“Yes, is that why—” I started to say, thinking of something my mother had told me recently about my grandmother taking the children to Israel at the last minute instead of moving back to Europe when my grandfather’s transfer from the UN’s New York headquarters back to Geneva came through. But he did not seem to hear me.
There was only one small teacup left to clean, but he left the water running, and it poured out of the faucet and landed in the sink with a harsh, metallic sound. “Of course you may think she is just a nice little old lady in a ruffled apron serving you cookies, but you do not know what poison she hides. For years, she has been trying to ruin my life. Horrible woman.”
I sat still. I had never seen my grandmother wear ruffles. Or bake cookies.
“The last time I saw her she had come all the way to the United Nations to try and get money out of me via the personnel office—to try and ruin my reputation. And of all things, I happened to be walking past the office when she came out. And do you know what she did?”
I shook my head.
“Do you know what she did?”
I cringed and kept shaking my head.
“She came up to me, said hello, and asked me for a ride to the train station.”
The water still splattered angrily against the sink’s metal sides. That did seem exactly like something my grandmother would do, but I refrained from saying so.
“Do you know what that is like?” He set the teacup in the dish drainer in a way that made me fear for its well-being. I shook my head again.
“That is like shitting on someone’s doorstep, ringing the doorbell, and asking for toilet paper.”
He rinsed the soap out of the sponge and wrathfully threw it down. “I should never, ever have married her.”
“Why did you?” I regretted it as soon as I said it and sat waiting for I knew not what fury to descend on me.
He turned to face me, the open faucet forgotten, hands dripping water all over the floor. “I couldn’t … and the war … what else could I do?” He looked helpless, shipwrecked, lost. “She was beautiful,” he said, his voice bewildered, almost dreamy. “She had beautiful hair. Beautiful coal-black hair.”
CHAPTER FOUR
AS I ENTERED THE THICK OF ADOLESCENCE, THE closeness my grandmother and I had once enjoyed became far less enjoyable. It still existed, somewhere, but we had trouble finding our way into it, and when we did, it was often to have an argument. Grandma may have spent a good deal of her career treating adolescents, but outside her office it was a phase of life for which she had no patience. In her mind, the teens were just another mystifying and wasteful American invention, like colored bathroom tissue or instant pancake mix. “That’s American teenagers for you. No respect,” she’d grouse if I failed to clear a plate from the table or wore glitter and mismatched socks to dinner. “Go and change. Someone will think you’re an escaped mental patient. Slovenliness is a dead giveaway.”
Indeed, I believe she decided to send me back across the ocean to check—or at least temper—my objectionable slide into one of the parts of her adoptive culture she liked the least.
When I announced I was bored in school and wanted to try something new, my mother phoned my grandmother for advice.
Grandma didn’t hesitate. “Send her to Geneva,” she instructed.
“Isn’t that far?” my mother objected.
Grandma brushed her off. After all, at sixteen she had moved from Romania to France to pursue her medical studies, a fifty-six-hour train ride from home.
“It will be good for her.” Her voice left no room for argument. “Your father will help pay for it.”
“What makes you think Daddy would want to help Miranda with her studies? It’s not like he ever helped you with mine.”
“You’ll see. He’ll be glad to have his granddaughter with him.”
As though the decades had been minutes and she could still predict the motions of his mind.
On the day of my departure, Grandma accompanied my parents and me to the airport. Sitting in the backseat and holding her hand, I felt sentimental and very grown up and, though I would have been loath to admit it, a little nervous. Seeing my smooth hand cupped in her brown-speckled one, I felt moved to say something about how much she meant to me, how I adulated her strength and wisdom, how I had all the spots on her skin memorized, how I would miss her. “My Godt,” she said, pulling her hand away with a little snort of irritation, “don’t talk like that. It’s bad luck.”
The less said about my life at boarding school, the better; it was lonely and largely uninteresting—Grandma’s convenient excuse, I am now convinced, to get me where she intended me to go. Every Friday I’d pack my overnight bag and walk the three miles that separated the boardinghouse from my grandfather’s apartment, where I’d spend the weekend experiencing a second, albeit more interesting, form of loneliness, for you can get only so close to a compulsively solitary and excessively punctilious eighty-one-year-old.
He certainly made an effort: he filled the wooden bowls on his honey-colored dining room table with my favorite fruits, found recipes for us to try together, read Proust aloud to me over linden blossom tea and madeleines, and picked out poems for me to memorize to perfect my French. But settling into a routine together was not easy. I was always making mistakes. Once I spilled ink on his dressing gown and spent a fearful evening convinced he would ask me to leave and never speak to me again. He thought I held my pen wrong and mentioned it so often that I taught myself to position my fingers differently so I could do my homework and write letters at his house without irking him. I quickly learned it was best to avoid the Shakespeare authorship question. I kept my hair up at all times because he didn’t like it left loose. But worst of all was the day I came back from a walk with a handful of four-leaf clovers. I was pleased to know that my gift for finding them functioned on both sides of the Atlantic and thought it would be nice to share it with him. I had forgotten the provenance of this gift, but my grandfather hadn’t.
I walked over to his desk, where he was correcting an article for a friend, and held the clovers out to him, a little offering cupped in the palm of my hand.
He peered at it and recoiled violently, pushing himself back in his chair, as far away from me as he could. His face drained of color. He looked so pale and horrified, I checked the clovers to make sure they weren’t harboring some dangerous insect.
“Witches,” he croaked. His voice was strangled and low, his gaze mistrustful, as if I might pull some other awful trick. “You’re all witches.”