False Memory

His mother, Claudette, answered the bell, and as always Dusty was startled and disarmed by her beauty. At fifty-two, she could pass for thirty-five; and at thirty-five she’d had the power to rivet everyone in a crowded room merely by entering, a power that she no doubt would still have at eighty-five. His father, her second of four husbands, once said, “Since birth, Claudette has looked good enough to eat. Every day the world looks on her, and its mouth waters.” This was so correct and so succinct that it was probably something Trevor, his father, had read somewhere rather than anything he had thought himself, and though it seemed at first crude, it was not, and it was true. Trevor hadn’t been commenting on her sexuality. He had meant beauty as a thing apart from sexual desire, beauty as an ideal, beauty so striking that it spoke to the soul. Women and men, babies and centenarians alike, were drawn to Claudette, wanted to be near her, and deep in their eyes when they gazed at her was something like pure hope and something like rapture, but different and mysterious. The love so many brought to her was love unearned — and unreciprocated. Her eyes were similar to Dusty’s, gray-blue, but with less blue than his; and in them he had never seen what any son longs to see in his mother’s eyes, nor had he ever seen a reason to believe that she wanted or would accept the love that — more as a boy than now, but still now — he would have lavished on her.

“Sherwood,” she said, offering neither a kiss nor a welcoming hand, “do all young people come unannounced these days?”

“Mother, you know my name’s not Sherwood —”

“Sherwood Penn Rhodes. It’s on your birth certificate.”

“You know perfectly well that I had it legally changed —”

“Yes, when you were eighteen, rebellious, and even more foolish than you are now,” she said.

“Dusty is what all my friends called me since I was a kid.”

“Your friends were always the class losers, Sherwood. You’ve always associated with the wrong type, so routinely it almost seems willful. Dustin Rhodes. What were you thinking? How could we keep a straight face, introducing you to cultured people as Dusty Rhodes?”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

“Hello, Claudette,” Martie said, having been ignored thus far.

“Dear,” Claudette said, “please use your good influence with the boy and insist he revert to a grown-up name.”

Martie smiled. “I like Dusty — the name and the boy.”

“Martine,” Claudette said. “That’s a real person’s name, dear.”

“I like people to call me Martie.”

“I know, yes. How unfortunate. You’re not setting a very good example for Sherwood.”

“Dustin,” Dusty insisted.

“Not in my house,” Claudette demurred.

Always, upon arrival here, no matter how much time had passed since his previous visit, Dusty was greeted in this distant fashion, not routinely with a debate about his name, sometimes with lengthy comments on his blue-collar dress or his unstylish haircut, or with probing queries about whether he had yet pursued “real” work or was still painting houses. Once, she kept him on the porch, discussing the political crisis in China, for at least five minutes, though it had seemed like an hour. She always eventually invited him inside, but he was never sure that she would let him cross the threshold.

Skeet had once been enormously excited when he’d seen a movie about angels, with Nicholas Cage starring as one of the winged. The premise of the film was that guardian angels aren’t permitted to know romantic love or other strong feelings; they must remain strictly intellectual beings in order to serve humanity without becoming too emotionally involved. To Skeet, this explained their mother, whose beauty even the angels might envy, but who could be cooler than a pitcher of unsweetened lemonade in midsummer.

Finally, having extracted whatever psychic toll she sought from these delays, Claudette stepped back, inviting them in without word or gesture. “One son shows up with a… guest at almost midnight, the other with a wife, and neither calls first. I know both took classes in manners and deportment, but apparently the money was wasted.”

Dusty assumed that the other son was Junior, who was fifteen and lived here, but when he and Martie stepped past Claudette, Skeet bounded down the stairs to greet them. He appeared to be paler than when they had last seen him, thinner as well, with darker circles under his eyes, but he was alive.

When Dusty hugged him, Skeet said, “Ouch, ouch, ouch,” and then said it again when he hugged Martie.

Astonished, Dusty said, “We thought you were —”

“We were told,” Martie said, “that you were —”

Before either of them could finish the thought, Skeet hiked up his pullover and his undershirt, eliciting a wince of distaste from his mother, and displayed his bare torso. “Bullet wounds!” he announced with amazement and a curious pride.

Four wicked bruises with ugly dark centers and overlapping aureoles marked his wasted chest and stomach.