Spoonwood (19 page)

Grandma Persephone had your room across the hall gutted, remodeled, redecorated, and turned into “a guest room.” (Like
we need one more. And in fact we don't have guests.) One of the first things I did when I moved into the mansion was sneak into your room to experience your presence, but I didn't get a feeling or a telepathed message. Grandma Purse won't talk about why she cleaned out your things, but she does show me pictures of you as an infant, as a kid, and as a teenager—you died as a teenager. I cannot connect the you in those pictures with the you I have in my mind. Except for one. It shows you in your bathing suit when you were a lifeguard. Your long legs and muscular body thrill me in a way I cannot explain. I know that the real you is/was/will be the you in the water, swimming to save a life.

In Grandma Purse's grand bedroom is a door—locked—that leads to another room where her “personal effects” are stored, and I am not allowed inside. I promise never to go into that room, but I'm lying. You see, Mother, I am not a good person. In my heart I'm a spy. I want to spy into forbidden rooms, spy into twisted minds, spy into mysterious crevices where crawfish, scorpions, and other interesting creatures reside.

One of the first things Grandma Purse does is have me tested to see if I am, as she puts it, “of sound mind and body.” I score one out of two. My body is sound. Grandma Purse and I meet with my therapist, a Dr. Lester Mendelson, to discuss my evaluation.

Doctor Mendelson, affectionately known as Mendy by his friends and Doc Mendy by his patients, has an office in Keene, but he only goes there once a week. He prefers to see his patients at his home, one of the new houses built on the slopes surrounding Grace Pond. The house has a flat roof, big windows, and several decks on three different levels. Inside, the walls and ceiling are painted off-white, the floors tiled like a black-and-white checker board. Abstract paintings that look like gasoline swirls on a street puddle hang on the walls. Other features include sculptures of curved metal and glass tables held up by stainless steel legs. We sit on plastic chairs with a minimum of padding. I ask about the house, and Doc Mendy says something I don't quite get. Sounds like “Foam follows function.” Doc Mendy's wife, Madeline—“Maddy”—used to be an art director for a magazine in New York. These days she's a consultant and
goes to People Central two days a week to consult. I don't see her much. They have two daughters both in prep school, so I don't see them either. The Mendelsons' goofy golden retriever, Rorschach, has his own quarters in the yard.

Doc Mendy sits with crossed ankles in a rocking chair while Grandma Purse and I sit knock-kneed at opposite ends of a couch. Doc Mendy has long hair like a hippie out of ancient times. I remember when Dad had long hair and a beard. He looked like a Sasquatch. Doc Mendy looks like a street mime wearing a lion's-mane wig.

“Birch has a very high IQ, and for someone with no formal education he's surprisingly well-read and well-informed,” Doc Mendy says, looking at the report in his hands. “He is mildly dyslectic. In his writings he sometimes confuses one word for another, especially common expressions. For example, on our test instead of writing animal, he wrote lamina; intents and purposes came out intensive porpoises. He claims to have memories going back to birth, and he supports these claims by supplying intimate details and conversations from these early periods.”

“Is it possible that he really does remember conversations between the Elmans before he could actually speak or understand language, or that, more extraordinarily, he remembers his actual birth?” Grandma Purse asks.

“It's more likely he gained most of the information from third-party sources.”

“You mean his father told him stories, and he internalized them as his own,” Grandma Purse says.

“Exactly,” Doc Mendy says—“exactly” is Doc Mendy's favorite word—“but we mustn't discount all of his stories. I'm sure he does remember further back and in greater incident than 99.9 percent of the population. You must understand that total recall is a sign of hysteria. It's possible that his birth trauma marked him early. A baby's brain is a powerful computer. He might well have absorbed conversations as the equivalent of digital bits and bytes. Later, when he learned language, he was able to decipher his memory data to make meaning of them. From birth to age three, Birch took in a lifetime of information. From
age three to the present his processing power has been more or less normal. Indeed, his more recent memories are murkier than most people's.”

“What does the future hold?”

“Because of his negative attitude toward children he will probably have a difficult time relating. Also, because his diction and body language are so much like an adult's, children will have difficulty relating to him.”

Grandmother Purse suddenly jumps to her feet. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“I'm sorry, I cannot permit . . .”

Grandma Purse wheels around and jabs her bony finger in Doc Mendy's direction. “With all due respect, fuck you, Doctor. I paid big money for this evaluation, and I have to smoke.” She lights a Kool and begins to pace. I love watching Grandma Purse when she is in full Persephone mode. She's like a dragon.

Doc Mendy is not scared of Grandma Persephone, not too much anyway. He's used to dealing with crazy people. “Okay, all right,” he says with a smile.

“You're telling me that his father has so screwed him up that this boy has had no childhood?” Grandma Purse's face reddens, which is how she gets when the subject of Dad comes up.

“Exactly. In essence he's neither a child nor an adult, but a kind of hybridized juvenile. Bottom line: He'll likely have problems adjusting to school and social situations.”

“The brats will eat him alive.”

“Exactly. Plus the fact that he's so far advanced in reading and computation skills he's sure to be bored. Also, culturally, he's in a different world, never having been to a movie or watched television.”

“I'll school him myself,” Persephone says, very excited. In fact, she's excited in the same way that Dad was when he decided to educate me in his own way.

Cousin Katharine and I meet twice a week to study the “y” stuff—astronomy (my favorite), biology, botany, geology (her
favorite), and chemistry (nobody's favorite); along the way she throws in some algebra and calculus. Katharine is all business. She gives me tests, grades my papers, and makes comments. I'm studying the same material as her college students. It's not all that difficult. It's just boring.

What's not boring is Katharine's life. I learn about it in bits and pieces from her and from Grandma Purse. Katharine's mother was Persephone's kid sister. They called her Flower. She was even prettier than Persephone, but impulsive and, by my estimation, kind of stupid. She gave away all the money from her trust fund to a guru who eventually left America with his fortune and returned to his home in India.

Flower had a number of lovers, but her favorite—and Katharine's dad—was Nigel Ramchand, a steel band musician from Trinidad. Katharine says that her father bragged that the blood of all the races of the earth ran through his veins—East Indian, African, European, Native Carib, and Asian. Her parents never married, but they were together for ten years on a commune. Turns out that Katharine and I both lived on Forgot Farm. She remembers her mother sitting on the stone wall in the sunlight and singing “we shall overcome” to her. It was that wall that started Katharine on to a career in social geology. Katharine also remembers her father telling her the news that her mother had died. She had taken drugs, danced half naked in a cold rain at an outdoor concert, and perished, maybe from the drugs, maybe from exposure. No one was sure.

After Katharine's mother died the commune fell apart. The guru took his American dollars to India, and Katharine went to live with her father in his native Trinidad. When Katharine was seventeen Nigel Ramchand went to Guyana to entertain gold miners. There was a raid by revolutionaries, and he disappeared. Katharine's not sure whether her dad was killed or joined the revolutionaries. Katharine left Trinidad and enrolled at Tulane University in New Orleans.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Sturtevant's son, Walter Jr., a Vietnam War vet with a plate in his head, bought the land to build his dream cabin on, but because of mental illness and finally death he never lived on his property. He did pay
the taxes on it until he died. Dad used to say that the government taxes everything—even dreams.

I respect Katharine as a teacher, because she knows so much and tries to help, but she's not much fun.

By contrast, classes with Grandma Purse are an adventure. We meet every weekday morning for “school” in her bedroom. Grandma Purse stays in bed for most of the day. It's a huge four-poster bed, complete with canopy. Grandma Purse sits fully dressed at the head of the bed, propped up by pillows, a tray beside her. Soapy brings her black chicory coffee all morning and homemade doughnuts from a recipe Soapy got from Katharine, who got it from the cafe DuMonde in New Orleans. Grandma Purse drinks her black brew. I drink Ovaltine. We both eat doughnuts. They are delicious.

Grandma lets me read any book I want in the house library, but I'm required to write up book reports and discuss them with her. Most of the time this exercise is pretty easy, because Grandma Purse hasn't read the book. When I ask why anybody would buy books and not read them, she tells me that in her family books were considered decorator items. We cover the topics in the official home-schooling packet, and we are done by eleven o'clock, and I am allowed to do whatever I want for the rest of the day. Like Dad, Grandma Purse is permissive, though in a different way. With Dad I wasn't allowed to stray too far, but Grandma Persephone lets me roam the estate at will. Which I do and then some.

We have another educational session in the evening. Grandma Purse makes herself a giant martini with one olive, and she lectures me on what she calls “life.” On nice days we sit outdoors in the garden. On cold days we sit around the fireplace. She likes the fire, because she can throw her cigarette butts into the flames. For the first couple years I whittle spoons while Grandma talks. Sometimes Katharine, who drinks white wine, joins us, but not usually. Katharine always has something to do. Grandma Purse says Katharine's way of getting over the death of her fiance, Garvin Prell, is to keep busy.

“Today we will talk about the dirty little secret of our society.” Grandma says to me one day. She always says “we,” but “we” don't say much. She pretty much talks on, and I pretty much listen, or pretend to.

“People are born into and/or slip and slide into five social class categories revolving around the most important thing in American affairs. Guess.”

“Love?”

“No.”

“Family?”

“No.”

“God?”

“No.”

“Cars?”

“Close.”

“Books?”

Grandma Purse bursts into laughter.

“The most important thing in American affairs is the big M. People today are willing to go on national television and discuss their sex lives, their addictions, their relationships, even their weight problems, but there is one thing they do not talk about. The dirty little secret is money. People might speculate on how much money others make, but they'll never reveal their own finances, unless to brag or lie. Young people pretend not to care about money, but that's only because somebody else is paying their bills. Once they pay their own way, they become obsessed like everybody else. The older a person, the more obsessed over money.

“The social class categories I want you to memorize include: Old Money, New Money, Funny Money, Hunger Money, and No Money.

“Most people from Upper Darby come from Old Money. You, my boy, are half Old Money. Remember that until your dying day. I've already arranged a trust fund for you, which officially makes you Old Money. It was Old Money that helped me gain custody of you. Old Money works through the unlisted phone numbers of judges, bankers, legislators, and corporate
boards. Some of us are dyed in the wool conservatives, and some of us are wooly-minded liberals, except when it comes to the issue of Money, capital M. The problem with Old Money is the same problem as Old Age: slippage.

“It happened to me. During that awful period when I lost my husband and your mother and was forced to go down under to regain my wits, I learned that your grandfather had squandered the family fortune in establishing his land trust. Through persistence and minor criminal activity I was able to find that loophole in his damn land trust and sell off the Grace Pond property to those crooks from Belgium and restore our financial stability. Old Money I was born into, Old Money I will die.

“The largest category is Hunger Money. These people vary from that Massachusetts bastard, Selectman Lawrence Dracut, to your—pardon my French—dumbfuck grandparents, the Elmans, and even, bless his bleeding heart, Doc Mendy. They have enough money, but they crave more. They work themselves sick to get money, and then they spend it on things they don't want and don't need so they can feel hungry again, because deep down it's that hunger for money that brings meaning to their lives. Witness perfectly secure senior citizens buying lottery tickets. The Hunger Money people are never satiated. They live off their craving.

“Once in a while Hunger Money persons acquire so much money they can't spend it without gross effort. The Hunger Money folk now become New Money. New Money are the richest of us all. They also have the worst tastes, the worst habits, and the worst philosophies. These people rule. Any questions?”

“What's Funny Money?” I ask.

“Glad you asked,” Grandma Purse said. “Funny Money people gain their wealth through illegal and extra-legal means. They include the mafia, drug lords of various stripes, Wall Street bunko artists, but also smaller fry, from building contractors to income tax cheats. The Funny Money crowd makes up a huge percentage of all the other categories, but they won't admit it. If they ever formed a political party they'd win in a landslide. Without Funny Money success is darned near impossible in the USA. Some
of your ancestors on the Salmon side made their fortunes as Funny Money entrepreneurs, but not on my side of the family. The Butterworths have been Old Money since the Middle Ages. We're pure.