Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders Read Online Free Page B

socialized with a few handpicked playmates, they trudged into the house with too many germs. And how could I allow Tilton to be herded into stuffy classrooms where the kids traded childhood diseases like baseball cards? Besides, school had always been a struggle. The teachers didn’t know how to reach Tilton in her miraculously fractured world anyway. Tilton needed to be home. I told myself I had no choice but to relent. My mother and Ruthie were gone, and so Tilton and I stayed home, together.
    It was much quieter without Ruthie. I was struck by a strange sense of relief, though that relief brought its wallops of guilt; what mother would be relieved that her daughter ran away? She’d filled the house with a whirlwind of chaos—loud music, lewd images on record covers and cassettes. She insisted that they watch the nightly news—and what could be more violent and upsetting? “This is the real world,” Ruthie would tell us. “We have to know these things if we’re ever going to have normal lives!” But as soon as Ruthie left, I gave the television away to the local nursing home, and I had the newspaper delivered to Mrs. Gottleib next door so that its graphic images wouldn’t find their way to each day’s breakfast table. I knew that my bedtime story was too graphic. This hypocrisy wasn’t lost on me. But Tilton had a right to her own history, to know her father.
    As horrifying as the images of the crash were, I always worried more about telling the second half of the bedtime story, which was bloodless, but more violent—a rupture of family. George, the deserter. My own father might have been a deserter too. My mother never gave me the details. And then she died, and all I had left were her ridiculous fables of Weldon and Daisy. I wouldn’t do that to my own kids. There were valuable lessons to be learned, and once Ruthie was gone I blamed myself for not having been more straightforward: this was a cautionary tale. Harriet Wolf was known for famously pooh-poohing stories laden with morals. “If I’d wanted to be a moralizer, I’d have done so,” she once wrote. “As novelist, my job is to make things up. As reader, yours is to sort morals out for yourself.” I, on the other hand, like my stories to have a point, thank you very much!
    So I became my own Greek chorus. “You can never tell what form danger will take, Tilton. It can look so sad, so in need of sympathy—like a woman who’s lost her husband in a plane crash—that you invite it into your own home.”
    When did Tilton truly understand that her father had an affair with the widow sent by the Red Cross to stay with us? When did she understand the word “affair”? Hard to say. She never questioned this part of the story—Marie Cultry and her love-lost air, her passionate, weeping impression collapsing around the house that chill December, how she seemed to carry heat wherever she went; Marie Cultry with her moist, exuberant wilting, her flushed, fevered cheeks, her wide-set eyes and quivering mouth; Marie Cultry, the thief.
    After all grisly identifications were attended to and she was emotionally stable enough to travel, I watched George through an upstairs window cup Marie Cultry’s elbow so she didn’t slip on the icy driveway. He guided her gently to the passenger seat and shut the door. He unlocked the trunk and heaved the suitcase in, roughly. After he slammed the trunk lid, he looked up at me in the window. I knew how I looked: one hand on my hip, the other pulling back the curtain. It was midmorning. Tilton was napping. Ruthie was building blocks and kicking them down.
    George waved, and I waved back to him.
    Did he know that he wasn’t coming back? Was he only 55 percent sure or was this the wave of a man without any doubts? Later, I took inventory of his things and realized that some of them—a few items of clothing, his toothbrush—had to have been hidden away in Marie Cultry’s suitcase. This was plotted.
    At the time, I was