There’s all kinds of books, Senor El-Stupido, Buddy whispered.
Yeah, but what kind?
How should I know? Go to sleep!
Silence. George thought it through.
Buddy?
What! An irritated hiss.
Why did Mom tell us Gramma quit the church and her job?
Because it’s a skeleton in the closet, that’s why! Now go to sleep!
But he hadn’t gone to sleep, not for a long time. His eyes kept straying to the closet door, dimly outlined in moonlight, and he kept wondering what he would do if the door swung open, revealing a skeleton inside, all grinning tombstone teeth and cistern eye sockets and parrot-cage ribs; white moonlight skating delirious and almost blue on whiter bone. Would he scream? What had Buddy meant, a skeleton in the closet? What did skeletons have to do with books? At last he had slipped into sleep without even knowing it and had dreamed he was six again, and Gramma was holding out her arms, her blind eyes searching for him; Gramma’s reedy, querulous voice was saying, Where’s the little one, Ruth? Why’s he crying? I only want to put him in the closet… with the skeleton.
George had puzzled over these matters long and long, and finally, about a month after Aunt Flo had departed, he went to his mother and told her he had heard her and Aunt Flo talking. He knew what a skeleton in the closet meant by then, because he had asked Mrs. Redenbacher at school. She said it meant having a scandal in the family, and a scandal was something that made people talk a lot. Like Cora Simard talks a lot? George had asked Mrs. Redenbacher, and Mrs. Redenbacher’s face had worked strangely and her lips had quivered and she had said, That’s not nice, George, but… yes, something like that.
When he asked Mom, her face had gotten very still, and her hands had paused over the solitaire clockface of cards she had been laying out.
Do you think that’s a good thing for you to be doing, Georgie? Do you and your brother make a habit of eaves-dropping over the register?
George, then only nine, had hung his head.
We like Aunt Flo, Mom. We wanted to listen to her a little longer.
This was the truth.
Was it Buddy’s idea?
It had been, but George wasn’t going to tell her that. He didn’t want to go walking around with his head on backwards, which might happen if Buddy found out he had tattled.
No, mine.
Mom had sat silent for a long time, and then she slowly began laying her cards out again. Maybe it’s time you did know, she had said. Lying’s worse than eavesdropping, I guess, and we all lie to our children about Gramma. And we lie to ourselves too, I guess. Most of the time, we do. And then she spoke with a sudden, vicious bitterness that was like acid squirting out between her front teeth — he felt that her words were so hot they would have burned his face if he hadn’t recoiled. Except for me. I have to live with her, and I can no longer afford the luxury of lies.
So his Mom told him that after Granpa and Gramma had gotten married, they had had a baby that was born dead, and a year later they had another baby, and that was born dead too, and the doctor told Gramma she would never be able to carry a child to term and all she could do was keep on having babies that were dead or babies that died as soon as they sucked air. That would go on, he said, until one of them died inside her too long before her body could shove it out and it would rot in there and kill her, too.
The doctor told her that.
Not long after, the books began.
Books about how to have babies?
But Mom didn’t — or wouldn’t — say what kind of books they were, or where Gramma got them, or how she knew to get them. Gramma got pregnant again, and this time the baby wasn’t born dead and the baby didn’t die after a breath or two; this time the baby was fine, and that was George’s Uncle Larson. And after that, Gramma kept getting pregnant and having babies. Once, Mom said, Granpa had tried to make her get rid of the books to see if they could do it without them (or even if they couldn’t, maybe Granpa figured they had enough yowwens by then so it wouldn’t matter) and Gramma wouldn’t. George asked his mother why and she said: “I think that by then having the books was as important to her as having the babies.”