Wild Game Read online

  Ben and Lily were the last to appear, freshly showered, hair combed, Lily’s graying locks held in place with a bright yellow headband. She wasn’t the kind of woman to fork over money to a fancy salon. Lily sported Bermuda shorts, a polo shirt, and a pair of reading glasses that rode precariously low on her nose. Under her arm was a weighty tome on the history of Norway; she held it up for my stepfather’s approval, and Charles gave her a nod and smile.

  Ben greeted Charles with his energetic “How do!,” then strode into our kitchen, took both my mother’s hands in his, and, in full view of his wife and my stepfather, kissed her right on the mouth.

  “Malabar,” he said, his face close enough to hers that he could see her pupils expand, “that might have been the best damn dinner of my entire life!”

  “Ben,” Lily said, playfully scolding her husband, “leave that poor woman alone.” Her voice was thin and raspy, the aftereffects of cancer treatments that she’d had in her twenties. Radiation seeds had been planted in her chest, and though the radiation had successfully halted the tumor’s growth, it went on to ravage other parts of her body: her ovaries, her heart, and, now, her vocal cords. Although she was no longer sick, you had only to look at Lily to know that she wasn’t well either. Frail was the word that came to mind.

  “Out of the question,” replied Ben, who neither dropped my mother’s hands nor took his eyes off her. “How many women know what to do when you give them a bag of fresh squab?” He shook his head in disbelief at his good fortune. “Marvelous. Just marvelous.”

  A happy heat spread over my mother’s face. Was there relief in there too? Had she second-guessed what had happened the night before, tried to convince herself that the kiss was nothing more than a drunken pass to be forgotten in the morning light? If so, now she could be sure that wasn’t the case. Ben Souther had just publicly declared her marvelous, and that act had awakened the dormant marvelousness within her.

  My mother wriggled her hands free and grabbed a large fork, the kind used to skewer meat on a grill. “Ben Souther, get out of my kitchen this instant!”

  Ben laughed as he backed out, his hands raised in surrender. He took his place on the other side of the counter, on the stool beside my stepfather. Ben’s hands chopped wood, built fences, deftly killed animals of every sort. Charles’s hands were baby-soft, his right one lacking dexterity since his strokes. Seeming to bask in his oldest friend’s admiration of his wife, my stepfather patted a palsied fist on Ben’s back, his bones showing through the papery skin. (My four stepsiblings could never quite decide if my mother was a gold digger, after the family money, or someone worth her weight in gold for staying with Charles after his strokes.)

  Outside, gulls were aloft, suspended like mobiles on the wind until something shifted and forced them to veer off in search of the next ethereal gust. Goldfinches and chickadees flitted to the feeder and jousted for the last mouthfuls of seeds before the rain began, and a lone chipmunk, beneath the fray, collected the spoils. The light was beautiful and then suddenly gone, in its place electricity.

  As if on cue, my mother lowered two gorgeous stacks of corn fritters, crisped to golden-brown perfection and topped with thick slices of bacon, onto the counter. As the plates clinked on the marble, Charles and Ben bowed their heads in unison, inhaling the holy communion of maple syrup and pork.

  * * *

  After breakfast, I went upstairs to document the monumental happenings of the previous twenty-four hours—my first orgasm and my mother’s illicit kiss. Although I had long kept a journal, until this morning, the contents hadn’t been particularly engrossing. Overnight, my life had become something else entirely. I wrote for hours.

  When I finally returned downstairs, I saw that my mother needed my counsel. At a loss for how to move the game along with Ben, she solicited my help. What do I do? she mouthed. Outside, it was pouring, and inside, the grownups lounged listlessly, reading books and watching a tennis match.

  She and I flitted from nook to nook, my mother telling me secrets that must have been a great relief for her to confess. In the window seat in her bedroom, she admitted that she’d been depressed for years. Had I known this? she asked. I knew she often had a hard time getting out of bed and that I had to beg her to brush the back of her hair, an unruly nest, for carpool. But like most children, I was self-absorbed, worried about my own friendships and crushes, and I hadn’t been overly preoccupied with my mother’s interior life. All I really wanted was to be assured that she loved me more than anyone else.

  In the pantry, amid bottles of olive oil and cooking paraphernalia, Malabar confessed that after Charles’s strokes, she’d felt she had no choice but to marry him. “Before he got sick, I’d never been so in love in all my life,” she told me. “But none of the doctors could tell me if he’d ever be the same. He couldn’t talk. They didn’t know if he’d regain all his mental faculties, let alone his physical ones. He’d been so good to me and to you and Peter,” she said, and she suddenly embraced me.

  Our lives would have been so different had my mother not married Charles. We’d still be in our old apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, spending summers in our tiny Cape cottage in Nauset Heights, where Peter and I shared a bedroom that my mother had to walk through to get to her own even smaller room. I’ve never been privy to my mother’s finances—to this day, they are a mystery to me—but I can’t imagine that she could have bought and renovated the large house we were in right now were it not for Charles’s assistance.

  “Besides,” she said, “we were already engaged.” She picked at a hangnail on her ring finger until it bled. “Going ahead with the marriage was the only decent thing to do.”

  That was the first time I understood that she’d considered other options. Later, she took my hands, averted her eyes as if holding on to some lingering sense of maternal propriety, and said, “Rennie, Charles has been more child than husband since his strokes. If you get my meaning.”

  I did.

  At various times during that day and during the weeks, months, and years to come, my brother, Peter, would walk by and see us in solemn discussion. He would slow, waiting for an invitation from one of us to join in these conspicuous conversations. It had always been us three, after all. Before Ben’s kiss, Peter’s opinion was as valued as mine. But now our mother would abruptly stop talking and regard her son with impatience and a look that said, Is there something you need? The sting of rejection would cross Peter’s face—easier for me to remember now than to see at the time—and he would move on.

  “What’s up with you two?” he asked us on that first day when my mother and I were cloistered in the pantry. He hated being excluded.

  “Oh, it’s nothing, really,” I assured him. “Boy problems. Trust me, you’d be bored.” Perhaps Peter would think I was confiding in my mother about Ted.

  From here on out, I would be lying to everyone.

  * * *

  The sun finally pushed through the sky in broad columns of slanted light. The tide was dead low, that still hour that marks the sea’s withdrawal and illuminates the teeming life beneath the surface of our bay: moon snails pushing plow-like across the sandy bottom, horseshoe crabs coupling, schools of minnows moving in perfect synchronicity. As the procession of sunbeams merged into one, the day became long with light, and a space in my mind opened like that between a boat and a dock.

  I grabbed a wire bucket that we kept in the outdoor shower, opened one of the sliding glass doors, and stuck my head inside. “Who wants to go clamming?” I asked.

  Lily and Charles looked up from their books, smiled lazily, and demurred. But Ben rose quickly, as I knew he would, eager to be active. The man could not sit still for long. My mother regarded me with more gratitude than I’d thought possible but remained in her chair. She would need, I understood, public convincing.

  Did it occur to me then that I was betraying Charles, who had always been gentle and kind to Peter and me and whom I loved? If it did, I pushed the th
ought away. All I knew at that moment was I felt lucky. My mother had chosen me, and, together, we were embarking on a great adventure.

  “Come on, Mom,” I pressed. “It’ll be fun.”

  And, as in a game of chess, having moved a piece and let it go, I could never undo the move.

  * * *

  Out in the marshes, across the bay and past rippled deserts of sand flats, noisy black-capped terns squawked disapprovingly at our arrival. Mom, Ben, and I slipped into a pond as warm as a bath and sank into the silt. The water was only waist-deep, but we bent our knees as if sitting on imaginary chairs and submerged to our chins. We clouded the water as we shuffled, trying to coax the blunt instruments of our feet to behave like eyes and hands, feeling for lumps in the dark mud. But even in these still waters, surprises lurked below; eels slithered along thighs, minnows bumped ankles, spiny creatures crawled over bare feet. Before long a crab scuttled up my mother’s leg and she sought protection in Ben’s lap, where I pictured his arms, invisible beneath the black water, wrapped around her midriff.

  I left the pond, claiming to know of a better spot—there was always a better pond just beyond the one you were in—and dashed across the prickly marsh grass, forgetting my bucket as I fled. There, in the next hole, I found my rhythm, greeting clam after clam with my feet. I turned up my oversize T-shirt to create a pouch and placed the cherrystones and littlenecks in it until my shirt was blackened with mud and stretched long.

  Perhaps an hour went by, maybe not quite. The sun was sinking in the late-afternoon sky and an incoming tide ushered cool water into the marsh. I was cold. I made my way back to the boat, scrubbed my catch in the sand, and piled the clean clams in shallow water, where innumerable trails rippled across the bay’s floor. Snails, their paths lingering ghosts of their journey. As the ocean washed over the clams, I watched their hinged shells part and the pink curve of their flesh emerge for a final sip.

  In the distance, my mother had also emerged and was sitting on the bank of the pool, long-necked and confident, her skin gleaming. She was flirting with Ben, who was covered in marsh mud and seemed to be pretending to be a creature from the deep. At last he hauled himself out alongside her, animal-like, on all fours, and their body language abruptly changed. They dipped their heads together, and, even from far off, I could tell that they were whispering, making sure their words did not take flight across the bay.

  Were they making a decision right then and there? Choosing whether or not to proceed? Having kissed, they could never not have kissed. Could that be their rationale? We’ve already done this thing . . .

  I wonder now if either of them was arguing against embarking on their affair, bringing up the cons, the repercussions, the friendships and families at stake.

  When Ben stood and pulled Malabar to her feet, the slight tilt of my mother’s head, her incline toward him, made it clear that they’d decided to go ahead with it, as casually and permanently as if they had tossed a stone into the ocean.

  Three

  Ever since my parents split up, when I was five, my mother had been chasing a new and better life. That was in the early 1970s, a time when the national divorce rate was soaring. First my father moved out and I saw him less frequently, every other weekend and on alternating Wednesday nights. He remarried in 1971. Then my mother followed suit, remarrying in 1974. Back then, children were tossed into new families and cities and schools, and expected to adapt, which is what happened to me as I entered the fourth grade.

  Peter and I were nine and eight, respectively, when our mother married Charles and we moved from a modest apartment in Manhattan, where we’d shared a bedroom, into the Greenwood family estate in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, an affluent suburb of Boston. Overnight, my brother and I acquired four adult stepsiblings—none of whom lived with us—and vaulted up several rungs on the socioeconomic ladder.

  Our new home was a mansion with seventeen bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a library, formal living and dining rooms, a grand entrance hall over which swung two table-size chandeliers, and a servants’ wing twice the size of our old apartment. Some of the rooms seemed almost as big as tennis courts, long enough for me to do my favorite tumbling pass—run, cartwheel, back walkover—and came with fort-size fireplaces. Our new silverware, from Charles’s mother’s side, was heavier than our old, its weight suggesting something I couldn’t quite grasp. My stepsiblings warned me of bats and the ghost of a long-dead gardener who haunted the grounds.

  I felt ill at ease in this place, which we referred to by its address: 100 Essex. I missed my father and my friends in New York City as well as the company of my brother, who was no longer my roommate. Peter’s bedroom was far away from mine, on a different floor and wing; we didn’t even have a staircase in common for random collisions. In the new house, that classic adage “Children should be seen and not heard” was taken even farther—children were neither seen nor heard. But the first time I saw my mother descend the splendid marble staircase, the one that curved like the tip of Cape Cod itself, it was clear that she was in her element.

  Every other weekend, Peter and I were shuttled off to visit our father, usually at his cabin in Newtown, Connecticut, which had been our family’s weekend getaway place when we all lived together in Manhattan. We would take a Greyhound bus from Boston to Hartford and sit directly behind the driver, our de facto babysitter, who’d been informed by our mother that we were traveling alone. My father would be waiting for us at the station, and he’d drive us the rest of the way. The tiny white house sat on a plateau in the forest ringed by toppled stone walls and towering tulip trees. Charming and bare-bones, the cabin was in every way the opposite of the mansion we now called home. There was a dilapidated outhouse to the rear, an antique Franklin stove in the main room that kept us toasty on chilly nights, and an old steel tub that my father filled with heated water on the rare occasions when we bathed there.

  Our weekends at the cabin followed a routine: We cooked pasta with meat sauce on Friday night, went trout fishing in the stream behind the house the next morning, and invited the neighbors down for supper on Saturday—always steak, grilled rare over an open fire. Occasionally, my father had a female companion, but the lack of indoor plumbing discouraged all but the most stalwart of girlfriends. Midday on Sunday, back to Chestnut Hill we went. Usually we took the bus, but every once in a while my father drove us, his mood darkening as we crossed the state line into Massachusetts and getting incrementally worse the closer we got to 100 Essex. At the final right-hand turn down the long drive that led to the house, he would eye the odometer and tell us the exact number of miles he’d traveled to take us home.

  The prevailing wisdom concerning divorce at the time was that children were resilient creatures who would fare better with happy parents. This was the new paradigm, or at least it was the version of it that our parents embraced and that we helped spin. (Today we understand that what’s best for the parents is not necessarily best for the children.) On top of my mother’s desk, frozen in a 1970s acrylic-cube frame, are six photos of Peter and me taken during this period. In every shot, our eyes look vacant and our expressions radiate worry and loss.

  * * *

  To this day, I cannot imagine my parents ever having been in love, nor can I fathom what attracted them to each other. Although there are photographs of them together in our baby albums, I have no memories of them as a married couple. My father wrote daily, loved to fish and garden, and was content to live within his means. My mother was insatiable and acquisitive, always striving for a better, more fabulous life. To me, my parents have always seemed like polar opposites.

  My mother is well into her eighties now and suffers from dementia, but she remains as grand as her impossibly formidable first name. When asked about its origins, she explained that while she was born in Malabar Hill in Bombay, she was actually named after the fictional Malabar Caves in E. M. Forster’s classic A Passage to India—the literary distinction was important to her. Only she got it wrong; the caves
in Forster’s novel are the Marabar Caves. That part of her story remains a mystery to me, but perhaps she related to what the caves represented: the loneliness of human existence.

  I imagine her on the first day of kindergarten sitting cross-legged alongside the other five-year-olds as they went around the circle introducing themselves—“Ruth,” “Elizabeth,” “Rachel,” and then, at her turn, that mouthful of a name: “Malabar.” Would she have become the same all-powerful person she did had she been named Betty or Jane? I wonder about this. As any magician knows, it is not the smoke and mirrors that trick people; it is that the human mind makes assumptions and misunderstands them as truths.

  Born in Bombay, India, in 1931, Malabar was the only child of Bert and Vivian, two charismatic and narcissistic people whose epic and alcohol-fueled relationship resulted in their being twice married to and twice divorced from each other. A few months after Malabar—“Mabby” to her parents—was born, her mother, desperately sick with a tapeworm, discovered that her compulsively cheating husband was up to his usual tricks. She took her newborn daughter, fled India, and returned to her home in New York City.

  My mother’s first memory of her father—her first memory period—was opening the door to her mother’s bedroom one morning when she was about three and seeing his penis. “I’m your father, Mabby,” Bert announced, as if this explained everything—his being in their New York apartment, his erect penis, his existence. Her father, apparently trying to save his marriage, was on leave from India. This was the protocol of his firm: three years abroad, three months home.