The Paper Palace(11)

Now I watch my mother lift her face into the warm breeze. The backs of her arms have age spots. Spider veins break the surface of the skin behind her knees and thighs. She looks around blankly, then gives a little shrug that I recognize as “Aha!” and picks up her prescription sunglasses from the end of the canoe where she left them. I’ve seen all this a hundred times before, but this morning she seems different. Older. And it makes me sad. There is something eternal about my mother. She’s a pain in the ass, but she has great dignity. She reminds me of Margaret Dumont from the Marx Brothers movies. She doesn’t take on airs, she has them naturally. We should have waited for her for breakfast.



* * *



—

“Can you pass the toast, or have the locusts finished that as well?” Mum says, coming onto the porch and pulling up a chair.

Peter peers over his newspaper. “Good swim, Wallace?”

“Hardly. The bladderwort is back. It’s those damned fishermen. They drag it in on the bottoms of their boats from God knows where.”

“Nevertheless, you’re looking radiant this morning.”

“Pish,” Mum says, reaching for a piece of toast. “Flattery will get you nowhere. And it certainly won’t bring the bacon back.”

“Then I shall get up and make you some.”

“Your husband’s in an unusually good mood today,” Mum says to me.

“I am indeed,” Peter says.

“You must be the only person in the world who’s ever been improved by a trip to Memphis.”

“I do so adore you, Wallace.” Peter laughs.

I get up from the table. “I’ll make more bacon. And eggs. Those are cold.”

“God, no!” Mum says. “And create an even bigger pile of dishes? Is there a single pot you didn’t use?”

“Scrambled or soft-boiled?” I’m hating her again already. “Jack, clear those plates off the table and bring your grandmother the marmalade.”

“Maddy, go get Wallace the marmalade,” Jack says to his sister without looking up. My mother has always insisted that the kids call her by her first name. “I’m not ready to be a grandmother,” she said before Jack had even started to talk. “And I certainly hope you aren’t expecting me to babysit.”

Maddy ignores Jack.

“Guys? Hello?” I actually put my hands on my hips.

“You’re already up,” Jack says to me. “You get it.”

I hold my breath for ten seconds, trying not to explode. I am underwater, watching the fish through murky green. I close my eyes. I am Peggy. I choose the quiet of the reeds.

Peter lights another cigarette. “Jack, do what your mother says. Stop acting the fool.”

“Yes, Jack,” Mum agrees. “You’re behaving like an asshole. That sort of behavior is unbecoming.”





1956. Guatemala.


My grandmother Nanette moved to Central America after her third husband left her. She had divorced the monstrous Jim at last, but she had no way of surviving in the world without a man to support her. Vince Corcoran was her way out—a millionaire, which in those days meant something. Vince had made his fortune in import/export—fruit and coffee. He wasn’t handsome, but he was a genuinely good man—bighearted, kind to the children, madly in love with their mother. She had married him for his money. She couldn’t stand the way his breath smelled, and when they had sex, big drops of sweat would fall on her face from his brow. It disgusted her. She was mortified that she had stooped to marrying a banana salesman, but she had a townhouse in Gramercy Park and a cabernet Rolls-Royce. Vince divorced her after reading this in her journal, or so the story goes. All Granny Nanette got in the settlement was the car, a small monthly stipend, and a massive villa in Guatemala she had never even seen. Vince had won it from a colleague several years back in a poker game. So Nanette, a single woman, barely thirty-three years old, three times divorced, left her New York socialite life behind: sold her furs, packed up her leather trunks, piled Wallace and Austin, aged twelve and ten, into the Rolls-Royce, and drove all the way to a remote valley on the outskirts of Antigua, a small and beautiful Spanish colonial city that sat in the shade of volcanoes.

Casa Naranjal was a crumbling, iguana-infested estate. Its lands were filled with orange, lime, and avocado orchards. Jacarandas burst into lavender fireworks in the spring. Clusters of bananas hung heavy under rattling fronds. In the rainy season the river swelled, then broke its banks. The estate was walled off from the prying eyes of the local villagers. Don Ezequiel, a toothless old man, guarded its massive wooden gates. Most days, he sat in the shade of an adobe hut eating frijoles on the blade of a knife. My mother loved to sit beside him on the hard earthen floor and watch him eating.

Along with the estate, Granny Nanette had inherited a small staff of servants, a private cook, and three horses that roamed the property untethered. A handsome dark-haired gardener, dressed only in white, picked mangosteens for their breakfast, chased armadillos off the lawns, and fished large worms out of the black-bottomed pool. My grandmother spent her days locked away in her bedroom, terrified of the strange world that had saved her, unable to communicate with anyone but her two children. Her bedroom was on the upper floor of an octagonal tower covered in purple bougainvillea. Directly underneath was a grand living room with soaring ceilings and massive doors that opened onto the landscape. The closest the kids ever got to their mother during the day was the sound of her pacing back and forth above them on the Saltillo floor.