Suffer the Children Read online

  “It’s not enough,” she shot back, her voice rising. “It won’t be enough till you get through this thing, whatever it is. Look at me. Aren’t I attractive any more?” She stripped the nightgown off and stood before him, naked, the moonlight streaming through the window to bathe her pale form in an almost metallic hue, the high breasts jutting out above the narrow waist, the full hips tapering into her long, lithe legs.

  “Well,” she demanded as Jack stared at her. “What about it? Have I turned into some sort of pig?” Jack shook his head, saying nothing. “Well then, what is it? What’s happened to you? If it isn’t me, it must be you. What’s wrong with you, Jack?”

  Again he shook his head. “I—I can’t tell you, Rose. I’m not sure I know.”

  “Then shall I tell you?” There was a note of malevolence in her voice that frightened him. He moved back a step, then sank into a chair, waiting. Rose began pacing the room, her eyes wild. She seemed to be casting about, wondering where to start, and for a second Jack waited, trying to fathom the direction from which the attack would come.

  “It’s the money, isn’t it?” she demanded. Safe, he thought “You just can’t stand the idea that the fortune’s gone, can you? That you, the last of the Congers, actually has to work, not for the fun of it, but for the money?” She stared at him as if waiting for a defense, then plunged on. “Well, when are you going to learn that it doesn’t matter? There’s enough left to pay the taxes on this place, though God knows why we even need it, and between us we certainly make enough to pay for whatever we need. It’s not as if we were poor, for God’s sake. And even if we were, so what? You don’t have to be rich to be a man, damn it!”

  He sat silently, knowing what was coming next Rose didn’t disappoint him.

  “Or is it me? Do you feel like I’ve cut your balls off by making more money than you do? I happen to be good at my job, Jack, and you should be proud of that. But not you! Oh, no! You take it as some kind of personal threat to your manhood. Christ, I begin to understand what all those liberationists are talking about. You do resent a successful woman. Well, let me tell you something. Do you want to know why I went to work in the first place? I was bored, Jack, just plain bored.”

  “Rose, we’ve been all through this—”

  “And we’ll go through it again.” Suddenly she sank onto the bed, her rage spent. “We’ll go through it till we get to the bottom of it.” The tears started, and Rose buried her face in her hands. “I don’t know how much more I can stand, Jack. I really don’t. I’m sorry I said I was bored. It wasn’t that I was really just frustrated.” She looked up, as if imploring him to understand. “Jack, it’s terrible to love a man who doesn’t love you.”

  “That’s not it, Rose,” he said softly. “I love you very much. I always have.”

  She sighed. “Well, it’s a strange way you show it I don’t know what to do. Sometimes I think it would help if I quit my job. But it’s too late for that now.” She smiled thinly. “Do you know what it’s like to be successful? It’s intoxicating. You want more, and more. And I’m going to have more, Jack. I don’t get anything at home any more, so I have to have some fulfillment somewhere else.”

  “If it’s that bad,” Jack said dully, “why are you still here?”

  She stared at him, and there was a hardness in her eyes that frightened him. “Someone,” she said slowly, “has to protect the children. Since you don’t qualify, that leaves me, doesn’t it?”

  His blow fell so fast that she had no time to move with it. His fist struck her hard on the cheek, and the force of the blow knocked her flat out on the bed, but she didn’t cry out Instead, she touched the bruise gently and stared up at him. “At least I’m fairly close to your size,” she said softly.

  He stared at her, then at his hand, and it seemed like an eternity before he realized what he had done. “My God,” he breathed. He went to the bathroom and ran the water until it was cold. Then he soaked a washcloth and brought it to her, handing it to Rose to press against her cheek, knowing that she wouldn’t let him touch her now.

  “I didn’t mean to do that.”

  “Didn’t you?” Her voice was listless, as if nothing mattered. “I suppose you don’t mean to do a lot of things you do.”

  “Rose, that isn’t fair.”

  “Life isn’t fair, Jack. Leave me alone.”

  He got up to leave the room. “Maybe it’s the curse,” he said, trying to keep his voice light “Maybe the old family curse has finally caught up with me.”

  “Maybe it’s caught up with both of us,” Rose said miserably. She watched him leave the bedroom, and wanted to call him back, wanted to hold him and be held by him. But she couldn’t. She turned off the light, rolled over, and tried to sleep.

  * * *

  Jack sank into his chair in the study and took a sip of the drink in his hand. He stared moodily out the window, watching the play of moonlight and shadows on the branches of the maple trees that broke the clean sweep of lawn from the house to the edge of the cliff beyond. The cliff looked inviting, but Jack knew that that was not one of the things that happened when he drank. Often he wished it were.

  The memory was still not clear. Perhaps it never would be, sodden as it was in alcohol.

  Rose was right; it was just about a year. It had been a Sunday, and it must have been a little over a year ago, for the leaves were still on the trees, glowing gold and red. Rose had gone off for a game of golf—who with? He couldn’t remember. There was so much of that day he couldn’t remember. He had been drinking, which wasn’t unusual for a Sunday, and in the afternoon he had decided to go for a walk. With Sarah.

  And then it was foggy. They had started off across the field, and Sarah had run ahead, calling to him to hurry. But he hadn’t hurried, and she had waited for him. They had talked, there in the field, but he couldn’t remember what they had talked about And then Sarah had asked him to take her to the woods. There were so many things in the woods she wanted to see, and she never got to go there. And so they had gone to the woods.

  He remembered carrying her out of the woods, but that was all.

  He listened to the clock strike, and watched the shadows dance on the window. It was an ugly dance, and he didn’t want to watch it. He looked at his drink, and tried to force himself not to refill it.

  Sarah slept restlessly, and the dream swept over her again, as it did every night, over and over, never ending.

  She was in a room, and the room was big. There was nothing in the room except Sarah and her toys. But she didn’t want to play with them. Then Daddy was there, and they were going out of the house together and into the field. She ran ahead of him and stopped to look at a flower. There was an ant on the flower, and she picked the flower to take back to her daddy. But she knew that if she tried to carry it, the ant would fall off. So she called him.

  “Daddy! Hurry!”

  But he hadn’t hurried, and she had waited for him. When he was finally there, the ant was gone, and the flower too, blown out of her hand on a gust of wind. It had gone to the forest, and she wanted to find it.

  “The flower’s in the woods, Daddy. Take me to the woods.”

  And so they went to the woods, and her daddy was holding her hand. She felt safe.

  They stepped out of the sunlight of the field into the deep shadow of the trees, and Sarah held her father’s hand even tighter. She looked around for the flower, and saw a bush. The flower was in the bush. She was sure the flower was in the bush, and the ant would be there too.

  She pulled her father toward the bush.

  “Hurry, Daddy, hurry. We’re almost there.”

  And then she was there, crawling under the bush, its branches catching at her hair, thorns reaching out to scratch at her. Then she felt something grab at her ankle. A vine. It must have been a vine. She tried to shake loose, but the thing held tighter to her ankle and began pulling her from the bush. She couldn’t find the flower. Wait! There it was. If she could only grab it!


  But she couldn’t, and the thing was pulling her out of the bush. She cried out.

  “Daddy! Help! Make it let go, Daddy!”

  She twisted around, and the thing was Daddy. But it wasn’t Daddy. It was someone else, and he looked like Daddy, but it couldn’t be Daddy. Not this man with his wild look. This man who was going to hit her.

  She felt the blow, and tried to cry out to her father to help her, but she had no voice. Her father would help her.

  Her father hit her.

  She wanted her father to pull the man off her.

  She wanted her father to stop hitting her.

  She wanted her father.

  The hand moved up and down through the air, and then Sarah couldn’t hear anything any more. She watched herself being beaten, but she felt no pain. She tried to get away, but she couldn’t move. As Daddy hit her again and again, she watched herself fade away. And then there was only the gray, the gray that she lived in, and in a far corner of the gray a girl—a blond, blue-eyed girl who would take care of her.

  Elizabeth. Elizabeth knew what had happened, and would take care of her. As the gray closed around her, she reached out to Elizabeth.

  Sarah woke up, and the hands that were outstretched moved slowly back, and she held herself. When she slept, she dreamed the dream again.

  Elizabeth lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling, watching the progress of the moonlight as it moved slowly toward the far wall. She listened to the silence.

  She had tried not to hear it; tried to bury her head under her pillow as her parents fought But the sounds came through the walls, under the door, into the bed, and she listened. Finally she heard her father as he went down the stairs. Now she waited, and watched the moonlight She would wait until she heard him come back up the stairs, until she heard the click of her parents’ door finally closing for the night. Then she would sleep.

  Didn’t her mother know what had happened in the woods that day? Elizabeth knew that she could tell hermother, but that she wouldn’t Elizabeth knew that she shouldn’t know what had happened. And she also knew she couldn’t forget it, either.

  She had been watching them from the house, and had decided to go with them. She had called to them, but the wind had blown her words the wrong way and they hadn’t heard. So she had followed them across the field. Then, just as she had been about to catch up with them, she had decided to play a game with them instead.

  She had veered off to the left, toward the road, and cut into the woods about fifty feet from them. Then she had begun making her way back, moving from tree to tree, keeping herself hidden. At the last minute, when she was so close that they would have to see her, she would jump out at them.

  She had heard a scuffling noise, and peeped around the tree to see Sarah crawling under a bush. She used the opportunity to dart closer and hide behind a fallen log, watching her sister through the tangle of rotting roots that thrust skyward. Sarah had pushed farther under the bush, and Elizabeth thought her father was about to crawl after her.

  But instead he grasped her ankle and began pulling her back toward him.

  She heard Sarah cry out, and watched as her father lifted his fist into the air. Suddenly, yanking Sarah free of the bush, he brought his fist down on her. Sarah screamed then, and turned to look up at her father.

  Elizabeth stayed hidden behind the log, watching the scene before her with a strange detachment Suddenly it had all seemed to be far away from her, not connected to her. She suddenly no longer saw her sister and her father, but two strangers, a little girl and a man, and the man was beating the child. And it seemed to have no effect on Elizabeth at all. She simply crouched there, watching it unfold before her.

  When Sarah finally lay still, Elizabeth saw herfather straighten up, and she could barely recognize him. There was a vacant look in his face, and his black hair, usually so neatly brushed, hung in damp strings around his face. He looked around wildly, then down at the child at his feet She heard a sob wrack his body, then watched as he picked Sarah up and began carrying her across the field toward the house. She stayed perfectly still until her father, still carrying her sister, had disappeared through the front door. Then she stood up and moved slowly to the spot where her sister had lain. She looked once more toward the house, then turned and began making her way through the woods toward the embankment.

  When she had returned to the house an hour later, the doctors were there, and they had taken Sarah away. Her father was nowhere to be seen, and her mother was hysterical. Mrs. Goodrich had finally noticed her, and asked her where she had been. She said she had been for a walk. Down by the quarry. It was the only thing she had ever said about that afternoon, and it was the only thing she would ever say about it.

  Elizabeth continued to stare at the ceiling, and when, much later, she heard the click of her parents’ door, she slept.

  Jack lay in bed, but he still didn’t sleep. He remembered what he could remember.

  He remembered the doctors coming, and he remembered them putting Sarah in the ambulance. He remembered Rose coming home, and he remembered that someone had given him a shot.

  They had flown Sarah to a hospital, a hospital far enough from Port Arbello that no one would ever have known what had happened to Sarah. She had been there for three months, and the doctors had been able to repair her body. The ribs had healed and there were no longer any scars on her face.

  But they had not been able to repair her mind. When she had come home from the hospital, she had been changed She was no longer the bright elfin child she had always been. She no longer laughed, or ran through the house. She no longer shouted, or played in the field.

  She was quiet. She neither spoke nor laughed, and when she moved she moved slowly, as if something were holding her back.

  Occasionally, she screamed.

  She seemed to be frightened, but she learned to tolerate the presence of her mother. She was never left alone with her father.

  She responded only to Elizabeth. She would follow Elizabeth whenever she could, and if Elizabeth could not be with her, she would sit quietly and wait But that wasn’t often.

  Elizabeth was usually with her. Except when they were in school, Elizabeth spent most of her time with Sarah—reading to her, talking to her, not seeming to notice that Sarah never talked back. Elizabeth played with Sarah, never losing her patience when Sarah’s interest wandered, always finding something new to distract Sarah from whatever was going on in her mind.

  The doctors said that Sarah could recover someday, but they didn’t know when it would be. Since they didn’t know exactly what had happened to Sarah, and nobody seemed able to tell them, they weren’t entirely sure how to treat her. But someday, they were sure, Sarah would be able to remember what had happened to her that day, and face it. When that day came, Sarah would be all right again. But until that day, Sarah might do anything. Schizophrenia, they said, was unpredictable.

  4

  Rose Conger stared across the breakfast table and wondered for the twentieth time how her husband could drink so much and never show the effects of it.

  Had he been less engrossed in his morning paper, Jack would have noticed the look of annoyance on Rose’s face as she studied his own. At forty, he looked ten years younger, and where the lines of character, or age, should have begun their march from his forehead to his jowls, only the smooth skin of youth was present; still unaffected by the years of drinking. It isn’t right, Rose thought. Any other man would have veins standing on his nose, and the awful pallor would make him look skeletal. But not Jack.

  “What time did you come to bed?” she asked.

  He looked up, then went back to his paper. “One thirty. Two. I don’t know.”

  “Would you like some more coffee?”

  He put down the paper, and a twisted smile crossed his face.

  “Do I look like I need it?”

  “I wish you did,” Rose said bitterly. “Maybe if it showed on your face you wouldn’t drink so much.” />
  “Oh, come on, Rose. Let’s let it alone, shall we? The kids will be down in a minute.” He glanced at his watch, as if the gesture would bring the girls into the room and rescue him from what he knew was coming.

  “They’ll be ten minutes yet,” Rose replied. “Jack, what we were talking about last night …”

  “Is it going to be the drinking this morning? Why is it, Rose, that it’s always the money at night and the drinking in the morning? Why don’t you, just for the sake of variety, talk about the drinking at night and the money in the morning? Then maybe we could both think of something new to say.”

  Rose glowered down at her plate and tried to keep her voice even. “I suppose I harbor the vain hope that maybe, if I don’t talk about it at night, you won’t do it You’d think I’d learn, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Jack said, “you would.” He folded the paper noisily and tried to concentrate on the print. He read a paragraph, then reread it as he realized that he hadn’t any idea of what it was about. He was on his third reading when Rose spoke again.

  “How long can we go on like this?”

  He put the paper aside and stared across at her. For a long time he was silent, and when he spoke his voice was hard.

  “What do you mean, ‘like this’? If you mean how long until I can get it up for you again, I don’t know. If you mean how long before I’m going to stop drinking, I don’t know. If you mean how long before you stop harping at me all the time, that’s up to you. I have a strange feeling that I will stop drinking, and start screwing, when you decide to let the whole thing alone and give me some peace. There are reasons, you know, why I have problems, and your nagging doesn’t help at all. So why don’t you just leave it alone, Rose? Just leave it alone.” He stood up and left the room, and Rose was amazed to hear the warmth with which he greeted his daughters before he left the house. His failure to slam the door as he left only increased her annoyance. She poured herself some coffee, and tried to match Jack’s warmth as the girls came into the room.