The truth is that if he hadn’t been so worried about his wife’s mental state, my grandfather might have welcomed a couple of days in jail. Repentance is the most solitary of pursuits, and there could be no better place for penitence than shelved on a steel bunk in the Tombs. But scenarios of imminent breakdown and disaster at home began to obsess him. Though he hated asking for help more than anything else, in particular from people who loved him or would do it free of charge, my grandfather saw no alternative but to tell Shulman to try to track down his kid brother.
Uncle Ray had been ordained as a rabbi at the age of twenty-three, a wonder boy of learning. But sometime in the early 1950s my great-uncle had begun to reverse himself on questions of chance and divine intention. He had resigned his pulpit in northwest Baltimore and now made a good living hustling pool and poker up and down the Delmarva peninsula. To raise my grandfather’s bail, Ray required a week’s time, a supply of willing victims, and a surprise win by Hopeless Hope in the fifth at Hialeah.
My grandfather walked out of the Tombs with enough money for a shave, a bus, a Zagnut bar for my mother, and coffee and a donut for himself when he reached the Paterson bus terminal. Through Shulman, coached to represent himself to my grandmother as “a lawyer involved with your husband’s business,” my grandfather had arranged for his wife to meet his bus at ten-thirty.
At eleven-fifteen there was still no sign of her. He used his last dime to call the house.
“I’m here,” he said.
“Here? Where is here?”
“In Paterson. At the bus.”
“Paterson,” she repeated. She might have heard rumors, her tone suggested, of there being such a place. She found her adopted homeland overburdened by places with preposterous names.
“Didn’t Shulman tell you?”
“Shulman? Who is this Shulman?”
“The lawyer. Shulman.”
“Shulman is the lawyer. Yes, I see.” You would have assumed she was jotting the words down for subsequent study: Paterson. Shulman. Lawyer. “And now tell me, please, who are you?”
Only much later did my grandfather learn there had been a story in the Daily News. But he understood now that in spite of his efforts, word had spread.
“Look,” he said. “I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry.”
“Are you? And why is that?”
“Darling, I know. I did a terrible thing, I’ll sort it out. I swear. I could not be more sorry. I know how worried you must have been.”
“Oh, but not in the least!” Because of her French accent, there was always a showiness to my grandmother’s sarcasm. “Every time I’m starting to worry, then I think of you jumping out of the airplane, bringing emergency hair combs to the dishevel-ded ladies of Binghamtown, New York.”
He winced, recognizing in this distorted version the lameness of the cover story he had concocted with Shulman. To sell it—as she clearly understood—he had been counting on the marginality of Binghamton to his immigrant wife’s disorderly mental maps. But as usual she had seen through him and his stratagems. Like many of the spouses of “the lucky ones,” my grandfather had observed that what got labeled luck was really stubbornness married to a knack for observation, a fluid sense of the truth, a sharp ear for lies, and a deeply suspicious nature. They’d had the same type of luck in South Philadelphia, but there you could do more with it than merely survive.
“Honey,” he pleaded. “I just spent a week in jail. I’m filthy, I’m half dead, I’m in a bus station in Paterson. Please. Come get me.”
“You have eaten something?”
“I had a donut. How is she?”
“She is at school.”
He had not asked for my mother’s whereabouts. They could be inferred from the time of day and the day of the week. But he let it pass. His question had been as pointless as any other.
“And this donut you ate,” she said. “How big it was?”
“How big? It was a donut. It was donut-size. Darling—”
“But it filled up your stomach?”
“Sure.”
“Good,” she said just before she hung up on him. “Then you will have energy for the long walk home.”
He pleaded with a soldier bound for Trenton on leave and wasted the dime on another call home. My grandmother had taken the phone off the hook. For the soldier’s benefit he pretended, while listening to the busy signal, to hold a brief conversation with his wife in which he was forgiven and redeemed. He coughed to cover the clatter as the phone returned the dime, which paid for the bus to Ho-Ho-Kus. It dropped him on Sheridan Avenue.
He walked surrounded, for a long time, by tracts of new construction. Dirt lawns, planted saplings, houses like boxcars in snaking lines. When he drove past these new housing tracts at forty-five miles per hour on his way to work every day, they had appeared harmless, contained. On foot he could not seem to get past them. Houses oozed without limit in every direction. Cornfields, orchards, stands of oak and hickory that had seemed untouchable by time or steel had all been dragged under. My grandfather felt a stirring of unease that grew stronger the nearer to home he came. He worried that, in his absence, the ooze would have spread to overtop their white house on its little green hill.
He shook off the thought. He was irritated with himself for thinking it. But as he threaded his way among the housing developments, the image returned to plague him: his house, his wife and daughter, driven beneath the ooze. At last he turned off the county road onto a road paved with gravel and found himself safely among apple trees and shoots of corn. The panic subsided. But he could not seem to reassure himself that his family would not be drowned.
* * *
The way I heard the story was that sometime after the fall of France my grandmother, unwed, not yet eighteen, and pregnant with my mother, had been taken in by Carmelite nuns in the countryside outside of Lille, where her family were prominent Jewish dealers in horses and hides. On learning that she was pregnant, and with the bastard of a Catholic—unappeased by knowing that the father was a handsome young doctor—her family had disowned her. It was the family of the handsome young doctor who had arranged things with the nuns. Shortly after my mother’s birth, my grandmother’s family was deported to Auschwitz, where they perished. After the handsome young doctor had treated the injuries of some local members of the Resistance, the SS had shot him.
All her life my grandmother’s family looked askance at her interest in drama, poetry, handicraft. The nuns, by contrast, were sympathetic, aesthetic. They supported themselves by making and selling fragrant wreaths of laurel and dried flowers. They tended orchards and beehives and a meadow dotted with sheep. When I was eight or nine my mother had explained the concept of survivor’s guilt to me, and told me that in her mother’s case this was one of its sources: She had never been happier than with the sisters of the Lille Carmel.
My grandparents’ farmhouse, on eleven acres outside Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, had neither nuns nor sheep. But there was a meadow and an apple orchard, and my grandfather had spent their first winter building hives and honeycomb frames according to plans in a book from the public library. He had taken out a lease on the property in anticipation of my grandmother’s discharge from her first hospitalization, from late 1952 to late 1954. He had hoped the place might carry her back to the remembered sweetness of the Carmel.
The apples had proved stony. The special-order French bees were prey to wanderlust and ennui. But from her first sight of the farmhouse, with its gingerbread, tangle of roses, and fresh coat of whitewash, my grandmother had conceded to my grandfather’s logic. She emerged from that first time at Greystone in a fragile and quiet state, holding herself like an egg balanced on a spoon, but for the next twenty-eight months they lived on the farm in relative contentment. No angel inspired her to bare the prophecies of her body to fellow passengers on buses or trolley cars. She abandoned the bouts of prolonged fasting that rendered her skin translucent to an inner light equivalent in her mind to the Christ
of her guardian nuns. She found work, taking leads in three productions at the prestigious Paper Mill Playhouse and being cast in a small role in a Broadway revival of Ah! Wilderness that closed out of town. Until the spring of 1957 the Skinless Horse had kept its gibes and railleries to itself.
Sometime during the week preceding my grandfather’s rampage at Feathercombs, Inc., her cruel familiar returned to take up residence in a grand hickory tree in the house’s front yard. The precise moment of its reappearance, like the reason thereof, remained unclear to my grandfather. In hindsight he recalled my grandmother once or twice having held herself very still, eyes closed, as if fighting down a bout of nausea. He remembered a shudder that she repressed, a smile that hung too long from the hooks of her face. For all my grandfather knew, the Skinless Horse might have been hanging around for months before it decided to occupy the tree fort my grandfather had built in the hickory tree as a thirteenth birthday present for my mother.
The day he got out of jail the first thing he saw, coming down the hill from the main road, was the tree. It was a sixty-footer, planted well before the turn of the century by the house’s original occupants, a fellowship of free-love Christians. At the height of summer it would spread its leaves across the sky like a child’s drawing of a tree, a perfect circle of crayon green. Hidden among its branches, the tree fort was my mother’s galleon and keep. Now at the base of the tree there was a burnt blotch from which four jagged streaks extended upward. It looked like the print of a giant paw.
The eyeholes of the tree fort stared down at my grandfather as he circled around to the kitchen at the back of the farmhouse. They never used the front door. My grandfather hauled himself up the last three steps of his long walk home onto the back porch. The boards under his wing tips were new last summer. The previous porch was rotten and colonized by insects, and my grandfather had demolished it with a ferocity that approximated hope. Working alone or with my mother passing him nails from a bucket or bracing a plank with her bottom, he had cut, framed, and whitewashed the lumber of the new one, carpentering its Gothic lace under the guidance of another library book. The new porch felt sound and solid under the weight of him. Like the rest of the house, it was not and would never be his property, but in those years his ambition was not to own a piece of the world. Just to keep that piece from falling down or burning up around him would suffice.
The spring afternoon had turned cool, but the back door was open. My grandfather smelled onions, bay leaf, simmering wine. He heard the “Trout” quintet bubbling on the record player in the living room. The kitchen windows streamed with vapor. Behind them darted the shape of my grandmother. She was an excellent cook, never more calm or present than with her hand on the rosewood grip of a razor-sharp Sabatier. In the early fifties, before her first hospitalization, she had been a frequent guest on WAAM’s Home Cooking, giving lessons in French cooking to Baltimore housewives (those with televisions, at any rate) and briefly the host of her own program, La Cuisine, which aired two mornings a week. *
“Look who’s here,” my grandfather said, coming into the heat of the kitchen.
She looked up from her bowl and whisk. She reached around to untie her apron. She had set her hair and put on her pearls. The pearls lay against the ruddy expanse between her throat and the cleft revealed by the scoop neck of her black sweater. The pearls seemed to radiate the absorbed heat of her skin. My grandparents forgave each other with the pragmatism of lovers in a plummeting airplane. There would be ample time for reproach in the event of their survival.
“We have an hour before the school bus,” my grandmother said.
My grandfather took off his shoes, his suit and tie, his curdled white shirt, his socks and garters. My grandmother helped him out of his undershorts. She led him naked up to the bathroom so he could wash away the Tombs.
Hot water was a pleasure, but he did not linger under the shower. When he came into the bedroom, my grandmother had unfurled her naked body on the bed, propped on an elbow. Knowing that he liked the look of it, she had retained the string of pearls.
A photograph of my grandmother posed in a bikini, taken in Florida when she was in her mid-forties, shows a zaftig dame with impressive cleavage and dimpled knees. By then she had undergone the first-generation hormone replacement therapy (HRT) that softened her body and pacified her mind.* When she took my grandfather into her arms on the afternoon of his release from the House of Detention, her abdomen was rounded and firm under the watered silk of her stretch marks. Her waist remained narrow, her wrists and ankles thin. He took one ankle and used it to drag her across the bed. He pinned her upraised legs against him and entered her with his feet planted on the floor. The pearls shone against her skin in the failing daylight.
* * *
As he was getting up from the toilet one morning in March 1990, in the master bathroom of his condominium at the Fontana Village retirement community in Coconut Creek, Florida, my grandfather heard something snap. He woke up bloody on the bathroom floor with a fat lip and a leg fracture. Later the broken bone would prove to be the result of a bone metastasis; it turned out that for the past six months, without telling anyone, he had been declining to undergo treatment for a carcinoid tumor in his gut. But at first all we knew was that he had fallen, and that someone would have to look after him as he recovered from a broken leg.
My mother, a public interest litigator, was in the midst of bringing a class-action suit against a pharmaceutical company whose popular second-generation HRT drug appeared to be giving thousands of women ovarian cancer and killing them before they turned sixty. My younger brother, embarked on a career as an actor in L.A., had just booked a TV pilot, a proposed reboot of the ’70s show Space: 1999. I was about to start a reading tour for the paperback edition of my first novel and was in the midst of an attempt, which turned out to be futile, to salvage something more than the material for a few short stories from the staved-in hull of my first marriage.
There was also the shadowy Lady Friend. Pooling information, we discovered that my grandfather had said little to any of us about her. Her name was Sally. She was an artist. She was a recent widow. None of us had a phone number or even knew her last name.
Sally called my mother on the day after my grandfather’s accident and got right to the point: Though she and my grandfather had been dating only since September and were still getting to know each other, she was willing to help. But she had spent three brutal years nursing her late husband through his illness, decline, and recent death, and frankly, she was not sure she had the strength. My mother thanked Sally and said she understood. She had the sense that Sally already knew my grandfather well enough to imagine that he might not take to being nursed.
So my mother flew to Florida to fetch the man who had been her father since she was not yet five years old. She hoped that by bringing him to Oakland she would be able to arrange for his care and whatever therapy he needed and still be able to do her job. She booked him a first-class seat—over his strenuous objections—for the long trip west, so that he would be more comfortable. She arranged for his mail to be forwarded, and packed a suitcase with his clothes and papers. It was a big suitcase, with plenty of room for personal items, but my grandfather chose to bring only five:
Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel by Willy Ley (3rd edition, Viking, 1957), a history of rocket flight up to 1956, combined with a detailed if ultimately mistaken prognostication of a manned mission to the Moon. I knew the book and its author were longtime favorites of my grandfather, but I had never seen this particular copy. It lacked a dust jacket and bore clear evidence—tape stains, a tear on the pastedown where a pocket for the date card had been, new york state dept. of corrections rubber-stamped along the top edge—of its provenance. When I flipped through its pages, I noticed that throughout the book, someone—presumably my grandfather—had used a black marker to blot out certain words. I held up the defaced pages to the bedside lamp. Every blot covered an occurrence of one man’s name: Wernh
er von Braun.*
A Zippo, known as “Aughenbaugh’s lighter,” which he had carried in his right pants pocket for as long as I could remember. He had quit smoking before I was born, but I’d seen him use Aughenbaugh’s lighter many times to light charcoal grills, chimney logs, campfires. On a smooth oval, set into a nickel finish otherwise pebbled to hide scratches, you could make out traces of an engraved representation of an organic molecule, a linked pair of hexagons whose vertices were Cs, Hs, and Os. Over the years I had asked him a few times what molecule was represented, but the answer I received (“Maltose”), or the reason for the answer (“Because it makes donuts taste good”) struck me as so nonsensical and seemed to explain so little—my grandfather didn’t even like donuts—that I finally concluded he was putting me on. As for the Zippo’s eponym, my grandfather would only say that Aughenbaugh had been an Army buddy.
A black-and-white photograph of my mother, taken in August 1958. In the photo she was sitting bareback on a lean gray horse. She wore a beach towel around her hips and a one-piece swimsuit that she filled out more thoroughly than might be advisable for a girl not yet sixteen. She and the horse were angled away from the photographer, looking to his left. My mother held an archery bow with an arrow nocked to the drawn bowstring, ready to let fly at a target out of the frame. I had never seen the photo before it showed up among my grandfather’s belongings. Neither he nor my mother would say much about it except that it had been taken at a hotel in Virginia Beach during the period of her life when she was remanded to the custody of Uncle Ray. My mother’s hair was unkempt, and the look in her eyes, taking aim, struck me as murderous.