by Sue Miller
It was overcast and silent Thanksgiving morning as we drove out of Cambridge. There wasn’t much traffic—most people had gone where they were going the night before—and once we got out of the city, the landscape seemed purified by the sudden absence of leaves. Only a week or so earlier they had still been clinging to the trees in a garish, desperate last display. As we drove south through the even gray day, I talked intermittently to Molly about the old grandparents she was about to meet, much older even than my parents or her father’s. “Do they like girls like me?” she asked, and I assured her they did before it occurred to me, and was too late to ask—she’d moved on to something else—what she meant by that.
There was a steep circular drive up to the house. At the top, the frame structure loomed dark and oppressive. It was painted deep green with yellowish shutters. Four or five other cars were parked at the edge of the drive near the front steps, indicating the presence of other cousins or aunts or uncles, including, I was sure, Uncle Orrie, who lived near my grandparents and, in the family words, “looked after them.”
As soon as the front door opened and the familiar smells enveloped us—the elaborate cooking odors, lemon furniture polish, old leather books, dampness, odors which were as familiar to me, I discovered, as my heartbeat, my breathing—I felt it was a mistake to have come. In spite of myself, I cared too much about this world. And I’d forgotten my grandmother, as it was too easy to do. She shuffled slowly forward to embrace me, her face revealing nothing. She murmured something I couldn’t make out over my grandfather’s louder greeting, my cousins’ hellos. And then she was kissing Molly. The small hands reached up to touch the old woman’s lined face as it descended towards her, and my grandmother stayed bent down an extra moment or two, murmuring, talking, while I was distracted by the business of shedding my coat, greeting and being introduced to those I knew and didn’t know. Then my grandmother disappeared, back to the kitchen. I’d had no sign, really, whether she’d registered me at all. And through the rest of the morning and early afternoon, she hovered in the background, vanishing frequently, often taking Molly with her for short periods. Sometimes I would look at her as she moved around slowly, but then feel my eyes skittering away, the way they might have from a scar or a missing limb. When our eyes did meet, there was no answering spark of life behind the thick glasses, no real acknowledgment of me. I hadn’t seen her in two and a half years, not since Molly was a baby, and I wondered whether in that time she’d begun to let go of her world, her connection with people. Did she know, even, who I was? Bunny’s girl, I wanted to say, though it was the very thing I’d come to her house to deny.
Once, I made a motion to follow her out to the kitchen, but my grandfather checked me. “Oh, stay here, Anna,” he said. “My darling has all the help she can use out there, and we haven’t seen you in too long for you to hide your light under that bushel.”
And so I stayed, a part of his captive audience. The living room was cavernous and dark. There was an enormous fireplace at one end under a stone mantel. A fire blazed in it throughout the day, but it didn’t warm the room perceptibly. The huge windows made that virtually impossible. One after another they paraded around two long walls of the room, framed by darkly carved wood. Threadbare Oriental rugs covered the floor, and the furniture was old and comfortable.
The group in the living room shifted some over the first hours I was there. There were new arrivals; the younger cousins and their friends went outside for a while to play football; various family members were successful in extracting themselves and going to help Grandmother. At different times I talked to my Uncle Orrie and his wife Cass, my cousin Bob and his wife Marie, Garrett and Catherine, and a much younger cousin, Michael, his girlfriend, and some members of a rock band he played in. My grandfather ran the conversation. The hostages were still being held in Iran, and he seemed personally offended by it. Something should have been done the minute they invaded our foreign space, he said. They had committed no less than an act of war, and we should have responded immediately. I recognized it as a set piece, like so many I’d heard throughout my childhood; but Michael got into a long argument with him. Uncle Orrie would gently try to divert them both. But Michael seemed to be enjoying goading the old man, and my grandfather was too committed to be distracted. Around the edges of this conversation, the usual family information, the real substance of the gathering, was being exchanged: who was pregnant, who was planning on getting married, who was Phi Beta Kappa, or had had stitches out or had ended an engagement.
No one asked me about the divorce, and I volunteered nothing. At the point when my grandfather seemed most lost in his argument, as intent as a Jehovah’s Witness at the door about pursuing his own line of thinking (“Young man, do you understand what it means to have an embassy in another country? Do you understand the sort of relationship that implies with another government? That was the equivalent of U.S. soil, it is as though they’d invaded a town on the U.S. mainland. . . .”) I made my exit, crossed the enormous front hall, and circled back through the pantry to the kitchen. Molly was there, standing at the kitchen table with an apron on, stirring powdered chocolate into a glass of milk. Drops of the grayish liquid, granules of the chocolate were scattered across the tabletop. Orrie’s wife, Cass, smaller and homelier than her sisters-in-law, was at the stove making gravy, and Garrett was gathering implements to set the table. I kissed Molly and moved to help Garrett. My grandmother and Marie were filling serving dishes.
There was a white cloth on the table. A floral arrangement sat in the center, and around it were scattered salt and pepper shakers, serving pieces, plates of butter and cranberry sauce and pickles and celery and olives. Cream-colored china plates and heavy white napkins had been set at each place. Garrett and I arranged the silverware around them. Then he began to push in the extra chairs. There was a wooden high chair for Molly, and he set it in the middle of one long side of the table. My grandmother came to the kitchen door to check on us. He turned to her. “Does this meet with your approval, Gram, my sweet?” he asked. The younger cousins, particularly the boys, spoke to her with an easy, familiar affection that made me slightly nervous. She was silent for a moment while we both looked expectantly at her. Her thin hair was frizzed around her head, and the mortal curve of her skull gleamed dully beneath it. She looked at me quickly, then away.
“If Anna doesn’t mind,” she said, “I’ll have the baby up by my place.”
Instantly I remembered how, in all the long summers I’d spent with my grandparents in Maine, she’d always surrounded herself with the babies, the littlest of the family. At meals, she’d be cutting meat, spooning cereal for two or three of her youngest grandchildren; and while all the other cousins and aunts and uncles talked volubly, garrulously, Gram’s sentences were three or four words long. If you leaned closely you could hear her gentle voice as she spoke softly to Agatha or Freddie or Garrett. “More?” she’d ask. “More what? Can you say it? Cookie? Cookie! More cookie! Good for you!” Whatever else shaped us as a family, I think we all must have been marked by the diminishment of love with time and age because of that pure lost bond we had all shared with Gram. And I felt now, as I said, oh no, it was fine with me for Molly to sit by her, the sense we sometimes have as adults of living things again through our children, of restoring to ourselves those things we’ve lost, of giving ourselves those things we never had. “I’m sure she’d love it,” I said, and meant it.
My grandfather carved. It was his moment as the official center of attention, and he prolonged it. He had a whetstone next to his place, and he took several minutes before he began, ceremonially whisking the long knife back and forth across it. I thought of all the families across the United States listening to the dull whirr of electric carvers, and yearned for a Thanksgiving like theirs, unweighted by personality. My grandfather was wearing a three-piece, herringbone tweed suit with a gold watch chain draped across his belly. When he leaned forward to attack the turkey, the chain curved away from
his body and clicked against his water glass. He stopped for a moment and removed the watch and chain from his pocket and set it on the table.
He always dressed like old money, although the chances were the watch and chain were purchased at an antique store or perhaps made especially for him. At any rate, they were hardly the old family pieces they looked like. His parents had worked in a textile mill when they’d first come to this country, and then his father had a small coal and ice business in Boston. My grandfather was wealthy, had been wealthy for most of his adult life; but his carriage, his clothing, his manner of speaking, all were intended to suggest a wealth which reached back deep into the nineteenth century, which had its root perhaps in oil or railroads or the invention of some industrial process, not in his own skill as an inventor and hustler, which was the case.
Oddly, it was my grandmother, still wearing a voluminous flowered apron as she served vegetables at the foot of the table, her head tilted up at an awkward supplicatory angle to see the creamed onions, the mashed potatoes, in front of her through the lower lens of her bifocals, who came from old money. But she had long ago passed down to her daughters—my mother and her sisters—the jewelry, the household treasures from her family, which would have publicly announced that connection. The garish engagement ring, which, along with her wedding band, was the only jewelry she still wore, was, of course, a gift from a younger, less confident version of my grandfather, his guess as to what elegance might be.
She didn’t speak much of her family, but her sisters had often visited us in the summers at camp. I’d heard one of them suggest once that it was my grandfather who was to blame for her servantless imprisonment with all those mouths to feed. My instant recognition of this as the grossest misconception possible of my grandparents’ relations marked it as one of the few times I had a sense at all of what their relations might be, of the choices she had exercised in marrying him, an immigrant nobody, and was still exercising in somehow silently insisting on her own austere version of the proper attitude towards her wealth. She had repudiated a whole way of life in marrying him; and then, I think, found herself locked in an endless struggle with him, who had at least in part been trying to embrace that life in marrying her. And so there were these peculiar inconsistencies in their use and display of money. But more and more, now that they were old, he seemed like the aging scion of a great and powerful family, and she like a dowdy country cousin who couldn’t stop helping out in the kitchen.
The plates were passed up and down the table, and we began to eat. Garrett, sitting next to me, was talking about film school and I was trying to avoid Molly’s glance. She had looked scared when she first sat down, miles away from me across a sea of damask and silver and china, and I thought a sympathetic glance from me might be enough to send her into a full-scale rebellion against all that was being asked of her. For my own sake more than hers, I wanted her to enjoy being next to my grandmother, and so I hid my head behind Garrett’s. I drank my wine and stared intently into his eyes as I asked him questions about his projected career.
At the head of the table, my grandfather talked through the first course with the younger cousins placed all around him. His mild condescending voice dominated, but they all seemed to respond politely enough. When I had finished eating, I sat back and listened to him. He was at that point arguing with Michael’s girlfriend, Ivy. She was defending the lyrics to rock music as her generation’s poetry. Suddenly my grandfather began to recite “Crossing the Bar.” Conversation stopped momentarily as everyone at our end of the table turned to listen. I leaned forward and saw my grandmother’s head bent towards Molly, Molly’s face lifted and open with expectation as she took in whatever Gram was telling her privately.
In the break between courses, all the younger people stood and cleared the table. We could hear them in the kitchen, released from the politeness of the dining room, laughing over the clatter of dishes. Molly climbed down from her highchair and sat in my lap for a while, but when Michael and his friends came back from the kitchen carrying four kinds of pie and big silver bowls of whipped cream and ice cream she wanted to go back and sit by her great-grandmother again. She slid off my lap without looking back at me. When I looked at her after a few minutes, I saw that the entire plate in front of her was covered with pillowy white—she didn’t like pie—and my grandmother was watching her lift a gooey spoonful into her mouth.
Suddenly, someone across the table from me, Michael, asked me what I was doing now. The now implied that he knew all about the divorce—I didn’t need to go into that—so I began to talk about a part-time job I’d just gotten in the clinical psychology department at B.U., testing rats for memory retention. I was doing a comic turn on it, describing it more as an animal training job, which it in fact also was, than an experimental one. It seemed to me the first moment my dubious status in the family might be scrutinized. I’d lost track of how much wine I’d drunk; my voice was a little too loud. I tried to control it.
Suddenly my grandfather interrupted me.
“Of course,” he said to the table at large, “Anna is really a pianist.”
There was a little silence. My grandfather went on eating, as though he didn’t anticipate any argument, any response to his assertion. I smiled. I tried on his smile, a gracious, condescending one. “Well, I’ve never made any money at that, Grandfather. I thought we were talking here of how I made my living.”
He looked at me as he chewed. Then slowly he drank some coffee. Only after he carefully set the cup back in its saucer did he respond.
“You make your living at least in part from teaching the piano, isn’t that so?”
“Yes,” I answered. I felt a sheepish blush rising.
“In that sense, anyway, surely you can call yourself a pianist,” he said. He looked around our end of the table with his smile, as though to get all those listening to agree that I was being silly, perverse, cute.
“Perhaps I could,” I said, my voice audibly edgy. “Though I think piano teacher would be more accurate then.” He took a breath, as though to answer me, and I hurtled ahead. “But rat trainer is at least a substantial part of it right now too.”
“Anna, Anna,” he said, shaking his head. “Why this nostalgie de la boue? It’s tiresome in a woman your age.” And he turned away and began to talk to Ivy again. I looked around me quickly. Everyone was engaged with eating or talking. No one seemed to have noticed or cared about the exchange. I was breathless, a little stunned, but I tried to cover for it. I focused my energies on Garrett again—he must have thought by now that I was quite in love with him—and chatted for a while to him and Michael about background music in films. After the meal, I went into the kitchen to help clean up. I stood at the sink, rinsing plates and scraping food into the disposal. Molly had pushed her stool over next to me, and was running her finger over the whipped cream left on the dessert plates. My grandfather came in. He spoke to several different people, then came to where I stood and asked me if he could talk to me in his study for a minute. I nodded, and after I’d finished what I was doing, followed him out of the kitchen.
His study was a large, square room tucked under the stairs. On their slanted underside, a carved walnut panel angled into the room, and his desk sat under this panel, its own walnut gleaming darkly. It faced towards a picture window. Outside, the ground fell steeply away from the house. The slate of a neighbor’s roof was just visible below, then woods. He was sitting behind the desk when I entered. He gestured to the chair opposite it, but I shook my head and continued to stand. He turned away for a moment. Then, without preamble, he said, “Your grandmother and I are worried about Molly.” His face was utterly grave, gave no hint of a smile.
“You don’t need to worry about her,” I said. “I can take care of Molly.” I thought of her, suddenly, lying scratched and dirty on the back seat of the open car.
“Please,” he said, raising a hand. “I’m not trying to discuss whether or not you can take care of her. In some sen
se, finally, that issue lies between you and Molly.”
I felt the anger rise in me. Yet what was not true about what he was saying? I turned away and began to examine a collection of paperweights on the shelves along one wall. Once, I remembered, Babe and a few of us cousins had stolen several of these during a holiday visit, and put them in the basement near the back of the coal bin. The idea, as I recalled it, was that we would return them in a day or two. We simply wanted to see whether he’d notice they were gone. But what were we trying to get at with the theft? Were we curious about the meaning of material possessions to him? Were we just being bad? I couldn’t remember. The next day at breakfast he had announced to the group that “certain things” were missing from his study. He had leaned forward then, and pierced the yolk of his poached egg. We all breathlessly watched the slow seep of intense yellow over his toast, onto his white plate.
“Now,” he had said, “as soon as all of you have finished eating, I want you to disappear from my sight”—he said it genially enough, but it had the power of an imprecation for us—“and if those paperweights are not in my study by the time I have finished eating, I shall begin to think of what an appropriate punishment might be.”