I never played solitaire again.
III
My aunt Dodo was severely retarded. She was not only retarded, she was deformed. Her left arm ended in a little nubby stump with a small red nipple on the end of it and she had a short, stumpy body and a large head and piercing eyes. People said she’d been retarded by scarlet fever at the age of two, but it looked to me like she had been retarded since day one. Apparently it never occurred to anybody that Dodo wasn’t exactly an appropriate name for her. She was born Virginia, that was her real name, but she was called Dodo all her life. My grandfather, my father’s father, was a drunk, the kind who wrecked cars and had to be sent away, and my father often had to go get him at the country club or wherever he was making a scene and help him home but, after Dodo’s mind went blank, he never took a single drink again.
After his death, Dodo slept in my grandmother’s bedroom until my grandmother died. They slept in twin beds. She would brush my grandmother’s hair in the morning with a silver hairbrush that had soft, yellowed bristles.
Dodo’s mental age was about four. She wore her hair in a little haircut kind of like Christopher Robin’s, and she wore checked shirtwaist dresses with thin leather belts and saddle oxfords and short cotton socks. She could dress herself and even tie her own shoelaces, a feat which always stupefied us as children.
She smoked like a madwoman, and every morning at eleven, she and my grandmother would sit down and have a glass of sauterne. They would drink sauterne pretty much throughout the rest of the day, so that besides being short and thick and dressed like a child, Dodo was drunk most of the time.
My grandmother had a cook named Martha who came at six in the morning and left at eight at night, and she had Warren, a gentleman boarder who did a lot in the way of keeping things running smoothly. She would sit down every morning at the telephone table and order her groceries from the Jones Brothers, Bobby and Ogle, I swear, so she didn’t have much to do except drink sauterne and nap and buy crabs from Archie Newton when he came by in the truck—softshells when they were in season—and big tins of potato chips from the Charles Chips man, who also came by in a truck once a week. She always looked lovely. She was known to be a great cook, but really all she ever did was sit in the enormous kitchen and tell Martha what to do, how to make deviled crab or angel food cake, recipes which Martha must have known by heart, after all those years.
Dodo watched television. Dodo was in love with the flickering image, and she would sit on the floor and watch anything that was on. She loved the early soap operas. She loved American Bandstand. She was a romantic.
She was the greatest playmate a child could have. She was strong, so when we played horsey she could carry an eight-year-old boy on her back with ease, crawling around the sitting room on all fours for hours, one eye on the TV. We would use her thin belts for reins. We would also arm wrestle and Dodo would always win. And, like all children, she could be mean, hurting you for no reason, pinching you until you bruised. But most of the time she was sweet and funny and amenable, and we adored her. My parents would pack us off to Fredericksburg in the summer so my grandmother could look after us, but she was old, and Warren was downtown working, and Dodo, except for nap time, was always available. Once my parents went to the Adirondacks, to Onteora, unimaginably far away, and we were at my grandmother Jinks’s house for three weeks.
Jinks was extraordinarily mean to me. She was my father’s mother, she doted on him, and she considered my brother and sister to be part of her family, since they were named after members of it, and I was considered to be part of my mother’s family, since I was named after my mother’s father. She would sit us all down, my brother and my sister and me, and she would say, “Look now, children. Everybody thinks Robbie’s so smart, but we all know that he’s just good at imitating the grownups. That’s not really intelligence. A parrot can do that. You two are really the smart ones.”
She would also sit me down with a family photograph album and show me pictures of one of my father’s uncles who was also named Robbie. He looked like Rudolph Valentino, hair all slicked back, three-quarter profile in the World War I uniform, dark handsome eyes, completely handsome everything. “This is your uncle Robbie, whom you’re named after,” she would say, even though we both knew it wasn’t true. “It’s a pity you’ll never be good-looking like he was.”
I would spend days every summer in this house with this woman, living her life and trying not to feel too bad.
Breakfast was elaborate, served in several courses: a fruit course, and then big silver trays with scrambled eggs and bacon or ham or shad roe. There would always be fresh biscuits with country butter. My grandmother had a lifetime collection of elaborately painted teacups, and they gleamed from a china cupboard in the dining room.
Dinner was served in the middle of the day, and it was roast beef or roast chicken or a fresh fish or deviled crab with vegetables and rolls or more biscuits, followed by dessert, and all of this was made by Martha and served from her seat by my grandmother, who had taken up the duty after my grandfather’s death and never relinquished it. Supper, after Martha left, after cocktails, was light, sandwiches or sliced chicken and, of course, potato chips. Dodo ate voraciously. She never seemed to run out of hunger. She was just hungry all the time.
Then we’d sit on the terrace in the warm summer night, drinking Cokes out of brightly colored aluminum glasses. The ice would melt in the glasses after five minutes. Cokes tasted different back then, better, or at least they seemed to have more fervor, on the terrace in the bright pink or ruby or turquoise glasses, in the dark with the humid smell of the caladium and mimosa. As we sat and moved slowly back and forth on a glider, the grownups had grease cutters, which is what some Virginia people call what normal people call nightcaps. They drank Tom Collinses from five o’clock until time to go to bed.
Dodo was in love with Frank Sinatra. She had seen him in movie magazines and then on the big screen. My grandmother took her, took us all, to grownup movies like Advise and Consent, scandalous movies with sex and violence, and Dodo had developed a passion for him in From Here to Eternity that was unstoppable. She believed that Frank would love her, too, and so she wrote to him nearly every day. She couldn’t write, of course, but she had developed a scribble that resembled what her handwriting would look like if she could actually write. It was an elegant scrawl, broken in word-length bits, and divided into paragraphs, and started with what would have been “Dear Frank,” except that it was just scribblescrabble. Gibberish.
She would write these letters, working at them for hours at the dining room table, and she would address an envelope in her scribble, and put a stamp on it, and ask Warren to mail it. He would pocket the letters and throw them away when he got to work. Every day she worked on her scrapbook filled with pictures of Frank Sinatra, and every day she asked if she’d gotten a letter from Frank, and the fact that she didn’t never lessened her assurance or her affection for the star of her dreams.
She also wanted to go to Mary Washington College, so she wrote them letter after letter, but they never answered either. It mystified her and eventually enraged her that they wouldn’t let her enroll. There was a building there named after her uncle.
So Warren, one day, sat down at the office and wrote her a reply. He carefully copied the style of her gibberish, wrote her a long letter, and put it in an envelope and addressed it in scribblescrabble and put a stamp on it. He brought it home that night, and proudly told Dodo that the letter from Mary Washington had finally come.
She looked at the envelope suspiciously, opened the letter, and said, “This is just scribblescrabble,” and started crying. She was inconsolable for days, and she never wrote to Mary Washington again, appalled that they would play such a foolish game with her.
She also read the funnies every day. She couldn’t read, of course, but she would look at the pictures and make up elaborate stories about Judge Parker or Steve Canyon and Poteet, who was always getting caught in Com
munist concentration camps where rats crawled all over her and the women wore skintight leather fetish outfits. We would sit at her feet and howl. Sometimes we were laughing with her, but a lot of the time we were laughing at her.
When I was fourteen, my grandmother died. She was old and she just died, in a nursing home she loathed. The night of her funeral, the grownups all went to the country club for dinner, and I was left to babysit for the children, which included Dodo. We ate sandwiches at my aunt’s house while Dodo drank sauterne, and then we all watched Ernie Kovacs or somebody on television, and then I put the little ones to bed while Dodo smoked and drank and stared at the TV.
Later, when Dodo was going to the bathroom, I sneaked a cigarette out of her pack. I told her I was going to sit outside for awhile, and I sat on the steps of the back porch and smoked a menthol cigarette. Just as I was finishing, Dodo came out on the porch and I flicked the cigarette into the hard, spiky grass that grows there.
I was afraid she would catch me smoking and tell my parents. But she didn’t say a word.
Dodo sat down next to me and pulled her cigarettes out of her pocket and lit one with the little lighter she could operate with one hand. She smoked with a voluptuousness and an ecstasy that was very glamorous, savoring every puff as though it were good champagne, rolling the smoke around in her mouth, then sucking it deep into her lungs and exhaling with a long, smooth sigh through her mouth and her nose.
Then we just sat in silence, looking at the stars. She smelled like Yardley Lavender, as my grandmother always had, and she was as familiar to me as dirt and it was nice.
Then Dodo moved a little closer to me. Then she moved a little closer. Our hips were touching. She laid her left arm casually across my thin shoulders, and we sat and looked at the stars. It was starting to turn creepy. Dodo said softly, still looking at the stars, “Kiss me.” I turned and kissed her on the cheek.
Suddenly her strong deformed arm tightened on my shoulders and I was pulled toward her, into her breasts, into the sweat and the lavender and the musk of this child, and she whispered softly in my ear even as her arm tightened in an unbreakable grip, “No. I mean really kiss me.” Like in the movies. The way Frank kissed Ava. The way grownups kissed in the parking lot at the country club.
I writhed out of her grasp and went inside, leaving her alone on the porch. When she came in the house, some minutes later, she didn’t mention it, we just sat and watched television until my parents and aunt and uncle came home. I never told anyone.
I almost never saw Dodo again. She went to live with my aunt, who used Dodo’s inheritance to put an addition on her house, an upstairs, so Dodo would have someplace to live.
My aunt made her stop drinking—that was hard—and then she made her stop smoking—which was harder. I guess Dodo went on loving Frank Sinatra, or fell in love with somebody new like Hoss Cartwright, but I don’t remember ever seeing her again. Not after the night when she so badly wanted me to kiss her.
She lived for a long time. I don’t know how long—I never knew how old Dodo was—and I lost track, but it was after my mother died and before my father died that Dodo herself died.
My father was too worn down to go to the funeral, and my sister had a sick child, and my brother, well, he lived in Atlanta, and I felt it was only right that somebody from my side of the family go down there and go to her funeral.
I took the shuttle to National and rented a car. Tom Brokaw was standing in front of me in line. I showed up at my aunt’s an hour before the funeral. It was cold, late winter, and I was wearing a black cashmere overcoat, trying to look happy and successful, but my aunt took one look at me and said disapprovingly, “You’ve put on weight.” Gaining weight in my family was as startling and reprehensible as murder in the general population. Her house was filled with silver and pictures and the painted teacups, all from my grandmother’s house, in some rooms practically floor to ceiling. We sat around, drinking sherry, waiting for the time to go to the cemetery.
Then we drove down there, to this cemetery where Dodo was to be buried, filled with Civil War generals and some of the best families, the most distinguished in the state. It’s a state where that kind of thing matters. It had rained in the night, a downpour, and the rain had caused Dodo’s grave to cave in, so where there was supposed to be a crisp hole there was only sludge. Her coffin was set up on a bier in the middle of the cemetery, beneath a marquee. The undertaker took one look at my black overcoat and my black scarf and suit, and concluded immediately that I must be a rival undertaker, come to steal away his business. He finally asked Warren, who told him I was the dead woman’s nephew.
Tom Faulkner had stepped out of retirement to do the ceremony. He had been a minister to my family for a long time, and had done our weddings and funerals and christenings since Jesus was a baby. He must have been eighty, but he looked pretty spruce in his cassock and cotta, standing there rosy-cheeked in the cold.
Dodo’s coffin was not small. She must have been in her fifties, her child’s lank hair would have been entirely gray by now, and she must have weighed more than two hundred pounds. We gathered under the awning that was near Dodo’s collapsed grave, and Tom Faulkner began to speak, with infinite kindness and affection, and I realized that he was reading the service that’s for the burial of a child. I had never heard it before. It’s at the very end of the old prayer book, just before the Psalms, and every word was new to me.
“Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me. Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven.”
And “Grant us steadfastly to believe that this thy child hath been taken into the safekeeping of thine eternal love; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
Then the prayer book goes on: “When they are come to the Grave shall be said or sung, ‘Jesus saith to his disciples, Ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.’
“While the earth is being cast upon the Body, the Minister shall say, ‘In sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commit the body of this child to the ground. The Lord bless Virginia and keep her, the Lord make his face to shine upon her and be gracious unto her, the Lord lift up his countenance upon her, and give her peace, both now and evermore.’”
It’s the only time I ever cried at a funeral, except at my aunt Anne’s when they sang “For All the Ships at Sea,” such an odd choice for a landlocked county in western Virginia. She loved it for some reason; she had had it sung at her wedding, too.
But Tom Faulkner had called Dodo Virginia, while still acknowledging that she was no more than a child, never had been.
“O God, whose most dear Son did take little children into his arms and bless them; Give us grace, we beseech thee, to entrust the soul of this child to thy neverfailing care and love, and bring us all to thy heavenly kingdom; through the same thy Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”
And after a short blessing to comfort the living, it was over. It had taken maybe twelve minutes, after coming all that way, but, as we filed out, past the mess of what was supposed to be Dodo’s grave, at that moment, I wished everybody in the world could be part of my family: the kindness and the graciousness, my aunt and uncle’s infinite good humor; the way my grandmother Jinks had made it all run so smoothly on no money at all, she had once bought a mink coat and was offended when the store called to ask for payment three years later; the way the heat would settle on the awnings in the summer nights and everybody would sit outside on the terrace until long after dark; the way Warren had once helped us plant a piece of bubblegum at the bottom of a little willow tree and, in the morning, we had gotten up to find the whole tree covered with pieces of Bazooka; the way he would tak
e us for the world’s best limeades at the Rexall, made from real, fresh limes, and let us steer the car on the long bridge home; the way my aunt could dive from a dock into the Potomac in a perfectly graceful arc, her long legs tanned, her body slim as a boy’s; the way the women in the family wore bathing caps and little rubber shoes when they went in the river; the way we would ride our bicycles down the lane and across to a creek where an ex-prizefighter called Bar’ Foot Green cooked crabs over an eternal fire of burning tires; the way we ate tomato sandwiches with the edges cut off, sometimes for days on end in the hot summers, even the way we said tomato; the way my grandmother could pick a crab completely clean with her needlelike fingers, her two huge diamonds flashing in the ring on her hand; my mother sitting in her blue slipper chair, my father sipping his drink and telling a story about his old friend Sam, who took a live turkey with him to Thanksgiving dinner in a roadhouse because he felt so guilty about the mass slaughter of the turkey’s brethren; the way people dressed up, back then, in evening dresses and tuxedos and linen suits and white dinner jackets for dinner at the club; the way Martha never complained, even though she stayed in that hot kitchen all day and went to the bathroom in an outhouse out back, in the yard, in a little hut I had always thought was a toolshed; the way we bore grief with dignity and grace; the way things never changed, even though everything had changed around us and nothing had turned out the way people imagined it would and we weren’t successful or rich and some of us were tragically and disastrously unhappy and many of us were already dead, too young, and I had tried to kill myself six years before, one of my dark secrets, blue razor and blue ruin, on the night of my thirty-fifth birthday, the fat scars still purple on my arms beneath my excellent clothes, while Dodo had lived a life with no more trouble than the fact that Frank Sinatra never answered her letters; the way she was buried as a child. I wanted, at that moment, for things to have stayed the way they were forever. I wanted, at that moment, for everybody to be us, and for us to be whole and clean and shining, the way we had meant to be. I wanted Dodo to go home to Jesus and be slim and tall and whole and happy and smart and loved by movie stars.