Russell Banks: Affliction

Wade nodded and, opening the door for his daughter, passed into the large, brightly lit hall. It takes up the entire first floor of the building, with a staircase in the far left corner, a small stage at the rear and rest rooms on the other side. The unpainted walls and ceiling are made of narrow tongue-in-groove spruce boards, and the place smells of the forest and of the fire in the big Ranger wood stove that heats it. The wooden chairs that usually fill the room had been folded and stacked to the right by the door. Half a hundred adults were gathered around the room in bunches close to the walls, and the children, all in costumes and makeup, were in the middle, as if penned.

Picture, if you will, clowns, tramps and robots of various types and sizes, at least two pirates, an angel and a devil, half a dozen vampires and as many witches. There were astronauts and a scarecrow and the hunchback of Notre Dame, and among the younger children, the toddlers, there were several species of animals represented, rabbits, lions, a horse, a lamb. Most of the costumes were homemade and depended for their effect on the viewer’s willed suspension of disbelief — willed only for the viewer, however, not for the wearer of the costume, whose disbelief got suspended regardless of will, for all the children, clearly, were eager to be out of their child’s body, if only temporarily, and into a more powerful one. They smiled, sometimes laughed outright, looked through their masks and makeup straight into the eyes of adults as they never would otherwise and seemed strangely independent and sure of themselves and a little dangerous.

Standing among them, like a nervous ringmaster surrounded by small but unpredictable and possibly hostile animals, was Gordon LaRiviere, clipboard in hand, in a loud voice urging the throng of children to start moving clockwise in a circle around the room. A large beefy red-faced man in his mid-fifties with a silver flat-top haircut and tiny bright-blue eyes, LaRiviere, as chairman of the Board of Selectmen this year, was the costume contest judge, a responsibility he seemed determined to exercise with great seriousness and attention to detail, for he repeatedly called out the various categories, alerting the audience and engaging its sympathies, as the children began to march in a slow swirl around the room. “We’re looking for the Funniest Costume!” LaRiviere shouted. “And the Scariest! And the Most Imaginative! And the Best Costume of All!”

Standing near the door, Wade put his hand on Jill’s shoulder and nudged his daughter forward. “Got here just in time for the judging,” he said. “Go ahead in. Just jump into line. Maybe you’ll win a prize.”

The girl took a single step forward and stopped. Wade nudged her a second time. “Go on, Jill. Some of those kids you know.” He looked down at the tiger’s tail drooping to the floor and the child’s blue sneakers peeking out from under the cuffs of the pathetic costume. Then he looked at the back of her head, her flax-colored hair creased by the string from the mask, and he suddenly wanted to weep.

He decided it was because he loved her so, and then the impulse passed. His stomach fell, and his chest heaved, and he took a deep breath and said to her, “Go ahead. You’ll have fun if you just go on and join the other kids out there. See how happy they seem,” he said, and he looked out at the children moving in a thick slow circle around the room with Gordon LaRiviere at the hub, and they did indeed seem happy to him, a parade of monsters and freaks delighted to find themselves admired for once.

Jill took another step away from Wade and the adults nearby, several of whom were staring at her now, aware, of course, that she was Wade’s daughter visiting him for the weekend, an event that for the last year and a half had occurred on a more or less monthly basis. Lately, it seemed, folks had not seen the girl much, possibly not since the Labor Day picnic, when Wade and Jill had played together in the father-daughter softball game and Wade had to leave in the seventh inning to get her back to Concord by dark because she had school the next day — though no one quite believed that, since the Lawford and Barrington schools never started the school year till the Wednesday after Labor Day, and Concord was unlikely to be on a different schedule. That ex-wife of his, Lillian, was a hard case. Everyone in town thought so. She had always been kind of a hard case — uptight and fussy, one of your more demanding women. Snooty was how some people described her, even though she was a Pittman and had been born and raised right here in Lawford and from the beginning and up to today was clearly no damn better than anyone else in town. Worse than some, if you wanted to know the truth.

Of course, Wade was a sonofabitch. That was truth too. Pure fact: the man got really mean when he wanted to. Still and all, he loved his daughter and she loved him, and there was no reason why the mother had to keep coming between them like she did. Whatever it was Wade did to Lillian back when they were married, it couldn’t have been so bad, since she married him twice. So it was hard to say why the man deserved such shabby treatment, now that they were divorced again. He was a hard worker, a fair-minded cop who liked to drink with the boys down at Toby’s Inn, and a slick left fielder for the local softball team who could probably still play Legion ball if he wanted to. That’s what most people in town thought.

“I don’t want to,” Jill said. She continued to stare at the other children, ignored by them but rapidly becoming of greater interest than they to the adults who were gathered near the entrance.

“Why? Why not?” Wade asked. “Go on, it’s fun. You know lots of those kids, you know them from when you were in school here,” he said. “It hasn’t been that long, for God’s sake.” He threw out his arms, hands open, feigning exasperation, and laughed.

She backed up to him, as if into his arms, and in a low voice that only he could hear, she said, “It’s not that.”

“What, then?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I just don’t want to. It’s stupid.”

“What’s stupid? Sure it’s stupid. But it’s fun,” he said. “Jesus.” He looked around him as if for advice. There was Pearl Diehler and three or four others he knew well and a couple more he knew only slightly. There was probably no one in town that he did not know in some way or another—757 year-round residents and another 300 or so in the summer. Wade carried all their faces and almost all their names in his head, and he did it with a certain pride, making sure that whenever he saw new folks in town, at Golden’s store, say, or Merritt’s, he got into a chat with them, asked their names, found out where they lived and where they used to live, learned what they did for their money. He would forget some of that, naturally, but seldom the name and rarely where they used to live and never where they lived now and what they did for their money. Wade was smart.

Suddenly Jill was squirming next to him, trying to get between him and the door and out. “Hey, what’s going on? Where’re you going, huh?” He reached out and grabbed her arm, and the child looked up at him, facing him with her bulbous plastic tiger mask, looking frightened even through the mask, her blue eyes wide and filling with tears.

Wade let go of her arm, and she pulled it to her, as if he had hurt it. “I want to go home,” she said quietly.

He leaned down to hear her better. “What?”

“I want to go home,” she said. “I don’t like it here.”

“Oh, Jesus, come on, will you? Don’t mess this up any more than it’s already been messed up, for Christ’s sake. Now get in there,” he said, “and join the other kids. Do that, and before you know it you’ll be happy as a goddamned clam.” He turned her with the flat of his hand and pushed her slowly forward into the open area, toward the circle of children. Gordon LaRiviere had spotted her and was waving her on with his clipboard, drawing attention to her from all over the room.