It’s April again. The frail fine blossoms of the crab apple tree shower to earth in the slightest stirring of the languid air, to lie like pastel snow among the clustered headstones of the Canning dead. Already the fruit is forming where the blossoms hung, and in a little while, after the swift passing of spring, toward the end of summer’s indolent amble, the small red apples will fall in turn, to lie where the blossoms lie. The seasons come, and the seasons go...
The nicest thing about Connie was that she was, so to speak, sort of in and out of the family at the same time. What I mean is, she wasn’t really a Canning at all, although she used the name for the lack of another.
As a matter of fact, she was someone Uncle Wish (a happy compromise for Aloysius) had picked up in Italy after the late great war and managed, by hook or crook, to appropriate and spirit home. She was, Uncle Wish had explained with tears in his voice, a homeless waif foraging among the rubble of an ancient world, her poor little body emaciated and filthy, her cute little nose chronically running.
Anyhow, Uncle Wish brought her home and left her with Grandfather, after which, having euphemistically borrowed a substantial sum of money, he was off again to some other place to see what else he could find.
Grandfather saw to it that Connie’s body was washed and her nose wiped. He believed, I think, that Uncle Wish’s bootleg adoption of Connie was a good sign. He took it as an indication that Uncle Wish was developing a sense of commitment to the serious problems of life.
Nothing, of course, could have been more absurd. Uncle Wish was simply a compassionate scoundrel who was always prepared to indulge his humanity if there was someone else at hand to pay the price over the long haul. Most of the girls he picked up in the places he went were well washed and well fed and, after Uncle Wish was finished with them, well paid. It should be said, moreover, that they were invariably older than Connie. And much less permanent. Uncle Wish may have been willing to be an absentee father, but he had absolutely no intention of becoming a husband, absent or present.
So, over the long haul, Grandfather paid for Uncle Wish’s grand gesture. But don’t shed any tears in your beer because of that. Having accumulated most of the money in an area approximately a hundred miles wide running roughly from Chicago to Denver, Grandfather was adequately equipped for it. And Connie blossomed in his tender care.
I saw her for the first time in the summer of 1949, when I made my annual visit to Grandfather’s country estate. He was a great family man, Grandfather was, and I was invited every summer for a visit of three months’ duration. The invitation was, in fact, by implication a command, and in view of the high price of disfavor I appeared faithfully near the first of every June, bearing the fulsome greetings of my father, Grandfather’s son and Uncle Wish’s brother; and I was mindful of my father’s fierce admonitions, delivered in private just before my departure, to for God’s sake be very careful not to say or do anything that would jeopardize our position in Grandfather’s will.
My father, you realize, was extremely sensitive about our position in Grandfather’s will, but I never blamed him for that. Inasmuch as he never earned a dime in his life, living quite richly on an allowance that Grandfather made him, it was perfectly understandable.
It was, as I said, nice to have Connie in and out of the family at the same time. Being in, she was, so to speak, handy; being out, she was, as it were, available. What I mean is, there were none of the messy complications and taboos ordinarily imposed on blood relationships.
That very first summer, in 1949, I was introduced to the advantages of our anomalous connection. While foraging among the rubble of an ancient civilization, it became quickly apparent, Connie had acquired a seamy sort of intelligence far beyond her years in matters that would have, if he had known it, set Grandfather’s few remaining hairs on end.
She was only ten at the time, and I was twelve, but in effect she was ages older. She was as old as Nero, and she spoke a language older than Latin. Her English was hardly more than a few key words and phrases, but the eyes and the hands have a vocabulary and a grammar of their own. She had much to teach me, and I must say that I was an apt pupil. I anticipated eagerly my annual pilgrimage to Grandfather’s house.
Cleaned up, Connie was a pretty little girl. Grown up, she was a beauty. She grew along lovely lines to intriguing dimensions, and when she reached the intriguing dimensions, she simply quit growing. As she mastered English she forgot Italian, but she never forgot her other ancient language.
She lived with Grandfather until she was ready for college, and after college she established herself in an apartment in Chicago, where she was, she claimed, working seriously at painting. I never visited her apartment and never saw any of her work, and I suspect that the reason I never saw any was that there never was any. As with me and Father and Mother and Uncle Wish — as with us all — Grandfather paid the freight over the long haul. But I was happy to learn, the first summer after her establishment in the Chicago apartment, that her command appearance at Grandfather’s was to run, for the most part, concurrently with my own.
In the summer of 1964 I was 27 and Connie was 25. Grandfather was 86. Father and Mother and Uncle Wish were dead. All dead. Father had died suddenly under Grandfather’s roof of what was diagnosed by Grandfather’s doctor, also an octogenarian, as a coronary. Mother, remaining in Grandfather’s house after Father’s death, had soon followed him to heaven as a result of an overdose of sleeping pills, which sad event was popularly supposed to have been incited by grief. I was present on both occasions, as was Connie, and I remember expressing to her a proper astonishment at discovering, on the first occasion, that Father had any heart at all, let alone a weak one, and, on the second, that Mother was capable of grief for anyone, let alone for Father.
But small matter. Every loss has its compensatory gain. Uncle Wish having previously come a fatal cropper in a distant land, from which his mortal remains were shipped home for burial, Connie and I were now the only heirs in Grandfather’s last will and testament. His estate, I believe, amounted to something like $70,000,000, which is, you must agree, a tidy sum.
And so, when I arrived at Grandfather’s house last June, there was Connie to meet me. As I tooled up the long drive from the road between tall and lithesome poplars, she came out of the house and across the veranda and down into the drive, and by the time I had brought my black Jag to a halt, she was in position to lean across the passenger bucket and give me a kiss. Contact, minimum. Effort, below standard.
“Hello, Buster,” she said. “Crawl out of that thing and get kissed properly.”
I crawled out and was kissed properly. Or improperly, depending on your point of view.
“Very stimulating,” I said. “I believe your technique has improved, if possible.”
“Do you think so? It’s sweet of you to say it.”
“No doubt you’ve been practicing. I must remember to call on you in that apartment of yours sometime.”
“No chance. The summer is sufficient, darling. I don’t believe I’d care for you in off seasons. You might become tiresome.”
“That’s true. There’s nothing to be gained from too much of a good thing. Where’s Grandfather?”
“He’s on his daily pilgrimage to the Happy Hunting Ground. He’s communing with Canning ghosts.”
“A dreary ritual, surely. It was, all in all, a dreary ritual even when the ghosts were alive and kicking. I refer especially to Father.”
“Well, you know Grandfather. He’s very devoted to his little family, dead, or alive. Fortunately, I might add, for you and me.”