Rumors from the Lost World Read Free

went off to rinse her hands with turpentine. When she returned, her mood had changed. “No, look, I’m sorry. Really. I’m sorry he was so unhappy.” She rubbed her eyes and sniffed her knuckles, as though ready to cry. “If it’s any consolation, your father was right, I think. We don’t earn our afflictions. Sometimes they’re just given to us, we have to live with them.”
    That was it. My grandfather was alive in somebody else’s head, the head of someone I loved, and I knew she would keep him there, tell people about him from time to time. Air him out, so to speak, let him move through the world in a way which was still very difficult for me. She smiled, shrugged, and padded into the kitchen to start dinner. I worked on details in the bedroom, touching up the baseboard, smoothing out the rough spots, but by nightfall the job was finished, the paint mostly dry.
    I joined my wife. Candles were flickering on the dining room table and the good china was laid out like a message from a more perfect world. Sally had pulled out a silver wine bucket, a wedding gift forgotten for years, and filled it with ice and a bottle of vin ordinaire, the only sort of wine we drank. After dinner, we brought the candles and the last of the wine to the new room and toasted my grandfather. The room was pale gray and satisfying to sit in, like being a child again and walking with him to that red-shuttered library on an overcast afternoon, his mind filled with the plight of the workingclass, mine with the necessity of traveling back and forth in time.

R AMPARTS S TREET
    E mily, after rejecting the eighties and its gold-plated bait, has come to the idea that she can learn about herself and her times by learning about her mother, getting in touch with her roots. Emily even flirts with taking a course in Italian, a language her grandfather spoke with gusto. English, though it served him well enough, never gave him pleasure. He liked to roll Italian phrases in his mouth, feel how they forced his lips to puff out and pucker with male pride. In English, he was much diminished.
    For Emily’s sake, her mother tells and retells the story of a rainy February evening in 1942, when two government agents tore apart the house with carnival glee, as though Mardi Gras, which vanished with the war effort, had to be replaced with something more physical than periodic blackouts and air raid practice, the self-important warden with his metal hat and flashlight smirking as he lectured the nineteen-year-old girl. “A single match could give away our position, sister.”
    Emily takes the story to heart, cites chapter and verse. “You were an American, Mama, New Orleans born,” she says, rubbing her fingers together like her father. “You went at things the way your ancestors did, hardscrabbling, getting in the door without asking. Isn’t that what the Vietnamese are doing, the Mexicans, the Cubans, the Haitians, all the immigrants?” Emily gave up managing a health spa in the suburbs of New Orleans to work with displaced people. “The same people who want to keep them out are the ones whose fathers wanted to keep us out, at least until they learned how to use us as strikebreakers. And now they want to cut the capital gains tax and give another break to people who don’t need it. Isn’t that right? Am I getting it right?”
    In response, her mother swirls her teaspoon in her coffee-and-milk. Each time she tells the story, she manages to recall more of the truth of what happened, because, God knows, on that overcast February evening she couldn’t explain herself the way she can now, after chewing it all over for so many years.
    â€œBut you were valedictorian the year before the war started. Isn’t that right?” Emily says. “You gave the commencement address. You knew a thing or two.”
    Whatever, her mother says. It was 1942 and Mama motioned me close. “Come