((A note on names: Post title is from T.S. Eliot?s ?The Hollow Men,? Oedipa?s name is borrowed from Pynchon, and the rest of the names are on loan from...well...everywhere.))
The Tristero Family was exceptionally lucky to have seven sons.
Seven sons were a boon to the father, for fathers take comfort in knowing that the family name will flourish and their lineage will persevere.
Seven sons were a blessing to the mother, for mothers note the glimmer of success in their baby smiles, their childhood war games, their adolescent growth.
Seven sons were strong.
Seven sons, each an attractive emblem of tradition and possibility, died. Seven deaths in seven years.
The grim announcements of departure developed into a macabre and familiar ceremony: the news was borne by a solemn military emissary to their doorstep, passed to the eldest surviving child, and finally related to the family?s ever-grieving and bitter patriarch. When Father saw his youngest child, the eighth, the daughter, statue-still in the door of his study, bearing the familiar white envelope, he knew that his last son had perished.
And he despised the pale, dark-haired messenger. He loathed her for resembling her mother (who was dead, of course, having succumbed to fever four years before the passing of their eldest). He abhorred her for her lack of emotion, her silence, and her solitude. He scorned her for surviving, while the others died.
So the family name would wander into obscurity as his health progressively failed. The daughter waited upon him for seven years, enduring his anger and insults, for she was the placid receptacle of his many frustrations with fate. She did not smile, have friends, or fall in love. She merely waited.
One evening she pressed a pillow into the face of wheezing, dreaming old man, and he joined his sons in eternity. She felt neither joy nor regret in the aftermath of patricide; she merely began making provisions to sell the family estate.
The Tristero Family was exceptionally lucky to have seven sons.
Seven sons were a boon to the father, for fathers take comfort in knowing that the family name will flourish and their lineage will persevere.
Seven sons were a blessing to the mother, for mothers note the glimmer of success in their baby smiles, their childhood war games, their adolescent growth.
Seven sons were strong.
Seven sons, each an attractive emblem of tradition and possibility, died. Seven deaths in seven years.
The grim announcements of departure developed into a macabre and familiar ceremony: the news was borne by a solemn military emissary to their doorstep, passed to the eldest surviving child, and finally related to the family?s ever-grieving and bitter patriarch. When Father saw his youngest child, the eighth, the daughter, statue-still in the door of his study, bearing the familiar white envelope, he knew that his last son had perished.
And he despised the pale, dark-haired messenger. He loathed her for resembling her mother (who was dead, of course, having succumbed to fever four years before the passing of their eldest). He abhorred her for her lack of emotion, her silence, and her solitude. He scorned her for surviving, while the others died.
So the family name would wander into obscurity as his health progressively failed. The daughter waited upon him for seven years, enduring his anger and insults, for she was the placid receptacle of his many frustrations with fate. She did not smile, have friends, or fall in love. She merely waited.
One evening she pressed a pillow into the face of wheezing, dreaming old man, and he joined his sons in eternity. She felt neither joy nor regret in the aftermath of patricide; she merely began making provisions to sell the family estate.