ONE

^“YOUR DEAD BUGS ARE DELICATE,” SAID BILL, BRUSHING a flake of ash off his suit sleeve. “Grease the pin up before you pierce ’em. Or else the little shits will fall apart.”

Home from the crematorium, he took her under his wing. In his private gallery, in display cases lining the walls, were legions of the dead. There were those who crumbled in their tombs, furred bodies frail as dry leaves, leg segments long departed from their casings. A stray proboscis here, a palpus there. Mr. Kraft was less a hobbyist than a gamesman. His chief interest was the animal world: a grandiose moth collection, and then there were the cockfights. His new mission, he proclaimed, was to school his daughter in the science of nature. “Your female tussock moth,” he advised on their first night in training, “has no wings. Can’t fly. She lives to mate.” After which, with a chortle, he swung off in the direction of her mother’s room, the invalid’s sanctum, his flat-footed feet crunching down on a carpet of Noctuidae corpses.

He insisted that the house be clean, and hired maids for this purpose, but his workroom, fitted out in dark wood, was littered with the musty debris of a thousand captures and purchases. If Estée put a drink down on a table she was sure to find, when she reached for it later, a dried-up bagworm floating and bobbing near the rim. He counseled intimacy with the specimens. The moths and butterflies, their cocoons and glistening pupae of infancy, had to be as familiar to his daughter as her fingers and toes. He administered tests to her on every other day. He was The Inquisition. His jiggling pounds and florid bursting face loomed close at every turn: he was a monstrous pachyderm, a monument in flesh who cornered her with his bulk, dogged her steps and breathed her exhalations. “Suborder Ditrysia?” he would bellow. “Describe! Define!” If she was slow he leapt into the breach. “Females with two genital openings, you stupid girl, receptive on eighth abdominal segment!” As penance he made her crush a specimen in her hand—something expendable, a common clothes moth or burrowing sod webworm. She was not allowed to wash it off till the session was over; for each wrong answer or long silence he would sacrifice an insect. At the start of her apprenticeship there were times she had to clutch whole handfuls of crushed bodies, whimpering for him to let her go. “You get ten wrong answers in a row, you eat them all,” he warned. She had to chew before she swallowed. “You keep this up, you pay the price,” he threatened when her scholarship did not improve. He vowed to make her ingest a goat moth, whose wingspan was over ten inches.

Thus while other teenagers were surfing or practicing birth control she was learning superfamilies in her room, murmuring in the stillness of midnight, “Zygaenoidea, Cossoidea, Danaus plexippus.” Mr. Kraft claimed his strictness was in her best interests. “Discipline, my girl. As my only child,” he told her sternly over a glass of sherry, flicking his wrist to dislodge a chrysalis from the hairs on the back of his hand, “you’re gonna hafta be prepared.” But he forgot to say for what and dozed off in his armchair, leaving her free to avert her eyes from the caverns of his nostrils.

She carried food to her mother in the evening and was trapped in a chair near the bed while the invalid prised pistachios from their fuchsia shells, dye mottling her fingertips, or sucked oysters down her throat, false teeth in effervescent liquid on the bedside table. Facing the canopied bed, whose aura was of medicine and rot, was the shrine, mama’s altar to the Bettys. Estée’s mother worshiped all famous Bettys, though there were only a few represented here: Grable, Friedan, Crocker, Rubble, Page, and Boop. Photographs, memorabilia, articles of clothing or publicity redolent of Bettydom hung on a tabernacle of gingham and lace. Betty disciplined her daughter in stillness: if Estée fidgeted while her mother ate, if she let her feet shuffle over the carpet in boredom, stretched out an arm in fatigue, or idly shifted in her seat, her mother would embark on a hunger strike. Pushing away her food she would sigh and remember the halcyon days. “I had all my teeth,” she would muse, “my own hair, and it was golden like yours,” while Estée bent over the supper tray, arranging morsels in appealing patterns.

Her dad brought bettors home to watch the roosters. In the skylit atrium men jeered and cheered, yelling and pumping arms at their favorites. Afterward they gathered with beers in the armory, bills changed hands, backslapping ensued, and Estée would linger under the dome, feathers floating up to cling to her legs, to watch the final throes of a mangled cock left behind on his battle site. He might be covered in the loops of his entrails as she knelt beside him, stroking an eyeless head as legs trembled, claws clutched, heartbeat stopped. The victory cock, corralled again in a sandy meshed pen beneath the garbled branches of a eucalyptus, strutted and crowed to lose another day.

Blundering into Betty’s boudoir while his two girls were sitting quietly, Bill was prone to bluster, “Betty, is that a smut on your nose or am I seeing double?” referring to his progeny. He would take Estée aside and say, “Your mother named you for Lauder the cosmetics queen, so let’s see you get gorgeous!” and jab his daughter in the ribs before she could reply. Estée hated her name, but Betty was proud of it and would not budge. “So feminine,” she liked to murmur. She had been inspired by a jar of cellulite cream on her nightstand, which reminded her of shopping days long past. Mrs. Kraft’s strained energies had during healthier times been channeled into volunteer work for humanitarian causes—civic beautification, Californian Ladies for the Right to Bear Arms, Orange County Citizens for Reagan. One year she’d thrown a charity dinner for hideously malformed children and financed a six-year-old’s harelip surgery with the proceeds. Now, bedridden, she concentrated on the home front. On her stronger days she was a hurricane. She made Estée sit beside a bust of Betty Grable, sculpted craftily in painted Styrofoam, and leering from her pillowed throne held up a Day-Glo hula hoop whose plastic sting was vicious.

“Be like Betty,” she ordered through clenched teeth, and Estée became inanimate. Over her shoulder quivered the hoop, eager to lash if she betrayed herself through movement. Estée and the bust stared with identical blankness at the surface of the wall. She was fond of the bust: there was safety in numbers. A stranger might say they didn’t have much in common, but she certainly knew better. Admittedly, according to Bill’s dog-eared Gray’s Anatomy, the bust was missing features Estée had, was lacking optic nerves, the fibrous tissue of the brain, and neither did it possess the power of autonomous motion; but these were minor points. In space their positions were similar. A tenderness would overtake her as she sat, and if she’d been able to she would have reached out and touched the curve of its nose, the slant of its Styrofoam cheekbone, the strands of its blond, Authentic Human Hair wig.

Massage was her duty. Betty would lie prone while Estée rubbed aromatic oils into her back, fragments of dead skin adhering to her palms and thumbs. The household dust was human epidermal cells sloughed off by Betty in paralysis. Her skin lined mantelpieces and old china, goblets and chandeliers, and with a breeze or Estée’s breath would float up in clouds and resettle on carpets and floorboards. Estée had witnessed, since a tiny tot, the constant exfoliation of Betty. Into her Fisher-Price tape recorder, by means of which she’d kept a private journal since she found it in a toy closet when she was ten, she confided, “The skin on top is clear, you can hold it up to the light and see through it. How does she store all those layers underneath?” Artificial talons were glued to the blackened crescent stubs of Betty’s fingernails, these in a bright rainbow of colors—another task assigned to Estée in the name of filial devotion. The maids were paid to keep house, but Estée was caretaker of its doyenne. Her schedule was tight and left few hours for diversion, and her movements outside the home were monitored with rigor. On rare occasions she escaped to freedom after school hours, but Bill, who waited in the car outside school grounds with a stopwatch in hand, caught up with her and meted out due punishment. “Told you, Esty,” he would lecture, “nothing but weirdos out there. They let ’em walk on the streets. Criminals, reprobates, and child molesters Esty. Death can jump on you lickety-split. It’s chaos Esty. At home’s the only place with order. You stay put and don’t stray. Sixteen years I fed you, not going to be ripped off now by some maniac with a switchblade. My investment in the future, girl. And don’t cry. Where’s your damn guts?”

Her father’s girth was an expanding universe. His stomach ballooned, his chest became breasts, his ankles settled into tubes of wrinkly fat. He stopped short of four hundred pounds by the breadth of a hair. He felt no shame in his body’s excesses, explosions, secretions, its rude assault on the innocent air. When they stood in the same room he was always within a two-foot radius of her, belching, farting, allowing himself every breach of decorum from which, during the day, he felt himself required to abstain. Massive, greedy, and abhorrent, he quizzed her on the habits of Yponomeuta. Seating himself to defecate he would make her stand at the bathroom door and rhyme off the members of superfamily Bombycoidea.

As her apprenticeship wore on Bill got sick of the laborious process of taxonomy and passed the mantle to her. She was the one to label the specimens he imported, to pin them on pads and encase them in glass. He wanted only to stroll through the gallery, admiring the blossoming crowd of rare species. He devoted his days to the crematorium, though he had a host of other assets, because it was his favorite enterprise. On his return in the evenings he would drink, put his feet up, and watch her at her labor.

Her bedroom was subject to warrantless searches and seizures. Her father snuck in often while she slept and woke her up in the middle of the night, stark naked. “What were you doing with this? This?” he would threaten, and shake in her groggy face some object he had found, burrowing in her drawers or closet, behind which she could see, since her mattress lay at the level of his crotch, purple plumlike testicles waggling and peeking from between columnar, dimpled thighs, and the poking inquisitive head of a small pink cigar.

Focus was Bill’s mantra: only a small canon of possessions was allowed, related to her studies at school or at home. Foreign material was not permitted, save for the few items related to personal hygiene and dress that Betty insisted she have. When she made the mistake of keeping a note she’d received from Mike Lamota in English class tucked between lined pages in a three-ring binder (Your hot, do you want to go Out), Bill found it on his nightly rounds. He didn’t wake her up; she found the scrap of paper glued to her forehead in the morning with industrial-strength adhesive. When she tried to pull it off it rent the skin. She had to go to school wearing the fragment stuck there, a banner of nonsense over her eyebrows, patchy with blood. She scrawled over the clumsy ballpoint words with a thick felt-tipped marker on her way to the bus stop, which saved her from specific humiliation though not from general.

After this episode, pursuant to threats of a lawsuit directed at the school board, Bill removed her from school, on the premise of acquiring a tutor. To this position he appointed himself, and it was no longer difficult to get away from him, but impossible. If he relented it was never for long: the span of a measly hour was too much to ask. All day long, while Mr. Kraft worked, Estée was locked in with her mother, whose foul nest full of detritus choked her and gave her swimming headaches. Though in all else Betty strove toward a pristine ideal, she could not be bothered to have herself moved from the bed more than once a week, when the custom-made sheets were taken by a maid, shaken in the backyard to expunge accumulated filth, and laundered. The bed had a toilet beneath it, specially constructed, whose flush lever was set into the wall within arm’s reach. A panel in the frame of the bed, button operated, slid back when excretion became necessary. There were no common bedpans for Betty. Her bed linen was constructed with fitted holes to make room for the plumbing apparatus.

The nature of her ailment? Medical experts hemmed and hawed and said it was in her genes, her history, her makeup. Yet there were some who claimed it was self-inflicted, that Betty Kraft condemned herself to paraplegia. No coincidence was it either that her wedding night had been the start, stated Dr. Joy the family psychiatrist, fired after one session. Once led to bed by Bill, penetrated and fertilized, she stayed there and refused to move. Was it the shock of violation or, as Dr. Joy was overheard to intimate, the laxness of postcoital bliss that laid her out for good?

Estée heard Betty’s version of the tale told over and over. “Your father got me on the bed,” murmured Betty dreamily, twisting in her hands the neck of one of the fat Persian cats she raised from kittenhood and strangled absently. Estée watched as it sputtered, tongue protruding. “He pulled out the manacles and chained me down, spread-eagled.” For distraction from these inappropriate disclosures Estée would sing, inside her head, “I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you,” to the tune of “Exsultate, Jubilate.” Religion was forbidden in the household but she had seen it on TV. The library was full of it. She liked to sit in a carrel in the audiovisual section, holding the padded headphones to her ears, and listen to the choral voices rise in harmony as her eyes skimmed over the pages she held, where ganglia and Malpighian tubes were pictured in gross magnification. Luckily her father had never been to a library, or he would know temptations lurked there, under the innocuous guise of lepidopterology. He had been surprised when, after her first visit, she told him there were whole rooms of books.

“I’m a self-made man,” he proclaimed, and left it at that.

But the tide of Betty’s words could not be stemmed. “He took it out of his fly,” she wailed, “and beat me with it till my jowls hung down like a basset hound’s.” Estée knew that, like heroines in the old movies Betty favored, she was expected to fall on bruised knees at the bedside, clasping a weak maternal hand to her own tear-stained cheek. Instead she kept her sympathy in reserve, awaiting the advent of reliable sources.

For visits from relatives, including her blind grandfather and a great-aunt with halitosis, Estée had to groom her mother, dress her, and affix to her bald pate, by means of glue, one of the wigs from her collection, which ranged in style from pageboy to beehive. On alternate Thursdays her mother Received. Reclining beneath her canopy, features painted into a ghoulish approximation of vigor, Betty ushered in her guests with a gracious beringed hand while Estée stood shyly behind the bedroom door. Mrs. Kraft had freshened the atmosphere with clouds of aerosol Glade, so that the visitors, on arrival, would cough, choke, and move toward the window to inhale. “Don’t open that!” Betty would screech, for natural light was her curse. The sun was unsubtle and would show her up in all her sad dilapidation.

“How’s my baby daughter?” Estée’s grandfather would croon, his eyes on Betty while he tossed a gift to Estée. These gifts were always records of old musicals—Oklahoma! Carousel, Singin’ in the Rain—the scores of which he claimed to have written in his youth. “But it says here Rodgers & Hammerstein,” Estée objected. The old man cut her off. “I wrote ’em,” he said shortly. “Wrote ’em right off the top of my head.” It made no difference, since the gifts, which were no use anyway to someone who had never seen a record player, were confiscated by Bill as soon as his doddering father-in-law was down the front steps. “Into the furnace with these little fellas,” Bill would say fondly, and Estée never saw them again. She imagined he carted them off to work the next day and threw them in the mix with a dowager deceased of multiple sclerosis.

How long could her parents persist? It was no use trying to talk of reason to them. Her father even knew more Latin than reason, though he believed it to be a lingo invented recently by specialists for the sole purpose of referring to moths. He was impatient when she forwarded the notion that there had once been an empire. “Don’t believe what you read,” he cautioned. “Lies and lies . . . I could tell you lies. I know guys who bring their kids up on a diet of the stuff. Never forget how lucky you are, Esty my girl. Take a walk through a church, they’ll have you believing in justice. Nothing but a sales pitch. Romans, Romans, everyone knows they speak French.”

She practiced secret prayer, a rite not unlike masturbation. Her father warned her it would drive her blind. “That was what struck down your granddad,” he whispered, out of earshot of Betty’s room. “God, God, and more God. He went against the laws of nature and now he can’t see a foot in front of his face. The Protestant old fuck. Excuse me, Esty, Daddy said the P word.” The prayer was conducted alone in her bed, in silence, with the utmost concentration. “Dear Lord, I am under strange government. There are devils here who masquerade as saints. And they are clearly insane.”

Her mother’s birthdays were celebrated with extravagance. Pretty Bettys emerged from eight-foot cakes, later to be fondled by her father in the hall for generous remuneration. “Today your mother turns thirty-nine,” Bill announced every year. “Bring on the dancing harlots.”

Betty chose the occasion of her fifth thirty-ninth birthday to initiate Estée into the private club of womanhood. “Onanism is healthy,” she confided, manipulating invisible parts with an agitated hand beneath her blanket by way of demonstration, as Estée, humiliated, hummed “Ave Maria” in her head. “It’s really the best way, and absolutely safe. When you’re older I will show you the devices.”

She became her mother’s procuress, in charge of new acquisitions for the Betty shrine. She made calls about auctions, when Betty Grable’s toothbrush or hair curlers went on the market, ordered memorabilia by mail, investigated by modem new venues for the purchase of Betty Boop cels and Betty Friedan first editions. Betty gave voice to a series of repeated themes, whining plaintive solos that sounded polyphonic, like fugues, like symphonies, like bagpipe serenades. “Have you found the shower curtain yet? Have you found the special mailbox decorated with her name? The leaflet the girdle the oven mitt the Negro ceramic the doggy bone the apron the potpourri sachet the baby book the ashtray the urn the poster the tampon the grass from the grave?”

At 3:30 on Sundays the bell rang for cocks, and Estée joined her father in the open air in order to observe the carnage. The number of cockfights grew as their audience diminished, until no one was present but Mr. Kraft and his daughter, whose attendance was mandatory. Over loudspeakers Bill blasted out “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” which he supplemented occasionally with a personal reading of “The White Man’s Burden.” True, he was not a man for poetry, he owned. But in former times Kipling, like him, had been a soldier, he claimed. He could also recite the first lines of “The Gettysburg Address.”

The rooster death toll mounted until gaming birds had to be shipped in from Arizona. Estée’s tolerance for fowl was tested past the breaking point. She had no more condolences for their final thrashing minutes, a veteran of too many gravel-pocked gizzards hanging by a thread, too many curled snakes of intestines, gall bladders, and pancreases in the sand. Even the eggs, incubating under heat lamps, and the newly hatched round-eyed chicks in Easter fuzz struck no maternal chord. She had to look elsewhere for her compatriots—to the bust of Betty, to the moths, to an army of imaginary martyrs. The dead of past centuries, like stars, were peers, perennial and silent. She recorded them in her electronic diary. “They might not be alive right now, but the possibility of them is alive. It is the same as a memory. History includes every combination. I have already been here ten thousand times. I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m here.”

In the evening, after Bill retired, she carried out her tasks in solitude till bedtime. He banned her from the library when he became suspicious of it; thus she had no access to information save those few necessary bulletins from the outside that pertained to Bettydom and moths. The modem was her only avenue: the Kraft household had entered the information age early, due to its spatial isolation. But she was fined for searching out irrelevant data. “Ten bucks for twelve minutes Esty?” he thundered, the bill shaking in his hand. “What were you doing? Were you downloading bullshit Esty? News, current events? I told you, everything you need is here. How do you know this stuff is real? Never trust what you read. It’s lies. They got whole books that are nothing but lies, they tried to fob ’em off on me when I was your age, Peter Pan and shit, a bunch of lies on purpose. I’m the only one that tells you what’s what. This comes out of your allowance.”

Since she had none it was gentle punishment.

Her first jailbreak effort was disorganized, pure impulse, and resulted in her capture five miles down the road by Bill, who zoomed after her in his goliath Cadillac, into the trunk of which he bundled her with no further ado. The second was better orchestrated but came to a sadder end when Estée, who had taken with her a lode of resalable jewelry, a wallet of crisp fifty-dollar bills straight from Betty’s chest of drawers, and a small Vuitton suitcase belonging to same, tried out hitchhiking and was hit upon by a Confederate trucker who told tales of the South before the Civil War. “When nigras was in their place,” he drawled. She asked him to let her off and in response he bundled her into the back of the cab, dressed her in a stinking, ratty ball gown, called her Scarlett, and licked her feet with Red Man in his mouth, his right hand down his pants. After that she was deposited at a McDonald’s and the trucker made a quick collect call to her father, who drove out and picked her up.

With that her quota was made and she resigned herself to marking time.

Her father’s guns had names. He took them down and polished them on Saturdays, all the while conversing with their infrared night scopes or matte-finish grips. “Now you be careful, Simon maboy, or I may just move you over there beside Jigaboo,” he would scold a semi-automatic, tsk-tsking and shaking his head. Estée would tiptoe off while he spoke, along through shining halls and archives where she expected to see, one dawn, the flocks of winged bodies shedding their pins, passing like ghosts through their glass sarcophagi, and flying in pale clouds of color to alight on her father, covering his face and cloaking his arms, binding his legs in a vast cocoon, and bearing him, wrapped in their homespun shroud, aloft to oblivion.

Bill, by accident, let her watch a show on TV one day about people living in an apartment, leading lives that must be standard. The people said stupid things and laughter came from nowhere like a miracle. It was the laughter of crowds, like the men that used to come to bet on the cockfights, who laughed loudly when Bill said something or gave them all drinks. The actors did what they wanted, went to and fro, out their front door and in again. She saw that luck eluded her, though it lunged into the paths of charlatans, flapping its arms and smiling.

Her birthdays passed unnoticed, unlike Betty’s, but she was glad to have the luxury of fading from sight. She had been exhausted since before she was born, her embryo, the far-flung molecules that constituted the idea of her, dragging themselves through fields of gravity with untold weariness. She looked for solidarity in the snippets of news she was permitted, items she heard when she borrowed a Sony Walkman radio from a temporary maid, when she bought a magazine from a pizza deliveryman by bartering a pearl barrette of Betty’s: routinely, other people too were forced through squalid tunnels of someone else’s devising. It was a maze run by perverts and idiots. There could be no protest: only, at long last, emergence into daylight.

Waiting for the new world, she compromised whenever danger crept near. Capitulation was natural, but she feared it. Invasion robbed her of herself. Boundaries were fluid, water and air exchanged atoms, she was unsure where she ended and the others began.

The moths, at first just one more pound of flesh off the lumbering mass of her father, horrible adjuncts to his tyranny, became objects of sympathy as soon as her scholarship saved her from having to eat them. In the face of her erudition, Bill no longer had recourse to scare tactics. She handled the lepidopterans gently, regretted piercing their corpses with her superfine pins. She attributed speech and character to them. “Excuse me,” a polyphemus would suggest, “be careful, I’m dead.” Handmaiden moths admonished her with sighs of defeat, decrepit viceroys talked about the kings and queens of exotic countries, a webworm told jokes. There was nothing else to do in her boredom. Silent dialogues with the dry carapaces consisted of connections made too quickly to be said, dismissed before fruition. Bill had another approach: he appropriated all things, exercised droit du seigneur even beyond the boundaries of human flesh. Inanimate and animate were one: black Rugers could be called homeboys, a weak .22 was named Flossy, there were assault rifles named Arnold and rifles christened Ronnie, dying cocks referred to as Minor and Major, Jewboy, Polack, and Spic. She watched him and made sure that her own lonely conversations didn’t reek of ownership. Bill’s was a cruel, one-sided alliance against helpless matter.

The claustrophobia of her routine was mitigated only by the fact that Bill was more and more distracted, making forays by airplane to collect his own specimens. He brought them back alive, tens or hundreds beating their wings against the mesh of compartmentalized lodgings, mating and fighting through the grilles. He came home with cocoons, mourning cloak pupae suspended on a branch by their cremasters, a silken nest constructed by American tent caterpillars, over which in dark and furry pandemonium they writhed. He was the hunter, she was the taxidermist.

Bill spent weekends in Mexico, warm summer weekends when the house was soft in his absence and the maids moved more lightly in their duties, carrying through passageways muted laughter and snatches of Spanish. Fans whirred overhead, stirring curtains and the scraps of laundry hanging in the atrium on clotheslines. On the evening of the solstice Estée watched a sunset from the second floor, a wash of tropical orange and mauve falling to the horizon. She overlooked the landlocked structures of crematorium, refinery, and power plant, their ugly daylight hulks turned into silhouettes. In the black and the orange she felt like ascending, trumpets behind her, into the dome of the sky. She thought: Without him we weigh nothing, there’s no gravity at all, I can float. Let Betty lie in her bed, nothing can touch me. She projected onto the air in front of her the vision of her own rising body, her wings unfurling from her sides, the sails of boats, but then there was noise, shrieks. She turned and rushed to the stairs, where two maids were hovering at the bottom of the grand spiral staircase, their burdens of dirty towels and silverware abandoned on the floor.

Betty was sitting astride the banister, chest pressed against its length. She pulled herself up bit by bit, bare, psoriatic scalp exposed, mouth smeared with lipstick. Her legs, thought to be atrophied from disuse, clutched together, toes curled, feet meeting through the interstice of rails; she made mewling noises, interspersed with grunts, which signaled she was not displeased by the friction between smooth wood and the angry grip of her pelvic muscles. She clambered in grubby desperation, pulling herself along by sheer arm-strength, her knuckles white.

“Let me help you down, you’ll be hurt,” said Estée, reaching out to take her hand. Betty growled and brandished a salad fork, the dull tines of which she inserted forcefully into her left knee. The knee was bony, but still a limp tab of flesh gave purchase to the fork, which stuck out almost level with the ground as Betty continued her rutting. It took all three of them to pry her off, kicking, mumbling, and biting with toothless gums, and carry her up to her bed so that the knee could be attended by medicos.

Mr. Kraft, on his return, was furious.

“Would Betty Grable be caught doing that?” he was heard to explode in milady’s chamber, after firing the maids for their roles as witnesses. He told Estée he held her responsible. “But she can walk,” said Estée. “She can walk, she got there by herself!”

Bill caught her by her shirt collar and shook her until he was tired. When he put her down she had a dislocated shoulder. “Your mother,” he shot out in parting, “is a sick sick sick sick woman. She can’t do one thing for herself.”

Betty was incommunicado for the next week, but when Estée was summoned she came out, in wary stage whispers, with a different account of the events. “Didn’t you know?” she asked Estée. “That’s when I walk. I walk when I’m in estrus.” Estée hummed the Agnus Dei aloud, but Betty failed to notice. “It’s not perpetual with me,” said Betty. “The call of the wild, I feel it and I make good. For that I can rise from my fetters.”

“Can we talk plainly just for once? Let’s can the crazy shit,” said Estée. “You’re either paraplegic or you’re not.”

“The stupid deafness of the young,” said Mrs. Kraft, and shook her head with condescending mien. “My place is in this bed. Why can’t you see I have a kingdom here?”

“Do you feel this?” said Estée, and felt around until she hit her mother’s knee beneath the quilt and comforter—the pocket of fat the salad fork had pierced, where there was still a scab. “Do you feel it or don’t you?”

“Not a twinge,” said Betty.

“This? This?” and blows were rained down on the thighs, the ankles, the feet.

“Why nothing, absolutely nothing,” protested her mother, straight faced, appearing, in her casual indifference, to be genuine.

It was an impasse. Lying in bed, Estée wondered if, when she closed her mother’s bedroom door behind her, there’d been an exhalation, grimace, and slow release of tears, the invalid rocking back and forth in her disheveled hills of linen, biting her lips and nursing, stroking with patient hands, the intricate patterns of pain.

For Bill the stakes had risen. He hired construction workers and electricians, the foreman of whom, a potbellied, inky-armed simian, stood guard outside Betty’s door while the others built fortifications. A second door was built beyond the first, with a built-in alarm to be triggered by anyone emerging from the room who did not punch the proper code into a digital keypad. Access to the room was easy, but exit was by number only. Numerical knowledge alone would get you nowhere, though: the second door was sixteen inches thick, with a metal bar across its midriff. Brute strength, therefore, was also required. Bill put his daughter on a weights program, installing a Nautilus machine in the basement, so that her own exit would be possible and the diurnal visits to Betty could continue. “I’m not an irrational man,” he said. “A mother, a daughter, there’s a bond there. Blood is thicker than your polystyrene.” In the meantime, while she was building up her biceps, the foreman would heave the door open as she went out.

Since the bettors had deserted him, Mr. Kraft went hunting on his own. Rubbing doe musk on his face, the urine of red foxes into his armpits, Mr. Kraft stalked elks and bucks and brought their heads home to hang on walls inside his trophy room. His supervisorial duties at the crematorium were slight: he delegated authority and his rounds were just for show. He watched to make sure that expertise prevailed, that there were no unseemly congresses between the employees and the deceased. On a day of inspiration he would roll up his sleeves and get down to work himself, to show the others how it should be done.

Estée was advised that she would inherit the establishment: to her would go the long rows of incinerators and metal drawers, and before long Bill would train her in their ways. She would start at the bottom and work to the top. Bill would practice what he preached, would take the necessary dose of his own medicine, because he too—and the plan was in his will, in black and white—would be burned to a crisp in the furnaces. He assured clients of this for persuasion, and it did the trick. For a hard sell he would take out a sealed copy of the testament, always freshly updated, and proffer it for their perusal.

When the second door outside Betty’s room was completed and fortified, and Estée was bench-pressing eighty, Bill decided to give up the roosters. “The grand finale,” he told Estée, “is gonna be a blowout. Company picnic, all the employees. IBM has ’em, other companies too. It’s good for morale. Serve ’em up some slop, give ’em a show. Give ’em a run for their money. Strictly speaking those fights are illegal, but I’m my own man. Those guys work for me, biting the hand that feeds if they gabbed about it. Your cockfights are some good clean family fun.”

Barbecue pits were set up, striped circus tents, a sea of folding chairs. To each worker from the crematorium, with his family in tow, was assigned a laminated badge and tickets to redeem for plates of food. The herds were ushered in through a makeshift parking lot on the plot of bare ground adjoining Kraft land, and they entered warily, prodding their children in front of them. A long line straggled out from the solitary Port-a-John. The program consisted of spectacle first, food last. Cow and chicken pieces simmered on the grills and barbecue smoke floated over the cheap seats, exciting salivary glands while the audience waited obediently for the show. Estée sat beside her father in a royal booth, a balcony on the second floor from which a banner hung: Velut arbor ita ramus. Moth lingo. “The branch is sorta like the tree, is what it stands for,” explained Bill.

Tape-recorded bugles sounded. The banner was raised to expose a huge screen. When the cocks were let out they were followed by the lens of a camera and the action was replicated, in extreme close-up, on the enormous screen. A gouged eyeball was presented in Technicolor, its gaping socket four feet high. Confused spectators turned in their seats and muttered to each other. For accompaniment Bill played “Pomp and Circumstance” from mammoth speakers set into the window frames at the rear of the house.

Bill stood on the balcony, straight-backed and regal. “Now that’s a sport,” he crowed. “Now that’s a damn good fight.” Wagers had not been made, but he professed love for the sport itself, the graceful ballet of evisceration, complete with pirouettes and pliés. When Estée shut her eyes and turned away from the screen, Bill pinched her slyly till she opened them again. Squawk, flap, feathers churned, the combatants were staggering maimed. Their strutting slowed, they flopped and heaved on the henpecked sand, they were limp and bleeding, one blind. Estée glanced over at the ringside seats, where frantic families played at censorship. Mothers covered the faces of their sons with flat hands, with peekaboo fingers, or scolded them until they looked away; fathers played patty-cake with female toddlers in desperate distraction measures. A few weak-stomached couples escaped to the parking lot, with surreptitious glances toward the balcony.

When the roosters collapsed, feathers skittering across the chairs, into hair and pockets, a stray gizzard pecked into fragments on the dry earth, Bill saluted and the screen blipped to black. Spectators were slow to rise. Hamburgers and pepper steaks piled up on festive platters, but no guests gravitated toward the grills. Chatter was kept to a minimum. Bill descended from his platform and mingled with the hoi polloi, making ad hoc speeches on the lawn, hands clasped across his bursting abdomen. “How’d you like it, put some iron back in your pecker, John? Bob it was? Iron in your pecker, Rob? Fine animals, yessir. Fine animals. Got guts. We know that for sure!” Wanly smiling, his employees stood with restless arms slack at their sides, their children clinging to their legs, eyes fleeing nervously to right and left. Behind her father Estée hovered, watching the wave he made as he advanced through the throng, people pulling away.

Soon they fled in droves. Their cars jammed the vacant lot and a rude cacophony of horns and raised voices drowned Bill’s speechifying. Estée stood motionless, soaking herself in the residue of the crowds, their normalcy, the relief afforded her by the evidence of their disgust. She lived in a nuthouse, it was confirmed, yet she was not insane. Stow away in a Volvo? It would never succeed.

A blue-clad member of the cleaning staff picked up a rooster carcass and carried it to the boneyard next to the generator, where, pinching her nose, she tossed it onto the pile. Estée watched her pick up a nearby shovel and throw a couple of clods of soil onto the corpse. The soil was rich in red worms and their casings, which sped the process of decomposition. Estée knew her worms.

All the grilled meat was still laid out on the long tables. It would putrefy, uneaten by the Krafts or their support personnel. Already the chairs were being folded and stacked, the tent was collapsing in undulations of green and white. The maids laid it out flat on the grass, folded the corners into halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, stepping nearer and nearer to each other as they folded. Finally it was a bundle that fit into the arms.

“Why’d they all take off?” demanded Bill of the air. “Food not good enough for these ingrates? Fire ’em! Fire ’em all! Those management boys won’t stop me this time, nosir, litigation my ass. Monday morning they’ll be scrounging up scraps from the gutter. Manners Esty. No one has manners anymore.”

She faced the banner Velut arbor ita ramus and the gigantic empty screen. There was Betty, at her closed bay window high above. She was crouching on all fours. A flimsy nightgown fluttered on her arms.

Estée envisioned a suicide leap, a shattering plunge through the glass. “What are you doing?” she called urgently from beneath.

Her mother shook her head, mouthing, “I can’t hear you.”

“Then open the window! How did you get out of bed? And what are you doing?”

Her mother mouthed, “I can’t hear you.”

“Then just open the window!”

Her mother mouthed, “I can’t hear you.”

“Would you please open the window?”

I can’t hear you.