The Necklace

America: 1965

I suppose I have the usual tawdry immigrant story—the rough crossing, the pitiable urchin existence, some usual and unusual mistreatment. I was only fifteen, cocky, starry-eyed, and ignorant. A disgusting creature deserving of all he endured. They beat me, they cheated me, they enslaved me; the last one tested his medicines upon me. Who blames them? I had to transform myself, shed the old skin and become a new American. I later invented my background—a solidly middle-class New York merchant father—I could even copy that trace of Brooklyn on the tongue—a story of tragic loss, fire, amnesia, and then the good Samaritan who took me, an American boy, into his shop and taught me all that I know.

This last is true. At least partly.

You would think a clever person would see through my thin fabrications, but no one did, not even my once-wife, your mother, who might have guessed a bit of the truth from the inconsistency and vagary of my tales. Only you, my youngest child to whom I write this confession, will know it all.

Here I sit in my office at the university where I teach languages and some attendant history, smug in my success, such as it is. I always had a facility for languages, for tongues, for accents, for phrases, slang and proper, words of all kinds: obscure, common, synonyms, antonyms, rhymes. I speak seven of them (languages) including my native Danish, a word of which, you have never heard me utter.

Why must I confess it now? That painful beginning in a faraway land is the memory I have long avoided; the whole thrust of my life has been to leave it behind. Still, I see how it has shaped me. Perhaps the telling will free me. That is my hope. For in the telling, I condemn my past. I stomp on it, I eschew it, I disown it. I dissolve it. Yes, I confess it. It’s the final prison that holds me.

I suppose the timing is relevant. Perhaps you can even use it to your advantage, an immigrant father who rose to academic and civic prominence and comfortable wealth. I, too, once ran for political office, defeated, as you know. That was the one time we met after you’d reached the age of consent. The one time we made an appearance together and pretended to be a proper loving family. They do not like a man estranged from his family, of course. But the deceit was quickly found out. They do not like a liar any more than a person who cheats on his wife with a series of unimportant girls. They will always side with the twelve against the one.

So, I will tell you who I really am, for it might be who you really are as well.

There is a poison running through my veins, a terrible thing I absorbed from the two who spawned me, miracle though they called it. I was not too old when my sisters left me in their exclusive care, as they fled to better lives, happier homes, new places, new people.

The two had a way of fighting that became unbearable with constant repetition. Fighting that infects the psyche, incites misplaced loyalties, unstable side-taking. He did not speak for days, while her frustration grew, and mine along with it. I used to pound him with my fists, and still he would not break his silence. But when she slapped him and trod purposefully on his toes, and did not give him his dinner, I began to hate her and take his side. He smiled a little to give me encouragement in promoting his cause, but still would not break his silence; you see he was fond of me, but his hatred for her was stronger. He would roll those drooping Danish eyes up in mockery. Well, perhaps not mockery, but a form of it. For he kept an innocent core that was not false.

I, on the other hand, have a deceptive core. Where did I learn this? I knew from the beginning, that I was not wrought of love, but of some kind of need for love. So, you see, my very existence was predicated on a falsehood. An emptiness that I was always looking to fill. I pretended to be grander than I was, rich, not poor, educated, not ignorant, sophisticated and worldly, not provincial, American, not Dane.

From my earliest days, I skated across the sea to Copenhagen with my father and helped him scavenge. He did not know it, but I stole and cheated and told him stories of my “finds” and “luck.” I think, much later, he knew that I was not as blessed as I pretended, that I was a petty thief after all. Or a grand one.

In Copenhagen I learned sleight of hand, which served me well later when I was making my living as a pickpocket in lower Manhattan. By then, I’d learned to affect manners and mannerisms that helped me pretend to be a gentleman who’d misplaced his wallet (and who wrote out an IOU in a grand flourished hand at an elegant business establishment.) But most importantly, I could speak with anyone, I could show my intelligence, my learning, real and faked, I knew when to intimidate, when to defer. That knowledge is the complete key to my success.

I was schooled as a child, but after the first month or so, I did not go. I could already read, so the lessons were beneath me; at least I thought they were. I had my sister’s books, an odd assortment of trashy novels and religious texts, and a few volumes of poetry, and read them until they were frayed and torn, and I was tired of reading. Then I went to the docks—in summer by boat, in winter across the frozen sea—and skulked around where the big ships came in once a week. I met all the sailors, including one by the name of Pierre, a French born who spoke many languages, including my own. He’d traveled to Russia and to all the European and Scandinavian ports. He taught me one thing: to always stay on your feet and watch, to find your path through the middle whenever you could. For they looked for you on the edges, always at the edges, and missed what was right under their noses.

Pierre traveled the darker alleys of the city and the bright boulevards with the same ease. He was not a big drinker, or often a whorer, though those two indulgences were his ultimate downfall. He liked money most of all. He told me he had ten thousand francs hidden away in his mother’s house. I did not know if it was true, but I always saw him with gold and silver coins in his hands. He had his trinkets to sell, his French perfumes, and jewelry, a scarf, or a fashionable pair of gloves. He was clean and dressed in a pretty coat with a nice little beret—he would not let on he was a sailor—and so he fooled the ladies into thinking he was a gentleman merchant when he set up on his corner, a fashionable corner, and sold his wares for three times what they were worth.

He taught me that appearances are everything, for the ladies, having been cheated, must hide that fact from everyone, most especially themselves by believing, ever more fervently, that last year’s fashion was this year’s fashion, that the fabric was imported silk, not a cheap imitation, that the perfume was not watered down or mixed from the dregs of stolen bottles.

It is of the murder of Pierre, that I must tell you now, my son.

At 14, I could easily pass for 17 or 18—I was a strapping lad—though in that day, with no age of consent, it didn’t matter much. Still, I’d always needed to be older than I was. I needed to get into the taverns, I needed to convince people that I knew something. Mostly I needed to be away from the doting person who still treated me like a boy, the person who poured all the love he had into me and only me. It wasn’t hard, not physically anyway. Poor Father had recently gone lame, and so I could easily outdistance him. It was my custom, whenever we went together to the mainland, to stay with him long enough to see him started on whatever rounds he was making before setting off on my own errands. But not that day. That day, I left him on the docks. I didn’t even help him tie up the boat. That morning, he and Mama had quarreled over the selling of a pig.

“I need that meat,” Mama told him. “This boy eats and eats.”

“What are you doing?” as Father edged towards the door that leads directly from the house into the barn. “Where do you think you’re going?”

She stomped after him, pressed her big body against him. “No! You will not! Not today! Today you’re going to listen and answer. Today you will give me that much courtesy.”

I’m not doing anything, he said without speaking. I’m as innocent as the day is long.

I’d seen that rolling of the eyes many times, the slight shrug of his thin shoulders, the droop of his mouth. He would not look at her, even when she took his chin in her hands and forced his face towards hers. He closed his eyes and squinted his mouth into a silent declaration of stoicism.

She has fought this same battle, again and again, and will always fight it until the day she dies. Her anger makes her think she can win though she never has before. If she didn’t lose her temper, she might have a chance. But always, she loses her temper.

“You are a worthless man,” she yelled. “What kind of father have you been? What kind of provider? What kind of husband? Mack is good company to Ingrid, at least. But you? You have not spoken a civil word to me in …”  and here she looked at me; the folds around her eyes went a bright piggy pink, and I knew what she was thinking. Not since him.

Then the real struggle began. It is always the flight to the barn that Father takes, and she resists. She will not set her own tiny feet in there. Her delicate feet, in which she takes such pride, insisting on wearing the fancy high-heeled lace-up boots that pinch her swollen ankles and make her limp and teeter. She hates the barn for many reasons, but primarily because of the shoes. Though she would have province over it, as over the house. She orders me to do her bidding in there, the killing of this chicken, that pig, so she can make her meaty pies, her blood puddings. She outweighs him, and he is lame, as I mentioned. Still, he is stubborn.

He grasped the hewn door handle with both his hands while she thrust her weight against his wrists, trying to break free his hold. She stepped on his lame foot. He grimaced but did not let go. Then they were sprawling on the floor, the broken latch still in his hands, and the door swinging open. She sat on him as he eyed his refuge. She banged his head into the floor and pounded her fists into his chest and he let her, going limp, closing his eyes, his ears.

I left then, my own anger crushing my heart within my chest. I was not so much angry with her or with him, as with them. Why could they not stop this dance, the repetition of which had worn me thin at such a tender age? Always the same, her verbal thrusts, his retreat, her escalation, his silences, finally the frustration giving way to the physical. In the end, his escape to the barn, the passive resistance, the things he will never say back to her or to anyone but me.

I left but returned in short order. I returned, as always, because I couldn’t stay away. I couldn’t stay away because those two and their struggle defined me. When they fought, it was always as though two halves of myself were at war. I swallowed them; the fight went on inside me. So, I always had to come back to witness it. To act out my part. Perhaps I still must.

The things father brooded on later that day as he and I crossed the channel in the boat, dodging ice flows—floating chunks that could capsize a small boat such as ours—did not illuminate the problem for me, as they were but one side of the story. His. A sympathetic story it was, though not enough. Her meanness, her greed, her anger, her physical punishing, all of it true.

We did not have the pig to sell, of course, its blood was on my hands. She was back there in her kitchen salting and frying the meat as though to cook for seven families of seven. Father and I would not be back that night, we had planned to stay in the Christian House as we often did, hoping to find a bunk, a refuge from the storm, and she would be there with her cream and her bacon and her breads and sweets, fuming to her sister, crying over her unfair lot in life, telling the story of what happened that morning. One side only. Hers.  

Father opened his heart, at last, as we broached the shore. Not his heart really, but the piece of coal that had replaced it. From the blackened center he made his case. I knew it backwards and forwards. I will not repeat it here, other than to say he bore no love for anyone but me, and I would not have such obsessive love, such needy love, earned at such an expense. No, I throw it back in his face.

You see they poisoned me. Poisoned me down to my very blood.

That day I went fast into the streets leaving Father to his struggles. I could only imagine how he moped along. I went through the best neighborhoods and the worst, picking up a thing or two, but mainly walking off my temper. To this day, I still struggle with temper, though it’s cooled now with age, channeled into a slow plotting. What do I plot for? Revenge, gain, false honors. Even this confession, which I vowed would be the truth, has a bit of that plotting in it. What if it gains sympathy from you, my son? A reconciliation? Filial love, even?

But no, you will not love me. You will only hate me more than you already do. I will make sure of that.

I happened upon Pierre mid-afternoon as the streets were growing shadowed, and the women were going inside for English tea, and to greet the children as they returned from school. Pierre was packing up his wares. He had a cart that he kept in the back of a tavern just at the edge of the fashionable district, and I eyed it as he folded his treasures away. Today he had a necklace, a pearl necklace that he carefully wrapped in cloth and put inside his coat. He said it was counterfeit, but I believed it was not. The pearls were large and colorful, tinged pink and lavender and gray, like a pale Nordic sunrise, and I thought they were the loveliest things I’d ever seen. I asked him where he’d gotten the necklace, and again he was evasive, so I instantly knew he’d stolen it.

You will recognize it, of course. Your mother wore it for many years. It was the bitterest token in our divorce, and I gave up much to retrieve it, not the least of which was the love of your sister, who had been promised the heirloom as a wedding gift. Her birthright, as the granddaughter of an imaginary woman she never knew, a woman I constructed in the false stories I told her at bedtime. And a good thing too, for she lost much in her own divorce, and the necklace would have been sold to pay off her husband’s debts.

The necklace now lives locked in my safe, and on the rare occasion I hire a woman to share my evening, it is around her neck for an hour or two.

You see, I fell in love with that necklace on first sight, and with the possibility of a woman’s fine white neck around which to place it. Part mother, part wife, this imaginary creature captured my heart. She would love me freely and completely. She would be as changeable and constant, as subtle and as gentle, as solid and real as the fine pearls themselves. It was a romantic notion that sprang wholly formed in my youthful breast. An idea so foreign and pure, that it immediately became the compelling purpose of my heart.

I have long ago lost the romantic notion of love, I’m sure you understand. But the thing itself—the necklace—I still love. For the pearls shine on their own, as though each has a little story inside. A perfect story. A story that can never be revealed. 

Have you even been in love with a thing? Oh, yes, of course, that fast car you drive—it often appears in your news-photos. You, getting out of the car in front of the state capital building. You, with your hand on its flank, as though it were a magnificent red horse. Did you realize that? Your car, more often than your wife?

Yes, I think we are cut from the same cloth, after all.

All the time that Pierre was packing and chatting to me about his sales, about the red-haired woman he was planning on meeting later that night, I thought of the necklace. Its pure luminance, its great value. I began to believe that in the necklace, lay some future for me. Some salvation. Some escape. I did not yet see with any clarity the path to relief from the life I’d led to that point, just a sureness that the path was there. I kept watch on the necklace as Pierre shifted it from his pocket to the hidden pouch inside his vest. He kept it close to his body all day and all night.

That afternoon, Pierre and I went into the bar, and I encouraged him to get drunk. I pretended to drink too, a trick I’d already learned at an age when most boys were seduced by the taste of alcohol, and the great high and recklessness that comes with the drinking of it. But I was cagey and disciplined, even then. You see, that was a bit of my nature, separate from the war within. I had a way of pouring off my beer or switching it with someone else’s empty. I was already plotting about the necklace, which Pierre kept patting through his clothes. All the time in the tavern I thought of it glowing and pulsing next to his skin, imagined it synchronized with the beating of his heart. Wanting it to be synchronized with mine.

Later, I shadowed him to his room and hid in the closet, waited through the loud lovemaking with the redhead, her acceptance of a large sum of money and an even larger amount that she stole from his wallet before she left him sleeping, sprawled out on the bed, and then I murdered him with his own knife and wrapped it in the whore’s lace handkerchief, which she’d left behind for my convenience.

You will not think this too egregious a crime, I understand, now, in the writing, for you have been mixed up in such affairs for a long time. You do not dirty your own hands, I’m sure, but you are the hand behind the hands, just the same.

Twice before, I had failed to appear at sunset to take the trip back across with Papa. The first time, he fretted and paced for hours, and asked everyone he encountered if they’d seen me. Finally, around midnight, he went to sleep in his boat, there at the shore. I came down to watch him in the fading light, and slept, myself, not far away on a bit of summer grass where I could keep on eye on him. I’m not sure why I did it—perhaps I wanted to see if I could make him feel something, just as she could. The second time, just the previous fall, he’d reluctantly left me and gone home alone, a punishment she’d decreed upon me, and one he executed for fear of his own punishment at her hands.

On the night of Pierre’s death, my father stayed at the Christian home, as we’d planned. He expected me to sneak in during the night and be there sleeping so he could shake me awake in the late morning and scold me in his affectionate manner and bring me a tin cup full of sweet coffee. But I did not, so he could not. That night, I wandered the streets in a kind of euphoria. The moon, but a sliver, seemed to be winking at me, congratulating me on the improvement of my fortune, and thus my future. It was a bitter night, and Pierre’s sheepskin gloves did not keep the chill away from my hands. Hands that seemed to tingle with the knowledge of the double deed they’d performed, the murder and the theft. The necklace, I kept in my pocket, and later, I learned a way to tape it up next to my privates, which I shaved, and covered with a false animal hair. No one who ever searched me, could get past the unnatural look of that hair, and the bestiality it implied.

All night and the next morning, as I walked to exhaustion, I contemplated my next move. I’d heard of a freighter that was leaving soon for Greenland. Of course, I dreamed of America as so many did in those days. But Greenland was a good start. Two long years I spent there, an eternity for a man caught in the body of a boy, a man, waiting to step up to the achievements and recognition that he surely deserved.       

I enjoyed, immensely, watching Papa the next day, when he risked Mama’s wrath to stay a second night in the Christian house in order to search for me. I enjoyed watching him limp about knocking on doors, describing me with hope and pride on his face. I imagined him telling the nuns of his beautiful son, and his exalted plans of my becoming a shipbuilder, of the large house I’d own on the mainland, and the way I’d take care of my parents in their old age. By then, the murder of Pierre was known, and the search for the redheaded whore was on. I came forward as a witness, of course, for I’d been seen with Pierre, and was known as his young apprentice. I was already quite an actor, with my shock and tears, and childish babble and blame.

Papa stirred up the pity of the locals—that crazy old man with the fantasy idea of his golden son lost and frightened by what he’d seen. He went to the police, when he heard I’d been there, but I eluded him, for I slipped out the side when I heard his voice at the desk. It was a game for me, by then, fed by the fever of my deed. As things spun in my favor, I began to believe I was invulnerable. It was my first real taste of power—that invulnerability—and it stayed with me a long time. Those few days after the murder, I was an animal on the prowl. A human animal, with the wits to transform itself. I followed Papa, so he felt haunted by my illusive presence. I started a rumor that I had been killed by the whore’s pimp. But she had no pimp, I was certain of that, for I’d found her too, and played a big scene, crying and accusing her of killing my friend, so convincingly, that she almost came to believe she’d done it.

By the third day, Papa began to look for my cousin who had once served in the employ of the Danish prince. He went to the army headquarters, with the illustrious relative’s name on his lips, and his pitiable story of my own trauma, for he believed I was still alive and hiding, shrinking away from the horrors I’d witnessed and the fear of reprisal. That I only needed the kindly and powerful prince to lend a hand, and I’d come forward to give my heroic testimony.

Papa was so ill-treated at the hands of royalty that I was almost sorry for my role in it. He was sent away again and again, finally, with such a beating that he had to go back to the Christian house to be tended by the nuns. It was there that Mama found him, still spouting his story of my future triumphs. She dragged him home. But first, she rooted out the wayward cousin, who had developed a taste for liquor, it turned out, and had lost everything, his position, his looks, his health. Mama and her sister dragged him out of an attic room above a bar, where he did a little cooking in exchange for watered-down booze. They took him back home to his parents. He only stayed a week or two before returning once again to his life on the mainland.

You’d think I would have been anxious to leave, but I was not finished with what I had to do there. I missed boat after boat sailing for shores far and near. Spring was turning into summer, and still I had not ventured away. Or home, to say my final farewell. I just could not decide to go—you see, their war still raged inside me. I slept here or there, any warm place I could find, but mainly, as it turned out, with the boozy cousin, who could do me no harm with his ramblings, which no one believed, anyway. Then one day, I chanced to catch sight of my sister, Astrid, walking through the streets with her husband. They had a small black trunk they carried between them by its handles. I followed them all day as they went from pawn shop to pawn shop. Later, I watched them board a boat in the dark of night with the help of an accomplice who they paid with a few coins they’d got by selling their wedding rings—a boat bound for Germany—and I almost followed them. But still I was not done.

My sisters had abandoned me, one by one you see, and my only brother, Peter, who I’d met only the one time, (and whose name I took) had fled before I was even born. I was angry with them, for they’d once doted on my babyhood. I dreamed of finding one of my traitorous siblings and exposing her for the tramp she was. Perhaps I’d hoped to secure a scene like the one that had played out with my cousin. I’d discover her in some hovel, opium-addicted, hungry, beauty faded, abandoned by a string of lovers, and my heart would fill with pity. Or, I would be the rich young master, and the sister would come to me, begging for help. But as I watched the boat sail away, I knew the truth. Astrid was no more pitiful than I was, and no less. She had not abandoned me out of any lack of affection, but because she had her own merciless search to make—her search for happiness in the arms of the tired-looking man she followed. Their search for survival, as they slunk, anonymously, through the world. I saw it all in their stealth, the presentable ragged clothes, the cant of their heads at the sound of sea birds flying overhead. The way they stopped cold in their tracks and waited for silence again, and then the beckoning whistle from the watchman. Not pitiable, just vastly human. After that, their lives were of no interest to me, and it did not matter if I ever saw them again. And I didn’t, not one of my relatives, except for Cousin Ada, who you knew as a child. Poor Ada, so bright and promising, dead before fifty, here, in a foreign land. Ada, who, except for that one time, when she called me by my real name, kept my secret well.

That brood that your mother and I spawned—two sets of twins, and you three boys—and her old parents who’d moved in, so early in our marriage, and her spinster sisters, all took up the chant. Thor, Thor. It was your bit of fun, the nickname, so pretentious, so ridiculous. The name that called up all the old bitterness and sweetness of my childhood. My preposterous name. You thought it a great joke, you accused me of any number of college pranks or childhood stunts, which had earned me the moniker. You manufactured memories that even I could not have imagined.

In my darkest moments I still remember everything. I remember my childhood when I was once a darling and pure. I remember when the girls were leaving, how they’d bend to kiss me and ruffle my curly hair. How our numbers dwindled, one by one, until all that was left was me and the two of them. I remember the cows in the barn, lowing for their hay. I remember throwing rocks at the younger boys on the beach, then running away too fast for them to catch me. I remember the day Old Mama died, the way her mouth gaped, then stuck, as though she was still gasping for air. I remember Papa and Mama doting on me, giving me sweets, and attention for the briefest of years afterwards, until their interest strayed again, back to their tormenting of each other, back to their feud.

After she’d fetched him home, Mama kept Papa a prisoner for as long as she could, until finally she had to let him return to the city to get the supplies she needed for her baking. Just what I was waiting for, I suppose. So, one morning, not long after the German boat had sailed, when I spotted Papa, his face bright with hope as he stepped onshore, I walked out into the open and let him take me in his arms. Tears ran down his reddened cheeks. He grasped me, again and again, and held my hand as though he was afraid I’d run. I told him some story, I don’t even remember what, it was so long and convoluted like a running dream. And then I let him ferry me home like a prize.

I will give her credit: she was overjoyed too. My absence had opened both their hearts. They feared they’d lost me, their precious son, their last child, and it changed them. Temporarily. A trick I have used again and again. A disappearance and reappearance when the heart has grown fonder. A relationship renegotiation in the advantageous aftermath of happy reunion. This worked with your mother a time or two, as you perhaps observed.

We had a family meal of veal and potato pancakes—an extravagant celebration, a sacrifice for poor Papa (his precious calf). I still prefer veal, you know, in the way of a gourmand, once a pauper. I always order veal if it appears on the menu, and the club stocks it for me. Though I’ve had to cut out the heavy sauces since the ulcer.

We drank a bottle of French wine. This I’d found among Pierre’s belongings and had been carrying as a kind of souvenir. It was not a fine bottle, though he’d sold them as such. He steamed off the labels, and the bottles passed as vintage.

I was not used to wine, nor were they. After the first glass I began to see them as better than they were, as humans with hearts. I began to see myself, in the aftershock of my action, as a good son returned to the fold for his redemption. The table was ringed with their spare laughter, for once, and conversation. I was hungry for it, this harmony, this love, as I’d never been hungry for anything before in my life. At some point, perhaps after we’d had a little of my mother’s sweet plum brandy, saved for all those years, and the cake—oh the cake!—I can still taste that velvety pudding cake, I brought out the necklace and hung it about her neck.

The sight of her face lingers with me still. Her heavy jowls, her splotched cheeks, the shine of a tear in her pale eyes as they opened in her piggy face. It was a thing that infected me for a long time to come for I knew instantly that she loved the necklace better than she loved me, and this struck at my core.

In desperation, I tried to win her back. First, I told them I’d seen Astrid and her husband. I invented a history of our meeting, of their successes, their well-wishes, and plans to return home on Saturday next. I invented a job for her husband, and a name, and a family from Germany, a good and prosperous family connected with those rising in power. I described a change coming in Europe, for I’d heard plenty of gossip in the streets, and canted it in a positive light, and this, the poor dears, in their innocence, had not heard before and welcomed as a new world order where a Nordic complexion counted for all. I told other lies—that our poor drunkard cousin had mended his ways, that he’d been accepted back into the graces of the prince. He had only to perform a small penance before reinstatement of his full benefits. I hinted at a connection of my own in that quarter.

Mama went all aflutter with her plans for Astrid’s homecoming, the baking, the parties; she was already getting out the recipes, she was thinking of altering her old wedding dress to wear at the celebration, to set off the new pearls. Poor Papa did not know whether to be pleased or not, for the festivities would require further sacrifices on his part. Still, they united in their hopes of happiness. They were glancing up at each other, a little of the shame they should feel shading their shy smiles. That is how I left them as I went off to bed.

That night, I woke in a sweat from the alcohol I’d consumed and possessed by a terrible dread. It was the valley after the elation, and it was far deeper than any I’d experienced before. I was angry, I was fearful; I was on fire with the shame of my seduction at their hands, my humiliating desire to please them. That I’d lied did not trouble me, for that was the way of the world, I’d already learned. Lies smooth the way. The murder on my conscience did not, at that time, bother me much, for I was convinced it was my own survival at stake, and I was still drunk with the power of it. (Later, my son, later, I’d think of poor Pierre and how he looked as his blood seeped onto the bed sheets and the way his cap hung so pertly on the bedpost when I left his room.) It was only my deep collaboration in their desires that stabbed at my gut. When I thought of the necklace, how I’d given it away to my mother so easily, my hated mother—oh! I was most angry and tortured. Only when I was struck with the idea that I might steal it back, did my heart began to right itself. I dressed and gathered my things.

I planned to take what was mine and slip away in the night, never to return. I thought I’d leave them at the peak of their hopes; I would not stay to witness their disappointment when Astrid failed to appear. But when I went to retrieve my prize, I could not resist one last look at them. They were sleeping together in the marriage bed in their summer room, her enormous mound dwarfing his taut one. I was filled with anger. I could not let them be.

I had expected to find the necklace on her small table where she kept her Mama’s ring and silver combs. The other items were there, as usual, but the necklace was not. I searched in the dresser drawer, even amongst her undergarments. By then, she was awake and watching me, her hand at her throat, fingering the pearls. She’d worn the necklace to bed on instinct, and now, in the darkness, she knew the truth.

Still, she did not shriek when I came to her and reached behind her fat neck to unclasp the thing. She did not fight me, nor did I make up any lie. Instead, I sat beside her, and told her the bald-faced truth, every bit of it. He did not make a sign of waking, though I felt his presence with us, as I gave her every sordid detail—the murder, the theft, my plans to leave, the cousin’s descent, Astrid’s flight, everything, including my abiding hatred for the two of them. It was eerily light in the room, as it gets in the north in May. Not yet solstice, just the suggestion of it in the shimmering darkness. She was still grasping the strand of pearls between her fingers, fondling them. I followed her example, rubbing the orbs like prayer beads, there, on her dimpled bosom. The warmth of our breaths mingled, as did the awe and terror in her eyes—it is my most vivid memory of my mother’s face. For she was afraid and hopeful and covetous, all at once, and I saw I controlled her with each shift in my tone of voice, as I whispered my contempt. After a time, I sweetened up my talk, promising to write, to return, for that was crueler. And then I told her I might bring the necklace back to her, if only she would give it to me now. Her cow-eyes lifted at that, full of doubt. She knew I was lying. She understood I would strangle her to get it, and that he would be no help to her. She was afraid of death, more than of losing the luminous promise of unattainable love. We made a bargain, in that moment. I would not take; she would not give. Until just a little later. All because of the bond of mother and son. An illusion we shared for an hour or two, as my hand rested on her breast like a baby’s, content after nursing. The necklace warmed between us, each round pearl, shining in the half-light, as though alive.  

He did finally open his eyes, and saw us, and judged us. He said but one word, my name.

“Yes Father?” I could not keep the hope out of my voice.

But I read his face, his expressive face. He let the question he’d wanted to ask fall away. Was it true? Was what I’d said to her true? Because he understood that it was true, all of it. His precious son was not a hero, not the family pride, rather a murderer and a thief, just as he’d suspected in his heart, all along.

As he moved, I understood the next thing. He planned to defend his wife against me, his son. Yes, his wife, against his son. For in that moment, he took her side, and I became the common enemy.

So, you see, my own son, I lost the war that early morning in their gray bedroom, as they both turned against me. The physical struggle was not too great, though she was a heavy strong woman, and he was wiry and tenacious and meaner than I’d imagined. I came away with some scratches that took a long time to heal. And them? I beat them badly, though I did not kill them. I was too tired for that as I pushed them away, and hit them with my fists, and kicked them, all the while fighting through my tears. They both cried out my name, again and again, begging me to stop until I finally did. I left that poor house where I’d been born, and that desolate island, and that sour country in the gray of the morning, never to return. Except in my thoughts, over and over again. Which has been my lifelong cross to bear.

And now it is yours. Just as your mother and I re-enacted, I suspect you do too in your sham of a marriage. It is the family curse and I pass it on to you. May you never be free of it. For pitiable though it might be, it is something true that lives.