American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [26]
I’m going to name her Honor.
Anna’s mother, in spite of herself, fell deeply in love with the child. She had imbued the drama of her only daughter’s illegitimate pregnancy with all of the pathos and regret that she felt about her own marriage and divorce and therefore once the baby was born believed strongly that this child in possession of a single teenage mother must be in need of toys. She thought about her granddaughter all the time, took care of her while Anna finished high school, and was heartbroken when Anna took Honor with her to college. Her apartment was covered in pictures of the little girl. Most of these showed Honor staring into the camera, a profusion of curls dancing around her head, one hand reaching out to touch the lens. Her eyes were a startling, electric blue. Her nose a squat pug. Her neck thin like the stick of a lollipop. Her mouth curved in a mature amusement beyond her years. She had caused the ruination of one life, so her grandmother believed, and resuscitated another, and from this the woman deduced that the child was destined for calamity and splendor.
The afternoon was a cloudy haze. The branches of the trees in the park trembled like etchings come momentarily to life. The little girl, just walking, bent down and found a penny on the path that encircled the toy-boat pond.
It was a dirty copper specimen bent slightly at one edge and embossed upon it was the date 1923. What the little girl did on that cloudy day with the March wind tossing her curls into her face was to lift the penny to her lips, put it on her tongue, taste its cold filthy sweetness, and swallow it. Pigeons sailed overhead, their shadows skating on the pond, and in front of the little girl, out of the sleeve of a wool coat, a gloved hand emerged and pulled her toward home.
Over the years the little girl had moments of sudden restlessness when she would begin to feel the quickening motion of the globe as well as her own small self delicately balanced on the spinning ball. She sensed the rapid palpitations of her heart. She was aware of her blood pulsing through her limbs. She had reached an age when her young mother felt that she could leave her alone without worrying, and consequently Honor was deeply acquainted with solitude. She read early and often and was currently, at the age of eight, inhaling, if not actually comprehending, Gone with the Wind and the complete works of Agatha Christie. She felt that her tenuous circumstances—the two of them lived now in a college town while her mother was in graduate school, with only minimal support from Honor’s grandparents, who were upset by Anna’s refusal to return to New York—created an uncertain, wavering, and often wondrous atmosphere around their daily life which was not at all like the concrete, material world she read about in the newspapers, or even novels. The days seemed to float along without any tether to the organized rituals she observed at friends’ houses: dinnertimes, bath-times, bedtimes. In her house, time was a fluid, untamable vapor and anything, Honor felt, could happen.