House of Wonder Read online

  He used the slightness of his frame to slide past me. “It wasn’t so far.”

  “Where were you?”

  “On the Raritan. Off of River Road.”

  “Warren,” I said, my mind running over the route as I followed him. “That’s got to be like thirty miles.” Pausing, I waited for a response that did not come. “Warren, this is why you need a cell phone.”

  Warren shuffled into the kitchen. When he saw Rose, he shifted course immediately and headed to the family room, standing beside the couch on which she was sitting, and waiting for his greeting. She turned to regard him briefly. “Hi, Uncle Warren!” she said, before being reabsorbed into her show. Warren seemed reluctant to leave her, but physiological need trumped all else, and he walked quickly over to the sink, turned on the water, and pulled a glass from the cabinet. He filled it and drank it down in three long slugs. Then he looked at me, the corners of his mouth lifted so subtly that his smile was almost undetectable, as if he was enjoying a joke all his own.

  “Warren, honey,” said my mother, who had come in behind us, “are you hungry? You must be hungry.” Our mother was always willing to forgive any and all of Warren’s transgressions. To bury them quickly. “I can call for some Chinese?” Mom looked at Rose. “Rose, honey, do you like Chinese food?”

  Rose looked over her shoulder and at me, as if the question were mine to answer.

  “All right, you know what?” I said, Gordo’s head emerging from between my legs. To Gordo, Warren’s arrival was all excitement, all good news. “Rosie and I really need to get going. I have to be at work early tomorrow.”

  Rose let out a whine of protest. I looked expectantly at my mother, though what she could have said that would have satisfied me, I did not know. Her mouth opened as if in advance of speech, but no words came. “Come on, Rosie!” I called, turning my face toward the family room.

  Rose and I were already in the car, my seat belt buckled, when my mother walked hurriedly out the front door, her arms crossed over her chest to ward off the cold. I rolled down the window and leaned my head out as she approached, letting the space between us fill with silence. It was night now, and the air had the cold calm of deep water. “Your poor brother,” she finally said. “Having to walk all that way.”

  “He didn’t exactly have to. He could have called someone.”

  “Well,” she said. “Your brother has his own way of doing things.”

  I let out a sound that might have passed for a laugh. “That’s one way to put it.”

  “Anyhow, you know what I was thinking?” she asked, her voice changing, becoming light and hopeful. “I was thinking that the block party is coming up this weekend.” I didn’t move, anticipating the request. “And it’s been so long since you came. And I just know everyone would love to see you.”

  “Mom—,” I started.

  But my mother cut me off. “Please, Jenna,” she said. There was desperation in her voice. “Please.” And seeing her face, I couldn’t deny her.

  Since that night, I’ve often pictured Warren, sleeping in the backseat of his car, parked in a small dirt turnaround at the side of a wooded road. The interior would be damp with his breath and he’d have pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up for warmth. The sun would have shone through the windows early. And he would have set out at once, his belly empty, his body stiff. It would take him all day to walk from his favorite fishing spot back to Harwick. And it may have been a coincidence, the timing of his trip. It may be simply hindsight that lends it significance; a pivotal event requiring time to be seen as such. Or perhaps Warren knew exactly the right moment to bring me back home. Because when Mom called the next day to tell me that they’d recovered his car, I asked, “So, what was wrong with it?”

  “You know, it was the darndest thing,” she said. “As soon as Warren put his key in, it started right up.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  All Alone

  1952

  P riscilla Harris’s three-year-old fingers worked the peel of a hard-boiled egg, tapping it against the kitchen table to crack the shell, then pulling the fragments off until there was only immaculate white. She shook some salt from the shaker over the top, then took a bite. That’s how she ate the egg, salting it as she went. When her mother was there, she sliced it for her, fanning it out. Like a peacock’s tail, her mother would say. But Priscilla had felt her stomach groan with hunger, and she hadn’t known when someone would be there to fix her egg the way she liked it, so she’d pulled as hard as she could on the refrigerator door until it opened. Then she had taken the egg from a bowl and sat at the kitchen table alone. As she ate, she had the dull, gnawing feeling that she sometimes felt when she was by herself—a child’s silent disquiet.

  She heard Mrs. Lloyd’s footsteps coming up the back steps, then the creak of the screen door as it was quietly opened, before it shut with a dull thud. Mrs. Lloyd was as thin a woman as Silla had ever seen and always moved like she was trying not to be noticed. She’d started working for the Harrises when Silla was a baby, after her husband lost his job and this time hadn’t bothered looking for another. At least she’s white, Silla’s father had said with his good ol’ boy smile, when his friend had teased him about hiring the wife of the town drunk. Mrs. Lloyd stood there now, the strap of her purse resting on her shoulder, her fingertips on its faded needlepoint flowers. She looked at Priscilla, who was still in her nightgown.

  “Good morning, Priscilla,” she said, her eyes cautious, her nod small.

  Priscilla glanced up. “Mornin’, Mrs. Lloyd,” she answered, before returning her focus to the egg. Mrs. Lloyd looked concerned. And when Mrs. Lloyd was concerned, Priscilla was concerned.

  Mrs. Lloyd took off her hat and set it on the rack by the door. “Where’s your mother?” she asked.

  Priscilla didn’t respond, didn’t acknowledge the question. One might think that she hadn’t heard it. But, of course, she had. As she pulled in her lips and concentrated on salting her egg, of course she had. Goddammit, Martha! she had heard her father yell one night. What am I supposed to tell people? That you lost track of time? When I don’t know where the hell you are for an entire goddamn day?

  Mrs. Lloyd waited and watched for a few more breaths, then sighed. “Lord have mercy,” she said, shaking her head, as she walked over to the cabinet and pulled out a glass. She filled it with milk, then set it down in front of Priscilla, who waited a polite interval before taking three enormous gulps. She hadn’t realized how thirsty she was. She hadn’t been able to reach the glasses.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Block Party

  T here was a time when my father had thought it was wonderfully, delightfully apropos that he lived with his wife, the beauty queen, on a street called Royal Court. I built a castle for you, Silla, he used to say. And she’d turn to him with a smile so bright that the memory burns to white. But as I stood on my mother’s porch before the annual King’s Knoll block party, I stared at a lawn sign featuring the face of the woman who was now married to my father. With an excess of both time and confidence, my stepmother, Lydia, had gone into real estate when my half sister, Alexandra, went to college, and quickly became one of the top Realtors in the state. In nearly every neighborhood in the area, you could see a facsimile of Lydia’s smiling face gracing the yards of homes that she had listed, including the one right across the street. New listings went up thirty-five percent, my father had said proudly, as soon as she added that photo.

  “Is that Lydia?” asked Rose, following the direction of my stare.

  Rose knew Lydia but not well, having seen her only a few times a year. But Lydia’s appearance was as predictable as a habit, with freshly blown-out blond hair, light pink lips, and a black shirt that was undone one button too many. “That’s Lydia.”

  Rose looked at the crowd that had assembled down on the cul-de-sac, where large rectangular tables held aluminum trays and brushed stainless
Crock-Pots. Then she turned back to me. “Do you want me to watch Uncle Warren?” she asked.

  Cupping her chin in my hand, I realized that she had understood more than I’d thought about Warren’s recent disappearance. “And who’s going to watch you?”

  “You watch me and I’ll watch Uncle Warren,” she reasoned.

  From behind us, the door opened and my mother, carrying a platter of Rice Krispies Treats, stepped out. “Okay,” she said, sounding anxious, hopeful. “We’re ready.” She glanced behind her at Warren. “Fix your hair, honey,” she instructed, after a quiet assessment. Warren took a moment to process the request, then used his fingers to straighten his bangs.

  Leaning past my mother, Rose said, “Uncle Warren, you come with me.”

  A smile formed slowly on his face, though his expression remained quizzical. “You want Uncle Warren to come?”

  “Yeah,” she said, marching toward him. Mom stepped aside and I watched Rose grip Warren’s pointer finger and pull him forward. Once she had his hand, she tucked it under her arm, as if for safekeeping. Warren gave a brief, suspicious glance toward the crowd. I often wondered how Warren, who interacted so oddly with strangers, held on to a job where he had to encounter so many of them each night. “Now you need to stay where I can see you,” said Rose, repeating a line she’d heard me say countless times in parks and playgrounds.

  Warren laughed. It was a quiet noise that sounded as if it had been turned out with a crank. “Are you in charge of Uncle Warren?”

  “Yeah,” she said, leading him down the stairs. “I’m going to make sure you don’t get lost.” My mother’s eye caught mine and she gave me a grateful look.

  As we made our way down to the party, we crossed the front yard, past metallic garden globes and faded pastel flags. Mom’s yard was scattered with such objects, all looking like shells in the sand that had been washed from the house during the retreat of some great tide. We passed neighbors holding bottles of beer and cups of hot cider, heading to this house or that. They looked at us, gave a nod and a tight smile. But no one stopped for a conversation. I was surprised by how many homes were inhabited by strangers now, by how many faces were unfamiliar.

  At the cul-de-sac a handful of the neighborhood’s old guard were gathered—Bill and Carol Kotch, Shelley Ditchkiss, and, of course, Linda Vanni. Standing next to his mother with a red plastic cup in his hand was Bobby. A little girl who I assumed was his daughter clung to his side. No taller than Rose, she had thick espresso-colored hair that was pulled half back and secured with a grosgrain bow. It looked like Bobby had been cornered by Shelley Ditchkiss, who was one to drone on for thirty minutes about her son-in-law’s promotion to partner or daughter’s decision to be a stay-at-home mom, or something equally self-congratulatory and uninteresting.

  The direction of my attention didn’t escape my mother’s notice and I felt her sidelong glance.

  “You know, Bobby’s living here now,” she said, as we trailed Rose and Warren.

  “With Linda and Sal?” I asked. It didn’t make sense that Bobby was living in King’s Knoll. Why would he need to?

  “He moved back home so he could finish his residency,” she said. “I guess they have him working all sorts of crazy hours in the emergency room, so he needs someone”—she nodded toward the little girl at his knee—“to help with Gabby.” I had known that Bobby had started medical school a bit later than was typical, having spent a number of years in the corporate world first.

  “What about his wife?” Several years ago I had heard Bobby had gotten married. I’d been pregnant with Rose and living with an increasingly distant Duncan at the time. I did an online search using the keywords Robert Vanni Harwick NJ Engaged. Photos of the wedding came up. His wife was named Mia. Mia Simon. I remembered thinking she looked exactly like the sort of girl with whom I had always imagined Bobby would end up—elegant and exotic and from somewhere other than down the street.

  “They split up,” answered my mother, with the sympathy of someone who had been through an ugly divorce herself. “They have a little girl, but . . .” She shook her head in the way you do when, try as you might, you can’t make sense out of something. “I guess she stayed with Bobby. The mother is out west somewhere.”

  “Huh,” was all I could say.

  As the crowd grew denser, I scanned the surrounding homes, their facades like familiar faces on which the years had begun to show. For the most part, they had been well kept. But a bit of passé brickwork or an outmoded feature told the neighborhood’s age, which was of that desolate stretch in the middle: not young enough to be desirable, not old enough to be classic.

  My mother’s house used to be the grandest and was now the most egregiously dated, with its chipped columns and monochromatic red bricks, its yard-sale lawn and crumbling pavement. The grass had been mowed fairly recently, but higher halos remained around the scattered ornaments—the garden flags and toad abodes and reflective orbs.

  The block party, too, seemed to have lost something, with residents ambling out to the street to make their requisite appearances. The party used to be held in the summer, rather than the fall, until it was decided that it was just too damn hot in July to stand in the street all day. Back then we all went outside early with our mothers as they set up, arranging carved watermelon baskets and red and white coolers filled with cans of soda. Everyone would trickle out of their homes and by eleven the street would be a sea of bodies. The mothers would stand in a semicircle, laughing in their sleeveless tops and visors, their legs tanned and strong with the skin only just beginning to loosen around their knees. Occasionally, their eyes would cast about for their children, to make sure that we were present and accounted for. But for the most part we ran free, a pack of us, with burned shoulders and blackened feet. The fathers’ voices would be louder than usual, boisterous and deep, as they reigned from their lawn-chair thrones, reveling in the suburbs’ fulfilled promise—the pretty wives, the nice neighborhood, the happy kids—all under summer’s hyper-color sun. Then we’d hear Mr. Vanni’s voice. The Seventh Annual King’s Knoll Sack Race is about to begin! he’d call, his huge arm waving above his head. And we’d all scramble over the smooth sunbaked asphalt, our lips stained red from the Popsicles that we were downing one after the other, taking advantage of the distracted adults and jubilant chaos that surrounded us.

  Arriving at one of the folding tables, my mother moved aside a Crock-Pot to make room for her platter. “How are you, Karl?” she said to a man in a Windbreaker with a corporate logo, who was plowing a potato chip through onion dip. She squinted and rested her curved hand over her brow. “We got a nice day for this, didn’t we?” With his face frozen in what must have been intended to be a pleasant expression, the man named Karl made a sound of noncommittal agreement before popping the chip into his mouth and turning away. A moment later, he engaged in a hearty backslap with a golf-garb-clad man whose huge convex belly gave him the look of a gestating aquatic mammal.

  Once Karl was out of earshot, my mother glanced from Warren to Rose to me, then back out at the party. “It’s good that we’re all here together,” she said, through her pageant smile. “We should walk around,” she said. “Say hello to everyone.”

  My mother held Warren’s upper arm protectively as we navigated the crowd, following Rose, who despite her best intentions was not doing a very good job of looking after her uncle Warren. Mom nodded her hellos to the neighbors, mentioning that their new shutters “look great!” or that their chrysanthemums were “gorgeous this year!” They nodded polite thank-yous and kept walking. For the most part, they ignored Warren. Occasionally, the neighbors would steal glances at him, their gazes moving subtly in his direction as we continued to make our way down the street. But the conversation in which they were engaged wouldn’t stop. And their assessment wouldn’t last more than a moment or so. Some would offer a too loud and too enthusiastic, “Hi, Warren! How’re your pl
anes?” referring to the RC planes that he built and flew, walking endless loops around the neighborhood. Hi, Warren! It was the way people talked to toddlers. And dogs. That was the way they talked to Warren.

  My brother used to have a friend in the neighborhood named Howard Li. Howard was a child prodigy whose parents were engineers at the enormous telecommunications company in the next town, and Howard was Warren’s only real friend. When they moved into King’s Knoll, everyone was nice enough, but made no real effort to engage the Lis socially, as Mrs. Li’s seeming optimism, as manifested by her constant nodding smile, made everyone a little uncomfortable. “I don’t understand what she thinks is so damn wonderful,” I had heard Mrs. Daglatella say. But Howard and Warren seemed to understand each other. And I used to watch as Howard, a twelve-year-old sophomore, and Warren, a visitor from another galaxy, waged battle with defoliated forsythia branches in the backyard. Their skinny, shirtless bodies would leap and twist as they whipped their branches at a legion of invisible and invented foes, the forsythia humming as it cut through the air.

  “Is she a Maglon?” Howard would ask Warren when I stepped out onto the deck, his forsythia aimed at me and ready to inflict its wrath.

  “No,” Warren would say almost coolly, having momentarily shed all geekiness. “She’s an Aurotite.” Howard would lower his branch and I would surreptitiously light the cigarette I had stolen from my mother, who still sometimes smoked back then—my small rebellion.

  As we headed for the Kotches, who were now standing alone, Rose caught sight of Gabby Vanni tucked against her grandmother’s side as she straightened up the buffet table. “Hey, Mom!” said Rose, pointing. “I see a girl!”