“Econ,” Amos mumbles, “ . . . political science.”
Cheryl suspects that her son has been spending most of this first semester with the crew of waifs he met during orientation. His roommate answers the phone every time she calls and tells her that Amos is in band practice. It seems that her son’s obsession with music has only intensified, that his attachment to his keyboard—what he calls a “keytar”—has become surgical. She remembers how, as a boy, he would sit and plink away at her virginals. Part of the credit for his interest in music belongs to her, for better or worse. Now, sitting hunched in his father’s handmade Windsor chair, he seems to be in physical pain just to be in the house.
During dessert, she asks about his band and he brightens as he tells about their performances on campus and off. Seniors are hiring them for parties, paying real money.
“Maybe you can minor in music?” Cheryl suggests.
Amos grimaces.
“Well, anyway, you know that you’re always welcome to practice on the virginals while you’re home.”
His grimace tightens. Cheryl rises from her chair again, brings the dessert dishes to the buttery. When she returns to the table, Roger is visibly ruffled.
“I know you think we’re too young,” their son is saying, “but this is the peak age. By the time we graduate, we’ll be older than half the guys out there.”
“The answer is no,” Roger says. “Education is a privilege and may not be thrown away so cavalierly. Our forefathers didn’t lose their lives for your freedom so that you could trample all over it.”
“What’s this?” Cheryl asks.
“Wait a minute,” Amos says, his voice rising in pitch. “If they fought so hard for my freedom, then shouldn’t I be able to use that freedom to do what I want? Isn’t that the whole point?”
“No.” Roger pushes back his chair and stands. At his full height, in his ivory linen waistcoat, he is a commanding figure. His features—the high forehead, narrow nose, hooded eyes—are not unlike those of Hiram Cook himself, who gazes out from the portrait on the dining room wall. In the adjacent portrait, Comfort smiles gently, her open face framed by a ruffled cap. What would the Cooks think of this family? Cheryl puts this question to herself at least once a day. What would they think of this town, what’s become of this country? They would appreciate her struggles, she knows. They would applaud what she and Roger are trying to do. Every day of her life, with every action and decision she makes, she endeavors to make Hiram and Comfort proud.
That night, the children lie quiet in their bedroom, in the same folding beds they slept in as toddlers. As they’d grown, she and Roger found themselves debating ever more torturous decisions, brokering compromises they’d sworn they’d never make, bending the rules to accommodate the culture’s gluttonous demands. The children joined sports intramurals, attended gatherings at the mall. Cheryl and Roger insisted on certain activities over others: the debate team over the audiovisual club, for instance, in the hope they might absorb something of the classical art of rhetoric. Still, the children went to unruly pool parties and came home with favor bags full of plastic junk. Cheryl found herself capitulating to Chinese-made toys so her children wouldn’t feel alienated. It hurt her to purchase Rebekah’s first Barbie and Amos’s first Game Boy.
Despite all their efforts, Rebekah had rebelled like any other teenager, dressing in showgirl ensembles, blasting music through her earphones, dating disgusting boys. It seemed an attack on Cheryl, the way she paraded them into the house as if to defile it. The culmination was an older boy—a stunted man, really—with the face of a vagrant, punctuated by an asinine earring between his nostrils. The boy was visibly on edge, a fact that Cheryl first attributed to drug use. She was surprised when, after peering into the stone hearth, he looked at her and asked point-blank, “Are there spirits here?”
“Y-yes,” she stuttered, “I do believe there are.”
Rebekah had kept seeing him through that summer, but did not bring him through the door again.
Lying in bed, Cheryl listens to the sounds of the house. There is an admonishing echo of history, of company, in each ghostly creak of the floorboards, each groan of the rafters. Scurrying in the walls, a mouse family keeps warm, as mice families have done in these walls for two centuries. Outside the bedroom window dwells the pale silhouette of the Slater house, grievously empty.