Early Spring 02 Scattered Leaves Page 2

  Not wanting Felix to think I was so sad. I snuck a final look at my room. Without me and my most cherished possessions, it would look abandoned if my mother came home and peered in at it. It would become what Ian called "another museum room in the house." So many rooms were simply there for show, unused and kept spotless. They were there for guests to be paraded past to be impressed. Ian used to say Grandmother Emma wore her house the way other women wear jewelry.

  "How can you wear a house?" I asked him.

  "In the minds of people who see you, you are inseparable from what you own," he said. "Nobody looks at her and doesn't think of this mansion, the furniture, the limousine, all of it. Understand?"

  I nodded. but I didn't. I knew when and how to push an Ian and get him to keep explaining, and when to just pretend I understood what he was saying. Would I ever be as smart as him? I wandered,

  "Your brother is a very special person," Mother used to tell me. "When you get older, you'll realize just how special he is."

  I had already.

  "We have a few hours of riding to do," Felix said, turning to me in the hallway. I knew that was his way of asking me if I needed to go to the bathroom. In this house, under the cloud of Grandmother Emma, you never said "bathroom." You said "powder room." You went there to "do your private or personal business."

  "Toilets are persona non grata," Ian told me.

  When I asked him what language he was speaking, he said. "The language of survival,"

  Maybe my brother is really from another planet. I once thought. Daddy acted as if he believed it.

  "I'm okay." I told Felix. I had done my business in preparation.

  "Good then," Felix replied and charged forward as if he was afraid I'd change my mind. I trailed behind him so silently that I felt as if I was floating away. Felix didn't look back to see if I was coming or if I was crying. I couldn't say I liked him or disliked him. We'd had so little to do with each other before this.

  His short hair was all gray. There were even ray strands in his bushy eyebrows, but he was still broad in the shoulders and stood with a military posture, tall with long arms. My suitcases didn't seem to weigh anything in his large hands. He moved easily ahead of me down the grand stairway. At the bottom he paused. and I knew he was expecting my father to be out in the hallway to say good-bye. We both looked in the direction of Daddy's bedroom, and then he turned to me.

  "I'll go let Mr. March know we're leaving," he said. "He must have forgotten,"

  He lumbered down the hallway, put a suitcase down, and tapped gently on Daddy's bedroom door.

  After my parents had the car accident. Daddy went to therapy to learn how to get around in a wheelchair and take as much care of himself as possible. Grandmother Emma said it was taking longer because he wasn't being cooperative. When it finally came time for him to come home.

  Grandmother arranged for his bedroom to be downstairs rather than have one of those chair elevators installed. She said she would never mar her beautiful stairway and hand-carved balustrade with some modem mechanical thing.

  I heard Felix mumble to the closed door. He waited and then it opened and he spoke again. He picked up the suitcase and started back toward me.

  "He'll be right along," Felix said. "I'll go and put your suitcases in the car."

  I waited for what seemed like a long time before my father came wheeling out of his room. I was afraid to move, even to sit. The grandfather clock in the living room bonged ten times. To distract myself. I played the same game with the shadows Ian often did. This one looked like a humpback whale, that one looked like a tiger about to pounce, and another resembled a giant hawk.

  When my father finally appeared, he was in his bathrobe and barefoot. His hair was as wild as it would have been had he just woken, and his eyes looked swollen and red. He used to attend to his personal hygiene closely and some days even shaved twice. He always smelled good. This morning he looked like he hadn't shaved for a few days. He had a paper bag in his lap.

  "Kimberly is in the shower," he told me, as if I cared whether or not his girlfriend said good-bye to me. "You have everything you need?"

  I didn't know what that meant. If I'd had everything I needed. I would have had my mother, but I nodded.

  "Well, okay. You be a good girl. As I said, we'll come visit you soon. I've finally given into this idea of a specially designed automobile for me to drive, so maybe I'll test it out with a ride out to see you and Aunt Frances."

  Of course. I thought he'd be coming not because of a burning desire to see me but instead to test-drive a special car. Again, I just nodded.

  "You know," he said suddenly, tipping his head to the side, "until this moment. I've never realized how much you look like your Grandmother Emma. Something about the way you purse your lips. Jordan. You know both she and Frances were pretty goodlooking young women in their time. You have good genes and resemble them both.'

  Ian often talked about our genes. He seemed afraid of what he had inherited from Daddy.

  "Are you going to see Ian soon. Daddy?"

  "Soon," he said, but without any real

  enthusiasm.

  "Would you please be sure to tell him where I am and please ask him to write back to me when you do see him? I gave you the letter for him. You will give him Great-aunt Frances's address so he can write back to me, okay?"

  "He has written to you," he said.

  I would swear my heart stopped and started. "He has?"

  "That's what this bag is full of," he explained. "His letters to you. I found them in the office just yesterday, rummaging through the files, looking for some legal tunnel to escape the prison your grandmother and her attorney have put me in."

  "Ian's letters?"

  "Yeah, your grandmother in her godlike wisdom decided not to give them to you, not that you or anyone normal could make head or tail of what the hell he wrote anyway. I read two and gave up. Kimberly even read a few and was just as lost. Maybe they'll amuse you," he added and handed the bag to me.

  I looked in it, surprised and elated over how many I saw bundled with a rubber band.

  "Will you ever take me to see him. Daddy?" I asked.

  "Sure, sure." he said, waving my request away just as he used to wave away my mother's.

  I would ask him to promise, but Daddy's promises were like scattered flowers, beautiful for a short time, and then quickly drying and fading until they crumbled and disappeared in the darkness of the earth, just like people.

  "Okay. Give me a kiss and get going," he told me.

  I leaned over his lap and kissed his cheek. He grunted something I didn't understand and spun his chair around. I watched him wheel himself down the hallway toward his room and recalled how he used to lumber down the hallways with his boots tapping the tiles, his head high, moving like the prince he was supposed to be, and for the first time all morning, I thought I wouldn't be able to stop myself from crying.

  I did, though. I imagined Ian standing at the top of the stairway looking down at me, mouthing. "Remember. Be like Grandmother Emma, Don't cry. Ever."

  I clutched the bag of his letters to my breasts, vanquished the throat lump, turned and walked out.

  It was a beautiful late August day. Over the horizon, a stream of milky white clouds seemed glued to the sky. Otherwise, the blue extended unstained in every direction. A warm breeze lifted the flower blossoms in Grandmother Emma's beautifully manicured gardens but barely stirred the branches of trees or combed the blades of grass. Felix stood outside the car beside the open rear door, waiting for me the way he often waited for Grandmother Emma. Ian used to say he expected him to snap his boots together and salute when she appeared.

  I gazed at the limousine. To me it looked like I was about to enter a dark cave, but I walked ahead and never looked back. I crawled in, sliding way over on the right side and pressing myself against the corner as if there had hardly been any room. Felix closed the door. I glanced back at the front of the mansion as he got in. In my imagi
nation Ian was standing there, watching, waiting to wave good-bye, his gaze firm, his eyes betraying no tears.

  "Here we go," Felix said, then he started the engine and drove down the long driveway,

  The silence that followed made me shiver. Ian was so correct in my imaginary analysis. I would never feel as alone as I did at this moment. I remembered when my mother and I were once in a crowd after a movie and my hand slipped out of hers. Someone behind me moved me ahead and someone else moved me to the right. I was terrified, but my mother was there quickly, seizing my hand again.

  She wasn't here now. Would she ever be again' ?

  The limousine turned and we headed off, my short life at the grand house trailing behind me in memories made of smoke, disappearing like the car's exhaust, unseen and gone so quickly that it made me wonder if any of it ever had happened.

  "It's nice where you're going,' Felix offered. trying. I suspected, to cheer me up. As when he spoke to my grandmother, he didn't look back.

  I used to think it looked like he was talking to himself. It had to be hard never to be able to look at the people to whom you spoke. Ian imagined that he had turned his head when he first started as

  Grandmother Emma's chauffeur.

  "She probably snapped so sharply at him to keep his eyes on the road," he told me. "that he felt the bite on the back of his neck forever.'

  "I haven't been out there in some time, but I do remember it being a pretty home," Felix added.

  "It's a farm, right?"

  "Well, it was a farm." Felix said. "They keep a home garden going, but it's not a commercial farm. They don't raise crops to sell. I remember a large pond on the property. Cows used to drink from it back when they had cows."

  "Are there any animals there now?"

  "Some chickens, I think. You'll have fresh eggs all the time." he added.

  I couldn't really see his face in the rearview mirror well, but I felt he was smiling. It occurred to me that Felix was the only one I knew now who wasn't a total stranger. It didn't do any good to be related to someone if you had never met them. My great-aunt Frances would still be a stranger to me. Despite what my grandmother told me in the hospital when I went to see her for the last time. I was afraid Great-aunt Frances wouldn't like me. Maybe she would be very mean to me. Maybe she hated the idea of having to take a young girl into her home to live with her. After all, as far as I knew, she hadn't asked for me to came live with her, Grandmother Emma had just told her it would be so. She could give everyone in the family orders through Mr. Pond, her attorney, even now, even though she couldn't speak well.

  But she did assure me that last day in the hospital that her sister would never hate me. She said something even more mysterious to me as well. She said she needed me. How could a woman as old as Great-aunt Frances need a girl my age, especially one who was like me with all my added problems?

  Did she need someone to help on the farm even though they didn't sell crops? Would I gather eggs? Would I plant vegetables? Pick wild berries for jams? I had been imagining all those things as this day had drawn closer and closer.

  I wondered if Felix really meant it when he made it sound as if he liked Great-aunt Frances's home so much. Maybe he didn't like living in a city.

  "Where did you grow up. Felix?"

  "Me? Oh, a little town just outside of Philadelphia."

  "On a farm?"

  "No. My father had a hardware store."

  "Did you go to college?"

  "No. I was in the army for a few years and through a friend. I met your grandfather and he hired me to be his driver after only an hour or so. He was like that, you know."

  "Like what. Felix?"

  "He could look at someone and pretty much decide about him or her quickly, and he was unafraid of acting on his impressions. Very decisive man. You know what that means?"

  "No."

  "He was very self-assured, very confident of himself, never worried about his decisions, no matter how quickly he made them. Sometimes, your brother reminds me of him. Reminded me, I should say."

  "Really?"

  Ian would be very interested to know that. I thought, I pressed the paper bag of his letters tighter to me. I had to be sure to write it down and put it in my next letter to him. I hoped Great-aunt Frances would make sure the letter was mailed to him.

  Then again, perhaps she'd been told not to do that. I had no idea what her instructions about me were. I knew she was younger than Grandmother Emma. but I didn't know exactly how much younger. I wondered if she was as elegant and as aristocratic a woman. Would everything be as formal in her house? Did she bark orders at servants, too? How much did she know about me? The more questions I asked myself, the more anxious I became.

  I think Felix was watching me on and off in his rearview mirror. Suddenly he said. "Everything is going to be fine. You'll see.-'

  How could everything be fine? I wanted to ask him. but I didn't want to seem ungrateful either, so I turned instead to look at the scenery and play another one of the games Ian had taught me to play whenever we were trying to ignore a long ride. We'd each choose a color and then claim a point for anything that was that color. Somehow, he always won; he always chose the right colors and got the most points. I didn't mind it. To me it seemed Ian should always win, always be right and correct. It was truly like having a big brother who was solid and strong in very important ways. Maybe he couldn't beat up other boys with his hands, but he certainly could destroy them with his words. He could even do it to adults.

  I think I was more frightened about being without him beside me than I was about being without my parents.

  Despite the game I tried to play and the beautiful sunny day, the ride began to feel dreary and long. I was going to start reading Ian's letters, but usually when I read in the car. I got carsick faster, and I wanted to save them for when I would be alone.

  Twice Felix asked me if I needed to stop or wanted him to stop to buy me something to eat, candy, gum, anything. It surprised me because Grandmother Emma never permitted us to bring gum or candy into her limousine. She insisted on it being kept spotless. It was years old but looked like it had just been built. I wondered if she would ever ride in it again.

  Finally. Felix announced we were in the community in which the farm was located. I felt like we were descending into another world, a world stained with shacks and run-down houses, overgrown farm fields, a village with most of the stores boarded up and buildings needing fresh paint. Children along the way gaped in awe at our passing limousine as if they had never seen a car so big on their broken highways. It made me feel as if my grandmother's car had been a space ship and I'd been an extraterrestrial.

  Felix pointed out the school, an old-fashioned looking redbrick building of three floors. I caught a glimpse of the playground and the parking lot. School hadn't started here either yet, so there were only a few cars there and no students around the building,

  "It's not too far from your great-aunt's farm." Felix told me.

  "I have to ride a school bus," I said. I knew that much. Ian and I had always been driven to our private school and back.

  "Well, you'll like that. It's how you can get to know other kids your age, too. I rode a school bus to school until I had my own car."

  I couldn't imagine Felix as a young boy. Some people just couldn't be diminished in your mind. They would always be the same size. It was just as impossible, if not more impossible, to imagine Grandmother Emma as a young girl even though I had seen some pictures of her. She looked so different, softer. happier. Were they really pictures of her? Maybe she used someone else's pictures.

  It was as if the world was really frozen in time. I was always this age and size, and so were my parents and grandparents. everyone. Everything else, the albums, the stories, all of it, was just makebelieve.

  We turned dawn a very long highway where there were fewer and fewer houses, and these, too, weren't very nice. Most were small and old and didn't look well cared for, because thei
r lawns were not neat and there weren't pretty bushes and flowers like there were at Grandmother Emma's home and the homes around it.

  Those I saw were far apart from each other. Felix pointed out what he called some working farms and one horse farm, where there were dozens of horses in corrals.

  "It's beautiful country here," he said. This time he really did sound as if he was saying that to himself.

  Maybe he really does want to live here now, I thought, even though the houses don't seem as nice as the houses in Bethlehem. What if Grandmother Emma never came out of the hospital? Would he remain working for my father, or would he retire? Once he dropped me off now, would I ever see him again?

  "Daddy told me he's getting a special car that he will be able to drive," I said. I said it to see what Felix would tell me. Would that mean he wouldn't be needed to drive Daddy anywhere anymore?

  "Hmm. so I hear," he said. He didn't sound very convinced or at all worried about keeping his job. He sounded confident that my father would always want someone to do things for him. "Okay," he announced a moment later. "get ready. It's right ahead on the left side."

  I leaned forward, then slid myself to the left side of the car as we drew closer to the old farm. The property began with a fieldstone wall not much taller than I was. Looking closely at the wall. I saw how weeds and mold had invaded it. Some of the stones appeared ready to topple, and in some places, they had crumbled. Why didn't anyone fix it? I wondered.

  Grandmother Emma would be very upset.

  At the foot of the driveway, there was a tall iron gate. It was wide open and quite rusted. The gate looked somewhat bent, too, because the hinges had come apart toward the top. The bottom of the right side was stuck in the ground and looked like it hadn't been closed for a hundred years. Was Felix sure this was Great-aunt Frances Wilkens's home? He said he hadn't been here for some time. He could be making a mistake.

  "What happened here?" Felix muttered to himself when he slowed down.