The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Read online

  She turned from the doorway and went back to the kitchen where she leaned for a time on the counter, waiting for her heart to slow. “Make me an instrument of thy loving kindness,” she prayed. “Change me.” She picked up the carafe and splashed cold coffee into a cup and brought it to her lips, sipped and swallowed, letting the bitter liquid cool her throat. She was tired from the day, but she set out flour and sugar, butter and eggs and molasses. About what she had seen she would not speak, not now or ever—the vision of her part in things was bleak, was terrible. But she would bake, she would fill the air with spice and warmth, refill the empty jar, and even if no one could taste the great change wrought in her, she would, and their lives together, even after all this time, might start again.

  Six

  In the living room between the Chickering spinet and the curio cabinet that held the senior portraits of the six children, mortarboarded and airbrushed in perpetual youth, a set of Norman Rockwell commemorative plates, Hattie’s pincushion collection, Abel’s gavel, bronzed, and the burnished nickel horsehead bookends Hattie had given Abel as a wedding present was a handsome Morris chair in dark mahogany and black leather, with carved lion’s-head armrests and ball-and-talon feet. This was the Eliot chair, handed down to Abel by his mother, Alice, whose family had lived in comfort and plenty until her father, a fancier of fast women, blooded horses, and strong drink, drove their fortunes to ruin. The chair was all that remained of the Eliot glory, and each of the five children was desperate to inherit it, for it was more than a chair.

  During the fifties when the first five were small and Abel was an insurance claims adjuster working in an office in downtown Chicago, he would come home past dark, wearing a black fedora, his thick wool topcoat smelling of city and unfiltered Winstons and snow, and the little ones would clamor to meet him, patting him down and chirping, “Any candy, any gum?” Sometimes his pockets would conceal a pack of Beeman’s Pepsin Chewing Gum or Juicy Fruit or Chuckles, anything that came in fives. Chuckles were the favorite, though one child always got stuck with the green one. Usually ClairBell or Gideon. Yellow and orange and purple were tolerable, but the red Chuckle was the prize, and the child who received it would prance about, lording it over the others, as it was taken as a token of their father’s favor. All of this to say that the Eliot chair was the red Chuckle.

  Doro believed she had earned it. Not only was she the oldest, but the last thing she would ever do would be to cross her parents. She strived always to please, and she was the only one who had made her way in the world without help from her parents. Sure, there had been her hippie interlude in Denver. A pot-smoking, hash-piping, Quaalude-popping, acid-dropping, war-protesting, peace-marching, free-love extravaganza. But that was 1970 and the whole country was acting up. And then there was the matter of the hamburger stand robbery she and a boyfriend had once pulled off, an inside job at a joint he worked in. Four hundred bucks she’d hidden in a box of Tide and eventually spent on she-couldn’t-remember-what, probably more hip-hugger bell-bottoms and rib-knit turtlenecks and hand-tooled leather. This probably qualified her for felon status, but fortunately no one knew—she was careful to keep her mouth shut about her own misadventures—and surely the statute of limitations had run out. The chair, by rights and despite her long-ago and well-rued crimes, should come to her.

  Jesse believed just as strongly that the chair should be his because he was, by default, the reigning first-born boy, and among Campbells and Eliots primogeniture carried the day. Moreover, he bore the family name, Jesse Eliot, and he had two sons—one named Eliot, to whom he could pass the chair when the time came. ClairBell’s claim on the chair was that she never got anything, not one solitary thing, and she should have the chair as a consolation prize to make up for the thousand ways she’d been slighted, from the moment of birth—nay, the moment of conception!—to the present day. Gideon had no sentimental attachment to the chair, but even if he was so far down in the birth order that there was no hope of receiving it, at least he wanted his fair chance, no matter that all he would do with the chair would be to sell it, for the proceeds could keep him in tallboys for a goodly number of months. Billy believed that his well-known love of history and art and architecture and fine things in general, along with the fact that he was probably the only one besides maybe Doro or Abel who knew the meaning of the words scion and ultimogeniture entitled him to be sole heir and assign.

  Although they all wanted it, most refrained from letting their desires be known. To begin jockeying before Hattie and Abel were gone struck them as greedy and crass. All of them but ClairBell, who felt no such compunction and who in Abel’s waning years had begun to mount in earnest her final campaign for the chair. That her efforts were obvious to her parents as well as her siblings was lost on ClairBell, who believed she had so far and quite cleverly concealed her desire under a veil of seeming disregard for the item by making such offhanded remarks as, “Oh, that old hunk of junk? I’d take it if nobody else wanted it, of course.” But at some point in every visit to her parents’ house she’d make mention of the chair, find occasion to sit in it, running her hands down its smooth armrests, fingers lingering on the lion’s heads, making sure to put a fond look in her eyes, and so the others knew well enough what her game was.

  In all things, her hope of inheriting the chair included, ClairBell consulted her spirit guides. At latest reading the psychic signs pointed to her being the most deserving recipient. Ever since she was a child, she had known she possessed powers, the gift of clairvoyance, second sight, whatever you wanted to call it. Not to put too fine a point on it, she was pretty much a witch.

  She could feel the magic deep in her bones, in the shiver that ran up her spine when a message arrived from the shadow realm. If a message came to her out of the blue on a clear, bright morning that it would rain, before the sun went down the rain would fall. If a cousin announced her pregnancy, ClairBell’s mind supplied the due date. She had prophesied the birth dates for nieces and nephews, predicting sex (six out of seven), weight (within three ounces), and length (within the half inch). In addition to their vital statistics she received premonitions as to their destinies, and most of these had come to pass. One of Jesse’s boys had become a pilot, the other a firefighter, one of Doro’s daughters was a soprano soloist and the other two had gone into medical fields like their father, just as ClairBell had foretold. Gideon’s oldest girl was in law school at Washburn, Abel’s alma mater, and the youngest had just finished her first year of veterinary school at Kansas State. About her own boys’ callings, she had been less accurate. She’d received no messages whatsoever, especially not about their joining the Army or managing the DoNut Dinette, but she reckoned the bloodlines were too close and this had bollixed the spirit communication. The cobbler’s children with no shoes and so on. Besides, the boys were still finding their ways. They’d had none of the advantages the other nieces and nephews possessed, and this lack was solidly the fault of their father, Burton Moody, who even though he was supposed to be a big accountant hadn’t been able to tolerate the demands of marriage and fatherhood. He acted like sending child support every month fulfilled his duty. Every time old Burt the Shirt tried to come around to meddle in her life under the guise of concern for the boys or to lecture her about her housekeeping or her spending or how shabbily the boys were dressed or what she fed them or whatever, she’d give him an earful on the subject of his low-down good-for-nothingness—and so what if the boys heard her or the neighbors called the police about the window she shattered with the cast-iron skillet, what did he expect?—and, after a time, he’d stayed away, which was good riddance anyway. She’d known before she even married him that he was uptight and controlling, a penny-pinching stick-in-the-mud with no sense of fun. All work and no play and rules and regulations out the wazoo. Not to mention his actual wazoo. Man walked like he had a corncob stuck up his butt. So dull you dozed off five minutes after he opened his other end to talk about actuarial tables or deductibles or whatev
er sleep-inducing dronefest came spewing forth. Why she’d failed to heed her inner light and save herself a lot of trouble where Burt Moody was concerned, she’d never know.

  To keep her powers of clairvoyance sharp, certain rituals were necessary. For instance, she had to count the food pieces she put in her mouth—M&Ms, cashews, red hots, whatever. One was okay and threes and fours were fine, as that made seven, which was lucky, but to put only two of anything into her mouth at the same time augured disaster. So far she’d succeeded. From time to time she made little tests for herself, making sure her radar worked, and she always passed. Once, during a period between her marriages to Burt the Shirt and Jimbo Green, when she was at a low point and had begun to doubt her abilities and no messages had visited her for a time, she turned on the television and happened onto a Kojak rerun from the eighties. There was Telly Savalas with his shining bald head and a lollipop sticking out of his mouth. The hair on her forearms stood up, her spine quivered: Telly Savalas wasn’t long for the world. He would die soon. Within the year, her secret sense told her. And it was so.

  Her greatest triumph had to be the inspiration she’d received some years after the assassination of Toodles, back when Abel was in his late seventies. He had stepped down from the bench, sold what was left of his practice, along with the office building on Hale Haven Road. Sold the Kansas Case Law books Doro wanted, a sale that, although ClairBell pretended to sympathize with her sister at the loss, had given her a pretty good laugh. ClairBell couldn’t bear it when their father gave something to one of her brothers or her sister. Even something small. Just the year before, Doro had worn a clunky necklace with a Buddhisty-looking design, and he’d complimented it and then he’d given Doro a Chinese coin medallion he’d had since his and Hattie’s trip to Hawaii. In front of everyone! ClairBell couldn’t contain her tears. She clattered up from the table and yelled at Randy to take her home. Randy tried to calm her down by telling her that the medallion was a cheap tourist trinket you could get at any Honolulu souvenir shop for a buck fifty, but value wasn’t the point. Her father hadn’t given it to her and she took it hard.

  Anyway, back to her greatest inspiration. Something had told her that after his retirement Abel was losing his rudder. Month by month he seemed to be shrinking. The Carhartts he’d taken to wearing had begun to sag in the hind end. He wandered around the property, stopping to gaze into the creek, to ponder the great chunk of white marble he’d hoisted onto sawhorses behind his barn. He saw a white whale in it, he’d told everyone, but somehow he couldn’t make the first mark with his hammer and chisel to release its shape. He had lapses of judgment. At Easter, along with the jelly beans and marshmallow chicks, he’d placed in his four-year-old great-grandson’s basket a .22-caliber air rifle. In fact, when she thought back, this was probably the beginning. On Thanksgiving Day of that year, at her mother’s table as she’d poured gravy onto potatoes and dressing and turkey and counted out three creamed onions and four peas, it had come to her like a flash that her father was in need of something to live for.

  At that time in her parents’ life, the early nineties, the house was empty but for the two of them. The Boomerang Boys had at last settled elsewhere—Gid had packed up for New Mexico to begin his dual career in drink and disgruntlement, and Billy, with high hopes and at a stable point in his health with the help of AZT, had gone east to make a new life with Doro and her daughters. This left Hattie and Abel alone and for the first time in their lives with no children to worry about. They had begun to knit themselves together again.

  They were happy and healthy. Hattie, knocking on wood and whispering a prayer, had begun to think their troubles were behind them and that maybe their golden years might actually have a little luster. As for Abel, he would have been surprised by his daughter’s diagnosis of his lack of zest for living. He considered that his seventies were by far his best decade. He had at last outgrown the young man’s competitive follies but he’d maintained the interests—welding, electronics, machinery, astronomy, stone-carving, physics, history, theology—that kept his mind agile, and he had come, finally, to understand the difference between cleverness and wisdom. He had begun to reconcile the dogmatic training of his youth with the fruits of his education to work out a view of religion and its dilemmas, an idea of creation and the order of the universe—now the multiverse—that would allow him peace. He reckoned that it had taken him a long time to become who he had always been, but now that he knew, his days were fine and full.

  But ClairBell had decreed that something was missing, and so this became the fact upon which she based her operation. She cast about for the solution and it came to her with the strength of a nine-volt charge: a puppy! Abel must have a puppy to replace Toodles, a puppy to be presented as a gift so that Hattie, who had killed the poor old doggie of blessed memory in cold blood and vowed she’d never have another animal in the house, could not say no.

  She persuaded Jesse to go in with her on the puppy surprise, strong-armed him into coughing up half the price of a sweet little black-and-white Chihuahua–rat terrier mix, male. She made arrangements to pick up the pup at the breeder’s farm so they could present him on Christmas Eve. She found a red ribbon to tie in a bow around the dog’s neck, and on the appointed day she dressed him in a doll’s sweater and tied the ribbon just so. As she and her sons pulled into the long driveway and moved toward the door of her parents’ house, she envisioned a blazing fire, the sequined felt stockings bearing all of their names, even Nick’s, hung in stair steps from the mantel, tree lights glistening, and the folks sitting side by side on the sofa, probably sharing the snootified plaid lap robe from Maine that those uppity-ups Doro and Billy had sent as their Christmas gift. Into all of this warmth and tradition she would bring a far better offering, a brand-new, living, breathing, bow-ribboned Christmas puppy. It would be a scene straight out of Thomas Kinkade!

  But her triumphal entry fell flat. She had instructed her sons, middle-school aged and balky, to go through the door ahead of her and shout “Surprise!” This they did, but in a mumble, giving the impression that a parade of oafs, a scouting party of Sasquatches had shambled into the room. She had concealed the puppy under her puffy ski coat, but he began to whimper so desperately that it sounded like ClairBell herself, or at least her ski coat, was in distress. The sound drew Hattie to the fore with concern, but when she caught sight of the dog emerging from his hiding place in the vicinity of her daughter’s collarbone she threw her hands in the air. The sight of the creature was like seeing Toodles returned from the dead, and she shrieked, “No! Get that dog out of here!”

  But ClairBell had already crossed the room to bestow the wriggling gift. From Abel’s lap the puppy squirmed up his chest and into the crook of his neck where he began to lick madly at Abel’s ears and cause him to laugh in a way she hadn’t remembered hearing him laugh for years.

  Hattie went to stand over him, wringing her holly-sprigged apron. “No,” she cried, “Abel, oh, please. Not again!”

  “But just look at this little dandy,” Abel began, but then he caught a glimpse of his wife’s face. The barbed-wire scar on the end of her nose had whitened, a sure sign of anger. Or maybe fear. Reluctantly he took the puppy—he, too, had hoped the golden years had come, he had his bride back after years of ginger relations, and he wanted nothing to tarnish them—and handed the dog back to ClairBell. “Sister, he’s a peach, all right, and from the bottom of my heart I thank you for your thoughtfulness, but you’d best take him back.”

  Oh, the hurt. Once again she had tried only to please and once again her mother had rejected her efforts. She had gathered the dog, let fly some scorching words aimed at Hattie, words she couldn’t remember later but which Hattie would never forget, and stormed out, the boys shuffling dejectedly, big-footedly, behind her.

  * * *

  She couldn’t have known and, in her anger and hurt, she wouldn’t have cared that across the country Billy and Doro, once they heard the story, considered the who
le drama a deliberate flouting of their mother’s wishes, as manipulation, as another of the traps their sister set for their mother so she would look bad. From the East Coast they had called home to wish their parents a merry Christmas and when they heard the terrible tale from Hattie via speakerphone they looked at each other with horror, with outrage and horror, made more outrageous and horrible by the fact that their sister had pulled such a ClairBellian stunt on Christmas Eve.

  Billy asked, “Mother, where is the dog now?”

  Hattie cleared her throat. “She took it away. It’s at her house. I’m afraid I hurt her feelings. She called me some terrible names.…”

  “What names?” Billy wanted to know, ready to spring to her defense.

  In a small voice, Hattie said, “Oh … witch with a B. Bag with an H. I can’t remember the rest.”

  Doro broke in. “Let the damned dog stay out there.” She wanted to travel through the phone lines as avenging angel and give her sister a piece of her mind. “What was she thinking?”

  Hattie’s voice had taken on the wavering quality it sometimes did at times of high stress. “The puppy was cute as a button. Like Toodles when she was young. In fact the little thing was just about a dead ringer—” She stopped herself when she realized the expression she’d used, and started again. “I’m sure it was expensive, but I just couldn’t…”