The Bestiary (6 page)

She had never said such a thing before. Not in all the years she had watched my grandmother’s family shun me.

It was Uncle Robert, of course, who made the funeral arrangements. Now, if only for a few seconds, I would see him up close, I thought.

Two days after my grandmother died, Evgénia had me put on my one suit, itchy gray wool, with a black knitted tie that she bought me. She put on a black dress herself. Then at three o’clock, in sharp sunlight, we took the No. 14 bus up Webster Avenue to Cichetti’s Funeral Home. The front room, visible through the glass doors, was a kind of fake living room. It had sofas, a Persian carpet, and dim lamps. A poor reproduction of some landscape—trees along a river—hung over the fake fireplace. The air was dusty, waxen, and I didn’t want to draw it into my lungs.

Outside the room where she was laid out, my grandmother’s name had been tacked onto a board in white letters, like the ones they used to spell out the daily menu in my school cafeteria. Evgénia took my hand and we went in. There were no other mourners present at that hour. The perfume of flowers from various bouquets was overpowering. She was lying in a rosewood casket lined with lavender silk. They had put a blue dress on her and fixed her hair and applied makeup to her face. I had heard people say that, freshly laid out, people look as if they are sleeping; but she didn’t look like she was sleeping, she looked dead. It brought me up short. I didn’t shed tears by her casket. I don’t remember feeling anything at all. In the suffocating stillness of that place I was sure if I looked at my wristwatch—a tenth-birthday gift from my grandmother—I would discover that time itself had stopped.

The funeral service the next day was at Saint Anthony of Padua Church, on another bus route. Wearing the same suit and tie, with Evgénia at my side, I entered the church near the end of the service and sat in a rear pew. My grandmother’s closed casket was up at the altar. The priest, flanked by acolytes, was praying over it in Latin. I glimpsed the backs of my relatives’ heads, including the children, my cousins, one of whom, a girl about my own age, had the reddest hair I’d ever seen. Once I had seen her in the rear seat of Uncle Robert’s car. This was Silvana, named after my great-great-grandmother the dryad; of all my cousins, she was the one my grandmother had most wanted me to meet. “Because you’re so much alike,” she once remarked. “And she’s going to be a great beauty, too.” But, thanks to my uncle, I hadn’t met her, and now I probably never would. I started to cry again, and for the next half hour I looked around that church, the stained glass, the icons of the saints, the flickering candles, through a veil of tears. And I never did see Silvana’s face.

Evgénia comforted me as best she could, keeping her arm around my shoulders, stroking my head. She had done as she promised, and then some. Her courage and audacity did not extend to marching me down the aisle to take my “rightful place,” as she called it, in one of the first three rows, reserved for family. Nor would I have wanted her to make this sort of scene; I doubt either of us could have handled the consequences. So, as the service wound down, we walked out of the church, past the hearse and limousines, back to the bus stop.

Some years later, I would discover the location of my grandmother’s grave at Sacred Heart Cemetery in Yonkers. But that night, I thought back to the first time my grandmother had taken me to my mother’s grave, a few miles to the east, in Mount Vernon. Chosen by my father, her gravestone was a modest slab of marble. Her name and dates were plainly chiseled, and in the upper corner there was a flying fish at the center of a rosette. My grandmother didn’t approve of the site, beside an iron fence at the end of a long row of graves. Down a slope of tall grass, traffic hummed on a busy road. Exhaust fumes rose through the trees. My grandmother didn’t like the flying fish, either. She said it was a symbol of resurrection for Greek sailors. “Marina wasn’t a sailor,” she muttered, resentful of this final intrusion by my father. What she wanted to say, and refrained on my account, was that my mother wasn’t Greek, but Italian—a distinction to be strictly maintained, even after death. I traced the letters of my mother’s name—their edges sharp beneath my fingertip—while my grandmother got to her knees, pulled weeds from the dirt, and planted geraniums. I thought of my mother lying face-up below my feet. Was she just a skeleton now, or was it too soon for that? I noted the dates on neighboring gravestones. Most were for old people. One was for an infant. My mother might have liked that, I thought, since she hadn’t had the chance to be with her own child. I realized that if I had died with her, I would have been buried in that place, too. Later, when my grandmother and I walked out the gates and down to the train station, I was glad to have visited, but I wasn’t sorry to leave.

I had often asked my grandmother what my mother was like. One night, when she was ailing, she answered more frankly than usual.

“Your mother,” she said, squinting across the room as if she might discern her in the shadows. “She loved to dance. At weddings she was the best dancer. She had plenty of friends. When she got married, she was still just a girl. I hoped she would have a nice wedding herself. I thought I knew her.” She shook her head. “I didn’t, really, and I can’t forgive myself for not going to her after she run away.”

My grandmother had given me a handful of snapshots of my mother. They were taken before my mother met my father. If he had photos of them together, or of my mother alone during their brief marriage, he had kept them to himself or destroyed them.

In four of the snapshots, taken on a rooftop against a smoky winter sky, my mother looked pensive, staring past the photographer. Was that a friend, or one of her siblings? She was wearing a brown coat and matching beret. The wind was fluttering her long hair.

In the fifth snapshot she looked happy. Wearing a white bathing suit and a sailor cap aslant, she was eating cotton candy at Jones Beach, mugging for the camera. A locker key on an elastic band was fastened around her ankle. She was tanned. Slim. With nice legs. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen. On the boardwalk beside her, elongated by the late-afternoon sun, there was an unusual shadow: the photographer, from the neck up, with a large bird perched on his shoulder. The bird had a curved beak and long, forking tail feathers. A distinctive crest—a row of spiky tufts—that ran down its neck made me think it wasn’t a parrot. Aside from the bird, there was nothing to distinguish the photographer; not even his height could be ascertained from the shadow.

I had studied this snapshot many times, weaving stories around it:

That the man was a stranger who, upon request, photographed my mother with her own camera.

That he was a boyfriend who happened to own (and take to the beach with him) an exotic bird.

That the bird belonged to a sailor whose cap she had put on (a seafarer who predated my father?)…or a vendor (of cotton candy?)…or a Gypsy fortune-teller whose booth my mother had visited and learned—what? Judging from her smile, not the fact that she wouldn’t live to see her twenty-first birthday. No, in that snapshot, with glowing limbs and bright eyes, she looked as if she would live forever.

The night of my grandmother’s funeral, Evgénia stayed in my father’s room. And I sat awake in my grandmother’s room with Re, who rarely left my side that week. I opened the silver music box containing the white whisker and listened to the lullabye my grandmother used to sing to me. Then I lit the candle that had replaced all the paraphernalia on her bedside table, and Re stared at the window where the fox had disappeared.

T
HE DAY
I had to leave Re with Bruno, a fierce storm hit the city. By three o’clock a foot of snow had fallen. It was so dark the streetlights had come on. Cars were skidding into intersections. Buses weren’t running. Re and I walked east, into Bruno’s neighborhood, cutting through U.S. Grant Park, onto DeMott Avenue. I ducked my head against the wind and guided Re away from the deeper drifts. In my knapsack I had his food bowl and plaid blanket.

When my grandmother died, the cover she provided for my father’s neglect went with her. However comfortable the apartment, he couldn’t just leave me alone there, with Evgénia coming in forty hours a week and no one else around on weekends. There could be no pretenses anymore about that aspect of my life. Evgénia had remained with me for several months, but when my father asked her to continue as a live-in caretaker, she declined. Whatever the particulars of her private life, she wasn’t willing to give it up. To my surprise, one morning my father woke me with the news that I would be enrolling in a boarding school in Maine. “There’s no alternative,” he said flatly, stalking from my room with his heavy gait, meaning there would be no discussion, either.

It also meant that Re needed a new home. He and I had become closer than ever. At fourteen, two years my senior, he was ancient for a German shepherd. His strength was ebbing, his vision dimmed, his hind legs stiff with arthritis. That day, he tugged at his leash, for he knew the way to the Morettis’ house and enjoyed visiting the other animals. The fact Re was so happy there was the only thing that offset my despair at having to give him up. I had been sick over it for weeks. The Morettis’ home was full of strays, and now Re would join them. They were taking him in unquestioningly, just as they had taken me in. As always, Re sensed what was coming: the previous night he had crouched on my bed and watched me pack. When I slipped under the covers, he laid his forepaws across my ankle and wouldn’t lift them until morning.

Now, as I rang the Morettis’ doorbell, at least his spirits seemed to have improved, even if mine had not.

Lena let us in. By that time, more than the family comforts and the menageries, my primary delight in visiting the Moretti household was her presence. I brushed the snow from my coat and she gave me a towel to dry Re.

“Here’s his bowl,” I said, removing it from the knapsack. “And he likes to sleep on this blanket.”

“He’ll sleep in my room. By the radiator. Can I hang up your coat, Xeno?”

“I can’t stay long. I’ll just say goodbye to Bruno,” I said, starting up the stairs.

I only had a few hours before my father and I were to go to Grand Central and board the train for Boston. At our apartment, my bags were lined up in the hallway and the furniture was covered with sheets.

I found Bruno hunched over his terrarium, feeding the lizards live roaches. In the ultraviolet light he appeared even paler than usual. While my physical capacities were growing as I entered puberty, Bruno’s were diminishing. To the list of his afflictions could be added the fact he was going deaf in one ear. I wished that I could lend him some of my own strength.

At that moment, I was overwhelmed by all the things I wanted to tell him. “I’m not just going away, Bruno. I’m losing my home, and Re along with it.”

“Re will always be your dog. And Mom told you you can stay with us anytime, not just Thanksgiving and Christmas. I mean, if you’re not going to be with your father.”

At the Morettis’, if nowhere else, I had ceased to be embarrassed by the instability of my life with my father.

“Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of him,” Bruno said as we headed for the stairs.

Passing Lena’s room, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

“I’ll be right with you,” I said to Bruno, who was already descending.

Lena pulled me into her room and closed the door.

Her eyes twinkled in the half-light. “I wanted to say goodbye, too,” she said.

I had been in her room many times, but never in such an intimate way. In the silence I could hear the clock ticking on her bureau. Her bed was neatly made, her white curtains open to the falling snow. There was a brass statuette of the Egyptian sphinx on the bureau, a gift from her maiden aunt who had traveled down the Nile with a tour group. Lena was very attached to it, especially after reading about the sphinx. She wasn’t one for riddles, but I knew she must feel an affinity for the sphinx’s subtler qualities, its unshakable repose.

She smiled at me. Her hair smelled of lavender. Her skin glowed. Around her neck she wore a gold locket, engraved with her initials, that I had never seen before.

I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

“Do you like it, Xeno?”

I nodded.

“It opens,” she said. Holding it between her thumb and index finger, she released a tiny catch. “See?”

The locket was empty.

She clicked it shut. “Will you come home at Easter?”

“I hope so.” I hesitated. “Lena, will you write to me?”

“Of course. And you do the same.”

Bruno was calling me from downstairs.

“I’d better go.”

Her lips parted, but she didn’t speak. She stepped up close and kissed me on the lips, long enough so that I could taste it. My first kiss. Then she opened the door with a small smile.

Saying goodbye to Re, I didn’t linger. He rested his head in my lap, then followed me to the door with his eyes. We both knew we wouldn’t see each other again. I had never felt worse about anything.