The Pullmans were an American family and their grown-up children did what Americans were doing in the 1950s: They moved, not from neighborhood to neighborhood or town to town, but from state to state, and Bug even had a stint in Germany working for a company that was trying to redesign its product to appeal to American consumers.
Most Christmases, though, one or another of the kids would come home, so Mr. and Mrs. Pullman were rarely without company during the holidays. And on the mantel, presiding over Christmas, there was always a photograph of Zanna’s gift—at first the sepia-toned Polaroid, and later a framed color photograph. Each of the brothers had their own, just like it.
There were also a couple of family reunions, with Davy, Bug, and Zanna bringing all their kids back to the family home—usually in the summer, though, because the house was too small and the parents too old to have so many kids cooped up inside. The cousins all knew each other, and by any standard the family stayed close no matter how farflung their residences were.
The best part about family reunions, Zanna thought, was getting to know her brothers’ kids. It was also, unfortunately, the worst part. At first Zanna tried to find, in each child, whatever aspect of them came from a particular parent. Oh, that’s how Bug was at that age—but this other trait must come from Bug’s wife Sylvia.
Only it didn’t hold up, not really. Each girl was her own self, each boy found his own way. You couldn’t look at children and hope to see much of their parents beyond their physical appearance, and not always that. They came, as Wordsworth said, “trailing clouds of glory.” Along with a few clouds of other things not quite so glorious. The adventure was to find out who they were.
Bug’s third child and oldest boy, Todd—not named Ernest because Davy had already taken the name for his first son—he was a problem. What was it that made a perfectly normal, healthy boy with parents who doted on him into a such a lying little sneak?
That was a horrible thing to think of him, Zanna knew, but she had never actually heard him say anything that didn’t have some kind of lie hidden in it somewhere. Though it hadn’t become obvious until her own children were involved and she had to sort out the difference between her own child’s version of events and Todd’s. The first few times it happened, she had actually taken Todd’s word over her own children’s. Todd was so convincing, and her kids’ versions were so outrageous.
Until the family reunion when she was coming back from the public restroom at the park where they were having their big family picnic, and she actually saw Todd drop to his knees in a patch of mud. There was no one around him; he just plopped in it and then used his hands to get back up and wiped them on his pants.
Strange boy, that’s what Zanna thought. She even mentioned it to Hal and Davy when she joined them by the fire where the hot dogs were being burnt in stripes.
When she went looking for her kids to eat the franks before they were pure ash, she ran across Bug lecturing her two oldest, Patty and Lyle, about how some pranks weren’t funny, they were mean.
“What did they do this time?” asked Zanna. “I thought things were going too smoothly.”
“Oh, they shoved my Todd down in the mud over there. It’s all over his pants.”
This was illuminating. She waited for Patty to wail about how she didn’t do it, and Lyle to get belligerent. But they just hung their heads in shame. It almost made her believe that they were guilty.
“Did you do it?” asked Zanna.
Lyle just stared at the ground, and Patty’s head-shake was almost imperceptible.
“Lyle, Patty, I know you didn’t do it,” said Zanna.
They looked up at her with such surprise and hope in their faces that she was almost appalled.
“What are you saying?” said Bug. “Todd doesn’t lie.”
“Then I’d have him checked out with a shrink, because he’s hallucinating,” said Zanna. “I came out of the john and saw him, clean pants, standing all by himself at the edge of the mud patch, and then he plunked himself down right on his knees, got up and wiped his hands on his pants. Does that sound like what he looked like when you saw him?”
“But Zan, it doesn’t make any sense. Why would he make it up?”
“Bug, that’s between you and Todd,” said Zanna. “I’m not even interested. I just know that my kids are not going to get blamed for something they didn’t do.”
“Are you so sure they didn’t do it?” demanded Bug.
Zanna just laughed at him. “Bug, before you accuse me of lying, maybe you’d better consider the possibility that Todd’s got a little tiny streak of aimless malice in him.”
“What are you saying about my son?” Bug demanded.
“I’m saying that I love you dearly, Bug, and I trust you to take care of your own children however you choose. But I’m not going to let Todd ruin this reunion for Lyle and Patty by getting them in trouble for something that I know for a fact Todd did all by himself.” Then, kids in tow, she headed off toward the food.
“What I want to know,” said Zanna, “is why you weren’t even bothering to defend yourselves, even when I asked.”
“What good would it do?” asked Patty.
“You never believe us,” said Lyle.
That’s when she remembered why she had asked Bug “What did they do this time?” Every reunion, her two oldest got in trouble—but only now did she make the connection that they got in trouble for something they did to Todd.
“This has happened before,” said Zanna.
“Last year we told you and told you we didn’t push his face in the cake,” said Lyle. “He’s taller than me anyway, how could I? And Patty wasn’t even there. But you didn’t believe us, and so we didn’t get any cake.”
“And you made us apologize to him in front of everybody,” said Patty.
“That’s why we hate coming to reunions. Because he always does stupid stuff and says we did it and nobody believes us.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Zanna. “I’m just sick about it, just . . . sick. You poor things. But to me it just . . . it made no sense for him to . . . I mean, how could I know until I saw it for myself that he just . . . he must have just pushed his own face into the cake last year and—”
“Tell us something we don’t know,” said Lyle snidely.
She couldn’t even rebuke him for being snippy with his mother.
“Well, now I know what Todd is like,” said Zanna, “I’ll believe you. I should have believed you all along. I mean, I’m so stupid. You never do things like that at home. Not to each other, not at school. Why would I think you’d . . . but it was so impossible that he’d be making it up.” She shook herself. “Oh this could make a person insane. Listen, I was wrong. And I’m sorry. I can’t do anything about Todd—”
“You mean Toad,” said Patty under her breath.
“Yes, I mean Toad,” said Zanna. “That’s between his parents and him. But I’ll never take his word over yours again.”
The two kids glanced at each other.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “I saw that look. So let me rephrase. I will never take his word over yours at first. But don’t take that as permission to do any mean thing to him that you want and I’ll stick up for you.”
Lyle grinned at her.
Patty was miffed. “I wouldn’t and you know it.”
“But Lyle was thinking of it, weren’t you, Lyle?”
“I was just wondering if somebody was dumb enough to bring another cake this year and leave it lying around.”
So that was Todd, whose malicious lying was not some hereditary trait—Bug and Sylvia were so honest they couldn’t conceive of having a lying child. It was just something he brought with him. Along with the clouds of glory.
But there were other nieces and nephews. Like Bug’s oldest daughter, Betty. She was such a tomboy, right from her knack for practically vaulting out of the crib so that you had to stay with her and watch her every second. She could throw a ball harder than most boys—which meant stones and snowballs, too, and with deadly aim. There wasn’t a tree whose loftiest branches she hadn’t climbed until Grandma yelled herself hoarse about how they had to get the child down and why doesn’t somebody do something and won’t somebody please tell her that she’s a girl?
“Girl schmirl,” said Grandpa. “Somebody needs to tell her about gravity.”
It wasn’t a fall from a tree or fence or roof that ended Betty’s daredevil days. It was polio.
Todd was almost five, then, showing no sign of the malice that surfaced later—and Bug’s other girl, Cindy, was only seven when they came to live with Zanna and Hal while Bug and Sylvia stayed with Betty around the clock as she struggled for life.
When she finally emerged from the iron lung, she had little use of her legs. It was a milestone when she finally got on her feet. It almost broke Zanna’s heart to see her that Christmas, a ten-year-old clunking around the house with two heavy leg braces, and still having to lean on walls and the table to keep from falling over.
But Bug still swung her up into his arms, leg braces and all, and she still knew how to whoop with delight when he did it.
That was almost the most heartbreaking thing about it. A girl who had been so active—polio should have made her glum, surly, even angry, but it didn’t.
Oh, there were times.
Zanna remembered coming into the parlor that first Christmas after the iron lung, and seeing Betty standing at the window, looking out at the other kids up to their knees—or higher—in snow. It was such a day as had once been Betty’s glory. She should have been up a tree raining snowballs down like the wrath of God on Sodom and Gomorrah.
But she and her leg braces were stuck inside, and Zanna stood in the doorway, her heart breaking for this beautiful child. Breaking twice: in grief for what she had lost, and in joy for how Bug’s and Sylvia’s prayers had been answered.
For she could see another face—Bug’s haggard expression when he brought the little kids to stay with her and Hal. He was facing the death of his own child, as Betty lay struggling just to breathe in a far-off hospital.
“I thought I knew,” he told her then, quietly, when Hal was showing the kids where they’d be sleeping. “What it was like for Mom and Dad to lose Ernie. I mean, we lost him too, didn’t we?”
Then suddenly his face crumpled and tears burst from his clenched eyes and he clung to her. “Oh, Zan. I pray to God you never know for yourself. It’s the worst thing in the world.”
But seeing him like that, and thinking of her own Patty and Lyle and baby Colleen, she could imagine. “They hold us hostage,” said Zan. “We make these children and we love them so much and the world holds them for ransom and any time it wants to, it gives us the note and demands that we pay.”
He pulled away from her then. “Anything. Just so she lives.”
She wanted to ask him then, Even crippled? But she knew the answer already—yes, even crippled, just don’t take her.
Then Bug got control of himself before his two younger kids came crashing back into the room. It wouldn’t do for them to catch their papa crying, would it?
So as she stood at that window, several years later, and watched Betty watching the other children outside in the snow, she could just imagine what yearning the girl must be feeling—and how bittersweet it was for her parents to see her like this, still alive, but now held by such heavy chains to the earth. Now she knew more about gravity than anyone else.
Yet when Betty felt her presence and turned to face Aunt Zanna, she didn’t look wistful or heartbroken. Quite the contrary, she looked a little disgusted. “I’m gonna have to teach Todd how to make a snowball. His always fly apart in midair. You got to pack ’em!” She socked one hand into the palm of the other. “Pack ’em!”
For a moment, she was her old self, fierce and vigorous.
Then she took a step toward Zanna and once again she was in the midst of that constant war with gravity, keeping precarious balance as she perched on those unreliable legs.
That’s when Zanna realized: She’s still the same child. Whatever it was that sent her climbing trees and treating death with such despite, it wasn’t killed by the polio, it’s still in her as much as ever. It isn’t really courage—courage is overcoming fear, and she never felt any. It’s more like determination. Not grim determination, just a kind of headlong rush toward life, and if her feet couldn’t keep up, that wouldn’t stop her heart or her mind.
That’s why Zanna went ahead and finished the painting.