Providence

“There was a time when I thought ‘goodbye’ was the saddest word in all the world.”

“Sunday?”

Mouth agape with woeful words primed for delivery, the speaker halted suddenly. The man cinched his dark eyes taut and circumnavigated on the haunches of his seat, disdain littered across his bronze countenance. He toyed listlessly with the silken collar of his paisley housecoat while his other hand fostered a momentarily discarded cigar.

He maintained his rueful glower, his voice flaring once again with annoyance instead of contemplative dejection. “It transcended language itself, I thought. I would think ‘How harrowing it must be to hear a word that means you won’t meet again. How painful,’ I’d say. ‘How cruel.’”

“But now,” he exclaimed with a weighty Spanish inflection, “I know that ‘no’ is the single most painful thing ever to hear, ever to say. It’s all I can think. It’s binding my tongue and shackling me to my place. Fester, I’m rotting alive!”

The paunchy man at the other end of the room lolled his eyes, labored by gamey black semicircles. His brother had an incurable proclivity for drama; he knew and was acclimated to the precarious art of skirting about him during his bouts of disconsolation, but never quite recognized the legality of it all. He prodded a jagged pawn forth upon the chess board with the knobby broadside of his forefinger, eyeing his opponent with facetious voracity from across the tabletop.

“That’s the most reassuring thing I’ve heard you say in a long while,” Fester muttered with a sardonic melody bobbing subtly at the recesses of his throat.

There was a short but remarkable silence in the parlor that afternoon as Gomez indulged in a long and toxic drag of his cigar. He turned loose a laden sigh amongst billows of wan and odorous smog. “You’re a hateful reptile, old man. Your own brother is dying right in front of you and all you can do is spite him.”

A half-satirical scoff surfaced from the bowl of Fester’s chest. “You talk a lot for a guy who has his tongue tied.”

Gomez drew his fingernails rakishly through his disheveled tawny tresses and delved deeper into the unaccommodating upholstery of the easy chair upon which he sat. “I just don’t understand. What did I do wrong? Where did I fail her?”

The elder of the Addams brothers watched in mildly engrossed intrigue as a bodiless hand scrambled deftly across the board and nudged a knight into place with a contorted middle finger. He furrowed his naked brow and expelled a gust of air through his nostrils. The clever hand had apprehended his pawn. He whetted his lips with his tonguetip as he scrutinized their shared checkered plain.

“I imagine it’s the part where you’re engaged to her sister.” He wagered in apathy.

“I never agreed to that!” the mournful man shouted stringently.

“You didn’t have to.” Fester allocated another pawn to a more satisfactory position on the warfield. “You slept for three entire days after Morticia rejected you. Mama didn’t want to keep Ophelia and her mother waiting, so she took it on herself.”

“Without my permission?” his spine was rigid and he buried his fingertips into the stale and brittle arms of his chair. His legs were reared back as though he might spring into a gallant and entirely typical stance and be rid of his morose ennui yet. Fester hoped.

“It’s incredibly difficult to talk with you when you get like this.”

“Heartbroken? Tormented? Rent asunder by the very woman that makes this wretched heart of mine beat for someone other than myself? Lazy?” the fluid architecture of the Addams manor carried the reverberation of Gomez’s voice beyond the room he, his brother, and his dearest friend had so miserably occupied. He swelled with dampened pride at the power in his tone, echoing ever still off the mildew infested walls.

“Dramatic.” his rejoinder was blunt.

He glanced between his brother and the game at hand, pursing his lips and eventually relinquishing a resentful sigh. He pressed his small palms, marred with sealed lesions and freshly encrusted blood clots from ventures undertaken in his workshop, against his thighs and eschewed himself from his seat. Before stalking raptly toward the impassioned younger man, however, he rotated a generous few degrees to address his opponent with a warning glare.

“Thing, don’t you dare cheat.” He righted himself and trudged ahead. “And while we’re on the subject, I’d like to remind you that that ‘woman’ is only seventeen years old.”

“That’s ridiculous. Who told you that?” Gomez sputtered incredulously - the first smile he had managed in days, albeit entirely sarcastic.

“Her mother! I was in the study with her and Ophelia and asked a thing or two about Morticia.”

Too emotionally fractured, the younger of the men could not find the audacious inspiration to repel the repulsive thought with a snarling retort and receded once more into the chair. He closed his eyes for a few precious seconds and relished in the sickly sensation of noxious fumes dilatorily flooding his lungs and numbing the agonizing throb of his heart. At the sound of Fester’s voice accruing an incommunicable and undesired message, he struck up his index finger and instructed him to halt there, with the words barricaded in his larynx. He was patient in holding his breath, shoulders easing and terse brows lessening in severity as his sensitive lung tissue stung and recoiled at the smog saturating it. He exhaled with a blissful sigh, although his expression translated sorrow.

“You traitorous bastard.” He calmly said, eyes still closed, frown still firmly impressed upon his skin.

The opaque haze dissipated throughout the room but left a phantom scent in its wake. A distinctly saccharine stench clung to the clothes of the men and the various antiques populating the room, leaving an earthy and eerily refined atmosphere contingent upon the cohabitation of odor and décor. Fester wrinkled his nose.

“Is that Rosado?”

Gomez took another dependent puff of the slowly incinerating cigar.

“You are depressed.”

The olive skinned man nestled his forehead against the rough exterior of the divan, seeking comfort where there was none. Clouds of tobacco smoke liberated themselves from his nostrils like a deadly airborne tide and for a moment Fester was quite legitimately aware of the disparate nature of his younger brother’s heart. He collapsed atop the chaise lounge adjacent to the easy chair Gomez had sought refuge in.

“I need her,” the young man lamented.

Fester swallowed harshly on emotions he didn’t understand. “You knew her for an hour, and spent the next seventy-two dreaming about it.”

He said nothing.

“All this over one girl? Gomez, what about the droves of women that you paraded through the house, before? All hours of the day, not a single one the same ever since you got back from Harvard.” His efforts were laudably exhausting.

“What women?” he replied as though it were a statement. He turned to face his brother after a perilous period of disquieting quiet. “Are they still here?”

“Mrs. Frump and Ophelia are still upstairs with Mama. Morticia hasn’t –“

Suddenly, he stood. His chest was nearly concave and his normally commendable posture was cumbersomely bowed due to his debilitating melancholy. He doggedly squared his shoulders and began to shed his robe, motioning Thing along with his cigar toting hand. The heft of the room lightened with the cluck of the younger man’s tongue against his cheek, every assertive stride he forced into action. Fester grinned unceremoniously to himself as Gomez entangled his fingers in the fibrous length of mooring rope dangling from the ceiling and yanked with all the strength he could muster. The house thundered beneath them as a sepulchral chime granted life to the industrial underbelly of the mansion and for several moments thereafter as Lurch lumbered into the room.

“You rang?” the mammoth man drawled tentatively.

“Lurch, start the Packard, I’ve some business to attend to.” Gomez commanded. “Thing, I’d hate to disturb your game any more than I already have, but I’ll need an address on the Frump household rather quickly.”

“Immediately,” Lurch supplemented from afar.

“My mistake. Immediately, Thing. Thanks, old boy.” He watched with a strained smile as the hand crept agilely from the table and into the foyer.

“You can’t.” Fester remarked from his place, entirely as unpersuasive as he was wont to be. “You know you can’t.”

Gomez grinned.