* * *
They have lived together now, the three of them, for more than a year. The creature sprawls, during the days, in the upholstered chair, beside whatever flicker of fire has been coaxed from the wet logs. When night arrives, the creature hauls itself wordlessly upstairs, clumping on each tread, where it remains in its bedroom (there’s no telling whether it sleeps) until morning comes again, when it resumes its place at the fireside.
Still, it is their child. What’s left of him. The Whites have covered the parlor walls with every old photograph they have: their son tiny in a snowsuit, grinning among a swirl of windblown white flakes; their son somberly adolescent in a bow tie, posing for the school’s photographer; their son smiling nervously beside the unsuitable girl (the hefty one, sly-eyed and morally slack, who is now the drunken wife of the town butcher) he took to his first dance.
The Whites burn incense to cover the smell. When spring arrives, they fill the house with lilacs and roses.
Mr. and Mrs. manage, as best they can, a version of their former days. They joke and reminisce. Mrs. White produces a mutton stew every Friday, although the creature no longer wants, or needs, to eat.
Usually, it stares blankly at the struggling fire, though every now and then, when some conversation has been broached, when Mother or Father asks if it wouldn’t like another pillow, wonders if it remembers that trip they took, years ago, to that lake in the mountains, it raises what remains of its head, and trains on them its single, opaquely opalescent eyeball, with an expression not so much of anger as confusion. What crime has it committed? Its jailers are kind enough, they make their attempts at offering comfort, but why do they keep it here, what exactly did it do that was so wrong?
Days pass into nights, and nights into days. Nothing changes, either within the house or outside, where gray skies and the bare branches of trees drop their reflections into the puddles on the road.
The effort required to continue in this altered world shows, however. Mrs. White, on more than one evening, wonders wistfully over the whereabouts of Tom Barkin, the man she might have married, and the fact that the words “might have married” mean only that she was (as Mr. White points out) one of a dozen girls with whom Tom Barkin flirted shamelessly, seems to strengthen rather than deter her convictions about renounced possibility. Mr. White finally tells her he does not like, has never liked, her habit of whistling as she goes about her duties, but finds afterward that her grudgingly obedient cessation produces a strangled silence worse than the whistling had been. The undercooked bacon is no longer consumed by Mr. White without comment. His infrequent baths no longer produce assurances that there’s something nice about a man’s natural smell. His stories are more often suffered, by Mrs. White, with an undisguised glaze of boredom.
The creature that sits staring into the smoking and smoldering logs appears to take no notice.
Mr. and Mrs. White remind themselves: This is still their son. They stand by him, as they must. They have that, at least, by way of virtue. They willed him into being, not once, but twice.
And so, the fire is kept alive. The stew is prepared every Friday. The occasional visitor is discouraged — the Whites are, they claim, simply too busy to receive, these days. There are moments, though, when Mrs. White imagines how much easier her life would be if Mr. White were to die of his compromised heart, and launch her into the simpler realm of widowhood, where nobody minds about whistling, or how the bacon is cooked; where Mr. White’s sour, sweaty pungency would evaporate; where she would not be asked to feign amusement over the same story, told one more time. There are moments when Mr. White imagines his wife going away with Tom Barkin, who’s old now, who’s lost half his teeth, who still flirts with girls even as they recoil in horror. She’d be an adulteress, and no one would blame him for maintaining a determinedly cheerful demeanor in his solitude. He’d be a figure of sympathy. An acquaintance or two might even venture the long-withheld opinion that, as everyone in the village agrees, Mr. White really could have done better. And there are a few youngish local widows who don’t seem like the kind of women who’d object to a man’s smell, or wouldn’t appreciate a rousing, well-told tale.
It would be easier, it seems, if there were fewer of them on the premises.
The Whites, all three of them, know exactly where the monkey’s paw resides — on the top shelf of the cupboard, beside the cracked mixing bowl. They know, they always know, all of them know, it has one more wish to grant.
LITTLE MAN
What if you had a child?
If you had a child, your job would be more than getting through the various holiday rushes, and wondering exactly how insane Mrs. Witters in Accounts Payable is going to be on any given day. It’d be about procuring tiny shoes and pull-toys and dental checkups; it’d be about paying into a college fund.
The unextraordinary house to which you return nightly? It’d be someone’s future ur-house. It’d be the place — decades hence — someone will remember forever, a seat of comfort and succor, its rooms rendered larger and grander, exalted, by memory. This sofa, those lamps, purchased in a hurry, deemed good enough for now, then (they seem to be here still, years later): they’d be legendary, to someone.
Imagine reaching the point at which you want a child more than you can remember wanting anything else.
* * *
Having a child is not, however, anything like ordering a pizza. All the more so if you’re a malformed, dwarfish man whose occupation, were you forced to name one, would be … What would you call yourself? A goblin? An imp? Adoption agencies are reluctant about doctors and lawyers, if they’re single and over forty. So go ahead. Apply to adopt an infant as a two-hundred-year-old gnome.
You are driven slightly insane — you try to talk yourself down, it works some nights better than others — by the fact that for so much of the population, children simply … appear. Bing bang boom. A single act of love and, nine months later, this flowering, as mindless and senseless as a crocus bursting out of a bulb.
It’s one thing to envy wealth and beauty and other gifts that seem to have been granted to others, but not you, by obscure but inarguable givers. It’s another thing entirely to yearn for what’s so readily available to any drunk and barmaid who link up for three minutes in one of the darker corners of any dank and scrofulous pub.
* * *
You listen carefully, then, when you hear the rumor. Some impoverished miller, a man whose business is going under (the small mill-owners, the ones who grind by hand, are vanishing — their flour and meal cost twice what the corporations can churn out, and the big-brand product is free of the gritty bits that find their way into a sack of flour no matter how careful you are); a man who hasn’t got health insurance or investments, who hasn’t been putting money into a pension (he’s needed every cent just to keep the mill open).
That man has told the king his daughter can spin straw into gold.
The miller must have felt driven to it. He must have thought he needed a claim that outrageous if he was going to attract the attention of the king at all.
You suppose (as an aspiring parent yourself, you prefer to think of other parents as un-deranged) he hopes that if he can get his daughter into the palace, if he can figure out a way for her to meet the king, the king will be so smitten (doesn’t every father believe his daughter to be irresistible?) that he’ll forget about the absurd straw-into-gold story, after he’s seen the pale grace of the girl’s neck; after she’s aimed that smile at him; after he’s heard the sweet clarinet tone of her soft but surprisingly sonorous voice.