Grandmother died—the bough of the evergreen on our balcony split and fell. The wind blew still, and the city stayed silent, and all this happened on the Tuesday before my 12th birthday.
Grandmother’s house was a tower of brick, a Park Avenue palace to which I had never been invited. Mother tells me her furniture was plastic-wrapped—too pristine to be released from its casings; too high to be touched by the sticky hands of new life. Grandmother was Grandmother Who Had Not Spoken, for we were the generation who had never heard her voice, and she was Grandmother Who Was Not Seen because she refused to show her face in our Bed-Stuy slum. Her grandchildren huddled in a matchbox apartment, Grandmother sat on Park Avenue and did not think of us.
She did not think of us when springtime came with flowers, her new life pleading with Grandmother to forgive, to begin anew. She did not think of us in the summer heat, for as long as her juleps were chilled so was all the city that seemed to matter—never mind our aircons that dripped more than they did blow. She did not think of us when the leaves began to fall and the familial whirl of Thanksgiving took the city. She did not think of us as the air turned cold and Mother repeated no money for heat. And each year, when Mother pulled the evergreen I once learned was ever green because it was, in fact, plastic, out from the closet and onto the fire escape we called a balcony, Grandmother did not wrap presents or write cards. The tree on Park Avenue was real, dripping diamonds of pinesap that stuck her Givenchy heels to the hardwood.
So it was hardly a surprise that we did not think of her, and had not thought of her for some time, until that night on the Tuesday before my 12th birthday, when all of Bed-Stuy heard the cracks.
***
Grandmother did not approve of bastard children. They are an Affront to The Lord Our God. But bastards she saw when a semester of study abroad in France turned into a yearlong series of visits from a Spanish stranger and Mother coming home on a red-eye, arms occupied with two squealing bundles the color of teakwood. And Mother soon learned that even lower in Grandmother’s regard than bastard children were bastard children the color of teakwood. The plane landed and she caught a cab, and she snuck in while Grandmother was still sleeping like she did as a teenager and waited for morning. Seamus and I cried and Grandmother woke, and she saw that we were bastards and saw that we were teak, and it was get out stay out and I have no daughter and Mother was sleeping in a shelter, a once-rich city girl with no money of her own and no place to go. I asked her once didn’t she have friends to take her in. Mother said she’d rather have raised us in that shelter than accept the scorn-filled pity of Park Avenue. Her friends from home were far from friends, and those far from home were moving on, up and away from where she sat.
***
Incidentally, Mother’s Father was also Not Seen and Had Not Spoken, but this was simply because he was dead. Mother says if he hadn’t been dead Grandmother might have let us stay. But he was dead.
Mother says lots of things. She says we’re not bastard children, Seamus and I. She tells us not to listen to the kids who call us that. She says bastards are unwanted, unplanned—a result of mere lust and nothing but. Mother says we are children of love. Of two people who would be together today were it not for the extenuating circumstances of war and death.
She says she named me Eleanor so that Grandmother might look at me and see herself in my eyes as she heard me in her name. Mother thought that Grandmother might pause for one who bore her title. She says she was wrong and sometimes people are truly just determined to hate.
Mother says Father was a military man, a young black recruit with a diamond smile and the kindest, softest eyes, like pools of burnt amber. Stationed in Naval de Rota for the year, he was handsome and charming and the love of her life from the moment she saw him in that Toulouse nightclub. In the weeks to follow, he snuck past sergeants and borders, covered by camo and the havoc of a civil war, to visit her whenever the opportunity presented itself. Two months later it was Christmas, and he surprised her with a tiny plastic evergreen under which he’d stuffed hundreds of handwritten letters because he loved her and was too poor to buy all the gifts he thought she deserved.
He was going to propose, she told us, Seamus and I. He was just so young. So broke. But they talked about all of it. And Evelyn, he told her, I will go to war, and they will pay for school, and I will go where you go. I will make some money, enough to make us a life, and I will talk to your mother, convince her to see I’m a good man, and Evelyn, I will come home and get down on one knee and look up at you with a real diamond ring in my hand and tell you that nothing would make me happier than to call you my wife. Father had a plan, Mother said.
But Father is dead too. Sometimes plans do not happen.
***
The Christmas trees on Park Avenue are like no others. Huge and glistening, taking over the street with the scent of the Catskills and wilderness we have never seen. Seamus and I wanted nothing more than to own such a magnificent thing. Just once. But the trees on Park Avenue cost more than our rent, and the little money we had from the odd jobs that a pair of soon-to-be-12-year-olds could get went to helping Mother keep the lights on. We were each allowed to keep some for ourselves. A little bit and nothing more.
The tree with the bough that broke was an outcast of the Park Avenue gang. We found it pressed up against a wall in an alley by the Brooklyn Bridge, guarded by a man in an overcoat. It was an outcast because of the hole in the back, a blight of brown amidst bright green needles. And also because of a broken bough—a large branch that stretched and twisted unnaturally, loose like a tooth. We should have cut that branch to begin with. But there are decisions you make and decisions you do not make, and once they are made or not there is only so much to do. Seamus and I were fond of the loose tooth, the way it bent toward the sky. So we left it.
Park Avenue was no place for our outcast tree. But it was tall and the branches had majesty like we had never seen, and the hole in the back with a deadened bough could be made to face in so that all of Bed-Stuy could see the beautiful parts of our genuine almost Park Avenue tree.
So Seamus and I ran, ran back to Bed-Stuy, back to the apartment, and pulled out our safe boxes with everything we had, everything that had not gone to lights, and ran back to the man with our scraps of savings and he looked and grimaced but still we walked away with empty safe boxes and a real evergreen Christmas tree.
The walk was bitterly cold, the wind biting at our wrists and nipping through our thin coats. It was worth it, though—every muscle ache, every stop to take a break because the two of us were strong but small and the tree weighed more than we had ever lifted. We carried it back through Brooklyn, into Bed-Stuy, up and up the rusty fire escape step by step. We are not supposed to put things on the fire escape. But we pay our rent on time (just barely) and don’t complain about the rats so the landlord won’t care, and the government hasn’t been by to inspect since years before we moved in. Mother says if a fire comes and we can’t get down then at least we won’t have to worry about making rent anymore. Ghosts don’t pay rent.
We made it to the fourth story, us and the tree, and leaned our Park Avenue beauty up against the railing. Surveying the world below. And when we did we saw that the beauty faced out and that was good, but the hole faced in and Seamus and I decided that for all that work we would rather Bed-Stuy see the hole and we get to revel in the beauty of our tree. So we turned it, and the hole faced out, and the bough hung over the rail, and from our window I could imagine it glistening with the lights of Cartier’s shop windows over on Fifth and warm glowing streetlamps.
Mother got home at 8 p.m. On Tuesdays, she has two hours before she has to be at her night job in the hotel downtown. Mother is always tired. But she put on a smile when we bounced toward the door to greet her, awash in the glow of our bounty. Beaming with childhood glory, each of us latched to a hand and pulled her to the window.
Mother stood still. Looking at our tree. She took a breath. She asked us where we got it. How much did it cost.
And so we told her about the safe boxes, the man with the overcoat and lugging it up the fire escape. How we were finally like Grandmother on Park Avenue, right here in Bed-Stuy. We told her Happy Christmas Mother.
And Mother just cried.
She cried because of the tree, because we were in Bed-Stuy and not Park Avenue, because she missed her finery and Father and the warm glow of streetlamps that weren’t busted up. But mostly she cried because she had come to tell us that she needed that money to keep the lights on.
***
They shut the lights off on our birthday. It was dark by 5 p.m. So we ate in darkness under cover of the thick wool blankets that Grandmother—perhaps, for a moment, human—had thrown out behind her daughter when she left on a cold night and stared at Father’s plastic evergreen that we put back up when the real one killed Grandmother and we had to take it down, and it was quiet and dark and very, very cold.
Mother said there was no money for candles. Especially not 12. There was even less no-money for cake, so we twisted wads of tissue into our Instant Mac and set them aflame with the last of our matches. I blew them out, ashes to breadcrumbs, and we held a silence for that fateful moment two days before when the evergreen broke and Grandmother Who Had Not Spoken, Who Was Not Seen, went to see what lay beyond the smog-choked sky.
As it turns out, there was indeed money for candles. And money for cakes and lights and heat and all the Instant Mac in the world. There was money for a tree without a broken bough and glass ornaments lined with silver. For the money that bled from the jewels Grandmother wore around her broken neck now ran in our own blood, and though it was weeks before we knew it, we sat cold and dark on top of riches we had never even begun to know.
***
Before the birthday happened, though, before the tree came down and the ever ever-green because it was plastic went back up, was the day that Grandmother died.
The city slept. Quiet in a way that Manhattan never is because half of Bed-Stuy works the night shift downtown and the other half has to be up at 4:30 a.m. for work. The wind cut through the too-thin walls and danced up and down fire escapes, chilling the residents that slept within almost as much as those that made their beds under newspapers outside. And four stories below, Grandmother Who Was Not Seen tiptoed, shuddering in the cold.
Not a soul can be sure why it was that night, of all nights, late when the children were bound to be asleep, that Grandmother came. Perhaps it was to be closer but removed, to See without Being Seen. Not yet ready to meet her teakwood grandchildren, much less the daughter she’d renounced so many years before, the children would later imagine that Grandmother had stood for a while distant and thought about the thick wool blankets. And hoped in a moment of quiet humanity that for as cold as the night wind blew, her daughter and her daughter’s children may have been warm. What none but Grandmother and a tired doctor knew was that only hours before she had returned from the office of a solemn-faced man who told her that she would be dead within the month. It is possible that in that moment just hours before, the bubble of finery that had distracted her for so long began to crumple and Grandmother caught her first glimpse into the vast impermanence of it all. No one in Bed-Stuy will ever truly know.
But what they did know is that Grandmother Who Shared A Name, Who Was Not Seen, Who Had Not Spoken, had a thought that day. A persistent thought, so politely nagging that even her bed with its silken sheets and a genuine lace curtain could not protect her. And the nagging was such that, lying awake in her bed late in the night, she thought of blankets and cold and dying and made a decision right then and there to pull herself upright, to put on her heels and an overcoat and a hat to hide the unkempt white hair—what was left of it—to pick up her lace umbrella for the pattering rain, and to take the subway for the first time since she met Grandfather and go where she had never gone.
It would later perplex the family that Grandmother had taken the subway. Neither Mother nor Eleanor nor Seamus would ever give thought to the idea that perhaps Grandmother had, for a moment, appreciated the irony of arriving in Bed-Stuy by chauffeured limousine. Mother herself held forever tight to the idea that the subway token in her pocket was simply a plant by a driver who had the sense to not get mixed up in the death of a rich lady far from the wrought-iron gates of her neighborhood.
But disbelieve as they might, this was how Eleanor Midner, deciding at last to take her first steps toward Speaking and Being Seen, ended up on the Bed-Stuy fire escape two stories below the window of her teakwood grandchildren. The soon-Christmas wind cutting through her coat, her pashmina shawl, Grandmother stood in silent revelry and saw that the tree on the fire escape was not so unlike the one on her own. Patchy and bare, perhaps. But not unknown. And it was here she stood when the wind blew cold and sharp and the loose bough that excluded the tree from the Park Avenue gang came free at last, and dropped down, down, right onto Grandmother’s head, and all of Bed-Stuy heard three cracks: the split of the evergreen, and the cleft of her skull, and the shattering sound of the both of them falling to the pavement two stories below.
And in an instant Grandmother lay with the bough of the evergreen, diamonds in her ears, a Park Avenue genuine and a Park Avenue fraud. Money floated in scatters and inheritance loomed, and all was wrong and all was well for still the city slept and neither Bed-Stuy nor Park Avenue seemed at all changed.
