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I put the diary that Grandma Huffy gave me in the drawer of the table by my bed and soon became so absorbed in Famous Paintings, which was my favorite of all the gifts my aunt gave me that weekend, that I was unaware of the door to my room cracking open to allow eyes, two sets of them—my brothers’ two sets—to observe me.
The door cracked, then creaked. I looked up. It opened wider, and first Danny, then Steve, stepped in.
The three of us were graduated in size. I was the tallest and, in these years before adolescence hit, had thick, silky hair that I had recently begun wearing longer over my ears. I had a version of my aunt’s botched nose, though I had been born with mine, which angled off slightly to the left; my eyes were green and often, even then, set within dark black circles that my mother said I had inherited from her father, my rabbi grandfather, but my aunt said were a sign of having an active, curious mind that was difficult to slow down even in sleep. Danny came next in line. His hair, also longer now, had a reddish tinge, and his face looked as if someone had taken an enormous pepper shaker and sprinkled freckles across it. His eyes were not circled in black; instead they went in and out of focus, as if he were intermittently listening to some piece of private music or following a conversation that he had no intention of sharing with anyone, ever. Steve was the “little one”; compact, wiry, athletic (as my aunt often said), he had a sly sense of humor and agate-like gray-green eyes that, even from the doorway, took rapid inventory of the new things on my desk.
“What’re you doing, Mike?” asked Danny.
“Reading,” I said.
“Is that book new?”
I nodded. “It’s a book about art.”
He approached my desk. Steve followed.
“You went to a bookstore without me?” Danny loved bookstores. The books he loved were simply different from the ones I loved. The ones my aunt and uncle and I loved.
I shook my head. “It’s something Auntie Hankie bought for me.”
He shrugged, too casually. “What’s that one?”
“I’m borrowing it from Grandma’s house. It’s a novel. Auntie Hankie read it when she was about my age. It’s for grown-up kids,” I added.
“You’re a grown-up kid?”
When I didn’t answer, Danny moved closer.
“I read novels too, you know.”
“You read science fiction. That’s different.”
“It’s still made-up. It’s still a story,” Danny said.
He picked up the pencil box and asked what it was for. I explained its purpose. I used the words artist, tool of an artist. Patina. Fragile. I said it wasn’t anything he would be interested in. He was the scientist in the family, I reminded him.
The phrase was so expertly parroted I didn’t realize I hadn’t thought it up by myself.
Steve reached over and picked up the box Danny had put down.
“Be careful,” I told him as he opened and closed the lid. “It’s old. It’s not a toy.”
The hinges on the pencil box were fragile. The lid snapped off.
“Sorry,” Steve said. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Sure you didn’t,” I said impatiently.
“I just wanted to see what was inside.”
“I’ll fix it,” I said, grabbing it away from him.
There was another set of eyes at the door now. My mother’s. She took in the scene as much through her pores as through her eyes.
She came in and made her own inventory. Then she looked out the window at the fold of canyon that enclosed our house in a green and brown ravine. The sky overhead was bright and nearly leached of all its color.
“Boys,” she said to my brothers more than to me, “I’ve told you before, I know I have, that things aren’t always equal, with siblings. They can’t be.”
She might not have always looked so carefully at the rest of our house, but in my room just then she was tracking sharply.
“Sometimes it might feel like it’s more unequal than others, but …”
The books, the bookends. The now-damaged pencil box. The pencils. The paper wrapping and bags left from the day’s loot in a hillock on the floor.
“But it all evens out in the end,” she said without much conviction. Without, from what I could tell, much accuracy either.
I found her later in the kitchen before dinner. She was pricking potatoes before putting them into the oven to bake—stabbing them was more accurate.
At dusk, when the lights were on in our kitchen, the window over the sink turned into a mirror. Our eyes met there.
“It’s not my fault if Auntie Hankie likes to buy me things,” I said.
My mother did not turn around to face me. She spoke to the window instead. “I know that,” she said.
She put the potatoes in the oven.
“Or tells me things …”
She closed the oven door. She turned to face me. “What kinds of things?”
I felt my skin redden. But I had started, so I had to finish. Or try to finish. So I repeated to her, as best I could, as best I understood, what my aunt had told me about my grandparents and their marriage.
I felt so … weighted down after that moment in the car. Telling my mother was like taking a huge rock out of my pocket.
My mother’s eyebrows drew close together. “Your aunt is a screenwriter. A dramatist. She is always making up things, making them more—”
“But is it true, what she said?”
With some difficulty my mother regained control of her face. “Not everyone—not every marriage—is like every other,” she said cautiously.
“So it is true, then.”
Her intake of breath made a wheezing sound. “Yes,” she said. “Your grandparents were not—happy together. But there’s no reason for a child to know anything about all that. I don’t know what your aunt was thinking. Really it’s best put out of your mind, Mike. It’s a story for later on.”
My father was a large man, and as different from my uncle as my mother was from my aunt. He had a version of his mother’s forceful, emphatic features, though he was darker and physically more powerful. A former high school football player, he skied and played tennis. He did everything hard. He worked hard at his own medical equipment business. He played sports hard. He chewed his food hard. He trod the stairs with a hard, loud step. When he became ill, which was rare, he became ill hard, spiking outrageous fevers or coming down with stomach bugs that would have landed other men in the hospital. He pruned trees and painted the house hard; he even washed cars hard.
My uncle was softer in every sense. He was brainy, bookish, and gentle. Curious, endlessly curious, about us children. He spoke quietly and with dry humor. He never raised his voice, at least to us, which distinguished him dramatically from my father, who had a terrific, terrifying temper. The Bergman Temper, my mother called it. In our family my father’s temper was assumed to be as elemental, and as unpredictable, as a winter storm. And as natural: he inherited it from his mother; he shared it with his sister and older brother. His rages came on suddenly and were loud and fierce; when he got going there was no reaching him, not ever. “It’s in his genes,” my mother said, trying to explain away what she was powerless to change.
Many different things could set my father off. A dropped egg in the kitchen while he was cooking. An unruly child and (later) an adolescent who gave lip. Traffic. A traffic ticket. Republicans. Criminals. A scratch on the car. A minor loss at gin.
His wife, naturally. My mother. Who now and then, even in these early days, when she was still the good girl, would introduce a dissenting point of view, a request. That morning, a concern.
“It’s breaking my heart, Marty, to see them treated so differently …”
These weren’t the words that started their argument. They came along somewhere in the middle, after my brothers and I were already listening in.
It started when my father returned from his Sunday tennis game. He was in the kitchen, preparing breakfast. Nothing unusual there. My mother joined him. Not so unusual either. She was always going back downstairs for more coffee. More and more coffee.
What was unusual were the voices, raised so suddenly and to such a decibel that they came up through the floorboards. I was poring over Famous Paintings in my room, my hard-won room of my own, which about a year earlier I had convinced my parents to let me have, arguing that with my reading and drawing and my interest in the visual, and being after all the eldest, it only made sense.
My brothers were in their shared room next door. We came to our respective doorways at the same moment. We looked at one another and then together, in silent agreement, we slipped down the stairs, which were open to the entry hall, which was open to the dining room, which led to the kitchen …
“She’s your sister. You need to speak to her.”
“He’s your brother. Why don’t you speak to him? Go ahead, damn it.”
“She’s the one driving. You know that. She’s the one taking him out nearly every week now, buying him things, never thinking of the other boys. It’s as though they don’t exist. You should have seen their faces. It doesn’t matter what she buys him—the mere fact of it, week after week. It’s breaking my heart, Marty.”
“There is no reaching Hank. You know that.”
There was a pause.
“She told him about your mother and her … exploits. He’s nine years old, for God’s sake. Nine!”
My father was silent.
“You have nothing to say to that?”
“There’s no reaching Hank,” he repeated.
“You don’t try hard enough!”
“I do try! I have tried!”
“Not forcefully enough.”
“I can’t make her do anything. You know her as well as I do. You can’t make that woman—”
“I think you’re afraid to stand up to her. I think you’re afraid, period, of your own sis—”
Loud at his end. High-pitched at hers. I did not need to see my father to know that his nostrils were flaring, his head shaking, as from a tremor.
Our parents had fought before, but not like this. Usually it was in their bedroom, with music on—and turned high. That was our mother’s trick. Crank up the Mamas and the Papas, the children won’t hear. Or they won’t understand if they do.
The children heard. They understood. Their voices, the content. Next: objects. A spatula—a spoon? Had he thrown something? At her? We heard it clattering to the ground.
“I cannot live with this kind of frustration—”
Then we heard a fist, our father’s fist, coming down. Hard. On what? We could not see. Not our mother. Something solid. It sounded like wood.
This sound was followed by another sound: something breaking, then falling to the ground.
There was a pause. A silence. As if even he was surprised at what he had done.
He had banged his fist on the kitchen table. Being an antique—with patina, a story, a treasure brought over from Yurp, all that—it had split in two (we saw the disjointed pieces later, lying there on the floor), scarring the wall as it went down.
“Marty, my God—”
“Don’t you dare—”
“Don’t you say ‘Don’t you dare’—”
My brothers looked at me, the oldest, to do something.
“I’m scared,” whispered Steve.
“So am I,” whispered Danny.
“Get your shoes,” I whispered back. “Come on.”
I could leave a house as stealthily as I could enter it, even with my little brothers following—tiptoeing—down the stairs and out through the glass door in the guest room, then around through the backyard, down the ivy slope, and onto the street.
On the street I noticed that Steve’s shoe was not properly tied. I bent down and knotted it. Double knotted it.
“Is Dad going to hurt Mom?” he asked.
He never had before. He tended to hurt objects, feelings, souls—not people.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I can’t be sure.”
“Where are we going?” Steve asked.
Geographically, Wonderland Park Avenue was a continuation of Greenvalley Road, the reverse side of a loop that wound around the hill the way a string did on its spool; only where Greenvalley was open and sunbaked, Wonderland Park was shady, hidden, mysterious, and at one particular address simply magical. Halfway down the block on the right and bordered by a long row of cypress trees, number 8930 was a formal, symmetrically planned, pale gray stucco house that stood high above its garden (also formal of course, with clipped topiaries and white flowers exclusively) and was so markedly different from all its neighbors that it looked like it had been picked up in Paris and dropped down in Laurel Canyon.
Everything about the house evoked another place, another time, a special sensibility; my aunt’s special sensibility. The curtains in the windows, edged in a brown-and-white Greek meander trim and tied back just so … the crystal chandeliers that even by day winked through the glass and were reflected in tall gilded mirrors … the iron urns out of which English ivy spilled elegantly downward … the eight semicircular steps that drew you up, up, up to the front doors. The doors themselves: tall and made to look like French boiserie, they were punctuated with two brass knobs the size of grapefruit that were so bright and gleaming they seemed to be lit from within.
I led my brothers up the steps and to these doors. Even the doors had their own distinct fragrance, as if they had absorbed and mingled years’ worth of potpourri, bayberry candles, and butcher’s wax and emitted this brew as a kind of prologue to the rooms inside.
I rang the bell. We waited and waited. When I heard the gradually thickening sound of footsteps crossing the long hall (black-and-white checkerboard marble set, always, on the diagonal), I began to feel uneasy for having brought my brothers here, at this time of all times. But where else were we to go?
There was a pause as whoever it was stopped to look, I imagined, through the peephole. Then the left-hand door opened. My aunt, seeing us there, at first lit up. “My darlings, what a surprise.”
It took her a moment to realize that Steve was still in his pajamas. Then she looked, really looked, at our faces. “But what’s wrong?”
“Mom and Dad are having a fight, a terrible, terrible fight,” Danny said, his lower lip turning to Jell-O.
She called back over her shoulder, “Irving—come, come quick.”
Then she knelt down and drew my younger brothers into her arms. “Not to worry, darlings. Everything will be all right.”
