Once Upon a Day (3 page)

It helped that Grandma took my side. She’d lived in California her entire life, but she never missed it. She said the world was a bad place that had made me sick and nearly destroyed our father. “You’re lucky he bought this Sanctuary for you,” Grandma said. She was in the kitchen, cooking as usual. We had Mrs. Rosa, our housekeeper, for weekly cleaning, but Grandma herself prepared all our meals. She never let me help her. Father didn’t want me to get cut or burned; he thought it might bring on one of my attacks. “I hate to think what would have happened if he hadn’t,” Grandma concluded, and I nodded.

The unknown was always more frightening than the familiar, and the Sanctuary was familiar. Why didn’t Jimmy see this too? The Sanctuary was a safe place for us all. We had very good books, old though they may have been. We had a beautiful piano, and a record player with hundreds of records, also old, but many great songs. We had fields of flowers to gaze at (but not walk through, in case of bees). We had a father who loved us more than life itself, and who had taught us algebra and geometry, Shakespeare and Spenser, the history of the world (up until 1960, when Father said the culture became so decadent that even learning about it could harm a child’s spirits), biology and physics and geography.

Our own nearest town, Tuma, New Mexico, we knew only by the address on our mail. It was too small to be on any of the maps in Father’s library. Too small to be interesting, I told Jimmy, when he complained about wanting to go and see it for himself.

Part of me did understand Jimmy’s longings, especially when I found myself wondering how I would ever fall in love. I’d never known a boy, never had a kiss, never even had a crush, though sometimes my stomach would do a strange flip when I saw a picture of a handsome man in our encyclopedia. My favorites were John Keats, F. Scott Fitzgerald and an unnamed Civil War soldier with the most mournful expression. When I was about fourteen, I made up a story about the soldier, ending with his arrival at our front door to ask for my hand in marriage. It was a silly daydream, but it cheered me. Father said I had an optimistic temperament, and maybe it was true. Certainly I never gave up hope that the man of my future would arrive when the time was right, though how that would happen, I couldn’t say.

To Jimmy, my optimism was just annoying.

“You’re so conservative,” he told me once. He was older then: eighteen, nineteen. I was older too, but I hadn’t changed, which of course was the point.

“Conservative means to hold on to what you have.” My voice was firm. “I see nothing wrong with that.”

I didn’t realize Father was standing right behind me until I heard his quiet laugh, but I was glad I could give this to him. Nearly every day, he had to listen to Jimmy’s complaints. He’d been a patient teacher throughout our childhood and he was patient now, almost to a fault. He’d let Jimmy yell at him, yet he never raised his own voice. And he always apologized to Jimmy. He said he’d done the best he could, but maybe it wasn’t enough. All he’d wanted was to protect us, and that’s all he still wanted.

“I hope you understand,” Father would say softly. He was a tall man with well-defined features and thick eyebrows over deep blue-gray eyes framed by his ever-present black glasses; I’d always thought
he was as distinguished as any of the presidents in our encyclopedia. But lately, he’d begun to look tired: his eyes haunted and his shoulders stooped with what I knew was the weight of his only son’s rebellion.

Half the time Jimmy said—or shouted—“No, I don’t understand,” and ended the conversation by stomping out of the room.

If Grandma hadn’t gotten sick, Jimmy probably would have left even sooner. He was twenty-one, of legal age to do as he wished, as he liked to say (constantly); maybe he was just waiting for the right moment. On the other hand, maybe he would have made his peace with Father if Grandma hadn’t gotten sick and suddenly decided that Father had been wrong for taking us away from California, after all.

I turned against her then, I have to confess. Not that she ever knew. I remained kind to Grandma until the end, and it wasn’t hard because I did love her. But I loved Father a thousand times more, and I quickly decided that Grandma’s sick-bed revelations were no different from the ramblings of a lunatic.

Even Dr. Humphrey, the town’s doctor, said Grandma’s mind was going faster than her body. The diagnosis, inoperable cancer, had been confirmed by tests at the hospital in Pueblo. She left in an ambulance, and returned the same way, a week later, to die at home with her family. She was eighty-six years old, and they predicted she wouldn’t last more than a month or two, but she lingered for over a year. During that year, she spent most of her time talking about the past.

Jimmy listened eagerly as she transformed California from a terribly corrupt place from which we were lucky to have escaped to a gorgeous land of sandy beaches and palm trees and sunsets reflecting gold and purple on the water. And oh, Grandma said, such fun things there were to do! Strolling the pier at Santa Monica and riding on the huge Ferris wheel. Driving in the canyon with all the twists and turns and beautiful views. Sipping a glass of wine by the side of the pool. Watching the filming of a movie on the studio lot. Taking the kids to Disneyland.

“Remember that, Fred?” Grandma would say to Father, after she’d sung the praises of another wonderful thing about the place she was now calling our “home.” He would sit on the side of her bed and take her hand—and I would look at Jimmy and raise my eyebrows. Our father’s name was Charles. If Grandma couldn’t remember her own son’s name, why should anything else she said be taken seriously?

One night Jimmy had the nerve to suggest that maybe Charles wasn’t his name. I pointed out that Grandma had always called Father Charles, but Jimmy wasn’t persuaded. “Maybe Grandma was in on it too,” Jimmy said. “Maybe now she’s finally telling the truth.”

We were standing outside on the porch. It was a cold night in January, so naturally I had on my coat and hat and gloves and warmest boots. Jimmy, on the other hand, was wearing only his light sweater and blue denim pants. He had decided Father’s rule about dressing warmly was as pointless as all his other rules.

“You realize that you’re calling him a liar,” I whispered. My heart was racing a little, but I was taking deep breaths and reminding myself that Jimmy could not possibly mean this. It was just his rebellion talking.

Jimmy was rubbing his hands together vigorously, stomping his feet, shivering a little. But he would not concede he needed his coat.

“I don’t want to believe it either,” he said. But then he added, “What makes you so sure he’s not?”

I could have given him a hundred reasons, yet in the end, I knew it came down to trust. I had trusted our father for my entire life. He had never done anything to make me question that trust.

“He has a driver’s license,” I finally said. We had both seen it, not often, but enough times to know it said “Charles O’Brien.”

This was what it took to convince my brother that our father hadn’t lied about his own name. It struck me as very sad.

During Grandma’s last few months she became even more incoherent.
She would talk of her own childhood as though it were happening now, even calling out in the most heartbroken voice for her mother and father. I felt so sorry for her, but Jimmy persisted in believing that somewhere in her talk he would find the key to understanding all the mysteries of our family. He even tried asking Grandma how our mother died (when Father was holed up in his study, doing his monthly accounting), but poor Grandma took the question as another opportunity to cry over all the people she’d lost over her long life. Whether she was crying about Mother too wasn’t clear. Jimmy swore she said Helena, our mother’s name, but I thought he only imagined it.

Actually, the only time I heard her talk about our mother, Jimmy wasn’t there. He was downstairs helping Father haul wood; I was reading to Grandma when, out of the blue, she patted my hand and said, “You know, your mother would be very proud of what a fine woman you’re turning out to be.”

I admit I took this a bit more seriously than the rest of Grandma’s talk. In fact, a few minutes later, when Grandma started crying again, I found myself crying along with her, thinking about my mother, this red-haired Helena whom I could barely remember. The idea that she would be proud of me was so wonderful, and yet, I didn’t think it was true. I had read of heroic women in the encyclopedia: women like Florence Nightingale, Joan of Arc, Harriet Tubman. My accomplishments so far were limited to keeping myself from any injuries beyond the rare paper cut, reading most of the books in Father’s small library and playing the piano, not particularly well. I had never had to face adversity; I had never even had to make a conscious choice that mattered to anyone but myself. What was I then but a grown-up-size little girl?

I rarely cried at all, and never for upwards of fifteen minutes as I did that day with Grandma. Crying invariably led to an attack of my nervous breathing, and I had learned over the years to stop the feelings before the tears could begin. I expected to have an attack that day too, but instead I just kept crying until I managed to pull myself
together and return to the job of reading
Jane Eyre.
I’d been reading it to Grandma since the day she came back from the hospital: partly because it had always been one of her favorite novels, but mainly because every time I asked her what book she wanted now, she’d say
Jane Eyre
as though the title had just occurred to her—even if we’d just finished it. We made it all the way through the book seven times and were halfway through the eighth when she finally passed away about a month later.

Before she died though, she managed to convince Jimmy that he should leave the Sanctuary as soon as possible. This was what he told me, only two weeks after Father and the preacher had buried her. He claimed Grandma had even told him where he should go, and it wasn’t to California, like I would have expected. It was to a place that made absolutely no sense. Missouri.

When I asked him why Missouri, he refused to say. My brother, who had always told me everything, would not tell me the reason for the most important decision he’d ever made in his life.

“Because there isn’t a reason,” I sputtered. “Because Grandma mumbled ‘misery’ and you decided she must have meant Missouri.”

He refused to argue. He was going to Missouri, end of discussion. He was leaving even though he knew how Father would feel about it.

“Too bad,” Jimmy told me, right before he left, “if I hurt him. He hurt us more.”

No doubt the anger I felt at Jimmy helped me watch him walk down that dirt road and disappear.

“I’m at the bus station,” Jimmy wrote. “I’ve never heard so much noise! The buses, the cars, talking, screaming, laughing! I’m sitting next to a woman from town who told me she heard our father was the richest man in New Mexico. Then she asked me, ‘Isn’t he eccentric, like Howard Hughes?’ I burst out laughing.”

I wasn’t sure who Howard Hughes was, but I looked him up in the appropriate volume of the encyclopedia. There wasn’t enough to conclude he was eccentric. I wondered how Jimmy knew to laugh.

From the beginning, he kept his promise to write; I was relieved about that. I got mail from him almost every day: sometimes letters, sometimes postcards. When he arrived in St. Louis, he sent me a card with an aerial view of the city. He talked about how excited he was, ending with, “I had to run in front of traffic to get a cab. Poor old man would shit if he knew.”

I winced at Jimmy’s crude language; I’d never heard him use a curse word before. The sad part was Father did know. He’d collected the mail himself every day for all the years we’d lived here. He read the postcard, and he saw all the return addresses on the letters as Jimmy moved from place to place, from new friend to new friend, trying to find where he belonged, he said. Find whatever it was he was looking for.

“I worry about him,” Father would say, nearly every night at supper. He still wouldn’t let me cook and nothing I could say would persuade him. Whenever I pressured him too hard, he would remind me of the day I was born.

“You only weighed five pounds. I could hold you in one hand.” His voice would grow soft. “I vowed that day to make sure nothing ever happened to you.”

One time I asked him, “What if your mother had vowed the same thing? Then how would we eat?”

He laughed a little, but he continued cooking the stew. And during the meal, he mentioned Jimmy again. Wondering how he was. Wishing he would return to us. Hoping he was all right, out there all alone in the world.

I was worried about Jimmy too, but I was also worried about Father. What Jimmy had done by leaving was no less than crush his spirit, and nothing I tried seemed to be of any help. My optimism was unrelenting; I never greeted Father with anything but a smile; I mentioned every day how lucky I felt to be here in the safest of places, but still, the shadow of sadness never left him.

It wasn’t even two years later when it took its inevitable toll.

Father was only sixty-one, but the disease that came over him
made him seem like a very old man. For weeks I watched him struggle to get out of bed, eat almost nothing, hold his head between his thin hands and wince with a pain he wouldn’t talk about. He still insisted on doing all the cooking himself, but luckily, there was much less to cook now that it was just the two of us. We could and did go months without ordering any food. I could and did eat meal after meal of what I claimed was my new favorite: bread and prepackaged slices of cheese (no cutting required), so he wouldn’t have to prepare anything.

I knew it was bad when he asked me to call Dr. Humphrey for a visit. I rushed to Father’s study where he kept the only phone we had, an unusual kind, according to Jimmy—it could dial out but not ring in. Though I’d never used a phone before, I figured it out quickly and was so pleased with myself I almost forgot the urgency of my mission.

Dr. Humphrey came by that same day. He said he was concerned, but he couldn’t make a precise diagnosis unless Father would come to the hospital for tests. I tried to persuade him, but all my attempts went nowhere. He wouldn’t leave. He said the only thing he wanted was to see his son again.