CHAPTER TWO
PEREGRINE LOWELL, MY GRANDFATHER, WAS PRESIDENT AND SOLE owner of Thought-Fox Inc. A big wheel in the Democratic Party, he owned hundreds of newspapers and magazines in dozens of countries, including some of the world’s most influential dailies. An aggressively merciless proprietor, he had a reputation for being hands-on when it came to editorial content, viewing the op-ed pages of even the lowliest community publication as his personal soapbox. One time, he got so inspired by the proposal to ban outdoor cats in some little town in Iowa that he wrote a guest editorial championing the rights of songbirds.
Not content simply with interfering in the grinding minutiae of his empire’s daily operations, he also considered it his duty to despise and denigrate everyone who worked for him, reflexively pointing to his signature on their paychecks as evidence of his superiority.
My grandfather both demanded and deplored compliancy, which meant he posed a unique set of challenges for the people around him. Fortunately, working for him was generally a temporary condition. He set some sort of industry record for firing people, a distinction he welcomed, saying, “Good people come, and good people go,” and sounding a whole lot like a raptor that’s just decapitated a goldfinch.
Nicknamed the Falcon by Bingo and me—seemed clever when we were kids—he sat darkly in the tops of trees, sleek and straight, eyes like stones, defined from all angles by his remote habit of trenchant surveillance. An Anglo-Irish Protestant on loan to New England from Ulster, he was bored by the conversation of field mice, and it showed.
It’s safe to say that he terrified and intrigued me. Stuck for a moment alone with him in the butler’s pantry at his sixty-third birthday party when I was ten, I weakly inquired what kind of icing he liked best, chocolate or vanilla, feeling as if I were interviewing Dracula about his preference in blood type.
“What are you squeaking about?” he asked, looking down on me, his contempt a talon, snapping my neck with the power of his disdain.
“Never mind,” I said, temporarily unable to swallow. I had asked him a question. For years, I never asked him another. A distinguished Dickens scholar, he’d published several books on the subject, but ornithology was his true passion, part of a family tradition that extended to the naming of male heirs. His old man was named Toucan by his father, Corvid, my great-great-grandfather, an unchecked eccentric from an aristocratic background—nicknamed Cuckoo Lowell by all who knew him. He bizarrely practiced ornithomancy, a form of divination using flight patterns.
The Falcon wanted us named after birds—Larkin and Robin were his choices—but Ma infuriated him by naming us after dogs instead.
“It could have been worse,” Bingo said. “She could have called us Sacco and Vanzetti.”
The Falcon lived on a century-old estate called Cassowary, a few hundred choice acres of woodland, marsh, and open field tucked into the New England coastline and within spitting distance of Boston. A black wrought-iron gate at the entranceway had this cheerful, biblical admonition engraved across the top, his idea of a welcome mat: “For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appeareth for a little time and then vanisheth away.”
My grandfather wasn’t big on small talk.
Cassowary was formally landscaped with topiaries, walls, and hedges. Four life-size elephants constructed of metal frames and filled in with a cladding of dark green English ivy paced round and round a large ring outlined in yew, their inertia like an airless memento of Pompeii. The big, Georgian-style gray brick house was covered in an ancient flowering wisteria; its winding stems were thick as tree trunks, a momentous sight in the spring, with thousands of lavender blossoms hanging like lanterns.
An outdoor aviary sat beneath my bedroom window, filled with ring-neck doves that made a pretty opiate sound in the mornings. Their cooing reminded me of Uncle Tom’s racing pigeons, a hobby he’d retained from boyhood.
Bingo and I loved to play in the rose garden, where there were two life-size limestone sculptures of English mastiffs, one sitting, the other one standing. We used to chase fireflies and feed the koi in the fishpond, hide in the tall grasses. The koi we fed as children still inhabit the pond, swimming back and forth in those same mysterious geometric patterns, pausing as always to bask in the sunlight as it feeds through the waterfall.
Cassowary was famous for its heritage rose gardens; hundreds of varieties bloomed all summer long, tended to by a battalion of English gardeners who handpicked them for every room in the house. Leave it to the Falcon to take a thing of beauty and turn it into a military operation. White roses in the living room, red roses in the dining room, pink roses in the library, orange roses in the conservatory, yellow roses in the kitchen, blue roses on the mantelpiece overlooking the wintry fireplace in my grandfather’s bedroom.
Cream-colored roses sat atop the desk in my mother’s old room, next to a framed portrait of Rupert Brooke, whom she discovered as a young girl. Ma’s likes and dislikes remained pretty consistent over a lifetime, as I can personally attest. To this day, the rose is my least favorite flower—I think of it as a scented hand grenade—although I still maintain the gardens. Their history outranks any preference of mine.
The Falcon, a widower, lived alone except for staff. I never saw him with a woman in a romantic way, although he was very social in the old-money sense of the word, frequently entertaining and being entertained, making it difficult to reconcile the charming public performer with the private contrarian.
My grandmother Constance Bunting was sole heir to the Ogilvy fortune and died at the age of fifty-one the year before I was born. Cassowary was her family home. My grandfather approached her father in the early thirties wanting to buy the estate, and when he refused to sell, the Falcon set out to marry his only child in order to get what he wanted.
Cassowary was a wedding gift. As for Constance: “Let’s just say that your grandmother was the price I paid,” the Falcon remarked tersely after I discovered their wedding photo buried underneath some old clothes at the bottom of a trunk tucked away in the attic.
My mother’s feelings about the marriage were slightly less discreet. “He never loved my mother. He hated her. He set out to get his hands on the estate, and once he achieved his goal he decided to get rid of my dear mama,” Ma told Bingo and me when we were little, her arms flailing as she paced frenetically around the room, pinging from one corner to another, her consternation as jarring as a slot machine.
“Sounds like an episode of Bonanza,” Bingo said, grinning over at me, flicking baseball cards against the kitchen wall, fiddling away as Ma burned.
Faced with Ma’s sketchy mental archives, I got in the habit of consulting outsiders when it came to trying to discern the facts of my family history. The general consensus among the Falcon’s biographers is that a few years into his marriage he fell in love with a champagne-and-caviar socialite by the name of Flora Hennessey and planned to leave his family for her. All that changed when Flora’s small plane disappeared at dawn somewhere along the eastern seaboard.
It might be true. I remember one time Bingo and I were snooping around in the library at Cassowary when we found the key to the Falcon’s desk. After unlocking its narrow drawer, Bingo pulled a small, black-and-white photo of a young, dark-haired woman from inside the pages of a slender notebook.
“Who’s the babe?” Bingo gleefully asked the Falcon, whose sudden entrance surprised both of us. Rather than conceal the evidence of our crime, Bingo, eleven years old, bravely held up the picture while I felt my scalp smoldering.
The Falcon walked toward us in soundless fury, seized the photo with one hand, and with the other slapped Bingo across the face so hard that he left a bright red handprint that glows in my memory to this day. Bingo tumbled backward off the chair and onto the ground, his hand to his cheek. Jumping to his feet, he met the Falcon’s angry stare and then watched in silence as the old guy spun around on his heels and vanished into the hallway.
“Wow, I’ve never seen him so mad,” I said, feeling weak in the knees, slowly sidling up alongside Bing.
“He’s always mad about something. Who cares?” Bingo answered, rubbing his eyes through clenched fists, trying to conceal an involuntary surge of tears.
“Not me,” I lied.
The truth was that I cared deeply about everything my grand-father thought and said, though I would have surgically removed my liver with a jackknife rather than admit it to anyone—in our family, it would have been less dangerous for me to confess to eating dog meat.
“Are you okay?” I asked Bing, unable to make eye contact, embarrassed by the sheer honesty of what had just transpired. I felt paralyzed, as if I’d been given a shot of pure unfiltered emotion directly into my spinal cord.
“I’m fine. Leave me alone,” Bingo was mumbling into the shirt collar he’d pulled up around his face. His hands were shaking. I thought about hugging him, but in the end it was easier to hide my sympathy than it was to show it.
“What was Grandma like?” I asked my mother a few days later as I lay on my back stretched across the bottom of my parents’ tarnished brass bed. Bingo and I didn’t dare tell Ma about the slapping incident. The repercussions would have demoted the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to the status of a minor irritant, a stray lash in the eye of history.
“She was a saint . . . ,” Ma said, her large, almond-shaped eyes a dilute blue watercolor as she stared beyond me and somewhere into the distant past. She was sitting at the head of the bed, legs extended beneath the covers, perfectly erect, narrow shoulders square as a military parade. The pillows at her back were purely ornamental—Ma never needed propping up.
The buttercup yellow wall behind her was bathed in late afternoon light. I was fascinated by the shadows cast by her chestnut brown hair, so wild and wavy that it could have supported teeming jungle life.
“Constance Lowell was skinny and mad, a veritable vibrating hairpin. . . .” Next to her, naked and ruddy, covers pulled up to his waist, Pop rubbed his face in disbelief and interrupted with a hoot. “She fell off her horse when she was thirty-five, sprained her ankle, and went to bed for the rest of her life claiming she couldn’t walk. Except that the servants used to hear her up and moving around all night while the rest of the house was sleeping.”
Laughing at the memory, he leaned forward, his big hand on my knee, and I felt the infrequent thrill of his undivided attention. “You should have seen her, Collie. She had long brown hair that hung in waves to her waist, all done up with satin ribbons. She was white as a ghost from being inside all the time, and she wore white lace nightgowns and collected ivory figurines, with a somewhat ironic emphasis on elephants. Her bed was covered in silk and satin. She was crazy as they come.”
“Don’t you dare ridicule Mama!” Ma’s long upper lip disappeared, her lower lip protruded like a boxing glove. “The most wonderful woman that ever lived, and he poisoned her a little bit every day. She warned me. She told me he was adding things to her food. He’s a monster.” The circles under her eyes darkened.
“For heaven’s sake, Anais, according to every medical man short of St. Luke, she died of stomach cancer. You throw around accusations of murder as if they were rice at a wedding. For years you’ve been accusing Tom of adding plant fertilizer to your coffee.” Pop looked over at me and winked as Ma’s escalating fury caused the room to spin. I hung on to the blanket out of habit—I knew where this was going.
“My mother did not have cancer. She was poisoned. He killed her, and he paid off the doctors. And as for Tom, you tell me why does my heart beat so erratically every time he serves me something he’s made? I enjoyed perfect health until he moved in with us, and since then I’ve had one ailment after another.” Her voice lowered to a whisper as she glanced fleetingly toward the door, as if Uncle Tom were poised outside with ear to glass—not an entirely far-fetched idea, by the way—and would up the ammonia content in retaliation if he overheard.
Ma never had a prosaic thought or justified suspicion except in the case of Uncle Tom’s eavesdropping, which fell into the same category as birth, death, and Lawrence Welk. She painted pictures in blood and tears and secret passions, everything intensely fragrant and wildly overgrown.
“Like most aesthetes, she’s a barbarian at heart,” Pop once confided to Bingo and me, the two of us nodding silently, chins bobbing in unison, though at the time we were barely able to write our own names and didn’t have a clue what he meant.
She threw back the covers, the fringe from the chenille bedspread covering my face, and launched herself from the bed as if it were a catapult—Ma always seemed poised for takeoff—her worn cotton nightgown reaching below her knees as she yanked open the top dresser drawer and began rooting strenuously through dozens of mismatched socks.
“Tell you what, Collie, the Lowells and the Buntings are all nuts, every one of them,” Pop said agreeably, settling deeper into the pillows, cozying up to one of his favorite topics, the shortcomings of my mother’s family, gesturing broadly, mellow as honey. “Do you know that the only time your mother and grandfather ever saw eye to eye, they accused your batty old grandma and me of having an affair? They might just as well have accused me of carrying on with an opinionated coat hanger.”
At the time, I had only the vaguest notion of what constituted an affair—if you’d asked me for a definition, I would have said it was something that my father did.
“Ha! You did, and you know perfectly well you did.” Ma banged shut the drawer and spun around to face Pop, who was visibly enjoying her anger. “And you got off easy. My mother paid for her vulnerabilities with her life, while you’re pensioned off courtesy her fortune.”
“Is that why Granddad hates you, Pop, because you did an affair with Grandma?” I’d taken up Ma’s position next to Pop on the bed.
“That’s one of his many phony excuses,” Pop said, examining his nails. “The reality is, Collie, your grandfather hates everyone. In my case, he holds me in particular contempt because I’m poor, I’m Catholic, and I refuse to mind my place. The worst crime you can commit in this life is being broke, and God help you if you don’t dress the part. Always dress well, Collie, it drives the Four Hundred mad.”
Ma laughed, a pealing sort of ringing bell sound I’d come to dread. “Please, Charlie, your personal vanities are nothing more than a symptom of moral vacuity. They are not any sort of challenge to established social order,” Ma said, opening the door to Pop’s elaborately endowed closet, bespoke suits of every color on irresistible display.
In Pop’s view, clothes absolutely made the man—the sight of a baseball cap and a sport jacket made him apoplectic. “The windbreaker crowd,” he’d mutter, erecting a bridge of contempt between himself and anyone in a sweatshirt. If Pop had been born a woman, he would have walked around the house fully accessorized, struggling down the laneway to pick up the mail in nylons and high heels.
He shot me a merry conspiratorial glance, inviting me to join in on the joke. I smiled nervously—if Ma was a seismic rumble with occasional release of acidic gases, then Pop was a full-scale volcanic eruption. Everything was funny to Pop until he lost his temper for reasons apparent only to him, and that’s when the sky opened up and the wind blew round him in brilliant shades of magenta, the world erupted and lava flowed in the streets, and everyone started running for their lives.
“Tell me again why we hate Granddad?” I asked.
“It’s a sin to hate. We don’t hate anyone in this family,” Pop said, taking a serious tone.
“Oh, yes, we do!” Ma said, practically producing sparks as she pulled on her blue jeans beneath her nightgown. “We despise your grandfather because he represents all that’s wrong with this world. He cares for nothing and no one. He despises the poor and denigrates the helpless. He thinks that poverty is a character defect—all that matters to him is accumulating wealth and power and setting himself up as some sort of pasha to be worshipped and obeyed.”
I could feel the pulverizing effects of my mother’s personal radioactivity as she stared me down. I averted my gaze and pulled the blankets up around my chest.
“You can’t hide from me, Collie. I know that you like him.”
“No, I don’t,” I said defensively while Pop looked mildly embarrassed, as if some unpleasant family secret were about to be revealed.
“You can’t fool me,” Ma said, triumphant expression on her face, her voice crackling with bitterness. “You think he’s so wonderful, then why don’t you go live with him? I’ll pack your bags and put you out the door myself. I’m sick of your betrayals.”
It was a familiar threat. I glanced over at the corner of my parents’ room, days of clothing heaped high as a small mountain range, two little dogs curled up on its summit, Ma agonizing over the laundry—how to do it, when to do it, why do it at all—the way international think tanks dwell on questions of war and peace.
“It’s nice there, at Granddad’s house, I mean,” I said, finally daring to look at her. “It’s quiet. I like the way the sheets smell.”
“That figures,” Ma sneered. “You’re so typical, Collie. I can hardly believe you’re my son. You want everything tied together in a nice, neat little potpourri package. Well, the world is a filthy, stinking place. I’m so sorry if I don’t conform to your narrow idea of what a mother should be, cooking and cleaning and pressing your sheets and starching your shirt collars. Life is not a goddamn dance recital!”
“Well, it’s not a bunch of dirty socks, either,” I said as Ma’s face contorted into a fixed expression of silent rage. She stared at me. Ma was always giving me the stare, aiming her eyes at me like loaded weapons.
“Charlie,” she said finally, “are you going to allow him to speak to me that way?”
“Don’t talk back to your mother,” Pop said, not paying attention, his eyes drooping, fingers tapping out some tune on his bare chest that only he could hear.
“Get your suitcase, Collie, you’re going to your grandfather’s. Make it fast,” Ma ordered, bouncing from the bedroom without a backward glance and banging down the stairs, big dogs and little dogs, their nails clicking against the hardwood, bounding forward to greet her.
Ma was a total hypocrite when it came to her old man, offering me up to him on a regular basis in the same way that primitive tribes would try to ensure good times by feeding virgins into the village volcano to appease the local gods. I used to spend most school holidays at Cassowary and went there at least one or two weekends a month, and Ma was right, I did like it there. My dark secret—I guarded my love for Cassowary as if it were a cache of dirty magazines under my mattress.
My grandfather was a tall man and a long road, formal and austere, but when you’re surrounded on all sides by clashing cymbals and blowing horns, it’s nice to occasionally find yourself with an oboe. Cool, cavernous, and resonant as a concert hall, Cassowary was a place where I could sit in peace and listen to the music of my own thoughts, free from the aural warscape of home, where I used to sneak off and climb on the roof of the stable to try to obtain some relief.
I’d sit with my arms wrapped around my legs, my forehead pressed against my knees, ocean breeze skimming the top of my head, and I’d empty out my brain, pour out the contents in one smooth flush as effortlessly as if I were tipping over a basin of water. Not thinking can bring its own pleasures, but it could cost you your life if Ma suspected even for a second that your insides weren’t rumbling away like the neighboring Atlantic on a stormy day.
Cassowary presented its own difficulties, but at least they were peacetime challenges. And unlike Ma, who could go from love to hate to indifference before brushing her teeth in the morning, the Falcon was consistent in the ways he was impossible to get along with. Still, I suspected that he liked me, though perhaps not very much, liked me in a vague, unloving sort of way—for one thing, we both shared a deep and abiding devotion to Cassowary. It was a quiet bond between us that even he understood and welcomed.
Ma made it pretty clear that the only reason the Falcon took notice of me was to annoy her, while Pop figured he was out to manipulate and subdue the magnificent Flanagan spirit, “spattering paint on the Mona Lisa,” he called it. In their combined view, Bingo was a tiger, primeval and exotic, a beautiful savage hovering way beyond the Falcon’s corrupting influence, while I was a less glamorous, more pliable species—something that liked to dig, an armadillo, maybe, something that could be housebroken.
Uncle Tom had various theories as to why the Falcon demonstrated an interest in me; one had to do with his bird preoccupation.
“Let’s see: Life gave you wings, but you can’t fly. What kind of a bird is built for running?” He stared at me. “Did you know that the ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain? Hmmn . . . Your grandfather told me when you were born, he thought you had tiny eyes. Well, say, that’s not good. He had you pegged as an imbecile from the get-go.”
Who knows? I had enough trouble trying to understand my own crazy feelings, let alone achieve any real insight into what my grandfather thought. Why did the Falcon persist in involving himself with people who appeared to hold him in contempt? Maybe it was simply the desire for connection, the yearning for family, that drove him, and he couldn’t overcome the outlandish tics of personality that prevented him from achieving his explicit longings.
One thing is certain. It was easier for him to declare his intention to take over the world than it was for him to ask me to join him on his morning ride before breakfast, though he never enjoyed riding alone.
And then there was Ma’s epic distaste for both of us that forged an unspoken, if creaky, alliance. Being mutually despised wasn’t much, but it was something, and it had the good effect of making me think that maybe Ma was the one with the problem.
No matter how anyone looked at it, I wasn’t exactly Ma’s cup of tea. Her distaste for me constituted a kind of psychic birthmark, a port wine stain that resisted fading. On the few occasions that she felt constrained to give me a hug, it was less a soft show of maternal tenderness and more a memorable lesson in force physics, like tripping and falling face-first onto an ice rink, her affection wounding as a cold, blunt object.
In the first hours and days after my birth, she tried to convince everyone that I was suffering from Down syndrome and needed to be institutionalized, pointing to my vaguely almond-shaped eyes as proof, the baffled doctors concluding she was suffering from a hormonal balance. Ma never would say die—all the time I was growing up, she continued to refer to the “Oriental cast” of my eyes as evidence there was something wrong with me.
Pop used to argue with her, armed with his own hyperbolic skill set: “Anais! The boy’s a genius. Look at his school marks! Right off the charts—and what about his language skills? He was only two years old and it was like talking to Sean O’Casey. If he’s an idiot, then he’s an idiot savant.”
“Well, you’ve got the idiot part right anyway,” said Uncle Tom, not bothering to look over at me but continuing to whisk a bowl of pancake batter.
Pop ignored him. “And let’s not forget he’s left-handed. Everyone knows that being left-handed denotes incipient genius.”
“Well, if that’s the case, then Princeton better start recruiting from the Arctic Circle,” Uncle Tom said. “Show me a polar bear that isn’t left-handed.”
As a kid I spent a lot of time trying to understand why Ma hated me, figuring the reasons were psychologically complex, mostly beyond my grasp, and maybe even a bit flattering. It wasn’t until I got older that I realized my greatest sin was that I looked like my grandfather.
Right from the start the resemblance was apparent, and it only increased over time. I was like a living portrait of the Falcon through the seven ages of man. Still am. Tall and narrow—Pop called us “the matchstick men” on account of our long limbs—I inherited the Falcon’s wide cheekbones (he could have passed for a Russian model), full lips (he could have passed for an Italian porn star), curly black hair (same again), mortician’s pallor, dark blue eyes, and permanently clenched jaw. Bingo took great pleasure in pointing out that I even inherited the Falcon’s girlish ankles.
The Falcon kept an Old English mastiff called Cromwell, his habitual companion. When one Cromwell died, he was immediately replaced with another, which he also named Cromwell. The Cromwells represented the only living creatures to which he showed affection, feeding each one a constant stream of shortbread cookies and carrying on long, complex conversations with them alone in the library when he thought no one was listening.
I once overheard him asking a Cromwell what time he’d like to eat, which seemed a very lonely question to ask a dog. I slipped away, not wanting to hear any more.
I was ten years old and staying with my grandfather for a weekend when one of the Cromwells died suddenly of a heart attack. I came down the long, winding stairs to the hallway, where he lay on the black-and-white floor tile surrounded by my grandfather and various members of the household staff.
When I realized what had happened, I quietly began to cry. My grandfather, in his indigo housecoat, silver hair falling over his forehead, turned sharply at the first sound of my sniffling.
“Oh, Lord,” he said. “I suppose this is what we have to look forward to for the rest of the visit.”
Feeling embarrassed and ashamed, I wiped my tears and watched as Cromwell the fifth or sixth, I’d lost track, was wrapped in a white cotton sheet by two of the housemaids and carried off by the cook and the groom to be buried on the grounds of the estate, a secret location only the Falcon knew.
Bingo and I spent many days looking to no avail for the Cromwells’ burial grounds. I suspected the Falcon paid frequent visits, but I never had the heart to follow him.
Even now I have no idea where the Cromwell collective lies buried, nor do I look any longer. Like my grandfather, it represents a mystery I’m content to leave unsolved.
Later that night, I awoke to the sound of pacing on the floor beneath me. I got up and crept partway down the stairs, stopping and concealing myself in the darkness in the curve of the banister railings. My grandfather was at the end of the hallway in front of his bedroom, pacing back and forth, back and forth, illuminated by the light from the moon as it shone through the windows in the landing. He was wearing his dressing gown and plain black slippers; he was rubbing his hands and crying.
I sat in the shadows for a long time, feeling almost paralyzed with the cold, my feet achingly exposed, until he went into his bedroom and shut the door. I waited for a moment, and then I did the same. It was my first indication that there was more to the Falcon than he was prepared to reveal to a ten-year-old boy.
Two days later the new Cromwell arrived, a three-month-old British import, an identical fawn-colored match to all his predecessors.
The Falcon greeted him indifferently. The next morning, I saw him offer the new Cromwell a shortbread cookie, and as the puppy wagged his tail and took up his place alongside him in the library, the door closing behind them, shutting me out, I heard the Falcon ask his opinion about the condition of the walls.
“I’ve no interest in changing the color, but I think maybe the room needs a fresh coat of paint. What do you think, Cromwell?”