The Astor Orphan (4 page)

The venison had been donated by men whom we allowed to hunt at Rokeby. Mom would get Dad to hang any newly slaughtered deer upside down from a water pipe in the old storeroom. She would stand on a ladder in her white canvas apron, machete in hand, and cut away the skin of the deer, busily slicing for hours. I knew from the enormous volume of the antique cauldron that we would be living on this stew for weeks.

“No food until all the grease is cleaned off your hands, Teddy!” Mom was one of Rokeby's fiercest females.

“Yes, dear. Anything you say, dear. . . .” Dad muttered this automatically, without making a move toward any cleaning products or running water.

Mom was a typical Polish wife in many respects. She'd been raised by a Russian mother who, as an infant, had escaped with her aunt from the Bolsheviks to Warsaw. I'd been told stories about how my mother's mother would stay up the entire night to do the family's laundry by hand, or how she would walk up their steep mountain road—about half a mile from the bus stop—carrying heavy groceries. Despite their poverty, Mom's family had had meals on time and clean laundry, china and linen tablecloths for Sunday and holiday meals. In Mom's childhood photos, she and her sister wore neatly ironed dresses and colorful ribbons tied around their freshly shampooed pigtails.

It was Mom who cleaned the front rooms of the big house—particularly the front hall and the three flights of white steps—although, with time, she did this less and less. Hers was a war of one against the mess of generations.

Like Grandma Claire's, Mom's upbringing had also instilled in her an understanding of the importance of money. She'd had jobs over the years—albeit jobs for which she'd been overqualified, with her degree in Russian and German philology from the University of Warsaw. She had picked strawberries, been a carpenter's helper, made mosaics for a public park. Eventually, she'd gone back to school for graphic design and taken a job as a commercial artist.

But in all other ways, Mom had left Poland behind. She now painted her nearly nonexistent eyebrows an electric blue and was very minimally interested in either propriety or family.

“You're a dirty swine!” Mom now kicked Dad's foot in what I had learned to see as a normal expression of spousal affection.

“Ow! Was that really necessary?” Dad laughed.

“Take off this filthy shirt now!” Mom started ripping off Dad's blue work shirt. Buttons went flying.

My unconventional parents were so oddly matched that people could not imagine either of them with anybody else.

I was enchanted by their story. When Dad spent time in Poland in his twenties, he rented a room from Mom's aunt, “Ciocia Jadzia,” and took courses at the University of Warsaw. Mom also lived with her aunt and attended the university. I imagined my parents as young students, staying up late in Warsaw's cafés and strolling through its shadowy streets, trying to steer clear of the secret police. Dad the handsome, Harvard-educated American aristocrat and Mom the meek, hopeful university student.

After they'd married, Dad chose to return to Rokeby, his inheritance, hopeful that he could revive the place. He was soon consumed by the dream and entangled by the reality.

Poland was a place of both physical and spiritual darkness. Mom was full of this darkness. I had it within me as well. I knew that one day I would have to go back to Poland—where Mom had taken me every other winter vacation until I was seven—to reconnect with the darkness that lived inside both of us.

I used to dream of living there with Mom, in her family's roughly stuccoed mountain house, under the protective eye of the sharp-peaked Carpathians. I believed that I would have thrived in a strict Communist system, where being poor was not seen as a mark of a weak character. School, I imagined, would be a place of hard work. The education was based on rote learning, which I loved because facts are never gray.

None of this meant that I wanted to eat like a Polish peasant.

“Is there anything besides venison stew?” I asked as I opened the fridge. Its rusting hinges creaked. It smelled of dead meat. On the first shelf were a pack of hot dogs, a quart of expired milk, a bottle of French's mustard, and a jar of green, furry Ragu. “Can we go to the Tea Garden tonight?” I asked hopefully. A cheap Chinese restaurant called the Tea Garden was the only place we ever went out to eat.

“I can't. Tonight is the last showing of
Fanny and Alexander
.”

The movies were Mom's refuge from reality. Occasionally, the arty local theater was our mutual escape. I had received a broad education in foreign and independent film because Mom couldn't afford a babysitter. She had taken me to see
Nosferatu
in black and white,
Orpheus, Women in Love
, and
From Mao to Mozart
.

This last—a documentary about Isaac Stern's visit to China to give master classes to conservatory students there—made me dream of having the discipline to practice my violin like the students in the film. They lived in cubicles and practiced five, eight, ten hours a day.

“Can I come?”

“No. I'm going with a friend who doesn't like children.”

Mom was most interested in me when I posed for her sketching sessions.

I stood over the table looking at my dinner. I would gladly have eaten a plate of distinguishable food items neatly arranged—a portion of colorful vegetables, a slab of meat, some rice, like the meals at Grandma Claire's house. I didn't like amorphous brown stews. I decided not to eat.

“I'm not hungry. No stew for me, thanks.”

The phone began to ring, as it always did at mealtimes. In addition to his Rokeby groupies, Dad had an extensive network outside Rokeby in the local community. He was usually involved with several charitable missions at any given time. He had a number of immigrant friends whom he was helping obtain refugee status. He would take junk off people's hands to add to his barnyard collection. Or he would offer the use of his backhoe or bulldozer and free labor in exchange for a couple of beers and some ice cream—keeping the barter system alive and well.

Regular correspondents included “Frankie the Freeloader,” who used foster children to work his pig farm, and Irving Rothberg. Irving's front lawn was littered with gravestones, as his business was carving messages and biographical information about the dead. Part of this business involved retrieving and transporting corpses and preparing them for burial, so we got to hear plenty of stories about him.

Our telephone—black and square with a rotary dial—sat neglected on its haunches like a fat cat.

“Are you going to answer it?” I asked Mom, who was closest to the phone.

“No, I don't want to,” she whined.

We had a party line, shared with both Uncle Harry's family and Grandma Claire, and anyone could listen in. Dad regularly joked that Mom had a fear of telephones, that she was afraid the phone would bite her. But Mom's paranoia of people listening in probably had its source in Communist Poland, where even a harmless exchange over the phone could end in arrest by the secret police, imprisonment, and even disappearance.

I finally answered it. It was one of Dad's Book of the Month clubs. Dad would order from them heavy hardcover books, like encyclopedias and atlases, under the names of various Rokeby pets. Dad's two favorites were “Ms. Mimi Katz”—named after my cat Mimi—and “Mr. Piesek Yaruzelski.” This latter subscriber was a bright yellow dog with pointy ears that Grandma had named Yellow Dog Dingo, but whom Dad called Piesek Yaruzelski—“little dog Yaruzelski”—after the last Communist leader of Poland, who imposed martial law in 1981.

“Um . . . Ms. Katz is not here right now. She has gone on vacation,” I told the creditor, as Dad had instructed me to do whenever they would call.

After I hung up, Dad and I had a good laugh, while Mom ranted.

“You're both criminals! I hope you end up in prison! Next time they call, I'm going to tell them the truth!”

“Come to think of it, I believe I also got
you
by mail order. But they sent me the wrong sister!” Dad would often joke that Mom had been a mail-order bride, since they'd been married by proxy—a third party had stood in for Dad at the wedding in Poland—so that Mom could leave the country and arrive at Rokeby like a mail delivery.

At that, Mom joined in the laughter. This was rare, as she generally disapproved of Dad and sided with the more powerful family members—his brother, sister-in-law, and mother—who collectively condemned him.

With my parents, I was immersed in a theater of the absurd: the beautiful Polish woman with blue eyebrows and a truculent temper; the filthy gentleman farmer beloved by all, except his closest relatives, for his brilliant mind, generous spirit, and total disregard for public opinion; and their serious young daughter, who mostly acted the part of the parent.

As if on cue, I now walked over to the cabinet above the sink and snatched a pair of nail clippers, then joined Dad at the far end of the table.

“Dad, give me a foot.”

Dad absently lifted a leg up. I placed his foot in my lap and began to remove his shoe and sock. He tried to withdraw it. “Now, wait a minute. What are you planning to do with those clippers?”

“Just the usual pedicure. Hold still.”

His toenails were thick and yellow like seashells, each with a dense layer of dirt and grease underneath. After clipping the end of each nail, I also dug under it with the metal file and scraped out the black dirt. Dad winced all the while.

“Other foot, please.”

“No, no. We can do the other foot some other time.”

“No. Now, Dad!”

Someone had to take care of him. Poor Dad sacrificed everything for Rokeby's care and had no time to take care of himself or his family. His gray, rotting teeth, his filthy clothes and skin, his gnarled hair, and the black dirt and oil under his fingernails all cried for my attention.

While I was happy to play the parent, I sometimes fantasized about having overbearing Chinese parents who would help me become as accomplished as the violinists in the Isaac Stern documentary—parents who would furiously scribble notes during my violin lessons and later review them while they supervised my practicing.

As I was finishing up Dad's pedicure, I noticed a pair of shining eyes glaring at me from the gloom beyond the kitchen doorway. It was Aunt Olivia, fixing me with her mad rhinoceros look, her nostrils flared and her eyes fierce.

Uncle Harry was Aunt Olivia's second husband. From her first marriage, she had a teenage son and daughter who were now both away at school.

She'd caught me off guard, amid the mess, with Dad's filthy bare foot in my lap, the cluttered table, the unmatched soup bowls and spoons, the rusty fridge, the dead flies. With her in the room, it all felt shamefully squalid.

“I'd like to speak with Alexandra for a second.” Aunt Olivia motioned with her index finger for me to follow her through the pantry and up the back stairs toward her part of the house. I felt light, as if my feet weren't touching the floor and my limbs might detach from my body. Aunt Olivia, an accomplished actress and singer, strutted dramatically.

“We can have our little
conference
in the middle room. Now, come in, and close the door behind you,” she ordered.

Courtesy of Charles Tanguy

A
unt Olivia summoned me to the middle room, so called because it was sandwiched between the back and front parts of the house. In the old days, food would be transported from the back kitchen, by way of the dumbwaiter located in the middle room, down half a floor to the old pantry—currently our kitchen—and then out through the swinging door into the dining room. Now the middle room served as the living room in Aunt Olivia and Uncle Harry's part of the house.

Aunt Olivia's figure towered over me like an oversized A, feet planted and hands on hips.

“Well?” Aunt Olivia's nostrils now flared.

I just waited for her to talk. I had nothing to confess.

“I want you to look into my eyes when I speak to you.” I tried, but her dark eyes, at times faraway, were now too severe. So I looked at her neck instead. “Now, let's get something very clear.” My eyes had already traveled back to the floor. “You are not to call my daughter fat!
Ever!
” She clenched her square jaw. “Do you understand? Do you think that you can bully
my
children?” Like a lioness, she never hesitated when it came to defending her young.

She didn't understand that I was only trying to do what was best for her daughters. As my father did with his protégés, I hoped to mentor and mold my cousins into accomplished and beautiful young women. How could Aunt Olivia feel the need to protect her girls from me when it was I who was protecting them from failure and disappointment?

“You can only play with my daughters if you agree to treat them nicely. No soldiering them around like they're in some kind of military camp. Got it?”