Preface
On a cool spring night in Savannah, my mother is walking. Her clogs make sounds like horses’ hooves against the cobblestone street. She passes among banks of azaleas in full bloom and live oak trees shrouded in Spanish moss, and she enters a green square bordered by a café.
My father is seated on a stool at a wrought-iron table. Two chessboards spread across the table, and my father has castled on one when he looks up, sees my mother, and drops a pawn, which falls against the tabletop and rolls onto the sidewalk.
My mother dips to pick up the chess piece and hands it back to him. She looks from him to the two other men sitting at the table. Their faces are expressionless. They’re tall and thin, all three, but my father has dark green eyes that somehow seem familiar.
My father stretches out a hand and cups her chin. He looks into her pale blue eyes. “I know you,” he says.
With his other hand he traces the shape of her face, passing twice over the widow’s peak. Her hair is long and thick, russet brown, with small wisps that he tries to smooth away from her forehead.
The other men at the table fold their arms, waiting. My father has been playing both of them simultaneously.
My mother stares at my father’s face — dark hair falling away from his forehead, straight dark eyebrows over those green eyes, lips thin but shaped in a cupid’s bow. Her smile is shy, frightened.
He drops his hands, slides off the stool. They walk away together. The men at the table sigh, and clear the chessboards. Now they’ll have to play each other.
“I’m going to see Professor Morton,” my mother says.
“Where’s his office?”
My mother waves her hand in the direction of the art college. He puts his hand on her shoulder, lightly, letting her lead.
“What’s this? A bug in your hair?” he says suddenly, pulling at what seems to be an insect.
“A barrette.” She takes the copper dragonfly from her hair and hands it to him. “It’s a dragonfly. Not a bug.”
He shakes his head, then smiles. He says, “Hold still,” and carefully slides a lock of her hair through the dragonfly, then pins it behind her left ear.
They turn away from the college. They’re holding hands now, walking down a steep cobblestone street. It’s growing dark and chilly, yet they pause to sit on a cement wall.
My mother says, “This afternoon I sat at my window, watching the trees grow dark as the sun went down. I thought, I’m growing older. I have only so many days left to watch the trees darken. Someone could count them.”
He kisses her. It’s a brief kiss, a rough touching of lips. The second kiss lasts longer.
She shivers.
He bends to cover her face — forehead, cheeks, nose, chin — with small, quick brushes of his eyelashes. “Butterfly kisses,” he says, “to keep you warm.”
My mother looks away, amazed at herself. In a matter of minutes she has let so much happen, without hesitation or protest. And she isn’t stopping it now. She wonders how old he thinks she is. She’s sure she’s older — he looks about twenty-five, and she has recently turned thirty. She wonders when she should tell him that she’s married to Professor Morton.
They stand up and walk on, down concrete steps leading toward the river. At the bottom of the steps is a closed cast-iron gate.
“I hate moments like this,” my mother says. Her shoes can’t climb gates.
My father climbs over the gate and opens it. “It wasn’t locked,” he says.
As she passes through, she has a sense of inevitability. She is moving toward something entirely new, yet predetermined. Without any effort at all, she feels years of unhappiness being erased.
They walk along the strand beside the river. Ahead they see the lights of the tourist shops, and as they reach them, he says, “Wait.” She watches him go inside a shop that sells Irish imports, then loses sight of him through the door’s wavy glass. He comes out carrying a soft wool shawl. He wraps it around her, and for the first time in years, she feels beautiful.
Will we marry? she wonders. But she doesn’t need to ask it. They walk on, a couple already.
My father tells me this story, twice. I have questions. But I save them until he’s finished for the second time.
“How did you know what she was thinking?” is my first question.
“Later she told me her thoughts,” he says.
“What happened to Professor Morton?” I ask next. “Didn’t he try to stop her from leaving him?”
I’m thirteen, but my father says I’m going on thirty. I have long dark hair and blue eyes. Except for the eyes, I take after my father.
“Professor Morton tried to keep your mother,” my father says. “He tried threats. He tried force. He’d done it before, when she talked about leaving him. But this time she was in love, and she wasn’t afraid. She packed up her things and moved out.”
“Did she move in with you?”
“Not at first. No, she took an apartment downtown near Colonial Cemetery, an apartment that some people still say is haunted.”
I look hard at him, but I’m not going to be distracted by the haunted apartment.
“Who won the chess game?” I ask.
His eyes open wider. “That’s a very good question, Ariella,” he says. “I wish I knew the answer.”
My father usually knows the answer to everything.
“Could you tell she was older than you?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I didn’t think about it. Age has never mattered much to me.” He stands up, goes to the living room window, draws the heavy velvet curtains. “Time for you to sleep,” he says.
I have a hundred more questions. But I nod, I don’t object. Tonight he’s told me more than ever before about my mother, whom I’ve never seen, and even more about himself.
Except for one thing — the truth he doesn’t want to tell, the truth I’ll spend years trying to understand. The truth about who we really are.
In My Father’s House
Chapter One
I stood alone outside our house in deep blue twilight. I must have been four or five, and I didn’t usually wander outside alone.
The bracketed windows of the upper house were gold rectangles framed by green vines, the lower hooded windows yellow eyes. I was gazing at the house when suddenly I fell backward onto soft grass. In the same instant, flames shot from the basement. I don’t remember hearing any explosion — one second, the night was filled with blue and yellow light; the next, red fire lunged at the sky. Someone swooped me up and carried me away from the house.
That’s my earliest memory. I remember the way the air smelled that night — smoke mixed with the scent of lilacs — and the roughness of a wool coat against my cheek, and a sensation of floating as we moved away. But I don’t know who carried me, or where we went.
Later, when I asked about the fire, Dennis, my father’s research assistant, told me I must have been dreaming. My father simply turned away — but not before I saw his face, eyes remote and guarded, lips set in an expression of resignation I had come to know too well.
One day when I felt bored, as I often did as a child, my father said that I should keep a journal. Even a dull life could make worthwhile reading, he said, provided the writer paid sufficient attention to detail. In his desk he found a thick notebook bound in blue, and he pulled a copy of Thoreau’s Walden from a shelf. These he handed me.
And so I began to write. But all the details in the world couldn’t make my first twelve years worth reading about. Children thrive on monotonous routine, I’m told, but I had more monotony than most. And so I’ll try to tell what is necessary in order for you to understand what will follow.
I lived with my father, Raphael Montero, where I’d been born, in a Victorian house in Saratoga Springs, New York. If you ever want to hide from the world, live in a small city, where everyone seems anonymous.
My father’s house had many rooms, but we lived in few of them. No one used the cupola at the top of the house (although much later I did spend several hours gazing through its oculus window, trying to imagine a world beyond the town). At the base of the tower, a long corridor ran past the doors of six vacant bedrooms. A broad front staircase led downward, interrupted by a landing with a recess beneath a stained-glass window; a carpet inside was strewn with large Moroccan cushions, against which I often lay to read and stare up at the glowing red and blue and yellow geometric panes of glass. Stained glass was much more interesting than the actual sky, which in Saratoga Springs appeared ashy most of the year, turning in summer to harsh cerulean.
Mornings began when Mrs. McGarritt arrived. She was a small, slight woman with thinning reddish hair; her narrow face had etched into it worry lines and smile lines in nearly equal measure. She almost always had a smile for me, during those days.
After getting her own flock off to school, Mrs. McGarritt came to our house and stayed until quarter of three, when her several children came home again. She cooked and cleaned and did the laundry. First she made my breakfast: oatmeal, usually, served with cream, or butter and brown sugar. Mrs. McGarritt wasn’t much of a cook — she managed to undercook and scorch food at the same time, and she never added salt. But she had a good heart. And somewhere, I sensed, I had a mother who understood food.
I knew a great deal about my mother that no one had ever told me. You might think I’d made it all up, to compensate for having never met her. But I felt certain that my intuitions were sound, based on facts to which I simply wasn’t privy.
Mrs. McGarritt said that she’d heard that my mother became ill after my birth and went into the hospital. Dennis, my father’s assistant, said she’d “been taken from us for reasons no one understands.” My father said nothing. They all agreed on one thing only: my mother disappeared after my birth and had not been seen by us since.
One morning after breakfast, I sat in the library, studying, and I smelled something sweet mixed with the usual scent of starch. Mrs. McGarritt had a fetish for using heavy starch when she ironed my clothes (and she ironed everything I wore, except underwear). She liked the old-fashioned kind that you boil on the stove.
I took a break and went into the kitchen, a hexagon-shaped room painted apple-green. The oak table was covered with flour and bowls and spoons, and Mrs. McGarritt stood next to it, peering into an oven. She seemed dwarfed by the enormous old stove — a Garland, with six gas burners (the ever-present pot of starch boiling on one), two ovens, a broiler, and a griddle.
A cookbook with yellowed pages sat on the table near me, opened to a recipe for honey cake. Someone had drawn three stars in blue ink next to the recipe and had written the words: “Best when made from our lavender honey in July.”
“What do the stars mean?” I asked.
Mrs. McGarritt let the oven door fall shut and turned around. “Ari, you always make me jump,” she said. “I didn’t even hear you come in.” She wiped her clean hands on her floury apron. “The stars? I guess it was your mother’s way of rating a recipe. Four stars are tops, I think.”
“That’s my mother’s handwriting?” It slanted to the right, with even loops and curlicues.