Chapter Nineteen
Nineteen
While we are making luck of our own as best we are able, other people are making luck for us, good and bad.
Sometimes luck falls toward us like dominos, bringing a series of insights, and something we have struggled to understand becomes clearer than we imagined it ever could be.
The night of the peach ice cream, I slept soundly, but I dreamed of dead mice, dead birds, dead baby rabbits.
This was not a nightmare, for each creature recovered from death.
The birds flew out of slippers; mice scampered from under pillows; rabbits hopped out of sight into the safe concealment of verdant foliage.
When I woke late Saturday morning, I felt that my subconscious, in its dreaming, had been telling me to be alert for revelations that would solve the mysteries that had baffled the children.
In the early afternoon of that sunny day, as Harry and Gertrude were playing badminton on the court behind the pavilion, Isadora and I were sitting on the rim of the fountain, enjoying the cool air that the breeze brought off the arcing streams spouted by the stone dolphins.
Water spilled down a series of granite bowls, and it was on the edge of one of those that a bird landed to drink.
“That,” said my companion, “is just like the bird that Gertie found in her slipper and like the one we found lying in the back hall when we were chasing the ghost of Rudolph Valentino. Valentino didn’t die here in the Bram, of course.
He never even visited this place. But since no one has ever died here, to the best of our knowledge, we have to settle for spirits who come visiting from elsewhere. ”
Later, when Isadora went into the house for her piano lesson, when Harry and Gertrude retreated to their rooms to clean up for dinner after working up a sweat at badminton, I lingered in the gardens to admire the last roses of the season.
Mr. Reinhardt, the groundskeeper, was trimming a low hedge that surrounded the roses.
He and I began talking about flowers when a bird like the one at the fountain landed on the stone walkway.
A few pill bugs rolled up tight in an attempt to avoid being eaten.
As the bird pecked at them, Mr. Reinhardt answered my question about it.
“Oh, fr?ulein, that pretty fellow is a purple martin. Migration season. He is passing through, ein klein Zigeuner, a little Gypsy. We have no great flocks of his kind at any time of year, but in summer a few families return to the Bram and stay till late autumn.” He pointed at two large birdhouses atop tall poles in the northwest corner of the property.
“Swallows. Mere two-ounce swallows. But they chase bigger birds out of those apartments. Tough little guys.”
I wished him a good day off, for he didn’t work on Sunday, and as I turned away, I thought of another question. “With the estate wall all the way around, do we have rabbits?”
“Kaninchen!” His brow furrowed, and his eyes squinted behind his wire-rimmed glasses.
“They come in through the driveway gate and eat my flowers. No roses. No begonias. But much else. When I catch one, I put it off the property.” He made shooing motions with his hands.
“Weggehen, weggehen! I cannot kill them. They are too sweet. I put them off the property. Danken Gott, we have had only one hare. A hare has such longer legs than a rabbit. Catching one is a fool’s errand.
And Rafael is no help. He refuses to chase a bunny.
He just sits and watches it and wags his tail.
And the first time the one hare made a ten-foot leap, our fierce dog ran off and hid from it. ”
At the word “dog,” the bird took flight, leaving half the order of pill bugs unconsumed, as if it knew what the word meant but lacked an understanding of Rafael’s gentle nature.
Assuming that the first exotic word the groundskeeper used meant rabbit in German, I said, “Has a Kaninchen ever produced a litter while inside the estate wall?”
“Once! Early last spring. A doe can have four litters a year. There were seven kittens in this one. What damage could have been done to my flowers, herbs, and exotic grasses. What devastation!”
“What happened to them, the kittens?”
He put down his hedge shears and took a plaid handkerchief from a pocket of his khakis.
Judging by his expression, I thought he was going to cry, but he blew his nose.
Then he said, “The kittens are born without fur. They look like tiny Meerschweinchen. Guinea pigs. The mother leaves them in a shallow burrow. She covers it with grass to hide her babies and returns every evening to nurse them. In ten days they double in size. They become covered in fur. In a month, they can leave the burrow to find their own food.” He tucked away the plaid handkerchief and withdrew a plain one from a different pocket.
He took off his eyeglasses and polished them.
“A month! So tiny, they were. So vulnerable. How could I wait a month? I kept thinking—hawks, owls, and rats. Dreckige Ratten! Stuffing themselves on the kittens. I couldn’t sleep.
I moved them into my office with their mother.
” His office and the gardening-supply room were behind the school bungalow.
“I fed them vegetables from Chef Lattuada. I built a rabbit hutch to keep them safe. When they were two months old and quick, I drove them out into the hills. Five miles from here. I set them free, the doe and six, so small in those endless fields. It was a hard thing to do. A rabbit in the wild lives only a year or two. So many predators.” Having put his glasses on a low garden wall, he was blotting his eyes with the plain handkerchief.
“It was hard to do, but there was nothing else.”
“Such is the world,” I said.
“That is very true. ‘Such is the world.’ So very true, Alida.”
“‘The doe and six.’ Weren’t there seven kittens?”
“One escaped the hutch. I don’t know how. Perhaps when I was cleaning it, putting in fresh water, the door opened. I searched and searched but never found it. Poor thing.”
As he put on his wire-rimmed spectacles and picked up the hedge clippers, I stood in contemplation of what information the day had brought to me for so little effort on my part.
I didn’t know quite what to make of them yet, but I realized that certain valuable facts had been laid before me like gold coins.
Dinner was another triumph for Chef Luigi Lattuada.
His kitchen seemed to be a culinary wonderland where food was prepared not by the usual methods but by the application of magic formulas and rare ingredients passed down through countless generations of sorciers de cuisine.
Over dessert, Franklin declared, “When the day comes I’m so old and feeble that I can digest nothing but pabulum, I’m sure Luigi will find a way to make it delicious. ”
“That could be as soon as Monday,” Gertrude said, and everyone laughed, especially the children.
After the family was well fed and after the chef had enjoyed his dinner with Julian and Victoria Symington, Mr. Lattuada and Franklin retired to the music room.
During the past few years, on either Saturday or Sunday night, their habit had been to take one generous snifter each of fine and highly illegal cognac while they listened to music of which both had become aficionados.
The music room contained a Steinway where Isadora took lessons but also comfortable chairs and a gramophone.
Franklin had a collection of 78-rpm disc records that in those days were made from a shellac compound and were heavier than the vinyl records that would come into home use years later.
To encourage the children to develop a wide background in culture, the door was left ajar; though they weren’t permitted to be in the music room and disturb the adults, they were encouraged to sit on pillows on the hallway floor and listen.
That was my first weekend at the Bram, and I settled on a pillow between Isadora and Gertrude.
They were familiar with the recordings and excited to hear them again.
Isadora whispered that we might want to dance.
If we did, we would have to move farther along the hall and do it quietly.
So it was there—September 13, 1930—that I first heard the group called the “Hot Five” and the singer and trumpet player who fronted them.
His name was Mr. Louis Armstrong, and of course everyone came to know him in time.
“West End Blues,” “Savoy Blues,” “Tiger Rag” .
. . During an amazing number called “Heebie Jeebies,” he sang some verses in what they called “scat,” making vocal sounds in imitation of instruments.
After listening for a while, Isadora and Gertrude could contain themselves no longer.
They got up from their pillows and moved about twenty feet along the hall, where they danced together, obeying the rule of silence.
Harry stayed where he was, rapt by the Hot Five but full of boyish disdain for dancing.
“Stupid girls,” he whispered. I felt the music in my heart, in my muscles and bones, and I wanted very much to dance, but I dared not.
I was neither dressed for dance nor properly constructed for it.
I sat and listened and comforted myself with the promise that I would dance in my dreams.
In fact, that night I did dance in my dreams. I had never done so before, because I’d never for a moment considered I could one day dance either while awake or asleep.
My imagination had not been able to encompass the possibility.
Now it could. I did more in my dreams than dance.
I explored the lush gardens of the Bram, which expanded far beyond their real-world dimensions, with new wonders everywhere I went.
At all times, parades of rabbits proceeded and followed me.
Small birds landed on my shoulders and sang to me.
Mr. Reinhardt and I got aboard his Ford truck and drove into the hills and found the doe with her six kittens, and we brought them home.
I was dancing again when a voice came to me out of the dolphin fountain: Alida, ask Mr. Reinhardt about mice.
Ask the children about the perfect world of peace and light.
It was a woman’s voice, one I did not recognize.
I’d never had the experience of being spoken to directly by a disembodied voice in a dream.
When the unseen speaker repeated those two instructions, I promised to do what she had asked.
The fountain overflowed, and I danced effortlessly on running water, through ferns and flowers, into moonlight and stars, into darkness and quiet.