The Astor Orphan (17 page)

I tried to picture it—
vomiting blood
. Throwing up was disgusting enough, but blood? It sounded as if she'd been shot. My muscles tightened.

“What can you expect, when a person abuses their body that way?”

I doubted that Grandma Claire wanted her life to be saved.

“Let's go. You're coming with me. . . .” She grabbed the pudding container out of my hand. “What's that cooking smell? You're just like your father, with a taste for American junk food. And let the dog out, so it doesn't piss in the house.” Mom was already rushing out the door with near-deadly force.

There had never been an exact moment when I suddenly understood that Grandma Claire was a drunk. I had been very lightly aware of it from watching Aunt Olivia's son Ben empty bottles of Jim Beam and Jack Daniel's down Grandma's drains, from hearing Aunt Olivia's mocking remarks about Grandma's “sucking on the bottle,” and from the scent of liquor and mouthwash on Grandma's breath. My awareness, like a cake in the making, had grown gradually richer with each additional layer.

Not wanting to let that day's events interfere with their plans, Mom and Dad were going to a dinner party.

“Hi, A-lex-an-dra.” My half–Puerto Rican cousin Veronique greeted me from our apartment's doorway. She was here to stay with me while my parents were out. Veronique was Cousin Chanler's twenty-year-old granddaughter. Her mother was Puerto Rican, so even though Veronique had a wide mouth and dimples, like me, her lips were much more voluptuous.

“Hi,” I grumbled, uncomfortable around her positive energy. It was hard not to like her, though, with her lovely cocoa skin and soft-looking, fluffy afro tied back with a kerchief.

“Don't worry,” she whispered, and winked. “Your grandmother is a tough lady. . . . Hey, can we go exploring through the house?”

“It's cold everywhere.” I felt little excitement about roaming around the house. I was irritable with worry about Grandma Claire. She was so thin and fragile, so desperate to fix her family and yet so destructive. “We'll have to wear our coats. Most of the house is like a refrigerator.”

We walked out into the third-floor hallway. It was lit by a single bare bulb.

“Where does this lead?” She pointed to a door.

“There's an old-fashioned elevator behind there.”

“It's too bad you can't use it all the time, instead of walking up and down three flights of stairs every day.”

“There are a lot of neat things in this house that we're not allowed to use. . . . Be careful!” I warned, as she opened the door to the empty elevator shaft, a dark void.

Standing on its precipice, Veronique started to pull on one of the frayed ropes dangling at the side of the doorway. At first, it was resistant and needed tugging. Then it started to slide quickly through her hands, threatening rope burn, whirring loudly as it sped along. Soon, the top of a wooden box appeared from below, then more of it, until a tiny room with a wooden bench against the back wall stood before us. It was the first time I'd ever seen the inside of the elevator.

Veronique sat beside me, still holding the rope, which had a locking mechanism so that we wouldn't go flying as soon as we sat down. Then she started tugging on the rope for us to move; we surged upward with each pull.

The elevator soon stopped. “We've hit the top,” Veronique said. It was pitch-black.

“Where are we exactly?” I asked, disoriented.

“We're at the edge of the house.”

“What are we doing?”

“Just sit still and feel the energy of this space. It's so quiet. I'm sure your great-grandmama never came to this part of the house. The house ghosts don't roam here.”

“How do you know?”

Veronique's brother had been killed in a motorcycle accident a few years earlier, at the age of seventeen. As one of the only black kids in the local school, he had been very badly treated by his peers and had turned to drugs and risky behavior.

“Because ghosts revisit spaces they used in their lifetimes, spaces that had meaning for them. It is not logical for a ghost to explore new spaces. It is dead. It is not motivated by curiosity or desire for new experiences.”

I didn't like novel experiences either.

“I guess that makes sense.” In fact nothing was making sense to me.

My feet were cold in my Polish slippers, and I hadn't brought gloves; sitting on my hands on the hard wooden bench of the elevator didn't help. And I didn't want to tell her that I tended to get claustrophobic. So, with my body tense from cold and the discomfort of being in a tight, pitch-black space, I kept still.

“I think you've had a rough go of it.”

“No, it's not so bad.” I despised being pitied. But in truth, I was miserable. The only person I could rely on to take care of me had nearly died that day.

In fact I had more in common with Veronique than I did with most people. She understood how difficult it was to be raised by people who inherited property without money, and who themselves were raised in privilege. Both Dad and Veronique's grandfather Cousin Chanler had caught the tail end of the old glory days. They had watched as their parents and grandparents had thrown dinner parties, gone to clubs, traveled the world. So although they both got the requisite Ivy League education, they never learned any professional skills. And of course they each had too strong a sense of entitlement to do a single job day after day and take orders from others. While they believed they were independent and could do whatever they wanted, they didn't inherit the money to support that attitude. Veronique and I would have to learn how to make it like regular people. But how could we be normal when we had no normal role models?

I could, however, imagine a different life. I'd thought so much about what I called “my New York City plan” that I almost believed it was about to happen.

I would be living in the city with a rich, childless aunt who would pay for my private school education and violin lessons at Juilliard. She would have a brownstone like the one Great-Grandma Margaret used to own. I would have a small room, with heat in the winter and lots of privacy, where I could do my homework and practice my violin undisturbed.

The only problem with this plan was that all my relatives had been accounted for.

When Grandma Claire finally came home after a week in the hospital, her face looked plumper and had its color back. Her eyes gleamed when she smiled. There were no more visible stress lines around her eyes and mouth, which previously had appeared so devastated by exhaustion and toxicity.

“I'm going away again for a few weeks, dear,” Grandma told me. “Your uncle is sending me out to a resting place in Minnesota.”

I knew Minnesota was a state, but I thought of soda.

I thought of the way Grandma Claire's facial skin looked like caked baking soda. Though she powdered it every morning with a powder puff, she missed crucial spots such as the middle of her cheek to her ear, or the tip of her nose. And I thought of the soda fountain at the old-fashioned diner and ice cream parlor in town where Grandma would take us kids. We would sit in the deep, highly varnished mahogany booth and eat grilled cheese sandwiches with ketchup. For dessert, Grandma would order a vanilla ice cream float with root beer. I never liked drinking soda because the fizz would hurt my tongue.

The news of Grandma's departure burned me in a similar way.

“Why?” I whined. Of course I understood. “Can I come?”

She had gone away before, each return beginning with hopeful expectations. I remembered one golden autumn day at Edgehill in Rhode Island, where we'd dropped her off. There had been a chill in the air. My heart sank as Dad's car pulled away from Grandma, who waved to us. Her silhouette and long shadow as she stood in the middle of the driveway are in my memory still. I continued to wave through the car's back window until her silhouette disappeared completely from view. I don't know if I saw a tear roll down her face, but I wanted to remember her lonely figure with that tear.

“No, dear. It's not for families.” Her long fingers rested on her knee and tapped in a semiconscious, gentle tic—from guilt and embarrassment, I knew. “Grandma has a problem and needs to get well.”

I preferred Grandma's version, which omitted the gore. Still, I couldn't get the thought of that bloody vomit out of my mind. I thought I could detect hints of its acrid smell in the house. She probably had been unable to lift her frail, six-foot frame out of the recliner and gotten some on her clothes. Had she passed out? Mom had forgotten to tell me.

“I'm going to return these to the library tomorrow. I checked them out for you before I went away.” She handed me
The Life of Paganini
and “something on the Dreyfus affair, to supplement your social studies unit. . . . Of course I could renew them for another two weeks, if you don't end up devouring them by tomorrow. . . .” She pursed her lips. “Meanwhile, how 'bout a game of Scrabble?”

So much a child herself! Maybe she had made herself sick with alcohol because she, like me, hadn't really had a childhood. Maybe the alcohol took her back to it, or helped her forget it.

Dad seemed to view alcoholism as a family tradition. That evening, he reminisced about his pop's alcoholism and the many rehabs he had visited: the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut; Austen Riggs in Stockbridge, Massachusetts; and Stony Lodge in Ossining.

“At Stony Lodge, they took the patients on tours of the neighboring maximum-security prison, where they would show them the electric chair. My father was a total failure in that place, and they kicked him out eventually. He always told them that he wanted to be an alcoholic. And that really cut the ground out from under his psychiatrists. Maybe Pop's drinking had something to do with the fact that my grandmother had never allowed alcohol into the house. So Pop went to the other extreme, I guess. . . .

“Pop would get so drunk! When it came time for me to graduate from high school in 1958, my mother snuck out of our New York apartment early in the morning while Pop was still sleeping something off and locked up all his clothes so he wouldn't be able to come later, as he would inevitably be too drunk to attend the graduation. So when he did wake up, he borrowed clothes from our elderly neighbor, Captain Barlow—of the British army and the Bermuda line—which were several sizes too big. Then he caught a flight up to Boston from LaGuardia, then another to Lawrence, and a cab to my boarding school. He arrived well before my mother, who was driving up. He had already gotten into the sauce on the plane, so the assistant headmaster, who was a close family friend, kindly locked him in his office until the graduation was over. You know, the odd thing is that my mother only started drinking after Pop died of it.”

W
HEN GRANDMA CLAIRE
returned from rehab in early December, I felt hopeful for a changed life, hopeful that in her new sobriety, Grandma would assert some parental authority and establish order. I even became chatty and affectionate with her again. The usual current of rage and betrayal that her drinking triggered in me had stilled.