“Ugh, dear,” Grandma Claire murmured. Her skirt and slip made a rustling sound as she slid down onto the prayer bench. She rested her forehead in her skeletal hand. I was touched by the way she communed with God on her knees, while the rest of the congregation was somewhere else in the prayer service. I assumed she was apologizing, as she tended to blame herself for the family’s problems.
I usually communicated with God in writing—anxious pleas in my journals for a better life, for a clean and orderly home, for acknowledgment from the people around me. I believed that God watched my every move and noted my hard work.
I was not at all satisfied with Christianity itself, however, and only really came to church for the social benefits. I felt that religion should be more than learning campy songs in Sunday school and weekly attendance at church. I wanted to be commanded in much more certain terms.
During Communion, Grandma Claire always remained in her seat, because alcohol was used—even though the minister said it was blood. Grandma preferred to drink at home, alone in her bathroom, from green, fish-shaped bottles.
After the service, Grandma Claire and I walked up the hill to the cemetery behind the church, to visit her dead husband, Grandpa Dickie. The sun brought droplets of sweat to Grandma’s face as she drifted off into the past in front of the simple gray slab, speaking as if she were making a confession to me.
“I took the kids away from Dickie and Rokeby when his drinking had become impossible,” she said as she cast her eyes downward apologetically, “and my mother-in-law made it quite clear that Rokeby was her property. All we had there was the tower bedroom. . . . So I decided to stay in New York with the children. Liz went to Chapin, and Harry to Buckley. Your father, of course, was a problem child. Sending him off to boarding school seemed like the right thing to do at the time. . . . We’d visit Rokeby in summers, and sometimes for holidays, of course. . . .” I wondered if she regretted taking the children away from their father, who had lived with his mother at Rokeby for the final decade of his life.
Then Grandma Claire remembered herself and patted the stone. “Everybody loved your grandpa.”
I prayed silently that Grandma Claire would not die any time soon. She was the person who paid for and drove me to my violin lessons, bought my school supplies and clothes, and had shelves stocked with food when our own supplies were depleted. Also, from time to time, she would mention the possibility of sending me to board with our cousin Lilly on the Upper East Side so that I might attend Chapin, her alma mater. I clung to Grandma Claire as if to a life raft that both kept me afloat in the present and would steer me out of Rokeby in the future.
BACK AT ROKEBY after the service, the lemon-colored Plymouth sailed on past Grandma Claire’s house, past the redbrick coach house, and pulled up alongside the grassy triangle in the center of the barnyard.
Grandma Claire slowed the car as she scanned the barnyard with her uncanny vision for all things Dad. Through the car’s open windows, we could hear the roar of his backhoe from down the hill, by the lower barn.
“Now what’s that father of yours up to?”
Grandma Claire parked and began making her way down the hill toward him. I followed her.
Dad was digging a trench.
The backhoe seat had been twisted to face the rear of the machine. Dad’s hands were on the levers. The backhoe’s feet were planted on the ground to each side, to steady the center while the hoe—like a giant squid arm—flailed out and around to the side of the trench. Then its hand opened and dumped more soil onto a pile at the edge of the gaping hole it had created.
Grandma Claire was waving her arms, signaling for Dad to shut off the engine. He did, then remained in the backhoe seat for the anticipated scolding.
“Now, Teddy! I don’t want that French creature anywhere near this property or this family! Do you understand, Teddy? You have a wife and child, for goodness’ sake!”
“I understand,” Dad responded automatically.
“And dinner tonight is at my house, at seven.” Grandma Claire’s resentments never interfered with her hospitality.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE OUTLAW
Courtesy of Charles Tanguy
Late that afternoon, I was alone in our kitchen when Dad entered with a load of TV dinners—rejects from the local pie factory. Dad had made friends with the owner of the factory and would sometimes get the dented TV dinners, as well as the leftover pie dough. He used the latter to feed his giant pig, Egbert.
On his heels was the French woman Grandma had assaulted on our way to church. Now she loped along, glancing over her shoulder as if pursued.
“Brought you a surprise!” Dad said ambiguously as he piled the TV dinners on the table and ushered in this latest stranger.
I marveled at the pile of aluminum trays: Instant dinner! A miraculous invention!
Without another word, Dad picked up the phone and made a call, leaving the introductions to me and the French woman.
“Yeah, Rick! I got those two-by-fours you wanted. They’re in the barnyard. . . . What’s new with the cleanup down at the tracks?” A freight train had jumped the tracks, and various local residents had been scavenging the spilled contents.
“You must be Alexandra!” the woman said to me in a seductive French accent. “I’ve heard so much about you! I’m Giselle.” Her eyes darted around as she spoke.
I was confused. Grandma Claire’s reaction to Giselle earlier that day made me suspicious, as did Giselle’s furtive manner. It was clear even to me that she was not a legitimate family friend, or even a mutual friend of my parents. On the other hand, she was rather too fashionably dressed to be one of Dad’s usual “riffraff”—as Grandma Claire called his protégés. She wore a brown leather jacket, cracked with age, and Levi’s. Even if she had been the usual type, I was well aware that both Grandma and Uncle Harry tended to overreact to Dad’s friends. Dad referred to his mother and brother as the “fun police,” claiming that the only reason the family kept such hard, lumpy mattresses in the guest rooms was to discourage guests from staying.
So in my confusion I assumed no attitude at all toward Giselle, neither respectful nor hostile—just blank.
However, the moment I let her take my hand in hers—her gold wrist bangles jingling—and cajole a disinterested smile out of me, I regretted that I hadn’t decisively discouraged her with a scowl. At ease now that she felt she’d won me over, Giselle took a seat at our kitchen table and began running her hand through her attractively disheveled hair.
Fighting a sense that I’d betrayed Mom and hoping to get Giselle out of her kitchen, I turned to Dad.
“Hey, thanks for the TV dinners, but we still need to go food shopping. The fridge is empty.”
“Just a minute . . . Let me see.” Dad dug into his shirt pocket and pulled out a wad of folded and soiled papers, mostly to-do lists written on the backs of bills. He rubbed them between the greasy thumb and forefinger of one hand to separate them, then tossed the papers onto the table. “See what you can find there.”
I saw a green edge sticking out from the middle of the pile, but it turned out to be only a ten-dollar bill. I knew we’d be paying a visit to Yishmael at the Mobil station.
Dad and I were headed to the cab of his green Chevy when Giselle shot past me like a small child who wanted the best seat. She wedged herself behind the stick shift, among old newspapers, bottles of motor oil and antifreeze, a half-eaten sandwich, and empty soda cans, and nestled next to Dad, who had just gotten in on the other side.
I sat in the cab, squeezed up against Giselle, embarrassed. I’d never seen Dad spend time with a woman in this way. Neither she nor Dad had offered me any explanation of who she was. Neither acted as though it was unusual for a complete stranger to go grocery shopping with us.
Giselle aside, it was a familiar ritual: Dad would brave the county road, tempting fate with his expired inspection sticker, broken taillight, and cracked windshield, to drive to Yishmael’s Mobil statio
n so we could borrow money for groceries.
When I was little, I would stick my head out the cab window and let the wind slap my face and suck my long, flapping hair back as Dad raced along this strip of highway, usually with an open beer bottle between his knees, just under the sight line of any passing cops.
We found Yishmael in his office.
“Ooooohhh . . .” He laughed, delighted to see us, his smile revealing his silver front teeth. He got up, making a hand sandwich with Dad’s right hand between his two. Then he shook my hand, his skin rough and dry, stretchy and very dark.
“Yes! Young daughter!” His r’s rolled in his thick Turkish accent. “So pretty now! How old?”
“Ten.”
Yishmael suddenly raised his eyebrows in bemusement as he noticed Giselle standing outside by the truck. She stood with her hands in her pockets, looking at her feet. She kicked at broken pieces of asphalt, her hair around her face as though she were the bored, restless child waiting for Dad.
I quickly turned my attention back to Yishmael and smiled politely, hoping to expedite the formalities. Yishmael knew why we were here. Yet, when one was coming to ask for a loan, when one had not paid one’s previous loans, perhaps ever, one had to discuss whatever one’s creditor wished to discuss.
“How is wife?”
“Oh, having a bad day, I would say. Wouldn’t you say so, Alexandra?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Still doing the, what you call . . .” Yishmael made knitting motions with his hands.
“Knitting? She doesn’t knit, does she?”
“He means weaving, Dad.”
“Actually, you’re asking the wrong person. I don’t keep track of what she does. I can’t be around her for more than a few minutes before she goes on the offensive.”
I tried to catch Dad’s eye and give him a significant look, but he eluded me.
“Well, we’ve got to move on. Hey, Yishmael, do you think I could borrow another fifty? The kid needs to eat again.”
“How much? Fifty? Sure.”
“Just be sure to note it down.” Dad made it sound as if he were serious about paying it back.
“Yeah, yeah, it’s all in the book.”
Dad and Giselle dropped me off at the A & P, with my calculator and my shopping list: Lender’s onion bagels, whipped cream cheese, eggs, frozen orange juice concentrate, hamburger meat, spaghetti, Lipton chicken noodle soup packs, milk, twenty Fancy Feast cat food cans, a large bag of generic dried cat food, and a pair of No Nonsense socks. To me, having clean white socks was a necessity, even though they cost four dollars out of my sixty.
I found it comforting to push a shopping cart up and down aisles full of food. Muzak was playing in the background, and the men who stocked the shelves always seemed to be whistling.
Yet I felt envious of the women who could afford to fill their carts to overflowing. The items I could buy with sixty dollars just barely covered the bottom of my wagon. And it was always nerve-racking to stand by as the cashier rang up my items. I made sure no one I knew was nearby, in case I ran over budget and had to return things.
Having paid without incident, I went outside to find the Chevy, but it wasn’t there. As I waited in the parking lot for Dad and Giselle, people rattled past with shopping carts, their shadows lengthening in the twilight. Car doors opened and closed. The evening air carried some cold patches, bringing goose pimples to my bare arms and legs.
It was getting late, and I began to feel self-conscious. I froze my face into its usual confident expression in order to discourage any concerned adults from asking me if I needed a ride, or if I needed them to call anyone for me.
When the Chevy did finally appear, I was relieved to see that Dad was alone, but not thrilled when he told me he still had some stops to make on our way home.
“I want to check up on the leftovers from the train wreck.”
To get to the railroad tracks that ran along the edge of the Hudson River, we had to drive through the heart of the cozy hamlet of Barrytown, just north of Rokeby. It had its own zip code and its own one-room post office, which had been built to look like a Greek temple. Aside from four estates, the hamlet consisted of single-family houses scattered up and down two extremely steep hills that descended to the railroad tracks and the river. Many of these houses had belonged, at one time, to Aunt Elizabeth, Great-Grandma Margaret’s sister.
On the other side of the tracks was a grand house that sat on a small piece of land, which included the post office—so one could say that the gentleman who owned this property also owned our zip code. He was a friend of Uncle Harry’s, as he shared his passion for historic preservation. I’d never actually seen the current owner, as he owned many grand houses and chose not to stay in this one for any length of time. But his presence was felt strongly enough that nobody dared cross the tracks to his entrance gate. We could see his house—with its weeping willows draping the front lawn—from the north end of Astor Point, a rocky riverfront outcropping at Rokeby’s western edge. His house was not like ours. He had not inherited it, but rather purchased it from Gore Vidal—who had bought it in the 1940s—and done a perfect historic renovation.
I walked along the tracks behind Dad as he scanned the ground with a flashlight. “Looks like the place has been picked clean. . . .” Dad had already been down here several times, and taken loads of plywood and cases of Schaefer beer that had been spewed from the derailed freight train.
“Warren Delano was killed in a train accident on these tracks,” Dad mused. Warren Delano—FDR’s uncle and president of the Delano Coal Company—had lived on the estate that bordered Rokeby to the south. “It was 1920. Warren Delano was on his way down to the post office to pick up the mail with a four-in-hand, and the horses bolted, as a ‘twentieth century’—a crack, express passenger train—was coming through at about ninety miles an hour, with no stop in Barrytown. It would go from New York to Chicago in seventeen hours. . . . It didn’t help that Delano was a famous driver successful in racing competitions. He couldn’t control those horses once they’d panicked and bolted. When they ran right into that train, all four horses, together with Warren, were caught in the wheels and dragged along. . . . The irony was that Warren Delano was on the board of directors of the Atlantic Coast Line consolidated railroad that ran from north Virginia to Florida.”
“Dad?” I asked anxiously. “Can you get arrested for taking stuff off the tracks?”
“Me, arrested? Ha!”
CHAPTER NINE
PAST PERFECT
Courtesy of The City College of New York, CUNY
Oh good evening, dear . . . hiccup . . . You’re jus’ in time to help with the dinner party. . . .” Grandma Claire welcomed me as I rushed in through her kitchen door, after having unpacked our groceries up at the big house. “Whaaaa . . . ?” she asked guiltily, in reaction to my scowl.
She was oscillating from side to side by the stove, as if unable to choose which way to fall. As she turned unsteadily to face me, I saw that her eyes had that milky, sleepy look, with her lids half closed. She seemed to grin through me. Her nose was red and swollen, in contrast to the deathly whiteness of her complexion. Because her posture had been permanently lost to a hunched back, her rocking gave her the aspect of a wrestler preparing to take me down.
On her mother’s side, Grandma Claire was descended from the Fishes, a very old New York family founded by an Englishman named Preserved Fish. Born in the 1760s, he’d been thus named because as a boy he’d survived a shipwreck and been plucked from the sea while crossing the Atlantic from England. Grandma Claire’s great-great-grandfather Nicholas Fish had been Alexander Hamilton’s fellow student at King’s College—what is now Columbia University—and had served as an executor of Hamilton’s estate. As a result, Nicholas named his son, who was born shortly afterward, Hamilton. He was the first of many generations of Fishes who were politicians named Hamilton. Hamilton Fish I served as secretary of state under Ulysses S. Grant. His grandso
n was Grandma Claire’s uncle Hamilton Fish III—known to us as “Uncle Ham”—who served in the U.S. Congress as a Republican from 1920 until 1945, and was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and one of America’s leading isolationists throughout the 1930s.
But despite her distinguished—if in the latter case morally dubious—lineage, and the fact that she still had enough money to live comfortably and help with her grandchildren, Grandma Claire’s life at Rokeby was difficult. The setting, with its long, dusty driveways riddled with potholes, was rustic. And Dad, whom she wanted so desperately to control, broke every rule of propriety that she held sacred.
So to help ease the stress, Grandma Claire drank. Though the drinking made her prone to sudden rages, I would most often find her asleep in her bed when I stopped by after school, her face pale and drained of life, her nose red as if she’d been crying. She’d open her filmy eyes and hiccup constantly in alarmed little gasps.
Grandma Claire had moved permanently to Rokeby—more affordable than renting an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side—once Aunt Liz had finished Chapin and gone off to college. With Great-Grandma Margaret and Grandpa Dickie dead, Grandma Claire had become one of Rokeby’s owners. As such, she was drawn to the property, like a concerned parent.
Grandma Claire now pointed to boxes of Triscuits and Wheat Thins and a chunk of cheddar cheese. “Uhhh . . .” She moaned in confusion as she took an unsteady step. “Oh dear!” Her movements were slow, her nasal breathing loud. “Could you take these out? . . . I’ll give you twenty dollars later.” She frequently slipped us kids payment for helping out at her dinner parties. We would set and clear the table, pass the hors d’oeuvres, and wash the dishes. It was tacitly understood that the money would also ensure our good manners. Be sure to curtsy and smile.
The Astor Orphan Page 5