WHEN ARIANE REALIZED Grandfather’s devotion for what it was, she was embarrassed to feel it resonating through her. She felt that she was taking something that wasn’t intended for her, even if she was only lapping up some of what had spilled over the edges, like a kitten, a stray invited into the kitchen to eat the scraps. They might be bits so meager and poor that the family wouldn’t even miss them, couldn’t tell them from garbage, but they were a feast to the little beggar, and that was she. She was that pathetic kitten.
Where did this devotion come from? How had they created this between them? How had Eleanor come to deserve such devotion from John? How had John come to feel such devotion for Eleanor?
She looked around the living room, looking for answers, looking for clues that would lead her into the heart of this kind of love. On a large round table in the rear of the large room were books about England, the treasures of the British Museum, the coronation of Elizabeth II, the crown jewels. On a shelf beside the fireplace there were ashtrays and a rack of pipes and the carved head of a cocker spaniel that had, long ago, been the family pet. A small television set stood on a table too small and flimsy for it in the far corner, beside a shelf that held a collection of shells. Between the television set and the fireplace was a wooden box, painted red, full of toys that my father and his brother had used, and that I had stopped playing with myself just a few years earlier. There weren’t many pictures on the walls, and they were conventional, like Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, which hung inside the door. A few were personal: a charcoal sketch of Grandfather’s sailboat, the Rambunctious, and photographs of their two sons, Bert and Buster, over a desk in a dark corner at the back of the room, at the turning of the staircase.
Ariane sat at the desk. Grandfather’s comforting voice hummed above her. She opened the top drawer: some bills and receipts, a checkbook, a savings passbook. In the middle drawer she found more pictures of their sons, some in an album, others in a brown envelope—not many, all in all. In the bottom drawer were stacks of letters. There were letters that my father and uncle had written to my grandparents, and even letters that I had written to them, and there were other letters, including one from a relative who had crossed the plains to the West a hundred years before and wrote of being pursued by Indians, but there were none of their letters to each other. She found birth certificates, and their wedding album, and the telegram that announced the death of Buster, their older son, and much more, but she couldn’t find the secret of that devotion, because some qualities distribute themselves throughout the whole of a thing, like the flavor of saffron in the clam chowder my grandfather made.
[to be continued]
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