Widow's Dozen. Marek Waldorf
“I’m no mind reader,” said Fenwick, “but my bet’s on Max. Something tells me he was behind your falling out with your sister.” This was Fenwick’s first mistake. Or should Russell say “Fenwick”? Because Fenwick obviously wasn’t his new companion’s name. Unlike the guesses that had come before, this one was too good— spot-on but with an edge of gloating around it, subtle but there. Maybe not the, but here was a devil so far gone he could take his comfort only in the suffering of others. Whatever could be wrung from such encounters. Probing old wounds. He had more than a gift for it. He’d made it his calling card. He roamed the city in search of victims. The incompletes. The defenseless slobs. A psychic vampire. Somebody like Russell would be like a buxom virgin to him.
“I know you,” said Russell, and tried to shift his chair around, away from the intruder, only it had been nailed into the concrete. “I see who you are.”
“And you think that makes us even? You know me. Shit, get off your high horse.”
“No.”
“No. No what. What?”
“Go away.”
“Of course. How can you believe in other people’s good intentions when you no longer believe in yourself?” Fenwick pulled a pair of sunglasses out of the briefcase and held them out to Russell. They were star-shaped and the powder-blue rims had glitter on them. “Everything you saw in that case? That’s my workload for just one week. One week. On the positive side, think about all the lives I get to touch. Kismet! Just try them on, will you? For eight seconds. A second out of your life. Eight seconds and I’ll leave you in peace. I’m not prepared to give up on you just yet.”
But somehow he didn’t make it sound like a threat, or even a promise. He was very good at what he did, this Fenwick. Hadn’t Russell always imagined the moment like this? When everything would change.
That’s what I am, this character seemed to be implying.
A chance to set things right, for the second (or seven hundredth) time.
He’d taken up the costume at first for the extra money. That was all it was back then, just a costume. The resemblance, even in his fifties, had been striking, uncanny even. After his mom died, Russell and his half-sister had moved into the Lower Slope brownstone she’d bequeathed them along with a small inheritance. By cautious investment, pooling their resources and renting out the top floor, they were able to achieve the modest dream of their generation: early retirement. To never have to set foot in an office again. To celebrate, Russell started growing a beard. He’d always been impressed by the forked monstrosities of the nineteenth century prophets, but when his own appeared, it was not just as white as snow—but just as fluffy. He had a workshop in the basement where he did carpentry, small projects—stools, mock ducks, doll- and birdhouses—and she took up worthy causes, most to do with the environment.
Through one of these, she landed herself a boyfriend, briefly. David stuck around long enough to get her pregnant, but when she decided to have the boy, he skedaddled to the opposite coast. But amicably enough to make Russell suspicious. Russell, who’d always heard Nancy tell it like anybody who brought a child into the world in the shape it was in would be perpetrating some kind of monstrous crime, thought there was too much symmetry behind it all. He double-checked the joint account, but found no evidence of an “arrangement.” But that wasn’t surprising. Twelve years younger, but she possessed his stepfather’s devious intellect.
It was a long pregnancy but a short labor, a C-section, and another three days to regain her strength. Russell visited her and Max at the off-white maternity ward every day, but the family feeling didn’t hit him then. It was when she brought him home from the hospital. It was the moment she carried the boy up the front steps and went through the door, into the brownstone. Ours. A threshold was crossed. He was so tiny, adorable, so helpless you couldn’t help but love him like your own better self but unformed and still open to impression. When he wasn’t colicky or hungry or scared, he was an angel. But he surprised them both by how much a little baby can run up the expenses. Russell tried the department-store gig in Max’s third year, expecting it to prove impossible or a joke, but what he discovered instead—besides how much a top-notch Claus can earn—was his calling. “Of course,” Fenwick interrupted. The knee to dandle them on had already been broken in. That was when it dawned on Russell. He understood why he’d been so lonely his whole life. He had been relating to the wrong kinds of people. It was kids he was meant for—the children.
But could Nancy just admit to being jealous, she could not. She had to criticize. Insinuate that his affections might be somehow warping to the boy. In summer, she would say, “Why can’t you wear a shirt when you’re handling him?” “Because it’s hot!” he would yell back. “Well, you’re getting your sweat all over him.” That was just one example. Not wearing a shirt! Was he so disfigured he needed to keep his shirt on at all times? When Max got older, she would ask, “What have you been telling him?” “What?” “I don’t want you talking to him about people being put in stocks.” “Why?” “Because it’s weird—and it’s disturbing him.” She implied that he was causing Max’s nightmares. Or that the nightmares the boy was obviously having—Russell heard him screaming, totally hysterical, every night—were Russell’s fault somehow.
She was getting Max so upset he started to believe these lies as well. It was a mounting campaign. And because Max was a child, everything came signposted far in advance, everything that at that age was sure to be fatal. Russell felt the distance between them growing. It was just a phase, he told himself, but it wasn’t. It was his sister’s neurotic moodswings that chipped away at her boy’s love for him. In despair, he banished himself to the basement, for longer and longer periods of time. And then, after the last rebuff—so childishly insensitive Russell found himself incapable of not bearing a grudge—suddenly everything was past the point of repair. “He’s not ours!” he remembered Nancy shrieking at him, from that remote time, with impossible violence. “He’s not yours to punish! God, Russell, do yourself a favor, and get some help!”
When they moved out, his own nightmares returned. He was in hell. He ate a potato chip, and it tasted like hell. It was like biting into paper. The salt burned into his tongue. The Juicy Juice he drank was all aftertaste, but it did nothing to slake this horrible thirst. His, he believed, was not a self-made hell but one imposed from the outside. Those who ensnared him, glib imitations like “Fenwick,” they were put here to test him. His sister foremost. And for what? He could conceive of only one answer, and in the grief of his betrayal and his days and nights of lonely suffering, the answer quickly grew to possess him, into assuming the shape of a saint. He would show them both by becoming Father Christmas.
But the little ones all took fright of him.
He felt the burden of shame his costume was carrying from the rank sweat and picked up the glasses Fenwick had set down, and he put them on. The lenses fogged up immediately. The blur got bigger until it included all Midtown, the whole city melting into facets of yellow and orange while his eyes watered with the effort to make sense of them. Tears of concentration ran down his cheeks. He’d all but given up—it couldn’t have been more than five seconds—when the riddle resolved itself. He passed into focus and saw he was looking at himself. It was extremely disorienting, but he appeared (so it seemed) through his companion’s eyes. Now “I” am Fenwick. But as soon as this thought popped into Russell’s head it popped back out because only the eyes were affected. The other senses stayed his. They were keener, in fact. With sight deposed—“thrown over,” in a sense—touch, taste, smell, and sound all fought for the priority spot. There was confusion in the scuffle, some mix-and-matching. The whisper of anise in Fenwick’s voice, like he’d walked out of an Indian restaurant. Or himself, salivating through his skin, watching himself surrender, drip by drip, to this creature of intrusive and irrational empathy, back into the pavement, drop by drop, the salty sweat of one word dripping off his tongue. “Holy—”
“By all means,” Fenwick said keenly. “Look! It’s apt to change your life.”
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