As he cooked, he lost himself pleasantly in the task of trying to find flaws in a completed design for an improved accelerometer feedback circuit that he and Milton Weinblatt, his partner at Patapsco Engineering, had been working on for the past several weeks. Six months earlier Weinblatt and my grandfather had quit their jobs in the instrumentation division of the Glenn L. Martin Company to open their own shop. Jews, malcontents, and restless men, they were frustrated by the timid pace of iteration at Martin and by having been passed over for promotion year after year while gentiles of lesser ability were made project managers and department heads. He and Weinblatt had sunk all their savings into their venture. The technology of inertial navigation systems, which enabled a rocket or missile to navigate and make course corrections on its own without external input or guidance, was in a fairly primitive state. Weinblatt and my grandfather were betting that the pace of innovation in computer circuit design, already rapid, was going to increase, soon making it possible to build nonmechanical, solid-state, or (as we would say now) digital navigation systems. If their bet turned out to be correct, Patapsco would be ready to take advantage of the innovations, and its proprietors would cash in.*
My grandfather felt in the soles of his feet that there were people climbing the front stoop of the house. The doorbell rang. It was a little early yet for trick-or-treaters, but he presumed that as she had done every Halloween since her first as the Night Witch, my grandmother intended to answer the door in costume. He slid the wax beans into the boiling water and forbade himself to touch the steak until his internal timer had registered the passing of another two minutes. He was aware of a thread of anxiety pulling at his belly when he thought about this year’s front-stoop theatrics, but the truth was, this made him anxious every year. He was uncomfortable with the whole Crypt of Nevermore situation in general. The weird sexuality of the Night Witch (and of the stories she presented on the program, Blackwood, Le Fanu, Lovecraft: Freud would have a field day with the stuff) reflected a little too closely the nature of my grandmother’s sexuality as he experienced it and, worse, the importance of that weirdness, that witchiness, to the hold that she had over him.
The doorbell rang again. He heard a buzz of little voices from the stoop. He flipped the steak and turned down the flame. He went to the front door. The vacant living room troubled him, unaccountably. There was no reason for the living room not to be vacant, but it did not feel empty. The luminous dial grinned on the front of the big RCA console. Its automatic tonearm return did not always work properly, and he heard the stylus worrying the record label skrchskrchskrch. Record sleeves lay scattered across the top of the console.
The record spinning on the RCA’s platter was a ten-inch LP by Pipe Band of His Majesty’s Scots Guard, 2nd Battalion, from an album called Marches, Strathspeys and Reels. Lately, my grandmother had been in the grip of a mania for bagpipes; he did not even attempt to begin to understand it. He lifted the tonearm and switched off the console.
“Honey?” he called up the stairs.
He had not seen my grandmother or my mother since walking in the door, but that was not unusual. Each of them seemed to spend increasingly longer periods alone, my mother in her bedroom, my grandmother in the room that my mother remembered as a “studio” and my grandfather as a “sewing room.” When he was home they would hang around whatever room he happened to be in, but when he was not around they seemed to avoid each other.
He opened the front door, where the cast for an impromptu Peter Pan had assembled by chance: a pirate, an Indian princess, a fairy, and a little fellow in green whom my grandfather supposed was meant to be Robin Hood but made a serviceable Pan.
The accidental Neverlanders offered to withhold from committing a ritually unspecified act of mischief in return for a bribe of candy. My grandfather was ill at ease with this custom, relatively novel in the early 1950s. In the South Philly of his childhood, Halloween was a night when masked Irish hooligans threw eggs and flour bombs and wrote obscenities and slurs in soap on people’s windows. He looked for the bowl, filled with loose pieces of Brach’s Autumn Mix of candy pumpkins, corns, and cat’s-heads, that ought to have been placed by the front door. It was not there.
“Just a minute,” my grandfather said to the trick-or-treaters.
He called again for my grandmother and my mother but got no answer. Maybe they had gone to the store for candy at the last minute.
“Huh,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you kids.”
The children regarded him with careful and, in the case of the fairy, sharp expressions. My grandfather got the idea that his enactment of confusion struck them as insincere. He took his coin purse out of his pocket. He found four quarters inside it. In 1952 a quarter could buy five candy bars. The children went away content.
Back in the kitchen the steak was nearly done. He turned up the gas for another minute, gave it a poke with his finger, then slid it onto a plate. He returned the pan lacquered with amber drippings to the fire and glugged some Johnnie Walker into the pan. There was a hiss and a billowing of vapor that stung his nostrils. He took out Augenbaugh’s lighter and ignited the vapor. As the whoosh of ignition faded to a simmer, he heard somebody scream. The sound arced like a skyrocket and burst with a yawp, almost a sob. My grandfather decided not to be alarmed. It had been an implausible scream, a Hollywood coloratura. Somebody having fun of the season. One of the neighbors scaring the evening’s foot traffic with a haunted house sound effects record album.
He gave the bubbling reduction a couple of stirs to deglaze the pan. He listened. The scream was not repeated or followed by a creaking crypt door, a howling wolf, chains dragging across a dungeon floor. He poured the whiskey reduction over the steak on the plate, buttered the wax beans, and snatched the potatoes out of the oven with a mitt.
Once again there was no reply when he called out, this time adding the information that supper was ready. He had cut the steak into three pieces and buttered his baked potato when my mother—two months past her tenth birthday—walked in, wearing old dungarees and a loden shirt with the tails untucked. He was a little surprised to see that she was not in her Halloween costume: Velvet Brown, winner of the Grand National, in her jodhpurs and her gold and magenta silks. No doubt she had reckoned correctly that if she showed up at the table to run its steeplechase of sauces, condiments, and other hazards in the beautiful costume my grandmother had sewn for her, she would have been sent back to her room to change.
“Where’s your mom?”
My mother glanced at the plate of bleeding steak between the two of them and looked away. Her features were arranged to give an effect of unconcern, but it was easy to see she was upset about something. He recalled that she had planned to go to school as Velvet Brown, for a parade around the neighborhood. He wondered if the costume had suffered some mischance. Maybe she had been teased. Behind the effort of her indifference he sensed consternation. If the problem was the costume, her eyes said that it had been spoiled. Her eyes said that it had been taken from her and torn to shreds.
“What happened?” he said.
She watched his hand and the fork it held convey her chunk of steak to her plate. She shook her head. “Nothing.”
“I thought you would have your costume on.”
Tears rolled like beads along her eyelashes. They scattered when she blinked.
“Did something happen to it? Did you get it dirty?”
“Nothing happened. I changed my mind.”
“What? You don’t want to be National Velvet? Why?”
Her reply was rapid and muttered so as to render it unintelligible, but there was nothing unusual in that. Lately, she did not really speak words to him so much as spirit them hastily and furtively out of her mouth like a bank robber tossing his gun and stocking mask out the window of a getaway car.
“Mumblemumblemumble,” he said, as if quoting her.
“I said I’m not going trick-or-treating! Okay?”
She was regard
ing the bleeding steak on her plate with unconcealed revulsion. She looked like she might be about to throw up.
“So I heard somebody scream about maybe ten minutes ago,” my grandfather said. “Now I’m wondering if that might have been you.”
* * *
That morning my grandmother had sent my mother off to school with an assurance that Velvet Brown would have her Pie. Even as the promise was tendered, my mother could not help feeling that something dreadful lay coiled at its bottom. Her mother, she knew, had endured terrible things during the war and after. She had been taken from her family, and then her family had been taken from her. The Nazis had also killed the handsome and heroic young doctor who was my mother’s real father and who was usually played, in her imagination, by James Mason. Her mother had fought her way through the confusions and indignities of life as a refugee, through homesickness, shock, mourning, professional struggle, and the storms of exaltation and fury that blew through her head with the inconstant rhythm of hurricanes. All this while never losing the air of cheerful bitterness that, for my mother, defined bravery. When my grandmother promised my mother a “Hallowsween horse,” her tone had been terribly cheerful. She would allow that she was not wild about horses—“I don’t have to love them,” she would tell my mother, “because you love them enough for both of us”—but my mother suspected that in fact my grandmother had a horror of them.
If my grandmother was walking downtown and saw that a mounted policeman or an arabber with his horse-drawn fruit wagon lay in her path, she would cross to the other side of the street. When she could not avoid contact with horses, my grandmother would hold herself still the way people did when it hurt too much to move, and take breaths in small sips through her nostrils until the animal had passed her. If they happened to pass on a drive one of the many horse farms in the countryside around Baltimore, my grandmother would lower her voice or stop talking entirely, as if she thought the horses in the pasture might be listening.
All day at school—my mother was in Mrs. Hampt’s fourth grade class at Liberty Elementary—though she tried not to think about it, her thoughts kept returning to the horse she had been promised or, rather, to the dread that mysteriously was its passenger. It was like when you lost a tooth and your tongue kept finding and probing at the tang of blood in the gap. She knew from experience that whatever its nature, the horse her mother constructed for her would manage to be both beautiful and disappointing. She hoped (though this seemed unlikely) that it would not also be strange.
Parading with her classmates in her gaudy silks through the streets of Forest Park after lunch, Velvet Brown had felt an odd bereavement, an emptiness between her knees. She felt unhorsed. For this sense of loss my mother blamed my grandfather, who had made the original promise to provide her with a Pie for Halloween.
“I didn’t even want a horse,” my mother told my grandfather. She was lying facedown on her bed, having abandoned her supper, still in her dungarees and wool shirt. “I was fine.”
“I apologize,” my grandfather said. “I thought that I would have the time.”
Emboldened by his success with the set of carved and painted horses, my grandfather had proposed to complete my mother’s costume that year with a stick horse whose wooden head would be modeled on that of the horse from the movie version of National Velvet. From the start the impulse was unduly freighted with guilt. Back at Martin my grandfather’s work had often cut in to his time with my mother, but since going out on his own, he was almost never home. The theory behind the stick horse was that if my mother consulted on her horse’s design and helped with its construction, my grandfather would no longer be neglecting her. Like many promises born of a guilty conscience, this one had fallen prey to the failing it was intended to rectify. The push to develop a closed-loop accelerometer meant that my grandfather rarely got home before eight, usually closer to eight-thirty, my mother’s bedtime. In the last two weeks, as he and Weinblatt found their designs taking a promising tack, his work on the Pie had all but come to a halt.
“A stupid head on a stupid broomstick,” my mother said. Her eyelashes were soaked with tears, and fury blotched her cheeks. Filaments of snot cobwebbed her face to her pillow. “Like I’m a baby. Like I would ever want my friends to see me with that.”
“I know.” My grandfather was standing by the side of bed, looking down at her. “I’m sorry.”
“You and your stupid idea—”
“Enough.”
“I was fine without a horse!”
“Enough.”
My grandfather rarely raised or felt the need to raise his voice with my mother. As if to compensate for the erratic and unpredictable behavior of my grandmother, my mother had fashioned herself, by will and instinct, into the most tractable child in the city of Baltimore. She left off yelling at him and lay crooning into the crook of her arm.
“What happened?” my grandfather said. “Where is your mother?”
“I don’t know.” Now the poor girl just sounded tired. “She wasn’t here when I got home. A record was playing. Her handbag was gone. I did my homework. I cleaned my room. I heard you come home. I wanted to see what she made. I went to look.”
“And?”
My mother pressed her lips together. Her chin trembled. She shook her head and then buried her face in the pillow. She was not giving anything else away.
My grandfather stood a moment, looking down at her. He wondered if the bigger misfortune was to have the crazy woman for a mother, or the father who was crazy enough to love her. He wanted to stroke my mother’s hair or give her shoulder a pat, but he felt angry with her for throwing his failure in his face. His hands dangled at his sides like inoperable tools. He knew he was being selfish and unfair to a child whose only mistake had been to put her trust in him.
“I’ll look into it,” he said to the back of my mother’s head. He wondered if he had ever said anything so useless.
My grandmother’s domain was a room off my grandparents’ bedroom that must have been a porch once. It was small and low-ceilinged, with a ribbon of mullioned windows running around three sides. My grandmother had found room in it for a sewing machine, a small worktable, a floor lamp, and a dressmaker’s dummy.* To the left of the door as you came in, my grandfather had built some shelves for my grandmother’s notions, her supplies, and her disorderly row of paperbacks, most with French titles. On the wall to the right of the door, over a steel typist’s table, hung a bulletin board shingled with art postcards and photos clipped from magazines. Neither my mother nor my grandfather could provide me with much in the way of specific works or artists (apart from van Gogh and a Delacroix tiger), but they remembered the imagery of the postcards and clippings as “creepy” (my mother) or “typical” (my grandfather): still lifes of meat, coin-operated automatons that told fortunes, a family of musical dwarfs who had survived Auschwitz. One morning the previous June my grandmother had found a luna moth expiring with languid wingbeats on a tree in the backyard. That got stuck to the bulletin board, too, its viridescence fading with time to dull dollar green.
The relative order or disorder of my grandmother’s “studio” was as reliable a gauge as any of the tenor of her mind. There were others: whether or not she greeted him by name when he walked in the door or called out a goodbye on her own departure. Whether she was in the middle of her cycle or a week before the end. If she brought him coffee in bed, that was a good sign. If she felt appreciated by the world. If there were cut flowers in the vases and jars; if the flowers were fresh: good signs. Empty vases were bad and dead flowers worse. If she touched her fingers to the back of his neck as though noticing it for the first time—as though noticing him for the first time—that could be a good sign. If it was not February. If she did not get out her deck of fortune-telling cards and waste hours laying them out in crosses and grids. If she did not linger in the cave mouths of Catholic churches but only passed them by. If she was not lost for the hundredth time in Vincent’s letters to Theo or
the Fioretti of Saint Francis. If it was not a Sunday; Sundays were the worst.
Every day had been a Sunday during that summer of 1952. Days of lassitude, nights of insomnia. Horrific dreams whose contents she refused to divulge, swallowing them whole on waking like a spy who feared capture. The sewing room filled with stacks of magazines she never got around to clipping, with sacks of grapes and cherries that rotted when she forgot to eat them and left the whole upstairs of the house smelling of vinegar. She would hang an old shawl across the doorway and stay in there for hours at a time. With a show of black humor, she would confess that she was in hiding but would never say from what or whom and did not really seem to be joking.
She checked out the usual bunch of weird records from the Pratt library—Indonesians banging on the local plumbing with hammers, G. I. Gurdjieff droning away at his harmonium, those fucking bagpipes—and played them over and over on a portable record player. She rarely ate and never cooked. When she emerged from behind the shawl and went out, she became a magnet for proselytizers and truth possessors. Copies of The Watchtower and The Theosophist, tracts and pamphlets dense with references to soul travel and vril, replaced the sacks of rotting fruit. In late August my grandmother covered the sewing room’s windowpanes with squares of black paper so that she could not be observed by the shadowy whickering thing of which my grandfather then knew relatively little and understood less.
The night before my mother started fourth grade, two policemen had brought my grandmother home, barefoot and wearing a man’s fishing jacket. Somebody had seen her, partly unclothed and moving erratically, down by the harbor and thought she might be contemplating or risking suicide. Just as the police had arrived on the scene, she was seen to set fire to the pages of a book and throw it into the water. From the description supplied by the witness to police, my grandfather recognized the book as having been one of the marbled notebooks in which his wife’s sketches of the latest Paris prêt-à-porter looks alternated with her notes, reflections, and dreams, jotted hastily in French and reading, as far as my grandfather could tell, like hallucinatory telegrams. The cops thought about bringing her to Hopkins for observation. Once she’d set her notebook on fire and thrown it into the harbor, however, she no longer seemed distressed or unbalanced. She was cool, contrite, embarrassed by her behavior and state of undress, and lovely. One of the policemen recognized her from television. He loaned her the fisherman’s jacket, and they brought her home. After that night she had seemed distinctly sane and unburdened. She lost herself in mothering. She returned to my grandfather’s bed and opened her legs to him with her accustomed readiness. She had tidied up her sewing room.