When they got home that afternoon from their outing, the radio in the living room was playing big-band rhumba music, but the house was empty. There was an envelope on the kitchen table, propped against a candlewick vase that held white peonies cut from the back garden. My grandmother had written my mother’s name on the outside of the envelope. Her penmanship, improved by nuns, made every word look like notes to be played on a celesta. In the envelope my mother found a red feather wrapped inside a letter informing her that her mother had decided, for the good of the family, to return herself for treatment at Greystone. The meaning or origin of the red feather was information my mother never ascertained.
My grandfather swore again and stepped on the brake. “You were supposed to be looking,” he said.
“I was looking.”
When you drove it in reverse, the car made a sound that my mother imagined to be the whirring of her father’s displeasure. My grandfather craned his head around and backed them past three houses with his right arm slung across the top of the seat back. He stopped in front of a house with an attic story. Its porch was hedged with bare azalea bushes. Instead of brick and siding, it appeared to have been clad in a grid made of hundreds of cut stones, brown, purple-brown, and gray. Its porch had lost or been deprived of its pillars. In their place someone had installed trellises of wrought iron, entwined by wrought-iron vines. In one of the two windows that looked onto the porch my mother saw a woman’s wide face before a muslin curtain fell across it.
My grandfather cut the engine. My mother grabbed handfuls of the skirt of her jumper and squeezed. Her eyes burned. Tears dripped from her chin to the Peter Pan collar of her blouse. It was so quiet in the car that she could hear the patter of the tears. My grandfather made a soft click with his tongue, irritation or pity. My mother pinned her scant hopes on pity.
“I have no choice in the matter,” my grandfather said. “Forgive me.”
“No,” said my mother. Her daring surprised her. Her heart was thudding against her breastbone.
My grandfather opened the door on his side and got out of the car. “Fair enough,” he said.
He put on his gray worsted suit jacket and shot his cuffs. He straightened the knot of his gray and black tie. He studied the stone face of the house.* He came around the front of the car and opened my mother’s door on his way back to the trunk. My mother wiped her face on her sleeve and climbed out. She followed him to the trunk of the Crosley, which held two suitcases of clothes, a train case with her toilet articles and her glass animal collection, her portable record player, and a box of 45 rpm records, among them “Wake Up Little Susie,” new that week, and “Dark Moon” by Gale Storm.
“Let me worry about this stuff,” my grandfather said. “You go ring the bell.”
My mother stood on the concrete checkerboard looking at the stone house. It had felt so good to say no. She contemplated saying it again, but Uncle Ray beat her to it.
“No!” He was standing on the topmost porch step. He was wearing a sky-blue suit piped in white, and a green necktie patterned with gold circles over a gold shirt. He was taking her in, making a show of it, his arms folded across his bony chest, looking her up and down. He shook his head, his mouth turned up at one corner as though ready, in a moment, to smile. “Unbelievable,” he said. “Impossible.”
My mother had not seen very much of Uncle Ray since the move from Baltimore in 1952. Since then he had grown more outrageous, and she loved him for it. The improbability of his cars, his clothes, and of the gifts he brought her—a brown-skinned doll wearing a hat of wooden fruit and a red dress embroidered with the word havana, a canvas sack stamped golden nugget containing a vial filled with gold dust—scandalized my grandfather in a way that paradoxically also seemed to bring him pleasure. When Uncle Ray came around, he and my grandmother would do the talking. My grandfather would just sit listening at the table or, once, on a blanket spread under the hickory tree. Uncle Ray’s stories of his life featured people with suggestive or humorous nicknames and towns or neighborhoods with questionable reputations. To narrate that life’s incidents and activities required an impenetrable jargon. The talk went over my mother’s head so completely that nobody bothered to shoo her away. When Uncle Ray got to the end of a story, my grandfather would sink his chin into his hand and say something like “I don’t believe it” or “That’s appalling” or simply “Oy, Reynard, why?” But sometimes he would be smiling.
“Hi, Uncle Ray,” my mother said.
“Hello, dollface.”
She went up the steps and put her arms around Ray’s neck and kissed him on the cheek. It was smoother than her father’s cheek. As always, he smelled of gardenia and tobacco ash. She did not have to go up on tiptoe to kiss him. Not yet fifteen, she was two inches taller than he was.
“Look at you! Nobody told me you were already done growing up,” he said. “This is going to be a piece of cake. My work is done!”
My mother did not reply.
“Right?” Uncle Ray said. “I’m looking forward to this, aren’t you?”
“I guess.”
“Sure you are, baby. This is going to be fun.”
There was a flat metal mailbox by the front door with a wire bracket to hold the evening paper. The name on the mailbox was einstein. My mother had been told that this was the name of Uncle Ray’s landlady, but seeing it spelled out on the mailbox gave her an uneasy feeling. It was a name long since affixed to matters of crucial importance that she knew she was never going to understand.
“You said a girl.”
The voice was pitched low, masculine. It belonged to the woman my mother had seen at the window. She seemed old to my mother at the time, but in retrospect my mother thought she must not have been sixty. Her black hair was grained with silver. It jutted out on either side of her head in two fins that curved upward at the tips, the toes of a pair of Persian slippers. She was wearing what appeared to be a lab coat over a blouse printed with chrysanthemums and a brown skirt. She drew a thread of some bitter odor along with her when she came out onto the porch.
“Mrs. Einstein,” Uncle Ray told my mother. “This is a girl, Mrs. E. She’s only . . . How old are you now, sweetheart?”
“Fourteen.”
Mrs. Einstein looked my mother up and down, her hands folded across her chest. My mother decided that the odor was coming from Mrs. Einstein. Later my mother would learn that her uncle’s landlady worked as a receptionist at a veterinary hospital out in Pikesville. A smell compounded from carbolic and the secretions of animals’ fear glands followed Mrs. Einstein wherever she went.
“Fourteen,” Mrs. Einstein said. “Nonsense.” She turned to Ray. “What do you take me for?”
“I can produce her birth documents,” Uncle Ray said with smoothness and assurance, worrying my mother, who was not sure she owned any birth documents. “If you really think it’s necessary.”
The summer before, as a hurricane was about to hit the Gulf Coast of Texas, my mother had seen a picture in the newspaper of people in its path nailing sheets of plywood over the windows of their houses. A similar procedure now seemed to be undertaken by Mrs. Einstein with the expression in her eyes.
“It’s all necessary when you’re involved,” she said to Uncle Ray. “I have to take every precaution.”
“Now, Mrs. E.”
“When you’re involved I read the fine print.” She shook her head infinitesimally, as if a fuller expression of disapproval might implicate her in whatever mischief her boarder had gotten himself into. Then she went back into the house.
“What did she mean, ‘You said a girl’?” my mother asked her uncle. “Does she think I’m a boy?”
Uncle Ray’s teeth were veined with gold. When he smiled, you felt he was giving you a glimpse of the wares he planned to sell you.
“No, sweetheart,” he said, “she thought you were a woman.” He started to ruffle her hair, then changed his mind and settled for a pat on the shoulder. “Don’t let her— Well, well.”
He was looking past my mother at my grandfather, coming up the walk with one of my mother’s suitcases under each arm, holding the record player with his left hand and the train case and box of records with his right.
“Shame on you, Mandrake,” Uncle Ray said to my mother. “Making Lothar here carry all your bags.”
“He wouldn’t let me help.”