By Nightfall. Michael Cunningham
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“Sorry.”
He steps back, closes the shower door. Mizzy has always been shameless, no, more like shame-free, satyr like, so unembarrassed by nakedness or by biological functions that he makes almost everyone else seem like a Victorian aunt. With the shower door closed Peter can see only the fleshly pink silhouette, and although Peter knows it’s Mizzy (Ethan) he finds himself pausing, thinking of the young Rebecca (striding into the surf, slipping out of a white cotton dress, standing on the balcony of that cheap hotel in Zurich), until he realizes he’s lingered there a second or two longer than he should—Mizzy, don’t get the wrong idea—and he turns to leave. As he does he catches sight of his own ghostly image, the blur of him, skating across the steam-fogged mirror.
Rebecca’s family is, in its way, a country unto itself. Peter married into it as he might have married the customs and legends, the peculiar history, of a girl from a small, remote nation. The Taylor family nation would be solvent but not wealthy, devoted to regional dishes and handicrafts, lax about timetables and train schedules, tucked into the declivities of a mountain range daunting enough to have protected it from invaders, immigrants, and most ideas and inventions it did not itself engender. Mizzy would be its wounded patron saint, whose pale, glass-eyed effigy is paraded annually through the streets and into the central square.
Before Mizzy, though … There was, still is, the big old dormered house beginning to go terminally soggy under the accumulated heat and soak of eighty-plus Richmond summers. There is Cyrus (professor of linguistics, a small, quietly confident man with a head like Cicero’s) and Beverly (pediatrician, brisk and ironic, defiantly indifferent to housekeeping). And there were, are, three lovely daughters: Rosemary, Julianne, and Rebecca, five years apart. Rose was the beauty, solemn, not unfriendly but not available, either; the girl for whom some older boy with a car was always waiting. Julie was less stunning but more easily amused, a one-of-the-guys girl, loud and funny, a champion gymnast, un-apologetically sexual. And then there was Rebecca, born famous thanks to her two older sisters; Rebecca, who was small and pale, gamine, the least beautiful but most intelligent; who had the same aloof, guitar-playing boyfriend since the eighth grade; whose girlhood is epitomized (for Peter) by the yearbook photo in which she, wearing the homecoming crown and holding homecoming roses, stands laughing (who knows why, maybe at the absurdity of where she finds herself) in a little sparkly dress, flanked by the two runners-up, the princesses, who smile mightily for the camera, and who are slightly stolid in their beauty, unremarkable, descendants of those sturdy “marriageable” girls in whom Jane Austen was not particularly interested.
And then. When Rebecca was about to graduate from high school, when Julie was in her second year at Barnard and Rose was already thinking of divorce, the Mistake arrived.
Beverly had had her tubes tied years before. She was forty-five; Cyrus was past fifty. Beverly said, “He must have been desperate to be born.” This statement was taken seriously. She was an expert on children, a doctor of children, and not prone to romances about them.
Peter had met Mizzy when Rebecca brought him for the first time to Richmond. He was nervous about meeting her family, embarrassed over the putative note of impropriety—wasn’t it a little creepy for a graduate student to date an undergraduate from his seminar, even if he had waited until after the semester’s end? Rebecca’s father was a professor, could Peter really and truly believe Rebecca when she assured him that her father didn’t disapprove?
“Just shut up,” she told him as the plane descended. “Stop worrying. Right now.”
She had that intoxicating, young-girl certainty; she had that Virginia lilt. Jest stop warying. Raht now. She might have been a nurse in a war.
He promised to try.
Then they were off the plane and there was Julie, vital and friendly in a cowgirl way, waiting for them outside the airport in the family’s old Volvo.
And then, there was the house.
The photo Rebecca had shown Peter had prepared him for its decrepit grandeur—its tangles of wisteria and deep, shadowy front porch—but not for the house in situ, not for the shabby wonders of the entire block, one lovely old matronly house after another, some better cared for than others but none done over or restored—it apparently wasn’t that kind of neighborhood; Richmond probably wasn’t that kind of city.
“My God,” Peter said, as they pulled in.
“What?” Julie asked.
“Let’s just say it’s a wonderful life.”
Julie lobbed a quick glance at Rebecca. Oh, right, one of those very, very clever boys.
In fact, he hadn’t meant to sound cynical, or even particularly clever. Far from it. He was falling in love.
By the end of the weekend, he’d lost count of his infatuations. There was Cyrus’s study—a study!—with its profoundly comfortable swaybacked armchair, in which it seemed you could sit and read forever. There was Beverly’s applauded (if failed) attempt to impress Peter by baking a pie (which was known afterward as “that goddamned inedible pie”). There was the upstairs window through which the girls had escaped at night, the three lordly and lazy old cats, the shelves crowded with books and elderly board games and seashells from Florida and framed, rather haphazard-looking photographs, the faint smells of lavender and mildew and chimney smoke, the wicker porch swing on which someone had left a rain-bloated paperback copy of Daniel Deronda.
And there was Mizzy, about to turn four.
No one liked the word “precocious.” There was something doomy about it. But Mizzy, at four, had figured out how to read. He remembered every word he heard spoken in his presence and could, forever after, use the word in a sentence, often as not correctly.
He was a serious and skeptical boy, prone to occasional fits of hilarity, though it was impossible to predict what might or might not strike him as funny. He was pretty, pretty enough, with a high pale forehead and liquid eyes and a precise, delicate mouth—it seemed at the time that he might grow up to be a beautiful princeling or, equally plausibly, a Ludwig of Bavaria, with a great dome of vein-mottled forehead and eyes too full of quivering sensitivity.
And (thank God) he harbored childish affections and inclinations along with his spooky proclivities. He loved Pop Rocks and, with an unsettling devotion, the color blue. He was fascinated by Abraham Lincoln, who Mizzy understood to have been president but who he also insisted had possessed superhuman strength, and the ability to conjure full-grown trees out of barren ground.
That night, in bed (the Taylors, it seemed, just assumed), Peter said to Rebecca, “This is so incredibly lovely.”
“What?”
“All of it. Every single person and object.”
“It’s just my crazy family and my creaky old house.”
She believed that. She wasn’t being coy.
He said, “You have no idea …”
“What?”
“How normal most families are.”
“Do you think my family is abnormal?”
“No. ‘Normal’ isn’t the right word. Prosaic. Standard.”
“I don’t think anyone is prosaic. I mean, some people are more eccentric than others.”
Milwaukee, Rebecca. Order and sobriety and a devotion to cleanliness that scours out the soul. Decent people doing their best to live decent lives, there’s nothing really to hate them for, they do their jobs and maintain their property and love their children (most of the time); they take family vacations and visit relatives and decorate their houses for the holidays, collect some things and save up for other things; they’re good people (most of them, most of the time), but if you were me, if you were young Pete Harris, you felt the modesty of it eroding you, depopulating you, all those little satisfactions and no big,