The Astor Orphan (5 page)

“Yeah, I guess so.” I had no voice with her. All my adult confidence and authority had vanished.

“All right, I'm finished,” Aunt Olivia concluded, as if she had just given me a perfunctory beating. “You may leave now.”

I just kept looking at the floor, my head bowed.

“Are you listening?”

I looked up to see her thin nostrils still flared.

I wished I could ignore things. If I told Mom that a kid was mean to me at school, she would say, “Just ignore them!” But I couldn't. Every critical word pierced me to the quick, an attack on the perfection I worked so hard to cultivate.

“But first, give me a hug.” Like a stick, I inched toward her, and she squeezed me for a second. “I really do love you, you know,” she said. My eyes were on the doorknob. “You can come into my kitchen now, if you want.”

I visited her kitchen often, though it made me uncomfortable. These visits gave me a chance to take note of how Mom's kitchen might be improved if we ever got hold of some money. As Aunt Olivia was also a gourmet cook, I frequently showed up at mealtimes.

As we walked through the bright kitchen's double doors, the smell of cloves and lilacs wafted toward us. The kitchen jutted out the north end of the house, with walls exposed to the east and west. A row of three curtained windows stretched along each of these walls. Leafy green plants hung from ceiling hooks. The hardwood floor had recently been revarnished, and the walls and ceiling were clean, white, and free of cobwebs. On the stove next to the welcoming fireplace sat a gleaming teakettle. The modern refrigerator was covered with reminders, phone numbers, grocery lists, all held up by funny, colorful magnets. Unlike our cabinets, which were stacked with unmatched hand-me-down dishes and glasses, Aunt Olivia's were stacked with matching sets of both. My favorite was a set of blue glasses the color of dusk in winter, what I imagined to be the hue of loneliness. It was here, in this pleasant, well-lit corner of the house, that I felt my position as the poor cousin, poised on the margins of their home life, most acutely.

Maggie and Diana, now back in their jeans, were eating chocolate pudding. They were seated at a slick white linoleum table, uncluttered except by glass bottles of herbs and a crystal vase of lavender lilacs. The girls' chins barely reached the table's surface, despite the fact that they were sitting on Manhattan phone books. I slipped into a chair next to Maggie. “Do you want to go outside and play?” I whispered, keeping my eyes on Aunt Olivia.

“No!” Maggie, imperious, knew she was in control as long as her mother was there.

“Can I have a tiny taste of your pudding?”

“Mo-o-om . . . can Alexandra have a pudding?”

“Ughhh!” she moaned. “Doesn't she have her own food?” Aunt Olivia's dark bun had partially unraveled into wisps around her face. She slapped a pudding down in front of me. “There you are,” she said with a sigh.

“Can I take a spoon?” I whispered to Maggie.

“Mo-o-om! Can Alexandra have a spoon?”

“What's the matter with
her
voice today?” Aunt Olivia said mockingly. “The cat got her tongue?” Maggie giggled. “She can take one herself.” Aunt Olivia looked at Maggie as she said this, then giggled too, like a schoolgirl sharing a mean little secret.

I wrestled open the sticky, heavy drawer in the table and picked out a spoon, then swallowed a spoonful of pudding with a hard gulp.

Little blond Diana, oblivious and eager to please, licked her lips happily and pushed the empty plastic cup toward her mother. “More!” She smiled by squeezing her lips together, as if she had been instructed to smile this way.

“Oh, aren't you a regular little piglet!” Being called a piglet was a compliment coming from Aunt Olivia, who adored pigs—clean, theoretical pigs, that is. She had pink pig magnets on her fridge; pink pig oven mitts; and pigs on coffee mugs, notepads, key chains. She even claimed Miss Piggy as a favorite children's show character.

While Aunt Olivia's attention was still on Diana, I took the opportunity to slip out.

D
ESPERATE TO RETURN
to my own part of the house, I rushed back through the middle room. As I climbed the back staircase, my hand slid along the rickety banister. The peeling plaster ceiling loomed overhead like an angry sky. Mounted under the north wall's windows were several sets of horns from Uncle Willie Chanler's hunting expeditions in East Africa. Draped over the horns were cobwebs too high to brush away.

At the top of the back staircase, which was still part of Aunt Olivia and Uncle Harry's territory, I passed through a double doorway. Beyond was a small, shadowy hall—a crevice of the house located so deep within its interior that it rarely got enough light to see by—and a staircase that led up to the third-floor storerooms and our apartment. This dark, dusty hallway, cluttered with broken odds and ends, was the point where Rokeby's three worlds converged: the lonely squalor of the third floor, the elegant formality of the front rooms, and the smug coziness of Aunt Olivia's domain.

Courtesy of Ania Aldrich

T
he world of the third floor, my floor, began in earnest at the foot of a narrow staircase. Its contrast with the rest of the house was so great that I felt ashamed each time I climbed these stairs.

The glare of the bare bulb overhead highlighted the peeling white paint on the steps. The pink wall and white banister had been seasoned over the years by the grime of passing hands.

At the top of the stairs, standing at the north end of the central light well, I could discern Uncle Harry through the dusty interior windows. He stood in an alcove among Great-Grandma Margaret's old steamer trunks. Although he lovingly refolded the gowns Maggie and Diana had been playing in, he wore an agitated expression, clearly distressed that the dresses had been disturbed.

Around his stooped figure stood the silhouettes of dress mannequins, rocking horses, slightly broken Victorian dolls, children's desks at which the orphans had been homeschooled. I would sometimes go back there to ride the creaking rocking horses and look through the antique toys, but there was something distinctly unsatisfying about playing with broken toys from another era. Pieces of them were usually missing or would fall off in my hands.

Most of the third floor consisted of padlocked storage rooms where the family archives were kept. Though these technically belonged to the whole family, Uncle Harry kept most of them locked away from the rest of us, as if he were the family's sole true heir.

I only got an occasional glimpse of what lay inside these mysterious storerooms. I had spied bookshelves lined up library-style, with stacks of documents—in and out of boxes—in the aisles, yellowing posters, medals, broken chairs, old mattresses, and stuffed animal heads on the walls. Everything was covered with pieces of the crumbling, water-damaged ceiling. Metal pails were poised under the known leaky spots. Here, among this mess, lay our history, an addendum to the museum downstairs.

This should have been our part of the house, exclusively. Uncle Harry had seven spacious rooms in his part—none of which were used for general storage by other family members—while my family kept only three small rooms for ourselves. I liked to imagine the third-floor storerooms reclaimed, cleaned, and renovated. Then my parents could have their own guest rooms and be able to invite people to the house whenever they liked, without having to get approval from the extended family.

Uncle Harry closed the trunk and brushed off some of its dust as he took a cursory glance around the room. In his role as guardian of our inheritance, my uncle knew exactly what we owned and exactly where it all was. About once a month, late at night, he used a flashlight to take a full inventory of all the objects in the house: books, vases, lamps, portraits, and items in third-floor storage. Sometimes a spooked guest would report the sound of footsteps during the night.

“It's only Uncle Harry, checking the house for theft.”

Now, done with his inspection, Uncle Harry began walking in my direction. As he passed me on his way downstairs, I melted into the shadows of boxes so he wouldn't notice me. But it wasn't necessary, as his mind often dwelled in the past perfect, making him oblivious to the present.

Behind me was the door to the shaft of an old-fashioned hand-operated elevator, which extended behind our kitchen on the first floor. Within minutes, Uncle Harry's voice rose through the shaft. I already knew the text.

“Why is it that I must cover your share of the taxes each and every pay period?!”

As the rent from Rokeby's outbuildings didn't cover the estate's considerable property taxes, Uncle Harry would come into our kitchen and roar at Dad for not being able to come up with his share of the tax money. He'd threaten to confiscate Dad's shares because of his lack of contribution to Rokeby. Finally, Uncle Harry would reluctantly agree to cover for Dad, but he would let it be known that he was keeping a meticulous record of the debt.

It was this tax debt that turned Dad into a willing slave, not demanding any compensation for his physical maintenance of Rokeby.

It was always in the wake of Uncle Harry's tirades about the taxes that I could sense Dad's heavy despair over his inability to find a regular job and earn money. He had worked once as a hospital orderly in New York City during a year off from Harvard. But he had found it difficult to stick to an arbitrary schedule imposed on him by others, and Rokeby continually called to him, like a kingdom missing its king.

Dad would never fight back. Unlike Uncle Harry, he didn't keep a meticulous record of his contributions to Rokeby. He would just stand uneasily, one foot slightly in front of the other, rubbing his head and shrugging.

“Well . . . I'll pay you back as soon as I can.”

“Hmpph!” I could almost see Uncle Harry laughing scornfully. “You've never worked a day in your life. How will you ever be able to repay me?”

As part of his lifelong commitment to keeping Rokeby in the family, Uncle Harry would also lecture us, the next generation, on the importance of making it in the “real world.”

“Each of you must learn a profession. One day, you will have to pay the Rokeby taxes out of your own pockets. You can't expect Rokeby to support you. There are no more multimillion-dollar trusts waiting to open when you reach your majority.”

Whenever he said this, I wanted to remind him that if we sold Rokeby, we could each have a very comfortable life. Nevertheless, I intended to take his advice.

I meant to learn a profession. But for me, learning a profession and earning a living would be a way not to keep Rokeby—but to leave it.

The first thing you saw as you entered our living room was a small wool tapestry hanging on the wall. It was Mom's portrait of our nuclear family. My two ponytails were strings of brown yarn hanging down off the two-dimensional surface, my shoes were laced with yarn, and Dad had a bunch of golden-brown yarn on each side of his balding crown, snaking in and out of the surface to re-create the effect of his hair's wiry texture.

Despite its peeling floor paint; mismatched, broken furniture; and bare bulbs, our apartment was a refuge from the open expanses of the rest of the house. Here I could close, and even lock, the doors. The ceilings weren't high and the rooms weren't sprawling. There were no reminders of the past. None of the extended family—aside from Maggie and Diana, who were my often welcome playmates—ever set foot here. In our apartment, it was possible to maintain an identity apart from our ancestors.

There were no photos or pictures on my plain white plaster walls, no sentimental family artifacts. My ideal living space was a cubicle, so I did my best to keep my room simple. I had basic furniture—a primitive metal cot, a bureau whose drawers had sharp screw ends where the knobs were missing. Against one wall was a five-foot-tall Victorian dollhouse, my prized possession, even though it was not officially “mine” but a Rokeby heirloom. It stood on stilts and had four open-faced chambers, two on each floor, connected by archways. In the middle of the room stood my music stand, with my music book open to the Vivaldi A-minor violin concerto, which I would soon be performing at my end-of-the-year student recital.