Red Dragon, Page 22

  A deputy sheriff met her at the end of the lane and stooped to the car window.

  “Mrs. Vogt, your mother called our office around noon, saying something about the help stealing. When I come out here, you’ll excuse me but she was talking out of her head and it looked like things wasn’t tended to. Sheriff thought he ought to get ahold of y’all first, if you understand me. Mr. Vogt being before the public and all.”

  Marian understood him. Mr. Vogt was commissioner of public works in St. Louis now and was not in the party’s best graces.

  “To my knowledge, nobody else has saw the place,” the deputy said.

  Marian found her mother asleep. Two of the old people were still sitting at the table waiting for lunch. One woman was out in the backyard in her slip.

  Marian telephoned her husband. “How often do they inspect these places? . . . They must not have seen anything. . . . I don’t know if any relatives have complained, I don’t think these people have any relatives. . . . No. You stay away. I need some Negroes. Get me some Negroes . . . and Dr. Waters. I’ll take care of it.”

  The doctor with an orderly in white arrived in forty-five minutes, followed by a panel truck bringing Marian’s maid and five other domestics.

  Marian, the doctor, and the orderly were in Grandmother’s room when Francis came home from school. Francis could hear his grandmother cursing. When they rolled her out in one of the nursing-home wheelchairs, she was glassy-eyed and a piece of cotton was taped to her arm. Her face looked sunken and strange without her teeth. Marian’s arm was bandaged too; she had been bitten.

  Grandmother rode away in the doctor’s car, sitting in the backseat with the orderly. Francis watched her go. He started to wave, but let his hand fall back to his side.

  Marian’s cleaning crew scrubbed and aired the house, did a tremendous wash, and bathed the old people. Marian worked alongside them and supervised a sketchy meal.

  She spoke to Francis only to ask where things were.

  Then she sent the crew away and called the county authorities. Mrs. Dolarhyde had suffered a stroke, she explained.

  It was dark when the welfare workers came for the patients in a school bus. Francis thought they would take him too. He was not discussed.

  Only Marian and Francis remained at the house. She sat at the dining-room table with her head in her hands. He went outside and climbed a crabapple tree.

  Finally Marian called him. She had packed a small suitcase with his clothes.

  “You’ll have to come with me,” she said, walking to the car. “Get in. Don’t put your feet on the seat.”

  They drove away in the Packard and left the empty wheelchair standing in the yard.

  There was no scandal. The county authorities said it was sure a shame about Mrs. Dolarhyde, she sure kept things nice. The Vogts remained untarnished.

  Grandmother was confined to a private nerve sanatorium. It would be fourteen years before Francis went home to her again.

  “Francis, here are your stepsisters and stepbrother,” his mother said. They were in the Vogts’ library.

  Ned Vogt was twelve, Victoria thirteen, and Margaret nine. Ned and Victoria looked at each other. Margaret looked at the floor.

  Francis was given a room at the top of the servants’ stairs. Since the disastrous election of 1944 the Vogts no longer employed an upstairs maid.

  He was enrolled in Potter Gerard Elementary School, within walking distance of the house and far from the Episcopal private school the other children attended.

  The Vogt children ignored him as much as possible during the first few days, but at the end of the first week Ned and Victoria came up the servants’ stairs to call.

  Francis heard them whispering for minutes before the knob turned on his door. When they found it bolted, they didn’t knock. Ned said, “Open this door.”

  Francis opened it. They did not speak to him again while they looked through his clothes in the wardrobe. Ned Vogt opened the drawer in the small dressing table and picked up the things he found with two fingers: birthday handkerchiefs with F.D. embroidered on them, a capo for a guitar, a bright beetle in a pill bottle, a copy of Baseball Joe in the World Series which had once been wet, and a get-well card signed “Your classmate, Sarah Hughes.”

  “What’s this?” Ned asked.

  “A capo.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “A guitar.”

  “Do you have a guitar?”

  “No.”

  “What do you have it for?” Victoria asked.

  “My father used it.”

  “I can’t understand you. What did you say? Make him say it again, Ned.”

  “He said it belonged to his father.” Ned blew his nose on one of the handkerchiefs and dropped it back in the drawer.

  “They came for the ponies today,” Victoria said. She sat on the narrow bed. Ned joined her, his back against the wall, his feet on the quilt.

  “No more ponies,” Ned said. “No more lake house for the summer. Do you know why? Speak up, you little bastard.”

  “Father is sick a lot and doesn’t make as much money,” Victoria said. “Some days he doesn’t go to the office at all.”

  “Know why he’s sick, you little bastard?” Ned asked. “Talk where I can understand you.”

  “Grandmother said he’s a drunk. Understand that all right?”

  “He’s sick because of your ugly face,” Ned said.

  “That’s why people didn’t vote for him too,” Victoria said.

  “Get out,” Francis said. When he turned to open the door, Ned kicked him in the back. Francis tried to reach his kidney with both hands, which saved his fingers as Ned kicked him in the stomach.

  “Oh, Ned,” Victoria said. “Oh, Ned.”

  Ned grabbed Francis by the ears and held him close to the mirror over the dressing table.

  “That’s why he’s sick!” Ned slammed his face into the mirror. “That’s why he’s sick!” Slam. “That’s why he’s sick!” Slam. The mirror was smeared with blood and mucus. Ned let him go and he sat on the floor. Victoria looked at him, her eyes wide, holding her lower lip between her teeth. They left him there. His face was wet with blood and spit. His eyes watered from the pain, but he did not cry.

  28

  Rain in Chicago drums through the night on the canopy over the open grave of Freddy Lounds.

  Thunder jars Will Graham’s pounding head as he weaves from the table to a bed where dreams coil beneath the pillow.

  The old house above St. Charles, shouldering the wind, repeats its long sigh over the hiss of rain against the windows and the bump of thunder.

  The stairs are creaking in the dark. Mr. Dolarhyde is coming down them, his kimono whispering over the treads, his eyes wide with recent sleep.

  His hair is wet and neatly combed. He has brushed his nails. He moves smoothly and slowly, carrying his concentration like a brimming cup.

  Film beside his projector. Two subjects. Other reels are piled in the wastebasket for burning. Two left, chosen from the dozens of home movies he has copied at the plant and brought home to audition.

  Comfortable in his reclining chair with a tray of cheese and fruit beside him, Dolarhyde settles in to watch.

  The first film is a picnic from the Fourth of July weekend. A handsome family; three children, the father bull-necked, dipping into the pickle jar with his thick fingers. And the mother.

  The best view of her is in the softball game with the neighbors’ children. Only about fifteen seconds of her; she takes a lead off second base, faces the pitcher and the plate, feet apart ready to dash either way, her breasts swaying beneath her pullover as she leans forward from the waist. An annoying interruption as a child swings a bat. The woman again, walking back to tag up. She puts one foot on the boat cushion they use for a base and stands hip-shot, the thigh muscle tightening in her locked leg.

  Over and over Dolarhyde watches the frames of the woman. Foot on the base, pelvis tilts, thigh muscle tightens unde
r the cutoff jeans.

  He freezes the last frame. The woman and her children. They are dirty and tired. They hug, and a dog wags among their legs.

  A terrific crash of thunder clinks the cut crystal in Grandmother’s tall cabinet. Dolarhyde reaches for a pear.

  The second film is in several segments. The title, The New House, is spelled out in pennies on a shirt cardboard above a broken piggy bank. It opens with Father pulling up the “For Sale” sign in the yard. He holds it up and faces the camera with an embarrassed grin. His pockets are turned out.

  An unsteady long shot of Mother and three children on the front steps. It is a handsome house. A cut to the swimming pool. A child, sleek-headed and small, pads around to the diving board, leaving wet footprints on the tile. Heads bob in the water. A small dog paddles toward a daughter, his ears back, chin high, and the whites of his eyes showing.

  Mother in the water holds to the ladder and looks up at the camera. Her curly black hair has the gloss of pelt, her bosom swelling, shining wet above her suit, her legs wavy below the surface, scissoring.

  Night. A badly exposed shot across the pool to the lighted house, the lights reflected in the water.

  Indoors and family fun. Boxes everywhere, and packing materials. An old trunk, not yet stored in the attic.

  A small daughter is trying on Grandmother’s clothes. She has on a big garden-party hat. Father is on the sofa. He looks a little drunk. Now Father must have the camera. It is not quite level. Mother is at the mirror in the hat.

  The children jostle around her, the boys laughing and plucking at the old finery. The girl watches her mother coolly, appraising herself in time to come.

  A close-up. Mother turns and strikes a pose for the camera with an arch smile, her hand at the back of her neck. She is quite lovely. There is a cameo at her throat.

  Dolarhyde freezes the frame. He backs up the film. Again and again she turns from the mirror and smiles.

  Absently Dolarhyde picks up the film of the softball game and drops it in the wastebasket.

  He takes the reel from the projector and looks at the Gateway label on the box: Bob Sherman, Star Route 7, Box 603, Tulsa, Okla.

  An easy drive too.

  Dolarhyde holds the film in his palm and covers it with his other hand as though it were a small living thing that might struggle to escape. It seems to jump against his palm like a cricket.

  He remembers the jerkiness, the haste at the Leeds house when the lights came on. He had to deal with Mr. Leeds before turning on his movie lights.

  This time he wants a smoother progression. It would be wonderful to crawl in between the sleepers with the camera going and snuggle up a little while. Then he could strike in the dark and sit up between them happily getting wet.

  He can do that with infrared film, and he knows where to get some.

  The projector is still on. Dolarhyde sits holding the film between his hands while on the bright blank screen other images move for him to the long sigh of the wind.

  There is no sense of vengeance in him, only Love and thoughts of the Glory to come; hearts becoming faint and fast, like footsteps fleeing into silence.

  Him rampant. Him rampant, filled with Love, the Shermans opening to him.

  The past does not occur to him at all; only the Glory to come. He does not think of his mother’s house. In fact, his conscious memories of that time are remarkably few and indistinct.

  Sometime in his twenties Dolarhyde’s memories of his mother’s house sank out of sight, leaving a slick on the surface of his mind.

  He knew that he had lived there only a month. He did not recall that he was sent away at the age of nine for hanging Victoria’s cat.

  One of the few images he retained was the house itself, lighted, viewed from the street in winter twilight as he passed it going from Potter Gerard Elementary School to the house where he was boarded a mile away.

  He could remember the smell of the Vogt library, like a piano just opened, when his mother received him there to give him holiday things. He did not remember the faces at the upstairs windows as he walked away, down the frozen sidewalk, the practical gifts burning hateful under his arm; hurrying home to a place inside his head that was quite different from St. Louis.

  At the age of eleven his fantasy life was active and intense and when the pressure of his Love grew too great, he relieved it. He preyed on pets, carefully, with a cool eye to consequence. They were so tame that it was easy. The authorities never linked him with the sad little bloodstains soaked into the dirt floors of garages.

  At forty-two he did not remember that. Nor did he ever think about the people in his mother’s house—his mother, stepsisters, or stepbrother.

  Sometimes he saw them in his sleep, in the brilliant fragments of a fever dream; altered and tall, faces and bodies in bright parrot colors, they poised over him in a mantis stance.

  When he chose to reflect, which was seldom, he had many satisfactory memories. They were of his military service.

  Caught at seventeen entering the window of a woman’s house for a purpose never established, he was given the choice of enlisting in the Army or facing criminal charges. He took the Army.

  After basic training he was sent to specialist school in darkroom operation and shipped to San Antonio, where he worked on medical-corps training films at Brooke Army Hospital.

  Surgeons at Brooke took an interest in him and decided to improve his face.

  They performed a Z-plasty on his nose, using ear cartilage to lengthen the columella, and repaired his lip with an interesting Abbé flap procedure that drew an audience of doctors to the operating theater.

  The surgeons were proud of the result. Dolarhyde declined the mirror and looked out the window.

  Records at the film library show Dolarhyde checked out many films, mainly on trauma, and kept them overnight.

  He reenlisted in 1958 and in his second hitch he found Hong Kong. Stationed at Seoul, Korea, developing film from the tiny spotter planes the Army floated over the thirty-eighth parallel in the late 1950s, he was able to go to Hong Kong twice on leave. Hong Kong and Kowloon could satisfy any appetite in 1959.

  Grandmother was released from the sanatorium in 1961 in a vague Thorazine peace. Dolarhyde asked for and received a hardship discharge two months before his scheduled separation date and went home to take care of her.

  It was a curiously peaceful time for him as well. With his new job at Gateway, Dolarhyde could hire a woman to stay with Grandmother in the daytime. At night they sat in the parlor together, not speaking. The tick of the old clock and its chimes were all that broke the silence.

  He saw his mother once, at Grandmother’s funeral in 1970. He looked through her, past her, with his yellow eyes so startlingly like her own. She might have been a stranger.

  His appearance surprised his mother. He was deepchested and sleek, with her fine coloring and a neat mustache which she suspected was hair transplanted from his head.

  She called him once in the next week and heard the receiver slowly replaced.

  For nine years after Grandmother’s death Dolarhyde was untroubled and he troubled no one. His forehead was as smooth as a seed. He knew that he was waiting. For what, he didn’t know.

  One small event, which occurs to everyone, told the seed in his skull it was Time: Standing by a north window, examining some film, he noticed aging in his hands. It was as though his hands, holding the film, had suddenly appeared before him and he saw in that good north light that the skin had slackened over the bones and tendons and his hands were creased in diamonds as small as lizard scales.

  As he turned them in the light, an intense odor of cabbage and stewed tomatoes washed over him. He shivered though the room was warm. That evening he worked out harder than usual.

  A full-length mirror was mounted on the wall of Dolarhyde’s attic gym beside his barbells and weight bench. It was the only mirror hanging in his house, and he could admire his body in it comfortably because he always worked
out in a mask.

  He examined himself carefully while his muscles were pumped up. At forty, he could have competed successfully in regional body-building competition. He was not satisfied.

  Within the week he came upon the Blake painting. It seized him instantly.

  He saw it in a large, full-color photograph in Time magazine illustrating a report on the Blake retrospective at the Tate Museum in London. The Brooklyn Museum had sent The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun to London for the show.

  Time’s critic said: “Few demonic images in Western art radiate such a nightmarish charge of sexual energy. . . .” Dolarhyde didn’t have to read the text to find that out.

  He carried the picture with him for days, photographed and enlarged it in the darkroom late at night. He was agitated much of the time. He posted the painting beside his mirror in the weight room and stared at it while he pumped. He could sleep only when he had worked out to exhaustion and watched his medical films to aid him in sexual relief.

  He had known since the age of nine that essentially he was alone and that he would always be alone, a conclusion more common to the forties.

  Now, in his forties, he was seized by a fantasy life with the brilliance and freshness and immediacy of childhood. It took him a step beyond Alone.

  At a time when other men first see and fear their isolation, Dolarhyde’s became understandable to him: He was alone because he was Unique. With the fervor of conversion he saw that if he worked at it, if he followed the true urges he had kept down for so long—cultivated them as the inspirations they truly were—he could Become.

  The Dragon’s face is not visible in the painting, but increasingly Dolarhyde came to know how it looked.

  Watching his medical films in the parlor, pumped up from lifting, he stretched his jaw wide to hold in Grandmother’s teeth. They did not fit his distorted gums and his jaw cramped quickly.

  He worked on his jaw in private moments, biting on a hard rubber block until the muscles stood out in his cheeks like walnuts.