David Flusfeder - The Pagan House

‘Enough! Alfonso! Please. Remember you are a man.’

Edgar made his heart hard and turned his face away and went back to the kitchen, and the broken Alfonso crawled after him, still weeping, his suede jeans smeared with dirt from the floor, his black curls tumbling, his white bullfighter’s shirt ripped.

Edgar poured himself a glass of chocolate milk from the refrigerator and downed it in one thirsty morning gulp and poured himself a second, which he measured against his fingers and sipped slowly from, contemplating his day.

‘Edward.’

‘Good morning, Mother.’

Mon looked at him sharply; she mistrusted Edgar at his most formal. She opened the refrigerator, withdrew from it an apple and a bowl of pineapple chunks, which she assembled on top of two slices of white bread in an approximation of the breakfast she ate at home. After a couple of mouthfuls, and an expression of dismay at how much sugar had been added to the pineapple, she was ready for conversation.

‘Who were you speaking to?’

‘Nobody,’ Edgar said, quickly and surprised, before guiltily remembering the corpse of Alfonso that lay in the hallway, his clothes grubby and bloodied, his unbeating heart clutched forlorn in his hand, an unwanted offering that he had held out as his last dying hope.

‘Why are you looking so shifty then?’

‘I’m not looking shifty.’

‘You’re looking shifty. Do you know what time it is?’

This was a familiar technique of his mother’s, to follow one question quickly with another, unrelated, one. It kept people on the back foot.

‘No. What time is it?’

‘It’s a quarter to six.’

‘Oh really? It’s a nice day isn’t it? Did you sleep well?’ Edgar asked, nimbly using his mother’s devices against her.

‘Jetlag,’ his mother grimly said.

They breakfasted to the rumble of Tom the cat snoring in his basket. Edgar ate toasted English muffins with butter and ham. He drank orange juice. His mother drank tea. They briefly speculated as to why English muffins were thought to be English, and Mon said English usually meant something sneaky in this country, and she broadened the topic to include the very unFrench phenomenon of so-called French toast and then they returned to silence. The day could turn out to be a long one but he didn’t care; this was the leisurely part of his American trip, here in this fine house, submerged by the agreeable fog of jetlag, waiting for his father to come.

At lunchtime Mon had been after him to show some enthusiasm as a visitor when the telephone rang. ‘I think we’ll take a walk around the neighbourhood after lunch. Explore things. I’ll show Ed the Mansion House.’

‘You wouldn’t mind getting that, would you?’ Warren was at the sink, his hands full with a colander of cooked spaghetti that he was splashing with olive oil. He was looking at Edgar when he said that, who stared blankly back, because Edgar didn’t like to use the telephone, and Mon took the call before Fay could finish making her preparations to leave her chair.

‘Yes,’ Mon said to the telephone, and as the conversation went on Edgar watched her expression change from patient to pleased.

Warren brought over the food. ‘Would you like a Kool-Aid?’

‘Yes please,’ said Edgar, wondering what it was he had said yes to. He hoped it wasn’t a piece of sports equipment. But Edgar felt expansive; he would take whatever the world offered him.

‘I might be going to New York a little early,’ Mon said.

‘Oh?’

‘That was Hen. It’s all very boring but it would be more convenient if I went there a little earlier than planned.’

His mother looked both stoical and frenzied. She pushed the salt cellar between her hands and stared at it in surprise when it fell over.

‘I can’t do it. Your father’s not even here yet. And your birthday …’

‘He’ll be all right with us, won’t you, Ed?’ said Warren.

For something to do, Edgar brushed at sleeping Tom’s fur until he became aware that ginger clumps of the stuff were coming away in his hands.

‘Ed?’

‘Yes. Of course I will.’

Nonetheless Edgar was alerted. Being here motherless was not unattractive, but Mon’s mood was both wilder and more discomfiting than he was used to. Perhaps it was torture for her to stay in this house, everything here a reminder of her failures as a woman and a wife, but that was a betrayal of him, who would never have been born without this place.

Edgar tried to pat the cat fur back into place. Tom’s only signs of life were the shallow rises of his chest to accompany each noisy breath, and the little rivulets of effluvia that leaked out of his face.

‘That’s so sweet of you to try to groom him,’ Fay said. ‘A lot of people would see him as a lost cause and they’d be missing the point completely.’

‘I’ve put her numbers on the pinboard. That’s her work number and that’s her home, and I’ll call you after I get there.’

‘When are you going?’

‘Well. If you’re sure. I could go in the morning. It’s a real bore,’ Mon said.

She sighed, hoping to indicate some of the boredom she purported to feel, but Edgar knew better. A small overspill of the curious excitement that was going through her seeped over to him.

Warren delivered a glass of some watery red liquid, which Edgar sipped at and found delicious.

‘Your father will be here tomorrow,’ Mon said—which was, Edgar observed, the first time she had given this up as an undisputed fact.

‘Yes, he will,’ Edgar said, pursuing his advantage.

‘You can call me if anything goes wrong.’

She moved over to hug him and rub his hair. He accepted the hug, stiffly, and pulled his hair back into its proper spiky shape, adding a few stray hairs of Tom’s to his own.

‘Oh Eddie.’

She might have been about to weep. Fay reached a hand to her. ‘You mustn’t worry about a thing,’ Fay said.

‘I’ll run you to the airport in the morning,’ Warren said.

‘That’s so nice of you. I don’t want to be any trouble.’

‘It’s no trouble.’

The rhythms of the Pagan House were based around mealtimes, and Edgar was required at supper that night.

‘I think it’ll be amusing for both of you. Some of the local personalities will be here,’ Fay said.

‘Company Bob and so forth,’ Warren said.

‘I’m sure,’ Mon said.

Edgar followed his mother up to her room and watched her pack. He tried to get out of supper but Mon was at her most ruthless: ‘This is my last night here. It’ll be horrible if you’re not around.’

‘I’ll be around. I’ll be upstairs.’

‘You absolutely won’t be upstairs. You’ll be at the dinner table. It’s far too rude otherwise.’

‘What would be just rude enough?’

She clicked her tongue and jerked her chin, she gave him her exasperated ‘Oh, Eddie!’ look and checked again that her passport was in the side-pocket of her handbag. ‘Please get ready. Change your trousers. Wear your good ones.’

Edgar lies on the bed and Edgar scratches. From the wall by his bed he lifts away the damp flap of wallpaper—navy blue, golden stars—and finds another layer of wallpaper beneath. It might once have been cream or white but now is aged urinous yellow, with washed-green cartoon stencils of amiable little rocketmen in large transparent helmets hardly smaller than the dinky little spaceships they ride in. This might have been his father’s childhood wallpaper, glimpses of a happy boundless future, where cheerful little astronauts enjoyed the freedom of infinite flight. This patch of wall is Edgar’s own time-machine. Now he sits here, in 1995, damp blue walls, faded golden stars; now he pulls himself into the early 1960s, and there’s paper beneath that one, and beneath that one; brave Edgar in wartime touches trompe l’oeil pillars; Edgar in the Great Depression wonderingly touches something sickly yellow. And beneath that one is paint, dull brown, which Edgar scratches at with his well-practised right hand, rubbing himself into a further past, white paint, go further, bare pine wood, the original wall, on which a man, the builder, or the architect, or Old Uncle Pagan himself, had pencilled in measurements in a high, confident, sloping hand.