Body of Knowledge

by Carol Dawson

Genres: Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; Short Stories

Synopsis

Carol Dawson's outrageous second novel chronicles the decline and fall of a strange dynasty--from post-frontier Texas to the present day. It's the story of a secret war, of obsession, fear, loathing, and betrayal. But most of all, BODY OF KNOWLEDGE is the story of Victoria Grace Ransom, the story's 600-pound narrator, whose engrossing secret gradually reveals itself in a novel as big as all Texas. "Gorgeously crafted, intelligent and wholly original."--Los Angeles Times Book Review ; "The best novelist to emerge from Texas in years."--Texas Monthly. A BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB and QUALITY PAPERBACK BOOK CLUB SELECTION.

Release date: July 1, 2012

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 299

Sample

The child stands outside under the fringe of trees as usual, at the woods’ edge that begins the lawn. I can see her, partly hidden behind a post oak trunk, peering intensely around it at the house front. This is her customary summer hour. An apron of shade, spangled with sunlight, stretches from the foot of the tree toward the open grass, but it fails to swallow the toe of a red tennis shoe poking out through the weeds. Her dark head emerges from behind the bark just enough to reveal the curve of her skull and the forehead glimmering. The distance is too great for me to tell the color of her eyes, but I suspect that they are black, matching her hair, and that they miss nothing. I have seen her far more often lately than I used to. Although it is more than three years since the morning she first appeared, smaller then, far less bold, she seems as curious as ever, and she has refined her spying techniques a good deal—during the summer she spends as much as two hours a day creeping from bush to grove, slipping around the old carpentry workshops, tiptoeing through the stables, gazing at the windows of this house as if she would penetrate their secrets by sheer will alone. I know, of course, what she wants. She wants to see me.

What does she imagine, as she stares so relentlessly towards the porch? Is she hoping for the front door to open? Would she be afraid? It could be she thinks a witch lives in here: someone spidery, unspeakable. Has she heard the stories they tell of us in Bernice? Perhaps an adult has repeated a rumor about a man who once cut off his own head, or the police report of the murder and the so-called burglary. Probably she has seized a crumb or two about Mother. Doubtless she wonders over the mysterious comings and goings here at which the general public can only guess, the skeletal facts being all they have to go on. The rich owe no one explanations. I am the sole member of the Ransom family the inhabitants of Bernice have never met, and the word skeletal, so fine-lined and angular as I write it here, is one I must regard with tender irony, things being as they are. Certainly some events, such as the time the town’s chief undertaker suddenly moved to Arkansas, six days after completing a Ransom burial, thereby severing all communication with friends and acquaintances in Bernice, Texas, forever, must stick in people’s minds. Or our very conspicuous absence at the Macafee family funeral back in 1923, which Grant Macafee threw New Orleans style with the black ragtime band hired in from Lafayette to lead the hearse, and the punch and petits fours served afterwards under the elms in the cemetery. They remember that. But people do not know why these things occurred.

Who will read this chronicle? I know that Nyla would be incapable of doing so. Other than that, who is there? Not a soul. The lawyers would recoil in a cold sweat if they knew that certain circumstances of the Ransom family were being recorded, or might see daylight. They have spent years suppressing what vague suspicions they have in their own minds. For the lawyers, no doubt, such rumblings disturb their Sunday dinners. I cannot blame them, being a victim of poor digestion myself. But that is neither here nor there. When they write to me, sight unseen, I imagine they picture some veiled, reclusive, ethereal woman, reminiscent of my great-aunt Mavis after her tragedy, or my mother. They do not question my refusals to talk with them in person, being accustomed to the family habits. As to their imagined picture of me, they could not be more mistaken. Except for the reclusion, of course.

But the little girl is different. To walk up the long drive past the greeting stone, through the woods, around the lakes, to actually reach the edge of the overgrown lawn itself, must challenge her courage. Perhaps someone has whispered within her hearing the terrible details of Grandfather’s crowning act—a merest whisper, overheard by chance, just enough to whet her determination. Perhaps the house, with its sugary marble grandeur, lures her.

Maybe she even knows about Baby Boy.

Whatever the case, there she is, out there, waiting.

First I cite physical conditions: I am the last of the Ransoms. There is no one left but me. Since earliest childhood I have remained immured within these grounds, concealed from all but the most private of viewers. This is because a freak’s nature admits only limited future social prospects. My destiny lies here. For the last few years I have been isolate; for certain reasons, almost inviolably so. Except for Nyla. And the fact that Nyla is here at all, and is someone I could not get rid of even if I could get along without her, has reinforced my solitude.

In order to explain how I came to be, to track the full, glorious preponderance of my incarnation, it is necessary to revel in history. Otherwise, what could possibly justify the quality of such a life?

I want to know. By God, I do.

It was Viola, of course, who told me about the ice money. It was Viola who told me everything. But I was the one who found this, the letter from my great-grandfather that began it all.

Planters’ Hotel
Saint Louis, Mo.
July 8, 1908

My Dearest Arliss,
You cannot conceive of the beauty that greeted my tired eyes on this sultry July day in Saint Louis, after a morning spent combating misery and a taste like cotton on my tongue. Upon finishing a poorly cooked luncheon, I retired to the hotel’s gallery to try and catch what little breeze there was in the street. There I called to the boy and told him to bring me a drink: “Any kind,” I said. He returned from the bar with a tall silver cup, adorned with a sprig of mint. But the loveliness lay in the way the sides of the cup misted over, as if it had passed through a chilly fog. Droplets stood out on the metal, reminding me of a cool spring bubbling from rocks, or the kitchen window during a frosty spell. In other words, the cup was cold! and held a mixture which I can only compare to Ambrosial Nectar. Holding it in my hand led me to think. Now, I know that Texans imbibe such drinks. I have often heard Governor Deloache praise them, in midst of our work on some civic project, and I have wondered what a mint julep could be like. But Bernice lacks one of its prime ingredients. And let me assure you, my dear wife, that the result was what saved your husband’s spirit on this hot day in a distant capital. Gone was the searing summer bane—or if not gone, then appeased. By what? Ice! The drink was made with ice. Now, we in Bernice have forgone this luxury. The town has been civilized such a short time that I don’t think anyone recognizes what a deficiency marks our way of life, relying on the spring houses as we do. It may strike you as a trivial concern to spend one’s energies on, when, as you so very often remind me, we have our chores cut out for us in the planning and governing of our town. But such concerns become colossal when used to oppose our oppressor, the Texas summer. Why has not some enterprising person taken it upon himself to institute ice’s charity? Certainly, during the winter, we get an occasional supply of it; but we don’t require it then, it is redundant. That mint julep was one of the happiest experiences of my forty-five years. I understand, from what Mr. Lawrence, the manager here at the hotel, tells me, that ice is a commonplace in eastern cities. Even in Dallas they have a factory! On my return, I intend to investigate this frigid haven with all haste, and to bring its balm back to Gilead.

I catch the four-fifteen back home tomorrow. I trust you and the children are well.

Your loving spouse,
Garner Ransom

P.S. I will inform Governor Deloache of my success regarding our transactions on my return. If you happen to see him beforehand, Please Do Not avail yourself of the opportunity to do so, as this is men’s business, and falls within my duties as Bernice’s City Clerk. I know that you, my dear, dear Arliss, with your wisdom and intelligence, will understand my plea.

This letter, written by my great-grandfather during the sole journey he ever made away from his wife’s side, arrived at his small shotgun house on Bois D’arc Street on July 10th, 1908.

A few hours later my great-grandfather himself followed it. He kissed his three children hello, went straight to Governor Deloache’s house to tell him the results of their “men’s business,” and then drove out into the country to have a chat with his old acquaintance, Mr. Archibald Macafee. At Mr. Macafee’s ranch, as he sat in the pine-board parlor and sipped a tepid bourbon-and-branch water, my great-grandfather shared his brainstorm. “Come to Dallas with me,” he urged Mr. Macafee. “Let’s take a look at this ice house.” Apparently Mr. Macafee too was hot and thirsty. For Archibald Macafee, who had stuck to cattle all his life, agreed to accompany my great-grandfather without delay.

Thus the initial partnership, pilgrimate in its overtones (balm to Gilead!), began on that steamy thirty-five-mile train ride. As they traveled together over the yellow dust-cloaked plains, Garner Ransom outlined his design in greater detail, and touched Archibald Macafee for the cash. Thus the poetry of ice was made manifest. And thus, a union with far-reaching implications was formed, which has connected the two families in arcane and arctic practices of the soul forever since.

My goodness. How one mint julep changed the destiny of my family, not to mention the entire town.

Within a year, my great-grandfather and Archibald Macafee had built two factories to supply not only Bernice but three nearby communities as well. The ice business caught on like a prairie fire, changing customs, altering the habits of everyone from the milkman to the local undertaker. All at once the meat stopped turning green in a day. Ice cream could be cranked before dinner and still eaten with a fork for dessert, and for the first summer in memory matrons saw the point in setting the table with butter knives. By 1909, when ladies got the afternoon flutters they could soothe their heads with an ice pack. Babies drank yesterday’s milk before it curdled. Children grew bilious on cold sarsaparilla. In short, the “trivial concern” that a hard-nosed wife might have condemned became the RanMac Chill Company, providing an invaluable service.

“YOUR GREAT-GRANDDADDY made a lot of money when he started off, but it was nothing like what he made after he let his imagination loose on the world,” said Viola. By that, she meant the oil money, and the Ford dealerships. The oil came after the ice venture. What excited my great-grandfather about it, as he paced the floor of his new office downtown, was its pedigree: from ancient forest and rotting dinosaur to befouler of well water to fuel for locomotion. When oil was discovered in West Texas, he was romantic enough to decide that the fields of Bernice must yield it, too, despite the reports of his geologists. He hired a team of drillers to probe a few acres of land he had bought on spec. Soon the black prehistoric soup was spouting from the ground, just as he had predicted, into the tanks he had ready for it. That same year he bought the woods, meadows, and pastures that became the Ransom estate, and, deep inside the post oaks at its heart, he built this house.

I live in a palace of white rock. Limestone from the Hill Country, slabs from Carrara, the columns of feldspar that front the porch: these rose up from the scrub landscape at my great-grandfather’s command until now they stand three stories tall against the blue sky. When I stroll along the porch, looking at the lawns pooled like green water between the azalea beds and the tangled rose gardens, watching the lake ripple under its arched bridge, and I run my hand over a pillar, or knock against the rough cheek of limestone, and hear the doves call from the woods beyond, I know what work and vision it took for him to impose this emerald isle set in its dry brush sea. Even so, it was not for himself. His birth home—the two-room log house with the dogtrot, the corncob mattress and frayed quilt and the patch of gilt on an old picture frame, his first glimpse of gold—did not goad him. This house on the still-raw frontier was not built for his tastes.

He built it for Arliss.

“I SWEAR this house been quiet as a tomb ever since Miss Arliss died,” Viola said in the kitchen, watching Bessie make cookies. Bessie was strictly the cook, but Viola did everything else in the house. “Was a time she use to have parties every weekend.”

“Law, yes,” said Bessie.

“Ladies wearing long white dresses, carrying little umbrellas they called parasols. I recollect Miss Arliss hollering at me one morning, ‘Now don’t you forget this time to give me my parasol, Viola, before I go call on Mrs. Deloache. I must have it or the sun will sap my strength.’ What a woman need with a parasol when she got on a hat the size of a laundry basket I sure don’t know. But ‘Viola!’ she’d holler. ‘You bring me my card case and hurry up about it, the trap’s waiting this minute.’ Them cards—everybody in town know perfectly well who Miss Arliss was, she don’t need to advertise. Ladies sure made me laugh in those days.”

“Mm-mm!” Bessie agreed, dropping some molasses snaps onto the sheet.

“Was she sickly, to need to keep off the sun?” I asked.

“Shoo! Miss Arliss was strong as a mule. She wore a long string of pearls down her bosom, even in the bathtub. Chock-full of pride, too.”

“In what way?” I loved to hear her tell it.

“Getting rich done gone to her head. She sassed over her old friends like the Queen of Sheba. She come in the first place from an old cotton farm out Tyrone way! From nothing but dirt-scratchers. She didn’t like to recollect that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it burned her up, that’s why. She wanted to pretend she been born to plenty. She didn’t like to recollect the time her husband was nothing but the city clerk, neither, or how the money come.”

“Do you recall that time?”

“Why, I reckon I do. I was living in her kitchen pantry room five full years before Mr. Ransom got the money.”

“Five full years. Sleeping in the kitchen pantry,” I repeated, pondering. “On the old wooden army cot.” Since the day she turned eleven years old Viola had worked for the Ransoms. One month before she came knocking on the back door of the shotgun house on Bois D’arc Street to ask for a job, her entire family, parents, brothers and sisters, had burned to death in a grease fire inside their shanty on the east side of Bernice. Viola had been spending the night helping an aunt in childbirth at the time. Her surviving relatives told her afterwards she was now going to have to go out and earn a living; they could not afford to keep her, and had no extra room in their homes. It was she who took over the care and raising of Arliss’s three children, playing with them in the back yard through the long afternoons, listening out for the cries of their bad dreams at night, teaching my grandfather William to slick down his hair with spit, trundling the toddler Sarah around in the arms that were still cocked open and ready for her own younger siblings. All this while she was still no more than a skinny little girl herself.

I was seven years old, and she had told me all of this. But Viola so completely made my world that I could not yet begin to imagine hers.

“What did Arliss like to recollect?” I asked instead. I closed my eyes, trying to conjure the living, breathing Arliss, my great-grandmother that Viola described so well and often, to bring her forth there before us.

“How rich she was.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” said Bessie.

“How did she do that?”

“She bought things! Miss Arliss had fifty different party dresses from New York City,” explained Viola. “She had twenty-four pairs of satin shoes, and three fancy capes and a fur cape. The fur cape was out of chili fur or something like that. It ain’t raccoon and it ain’t mink.”

“Chinchilla?” My own mother had a chinchilla stole, which I had seen. Mentally I draped the cape around Arliss’s wide white shoulders.

“Yeah,” Viola answered. “She wore that one in the winter. And when we moved to this here house, she got all the furniture and the china and the glass from Europe. She put on the dog, my land! She told your great-granddaddy how she want this house to be, and he have to do it, just like before he got rich and she told him how to run the courthouse.”

“That was when she told him to give the hunting parties, and invited people all over Texas,” I said. Viola nodded, smiling grimly. I had already gathered many details of these parties, and Arliss’s presiding over them. She would go into the fields with the men to shoot birds, while the other ladies remained back in the house, eating little sandwiches and drinking lemonade. They tried to imitate Arliss on some things, but not that one. She fished as well. She would instruct Ezra to bear champagne to the hunting field, or down to the river if there was a fish-meet, in the manner she had understood was used throughout aristocratic England and Scotland.

“Bernice was too dull for Miss Arliss,” Viola added. “She get mean when she get her money, but she was a mean woman anyhow.”

“Surely was,” growled Bessie. “Remember that time Dandy still work for Mrs. March?”

“Yes, yes. Mrs. March, she was a Baptist lady from Mississippi,” Viola said to me.

“She told me the same thing, Dandy do,” Bessie said. “She say she never met a meaner white woman than Miss Arliss. She act just like a hurricane when she got mad. One time she go call on Mrs. March, when the Ransoms still in that house on Bois D’arc Street, before the ice house, and she say that boy what done the gardening had been taking Dandy out behind Miss Arliss’s woodshed. ‘Just like a bitch in heat!’ Miss Arliss hollered. She was madder than a rattlesnake caught in the corner. ‘You keep that gal of yours in your kitchen, Mrs. March, or I’m going to whip her myself.’ Dandy hear it all, but she wasn’t scared. Mrs. March was sweet as could be, she treated Dandy good. Mm-mm! Miss Arliss was mean, all right.”

“That was before Dandy left Mrs. March’s house to go work for You-Know-Who,” Viola said. Then she shot me a sidelong look. “You know what Bessie mean? About that Dandy and the woodshed?”

“No,” I lied.

“That’s enough of that, Bessie. You hush about Dandy, now. Victoria remembers her good, from the time she come to visit us when Victoria was a tiny. She always talked too much anyhow.”

“May I have another biscuit, please, Bessie?” I asked.

“So Miss Arliss give a lot of parties when she got rich,” continued Viola. I buttered my biscuit and waited. “Yes, she surely did.” She leaned back and shut her eyes. Soon she began to whistle through her nose. I ate three more biscuits. Bessie measured the ingredients for pecan cake into a bowl, and began to beat the eggs. She did it gently, so as not to make much noise; Viola hated to be jerked awake.

By the time Bessie was pouring batter into the pans, Viola’s lids had begun to flutter. “Oh, law,” she sighed. “Miss Arliss give parties that folk come from the whole state to dance at. And barbecues and all kinds of food parties. Luncheons and dinners. We sure worked a lot harder in them days than we do now.”

“Huh. I don’t know about you, you best talk for yourself,” Bessie muttered.

“Your mama, she have her little party sometime, but child, they ain’t nothing like Miss Arliss’s. And she never let Miss Mavis come to them, neither. Not till Miss Sarah went away.”

I had always watched Mother’s dinner parties, and her bridge afternoons with cocktails, from my place on the staircase landing. It was an amenable arrangement. But I could understand how it would certainly have galled Mavis.

“When Miss Sarah have a luncheon or a tea for her friends, she let Miss Mavis come. But she still not allowed to dance. You guess why! Yes, though, Miss Arliss was tall as a soldier, and she danced to beat the band. What time is it, Bessie?”

“Two, two-thirty,” Bessie mumbled around her snuff.

“Time for my rocker in the sunshine. If folk ask me what Miss Arliss doing today, I say, ‘Miss Arliss up in heaven, telling Gabriel the right way to hold his fork, when he’s doling out the manna.’ And then I say, ‘And he better listen good.’”

GARNER RANSOM’S partner, Archibald Macafee, loved to remember what Arliss preferred to forget.

“Wasn’t that one whale of a day, when we climbed on that train, Garner?” he said at a hunting breakfast one morning, as they sat around the huge mahogany table sipping coffee over the remnants of scrambled eggs and toast and fried quail. Among the guests present were the lieutenant governor, three businessmen from Connecticut, and a minor German count. “I tell you! And didn’t we have us a time in Dallas, going through that factory like a couple of cowhands on a Saturday night spree?”

“Yes, we sure did,” said Garner, smiling in reminiscence.

“And I declared I’d never dream of investing in anything so farfetched and high-faluting.”

“I believe the price of beef is predicted to climb this year, isn’t it?” said Arliss, turning to the neighbor on her right, although talk of cattle or cotton bored her silly.

“And then, you old coon dog, you poked me and said it was going to cost me ten thousand dollars and a mortgage on my ranch to taste the same damn drink you had for ten cents up in Saint Louie. By God—by God!” And he laughed and chuckled, thumping the table with his fist. Then he reached an elbow over and nudged Arliss.

“That’s the truth, Archibald,” said Garner. “It was one hot afternoon, too, I can recall.”

“Whooee! Was it ever! All the more inspiring. Or should I say ‘perspiring’? Haw, haw.” And Archibald stood up, and proceeded to regale the whole table with the story of how he and his friend got rich.

That was the first occasion. But Archibald enjoyed himself so much telling it that soon he developed the habit. Every time Arliss and Garner would go to a party, there he’d be, talking and talking, catching every ear he could with his one big adventure, and roping my great-grandfather into it as well. Then one day Arliss could take no more. In the middle of an important formal banquet, right at the point when he said, “How about that train going Dallas way, Garner?” Arliss shoved back her chair, stood up, whirled around, and stomped out of the room. The trouble was, it was her own party, and they had only just started the soup. Everybody began talking and whispering, commenting on what a powerful strength of mind Arliss commanded, and how adroitly she could make her feelings plain without one word. Archibald cocked his head at the dining room doors, and looked puzzled for a moment. “Why, Garner,” he said, “is Arliss troubled about something?” My great-grandfather sighed. “Wind, I think, Archibald.” All the guests fell deathly quiet for the remainder of the meal.

Perhaps that was the beginning of the terrible split between the Ransoms and the Macafees. In any event, it was the last time Archibald Macafee was ever invited to this house. I regard it as a pity, because he was a widower. His wife had died many years before, and he must have grown lonesome, living out on the old Macafee ranch, companioned only by men, with not one good cook among them. But if he missed coming to Arliss’s parties he was too polite to say so. Her stomach trouble grew and grew in his mind, until it swelled to an affliction of Job-like proportions. He would come up to this house with one express purpose, wait until Viola opened the door, and then ask in a whisper loud as a squeaking hinge, “Tell me, Viola. How is Mrs. Ransom? Is that poor lovely woman still a martyr to her food?” And when Viola replied, “Oh, Mr. Archibald, the doctor say he can’t do nothing at all,” he’d shake his head, make a tch-tch sound with his tongue, exclaim “Such a tragedy!” and go away again without disturbing anyone. The fact that Arliss possessed a digestive tract like an iron foundry never entered his head. It nearly drove her mad in the years to come how her snub missed home. She had to put up with his kindness for the rest of his life, and she often complained to Viola that it was ten times worse hearing about it than hearing any malice he might have spread regarding her, because all of Bernice came to believe in her malady, and every time she would choose to pursue some unorthodox whim they excused her by saying it must be her belly made her do it. If there was one thing Arliss detested, it was to get misunderstood.

Archibald Macafee’s innocence failed to pass down to his only son, Grant.

His mother died when he was six years old. She had come from Scottish stock, followers of John Knox, as had her husband. But whereas Archibald Macafee exemplified the shrewd good will of a pioneer, and left religion to those less rooted in the soil than he, his wife pursued God and His predestined plans with a fanatic’s zest. From what little I have heard of her, she was primarily known as the first figurehead of the Bernice Presbyterian Church, a woman noted for her good works, stern nature, and inexorable dogma. She had been poor when she married; the legacy she left to her son was an abstract one. But her heritage remained imprinted on his features, graven in his personality. Everyone always agreed that Grant was his mother’s boy.

“Grant Macafee always reminded me of the boy loitering at the open windowsill, sneering at the cooling cherry pie he couldn’t have,” Grandfather once told me.

My grandfather William and Grant Macafee attended school together. There they kept out of each other’s way. The Bernice elementary school was small at that time, the classrooms uncrowded. But apparently Grandfather, and Grant also, marshaled the intuitive wisdom to avoid contact. Otherwise their profound difference was sure to lead to trouble.

At the time my grandfather said to me what he did concerning Grant, they were both well into their fifties. He then added, “When we were boys, Grant Macafee was hell with a rock in his hand. We used to have rock fights in the schoolyard after class. Grant grew notorious as a dead shot.” Grandfather bore a faint silver scar on his temple, above the cheekbone, which he touched ever so lightly as he said this. Perhaps that, rather than Arliss’s banishment of Grant’s father, was where the enmity began. Or perhaps it came from some later battle. Grandfather could have been a network of scars inside, all inflicted by life among the Macafees, and he would not have let me know it.

When the ice partnership crystallized, however, the two boys, now in early adolescence, suddenly found themselves thrown together.

Viola said to me: “Some folk are born all in one piece, and they stay that way for all their days. Ain’t nothing they can do about it. They’re never even babies.”

In Viola’s opinion, Grant came out on his birthday the way he meant to stay.

As a child he was apparently friendless. Nobody invited him anywhere or solicited his company; chances were he would have refused them had they done so. Then the partnership bloomed between his father and Garner Ransom. “We want you two to be chums,” the fathers urged. “Come on, boys, it’s Saturday. We’re going to take you out hunting.” So the two children marched through the cornfields together for their parents’ sakes. But a David-and-Jonathan intimacy failed to evolve. Grant shirked it, William shrank from it, and according to Viola, the best they could manage was to eye each other askance, shuffle their feet and speak with good manners. The dynamics changed somewhat when they were grown. But only for awhile, before the real trouble began.

“But my Mr. William, he was the soft one,” said Viola. “It ain’t no fault of his that Mr. Grant got born with a hole where his stomach ought to been. You listen to me, child, it’s the stomach from where we get the juice of human love. Most people think it’s the heart, but it ain’t. You look at Mr. Grant Macafee. His pieces all stuck together like a scarecrow. He’s so dried out that if you blow on him, he fly away.” She turned to me. “That’s why I’m glad my lamb here is so nice and round. It means you busting with good juice.”

“I am?” I stared at her longingly.

“Well, naturally. What else you think? Look at you! But Mr. Grant, now—the only time he ever plumped out a little was when he got to mooning over Miss Sarah, and look where that landed us all. He dried back up after she gone. Yes, you could pour the cooking into his mouth, and it just disappeared, he’d squeeze it all out again like bile.”

My grandfather William Ransom was short and compact, built like a nail keg. His sturdy red neck, rising above the white constriction of his collar, is one of the features I recall best about him: I can see that head like a burnished block, set squarely on its pillar, as he peers down and levels brown eyes dim with reserved tenderness to my hands where they clutch at his trouser leg. He does not smile, but seats himself wordlessly in an armchair, so that he can then invite me into his lap—for at that time I am already too “round” to hoist into anyone’s arms. He does not sigh. He does not say anything. He runs his palm over my shoulder, and then pats it. The formality of his caress is in keeping with the rest of him: no