It was a great big house that had a horse fence
around it and sat on a little
promontory. It had once, during my
grandmother's tenure, been featured in a
lush Better Homes and Gardens
photo spread. At the time, its garage sheltered the splashiest car in
all of
Des Moines, a yellow four-door Lincoln Continental
convertible. Yellow! What a rich, grand life they had led, and it was
only compounded when my grandfather rose to the position of assistant
secretary of defense under Eisenhower. My parents had married by then,
but they soon divorced, my father moving back home to Denmark — where
he married the Danish prime minister's daughter, had three beautiful
kids, and made a ton of dough in the reinsurance
racket — while my
mother (with whom I stayed) briefly dated a Rhode Island
Mafia-type
racketeer, then settled down with a spineless,
bearded, love-bead-wearing music teacher, which so infuriated my
grandmother that she would often haul her skinny Cadillac-driven bones
onto our front porch and start shrieking at the top of her
lungs.