Read Online Blue Genes by Christopher Lukas - Free Book Online Page A

dormers; the grounds needed maintenance), it was
bigger
than I remembered it. I looked for additions since I lived there, sixty-four years ago, to account for the size, but there were none. It was just plain large—with many rooms, hallways, porches. The old, rotting apple tree had been pulled down; a pool had been installed where the rose garden used to bloom. Over half of the acreage had been sold off to other property owners. But the garage and rock garden remained. And so did the lake, which was also larger than I recalled. It filled over an acre of land. I walked down the road to West Street, turned left, and stood looking at what used to be the one-room schoolhouse where I attended kindergarten and first grade. Miss Honeywell, a rotund woman in her forties, taught eight grades, each with no more than five or six students. Still, we must have been a handful. On the front of the building, now a comfortable home painted a robust barn-red color, a plaque announced that the building was constructed in 1884. I remembered the potbellied stove that kept us warm in the winter. I remembered everything, and my eyes filled with tears.

    I DON’T THINK I UNDERSTOOD that my family was very well-off. At the age of five, I had no such perspective. I didn’t know that families existed all over the country with no one to drive the car or cook the meals or put their little ones to bed. Though almost every upper-middle-class family had at least one person to help with the chores, ours had two. And this was during the Depression.
    When I went away to school, it wasn’t Groton or Exeter, it was coeducational and “progressive”: more chinos and blue jeans than flannel slacks; more outdoor activities and chores than perks. We were forbidden to have expensive items in our bare-bones rooms. Egalitarian in the extreme, it was a place where we were meant to ignore differences. No, it was more than that: we weren’t supposed to know that money was a factor in people’s lives.
    I grew up believing that a happy life did not require having a lot of money, that work was beneficial for one’s soul as well as for society, and that equality between the sexes was a given—and constructive to boot.
    Nevertheless, for much of my young life, I was coddled, protected by Missy’s largesse.
    ______
    IN HADES , there is a river called Lethe. For those who drink from those waters, the past becomes obliterated. It’s not clear to me who in the big white house at 250 Rosedale Avenue actually drank, but they all
appeared
to be oblivious to the immediate past: nothing bad had happened.
    It was a grand illusion.
    All continued to think they were living a golden life. On weekends, visitors sat with the family in capacious Adirondack chairs on the side lawn, sipping iced tea. A formal dining room was the scene of parties—not just for the grown-ups but for the children as well. I remember my fifth birthday. A number of neighborhood children were invited to an Italian feast. We had fake noses (Pinocchio had recently been in my reading material) and ate spaghetti.
    Willows grew quickly in the moist soil at the edge of the lake. Even the algae that persisted in the lake were of a quality such as to make friends, relatives, and even ourselves shimmer with delight at the sheer beauty.
    Fall was the most devastatingly beautiful there ever was. Spring, the most pleasurable.
    Our nanny was warm and generous and devoted to us. She was married to a man who lived elsewhere. Where he was or when she found time to see him was unclear, for she took care of us and did housework and cooked a good deal of the time. Tony had named her Baba, an infant’s attempt to merge “Mama” with “Mary.” She was kind, attentive, and aware of everything that went on in the house. I have a photograph of her in our garden in White Plains. She sits, primly dressed, quite small, quite young, in a large rocking chair. On one side, his arm leaning on the chair, stands Tony in a striped