Peter Straub - Mr. X

‘At first, I wasn’t even sure I liked that group. It was a quartet from the West Coast, and I was never all that crazy about West Coast jazz. Then this alto player who looked like a stork pushed himself off the curve of the piano and stuck his horn in his mouth and started playing “These Foolish Things.”’ The memory still had the power to make her gasp. ‘And, oh, Neddie, it was like going to some new place you’d never heard about, but where you felt at home right away. He just touched that melody for a second before he lifted off and began climbing and climbing, and everything he played linked up, one step after another, like a story. Neddie! It was like hearing the whole world open up in front of me. It was like going to heaven. If I could sing the way that man played alto, Neddie, I’d stop time forever and just keep on singing.’

She was trying to communicate the importance of music in her life, but at the time I had no idea of the impact these words would have on me. It would certainly never have occurred to me that one day I would find it possible to witness the rapture she was describing. All of that was far ahead of me, and I thought she was trying to keep me from asking my question.

When she stopped talking, I said, ‘I really want to know something.’

She turned her head to smile at me, warmed by the memory of the music and expecting a question about it. Then the smile clicked off, and her hands stopped moving in the water. She already knew that my question had nothing to do with an alto saxophone solo on ‘These Foolish Things.’

‘Ask away.’ She plucked a dish out of the foam with self-conscious gravity.

I knew that whatever she was going to tell me would be a lie, and that I would believe it for as long as I could. ‘Who’s my dad? He isn’t Uncle Clark, is he?’

She glanced over her shoulder, shook her head, and smiled down at me. ‘No, honey, he sure isn’t. If Uncle Clark was your daddy, Aunt Nettie would be your mommy, and wouldn’t you be in a pickle?’

‘But who is he? What happened to him?’

She seemed to concentrate on scrubbing the plate in her hands. I know now that she sat next to my father during the concert she had been talking about. ‘Your father went into the army after we got married. Because he was so smart and so strong, it wasn’t long before they made him an officer.’

‘He was an army man?’

‘One of the best army men ever,’ she said, locking into place both my disbelief and the need to deny it. ‘They sent him places ordinary soldiers couldn’t go. He wasn’t allowed to tell me about them. When you’re on a Top Secret mission, you can’t talk about it.’ She passed the plate beneath a stream of water and handed it to me. ‘That’s what your father was doing when he died. He was out on a secret mission. All they could tell me was that he died like a hero. And he’s buried in a special hero’s grave, way up on a mountainside on the other side of the world, overlooking the sea.’

I could see an American flag on a mountainous promontory far above silvery water and endless waves, marking the grave of that without which I would forever be incomplete.

‘I wasn’t supposed to tell you, but now you’re old enough to keep it to yourself. Nobody else knows what I just told you, except his superior officers.’

We washed and dried the remaining dishes in a charged but companionable silence. I knew that she was in a rush to change clothes and drive to her modeling job, but she stopped and turned around on her way to the kitchen door. ‘I want you to know something else, too, Neddie. Your father isn’t the only thing you have to be proud of. Our family used to be important people here in Edgerton. They took most of it away, but folks here remember, and that’s why we’re different from everyone else. You come from a special family.’

I sat on the living room rug and tried to see what was special in my aunts and uncles. The detectives had solved the weekly murder, and the aunts had come inside to sit on the green davenport and enjoy their favorite program. From my low, sidelong perspective, Nettie and May resembled monuments of Egyptian statuary. Their massive bodies in shapeless print dresses reared up side by side above four hugely stationary legs. In a sleeveless mesh T-shirt, his suspenders clipped to the waistband of tan gabardine trousers, Uncle Clark was canted back in his easy chair, his wide mouth twisted into a sneer. Eyes closed, arms folded over his chest, Uncle James filled the high-backed rocker. A man with wavy blond hair and an aristocratic profile was sawing away at a violin.

‘Mr Florian Zabach has a gift which comes straight from God,’ said Aunt Nettie. ‘I never heard prettier sounds in all my life.’

‘Remember the time we went up to Chicago and saw Eddie South?’ said Uncle Clark.

‘Eddie South brought a beautiful tone out of his fiddle,’ said Aunt May. ‘I have wondered if he might have been one of our category. A number of musicians are, I believe.’

‘Little pitchers,’ Nettie said. ‘Mind what you say.’

Uncle James snorted and stirred, and the other three looked at him until his chin dropped as far as his redwood neck would permit.

‘That tone was why they called Eddie South “The Dark Angel of the Violin,”’ Uncle Clark said. ‘But if Stuff Smith got up there, he’d gobble your Florsheim Swayback down in one bite.’

‘Nettie,’ said Aunt May, ‘I believe Mr Welk is putting on some weight.’

My eyelids sagged, and I pushed myself upright before I fell asleep in the living room, like Uncle James.

My mother woke me up when she let herself into our room. I waited while she took off her clothes, put on her nightshirt, and found her way to bed. I heard her yank up the sheet and wrestle her pillow into shape. She had carried into the room an odor of smoke and beer mingled with fresh air and summer rainfall, and I tried to sort out these traces of her evening’s history as she relaxed into sleep. Her breathing stretched out and slowed down. When I heard it catch in her throat and release itself in what was almost a snore, I crept across and crawled in beside her. Star seemed enormous, a huge female animal still wrapped in the atmosphere of the adventures through which she had passed on her way home. I nestled my back against hers. My body instantly doubled in weight and began to slip toward the center of the earth, where my hero father lay buried. Star shuddered and spoke a single word I trapped in my hands as I plummeted out of consciousness. Rinehart .

At the whispery pop of a seam I looked over my shoulder, saw a shadow fleeing down sunny Cherry Street, and fell bang on my bottom in surprise. At least once a week during my childhood and adolescence, this happened the moment my head hit the pillow. My shadow elongated over the white sidewalk and bent sideways to slip around the corner. The terror of an irredeemable loss immobilized me on the warm pavement. I got up, ran to the corner, and saw my shadow floating like a solid substance above the sidewalk ahead. When I pounded forward, the sidewalk tilted like a slide, and the familiar houses and dark porches softened in the heat.

Edgerton was gone.

I ran down a beaten track leading to a narrow river and an arched wooden bridge. The upright shadow scampered on. On the far side of the bridge, a line of stunted trees marked the beginning of a forest. I glimpsed the peaked roof and broken upper windows of an abandoned house above the treetops. My shadow moved up the arch of the bridge, leaned on the curved iron railing, and crossed one foot over the other. It faced me without having turned around.

Like an optical illusion, the mocking shadow receded with every stride I took. When finally I stood on the bridge, the shadow regarded me from fifty feet away and a point well above my head.