Unknown - The Genius

The news on the radio is all about the Depression. Like Delia’s untouched cakes and the rules of sass, the Depression is another thing that David wants to understand. Father talks of tightening his belt and Mother in response says that they must live like human beings. David does not understand the connection. If you tightened your belt, why couldn’t you live like a human being, except with tighter pants? Could you live like a human being if your pants were falling down? Of course not. David sides with Father, decisively.

The Depression has always existed. Yet his parents talk about Before. Before, we used to have more help around the house. Before we made adjustments. Delia talks about Before, too; Before, she had a friend, and now there is nobody for her to talk to. David can see that Delia is lonely. Why? There are plenty of other people around her. There’s Mother and Father and the cook and the driver and the butler and the man who comes to take the pictures and the doctor with the oily leather bag and all sorts of people, all the time. The house is never empty. So why does Delia seem so lonely? And if she’s so lonely, why does she act so nasty? David can easily see that more people would smile at her if she smiled herself. That much he understands. There may be a lot she knows that he doesn’t, but at least he can feel smarter about that.

The Depression, as far as David can tell, has something to do with the weather. So says Father. We’ll have to weather it. Or horses: we’ll have to ride it out. Perhaps—and here David feels on uncertain ground—it has to do with ships, and leaking. He wishes he understood better, because these storms and horses and leaky vessels exert a strong effect on his parents’ mood, particularly Father’s. Sometimes Father will come home in a terrible state, casting a black spell across the household. Dinners will be silent, no sound but squeaking knives. Father might start to talk about the news but

Mother will then say Not at the table or Please, Louis and Father will fall quiet again.

Friday night, Family Night, Father retreats to the corner with the big radio and switches on the lamp with the pretty green glass shade and sits with his legs crossed, tenting his fingers or chewing at the corners of his nails, a habit Delia calls dirty. Or he pulls gently on his earlobes, as though he’s trying to stretch them like taffy. He seems to disappear into the cushions, and David will sometimes stop playing the game in his head and look at him, with his hairy lip and his sunken cheeks and eyes like marbles that want to shoot across the floor. He fiddles with his necktie but never removes it. His shoes are a lustrous black, and if David creeps close enough he can see his bulging reflection in their shiny, rounded caps.

Mother reads books. They have names like The Rose of Killearney and The Wife of the Saxon Chieftain. David tried to look inside one of her books once, but could not understand. This is not because he cannot read. He learned to read, the tutor taught him. To practice he reads the picture books. Sometimes, when Delia has thrown away the newspaper—she reads it out loud to the chef, who is from Italy and whose accent makes him sound like he’s singing, all the time, even when he is not—he will fish it out of the trash and sit in the cupboard with it. Like Father, all the newspaper seems to care about was the Depression.

On Friday nights David stands at the window and looks down at the men and women walking in their hats and their scarves. Cars used to honk until the noise drove Mother loony and she couldn’t stand it a second longer and she had the men come and put on a second set of windows, glass as thick as David’s fingers. Now the picture show in the street makes no sound at all. David doesn’t mind. He can supply the voices and the sounds in his head, where he keeps so much.

Come away from there, David.

He goes back to his spot on the rug, lies down, and looks at the ceiling, where there are paintings of angels that Father had put there. They are playing trumpets and flowers are coming out of them. The trumpets, not the angels. It would be funny if flowers came out of the angels. But coming out of the trumpets they just look silly. David never says anything because Father seems quite fond of his angels.

This Friday night in particular, he is in the middle of extracting Roger Dollar from a very difficult situation. Roger has been kidnapped by lawless bandits who want to take his gold. He is using an oar to fight them off, and as the bandits fire their guns, David hears someone coming down the stairs. He is surprised. Nobody may come into the drawing room on Family Night; anybody who does will probably get whipped, worse than if they sassed.

He looks at Mother and Father. Neither of them have noticed anything.

David wonders if he imagined the footsteps. He has a strong imagination, so strong he sometimes gets lost in it. Instead of reviewing his lessons, math or German or music, he will focus on the faint whoop of a cardinal, two slow calls and then a series of sharp ones, or on the way a crack in the plaster traces its way up the wall, like a river flowing upward. He will spin such impressions into elaborate stories, jungle exploration, clashes between savage tribes full of men with pointy teeth and drawings on their bodies, he saw them in Ripley’s Believe It or Not. David knows that distraction takes him easily. When he returns to the world, it is usually through a tunnel of shouts, at the end of which Delia stands, grinding her jaw and cracking her knuckles.

He did not imagine the footsteps. They are coming closer, in bursts of four or five, as though the person is learning how to walk.

Should he get up? He could pretend to go to the bathroom, and on the way warn the approaching stranger to turn back. It’s Family Night, don’t go in there!

But what if the stranger is dangerous: a monster, or worse? What if David needs to protect Mother and Father? What if he can save only one of them? Who would he choose? The answer comes quickly: Father. Father is skinnier, and David likes him more. Mother, with her heaving bosom, her huge raft of skirts, could probably defend herself. If she didn’t manage that would be okay, too.

Now Mother puts down her book.

“Louis.”

Father has passed out, his eyelids fluttering.

“Louis.”

Father wakes. “What’s that, Mother?”

“There’s someone in the hall.”

“Who’s that.”

“I heard a noise.”

Father nods sleepily. “Yes.”

“Well? Go see what it is.”

Father takes a deep breath and unfurls himself from deep within his armchair. His legs looks like a spider’s, frail and long and jointed, and though he looks small in his chair, when he rises, it is always to an awesome height.

“Did you hear something?” he asks David.

David nods.

Father tugs at his collar and yawns. “Let’s have a look, shall we?”

Before he can, the door swings open with a shriek. Father jumps back and Mother puts her hand to her chest and David blinks furiously, trying to keep quiet. In comes a girl he has never seen before. She is wearing a white nightgown, so thin that the fabric is see-through; and she is weird-looking, with small bosoms and a rounded stomach and hairy arms. She is short. Her face is squashed, like a frog’s. Her tongue sticks out of her mouth like she has tasted something rotten. Her hair is smooth and tied back with a yellow bow. She has slanty eyes that dart around the room, looking at this chair and that wall and then at Mother and Father. Then she looks at David and she seems to start to smile. He does not smile back; he is frightened and he wants to hide.

Mother leaps up, dropping her book on the floor.

Father says, “Bertha—”

Mother crosses the room in three big steps; she takes the girl by the wrist and pulls her from sight. David hears them going up the stairs.