The Lioness(32)

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.?.?.

It was like the time (the one time) that Roman Stepanov had belted him. Usually the corporal punishment was meted out by his mother, and usually it was far more creative than mere spanking or brute violence. There was the front closet that, for reasons he couldn’t quite parse, scared the shit out of him when he had to be inside it alone. It was big and had a light, but the switch was outside the door and Mother always shoved him in there in the dark. And then locked the door. He’d sit on the floor, his knees at his chest and his arms hugging his shins, and be eye level with the bottoms of furs and dusters and wool coats. When he grew tired, because invariably Glenda would box him in there for hours, he’d curl up on the floor next to the galoshes with the tin buckles he hated, his mother’s leather boots that smelled of the street, and umbrellas musty from their work in the rain.

And then there were the nights when she would use her husband’s old neckties to bind his ankles to the chair in the dining room until he had cleaned his dinner plate. When one of the Irish girls was sticking around to clean up after dinner—to this day, Billy didn’t know why some nights his mother had them stay and some nights she didn’t—they knew to look away. They were better cooks than Glenda, but largely because Glenda was a terrible cook. In Billy’s memory, he was more likely to eat what they prepared than what his mother concocted, but he was unsure whether it was because he wanted to be polite or because their brisket was better than his mother’s mussels and clams.

There was no “worst” punishment, but among the stories he thought about most in the small hours of the night now that he was a grown-up was the underwear. Katie was just starting to walk, he believed, and so he supposed he was six. But memories, he knew, were fuzzy, frangible things. Perhaps his sister was only six months old. Perhaps she was as old as two. Which meant he could have been five and he could have been seven. His misbehavior had occurred when they had gone to the doctor. Just a checkup. But, apparently, he hadn’t wanted to strip down to his underpants. Eventually he had, but whatever the reason, first he’d made a stink. And so, when they got home, she made him take off all of his clothes but his underpants and spend the rest of the day in them. And only them. She wouldn’t allow him to retreat to his bedroom, even when she had a friend over for tea.

In some ways, he guessed, it had all made him a better father, even though he’d had one psychology professor who had hinted that it would, someday, make him a terrible parent if he didn’t watch himself carefully. The professor, knowing that Broadway ran in his blood, quoted South Pacific to make his point, observing almost ruefully, “You’ve got to be taught to hate.” Arguably, that childhood had made him a terrible first husband in ways he was still analyzing, but he loved little Marc madly and had striven mightily to be a kind and forward-thinking father. He had never spanked the boy, not once. He and his ex-wife both bought into what his mother referred to dismissively as “all that Dr. Spock mumbo-jumbo.” He sure as hell would never lock their boy in a closet.

The one time that Roman had hit Billy, he’d hit him hard, which more than anything was why it had come back to him that moment in the Land Rover. His infraction? When he was seventeen, he’d said something dismissive over a Monday night dinner, the whole family together at the dining room table, about his kid sister’s performance in one of their father’s shows. Then, in a moment of classic teenage brinksmanship, he had dug in his heels and refused to apologize to either his sister or his father, which caused the event to escalate. And suddenly, out of the blue, his father backhanded him, sending him falling backward out of the chair and onto the thick Oriental carpet on the floor.

Yes, his parents had raised Katie in ways that were cruel too, but they were demonstrably less sadistic than the ways they treated him. It wasn’t that she was a girl and it wasn’t that she was younger and it wasn’t that she was a second child and they had figured some things out by then. It was just that she was…Katie. Even at two and three, you just knew that she was going to be a star, and so Roman and Glenda Stepanov were constitutionally predisposed to be gentler with her.

Or, at least, to not risk disfiguring her.

Katie claimed not to recall much of what she had witnessed them do to him—though fuzzy snippets had stuck, and they’d discussed some of the stranger moments when his first marriage was unraveling—but he supposed that she really had repressed much of it. Nevertheless, she hated her mother as much as he did, and she had hated her father until the day he died as much as her brother had. Billy supposed it was why he was so very close to a kid sister five years his junior.

Still, the mind was the damnedest thing: repression was a gift reserved for the Katie Barstows of the world. Mere mortals like him? Too often you couldn’t mine the recollections that might keep you sane, but instead held close the memories that someday would kill you.



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.?.?.

The Land Rover left the pavement and continued, based on the sun, to the west on grass that had been grazed almost to dirt. They drove for thirty minutes, once again occasionally spotting wild animals—warthogs and wildebeest, more gazelles, a small group of elephants—and then he saw ahead of them a kraal, a Maasai livestock pen. They coasted to a stop before it, and Billy saw that it was made from poisonous candelabra branches and thorn brush and some spiky wood he couldn’t identify. Nearby he counted eight round huts built mostly from cow dung and mud. He saw neither people nor their herds: not cattle or goats.