The Astor Orphan (14 page)

Courtesy of Charles Tanguy

D
ad kept his Rokeby dream alive, in part, by maintaining a semblance of the former farm. He grew corn and hay, he harvested and mowed the fields, and he kept farm animals: a pig, a horse, and two goats.

Working within his limited resources, Dad had to be creative about keeping these animals. His giant pig, Egbert, ate the rancid pie dough discarded by the local pie factory. He lived in the old cement icehouse, which had been used to store ice cut from the frozen river before the advent of electric freezers. Dad almost never let the pig outside to eat. Instead he boarded up the large rectangular entrance to the icehouse with a slab of plywood, which he would slide open and reach around to drop in the pie crust. Whenever I asked Dad if I could get a peek at the pig, which had taken on legendary proportions in my mind, he'd respond, “If the board gets moved over too much, seeing the light might cause him to charge. And he is big!” Whenever I passed the icehouse, I'd imagine the mad, massive pig charging through its barricade, impaling me with its giant tusks.

Dad had rescued his goats from a laboratory. The research they'd been subject to had left them with plastic intestines. Dad kept the goats in the yard of the milk house surrounded by a makeshift chicken-wire fence and fed them, among other things, aluminum foil from our TV dinners. “They'll eat anything. Watch this!”

It made Grandma furious that Dad kept goats when he couldn't feed his own family.

G
RANDMA ALSO HATED
that Dad kept a horse named Cricket—his favorite pet—and often threatened to euthanize the animal.

She would rationalize: “You don't feed that creature properly. That horse is all bones, half dead already.”

To save Cricket from his mother, Dad secretly brought him to live in Cousin Chanler Chapman's barns. As I got older, the horse began to take on a tragic aspect, banished as a proxy for Dad.

Aunt Olivia, on the other hand, kept four horses in Rokeby's stables. She gave horseback riding lessons in the lower field below the big house, where she would stand with her long black whip in the middle of the track created by the horses' hooves and shout instructions to students in the ring around her. She was often dressed in beige riding britches and black riding boots.

Aunt Olivia's horses included a sixteen-year-old bay, a palomino, and two white ponies. The bay had
dignitas
. He was very tall, with a black mane and tail. Sometimes I would see him get into kicking fights with the palomino out in the pasture, and I'd wonder why Cricket couldn't be out there with those horses, rather than penned up alone inside a dark stall all day.

Sometimes, I'd go with Dad down to Cousin Chanler's empty barn to feed the lonely horse. Cricket's rarely brushed coat was usually caked with mud.

“Good boy.” Dad would pull a soft dirty carrot out of his pants pocket and hold it out on his flattened palm, while Cricket's fuzzy lips nipped at it, leaving a bit of drool on Dad's palm.

O
NE AUGUST EVENING
, Dad entered our kitchen wearing—beneath the usual layer of motor oil, dust, and sweat—an unfamiliar pall. In his hair were stray pieces of hay, and his gray eyes had the cold, open stare of an Arctic wolf.

“What did Grandma do with Cricket?” I knew only what anyone from the family would know: if Cricket was missing, the only explanation was that Grandma had made good on her threat to put the horse down.

Dad bore down on me.

“Where's Cricket?”

He expected me to give him a straight answer. But would he have given me a straight answer if I'd asked him about his relationship with Giselle?

“I'm not sure,” I answered.

Dad rushed off. His steady footfall, which usually thundered through the front hall, had been replaced by something faster and lighter.

W
HEN I WENT
down to Grandma Claire's for church the next morning, she was standing on the front stoop calling her white Labrador retriever.

“Bi-aan-ca! Yoo-hoo! Here, girl . . .” She shook some dry dog food into a metal bowl. “Yoo-hoo. Bianca!” She whistled. “Oh, good morning, dear! Have you seen Bianca? It's the strangest thing! I don't know where she could have gone.”

We both knew Bianca wasn't capable of going far. She was very overweight because Grandma Claire fed her three times a day.

Grandma Claire moaned plaintively.

“Oh, dear me . . .”

That Sunday afternoon, in the hot August sun, Mom and I took a walk on the dusty farm road to look for Bianca. Nature had grown still, as if holding its breath. The fields were brown with dead grass.

I looked hard, half-expecting to see the fat white Lab drinking from the stream by Grandma Claire's house, a canine ghost amid the dark green foliage.

Suddenly, a magnificent ball of orange rose over the roofs of the barnyard, as if the sun were rising at the wrong time and in the wrong place, its edges blurring and blending as they expanded outward.

“Holy smokes!” I exclaimed. “What's that?” I'd never seen so much fire. Mom and I both started running toward it. “Maybe it's the yellow house.” It seemed an appropriate end for Sonny Day, with his heliophilic name, to be cremated by the sun itself.

“It's too far north to be the creamery.”

“Maybe it's the greenhouse.” Once all glass, the original Rokeby greenhouse had been converted into a residence by Dad in the late 1960s, with the help of a Bulgarian named Boris, who was known for his dramatic recitations of Poe's poem “The Raven” in Bulgarian.

Mom and I soon found the tenants congregated at the top of the hill.

The lower barn—a solid three-story gambrel-roofed barn—was on fire. Eaten by flames, it was mesmerizing: melting, dying with more fanfare than it had ever known in its lifetime. The lower barn had always been a dark place, its floors lined with loose straw, smelling of death. It had never been alive with animals in my time, only dead with skeletons of cattle in some of the stalls. Abandoned, it felt to me as if it had already been dead for years.

“Save it, damn it!” Uncle Harry suddenly torpedoed through the crowd, sweating in his suit and tie. “I'll catch whoever's responsible for this!” He ran down the hill toward the barn with one hand in the air, his index finger pointing upward like a torch-bearing messenger rushing between villages with urgent news. Then he suddenly disappeared from view.

“He's fallen into Ted's ditch!”

The ditch, which Dad had been digging since spring, was like a moat around a fortress, making the lower barn inaccessible to fire trucks. While it saved Uncle Harry, it doomed the barn.

Good-bye, old barn.

A
FTER THE FIRE
, Bianca returned to Grandma's, looking thinner. One-armed Roy had found her locked in one of the junked cars out in our woods. The cars, thirty in all, were lined up, hoodless and paintless, with tires strewn about, pools of broken glass next to some.

In the wake of Cricket's disappearance, only Dad had a motive for locking Bianca in a junked car.

“Did you know anything about this?” Grandma asked me.

I was caught in the middle. I had seen revenge in Dad's face when he asked me about Cricket, and I'd sensed that rage had temporarily transformed him, but did that make me an accomplice?

“No!” I said defensively. I felt accused by her knowing look: her lips pursed in annoyance, her eyebrows furrowed, her eyes glaring at a slight angle over the rim of her glasses. She could get a false confession out of me if she glared at me this way for long enough.

But instead, Grandma Claire turned the criticism against herself, because someone had to take the blame. “I must have done something wrong to deserve such a son. . . . Well, I'll be dead soon, anyway. Then you'll all be rid of me.”

Grandma Claire would often say this, hoping it would get us to repent and mend our ways.

Despite her implied resignation, Grandma retaliated anyway, by disposing of Dad's goats. For the time being, exactly how and where she disposed of them remained a mystery.

By mid-August, any semblance of structure and practice—my pillars of sanity—had blown away like napkins at a garden party. Swimming lessons had come to an end. I'd stopped following my to-do list. Mrs. Gunning had gone away on vacation, so my practice record sat dry and empty.
Month of August: no progress whatsoever
.

Unprotected by work, I was consumed by the darkness.

It was therefore a great relief when Giselle's husband, Jacques, arrived on our doorstep—just days before our annual Rokeby square dance. Finally an authoritative adult had decided to intervene in our chaotic lives.

He charged into our kitchen, wearing a dress shirt and tie, presumably on his way home from work. “
Un mot, monsieur, s'il vous plait
,” he said to my dad. He ignored Mom and me, adding only, “
En privé
.”

Dad led the way, through the windowless pantry, redolent of tuna and chicken cat dinners; past the giant cupboard that stored the green-and-gold-rimmed Astor china; past the portrait of John Jay Chapman, the tapestry of Pompey, and the engraving of George Washington. Jacques was at his heels, a full head shorter, with a square frame, an inflated chest, and hunched, rounded shoulders. With his multiple chins tucked into his neck, he was a bulldog of a man.

All I could hear through the door was a fast stream of incomprehensible words, with an emphasis every fifth word or so, like small gunshots. The conversation was clearly one-sided. I felt humiliation for Dad as he got a severe scolding. But did he feel it? I wondered. Later, Mom reported that after Jacques had given Dad an earful in French, he had slapped Dad hard enough to give him a bloody nose. I imagined Jacques challenging Dad to a duel, to defend his French honor, and Dad explaining that it would be impossible just now, as none of his weapons were currently in working order. Aside from the collection of rusted swords in cracked, crumbling leather sheaths in the front library, Dad had only various shotguns that he used for hunting.

He used one of these to kill a pig for the square dance.

Courtesy of Sarah Stitham

D
ad had started up our tradition of an annual square dance in the early seventies. It included a potluck picnic, but Dad provided the meat. Every year, he would buy a small live pig several days in advance.

This year, we kids peered in to see the pig lying down on the backseat of a crashed-up, tire-less 1968 Volvo that had been lying around the barnyard for some time. The animal's grotesquely fat belly heaved as it panted.

“Here, piggy, piggy, pig! Awww.”

It stuck its snout toward us and sniffed the air through the crack in the window. The flaps of its snout around the nostrils wiggled visibly. We tapped the glass, laughing.