The Servants of Twilight

Her mind drifted back, against her will, and she became aware of a pressure on her chest and began to have some difficulty drawing her breath, for the predominant feeling associated with her childhood was one of suffocation.

She saw the rambling Victorian house in Pomona that had been passed from her Grandma Giavetti to Evelyn, where they had lived from the time Christine was a year old, where Evelyn still lived, and the memory of it was an unwelcome weight.

Although she knew it to be a white house with pale yellow trim and awnings, with charming gingerbread ornamentation and many windows to admit the sun, in her mind's eye she always saw it crouched in shadows, with Halloween-bare trees crowding close to it, beneath a threatening gray-black sky. She could hear the grandfather clock ticking monotonously in the parlor, an ever-present sound that in those days had seemed always to be mocking her with its constant reminder that the misery of her childhood stretched almost to eternity and would be counted out in millions and millions of leaden seconds. She could see again, in every room, heavy over-stuffed pieces of furniture pressed too close to one another, and she supposed that her memory made the ticking clock louder and more maddeningly intrusive than it had actually been, and that in reality the furniture hadn't been quite so large and clunky and ugly and dark as it was in recollection.

Her father, Vincent Scavello, had found that house, that life, as oppressive as it was in Christine's memory, and he had left them when she was four and her brother, Tony, was eleven. He never came back, and she never saw him again. He was a weak man with an inferiority complex, and Evelyn made him feel even more inadequate because she set such high standards for everyone. Nothing he did could satisfy her. Nothing anyone didespecially not Christine or Tony-was half as good as Evelyn expected of them. Because he couldn't measure up to her expectations, Vincent developed a drinking problem, and that only made her nag him more, and finally he just left. Two years later, he was dead. In a way he committed suicide, though not with a gurmothing so dramatic as that; it was just a case of drunken driving; he ran head-on into a bridge abutment at seventy miles an hour.

Evelyn went to work the day after Vincent walked out, not only supported her family but did a good job of it, living up to her own high standards. That made things even worse for Christine and Tony." You've got to be the best at what you do, and if you aren't the best there's no use doing it at all," Evelyn said-at least a thousand times.

Christine had one especially clear memory of an entire, tense evening spent at the kitchen table, after Tony brought home a report card with a D in math, a failure that, in Evelyn's eyes, was in no way mitigated by the fact that he had received an A in every other subject. This would have been bad enough, but that same day he had been mildly reprimanded by the school principal for smoking in the boys' washroom. It was the first time he tried a cigarette, and he didn't like it and didn't intend to smoke again; it was just an experiment, hardly unusual for a fourteen-year-old boy, but Evelyn was furious. That night the lecture had gone on for almost three hours, with Evelyn alternately pacing, sitting at the table with her head in her hands, shouting, weeping, pleading, pounding the table." You're a Giavetti, Tony, more of a Giavetti than a Scavello. You might carry your father's name, but by God, there's more of my blood in you; there must be. I couldn't bear to think half your blood is poor weak Vincent's, because if that was true, God knows what would become of you. I won't have it! I won't! I work my fingers to the bone to give you every chance, every opportunity, and I won't have you spitting in my face, which is what this is, goofing off in school, goofing off in math class-it's just the same as spitting in my face!" The anger gave way to tears, and she got up from the table, pulled a handful of Kleenex from the box on the kitchen counter, noisily blew her nose." What good does it do for me to worry about you, to care what happens to you?

You don't care. There's that few drops of your father's blood in you, that loafer's blood, and it only takes a few drops to contaminate you.

Like a disease. Scavello Disease. But you're also a Giavetti, and Giavettis always work harder and study harder, which is only right, only fitting, because God didn't intend for us to loaf and drink our lives away, like some I could mention.