—
WHEN HARRIET FINALLY went to fetch Ari, she found him in one of the living rooms. Music was blasting throughout the house, and she simply went to the room where it was loudest, the room where Ari and Perdita were dancing together like a pair of vagabond wizards—jerking shoulders, grinding heels, twirling fingers as a question thunders through the loudspeakers: Where do you know me from . . . WHERE DO YOU KNOW ME FROM? Kercheval House wasn’t ready for this; the windows of the room were sagging a little below the window frames—the room was thinking about sending itself down to the basement to recuperate. It couldn’t do that without dislodging Rémy and Tamar, though. They were perched on the windowsill looking on. Harriet joined them; the windowsill seemed to be the place where the grown-ups went. Rémy said something she couldn’t quite catch, so she asked him to repeat it.
“I said: How was it?”
“How was what?”
“That future you were so sure you were going to have.”
After a moment of hesitation, of trying to think what a good deception would be, Harriet shuffled over to Tamar and whispered in her ear that Gabriel was waiting to speak to her in the kitchen.
“Me? He asked for me?”
Once Tamar had gone, Harriet turned to Rémy, covered her mouth with her hands, and, gazing very sweetly into his eyes, proceeded to bestow a cornucopia of curses upon him, swearing repeatedly and at length, for the duration of the very loud song that was playing. She left it to Rémy to guess what she was saying, and judging from the look on his face, he was guessing fairly well.
Meanwhile Ari screamed at Perdita: “What’s the name of the young man whose music we’re dancing to?”
“Stormzy, Grandpa—this is Stormzy . . .”
Aristide Kercheval switched the music off and, head tilted, listened to the last few syllables of Harriet’s swearing marathon before giving Perdita the gimlet eye. His response to being annoyed was slowing down a bit as he aged and reliance on lip-reading increased.
“Grandpa?” he said.
Perdita linked arms with him. “Can’t I call you that?”
“You can call me that,” Ari decided. It was the snappiest of his snap decisions.
(“Putty in her hands,” Rémy remarked. He’ll get along famously with the dolls named Prim and Lollipop when they meet.)
After a decent interval, Ari Kercheval returned to the subject of Stormzy—did Perdita happen to know if anybody was currently managing this young man’s wealth? Rémy had ample opportunity to say, “Fuck this family,” but he didn’t. Not even once. Plans were afoot that morning, and they were to do with the Kerchevals’ good deed for the year.
“I got mugged a couple of months ago,” Ari said gruffly. “In an underground car park. Nothing too violent—some boy just pushed me over and took all my stuff. Phone, cards, keys, money, all of it. And for that hour or so that I didn’t have anything, I kept asking myself if I have any relationships that wouldn’t be adversely affected by my losing everything for real. Everything in my bank accounts, for instance. And I thought of you two, Margot and Harriet—” He looked at Perdita. “I didn’t know about you yet.”
There was a jumble of spoken responses—what, the Lees had been the first to come to Ari’s mind as people who’d stand by him in times of dire need? Tamar had walked in just in time to hear her husband say this, and she was very far from thrilled. Rémy said Ari might as well mention his “health scare” while he was busy creating an awkward atmosphere. “Me and Gabriel were actually with him at the hospital around the time I noticed someone had, er, hacked what you call my ‘gentleman detective email’ account,” Rémy told Perdita. Margot wanted to know what Ari had been hospitalized for. Ari waved a hand.
“It was stupid.”
“If you call a heart attack stupid—!” Tamar said. “We thought you were going to die.”
“Die?” Margot told Ari he wasn’t allowed to do that. Ari said he’d do as he pleased, and Perdita said Ari was right not to make a big deal out of it since the heart only makes up 1.5 percent of body mass at most. One-point-five percent, eh? And with what grim composure Harriet’s daughter stated that quantity . . . her tone implied firsthand knowledge, the kind that comes with having done all the dissection, weighing, and measuring yourself . . . What else? Harriet watched Ari blow kisses at his granddaughter and listened to Tamar telling Perdita, “You can’t call me Grandma, though,” and heard Perdita answer Tamar in tones hundreds of degrees colder than the tones in which she spoke to Ari: “That’s absolutely fine with me, Tamar” (Tamar hung her head; her penance would be long), and Harriet Lee was happy. No? Joyously giddy? What if I just say she experienced some emotion of extremely high hedonic value—like a diamond, only a feeling—and she experienced it so strongly that it . . . echoed. No? Oh, because it’s a sound word and no particular sound was singled out for Harriet’s attention? You give me a word for it, then. You tell me what it is when some sensation leaves you for the space of one heartbeat and returns at double strength. It seemed to Harriet Lee that her father must be happy too. They’d agreed that they were alike, she and her father, whether happy, cross, or sad. I’m alive, so he is too, isn’t he? Isn’t he? There’s no end to the serrated edge of this illogic; might as well press on and read the fulfillment of so many other hopes into it . . . this thing that I’m apparently not allowed to call an echo meant that Zu was happy too, ditto Dottie and Rosolio and Cinnabar and all the Gingerbread Girls, everyone at the farmstead, and . . .
. . . Gretel . . .
But Ari was unfolding his plan, and Harriet had to listen if she wanted to help.
“You came to us willing to join our family, and you did it, you’re family. What we want to do now is start three new families. This was originally Tamar’s plan, actually.”
This was to be this year’s Kercheval Good Deed: Ari proposed to begin with three houses, each house to be occupied by a group of people not necessarily related by blood who were prepared to live together as a family unit. Not some sham family, politely avoiding having to care about one another, but people who would share a surname and the task of weaving a collective meaning into that name. People who would support and protect and staunchly cherish one another.
Margot gave Ari a sour look. “Sorry, what? Did you say this was Tamar’s idea?”
Tamar answered before Ari could: “That’s right, and it’s better than any you’ve ever had!”
Margot got up, stood over the seated Tamar, and pointed at her. Tamar bared her teeth and pushed Margot’s hand away, but Margot kept pointing. “Did you come up with this plan before or after the outcome of your dealings with our granddaughter?”
“After,” Tamar muttered.
Margot sat down. “That’s all I wanted to know! I’ve been looking for clues all this time, searching for this woman’s sense of guilt.”
“Tamar’s guilt is my guilt,” Ari said. From the look on Tamar’s face when he said that, Harriet could see that this was how Ari got through to his wife, with words matched to deeds in exactly this way. “And her plans are my plans. I’m the one who thought of asking you Lees to advise, though.”
“Now we, we Kerchevals and Lees, Kercheval-Lees, Lee-Kerchevals, we’ve had, er, we’ve had our tiffs, we’ve had our little disagreement, and I’m sure there’s more where they came from, but all of us here know what family’s about. Gabriel off in Beijing knows what family’s about—”