a regular bloodhound, Mr. C. No wonder you close so many cases.”
In youth, Imogene must have been a pocket Venus. Her features were still delicate and her skin as clear as morning light. In spite of her petite stature, she was not now – and likely never had been – fragile either in body or spirit. She had the air of one who could readily assume Atlas’s burden if he could not carry it any longer.
“But I don’t detect even a hint of polenta,” John worried.
“How could you smell polenta through such a cloud of stew? But it’s here, of course. We’d never serve carbonata without it.”
After another deep breath, he said, “Piselli alle noci,” which was an Italian dish of buttered peas and carrots garnished with walnut halves.
To her husband, Imogene said, “He’s got a better nose than you do, Wally.”
“Of course he does,” Walter agreed as he shaved fresh Parmesan on the salads. “After all those years of navy cooking, I’ve ruined my nose for nuance. Which reminds me, sir, leave the laundry-room door closed, we’ve got an ugly stink in there. I only discovered it ten minutes ago. I’ll deal with it in the morning.”
“What’s wrong?” John asked.
“I’m not sure. But my best guess is a sick rodent found a way into the dryer exhaust duct and met his fate just on the farther side of the lint trap.”
“Wally,” Imogene said with some exasperation. “The man’s about to sit down to his dinner.”
“Sorry, Mr. C.”
“No problem. Nothing could turn me off carbonata.”
“It’s just curious,” Walter said, “how the smell came on so suddenly. One minute the laundry room is fine, and a minute later, it reeks.”
John sat at the head of the dining-room table, Nicolette to his right, Minnie to his left and boosted on a pillow. Naomi sat beside her little sister, Zachary across from Naomi.
For the first time, the sight of his family gathered in one place didn’t at once warm John but instead inspired a cold tightness in his chest, a greasy sliding sensation in his stomach. The dining room seemed too bright, although the lighting was the same as ever at dinner, and every window invited hostile observation. The stainless-steel flatware flanking his plate had the sinister gleam of surgical instruments. His wineglass was indeed glass, a potential source of jagged shards.
For a moment, this curious uneasiness threatened to disorient him – until he understood the cause of it. Together, the family was five targets clustered, therefore vulnerable to quick annihilation. Although he had no incontestable proof that any enemy waged war against him, he was thinking like a man embattled.
His hyperbolic suspicion embarrassed him, and more important, he recognized that if not controlled, it would cloud his judgment. If he permitted his imagination to paint a gloss of evil on all things, he would provide camouflage for true evil. Besides, if you painted the devil on the walls often enough, you got the devil on the stairs, his footsteps approaching.
When John allowed his children to delight him, they soon lifted from him this pall of foreboding.
After grace, during the salad course, the primary subject discussed was the brilliant, the magnificent, the incomparable, the current that’s-who-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up, Louisa May Alcott, immortal author of Little Women, which Naomi had finished reading just that afternoon. She wanted to be Louisa May Alcott, and she wanted also to be Jo, the young writer in the story, but of course she wanted to be herself, embodying all the Alcott-Jo qualities while writing and living in her unique Naomi style.
Naomi seemed destined, as an adult, to appear on Broadway in the title role of a revival of Peter Pan. She contained both a tomboy who yearned for swashbuckling adventures and a perpetually breathless girl who saw romance and magic everywhere she looked. She wanted to know how to throw a perfect sinking curveball every bit as much as she wanted to know how to arrange roses to the best effect, and she believed both in Truth and in Tinker Bell. As likely to dance along a hallway as to run it, more likely to sing away a sadness than to sulk, she exhausted the possibilities of each new enthusiasm just as inevitably another one came along to captivate her.
As Walter whisked away the salad plates, Zachary said, “Little Women sounds like a giant bore. Why can’t you go nuts about vampire novels like every other dorky sixth-grade girl? Then we’d really have something worth talking about at the table.”
“I don’t find the living dead the least bit attractive,” Naomi said. “When I’m old enough to have a boyfriend, I don’t want one who drinks my blood. Imagine his bad breath and what a mess his teeth would be. All these girls swooning over hunky vampires, what they really want is to give away their freedom, to be controlled and told what to do and not have to think – and never die, of course. It’s sick is what it is. I don’t want to be a forever-young living corpse, I want to be Louisa May Alcott.”
Minnie said, “It’s stupid how she has three names.”
“We all have three names,” Naomi said. “You’re Minette Eugenia Calvino.”
“But nobody calls me all three, like you guys said a thousand times already ‘Louisa May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott.’ It’s stupid.”
“Celebrity-shooters always have three names,” Zach said. “Like Mark David Chapman and Lee Harvey Oswald. There’s a bunch of others, but I can’t think of them right now.”
“Good,” his mother said. “I’d be very disturbed to have a thirteen-year-old son obsessed with three-name celebrity-shooters.”
“Zach is totally obsessed with the United States Marines,” Naomi said. “He’s got like eighty-six books about them.”
“I only have thirty-one books about them,” Zach protested, “and I’m not obsessed with the marines. I just like military history is all. Lots of people are interested in military history.”
“Relax,” Naomi said. “I wasn’t implying your interest in the marines is a homosexual thing. After all, you’re also obsessed with Laura Leigh Highsmith worse than you are the marines.”
“Three names,” Minnie observed.
John said, “Who’s Laura Leigh Highsmith?”
Minnie said, “Is she related to Louisa May Alcott?”
“She’s just a girl in my human-head class.”
The children were primarily home-schooled. For educational purposes, Naomi went out of the house only to music lessons and to junior-orchestra practices. Zach attended group lessons twice a week as part of an art-institute program for gifted children. Currently he was enrolled in a pencil class to learn the fine points of drawing the human head.
Teasingly, Naomi said, “Hey, does Laura Leigh Highsmith draw portraits of you?”
“She’s just a challenging subject,” Zach said. “Hard to get right. Other than that, she’s nobody.”
“Are you gonna marry her?” Minnie asked.
“Of course not,” Zach said. “Why would I marry a nobody?”
“What’s wrong with your face?” Minnie asked.
Naomi said, “It’s sure not sunburn. He’s blushing.”
“I’m not blushing,” Zach declared.
“Then it’s a bad rash,” Minnie said. “Mom, he’s got a bad rash.”
“Permission to leave the table,” Zach said.
John said, “Denied. You’ve eaten only a salad.”
“I’ve