Louise Erdrich - Four Souls

During this time, Fleur made a number of day trips that, I was given to understand, had to do with a daughter by a former liaison. The girl now resided in a boarding school, and Fleur was intent on getting her to live with us. Each time Fleur left, I awaited her return with excitement, and told the boy he’d best prepare to have an older sister. But each time the driver pulled the dusty car around the curve of the drive, Fleur sat alone in the backseat. There was no child. She never let me know the entire reason she returned alone, but I understood in time that it had something to do with the girl’s wishes, her pride. And so it was, the boy alone reigned over our little kingdom, and although we tried not to spoil him, it was obvious at last that we had done so. He was a commanding little thing and could get the better of us with a gesture.

One day, as Fleur was tumbling back and forth on the figured carpet of the nursery, laughing with her boy, John James Mauser entered the room. He stood watching the two at their wild play, his face rapt and charmed. Fleur was reserved around him, held herself stiffly and never smiled. It was a mystery to me why Mauser had chosen to marry her, for I’d never seen her give to him one signal of affection. He did not seem to miss it, somehow, but took his pleasure in watching her at times like these — when she was unguarded, unaware that he was watching, entirely natural. She was playful, then. I knew that side of her well. We even shared it. A love of foolishness perhaps only possible with an innocent child.

“Don’t stop,” said Mauser, putting up his hand when Fleur noticed him and froze. It was remarkable how she could suddenly become another person in his presence. She wasn’t cold, exactly, nor did she seem angry or filled with some hidden and resenting energy. She was simply solemn and watchful. She was decorous. Within that room, she raised herself and gave the boy over into my arms. When she walked to Mauser it was with an upright gliding grace that the most polished women in Minneapolis society might envy. She took his arm. A talented mimic, she had quickly perfected her carriage, manners, behavior, by steady observation of other women.

“We must go now,” she said, and as she swept past him, taking his arm, I saw that hot glow in his eyes. It was always there. He burned in the grip of some blandishment. She must know spells, I always thought, for to elicit such devotion one would think she might make some tender movement toward him. Show him some slight mark of love. He had apparently accepted his fate, though, to love unrequited and with a simple, fateless, heat. Whatever spell she laid on him, I wish I knew its verse. Can there be anything quite so remarkable and pure as devotion without recompense, devotion for devotion’s art?

He folded her arm against his breast and they went out, who knows where, to some dinner, and I was left with the boy. I remember that day, it sticks. I cannot forget it. That is because it was the first day I saw something wrong with the child.

John James Mauser II had of course been to doctors, but all had pronounced him normal and even advanced, a credit to a father who sat on the hospital board. It occurs to me now that the doctors may have had suspicions, but that they had perhaps been afraid to speak frankly to one who possessed so much power over them individually and over the institution as a whole. Mauser was the hospital’s primary philanthropic benefactor. Who’d dare tell such a man that his child was damaged, unwhole, fractured in mind? I myself couldn’t do it, and even now I hasten to add that the boy was swift in certain other ways. Alert, he was alert in spirit I know that, though with a stranger he was apt to shut his eyes and become dull and heavy as a stone. I’d always made excuses. I saw what I wanted, doted on it, and disregarded any sign that did not fit.

But on that day, as we played sweetly together on the lion-shaped rug that his mother had bought, he suddenly went absent. He crouched beside me, very still, staring out the window into the empty sky. His blue eyes were just as vacant. He did not see me. He saw nothing, but could not be moved. For one hour, he sat there, me beside him, ever more frantically trying to coax his attention away from the nothingness where he had flown. But he was unswerving. His mouth fell open. His features coarsened into caricature. He was the very picture of idiocy. I cried out, swept him close to me, and then he began to babble. Those sounds, those syllables, those pathetic attempts. They were frightful, then, never mind the hideous they would become.

SWIFT in other ways. I said, didn’t I, that young Mauser who succeeded in breaking my heart on that calm day (where others more adept had failed) was swift in other ways? Well, so he was. The boy could count. By some strange and secret method he assigned to his little world numbers, numerical values, mathematical identities. I think it started with the card playing that Fleur taught him. For he picked it up and soon it was evident that he could make lightning calculations somewhere in his puzzle box of a brain. They played cards — all in all, it was the strangest sight I ever saw. She began by teaching him little simple games, harmless child’s games, but progressed until they immersed themselves daily in those matches, of which I know little, that occupy coarse men at coarse tables and are carried on under clouds of cigar smoke to the tune of clinking shot glasses. I may be too much a creature of social fears, or at any rate of rules and breeding, but I did think it wasn’t right for Fleur to teach the boy every kind of poker and gambler’s trick when he couldn’t yet recite the alphabet.

And yet she loved him to her heart’s end, yes, that could be seen. She did not believe the doctors Mauser took him to weekly, who pronounced the boy a hopeless idiot and cast his father into a depth. She remained as she was with him, cheerful and laughing. She drank her whiskey, but now more secretly I think. The only difference in their play was that mutual and growing passion for cards. John James Mauser, meanwhile, changed. Not that Fleur would have cared to note it. But he did change, he grew still more thoughtful, and where he had always made an outward show of the Roman Catholic faith, a hypocritical nod to the church when it suited his purpose, he now became a true believer. I alone saw this occur in him. No one else thought it remarkable he went to Mass every morning before his coffee was poured. No one else was aware he took daily Eucharist and made a score of confessions every month. I suppose, being who he was, he had a lot to confess. I wonder if he ever got to the bottom of the barrel of his sins?

As he was somewhat more approachable now, and as I had by sheer ubiquity become an accepted person — perhaps an accepted annoyance to Mauser, but nonetheless accepted — I thought to ask him about his fervent adoption of religious practice. To my surprise, he took me seriously, and answered. Perhaps I should have known it was the boy’s affliction that had prompted him.

“You were always aware, I think”—he regarded me with a sharp gaze—“of how I wanted a son. It was a dear wish of mine — it still is,” he amended quietly. “I feel that I am responsible for this one’s lack of…” He struggled. “…his abnormalities… his strangeness. I have come to believe that the boy’s backward traits are a judgment on the man I was.”

This amazing statement was forced out with honesty through pride. For the first time ever, I felt some human quality, a streak of humility, a signal of Mauser’s inner workings and life, that pulled at me. Mauser had avoided me ever since his illness, hating that I’d seen him weak and outside himself in the throes of appalling fits. Now, he seemed to have put aside that old shame. He allowed himself to speak with an exhaustive frankness. Apparently, having had the time to page back through his life, he found evidence all along of the workings of a certain presence.