Enchantment by Daphne Merkin

Author:Daphne Merkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

* * *

History belongs, at last call, to the strong—those who have forgone the niceties, whose versions of life have grown the thickest skins. There are always things, even in the most conspicuously open of accounts, that must not be said.

* * *

“Margot!”

A decade or so earlier, my father steps out of his study—a room sacrosanct, preserved for him, like the chair at the head of the oval dining room table.

“Yah, Valter?”

“Has one of the children taken my pencil?”

We are always “one of the children,” as though to individualize us would be to concede a respect he does not feel.

“What pencil?”

My mother rises from her chair.

“My pencil,” my father repeats. “I can’t find it.”

“Can’t you use another one? For now?”

My mother appeals to the rational mode that is supposed to be one of his distinguishing characteristics. “Your father is so lucid,” she often says, when pressed by me to enumerate his good qualities. “He never lets emotions get in the way.”

“No!”

“Valter, don’t yell.”

Even the strong can get bent out of shape when they are being formed. My father, who was supposed to have been a brilliant student, was yanked out of school at the age of sixteen to go into business. Rage has wily substitutions with which to assuage itself—a pencil instead of a father.

“Check with the children.”

“Fine, I’ll check with the children,” my mother says, her thin mouth tightening so that it almost disappears.

“What does it look like?” Eric adopts his official cooperative tone.

“Like any other pencil,” my mother says.

“You should know,” Benjamin says. “You sharpen them for him.”

It is Eric’s self-appointed task to keep my father’s pencils in perfect pointillist condition. On Sunday mornings he gathers them up and grinds them through the round-bellied manual sharpener that stands on a shelf in the study closet, which smells of mothballs. Benjamin disapproves of this service, happily undertaken though it is.

“I don’t mind,” Eric says. “Besides, he doesn’t know how to do it himself.”

“That’s the problem,” Benjamin says. “He tries to get everyone to do things for him. You act like his valet.”

Neither of my brothers was wrong: my father adored being waited on, and was waited on daily, at home and at the office, more than most people manage to arrange for in a lifetime. My mother set the pattern for the rest of us by enabling my father to remain helpless when it came to basic skills like boiling water or sharpening pencils, but my father had a shrewd sense of his own about who was or wasn’t likely to cater to his needs in a particular instance. I think Benjamin was half jealous that he hadn’t been asked to do this job and was thereby denied the opportunity to refuse.

“I think I saw it,” Rachel volunteers. “In the boys’ room.”

“My pencil,” Arthur says.

He is no more than five, and he doesn’t understand what is at stake. For the past year he has been busily drawing pictures, always in pencil rather than crayon, full of round, breastlike objects and careful curlicues of hair.

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