The Beasts: A Winter's Tale

“The piano,” Rebecca said, “Use the piano. Songs like that need the piano, and he loved that hymn.”

Natalie had said something, and Rebecca didn’t really care. She loved her, but sometimes the old woman was infuriating, and it was because of her that she had gone to the morgue and seen what she had seen, that she had seen her beloved Nathan in a way she never wished to see him. But in those last days before he left, there had also been a lot of seeing him the way she didn’t want to see him.

This is a part of marriage I suppose.

Till death do us part, for richer or poorer, for sickness and health, but what if the sickness led to death, what if poorer lasted past the grave? So many ended a marriage well before the end of life, but what no one told you is how married you were long past the death of your loved one.

He was still here. She wanted to imagine him in that rayon Hawaiian shirt with the palm trees, the red one that might have been silly looking, but fit on him so snug. She remembered his dark thick hair and the sharpness of his handsome face, the eyes you could fall into, eyes Marabeth had inherited.

She remembered how little she cared about church or God or anything like that, and she remembered coming into that church, Saint Agatha’s, not Saint Ursula, and the singing:

Glory and praise to our God

Who alone gives light to our days

Many are the blessings he sends

To those who trust in his ways!

She had met him in Miami, and so, despite everything, she associated Nathan Strauss with the sun. She had been running away from home in the way that young adults can, and at the time she was Rebecca Cunningham. She was high on Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and Nathan reminded her of them, with a touch of Hunter S. Thompson. They got high a lot and almost the first time they had met they went to bed together. Wouldn’t the kids be surprised by that! Though who knows what the hell Marabeth would be surprised by?

But then she had come to know him because he wanted her to. And she didn’t really mind telling him everything. About her Irish father and her Jewish mother and a family that was done in by fear and depression and too much drinking, and how she couldn’t wait to be away from them, and it was hard to say exactly when the alchemy had happened, but they were married soon after, and when Nathan had asked her if she wanted to come and live in Lassador, she said, well, hell, why not?

But if the children did not think of them that way, did not think of her that way, whose fault was that? The Rebecca Cunningham Strauss who had shown up in the late seventies in short skirts and long red hair that fell all the way to her firm ass was a wilder, crazier girl who instantly felt cowed by the pale and dark haired Kellers. And they were all Kellers by then, except for Byron, who wasn’t long for this world, and the old and indomitable Pamela.

“You mean that your mother and her brothers married your father and his sisters,” Rebecca said one night in bed when she was still trying to think the whole arrangement was funny.

“Yeah, how do you like that?”

“I don’t,” she said.

But that’s what memory does. Memory makes you forget, and there was that business. The business of the Change. Of course he had told her. They were not married yet. They’d just been having their affair, and sitting in bed, in Florida, where warm air came through the window of their shitty motel room, one which she still remembered fondly forty years later. She had been telling him all sorts of things about herself. All about that time when she was fourteen and she had taken an entire bottle of pills because she didn’t think she belonged in this world anymore.

“Something happened to me too,” Nathan began, “when I was fourteen.”

And when Rebecca looks back she realizes this is why she married him. Not out of pity, and certainly not out of any sense that she needed to be married to a werewolf, but because no man had ever been this honest with her, and she knew no other man would again. So she knew, sort of, what she was getting into when she came to live in the house on Dimler Street, when she met the ancient Pamela, and her mother-in-law Natalie, who at first seemed so severe. Byron was as young and handsome as Jim was now, but more frail, and in those days, red headed like Rebecca, Delia was alive.

“Delia,” Rebecca murmured.

She saw so many movies of women and women’s friendship, but in her real life, the only woman friend she’d had was Delia, and if she was honest about it, the only friend, really, she’d had was Delia. Delia Strauss and Rebecca Strauss. The Strauss Sisters they called them, or the New Strauss Sisters because Maris and Claire and Pamela were the old ones. Some called them the twins, laughing, hair flying in the wind they could conquer anything, and in those days it seemed there was so much to conquer.

“There is a weight on this family,” Nathan said. “And in this house.”

Part of Rebecca had wanted to say, “Well, then why the hell not leave it?” But then, of course, the weight was in the blood. And also the best cure for it seemed to be here.

“We can overcome it together.”

She often said that when it was her, Nathan and Delia. “We can do anything together.”

None of them would be terribly old now. She was not very old, certainly not young, but not ancient, and yet, out of the four of them, the four musketeers, she was the only one remaining, and all of her shine was gone, she had to admit that. There was no more fighting, merely accepting, and she often felt as if there was nothing left to be done. She had fought something like the good fight and she had waited faithfully for her husband to return. Nathan had returned, and now what was there for her to do? Start a new life? Walk away from this? How? How, when one had spent over forty years being a Strauss did she walk away from it and become something else?

She reached into her pocket and began to untangle the old blue glass bead rosary. Rose had given this to her. Its beads were light and small, and it wrapped easily around her hands, the little silver cross with its blue enamel shone like a small gem. When Nathan had wanted to go back to church, he had chosen Saint Agatha’s which was prettier anyway. There was an organ, but they didn’t use it. These were still the days of the folk guitar Mass. Old Rose, dark as mahogany, had been born into that parish, and on the Easter vigil, when Rebecca had come up from the baptismal waters, this had been her gift.

I never learned to love saying the rosary, but I did love to have one.

Now someone might mistake her for one of those old pious women, and in the last few years she had occasionally gone to Saint Ursula’s with her husband’s large family, but she wished that the funeral was at Saint Agatha’s, with the people they had known and the pastor who had helped her all the previous times it seemed like Nathan would never reappear.

“It’s your call,” Marabeth said. “I’ll stand right by you and see it’s your call.”

Yes, Marabeth was good like that, and really, Rebecca reflected, she hadn’t been a very supportive mother, not supportive enough to deserve that. But there were some things Marabeth still did not understand, like that it was not her call, that Nathan belonged to the family more than to her, and that Natalie, who had been the first to go to Saint Agatha’s, would have still not approved of a Strauss being buried out of any church but Saint Ursula’s.

Kristian Strauss was getting dressed, and he had turned around to look at Jenean twice before he said, “You’ve got something on your mind. You really ought to say it.”

“No, ” Jenean sat on the bed, and she took up all of that ash blond hair he was coming to love, even when he found strands of it in his mouth.

“It’s too soon. It’s silly.”

Kris turned around and suddenly cupped her chin, kissing her.

“Tell me.”

“I wished that I could come with you, come to the funeral. Be by your side, for your dad. Let people know you had someone. And that,” she shook her head, “is a little too clingy, and a little too soon.”

Kris smiled at her.

“I wish more of the women in my life had been more clingy.”

“And I realize that right now is not the time,” Jenean said. “This time is for your family, and we’re not there yet.”

Kris pulled on his jacket.

“Would you like to be?”

“Huh?”

“Would you like to be?” Kris said. “Because, I think you’re good for me, and I hope I could be good for you, and maybe we can move on to more than we are right now. If you’d like.”

“I haven’t even seen your place.”

“I don’t actually have a place.”

“Cause you haven’t had to get one. But... do you think you might?”

“Is it important?”

Then Kris said. “It’s important. Yes. I haven’t had to keep my own place for a while.”

“You’ve been in your university office and then banging chicks when it suited you. You’ve been a damn bachelor.”

“I could make a nest,” Kris was tucking in his shirt. “I’ll start to make a nest.”

He leaned into the bed and kissed her before he left. This was her late day, and she was going into a long shift at work. She needed to rest, but falling into her arms he was ready to make love again, to climb into that bed and begin again what they had so recently ended. There was no time, though, and he had to get home and out of these clothes and into the shower and into his good clothes for this day.

He would tell her, he decided as he drove home, heading down Ashton. He had to tell her the truth if they were going to stay together, and he believed they would. Or could. He’d stopped believing in things like that. There hadn’t been any woman where he’d known her long enough to even consider telling the truth. With Jenean he felt so at home and with Jenean he also felt that there were things she needed to share, and that she could not share them with him until he could share himself with her.

I ought to feel worse. I ought to feel so terrible today!

And he does. His dad is gone. But Dad has been gone a long time. Now something is ended. The long waiting is over. He crosses the Main Street Bridge into downtown and thinks about going to visit his sister. She’ll be at the house soon enough, though. The old shops are giving way to the larger buildings and the tall downtown riverfront buildings are ahead of him when he stops at the red light and calls his sister.

“You need a ride to the house? I’m in the area.”

“Kristian!” Marabeth sounds incredibly happy, and then he can tell next that she’s trying to take that happiness down, knows what today is. “No, no, don’t worry about it. I’ll be there. I’m hardly even up yet. You have a good night?”

“I… the light is green.”

“I’ll see you at the house. We’ll have a good talk before we go to Saint Ursula’s.”

“Love you, Sis,” Kris says.

He hangs up before Marabeth can say anything and heads into downtown. A block later he crosses Birmingham knowing that four blocks west is Marabeth’s place, and traveling south on Buren Avenue, coming out of downtown, he knows Germantown is to the east and Little Hungary to the West, and he turns into Germantown when he sees Saint Agatha’s, the old pink brick church with the wide rose window, as light and beautiful on a winter day as it is in the summer. There is the church he loved. Dad should have been buried there. And why the fuck is Marabeth in such a great mood? As he turns east on Dimler and sees the Schiller beer factory behind the houses, he thinks, I wonder if she’s getting any. I bet that’s what it is.But Marabeth is four miles north now, and he’s coming down the long row of stately townhouses toward the large old one he has spent most of his life in.

He turns, and the car rumbles through the alley, over snow and pebbles, and he parks in the garage and comes out of it, passing the coach house. What if that became his place? But would Jenean like that? But does that matter? What if he liked it? What it he had his own separate space? He was so used to having that third floor and calling it his own separate space, moving around the fact that he had to walk through the kitchen and be seen by his family, wondering what they were thinking. What if he were to have this space which could be, after all, entirely his own?

The kitchen is quiet. He remembers the other night, when Peter and Marabeth came to the house together, when he and Jim and Grandma and Mom were together and Peter had simply said, “We have to talk.”

And there it was, and there he was looking at Jim and Peter, all of them knowing what each of them had thought was a very private struggle was a family one. He remembers Jim looking at him, Jim the golden cousin, the blue eyed wonder. And now, this morning, Jim enters the kitchen. He is already dressed, but of course he is, and he looks good, but of course he does. What is more, Jim has been through the same grief, and Jim only says, “You want some coffee?”

“Yeah,” Kris says. “That’d be great.”

Jim nods.

“I’ll bring it up to you.”

“You don’t—” Kris begins, and then he says, “Bring yourself a cup up too. I’ve got cigarettes, or are you too healthy for them now?”

“Not today,” Jim gives him a brief smile. “I’ll be up when the coffee’s ready.”