The Wicked: A Love Story

The Book of Pamela Strauss

FOR THE FIRST FEW years of their marriage, it seemed as if Katherine was not capable of bearing children. This was in its way fine, for Friederich already had me. Ada, though, had begun to suggest that what might be needful was for me to marry, a thing I had never planned. I still didn’t, but in those day this was the only respectable way to have a child. My plan was to go to college, and I was enrolled into Wallington out in Rawlston. In this day and age Wallington is a trip down the road which can be accomplished in about forty five minutes, but in those times, when much of what is now the city was still wilderness and ponds, when the automobile was new, we took the train, and the journey by train, including the trip to the station, was an hour and a half. I remained in Wallington, in the women’s dormitory four nights of the week for the next four years.

In 1922, about the time I graduated, Katherine was pregnant with her first child, and I returned to the large house on Dimler Street. Her father had died, and Friederich, grown wealthy on his wood business as well as the business of the Dashbach family. Nevertheless, he insisted that the house needed fewer servants. He was truly the master of his domain, and it was as if America was forgetting its hatred of us during the war. Ada and I attended the birth, but when the baby was born, and named Friederich, it died the same night.

“There are charms,” Ada said, “which can be said, if you would say them so that the next time the child will come full and strong. I believe Katherine Dashbach was never a strong woman, and she gets no younger.”

I did not say that my father was getting no younger either, but then, he was not carrying the child. Again, Katherine became pregnant. A bundle of herbs was hung over the doorpost that led to her room, and in the spring of 1923, at last she gave birth to her first living child, my sister Maris. Though she was my sister, I was well old enough to be her mother. A year later Katherine was pregnant again, and by the end of 1925 she had Claire.

Still, with all the magic, Katherine miscarried easily. She lost a boy, and she lost a girl, and around this time Ada died, and her family mourned. Often I worked with her daughter, Liesle, but we were not close as I had been with Ada or with Frau Inga. After this Peter, Ada’s son, became the master of the house, and he already had two sons.

I believed that Katherine was well past childbearing, and also that she was not long for this world. I conceived the beginnings of a plan. Maybe, also, I was afraid that I would lose my own fertility, my own best years. I took herbs for a month, herbs that made me supple, and wet, filled me with life, and then, because I knew Friederich was tired of Katherine, because I knew they slept in separate rooms, I came to him at night, and loved him as I had, long ago, when it was only the two of us in that long gone house. Even as an aging man, his grip was still powerful, his body still strong. His manhood, and I had almost forgotten it, was so thick and so firm, it almost hurt when he was inside of me. I gave myself to him all too willingly until, at last, I knew I was pregnant.

Pamela! Was pregnant?By Friederich? But then, Marabeth thought, she had never known that the Keller side of her family came from the same place as the Strausses, was descended from these two witches. She had never known that Peter’s great-grandfather, hers as well, was also named Peter, or that Friederich and Pamela had once bordered in the house that was now her cousin’s. She hadn’t known anything, anything at all about the Dashbachs or about that faded sepia print in the library of Friederich’s wife, and how many children her great-grandmother had lost. That Pamela, in the very old house Marabeth grown up in, had not only had an affair with her father, but intentionally been impregnated by him…

I CARRIED THE SECRET within me, savoring it like a growing treasure under my heart. My body did not show it, except that my breasts were rounder, my body tighter. I was swollen in a way Ada would have identified, though I doubt even she would have approved, and it was in the midst of my joy that Katherine announced, that, at last, she was pregnant again.

I had no intention of not having my baby, but I could not very well remain pregnant in my stepmother’s house, carrying my own father’s child, so I took much money for myself and went journeying with good clothes, a wedding ring and the sad story of a devoted but rich husband who had died. I felt ripe, and powerful, and I was already making plans for my son, for I knew it would be a son. I even had a name, and this you will learn in time. When I gave birth to him, I planned to have him near me. I had already spoken to a family that had worked for Friederich in our first years, and told them I would give them the child. If Katherine’s baby died, and I expected it would, then I would come for the child, perhaps even switch it with the dead one.

Early in 1928, I returned to Lassador and resumed my life, feeling strangely free and full, and around that time Katherine gave birth to the last of her children, a pale, frail, sickly looking boy who, despite all appearances, continued to live, and who was baptized James. I gradually came to understand that Katherine’s child would live as my father’s heir, and the one I had born would simply have to be loved from afar. And, at last, I began to understand, or to remember, that this baby I thought competition for my own was my own brother, and the child I had born was his brother two, that I had given birth to my own sibling, and to both of these babies I must be a sister and put aside all envy.

They sat in Jim’s car,and they had been quiet a while before Seth said, “You can ask me, you know? If you want.”

“Ask you?”

“If you’re just going to pretend, you can take me home,” Seth said.

Jim blinked at him.

“I’m not really a very forward person,” Seth said. “I’ve never been a person who… I’ve always had a hard time speaking, but not right now.”

“Well, usually I’m just the opposite,” Jim said. “You… you’ve got me fucking nervous, Seth.”

Seth waited for him to continue.

“Cause I like you. I hardly know you, but I like you, and… I don;’t want to leave you.”

“Then ask me,” Seth almost pleaded.

“Come home with me tonight?”

“Yeah,” Seth said. “Yes.”