Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

“Vi,” she repeated. “He told us last week.” I saw the twins nod in agreement. I avoided looking at Victor but knew he was smiling his stupid, smug smile, the one that made me want to smack him as hard as I could and keep smacking him until his eyes became shiny with tears and his face grew ugly with misery.

But of course I did not. “Is that so?” I asked sternly, looking around at the table, watching the children lower their eyes.

Only Whitney met my gaze. “Yeah,” he said. He was twelve and already busy hating me, but he had always been a fast learner. “If you were around more often, you might know that.” He looked over at Victor eagerly, as if expecting to be praised for his loyalty and complicity, but Victor (and here I had to look at him) stared straight at me, grinning significantly.

Silence would perhaps have perplexed me, but children can never resist the sound of their own voices, and Victor was no exception. “From now on, I’m only answering to Vi,” he announced, still staring at me. “Not Victor. Not Vic. Not Tor”—the twins giggled at this—“nothing but Vi. Everyone got it?”

“Oh, Victor ,” scoffed Ella, “you’re so immature. Stop acting like such a child.”

But Ella’s scorn seemed only to glance off him. And besides, he didn’t care what the other children thought of him; Victor never did. The point with Victor — it was always the point — was to infuriate me, to make me engage in his games.

“Victor,” I began, taking a breath, and he raised his chin, readying for his fight. The other children were watching me eagerly; even Ella could not resist slipping back into the outlines of her old teenage self: she pretended to be dismissive, but she too was awaiting a juicy brawl. And then suddenly it occurred to me: Victor is thirteen. I am sixty-five. I am too old and too accomplished to be arguing with this ridiculous boy . “Fine,” I told him. “That’s fine. You can have your sisters and brothers call you that moronic name if you choose. It is only your dignity. Do you hear that, children? No Victor.”

The children looked from me to Victor, and I could see at once that he was disappointed. Who knew what scrap-iron ammunition he had stored in his arsenal, what books he had read to prepare for our duel, which arguments he was eager to make, which theatrics he had anticipated employing? There is no one more disappointed than the pugilist whose sparring partner forfeits the fight.

I stood, and as I pushed my chair back, its legs made a sharp screeching noise against the floor. “I’m going to my study now,” I said. “Isolde, you wash. Whitney, you dry.”

“I’ll do it, Papa,” said Ella sweetly, over Isolde’s and Whitney’s complaints.

“Fine,” I said, and turned to leave the room. When I was at the door, though, I stopped and spoke to the empty hallway. “This is the last minute I’ll waste on this topic,” I said, loudly and clearly so the entire room of children would hear me. “But Victor, don’t expect me to call you by your new name. From now on I shall think of you as my No-Name Boy, like a stray dog, all right? But no more Victor, I promise you that. Goodnight, Ella, Kerry, Jared, Drew, Jane, Isolde, Whitney, William, Frances, Grace. Goodnight, Boy.”

I didn’t have to turn around to see what was happening in the silence; the children’s anxious, excited expressions, their eyes gleeful with anticipation, and Victor’s chin thrust high in the air, the inscrutable expression in his dark hooded eyes.

I realized in the days that followed that Victor had decided to think he had won a sizable victory against me. Unfortunately, this feeling was shared by some of the younger and more impressionable children; although they did not wish to be humiliated by me as Victor had been, they would engage in games they thought provocative, such as calling Victor Vi in my presence before glancing at me quickly and giggling nervously. I would smile beatifically or ignore them, and they would giggle again, all of which served only to severely undermine the seriousness of Victor’s intent. He would only scowl and turn down his mouth. But soon they too tired of this game.

When there was need to use his name, I continued to call him Boy, but mostly I did not call him anything at all. In his confusion, he seemed to have become resigned to the name, mostly, I believe, because he could not find a good argument with which to counter it. As long as I did not call him Victor — and, true to my word, I ceased to do so at once, thinking carefully before I spoke to him — he would come when I called, grudgingly and slowly and in fact very much like a dog. (One could always tell which children were squabbling or dissatisfied with him, for they too would call him Boy; to his friends and supporters, though, he was Vi.)

After a few months, this became quite normal. In fact, many unusual things eventually become normal in a large family, in which a gift for consistent adaptation, not cleverness, is often the best means to survival. Indeed, for a longish stretch of time, life remained locked in its unexciting rhythms: the children went to school and played and fought and ate. Children detested me and others returned to profess their newly discovered love for me. I went to the lab and gave speeches and wrote and published. It was a contented time for all of us.

Thanksgiving arrived, and a dozen or so of the older children returned to the house with their spouses and children, their bags fat with presents for the current generation: dresses and soccer balls and motorized cars and trinkets from the mall that the children seized in a frenzy as if they had never seen toys before in their lives. That year we had twenty-six of the children at Thanksgiving dinner, as well as eight spouses and eleven grandchildren. Of course they could not all stay with me, even tripled up in the rooms, but they all seemed to spend a great deal of time idling about the house, and I was glad when the holiday was over and they returned to their normal lives and I was able to enjoy the brief week of quiet before it was time to prepare for the Christmas holidays, when the entire production would repeat itself, albeit with many more people. Still, I was eager for Christmas that year, as Owen and his current companion, a thirty-seven-year-old sculptor named Xerxes (whose real name, he had once accidentally revealed, was Shawn Ferdlee — Ferdlee! — Jones), were coming to visit.

The month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is always one of the most unpleasant in the year, and that year was a particularly difficult one. It had always been that there were in the house at least two or three older children to manage the younger ones’ holiday shopping and gift wrapping, and to buy and decorate the Christmas tree the children insisted on, and then to supervise the cleaning and some of the cooking. As it happened, though, that year the oldest children still living at home were Isolde and William, who were both fifteen and therefore not of much use: neither of them knew how to drive, and both of them were still too young to exert any sort of authority over their siblings. The college and graduate students too were of little use; they generally made their appearance the weekend before Christmas, lugging with them garbage bags full of reeking laundry and preferring to spend their time squashed into the sofa, idly flicking through the television channels and sprinkling their dinnertime pronouncements with bits of atrociously accented but confidently delivered German or Spanish and brushing the little ones aside impatiently. Finally I called Ella, who was at university in Washington, and asked if she could come home for the weekend and, as I said vaguely, help out.