I could enter it, even with my little brothers following—tiptoeing—down the stairs and out through the glass door in the guest room, then around through the backyard, down the ivy slope, and onto the street.
On the street I noticed that Steve’s shoe was not properly tied. I bent down and knotted it. Double knotted it.
“Is Dad going to hurt Mom?” he asked.
He never had before. He tended to hurt objects, feelings, souls—not people.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I can’t be sure.”
“Where are we going?” Steve asked.
Geographically, Wonderland Park Avenue was a continuation of Greenvalley Road, the reverse side of a loop that wound around the hill the way a string did on its spool; only where Greenvalley was open and sunbaked, Wonderland Park was shady, hidden, mysterious, and at one particular address simply magical. Halfway down the block on the right and bordered by a long row of cypress trees, number 8930 was a formal, symmetrically planned, pale gray stucco house that stood high above its garden (also formal of course, with clipped topiaries and white flowers exclusively) and was so markedly different from all its neighbors that it looked like it had been picked up in Paris and dropped down in Laurel Canyon.
Everything about the house evoked another place, another time, a special sensibility; my aunt’s special sensibility. The curtains in the windows, edged in a brown-and-white Greek meander trim and tied back just so … the crystal chandeliers that even by day winked through the glass and were reflected in tall gilded mirrors … the iron urns out of which English ivy spilled elegantly downward … the eight semicircular steps that drew you up, up, up to the front doors. The doors themselves: tall and made to look like French boiserie, they were punctuated with two brass knobs the size of grapefruit that were so bright and gleaming they seemed to be lit from within.
I led my brothers up the steps and to these doors. Even the doors had their own distinct fragrance, as if they had absorbed and mingled years’ worth of potpourri, bayberry candles, and butcher’s wax and emitted this brew as a kind of prologue to the rooms inside.
I rang the bell. We waited and waited. When I heard the gradually thickening sound of footsteps crossing the long hall (black-and-white checkerboard marble set, always, on the diagonal), I began to feel uneasy for having brought my brothers here, at this time of all times. But where else were we to go?
There was a pause as whoever it was stopped to look, I imagined, through the peephole. Then the left-hand door opened. My aunt, seeing us there, at first lit up. “My darlings, what a surprise.”
It took her a moment to realize that Steve was still in his pajamas. Then she looked, really looked, at our faces. “But what’s wrong?”
“Mom and Dad are having a fight, a terrible, terrible fight,” Danny said, his lower lip turning to Jell-O.
She called back over her shoulder, “Irving—come, come quick.”
Then she knelt down and drew my younger brothers into her arms. “Not to worry, darlings. Everything will be all right.”
Those eyes of hers. Two lanterns, set on high cheekbones. Wicks untrimmed and flaming.
Auntie Hankie sat us down in the kitchen and insisted on making us hot chocolate, even though it was already pushing eighty degrees. She found cookies in a tin too, and brought in from the living room our beloved jar of foil-covered chocolate Easter eggs, which she kept there to entice us all year long.
She brought us a deck of cards, a jar of coins from her recent European travels. My uncle rustled up some pencils and some shirt cardboards to draw on.
Then she sat down with us. “Now tell me. Tell us both.”
My brothers looked at each other, then at me.
“Mom and Dad were fighting,” I said.
“Yes, you said. But what about?”
My brothers looked at each other, then into their laps.
I felt my face burning. “I don’t know. We were upstairs. It was loud.”
“Very loud,” Danny said.
“So loud,” she asked, “that you couldn’t hear what they were talking about?”
My brothers shook their heads. My aunt looked at me, but I didn’t say anything.
“I know this may be hard for you to understand,” she said, “but everyone fights sometimes—even mothers and fathers.”
“Your aunt and I fight, sometimes,” said my uncle.
“Puddy, we do not. We’ve never had a cross word in our lives.”
“Well, not this week,” my uncle said drily.
“Not any week that I know of,” she said tartly.
My uncle emitted one of his trademark six-step sighs, a cascade of diminishing breaths that generally alerted us to his not-quite-silent dissent.
“It’ll blow over, children,” he said. “These things always do.”
Steve said, “Dad has the Bergman Temper.”
My aunt stiffened as she said, “The Bergman Temper? Now what would that be, exactly?”
The sharpness in her voice caused Steve’s eyes to return to his lap.
“Do you even know who the Bergmans are—were?”
“Grandma is a Bergman,” he said. “And Dad. You are and I am too.” He looked up. “It’s my middle name,” he added.
“Yes, that’s right, partially right,” she said. “The Bergmans were Huffy’s people,” she added. And then she waited.
When none of us said anything further, she continued, “Well, your father is passionate about things, the way I am. And Mamma too. If it’s passion you mean, I’ll concede that, yes, it runs in our side of the family. It always has.” She paused. “I’m just curious. That term, the ‘Bergman Temper.’ Who came up with it?”
Both my brothers looked at me. My stomach tightened.
“Was it your mother, by chance?”
“No,” I lied. My skin, giving away my lie, began to burn red.
My aunt nodded, not to us, or to herself, so much as to some invisible off-screen observer or camera. She often did that: she pretended, or maybe assumed, that there was an audience following her—tracking her—at all times. She did not say, I know perfectly well that it was your mother. I do honestly believe that woman sometimes hates us, me and Mamma both. She did not need to say this, at least to me. I knew what she was thinking, and because I knew, or believed I knew, I began to feel uneasy all over again for having brought my brothers here. But I was scared. My father had never smashed a piece of furniture in anger before.
“We should probably call over there,” said my uncle. “They’ll be concerned.”
“Oh,
