The Patron Saint of Ugly (36 page)

“Well,” Skiff said. “
That
is Marina’s child, for sure.” I don’t think I imagined the relief in his voice as he predicted what their own progeny would look like.

“Isn’t he exquisite?” Bonbon said.

“Yes. He is,” Taffy conceded.

My brother was the savior who would elevate my family. It would never be me.

Skiff went to congratulate Grandma on the painting. Mom crept forward and craned her neck to take in the full impact of her son painted monumentally out of scale with the delicately boned prince he actually was. The guests warbled amongst themselves.

“He was her only son, you know.”

“He would have been the first male Caudhill-Adams-Rutledge heir.”

“Yes. What a horrible, horrible loss.”

I was stunned by the sentiment bubbling beneath their words. The presumed superiority of the male offspring was alive and well, as was the preference for beauty over, well, me. How easily they would have chosen to slip me into the front seat of the station wagon that day and tuck my brother safely between his sheets.

“What did you say?” Mom still faced my brother, so we all assumed she was communing with her dead son.

In one movement she spun to face the crowd, the sentient spark again ignited. “I said, what did you say?”

“We said he’s a beautiful boy,” Bonbon valiantly answered.

“He certainly got all of your looks,” said Chompers.

The wrong thing to say, as it turned out.

“Where’s Garnet?” Mom desperately scanned faces, bypassing mine three times before she understood what Grandma had done to my real face, which was the antithesis of everything lovely in that room.

“What did you do to her?” Mom looked from me to Grandma. “What the hell did you do to her?”

“It’s, it’s, it’s just a dress, dear. Nothing fancy,” Grandma sputtered, eyes frantic.

Mom raced to me and grabbed me by the wrist. “This isn’t my daughter,” she said, seething, to Grandma, to everyone. “This isn’t my daughter!”

Mom pulled me across the hall and whisked me upstairs with the force of a hypercharged mother protecting her young, if that’s what she was doing.

I could hear Taffy asking, “That’s not her daughter? Then who is she?”

My feet stumbled as Mom led me to my bathroom. I expected her to order me to raise my arms so she could pull the offending costume over my head, but she turned on the hot water, grabbed a washcloth, and soaked it. She held the steaming thing to my face and scrubbed and rubbed until most of that opaque foundation and powder and rouge was off, mulberry continents resurfacing. When she was finished, everything was smeared, my ponytail was lopsided, and errant strands were springing every which way. There were beige streaks on my Battenberg collar, dripping down my dress.

I expected her to say,
Now go change
, but instead she once again yanked me from where I stood, this time taking me out of the bathroom and into the hall. I resisted but couldn’t match her strength. She whooshed me back downstairs, hurried me across that cool marble, and stood me under Fanny Brice’s chandelier.

It was horrible, all those gasps and cringes from the wait staff and guests. From Cookie.

“This is my daughter.” Mom gripped my chin and twisted my face toward the guests so they could all get a good look. I tried to wrench free but Mom held me tight as she yelled at the spectators, and Grandma, “Isn’t she beautiful? Isn’t she!”

There was no sound for two whole minutes as the stares pierced my skin like a million blowgun darts. Then someone started whimpering. I scanned the crowd to find out who; perhaps it was Bonbon, or Cookie, or even Skiff (who was hurtling toward the door as fast as he could). But it was me blubbing like a three-year-old.

Cookie dashed up and pried Mom’s hand from my face. “Leave her be!” It was the first time I ever heard her voice raised.

Mom looked at her hand still in a claw, makeup smears on her arms, her sweater. She looked at me, really looked at me, and understood.

“Garnet,” she whispered, but I cowered behind Cookie, the only person I could trust.

“I . . . I . . .” Mom looked for someone, something to pin her actions on. “It’s this place, this goddamn place! We’ve got to leave, tonight, and go back home.”

Grandma clipped up beside us. “I’m afraid that’s not possible, dear.”

“What?” Mom asked.

“Your house went into foreclosure months ago. It’s been sold, contents and all.” Grandma no longer cared what polite society thought about this if it would keep her daughter under her barred roof.

Mom shook her head. “But you were supposed to take care of all that.”

Grandma didn’t have to answer. We all understood that she had done just that.

Mom looked at me and I read the apology in her eyes, not just for past omissions, but for what she was about to do. Inside her left iris, a minuscule version of her waved goodbye. She looked past me into one of those mirrors and padded to it, pretended to smooth down her ponytail, but she was looking into the glass, perhaps into our old life on the hill, the squat house, the lost fam-i-ly, maybe even into a version of herself trapped on the other side squinting into the mirror too. I heard it, the crack that sounded from inside her skull. Her hands balled into fists and she pounded her thighs, gently at first, then harder.

“Mom, stop it.” I pictured the bruises that would bloom on her willowy legs.

Mom didn’t hear me, or maybe she did, because she stopped pummeling herself and started pounding the mirror, the mirror, the mirror.

“Oh my God,” Bonbon said. “Somebody do something.”

Nobody stepped forward as Mom punched the glass, chanting, “No-no-no-no-no.” Now using her fists, harder and harder, until the glass shattered, fragmenting her view, so she moved to the next mirror, pounding and shattering, cuts on her hands as she moved to the next and the next, until someone, Cookie, I think, screamed, “Someone do something!”

Grandma didn’t come to her rescue. Neither did Black Radisson or Cedrick. Muddy appeared from who-knows-where. He wrapped his arms around Mom while cooing, “Shh. Shh. It’s all right now, missy.”

Mom struggled against him, but he held on tight. “It’s okay now. I’ve got you.”

Mom sank in his arms. He scooped her up and carried her upstairs as she bawled what was incomprehensible to everyone except me: “I put the kill keys in his hand.”

“That’s all right, dearie.”

“And they weighed so little.”

“So very little.” Muddy ferried Mom to the east wing, to the sleigh bed, where she climbed back into herself for good.

The guests stood there goggle-eyed, as if this were the stunning coda at the end of the performance. Finally they collected their opera glasses and programs, crunched over all that shattered glass, and peeled out in their fancy cars to their fancy homes and telephones to call in their reviews so that impolite society would be informed of the madness.

Grandma called Dr. Trogdon and while we waited for him I sat on the stairs as Cookie and Opal swept up the shards of glass and taped cardboard over the broken mirrors, both women working in silence.

When Dr. Trogdon arrived I followed him to Mom’s bedside; his pill vials rattled around in his case as he removed a syringe of brown liquid, which he injected into Mom’s arm. Grandma stood over him with a look that was neither distressed nor fretful; it was pure content.

A decade after that party I sat in the whippet room examining the contents of Grandma Iris’s safety-deposit box that had been delivered to me by the fiduciary of her estate. Amid the codicils, stock certificates, and many car titles were, I discovered, two clues that helped decode Grandpa Postscript. The first was a
Charlottesville
Daily Progress
society column, which I’ll include as exhibit C.

Confidence Man Leaps to His Death

On V-E Day, while the rest of America and her Allies celebrated the fall of the Third Reich, thirtynine-year-old Donald Flyman (aka Reginald White) leaped to his death from a second-story window in the home of his wife, socialite Iris Caudhill-Adams-Rutledge, of the Mayflower Caudhills. It is unclear if suicide was his intent or if, according to a member of the housekeeping staff, he was attempting to flee after it was discovered that he had embezzled $400,000 from his wife’s estate and was planning to leave the country with an unnamed woman.

Flyman was born in Tredegar, South Wales, the son of a coal miner who worked in Bedwellty pits. Young Flyman emigrated to the United States, where he initially sold encyclopedias and wrote greeting-card verse before infiltrating the wealthy class.

Flyman and Caudhill-Adams-Rutledge had a brief engagement that culminated in the most anticipated wedding of 1929, held on Saturday, October 26, just days before Black Tuesday and the stockmarket crash that would financially devastate so many of theweddinggoers, but not the well-diversified Caudhills.

Nine months after the ceremony, the young wife delivered a daughter, Marina, who, according to the same source, “was the apple of her father’s eye.”

Mrs. Caudhill-Adams-Rutledge refused to allow her late husband’s remains to be interred in her family’s crypt.

Flyman was buried in Potter’s Field with only the housekeeping staff and his daughter, now almost fifteen, in attendance.

The second item was a black-and-white photograph of Grandfather standing in that three-tiered fountain wearing a shirt-and-trunks-combined swimsuit with horizontal stripes that made him look like a convict. He’s grinning broadly, his right hand waving, revealing a stunning anomaly: a second pinkie. Behind him, barely caught in the frame, one of the black maids smiles a bit too knowingly, one finger pressed to her butt-creased chin.

TAPE EIGHTEEN

Get Thee to a Nunnery

Happy Holy Days, Archie:

The ladies and I just watched Perry Como’s Christmas special, so we’re feeling all gooey inside, thanks to Mr. C.’s cardigan and Nonna’s ninety-proof wassail. Now Betty can’t wait to buy our tree, and she’s already ordered strings of pink-flamingo lights from the mail-order-crap store. I’m going to have to speak with her about her spending habits.

I said nighty-night and now I’m in the crystal-ball room, one of the towers fitted with bubble windows, which offer excellent viewing. We got a dusting of snow today and the village is gussied up: Saint Garnet angels hanging from street lamps—sheesh—colored lights rimming storefronts, Christmas trees in apartment windows above them. Even my hill neighbors have outdone themselves in case they make the national news.

The pilgrims still refuse to leave, though I had hoped this arctic blast would send them flapping back to Capistrano. They just pulled closer to the heated pond, where the steam works wonders on their pores. They’ve also somehow tapped into electricity since I see a number of space heaters, utility lamps, and pink-flamingo lights strung around luggage racks.
Betty!
They’re never going to leave. In fact, Nonna is out there right now handing out candy canes, afghans, and swigs of something from a thermos; high-octane wassail, no doubt. She really needs to stop that, though she does look content tugging children’s earlobes, muttering prayers, offering hugs and kisses. The children follow her as if she’s the real healer—as I keep insisting.

There was a time when I thought I would never see her again, or Aunt Betty. And though the mood is ripe now, since I’m inside a crystal ball, I don’t think I could ever have forecast our reunification, especially during my exile in Virginia, and after Mom obliterated Grandma’s Hall of Mirrors, I was banished to even more distant lands.

Back in Charlottesville, after Mom’s outburst, Dr. Trogdon and Grandma kept vigil by Mom’s bed, the doctor redressing the cuts on her hands, Grandma pushing back Mom’s cuticles, the words
I win
almost visibly scrolling across Grandma’s eyelids. I sat on the floor in the doorway tending my own wounds. Cookie—Aunt Cookie, though neither of us knew that yet—checked on me regularly, urging me to whisper something into Mom’s ear that might keep her from slipping so far away.

Honestly, Padre, I don’t know what I would have said to Mom at that moment since I now doubted her maternal love. Perhaps, like her slog through the underclass, her love for me was merely a defiance of everything Grandma Iris held dear. I was a rue-the-day temper tantrum, that’s all.

I wanted to jump somewhere too, through a bricked-up window perhaps, but mostly back to Sweetwater. I fingered that volcano in Iceland beneath which I had hidden my love for two women who I hoped would rush to embrace me, though I wasn’t sure. I longed for a way we could live together without Grandpa or Uncle Dom peeing testosterone all over our lives. Then there was the issue of Ray-Ray.

Eventually I went to bed, but in the morning I discovered the next part of Grandma’s scheme. I was eating breakfast with Opal and Cookie when Grandma came in and sat beside me.

I don’t think I just imagined the difficulty she was having spitting out what was on her mind. Finally, she turned her chair toward me. “Garnet, I’m sending you away to boarding school.”

Cookie and Opal gasped.

Grandma looked at them. “It’s really for the best.” She patted my wrist in a gesture she’d likely been practicing for months.

I withdrew my arm. “I don’t want to leave Mom.”

Grandma stood. “We must secure your future with a solid education. There’s no telling what they’ve been teaching you in West Virginia.”

My mind flew back to all those nuns who genuinely loved me.

Grandma added the final dollop. “I would have done the same for Nicky.”

There was no rebutting that, even if her motives in each case were quite different.

Grandma tugged me to my feet. “I’ll help you pack.”

Upstairs, a trunk had already been placed in my room. In went the clothes, the makeup. No globes or
Britannica
s. Before I left I climbed onto Mom’s bed, wrapped my arms around her neck, and whispered into her ear, “Don’t let her send me away.”