"Struwwelpeter" by Glen Hirshberg
Halloween (2011) edited by by Paula Guran
Readers unfamiliar with "Struwwelpeter" by Glen Hirshberg may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.
"Struwwelpeter" by Glen Hirshberg is a meaning-full, weighty coming-of-age Halloween horror story. Each of these elements is made strange and new with real skill. (It also inadvertently ratifies my earlier judgment that Stewart O'Nan's "Monsters" is a Potemkin village of a story, a cardboard bullshit Hobby Lobby Fall Season replica coming of age Halloween horror story).
Fathers, sons, and their fear of and for one-another centers "Struwwelpeter." Family solidarity, which can quickly turn inward and curdle, blights both father and sun here: neither ultimately can figure out a route from under the shadow of school and schooling.
This breaking between parent and child also leads to subjective ruptures between the living and the dead on Halloween night, a premonitory skit foreshadowing future calamity.
On Halloween night four teenage friends enter the Paar house, whose odd and threatening owner has not been seen for a year. The power of suggestion wielded by Hirshberg in this scene is done with inspiring surety.
Peter appeared in a doorway across the foyer from us, his black hair bright against the deeper blackness of the rooms behind him. “Don’t miss the den,” he said. “I’m going to go look at the kitchen.” Then he was gone again.
Kelly had started away, now, too, wandering into the living room to our right, running her fingers over the tops of a covered couch as she passed it. One of the paintings on the wall, I noticed, had been covered rather than removed, and I wondered what it was. Kelly drew up the cover, peered beneath it, then dropped it and stepped deeper into the house. I started to follow, but Jenny pulled me the other way, and we went left into what must have been Mr. Paars’ den.
“Whoa,” Jenny said, and her fingers slid between mine and tightened.
In the dead center of the room, amidst discarded file folders that lay where they’d been tossed and empty envelopes with plastic address-windows that flapped and chattered when the wind filled them, sat an enormous, oak, roll-top desk. The top was gone, broken away, and it lay against the room’s lone window like the cracked shell of a dinosaur egg. On the surface of the desk, in black, felt frames, a set of six photographs had been arranged in a semi-circle.
“It’s like the top of a tombstone,” Jenny murmured. “You know what I mean? Like a . . . what do you call it?”
“Family vault,” I said. “Mausoleum.”
“One of those.”
Somehow, the fact that two of the frames turned out to be empty made the array even more unsettling. The other four held individual pictures of what had to be brothers and one sister—they all had flying white hair, razor-blue eyes—standing, each in turn, on the top step of the gazebo outside, with the great bell looming behind them, bright white and all out of proportion, like the Mountain on a too-clear day.
“Andrew,” Jenny said, her voice nearly a whisper, and in spite of the faces in the photographs and the room we were in, I felt it all over me. “Why Struwwelpeter?”
“What?” I said, mostly just to make her speak again.
“Struwwelpeter. Why does Mr. Andersz call him that?”
“Oh. It’s from some kids’ book. My mom actually had it when she was little. She said it was about some boy who got in trouble because he wouldn’t cut his hair or cut his nails.”
Jenny narrowed her eyes. “What does that have to do with anything?”
“I don’t know. Except my mom said the pictures in the book were really scary. She said Struwwelpeter looked like Freddy Krueger with a ’fro.”
Jenny burst out laughing, but she stopped fast. Neither of us, I think, liked the way laughter sounded in that room, in that house, with those black-bordered faces staring at us. “Struwwelpeter,” she said, rolling the name carefully on her tongue, like a little kid daring to lick a frozen flagpole.
“It’s what my mom called me when I was little,” said Peter from the doorway, and Jenny’s fingers clenched hard and then fell free of mine. Peter didn’t move toward us. He just stood there while we watched, paralyzed. After a few, long seconds, he added, “When I kicked the shit out of barbers, because I hated having my haircut. Then when I was just being bad. She’d say that instead of screaming at me. It made me cry.” From across the foyer, in the living room, maybe, we heard a single, soft bump, as though something had fallen over.
With a shrug, Peter stepped past us back into the foyer. We followed, not touching, now, not even looking at each other. I felt guilty, amazed, strange. When we passed the windows the curtains billowed up and brushed across us.
“Hey, Kelly,” Peter whispered loudly into the living room. He whispered it again, then abruptly turned our way and said, “You think he’s dead?”
“Looks like it.” I glanced down the hallway toward the kitchen, then into the shadows in the living room, which seemed to have shifted, somehow, the sheet some way different as it lay across the couch. I couldn’t place the feeling; it was like watching an actor playing a corpse, knowing he was alive, trying to catch him breathing.
“But the car’s here,” Peter said. “The Lincoln. Hey, Kelly!” His shout made me wince, and Jenny cringed back toward the front door, but she shouted, too.
“Kell? Kell?”
“Oh, what is that?” I murmured, my whole spine twitching like a severed electrical wire, and when Jenny and Peter looked at me, I pointed upstairs.
“Wh—” Jenny started, and then it happened again, and both of them saw it. From under the half-closed door at the top of the staircase—the only door we could see from where we were—came a sudden slash of light which disappeared instantly, like a snake’s tongue flashing in and out.
We stood there at least a minute, maybe more. Even Peter looked uncertain; not scared, quite, but something had happened to his face. I couldn’t place it right then. It made me nervous, though. And it made me like him more than I had in a long, long time.
Then, without warning, Peter was halfway up the stairs, his feet stomping dust out of each step as he slammed them down, saying, “Fucking hilarious, Kelly. Here I come. Ready or not.” He stopped halfway up and turned to glare at us. Mostly at me. “Come on.”
“Let’s go,” I said to Jenny, reached out on my own for the first time and touched her elbow, but to my surprise she jerked it away from me. “Jenny, she’s up there.”
“I don’t think so,” she whispered.
“Come on,” Peter hissed.
“Andrew, something’s wrong. Stay here.”
The story's slingshot ending, which expands the scope of preceding action, is deftly handled.
Jay
