A Memorable Family

by Taylor Hagood

          The little boy’s father feared clowns as a child. When the little boy was born, his father determined he would grow up not afraid of clowns. By this time the father had become a collector of circus memorabilia, which included a great many clown posters. They ranged from elaborate stone lithographs to plain silkscreen prints. The father covered the walls of the little boy’s room with them.

          The little boy knew none of this background or motivation, of course. He simply grew up in that room surrounded by smiling clowns. His father’s plan worked. The boy had no fear of the clown images around him.

          In fact, the little boy would lie in bed at night looking around at the shadowy visages. As he watched, the fixed smiles of the clowns seemed to twitch.

          It became a kind of game for the little boy. Like hide and seek. A clown would twitch to catch the little boy’s eye. The little boy would just miss it and train his gaze on the smile looking for another twitch. The clown stayed still but was actually trying not to burst out laughing. Just before the explosion of laughter came, another clown got in on it and got the boy to look that way so that he would not see the first one laughing. They were daring the little boy to catch them.

          After a few minutes nobody worried about the little boy catching them anymore. They just went on and twitched their smiles in full view. Eventually they broke into silent uproarious laughter. At that point the little boy would be laughing aloud with them. When his parents heard him they thought how happy their little boy was that he would laugh in his sleep.

          When the boy entered the double-digits of age his father decided he would sell his clown posters. He had grown bored with the circus thing and wanted to start a new collection. He did not say anything about it to anybody but went into the boy’s room planning to snap pictures of the posters for advertising. He stopped in the doorway and gasped.

          All the smiles on the clowns’ faces had turned to frowns. And their eyes had changed, narrowing from gladness to squinting rage.

          At the moment, the boy was with his mother at the grocery store. When they returned a little over half an hour later, they were stunned to find the boy’s father lying face-down across the threshold of the boy’s room. Doctors determined he died of a heart attack.

          The father had been a shrewd investor and left his wife and son in excellent financial condition. It did not occur to either the wife or the son to sell the clown posters. Not knowing her husband’s intentions at the time of his death, the wife thought the posters were part of his connection to the boy. The boy had always viewed the clowns as his friends and went on laughing at their mouth-twitching game.

          The boy grew big and muscular. He played wide receiver and free safety on the high school football team. His playing career ended with a broken leg midway through his senior season. His intelligence and activities got him several scholarship offers, including one from the university in the nearby city his father had attended. The boy went there and got top grades and found favor in the eyes of professors as well as students. Everyone felt especially soft-hearted toward him when his mother was diagnosed with a virulent form of cancer that claimed her life toward the end of his second year.

          Although his aunt strongly advised him to sell his parents’ home the boy did not want to. The income from his father’s investments easily paid for the taxes, insurance, and utilities. So the boy, now turned into a young man, kept the house, although he did not stay there or go to it during school breaks.

          Instead, he rented an apartment about halfway between the university and his childhood home. His apartment looked nothing like the room he grew up in. There was no sign of a clown or the circus. The colors were the blandest of gray and coffee hues his generation found attractive and sophisticated. What few pictures adorned the walls were abstract prints and framed photographs of his parents. Nothing in his personality set him apart from any of his peers. He dressed stylishly.

          The young man graduated and began a job in his father’s profession. He showed no brilliance in his work but was dedicated and never missed a day. His positive outlook drew people, and he had many friends. Eventually he started dating a woman and proposed to her. The wedding took place the following June, as is traditional. The bride’s family hired a crew to film the wedding. A woman with a camera helicoptered around the couple as they took their vows. Like all brides, this one looked beautiful. Anyone who ever watched the footage later remarked how carefree she looked during the ceremony.

          The young man and his bride were scheduled to go to Costa Rica for their honeymoon. Their flight would depart very early in the morning after the wedding, and they had a hotel room near the airport for their first night as a married couple. But on the way to the hotel, the young man took an unexpected turn. When his wife asked him where they were going, he smiled and said it was a surprise. He was very handsome and had a beautiful smile and she had never had any reason not to trust him.

          So she felt confused when he pulled into the driveway of an obviously abandoned home.

          “What is this place?” she asked.

          “It’s the house I grew up in,” his smile gleamed in the darkness.

          “Nobody lives here anymore.”

          “No. But I still own it.”

          She did not know how to respond. To her silence he continued, “It is very special to me. I want us to stay here on our first night together.”

          A feeling spread inside the young woman’s chest urging her to get out of the car and walk away. But she had just vowed to stay with her husband for better or for worse.

          Opening the front door, the young man had to claw away thick cobwebs. He excused himself with his usual politeness to go turn on the power. He vanished into the darkness, leaving her to smell the dankness of the empty house.

          Moments later, she heard the beeps of electronics coming on as light illumined the hall. Her new husband’s svelt form returned, and he took her by the hand to show her each room. Not only did no one live here, but no one had been inside in a long time. There were many more cobwebs. The smell of mice droppings came to her nose. The house had a close, airless feeling about it.

          He took her to his old bedroom and turned on the light. The bright colors of over a hundred clown faces sprang to view. Their grins lashed, jolting her backward. She uttered a single syllable curse, a word she rarely used.

          Her husband steadied her, telling her everything was ok, that this room was where he had spent so many of his happiest moments. But his voice sounded far away and meaningless to her because she felt herself deafened by the silence of the clowns’ hilarity. She felt a sensation as if she were acting in a silent film and looking out of the celluloid at an audience laughing at her with no noise.

          As her eyes scanned the room, she took in the myriad individual faces of the clowns in the posters. Some looked directly at her, and when her eyes met theirs they seemed to squeeze a little with gladness. Other clowns were printed to gaze into the middle distance or at something around them. But their eyes seemed to shift over to her, straining to see her out of their corners without turning their heads the way people do when they do not want others to see they are looking at them.

          She felt frantic and out of control. All those printed clown faces collaged into a four-square barrage of colorful confetti. The room pulsed with power so absolute it felt like a wave lifting her out of anything familiar.

          The sound of her husband’s voice became intelligible to her again

“ . . . yourself comfortable, and I will go get ready.”

          “What?” she said.

          “Just go ahead and get in bed and I’ll be right back.”

          She looked at him and his expectant smile. He winked at her and hurried out of the room. She could hear a door close somewhere in the house. It must have been a bathroom because then she heard loud explosions of air followed by running water.

          Again a whisper in her brain told her she must leave this place at once even as an overwhelming force in this room assured her she could not. As she undressed, she felt the hundreds of eyes around her watching. An image of herself as a slave on an auction block arose in her mind. As she turned back the covers she felt small and weak, like an emaciated rat.

          She trembled as she got under the covers and curled up. She closed her eyes and felt tears seep out of them. She thought she could sense movement all around her, a fluttering of clothing and limbs, something like a crowd settling in before the beginning of a performance.

          Then she heard the light switch flick, and her eyelids darkened.

          “I’m here,” her husband said. “Are you ready?”

          The last thing on earth she wanted to do was open her eyes but felt compelled by an intense external force. She blinked the tears out of them and looked up at her husband standing in the doorway. Though the bedroom was darkened the hall light was still on. It caught one side of his face. On it she could see makeup applied in a poorly-done style of a clown.

          The young bride was too sick the next day to go to Costa Rica. The couple cancelled their plans. Rather than take time off, the young man went to work. He seemed as happy as ever; no resentment at missing his honeymoon. That his wife should be so sick she could not go out did not seem to concern him. When people asked about her, he simply said she was not feeling well that day. That condition continued into the next day and then the next. Soon it became the norm of their married life as they settled into the house of his youth.

          Eventually, she did get out again. People would see her grocery shopping. Any questions they asked her received only vague answers. Always they noticed how worn she looked. No one could understand because her husband, with his perpetually sunny outlook, would surely have been the happiest kind of person to live with. People wondered if mental illness ran in her family. Or had she come down with some sudden disease that could not be spoken of? No one ever heard of her going to a doctor or for treatment.

          The couple continued in their married life six years. Then one day the young man died of a heart attack. People who had known him his entire life recalled how his father had also died at a young age of the same cause.

          The young man’s many friends went to the funeral home. I was among them. All of us were shocked to see him in the coffin. His face was painted up in an amateurish approximation of a clown. A red smile smeared over the lips. What should have been blue diamonds under his eyes were just splotches. The white foundation sprawled unevenly and with messy edges. Our understanding was that his wife had done the make-up and claimed it was how he would have wanted to be displayed. She herself came neither to the visitation nor the funeral.

          But I had known her before she had married him. I knew them both. I was her boyfriend in college before she left me for him. I had never dated a single woman since we broke up, and I hoped I could reignite her passion for me. So I did something no one had ever thought to do while her husband was alive—go to their house and ring the doorbell. I had no idea if she would come to the door.

          But she did. She opened it and looked at me uncomprehending, as if she had never known me. I spoke her name. Then, feeling foolish, I told her mine. When I did that, her face softened a little. Not into a smile but into recognition. Then a look came into her eyes I cannot exactly describe. It blended urgency with apology and something else I cannot even now identify.

          I asked if I could come in. Her entire body shook once, as though repulsed at the idea. But then she relented and said “Yes” with strange deliberateness.

I walked in, and she shut the door behind me and led me into the living room. I could hear the sound of activity all over the house, stomping and knocking. I raised my eyebrows to her. She looked at me like no other person has ever done before.

          Then they came rushing in. Hundreds of them. All different sizes of paper-thin clowns—a legion of paper dolls but with solidity to shake the house although they made no sound from within themselves. Seeing me, they all stopped. Their smiling faces turned toward me in a momentary frieze. Then they rushed back into their tumbling play, swirling into the shadowy corners of the house.

      I looked back at the woman I love as she opened her mouth to speak.