The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [200]
The scenes of the movie, jumbled and disjointed, included awful memories that Sam had told no one but Jill and Clark and that she was upset to see playing out at the local cinema. In one scene, her father Judge Peregrine, austere in his black robes, spoke directly to the camera in extreme close-up. Addressing the mourners at the funeral of his two-year-old son John Ingersoll Peregrine, he told them that “candidly” he did not care for his daughter Samantha, whom he considered not particularly bright and that “frankly” he had an aversion to his son Jack, who had from his youth been defiant and volatile and beautiful and who had therefore always reminded the judge of his wife.
The camera panned rapidly left to right and ended up on the second-floor hallway of Pilgrim’s Rest. Then it tracked into the bathroom where the judge was pushing the teenaged Jack down into a tub of scalding hot water, holding the boy’s head under, while his wife Grandee beat him on his back.
The next shot was in a tennis court, where Sam hit dozens of serves of yellow apples to her mother, who ignored them.
Then her mother was sitting on the living room floor, bloody, with photographs of Johnny around her. The photographs burned like candles.
Then Sam ran into the St. Mark’s cemetery. Her mother was there, digging a hole and jumping down into it. Sam heard her screaming from beneath the ground and she heard the deep growling bark of a dog down there. Sam pulled her mother out of the open grave, just before a massive black dog snapped her leg between his jaws. Sam’s mother held to her breast the blue corpse of her first-born son, dressed in his white burial clothes.
Sam awakened to sharp pain in her leg. A young African American nurse leaned over her. “You doing okay?”
“Not really,” admitted Sam.
The nurse looked at the IV drip, adjusted it, gave it a tap. Sam drifted back to sleep.
Outside, alone in the recovery room lobby, Clark sat on a vinyl couch, his long legs resting on a nearby chair. He had read a report about Sam’s surgery and it looked to him as if the orthopedist Sarah Yoelson had done a fine job repairing the nerve damage, replacing the knee. There was no reason Sam wouldn’t even be able to play tennis again, although it would be unlikely that she could again be a state champion. He recalled how once years ago they’d pushed a big dead oak root up out of the loosened earth. He’d wanted to quit but she hadn’t let him. By strength and will, she’d kicked the last tendril loose. Sam never quit; not with him, not with Annie, not even with her awful parents.
***
“Tell me what Sam and Dad’s parents were really like.” On summer break from her first year at Annapolis, Annie had asked Clark that question one hot summer night. “Really. Tell me.”
And so he had. At least the part he knew at the time.
Sam’s father was a Peregrine, the youngest Superior Court judge in the state; snobbish, bright, cold, and sanctimonious. Sam’s mother had from her baby days been called Grandee Worth as an ironic comment on her petite stature and her illustrious family. She was capricious and charming, with a reputation as a great beauty. Grandee had tormented young Judge Peregrine into proposing, flirting publicly with his friends even on their wedding day. She had once confided to Clark—she was erratic and careless in her confidences—that she had never liked her husband but that she had started actively hating him after the death of their son Johnny. “He killed my baby,” she told Clark in her soft secretive lilt.
The toddler Johnny, while in the care of the judge, had drowned in the new swimming pool Grandee had insisted on building between Pilgrim’s Rest and the Nickerson house. It was the first inground pool in the town of Emerald, and the briefest,