Agnes Mallory Read Free Page A

trees had a nicely spooky effect. The yellow lights of houses at suppertime seemed very cozy as we passed them by.
    â€˜Well, he might look different, that’s all,’ my father said. ‘I don’t want you to be shocked or to say anything that might hurt his feelings.’
    â€˜I won’t, okay? I won’t,’ I said.
    He made me very uncomfortable, my father. Just his presence. His aura of obscure misery. The sloped shoulders, the podgy middle, the thin, patrician face beginning to grow saggy and foreign and Jewish. Even the way his skin smelled, even the hair on the back of his hands as he gripped the wheel. And whatever it was about his life that made him this way, I was always aware that I could never make it up to him.
    Tonight, he was making me even more jittery than usual: the way he was making a state occasion of this. Coming to get me this way, speaking now in portents. I didn’t know my grandfather all that well anyway. I’d only seen him once since he’d moved to town, several months ago. Before that, once or twice each year, he had come out from Brooklyn. Patted me on the head. Brought me silver dollars. I had a stack of them on my shelf next to my president milk bottle tops and my Martian invasion cards.
    Gazing out the window at the eerie trees and the homey suburban windows shining in the night, I thought about him now. Grandpa. I thought about him looking ‘different’, being ‘very ill’. It made me nervous, yes, but I was excited too. I had to keep my face turned away from my father to hide my smile of anticipation. I had never seen real sickness before. It might be neat, it might be gruesome. I could already imagine myself casually tossing off gory details to my friends.
    The anticipation swelled as we arrived at the end of the road, at the railway station. It was fueled by the sight of Grandpa’s building. Ours was a well-to-do Long Island town of stalwart houses and imperious lawns. There weren’t many apartment houses around, hardly any. But there was a block-long collection of them here across the street from the station. The Colony Arms, they were called, or the Estates or the Towers or something like that. Clean, old brick buildings with courtyards and gardens – but foreign and even forbidding to young Harry, who hadn’t been in such a place since I was three. There were great thuddings in my chest as we got out of the car, as we walked side by side through the lobby, rode silently up in the elevator, as we went down the hallway together toward Grandpa’s apartment. A ghost house journey, it seemed to me, down this thin corridor, toward that closed door. Amber lanterns burning dull on the wall. Custard wallpaper with port paisley flock; burgundy carpet that muffled your footsteps – uncanny colors at once posh and sepulchral. And smells; there were smells – or I imagined smells: slack skin and old men’s potions, cobwebs, dust, orange photographs, porcelain shepherd boys from another country, the old country.
    Now – creak – the ghost house door was opening – my father had a key. And he was there, Grandpa, in his big chair, in the circle of light from a standing lamp, with the TV glow flickering on the carpet beneath him but not quite reaching his slippered feet. My father had not exaggerated. It was a creepy thrill to see him all right. He looked like a marionette collapsed in the plush chair; a homemade marionette, just matchsticks held together with twine. And the skull sort of jogged up when he saw us, and the arms bounced and danced just like a puppet’s pulled by strings.
    â€˜Harry … Harry … Oh!’ He was so happy to see me. ‘Come give your old Grandpa a kiss.’
    I ran right to him. I was a Good Guy, I knew how to be brave. I leaned into his lap as the stick arms flopped around me. I kissed him a good one on his rough, moldering cheek.
    â€˜Harry …’ he