From the Corner of His Eye

  Softened by a Shantung shade, the lamplight was golden on his small smooth face, but sapphire and emerald in his eyes.

  “You didn’t mention it to Uncle Edom or Uncle Jacob,” she said.

  “Better not.”

  “Why?”

  “You were scared, huh?”

  “Yes, I was.” She didn’t tell him that her fear had not been allayed by his assurances or by his second walk in the rain.

  “And you,” Barty said, “you’re never scared of anything.”

  “You mean…Edom and Jacob are already afraid of so much.”

  The boy nodded. “If we told ’em, maybe they’d have to wash their shorts.”

  “Where did you hear that expression,” she demanded, though she couldn’t conceal her amusement.

  Barty grinned mischievously. “One of the places we visited today. Some big kids. They saw this scary movie, said they had to wash their shorts after.”

  “Big kids aren’t always smart just because they’re big.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  She hesitated. “Edom and Jacob have had hard lives, Barty.”

  “Were they coal miners?”

  “What?”

  “On TV, it said coal miners have hard lives.”

  “Not only coal miners. Old as you are in some ways, you’re still too young for me to explain. I will someday.”

  “Okay.”

  “You remember, we’ve talked before about the stories they’re always telling.”

  “Hurricane. Galveston, Texas, back in 1900. Six thousand people died.”

  Frowning, Agnes said. “Yes, those stories. Sweetie, when Uncle Edom and Uncle Jacob go on about big storms blowing people away and explosions blowing people up…that’s not what life’s about.”

  “It happens,” the boy said.

  “Yes. Yes, it does.”

  Agnes had struggled recently to find a way to explain to Barty that his uncles had lost their hope, to convey also what it meant to live without hope—and somehow to tell the boy all this without burdening him, at such a young age, with the details of what his monstrous grandfather, Agnes’s father, had done to her and to her brothers. The task was beyond her abilities. The fact that Barty was a prodigy six times over didn’t make his mother’s work easier, because in order to understand her, he would require experience and emotional maturity, not just intellect.

  Frustrated again, she said simply, “Whenever Edom and Jacob talk about these things, I want you to be sure always to keep in mind that life’s about living and being happy, not about dying.”

  “I wish they knew that,” Barty said.

  For those five words, Agnes adored him.

  “So do I, honey. Oh, Lord, so do I.” She kissed his forehead. “Listen, kiddo, in spite of their stories and all their funny ways, your uncles are good men.”

  “Sure, I know.”

  “And they love you very much.”

  “I love them, too, Mommy.”

  Earlier, the dirty-sheet clouds had been wrung dry. Now, the trees that overhung the house had finally stopped dripping on the cedar-shingled roof. The night was so still that Agnes could hear the sea softly breaking upon the shore more than half a mile away.

  “Sleepy?” she asked.

  “A little.”

  “Santa Claus won’t come if you don’t sleep.”

  “I’m not sure he’s real.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Something I read.”

  A pang of regret pierced her, that her boy’s precocity should deny him this fine fantasy, as her morose father had denied it to her. “He’s real,” she asserted.

  “You think so?”

  “I don’t just think so. And I don’t just know it. I feel it, exactly like you feel all the ways things are. I’ll bet you feel it, too.”

  Bright though they were at all times, Barty’s Tiffany eyes shone brighter now with beams of North Pole magic. “Maybe I do feel it.”

  “If you don’t, your feeling gland isn’t working. Want me to read you to sleep?”

  “No, that’s okay. I’ll close my eyes and tell myself a story.”

  She kissed his cheek, and he pulled his arms out from under the covers to hug her. Such small arms, but such a fierce hug.

  As she tucked the bedclothes around him again, she said, “Barty, I don’t think you should let anyone else see how you can walk in the rain without getting wet. Not Edom and Jacob. Not anyone at all. And anything else special that you discover you can do…we should keep it a secret between you and me.”

  “Why?”

  Furrowing her brow and narrowing her eyes as though prepared to scold him, she slowly lowered her face to his, until their noses were touching, and she whispered, “Because it’s more fun if it’s secret.”

  Matching his mother’s whisper, taking obvious delight in their conspiracy, he said, “Our own secret society.”

  “What would you know about secret societies?”

  “Just what’s in books and TV.”

  “Which is?”

  His eyes widened, and his voice became husky with pretended fear. “They’re always…evil.”

  Her whisper grew softer yet more hoarse. “Should we be evil?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What happens to people in evil secret societies?”

  “They go to jail,” he whispered solemnly.

  “Then let’s not be evil.”

  “Okay.”

  “Ours will be a good secret society.”

  “We gotta have a secret handshake.”

  “Nah. Every secret society has a secret handshake. We’ll have this instead.” Her face was still close to his, and she rubbed noses with him.

  He stifled a giggle. “And a secret word.”

  “Eskimo.”

  “And a name.”

  “The North Pole Society of Not Evil Adventurers.”

  “That’s a great name!”

  Agnes rubbed noses with him again, kissed him, and rose from the edge of the bed.

  Gazing up at her, Barty said, “You’ve got a halo, Mommy.”

  “You’re sweet, kiddo.”

  “No, you really do.”

  She switched off the lamp. “Sleep tight, angel boy.”

  The soft hallway light didn’t penetrate far past the open door.

  From the plush pillowy shadows of the bed, Barty said, “Oh, look. Christmas lights.”

  Assuming that the boy had closed his eyes and was talking to himself, somewhere between his self-told bedtime story and a dream, Agnes retreated from the room, pulling the door only half shut behind her.

  “Good-night, Mommy.”

  “Good-night,” she whispered.

  She switched off the hall light and stood at the half-open door, listening, waiting.

  Such quiet filled the house that Agnes couldn’t hear even the murmuring miseries of the past.

  Although she had never seen snow other than in pictures and on film, this deep-settled silence seemed to speak of falling flakes, of white muffling mantles, and she wouldn’t have been in the least surprised if, stepping outside, she had found herself in a glorious winter landscape, cold and crystalline, here on the always-snowless hills and shores of the California Pacific.

  Her special son, walking where the rain wasn’t, had made all things seem possible.

  From the darkness of his room, Barty now spoke the words for which Agnes had been waiting, his whisper soft yet resonant in the quiet house: “Good-night, Daddy.”

  On other nights, she had overheard this and been touched. On this Christmas Eve, however, it filled her with wonder and wondering, for she recalled their conversation earlier, at Joey’s grave:

  I wish your dad could have known you.

  Somewhere, he does. Daddy died here, but he didn’t die every place I am. It’s lonely for me here, but not lonely for me everywhere.

  Soundlessly, reluctantly, Agnes pulled the bedroom door nearly shut, and went down to the kitchen, w
here she sat alone, drinking coffee and nibbling at mysteries.

  Of all the gifts that Barty opened on Christmas morning, the hardback copy of Robert Heinlein’s The Star Beast was his favorite. Instantly enchanted by the promise of an amusing alien creature, space travel, an exotic future, and lots of adventure, he seized every opportunity throughout the busy day to crack open those pages and to step out of Bright Beach into stranger places.

  As outgoing as his twin uncles were introverted, Barty didn’t withdraw from the festivities. Agnes never needed to remind him that family and guests took precedence over even the most fascinating characters in fiction, and the boy’s delight in the company of others pleased his mother and made her proud.

  From late morning until dinner, people arrived and departed, raised toasts to a merry Christmas and to peace on earth, to health and to happiness, reminisced about Christmases past, marveled about the first heart transplant performed this very month in South Africa, and prayed that the soldiers in Vietnam would come home soon and that Bright Beach would lose no precious sons in those far jungles.

  The cheerful tides of friends and neighbors, over the years, had washed away nearly all the stains that the dark rage of Agnes’s father had impressed on these rooms. She hoped her brothers might eventually see that hatred and anger are only scars upon a beach, while love is the rolling surf that ceaselessly smooths the sand.

  Maria Elena Gonzalez—no longer a seamstress in a drycleaner’s, but proprietor of Elena’s Fashions, a small dress shop one block off the town square—joined Agnes, Barty, Edom, and Jacob on Christmas evening. She brought her daughters, seven-year-old Bonita and six-year-old Francesca, who came with their newest Barbie dolls—Color Magic Barbie, the Barbie Beautiful Blues Gift Set, Barbie’s friends Casey and Tutti, her sister Skipper, and dreamboat Ken—and soon the girls had Barty enthusiastically involved in a make-believe world far different from the one in which Heinlein’s teenage lead owned an extraordinary alien pet with eight legs, the temperament of a kitten, and an appetite for everything from grizzly bears to Buicks.

  Later, when the seven of them were gathered at the dinner table, the adults raised glasses of Chardonnay, the children raised tumblers of Pepsi, and Maria gave the toast. “To Bartholomew, the image of his father, who was the kindest man I’ve ever known. To my Bonita and my Francesca, who brighten every day. To Edom and Jacob, from who…from whom I’ve learned so much that has made me think about the fragility of life and made me realize how precious is every day. And to Agnes, my dearest friend, who has given me, oh, so much, including all these words. God bless us, every one.”

  “God bless us, every one,” Agnes repeated with all her extended family, and after a sip of the wine, she made an excuse to check on something in the kitchen, where she pressed hot tears into a cool, slightly damp dishtowel to prevent the telltale swelling of her eyes.

  Frequently, these days, she found herself explaining aspects of life to Barty that she hadn’t expected to discuss for years to come. She wondered how she could make him understand this: Life can be so sweet, so full, that sometimes happiness is nearly as intense as anguish, and the pressure of it in the heart swells close to pain.

  When she was finished with the dishtowel, she returned to the dining room, and though dinner was underway, she called for another toast. Raising her glass, she said, “To Maria, who is more than my friend. My sister. I can’t let you talk about what I’ve given you without telling your girls that you’ve given back more. You taught me that the world is as simple as sewing, that what seem to be the most terrible problems can be stitched up, repaired.” She raised her glass slightly higher. “First chicken to be come with first egg inside already. God bless.”

  “God bless,” said everyone.

  Maria, after a single sip of Chardonnay, fled to the kitchen, ostensibly to check on the apricot flan that she’d brought, but in reality to press a cool and slightly damp dishtowel against her eyes.

  The kids insisted on knowing what was meant by the line about the chicken, and this led to the laying of a coopful of Why-did-the-chicken-cross-the-road jokes, which Edom and Jacob had memorized in childhood as an act of rebellion against their humorless father.

  Later, as Bonita and Francesca proudly served their mother’s individually molded Christmas-tree-shaped servings of flan, which they themselves had plated, Barty leaned close to his mother and, pointing to the table in front of them, said softly but excitedly, “Look at the rainbows!”

  She followed his extended finger but couldn’t see what he was talking about.

  “Between the candles,” he explained.

  They were dining by candlelight. Vanilla-scented bougies stood on the sideboard, across the room, glimmering in glass chimneys, but Barty pointed instead to five squat red candles distributed through the centerpiece of pine sprays and white carnations.

  “Between the flames, see, rainbows.”

  Agnes saw no arc of color from candle to candle, and she thought that he must mean for her to look at the many cut-crystal wineglasses and waterglasses, in which the lambent flames were mirrored. Here and there, the prismatic effect of the crystal rended reflections of the flames into red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet spectrums that danced along beveled edges.

  As the last of the flan was served and Maria’s girls took their seats once more, Barty blinked at the candles and said, “Gone now,” even though the tiny spectrums still shimmered in the cut crystal. He turned his full attention to the flan with such enthusiasm that his mother soon stopped puzzling over rainbows.

  After Maria, Bonita, and Francesca had gone, when Agnes and her brothers joined forces to clear the table and wash the dishes, Barty kissed them good-night and retired to his room with The Star Beast.

  Already, he was up two hours past his bedtime. In recent months, he’d exhibited the more erratic sleeping habits of older children. Some nights, he seemed to possess the circadian rhythms of owls and bats; after being sluggish all day, he suddenly became alert and energetic at dusk, wanting to read long past midnight.

  For guidance, Agnes couldn’t rely entirely on any of the child-rearing books in her library. Barty’s unique gifts presented her with special parenting problems. Now, when he asked if he could stay up even later, to read about John Thomas Stuart and Lummox, John’s pet from another world, she granted him permission.

  At 11:45, on her way to bed, Agnes stopped at Barty’s room and found him propped against pillows. The book was not particularly large as books went, but it was big in proportion to the boy; unable to hold it open with his hands alone, he rested his entire left arm across the top of the volume.

  “Good story?” she asked.

  He glanced up—“Fantastic!”—and returned at once to the tale.

  When Agnes woke at 1:50 A.M., she was in the grip of a vague apprehension for which she couldn’t identify a source.

  Fractional moonlight at the window.

  The great oak in the yard, sleeping in the breathless bed of the night.

  The house quiet. Neither intruders nor ghosts afoot.

  Uneasy nevertheless, Agnes went down the hall to her son’s room and found that he had fallen asleep sitting up, while reading. She slipped The Star Beast out of the tangle of his arms, marked his place with the jacket flap, and put the book on the nightstand.

  As Agnes slipped excess pillows out from behind him and eased him down into the covers, Barty half woke, muttering about how the police were going to kill poor Lummox, who hadn’t meant to do all that damage, but he’d been frightened by the gunfire, and when you weighed six tons and had eight legs, you sometimes couldn’t get around in tight places without knocking something over.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered. “Lummox will be all right.”

  He closed his eyes again and seemed asleep, but then as she clicked off the lamp, he murmured, “You have your halo again.”

  In the morning, after Agnes showered and dressed, when she went downstairs, she discovered Bart
y already at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of cereal while riveted to the book. Finished with breakfast, he returned to his room, reading as he went.

  By lunch, he had turned the final page, and he was so full of the tale that he seemed to have no room for food. While his mother kept reminding him to eat, he regaled her with the details of John Thomas Stuart’s great adventures with Lummox, as though every word that Heinlein had written were not science fiction, but truth.

  Then he curled up in one of the big armchairs in the living room and began the book again. This was the first time he had ever reread a novel—and he finished it at midnight.

  The following day, Wednesday, December 27, his mother drove him to the library, where he checked out two Heinlein titles recommended by the librarian: Red Planet and The Rolling Stones. Judging by his excitement, on the way home in the car, his response to previous mystery-novel series had been a pleasant courtship, whereas this was desperate, undying love.

  Agnes discovered that watching her child be totally consumed by a new enthusiasm was an unparalleled delight. Through Barty, she had a tantalizing sense of what her own childhood might have been like if her father had allowed her to have one, and at times, listening to the boy exclaim about the space-faring Stone family or about the mysteries of Mars, she discovered that at least some part of a child still lived within her, untouched by either cruelty or time.

  Shortly before three o’clock, Thursday afternoon, in a state of agitation, Barty raced into the kitchen, where Agnes was baking buttermilk-raisin pies. Holding Red Planet open to pages 104 and 105, he complained urgently that the library copy was defective. “There’s twisty spots in the print, twisty-funny letters, so you can’t just exactly read all the words. Can we buy our own copy, go out and buy one right now?”

  After wiping her floury hands, Agnes took the book from him and, examining it, could find nothing wrong. She flipped back a few pages, then a few forward, but the lines of type were crisp and clear. “Show me where, honey.”

  The boy didn’t at once answer, and when Agnes looked up from Red Planet, she saw that he was staring oddly at her. He squinted, as if puzzled, and said, “The twisty spots just jumped off the page right up on your face.”

  The formless apprehension with which she had awakened at 1:50, Tuesday morning, had returned to her from time to time during the past couple days. Now, here it came again, pinching her throat and tightening her chest—at last beginning to take form.

  Barty turned away from her, surveyed the kitchen, and said, “Ah. The twisty is me.”

  Halos and rainbows loomed in her memory, ominous as they had never been before.

  Agnes dropped to one knee before the boy and held him gently by the shoulders. “Let me look.”

  He squinted at her.

  “Peepers open wide, kiddo.”

  He opened them.