Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

“Great-grandfather was a type ,” Toby now remarked. “Cultivated European.”

“Prescient,” Angelica reminded him. “Without Great-grandfather you and I would never have been born.”

“We were fated to be born.”

“No, no, it was hap.” Yesterday she had won bonus points for hap in bilingual Scrabble. “Hap and heroism.”

Their heroic great-grandparents had settled in Jerusalem, thrived, worriedly saw the birth of Israel. Their grandfather, though, had remained only long enough to conceive a dislike for the coarse country. The end of the war found him on another ship, this one bound for Hoboken. (Two years later his younger brother emigrated to Cape Town.) The family had retained its banking connections: useful to both sons. In New York, Gramp made money from money. He was a dandy, he was musical, he married a renegade Yankee then working as a veterinarian’s assistant. Grace Larcom — Gran, now — was an only child, born late in the life of her parents. She insisted on converting, or at least declaring herself converted, though Gramp said it was unnecessary. This big summerhouse in Maine was all Gran’s straitened father and mother had to give her, and they gave it gladly. “They were relieved that I was chosen by a human being,” she’d said to Angelica in her dry voice. “They were braced for an interspecies liaison.” And decades afterward, summer after summer, Gramp and Gran’s three far-flung daughters returned with their husbands and their growing families — Angelica’s beautiful mother from Paris; Toby’s artistic one from Washington; the third sister, the one who rarely finished a sentence, from Buenos Aires.

Angelica was a month older than Toby. That made her the oldest of the nine grandchildren. This accident of rank brought little privilege — everyone had chores to do — though she did get her own room on the third floor. The third floor was reached only by a set of shabby back stairs, but rising from the spacious front hall toward the balustraded second floor was a handsome central staircase. It separated into two staircases halfway up, an enormous Y. “Fit only for an opera house,” Gran complained; still, she kept the carved posts in good repair. Except for this spectacular feature, the house was asymmetrical, and also disorderly. Parlor opened off parlor, and the pantry cupboards were decorated with stained glass stained more deeply by time, and a piano was covered with brocade edged in dusty fringe, and the whole place was strewn with heirlooms of little value if you didn’t count the occasional signed piece of silver. “Impedimenta,” Gran said. Dense pines protected the house from the prying sun. But here and there light unexpectedly winked — reflected from a copper shovel, from a chandelier long ago cut down from the ceiling and left unmourned on its side, from a decanter holding a cloudy amethyst liquid.

“That purple stuff has gone organic,” Toby suggested. “One day a flatworm will crawl out of it and we’ll have a new universe.”

Through the cluttered house moved nine adults and two teenagers and seven children, seeking each other, avoiding each other, carrying books wine rackets flowers teddy bears. The smallest ones liked riding on the shoulders of their fathers and their uncles. Sometimes Gramp played pony to one or another of them. “You’re killing me!” he complained, groaning with happiness.

Every summer the daughter who lived in Buenos Aires drew up a detailed schedule for ridding the house of unnecessary items; sooner or later she abandoned the project. Meanwhile the once-a-week cleaning was accomplished, more or less, by a mother and daughter from the nearby town. They had brown teeth. Meals were prepared by Myrrh, a large, hunch-shouldered, muttering woman who was Gran’s second cousin with a few removes. Myrrh was paid for her work, and she dined with the family — it was her family, too. She endured without comment the nightly dinners, everybody talking at once; she endured the endless Sabbath-eve meal. Gramp had returned to religion in his later years, and he recited a long individualized blessing over the heads of each of his twelve offspring. The three daughters and the nine grandchildren took turns helping in the kitchen, obeying a complicated rotation devised by Gran. While cleaning up, Myrrh grunted an occasional brief command: “Here,” or “Discard.” Recently she had snapped “Cut that out” to Toby and Angelica, who were merely standing at the trash barrel hip to hip, scraping plates.

Myrrh slept in the room next to Angelica’s. She spent most of the day in the house, though sometimes she took a walk with the youngest grandchild, who still spoke only her native Spanish. They came back looking peaceful, carrying pails of blueberries. They sat next to each other at the table. “Silent, depthful,” Myrrh said one dinnertime: an actual remark, apparently addressed to Gran. “Reminiscent of Abigail the lumber woman, our progenitress.” Gran nodded.

At night the kitchen became Gran’s domain. Here she endured her famous insomnia. She read books about extinct mammals and examined her childhood collection of bird skeletons. “My cat brought me the corpses.” She smoked. She worked chess problems and played an old flute. By day the flute rested on a table in the big useless front hall; the instrument, too, caught the light.

TOBY AND ANGELICA were drifting on the lake. He rowed from time to time. Her fingers trailed in the water. It was a cliché of a pose. Why strike a pose for this amusing relative, her favorite. He was like a brother, like a sister … “We are a terrified family?” she wondered aloud.

A different fellow might have forgotten he’d thrown out the phrase. Toby remembered. He remembered the dates of kings and presidents. He remembered all their Scrabble disputes. Could you really add — tous to anathema ? You could; anathematous was right there in the American Heritage . He could recite entire paragraphs from the books they chose for the nine months each year they were apart. In Angelica’s Paris house, in Toby’s dormitory cell, the cousins read by arrangement Ransome, Colette, Naipaul … During the past year they’d read Russian novelists. They agreed to study Russian at university — no one in the family spoke it; it would be theirs alone. This summer Toby kept trying to Russify various words — Gothamgrad, the Volvoskaya, anathematouski.

His gray eyes searched her face. He was not smiling. “Terrified. Look at yourself, moy Angelica. You have every reason to be confident. Beauty — don’t shake your head, dushinka . Those ochi charnya , your eyes are yellow, not dark, but I don’t know the Russian for yellow”—as if he knew the Russian for everything else; the scamp had about five words. “You belong to a noble house …”

“Don’t talk nonsense, Toby. Jews recognize only … nobility of purpose.”

“Spiritual meritocraski, sure, but we’re a first family all the same.”

“—okay,” she said, sighing.

“And yet … our importance rests on sand, and we all feel it. You feel it.”

“The diamonds, you mean?”

“They’re carbon. I mean a metaphysical sand … no, metaphorical,” he corrected, suddenly sounding very young. “It shifts, the sand. It casts us out, or accepts us unwillingly. We don’t belong anywhere, so each generation flees to some other place.”

“Portugal,” she said. There was a shameful legend: some ancestor had advised the Portuguese king against sponsoring Columbus’s voyage. “We started in Portugal.”

“We started in the desert, like everybody else.”

They had reached a cove. “Literal sand,” he said, hopping out, dragging the boat onto the tiny beach with Angelica still seated in its stern. He helped her get out; all the grandchildren had been taught good manners. They walked up a path, Toby leading the way. “ Terrified was too strong,” he said over his shoulder, giving her a glimpse of his rippling profile. “Uneasy … that’s what we are.”