Haywire, Brooke Hayward [the best ebook reader for android TXT] 📗

drank our ginger ale, pretending it was champagne, seemed to exemplify our intangible conquest. “Grandsarah,” I would say, stroking my glass, which had small green bumps blown onto its surface, “you must take good care of these glasses. Right now there are two missing, so—”

Grandsarah chuckled, amused by my ill-concealed longing.

“Don’t worry,” she said cheerfully, poking at the chicken frying on the big stove, “I’ll take good care of them for the next ten years, and then—give the gravy a stir, would you, Viola?” Viola came twice a week to clean and on Sundays to help with lunch; she was black and so fat it took her some time to lower herself, grunting, into a sitting position and quite a bit longer to get up from one. Both Viola and Grandsarah laughed at everything we said and let us do whatever we wanted—spoiled us rotten, said Father, but that’s what grandparents were for.

Bridget’s glass was etched with red leaves. “Mine, too?” she asked, holding it up for more ginger ale, which was forbidden at home.

“Yes, yes.” Grandsarah smiled broadly. “Now I think these mashed potatoes are done just the way your father likes them—yes, and yours, too, Bill. And in ten years when I’m seventy, I’ll probably be dead anyway—nobody should live past seventy—and then I’ll leave them to you.”

“Oh, no, Grandsarah,” we’d wail, simultaneously terrified that she would ever die and pleased at the prospect that the glasses would finally be ours. “Don’t die, Grandsarah, don’t die—what would we do without you? You’re going to live to be a hundred.”

“Seventy’s old enough, old enough. Don’t want to push my luck,” said Grandsarah.

Fried chicken was the traditional Sunday lunch because Father loved it, and as Grandsarah said, he was her only son and the most wonderful person in the whole world. We all sat around her pink wrought-iron-and-glass table while the grownups talked and laughed a lot, dogs pushed their way in and out the French doors to the patio, and Bridget, Bill, and I shoveled speckled vanilla ice cream into our mouths. “My God, that was good, Mother,” Father would say, putting down his napkin. “Now, there is one thing in this room I have my eye on, wanted it for as long as I can remember.”

We would all look toward the sideboard where a portable antique liqueur cabinet sat. “Now, Mother,” Father would continue to our huge enjoyment, “you know how much I need this.” He would fondle its dark mahogany sides and open its hinged top to show off the perfect set of crystal decanters and liqueur glasses arranged inside. “You have no use for it whatsoever, Mother, for God’s sake.”

“Oh, Leland.” Grandsarah’s eyes twinkled as she smiled and patted her hair, which was pinned in a roll. “I use it when we play poker.” (Grandsarah had a weekly poker game with Junior and Irene Egan, whom she had met while traveling around the world in 1910.) “Besides, Leland,” she continued, “you know perfectly well I’ve never been able to refuse you anything at all—you’ll get it out of me one of these days.” Then she’d hug him and laugh some more.

“How about my next birthday?” Father would ask.

“Good Lord, Mr. Hayward,” said Emily, “you’re worse than the children.”

After lunch we’d follow Grandsarah down to the kennels at the back of the property to watch her feed the little dogs yapping in their runs. For years she was the foremost breeder of cairn terriers in Los Angeles, until the zoning laws changed and the kennels fell into musty disrepair. Even then we would go down to the end of the garden, through the sunny tangle of irises and narcissus in spring, lilies and roses in summer, to play hide-and-seek in the overgrown ruins that were haunted by mildewing, spider-infested wicker cases and shards of earthenware feeding bowls.

Crisscrossing the gardens was a maze of concrete paths that had taken Archie and the gardener months to lay and that was inscribed at intervals with Archie’s duly noted progress—“OCT. 1943, HALFWAY”—and the occasional graffiti of Bridget, Bill, and me, who had immortalized ourselves in the wet cement under Archie’s drowsy supervision.

“Grandsarah,” we would clamor before leaving, “it’s time to look at your treasures.” To us, her house glittered with treasures: small boxes with dogs enameled on them, silver trophies from dog shows, and the big oil painting over the fireplace that depicted, in deep perspective, all the champion terriers she had ever raised, posing grandly in their wiry coats of different colors against a green Connecticut landscape.

“Can I have that someday, Grandsarah?”

“No, I asked for it last time. She said—”

“No, me, me—”

“When I die, children, when I die.”

And the jewelry boxes, filled with charms and earrings. Our lust had dropped all its disguises somewhere in the garden during the long hot afternoon. “Ooh, what’s this, a moonstone heart? Can I have this when you die?”

We were motivated not just by avarice but also by our first intimations that people grew old and did not live forever, that maybe we could capture her forever as she was at that moment by simply dividing up her possessions.

“Oh, Grandsarah, don’t forget, please, you promised to leave this old photograph to me.”

And she, understanding, found nothing macabre in our articulate greed and inarticulate desire to stop time.

“I won’t forget, I won’t forget, you darling children. You tickle me, you really do. You’re almost as darling as your father was when he was little.”

We pestered her for stories about Father when he was a little boy, unable to conceive of such a time. “It’s a long way back to make my poor old brain go,” Grandsarah would say, with a laugh, sitting in her plum-colored armchair with her slender ankles crossed on a footstool. Then she would shake her head and look down at her lap. “Things were easier then, more fun.”

“Oh, come on, Grandsarah, please.” She wavered, we pressed, awed by the history she embodied. She was born November 7, 1882, in Nebraska City,