Oof. This one was a long time coming, no? It’s not quite what I imagined it would be, but hey, it’s complete. In honor of Labor Day, there will be no update on Monday, but check back on Friday for something completely different!
I chastised my son for his callousness, but said nothing to Jocelyne of the full extent of what he had revealed to me. In truth, I didn’t know quite what to do with the boy. I had taught him to fight so that he could defend himself, not so that he could humiliate and mutilate others. I did my best to impress this distinction upon him, but there was nothing in his eyes to indicate that he understood me one way or the other.
Perhaps it is my fault. Perhaps I failed as a parent to teach my child respect, self-control, discipline.
But then, what man can expect to raise an unnatural being? How? How can I be held responsible for that failing?
I watched the boy after that with all the grim focus of a prison guard watching over a dangerous criminal, but he never did anything to suggest that his cruel and vicious behavior would resurface. Indeed, he seemed to become the happy, inquisitive child he had been before the unfortunate affair with the Fairchilde boy had begun.
He had been expelled from Goodfellow Academy, of course, and when Jocelyne and I attempted to enroll him in other private institutions, we discovered that none of them would accept him. I suspect that Franklin Fairchilde had wielded his considerable social clout to poison the other schools in the city against my boy. The entire action struck me as bitter and petulant, but then I suppose we were lucky that the police didn’t show up on our doorstep and demand to take Robin into custody. We briefly considered the idea of sending Robin to a boarding school (I, perhaps, considered it more seriously than my wife,) but ultimately decided that there was no sense in it. Jocelyne loved having him around to much to willingly part with him in such a manner, and when she argued that we had waited and wished for him too long to let him go, I had no choice but to relent.
With no other choice, we sent Robin to public school. He seemed to thrive there. Once more I was certain that his encounters with the other children would leave him feeling isolated and unwanted, but once more I was proven wrong. Robin never seemed to achieve the level of easy familiarity that he had with some of the students at Goodfellow Academy, but he never wanted for children to play with. I watched him closely then, taking a keen interest in his activities and interests and speaking with his teachers at every available opportunity. They were shocked at my level of involvement, and to be fair, it was highly unusual. But they were also pleased. To see a parent of any sort taking such interest in their child’s education and development, let alone a father who would normally have been (and, perhaps, should have been) focused on providing for the family, was unheard of. I would simply smile and nod, playing the part of the affable father. They didn’t know my true reasons for taking such an interest. Indeed, they could not ever know.
I had to monitor the boy. I knew full well what he was already capable of and I feared what he would become as he grew older.
I should have known from the moment of his birth that the child wasn’t to be trusted. He was too different from me. The aura about him was too unnatural. Those eyes, those horrible, beautiful, scintillating eyes. No such child could have sprung from my loins. He must have been some kind of changeling, some foul spirit sent to beguile my beautiful Jocelyne and confound myself.
I realized then that Robin’s beating of the Fairchilde boy had been nothing but a game to him. He had taken my words and twisted them into some grim and perverse thing. My dissertation on self-defense and on standing up to would-be bullies had been used to perpetrate sadism and malice. I ask you, what kind of son would so ignore a father’s teachings? What kind of son could misconstrue them so? What boy vested with humanity and love and care could ever become such an unthinking brute?
None. None.
* * *
The boy’s primary school education concluded without further event, save for a few scuffles. They were nothing of note, largely instigated by other boys, and largely concluded with a single blow to the nose. Perhaps Robin’s reputation preceded him, but few of the boys seemed to have much taste for fighting him.
High school proved another matter.
The very concept of high school was new in those days, untested and uncertain. The wealthiest simply had their scions educated at home or else in private academies until such a time as they went to university, and those less fortunate simply sent their children off to the fields or the factories upon completion of their primary education. High school became a happy medium for the rest of us, a place where our own children could further better themselves and prepare for still higher education.
Robin loved it and hated it all at once.
Where previous years had been spent at play and at learning simple, practical things, Robin’s lesson in high school had a decidedly more philosophical bent. Perhaps it was because the teachers intended to prepare their wards for the rigors of college, or perhaps it was because they simply didn’t know what else to teach, but Robin suddenly found himself in possession of a rudimentary understanding of civics, of ethics, of moral and political philosophy of all sorts, of literature, of mathematics. His education rivaled my own, and in some instances surpassed it.
I had never been more unsettled. If I couldn’t understand the boy, how could I possibly hope to predict his behavior, to be ready for the inevitable break in his facade when his true self would be visible once more?
Robin grew strong and tall as a young man, and the quick temper and senseless, fiery passions I had known as a youth were present in full force in him. In classes that permitted debate and discussion, he was quick to voice his opinion. He would often report to Jocelyne and I of arguments with his peers and even his teachers. At times he would let slip details of physical altercations with the other boys. He grew fond of tossing around terms like “narrow-minded,” “selfish,” and “conservative fools standing in the way of progress.”
Jocelyne and I digested his every word with great care, she mourning the loss of her “sweet” and “innocent” little boy, and I assessing the capacities and tendencies of the alien creature that shared my home. But nothing he said revealed the darker nature that lurked inside him. If anything, his preoccupation with social responsibility and justice and morality suggested an underlying kindness and sensitivity to his soul, even if it were tempered by a certain amount of arrogance and a tendency to hyperbole. I began to think that perhaps I had been wrong about him after all. Or else that time had eliminated the baser elements from his personality.
And then the war came.
Robin followed the growing crisis in Europe with rapt attention. He would speak at great length of the fall of monarchies, of the European nations dividing the globe up for themselves, of the spread of democracy. He protested Wilson’s insistence that the United States remain neutral, calling it cowardice and a lack of rectitude. But then the submarines began sinking ships of all stripes again, and Wilson went before Congress, and soon we were involved. And Robin, idealist that he had become rushed out to enlist the very instant he heard the news broadcasted over the radio. Jocelyn begged him not to go, told him that he didn’t need to fight and die in Europe to prove that he was a man of character, that there were ample things he could do at home to support the war effort, but he would not be dissuaded. She turned to me in tears, told me to stop him, to do something, anything
I turned to face Robin, and I looked him in the eyes, in those terrible incandescent eyes of his, and I saw nothing there but still. His mind was set. He had found a cause to believe in, something to fight for, and he would see it through to its bloody end. “Robin,” I said to him. “Is there anything I can say or do that will keep you from going? For your mother’s sake?”
He looked at her, and I could see the hard and unflinching resolve in his eyes begin to break. Looking at me, he felt nothing, but when he looked at her and saw the heartbreak she was suffering, he could do nothing but try to find a way to alleviate the pain there.
“I’ll be fine, mother,” he said. “We’ll be fresh and better trained and better armed. The Axis won’t stand a chance once the Allies get a shot of fresh American blood.” Jocelyne wailed at this, told him that he didn’t know what it was like, what it would do to him. She told him stories of uncles who had fought in the war between the states, and how her father had told them that they were never the same after, and how even twenty years after the fighting ended her clearest memories of them was of vacant-eyed men, their mind flitting back and forth between the present moment and the horrors of a war long since ended.
Robin’s composure began to fail him (even now I find myself reflecting on how oddly beautiful he looked when he was crying, his tears so much like prisms,) and all he could say was, “Fine. For mother.”
In time, Robin forgave us for persuading him to stay. He took his mother’s advice and began cultivating a victory garden, collecting scrap, distributing pamphlets, and a dozen other little things we were all encouraged to do to help the war effort. But as we were to discover, his decision not to enlist was only a temporary reprieve. Not even four months from the day of our argument, a draft notice came and Robin found himself called upon to join the 77th Infantry Division. Jocelyne cried. My son left for training and then for Europe.
* * *
Robin sent postcards and the occasional letter home to us, and we wrote him back, but months passed between our communications. Jocelyne took up the reins of his endeavors, tending to his garden and gathering her friends to raise awareness over the war effort and what people could do to help. For my part, I focused on my work. I believed that my responsibility was not to my country but to my family, and that the best thing I could do was support Jocelyne and Robin, working hard to ensure that she had the freedom to pursue her own goals and that he had a home to return to after the terms of his service were up.
As it would happen, that would come quicker than we expected. The summer after he was drafted, Robin fought in France at Chateau-Thierry and a few months later in the Argonne forest, and that was where he was injured. His company had been cut off from the other Allies, and assaulted mercilessly by the Germans, and in their hour of most desperate need, their own side had shelled them with artillery. A mere month later, the war would end in victory for the Allies, but Robin found himself wounded and recovering in a hospital well away from the front lines. Their victory became his defeat, and he returned home with the darkness in him awakened once more.
I could see it in his eyes as soon as he walked through the door. Jocelyne ran to him and embraced him, but she didn’t notice that the light had gone out of his eyes. They were dull with nothing to them but the calculating malevolence of a predator, a killer. “Hello, mother,” he said, his voice flat and lifeless. Jocelyne paid it no heed, instead conducting him to the kitchen so he could enjoy the meal she’d been preparing in anticipation of his return.
I took his duffel bag to his room and considered how out of place it looked there, an adult’s item amongst the artifacts of childhood and innocence. I had the sudden sensation that Robin would not be with us for long, that he would find a reason to leave the home he had grown up in and strike out on his own. When I returned to the kitchen, Jocelyne was talking a mile a minute about all of the local developments that Robin had missed over the past year while Robin just sat there quietly, his fork bringing his food to his mouth with all the enthusiasm of a machine performing the soulless task for which it had been designed.
My assessment of Robin’s desire to leave would eventually prove to be correct. Not even a month had passed before I began to detect a certain restlessness in him. He spent much of his days in his room reading and listening to radio broadcasts, and much of his nights out on the town. He rarely interacted with myself or with his mother and he declined many of the invitations we extended to him to join us on our various activities in the neighborhood. When I asked him of his plans for the future, of how he expected to find gainful employment, he would simply shrug and deflect my question, speaking of “needing to rest and gather his strength for a while.” A bit more time passed and Robin asked me for a monthly stipend of sorts so that he could move from my home into the city proper and make a life for himself there. I was more than sick of his churlish attitude at that point and I decided that if a few hundred dollars a month “just until he could get started” was what it would take to remove him from my home, I was fine with it. Jocelyne protested, but the boy charmed her and promised to visit every weekend and that he would stay out of trouble and that he wouldn’t run with men and women of ill repute.
And for a while, he was true to his word. For a while. But then came the Volstead Act, and with it, all that was good in Robin died.
* * *
The civic virtue that so possessed Robin when he was a few years younger turned into a seething hatred of the government after the war. He would often decry the men who legislated and lead the country as being out of touch not just with their people, but with fundamental truths of human nature. He began to speak more freely about his thoughts and feelings regarding the war he had once believed so strongly in. “Everything that’s wrong with this country can be found in what happened to me in Argonne,” he would say. “Those who ought to know better raining death upon their own men, even as they beg us to stop. I tell you, John Brown’s not the only one moldering in the grave.”
We tried to direct the conversation to happier things, asking him how his search for work was going and if he found city life agreeable. He was vague in his answers, but he seemed to be generally positive, speaking of having befriended a group of young, artistically-minded individuals. For my part, I suspect he may even have been associating with communists and anarchists. But the three of us tried to get along as best we were able, he with his radical ideas and sunny disposition, Jocelyne with her memories of a boy so much sweeter than the surly man her son had become, and I with my ever constant suspicion of the boy’s activities and motives.
And then one day Robin stopped visiting. Instead, we received a missive stating that he had found an opportunity he needed to pursue that required his full attention but that he would surely join us the next week. And that next week, we received naught but another letter, and then another, and then another. A month passed with little contact at all with our son, and in her worry, Jocelyne sent me into the city to personally check on the boy.
Robin’s lodgings were in the Bowery, and I noted with some surprise how many of the neighborhood’s residents seemed to be young men who had returned to military service. The atmosphere of the neighborhood catered to them with distractions and diversions and saloons that respectable people would never patronize. It shamed me some to see Robin dwelling in such a place, but then, what more could I have expected from the boy? I asked for directions to his building and made my way there, preparing myself to see a room defined by sloth and laziness and likely unclean.
What I found shocked me to my very core. There were empty bottles everywhere of every size. That Robin was no teetotaler didn’t surprise me, given the passion with which he had spoken against the temperance movement since his return, but there were not only empty wine and beer and whiskey bottles floating around. I saw too the familiar little vials of Bayer heroin, and found still others labeled as tincture of opium and cocaine. There was a table covered in playing cards and half-eaten food, empty hypodermic needles crunched underfoot, and the very stench of human misery paraded the room.
The boy I had spent so many years raising, the boy I had tried to mold as a creature knowing only love and good and self-sacrifice, had moved into the city and created a drug den for his home. I picked up an empty vial and considered it glumly. No wonder he had not been to visit in so long, I thought.
There was a laugh from the corner of the room. I spun to face the sound, suddenly wishing that I had a weapon, when I saw that it was merely Robin standing in the doorway to his bedroom, shirtless and smiling, his body thin and pale. He indicated the empty bottles with a nod of his head, and said “’What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?’” We made eye contact. I tried to keep my face neutral. Robin smiled, but his eyes were as inhuman as ever behind the facade he projected. “Do you like that? It’s from a poem that was getting passed around the trenches. Some English tommy fancied himself a poet and wrote reams of the stuff. God only knows how he found the time in between killing and getting shelled to Hell and back.” He sat down at the table, folded his hands neatly before himself, and looked up at me. “What do you want, Father?”
“Your mother asked me to check in on you. She was worried when you didn’t come to dinner last night.”
“I’m fine.”
I pointed at the emtpy bottles that seemed scattered all about the apartment, heroin and liquor and god knows what else. “I’m not sure I agree with you.”
“The heroin’s perfectly legal. I have a doctor who prescribes it to me for my nerves.” He smiled again, the contempt he felt for me, for everything, writ plain across his face. “My nerves have been ever so dreadful since I got back from the war, you know.” He shrugged. “And besides, I don’t even use most of it. Agatha likes the junk much more than I do.”
“Agatha?”
He turned to look over his shoulder and shouted for her to come out. She was a short girl, with dark eyes and fair skin, and she was completely, shamelessly nude. I looked away, feeling my face turn red. “Agatha,” Robin said, “this is my father.”
“A pleasure to meet you, Sir.” Her voice was high and soft and dreamy, as if she had either just awakened or else was on the verge of falling asleep.
I mumbled a response. Robin laughed, kissed the girl, and sent her back into the bedroom.
“What has happened to you?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper. “What foul spirit possessed you at birth to turn you into this ravening, debased fiend?”
“’It’s not these stiffs have crazed him; nor the Hun.’”
“What?”
Robin shook his head. “Nevermind. I shouldn’t have expected you to understand.” He studied me for a moment then smiled. “I have good news for you, Father. I won’t be needing your money anymore soon. I’m entering into a business deal of sorts with an acquaintance of mine from the army.”
I eyed the boy suspiciously, uncertain what he was getting at. He rarely spoke of the men he had served alongside. “What’s that?”
“Well, once the Volstead Act comes into effect, people are going to be looking to get their fun wherever they can get it. My… associate… has some family upstate that have long brewed their own beer and fermented their own wine. They’re learning how to distill spirits even now, I’m given to understand, and they’ll be able to produce the goods in such quantity that there will be plenty to sell. They just need distribution. Someone who can handle a car, that’s my associate, and someone who can handle a gun. That’s me.”
He smiled as if genuinely pleased by this arrangement, and I could only gawp at him in horror. “My God,” I said, “what is wrong with you?”
He frowned, snorted. “And here I thought you would applaud my good business sense!”
“You’re a thug,” I said, the anger in me rising. “Nothing but a drug-addled thug. I tell you, I knew what you were the instant I laid eyes upon you! You may have fooled your mother, but I knew!”
He chuckled, his voice low, his eyes unblinking. “Did you, now? Did you use your magical prescience to look to the future and see this very moment? Did you look at an innocent, unsullied baby and really ‘know what it was?’” He laughed, and his eyes narrowed to slits. “You are a fool.”
“I’m going to stop you. I’ll go to the police and inform them of your conspiracy to break the law.”
“No, you won’t. Think of my mother for once in your miserable life. Think of your wife. What’s it going to do to her if her own husband, the father of her only child, the one she waited so long for, turns him over to the police? How will she feel if your actions lead to my dying in a shootout with the cops.”
I blinked, my stomach beginning to twist itself into knots. “What?”
“Think of the headlines. ‘War Hero Gunned Down by Police.’ ‘Decorated Soldier Shot to Death by Trigger-happy Cops.’ ‘Tragic Misunderstanding Leads to Dead Soldier, Police Officers.’ I promise you, Father, that if any police officers come through that door, I am opening fire without hesitation. And not only that, but if they search this apartment, they won’t find a damn thing here other than proof that I’m a poor, shell-shocked artist. And then what will Mother think?”
I was silent. I didn’t have a single thing to offer up in response.
“That’s what I thought,” he said. He stood up, walked to his icebox, and pulled out a bottle of what I assumed to be beer. He opened it and took a sip. “Now, then,” he said. “Get out.”
I stepped forward. “Now wait a moment,” I said. “Wait just a mo—“
He lashed out with his fist, hitting me on the cheek with a speed and a strength I would not have expected from his slight frame. He roared. “Get out!” and advanced, his fists raised, but he did not strike me again. Instead he stood there, his eyes nearly glowing with hate, his body like a coiled spring waiting to unleash its energy.
Numb and defeated, I did just as he asked.
* * *
That was months ago. After my exchange with Robin, a deep despondency settled over me. The boy had always been smart, had always been driven, and when he set his mind to task, he usually accomplished it handily. And now he had set it to undermining a government he had fought for less than year ago. The weight of this settled heavily upon my soul, and the depression that Jocelyne fell into when I told her that Robin would no longer be joining us on the weekends only compounded the situation. She asked me what had happened during the trip, and I told her only that our son was a disgrace we should have nothing to do with. She wrote him letters beseeching him to tell her his side of things and to come home, assuring him that all would be forgiven, promising sanctuary if he was in some kind of trouble with the law, but they all went unanswered.
How little she knew. I read the newspapers every day, watching for headlines about bootleggers slain by the police either in the city or upstate, waiting to see Robin’s name appear in the obituaries, but nothing ever came of it. There was no shortage of men seeking to profit from human misery and suffering, and knowing that the boy was not only one of them but perhaps one of the best was almost more than I could take.
Recently, I’ve found myself thinking about the lectures Robin would give when he was a young boy about civic duty and social responsibility. We have an obligation to do good, he would say. To take steps to limit and ease the sufferings of others. To try to make the world a better place. I remember hearing all of these comforting little philosophies, but one in particular stands out to me.
We have a responsibility, he said, to acknowledge and correct our mistakes.
To that end I have acquired a small automatic pistol. It is an inconspicuous thing, perfectly sized to fit into a coat pocket but powerful enough to drop a charging, drug-fueled madman. Indeed, the salesman assured me that it had been designed explicitly for this purpose.
I have made many mistakes in my life, but some of them haunt me more than others. Some I can acknowledge and take steps to correct, and some I never speak of or think about, save in the darkness of night when the world is still and I am alone with my thoughts. It is weakness, really, that keeps us repeating our mistakes. It is weakness that blinds us to the truth of things. It is weakness that keeps us from helping those who need it most.
I was weak twenty years ago. I pray I will not be weak now.
Stupendous Stories 