Chapter Forty Two

Dear she began, and stopped.  She did not write this.  This has been written by another.  This is an account kept in a latter-day.  She might have written thusly, but in the ordering of things it was not to be.  Neither was she.

The Remedy was born in Seattle to loving parents.  He was born healthy and happy, in a hospital not far from the house where he would spend his earliest years.  That hospital is gone now, demolished to make way for a shopping mall, but there are many who remember its wide corridors, and all the patients who passed into and out of that place.

His parents, Ronald and Mary, saw in their son the promise of future things.  Their son, their strong and handsome son, would reveal secrets to them, and accomplish things that were beyond their imagining.  He was their hope for a better life.

        Ronald was a man who worked with his hands.  He had always been so.  He had always been good at fixing things.  He came from that kind of stock, from the sort of people who carved democracies and enslaved Indian nations, all the while whittling away at some piece of wood.  He was the kind of man who could repair anything, and moreover the kind of man who enjoyed repairing anything, taking things apart, and learning how they worked.  He never exactly knew what kind of son he had fathered, but he expected that the boy would learn quickly, and find the successes his father had never qualified for.  

Ronald was a man without education, but a man who got along well with other men.  He had very dark hair – almost black, and his tan skin and sturdy proportions exuded vitality.  Ronald was also a man that women admired, but not a man swayed by flattery.  Women might tell him about how good he was with his hands, women might tell him that he was handsome, but he only took such compliments for what they were worth.  At the end of each day, he went home to his wife.  He was never plagued by temptation.

        His wife, Mary, was a pretty woman, but not strikingly so.  She was petite, with blonde hair and delicate features.  She was honest, and she was true to him.  To her, and to most people where she came from, unfaithfulness was an almost unspeakable crime, and among the worst crimes that any woman might commit.  She didn’t just love her husband; she devoted herself to loving him more each day.  Her husband was everything she wanted, and if he wasn’t she did her best to think that it was so.

        Her son, to her unending satisfaction, was a reflection of the man she had married.  She saw in him the beginnings of a loyal, loving man, who would one day bring grandchildren to her house.  She saw in him the comfort of her old age.  College, she thought, and a devoted wife.  Grandchildren who would laugh through the greenery that guarded over Ronald and Mary’s house.  Thanksgivings, Christmases, and even Easters.  Warm memories yet to be tasted.

        There are some for whom marriage and family are a religion, and it might be said that adherents of such a religion cultivate happiness in the world of the living, if not in the hereafter.  Mary and Ronald were such adherents, and if they believed in God it was only a God that resembled their spouse.  This God was handsome or pretty, good at fixing things, and unassuming.  This God was only ever in one place – their home.

        Their little boy grew quickly, and took after his father in almost every way.  Had there never been a fire that killed both Ronald and Mary, he would have learned to better emulate his father, and to adore his mother even more.  He would have grown up quiet and confident, and he probably would have married someone just like Mary without remarking upon the resemblance between his bride and his mother.  Unfortunately for him, this was not to be.

        Ronald and Mary took their little boy home from the hospital, and loved him as much as possible.  They took joy in his small triumphs, from his learning to walk to singing his first song.  Five years old, and then he was on his way to kindergarten.  Six years old, and learning his ABCs.  He was such a handsome little boy – like his father – and he made friends so easily.  He charmed everyone who crossed his path, and his parents worked hard to ensure that he wanted for nothing.  Ronald slaved at more than one job to pay off the house, but he never raised an eyebrow when Mary came home with yet another toy for their treasured son.  

Ronald expected that all his troubles would be redeemed in a son who found success.  Ronald, however, did not expect accidents.  Not that anyone ever does.  Fires.  Bad wiring.  Parts of the house uninspected.  Ronald could have replaced the wiring himself, but he had never seen it and had never thought to look.

        Such a tragedy, that fire.  The whole place burned right down to the ground.  The fire left only one survivor, a little boy at school, not so far away.  And the policeman would come in with the social service lady and tell him that his parents were dead, only a handful of years after kindergarten and learning how to walk.  His father would have been proud of how much love and grief poured out of that little boy, but his father and mother and everything had been offered to other gods.

        On one Saturday morning before the fire, the Remedy ran into the yard where his mother was weeding.  It was a hot summer day, and sweat stung her eyes.  She looked up and saw her little boy shining like the sun, full of some idea that had captivated him for the past several minutes.  He had been watching Superfriends, which she could hear blaring from the living room, and his mind was full of superheroes and supervillains and strange cosmic devices.

        “Superman is the strongest!” he yelped at the top of his lungs, “I can be Superman!”

        He ran into his mother’s arms.

       “Yes, you can,” she said, wiping her blonde hair out of the way, “You can be anything, anything you want to be.  You’re my darling, aren’t you?

        “Yeah,” he said, his thoughts already turning away from his mother.  He was about to run back into the house, back to where the superheroes were foiling their arch-enemies.  Some character from the television groaned as a laser blast incinerated something.

        She watched him run back up to the porch stairs, and then disappear into the living room.  He was such an active little boy, exhausting at times.  She wanted him to know how much she loved him, but the words weren’t always there.  Not so that he could understand.  His mind wandered, and it was hard to tell what he was thinking, but she knew that in time he would calm down.  Superheroes and sugar highs were not forever.

        Their house was small, and it was square in shape with a brown shingled roof that rose to a modest point.  It was white with blue trim.  Ronald had painted it himself the week before.  Their yard was large, and Mary had done a splendid job of landscaping.  There were birches in the front, and many flowers and other bushes around the corners of the house.  It wasn’t the kind of house you’d see in a magazine or in a movie, but it was simple and comfortable inside.  It was a place to come home to.

And she knew that he would be home soon – her husband.

        The day before, she had been writing a letter to her cousin.  In the letter she talked about her family to the exclusion of almost everything else.  She had expended a few lines on greetings and shared acquaintances, but for almost four additional pages she listed all of the things she, her husband, and her son had done together.  She discussed the places they had gone, and how happy – how truly happy – the three of them were together.

Yet after she wrote the letter, its contents seemed alien to her, and she almost wondered how she could have written a story about someone else’s life.  What she had written almost seemed too good to have really happened to her, and she wondered at her own audacity.  How could one speak of such happiness, and not be using it as some kind reproach?  As some kind of conceit?  How could exalting in such good fortune not come across as a kind of vanity?  As a kind of self-aggrandizement?

She began to feel the weight of her good fortune in the misfortunes of her cousin, and it began to seem that the letter she had written was some kind of personal attack, intended to make her cousin feel inferior.  Certainly no one could blame her cousin for picking a husband that died of cancer.  Certainly she was no better for having married a dependable man who didn’t.  So why had she written her letter in such a confident – some might say arrogant – tone?  Why had she put so much confidence in her present prosperity, when everything her parents had ever taught her spoke to the fact that prosperity was only ever a prelude to the unforeseeable?

        Pausing over the unfinished letter, she returned the paper to her writing desk and placed the pen back in the cup where it resided.  To write about her good fortune suddenly felt like inviting trouble.  To broadcast her good news felt like mockery.  She didn’t want to write her son into a story.  To do so felt like a setup for disappointment.