“So it’s all right? You don’t mind if I go live there?”
“Why not? There are sure to be scorpions,” he added. “It will probably be infested, by now.”
“Of course,” said my grandmother, as if she were merely confirming a plan she’d made herself.
I had gone to visit her in Pearl River; we were walking together in her neighborhood, and Grandma, never one to follow the path laid out for her, cut a corner across the grassy embankment between two sidewalks. When she’d gone half the way, she stopped still. “Just promise me one thing,” she said. I stopped, too, and waited for her to catch her breath. Her trip to France with me had indeed been her last. Now she avoided airplanes and generally strayed no farther than the ShopRite a couple of blocks from her house, or down to the park and the library, and then only by foot.
“What?”
“Don’t come home.”
“Don’t come home? Of course I’m coming home—”
“For my funeral,” she cut in, “or, you know, if something should happen to me. Stay where you are.”
“Don’t say that,” I protested.
“What? I’m in my ninety-first year.” My grandmother was the only woman I have ever known who made herself sound older than she actually was. “I didn’t come to my grandmother’s funeral. I saw her before, and we said what we needed to say to each other. A grave is nothing. Just the ground they put your body in.”
“I guess. But please, I hope you stick around. I’m only going for a year.”
I offered her my arm. She shook me off. “What do I always say?” she reprimanded. “Never help an old person. We need to stay in shape.”
“You’re in great shape,” I countered, as if I could change her mind about being old. “Look at you. You get around just fine. You still do your yoga.”
She flicked these observations aside with a wave of her hand. “My eyes are going.” She’d stopped under some oak trees, and the afternoon sun filtered through the branches and lit the leaves as if from within. I wondered what she saw, or did not see, with her aging eyes. “Four-leaf clovers,” she replied, as if I’d asked the question aloud. “You know I used to find them all the time.”
I nodded, thinking of my grandfather and that handful of clovers I’d tried to give him. I also remembered a winter visit to my grandmother when I was four or five. Grandma had let me go outside to play in the snow on my own, and I had stepped right out of my galoshes, which were too big for me, and kept moving through the snow in my stocking feet. In the time it took me to realize what had happened, my grandmother had darted outside, swept me up the stairs, stripped off my wet clothes, wrapped me in a wool blanket, and dumped me in front of the woodstove, muttering angrily about frostbite. That eagle eye and that swiftness contributed to the witchiness I so admired in her and that my grandfather found so unsettling.
Grandma still hadn’t moved. “I can’t see them anymore. I can’t see that far.” She sighed, and then she shrugged. “It’s all right, though,” she added. “I know they’re there. I tell myself someone else will find them now.” I looked at her with great love and a little sadness, unmoving and resolute in her neon-splatter-painted denim children’s hat and funny-looking shoes, a pint-sized figurehead on a grassy knoll in the New York suburbs.
Then I looked again. At her feet was a halo of four-leaf clovers, neatly lined up around her toes.
“Grandma!” I exclaimed, kneeling to pick them. I held them out to her, but she pushed my hand away.
“You keep them.” Still clasping my hand, she closed my fingers around them. “It’s your turn for luck. I don’t need them anymore.”
When we got home from our walk, Grandma sat down and rested for all of thirty seconds, then popped out of her chair again. “I have something for you.” She left the room and came back with a three-inch stack of photocopied pages.
“What are these?”
“My refugee files. I ordered them from the Swiss archives. Can you imagine? They kept such records of us, and they still have them.”
“What’s in them?”
Grandma shrugged. “I didn’t look too closely. It brought back memories.”
I flipped through the pages, which blew a little breath of air on my fingers as they settled back into the stack. “Thank you.”
“Sure, well, you’re always asking me questions, and I’m getting too tired to answer them.” Grandma sat down again, heavily this time. “You want something to eat?”
I shook my head.
And then, apropos of nothing, she said, “It’s good you’ll be close to your grandfather. You can keep an eye on him. He needs you.”
In February 2004, when I arrived at my grandfather’s apartment in Geneva to pick up the keys to the house in La Roche, I noticed that the usual perfect order of his apartment seemed subtly disarranged. I had written and phoned to remind him of my arrival time, but he appeared surprised, though not wholly displeased, to see me.
“That’s quite a lot of luggage,” he remarked, with a disapproving gesture at my bag.
Automatically, I assumed his forgetting was a kind of reproof. “It’s for the whole year,” I pointed out.
“Really? Well in that case, I suppose it’s not that much. Would you like some tea?”
“Yes, please.” I trundled my suitcase into the sitting room, taking care to smooth out the scuffs on the green carpet. Usually when I visited, Grandpa placed a neat stack of sheets and blankets on the chair at the end of my bed. This time there was no bedding, just a pile of papers.
Grandpa appeared in the doorway. “I don’t know, Miranda, how you prefer your tea. Do you like it weak, medium, or strong?”
“Medium, please.” I straightened up and smiled. Something about him seemed milder than usual, which put me on my guard.
From the kitchen, I heard him call, “Pardon, I didn’t hear your answer. Weak, medium, or strong?”
“Medium’s fine—I’m just going to wash up.”
“Miranda,” Grandpa summoned.
I hurried back to the kitchen.
“Ah, there you are. Now, how do you like your tea? Weak, medium, strong?”
“However you like,” I replied. Was this some sort of test? “Medium?”
Tea making, once a plain, established ritual, had become strangely chaotic. Grandpa’s electric kettle sat abandoned on the edge of the kitchen windowsill while water boiled down to nothing in a saucepan on the burner. Grandpa chose a tea at random from the cabinet, and I saw that the regiment of carefully labeled jars he’d always kept on his shelf had disbanded into an aimless group of stragglers. “How do you like your—”
“Medium, please.”
“Ah yes”—there was his triumphant slyness—“but is that medium-strong or medium-weak?”
“You choose,” I told him, my worry easing a bit.
“I don’t remember—do you take milk in your tea?”
“Yes, I do, please.”