Free Borrowed Finery: A Memoir by Paula Fox Page A

sprawling estate in Santa Monica.
    “Pal, take this creature to the door,” he said, as he handed me the toy, “and give it to anyone who answers the bell. Whoever the hell it is, tell him the bear is for your cousin, Douglas Fairbanks.”
    The task restored some balance I’d lost on the roller-coaster ride, and I did it willingly. I walked up a long path to the front door and rang an ornate bell. After a while, it was answered by an old man in some sort of costume. He peered down at me and asked, “Yes, miss?”
    I handed up the bear and repeated my father’s message. The old man accepted both words and toy and said he’d pass them on to Mr. Fairbanks when he returned from the studio.
    *   *   *
    The last day I spent at Malibu Beach, Uncle Elwood appeared on the sand wearing a black bathing suit.
    I don’t know how he had arrived there. I knew he had come to see me. I took his hand and led him across sand warmed by the morning sun and into the foaming surf, urging him on, elatedly, until we were both dog-paddling in the Pacific. He came the next day and then, as far as I knew, returned to Balmville.
    Within a month or two of his visit, I too returned to the minister’s house on the hill, with whom or how I don’t recall.
    I thought I might burst with happiness, freed from a yearlong curse, as though I were a girl in a fairy tale.
    Uncle Elwood told me he had stood on the roof of the old stable to watch the California-bound train make its way north on the east bank of the Hudson River, the train I had been on with Aunt Jessie.
    One afternoon I saw a taxi pause at the bottom of the driveway. An elderly woman emerged from the passenger seat.
    It had been raining on and off for days. The driveway was impassable for most cars except for Uncle Elwood’s doughty old Packard. I watched the woman make her slow way through the rain and mud.
    At last she stood in the hall, laughing with what I took to be embarrassment at her disheveled state, at the mud on her shoes.
    “Paulita,” she said. My heart sank. She was my Spanish grandmother, come to take me away. Her duties with her Spanish relative in Cuba were lighter; she would not be traveling there every year. At some moment during the grim hours that followed each other like links in a chain drawing me away from Uncle Elwood, she looked at me for a long moment and then said to him, “She is of my blood.”
    It was far worse than a fairy-tale enchantment. My parting from the minister was an amputation.

Long Island

     
     
    Once upon a time, there were four brothers, Fermin, Leopold, Frank (also known as Panchito), and Vincent. There was a sister, too, Elsie, youngest of them all. Two of the brothers, Leopold and Vincent, lived with their mother, my grandmother, Candelaria, in a small brick house on Audley Street, in Kew Gardens, Long Island. I went to live there in 1930.
    Fermin, the oldest son, was married to Elpidia, a peasant woman born in a small Cuban village. They lived in a section of New York City then known as Spanish Harlem with their two daughters, Isabel and Natalie. Eventually, a third daughter was born, Alicia.
    Frank was employed by a pharmaceutical company as a salesman. His work required him to travel in South America, a good market for drugs. In his youth, he had played baseball and had almost made it into the major leagues. He was the most American of his mother’s five children, at least externally.
    Vincent, small of stature, with no visible waist, kept up his trousers with suspenders. He accompanied singers or violinists on the piano and was sometimes away on tour. Most afternoons he left the brick house swiftly and silently on mysterious errands. When he was home, he practiced the piano all day long, or so it seemed to me.
    When Frank dropped in for a visit after months away in Peru or Argentina, Vincent didn’t look up from the keyboard until he had completed the piece he was playing. With a sliding glance at his brother, he would say,