she would stay silent, allowing me to feel the full weight of her abandonment and the possibility that she loved Peter or Christopher more than me.
Prone to melancholy, my mother used to recite a poem to me called “Monday’s Child,” always slowing down when she reached the final lines.
Monday’s child is fair of face
Tuesday’s child is full of grace
Wednesday’s child is full of woe
Thursday’s child has far to go
Friday’s child is loving and giving
Saturday’s child works hard for a living
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe and good and gay.
I came to understand why her eyes got misty. Peter and I had been born on ordinary days, but Christopher was Sunday’s child, the most special of all. He’d been her cherished firstborn, a boy whose birthday I had unwittingly hijacked. Christopher became my obsession, but there was no competing with a ghost. I couldn’t help but think that if my parents had been given their choice between Christopher and me, they would have picked him.
As children, Peter and I got the story of our brother’s death bit by bit from various sources, and, as happens, the facts changed in the telling. Christopher had stashed a piece of meat inside his cheek, that much we knew. No one was aware he’d hidden the meat. Everyone knew he’d hidden the meat. Christopher started to choke when the car hit a bump in the road. The choking started in the parking lot of an antique store. Our parents were with him at the time. Our parents were in the store, but the au pair ran to get them. A fireman tried to resuscitate him. A doctor, who had an office next door, refused to help. Our father felt responsible, according to our mother. Our mother felt responsible, according to our father. The au pair was responsible, according to our aunt. It was God’s will, our grandmother declared.
But nothing changed the outcome—our older brother had died before Peter and I were born, and we would always live in his shadow.
I have known my mother only as the person she became after Christopher died: a mother who had lost a child. Who might she have been before? I imagine her, in the days and weeks and months that followed Christopher’s death, engaging in magical thinking, as the grief-stricken do. I picture her daily shock on waking up after a few hours of respite, thanks to her sleeping pills, and remembering again that her son was dead. Forgetting and remembering. I wonder if that part of it is over for her now, if five and a half decades is long enough to metabolize such a loss or if there are still moments when time collapses and her agony overtakes everything.
* * *
Whenever Malabar got sentimental, she would pull out the Indian necklace. She would retrieve the purple velvet case from the depths of her walk-in closet, place it on her bed between us, and pop open the lid. There it was.
“This necklace is the most valuable item I own. Do you understand, Rennie? It’s extraordinary and priceless, absolutely priceless,” she would say. “I should leave it to a museum. It would be irresponsible to do anything else.”
Then Malabar would make me promise, again and again, that if she left the necklace to me, I would never sell it, no matter what. I swore on my life that I wouldn’t.
On one occasion, she wrapped the sparkling collar around my neck and I felt the mighty weight of it, our yoke. I might have been ten at the time, no longer a towhead but still with light blond hair, almost invisible eyebrows, and round, childish features. Everything about me was soft—my nose, my cheeks, my jawline—and I lacked the essential gravitas for the piece. My mother, dark-haired, dark-eyed, fiercely beautiful, laughed. We both did. I looked ridiculous.
“Don’t worry. You’ll grow into it,” she said, unclasping it. “You shall wear it on your wedding day.” Then she lovingly placed the necklace back in its box.
Four
To cover for Malabar’s affair, I would tell Charles one thing, my father and Peter another, my friends something else, attempting to explain either my mother’s absences or my own. Someone had to take care of Charles when she was gone. He still went to the office every day but required assistance at home. With his right side paralyzed and his weak heart, my stepfather needed help preparing dinner and uncapping his bottle of nitroglycerin pills, those tiny white