The Paper Palace(7)

Grandfather Amory built our camp during the short time he and my grandmother were in love. He chose a long narrow stretch of shoreline, hidden from his own house by a sharp curve in the land. He had an idea to rent the cabins out in summer for extra money to support his glamorous young wife and two small children. On the outside, the cabins are solid—watertight saltboxes that have withstood endless harsh winters, nor’easters, and generations of squabbling families. But my grandfather was running low on funds, so he built the interior walls and ceilings out of pressed paperboard, Homasote, cheap and utilitarian, and nicknamed the camp the Paper Palace. What he didn’t count on was that my grandmother would leave him before he had finished building it. Or that Homasote is delicious to mice, who chew holes through the walls each winter and feed the regurgitated paper, like a breakfast of muesli, to the minuscule babies they birth inside the bureau drawers. Every summer, the person who opens the camp has the job of emptying mouse nests into the woods. You can’t really begrudge the mice: Cape winters are hard, as the Pilgrims discovered. But mouse piss has a warm stink, and I have always hated the terrified squeaks of dismay as they fall from the wooden drawers into the scrub.

After she divorced my grandfather, Granny Nanette spent a few months swanning around Europe, sunning herself topless in Cadaqués, drinking cold sherry with married men, while Mum and her little brother Austin waited in hotel lobbies. When her money ran out, Nanette decided it was time to go home and do what her parents had wanted her to do in the first place. So she married a banker. Jim. He was a decent sort of fellow. Andover and Princeton. He bought Nanette an apartment overlooking Central Park and a long-haired Siamese cat. Mum and Austin were sent to fancy Manhattan private schools where first-grade boys were required to wear a jacket and tie, and Mum learned to speak French and make Baked Alaska.

The week before her ninth birthday, my mother performed her first blow job. First, she watched as little Austin, his tiny six-year-old hands shaking, held their stepfather’s penis until it got hard. Jim told them it was all very natural, and didn’t they want to make him happy? The worst part, my mother said, when she finally told me this story, was the sticky white ejaculate. The rest she could, perhaps, have dealt with. That, and she hated the warmth of his penis, the slight urine smell of it. Jim threatened them with violence if they ever told their mother. They told her anyway, but she accused them of lying. Nanette had nowhere else to go, no money of her own. When she found her husband in the maid’s room off the kitchen screwing the nanny, she told him not to be vulgar and shut the door.

One Saturday, Nanette came home early from lunch at the Club. Her friend Maude had a headache and my grandmother didn’t feel like going to the Frick on her own. The apartment was empty—just the cat, who curled around her ankles at the front door, arching his back seductively. She dumped her fur coat on the bench, took off her high heels, and headed down the hallway to her bedroom. Jim was sitting in a wingback chair, pants around his ankles. My mother was on her knees in front of him. My grandmother strode over to them and slapped my mother hard across the face.



* * *



—

My mother told me this story when I was seventeen. I was in a rage because she had given Anna money to buy a new lip gloss at Gimbels, while I stayed home and did chores. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Elle,” she said as I stood at the kitchen sink, fuming over a pile of dishes. “You have to wash a plate . . . you don’t get a lipstick. I had to give my stepfather blow jobs. All Austin had to do was masturbate him. What can I tell you? Life’s not fair.”

9:20 A.M.

The odd thing is, I think now as I walk down the path toward the kids’ cabin, my mother lost her respect for women but not for men. Her stepfather’s perversion was a hard truth, but it was her mother’s weak-willed betrayal that made her go cold. In my mother’s world, the men are given the respect. She believes in the glass ceiling. Peter can do no wrong. “If you want to make Peter happy when he comes home from work,” Mum advised me years ago, “put on a fresh blouse, put in your diaphragm, and smile.”

Think Botticelli.





3


   1971. April, New York.


Mr. Dancy stares into a small square tub in the maid’s-room bath off the sunless kitchen of our apartment. Mrs. Dancy has moved out of the building. Mr. Dancy visits us often, his shirt-sleeves rolled up to reveal his muscular arms. The enamel faucets he closes now have letters on them, H and C. The old brass drain shines from underneath the cool water. A tiny alligator is swimming around the tub. Mr. Dancy bought it in Chinatown for his children as a pet. He was told it was a species of alligator that would never grow more than a foot long. Now he has learned he was conned. The alligator is just a baby alligator. Soon it will grow to be dangerous. Even here in this little tub it has a menacing light in its eyes. I lower a wooden chopstick into the water and watch it snap angrily in frightened, futile little grabs.

“Give me the stick,” Anna says, leaning perilously close to the water. “Give it!” Her long black braid trails the top of the water like a lure.

I hand it over to her and she jabs at the creature. Mr. Dancy watches, strokes his thick butterscotch mustache. After a while, he lifts the baby alligator from the water by its nubbly tail and holds it over the toilet bowl. It writhes in the air, snapping at his wrist. I watch in fascination as he drops it in the toilet and flushes it down.