“Hello, dollface.”
She went up the steps and put her arms around Ray’s neck and kissed him on the cheek. It was smoother than her father’s cheek. As always, he smelled of gardenia and tobacco ash. She did not have to go up on tiptoe to kiss him. Not yet fifteen, she was two inches taller than he was.
“Look at you! Nobody told me you were already done growing up,” he said. “This is going to be a piece of cake. My work is done!”
My mother did not reply.
“Right?” Uncle Ray said. “I’m looking forward to this, aren’t you?”
“I guess.”
“Sure you are, baby. This is going to be fun.”
There was a flat metal mailbox by the front door with a wire bracket to hold the evening paper. The name on the mailbox was einstein. My mother had been told that this was the name of Uncle Ray’s landlady, but seeing it spelled out on the mailbox gave her an uneasy feeling. It was a name long since affixed to matters of crucial importance that she knew she was never going to understand.
“You said a girl.”
The voice was pitched low, masculine. It belonged to the woman my mother had seen at the window. She seemed old to my mother at the time, but in retrospect my mother thought she must not have been sixty. Her black hair was grained with silver. It jutted out on either side of her head in two fins that curved upward at the tips, the toes of a pair of Persian slippers. She was wearing what appeared to be a lab coat over a blouse printed with chrysanthemums and a brown skirt. She drew a thread of some bitter odor along with her when she came out onto the porch.
“Mrs. Einstein,” Uncle Ray told my mother. “This is a girl, Mrs. E. She’s only . . . How old are you now, sweetheart?”
“Fourteen.”
Mrs. Einstein looked my mother up and down, her hands folded across her chest. My mother decided that the odor was coming from Mrs. Einstein. Later my mother would learn that her uncle’s landlady worked as a receptionist at a veterinary hospital out in Pikesville. A smell compounded from carbolic and the secretions of animals’ fear glands followed Mrs. Einstein wherever she went.
“Fourteen,” Mrs. Einstein said. “Nonsense.” She turned to Ray. “What do you take me for?”
“I can produce her birth documents,” Uncle Ray said with smoothness and assurance, worrying my mother, who was not sure she owned any birth documents. “If you really think it’s necessary.”
The summer before, as a hurricane was about to hit the Gulf Coast of Texas, my mother had seen a picture in the newspaper of people in its path nailing sheets of plywood over the windows of their houses. A similar procedure now seemed to be undertaken by Mrs. Einstein with the expression in her eyes.
“It’s all necessary when you’re involved,” she said to Uncle Ray. “I have to take every precaution.”
“Now, Mrs. E.”
“When you’re involved I read the fine print.” She shook her head infinitesimally, as if a fuller expression of disapproval might implicate her in whatever mischief her boarder had gotten himself into. Then she went back into the house.
“What did she mean, ‘You said a girl’?” my mother asked her uncle. “Does she think I’m a boy?”
Uncle Ray’s teeth were veined with gold. When he smiled, you felt he was giving you a glimpse of the wares he planned to sell you.
“No, sweetheart,” he said, “she thought you were a woman.” He started to ruffle her hair, then changed his mind and settled for a pat on the shoulder. “Don’t let her— Well, well.”
He was looking past my mother at my grandfather, coming up the walk with one of my mother’s suitcases under each arm, holding the record player with his left hand and the train case and box of records with his right.
“Shame on you, Mandrake,” Uncle Ray said to my mother. “Making Lothar here carry all your bags.”
“He wouldn’t let me help.”
“No, he wouldn’t, would he,” Uncle Ray said.
My grandfather kept his head down, his eyes hidden behind the brim of his hat. He tromped up the porch steps and tried to bull past my mother and Uncle Ray without saying a word.
“Hey, sourpuss,” Uncle Ray said. He stepped into his brother’s path. He waited until my grandfather looked up from under the brim of his fedora. “You can’t even manage a hello?”
My grandfather paused. He nodded without meeting his brother’s gaze. “Hello,” he said.
“That’s it? That’s all I get?”
“Move it,” my grandfather said softly.
Uncle Ray stepped aside with a show of mock alarm. My grandfather went through the door with the luggage.
“We’re putting her in the attic,” Uncle Ray called after him. “Good luck getting all that up the ladder. I’d help you if you weren’t such a jerk.”
My grandfather reminded his brother that he didn’t need help. Uncle Ray rolled his eyes at my mother. She wanted to smile but could not manage it. She was already apprehensive about having to sleep in an attic. She had not been told that the attic was reached by a ladder. This worried her, too. What if she had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night?
“Good thing he’s not sticking around,” Uncle Ray said. “Himself and Mrs. Einstein under the same roof? Marciano versus Moore, duking it out for the heavyweight sourpuss title.”
“He’s going to prison,” my mother said, remembering now that in spite of the affection and sense of mild wonder Uncle Ray inspired in her, there had always been something about him that got on her nerves. He was not a serious person. “If he weren’t going to prison, neither of us would have to be here at all.”
Uncle Ray looked as if she had slapped him. My mother felt instantly sorry. She forced herself to smile. “Anyway,” she said. “I’d put my money on Daddy.”
“For the sourpuss title?”
“Definitely.”
“How much?”
“Five dollars?”
“You’re on,” Uncle Ray said. They shook on it.
Mrs. Einstein fed them. The fifteen dollars a week she charged Uncle Ray for a room with its own bathroom on the second floor of her house did not include meals. Mrs. Einstein took no interest in food. On the rare occasions when she cooked, the results were nothing anybody would pay money to eat. Though not observant, she shopped at a kosher butcher. She would buy the cheapest cuts, all string and gristle, sear them, then submerge them in a signature brown gravy that reminded my mother of Jell-O, only salty and hot. The vegetables were boiled until safely gray. Once a week Mrs. Einstein forced herself to sit down and eat a piece of fried beef liver with grilled onions, and if Uncle Ray and my mother were around, she forced them to eat it, too. Her husband and son had always refused to touch liver, and they were dead, and she was alive.
On that first night, however, she served an excellent dairy supper. She had stopped at an appetizing store and brought home smoked whitefish, pickled herring, a dozen deviled eggs. She put out cottage cheese and some sliced celery and carrots. For dessert there was a marvel of a cake, a slender block frosted with chocolate that revealed, when Mrs. Einstein sliced it open, gaudy layers of pink, green, and yellow separated by ribbons of raspberry jam. Mrs. Einstein had no illusions about her table—she had no illusions about anything except maybe the tonic properties of beef liver. But she knew where my grandfather would be headed after he departed her house. She felt that his last free meal ought to be edible, at least.
“You’re very kind,” my grandfather said, pushing away his plate.
“Not really,” Mrs. Einstein said. She looked at my mother, who was just then contemplating asking for a second slice of ribbon cake. “One is enough,” Mrs. Einstein said.
My mother nodded. She put her fork down.
“Maybe your brother told you, I have doubts about this arrangement,” Mrs. Einstein said. “I have a hard time picturing Reynard looking after a child, and I worry that the burden is going to fall on me. I don’t much care for children. I had one of my own. That was more than
sufficient.”
My grandfather turned on his brother. “You said it was fine with her.”
“Fine is a relative term,” Uncle Ray observed. “Maybe I ought to have said, as fine as anything ever gets with this one.”
My mother told me that she still remembered the heat spreading across her cheeks as she listened to this exchange. A spasm of restlessness took hold in her legs, a kind of panic of the muscles. She ran through a handful of smart or angry or cold remarks she might toss at Mrs. Einstein on the subject of children and their feelings toward Mrs. Einstein. She reconfirmed with herself the certainty that she had nowhere else to go.
“I don’t need it to be fine,” Mrs. Einstein said. “Obviously, the girl needs a home.”
It was not yet eight o’clock when my grandfather took his hat from a peg in the front hall. My mother tried to stay put on Mrs. Einstein’s sofa. The sofa was upholstered in pale pink chenille sealed in a layer of clear vinyl. Under her circle skirt, my mother could feel her bare thighs sticking to the vinyl slipcover, and she pretended that the adhesion would be sufficient. But in the end she tore loose and ran to her father. He suffered her to put her arms around his waist and her cheek against his shirtfront. When he saw that she was not going to make a scene, he took hold of her head with both hands and raised her face to his.
“If I thought you were not up to this, I would not ask you to do it,” he said. “Do you understand?”
My mother nodded. A tear spilled from her left eye, streaked down her temple, and chimed inside her right ear.
“You’re tough,” he said. “Like me.”
He lowered his lips to her forehead and left the scratch of his whiskers on it. Hours afterward, lying on a folding cot in Mrs. Einstein’s attic, trying to fall asleep, she could feel the abrasion of his kiss radiating heat across her forehead like a sunburn. It was only then, in the dark and the smell of old luggage and galoshes, that it occurred to my mother she should have asked my grandfather what he would have done if he’d thought she wasn’t up to the ordeal. She lay there in the dark, picturing to herself all the bright forms his mercy might have taken if only she had not been so tough.
25
On the original charge of aggravated assault, my grandfather might have been looking at five years. But by 1957 New York was already struggling with the judicial backlog that, at the end of the sixties, brought its court system to the point of collapse. As a veteran and a family man with no criminal record, my grandfather was persuaded to waive his right to a trial and plead guilty to a lesser charge of simple assault. He was sentenced to twenty months in Wallkill Prison.
Wallkill had been built in a spirit of experiment, when FDR was governor of New York. Its perimeter was not enclosed by a wall or a fence. Its tree-lined walkways and gray Gothic stonework reminded visitors of a small men’s college or seminary. It had a library, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a profitable dairy farm, a horse barn, machine and craft shops, greenhouses and vegetable gardens, an orchard, livestock, and bees. Under qualified instructors, inmates were required to learn and paid to work at manual or agricultural trades, or to put in a daily shift for making eyeglasses or plastic novelties in one of Wallkill’s two manufactories. The warden recruited the prison guards personally to ensure that they were in sympathy with Wallkill’s philosophy and methods. The guards dressed like park rangers. They carried handcuffs but no guns or batons. You had your own cell with a small outdoor terrace on which you were free to grow vegetables or flowers. You carried a key to your cell. Between lights-out and reveille you were confined to quarters, but once you had proved trustworthy you were given a fair amount of liberty to come and go. As long as you reported promptly for work, chow, exercise, chapel, and other mandatory activities, your spare time was your own.
The first night in his cell my grandfather had trouble sleeping. Outside the window the prison yard was flooded with light. The cell door was inset with a large peephole that let in light and noise from the gallery. The mattress crinkled. The air felt close and heavy. Sleeping inmates made a racket out of a cartoon, a barn at night transformed into a calliope of cows, pigs, and chickens playing a wheezy polka. At intervals too random to anticipate or adjust to, the prisoner in the next cell would break into spasmodic coughing. It sounded like a drum falling down a flight of stairs. It sounded painful.
My grandfather lay for hours with his arms folded under his head, bothered by thoughts of his wife and daughter. He pictured my mother jostled in the grandstand of a racetrack, losing tickets snowing down around her as a crowd rose to its feet and roared. He pictured her alone at a table in the back of a poolhall in some godforsaken place like Hagerstown, hair falling across a page of algebra or Modern Screen, while Uncle Ray sandbagged some dumb bastard who afterward beat him to death in an alley before raping my mother. My grandmother, he envisioned shorn and strapped to a table in a harsh-lit operating theater, plunged into tubs of ice, wound into a straightjacket, and force-fed medicated pap. He sat up, shuddering.
My grandfather went to the window to look at the night sky, but it turned out that the floodlights of Wallkill abolished the stars. Returning to the cot, my grandfather determined to map the ceiling of his cell with the stars he knew to be overhead. He pretended that the ceiling could be rolled away like the roof of an observatory dome. With a clear view of the heavens he contemplated the Dolphin, the Indian, the Microscope. He found the Ring Nebula in Lyra. Cassiopeia and Andromeda ascended the inner surface of his skull with their uncomfortable mythology. He saw the mother crooked as an M with torment, the oblique angle of the daughter chained and waiting for something monstrous to arrive. It was nothing he wanted to think about. He switched off the Zeiss of his imagination. The stars winked out.
He rolled onto his side, and in time my grandmother returned to his thoughts. She lay naked across their marriage bed on her belly, with her legs pressed together and my grandfather standing by her feet. His gaze traveled up an arrow of shadow that pointed to the cleft in her ass. Her ass, that ripe and downy apricot. He took hold of her feet by the ankles and opened her legs.
He fell asleep and was roused from a dream of a girl he’d been sweet on in high school by the blare of the bell that must have provoked it. When he opened his eyes, he was in prison. In twenty months it would be 1959.
He put on the dark blue workshirt and gray poplin trousers of the Wallkill uniform and sat down on the cot to lace up his boots. As he sat down, he happened to look out the window at the sky. Mysteriously, that turned out to be a mistake.
As I no doubt have made clear by now, my grandfather was not a man for tears, and when tears did come he fought them. The last time he had allowed himself to weep freely, he’d been in short pants and Herbert Hoover had been the president. Like blood, tears had a function. They served to indicate the severity and depth of the blow you had absorbed. When your friend died in your arms, your wife had lost her sanity, or you were saying goodbye to your daughter in Mrs. Einstein’s front hall, tears flowed, and as with blood, you stanched them. So what the fuck was this? A blue sky on a clear morning at the end of a Catskills summer. Big deal. A matter of wavelength and refraction. An agitation of the rods and cones.
Meanwhile, breakfast was at seven o’clock sharp. If you showed up at 7:01, he had been informed, you would be shut out of the mess hall and then go hungry until lunch. The bathroom was all the way down at the end of the gallery. There might be a wait for the toilet, for the sink, for a place in front of the mirror. What was more, he needed to take a piss. Any second now he was going to stop looking at the sky and tie his boots and go. It was time to get moving.
There was a knock on the door. My grandfather jumped. “Yes?” he called. He cleared his throat. “Yes, what is it?”
“Excuse me. I don’t mean to intrude.” There was something arch about the intonation—mannered was the right word. “I’m— It’s Dr. Alfred Storch.”
On arrival yesterday my grandfather had been examined by an internist and in
terviewed by a psychiatrist. Neither of them had been named Alfred Storch. The name of the warden was Dr. Wallack.
“Just a minute.” My grandfather knotted his bootlaces and got up off the cot. When he opened the door, he was surprised to find another prisoner standing there. He had noticed this man in the mess hall the night before. Well over six feet tall, gaunt, silver in his black brush mustache. An apologetic stoop from a lifetime of ducking through doorways. He wore heavy-rimmed black glasses, and his eyes were a mess. The left one turned outward. It was hyperopic and swam huge behind its lens. The right eye was nearsighted, and its correction left it looking shrunken by comparison. He appeared to be wearing not ordinary spectacles but some kind of crude device of his own manufacture that would let him see around corners or in opposite directions. Dr. Storch held out his right hand, large and long-fingered. On a piano keyboard it would have spanned an octave and a half without stretching.
“I’m just next door,” Dr. Storch said. I’m chust next door. It was a German accent, tinged with British instruction. It sounded pretty classy, Leslie Howard playing a Prussian count. “I wanted to make sure you, ah—” He broke off and averted his face from my grandfather’s, though the left eye maintained its vigil. “Terribly sorry. I see I’m disturbing you.”
My grandfather wiped his cheeks savagely on the sleeve of his workshirt. “Not at all,” he said. “I was just going to wash up before breakfast.”
“Right,” said Dr. Storch. “You know I, I saw your door was closed, you see, and you’re new here, so I wasn’t sure if you knew—”
“I know,” my grandfather said. “Seven sharp or they lock you out.”
“Oh, they really do,” Dr. Storch said. “They are sticklers.”
It was worded like a complaint, but to my grandfather it sounded more like boasting. You would have thought Dr. Storch himself had formulated the policy on promptness at mealtime.
My grandfather followed into the gallery and closed the door of his cell behind him. He took the key from his pocket.