The Paper Palace(18)

Joanne’s younger brother Frank still lives at home. He is fifteen. Frank was a surprise. “A blessing,” Nancy tells us when Anna asks why Frank is so much younger than Joanne. “She means a mistake,” Frank says. He has a blond military crew cut and acne. When he bends over in his chinos, we can see the crack of his behind.

The Burkes live in a three-story white brick house surrounded by delphiniums and banks of sweet pachysandra, overlooking the ribbon of the Hudson River. The house is filled with chocolate Labradors with names like Cora and Blue, and the constant smell of rising yeast. On Sunday mornings, we go to church.

Anna and I have our own room on a little half-story behind the kitchen. A hidden staircase leads from a broom-closet door in the pantry up to our room. “The maid’s,” Nancy calls it. No one else uses this section of the house. Our diamond windowpanes look out on steep gray bedrock that weeps chill water from somewhere deep inside it.

Anna and I are friends again. We play Red Light, Green Light in the garden, sit on the wooden stairs making paper dolls, or read our books curled up in bed. No one bothers us. No one shouts. When it’s time for luncheon, Nancy rings a cowbell and we run downstairs to the dining room, where a fire is always lit, even in early summer. Nancy loves having us here, she tells us. She smothers us in hugs and kisses and unpacks our weekend suitcases into hickory bureau drawers.

Frank has a rec room in the back of the house, where he raises mice, hamsters, and gerbils in fish tanks. They stare across the room at Waldo, the boa constrictor who lives in a larger glass cage in their midst. At night, after dinner, Frank forces us to watch as he feeds teensy baby mice to his snake. Pinkies. I beg to be let out of the room, but he blocks the door. The room smells of cedar sawdust and fear.

“Are you kids having fun in there?” Nancy calls from the kitchen where she is finishing up the dishes.

“We’re feeding Waldo,” Frank yells. “Here. Take this.” He shoves a squirming pinky into Anna’s hand.

“I don’t want to.” She tries to hand the mouse back to him, but he sticks his hands in his pockets.

“If you don’t feed Waldo he’ll be hungry tonight. He might try to escape. Did you know that even a young boa constrictor can strangle a human to death in seconds?”

Anna opens the top of the snake cage, closes her eyes, and releases the baby mouse. I watch it fall into a soft pile of aspen shavings. For five long seconds, it blinks and looks around, relieved to be alive. Waldo slithers forward, then strikes. The mouse is gone. All that is left is a small bump the size of a marble in Waldo’s throat. We watch as the muscles move it down toward his stomach—a gagging, sinuous movement.

Frank loves his snake, but he loves his hamsters even more. He breeds them and sells them for pocket money. They are his most prized possessions. One weekend Goldie, his favorite hamster, escapes. Frank is frantic. He races up and down stairs, looking under sofas, pulling books off the shelves calling for her. He is certain one of the dogs has eaten her and kicks the oldest Lab, Mabel, in the shin. Mabel yelps and limps away.

“Is everything okay?” Nancy calls out from the kitchen, where beef stew is cooking.

Frank turns on me now. Accuses me of having fed Goldie to Waldo. “I know you think I’m ugly,” he says. “I heard you say it.” He pins me against the staircase wall. His breath smells of Chee-tos and milk. I stare at the neon-orange dust that has built up around his lips as I swear to him that I did not.

That night, when Nancy pulls up Anna’s blanket to tuck her in, Goldie’s limp body shakes out onto the bed. She has been squashed flat between the bed and the wall. Nancy fetches a broom and dustpan, opens the window, and tosses Goldie into the hydrangea bushes.

Frank is watching from the doorway. A high-pitched gurgling sound comes from his throat. His face twists and pinches, his acne bulges dark red. I’m certain that he is choking. I watch, transfixed, wondering if he will die. Instead, he lets out a strangled sob. Anna and I look at each other, horrified, and then burst out laughing. Frank runs away, shamefaced. I listen to the thump of his feet on our wooden staircase, hear the faraway slam of a door. Nancy stares out into the darkness, her back to us.

The next weekend, when we arrive at the train station, our father tells us we will be spending the weekend with him and Joanne. Dwight and Nancy feel it would be best.





6


11:30 A.M.

In my mother’s family, divorce is just a seven-letter word. Letters that could easily be replaced with I’m bored or bad luck. Both of her parents married three times. My grandfather Amory, who built the Paper Palace, lived in his house on the pond until the day he died, chopping wood in his hiking boots, fishing, canoeing, watching the changing ecosystem of the pond. He tracked the water lilies, the great blue herons, counted painted turtles basking on the tree trunks that rotted and grayed in the shallows. Wives moved in and out, but the pond remained his. He had found it, stumbled out of the deep woods with his hunting rifle at the age of eighteen, found the pure fresh water, its white sandy bottom, and drunk from it. When he died, Grandfather Amory left his house to Pamela, his third and final wife. She alone had proved herself worthy of it, understood its powerful hold, its soul—the religion of the Pond. The Paper Palace he left to Mum. Her brother Austin, who had never left Guatemala, wanted nothing to do with it. But to Mum, it was everything.

On the wall of my office at NYU there’s a black-and-white photograph of my mother as a young girl in Guatemala. My office is a hoarder’s paradise—books falling off the shelves, desk piled high with graduate theses, pencil stubs, Comp Lit papers to be graded, a depressing, old-womanish avocado plant I am forced to keep because Maddy “made” it for my birthday when she was six. The only clean spaces are the white walls, entirely bare except for that single photograph. In the photo, my mother is sitting astride a palomino horse. She has long braids and wears an embroidered peasant blouse, blue jeans rolled up at the cuff, leather huaraches. She is fifteen. Behind her, a young boy dressed in white walks down the dusty road pushing a wooden wheelbarrow; open fields stretch toward lava cliffs in the rugged foothills of a shrouded volcano. In one hand, my mother holds the burnished horn of her Western saddle. In the other, a single ear of corn. She is smiling at the camera, relaxed, happy—a looseness and freedom I have never seen on her face. Her teeth are white and straight.