“Speaking of eating a pig or a deer,” Sally Sichel said, “I could make you some French toast.”
My grandfather looked at his watch and his heart seized. He had forgotten all about the launch. If he left now, drove fast, and didn’t stop, he would probably, with a little luck, just make it in time. He had been planning for months, since the Return to Flight was first announced, to do this trip up to the Kennedy Space Center. He knew the names and ranks of all five members of Discovery’s crew. He could tell you the fields of their graduate and post-graduate work, their mission histories, their hobbies and foibles, their relationships and personal ties to the lost crew members of Challenger. He had followed the investigation into the cause of that disaster acutely, delving into its minutiae. During the visit of mine that had featured such a fine dish of macaroni and cheese, all my grandfather wanted to talk about was O-rings, ceramic-tile heat shielding, and Dr. Richard Feynman—always referred to by full name and title. In Feynman’s relentless common sense, my grandfather saw rare evidence of hope for the world.
For months he had felt that it was not just the shuttle program that would be at stake when Discovery blasted off. It would be an entire vision of the future, shared by all the fading partisans of space flight, for whom the launch held the promise of collective redemption. Now my grandfather understood that his interest in the loss of Challenger and the fate of Discovery, his obsession with the modifications that had been made to its solid rocket booster, or to Commander Rick Hauck’s vintage Corvette, amounted to nothing grander than Sally Sichel’s feeling that she was living only to care for her late husband’s cat. There was nothing collective about it. It was purely personal, a seal to stop his heart against a leak of sorrow. Seen in that light, the whole business struck him as much less interesting.
“I already ate,” he told Sally Sichel. “I really ought to get on the road.”
“That’s why you were up and about. I wondered. Where are you off to?”
My grandfather checked his watch again. Almost ten to seven. The darkness of his predawn kitchen, the hum of the electric clock on the wall, the faucet dripping as he cranked out a brown dollop of meat salad, felt like a long time ago.
“Nowhere,” he said. “Never mind.”
“French toast? Still no French toast. All right. How about a cup of coffee?”
“I wouldn’t want you to go to any trouble.”
“I promise I won’t,” said Sally Sichel. “Anyway, I get the feeling trouble is your department.”
8
For a while after my grandfather got out of jail, the Skinless Horse appeared content merely to stalk my grandmother. When her daughter or husband happened to be around—and my grandfather, out of work and facing trial, happened to be around a lot—she drowned its nickering in a flood of chitchat and palaver. When she found herself alone in the house, she had a record of Highland reels and marches that she played very loud, because for unknown reasons the sound of bagpipes kept the creature at bay. At all times, alone or in company, she fought to avert her face from windows that overlooked the hickory tree. When her strength failed, the Skinless Horse would be there, sitting on one of the lower branches, baring its square teeth, stroking its enormous bloodred penis.
* * *
“Was it a horse, though?” I asked my grandfather on the second or third day of my visit home. “Or just a man with a horse’s head?”
“I never saw it,” my grandfather said dryly. “I guess it must have had hands.”
“And a penis.”
He stuck his tongue out at me a couple of times. He stared out his window at a skein of fog wound around the eucalyptus and arborvitae trees. “The penis looked like a raw turkey neck,” he said. “Or so she said.”
To a psychiatrist who treated my grandmother in the late fifties, she once attributed the physical appearance of her tormentor to a picture-book painting of Bottom and Titania that haunted her childhood dreams. Another time she described having witnessed the gelding of a draft horse in the stable of her family’s tannery, and once she speculated about the weird comminglings of men and bleeding hides she had watched come and go across the tannery yard. In the pit of her worst ravings she often claimed to have been raped by a stallion or a man with a stallion’s head. There was a timelessness in these ravings that made it seem as if the childhood violation were ongoing, happening still.
“She cooked up all kinds of theories,” my grandfather said. “She used to read Freud and Jung.” He pronounced it Young. “Adler. All those guys. So she could tell the doctors what she thought they wanted to hear.”
My grandfather often felt frustrated or baffled by my grandmother’s illness, but when it came to the origins of the Skinless Horse he thought he understood. The Skinless Horse was a creature sworn to pursue my grandmother no matter where she went on the face of the globe, whispering to her in the foulest terms of her crimes and the blackness of her soul. There was a voice like that in everyone’s head, he figured; in my grandmother’s case it was just a matter of degree. You could almost see the Skinless Horse as a clever adaptation, a strategy for survival evolved by a proven survivor. If you kept the voice inside your head, the way most people did, there could really be only one way to silence it. He admired the defiance, the refusal to surrender, involuntary but implicit in the act of moving that reproachful whisperer to a shadowy corner of a room, an iron furnace in a cellar, the branches of a grand old tree.
* * *
On the eve of the preliminary hearing of charges in the Feathercombs case, my grandfather took his telescope and a thermos of tea up to the top of the hill behind the farmhouse to have a look at the full moon. In his heart, he said, he knew that the Horse was lurking. He could see the signs. There was the stream of observations, questions, and imponderables that had begun to pour out of his wife, drowning out silences almost before they could begin. Once, nearing home with the car window rolled down, he’d heard a ghostly skirl of bagpipes on the air. Another time he had caught my grandmother turning from the living room windows that looked out on the tree with a violent bloom of color in her cheeks and throat.
He had been outside with his telescope for two hours, in his fur hat and Pendleton jacket, when wood smoke reached his nostrils. At first he registered the smell without attributing or even identifying it. His right eye had full possession of his brain and was busy dazzling it. He had just pointed his telescope at Reiner Gamma, near the southern coast of the Sea of Storms.
Of all the celestial bodies available for viewing to the backyard astronomer, the Moon was the only one you could see in enough detail to imagine living there, ranging those quicksilver mountains in seven-league moon boots. Naturally, my grandfather knew the Moon was inhospitable to life. When it came to astronomy, he might have been a layman, but he had worked throughout the late forties and early fifties as an aerospace engineer, first for the Glenn L. Martin Company, then briefly at a firm of his own, Patapsco Engineering, designing inertial guidance and telemetry systems. The need for a guaranteed paycheck after my grandmother’s first breakdown in 1952 had obliged him to sell his interest in Patapsco.* Since then the recession of 1953, bad luck, and—in my grandfather’s view—the white-shoe, genteel anti-Semitism that pervaded the aerospace industry had forced him gradually down the economic ladder and, at spare moments, ever deeper into the world inside his telescope’s lens. In his imagination, he built my grandmother a city on the Moon and escaped by rocket with her and my mother to settle there and live in peace.
At first it was a domed city to afford a stunning view with every earthrise of all the strife and unhappiness they had left behind. Over the years, as he read and researched, its configuration changed. To account for cosmic rays, he put buildings inside of craters and in tunnels underground. To assure reliable sunlight, he put my grandmother’s moon garden in a bright spot near the North Pole. But two principles, two rules of the game, endured: On the Moon there was no capital to grind the working moonman down. And on the Moon
, 230,000 miles from the stench of history, there was no madness or memory of loss. The thing that made space flight difficult was the thing that, to my grandfather, made it beautiful: To reach escape velocity, my grandmother, like any spacefarer, would be obliged to leave almost everything behind her.
A moment after he smelled smoke, he became aware of a flicker at the edge of his field of vision, light leaking in. For a few seconds he ignored it. Then, with a jolt, he connected the orange flicker to the smell of firewood. He looked up from the oculus of the telescope, blinking away the ghost on his retina of Reiner Gamma, a luminous fish.
In the yard beyond the farmhouse, the hickory tree stood rigged in sails of fire. The windows in the face of the tree fort shone with a malign glint.
My grandfather’s first reaction, after disbelief, was annoyance with himself. On his return from jail, in the wake of the first fire, he had gone through the house from cellar to attic, rounding up combustibles and locking them in the toolshed. But he had relaxed his vigil, and his wife would have had ample time to replenish her stock of hair spray, lamp oil, paint thinner. (In fact, it would emerge that she had improvised, showing an ingenuity he could not help but admire, by using a kitchen spoon to fling cotton balls larded in Vaseline, like tiny gouts of Greek fire, directly into the treehouse.)
The second thing my grandfather felt was rage. The persistence of his wife’s madness was an insult, an act of defiance, a repudiation of the past two years of relative peace in their marriage. From the top of his hill my grandfather shouted my grandmother’s name like God summoning a prophet to a mountain of reckoning. Even five hundred feet from the roar of the flames, his voice in his own ears sounded thin and feeble. Its very feebleness increased his anger.
He strode down the hill at a vengeful clip. If he didn’t find her already burned up and dead, then he intended to kill my grandmother. He held off on making the decision as to how the killing would be done until he got his hands on her and discovered which method promised the sweetest deliverance.
By the time he reached the bottom of the hill, the tree was englobed in gases, spewing a long orange jet. It looked, my grandfather said, like a comet on an old map of the heavens. Between him and the tree hung a curtain of heat that turned his cheeks red for days afterward and singed the tips of his hair. His anger dissipated as he contemplated the shimmering curtain, a heart of fire pumping its lifeblood into the sky. There was nothing for him to do but stand there and marvel.
* * *
My mother remembered none of this.
“Just the next morning,” she said. “The tree was this shriveled black stump. Like a burnt wick on a candle.”
She had changed out of her work pantsuit into a turtleneck and jeans. She had more work to do on the class-action suit, but she was taking a break to knit a stocking cap for her father, who often complained that his head felt cold. When she was through, it would have gold and crimson stripes and a green pom-pom. It was not the kind of hat anybody would want to die in, but maybe that was the point.
Every night after work my mother came in and sat with my grandfather while I cooked dinner and got a tray ready for him with some Jell-O and a cup of lemon tea. My grandfather had expressed impatience at the constant presence by his bedside of one of us or the night nurse. He understood we were there because we were afraid he might die when no one was in the room. He had promised us that he would cling to life, in spite of pain and all cancers primary and secondary, until at last, one day, the doorbell would ring, somebody would have gone to the toilet, and we would be forced in spite of our precautions to leave him unattended. Then, and only then, would he permit himself to die.
“Your mother dosed you with Benadryl,” my grandfather told her. “You slept through the whole thing. I think she used to put a pill in some pudding. She was always knocking you out, any time you couldn’t sleep.”
I watched the truth of this surface in my mother’s eyes.
“Wow,” she said. Her recollection of these years was riddled, an empty quadrant of space lit by infrequent stars. “I used to eat a lot of tapioca pudding.”
I could tell she thought this explained why she had lost so much history from that period of her life, but I wanted to point out that amnesia, whether induced by drugs or by trauma, did not explain everything. It did not explain, for example, the constant gaps and erasures that she introduced into her accounts of the things that she did remember. My brother and I had grown up knowing that the destiny of our family was tied in some way to that of Alger Hiss. We knew that our grandfather had gone to prison, our grandmother to a state hospital. We knew that the time our mother had spent in the care of Uncle Ray had left her with a grasp of the intricacies of pari-mutuel betting, a couple of gaudy trick shots at nine-ball, and an abhorrence for racetracks, poolrooms, and their denizens. Those were all things worth knowing, I supposed, but they didn’t add up to much. If her children studied her silence as she had studied their grandfather’s, they could hope to learn only that silence, that old folk remedy, was at best a partial antidote to pain.
“Where was Mamie?” I asked my grandfather. “While the tree was burning down?”
My grandfather looked at my mother and out came his tongue, as if in distaste at my idiotic question. “She was watching it burn,” he said.
* * *
Like most wonders, the fire in the hickory tree was of short duration, and when its meal was through, it winked out like a candle snuffed. The suddenness of its departure, my grandfather said, was a measure of how thoroughly it had consumed the available fuel. One minute it was there, a comet plunged to the earth, dazzling the January darkness, its heat so intense that it stopped my grandfather in his tracks. The next minute it was gone, along with the tree fort, the tree, and the cult of gentle New Jersey ecstatics who had planted it long ago. A few flames crackled here and there along the nubs that once were branches. Then they flickered out, too, leaving smoke, a whistle of steam, and a light snowfall of ashes.
My grandfather found my grandmother sitting barefoot on the porch steps in a thin nightgown, outside the front door that was never used. Her cheeks were gray with ash, her eyelashes and eyebrows singed, her mouth expressionless.
“Never mind,” he said to her and to himself. He sat down beside her on the top step of the porch. The skin of her bare shoulders was cold, but she took no notice of the chill or of the arm that he put around her. After a while he got up and called the fire department. Then he came back and sat with her until the truck showed up, lights and sirens and seven men in boots and helmets with nothing in particular to do.
“Well, somebody went bananas,” one of the firemen said.
As my grandfather recalled the fireman’s diagnosis, so many years later, his eyes filled with tears, as if to drown the fire of his own bitter memory. He closed his eyes against them.
“Dad?” my mother said after my grandfather had been lying still and quiet for a while with his eyes closed. Resting, sleeping, scudding across a soft gray sky of Dilaudid. We watched his chest with practiced eyes for signs of respiration. “Are you tired? Do you feel like eating something?”
“Grandpa,” I said, trying to sound chipper. “Come on, let me make you something.”
He opened his eyes. I saw that the fire of memory had returned, inextinguishable.
“Tapioca pudding for everyone,” he said. “And lots of it.”
9
I remember my mother telling me, when she was in the midst of settling my grandfather’s estate, that fifty percent of a person’s medical expenses are incurred in the last six months of life. My grandfather’s history of himself was distributed even more disproportionately: Ninety percent of everything he ever told me about his life, I heard during its final ten days. Out of a scant handful of memories that he had shared with me when I was growing up, one of the few I heard more than once was of his first glimpse of my mother. He always put it more or less the same way: “The first time I saw your mother, she was crying her ey
es out.”
This hardly qualified as reminiscence, since he never really enlarged upon it or added any detail. It was offered more in the way of an ironic commentary on some fresh instance of my mother’s stoicism, pragmatism, or levelheadedness, of her being a tough cookie, a cool customer.
“They think they can crack her,” I remember him saying during the days she was fighting (with his assistance) to disentangle herself legally and financially from the mess my father had made of our lives, “but she won’t crack.” After a pronouncement of this kind my grandfather would often shake his head and add, savoring the irony, “Hard to believe the first time I saw her, she was crying her little eyes out, poor thing.”
The first time my grandfather saw my mother was a Sunday afternoon in early March 1947, a couple of weeks after “Night in Monte Carlo.” He rode the number 5 streetcar from his brother’s house in Park Circle to Ahavas Sholom, which was about to begin its observation of Purim. Technically, Purim had fallen on a Friday that year, but due to some Sabbath pettifoggery and the city of Baltimore not having been walled during the time of Joshua, it was to be celebrated today.
My grandfather had no interest in the Jewish calendar or Uncle Ray’s explanation thereof, and as for Purim itself, he could take it or leave it. Unlike the other Jewish holidays, it had been fun when he was a kid, and he still gave it credit for that. But somewhere between the Ardennes and the Harz mountains, my grandfather had lost the taste or the capacity for celebrating an enemy’s defeat, and it struck him as cheap and painfully mistaken to draw all the neat parallels that Ray planned to draw in his sermon between the would-be exterminator Haman and the bona-fide exterminator Hitler. Jewish wiles and bad luck (aka “God”) had put a stop to Haman’s plans; Hitler had simply run out of time.
The annual celebrations of God’s mercy, justice, and power, the feasts or fasts undertaken in praise of His Name, the miracles He was supposed to have thrown our way over the centuries—in my grandfather’s mind, it was all nullified by the thing he had not yet learned to call the Holocaust. In Egypt, in Shushan, in the time of Judah Maccabee, God had intervened to deliver us with a mighty hand and outstretched arm; big deal. When we were sent to the ovens, God had sat with His outstretched thumb up His mighty ass and let us burn. In 1947 there was, to my grandfather, one reason to continue calling oneself a Jew, to go on being Jewish before the world: as a way of telling Hitler Fuck you.