“We don’t need a Baltimore line,” our father said. “But we can compromise. If your grades are good on your third-quarter report card, I’ll install an extension, only in the living room.”
The phone that arrived in April was as ordinary as a phone could be: black, squat, unmoving. If you wanted to use it, you had to sit in one of the two wing chairs flanking the round mahogany table where the phone lived. Still, it was a novelty and like all children, I loved novelty. Home alone (except for Teensy) until 4 or 5 P.M., I would sit in a wing chair, the TV muted, and pretend to place calls. The White House, Buckingham Palace, China. I yearned to make prank phone calls, but knew the circumstances would be dire if I were caught. Besides, the only two jokes I knew were about Prince Albert in the can, which I didn’t really understand, and “Is your refrigerator running?” (Then go out and catch it!) I wasn’t even sure to whom someone was meant to place prank calls. Friends? Strangers? I would pick up the black handset, my index finger on the button so the phone was not actually off the hook, and imagine someone calling me. Lu? Lu? Would you like to come over? Sure, let’s make ice cream sundaes and watch The Big Valley.
I was playing this sad little game when the phone rang one afternoon, vibrating beneath my finger. Startled, I almost dropped the handset. Instead, I lifted my finger and rattled off as I had been instructed, “Brant household-who-may-I-say-is-calling?,” even as Teensy was saying the same thing into the kitchen phone, although not quite as swiftly.
“Luisa?” a strange woman’s voice asked. “Luisa?”
At that, I did drop the phone with a shriek, let it clatter to the floor, believing a ghost was calling me. From the kitchen, Teensy yelled: “You hang that phone up NOW, Lu. You hear me? You hang up that phone and go outside.” I did, but not before I heard Teensy in the kitchen, breathing hard into the receiver. “Please do not call here again. I’m sorry, ma’am, but you know that’s how it has to be.”
The phone began to ring every day after that, between the hours of three and five. At some point, Teensy decided to stop answering. “Nuisance calls,” she said. “Like pranks?” “Yes. Do not pick up the phone. That only encourages them. Just let it ring.”
Every afternoon, the phone continued to ring. Five times, eight times, a dozen. We got used to it. As for telling my father-I guess I assumed Teensy had filled him in. Surely this had something to do with his work.
Now, even though Miss Maude was no longer available to look after me, Teensy had come to expect her early leave-taking on Fridays. My father had decided I could stay home alone as long as AJ promised to get there as soon as possible. “As soon as possible,” to AJ’s way of thinking, was any time that put him through the door ahead of our father, who seldom left the office before 6:30. I kept his secret, enjoying my autonomy and the power it gave me. Then, one Friday, as I was watching a rerun of The Big Valley, the phone rang and I was so caught up by the strange things that were happening on the show-the Barkley brothers were threatening a Chinese man, making him swear on a chicken that he didn’t know where Victoria Barkley was, when she was downstairs in his master’s basement-that I picked up the receiver almost without thinking.
“Brant-residence-who-may-I-say-is-calling?”
“Luisa? Luisa, is that you?”
The strange woman’s voice again. Yet I wasn’t scared this time, despite being alone in the house. It was just a prank, after all. Victoria Barkley wasn’t scared. She was played by Barbara Stanwyck and on those rare times when AJ was home during The Big Valley, Noel would drop into the other wing chair and watch with me, telling me what a great actress she was.
“Yes.”
“Don’t you know who this is?”
“Miss Maude?”
“It’s your grandmother, Luisa. Your mother’s mother, Victoria Closter. Your nana.”
“I don’t have any grandparents,” I said, confused. My father’s parents might be alive, but I knew he had chosen to live his life without them. My mother’s parents were dead. I was quite clear on that. They had died years ago, not long after my mother died. That’s why we never saw them. They were dead.
“Oh, that wicked, wicked father of yours, trying to keep us apart. You do have grandparents and we want to see you, darling. I haven’t seen you since you were a baby.”
“You saw me when I was a baby?” There was no photographic evidence to support this.
“We did. But then your father said we couldn’t see you anymore-”
AJ came in then, breathless and red-cheeked; the late April day was unseasonably cold.
“AJ, it’s our grandparents! They’ve alive. It must have been some terrible mistake, like, like”-my mind groped for such a scenario and found it instantly in the soap operas I had watched with Miss Maude-“maybe they just had amnesia!”
He took the phone from me-and hung it up.
“What did she say to you, Lu?”
“That she was my grandmother. But I thought we didn’t have any grandparents.”
“Did she say anything else?”
“She said our father was wicked.”
The phone began to ring again. AJ motioned for me not to touch it. He let it ring ten, fifteen times-phones would do that, then. When the person on the other end finally gave up, AJ called our father’s office and spoke to his secretary. “Miss Dolores? This is AJ. We’ve been having some nuisance calls and I’m taking the phone off the hook for now. I just thought our father should know.” Pause. “I’m fine, she’s fine. But I know he doesn’t want us to have anything to do with these calls.”
Our father was home within the hour. He asked AJ to speak to him in his room. For some reason, I accepted this was a private matter. How can this be? Yet my memory is that I sat at the kitchen table, busy at something. What exactly? I had a small loom on which I could make belts, ugly imitations of the Native American styles that were still popular. No, I was getting a head start on Easter, preparing the eggs. Teensy had taught me how to hollow eggs. I couldn’t dye them on my own, but I knew how to hollow them. Or thought I did. The kitchen table told a different story, with two destroyed eggs for every one that remained intact, and the intact ones had enormous blow holes. Meanwhile, we had enough eggs to make omelets all weekend. It was almost as if I didn’t want my father to summon me to his room, or I hoped he would be so upset with me that he would be distracted. I didn’t want to hear what he was going to tell me.
But eventually, he did ask me to talk to him, without any comment about the mess I had made.
In the corner of my father’s room that he used as a home office, there was a big leather wing chair, his, and a wooden rocking chair at three-quarters scale, in which I had often read alongside him. I started to climb into the chair, but my father startled me by asking: “Do you want to sit in my lap?”
We were not that kind of family. I sat next to him when we read the paper together; I did not sit on him.
“No, sir, that’s okay. We can talk like this.” He seemed relieved.
“Lu, there were some things that happened, back when you were born, that I never told you about. Your grandparents-your mother’s parents-did not approve of her having a second child.”