My father’s knocking, I thought I heard it, and I remembered.
“What,” Grandfather said, “you must remember what.”
“See here,” my grandfather said to the company — not her, but men like my grandfather with vacation faces, smooth and oiled and brown. Same suits, thin cuffs, glint of heavy watches when they signed. Here and here and here — so many papers.
“What am I a party to?” she asked when she arrived, knife-pleated skirt and filmy blouse, spectacles for reading, a pair for seeing out.
“This,” my grandfather said, as surely as he cleared his throat or pulled at his eccentric too-big clothing; and the second wife came to where we stood hooding our eyes from the dazzle at the window. Water from such a height was a dizzying coin — that, and the hard shore, the palings of trees, and closer to the house, at our feet from the window, the raw paving of my grandfather’s terrace, a stony estate designed to withstand winters that cracked the very roads — to whom now would all of this be given?
I didn’t quite ask, really. I hoped to be polite. “How much do you have, Grandfather? For how long has this been yours?”
My grandfather said for as long as he remembered. He was born in the bedroom where he once slept with a wife. He said, “I have always been comfortable.”
I wanted to be comfortable.
In the sunroom with the easy men in pearly colors, I spoke freely of my father and of what I had seen with and without wives, waking to my father in his sleepless disarray, a man in tears, kissing my foot and saying I had saved him — my father always threatening death — rolled playbill in his pocket, at my face his sugared breath: We should, we should.
“Yes,” she said. “I have seen him with her in this way and been afraid.” His temper, for one, as when the milk had boiled over — scalded; and of course, he wouldn’t drink it, but argued through the rising light before he took his sleep. “Insomniacs,” she said, “are true accountants; they are smug about the time they keep. But he sold the family silver,” she said.
“He is not rich,” my grandfather said.
I did not tell them what my father had bought me, but I wore the earrings and the small, slight clothes he had said I would grow into — and I had. Even as my grandfather spoke, I was lifting off elastic from where it pinched me.
Breasts, my own.
Breasts, hands, long, thin feet and water-thinned soles — mine — walking the cold stones of my grandfather’s terrace, the cold knocking me just behind the knees every time; but not so with her, the second wife in broken shoes, a generous sweater; she was warm.
She asked, “Did you ever think I heard you? Did you wonder if I knew?”
I had wondered if there was other breathing in the room, a greater dark near the doorway rimmed in downstairs light, and which wife standing, the second, third, or first — in this way alike, watching or sometimes driving for him when Daddy said he could not concentrate to drive — made sick by just the entrance at Grandfather’s gate.
“Was it for money that we came here?” I asked — all those Sunday dinners with the slavering roast sliced bloody on the tines of the carving tools. Grandfather’s rare meat and garden vegetables, not the lunch we had on visits to my father’s last new place, but Sunday dinner and the long white afternoon in a room where we sat reading until supper.
Quiet, the gaping stairways still and cold, cold air hissing through the sills — the rooms I looked into were dark and cold except for where my grandfather was reading Sunday’s papers after the visit to my father; or it might have been after the visit from the pearly men — or any Sunday, really. It might have been that we were alone, long years alone, my grandfather and I, the wives fled and the cook’s night off, so what were we to do but what we did? We took the afternoon’s roast, and it seems to me this happened: My grandfather gave me a knife and fork and said, “Take what you want,” and we cut into the bleedy meat and picked at it standing, not bothering with plates, with no one there to scold for what we did, pouring salt into a spoon of juice and drinking from a meat so raw it still said Ouch! at a prick from the tines of my grandfather’s enormous bone-handled fork.
My nails were grimed with cinder, my lips a smear of grease.
Complicitous season, winter, the day blacked as sudden as did the hallway from my room to his, and we often did not make a visit to my father. We often stayed at home, saying we would only have to turn around again, and so we did not visit — or phone, as my father complained to me, brushing his lips against the mouthpiece of the phone, voice over ocean on the holidays’ connections, sometimes cut off.
The way my father talked! Tremulous show-off, he was, all fustian to-do when in the last new place we saw him with his friends, the same we always caught peeking in on us together. “Still here!” my father said, as if another place were possible. “Come in, please, come in.” We were introduced again, but I remember no one’s name. Even the faces are gone. We had come to see my father. Grandfather and I — and sometimes the second wife — we hadn’t driven this far just to shake some soft hands.
“So why bother?” we agreed, and I often didn’t see my father. Easy to make excuses in the gaudy life — fourteen, fifteen, sixteen — riding on my way somewhere and smoking a cigar, stinking up the driver’s daddy’s car.
“I live here,” I said by way of a good night at my grandfather’s door, yet forgetful of the driveway lights, which shone through falling snow, pooling white on white when next I saw them.
Morning, my grandfather at the table talked of lights left on. He said, “You are not with your father. There are rules in this house, remember,” rules I was told my father never followed — which was why, then. The inexorable logic, how hard I worked to live by it as Grandfather’s darling. No thank you, no I couldn’t, no, please, to what he took from Daddy to give to me.
Petting my watch on any Sunday’s visit, my father said to me, “So the old man won’t die with it still on his wrist.” Lucid on the subject of anyone’s belongings, noticing the second wife’s new rings, my father seemed alert to the getting. The shadow boxes and the canes, the grandfather clock, the shoehorns, the brushes, the studs, the links, the pins — such enameled old blue — my father knew the history to and wanted them. He said so. My father said to my grandfather, “When were you last dancing?”
My grandfather’s smile had teeth for this part. Such things as he had were his to give, which he did when he was not afraid of dying — or so my father said. My father said to my grandfather, “Maybe not dancing, but traveling — are you thinking of traveling again?” To the places I had seen in photographs — Grandfather backdropped by the walleyed rams at Karnak — would he travel there again, as once he had, a young man in a high collar, unused to such heats, yet smiling?
Upright before whatever scene the camera found him, my grandfather had traveled, had been to, had seen the famous cities before the modern wars rubbled them. He had plundered the shops famous for their porcelains and brought home plate and platter and sconce: the teardrop chandelier above the table where we ate, and the canes, of course, from London. I heard him speak. Those are Portuguese, those Italian, but the bronze Diana — oh, God, who knows from where? “I bought it,” he said, “but your grandmother was offended by the figure’s upturned breasts. Your grandmother,” he said, “you can imagine how she suffered your father’s first attack, the second — all those wives.”
Grandfather’s disappointment, I could hear it in his voice when he said his good nights, the way the words came out words — and was it with some longing, and for what, from a man who had had and had? Mistresses, my father told me, he had glimpsed in the crowds of the company parties, ladling the punch, stacking plates high with sandwiches. “My poor mother,” my father said.