What the Night Knows

From the journal of Alton Turner Blackwood:

The awkward boy stood on the patio, in the shadow of the big maidenhair tree, which in those days he believed had been named for the two maidens who sat playing cards at the table before him: the beautiful Regina, his aunt, and her even more beautiful daughter, Melissa.

Smug Regina took a wicked pleasure in educating the boy about his family history, which was in part buried in the secret cemetery that he had found in a woodland clearing. So Jillian had given birth to Marjorie, and out of Marjorie had come Regina and Anita, the boy’s own mother, all fathered by Teejay. When Anita and Regina, fraternal twins, were in their turn impregnated, Regina produced Melissa, whose exquisite beauty seemed further proof of Teejay’s insane theory about selective inbreeding. But the boy’s arrival hardly a month later was a dramatic refutation.

Teejay wanted to kill the newborn boy and bury him in the woods—or at least commit him to an institution, but Anita rebelled. If Teejay wanted to continue his experiment with her, if he wanted to father other children with her, he must allow her son to live. And thus the boy’s mother bought his survival.

In the decade following, Regina gave birth to three sons, but Teejay had no interest in sons, who could not bear his children and thereby help him distill his unique genes into a perfect beauty never before known on earth. He smothered them in infancy and buried them in the woods.

“Why do you let him?” the boy demanded.

“What use do I have for sons, either?” Regina asked.

“I mean, why do you let him touch you?”

“It’s what I’ve always known. I’ve known nothing else. It’s his religion, and it’s mine. What do I have if I leave? What do I have if I tell and destroy everything? There’s luxury in Crown Hill, and I’m accustomed to luxury.”

The boy thought that the estate staff must know, but Regina was amused by his naiveté. People routinely blinded themselves to truth, she said. Besides, each year, there were a few three-day weekend parties at Crown Hill, and among the houseguests were men who might have seduced a young girl. Teejay’s daughters also traveled with him from time to time, and perhaps he was not a diligent chaperone during those excursions. Teejay had been born at the turn of the century, when midwives attended virtually every birth, and he himself midwifed the births at Crown Hill; no physicians ever saw that the “stillborn” male children were, in fact, smothered in the crèche. If a member of the staff became suspicious, he might be retired young with a most generous pension, an irresistibly fat monthly check that made his easy life dependent on his silence. Or perhaps he would leave his position without notice—to trade his handsome room and private bath in the comfortable staff quarters for a new bed and a long sleep in the woodland clearing.

“In the woods,” the boy said. “My mother, your sister.”

“My competition,” said Regina.

Under the maidenhair tree, in the privileged afternoon, in the golden light of a sun swelling toward the horizon as if to burst, the awkward boy stood as though rooted, the ugly boy, towering and rough and shatter-faced, watching the elegant hands of the beautiful women as they dealt and received the cards, moisture beading on their tall glasses of iced tea, lemon slices and leaves of mint, their skin as flawless as that of the bisque-porcelain figurines in the drawing-room display case, and the ugly boy was pierced by a sharp yearning as the women ordered their cards, not yearning for the women but for something he could not name, watching as Melissa put upon the table four threes, one in each suit, and with them won the hand, watching as Regina totaled their scores, the fluid shuffling of the deck, the languid dealing of the cards, their grace and catlike confidence, their glittering eyes as Regina recounted how her sister, the mother of the ugly boy, wound up dead and buried in the wildwood.