IT WAS OBVIOUS Jack Griffith was the father of Viviane Lavender’s children — anyone who knew Jack could recognize him in my brother’s face — but no one in the neighborhood dared to mention it. Perhaps they took their cues from Jack’s father, the disagreeable John Griffith, who furrowed his brow and clenched his jaw whenever he passed Emilienne’s bakery. Some swore they’d seen him spit at Viviane the day she quit her job at the soda fountain, still pregnant and wearing that soiled white dress she refused to take off. His long, spindly drop of saliva had run down the back of her dress and landed on the pavement with a wet, milky splat.
Most preferred to give Jack the benefit of the doubt. They liked to assume that he simply didn’t know about us. He’d returned to Whitman College the September before we were born. And hadn’t come back since. It was two hundred ?seventy miles away, after all.
But then, on our second birthday, Beatrix Griffith came to visit us.
It was the first and only time.
My grandmother was the one who saw her come up the walk. The woman’s tiny frail steps were so reminiscent of Emilienne’s own delicate maman that she couldn’t help but welcome Beatrix and usher her into the parlor. Later Emilienne would recall how remarkably overdressed Beatrix seemed for such a short visit. She was wearing a smart-looking gray suit with a wide belt cinched around her waist, a pair of white gloves, and a netted hat cupped around her short hair. On each paper-thin cheek, she’d carefully applied a pink oval of rouge.
When our mother introduced Henry and me to her, Beatrix clutched her tiny gloved hands together and murmured a soft mmm until her hands began to shake and tears slid into her smile lines.
She brought gifts — a spinning top for me, a set of blocks for Henry. And she held me in her lap until my wings tickled her chin.
Before she left, Beatrix seized Viviane’s hand. “You shouldn’t have to do this alone,” she whispered.
Beatrix Griffith wasn’t always such a quiet woman. She used to be funny — spirited even — and was voted Most Outstanding Girl in her senior class. She was the one who distracted the rival football team with her wit while classmates stole the team mascot. She was the first girl in the neighborhood to cut her hair into a stylish new bob, then convinced her girlfriends to do the same once she felt the thrill of the fall air on her ears. When John Griffith came into her life, his blue eyes and firm jaw made her weak in the knees, and her friends saw a change in their fun-loving Beatrix. Before long, waiting at home for John to call was more important than attending the homecoming game. “What would I tell him if it ran late?” she’d worry, her fingers fidgeting with anxiety.
John — the son of an unsuccessful carpet salesman — worked as a laundry delivery truck driver. His illegal involvements were mere rumors, quiet whispers that followed him about like an elusive mosquito on a warm summer evening. People saw even less of Beatrix once she and John were married. When her girlfriends invited her over for tea, Beatrix always had an excuse not to come, a reason to hurry back out the door. She had to prepare dinner. John liked his promptly at six. She had to clean the house. John liked coming home to floors freshly waxed, the bathtub newly scoured. But, most important, she had to conceive a child, and John wanted a son.
Her friends stopped coming to call altogether shortly after Jack was born. What was the point? The sprightly Beatrix they once knew had long since faded away. Perhaps this was why, many years later, no one noticed when she did actually disappear. Not her neighbors or her old friends or even Emilienne, who was too busy trying to run a bakery to notice that Beatrix Griffith no longer stopped in for her weekly three loaves of bread.
Beatrix’s own husband might not have realized she was gone if he hadn’t arrived home at six and found his dinner wasn’t waiting for him on the table.
“Goddammit, Beatrix!” he called. “What the hell is this about?”
That was when he noticed that all of his wife’s belongings were gone — one side of their bedroom sat empty and bare. It looked as if she’d never lived there at all, as if John had spent the last twenty-three years merely living a half-life. He called out her name again and was surprised by how easily his big voice filled the room.
In all their years of marriage, Beatrix Griffith never once considered her husband a controlling man. Perhaps it had crossed her mind once or twice, but she’d always assumed that freedom was a sacrifice one made for love. Which was why she hadn’t batted an eye when, on the night of their wedding, her new husband closely inspected their nuptial sheets for her virginal blood. Or when he’d thrown her carefully planned meals to the dogs when the meat wasn’t prepared to his liking. No, Beatrix never considered her husband a controlling man until she heard him command their son, Jack, to break up with Viviane Lavender. Afterward, when they were alone, Beatrix took a deep breath and said, “You shouldn’t be so hard on him, dear. He’s fallen in love with her.”
John looked at her in amazement, as if shocked to learn she still had a voice at all, and said, “What kind of man falls in love?”
After an unsatisfying meal of canned cocktail sausages and a jar of peach preserves he found in the basement, John Griffith went to sleep in that half-empty room. That night he dreamed he could fly. He dreamed of the whispery kiss of clouds, cold and wet on his cheek, as he soared into the night sky, the streets below fading into darkness.
But this wasn’t his dream. It was his wife’s.
The next morning John Griffith awoke feeling heavy and weak, as if in sleep he’d swallowed a handful of large rocks and no longer had the strength to carry his own weight. No one on Pinnacle Lane ever saw Beatrix Griffith again, not even John, but he knew she was still out there, that she had not simply faded into a small pile of blue ashes he would someday find between the sheets of their bed. He knew because every night after she left, he shared her dreams. Dreams of giant flocks of pelicans, mugs of hot chocolate, and foreign men’s strong hands.
My mother didn’t want to fall in love with her strange children. She was sure that she hadn’t enough room in her heart for anyone but Jack.
She was wrong.
Lucky for us, Viviane found motherhood to be more and more agreeable as time went by. She was amazed by how easy it all was: learning how Popsicles could be made with orange juice, toothpicks, and an ice tray; how to listen for noises from a child’s bedroom even in the midst of a dead sleep; when a scraped elbow needed a kiss or a bandage. But more than that, she learned how to worry. She, who’d always thought love’s only companion was sorrow, learned that worry came hand in hand with love.
By our third birthday, Henry still had yet to utter a sound. Not a peep, not a whimper, not a grunt, a moan, or a groan. He reached other developmental stages without any obvious difficulties. Just like me, he cut his first tooth at twelve weeks, could stand on his own by our first birthday, and was walking just a couple of months later. The fact that he was silent while doing so hardly bothered our mother, or so she told herself. And perhaps he just wasn’t one for smiling. Or touching, for that matter. And when he stared into space in such a daze that Viviane couldn’t get his attention, even when banging the kitchen kettle against a black iron pot, well, that didn’t necessarily signify anything either.
The doctors, of course, had their theories, their special labels and terminology for Henry. They had their contradicting diagnoses, their remedies, their medical recommendations.
Our mother had her own ideas. She placed her good china bowls in the yard, and Henry was washed with the collected water every night for eight months because she’d heard that some babies who were bathed in rainwater spoke earlier than others. Though it hardly increased his verbal skills, after a while Viviane noticed that Henry’s skin now permanently shared the crisp wet smell of Seattle rain.
Our grandmother was convinced that Henry had merely been born fluent in a language other than English. She spoke to him in French and in the Italian she still remembered from her life before. It was the most attention Emilienne ever paid to either of us, who, for our part, were much more Roux than Viviane ever was. Perhaps that was the problem. Perhaps my feathers reminded Emilienne of the days when canary feathers collected in the far corners of a Manhattan apartment. Perhaps Henry’s lack of speech reminded Emilienne of the three silent translucent figures still lingering in the shadows.
When we reached the age at which most children typically begin to read, Viviane spent her nights secretly begging the sky to give Henry some form of language, some way to let her know she was doing a good job, some way to make it better. She read to him before bed and obsessed over the attentive way Henry listened to the story. She hired a specialist to come to the house and work with Henry. Still, Henry gave no sign that he knew his numbers or his letters, the word hi from no, or that he knew what the specialist meant when he held up a flash card and said, “This is a house. Can you point to the picture of the house? Henry?”
Everyone eventually gave up hoping. Our grandmother spoke to Henry less intentionally, using the partial-French, partial-English babble she used when she spoke to herself. Our mother continued to read to us every night, usually from books that Gabe brought home from the library — books about carpentry or the wingspan of the southern brown kiwi and other flightless birds. And Henry was still bathed, of course, but in the water that flowed from the bathroom faucet and with charcoal soap to counter his fresh-rain smell. Viviane just came to accept that Henry was different from the rest. As was I.
Our mother decided that the best place for her strange children was within the confines of our house and the hill. My young childhood was spent among the familiar faces of my family: my mother, warm and smiling, a twinge of sadness hidden in the corner of her mouth; my grandmother, stern but beautiful, the grief of her past worn in lines around her eyes. There was Wilhelmina Dovewolf. Gabe, the gentle giant. And Henry, my mute, wingless half.
Some twins have their own language, their own “twin speak.” There are reports of twins sharing the same dreams, of one feeling sympathetic pain when the other is injured. There was even a case of twins who died at the very same time, right down to the minute. I never experienced such a connection with Henry. My twin always lived in his own world — one that even I, in my holy, mutated form, was unable to visit. It felt as though Henry had been born my twin only to remind me of my own constant state of isolation. By the time we learned just how strong the connection between Henry and myself really was, it was almost too late.
There it was again. Fate. As a child, that word was often my only companion. It whispered to me from dark corners during lonely nights. It was the song of the birds in spring and the call of the wind through bare branches on a cold winter afternoon. Fate. Both my anguish and my solace. My escort and my cage.
Before I turned five, the religious stopped paying homage to me in clusters at the bottom of Pinnacle Lane. Eventually very few recalled the references in the local paper to the Living Angel. But what did that mean? Was my safety worth my isolation? It made my mother wonder if I was lonely. Or bored. Which may have been the reason Gabe decided to teach me how to fly.
Gabe spent his days off in a workshop he built behind the house, trying time and time again to build a set of wings with the same wingspan and contours as mine. He studied birds — the ones in our backyard and the ones in the books he borrowed from the elementary-school library. He measured my wings and my growth spurts, and he asked Viviane to collect my molted feathers so he could examine them more closely.
“Do you really think she needs to fly?” Viviane asked Gabe late one night. The two sat in the parlor, Viviane in the wing-backed chair across from the harpsichord, Gabe on the divan by the window. One of our cats sat in Viviane’s lap. A fire crackled low in the cobblestone chimney, the soft light making the highlights in Viviane’s hair glow red.
Now twenty-five, Viviane maintained her youthful appearance by keeping her hair long and applying cold cream to her cheeks with the same diligence she used to preen my feathers. She never got back into the habit of wearing shoes. Not that there was ever a reason to. My mother hadn’t left the hill on Pinnacle Lane since the day she brought us home from the hospital. When she allowed herself to consider why, she realized that she was still waiting. Waiting for Jack to come back for her.
Viviane stole a glance at Gabe, whose own gaze was lost in the fire’s flames. It wasn’t that she didn’t think Gabe was handsome. She did. Sometimes she’d catch herself studying him — the ease in his grasp as he reached for a bowl from the cupboard or the movement of the muscles in his forearms as he sanded the arched leg of a rocking chair — and she’d imagine how his hands would feel on her skin, the strength behind them as he lifted her hips to his. But before she got too far lost in her reverie, she’d remember Jack and the world would crash to the ground once again.
“It’s not like she’s shown any interest in it,” Viviane said. This was true; once I’d learned how to tie the ribbons she sewed into the backs of all my clothes, and figured out that sleeping was most comfortable with the tip of one wing covering my nose, and how to pop open my wings with such force I could blow a candle out across the room, I figured I’d mastered everything that came with having wings. That I might fly never even crossed my mind.
“Maybe not yet. But when she does, I’ll be ready,” Gabe said. Gabe had decided a while ago that what Viviane’s children needed was a father. He was afraid of letting us down. If the world that Gabe knew was unprepared for a Romanian beauty with royal blood, how would it treat a child with wings? Or another who preferred to be left alone, unable to stand a hug or a kiss? The problem was, he didn’t know how to act like a father — it wasn’t as if he’d had one himself. Instead, he improvised good parenting by strapping handmade wings to his back and taking unintentional nosedives off the roof of his woodshop. Gabe had yet to decide what to do for Henry.
“Besides,” Gabe finished, “why would she have wings if she wasn’t meant to fly?”
My mother didn’t have an answer for that.
I acknowledged Gabe and his attempts at flight the way a legless child might view a hopeful but misguided parent buying a house full of stairs. After a while, when Gabe offered me a morning greeting, it didn’t feel like he was greeting me but rather a giant pair of wings; no girl, just feathers.
By 1952 Pinnacle Lane, like the rest of the world, had undergone a few changes. Two years earlier the Cooper family built a house next door to ours. The father, Zeb Cooper, was a red-haired Irishman with a thick woolly beard, a large menacing stride, and a quiet demeanor. His wife, Penelope, was a vivacious blonde quickly hired by my grandmother to help in the bakery. They had two children: a son, Rowe, who was quiet, but not quite as quiet as Henry, and a daughter, Cardigan, who had no problem declaring her age (eight) and the number of months (eleven) until her next birthday to anyone she met.