She did not return to America with them; she boarded a train to Ancona instead. “Tooth fairy!” they yelled at her as they parted ways. “Thief! Witch! Slut! Cunt!” She did not look back.
Months later, Moses’s friend explained what had really happened: he had broken into the hotel bathroom while his nanny was showering, opened the curtain, and offered her his erection. She physically kicked him out of the room. “Gave me a bruise, can you believe it? Child abuse! My mother didn’t pay her for that month.” But before quitting her job, the nanny ordered the boy to tell a priest what he had done. Forcing him into confession was her last act as his caregiver. He wasn’t Catholic. Neither was she. Moses had a sensational time in Rome.
The Roman confessor told Moses’s friend to do a year of community service, preferably at a women’s shelter. This is why Moses likes religion: it has a way of dealing with incidents like these—summarizing them, interpreting them, offering a course of action.
“What was your mother protecting you from, by abandoning you?” repeats Father Tim.
Moses rolls his eyes. “That Moses’s mother put him in a watertight basket. Mine basically put me on the back of a crocodile and told me to tip him.”
“I’m not dismissing the harm she caused,” says Father Tim. “I’m just trying to understand her. I find that’s the best place to start, no matter how cruel someone seems.”
“You people. You Hoosiers.”
“Sorry?”
“Why do you assume that she was protecting me from something? Maybe she wasn’t thinking of me at all, did that occur to you? People are selfish. Sometimes that’s all there is to it. When they seem cruel, they are cruel.” Suddenly, Moses feels like he is attached to a bike pump of rage. The Midwestern breed of narcissist, Moses reasons, must be much smaller and more docile than the breed they have in Hollywood—like those tiny foxes near the equator. But how can Father Tim know that? “But how could you know that?” Moses demands. “You live in this godforsaken town, where your serial killers probably hold the door open for you. They probably ask you how you’d like it before they murder you. You have no idea what she was like.”
For a moment, Moses feels relieved. Then he feels ashamed.
“Maybe,” suggests Father Tim, “your mother abandoned you to protect you from herself?”
Moses Robert Blitz was twelve years old, recently acquainted with arousal and humiliation, and the date was the fifth of July. It was around five in the morning, and he had woken in a sweat, so dehydrated he felt like he was filled with sand. The problem was that there were no cups upstairs and he hated drinking from bathroom taps—it seemed dirty. He switched his light on and off several times before deciding to get out of bed and retrieve a glass from the kitchen. His dream had taken the form of a blooper reel—he had to act out the same scene over and over, making different mistakes every time, triggering eruptions of laughter from the people around him.
It was therefore disorienting when Moses heard real laughter as he descended the stairs. He froze. Detected at least five different voices. The various laughs of his mother funneled toward him: the tense one, the one that sounded like winter, the one that meant she was bored.
Carefully, he leaned over the railing to observe the scene below: Elsie and four of her friends—two women and two men, often the last to leave the Blitz of July—splayed their bodies in various poses around the fireplace. All wore blue. There were two couches, two loveseats, and four armchairs in this room, but they favored the shag rug. Glasses and bottles glittered around them like boats at sea. It was his mother’s favorite room, with its skylight and white walls, twenty-foot ceiling and taxidermy—exclusively birds, suspended from the ceiling as though frozen midflight in a multispecies migration. An exodus. Moses could tell by their eyes that Elsie and her friends were drunk or high or both. Jazz howled and candles flickered. Someone was articulating a complicated opinion that ended in the word earthmen.
“But in the end, he gets stabbed.”
“What do you do when someone gets stabbed? I’ve always wondered.”
“Oh! Oh, I know this!”
“Check your enthusiasm.”
“No, on Roses Are Red, my fiancé got stabbed and I had to—”
“Oh please, educate us with your soap opera knowledge. I’m sure it’s medically valid.”
“It is! They consulted an expert! You bind it. The wound. And then you apply pressure. I think you’re supposed to elevate the wound above the heart, but they don’t do that so much anymore. It’s not as important as the pressure. You’re supposed to lie them flat, though, and you can raise their legs. I think it’s about, like, circulation?”
“Very useful information, Marianne. Thank you.”
“Good morning, Moses.”
Moses gasped. One of the men had noticed him, and now everyone except his mother stared. In the spotlight of their attention, he felt like some kind of swamp monster, emerging to prey on the hippos. They were the trespassers, he reminded himself, trying to summon the courage to speak. He lived in this house; they didn’t. But he knew that confidence was as likely to descend upon him as God was. To summon something like that it must be inside you, or at least respond to your call.
“Look at those darling pajamas.”
“You’re a mess, Junior. You been swimming?”
“No, I have an idea, let’s all give him advice—booze makes me wise, and Paul’s an aficionado of—”
“For fuck’s sake, Marianne. Have kids of your own.”
“You hungry, big guy?” asked a man that Moses recognized as an Important Director.
“Bodies . . .” began Marianne prophetically, squinting at her glass, but did not continue.
“We’ve got snacks here,” said the director. “Prosciutto.”
“But not too much for grasso,” said a man in an electric blue suit. This man appeared at their house once annually, and Moses had no idea who he was. Moses did, however, hate the man with an intensity that did not correspond to their interactions. It must have been a response to a message only available to his subconscious. Wistfully, Moses thought of the Christmas Island crab migration, which he learned about in school, and which was also an annual event, and which he would strongly prefer to witness than the Blitz of July. He imagined the female crabs, red and sturdy, marching en masse through the darkness to reach a high-tide beach. He learned that each crab carries a hundred thousand eggs that she must deposit into the sea—a treacherous endeavor because she can’t swim. As soon as the eggs touch the water, they hatch, and the female leaves them to fend for themselves. Could you call such a creature a mother? Moses feared that if he ever attended the Christmas Island crab migration, he would step on one. “Yes, Elsie?” continued the hateful man in the blue suit. “It’s not healthy to feed your child too much. It’s abuse. You are a bad mother, my darling. But this is why you are interesting!”
Moses watched his mother, who did not look at him. Her auburn hair was pinned in a complex updo. Her skin gleamed with sweat, oil, sun, makeup. The rest of her gleamed with sapphires. She had changed into indigo silk pajamas but had not removed her jewelry.
“Do you know they took Fattest Domestic Cat off the list of Guinness World Records because it encouraged animal abuse?” contributed Marianne, who was the youngest and most beautiful of the five.
“Elsie, your son is hungry,” said the director. “Do something about it. We’re frightening him.”
“We just tease you, my Moses,” said Sabine, a Parisian costume designer in her forties, one of Elsie’s closest friends. “You know that. You know we are just having a little fun because we are all very tired—very tired of ourselves.”
“It’s true,” said Marianne, smiling. “You’re like a godson to us, Moses.”
“Elsie,” said the director. “Feed him before we inflict lasting psychological damage.”
“I’m n-n-n-n-not hun-hun—hungry.”
Moses enjoyed a brief high after the expulsion of this sentence. He was then mobbed by embarrassment. The adults fell silent for a moment, and he noticed something watery about them, something dissolvable, as though they were the substance of a dream.
“Do not feel shame for your hunger!” cried Sabine, who was prone to dramatic interpretations of ordinary scenes. A feather boa was coiled around her neck, and it quivered when she spoke. Moses could track her exhalations. “If our boys feel shame for their hunger, what kind of men will they be!”
“Of course you’re hungry, big guy,” said the director, whose hand was resting on Elsie’s ankle. It occurred to Moses in preteen abstractions that this man and his mother were fucking. “Come on. We won’t bite.”
“He is a growing boy,” said Sabine. “Elsie, feed your growing boy.”