The Treasurelock
My grandmother first described the treasurelock as the place where St Francis of Assisi’s fingers crossed before his ribs — she did not say chest — as he prayed. These were early days when her sight hadn’t started to fool around and the moon hung in the blind spots of her control. As I grew and her knuckles enlarged she one afternoon described the treasurelock as the pressure between sand grains in the squeeze-ball the doctors had given her to keep up her strength. By now I had invested everything into typewriters and needed this talk to strengthen my spirits, as it were.
That same year she broke her hip. The jokes my grandfather made when his friends broke their hips (horses, kerpow) went inside out, the autumn winds laughing in her leaves, and grandmother took my hand one afternoon, a wicked laceration along my palm from a broken key, and squeezed. I winced; her vision and feeling were nearly gone, the plane gliding into a landing, and she tried to place my palm on her pelvis as though I were St Francis or a squeeze-ball but drove my palm onto the center of her pelvis and kept it there. The treasurelock, she said, mimicked the trust between doctor and patient but where the doctor is quite smart and competent yet, unexplainably, unsure and the patient feels this but knows no more.
Years later one of my writers plunged the business into a lawsuit after plagiarizing Vladimir Nabokov. The discovery process, to use the term, sent me into fits of cleaning and on a shipwrecked eve I came upon a letter grandmother sent to me the month I was born. It had passed unnoticed in my boxes. Here, she typed out a detailed description of the treasurelock, using her arguments with the moon and indifference to the trees as examples of how not to behave when within its grasp. At the bottom she drew — I never knew she drew and here she had done so seemingly with the tip of a scalpel the lines were so delicate — a pair of knitted gloves, each stitch and rib textured perfectly. The fingers were splayed wide, as though stopping a car, and below steamed a cup of tea, as though the hands rose out like a genie from a lamp.