Broken Flower (Early Spring 1)

"What?" I asked, my eyes wide with expectation.

"I menstruated,"

"What?" I scrunched my nose. It didn't sound very good or like any fun.

She was quiet. I saw her eves glisten. She was holding back tears. Why?

"I'm not going to have this conversation with you," she suddenly decided firmly, and stood up. "This is just not happening. We don't need to talk about this yet. Remember my warning, however," she added, nodding at me. "Don't let anyone else see you naked. Especially Grandmother Emma," she emphasized.

My mother hated the idea of our moving in to live with Grandmother Emma. I think the saddest day in her life was the day we walked out of our home and came here. In the begriming she would often forget, make wrong turns and head toward our old home, not remembering it was no longer her house until she nearly pulled into the driveway. On a few occasions, I was the one who reminded her. She'd stop and look and say, "Oh," as if she had just woken from a dream.

I had lived there five and a half of my six years and eleven months. Ian was just a little more than eight when my parents bought the house. Before that they had been living in one of my grandfather's apartment buildings. In those days there was supposedly a great deal of hope and promise. After all, how could my father not succeed? He was the son of Blake and Emma March, and my grandfather Blake March had been a vice president of Bethlehem Steel during its heyday, what Grandmother Emma called the Golden Age, a time when Bethlehem Steel supplied armies, built cities, and had a fleet of twentysix ships. If she had told me about it once, she had told me a hundred different times.

"You have to understand how important it was," she always said as an introduction. "Bethlehem Steel was the Panama Canal's second-best customer. Lunch each day for the upper management of which your grandfather was an essential part was held at the headquarters building along Third Street and was equivalent to a four-star dining experience. Each department had its own dining room on the fifth floor and each executive enjoyed a five-course meal."

Once Grandmother Emma permitted me to look at her albums and I saw pictures of their lawn parties during the summer months. Other executives from Bethlehem Steel and their wives and children would be invited, as well as many of the area's leading businessmen, politicians, lawyers, and judges. There was music and all sorts of wonderful things to tat. She told us that in those days the champagne flowed like water. She pointed out Daddy when he was Ian's age, dressed in his suit and tie and looking like a perfect little gentleman, the heir to a kingdom of fortune and power.

My mother always said my father grew up spoiled. Whenever she accused him of it, he didn't deny it. In fact, he seemed proud of it, as proud as a prince. For most of his young life, he was attended by a nanny who was afraid of not pleasing him and losing her job. When he was school-age, he was enrolled in a private school and then a preparatory school before going to his first university. He flunked out of two colleges and never did get a degree. My grandfather eventually set him up in business by foreclosing on a supermarket, which was renamed March's Mart, in Bethlehem. It was expected that because the business now had the March name attached, it could be nothing but a success and the expectation was Daddy would eventually create a supermarket chain.

However. Daddy's supermarket business was always hanging by a thread, or as my grandmother Emma would often say, "Was always doing a tap dance on the edge of financial ruin." Our expenses grew and grew and our own home became too much to maintain. Since my seventy-two-year-old grandmother lived alone now in this grand house after my grandfather had died, she decided that it made no economic sense for us to live elsewhere. Economics reigned in our world the way religion might in other people's lives.

Mama always said, "For the Marches, the portfolio was the Bible, with the first commandment being 'Thou shalt not waste a penny."

Even so, my father never had much interest in being a businessman. He hired a general manager to run the market and was so uninvolved in the day-today activities that it came as a surprise to him to learn it was on the verge of bankruptcy. My grandfather invested twice in it to keep it alive and after his death, my grandmother gave my father some money, too, but in exchange, she forced us to sell our home and move in with her. Daddy was permitted to have assistant managers, but he had to become the general manager.

After that, Grandmother Emma took over our lives as if my parents were incapable of running their own personal financial affairs. ''Practice efficiencies and tighten your belts"' were the words we heard chanted around us those days. Once I heard Mama tell Daddy that Grandmother Emma had cash registers in every room in her house ringing up charges even for the air we breathed. I actually looked for them.

It didn't surprise me that my mother had complaints about Grandmother Emma. I don't think my mother and Grandmother Emma were ever fond of each other. According to what I overheard my mother say to my father, my grandmother actually tried to prevent their marriage. My mother came from what Grandmother Emma called "common people. My mother's father also had worked for Bethlehem Steel, but as a steelworker, a member of the union and not an executive. Both her parents had died, her father from a heart attack and her mother from a massive stroke. Mama always said it was stress that killed them both, whatever that meant.

My mother had an older brother, Uncle Orman, who was a carpenter and lived way off in Oregon where, according to what I was told, he scratched out a meager living, working only when he absolutely had to work. He was married to my aunt Ada, a girl he knew from high school, and they had three boys they named after the Beatles. Paul, my age. Ringo, a year younger, and John, two years younger, all of whom we had seen only once. They were invited to visit us but never came, which was something I think pleased Grandmother Emma.

"Your grandmother thinks your father went slumming when he dated me," Mama once told me. At the time. I didn't know what slumming meant exactly, but have since understood it to mean Grandmother thought he should have married someone as rich or at least nearly as rich as the Marches.

However, even though Grandmother Emma scrutinized us like an airport security officer when we entered a room. I didn't think it would be too difficult to keep my new secret from her. Since we had moved into her house, my grandmother had not once set foot in my room. She didn't even come over to our side of the house and said nothing about our living quarters except to warn my mother not to change a thing. She had set up imaginary boundaries so that Ian and I were discouraged from going into her side as well.

We were now living in what had once been the guest quarters in what everyone in our community called the March Mansion. It was a very large Queen Anne, an elaborate Victorian style house Grandmother Emma described as romantic even though it was, as she said, a product of the most unromantic era, the machine age. She often went into great detail about it and I was often called upon to parrot her descriptions for her friends.

The mansion had a free classic style with classical columns raised on stone piers, a Palladian window at the center of the second story, and dentil moldings. The house had nineteen rooms and nine bedrooms. Although a great deal had been added on and redone, the house was built in the early 1890s and was considered a historic Pennsylvania prop city. which was something my grandmother never wanted us to forget. Her lectures about it made me feel like I was living in a museum and could be sat

down to take a spot quiz any moment of any day, which is what would happen if she asked me to recite about it to her friends.

Ian wouldn't mind being tested on the house. He could not only get a hundred every time, he could give my grandmother the quiz, not only about the house, but all the history surrounding it, even the history of her precious Bethlehem Steel Company.

Daddy's old bedroom was on my

.grandmother's side of the house, but we knew the door was kept locked. It was opened with what Ian called an old-fashioned skeleton key. Only Nancy, the maid, entered it once a month to dust and do the windows. I was always curious about it and longed to go into it and look at what had once belonged to him as a little boy. As far as I knew. Daddy didn't even go in there to relive a memory or find something he might have left from his younger days.

Mama told me this house was fall of secrets locked in closets and drawers. She said we were all better off keeping them that way. Opening them would be like opening Pandora's box, only instead of disease and illness, scandals would flutter all around us. I didn't know what scandals were exactly, but it was enough to keep me from opening any drawer or any closet not my own.

Ian's bedroom was next to mine but closer to our parents' bedroom, which was across the hall and down toward the south end of the house and property. Although they were originally meant to be guest rooms, all of our bedrooms were bigger than the bedrooms we had in our own house. Even the hallways in the March Mansion were wider, with ceilings higher than those in any home I had ever entered.

Along the walls were paintings my

grandparents had bought at auctions. There were pedestals with statuary they had acquired during their traveling and at estate sales. My grandmother was supposedly an expert when it came to spotting something of value that was underpriced. When she was asked about that once, she said, "If someone is stupid enough to sell it for that price, you should be wise enough to grab it up or else you would be just as stupid."

So many things in my grandmother's house once belonged to either other wealthy people who had bequeathed their valuables to younger people who didn't appreciate them or know their value, or wealthy people who had simply gone bankrupt and needed money desperately.

"One man's misfortune is usually another's good luck," Grandmother Emma said. "Be alert. Opportunity is often like a camera's flash. Miss it and it's gone forever."