Apologize, Apologize! - By Elizabeth Kelly Page 0,65
things aflutter. “They tend not to form attachments to their human caretakers and need very little interaction or stimulation to make them happy. Pretty, entertaining, and remote—a perfect pet for those who admire beauty and performance but don’t want to be bothered with emotional engagement.”
“Unlike Carlos,” I said. Carlos was the Falcon’s forty-year-old hyacinth macaw.
He laughed—laughed! I couldn’t believe it. This was turning into a latter-day version of A Christmas Carol.
“Carlos is a damn nuisance,” he said.
Encouraged by his friendliness, I persisted. “Did you and Ma ever get along?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Genetics. Let’s just say that when it came to alienation of affection, her mother, your grandmother, could have written an instruction manual.”
He snapped shut the birdcage door and walked back toward the portrait, pausing in front of a large mirror in an ornate Oriental frame.
“In some ways, your mother was very much like my grandmother Lowell, who was a willful, opinionated, stubborn woman. Very stern and unyielding, though certainly she had her good qualities, too,” he said, making some concession to her character while seeming a little unconvinced. “I spent a great deal of time with her when I was a child after my mother died. I lived with her until I was twelve, and I formed an attachment to her of sorts. She passed away when I was about your age. She was the most humorless person I’ve ever encountered. I suppose I loved her, well, yes, I did love her, but to this day, I’ve never shed a tear over her passing. ” He paused and glanced over at the grandfather clock as it chimed in the background, and then he turned and waited for me to speak.
“I don’t know why, but I haven’t cried over Ma,” I blurted out. “I did love her.”
“Maybe you loved her in the same unkind way that she loved you,” the Falcon said softly.
“Maybe . . . I don’t know.”
“Don’t worry, Collie, your mother will extract her period of mourning from you. Some people just get buried more deeply than others. You’ll find out that sorrow takes different forms, but in the end true grief is an honorific conferred on those people, however unlikely they may be, who bring us some measure of joy. Your mother was many things, but a joyful presence she was not. Unfortunately, Anais’s grave is not a shallow one.”
Ingrid appeared at the dining room door. “Have you forgotten the plane is waiting?” she said to the Falcon, tapping her foot.
“Please feel free to interrupt us anytime, Ingrid. Do I actually pay you to be meddlesome? If so, then you deserve a bonus for a job well done.”
The Falcon reached for his leather bag looped over the back of one of the dining room chairs.
“Well, I must be going. I’m flying to Chicago, but I’ll be back tomorrow morning. In the meantime, Collie, please don’t sit on the table. It makes you look like a yahoo.”
Hearing his footsteps on the stairway, his vigor belying his age, I slid off the table and walked through the garden doors and out onto the patio, where cages of canaries were enjoying the brilliant sun and its early morning warmth.
Ingrid followed behind me. “Would you like some tea, Collie?”
“No thanks,” I said, the prosaic sound of my voice no match for the singing of the canaries and the responsive chorus of wild birds. “I’m fine.”
“Of course you are,” she said.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE NEXT DAY, I GOT UP AROUND DAWN. IT WAS SATURDAY MORNING. The house was still, and the air was infused with a sepia-toned light. I grabbed a bowl of cereal, cleaned up, or so I thought— Ingrid later told me that she knew something must have been wrong when she found the milk in the cupboard along with the orange juice, and the cornflakes in the fridge. I left the water running in the shower. I wore my T-shirt inside out.
I drove to the dock where my grandfather kept the Seabird, a fully restored forty-three-foot antique wooden sailboat, a fractional sloop made from teak and mahogany. The Falcon had insisted we take sailing lessons when we were little. Pop, on the other hand, had no experience of boats. Every time we set sail, he was convinced we’d never be seen or heard from again. As far as Pop was concerned, boats sank.
“Your father,” my grandfather, referencing an old joke, once said to Bing and me, “thinks that yacht rhymes with hatchet.”