Chez Cordelia Read Free Page A

third grade except for Danny and me.
    Danny learned, too, though even more slowly than I did. He was always a Problem Reader, all through elementary school, sullenly collecting U’s and 43’s and “Disgraceful!”s on his spelling tests and book reports. I remember once, in sixth grade, I sat across the aisle from him, and we had to correct each other’s English tests. In an exercise requiring us to class a list of sentences as simple or compound, Danny got two out of ten right, obviously by hit-or-miss, and he spelled simple and compound , consistently, as smiple and compond , two words I came to like very much by the end of the test. (I had four wrong myself, but Danny caught only one of them.)
    When I graduated out of the remedial class, Mrs. Meek gave me a giant Hershey bar, tied with a red ribbon, which I ate sitting on a toilet in the girls’ bathroom before I returned to the third grade. Candy was one of the many aspects of what I considered normal life that were forbidden by my parents, and even though the eight-ounce slab of Hershey chocolate was my diploma certifying passage into the world of letters, I knew it was best to devour it and destroy the evidence. I flushed the wrappers down the toilet along with the red ribbon, wiped my mouth on a paper towel, and marched, slightly sick, down the hall to the third-grade classroom, where Sister Victoria Maria gave me a cold smile and the Third Reader, Earth and Sky , in which I laboriously wrote my name. I leafed through it before lunch (which I gave to Billy Arp in exchange for being allowed into the kickball game at recess) in hopes of finding Ted and Nancy replaced at last by more interesting children. But there they were, lumpishly smiling, visiting Uncle Bill’s farm and learning about weather and romping with yet another dog, a collie named Sport. And I could read it all. I felt no triumph, only a sort of drab, betrayed gloom and a vivid, precocious resolution never to let such a thing happen to me again.
    I had mastered reading, after a fashion, as I had learned to make my bed, and I put it in that category: “Boring Chores.” But I did it when I had to, and I ascribe to the fanged, creepy witchiness of Mrs. Meek the fact that the only kind of books I really like to read, to this day, are mysteries—and, come to think of it, that, I suppose, is what I’m writing.

Chapter Two
    My Father’s House
    My brother, Horatio, writes real mysteries—or, rather, not-real ones, fictional ones. He began as a professor specializing in Chaucer, but in the donnish tradition of academics who turn to crime writing as a sideline, he produced (one summer when it was too hot, he explained, for Middle English) his first murder mystery, Pride, Prejudice, and Poison , in which Jane Austen tracks down the “spa poisoner” who is mixing strychnine with the healthful waters of Bath. It was such a success, winning the Edgar award and selling half a million copies, that, at the expense of his book on Chaucer, Horatio turned out another the following summer: Deep in the Madding Crowd , with Thomas Hardy as the amateur detective who exposes a mass murderer. And when that too hit the bestseller lists he abandoned forever Chaucer, his associate professorship, and the hopes of my parents which he’d filled so faithfully all his life, and became a full-time writer of lurid literary detective stories: Death on the Mississippi (starring Mark Twain), Remembrance of Crimes Past (in which Proust solves the crime without leaving his cork-lined bedroom), and his latest, The Canterbury Deaths (because he got homesick for Chaucer).
    My parents always tolerated Horatio’s degeneration into popular culture because he made so much money at it. My father is a poet, and like all poets he has spent most of his adult life grubbing after cash—grants, fellowships, chairs, residencies, readings, publishers’ advances—and he respects the