"One man's misfortune is usually another's good luck," Grandmother Emma said. "Be alert. Opportunity is often like a camera's flash. Miss it and it's gone forever."
She tossed her statements at us as if we were chickens clucking at her heels, waiting to be fed her wisdom or facts about the house and its contents. The truth was there was so much about it that I. even so young, thought was breathtaking, and I couldn't help being proud when other people complimented me on where I lived. Even my teacher, Mrs. Montgomery, who had been at Grandmother Emma's house once, made flattering comments, comments that caused me to be more conscious of its richness.
Some of the grand chandeliers hanging over the stairway, the hallways below, and the dining room came from Europe, and one was said to have once belonged to the king of Spain.
"The light that rains down on us now once fell on royalty," Grandmother Emma was fond of saving.
Did that mean we were magically turned into royalty, too, when we stood within its glow? She certainly acted as if she thought so. She walked and talked and made decisions like someone who expected it all to be written down as history. After all, the mansion was historic, why wasn't she?
No two rooms had the same style furniture. Ian and I were often given sermons about it so that we would fully appreciate how lucky we were to be living in the shadows of such elegance and culture. Everything, even the knobs on doors, had some significance and value. She made the house sound like a living thing.
"Each room in a house like this should be like a new novel," Grandmother Emma said. "Every piece should contribute to some sort of history and tell its own story, whether it be the saga of a grand family or a grand time."
Some of the pieces of furniture in the same room could have a different background and heritage, as well, whether it be a picture frame, a stool, or a bookcase.
The dining room had a table, chairs, and a buffet that was vintage nineteenth-century Italian and had once belonged to a cardinal. The sitting room, which was different from the living room, had a Victorian parlor settee, a Victorian gossip bench, and a Victorian swan fainting couch I loved to lie on when my grandmother was out and about and wouldn't see. The wood was mahogany and the material was a golden wheat brocade with a detached roll pillow.
All of her furniture, despite its age, looked brand new and there was always this terrible fear that either Ian or I would tear something or spill something on a piece and bring down the family fortune. Our own grand heritage and glory would be lost, for we were never to forget that this family once paraded through the Bethlehem community with great pomp and circumstance, our family crest flapping in the breeze.
There had often been overnight guests here and grand dinner parties during Grandmother Emma's Golden Age. She would describe them to us with an underlying bitter tone as if it was our fault she no longer had them. I knew she couldn't blame us for her not having guests anymore. There was still another guest bedroom downstairs and Daddy's old bedroom on her side, so there was plenty of room for someone to sleep here. She maintained a maid. Nancy, and a limousine driver named Felix, and a man named MacIntire whom everyone called Mac, to oversee the grounds. He lived just down the street, so it wasn't a question of extra work for her either. Money was certainly no problem, although I often heard my father complain that his mother held such a tight grip on the money faucet, there was barely a drip, drip, drip.
I didn't doubt that. Grandmother Emma was always criticizing my mother for being extravagant. I thought that was at least part of the reason she stopped going regularly to the beauty parlor and stopped buying herself new clothes. Like someone living on a fixed income, Grandmother Emma would complain' about the electric and the gas bills, too.
"If you would stay after your children and have them turn off lights when they are not necessary and close windows when we're heating the house, we wouldn't be throwing money out the window," she lectured. She threatened to fine us for every
unnecessary expense.
"They're not wasteful," my mother said in OUT defense. "Especially not Ian."
Grandmother Emma would only grunt at that. She couldn't argue about Ian doing anything illogical or unnecessary. If anything, he was looking after wasteful practices on her side of the house. He would venture over at least as far as the switch on the wall and deliberately turn off a hall light. If she
complained about having to navigate in the dark, he would say, "I didn't think it was necessary with so much natural light through the windows,
Grandmother. Perhaps you should fine yourself. "
Behind the hand she held over her mouth, my mother might smile at that. My grandmother would shoot a reprimanding look at Ian, who would stare back at her without so much as a twitch in his lips. He had two licorice black eves with tiny white specks and when he looked at someone so intensely, he didn't even blink. Mama was always telling him not to stare at people.
"It makes you look like an insect and not a little boy." she told him. Other boys his age might have been upset about that, but Ian looked pleased. I knew that sometimes he did deliberately imitate creatures so he could better understand them.
"What would it be like to only be able to crawl?" he asked me when I saw him doing it in his room. He'd walk about the house with his forearms pressed against himself so he resembled a praying mantis. Or he would wonder what it would be like to be a Venus flytrap and have to wait patiently for your meal to succumb to deception. He would sit with his mouth open for as long as he could stand it. He was studying carnivorous plants as well as insects. He was truly interested in everything.
Grandmother Emma was often disturbed about something he would do, especially when he stood ye1y still and flicked out his tongue like a snake.
After trying to reprimand him for staring at people, my mother would only shake her head and walk away. Grandmother Emma would do the same. I envied the way Ian could make her shake her head and retreat.
When it came to Grandmother Emma's criticism of Daddy, however, she was relentless and unswerving. She never failed to tell him he was lazy and wasteful. She found ways to blame that on my mother, claiming she just didn't inspire him to be better or try harder.
"At times I think you are completely void of ambition and self- respect, Christopher."
She would say these horrible things to him right in front of Ian or me and even in front of my mother sometimes. Her sharp, surgical comments were never dressed in euphemisms or subtleties. She refused to rationalize or make excuses for Daddy and especially not for my mother and us. On occasion, my mother would try to stand up to her.
"Is it wise to be so critical of Christopher in front of his children?" she once asked her.
"The sooner they learn to base respect upon reality and not false promises the better off they'll be. As ye sow so shall ye reap," she added.
"So do you blame yourself for Christopher's failings?" my mother dared to follow up.
Grandmother Emma faced her firmly and replied, "No. I blame his father."
"That woman has an icicle for a spine," my mother muttered to me.
At the time I was young enough to believe that was literally true. I wondered how she kept it from melting.
There was so much tension and often so much static in our house, or I should say my grandmother's house that sometimes. I'd look down the hallway toward the circular stairs and think of the inside of the mansion as having its own weather. I'd imagine clouds or storms no matter what was happening outside. Shadows in the house could widen or stretch so that I would feel as if I was walking under a great overcast sky. Even in the summer months, it could be chilly and not because of too much air-conditioning either. Fair weather days were happening less and less, not that there were all that many after we were forced to move in with Grandmother Emma, anyway. It was no wonder then that my mother was adamant, even terrified, about Grandmother Emma finding out about me.
I suppose anyone would wonder how someone so small could command such obedience and fear. She
was just five feet tall with small features, especially small hands, but I never thought of her as being tiny or diminutive. Even in front of Daddy, who was six feet one and nearly two hundred pounds, she looked powerful and full of authority. She had ruler-perfect posture and a commanding tone in her voice. When she spoke to her servants, she whipped her words at them. She rarely raised her voice. She didn't have to shout or yell. Her words seemed loud anyway because after she said them in her manner of speaking, they boomed in your head. No one could ignore her, no one except Ian, but he could ignore a tornado if he was thinking or reading about something that interested him at the time.
My grandmother was always well put together, too. She never appeared out of her room without her bluish gray hair being brushed and pinned. She liked to keep it in a tight crown bun, but on rare occasions, she would have it twisted and tied in something called a French knot. That was when she looked the prettiest and youngest. I thought, although she was very careful not to dress in anything she believed was inappropriate for a woman of her age. Everything she wore was always coordinated, as well. She had shoes for every outfit and jewelry that seemed to have been purchased precisely for this dress or that sweater. There were butterfly pins full of emeralds and rubies, diamond brooches, earrings and bracelets that were heirlooms, handed down by her mother and her mother's mother, as well as my grandfather's mother.
I couldn't help but secretly admire her. In my mind she really was as important as a queen. When she criticized me for the way I stooped or ate with the wrong knife and fork. I didn't resent her as much as Ian did when she said similar things to him. I swallowed back my pride and tried to be more like her. I watched how she sat at the table, how she ate, how she walked and turned her head. I think she saw all this because once in a while. I caught her looking at me with the tiniest smile on her lips and I wondered, could it be that she likes me after all?
I was afraid that if she did. Mama would hate me and miaht even think I had betrayed her somehow.
But I was also afraid that if she didn't like me. Daddy would be disappointed.
Did she or didn't she?
In my heart of hearts I 'mew that finding out would be something I would do on the journey toward discovering who I was. And so with trembling feet. I stepped into my future.
2 Our Great Secret
.
It was spring. We had just ten days left to school. Grandmother Emma wanted Ian and me to go to summer camp, but Ian hated the idea because of all
the boring things they made him do, and my mother refused to send me off at such a young age. Now, after she saw what was happening to me, she was going to be even more unyielding about refusing to send me to sleepaway camp.
"That's absolutely ridiculous," Grandmother Emma told her when my mother argued against it, using my age as an excuse. "I sent your husband away when he was just five and every summer thereafter."
"Maybe his failings aren't all because of his father's spoiling him then," my mother replied, and Grandmother Emma bristled like a porcupine. It was just as if my mother had reached out and slapped her cheek. Touch her anywhere and you would bleed.
"It was precisely my getting Christopher away from his father that gave him the few ounces of backbone he has,"
Grandmother Emma responded to my mother's sharp response. "At least at the camps he was made to bear some responsibility for his actions and himself. If he called here crying. I would hang up on him. Eventually, he matured. Somewhat," she added. She was always careful not to give Daddy a full
compliment or say something nice about him without a qualification.
She looked at me sitting quietly on the medieval cross frame chair I was somehow permitted to use in the living room. I was quietly cutting out some paper dolls, but listening keenly to their conversation. As long as you didn't look at them when they spoke, adults thought you weren't listening.
"I might not start up the swimming pool this summer," Grandmother Emma threatened as an added reason to send us off to camp. "It's a costly luxury just to please two children who are bored silly."
"Do what you want. I'm not sending Jordan to a sleepaway camp," my mother told her, digging her heels into the ground.
"Ridiculous," Grandmother Emma said, and walked away.
Mama looked at me, her face flushed with a crimson shade of rage and fear. She knew I
understood why she was so determined not to send me off.
Despite the way my mother had reacted to the changes in my body. I was happy she and I shared a secret, a secret no one else in our family knew. It made me feel very special, even a little more grownup. Everything else about Mama, Daddy, Ian, and me was pretty much out in the open, especially, as Mama had said, for Grandmother Emma to set or hear. There was little she didn't know about us, if she wanted to know it. She certainly knew all about our finances and whatever we bought. My mother couldn't do much in the house or even in the community without her finding out about it. She knew what we ate and if we ate. She knew all our clothes and shoes. She usually knew our daily schedules, too, even when we had our dental appointments. All the bills went through her hands at one time or another, it seemed. She especially knew if my father and my mother had an argument. How could they be mad at each other and not show it in front of her?
Lately, there were more and more arguments between them, too. Daddy always seemed to have a reason to go somewhere. He claimed there were endless food shows and conventions. Rarely, if ever, did he ask Mama to go with him. Grandmother Emma thought that was my mother's choice and was always critical of her not being more involved in his business.
"You could at least go down there and watch the cashiers and packers," Grandmother told her. "Didn't you used to work at a supermarket after high school?"
"I only worked there part-time to tarn money for college, Emma. It hardly qualifies me to be a supermarket manager."
"Nevertheless, you know what to look for. I'm sure we're being robbed daily," Grandmother Emma told her. "You could watch for that. You know all the tricks."
"What do you mean. I know all the tricks? I didn't rob from anyone," my mother said, her light gray eyes sparking like shiny new dimes. "I worked hard for everything I had. We all did in my family, especially my father, who like his fellow workers, was exploited."
Grandmother Emma looked at her, raised her eyes a little as if my mother was living in a fantasy, and walked away. No matter how good or quick my mother's answers were, she never felt she had defeated my grandmother.
"Her skin is so thick. She doesn't bleed," my mother mumbled.
Could that be true? I wondered. I never had seen Grandmother Emma bleed or groan. I never saw her sick, in fact. If she didn't feel well, she wouldn't come out of her bedroom. Everything was brought to her until she was better. It was from her behavior and attitude about illness that I often felt guilty for having a cold or a sore throat, and when I had a minor case of the measles. I thought I surely had embarrassed the whole family.
I suppose this was why I had such a panic attack when I had cramps in my stomach and felt a warmth between my legs that turned out to be blood. It happened only a week after my mother had made her discoveries about me in the bathroom. I touched myself and then brought my hand into the glow of the small night lamp I had to have turned on beside my bed when I went to sleep. The sight of blood on my fingers took my breath away. Now I was certain something terrible was happening to me, something my mother had feared.
I cried out for her, which I knew immediately was stupid. My room was so far away from her and Daddy's bedroom neither could hear me. Ever since we had moved into Grandmother Emma's house, I was on my own when it came to nightmares. By the time I would get up, if I had the courage to do so, and walk out and down the hallway to my parents' bedroom, the nightmare had lost most of its terror.
Daddy was always wrapped too tightly in his cocoon anyway. I remembered going to their bed when I was only four and shaking him to get him to wake up and comfort me. He m
erely groaned and turned over without opening his eyes, and when I cried, he just waved his hand over his ears like someone chasing off flies.
"Carol, see what she wants," he would moan, and turn over so his back was to me. Sometimes Mama heard him; sometimes she was in too deep a sleep herself and I had to wake her. I hated the idea of waking her more than waking my father. Even at that age. I had the sense that she cherished every minute of sleep because it was so difficult for her to get to sleep. She was always worrying so much about everything.
Groggy, but full of comfort, she would put me back to bed and stay with me for a while. In the morning, she always looked the worst for it, worse than I did or felt, and I was ashamed of my fear and my nightmares. Ian said it was ridiculous to be afraid of a dream.
"Just blink your eyes and pop it out of your head," he told me. "Besides, bad dreams can be interesting. Wake me up if you want. I don't mind hearing about them even if they seem terrible to you."
This was different. I couldn't run to him, I 'mew instinctively that it was part of Mama's and my secret. Wake her or not, she had to be told. I started to get out of bed and then I worried that I would drip blood all over the rug and on the hallway floor. Nancy, the maid, would tell Grandmother Emma. Mama always said Nancy was an informer and a snoop, "an apple polisher who would sell out her own mother for one of your grandmother's compliments."
Ian agreed with Mama. He thought that the reason Nancy's ears were so close to her head was that she kept them against the walls so much.
For a while I just sat up in bed, wondering what I should do. I was tied up in indecision. Finally, I rose and, squeezing the blanket between my legs, hurried to my bathroom. I closed the door and put on the light. When I dropped the blanket, I nearly fainted. My pajama bottoms were soaked in blood.