She backs off, stares at him coldly. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Nothing.”
“So why didn’t you come with your father like you were supposed to?”
“I was busy.”
“Exactly. Don’t make excuses.”
“No excuses. I was busy.”
“Did you catch a ride?” Ingrid asks knowingly, as if the expression doesn’t mean what Chloe thinks it means but something else more sinister. “You don’t have to make excuses with me, of all people,” she continues. “I know what’s going on. I’ve made them all myself—better than you.”
“Well, you have had more practice.”
Chloe sucks in her breath. Yeesh! Didn’t he tell her their job was not to speak but to listen? He blew that one in five seconds. It hurts her to hear him get so instantly hostile with his mother. It’s too familiar. What is it about parents and children, Chloe thinks.
Ingrid also sucks in her breath.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” says Johnny. “I’m here for such a short time. I want to have a nice visit. I don’t want to fight again. Please.”
“Who’s fighting? I made a polite request …”
“And I said no. Just because you ask politely doesn’t mean the answer will be yes. That’s what you and Dad taught me, isn’t it?”
She harrumphs. “You can’t ask your father anything, polite or not. You know that better than anyone.”
“Yes. How was his visit?”
“Excellent. Better than this. He stayed for two days. We had a wonderful time. Just like the old days, first he was his charming old self and then poof, he vanished.” Ingrid’s voice is not operatic but throaty and ragged, as if scorched by too many cigarettes or too much screaming, or by other things, perhaps, in hidden flasks.
“Why do you sound so hoarse, Mom?”
“I had some large polyps removed,” she replies. “I’m fine, nothing to even talk about. Enough about me. How have you been is the question.”
“I told you, good.”
“When did you get out?”
“Uh, about a week ago, I guess.”
Ingrid lowers her voice. Fully awake, Chloe strains to hear. And she thought she could have a nap! “How did they treat you in Kurosta?” she asks. “I can’t tell you how upset I was—”
“It’s all fine,” Johnny cuts her off. “Look at me. Not a hair harmed on my head. In fact, they let me keep my hair. And Dad’s guitar, and I had all the books I wanted. How bad could it be? I read a lot. The time flew by.”
“Yeah, sure,” she says. “I want you to know, I was very upset with your father. I couldn’t believe he let you rot there for a whole fucking year.”
“What are you talking about? He didn’t let me. It’s only because of him that I’m out. I would’ve gotten five to ten mandatory if it wasn’t for his connections. And five years not in a halfway house, a juvy derelict place, but up a very real river.”
“You mean like this?” She waves her dismissive arm to the splendor around her.
He takes a breath. “You can leave any time you want. You don’t want to.”
“I came to Italy only to keep an eye on you,” she says. “I didn’t do very well, did I?”
“We all could use someone to watch over us, don’t you think?”
Ingrid sighs deeply. She has not let go of Johnny’s hand the entire time they’ve been speaking. “Are you still singing?”
“Yeah, why not.”
“Your father says you sound pretty good.”
“How would he know?”
“He heard you in Trieste. You didn’t want to come with him to see me, but you were working the street. He said you were good.”
Johnny shrugs.
“He is very worried about you,” Ingrid says. “Because, son, you don’t know this, and we don’t want to, but I’m going to tell you something about dead children.”
“I don’t want to know.”
Chloe sits up. Or sinks down.
“You’re never okay after. You never get over it.”
Chloe stays sunk. Diminished, you learn to live with it, Chloe wants to say.
“I’m fine, Mom,” Johnny says. “There’s nothing to worry about anymore.”
“So I asked your father,” Ingrid continued, “if he was trying to save you any which way he could, then why in hell was he sending you to Afghanistan?”
“Boy, sounds like you two had quite a time together.”
“Oh, we did. We brawled like we did back in Washington. Remember?”
“How could I forget?”
“Exactly. I told him he was making a huge mistake forcing you into the army. I told him you’d sort yourself out in other ways. And do you know what he said?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“He said, what, like you sorted yourself out?” Ingrid sneers. “Didn’t take him long to get back to his old insults. But I told him the army is not the place for you. You aren’t cut out for it the way he was. You’re too gentle a boy. You’re too sensitive, feel things too much. You know, son, in my family we weren’t fighters. Not my brothers or my uncles. That’s your father’s side, the damn pugilists. But you’re still half-mine, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Mom.”
Letting go of him, she wrings her hands, slightly histrionically. It passes, fades, but Chloe is jarred by it. It seems so desperate. “Why,” says Ingrid, “why did you have to inherit the very worst from your father, and all the worst from me?”
“I didn’t inherit the worst from you, Mom,” says Johnny, hanging his head.
“No?”
“No.”
Mother and son don’t look at each other. They both stare down into the grass. Ingrid leans into Johnny. Their heads touch. “My life is an unimaginable nightmare,” she breathes out wrenchingly. “If you only knew.”
“I know.”
She separates from him, eventually brightens.
“Are they bringing you lunch? Ring the bell. They’re so slow. I don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Not making you lunch, that’s for fucking sure. Ring the bell!”
She grabs a small silver bell beside her chair and rings it like a fire alarm, non-stop. Johnny holds his hand over it to stop it from trilling. “They said a few minutes.”
“How long can you stay?”
Johnny hesitates to answer. “Didn’t Dad tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“I have to be on the plane back to Washington at eight tomorrow morning. I report for training at 6 p.m. the day after.”
Ingrid emits a throaty groan of disappointment and pain. She falls silent. For a long time they don’t speak. Without something to concentrate on, Chloe starts to fade away in the rustling of leaves, in the roll of the river.
Then Ingrid speaks. “You’ve always been this way,” she says. Her voice is cold. “Pushing every single thing in your life until the last possible second, and then another minute past that. After not visiting me for over a year, you’re only staying for one day?”
“Well, I could hardly visit when I was … why didn’t you come visit me? Exactly. You couldn’t. Do I blame you?”
“Absolutely. Like it’s my fault.”
“Isn’t it?” Johnny sighs. “Look, we have all afternoon, all evening. We’ll have lunch, we’ll take a walk. Do you still like the river? We’ll go down there.”
And here is Chloe shaking her sleepy head. Don’t go down to the river, don’t. With half-closed eyes she spots a woman walking from the veranda carrying a large tray with a silver pot, silver plates, tall glasses, a lonely rose in a vase. When the woman passes her chair, Chloe smells smoked ham and crusty warm bread and olive oil and coffee. The smells are good, the food is good. But Chloe can’t help it anymore, she can’t help anything. She falls into a black well.
She hears them whispering over her before she opens her eyes.
“Why did you bring her here? Who is she?”
“I told you—Chloe.”
&nb
sp; “So what’s wrong with her that she is passed out in the middle of the afternoon? Even your sick mother is awake.”
“She’s not passed out, Mom. She’s asleep.”
“Why is she asleep?”
“I don’t know. She got tired?”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask her?”
“I would but she’s asleep.”
“Chloe,” Johnny calls softly. “Chloe.” There’s love in his voice.
She opens her eyes and looks up. Both mother and son are looming over her. There is love in his eyes. The mother studies her with unfriendly intent. Remembering her manners, Chloe struggles up from the low-to-the-ground Adirondack. Johnny gives her his hand to help. The mother notes the gesture, watches it grimly. How long was Chloe out? Hours? All the food is gone and the shadows are longer.
“Chloe, this is my mother. Mom, this is Chloe.”
Chloe remembers that the young must never extend their hand to the adults first, so she doesn’t. But Ingrid says, “What, she’s too good to shake my hand?”
“She is right here,” says Johnny.
Chloe sticks out her hand. “Hello, Mrs. …”
She waits. With paused breath, she waits.
“Call me Ingrid,” Ingrid says. “No formalities here. Just Ingrid. And anyway, didn’t he tell you? I’m not a Mrs. anymore. His father made sure of that. Sent me away and got himself another Mrs. in a hurry.”
Ingrid is bloated of face and body. She may have been attractive once. Her bone structure still retains the prominent thing all beautiful faces retain forever—as if they had once been sculpted. She has thick straight black hair, shiny and short. She wears no makeup. Her olive skin is sallow and stretched out with lines before their time and her full lips are dry and blue. She may be forty-five, but she looks sixty-five. Her almond eyes are dull and black with agonies Chloe doesn’t understand. She is tall for a woman. Both mother and son dwarf Chloe, who wishes they’d all sit down so she wouldn’t feel so self-conscious and undersized, and, as if reading her mind, Johnny directs them to Ingrid’s chaise, pulls up another straight-back chair next to his own, and they sit in a little triangular circle under the elms.
Ingrid stares at Chloe interminably. She stares at her the way Chloe imagines Lang must stare at some of her friends who stop by the house after having made poor clothing choices. She feels sorry for every girl that’s ever entered her home. Ingrid scrutinizes the substantial swell of Chloe’s breasts under the fitted green sweater, as if she can see the imprints of her son’s paws on Chloe’s fragile white flesh. It’s excruciating!
And then Ingrid speaks.
“I have a question for you,” she says to Chloe. “Let’s assume we are all lost in the woods. Each and every one of us. In your opinion, what do you think is better, to live in a wood out of which there is no exit and not care there is no exit, or to live in a wood in which you’ve lost your way, and to know you’ve lost your way, and to rush about looking for the road, for the way out, knowing it’s out there, but being unable to find it, and becoming only more and more hopelessly confused and lost?”
Chloe is hopelessly confused herself, and scared. She can’t remember the question. Johnny is no help. He’s not saying a word, just looking down at his guitar, strumming it quietly. Chloe stammers. “I’d say better not to be in the woods at all.”
“That isn’t one of the options,” says Ingrid. “The woods is what we all live in, like fish in the sea.”
“Mom, all right, come on.”
“Either way,” Ingrid continues, “at the end of the woods is death. The reaper awaits us all. So my question remains. Since you know that death is ahead either way, is it better not to know you’re lost or to keep trying to machete your way through the brambles?”
“I don’t know,” Chloe whispers, peering at Johnny for guidance which he’s not providing. “Is this a trick question? Is there no right answer?”
“I just want to know what you think,” Ingrid says. “What side of the equation you’re on about the meaning of life.”
When did Chloe acquire such a prominent stutter! “I want to say, um, that it’s better to be on the … um, road.”
“Are you on the road?”
Chloe nods. She doesn’t know anything anymore.
Ingrid leans back in her chair, puts her feet up, folds her arms in satisfaction.
“Very good,” she says. “Now, what about my son? Is he on the road?”
“Mom!”
“I’m making conversation, Junior. You brought her here. So let me talk to her. Let me see what this girl of yours is made of.”
Did Ingrid say Junior? Or is Chloe so panicked she misheard?
“I don’t know,” Chloe says.
Ingrid gives Johnny a critical glare and Chloe a pitying one. “But if you had to guess.”
She can’t guess and doesn’t want to!
“All right, I’ll tell you,” says Ingrid. “He is lost. But he’s still trying to claw his way out. Two more questions. Say you’re in the woods trying to claw your way out, but you’re blind. Would that be terrifying?”
Barely, Chloe acknowledges that it would be. This is terrifying.
“So my last question is not: what will he do to rid himself of the terror,” says Ingrid, “but what won’t he?”
Chloe wants to cry. Shaking his head, Johnny remains steady.
Ingrid leans forward to Chloe. “There is nothing my son won’t do,” she says, “to rid himself of the terror.”
“Honestly, Mom, you have to stop,” Johnny says.
“Has he told you about the dragon pit and the honey?” she asks. “Has he told you the story of his father’s parents?” Ingrid spits out the words father’s parents. Also story.
Chloe nods. Or shudders.
“So what do you see happening here?” The large woman circles the air in a cynical sphere between Chloe and Johnny. “I want to say you must know it’s just for fun, but since my son has never brought anyone to parade in front of me before, I have to assume at least one of you feels it’s more than just fun. Possibly both of you by the dumbstruck looks on your faces.”
Chloe heeds well Johnny’s earlier admonition and says nothing.
“Are you in love? How darling. How retro of you.” Her puffy face lifts to the sky. “Are you like me with his father? Thinking you can have what his grandparents had?”
“Mom, leave her alone. Come on, we came to visit you. Be nice.”
“No one can have it.” As if Johnny hasn’t spoken.
“You’re wrong, Mom. Everyone can have it!”
“Your father couldn’t.”
“Not with you.”
They argue. Chloe can’t even watch them, twitching on the outside, cringing inside. She wants to put her hands over her ears.
“We talked about this, Mom. A million times. Grandma and Grandpa gave each other an extravagant thing. A marriage.”
“What does it even mean, marriage?” Ingrid scoffs. “It’s a farce. To comfort each other to the end of your days. What shite!”
Johnny throws Chloe a tiny look, as if to say, do you see what I mean?
Ingrid catches the glance. “You think your father’s found the holy grail with his new wife?” She shakes her head. “How long has it been, ten minutes? He’ll be moving on at the one hour mark.” She leans to Chloe as if the young woman has suddenly become her confidante. “Men don’t understand this,” she says, “but marriage is being there not just when they feel like it, but even when they don’t feel like it. Especially when they don’t feel like it. There is hardly more he can give away of himself. He has to give away everything. He takes on your burdens. He helps you carry the cross. He binds his life to yours.”
“Yes,” says Johnny. “But not just him. You too must do this.”
“Pfft. Why would anyone do this? What the hell do you get in return?”
“Each other?” Chloe replies in a timid voice. “You don’t have to
face the world alone again.” She inhales. For bravery. “Those woods you were talking about before; married you’re not alone in them, even if you might be a little bit lost. You’re lost together.”
“Oh! But aren’t you a dear sweet romantic!” Ingrid gazes at Chloe with nothing but bitter pity. “Johnny, wherever did you find such a simple thing?”
Chloe wants to disappear. She looks around, at the trees, at the river down the rocky shore. “It’s beautiful here,” she says quietly. “So peaceful.” She doesn’t look at mother and child.
“Yeah, yeah. It’s all bullshit. Those damn show-offs lived out their love story, and now the rest of us have to suffer because of it, trying to duplicate the stupid fucking thing.” She swears like a sailor. It must make her feel better. But Chloe is not used to it, her own mother and father always so proper around her, so … parental. “My rags of heart can like, wish and adore,” Ingrid whispers haltingly, her low voice breaking, “but after one such love can love no more.”
“Don’t listen to my mother, Chloe.” Johnny stands up, leaning unsteadily on the neck of his guitar. “Everything is a love story. You can make a love story out of anything. Where there is a story, there will be love.”
“Not like theirs,” says Ingrid.
“Better! Because it will be your own.”
“Not like theirs.”
“Mom, stop saying that!” In exasperation Johnny bangs his father’s guitar on the grass. “It’s not true,” he says adamantly, almost hisses. “What they had, okay, they had, but that was a long time ago, and we all still have to live. We have to fight new wars, build our own homes, love new people. Make our own mistakes. Break hearts anew. As many stories as there are human beings, Mom.” He stands up tall and forces himself to stay composed. “I’m not going to be weighted down by it,” Johnny says. “No one is—except you. Tomboy doesn’t care a lick about it. I swear, he looked shocked when he read what Beck wrote, that Grandpa had been to Poland. No one knows anything anymore. No one cares. Not about the war, or Coral Gables, or the wine country, or Majdanek, or anything.”
“You care, son,” Ingrid says.
“Yes, but I’m making my own drama!”
Now that she has Johnny thoroughly agitated, Ingrid is soothed. She turns her attention back to Chloe. “Aww, look at the way she’s looking at you. As if she thinks you’re the one.” She makes a derisive sound. “Trust me, sweetheart, he is not the one.”