Evan Hunter - The Moment She Was Gone

When he read to us at night...

I have to tell you, first, that he loved to play board games with us. Along around five-thirty or six each evening, he would come out of his studio (he called even the tiny back room a “studio”), stinking of cigar smoke and turpentine, and even before my mother called us to dinner he would say, “Hey, kiddos, some Monopoly after supper?” (He still called dinner “supper,” the way Grandma Kate always did.) Or Risk, which was another game. Or Clue. My mother would always tell us to finish our homework first, but every night, nonetheless, we would sit down to play a board game for an hour or so after dinner.

My sister didn’t like playing board games. “Are you bored, darlin?” my father would ask her. (He was an inveterate punster, which my mother said was his way of taking revenge on the English language, the same way she maintains sarcasm is her way of doing it.) Annie was indeed bored, and a punster in her own right. “No, Dad, just Terry -fied of losing,” she would say, making a pun on my father’s name, which Aaron never seemed to get even though it had become a standard response to my father’s board/bored question. A fiercely competitive player, Aaron was too busy concentrating on the game itself, whichever game it happened to be. Whenever he was losing, he would knock the board and all its pieces off the table. “ Oop -a-la!” my father would shout, and burst out laughing, but my mother would send Aaron to his room, anyway.

At night, after we had carefully put whichever game away, its pieces still in position for the next night’s foray, we would go into the room Aaron and I shared, which was larger than Annie’s, and we would curl up on one of the beds, and my father would read to us. He read all sorts of bedtime stories to us, but his favorite — and ours as well — was The Once and Future King. Even Aaron liked this one, though I think at first he identified with Kay, “who was too dignified to have a nickname” and who would be called Sir Kay when he grew older. Aaron didn’t know, of course, that the Wart would grow up to be King Arthur.

There were four volumes in the book, but my father read only the first one to us, and so we didn’t learn anything about the interlocking Arthurian tales of incest and infidelity. Neither did any of us have the slightest inkling that at this exact moment in time our father was “playing around,” as my mother later explained it to us, and might therefore have had an affinity for the Guinevere-Lancelot parts of the story, if ever he’d got around to reading those to us, which he never did. What interested us about The Sword in the Stone, as this first volume was called, was not T. H. White’s concern with force majeure (which we wouldn’t have recognized if it came up behind us and hit us on the head with a club) but instead the way he and Merlin together worked their magic.

Aaron was eight years old in that year before my father abandoned us. Annie and I were each four. In the soft light from the lamp beside Aaron’s bed, we listened to my father’s liquid voice as he began reading to us yet another time, crediting the book and its author each and every night before continuing with the story — “This is The Once and Future King, by T. H. White” — and then conjuring for us the twelfth-century England White had created.

Spellbound, we listened.

This was the opening epigraph of the first volume, and my father read it with portentous intonations proper to the magical proceedings that would follow.

“Who’s Grandma Marie?” Annie asked.

“It’s Gram -a-ree,” my father said. “It’s White’s name for England. It also means magic.”

“Who’s Merlin?” Aaron asked.

“A magician,” my father said. “Are you going to listen to this, or shall we just turn out the lights and go to bed?”

“What does ‘Where you and I shall fare’ mean?” I asked.

“In a minute, it’s going to mean fare thee well.”

“What’s fare thee well?” Annie asked.

“It’s good night, Toots,” my father said.

“Is Toots a pun?” Annie asked.

The minute Daddy got famous, he bought a house in Connecticut. Paintings that were earlier selling for $3,000 a week before were this week selling for $100,000, and a week after that for $300,000. At great cost, he transformed some old stables on the property into a spacious studio with terrific skylights, where he could smoke his smelly little Brazilian cigars while he painted all day long and sometimes deep into the night. (I always thought he and Grandma Rozalia smelled exactly alike with their tobacco stink. Except Daddy had a turpentine smell besides.)

My mother got not only the house in the divorce settlement, but also the studio and everything in it. This came to quite a bit of change; when she locked him out of her house and her life, there were paintings valued at two-million-five stacked in the old carriage house. She promptly sold all the paintings (“Good riddance to bad rubbish!” she announced) and moved all of us back full-time to the apartment we still kept in New York. But at first, we continued to use the house during the summer months. And one summer, when Aaron was fourteen, and my sister and I were ten, someone broke into the house one night.

We didn’t know this had happened until the next morning, when we were all sitting down to breakfast and Aaron was going out to get the New York Times from the mailbox, and he noticed that one of the glass panels on the back door to the house, the kitchen door, was smashed. My mother suspected at once that it was my “no-good father,” as she called him, even though all evidence had him living in San Miguel de Allende with an Irish girl who was purportedly his new model and mistress. I later saw one of the paintings he’d done of her during that time in his life. Actually, I went looking for it in MOMA’s permanent collection. Even given my father’s abstractionist bent, Molly O (the name of the painting and the girl) was identifiably redheaded, green-eyed, and blessed with three abundant breasts, surely hyperbole.

My mother called Mr. Schneider, the contractor who had renovated the stables when we first bought the house. A portly little man with a heavy German accent, he kept telling my mother she should keep up with house repairs, that it was a “zad t’ing” (I can’t do accents) to see a fine old house “like zis one” fall into neglect. She always pooh-poohed his concern. I don’t think she’d even have had the glass panel replaced if its absence wasn’t letting in bugs at night. Mr. Schneider came over with a glazier the next day, and stood with his hands on his hips, watching the man as he replaced the glass panel, clucking his tongue every now and then, perhaps thinking something like this would never have happened in his native Germany.

Two nights later, someone broke into the house again.

This time, a different panel on the back door was broken.

We figured that whoever was trespassing had broken the glass so he could reach in and turn the simple spring latch on the door. The odd thing was that nothing was missing from the house, and no one had heard anyone coming in or going out. The bedroom my mother used to share with my father was on the second floor of the house, at the end opposite the ground floor kitchen. Besides, she was a sound sleeper, so it wasn’t surprising that she hadn’t heard anything. Annie slept right down the hall from her, in a room just over the kitchen. If anyone could have heard the intruder, it was Annie. But she claimed she had heard nothing. Aaron and I shared a room on the third floor of the house, m what used to be the attic. Neither of us had heard any sound of glass breaking, or doors opening, or anything of the sort, but after the third nocturnal visit, we both started listening very hard. That was the last break-in, though, the third one. Mr. Schneider brought his glazier over after each time, and stood by with his hands on his hips, clucking his tongue, while the glass panel was fixed.