Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 22 (12 page)

I lifted, and the mole disintegrated in a shower of bunchy, crawling maggots.

I raced out of the garage as fast as my legs would carry me. Twenty yards down the driveway, I realized I still had what was left of the mole in my left hand, and I flung it into the daylilies, spikes of green topped with flaming bursts of peach-yellow, and then, after a lengthy, panting minute, I settled myself, forced down my gag reflex, and ventured back up the drive to the garage.

Where the mole had been was a damp, colorless stain. It looked like a two-dimensional bomb blast, a flat crater, and all the victims were crawling pell-mell away in an ever-spreading ring, blindly seeking for shelter and a fresh supply of food.

That was it: Proof positive of reincarnation, demonstrated by a common mole turned suddenly to an army of larvae. I was appalled—and fascinated. I stared despite myself and then, suddenly skittish, I ran inside to find Gran and beg her to read me a story, the longest, most involving sort, the kind that would transport me so utterly that I wouldn't have to cope with the image of those hurrying maggots—their voracious, hungry circle—and how the largest had been crawling, as if they could scent my warmth from afar, directly toward me.

"Must have been the rat poison,” said Grandpa, over dinner that night. “I hate to put the stuff out, but if I have to kill a mole or two to keep the rats out of the basement, then that's their tough luck. You know Boston's crawling with rats."

Gran allowed her fork to clink hard against her chinaware plate. “Can we find a topic more suitable to the table?"

She painted, my Gran. She painted well and often, concentrating on flowers and birch trees, with occasional forays into brick-walled alleys, mud-red and choked with vines. Other departures included a series of looming stone portals that led only into darkness, and she'd won an award for a flight of freed balloons racing past a skyscraper. She won another for a great blue heron winging its way home across a lake lit only by a wash of green-hued Northern Lights.

Her busy, cramped studio could hold me transfixed for hours at a time. I would simply stand there, gazing at image after image, half of them painted only on cheap cardboard or featherweight construction paper. These preliminary pieces sat in piles on the floor, they hung from string on tiny rusting clips, they huddled together in heaps and clumps. The most recent scratch-work and sketches always rested on two black metal music stands, awaiting judgment.

"Studies,” she called them. “Beginnings."

To me, they were masterpieces one and all, but the obvious quality of her work was almost beside the point. For me, each of her paintings was like a window, more inferred than seen, a glimpse or an echo of the mysterious and independent adult lurking inside my cheerful, worldly-wise grandmother.

Gran's studio was an afterthought, an addition built directly behind Grandpa's study. From the outside, the studio looked as it had been tacked to the house like a secondary appendage, cheap and boxy. From the inside, it always felt like a comfortable part of the whole, perhaps because it boasted windows on three sides that afforded easy views of the shady, fenced back yard. Gardens bloomed in front of the fences, uncomplicated affairs that relied heavily on hosta, daffodils, and innumerable impatiens: purple, red, white, and the occasional white and red mix.

Gran had Grandpa plant impatiens because she adored painting them. No subject held her more rapt, and when housework or church business or visiting friends didn't demand otherwise, warm weather usually found her perched on a stool with a sketchbook on her knee, selecting yet another perfect grouping of the tiny upturned flowers. Painted and framed, her myriad impatiens had migrated to every relative and neighbor; they were given—and received—as cherished Christmas gifts. To unwrap one of Gran's impatiens was to be accepted, blessed and acknowledged. To have one hanging from your wall connoted status, and arrival.

I was too young that summer to have been given a proper painting of my own—despite my presence in the house, I had not yet arrived—but Gran had kindly worked up a rough version of several blotchy purple impatiens on a strip of cardboard.

"A bookmark,” she said. “For a grandson gifted with a keen imagination."

I kept that bookmark jammed in the pages of my
Illustrated Knights of the Round Table
, a measure of the value I attached to both. My father had given me that amazing book as a gift for my recent birthday, and I hardly ever closed its cover, leaving it always open to one page or another, each more full than the last of steely blades and unfurled standards, mighty jousts and grim-walled castles. With both of my parents looking for work in far-away Bangor (where distant relatives had promised lucrative seasonal highway jobs), I dreamed my way daily through that book, not just because of its own implicit wonder, but also to keep better track of my family, and myself. The stories inside told me more than mere tales of Arthur's long-dead retainers, they sang to me that my parents would one day return, like knights from a quest, for me. We'd settle in one place and there'd be good and steady work, and all would again be right with the world.

Not that I objected to spending a Belmont summer with Grandpa and Gran. They were wonderful people, by a child's or any other standard, and they made it easy to slip into their routines while still allowing me the freedom to strike out on my blue banana-seat Huffy and pedal my way to new, mettle-testing friendships with all the neighborhood children. Pirates, bombardment, sandlot baseball: It was summer, and we played them all. It should have been as idyllic a summer as any I ever experienced.

"We have,” Grandpa told me, on the day I arrived for my extended stay, “only one house rule."

My parents sat across from him at the enormous oval dinner table in the slightly grimy kitchen. The tablecloth was corn-yellow, the walls pistachio green; I never understood, until owning a time-consuming home of my own, how anyone as artistic as Gran could put up with such a horrid-looking room. Not that the color scheme was on my mind at that moment. I stood at Grandpa's elbow, nervous as all get out, waiting for the axe to fall. A rule, one rule! It would surely be a terror.

Grandpa grinned and showed his gums. “My one rule is: Listen to your Gran."

Gran confided her single rule after my parents had driven away, a departure that had taken an hour or more thanks to the endless admonitions they'd only at the last minute remembered. Wear clean socks, use soap in the bath, listen to your grandparents, help out around the house, don't track mud all over the place, leave insects and snakes and toads outside...

...and above all, listen to your grandparents. We know you'll be a good boy.

Gran's one rule wasn't a rule. It was an injunction.

"Nathan,” she said, “you will ignore the portfolio behind the piano. Do not pick it up, do not take it out, do not venture any little peeks. Do you understand me?"

I did, of course, but I already knew perfectly well that if I was told not to investigate something, then it stood to reason that I would have to do so, and that at the earliest opportunity.

To my surprise, I tried to explain this, and Gran's response I remember still, as clearly as any statement she ever made.

"You are not the first child to enter this house, and you are not the first to take a liking to my work. But you are the first that I have warned away. Of course I know that you will eventually break this rule, and I look forward to the day that you do. I only ask that you put it off as long as possible. Some paths cannot be retraced."

What that meant, I had no idea, so I got on with the business of being eight, eight in the summer. Eight: The age when time ran fast enough that I could look to my future with a certain expectation, and yet it still crawled with sufficient slowness that I could pause and look behind with a feverish, leaden accuracy.

That combination made for a summer of powerful, indelible memories. I remember a mosquito bite behind my left ear that itched for a week. I remember devouring a coconut cake at a neighbor's house. I cannot recall the neighbor's name or the names of her children, my playmates, but I remember the cake, not only its flavor but its texture, the roughness of the coconut shavings blended with the sumptuous plaster-white icing. I remember bicycling all the way to Beaver Brook, shooting straight through the lethal five-way intersection at Belmont Square with hardly a glance for crossing traffic, and I vividly remember somehow making it home both alive and in time for supper. I remember slipping one day when I stepped out of the tub and catapulting head-first into the bathroom wall's indigo tile. Grandpa had to drive me to a wizened, lisping doctor who gave me nine stitches, black and thick, on my forehead. I was the hit of the neighborhood for a month, and all the kids called me Frankenstein.

Grandpa had been a jeweler, and while he had retired from his shop, he had never stepped back from his craft. He spent long hours at it still, a green-tinted visor over his eyes to block any glare as he poked and prodded tiny strands of metal into clasping shards of brilliant jewels. He made metal and stone meet and match, he bent them to his bidding. He did private work, for friends of the family, long-time customers, relatives. Had his projects been on a larger scale, I'm sure his rings and bracelets and pendants would have fascinated me just as much as Gran's canvases, but there were times when the work he held was all but obscured by his heavily knuckled hands or the fingers of his vise, and it was all I could do to see. For the most part, I left him alone.

And, on a day when he and Gran left me alone while they ventured out to the supermarket, I decided to do as Gran had said I must, and break her single law.

The forbidden portfolio wasn't hidden or even locked up. Just as she'd said, she kept it tucked along the side of the old upright piano, black and mostly in key, an instrument that Grandpa still played daily in a mournful, offhand way as he waited for his morning coffee to percolate. As if the piano itself were a sentinel and I a thief, I avoided looking at it as I hauled the portfolio, stuffed and heavy, to the living room. I spread the canvases and boards across the furniture until they ringed and surrounded me. Only then did I allow myself to fully survey what I had exhumed.

Impatiens, one after another. All colors and stripes. More and more impatiens, on every single panel.

Was this a trick? Gran's way of setting me up? No, it couldn't be. I narrowed my gaze, I stared harder. And I saw beneath those cheerful blooms.

They were impatiens, yes, but this time rendered with a sickening attention to what lay below the gaps in the dark, orderly tangle of leaves. These were not mere flowers, a homey portraiture of petals and sepals. No, in these paintings, Gran had used the blossoms to guard and highlight what crawled and twisted beneath, host after host of hideous, snaking worms, many of them deformed into multi-tentacled, many-headed monstrosities that nature surely never meant to allow.

I peered closer. I reached out a finger to touch the surface of the nearest painting, and there is a part of me that will swear to this day that those writhing worms turned toward me and reached, up and out, to meet my offered finger.

I jerked my hand away and backed up until I stood in the very center of the artwork circle. Perky impatiens blossomed on every sofa, chair and ottoman; they leaned against the bookshelves, they stood beneath the tarnished brass lamps, they sidled up to the cobwebbed legs of the stereo cabinet. From a distance of even a couple of feet, it was impossible to see the wormlike things beneath the leaves—but I knew, without even checking, that they infected every canvas, the perfect marriage of macabre and mundane.

So there I stood, encircled by that hellish floral gallery, spinning awkwardly this way and that, and wondering if I even dared ask my fingers and hands to make contact, to do the simple but suddenly dangerous work of replacing them back in the portfolio.

I might well have remained stranded there all afternoon, transfixed by those grisly flowerbeds, but then, their approach entirely unheard, Grandpa and Gran walked in, laden with grocery bags. Time did what it so often is accused of doing, and stopped.

Grandpa spoke first. “Nathan,” he said. “Why don't you help me unload the rest of the car?"

I don't believe I said a word, but I followed him outside and allowed Grandpa to fill my arms with the stiff paper grocery sacks. I trudged them into the house and avoided looking into the living room as I passed it, kitchen-bound. Grandpa brought in the remainder of the food and joined Gran in the living room. I put away what I could, leaving only the items that lived on upper shelves beyond my reach. And then I stood by the sink, still mute, awaiting what I assumed would be a whipping or worse. One never knew with grandparents, no matter how kindly; they were of a different generation, and my imagination insisted that their punishments would tend toward the corporal.

Not long after, they called me in. The paintings were gone, back in their portfolio.

"Sit down,” Grandpa said. “I want to play you something."

I sat on the sofa, maroon to match my mood, and I hugged my knees to my chin. Grandpa bent to the turntable atop the stereo cabinet and set the stylus on the edge of one of his faceless vinyl albums. I heard the faintest popping and hissing from the walnut speakers, and then a spray of sparkling piano. A violin joined in, and something deeper—a cello, perhaps. Grandpa closed the turntable's lid and stood up straight, head listing sideways. An admiring smile played across his face.

"Schubert,” he announced, very softly. “I think of it as sun chasing shadow, one after the other in endless succession, sweeps of light and dark playing across green and distant hills. Listen. Picture that, and let those other pictures fall away."

I listened. I imagined soft pastures, scattered flocks of sheep roaming verdant emerald moors. The music drifted from light to dark, just as Grandpa had said it would; it fled over my imagined landscape as if the notes themselves were scudding clouds and bolts of brilliant, rain-swept sun.