Читать книгу The Mighty Franks: A Memoir - Michael Frank, Michael Frank - Страница 10

The rhythms on Ogden Drive began to change. I still accompanied my aunt to Morning Time, but often—as often—we went to The Apartment together as a family, the five of us, my parents, my brothers, and me. We went on Sunday mornings after my father’s tennis game, and we went on Friday nights after dinner. “Let’s pop down to The Apartment for a few minutes,” my father would say. He was not a great instigator of plans; that job tended to fall to my mother or my aunt and uncle. It seemed to mean something, something significant, that he started directing us to The Apartment in this way.

Always, almost always, we found Huffy in bed, those gold flames leaping on the bedposts, books in tall uneven stacks on the table nearby. We would all pile into the second bed or sprawl on the floor or sit in the self-rocking rocking chair and tell her about our day or our week.

I found myself waiting for an invitation to sleep over, and when it didn’t come I finally took my mother aside one evening and asked her if it would be all right if I spent the night. She thought for a moment, then answered, “You’ll have to ask your grandmother.”

Her answer puzzled me. It was backward. Usually my grandmother asked me to stay, and then I had to ask my mother for permission.

When I approached Huffy’s bed, for no reason I could then explain, my face began to burn with embarrassment, and after I got the words out—with a stutter accompanying my hot red face—Huffy said, “Darling, perhaps not tonight. I think I may be too tired. But another time, certainly.”

I saw my parents exchange a look, and I saw my mother glance at her mother, who had come to join us but kept her distance, standing in the doorway as she often did, a dish towel in hand. Something was going on, but I had no idea what.

In the car as we drove back up into the canyon we were all quiet. Sad is what I was—sad and confused about why I appeared to have been cast out from the special protected garden that was Ogden Drive.

When my mother tucked me into bed that night, there seemed to be a glistening in her eyes, the very beginning of tears, as she said, “Huffy really was very sorry that she couldn’t have you stay. You understand that, don’t you?”

I nodded, but I didn’t understand at all.

I didn’t understand, but I did go on noting the things that I did not know how to put together. They were like scenes from a movie that had not yet been edited, or from a grown-up or foreign movie of the kind that my aunt and uncle preferred, only without the subtitles to help decipher their meaning.

I noted that on Saturdays now Sylvia began spending more time up in the canyon with us. This Sylvia was a different person from the Sylvia of The Apartment. She moved through our kitchen unmonitored, unjudged, unwatched, without competition and therefore at ease.

I noted that there was a change, too, in my grandmother’s—both my grandmothers’—midweek habits.

One of the few things that these two such disparate women had in common was that they had both begun working when they were very young and continued to work until they were very old. Twice a week, Sylvia took two long bus rides, first down Fairfax Avenue, then west along Pico, to a synagogue on the west side of the city, where she gave Hebrew lessons to bar and bat mitzvah students, thereby winding up in life as she had set out, as a teacher of her native tongue.

Most every weekday afternoon Huffy would drive herself to my father’s medical equipment business on South La Cienega Boulevard. She had a desk there and a job that my father had made—made up—for her in the early fifties after Louis B. Mayer had been fired as the production chief of MGM and was replaced by Dore Schary, who had a different approach that did not include giving story editors like Harriet senior so much power over the kind of material that was adapted into movies. My grandmother went from helping Katharine Hepburn try to persuade Mayer to let her appear opposite Garbo in Mourning Becomes Electra to keeping my father’s books, paying his bills, and answering his phone. This was quite a dramatic change of professional milieu and stature, but the point was to allow Huffy to maintain her financial independence and, perhaps more important, to keep her occupied.

Now when we went to visit my father at work, however, my grandmother was more and more often missing from her desk, until eventually her desk stopped being her desk and became a catchall for the flood of paperwork that came in and out of 1920 South La Cienega Boulevard. The only remaining trace of her in this workplace was the pencil cup I had made for her as an art project in school, its pens and pencils disappearing week by week as they were appropriated by other, more present employees.

Back on Ogden Drive I noticed that for the first time Huffy began to defer to Sylvia in the kitchen, handing over the responsibility for whole meals that, formerly, she would supervise down to the last thickened drop of gravy. Meanwhile she left her bed less and less. She spent much of her day reading, though her reading changed from the big classic novels that lined the shelves in her living room to paperback mysteries that it fell to my uncle Peter, my father and aunt’s older brother, who also read them, to bring her, a dozen at a time.

One book appeared by Huffy’s bed and never left: Adelle Davis’s Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit, which had scraps of paper poking out of its pages, marking important passages that contributed to the change in my grandmother’s diet. Now for breakfast in place of her own German pancakes (or Sylvia’s paler version) or scrambled eggs with bacon and toast, she ate wheat germ and yogurt. Or pungent cereals made of bran, lots of fruit, and weak tea. Lunches were simplified to clear broths. Dinners became lighter and packed with vegetables as she ate less and less meat, less and less period.

Instead of antiquing with my aunt, Huffy began shopping in her own house, as she put it, by rummaging around in cupboards and closets to introduce an object that had long been out of view. One day, more curiously still, I arrived at The Apartment and saw at once that all kinds of things were missing, a pair of lamps, two jade birds, even the Chinese ladies painted on mirrored glass. My grandmother noticed me noticing. “I’ve sent some things up the hill with your aunt,” she explained. “I don’t need them here anymore.”

“But when you sit in your chair, you won’t be able to see the portrait of Auntie Hankie reflected in the mirror behind the Chinese ladies,” I said, confused and also, for no reason I understood, unsettled by these changes.

“Ah, but I know so well what your aunt looks like all I have to do is close my eyes, and there she is.”

She demonstrated. Then smiled—half smiled.

Even Morning Time underwent a change. I was no longer banished while my aunt brushed and pinned my grandmother’s hair. Was it because I was a year older? Or because she was taking less care with the job now that my grandmother wasn’t going out as much as she had been before?

On these mornings I often sat on the floor, bent over my ever-present Académie sketch pad, the one with the brown cover on which there was the depiction of a hand holding a pencil (a right hand; I was a leftie), poised and ready, as I was, to draw. On one particular morning I decided to capture the scene playing out in front of me: my grandmother sitting up in bed over her breakfast tray, my aunt seated across from her in the self-rocking rocking chair, with her back to me. As I drew, the atmosphere in the room changed: the two hot-tempered Bergman women, despite never having a cross word between them, were exchanging many.

The subject was one of my aunt and uncle’s screenplays, which my grandmother had read and, evidently deploying some of her well-honed story editor’s skills, had found wanting. She was not hesitant to express her opinion, and my aunt, her voice rising higher and higher, was similarly unafraid to express hers in powerful contradiction.

“But you’re not following. If you cut all that backstory, you’ll never believe his behavior in the third act,” Hankie said in a voice whose firmness I had never before heard her use in conversation with her mother.

This voice was accompanied by a fist, raised and punching the air.

“There is too much static material in the story already,” my grandmother said. “Too much exposition. It’s confusing and slow. Your audience is sharp. You have to move them forward.”

“You haven’t read the original material. The suggestion is too radical.”

“It’s my take. A reasonable take, I would argue.”

They moved on conversationally, but the room still felt sharpened, anxious.

In my drawing I depicted my aunt’s right arm and clenched fist at four different heights, to indicate that it was gesticulating. A cloud of spark-like pencil strokes near her mouth suggested her raised voice. I thought the effect was very clever, and when it was finished I carefully tore the page out of the sketchbook and stood up to show it to her.

She looked at it for a moment. “It’s clear that your skills as an artist are continuing to develop, Mike,” she said flatly. “I’ll give you that.”

My grandmother asked to see the drawing. I took it from my aunt and presented it to her. She held it between both her hands and looked at it, then at me, then at my aunt. “This is a very accurate piece of work indeed,” she said. “The boy is so very perceptive, don’t you think?”

“Of course,” my aunt replied.

Later, when she went to clear away the tray, I saw that she had crumpled up the page and added it to the leavings of my grandmother’s breakfast. By accident, I told myself.

Around this time there was also a shift in daily life in the canyon. It started up so gradually that I could not say exactly when it happened that my uncle Irving began coming to our house to speak to my mother every single weekday afternoon at exactly four o’clock.

I would be sitting at my desk in my bedroom, well into my homework, when the scent of freshly brewed coffee floated up the stairs. Five or ten minutes later there would be the sound of a car parking out front, and just after that the front door would swing open as my uncle stepped into the house.

At first my brothers and I bounded down the stairs or in from the yard to see him. Irving was one of our favorite people, and it always felt like an event when he paid a visit. Not because, like my aunt, he came bearing presents or treats or had big plans but because of his attention and his spirit, the lightness of his spirit. Our uncle was avidly interested in whatever we boys had to say. From the moment he stepped out of his shoes (a lifelong habit of his whenever he walked through the front door—I am convinced your unc was Japanese in a former life!), he peppered us with questions about our day, our games, our friends, and later our reading and our schoolwork; he didn’t ask in order to evaluate or criticize or advise, as my aunt so often did, but simply because he was curious about us and entertained by us. And he loved us. The power of his attention was like a portable sunbeam, our own source of avuncular light.

But on these new afternoon visits Irving had not come to see us; or not to see only us. At the end of his time with my mother we would be invited to join them, but at the beginning he and my mother gave us strict orders to make ourselves scarce. They had grown-up matters to discuss, they said. Boring matters, they always added, that were not of any interest to children.

Danny and Steve obeyed agreeably—innocently, you might say—disappearing back into their schoolwork or their games. I was not so compliant. I was becoming experienced enough to understand that when grown-up matters were described as not being of interest to children, they were most probably the exact opposite. Also, for me, observing was beginning to evolve into something more active, more like eavesdropping, if not (yet) deliberate spying, though that would come with time.

The design of our house, with the staircase halfway open to the entry hall and the living room beyond, was a great help to me. I had heard interesting things from the stairs before. I always waited until I detected the murmuring coming up through the floorboards, his-hers, hers-his, back and forth in somber, subdued tones, before I slipped out into our carpeted upstairs hall, first along the landing, then slowly, very slowly, down the first step … then the second … then the third. I had learned early on that when you inched along you were less likely to cause the stairs to produce a revealing creak.

The murmuring clarified into recognizable words, then phrases.

I don’t know how much more of this she can take. I don’t know how much more of it I can take—

Dr. Irvine says there is a connection between the tension and the pressure in his eyes. He says Marty has to watch the glaucoma extra closely right now. I worry he’s going to go blind—

I’m concerned she’s going to have a heart attack. Or a car accident. She hasn’t slept through the night in more than six months. She screams whenever a spatula drops to the floor. Sometimes she wails in her sleep—

He doesn’t wail. He roars, like when he’s angry, but—

A creaking stair or a sound from the garden produced a sharp Red nisht, di kinder darfn nisht hern. But it was no good resorting to Yiddish, not that Yiddish, since I knew it meant they suspected someone—a kind—was there and were alerting each other to stop talking.

That’s when we would be invited to join them. I always waited a few minutes before hurrying, pretending, that is, to hurry down the stairs. When I skidded to a stop near my uncle’s chair he would look over at me with raised eyebrows that said, I know what you’ve been up to, Mike. But did he, really?

One evening in the middle of July 1969, all nine of us assembled at The Apartment. The living room had been transformed into a little theater: Huffy’s wing chair had been turned around to face the Zenith, and so had Sylvia’s low-slung Victorian chair. The dining room chairs had been brought in and lined up in rows for my parents and aunt and uncle. Open space was left for us children on the braided rug.

This, all this, created a sense of suspense. A Major World Event, my uncle called it; but he might as easily have said A Major Family Event, since it was the first time in a long time we had all gathered together in The Apartment.

We watched with the rest of America, the rest of the world. We watched and we waited. The screen was gray and granular, alternately dancing with lines and spotted, or pulsing. “It’s like when you have motes in your eyes,” my mother said. Time seemed to move very slowly as we listened to Walter Cronkite and waited patiently, then less patiently, for the hatch of the Eagle module to swing open. It seemed to take forever, yet no one got up for a drink of water or to stretch. We sat where we were, transfixed.

And then, finally, just like that, it happened. The hatch opened, and Neil Armstrong backed down the ladder and set his foot right there, on the white surface of the moon. We all watched in silence for several minutes. Everyone, and everything, grew even more still. It was as though all the eyes in the room were watching with us—the eyes in the portraits and in the Flemish mirror, the eyes of all the Chinese figures in the lacquer and on the porcelain …

Afterward Huffy angled around to face us children, and with a strong but also strangely glazed light in her eyes she said, “When I was born, boys, we still traveled by horse and buggy. Ice was delivered by a man in a cart. Radios and telephones were still newfangled inventions. Televisions—no one had even imagined them. Women couldn’t even vote—we couldn’t—” She made a small sweeping gesture in the air with her right hand. “I wonder if you can understand what it feels like for me to have lived long enough to see an astronaut walk on the moon.”

She turned her perfectly combed and pinned silver head back to the television screen. “The moon …”

At three o’clock in the afternoon on the first Friday in October the school bus dropped us as usual at the bottom of our hill, and as my brothers and I walked up to our house I saw that cars were parked in our driveway and all along the street nearby. It was the weekend our new dog was supposed to come live with us in the canyon. Something must have happened to the dog, I remember thinking. Something bad.

It’s a wonder how quickly the human mind—a child’s mind—can conjure a plausible story out of implausible facts, how the waking mind can think as magically as the dreaming mind; or—more simply—what a thick ten-year-old I was.

As we made our way along the path to the front door I saw Sylvia standing in the guest room window, peering around the curtain.

I saw my mother come out the front door and down the steps.

Behind her I saw a room full of people. Some I recognized as members of our extended family.

My mother led us to the backyard, where my father was standing next to our yellow kitchen chairs, which in my mind had jumped all by themselves from the kitchen to the garden, where they had arranged themselves in a semicircle on the lawn. This itself was dreamlike, or like something on a movie set. But no one was dreaming, or filming, or writing, now. My father was holding on to the back of one of the chairs; gripping it, as though the chair were keeping him upright.

“Boys,” he said, his voice breaking. “I have something to tell you.”

He paused to steady himself because his legs were shaking under his strong torso. My brothers had already dropped down into the yellow chairs, which had been placed there for this very purpose.

“Your grandmother—my mother—Huffy—”

That was as far as he got before his face liquefied.

For some time it was difficult to breathe. I was being held so tightly by my aunt and I was being rocked by her so vigorously, back and forth on the sofa in the guest room, that I had to steal gulps of air whenever I could. She was rocking herself, and me with her, and she was emitting wild howls, animal howls, that came up from somewhere so deep in her, so bottomless and broken, that I was afraid she was going to choke. She kept howling and sobbing and saying, “Huffy wouldn’t want us to cry, she would want us to be brave. That’s what she would want …”

I did not know what to feel, what I felt. It was impossible to find my own sensations in the face of all this raging grief of my aunt’s. Instead I became all eye, one big Cyclopsian eye; a dry eye, because how could any tears I might produce approach Hankie’s, how could they come anywhere near the sight of my father, the man who never cried, dissolving in the garden, becoming an un-father, a non-father, a creature I had never seen before?

Locked in my aunt’s embrace, I became aware of my mother standing in the doorway. On her face there was a look of alarm tinged with dismay. She was there, and then she disappeared.

Soon afterward my uncle came and detached me from my aunt’s grip.

My dry unblinking eye was free now to prowl over all the surfaces on Greenvalley Road, registering every detail that underlined the inside-outness of the day. It had started with the cars, and Sylvia in the window, and the yellow chairs in the garden; now it moved on to the chicken roasting in a stew of carrots and onions and beef consommé, a familiar scent that, at three o’clock in the afternoon, was as wrong as the dining room table covered in a good linen cloth and piled with pink bakery boxes from Benês’s. It was as wrong as the platter of deli meats nearby mummified under layers of plastic; as wrong as the vases of flowers jammed into water unarranged and still wrapped in their cellophane cones; as wrong as Aunt Baby and Aunt Trudy, Uncle Peter’s wife, sitting together on the sofa and holding hands, their legs crossed in opposite directions, their shoes shed onto the carpet beneath them; as wrong as our dark stairwell, which I climbed alone, leaving behind the living room full of people whispering and murmuring and crying; as wrong as my parents’ room, where even though it was still light out the door was closed (as wrong as that too) and where, when I cracked it ever so slightly open (wrong), I saw a body lying (wrong) in my parents’ bed, not on the left, which was my father’s side, or the right, which was my mother’s, but precisely in the center, a body, covered in a blanket and seen, as I was seeing it, severely foreshortened, like the Andrea Mantegna Christ in Famous Paintings, so that it was all chin and nose and nostril, to me a familiar chin and nose and nostril, my grandmother’s chin and nose and nostril, I would know them anywhere, at any time and from any angle; but why, why would they bring her body here, to this house, this room, this bed—

The nose exhaled, the chin ever so minutely quivered. Wrong!

I thought my chest would crack open and my heart bounce onto the floor. I scrambled down the stairs three at a time to find my mother and, choking on the words, asked her what—who—that was lying in her bed.

It took her a moment to absorb what I had said. Then she explained that it was my uncle Peter.

My uncle Peter, who shared some of his mother’s physiognomy. Her nose, her chin.

“He was up so early,” she added. “He went to deal with—matters.”

“Which matters?”

If my mother found it difficult to have a child who asked questions like this, she did not give any indication. Not usually; not then.

“With Huffy’s body,” she answered simply.

“What did he do with it? To it?”

“He arranged for it to be taken away and …”

“And?”

“My father did not believe it was what Jews should do. He believed their bodies should be buried.”

“I don’t understand.”

She put her hand on mine. “He arranged for your grandmother to be cremated.”

I looked at her, confused.

“That means incinerated. Burned instead of buried.”

I shuddered. “All of her?”

“All of her.”

“Has it happened—already?”

“I don’t know the answer to that. He took care of it. The logistics. That’s all I know.”

It was a lot to take in, a lot to put together. “When is the funeral?” I asked.

“Your grandmother didn’t want a funeral. Your aunt doesn’t want one either. And what your aunt wants …” She paused. “Huffy wished to be cremated, and then—then I don’t know what. It’s like she’s still here. I have a feeling it will be like that for a long time.”

If I was so very perceptive, how did I miss so much, how did I miss the central thing?

Was it because I was still just a child? Was it that? Or was it because the central thing had been hidden—purposefully, and with great care—from Huffy herself?

The central thing: this, too, was shared by my two grandmothers.

I had seen Sylvia’s chest deflate—her bra that is, under her dress. And I had seen her reach in to inflate it again, meaning arrange the pad bulked up with crumpled tissues that stood in for her flesh. And I had seen her bra on the hope chest, folded over on itself, its aggregation of padding and tissues peeking out from behind the skin-colored fabric.

No one had ever explained who had taken away a part (two parts) of her body, or why.

What with all that dressing and undressing happening behind closed doors, I had not seen anything equivalent to Sylvia’s deflating chest in Huffy, and nor had I put together all the signs of her changing habits and diminishing energies. What I learned I learned later. The Operation—the mysterious operation that established the ritual of Morning Time—turned out to be a double mastectomy that Huffy had had in October 1965. In 1968 she had a recurrence of the cancer and another surgery, after which the doctor came out from the operating room and told my father, my aunt, and my uncle Peter that he had been unable to remove it all; the disease had spread too far into her body.

“He shook his head,” my mother told me, shaking her own head as she conveyed this scene to me long after the fact. “With that one sentence everything was different … forever different …”

Improbable though it seems now, absurd, really, in view of who this woman was and what her mind and character were like, her children, working in collaboration with the surgeon and our family doctor, agreed—plotted—that very afternoon not to tell my grandmother the truth about herself, about her body, about her body’s fate. Instead they invented a diagnosis, rheumatoid arthritis, that would serve to explain her intermittent pain and weakening and require her to stay in bed for long stretches at a time, like one of her favorite writers, Colette.

For a brief time a stack of Colette’s novels appeared by my grandmother’s bed, in beautiful patterned-paper dust jackets, and my aunt talked about dear, darling Sido—Colette’s mother—and how she and Colette, like Madame de Sévigné and Françoise, were connected in the way that the two Harriets were, beyond mother and daughter, best friends; best friends for all time.

Yet there was something even stranger than this fabrication, this pretend diagnosis that my aunt and my uncle and my father and the doctors devised, and that was the fact that my grandmother went along with it, acting as though she weren’t dying so that her children could act as though she weren’t dying, even though she told a friend of hers, who later told my mother—who was like a great fishing net collecting all the stray, and many of the essential, pieces of information that helped convey the truth of these lives, or a far truer truth than the rest of these people lived by—that Huffy knew perfectly well that the cancer had metastasized and that she was mortally ill.

Everyone was acting, everyone was pretending; too many books had been read, too many movies seen (or conceived, or made). A family that had quite literally written, or story-analyzed, itself into a better, sunnier life, a life where everyone went by new names (and nicknames) and lived in a new or newly done, or redone, house in a new neighborhood in a new city, was unable to write itself out of death. No, not even the Mighty Franks could manage that.

The house filled up with more people.

I went upstairs and changed into a black turtleneck sweater, an article of clothing I wore only when we went skiing. Being unable to cry, I felt I had to find some way to participate, to show people, my aunt above all, that I, too, was upset. When I came downstairs again my mother took one look at me and said, “We don’t dress in black just because someone has died. That’s not who we are or what we do in this family.”

I was ashamed to have been seen through so clearly. I returned to my room and changed back into my school clothes.

I was coming down the stairs again when the doorbell rang. It was Barrie and Wendy, the girls who lived across the street and were our oldest and closest friends. They had come to see if my brothers and I were all right. Their eyes were red and swollen. They called Grandma Huffy “Grandma Huffy” too. But then we were practically related—that’s how we explained it when people asked what we were to each other, since we were so obviously something.

Barrie and Wendy nestled between my brothers and me chronologically, boy-girl-boy-girl-boy, oldest to youngest, tallest to shortest. We sometimes broke down into different pairs and configurations; sometimes we fought with one another, but mostly we adored each other. After school and during the summer, we were often inseparable, playing games and doing art projects and putting on shows together or playing handball or building forts up on the hill—my time with them constituted altogether the most, virtually the only, “normal” time in my childhood.

What practically related us was marriage. Trudy, their aunt, was married to Peter, my father and aunt’s brother and our “outlying” uncle (Herbert was the outlying uncle on my uncle and mother’s side but brought no parallel interlacing into our world); this meant that we had first cousins in common. It was a very Mighty Franks sort of situation and had not come about by accident, either. Trudy had worked as Huffy’s secretary for a time at MGM and had made a good enough impression on my grandmother that when Huffy finally became exasperated by Peter’s taste in women, who inevitably fell short, way short, of The Standard, she invited Trudy to dinner one Sunday and seated her next to her firstborn son. By dessert she had already nicknamed her Beaky, on account of her being tiny, birdlike, and apparently unthreatening, and declared her to be full of clever insights and perceptive conversation. And voilà: this, one of the earliest of my grandmother’s many stabs at matchmaking, became also the most easily realized.

Beaky, it turned out, had a younger brother, Norm, whom Huffy looked up when she traveled to New York on one of her scouting trips for the studio; finding Norm bright and congenial, she convinced him to move to Los Angeles after he finished high school, and she absorbed him, too, into the family, moving him into a spare bedroom for a while until she got him enrolled at UCLA and on his feet. Norm and my father became great friends; after my father moved to Greenvalley Road, he convinced Norm and Linda, his new wife, to move across the street; as before with Aunt Baby, my grandmother’s conjuring yet again expanded and tightened the family weave. And the girls and their parents would have been fully absorbed into our extended family except for one thing: for reasons we never understood, my aunt developed a seething dislike of Norm, Linda, and—especially—the girls. Even on this day of all days, all she had to do for her face to turn black with disapproval was take one look at Barrie and Wendy as they stepped tentatively into the living room to pay a sympathy call.

As the oldest of the five of us kids, I felt very protective of the girls, but there was no way I could shield them from my aunt’s dark look other than trying, and failing, to stand where I could block her view of them and theirs of her.

The girls seemed uncertain whether they should approach Hank or not. They went for not and received an embrace from Trudy, their aunt, instead.

Hank had moved into an armchair. She was no longer rocking back and forth, but then she didn’t have anyone to rock with her. She was still a magnet for everyone’s attention—she had no need for a black turtleneck, or a black anything else. The grief was just pouring off her, like rain. Was grief always like this? My aunt was undergoing a very private experience in a very public setting. Everyone was keeping an eye on her, wondering when she would again erupt. The room was taut with anticipation.

In the armchair she was sitting upright, talking to our family doctor. Her eyes had vanished behind her largest pair of sunglasses. My uncle was standing behind her with one steadying hand resting on her shoulder.

Dr. Derwin said, “I have never had a patient, or known a woman, quite like Senior. It’s hard to think of your family without her …”

From behind my aunt’s sunglasses tears began to shower across her cheeks as a sound formed itself deep in her chest. A moan came up out of her, and another, and soon she was howling again and trembling so violently that she slipped out of the chair. My uncle and the doctor drew in to catch her before she hit the floor.

Barrie came over to me and whispered, “I think we should go now.”

“Maybe you should,” I whispered back.

I walked them out. When I returned, my aunt was back in the chair, but she was still shaking.

In the kitchen my mother was on the phone speaking to Dr. Coleman, our pediatrician. “I don’t think it’s healthy for the children to witness such extreme grief,” she was saying into her hand, which was cupped around the mouthpiece.

Later that night, on Dr. Coleman’s advice, she would dispatch me for several days to the deep Valley, to my cousins. My brothers would be sent elsewhere, to similarly far-removed relatives.

“If you want me out of the house, why can’t I just stay at Barrie and Wendy’s?” I asked when she told me where I was to go.

“It’s not far enough away,” my mother said firmly.

I would never forgive my parents for that, for cutting me off from my own private source of oxygen, which was knowing. Knowing and noting.

My father had not yet come inside. I saw him through the large windows, standing at the edge of the lawn, looking out over the canyon, where daylight was slowly leaking from the sky.

I found Sylvia in the guest room. She was sitting patiently on the sofa, as if she had been waiting for me all this time. I sat down next to her, and she gathered me up in her arms. In her arms I could breathe.

“Are you going to die soon, Grandma?” I asked.

She gave me one of those knowing smiles of hers. “Not soon, my darling,” she said. “No, I’m not.”

“You promise?”

“Yes,” she said, “I promise.”