“She only learned you were coming the other day, isn’t that right? Did she know what time you two would be arriving today?”
“I must have forgotten to tell her,” my grandfather said. He had sent a telegram, which might have gone astray, but he did not want this woman feeling sorry for him. He looked at his watch. The doctor had been promised in five and no more than ten minutes hence. He gave my mother a curt nod. “Go ahead.”
My mother failed to take the cue. She was staring at something with an expression of uneasiness. My grandfather put a hand on her shoulder and followed her gaze. Expecting some ruin of a patient, shuffling, head-down, fingernails like guitar picks. He knew one instant of raw panic that the thing she was staring at, frozen in place, eyebrows furrowed, was my grandmother. But when he turned, he saw that my mother appeared simply to be staring at the wall.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” my mother said unconvincingly.
“Come, dear,” the woman in the white cardigan said again. This time she took hold of my mother’s elbow and pulled her gently toward a wide doorway between the stairways. She told my grandfather, “Please, have a seat. Dr. Medved won’t be long.”
My grandfather sat down in a Harvard chair by the front door, watching as my mother was led away. He stood up again and called out, “Excuse me?”
The woman in the white cardigan stopped and looked back at him. “Yes?”
“What is the play?”
“I really couldn’t tell you that,” said the woman. “I can’t make head or tail out of any of it.”
* * *
The woman introduced herself as Mrs. Outcault. Between the entry hall and the theater, at the far end of a long series of alternating left and right turns through one of the hospital’s lightning bolt–shaped wings, she punctuated the void of my mother’s silence with bursts of hospital history and lore. She had a sixteen-year-old daughter of her own, she said. She knew the type of thing a girl my mother’s age most wanted to hear about. If they passed a patient with an interesting biography or symptomology—narcolepsy, a pathological fear of hats, an inability to recognize danger, the folksinger Mr. Guthrie—she divulged it.
She told my mother that the hospital had a theater because of the opinions of a wealthy man named Adolf Hill, a manufacturer of necktie silk from Paterson. It was Mr. Hill’s belief that the ancient Greeks had been the sanest men who ever lived. This was due, Hill further believed, to the greatness of Greek drama, which allowed audiences and actors alike to face the frightful things inside and outside their skulls. When, in time, Hill’s wife was committed to Greystone, Hill had endowed construction of the Adolf and Millicent Hill Theater. It was not true, Mrs. Outcault said, that Hill deliberately arranged to have his wife committed in order to put his theories about drama therapy to the test, but it was possible that Mr. Hill’s theorizing was the thing that had driven poor Millicent insane. Around 1927 she had hanged herself in her room—not in the theater, thank goodness—by stringing together three neckties made from Empire Silk Company’s finest stock.
Outside the theater doors on a settee of tufted leather sat an old man in a green three-piece suit cut from a coarse-textured fabric the color of lederhosen and piped at the lapels and buttonholes in a paler shade of artichoke heart. He was sitting very erect with his hands on his knees. The lily of a pocket square peeped from the breast pocket of his jacket. He seemed to be studying the opposite wall with surprising intensity, given the fact that it was a blank expanse of beige. He did not look over or break off his study of the blank wall until Mrs. Outcault reached out to touch his shoulder. “Author! Author!”
He started, flinched, and cried out in a voice like a rusty pump.
“Oh, I always spook him,” Mrs. Outcault said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Casamonaca.” She clasped her hands together at her breast and looked deeply sorry. “Mr. Casamonaca wrote the play.”
Mr. Casamonaca lurched to his feet and made another sound that did not form itself into a word or words. He smiled. He was long-shanked and, before gravity had bent him to its purpose, might have been tall once. Inside the green suit he was mostly skeleton. His palm against my mother’s was powdery and cool.
“How are you?” Mrs. Outcault said very loudly.
Mr. Casamonaca nodded genially and made a looping benedictory gesture in the air, just in front of his face, more ornate than a cross, as if he were a priest in a sect whose symbol was the holy coat hanger of God.
“Sign language,” Mrs. Outcault explained. “Poor thing’s deaf as a boot. I heard he was struck by lightning, though I can’t say for sure.”
With his long pallid fingers and his nails manicured to a moonlike luster, Mr. Casamonaca continued to draw things across the space between him and my mother. The regular rippling of a corrugated roof. The outline of a jellyfish. The downward spiral of water in a toilet bowl.
Mrs. Outcault nodded emphatically. “Oh yes,” she said. “I know. You’re so right.”
“What’s he saying?”
“I have no idea,” Mrs. Outcault said through a tight smile. She kept on nodding. “It isn’t real sign language at all. Just something he made up. He never learned to speak English very well, and in the past few years he’s lost the ability to read and write in Italian.”
“He— Then how did he write a play?”
“He dictated it to your mother, which is why she has been so involved in all this. Using those crazy signs of his.”
“My mom doesn’t know any sign language.”
“Apparently, she is fluent in Mr. Casamonaca’s.”
My mother watched Mr. Casamonaca’s hands and fingers explain the behavior of skyrockets, the opening of a can of beer, and the proper means for setting a golf ball on a tee.
“It looks like he’s just making it up as he goes along,” she said.
“That is a popular theory,” said Mrs. Outcault.
* * *
Dr. Medved’s head was a thumb upthrust from his shirt collar. Blue ink stain of chin stubble, white lab coat worn open over a summer suit the color of a manila folder. Purple bow tie. Barrel-chested with a heavy gut, the body of a dockworker belied or redeemed by framed diplomas from NYU and the Tulane School of Medicine. He winced as he belayed himself into the swivel chair behind his desk. His face suggested gas pain, a hemorrhoid, maybe both. The chair’s steel joints creaked. Its spring uncoiled with a clang of metal fatigue.
“As I told you, there has been marked improvement,” Dr. Medved said.
As in the course of their brief phone conversation, there was something off in the doctor’s tone, a hint of hedging or doubt. Or maybe it was only chronic heartburn. Medved set down the paper cup of water he had stopped to fill from the cooler outside his office. He yanked open a drawer in his desk and found a bottle of Bromo-Seltzer. He unscrewed the bottle, dropped two tablets into the cup of water, and unbent a paperclip before he seemed to notice that my grandfather had yet to reply. He stirred the cup with the paperclip, looking up at my grandfather from under his wide-nib eyebrows. “Anything you want to say to that?”
Ordinarily, my grandfather distrusted Jews who wore bow ties, but something about Medved—probably the paperclip—inclined him to make an exception. “Naturally, I’m relieved to hear it,” my grandfather said.
“But you’ve been relieved before. Of course. I understand. I have to tell you, though. A future setback. A relapse, should one occur. It won’t in any way invalidate your present feelings of relief.”
“In my experience, Doc, with all due respect, I beg to differ.”
Dr. Medved nodded. The tablets hissed and chuckled in the cup. He picked it up and glugged it down. He held up a finger, begging my grandfather’s indulgence for one minute, then curled the hand into a fist that he pressed against his abdomen under the rib cage. His expression grew thoughtful, searching. He let out a belch that was low and resonant, a sustained note drawn across the strings of a cello. He ducked his head shyly and smiled an embarrasse
d little smile. “Hoo boy.”
“Mazel tov.”
“Forgive me,” he said. “Lunch was rather heavy. Now, listen. You hear me say improvement, I understand you may have some reason to be skeptical. Improvement is measured at a scale so much finer, more incremental, than calamity, isn’t it? And it’s perfectly normal to feel apprehension about a loved one’s return to so-called civilization. As a general rule, when it comes to the families, I encourage efforts to keep expectations low, to minimize the impact of the inevitable disappointment.”
This was more or less a précis of my grandfather’s approach to existence itself. Hearing Medved formulate it, and in this particular context, undid a string long knotted inside him.
“I think I can do that,” he said.
31
She hangs back in the dark of the little theater. The bright stage under the proscenium reminds her of something she saw once in a Stewart Granger movie, a bonfire blazing in the maw of a stone god. She seems to be seeing faces everywhere today. Maybe she ought to take her mother’s place here in this creepy joint. Above the proscenium, two more faces: masks representing the poles of mania. A woman in a gold-and-black-striped leotard looks out from the wings, her painted face as hectic as a ballerina’s. A fat man in a bathrobe plays glassy ostinatos on a Wurlitzer organ, shards of waltz from some half-familiar whole. Rocking back and forth on the bench, wildly out of tempo with his music. Later, she will learn that the fat man was really a fat woman.
There is something awful about this cave of make-believe with its smell of velvet and dust. It has the magic weirdness of the old amusement halls on Uncle Ray’s nine-ball circuit, the back rooms beyond the pool tables and pinball machines. The penny catacombs of entertainment. Live chickens in glass music boxes that dance when subjected to mild electrocution through the feet. Coin-operated beheadings of tiny queens, lynchings of tiny clockwork Negroes. A lifesize Little Egypt automaton enacting a creaky seizure of a hoochie-koochie dance. A clockwork Lucifer with a clockwork leer who makes predictions about your love life in racy slang rendered incomprehensible by time.
She stands unnerved by the bright mouth of the stage as if it is about to render prophecy.
* * *
“It’s all right,” the woman in the white cardigan says. “Do you see your mother, sweetheart?”
“No.”
Here and there among the seats she sees the outlined heads of other people in the audience, but none of them is right. She cannot imagine and will never discover the nature or identities of these other people. Doctors. Attendants. Napoleons and mothers of Christ. She hears the clunk of a switch. In the sudden total dark, a ghostly half-moon slews across her retinae.
The lights come up again on a field of clover. Trefoil hands, faces uplifted toward a shiny sun that hangs above their spiky pink and white heads. A swarm of fat-bottomed bees careen in and out among the flowers. Wordlessly, they quarrel with the flowers. They dip into the flowers’ faces with the bowls of big wooden spoons.
George Washington appears, dressed in knee britches, a powdered wig, a greatcoat, hatchet slung from his belt. He stomps around abusing the flowers and exhorting the bees to molest them for their nectar. This is not George Washington, it turns out, but a herdsman of bees. The purpose or significance of the hatchet, apparently not intended for the chopping down of a cherry tree, remains unclear. The bee herder watches contentedly as his bees fly back and forth with their ladles full of nectar from the looted flowers to their unseen hive. All of this is routine for the bee herder. He lounges on a hummock and fights to stay awake. The sun with its metallic glow goes down. Evening hoists a silvery moon into the heavens.
A pair of bears, unseen by the bee herder, shamble on from stage left. They swing their heads in unison from side to side as they advance. They are shabby-looking bears, a couple of ruffians with patchy coats. They observe the traffic in nectar. When the bee herder’s back is turned, they accost the plumpest of his bees. They threaten it with violence and confiscate its wooden spoon. With bearish ardor, they guzzle up every drop. At last the cries of the assaulted bee attract the attention of the drowsing bee herder. He leaps to his feet and throws his silver hatchet at the bears. But instead of striking them, it just keeps rising, all the way to the Moon overhead, where it lodges with a soft thump like a dictionary falling onto a pillow.
The bee herder studies the problem. He fidgets with his wig. Then he remembers his rope. He makes a lariat, swings it over his head with an audible whirr, and then launches the loop toward the hatchet with its handle protruding from the Moon. The loop misses the handle and the rope falls back to earth. He windmills it and launches it moonward again. This time the eye of the rope snags the wooden handle. He gives it a tug and then starts to pull himself up the rope hand over hand. Bees, bears, and flowers raise their heads and gawp in amazement. The bee herder climbs unamazed.
Darkness falls over the field of clover, dawn breaks on the Moon. Jagged moon mountains glow cool and silvery blue in the background as the bee herder, hatchet restored, strolls along unfazed by his new surroundings. He passes silver moon trees like the skeletons of cacti. He picks a bouquet of silver moonflowers. As he turns, he notices a small silver ball rolling toward his feet. A woman comes running in after it but stops when she sees him. She wears a silver gown and a silver crown. A large pair of silver wings rise up behind her, a moth’s wings, billowing gently in a lunar breeze. He picks up the ball, and for a moment they regard each other. Then he tosses her the ball, and she catches it.
What befalls the bee herder and the Queen of the Moon after this first encounter—how the pantomime is meant to end—will remain forever unknown by my mother.*
* * *
The mountains of the Moon glowing under the light of a blue gel at the back of the stage were tinfoil balls, massed and squashed into cake-frosting peaks. The moon trees were a couple of branching coat racks wrapped in more foil—“silver paper,” my grandmother always called it. The moonflowers were clusters of eggbeaters, whisks, and serving spoons planted in cake pans. It was all so ridiculous and sad. It was pathetic. And yet the foil shone in the subaqueous light. The coat racks raising their jubilant arms and the bouquets of kitchen implements had the incongruous dignity of homely things.
Looking into the radiant mouth of the stage, my mother felt a strong sense of recognition, as if she had visited this world in a dream. As if, when she was a child, the fog of her mother’s dreams had rolled through the house every night and left this sparkling residue on her memory. There was no way the baffling history of a spacefaring bee herder and his visit to the Moon had been dictated to her mother in some kind of bogus hand symbology by poor old lightning-addled Mr. Casamonaca. The Queen of the Moon entered, chasing the little ball of foil, in her tinfoil dress and crown, and her wobbling wings made from nylons stretched over coat hangers and glued with sequins. This was not the Moon at all. It was some other world—some other mother—uncharted and hitherto unknown.
It was just the most beautiful thing, my mother told me.
Then the bright glints seemed to startle from her the tinfoil crown and swarm the air between her mother and her, jigging and flittering, until they all flew away and left her in the dark.
* * *
She came to herself on the leather settee outside the theater door, sitting beside Mr. Casamonaca, her nose rife with the smell of mothballs oozing from his suit. Mrs. Outcault crouched in front of her, frowning as if watching a doubtful cake through the window of an oven. Behind Mrs. Outcault stood a bear, three clovers, two bees, and the fat pianist in his bathrobe and slippers. Behind them stretched an expanse of wall covered in the same wallpaper that was in the entry hall, which my grandfather had caught her staring at without understanding why. The thing was that if you looked at the wallpaper one way it was nothing special, a repeating pattern of carnation-pink escutcheons with white roundels, each shield supported by a pair of gold willow-leaf garlands. But if you looked at the wallpaper anoth
er way, you were confronted by a crowd of bloody-mouthed faces, ass-eared and staring.*
“Here she is!” Mrs. Outcault said. “You’re fine, honey, aren’t you?”
My mother nodded, though she was not entirely sure. She averted her eyes from the wallpaper and found Mr. Casamonaca beside her. He had his chin in the air and was looking down his long nose at her with an air of satisfaction and calm. Don’t worry, said his eyes, everything is unfolding just as I intended.
“I enjoyed your play,” my mother told him.
In reply, Mr. Casamonaca gravely unscrewed an invisible jar. My mother heard heels tapping, a rustling that was also a rattle. My grandmother came running into the small lobby minus her wings, with her crown askew, pressing it against her head with one hand. Mrs. Outcault stood up, and everyone stepped back and looked at my grandmother except Mr. Casamonaca, who seemed not to notice. My mother got up too fast. Her pulse drummed its fingers along the hinge of her jaw.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” my mother said. It was the first thing she could think of to say.
My mother went to her mother, who slid her cool bare arms alongside my mother’s neck and scissored her between them. It was an awkward but sincere embrace. My mother’s gaze strayed again to the wallpaper with its thousand gaping, long-eared faces, and my grandmother knew without following it what there was to see. “You don’t have to look,” she said.
My mother turned her face from the wallpaper for good.
* * *
“You have been in prison,” Dr. Medved said.
“Wallkill,” my grandfather said. “Thirteen months.”
“For a violent crime.”
My grandfather had anticipated that from time to time, over the course of his life to come, he would be expected to give some account of events between August 1957 and September 1958. He would do so, he had decided, only when asked directly by someone who had a reasonable right to know. Employers, inevitably; though in his present situation, since he’d been recruited by Sam Chabon—who was filled in by the warden—on the very grounds of the prison, nothing had needed to be said. He would tell my grandmother about his time served, provided she asked; the details were nothing he felt a need to volunteer. As for my mother, What was it like in prison? had been among the few spontaneous questions aimed his way during their drive down from New York City, and she had seemed content—or, according to her version, she had been obliged to content herself—with a one-word answer: Interesting. Beyond these moments, my grandfather had estimated that he was likely to be forced into, and had therefore budgeted, ballpark three to five discussions of his incarceration between now and the day he died. He decided to spend one of them now.