The Astor Orphan (18 page)

Courtesy of Ralph Gabriner

B
oxes of books suddenly appeared in the third-floor hallway outside our apartment. There were so many of them that we could hardly pass. Old Cousin Chanler had just died. His death had left Dad with quite a funeral story, and Uncle Harry with additional archives for his Rokeby collection.

Mom had been ordered to vacate the billiard room—which had served as her bedroom for many years—to make space for these new Chapman archives. Dad and I would be moving into two of the old storage rooms, which Dad would renovate, to make space for Mom.

“Your uncle wants to keep history about that branch of the family away from strangers,” Mom joked, seemingly unperturbed that she'd been displaced.

I
WENT DOWN TO
Maggie and Diana's part of the house, as usual, to borrow some of their domestic stability. I found them in the middle room, reading together in their father's leather recliner.

I picked up an old Talbots catalog that was hanging out of their magazine rack. “Let's look at Talbots. Shove over.” I squeezed into the recliner next to my cousins and opened the catalog.

“I call
her
,” I said as I pointed at the model I wanted to be. She was, of course, the most glamorous one on the page.

“Not fair,” Maggie complained. “How come you always get to be the prettiest?”

“Because I'm the oldest, and I know the most.”

“I call
her
, then.” Maggie was always the red ribbon behind my blue. And Diana happily accepted third place.

“And she is Anna.” We assigned an older model to our absent cousin Anna, who was overseas and had no say in the matter.

Suddenly, a burst of agitation came from their kitchen. Aunt Olivia was crying, and Uncle Harry's voice was growing louder.

Then both grown-ups rushed through the middle room, Aunt Olivia scurrying on her husband's heels.

“How could this have happened on a school trip?” my aunt sniffled, holding a napkin next to her nose.

Uncle Harry, wearing his official-business face, said nothing.

They blustered quickly down to my parents' kitchen, from which came more moaning and caterwauling. Then Uncle Harry spoke, sounding like Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg address.

“. . . might be the greatest tragedy this generation has endured . . .”

We rushed to the top of the staircase that curled down to the old pantry outside my parents' kitchen so we could eavesdrop.

Behind us hung Uncle Bob's sinister painting of Death, on a canvas about ten by fifteen feet. In it, a skeleton played the flute to the marching of pilgrims up the mountains of their respective religions. In the dim light, the whole canvas looked totally black.

We tried to make out the phrases between Aunt Olivia's sobs.

“. . . on a ski trip . . . neck's broken . . . may never walk again . . .”

“It's Ben,” Maggie whispered, wide-eyed, violently gnawing on her thumbnail.

Diana whimpered. “Ben's going to die. . . .”

“Where is Ben now?” We could hear Dad ask.

“Mass General,” Uncle Harry answered. “We're going to drive up to Boston tonight. . . . The girls can stay at Mommy's house. But just for tonight, so as not to alarm her this late, they'll have to stay with you on the third floor.”

“Let's go back up to the middle room before they find us here,” I suggested. We quickly reopened the Talbots catalog as if we hadn't heard a word. Except that Diana was now moaning.

The air was tinged with the excitement of a big event, as it must have been when the ambulance had come to rescue Grandma Claire from her bloody vomit.

Later that evening, Diana came up to our apartment in her pajamas, dragging along a torn mini patchwork quilt that she called her “little blankie.” She didn't speak, but rather stared at all of us: Mom, Dad, Maggie, and me, sitting in a row on the green leather sofa.

My parents had never hosted Maggie and Diana before. The only time my cousins ever came up to our apartment was to play with dolls in my room. I believed that their parents didn't think our apartment was a suitable environment for their children. They were the respectable family. Thus, I would eat with Aunt Olivia and Uncle Harry and go on trips with them, but their girls never ate with us or accompanied us to the movies or the A & P.

Diana's face wrinkled up as she started to cry.

“What does the kid want now?” Dad asked nobody in particular.

The next day, Maggie and Diana settled in at Grandma Claire's house. Maggie slept on the rock-hard horsehair mattress in the peach-colored guest room. Diana slept on the daybed in the long front room. We all lived in a mood of frozen dread, not knowing how long Aunt Olivia would remain with Ben in Boston, how long Maggie and Diana would remain at Grandma Claire's, or when to expect Grandma Claire's next relapse.

I only caught snippets of information about the accident. From what I gathered, Ben had been skiing when he broke his neck. Now he was paralyzed from the waist down. What made him a quadriplegic was the fact that, as Uncle Harry explained it, he also had lost all fine motor function in his hands. None of us had been permitted to go up to see him, but I imagined him broken and stretched out in traction on a hospital bed, wrapped, mummylike, in bandages.

Shortly after Ben's accident, Aunt Olivia decided to buy Cousin Chanler's red ranch house, which would be easier for Ben to navigate in his wheelchair, and which had been subdivided from the rest of the Chapman estate after Chanler's death. They would move in when Ben returned from the hospital. In the meantime, Uncle Harry was always at work, Aunt Olivia was living in Boston with Ben, and Maggie and Diana were staying at Grandma Claire's. This left Uncle Harry's part of the big house empty, with the feeling of a place that had been abruptly evacuated.

It was now Uncle Harry's family that had become fragmented. This would have been the perfect moment for my family to move into the spacious back of the house. What stopped us from claiming it, now that Uncle Harry and Aunt Olivia were away and planning to move to Cousin Chanler's old house for good?

Fear and indebtedness stopped us. Uncle Harry had always had more de facto rights and authority than his older brother. And while, in some ways, Dad was a rebel, he was terrified of Uncle Harry and would never openly defy him.

I knew that if I suggested moving to Mom, she'd echo Grandma Claire: “What do you have against your aunt and uncle that you want to steal their space away from them? Can't you be just a little bit grateful for all they've given you?”

We would never ask for more.

Courtesy of Ania Aldrich

B
y late December, I was walking between the big house and Grandma Claire's at least once a day, in search of warmth, food, and company. Like a Gypsy, I'd carry my luggage with me—violin, homework, music stand, and clothes—with the expectation of sleeping over. Each time I was sure that I'd find peace and productivity in the warm, familial environment of Grandma's house. Each time I was disappointed.

I redoubled my efforts to enforce order. With Maggie and Diana's parents away, I armed myself with an agenda for my young protégés. I had Diana, a first-year Suzuki violin student with Mrs. Gunning, on a strict practice schedule: twenty minutes per day.

“Okay. Let's get the violins out.” Diana and I would open our violin cases on the cast-iron guest bed. “First we do what?”

“Tighten the bow.”

“Good.” Each of us would turn the small, metal screwlike part at the bottom of the “frog,” or base of the bow, to tighten the horsetail hairs.

“Now what?”

Diana shrugged, her lips pursed, her eyes looking down at the floor, reminding me of my “conferences” with Aunt Olivia, but with a different cast and story line.

“We have to rosin the bow.” As we rubbed the horsehair over the hard, amber-colored rosin, it squeaked and sent dust flying.

I enjoyed being the teacher.

“Okay, now let's tune.”

“I can't tune myself.”

“Oh, all right. I'll do it for you, but you do need to learn how.” I would try to move the sticky black tuning pegs on her tiny quarter-size violin. “Okay, let's go over ‘Lightly Row.' First play it for me.”

She would scratch it out, plunking her fingers down mechanically. I'd roll my eyes. “This sounds bad. Try not to press the bow so much against the string. And relax your hand.”

She would try again. Her half brother was half dead, her parents were away, and her overbearing older cousin was forcing her to relax her muscles for a less pressed sound. She did not relax.

Diana had kept quiet throughout this ordeal with Ben, though I imagined that she felt trapped at Grandma Claire's. Her soft skin had become blemished and oily, as had her hair, which appeared to go unwashed for weeks at a time. She had black owl eyes with swollen circles around them. Yet I envied the fact that she could show her sorrow. Unlike me, she apparently did not feel the need to maintain a façade of nonchalance.

Maggie suffered too, and again, not in silence. She would howl in her bed every night, knowing that she couldn't go home to her parents. Maggie cried easily; she would even bawl freely at sad movies. I envied her ability to cry out loud, unembarrassed. But most of all, I envied the attention Grandma Claire lavished on both of them. I understood even then that the ease with which they showed their feelings came from an innate sense of security, an earned faith that their pain wouldn't be ignored by the grown-ups in their lives.

“No. Listen as I play it. Then try to imitate. Imitation is the basis of the Suzuki method.”

She tried again. More scratch. This time she missed some notes. I felt myself tense up. Lenience, encouragement, and patience were eluding me.

“No. Check the notes. You're doing it wrong.” As her sound and intonation deteriorated, I swirled into a rage. “Why can't you get it right?”

I was angry at my mother for never supervising my violin practice, at my father for ruining our nuclear family, at Aunt Olivia for mocking me, at Aunt Liz for taking my dollhouse and making me feel I had no part of Rokeby, at Uncle Harry for humiliating Dad, and at Grandma Claire for choosing the bottle over me.

Small, obedient Diana was the only person I could safely abuse with my fury, and as I yelled at her, it grew.

“No! No! No!” I hurled my own violin bow across the guest room. Diana's face wrinkled up, and she ran out of the room. When I went to retrieve my bow I saw that I had chipped the wooden tip.

“What have you done to her?” Grandma Claire rushed out of her kitchen, gritting her teeth and glaring at me like a wild dog, certain that I was bullying “this poor child,” who was “practically an orphan.”

If anything, sobriety, grim and real, had made Grandma Claire meaner and edgier. The clouds in her eyes had dissipated.

“Leave this house at once! I won't have you torturing your poor cousins. You know they have nowhere else to go!”

Every time Grandma Claire turned on me, I'd trust her a little less. Didn't she understand that I too was a child? And yet, what I resented most as I was getting kicked out of Grandma's house again was the way she had undermined my authority as a teacher and parental figure.

I grabbed my reversible blue/red puffy down vest. Banished, I wandered out into the blue wintry dusk, toward the ice-encrusted field north of the farm road.

They'd be sorry if I died
.

I stumbled over the frosty surface of the snow. As my feet broke through the crust again and again, the powder underneath drifted into my shoes and chilled me with the cold and wet.

My eyes burned, but I could not cry.

The first time I ran away from home, I was three. I had just been punished by Mom for pushing the cork inside her treasured brown-glass bottle—rendering it unusable. She grabbed a leather belt and folded it. “You want the belt?” she asked me in Polish. Then she snapped it under my nose with a loud crack. “You smell the belt?” At which point I took off like a jackrabbit through our attic apartment. Although she chased me—over beds, under tables, around chairs—she couldn't catch me before I escaped into the cavernous halls and stairwells that lay like their own wintry landscape outside the walls of our apartment. Later, when things had settled down and while she was taking a bath, I furtively packed some things into my shiny, round aquamarine suitcase, put on my pink satin nightgown and slippers, and walked out into the snow. When I found Dad at Sonny's house, I asked him to call our friends the Johnsons to see if they would foster me for a while.

To me, Bob Johnson's family epitomized middle-class normalcy. They had a quaint yellow Victorian house near our church, with clean orderly rooms and a color TV. They ate meals together as a family. The boys—self-confident and comfortable with who they were—played baseball. Their mother had domestic skills; in fact, she had reupholstered several armchairs for Grandma. When I was little, I would sleep over at their house as often as I could to experience a peaceful and healthy family life without daily fights and power struggles.