Part 29 (1/2)
”Yuh. Uh-huh. Arlene and I. Arlene ran through the kitchen. Wasn't looking. Mrs. Kutchner-Mrs. Kutchner dropped a stack of plates-”
Max shut his eyes, bent his head forward, yanking at the roots of his hair in anguish.
”Mrs. Kutchner shouldn't tire herself. She's unwell. Indeed, I think she can hardly rise from bed.”
”That's what-that's what I thought. Too.” Rudy's voice at the bottom of the porch. He was beginning to recover his air. ”It's not really all the way dark yet.”
”It isn't? Ah. When one get to my age, the vision fail some, and dusk is often mistake for night. Here I was thinking sunset has come and gone twenty minutes ago. What time-?” Max heard the steely snap of his father opening his pocket watch. He sighed. ”But it's too dark for me to read the hands. Well. Your concern for Mrs. Kutchner, I admire.”
”Oh it-it was nothing-” Rudy said, putting his foot on the first step of the porch.
”But really, you should worry more about your own well-being, Rudolf,” said their father, his voice calm, benevolent, speaking in the tone Max often imagined him employing when addressing patients he knew were in the final stages of a fatal illness. It was after dark and the doctor was in.
Rudy said, ”I'm sorry, I'm-”
”You're sorry now. But your regret will be more palpable momentarily.”
The quirt came down with a meaty smack, and Rudy, who would be ten in two weeks, screamed. Max ground his teeth, his hands still digging in his hair; pressed his wrists against his ears, trying vainly to block out the sounds of shrieking, and of the quirt striking at flesh, fat and bone.
With his ears covered he didn't hear their father come in. He looked up when a shadow fell across him. Abraham stood in the doorway to the hall, hair disheveled, collar askew, the quirt pointed at the floor. Max waited to be hit with it, but no blow came.
”Help your brother in.”
Max rose unsteadily to his feet. He couldn't hold the old man's gaze so he lowered his eyes, found himself staring at the quirt instead. The back of his father's hand was freckled with blood. Max drew a thin, dismayed breath.
”You see what you make me do.”
Max didn't reply. Maybe no answer was necessary or expected.
His father stood there for a moment longer, then turned, and strode away into the back of the house, toward the private study he always kept locked, a room in which they were forbidden to enter without his permission. Many nights he nodded off there, and could be heard shouting in his sleep, cursing in Dutch.
”Stop running,” Max shouted. ”I catch you eventually.”
Rudolf capered across the corral, grabbed the rail and heaved himself over it, sprinted for the side of the house, his laughter trailing behind him.
”Give it back,” Max said, and he leaped the rail without slowing down, hit the ground without losing a step. He was angry, really angry, and in his fury possessed an unlikely grace; unlikely because he was built along the same lines as his father, with the rough dimensions of a water buffalo taught to walk on its back legs.
Rudy, by contrast, had their mother's delicate build, to go with her porcelain complexion. He was quick, but Max was closing in anyway. Rudy was looking back over his shoulder too much, not concentrating on where he was going. He was almost to the side of the house. When he got there, Max would have him trapped against the wall, could easily cut off any attempt to break left or right.
But Rudy didn't break to the left or right. The window to their father's study was pushed open about a foot, revealing a cool library darkness. Rudy grabbed the windowsill over his head-he still held Max's letter in one hand-and with a giddy glance back, heaved himself into the shadows.
However their father felt about them arriving home after dark, it was nothing compared to how he would feel to discover either one of them had gained entry to his most private sanctum. But their father was gone, had taken the Ford somewhere, and Max didn't slow down to think what would happen if he suddenly returned. He jumped and grabbed his brother's ankle, thinking he would drag the little worm back out into the light, but Rudy screamed, twisted his foot out of Max's grasp. He fell into darkness, crashed to the floorboards with an echoing thud that caused gla.s.s to rattle softly against gla.s.s somewhere in the office. Then Max had the windowsill and he yanked himself into the air- ”Go slow, Max, it's a... ” his brother cried.
and he thrust himself through the window.
”Big drop,” Rudy finished.
Max had been in his father's study before, of course (sometimes Abraham invited them in for ”a talk,” by which he meant he would talk and they would listen), but he had never entered the room by way of the window. He spilled forward, had a startling glance of the floor almost three feet below him, and realized he was about to dive into it face first. At the edge of his vision he saw a round end table, next to one of his father's armchairs, and he reached for it to stop his fall. His momentum continued to carry him forward, and he crashed to the floor. At the last moment, he turned his face aside and most of his weight came down on his right shoulder. The furniture leaped. The end table turned over, dumping everything on it. Max heard a bang, and a gla.s.sy crack that was more painful to him then the soreness he felt in either head or shoulder.
Rudy sprawled a yard away from him, sitting on the floor, still grinning a little foolishly. He held the letter half-crumpled in one hand, forgotten.
The end table was on its side, fortunately not broken. But an empty inkpot had smashed, lay in gleaming chunks close to Max's knee. A stack of books had been flung across the Persian carpet. A few papers swirled overhead, drifting slowly to the floor with a swish and a sc.r.a.pe.
”You see what you make me do,” Max said, gesturing at the inkpot. Then he flinched, realizing that this was exactly what his father had said to him a few nights before; he didn't like the old man peeping out from inside him, talking through him like a puppet, a hollowed-out, empty-headed boy of wood.
”We'll just throw it away,” Rudy said.
”He knows where everything in his office is. He will notice it missing.”
”My b.a.l.l.s. He comes in here to drink brandy, fart in his couch and fall asleep. I've been in here lots of times. I took his lighter for smokes last month and he still hasn't noticed.”
”You what?” Max asked, staring at his younger brother in genuine surprise, and not without a certain envy. It was the older brother's place to take foolish risks, and be casually detached about it later.
”Who's this letter to, that you had to go and hide somewhere to write it? I was watching you work on it over your shoulder. 'I still remember how I held your hand in mine.'” Rudy's voice swooping and fluttering in mock-romantic pa.s.sion.
Max lunged at his brother, but was too slow, Rudy had flipped the letter over and was reading the beginning. The smile began to fade, thought lines wrinkling the pale expanse of his forehead; then Max had ripped the sheet of paper away.
”Mother?” Rudy asked, thoroughly nonplussed.
”It was a.s.signment for school. We were ask if you wrote a letter to anyone, who would it be? Mrs. Louden tell us it could be someone imaginary or-or historic figure. Someone dead.”
”You'd turn that in? And let Mrs. Louden read it?”
”I don't know. I am not finish yet.” But as Max spoke, he was already beginning to realize he had made a mistake, allowed himself to get carried away by the fascinating possibilities of the a.s.signment, the irresistible what if of it, and had written things too personal for him to show anyone. He had written you were the only one I knew how to talk to and I am sometimes so lonely. He had really been imagining her reading it, somehow, somewhere-perhaps as he wrote it, some astral form of her staring over his shoulder, smiling sentimentally as his pen scratched across the page. It was a mawkish, absurd fantasy and he felt a withering embarra.s.sment to think he had given in to it so completely.
His mother had already been weak and ill when the scandal drove their family from Amsterdam. They lived for a while in England, but word of the terrible thing their father had done (whatever it was-Max doubted he would ever know) followed them. On they had gone to America. His father believed he had acquired a position as a lecturer at Va.s.sar College, was so sure of this he had ladled much of his savings into the purchase of a handsome nearby farm. But in New York City they were met by the dean, who told Abraham Van Helsing that he could not, in good conscience, allow the doctor to work unsupervised with young ladies who were not yet at the age of consent. Max knew now his father had killed his mother as surely as if he had held a pillow over her face in her sickbed. It wasn't the travel that had done her in, although that was bad enough, too much for a woman who was both pregnant and weak with a chronic infection of the blood which caused her to bruise at the slightest touch. It was humiliation. Mina had not been able to survive the shame of what he had done, what they were all forced to run from.
”Come on,” Max said. ”Let's clean up and get out of here.”
He righted the table and began gathering the books, but turned his head when Rudy said, ”Do you believe in vampires, Max?”
Rudy was on his knees in front of an ottoman across the room. He had hunched over to collect a few papers which had settled there, then stayed to look at the battered doctor's bag tucked underneath it. Rudy tugged at the rosary knotted around the handles.
”Leave that alone,” Max said. ”We need to clean, not make bigger mess.”
”Do you?”
Max was briefly silent. ”Mother was attacked. Her blood was never the same after. Her illness.”
”Did she ever say she was attacked, or did he?”
”She died when I was six. She would not confide in a child about such a thing.”
”But... do you think we're in danger?” Rudy had the bag open now. He reached in to remove a bundle, carefully wrapped in royal purple fabric. Wood clicked against wood inside the velvet. ”That vampires are out there, waiting for a chance at us. For our guard to drop?”
”I would not discount possibility. However unlikely.”
”However unlikely,” his brother said, laughing softly. He opened the velvet wrap and looked in at the nine-inch stakes, skewers of blazing white wood, handles wrapped in oiled leather. ”Well I think it's all bulls.h.i.+t.
Bullll-s.h.i.+t.” Singing a little.