When, as a child, he plucked up his courage and asked his father and stepmother about the woman who gave him birth, his father would simply throw up his hands and leave the room. His stepmother would grow angry. “Leave it!” she cried one fateful day. “That was a woman of no consequence. She went away, got sick and died.”
What was it like, to be Mowgli, born of a woman of no consequence, who had been so cruelly cast off by his father and then in the outer darkness had died one of the myriad deaths of the forgotten poor? I heard a shocking story later, from Apu, after the code of silence was broken. There had been a time when the old man’s relationship with their mother was in difficulties. He raged at her and she shouted back. I sat up and paid attention because this was the first time in my conversations with the Goldens that the faceless, nameless woman, Nero’s wife—since ancient times an unlucky thing to be—had walked out onto the stage and opened her mouth; and because, according to the story, Nero had shouted and screamed, and she had screamed and shouted back at him. This was not the Nero I knew, in whom the force of his rage was kept under control, emerging only in the form of self-glorifying bombast.
At any rate: after the explosion the family split into two camps. The older boys took their mother’s side but Dionysus Golden stood firmly by his father and persuaded the patriarch that his wife, Petya and Apu’s mother, was not fit to run the household. Nero summoned his wife and ordered her to surrender the keys; and after that for a time it was D who gave instructions and ordered groceries and decided what food would be cooked in the kitchens. It was a public humiliation, a dishonoring. Her sense of her own honor was profoundly linked to that iron ring, a majestic O three inches in diameter, from which hung maybe twenty keys, large and small, keys to the larder, to cellar strongboxes packed with gold ingots and other arcana of the rich, and to various secret crevices all over the mansion where she concealed only she knew what: old love letters, wedding jewelry, antique shawls. It was the symbol of her domestic authority, and her pride and self-respect hung there along with the keys. She was the mistress of the locks, and without that role she was nothing. Two weeks after she was commanded by her husband to give up the key ring, the deposed lady of the house attempted to take her own life. Pills were swallowed, she was found by Apu and Petya slumped at the foot of the marble stairs, an ambulance came. She was clutching Apu by the wrist and the ambulance men said, please come with us, her holding on to you is important, she’s holding on to life.
In the ambulance the two paramedics played good cop, bad cop.—Stupid bitch scaring your family, you think we have nothing better to do, we have serious things to deal with, real injuries, emergencies that are not self-inflicted, we should just leave you to die.—No the poor thing, don’t be so hard on her, she must be so sad, it’s all right darling, we will look after you, things will get better, every cloud has a silver lining.—To hell with the silver lining, she doesn’t even have a cloud, look at her house, her money, these people think they own us.—Don’t mind him darling, it’s just his way, we are here to take care of you, you’re in good hands now. She was trying to mutter something but Apu couldn’t make out the words. He knew what they were doing, they were trying to keep her from slipping into unconsciousness, and afterwards, after the stomach pump which he had had to watch because of her claw-hand clutching at his wrist, when she was conscious again in a hospital bed, she told him, The only thing I was trying to say in the ambulance was, my child, will you please punch that rude bastard on the nose.
She returned home in a kind of triumph, because of course she was restored to her position as head of the household and the traitor child who was not her child begged for her forgiveness, and she told him she forgave him, but actually she never did, and barely spoke to him again for the rest of her life. Nor did he truly want her forgiveness. She had called his mother a woman of no consequence and deserved everything he had inflicted upon her. After that his brothers slammed emotional doors in his face and told him he was lucky they were not violent men. He swallowed his pride and pleaded for their forgiveness also. It did not come quickly. But as the years passed a reserved cordiality slowly grew up between them, a brevity of interaction that outsiders mistook for inarticulate brotherly love, but was no more than mutual toleration.
Unasked questions hung in the air, unsolved mysteries: Why did the young boy who grew up to be D Golden want so desperately to run the household that he would humiliate his stepmother to fulfill his desire? Was it to prove he belonged? Or was it, as it could so easily have been, to avenge the dead woman who gave him birth?
“I don’t know,” Apu said dismissively when I asked him. “He can be an extraordinary little shit when he wants.”