From the Corner of His Eye (35 page)

Reading about child prodigies, Agnes learned that most if not all math whizzes also possessed musical talent. To a lesser but still impressive extent, many young geniuses in the music world were also proficient at math.

Barty’s reading and writing skills appeared to be related to his talent for math, as well. To him, language was first phonics, a sort of music that symbolized objects and ideas, and this music was then translated into written syllables using the alphabet—which he saw as a system of math employing twenty-six digits instead of ten.

Agnes discovered, from her research, that among child prodigies, Barty was not a wonder of wonders. Some math whizzes were absorbed by algebra and even by geometry before their third birthdays. Jascha Heifetz became an accomplished violinist at three, and by six, he played the concertos of Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky; Ida Haendel performed them when she was five.

Eventually Agnes came to suspect that for all the pleasure the boy took in math and for all his aptitude with numbers, his greatest gift and his deepest passion lay elsewhere. He was finding his way toward a destiny both more astonishing and stranger than the lives of any of the many prodigies about whom she’d read.

Bartholomew’s genius might have been intimidating, even off-putting, if he’d not been as much child as child genius. Likewise, he would have been wearisome if impressed by his own gifts.

For all his brilliance, however, he was still a boy who loved to run and jump and tumble. Who swung from the backyard oak tree in a rope-and-tire swing. Who was thrilled when given a tricycle. Who giggled in delight while watching his uncle Jacob roll a shiny quarter end-over-end across his knuckles and perform other simple coin tricks.

And though Barty was not shy, neither was he a show-off. He didn’t seek praise for his accomplishments, and in fact, they were little known outside of his immediate family. His satisfaction came entirely from learning, exploring, growing.

And as he grew, the boy seemed content with his own company and that of his mother and his uncles. Yet Agnes worried that no children his age lived in their neighborhood. She thought he would be happier if he had a playmate or two.

“Somewhere, I do,” he assured her one night as she tucked him into bed.

“Oh? And where are you keeping them—stuffed in the back of your closet?”

“No, the monster lives in there,” Barty said, which was a joke, because he’d never suffered night frights of that—or any—sort.

“Ho, ho,” she said, ruffling his hair. “I’ve got my own little Red Skelton.”

Barty didn’t watch much television. He’d been up late enough to see Red Skelton only a few times, but that comedian always drew gales of laughter from him.

“Somewhere,” he said, “there’s kids next door.”

“Last time I looked, Miss Galloway lived to the south of us. Retired. Never married. No children.”

“Yeah, well, somewhere, she’s a married lady with grandkids.”

“She has two lives, huh?”

“Lots more than two.”

“Hundreds!”

“Lots more.”

“Selma Galloway, woman of mystery.”

“Could be, sometimes.”

“Retired professor by day, Russian spy by night.”

“Probably not anywhere a spy.”

As early as this evening, here at her son’s bedside, Agnes began dimly to sense that certain of these amusing conversations with Barty might not be as fanciful as they seemed, that he was expressing in a childlike way some truth that she had assumed was fantasy.

“And to the north of us,” Agnes said, drawing him out, “Janey Carter went off to college last year, and she’s their only child.”

“The Carters don’t always live there,” he said.

“Oh? Do they rent their house out to pirates with little pirate children, clowns with little clown children?”

Barty giggled. “
You’re
Red Skelton.”

“And you’ve got a big imagination.”

“Not really. I love you, Mommy.” He yawned and dropped into sleep with a quickness that always amazed her.

And then everything changed in one stunning moment. Changed profoundly and forever.

The day before Christmas, along the California coast. Although sun gilded the morning, clouds gathered in the afternoon, but no snow would ease sled runners across these roofs.

Pecan cakes, cinnamon custard pies boxed in insulated coolers, gifts wrapped with bright paper and glittery ribbons: Agnes Lampion made deliveries to those friends who were on her list of the needful, but also to friends who were blessed with plenty. The sight of each beloved face, each embrace, each kiss, each smile, each cheerfully spoken “Merry Christmas” at every stop fortified her heart for the sad task awaiting her when all gifts were given.

Barty rode with his mother in her green Chevrolet station wagon. Because the cakes, pies, and gifts were too numerous to be contained in one vehicle, Edom followed them in his flashier yellow-and-white ’54 Ford Country Squire.

Agnes called their two-car parade a Christmas caravan, which appealed to Barty’s sense of magic and adventure. Repeatedly he turned in his seat and rose to his knees to look back at his uncle Edom, waving vigorously.

So many stops, too little time at each, a dazzle of Christmas trees decorated every one to a different taste, offers of butter cookies and hot chocolate or lemon crisps and eggnog, morning chats in bright kitchens steeped in wonderful cooking odors and—in the chillier afternoon—good wishes exchanged in front of hearth fires, gifts accepted as well as given, cookies taken in trade for pecan cakes, “Silver Bells” and “Hark How the Bells” and “Jingle-Bell Rock” on the radio: Therewith they arrived at three o’clock in the afternoon, Christmas Eve, their deliveries completed before Santa’s had begun.

His Country Squire laden with cookies, plum cakes, homemade caramel corn with almonds, and gifts, Edom drove directly home from Obadiah Sepharad’s place, which had been their final stop. He roared away as if trying to outrun tornadoes and tidal waves.

For Agnes and Barty, one stop remained, where some of the joy of Christmas would always be buried with the husband that she still missed every day and the father that he would never know.

Cypresses lined the entry drive to the cemetery. Tall and solemn, the trees kept guard, as though posted to prevent restless spirits from roaming out into the land of the living.

Joey rested not under the stern watch of the cypresses, but near a California pepper tree. With its graceful, cascading boughs, it appeared to stand in meditation or in prayer.

The air was cool but not yet cold. A faint breeze smelled of the sea beyond the hill.

At the grave, they arrived with red and white roses. Agnes carried the red, and Barty brought the white.

In spring, summer, and fall, they brightened the grave with the roses that Edom grew in the side yard. In this less rose-friendly season, these Christmas bouquets had been purchased at a flower shop.

From his early adolescence, Edom was drawn to gardening, taking special pleasure in the cultivation of hybrid roses. He’d been only sixteen when one of his blooms earned first place in a flower show. When his father learned about the competition, he regarded Edom’s pursuit of the prize as a grievous sin of pride. The punishment left Edom bedridden for three days, and when he came downstairs at last, he discovered that his father had torn out all the rose bushes.

Eleven years later, a few months after marrying Agnes, Joey mysteriously invited Edom to accompany him on “a little drive,” and took his bewildered brother-in-law to a nursery. They returned home with fifty-pound bags of special mulch, jars of plant food, and an array of new tools. Together, they stripped the sod from the side yard, turned the soil, and prepared the ground for the rich variety of hybrid starter plants that were delivered the following week.

This rosarium was Edom’s only relationship with nature that did not inspire terror in him. Agnes believed that Joey’s enthusiasm for the restoration of the garden was, in part, the reason why Edom had not turned as far inward as Jacob and why he’d remained better able than his twin to function beyond the walls of his apartment.

The roses filling the countersunk vases in the corners of Joey’s gravestone were not Edom-grown, but they were Edom-bought. He had visited the florist himself, personally selecting each bloom from the inventory in the cooler; but he didn’t have the courage to accompany Agnes and Barty to the grave.

“Does my dad like Christmas?” Barty asked, sitting on the grave grass in front of the headstone.

“Your dad didn’t just like Christmas, he
loved
Christmas. He started planning for it in June. If there wasn’t already a Santa Claus, your father would have taken on the job.”

Using a clean rag that they had brought to polish the engraved face of the memorial, Barty said, “Is he good with numbers like me?”

“Well, he was an insurance agent, and numbers are important in that line of work. And he was a good investor, too. Not the whiz you are with numbers, but I’m sure you got some of your talent from him.”

“Does he read Father Brown mysteries?”

Crouching beside the boy as he rubbed a brighter shine onto the granite, Agnes said, “Barty, honey, why are you…?”

He stopped polishing the stone and met her stare. “What?”

Although she would have felt ridiculous phrasing this question in these words to any other three-year-old, no better way existed to ask it of her special son: “Kiddo…do you realize you’re speaking of your dad in the present tense?”

Barty had never been instructed in the rules of grammar, but had absorbed them as the roots of Edom’s roses absorbed nutrients. “Sure. Does and is.”

“Why?”

The boy shrugged.

The cemetery had been mown for the holiday. The scent of fresh-cut grass grew more intense the longer Agnes met her son’s radiant green-blue gaze, until the fragrance became exquisitely sweet.

“Honey, you do understand…of course you do…that your dad is gone.”

“Sure. The day I was born.”

“That’s right.”

Thanks to his intelligence and his personality, Barty’s presence was so great for his age that Agnes tended to think of him as being physically larger and stronger than he actually was. As the scent of grass grew more complex and even more appealing, she saw her son more clearly than she’d seen him in a while: quite small, fatherless yet brave, burdened with a gift that was a blessing but that also made a normal boyhood impossible, forced to grow up at a faster pace than any child should be required to endure. Barty was achingly delicate, so vulnerable that when Agnes looked at him, she felt a little of the awful sense of helplessness that burdened Edom and Jacob.

“I wish your dad could have known you,” Agnes said.

“Somewhere, he does.”

At first, she thought that Barty meant his father watched him from Heaven, and his words touched a tenderness in her, overlaying an arc of pain across the curve of her smile.

Then the boy put new and puzzling shadings on his meaning when he said, “Daddy died here, but he didn’t die every place I am.”

His words echoed back to her from July:
My cold’s just here, not every place I am.

The pepper tree had been whispering in the breeze, the roses nodding their bright heads. Now a stillness came into the cemetery, as if rising from beneath the grass, from out of that city of the lost.

“It’s lonely for me here,” said Barty, “but not lonely for me everywhere.”

From a bedtime conversation in September:
Somewhere, there’s kids next door.

And somewhere Selma Galloway, their neighbor, was not a spinster but a married woman with grandchildren.

A sudden strange weakness, a formless dread, dropped Agnes out of her crouch and onto her knees beside the boy.

“Sometimes it’s sad here, Mommy. But it’s not sad every place you are. Lots of places, Daddy’s with you and me, and we’re happier, and everything’s okay.”

Here again were these peculiar grammatical constructions, which sometimes she had thought were just the mistakes that even a prodigy could be expected to make, and which sometimes she had interpreted as expressions of fanciful speculations, but which lately she had suspected were of a more complex—and perhaps darker—nature. Now her dread took form, and she wondered if the personality disorders that had shaped her brothers’ lives could have roots not just in the abuse they had taken from their father, but also in a twisted genetic legacy that could manifest again in her son. In spite of his great gifts, Barty might be destined for a life limited by a psychological problem of a unique—or at least different—nature, first suggested by these occasional conversations that seemed not fully coherent.

“And in a lot of somewheres,” said Barty, “things are worse for us than here. Some somewheres, you died, too, when I was born, so I never met you, either.”

These statements sounded so convoluted and so bizarre to Agnes that they nourished her growing fear for Barty’s mental stability.

“Please, sweetie…please don’t…”

She wanted to tell him not to say these queer things, not to talk this way, yet she couldn’t speak those words. When Barty asked her
why,
as inevitably he would, she’d have to say she was worried that something might be terribly wrong with him, but she couldn’t express this fear to her boy, not ever. He was the lintel of her heart, the keystone of her soul, and if he failed because of her lack of confidence in him, she herself would collapse into ruin.