The Wicked: A Love Story

Okay, so the last section was pretty long... AND I thought 40 chapters made a better symmetry than 39, so I've divided the last part into two sections and chapter 40 will come Sunday.

Of course, outside of the house on Dimler Street, life for the Keller Strauss family went on. The next big happening took place in 1960. Maris came to the house, shaken, and sat down in her chair in the living room, trembling and drinking glass after glass of bourbon. Nathan was moving around the house with his brother and sister and Delia, and Natalie looked at him, then at her sister-in-law.

“If you don’t start speaking, I’m not going to let you have another drink, Maris.”

“Ed’s in the basement,” Maris said.

Ed was Edward Keller Junior, the oldest of my father’s grandchildren, and Maris said. “He had told me he wasn’t feeling well, but I didn’t think. I was so foolish. And we are always watching him.”

“So he’s made the Change,” I said.

And Maris nodded.

“Well, when you say down in the basement…” Natalie began.

“Edward’s father built the same thing in his basement that he built in Father’s for Jimmy. He said there was a chance of it happening. We all knew there was a chance of it happening, but I thought,” Maris shrugged, “maybe because I was a woman, maybe it would skip or something.”

“Well, then this means we have to watch out for Fred too,” I said.

“And Granger,” Maris said, thinking of her little boy, young Peter’s father.

“I can’t believe we’re having this discussion,” Maris said, taking the bottle of bourbon out of Natalie’s hand.

“We should have had it a while ago,” I said. “And we will have to send a bottle of the elixir to the house for him.”

“Pamela,” Natalie said.

I looked to my sister-in-law.

“We need to tell Claire so she can be safe from Fred.”

“If it happens to Fred,” Maris said.

“It’s going to happen to all of them,” Natalie said, matter of factly. “It’s even going to happen to my boys. There’s no point denying it. There’s no point denying anything. We just have to be prepared.”

Natalie was right, of course. Fred went through the Change the next year, and the next came Dillard, Maris’s second son. We were on the watch for Byron, a boy who was, in many ways, more sickly looking than his father had been at that age. But if Byron was a sickly child, then Jimmy was sickly as a man. In the end, even Steiger couldn’t keep him from drinking. The sorrow that tore through Natalie began to tear through Steiger, and I had heard him telling Jimmy, “Delia is my daughter. If you’re going to be drunk, you can’t be drunk in the coach house around her.”

“This house is mine! Everything here is mine! If you want to make rules about a house, you’d better get your own.”

Jimmy tried to fight Steiger, but Steiger only took one wrist, and then the other and stood sadly watching Jimmy try to struggle against him in his drunkenness. One morning in 1962, Jimmy went to the coach house, weeping, and not incredibly stable, and the next morning, Steiger came in white faced and stricken,

“Delia’s asleep,” he whispered to me. “Delia’s in bed. I can’t wake her up. She’s got school at eight anyway. She’s got school, and we’ve got to get her to school. School is what matters. School is all that matters.”

“Steiger!” Natalie interrupted, “what’s going on?”

“Oh,” Steiger looked at her as if he’d just waken up. “Oh, what’s going on? Jimmy’s dead. He’s dead in my bed upstairs in the coach house. My brother, my best friend, my broken best friend. He’s dead, Natalie. Your husband is dead.”

This was the first Strauss funeral we’d ever had. You would have thought it would be Father, or even me. All of us Strausses and Kellers escorted him to Saint Ursula, traveling in a line of black cars, behind Jimmy’s hearse which moved with a slow elegance Jimmy had never possessed in life. All of Germantown, including the families who had moved to the south side, were present. There was the picture of my brother as a soldier, smiling and proud on his flag draped casket, and for a time our grief was public.

But then we retreated to our necessary privacy. No sooner had Jimmy been buried than Kristin went into the first of her depressions, and Byron made his first Change. That very first time he stayed locked in the basement and Friederich, shouting only in German, would not let anyone go to him.

“Get out of the way you stupid old man,” Natalie snapped, reaching out to slap him across the face. But it was her brothers who pointed out that they must wait till the next morning to give Byron the elixir. Amazingly, Natalie had been pregnant again, but she miscarried a child who was so new the sex could not be determined. In the midst of this, Steiger came to me.

“Pamela, I feel like I will kill myself if I stay here.”

I didn’t make him ask. I simply said, “Go and do what you need to do and return to us when you can. Leave Delia here. We will care for her.”

“No one in this house is fit to care for anyone,” Steiger said.

“I am,” I said, “I am, and Delia will be like my very daughter. In fact, I will move into the coach house with her. Now go.”

Steiger leaned forward and embraced me, and I could smell his cologne and the sun in his hair.

“Go,” I said, and he whispered into my ear, “Pamela, you have always been a mother to me.”

I, who never cry, wept for a day after Steiger left, and that same evening, I moved into the coach house to be with Delia and pay little attention to the madness in the large house on Dimler Street.

For reasons I could not discern, Friederich took to hiding Byron’s elixir. I think he wanted to see Byron become strong as a wolf, and then I also think a part of him enjoyed locking his weak grandson, who reminded him so much of Jimmy, in the basement. Every month, for those three days we had to go through the drama of Friederich, an increasingly old and unlovable man, trying to find the elixir and hide the elixir and, at last, I kept one bottle under lock and key and Natalie kept another the same way.

But the trouble began the year that Nathan made the Change. For him it happened earlier than we thought. He was only eleven, and it was 1967, When he made the change, Friederich did not call any of us. There were signs. He could have. And by the time we came it was to the sounds of growling and snarling. It was Natalie who understood even as I did.

Friederich had chosen to transform and fight Nathan.

Even I could do very little, and I had left Delia in the house, But it was Natalie who made the decision. She had never seen Friederich transform, but she knew I had, and looking from a dark almost black slender wolf to a grizzled white one, nipping at him and drawing blood, she said, “The old one is Friederich, right?”

I nodded dumbly,

And then, just like that, Natalie pulled out her pistol, and before I could say anything, she shot him in the head, and with a whimper, Friederich fell over. The young wolf was caught unawares, and stood blankly staring at Natalie and she said, unmoved. “Go. Through that door. Go down into that basement.”

Was it that Nathan knew his mother, or was it that she was the great granddaughter of Frau Inga, and that witch blood was coming through her? Natalie had always been an amazing if infuriating woman, and now she said, “Come, my baby. Come, my baby, and we’ll fix you tomorrow. I will have just the thing for you tomorrow, but tonight you need this. Come with me.”

She led her son downstairs, and as if he were a puppy, Nathan made snuffling noises. I could hear them. Down below, sadly, Natalie harnessed her own son and stayed with him. Up above, in the living room, I stood with Katherine, and we looked at the great form of Friederich Strauss, restored to human shape and still large in his old age, his mouth open and his eyes open, a great red black bullet hole in his temple. How old had he been? I imagined him as at least thirty years older than me, He was certainly well past eighty. For sixty years his presence had swallowed all the light from this house and overshadowed every woman and child in it, and now he lay dead on the floor, his life ended by a mother who would not see an old man who had become increasingly evil harm her son.