There wasn’t a trick he didn’t know, such as how to find out when my sisters and I were alone, or likely to be. Gloria, Carmen, Bethany and I, we all knew what he was up to when he asked Mom to fetch something from his office at the university or get him something at the supermarket. She knew too, and never said no. No one asked what sense it made for Mom to walk to the university or the store, to spend an hour or two doing what they could have done in ten minutes if they used the car.
Even when we were sailing from Cape Town to Southampton, it continued. We had three berths on the Edinburgh Castle, one for Bethany and me, one for Gloria and Carmen, and one for Mom and Dad. In each of the children’s berths, there were two narrow bunks.
At various points during the voyage, Dad invented ailments for all four of us—seasickness, toothaches, tummy aches, earaches—and removed one of us from our bunk and sent us to sleep in his and Mom’s bed so that he could be on hand if the “sick” one needed him through the night. When he announced that one of us had told him we weren’t feeling well, we didn’t contradict him or even say a word. We’d been chosen and that was it. Mom said nothing.
I sometimes worked up the nerve to be mischievous. “Why can’t Mom keep me company?” I asked one night during dinner in the ship’s dining room after Dad announced that I had told him I had an earache that would keep me up all night.
“Your mother’s too tired after all the sun she had today,” he said. My mother had spent the day in the shade, as she did every day, but didn’t protest.
On another occasion, also at dinner, when he announced that Gloria was seasick, I observed that the rate at which she was working her way through dinner would have been remarkable even for someone who wasn’t sick. “Seasickness is like that,” Dad said. “Food makes it better for a while, but not for long.” No one challenged this absurd assertion, not even the strangers who shared our table. It was as if he couldn’t be bothered to make up a convincing excuse.
As a child, I thought every house with one or more girls in it was like our house. I didn’t know that other fathers didn’t do what he did to us. I had nothing to compare us to. I didn’t ask the few friends I had about it.
He was like a doctor, gently persuading me to submit to things that, though new to me, were old hat to him, momentarily unpleasant things that he would see me safely through, just as he had done for many others. I was so young when he started that, by the time I was ten, I knew my part as well as he knew his. He didn’t have to say a word. I didn’t wonder why it happened. It was how things were, just as Elsie living in a shed and eating by herself in the kitchen and going back to Langa on the weekends was how things were.
I woke to the sound of doors being eased open and closed in the middle of the night, the floor of the hallway squeaking as he padded back and forth in his bare feet. I wondered which room he was headed to, preparing for the possibility that it was mine, but hoping it wasn’t, and hating myself for hoping that he would go to one of the other three, or that he would go out in the car and look for girls whose names I would never know. Once I was certain that he hadn’t chosen me, I went quickly back to sleep, so normal-seeming was it to be, or not be, spared. There was Dad by day and Dad by night, the house by day, the house by night; they were entirely different. He acted like a dad in the house by day. No one ever talked about the night, as if it was only an interval of silence and darkness and dreamless sleep that separated one day from the next. There was a place in my mind for what happened in the house at night, a place that, except at night, was locked and sealed.
I thought that, if I kept absolutely still and didn’t make a sound, he would go to one of the other rooms. I clung to this notion even though he sometimes came to my room no matter how quiet I was. I pulled the blankets over my head and covered my ears with my hands as if the darkness and the silence would protect me, and I went on doing this even though it didn’t work. I worried that he would come to my room every night if I wasn’t careful. I thought of Anne Frank, lying awake in the Secret Annex, listening for sounds from outside, footsteps in the courtyard that might be those of the Gestapo, the clumping of boots on cobblestones growing louder as they neared 263 and then receding as her prayers that they wouldn’t stop were answered every night. I thought of her wondering if Dussel, in the bed so close to hers, could hear the pounding of her heart.
When I heard the door opening, I pretended to be asleep, even though I knew it would not deter him. It was my opening gesture of doomed defiance, a delaying tactic that he seemed to relish. “I know my little Rachel Lee is not asleep,” he said as he closed and locked the door.
“I’ll tell Mom,” I said. He didn’t answer. “You have to leave in five minutes,” I said.
“Ten minutes,” he said.
“You should go to Carmen’s room,” I said. “You never go to Carmen’s room.”
“You know that’s not true,” he said as he knelt beside my bed. “But your sisters would be jealous if they knew that you’re my favourite girl.” I shook my head. “It’s much too warm in here for all these blankets,” he said.
“I’m afraid of my room.”
“A room can’t hurt you. You know that.”
“This one can.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Now you have eight minutes.”
There had to have been a first time. It was likely Gloria that he chose first. Then it got easier for him. It must have. How long had he considered it by then? Didn’t he realize that there was no going back? Once you touch your daughter, you will forever be a man who touched his daughter, even if you never do it again. If you stop just short, you will only be a man who considered it. Did he know he was about to cross an infinite divide? There are many other infinite divides. By then, he may have crossed some of them. During the war. Once you cross one, you may as well have crossed them all. Is that how it is? Is that how he saw it? You can’t take a life and give it back. And once you’ve taken one…
The day after they went shopping together, Gloria came by while Wade was at the library and told me she had confessed to Wade. She was in a panic but, though I was near panicking too, I managed to calm her down.
“He believed you?” I said. “You’re absolutely sure that he believed you?”
“How can I be absolutely sure?” she said. “But he seemed to believe me when I said that no one was involved but me and Fritz and the man he hired.”
“Have you told Fritz about this?”
“No,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about what to do, but I haven’t done anything.”
“Thank God,” I said. “Don’t tell Fritz Wade knows. Don’t tell anyone.”
“I won’t,” she said. “But I thought you should know in case Wade confronted you, or told you, or something.”
I hugged her and said she had done exactly what I would have done. She touched up her makeup in the mirror and left looking more or less composed.
I had called her on a Wednesday night when Max was away in Amsterdam.
At first I was so nervous I couldn’t speak. Then I managed, “I think we need to do something about Dad.”
Gloria said she didn’t know what I meant.
“I can’t stand to say it any other way,” I said.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You do know what I mean,” I said.
I told her things I’d never told anyone else. Each of my sisters had always known that what was happening to us was happening to us all, but we’d never said a word about it to each other until Bethany’s accusations. But I told Gloria. She broke down, sobbing. And then she began to tell me things.
“I can’t stand it,” she said. “When I’m alone with him, or even just speaking to him on the phone, I feel as if I’m six years old again. I become a frightened little girl who does whatever Daddy says. I believe it when he tells me I’ve been bad and must be punished, or when he tells me that I have to do something again tomorrow because I didn’t do it right today. He calls me his ‘little G.’ One minute, he tells me that I’m his favourite daughter because I’m the only one who loves him, that he’d be all alone if not for me, and the next he says that he likes you and Bethany and Carmen more than me because I never do what he tells me to. I still get sad when he tells me that he’s sad. I still tell him, ‘Don’t be sad, Papa.’ I still feel guilty when he tells me that he’s mad with me. Jesus, Rachel, I can’t go on like this. I can’t. I literally can’t. I’ve been thinking of how easy it would be to kill myself…It’s the only thing that makes me feel a little better.
“You were the only one of the four of us still at home with them for years. You don’t have to tell me what that means. I believe you that he hasn’t gone near you since they came back from Switzerland. But he will. Once he’s sure of Wade’s daily routine, he will. And when you and Wade settle down somewhere, they’ll visit you, mark my words, announced, unannounced. He arranges his entire life to maximize his access to his girls. He’s bored to death between visits. That’s why he can’t keep still when none of us is available. Even if the police and the courts were an option, I know I wouldn’t hold up through a trial. You wouldn’t, and neither would Carmen or Bethany. And what credibility would we have? We’re not exactly shining examples of normalcy. They moved back to South Africa because they knew you would soon be leaving home and Carmen and I are here. If Max and I moved, they’d follow us or go to live where you or Bethany are living. Max has actually given them money so they could visit us. He’ll go on doing that, and he’ll give them money so they can visit you, too. I’d give them money if Dad asked me for it. You and Wade would. They’d visit often and stay for as long as you let them. I can’t say no to them. None of us can. If we could, we’d have done it by now. That’s why we have to do something else.”
It was as if she had forgotten that I was the one who suggested the idea in the first place.
I told her that, once, when Carmen was stoned on something, she had admitted to me that Dad had been driving along the Cape Flats late at night to Fritz’s house and waiting outside in the car with the engine running until she came out. Carmen had been telling Fritz that Dad needed someone to keep him company while he drove around when he couldn’t sleep. She’d been leaving the house in the dead of night, and Dad had been taking her someplace to park and taking her home afterward. She’d been going back to sleep without a word to Fritz.
“Bethany will go back to them,” I said. “I know she will, long before that baby is born, if it ever is. It will make no difference to Dad that she’s pregnant. Or else it will make a difference to him. He’ll use it against her somehow. I’m sure he already has. Even if she keeps staying at your place, he’ll visit her when you and Max are out of town, or even when you’re not. You have a big house and he’s gotten away with everything for years in smaller ones. He doesn’t want to get any of us pregnant but he’s jealous of any man who does. Imagine being jealous of Clive. But he is.”
“Could we really do something like this?” Gloria said.
My heart was going a mile a minute. I told her what I had in mind, but I used so many euphemisms that she had no choice but to do the same. We spoke as if we thought the line was tapped.
“Do you know someone who does things like that?” she said. “Fritz does.”
“Do you think you could live with it, Gloria?”
“I can’t live with the alternative.”
A week later, I sounded out Carmen and Bethany. Max was still travelling, so we met at Gloria’s house—me, Gloria, Carmen and Bethany. And Fritz—Fritz, to whom Carmen had, a few nights before, told the truth about Dad. My excuse for Wade was that Gloria could use some company because Max was away. We sat around the enormous dining room table. The view through the window of the lights along the shore of the Apostles was so distracting that Gloria drew the drapes. Or perhaps she couldn’t stand the thought that we’d be seen conferring.
I sat at the head of the table, Gloria on my immediate right, Bethany beside her, Carmen on my left, her head resting on Fritz’s shoulder.
“The Star Chamber,” Fritz said, grinning at me. I ignored him.
“Here’s what I think,” I said. “If we turn him in, the police will think we cooked it all up together. Or they’d believe us but blame us. They’d say, ‘If you didn’t want him to do what he did, why didn’t you tell someone about it?’ People would rather blame anyone than blame the father. Girls who have no better sense, wives who won’t put out. Anyone. People don’t understand that, after it’s been through enough, your own mind will turn against you. A lot of people just wouldn’t swallow that this was going on for so long and we said nothing.”
There was much nodding around the table, everyone looking grim-faced, even Fritz.
“But this is not going to happen unless we all agree to it, all of us,” I said. “If you’re against it, say so now and we’ll never speak of it again.”
There was a long silence until Fritz spoke at last.
“Hans drove out to the Flats just last night,” he said. “We heard the car pull up and saw the lights. I went out and he took off. I’m not always there. Even when I am there, I’m sometimes so out of it I don’t notice when Carmen leaves the house.”
“Dad stays in the yard for hours if he has to, waiting,” Carmen said. “Sometimes I go out just to get it over with.”
“There’s nowhere else we can go to live,” Fritz said. “Our life, whatever the rest of you might think of it, is here.”
“What about Mom?” I said.
“She’s as bad as him,” Carmen said. “Worse. He’s crazy. What’s her excuse?”
“This is not about revenge,” Bethany said. “For me, it’s about my baby.”
Fritz laughed. “Not even a teeny-weeny bit of revenge, Lady MacBethany? I don’t mind saying that I want payback for what he’s done to Carmen.”
“If we leave Mom out of it,” I said, “she’ll divide her time between the four of us until she dies.” Carmen and Fritz snorted derisively. “The three of us, at least. And you never know, Carmen, when your marital circumstances might change. You might get tired of waiting for the revolution.”
“Wishful thinking,” Fritz said.
“I’ve imagined our lives with her still in it,” I said. “Myra van Hout alone because of us. Imagine my children’s lives, your lives and your children’s lives if she was still around, if we had to go back to pretending, for her sake, that he never touched us, if we had to go back to pretending that one million other obviously untrue things were true. We are under her control as much as we are under his. That would continue without him. On the other hand, I can’t bring myself to hurt her. I’ve thought about it and I can’t.”
“We’ll hurt her by hurting Dad,” Bethany said. “But she doesn’t use us the way he does. We should leave her out of it.”
“Hans the unknown hero of the Dutch Resistance,” Carmen said.
“We don’t know what he did or didn’t do during the war,” Gloria said.
“Oh, come on,” Bethany said, looking to me for support. “I still wake up reciting The Ballad of the Clan van Hout in my head.”
“Gloria’s right,” I said. “We don’t know and we’ll never know. Not for certain.”
Fritz frowned and shook his head. “The guy I have in mind—I don’t think he’ll be in unless it’s both of them. Too tricky to pull off otherwise. How you all feel about your mother is irrelevant.”
“No, it’s not,” Bethany said. She dabbed tears from her eyes with a Kleenex. “I wish there was some other way. It seems hard to believe that there’s not. Were we never a family? I remember times when I was happy.”
“Children live in the moment,” I said. “That’s why they heal so quickly. For a while, at least.” I, too, remembered times when I was happy. When I was a child, happiness could come on the heels of misery and not be tarnished by it. I saw phantoms of happiness in family photographs and heard them in The Ballad. I also remembered what it was like when the four of us were little girls, waiting for the sound of him getting out of bed or hearing the car in the driveway and his footsteps on the stairs, each of us wondering which room he would visit, which one of us he’d pick that night. There was no pattern. Having been chosen the night before didn’t mean you wouldn’t be chosen again. But I wasn’t a helpless child anymore. I didn’t want to die before my time. I didn’t ever want to lose my mind. As things stood, both seemed definite and imminent.
“I hate this so much,” Bethany said.
“So do I,” Carmen said. “But not as much as I hate them.”
“I don’t hate them. I hate this, having to do this.”
“You don’t have to lift a finger,” Fritz said.
“I have a conscience,” Bethany said.
“It was implanted in your brain when you were too young to resist,” Fritz said. “You know, this is how revolutions start. A handful of people, a cell meeting secretly.”
“You’re not a revolutionary, Fritz,” Bethany said. “We’re not revolutionaries. This is a conspiracy. You’re not here for Carmen’s sake. You’re here to make money. You’re here because you’re the only person we know who can find someone to do this.”
Fritz laughed. “Bethany, keep trying to work up the nerve to kill yourself. This is not a country of merciful Canadians. The penalty for murder is not life in prison; it’s death. My fee reflects the fact that I’m the only one who knows the name of the guy we’re hiring.”
“Sleep lightly,” Bethany said. “You never know when your guy might decide to tie up a loose end.”
“The four of you would be loose ends too. You and your consciences.”
“You might keep all the money for yourself and do nothing, Fritz,” I said. “What could we do about it? Or you might try to do it yourself to avoid splitting the money with this man of yours who you say will do it right. He might not even exist.”
“He exists. And he’ll do it right.”
“Do it right?” Bethany said. “There’s no way of doing this right.”
This is how it was—bickering, threats and, threaded through it all, the gradual piecing together of a plot to kill our father, which, as the hours went by, became so detailed and plausible that the squabbling stopped and we stared blank-faced at the table like children who’d been scolded into silence.
“What we’re planning,” I said at last, “won’t rid us of our memories of him. But there is a way to leave Mom out of this.”
“Are we agreed that we should?” Gloria said. “Speak up if you’re not.” No one did.
I took a notepad and a pen out of my purse, opened it and placed it on the table in front of me. “I’ve written some things down, in Arellian, just in case. But there are still some things left to talk about. Things we know about Dad that Fritz’s guy will need to know.”
“I always knew that that language you invented would come in handy someday,” Fritz said.
Bethany leaned across the table toward him. “She wants you to swear on your word of honour as a scumbag that you won’t double-cross us.”
“You’ll have to trust me,” Fritz said.
“This all sounds so creepy,” Carmen said.
“She’s right,” Bethany said, shuddering. “Maybe if we didn’t refer to them as Mom and Dad—”
“Make up your minds now. We do it or we don’t,” Gloria said.
“Okay, okay,” Bethany said.
By this point, the only one in the room not crying was Fritz. I asked him to go upstairs so that the four of us could talk.
As he made for the stairs, he stopped and looked back.
“The Final Solution,” he said.
“Never mind him,” Gloria whispered to me.
Carmen leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. I took her hand and joined hands with Gloria, who took Bethany’s hand as she reached across for Carmen’s. Carmen opened her eyes and looked around at the three of us. I tried to think of something to say.
I made a checklist and went over it countless times, convinced that I had overlooked something. It had to be late enough for Nora to be asleep in the shed. There was no point in trying to make it look like a botched burglary, because my parents’ rundown house with the rusting Ford Cortina in the driveway looked far less promising for a thief than any other house on the street. Also, if Nora or the DeVrieses or Max noticed that something had been taken and it was later found, because it had been sold or imperfectly disposed of, it might be traced back to Fritz’s man.
After Gloria gave Fritz the money, I made him promise that he would not contact us to let us know that it was done. We would simply wait to hear.
I chose the day Mom would be away attending the Star of the Sea Convent School’s annual reunion and fundraiser with Theresa DeVries. She’d been looking forward to it since she’d come back to South Africa.
Early in the afternoon, Gloria and Max went by Liesbeek Road to visit Mom and Dad. Gloria told them she had to go to the bathroom. She did go to the bathroom but, on the way back to the front room, she went to the kitchen and opened the fridge. His glass of Horlicks was there as always, a saucer on top, which she quickly removed. She broke in half four of Bethany’s Valium capsules, poured the powder into the Horlicks and stirred it around. Forty milligrams of Valium. We had to be sure that he was in bed, asleep, and not lying awake as usual, or walking around the house or the backyard, or out prowling in his car.
I thought often about phoning Fritz to tell him to call it off, to give the money to the man he said he’d hired, and to keep his share and forget about the rest of it. I thought about it, but I didn’t do it.
From The Ballad of the Clan van Hout
SCAPEGOAT (1985)
I know My looked the other way.
I’ve known it ever since the day
I came to bed from Carmen’s room,
my face so flushed, my clothes askew.
I knew that I had been found out;
at first I thought She might walk out
or turn me in or turn me out.
We made a silent pact that night:
she’d overlook what wasn’t right
but we would never speak of it.
We’d go on as we had before;
I’d keep it all behind closed doors.
It binds us like no other thing,
the meaning of a wedding ring,
the sacred secret that we share,
the thing that makes us what we are.
Why was She not enough for me?
(Nor was my Glormenethalee
and others too—I doubt She knows
how many there have been of those,
or what became of most of them.)
I think of when She was so slim,
when She was young and beautiful,
not that much older than those girls.
I couldn’t get enough of Her.
She tired of my flattery,
but it was not because of me,
so I went down the hall to them,
but they were not enough for me:
no number was enough, you see.
I wanted what I couldn’t have;
sometimes it makes me want to laugh.
It made me want them all the more,
for She was just the appetizer,
my girls my entree for a while,
but still not quite a bellyful…
I read this part to Rachel Lee;
soon after, she abandoned me:
This is not the Nazi waiter;
this is something even greater,
which means it’s even worse for us,
and that is why we must discuss
the accusations being made
by those Without about your dad.
I drive the streets alone at night,
get out of bed, turn off the light.
Oh how I love my nightly drives;
they let me think about the lives
of other husbands, other wives.
I like to watch the girls, of course—
by ten they’re always out in force.
I see the girls in twos and threes,
the girls like you girls used to be,
and like the ones I used to see
back home in the Land of Hout
on sleepless nights when I went out
and sometimes came home furtively,
so worried that I would wake My
or wake you girls that I would stay
downstairs till you began the day.
I know I needn’t spell it out;
you know your father drives about
because his ulcers keep him up—
he hardly gets a minute’s sleep.
It’s better that I leave the house
than creep around it like a mouse
and keep the two of you awake—
a family of insomniacs!
No movies play around the clock;
you go to bars, you have to drink.
The strongest thing I drink is milk—
sometimes the Horlicks makes me sick!
So out I go into the night—
there’s not another soul in sight.
The bad man must be Hans van Hout
because the bad are always bald
and most are fifty-four-year-old
university professors:
the jails are full of lecturers,
and vicious intellectuals.
The worst are the accounting profs
who scramble up onto the roofs
and jump on young girls passing by.
(The ones with gowns know how to fly.)
Because some crimes have gone unsolved,
and someone must have been involved,
they’ve got it narrowed down to this:
it’s either me or someone else.
It seems my car is everywhere—
they saw it here while it was there,
or going east while headed west—
almost enough for an arrest.
It seems I own a magic car
that goes so fast it disappears.
It seems that I’m behind the wheel
of every single vehicle
on every single city street
at every moment every night
and every car looks just like mine.
It’s all the fault of the police,
this witch hunt that will never cease.
They can’t seem to investigate
the number of a licence plate.
I never drive it very far
but they’re obsessed with van Hout’s car.
More often home than it is not,
it sits there in the very spot
I park it in night after night:
the driveway of the van Hout house—
you can’t get more conspicuous!
They still suspect me of those crimes:
I wish I knew how many times
they’ve parked across from 44
and stared and stared at our door
and stared and stared at that front step
till they deduced the sun was up.
While criminals just roam about,
they wait in vain for Hans van Hout!
They seem to think they have their man
and yet the crimes go on and on;
they took me in for questioning
and then they let me go again.
I’m not ashamed to say that My
is glad to be my alibi—
“Where did you go three months ago,
the night that there was so much snow?”
Who has that kind of memory?
She told them, “He was home with me.”
Beware of what you hear out there;
my enemies are everywhere.
Their daughters went to school with you
and gossip like their parents do.
They’ll seem so nice, it’s just pretend—
they’ll play a game called “let’s be friends”
to try to worm it out of you:
they’ll say they know it isn’t true,
it isn’t true what people say,
but still they’ll say it every day,
and they’ll closely watch your face
in case you show some hint, some clue—
and if you don’t, they’ll turn on you.
When they do, you must be ready—
no one else will vouch for Daddy.
Who are these girls that disappear?
It’s in the winter of the year
that girls go missing everywhere.
They’re not the ones from proper homes;
they run away from home in droves—
you don’t run from a place that’s safe
to strike out for another life.
They have one thing to bargain with,
the ones that are so slim and lithe—
they get more than they bargain for
the second they step out the door.
The evil man who lurks about
is not Professor Hans van Hout.
The safe place is the House Within;
let’s both say those words again.
The way they dress, they freeze to death:
they don’t grow up, they don’t grow old,
they catch their deaths out in the cold;
their deaths catch them is what I mean—
their epitaphs are “when last seen.”
No one has taught them wrong from right;
they stand beneath street lights at night,
alone, half-dressed, on drugs, drinking—
what on earth are parents thinking?
All of it is self-expression—
an odd way to express yourself,
to dress so as to bait the wolf.
Not until they’ve been undressed
do girls these days feel self-expressed.
Cops can’t admit they got it wrong;
they must invent a bogeyman
who steals their precious girls away—
they have to make some stranger pay:
“Some man was seen the other day—
he’s not from here, it must be him.
We can’t blame us, we can’t blame them,
we’ll blame the high-and-mighty man,
the foreign-sounding also-ran;
it’s obvious where he went wrong—
he simply cannot get along.”
It seems your father, Hans van Hout,
has been chosen as the scapegoat,
a role that he was born to play,
Professor Hout, from Bantry Bay,
who drives about the streets at night
and parks his car in vacant lots
and other such suspicious spots
and listens to the radio
and thinks of things from long ago
that his accusers do not know,
the war, the fall of Amsterdam,
the ones who fought, the ones who ran,
the memories that forbid sleep,
the secrets I have had to keep.
It all starts in the House Within;
that’s where the best and worst begin.
You have to bring a girl up right
(make sure her jeans are not too tight).
Don’t let her stay out after ten.
The House Within, the House Within—
that’s where the tale begins again.
I must go back to chapter one;
I have to get it right this time:
the lines must scan, the words must rhyme.
Throw out the drafts, erase the past;
I know this chance will be my last
to re-right what they did to me,
to rewrite what they wrote of me.
I must create the world anew;
it’s what the greatest writers do.
There were no other families—
I must invent the memories:
in order to perfect the world
I’ll have to raise four perfect girls.
You let me down, my Rachel Lee,
but I still have the other three.
From The Arelliad
MYRA (1985)
He comes home late most every night—
I go to bed, leave on the light
above the door, but I don’t sleep:
there is a watch I have to keep.
He thinks that I’m protecting Him
(unless he only thinks of Them
and never thinks of me at all).
What those who take Him for a fool
take me to be is plain to see
(to Him, perhaps, a mystery).
The truth is I’m protecting me. It’s far too late for Myra van Hout to be a prison inmate’s loyal and faithful wife. Hans would never leave me for anyone except those four. I’ve taken my share of the blame for Him, and I’ve done my best for Them.
They think that they have had it bad, but I grew up without a dad. I didn’t throw myself at every pair of pants or starve myself. I didn’t self-lobotomize with drugs and booze. I never tried to run away inside some book like someone half-demented, pretending that she wrote in a language she invented while idolizing long-dead Jews.
The four of Them are women now, and still He has his way with Them. They won’t, or can’t, say no. It seems He needs all four of Them but has no need of me—we last kissed when I was forty.
It’s no big deal what they’ve been through. Others have come through it none the worse. I suppose I cleared the way for Him: He wrote for Them, He read to Them—my Husband was my gift to Them, as were my girls my gift to Him. The five of them have special love, but I have none at all—though, in my way, I still have Him.
If He was caught, they’d let me go. I’d be the wife who lived in blissful ignorance, so blinded was she by her love for Him and Them. Or else I’d be regarded as stupid and gullible, or even callous, the woman who knew but looked the other way.
You’d be surprised what women do
to make the fairy tale seem true,
the perfect spouse, the wedding dance,
the perfect house, the picket fence,
the perfect kids in Perfect School,
the backyard with the perfect pool—
and what was she? A perfect fool.
Years ago, I thought of nothing but the worst. How would it look if people knew? Where would we go? How would we get by? “The hero of the underground.” He had to spread all that around. For all I know, it might be true, but saying it made Him look like such a craven fool, as much in need of a pat on the head as some attention-seeking child. He said things first, then thought them through.
What He does when He goes out is something I don’t think about. I know what He’s guilty of, but He’s not guilty of everything. I think I know the man I love better than others do. I’m not some twit who wouldn’t see a monster right in front of me. They’re barking up the same wrong tree that others barked up long ago. Hans van Hout, the bald professor, is not the man they’re looking for—it’s just that He can’t help saying and doing things that make Him look suspicious. He’s not their man, no, He is mine. They need someone to blame it on, someone to frame for it. They can’t just come out and admit that, although young girls in St. John’s go missing more and more, they don’t know why. To cover their incompetence, they’ll try to force Him to confess to something that He didn’t do, and I doubt that He could stand up to the kind of methods they would use. It’s not a crime to drive at night. He always has because of his insomnia. But they hope that His inconsequence can cover their incompetence. We have to get out of here.
It may not be too late to start again
back there in the Land Within,
back there in the Land of Hout,
back there where we started out,
back where The Ballad first began
and Hans was still a strong young man
and I was young and beautiful
and everything seemed possible.
It’s not too late to turn back time—
the lines still scan, the words still rhyme.