Peter Carey - His Illegal Self

He stopped in the doorway, not knowing what to do. The mother clamped her arms around his chest and squashed him against her, breathless as a paper bag. He was so tired he could have cried.

They were hippies-who else! Arms and faces in shadow like a boring painting in the Met. There was a dense cloud of bugs around them, some flying, some dying, some bouncing off the lamp. They smelled of dope. The bugs settled on the boy’s sweaty nose and a scabby black moth rose suddenly from the table and smacked briefly at the light.

No one said anything.

Can I help you, Dial said. The only one she recognized was the Rabbitoh, one eye hidden by his raven hair.

A woman’s arm offered a joint. The lantern caught the green stones on her wrist, the small silver bells. Dial kept her arms around the boy.

We’re waiting for Jimmy Seeds, said the woman with the drugs.

Adam is gone, the mother said.

If he’s gone, said a man, he’ll come back.

Believe me, said Dial, he’s not coming back. We just bought this place today. Really, guys. I’m sorry. We have to go to bed. We’ve had a heavy day.

There were only five people at the table and all they had was a bag of dope and a teapot but they gave off a bad mood more smelly than the smoke.

She’s Dial, said the Rabbitoh, in case you didn’t know.

I’m Dial, the mother said stubbornly. This is Jay, my son.

Dial? This was a slender man with a handsome shaven face, a head of tousled tangled hair. He had a rubbery upper lip, maybe funny if you were his friend.

We’ve known Jimmy a long long time, Dial.

A dumb stoned laugh. A woman. The boy could see her in the gloom-curling thick black hair and big breasts loose inside her T-shirt.

The mother said, Adam got the bus to Cairns this afternoon.

The boy took out the book and gave it to the mother in case she should forget their plan.

The hippie woman pushed her hair back and shoved her long wide jaw into the light. I don’t want to lay some authority rave on you, Dial, she said, but Jimmy Seeds can’t actually sell his shares without the new buyer meeting the community.

She lifted up the lantern. Buck squeezed his eyes shut against the glare.

Anyway, you cannot have the cat.

She stood, revealing herself to be a head shorter than Dial. She had a thick waist and sturdy brown legs.

None of this is your fault, she said to Dial.

It’s cool, said the Rabbitoh. We just need to sit down and talk it through.

Sure you do, said Dial, giving the book back to the boy.

The boy let Buck slip away. Then, quiet as a shadow swimming in the dark, he climbed the giddy narrow-runged ladder to the loft. There he lay in the middle of the nest and pulled a fistful of tangled rug across his head. He waited for them to leave, blocking out their endless foreign voices.

She lay beside him in the blue light listening to the metallic explosions of possum droppings on the roof. With his moon-black lips, he seemed even more a foundling. To continue to deceive him seemed too cruel, but to tell the truth was even worse. In the humid darkness, Dial screwed up her face imagining how it would feel to have the whole foundation pulled from underneath your life. His real mother had been a star child too, so blessed that when you saw her do the simplest thing, pull on a sweater or break into a jog, for instance, you were aware of a perfectly symmetrical being, each foot the same, each blue eye identical, her even white teeth beyond the reach of orthodontics. She came to Radcliffe at sixteen, summa cum laude from Dalton, fluent in three languages. When she returned to the Belvedere at Christmas 1964 this child was in her womb, a fish with gills, a tadpole heart.

It was the sixties, but years before Radcliffe girls were on the Pill and boys slept over Friday nights. This was a teenage pregnancy with fifties shame and shadows, linocut illustrations in a women’s magazine.

Did she even know she was pregnant. She confessed nothing, but it did not take a great deal for Phoebe Selkirk to make the diagnosis. It was Christmas morning when things came to a head, the news giving Buster Selkirk all the reason he needed for a vodka. The day sort of went from there, filled with shouting and wailing and the caterer’s trays and boxes were abandoned and Susan retreated to a locked bedroom, alone with a tray of garlic mashed potatoes.

By midnight, lying awake listening to her daughter vomiting in the bathroom, Phoebe Selkirk still had no clear idea of who the father was or what her daughter imagined her life would be from here, only that the subject of “tidying up” her “condition” was not acceptable. That suicide had not been threatened seemed an encouraging sign, in the circumstances.

Mrs. Selkirk had until now proclaimed she had too much energy to sit still on an airplane, but on the following day, which she insisted on calling Boxing Day, she took a single Valium and traveled from Idlewild to Boston and from there to Harvard where her father had endowed a library and a chair. She consulted with no one about this trip, neither daughter nor husband, the latter having, in any case, gone off to sleep at the Harvard Club which was half empty for the holiday. She left her daughter sleeping and called in Gladys from vacation to clean up the mess and keep her company. In Quigley House she met with the dean of students and the president and persuaded them that they were capable of dealing with this little “bump,” which she thought of as a kind of hiccup but which was not understood that way by the two men. If the father had been a Harvard man there was no curiosity expressed and in the years when she drank her first martini at exactly six o’clock, Mrs. Selkirk would wryly comment on the three wise men come to discuss the virgin birth.

Mrs. Selkirk made no gift immediately, but she did encourage the dean and president to consider what it was that the School of Arts might have on its Christmas wish list. At the time she could not imagine she would ever blame Harvard for anything.

Phoebe Selkirk was, to put it very mildly indeed, curious about who the baby’s father was, but each time the question was asked the girl withdrew further, and her room, normally so bright and orderly, took on a dark dank tangle more suitable to an adolescent boy than the girl who had announced, on her twelfth birthday, her plan to be the American ambassador to France.

So you have no plans for marriage? she asked.

The girl’s laughter shocked her to such a degree that she began to wonder if schizophrenia more than pregnancy might be the problem.

In a very small way this disaster was a gift for Phoebe Selkirk, energizing her at a time when she was beginning to cause major trouble on the co-op board. While the boy’s cartilage was changing into bone, his grandmother found the house two hours from New York City, Kenoza Lake, Sullivan County, a million miles from anyone she knew.

She announced this to her daughter, who did not comment, and to her husband, who smiled and lifted both arms in the air, a very irritating habit that seemed to absolve him of all responsibility for anything, even his art purchases which he always sold too early or too late. He was kind of famous, although she wished he would shut up about it, for “getting out of” Pollock.

Tomorrow, we’re going, she said.

Later everyone would hear that Susan had been too young for Radcliffe and so was going to the Sorbonne for a year, a story her mother later amended when she learned the Kelvin and the Goldstein girls would be doing just the same and wanted to share an apartment in the Sixth.

She took the Peugeot and left her husband the ridiculous Alfa Romeo Spider with the midlife-crisis soft top. It was sunny and clear on the Palisades Parkway but once they crossed Bear Mountain the weather changed and they drove the last miles along 17B in freezing rain. On 52 they slid off the road, but it was close enough to walk. All through this the strange creature, her daughter, once talkative and happy, would not speak. She fell on the ice and bloodied up her knees.