he decided to get rid of my dear mama,” Ma told Bingo and me when we were little, her arms flailing as she paced frenetically around the room, pinging from one corner to another, her consternation as jarring as a slot machine.
“Sounds like an episode of Bonanza,” Bingo said, grinning over at me, flicking baseball cards against the kitchen wall, fiddling away as Ma burned.
Faced with Ma’s sketchy mental archives, I got in the habit of consulting outsiders when it came to trying to discern the facts of my family history. The general consensus among the Falcon’s biographers is that a few years into his marriage he fell in love with a champagne-and-caviar socialite by the name of Flora Hennessey and planned to leave his family for her. All that changed when Flora’s small plane disappeared at dawn somewhere along the eastern seaboard.
It might be true. I remember one time Bingo and I were snooping around in the library at Cassowary when we found the key to the Falcon’s desk. After unlocking its narrow drawer, Bingo pulled a small, black-and-white photo of a young, dark-haired woman from inside the pages of a slender notebook.
“Who’s the babe?” Bingo gleefully asked the Falcon, whose sudden entrance surprised both of us. Rather than conceal the evidence of our crime, Bingo, eleven years old, bravely held up the picture while I felt my scalp smoldering.
The Falcon walked toward us in soundless fury, seized the photo with one hand, and with the other slapped Bingo across the face so hard that he left a bright red handprint that glows in my memory to this day. Bingo tumbled backward off the chair and onto the ground, his hand to his cheek. Jumping to his feet, he met the Falcon’s angry stare and then watched in silence as the old guy spun around on his heels and vanished into the hallway.
“Wow, I’ve never seen him so mad,” I said, feeling weak in the knees, slowly sidling up alongside Bing.
“He’s always mad about something. Who cares?” Bingo answered, rubbing his eyes through clenched fists, trying to conceal an involuntary surge of tears.
“Not me,” I lied.
The truth was that I cared deeply about everything my grand-father thought and said, though I would have surgically removed my liver with a jackknife rather than admit it to anyone—in our family, it would have been less dangerous for me to confess to eating dog meat.
“Are you okay?” I asked Bing, unable to make eye contact, embarrassed by the sheer honesty of what had just transpired. I felt paralyzed, as if I’d been given a shot of pure unfiltered emotion directly into my spinal cord.
“I’m fine. Leave me alone,” Bingo was mumbling into the shirt collar he’d pulled up around his face. His hands were shaking. I thought about hugging him, but in the end it was easier to hide my sympathy than it was to show it.
“What was Grandma like?” I asked my mother a few days later as I lay on my back stretched across the bottom of my parents’ tarnished brass bed. Bingo and I didn’t dare tell Ma about the slapping incident. The repercussions would have demoted the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to the status of a minor irritant, a stray lash in the eye of history.
“She was a saint . . . ,” Ma said, her large, almond-shaped eyes a dilute blue watercolor as she stared beyond me and somewhere into the distant past. She was sitting at the head of the bed, legs extended beneath the covers, perfectly erect, narrow shoulders square as a military parade. The pillows at her back were purely ornamental—Ma never needed propping up.
The buttercup yellow wall behind her was bathed in late afternoon light. I was fascinated by the shadows cast by her chestnut brown hair, so wild and wavy that it could have supported teeming jungle life.
“Constance Lowell was skinny and mad, a veritable vibrating hairpin. . . .” Next to her, naked and ruddy, covers pulled up to his waist, Pop rubbed his face in disbelief and interrupted with a hoot. “She fell off her horse when she was thirty-five, sprained her ankle, and went to bed for the rest of her life claiming she couldn’t walk. Except that the servants used to hear her up and moving around all night while the rest of the house was sleeping.”
Laughing at the memory, he leaned forward, his big hand on my knee, and I felt the infrequent thrill of his undivided