Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [8]
Of course, my “parents” were suitably impressed with the majesty of the house, but I felt possessive and sullen. They walked enthusiastically through the rooms, commenting on the splendor, while I lagged behind them, just at the edge of another family.
When the tour guide pointed to a gold faucet fixture in one of the gargantuan master bathrooms and remarked, “These faucets feature hot and cold running seawater,” I glared at my parents. See what I used to enjoy? I tried to recall if I’d ever sat in that tub. A dim memory floated to the surface, but a memory without any images, only a taste on the tip of my tongue: sea salt.
Our own faucets had hot and cold running tap water, the same plain water that everyone in town had, even the Latts, with their Down’s syndrome girl, who lived in a shack near the dump. Our own bathtub featured a permanent dark ring of grime compliments of my older brother, who was seventeen and learning to repair car engines. A common grease monkey, someone who would hit me on the shoulder with the serrated edge of the aluminum foil box and then laugh as pinpricks of blood bloomed through the starched white dress shirt that I always wore. My brother was a farm animal, a grunting primitive. Not a Vanderbilt. Certainly not suitable for this vacation to Newport. He had thankfully stayed home with his pet car.
I saw my self, my other self—the one who lived in a parallel universe and had not been stolen—hiding behind the heavy velvet drapes in the formal living room, while my mother searched for me, silk and gold-thread slippers on her feet, martini glass poised in her hand, pinkie extended. “Amadeus?” she was calling out through the vast home, peering behind tufted sofas, under fourposter beds. “Come out, come out wherever you are.” In the vision, I am smiling behind a large Ming vase, thinking about dashing outside and scratching the ears of my pet camel.
I also knew with certainty that I was an only child. I had learned about only children at school, and everything those only children felt, I felt. The feeling hit me, too, in the Vanderbilt mansion. Why else would it be unoccupied, a museum? My real parents had been hopelessly distraught when I was taken, neither of them able to bear such extravagance in the face of such unthinkable loss. “Amadeus,” my mother would have wept. “Every tassel reminds me of him. All these marble columns he used to dance around.” My father would have wiped a tear from his own eye, the memory of me being placed in his arms by my Scandinavian wet nurse while he sat in the library too much for him to contain. Of course they would have sold the estate, at a loss. Unloaded it to the state. “Do whatever vulgar thing you want to with it; I don’t care. Sell tickets, print postcards—it just doesn’t matter,” my mother would have told the governor.
The tour guide pointed to a painting of Cornelius Vanderbilt hanging above a fireplace that was larger than our car. I studied him closely, and it was like looking into a mirror.
How did they do it, I wondered? My parents, how did they snatch me? Was I playing outside alone, perhaps chasing one of our peacocks, while my mother was taking a bath in the marble tub? Had she told me never to leave the house, but at the young age of three or four I simply didn’t understand? Or had they done it sooner, when I was a baby? I had no way of knowing, as I could remember nothing of my life until the age of five.
My first memory is of the pyramid of the moon in Mexico City. I was there with my mother, who had taken me on a trip. Thinking back, it makes such polished sense. Steal the Vanderbilt child, leave the country, hide out in a motel in Mexico, and eat Vienna sausages stashed in a blue, hard plastic American Tourister. The Dippity-Do also clicked into place. She needed that green hair gel to glue temporary