The Genius

Louis would not mind paying more. He would, in fact, be happy to pay much more, give and give and give until he has left himself bloody and shattered. But here is the punch line: he has too much money to ever be broken. Writing checks will never be an effective method of expiation, and unfortunately for him, he knows no other way.

As Louis listens to the superintendent, he tries to convey the message to Bertha, who stands nearby, grinding her teeth impatiently.

“He says—one moment. He says that she—what was that?”

Fed up, Bertha seizes the receiver. “In plain English, please,” she says. Over the next minute and a half, her face shifts from exasperation to incredulity to fury to determination and finally to the blank, chill mask she puts on during difficult times. She says a few short words and puts down the phone.

“The girl is pregnant.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Well,” she says, pushing the button for the maid, “obviously, it isn’t.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t see what choice we have. She can’t stay there.”

“Then what do you inte—”

“I don’t know,” says Bertha. “You haven’t given me much time to think.”

The maid appears in the doorway.

“Call for the car.”

“Yessum.”

Louis looks at his wife. “Now?”

“Yes.”

“But it’s Sunday,” he says.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

He has no answer.

She says, “Do you have a better idea?”

He does not.

“Then run along. You’re not dressed for an outing.”

AS HE PERFORMS HIS TOILET, he wonders how he has gotten here. The events of his life do not seem connected in any way. First he was there, then somewhere else; now he is here. But how did he arrive? He does not know.

He reaches for his comb; his valet steps forward and hands it to him.

“That’s all right,” Louis says. “I’ll be alone now, thank you.”

The valet nods and withdraws.

Once he has gone, Louis removes his shirt and stands bare-chested. The last eight years have aged him. Once he had ringlets so dense that the teeth of the comb would get stuck. He had smooth skin, not the elephantine wattles that appear at his waist as he bends. His is not the dense, cannon-ball belly men of wealth and power should have but a soft paunch, a loosening around the ribs. His hips are wide and feminine, and his trousers must be let out at the seat. He repulses himself. He did not always look this way.

He puts on his shirt and his shoes and descends to the foyer.

The Home is near Tarrytown, a few miles off the Hudson. Once they leave the city, the roads become lined with deep ruts that the car is ill equipped to handle. The drive takes several hours; his suit is stuffy and his back stiffens; by the time they arrive, he can hardly move. It’s hard to say what would be worse, getting out of the car or turning right around and going back to Fifth.

The superintendent stands outside the gate, indicating where they may park, a gesture that annoys Louis, insofar as it implies that this visit is the Mullers’ first. Bertha might not come, but he does, at least once a year.

The grounds are lush and colorful, thick with wildflowers and weeds that make Louis’s sinuses buzz. He blows his nose and glances at his wife, staring impassively out the window at a building that did not exist the last time she was here. He knows this to be true because he paid for a portion of its construction. Anonymously. Bertha would not allow him to disgrace the family name. Another irony, that little bout of possessiveness, for it is he who turned her from a Steinholtz into a Muller.

She has changed, too, although he has a hard time putting his finger on how. Everything that made her a beautiful girl has lingered, more or less, into middle age, without the need for heavy investments in cosmetics. Other women spend half their day staving off wrongs done by time and childbearing. Not so Bertha.

What, then? Louis watches her gazing out the window and notices that all of those lovely features are still there—but more so. The beauty mark a touch larger; the nose a trifle rounder. It is as though the real Bertha, for years tightly wrapped in youth, has pushed her way through to the surface, causing tiny ruptures all over, individually imperceptible but together enough to render the whole grotesque. Perhaps these changes are real, or perhaps familiarity has bred contempt. Whatever the case may be, what scant desire he could conjure up for her, back when he was supple and highly motivated, has long since dried out and blown away. His appetites in general have waned, leaving in their stead regret, a multipartite regret made up of all his poor decisions. Because although he has a hard time understanding how he came to the present, if he is honest with himself he will say that the path has been of his making. What seemed like inevitabilities he now understands as choices. When, so many years ago, they brought him into the room to meet her and they told him she was to be his bride, and he agreed, and the whole machine swung into motion—that was his choice, wasn’t it? His father said to him: marry or go to London. Well, why not London? At the time he told himself that marriage would follow eventually, so he might as well accept his fate and be allowed to stay on. But perhaps his father had been giving him an out. Perhaps he could have spent his life in bachelorhood, like great-uncle Bernard. What might have happened in London? Louis wonders. And when Bertha sent the girl away—hadn’t he had a choice? He argued and argued and finally gave in, but he could have stood his ground. He could have done something. What, he does not know. But something.

In business he never second-guesses himself; in life he has no peace.

The car rolls across the gravel, slows, comes to a halt. Bertha gets out but he is impaled on regret.

“Get out of the car, Louis.”

He gets out of the car.

The superintendent’s name is Dr. Christmas. Though normally full of good humor, today he has a bilious look about him.

“Mr. Muller. Mrs. Muller. Did you have a pleasant drive?”

“Where’s my daughter,” Bertha says.

They pass through the lobby. Louis allows his wife to take the lead, and she does, pushing out in front of everyone else, as though she knows where to go. Her daughter. Preposterous. An insult to the effort he has expended over the last twenty years. The girl has never been hers, not since the moment they parted company on the delivery table. But does he really want to claim that the girl is his? If so, then that makes her his responsibility; it makes everything that has happened his fault.

Dr. Christmas has decided to turn their walk into a tour, pointing out the Home’s prouder features, such as the hydrotherapy rooms, with their hippopotamus-sized tubs and stacks of linens. They perform more than a thousand cold wet sheet packs every year.

“Recently we’ve had some success with insulin treatments,” he says, “and you’ll be pleased to know that thanks to your—”

“What I will be pleased to know,” says Bertha, “is where my daughter is. Until then I am not pleased to know anything.”

They walk the rest of the way in silence.

Or—not silence. From other rooms, other floors—from far away on the grounds—muffled by concrete and plaster, oozing through ducts—come the most ungodly sounds. Screams and weeping and a jagged laughter that stands Louis’s hair on end, and a variety of noises that no human being should be able to produce. He has heard these noises before but they never fail to unnerve him. They do not have a daughter, they have a son; Bertha has repeated this mantra enough, forcing him to recite it with her, and he has come to believe. Thus every visit to the Home brings fresh horror.

Their child, their real child, David—he is growing up handsome and articulate, a model young man. At thirteen he has already read Schiller and Mann and Goethe in German, Moliere and Racine and Stendhal in French. He plays the violin and has a knack for mathematics, especially as applied to business. While it is true that education at home has left him shy around other children, he is nonetheless charming toward adults, fully capable of engaging in conversation with men thirty years his senior.