But at least by the end of the first ten days, Agatha no longer fled, but stood in nearby doors, or sat in distant chairs under trees, or if we went out for hikes, followed ten paces behind.
And Grandma? She merely waited. She never tried to urge or force. She went about her cooking and baking apricot pies and left foods carelessly here and there about the house on mousetrap plates for wigglenosed girls to sniff and snitch. An hour later, the plates were empty, the buns or cakes gone, and without thank yous, there was Agatha sliding down the banister, a mustache of crumbs on her lip.
As for Tim and me, we were always being called up hills by our Electric Grandma, and reaching the top were called down the other side.
And the most peculiar and beautiful and strange and lovely thing was the way she seemed to give complete attention to all of us.
She listened, she really listened to all we said, she knew and remembered every syllable, word, sentence, punctuation, thought, and rambunctious idea. We knew that all our days were stored in her, and that any time we felt we might want to know what we said at X hour at X second on X afternoon, we just named that X and with amiable promptitude, in the form of an aria if we wished, sung with humor, she would deliver forth X incident.
Sometimes we were prompted to test her. In the midst of babbling one day with high fevers about nothing, I stopped. I fixed Grandma with my eye and demanded:
‘What did I just say?’
‘Oh, er—’
‘Come on, spit it out!’
‘I think—’ she rummaged her purse. ‘I have it here.’ From the deeps of her purse she drew forth and handed me:
‘Boy! A Chinese fortune cookie!’
‘Fresh baked, still warm, open it.’
It was almost too hot to touch. I broke the cookie shell and pressed the warm curl of paper out to read:
‘“—bicycle champ of the whole west. What did I just say? Come on, spit it out!”’
My jaw dropped.
‘How did you do that?’
‘We have our little secrets. The only Chinese fortune cookie that predicts the Immediate Past. Have another?’
I cracked the second shell and read:
‘“How did you do that?”’
I popped the messages and the piping hot shells into my mouth and chewed as we walked.
‘Well?’
‘You’re a great cook,’ I said.
And, laughing, we began to run.
And that was another great thing.
She could keep up.
Never beat, never win a race, but pump right along in good style, which a boy doesn’t mind. A girl ahead of him or beside him is too much to bear. But a girl one or two paces back is a respectful thing, and allowed.
So Grandma and I had some great runs, me in the lead, and both talking a mile a minute.
But now I must tell you the best part of Grandma.
I might not have known at all if Timothy hadn’t taken some pictures, and if I hadn’t taken some also, and then compared.
When I saw the photographs developed out of our instant Brownies, I sent Agatha, against her wishes, to photograph Grandma a third time, unawares.
Then I took the three sets of pictures off alone, to keep counsel with myself. I never told Timothy and Agatha what I found. I didn’t want to spoil it.
But, as I laid the pictures out in my room, here is what I thought and said:
‘Grandma, in each picture, looks different!’
‘Different?’ I asked myself.
‘Sure. Wait. Just a sec—’
I rearranged the photos.
‘Here’s one of Grandma near Agatha. And, in it, Grandma looks like…Agatha!
‘And in this one, posed with Timothy, she looks like Timothy!
‘And this last one, Holy Goll! Jogging along with me, she looks like ugly me!’
I sat down, stunned. The pictures fell to the floor.
I hunched over, scrabbling them, rearranging, turning, upside down and sidewise. Yes. Holy Goll again, yes!
O that clever Grandmother.
O those Fantoccini people-making people.
Clever beyond clever, human beyond human, warm beyond warm, love beyond love…
And wordless, I rose and went downstairs and found Agatha and Grandma in the same room, doing algebra lessons in an almost peaceful communion. At least there was not outright war. Grandma was still waiting for Agatha to come round. And no one knew what day of what year that would be, or how to make it come faster. Meanwhile—
My entering the room made Grandma turn. I watched her face slowly as it recognized me. And wasn’t there the merest ink-wash change of color in those eyes? Didn’t the thin film of blood beneath the translucent skin, or whatever liquid they put to pulse and beat in the humanoid forms, didn’t it flourish itself suddenly bright in her cheeks and mouth? I am somewhat ruddy. Didn’t Grandma suffuse herself more to my color upon my arrival? And her eyes? Watching Agatha-Abigail-Algernon at work, hadn’t they been her color of blue rather than mine, which are deeper?
More important than that, in the moments she talked with me, saying, ‘Good evening,’ and ‘How’s your homework, my lad?’ and such stuff, didn’t the bones of her face shift subtly beneath the flesh to assume some fresh racial attitude?
For let’s face it, our family is of three sorts. Agatha has the long horse bones of a small English girl who will grow to hunt foxes: Father’s equine stare, snort, stomp, and assemblage of skeleton. The skull and teeth are pure English, or as pure as the motley isle’s history allows.
Timothy is something else, a touch of Italian from Mother’s side a generation back. Her family name was Mariano, so Tim has that dark thing firing him, and a small bone structure, and eyes that will one day burn ladies to the ground.
As for me, I am the Slav, and we can only figure this from my paternal grandfather’s mother who came from Vienna and brought a set of cheekbones that flared, and temples from which you might dip wine, and a kind of steppeland thrust of nose which sniffed more of Tartar than of Tartan, hiding behind the family name.
So you see it became fascinating for me to watch and try to catch Grandma as she performed her changes, speaking to Agatha and melting her cheekbones to the horse, speaking to Timothy and growing as delicate as a Florentine raven pecking glibly at the air, speaking to me and fusing the hidden plastic stuffs, so I felt Catherine the Great stood there before me.
Now, how the Fantoccini people achieved this rare and subtle transformation I shall never know, nor ask, nor wish to find out. Enough that in each quiet motion, turning here, bending there, affixing her gaze, her secret segments, sections, the abutment of her nose, the sculptured chinbone, the wax-tallow plastic metal forever warmed and was forever susceptible of loving change. Hers was a mask that was all mask but only one face for one person at a time. So in crossing a room, having touched one child, on the way, beneath the skin, the wondrous shift went on, and by the time she reached the next child, why, true mother of that child she was! looking upon him or her out of the battlements of their own fine bones.
And when all three of us were present and chattering at the same time? Well, then, the changes were miraculously soft, small, and mysterious. Nothing so tremendous as to be caught and noted, save by this older boy, myself, who, watching, became elated and admiring and entranced.
I have never wished to be behind the magician’s scenes. Enough that the illusion works. Enough that love is the chemical result. Enough that cheeks are rubbed to happy color, eyes sparked to illumination, arms opened to accept and softly bind and hold…
All of us, that is, except Agatha who refused to the bitter last.
‘Agamemnon…’
It had become a jovial game now. Even Agatha didn’t mind, but pretended to mind. It gave her a pleasant sense of superiority over a supposedly superior machine.
‘Agamemnon!’ she snorted, ‘you are a d…’
‘Dumb?’ said Grandma.
‘I wouldn’t say
that.’
‘Think it, then, my dear Agonistes Agatha…I am quite flawed, and on names my flaws are revealed. Tom there, is Tim half the time. Timothy is Tobias or Timulty as likely as not…’
Agatha laughed. Which made Grandma make one of her rare mistakes. She put out her hand to give my sister the merest pat. Agatha-Abigail-Alice leapt to her feet.
Agatha-Agamemnon-Alcibiades-Allegra-Alexandra-Allison withdrew swiftly to her room.
‘I suspect,’ said Timothy, later, ‘because she is beginning to like Grandma.’
‘Tosh,’ said I.
‘Where do you pick up words like “tosh”?’
‘Grandma read me some Dickens last night. “Tosh.” “Humbug.” “Balderdash.” “Blast.” “Devil take you.” You’re pretty smart for your age, Tim.’
‘Smart, heck. It’s obvious, the more Agatha likes Grandma, the more she hates herself for liking her, the more afraid she gets of the whole mess, the more she hates Grandma in the end.’
‘Can one love someone so much you hate them?’
‘Dumb. Of course.’
‘It is sticking your neck out, sure. I guess you hate people when they make you feel naked, I mean sort of on the spot or out in the open. That’s the way to play the game, of course. I mean, you don’t just love people; you must love them with exclamation points.’
‘You’re pretty smart, yourself, for someone so stupid,’ said Tim.
‘Many thanks.’
And I went to watch Grandma move slowly back into her battle of wits and stratagems with what’s-her-name…
What dinners there were at our house!
Dinners, heck; what lunches, what breakfasts!
Always something new, yet, wisely, it looked or seemed old and familiar. We were never asked, for if you ask children what they want, they do not know, and if you tell what’s to be delivered, they reject delivery. All parents know this. It is a quiet war that must be won each day. And Grandma knew how to win without looking triumphant.
‘Here’s Mystery Breakfast Number Nine,’ she would say, placing it down. ‘Perfectly dreadful, not worth bothering with, it made me want to throw up while I was cooking it!’
Even while wondering how a robot could be sick, we could hardly wait to shovel it down.
‘Here’s Abominable Lunch Number Seventy-seven,’ she announced. ‘Made from plastic food bags, parsley, and gum from under theater seats. Brush your teeth after or you’ll taste the poison all afternoon.’
We fought each other for more.
Even Abigail-Agamemnon-Agatha drew near and circled round the table at such times, while Father put on the ten pounds he needed and pinkened out his cheeks.
When A. A. Agatha did not come to meals, they were left by her door with a skull and crossbones on a small flag stuck in a baked apple. One minute the tray was abandoned, the next minute gone.
Other times Abigail A. Agatha would bird through during dinner, snatch crumbs from her plate and bird off.
‘Agatha!’ Father would cry.
‘No, wait.’ Grandma said, quietly. ‘She’ll come, she’ll sit. It’s a matter of time.’
‘What’s wrong with her?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, for cri-yi, she’s nuts,’ said Timothy.
‘No, she’s afraid,’ said Grandma.
‘Of you?’ I said, blinking.
‘Not of me so much as what I might do,’ she said.
‘You wouldn’t do anything to hurt her.’
‘No, but she thinks I might. We must wait for her to find that her fears have no foundation. If I fail, well, I will send myself to the showers and rust quietly.’
There was a titter of laughter. Agatha was hiding in the hall.
Grandma finished serving everyone and then sat at the other side of the table facing Father and pretended to eat. I never found out, I never asked, I never wanted to know, what she did with the food. She was a sorcerer. It simply vanished.
And in the vanishing, Father made comment:
‘This food. I’ve had it before. In a small French restaurant over near Les Deux Magots in Paris, twenty, oh, twenty-five years ago!’ His eyes brimmed with tears, suddenly.
‘How do you do it?’ he asked, at last, putting down the cutlery, and looking across the table at this remarkable creature, this device, this what? woman?
Grandma took his regard, and ours, and held them simply in her now empty hands, as gifts, and just as gently replied:
‘I am given things which I then give to you. I don’t know that I give, but the giving goes on. You ask what I am? Why, a machine. But even in that answer we know, don’t we, more than a machine. I am all the people who thought of me and planned me and built me and set me running. So I am people. I am all the things they wanted to be and perhaps could not be, so they built a great child, a wondrous toy to represent those things.’
‘Strange,’ said Father. ‘When I was growing up, there was a huge outcry at machines. Machines were bad, evil, they might dehumanize—’
‘Some machines do. It’s all in the way they are built. It’s all in the way they are used. A bear trap is a simple machine that catches and holds and tears. A rifle is a machine that wounds and kills. Well. I am no bear trap. I am no rifle. I am a grandmother machine, which means more than a machine.’
‘How can you be more than what you seem?’
‘No man is as big as his own idea. It follows, then, that any machine that embodies an idea is larger than the man that made it. And what’s so wrong with that?’
‘I got lost back there about a mile,’ said Timothy. ‘Come again?’
‘Oh, dear,’ said Grandma. ‘How I do hate philosophical discussions and excursions into aesthetics. Let me put it this way. Men throw huge shadows on the lawn, don’t they? Then, all their lives, they try to run to fit the shadows. But the shadows are always longer. Only at noon can a man fit his own shoes, his own best suit, for a few brief minutes. But now we’re in a new age where we can think up a Big Idea and run it around in a machine. That makes the machine more than a machine, doesn’t it?’
‘So far so good,’ said Tim. ‘I guess.’
‘Well, isn’t a motion-picture camera and projector more than a machine? It’s a thing that dreams, isn’t it? Sometimes fine happy dreams, sometimes nightmares. But to call it a machine and dismiss it is ridiculous.’
‘I see that!’ said Tim, and laughed at seeing.
‘You must have been invented then,’ said Father, ‘by someone who loved machines and hated people who said all machines were bad or evil.’
‘Exactly,’ said Grandma. ‘Guido Fantoccini, that was his real name, grew up among machines. And he couldn’t stand the clichés any more.’
‘Clichés?’
‘Those lies, yes, that people tell and pretend they are truths absolute. Man will never fly. That was a cliché truth for a thousand thousand years which turned out to be a lie only a few years ago. The earth is flat, you’ll fall off the rim, dragons will dine on you; the great lie told as fact, and Columbus plowed it under. Well, now, how many times have you heard how inhuman machines are, in your life? How many bright fine people have you heard spouting the same tired truths which are in reality lies; all machines destroy, all machines are cold, thoughtless, awful.
‘There’s a seed of truth there. But only a seed. Guido Fantoccini knew that. And knowing it, like most men of his kind, made him mad. And he could have stayed mad and gone mad forever, but instead did what he had to do; he began to invent machines to give the lie to the ancient lying truth.
‘He knew that most machines are amoral, neither bad nor good. But by the way you built and shaped them you in turn shaped men, women, and children to be bad or good. A car, for instance, dead brute, unthinking, an unprogrammed bulk, is the greatest destroyer of souls in history. It makes boy-men greedy for power, destruction, and more destruction. It was never intended to do that. But that’s how it turned out.’
Grandma circled the table, refilling our glasses with
clear cold mineral spring water from the tappet in her left forefinger. ‘Meanwhile, you must use other compensating machines. Machines that throw shadows on the earth that beckon you to run out and fit that wondrous casting-forth. Machines that trim your soul in silhouette like a vast pair of beautiful shears, snipping away the rude brambles, the dire horns and hoofs, to leave a finer profile. And for that you need examples.’
‘Examples?’ I asked.
‘Other people who behave well, and you imitate them. And if you act well enough long enough all the hair drops off and you’re no longer a wicked ape.’
Grandma sat again.
‘So, for thousands of years, you humans have needed kings, priests, philosophers, fine examples to look up to and say, “They are good, I wish I could be like them. They set the grand good style.” But, being human, the finest priests, the tenderest philosophers make mistakes, fall from grace, and mankind is disillusioned and adopts indifferent skepticism or, worse, motionless cynicism, and the good world grinds to a halt while evil moves on with huge strides.’
‘And you, why, you never make mistakes, you’re perfect, you’re better than anyone ever!’
It was a voice from the hall between kitchen and dining room where Agatha, we all knew, stood against the wall listening and now burst forth.
Grandma didn’t even turn in the direction of the voice, but went on calmly addressing her remarks to the family at the table.
‘Not perfect, no, for what is perfection? But this I do know: being mechanical, I cannot sin, cannot be bribed, cannot be greedy or jealous or mean or small. I do not relish power for power’s sake. Speed does not pull me to madness. Sex does not run me rampant through the world. I have time and more than time to collect the information I need around and about an ideal to keep it clean and whole and intact. Name the value you wish, tell me the Ideal you want and I can see and collect and remember the good that will benefit you all. Tell me how you would like to be: kind, loving, considerate, well-balanced, humane…and let me run ahead on the path to explore those ways to be just that. In the darkness ahead, turn me as a lamp in all directions. I can guide your feet.’