The Urn
Frederick was the only child of Thomas Drauger, a rapacious Wall Street financier who died suddenly in his penthouse duplex on Park Avenue at the age of sixty-nine. Because Thomas had been a fabulously wealthy man who neither smoked, drank to excess, or overate, and had enjoyed robust health all his life, there was an inquest. According to the doorman, Frederick had been the last person to see him alive, so he was brought in for questioning. He expressed genuine shock and grief, maintaining that his father had been fine during their meeting, so he was released. The autopsy revealed signs of a massive heart attack, the authorities were satisfied, and the body was released to Frederick, who had it cremated.
Initially, the mortician tried to sell him a deluxe funeral package which included embalming, a mahogany casket, and a burial vault in Woodlawn Cemetery. Frederick told him that since no viewing or wake was planned, embalming what was left of a body that had been cut open and emptied of its entrails was unnecessary, even grotesque. He went on to say that cemeteries were a waste of land better used to house the living, and burial vaults served no purpose whatsoever, unless you believed that on Judgment Day, corpses will rise intact from their graves to appear before God and be sent to eternal bliss or endless torment.
“My father believed only in money,” Frederick said, “and so do you, obviously. I will pay you what I owe you for picking up his body, cremating it, placing the ashes in a container of some sort, and sending it to me.”
The mortician agreed, reluctantly, and a few days later a FedEx driver arrived at the door of Frederick’s small apartment on the Upper West Side, and had him sign for a package labelled “Special Handling: Human Cremains.”
After Frederick had scrawled his signature and taken the oddly heavy little box, the driver said, “Tellya the truth, sir, this delivery gave me the creeps. Are there really somebody’s ashes in there?”
“My father’s,” said Frederick.
“Sorry for your loss. It’s just that I’m Catholic, and we don’t believe in cremation.”
“Why should your beliefs impress someone who doesn’t share them?” Frederick asked. “The dead are dead. Their survivors can make up all the fairy-tales they want about spirits and souls, but a corpse is just dead meat that has to be disposed of before it begins to stink.”
The driver looked at him with marked distaste. “No offence, sir,” he said, “but that’s really cold.”
“So are the dead.” Frederick gave him a five dollar tip to smooth his feathers, even though he knew FedEx drivers weren’t supposed to accept gratuities. The man thanked him tersely and went on his way. After locking his apartment door, Frederick placed the package on his kitchen table and stripped off its brown paper wrapping. The cardboard box inside was sealed with thick plastic tape, and he went to the kitchen to get a knife from the kitchen drawer so he could cut it open. Behind his back he heard a heavy thump. He turned. The tabletop was empty. The box had fallen to the floor.
He picked it up. It felt warm to the touch, and he heard a faint rustling sound coming from inside it. But the rustling stopped when he replaced it on the table, and it was no warmer than the tabletop. He sliced through the tape and opened the box. It was full of styrofoam peanuts to keep its contents from shifting – that explained the rustling noise – and on top of them was the mortician’s invoice for $3,000. It was a substantial sum, but not as much as he had feared, given the man’s avarice.
He scooped out some of the peanuts and reached into the box, withdrawing an urn made of some sort of cheap ceramic material. It had the classic shape of Grecian funerary urns, and a line from Keats’s ode drifted into his mind:
“Beauty is truth; truth beauty.
That is all ye know on earth,
And all ye need to know.”
The romantic sentiment made him snort. The thing was a piece of mass-produced kitsch, not the glorious Sosibios urn, with its lissome mourning goddesses, that Keats had written about. And Thomas Drauger’s relationship to truth had been highly flexible, or he wouldn’t have made a fortune on the Street. As for beauty, although he had pursued attractive woman compulsively, his attitude toward works of art had been strictly transactional. He retained an art consultant who pointed him toward paintings that could be bought for millions at New York galleries, and sold at auction for tens of millions. On the walls of the penthouse on Park Avenue where Frederick had spent his youth, he’d seen Renoirs, Cézannes, and Picassos appear briefly and vanish, to be replaced by other masterpieces that likewise disappeared after a couple of weeks.
Thomas had been a tall, ruggedly handsome man who played football and hockey in college. He’d hoped that his son would share his passion for contact sports, but Frederick grew up bookish and shy. Physically, he took after his mother Holly, a slim, frail woman who divorced his father after finding out that he’d been having an affair with his secretary. Holly never married again. Not long after the divorce, she died of uterine cancer. Frederick blamed her death on his father, even though he knew that made no sense, for he had adored his mother, who passed on to him her love of literature and art. Needless to say, Thomas considered his son a mama’s boy, and told him so frequently. The summer before the divorce, when Frederick turned thirteen, over Holly’s objections Thomas sent him to a camp in Maine that was run along military lines, to toughen him up.
The plan didn’t work. At five o’clock each morning, the counsellors, all of whom were college jocks on summer break, rousted Frederick out of his cot in the drafty wall-tent he shared with four other boys, to hustle into his camp uniform and proceed to the central square, where he had to recite the Pledge of Allegiance as the flag was raised. He was the shortest, skinniest boy in the camp, and the other campers, with the tacit encouragement of the counsellors, targeted him as a victim for cruel pranks. Some of them short-sheeted his cot, others tripped him up at night when he got up to use the outhouse, and one even used a log to bar it from the outside, so that he had to pound on the door and scream before a counsellor finally let him out. The counsellor walked behind him all the way to his cabin, calling him a pussy and cuffing him on the back of his head hard enough to make him cry. His tears only made his reputation worse, and the bullying escalated to punches and kicks.
Finally one afternoon, as Frederick was about to climb into the bow seat of a canoe on the edge of the camp’s lake, the other paddler shoved him in the small of the back. Frederick fell forward into the shallows and banged his head on a protruding rock. The blow knocked him out. He woke up in the camp’s infirmary, lying on a cot with a bandage on his forehead. When he told the camp nurse what had happened, she passed the information on to the man who owned the camp. Terrified of a law suit, he called Thomas and said there had been a minor accident. Frederick wasn’t seriously injured, the owner continued, but the best course was to send him home. Thomas concurred, but insisted that the camp return its fee in full, plus several hundred more dollars to make up for his son’s discomfort. The owner agreed hastily, and used his own money to pay for Frederick’s transportation, by bus and train, back to New York.
Frederick had only a vague memory of the trip, because the nurse had given him painkillers, and he drifted in and out of sleep. He came fully awake only when he was sitting in the back seat of Thomas’s limousine. The driver didn’t say a word to him on the way to the penthouse, nor did he bother to open the door for him. The building’s doorman, Stanley, a more genial man, noticed the bandage and asked what had happened to him.
“I hurt myself,” Frederick said.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said the doorman. “Hope you feel better soon. Mr. Drauger’s waiting for you.”
Thomas was in what he called his library, though there was only a single free-standing book-shelf against the wall next to the window behind his desk, and it contained nothing but a set of the Condensed Encyclopedia Americana and a few books on economics and civil law. He was wearing a suit and tie, as if he’d come directly from his office, and he stood up when Frederick entered.
“You disgust me,” he said. “You’re a disgrace to the Drauger name.” His normal voice was a resonant baritone, but when he was very angry, it came out as high tenor, almost falsetto, an incongruous range for a man of his size and heft. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
“I’m sorry,” Frederick said, trying to choke back tears.
“’I’m sorry’ what?”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“Sorry isn’t good enough. I sent you to the best camp in Maine, and you wasted my money. Even worse, you made me look like a fool. I should have known you wouldn’t measure up. You quit like a goddamn quitter, just because of a bump on the head. Now get over here, you little sissy. I’m going to give you something you’re really going to be sorry about.”
He stripped off his suit jacket and draped it carefully over the back of his chair. Then he unbuckled his belt and pulled it through the belt loops of his trousers. “Drop your pants and underwear and bend over my desk,” he said, still in that eerie, terrifying tenor. His face was red and the veins in his neck stood out.
Frederick was too scared to beg. He obeyed mutely. His father lashed him viciously with the belt, grunting with the effort of swinging it against his bare buttocks and upper thighs. The pain of the first stroke was incandescent, and it took his breath away. The second was worse, but Frederick bit his tongue until he could taste blood, and didn’t cry out. But the third blow broke him. He howled with pain, and Thomas said, “I’m doing this for your own good. You have to learn how to be strong in today’s world, or you won’t survive.” He swung the belt again, even harder. Frederick’s howl became a shriek, but Thomas didn’t let up. He whipped his son a fourth time, and Frederick, screaming, tried to writhe off the desk. Thomas pinned him down with his spare hand and gave him two more lashes before letting him slump to the floor. He threaded the belt back through its loops and buckled it.
“Get up and get dressed,” he said, his voice back to normal, as if the beating had restored his good spirits. “I trust you have learned your lesson. If not, I’ll have to teach it again. And neither of us want that. Do we?”
“No, sir,” Frederick choked out. His own voice cracked into adolescent treble.
“You sound like a girl! Talk like a man, dammit!”
Frederick’s voice changed to a creaky tenor. “No, sir,” he repeated as loudly as he could.
“That’s better. Now get out of here.”
What was left of Frederick’s childhood love for his father was beaten out of him that afternoon. Into the void a thick, powerful hatred began to seep, drip by drip, as additional episodes of brutality occurred each time Thomas found something in his son’s behavior that needed correcting. But during Frederick’s first year at prep school, he experienced a growth spurt and filled out a little. There were plenty of bullies among the students, but he was no longer a prime target. His additional height helped, but what made the bullies back off was the rage inside him, which made him seem a little crazy.
Athletics were manditory, but Frederick, already a loner, had no interest in team sports. However, the school had a fencing team, and with his long reach, he excelled at épée, the weapon which most resembled the rapiers of Shakespeare’s fiery duelists. The rules of épée weren’t as restrictive as those of foil and saber; a fencer didn’t have to parry his opponent’s blade before attacking, but could evade it and start his own attack. The points of the swords were blunted, of course, but the bouts were true single combat, in which audacity usually prevailed over calculation. Frederick transferred his hatred of his father to his opponents, and often launched a flèche attack the moment the referee said “Fence!” The word was French for arrow, and the tactic involved leaping straight at the other fencer, both feet off the ground, weapon extended like an arrow from a bow, using the element of surprise to score the first touch. Then Frederick would settle back to defensive fencing, parrying his opponent’s lunges and retreating down the strip until the clock run out. It wasn’t sportsmanlike, but it was effective.
He did well enough at prep school to gain admittance to Yale, where he majored in English and continued to fence. The Yale team’s coach ridiculed his reliance on the flèche, taking him out on the strip and systematically humiliating him in front of his teammates. Frederick submitted to the brutal fencing lesson, just as he’d submitted to his father’s beating, but he quit the team the next day. For the next three years he fulfilled Yale’s athletic requirements by playing intramural soccer in the fall, doing non-competitive gymnastic exercises in winter, and joining his residential college’s softball team in the spring. He played none of these sports well, but he didn’t care. His studies took up all his interest.
The first time he had visited Yale’s magnificent Sterling Memorial Library, he realized that he’d found a calling. He’d always enjoyed doing research for the papers he was assigned in his English classes, and Sterling’s book collection was among the world’s finest. The Neo-Gothic building resembled a cathedral, and the scholars who worked in it maintained a monastic silence as they pored over their tomes. So Frederick changed his major to Library Sciences, and became one of the monks. It was in the library that he discovered datura.
Over winter break he visited the New York penthouse – he hadn’t thought of it as home since the beating – only for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. His hatred toward his father had continued unabated, but he’d become expert at masking his emotions, and had no trouble being courteous, if a little distant, to his stepmother Gloria, a sexy brunette who looked only a few years older than he was, thanks to the skill of her cosmetic surgeon. Gloria threw a big Christmas Eve party, so there were plenty of guests in the apartment, which made it easy for him to avoid his father without appearing rude. He left after the empty exchange of presents on Christmas morning – he gave Thomas a tie, and Thomas gave him a check – stayed at Yale over the Easter holiday, and continued his research.
Datura, commonly known as jimson weed, is a deadly poison, and in highly-concentrated form it can kill almost instantly. The best thing about it is that it is untraceable unless a medical examiner is specifically looking for it, which wouldn’t be likely. He filed the information away to use at an opportune moment. As he’d read somewhere, revenge was a dish best served cold. And it would take more research to find out how to obtain datura extract, and learn the best way to use it.
Thomas summoned him to another meeting. He ridiculed Frederick’s choice of majors, telling him that he was wasting his Yale education. He threatened to stop paying his son’s tuition fees unless Frederick dropped the library foolishness and switched to something serious, like law or political science. For the first time in his life, Frederick defied him.
“My studies are my own business, not yours,” he told his father flatly. Thomas raised his hand to strike him, and Frederick said, “Go ahead. But you won’t change my mind.” His father hesitated, taking in Frederick’s additional height and muscularity, and finally lowered his hand. “Very well,” he responded. “Perhaps you’ll think differently when you have to leave Yale.”
“I’ll find a way to stay without your help.”
Thomas laughed at him. “How? You don’t qualify for a scholarship. In case it has slipped what passes for your mind, I’m a very rich man.”
“Sarcasm is the weapon of the weak, Daddy,” said Frederick, and gave his father a seraphic smile.
“That’s it!” Thomas exploded. “Get the hell out of here!” His face had turned beet-red. As Frederick rose to leave, he remarked mildly, “You ought to have your doctor check your blood pressure. You don’t look well.”
When he got back to Yale, Frederick explained his financial dilemma to his Library Sciences professor, who came up with a solution. Professor Alexander contacted the Dean of Undergraduate Students, and in short order Frederick was given a student loan, which he immediately started paying off by working on the campus grounds crew and washing dishes in the kitchen of his residential college. Pocket money was tight, but he didn’t need much. He’d come to Yale with plenty of clothes, he took his meals in the college dining hall, he didn’t smoke, and he was too young to buy beer. The kitchen job was miserable, but he came to enjoy working outdoors in all weathers. The labor strengthened him both physically and psychologically: one morning after his shower, as he shaved he examined his newly muscular body in the bathroom mirror and realized that he was becoming a match for his father.
He graduated with honors, and his father attended the ceremony with a blonde beauty Frederick had never seen before. “What happened to Gloria?” he asked. The blonde smiled smugly.
“She and I never really saw eye-to-eye,” Thomas replied. “It’s complicated. You’ll understand when you’re older. This is Marian. We’re going to be married as soon as the divorce goes through.”
Marian flashed the diamond engagement ring on her finger, which Frederick recognized as the one his mother used to wear. He choked back a surge of rage and said, “Congratulations, Marian. Good luck.”
The blonde simpered. “Oh, thank you!” she said in a breathless little Marilyn Monroe voice. “I’m so happy! Your father is a wonderful man.”
“He’s a wonder, all right,” said Frederick. Thomas eyed him suspiciously and changed the subject.
“Frederick, I owe you an apology,” he said. “I underestimated you. The way you figured out a way to get through Yale on your own showed real gumption. I still worry about how you plan to make a living as a librarian, but I guess that’s out of my hands now.”
“Yes it is,” said Frederick. “But I accept your apology.”
“Friends, then?” Thomas asked, holding out his hand.
“Of course.” Frederick extended his own hand. As he had anticipated, Thomas tried to crush it, but the grounds crew work had given him a powerful grip, and he bore down until his father hissed with pain. Frederick squeezed his hand even harder before releasing it, and Thomas gave him a mirthless smile.
“You’ve gotten stronger,” he said.
“I followed your advice, Dad. You have to be strong to survive in today’s world, right?”
“Very true. So let’s let bygones be bygones. I was wrong about you, and I’m sorry.”
“No need to be sorry,” said Frederick. “I have you to thank for teaching me my lessons.”
The reconciliation made Frederick’s long-term plan easier. He got a job as an assistant archivist at the main branch of the New York Public Library, and stayed in touch with his father. Four years passed. Like the paintings on the walls of Thomas’s penthouse, the blonde disappeared and was replaced by a willowy redhead, who in turn gave way to a curvacious young creature with raven-black hair who made a drunken pass at him one evening as a loud party in the penthouse was at its height. Frederick had never had a strong sex-drive, and took care of his occasional needs with his hand. But that night his hatred for his father awoke his dormant erotic impulse. He thought of Thomas as an opponent on the fencing piste, and his cock turned into a sword. He took his father’s latest mistress up to one of the guest bathrooms on the penthouse’s second floor and made her lean forward against the wall. He flipped up her short skirt, pushed the crotch of her panties to one side, and fucked her from behind until she had a screaming orgasm. She sounded as if she were dying, and her cries sent him over the top. They rested for a moment before adjusting their clothes, and without another word, they went back downstairs. Nobody had noticed their absence.
He never tried to see her again, and she made no effort to contact him. The encounter had been strictly expedient. In later years, when he needed sexual relief, he used the Internet to engage an escort service. The whores faked their orgasms expertly, like opera divas singing passionate arias. He hired a male hooker once, more out of curiosity than desire, and the handsome young man sucked his cock until he was about to come, and told him that for another hundred bucks, he would bring him off by fucking him up the ass. The hooker had a condom, and Frederick agreed, but the experience was more painful than pleasant, and he never repeated it. Thereafter, he took care of his occasional moments of lust by logging on to a porn site and masturbating as he watched the actors faking their passion. All very neat and tidy, no messy contacts with other people.
He repressed his anger and continued to accept his father’s invitations to gatherings in the penthouse. As he got older, Thomas managed to stay fit, thanks to a personal trainer who worked with him three times a week, but he began to go bald, which injured his vanity. He paid a fortune for hair implants, but to Frederick’s eye the result wasn’t much more convincing than a wig. Frederick himself had thinning hair, a legacy from his mother, but apart from staying clean and dressing neatly, he didn’t care about his appearance. He was self-effacing, a man few people noticed, and he preferred it that way.
As he continued to research datura, he was careful to use one of the library’s computers, not his own PC, in case something went wrong with his plan and the authorities got suspicious. But it turned out that datura had certain medical benefits, in low doses, and was readily available through the Internet. He took the additional precaution of setting up a separate credit card account under the name of Timothy Fergus, giving his father’s address and phone number, and as soon as the vial of datura extract arrived, he paid the bill and closed the account.
Administering the lethal dose to his father presented a problem. It needed to be full strength, so diluting it by slipping it into Thomas’s morning coffee or orange juice wouldn’t work. The best method was to inject it into his father’s body with a syringe. But the prick of the needle would alarm him, and Frederick felt stymied until he realized it didn’t matter. The injected concentrate would induce a heart attack almost instantly, and Thomas would have no time to fight back before he died. Frederick looked forward to jabbing the needle into his father’s arm, hearing his cry of pain, and watching him collapse.
He called Thomas early on a Saturday morning and said he wanted to consult him about an investment he was thinking of making. Thomas was delighted. “You’re a chip off the old block after all, son,” he said. “Come on over.”
“I don’t want to disturb you if you have company,” said Frederick.
“There’s nobody here but me. It’s the cook’s day off, and the cleaning woman only comes in on Tuesdays and Fridays. Have you had breakfast yet?”
“No.”
“Splendid! I’ll make scrambled eggs and bacon.”
“When did you learn to cook?”
“Oh, your old man has lots of hidden talents,” Thomas said.
So do I, you bastard, Frederick muttered to himself as he switched off his cell phone.
He took a cab to his father’s building, returned Stanley’s genial greeting, and stepped into the elevator. On the way up to the penthouse he made sure the hypodermic needle with its protective cap was ready to hand in the breast pocket of his tweed jacket. Thomas was in the living room, seated on the couch in front of the coffee table. He wore a blue Oxford-cloth business shirt with its sleeves neatly rolled up to the elbows.
“Have a seat,” he said. “I’ll start breakfast in a minute.”
“Actually, Dad, I’m not hungry,” said Frederick, slipping the syringe out of his pocket and removing the cap. He threw the cap aside and jammed the needle into Thomas’s left forearm, depressing the plunger with his thumb. Thomas’s eyes widened, and he started to say something, but the poison worked as quickly as Frederick’s research had promised it would. His father clutched his chest with both hands, gasped, and slumped over on his side. Frederick waited until he stopped twitching. Then he pulled out the syringe, replaced its cap, and put it back in his pocket. Thomas’s chest wasn’t moving. His mouth hung open, and his eyeballs were rolled up in his head. A wet stain had appeared in the crotch of his pants, and a stench indicated that he’d emptied his bowels. He seemed thoroughly dead, but Frederick checked his wrist for a pulse anyway. Nothing.
He used his pocket handkerchief to wipe any fingerprints off Thomas’s wrist, and left. Stanley offered to hail a cab for him. “Thanks, he said, “but it’s a fine morning. I’ll walk for awhile.”
“I’m glad you’re back on good terms with your dad,” said the doorman.
“So am I,” Frederick said,” but I worry about him. He works too hard.”
“Well, hard work got him where he is today, right?”
“Right as rain, Stanley.”
“Have a nice day.”
“Thanks. I’m already having one.”
Frederick left the urn on the table and decided to make himself a late breakfast. He cracked four eggs into a bowl, added a little salt and pepper, and used a fork to whisk them into a froth. After getting a package of bacon and a stick of butter out of the fridge, he placed a stainless steel sauté pan and a cast-iron skillet on the gas stove’s front burners, and put a pat of butter in the pan. He lit the burners and set both of them on low. He’d worked up an appetite, and he loved bacon, so he decided on four slices of it. The butter began to melt, and the bacon in the skillet started sizzling. He turned back to the table. To his astonishment, the urn was on the floor again, though he hadn’t heard it fall. He bent to pick it up and shrieked. It was red-hot to the touch, and burned his fingers badly. The pain made him recoil against the stove, and the skillet began to slide off its burner. Reflexively, he grabbed the skillet’s handle, and seared the palm of his hand. He let go of the handle, and the skillet flipped over, spilling hot grease, which the open flames of the two burners ignited. In a heartbeat, a tongue of flame licked out, reaching almost to the ceiling, and set the kitchen curtains ablaze.
He reached for the small fire extinguisher across from the stove, but he’d forgotten about his burned hands, and the pain made it impossible for him to hold the canister, let alone pry off its seal and press the button. He dropped it, and because he was only wearing slippers, it crushed the toes of his left foot. He staggered and fell. The smoke alarm in the living room began to whoop, and he tried to get up. But the smoke was already so thick that he couldn’t breathe. The last thing he saw before he choked to death was the urn. It was still standing on the floor, right next to him, and it glowed as if lit from within.