What Remains by Carole Radziwill Read Free Book Online

CorningWare. Their husbands carried briefcases on the bus from their jobs in the city. Their children set their places at the table. They all bowed their heads for grace.
    By this measure, we weren’t ordinary. My father worked as a cook. It was my mother who dressed up to go to work in the city, my mother who got a college degree. Her mother, Grandma Binder, came to live with us when I was six, after she retired from the cafeteria at New York Telephone & Co., and was put in charge of a loose arrangement. My parents popped in at odd hours, around various jobs and my mother’s school. Grandma tried to impose a sort of structure, but she was no match for five slippery grandkids, and we ran as unchecked as the dandelions and black-eyed Susans that grew wild in our backyard.
    In a sense it was a life every kid dreams about—unruly, wild, unhampered. We had a baseball diamond worn into the side yard, where you could always find a game. We ran through the woods that edged our backyard at all hours of the day and into the night. We were dressed and fed and pointed toward school and the rest was more or less up to us. There was no quiet stretch of time when we were called in for dinner or told to wash up. No hours set aside to do chores or homework. No one checked our report cards, watched the clock when we were out, made sure we brushed our teeth at night. There were no bedtimes or story times except for the few weeks one winter my mother read us the first half of Treasure Island .
    There was an infrequent and arbitrary use of discipline and attempts at order. One year family meetings were introduced, a sort of family court run by my mother, during which our shortcomings were pointed out and we were allowed, in turn, to point at one another. There was a chore chart and a meal schedule laid out. There were a handful of these meetings at best, so they were quickly forgotten, and disorder resumed.
    I developed two traits as a result of my childhood: an obsession with order and a devotion to detail. I line up details and study and rearrange them until they please me. The simplest task is thought out, well-ordered, planned. I am unable to leave a thing to chance.
    We turned our basement into Grandma Binder’s apartment—a cramped bedroom with a living area and kitchenette. Her Singer sewing machine, the kind with a floor pedal, was wedged in by the TV, next to a clear plastic sewing box with fabric scraps and hundreds of spools of colored thread that she used to make aprons, splurging only on the s-shaped rickrack she sewed around the hems. She hung picture puzzles of Austria on the wall and grew pots of African violets on the windowsills; they thrived somehow in that basement. She was known in the neighborhood for her green thumb. Mrs. Merrick showed up at our door one day with a pot of dirt and a limp stalk and Grandma Binder had it back to life in a week.
    There was no furniture in the house to speak of, outside of Grandma’s apartment. There were beds to sleep on and a couple of mismatched chairs and a bookshelf, but the rooms gave an overall impression of emptiness. The previous owners left gold satin floor-length drapes in the living room, and they looked extravagant in the empty space. For years we posed for pictures in front of them closed so that the bare wood floors, the empty room, made it look like a small theater. As though we had just ended the school play and were crowded around my mother taking a curtain call.
    We ate downstairs at Grandma’s, arranged around her table. She cooked Austrian foods that our friends had never heard of—boiled pig knuckles and kraut nödel. She had a thick, clotted accent and struggled with English. She watched Guiding Light while we were in school, hoping to improve it.
    Grandma lived in New York City for thirty years on Seventy-First Street, the Upper East Side. When she arrived, Seventy-First Street was not an address people dropped at dinner parties. It was called Yorkville then, a