The Bestiary by Nicholas Christopher Read Free Book Online Page A

leave.
    I had often asked my grandmother what my mother was like. One night, when she was ailing, she answered more frankly than usual.
    “Your mother,” she said, squinting across the room as if she might discern her in the shadows. “She loved to dance. At weddings she was the best dancer. She had plenty of friends. When she got married, she was still just a girl. I hoped she would have a nice wedding herself. I thought I knew her.” She shook her head. “I didn’t, really, and I can’t forgive myself for not going to her after she run away.”
    My grandmother had given me a handful of snapshots of my mother. They were taken before my mother met my father. If he had photos of them together, or of my mother alone during their brief marriage, he had kept them to himself or destroyed them.
    In four of the snapshots, taken on a rooftop against a smoky winter sky, my mother looked pensive, staring past the photographer. Was that a friend, or one of her siblings? She was wearing a brown coat and matching beret. The wind was fluttering her long hair.
    In the fifth snapshot she looked happy. Wearing a white bathing suit and a sailor cap aslant, she was eating cotton candy at Jones Beach, mugging for the camera. A locker key on an elastic band was fastened around her ankle. She was tanned. Slim. With nice legs. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen. On the boardwalk beside her, elongated by the late-afternoon sun, there was an unusual shadow: the photographer, from the neck up, with a large bird perched on his shoulder. The bird had a curved beak and long, forking tail feathers. A distinctive crest—a row of spiky tufts—that ran down its neck made me think it wasn’t a parrot. Aside from the bird, there was nothing to distinguish the photographer; not even his height could be ascertained from the shadow.
    I had studied this snapshot many times, weaving stories around it:
    That the man was a stranger who, upon request, photographed my mother with her own camera.
    That he was a boyfriend who happened to own (and take to the beach with him) an exotic bird.
    That the bird belonged to a sailor whose cap she had put on (a seafarer who predated my father?)…or a vendor (of cotton candy?)…or a Gypsy fortune-teller whose booth my mother had visited and learned—what? Judging from her smile, not the fact that she wouldn’t live to see her twenty-first birthday. No, in that snapshot, with glowing limbs and bright eyes, she looked as if she would live forever.
    The night of my grandmother’s funeral, Evgénia stayed in my father’s room. And I sat awake in my grandmother’s room with Re, who rarely left my side that week. I opened the silver music box containing the white whisker and listened to the lullabye my grandmother used to sing to me. Then I lit the candle that had replaced all the paraphernalia on her bedside table, and Re stared at the window where the fox had disappeared.
             
             

    T HE DAY I had to leave Re with Bruno, a fierce storm hit the city. By three o’clock a foot of snow had fallen. It was so dark the streetlights had come on. Cars were skidding into intersections. Buses weren’t running. Re and I walked east, into Bruno’s neighborhood, cutting through U.S. Grant Park, onto DeMott Avenue. I ducked my head against the wind and guided Re away from the deeper drifts. In my knapsack I had his food bowl and plaid blanket.
    When my grandmother died, the cover she provided for my father’s neglect went with her. However comfortable the apartment, he couldn’t just leave me alone there, with Evgénia coming in forty hours a week and no one else around on weekends. There could be no pretenses anymore about that aspect of my life. Evgénia had remained with me for several months, but when my father asked her to continue as a live-in caretaker, she declined. Whatever the particulars of her private life, she wasn’t willing to give it up. To my surprise, one morning my