Moonglow
Moonglow
Michael Chabon
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEARThe keeping of secrets and the telling of lies; sex and desire and ordinary love; existential doubt and model rocketry – all feature in the new novel from the author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.‘The world, like the Tower of Babel or my grandmother’s deck of cards, was made out of stories, and it was always on the verge of collapse.’Moonglow unfolds as a deathbed confession. An old man, his tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, his memory stirred by the imminence of death, tells stories to his grandson, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried. Why did he try to strangle a former business partner with a telephone cord? What was he thinking when he and a buddy set explosives on a bridge in Washington, D.C.? What did he feel while he hunted down Wernher von Braun in Germany? And what did he see in the young girl he met in Baltimore after returning home from the war?From the Jewish slums of pre-war Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of a New York prison, from the heyday of the space programme to the twilight of ‘the American Century’, Moonglow collapses an era into a single life and a lifetime into a single week.
Copyright (#ulink_bb644281-ca36-5ad5-8a1f-5f9429f30fd8)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016
First published in the United States by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, in 2016
Copyright © Michael Chabon 2016
Cover design by Anna Morrison
Michael Chabon asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Scout’s honor.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780007548910
Ebook Edition © October 2016 ISBN: 9780008189860
Version: 2018-06-11
Dedication 1 (#ulink_617db082-5609-5158-9b34-fb3ecb69c5fe)
To them, seriously
Dedication 2 (#ulink_86861e3e-86d8-5ddc-a572-2667d0ff5d2d)
To them
Epigraph (#ulink_7d0b57cf-6ecd-55db-984f-77e56f44689f)
There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark.
—Wernher von Braun
Contents
Cover (#ud268d6f1-3595-53ae-b3fb-f90757e99be0)
Title Page (#u7ec7bd70-c753-5375-98a4-d52c394f245c)
Copyright (#u804828d7-c79c-59db-bcb3-3c9f25a906b8)
Dedication 1 (#u59096d2c-3b46-5bb2-99a9-6d81238bd795)
Dedication 2 (#u032ed8b9-6ad3-54b8-8e7b-947ac30b8751)
Epigraph (#u55b15d98-1986-5f3e-875e-04719b95ba96)
Author’s Note (#u15bb2b64-e94c-5136-aadc-692b89a166db)
Chapter 1 (#u96fb9979-58d0-5e41-a4e2-511da7fd4f50)
Chapter 2 (#u4554f58d-aea8-5748-b1e4-91781aa2142b)
Chapter 3 (#ucfe62948-fc02-5563-993f-23f0a6a347cf)
Chapter 4 (#u3db1ee95-be89-5271-8ece-8c74b06d4408)
Chapter 5 (#u7bceb01a-26b6-5694-9ca5-6a67b16025aa)
Chapter 6 (#ud2146a22-12de-5c53-a23d-5a816f12778b)
Chapter 7 (#u25f85ee9-b7fe-5a9b-8e16-135adac14164)
Chapter 8 (#ubf3ca6ba-fb9f-5b29-8ef1-c0ac49dccaa3)
Chapter 9 (#ufecfe02c-a518-5617-999e-d9c390e8eb54)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Michael Chabon (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#ulink_e1e1d7a4-6ce8-51ba-b397-57f62d908c25)
In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Wherever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events, and conversations, or with the identities, motivations, and interrelationships of family members and historical personages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon.
Advertisement, Esquire, October 1958
1 (#ulink_2b40836b-a7cf-538f-8cdb-311a721d8992)
This is how I heard the story. When Alger Hiss got out of prison, he had a hard time finding a job. He was a graduate of Harvard Law School, had clerked for Oliver Wendell Holmes and helped charter the United Nations, yet he was also a convicted perjurer and notorious as a tool of international communism. He had published a memoir, but it was dull stuff and no one wanted to read it. His wife had left him. He was broke and hopeless. In the end one of his remaining friends took pity on the bastard and pulled a string. Hiss was hired by a New York firm that manufactured and sold a kind of fancy barrette made from loops of piano wire. Feathercombs, Inc., had gotten off to a good start but had come under attack from a bigger competitor that copied its designs, infringed on its trademarks, and undercut its pricing. Sales had dwindled. Payroll was tight. In order to make room for Hiss, somebody had to be let go.
In an account of my grandfather’s arrest, in the Daily News for May 25, 1957, he is described by an unnamed coworker as “the quiet type.” To his fellow salesmen at Feathercombs, he was a homburg on the coat rack in the corner. He was the hardest-working but least effective member of the Feathercombs sales force. On his lunch breaks he holed up with a sandwich and the latest issue of Sky and Telescope or Aviation Week. It was known that he drove a Crosley, had a foreign-born wife and a teenage daughter and lived with them somewhere in deepest Bergen County. Before the day of his arrest, my grandfather had distinguished himself to his coworkers only twice. During Game 5 of the 1956 World Series, when the office radio failed, my grandfather had repaired it with a vacuum tube prized from the interior of the telephone switchboard. And a Feathercombs copywriter reported once bumping into my grandfather at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, where the foreign wife was, of all things, starring as Serafina in The Rose Tattoo. Beyond this nobody knew much about my grandfather, and that seemed to be the way he preferred it. People had long since given up trying to engage him in conversation. He had been known to smile but not to laugh. If he held political opinions—if he held opinions of any kind—they remained a mystery around the offices of Feathercombs, Inc. It was felt he could be fired without damage to morale.
Shortly after nine o’clock on the morning of the twenty-fourth, the president of Feathercombs heard a disturbance outside his office, where a quick-witted girl had been positioned to filter out creditors and tax inspectors. A male voice spoke with urgency that scaled rapidly to anger. The intercom on the president’s desk buzzed and buzzed again. He heard a chime of glass breaking. It sounded like a telephone when you slammed down the receiver. Before the president could rise from his chair to see what the matter was, my grandfather muscled into the room. He brandished a black handset (in those days a blunt instrument) that trailed three feet of frayed cord.
Back in the late 1930s, when he wasn’t hustling pool, my grandfather had put himself through four years at Drexel Tech by delivering pianos for Wanamaker’s department store. His shoulders spanned the doorway. His kinky hair, escaped from its daily paste-down of Brylcreem, wobbled atop his head. His face was so flushed with blood that he looked sunburned. “I never saw anyone so angry,” an eyewitness told the News. “You could almost smell smoke coming off him.”
For his part, the president of Feathercombs was astonished to discover that he had approved the firing of a maniac. “What’s this about?” he said.
It was a pointless question, and my grandfather disdained to answer it; he was opposed to stating the obvious. Most of the questions people asked you, he felt, were there to fill up dead space, curtail your movements, divert your energy and attention. Anyway, my grandfather and his emotions were never really on speaking terms. He took hold of the frayed end of the telephone cord. He wound it twice around his left hand.
The president tried to stand up, but his legs got tangled in the kneehole of his desk. His chair shot out from under him and toppled over, casters rattling. He screamed. It was a fruity sound, halfway to a yodel. As my grandfather fell on top of him, the president twisted himself toward the window overlooking East Fifty-seventh Street. He just had time to notice that passersby seemed to be crowding together on the sidewalk below.
My grandfather looped the cord of the handset around the president’s throat. He had maybe two minutes before the rocket of his anger burned up its fuel and fell back to earth. That would be ample time. During World War II, he had been trained in the use of a garrote.* He knew that, done properly, strangulation was short work.
“Oh my God,” said the secretary, Miss Mangel, making a late appearance on the scene.
She had reacted quickly when my grandfather burst into her office smelling, she would recall afterward, like wood smoke. She had managed to buzz twice before my grandfather grabbed the handset away from her. He picked up the intercom. He yanked the handset cord from the base.
“You’ll have to pay for that,” Miss Mangel said.
When he told this story thirty-two years later, my grandfather put a checkmark of admiration beside Miss Mangel’s name, but with his rocket only halfway up the slope of its parabola he took her words as provocation. He threw the base of the intercom out the window of Miss Mangel’s office. The chiming noted by the president was the sound of the intercom sailing through a spiderweb of glass into the street.
Hearing a cry of outrage from below, Miss Mangel went to the window to look. Down on the sidewalk a man in a gray suit was sitting looking up at her. There was blood on the left lens of his round spectacles. He was laughing.* People stopped to help him. The doorman announced that he was going to call the police. That was when Miss Mangel heard her boss screaming. She turned from the window to run into his office.
At first glance the office appeared to be empty. Then she heard the tap of a shoe against a linoleum floor, a tap, another tap. The back of my grandfather’s head rose from behind the desk, then sank again. Brave Miss Mangel went around the desk. Her boss lay sprawled on his belly on the polished floor. My grandfather straddled his back, hunched forward, applying the impromptu garrote. The president bucked, and thrashed, and tried to roll himself over. The only sound was the toes of his cordovan bucks trying to get purchase against the linoleum.
Miss Mangel snatched up a letter opener from the president’s desk and jabbed it into my grandfather’s left shoulder. In my grandfather’s reckoning, many years later, this action merited another checkmark.
The point of the letter opener sank only half an inch or so into meat, but the bite of metal blocked some meridian in the flow of my grandfather’s rage. He grunted. “It was like I woke up,” he said when he told me this part of the story for the first time, during the last week of his life. He unwound the cord from the president’s neck. He peeled it from the grooves it had cut into the flesh of his own left hand. The handset clattered against the floor. With a foot on either side of the president, he stood up and took a step away. The president flopped onto his back and raised himself into a sitting position, then sledded backward on his ass into a notch between two filing cabinets. He sobbed for air. When his face had hit the floor, he’d bitten his lower lip, and now his teeth were dyed pink.
My grandfather turned to face Miss Mangel. He plucked out the letter opener and laid it on the president’s desk. When one of his rages wore off, you could see regret flooding his eyes like seawater. He dropped his hands to his sides.
“Forgive me,” he said to Miss Mangel and to the president. I suppose he was also saying it to my mother, fourteen at the time, and to my grandmother, though arguably she was as much to blame as my grandfather. There was scant hope of forgiveness, but my grandfather did not sound as if he expected, or even wanted, to find any.
* * *
At the end of my grandfather’s life, his doctor prescribed a powerful hydromorphone against the pain of bone cancer. A lot of Germans were busy knocking holes in the Berlin Wall around that time, and I showed up to say goodbye to my grandfather just as Dilaudid was bringing its soft hammer to bear on his habit of silence: Out flowed a record of his misadventures, his ambiguous luck, his feats and failures of timing and nerve. He had been installed in my mother’s guest bedroom for almost two weeks, and by the time I arrived in Oakland he was getting nearly twenty milligrams a day. He started talking almost the minute I sat down in the chair by his bed. It was as if he had been waiting for my company, but I believe now that he simply knew he was running out of time.
The recollections emerged in no discernible order apart from the first, which was also the earliest.
“Did I tell you,” he said, lolling on his palliative cloud, “about the time I dropped a kitten out of the window?”
I did not say, then or at any point until he sank into the cloud for good, that he had told me very little about his life. I had yet to hear about the attack on the president of Feathercombs, Inc., so I could not point out to him that I sensed a motif of defenestration beginning to emerge in his autobiography. Later, when he did tell me about Miss Mangel, the intercom, and the Czech diplomat, I would choose to skip the smart remark.
“Did it die?” I asked him.
I was eating a cup of his raspberry Jell-O. Nothing else tempted his palate apart from a spoonful or two of the chicken soup my mother cooked for him, following the recipe of my late grandmother—born and raised in France—which called for a squeeze of lemon to brighten the broth. Even the Jell-O was not of much interest to him. There was plenty to spare.
“It was a third-story window,” my grandfather said. He added, as if his native city were known for its adamantine sidewalks, “in Philadelphia.”
“How old were you?”
“Three or four.”
“Jesus. Why would you do something like that?”
He poked out his tongue, once, twice. That was something he did every few minutes. It often looked as if he were passing clownish judgment on something you had told him, but it was really only a side effect of the meds. His tongue was pale and had the nap of suede. I knew from a few precious demonstrations during my childhood that he could touch the tip of it to the tip of his nose. Outside the window of my mother’s guest bedroom, the East Bay sky was gray as the nimbus of hair around his suntanned face.
“Curiosity,” my grandfather decided, and stuck out his tongue.
I said that I had heard curiosity could be harmful, in particular to cats.
2 (#ulink_28745f52-f9d6-5acb-b229-6fe2798b84c0)
As a boy, my grandfather lived with his parents, his father’s father, and his kid brother, Reynard—my mother’s Uncle Ray—in three rooms at the corner of Tenth and Shunk in South Philadelphia.
His father, a German-speaking native of Pressburg (now Bratislava), had failed in a series of dry goods stores and corner groceries throughout the 1920s and ’30s. After that he abandoned hope of enduring ownership and played out the string as a sales clerk in liquor stores, watching other men’s cash registers get robbed. In my grandfather’s recollections his mother appeared as a strong back and a heart of gold, a “saint” indentured to the service of her husband and sons. In photographs she is a boxy woman, girdled with steel, shod in coal-black stompers, her bosom so large it might have housed turbines. She was all but illiterate in Yiddish and English but obliged my grandfather, and later Uncle Ray, to read to her daily from the Yiddish press so that she could keep abreast of the latest calamities to beset Jewry. From every week’s household budget she managed to siphon off a dollar or two for the pushke can. Orphans of pogrom were fed, refugees berthed on steamships to freedom. Entire hillsides in Palestine bore the oranges of her compassionate embezzlement. “In the winter the laundry froze stiff on the clothesline,” my grandfather recalled. “She had to carry it up all those stairs.” Uncle Ray I knew as a playboy of the late 1960s in a sky-blue turtleneck and a gray tweed blazer. He drove an Alfa Spider and wore a raffish eyepatch over his gnarly left eye. Sometimes when I looked at him I thought of Hugh Hefner and sometimes of Moshe Dayan. As a boy, however, Reynard was studious and frail. It was my grandfather, in the early days, who ran wild. Throwing a kitten out of a window was only a warning shot.
He wandered in the summertime from breakfast to dark, ranging as far east as the rancid Delaware and as far south as the Navy Yard. He saw an evicted family drinking tea on the sidewalk amid their beds, their lamps, their Victrola, a parakeet in a brass cage. He unfolded a packet of newspaper on the lid of an ashcan and found the eyeball of a cow. He saw children and animals beaten savagely and yet with patience and care. He saw a convertible Nash mobbed outside an AME church; Marian Anderson stepped out of it and lit up his memory, six decades afterward, with the crescent moon of her smile.
South Philadelphia was broadcast with Moonblatts and Newmans, those cousins who one day would people the weddings and funerals of my mother’s and my childhoods. Their homes served as my grandfather’s way stations. In threading his routes from one to the next, past blocks controlled by Irish and Italians, my grandfather laid the foundation of his wartime work. He cultivated secret contacts among the Italian bakers and grocers, running errands or working a broom in exchange for payment in pennies, lemon ice, or a twist of warm bread. He studied the nuances of people’s ways of speaking and carrying themselves. If you hoped to avoid a beating on Christian Street, you could alter your gait and the cant of your head to look as though you were walking where you belonged. When that failed—or if, like my grandfather, you were not averse to scrapping—you fought dirty. Even Christian Street bravos squealed like babies if you hooked your thumbs in their eye sockets. Every so often, on the slope of a train embankment, behind the breast-shaped silos of the fertilizer plant, a battle would be pitched with bed slats, lengths of pipe, slingshots, and rocks. My grandfather lost a tooth, broke an arm, took uncountable stitches. On his left buttock he bore a pouty scar, the work of a beer bottle he sat on during a fight in a vacant lot behind the McCahan sugar refinery. Sixty years later the scar was visible whenever he used the bedpan, a silvery pucker, the kiss of violence.
His absences and injuries caused consternation to his parents, who made efforts to curtail them. Bounds were set, borders established; my grandfather subverted them. Resolute in his refusal to give details or name names, resistant to corporal punishment, willing to forgo whatever treat he was to be deprived of, he wore his parents down. In time they surrendered.
“Nothing can be done about a boy who throws cats out of windows,” said old Abraham, my grandfather’s grandfather, in his Pressburger German. Abraham ruled from his corner of the parlor that doubled as a dining room, enthroned atop his hemorrhoid donut among his books of commentary. It was nearly dark, one of the last free evenings of the summer.
“But what if he’s lost?” my grandmother said for the thousandth or millionth time.
“He isn’t lost,” Uncle Ray said, issuing the finding that ultimately prevailed in the family Talmud. “He knows where he is.”
He was trapped under a train car, one of six wooden boxcars on a stub at the far end of a storage yard by the river. The boxcars were used last to rush Baldwin-Felts men to the Paint Creek Mine War. Now they stood pastured against a hump of ground, and the mouths of a trumpet creeper devoured them.
He was hiding from a railroad bull, a big man named Creasey with a film on his left eye and patches of carroty hair growing on parts of his face where no hair ought to be. Creasey had already thrashed my grandfather soundly a number of times that summer. The first time he jerked my grandfather’s arm up behind his back so hard the bones sang. The second time he dragged my grandfather by an earlobe across the yard to the main gate, where he applied his boot heel to the seat of my grandfather’s trousers; my grandfather claimed the earlobe still bore the print of Creasey’s thumb. The third time Creasey caught my grandfather trespassing, he strapped him thoroughly with the leather harness of his Pennsy uniform. This time my grandfather planned to stay under that boxcar until Creasey moved on or dropped dead.
Creasey stuck around, smoking cigarettes, pacing the weeds between the stub of track and the rest of the storage yard. My grandfather, flat on his belly, watched the bull’s dusty boots through a scrim of dandelion and foxtail. Scrape, stop, pivot, return. Every few minutes a cigarette fell with a pat against the gravel and met its end beneath Creasey’s right boot. My grandfather heard the twist of a bottle cap, a slosh of liquid, a belch. He had the impression that Creasey was waiting for somebody, killing time, maybe getting up his nerve.
My grandfather puzzled over it. Creasey was supposed to keep moving, sweeping the lots for hoboes, tramps, and pilferers like my grandfather, who had come to the Greenwich Yard that summer drawn by reports of coal for the taking, spillover from the cars as they trundled to the piers. The first time Creasey caught him it was because my grandfather had been weighed down by twenty-five pounds of coal in a sugar sack. Why did the man not carry on now with the work the Pennsylvania Railroad paid him to do? Inside the boxcar, over his head, my grandfather heard small animals in their nests, rousing themselves to their nightly business. According to his mother’s natural history, he knew, that business was to bite young boys and give them rabies.
At last Creasey trampled his fifth cigarette, took another swig, and moved off. My grandfather counted to thirty and then slid out from under the boxcar. He brushed the grit from his belly, where the skin prickled. He spotted Creasey carrying a knapsack, making for one of the little stucco houses scattered here and there across the lots. On his first forays into the Greenwich Yard my grandfather had been charmed by the idea that railmen were cottaged like shepherds among the herded trains. He soon determined that the bungalows were no one’s habitations. They had mesh grilles over their blackwashed windows, and if you put your ear to their doors you could hear a thrum of power and sometimes a thunk like the clockwork of a bank vault. Until now my grandfather had never seen anybody going into one or coming out.
Creasey fished a key ring from his hip and let himself in. The door closed softly behind him.
My grandfather knew that he ought to head for home, where a hot supper and an operetta of reproach awaited him. He was hungry, and practiced in deafness and the formulation of remorse. But he had come here today to stand one final time at the top of one particular signal bridge that he had come to think of as his own, and tell another summer goodbye.
He cut across the storage yard and stole along a stretch of railbed to “his” signal bridge. He scaled the service ladder and clambered out along the catwalk to its midpoint, fifteen feet above the tracks. He raised up, holding onto the body of the central signal lantern. He jammed his feet in their canvas sneakers into the steel lattice of the catwalk. He let go of the signal lantern and stood balanced with arms outspread, hooked only by his ankles to the turning earth. Between him and the tenement on Shunk Street, the rail yard shuffled and sorted its rolling stock bound for New York, Pittsburgh, St. Louis. Trains and sections of trains clanged and rumbled and plowed furrows in the gloom.
He turned his face to the east. Darkness piled up like a thunderhead over New Jersey. Beyond the river lay Camden, beyond Camden the Jersey Shore, beyond the shore the Atlantic Ocean, and beyond that, Paris, France. His mother’s brother, a veteran of the Argonne, had informed my grandfather that in the “cathouses” of that city a man might cross one further border, where silk stocking met white thigh. My grandfather took the signal lantern in his arms. He pressed his hips against its smooth encasement and looked up at the evening sky. A full moon rose, tinted by its angle on earth’s atmosphere to a color like the flesh of a peach. My grandfather had spent most of that last Friday of the summer reading a copy of Astounding Stories of Super-Science, found among some other unsold magazines in the back room of his father’s store. The last story was about a daring earthman who flew in an atomic rocket to the Moon’s dark side, where he found ample air and water, fought bloodthirsty selenites, and fell in love with a pale and willing lunar princess. The Moon was a tough neighborhood, and the princess required frequent salvation by the earthman.
My grandfather regarded the Moon. He thought about the noble girl in the story with her “graceful, undulating body” and felt the swell of an inner tide reaching toward her, lifting him like Enoch in the whirlwind into the sky. He ascended the skyward tide of his longing. He would be there for her. He was coming to her rescue.
A door banged shut, and Creasey came out of the little house and rejoined his evening route. He was no longer carrying the knapsack. He crossed a set of tracks, a hitch of stiffness in his walk, and vanished among the cars.
My grandfather climbed down from the signal bridge. His path home did not run past the little house. But old Abraham had ruled correctly from his corner of the parlor: Nothing could be done for a boy who would throw a kitten out of a window onto a Philadelphia pavement just to see what would happen if he did.
My grandfather approached the little house with its gridded black windows. For a full minute he stood and watched it. He put his ear to the door. Over the electrical hum, he heard a human sound: choking, or laughter, or sobs.
He knocked. The sound broke off. The house’s mysterious clockwork clicked. From the marshaling yard came the trumpeting of lashed-up engines, ready to drag a long load west. He knocked again.
“Who’s there?”
My grandfather gave his first and last name. On reflection he appended his address. There followed a prolonged spell of unmistakable coughing from the other side of the door. When it passed, he heard a stirring, the creak of a bed or chair.
A girl peered out, hiding the right half of her face behind the door that she gripped with both hands, looking ready to slam it shut. The visible half of her head was a mat of peroxide tangles. Around the left eye, under a delicate eyebrow, paint mingled with mascara in cakes and blotches. She wore the fingernails on her left hand long, lacquered in black cherry. The nails on her right hand were bitten and bare of paint. She was wrapped loosely in a man’s tartan bathrobe. If she was surprised to see him, she did not show it. If she had been crying, she was not crying anymore. But my grandfather understood Creasey the way you come to understand a man who repeatedly kicks your ass. The details of the hurt that Creasey might have done to this girl during his visit remained obscure, but my grandfather felt the outrage all the more vividly for his ignorance. He saw it in the ruin of her eye paint. He smelled it, a taint of Javela water and armpit in the air that leaked from behind the half-open door.
“Well?” she said. “State your business, Shunk Street.”
“I saw him come in there,” my grandfather said. “That Creasey bastard.”
It was a word not to be used in the hearing of adults, especially women, but in this instance it felt fitting. The girl’s face came out from behind the door like the moon from behind a factory wall. She took a better look at him.
“He is a bastard,” she said. “You’re right about that.”
He saw that the hair on the right side of her part was cropped as short as his own, as though to rid that half of lice. On the right side of her upper lip she had raised enough whisker to form the handlebar of a mustache. Her right eye was free of paint, under a dense black brow. Apart from a shadow of stubble universal on either side of the chin, an invisible rule appeared to have apportioned evenly the male and female of her nature. My grandfather had heard but disbelieved neighborhood reports of sideshow hermaphrodites, cat girls, ape girls, four-legged women who must be mounted like tables. He might have reconsidered his doubt if not for the fact that he saw, filling both sides of the loose flannel wrapper from the neck down, only womanly curvature and shadow.
“The price of a peep is one nickel, Shunk Street,” she said. “I believe you may owe me a dime.”
My grandfather looked down at his shoes. They were not much to look at. “Come on,” he said, reaching for her arm. Even through the flannel of her sleeve, he could feel fever on her skin.
She shook loose of his grip with a jerk of her arm.
“He won’t come back this way for a while. But we have to go now,” my grandfather said. There were whiskers on the chins of his own aunts: big deal. He was here by the power of a wish on an evening star. “Come on!”
“Aren’t you funny,” she said. She peeked out of the doorway, looked to either side. She lowered her voice in a show of co-conspiracy. “Trying to rescue me.”
From her lips it sounded like the most peabrained idea ever conceived. She left the door hanging open and went back inside. She sat down on a cot and pulled a stiff blanket around her. In the light of a candle guttering on an overturned jar lid, panels of black switches and gauges glinted. Creasey’s knapsack lay neglected on the floor.
“Are you going to take me home to your mama and papa?” she suggested in a voice that made him momentarily dislike her. “A drug-sick whore full of TB?”
“I can take you to a hospital.”
“Aren’t you funny,” she said, more tenderly this time. “You already know I can unlock the door from the inside, honey. I’m not a prisoner here.”
My grandfather felt there was more to her imprisonment than a lock and key, but he did not know how to put that feeling into words. She reached into the knapsack and pulled out a package of Old Golds. Something about the pomp with which she set fire to her cigarette made her seem younger than he had thought.
“Your pal Creasey already rescued me,” she said. “He could have left me lying there right where he found me, half dead with my face in a pile of cinders. Right where those Ealing boys red-lighted me.”
She told him that from the age of eleven she had been traveling in the sideshow of the Entwhistle–Ealing Bros. Circus, out of Peru, Indiana. She had been born a girl, in Ocala, Florida, but at puberty, nature had refashioned her with a mustache and chin fuzz.
“I went over big for quite a little while, but lately, I’m getting all this action from my girl department.” She folded her arms under her breasts. “Body’s been goofing with me all my life.”
My grandfather wanted to say that he felt the same way about his brain, that organ whose flights of preposterous idealism were matched only by its reveries of unfettered violence. But he thought it would be wrong to compare his troubles to hers.
“I guess that’s the reason I started on the junk,” she said. “A hermaphrodite was something. It has a little poetry. There is just no poetry in a bearded lady.”
She had been nodding, she said, dead to the world, when management at last saw fit to throw her off the circus train as it pulled out of the yard, bound for Altoona.
“Creasey found my valise where those assholes had pitched it. Conveyed me to these comfortable lodgings.” She adjusted her legs and, before she gathered the blanket more tightly, caught my grandfather trying to see into the shadow between them. “Creasey is a bastard, true. But he brings me food, and smokes, and magazines. And candles to read by. The only thing he won’t bring me is a fix. Pretty soon it’ll be all the same to me, anyway. Meantime he doesn’t charge me more rent than I’m willing to pay.”
My grandfather contemplated the ashes of his plan. He felt she was telling him she was going to die, and that she planned on doing it here, in this room that jumped in the candlelight. Her chest blood was all over a crumpled chamois rag, and on the woolen blanket, and on the lapels of the robe.
“Creasey has his points,” she said. “And I’m sure the folks on Shunk Street would be happy to know that he has been kind enough to leave me in possession of my virginity. In the technical sense.” She squirmed against the cot illustratively. “Railroad men. They are practical fellows. Always find a way around.”
That started her barking into her scrap of chamois, which bloodied it some more. The violence of her coughing shook the blanket loose, baring her legs to my grandfather’s inspection. My grandfather felt very sorry for her, but he could not keep his gaze away from the inner darkness of her robe. The spasm passed. She folded the bloodstained part of the chamois into the remnant that was still clean.
“Have a look, Shunk Street,” she said. She hoisted the hem of the tartan robe, opened her legs, and spread them wide. The pale band of belly, the shock of dark fur, the pink of her labia would endure in his memory, flying like a flag, until he died. “On the house.”
He could feel the turmoil in his cheeks, throat, rib cage, loins. He could see that she saw it and was enjoying it. She closed her eyes and raised her hips a little higher. “Go ahead, sweetheart. Touch it if you want to.”
My grandfather found that his lips and tongue could not form a reply. He went over and put his hand against the patch of hair between her legs. He held it there, sampling it with rigid fingers like he was taking a temperature or pulse. The night, the summer, all time and history came to a halt.
Her eyes snapped open. She lurched forward and shoved him aside, covering her mouth with the bare hand while the painted one groped for the chamois. My grandfather took a crisp white handkerchief from the back pocket of his cutoff corduroys. He presented her with this evidence of the hopefulness invested in him by his mother, every morning afresh, when she sent him out into the world. The girl crushed the handkerchief in her fist without seeming to notice it was there. My grandfather watched her body tear itself apart from the inside for what felt like a long time. He worried she might be about to die right then, in front of him. Presently, she sighed and fell backward against the cot. Her forehead shone in the light from her stub of candle. She breathed with caution. Her eyes were half open and fixed on my grandfather, but minutes went by before she took notice of him again.
“Go home,” she said.
He eased the day’s inviolate handkerchief from her fist. Like a road map he unfolded it and laid it against her brow. He sealed up the flaps of her robe around her and dragged the awful blanket up to her chin with its babyish dimple. Then he went to the door, where he stopped, looking back at her. The heat of her clung like an odor to his fingertips.
“Come back sometime, Shunk Street,” she said. “Maybe I’ll let you rescue me yet.”
When my grandfather finally made it home well after dark, there was a patrolman in the kitchen. My grandfather confessed to nothing and provided no information. My great-grandfather, egged on by the patrolman, gave my grandfather a slap across the face to see how he liked it. My grandfather said he liked it fine. He felt he had earned a measure of pain through his failure to rescue the girl. He considered informing the patrolman about her, but she was by her own admission a drug fiend and a whore, and he would rather die than rat her out. Whichever course he chose, he felt, he would betray her. So he answered to his nature and said nothing.
The patrolman returned to his beat. My grandfather was subjected to lectures, threats, accusations. He bore up under them with his usual stoicism, was sent to bed hungry, and kept the secret of the two-sided girl in the train yard for the next sixty years. The following day he was put to work in the store, working before and after school on weekdays and all day Sunday. He was not able to make it back to Greenwich Yard until late the following Saturday afternoon, after shul. It was getting dark, and the weather had turned wet the night before. Along the tracks the reflected sky lay pooled between the wooden ties like pans of quicksilver. He knocked on the door of the little house until his hand rang with the pain of knocking.
3 (#ulink_3aa4720f-6a3e-5a9d-a51a-3b62ae2a8b3c)
I came into my patrimony of secrets in the late 1960s, in Flushing, Queens. At the time my grandparents were still living in the Bronx, and generally, if my parents needed to be free of me for more than a few hours, I would be deposited in Riverdale. Like the space program, my grandfather’s business was then at its peak, and though later he became a strong presence in my life, in those days my clearest memory of him is that he was seldom around.
My grandparents and their Martian zoo of Danish furniture shared seven rooms in the Skyview, overlooking the Hudson. They lived on the thirteenth floor, though it was styled the fourteenth because, my grandfather explained, the world was full of dummies who believed in lucky charms. It was bad luck, my grandfather said, to be a dummy. My grandmother also scoffed. Though she personally had no particular fear of the number thirteen, she knew that bad luck could never be fooled by such a simple-minded stratagem.
Left to ourselves my grandmother and I might go to see a movie, one of the interminable candy-colored epics of the day: Doctor Doolittle,The Gnome-Mobile, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. She liked to shop every morning for that evening’s dinner; consequently, we spent a lot of time in grocery stores, where she taught me to look for tomatoes that still had a smell of hot sun in their stems, and then in her kitchen, where she taught me the rudiments and entrusted me with knives. If I have inherited it from her, then she must have found a mindful mindlessness in the routines and procedures of the kitchen. It tired her to read aloud in English, but she had a lot of French poems by heart and sometimes recited them to me in the ghostly language of her loss; I formed the impression that French poetry trafficked mainly in wistful rain and violins. She taught me colors, numbers, the names of animals: Ours.Chat.Cochon.
There were days, however, when being left with my grandmother was not very different from being left alone. She lay on the sofa or on her bed with the curtains drawn and a cool cloth folded over her eyes. These days had their own lexicon: cafard, algie, crise de foie. In 1966 (the date of my earliest memories of her) she was only forty-three, but the war, she said, had ruined her stomach, her sinuses, the joints of her bones (she never said anything about what the war might have done to her mind). If she had promised to look after me on one of her bad days, she would rally long enough to persuade my parents, or herself, that she was up to the task. But then it—something—would come over her and we would leave the movie theater halfway through the show, conclude the recital after a single poem, walk out of the supermarket abandoning an entire cart of groceries in the middle of the aisle. I don’t think I really minded, exactly. When she took to her bed—and only then—I was allowed to watch television. Once she was down for the count, my only responsibility would be from time to time to run a little cool water on the washcloth, wring it out, and drape it over her face like a flag on a coffin.
Outside of the kitchen my grandmother’s favorite pastime was cards. She detested the games Americans considered suitable for children: war, concentration, go fish. She found gin rummy dull and interminable. The card games of her own childhood were all trick-taking games that rewarded acuity and deception. When I was old enough to add and subtract in my head—around the time I learned to read—she taught me how to play piquet. It was not long before I could nearly hold my own against her, though when I was older my grandfather told me that she was always careful to make mistakes.
Piquet is played with a shortened deck of thirty-two cards, and before we could begin, my grandmother would strip a pack of Bicycles or Bees of all the cards from deuce to six. This was an operation she performed with a certain heedlessness. When someone came home after a long day at the office, say, hoping to relax with a few hands of solitaire, and went to the drawer in the cabinet where games were kept, he was likely to find half a dozen plundered decks awash in an indiscriminate surf of pip cards. Those were the only occasions when I ever saw my grandfather openly express irritation with my grandmother, whom he otherwise coddled and indulged.
“It drove me nuts,” he remembered. “I used to say, ‘One deck! Is that too much to ask? Could there be one goddamn deck that isn’t ruined?’” He made a duck’s bill of his lips, narrowed his eyes, hoisted his shoulders. “‘Boh.’” I remembered this echt-gallicism of my grandmother’s. “She wasn’t ruining the deck, if you please, she was correcting it.” He put on the Texan-in-Paris accent he used whenever he spoke French. “See-non, come-awn fair une pe-teet par-tee?”
One afternoon when my grandmother sent me to get a deck so we could make a few parties, I discovered that since my last visit the drawer had been cleaned out and restocked with several new packs of poker decks, sealed and in their wrappers. It would be a worse outrage to my grandfather than usual, it seemed to me, to “ruin” one of these brand-new packs.
I opened some other drawers and poked around among the Yahtzee and Rack-O and Monopoly boxes, looking for any of the decks that my grandmother had previously stripped. Inside a tin that once held Barton’s almond kisses I found a deck of cards in a curiously drab box, pale blue printed with some words, which I took to be French, in a medieval-looking typeface like the one across the banner of The New York Times. It was thinner than an American deck, as if it contained fewer cards. Assuming that I had managed to locate an actual French piquet deck, I carried it into the kitchen, where my grandmother and I usually played.
I thought she would be pleased to see that I had found a way to keep my grandfather happy. Instead she looked alarmed. She was in the act of lighting one of the Wintermans cigarillos that she smoked only while playing cards, but she stopped with the match halfway to her mouth. My mother used to complain bitterly about the stink of my grandmother’s cigars in my hair and on my clothing when I was returned after a visit, but I thought they smelled wonderful.
She took the unlit cigarillo from her lips and returned it to its little tin. She held out her hand, palm up. I surrendered the pale blue box. She opened its flap, tipped out the cards, and set it down on the table by the ashtray. She held up the deck and fanned it so she could see the faces. I saw only the backs, midnight blue patterned with crescent moons.
She asked where I had found the cards. I told her, and she nodded. She remembered having hidden them there long ago. She explained that she’d had to hide them because they were magical cards, and my grandfather did not believe in magic. I must not tell him about the cards, she said; it would annoy him and he would throw them away. I agreed to keep the cards a secret and asked my grandmother if she believed in magic. She said she did not but that, surprisingly, magic worked even if you did not believe in it. She seemed to have entirely recovered from her alarm at the thought that my discovery might be discovered.
She held up the blue box and told me that the words printed there were German, not French, and that, translated, they read FORTUNE-TELLING CARDS FOR WITCHES.
I asked my grandmother if she was a witch. I had the odd sensation that it was a question I had been holding at the back of my tongue for a long time.
She looked at me and reached for the cigarillo she had put aside. She lit it, shook out the match. She shuffled the cards a few times with her long pale fingers. She set the deck on the table between us.
In putting down these very early memories of my grandmother, I have so far avoided quoting her directly. To claim or represent that I retain an exact or even approximate recollection of what anyone said so long ago would be to commit the memoirist’s great sin. But I have not forgotten my grandmother’s two-word reply when I asked if the reason she owned a secret deck of magical fortune-telling cards for witches was that she was herself a witch:
“Not anymore.”
I asked if this meant that she was no longer able or didn’t remember how to tell fortunes. It was probably a little of both, she said. She would, however, be happy to show me how her magical deck of cards could be used to tell a story. All I had to do—she demonstrated as she explained—was cut the cards, cut them again, and then choose three from the top of the deck.
I have never had success in tracking down or identifying my grandmother’s particular deck, the “Fortune-telling Cards for Witches,” or “The Witch’s Fortune-telling Cards,” or however the name was translated. It may be that things I heard afterward about my grandmother’s brief television career as a witch corrupted my recollection of the deck’s name—maybe they were called “Cards of a Gypsy Fortune-teller,” or “The Sibyl’s Fortune-telling Cards.” But I remember enough about the cards to conclude that it must have been a German variant on the standard “Lenormand” deck.
The first time I saw a classic Mexican Lotería deck with its iconic imagery (El Sol,El Arbol, La Luna), after moving to Southern California in the mid-’80s, I recognized its kinship to my grandmother’s. Her deck had a card called the Ship that showed an old-fashioned argosy under full sail beneath a sky filled with stars. The House was white stucco with a red tile roof and a pretty green garden. The Rider in his red tailcoat rode a prancing white horse through yellow and green woods. The Child in its neutering nightdress clutched a doll and looked afraid. As on the faces of most Lenormand decks, a small oblong panel, inset at the top of each card above the Scythe or the Birds or the Bouquet, depicted a pip or court card with the German suits of hearts, leaves, acorns, and bells.*
I don’t remember the first story she told me with her fortune-telling deck, or which set of three cards she drew it from. But after that first time, “playing with the story cards” became an occasional feature of our time together. There was no way to predict when the urge would come over her, though it came over her only when we were alone. In my memory of those occasions the day outside the windows of the apartment would be gray, cold, and wet; the weather may have played a part in putting her in the mood. Anyone who has spent time in the company of small children knows that a crushing boredom can unlock great powers of invention. My grandmother would be drifting gray and unfocused through an October afternoon, unsettled in the kitchen, wearying of my prattle. And then the cards would come out of their hiding place in the empty can of almond kisses, and she would say: “Do you want me to tell you a story?”
At this point I always faced a dilemma. I liked the way my grandmother told a story, but the characters who emerged from her witch’s deck unsettled and frightened me, and the fates that befell them were dark. From the three cards I turned faceup on the kitchen table my grandmother’s imagination would wind a cryptic path to the narrative she unfolded. The Lilies, the Ring, and the Birds, say, would not necessarily produce a story that had anything to do with either lilies, rings, or birds, and if it did, then it would reveal something terrible about them, some latent capability for malice or liability to perdition.
In my grandmother’s stories wicked children received grim punishments, hard-earned success was forfeited in one instant of weakness, infants were abandoned, wolves prevailed. A clown who liked to scare children woke up one morning and found that his skin had turned paper-white and his mouth had twisted into a permanent grin. A widowed rabbi unraveled his tallis and used the thread and some of his dead wife’s clothes to sew their child a new mother, a soft golem silent as a raincoat. The stories gave me nightmares, but while she was telling them I found myself in the company of the grandmother I loved best: playful, exuberant, childlike, fey. In later years, whenever I recalled my grandmother to a close friend or a therapist, I would say that when she told a story, the actress in her came out. Her storytelling was a performance undertaken with ardor and panache. She did the different voices of animals, children, and men; if a male character disguised himself as a female, my grandmother would put on the funny, fluting voice that men affect in drag. Her foxes were suave, her dogs wheedling, her cows moronic.
If I hesitated before assenting to a story, my grandmother would rescind the offer, and weeks might pass before she offered again. So most of the time I simply nodded, unable to resolve the question of whether the company of the teller was worth the toll in bad dreams.
Almost fifty years later I still remember some of her stories. Bits of them have consciously and unconsciously found their way into my work. The stories I remember tend to be the ones I re-encountered in the plot of a film or in a book of folktales.* A few survived because some incident or sense impression of mine got tangled with or trapped inside the telling.
That happened with a story she told me about an encounter between King Solomon and a djinn. Afterward I remembered her introducing it as “from the Hebrew Bible,” but that turned out to be nonsense. Eventually I did find some Jewish folktales about Solomon matching wits with djinn but nothing like my grandmother’s story. She told me that one day Solomon, the wisest king who ever lived, was captured by a djinn. On pain of death, the djinn demanded that Solomon grant him three wishes. Solomon agreed to try. He set a condition: Granting the wishes must cause no harm to any living person. The djinn therefore wished for an end to war; Solomon reminded him that if there were no war, the swordsmith’s children would starve to death. Solomon helped the djinn to envision the disastrous outcomes of two more apparently benign wishes, and in the end the djinn was obliged to set King Solomon free. Typically the story did not quite have a happy ending, since afterward King Solomon himself could never again bring himself to wish for anything.*
I remember this story because after she was done telling it, my grandmother sent me to fetch something—a magazine, her glasses—in her bedroom. Maybe I was just snooping around. When I walked into the bedroom, I saw a shaft of afternoon sunlight, slanting in through a window, strike the eternal bottle of Chanel No. 5 on my grandmother’s vanity. A djinn kindled in the bottle. It was the very color of the way my grandmother smelled; the color of the warmth of her lap and enfolding arms; the color of her husky voice resounding in her rib cage when she pulled me close. I stared at the flickering fire imprisoned in the bottle. Sometimes I found pleasure, warmth, and comfort in that fragrance, and sometimes when she dragged me onto her lap, her perfume dizzied me and brought on a headache. Sometimes her arms would be iron bands encircling my neck, and the scrape of her laughter sounded embittered and hungry, the laughter of a wolf in a cartoon.
* * *
My five earliest memories of my grandmother:
1 The tattoo on her left forearm. Five digits encoding nothing but the unspoken prohibition on my asking her about them. The jaunty 7 with its continental slash.
2 A song about a horse, sung in French. She bounces me on her knees. Holding my hands in hers, clapping them together. Faster and faster with each line, from a walk to a trot to a gallop. Most of the time when the song ends, she folds me in her arms and kisses me. But sometimes when she gets to the last word of the song, her lap opens like a trapdoor and she tumbles me onto the carpet. While she sings me the horse song, I watch her face, looking for a clue to her intentions.
3 The crimson blur of a Jaguar. A Matchbox, a 3.4 Litre, the same color as her lipstick. She has bought it to console me after taking me to an ophthalmologist who dilated my pupils with drops of belladonna. When I panicked about the loss of vision she kept her cool, but now that I am happy again she gives way to worry. She tells me to put away the toy or I will lose it. If I play with it on the subway, one of the other boys riding on our train will envy it and steal it. The world is a blur to me, but my grandmother sees it clearly. Any of the shadows populating the 1 train might be a covetous boy bent on thievery. So I put the Jaguar in my pocket. I feel the Jaguar cool against my palm, the elegant taper of its lines, the words jaguar and belladonna that she will own forever afterward in my memory.
4 The seams of her stockings. Running true as plumb lines from the hem of her skirt to the backs of her I. Miller pumps as she feeds bones to a soup pot on the stove. Golden bangles stacked for safekeeping beside a floured marble pastry board on a countertop patterned with asterisks and boomerangs. The knob on the dial of her kitchen timer, finned and streamlined like a rocket.
5 The luminous part in her hair. Seen from above as she crouches in front of me, buttoning my pants. A ladies’ room, maybe Bonwit or Henri Bendel, a periphery of foliage and gilt. I am—in English and French—her little prince, her little gentleman, her little professor. Her coat has a fur ruff that smells of Chanel No. 5. I have never seen anything as white as her scalp. My mother would have sent me into the men’s room to do my own urinating and zip my own fly, but I am aware of no insult to my dignity. I understand that with my grandmother a different law obtains. A phrase I have heard comes to mind and along with it a sudden gain in understanding: She will not let me out of her sight.
4 (#ulink_c243ba0f-5a6c-5cbb-b325-c9ffdf74a945)
On December 8, 1941, unemployed, bored, and known as a shark in every pool hall within a hundred miles of the corner of Fourth and Ritner, my grandfather enlisted in the Army Corps of Engineers. Bequeathing his custom Brunswick cue to Uncle Ray—depriving the world, in time, of a tzaddik—he boarded a troop train for Rapides Parish, Louisiana. After six weeks of basic he was sent to a Corps base near Peoria, Illinois, for training in the construction of airfields, bridges, and roads.
His hustler’s instinct was to underplay and advertise nothing, but among the raw recruits of Camp Claiborne and the bohunks and golems of Camp Ellis, he could not conceal the caliber of his game as a soldier and an engineer. He was strong and durable. His frugality with words got interpreted variously but to his advantage as manliness, self-possession, imperviousness. Inevitably word got around that he held an engineering degree from Drexel Tech, spoke fluent German, was all but unbeatable at pool,* and on intimate terms with motors, batteries, and radios. One afternoon when he and his fellow trainees were out butchering a meadow along the Spoon River, some idiot drove a truck through the line that connected their field telephone to the switchboard. My grandfather improvised a new connection using a nearby barbed-wire fence. When it started to rain and the wet fence posts grounded the line, he cut a spare inner tube into foldable bits and sent men down along the fence for two miles to insulate wire from wood.
The next day he was ordered to report to the commanding officer of his cadre. The major was a lean Princetonian, stained and yellowed by years of spanning chasms and draining swamps in malarial climes. His cheeks were all peeling skin and gin blossoms. He filled a briar pipe and took his time about it. Every now and then he sneaked a sidelong look at my grandfather, who stood uncomfortably at ease, wondering what he had done wrong. After the major had set fire to his pipe, he informed my grandfather that he was to be recommended for transfer to the Corps’s officer candidate school at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
The atmosphere of life as an enlisted man was toxic with disdain for officers, and from the first my grandfather had breathed that atmosphere freely, without need of filter or adjustment period.
“Sir,” my grandfather replied after a moment of irresolution. He had nothing against this particular major. It was officers as a class whom he despised. “I’ll swing a hammer until we’ve built a highway from here to Berlin. But, all due respect, I’d rather be a dancing chicken in a box on the Steel Pier than a commissioned officer. No offense, sir.”
“None taken. I understand what you’re saying, and between you and me, your dancing-chicken analogy is very close to the mark.”
“Sir.”
“All the same, are you aware that if you were to make the grade as a first lieutenant, it would add fifty dollars to your monthly soldier’s pay?”
It happened that my great-grandfather’s final enterprise, a lunch counter near Shibe Park, had recently gone under. He was working now at a package store, grappling in a hernia truss with steel kegs of Yuengling. For years my great-grandmother had taken in piecework, sewing ribbon and trim for a milliner. Now she had been obliged to get a job outside the house, boxing cakes and pastries in a bakery where the bakers, two half brothers, burned off their mutual contempt by abusing the counter help. My grandfather knew that his parents would shoulder any work and stomach any companions to pay the upkeep on Ray’s education, in which they lodged their dreams.
“No, sir,” he said, “I was not aware of that.”
Two weeks later—the day before the men of his cadre boarded a train for Dawson Creek, BC, where they pitched in to work on the Alaskan Highway—my grandfather was ordered to report to the Corps OCS at Fort Belvoir. It was a bitter journey.
Far from the frozen north or the war’s early battlefields, three hours from Shunk Street, more bored than ever, my grandfather began to brood. His years in poolrooms and classrooms inclined him to divide men into patsies, idiots, and shams, and there was little evidence at Fort Belvoir to debunk this taxonomy. Everywhere he looked he discovered laziness, incompetence, waste, bluster. In other soldiers’ hearts such discoveries bred cynicism, but in my grandfather’s there arose a more or less permanent state of aggravation.
Given the proximity of Fort Belvoir to Washington, D.C., it was only a matter of time before his exasperation generalized beyond the perimeter fence to encompass the seat of government itself. In spite of Pearl Harbor and the invasion panics it inspired, the capital had yet to lose its complacency toward enemies who were continents and oceans away. Anti-aircraft batteries were spotty. Elderly Curtiss biplanes patrolled sputtering overhead. A handful of Coast Guard tubs policed the rivers and bridges.
Walking the streets one afternoon on a one-day pass, my grandfather nursed his anger and amused himself by planning the conquest of Washington. For verisimilitude he enacted his role of reichsmarschall in his grandfather’s Pressburger German, debating strategy with the added relish its glottals afforded. He ordered that crack commando units be trained to crew U-boats. He landed three hundred men on the Patuxent at the spot where the British had begun their invasion of 1814. His submarine jaegers blew up the Potomac bridges and electrical power stations, seized radio towers, cut telegraph and telephone cables. They entrenched the orderly street grid with grenade craters and razor wire, piled up chicanes across the approaches to the city. Thirty men sufficed to take the Capitol, a dozen to seize the White House. By the evening of the second day of his invasion, my grandfather stood in jackboots and peaked schirmmütze at the elbow of FDR, proffering his pen for the formal surrender.
He returned to Fort Belvoir that evening alarmed by the clarity and elegance of his plan. Before retiring for the night he formulated its essentials in a typed three-page memorandum to his CO, which was afterward mislaid, ignored, or possibly forgiven. In the darkness of the dormitory room he shared with an MIT-educated civil engineer named Orland Buck, he laid out the scheme again.
By pure chance, this Buck happened to be one of the few officer candidates not readily fitted onto my grandfather’s three-part schema of humanity. Orland Buck was a Maine Brahmin whose father and grandfather both had died fighting to build heroic bridges, in Argentina and the Philippines. A history of raising hell in genteel institutions and the weight of his patrimony inclined Buck to the arts of demolition, and he zeroed in on that element of my grandfather’s plan.
“One bridge would do,” he decided. “Make it the Francis Scott Key and you would get their attention, all right.”
Weeks passed without any acknowledgment of my grandfather’s memorandum. Orland Buck and my grandfather spent their leave hours ostentatiously casing the Francis Scott Key Bridge with its arches in elegant cavalcade. Buck took documentary pictures of my grandfather taking pictures, unmolested, of the bridge’s piers and abutments. Despite their efforts, no one questioned or even appeared to remark on the young men’s fascination with the bridge, built by the Corps in the twenties, engineered by an associate of Buck’s father.
In demolition training sessions, the Corps daily broadened their expertise, and at night Buck and my grandfather studied official copies of the bridge’s construction plans in the base library.
“It will teach them a lesson,” Buck said, lying on his bunk in the darkness. A radio, tuned low, brought news of Rommel’s capture of Tobruk. “It will serve the bastards right.”
My grandfather wondered how long ago, without his having noticed, his bunkmate had passed from the conditional to the future in talking about their plan. He didn’t believe for a moment that Buck wanted to teach anyone a lesson or had the slightest interest in seeing justice done. Buck was not a sorehead, a perfectionist, or a nurser of grievances. He was in it for fun and only saying what he thought my grandfather wanted to hear.
“Don’t get carried away,” my grandfather told him.
“Who, me?”
In a strongbox at the back of an old Mack truck that stood rusting without engine or wheels under a tarp in the motor pool, Buck and my grandfather had stashed ten bombs of their own manufacture. The bombs’ design was plausibly straightforward and effective: empty wooden ammo boxes stuffed with guncotton, which Buck and my grandfather had spirited away in amounts small enough to go unnoticed during demolitions training. A small amount of primer and Cordtex had been obtained in the same way, just enough for my grandfather to make his point harmlessly. Twisted to the end of each coil of Cordtex was a note typed by my grandfather that read nur zu demonstrationszwecken.*
“I don’t like it when people get carried away,” my grandfather said.
“Oh, no, neither do I,” Buck said shamelessly.
On the night appointed for the exploit they strapped on tool belts, retrieved their store of demonstration bombs from the strongbox, zipped the bombs into four duffel bags, and went AWOL with an ease that bore out my grandfather’s contempt for the way things were done at Fort Belvoir. They hiked through tall weeds and trash pine, across a service road, and into some woods that had been part of the original Belvoir plantation. They stumbled cursing in the dark of the forest until they came to the tracks of the RF&P, where they hopped a freight and rode an empty flatbed into Alexandria.
They jumped off just before the train entered the rail yard, in a neighborhood of low brick houses. From the Potomac Yard came a smell of diesel, an ozone scorch of pantograph sparkings. Those smells and the houses with their puzzled expressions stirred old yearnings and rancors in my grandfather’s heart. He wondered, as in the past and for years to come, if this might be the night on which his life, his true life, began at last.
They found an old Model A pickup parked in an alley. The rear window glass of its cab had been replaced by a sheet of pegboard. My grandfather stove in the pegboard with a jab of his left elbow and wriggled through. He had never hot-wired a car before, but the principle was trivial and the Ford unresisting. It took him under a minute to turn the engine over. He unlocked the door and slid across to the passenger side. Orland Buck got in behind the wheel and pawed it for a second or two.
“You bastard,” Orland Buck said happily. “God damn you.”
“Drive.”
A body slammed against the truck on Buck’s side. Buck’s window was filled with the eyes and red jaw of a dog. A man shouted from a house that backed onto the alley. Orland Buck laughed. He fought against the clutch and the gearshift. They lurched out of the alley under escort from the outraged dog before Buck hit the gas and they left the animal in their dust. The truck was not going to afford them very much in the way of stealth. As they turned onto the Jeff Davis Highway, it sounded like they were dragging a sack full of clocks behind them.
Orland Buck took himself in hand after that. He drove with care in the darkness, meeting the speed limit. They drove past the new airport, past the wasteland where they were putting up the new War Department building, past the cemetery where Buck’s father and grandfather lay under their white crosses. They dragged their load of clock parts across the roadbed of their intended victim and turned left on the District side. Upriver a little way from Georgetown, near the old terminus of the C&O canal, Buck put the truck into neutral and cut the engine. They rolled into the gravel lot of Fletcher’s Boathouse. Before getting out of the truck, they blackened their faces with burnt cork and pulled dark watch caps over their heads. Orland Buck was in heaven. My grandfather was obliged to admit that he was also enjoying himself so far.
“Now, did you ever paddle a canoe?” said Buck, a veteran of many Down East camps.
“I’ve seen it done,” my grandfather said, thinking in particular of a silent version of TheLast of the Mohicans he had taken in at the Lyric in Germantown. “If Bela Lugosi can do it, I can do it.”
The hasp on the boathouse door broke at a tap of his hammer and chisel. My grandfather eased the door open a foot on its rollers and slipped inside. The darkness smelled of old canvas tennies. Buck found the canoe, lucky number 9, in which a War Department typist named Irma Budd once sucked him off. Bowed and loping, they ran it down to the boat ramp. My grandfather loaded in the duffel bags while Buck fetched two paddles. “Ready to have some fun, Lugosi?”
My grandfather dragged the canoe to the bottom of the ramp and climbed into the stern as the hull scraped, then slid free. It was not the type of question he would ever bother to answer.
In canoe number 9, silent as Piscataways, they breasted the Potomac. This was the part of the exploit that would expose them most to public view, and they had decided it would be better to get across and hug the Virginia bank, in those days still half wilderness. Adventure silenced Orland Buck. It brought out in him the sobersided Yankee, two wiry hands on a wooden shaft. For most of the crossing my grandfather was as useless as a Hungarian actor, though he did not give way to distress or embarrassment. By design they had chosen a moonless night, but the weather was clear, and over my grandfather’s head the circuitry of heaven was printed in bright joints of solder. By the time Buck brought them around for the short downstream run to the Key Bridge, my grandfather was handling his own paddle with aplomb. He was as happy as he had ever been.
The bridge seemed to hold itself in tension, straining at its tethers as Orland Buck and my grandfather slid beneath its haunch. It thrummed with the passage of a car overhead. My grandfather shipped his paddle and crouched, rocking the canoe a little as Buck eased them to the foot of the abutment that buried its massive burden in the soil of Virginia. Buck reached out to steady the boat. My grandfather zipped open one of the duffel bags and took out the first bomb and a roll of adhesive tape they had boosted from the infirmary. Given time and actual malicious intent, they would have holed the concrete with a pick or borer to sink the bombs, to give the blasts some muscle. Concrete was a bastard, and my grandfather estimated that to bring the Key Bridge down in earnest might take a thousand pounds of guncotton. He taped the first bomb to the bridge’s great concrete hoof. The strips of sticky tape as he unrolled them resounded in the arch like thunder cracks.
“Next,” he said.
Orland Buck stroked at the water and they went farther in under the bridge. The water slapped against the canoe and against the abutment.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge has five arches, three that take giant steps across the water, one at either end to anchor the bridge to land. Orland Buck and my grandfather took turns taping three bombs to each of the four central piers, six bombs per man. When they had finished, it was nearly four in the morning. My grandfather looked up at the belly of the bridge. He admired the way the gap between the top of each arch and the flat bridge deck was taken up by a series of daughter arches, each inverted U obliged to descend farther from the deck than the last as the mother arch curved down and away. The whole space hummed as the wind passed through it. Beyond the vault of steel and concrete the vernal animals and heroes wheeled in the greater vault of the sky. Arch upon arch upon arch bearing up, craving the weight, crushed by the force that held it together. He looked down at Orland Buck in the stern of the stolen canoe. Buck was holding a time pencil and a 150-foot coil of Cordtex my grandfather had never seen and knew nothing about.
“You probably want to grab a paddle and put some distance between here and this boat,” said Orland Buck.
My grandfather nodded. On some level he had suspected Buck was planning something of this nature. He sat down and deftly turned the canoe upstream. Buck paid out the coated cord with one hand, taking care not to dislodge the detonator pencil. When they had gone about a hundred and forty feet along the bank on the District side, my grandfather swung the paddle up out of water and ensured that it made solid contact with the side of Orland Buck’s head. Buck fell onto his face. My grandfather twisted the time pencil free of the Cordtex and tossed it into the river. He sat Buck up, made sure that his friend was unconscious and not dead, and laid him out in the stern of the canoe. Then he paddled back to Fletcher’s. When they got there, Buck was still out cold. My grandfather returned the canoe to the shed by himself, leaving three dollars to pay for the broken hasp. He shoved the empty duffel bags into a trash bin and loaded Buck into the cab of the stolen truck.
When they were crossing the Key Bridge, Orland Buck made a noise, and opened his eyes. He looked out the window and saw where they were. He experimented with his fingers at the site of his injury and groaned again. He shook his head. “Christ,” he said with bitter respect.
“You got carried away,” said my grandfather.
The next afternoon, when my grandfather returned to quarters after Maps and Surveying, there was an MP stationed on either side of his door. My grandfather braced himself to flee and then accepted his fate as it bore down on him. His cheeks, ears, and inner organs burned at the thought that his mother would now be obliged to let those two bakers shit on her head for the rest of her life.
The snowdrops in their spotless helmets held still as he approached them. They stared death, hatred, and tedium at him, and my grandfather stared those things back.
“Looking for me?” he said, stopping in front of the door, equidistant to each of their throats.
“No, son,” said a voice from inside the room where he and Orland Buck had foolishly conspired to land themselves, my grandfather presumed, in Leavenworth. It was a rich man’s voice, lilting and soft but accustomed to being listened to. “I’m the one that’s looking for you.”
A big man, past middle age, sprang up from the chair when my grandfather walked in. Broad at the shoulder like my grandfather, a bruiser gone old and fat. He wore a gray Glen plaid suit gridded with red, a red and silver silk tie, and wonderful black bucks. Though he looked like an English lawyer, my grandfather could smell the army on him. The man took the measure of my grandfather coldly and openly, top to bottom. What he saw appeared to confirm report or rumor. His eyes were extraordinary. Remembering them to me, my grandfather groped to define their color, comparing them first to sea ice, then to a lit stove ring.
“I am sure it will come as no surprise to you, soldier,” the man said in his Park Avenue drawl, “to learn that you are in trouble.”
“No, sir.”
“No, indeed. How could it? You went looking for trouble, and you found it. Consistent behavior produces predictable results.”
“Sir, I wasn’t looking for trouble, I—”
“Don’t bother to deny it. One glance at you and I know the whole story. You’ve been looking for trouble all your life.”
“Sir—”
“Am I wrong, soldier?”
“No, sir.”
“You stole equipment and materiel from the U.S Army. Went AWOL. Hot-wired a truck. Purloined a canoe. Planted live explosives on federal property.”
“That part was not the plan,” my grandfather said. “The live charge.”
“No? Then how did it happen?”
It was clear that Buck had already confessed to everything, but my grandfather had not given up the whiskered girl in the train yard, and he was unwilling to give up his friend, even if his friend had turned out to be a rat.
“It was a breakdown in leadership,” my grandfather confessed.
The eyes went abruptly from ice to fire. My grandfather had the disconcerting sensation of being loved by the beefy old man.
“Orlie Buck’s father served in the Fighting Sixty-ninth as my aide-de-camp,” the old man said. “He was always looking for trouble, too, and he knew that if ever he called out to me, I would hasten to his side and endeavor to get him out of whatever fix he was in, one way or another. I believe that is why, when those two snowdrops out there showed up to arrest him, Orlie reached out to his old uncle Bill.”
A seine of anecdotes, genealogies, and dark allusions let out by Orland Buck over the past few months cinched together all at once in my grandfather’s mind and caught a darting hope.
“Colonel Donovan, can you get me out of trouble, too?” my grandfather said.
“Well, my boy,” Wild Bill Donovan said, “you know, the truth is I probably could. But as we’ve already established, that’s not what you really want, now, is it?”
5 (#ulink_4e74eb62-fa3c-5f08-a529-295f3fc38177)
Following his arraignment on charges of assaulting the president of Feathercombs, my grandfather spent a week in jail. The bail was steep, and he had no collateral apart from a twenty-five-dollar reflecting telescope and a 1949 Crosley sedan.
Over that week he telephoned my grandmother twice. In the first call he misinformed her as to his whereabouts and said nothing at all about his arrest. The lawyer, Shulman, sent someone to pick up the Crosley from the garage on East Fifty-seventh and drive it back to New Jersey. The driver was instructed to tell my grandmother only that her husband planned to go by train on an urgent sales trip upstate.
On the fourth day of his stretch in the House of Detention, my grandfather phoned again. He provided my grandmother with memories not previously shared from a trip the previous August: a view from a motel window overlooking the rancid Susquehanna. An Italian restaurant that had served spaghetti in a green sauce called pesto. A long afternoon making sales calls in the heat. He had hated the job from the day he was hired, but now that he had lost it—demolished it—there was a retrospective charm in the tedium of those days spent barnstorming upstate beauty counters. Tears came to his eyes as he leaned against the outgoing-only pay phone in his gray jailhouse twills, eulogizing the wife of a pharmacist in Elmira who at first had taken only a case of Feathercombs but increased her order to three after he held up his demo mirror.
He never considered telling my grandmother the truth. She was already teetering; he was afraid the truth would push her over the edge. That was how he explained his subterfuge to himself, and to me thirty-two years later. It was not, in my view, a complete explanation. My grandfather never would have lied to exonerate himself, make himself look good, or evade responsibility. Unlike my grandmother, he did not seem to find pleasure or release in telling lies. But while he was a family man and loved us all in his wordless way, he was also, to the core, a solitary. If there was suffering to be endured, he preferred to withstand it alone. If he made a mess, he would clean it up himself. Unlike his wife, he was uncomfortable with make-believe, but his fetish for self-reliance made him secretive. So though it was true that psychiatrists, who got paid to know such things, had instructed him over the years to keep upsetting news away from my grandmother, it was also true that this advice suited his furtive nature. She was always threatening rain; he had been born with an umbrella in his hand.
The truth is that if he hadn’t been so worried about his wife’s mental state, my grandfather might have welcomed a couple of days in jail. Repentance is the most solitary of pursuits, and there could be no better place for penitence than shelved on a steel bunk in the Tombs. But scenarios of imminent breakdown and disaster at home began to obsess him. Though he hated asking for help more than anything else, in particular from people who loved him or would do it free of charge, my grandfather saw no alternative but to tell Shulman to try to track down his kid brother.
Uncle Ray had been ordained as a rabbi at the age of twenty-three, a wonder boy of learning. But sometime in the early 1950s my great-uncle had begun to reverse himself on questions of chance and divine intention. He had resigned his pulpit in northwest Baltimore and now made a good living hustling pool and poker up and down the Delmarva peninsula. To raise my grandfather’s bail, Ray required a week’s time, a supply of willing victims, and a surprise win by Hopeless Hope in the fifth at Hialeah.
My grandfather walked out of the Tombs with enough money for a shave, a bus, a Zagnut bar for my mother, and coffee and a donut for himself when he reached the Paterson bus terminal. Through Shulman, coached to represent himself to my grandmother as “a lawyer involved with your husband’s business,” my grandfather had arranged for his wife to meet his bus at ten-thirty.
At eleven-fifteen there was still no sign of her. He used his last dime to call the house.
“I’m here,” he said.
“Here? Where is here?”
“In Paterson. At the bus.”
“Paterson,” she repeated. She might have heard rumors, her tone suggested, of there being such a place. She found her adopted homeland overburdened by places with preposterous names.
“Didn’t Shulman tell you?”
“Shulman? Who is this Shulman?”
“The lawyer. Shulman.”
“Shulman is the lawyer. Yes, I see.” You would have assumed she was jotting the words down for subsequent study: Paterson. Shulman. Lawyer. “And now tell me, please, who are you?”
Only much later did my grandfather learn there had been a story in the Daily News. But he understood now that in spite of his efforts, word had spread.
“Look,” he said. “I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry.”
“Are you? And why is that?”
“Darling, I know. I did a terrible thing, I’ll sort it out. I swear. I could not be more sorry. I know how worried you must have been.”
“Oh, but not in the least!” Because of her French accent, there was always a showiness to my grandmother’s sarcasm. “Every time I’m starting to worry, then I think of you jumping out of the airplane, bringing emergency hair combs to the dishevel-ded ladies of Binghamtown, New York.”
He winced, recognizing in this distorted version the lameness of the cover story he had concocted with Shulman. To sell it—as she clearly understood—he had been counting on the marginality of Binghamton to his immigrant wife’s disorderly mental maps. But as usual she had seen through him and his stratagems. Like many of the spouses of “the lucky ones,” my grandfather had observed that what got labeled luck was really stubbornness married to a knack for observation, a fluid sense of the truth, a sharp ear for lies, and a deeply suspicious nature. They’d had the same type of luck in South Philadelphia, but there you could do more with it than merely survive.
“Honey,” he pleaded. “I just spent a week in jail. I’m filthy, I’m half dead, I’m in a bus station in Paterson. Please. Come get me.”
“You have eaten something?”
“I had a donut. How is she?”
“She is at school.”
He had not asked for my mother’s whereabouts. They could be inferred from the time of day and the day of the week. But he let it pass. His question had been as pointless as any other.
“And this donut you ate,” she said. “How big it was?”
“How big? It was a donut. It was donut-size. Darling—”
“But it filled up your stomach?”
“Sure.”
“Good,” she said just before she hung up on him. “Then you will have energy for the long walk home.”
He pleaded with a soldier bound for Trenton on leave and wasted the dime on another call home. My grandmother had taken the phone off the hook. For the soldier’s benefit he pretended, while listening to the busy signal, to hold a brief conversation with his wife in which he was forgiven and redeemed. He coughed to cover the clatter as the phone returned the dime, which paid for the bus to Ho-Ho-Kus. It dropped him on Sheridan Avenue.
He walked surrounded, for a long time, by tracts of new construction. Dirt lawns, planted saplings, houses like boxcars in snaking lines. When he drove past these new housing tracts at forty-five miles per hour on his way to work every day, they had appeared harmless, contained. On foot he could not seem to get past them. Houses oozed without limit in every direction. Cornfields, orchards, stands of oak and hickory that had seemed untouchable by time or steel had all been dragged under. My grandfather felt a stirring of unease that grew stronger the nearer to home he came. He worried that, in his absence, the ooze would have spread to overtop their white house on its little green hill.
He shook off the thought. He was irritated with himself for thinking it. But as he threaded his way among the housing developments, the image returned to plague him: his house, his wife and daughter, driven beneath the ooze. At last he turned off the county road onto a road paved with gravel and found himself safely among apple trees and shoots of corn. The panic subsided. But he could not seem to reassure himself that his family would not be drowned.
* * *
The way I heard the story was that sometime after the fall of France my grandmother, unwed, not yet eighteen, and pregnant with my mother, had been taken in by Carmelite nuns in the countryside outside of Lille, where her family were prominent Jewish dealers in horses and hides. On learning that she was pregnant, and with the bastard of a Catholic—unappeased by knowing that the father was a handsome young doctor—her family had disowned her. It was the family of the handsome young doctor who had arranged things with the nuns. Shortly after my mother’s birth, my grandmother’s family was deported to Auschwitz, where they perished. After the handsome young doctor had treated the injuries of some local members of the Resistance, the SS had shot him.
All her life my grandmother’s family looked askance at her interest in drama, poetry, handicraft. The nuns, by contrast, were sympathetic, aesthetic. They supported themselves by making and selling fragrant wreaths of laurel and dried flowers. They tended orchards and beehives and a meadow dotted with sheep. When I was eight or nine my mother had explained the concept of survivor’s guilt to me, and told me that in her mother’s case this was one of its sources: She had never been happier than with the sisters of the Lille Carmel.
My grandparents’ farmhouse, on eleven acres outside Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, had neither nuns nor sheep. But there was a meadow and an apple orchard, and my grandfather had spent their first winter building hives and honeycomb frames according to plans in a book from the public library. He had taken out a lease on the property in anticipation of my grandmother’s discharge from her first hospitalization, from late 1952 to late 1954. He had hoped the place might carry her back to the remembered sweetness of the Carmel.
The apples had proved stony. The special-order French bees were prey to wanderlust and ennui. But from her first sight of the farmhouse, with its gingerbread, tangle of roses, and fresh coat of whitewash, my grandmother had conceded to my grandfather’s logic. She emerged from that first time at Greystone in a fragile and quiet state, holding herself like an egg balanced on a spoon, but for the next twenty-eight months they lived on the farm in relative contentment. No angel inspired her to bare the prophecies of her body to fellow passengers on buses or trolley cars. She abandoned the bouts of prolonged fasting that rendered her skin translucent to an inner light equivalent in her mind to the Christ of her guardian nuns. She found work, taking leads in three productions at the prestigious Paper Mill Playhouse and being cast in a small role in a Broadway revival of Ah! Wilderness that closed out of town. Until the spring of 1957 the Skinless Horse had kept its gibes and railleries to itself.
Sometime during the week preceding my grandfather’s rampage at Feathercombs, Inc., her cruel familiar returned to take up residence in a grand hickory tree in the house’s front yard. The precise moment of its reappearance, like the reason thereof, remained unclear to my grandfather. In hindsight he recalled my grandmother once or twice having held herself very still, eyes closed, as if fighting down a bout of nausea. He remembered a shudder that she repressed, a smile that hung too long from the hooks of her face. For all my grandfather knew, the Skinless Horse might have been hanging around for months before it decided to occupy the tree fort my grandfather had built in the hickory tree as a thirteenth birthday present for my mother.
The day he got out of jail the first thing he saw, coming down the hill from the main road, was the tree. It was a sixty-footer, planted well before the turn of the century by the house’s original occupants, a fellowship of free-love Christians. At the height of summer it would spread its leaves across the sky like a child’s drawing of a tree, a perfect circle of crayon green. Hidden among its branches, the tree fort was my mother’s galleon and keep. Now at the base of the tree there was a burnt blotch from which four jagged streaks extended upward. It looked like the print of a giant paw.
The eyeholes of the tree fort stared down at my grandfather as he circled around to the kitchen at the back of the farmhouse. They never used the front door. My grandfather hauled himself up the last three steps of his long walk home onto the back porch. The boards under his wing tips were new last summer. The previous porch was rotten and colonized by insects, and my grandfather had demolished it with a ferocity that approximated hope. Working alone or with my mother passing him nails from a bucket or bracing a plank with her bottom, he had cut, framed, and whitewashed the lumber of the new one, carpentering its Gothic lace under the guidance of another library book. The new porch felt sound and solid under the weight of him. Like the rest of the house, it was not and would never be his property, but in those years his ambition was not to own a piece of the world. Just to keep that piece from falling down or burning up around him would suffice.
The spring afternoon had turned cool, but the back door was open. My grandfather smelled onions, bay leaf, simmering wine. He heard the “Trout” quintet bubbling on the record player in the living room. The kitchen windows streamed with vapor. Behind them darted the shape of my grandmother. She was an excellent cook, never more calm or present than with her hand on the rosewood grip of a razor-sharp Sabatier. In the early fifties, before her first hospitalization, she had been a frequent guest on WAAM’s Home Cooking, giving lessons in French cooking to Baltimore housewives (those with televisions, at any rate)and briefly the host of her own program, La Cuisine,which aired two mornings a week. *
“Look who’s here,” my grandfather said, coming into the heat of the kitchen.
She looked up from her bowl and whisk. She reached around to untie her apron. She had set her hair and put on her pearls. The pearls lay against the ruddy expanse between her throat and the cleft revealed by the scoop neck of her black sweater. The pearls seemed to radiate the absorbed heat of her skin. My grandparents forgave each other with the pragmatism of lovers in a plummeting airplane. There would be ample time for reproach in the event of their survival.
“We have an hour before the school bus,” my grandmother said.
My grandfather took off his shoes, his suit and tie, his curdled white shirt, his socks and garters. My grandmother helped him out of his undershorts. She led him naked up to the bathroom so he could wash away the Tombs.
Hot water was a pleasure, but he did not linger under the shower. When he came into the bedroom, my grandmother had unfurled her naked body on the bed, propped on an elbow. Knowing that he liked the look of it, she had retained the string of pearls.
A photograph of my grandmother posed in a bikini, taken in Florida when she was in her mid-forties, shows a zaftig dame with impressive cleavage and dimpled knees. By then she had undergone the first-generation hormone replacement therapy (HRT) that softened her body and pacified her mind.* When she took my grandfather into her arms on the afternoon of his release from the House of Detention, her abdomen was rounded and firm under the watered silk of her stretch marks. Her waist remained narrow, her wrists and ankles thin. He took one ankle and used it to drag her across the bed. He pinned her upraised legs against him and entered her with his feet planted on the floor. The pearls shone against her skin in the failing daylight.
* * *
As he was getting up from the toilet one morning in March 1990, in the master bathroom of his condominium at the Fontana Village retirement community in Coconut Creek, Florida, my grandfather heard something snap. He woke up bloody on the bathroom floor with a fat lip and a leg fracture. Later the broken bone would prove to be the result of a bone metastasis; it turned out that for the past six months, without telling anyone, he had been declining to undergo treatment for a carcinoid tumor in his gut. But at first all we knew was that he had fallen, and that someone would have to look after him as he recovered from a broken leg.
My mother, a public interest litigator, was in the midst of bringing a class-action suit against a pharmaceutical company whose popular second-generation HRT drug appeared to be giving thousands of women ovarian cancer and killing them before they turned sixty. My younger brother, embarked on a career as an actor in L.A., had just booked a TV pilot, a proposed reboot of the ’70s show Space: 1999. I was about to start a reading tour for the paperback edition of my first novel and was in the midst of an attempt, which turned out to be futile, to salvage something more than the material for a few short stories from the staved-in hull of my first marriage.
There was also the shadowy Lady Friend. Pooling information, we discovered that my grandfather had said little to any of us about her. Her name was Sally. She was an artist. She was a recent widow. None of us had a phone number or even knew her last name.
Sally called my mother on the day after my grandfather’s accident and got right to the point: Though she and my grandfather had been dating only since September and were still getting to know each other, she was willing to help. But she had spent three brutal years nursing her late husband through his illness, decline, and recent death, and frankly, she was not sure she had the strength. My mother thanked Sally and said she understood. She had the sense that Sally already knew my grandfather well enough to imagine that he might not take to being nursed.
So my mother flew to Florida to fetch the man who had been her father since she was not yet five years old. She hoped that by bringing him to Oakland she would be able to arrange for his care and whatever therapy he needed and still be able to do her job. She booked him a first-class seat—over his strenuous objections—for the long trip west, so that he would be more comfortable. She arranged for his mail to be forwarded, and packed a suitcase with his clothes and papers. It was a big suitcase, with plenty of room for personal items, but my grandfather chose to bring only five:
1 Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel by Willy Ley (3rd edition, Viking, 1957), a history of rocket flight up to 1956, combined with a detailed if ultimately mistaken prognostication of a manned mission to the Moon. I knew the book and its author were longtime favorites of my grandfather, but I had never seen this particular copy. It lacked a dust jacket and bore clear evidence—tape stains, a tear on the pastedown where a pocket for the date card had been, new york state dept. of corrections rubber-stamped along the top edge—of its provenance. When I flipped through its pages, I noticed that throughout the book, someone—presumably my grandfather—had used a black marker to blot out certain words. I held up the defaced pages to the bedside lamp. Every blot covered an occurrence of one man’s name: Wernher von Braun.*
2 A Zippo, known as “Aughenbaugh’s lighter,” which he had carried in his right pants pocket for as long as I could remember. He had quit smoking before I was born, but I’d seen him use Aughenbaugh’s lighter many times to light charcoal grills, chimney logs, campfires. On a smooth oval, set into a nickel finish otherwise pebbled to hide scratches, you could make out traces of an engraved representation of an organic molecule, a linked pair of hexagons whose vertices were Cs, Hs, and Os. Over the years I had asked him a few times what molecule was represented, but the answer I received (“Maltose”), or the reason for the answer (“Because it makes donuts taste good”) struck me as so nonsensical and seemed to explain so little—my grandfather didn’t even like donuts—that I finally concluded he was putting me on. As for the Zippo’s eponym, my grandfather would only say that Aughenbaugh had been an Army buddy.
3 A black-and-white photograph of my mother, taken in August 1958. In the photo she was sitting bareback on a lean gray horse. She wore a beach towel around her hips and a one-piece swimsuit that she filled out more thoroughly than might be advisable for a girl not yet sixteen. She and the horse were angled away from the photographer, looking to his left. My mother held an archery bow with an arrow nocked to the drawn bowstring, ready to let fly at a target out of the frame. I had never seen the photo before it showed up among my grandfather’s belongings. Neither he nor my mother would say much about it except that it had been taken at a hotel in Virginia Beach during the period of her life when she was remanded to the custody of Uncle Ray. My mother’s hair was unkempt, and the look in her eyes, taking aim, struck me as murderous.
4 A model “moon garden,” constructed from the lid of a to-go coffee cup, pieces salvaged from commercial model airplane and tank kits, a dozen small capacitors and four links of a metal wristwatch band, glued together and spray-painted Tamiya “Light Ghost Grey.” It belonged to LAV One, my grandfather’s scale-model lunar outpost, which he had spent the years since my grandmother’s death building and reconfiguring. With its tunnels, pods, aerials, dishes, and domes, the LAV One model on its craggy scale-model lunar surface covered most of the dining room table in his condo back in Florida. “He only wanted the Moon garden,” my mother told me. “I had to kind of tweeze it out from the rest of it.”
5 A publicity photograph, in a Lucite box frame, of the last crew of the space shuttle Challenger. In this photograph astronauts Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, and Ronald McNair sat at a table with their helmets in front of them like fishbowls from which they planned to draw lucky numbers. Behind them stood Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, and Judith Resnik, cradling their helmets in their hands. The crew’s flight suits, like the shiny cloth that covered the table, were a variation on the blue of the Florida sky in which they would soon be lost. Their seven smiles mocked them, at least to my eye. At one end of the blue table, like a human skull in a still life, stood a scale model of Challenger strapped to its fuel tank and booster rockets. In the photograph, the model shuttle looked like a child’s toy, albeit a splendid one. It was hard to see the fine detail that my grandfather had put into this particular commission, how the cargo bay doors opened to reveal the remote manipulator arm, how the engine nozzles could be made to pivot. You could pull open the nose of the fuselage and look into the crew cabin, rendered in faithful detail down to the buttons and switches of the instrument panels and the “Sally Ride curtain” over the toilet.
Even if his scale model had not been selected by NASA for inclusion in the official mission portrait, my grandfather likely would have planned to attend the launch on January 28, 1986. He was a habitué of Cape Canaveral who drove up for almost every shuttle firing, as if trying to make up for his boycott—painful to him to have to maintain, I knew—of every Apollo mission. But that Tuesday corresponded to the eleventh yahrzeit of my grandmother’s death. At 11:39 a.m., when an O-ring failed and the shuttle began to break apart, my grandfather was at her grave in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. He didn’t learn of the disaster until he got back to his motor lodge in Center City and turned on the television.
He sat without moving, without blinking or breathing, as a flower of fire bloomed on a stem of vapor. In that and subsequent replays he watched fragments of the disintegrated spacecraft snake across the sky, wandering, doubling back, as if blindly searching for one another in the blue.
As soon as I heard the news—I was then in graduate school at UC Irvine—I tracked him down through my mother. I had expected that when I reached him, my grandfather might sound low, even mournful, but I ought to have known better.
“Too goddamn cold!” he said. “Thirty-six degrees at launch. Idiot bureaucrats.”
“Why didn’t they scrub it?”
“Because they’re pencil pushers. Judy knew better than to launch in weather like that.”
The astronaut Judith Resnik was a particular favorite of my grandfather’s. She was a brilliant engineer who had, on a prior mission, become the first Jewess in space. Her tangle of wild black curls had enacted medusa feats in zero gravity.
“Poor Judy,” my grandfather said. I could hear the voice of a television reporter in the background, shouting to be heard over the wind gusting along a stretch of Florida beach.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be with you,” I said. “How was it?”
“How was the cemetery?”
“Dumb question.”
“It was very festive.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Frankly? The grave looked untidy. I was shocked.”
The wind whipped up along the beach on the motel TV.
“Grandpa? You there?”
“Yeah.”
“You okay?”
“No.”
“I know you miss her. I wish she were still here.”
“I’m glad she isn’t. If she saw what a mess her grave is, she’d be furious and she’d blame me. Because I insisted on that cemetery.”
“Oh.”
“Everyone else is already buried there, it was already paid for a long time ago.”
I knew my grandfather didn’t mean that he was glad my grandmother had died. I knew how much he missed her. I didn’t know, because he had not yet told me, that inside the crew cabin of his Challenger model, one of the webbed panels enclosing the sleep niches could be lifted on a hinge to reveal two miniature human figures. They had been the original occupants of LAV One’s moon garden before my grandfather enlarged the scope of that structure’s function. A man and a woman, five eighths of an inch tall, lay together in a sleep niche, naked in each other’s arms.* The male figure spread his body like a shield across the female; the female figure’s long hair was painted a vivid shade of auburn.
My grandfather never revealed the intention behind this “Easter egg”—not to me, at least. It may have been a gag or, never one to let an empty grave or a $3.99 model kit go to waste, my grandfather may simply have been economizing. When I look at the Challenger mission photograph now, I don’t see the seven smilers, pretty Judy Resnick, or even, really, the model itself. I see the hidden lovers, fates entangled like their bodies, waiting for release from the gravity that held them down all their lives.
* * *
She touched his leg, and he woke up. The world around him was his bedroom and not a jail cell. My grandmother was taking her skirt and sweater from the valet on which she had neatly hung them. “Ten minutes,” she said.
My grandfather put on a blue work shirt and a pair of chinos and went downstairs to find his mud-caked work boots. My grandmother had resumed work on her interrupted coq au vin. She stood at the stove with her head inclined over a wooden spoon that brimmed with steam. He came up behind her and touched his lips to her nape. She shivered. He felt that she expected him to say something. They had spoken very little so far, and he was not sure what he meant to say or what she needed to hear. He wrestled fiercely against the urge to say nothing at all. In his powerlessness to undo what had already been done or avert what lay ahead, he resorted to the usual inanity.
“We’ll be fine,” he told her. “It’ll all be fine.”
She did not contradict him, did not assent. She took a sip from the spoon. She made a sound that committed her to nothing. “Go,” she said. “She is expecting to see you.”
My grandfather waited at the top of the drive to meet the school bus, ready with the Zagnut bar. The sky was promisingly blue. To occupy himself, my grandfather constructed an almanac of nights lost to the House of Detention. The moon would be at three quarters and waning. Tonight, after he had eaten his wife’s good coq au vin and dried and put away the dishes, he and my mother would rejoin Oliver Twist in his interminable sufferings. My grandfather would lie beside his daughter and then his wife, in turn, until their breathing gathered into sleep. Then he would go to the top of the hill behind the house, with his telescope and a thermos of tea, and lose himself for an hour or two in contemplation of the Sea of Serenity; Algol and Deneb; Eridanus, the river of stars.
“It will all be fine,” he said aloud.
When the bus pulled up, he watched my mother, fourteen and lanky, slouch her way along the aisle, down the steps. When her feet touched ground, she burst into a run. He pressed his nose against her hair and breathed in her school smell, a smell like the flavor of a postage stamp. Against her better judgment, he persuaded my mother to devour the entire candy bar before they got to the bottom of the drive, where the hickory tree fingered the sky, awaiting my grandmother’s next attempt on its life.
The candy bar spoiled my mother’s appetite for dinner, but in the interest of peace, not wanting to betray my grandfather, she forced herself to clean her plate.
6 (#ulink_be1ded4f-8b42-53d5-b8f1-2ce4fad54e44)
My grandfather saw my grandmother for the first time in February 1947, at Ahavas Sholom synagogue.* She had been posed beside a potted palm, in a fox stole and sunglasses, under a banner that read try your luck! The fur was on loan from the president of the Sisterhood. The dark glasses had been provided free of charge by the president’s husband, an ophthalmologist, to treat a case of photophobia brought on by chronic malnutrition. I assume that the text painted on the bedsheet banner, part of the decor for Congregation Ahavas Sholom’s inaugural “Night in Monte Carlo,” was coincidence. The pose, however, had been calculated with utmost strategy.
Without consulting her, the sisterhood had decided that even though she was a widow encumbered with a four-year-old daughter, my grandmother, transferred safely to Baltimore from a DP camp in Austria, was the leading candidate for the position of wife to the new rabbi. Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society canteens and then the kitchens of Park Circle and Forest Park had conspired to ensure that my grandmother regained her shape, her color, and what the president always referred to as “that gorgeous head of hair.” My grandmother was courteous, conversant with literature and art. She had ambitions and the talent, it was said, to be an actress on the stage. Her feline face and French accent, at times impenetrable, led more than one admirer to compare her to Simone Simon. In spite of suffering and loss, she laughed often, smiled easily. She strode into rooms with actressy shoulders and the humble swagger of a girl who had come of age among hardworking nuns.
A few times, it was true, she had come out with utterances that made no sense whatsoever, in French or English. It was also true that when she was not smiling, she fell into taut silences, seemed to listen for footsteps on the other side of doors, studied shadows in the corners of rooms. When taken to a Baltimore public library for the first time, it was reported, she had made straight for the recordings of Highland reels. The first two peculiarities were put down to her being a relative newcomer to English and a girl who had endured and survived the unspeakable. (Nobody could account for the love of bagpipes.) If one sometimes sensed a weird crackle around her, a scorching like dust on a solenoid, it was believed by the Sisterhood—and seconded by many of their husbands—that this mysteriously added to her allure.
The new rabbi, freshly graduated first in his class from the Jewish Theological Seminary, had charmed everyone with his brilliance and élan, his tailored suits and his faint delicious odor, unexpected in a rabbi, of gardenias. But he displayed a troubling streak of self-will. All his life he had been the pride of his family and the joy of his teachers. As a result he had learned to prefer his own ideas to those of other people, even with regard to subjects, such as the woman he ought to marry, about which he could be expected to know very little. Overt matchmaking attempts, each to a thoroughly eligible candidate, had not turned out well. The Sisterhood caucused and agreed to authorize the use of wiles.
To ensure that the target of the operation could not fail to notice her when he put in his scheduled appearance at “Night in Monte Carlo,” the Sisterhood had posed my grandmother beside the rented palm tree just by the main door of the synagogue’s reception room. Two Sisterhood members were deployed here to pin my grandmother down. Mrs. Waxman, married to a judge, had been the chief sponsor of my grandmother’s petition for refugee status. Mrs. Zellner, among the first Jewish graduates of Bryn Mawr, spoke excellent French. Playing on my grandmother’s sense of obligation and her hunger to speak her mother tongue, the women were prepared to hold her on the spot for however long it took the rabbi to arrive, at which point they would merely put my grandmother in his way, so that afterward—a key to the strategy—he could operate under the impression that he had discovered his future bride for himself.
The rabbi was late. The reception room filled with congregants who knew nothing of the Sisterhood’s maneuverings and were eager for the evening to begin. The chair of the fund-raising committee stepped to the dais. He had prepared a welcome, studded with mildly off-color puns about spades and craps, but when the microphone gave him a mild electric shock, he was obliged to break off his speech. The Sisterhood president shoved her husband toward the dais, where the hired musicians, Jews dressed as fanciful Cubans, loitered with their instruments. The ophthalmologist crouched down beside the chairman of the fund-raising committee. He took the man’s pulse and helped him unbutton his collar. Other male congregants offered assistance in the form of impromptu puns on the words shock, current, spark,what a revolting development this was, and so forth.
The fifteen-year-old sound technician struggled to locate and swap in a new mike, a task in which he was hampered by his mother’s constant reminders that he ought to hurry. A scrum kicked up around the table of dairy appetizers, awakening old antipathies and reinforcing new ones. Meanwhile the thong of small talk and college French that the Sisterhood tiger hunters were using to lash their goat to its stake stretched ever thinner. A second microphone was found and tested. The board president was certified fit to conclude his speech.
“Please,” he enjoined all those who had come to try their luck that night, “lose as much and as often as you possibly can.”
The lights were lowered. The dance band generated a supper-club ambiance. Over the cha-cha-cha, the chatter, and the rattle of dice and roulette balls, my grandmother’s handlers found it impossible to maintain their grip on her. She took a package of Herbert Tareytons from her borrowed beaded clutch.
“I find it is very warm in this room,” she said, still unsuspecting her status as prey but conscious of the strain on the conversational tether. “Excuse me, please. Maybe I will have a look at the beautiful moon.”
All at once the moon of Mrs. Zellner’s face was suffused with delight. In her relief she may have tipped her hand slightly.
“Mais voilà le rabbin!” she cried.
* * *
All day my grandfather had busied himself finding reasons not to accompany Uncle Ray to “Night in Monte Carlo.” He was not ready to mix with “regular people.” He was uncomfortable making small talk with strangers. He lacked the funds and the appropriate attire. He had no use for synagogues. He would just get in his brother’s way. Each of these reasons, with the aplomb of a born dialectician, Uncle Ray discounted, dismissed, disarmed, or batted to one side. He appreciated the challenge a return to civilian life must represent, he said, but in the end you just had to hold your breath and jump into the pool. Nobody, apart from traveling salesmen and the people who accosted you in bus terminals, was comfortable making small talk with strangers. He would happily stake my grandfather for the evening, to be repaid by the winnings or at a later date. He owned a very nice blazer, Harris tweed, that was much too big in the shoulders for him. A synagogue, when you came right down to it, was only a building; great Jews from Abraham to Hillel had never laid eyes on one. And everyone, by design and almost by definition, was in a rabbi’s way.
When the time came to leave for the synagogue, the only card my grandfather still held was to make himself disagreeable. Pick a fight and hope to be uninvited.
The problem with this approach was Uncle Ray’s satisfaction with himself and his opinions. Whatever position you adopted, Uncle Ray alighted on higher ground. Attacks on his person or character could have no basis in fact; the kid just laughed them off. My grandfather hit him with surliness, scorn, wet-blanket inertia. Uncle Ray floated effortlessly above it all. But in the parking lot of Ahavas Sholom, as they were about to get out of his brother’s brand-new Mercury coupe—Ray already had his door open—my grandfather, in his desperation to give offense, stumbled at last on a viable approach.
In the winter of 1947, no one—least of all Uncle Ray—was conscious of the creeping unbelief that afterward began to trouble my great-uncle and ultimately led him to exchange his pulpit for the pool halls and racetracks of Baltimore, Wilmington, and Havre de Grace. My grandfather seemed to have picked up on some early vibration of the crisis to come. From childhood he had suspected Uncle Ray of faking “the whole ‘boy tzaddik’ thing,” to gain the attention and approval first of their parents, then of the greater Jewish world. A sibling’s ESP guided my grandfather’s hand as it reached for the quiver, let fly the shaft.
“You don’t see the irony?” he said. “‘Night in Monte Carlo’? You don’t see how disingenuous that is? The whole joint’s already a fucking casino, Ray. A sideshow tent. Remember, upstairs from Pat’s Steak, that crew came in and opened a betting office? Those grifters from Buffalo who fleeced Frank Osterberg? That’s you. You’re running a wire store. Taking bets on races you’re never going to have to pay off because you already know the result. The marks come in, you take their money. Promise them what, forgiveness, eternity, a line item in God’s account book? Then you just sit back and wait for the blow-off. Give them a few last words of mumbo-jumbo, plant their chump bodies in the ground.”
It was a long speech for my grandfather, who felt his argument take on more weight and conviction as it carried him along. Uncle Ray eased shut the driver’s-side door with an angry punctilio. He twisted around in his seat to face my grandfather. His elbow mashed the Mercury’s horn. His freckles vanished into the overall redness of his face. “How dare you?” he promisingly began.
With that opening horn blast and an encouraging flicker of guilt in his eyes, Uncle Ray mounted to the saddle of his high horse. He cited the humble piety of their long-suffering parents and grandparents, the good deeds and intentions of his congregants, the faithfulness and martyrdom of Jews the world over, the integrity of the rabbinate, the accomplishments of five thousand years. From there he moved on to Maimonides, Hank Greenberg, Moses, Adonai. Evidently pleased with the effect it made, he pounded the horn a couple more times for emphasis. At one point he grew so heated that his saliva flecked the lapel of the Harris tweed jacket my grandfather had borrowed. But then, having instanced the Lord God of Hosts, Uncle Ray paused. He narrowed his eyes. My grandfather, he realized, had offered no resistance or counterarguments. He just sat there with spiderlike patience, letting Uncle Ray rage.
“You almost had me.” Uncle Ray grew calm, his tone measured. “You are coming in there with me,” he said, “and you are going to be glad that you did. And do you know how I know you’re coming in there with me?”
“How?”
“Because that is the Holy One’s plan for you.”
“Oh, really, God has a plan for me? About goddamn time.”
Home a month, my grandfather was out of work, depressed, and scuffling. His college degree had been gathering dust for six years. His experience in Europe qualified him for nothing that was legal in peacetime. His Philadelphia homecoming had seemed to disappoint all participants, in particular his parents, whose keenest disappointment lay in discovering that, despite the captain’s bars and the decorations for actions he could not discuss, they were still disappointed in him.
“Everything that has happened to you in your life before now,” Uncle Ray said, “was part of the plan. And tonight it’s all going to come together and make sense.”
“You know this.”
“I do.”
“God slips you the inside dope.”
Uncle Ray ran his hand along the tuck-and-roll upholstery under his thigh, his smooth chin adorned with the minute smirk of a man with a fix in.
“Christ, you are so full of it, Ray!”
“Yeah? So let’s make a bet,” Uncle Ray said. Only moments after his pious outburst, along the very lines my grandfather had employed to needle him, my great-uncle pointed unwittingly toward the exit door through which he and the custom Brunswick pool stick would afterward pass. “Five hundred dollars says you walk into that shul, in the first half hour—no, in the first ten minutes—the Holy One’s plan for you will be revealed. The reason you needed to show up tonight.”
“What horseshit,” my grandfather said. “Brother, you are on.”
His discharge pay had been snarled in red tape, and he didn’t have anything close to five hundred dollars, but he figured you had to like his odds.
* * *
My grandmother turned toward the doors of the reception room, curious to see the new-crowned princeling of Jewish Baltimore. She caught a glimpse of a slender young man in a navy blazer with buttons like gold coins. Under a velvet yarmulke, also navy blue, he wore his ginger hair half an inch too long. Entering the room, he was mobbed by a group of men (among them Judge Waxman) who teased and fussed over him like uncles ushering a virgin nephew into a brothel. The rabbi was soon lost from view. Mrs. Waxman coughed up a Yiddish imprecation or description of what lay in store for her husband when they got home.
“I don’t know,” my grandmother heard the rabbi say. He was making a show of reluctance, letting the men pull him by the wrists into the room. “Gentlemen, I have my doubts.”
As he was swept, redolent of gardenia, past my grandmother, she heard him apologizing for his tardiness. “It wasn’t my fault,” he said. “Blame my date.”
“The brother,” Mrs. Zellner said. She sounded doubtful of the identification, as if the visible facts did not conform with what she had been told. “A decorated war hero.”
My grandmother saw my grandfather lingering in the hallway outside the reception room, looking as if he harbored doubts far graver than his brother’s. He kept his hands straightjacketed so fiercely in his pockets that they had begun to pull open the fly of his trousers. His knit necktie was ill-knotted, and his brown tweed blazer, worn over a chambray shirt that needed ironing, was too tight at the shoulders. Everything—the music, the lights, the rattle of wheels and dice, the outbursts of joy or disgust from the tables, his clothes, his skin—seemed to fit the man too tightly. Only his eyes had found a way to escape. They leaped to my grandmother from the hollows of his face as though from the windows of a burning house.
“He could stand a little more decoration,” said Mrs. Waxman.
* * *
For all the resistance he had put up to attending that evening’s event, my grandfather had given no thought to what it would be like when he got there. It was worse than he could have imagined. “Night in Monte Carlo”! A sequined half-moon, swags of ten-watt stars, paper carnations and potted palms, all carted in to cloak machinery that had been rigged to grind everyone down to zero sooner or later: To my grandfather, postwar, it seemed a ham-fisted synopsis of the world as he had come to understand it.
He sidled a little way into the room, hands stuffed into the pockets of his workman’s pants, feeling fit for nothing. He lowered his head to avert his eyes from the gaudiness and blare, the unseemliness of his unscathed homeland and countrymen, the unseemliness of Baltimore and its thirty thousand well-fed Jews.
The girl in the black dress walked right up to him. He had not spoken to a desirable woman who was not at some level his enemy or a whore since 1944.
“I was not ready for her,” he told me. “I was totally unprepared.”
She was wearing sunglasses indoors, at night. Around her shoulders the remains of what had been a fox sank its teeth into itself. She came confidently but hedging a little, head cocked to one side, as if only eighty-five percent certain they had met before and prepared to acknowledge her mistake. Between the fox stole and the bateau neck of the cocktail dress (on loan from the board president’s daughter) blazed an inch of bare white collarbone.
My grandfather heard Mrs. Waxman and Mrs. Zellner disconsolately calling after my grandmother as she bridged the final twenty feet of linoleum mock-parquetry that separated him from her. He registered the tick-tock oscillation of her hips, the amplitude of the curves divulged by the cut of the taffeta dress. During the war he had come to depend on his pool hustler’s gift for taking rapid readings of other people’s eyes, and her sunglasses unnerved him. They struck him as unlikely. He wondered if she was in costume, starring later in a skit or pageant on the theme of “Night in Monte Carlo.” He surprised himself by smiling, which unnerved him further. The girl’s lips were painted red as Bicycle hearts and diamonds, and they parted to reveal an Ingrid Bergman smile to go with the sunglasses.* My grandfather heard a sound inside his head that he compared, years later, to the freight-train rumble of an earthquake. He felt he was standing in the path of something fast-moving and gigantic that, in its blindness, was bound to carry him away. Swept off his feet, he thought. This is that. At the last moment he managed to return his gaze to his shoe tops and shook his head.
“Unbelievable,” he said, aware that he was still smiling, and that he owed his brother five hundred bucks.
* * *
Where the carport roof overhung the patio my mother had set out a birdfeeder, a Lucite tube with an aluminum peg for a perch, packed with birdseed, dangling on a chain. My grandfather liked to keep an eye on the traffic through his window. He took particular interest in a squirrel he called “the momzer,” which came every day to raid the feeder. The momzer lacked grace, finesse, the power of flight. Once it had scattered the sparrows, it would approach the business end of the birdfeeder with a fierceness and a purpose whose futility amused my grandfather. The momzer was subject to gravity and the physics of a pendulum in ways a bird could not understand. It would begin with bold resolve, clambering down the chain from the overhang, hurling itself from a nearby trellis. But within seconds it would find itself clinging by its forepaws to the metal peg, or to the bottom of the tube, its tail madly switching, while the birdfeeder bucked and gyrated and worked to shake the momzer loose. As though he had yet to exorcise the demon that, decades ago, had urged him to drop a kitten out of a third-story window, my grandfather burst into laughter every time the squirrel fell, with a meaty thud, onto the flagstones of the patio. Sometimes he laughed so hard that I would have to take a Kleenex and wipe tears from his eyes.
“All those ladies in the Sisterhood, putting out their birdseed to catch a little chickadee,” my grandfather said. “But they caught a momzer instead.”
* * *
According to my grandfather, my grandmother’s first words to her future husband were: “Your head would look good on a fence.”
She had approached him with an unlit cigarette scissored between her index and middle fingers, one eyebrow, just visible over the rim of her sunglasses, arched in entreaty. My grandfather got the immediate sense, from the dumbshow and from something else—a lack of gaucherie in her girlishness—that she might be a foreigner. He lit her cigarette with Aughenbaugh’s lighter.
“Come again?” my grandfather said, the lighter’s flame stopped just short of the tip of his own cigarette. He replayed the remark in his mind. He decided he had heard her correctly, that she had indeed told him his head would look good on a fence. “How so?”
My grandfather had seen human heads discarded or reposed in unusual places, though never, it was true, on a fence. Nevertheless, he felt this was a conversational gambit he would not have thought to attempt. Because he could not see my grandmother’s eyes, he could not come to any solid conclusions about the spirit in which her observation had been offered. Only much later did he realize that in her weird way she had dispatched, with one stroke, the problem of making small talk with strangers.
“Oh, dear, I made a fault,” she said. “I see you take offense.”
“It’s my natural expression,” my grandfather said. “You’d look like this, too, if somebody stuck your head on a fence.”
“Wall.” The word burst forth from her, followed by a startling heehaw of laughter. She clapped a hand over her mouth. “I am so sorry. I mean to say wall, not fence.”
“That changes everything,” my grandfather said. His approach to the art of flirtation with women was founded on an impeccable poker face.
“Wait,” she said, trying to hold back another of her braying laughs. “Have you ever seen a, how do you say, catheedral?”
With three sweeps of her white arms, she drew the walls, towers, and spires of a cathedral. She sketched with an efficiency of gesture that came as close as anything he remembered having seen to what poets and sportswriters liked to call grace. As her hands soared and dived, the coal of her cigarette shed glowing threads of tobacco. The orange sparks were reflected in the lenses of her cheaters. She finished by miming a rose window, encircling her fingers over her chest, a zone to which my grandfather’s attention had already been drawn. Brassieres of the era were architectural affairs; in her bust, with its loft and scale and defiance of gravity, there was something cathedral-like that moved him. Then he saw that in gun-colored ink on the inside of her left arm, she bore the recent history, in five digits, of her life, her family, and the world. He read its brief account and felt ashamed.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve seen some cathedrals.”
“On the walls,” she said. “The ancient walls.” She pronounced it hancient. “You see faces in the stone. That is the kind of the face you have.”
“Got it,” he said. “I look like a gargoyle.”
“Yes! No! Not a . . .” and she came out with the French word for gargoyle, which my grandfather after forty-two years could no longer retrieve. “Those are to catch the rain, and they are animals, monsters, they are ugly. That is not the kind of the face you have.”
That was at least partly a lie. To one of her psychiatrists, she later confessed that she did think he was ugly, albeit in a way she found appealing, even arousing. When she first saw him, standing at the threshold of the reception room, contemplating departure before he had even arrived, she thought he had an American face, an American body. Buick shoulders, bulldozer jaw. Only if you considered his eyes would you be forced to conclude, and she did conclude, that he was beautiful.
“I am the one who look like the gargoyle,” she said.
“Hardly.”
“Yes,” she said. “On the inside.”
He let that one pass without comment, taking it for prattle, compliment-fishing; his first misjudgment, his first encounter with the voice of the Skinless Horse, speaking through her.
“Can I ask you to do something?” he said. “Would you by any chance be willing to take off those glasses?”
She stood very still, red lips pressed together. He wondered if he had made some kind of gaffe, if asking a Frenchwoman to remove her sunglasses violated a well-known Gallic taboo.
“The eye doctor said I am not supposed to,” she said. Her voice faltered. “But I will.” This came out barely louder than a whisper.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Never mind. You can just tell me what color your eyes are. That’s all I really wanted to know.”
“No,” she said. “I will take them off for you. But also you have to do something for me. Let me to do something, I mean to say.”
“Yeah? And what’s that?”
I don’t know how many people could have seen my grandparents, standing there in the hallway outside the doors of the reception room, whether anyone was paying any attention. But even if they had been standing in an empty room, I imagine that neither my grandfather nor the mores of 1947 can have expected my grandmother to do what she did next. Looking back at that night from inside the soft gray nimbus of Dilaudid, my grandfather could only close his eyes, the way he closed them that night, as she reached out to the fly of his trousers and, tooth by tooth, zipped him up.
“C’est fait,” she said.
When he opened his eyes, he found himself lost for the first time in hers. They were the color of twilight in Monte Carlo, when the stars come out to twinkle like ten-watt bulbs, and the quarter-moon fans her hem of sequins against the sky.
“Blue,” my grandfather said, falling back against the pillow of the rented hospital bed in my mother’s guest room. After that it was a long time, hours, before he opened his eyes again.
7 (#ulink_636f546a-49f0-5a20-bd2e-e6cb71e0a3a7)
Just before midnight of September 29, 1989, my grandfather completed the model of LAV One. It represented the latest thinking on lunar settlement design (the reason it had needed so many revisions), fourteen years’ work, and about twenty-two thousand individual polystyrene pieces cannibalized from commercial model kits.* At the center of the model, amid the half-buried tunnels, bays, domes, huts, landing strips, and radar arrays, there was a hole about four inches in diameter. Looking down into this hole, you could see through to the plywood substructure of the model’s molded lunar surface. If you asked my grandfather the purpose of the hole, he would always give you some variation on You’ll just have to wait and find out; to be honest, there was not a lot of variation. After a while—no doubt according to his plan—I stopped asking.
He went to his workbench and took down a gaudy Romeo y Julieta cigar box. He removed a bundle of tissue paper from the box and unwrapped a circular structure fashioned from a take-out coffee-cup lid. He had initially completed the moon garden in May 1975, pillaging tiny n- and British OO-scale model train kits to fill it with flowering shrubs, rosebushes, and vegetables grown in hydroponic racks. With a careful thumbnail he lifted the lid’s sipping flap, which he had reconfigured as an access hatch. He peered in to check on the family who had replaced the original lovers as occupants of the moon garden. On a sling bench and two sling chairs of his own design, enjoying moist and oxygenated air, sat figures representing my grandfather and grandmother, my mother, and my brother and me. The figures were posed stiffly (even for polystyrene people), as if for a formal photograph. Everyone safe and sound.
My grandfather lowered the flap. He carried the moon garden to the model of LAV One and fitted it into the hole that awaited it. He was not aware of any great sense of accomplishment. It was a job he had left undone for too long, a promise too long unkept, and what he felt most was relief.
Six months later he would be dead.
The next morning, well before dawn, my grandfather went out into the dense Florida darkness to load the trunk of his Buick LeSabre for a trip to Cape Canaveral. There had been no launches since the Challenger disaster nearly four years earlier. Now another shuttle, Discovery,was scheduled to lift off that morning at ten. He had filled a bait cooler with a freezer pack, a bottle of Michelob, a plastic food container of cut-up pineapple, and two meat salad sandwiches. Meat salad was a specialty of my grandfather’s. You passed a piece of leftover roast through a meat grinder with some dill pickles, a couple tablespoons of mayonnaise, salt and pepper. Like many of my grandfather’s specialties, meat salad tasted better than it looked or sounded, served on a nice challah roll. He put the cooler into the trunk with a pair of binoculars, a secondhand Leica with a brand-new telephoto lens, the latest issue of Commentary, a transistor radio, a gallon of tap water, and a reclining folding chair, complete with a footrest and a sun umbrella you could attach to the chair’s frame. He had made the sun umbrella himself, surgically replacing the handle of a rain umbrella with a C-clamp.
Like any habitation of the elderly, Fontana Village was rich in insomniacs and early birds, but for the moment my grandfather had the morning to himself. Before closing the trunk of his car, he leaned against the rear bumper and listened to the silence. It was not perfect. It was never perfect. But he had come to appreciate how small or distant sounds could intensify it, the way a drop of blue paint intensified whiteness. The tick-tick of an insect or possibly a frog. A big rig downshifting out on I-95. Mist effervescing in the beams of the security lighting. Underlying everything, the low-pitched tinnitus that was the sound of Fontana Village itself, a compound hum of air conditioners, vending machines, circuit breakers, swimming-pool filtration systems, poorly insulated wire. A woman’s voice, far away, calling out, “Ramon!”
My grandfather straightened up. He angled his head, his ear a dish attuned to the cosmic background radiation. He shuffled the short deck of Ramons he had encountered in his life. None of them lived in Fontana Village. There were some Cubans living at Fontana Village, and they sometimes had first names like Adolfo and Raquel, but they were Jews like everybody else, Goldmans and Levys come to the promised land of South Florida along a different branch of the river of exile. He did not know any of the Cuban Jews well. One of them might well be Ramon. Ramon Lifschitz. Ramon Weinblatt. From time to time some poor bastard with dementia went walkabout, and you would see his wife or the home care nurse running after him, shouting his name.
“Ramon! Hee-er, kittykittykitty.”
The voice seemed to be coming from the direction of the Jungle, as the residents of Fontana Village called the wasteland that bordered the retirement village to the north and east. In the Jungle, nuisance plants and Bermuda grass gone feral had been at war with native stranglers since the late seventies, contending for ownership over five hundred acres that was briefly a golf course and country club. Somewhere in that tangle a devourer of pets, widely believed to be an alligator, plied its leisurely trade.
“Ramo-ohn!”
On the second syllable the woman’s voice broke like a bar mitzvah boy’s. There had been amusement in her frustration before, but that was gone now.
My grandfather looked at his watch, which he wore with the face on the inside of his wrist. It was already past five-thirty, and the trip north would take about three and a half hours, four if he stopped for gas and a toilet break. The return to service of the shuttle fleet had attracted considerable interest in the media, and traffic might be heavy. He really could not afford delay.
“God damn you, lady,” my grandfather said.
He opened the well that held his tire-repair kit and took out the socket wrench without thinking about it or knowing why. He slammed shut the lid of the trunk. It thudded like a kettledrum in the humid air.
He crossed the parking lot, nervously gripping and renewing his grip on the shaft of the tire wrench, to a walkway lit at intervals. If you went right, the walkway led past the swimming pool that served this end of the complex. To the left, it wandered around the back of the cluster that included his own two-bedroom unit to a service area with a charging station for the carts that village residents used to get around. Past the service area, you came to a fairly wide strip of lawn backed by a running wooden rail about a foot high. After that, things became primeval.
My grandfather’s leather sandals, imitation Birkenstocks of Israeli manufacture, slapped against the pavement. It was an angry sound. He was annoyed with Ramon, whom he pictured lean and cross-eyed, skulking into the Jungle to meet his death, just for a taste of rat or nutria. He was annoyed with Ramon’s owner for coming out to look for Ramon when it was still pitch-dark and there was, at any rate, nothing to be done. There was nothing to be done, and yet off he went to try and do it; my grandfather was annoyed, most of all, with himself. The louder his sandals slapped against the pavement, the angrier he became. He found himself hoping that when he reached the edge of the Jungle, he really did encounter the alligator so that he could beat it to death with the socket wrench. That was the purpose, he now understood, for which he had taken the tool out of his trunk.
He crossed the northernmost of the lawns serviced by the groundskeepers of Fontana Village. The soles of his sandals kicked up pinpricks of dew that stung his shins. He was wearing khaki shorts, one of seven identical pairs he had purchased at Kmart, to go with the seven polo shirts and seven pairs of white tube socks, which he always wore with sandals, that constituted his daily uniform after my grandmother died. If it was somebody’s birthday or some function he could not avoid, he would put on a Hawaiian shirt, decorated with bare-breasted hula girls, that I had given him as a joke. The shirt had scandalized some of his fellow villagers, but my grandfather had no regard for anyone who could be scandalized by a shirt.
Out here past the service area, it was too dark to see. My grandfather took out Aughenbaugh’s Zippo and struck a light. Tiny beads of moisture in the air trapped the light before it could travel very far. Light enveloped his hand like a ball of St. Elmo’s fire.
“Hello?” said the woman. “Who’s that?”
“Your neighbor,” my grandfather said.
The lighter grew hot against his skin and he snapped it shut. Retinal fire swam across the darkness. Then his eyes adjusted, and he found that he could see. Dawn was an abrupt business in Florida; in another ten minutes or so it would be morning.
“Mrs. Winocur claims to have seen it. She calls it Alastair,” said the woman. My grandfather heard her introduce herself as Sally Seashell; later the last name turned out to be Sichel. “But do you think it’s really out there?”
“Something’s there,” my grandfather said, never one to give false comfort. He thought Phyllis Winocur was full of shit, but he doubted that the cats and lapdogs of Fontana Village were vanishing voluntarily into the swamp in a bid for freedom, banding together out there like four-legged Seminoles. “How’d he get out?”
“My fault,” she said, “I was dumb. I took pity on him. Back home he used to range so freely. He and I haven’t been here long.”
“Where’s home?”
“Philly.”
It crossed my grandfather’s mind to observe that Philly could be tough on cats, too, but then he would have to explain. It had been a long time since he had attempted to explain himself to a woman. It felt like an insurmountable task.
“What part?” he said.
“Bryn Mawr.”
“Bryn Mawr ain’t Philly.”
“Aha,” she said. “Yes, I can hear it in your voice.”
As it grew lighter, my grandfather came to see that Sally Sichel was a good-looking woman, tall, slender, but full-breasted. Dark complexion, long nose with a bump, a touch of Katharine Hepburn in the cheekbones. Maybe a couple of years younger than he was, maybe not. She wore a pair of men’s pajamas, the kind that buttoned up the front, and duck boots coated in rubber the color of a New York taxi. She had not troubled to lace them up very well.
“Does he usually come when you call him?”
“Always.”
“How long has he been gone?”
“All night.”
“Hmm.”
“I probably shouldn’t say this,” Sally Sichel said. “We just met. But that piece-of-shit cat is more or less my only reason for living.”
My grandfather fought against an overwhelming impulse to say something along the lines of In that case, maybe you ought not to have let him out of your house to be eaten by a half-ton reptile or For Christ’s sake, lady, it’s just a motherfucking cat. He revised downward the favorable impression he had begun to form of her, an impression shot through with a surprising vein of lust; it had been a very long time. Anyway, you had to have reservations about somebody who walked around with her shoes untied.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “He was only a cat.”
“Not at all.”
“It’s just, I lost my husband very recently. And Ramon was really his cat.”
“I see.”
“They were very close.”
“I understand,” my grandfather said. “I lost my wife.”
“Recently?”
“Fourteen years.”
“Oh. Well, I’m sorry.”
Sally Sichel started to cry. Standing there in her pajamas, arms crossed under her commendable breasts. Looking out at the Jungle that had taken her husband’s cat, the architecture of her cheeks glazed with tears. Her nose began to run. My grandfather took a chamois, which he used to wipe his camera lenses, out of the back pocket of his shorts and passed it to her.
“Oh,” she said, blowing her nose into the chamois. He remembered—as much in his loins as in his head or heart—the circus girl who had spread her legs for him in the cottage at Greenwich Yard, Creasey’s bloody chamois clutched in her hand. “What a gentleman. Thank you.”
He knew that it would also be gentlemanly to put a consolatory arm around Sally Sichel’s shoulder. Not just gentlemanly; it would be humane. But he was afraid of what might happen down the line. A widow and a widower, easing each other’s passage from grief to passion in the autumn of their lives: The very triteness of it seemed to ensure its likelihood.
From the time he’d moved to Florida in the mid-Seventies, the available women of Fontana Village had been giving my grandfather their best shot. While he turned out the beautiful and high-priced scale models that NASA and private collectors had commissioned, and explored the labyrinth of LAV One as it grew in intricacy and size on the dining room table, the available women of Fontana Village came to make their case. They sent scouts and embassies, plates of cookies and brownies and blondies, pots of soup, potato latkes at Hanukkah, cards, knit goods, pies, poems, oil paintings, cuts of meat, bottles of wine, and a dish of macaroni and cheese. I happened to be visiting when the macaroni and cheese showed up, and I thought it made a pretty strong case for its author, who had followed a recipe adapted from Horn & Hardart’s.
As he’d been licking his fork, awash in memories of the Broad Street Automat, I’d thought my grandfather had looked more contented than I’d seen him in a long time. When the dish was empty, however, he had washed it out and dried it, dropped in a thank-you note scrawled on a scrap of legal paper, and left it on the woman’s back patio at a moment when he knew she would be out. On a few occasions he had been cornered by some available and exceptionally persistent woman of Fontana Village, and just to get a little peace he had accepted her dinner invitation. More intimate invitations, some tempting, some issued with a frankness he could not help but admire, he had declined.
It was not that he wanted to be celibate. He got ideas. He missed the contact, the skin-on-skin warmth of it. The property manager of Fontana Village, Karen Radwin, had a way of touching your arm or your shoulder when she spoke to you, sometimes he would feel a jolt of current. And yet apart from one night in Cocoa Beach, Florida, in April 1975, my grandfather had kept his hands to himself since my grandmother’s death.
You could say this or you could say that about the why or why not of it, but in the end it came down to this: He didn’t feel like talking. He didn’t feel like explaining himself. My grandmother used to complain sometimes about his silences, but only when there were other people around, when people started in with the banter and the repartee and the opinions on Agnew or Sondheim, as if she were embarrassed for his sake because his silence might be taken for disapproval or thickheadedness. Don’t worry about him, she would say, that’s how he is—every time we start an argument I end up with a monologue. Or Some husbands take lovers, mine he take the Fifth. Then she might put a hand on his knee and insist, reassuring herself maybe as much as whomever they were with at the time, But he is listening. After they had been married fifteen years—around the time I came into the picture—there was nothing he could tell her that she didn’t already know. That was all he wanted: to be known.
He did not put his arm around Sally Sichel. He kept it where it belonged, by his side. Just to make sure, he transferred the socket wrench over to that hand as ballast.
Sally Sichel went to the low rail, put her hands to her mouth, and screamed, “RAMOOOOOOOON!” A yellow bird hiding in the brush nearby startled and took wing. She held the ragged note of the O. Lights came on in the units that overlooked the Jungle; calls were placed to the security office. My grandfather had not heard a woman scream that way—holler might be a more accurate characterization—for a very long time. Sally Sichel hollered for Ramon in precisely the way that a peeved older sister would holler from a stoop on Shunk Street when sent out to call her jackass brother home for supper. After the echo died away, Sally Sichel lowered her hands, stepped back from the wooden rail, and turned to my grandfather. She looked a little sheepish, but not very. With the coming of daylight, he could see the marks of care on her face, the shadows under her eyes, a tautness around her mouth as if she had bitten in to something mealy. A fine-looking woman, all the same.
She folded the chamois in half, smoothed it against the swell of her hip, folded and smoothed it again. She handed it back to my grandfather, and he returned it to the back pocket of his khaki shorts.
“Fucking alligator,” she said. “He should choke on Ramon.”
For that, Sally Sichel got a checkmark.
“Let me look into it,” he said.
Sally Sichel stepped back and gave my grandfather a careful once-over. The opinion she had formed of him now appeared to be in need of emendation. Doubtless she had noted the baggy shorts, the sandals worn over socks, the coral-pink polo shirt appliquéd, as if out of sensitivity to the fate of Ramon, with a leaping fox (or possibly a wolfhound) in place of the usual crocodile. He looked like the retired director of a Zionist summer camp. Now she considered his hair, silver turning to white, straighter and finer than in younger days but still a good head of it. She noted his suntanned, sinewy arms, his broad chest, the shoulders that over the years had borne up under the weight of pianos and other burdens. For some reason—she had not noticed until now—he was carrying a big iron wrench, his fingers flexing restlessly along its shaft as if he were itching to use it.
“Let you ‘look into it’?” She laughed. It might have been a bitter or even a mocking laugh. Or maybe he had just cracked her up. My grandfather had spent his life saying things in earnest that struck people, women in particular, as funny. “What does that mean?”
My grandfather supposed it was a strange thing to have said. A more honest formulation would have been that he intended to see what could be done in the area of kicking an alligator’s ass. But that also would have been a strange thing to say. At best it would have sounded like swagger, at worst like psychopathy. If he failed to kick the alligator’s ass, it would be an idle boast. That was the problem, finally, with saying things, in particular things that were true. Yesterday his doctor had shown him a couple of numbers on a blood panel that looked “a little off,” and said it might be nothing serious or it might be very bad. He wanted my grandfather to see a specialist. He had written down a name and a number on a card. The card was stashed inside the Commentary, keeping company with an unflattering caricature of Hosni Mubarak.
My grandfather was seventy-three. Over the course of his life, the definition and requirements of manhood had been subject to upheaval and reform. Like the electoral laws of his adopted home state, the end result was a mess. A patchwork of expedients, conflicting principles, innovations nobody understood, holdovers that ought to have been taken off the books years ago. Yet in the midst of modern confusion, fundamental kernels of certainty remained: Representative democracy was still the best way to govern a large group of human beings. And when some lady’s dead husband’s cat got eaten by an alligator, a man looked into the matter. Even an old man who wore socks with his sandals and needed to see a specialist because something was off in the numbers that told the story of his blood. A man would see what there was to be done.
“I could research what the proper procedure is with alligators,” my grandfather said. After all, alligators were dealt with every day in a variety of ways. They could be trapped, snared, hit with tranquilizing darts. They could be shot, butchered, skinned, and turned into steak and boots. “I mean, if you like. I realize it won’t be any help to Ramon.”
Sally Sichel started to laugh, but this time she caught that my grandfather wasn’t joking, and her mouth snapped shut. Her cheeks turned bright red, but it was not out of embarrassment, because she looked him straight in the eye. “Why not?” she said.
There was the whirr of an electric cart. My grandfather looked toward the service area. It was Devaughn, the night guard, coming to find out who had been making all that noise. Devaughn was almost as old as the people he was paid to protect. He had been born and raised in the part of Florida that was really Georgia and Alabama. No one was sure if he was white or black—it could have gone either way—and those residents of Fontana Village who were deputized or inspired to ask found that in his presence, their nerve failed them or the relevance of the question dwindled away. He had been taught as a boy to regard the occasional Jewish salesman who passed through his native swamp as belonging to a race of lesser demons, horned and dealing in wonders. His manner toward the residents of Fontana Village was suitably tinged with wariness.
Devaughn listened to the story of Ramon and the alligator, and it was not long before he started shaking his head. At first my grandfather took Devaughn’s head-shaking for an expression of regret, commiseration, or disgust. But it turned out that Devaughn felt there was schooling that needed to be done.
“That is not no alligator,” he said. “Been telling Ms. Radwin almost two years now. I have seen its bowel movements. I know how a alligator bowel movement supposed to look. And I know how a snake bowel movement supposed to look.”
“A snake,” Sally Sichel said. “A snake that can eat a cat or a dog? Does Florida have snakes like that?”
“It’s probably somebody’s pet boa constrictor that escaped,” my grandfather said. Once when I visited him, we had watched a program on channel 12 (the only channel my grandfather watched) about the problem of invasive animal species in the state of Florida. Boas, mynahs, feral pigs, rare aquarium fish had escaped captivity or been deliberately released into the wild, where generally they had done well for themselves. The program had been an hour long, but my grandfather waited in vain for a discussion of what was to be done about the invasive species that was really the cause of the problem. “If it’s a boa constrictor, it could get big enough to eat a pig or a deer.”
Sally Sichel, my grandfather, and Devaughn looked at the Jungle. The idea of a giant snake that could strangle a pig or a deer and then swallow it whole slid cold and coiling through their hearts. Then Devaughn got into his cart and whirred away, back to the security desk in the Village Center. Let the day man worry about giant snakes and crazed old Jewesses wandering out into the weeds at the crack of dawn, hollering when they were supposed to be sleeping.
“Speaking of eating a pig or a deer,” Sally Sichel said, “I could make you some French toast.”
My grandfather looked at his watch and his heart seized. He had forgotten all about the launch. If he left now, drove fast, and didn’t stop, he would probably, with a little luck, just make it in time. He had been planning for months, since the Return to Flight was first announced, to do this trip up to the Kennedy Space Center. He knew the names and ranks of all five members of Discovery’s crew. He could tell you the fields of their graduate and post-graduate work, their mission histories, their hobbies and foibles, their relationships and personal ties to the lost crew members of Challenger. He had followed the investigation into the cause of that disaster acutely, delving into its minutiae. During the visit of mine that had featured such a fine dish of macaroni and cheese, all my grandfather wanted to talk about was O-rings, ceramic-tile heat shielding, and Dr. Richard Feynman—always referred to by full name and title. In Feynman’s relentless common sense, my grandfather saw rare evidence of hope for the world.
For months he had felt that it was not just the shuttle program that would be at stake when Discovery blasted off. It would be an entire vision of the future, shared by all the fading partisans of space flight, for whom the launch held the promise of collective redemption. Now my grandfather understood that his interest in the loss of Challenger and the fate of Discovery,his obsession with the modifications that had been made to its solid rocket booster, or to Commander Rick Hauck’s vintage Corvette, amounted to nothing grander than Sally Sichel’s feeling that she was living only to care for her late husband’s cat. There was nothing collective about it. It was purely personal, a seal to stop his heart against a leak of sorrow. Seen in that light, the whole business struck him as much less interesting.
“I already ate,” he told Sally Sichel. “I really ought to get on the road.”
“That’s why you were up and about. I wondered. Where are you off to?”
My grandfather checked his watch again. Almost ten to seven. The darkness of his predawn kitchen, the hum of the electric clock on the wall, the faucet dripping as he cranked out a brown dollop of meat salad, felt like a long time ago.
“Nowhere,” he said. “Never mind.”
“French toast? Still no French toast. All right. How about a cup of coffee?”
“I wouldn’t want you to go to any trouble.”
“I promise I won’t,” said Sally Sichel. “Anyway, I get the feeling trouble is your department.”
8 (#ulink_73322f91-a83b-5efd-aa26-ad776533647a)
For a while after my grandfather got out of jail, the Skinless Horse appeared content merely to stalk my grandmother. When her daughter or husband happened to be around—and my grandfather, out of work and facing trial, happened to be around a lot—she drowned its nickering in a flood of chitchat and palaver. When she found herself alone in the house, she had a record of Highland reels and marches that she played very loud, because for unknown reasons the sound of bagpipes kept the creature at bay. At all times, alone or in company, she fought to avert her face from windows that overlooked the hickory tree. When her strength failed, the Skinless Horse would be there, sitting on one of the lower branches, baring its square teeth, stroking its enormous bloodred penis.
* * *
“Was it a horse, though?” I asked my grandfather on the second or third day of my visit home. “Or just a man with a horse’s head?”
“I never saw it,” my grandfather said dryly. “I guess it must have had hands.”
“And a penis.”
He stuck his tongue out at me a couple of times. He stared out his window at a skein of fog wound around the eucalyptus and arborvitae trees. “The penis looked like a raw turkey neck,” he said. “Or so she said.”
To a psychiatrist who treated my grandmother in the late fifties, she once attributed the physical appearance of her tormentor to a picture-book painting of Bottom and Titania that haunted her childhood dreams. Another time she described having witnessed the gelding of a draft horse in the stable of her family’s tannery, and once she speculated about the weird comminglings of men and bleeding hides she had watched come and go across the tannery yard. In the pit of her worst ravings she often claimed to have been raped by a stallion or a man with a stallion’s head. There was a timelessness in these ravings that made it seem as if the childhood violation were ongoing, happening still.
“She cooked up all kinds of theories,” my grandfather said. “She used to read Freud and Jung.” He pronounced it Young. “Adler. All those guys. So she could tell the doctors what she thought they wanted to hear.”
My grandfather often felt frustrated or baffled by my grandmother’s illness, but when it came to the origins of the Skinless Horse he thought he understood. The Skinless Horse was a creature sworn to pursue my grandmother no matter where she went on the face of the globe, whispering to her in the foulest terms of her crimes and the blackness of her soul. There was a voice like that in everyone’s head, he figured; in my grandmother’s case it was just a matter of degree. You could almost see the Skinless Horse as a clever adaptation, a strategy for survival evolved by a proven survivor. If you kept the voice inside your head, the way most people did, there could really be only one way to silence it. He admired the defiance, the refusal to surrender, involuntary but implicit in the act of moving that reproachful whisperer to a shadowy corner of a room, an iron furnace in a cellar, the branches of a grand old tree.
* * *
On the eve of the preliminary hearing of charges in the Feathercombs case, my grandfather took his telescope and a thermos of tea up to the top of the hill behind the farmhouse to have a look at the full moon. In his heart, he said, he knew that the Horse was lurking. He could see the signs. There was the stream of observations, questions, and imponderables that had begun to pour out of his wife, drowning out silences almost before they could begin. Once, nearing home with the car window rolled down, he’d heard a ghostly skirl of bagpipes on the air. Another time he had caught my grandmother turning from the living room windows that looked out on the tree with a violent bloom of color in her cheeks and throat.
He had been outside with his telescope for two hours, in his fur hat and Pendleton jacket, when wood smoke reached his nostrils. At first he registered the smell without attributing or even identifying it. His right eye had full possession of his brain and was busy dazzling it. He had just pointed his telescope at Reiner Gamma, near the southern coast of the Sea of Storms.
Of all the celestial bodies available for viewing to the backyard astronomer, the Moon was the only one you could see in enough detail to imagine living there, ranging those quicksilver mountains in seven-league moon boots. Naturally, my grandfather knew the Moon was inhospitable to life. When it came to astronomy, he might have been a layman, but he had worked throughout the late forties and early fifties as an aerospace engineer, first for the Glenn L. Martin Company, then briefly at a firm of his own, Patapsco Engineering, designing inertial guidance and telemetry systems. The need for a guaranteed paycheck after my grandmother’s first breakdown in 1952 had obliged him to sell his interest in Patapsco.* Since then the recession of 1953, bad luck, and—in my grandfather’s view—the white-shoe, genteel anti-Semitism that pervaded the aerospace industry had forced him gradually down the economic ladder and, at spare moments, ever deeper into the world inside his telescope’s lens. In his imagination, he built my grandmother a city on the Moon and escaped by rocket with her and my mother to settle there and live in peace.
At first it was a domed city to afford a stunning view with every earthrise of all the strife and unhappiness they had left behind. Over the years, as he read and researched, its configuration changed. To account for cosmic rays, he put buildings inside of craters and in tunnels underground. To assure reliable sunlight, he put my grandmother’s moon garden in a bright spot near the North Pole. But two principles, two rules of the game, endured: On the Moon there was no capital to grind the working moonman down. And on the Moon, 230,000 miles from the stench of history, there was no madness or memory of loss. The thing that made space flight difficult was the thing that, to my grandfather, made it beautiful: To reach escape velocity, my grandmother, like any spacefarer, would be obliged to leave almost everything behind her.
A moment after he smelled smoke, he became aware of a flicker at the edge of his field of vision, light leaking in. For a few seconds he ignored it. Then, with a jolt, he connected the orange flicker to the smell of firewood. He looked up from the oculus of the telescope, blinking away the ghost on his retina of Reiner Gamma, a luminous fish.
In the yard beyond the farmhouse, the hickory tree stood rigged in sails of fire. The windows in the face of the tree fort shone with a malign glint.
My grandfather’s first reaction, after disbelief, was annoyance with himself. On his return from jail, in the wake of the first fire, he had gone through the house from cellar to attic, rounding up combustibles and locking them in the toolshed. But he had relaxed his vigil, and his wife would have had ample time to replenish her stock of hair spray, lamp oil, paint thinner. (In fact, it would emerge that she had improvised, showing an ingenuity he could not help but admire, by using a kitchen spoon to fling cotton balls larded in Vaseline, like tiny gouts of Greek fire, directly into the treehouse.)
The second thing my grandfather felt was rage. The persistence of his wife’s madness was an insult, an act of defiance, a repudiation of the past two years of relative peace in their marriage. From the top of his hill my grandfather shouted my grandmother’s name like God summoning a prophet to a mountain of reckoning. Even five hundred feet from the roar of the flames, his voice in his own ears sounded thin and feeble. Its very feebleness increased his anger.
He strode down the hill at a vengeful clip. If he didn’t find her already burned up and dead, then he intended to kill my grandmother. He held off on making the decision as to how the killing would be done until he got his hands on her and discovered which method promised the sweetest deliverance.
By the time he reached the bottom of the hill, the tree was englobed in gases, spewing a long orange jet. It looked, my grandfather said, like a comet on an old map of the heavens. Between him and the tree hung a curtain of heat that turned his cheeks red for days afterward and singed the tips of his hair. His anger dissipated as he contemplated the shimmering curtain, a heart of fire pumping its lifeblood into the sky. There was nothing for him to do but stand there and marvel.
* * *
My mother remembered none of this.
“Just the next morning,” she said. “The tree was this shriveled black stump. Like a burnt wick on a candle.”
She had changed out of her work pantsuit into a turtleneck and jeans. She had more work to do on the class-action suit, but she was taking a break to knit a stocking cap for her father, who often complained that his head felt cold. When she was through, it would have gold and crimson stripes and a green pom-pom. It was not the kind of hat anybody would want to die in, but maybe that was the point.
Every night after work my mother came in and sat with my grandfather while I cooked dinner and got a tray ready for him with some Jell-O and a cup of lemon tea. My grandfather had expressed impatience at the constant presence by his bedside of one of us or the night nurse. He understood we were there because we were afraid he might die when no one was in the room. He had promised us that he would cling to life, in spite of pain and all cancers primary and secondary, until at last, one day, the doorbell would ring, somebody would have gone to the toilet, and we would be forced in spite of our precautions to leave him unattended. Then, and only then, would he permit himself to die.
“Your mother dosed you with Benadryl,” my grandfather told her. “You slept through the whole thing. I think she used to put a pill in some pudding. She was always knocking you out, any time you couldn’t sleep.”
I watched the truth of this surface in my mother’s eyes.
“Wow,” she said. Her recollection of these years was riddled, an empty quadrant of space lit by infrequent stars. “I used to eat a lot of tapioca pudding.”
I could tell she thought this explained why she had lost so much history from that period of her life, but I wanted to point out that amnesia, whether induced by drugs or by trauma, did not explain everything. It did not explain, for example, the constant gaps and erasures that she introduced into her accounts of the things that she did remember. My brother and I had grown up knowing that the destiny of our family was tied in some way to that of Alger Hiss. We knew that our grandfather had gone to prison, our grandmother to a state hospital. We knew that the time our mother had spent in the care of Uncle Ray had left her with a grasp of the intricacies of pari-mutuel betting, a couple of gaudy trick shots at nine-ball, and an abhorrence for racetracks, poolrooms, and their denizens. Those were all things worth knowing, I supposed, but they didn’t add up to much. If her children studied her silence as she had studied their grandfather’s, they could hope to learn only that silence, that old folk remedy, was at best a partial antidote to pain.
“Where was Mamie?” I asked my grandfather. “While the tree was burning down?”
My grandfather looked at my mother and out came his tongue, as if in distaste at my idiotic question. “She was watching it burn,” he said.
* * *
Like most wonders, the fire in the hickory tree was of short duration, and when its meal was through, it winked out like a candle snuffed. The suddenness of its departure, my grandfather said, was a measure of how thoroughly it had consumed the available fuel. One minute it was there, a comet plunged to the earth, dazzling the January darkness, its heat so intense that it stopped my grandfather in his tracks. The next minute it was gone, along with the tree fort, the tree, and the cult of gentle New Jersey ecstatics who had planted it long ago. A few flames crackled here and there along the nubs that once were branches. Then they flickered out, too, leaving smoke, a whistle of steam, and a light snowfall of ashes.
My grandfather found my grandmother sitting barefoot on the porch steps in a thin nightgown, outside the front door that was never used. Her cheeks were gray with ash, her eyelashes and eyebrows singed, her mouth expressionless.
“Never mind,” he said to her and to himself. He sat down beside her on the top step of the porch. The skin of her bare shoulders was cold, but she took no notice of the chill or of the arm that he put around her. After a while he got up and called the fire department. Then he came back and sat with her until the truck showed up, lights and sirens and seven men in boots and helmets with nothing in particular to do.
“Well, somebody went bananas,” one of the firemen said.
As my grandfather recalled the fireman’s diagnosis, so many years later, his eyes filled with tears, as if to drown the fire of his own bitter memory. He closed his eyes against them.
“Dad?” my mother said after my grandfather had been lying still and quiet for a while with his eyes closed. Resting, sleeping, scudding across a soft gray sky of Dilaudid. We watched his chest with practiced eyes for signs of respiration. “Are you tired? Do you feel like eating something?”
“Grandpa,” I said, trying to sound chipper. “Come on, let me make you something.”
He opened his eyes. I saw that the fire of memory had returned, inextinguishable.
“Tapioca pudding for everyone,” he said. “And lots of it.”
9 (#ulink_fb064717-c097-50bf-96d1-919c34e3082f)
I remember my mother telling me, when she was in the midst of settling my grandfather’s estate, that fifty percent of a person’s medical expenses are incurred in the last six months of life. My grandfather’s history of himself was distributed even more disproportionately: Ninety percent of everything he ever told me about his life, I heard during its final ten days. Out of a scant handful of memories that he had shared with me when I was growing up, one of the few I heard more than once was of his first glimpse of my mother. He always put it more or less the same way: “The first time I saw your mother, she was crying her eyes out.”
This hardly qualified as reminiscence, since he never really enlarged upon it or added any detail. It was offered more in the way of an ironic commentary on some fresh instance of my mother’s stoicism, pragmatism, or levelheadedness, of her being a tough cookie, a cool customer.
“They think they can crack her,” I remember him saying during the days she was fighting (with his assistance) to disentangle herself legally and financially from the mess my father had made of our lives, “but she won’t crack.” After a pronouncement of this kind my grandfather would often shake his head and add, savoring the irony, “Hard to believe the first time I saw her, she was crying her little eyes out, poor thing.”
The first time my grandfather saw my mother was a Sunday afternoon in early March 1947, a couple of weeks after “Night in Monte Carlo.” He rode the number 5 streetcar from his brother’s house in Park Circle to Ahavas Sholom, which was about to begin its observation of Purim. Technically, Purim had fallen on a Friday that year, but due to some Sabbath pettifoggery and the city of Baltimore not having been walled during the time of Joshua, it was to be celebrated today.
My grandfather had no interest in the Jewish calendar or Uncle Ray’s explanation thereof, and as for Purim itself, he could take it or leave it. Unlike the other Jewish holidays, it had been fun when he was a kid, and he still gave it credit for that. But somewhere between the Ardennes and the Harz mountains, my grandfather had lost the taste or the capacity for celebrating an enemy’s defeat, and it struck him as cheap and painfully mistaken to draw all the neat parallels that Ray planned to draw in his sermon between the would-be exterminator Haman and the bona-fide exterminator Hitler. Jewish wiles and bad luck (aka “God”) had put a stop to Haman’s plans; Hitler had simply run out of time.
The annual celebrations of God’s mercy, justice, and power, the feasts or fasts undertaken in praise of His Name, the miracles He was supposed to have thrown our way over the centuries—in my grandfather’s mind, it was all nullified by the thing he had not yet learned to call the Holocaust. In Egypt, in Shushan, in the time of Judah Maccabee, God had intervened to deliver us with a mighty hand and outstretched arm; big deal. When we were sent to the ovens, God had sat with His outstretched thumb up His mighty ass and let us burn. In 1947 there was, to my grandfather, one reason to continue calling oneself a Jew, to go on being Jewish before the world: as a way of telling Hitler Fuck you.
He was not on his way to Ahavas Sholom to celebrate Purim, endure his brother’s preaching, or stamp his feet every time Haman’s name was read from the Megillah. He was not even going for the hamantaschen, though naturally, he would not say no.* He was going to the synagogue that afternoon because Uncle Ray had assured him that my grandmother would be there, and my grandfather was hoping to get into my grandmother’s panties. The woman had passed through the fire without being consumed, but she had, my grandfather understood, been damaged. So he had decided that he was going to save her. Getting into her panties was a necessary first step.
From the first that was a part of his attraction to her: not her brokenness but her potential for being mended and, even more, the challenge that mending her would pose. He thought that if he took on the job of loving this broken woman, some measure of sense or purpose might be returned to his life. He thought that in mending her, he might also be mended. Ever since the late winter and spring of 1945 my grandfather had been suffering from a form of spiritual aphasia. No matter how many times he pored over them, he had trouble assigning sense or value to the things he had seen and done during the war. He had been assured many times by experts and authorities that his wartime actions had served a larger purpose and, furthermore, that some new purpose would be found for him in the after-war. Until the night he met my grandmother, he had put no credit in such assurances; now, as he returned to the synagogue on a mission of lust, he was more inclined to believe them. His lust itself felt like a form of belief.
He understood that it was possible to define the word fool as “one who takes on a job without knowing its true extent or difficulty,” but after all, that had been standard procedure in the Army Corps of Engineers. If there was anything like wisdom to be gained in this world, maybe it was to be found in the hopeful, hopeless motto of the Corps: Essayons. So, he didn’t know how big or hard a job he was getting himself into with this woman. At least he knew where to begin: with her hips pressed against him, her legs wrapped around him, her body encompassed by his arms.
* * *
Since “Night in Monte Carlo,” my grandfather had seen my grandmother three times.
The first time was as the result of a kind of reverse ambush engineered by Uncle Ray. Mrs. Waxman, recovering swiftly from the failure of the Sisterhood’s first plot to ensnare the new rabbi, had invited him to a “casual supper” at the Waxmans’ floor-through apartment in the Riviera, on Eutaw Place, to which, secretly, she had also invited my grandmother. Uncle Ray was hip by now to the conspiracy against him, however, and aware that his brother had blundered head over heels into the trap the Sisterhood had laid. Accepting the invitation, Uncle Ray showed up with my grandfather in tow, counting on a display of brotherly solicitude for the decorated vet with the thousand-yard stare to earn him the forgiveness of the Waxmans.
Awkwardnesses followed. A seating arrangement devised for pre-dinner drinks in the intimate drawing room of the vast apartment, where two Joseph Urban armchairs encouragingly faced an exceedingly narrow Hagenbund love seat, was spoiled both visually and tactically by the hasty interpolation of a crewel-work Eastlake side chair from the front parlor. Also, a leaf and a place had to be added to a kitchen table that was just the size, and had been set, for four. Also, the cook was obliged to reapportion fifty exorbitant grams of beluga caviar on the toast points with cream cheese that were the hors d’oeuvre. But the greatest awkwardness that night, undoubtedly, was my grandfather. Positioned alone on one side of the kitchen table, across from his brother and at an angle to my grandmother, he barely spoke, introduced food into his mouth at mechanical intervals, and stared at my grandmother without art or restraint. When she caught him staring, he would even more artlessly look down at the food on his plate with a show of puzzlement, as if he kept forgetting what supper was and how it was supposed to work.
What puzzled him, in fact, was my grandmother. When an engineer encounters his destiny or doom, it always takes the form of a puzzle.
The elegant girl he remembered from “Night in Monte Carlo” had been lively and cosmopolitan but odd and flighty and possibly a bit of a nut. She had, for God’s sake, zipped up his fly in a synagogue! The woman at the Waxmans’ kitchen table was no less beautiful than that girl but otherwise completely different in manner, in style, in energy. No more interested in the young rabbi than he was in her, she had chosen to wear a drab woolen suit-dress of an outmoded military cut. She filled it out nicely but could not enliven it. Her conversation was measured, tentative, careful, even grave. It gave no evidence of nuttiness. It was more polished, couched more in American English than two weeks before.
The absence of playfulness and flirtation in her manner brought out the languid solemnity of her feline face and eyes. The tangles of her hair had been combed and pinned close to her scalp and seemed more russet than auburn, with a sheen like the coat of a chestnut horse. The laugh he remembered as raspy, verging on braying, was a demure chuckle. At “Night in Monte Carlo,” my grandfather had pegged (maybe even a little bit dismissed) her as a fetching but scatterbrained gamine trying to relinquish her dark and painful history into the hands of hairstylists, dentists, and couturiers. A bird of passage, hollow-boned. The woman he met at the Waxmans’ that second evening seemed heavy at her core, subject to some crushing gravity. She was a vessel built to hold the pain of her history, but it had cracked her, and radiant darkness leaked out through the crack. When the conversation touched on the Carmelite convent where she had been hidden during the war, my grandmother’s voice grew husky. It throbbed with sadness. Uncle Ray passed her his handkerchief, and they all watched her dab at her eyes as the kitchen filled with silence and the smell of gardenia.
My grandfather was troubled and fascinated by this alteration from the girl of ten days before. Had the flirtatious gamine in the Ingrid Bergman sunglasses been a pose adopted for the evening, while this shapely vessel leaking sadness approximated something closer to the truth of her self? Or was it the other way around? Maybe neither version was the “truth.” Maybe “self” was a free variable with no bounded value. Maybe every time you met her, she would be somebody else. He became vaguely aware that he was experiencing pain, a pulsing in his left shin, and realized that his brother was kicking him under the table. Inferring or registering that Mrs. Waxman or Judge Waxman had just asked him a question, my grandfather looked helplessly from one to the other. No help was forthcoming from either direction. Uncle Ray was obliged to intervene.
“Electrical engineering,” he said in a dry tone of voice, sounding exasperated but not unamused. “He has a BS from Drexel Tech. And yes, Judge, he is very much looking for employment, sensitive as he is to the fact that his long-suffering kid brother would dearly love to have his couch back.”
Until very recently, my grandfather, on hearing this remark, would have shot back with something along the lines of Hey, you know what? I can be gone tomorrow, and would have meant it. For weeks he had woken up on Uncle Ray’s couch every morning not knowing why he was still in Baltimore, and lay down on it again every night telling himself it was time to move on.
“I’m interested in rocketry,” he was astonished to hear himself declare. “Inertial guidance systems, telemetry. I’d like to find work out at Glenn Martin, if I could. I hear they might be starting to do some things in that area.”
Mrs. Waxman looked impressed, or maybe she was just taken aback; it was by far my grandfather’s longest utterance of the evening. Judge Waxman said that, as it happened, one of his former law partners had a brother who was a vice president of the Martin Company. Perhaps there was something he could do to help my grandfather.
“Are they building space rockets out there?” Uncle Ray said. During the war, Glenn Martin had built a vast plant at Middle River in the northeastern wastes of Baltimore to manufacture thousands of B-26 Marauders and Mariner seaplanes. “Because let me tell you something, this brother of mine, with his inertia and his telepathy? He might look like a chunk of cement with a flattop. But he wants to fly to the moon.”
Apart from this and my grandmother choking up about the sisters of Carmel, my grandfather had no clear recollection, forty-two years later, of anything else said by anyone at the table that night. The only other conversation he remembered came after dessert and coffee had been served. His feelings about my grandmother at this point were a confusion of curiosity, pity, ambition, desire. He felt that he needed, for the sake of clarity, to escape her gravity for a minute or two, for as long as it would take to smoke a cigarette. He slipped away from the table and, looking for some kind of back stair or terrace, found his way to a large porch enclosed with glass. It was unheated but furnished with wicker and an étagère to hold plants and on a spring afternoon must be a pleasant place to sit and have money and be a judge. It had a closed-up smell. He opened one of the casement windows, hoping to find some purchase in the cold night air.
He had just lit a Pall Mall when the door clanged open. It was my grandmother, cloaked in a thick fur coat, sleeves dangling empty at her sides. The coat, like Mrs. Waxman, came enveloped in a formidable vapor of Tabu. It must have cost the judge as much as the 1947 Cadillac Sixty he had sent around to pick up his guests.
“Hello.”
“Oh, uh, hiya.”
She looked longingly at the cigarette between his lips. He passed it to her and lit another for himself. When he looked up again from the spark and flare of butane, still a little cross-eyed, he saw her shudder once, a traveling wave that passed from her hips to her shoulders and then across her face in a ripple of dismay.
“You okay?”
My grandmother made a funny sound, somewhere between embarrassed laughter and a yelp of pain, then ducked out from under Mrs. Waxman’s coat like it was on fire. At the same time she tossed it in the general direction of my grandfather like she was the burning building and it was up to him, a fireman waiting with his life net, to save it. He caught the coat by the collar. She put a hand to her chest, swallowed, and took a drag on the cigarette. She looked sheepish.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Only I really don’t like fur.”
“Oh?”
“When they cut away the skins . . . ? I have seen it.”
“Yeah?”
“And I never liked it.”
That was the first time she told him about the family tannery, in Lille, near the Belgian border. In her schoolgirl English, with almost nothing in the way of expression or emotion, she depicted a childhood haunted by blood and putrefaction and the piss stink of the tanning vats, by horses in the slaughter lot screaming like girls. She described the flaying of hides in terms of vivid color. Silver blade. Red blood. Blue membrane. Golden fat. White bone.
He held the coat up between them. In the moonlit dark of the glassed-in porch, it seemed to shimmer with a ghost of animal motion.
“That is hotter,” she said.
“Oh, yeah?” He had no idea what she was talking about but felt abruptly that he was back on familiar territory with her, with the girl from “Night in Monte Carlo” telling him how his head would look good on a fence.
“Many hotters. Mrs. Waxman says it takes fifteen or twenty hotters.”
My grandfather could not help it. He laughed. “Otters,” he said.
“You know what this is, a hotter?”
“I’m pretty sure that was otter in the soup tonight.”
She frowned, less with her mouth than with her thick Jennifer Jones eyebrows. He liked what her eyebrows did, particularly when she frowned.
“Oh, you are teasing me,” she concluded.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, teasing me is not bad.”
“Really?”
“Yes, when you do it. I like if you do it.”
My grandfather felt himself blush. The only light came from moonglow and a lamp at the far end of the drawing room. He wondered if it was enough for her to see that he was blushing.
“I like you,” he said.
“I like you, too.” She said it in half a second and then added less than half a second later, “I have a little girl, did you know this?”
“Right,” my grandfather said, caught off guard. So there were two of them, two who would need saving. Essayons. “How old?”
“Four years. Five years in September.”
“And your, uh, the father?”
“I murdered him.” When she saw my grandfather’s face, she burst out laughing, then covered her mouth with her hand. She started to choke on the smoke of her cigarette. “No! I’m sorry . . . !” At first she kept on laughing, but as the coughing fit persisted, it seemed maybe she had started to cry. My grandfather couldn’t tell. She held her breath, let it out. She pulled herself together. “That was a joke but not funny, so why I was laughing?”
That was a tough one to answer. My grandfather let it pass. She stubbed out the cigarette in a pot on the étagère that held dirt and a withered stalk.
“The father is dead,” she said. “In the war.”
She walked over to the casement window my grandfather had opened and put her face through into the cold air. She looked up at the Moon, a day or two past its first quarter. She was convulsed by another shudder, then another. She was definitely crying now, and probably cold as hell. He slung the fur coat over one of the wicker chairs. He took off his blazer. It was the same one he had borrowed from his brother to wear to “Night in Monte Carlo.” He lowered the blazer over her shoulders. She leaned in to it as if it were a stream of hot water from a shower head. She kept on leaning backward until she fell against him. He felt the shock of contact. The weight of her against his chest felt like something she had decided to entrust to him. He wanted badly, wanted only, to be worthy of that trust, although apparently his penis, stirring, had its own ideas on the subject.
“I want to fly to the Moon, too,” she said. “Take me with you.”
“Sure thing,” my grandfather said. “I’ll figure it out.”
The next time he saw her, she was coming out of Silber’s bakery holding a box tied with candy-striped string. She did not see him. He followed her down Park Heights to Belvedere and then to the ragged lower end of Narcissus Avenue, keeping a careful distance, and watched her disappear with the box into the upstairs unit of a two-family house that was better maintained than its neighbors (and turned out to be a rental property of Judge Waxman’s). The following night, around two in the morning, he got up off of Uncle Ray’s couch, where he could not sleep for thinking of her. He got dressed and took the keys to his brother’s Mercury and drove over to the two-family house on Narcissus. There was a light on in a window upstairs. His heart caught on some hook inside him. He nosed to the curb, and cut the lights. It was another chilly night, but the lighted window was open and she was leaning on the sill, smoking a cigarette and looking up at the Moon. He wondered if she was looking at the Moon and feeling the cold air and remembering the promise he had made her, his chest unyielding against the weight of her.
My grandfather heard a child’s calling voice, too faint and far away for him to hear distress or complaint or urgency in it. My grandmother turned her head sharply toward the room behind her, stubbing out the cigarette against the windowsill. Sparks rained down into the shrubbery below.
* * *
As he approached Ahavas Sholom that Purim Sunday with a clear sense of mission if not of operational plan, he saw a little girl sitting alone on a stone bench outside the glass doors, knees pulled to her chin, arms encircling her legs at the ankles. She was rocking back and forth, no more than three degrees in either direction, and making low sounds that at first, from a distance, my grandfather took for singing. She had on a green dress, green tights, and black patent-leather Mary Janes. The dress had cap sleeves that left her arms bare, and even with the tights she must be awfully cold—my grandfather was wearing a hat, a scarf, and a wool topcoat over a cardigan sweater. He supposed that when he was three or four years old he might have felt like crying his eyes out, too, bare-armed in forty-degree weather on a cold stone bench, but he liked to think that he would have had the sense to get up and go inside where it was warm.
One of the synagogue front doors banged open. The girl stopped rocking and sat up straight. A Jew came out of the building, holding a small loden coat. The Jew had on an enormous shtreiml, a black caftan whose hem swept the concrete, and a beard like Edmund Gwenn’s in Miracle on 34th Street. My grandfather was surprised to see a Jew of this variety attending services at Ahavas Sholom, where the women sat with the men and the rabbi was a fast-talking dandy who could not even raise a decent five o’clock shadow. The Jew in the big fur hat ignored or seemed not to hear my grandfather coming up the walk, and the girl ignored the Jew except to the degree that she was no longer crying her eyes out. She was no longer crying at all.
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Michael Chabon
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEARThe keeping of secrets and the telling of lies; sex and desire and ordinary love; existential doubt and model rocketry – all feature in the new novel from the author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.‘The world, like the Tower of Babel or my grandmother’s deck of cards, was made out of stories, and it was always on the verge of collapse.’Moonglow unfolds as a deathbed confession. An old man, his tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, his memory stirred by the imminence of death, tells stories to his grandson, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried. Why did he try to strangle a former business partner with a telephone cord? What was he thinking when he and a buddy set explosives on a bridge in Washington, D.C.? What did he feel while he hunted down Wernher von Braun in Germany? And what did he see in the young girl he met in Baltimore after returning home from the war?From the Jewish slums of pre-war Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of a New York prison, from the heyday of the space programme to the twilight of ‘the American Century’, Moonglow collapses an era into a single life and a lifetime into a single week.
Copyright (#ulink_bb644281-ca36-5ad5-8a1f-5f9429f30fd8)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016
First published in the United States by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, in 2016
Copyright © Michael Chabon 2016
Cover design by Anna Morrison
Michael Chabon asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Scout’s honor.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780007548910
Ebook Edition © October 2016 ISBN: 9780008189860
Version: 2018-06-11
Dedication 1 (#ulink_617db082-5609-5158-9b34-fb3ecb69c5fe)
To them, seriously
Dedication 2 (#ulink_86861e3e-86d8-5ddc-a572-2667d0ff5d2d)
To them
Epigraph (#ulink_7d0b57cf-6ecd-55db-984f-77e56f44689f)
There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark.
—Wernher von Braun
Contents
Cover (#ud268d6f1-3595-53ae-b3fb-f90757e99be0)
Title Page (#u7ec7bd70-c753-5375-98a4-d52c394f245c)
Copyright (#u804828d7-c79c-59db-bcb3-3c9f25a906b8)
Dedication 1 (#u59096d2c-3b46-5bb2-99a9-6d81238bd795)
Dedication 2 (#u032ed8b9-6ad3-54b8-8e7b-947ac30b8751)
Epigraph (#u55b15d98-1986-5f3e-875e-04719b95ba96)
Author’s Note (#u15bb2b64-e94c-5136-aadc-692b89a166db)
Chapter 1 (#u96fb9979-58d0-5e41-a4e2-511da7fd4f50)
Chapter 2 (#u4554f58d-aea8-5748-b1e4-91781aa2142b)
Chapter 3 (#ucfe62948-fc02-5563-993f-23f0a6a347cf)
Chapter 4 (#u3db1ee95-be89-5271-8ece-8c74b06d4408)
Chapter 5 (#u7bceb01a-26b6-5694-9ca5-6a67b16025aa)
Chapter 6 (#ud2146a22-12de-5c53-a23d-5a816f12778b)
Chapter 7 (#u25f85ee9-b7fe-5a9b-8e16-135adac14164)
Chapter 8 (#ubf3ca6ba-fb9f-5b29-8ef1-c0ac49dccaa3)
Chapter 9 (#ufecfe02c-a518-5617-999e-d9c390e8eb54)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Michael Chabon (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#ulink_e1e1d7a4-6ce8-51ba-b397-57f62d908c25)
In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Wherever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events, and conversations, or with the identities, motivations, and interrelationships of family members and historical personages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon.
Advertisement, Esquire, October 1958
1 (#ulink_2b40836b-a7cf-538f-8cdb-311a721d8992)
This is how I heard the story. When Alger Hiss got out of prison, he had a hard time finding a job. He was a graduate of Harvard Law School, had clerked for Oliver Wendell Holmes and helped charter the United Nations, yet he was also a convicted perjurer and notorious as a tool of international communism. He had published a memoir, but it was dull stuff and no one wanted to read it. His wife had left him. He was broke and hopeless. In the end one of his remaining friends took pity on the bastard and pulled a string. Hiss was hired by a New York firm that manufactured and sold a kind of fancy barrette made from loops of piano wire. Feathercombs, Inc., had gotten off to a good start but had come under attack from a bigger competitor that copied its designs, infringed on its trademarks, and undercut its pricing. Sales had dwindled. Payroll was tight. In order to make room for Hiss, somebody had to be let go.
In an account of my grandfather’s arrest, in the Daily News for May 25, 1957, he is described by an unnamed coworker as “the quiet type.” To his fellow salesmen at Feathercombs, he was a homburg on the coat rack in the corner. He was the hardest-working but least effective member of the Feathercombs sales force. On his lunch breaks he holed up with a sandwich and the latest issue of Sky and Telescope or Aviation Week. It was known that he drove a Crosley, had a foreign-born wife and a teenage daughter and lived with them somewhere in deepest Bergen County. Before the day of his arrest, my grandfather had distinguished himself to his coworkers only twice. During Game 5 of the 1956 World Series, when the office radio failed, my grandfather had repaired it with a vacuum tube prized from the interior of the telephone switchboard. And a Feathercombs copywriter reported once bumping into my grandfather at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, where the foreign wife was, of all things, starring as Serafina in The Rose Tattoo. Beyond this nobody knew much about my grandfather, and that seemed to be the way he preferred it. People had long since given up trying to engage him in conversation. He had been known to smile but not to laugh. If he held political opinions—if he held opinions of any kind—they remained a mystery around the offices of Feathercombs, Inc. It was felt he could be fired without damage to morale.
Shortly after nine o’clock on the morning of the twenty-fourth, the president of Feathercombs heard a disturbance outside his office, where a quick-witted girl had been positioned to filter out creditors and tax inspectors. A male voice spoke with urgency that scaled rapidly to anger. The intercom on the president’s desk buzzed and buzzed again. He heard a chime of glass breaking. It sounded like a telephone when you slammed down the receiver. Before the president could rise from his chair to see what the matter was, my grandfather muscled into the room. He brandished a black handset (in those days a blunt instrument) that trailed three feet of frayed cord.
Back in the late 1930s, when he wasn’t hustling pool, my grandfather had put himself through four years at Drexel Tech by delivering pianos for Wanamaker’s department store. His shoulders spanned the doorway. His kinky hair, escaped from its daily paste-down of Brylcreem, wobbled atop his head. His face was so flushed with blood that he looked sunburned. “I never saw anyone so angry,” an eyewitness told the News. “You could almost smell smoke coming off him.”
For his part, the president of Feathercombs was astonished to discover that he had approved the firing of a maniac. “What’s this about?” he said.
It was a pointless question, and my grandfather disdained to answer it; he was opposed to stating the obvious. Most of the questions people asked you, he felt, were there to fill up dead space, curtail your movements, divert your energy and attention. Anyway, my grandfather and his emotions were never really on speaking terms. He took hold of the frayed end of the telephone cord. He wound it twice around his left hand.
The president tried to stand up, but his legs got tangled in the kneehole of his desk. His chair shot out from under him and toppled over, casters rattling. He screamed. It was a fruity sound, halfway to a yodel. As my grandfather fell on top of him, the president twisted himself toward the window overlooking East Fifty-seventh Street. He just had time to notice that passersby seemed to be crowding together on the sidewalk below.
My grandfather looped the cord of the handset around the president’s throat. He had maybe two minutes before the rocket of his anger burned up its fuel and fell back to earth. That would be ample time. During World War II, he had been trained in the use of a garrote.* He knew that, done properly, strangulation was short work.
“Oh my God,” said the secretary, Miss Mangel, making a late appearance on the scene.
She had reacted quickly when my grandfather burst into her office smelling, she would recall afterward, like wood smoke. She had managed to buzz twice before my grandfather grabbed the handset away from her. He picked up the intercom. He yanked the handset cord from the base.
“You’ll have to pay for that,” Miss Mangel said.
When he told this story thirty-two years later, my grandfather put a checkmark of admiration beside Miss Mangel’s name, but with his rocket only halfway up the slope of its parabola he took her words as provocation. He threw the base of the intercom out the window of Miss Mangel’s office. The chiming noted by the president was the sound of the intercom sailing through a spiderweb of glass into the street.
Hearing a cry of outrage from below, Miss Mangel went to the window to look. Down on the sidewalk a man in a gray suit was sitting looking up at her. There was blood on the left lens of his round spectacles. He was laughing.* People stopped to help him. The doorman announced that he was going to call the police. That was when Miss Mangel heard her boss screaming. She turned from the window to run into his office.
At first glance the office appeared to be empty. Then she heard the tap of a shoe against a linoleum floor, a tap, another tap. The back of my grandfather’s head rose from behind the desk, then sank again. Brave Miss Mangel went around the desk. Her boss lay sprawled on his belly on the polished floor. My grandfather straddled his back, hunched forward, applying the impromptu garrote. The president bucked, and thrashed, and tried to roll himself over. The only sound was the toes of his cordovan bucks trying to get purchase against the linoleum.
Miss Mangel snatched up a letter opener from the president’s desk and jabbed it into my grandfather’s left shoulder. In my grandfather’s reckoning, many years later, this action merited another checkmark.
The point of the letter opener sank only half an inch or so into meat, but the bite of metal blocked some meridian in the flow of my grandfather’s rage. He grunted. “It was like I woke up,” he said when he told me this part of the story for the first time, during the last week of his life. He unwound the cord from the president’s neck. He peeled it from the grooves it had cut into the flesh of his own left hand. The handset clattered against the floor. With a foot on either side of the president, he stood up and took a step away. The president flopped onto his back and raised himself into a sitting position, then sledded backward on his ass into a notch between two filing cabinets. He sobbed for air. When his face had hit the floor, he’d bitten his lower lip, and now his teeth were dyed pink.
My grandfather turned to face Miss Mangel. He plucked out the letter opener and laid it on the president’s desk. When one of his rages wore off, you could see regret flooding his eyes like seawater. He dropped his hands to his sides.
“Forgive me,” he said to Miss Mangel and to the president. I suppose he was also saying it to my mother, fourteen at the time, and to my grandmother, though arguably she was as much to blame as my grandfather. There was scant hope of forgiveness, but my grandfather did not sound as if he expected, or even wanted, to find any.
* * *
At the end of my grandfather’s life, his doctor prescribed a powerful hydromorphone against the pain of bone cancer. A lot of Germans were busy knocking holes in the Berlin Wall around that time, and I showed up to say goodbye to my grandfather just as Dilaudid was bringing its soft hammer to bear on his habit of silence: Out flowed a record of his misadventures, his ambiguous luck, his feats and failures of timing and nerve. He had been installed in my mother’s guest bedroom for almost two weeks, and by the time I arrived in Oakland he was getting nearly twenty milligrams a day. He started talking almost the minute I sat down in the chair by his bed. It was as if he had been waiting for my company, but I believe now that he simply knew he was running out of time.
The recollections emerged in no discernible order apart from the first, which was also the earliest.
“Did I tell you,” he said, lolling on his palliative cloud, “about the time I dropped a kitten out of the window?”
I did not say, then or at any point until he sank into the cloud for good, that he had told me very little about his life. I had yet to hear about the attack on the president of Feathercombs, Inc., so I could not point out to him that I sensed a motif of defenestration beginning to emerge in his autobiography. Later, when he did tell me about Miss Mangel, the intercom, and the Czech diplomat, I would choose to skip the smart remark.
“Did it die?” I asked him.
I was eating a cup of his raspberry Jell-O. Nothing else tempted his palate apart from a spoonful or two of the chicken soup my mother cooked for him, following the recipe of my late grandmother—born and raised in France—which called for a squeeze of lemon to brighten the broth. Even the Jell-O was not of much interest to him. There was plenty to spare.
“It was a third-story window,” my grandfather said. He added, as if his native city were known for its adamantine sidewalks, “in Philadelphia.”
“How old were you?”
“Three or four.”
“Jesus. Why would you do something like that?”
He poked out his tongue, once, twice. That was something he did every few minutes. It often looked as if he were passing clownish judgment on something you had told him, but it was really only a side effect of the meds. His tongue was pale and had the nap of suede. I knew from a few precious demonstrations during my childhood that he could touch the tip of it to the tip of his nose. Outside the window of my mother’s guest bedroom, the East Bay sky was gray as the nimbus of hair around his suntanned face.
“Curiosity,” my grandfather decided, and stuck out his tongue.
I said that I had heard curiosity could be harmful, in particular to cats.
2 (#ulink_28745f52-f9d6-5acb-b229-6fe2798b84c0)
As a boy, my grandfather lived with his parents, his father’s father, and his kid brother, Reynard—my mother’s Uncle Ray—in three rooms at the corner of Tenth and Shunk in South Philadelphia.
His father, a German-speaking native of Pressburg (now Bratislava), had failed in a series of dry goods stores and corner groceries throughout the 1920s and ’30s. After that he abandoned hope of enduring ownership and played out the string as a sales clerk in liquor stores, watching other men’s cash registers get robbed. In my grandfather’s recollections his mother appeared as a strong back and a heart of gold, a “saint” indentured to the service of her husband and sons. In photographs she is a boxy woman, girdled with steel, shod in coal-black stompers, her bosom so large it might have housed turbines. She was all but illiterate in Yiddish and English but obliged my grandfather, and later Uncle Ray, to read to her daily from the Yiddish press so that she could keep abreast of the latest calamities to beset Jewry. From every week’s household budget she managed to siphon off a dollar or two for the pushke can. Orphans of pogrom were fed, refugees berthed on steamships to freedom. Entire hillsides in Palestine bore the oranges of her compassionate embezzlement. “In the winter the laundry froze stiff on the clothesline,” my grandfather recalled. “She had to carry it up all those stairs.” Uncle Ray I knew as a playboy of the late 1960s in a sky-blue turtleneck and a gray tweed blazer. He drove an Alfa Spider and wore a raffish eyepatch over his gnarly left eye. Sometimes when I looked at him I thought of Hugh Hefner and sometimes of Moshe Dayan. As a boy, however, Reynard was studious and frail. It was my grandfather, in the early days, who ran wild. Throwing a kitten out of a window was only a warning shot.
He wandered in the summertime from breakfast to dark, ranging as far east as the rancid Delaware and as far south as the Navy Yard. He saw an evicted family drinking tea on the sidewalk amid their beds, their lamps, their Victrola, a parakeet in a brass cage. He unfolded a packet of newspaper on the lid of an ashcan and found the eyeball of a cow. He saw children and animals beaten savagely and yet with patience and care. He saw a convertible Nash mobbed outside an AME church; Marian Anderson stepped out of it and lit up his memory, six decades afterward, with the crescent moon of her smile.
South Philadelphia was broadcast with Moonblatts and Newmans, those cousins who one day would people the weddings and funerals of my mother’s and my childhoods. Their homes served as my grandfather’s way stations. In threading his routes from one to the next, past blocks controlled by Irish and Italians, my grandfather laid the foundation of his wartime work. He cultivated secret contacts among the Italian bakers and grocers, running errands or working a broom in exchange for payment in pennies, lemon ice, or a twist of warm bread. He studied the nuances of people’s ways of speaking and carrying themselves. If you hoped to avoid a beating on Christian Street, you could alter your gait and the cant of your head to look as though you were walking where you belonged. When that failed—or if, like my grandfather, you were not averse to scrapping—you fought dirty. Even Christian Street bravos squealed like babies if you hooked your thumbs in their eye sockets. Every so often, on the slope of a train embankment, behind the breast-shaped silos of the fertilizer plant, a battle would be pitched with bed slats, lengths of pipe, slingshots, and rocks. My grandfather lost a tooth, broke an arm, took uncountable stitches. On his left buttock he bore a pouty scar, the work of a beer bottle he sat on during a fight in a vacant lot behind the McCahan sugar refinery. Sixty years later the scar was visible whenever he used the bedpan, a silvery pucker, the kiss of violence.
His absences and injuries caused consternation to his parents, who made efforts to curtail them. Bounds were set, borders established; my grandfather subverted them. Resolute in his refusal to give details or name names, resistant to corporal punishment, willing to forgo whatever treat he was to be deprived of, he wore his parents down. In time they surrendered.
“Nothing can be done about a boy who throws cats out of windows,” said old Abraham, my grandfather’s grandfather, in his Pressburger German. Abraham ruled from his corner of the parlor that doubled as a dining room, enthroned atop his hemorrhoid donut among his books of commentary. It was nearly dark, one of the last free evenings of the summer.
“But what if he’s lost?” my grandmother said for the thousandth or millionth time.
“He isn’t lost,” Uncle Ray said, issuing the finding that ultimately prevailed in the family Talmud. “He knows where he is.”
He was trapped under a train car, one of six wooden boxcars on a stub at the far end of a storage yard by the river. The boxcars were used last to rush Baldwin-Felts men to the Paint Creek Mine War. Now they stood pastured against a hump of ground, and the mouths of a trumpet creeper devoured them.
He was hiding from a railroad bull, a big man named Creasey with a film on his left eye and patches of carroty hair growing on parts of his face where no hair ought to be. Creasey had already thrashed my grandfather soundly a number of times that summer. The first time he jerked my grandfather’s arm up behind his back so hard the bones sang. The second time he dragged my grandfather by an earlobe across the yard to the main gate, where he applied his boot heel to the seat of my grandfather’s trousers; my grandfather claimed the earlobe still bore the print of Creasey’s thumb. The third time Creasey caught my grandfather trespassing, he strapped him thoroughly with the leather harness of his Pennsy uniform. This time my grandfather planned to stay under that boxcar until Creasey moved on or dropped dead.
Creasey stuck around, smoking cigarettes, pacing the weeds between the stub of track and the rest of the storage yard. My grandfather, flat on his belly, watched the bull’s dusty boots through a scrim of dandelion and foxtail. Scrape, stop, pivot, return. Every few minutes a cigarette fell with a pat against the gravel and met its end beneath Creasey’s right boot. My grandfather heard the twist of a bottle cap, a slosh of liquid, a belch. He had the impression that Creasey was waiting for somebody, killing time, maybe getting up his nerve.
My grandfather puzzled over it. Creasey was supposed to keep moving, sweeping the lots for hoboes, tramps, and pilferers like my grandfather, who had come to the Greenwich Yard that summer drawn by reports of coal for the taking, spillover from the cars as they trundled to the piers. The first time Creasey caught him it was because my grandfather had been weighed down by twenty-five pounds of coal in a sugar sack. Why did the man not carry on now with the work the Pennsylvania Railroad paid him to do? Inside the boxcar, over his head, my grandfather heard small animals in their nests, rousing themselves to their nightly business. According to his mother’s natural history, he knew, that business was to bite young boys and give them rabies.
At last Creasey trampled his fifth cigarette, took another swig, and moved off. My grandfather counted to thirty and then slid out from under the boxcar. He brushed the grit from his belly, where the skin prickled. He spotted Creasey carrying a knapsack, making for one of the little stucco houses scattered here and there across the lots. On his first forays into the Greenwich Yard my grandfather had been charmed by the idea that railmen were cottaged like shepherds among the herded trains. He soon determined that the bungalows were no one’s habitations. They had mesh grilles over their blackwashed windows, and if you put your ear to their doors you could hear a thrum of power and sometimes a thunk like the clockwork of a bank vault. Until now my grandfather had never seen anybody going into one or coming out.
Creasey fished a key ring from his hip and let himself in. The door closed softly behind him.
My grandfather knew that he ought to head for home, where a hot supper and an operetta of reproach awaited him. He was hungry, and practiced in deafness and the formulation of remorse. But he had come here today to stand one final time at the top of one particular signal bridge that he had come to think of as his own, and tell another summer goodbye.
He cut across the storage yard and stole along a stretch of railbed to “his” signal bridge. He scaled the service ladder and clambered out along the catwalk to its midpoint, fifteen feet above the tracks. He raised up, holding onto the body of the central signal lantern. He jammed his feet in their canvas sneakers into the steel lattice of the catwalk. He let go of the signal lantern and stood balanced with arms outspread, hooked only by his ankles to the turning earth. Between him and the tenement on Shunk Street, the rail yard shuffled and sorted its rolling stock bound for New York, Pittsburgh, St. Louis. Trains and sections of trains clanged and rumbled and plowed furrows in the gloom.
He turned his face to the east. Darkness piled up like a thunderhead over New Jersey. Beyond the river lay Camden, beyond Camden the Jersey Shore, beyond the shore the Atlantic Ocean, and beyond that, Paris, France. His mother’s brother, a veteran of the Argonne, had informed my grandfather that in the “cathouses” of that city a man might cross one further border, where silk stocking met white thigh. My grandfather took the signal lantern in his arms. He pressed his hips against its smooth encasement and looked up at the evening sky. A full moon rose, tinted by its angle on earth’s atmosphere to a color like the flesh of a peach. My grandfather had spent most of that last Friday of the summer reading a copy of Astounding Stories of Super-Science, found among some other unsold magazines in the back room of his father’s store. The last story was about a daring earthman who flew in an atomic rocket to the Moon’s dark side, where he found ample air and water, fought bloodthirsty selenites, and fell in love with a pale and willing lunar princess. The Moon was a tough neighborhood, and the princess required frequent salvation by the earthman.
My grandfather regarded the Moon. He thought about the noble girl in the story with her “graceful, undulating body” and felt the swell of an inner tide reaching toward her, lifting him like Enoch in the whirlwind into the sky. He ascended the skyward tide of his longing. He would be there for her. He was coming to her rescue.
A door banged shut, and Creasey came out of the little house and rejoined his evening route. He was no longer carrying the knapsack. He crossed a set of tracks, a hitch of stiffness in his walk, and vanished among the cars.
My grandfather climbed down from the signal bridge. His path home did not run past the little house. But old Abraham had ruled correctly from his corner of the parlor: Nothing could be done for a boy who would throw a kitten out of a window onto a Philadelphia pavement just to see what would happen if he did.
My grandfather approached the little house with its gridded black windows. For a full minute he stood and watched it. He put his ear to the door. Over the electrical hum, he heard a human sound: choking, or laughter, or sobs.
He knocked. The sound broke off. The house’s mysterious clockwork clicked. From the marshaling yard came the trumpeting of lashed-up engines, ready to drag a long load west. He knocked again.
“Who’s there?”
My grandfather gave his first and last name. On reflection he appended his address. There followed a prolonged spell of unmistakable coughing from the other side of the door. When it passed, he heard a stirring, the creak of a bed or chair.
A girl peered out, hiding the right half of her face behind the door that she gripped with both hands, looking ready to slam it shut. The visible half of her head was a mat of peroxide tangles. Around the left eye, under a delicate eyebrow, paint mingled with mascara in cakes and blotches. She wore the fingernails on her left hand long, lacquered in black cherry. The nails on her right hand were bitten and bare of paint. She was wrapped loosely in a man’s tartan bathrobe. If she was surprised to see him, she did not show it. If she had been crying, she was not crying anymore. But my grandfather understood Creasey the way you come to understand a man who repeatedly kicks your ass. The details of the hurt that Creasey might have done to this girl during his visit remained obscure, but my grandfather felt the outrage all the more vividly for his ignorance. He saw it in the ruin of her eye paint. He smelled it, a taint of Javela water and armpit in the air that leaked from behind the half-open door.
“Well?” she said. “State your business, Shunk Street.”
“I saw him come in there,” my grandfather said. “That Creasey bastard.”
It was a word not to be used in the hearing of adults, especially women, but in this instance it felt fitting. The girl’s face came out from behind the door like the moon from behind a factory wall. She took a better look at him.
“He is a bastard,” she said. “You’re right about that.”
He saw that the hair on the right side of her part was cropped as short as his own, as though to rid that half of lice. On the right side of her upper lip she had raised enough whisker to form the handlebar of a mustache. Her right eye was free of paint, under a dense black brow. Apart from a shadow of stubble universal on either side of the chin, an invisible rule appeared to have apportioned evenly the male and female of her nature. My grandfather had heard but disbelieved neighborhood reports of sideshow hermaphrodites, cat girls, ape girls, four-legged women who must be mounted like tables. He might have reconsidered his doubt if not for the fact that he saw, filling both sides of the loose flannel wrapper from the neck down, only womanly curvature and shadow.
“The price of a peep is one nickel, Shunk Street,” she said. “I believe you may owe me a dime.”
My grandfather looked down at his shoes. They were not much to look at. “Come on,” he said, reaching for her arm. Even through the flannel of her sleeve, he could feel fever on her skin.
She shook loose of his grip with a jerk of her arm.
“He won’t come back this way for a while. But we have to go now,” my grandfather said. There were whiskers on the chins of his own aunts: big deal. He was here by the power of a wish on an evening star. “Come on!”
“Aren’t you funny,” she said. She peeked out of the doorway, looked to either side. She lowered her voice in a show of co-conspiracy. “Trying to rescue me.”
From her lips it sounded like the most peabrained idea ever conceived. She left the door hanging open and went back inside. She sat down on a cot and pulled a stiff blanket around her. In the light of a candle guttering on an overturned jar lid, panels of black switches and gauges glinted. Creasey’s knapsack lay neglected on the floor.
“Are you going to take me home to your mama and papa?” she suggested in a voice that made him momentarily dislike her. “A drug-sick whore full of TB?”
“I can take you to a hospital.”
“Aren’t you funny,” she said, more tenderly this time. “You already know I can unlock the door from the inside, honey. I’m not a prisoner here.”
My grandfather felt there was more to her imprisonment than a lock and key, but he did not know how to put that feeling into words. She reached into the knapsack and pulled out a package of Old Golds. Something about the pomp with which she set fire to her cigarette made her seem younger than he had thought.
“Your pal Creasey already rescued me,” she said. “He could have left me lying there right where he found me, half dead with my face in a pile of cinders. Right where those Ealing boys red-lighted me.”
She told him that from the age of eleven she had been traveling in the sideshow of the Entwhistle–Ealing Bros. Circus, out of Peru, Indiana. She had been born a girl, in Ocala, Florida, but at puberty, nature had refashioned her with a mustache and chin fuzz.
“I went over big for quite a little while, but lately, I’m getting all this action from my girl department.” She folded her arms under her breasts. “Body’s been goofing with me all my life.”
My grandfather wanted to say that he felt the same way about his brain, that organ whose flights of preposterous idealism were matched only by its reveries of unfettered violence. But he thought it would be wrong to compare his troubles to hers.
“I guess that’s the reason I started on the junk,” she said. “A hermaphrodite was something. It has a little poetry. There is just no poetry in a bearded lady.”
She had been nodding, she said, dead to the world, when management at last saw fit to throw her off the circus train as it pulled out of the yard, bound for Altoona.
“Creasey found my valise where those assholes had pitched it. Conveyed me to these comfortable lodgings.” She adjusted her legs and, before she gathered the blanket more tightly, caught my grandfather trying to see into the shadow between them. “Creasey is a bastard, true. But he brings me food, and smokes, and magazines. And candles to read by. The only thing he won’t bring me is a fix. Pretty soon it’ll be all the same to me, anyway. Meantime he doesn’t charge me more rent than I’m willing to pay.”
My grandfather contemplated the ashes of his plan. He felt she was telling him she was going to die, and that she planned on doing it here, in this room that jumped in the candlelight. Her chest blood was all over a crumpled chamois rag, and on the woolen blanket, and on the lapels of the robe.
“Creasey has his points,” she said. “And I’m sure the folks on Shunk Street would be happy to know that he has been kind enough to leave me in possession of my virginity. In the technical sense.” She squirmed against the cot illustratively. “Railroad men. They are practical fellows. Always find a way around.”
That started her barking into her scrap of chamois, which bloodied it some more. The violence of her coughing shook the blanket loose, baring her legs to my grandfather’s inspection. My grandfather felt very sorry for her, but he could not keep his gaze away from the inner darkness of her robe. The spasm passed. She folded the bloodstained part of the chamois into the remnant that was still clean.
“Have a look, Shunk Street,” she said. She hoisted the hem of the tartan robe, opened her legs, and spread them wide. The pale band of belly, the shock of dark fur, the pink of her labia would endure in his memory, flying like a flag, until he died. “On the house.”
He could feel the turmoil in his cheeks, throat, rib cage, loins. He could see that she saw it and was enjoying it. She closed her eyes and raised her hips a little higher. “Go ahead, sweetheart. Touch it if you want to.”
My grandfather found that his lips and tongue could not form a reply. He went over and put his hand against the patch of hair between her legs. He held it there, sampling it with rigid fingers like he was taking a temperature or pulse. The night, the summer, all time and history came to a halt.
Her eyes snapped open. She lurched forward and shoved him aside, covering her mouth with the bare hand while the painted one groped for the chamois. My grandfather took a crisp white handkerchief from the back pocket of his cutoff corduroys. He presented her with this evidence of the hopefulness invested in him by his mother, every morning afresh, when she sent him out into the world. The girl crushed the handkerchief in her fist without seeming to notice it was there. My grandfather watched her body tear itself apart from the inside for what felt like a long time. He worried she might be about to die right then, in front of him. Presently, she sighed and fell backward against the cot. Her forehead shone in the light from her stub of candle. She breathed with caution. Her eyes were half open and fixed on my grandfather, but minutes went by before she took notice of him again.
“Go home,” she said.
He eased the day’s inviolate handkerchief from her fist. Like a road map he unfolded it and laid it against her brow. He sealed up the flaps of her robe around her and dragged the awful blanket up to her chin with its babyish dimple. Then he went to the door, where he stopped, looking back at her. The heat of her clung like an odor to his fingertips.
“Come back sometime, Shunk Street,” she said. “Maybe I’ll let you rescue me yet.”
When my grandfather finally made it home well after dark, there was a patrolman in the kitchen. My grandfather confessed to nothing and provided no information. My great-grandfather, egged on by the patrolman, gave my grandfather a slap across the face to see how he liked it. My grandfather said he liked it fine. He felt he had earned a measure of pain through his failure to rescue the girl. He considered informing the patrolman about her, but she was by her own admission a drug fiend and a whore, and he would rather die than rat her out. Whichever course he chose, he felt, he would betray her. So he answered to his nature and said nothing.
The patrolman returned to his beat. My grandfather was subjected to lectures, threats, accusations. He bore up under them with his usual stoicism, was sent to bed hungry, and kept the secret of the two-sided girl in the train yard for the next sixty years. The following day he was put to work in the store, working before and after school on weekdays and all day Sunday. He was not able to make it back to Greenwich Yard until late the following Saturday afternoon, after shul. It was getting dark, and the weather had turned wet the night before. Along the tracks the reflected sky lay pooled between the wooden ties like pans of quicksilver. He knocked on the door of the little house until his hand rang with the pain of knocking.
3 (#ulink_3aa4720f-6a3e-5a9d-a51a-3b62ae2a8b3c)
I came into my patrimony of secrets in the late 1960s, in Flushing, Queens. At the time my grandparents were still living in the Bronx, and generally, if my parents needed to be free of me for more than a few hours, I would be deposited in Riverdale. Like the space program, my grandfather’s business was then at its peak, and though later he became a strong presence in my life, in those days my clearest memory of him is that he was seldom around.
My grandparents and their Martian zoo of Danish furniture shared seven rooms in the Skyview, overlooking the Hudson. They lived on the thirteenth floor, though it was styled the fourteenth because, my grandfather explained, the world was full of dummies who believed in lucky charms. It was bad luck, my grandfather said, to be a dummy. My grandmother also scoffed. Though she personally had no particular fear of the number thirteen, she knew that bad luck could never be fooled by such a simple-minded stratagem.
Left to ourselves my grandmother and I might go to see a movie, one of the interminable candy-colored epics of the day: Doctor Doolittle,The Gnome-Mobile, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. She liked to shop every morning for that evening’s dinner; consequently, we spent a lot of time in grocery stores, where she taught me to look for tomatoes that still had a smell of hot sun in their stems, and then in her kitchen, where she taught me the rudiments and entrusted me with knives. If I have inherited it from her, then she must have found a mindful mindlessness in the routines and procedures of the kitchen. It tired her to read aloud in English, but she had a lot of French poems by heart and sometimes recited them to me in the ghostly language of her loss; I formed the impression that French poetry trafficked mainly in wistful rain and violins. She taught me colors, numbers, the names of animals: Ours.Chat.Cochon.
There were days, however, when being left with my grandmother was not very different from being left alone. She lay on the sofa or on her bed with the curtains drawn and a cool cloth folded over her eyes. These days had their own lexicon: cafard, algie, crise de foie. In 1966 (the date of my earliest memories of her) she was only forty-three, but the war, she said, had ruined her stomach, her sinuses, the joints of her bones (she never said anything about what the war might have done to her mind). If she had promised to look after me on one of her bad days, she would rally long enough to persuade my parents, or herself, that she was up to the task. But then it—something—would come over her and we would leave the movie theater halfway through the show, conclude the recital after a single poem, walk out of the supermarket abandoning an entire cart of groceries in the middle of the aisle. I don’t think I really minded, exactly. When she took to her bed—and only then—I was allowed to watch television. Once she was down for the count, my only responsibility would be from time to time to run a little cool water on the washcloth, wring it out, and drape it over her face like a flag on a coffin.
Outside of the kitchen my grandmother’s favorite pastime was cards. She detested the games Americans considered suitable for children: war, concentration, go fish. She found gin rummy dull and interminable. The card games of her own childhood were all trick-taking games that rewarded acuity and deception. When I was old enough to add and subtract in my head—around the time I learned to read—she taught me how to play piquet. It was not long before I could nearly hold my own against her, though when I was older my grandfather told me that she was always careful to make mistakes.
Piquet is played with a shortened deck of thirty-two cards, and before we could begin, my grandmother would strip a pack of Bicycles or Bees of all the cards from deuce to six. This was an operation she performed with a certain heedlessness. When someone came home after a long day at the office, say, hoping to relax with a few hands of solitaire, and went to the drawer in the cabinet where games were kept, he was likely to find half a dozen plundered decks awash in an indiscriminate surf of pip cards. Those were the only occasions when I ever saw my grandfather openly express irritation with my grandmother, whom he otherwise coddled and indulged.
“It drove me nuts,” he remembered. “I used to say, ‘One deck! Is that too much to ask? Could there be one goddamn deck that isn’t ruined?’” He made a duck’s bill of his lips, narrowed his eyes, hoisted his shoulders. “‘Boh.’” I remembered this echt-gallicism of my grandmother’s. “She wasn’t ruining the deck, if you please, she was correcting it.” He put on the Texan-in-Paris accent he used whenever he spoke French. “See-non, come-awn fair une pe-teet par-tee?”
One afternoon when my grandmother sent me to get a deck so we could make a few parties, I discovered that since my last visit the drawer had been cleaned out and restocked with several new packs of poker decks, sealed and in their wrappers. It would be a worse outrage to my grandfather than usual, it seemed to me, to “ruin” one of these brand-new packs.
I opened some other drawers and poked around among the Yahtzee and Rack-O and Monopoly boxes, looking for any of the decks that my grandmother had previously stripped. Inside a tin that once held Barton’s almond kisses I found a deck of cards in a curiously drab box, pale blue printed with some words, which I took to be French, in a medieval-looking typeface like the one across the banner of The New York Times. It was thinner than an American deck, as if it contained fewer cards. Assuming that I had managed to locate an actual French piquet deck, I carried it into the kitchen, where my grandmother and I usually played.
I thought she would be pleased to see that I had found a way to keep my grandfather happy. Instead she looked alarmed. She was in the act of lighting one of the Wintermans cigarillos that she smoked only while playing cards, but she stopped with the match halfway to her mouth. My mother used to complain bitterly about the stink of my grandmother’s cigars in my hair and on my clothing when I was returned after a visit, but I thought they smelled wonderful.
She took the unlit cigarillo from her lips and returned it to its little tin. She held out her hand, palm up. I surrendered the pale blue box. She opened its flap, tipped out the cards, and set it down on the table by the ashtray. She held up the deck and fanned it so she could see the faces. I saw only the backs, midnight blue patterned with crescent moons.
She asked where I had found the cards. I told her, and she nodded. She remembered having hidden them there long ago. She explained that she’d had to hide them because they were magical cards, and my grandfather did not believe in magic. I must not tell him about the cards, she said; it would annoy him and he would throw them away. I agreed to keep the cards a secret and asked my grandmother if she believed in magic. She said she did not but that, surprisingly, magic worked even if you did not believe in it. She seemed to have entirely recovered from her alarm at the thought that my discovery might be discovered.
She held up the blue box and told me that the words printed there were German, not French, and that, translated, they read FORTUNE-TELLING CARDS FOR WITCHES.
I asked my grandmother if she was a witch. I had the odd sensation that it was a question I had been holding at the back of my tongue for a long time.
She looked at me and reached for the cigarillo she had put aside. She lit it, shook out the match. She shuffled the cards a few times with her long pale fingers. She set the deck on the table between us.
In putting down these very early memories of my grandmother, I have so far avoided quoting her directly. To claim or represent that I retain an exact or even approximate recollection of what anyone said so long ago would be to commit the memoirist’s great sin. But I have not forgotten my grandmother’s two-word reply when I asked if the reason she owned a secret deck of magical fortune-telling cards for witches was that she was herself a witch:
“Not anymore.”
I asked if this meant that she was no longer able or didn’t remember how to tell fortunes. It was probably a little of both, she said. She would, however, be happy to show me how her magical deck of cards could be used to tell a story. All I had to do—she demonstrated as she explained—was cut the cards, cut them again, and then choose three from the top of the deck.
I have never had success in tracking down or identifying my grandmother’s particular deck, the “Fortune-telling Cards for Witches,” or “The Witch’s Fortune-telling Cards,” or however the name was translated. It may be that things I heard afterward about my grandmother’s brief television career as a witch corrupted my recollection of the deck’s name—maybe they were called “Cards of a Gypsy Fortune-teller,” or “The Sibyl’s Fortune-telling Cards.” But I remember enough about the cards to conclude that it must have been a German variant on the standard “Lenormand” deck.
The first time I saw a classic Mexican Lotería deck with its iconic imagery (El Sol,El Arbol, La Luna), after moving to Southern California in the mid-’80s, I recognized its kinship to my grandmother’s. Her deck had a card called the Ship that showed an old-fashioned argosy under full sail beneath a sky filled with stars. The House was white stucco with a red tile roof and a pretty green garden. The Rider in his red tailcoat rode a prancing white horse through yellow and green woods. The Child in its neutering nightdress clutched a doll and looked afraid. As on the faces of most Lenormand decks, a small oblong panel, inset at the top of each card above the Scythe or the Birds or the Bouquet, depicted a pip or court card with the German suits of hearts, leaves, acorns, and bells.*
I don’t remember the first story she told me with her fortune-telling deck, or which set of three cards she drew it from. But after that first time, “playing with the story cards” became an occasional feature of our time together. There was no way to predict when the urge would come over her, though it came over her only when we were alone. In my memory of those occasions the day outside the windows of the apartment would be gray, cold, and wet; the weather may have played a part in putting her in the mood. Anyone who has spent time in the company of small children knows that a crushing boredom can unlock great powers of invention. My grandmother would be drifting gray and unfocused through an October afternoon, unsettled in the kitchen, wearying of my prattle. And then the cards would come out of their hiding place in the empty can of almond kisses, and she would say: “Do you want me to tell you a story?”
At this point I always faced a dilemma. I liked the way my grandmother told a story, but the characters who emerged from her witch’s deck unsettled and frightened me, and the fates that befell them were dark. From the three cards I turned faceup on the kitchen table my grandmother’s imagination would wind a cryptic path to the narrative she unfolded. The Lilies, the Ring, and the Birds, say, would not necessarily produce a story that had anything to do with either lilies, rings, or birds, and if it did, then it would reveal something terrible about them, some latent capability for malice or liability to perdition.
In my grandmother’s stories wicked children received grim punishments, hard-earned success was forfeited in one instant of weakness, infants were abandoned, wolves prevailed. A clown who liked to scare children woke up one morning and found that his skin had turned paper-white and his mouth had twisted into a permanent grin. A widowed rabbi unraveled his tallis and used the thread and some of his dead wife’s clothes to sew their child a new mother, a soft golem silent as a raincoat. The stories gave me nightmares, but while she was telling them I found myself in the company of the grandmother I loved best: playful, exuberant, childlike, fey. In later years, whenever I recalled my grandmother to a close friend or a therapist, I would say that when she told a story, the actress in her came out. Her storytelling was a performance undertaken with ardor and panache. She did the different voices of animals, children, and men; if a male character disguised himself as a female, my grandmother would put on the funny, fluting voice that men affect in drag. Her foxes were suave, her dogs wheedling, her cows moronic.
If I hesitated before assenting to a story, my grandmother would rescind the offer, and weeks might pass before she offered again. So most of the time I simply nodded, unable to resolve the question of whether the company of the teller was worth the toll in bad dreams.
Almost fifty years later I still remember some of her stories. Bits of them have consciously and unconsciously found their way into my work. The stories I remember tend to be the ones I re-encountered in the plot of a film or in a book of folktales.* A few survived because some incident or sense impression of mine got tangled with or trapped inside the telling.
That happened with a story she told me about an encounter between King Solomon and a djinn. Afterward I remembered her introducing it as “from the Hebrew Bible,” but that turned out to be nonsense. Eventually I did find some Jewish folktales about Solomon matching wits with djinn but nothing like my grandmother’s story. She told me that one day Solomon, the wisest king who ever lived, was captured by a djinn. On pain of death, the djinn demanded that Solomon grant him three wishes. Solomon agreed to try. He set a condition: Granting the wishes must cause no harm to any living person. The djinn therefore wished for an end to war; Solomon reminded him that if there were no war, the swordsmith’s children would starve to death. Solomon helped the djinn to envision the disastrous outcomes of two more apparently benign wishes, and in the end the djinn was obliged to set King Solomon free. Typically the story did not quite have a happy ending, since afterward King Solomon himself could never again bring himself to wish for anything.*
I remember this story because after she was done telling it, my grandmother sent me to fetch something—a magazine, her glasses—in her bedroom. Maybe I was just snooping around. When I walked into the bedroom, I saw a shaft of afternoon sunlight, slanting in through a window, strike the eternal bottle of Chanel No. 5 on my grandmother’s vanity. A djinn kindled in the bottle. It was the very color of the way my grandmother smelled; the color of the warmth of her lap and enfolding arms; the color of her husky voice resounding in her rib cage when she pulled me close. I stared at the flickering fire imprisoned in the bottle. Sometimes I found pleasure, warmth, and comfort in that fragrance, and sometimes when she dragged me onto her lap, her perfume dizzied me and brought on a headache. Sometimes her arms would be iron bands encircling my neck, and the scrape of her laughter sounded embittered and hungry, the laughter of a wolf in a cartoon.
* * *
My five earliest memories of my grandmother:
1 The tattoo on her left forearm. Five digits encoding nothing but the unspoken prohibition on my asking her about them. The jaunty 7 with its continental slash.
2 A song about a horse, sung in French. She bounces me on her knees. Holding my hands in hers, clapping them together. Faster and faster with each line, from a walk to a trot to a gallop. Most of the time when the song ends, she folds me in her arms and kisses me. But sometimes when she gets to the last word of the song, her lap opens like a trapdoor and she tumbles me onto the carpet. While she sings me the horse song, I watch her face, looking for a clue to her intentions.
3 The crimson blur of a Jaguar. A Matchbox, a 3.4 Litre, the same color as her lipstick. She has bought it to console me after taking me to an ophthalmologist who dilated my pupils with drops of belladonna. When I panicked about the loss of vision she kept her cool, but now that I am happy again she gives way to worry. She tells me to put away the toy or I will lose it. If I play with it on the subway, one of the other boys riding on our train will envy it and steal it. The world is a blur to me, but my grandmother sees it clearly. Any of the shadows populating the 1 train might be a covetous boy bent on thievery. So I put the Jaguar in my pocket. I feel the Jaguar cool against my palm, the elegant taper of its lines, the words jaguar and belladonna that she will own forever afterward in my memory.
4 The seams of her stockings. Running true as plumb lines from the hem of her skirt to the backs of her I. Miller pumps as she feeds bones to a soup pot on the stove. Golden bangles stacked for safekeeping beside a floured marble pastry board on a countertop patterned with asterisks and boomerangs. The knob on the dial of her kitchen timer, finned and streamlined like a rocket.
5 The luminous part in her hair. Seen from above as she crouches in front of me, buttoning my pants. A ladies’ room, maybe Bonwit or Henri Bendel, a periphery of foliage and gilt. I am—in English and French—her little prince, her little gentleman, her little professor. Her coat has a fur ruff that smells of Chanel No. 5. I have never seen anything as white as her scalp. My mother would have sent me into the men’s room to do my own urinating and zip my own fly, but I am aware of no insult to my dignity. I understand that with my grandmother a different law obtains. A phrase I have heard comes to mind and along with it a sudden gain in understanding: She will not let me out of her sight.
4 (#ulink_c243ba0f-5a6c-5cbb-b325-c9ffdf74a945)
On December 8, 1941, unemployed, bored, and known as a shark in every pool hall within a hundred miles of the corner of Fourth and Ritner, my grandfather enlisted in the Army Corps of Engineers. Bequeathing his custom Brunswick cue to Uncle Ray—depriving the world, in time, of a tzaddik—he boarded a troop train for Rapides Parish, Louisiana. After six weeks of basic he was sent to a Corps base near Peoria, Illinois, for training in the construction of airfields, bridges, and roads.
His hustler’s instinct was to underplay and advertise nothing, but among the raw recruits of Camp Claiborne and the bohunks and golems of Camp Ellis, he could not conceal the caliber of his game as a soldier and an engineer. He was strong and durable. His frugality with words got interpreted variously but to his advantage as manliness, self-possession, imperviousness. Inevitably word got around that he held an engineering degree from Drexel Tech, spoke fluent German, was all but unbeatable at pool,* and on intimate terms with motors, batteries, and radios. One afternoon when he and his fellow trainees were out butchering a meadow along the Spoon River, some idiot drove a truck through the line that connected their field telephone to the switchboard. My grandfather improvised a new connection using a nearby barbed-wire fence. When it started to rain and the wet fence posts grounded the line, he cut a spare inner tube into foldable bits and sent men down along the fence for two miles to insulate wire from wood.
The next day he was ordered to report to the commanding officer of his cadre. The major was a lean Princetonian, stained and yellowed by years of spanning chasms and draining swamps in malarial climes. His cheeks were all peeling skin and gin blossoms. He filled a briar pipe and took his time about it. Every now and then he sneaked a sidelong look at my grandfather, who stood uncomfortably at ease, wondering what he had done wrong. After the major had set fire to his pipe, he informed my grandfather that he was to be recommended for transfer to the Corps’s officer candidate school at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
The atmosphere of life as an enlisted man was toxic with disdain for officers, and from the first my grandfather had breathed that atmosphere freely, without need of filter or adjustment period.
“Sir,” my grandfather replied after a moment of irresolution. He had nothing against this particular major. It was officers as a class whom he despised. “I’ll swing a hammer until we’ve built a highway from here to Berlin. But, all due respect, I’d rather be a dancing chicken in a box on the Steel Pier than a commissioned officer. No offense, sir.”
“None taken. I understand what you’re saying, and between you and me, your dancing-chicken analogy is very close to the mark.”
“Sir.”
“All the same, are you aware that if you were to make the grade as a first lieutenant, it would add fifty dollars to your monthly soldier’s pay?”
It happened that my great-grandfather’s final enterprise, a lunch counter near Shibe Park, had recently gone under. He was working now at a package store, grappling in a hernia truss with steel kegs of Yuengling. For years my great-grandmother had taken in piecework, sewing ribbon and trim for a milliner. Now she had been obliged to get a job outside the house, boxing cakes and pastries in a bakery where the bakers, two half brothers, burned off their mutual contempt by abusing the counter help. My grandfather knew that his parents would shoulder any work and stomach any companions to pay the upkeep on Ray’s education, in which they lodged their dreams.
“No, sir,” he said, “I was not aware of that.”
Two weeks later—the day before the men of his cadre boarded a train for Dawson Creek, BC, where they pitched in to work on the Alaskan Highway—my grandfather was ordered to report to the Corps OCS at Fort Belvoir. It was a bitter journey.
Far from the frozen north or the war’s early battlefields, three hours from Shunk Street, more bored than ever, my grandfather began to brood. His years in poolrooms and classrooms inclined him to divide men into patsies, idiots, and shams, and there was little evidence at Fort Belvoir to debunk this taxonomy. Everywhere he looked he discovered laziness, incompetence, waste, bluster. In other soldiers’ hearts such discoveries bred cynicism, but in my grandfather’s there arose a more or less permanent state of aggravation.
Given the proximity of Fort Belvoir to Washington, D.C., it was only a matter of time before his exasperation generalized beyond the perimeter fence to encompass the seat of government itself. In spite of Pearl Harbor and the invasion panics it inspired, the capital had yet to lose its complacency toward enemies who were continents and oceans away. Anti-aircraft batteries were spotty. Elderly Curtiss biplanes patrolled sputtering overhead. A handful of Coast Guard tubs policed the rivers and bridges.
Walking the streets one afternoon on a one-day pass, my grandfather nursed his anger and amused himself by planning the conquest of Washington. For verisimilitude he enacted his role of reichsmarschall in his grandfather’s Pressburger German, debating strategy with the added relish its glottals afforded. He ordered that crack commando units be trained to crew U-boats. He landed three hundred men on the Patuxent at the spot where the British had begun their invasion of 1814. His submarine jaegers blew up the Potomac bridges and electrical power stations, seized radio towers, cut telegraph and telephone cables. They entrenched the orderly street grid with grenade craters and razor wire, piled up chicanes across the approaches to the city. Thirty men sufficed to take the Capitol, a dozen to seize the White House. By the evening of the second day of his invasion, my grandfather stood in jackboots and peaked schirmmütze at the elbow of FDR, proffering his pen for the formal surrender.
He returned to Fort Belvoir that evening alarmed by the clarity and elegance of his plan. Before retiring for the night he formulated its essentials in a typed three-page memorandum to his CO, which was afterward mislaid, ignored, or possibly forgiven. In the darkness of the dormitory room he shared with an MIT-educated civil engineer named Orland Buck, he laid out the scheme again.
By pure chance, this Buck happened to be one of the few officer candidates not readily fitted onto my grandfather’s three-part schema of humanity. Orland Buck was a Maine Brahmin whose father and grandfather both had died fighting to build heroic bridges, in Argentina and the Philippines. A history of raising hell in genteel institutions and the weight of his patrimony inclined Buck to the arts of demolition, and he zeroed in on that element of my grandfather’s plan.
“One bridge would do,” he decided. “Make it the Francis Scott Key and you would get their attention, all right.”
Weeks passed without any acknowledgment of my grandfather’s memorandum. Orland Buck and my grandfather spent their leave hours ostentatiously casing the Francis Scott Key Bridge with its arches in elegant cavalcade. Buck took documentary pictures of my grandfather taking pictures, unmolested, of the bridge’s piers and abutments. Despite their efforts, no one questioned or even appeared to remark on the young men’s fascination with the bridge, built by the Corps in the twenties, engineered by an associate of Buck’s father.
In demolition training sessions, the Corps daily broadened their expertise, and at night Buck and my grandfather studied official copies of the bridge’s construction plans in the base library.
“It will teach them a lesson,” Buck said, lying on his bunk in the darkness. A radio, tuned low, brought news of Rommel’s capture of Tobruk. “It will serve the bastards right.”
My grandfather wondered how long ago, without his having noticed, his bunkmate had passed from the conditional to the future in talking about their plan. He didn’t believe for a moment that Buck wanted to teach anyone a lesson or had the slightest interest in seeing justice done. Buck was not a sorehead, a perfectionist, or a nurser of grievances. He was in it for fun and only saying what he thought my grandfather wanted to hear.
“Don’t get carried away,” my grandfather told him.
“Who, me?”
In a strongbox at the back of an old Mack truck that stood rusting without engine or wheels under a tarp in the motor pool, Buck and my grandfather had stashed ten bombs of their own manufacture. The bombs’ design was plausibly straightforward and effective: empty wooden ammo boxes stuffed with guncotton, which Buck and my grandfather had spirited away in amounts small enough to go unnoticed during demolitions training. A small amount of primer and Cordtex had been obtained in the same way, just enough for my grandfather to make his point harmlessly. Twisted to the end of each coil of Cordtex was a note typed by my grandfather that read nur zu demonstrationszwecken.*
“I don’t like it when people get carried away,” my grandfather said.
“Oh, no, neither do I,” Buck said shamelessly.
On the night appointed for the exploit they strapped on tool belts, retrieved their store of demonstration bombs from the strongbox, zipped the bombs into four duffel bags, and went AWOL with an ease that bore out my grandfather’s contempt for the way things were done at Fort Belvoir. They hiked through tall weeds and trash pine, across a service road, and into some woods that had been part of the original Belvoir plantation. They stumbled cursing in the dark of the forest until they came to the tracks of the RF&P, where they hopped a freight and rode an empty flatbed into Alexandria.
They jumped off just before the train entered the rail yard, in a neighborhood of low brick houses. From the Potomac Yard came a smell of diesel, an ozone scorch of pantograph sparkings. Those smells and the houses with their puzzled expressions stirred old yearnings and rancors in my grandfather’s heart. He wondered, as in the past and for years to come, if this might be the night on which his life, his true life, began at last.
They found an old Model A pickup parked in an alley. The rear window glass of its cab had been replaced by a sheet of pegboard. My grandfather stove in the pegboard with a jab of his left elbow and wriggled through. He had never hot-wired a car before, but the principle was trivial and the Ford unresisting. It took him under a minute to turn the engine over. He unlocked the door and slid across to the passenger side. Orland Buck got in behind the wheel and pawed it for a second or two.
“You bastard,” Orland Buck said happily. “God damn you.”
“Drive.”
A body slammed against the truck on Buck’s side. Buck’s window was filled with the eyes and red jaw of a dog. A man shouted from a house that backed onto the alley. Orland Buck laughed. He fought against the clutch and the gearshift. They lurched out of the alley under escort from the outraged dog before Buck hit the gas and they left the animal in their dust. The truck was not going to afford them very much in the way of stealth. As they turned onto the Jeff Davis Highway, it sounded like they were dragging a sack full of clocks behind them.
Orland Buck took himself in hand after that. He drove with care in the darkness, meeting the speed limit. They drove past the new airport, past the wasteland where they were putting up the new War Department building, past the cemetery where Buck’s father and grandfather lay under their white crosses. They dragged their load of clock parts across the roadbed of their intended victim and turned left on the District side. Upriver a little way from Georgetown, near the old terminus of the C&O canal, Buck put the truck into neutral and cut the engine. They rolled into the gravel lot of Fletcher’s Boathouse. Before getting out of the truck, they blackened their faces with burnt cork and pulled dark watch caps over their heads. Orland Buck was in heaven. My grandfather was obliged to admit that he was also enjoying himself so far.
“Now, did you ever paddle a canoe?” said Buck, a veteran of many Down East camps.
“I’ve seen it done,” my grandfather said, thinking in particular of a silent version of TheLast of the Mohicans he had taken in at the Lyric in Germantown. “If Bela Lugosi can do it, I can do it.”
The hasp on the boathouse door broke at a tap of his hammer and chisel. My grandfather eased the door open a foot on its rollers and slipped inside. The darkness smelled of old canvas tennies. Buck found the canoe, lucky number 9, in which a War Department typist named Irma Budd once sucked him off. Bowed and loping, they ran it down to the boat ramp. My grandfather loaded in the duffel bags while Buck fetched two paddles. “Ready to have some fun, Lugosi?”
My grandfather dragged the canoe to the bottom of the ramp and climbed into the stern as the hull scraped, then slid free. It was not the type of question he would ever bother to answer.
In canoe number 9, silent as Piscataways, they breasted the Potomac. This was the part of the exploit that would expose them most to public view, and they had decided it would be better to get across and hug the Virginia bank, in those days still half wilderness. Adventure silenced Orland Buck. It brought out in him the sobersided Yankee, two wiry hands on a wooden shaft. For most of the crossing my grandfather was as useless as a Hungarian actor, though he did not give way to distress or embarrassment. By design they had chosen a moonless night, but the weather was clear, and over my grandfather’s head the circuitry of heaven was printed in bright joints of solder. By the time Buck brought them around for the short downstream run to the Key Bridge, my grandfather was handling his own paddle with aplomb. He was as happy as he had ever been.
The bridge seemed to hold itself in tension, straining at its tethers as Orland Buck and my grandfather slid beneath its haunch. It thrummed with the passage of a car overhead. My grandfather shipped his paddle and crouched, rocking the canoe a little as Buck eased them to the foot of the abutment that buried its massive burden in the soil of Virginia. Buck reached out to steady the boat. My grandfather zipped open one of the duffel bags and took out the first bomb and a roll of adhesive tape they had boosted from the infirmary. Given time and actual malicious intent, they would have holed the concrete with a pick or borer to sink the bombs, to give the blasts some muscle. Concrete was a bastard, and my grandfather estimated that to bring the Key Bridge down in earnest might take a thousand pounds of guncotton. He taped the first bomb to the bridge’s great concrete hoof. The strips of sticky tape as he unrolled them resounded in the arch like thunder cracks.
“Next,” he said.
Orland Buck stroked at the water and they went farther in under the bridge. The water slapped against the canoe and against the abutment.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge has five arches, three that take giant steps across the water, one at either end to anchor the bridge to land. Orland Buck and my grandfather took turns taping three bombs to each of the four central piers, six bombs per man. When they had finished, it was nearly four in the morning. My grandfather looked up at the belly of the bridge. He admired the way the gap between the top of each arch and the flat bridge deck was taken up by a series of daughter arches, each inverted U obliged to descend farther from the deck than the last as the mother arch curved down and away. The whole space hummed as the wind passed through it. Beyond the vault of steel and concrete the vernal animals and heroes wheeled in the greater vault of the sky. Arch upon arch upon arch bearing up, craving the weight, crushed by the force that held it together. He looked down at Orland Buck in the stern of the stolen canoe. Buck was holding a time pencil and a 150-foot coil of Cordtex my grandfather had never seen and knew nothing about.
“You probably want to grab a paddle and put some distance between here and this boat,” said Orland Buck.
My grandfather nodded. On some level he had suspected Buck was planning something of this nature. He sat down and deftly turned the canoe upstream. Buck paid out the coated cord with one hand, taking care not to dislodge the detonator pencil. When they had gone about a hundred and forty feet along the bank on the District side, my grandfather swung the paddle up out of water and ensured that it made solid contact with the side of Orland Buck’s head. Buck fell onto his face. My grandfather twisted the time pencil free of the Cordtex and tossed it into the river. He sat Buck up, made sure that his friend was unconscious and not dead, and laid him out in the stern of the canoe. Then he paddled back to Fletcher’s. When they got there, Buck was still out cold. My grandfather returned the canoe to the shed by himself, leaving three dollars to pay for the broken hasp. He shoved the empty duffel bags into a trash bin and loaded Buck into the cab of the stolen truck.
When they were crossing the Key Bridge, Orland Buck made a noise, and opened his eyes. He looked out the window and saw where they were. He experimented with his fingers at the site of his injury and groaned again. He shook his head. “Christ,” he said with bitter respect.
“You got carried away,” said my grandfather.
The next afternoon, when my grandfather returned to quarters after Maps and Surveying, there was an MP stationed on either side of his door. My grandfather braced himself to flee and then accepted his fate as it bore down on him. His cheeks, ears, and inner organs burned at the thought that his mother would now be obliged to let those two bakers shit on her head for the rest of her life.
The snowdrops in their spotless helmets held still as he approached them. They stared death, hatred, and tedium at him, and my grandfather stared those things back.
“Looking for me?” he said, stopping in front of the door, equidistant to each of their throats.
“No, son,” said a voice from inside the room where he and Orland Buck had foolishly conspired to land themselves, my grandfather presumed, in Leavenworth. It was a rich man’s voice, lilting and soft but accustomed to being listened to. “I’m the one that’s looking for you.”
A big man, past middle age, sprang up from the chair when my grandfather walked in. Broad at the shoulder like my grandfather, a bruiser gone old and fat. He wore a gray Glen plaid suit gridded with red, a red and silver silk tie, and wonderful black bucks. Though he looked like an English lawyer, my grandfather could smell the army on him. The man took the measure of my grandfather coldly and openly, top to bottom. What he saw appeared to confirm report or rumor. His eyes were extraordinary. Remembering them to me, my grandfather groped to define their color, comparing them first to sea ice, then to a lit stove ring.
“I am sure it will come as no surprise to you, soldier,” the man said in his Park Avenue drawl, “to learn that you are in trouble.”
“No, sir.”
“No, indeed. How could it? You went looking for trouble, and you found it. Consistent behavior produces predictable results.”
“Sir, I wasn’t looking for trouble, I—”
“Don’t bother to deny it. One glance at you and I know the whole story. You’ve been looking for trouble all your life.”
“Sir—”
“Am I wrong, soldier?”
“No, sir.”
“You stole equipment and materiel from the U.S Army. Went AWOL. Hot-wired a truck. Purloined a canoe. Planted live explosives on federal property.”
“That part was not the plan,” my grandfather said. “The live charge.”
“No? Then how did it happen?”
It was clear that Buck had already confessed to everything, but my grandfather had not given up the whiskered girl in the train yard, and he was unwilling to give up his friend, even if his friend had turned out to be a rat.
“It was a breakdown in leadership,” my grandfather confessed.
The eyes went abruptly from ice to fire. My grandfather had the disconcerting sensation of being loved by the beefy old man.
“Orlie Buck’s father served in the Fighting Sixty-ninth as my aide-de-camp,” the old man said. “He was always looking for trouble, too, and he knew that if ever he called out to me, I would hasten to his side and endeavor to get him out of whatever fix he was in, one way or another. I believe that is why, when those two snowdrops out there showed up to arrest him, Orlie reached out to his old uncle Bill.”
A seine of anecdotes, genealogies, and dark allusions let out by Orland Buck over the past few months cinched together all at once in my grandfather’s mind and caught a darting hope.
“Colonel Donovan, can you get me out of trouble, too?” my grandfather said.
“Well, my boy,” Wild Bill Donovan said, “you know, the truth is I probably could. But as we’ve already established, that’s not what you really want, now, is it?”
5 (#ulink_4e74eb62-fa3c-5f08-a529-295f3fc38177)
Following his arraignment on charges of assaulting the president of Feathercombs, my grandfather spent a week in jail. The bail was steep, and he had no collateral apart from a twenty-five-dollar reflecting telescope and a 1949 Crosley sedan.
Over that week he telephoned my grandmother twice. In the first call he misinformed her as to his whereabouts and said nothing at all about his arrest. The lawyer, Shulman, sent someone to pick up the Crosley from the garage on East Fifty-seventh and drive it back to New Jersey. The driver was instructed to tell my grandmother only that her husband planned to go by train on an urgent sales trip upstate.
On the fourth day of his stretch in the House of Detention, my grandfather phoned again. He provided my grandmother with memories not previously shared from a trip the previous August: a view from a motel window overlooking the rancid Susquehanna. An Italian restaurant that had served spaghetti in a green sauce called pesto. A long afternoon making sales calls in the heat. He had hated the job from the day he was hired, but now that he had lost it—demolished it—there was a retrospective charm in the tedium of those days spent barnstorming upstate beauty counters. Tears came to his eyes as he leaned against the outgoing-only pay phone in his gray jailhouse twills, eulogizing the wife of a pharmacist in Elmira who at first had taken only a case of Feathercombs but increased her order to three after he held up his demo mirror.
He never considered telling my grandmother the truth. She was already teetering; he was afraid the truth would push her over the edge. That was how he explained his subterfuge to himself, and to me thirty-two years later. It was not, in my view, a complete explanation. My grandfather never would have lied to exonerate himself, make himself look good, or evade responsibility. Unlike my grandmother, he did not seem to find pleasure or release in telling lies. But while he was a family man and loved us all in his wordless way, he was also, to the core, a solitary. If there was suffering to be endured, he preferred to withstand it alone. If he made a mess, he would clean it up himself. Unlike his wife, he was uncomfortable with make-believe, but his fetish for self-reliance made him secretive. So though it was true that psychiatrists, who got paid to know such things, had instructed him over the years to keep upsetting news away from my grandmother, it was also true that this advice suited his furtive nature. She was always threatening rain; he had been born with an umbrella in his hand.
The truth is that if he hadn’t been so worried about his wife’s mental state, my grandfather might have welcomed a couple of days in jail. Repentance is the most solitary of pursuits, and there could be no better place for penitence than shelved on a steel bunk in the Tombs. But scenarios of imminent breakdown and disaster at home began to obsess him. Though he hated asking for help more than anything else, in particular from people who loved him or would do it free of charge, my grandfather saw no alternative but to tell Shulman to try to track down his kid brother.
Uncle Ray had been ordained as a rabbi at the age of twenty-three, a wonder boy of learning. But sometime in the early 1950s my great-uncle had begun to reverse himself on questions of chance and divine intention. He had resigned his pulpit in northwest Baltimore and now made a good living hustling pool and poker up and down the Delmarva peninsula. To raise my grandfather’s bail, Ray required a week’s time, a supply of willing victims, and a surprise win by Hopeless Hope in the fifth at Hialeah.
My grandfather walked out of the Tombs with enough money for a shave, a bus, a Zagnut bar for my mother, and coffee and a donut for himself when he reached the Paterson bus terminal. Through Shulman, coached to represent himself to my grandmother as “a lawyer involved with your husband’s business,” my grandfather had arranged for his wife to meet his bus at ten-thirty.
At eleven-fifteen there was still no sign of her. He used his last dime to call the house.
“I’m here,” he said.
“Here? Where is here?”
“In Paterson. At the bus.”
“Paterson,” she repeated. She might have heard rumors, her tone suggested, of there being such a place. She found her adopted homeland overburdened by places with preposterous names.
“Didn’t Shulman tell you?”
“Shulman? Who is this Shulman?”
“The lawyer. Shulman.”
“Shulman is the lawyer. Yes, I see.” You would have assumed she was jotting the words down for subsequent study: Paterson. Shulman. Lawyer. “And now tell me, please, who are you?”
Only much later did my grandfather learn there had been a story in the Daily News. But he understood now that in spite of his efforts, word had spread.
“Look,” he said. “I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry.”
“Are you? And why is that?”
“Darling, I know. I did a terrible thing, I’ll sort it out. I swear. I could not be more sorry. I know how worried you must have been.”
“Oh, but not in the least!” Because of her French accent, there was always a showiness to my grandmother’s sarcasm. “Every time I’m starting to worry, then I think of you jumping out of the airplane, bringing emergency hair combs to the dishevel-ded ladies of Binghamtown, New York.”
He winced, recognizing in this distorted version the lameness of the cover story he had concocted with Shulman. To sell it—as she clearly understood—he had been counting on the marginality of Binghamton to his immigrant wife’s disorderly mental maps. But as usual she had seen through him and his stratagems. Like many of the spouses of “the lucky ones,” my grandfather had observed that what got labeled luck was really stubbornness married to a knack for observation, a fluid sense of the truth, a sharp ear for lies, and a deeply suspicious nature. They’d had the same type of luck in South Philadelphia, but there you could do more with it than merely survive.
“Honey,” he pleaded. “I just spent a week in jail. I’m filthy, I’m half dead, I’m in a bus station in Paterson. Please. Come get me.”
“You have eaten something?”
“I had a donut. How is she?”
“She is at school.”
He had not asked for my mother’s whereabouts. They could be inferred from the time of day and the day of the week. But he let it pass. His question had been as pointless as any other.
“And this donut you ate,” she said. “How big it was?”
“How big? It was a donut. It was donut-size. Darling—”
“But it filled up your stomach?”
“Sure.”
“Good,” she said just before she hung up on him. “Then you will have energy for the long walk home.”
He pleaded with a soldier bound for Trenton on leave and wasted the dime on another call home. My grandmother had taken the phone off the hook. For the soldier’s benefit he pretended, while listening to the busy signal, to hold a brief conversation with his wife in which he was forgiven and redeemed. He coughed to cover the clatter as the phone returned the dime, which paid for the bus to Ho-Ho-Kus. It dropped him on Sheridan Avenue.
He walked surrounded, for a long time, by tracts of new construction. Dirt lawns, planted saplings, houses like boxcars in snaking lines. When he drove past these new housing tracts at forty-five miles per hour on his way to work every day, they had appeared harmless, contained. On foot he could not seem to get past them. Houses oozed without limit in every direction. Cornfields, orchards, stands of oak and hickory that had seemed untouchable by time or steel had all been dragged under. My grandfather felt a stirring of unease that grew stronger the nearer to home he came. He worried that, in his absence, the ooze would have spread to overtop their white house on its little green hill.
He shook off the thought. He was irritated with himself for thinking it. But as he threaded his way among the housing developments, the image returned to plague him: his house, his wife and daughter, driven beneath the ooze. At last he turned off the county road onto a road paved with gravel and found himself safely among apple trees and shoots of corn. The panic subsided. But he could not seem to reassure himself that his family would not be drowned.
* * *
The way I heard the story was that sometime after the fall of France my grandmother, unwed, not yet eighteen, and pregnant with my mother, had been taken in by Carmelite nuns in the countryside outside of Lille, where her family were prominent Jewish dealers in horses and hides. On learning that she was pregnant, and with the bastard of a Catholic—unappeased by knowing that the father was a handsome young doctor—her family had disowned her. It was the family of the handsome young doctor who had arranged things with the nuns. Shortly after my mother’s birth, my grandmother’s family was deported to Auschwitz, where they perished. After the handsome young doctor had treated the injuries of some local members of the Resistance, the SS had shot him.
All her life my grandmother’s family looked askance at her interest in drama, poetry, handicraft. The nuns, by contrast, were sympathetic, aesthetic. They supported themselves by making and selling fragrant wreaths of laurel and dried flowers. They tended orchards and beehives and a meadow dotted with sheep. When I was eight or nine my mother had explained the concept of survivor’s guilt to me, and told me that in her mother’s case this was one of its sources: She had never been happier than with the sisters of the Lille Carmel.
My grandparents’ farmhouse, on eleven acres outside Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, had neither nuns nor sheep. But there was a meadow and an apple orchard, and my grandfather had spent their first winter building hives and honeycomb frames according to plans in a book from the public library. He had taken out a lease on the property in anticipation of my grandmother’s discharge from her first hospitalization, from late 1952 to late 1954. He had hoped the place might carry her back to the remembered sweetness of the Carmel.
The apples had proved stony. The special-order French bees were prey to wanderlust and ennui. But from her first sight of the farmhouse, with its gingerbread, tangle of roses, and fresh coat of whitewash, my grandmother had conceded to my grandfather’s logic. She emerged from that first time at Greystone in a fragile and quiet state, holding herself like an egg balanced on a spoon, but for the next twenty-eight months they lived on the farm in relative contentment. No angel inspired her to bare the prophecies of her body to fellow passengers on buses or trolley cars. She abandoned the bouts of prolonged fasting that rendered her skin translucent to an inner light equivalent in her mind to the Christ of her guardian nuns. She found work, taking leads in three productions at the prestigious Paper Mill Playhouse and being cast in a small role in a Broadway revival of Ah! Wilderness that closed out of town. Until the spring of 1957 the Skinless Horse had kept its gibes and railleries to itself.
Sometime during the week preceding my grandfather’s rampage at Feathercombs, Inc., her cruel familiar returned to take up residence in a grand hickory tree in the house’s front yard. The precise moment of its reappearance, like the reason thereof, remained unclear to my grandfather. In hindsight he recalled my grandmother once or twice having held herself very still, eyes closed, as if fighting down a bout of nausea. He remembered a shudder that she repressed, a smile that hung too long from the hooks of her face. For all my grandfather knew, the Skinless Horse might have been hanging around for months before it decided to occupy the tree fort my grandfather had built in the hickory tree as a thirteenth birthday present for my mother.
The day he got out of jail the first thing he saw, coming down the hill from the main road, was the tree. It was a sixty-footer, planted well before the turn of the century by the house’s original occupants, a fellowship of free-love Christians. At the height of summer it would spread its leaves across the sky like a child’s drawing of a tree, a perfect circle of crayon green. Hidden among its branches, the tree fort was my mother’s galleon and keep. Now at the base of the tree there was a burnt blotch from which four jagged streaks extended upward. It looked like the print of a giant paw.
The eyeholes of the tree fort stared down at my grandfather as he circled around to the kitchen at the back of the farmhouse. They never used the front door. My grandfather hauled himself up the last three steps of his long walk home onto the back porch. The boards under his wing tips were new last summer. The previous porch was rotten and colonized by insects, and my grandfather had demolished it with a ferocity that approximated hope. Working alone or with my mother passing him nails from a bucket or bracing a plank with her bottom, he had cut, framed, and whitewashed the lumber of the new one, carpentering its Gothic lace under the guidance of another library book. The new porch felt sound and solid under the weight of him. Like the rest of the house, it was not and would never be his property, but in those years his ambition was not to own a piece of the world. Just to keep that piece from falling down or burning up around him would suffice.
The spring afternoon had turned cool, but the back door was open. My grandfather smelled onions, bay leaf, simmering wine. He heard the “Trout” quintet bubbling on the record player in the living room. The kitchen windows streamed with vapor. Behind them darted the shape of my grandmother. She was an excellent cook, never more calm or present than with her hand on the rosewood grip of a razor-sharp Sabatier. In the early fifties, before her first hospitalization, she had been a frequent guest on WAAM’s Home Cooking, giving lessons in French cooking to Baltimore housewives (those with televisions, at any rate)and briefly the host of her own program, La Cuisine,which aired two mornings a week. *
“Look who’s here,” my grandfather said, coming into the heat of the kitchen.
She looked up from her bowl and whisk. She reached around to untie her apron. She had set her hair and put on her pearls. The pearls lay against the ruddy expanse between her throat and the cleft revealed by the scoop neck of her black sweater. The pearls seemed to radiate the absorbed heat of her skin. My grandparents forgave each other with the pragmatism of lovers in a plummeting airplane. There would be ample time for reproach in the event of their survival.
“We have an hour before the school bus,” my grandmother said.
My grandfather took off his shoes, his suit and tie, his curdled white shirt, his socks and garters. My grandmother helped him out of his undershorts. She led him naked up to the bathroom so he could wash away the Tombs.
Hot water was a pleasure, but he did not linger under the shower. When he came into the bedroom, my grandmother had unfurled her naked body on the bed, propped on an elbow. Knowing that he liked the look of it, she had retained the string of pearls.
A photograph of my grandmother posed in a bikini, taken in Florida when she was in her mid-forties, shows a zaftig dame with impressive cleavage and dimpled knees. By then she had undergone the first-generation hormone replacement therapy (HRT) that softened her body and pacified her mind.* When she took my grandfather into her arms on the afternoon of his release from the House of Detention, her abdomen was rounded and firm under the watered silk of her stretch marks. Her waist remained narrow, her wrists and ankles thin. He took one ankle and used it to drag her across the bed. He pinned her upraised legs against him and entered her with his feet planted on the floor. The pearls shone against her skin in the failing daylight.
* * *
As he was getting up from the toilet one morning in March 1990, in the master bathroom of his condominium at the Fontana Village retirement community in Coconut Creek, Florida, my grandfather heard something snap. He woke up bloody on the bathroom floor with a fat lip and a leg fracture. Later the broken bone would prove to be the result of a bone metastasis; it turned out that for the past six months, without telling anyone, he had been declining to undergo treatment for a carcinoid tumor in his gut. But at first all we knew was that he had fallen, and that someone would have to look after him as he recovered from a broken leg.
My mother, a public interest litigator, was in the midst of bringing a class-action suit against a pharmaceutical company whose popular second-generation HRT drug appeared to be giving thousands of women ovarian cancer and killing them before they turned sixty. My younger brother, embarked on a career as an actor in L.A., had just booked a TV pilot, a proposed reboot of the ’70s show Space: 1999. I was about to start a reading tour for the paperback edition of my first novel and was in the midst of an attempt, which turned out to be futile, to salvage something more than the material for a few short stories from the staved-in hull of my first marriage.
There was also the shadowy Lady Friend. Pooling information, we discovered that my grandfather had said little to any of us about her. Her name was Sally. She was an artist. She was a recent widow. None of us had a phone number or even knew her last name.
Sally called my mother on the day after my grandfather’s accident and got right to the point: Though she and my grandfather had been dating only since September and were still getting to know each other, she was willing to help. But she had spent three brutal years nursing her late husband through his illness, decline, and recent death, and frankly, she was not sure she had the strength. My mother thanked Sally and said she understood. She had the sense that Sally already knew my grandfather well enough to imagine that he might not take to being nursed.
So my mother flew to Florida to fetch the man who had been her father since she was not yet five years old. She hoped that by bringing him to Oakland she would be able to arrange for his care and whatever therapy he needed and still be able to do her job. She booked him a first-class seat—over his strenuous objections—for the long trip west, so that he would be more comfortable. She arranged for his mail to be forwarded, and packed a suitcase with his clothes and papers. It was a big suitcase, with plenty of room for personal items, but my grandfather chose to bring only five:
1 Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel by Willy Ley (3rd edition, Viking, 1957), a history of rocket flight up to 1956, combined with a detailed if ultimately mistaken prognostication of a manned mission to the Moon. I knew the book and its author were longtime favorites of my grandfather, but I had never seen this particular copy. It lacked a dust jacket and bore clear evidence—tape stains, a tear on the pastedown where a pocket for the date card had been, new york state dept. of corrections rubber-stamped along the top edge—of its provenance. When I flipped through its pages, I noticed that throughout the book, someone—presumably my grandfather—had used a black marker to blot out certain words. I held up the defaced pages to the bedside lamp. Every blot covered an occurrence of one man’s name: Wernher von Braun.*
2 A Zippo, known as “Aughenbaugh’s lighter,” which he had carried in his right pants pocket for as long as I could remember. He had quit smoking before I was born, but I’d seen him use Aughenbaugh’s lighter many times to light charcoal grills, chimney logs, campfires. On a smooth oval, set into a nickel finish otherwise pebbled to hide scratches, you could make out traces of an engraved representation of an organic molecule, a linked pair of hexagons whose vertices were Cs, Hs, and Os. Over the years I had asked him a few times what molecule was represented, but the answer I received (“Maltose”), or the reason for the answer (“Because it makes donuts taste good”) struck me as so nonsensical and seemed to explain so little—my grandfather didn’t even like donuts—that I finally concluded he was putting me on. As for the Zippo’s eponym, my grandfather would only say that Aughenbaugh had been an Army buddy.
3 A black-and-white photograph of my mother, taken in August 1958. In the photo she was sitting bareback on a lean gray horse. She wore a beach towel around her hips and a one-piece swimsuit that she filled out more thoroughly than might be advisable for a girl not yet sixteen. She and the horse were angled away from the photographer, looking to his left. My mother held an archery bow with an arrow nocked to the drawn bowstring, ready to let fly at a target out of the frame. I had never seen the photo before it showed up among my grandfather’s belongings. Neither he nor my mother would say much about it except that it had been taken at a hotel in Virginia Beach during the period of her life when she was remanded to the custody of Uncle Ray. My mother’s hair was unkempt, and the look in her eyes, taking aim, struck me as murderous.
4 A model “moon garden,” constructed from the lid of a to-go coffee cup, pieces salvaged from commercial model airplane and tank kits, a dozen small capacitors and four links of a metal wristwatch band, glued together and spray-painted Tamiya “Light Ghost Grey.” It belonged to LAV One, my grandfather’s scale-model lunar outpost, which he had spent the years since my grandmother’s death building and reconfiguring. With its tunnels, pods, aerials, dishes, and domes, the LAV One model on its craggy scale-model lunar surface covered most of the dining room table in his condo back in Florida. “He only wanted the Moon garden,” my mother told me. “I had to kind of tweeze it out from the rest of it.”
5 A publicity photograph, in a Lucite box frame, of the last crew of the space shuttle Challenger. In this photograph astronauts Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, and Ronald McNair sat at a table with their helmets in front of them like fishbowls from which they planned to draw lucky numbers. Behind them stood Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, and Judith Resnik, cradling their helmets in their hands. The crew’s flight suits, like the shiny cloth that covered the table, were a variation on the blue of the Florida sky in which they would soon be lost. Their seven smiles mocked them, at least to my eye. At one end of the blue table, like a human skull in a still life, stood a scale model of Challenger strapped to its fuel tank and booster rockets. In the photograph, the model shuttle looked like a child’s toy, albeit a splendid one. It was hard to see the fine detail that my grandfather had put into this particular commission, how the cargo bay doors opened to reveal the remote manipulator arm, how the engine nozzles could be made to pivot. You could pull open the nose of the fuselage and look into the crew cabin, rendered in faithful detail down to the buttons and switches of the instrument panels and the “Sally Ride curtain” over the toilet.
Even if his scale model had not been selected by NASA for inclusion in the official mission portrait, my grandfather likely would have planned to attend the launch on January 28, 1986. He was a habitué of Cape Canaveral who drove up for almost every shuttle firing, as if trying to make up for his boycott—painful to him to have to maintain, I knew—of every Apollo mission. But that Tuesday corresponded to the eleventh yahrzeit of my grandmother’s death. At 11:39 a.m., when an O-ring failed and the shuttle began to break apart, my grandfather was at her grave in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. He didn’t learn of the disaster until he got back to his motor lodge in Center City and turned on the television.
He sat without moving, without blinking or breathing, as a flower of fire bloomed on a stem of vapor. In that and subsequent replays he watched fragments of the disintegrated spacecraft snake across the sky, wandering, doubling back, as if blindly searching for one another in the blue.
As soon as I heard the news—I was then in graduate school at UC Irvine—I tracked him down through my mother. I had expected that when I reached him, my grandfather might sound low, even mournful, but I ought to have known better.
“Too goddamn cold!” he said. “Thirty-six degrees at launch. Idiot bureaucrats.”
“Why didn’t they scrub it?”
“Because they’re pencil pushers. Judy knew better than to launch in weather like that.”
The astronaut Judith Resnik was a particular favorite of my grandfather’s. She was a brilliant engineer who had, on a prior mission, become the first Jewess in space. Her tangle of wild black curls had enacted medusa feats in zero gravity.
“Poor Judy,” my grandfather said. I could hear the voice of a television reporter in the background, shouting to be heard over the wind gusting along a stretch of Florida beach.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be with you,” I said. “How was it?”
“How was the cemetery?”
“Dumb question.”
“It was very festive.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Frankly? The grave looked untidy. I was shocked.”
The wind whipped up along the beach on the motel TV.
“Grandpa? You there?”
“Yeah.”
“You okay?”
“No.”
“I know you miss her. I wish she were still here.”
“I’m glad she isn’t. If she saw what a mess her grave is, she’d be furious and she’d blame me. Because I insisted on that cemetery.”
“Oh.”
“Everyone else is already buried there, it was already paid for a long time ago.”
I knew my grandfather didn’t mean that he was glad my grandmother had died. I knew how much he missed her. I didn’t know, because he had not yet told me, that inside the crew cabin of his Challenger model, one of the webbed panels enclosing the sleep niches could be lifted on a hinge to reveal two miniature human figures. They had been the original occupants of LAV One’s moon garden before my grandfather enlarged the scope of that structure’s function. A man and a woman, five eighths of an inch tall, lay together in a sleep niche, naked in each other’s arms.* The male figure spread his body like a shield across the female; the female figure’s long hair was painted a vivid shade of auburn.
My grandfather never revealed the intention behind this “Easter egg”—not to me, at least. It may have been a gag or, never one to let an empty grave or a $3.99 model kit go to waste, my grandfather may simply have been economizing. When I look at the Challenger mission photograph now, I don’t see the seven smilers, pretty Judy Resnick, or even, really, the model itself. I see the hidden lovers, fates entangled like their bodies, waiting for release from the gravity that held them down all their lives.
* * *
She touched his leg, and he woke up. The world around him was his bedroom and not a jail cell. My grandmother was taking her skirt and sweater from the valet on which she had neatly hung them. “Ten minutes,” she said.
My grandfather put on a blue work shirt and a pair of chinos and went downstairs to find his mud-caked work boots. My grandmother had resumed work on her interrupted coq au vin. She stood at the stove with her head inclined over a wooden spoon that brimmed with steam. He came up behind her and touched his lips to her nape. She shivered. He felt that she expected him to say something. They had spoken very little so far, and he was not sure what he meant to say or what she needed to hear. He wrestled fiercely against the urge to say nothing at all. In his powerlessness to undo what had already been done or avert what lay ahead, he resorted to the usual inanity.
“We’ll be fine,” he told her. “It’ll all be fine.”
She did not contradict him, did not assent. She took a sip from the spoon. She made a sound that committed her to nothing. “Go,” she said. “She is expecting to see you.”
My grandfather waited at the top of the drive to meet the school bus, ready with the Zagnut bar. The sky was promisingly blue. To occupy himself, my grandfather constructed an almanac of nights lost to the House of Detention. The moon would be at three quarters and waning. Tonight, after he had eaten his wife’s good coq au vin and dried and put away the dishes, he and my mother would rejoin Oliver Twist in his interminable sufferings. My grandfather would lie beside his daughter and then his wife, in turn, until their breathing gathered into sleep. Then he would go to the top of the hill behind the house, with his telescope and a thermos of tea, and lose himself for an hour or two in contemplation of the Sea of Serenity; Algol and Deneb; Eridanus, the river of stars.
“It will all be fine,” he said aloud.
When the bus pulled up, he watched my mother, fourteen and lanky, slouch her way along the aisle, down the steps. When her feet touched ground, she burst into a run. He pressed his nose against her hair and breathed in her school smell, a smell like the flavor of a postage stamp. Against her better judgment, he persuaded my mother to devour the entire candy bar before they got to the bottom of the drive, where the hickory tree fingered the sky, awaiting my grandmother’s next attempt on its life.
The candy bar spoiled my mother’s appetite for dinner, but in the interest of peace, not wanting to betray my grandfather, she forced herself to clean her plate.
6 (#ulink_be1ded4f-8b42-53d5-b8f1-2ce4fad54e44)
My grandfather saw my grandmother for the first time in February 1947, at Ahavas Sholom synagogue.* She had been posed beside a potted palm, in a fox stole and sunglasses, under a banner that read try your luck! The fur was on loan from the president of the Sisterhood. The dark glasses had been provided free of charge by the president’s husband, an ophthalmologist, to treat a case of photophobia brought on by chronic malnutrition. I assume that the text painted on the bedsheet banner, part of the decor for Congregation Ahavas Sholom’s inaugural “Night in Monte Carlo,” was coincidence. The pose, however, had been calculated with utmost strategy.
Without consulting her, the sisterhood had decided that even though she was a widow encumbered with a four-year-old daughter, my grandmother, transferred safely to Baltimore from a DP camp in Austria, was the leading candidate for the position of wife to the new rabbi. Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society canteens and then the kitchens of Park Circle and Forest Park had conspired to ensure that my grandmother regained her shape, her color, and what the president always referred to as “that gorgeous head of hair.” My grandmother was courteous, conversant with literature and art. She had ambitions and the talent, it was said, to be an actress on the stage. Her feline face and French accent, at times impenetrable, led more than one admirer to compare her to Simone Simon. In spite of suffering and loss, she laughed often, smiled easily. She strode into rooms with actressy shoulders and the humble swagger of a girl who had come of age among hardworking nuns.
A few times, it was true, she had come out with utterances that made no sense whatsoever, in French or English. It was also true that when she was not smiling, she fell into taut silences, seemed to listen for footsteps on the other side of doors, studied shadows in the corners of rooms. When taken to a Baltimore public library for the first time, it was reported, she had made straight for the recordings of Highland reels. The first two peculiarities were put down to her being a relative newcomer to English and a girl who had endured and survived the unspeakable. (Nobody could account for the love of bagpipes.) If one sometimes sensed a weird crackle around her, a scorching like dust on a solenoid, it was believed by the Sisterhood—and seconded by many of their husbands—that this mysteriously added to her allure.
The new rabbi, freshly graduated first in his class from the Jewish Theological Seminary, had charmed everyone with his brilliance and élan, his tailored suits and his faint delicious odor, unexpected in a rabbi, of gardenias. But he displayed a troubling streak of self-will. All his life he had been the pride of his family and the joy of his teachers. As a result he had learned to prefer his own ideas to those of other people, even with regard to subjects, such as the woman he ought to marry, about which he could be expected to know very little. Overt matchmaking attempts, each to a thoroughly eligible candidate, had not turned out well. The Sisterhood caucused and agreed to authorize the use of wiles.
To ensure that the target of the operation could not fail to notice her when he put in his scheduled appearance at “Night in Monte Carlo,” the Sisterhood had posed my grandmother beside the rented palm tree just by the main door of the synagogue’s reception room. Two Sisterhood members were deployed here to pin my grandmother down. Mrs. Waxman, married to a judge, had been the chief sponsor of my grandmother’s petition for refugee status. Mrs. Zellner, among the first Jewish graduates of Bryn Mawr, spoke excellent French. Playing on my grandmother’s sense of obligation and her hunger to speak her mother tongue, the women were prepared to hold her on the spot for however long it took the rabbi to arrive, at which point they would merely put my grandmother in his way, so that afterward—a key to the strategy—he could operate under the impression that he had discovered his future bride for himself.
The rabbi was late. The reception room filled with congregants who knew nothing of the Sisterhood’s maneuverings and were eager for the evening to begin. The chair of the fund-raising committee stepped to the dais. He had prepared a welcome, studded with mildly off-color puns about spades and craps, but when the microphone gave him a mild electric shock, he was obliged to break off his speech. The Sisterhood president shoved her husband toward the dais, where the hired musicians, Jews dressed as fanciful Cubans, loitered with their instruments. The ophthalmologist crouched down beside the chairman of the fund-raising committee. He took the man’s pulse and helped him unbutton his collar. Other male congregants offered assistance in the form of impromptu puns on the words shock, current, spark,what a revolting development this was, and so forth.
The fifteen-year-old sound technician struggled to locate and swap in a new mike, a task in which he was hampered by his mother’s constant reminders that he ought to hurry. A scrum kicked up around the table of dairy appetizers, awakening old antipathies and reinforcing new ones. Meanwhile the thong of small talk and college French that the Sisterhood tiger hunters were using to lash their goat to its stake stretched ever thinner. A second microphone was found and tested. The board president was certified fit to conclude his speech.
“Please,” he enjoined all those who had come to try their luck that night, “lose as much and as often as you possibly can.”
The lights were lowered. The dance band generated a supper-club ambiance. Over the cha-cha-cha, the chatter, and the rattle of dice and roulette balls, my grandmother’s handlers found it impossible to maintain their grip on her. She took a package of Herbert Tareytons from her borrowed beaded clutch.
“I find it is very warm in this room,” she said, still unsuspecting her status as prey but conscious of the strain on the conversational tether. “Excuse me, please. Maybe I will have a look at the beautiful moon.”
All at once the moon of Mrs. Zellner’s face was suffused with delight. In her relief she may have tipped her hand slightly.
“Mais voilà le rabbin!” she cried.
* * *
All day my grandfather had busied himself finding reasons not to accompany Uncle Ray to “Night in Monte Carlo.” He was not ready to mix with “regular people.” He was uncomfortable making small talk with strangers. He lacked the funds and the appropriate attire. He had no use for synagogues. He would just get in his brother’s way. Each of these reasons, with the aplomb of a born dialectician, Uncle Ray discounted, dismissed, disarmed, or batted to one side. He appreciated the challenge a return to civilian life must represent, he said, but in the end you just had to hold your breath and jump into the pool. Nobody, apart from traveling salesmen and the people who accosted you in bus terminals, was comfortable making small talk with strangers. He would happily stake my grandfather for the evening, to be repaid by the winnings or at a later date. He owned a very nice blazer, Harris tweed, that was much too big in the shoulders for him. A synagogue, when you came right down to it, was only a building; great Jews from Abraham to Hillel had never laid eyes on one. And everyone, by design and almost by definition, was in a rabbi’s way.
When the time came to leave for the synagogue, the only card my grandfather still held was to make himself disagreeable. Pick a fight and hope to be uninvited.
The problem with this approach was Uncle Ray’s satisfaction with himself and his opinions. Whatever position you adopted, Uncle Ray alighted on higher ground. Attacks on his person or character could have no basis in fact; the kid just laughed them off. My grandfather hit him with surliness, scorn, wet-blanket inertia. Uncle Ray floated effortlessly above it all. But in the parking lot of Ahavas Sholom, as they were about to get out of his brother’s brand-new Mercury coupe—Ray already had his door open—my grandfather, in his desperation to give offense, stumbled at last on a viable approach.
In the winter of 1947, no one—least of all Uncle Ray—was conscious of the creeping unbelief that afterward began to trouble my great-uncle and ultimately led him to exchange his pulpit for the pool halls and racetracks of Baltimore, Wilmington, and Havre de Grace. My grandfather seemed to have picked up on some early vibration of the crisis to come. From childhood he had suspected Uncle Ray of faking “the whole ‘boy tzaddik’ thing,” to gain the attention and approval first of their parents, then of the greater Jewish world. A sibling’s ESP guided my grandfather’s hand as it reached for the quiver, let fly the shaft.
“You don’t see the irony?” he said. “‘Night in Monte Carlo’? You don’t see how disingenuous that is? The whole joint’s already a fucking casino, Ray. A sideshow tent. Remember, upstairs from Pat’s Steak, that crew came in and opened a betting office? Those grifters from Buffalo who fleeced Frank Osterberg? That’s you. You’re running a wire store. Taking bets on races you’re never going to have to pay off because you already know the result. The marks come in, you take their money. Promise them what, forgiveness, eternity, a line item in God’s account book? Then you just sit back and wait for the blow-off. Give them a few last words of mumbo-jumbo, plant their chump bodies in the ground.”
It was a long speech for my grandfather, who felt his argument take on more weight and conviction as it carried him along. Uncle Ray eased shut the driver’s-side door with an angry punctilio. He twisted around in his seat to face my grandfather. His elbow mashed the Mercury’s horn. His freckles vanished into the overall redness of his face. “How dare you?” he promisingly began.
With that opening horn blast and an encouraging flicker of guilt in his eyes, Uncle Ray mounted to the saddle of his high horse. He cited the humble piety of their long-suffering parents and grandparents, the good deeds and intentions of his congregants, the faithfulness and martyrdom of Jews the world over, the integrity of the rabbinate, the accomplishments of five thousand years. From there he moved on to Maimonides, Hank Greenberg, Moses, Adonai. Evidently pleased with the effect it made, he pounded the horn a couple more times for emphasis. At one point he grew so heated that his saliva flecked the lapel of the Harris tweed jacket my grandfather had borrowed. But then, having instanced the Lord God of Hosts, Uncle Ray paused. He narrowed his eyes. My grandfather, he realized, had offered no resistance or counterarguments. He just sat there with spiderlike patience, letting Uncle Ray rage.
“You almost had me.” Uncle Ray grew calm, his tone measured. “You are coming in there with me,” he said, “and you are going to be glad that you did. And do you know how I know you’re coming in there with me?”
“How?”
“Because that is the Holy One’s plan for you.”
“Oh, really, God has a plan for me? About goddamn time.”
Home a month, my grandfather was out of work, depressed, and scuffling. His college degree had been gathering dust for six years. His experience in Europe qualified him for nothing that was legal in peacetime. His Philadelphia homecoming had seemed to disappoint all participants, in particular his parents, whose keenest disappointment lay in discovering that, despite the captain’s bars and the decorations for actions he could not discuss, they were still disappointed in him.
“Everything that has happened to you in your life before now,” Uncle Ray said, “was part of the plan. And tonight it’s all going to come together and make sense.”
“You know this.”
“I do.”
“God slips you the inside dope.”
Uncle Ray ran his hand along the tuck-and-roll upholstery under his thigh, his smooth chin adorned with the minute smirk of a man with a fix in.
“Christ, you are so full of it, Ray!”
“Yeah? So let’s make a bet,” Uncle Ray said. Only moments after his pious outburst, along the very lines my grandfather had employed to needle him, my great-uncle pointed unwittingly toward the exit door through which he and the custom Brunswick pool stick would afterward pass. “Five hundred dollars says you walk into that shul, in the first half hour—no, in the first ten minutes—the Holy One’s plan for you will be revealed. The reason you needed to show up tonight.”
“What horseshit,” my grandfather said. “Brother, you are on.”
His discharge pay had been snarled in red tape, and he didn’t have anything close to five hundred dollars, but he figured you had to like his odds.
* * *
My grandmother turned toward the doors of the reception room, curious to see the new-crowned princeling of Jewish Baltimore. She caught a glimpse of a slender young man in a navy blazer with buttons like gold coins. Under a velvet yarmulke, also navy blue, he wore his ginger hair half an inch too long. Entering the room, he was mobbed by a group of men (among them Judge Waxman) who teased and fussed over him like uncles ushering a virgin nephew into a brothel. The rabbi was soon lost from view. Mrs. Waxman coughed up a Yiddish imprecation or description of what lay in store for her husband when they got home.
“I don’t know,” my grandmother heard the rabbi say. He was making a show of reluctance, letting the men pull him by the wrists into the room. “Gentlemen, I have my doubts.”
As he was swept, redolent of gardenia, past my grandmother, she heard him apologizing for his tardiness. “It wasn’t my fault,” he said. “Blame my date.”
“The brother,” Mrs. Zellner said. She sounded doubtful of the identification, as if the visible facts did not conform with what she had been told. “A decorated war hero.”
My grandmother saw my grandfather lingering in the hallway outside the reception room, looking as if he harbored doubts far graver than his brother’s. He kept his hands straightjacketed so fiercely in his pockets that they had begun to pull open the fly of his trousers. His knit necktie was ill-knotted, and his brown tweed blazer, worn over a chambray shirt that needed ironing, was too tight at the shoulders. Everything—the music, the lights, the rattle of wheels and dice, the outbursts of joy or disgust from the tables, his clothes, his skin—seemed to fit the man too tightly. Only his eyes had found a way to escape. They leaped to my grandmother from the hollows of his face as though from the windows of a burning house.
“He could stand a little more decoration,” said Mrs. Waxman.
* * *
For all the resistance he had put up to attending that evening’s event, my grandfather had given no thought to what it would be like when he got there. It was worse than he could have imagined. “Night in Monte Carlo”! A sequined half-moon, swags of ten-watt stars, paper carnations and potted palms, all carted in to cloak machinery that had been rigged to grind everyone down to zero sooner or later: To my grandfather, postwar, it seemed a ham-fisted synopsis of the world as he had come to understand it.
He sidled a little way into the room, hands stuffed into the pockets of his workman’s pants, feeling fit for nothing. He lowered his head to avert his eyes from the gaudiness and blare, the unseemliness of his unscathed homeland and countrymen, the unseemliness of Baltimore and its thirty thousand well-fed Jews.
The girl in the black dress walked right up to him. He had not spoken to a desirable woman who was not at some level his enemy or a whore since 1944.
“I was not ready for her,” he told me. “I was totally unprepared.”
She was wearing sunglasses indoors, at night. Around her shoulders the remains of what had been a fox sank its teeth into itself. She came confidently but hedging a little, head cocked to one side, as if only eighty-five percent certain they had met before and prepared to acknowledge her mistake. Between the fox stole and the bateau neck of the cocktail dress (on loan from the board president’s daughter) blazed an inch of bare white collarbone.
My grandfather heard Mrs. Waxman and Mrs. Zellner disconsolately calling after my grandmother as she bridged the final twenty feet of linoleum mock-parquetry that separated him from her. He registered the tick-tock oscillation of her hips, the amplitude of the curves divulged by the cut of the taffeta dress. During the war he had come to depend on his pool hustler’s gift for taking rapid readings of other people’s eyes, and her sunglasses unnerved him. They struck him as unlikely. He wondered if she was in costume, starring later in a skit or pageant on the theme of “Night in Monte Carlo.” He surprised himself by smiling, which unnerved him further. The girl’s lips were painted red as Bicycle hearts and diamonds, and they parted to reveal an Ingrid Bergman smile to go with the sunglasses.* My grandfather heard a sound inside his head that he compared, years later, to the freight-train rumble of an earthquake. He felt he was standing in the path of something fast-moving and gigantic that, in its blindness, was bound to carry him away. Swept off his feet, he thought. This is that. At the last moment he managed to return his gaze to his shoe tops and shook his head.
“Unbelievable,” he said, aware that he was still smiling, and that he owed his brother five hundred bucks.
* * *
Where the carport roof overhung the patio my mother had set out a birdfeeder, a Lucite tube with an aluminum peg for a perch, packed with birdseed, dangling on a chain. My grandfather liked to keep an eye on the traffic through his window. He took particular interest in a squirrel he called “the momzer,” which came every day to raid the feeder. The momzer lacked grace, finesse, the power of flight. Once it had scattered the sparrows, it would approach the business end of the birdfeeder with a fierceness and a purpose whose futility amused my grandfather. The momzer was subject to gravity and the physics of a pendulum in ways a bird could not understand. It would begin with bold resolve, clambering down the chain from the overhang, hurling itself from a nearby trellis. But within seconds it would find itself clinging by its forepaws to the metal peg, or to the bottom of the tube, its tail madly switching, while the birdfeeder bucked and gyrated and worked to shake the momzer loose. As though he had yet to exorcise the demon that, decades ago, had urged him to drop a kitten out of a third-story window, my grandfather burst into laughter every time the squirrel fell, with a meaty thud, onto the flagstones of the patio. Sometimes he laughed so hard that I would have to take a Kleenex and wipe tears from his eyes.
“All those ladies in the Sisterhood, putting out their birdseed to catch a little chickadee,” my grandfather said. “But they caught a momzer instead.”
* * *
According to my grandfather, my grandmother’s first words to her future husband were: “Your head would look good on a fence.”
She had approached him with an unlit cigarette scissored between her index and middle fingers, one eyebrow, just visible over the rim of her sunglasses, arched in entreaty. My grandfather got the immediate sense, from the dumbshow and from something else—a lack of gaucherie in her girlishness—that she might be a foreigner. He lit her cigarette with Aughenbaugh’s lighter.
“Come again?” my grandfather said, the lighter’s flame stopped just short of the tip of his own cigarette. He replayed the remark in his mind. He decided he had heard her correctly, that she had indeed told him his head would look good on a fence. “How so?”
My grandfather had seen human heads discarded or reposed in unusual places, though never, it was true, on a fence. Nevertheless, he felt this was a conversational gambit he would not have thought to attempt. Because he could not see my grandmother’s eyes, he could not come to any solid conclusions about the spirit in which her observation had been offered. Only much later did he realize that in her weird way she had dispatched, with one stroke, the problem of making small talk with strangers.
“Oh, dear, I made a fault,” she said. “I see you take offense.”
“It’s my natural expression,” my grandfather said. “You’d look like this, too, if somebody stuck your head on a fence.”
“Wall.” The word burst forth from her, followed by a startling heehaw of laughter. She clapped a hand over her mouth. “I am so sorry. I mean to say wall, not fence.”
“That changes everything,” my grandfather said. His approach to the art of flirtation with women was founded on an impeccable poker face.
“Wait,” she said, trying to hold back another of her braying laughs. “Have you ever seen a, how do you say, catheedral?”
With three sweeps of her white arms, she drew the walls, towers, and spires of a cathedral. She sketched with an efficiency of gesture that came as close as anything he remembered having seen to what poets and sportswriters liked to call grace. As her hands soared and dived, the coal of her cigarette shed glowing threads of tobacco. The orange sparks were reflected in the lenses of her cheaters. She finished by miming a rose window, encircling her fingers over her chest, a zone to which my grandfather’s attention had already been drawn. Brassieres of the era were architectural affairs; in her bust, with its loft and scale and defiance of gravity, there was something cathedral-like that moved him. Then he saw that in gun-colored ink on the inside of her left arm, she bore the recent history, in five digits, of her life, her family, and the world. He read its brief account and felt ashamed.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve seen some cathedrals.”
“On the walls,” she said. “The ancient walls.” She pronounced it hancient. “You see faces in the stone. That is the kind of the face you have.”
“Got it,” he said. “I look like a gargoyle.”
“Yes! No! Not a . . .” and she came out with the French word for gargoyle, which my grandfather after forty-two years could no longer retrieve. “Those are to catch the rain, and they are animals, monsters, they are ugly. That is not the kind of the face you have.”
That was at least partly a lie. To one of her psychiatrists, she later confessed that she did think he was ugly, albeit in a way she found appealing, even arousing. When she first saw him, standing at the threshold of the reception room, contemplating departure before he had even arrived, she thought he had an American face, an American body. Buick shoulders, bulldozer jaw. Only if you considered his eyes would you be forced to conclude, and she did conclude, that he was beautiful.
“I am the one who look like the gargoyle,” she said.
“Hardly.”
“Yes,” she said. “On the inside.”
He let that one pass without comment, taking it for prattle, compliment-fishing; his first misjudgment, his first encounter with the voice of the Skinless Horse, speaking through her.
“Can I ask you to do something?” he said. “Would you by any chance be willing to take off those glasses?”
She stood very still, red lips pressed together. He wondered if he had made some kind of gaffe, if asking a Frenchwoman to remove her sunglasses violated a well-known Gallic taboo.
“The eye doctor said I am not supposed to,” she said. Her voice faltered. “But I will.” This came out barely louder than a whisper.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Never mind. You can just tell me what color your eyes are. That’s all I really wanted to know.”
“No,” she said. “I will take them off for you. But also you have to do something for me. Let me to do something, I mean to say.”
“Yeah? And what’s that?”
I don’t know how many people could have seen my grandparents, standing there in the hallway outside the doors of the reception room, whether anyone was paying any attention. But even if they had been standing in an empty room, I imagine that neither my grandfather nor the mores of 1947 can have expected my grandmother to do what she did next. Looking back at that night from inside the soft gray nimbus of Dilaudid, my grandfather could only close his eyes, the way he closed them that night, as she reached out to the fly of his trousers and, tooth by tooth, zipped him up.
“C’est fait,” she said.
When he opened his eyes, he found himself lost for the first time in hers. They were the color of twilight in Monte Carlo, when the stars come out to twinkle like ten-watt bulbs, and the quarter-moon fans her hem of sequins against the sky.
“Blue,” my grandfather said, falling back against the pillow of the rented hospital bed in my mother’s guest room. After that it was a long time, hours, before he opened his eyes again.
7 (#ulink_636f546a-49f0-5a20-bd2e-e6cb71e0a3a7)
Just before midnight of September 29, 1989, my grandfather completed the model of LAV One. It represented the latest thinking on lunar settlement design (the reason it had needed so many revisions), fourteen years’ work, and about twenty-two thousand individual polystyrene pieces cannibalized from commercial model kits.* At the center of the model, amid the half-buried tunnels, bays, domes, huts, landing strips, and radar arrays, there was a hole about four inches in diameter. Looking down into this hole, you could see through to the plywood substructure of the model’s molded lunar surface. If you asked my grandfather the purpose of the hole, he would always give you some variation on You’ll just have to wait and find out; to be honest, there was not a lot of variation. After a while—no doubt according to his plan—I stopped asking.
He went to his workbench and took down a gaudy Romeo y Julieta cigar box. He removed a bundle of tissue paper from the box and unwrapped a circular structure fashioned from a take-out coffee-cup lid. He had initially completed the moon garden in May 1975, pillaging tiny n- and British OO-scale model train kits to fill it with flowering shrubs, rosebushes, and vegetables grown in hydroponic racks. With a careful thumbnail he lifted the lid’s sipping flap, which he had reconfigured as an access hatch. He peered in to check on the family who had replaced the original lovers as occupants of the moon garden. On a sling bench and two sling chairs of his own design, enjoying moist and oxygenated air, sat figures representing my grandfather and grandmother, my mother, and my brother and me. The figures were posed stiffly (even for polystyrene people), as if for a formal photograph. Everyone safe and sound.
My grandfather lowered the flap. He carried the moon garden to the model of LAV One and fitted it into the hole that awaited it. He was not aware of any great sense of accomplishment. It was a job he had left undone for too long, a promise too long unkept, and what he felt most was relief.
Six months later he would be dead.
The next morning, well before dawn, my grandfather went out into the dense Florida darkness to load the trunk of his Buick LeSabre for a trip to Cape Canaveral. There had been no launches since the Challenger disaster nearly four years earlier. Now another shuttle, Discovery,was scheduled to lift off that morning at ten. He had filled a bait cooler with a freezer pack, a bottle of Michelob, a plastic food container of cut-up pineapple, and two meat salad sandwiches. Meat salad was a specialty of my grandfather’s. You passed a piece of leftover roast through a meat grinder with some dill pickles, a couple tablespoons of mayonnaise, salt and pepper. Like many of my grandfather’s specialties, meat salad tasted better than it looked or sounded, served on a nice challah roll. He put the cooler into the trunk with a pair of binoculars, a secondhand Leica with a brand-new telephoto lens, the latest issue of Commentary, a transistor radio, a gallon of tap water, and a reclining folding chair, complete with a footrest and a sun umbrella you could attach to the chair’s frame. He had made the sun umbrella himself, surgically replacing the handle of a rain umbrella with a C-clamp.
Like any habitation of the elderly, Fontana Village was rich in insomniacs and early birds, but for the moment my grandfather had the morning to himself. Before closing the trunk of his car, he leaned against the rear bumper and listened to the silence. It was not perfect. It was never perfect. But he had come to appreciate how small or distant sounds could intensify it, the way a drop of blue paint intensified whiteness. The tick-tick of an insect or possibly a frog. A big rig downshifting out on I-95. Mist effervescing in the beams of the security lighting. Underlying everything, the low-pitched tinnitus that was the sound of Fontana Village itself, a compound hum of air conditioners, vending machines, circuit breakers, swimming-pool filtration systems, poorly insulated wire. A woman’s voice, far away, calling out, “Ramon!”
My grandfather straightened up. He angled his head, his ear a dish attuned to the cosmic background radiation. He shuffled the short deck of Ramons he had encountered in his life. None of them lived in Fontana Village. There were some Cubans living at Fontana Village, and they sometimes had first names like Adolfo and Raquel, but they were Jews like everybody else, Goldmans and Levys come to the promised land of South Florida along a different branch of the river of exile. He did not know any of the Cuban Jews well. One of them might well be Ramon. Ramon Lifschitz. Ramon Weinblatt. From time to time some poor bastard with dementia went walkabout, and you would see his wife or the home care nurse running after him, shouting his name.
“Ramon! Hee-er, kittykittykitty.”
The voice seemed to be coming from the direction of the Jungle, as the residents of Fontana Village called the wasteland that bordered the retirement village to the north and east. In the Jungle, nuisance plants and Bermuda grass gone feral had been at war with native stranglers since the late seventies, contending for ownership over five hundred acres that was briefly a golf course and country club. Somewhere in that tangle a devourer of pets, widely believed to be an alligator, plied its leisurely trade.
“Ramo-ohn!”
On the second syllable the woman’s voice broke like a bar mitzvah boy’s. There had been amusement in her frustration before, but that was gone now.
My grandfather looked at his watch, which he wore with the face on the inside of his wrist. It was already past five-thirty, and the trip north would take about three and a half hours, four if he stopped for gas and a toilet break. The return to service of the shuttle fleet had attracted considerable interest in the media, and traffic might be heavy. He really could not afford delay.
“God damn you, lady,” my grandfather said.
He opened the well that held his tire-repair kit and took out the socket wrench without thinking about it or knowing why. He slammed shut the lid of the trunk. It thudded like a kettledrum in the humid air.
He crossed the parking lot, nervously gripping and renewing his grip on the shaft of the tire wrench, to a walkway lit at intervals. If you went right, the walkway led past the swimming pool that served this end of the complex. To the left, it wandered around the back of the cluster that included his own two-bedroom unit to a service area with a charging station for the carts that village residents used to get around. Past the service area, you came to a fairly wide strip of lawn backed by a running wooden rail about a foot high. After that, things became primeval.
My grandfather’s leather sandals, imitation Birkenstocks of Israeli manufacture, slapped against the pavement. It was an angry sound. He was annoyed with Ramon, whom he pictured lean and cross-eyed, skulking into the Jungle to meet his death, just for a taste of rat or nutria. He was annoyed with Ramon’s owner for coming out to look for Ramon when it was still pitch-dark and there was, at any rate, nothing to be done. There was nothing to be done, and yet off he went to try and do it; my grandfather was annoyed, most of all, with himself. The louder his sandals slapped against the pavement, the angrier he became. He found himself hoping that when he reached the edge of the Jungle, he really did encounter the alligator so that he could beat it to death with the socket wrench. That was the purpose, he now understood, for which he had taken the tool out of his trunk.
He crossed the northernmost of the lawns serviced by the groundskeepers of Fontana Village. The soles of his sandals kicked up pinpricks of dew that stung his shins. He was wearing khaki shorts, one of seven identical pairs he had purchased at Kmart, to go with the seven polo shirts and seven pairs of white tube socks, which he always wore with sandals, that constituted his daily uniform after my grandmother died. If it was somebody’s birthday or some function he could not avoid, he would put on a Hawaiian shirt, decorated with bare-breasted hula girls, that I had given him as a joke. The shirt had scandalized some of his fellow villagers, but my grandfather had no regard for anyone who could be scandalized by a shirt.
Out here past the service area, it was too dark to see. My grandfather took out Aughenbaugh’s Zippo and struck a light. Tiny beads of moisture in the air trapped the light before it could travel very far. Light enveloped his hand like a ball of St. Elmo’s fire.
“Hello?” said the woman. “Who’s that?”
“Your neighbor,” my grandfather said.
The lighter grew hot against his skin and he snapped it shut. Retinal fire swam across the darkness. Then his eyes adjusted, and he found that he could see. Dawn was an abrupt business in Florida; in another ten minutes or so it would be morning.
“Mrs. Winocur claims to have seen it. She calls it Alastair,” said the woman. My grandfather heard her introduce herself as Sally Seashell; later the last name turned out to be Sichel. “But do you think it’s really out there?”
“Something’s there,” my grandfather said, never one to give false comfort. He thought Phyllis Winocur was full of shit, but he doubted that the cats and lapdogs of Fontana Village were vanishing voluntarily into the swamp in a bid for freedom, banding together out there like four-legged Seminoles. “How’d he get out?”
“My fault,” she said, “I was dumb. I took pity on him. Back home he used to range so freely. He and I haven’t been here long.”
“Where’s home?”
“Philly.”
It crossed my grandfather’s mind to observe that Philly could be tough on cats, too, but then he would have to explain. It had been a long time since he had attempted to explain himself to a woman. It felt like an insurmountable task.
“What part?” he said.
“Bryn Mawr.”
“Bryn Mawr ain’t Philly.”
“Aha,” she said. “Yes, I can hear it in your voice.”
As it grew lighter, my grandfather came to see that Sally Sichel was a good-looking woman, tall, slender, but full-breasted. Dark complexion, long nose with a bump, a touch of Katharine Hepburn in the cheekbones. Maybe a couple of years younger than he was, maybe not. She wore a pair of men’s pajamas, the kind that buttoned up the front, and duck boots coated in rubber the color of a New York taxi. She had not troubled to lace them up very well.
“Does he usually come when you call him?”
“Always.”
“How long has he been gone?”
“All night.”
“Hmm.”
“I probably shouldn’t say this,” Sally Sichel said. “We just met. But that piece-of-shit cat is more or less my only reason for living.”
My grandfather fought against an overwhelming impulse to say something along the lines of In that case, maybe you ought not to have let him out of your house to be eaten by a half-ton reptile or For Christ’s sake, lady, it’s just a motherfucking cat. He revised downward the favorable impression he had begun to form of her, an impression shot through with a surprising vein of lust; it had been a very long time. Anyway, you had to have reservations about somebody who walked around with her shoes untied.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “He was only a cat.”
“Not at all.”
“It’s just, I lost my husband very recently. And Ramon was really his cat.”
“I see.”
“They were very close.”
“I understand,” my grandfather said. “I lost my wife.”
“Recently?”
“Fourteen years.”
“Oh. Well, I’m sorry.”
Sally Sichel started to cry. Standing there in her pajamas, arms crossed under her commendable breasts. Looking out at the Jungle that had taken her husband’s cat, the architecture of her cheeks glazed with tears. Her nose began to run. My grandfather took a chamois, which he used to wipe his camera lenses, out of the back pocket of his shorts and passed it to her.
“Oh,” she said, blowing her nose into the chamois. He remembered—as much in his loins as in his head or heart—the circus girl who had spread her legs for him in the cottage at Greenwich Yard, Creasey’s bloody chamois clutched in her hand. “What a gentleman. Thank you.”
He knew that it would also be gentlemanly to put a consolatory arm around Sally Sichel’s shoulder. Not just gentlemanly; it would be humane. But he was afraid of what might happen down the line. A widow and a widower, easing each other’s passage from grief to passion in the autumn of their lives: The very triteness of it seemed to ensure its likelihood.
From the time he’d moved to Florida in the mid-Seventies, the available women of Fontana Village had been giving my grandfather their best shot. While he turned out the beautiful and high-priced scale models that NASA and private collectors had commissioned, and explored the labyrinth of LAV One as it grew in intricacy and size on the dining room table, the available women of Fontana Village came to make their case. They sent scouts and embassies, plates of cookies and brownies and blondies, pots of soup, potato latkes at Hanukkah, cards, knit goods, pies, poems, oil paintings, cuts of meat, bottles of wine, and a dish of macaroni and cheese. I happened to be visiting when the macaroni and cheese showed up, and I thought it made a pretty strong case for its author, who had followed a recipe adapted from Horn & Hardart’s.
As he’d been licking his fork, awash in memories of the Broad Street Automat, I’d thought my grandfather had looked more contented than I’d seen him in a long time. When the dish was empty, however, he had washed it out and dried it, dropped in a thank-you note scrawled on a scrap of legal paper, and left it on the woman’s back patio at a moment when he knew she would be out. On a few occasions he had been cornered by some available and exceptionally persistent woman of Fontana Village, and just to get a little peace he had accepted her dinner invitation. More intimate invitations, some tempting, some issued with a frankness he could not help but admire, he had declined.
It was not that he wanted to be celibate. He got ideas. He missed the contact, the skin-on-skin warmth of it. The property manager of Fontana Village, Karen Radwin, had a way of touching your arm or your shoulder when she spoke to you, sometimes he would feel a jolt of current. And yet apart from one night in Cocoa Beach, Florida, in April 1975, my grandfather had kept his hands to himself since my grandmother’s death.
You could say this or you could say that about the why or why not of it, but in the end it came down to this: He didn’t feel like talking. He didn’t feel like explaining himself. My grandmother used to complain sometimes about his silences, but only when there were other people around, when people started in with the banter and the repartee and the opinions on Agnew or Sondheim, as if she were embarrassed for his sake because his silence might be taken for disapproval or thickheadedness. Don’t worry about him, she would say, that’s how he is—every time we start an argument I end up with a monologue. Or Some husbands take lovers, mine he take the Fifth. Then she might put a hand on his knee and insist, reassuring herself maybe as much as whomever they were with at the time, But he is listening. After they had been married fifteen years—around the time I came into the picture—there was nothing he could tell her that she didn’t already know. That was all he wanted: to be known.
He did not put his arm around Sally Sichel. He kept it where it belonged, by his side. Just to make sure, he transferred the socket wrench over to that hand as ballast.
Sally Sichel went to the low rail, put her hands to her mouth, and screamed, “RAMOOOOOOOON!” A yellow bird hiding in the brush nearby startled and took wing. She held the ragged note of the O. Lights came on in the units that overlooked the Jungle; calls were placed to the security office. My grandfather had not heard a woman scream that way—holler might be a more accurate characterization—for a very long time. Sally Sichel hollered for Ramon in precisely the way that a peeved older sister would holler from a stoop on Shunk Street when sent out to call her jackass brother home for supper. After the echo died away, Sally Sichel lowered her hands, stepped back from the wooden rail, and turned to my grandfather. She looked a little sheepish, but not very. With the coming of daylight, he could see the marks of care on her face, the shadows under her eyes, a tautness around her mouth as if she had bitten in to something mealy. A fine-looking woman, all the same.
She folded the chamois in half, smoothed it against the swell of her hip, folded and smoothed it again. She handed it back to my grandfather, and he returned it to the back pocket of his khaki shorts.
“Fucking alligator,” she said. “He should choke on Ramon.”
For that, Sally Sichel got a checkmark.
“Let me look into it,” he said.
Sally Sichel stepped back and gave my grandfather a careful once-over. The opinion she had formed of him now appeared to be in need of emendation. Doubtless she had noted the baggy shorts, the sandals worn over socks, the coral-pink polo shirt appliquéd, as if out of sensitivity to the fate of Ramon, with a leaping fox (or possibly a wolfhound) in place of the usual crocodile. He looked like the retired director of a Zionist summer camp. Now she considered his hair, silver turning to white, straighter and finer than in younger days but still a good head of it. She noted his suntanned, sinewy arms, his broad chest, the shoulders that over the years had borne up under the weight of pianos and other burdens. For some reason—she had not noticed until now—he was carrying a big iron wrench, his fingers flexing restlessly along its shaft as if he were itching to use it.
“Let you ‘look into it’?” She laughed. It might have been a bitter or even a mocking laugh. Or maybe he had just cracked her up. My grandfather had spent his life saying things in earnest that struck people, women in particular, as funny. “What does that mean?”
My grandfather supposed it was a strange thing to have said. A more honest formulation would have been that he intended to see what could be done in the area of kicking an alligator’s ass. But that also would have been a strange thing to say. At best it would have sounded like swagger, at worst like psychopathy. If he failed to kick the alligator’s ass, it would be an idle boast. That was the problem, finally, with saying things, in particular things that were true. Yesterday his doctor had shown him a couple of numbers on a blood panel that looked “a little off,” and said it might be nothing serious or it might be very bad. He wanted my grandfather to see a specialist. He had written down a name and a number on a card. The card was stashed inside the Commentary, keeping company with an unflattering caricature of Hosni Mubarak.
My grandfather was seventy-three. Over the course of his life, the definition and requirements of manhood had been subject to upheaval and reform. Like the electoral laws of his adopted home state, the end result was a mess. A patchwork of expedients, conflicting principles, innovations nobody understood, holdovers that ought to have been taken off the books years ago. Yet in the midst of modern confusion, fundamental kernels of certainty remained: Representative democracy was still the best way to govern a large group of human beings. And when some lady’s dead husband’s cat got eaten by an alligator, a man looked into the matter. Even an old man who wore socks with his sandals and needed to see a specialist because something was off in the numbers that told the story of his blood. A man would see what there was to be done.
“I could research what the proper procedure is with alligators,” my grandfather said. After all, alligators were dealt with every day in a variety of ways. They could be trapped, snared, hit with tranquilizing darts. They could be shot, butchered, skinned, and turned into steak and boots. “I mean, if you like. I realize it won’t be any help to Ramon.”
Sally Sichel started to laugh, but this time she caught that my grandfather wasn’t joking, and her mouth snapped shut. Her cheeks turned bright red, but it was not out of embarrassment, because she looked him straight in the eye. “Why not?” she said.
There was the whirr of an electric cart. My grandfather looked toward the service area. It was Devaughn, the night guard, coming to find out who had been making all that noise. Devaughn was almost as old as the people he was paid to protect. He had been born and raised in the part of Florida that was really Georgia and Alabama. No one was sure if he was white or black—it could have gone either way—and those residents of Fontana Village who were deputized or inspired to ask found that in his presence, their nerve failed them or the relevance of the question dwindled away. He had been taught as a boy to regard the occasional Jewish salesman who passed through his native swamp as belonging to a race of lesser demons, horned and dealing in wonders. His manner toward the residents of Fontana Village was suitably tinged with wariness.
Devaughn listened to the story of Ramon and the alligator, and it was not long before he started shaking his head. At first my grandfather took Devaughn’s head-shaking for an expression of regret, commiseration, or disgust. But it turned out that Devaughn felt there was schooling that needed to be done.
“That is not no alligator,” he said. “Been telling Ms. Radwin almost two years now. I have seen its bowel movements. I know how a alligator bowel movement supposed to look. And I know how a snake bowel movement supposed to look.”
“A snake,” Sally Sichel said. “A snake that can eat a cat or a dog? Does Florida have snakes like that?”
“It’s probably somebody’s pet boa constrictor that escaped,” my grandfather said. Once when I visited him, we had watched a program on channel 12 (the only channel my grandfather watched) about the problem of invasive animal species in the state of Florida. Boas, mynahs, feral pigs, rare aquarium fish had escaped captivity or been deliberately released into the wild, where generally they had done well for themselves. The program had been an hour long, but my grandfather waited in vain for a discussion of what was to be done about the invasive species that was really the cause of the problem. “If it’s a boa constrictor, it could get big enough to eat a pig or a deer.”
Sally Sichel, my grandfather, and Devaughn looked at the Jungle. The idea of a giant snake that could strangle a pig or a deer and then swallow it whole slid cold and coiling through their hearts. Then Devaughn got into his cart and whirred away, back to the security desk in the Village Center. Let the day man worry about giant snakes and crazed old Jewesses wandering out into the weeds at the crack of dawn, hollering when they were supposed to be sleeping.
“Speaking of eating a pig or a deer,” Sally Sichel said, “I could make you some French toast.”
My grandfather looked at his watch and his heart seized. He had forgotten all about the launch. If he left now, drove fast, and didn’t stop, he would probably, with a little luck, just make it in time. He had been planning for months, since the Return to Flight was first announced, to do this trip up to the Kennedy Space Center. He knew the names and ranks of all five members of Discovery’s crew. He could tell you the fields of their graduate and post-graduate work, their mission histories, their hobbies and foibles, their relationships and personal ties to the lost crew members of Challenger. He had followed the investigation into the cause of that disaster acutely, delving into its minutiae. During the visit of mine that had featured such a fine dish of macaroni and cheese, all my grandfather wanted to talk about was O-rings, ceramic-tile heat shielding, and Dr. Richard Feynman—always referred to by full name and title. In Feynman’s relentless common sense, my grandfather saw rare evidence of hope for the world.
For months he had felt that it was not just the shuttle program that would be at stake when Discovery blasted off. It would be an entire vision of the future, shared by all the fading partisans of space flight, for whom the launch held the promise of collective redemption. Now my grandfather understood that his interest in the loss of Challenger and the fate of Discovery,his obsession with the modifications that had been made to its solid rocket booster, or to Commander Rick Hauck’s vintage Corvette, amounted to nothing grander than Sally Sichel’s feeling that she was living only to care for her late husband’s cat. There was nothing collective about it. It was purely personal, a seal to stop his heart against a leak of sorrow. Seen in that light, the whole business struck him as much less interesting.
“I already ate,” he told Sally Sichel. “I really ought to get on the road.”
“That’s why you were up and about. I wondered. Where are you off to?”
My grandfather checked his watch again. Almost ten to seven. The darkness of his predawn kitchen, the hum of the electric clock on the wall, the faucet dripping as he cranked out a brown dollop of meat salad, felt like a long time ago.
“Nowhere,” he said. “Never mind.”
“French toast? Still no French toast. All right. How about a cup of coffee?”
“I wouldn’t want you to go to any trouble.”
“I promise I won’t,” said Sally Sichel. “Anyway, I get the feeling trouble is your department.”
8 (#ulink_73322f91-a83b-5efd-aa26-ad776533647a)
For a while after my grandfather got out of jail, the Skinless Horse appeared content merely to stalk my grandmother. When her daughter or husband happened to be around—and my grandfather, out of work and facing trial, happened to be around a lot—she drowned its nickering in a flood of chitchat and palaver. When she found herself alone in the house, she had a record of Highland reels and marches that she played very loud, because for unknown reasons the sound of bagpipes kept the creature at bay. At all times, alone or in company, she fought to avert her face from windows that overlooked the hickory tree. When her strength failed, the Skinless Horse would be there, sitting on one of the lower branches, baring its square teeth, stroking its enormous bloodred penis.
* * *
“Was it a horse, though?” I asked my grandfather on the second or third day of my visit home. “Or just a man with a horse’s head?”
“I never saw it,” my grandfather said dryly. “I guess it must have had hands.”
“And a penis.”
He stuck his tongue out at me a couple of times. He stared out his window at a skein of fog wound around the eucalyptus and arborvitae trees. “The penis looked like a raw turkey neck,” he said. “Or so she said.”
To a psychiatrist who treated my grandmother in the late fifties, she once attributed the physical appearance of her tormentor to a picture-book painting of Bottom and Titania that haunted her childhood dreams. Another time she described having witnessed the gelding of a draft horse in the stable of her family’s tannery, and once she speculated about the weird comminglings of men and bleeding hides she had watched come and go across the tannery yard. In the pit of her worst ravings she often claimed to have been raped by a stallion or a man with a stallion’s head. There was a timelessness in these ravings that made it seem as if the childhood violation were ongoing, happening still.
“She cooked up all kinds of theories,” my grandfather said. “She used to read Freud and Jung.” He pronounced it Young. “Adler. All those guys. So she could tell the doctors what she thought they wanted to hear.”
My grandfather often felt frustrated or baffled by my grandmother’s illness, but when it came to the origins of the Skinless Horse he thought he understood. The Skinless Horse was a creature sworn to pursue my grandmother no matter where she went on the face of the globe, whispering to her in the foulest terms of her crimes and the blackness of her soul. There was a voice like that in everyone’s head, he figured; in my grandmother’s case it was just a matter of degree. You could almost see the Skinless Horse as a clever adaptation, a strategy for survival evolved by a proven survivor. If you kept the voice inside your head, the way most people did, there could really be only one way to silence it. He admired the defiance, the refusal to surrender, involuntary but implicit in the act of moving that reproachful whisperer to a shadowy corner of a room, an iron furnace in a cellar, the branches of a grand old tree.
* * *
On the eve of the preliminary hearing of charges in the Feathercombs case, my grandfather took his telescope and a thermos of tea up to the top of the hill behind the farmhouse to have a look at the full moon. In his heart, he said, he knew that the Horse was lurking. He could see the signs. There was the stream of observations, questions, and imponderables that had begun to pour out of his wife, drowning out silences almost before they could begin. Once, nearing home with the car window rolled down, he’d heard a ghostly skirl of bagpipes on the air. Another time he had caught my grandmother turning from the living room windows that looked out on the tree with a violent bloom of color in her cheeks and throat.
He had been outside with his telescope for two hours, in his fur hat and Pendleton jacket, when wood smoke reached his nostrils. At first he registered the smell without attributing or even identifying it. His right eye had full possession of his brain and was busy dazzling it. He had just pointed his telescope at Reiner Gamma, near the southern coast of the Sea of Storms.
Of all the celestial bodies available for viewing to the backyard astronomer, the Moon was the only one you could see in enough detail to imagine living there, ranging those quicksilver mountains in seven-league moon boots. Naturally, my grandfather knew the Moon was inhospitable to life. When it came to astronomy, he might have been a layman, but he had worked throughout the late forties and early fifties as an aerospace engineer, first for the Glenn L. Martin Company, then briefly at a firm of his own, Patapsco Engineering, designing inertial guidance and telemetry systems. The need for a guaranteed paycheck after my grandmother’s first breakdown in 1952 had obliged him to sell his interest in Patapsco.* Since then the recession of 1953, bad luck, and—in my grandfather’s view—the white-shoe, genteel anti-Semitism that pervaded the aerospace industry had forced him gradually down the economic ladder and, at spare moments, ever deeper into the world inside his telescope’s lens. In his imagination, he built my grandmother a city on the Moon and escaped by rocket with her and my mother to settle there and live in peace.
At first it was a domed city to afford a stunning view with every earthrise of all the strife and unhappiness they had left behind. Over the years, as he read and researched, its configuration changed. To account for cosmic rays, he put buildings inside of craters and in tunnels underground. To assure reliable sunlight, he put my grandmother’s moon garden in a bright spot near the North Pole. But two principles, two rules of the game, endured: On the Moon there was no capital to grind the working moonman down. And on the Moon, 230,000 miles from the stench of history, there was no madness or memory of loss. The thing that made space flight difficult was the thing that, to my grandfather, made it beautiful: To reach escape velocity, my grandmother, like any spacefarer, would be obliged to leave almost everything behind her.
A moment after he smelled smoke, he became aware of a flicker at the edge of his field of vision, light leaking in. For a few seconds he ignored it. Then, with a jolt, he connected the orange flicker to the smell of firewood. He looked up from the oculus of the telescope, blinking away the ghost on his retina of Reiner Gamma, a luminous fish.
In the yard beyond the farmhouse, the hickory tree stood rigged in sails of fire. The windows in the face of the tree fort shone with a malign glint.
My grandfather’s first reaction, after disbelief, was annoyance with himself. On his return from jail, in the wake of the first fire, he had gone through the house from cellar to attic, rounding up combustibles and locking them in the toolshed. But he had relaxed his vigil, and his wife would have had ample time to replenish her stock of hair spray, lamp oil, paint thinner. (In fact, it would emerge that she had improvised, showing an ingenuity he could not help but admire, by using a kitchen spoon to fling cotton balls larded in Vaseline, like tiny gouts of Greek fire, directly into the treehouse.)
The second thing my grandfather felt was rage. The persistence of his wife’s madness was an insult, an act of defiance, a repudiation of the past two years of relative peace in their marriage. From the top of his hill my grandfather shouted my grandmother’s name like God summoning a prophet to a mountain of reckoning. Even five hundred feet from the roar of the flames, his voice in his own ears sounded thin and feeble. Its very feebleness increased his anger.
He strode down the hill at a vengeful clip. If he didn’t find her already burned up and dead, then he intended to kill my grandmother. He held off on making the decision as to how the killing would be done until he got his hands on her and discovered which method promised the sweetest deliverance.
By the time he reached the bottom of the hill, the tree was englobed in gases, spewing a long orange jet. It looked, my grandfather said, like a comet on an old map of the heavens. Between him and the tree hung a curtain of heat that turned his cheeks red for days afterward and singed the tips of his hair. His anger dissipated as he contemplated the shimmering curtain, a heart of fire pumping its lifeblood into the sky. There was nothing for him to do but stand there and marvel.
* * *
My mother remembered none of this.
“Just the next morning,” she said. “The tree was this shriveled black stump. Like a burnt wick on a candle.”
She had changed out of her work pantsuit into a turtleneck and jeans. She had more work to do on the class-action suit, but she was taking a break to knit a stocking cap for her father, who often complained that his head felt cold. When she was through, it would have gold and crimson stripes and a green pom-pom. It was not the kind of hat anybody would want to die in, but maybe that was the point.
Every night after work my mother came in and sat with my grandfather while I cooked dinner and got a tray ready for him with some Jell-O and a cup of lemon tea. My grandfather had expressed impatience at the constant presence by his bedside of one of us or the night nurse. He understood we were there because we were afraid he might die when no one was in the room. He had promised us that he would cling to life, in spite of pain and all cancers primary and secondary, until at last, one day, the doorbell would ring, somebody would have gone to the toilet, and we would be forced in spite of our precautions to leave him unattended. Then, and only then, would he permit himself to die.
“Your mother dosed you with Benadryl,” my grandfather told her. “You slept through the whole thing. I think she used to put a pill in some pudding. She was always knocking you out, any time you couldn’t sleep.”
I watched the truth of this surface in my mother’s eyes.
“Wow,” she said. Her recollection of these years was riddled, an empty quadrant of space lit by infrequent stars. “I used to eat a lot of tapioca pudding.”
I could tell she thought this explained why she had lost so much history from that period of her life, but I wanted to point out that amnesia, whether induced by drugs or by trauma, did not explain everything. It did not explain, for example, the constant gaps and erasures that she introduced into her accounts of the things that she did remember. My brother and I had grown up knowing that the destiny of our family was tied in some way to that of Alger Hiss. We knew that our grandfather had gone to prison, our grandmother to a state hospital. We knew that the time our mother had spent in the care of Uncle Ray had left her with a grasp of the intricacies of pari-mutuel betting, a couple of gaudy trick shots at nine-ball, and an abhorrence for racetracks, poolrooms, and their denizens. Those were all things worth knowing, I supposed, but they didn’t add up to much. If her children studied her silence as she had studied their grandfather’s, they could hope to learn only that silence, that old folk remedy, was at best a partial antidote to pain.
“Where was Mamie?” I asked my grandfather. “While the tree was burning down?”
My grandfather looked at my mother and out came his tongue, as if in distaste at my idiotic question. “She was watching it burn,” he said.
* * *
Like most wonders, the fire in the hickory tree was of short duration, and when its meal was through, it winked out like a candle snuffed. The suddenness of its departure, my grandfather said, was a measure of how thoroughly it had consumed the available fuel. One minute it was there, a comet plunged to the earth, dazzling the January darkness, its heat so intense that it stopped my grandfather in his tracks. The next minute it was gone, along with the tree fort, the tree, and the cult of gentle New Jersey ecstatics who had planted it long ago. A few flames crackled here and there along the nubs that once were branches. Then they flickered out, too, leaving smoke, a whistle of steam, and a light snowfall of ashes.
My grandfather found my grandmother sitting barefoot on the porch steps in a thin nightgown, outside the front door that was never used. Her cheeks were gray with ash, her eyelashes and eyebrows singed, her mouth expressionless.
“Never mind,” he said to her and to himself. He sat down beside her on the top step of the porch. The skin of her bare shoulders was cold, but she took no notice of the chill or of the arm that he put around her. After a while he got up and called the fire department. Then he came back and sat with her until the truck showed up, lights and sirens and seven men in boots and helmets with nothing in particular to do.
“Well, somebody went bananas,” one of the firemen said.
As my grandfather recalled the fireman’s diagnosis, so many years later, his eyes filled with tears, as if to drown the fire of his own bitter memory. He closed his eyes against them.
“Dad?” my mother said after my grandfather had been lying still and quiet for a while with his eyes closed. Resting, sleeping, scudding across a soft gray sky of Dilaudid. We watched his chest with practiced eyes for signs of respiration. “Are you tired? Do you feel like eating something?”
“Grandpa,” I said, trying to sound chipper. “Come on, let me make you something.”
He opened his eyes. I saw that the fire of memory had returned, inextinguishable.
“Tapioca pudding for everyone,” he said. “And lots of it.”
9 (#ulink_fb064717-c097-50bf-96d1-919c34e3082f)
I remember my mother telling me, when she was in the midst of settling my grandfather’s estate, that fifty percent of a person’s medical expenses are incurred in the last six months of life. My grandfather’s history of himself was distributed even more disproportionately: Ninety percent of everything he ever told me about his life, I heard during its final ten days. Out of a scant handful of memories that he had shared with me when I was growing up, one of the few I heard more than once was of his first glimpse of my mother. He always put it more or less the same way: “The first time I saw your mother, she was crying her eyes out.”
This hardly qualified as reminiscence, since he never really enlarged upon it or added any detail. It was offered more in the way of an ironic commentary on some fresh instance of my mother’s stoicism, pragmatism, or levelheadedness, of her being a tough cookie, a cool customer.
“They think they can crack her,” I remember him saying during the days she was fighting (with his assistance) to disentangle herself legally and financially from the mess my father had made of our lives, “but she won’t crack.” After a pronouncement of this kind my grandfather would often shake his head and add, savoring the irony, “Hard to believe the first time I saw her, she was crying her little eyes out, poor thing.”
The first time my grandfather saw my mother was a Sunday afternoon in early March 1947, a couple of weeks after “Night in Monte Carlo.” He rode the number 5 streetcar from his brother’s house in Park Circle to Ahavas Sholom, which was about to begin its observation of Purim. Technically, Purim had fallen on a Friday that year, but due to some Sabbath pettifoggery and the city of Baltimore not having been walled during the time of Joshua, it was to be celebrated today.
My grandfather had no interest in the Jewish calendar or Uncle Ray’s explanation thereof, and as for Purim itself, he could take it or leave it. Unlike the other Jewish holidays, it had been fun when he was a kid, and he still gave it credit for that. But somewhere between the Ardennes and the Harz mountains, my grandfather had lost the taste or the capacity for celebrating an enemy’s defeat, and it struck him as cheap and painfully mistaken to draw all the neat parallels that Ray planned to draw in his sermon between the would-be exterminator Haman and the bona-fide exterminator Hitler. Jewish wiles and bad luck (aka “God”) had put a stop to Haman’s plans; Hitler had simply run out of time.
The annual celebrations of God’s mercy, justice, and power, the feasts or fasts undertaken in praise of His Name, the miracles He was supposed to have thrown our way over the centuries—in my grandfather’s mind, it was all nullified by the thing he had not yet learned to call the Holocaust. In Egypt, in Shushan, in the time of Judah Maccabee, God had intervened to deliver us with a mighty hand and outstretched arm; big deal. When we were sent to the ovens, God had sat with His outstretched thumb up His mighty ass and let us burn. In 1947 there was, to my grandfather, one reason to continue calling oneself a Jew, to go on being Jewish before the world: as a way of telling Hitler Fuck you.
He was not on his way to Ahavas Sholom to celebrate Purim, endure his brother’s preaching, or stamp his feet every time Haman’s name was read from the Megillah. He was not even going for the hamantaschen, though naturally, he would not say no.* He was going to the synagogue that afternoon because Uncle Ray had assured him that my grandmother would be there, and my grandfather was hoping to get into my grandmother’s panties. The woman had passed through the fire without being consumed, but she had, my grandfather understood, been damaged. So he had decided that he was going to save her. Getting into her panties was a necessary first step.
From the first that was a part of his attraction to her: not her brokenness but her potential for being mended and, even more, the challenge that mending her would pose. He thought that if he took on the job of loving this broken woman, some measure of sense or purpose might be returned to his life. He thought that in mending her, he might also be mended. Ever since the late winter and spring of 1945 my grandfather had been suffering from a form of spiritual aphasia. No matter how many times he pored over them, he had trouble assigning sense or value to the things he had seen and done during the war. He had been assured many times by experts and authorities that his wartime actions had served a larger purpose and, furthermore, that some new purpose would be found for him in the after-war. Until the night he met my grandmother, he had put no credit in such assurances; now, as he returned to the synagogue on a mission of lust, he was more inclined to believe them. His lust itself felt like a form of belief.
He understood that it was possible to define the word fool as “one who takes on a job without knowing its true extent or difficulty,” but after all, that had been standard procedure in the Army Corps of Engineers. If there was anything like wisdom to be gained in this world, maybe it was to be found in the hopeful, hopeless motto of the Corps: Essayons. So, he didn’t know how big or hard a job he was getting himself into with this woman. At least he knew where to begin: with her hips pressed against him, her legs wrapped around him, her body encompassed by his arms.
* * *
Since “Night in Monte Carlo,” my grandfather had seen my grandmother three times.
The first time was as the result of a kind of reverse ambush engineered by Uncle Ray. Mrs. Waxman, recovering swiftly from the failure of the Sisterhood’s first plot to ensnare the new rabbi, had invited him to a “casual supper” at the Waxmans’ floor-through apartment in the Riviera, on Eutaw Place, to which, secretly, she had also invited my grandmother. Uncle Ray was hip by now to the conspiracy against him, however, and aware that his brother had blundered head over heels into the trap the Sisterhood had laid. Accepting the invitation, Uncle Ray showed up with my grandfather in tow, counting on a display of brotherly solicitude for the decorated vet with the thousand-yard stare to earn him the forgiveness of the Waxmans.
Awkwardnesses followed. A seating arrangement devised for pre-dinner drinks in the intimate drawing room of the vast apartment, where two Joseph Urban armchairs encouragingly faced an exceedingly narrow Hagenbund love seat, was spoiled both visually and tactically by the hasty interpolation of a crewel-work Eastlake side chair from the front parlor. Also, a leaf and a place had to be added to a kitchen table that was just the size, and had been set, for four. Also, the cook was obliged to reapportion fifty exorbitant grams of beluga caviar on the toast points with cream cheese that were the hors d’oeuvre. But the greatest awkwardness that night, undoubtedly, was my grandfather. Positioned alone on one side of the kitchen table, across from his brother and at an angle to my grandmother, he barely spoke, introduced food into his mouth at mechanical intervals, and stared at my grandmother without art or restraint. When she caught him staring, he would even more artlessly look down at the food on his plate with a show of puzzlement, as if he kept forgetting what supper was and how it was supposed to work.
What puzzled him, in fact, was my grandmother. When an engineer encounters his destiny or doom, it always takes the form of a puzzle.
The elegant girl he remembered from “Night in Monte Carlo” had been lively and cosmopolitan but odd and flighty and possibly a bit of a nut. She had, for God’s sake, zipped up his fly in a synagogue! The woman at the Waxmans’ kitchen table was no less beautiful than that girl but otherwise completely different in manner, in style, in energy. No more interested in the young rabbi than he was in her, she had chosen to wear a drab woolen suit-dress of an outmoded military cut. She filled it out nicely but could not enliven it. Her conversation was measured, tentative, careful, even grave. It gave no evidence of nuttiness. It was more polished, couched more in American English than two weeks before.
The absence of playfulness and flirtation in her manner brought out the languid solemnity of her feline face and eyes. The tangles of her hair had been combed and pinned close to her scalp and seemed more russet than auburn, with a sheen like the coat of a chestnut horse. The laugh he remembered as raspy, verging on braying, was a demure chuckle. At “Night in Monte Carlo,” my grandfather had pegged (maybe even a little bit dismissed) her as a fetching but scatterbrained gamine trying to relinquish her dark and painful history into the hands of hairstylists, dentists, and couturiers. A bird of passage, hollow-boned. The woman he met at the Waxmans’ that second evening seemed heavy at her core, subject to some crushing gravity. She was a vessel built to hold the pain of her history, but it had cracked her, and radiant darkness leaked out through the crack. When the conversation touched on the Carmelite convent where she had been hidden during the war, my grandmother’s voice grew husky. It throbbed with sadness. Uncle Ray passed her his handkerchief, and they all watched her dab at her eyes as the kitchen filled with silence and the smell of gardenia.
My grandfather was troubled and fascinated by this alteration from the girl of ten days before. Had the flirtatious gamine in the Ingrid Bergman sunglasses been a pose adopted for the evening, while this shapely vessel leaking sadness approximated something closer to the truth of her self? Or was it the other way around? Maybe neither version was the “truth.” Maybe “self” was a free variable with no bounded value. Maybe every time you met her, she would be somebody else. He became vaguely aware that he was experiencing pain, a pulsing in his left shin, and realized that his brother was kicking him under the table. Inferring or registering that Mrs. Waxman or Judge Waxman had just asked him a question, my grandfather looked helplessly from one to the other. No help was forthcoming from either direction. Uncle Ray was obliged to intervene.
“Electrical engineering,” he said in a dry tone of voice, sounding exasperated but not unamused. “He has a BS from Drexel Tech. And yes, Judge, he is very much looking for employment, sensitive as he is to the fact that his long-suffering kid brother would dearly love to have his couch back.”
Until very recently, my grandfather, on hearing this remark, would have shot back with something along the lines of Hey, you know what? I can be gone tomorrow, and would have meant it. For weeks he had woken up on Uncle Ray’s couch every morning not knowing why he was still in Baltimore, and lay down on it again every night telling himself it was time to move on.
“I’m interested in rocketry,” he was astonished to hear himself declare. “Inertial guidance systems, telemetry. I’d like to find work out at Glenn Martin, if I could. I hear they might be starting to do some things in that area.”
Mrs. Waxman looked impressed, or maybe she was just taken aback; it was by far my grandfather’s longest utterance of the evening. Judge Waxman said that, as it happened, one of his former law partners had a brother who was a vice president of the Martin Company. Perhaps there was something he could do to help my grandfather.
“Are they building space rockets out there?” Uncle Ray said. During the war, Glenn Martin had built a vast plant at Middle River in the northeastern wastes of Baltimore to manufacture thousands of B-26 Marauders and Mariner seaplanes. “Because let me tell you something, this brother of mine, with his inertia and his telepathy? He might look like a chunk of cement with a flattop. But he wants to fly to the moon.”
Apart from this and my grandmother choking up about the sisters of Carmel, my grandfather had no clear recollection, forty-two years later, of anything else said by anyone at the table that night. The only other conversation he remembered came after dessert and coffee had been served. His feelings about my grandmother at this point were a confusion of curiosity, pity, ambition, desire. He felt that he needed, for the sake of clarity, to escape her gravity for a minute or two, for as long as it would take to smoke a cigarette. He slipped away from the table and, looking for some kind of back stair or terrace, found his way to a large porch enclosed with glass. It was unheated but furnished with wicker and an étagère to hold plants and on a spring afternoon must be a pleasant place to sit and have money and be a judge. It had a closed-up smell. He opened one of the casement windows, hoping to find some purchase in the cold night air.
He had just lit a Pall Mall when the door clanged open. It was my grandmother, cloaked in a thick fur coat, sleeves dangling empty at her sides. The coat, like Mrs. Waxman, came enveloped in a formidable vapor of Tabu. It must have cost the judge as much as the 1947 Cadillac Sixty he had sent around to pick up his guests.
“Hello.”
“Oh, uh, hiya.”
She looked longingly at the cigarette between his lips. He passed it to her and lit another for himself. When he looked up again from the spark and flare of butane, still a little cross-eyed, he saw her shudder once, a traveling wave that passed from her hips to her shoulders and then across her face in a ripple of dismay.
“You okay?”
My grandmother made a funny sound, somewhere between embarrassed laughter and a yelp of pain, then ducked out from under Mrs. Waxman’s coat like it was on fire. At the same time she tossed it in the general direction of my grandfather like she was the burning building and it was up to him, a fireman waiting with his life net, to save it. He caught the coat by the collar. She put a hand to her chest, swallowed, and took a drag on the cigarette. She looked sheepish.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Only I really don’t like fur.”
“Oh?”
“When they cut away the skins . . . ? I have seen it.”
“Yeah?”
“And I never liked it.”
That was the first time she told him about the family tannery, in Lille, near the Belgian border. In her schoolgirl English, with almost nothing in the way of expression or emotion, she depicted a childhood haunted by blood and putrefaction and the piss stink of the tanning vats, by horses in the slaughter lot screaming like girls. She described the flaying of hides in terms of vivid color. Silver blade. Red blood. Blue membrane. Golden fat. White bone.
He held the coat up between them. In the moonlit dark of the glassed-in porch, it seemed to shimmer with a ghost of animal motion.
“That is hotter,” she said.
“Oh, yeah?” He had no idea what she was talking about but felt abruptly that he was back on familiar territory with her, with the girl from “Night in Monte Carlo” telling him how his head would look good on a fence.
“Many hotters. Mrs. Waxman says it takes fifteen or twenty hotters.”
My grandfather could not help it. He laughed. “Otters,” he said.
“You know what this is, a hotter?”
“I’m pretty sure that was otter in the soup tonight.”
She frowned, less with her mouth than with her thick Jennifer Jones eyebrows. He liked what her eyebrows did, particularly when she frowned.
“Oh, you are teasing me,” she concluded.
“I’m sorry.”
“No, teasing me is not bad.”
“Really?”
“Yes, when you do it. I like if you do it.”
My grandfather felt himself blush. The only light came from moonglow and a lamp at the far end of the drawing room. He wondered if it was enough for her to see that he was blushing.
“I like you,” he said.
“I like you, too.” She said it in half a second and then added less than half a second later, “I have a little girl, did you know this?”
“Right,” my grandfather said, caught off guard. So there were two of them, two who would need saving. Essayons. “How old?”
“Four years. Five years in September.”
“And your, uh, the father?”
“I murdered him.” When she saw my grandfather’s face, she burst out laughing, then covered her mouth with her hand. She started to choke on the smoke of her cigarette. “No! I’m sorry . . . !” At first she kept on laughing, but as the coughing fit persisted, it seemed maybe she had started to cry. My grandfather couldn’t tell. She held her breath, let it out. She pulled herself together. “That was a joke but not funny, so why I was laughing?”
That was a tough one to answer. My grandfather let it pass. She stubbed out the cigarette in a pot on the étagère that held dirt and a withered stalk.
“The father is dead,” she said. “In the war.”
She walked over to the casement window my grandfather had opened and put her face through into the cold air. She looked up at the Moon, a day or two past its first quarter. She was convulsed by another shudder, then another. She was definitely crying now, and probably cold as hell. He slung the fur coat over one of the wicker chairs. He took off his blazer. It was the same one he had borrowed from his brother to wear to “Night in Monte Carlo.” He lowered the blazer over her shoulders. She leaned in to it as if it were a stream of hot water from a shower head. She kept on leaning backward until she fell against him. He felt the shock of contact. The weight of her against his chest felt like something she had decided to entrust to him. He wanted badly, wanted only, to be worthy of that trust, although apparently his penis, stirring, had its own ideas on the subject.
“I want to fly to the Moon, too,” she said. “Take me with you.”
“Sure thing,” my grandfather said. “I’ll figure it out.”
The next time he saw her, she was coming out of Silber’s bakery holding a box tied with candy-striped string. She did not see him. He followed her down Park Heights to Belvedere and then to the ragged lower end of Narcissus Avenue, keeping a careful distance, and watched her disappear with the box into the upstairs unit of a two-family house that was better maintained than its neighbors (and turned out to be a rental property of Judge Waxman’s). The following night, around two in the morning, he got up off of Uncle Ray’s couch, where he could not sleep for thinking of her. He got dressed and took the keys to his brother’s Mercury and drove over to the two-family house on Narcissus. There was a light on in a window upstairs. His heart caught on some hook inside him. He nosed to the curb, and cut the lights. It was another chilly night, but the lighted window was open and she was leaning on the sill, smoking a cigarette and looking up at the Moon. He wondered if she was looking at the Moon and feeling the cold air and remembering the promise he had made her, his chest unyielding against the weight of her.
My grandfather heard a child’s calling voice, too faint and far away for him to hear distress or complaint or urgency in it. My grandmother turned her head sharply toward the room behind her, stubbing out the cigarette against the windowsill. Sparks rained down into the shrubbery below.
* * *
As he approached Ahavas Sholom that Purim Sunday with a clear sense of mission if not of operational plan, he saw a little girl sitting alone on a stone bench outside the glass doors, knees pulled to her chin, arms encircling her legs at the ankles. She was rocking back and forth, no more than three degrees in either direction, and making low sounds that at first, from a distance, my grandfather took for singing. She had on a green dress, green tights, and black patent-leather Mary Janes. The dress had cap sleeves that left her arms bare, and even with the tights she must be awfully cold—my grandfather was wearing a hat, a scarf, and a wool topcoat over a cardigan sweater. He supposed that when he was three or four years old he might have felt like crying his eyes out, too, bare-armed in forty-degree weather on a cold stone bench, but he liked to think that he would have had the sense to get up and go inside where it was warm.
One of the synagogue front doors banged open. The girl stopped rocking and sat up straight. A Jew came out of the building, holding a small loden coat. The Jew had on an enormous shtreiml, a black caftan whose hem swept the concrete, and a beard like Edmund Gwenn’s in Miracle on 34th Street. My grandfather was surprised to see a Jew of this variety attending services at Ahavas Sholom, where the women sat with the men and the rabbi was a fast-talking dandy who could not even raise a decent five o’clock shadow. The Jew in the big fur hat ignored or seemed not to hear my grandfather coming up the walk, and the girl ignored the Jew except to the degree that she was no longer crying her eyes out. She was no longer crying at all.
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Michael Chabon
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEARThe keeping of secrets and the telling of lies; sex and desire and ordinary love; existential doubt and model rocketry – all feature in the new novel from the author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.‘The world, like the Tower of Babel or my grandmother’s deck of cards, was made out of stories, and it was always on the verge of collapse.’Moonglow unfolds as a deathbed confession. An old man, his tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, his memory stirred by the imminence of death, tells stories to his grandson, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried. Why did he try to strangle a former business partner with a telephone cord? What was he thinking when he and a buddy set explosives on a bridge in Washington, D.C.? What did he feel while he hunted down Wernher von Braun in Germany? And what did he see in the young girl he met in Baltimore after returning home from the war?From the Jewish slums of pre-war Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of a New York prison, from the heyday of the space programme to the twilight of ‘the American Century’, Moonglow collapses an era into a single life and a lifetime into a single week.