The Family Tree Read Free Page B

heater on even though he knew it didn’t work right. Have to see to that, he’d said. Have to see to that, someday, sometime, when I get around to it.
    Which was maybe reason enough right there for Dora to have married Jared. Jared never went anywhere or did anything without planning it right down to the molecular level. There was something almost inhumanly rigorous about Jared. With him, you always knew right where you stood.
    Grandpa’d been gone about eight years: stroke. Grandma’d died four years ago: heart. Jimbo’d been only sixteen. Polly was seventeen, ready to start college on a full scholarship. Milly was eighteen, not starting anything, just moping around. Grandma left the house to the girls, and Dora had kept the household togetherfor a year, until the last three had gone: Milly to a cult, Polly to college, Jimbo off God-knows-where.
    The other kids were spread all over the map now, and except for Milly and maybe Jimbo, they’d escaped the worst of the family curse. Michael and Margaret had married, Kathleen had a job in advertising, Mark and Luke had joined the army. They were going to make a career of it and never get married. So they said.
    Milly had inherited the diddle gene, and a cult was easier than thinking, and drugging was easier yet. She’d died of a drug overdose, though Dora had told the others it had been meningitis. Polly had graduated from college the past June with a degree in botany. She’d always been a little soldier, now she wanted to get a graduate degree.
    And the baby, Jimbo…well, God knows what would become of Jimbo. Every now and then he lit on Dora’s doorstep, like a confused migratory bird, not sure whether he was coming or going. He never stayed long, though. Jared didn’t look kindly on people like Jimbo. Jared didn’t look kindly, period.
    Maybe seven out of nine wasn’t that bad. In a family with the diddle gene, seven out of nine was damn near a miracle. Dora didn’t call it the diddle gene now, of course. She knew the curse for what it was. Chronic depression, something you could be born with, something you couldn’t do much about, something you passed from parent to child, begetting misery and suicides and endless dark days of hopelessness and despair. Dora had seen it, firsthand, and why would she want more babies to pass it on to? After all the years, she still missed the music….
    “Did you ever hear music in your head, Grandma?”
    “Like a tune, child?”
    “No. Like a huge orchestra, with all the instruments, and playing the most marvelous music….” She had looked up to find tears in Grandma’s eyes. “Grandma?”
    “Just remembering, child. Oh, yes. I remember the music. The horns of elfland, that’s what it was.”
    “Elfland?”
    “That’s what Tennyson called it. Oh, well, child. I’ve never heard it since I was…maybe ten. It’s a childhood thing, I think. Once we’re grown, all we can hear are what the poet described: the echoes, dying.”
    Dora shook herself. Enough. Here she was, rolling around in the surf again, letting the undertow take hold of her. Currents of memory. Sadnesses that could turn you upside down, rubbing your face in the sands of what-if. Get up on your hind legs, as Grandma used to say, and put one foot in front of the other!
    She had three days off, and she wanted to wash all the blinds and take the drapes to be cleaned. They were such heavy fabric, stiff as a board. Dora would have preferred light curtains that stirred in the wind, graceful fabric, like the skirts of dancers, but Jared preferred things that remained rigidly in place, always the same. If he hadn’t known the neighbors would laugh at him, he’d have bought plastic rose bushes and plastic hostas, unfading, unchanging, ungrowing.
    She caught herself grinning ruefully. If he hadn’t known the neighbors would laugh, he’d have bought himself a plastic wife.
    Wednesday morning she went out to get the paper, and when she came back to the door, there