When they piled out of the car onto the smooth black driveway in the midafternoon, the children were sunburnt, the parents drunk, and everyone was crumpled and filthy. Polly braced for hugs—all of her relatives hugged—and found with relief that none of the Wards were interested in touching anyone. There’d been tornado warnings, and Thomas’s mother, angry from the minute she appeared at the front door, was hysterical about the idea they’d driven through death. She made the children go in the basement—the cleanest basement, still, of Polly’s life—until Tommy convinced her that the warning was over, and the children should be outside.
Back upstairs, moving through the chilly immensity of the house, Detroit was burning in rare color on a large television. Everyone paused and watched. Tommy argued with his parents, and when he went outside with his father (who said, Let’s get into it then, sonny) and Merle, who tried to make peace, the children and women fell into a horrible quiet as they watched police and crowds give way to footage of Vietnamese jungles on television.
“Merle is such a steady influence,” said the elder Mrs. Ward, now calm. She had stiff frosted hair and huge diamonds on both hands, and she smoked Pall Malls. “Merle didn’t volunteer for that silly mess. These boys have so many better things to do.”
Merle probably would have served, like his brother, but for the polio arm. Nevertheless, he thought Tommy should have used his university exemption.
When the men came inside again, the children were released back into the yellow-green storm air, to a blanket of velvet grass. Polly had seen yards like this—lacking patches and dog piles—only from a distance. She and Edmund rolled on the lawn but there was nothing else to do, not a tool, toy, shrub, climbable tree. Through the fancy sliding screen doors they could hear an argument begin again—war now, and Tommy leaving for it. When they heard more voices raised, and a car engine, Jane came running toward them and scooped them up—Rita and Tommy had roared off without their child—while Merle stowed their bags and they followed in a fancy car borrowed from the Wards.
They ended up together at a Holiday Inn restaurant with umbrellas in the drinks and Hawaiian music. Later Polly and Edmund were left in a hotel room with peanut butter sandwiches and coins and a Magic Fingers bed, while all four parents drank.
Tommy’s mother and father weren’t dog people, and the Schusters promised to take care of the pointer Lemon when Tommy shipped out in October. Polly and Jane took the train back. The upper bunk, the sink that folded down, the ceremony of the dining car made Polly insanely happy. Merle drove, taking uppers while Lemon was on downers; at about 2 a.m., he said, they were moving at the same speed. Rita and Edmund lasted at the older Wards’ house until Christmas, when she set their garage on fire.
Now, in January of 1968, no one made Edmund go to school immediately. Polly needed to go, of course, and when she came home on the second day, she found him on the couch, surrounded by her books. She guessed that he hadn’t done this on his own, that her mother or Dee or Papa ransacked her room, but she minded, and she walked upstairs and slammed her door. When she couldn’t bear it any longer—she was hungry, for one thing, because everyone was too distracted by Edmund and Rita to pack a lunch, and the cafeteria food revolted her—she nearly fell over the stack left outside of her door.
More stewing, some guilt, though what did you call it at seven or eight? Edmund’s bedroom door was closed, but everyone seemed to be behind a door—Dee napping, Papa on the phone, a low grumble—but Merle and Jane, who were at class. Rita was singing in her room, and her voice was so unnerving that Polly dropped half the books back against Edmund’s door and retreated to her room after grabbing a handful of cookies.
Neither Polly nor Edmund ever mentioned this later. By the weekend they went in and out of each other’s rooms, and she had read his copies of Bruce and Lad: A Dog. The following week, he was put in a different third-grade classroom, but they saw each other at recess. He was quiet, and careful, and people grew used to him without any of the crap that often dropped on a new kid. When the prettiest girl in Polly’s class teased Edmund, clearly liking him, it gave Polly a borrowed glow.
Edmund talked in his sleep, on the other side of the wall, and he picked his nose, though no more than a boy she liked in school. Rita talked to herself all night long.
Papa and Dee were very old, which Polly no longer noticed; they were from another century. When Edmund first arrived, Polly, who’d been living there for half a year, would catch him watching them—a little fear, some wonder, the same look that he gave to all the things in the house: statues and arrowheads and books everywhere. Within a week he no longer seemed to notice Papa or Dee’s tissuey skin, pale as a photographic negative except for during summer, or hear a reedy sound in their voices.
Papa was the oldest person in the house, but he was also the tallest. He’d been an archaeologist before he taught mythology at Columbia, and had a way of moving through things, of looming without it feeling like a threat. He was a Presence, according to Merle, a Fucking Piece of Work, and he was known for writing about universal stories, the way they’d evolved through cultures, about shamanism and the archaeological evidence behind myth. Dee was tiny, with big arthritic arms below delicate collarbones, and a young woman’s head of hair, still half-brown. She wasn’t shaped like an old lady, and she dressed in slacks or straight skirts instead of what Papa called old ladies’ bags. She was a year younger than Papa, who’d been born in Sweden by the ocean, both of them before cars or planes or plastic. She’d broken a leg in a fall as a child, and again when Jane was a child—one shin below her skirt hem was slender but dented—and she kept a grove of canes with different heads, of different shimmers and substances, like so many magic wands, in a pot at the front door and against a bedroom table that held her jewelry and perfume and medicine bottles. But she and Papa moved quickly, like young people, and their muscles were visible ropes, and they were sometimes drunk and silly and snappish. They did not fret over what the children ate, or whether they’d do something stupid near the road or in the water. They knew Polly and Edmund were terrified of both; why add to the humiliation?
Jane, who was getting a master’s in history and mythology, planned to write her thesis about natural disasters and legends, though Papa thought she should focus on the universal nature of the flood story, and not get into variations. In the corner of her bedroom, above her typewriter, she’d hung a hand-drawn timeline of floods and volcanoes and earthquakes throughout the world, with bubbles of tiny handwriting for details. Sometimes she helped Papa with his research, tracking down versions of stories through the ages, trying to determine which were earliest, how they’d blended and changed across times and peoples, how they’d lasted.
Papa, surrounded by pens and books and bones at his desk, would let Edmund and Polly flop around on his old velvet sofa. He showed them crows dancing in the yard and pointed out that they seemed to perform for May, the one-eyed cat, who watched from a tree or climbed farther to the roof. He had maps on his walls, a poster of spinning souls, a photo of a tattooed Scythian mummy who’d been buried with her horses. He’d dug her up, and said he wished he’d let her be.