Moonglow

  After a minute Pat had not returned. My grandfather went to the banquette with its legs of bent rebar, and though sitting was the last thing he wanted to do, he forced himself to sit. He shuffled through the magazines: Broadcast News, Sponsor, Advertising Age, a Ring, a couple of old New Yorkers. One New Yorker somebody had left open to an advertisement with a cartoon drawing of a dismayed fisherman reeling in a boot. My grandfather sympathized. Then, in the column of text that ran down the page alongside the advertisement, his gaze caught on the hook of a capital V, separated by a hyphen from the numeral 2.

  The article was entitled “A Romantic Urge.” Its author’s name was Daniel Lang. Over the course of several pages in the middle of the issue for the week of April 21, 1951—over a year and a half ago—Lang revealed to the literate, Dunhills-smoking, Triple Sec–drinking American public that the man behind Germany’s fearsome V-2 rocket was now living happily in Huntsville, Alabama, and working as a top scientist along with many other former Nazi “men of science” in the U.S. Army’s guided missile program. My grandfather had heard reports of something like this, with no mention of Wernher von Braun, and they had been vague enough for him to dismiss from his mind. It appeared, however, that not only von Braun but the better part of the German rocket program—more than a hundred men captured by the U.S. military’s wartime Operation Paperclip—had been transplanted to El Paso and then to Huntsville, where they were now being paid excellent salaries, learning to eat tamales and grits, driving around in their Chevys wearing cowboy hats and providing the United States with a missile capable of putting a nuclear warhead in the middle of downtown Moscow. Lang characterized Operation Paperclip as having been a treasure hunt and its operatives as “talent scouts.”

  Lang was charmed by von Braun, with his blond hair and his buoyant manner and his protestations of innocent indifference to the strange ways of generals and führers. Von Braun was quoted to the effect that it made as much sense to blame a rocket scientist, who had wanted only to “blaze a trail to other planets,” for the deaths and destruction caused by the V-2 as it did to blame Einstein for the A-bomb. Lang characterized the man my grandfather knew to have held the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer (major) as a civilian, a man of peace, a reluctant warrior with his head in the clouds; he referred to the mechanized slave pit Nordhausen where the V-2 rockets had been assembled as a “production plant” staffed by Russian POWs.

  “This is not good,” Barry Kahn said. My grandfather looked up. The director was a good-looking kid, one of those new postwar intellectual young Jews who dressed like a hoodlum in motorcycle jackets, rolled dungarees, never a tie. Behind him Pat stood shaking his head, looking at once reproachful and satisfied, as if he had predicted that nothing good would come of him going off to look for Mr. Kahn, or of my grandfather marrying a woman like my grandmother. “Where the hell is she, man? What am I supposed to put on the air in twenty-five minutes?”

  The telephone behind the reception counter rang and rang again. Pat went around behind the counter and answered on the fourth ring, “WAAM.” He listened. His yellowed eyes, forked with pink, rolled toward my grandfather. “He’s right here.” Pat handed my grandfather the receiver. “It’s your brother.”

  Less than a minute later, having spoken fewer than five words to the individual on the other end of the call, the husband of Nevermore, the Night Witch, hung up the phone. He turned to Barry Kahn. The tough-looking young Jew took a step backward, stumbling a little in his haste. His gaze was fixed on the point of the letter opener my grandfather held in his right hand. The blade of the letter opener was smeared, as with gore, with a film of orange pulp. “Easy, now,” said Barry Kahn.

  In 2014, when I interviewed Kahn at his daughter’s home in Owings Mills, Maryland, the phrase he used to describe my grandfather at this moment was almost identical to the one employed by the anonymous witness who would be quoted on May 25, 1957, in the New York Daily News: I’ve never seen anyone so angry in my life.

  My grandfather took a folded handkerchief from his hip pocket and used it to wipe the pulp from the blade of the letter opener, then dropped it back in the leather pen cup. He turned to Barry Kahn and handed him the pumpkin. “Here you go,” he said. While he’d been on the phone hearing the news that Uncle Ray tracked him down to pass along, my grandfather had used the letter opener to carve—punch out, really—a ragged parody of a human face. It had holes for eyes, a slit for a nose, a bent, moronic leer.

  “What’s this?” Kahn didn’t want to take the pumpkin. He took it nevertheless.

  “Her understudy,” my grandfather said.

  He went to the coffee table and picked up the April 21, 1951, issue of The New Yorker. He held it up and took Aughenbaugh’s lighter from his pocket and set fire to a corner of the magazine. When the magazine had caught, he dropped it in a metal wastebasket by the station’s front door. “Happy Halloween,” he said.

  A fire blazed up in the wastebasket. The metal rumbled with heat and then fell silent as the flame died away.

  * * *

  The Carmel, corner of Caroline and Biddle. An eminence of brick behind an iron gate in a high brick wall. Windows like slits behind heavy jalousies, steep roof castellated with dormers. A house of refuge or penitence but either way a house built to estrange its occupants from the world. On the roof the tall white cross, that high diver with arms outspread.

  My grandfather had been instructed to use the back door. He parked the car on Caroline and found the alleyway promised by the prioress of the Carmel. It was an old East Baltimore alleyway paved unevenly in stones that made him wobbly at the ankles. The prioress had said to look for a steel door with a granite step. Beside the door he would see a little crank for the doorbell; on no account was he to crank it. At this hour of the night, she had told him, the Carmel was ruled by silence, or under a rule of silence, or words to that effect. They would hear him coming before he even had time to knock.

  The prioress had struck him over the phone as a woman accustomed to taking matters in hand. “It was hard to know how best to serve your wife when she got here,” she had told him when he’d called the number she’d left with Uncle Ray. “I settled on a cup of tea and a pillow.”

  Everything was as the prioress had promised: steel door with a sheen of moonlight, wide stone step for the leaving of deliveries, donations, and foundlings. Crank like the handle on a pepper mill below a plaque that bore the duplicitous suggestion turn. As my grandfather raised his hand to knock, a bolt slid back and the door swung inward. In the open doorway, surrounded by shadow, a round face hung pale and disembodied, a full moon painted on a theater drop.

  “Mother Mary Joseph?”

  The face twisted with amusement, annoyance, or disdain. Its owner drew back a step, and my grandfather saw that she was barely out of her teens and likely nobody’s mother in any sense of the word. It was the flowing brown scapular that had made her face seem to hang bodiless in the dark. The scapular gave off a clean smell of lavender and steam. The young nun invited him in with an awkward chopping gesture, like someone trying to wave away a bee. He stepped over the threshold of the Carmel.

  Snow shovels, sandbags, a hand truck, rolls of strapping tape, some old bicycles, all labeled, everything stacked on shelves or hung from hooks. A menagerie of overshoes, Wellingtons, and galoshes. And a second nun, an ancient woman, swarthy and whiskered and crooked like a finger. The moment my grandfather came through, this tiny personage hurled herself at the heavy door and shoved it to, and the young nun drove home the deadbolt. With the breach sealed, the air in the Carmel’s basement corridor seemed to thicken with silence. It was like putting in a pair of earplugs. You could hear yourself swallowing, the click of your neck bones. The nuns slid past him, keeping their eyes downcast, away from the service entry.

  “I’m here to see my wife,” my grandfather said.

  His voice was a blare, a racket. He started to apologize, but the nuns were moving away from him down a hallway of painted cinder block.
Bare bulbs, a green and white chessboard of linoleum polished to a high shine, as from constant sweeping by the hems of habits. The nuns were heading toward a stairwell at the far end. They went with a kind of slow urgency, like they were carrying iron kettles full of boiling water. At the bottom of the stairwell they stopped. This was as far as they planned to travel in my grandfather’s company. The old nun unbent one gnarled hand and uplifted its palm. My grandfather nodded; pointlessly, since they had yet to look at him. He started up the stairs. The unspoken apology lingered at the tip of his tongue.

  “I’m sorry,” he said when he reached the first-floor landing.

  The prioress was waiting for him, a handsome woman tented in a great volume of brown serge like a pylon planted in the doorway to block his path. Her voice was barely louder than a whisper yet not the least bit soft. It carried. It expected to be heard.

  “Are you now?” she said. “And why would that be?”

  She had three inches and thirty pounds on him, and she looked him right in the eye. She wore a pair of men’s eyeglasses, circular black frames with thick lenses.

  “For the intrusion,” my grandfather said. “For the late hour.”

  “There’s nothing to apologize for. I told you to come.”

  He followed her down another hallway. The flooring here was some kind of hardwood, spotless and redolent of beeswax. Her habit trailed the same good smell of serge freshly laundered and ironed. She led him past unmarked doors, a radiator, a statuette of some naked martyr in ecstasy or torment, a framed portrait of a beautiful nun interrupted, while writing in a book with a quill pen, by the appearance of a giant human heart in the blue sky over her head. The airborne heart was being pierced by a giant arrow; maybe she was writing about that. The pipes of the radiator rang with steam hammers, and the hallway was uncomfortably warm. Down toward the end of the hall was a door with a tin plaque that read infirmary, black letters on white enamel.

  “Wait,” the prioress said. Again she interposed her body between my grandfather and the place where he needed to go. She opened the infirmary door enough to look in, and gave a little grunt, somewhere between enlightenment and annoyance. She closed the door and turned to face my grandfather. Behind the lenses of her eyeglasses, the look in her eyes was compassionate without being friendly. “Come with me, please.”

  “Is she in there?”

  “Yes. Come with me.”

  “Sister—”

  “Please.” She was pointing to the next door down the hall. It stood ajar. “You have a decision to make and right now too little information for making it.”

  By chance or instinct, she had hit on the type of reasoning that could move my grandfather. After a moment of hesitation, he gave in and followed her into the room next to the infirmary. It was unmarked. She switched on a bare light overhead, revealing a desk and two bentwood chairs, a tall shelf crowded with dull-looking texts, an empty mesh wastebasket, and a metal filing cabinet. The surface of the desk was bare but for a blotter, a dreadnought telephone of the 1930s, and a framed photograph of that era’s pope sitting smugly on a throne, wearing a hat that looked like a white yarmulke. My grandfather took the seat across from hers.

  “It’s a very long time, I’ve no doubt, since a man set foot in this room,” she said, her tone disapproving and a touch melancholy. “Ordinarily you and I ought to be separated by a screen of some kind.”

  “Is that the information I’m going to need to make my decision?”

  The smart remark seemed to take them both a little by surprise. The prioress looked at him through half-lowered eyelids. “Maybe so,” she said mysteriously after a moment. “Now, I gave your wife some tea.”

  “You mentioned that.”

  “Valerian tea. It has sedative properties.”

  “Yes.”

  “And now she’s gone and fallen asleep.”

  “Ah.”

  “She was wrung out. I know you’re anxious to see her, my friend. But tonight we must let her sleep.”

  “Sister—”

  “Of course it’s inconvenient, you came all the way over here, and I’m sure you’re very concerned. Of course you are. I see it on your face. But you’ll agree, won’t you, that it would be an unkindness to wake her? Please. Go home. Come back in the morning or as soon as you can tomorrow. We’ll look after her until then.”

  “Sister, I, uh, truly, I appreciate the concern and the care you’ve already taken with her. But I just want to take her home. Tonight. Now.”

  “I see. And are you sure that she’ll want to go home with you?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Don’t take offense, please. I may be a nun, but I am also a woman and thus very sure that I know much more about men in general and husbands in particular than you do. My question was reasonable. If she wants so very much to be at home with you, then why isn’t she there at home with you right now?”

  It was a fair question, he had to admit.

  “She went out, she, uh, left. She was upset.”

  “Friend, let me tell you something. Your wife wasn’t ‘upset.’ She was out of her cotton-picking mind.” She seemed to listen to the echo of the phrase as it faded. She looked satisfied by the sound of it. “Did you actually see her, did you witness her behavior, at any point this evening?”

  “No.”

  “Did you hear her? Did you hear the language that came flying out of her mouth?”

  “I was at work,” my grandfather said. “When I got home, she had already left, I didn’t realize right away.”

  “I see,” the prioress said. “Listen, do you know how I found you tonight? How I happen to know your name, how I came to have your telephone number?”

  “I assumed . . . I figured she asked you to call.”

  “She did not say one word about you, as a matter of fact. Not in my hearing. I knew your name because, hmm, when was it, maybe two or three months back, your wife left a check for five hundred dollars in our charity box. Drawn on your joint checking account. I never cashed it. It was so much money. I felt it might be taking advantage. In any case, I kept the check. Your name was printed on it. That’s how I knew how to reach you.”

  “You’re saying she’s been here before.”

  “Your wife has been coming to our special ‘Sisters in Prayer’ service, it’s open to all women of faith, one Sunday a month for, oh, it must be a year now.”

  The compassion that had never entirely left her eyes, even when she was exercised and aggravated with my grandfather, now seemed to give way to outright pity.

  “You didn’t know,” she said.

  “No.”

  “But you do know . . . Forgive me, my friend. You do know that your wife isn’t just ‘upset.’ You do understand that she’s mentally ill?”

  He did understand it, but he had never said the words, aloud or to himself, or even permitted himself to squarely think the thought.

  “The things she was saying tonight, oh!” The prioress closed her eyes and shook her head a little. “Calling herself a witch. A ‘night witch,’ if you please. Calling herself liar, bad mother, whore. And worse. Telling me, ‘I killed my baby tonight.’ Saying she had, if you please, been violated, sexually, by a horse that had no skin, and that after it was over, she went to the toilet, and looked in, and saw her baby floating in there.” These words came out in a rush as if the prioress could not wait to get them out of her mouth and be done with them. “You’ve never heard talk like that from her?”

  “She never . . . She never put it . . . like that.”

  “Finally, well, I had enough, I suppose. I’m sitting with her, right beside her. I give her the tea, and I tell her, ‘Now, that’s enough. No more of that talk. And she does calm down. And she looks at me, and she takes my hands in hers. ‘I feel safe here,’ she says. ‘I only feel safe here. I want to stay. I have a vocation, Mother,’ she says. ‘I’m called.’”

  My grandfather surprised both of them. He laughed. “That is crazy,
” he said. “First of all, she’s married, to me. Second of all, she has a daughter who’s eleven years old. And third, she’s a Jew.”

  The prioress wanted to remind him that many women born Jewish had lived out their lives in orders.* He could see it on her face. No doubt there were plenty of nuns who had children, and ex-husbands, too.

  “It’s not necessarily crazy,” the prioress said. “But in this instance, I happen to agree with you. She may very well have a vocation. It isn’t for me and you to say if she does or she doesn’t. She can’t stay here, though, not like this. And yet, please, my friend, let’s be honest with each other and with ourselves: She can’t go home, either.”

  My grandfather started to protest, but she raised a pale hand. Her palm at the base of each finger was studded with callouses like ivory buttons. My grandfather closed his mouth.

  “I’m not a psychiatrist,” the prioress said, “and you are her husband, and so naturally and rightly it must be your decision, and I will defer to it as I must. But I am a trained nurse, I’ll have you know. And I do have experience in these matters. And I can tell you without a nickel’s worth of doubt that your wife needs to be under a doctor’s care. A psychiatrist’s care. Your wife needs to be in a mental hospital, friend, getting medical treatment, while I and all the sisters in this house pray for her recovery.”

  A floorboard creaked. The prioress looked up and my grandfather turned to the door. A nun stood in the doorway, small, thin, something mouselike in her long nose and the front teeth that showed in the parting of her lips. She lowered her eyes to the floor when my grandfather looked at her.

  “Is she awake, Sister Cyril?”

  Sister Cyril nodded. “And she seems . . . happy!” She looked up, a flash of defiance in her voice, and met my grandfather’s gaze.

  “Sister Cyril!”

  Sister Cyril lowered her head again. “She says she wants to tell him . . . about her vocation.”