Borrowed Finery. Paula Fox

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      Grandfather Fox appeared at the Balmville house one afternoon. I sat on his bony lap and asked him why he sometimes whistled as he spoke. “False teeth,” he replied.

      I couldn’t recall seeing him before. He seemed pleasant if close-mouthed. I wondered if it was because he didn’t know me despite the fact that there I was, sitting on his lap. Perhaps I was being premature, as I had been with the bishop.

      Then he said to Uncle Elwood, with no reproach in his voice, “You are ruining my son,” and I understood that until that moment he had been holding back those words as if they were hard little pebbles, rolling around in his mouth. I didn’t understand what they meant.

      When I was a few years older, my father told me his father had attended a German university, where he had taken a degree in philosophy. Most of the other students had saber scars on their faces from the duels they had fought.

      My grandmother Fox, Mary Letitia Finch, had been one of five sisters, my father said. When admirers came to court them, their father would stomp into the living room, lift out a sword hanging in its scabbard over the fireplace mantel, and brandish it at them.

      One daughter, Sara Finch, had packed a footlocker at the age of fifty and moved to the Bowery in New York City, where she made the acquaintance of a sailor at a tavern. She lived with him a year until he found a desirable berth on a ship bound for South America. She then returned to her father’s house and proceeded to write love letters, signing the sailor’s name to them and mailing them to herself. She greeted their arrival with cries of joy if her father was nearby.

      My father recalled that another Finch sister had eloped with a Hungarian Jew. They had a child and named him Douglas, a family name. He grew up and became an actor, Douglas Fairbanks. He was my father’s first cousin.

      When Grandfather Fox returned from Germany to the United States, he had been able to find work only as a traveling salesman, a drummer, selling medical supplies, going from town to town lugging a huge black sample case.

      My grandmother’s tyrannical father had felt that his daughter had married beneath her when her husband became a traveling salesman, although when he was a philosopher he didn’t consider that she had.

      One morning when my grandfather left the family home for a week of peddling in Pennsylvania, my father, then a small boy, hid behind a tree and threw an apple core at him, shouting, “Red! Red!” at his redheaded father. He desperately didn’t want him to go away on still another trip for what must have seemed to him a year.

      Shortly after my grandfather’s visit, the minister drove me to Yonkers, to Warburton Avenue, where my Aunt Jessie Fox and my grandparents lived in a tall, narrow wooden house. I looked forward to the visit with curiosity and apprehension.

      My aunt had thin freckled hands and a slight hump below her right shoulder, which gave her an air of impending wickedness. It was a result, Daddy said, of an early bout with tuberculosis. She smoked continually. Often, as she spoke, she twisted and twirled her hands about. She was ten years older than her brother, my father, and, like him, had a beautiful voice, but she talked constantly, and it became beautifully monotonous.

      She led me through the many rooms of the house. They were either empty or crowded with furniture. In the long living room, on the wall behind a small sofa, hung a gold-framed mirror. It diminished the size of all that it reflected, and showed a scene as tiny and perfect and lifeless as a village inside a spun-sugar Easter egg I had once seen somewhere. When I looked away from it to the real room I was in, I realized how shabby and forlorn the furnishings were.

      Someone very old was sitting in a large chair in front of a table at the end of the room. She was wrapped in many scarves and a blanket but had worked one of her arms loose so she could do the crossword puzzle in a newspaper that lay on her lap. From time to time, she raised her head and stared into the distance through thick-glassed spectacles.

      “Here’s little Paula, Mother,” Aunt Jessie said.

      The old woman made a comment. I’ve forgotten the words, but I recall her voice, soft and cold and small, a sound that might have issued from something that lived on the bottom of the sea.

      Later that day, I sat at my aunt’s dressing table letting a necklace of bright glass beads flow from hand to hand. She told me the necklace had come from Venice, a city in Italy that floated upon water.

      She spoke about my father’s restlessness when he’d been a boy. She had waked many mornings just before dawn to discover her little brother, unable to sleep through the night, curled up on the floor beneath her bed. On other nights, he slept under his parents’ bed. “Even in winter when it’s so cold?” I asked her, startled by the image of him in a nest of dust and cobwebs. “Even in winter,” she replied.

      I noted that day how she spoke of men as “the little fellows,” but when she mentioned my father it was always by his name, Paul. “The little fellows came to repair our plumbing but they didn’t do so well,” she remarked when I told her that the faucet in the bathroom was leaking.

      At one point, she recalled an incident that involved her brother and began to smile. When my father was ten or so, he was standing beside her at a window that looked out on the skimpy lawn at the front of the house. It was a summer evening, and she was waiting for a suitor to call. As the young man came into view, walking up the cement path to the porch, Paul, who had not seen him before, made a derisive remark about him.

      My aunt had laughed. She was laughing as she told me about it, and had laughed as she had gone to the front door, opened it, and given the young man his “walking papers.” She could no longer remember his name.

      My grandmother lived to be 101, kept alive, my father told me some years later, by his sister’s desperate measures. Jessie was like a living bellows, breathing air, day after day, into the ancient woman’s exhausted lungs. When her mother died, Jessie began to slide into a state of senile dementia and was taken off to a local nursing home where, unless restrained, she bit her nurses when they attended her. She was carried out of life one day in a fit of deranged anger. My grandfather had died in his eighties, long before his wife and daughter, from what, I don’t know; but I attributed to him as his last conscious emotion—unjustly, perhaps—relief at leaving behind him his deplorable family.

      I drove past the house decades later. Warburton Avenue led to an old scenic drive along the east bank of the Hudson River. The front door was boarded up. It looked abandoned. I wondered who would be so desperate for housing that they would buy it.