He twisted a key in the dead bolt. Pushing open the door, he called out, "I'm home and, no, we aren't having a Security Council meeting."
The twins slid off the piano bench and rushed to greet him. Gray dropped his briefcase and hugged one in each arm.
Carolyn giggled. "We already had a vote."
Julie added, "And you lost three to one."
They kissed him, Julie always on the right cheek, Carolyn always on the left.
"I want a recount," he said. "I'll bet I can change the tally."
"You lost fair and square," Carolyn countered. "We get the new piano."
This lobbying had been going on a month. One piano apparently was not enough for four hands. The twins, twelve years old, practiced with adult stamina on the old Clarendon upright, encouraging and competing with each other. Gray was tone deaf, but even he could hear they were talented.
The twins were Korean, adopted by Gray eight years ago. They had lately begun to revel in their heritage, frequently pointing out to Gray the advantages of Asian ancestry ("We're better looking and there's more of us"), and naming the doorway to their bedroom the DMZ.
When Gray had challenged Julie and Carolyn to find a place in the apartment where another piano would fit, they proposed putting one on rollers across the doorway to the bathroom and moving it aside whenever anyone needed to pee. Occasionally during this campaign they would taunt him by switching to Korean and wagging their fingers. He suspected they didn't remember a word of Korean and were inventing it on the spot, but he couldn't prove otherwise.
The twins were identical and blossoming. Gray knew that in a few years he would be sweeping neighborhood boys out of the apartment with a broom. The girls had wide cheekbones, teardrop eyes, and sculpted lips. Their teeth were as white and even as the keys on their piano, and their smiles were glorious.
His son John always got the third hug. The boy never charged his father, always waiting until the girls were done. John smiled shyly from the kitchen doorway, half an Oreo in his good hand.
Gray crossed the small room to him. He lifted the boy so their noses touched and accused, "Did your sisters buy your Security Council vote with that cookie?"
John laughed wildly and held the Oreo away from his father. "Three cookies," he crowed. "I already ate two."
"Does Mrs. Orlando know you've been pigging out on Oreos?"
The boy looked with transparent guilt toward the kitchen, then crammed the cookie into his mouth. He shook his head and laughed again, showing a mouth full of mashed cookie.
John was nine years old and of Vietnamese ancestry. Like his sisters he had been an orphan. When he was three he had found a shell in a pasture near the foundling home in the Dong Nai province and had hammered it with a stone. The explosion had ripped his hand from his arm. He had been brought to the United States by a Greenwich Village couple who somehow had not known that John's arm ended three inches below his elbow and who had changed their minds once they saw him.
Gray had been successful adopting John when he persuaded his landlord to temporarily switch apartments for the adoption-agency interview. The landlord's place had three bedrooms. Gray's had only two. The ruse worked. Now the girls occupied one bedroom, John the other, and Gray used a hide-a-bed in the living room. Unfolding the bed every evening had proven too much trouble, so he slept on it as a couch. His back ached every morning.
One day half a year ago John came home from school inconsolably bawling. Playmates had made fun of his arm, with its clamp prosthesis where a hand should have been. Gray had visited a friend, a sergeant who was an armorer at the 42nd Infantry Division at its armory on West Fourteenth Street. The sergeant had rigged a new prosthesis, a one-pound ball bearing on a short iron shaft. Next day when the teasing began again at school, John smashed the steel ball into his desktop, splintering the wood. The harassing stopped instantly. John wore the daunting battering ram only once a month now as a reminder.
Gray kissed the boy's forehead. John had ebony hair. Gray had given him haircuts in the kitchen until the twins said John was looking like Moe Howard of the Three Stooges. Now John went to the same barber Gray did. His son had gaps between his front teeth, so Gray had just started writing checks in startling amounts to an orthodontist. With John's braces and prosthesis, the twins called him their Man of Steel. He loved it.
Julie began again: "John's vote counts. Three to one."
"This family is a monarchy." Gray lowered the boy and removed his jacket. "I'm the cruel king. You three are serfs. The king scoffs at voting."
"Aw, Dad," Carolyn said.
John lifted the briefcase with his hook. He showed his braces in a smile and swung the case back and forth like a pendulum.
"Do you not hear the king scoffing at you serfs' impertinence?" Gray snorted, "Scoff, scoff, scoff."
Mrs. Orlando emerged from the kitchen and handed him a glass of iced tea. "You must choose, Mr. Gray. Me or the kimchi. Make your choice."
"Three more days, Mrs. Orlando," Gray said. "If I can stand it, so can you."
"The smell." She waved her hand in front of her face. "It is killing me."
For most of a week the apartment has smelled of kimchi. The twins had coaxed Mrs. Orlando into buying a jar of it. They both gagged at their first taste of the fermented fish, cabbage, onions, garlic, and horseradish; but in an attempt to savor Korean culture, the girls were determined to last a week of kimchi breakfasts. Julie and Carolyn had been singularly unsuccessful in getting their father to taste the dish. John had also refused to try kimchi, saying it would give him a case of the zacklies. When his father had blithely asked what the zacklies were, John had hooted, "It's when your mouth smells zackly like your butt." He had been sentenced to a night without the Nickelodeon channel.
The apartment was normally redolent of Mrs. Orlando's Caribbean cooking. She was from Haiti. When Gray interviewed her for the job, he had asked to see her green card so he could fill out the 1–9 form. She had produced a photograph of her neighborhood in Cap Haitien on Haiti's north shore showing a row of destitute tar-paper shacks on a dusty road, an abandoned wringer clothes washer on its side near a mound of rubbish, and two ragged chickens. She had said in her melodic accent, "That's all the paper I've got." It was enough for Gray.
Mrs. Orlando was wearing her usual riotous colors. For Christmas, Gray had given her an ornate silver necklace with a dozen tiny bells hung among stylized fish and shells, and she had not taken it off since. The necklace made her jangle like a belled cat when she walked. Her skin was bronze and her eyes were set at a laughing cant. The children adored her but were wary of the voodoo curses she threatened them with when they watched too much television. She was generous with her singing talent, and Gray credited her with instilling musical ability in the twins. She was patient and loving with John when the boy cried out against his missing hand. If she had a fault it was that she would occasionally miss an afternoon of work, always because she had met a new boyfriend, and would later claim with heavy invention that she had come down with Haitian pox, a little-known disease whose most distressing symptoms were an inability to work and a fuzziness of mind that precluded calling in sick. Gray suspected she devoured and tossed aside these boyfriends, leaving them nothing but husks.
"Are you feeling better, Dad?" Carolyn asked.
Gray removed Julie's Discman from an overstuffed chair next to the piano, then sank into the chair. He had been unable to hide from them his bitter disappointment over the De Sallo verdict. He balanced his glass of tea on the torn armrest.