The Open Curtain Read Free

sleeping pills. He felt vaguely responsible. The principal, a hometown football hero now in his fifties who had a dour, droopy face, decided to have a serious talk with the class about death. Death was wrong, he told them, suicide especially. After closing the door, he brought out the Book of Mormon, telling them that normally school and religion didn’t mix, but that this was a special case. The gist apparently was that Mrs. Frohm was going to Hell. Rudd’s essay had been praised by someone going to Hell. Did that mean he was going to Hell too, or just his essay?
    Rudd didn’t know what to wear to the viewing, settled on a red tie and a white shirt, his church pants. He stood in line to get to the body, hands in pockets, wondering what he would feel when he saw her corpse. Her face was pale under the rouge. He got his head down close enough to see thepores of her skin. Her eyelid, he could see, was just slightly open, two or three strands of cotton visible between the lashes. If there hadn’t been people behind him, he would have touched her skin. Just thinking about it made him feel lightheaded.
    It suddenly became too much of a bother to get in trouble in Sunday school. Instead, he sat still in his chair, blanking it out, his arms crossed, answering only when he had no other choice. The answers were the same as they had been when he was six—each year they were taught the same things over and over again in a slightly different format. Even the objections that some of the students raised, he realized, were objections they had been preconditioned to raise for years, easy objections with pat solutions. He could rattle them out as easily as anyone:
    TEACHER:
Does God answer prayers?
CLASS [in unison]:
Yes, of course.
TEACHER:
So, if I pray for a red corvette, I’ll get it, right?
CLASS:
It’s not a worthy prayer.
OBJECTOR:
What if you need the red corvette to convert someone?
TEACHER [solicitous]:
That would be a worthy purpose. But I can’t possibly imagine a car is going to bring anyone closer to God.
OBJECTOR:
What if you pray for something that God knows will be bad for you?
TEACHER:
Like a red corvette? [Laughs.] Then if you’re worthy, God gives you what you
really
need.
OBJECTOR:
So, if you’re not worthy, you end up with the car?
TEACHER:
If you’re not worthy, you end up with nothing. It’s best to ask God to give you what you need to fulfill his will. There’s no need to be too specific.

    Perfect, thought Rudd, same technique fortune-tellers use.
    One Sunday, their teacher passed out a slip of mimeographed paper, a genealogical tree on it in blue, slightly blurred ink.
    “Today,” he said, “we’re going to learn about family history.”
    Rudd was instructed to write his parents’ names in the first two slots. Ifyou knew your parents’ birthdays or—he suggested, looking at Rudd—death day, you should write that information in the half-slots below marked “b” and “d.” The full slots on the next column were for your name and the names of your brothers and sisters.
    Rudd looked at the form. He wrote his father’s name in the first slot.
Gyle Theurer.
He wrote his mother’s name in the second slot.
    He crossed to the next column, wrote his name in the first slot. There were five other slots, all of them blank. He looked at the form. It seemed imbalanced, his name crowded at the top as it was.
    He began to write his name again in the second slot, then stopped. Crossing out the “R” and the “u,” he wrote instead,
Lael Korth.
Next to “b” he wrote a “?” and then, in parentheses,
bastard.
Beside his father’s name, he drew in another line and wrote,
Anne Korth.
It had been four or five years since he had read the letters. He was surprised he still remembered the names.
    He stayed staring at the tree, trying to figure out what it meant. Then suddenly the teacher was behind him, staring down at the paper.
    “What’s this?” the teacher asked.
    Rudd smiled weakly, turned the