never mind the hideous they would become.
S WIFT in other ways. I said, didn’t I, that young Mauser who succeeded in breaking my heart on that calm day (where others more adept had failed) was swift in other ways? Well, so he was. The boy could count. By some strange and secret method he assigned to his little world numbers, numerical values, mathematical identities. I think it started with the card playing that Fleur taught him. For he picked it up and soon it was evident that he could make lightning calculations somewhere in his puzzle box of a brain. They played cards—all in all, it was the strangest sight I ever saw. She began by teaching him little simple games, harmless child’s games, but progressed until they immersed themselves daily in those matches, of which I know little, that occupy coarse men at coarse tables and are carried on under clouds of cigar smoke to the tune of clinking shot glasses. I may be too much a creature of social fears, or at any rate of rules and breeding, but I did think it wasn’t right for Fleur to teach the boy every kind of poker and gambler’s trick when he couldn’t yet recite the alphabet.
And yet she loved him to her heart’s end, yes, that could be seen. She did not believe the doctors Mauser took him to weekly, who pronounced the boy a hopeless idiot and cast his father into a depth. She remained as she was with him, cheerful and laughing. She drank her whiskey, but now more secretly I think. The only difference in their play was that mutual and growing passion for cards. John James Mauser, meanwhile, changed. Not that Fleur would have cared to note it. But he did change, he grew still more thoughtful, and where he had always made an outward show of the Roman Catholic faith, a hypocritical nod to the church when it suited his purpose, he now became a true believer. I alone saw this occur in him. No one else thought it remarkable he went to Mass every morning before his coffee was poured. No one else was aware he took daily Eucharist and made a score of confessions every month. I suppose, being who he was, he had a lot to confess. I wonder if he ever got to the bottom of the barrel of his sins?
As he was somewhat more approachable now, and as I had by sheer ubiquity become an accepted person—perhaps an accepted annoyance to Mauser, but nonetheless accepted—I thought to ask him about his fervent adoption of religious practice. To my surprise, he took me seriously, and answered. Perhaps I should have known it was the boy’s affliction that had prompted him.
“You were always aware, I think”—he regarded me with a sharp gaze—“of how I wanted a son. It was a dear wish of mine—it still is,” he amended quietly. “I feel that I am responsible for this one’s lack of…” He struggled. “…his abnormalities… his strangeness. I have come to believe that the boy’s backward traits are a judgment on the man I was.”
This amazing statement was forced out with honesty through pride. For the first time ever, I felt some human quality, a streak of humility, a signal of Mauser’s inner workings and life, that pulled at me. Mauser had avoided me ever since his illness, hating that I’d seen him weak and outside himself in the throes of appalling fits. Now, he seemed to have put aside that old shame. He allowed himself to speak with an exhaustive frankness. Apparently, having had the time to page back through his life, he found evidence all along of the workings of a certain presence.
“An inhuman presence,” he told me carefully. “I hesitate to assign God the tedious task of looking after me, but I’ve come to believe that I’ve been spared death many times in narrow circumstances by something, for something. For some reason.”
I sat alertly. “I would like to hear it.”
“Perhaps it is not for me to understand. If so, may it remain shrouded. But I have been spared, or rescued, or brought back to life, many times. When I was a boy, for
S WIFT in other ways. I said, didn’t I, that young Mauser who succeeded in breaking my heart on that calm day (where others more adept had failed) was swift in other ways? Well, so he was. The boy could count. By some strange and secret method he assigned to his little world numbers, numerical values, mathematical identities. I think it started with the card playing that Fleur taught him. For he picked it up and soon it was evident that he could make lightning calculations somewhere in his puzzle box of a brain. They played cards—all in all, it was the strangest sight I ever saw. She began by teaching him little simple games, harmless child’s games, but progressed until they immersed themselves daily in those matches, of which I know little, that occupy coarse men at coarse tables and are carried on under clouds of cigar smoke to the tune of clinking shot glasses. I may be too much a creature of social fears, or at any rate of rules and breeding, but I did think it wasn’t right for Fleur to teach the boy every kind of poker and gambler’s trick when he couldn’t yet recite the alphabet.
And yet she loved him to her heart’s end, yes, that could be seen. She did not believe the doctors Mauser took him to weekly, who pronounced the boy a hopeless idiot and cast his father into a depth. She remained as she was with him, cheerful and laughing. She drank her whiskey, but now more secretly I think. The only difference in their play was that mutual and growing passion for cards. John James Mauser, meanwhile, changed. Not that Fleur would have cared to note it. But he did change, he grew still more thoughtful, and where he had always made an outward show of the Roman Catholic faith, a hypocritical nod to the church when it suited his purpose, he now became a true believer. I alone saw this occur in him. No one else thought it remarkable he went to Mass every morning before his coffee was poured. No one else was aware he took daily Eucharist and made a score of confessions every month. I suppose, being who he was, he had a lot to confess. I wonder if he ever got to the bottom of the barrel of his sins?
As he was somewhat more approachable now, and as I had by sheer ubiquity become an accepted person—perhaps an accepted annoyance to Mauser, but nonetheless accepted—I thought to ask him about his fervent adoption of religious practice. To my surprise, he took me seriously, and answered. Perhaps I should have known it was the boy’s affliction that had prompted him.
“You were always aware, I think”—he regarded me with a sharp gaze—“of how I wanted a son. It was a dear wish of mine—it still is,” he amended quietly. “I feel that I am responsible for this one’s lack of…” He struggled. “…his abnormalities… his strangeness. I have come to believe that the boy’s backward traits are a judgment on the man I was.”
This amazing statement was forced out with honesty through pride. For the first time ever, I felt some human quality, a streak of humility, a signal of Mauser’s inner workings and life, that pulled at me. Mauser had avoided me ever since his illness, hating that I’d seen him weak and outside himself in the throes of appalling fits. Now, he seemed to have put aside that old shame. He allowed himself to speak with an exhaustive frankness. Apparently, having had the time to page back through his life, he found evidence all along of the workings of a certain presence.
“An inhuman presence,” he told me carefully. “I hesitate to assign God the tedious task of looking after me, but I’ve come to believe that I’ve been spared death many times in narrow circumstances by something, for something. For some reason.”
I sat alertly. “I would like to hear it.”
“Perhaps it is not for me to understand. If so, may it remain shrouded. But I have been spared, or rescued, or brought back to life, many times. When I was a boy, for
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