Acre Under a Green Sky

When we returned home from the office early that evening, my mother set upon us even before the door closed on our backs.

"That woman was here today!"

She was pacing the living room waving her half-full glass about as if it were a conductor's baton; punctuating her comments with it, rattling the ice cubes like a rattlesnake –– raging:

"That woman with her prim little hat and her rat-headed furs with the tails dangling down! Furs! Only your mother would dare wear furs in summer. Eighty-five degrees and she comes in here with those furs! And those cold black eyes of hers like onyx buttons and her mouth sucking on itself. You have her eyes! Terrible little black disapproving eyes like a rat! And what the hell is she doing with her mouth? Tasting herself? Constantly working that mouth around her bitter tongue. God, I hate that woman! 'Please tell me Josh isn't going to get involved with this business across the street,' she says. 'It'll ruin him,' she says. She standing there in a suit buttoned up to her neck with those rat-headed furs in eighty-five degree summer telling me I should talk to you, persuade you, show you how 'ill-advised' it would be to get involved with 'people like that'! Surely, I can see that, she says.

"'But Luka didn't do it!' I said, 'I know he didn't!' And she finds it all so distasteful. 'Even to have to discuss such matters.' With me!!-she meant. That bitch is standing in my living room tugging on the wrist of one of her gloves. Gloves! Your mother came into my house wearing gloves!"

At last, she seemed to require some response from my father.

"Have you been drinking all day?" he said.

"Haven't you heard a word I said? That woman was here today! And if she ever comes back, I'll kill her! I swear I will!"

That woman was my father's mother who years later would starve herself to death in a nursing home. Her name was Natalie, and it was the purest coincidence that both she and my grandfather would try to stop my father's involvement in the murder case on the same day. They were certainly not in cahoots. The fact that they agreed was probably testament to the wisdom of his pulling out of the case. It was not, however, a statement of their common bond. If anything, they were bound together by hatred.

As a young woman, Natalie was extremely attractive to a score of young men as well as to my grandfather. She was pretty and she had a high sense of style and she was insane. Only her mother knew the extent of her mental illness, and she was not shy about warning off suitors. But, sadly, Natalie's insanity was not the off-putting kind. It was wildly intriguing and invariably misinterpreted as flamboyance with a mix of superiority and danger. The mood swings of a very pretty girl can be both unsettling and arousing to a young man. Being highly excitable one moment and morose the next can strike a young man as daring when the turn of expression is on a lovely pale face with dark penetrating eyes. Physical agitation is downright alluring when it is the body of a full-figured eighteen-year-old girl that won't be still. And dark paranoia can so easily be misread as playing hard to get when a young man has set his cap on a haughty beauty taking refuge in the remote recesses of terror.

My grandfather was a poor, unattractive, highly ambitious young man who simply would not take "no" for an answer. He wooed her unrelentingly; long after her more desirable suitors had given up the chase. He would 'have' and he would tame this wild, unattainable creature. And in time, he married her, but he would never tame the demons tormenting her. They had three children; my father being the eldest, and then they separated forever.

But my grandmother would remain inextricably bound to my grandfather for the rest of her life. She fixated on him like a pit bull, and gloried in the most implausible slanders against him. She claimed he was phoning her in the middle of the night to brag about his sexual exploits with every female available to him. He had her phone tapped, and had her prospective suitors run out of town. We kids heard all of this over the phone along with graphic details of his prowess and abuse until the day my father accidentally picked up an extension phone in the bedroom and overheard her insane ranting and pleas for information about my grandfather's comings and goings. He ended it then and there. He fixed it. No more phone calls. But that was many years after her rare afternoon visit to my mother on Ledge Avenue.