Chez Cordelia (2 page)

There was another third-grade failure taken on by Mrs. Meek, along with me—Danny Frontenac. Three times a week Danny and I met with Mrs. Meek in her little room with the bright green tables and chairs and yellow walls and red square of carpet, a room so deliberately cheery that even third-graders noticed and resented it. There were always animal cutouts stuck up on the walls with tape, the kind of thing we were far too old to relish—duckies wearing boots and carrying umbrellas, black cats popping out of jack-o'-lanterns, that sort of nonsense. There was a permanent one on the door, under the sign
JUNE MEEK, READING SPECIALIST
(which for months I deciphered as
JUNIOR MEEK, READING SPACEMAN)
—a white kitten with glassy green eyes and a ballon coming out of its mouth saying, “Please Come In!”

In we went, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday before lunch, and I recall that for some reason we went hand in hand, like Hansel and Gretel into the forest, perhaps because children in St. Agatha's Catholic Academy were made to travel in pairs, on the grounds that idle hands are the devil's playground and linked hands are therefore at least half spoken for. But I can't remember if our hand-holding was officially sanctioned school policy, or if it was a symbol of our unity. For we were united, Danny and I, not in friendship but in fear. Terror of Mrs. Meek was what we had in common. Otherwise we disliked each other heartily, as all third-grade boys and girls who have been ruthlessly segregated since kindergarten dislike each other. But for those three half-hours a week we were bound by ties of hate and fear, and by our clutched hands, which kept their white-knuckled grip on each other down the corridor to the stairs, up the stairs, down half another corridor, and into a cul-de-sac which contained the nurse's office on the right, the nuns' bathroom (hee hee hee!) on the left, and straight ahead Mrs. Meek's chamber of horrors inviting us in. There our sweaty hands parted, reluctantly, and took up pencils and workbooks and chocolates.

The horrors in the chamber were the words, our enemies—books full of them, and flash cards which Mrs. Meek could snap in our faces like a magician doing some evil card trick, and stories with questions to go with them that were designed to trip us up and humiliate us. And there was Mrs. Meek herself.

She terrified us, though it's hard now to say why. She was tall and broad, middle-aged, with short blond hair, and she always wore dark blazers and skirts. “She looks like a daddy,” Danny said once, shuddering, but while I saw his point—there
was
something of the female impersonator about her—I didn't agree. For one thing, my daddy had a long black beard. I thought she looked like an off-duty nun, out of uniform.

She had a way of looking swiftly stunned (eyes popping, lips parted, nostrils pinched) and then pained (eyebrows angled down, teeth bared to the canines, eyes squinted half shut) at our mistakes, before the forbearing nunlike smile appeared again and the encouraging nods commenced. She filed her nails short, in points, and painted them red. Her eyes were pale blue with brown streaks in them. She must have worn a powerful girdle under her dark straight skirts, because I once jostled her and she felt exactly like a piece of furniture—the unyielding back of our sofa, maybe, stuffed with horsehair and covered tightly with fabric. She always seemed to both of us like a fraud, a witch disguised as a nice lady. She smiled a lot, showing plenty of crimson gum line and sharp white teeth, and she always spoke gently, and she rewarded us with candy, and she was always patient, but the whole performance, no matter how well acted, reminded me of the witch in Hansel and Gretel—sweet as pie until she had the children where she wanted them, and then
wham!
The door slammed shut, the oven was lighted, the fiendish cackles were released at last …

I had to hold off Mrs. Meek, and the only way to do it was to resist reading, resist the words she sent flying at me, fight the workbook with its trick questions. And I did fight; so did Danny. My weapon was inattention, his a slowness of mind I thought well feigned. Together we drove her crazy, drove her to superhuman patience and weekly more terrible smiles and bags and bags of Hershey kisses. (Even then a practical child, I used to wonder who paid for the candy, Mrs. Meek or the nuns?) She used to say, “That's better, Cordelia, really much better, it's coming nicely,” after I stumbled through the tale of the spotted dog and the mud puddle; translated, her words meant “You little beast, how much longer will this go on?” (I could hardly read English, but I could read Mrs. Meek.) Once—only once—when my absentminded stammerings drove her to some kind of brink, she raised her hand as if to slap me, and there was an awful pause, an eternal three seconds that lasted until she deflected her hand to the candy bag. The smile remained frozen on her face, no less grim than the creepy leer of the cat-sprouting jack-o'-lantern on the wall, and she pushed a piece of candy at me and watched me eat it, showing her sharp teeth, her sharp claws reaching for another one. I ate all she gave me, hungrily; it was not for nothing that our remedial sessions were held just before lunch. But the candy wasn't candy: it was reading medicine, and all three of us knew it. I would have resisted that, too, along with the other witch-blandishments, but though I knew it was medicine as surely as Robitussin and Kaopectate were medicine, it tasted just like candy, and I bolted it.

It worked. Gradually I learned to read, against my will. My will, as I said, was no match for Mrs. Meek's. I sat at her knee and prattled off the little stories, stumbling still but, if I went slowly and kept my mind on it, getting through them passably, at least as well as Vinnie DeLuca, who was the worst reader in the third grade except for Danny and me.

Danny learned, too, though even more slowly than I did. He was always a Problem Reader, all through elementary school, sullenly collecting U's and 43's and “Disgraceful!”s on his spelling tests and book reports. I remember once, in sixth grade, I sat across the aisle from him, and we had to correct each other's English tests. In an exercise requiring us to class a list of sentences as simple or compound, Danny got two out of ten right, obviously by hit-or-miss, and he spelled
simple
and
compound
, consistently, as
smiple
and
compond
, two words I came to like very much by the end of the test. (I had four wrong myself, but Danny caught only one of them.)

When I graduated out of the remedial class, Mrs. Meek gave me a giant Hershey bar, tied with a red ribbon, which I ate sitting on a toilet in the girls' bathroom before I returned to the third grade. Candy was one of the many aspects of what I considered normal life that were forbidden by my parents, and even though the eight-ounce slab of Hershey chocolate was my diploma certifying passage into the world of letters, I knew it was best to devour it and destroy the evidence. I flushed the wrappers down the toilet along with the red ribbon, wiped my mouth on a paper towel, and marched, slightly sick, down the hall to the third-grade classroom, where Sister Victoria Maria gave me a cold smile and the Third Reader,
Earth and Sky
, in which I laboriously wrote my name. I leafed through it before lunch (which I gave to Billy Arp in exchange for being allowed into the kickball game at recess) in hopes of finding Ted and Nancy replaced at last by more interesting children. But there they were, lumpishly smiling, visiting Uncle Bill's farm and learning about weather and romping with yet another dog, a collie named Sport. And I could read it all. I felt no triumph, only a sort of drab, betrayed gloom and a vivid, precocious resolution never to let such a thing happen to me again.

I had mastered reading, after a fashion, as I had learned to make my bed, and I put it in that category: “Boring Chores.” But I did it when I had to, and I ascribe to the fanged, creepy witchiness of Mrs. Meek the fact that the only kind of books I really like to read, to this day, are mysteries—and, come to think of it, that, I suppose, is what I'm writing.

Chapter Two

My Father's House

My brother, Horatio, writes real mysteries—or, rather,
not-real
ones, fictional ones. He began as a professor specializing in Chaucer, but in the donnish tradition of academics who turn to crime writing as a sideline, he produced (one summer when it was too hot, he explained, for Middle English) his first murder mystery,
Pride, Prejudice, and Poison
, in which Jane Austen tracks down the “spa poisoner” who is mixing strychnine with the healthful waters of Bath. It was such a success, winning the Edgar award and selling half a million copies, that, at the expense of his book on Chaucer, Horatio turned out another the following summer:
Deep in the Madding Crowd
, with Thomas Hardy as the amateur detective who exposes a mass murderer. And when that too hit the bestseller lists he abandoned forever Chaucer, his associate professorship, and the hopes of my parents which he'd filled so faithfully all his life, and became a full-time writer of lurid literary detective stories:
Death on the Mississippi
(starring Mark Twain),
Remembrance of Crimes Past
(in which Proust solves the crime without leaving his cork-lined bedroom), and his latest,
The Canterbury Deaths
(because he got homesick for Chaucer).

My parents always tolerated Horatio's degeneration into popular culture because he made so much money at it. My father is a poet, and like all poets he has spent most of his adult life grubbing after cash—grants, fellowships, chairs, residencies, readings, publishers' advances—and he respects the stuff with a respect bordering on dementia, but he'd never admit it, any more than he'd admit he looked down on Horatio and considered him a sellout and a crass materialist. Money, according to my parents, is no good unless it's been grubbed after in some arty way, and achieved in bits. The cash that flowed into Horatio's bank account (and promptly out again, I should say) they considered tainted money.

Juliet did a little better: she was perpetually hard-up but intellectually respectable, writing verse dramas no one would produce and sonnet sequences no one would publish. For years, she flitted around the earth living on grants at various universities where she studied Greek. In her spare time, she poured out her soul into her verse epic,
The Labyrinth
, which dealt with herself in relation to Greek mythology. She'd been working on it for nine years, and the end was not in sight—which was just as well, because although my father (who managed to remain wildly excited by the project for all those nine years) promised to get Juliet a publisher, I had a feeling that this time his vast network of connections would break down and no one would touch it. I had seen the thing: it was thicker than
David Copperfield
and it was partly in Greek. Juliet used to bring my parents all the new bits, and they read them and beamed ecstatically and hugged her, as if she'd presented them with grandchildren.

My other sister, Miranda, was married to a man named Gilbert Sullivan (I kid you not) and had her own printing press, on which she and Gilbert published, chiefly their own works. (Miranda wrote novels about tormented women in analysis; Gilbert wrote art criticism.) Miranda is shaped like a hatpin—tall and thin, with piled-up hair. She used to play basketball. Both my sisters, in fact, went through periods of what my parents considered frivolity in connection with their height: Miranda, as “Ready Randy” Miller, put herself through college on basketball scholarships, and Juliet was briefly a fashion model. But Daddy went to Miranda's games, and Mom bought the magazines in which Juliet was featured, just as they both read Horatio's books. Their disapproval of Miranda's and Juliet's and Horatio's strayings from the fold was always touched with amusement, and that's because the three of them are relentlessly literary types, whatever their peccadilloes. Juliet with her epic, Miranda with her little press, even Horatio with his abandoned professorship and vulgar success: they all sit smack in the middle of various literary pies. Small wonder that I, by contrast, am the family disappointment: short to their tall, discreet to their flashy, sense to their sensibility. What they liked to do when we all got together was play Botticelli or Scrabble, or read Juliet's verse epic aloud. What I liked to do was watch
Hawaii Five-O
or play blackjack.

My father is Jeremiah Miller, “a household word the way Tennyson was,” my mother likes to say when she sums up his career. There used to be a picture of Tennyson in the guest room (where all the odds and ends went), and he did remind me of my father—the beard, the melancholy brown eyes, the look of celebrity about him. But my father seems rougher, heartier, and I doubt Tennyson would want to have anything to do with him.

My father is, officially, an old-fashioned family man. He can be flamboyantly paternal. “These are my best poems,” he would say when we were small, gathering us to his bosom where the soft black beard flowed. “My masterpieces,” he sometimes continued. “My
chefs d'oeuvres
, my
Don Juan
, my
Canterbury Tales
, my Four
Quartets
—” His I-don't-know-whats. It's always been clear that he loves us—
adores
us—although it was also clear to me, from my earliest youth, that he loved us best when we were quiet, that children should be as unobtrusive as books on a shelf except when they were taken down for inspection, for inspiration, for amusement—sometimes for annotation. He loved us best when we were the children he had designed in his head.

I was never one of those children, and I learned early to stay out of his way, to avoid in particular his attic study (where Horatio had put a sign on the door:
HALLOWED GROUND
—characteristically, my father didn't remove it when the joke was over) and the window beneath it. I learned silence. I tried to stay out of the house all I could. For one thing, I got more dirty work than any of my siblings. They caught on early that, at our house, you could effectively shirk chores if you whined out, “I'm
reading!
” or “Can't I just finish this chapter?” So it was I, little Cinderella (“Here, Cordelia, you're not doing anything—take out the garbage”), who became, by default, mother's helper. At six, at seven, I was drying dishes, emptying garbage, setting the table, while Horatio and Juliet and Miranda slouched around lapping up pages of print. It made me mad, but it didn't make me read. The truth was, I preferred to empty the garbage.