“Okay, okay,” he said, glaring back at the haunted recliner. “I’ll be right over.”
The unit did not belong to Sally but to an old friend who was living now with a daughter in Tel Aviv. The friend and her late husband had bought the unit, remodeled it, and furnished it with lots of raffia and glass, and then a week after they moved in, the husband had keeled over on the Fontana Village tennis courts and died. Everything that was not raffia or glass had been painted, covered, or tiled in soft tones of rose and ash-gray, a modish palette that Sally didn’t care for. A bedsheet had been tacked to the large white wall by the patio doors, where it struck a discordant note, because it was patterned with green and gold dandelions, and because it was a bedsheet.
“You have one of your paintings under there?”
Sally shook her head. She turned to the bedsheet on the wall and lifted it with both hands. My grandfather went and stood underneath this impromptu canopy to look. It was a large photographic portrait in black and white, mounted and matted in a black metal frame. It was a close-up shot of a moonfaced beauty and a handsome fellow with satyric eyebrows, both around his age. They were posed with their heads together, their eyes twinkling with acceptance and wisdom.
“Little did they know,” my grandfather said.
She nodded. They stepped out from under the bedsheet and she let it fall. “I have to keep it covered,” she said. “I don’t have the patience for hindsight.”
“Too much like regret,” my grandfather said.
A viable moment had arrived. Sally leaned in to kiss him. He got a late start and then misjudged her angle of approach. There was an unfortunate encounter between her teeth and his chin. She clapped a hand to her mouth, her cheeks ablaze, and made an adjustment to her dental work.
My grandfather dabbed at the bite mark on his chin, checked his fingertips for blood. “Wee wow,” he said.
“Shit,” Sally said, having restored order in her mouth. “Is this going to be a disaster?”
My grandfather had a hunch about it, but he kept it to himself. She reached out and took hold of his chin and examined it, then used her purchase on his chin to guide her mouth toward his. There had been pink grapefruit in her salad at dinner and he thought he could taste it on her lips.
“How about we give it one last try?” Sally said.
“If you wouldn’t mind,” said my grandfather.
But thirteen minutes later, when she emerged from the master bath having made it plain that she intended to fuck him, the expanse of her naked body, lavishly freckled and presented without modesty, overwhelmed my grandfather. An inner coaxial was cut, and his head filled with white noise, and then he passed out. When he came to his senses, he was on his back on the bed in possession of what felt like a monstrous erection. Stretched out alongside him, Sally reached to take hold of it. Before her fingers even brushed against his skin, however, my grandfather came. The spurt was so abrupt and unadvertised that it had the character of a practical joke. Sally flinched and looked slightly offended. My grandfather’s sense of humiliation was acute. It took everything he had not to get up and leave. Pack his car, drive to California without stopping. Only California would not really be far enough.
Sally went back into the bathroom. This time when she came out, she was wearing a robe.
“I’m sorry,” said my grandfather. “Maybe it was a little too soon.”
“Too soon is better than too late, dear.”
“Yeah? What if it’s too soon and too late?”
“Oh, it is,” Sally said. “Definitely. Too soon for that type of talk.” She sat down on the bed beside him and gave him a brief but not perfunctory kiss on the lips. “And too late for backing out now, because I like you.”
“Sally . . .” Now was the time at last to talk to her, to tell her about the blood panel and Dr. Mubarak, as my grandfather had come to think of the specialist. Now, before like turned to something stronger and it really was too late.
“How do you feel about rum raisin ice cream?” Sally said.
“I’m the only person I know who likes it.”
“Not anymore. How about Spencer Tracy?”
“In my opinion? The best.”
“I agree. So, channel twelve is showing Boys Town at nine.”
“Yeah? You know, I remember when it came out, it was showing at the Stanley. But somehow I missed it.”
“That’s what I’m telling you,” Sally said. “It’s never too late.”
17
Many years later, when my mother was packing up to move out of the house where my grandfather had died, she came upon some liquor boxes in a crawl space.
“It’s just lot of your old junk,” she reported when she called me.
Knowing that I had a weakness for old junk in general but especially my own, she brought the boxes over one afternoon* to consign them to the mercy of my nostalgia. The first one I opened was a Captain Morgan rum carton that held fifty or sixty letters and postcards from friends, lovers, and writing teachers of the 1980s. Buried under the old mail were some cassette recordings I had made from a friend’s father’s collection of Bob and Ray albums, a baggie that held a loose joint, a Hot Wheels Beatnik Bandit, and my brother’s vinyl copy of Moving Pictures.
“Good box,” I said.
In the next one—Gilbey’s gin—I found a plastic shopping bag from New Rose Records in Paris. It once held either Fire of Love or a Johnny Thunders live album, depending on which visit to New Rose it was from. Now it contained a floppy black felt hat with a wide brim. That, an unopened box of blank TDK cassettes, and an “Aquarian” deck of tarot cards bought at Spencer Gifts in the Columbia Mall when I was thirteen turned out to be all there was in the Gilbey’s box. I scowled at the hat, trying to place it.
“Blond,” my mother said, tweezing a long strand from the nap of the wide felt brim.
Simultaneously, we recalled having seen this hat on the head of my fair-haired ex-wife.
I pointed to the third carton, which once held a dozen bottles of Old Crow. Its cardboard was more brittle than the others’, its typography antiquated, its cartoon crow a raffish Jazz Age dandy. It had been sealed with old-fashioned packing tape, the kind you used to have to moisten with a sponge.
“I’m pretty sure that one’s not mine,” I said. “It looks really old.”
“Oh,” my mother said, slicing through the packing tape with her house key. “Huh.”
I thought I caught a note of unease or at least wariness in her voice, but that may be a detail contributed by hindsight. The first thing to come out of the box were some children’s books, small hardcovers without jackets: The Black Stallion, Misty of Chincoteague and King of the Wind, National Velvet, and one called Come on Seabiscuit! Beneath these lay a manila folder and a zippered fabric pouch. The folder was full of color photographs of thoroughbreds clipped from magazines, pasted onto cardboard backing, and cut out to make horse paper dolls. The zip pouch held the moldering remains of miniature tack my mother had fashioned for her paper horses out of bits of lanyard and leather thong and scraps of what looked like brown Naugahyde.
“That’s what Velvet did,” my mother explained. “In the book. So I made my own. But then your grandpa made these for me.” From the Old Crow box she took nine little wooden horses, each balled up in a page from The Baltimore Sun for November 12, 1952. As she unwrapped each one, she set it on my kitchen table. The horses stood about three inches at the shoulder, carved—the first two with a pocketknife, my mother recalled, the rest with a set of carving tools—from soft lightweight wood. Each had been fitted with a mane and tail made of brush bristles, then painted: bay, chestnut, brown, dappled gray, dun, black, white, piebald, midnight blue. The modeling of the brown and the bay was crude, simplified almost to the point of abstraction, but after the first two my grandfather’s skill had improved along with his tools. There was real likeness if not realism in the arcs of the other horses’ necks, in their streamlined heads and balletic poses.
&nb
sp; I held up the blue horse. “Kinda whimsical for Grandpa.”
“That’s Midnight. He knew how to fly.”
“Midnight,” I said. “Ooh.”
I flew Midnight in a figure eight over the heads of the other horses and brought him in for a landing. I was surprised to discover at this late date that some part of the business of her girlhood had been conducted in my mother’s imagination. When she told a story from those days, it was usually an account of something observed, overheard, endured, or undertaken, as though her formative years had been spent entirely in the world outside her own head. In self-portrait she was a child without daydreams, without fears, fantasies, doubts, longings, or unaskable questions. When I was a boy, my most routine flights of fancy and invention always seemed to leave her shaking her head, looking up at God or the kitchen ceiling, making a face that said something along the lines of Where does he get this shit? When I heard about Midnight, it made me wonder if she had been sandbagging all this time, pretending to be ignorant of a language in which she was conversant if not fluent. Concealing her origins, safely assimilated into a daylight country of earthbound horses.
“What else you got in there?” I said.
She glanced into the Old Crow box and looked away. She swept up all the blown blossoms of newsprint and shoved them crinkling down into the box.
“Well,” she said, and I understood that there was something else in the box.
She turned to the little painted remuda on the kitchen table. Her eyebrows tangled above the bridge of her nose, and her mouth was pursed as though the horses presented her with a problem. At first I thought she might be debating whether or not to make a present of them to my younger daughter, who was then on the cusp of the Velvet Brown years. But my mother’s eyes seemed too faraway and fretful for that.
“Well,” she said again. She folded the flaps of the box and picked it up. “I can leave all that here for the kids, if you think they’ll want it.”
“Great.”
“What?”
“No, nothing.”
“I know,” my mother said. I saw her push herself to say the next word. “Horses.”
“A whole box of them.”
“You think that’s weird. Because of my mother.”
“No, I . . . I mean, 1952? So you were ten when all this got packed up?”
“Yes. I went to live with Bubbe and Zayde.” These were her names for my grandfather’s parents, dead long before I was born. “They were over in Camden by then. It was only supposed to be until he found work, but I ended up finishing the school year in Camden. It took him a while to get a job. He ended up in New York.”
“On Radio Row, right? Where the World Trade Center is.”
“He worked for Arrow as a store manager, and then when Arrow started selling parts to companies, he went into sales because the money was better. I went to live with him in Queens.”
“Where was Grandma?” I said, though I guessed the answer to my question the moment I asked it.
“November ’52,” my mother said. “That was the first time.”
“Ah.”
“They dropped me with Bubbe and Zayde and then he took her to the hospital. She was really, you know. Something was really out of whack.”
She was looking at the midnight-blue horse. The bristles of its mane and tail were ivory white. Its head was angled skyward as though in aspiration. Any kid could have seen, I thought, that it was the magic one, the one that might be able to fly.
“I mean, all girls have the horse thing around that age,” I said. “Ten eleven twelve. It’s super-common.”
“Mm-hmm,” my mother said, but it didn’t sound like she was agreeing with or even humoring me. She was pitying me. She thought that I was kidding myself, in denial.
“Because, I mean, did you know about the Skinless Horse?” I said. “Before she went into the hospital the first time?”
She set the box back down on the kitchen table. I started the teakettle. I had some Drambuie on hand. I assured her that it was not too early in the day to add a slug of the stuff to one’s cup of Earl Grey.
“Before that?” she said. “Did I know? Did I know. I mean, I . . . sensed . . .” She paused, reluctant to carry on in this vein, trucking with things that could merely be sensed. “I knew she was afraid of something I couldn’t see.”
I poured tea from the pot into her mug and doctored it to her specifications. She took a sip and then, a moment later, took another, longer sip.
“Good,” she said. She didn’t say anything else after that, and she probably would have liked to move on.
“So when you were ten,” I said, “November 1952, you packed it all up in that box.”
“Yeah.”
“It kind of looks like you never unpacked it again.”
“I never did.”
“How come?”
“Because I stopped liking horses.”
“Because you found out about the Skinless Horse?”
“No,” my mother said. She drained the cup of spiked tea. Then she opened up the flaps of the Old Crow box again and started rooting down through the crumpled flowers of Baltimore to the bottom. “Because I saw it.”
* * *
My grandmother was an on-air personality—star would be overstating the case—on station WAAM from around 1948 to 1952. In those years relatively few Baltimore households owned television sets. Growing up in the Baltimore area twenty years later, I rarely encountered people who had seen my grandmother on TV. From time to time when I was a kid, a former housewife of the fifties might recollect the pert, impeccably coiffed ménagère who calmly disjointed rabbits or whacked cutlets with a tenderizer while wearing pearls and a Dior dress supplied by Hutzler’s, the sponsor of La Cuisine. My mother is now my only surviving authority for channel 13’s having aired a French-language instruction program taught by my grandmother on Sunday mornings after The Christophers. And nobody ever seemed to remember Fay Beau the French Weather Maid, promising sunshine or warning of storm fronts on News at Noon in her black livery and starched white cap and apron.
To this day most of the people who remember my grandmother on television were kids at the time, my mother’s age or a little older, and what they remember is a mass of dark hair teased into a feathery cowl around a dead-white face, eyebrows like a raven’s wings, dark sleeves restlessly flapping and swooping in a dry-ice fog as my grandmother stalked the set of The Crypt of Nevermore, an antebellum Gothic fantasia of toppled columns, tilted headstones, and iron gingerbread. They remember her as “Nevermore, the Night Witch,” and they are unanimous in recalling that if you were allowed to stay up late on a Friday night during those years, and tuned in to channel 13 for the forty-five minutes before WAAM’s twelve-forty-five sign-off, my grandmother would freak you the fuck out.
Television’s first “horror host” is generally agreed to have been Maila Nurmi, aka Vampira, who emerged a couple of years afterward from some murky Hollywood borderland of cheesecake soft porn and Maya Deren–esque surrealism to introduce and heap ridicule upon Z-grade thrillers on KABC in Los Angeles. Others in other cities—Zackerley in New York, Ghoulardi in Cleveland, Marvin in Chicago—emerged toward the end of the decade, after the classic Universal horror films were packaged for television, and though they had their own gimmicks they all more or less followed the pattern laid down by Vampira: camp, innuendo, and the airing of movies ripe for mockery by the host of the show.
Nevermore, the Night Witch, wasn’t like that. She didn’t show movies; there were no horror movies licensed to be shown on television, and if there had been, the brothers who owned the station—more friends of the ubiquitous Judge Waxman—would not have seen the value in acquiring them.
“She hammed it up pretty good,” my grandfather told me. “But she played it straight, not for laughs. The accent helped. She lived in the Usher family crypt, that was the shtick. Name over the door.” He closed his eyes, and they sank into the purple shadow that surrounded them. He re
ran the grainy kinescope of memory. “She’s there shpatziring around the graves, she turns and looks at the camera, ‘Oh!’” His voice went half an octave up and took on a certain slinkiness. “‘I see you have dared to return!’ Right? Then she invites you in. The camera, what do you call, zooms in on the iron gate of the crypt, meanwhile she has to quick run around to the other half of the set, where it’s supposed to be the inside of the crypt. Cut to the other camera, she comes in, sits down in a chair, more like a throne, I think they got it from a church. She picks up a book and she reads. Out loud. Ghost stories. Weird tales. That type of thing. Never my cup of tea.”
The Crypt of Nevermore, broadcast live, aired weekly from October 7, 1949, the centennial of Edgar Allan Poe’s death, to October 24, 1952.
Baltimoreans who sat down at midnight on October 31, 1952, to watch the Night Witch’s presentation of Poe’s “Metzengerstein,” as promised by TV listings in the Sun, were surprised to find only a static shot of a jack-o’-lantern posed on a wooden stool in a fog of CO2. The holes of its face had been hacked in haste with some dull tool, and as its candle guttered and flared, the jack-o’-lantern displayed an expression of torment that many viewers, according to a subsequent report in the Sun, found disturbing; there were complaints. On the following Friday at midnight an old March of Time newsreel was shown. Neither The Crypt of Nevermore nor my grandmother ever returned to the air.
Around five-thirty that Halloween Friday my grandfather was in the kitchen of a rented house on Maine Avenue, in Forest Park. On first walking in the door that evening—home early for a change—he had wrapped three potatoes in foil and stuck them in the oven. Now he had a steak frying in a cast-iron skillet and a pot on the boil for some wax beans. He stood at the range, sleeves rolled, still in suit pants and necktie, wearing an apron patterned with tomatoes on a background of yellow plaid. Pancake turner in one hand, tumbler of Scotch in the other. Every Friday night he poured two fingers of Johnnie Walker over an ice cube. That would be the extent of his consumption for the week.