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.
