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Mr. Addams's Family

The Story of the Real Morticia and Gomez

By Aliza DubePublished 5 years ago 5 min read
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In the beginning, there was the woman. Not just any woman, that woman. That woman standing with her hip held akimbo in the parlor of her decaying Victorian mansion. A mask of politeness hung about her face, trying to urge a vacuum cleaner salesman to turn on his heels and retreat back past her front door. A “ruined beauty,” Charlie would call her. The woman with a dress as black as night that hugged every curve of her skeletal figure before pooling down at the floor, reaching like the tentacles of something monstrous. The woman with blood red nails, long enough to pluck your eyeballs from your very skull if she had a mind to. That woman with skin as pale as a tomb. In the beginning, she was standing there, staring up from the page at him, smirking, as though she knew something he never would.

New Yorker cartoonist, Charlie Addams, had rubbed his eyes, startled by what had bled from his pencil tip. Charlie was used to drawing impossibilities. Once had drawn two ski tracks diverting around a tree, his absurdities were being discussed in psychology classes nationwide while he sat back, just trying to be funny. But this was the most impossible thing he had ever managed to sketch, his wife and his torment: Bobby Addams.

People weren’t really sure what to call the woman at first; Victorian lady, creepy woman, a demon or ghost of someone long forgotten. Someone at the magazine finally settled on Morticia, as in mortician. As in cold as the grave. As in, where all good things go to die. Charlie didn’t quite think that suited Bobby at all. Not a bit.

Bobby resembled Morticia more than Charlie would’ve ever liked to admit. She had the same raven hair that cascaded down like the river Styx to the small of her back. She favored wearing black, joking that more often than not, she was already dressed for Charlie’s funeral. Her skin was a shade of pale that reminded Charlie of peppermint candies handed out to children at Christmas time; delicious, tooth decaying and all too likely to melt in his mouth. There was just one major difference between the two women. Bobby wasn’t cold, if only she were. Where Morticia only interested herself with serving her dark lord, Bobby wanted something more. Bobby wanted a baby. Charlie would die for this woman, would kill for this woman, he would give her anything she ever asked of him. But he was not about to give her this.

Charlie once told an interviewer that he was “his own child,” leaving little wiggle room for any actual progeny. He drove cars, fast and racing. Charlie was only happy when he could heart his heart beating like the ocean current against his chest, when death was so close that it whispered sweet lullabies in his ear. He held picnics in graveyards, nibbled at sandwiches beside the stone names of people he would never know, made small talk over their bones. He kept a human femur, bejeweled and preserved on his desk for inspiration. Irreverence was what people called it, laughing in the face of anything that dare take itself seriously. Irresponsibility was what Bobby called it. Charlie would never be the man that she had thought she had married. He knew this, even if she hadn’t yet realized. The inevitability of their separation was closing in on him like a the mouth of a noose each day. His love life had always and would always be a half hung jury.

What Charlie could not make up for in life, he tried to in his comics. He gave Morticia a companion, a stout, cigar smoking, mustachioed gremlin of a man named Gomez, who if you tilted your head at just the right angle, looked all too much like Charlie himself. Gomez and Morticia were a knife blade kind of romance. Sharp and pulsing. Charlie would draw Morticia and Gomez, seated on a decrepit lounge, a fire spitting at them from the mantel, cathedral ceilings arching up over their skulls heavy with familiar ghosts. “Aren’t you so very unhappy, darling?” Gomez would coo to Morticia and she’d snuggle closer into his arms. Charlie wanted a love like that, simple. He wanted that for Bobby. But real life wasn’t drawn that way.

Bobby called it quits. Charlie was never really surprised. But her ghost stuck around for a bit, how could it not? The cartoons that featured her, or a monster like her, had become a huge hit. People were begging to use his work for their Christmas cards for god's sake. Morticia’s face leered from every holiday greeting, as if it were Charlie himself and not the carolers below her feet that she intended to dump a cauldron of boiling oil on. How can you let someone go when they’ve become your life’s work? Charlie didn’t rightly know.

So he began drawing children to fill that spacious Victorian manor. A girl with two snake long obsidian braids that looked all too much like her mother. A solemn, lost little girl with no real direction. He named her after the worst day of the week; Wednesday. And a boy, too. A squat, joweled little man who looked more like an ugly dog than an actual child; Pugsley. Morticia would survey their antics, the care they took in using their model guillotine to slice the heads off Barbie dolls. She would smile, soft and slow. Charlie wondered if Bobby would ever smile like that, but not for him. No, not ever for him ever again.

Looking back, it would be important to note that Charlie never once called them a family. They were simply a collection of weirdos who just happened to live under the same roof—that was as much as he would admit to the press. But the world wouldn’t let it rest. After all, this was the only real family Mr. Addams would ever have. Was it not fitting to call it by its name? Charlie had always made a habit of drawing impossibilities; two ski tracks wrapping their way around a tree. Charlie knew then, in the old days at the New Yorker, that it was impossible to travel both paths at once. You could not travel two different ways around the same obstacle and survive. Charlie drew impossibilities, and so he made his fame drawing the path he had not dared to travel by.

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About the Creator

Aliza Dube

I am a recent graduate of the BFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Maine at Farmington. I am currently living with my boyfriend and cat in Kansas, cause why not? I am currently seeking publication for a memoir manuscript.

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