ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
IN THE WEEKEND PORTION, THE REVELATIONS COME FAST AND HEAVY. DAN AND LAURIE COPE WITH LOREAL'S DEPARTURE AND MORE OF PAMELA'S STORY IS REVEALED
“Where do you wanna go?” Dan asked.
He was driving. They could have gone back to Lassador, or they could have gone back to Chicago, taken up in this whole strange adventure, suddenly, he almost felt discarded.
And Laurie, sounding discarded, said, “It doesn’t matter.”
“Well, you do have to go back to work.”
“I don’t really ever have to go back to work if I don’t want to.”
Dan said nothing as they drove over the unvaried countryside, and finally Laurie said, “I’m sorry. I’m just…”
“I know,” Dan said.
“So much work for us all to be together, and now she’s gone.”
Laurie sighed and put his hands, leaning back and pressing his shades on.
Dan only said, “I know.”
“I feel… strange,” Laurie said.
They drove, and Dan thought how strange was the only word for their current feeling. The moment Loreal had come it was as if there was more room, not less, to live in, and it wasn’t that they were incomplete without her, but… no, it was that. And now, with her gone, they’d have to find a new completion. And on top of that, the strange way he had felt all morning but, damn, he had to get a better word than strange.
On that last night, they’d all been together in that bed, impassioned, but the desire had given way to sleep, the need to be together in every way possible given way to the need to rest in one another’s arms. Dan regretted that he hadn’t had Loreal one last time. That they hadn’t had each other one last time.
Laurie looked at him sadly, pulling off his glasses so that Dan smiled to look at those deep brown eyes.
“Where do you wanna go, baby?”
“I’m driving to Chicago,” Dan said. “Let’s just be alone there for a few days.”
Dan felt Laurie’s hand between his legs, felt Laurie’s hand close on him.
“Shit,” he murmured.
“You were already hard before I touched you,” Laurie said. “You were pitching a tent like n other.”
Laurie kept stroking him while Dan drove.
Before the black jeep parked on the side of the winter road there was a green sign that said,
Chicago, next right exit.
Under the white sky and in the midst of naked trees, where no cars passed, the door of black jeep open, Dan Rawlinson, naked as the day he was born, fucked Laurie Malone on the side of the road. Teeth clenched as his hips smacked against Laurie’s, he just kept hissing, “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” as he pushed his dick deeper into him.
The white earth studded with brown stalks said nothing, nor the chapped grey winter road. No birds, no engines, no cars could be heard in that silent landscape, only the satisfied sounds of two hot blooded creatures who cared nothing for the cold, or Laurie as he cried out, “Fuck me! Fuck me! God! God, that’s it!”
…And the slight creak of the springs of the Jeep, while Dan, hands on Laurie’s shoulders, plowed him.
CHAPTER
E L E V E N
DAS ENDE
IHRES
BUCHES
Yet she shall be known & I never.
-The Book of the Law
I had not been pregnant in twenty-six years, and back then it was with Steiger. Now I took the train down south carrying Steiger’s child in my body. Before I had not known where to go, but this time I never thought twice about going to Augustus. He received me and I was nearly ashamed, but he said, “What is the matter?”
“You are unchanged,” I said.
“Nothing is unchanged,” he replied.
He told me of his children, and I was surprised for I had not known him to have any.
“My brother had the children until now,” Augustus said, “and it was I who watched over the family. Susanna and I had a child once, and now we have had others. But Susanna and I no longer see eye ot eye, and she has decided to age. It will be slow, for she is as old as I. It will not happen right away, but it is her decision.”
I did not say anything as pat as, she must have her reasons, especially since I thought, if there was a way to stop from aging, I would have. But perhaps, in some way it had stopped for me.
“It has not stopped, “Augustus said truthfully. “It has done something, but it has not stopped. How is that you are with child, Pamela?”
Once he had asked, it did not occur to me to lie to him. I began at the beginning, with Germany and Friedereich coming to a wolf in the woods to beget me, and though, often, his eyes showed interest, Augustus was beyond condemnation or puerile shock, so when I had told my tale, he said, “and Steiger has no idea.”
“Nor must he ever,” I said. “How could one live with such knowledge?”
I remained in that lush southern land my whole pregnancy, and when the child was born, Augustus said, “You know, you need never return there. You could stay here if it suits you.”
It did suit me, and I did wish to stay but I said, “I may come back. I would be pleased to come back, but for now I feel I am needed. There are certain things to be worked through and I am not entirely sure anyone is ready to work them through yet who is not me.”
I was on a train fourteen hours and returned to Lassador in the night. It had never even occurred to me to hide the baby. It was a delight to keep her to my breast. I was full of milk and loved to suckle her, and her hair was red, much like Caroline’s. I thought to live in the coach house, the place where, really, Jimmy and Natalie should live, and I was setting myself up there, and putting the baby to bed when I decided to cross the yard and enter the townhouse. It was empty except for my sister Claire and her son, and she said, “They’re all at the hospital. Caroline isn’t well at all.”
“Caroline?”
“She went into labor.”
“Tonight?’
“Yes, Pam!” Claire nearly shouted.
“What hospital?”
“St. Joseph.”
“I’ll borrow your car.”
I took the baby with me. I did not trust Claire to watch her, and could not leave her in the carriage house, and it was a different time, a time when, if an old woman showed up to the hospital asking for someone sick and she had a baby, there would be someone to take the baby and watch it, some place she could put the child. So I went up, and here is all the family, weeping and strange, and here is Steiger looking heartbroken, and see, I go into the room, and Caroline is not merely sick. She is drained of color. Caroline is dead, and it is all too much, and they say, and look, the baby died too, and its hair was red like hers, and they take me into a room too large where there is, like some grave and sweet doll, a baby, like gray porcelain lain on a table, its blue veins showing through white skin, and then, like a miracle, to a family so distraught, no magic worked at all, hardly any, I produce a living, lustrous red headed child and put it in Steiger’s arms and say, “Here is your baby. This is your baby, see? The baby who died is taken away and buried, and that baby was never named, but I have the Negro preiest put water on its head and name it, make it ready for heaven. This is that same night, and I take my red headed baby from the weeping Steiger’s arms. He is so grateful. I take my daughter and Steiger’s daughter to my breast and continue to milk her.
“Delia is your name,” I croon to her. I thought of it in the warm air of the south. “Delia Frey.”
“Well, goddamn,” Marabeth put the book down.
It was so far removed from anything she had known about these people. Steiger she had known her whole life, but as a very old man. Pamela, she had known, but she had been an ancient woman. Grandmother… but Grandmother was always old and there had been no knowledge of her grandfather. Caroline, as the record told, had always been dead and Delia…
But I knew Delia. I knew poor mad Delia. She was Mother’s best friend. She was… she is Jim’s mother. Her own mother was Caroline Dashbach who died in childbirth. She was… But… it wasn’t possible.
“But it changes everything. It explains everything,” Marabeth said, conscious that she was walking around in the motel room talking to herself.
“That’s why Jim never had the change. Why he’s different from Kris.”
All of their lives, Jim was their first cousin, the son of their Uncle Byron—someone Marabeth just barely remembered—and their Aunt Delia, the daughter of Steiger Frey, their grandfather’s best friend. But if this journal was true, and it was, then Delia was not just the daughter of her grandfather’s best friend. No, Delia was…
“Pamela’s daughter, the granddaughter of Friederich.”
And, and now she had to bend her mind, a child of deep incest, begotten by Pamela on Steiger who was not simply her grandfather’s best friend, but…
Pamela’s son. Friederich’s son. Delia was Friederich’s granddaughter twice over. Pamela’s daughter, Pamela Strauss’s daughter, and her granddaughter.
“And niece,” Marabeth murmured with a shudder.
“She was always so kind ot me,” Jim had said about Pamela. “I was never afraid of her. She used ot take me on her knees and tell me stories…”
Jim was Pamela’s grandson. He was Pamela’s great grandson, her soul scion. He was the only one of Freiderich Strauss’s descendants who was….
But her mind did not go to incest.
“He is the purest descendant of Friederich. He is the only descendant of Pamela, several times over. He is… the only one of us who comes from the mating of Friederich and the wolf that created Pamela.”
It was the reason Delia had died insane, probably, but it was also the reason Jim of all the men in the family without the female female barrier, did not change, did not manifest the curse… or the ability.. in the same way.
Marabeth reflected that what she was thinking was so very German. A little too twentieth century German.
“He is the purest one of us all.”
It never occurred to her not to tell him. She went down the hall before she let the thought of protecting him come. Too many people were kept from knowing things because people wanted ot protect them. She rapped on the door and then thought, God, I hope he and Seth weren’t—
But the door opened, and though Seth looked sleepy, he smiled at her. He was a good guy. He was.. yes… just what Jim needed. Jim was sitting up in bed and he pulled a tee shirt on and came out of the covers, joining them.
“You guys have to read this,” Marabeth said, entering the room, and putting the book down on the bed.
“What?” Jim began. “Is it that important?”
“Yes. And you need to read it yourself. How far did you get?’
“Good God, Mara, until I had to stop., It’s more than I really ever wanted to know, but…”
“But where did you stop?”
“I dunno. When Grandma got married to Granddad Jimmy.”
“Well, then you have to get to 1953.”
“1953?”
Marabeth nodded.
“When your mother was born.”
THE BOOK OF PAMELA STRAUSS
THE YEAR THAT DELIA was born was full of happiness and sadness. Of course, Caroline was gone ,and this was a great sorrow for Katherine and for Natalie. She and Natalie had been close, and from then on, Natalie would never have such a close friend. But the truth is, I cannot say that Steiger was overly moved by her death. He was sad. Sadness was there. I do not mean to make him seem worse than he was. But he had Delia, who was the pride of his lfie, and after all, his true daughter, and he knew that I would care for her. I was glad to do it.
Steiger was the only one who could keep Jimmy from his drinking. Steiger did not seem to suffer from the dreams Jimmy did, and there were times when Jimmy either forgot or chose to forget to take his pills, and then he was locked in the basement causing terror to all above. Kristin and Byron were just babies, and I thought that life in the house on Dimler Street would always be like this, alternating between the joy of the baby, whom Natalie loved like a second mother, and the sadness and occasional terror of Jimmy and his fits of drunkenness, and then the times when he descended into being a monster.
Jimmy’s rages subsided in Steigers arms. Steiger, having brought a child into the world and been married once, never felt the need to be married again. Whatever complicated business had gone on in the two marriages, now Jimmy came to Steiger the way I came to Friederich. Steiger and Delia had moved into the coachhouse, and Jimmy would spend his nights there.
But Natalie was Jealous, and what woman would not be. In her way she feared Steiger, or respected him, and she said nothing around him, but one night when he was gone, I heard her screaming at Jimmy, “Your sisters don’t go through this with my brothers. Caroline had to live like this. That’s why she died! That’s why she was so full of sorrow. How dare you shame me this way, always running off to him! How dare you.”
When Steiger came back, Jimmy went to him, but only for a little while. He came back changed, and a few days later Steiger announced that he and Delia were moving.
“We are going to do a bit of traveling, see the country. I’ve seen the world, but not much of the country, and this little lady should experience the same thing.”
I could have killed Natlaie for taking my son and granddaughter, ah, my daughter, from me. I almost did. I contemplated it. And she had separated Jimmy from his best friend, all to have a man who could never really be hers. She paid for it however. With Steiger gone ,there was no sobriety, many fights, thrown furniture, though no black eyes, and the medicine was gone, that is to say, Jimmy refused to take it and so the rest of the family did not come during the full moons when Jimmy was chained below, screaming.
Natalie came to me in 1955 and I was put out with her.
“What do you want?’
“Pamela, I am pregnant.”
“With whose baby?”
“Jimmy’s!” she almost shrieked. “What kind of question is that?”
“A very good kind considering my brother is as mad as a hare. Or a wolf? Didn’t you see that when you married him?”
“She didn’t answer, and I said, “So it is Jimmy’s”.
“Yes?”
“You’re married to a homosexual werewolf and still you manage to have children, while Claire, married all these years to a man who loves her has only one son. Marriage is a mystery.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“You’ve had two children already, I’m sure you know just what to do.”
Was she coming to me woman to woman? Even if she had not known that Steiger was my son and that Delia was our daughter, even if she had not known how much I loved them, she knew that I loved them, and what was more she surely must have known I had ltitle sympathy for her current situation. Was she looking to me to ask if she should have the baby?
“I’ve heard that you know of… herbs… ways.”
“You want to kill your baby.”
“I don’t WANT to kill my baby.”
“You are coming to me, having he audacity to ask me to kill your baby.”
“I don’t want to do this. Have a child that could be like Jimmy. It’s bad enough Byron will be! I don’t want to do this! I don’t want to do this!”
She kept screaming until I slapped her.The second time I slapped her because I wanted to hit her. She sank down in the old chair in the corner of my room and I said, “Stop your crying. Go back and have your baby. He is a Strauss. He will not be like Jimmy or Byron. Jimmy was weak. He was always weak. You knew that when you married him. And Byron is deficient,” Natalie’s eyes flashed, but hadn’t she been the one to say she wanted an abortion.
“Byron is…not right in his head. Go back and have this baby. He will be different.”
I think that all that summer and autumn, as Natalie grew, her womb was filled with sadness and sorrow. She swelled with misery. There was no joy in her pregancy, and the truth is, Jimmy was barely lucid for it. The January night that Nathan Friederich James Strauss was born, I was in the room with Natalie and with my younger sisters. We lifted the child and held him to us, counting his toes and kissing his feet, and the sorrow in Natalie seemed to lighten. Her brothers were in the house as well, waiting to see their nephew, but no one said anything about Jimmy, who was passed out drunk in the library.
“I always thought I could own Jimmy,” Natalie confessed, “that if I just had him to myself he would be a proper husband. But now I see that isn’t so.”
As she drifted off to sleep she said, “Pamela, bring Steiger and Delia home.”
LATER TONIGHT: THE WEEKEND PORTION OF CHAPTER TWO OF ROSSFORD: THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
“Where do you wanna go?” Dan asked.
He was driving. They could have gone back to Lassador, or they could have gone back to Chicago, taken up in this whole strange adventure, suddenly, he almost felt discarded.
And Laurie, sounding discarded, said, “It doesn’t matter.”
“Well, you do have to go back to work.”
“I don’t really ever have to go back to work if I don’t want to.”
Dan said nothing as they drove over the unvaried countryside, and finally Laurie said, “I’m sorry. I’m just…”
“I know,” Dan said.
“So much work for us all to be together, and now she’s gone.”
Laurie sighed and put his hands, leaning back and pressing his shades on.
Dan only said, “I know.”
“I feel… strange,” Laurie said.
They drove, and Dan thought how strange was the only word for their current feeling. The moment Loreal had come it was as if there was more room, not less, to live in, and it wasn’t that they were incomplete without her, but… no, it was that. And now, with her gone, they’d have to find a new completion. And on top of that, the strange way he had felt all morning but, damn, he had to get a better word than strange.
On that last night, they’d all been together in that bed, impassioned, but the desire had given way to sleep, the need to be together in every way possible given way to the need to rest in one another’s arms. Dan regretted that he hadn’t had Loreal one last time. That they hadn’t had each other one last time.
Laurie looked at him sadly, pulling off his glasses so that Dan smiled to look at those deep brown eyes.
“Where do you wanna go, baby?”
“I’m driving to Chicago,” Dan said. “Let’s just be alone there for a few days.”
Dan felt Laurie’s hand between his legs, felt Laurie’s hand close on him.
“Shit,” he murmured.
“You were already hard before I touched you,” Laurie said. “You were pitching a tent like n other.”
Laurie kept stroking him while Dan drove.
Before the black jeep parked on the side of the winter road there was a green sign that said,
Chicago, next right exit.
Under the white sky and in the midst of naked trees, where no cars passed, the door of black jeep open, Dan Rawlinson, naked as the day he was born, fucked Laurie Malone on the side of the road. Teeth clenched as his hips smacked against Laurie’s, he just kept hissing, “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” as he pushed his dick deeper into him.
The white earth studded with brown stalks said nothing, nor the chapped grey winter road. No birds, no engines, no cars could be heard in that silent landscape, only the satisfied sounds of two hot blooded creatures who cared nothing for the cold, or Laurie as he cried out, “Fuck me! Fuck me! God! God, that’s it!”
…And the slight creak of the springs of the Jeep, while Dan, hands on Laurie’s shoulders, plowed him.
CHAPTER
E L E V E N
DAS ENDE
IHRES
BUCHES
Yet she shall be known & I never.
-The Book of the Law
I had not been pregnant in twenty-six years, and back then it was with Steiger. Now I took the train down south carrying Steiger’s child in my body. Before I had not known where to go, but this time I never thought twice about going to Augustus. He received me and I was nearly ashamed, but he said, “What is the matter?”
“You are unchanged,” I said.
“Nothing is unchanged,” he replied.
He told me of his children, and I was surprised for I had not known him to have any.
“My brother had the children until now,” Augustus said, “and it was I who watched over the family. Susanna and I had a child once, and now we have had others. But Susanna and I no longer see eye ot eye, and she has decided to age. It will be slow, for she is as old as I. It will not happen right away, but it is her decision.”
I did not say anything as pat as, she must have her reasons, especially since I thought, if there was a way to stop from aging, I would have. But perhaps, in some way it had stopped for me.
“It has not stopped, “Augustus said truthfully. “It has done something, but it has not stopped. How is that you are with child, Pamela?”
Once he had asked, it did not occur to me to lie to him. I began at the beginning, with Germany and Friedereich coming to a wolf in the woods to beget me, and though, often, his eyes showed interest, Augustus was beyond condemnation or puerile shock, so when I had told my tale, he said, “and Steiger has no idea.”
“Nor must he ever,” I said. “How could one live with such knowledge?”
I remained in that lush southern land my whole pregnancy, and when the child was born, Augustus said, “You know, you need never return there. You could stay here if it suits you.”
It did suit me, and I did wish to stay but I said, “I may come back. I would be pleased to come back, but for now I feel I am needed. There are certain things to be worked through and I am not entirely sure anyone is ready to work them through yet who is not me.”
I was on a train fourteen hours and returned to Lassador in the night. It had never even occurred to me to hide the baby. It was a delight to keep her to my breast. I was full of milk and loved to suckle her, and her hair was red, much like Caroline’s. I thought to live in the coach house, the place where, really, Jimmy and Natalie should live, and I was setting myself up there, and putting the baby to bed when I decided to cross the yard and enter the townhouse. It was empty except for my sister Claire and her son, and she said, “They’re all at the hospital. Caroline isn’t well at all.”
“Caroline?”
“She went into labor.”
“Tonight?’
“Yes, Pam!” Claire nearly shouted.
“What hospital?”
“St. Joseph.”
“I’ll borrow your car.”
I took the baby with me. I did not trust Claire to watch her, and could not leave her in the carriage house, and it was a different time, a time when, if an old woman showed up to the hospital asking for someone sick and she had a baby, there would be someone to take the baby and watch it, some place she could put the child. So I went up, and here is all the family, weeping and strange, and here is Steiger looking heartbroken, and see, I go into the room, and Caroline is not merely sick. She is drained of color. Caroline is dead, and it is all too much, and they say, and look, the baby died too, and its hair was red like hers, and they take me into a room too large where there is, like some grave and sweet doll, a baby, like gray porcelain lain on a table, its blue veins showing through white skin, and then, like a miracle, to a family so distraught, no magic worked at all, hardly any, I produce a living, lustrous red headed child and put it in Steiger’s arms and say, “Here is your baby. This is your baby, see? The baby who died is taken away and buried, and that baby was never named, but I have the Negro preiest put water on its head and name it, make it ready for heaven. This is that same night, and I take my red headed baby from the weeping Steiger’s arms. He is so grateful. I take my daughter and Steiger’s daughter to my breast and continue to milk her.
“Delia is your name,” I croon to her. I thought of it in the warm air of the south. “Delia Frey.”
“Well, goddamn,” Marabeth put the book down.
It was so far removed from anything she had known about these people. Steiger she had known her whole life, but as a very old man. Pamela, she had known, but she had been an ancient woman. Grandmother… but Grandmother was always old and there had been no knowledge of her grandfather. Caroline, as the record told, had always been dead and Delia…
But I knew Delia. I knew poor mad Delia. She was Mother’s best friend. She was… she is Jim’s mother. Her own mother was Caroline Dashbach who died in childbirth. She was… But… it wasn’t possible.
“But it changes everything. It explains everything,” Marabeth said, conscious that she was walking around in the motel room talking to herself.
“That’s why Jim never had the change. Why he’s different from Kris.”
All of their lives, Jim was their first cousin, the son of their Uncle Byron—someone Marabeth just barely remembered—and their Aunt Delia, the daughter of Steiger Frey, their grandfather’s best friend. But if this journal was true, and it was, then Delia was not just the daughter of her grandfather’s best friend. No, Delia was…
“Pamela’s daughter, the granddaughter of Friederich.”
And, and now she had to bend her mind, a child of deep incest, begotten by Pamela on Steiger who was not simply her grandfather’s best friend, but…
Pamela’s son. Friederich’s son. Delia was Friederich’s granddaughter twice over. Pamela’s daughter, Pamela Strauss’s daughter, and her granddaughter.
“And niece,” Marabeth murmured with a shudder.
“She was always so kind ot me,” Jim had said about Pamela. “I was never afraid of her. She used ot take me on her knees and tell me stories…”
Jim was Pamela’s grandson. He was Pamela’s great grandson, her soul scion. He was the only one of Freiderich Strauss’s descendants who was….
But her mind did not go to incest.
“He is the purest descendant of Friederich. He is the only descendant of Pamela, several times over. He is… the only one of us who comes from the mating of Friederich and the wolf that created Pamela.”
It was the reason Delia had died insane, probably, but it was also the reason Jim of all the men in the family without the female female barrier, did not change, did not manifest the curse… or the ability.. in the same way.
Marabeth reflected that what she was thinking was so very German. A little too twentieth century German.
“He is the purest one of us all.”
It never occurred to her not to tell him. She went down the hall before she let the thought of protecting him come. Too many people were kept from knowing things because people wanted ot protect them. She rapped on the door and then thought, God, I hope he and Seth weren’t—
But the door opened, and though Seth looked sleepy, he smiled at her. He was a good guy. He was.. yes… just what Jim needed. Jim was sitting up in bed and he pulled a tee shirt on and came out of the covers, joining them.
“You guys have to read this,” Marabeth said, entering the room, and putting the book down on the bed.
“What?” Jim began. “Is it that important?”
“Yes. And you need to read it yourself. How far did you get?’
“Good God, Mara, until I had to stop., It’s more than I really ever wanted to know, but…”
“But where did you stop?”
“I dunno. When Grandma got married to Granddad Jimmy.”
“Well, then you have to get to 1953.”
“1953?”
Marabeth nodded.
“When your mother was born.”
THE BOOK OF PAMELA STRAUSS
THE YEAR THAT DELIA was born was full of happiness and sadness. Of course, Caroline was gone ,and this was a great sorrow for Katherine and for Natalie. She and Natalie had been close, and from then on, Natalie would never have such a close friend. But the truth is, I cannot say that Steiger was overly moved by her death. He was sad. Sadness was there. I do not mean to make him seem worse than he was. But he had Delia, who was the pride of his lfie, and after all, his true daughter, and he knew that I would care for her. I was glad to do it.
Steiger was the only one who could keep Jimmy from his drinking. Steiger did not seem to suffer from the dreams Jimmy did, and there were times when Jimmy either forgot or chose to forget to take his pills, and then he was locked in the basement causing terror to all above. Kristin and Byron were just babies, and I thought that life in the house on Dimler Street would always be like this, alternating between the joy of the baby, whom Natalie loved like a second mother, and the sadness and occasional terror of Jimmy and his fits of drunkenness, and then the times when he descended into being a monster.
Jimmy’s rages subsided in Steigers arms. Steiger, having brought a child into the world and been married once, never felt the need to be married again. Whatever complicated business had gone on in the two marriages, now Jimmy came to Steiger the way I came to Friederich. Steiger and Delia had moved into the coachhouse, and Jimmy would spend his nights there.
But Natalie was Jealous, and what woman would not be. In her way she feared Steiger, or respected him, and she said nothing around him, but one night when he was gone, I heard her screaming at Jimmy, “Your sisters don’t go through this with my brothers. Caroline had to live like this. That’s why she died! That’s why she was so full of sorrow. How dare you shame me this way, always running off to him! How dare you.”
When Steiger came back, Jimmy went to him, but only for a little while. He came back changed, and a few days later Steiger announced that he and Delia were moving.
“We are going to do a bit of traveling, see the country. I’ve seen the world, but not much of the country, and this little lady should experience the same thing.”
I could have killed Natlaie for taking my son and granddaughter, ah, my daughter, from me. I almost did. I contemplated it. And she had separated Jimmy from his best friend, all to have a man who could never really be hers. She paid for it however. With Steiger gone ,there was no sobriety, many fights, thrown furniture, though no black eyes, and the medicine was gone, that is to say, Jimmy refused to take it and so the rest of the family did not come during the full moons when Jimmy was chained below, screaming.
Natalie came to me in 1955 and I was put out with her.
“What do you want?’
“Pamela, I am pregnant.”
“With whose baby?”
“Jimmy’s!” she almost shrieked. “What kind of question is that?”
“A very good kind considering my brother is as mad as a hare. Or a wolf? Didn’t you see that when you married him?”
“She didn’t answer, and I said, “So it is Jimmy’s”.
“Yes?”
“You’re married to a homosexual werewolf and still you manage to have children, while Claire, married all these years to a man who loves her has only one son. Marriage is a mystery.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“You’ve had two children already, I’m sure you know just what to do.”
Was she coming to me woman to woman? Even if she had not known that Steiger was my son and that Delia was our daughter, even if she had not known how much I loved them, she knew that I loved them, and what was more she surely must have known I had ltitle sympathy for her current situation. Was she looking to me to ask if she should have the baby?
“I’ve heard that you know of… herbs… ways.”
“You want to kill your baby.”
“I don’t WANT to kill my baby.”
“You are coming to me, having he audacity to ask me to kill your baby.”
“I don’t want to do this. Have a child that could be like Jimmy. It’s bad enough Byron will be! I don’t want to do this! I don’t want to do this!”
She kept screaming until I slapped her.The second time I slapped her because I wanted to hit her. She sank down in the old chair in the corner of my room and I said, “Stop your crying. Go back and have your baby. He is a Strauss. He will not be like Jimmy or Byron. Jimmy was weak. He was always weak. You knew that when you married him. And Byron is deficient,” Natalie’s eyes flashed, but hadn’t she been the one to say she wanted an abortion.
“Byron is…not right in his head. Go back and have this baby. He will be different.”
I think that all that summer and autumn, as Natalie grew, her womb was filled with sadness and sorrow. She swelled with misery. There was no joy in her pregancy, and the truth is, Jimmy was barely lucid for it. The January night that Nathan Friederich James Strauss was born, I was in the room with Natalie and with my younger sisters. We lifted the child and held him to us, counting his toes and kissing his feet, and the sorrow in Natalie seemed to lighten. Her brothers were in the house as well, waiting to see their nephew, but no one said anything about Jimmy, who was passed out drunk in the library.
“I always thought I could own Jimmy,” Natalie confessed, “that if I just had him to myself he would be a proper husband. But now I see that isn’t so.”
As she drifted off to sleep she said, “Pamela, bring Steiger and Delia home.”
LATER TONIGHT: THE WEEKEND PORTION OF CHAPTER TWO OF ROSSFORD: THE CHRISTMAS PARTY
