The Book of Speculation

17 JULY 21ST

Frank is on the front step, waiting for me to let him in. He’s come to talk about the details of the money. Boat shoes, khaki shorts, a slightly frayed polo shirt, casual attire for what amounts to hours and blood. When I asked if we could postpone, he said, “We should deal with it quickly. It doesn’t look like there’s time to play around.”

I let him in, leaning against the door; the ankle is more grotesque than yesterday, just a sprain, but painful nonetheless.

Frank’s eyes go immediately to the hole. “Jesus, Simon. What happened?”

“The house attacked.” There’s a bump on my head where it hit the floor. If I touch it, pain spiders across my skull, and when I close my eyes there’s a pulsing checkerboard. Frank says something and it sounds like he’s two miles away.

“Looks like it,” he says, pacing around, eyeing the hole. He crouches down, rubs a callused hand around it. “Shit.” I can’t remember if I’ve heard Frank swear before, but it sounds strange. We should talk about the money, I know, but there’s something else.

“The curtains and the paintings you have in the barn, did my mother know about them? Did she ever touch them?” A trigger point for a curse may be hard to find, but if it’s there, then there’s a chance to break it. There is no stopping sadness. Sadness slips through the fingers.

Frank doesn’t answer. He raps his knuckles against the floor, tapping and knocking in different areas. He mutters something. “What happened to this place? The outside’s bad, we knew that, but the inside?” He stands with care, testing the boards. “Dry rot’s all the way through.”

“It’s just a floor. Was my mom in the barn when she gave you her cards?”

“Just a floor? This is bad. Bad.” His mouth snaps closed, bulldoggish. He walks the rest of the room, tracing the walls, tapping and listening. He stops at my desk, carefully avoiding the hole, and looks at the book, leafs through a few papers and casually slides them across the desk.

“I’d appreciate it if you don’t touch that, it’s very old,” I say. “Delicate.”

“Delicate.” The word is a slap. “The floor is gone. Gone, Simon. Haven’t you done anything? Why didn’t you ask for help?”

“I did.”

His hand starts pumping. “I need to get a few things. I’ll be back,” he grunts. “Don’t touch anything, and for chrissakes, don’t — just don’t.”

He slams the door. Plaster crumbles, leaving a dust shower in his wake. Inching back to the desk is a wobbling balancing trick, and when I get to the chair there’s the distinct feeling that I’ll be here for some time. My face itches. I rub it hard. Lack of sleep is taking its toll.

I spend the next hour and a half bouncing through genealogy websites. At last, a name pops up among a record of marriage ceremonies performed in a Philadelphia church. Among a column of names one sticks out, highlighted in yellow. At the sight of it I gasp. Ryzhkova. Katerina Ryzhkova was wed to a Benno Koenig. Madame Ryzhkova’s daughter and the Koenig from the book. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my research it’s that my parents were the exception, not the rule; circus performers tend to marry each other. I can hear Frank loading and unloading things from his truck, a beaten-up flatbed made of rust. He soon pulls out of the driveway, leaving me to work in silence. Their marriage leads me on a search for children, which does not disappoint. Within two years of marrying, the Koenigs had a daughter, Greta. Greta Koenig proves something of a dead end, turning up no records after 1824. In fact, the Koenigs seem to disappear. I dash off an email to Shoreham’s reference librarian, asking Raina if she wouldn’t mind searching for marriage or death records for Greta Koenig. She has a sweet spot for genealogy, her family being one of the oldest on the east end. On a whim I ask her to search for Greta Ryzhkova as well. Performers can be funny about names; if Ryzhkova was a bigger draw than Koenig, it’s possible Greta went by her mother’s name. I go back to the book. While the portraits almost certainly belonged to the fortune-teller Ryzhkova, the curtains have no purchase record; they appear only in drawings and notes on a cage for a Wild Boy. Nothing indicates how or why any of them would wind up in Frank’s possession and there’s no mention of what caused such substantial damage to the book. I’m missing things, in part due to Enola. All the cards. The Tenets of the Oracle should refresh my memory as to what she destroyed. But The Tenets’ pictures are different, flatter somehow, and less sinister; they read like stained glass, whereas the pictures Enola ruined were a shattered mirror.

Frank returns, his truck rattling as it pulls into the gravel driveway. Before I can hobble to him, he’s already set up a sawhorse on the beach grass that passes for my lawn. I get closer and hear a string of swears. He stops when he sees me. It’s clearly an effort.

“I’ll patch the hole so it’s not gaping.”

“Thanks,” I say. “This may sound strange, but is any of your family Russian? The paintings in your—”

“Stop with that. Just stop,” he says as he grabs a piece of plywood. “You’re like a dog with a damned bone. I don’t know about that stuff, we’ve just always had it.”

I offer to help. He looks at my ankle. I limp back to the house and he stays outside. I’m glad he does. He kicks the sawhorse and swears again, then paces around his truck, picking out tools, putting them back, pausing to look at the house and judge the lean of it. I can’t help but see Alice in him, the way she tips her head when looking at something high up in the stacks. If I don’t take his money I might keep her, but then I’m letting the house go, all of it — Mom’s laughter in the wallboards, the only place in the world I can picture my father. Where would I go? To Alice’s? On to Savannah with its grand houses and grass rivers?

Frank drops to his knees, face low to the ground, eyeing the foundation. There’s no need for a level — the interior of the house makes everything clear: no door hangs straight, none of the windows open and, surely as all the tables lean, the house will go over if nothing is done. It’s rotting at its core.

I should have gone to the carnival with Enola. I should be watching her. Last night, she and Doyle staggered in closer to dawn than dusk. I heard him whisper in the rasp-voiced way that makes things louder. He’s fine, Little Bird. It was just a weird day. Get some sleep, okay? They were gone before I woke. She left a note telling me to come by the carnival. Thom Rose wants to talk to me.

Frank walks into the house like it’s his. He puts his hands on either side of the door, resting on Dad’s palm prints, and it feels perverse. “How’d you let it get like this,” he barks.

“It’s been in bad shape for a while. Dad didn’t do much maintenance.”

He squeezes the back of his neck and tugs on the hair peeking out from under his hat. “I thought you were trying to keep the place up, but this? This is structural, the whole damned thing. You did nothing.” He goes on about support beams and foundations, undermining. His color rises until he looks like a ripe plum. “I called the town. They’re sending an inspector.”

The knot on my head announces itself. “You did what? You know what will happen.”

He nods. “Maybe.”

The house will be declared uninhabitable and I’ll be forced out. “Why would you do that?”

“You’ve got no money. You’re borrowing off me and I’ve got to move fast or we’ll lose her. I didn’t know how much you’d let her go. Every day work’s not done is a day closer to her collapsing. The town will condemn her and force a rehab. You’ll have to leave, and then Pelewski can start on the structural work right away.” Her, like the house is a woman. He surveys the room, the subtle bulge of buckling walls, the loose floorboards. “It’s dangerous, too. You shouldn’t be here,” he says, but he’s staring past me. There is no mention of when I could come back or if I ever could. His eyes are wet. Good god, is he crying?

“I won’t take your money. I’ll figure it out.”

“I want you out of here,” he says, his voice flat and even.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. If they need to, Enola and that Doyle kid can stay with us a few days.” He rubs his forehead. He is crying, actually crying. “But I want you all out. Nobody stays here. It isn’t safe.”

“What gives you the fucking right?”

There should be silence or a moment of apology. There isn’t.

“I’ve got the right.” He scratches his splotchy neck. “I’ve got the right,” he repeats. His eyes dart to the ceiling, the kitchen, the floor. “It’s my house as much as it is yours. I bought this house for Paulina.”

Through a thousand feet of water I ask, “What?”

“I bought this house for your mother.”

It isn’t true. Why would he lie? Dad promised my mother a house, this house, that’s why we never left, never sold. It was his love letter. “Why?”

He moves to the couch, by the arm Enola picked bare. “I loved her.” It’s sincere, awful, like hearing she’s dead all over again. He presses the heels of his hands to his eyes.

“You what?”

“I loved her. You don’t remember, you were too young, but Paulina was so, so beautiful.”

“Shut up.” I remember.

“It’s nothing you could understand. I just—” He coughs. “I met her first.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” I don’t recognize my voice.

“I brought him back to meet her. Had I known,” he laughs bitterly. “Had I known. The night I met Paulina she read my cards. She read my palm, too. She held my hand.”

Mom’s thin fingers held in those square hands, those carpenter paws — her fingers that messed my hair — her fingernail tracing across his lifeline. “Stop it.”

“Maybe you don’t know because you’re a quiet kid, but when a woman takes your hand like that and looks you in the eye, something changes inside you. I brought Dan with me because I had to show my best friend the woman I was going to be with.”

My foot bounces, sending rhythmic stabbing pain up my leg. I can’t stop it.

“I told her to come see me, that I was up early and she could find me at the dockmaster’s in the harbor. She came by in the morning. The day after, too. She kept coming by, even after he saw her. Even after he told me he loved her, she kept coming by. I never should have brought him. You can’t know what it is to stand in the middle of a crowd, watching the woman you love, watching your best friend fall in love with her.” He talks to the floor, to his feet, unable to meet my eye.

“Did she know?”

“That I loved her?” He rubs his bulldog jowls and sad man splotches. “Yes.”

“Dad bought her the house. He promised it to her.”

“My grandfather left me money. Paulina wanted to settle down. She was sick of traveling; she’d been on the road her whole life, hadn’t ever lived in a house. Maybe she didn’t want me then, but I could give her that. So I gave him the money.”

“He took it.”

“I didn’t want to lose him, either. He’d have followed her anywhere. She was like that; she could do that to a man.”

I remember my father manning a folding grill, Leah and my mother sitting in beach chairs. Frank telling a story about kids running aground on a sandbar. Would anyone have noticed if his eyes lingered? “No. You don’t buy a house for a friend.”

“No,” he says. “You don’t.”

There is the other half of the story, and he tells it like a drunken man. Mornings at the dockmaster’s came with quick touches, kisses, things they’d meant to stop. That they did stop, eventually. “After a time,” he says. He is kind in that he’s not explicit. “She loved your dad, I know she did. I loved him too.” So he began dating Leah, a teaching student at St. Joseph’s, and married her. They all became friends. Of a sort.

“You slept with my mother.”

“If you want me to apologize, I won’t. I’m not sorry for knowing her.” He gets up to pace and feel for cracks in the walls. He stops by a photograph of Enola in the water, in my mother’s arms. “I took that picture.” He starts in about how it was the end of June when the water gets warm but the jellyfish aren’t out yet. “Paulina didn’t want Enola to get stung, so she made me go in first, just to check. I’m not sorry for knowing you, either.”

“Don’t pretend you’re my father.” I see him wince. “You slept with her.”

“Yes.”

“How long did it go on? How long did you fuck under my father’s nose?”

“Don’t talk about her that way.” A floorboard creaks.

“Was it before I was born? After? After Enola? How long? Months? Years?”

“A while,” he says quietly.

“Am I?” We both know what I mean. Am I his.

“No.”

“Enola?”

“No.”

“Dates,” I say. “I need to know the goddamned dates.” I need to be sure.

“We stopped when Dan wanted kids. We were apart a year before she got pregnant with you. It wasn’t me.” His cheek twitches as if holding back a wince. “It was hard to look at her sometimes, hard enough knowing I was sharing her, but then she wanted his kids.” And not Frank’s. “It tore me up some, but I’d give her anything she wanted. When you were around two we started up again. On and off for about two years. Then she wanted another kid, a little girl. I guess she saw Alice and fell in love. She cut it off, said she was done. We hadn’t been together in a year and a half before Enola.” Here is a new awful part: all the time he wanted my mother, he had his wife, and they had Alice. Quiet, perfect Alice. They threw us together — was it to keep Leah occupied? Were we an intentional distraction? My gut hurts. For me, for her. Frank sits down again and reaches over as if to touch me, but he stops.

“Dates,” I say.

“I don’t have them.” He’s almost shouting. “I didn’t write it down. It’s not something — it’s not the sort of thing I ever thought I’d have to explain to her son,” he says. “You’re his. Hell, you even chew your fingers the way he did. It was never a question. Your mom wouldn’t let it be. No matter how much I wished you were mine sometimes.”

“Stop lying.” I’m up. My ankle shouts, but it fades into the rest of the noise. My teeth hurt. My veins hurt.

“I wouldn’t lie about that. You’re not mine, but I wished you were.”

“Did she know you gave him the money?” He doesn’t answer. “Did she know?”

“Yes,” he says, at length. “It was the one thing I could give her. And it’s gone to shit, Simon—”

“How much did you give him?” He looks at me blankly. “How much did the house cost?” We’d been family, all of us. Frank, who’d shared a boat with my father, gone sailing with the man whose wife he slept with. I’ve eaten at his table. Kissed and loved his daughter.

“Two hundred fifty thousand.”

There is no apology in him, and that, of all things, is most repugnant. “And for how many years? How long were you two together?”

“Five years, on and off,” he says.

Five years; 1,826 days. “If you look at it logically, that’s fifty thousand a year to sleep with my mother. How many times a year do you figure?” His jaw clenches and his Adam’s apple bobs. Still, no remorse. “Once a month would be around four thousand and change. Once a week would make it roughly a thousand. So, my mother was worth a thousand dollars a week to you. That’s like keeping a family on the side, just for fucking.”

His fist slams into the wall and an apple-sized hole devours it. He pulls his hand out, cradles his fingers, then examines the wall. He touches all around it, murmuring, apologizing — to the house, to my mother.

“Did my dad know?”

“We didn’t tell him.”

It’s answer enough. “He knew.”

“I used to watch her swim in the mornings. Even after,” he says. He doesn’t look at me. Can’t. “That’s when your dad figured it out. It was a little more than a year after Enola was born. He was coming down the steps and I was going up. He passed me and asked if Leah knew. I said there’s nothing to know. There wasn’t by then, hadn’t been for a good couple of years. Next thing Paulina says he’s looking to move you all upstate.”

Away from anywhere that might be a good place for a man who works on boats.

“I loved her,” Frank says, softly. “Every day even after I knew it couldn’t continue, I loved Paulina. We stopped because I loved her, him too. Then she was gone.” He pulls his hat from his head, crumpling it in his hands. “If you stay out of the house for a while, I can fix it up. I’ll get Pete and we’ll start working, but it isn’t safe here now. You could get hurt. I loved you, too, you and Enola. It would have killed me if he took you all away.”

Picture life over again. Picture the things I sometimes wished. Frank as my father. The family across the street would be strangers, people who occasionally got our mail by mistake, people we’d see as we took out our boat. But where is Alice? There would be no Alice.

Mom died. Dad sold the boat. We saw less of Frank, only when I was on the beach with Alice, or when Leah watched us. I’d thought grief had made Dad cut Frank out, but it was worse. My mother drowned and he cut ties with his best friend. It’s a simple logic chain.

“Your money fixed nothing. All it ever did was break things. Us. The house went to hell because he wouldn’t lift a finger on it. Not once. He didn’t put a penny into it. He didn’t care if the whole thing fell down because you bought this house to hold on to my mother.” It’s a crippled token of one man’s love for another man’s wife. Dad knew it. He must have sat at that kitchen table, praying it would collapse. “You killed him, too,” I say. “It just took longer.”

“Simon,” he pleads.

“No, you don’t get to say my name.” I can’t be here in this place that smells like varnish, sawdust, and carpenter’s glue — like Frank.

I go to the car. I would run but my leg won’t let me. Frank follows. He’s talking, but I can’t hear him through the car door. I don’t care. I can barely feel my hands on the wheel. I pump them a few times to get the blood back in the fingers; stress causes both vasoconstriction and vasodilatation — a fact I picked up when helping a student with a term paper — this is vasoconstriction. Three pumps. Frank is at the car. He’s broken, but not broken enough. I roll down the window. He puts his hands on the roof, hooking his thumbs into the interior, creeping inside.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “You have no idea how much I wished you’d been my son.”

“You never came by after he died,” I tell him. “We had to go to you.” My shame is that I could have loved him, despite everything, if he’d so much as tried.

“It was too much. With your dad and the house, and there was Leah and Alice,” he says. They hadn’t been enough to stop him before. No, Alice and Leah were only concerns after, when Enola and I were difficult to love, not as convenient as the family he already had. The fruit is too ripe to not be picked. I feel myself smile, knowing I look insane. I throw the car into reverse, spinning the tires. Frank stands in the driveway, covering himself with his arms like he’s naked.

Yes, Alice will be mad at me, but she is already. I lean out the window and yell, “I fucked your daughter. Go ahead and fix my goddamned house.”