The Astor Orphan Read Free Page B

commanded from the horse barn’s cluttered doorway. He had no patience for stupidity, so I didn’t ask him how I was supposed to check. I just sat there, slumped and waiting.
    â€œGo ahead and take the stick in your hand, and see if it’s loose,” he said in feigned exasperation at what he saw as my girlish tentativeness.
    And I felt sorry that I wasn’t a boy. I knew how much Dad had wanted a son—someone who could approximate his intimate relationship with Rokeby’s land, buildings, and infrastructure when he was gone. As much as he let me tag along, I knew he would never see me as a proper heir.
    The best I could do was to act like a boy so that Dad would teach me to sail an iceboat, weld, dig trenches with the backhoe, and drive a tractor.
    I tried to move the stick shift. “It’s not loose,” I reported.
    â€œStep on the clutch, then move the stick into the middle, where it’ll wiggle freely.”
    I did as Dad instructed, excited to learn.
    â€œNow keep your left foot on the clutch as you turn the key.”
    The key was slightly bent and hard to turn in the ignition. When I finally turned it, nothing happened.
    â€œNeeds starter fluid.” Dad began scavenging amid the debris. He rolled a tire onto its side and some water gushed out of it. He kicked an empty oil can. Finally he found the starter fluid under a ripped blue tarp and sprayed something onto the uncovered engine that burned my lungs. I turned the key. As the backhoe roared to life, I felt a rush.
    Just as Dad was about to show me how to put the machine into reverse, Grandma Claire’s lemon-colored Plymouth sailed into the barnyard and stopped abruptly.
    Grandma Claire opened the door and heaved her fragile body out of the low driver’s seat. In her younger years, she had stood six feet tall, but now her back was badly hunched over. Her face was gaunt, her eyes sunk deeply into her skull. Her frizzy, once-black hair was now cut short and had long since turned salt and pepper. She stepped gingerly around the piles of metal in her red espadrilles.
    One-armed Roy darted out of sight.
    Grandma Claire lived down the hill, past the barnyard, in what had once been the chauffeur’s garage. After Grandpa Dickie died in 1961, Grandma Claire had the garage converted to store her, instead of Great-Grandma Margaret’s ’39 Mercury. And, for us, her granddaughters, Grandma Claire was indeed the chauffeur’s replacement. She drove us to music lessons, the public library, doctors’ appointments, stores, and parties.
    Grandma’s skinny arms hung loosely from her torso, which was crunched up beneath the curve of her hunchback. She lifted them and waved at Dad, her son.
    â€œTurn that thing off!” Her voice cracked with the desperation of a mother unable to control her child’s errant behavior. “Who allows their child to drive heavy farm machinery?” Most of her r ’s disappeared into her old New England accent. Her father’s family had been New Englanders, and Grandma had spent her first ten years on Boston’s North Shore.
    I shut off the engine. Since Grandma Claire paid all the bills, I felt obligated to listen to her.
    â€œTeddy, I demand to know what’s going on here!”
    â€œWe were just testing out the backhoe, in preparation for some possible digging.” Dad generally tried to disarm the fierce females in his life with meek acquiescence, though he was rarely successful.
    The blood rose up Grandma Claire’s neck like a rapid red tide. Her lips tightened, and she bared her large, once-glamorous teeth like a mad dog. “I suppose you think you’re doing useful work here, do you? I suppose that digging up the place makes you feel better about not having a real job. . . .”
    In true aristocratic fashion, Dad had never learned a profession. He had attended elite private schools, then Harvard and Johns Hopkins. After college,