William Vollmann - The Royal Family

I get it, Maj, he said. But I…

You don’t have to say anything you’re not ready to say, the Queen told him. You know I love you?

I know it. Are you pregnant?

I don’t believe so. Not yet.

Strawberry said: Listen, Henry. I don’t know so much about you and Charlene—

Irene, he said furiously.

Irene. And it’s not really my business. But we talk about you all the time, because you’re the only man who ever comes to visit us, aside from Justin, who lives here, and, I mean, good heavens, it’s nice to talk about men once in a while! Gosh, I wish you’d buy us all a drink at the Wonderbar and we could just sit and—

Tyler shot a quick shy look at her, and, seeing that she was not his enemy, became if anything even more dejected and humiliated. The dead woman would not let him go. And his Queen would never become pregnant, because she herself had prophesized that her purpose on earth would all too soon be fulfilled, the purpose to which she’d been so supremely faithful, and he’d be left alone again as he had been after Irene died, because the Queen had insisted that it must be so. But gradually his own self-pity became as gentle and blurry as Strawberry’s when she got drunk or entered the heroin nods, swaying and doubling and tripling. Didn’t she mean well? Didn’t she? And the Queen sat so silent! Why? Was this supposed to be another ordeal like his obedient worship of the false Irene, something whose bitter uselessness would further hollow out his heart into an ashtray in which Domino or anybody else could stub out cigarettes? But surely Strawberry meant well. She said: My brother was in college with a girlfriend and she, well, she became pregnant. I was always very close to my brother and I was the first to hear. And we celebrated. When I think back on all the champagne we went through! Oh, everybody was so happy, it was all like a dream! They could have had an abortion, I know. But he decided he was going to marry this girl. I don’t know why I’m even telling you this, maybe just because it came into my head just now when Maj was talking about having a child and I… God, I could use a drink at the Wonderbar. I could use a motherfucking drink. Anyway, they had a child. He finished college; she didn’t. She always resented it. So the marriage broke up. She broke it up. But he really has a kid that he loves. Maybe his life would have been different if they’d had the abortion. But who’s to judge him? He got his life together. It worked out for him. Most of the time the circumstances just need to be negotiated. How do you grow without conflict and difference?

Are you saying I don’t want conflict? asked Tyler in a dull, exhausted voice. Are you saying I’m afraid of something? What are you saying?

Oh, can’t you leave him alone, sighed the Queen. Leave my man alone.

Beatrice said: Excuse me, Maj. Excuse me, Henry. Excuse me, Strawberry. I have to say something about abortion. Some people they doan believe that at the time of conception the soul enters the body. I do know that doing away with any form of life, it’s not a nice thing.

Yeah, and how many babies have you killed with your own coat hanger? snarled Domino from the Queen’s arms.

What’s all this about? said Tyler. What kind of discussion is this? — The eagerness of these women to speak of babies and childbirth, the avidity in their eyes, above all the hope with which they now regarded their Queen, as if her baby would be theirs or would somehow save them, disconcerted him as much as if he’d suddenly realized that he had no soul.

We just be sharin’ our thoughts with you, that’s all, said Chocolate from the doorway, while Sapphire, rocking back and forth in the corner, whispered: Luh-luh-luh-luh…

I love you, too, he said to the retarded girl, who seemed to be uneasy, like a dog which knows something is wrong when its master begins packing his suitcase. She had sat in the same place all night, watching her mother and her sisters with wide and anxious eyes.

I want a baby but I can’t, said Strawberry. I had two children they took away an’ put in foster care, and now I don’t know where they are. And my third died in crib death. That’s the one I cry for. And then I got pelvic inflammatory disease, so now I’m sterile.

When Irene reached her sophomore year of high school in Westwood, she and four classmates — one Chinese, two Japanese, and one other Korean — secretly if lightheartedly founded what they called the Virgins’ Club. Really it was an excuse to gossip, go out to movies together, and help each other with homework — a particular benefit in Irene’s case, since she was only a B student and had always been even in elementary school when her mother used to punish her for not coming home with perfect grades. The Virgins’ Club met neither regularly nor formally. Nonetheless, its rules had teeth. Each girl swore not to have sex before marriage, and never to wed any man of another race, in order to avoid disappointing her parents, who by immigrating in the first place had left themselves all too susceptible to such affronts. Indeed, when Irene raised her hand to swear the oath, she saw before her her dear mother’s fine face and thin dark arched eyebrows. Their promise, then, emblematized daughterly love, which must remain inseparable from clanishness, and perhaps it reassured those schoolgirls in their warm expectations that the families which they each would surely found would resemble the ones departed, protecting them from futurity, keeping them happily isolated like the emerald rectangle that is Union Square, set into its bezel of brick and concrete. (And here one might also make analogy to the Queen’s court, with its exclusiveness, secrecy and helpfulness.) In Irene’s opinion, it was the Chinese girl who broke her vow first. In her freshman year at San Diego State, defiant in the face of family ostracism and de facto expulsion from the Virgins’ Club, she married a nice boy from Saudi Arabia. One of the Japanese girls dated a white boy in her senior year, and the rumor flitted around the Virgins’ Club (which by that time had become rather too loose-knit, nourished only by increasingly far-flung telephone calls from one member to another) that she had given him everything, but none of the remaining virgins chose to address her silence directly because that would have been rude and because, like Cain, they were not their siblings’ keepers, and above all because the Virgins’ Club was itself mere silliness which, had it been completely immersed in the solvent of sexuality, could have dissolved without repercussions. Both of the Japanese girls did end up marrying Japanese, and the other Korean girl married into a rich Korean family in Brentwood. Irene, of course, ended up with John. The other Korean girl and one of the Japanese girls came to Irene’s wedding. They said that they were very happy for her.

By then Irene’s brother Steven, who was a software engineer prone, like John, to elegant neckties, had already married a good Korean girl whom he considered slightly beneath him and who gave him a son before her wifehood was a year old — singular fortune for her, because Irene’s mother, who’d thought her frivolously delicate until then, immediately held her precious. The impetus now lay on Irene to conceive, although her parents regretfully understood that John preferred to postpone that beginning; themselves being postponers in the name of self-sacrifice, they accepted in their first-generation American hearts what John had chosen for entirely different ends. Irene kept modestly silent. Although she mentioned her mother and father hardly at all, Tyler afterward wondered whether her understanding with them on this crucial subject of maternity might have anything to do with her suicide. One night in September when the vigs had already arrived in San Francisco and he was sitting alone in his apartment, asking himself when he’d go to worship his Queen, he suddenly visualized Irene picking up the telephone to call Los Angeles and tell her parents that she was pregnant. Her mother would have known the very first instant that Irene was not smiling with pleasure. And how would she and Irene’s father interpret that? Their own natural impulse to be joyous would have been stifled by Irene’s listless, anxious monotone. They would wonder what had occurred between her and John. (I think John is angry at me, Irene had publicly said during that final vacation in Monterey. John, you’re angry, aren’t you? — Tyler had found that very distasteful.) No doubt, since Irene’s parents had never met John’s brother except briefly at the wedding, it would scarcely have occurred to them that there might have been third parties involved. Tyler, imagining that familial conversation and all the subsequent ones for the remaining months of Irene’s life, could hardly keep from groaning. And now she was dead, killed, self- killed, self-murdered. The Queen had made him promise not to forget her. The false Irene was always asking him about her…