It was beyond imagining, even when Rosie wasn’t working and they were both home in the evenings, even when Rosie’s mom was staying with them to help out as she did for a couple months after each child was born, to consider reading to each son separately. Bedtime stories were a group activity. And because showing the pictures all around to everyone involved a great deal of squirming and shoving and pinching and pushing and get-outta-my-ways and he-farted-on-mes and you-got-to-look-longer-than-I-dids, Penn often resorted to telling stories rather than reading them. He had a magic book he read from. It was an empty spiral notebook. He showed the boys it was blank so that there was no clamoring to see. And then he read it to them. Like magic.
When he’d told it to Rosie, the suit of armor outside the prince’s bedroom had been full of roses. The prince had been stunned to find it brimming over with blooms, but Penn knew it was narratively inevitable when you woke up in bed next to an ER resident named Rosie who insisted she had no time for a boyfriend. Not just the first time but every time the prince peeked under the visor, ardent red and pink and yellow petals burst forth, and his hallways filled with their rosy perfume. But for the boys, the suit of armor was filled with something even better.
“So the prince lifted up the visor and looked inside, and there he saw … absolutely nothing.”
“Nothing?” shrieked Roo.
“Nothing,” Penn reported soberly.
“No fair,” said Rigel.
“‘No fair,’ said Grumwald. ‘I just realized this stupid hunk of metal has been outside my bedroom my whole life, and I expected there’d be a charmed knight inside or a mummy or at least a magic rodent of some kind.’”
“Or a talking spider.” Ben was reading Charlotte’s Web.
“‘Or a talking spider,’ Grumwald thought. ‘Or some roses.’”
“Roses?” said Roo. “Why would there be roses in a suit of armor?”
“Yeah,” said Rigel.
“Yeah,” said Orion.
“You’ll understand in a few years. In any case, there was nothing in there, and Grumwald was about to close the visor and climb down from the stool he’d needed to reach it when he heard something.”
“A ghost?” said Ben.
“A zombie?” said Roo.
“It was a voice,” said Penn. “And the voice said…”
“Boo!” yelled Rigel.
“Roo!” yelled Roo.
“‘Once upon a time,’” said Penn.
“Once upon a time?” said Ben.
“The armor wasn’t empty. The armor was full. What was inside the armor was a story, a story wanting to get out.”
“Why did it want to get out?”
“That’s what all stories want. They want to get out, get told, get heard. Otherwise, what’s the point of stories? They want to help little boys go to sleep. They want to help stubborn mamas fall in love with dads. They want to teach people things and make them laugh and cry.”
“Why would a story want to make someone cry?” Ben was so much more serious than his brothers.
“Same reason you cry anyway,” said Penn. “You cry and then you feel better. Your owie stops stinging. Your feelings get less hurt. Sometimes you feel sad or scared, and you hear a sad or scary story, and then you feel less sad and less scared.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” said Ben.
“Nonetheless,” Penn explained.
“Was that all the story said?” Orion got back to the point. “Once upon a time?”
“Nope, the story was a magic story. It was endless. It had no end. It was unlimited. Every time it seemed like it was going to come to some kind of conclusion or moral or denouement, it went in a different direction and began again.”
“What did it say on the last page”—sometimes Ben’s literalism strained Penn’s creative talents—“where it’s supposed to say ‘The End’?”
“There was no last page. It was magic.” He showed them his blank spiral notebook again, how you could keep turning and turning the pages and never lack for another page to turn.
“Like a circle?” said Ben.
“Exactly like a circle.”
“Stories aren’t circles,” said Roo.
“Stories are all circles,” said Penn.
“I don’t understand, Daddy,” Rigel and Orion said together.
“No one understands,” said Penn. “Stories are very mysterious. That’s their other point. To tell themselves. And to be mysterious.”
“What happened next?” said Roo. “In the story?”
“Which one?”
“Which one what?”
“Which story? The story about Grumwald? Or the story coming out of his suit of armor?”
“Both.”
“Lots. Lots happened next. In both.”
“Tell us! Tell us!”
Penn considered how clever it was of him to have birthed a Greek Chorus to hear his tales. “Tomorrow. More tomorrow. Tonight, we sleep.”
Bedtime took a further forty-five minutes and was followed by Penn’s scraping toothpaste off the downstairs bathroom ceiling, gathering up a whole load of discarded laundry from the floor in the hallway, and accidentally crushing a LEGO jungle dinosaur castle for which he knew he’d pay dearly the next morning. In all, a successful bedtime and an accomplishment on par with finishing a particularly difficult chapter or a tax return. It wasn’t diagnosing a pulmonary embolism, but it was not unimpressive, and it allowed a pulmonary embolism to be diagnosed. It could not, unfortunately, be followed up by work or by house cleaning, dish doing, lunchbox packing, exercising, or any of the other things that needed doing. Bedtime could only be followed by TV. Or drinking. On the night Claude became—the fruition of which, of course, would only make bedtime worse—Penn thought both at once sounded best and gave it a good try but was asleep on the couch before he was very far into either one.