Gypsies

In his room Michael thought about Willis and about the silence at the di

This attic room looked out over the rooftops of Polger Valley toward the river and the mill. The mill dominated the valley like a black, crouched animal. The chimney flues were black and smokeless against a hard gray dusk. Michael put his hand to the window and the glass felt icy under his fingers. Snow soon, he thought.

He kept his T-shirt on.

It wasn’t the shirt, of course; it was the power in him. Willis must have sensed that. Michael thought about what Laura had told him, some of the hints his mother had dropped. He understood that the T-shirt was itself irrelevant; that Willis might as easily have objected to his haircut, his shoes, the way he held his fork. What he really meant was: here is this new person under my roof and I don’t control him and I don’t like that.

Michael understood because the house in Toronto had operated the same way, though without the implied threat of violence. He recognized in Willis the shadow of his mother’s cryptic silences. He had grown up in that silence. The vacancy of unpronounced words. This wasn’t a new thing with Willis, only louder and more frightening.

He wondered whether that was the way it always worked in families, whether fears were passed on from generation to generation, like the color of a person’s hair or eyes. Maybe it was like a curse, something you could never escape, something you carried with you whether you wanted to or not.

But, he thought, some things do change. Willis depended on his ability to scare people, and it worked: Michael’s mother was frightened of him; even Laura was frightened of him…

But not me, Michael thought.

Not me.

He lay on his bed in the gathering dark and watched an early-winter show begin to beat against the window. He felt the tremble of the power in himself and thought, Hell, I’m a long way beyond Willis Fauve. He doesn’t scare me.

2

When Karen stopped in to say good night Michael was already dozing. Cradled in the old bed, he looked almost like a child again. Predictably, he still had the T-shirt on. Rather than wake him, she folded the comforter around him and tiptoed to the door.

He stirred long enough to raise one eyelid. And he said a strange thing, faintly, from the depths of his sleep.

He said, “Don’t be afraid.” “I won’t,” Karen said. “Sleep now.” She eased the door shut.

But she was afraid.

She was afraid of the Gray Man and she was afraid of her father.

It surprised her, the depth of her fear. Maybe it was predictable, maybe she should have expected it. After all, what had changed? Well, she was an adult now, she had been married, had lived on her own. Those things should make a difference. But they didn’t, and maybe that wasn’t unusual; maybe these angles of co

The next day, after Willis left for work, she helped her mother with the laundry; in the afternoon she carried the plastic laundry basket up to the second floor where Laura was waiting. Karen sat with her sister in the guest room folding sheets. The sheets were warm from the basement dryer; the fabric softener had imparted a faint, delicate scent of lavender.

Laura said, “We’re not getting anywhere.”

“I know,” Karen said. This frightened her, too: this motionlessness. “It’s harder than I thought it would be.”

“It’s hard because nothing’s changed.” Laura whirled a sheet out over the bed. “Everybody’s older but nothing’s different. They say you can’t go home again, but the scary thing is that you can—it’s too easy to step back into all the old mistakes.”

Karen said, “Mistakes?”

“You know what I mean. He rules this house. You saw him at di

“Well, it is, isn’t it? It is his turf.”

“It was our home for twenty years, for God’s sake! We lived under his roof like prisoners—it was only Tim who ever spoke up.”

But, Karen thought, look what happened to Tim. Tim had disappeared out into the big world; for all anyone heard from him he might as well be dead. Maybe was dead. Maybe worse. Maybe the Gray Man had found him.

But she folded that traitorous thought into a dresser drawer along with the spare sheets. “Tim was braver than us.”

“Brave or stupid. Or maybe he just liked getting bruised. But at least he fought back.”

Karen thought privately that Tim was like a small frightened dog: the harder you kick him, the more he tries to bite… until he chews through the rope and runs away. Tim, after seventeen years of this life, had finally gnawed through his rope. She said, “We won’t find out anything from Daddy.”

“We haven’t tried to find out anything from anybody.” Laura smoothed the sheet over the mattress and slipped the two old pillows into their flowered cases. “It’s Mama we should talk to.”

“She won’t like it.”

“If we wait for her to like,” Laura said, “we’ll be here another twenty years.” It was undeniable.

“Now,” Laura said. “We should talk to her now.”

Karen hesitated and then wondered at her own reluctance. “Doesn’t it scare you at all—what she might say? Don’t you think about what it might mean —knowing?”

Laura walked with her to the stairs. They were sisters now for certain. No time had passed; they were altogether children. Laura said, “I’m more scared of what might happen if we don’t.” The house felt suddenly colder.

Mama was in the kitchen drying dishes.

How full of memories this house is, Karen thought. But it was not so much the house as the furnishing of it, the lay of things. The kitchen was like the kitchen in every other house they had lived in. The tile was peeling up, the cupboards were painted a dingy flat yellow color. Dish towels hung on a wooden rack; the dishes were stacked in a white Kresge’s drainer. Cups on cup hooks, pot holders in the shape of roosters tucked behind the toaster, a hand-stitched sampler on the wall bearing a passage from Proverbs. It was late afternoon and the kitchen window showed a dismal backyard terrain of powder snow and hillside and empty sky. Daddy would be home in an hour or two… longer if he stopped to have a drink.

It was Laura who had the courage to say, “Mama, we need to talk.”

Jea

“Old times.”

Mama stood still for a few moments, then set down the dish she’d been drying and turned to face Laura. Her expression was hooded, unreadable. “Wait here,” she said finally, and bustled out of the room.

Karen sat with her sister at the kitchen table, tracing patterns with her finger in the chipped Formica. How old was this table? As old as herself? My God, she thought, we don’t need to dig up the past: it’s here, it’s all around us.

Mama came back with a shoe box under her arm. She sat down at the table and pried up the lid.

Inside the box there were pictures.

Mama said, “These are the old days. All these photos.” She emptied them onto the table.

Karen sifted through the pile. The photographs had aged badly. She remembered the various cameras Mama used to own: a Kodak Brownie, which had produced most of these mirror-finished black-and-white pictures; and later a big plastic Polaroid camera, the kind where the photograph rolled out by itself and then you had to wipe it down with some evil-smelling preservative.