From the time I was four until I was eight my grandmother lived with us. She slept in the big bedroom with my mother (my father had remarried by then) and was bedridden most of the time, her heart condition critical, killing her just past her sixtieth birthday. I called her Nanny, for no reason I can remember, and I loved her, as small boys suppose they do. My mother was often away in those days, and while I don’t remember Nanny ever feeding me, (too sick to get out of bed for that) or dressing me, or making me laugh (there was Flo for that, my black mammy who later “ran off with some man,” as my mother was wont to disclose; and then a succession of other maids and nurses most of whom, again according to my mother, either ransacked liquor cabinets or ran away à la Flo—anyone who left my mother always “ran off”), I do remember her scolding me, and once my mother was in Puerto Rico, for some reason I’m sure Nanny considered adequate (sufficient to pry her from bed), she backed me into a corner of my room against the full-length mirror on my closet door (thus I watched her though my back was turned) and beat me with a board, me screaming, “My mother’ll get you for this!”; and when my mother returned my not believing it was really her (she being so brown from the sun), and my momentary fear of her being an impostor, some woman hired by my grandmother to beat me because it was too hard on her heart for her to do it herself.
This repeated paranoia, persistent tension, allowed no relief for me then but through my toy soldiers, sworded dragoons, Zouaves, and Vikings that I manipulated, controlled. Hours alone on my lined linoleum floor I played, determinedly oblivious to the voices, agonies perpetuated dining room to kitchen to bedroom.
And there was the race we never ran. Nanny and I planned a race for when she was well, though she never would be. Days sick I’d sit in my mother’s bed next to Nanny and devise the route, from backyard down the block to the corner, from the fence to the lamppost and back—and Nanny would nod, “Yes, certainly, soon as I’m well”—and I’d cut out comics or draw, listening to Sergeant Preston on the radio, running the race in my mind, running it over and over, never once seeing Nanny run with me.