The bookshelves were topped by photos of Dee’s children, Maude and David and James, taken in Montana and at all the archaeological digs they’d traveled to with Papa after their own father died. In most of the photos they were holding Papa’s daughter Asta, the youngest. When Asta died young, Papa and Dee raised Jane, too, and Polly envied those photos: Jane at Polly’s age on a French beach, in a Greek temple, riding a camel in a desert. And yet she’d had no mother. Polly knew even then she was lucky, that her parents might be half drunk and at odds half the time, but they were alive, and they did essentially love each other, and they certainly loved her, and they weren’t like Rita.
Everyone told Polly she should help Edmund, but she was already doing so. They moved through their days with an almost British disregard for the chaos around them, barricaded together in one of their rooms or hidden in the arbor or down by the Sound, watching to see what was revealed when the tide moved out. Over the next few months, they were almost always within six feet of each other but never touched, except for two fights. But Polly was fascinated by Edmund’s thick hair, the moles on his forearm, the way his skin would flame in bad moments.
Polly had friends at school, but she’d been so lonely. She took Edmund up to the attic to show him boxes of strangeness, the broken spinning wheel and treadle sewing machine and old clothes, or to Dee’s greenhouse, with its kiln and wheel, nasturtiums and jasmine, a box of glass bottles that held powders for glazes. They’d watch Dee uncork the bottles, mix potions, spin the potting wheel, light the kiln. In the basement, where Merle kept salamander and frog specimens in an old refrigerator, they’d watch Dee add bleach and soap to the old open washing machine, the water gushing from a sheet when it went through the mangle, which looked like a deadly version of Dee’s pasta-rolling machine. Dee said she’d once been distracted and put her fingers through, but nothing had broken except the tips of her fingers, which exploded and stained the sheets. She laughed, telling them this.
But mostly Edmund and Polly went down to the water. You could see a sliver of the Sound from the porch, even when the grapevines leafed out, and there was a ravine with skunk cabbage, which Polly liked to pretend was some sort of man-eating Venus flytrap. The house was on a rise off of the main road into town, Christian Avenue, and the lots were irregular and the streets were narrow and dirt, following the hill’s contour, more paths than roads. The witch, whose house was wreathed in grapevines, burned wood (rather than children, as Papa joked) for heat and let out her parrot when the weather was nice. The only times she’d spoken to Dee and Papa over the last twenty-five years were to threaten to kill their cats if those cats killed the parrot.
The name on the old woman’s mailbox, in stenciled letters, was Maw.
Edmund thought Polly was of a piece with the place, all of it so much better than life with Rita and his grandparents. The good part of his past was his father, but Tommy Ward had been around for only a few weeks since Edmund was five. By now, Edmund knew this place might save his life. The old magicians, Polly’s beautiful mother, Merle’s essential kindness, wild Lemon, given away by his parents but glued again to the end of his bed, the acrobatic cat arriving every night to lie on his chest—they all made for comfortable chaos, the people and even the walls buffers against his mother. Upstairs, when Rita muttered, the words echoed in the hall, but people were near, and his door locked.
He was sure his father would never come back.
In Edmund’s and Polly’s rooms ventilation grates, usually covered with rugs, opened on the kitchen below. In the morning, they could hear Papa walking down the hall humming, snapping his fingers softly. Next came the smell of coffee and some sort of pork, eventually toast. You could tug the rugs off the grates and see the top of his head, and sometimes he’d look up and smile. He taught at Columbia two days a week now, spending a night in the city at the apartment he and Dee still rented, on Bleecker near the corner of Sullivan.
Papa would bring coffee to Dee, who ached when she first woke and would not leave bed without it. Merle was first in the bathroom and rousted the children for school when he came out. Jane always got up quietly and was mysteriously and calmly ready at the table by the time they came down, whether or not she needed to go to the city. Merle dropped her off and picked her up at the train three days a week. She almost always came home for the night. Rita was never up before they left for school, and usually never came out of her room until noon on weekends. No one ever tried to wake her.
They did not have G.I. Joes, Easy-Bake Ovens, BB guns, spangled hairdressing dolls. Polly had two Barbies, both a little worn, origami and puzzles and books, glass figurines she kept on a high shelf after an experiment with roller skates as carriages. Edmund tried to trade a Batman figure for Polly’s rock collection and a Lego set from an Irish uncle for her board games. They spent a stunning amount of time dangling upside down in a tire swing, spinning each other, occasionally using it as a weapon. Dee, with a fear of malaria that Merle considered irrational, made them rinse it out after every rain.
Edmund had arrived with a collection of wooden swords and shields and a crossbow-style rubber-band gun. Papa gave him a heavy German pellet gun, but after a flurry of wild pumping—Polly had been beside herself with the mechanical magic of it all—the first dead squirrel ended all but target practice. They both knew it was one of those moments that they’d despise being lectured about, but still Edmund stared down at the way the fur on the squirrel’s chest gaped and closed around the wound for the last few breaths, and he pitched forward in a faint, giving himself a bloody nose. Polly never brought it up.
Arnold Galante, a poet who had been Papa’s brother-in-law and was still his best friend, taught them card games—euchre and hearts and spades, games of solitaire that turned into feeding frenzies when three or four people played at once. Dee loved cards but didn’t play well, and her insults were another game. Polly was a strumpet when she won a rare hand of hearts, Jane could learn to cook for herself, Arnold was an ass, Papa was an arrogant, horrible man. Merle was the best player in every game, especially poker, and card nights were the only nights when he was reliably not drunk. Jane tended to float away, and Arnold lost track while he told stories about the war in Spain, ocean liners, and the people he and Papa had known when they’d worked on movies together. He loved to goad Papa.
“Ask about what he did to the guy who called him a German in 1919.” Or: “When you’re older, ask him why so many people used to be afraid of him.”
“We might not manage to be older at the same time,” said Papa, who was almost ninety. “They don’t need to know the bad stuff, Arnie.”
Arnold was the only one who brought up the people who were missing. He said that Jane’s mother, Asta, had loved to ride and fish and camp, and that Polly could be like her, someday. Asta’s mother, Perdita, on a movie poster in Papa’s office, was also dead and therefore beautiful and mysterious forever. She’d loved to sing and dance (even then, no one seemed to think Polly would ever sing or dance).
“Ask your great-grandfather how he acted when he first saw my pretty sister. I mopped him off a London sidewalk.”
Perdita, frozen on the poster, looked nothing at all like Arnold, who was wizened and brown, with wild gray hair. Arnold had one blind eye, like May the cat, who loved him, and he drove out every other weekend or so—he taught poetry at Columbia, where Papa taught—and would spend the night in the last empty bedroom at the top of the stairs. Polly always put a rubber spider in the bed, and Arnold always screamed for her benefit.