The first clever-kids story I remember was about her: the grandmother was chewing gum, and she blew a bubble so big that you could see things in it, like a mirror. The clever kids looked into the bubble and saw a robber coming in the door, and as the grandmother began to breathe in and retract the bubble they saw the robber getting smaller and smaller, but coming closer. The grandmother didn’t see anything because she was squinting, concentrating on making the bubble disappear. Just as the bubble was about to disappear, the clever kids whirled around and overpowered the robber. They took out their guns and shot him dead.
Nothing about the stories seemed odd to me. That we would have real guns seemed perfectly possible. Anything Joseph said seemed reasonable and likely. He told me that he could fly, and I believed him. Partly it was because when he told me the stories late at night — when he crept into my bed and awed or scared me and then ended the stories in some satisfactory way — he seemed so authoritative that I couldn’t help but believe him. His whispering made the stories more emphatic. The secret ritual of climbing into my bed made them something we shared privately, and things privately shared must be important — and therefore true. When he told me he could fly I didn’t challenge him. I had never heard of Peter Pan, and had never even been to a circus to see the trapeze performers, but I could believe that a person, particularly my brother Joseph, could fly. “Where do you fly?” I whispered. He thought about it. “I fly by the lake,” he said. “I’ve flown on the main beach. One Sunday when it rained and there was nobody around.”
I remembered the day he was talking about. It was a Sunday in springtime and it had rained for three days, but the rain was really pouring down that Sunday. And Joseph put on his black rubber boots and his raincoat and said he was going to the beach. My mother grabbed him by the arm and said he was not. My father told Joseph to go ahead, then turned to my mother and said he admired his son’s spirit. Sebastian was visiting, and she started to argue but backed down when Sebastian asked them please not to fight. In many ways Sebastian was like one of us: he put his hands over his ears if someone said something harsh. Once when he hit his finger with a hammer, I saw him cry. Sebastian had left New York the same year my parents did; my father worked as a carpenter with two other men, and Sebastian kept the books.
My grandmother did not like Sebastian. My father liked him very much, and my mother tolerated him. Joseph and I had mixed emotions: he was always kind to us, but when he was with adults he seemed childish, so we didn’t respect him as we’d respect an adult, but when he played with us he seemed reserved — the way an adult would. When I was seven, when I saw him cry after he hit his thumb, my father took me aside and told me that sometimes Sebastian’s reactions were a little out of whack because in New York he had had a breakdown. He explained to me what a breakdown was. I was fascinated and wanted to tell Joseph, but somehow I knew that he was the storyteller. In fact, I started to tell him, but he interrupted with his own Sebastian story: in the Bible they shot him full of arrows, for being evil, but a beautiful lady pulled out all the arrows, without causing him any pain. “What happened to the holes?” I said. “All the arrows were shot into his face. She pulled them out so carefully that they just left little holes. Whiskers grew out of them.”
As Joseph was fabricating stories that spring, strange things were happening that we didn’t know about. We knew things were going on, but we were involved in collecting seashells from the main beach, playing hide and seek in the woods with Billy LaPierre, whose family had the camp next to ours, and the secret nighttime stories. We knew our mother was irritable and our father silent. We knew that Sebastian didn’t come around very often. We did not know that our mother had had an abortion, and that Sebastian had driven her to Montreal, where she had it performed illegally, and against my father’s wishes. I overheard her, one night, saying to him, “Where would we get the money for another baby? You won’t commit yourself to anything. You could have worked for a prosperous business, but you hooked up with Frankie and Phil Renshaw. I’m already surrounded by babies: Sebastian in tears every time I turn around, you bumming around, your mother coming every summer and expecting me to do everything but wipe her chin.”
I don’t think that my mother loved Sebastian — just that after the abortion, when he felt she and Sebastian had both turned against him, they began to spend more time with each other, discussing it. Then my father became jealous, and my mother laughed at him for thinking anything so stupid, and her taunting made my father bitter, and finally silent. Things were so bad that my grandmother came in June and left before the month was over, pretending that she felt guilty for having left her cousin.
Sebastian and Joseph and I drove her to Boston to get a plane. Everyone knew that it was strange my parents didn’t go. My father said that he had to work, and my mother offered to go along for the ride, looking very ashamed, but my grandmother said no — she wanted some time alone with her two favorite children. As I recall, she hardly talked to us, but she gave us both money. On the way back, Sebastian bought us large vanilla ice cream cones. We sat on the grass beside the ice cream stand, bees swarming around the trash can, Joseph more interested in watching them than in licking his cone. He got ice cream all down his shirt, and when we got home my mother complained about that instead of thanking Sebastian for what he had done. We ran outside as soon as we could and hid our five-dollar bills in an old tackle box and buried the box in the nook of a tree, because Joseph said we should.
At dinner my mother asked if Grandma had given us a treat before she left. It was all she said about her having left. Joseph tried to evade the question.
“Because your father has stopped speaking doesn’t mean that you should stop, Joseph,” she said. She laid down her fork and Sebastain laid his down too.
“I think she gave them both some money,” Sebastian said, looking at me because he knew I’d never have the courage to avoid a direct question.
“Yes,” I said.
My mother smiled. “She said she was going to give you money to buy a treat when she and I had breakfast this morning.”
Sebastian picked up his fork and began to eat his salad.
“Did you put it somewhere safe?” she said.
Joseph looked at me — a warning look.
“What’s the big secret?” my mother said.
“Look,” my father said, “it isn’t necessary to fill us in on little details. We don’t need to know everything. They should just do whatever they feel like doing.”
My mother frowned. “That’s unfair,” she said, “to challenge me in the guise of protecting the children.”
“I was aiming it at you. I love children. I wouldn’t put the children on the spot.”
“Stop it,” she said, “or I’m going to leave the table.”
“Take Sebastian with you. There’s nearly a full moon tonight — good night for a walk.”
“Why don’t you two make up?” Sebastian said.
“Why don’t I get a direct answer from my children before the conversation veers off again?” she said. She turned to me. Everybody knew I was the easiest mark.
“We pretended, we — played pirates, and we buried the ten dollars in a box in the hole of a tree.”