“Well, Hillary met the Sevastyanos at the train station. In fact, I was with her.”
“What—?”
“Hillary’s sponsoring them, don’t you know. Helping them with their citizenship. Are you sure Clarissa hasn’t mentioned any of this?”
Charles stepped closer. “When Henry? When did you meet them at the train station?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Why?”
Charles grabbed him. “When Henry?”
“Easy now, Charles!”
“When?”
“A few weeks ago, Charles! What’s come over you?”
“Exactly, Henry? When exactly?”
“Damn, Charles, a month, probably not even — around the time Clarissa had the baby! What’s with the interrogation—?”
“Oh my gosh, oh my gosh!” Charles kissed him. “Listen, Henry! Listen to me! Next month’s entire batch, it’s on me, Henry! You understand? On me, Henry! Oh God bless you, Henry Cabot! God bless you!” And with this Charles skipped out the door like a knob-kneed jester.
Outside he went weak and began to weep. In his haste along the sidewalk the tears turned into streams and he had trouble seeing, such that he weaved as a car steered by a drunk. Cabot had had no idea that frumpy Charles Percival could move so fast. Nor, of course, could he have had the first idea of how Charles felt just then, or why: how utterly relieved he was that Clarissa was innocent — that the child was his!
As Charles passed the townhall, his head tottering of his exhaustion, townspeople stopped and stared at him as if he were a kook. One lady ducked beside a nearby bench, another behind a light pole; a couple at the bus-stop portico cowered in embrace as he approached. Through the keen lens of rapture, Charles interpreted these actions as auspicious. When finally he had all but lost his breath and stopped, hunched over and wheezing, it was not pain that had motivated the halt, but a desire to feel his ecstasy in its whole.
Near the train station he was struck by a marvelous idea. Huffing still, he opened his wallet. “Just enough!” he smiled.
III
As he entered his little homestead in the valley, Charles organized the collection of bags over which he’d kept a close vigil on the train. The intrinsic value of their contents was sublime, for they were gifts for his wife and son: for Clarissa, bonbons, slippers, and a scarf he’d once noticed before the move, as well as a dozen jars and tubes of cosmetics to replace her empties; and for little Charles, a rattle, a Christmas pajama suit, and an ark filled with animal-shaped woodblocks. On the long plank kitchen table he arranged everything in two rows, just so. But where was his family? He filled the house with greetings, yet heard in response only a wind chime playing before a lapping window curtain. Next he called into the valley, yet only a flock of quail answered in its sudden rising like fire streamers.
Only after he’d fallen into bed did Clarissa come to him. There, in the shadows, stood the frumpy form of the littlest but most substantial woman he had ever known: his first, and only, love. Arms crossed, she cast an expression that seemed contemplative but not judgmental. Even so, he had a terrible sense that she had come to dismiss him. He sat up and attempted to bow, as simultaneously he groped for the gifts, which were still in the kitchen. Before he looked up again her image had vanished with the dream.
When the howls of coyotes wakened him, he limped to the bathroom for the herbs he’d taken for months to help him rest: ever since he’d learned he was a father. Then he limped to the kitchen to fetch the gifts to the bedroom, where, lying down again, he let them consume him.
It seemed but a few minutes had passed when he reawakened.
“They’ve taken our baby, they’ve taken our baby—!” a scream sliced the thick, fledgling morning. Through glazed eyes he stared wondrously at its source as it collapsed before him.
“Where have you been?” he asked.
“How much they demanding, Charles, how much?” An envelope trickled from her hand.
“Easy, easy there, Li’l Love Button,” he said. He opened the envelope.
“Oh, Charles, how much they want!” she was sobbing.
“It’s a check, Clarissa,” he wagged the note like a handkerchief, “it’s just a check — an additional month’s rent, for our ‘trouble.’”
“Oh good God, oh blessed good God!” Clarissa leaped into him. “Oh, but where’s—?”
“He’s fine, he’s right there, Li’l Button,” Charles pointed to an overstuffed pillow beside the dresser. “And you best be quiet now, or you’ll wake him.”
In an instant Clarissa was hoisting the child with hands that had been dipped in treasure.
Poor Li’l Love Button, thought Charles. No wonder she was hysterical; the baby had not been in his crib since mid-night, when Charles had gone with such desire to the great-room and brought him back with him; then later had even tended to the first feeding so that Clarissa could sleep. He made no effort, of course, to explain this to her now, but simply embraced them both.
Suddenly she flinched and dashed away, outside, where she fetched the great axe at the shed, and, with all her strength, tried to hack the apartment to pieces.
It was as Charles finished the job that she opened his gifts, and with the baby rocking on a thigh marveled at each in turn. “Oh, such a pretty scarf,” she cooed at the first, “and slippers,” she chirped at the second, “—finally, something to warm these toes in this interminably frigid land!” Soon she had opened them all, including the baby’s, too, and had spread them across the bed — that is, all except the cosmetics, which she tossed outside into the heap of boards.
***
Now, about the departed tenants and the broken apartment: Clarissa cried some more, of course. Yet these were not remorseful tears. For she realized now that it was not their lot to have an apartment, or tenants, or cosmetics, or even a child, really. And yet, the child they would endure.
Why, little Charles would even help restore order, such as they would manage from then on in blissfully eternal serenity.
The End