by Linda Sandoval
The bookcases belonged to Grandfather Urban. They were the kind lawyers collect. Modular stacking cases of oak with glass doors to keep the books from getting dusty. My grandmother kept the bookcases in the attic because they were full of old encyclopedias in German, and books on physics, and philosophy. Things that only Grandfather knew about. My grandmother said she didn’t understand a word of any of it. I was not at all interested in German or mathematics either but I did understand that if I ever put my books inside they would be all about me, like German and mathematics were all about Grandfather Urban. Collections of interests. A map going to the inside, expansive and personal but still there for anyone else to see.
The bookcases were all about being smart. Not smart like being the best in school or figuring out ways to get rich but a secret kind of smart, private and boundless and wholly good. And that the books were hidden away in the attic was part of the attraction.
Grandfather Urban was not my real grandfather but he was the Grandfather I knew best. He never scolded me or belittled me. He never criticized. He allowed me to look in a little china box that had a tie clip in it and a wedding ring and some diamond studs that were for buttoning a fancy shirt, and some heavy, scrolled cufflinks with the letter “U”. I could look at these things any time I wanted. It was the first thing I asked for when I visited, a ritual he was never too impatient to perform. Next was a trip to the attic and the books. And on summer nights he and my grandmother would sit on the front porch and watch my more than unique interpretive dance. Grandmother let me use an old lace tablecloth as a costume and I liked to dance under the moon, being an Egyptian princess, twirling around with the flying lace, the black lace tree branches over me. Grandfather Urban would smile and rock away with my grandmother, side by side, in weathered paint- peeled rocking chairs. On those nights I would dream of figure eights twisting in the sky. I would dream them or just visualize them. Cloudy symbols of infinity that were often magenta or icy blue and these symbols and the lace and the dancing and the moon all had to do with some kind of long connection between myself and my grandparents, the rocking chairs, the pleasures of old people on a porch. It was ancient and unnameable.
In those days I liked to wear a cowgirl outfit. A little red skirt and vest with white plastic fringe, checked western-style shirt, my orthopedic shoes. Those couldn’t be helped. My feet bent inward until I was nearly crippled and the ugly brown shoes were there to shore up my arches. Another defect. One of many that I tried not to think about. Of course a real cowgirl would not have crippled feet and would be strong and independent and I was determined to be a real cowgirl.
I wore my costume every day, even to Christmas dinner, which was inappropriate, my grandmother said. Not how little girls should look around candlelight and silver. Grandfather Urban watched me galloping into the front parlor in my cowgirl suit and held his arms open.
Mother was mystified. How I could be Grandfather’s favorite? He was so refined and educated. I was not “advanced” in any way. And I was always playing wild, unladylike games…pretend galloping horses stomping up and down the sidewalks and Egyptian princesses twirling around in the yard. And I was always angling for approval, for a little bit of spotlight to come my way. My own parents were annoyed at my attempts at grandstanding and ignored them mostly, but not him.
My father said Grandfather loved me because he was not used to affectionate people and I was naturally affectionate. He was used to restrained, analytical people and was probably good and tired of the lot of them.
Mother told me his own real grandson killed himself. Hung himself in the closet when he was only ten because bullies beat him up every day and called him kike and kept him from getting into the school until after the bell rang. The poor boy was afraid to go inside and get in trouble for being late, so he sat on the steps all day. When he got home from school he was too afraid of his parents to ask for help.
He figured he would get a beating for missing school, Mother said.
The grandson’s parents both taught at some college in a big city and were math geniuses.
Eggheads, my father retorted.
I wanted the grandson to be around and to maybe play Robin Hood with me (I was not Maid Marion, but Robin Hood’s sister who was just as good and brave as Robin Hood). I would walk to school with him and he would never be hurt and he would get to be Robin Hood if he wanted. I wished that, but it was too late.
What happened to Mr. Urban’s grandson happened years before in a big city where kids really had a tough time, Mother said. So no complaints from you, young lady. You don’t know how good you have it.
Grandfather Urban was born and educated in Germany. He married there and had a son. He left when things started to look threatening.
He sensed it coming early on, my father said, and that was real smarts.
When he got to the United States, everyone he loved died… wife, grandson, son. One by one. When my grandmother met him he was a bachelor professor at the local university.
My grandmother was proud to be married to Grandfather Urban. He had a refinement not often seen in a midwestern farm town. He also loved tinkering with hybrid varieties of tomatoes and roses and road trips to see the autumn leaves in Maine or waterfalls in Yosemite. The two of them enjoyed these things together. They had both lost irreplaceable people. Grandmother travelled to him from widowhood and starched schoolmarm duties and he to her from a lost fairytale place with castles and cobblestones.
They were old now and going to have fun at last.
Grandmother and Grandfather moved from the big house with the stained glass windows and broad front porch and massive elms. They built a new house on the edge of town where there was an unplanted treeless, weedy acreage for a future garden. My grandmother wanted a house where everything worked for a change, she said.
She painted the house an unheard shade of rose petal pink. It was the only pink house I knew of anywhere. It had a pink kitchen with a pink refrigerator and pink stove and pink Formica table with four pink wrought iron chairs. The living room had dusty rose carpets and matching satin valances over the windows. Perhaps my grandparents wanted to leave behind the inevitable accumulation of oldness by living together in springtime pink all year long.
I didn’t like it. What was Robin Hood’s sister supposed to do in a pink house?
Grandfather Urban was planting a tree by the side of this bald, pink house.
He pushed the shovel into the hard earth and died. My grandmother found him there, somehow still balanced over the shovel.
Two people, I know for sure, felt grief at his death. My grandmother felt it. She held her coffee cup and her hands were shaking and slopping coffee on the table. When she set it down, the saucer rattled violently. My mother tried to get her to smoke a cigarette. Mother believed the smoking of cigarettes was good for nervous disorders. A doctor told her so. But the smoking didn’t work and my grandmother’s hands trembled for the rest of her life.
And I felt grief for the first time. I was baffled by the emotion as it had several conflicting components. There was pain and an aching hunger, but also a sly pleasure in the sympathy and attention.
I was sent to school on the day my grandfather died as my mother had to be at the funeral home all day and that was not a good place for an eight year old. But I felt completely unable to face school. I felt worse than any day of my life. Worse than being sick. The walk to school took forever. The bell clanged away and then stopped. I fell into a muddy hillside and clawed the earth and cried. That was the pain part.
Schoolmates ran by, perplexed. My best friend, Bart Richards, pulled me out of the mud and said I was going to be late and would get in trouble. And I was late. But I was crying and Mrs. Rolland asked what was the matter and I said my grandfather died and she hugged me, mud and all. Just the week before Mrs. Rolland whacked me on the palms with the sharp edge of a ruler for talking. Now I was being comforted because of grief. I figured out older people were real suckers for death. I only felt a little guilty taking advantage of that.
My parents did not allow me to attend the funeral. Inappropriate. Not that I wanted to go. I didn’t want to see Grandfather Urban wearing makeup. I had heard about that kind of thing from Mike Sweeny whose father owned the mortuary. It’s better to remember your Grandfather alive and happy as you knew him, my mother advised.
So instead I watched Winky Dink and You on television. Winky Dink was a squeaky- voiced cartoon boy with a star for hair, or maybe it was a hat. I think that was the “winky” part. In that episode, I remember Winky Dink trying to get home. He had to cross a deep ravine but there was no bridge. I placed a greenish plastic sheet over the television screen and drew a bridge with a crayon. (The “magic” plastic film and “magic” crayons and “magic” cleaning cloth had been ordered from the Winky Dink Corporation after many suggestive commercials and much begging by me.) After the bridge I drew a chair under Winky when he needed to eat dinner and a star in the window that he always wished on when he went to sleep.
My parents showed me the memorial program from the funeral. The college motet had sung a version of Das Lied Von der Erder. Rather modern sounding my mother said, but one of Grandfather’s favorites, I guess. So I imagined him there, alive and happy and listening to the music.
Some months later my grandmother asked if I would like to have something that belonged to Grandfather Urban. She offered the china box full of his jewelry…a surprisingly large gift for a little girl.
No, give that to Daddy, I said. But can I have the bookcases?
My mother rolled her eyes.
Why would you want a huge set of bookcases with a bunch of books about philosophy and mathematics, in German for goodness sake, when you can barely read in English and don’t even know your multiplication tables?
I might learn something if I had the bookcases, I said.
And your room is crammed with stuff already. Where on earth would I put even one bookcase?
I had that one figured out. They can go on the sun porch, I said.
There was nothing on the sun porch but a long splintery table, two old chintz covered chairs with the springs pushing out and a radiator that was rusted shut. No one ever went to the sun porch. I would have my own special place and put my own books in the bookcases and that would clear up my bedroom a little, I told Mom. Impeccable logic. I even promised to do schoolwork there.
Well, I guess, she said. But you had better keep it picked up. No making a mess and leaving it for others.
The sun porch was on the second floor and had windows on three sides that looked out into the treetops. Leafy summers, snow falling and fairy fingers made of icy branches in the winter, then the pale green lace of spring, songbirds, flirting squirrels. It was freezing cold until my father fixed the radiator. Then my mother reupholstered the old chairs. The fabric was a brocade of lords and ladies dancing in a garden. No doubt it was the best room in the house.
The big table was mainly used, not for schoolwork, naturally, but for drawing paper dolls that looked like Veronica and Betty. An older girl and sometime babysitter, Natalie Brockman, was the best kid on the block for drawing clothes and we constructed huge wardrobes for Veronica and Betty. It was a marvel how Natalie could draw those smart nip-waisted dresses and elaborate ball gowns, tiaras, brassieres even. I was relegated to mere coloring but it was still very satisfying.
And the bookcases were there, full of Goethe and Heidegger and my collection of Little Golden Books.
My favorite story was about two children, a brother and sister, who moved from the city to the forest. It was a great fantasy of mine to be liberated from my tidy busybody-nose–in-your-business town and instead live surrounded by dark pines and wild, solitary mountains. The two children in the story stood in their unfinished kitchen and listened while the father talked with a jolly, confident plumber. The new forest house would have water by piping it in from the nearby city. There were illustrations showing pipes traveling back and forth through underground streams and lakes, past rocks and turtles and friendly fish, until the newly treated city water returned to the kitchen faucet in the forest. It was one of those how-things-really- work books.
I wasn’t interested in how things really work, exactly. In fact that very summer Bart Richards and I flooded his backyard with raw sewage when we tried to dig a hole to China and instead struck a sewer pipe with the shovel. Engineering was not in our future. What I liked best about the book, besides the mountains and forest, was that someone, somewhere, did understand how things really work. At least some of the time. Understood the hidden conduits connecting under our feet. This knowledge was like magic but better than magic because for some actual, living persons it was not magic at all.
What I liked best was the secret smartness.