A moment, a hitch, a hiccup of time passed before I spoke. A moment I was only barely aware of, in which I made the decision not to remain silent. I have never been very good at remaining silent to spare her feelings.
“My therapist says,” I began, but found I was out of words. Even to say this word, therapist, is a risk in my family. I tried again. “My therapist says that if the house is torn down I should get to drive the bulldozer.”
She cut the engine. Wherever we were going, we’d arrived, but neither of us moved. The air in the car was suddenly thick, viscous with silence. When my mother spoke, her words came slowly. “I get to drive the bulldozer.”
No one story is simple. No one story complete.
After two hours of searching, it’s almost time for Janna and me to leave. We have to catch a train. But I cannot find a photograph of my grandfather. Hundreds of photographs in the cabinet, but not a single one of him. I keep wanting to think that when they told me it didn’t haunt them, it didn’t. I keep wanting to take the past, and my anger, at its word.
Yet someone went through this cabinet. There are photographs of every cousin, every aunt and uncle, of both of my grandmothers. Of relatives who died before I was born, and some I even recognize as of my grandfather’s siblings, taken at the party for his and my grandmother’s fiftieth anniversary. Someone removed the photographs of him. Not to keep him from display—this cabinet hides its contents. But to scour him even from here, the left-behind part of the story. And I don’t believe, I realize, looking at all the photographs, that they did this scouring right after they found out about the abuse. Whoever did it, did it later. When they realized the hurt.
In the doorway, Janna appears. We will miss the train if I don’t hurry.
“Five more minutes,” I say.
Then I realize. My parents’ wedding album. They keep it in the living room, on the bookcase opposite the couch that replaced the couch I lay on as a sick child. All the games of checkers I played there with my grandparents in the winter, when it was too cold to sit on the porch. All the Sundays and Christmases we spent here. As I sat cross-legged with the board on the floor, my grandfather would lean far forward on the couch to see where my checkers were landing. He’d laugh at the eager jokes I told, and ask me how school was. Above us the whole time, waiting, was the staircase.
The album is what I’ve come to the room for. But next to it is something unexpected. Another album, broad-faced and slender, that was once white. I run my hands over its vinyl cover. From its bottom, half a rainbow blooms. It was meant for a child. I flip through the pages, expecting it to be empty. Most of the albums on my parents’ shelves are empty.
But suddenly, there is my family. We stand behind the house, on the lush lawn, its green as vibrant as I remember from childhood, the green my father tended from his tractor. I can almost hear Vivaldi’s cellos and violins race from the speakers my father strung up. The photograph is labeled FATHER’S DAY. My siblings and I stand in a row, my sisters and me in dresses, my brother in a navy blazer and pants. Beside us, on a bench, sit my father’s mother and my mother’s mother. My parents stand behind them, and then—there. My grandfather.
His sport coat is gray, as are his slacks. His shoulders slump, his lips are parted just slightly. He stares directly into the camera. He is younger than I remember him being, but what is age to a child? The unexpected thing is how much a stranger he is. I would pass him on the street and think only that there, with a head of gray curls and his pants high around his waist, goes an elderly Italian man.
That’s what I think, at first. But as I hold the album and study the picture, I feel the tremors start in my body. The bristle of his hair prickles. The wet murk of his mouth. The deep nausea and the grief and the shock and the fear. No. I might not know, I might not know consciously who I passed on the street, why I recoiled. But my body would know. My body remembers.
The girl in the photograph, standing to his left, is eight years old. She has brown curls brushed into gently waved frizz held back by a thin white headband. She loves Nancy Drew mysteries, and I know, looking at her, that right now though she holds her lips in a half smile she is off somewhere behind her eyes. She smells the grass; she hears the violins; she feels the weight of her family beside her. She feels everything she cannot yet understand. And she has escaped in her head, dreaming up a world that will live inside her, with characters who feel as real as her own.
A memory comes: I sit cross-legged on the living room carpet, my grandfather on the couch above me. I am sketching an oval on a drawing pad—the shape of a face. “Good, good,” he says. He leans down to take my pencil. He shows me how to section the planes of the face into quadrants. He marks where the eyes go, the nose, the mouth.
“I have to go to my grandfather’s grave.” I have found Janna in the kitchen, seated at the white Formica table, and I realize that I am telling her we are going to miss the train. But I have gone to Jeremy’s grave, I have gone to Bessie and Alcide’s and Oscar’s. “We have to go to his grave.”
Forty
I say goodbye to the boys, kneeling down next to them to bury my face in their fur. Then we drive through Tenafly, down the hill and past the old apartment building, over the railroad tracks. The cemetery is a ten-minute drive away, nestled on a street framed high by elms and oaks.
Janna waits by the car while I walk toward the trees. “Marzano,” I say to the caretaker who sits in a small office at the entrance gate, and he points me up an embankment, to a deep gathering of graves. As I climb, I pass headstones of gray and glossy black. On one, an engraved sun hovers over water, setting or rising, there is no way to tell. Above, the canopy is thick with leaves. Fall is coming.
I see the gravestone’s back first. Rose granite.
I walk around to its front.
My grandmother is a young woman. In her wedding portrait her face is round and unlined, a white veil of Spanish lace laid over her hair, a wide bouquet of flowers spilling over her arms. Beside her stands a young man. My grandfather’s hair is dark. He wears a crisp black suit, his white shirt collar starched into high points ringed by a black bowtie. He stands upright, no cane.
I remember this photograph well. When I was a child it sat on my grandmother’s vanity table at their house, and I liked looking at it. How unimaginable the people in it had seemed then. But I see the picture differently now than I did as a child. Now I look at them and I see how young they were. I see love, and I see fear, and everything the years will take. They have so much ahead. They have no idea what is ahead.
They were young, then they were old, now they are dead.