ce, that everything had an understandable and explainable explanation, or what he called a cause and effect, once rattled off the downward slide of our family this way:
"Grandmother Emma and her husband. Blake. created Daddy's personality and weaknesses because of the manner in which they brought him up. They spoiled him and made him selfish. That's why he has not been a good father to us and a good husband for our mother, why he failed at business and why he womanized."
"What's womanized?" I asked him.
Ian's vocabulary was years ahead of my age, even years ahead of his own.
"He has sex with other women. Jordan."
"You mean with those tadpoles and eggs?"
He had once explained it all to me and showed me pictures of sperm, which had reminded me of tadpoles. At the time I'd had a great deal of trouble understanding the intricacies of the whole human reproduction process. Ian gave me a book about it on my seventh birthday. My mother was surprised he did that, but she thought it was probably sensible. To her. Ian was always more sensible than even my father, maybe especially my father. My grandmother, on the other hand, thought the book and Ian's giving it to me were disgusting. She, like my father, never understood Ian.
"Just listen," he said, impatient with my questions and interruptions. "I'm talking about our family, our father. His upbringing led him to make these choices and mistakes. Mother reacted to his mistakes and wanted to divorce him.
Grandmother Emma, who refused to permit the word failure in the March vocabulary, talked Mother into backing down, but as you know, she called them up in the Pocono Mountains at the family cabin where they were meeting to iron out their problems and told them those lies about us, making me look like some pervert just because I was studying your accelerated development and she caught me measuring your budding breasts."
"Perverted isn't nice," I said, shaking my head. I loved demonstrating whatever knowledge I possessed to Ian. I wanted his respect, even more than I wanted his love.
"Of course not. It's disgusting. However, if she hadn't done that, made that phone call. Daddy wouldn't have rushed out in the storm. They wouldn't have had the accident. He wouldn't be a paraplegic. Mother wouldn't be in a coma and Grandmother Emma wouldn't have hired this sadistic woman. Miss Harper, to be our minder."
"And you wouldn't have poisoned her." I could now add. He had taken rat poison from the
groundskeeper's shed and mixed it in the glass of water Miss Harper had kept at her bedside. She'd been very cruel to us, and when Ian had secretly taken me to see our mother at the hospital in Philadelphia, she'd punished him by taking all of his precious scientific things, including his private notebooks, out of his room.
Ian was already gone by the time Grandmother Emma had her stroke. As I sat thinking about the things he had told me. I concluded, as Ian would, that she had her stroke because of all the previous terrible events that now troubled her day and night. Her iron will finally crumbled under the weight of it all, and she collapsed. But even then, even now, in her battered and distorted form, she still managed to hold on to the reins and run our family.
She arranged for me to live with her sister_ my great-aunt Frances Wilkens, on a farm my grandfather and grandmother had seized in a foreclosure many years ago. She kept control of the family fortune and forced my father to agree to everything. She wasn't here, but her shadows still lingered on our walls and still reported to her. Every precious piece of antique furniture, every chandelier, every painting and sculpture, the very drapes hung waiting for her commands. The house remained loyal to her. She was still the monarch, the Queen of Bethlehem.
Pennsylvania. I could feel it even now as I sat there in my room, stared at the doorway and waited for Felix.
Daddy was below with his old girlfriend Kimberly, the woman who'd started all the recent trouble. He had been seeing her secretly, and Mother had found out. I wondered if he would wheel himself out of his bedroom to say good-bye. With his gaze down, his fingers kneading his palms like Nancy would knead dough for bread, he had told me my grandmother was probably right about my going to live with Great-aunt Frances. He would be unable to be a real father to me and with Ian now in some institution because of what he had done to Miss Harper. I would be terribly alone in this grand old mansion.
It had been on the tip of my tongue to say I had always been alone and he had never been a real father to me. but I'd swallowed it back with my tears and clung instead to my hope that someday soon my mother would get better and come for me. Together then, we would go get Ian and somehow, some way, all of us would be a family again. I wished hard for it as I fingered the locket she had given me for my last birthday. Inside were pictures of her and Daddy just after they had turned their love into a marriage, both wearing smiles trapped in gold. Ian whispered they were photographs of illusions. He made me believe they would simply disappear, so I checked often to see if they were still there.
Maybe he was right about illusions, however. In the hollow silence of this great house, in which even footsteps seemed to sink and be lost, it felt out of place to have any sort of hope. If Ian had been here, he would have analyzed it all carefully and told me why I had all these dark feelings rumbling under my heart.
"You're leaving for a place, a home you've never seen, to live with someone you've never met, someone you've only known through an old picture or some vague reference Grandmother Emma has made. Great-aunt Frances is like some fantasy, a storybook character.
"You're going to be entered into a new school and be alongside students you don't know. You won't have a mother or a father to accompany you and stand up for you. Everything will be unfamiliar, strange, even frightening.
"You won't have anyone to call. I'm in an institution. I haven't even answered your letters to me because Grandmother Emma never mailed them to me. You don't even know where I am exactly. No one will talk about it with you. You can't call me on the telephone. You wrote another letter describing what's happening to you, but you can't depend on Father sending it to me. Mother can't hear you or speak to you even if she could hear you, and as Grandmother Emma would say, our father is lost in his own selfpity.
"You still have your accelerated development to face. When the mothers of other young girls your age see you, they will probably not want their daughters to be around you. Some will think you're older and were left back or something. You saw some of that starting to happen here. They'll be afraid for their daughters. They won't call you a freak to your face, but they'll think of you that way. I'm sorry to have to tell you all this, but we have to think about it all sensibly."
"Then what should I do?" I asked my imaginary Ian.
He was silent. In my mind's eye I could see his eyes narrowing as they did when he gave something great thought. I waited patiently, relying on my imagination and my memory to help me realize what Ian's answer would be.
Suddenly his eyes lit up, his whole face brightening with his successful pursuit of an answer. They always came to him from some magical place. He heard voices no one else could hear.
'Be a March," he replied with his characteristic confidence. 'Be like Grandmother Emma."
"Like Grandmother Emma?'
"Yes."
"How?" I asked.