To me, Bob Johnson’s family epitomized middle-class normalcy. They had a quaint yellow Victorian house near our church, with clean orderly rooms and a color TV. They ate meals together as a family. The boys—self-confident and comfortable with who they were—played baseball. Their mother had domestic skills; in fact, she had reupholstered several armchairs for Grandma. When I was little, I would sleep over at their house as often as I could to experience a peaceful and healthy family life without daily fights and power struggles.
But Dad, in a rare moment of cooperation with Mom, wouldn’t call the Johnsons that evening. He returned me to the big house. After that, my escape from Rokeby occurred mostly in my mind, alternating between fantasies of becoming a famous violinist and of being adopted by wealthy long-lost aunts.
I now wheezed with the cold. Steam poured from my mouth and my throat burned. Each self-pitying moan hurt, yet the pain felt delicious, because it was my pain.
I did what I would usually do when I felt sad. I hummed a melody in a minor key. It sounded vaguely Gypsy, vaguely Jewish.
My boots made a crunching sound on the frozen snow, the sound of grown-ups walking on children’s bones.
I was cozy in my sadness and self-pity, until my feet began to seize up from the bitter cold. I soon had no other choice but to head up to the big house.
I walked onto the flagstoned courtyard outside Aunt Olivia’s and Uncle Harry’s part of the house. The stones were crispy and slippery with snow and ice, and the lights were off in Aunt Olivia’s kitchen. A bell jingled as I opened the door to their mudroom, which was dark except for some light from the back hall—a bulb permanently left on—that peeked through the cracks in the door frame. Coats still hung on the coatrack, and duck boots and riding boots were lined up on the floor.
My boots clumped heavily as I walked up the back staircase, where again I encountered Uncle Bob’s giant painting of Death.
Suddenly a figure emerged on the stairs. It was “Bob the Ghost,” the pale-faced man with the oily, long blond hair, almost as pale as his white, expressionless face. He stared at me, and I stared back—a sort of greeting in the form of the briefest acknowledgment.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
INTO THE MOUTH OF HELL
Courtesy of Ania Aldrich
Tonight was Debbie’s spring pageant. It was March, just days before my eleventh birthday. The air was frigid. Mom and I, together with about ten other volunteers, were wearing suffocating tubelike spandex slip-ons that covered us from head to toe.
We had been instructed to wriggle around inside our spandex suits, to create the illusion of esophagus muscles digesting food as participants passed among us. We were the Mouth of Hell (or more accurately, the throat). The participants were on a mission to retrieve Persephone from her bed in the underworld, which was at the top of the hill, near the cliff on Astor Point, where we frequently picnicked in summertime.
To get in and out of the underworld here at Astor Point, the pageant participants were ferried by Chiron, played by Dad, across the river Styx—our deteriorating railroad bridge.
Now my wriggling and moaning inside the spandex felt senseless. I was uncomfortably blind, although it was so dark and moonless that I would probably not have seen any better had the spandex not been wrapped around me. Nor could the other participants see as they squeezed through us, the throat muscles.
Because Uncle Harry wanted to put an end to these pageants and would scream at Debbie every year before and after each pageant, I felt that my participation in this one was in some way a violation of the rules. I moaned and wriggled very reluctantly, afraid I would also get yelled at. It also felt as if, by re-creating Hell, we were messing with some dangerous, satanic powers.
ABOUT THREE WEEKS after the pageant took place, the dead body of one of the participants was found on the rocks under the cliff. He had been missing since the night of the pageant.
“John Martin and I went down there, after I got the call that there was a dead body washed up against our rocks,” Dad shouted into the phone, like a newscaster relaying live war coverage over the din of gunfire. “We went out in a rowboat. It was cold like a son of a bitch. John’s still out there keeping an eye on things.”
I imagined the smashed body on the rocks at low tide, its hair matted with thick river grass. I imagined the waves of the ancient Hudson gently lapping against the body, trying to push its stubborn weight closer to shore in benign rejection: Go back to the land.
“Surprisingly, nobody asked any questions. The police aren’t interested in doing an investigation. It was chalked up to suicide. They’re used to bodies washing up on shore. There are so many jumpers, you know, off the bridge. They say he was a heavy drug user, with a history of mental illness.”
We had to go to Irving Rothberg’s to consult about the removal of the dead body. This was just the type of work Dad was competent at, as nothing was too disgusting for him.
In his unlit living room, his son and daughter were sitting on the furry green wall-to-wall carpet. The blue light from their color TV illuminated their faces, gaping full moons, lulled into a stupor by Richard Dawson on Family Feud.
“Want a TV dinner, midget?” Irving asked me.
Dad perched on a kitchen stool by the counter. “The kid loves ’em. She never knows where her next meal will come from.” For Dad, our poverty was amusing, a delightful challenge. “So, as I was saying. This death is the excuse my brother’s been waiting for, to put an end to artistic events once and for all and purge the property of what he deems undesirables.”
“I’ll bet he’s scared of a lawsuit!”
“Any excuse to get wound up . . .” Dad chuckled. “Yup! That’s the way it goes. Just another day at the Funny Farm . . . Anyway, Irv, keep me posted about any new corpses that come your way, and if you get anything really nice off any of ’em, don’t hesitate to call!” Irving would give Dad the hand-me-downs—clothes, prosthetic limbs, even false teeth—from those he buried. While Dad wore some of these prizes, he added most of them to his collection of junk. “And I’ll also be in touch if any new bodies wash up onto our shores!”
“Certainly, Mr. Theodore.” Irving nodded matter-of-factly. Irving never smiled. He and Dad, with their matching overbites, looked like earnest beavers. “Now, take that kid on home, and show her how to do some laundry, if your wife won’t do it for you. You’ve succeeded in stinkin’ up my house.”
With that, Irving escorted us out the back door and into his dimly lit driveway, where the truck was parked.
Usually, the annual family meeting was held in August, as September was when the bulk of the property taxes were due. But in light of recent events, Uncle Harry called an emergency family meeting in early April.
I pretended to sweep the front hall while I tried to listen in on the commotion in the home parlor. I pictured Grandma Claire, Uncle Harry, Mom, Dad, and the family accountant, all seated around the gray marble mantelpiece—with their bills and receipts, reports and notebooks—talking of insurance, infidelity, leaks, accidents, missing roofs, barns burning, and bridges burned.
“Good afternoon, Miss Alexandra . . .”
I was startled from my eavesdropping by the mock British accent of Walter, who tended to creep out of nowhere, in the halls and stairwells, then fade just as quickly back into the woodwork. As he blithely descended the white stairs, I wondered what Pompey, Washington, and William B. would have thought of this, our latest boarder.
“Eavesdropping, I see. . . . Nice day at schoo-oool . . . I hope?” Walter spun his words with a murderous and calculating politeness.
“Shut up, you fairy!” The words slipped out of my mouth. I tended to treat Dad’s boarders with utter disrespect, as it was easier for me to blame them for their invasions into our family life than to be angry at Dad for never setting boundaries.
Walter’s beady eyes grew darker behind his thick, black-rimmed eyeglasses. His red, chapped, oversize lips tightened in anger under his oily, pockmarked
nose.
“Don’t you dare speak to me like that, you little bitch!” He grabbed the broom out of my hands and swatted me across the butt with it.
Walter was different from other boarders we’d had, all of whom I’d found irritating to some degree but not truly threatening.
I rushed away from him now, before he could see that his physical attack had brought tears to my eyes.
As my father had surmised, the death of the pageant participant gave Uncle Harry the leverage he needed to ban future Rokeby pageants and the unwanted drifters that necessarily came with them. In his mind, the pageant had caused the death at Astor Point and exposed Rokeby to a possible lawsuit.
I imagined Uncle Harry’s voice rumbling between the home parlor’s walls.
“I always said that pageant organizer was a dangerous, manipulative woman, and that we are not insured for pageants, or whatever it is she does. And all those drifters that hang around the creamery . . . None of them have real jobs, of course. . . . Just a bunch of jackals waiting for a meal! I suppose they all use narcotics as well. That goes without saying. . . . Now that there’s been a death, there’ll most certainly be a lawsuit, and they’ll milk us dry! I won’t allow some performance artist to bring down this family!”
But these plays and festivals had breathed the only real life into the place since I could remember.
I thought of Astor orphan Uncle Bob’s painting of Death playing the flute against the Tree of Life, which Uncle Harry proudly pointed out on house tours. When Uncle Bob, at the age of twenty, informed his Chanler siblings that he had decided to attempt a career as a painter, he felt he needed to defend his decision. He wrote to Great-Grandma Margaret, “To me an artist is the most peaceful man alive, peaceful and sometimes joyfully happy and nearly every day sad. . . . And their ways of thinking are not given to the world except by pictures, so the world calls them fools and empty. But they are deep-souled, high minded and brave.”
While Mom and Dad believed that this icy spell in the creative life of Rokeby would soon pass—after all, this conflict was not a new one—I felt the new order, catalyzed by a death, as a permanent solution. With his edict, Uncle Harry seemed to be saying that the artists were undeserving and unwelcome because they were irresponsible and careless.
I would no longer visit the safe haven of the old Rokeby creamery.
STANDING IN THE storeroom that was soon to become my new room, I watched Dad jab at the loose plaster walls with a shovel while he talked about Cousin Chanler’s funeral.
“I won’t be forgetting that funeral anytime soon! The family attorneys limoed up to the event from Manhattan, because they wanted to read the will to the children, which they tried to do, with some difficulty. Sty proved hard to find.”
Sty had been hiding out at the hermitage, where he had lived ever since he’d been thrown out of his father’s for falling asleep with a lit cigarette and setting the house on fire. When they finally found Sty, he was armed, so they stayed outside as they read him the will. He was reportedly screaming obscenities all the while.
I heard footsteps in the hall outside. It was Mom, coming to check on Dad’s progress.
“When will the rooms be ready? I feel like I’m living in a Gypsy camp, with boxes of books coming into the billiard room and my stuff in the halls,” she complained from the doorway.
“Any day now, dear. Any day . . .” Dad threw a shovelful of broken plaster onto the window chute that led to a dump truck parked on the lawn below. The dust made Mom cough and wave her hand in the air irritably.
“Oh, has your father told you the latest news yet?” she said, jeering.
“More news?” I asked.
“Entertaining stories are what your father lives for. But I doubt he’ll be telling this one to everyone he runs into,” Mom snorted. “Giselle is pregnant!” She laughed in contempt as she walked away.
“What?” Numbness climbed my legs, fingers, arms, and face.
When Ben returned from the hospital later that spring, Uncle Harry and his family moved into the house that Aunt Olivia had bought from Cousin Chanler Chapman’s estate.
When Maggie and Diana showed me their new rooms, I understood that they had done it. They, not I, had gotten out. Only Mom, Dad, and I remained.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
A DREAM FULFILLED
Courtesy of Ania Aldrich
As a little girl, I used to wait by the phone, because Dad had said they would be calling any day now with a baby brother for me.
“There are plenty of unwanted kids out there. Someone is bound to call with a baby they want to give away.”
And for years I’d waited, hoping not to remain an only child.
At the beginning of the summer, just as I was feeling that my own little family unit could not become more broken, Giselle reappeared. It had been almost a year since I had last seen her. As if to fill the void, she brought with her a new baby boy.
He’d finally arrived: the brother of my dreams, and the son of Dad’s.
Everyone knew the truth about the baby’s paternity, of course. He had a shock of straight black hair and beady little black eyes, just like Dad had in the baptism picture that had long sat in a silver frame on a desk in the octagonal library.
And yet, Grandma Claire and Mom maintained that it was best to say nothing. And since we were not allowed to speak of the facts of the case, we could definitely not speak about our feelings regarding these facts.
Giselle was physically much changed since last summer. Her shoulder-length wavy hair was disheveled in what could only be described as the lack of a hairdo, marked with a few gray streaks. The lines running along the sides of her nose and down around her mouth were more pronounced. Now that she was weighed down by a new infant, she would have more difficulty keeping up with Dad—unless, of course, she left the child with us.
When she asked to speak to me alone, I led her into the dining room. Here, whatever was said could be witnessed by the general, John Armstrong; the “Duchess,” Great-Grandma Margaret; even Aunt Liz and Grandma in their younger incarnations.
Then Giselle dropped the bomb. “I would like you to be the godmother for baby Jean. . . .”
I was Elizabethan in my icy stiffness. I had not yet even been stricken with bleeding, and she wanted to burden me with motherhood! But of course I did not say no. In my inexpressible anger, I was voiceless.
Yet I felt sorry for this infant. I wanted to rescue him from a chaotic childhood, kidnap him away from Giselle.
Giselle moved quickly. In a Napoleonic way, once she had gotten what she wanted from me—I had practically surrendered—she moved on. Later that same day, I spied her with her bundle on Grandma’s doorstep, a place she’d never dared stand before. Her shadow was exaggerated, elongated in the late-afternoon sun. Her polite knock rattled against the plastic half of Grandma’s screen door.
Then I saw Grandma Claire at the door, hunched over, her spindly fingers pushing against the screen door’s Plexiglas. Her lips were pursed tightly. She was not quite smiling as she peered disapprovingly over the top of her black-rimmed spectacles. Yet, unable to be inhospitable within the walls of her own house, she opened the door. Giselle disappeared into the house’s dimness, as if she had lasers that could burn through all obstacles, even Grandma’s fury—now just a pile of smoldering ashes.
Perhaps the tragic events of this year had left Grandma Claire too broken to fight. Or perhaps she could not deny that Giselle had won.
I slipped in through the kitchen door.
I could hear Grandma in the living room. “Vous voulez jus de canneberge? Ou tomate?” Even to my untrained ear, Grandma Claire sounded funny trying to speak French. “Pas de vin, you know, when you’re nursing. . . . Is the bébé sleeping through the night?”
It wasn’t until the day of the baptism that Giselle inadvertently introduced the baby to Mom.
Mom, Dad, and I were getting ready to go out to a lunch party at the Simmonses’.
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p; Mom sat at our kitchen table, tapping her foot impatiently and smelling of Chanel No. 5 as she waited for Dad to show up. She had her newly hennaed hair pinned back, with some locks hanging free, like vines of morning glory around her moon face.
In a moment, we heard the echo of Dad’s construction boots stomping through the front hall.
“Mrs. Simmons said one o’clock!” Mom snapped at him the minute he walked through the kitchen door. Dad was still dressed in his blue working uniform; on his shirt was a name badge reading TONY. His face and hair looked as if he’d just come out of a chimney. “Why are you getting ready only now? It’s ten to one. We’ll be late, as usual. Do you think I care? I should just drive myself, and let you walk. . . . But what if the brakes should fail?”
“So sorry, Ala.” He turned right around, and in a moment, we could hear his boots thumping up the front stairs. In another minute, Mom’s eyes squinted peevishly as another figure appeared in the dimly lit doorway.
“What does she want?” Mom’s upper lip curled around her left canine. “We’re about to go out,” she shouted, as if volume would aid the quietly frantic Frenchwoman’s understanding, and as if understanding would result in cooperation. We both knew she would not just shrug her shoulders indifferently and walk back to wherever she’d come from.
“Uh?” she grunted, confused. She was also squinting. “Teddy ’ere?”
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