“It’s good night, Toots,” my father said.
“Is Toots a pun?” Annie asked.
The minute Daddy got famous, he bought a house in Connecticut. Paintings that were earlier selling for $3,000 a week before were this week selling for $100,000, and a week after that for $300,000. At great cost, he transformed some old stables on the property into a spacious studio with terrific skylights, where he could smoke his smelly little Brazilian cigars while he painted all day long and sometimes deep into the night. (I always thought he and Grandma Rozalia smelled exactly alike with their tobacco stink. Except Daddy had a turpentine smell besides.)
My mother got not only the house in the divorce settlement, but also the studio and everything in it. This came to quite a bit of change; when she locked him out of her house and her life, there were paintings valued at two-million-five stacked in the old carriage house. She promptly sold all the paintings (“Good riddance to bad rubbish!” she announced) and moved all of us back full-time to the apartment we still kept in New York. But at first, we continued to use the house during the summer months. And one summer, when Aaron was fourteen, and my sister and I were ten, someone broke into the house one night.
We didn’t know this had happened until the next morning, when we were all sitting down to breakfast and Aaron was going out to get the New York Times from the mailbox, and he noticed that one of the glass panels on the back door to the house, the kitchen door, was smashed. My mother suspected at once that it was my “no-good father,” as she called him, even though all evidence had him living in San Miguel de Allende with an Irish girl who was purportedly his new model and mistress. I later saw one of the paintings he’d done of her during that time in his life. Actually, I went looking for it in MOMA’s permanent collection. Even given my father’s abstractionist bent, Molly O (the name of the painting and the girl) was identifiably redheaded, green-eyed, and blessed with three abundant breasts, surely hyperbole.
My mother called Mr. Schneider, the contractor who had renovated the stables when we first bought the house. A portly little man with a heavy German accent, he kept telling my mother she should keep up with house repairs, that it was a “zad t’ing” (I can’t do accents) to see a fine old house “like zis one” fall into neglect. She always pooh-poohed his concern. I don’t think she’d even have had the glass panel replaced if its absence wasn’t letting in bugs at night. Mr. Schneider came over with a glazier the next day, and stood with his hands on his hips, watching the man as he replaced the glass panel, clucking his tongue every now and then, perhaps thinking something like this would never have happened in his native Germany.
Two nights later, someone broke into the house again.
This time, a different panel on the back door was broken.
We figured that whoever was trespassing had broken the glass so he could reach in and turn the simple spring latch on the door. The odd thing was that nothing was missing from the house, and no one had heard anyone coming in or going out. The bedroom my mother used to share with my father was on the second floor of the house, at the end opposite the ground floor kitchen. Besides, she was a sound sleeper, so it wasn’t surprising that she hadn’t heard anything. Annie slept right down the hall from her, in a room just over the kitchen. If anyone could have heard the intruder, it was Annie. But she claimed she had heard nothing. Aaron and I shared a room on the third floor of the house, m what used to be the attic. Neither of us had heard any sound of glass breaking, or doors opening, or anything of the sort, but after the third nocturnal visit, we both started listening very hard. That was the last break-in, though, the third one. Mr. Schneider brought his glazier over after each time, and stood by with his hands on his hips, clucking his tongue, while the glass panel was fixed.
My mother called the police after the third visit, but they were a Mickey Mouse department and they didn’t take fingerprints or anything, and besides it never happened again, so that was the end of that. My mother never surrendered her belief that my father had been breaking into the house out of Irish spite. Aaron and I figured a squirrel or a raccoon had been breaking the glass on the kitchen door, trying to get at the food in the pantry. Only Annie knew it wasn’t any squirrel or raccoon breaking that glass.
She told me years later that she used to sneak out of the house in her nightgown, and run down the hill through the trees, past Daddy’s studio to where the property joined the main road. There she would lie on her belly in the dark, watching automobiles speed by in the dead of night. Sometimes, when she got back to the house, she found the kitchen door locked behind her. She would break the glass panel just above the lock, and then reach in to open the door. Once she cut her hand. When she mentioned all this, I asked her why she would do such a thing. Leave the house in the middle of the night to go watch cars speeding by on the road below. She told me she thought Daddy might be coming back. She told me she was waiting for Daddy.
Now I wonder if my father was the start of it all.
Her neurosis, or whatever it is.
Whatever has caused her to run away again in the middle of the night.
In the summer of 1982, my mother took Annie and me to Europe. We visited Denmark and Sweden and Norway, the Scandinavian Tour, except that we never got to Finland because my mother said it was too close to Russia and this was still during the Cold War, and she was afraid there’d be a pogrom or something. It was in Stockholm, at our hotel, that my sister fell in love with an eighteen-year-old waiter named Sven. She was fifteen at the time. Our birthdays are in September, and this was in August.
“Oh, he’s so beautiful,” she used to tell me, which I guess he was, with my sister’s blond hair and green eyes, almost a third twin except that he was much taller than I, and spoke English with a marked accent. We were moving on to Norway the following week. My sister stared at Sven goggle-eyed and open-mouthed while he brought us double desserts. My mother thought it was cute, Annie being so smitten and all. I thought it was dangerous. I knew what eighteen-year-old boys wanted from beautiful young girls. Especially eighteen-year-old Swedish boys. When he asked her to go for a walk one night, my mother said Sure, why not, what’s the harm?
I followed them at a discreet distance. Well, not too discreet. I didn’t want to lose them. T didn’t want him working his Swedish charms on my unsuspecting little sister, my kid sister. I am five minutes older than she is. I chipped my collar bone coming out of my mother’s womb, preparing the way for both of us. They had to put me in an incubator. When the doctor came in to report this to my mother, he said, “One of your twins, the boy, is a little rocky, so we put him in an incubator.” A little rocky! His exact words. My mother almost expired on the spot. He was trying to tell her I’d experienced some discomfort breaking my collar bone. Anyway, he walked her by the lake, young Sven did. My fifteen-year-old sister. He kissed her by the lake. I wanted to strangle him. I kept watching. One false move...
But no, that was it.
That solitary kiss by the lake, under a full moon. And then he walked her back to the hotel, and... well, wait a minute... he kissed her once again. I watched her go up the steps into the hotel. I watched him looking after her as she disappeared. Then he put his hands in his pockets and walked away.
She sent him postcards every day.
It was as if my mother and I were no longer with her. All through Norway, she talked of him day and night. We’d be having lunch or dinner, she’d be scribbling postcards to him, sometimes three or four postcards a day. It was infuriating. And humiliating. We were invisible. His birthday was at the end of August, she wanted to send him a gift. We went shopping all one day, looking for an appropriate shirt for him. She made me try on six or seven shirts she liked, to see how they looked. I told her Sven was bigger than I was. She said, “That’s okay, I just want to get an idea.” Six or seven shirts. Maybe eight. She finally picked a lime-green, short-sleeved shirt she said would go well with his blond hair and green eyes. My mother thought all of this was cute, even though she was the one who paid for the shirt. In retrospect, this is not strange. She’s been paying for my sister’s voyage through life ever since.