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, infant
s 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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.