Our house was full of shiny valuables that we were forbidden to touch. Rare Martin guitars leaned against upholstered chair backs in our living room, as if waiting for cocktails to be delivered. Glossy silver boxes housing monogrammed guitar picks littered the mahogany tabletops. Antique Leica cameras and real guns from the Wild West decorated desktops and bookshelves, where leather-bound first editions of Nathaniel Hawthorne comingled with a first edition of Through the Looking-Glass signed by Lewis Carroll.
On occasion, my father would take out his favorite antique revolver, a perfect greyhound of a gun with a long barrel and intricate engravings surrounding its ivory-inlaid grip, and show me how to clean and oil it. Then he would have me reach my finger around the trigger and pull. Afterward he’d open it up and show me why it hadn’t fired; there were no bullets, see.
“John Wayne carried this gun in How the West Was Won,” he’d tell me with pride. My father loved old Westerns. He sometimes dressed the part and walked around the house in boots, spurs, and a cowboy hat, flipping the guns out of their holsters like the outlaw Jesse James. He often told the story of dressing up as a cowboy when he was a kid on Christmas Day, and how his mother had shouted at him to change into a jacket and a tie. “I never forgave my mother for that,” he would say with a faraway look.
If my mother came into the room while my father was showing me how to load the bullets, he’d look up at her and beam. “God, I love my guns, Gail—more than anything in the world.”
“Those awful guns.” This was her habitual reply. “How can you love them?” And while the two of them dueled it out with their scripted conversation, I enjoyed the privilege of handling the goods. My parents often talked this way; I usually knew what one would say to the other, a predictability I found deeply comforting. Nor did it concern me, the thought that my father loved his possessions at least as much as he loved us. I took it as a given.
But there was a double standard in our house. While I was sometimes allowed to handle my father’s treasures, as soon as my younger brother, Whitney, could walk, he was punished just about daily for touching my father’s things—spanked, yelled at, and sent to his room. None of us was immune; when I was four I wandered into my parents’ bathroom and ran my father’s razor up my arm to see how it worked. When he found it clogged with hair, he slapped me across the face three times, until I admitted I’d done it.
And yet Whitney had these run-ins with my father more than all the rest of us put together.
One day my father left a fragile clay pipe on a table—well within reach of a toddler’s wandering hands—and then snapped like a mousetrap when Whitney of course broke it.
“Why the hell did you break my pipe?” my father angrily demanded, taking Whitney by the shirt collar.
“Because I did,” said my frightened three-year-old brother.
“Then I’m going to spank you,” said my father.
“Why?” asked Whitney.
“Because I am. That’s why.”
My father and I often went out to a local diner for dinner, just the two of us, while my mother stayed at home to make dinner for the boys. Other times my father and I played a game that I secretly hated, a game ostensibly designed to teach me a valuable skill: how not to get kidnapped.
I still remember the first time he made me play. “Frances!” He shouted from the bottom of the stairs. “Time to practice. Step outside, please.”
My whole body tensed at the sound of his voice. I could tell from the sour smell of the air around him that he’d been drinking.
Because we were a known family, because we had a name that made us stand out, it was very important, my father had told me, that I play this game with him. Nothing mattered more than this—not even learning how to swim, or how to read, or how to hit a tennis ball.
“They’ll take you away and we’ll never see you again,” my father said. “Or they’ll ask for a ransom that we can’t possibly afford to pay.”
“What’s a ransom?” I asked.
“A lot of money—you know, millions of dollars.”
It seemed a terrible curse to have a recognizable name. But to have a recognizable name and not enough money to pay the ransom?—nothing less than a cruel joke.
We walked outside.
“Stand right here,” said my father, his brow unaccountably heavy with anger, pointing to a spot on the sidewalk in front of our house, a six-bedroom Spanish Mediterranean with a sprawling green lawn.
This was a serious game, a game that made my father stern, impatient.