The Bestiary Read online

  “Come on,” my father said to me.

  “Hey, one for the road, Teddy?” Gus said.

  My father shook his head.

  “Suit yourself. So you’re in town until Friday. Then you go home?”

  My father stiffened. “Then I leave home. I’m shipping on the Hecate for Barcelona.”

  Gus looked away, nodding vigorously. “Yeah, that’s what I meant.”

  “Goodbye,” my father muttered, clutching my arm and leading me from the restaurant.

  On the sidewalk he tried to head off my questions. “Sometimes that’s what sailors say when they’re putting to sea: ‘going home.’”

  Speeding through the subway tunnel beneath the East River, I was thinking hard about this. “Do you think of a ship as home?” I asked him.

  Without missing a beat, he said, “You’d better think that way about your ship when you’re in the middle of the ocean. But, no, I think of our apartment as home.”

  I didn’t believe him. I decided to be as direct as I’d ever been on the subject. “Even though you’re on ships more than you’re here?”

  But he didn’t bridle. “Yes,” he replied, staring at the lights that flew by.

  “Why did you get mad at Gus?” I said.

  Asking my father a question like this, however innocently, was usually out of the question. It wasn’t that he got angry when you probed: he just clammed up.

  This time he looked at me. “Never trust what a man says when he’s drinking.”

  This was not an answer to the question I had asked, and he knew it. But that was all he was going to say.

  The door between us had been jarred open a crack, and I had hoped to open it further. But, just as quickly, it closed on me. A few days later, my father set sail. And that same evening, while my grandmother dozed on the sofa and Evgénia prepared dinner, I realized how much it had hurt when Gus said my father never talked about me.

  MY GRANDMOTHER DIED on a snowy December night. Only the cause of death was unexpected: she was being treated for kidney disease and intestinal disorders, but she suffered a massive heart attack. She had had her spleen removed the previous winter, after which her sister Frances urged her to move in with her once and for all. My grandmother refused: our apartment had become her home, and sensing that the end was near, she said she wanted to die there.

  She rarely left her room that last year. I sat at her bedside for hours at a time, with Re at my feet, beside a table cluttered with pill containers, tonics, tinctures, ointments, lozenges, and a Thermos of blackberry tea, which she believed superior to all her medicines. She sat propped up with a heating pad at the small of her back and packets of herbs beneath her pillow.

  Cataracts had set in, but though her vision was darkening, she refused surgery. At first, she continued to watch the morning soap operas. Or she stared out the window at the shadows that shifted, like pieces of a jigsaw, across the building façades. Finally, though, she could only listen to the television. And even when the room was sunlit, all she could see was a vast spiderweb—una ragnatela vasta. As her condition worsened, she often lapsed into Italian.

  “I ragni stanno facendo…” she murmured. The spiders are spinning…

  In her mind’s eye, however, she saw clearly. She described to me a panther that walked on its hind legs and addressed her in a language she had never before heard but understood completely; a burning salamander that exploded into a rainbow; an eyeless crow with one white and one black wing threading a forest.

  “I demoni,” she whispered.

  The demons that inhabit this world—to whom the world belongs, as she once told me—were now everywhere, in all their manifestations.

  “No, Xeno, they’ve been there since the world began,” she corrected me, “but now I can see them clearly. The panther—la pantera— most of all. He stood right there at the foot of the bed.”

  I looked at the spot. “What did he say?”

  “Ah,” she smiled. “Things I wished I knew before, that I can tell you now. So you’ll know them all your life. First, he explained why I could understand him. He said before men started their killing ways, they spoke the same language as all the other animals. There was no boundaries between them. Then the worm of cruelty burrowed into man’s heart. The animals needed to protect themselves, so they made up their own languages that only their own kind could understand. The same thing happened when men started killing other men. Everyone felt safer talking their own language. They still do.”

  She sipped her tea.

  “Next he told me that there are animals like the phoenix—la fenice—that can only live in the world one at a time. You can’t be more alone than that.”

  I was about to pipe in about the chimera, but she was getting short of breath and I didn’t want to interrupt her.

  “He said there are other animals like that,” she went on. “‘The lost animals,’ he called them, that didn’t make it onto the ark at the time of the Great Flood. One day these animals are gonna be discovered, and all of their stories told, and the great mysteries will come clear.” She closed her eyes. “That panther promised me that soon my spirit’s gonna move on. If you’re lucky, it doesn’t live on in heaven—forget all that—but inside another creature on earth. Otherwise, it becomes a lost soul, like one of those seabirds that tries to fly to the moon but instead falls into what my grandmother Silvana called il mare di tempo— the sea of time—and never returns. When I was a girl, and we went to Messina, we waited in the dunes all night for a look at those birds. I don’t have to wait long now, Xeno, no matter where I’m going.”

  “Don’t say that, Grandma.” I choked back tears, but she was happy with the thought, and she pulled me close and kissed me.

  That last night, I was eating a sandwich in the kitchen when I heard a glass break in her room. Then Re started barking. Evgénia had just stepped out the front door, on her way home, and I cried out to her as I raced down the hall.

  At my grandmother’s door, I stopped cold. Her bed was empty. Re was barking at the window, where the red fox I had seen years before was slipping out onto the fire escape, into the snow.

  I turned to Evgénia as she reached my side, and when I looked back into the room, the fox was gone and my grandmother was lying in bed. Her head was tilted and her mouth was open. Her face was white as powder. Shadows from the lamp swam up onto the bedclothes. The tea from the broken glass was spreading on the floor-boards.

  It felt as if my own mouth was filling with sand. I was shaking as I ran over and laid my head on my grandmother’s chest, listening for her heart. Evgénia took hold of her wrist, then pressed her neck, searching for an artery.

  “I think I hear something!” I cried, but Evgénia shook her head and hurried away to the telephone.

  What I heard was my own blood pounding in my ears. I sank to my knees sobbing and at the same time felt as if I were floating far away from myself, that room, my grandmother’s body. Despite her bittersweet feelings toward my mother, and her strange ways, my grandmother had been the great constant in my life. I became inconsolable. If it hadn’t been for Evgénia, I don’t know what I would have done. She was the only one I had to fall back on in those terrible days, and she came through for me.

  The ambulance took my grandmother away. And then her family—the family of Rose Conti—prepared to bury her. She was theirs now. And I was not invited to the funeral. Even if my father had been around, I would not have been invited. Evgénia was outraged. “I won’t allow it,” she declared.

  She had never said such a thing before. Not in all the years she had watched my grandmother’s family shun me.

  It was Uncle Robert, of course, who made the funeral arrangements. Now, if only for a few seconds, I would see him up close, I thought.

  Two days after my grandmother died, Evgénia had me put on my one suit, itchy gray wool, with a black knitted tie that she bought me. She put on a black dress herself. Then at three o’clock, in sharp sunlight, we took the No. 14
bus up Webster Avenue to Cichetti’s Funeral Home. The front room, visible through the glass doors, was a kind of fake living room. It had sofas, a Persian carpet, and dim lamps. A poor reproduction of some landscape—trees along a river—hung over the fake fireplace. The air was dusty, waxen, and I didn’t want to draw it into my lungs.

  Outside the room where she was laid out, my grandmother’s name had been tacked onto a board in white letters, like the ones they used to spell out the daily menu in my school cafeteria. Evgénia took my hand and we went in. There were no other mourners present at that hour. The perfume of flowers from various bouquets was overpowering. She was lying in a rosewood casket lined with lavender silk. They had put a blue dress on her and fixed her hair and applied makeup to her face. I had heard people say that, freshly laid out, people look as if they are sleeping; but she didn’t look like she was sleeping, she looked dead. It brought me up short. I didn’t shed tears by her casket. I don’t remember feeling anything at all. In the suffocating stillness of that place I was sure if I looked at my wristwatch—a tenth-birthday gift from my grandmother—I would discover that time itself had stopped.

  The funeral service the next day was at Saint Anthony of Padua Church, on another bus route. Wearing the same suit and tie, with Evgénia at my side, I entered the church near the end of the service and sat in a rear pew. My grandmother’s closed casket was up at the altar. The priest, flanked by acolytes, was praying over it in Latin. I glimpsed the backs of my relatives’ heads, including the children, my cousins, one of whom, a girl about my own age, had the reddest hair I’d ever seen. Once I had seen her in the rear seat of Uncle Robert’s car. This was Silvana, named after my great-great-grandmother the dryad; of all my cousins, she was the one my grandmother had most wanted me to meet. “Because you’re so much alike,” she once remarked. “And she’s going to be a great beauty, too.” But, thanks to my uncle, I hadn’t met her, and now I probably never would. I started to cry again, and for the next half hour I looked around that church, the stained glass, the icons of the saints, the flickering candles, through a veil of tears. And I never did see Silvana’s face.

  Evgénia comforted me as best she could, keeping her arm around my shoulders, stroking my head. She had done as she promised, and then some. Her courage and audacity did not extend to marching me down the aisle to take my “rightful place,” as she called it, in one of the first three rows, reserved for family. Nor would I have wanted her to make this sort of scene; I doubt either of us could have handled the consequences. So, as the service wound down, we walked out of the church, past the hearse and limousines, back to the bus stop.

  Some years later, I would discover the location of my grandmother’s grave at Sacred Heart Cemetery in Yonkers. But that night, I thought back to the first time my grandmother had taken me to my mother’s grave, a few miles to the east, in Mount Vernon. Chosen by my father, her gravestone was a modest slab of marble. Her name and dates were plainly chiseled, and in the upper corner there was a flying fish at the center of a rosette. My grandmother didn’t approve of the site, beside an iron fence at the end of a long row of graves. Down a slope of tall grass, traffic hummed on a busy road. Exhaust fumes rose through the trees. My grandmother didn’t like the flying fish, either. She said it was a symbol of resurrection for Greek sailors. “Marina wasn’t a sailor,” she muttered, resentful of this final intrusion by my father. What she wanted to say, and refrained on my account, was that my mother wasn’t Greek, but Italian—a distinction to be strictly maintained, even after death. I traced the letters of my mother’s name—their edges sharp beneath my fingertip—while my grandmother got to her knees, pulled weeds from the dirt, and planted geraniums. I thought of my mother lying face-up below my feet. Was she just a skeleton now, or was it too soon for that? I noted the dates on neighboring gravestones. Most were for old people. One was for an infant. My mother might have liked that, I thought, since she hadn’t had the chance to be with her own child. I realized that if I had died with her, I would have been buried in that place, too. Later, when my grandmother and I walked out the gates and down to the train station, I was glad to have visited, but I wasn’t sorry to leave.

  I had often asked my grandmother what my mother was like. One night, when she was ailing, she answered more frankly than usual.

  “Your mother,” she said, squinting across the room as if she might discern her in the shadows. “She loved to dance. At weddings she was the best dancer. She had plenty of friends. When she got married, she was still just a girl. I hoped she would have a nice wedding herself. I thought I knew her.” She shook her head. “I didn’t, really, and I can’t forgive myself for not going to her after she run away.”

  My grandmother had given me a handful of snapshots of my mother. They were taken before my mother met my father. If he had photos of them together, or of my mother alone during their brief marriage, he had kept them to himself or destroyed them.

  In four of the snapshots, taken on a rooftop against a smoky winter sky, my mother looked pensive, staring past the photographer. Was that a friend, or one of her siblings? She was wearing a brown coat and matching beret. The wind was fluttering her long hair.

  In the fifth snapshot she looked happy. Wearing a white bathing suit and a sailor cap aslant, she was eating cotton candy at Jones Beach, mugging for the camera. A locker key on an elastic band was fastened around her ankle. She was tanned. Slim. With nice legs. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen. On the boardwalk beside her, elongated by the late-afternoon sun, there was an unusual shadow: the photographer, from the neck up, with a large bird perched on his shoulder. The bird had a curved beak and long, forking tail feathers. A distinctive crest—a row of spiky tufts—that ran down its neck made me think it wasn’t a parrot. Aside from the bird, there was nothing to distinguish the photographer; not even his height could be ascertained from the shadow.

  I had studied this snapshot many times, weaving stories around it:

  That the man was a stranger who, upon request, photographed my mother with her own camera.

  That he was a boyfriend who happened to own (and take to the beach with him) an exotic bird.

  That the bird belonged to a sailor whose cap she had put on (a seafarer who predated my father?)…or a vendor (of cotton candy?)…or a Gypsy fortune-teller whose booth my mother had visited and learned—what? Judging from her smile, not the fact that she wouldn’t live to see her twenty-first birthday. No, in that snapshot, with glowing limbs and bright eyes, she looked as if she would live forever.

  The night of my grandmother’s funeral, Evgénia stayed in my father’s room. And I sat awake in my grandmother’s room with Re, who rarely left my side that week. I opened the silver music box containing the white whisker and listened to the lullabye my grandmother used to sing to me. Then I lit the candle that had replaced all the paraphernalia on her bedside table, and Re stared at the window where the fox had disappeared.

  THE DAY I had to leave Re with Bruno, a fierce storm hit the city. By three o’clock a foot of snow had fallen. It was so dark the streetlights had come on. Cars were skidding into intersections. Buses weren’t running. Re and I walked east, into Bruno’s neighborhood, cutting through U.S. Grant Park, onto DeMott Avenue. I ducked my head against the wind and guided Re away from the deeper drifts. In my knapsack I had his food bowl and plaid blanket.

  When my grandmother died, the cover she provided for my father’s neglect went with her. However comfortable the apartment, he couldn’t just leave me alone there, with Evgénia coming in forty hours a week and no one else around on weekends. There could be no pretenses anymore about that aspect of my life. Evgénia had remained with me for several months, but when my father asked her to continue as a live-in caretaker, she declined. Whatever the particulars of her private life, she wasn’t willing to give it up. To my surprise, one morning my father woke me with the news that I would be enrolling in a boarding school in Maine. “There’s no alternative,” he said flatly, stal
king from my room with his heavy gait, meaning there would be no discussion, either.

  It also meant that Re needed a new home. He and I had become closer than ever. At fourteen, two years my senior, he was ancient for a German shepherd. His strength was ebbing, his vision dimmed, his hind legs stiff with arthritis. That day, he tugged at his leash, for he knew the way to the Morettis’ house and enjoyed visiting the other animals. The fact Re was so happy there was the only thing that offset my despair at having to give him up. I had been sick over it for weeks. The Morettis’ home was full of strays, and now Re would join them. They were taking him in unquestioningly, just as they had taken me in. As always, Re sensed what was coming: the previous night he had crouched on my bed and watched me pack. When I slipped under the covers, he laid his forepaws across my ankle and wouldn’t lift them until morning.

  Now, as I rang the Morettis’ doorbell, at least his spirits seemed to have improved, even if mine had not.

  Lena let us in. By that time, more than the family comforts and the menageries, my primary delight in visiting the Moretti household was her presence. I brushed the snow from my coat and she gave me a towel to dry Re.

  “Here’s his bowl,” I said, removing it from the knapsack. “And he likes to sleep on this blanket.”

  “He’ll sleep in my room. By the radiator. Can I hang up your coat, Xeno?”

  “I can’t stay long. I’ll just say goodbye to Bruno,” I said, starting up the stairs.

  I only had a few hours before my father and I were to go to Grand Central and board the train for Boston. At our apartment, my bags were lined up in the hallway and the furniture was covered with sheets.

  I found Bruno hunched over his terrarium, feeding the lizards live roaches. In the ultraviolet light he appeared even paler than usual. While my physical capacities were growing as I entered puberty, Bruno’s were diminishing. To the list of his afflictions could be added the fact he was going deaf in one ear. I wished that I could lend him some of my own strength.