And then I forgot. (Of course I forgot! I was six.) In the third-floor bedroom where I was supposed to sleep with my baby brother, there was a glass-fronted cabinet full of darling porcelain birds. I was immediately besotted with a pair of bright green parrots, their black eyes like little beads. At my family’s mansion in San Francisco, everything in my bedroom was solely for my entertainment—no one got upset if I smeared makeup on my Barbies or fed puzzle pieces to the dogs—and so of course I assumed that these birds were toys that had been put there for me. That first night, I pulled one of the parrots from the cabinet and set it next to the bed where I slept, so that it would be the first thing that I saw in the morning. Instead, as I slept that night, a decorative sham slid off the bed, taking the parrot down along with it. When I woke up at dawn, there was no bird, just a pile of shards on the floor.
I burst into tears, which woke Benny up, and then he started wailing, too. Maman soon appeared in the door with her silk robe wrapped tight against Stonehaven’s chill, blinking blearily.
“Oh God. You broke a Meissen.” She nudged a shard of green porcelain with her toe and made a face. “Gaudy little baubles.”
I sniffled. “Grandmama is going to get mad at me.”
My mother stroked my hair, gently tugging out the tangles. “She won’t notice. She has lots of them.”
“But it was a pair.” I pointed to the cabinet, where the remaining parrot was peering inquisitively through the glass, as if looking for his dead friend. “She’ll see there’s only one left. And then she’ll spank me.”
Benny wailed some more in the bed beside me, sallow and sulky. Mother swept him up with one arm and perched him on her hip, and then swanned across the room to the cabinet. She threw the glass door open and reached in to grab the remaining parrot, placing it on the palm of her hand. She balanced it there for a moment, and then tipped her hand slightly, so that the bird fell to the floor and shattered. I shrieked. Benny whooped with excitement.
“Now we both broke one, and she won’t dare punish me, which means she can’t punish you, either.” She came back and sat on the bed next to me, wiping the tears from my face with her soft white hand. “My beautiful girl. You are not going to be spanked, ever. Do you understand? I will never let that happen.”
I was stunned silent. My mother disappeared and a few minutes later came back with a broom and a dustpan—I remember thinking that they looked so unlikely in her hand—and swept the shards into a bag that she then spirited away. My grandmother never came into the bedroom that Christmas (she avoided us altogether, for the most part) and so as far as I know she never noticed that the birds were missing. Benny and I spent most of the rest of the trip outside with our cousins and our nannies, building igloos until we were pink with cold and our snow pants were soaked through, but at least there we were safe from the dangers that lurked inside the house.
So yes, I hated Stonehaven. I hated everything that it represented to me: honor and expectation, all that formality, the noose of history dangling just over my neck. I hated it when my grandmother made a grand gesture over Christmas dinner, as she peered down the table at the children, and murmured, “Someday all this will be yours, children. Someday you will be the caretakers of the Liebling family name.” It didn’t make me feel big at all, this legacy that had been handed to me; instead, it made me feel tiny under its looming shadow, as if I was insignificant in comparison to its sprawl, as if I could never possibly live up.
* * *
—
I was never supposed to be Stonehaven’s caretaker and yet somehow here I am anyway. Hooray. Life is ironic, no? (Or maybe I should say bittersweet, unfair, or just plain old fucked-up.) Some days, as I wander these rooms, I