Gypsies

The screen door creaked open. Mama stepped out into the porch light. Laura’s hands were shaking; she clasped them together in front of her.

“Yes,” she told her nephew. “This is it.”

Chapter Ten

1

His mother and his aunt shared a second-floor bedroom, but Michael had the third floor of this old house all to himself.

He liked it up here. His grandparents were too old to climb the stairs, so everything was covered with a fine layer of undisturbed dust, and everything was antique: furniture, he guessed, they had been packing around all their lives. Michael was accustomed to the house in Toronto, a new house full of new things, as if nothing had existed before the year 1985; the Fauves’ third floor was a shocking contrast.

His grandmother had come up once that first night, gasping on the stairs. She apologized for the clutter. “All this mess,” she said sadly. “When Mama Lucille died we put all her stuff up here. So this is your family, Michael. See? This was your great-grandfather’s rolltop desk. That big old bed belonged to my parents …”

The bed had sat for so long in this room, and was so massive, that the floorboards had curved around it. His mother aired the sheets and pillowcases for him, but the bed retained a characteristic odor, not unpleasant, of ancient down and ticking, of whole lives lived between its sheets. Sleeping there these last few nights Michael had wished he could make windows into past time as well as across worlds: that he could gaze back down the years and maybe discover the secret of his strangeness. Wished this old bed could talk.

He spent a lot of time up here. Considering the situation in the house, it was better to be alone. And, anyway, he liked to be by himself. Alone, he could let his thoughts roam freely. Nothing to fear up here, no Gray Man, only these old high corniced rooms with their ripply windowpanes and the winter sky showing through; only the trickle of the water in the radiator grills. Lying here, suspended in down and history, he could allow himself to feel (but faintly, carefully) the rush of secret power in himself, the wheels of possibility spi

He thought about it often.

Downstairs, things were different. A week in this house had not inured Michael to all the silence and indignities.

His grandmother insisted on cooking. Every evening he helped her with the heavy china platters: chicken and gravy, roast beef and potatoes, meat loaf and boiled peas relayed steaming from the tiny kitchen to the dining room. Jea

Tonight Michael helped her carry in a pot roast from the oven. Everything was in place: linen tablecloth, the china, the tarnished silverware. Everybody in their chair except Michael’s grandfather. Michael sat down at the foot of the table. He was hungry and the roast smelled wonderful, but he had learned to be patient. He put his hands in his lap; the mantel clock ticked. His mother whispered something to Aunt Laura.

Then, finally, Willis Fauve came ambling in from the downstairs bathroom, where he had washed his hands. Willis was not really a large man, Michael thought, but he was a big presence in the room. His forearms were big and he wore polyester pants cinched over his expansive belly and a starched white shirt open at the collar. He had a small face set in a large head, blunt features concentrated around heavy bifocals. He wore his hair in a bristly Marine cut and his thick eyebrows made him seem to be always frowning. Most of the time he was frowning. Certainly he did not ever seem happy.

Sometimes he would come to the table drunk. Not loudly or conspicuously drunk, but his walk would be unsteady and he would talk more than he normally did: mainly complaints about the neighbors. He would sit opposite Michael, and his acrid breath would waft across the table. Willis Fauve was a beer drinker. Beer, he said, was a food. It had food value.

Tonight Willis was just detectably drunk. Michael thought of him as “Willis” because he could not imagine calling this man “Grandfather.” Michael was acquainted with grandfathers mainly from TV: kindly, grizzled men in bib overalls. But Willis was not kindly; he was not even friendly. He had made it obvious that he regarded this visit as an intrusion and that he would not be happy until his privacy was restored. Sometimes—if he’d had enough to drink—he would come out and say so.

Willis sat down wheezing. Without looking at anyone he folded his hands in his lap and closed his eyes. Michael was supposed to do the same, but he kept his eyes open. “Thank you, Lord,” Willis Fauve intoned, “for this food which you have seen fit to set before us. Amen.”

Michael’s grandmother echoed the “Amen.” Willis began to circulate the pot roast. Michael took modest helpings.

He felt his grandfather’s attention on him while he ate. He kept his eyes on his plate, worked his knife and fork mechanically. But he felt Willis watching him. His grandmother tried to make some conversation, the shopping she’d done, what the hairdresser had said, but nobody could think of anything to add and the talk ran out of gas. Michael had pretty much cleared his plate and was looking forward to the end of the meal when his grandfather said, too loudly, “You know what I call that shirt?”

Michael’s shirt, he meant. Michael was wearing a Talking Heads T-shirt he’d carried with him from Toronto. Black T with a red-and-white graphic. Nothing spectacular, but he was moderately proud of the way he looked in it.

Nobody wanted to answer the question but Willis himself. Willis said brightly, “I call that a fuck shirt.”

Michael regarded his grandfather with bewilderment.

“I see these kids,” Willis said. “I drive by the high school every morning. I see the way they dress. You know why they dress like that? It’s like sticking up their middle finger. It’s an insult. It’s ‘fuck you.’ They’re saying that with their clothes.”

Michael had observed that Willis, who complained about profane language on TV, loosened up in that regard when he was drinking.

Karen said, “Michael forgot to change before di

Michael looked at his mother sharply. She returned the look, a warning: Don’t say anything… not now.

“A fuck shirt,” Willis repeated.

“Michael,” Karen said, “go change.” When he didn’t move, she whispered, “Please!”

He stood up sullenly.

At the stairs Michael paused a second to look back at the di

It was Willis who looked away. He said to Michael’s mother, “You let him dress like that?”

Michael moved on up the stairs.

“A fuck shirt,” Willis marveled, “at my di

But Michael understood the significance of Willis’s complaint. It’s not the shirt, he thought. You know it, I know it. It’s not the shirt you’re afraid of.