The Blood: A Denouement
Chapter Six
The Journal of Nathan Strauss
They shall gather my children into their fold: they shall bring the glory of the stars into the hearts of men.
-The Book of the Law
In her room, Marabeth Strauss continued to read.
I told her today. I told her about the shadow. I suppose that’s a metaphor, but it’s the thing that matters. I told her how sometimes it swamps me so much I almost can’t go on. And the reason for this honesty is because we were making out all night in that little dive in Florida. Her hair was smelling so good and she’s going back to college, and she said something about me looking like Rock Hudson. I wanted her to know what she would really be getting if she was going to get me. Before we can go anywhere else, before we can move forward she’s got to know I’m crazy as a loon.
It was when Marabeth read this that she started looking at the dates.
Until this moment she hadn’t realized her father was telling her a story. He had not simply given her his journals, he had given her what he thought was important out of his journals, and cobbled them together into something. But why in the world was his desire for Delia and the weird things she had done to him, or vice versa, part of the journal she received? And, of course, Marabeth had to remember, her father hadn’t read Pamela’s journal. He didn’t know that Delia was not only Steiger’s daughter, but Steiger’s sister and his daughter by Pamela. He did not know that Delia was the granddaughter of Friederich as well as his great-granddaughter, or that he was, in fact, linked to her by all of those ways. Presumably, Delia did not know either, and if Pamela had known anything about Delia’s liaisons with the cousins she didn’t know were cousins, then that certainly had not been brought up. Even though Nathan had not retyped all of these words out, and he had cut out with a knife bits and pieces from old books he’d written through over the years, he was telling her a story as much as Pamela had, and so, when she read the next note, she was not surprised that it was some time later and Nathan reported:
She has agreed to marry me! But she has said she won’t do it until she comes home with me. I told her I have a great secret and she said she has to see it. I have stopped taking the pills. We must arrive in Ohio before the full moon. We will go to Grange’s house. He’s married a Jewish girl, and apparently she knows what he is. She must. How could you not tell your wife? But Granger will help to bind me so I can show Becca. She has to know or there is no happiness for us. She cannot not know what she is getting into.
Seeing Lassador through someone else’s eyes is an education. I say I’m seeing it through Rebecca’s eyes, but maybe I’m seeing it through my own after being in Florida so long. Down south everything was so full of color. It was almost too much color, too much heat. Here, everything is muted like a dirty watercolor, and Germantown is shabby. The streets need to be paved and the sidewalks are covered in trash. A few old places try to look proud. Every year, one of Mom’s brothers comes to paint the shutters on 1948 Dimler, and I have to say, no matter how ragged everything else looks, our old house is still in shape.
The house looks like it needs to be aired out. Not that it smells like it does, but it looks like it does. It’s just so old, and it hasn’t been redecorated since 1945. Pamela is living back in the house, upstairs. The carriage house is empty. Byron seems mad as ever. Kristin’s still a crazy bitch. Mom seems suspicious of Rebecca, suspicious of a strange person coming into this house, and of course that makes sense. The best way to desctibe her is protective. Pamela is always hard to describe, but she doesn’t seem afraid. Not ever.
Becca says, “This is the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen. I can’t wait to meet the rest of your family.”
I think she’s nuts.
It happened. Of course I told Grange that if he said a word to my mother, I would kill him, and I told him there was no help for it, I had to be bound.
You could do it at your house he told me. The bonds are there too.
I could not I told him, because my mother and aunt and my sister are there also.
On the full moon, in the basement of this house, behind the steel doors he has added he binds me, and when he says to Rebecca, “You can stay upstairs” she says, no, she’ll stay right down here with me. I want to tell her no. I’m afraid too. But the look in her eyes that I know very well by now, says that this is not going to be an option.
She’s seen me naked before, but not bound, and after a while, as the night comes on, I feel the madness and the wildness coming.
When I wake up the next morning, she is asleep on the other end of the room. Whatever terror she had, did not last. Did I stop my howling, stop barking? I see that I finally ate the bloody carcass set before me. Only the bones remain, cracked by the strong jaws I can’t remember.
“Did it terrify you?” I asked her.
“It did. I was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, though. If I had died in your jaws I wouldn’t have minded.”
She remained with me for the next two nights, and on the fourth we went to the house and announced our plans to marry.
When Mother looked at us, looked at Rebecca, Rebecca only said, “There is nothing that Nathan has hidden from me. Nothing.”
R&N
Together with their Parents
Rebecca Susan Cunningham
&
Nathan Friederich Strauss
Request the pleasure of your company at the celebration of their union
Saturday the Fifth of October, Nineteen-Hundred and Seventy-Eight
At three o’clock in the afternoon
The Cathedral of Saint Ursula, Lassador, Ohio,
Reception to Follow
Rebecca works more than me. I just can’t always do it. I’ve started the temp agency thing cause these are jobs for a small time, and they come to an end, and then I do something else. This seems to be what I’m good for. I was tired of the way Becca looked at me when I kept on getting fired, and today when I get home Becca says, “There’s a call from your mom.”
I know I’ll call her later, but I know Rebecca wants to tell me what they discussed.
“She says she doesn’t know why you don’t just come back home. Grange’ll set you up in his office, and you won’t have to worry about money. We’ll have the house, so you won’t have to worry about rent. Or anything. Which is good for you. Good for us?’
And I ask her if she means it’s good cause I can’t hold down a job, and Rebecca doesn’t say anything.
I don’t want to live in my mom’s house, in my grandmother’s house I tell her. I’d be as big a failure as Byron.
“You should call your mother,” is all Becca says.
I do, and Mom says I should come home.
“Kristin wants you back too, and so does Pamela.”
I can’t tell if that’s the truth. It’s not that Pamela doesn’t care, but I can’t imagine her saying, “I want Nathan back.” Or that she wants anyone back. And I tell mom I don’t want to have to come back and live under her roof.
“It’s not my roof,” is all my mom says.
And then she says that when my Great Grandfather Dashbach died, the house and much of the business went to Grandfather, and under his will it would have gone to Dad, but Dad died and so, the day Friederich died, the house and half of the beer factory went to me.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me this?” I asked her.
She said, “Because you wanted to be free and independent,” but I said I wanted to see that will, and that it was shitty not to know this until now. And then I said, “Well, does Rebecca know?”
“I told it all to her, so she’ll probably be asking you to come home, and I think you should.”
When I stood there not saying anything, Mom also said, “And Rebecca told me she’s pregnant. You all are expecting. So the days of pleasing yourself are through.”
I am not entirely sure how I feel that my mother, the woman who saved my life once, didn’t tell me about my inheritance, but did tell me about my child before my wife had the chance to. There is no help for it. I am hopeless at making money, but then I don’t really need to spend it, so I should be okay. I was surprised that my grandmother or mother never owned the house, but apparently my great grandfather left my grandmother Katherine a substantial inheritance anyway. I’ve got half a mind to come back, take the deed, sell that huge fucker and then chuck all those old bitches onto the street and come back to Florida with the money. I know that I won’t
We have named her Marabeth. Actually Pamela named her. She said it was an old family name from a time when we were lords and ladies. I don’t believe we were ever lords and ladies and I think old Pam is half cracked.
When Me and Becca came back to the house it was only a few days before, at the dinner table, she announced, “If this is really going to be our house, it’s going to be our house,” and she started renovating everything, taking down old curtains, getting rid of furniture, having the walls repainted. I don’t know how Mom felt about it, and Pamela said nothing. Kristin and Byron never have opinions on anything. All this is to say Becca went into labor while she was painting the dining room, and a bucket of eggshell paint spilled all over the old floor. Even in the hospital bed with this little bitty baby, she is talking about the renovations.
“It hardly matters, because those floors are going to be stripped,” she says. “But I won’t be doing it. That’ll be so much turpentine, and that can’t be good for the baby.”
So many people are coming in and out of the hospital to visit. Grange and his wife Vanessa and their kid Peter, who just keeps reaching out to play with Mara. You can tell they’re going to be best friends! Cousin Marianne comes from the convent. Claire and Maris congratulate Mom on her first grandchild, though when Claire says it, a strange look passes over Maris’s face, and I can’t tell why. Kristin and Byron are always there, but so is Pamela, who is more tender than I could imagine, and who looks on Mara with a sort of hunger.
“This will be an amazing girl,” she insists in that throwback German accent I always tried to make fun of, but that really just scared me. It’s strange she says such things about Marabeth because Pamela has several nieces and two sisters, and I’m sure she never said that about any of them.
And then, on the day Becca is being discharged, comes an old demon in a short, black skirt, red hair flying about, and she rushes on Becca, kisses her and says, “I’m Delia, I’m home, and we’re going to be best friends.”