The Captive Condition (22 page)

It occurred to him that he might never succeed in exorcising Emily's ghost from his memory. Kingsley had treated her cruelly, had opened vistas of hope where before there had been none, and for this she would never forgive him. He shivered in the cold night and waited for a limb from the old oak to come crashing down on his head and put an end to his vile existence. When nothing happened he stood up, and with
Madame Bovary
tucked under his arm, he plodded toward his house.

Guilty of the life within him, he surveyed the pool and backyard, a onetime oasis and carefully manicured Eden that had been swallowed up by a blinding sandstorm of grief, harsh and barren as the Sinai. Like some haggard, middle-aged American Moses, he gazed hopefully at the light inside his study as though it were a burning bush capable of providing a dose of divine revelation. He need only step through the door, remove his shoes, and announce, “Here I am!” But when he entered the house, he heard the voices of those two little fiends repeating their perverse and familiar refrain.

“Something to harden the soul, something to harden the soul, something to harden the soul before a long, brutal winter!”

If the girls found their new living arrangements comfortable, they also found them intimidating and, to a certain extent, rather unsettling. For one thing, the Kingsleys' house, though it was an old Victorian with dimensions roughly the same as their own, had been renovated from top to bottom and gave the impression of being far more spacious and filled with sunlight even on the dreariest of days when there was no sunlight at all and springtime seemed a hundred years off. For another, every room was kept neat and tidy. The hardwood floors gleamed with a fresh coat of polyurethane, the glass tabletops sparkled from harsh chemical solutions and obsessive dustings, and the books lining the walls of Professor Kingsley's study, systematically shelved by subject and carefully arranged so their spines were flush, emitted a kind of forbidden aura, the tiny print and incomprehensible prose accessible to those neophytes who'd been ritualistically cleansed of their offensive ignorance after long years of intense study. The girls were also baffled by the bizarre collection of original sculptures proudly displayed on the fireplace mantel. To them the house resembled a museum and the Kingsleys grouchy curators who were aghast to find themselves surrounded by so many unruly children, but rather than guide Madeline and Sophie from room to room, explaining the meaning of each book and painting and sculpture, the Kingsleys, who had a great sense of possession, repeatedly enjoined them to keep their hands off
everything.

For the most part their days were quiet and uneventful, and the girls were treated to regular meals, usually steaming piles of colorless tofu cooked down to a pasty sweetness and an assortment of steamed vegetables seasoned with a touch of salt. Hot showers were mandatory each evening and bedsheets were changed first thing on Saturday morning. At night the girls were treated to elaborate bedtime stories that Mrs. Kingsley didn't so much read as perform with a dozen different voices from an illustrated book of wonderfully gruesome fairy tales in which wicked stepsisters lopped off their own heels and toes and then stuffed their bloody stumps into glass slippers. It was Marianne Kingsley's company the girls most enjoyed, or at least tolerated, and from her they learned to say “please” and “thank you” and to carry their dirty dishes to the kitchen sink after they were finished eating. Unlike their mother, Mrs. Kingsley rarely raised her voice or rushed off to the medicine cabinet to take a handful of pills whenever she grew tired of listening to her husband's “tedious bloviating” and “secular piety.”

The peevish professor, when he launched into another self-righteous sermon, had an irritating habit of raising his chin and lowering his eyelids, and he used perplexing words and phrases that the girls enjoyed repeating with the same silly bluster—“gentrification” and “upward mobility” and “empowering the working classes.” Aside from his extensive vocabulary, he sounded a lot like their father. Neither man seemed to have any idea what he was talking about. There were, of course, a number of key differences between them. Instead of jeans and flannel shirts, Martin Kingsley wore striped ties and sweater vests and khaki trousers that he had professionally laundered and pressed, and instead of cigarettes he kept a half-dozen ballpoint pens in his shirt pocket. He was also a big believer in “structured playtime” and “maintaining strict schedules,” which precluded the girls from going outside and dragging snow into the house. But what irritated the girls most about these antiseptic surroundings was the presence of the Kingsleys' three-year-old son, Christopher.

Golden-haired, blue-eyed, developmentally challenged Christopher, long drunk on his mother's breast milk, stumbled in mad fits around the house, drooling over his shirt and wiping snot on the walls. Like some horror-movie toddler possessed by a legion of devils, he soiled his pants with absolute impunity and puked up the solid food he ate—scraps from beneath the dinner table, insects he'd found crawling in dark corners, buttons, marbles, bobby pins. He smashed, snapped, bent, scraped, and chewed all of his toys, and when he finished with this dastardly work, he hunted down and then viciously savaged the porcelain dolls Madeline and Sophie tried so hard to hide from him. The porcelain dolls had imperturbable faces, unbruised and free of blemishes, and shiny red ringlets of hair that fell into their penetrating green eyes. Their mother told them the dolls had been fired in a giant kiln long ago by an eccentric old woman who once lived in a lonely cottage in the valley, and the twins found in them some small measure of solace and comfort.

Whenever he saw the dolls, Christopher howled his head off with desire. He escaped from his playpen and with determined grunts and growls seized the dolls by their hair, twisted their arms, lifted their skirts, and searched longingly for orifices to violate with his sticky fingers. For these heinous crimes he was never punished. The girls were not pleased. After witnessing yet another molestation, Madeline and Sophie decided the entire family should pay the price, and in the quiet hours of the night, when everyone else in the house had fallen fast asleep, the twins sat in bed and began to plot their revenge.

The New Year's Eve party was a grand undertaking and the talk of the town; the college newspaper said so. As Marianne Kingsley, a shameless self-promoter, hyperbolically put it, “By eight o'clock the bistro will be bustling with
tout le monde.
” But on the night of the big event there was a quarrel that sent Madeline and Sophie scampering for the safety of blankets and pillows in the guest bedroom. Like a pair of stowaways, they huddled together on the canopied bed, their backs pressed against the cold plaster wall, their bodies warmed by an itchy wool quilt pulled up to their chins, their battered dolls cradled safely in the crux of their arms. From behind closed doors they listened to the heated exchange.

“Absolutely outrageous!” said the professor.

“Keep your voice down,” said Mrs. Kingsley.

“But she's known about this event for weeks.”

“Nothing we can do about it now, I'm afraid. I'm already late, Martin. You'll need to stay home and watch the children. I can think of no other solution to our predicament.”

“You seem almost happy about it, like you've been planning this all along.”

“Planning what? The babysitter canceling at the last minute?”

“Precisely. Now you can go to the party without me. And please tell me you're not wearing that dress.”

“Certainly I am.” Mrs. Kingsley's voice had a lurking scratch of mordant sarcasm. “Oh, I suppose you think it's in poor taste for me to wear something that looks so much like the sari my rival wore. Uncanny, isn't it? It's almost like wearing a burial shroud.”

“Your rival?”

She grabbed a scarf off the hook in the foyer and then added tartly, “I'm sure you remember how Mrs. Ryan wore a turquoise sari on the night she took her own life. Or was she murdered? Investigators never made a definite ruling on the case.”

Studiously ignoring her insinuating tones, Kingsley said, “That is by far the most outlandish thing you've ever said to me. Who put such a crazy idea into your head?” He followed her to the front door. “It was those two hellions upstairs, wasn't it? Didn't I warn you, Marianne? Didn't I tell you they were trouble, not to be trusted? They come from a world where vulgarity is considered a virtue, intellectual ambition ridiculed. Their dumb daddy should have sent them to an orphanage, a psychiatric ward, an animal shelter, a laboratory. They were born in captivity, and that's where they should have stayed.”

Mrs. Kingsley silenced him with a fluttering gesture, a diamond ring flashing on her finger. She glanced at herself in the mirror beside the door and arranged her hair a final time. “The girls are perfectly innocent, Martin. And I do wish you would stop drinking. I'm not stupid, you know. I can smell the alcohol on your breath. You reek like an oil refinery.” Her words had a cool edge to them. “I'll be home after midnight. Don't bother waiting up for me.”

“You can't leave me alone. Not with those girls. Marianne, wait!”

She slammed the door behind her.

Engulfed in the dread silence of the house, Madeline and Sophie could feel the seconds crawling by, the minutes, the hours, and as midnight approached they heard footsteps, muffled and indistinct, outside the guest room. Coming from a troubled home made the girls natural watchers, and in the contained darkness they followed Professor Kingsley's portentous shadow as it floated in the hallway through a pool of dirty yellow light. Above the prolonged gusts that battered the gabled roof and made the slate tiles clatter like a heap of restless bones inside a crypt, they heard his raspy voice. The man muttered, he snarled. A rolling fog of hatred clouded his brain, obscured his thoughts. His words turned into a low, stifled laughter, his lips puckering with a seething distaste for his houseguests. Like a riddle or a difficult math problem at school, the exact meaning of his slurred and bitter ramblings perplexed the twins, but they both knew it was only a matter of time before he burst into their room to provide the solution.

Clutching their dolls more tightly, they moved closer together and held hands under sheets that smelled of harsh detergent. As the glass knob began to wiggle and turn, they thought how awful it was to have such an embittered and wayward man as their guardian. Little by little, oh, so gently, careful not to let the hinges squeak, the professor opened the bedroom door. The twins remained stock-still, like two animals frozen against the background, and clamped their eyes shut against a thin ray of light that cut through the darkness and fell across their faces. Slowly, very slowly, the professor moved his head through the narrow opening, and in the terrible gloom the girls caught a familiar whiff of formaldehyde that reminded them of the funeral parlor.

“Are you awake? Ha! Of course you are. Watching me with those vulture eyes. You're so clever, the two of you.” In his voice the girls could hear the crushing self-pity and staggering incompetence that had led him to this moment of reckoning, and with one corner of his mouth turned up in a piratical leer he whispered, “You've said discreditable things about me, haven't you? Told my wife about our pool parties over the summer. Yes, I think so. I think I have two moles in the house. Moles that perpetually burrow beneath the ramparts of my happiness. Marianne thinks I'm paranoid. But I'm not paranoid. Not in the least.” In a gesture of self-defense, he gave a tug at his collar and brushed away a forelock of pomaded hair with his scrubbed, red hands. “What do I have to fear? It's your word against mine, isn't it? And I'm tired of you making a mockery of my marriage. But just to be safe, I'm going to speak to my wife at the bistro. I won't be gone long. And then tomorrow morning we'll all sit down and discuss what should be done with you. Because something must be done.”

When they were certain he'd left the house, the girls hopped out of bed, put on their winter coats, pulled on their boots, and packed up their dolls. Having already given the matter a great deal of thought, they decided it was now time to move forward with their plan. They went from room to room, systematically unscrewing every lightbulb and unplugging every electronic device; they opened the toy chest and scattered Christopher's trucks and rubber reptiles all around the house; they poured salt into the sugar bowl; they tossed greasy banana peels beneath the couch where no one would find them until after the living room began to reek; they snapped the heads off the sculptures on the mantel. These tasks completed, they entered the professor's private study.

Working quickly, keeping an eye on the clock in the corner, they pulled his precious books from the shelves and arranged them according to the color of their dust jackets. They had just finished reshelving the red covers and were about to start on the black when they could no longer resist the lure of the professor's cherished manuscript on
Madame Bovary.
Like some flimsy tower, the thing sat atop his desk in a precise stack sorted by chapter, the pages held in place by small brass paperweights shaped like coffins—a gift that Christmas from Mrs. Kingsley. The girls looked at each other and squealed. Joyfully, they set upon his work in progress and took a particular, giant-killing glee in ripping the pages into tiny pieces. First, they trampled on them and kicked them across the room like confetti, then they collected the tattered fragments and stapled them to the walls. It became a kind of art project, and as they created ever more elaborate patterns, the girls called back and forth to each other.

“What are
you
making?”

“I'm making a
fish
!”

“I'm making a
bird
!”

In fact, the study now resembled nothing so much as a library in the aftermath of an explosion.

When they ran out of staples they barged into Christopher's room and screamed in his ears. They pounced on him, pulled his hair, rejoiced at his shrieks of terror and confusion, and when his tears finally subsided, they led him downstairs and into the forbidden outdoors—the one place children were never supposed to go. There, beside the holly bushes, they pushed him into a snowdrift. Not unexpectedly he took to it like a rutting sow and with eager hands heaped hard clumps of yellow snow on his head until he looked like a strange geological formation come to life, a giant calcium deposit from the depths of a salt mine. They brought him back inside and planted him on the couch in front of the television, but instead of letting him watch mallet-wielding cartoon cats and dogs with eyes hanging from their sockets on enormous springs, they flipped through the channels until they found a program about serial killers, war criminals, deposed dictators, scratchy black-and-white footage of unrepentant men being led to electric chairs and the gallows. Christopher applauded with each jolt of electricity, each snap of the neck and strangulation of the hangman's noose.