Ch 41

Madeline left the guest room and spent a while speaking with Alex, Lisette and Julia, who had started dinner. It smelled like pot roast although I didn't much care what she made for supper. My thoughts were on Alex, not hunger. I could hear him telling Madeline how he and Lisette had found a toad in the back yard. By the sound of him, one would have thought the toad was made of gold.

"…and we kept Bessie from eating it, because she thought it was the rubber ball, so we moved it away from the house and put it in our backyard, well, Father's backyard. And do you know why we moved it? Because once Charles told me thattoads can be poisonous…"

He never once took a breath. Quite remarkable, really, that a child of his age could say so much in one breath.

"….and Father would be furious if Bessie ate a toad. Why, she would be sick on his bed. And if she was sick on his bed he would tie her up and leave her someplace. Or if she died, he would be the one who would have to bury her, and he doesn't want to dig a hole in the yard…."

I thumbed through the book I had found in the box and chuckled to myself. He watched me closer and listened better than I had ever guessed.

Once he was more aware of the world, when he was around the age of five or so, I assumed I would be the last thing he would notice. He had Madeline to wash his clothes and fed him and holler at him for ridiculous things. He had Charles to teach him and tell him of the world. He had Lisette as a playmate and Meg as an aunt who listened to him ramble without ever batting an eye. He even had Julia as a nanny when he bumbled through the backyard and walked into her kitchen.

For the most part, he had a good life, with plenty of people around him to watch over his every move and pay attention to what he did. What had I been to him other than a grim figure that rarely looked him in the eye?

The older he became the more I realized I was afraid of him. When he was merely an infant or a toddler who knew no better it was simple to love him, to hold him close and speak with him. While I wrote music, he sat on the floor and played contentedly at my feet. Sometimes he sat on my lap while I read and begged me to tell him what the books were about. I obliged, wrapping one arm around his body, feeling his rib cage rise and fall.

He would close his eyes as I read to him things that no child of his age would find interesting. He stayed mostly because the sound of my voice lulled him to sleep, and once he told me that I read better stories than Meg.

But then he grew. As the years passed he gazed longingly outside and came to realize that my lap and the library were, in a sense, nothing more than a cage. When he grew old enough Madeline took him down to the market and Meg took him by the stock yards to watch the auctions. He knew that there were larger, grander, better things available. Things I would never show him.

Never had the threat of losing him seemed closer than while I sat and waited for him to speak with me. Now that Christine was here, he would find opportunities I could not give him. He would see the grandeur of the world as he had never seen before, the things he had only known in the books Charles made him study. Christine would offer and Alex would see what it was to be the peer of royalty. He would see everything while in her care...Russia, Africa, the United States, the Far East, Australia…everything. She had everything.

In two nights, she would flash a lovely smile, open her arms to her bastard son, and tantalize him with the world in the palm of her hand.

In two nights, he would hear me ask him to stay with me. Out of mercy, out of compassion, I would ask him to remain with me, with his father. With a ghost.

And in two nights, I would see him leave forever.

The book page I had absently stopped at grew wet with a single tear. Christine could have done anything else to me, but not this. She couldn't take him from me, not when she didn't know how to spell his name, when she had never even sent him a letter. She had done nothing but give him life and even that had been a mistake

Everything else I could still forgive her for, but taking Alexandre? Never. I would hate her for the rest of her life should she take him from me.

My hands began to shake. My breaths turned to gasps for air. She would steal him from me out of my own house.

The door creaked open and I quickly glanced up, running my fingers over my eyes. By the tapping on the floor I knew who had come to visit me: the dog.

"Well what do you want?" I asked. I closed the book in my hands and slid it under the pillow.

Bessie cocked her head to the side and whined. I tapped twice on my leg and she tried to gallop toward the bed. The wooden floors didn't agree with her four feet and she ran in place for a moment, ears flopping from side to side, tongue lolling from her maw. Somehow she managed to gain momentum and ended up slamming into the bed with a grunt.

"Honestly," I said with a shake of my head. I leaned over the bed and scratched behind one of her ears, chuckling at her antics. Basset hounds have always been the most ridiculous creatures, highly intelligent but lacking grace.

Her limbs were far too short to climb onto the bed, but she tried her best to scurry as fast as she could, leaping into the air on her back legs. I watched her for a moment as she struggled but then she growled at me, finding no amusement in her failure. I grabbed her under the chest and placed her on the bed. Once I managed to get her to sit, I ran both hands along her sides. Someone had fed her, it seemed, as I couldn't feel her ribs, though I suppose three days weren't enough to turn her into a bag of bones.

She continued to shift and thrash me with her wickedly excited tail. She had gotten this way before when I went down to the cellar and walked all the way to the opera house. I had been gone for several hours longer than she had apparently found necessary. She bayed at me, then squatted.

"If you pee on the bed, I'll toss you out the window," I threatened as she whined. "And then once Julia finds out I let you on the bed, I'll be in the yard beside you."

She stared at me as though it was the most marvelous thing she had heard in her life.

"I suspect you've been worse off than I have, what with Madeline caring for everyone in the house. God knows what Meg would do if she was forced from the nest. She can barely care for herself, that girl. You're probably better off in the cellar than around the rest of them."

Bessie made a half-growl half-yawning sound in protest.

"They know I care for them," I assured her.

Her entire body trembled, her tail whipping through the air. She stared at me from beneath her wrinkled brow and I finally relented, shifting towards the headboard to allow her fifty pound frame additional room. Once I moved, she rolled onto her back and stared at me impatiently, back legs kicking at my shins.

"Demanding, gluttonous creature, aren't you?" I whispered as I rubbed her chin. "As well you should be. I hear Madeline has kept you in confinement? I also hear you bit someone?"

She whined again and I smiled at her.

"You should have drawn blood."

The reason I always appreciated Bessie was that she spoke her own mind in her own tongue oblivious to the obvious borders that hindered our communication. When no one else would listen, I had two velvety long ears always willing. She scraped away at my loneliness, at the solitude I had insisted upon.

There were nights when I wondered if Alex had wanted her at all or if he had insisted on a dog for my benefit. I had heard him ask Madeline if I was angry at him. It was a week after the first article claimed that Christine was coming back for the Columbian Exhibition.

"Why doesn't Father come downstairs?"

"He just likes being alone," Madeline had told him.

"But why?" Alex had persisted. He was stubborn, insatiable when it came to answers.

Madeline hated his persistence. Perhaps she feared it would lead him in the direction I had strayed. "Because he does. Because he doesn't like people."

"But what if—"

"Hush. Just leave him be, Alex. Just leave him be."

The very next day twenty francs ended up missing from my writing desk and a ball of hair sat whining on the kitchen floor. I stood, arms crossed, jaw tight as I looked from the dog to Alex. He had looked so elated as he knelt beside Bessie that I waved a hand at him and said that if the dog urinated anywhere in the house, I would throw it in a bag and drown it in the river. I returned to my room, not even turning once he thanked me for letting him keep the dog he had 'found'. There was no way I could have made him return her. In so many ways I had disappointed him by denying him days at the park or walks down to the bakery. If he wanted a dog, then so be it. At least he had something.

In the past year, I had done nothing for him. Where once I stood in the doorway and watched over his afternoon lessons, there was nothing. I found myself preoccupied in scouring newspapers. Hour after hour I stayed locked in my room as I dug up information on whether or not Christine would attend. My German and English became better as I went through pages of every newspaper I could find.

Then one day, the dog was sitting at my bedroom door with her leash tied around the doorknob. Alex had left for the day with Madeline. I stared at the animal and she stared at me. Infuriated I allowed her into the room to keep her from barking. Once she came into my room for the afternoon and had strips of beef feed to her there was no making her leave. She slept in my room that night. Not once did Alex say a word of it.

That had been his way to enter my world, to creep into my heart; I realized as I sat in bed and listened to him talk about the toad. Bessie had been a gift, an offering of companionship from a son who had stood on the outside for so long. A dog, a simple animal, was a present from a child who had no idea that his father feared losing him; that dreaded the day he would see me unmasked. A seven-year-old child, my child, groping in vain for the entrance to the dark gates I had built.

My God, what had I done?

Everything I did to keep him with me, to keep him wanting, had pushed him away. He had always been everything to me, the reason why I knew I still woke in the morning when I had never deserved to take that first breath.

I wondered if he still searched for a way into my heart, for a way to my affection.

He never knew he was already there, that he had always been there, and that nothing would ever take my love for him away. Not even his own mother.

Bessie licked my chin, undoubtedly tasting the salty rivers that trailed from my eyes.

"It seems we've both been in hell," I muttered.

Bessie whined again and continued to lick my hand, washing her warm tongue over the bruises and scrapes.

I looked away from her dark eyes and stared at the window that Alex had used to enter the room the previous night. Two days. I had two days left until Christine's lunch with him. Two days until she would make her rounds like a vulture. She had slowly circled in the air and waited for the perfect moment to indulge in the last glorious feast of my suffering. She descended down to pick the last of my carcass clean. I thought there had been nothing left to take from me yet she had found something. It was only a scrap, but I could feel her reach through my ribs and tear away at the bloody remnants of my heart. Once again she had it, my waiting, writhing, suffering heart.

Without intending toI pushed Bessie from the bed and curled up on my side, shaking with soundless sobs. Each movement sent a wave of sharp inside and out. Already I began to mourn Alex leaving me for good. Alone I embraced myself, gripping onto my own arms as I drew my legs up to my chest.

I made the sign of the cross. Slowly, I rolled to the floor and sat on my knees, teeth grit together through the throbbing pain of cuts and bruises. I would suffer anything for my words to be heard. Flames, knives, any form of torture would seem like a blessing compared to what lay ahead. My hands clamped together and I bowed my head.

"Oh Father, if you still know me, if you still remember your morbid creation," I sobbed. "Show me mercy just this once and let him stay with me. Send me to Hell for eternity, but let me keep my son. He needs to know it, Father. He needs to know that I do love him, that I've always loved him. He needs to know. He needs to, he deserves it…he deserves something better than this. Oh please don't take him from me, not now."

I sank farther until I was on the ground with the left side of my face against the cold wooden floor. My chest tightened, my insides churning, threatening. My entire body felt cold and empty. Empty and denied an answer. I kept my eyes closed and thought about praying for death. That, I thought, God would give me but not soon enough.

There was nothing else to feel, I was certain. I willed myself to die and be done with this anguish weighted down by the world, by earthly suffering and expectations but something happened. Warmth, there was warmth on my shoulder. A hand, an angel's soft touch. There were no words but I knew without opening my eyes who had come to me.

It was Alex.

My son. My prayer had been heard.