Philipp Meyer - The Son

In the old days it would have been the opposite. Jeannie would have been the one with the house full of lively children, weddings and birthdays and graduations to plan, while Dolores would have lost most of hers — perhaps all of them — to dysentery and malnutrition, to overwork and bad doctoring and the coraje and jealous husbands (they used to butcher each other, she thought, it was always in the paper that some peón had woken up and found he’d cut his wife’s throat). But now… now…

The sun was bright. Soon it would be summer and the light would extinguish everything, all the colors. But for now it was green and cool. She had a feeling, which became a clear thought, that she would not live to see it. She looked at her hands. Something was moving in the corner. She felt cold.

AFTER HANK DIED, there were times when the face that stared back at her in the mirror meant exactly nothing; given the right circumstance she would have obliterated it like a fly on a window. But they had not let her alone. If there was anything you could say about oilmen, they knew about suffering and loss; most were only a generation or two out of some tarpaper shack and for weeks after Hank died they had not let her alone. No matter how much she wanted silence there were people in the kitchen, living room, guest rooms, there was food out, servants she didn’t recognize, strangers coming and going, the kids going to school, coming back, how she didn’t know.

The Texans had been relentless; they might hate the blacks and Mexicans, they might hate the president enough to kill him, but they had not let her alone, they had cared for her like a mother or daughter, men she barely knew, men whose absence from their offices cost them thousands of dollars an hour, and yet she would come downstairs and find them asleep on her couch, and call their drivers to pick them up.

Though of course it was these same men who had nearly refused to do business with her in the years that followed. It was better not to think about. It was all forgiven, they had all gone back to the earth, they had lived only to die.

TED HAD COME into her life a few years after Hank left it. He was older and he came from an even older family, he spent most of his time playing polo — when he was not running or swimming — though he gave off the aura of someone who had done a lot of drugs, a man going to seed.

Not physically; at fifty he was over six feet, with a thirty-two-inch waist and the rugged looks of his ancestors, though his calluses were particular to polo mallets and dumbbells and he had never broken a bone in his life, most of which he had spent chasing women. But as if a switch had turned, he’d decided to settle down. He was smart, though it took her a long time to realize it, he paid attention to her in many ways that Hank had not and she had slowly come to see that Hank, as good as he was, had lived mostly for himself, though neither one of them had known it at the time.

And Ted, just in this difference, had given her hope, that she had not totally figured out life or people, that things might be different; it was a pleasant feeling. It mattered to Ted how she looked, he noticed all her haircuts and new clothes, he knew the difference between a mood he could talk her out of and one he couldn’t. He didn’t fawn, but he noticed. And yet he was not a serious person. He was an aging playboy who wanted company; who had grown tired, she guessed, of putting on an act for every waitress or stewardess who caught his eye. He’d decided he was old, and he wanted to be around his own people.

The boys liked him well enough. They did not quite take him seriously, though he was good to them, and filled a role she could not, taking them shooting and riding; he was too lazy to hunt deer but enjoyed hunting quail. The boys never seemed to learn anything from him; neither their riding nor their shooting improved in his presence, but he did not demand anything of them, either, and nights she would come home and find them sitting together on the sofa watching television, Ted with a bottle of wine, the boys with their pop, The Avengers or Bonanza, none of them with anything to say, but as happy as a pile of dogs in winter.

As for Susan, she had begun to summer in Maine with Jonas’s children, three months of blessed silence and privacy and after the second summer she came back asking to leave Kincaid and go away to Garrison Forest, like Jonas’s daughters. The idea that her daughter might disappear from her life for eight months was not entirely appealing, though it seemed better — barely — than having to put up with her. By then Susan was not just needy; she was a saboteur. She would go through her mother’s things, she would walk into their bedroom when she knew Ted was there, she would pretend to sneak to the kitchen for a snack, wearing only her T-shirt and underpants.

“That girl is a handful,” Ted told her.

“She will be lucky if she isn’t pregnant by her next birthday,” Jeannie said.

“I think you will be the lucky one.”

Of course he was right. But somehow, even then, it had not felt that way.

Ted didn’t have children of his own; she might have given him one while it was still possible, but neither one of them had been willing to commit to that. Mostly what Ted wanted was a family, without having to raise it himself; a woman who had her own money, a woman who accepted him as part of her pack, but otherwise asked nothing. She would never have guessed it, but she’d been more happy with him, more settled than she’d ever felt. Of course she could not help but be drawn to people like Hank, people with their own fire, but no matter how much they thought they loved you or their family or their country, no matter how they pledged their allegiance, that fire always burned for them alone.

Sally called to say she will be coming to visit. “Don’t worry about your little pelado, ” she told me. “I won’t interfere.”

For a moment I saw everything falling in around me. I didn’t say anything. Finally I told her, “There is no reason for you to be here.”

“Except that it is my home. I would like to visit my own home. All sorts of excitement going on, I hear.”

“You are not welcome,” I said, though I knew it was pointless.

“Well, get that idea out of your head. Because I am coming back.”

MY FATHER WAS sitting on the porch with the driller and a few other men.

“I just spoke to Sally,” I said.

He gave me a look.

“And if anything happens, I will make certain things known.”

“I’ll see you boys this evening,” he told the men. They got up as one and left.

“Whatever you are about to say, do not say it. In fact do not even think it.”

“Stop her from coming.”

“I have nothing to do with that,” he said.

I shook my head.

“Anyone but that girl, Pete. In fact I would like it if you got every wetback in town pregnant, because unless I am given a proper Goodnighting, my days of prodding are over, and I could use a few more heirs.”

“We have nothing to worry about from María,” I said.

“I know that.”

“Then tell Sally to stay away.”

“You know, if you were a Comanche you could just cut Sally’s nose off, and throw her out, and get married to the new one.”

“Her name is María.”

“Unfortunately you are not a Comanche. You are subject to the laws of America. Which means you should have gotten rid of Sally before signing this other one on.”

“I’m embarrassed for you.”

“The feeling is mutual,” he told me.

“SO YOUR WIFE is returning?”

I look at her; there is no point denying it. “Don’t worry about her,” I say.