The Paper Palace(37)

“Hello, old girl,” Dad says, patting her. “You remember Cora?” he asks me.

“The puppy?”

“She’s an ancient lady now. Dog years.” He knocks on the door. “Hello-o?” he calls out. “Nancy? Dwight? Anybody home?” But there is only the silent house. “Nancy’s car is here. She must be gardening out back.” He opens the front door and we let ourselves in.

Everything is exactly as I remember it: the shiny brass tongs and cinder scoop for ashes leaning against the white brick fireplace. The WASPy threadbare wingbacks, worn Persian rug. A vase of garden peonies sits on the coffee table, loose petals strewn over art books.

“Hello, hello?” Dad calls out, again. I follow him into the kitchen. The Mr. Coffee has been left on, giving off the faint sour odor of burnt coffee. My father turns off the machine, holds the glass pot under the tap. It hisses and steams as water hits the caramelized ring, tinting the water brown.

“She’s not in the garden. They must be out for a walk. I’ll start bringing my boxes down from the attic. Go have a look at your old room.”

“Maybe we should wait. It feels like we’re trespassing.”

“The Burkes are family, Joanne or no Joanne.”

The hidden door that leads to our room is open. I pause halfway up the wooden staircase on the landing where Anna and I used to sit and play with our dolls, before heading upstairs. Nothing has changed—the same flowered pillowcases we used when I was six, the same lace doilies on the bureaus. Dotted swiss bedspreads. I picture Frank’s agonized face, the day we found his hamster Goldie squashed behind Anna’s bed. The way he cried. His high-pitched gurgle. Sun streams in through the mullioned windows. Above the dour rock face, the sky is brilliant. Nancy’s rhododendrons are in bloom. Nothing has changed, and yet now our old room feels sad and hollow, one-dimensional—like a stage set for a happy childhood, which, when you look behind it, reveals itself to be false walls and empty spaces. Suddenly all I want is to be with my father.

Downstairs in the pantry, I stop in front of the door to Frank’s old hamster room. A yellowing sign in faded Magic Marker is still tacked to the door: do not enter on pain of death. I turn the knob, step into the forbidden, windowless room. My eyes take a little while to adjust. It’s a storage room now, the walls stacked high with crates. Frank’s hamster cages are gone. But in the far corner, illuminated by the pale glow of neon, is a glass aquarium. It is five times larger than the one I remember. As I walk toward it, I see a subtle shift, a movement, sinuous, reptilian. I back out of the room.

Nancy is sitting at the kitchen table, slicing apples. “Well hello, dear,” she says brightly. “There you are.”

I feel caught in the spotlight of her benign smile.

She puts down an apple core and wipes her hands on her apron. “Hasn’t Waldo gotten big?”

“We knocked.” I say. “Dad said it would be okay to start moving his things.”

“Of course, dear. I lay down for a quick catnap. You’ve certainly blossomed into a lovely young woman. You must be fifteen by now.”

“Thirteen—I’ll be fourteen in September.”

“I imagine you’re thirsty after that drive. I made iced tea. Dwight should be back any minute now. He drove down the hill to return a book to his friend Carter Ashe.” She goes to the refrigerator and stands there without opening it, gives her head a little shake as if she’s trying to get rid of a passing thought. “He missed luncheon,” she says. “You must be thirsty. I made iced tea.”



* * *



—

I find my father in the attic surrounded by boxes and piles of old photographs. The air is hot, stuffy. It smells of the past.

“Have a look at these.” He passes me a thick manila envelope. “All my old contact sheets and negatives. There are some wonderful ones of your mother.”

I pull out the black-and-white contact sheets and look through them. Endless photos of my mother in a cocktail dress and pearls, lying on a sofa, smiling into the camera. Anna in the bathtub, covered in soapsuds, with a colander on her head. Me and Mum in the playground. Mum is pushing me on the baby swings; one of my red buckle-up shoes has fallen off. At the bottom of the stack, I find a series of photos of the four of us. We are on the steps of the Natural History Museum, Anna and I in matching smocked dresses and Mary Janes. Dad is carrying me on his shoulders. I have no memory of any of it.

In the shadows of an eave, pushed up against the crawl space, are three open boxes with my father’s name scrawled across them in black marker. They are filled with record albums. His collection of 78s in brown paper envelopes, LPs in worn cardboard covers. I run my finger across their spines. I like the sound it makes. I remember these.

My father picks up a faded color photograph from the pile in front of him. “Come look at this one.”

It is a photo of Dad with Mum. They look so young. They are in a field. My mother is lying in the grass, her head resting on my father’s lap. She’s wearing sailor shorts and a frilly white blouse, its top three buttons unbuttoned. Her eyes are closed. He is staring down at her. He looks happy in a way I do not recognize. Behind them, in the distance, a volcano rises up into a faded sky.

“Acatenango.” He points to the volcano. “Your mother and I flew to Guatemala so I could meet your grandmother Nanette and your uncle Austin. What a disaster that was. You never met her, did you?”