Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe? Page 7

  “When did you live here, Aunt Beatrice?”

  I didn’t expect her to answer directly, but she did. “From 1968 through 1972,” she said.

  “I was born on July 1, 1968,” I pointed out. I said this because I couldn’t bring myself to ask the question I wanted to ask, which was, Were you in Congress on the day when I was born? Because I couldn’t bring myself to ask, Were you there? Aunt Beatrice looked at me sideways through her veil of hair and said, “There’s a drawer somewhere, Calvin.”

  I waited for her to explain this remark, but she didn’t, and so I asked, “How did you end up in Stockholm?”

  “After I left Congress,” my aunt said, “I went to New York, where I met a boy. I followed him here.”

  “Who was he?”

  “He was no one,” my aunt said, and I thought I heard a little bit of the night enter her voice. And when it did, a little bit of the night entered my mind, too—I thought of my father in his grave; I thought of my mother in her grave, and in her church, and in her book; I thought of Dawn in Charlotte, and in her blog; I thought of the Otises in Congress—and so to get rid of all that I blurted out, “I have never understood men.” Where had this come from? It took me a few seconds to locate its origin. This was what Aunt Beatrice had said to me in response to my bald head, my unruly gray-and-white beard.

  My aunt nodded in approval and said, “Those were your mother’s words.”

  “My mother said that?”

  My aunt nodded again. Then she turned and threw her beer can far into the water. I can still see it, flipping end over end, can still hear its tinny splash. When my aunt heard that splash she smiled, a wide satisfied smile, as if to say of the noise, I made that.

  “‘The house of horrors,’” my aunt said. “Those were your mother’s words, too.”

  66.

  My mother once gave a sermon (and this sermon also appeared in her famous book) that provided yet another reason for John Calvin’s importance. “We cannot understand God. But we can understand John Calvin, who understands God for us.”

  John Calvin understands God for us. But apparently he could not understand men for my mother. Maybe because he was one.

  67.

  And what, after all, made our house so horrible for my mother? I didn’t find out that until later either. But I will tell you now, just to prove that I can and will. It’s not what you think. No one was raped. No one was hit. Yes, my mother cheated and my father cheated, and in fact everyone in this story at some point or other cheated, but that was not what was so horrible. No, the house was horrible for my mother because she was living in it with two men whom she didn’t understand. The two men in it didn’t understand her, or each other much either, and that was not a great feeling, and, as I said, I often felt lonely in our house, and it’s possible my father did, too, but I wouldn’t call the loneliness horrible, and I wouldn’t call the not understanding one another horrible either. It was all right. I could live with it. Apparently my father could, too. Which made it even more horrible for my mother. Because she could not live with, and love, what she couldn’t understand. Which was why she preferred John Calvin to us and, I think, even to God.

  68.

  “And in that drawer,” my aunt said, “are forty-seven birthday cards.”

  I should say here that alcohol made my aunt’s mind, and mouth, sharper, but it made mine duller. It took me several minutes to remember that my aunt had mentioned that there was a drawer somewhere and to realize that that drawer was imaginary and that the forty-seven birthday cards she hadn’t sent me were in it.

  69.

  I said earlier that my aunt’s and my walking seemed aimless. But it’s clear to me now that my aunt had an aim and that I just didn’t know what it was at the time.

  We were a good distance from our hotel now, I was pretty certain. Still along the water but with fewer pedestrians. And ahead of us was an incredibly bright spot in the middle of the darkness. It was like a UFO or a highway construction site at night. Coming from the spot, I could hear human voices, not so much talking as babbling. We walked toward it. Soon I could see several light towers surrounding what looked like a parking lot. In the middle of the lot were tents, rubble, pot smoke, handmade cardboard signs advertising, I think, food for sale: the signs were in Swedish and the food was all being ladled out of vats. I got the general sense that the place was being occupied, but by several different forces. Some of the people were wearing old secondhand military garb—lots of green and gray and epaulets and even a plumed hat—while others were wearing brightly colored serapes and ponchos and rasta hats. Then there was a man sitting behind a table. We paused in front of it, and he handed me a flyer. The words on the flyer were in English, English, apparently, the language in which you advertise small-animal pornography.

  Sexy Sexy! the flyer said, and under that appeared a photo of a small rodent.

  I said that the man was sitting behind a table. On the table was a stack of DVDs. On the cover of the DVD was a photo of what appeared to be the same small rodent.

  Other than a picture of the animal looking alert with his teeth showing, there were no other pictures. I held the flyer, flipped it over (it was blank on the other side), flipped it back over, looked at it, wondered over it.

  “Do the hamsters have sex with each other or with humans?” You might think that it was my aunt who asked this question, but no, it was me, Calvin Bledsoe. And I asked the question because I really wanted to know. I glanced at my aunt who smiled at me, as if to say, Well, of course you do, and that’s what I mean when I say that I loved her.

  “Gerbils,” the man said, in English. “And yes.” The man looked somewhat younger than me, possibly in his late thirties. His face was tan, but as smooth as my aunt’s was cracked. He had dark curly hair and a curling black mustache, and he was wearing a cream-colored thermal undershirt under his suspenders. He didn’t look Swedish, although I didn’t know what he did look like. If anything, he looked like a strongman in the circus.

  “I guess you’re wondering about the genitalia,” the man said in a kind of flat, American-sounding English.

  “Really small?” I said.

  “Not our special gerbils,” the man said.

  This whole time the man had been staring. Not at me but at my aunt. I didn’t like that: it was as though he were attempting to set her on fire with his eyes. I’d seen my mother look at her congregation like that. As though she were burning with the truth and wouldn’t be happy until they burned also.

  My aunt said something in Swedish to the small-animal pornographer. Her voice sounded softer, more whispery than usual. After she’d said whatever she’d said, she took off her glasses. Her eyes were disturbing in the klieg lights: cold blue but also runny, like melting ice.

  The small-animal pornographer looked up into bleached-out sky as though in deep thought, although maybe it was just that he didn’t want to look at my aunt’s eyes. Meanwhile, I looked back at the gerbil on the flyer. His whiskers were at attention and it seemed to me that he had a remarkably sensitive, alert face. “What’s the gerbil’s name?” I asked the small-animal pornographer, and he looked away from the sky and at me. He seemed startled. It was clear that no one had ever asked him that particular question before.

  “Gerbie,” he said to me. And then he said something to Aunt Beatrice in his own language and she said something in return, and they went back and forth like that for a while. Finally, he handed her a DVD and she took it. It seemed like part of a transaction, and so I expected my aunt to pay the man, but instead she did something very strange: she hugged him. Just walked around the table and hugged him. He didn’t hug her back. He kept his arms to his side as Aunt Beatrice held him. I felt jealousy flare up in my throat and face. And I also felt an intense dislike for the man; that he wasn’t hugging my aunt back seemed like an insult. Don’t hug him, I wanted to say to my aunt. Hug her, I wanted to say to the small-animal pornographer. Eventually, he did: his arms were mostly pinned
by my aunt’s hug, but slowly his right arm bent at the elbow and his hand went to my aunt’s back and stayed there, for one second, then several, and I felt my aunt had been respected, and I was even more jealous than before.

  And then my aunt let go of the man, and we walked away.

  “Who was that?” I asked my aunt

  “Him?” my aunt said, and I could hear the shrug in her voice. “He’s no one.”

  “All right,” I said, trying to make my shrug audible, too. But in truth, I was happy to hear Aunt Beatrice say he was no one. It is easier to feel like you’re someone if you know someone else is no one.

  70.

  Aunt Beatrice bought yet two more Carlsbergs, warm, from another man sitting behind another table, and we drank them as we left the encampment, if that’s what it was, and walked back toward the hotel. Now that we were out from under the klieg lights, we could better see the stars, the deep blackness of the sky around them. There were more people, all of them seemingly in groups, laughing. In front of us a ferry sounded its horn—a long blast and then a shorter one—and then began backing out of its berth. Passengers leaned against the railings and waved. We seemed to pass through the air the way the boat seemed to pass through the water. The air felt light around us, is what I’m saying.

  My aunt handed me the DVD, and with it I beat a happy tune against my thigh as we walked.

  “Again and again,” she said thoughtfully, “we look for a better way, a deeper truth, and instead we find vulgarity, we find irony, we find cheapness, we find jokes. We should want what is high, which is difficult, and instead we settle for what is low, which is easy.”

  This was a quote, of course, from my mother’s famous book. I can’t say at that moment that I was happy to hear it. Suddenly my mother’s face appeared before me. I saw her seeing me holding a large can of beer in one hand, the pornographic gerbil DVD in the other. Calvin, she said, her voice full of judgment and disappointment, and I waited, full of dread, to hear what she would say next, but she didn’t say anything next and then disappeared.

  “Nola makes a fair point,” Aunt Beatrice said. “But then, it’s probably a mistake to think that it was easy for the gerbil.”

  71.

  It must have been after midnight by the time we reentered the hotel. The lobby was empty, intensely so. It reminded me of mother’s church—not during one of my mother’s services but when I was there during off-hours, alone, up in the choir loft. I remembered during those moments feeling a sense of expectation. Nothing is happening, I always thought, in my mother’s empty church, but something is about to happen. Although usually the only thing that was about to happen was that I was about to write one of my blog posts.

  “He was my son,” my aunt said. Her voice was quieter than usual, but still, it bounced around the empty lobby.

  “Who was?” I said. Aunt Beatrice didn’t answer, but she didn’t have to: I knew she was talking about the small-animal pornographer. I noted that she spoke about him in the past tense, just as I’d noted earlier that she’d said he was no one. And I thought that said a great deal about the seriousness of their estrangement. And I really hoped she would never end up speaking about me like that.

  72.

  Our rooms were connected, but they had separate doors to access our separate rooms from the hallway. My aunt entered hers, and I entered mine. With my left hand I flicked the light switch and then with my right hand tossed the gerbil DVD onto the couch that was to the right of the door. The DVD landed faceup. And next to it, I saw, was a copy of my mother’s famous book. It was a hardback copy, facedown. On the back cover was a photo of my mother in her church, standing at her pulpit. The way the DVD and the book were positioned, next to each other on the couch, it looked as though my mother and Gerbie were having a conversation about John Calvin.

  73.

  “When I was a child I read John Calvin,” my mother writes at the beginning of her famous book, “and to read John Calvin as a child is to be made aware of all the great mysteries of this world, and one of the great mysteries of this world is why more children don’t read John Calvin.”

  74.

  It is a strange thing, having a mother who has written a famous book. But it is an even stranger thing being in that famous book. I looked at the back cover of that book and saw myself at age four, in chapter 4, being asked by my mother while being pushed on the swing what the difference was between theism and the new atheistic science. I saw myself in chapter 7, ten years old, in the emergency room in the hospital in the next town over, after I’d accidentally fallen and broken my arm while reading John Calvin while walking down the stairs in my house, about which my mother wrote, “My son went to John Calvin for salvation and to Bangor for X-rays.” I saw myself in chapter 11, sixteen years old, not going to the prom, and my mother telling me that it was necessary to be alone because to be alone is to find yourself in close proximity to the sacred.

  75.

  My mother’s acolytes read her famous book and saw me as lucky. Dawn read the book and saw me as a loser. I wondered how the person who’d left the book on my couch saw me.

  76.

  I knocked on the door between my aunt’s part of the suite and my own, and my aunt told me the door was unlocked, to come in. She was sitting on her bed, feet dangling. Her room smelled faintly of dirty laundry, and it occurred to me that neither my aunt nor I had changed clothes since we left Congress because we hadn’t brought a change of clothes.

  Anyway, I showed her the book, explained how I’d found it on the couch next to the gerbil DVD. The book wasn’t mine, I told her, and she told me it wasn’t hers either: that meant that someone else had left it there. Aunt Beatrice seemed to be thinking, thinking, thinking—she adjusted her glasses many times over the course of many seconds—until, through the closed window, there came the muted blast of a ferry horn, and then my aunt stood up and said that it was time to leave.

  “The hotel?” I said.

  “Stockholm,” she said, walking out of the room and then calling over her shoulder, “Make sure to bring your cousin’s film.” Cousin! It’s odd how that hadn’t occurred to me immediately. I had a cousin! Big deal, you say, but it was a big deal for someone like me, who for so long had only a mother and a father. I could feel the world filling in around me. Anyway, I picked up my cousin’s gerbil film, then also picked up the copy of my mother’s famous book, looked at her stern face, her open mouth (the picture had been taken midsermon), her alive eyes. They seemed to be seeking me out, and I flipped the book over and tossed it back on the couch, where it bounced off the cushion and fell to the floor. I left it there and in doing so felt like I’d taken another small step toward growing up and leaving my mother behind. Although it turned out that there would be plenty of copies of my mother’s famous book in my future anyway.

  Seven

  77.

  “Never travel by car or truck,” Aunt Beatrice was telling me, “unless they’re stolen.”

  We were on the ferry to Copenhagen, on the upper deck, looking at, well, nothing: the world was made of fog. And the fog let nothing else in. Not even seagulls or seagull noise. There was just the churn of the ferry’s engine and the wet of the fog on our faces.

  My aunt was telling me the best way to flee, if I had to flee. I had my phone out, taking notes. Later, when I consulted these notes, I noticed that my aunt rarely told me the reasons behind her rules. Just that she had them and that I should have them, too.

  “And the train . . .” My aunt kept her mouth open, as though she were prepared to finish her sentence, but then didn’t, as though she felt there had been too much said about the train already.

  “No, it’s best to travel by boat, ship, ferry. The water route,” my aunt continued with satisfaction. There had been a women’s clothing store in the ferry terminal, and she’d had just enough time to buy new clothes: bright blue pants, a white turtleneck sweater. She wore the same white sneakers. She looked nautical, and her clipper ship neck
lace made her look even more so: it dangled over the lip of her white turtleneck, like my mother’s silver cross always hung on the outside of her gray turtleneck. Finally, a detail from my last conversation with Dawn fell into my head: the name of the real estate company that had listed my under-contract house in Congress.

  “Admiralty Realty,” I said, and my aunt smiled. There was something bashful about this smile. She looked down as she smiled and adjusted her glasses. For the first time, I had that sense that the sunglasses could be a shield for my aunt and not just a weapon.

  “My house isn’t really under contract, is it?” I asked.

  “It is according to Admiralty Realty,” Aunt Beatrice said.

  “Admiralty Realty isn’t really a real estate agency, is it?” I asked.

  “It is according to its website,” Aunt Beatrice said.

  “But you made the website,” I said.

  “Well, I had the right,” my aunt said, and she smiled bashfully again. “After all, I am the Admiral.”

  But before I could ask my aunt what made her the Admiral, whether it was an actual rank that she’d actually earned or whether it was a nickname, and if it was the latter, who’d given it to her, or why she’d made the fake website in the first place, our conversation moved to who had placed the copy of my mother’s book in my hotel room, and why.

  “And how,” I added. My aunt didn’t respond to that, so I elaborated: “I mean, who even knew we were in Stockholm in the first place?”