The Astor Orphan

by Alexandra Aldrich

  Mom was a typical Polish wife in many respects. She’d been raised by a Russian mother who, as an infant, had escaped with her aunt from the Bolsheviks to Warsaw. I’d been told stories about how my mother’s mother would stay up the entire night to do the family’s laundry by hand, or how she would walk up their steep mountain road—about half a mile from the bus stop—carrying heavy groceries. Despite their poverty, Mom’s family had had meals on time and clean laundry, china and linen tablecloths for Sunday and holiday meals. In Mom’s childhood photos, she and her sister wore neatly ironed dresses and colorful ribbons tied around their freshly shampooed pigtails.

  It was Mom who cleaned the front rooms of the big house—particularly the front hall and the three flights of white steps—although, with time, she did this less and less. Hers was a war of one against the mess of generations.

  Like Grandma Claire’s, Mom’s upbringing had also instilled in her an understanding of the importance of money. She’d had jobs over the years—albeit jobs for which she’d been overqualified, with her degree in Russian and German philology from the University of Warsaw. She had picked strawberries, been a carpenter’s helper, made mosaics for a public park. Eventually, she’d gone back to school for graphic design and taken a job as a commercial artist.

  But in all other ways, Mom had left Poland behind. She now painted her nearly nonexistent eyebrows an electric blue and was very minimally interested in either propriety or family.

  “You’re a dirty swine!” Mom now kicked Dad’s foot in what I had learned to see as a normal expression of spousal affection.

  “Ow! Was that really necessary?” Dad laughed.

  “Take off this filthy shirt now!” Mom started ripping off Dad’s blue work shirt. Buttons went flying.

  My unconventional parents were so oddly matched that people could not imagine either of them with anybody else.

  I was enchanted by their story. When Dad spent time in Poland in his twenties, he rented a room from Mom’s aunt, “Ciocia Jadzia,” and took courses at the University of Warsaw. Mom also lived with her aunt and attended the university. I imagined my parents as young students, staying up late in Warsaw’s cafés and strolling through its shadowy streets, trying to steer clear of the secret police. Dad the handsome, Harvard-educated American aristocrat and Mom the meek, hopeful university student.

  After they’d married, Dad chose to return to Rokeby, his inheritance, hopeful that he could revive the place. He was soon consumed by the dream and entangled by the reality.

  Poland was a place of both physical and spiritual darkness. Mom was full of this darkness. I had it within me as well. I knew that one day I would have to go back to Poland—where Mom had taken me every other winter vacation until I was seven—to reconnect with the darkness that lived inside both of us.

  I used to dream of living there with Mom, in her family’s roughly stuccoed mountain house, under the protective eye of the sharp-peaked Carpathians. I believed that I would have thrived in a strict Communist system, where being poor was not seen as a mark of a weak character. School, I imagined, would be a place of hard work. The education was based on rote learning, which I loved because facts are never gray.

  None of this meant that I wanted to eat like a Polish peasant.

  “Is there anything besides venison stew?” I asked as I opened the fridge. Its rusting hinges creaked. It smelled of dead meat. On the first shelf were a pack of hot dogs, a quart of expired milk, a bottle of French’s mustard, and a jar of green, furry Ragu. “Can we go to the Tea Garden tonight?” I asked hopefully. A cheap Chinese restaurant called the Tea Garden was the only place we ever went out to eat.

  “I can’t. Tonight is the last showing of Fanny and Alexander.”

  The movies were Mom’s refuge from reality. Occasionally, the arty local theater was our mutual escape. I had received a broad education in foreign and independent film because Mom couldn’t afford a babysitter. She had taken me to see Nosferatu in black and white, Orpheus, Women in Love, and From Mao to Mozart.

  This last—a documentary about Isaac Stern’s visit to China to give master classes to conservatory students there—made me dream of having the discipline to practice my violin like the students in the film. They lived in cubicles and practiced five, eight, ten hours a day.

  “Can I come?”

  “No. I’m going with a friend who doesn’t like children.”

  Mom was most interested in me when I posed for her sketching sessions.

  I stood over the table looking at my dinner. I would gladly have eaten a plate of distinguishable food items neatly arranged—a portion of colorful vegetables, a slab of meat, some rice, like the meals at Grandma Claire’s house. I didn’t like amorphous brown stews. I decided not to eat.

  “I’m not hungry. No stew for me, thanks.”

  The phone began to ring, as it always did at mealtimes. In addition to his Rokeby groupies, Dad had an extensive network outside Rokeby in the local community. He was usually involved with several charitable missions at any given time. He had a number of immigrant friends whom he was helping obtain refugee status. He would take junk off people’s hands to add to his barnyard collection. Or he would offer the use of his backhoe or bulldozer and free labor in exchange for a couple of beers and some ice cream—keeping the barter system alive and well.

  Regular correspondents included “Frankie the Freeloader,” who used foster children to work his pig farm, and Irving Rothberg. Irving’s front lawn was littered with gravestones, as his business was carving messages and biographical information about the dead. Part of this business involved retrieving and transporting corpses and preparing them for burial, so we got to hear plenty of stories about him.

  Our telephone—black and square with a rotary dial—sat neglected on its haunches like a fat cat.

  “Are you going to answer it?” I asked Mom, who was closest to the phone.

  “No, I don’t want to,” she whined.

  We had a party line, shared with both Uncle Harry’s family and Grandma Claire, and anyone could listen in. Dad regularly joked that Mom had a fear of telephones, that she was afraid the phone would bite her. But Mom’s paranoia of people listening in probably had its source in Communist Poland, where even a harmless exchange over the phone could end in arrest by the secret police, imprisonment, and even disappearance.

  I finally answered it. It was one of Dad’s Book of the Month clubs. Dad would order from them heavy hardcover books, like encyclopedias and atlases, under the names of various Rokeby pets. Dad’s two favorites were “Ms. Mimi Katz”—named after my cat Mimi—and “Mr. Piesek Yaruzelski.” This latter subscriber was a bright yellow dog with pointy ears that Grandma had named Yellow Dog Dingo, but whom Dad called Piesek Yaruzelski—“little dog Yaruzelski”—after the last Communist leader of Poland, who imposed martial law in 1981.

  “Um . . . Ms. Katz is not here right now. She has gone on vacation,” I told the creditor, as Dad had instructed me to do whenever they would call.

  After I hung up, Dad and I had a good laugh, while Mom ranted.

  “You’re both criminals! I hope you end up in prison! Next time they call, I’m going to tell them the truth!”

  “Come to think of it, I believe I also got you by mail order. But they sent me the wrong sister!” Dad would often joke that Mom had been a mail-order bride, since they’d been married by proxy—a third party had stood in for Dad at the wedding in Poland—so that Mom could leave the country and arrive at Rokeby like a mail delivery.

  At that, Mom joined in the laughter. This was rare, as she generally disapproved of Dad and sided with the more powerful family members—his brother, sister-in-law, and mother—who collectively condemned him.

  With my parents, I was immersed in a theater of the absurd: the beautiful Polish woman with blue eyebrows and a truculent temper; the filthy gentleman farmer beloved by all, except his closest relatives, for his brilliant mind, generous spirit, and total disregard for public opinion
; and their serious young daughter, who mostly acted the part of the parent.

  As if on cue, I now walked over to the cabinet above the sink and snatched a pair of nail clippers, then joined Dad at the far end of the table.

  “Dad, give me a foot.”

  Dad absently lifted a leg up. I placed his foot in my lap and began to remove his shoe and sock. He tried to withdraw it. “Now, wait a minute. What are you planning to do with those clippers?”

  “Just the usual pedicure. Hold still.”

  His toenails were thick and yellow like seashells, each with a dense layer of dirt and grease underneath. After clipping the end of each nail, I also dug under it with the metal file and scraped out the black dirt. Dad winced all the while.

  “Other foot, please.”

  “No, no. We can do the other foot some other time.”

  “No. Now, Dad!”

  Someone had to take care of him. Poor Dad sacrificed everything for Rokeby’s care and had no time to take care of himself or his family. His gray, rotting teeth, his filthy clothes and skin, his gnarled hair, and the black dirt and oil under his fingernails all cried for my attention.

  While I was happy to play the parent, I sometimes fantasized about having overbearing Chinese parents who would help me become as accomplished as the violinists in the Isaac Stern documentary—parents who would furiously scribble notes during my violin lessons and later review them while they supervised my practicing.

  As I was finishing up Dad’s pedicure, I noticed a pair of shining eyes glaring at me from the gloom beyond the kitchen doorway. It was Aunt Olivia, fixing me with her mad rhinoceros look, her nostrils flared and her eyes fierce.

  Uncle Harry was Aunt Olivia’s second husband. From her first marriage, she had a teenage son and daughter who were now both away at school.

  She’d caught me off guard, amid the mess, with Dad’s filthy bare foot in my lap, the cluttered table, the unmatched soup bowls and spoons, the rusty fridge, the dead flies. With her in the room, it all felt shamefully squalid.

  “I’d like to speak with Alexandra for a second.” Aunt Olivia motioned with her index finger for me to follow her through the pantry and up the back stairs toward her part of the house. I felt light, as if my feet weren’t touching the floor and my limbs might detach from my body. Aunt Olivia, an accomplished actress and singer, strutted dramatically.

  “We can have our little conference in the middle room. Now, come in, and close the door behind you,” she ordered.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE CONFERENCE

  Courtesy of Charles Tanguy

  Aunt Olivia summoned me to the middle room, so called because it was sandwiched between the back and front parts of the house. In the old days, food would be transported from the back kitchen, by way of the dumbwaiter located in the middle room, down half a floor to the old pantry—currently our kitchen—and then out through the swinging door into the dining room. Now the middle room served as the living room in Aunt Olivia and Uncle Harry’s part of the house.

  Aunt Olivia’s figure towered over me like an oversized A, feet planted and hands on hips.

  “Well?” Aunt Olivia’s nostrils now flared.

  I just waited for her to talk. I had nothing to confess.

  “I want you to look into my eyes when I speak to you.” I tried, but her dark eyes, at times faraway, were now too severe. So I looked at her neck instead. “Now, let’s get something very clear.” My eyes had already traveled back to the floor. “You are not to call my daughter fat! Ever!” She clenched her square jaw. “Do you understand? Do you think that you can bully my children?” Like a lioness, she never hesitated when it came to defending her young.

  She didn’t understand that I was only trying to do what was best for her daughters. As my father did with his protégés, I hoped to mentor and mold my cousins into accomplished and beautiful young women. How could Aunt Olivia feel the need to protect her girls from me when it was I who was protecting them from failure and disappointment?

  “You can only play with my daughters if you agree to treat them nicely. No soldiering them around like they’re in some kind of military camp. Got it?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” I had no voice with her. All my adult confidence and authority had vanished.

  “All right, I’m finished,” Aunt Olivia concluded, as if she had just given me a perfunctory beating. “You may leave now.”

  I just kept looking at the floor, my head bowed.

  “Are you listening?”

  I looked up to see her thin nostrils still flared.

  I wished I could ignore things. If I told Mom that a kid was mean to me at school, she would say, “Just ignore them!” But I couldn’t. Every critical word pierced me to the quick, an attack on the perfection I worked so hard to cultivate.

  “But first, give me a hug.” Like a stick, I inched toward her, and she squeezed me for a second. “I really do love you, you know,” she said. My eyes were on the doorknob. “You can come into my kitchen now, if you want.”

  I visited her kitchen often, though it made me uncomfortable. These visits gave me a chance to take note of how Mom’s kitchen might be improved if we ever got hold of some money. As Aunt Olivia was also a gourmet cook, I frequently showed up at mealtimes.

  As we walked through the bright kitchen’s double doors, the smell of cloves and lilacs wafted toward us. The kitchen jutted out the north end of the house, with walls exposed to the east and west. A row of three curtained windows stretched along each of these walls. Leafy green plants hung from ceiling hooks. The hardwood floor had recently been revarnished, and the walls and ceiling were clean, white, and free of cobwebs. On the stove next to the welcoming fireplace sat a gleaming teakettle. The modern refrigerator was covered with reminders, phone numbers, grocery lists, all held up by funny, colorful magnets. Unlike our cabinets, which were stacked with unmatched hand-me-down dishes and glasses, Aunt Olivia’s were stacked with matching sets of both. My favorite was a set of blue glasses the color of dusk in winter, what I imagined to be the hue of loneliness. It was here, in this pleasant, well-lit corner of the house, that I felt my position as the poor cousin, poised on the margins of their home life, most acutely.

  Maggie and Diana, now back in their jeans, were eating chocolate pudding. They were seated at a slick white linoleum table, uncluttered except by glass bottles of herbs and a crystal vase of lavender lilacs. The girls’ chins barely reached the table’s surface, despite the fact that they were sitting on Manhattan phone books. I slipped into a chair next to Maggie. “Do you want to go outside and play?” I whispered, keeping my eyes on Aunt Olivia.

  “No!” Maggie, imperious, knew she was in control as long as her mother was there.

  “Can I have a tiny taste of your pudding?”

  “Mo-o-om . . . can Alexandra have a pudding?”

  “Ughhh!” she moaned. “Doesn’t she have her own food?” Aunt Olivia’s dark bun had partially unraveled into wisps around her face. She slapped a pudding down in front of me. “There you are,” she said with a sigh.

  “Can I take a spoon?” I whispered to Maggie.

  “Mo-o-om! Can Alexandra have a spoon?”

  “What’s the matter with her voice today?” Aunt Olivia said mockingly. “The cat got her tongue?” Maggie giggled. “She can take one herself.” Aunt Olivia looked at Maggie as she said this, then giggled too, like a schoolgirl sharing a mean little secret.

  I wrestled open the sticky, heavy drawer in the table and picked out a spoon, then swallowed a spoonful of pudding with a hard gulp.

  Little blond Diana, oblivious and eager to please, licked her lips happily and pushed the empty plastic cup toward her mother. “More!” She smiled by squeezing her lips together, as if she had been instructed to smile this way.

  “Oh, aren’t you a regular little piglet!” Being called a piglet was a compliment coming from Aunt Olivia, who adored pigs—clean, theoretical pigs, that is. She had pink pig magnets on her fridge; p
ink pig oven mitts; and pigs on coffee mugs, notepads, key chains. She even claimed Miss Piggy as a favorite children’s show character.

  While Aunt Olivia’s attention was still on Diana, I took the opportunity to slip out.

  DESPERATE TO RETURN to my own part of the house, I rushed back through the middle room. As I climbed the back staircase, my hand slid along the rickety banister. The peeling plaster ceiling loomed overhead like an angry sky. Mounted under the north wall’s windows were several sets of horns from Uncle Willie Chanler’s hunting expeditions in East Africa. Draped over the horns were cobwebs too high to brush away.

  At the top of the back staircase, which was still part of Aunt Olivia and Uncle Harry’s territory, I passed through a double doorway. Beyond was a small, shadowy hall—a crevice of the house located so deep within its interior that it rarely got enough light to see by—and a staircase that led up to the third-floor storerooms and our apartment. This dark, dusty hallway, cluttered with broken odds and ends, was the point where Rokeby’s three worlds converged: the lonely squalor of the third floor, the elegant formality of the front rooms, and the smug coziness of Aunt Olivia’s domain.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A METICULOUS RECORD

  Courtesy of Ania Aldrich

  The world of the third floor, my floor, began in earnest at the foot of a narrow staircase. Its contrast with the rest of the house was so great that I felt ashamed each time I climbed these stairs.

  The glare of the bare bulb overhead highlighted the peeling white paint on the steps. The pink wall and white banister had been seasoned over the years by the grime of passing hands.

  At the top of the stairs, standing at the north end of the central light well, I could discern Uncle Harry through the dusty interior windows. He stood in an alcove among Great-Grandma Margaret’s old steamer trunks. Although he lovingly refolded the gowns Maggie and Diana had been playing in, he wore an agitated expression, clearly distressed that the dresses had been disturbed.