Red Dragon (27 page)

Marian was a useful and attractive hostess and Vogt bought her a handsome, half-timbered house on Olive Street that was perfect for entertaining.

Francis Dolarhyde had lived with his grandmother for a week when she took him there.

Grandmother had never seen her daughter’s house. The maid who answered the door did not know her.

“I’m Mrs. Dolarhyde,” she said, barging past the servant. Her slip was showing three inches in the back. She led Francis into a big living room with a pleasant fire.

“Who is it, Viola?” A woman’s voice from upstairs.

Grandmother cupped Francis’s face in her hand. He could smell the cold leather glove. An urgent whisper. “Go see Mother, Francis. Go see Mother. Run!”

He shrank from her, twisting on the tines of her eyes.

“Go see Mother. Run!” She gripped his shoulders and marched him toward the stairs. He trotted up to the landing and looked back down at her. She motioned upward with her chin.

Up to the strange hallway toward the open bedroom door.

Mother was seated at her dressing table checking her makeup in a mirror framed with lights. She was getting ready for a political rally, and too much rouge wouldn’t do. Her back was to the door.

“Muhner,” Francis piped, as he had been taught. He tried hard to get it right. “Muhner.”

She saw him in the mirror then. “If you’re looking for Ned, he isn’t home from . . .”

“Muhner.” He came into the heartless light.

Marian heard her mother’s voice downstairs demanding tea. Her eyes widened and she sat very still. She did not turn around. She turned out the makeup lights and vanished from the mirror. In the darkened room she gave a single low keening that ended in a sob. It might have been for herself, or it might have been for him.

 

 

 

Grandmother took Francis to all the political rallies after that and explained who he was and where he came from. She had him say hello to everyone. They did not work on “hello” at home.

Mr. Vogt lost the election by eighteen hundred votes.

At Grandmother’s house, Francis Dolarhyde’s new world was a forest of blue-veined legs.

Grandmother Dolarhyde had been running her nursing home for three years when he came to live with her. Money had been a problem since her husband’s death in 1936; she had been brought up a lady and she had no marketable skills.

What she had was a big house and her late husband’s debts. Taking in boarders was out. The place was too isolated to be a successful boardinghouse. She was threatened with eviction.

The announcement in the newspaper of Marian’s marriage to the affluent Mr. Howard Vogt had seemed a godsend to Grandmother. She wrote to Marian repeatedly for help, but received no answer. Every time she telephoned, a servant told her Mrs. Vogt was out.

Finally, bitterly, Grandmother Dolarhyde made an arrangement with the county and began to take in elderly indigent persons. For each one she received a sum from the county and erratic payments from such relatives as the county could locate. It was hard until she began to get some private patients from middle-class families.

No help from Marian all this time—and Marian could have helped.

Now Francis Dolarhyde played on the floor in the forest of legs. He played cars with Grandmother’s Mah-Jongg pieces, pushing them among feet twisted like gnarled roots.

Mrs. Dolarhyde could keep clean wash dresses on her residents, but she despaired at trying to make them keep on their shoes.

The old people sat all day in the living room listening to the radio. Mrs. Dolarhyde had put in a small aquarium for them to watch as well, and a private contributor had helped her cover her parquet floors with linoleum against the inevitable incontinence.

They sat in a row on the couches and in wheelchairs listening to the radio, their faded eyes fixed on the fish or on nothing or something they saw long ago.

Francis would always remember the shuffle of feet on linoleum in the hot and buzzing day, and the smell of stewed tomatoes and cabbage from the kitchen, the smell of the old people like meat wrappers dried in the sun, and always the radio.

 

 

 

 

Francis spent as much time as he could in the kitchen, because his friend was there. The cook, Queen Mother Bailey, had grown up in the service of the late Mr. Dolarhyde’s family. She sometimes brought Francis a plum in her apron pocket, and she called him “Little Possum, always dreamin’.” The kitchen was warm and safe. But Queen Mother Bailey went home at night. . . .

 

 

 

 

 

 

Francis Dolarhyde, five years old, lay in bed in his upstairs room in Grandmother’s house. The room was pitch dark with its blackout curtains against the Japanese. He could not say “Japanese.” He needed to pee. He was afraid to get up in the dark.

He called to his grandmother in bed downstairs.

“Aayma. Aayma.” He sounded like an infant goat. He called until he was tired. “Mleedse Aayma.”

It got away from him then, hot on his legs and under his seat, and then cold, his nightdress sticking to him. He didn’t know what to do. He took a deep breath and rolled over to face the door. Nothing happened to him. He put his foot on the floor. He stood up in the dark, nightdress plastered to his legs, face burning. He ran for the door. The doorknob caught him over the eye and he sat down in wetness, jumped up and ran down the stairs, fingers squealing on the banister. To his grandmother’s room. Crawling across her in the dark and under the covers, warm against her now.

Grandmother stirred, tensed, her back hardened against his cheek, voice hissing. “I’ve never sheen. . . .” A clatter on the bedside table as she found her teeth, clacket as she put them in. “I’ve never seen a child as disgusting and dirty as you. Get
out,
get out of this bed.”

She turned on the bedside lamp. He stood on the carpet shivering. She wiped her thumb across his eyebrow. Her thumb came away bloody.

“Did you break something?”

He shook his head so fast droplets of blood fell on Grandmother’s nightgown.

“Upstairs. Go on.”

The dark came down over him as he climbed the stairs. He couldn’t turn on the lights because Grandmother had cut the cords off short so only she could reach them. He did not want to get back in the wet bed. He stood in the dark holding on to the footboard for a long time. He thought she wasn’t coming. The blackest corners in the room knew she wasn’t coming.

She came, snatching the short cord on the ceiling light, her arms full of sheets. She did not speak to him as she changed the bed.

She gripped his upper arm and pulled him down the hall to the bathroom. The light was over the mirror and she had to stand on tiptoe to reach it. She gave him a washcloth, wet and cold.

“Take off your nightshirt and wipe yourself off.”

Smell of adhesive tape and the bright sewing scissors clicking. She snipped out a butterfly of tape, stood him on the toilet lid and closed the cut over his eye.

“Now,” she said. She held the sewing scissors under his round belly and he felt cold down there.

“Look,” she said. She grabbed the back of his head and bent him over to see his little penis lying across the bottom blade of the open scissors. She closed the scissors until they began to pinch him.

“Do you want me to cut it off?”

He tried to look up at her, but she gripped his head. He sobbed and spit fell on his stomach.

“
Do
you?”

“No, Aayma. No, Aayma.”

“I pledge you my word, if you ever make your bed dirty again I’ll cut it off. Do you understand?”

“Yehn, Aayma.”

“You can find the toilet in the dark and you can sit on it like a good boy. You don’t have to stand up. Now go back to bed.”

 

 

 

At two A.M. the wind rose, gusting warm out of the southeast, clacking together the branches of the dead apple trees, rustling the leaves of the live ones. The wind drove warm rain against the side of the house where Francis Dolarhyde, forty-two years old, lay sleeping.

He lay on his side sucking his thumb, his hair damp and flat on his forehead and his neck.

Now he awakes. He listens to his breathing in the dark and the tiny clicks of his blinking eyes. His fingers smell faintly of gasoline. His bladder is full.

He feels on the bedside table for the glass containing his teeth.

Dolarhyde always puts in his teeth before he rises. Now he walks to the bathroom. He does not turn on the light. He finds the toilet in the dark and sits down on it like a good boy.

The change in Grandmother first became apparent in the winter of 1947, when Francis was eight.

She stopped taking meals in her room with Francis. They moved to the common table in the dining room, where she presided over meals with the elderly residents.

Grandmother had been trained as a girl to be a charming hostess, and now she unpacked and polished her silver bell and put it beside her plate.

Keeping a luncheon table going, pacing the service, managing conversation, batting easy conversational lobs to the strong points of the shy ones, turning the best facets of the bright ones in the light of the other guests’ attention is a considerable skill and one now sadly in decline.

Grandmother had been good at it in her time. Her efforts at this table did brighten meals initially for the two or three among the residents who were capable of linear conversation.

Francis sat in the host’s chair at the other end of the avenue of nodding heads as Grandmother drew out the recollections of those who could remember. She expressed keen interest in Mrs. Floder’s honeymoon trip to Kansas City, went through the yellow fever with Mr. Eaton a number of times, and listened brightly to the random unintelligible sounds of the others.

“Isn’t that interesting, Francis?” she said, and rang the bell for the next course. The food was a variety of vegetable and meat mushes, but she divided it into courses, greatly inconveniencing the kitchen help.

Mishaps at the table were never mentioned. A ring of the bell and a gesture in mid-sentence took care of those who had spilled or gone to sleep or forgotten why they were at the table. Grandmother always kept as large a staff as she could pay.

As Grandmother’s general health declined, she lost weight and was able to wear dresses that had long been packed away. Some of them were elegant. In the cast of her features and her hairstyle, she bore a marked resemblance to George Washington on the dollar bill.

Her manners had slipped somewhat by spring. She ruled the table and permitted no interruptions as she told of her girlhood in St. Charles, even revealing personal matters to inspire and edify Francis and the others.

It was true that Grandmother had enjoyed a season as a belle in 1907 and was invited to some of the better balls across the river in St. Louis.

There was an “object lesson” in this for everyone, she said. She looked pointedly at Francis, who crossed his legs beneath the table.

“I came up at a time when little could be done medically to overcome the little accidents of nature,” she said. “I had lovely skin and hair and I took full advantage of them. I overcame my teeth with force of personality and bright spirits—so successfully, in fact, that they became my ‘beauty spot.’ I think you might even call them my ‘charming trademark.’ I wouldn’t have traded them for the world.”

She distrusted doctors, she explained at length, but when it became clear that gum problems would cost her her teeth, she sought out one of the most renowned dentists in the Midwest, Dr. Felix Bertl, a Swiss. Dr. Bertl’s “Swiss teeth” were very popular with a certain class of people, Grandmother said, and he had a remarkable practice.

Opera singers fearing that new shapes in their mouths would affect their tone, actors and others in public life came from as far away as San Francisco to be fitted.

Dr. Bertl could reproduce a patient’s natural teeth exactly and had experimented with various compounds and their effect on resonance.

When Dr. Bertl had completed her dentures, her teeth appeared just as they had before. She overcame them with personality and lost none of her unique charm, she said with a spiky smile.

If there was an object lesson in all this, Francis did not appreciate it until later; there would be no further surgery for him until he could pay for it himself.

Francis could make it through dinner because there was something he looked forward to afterward.

Queen Mother Bailey’s husband came for her each evening in the mule-drawn wagon he used to haul firewood. If Grandmother was occupied upstairs, Francis could ride with them down the lane to the main road.

He waited all day for the evening ride: sitting on the wagon seat beside Queen Mother, her tall flat husband silent and almost invisible in the dark, the iron tires of the wagon loud in the gravel behind the jingle of the bits. Two mules, brown and sometimes muddy, their cropped manes standing up like brushes, swishing their tails across their rumps. The smell of sweat and boiled cotton cloth, snuff and warm harness. There was the smell of woodsmoke when Mr. Bailey had been clearing new ground and sometimes, when he took his shotgun to the new ground, a couple of rabbits or squirrels lay in the wagon box, stretched long as though they were running.

They did not talk on the ride down the lane; Mr. Bailey spoke only to the mules. The wagon motion bumped the boy pleasantly against the Baileys. Dropped off at the end of the lane, he gave his nightly promise to walk straight back to the house and watched the lantern on the wagon move away. He could hear them talking down the road. Sometimes Queen Mother made her husband laugh and she laughed with him. Standing in the dark, it was pleasant to hear them and know they were not laughing at him.