Creasey stuck around, smoking cigarettes, pacing the weeds between the stub of track and the rest of the storage yard. My grandfather, flat on his belly, watched the bull’s dusty boots through a scrim of dandelion and foxtail. Scrape, stop, pivot, return. Every few minutes a cigarette fell with a pat against the gravel and met its end beneath Creasey’s right boot. My grandfather heard the twist of a bottle cap, a slosh of liquid, a belch. He had the impression that Creasey was waiting for somebody, killing time, maybe getting up his nerve.
My grandfather puzzled over it. Creasey was supposed to keep moving, sweeping the lots for hoboes, tramps, and pilferers like my grandfather, who had come to the Greenwich Yard that summer drawn by reports of coal for the taking, spillover from the cars as they trundled to the piers. The first time Creasey caught him it was because my grandfather had been weighed down by twenty-five pounds of coal in a sugar sack. Why did the man not carry on now with the work the Pennsylvania Railroad paid him to do? Inside the boxcar, over his head, my grandfather heard small animals in their nests, rousing themselves to their nightly business. According to his mother’s natural history, he knew, that business was to bite young boys and give them rabies.
At last Creasey trampled his fifth cigarette, took another swig, and moved off. My grandfather counted to thirty and then slid out from under the boxcar. He brushed the grit from his belly, where the skin prickled. He spotted Creasey carrying a knapsack, making for one of the little stucco houses scattered here and there across the lots. On his first forays into the Greenwich Yard my grandfather had been charmed by the idea that railmen were cottaged like shepherds among the herded trains. He soon determined that the bungalows were no one’s habitations. They had mesh grilles over their blackwashed windows, and if you put your ear to their doors you could hear a thrum of power and sometimes a thunk like the clockwork of a bank vault. Until now my grandfather had never seen anybody going into one or coming out.
Creasey fished a key ring from his hip and let himself in. The door closed softly behind him.
My grandfather knew that he ought to head for home, where a hot supper and an operetta of reproach awaited him. He was hungry, and practiced in deafness and the formulation of remorse. But he had come here today to stand one final time at the top of one particular signal bridge that he had come to think of as his own, and tell another summer goodbye.
He cut across the storage yard and stole along a stretch of railbed to “his” signal bridge. He scaled the service ladder and clambered out along the catwalk to its midpoint, fifteen feet above the tracks. He raised up, holding onto the body of the central signal lantern. He jammed his feet in their canvas sneakers into the steel lattice of the catwalk. He let go of the signal lantern and stood balanced with arms outspread, hooked only by his ankles to the turning earth. Between him and the tenement on Shunk Street, the rail yard shuffled and sorted its rolling stock bound for New York, Pittsburgh, St. Louis. Trains and sections of trains clanged and rumbled and plowed furrows in the gloom.
He turned his face to the east. Darkness piled up like a thunderhead over New Jersey. Beyond the river lay Camden, beyond Camden the Jersey Shore, beyond the shore the Atlantic Ocean, and beyond that, Paris, France. His mother’s brother, a veteran of the Argonne, had informed my grandfather that in the “cathouses” of that city a man might cross one further border, where silk stocking met white thigh. My grandfather took the signal lantern in his arms. He pressed his hips against its smooth encasement and looked up at the evening sky. A full moon rose, tinted by its angle on earth’s atmosphere to a color like the flesh of a peach. My grandfather had spent most of that last Friday of the summer reading a copy of Astounding Stories of Super-Science, found among some other unsold magazines in the back room of his father’s store. The last story was about a daring earthman who flew in an atomic rocket to the Moon’s dark side, where he found ample air and water, fought bloodthirsty selenites, and fell in love with a pale and willing lunar princess. The Moon was a tough neighborhood, and the princess required frequent salvation by the earthman.
My grandfather regarded the Moon. He thought about the noble girl in the story with her “graceful, undulating body” and felt the swell of an inner tide reaching toward her, lifting him like Enoch in the whirlwind into the sky. He ascended the skyward tide of his longing. He would be there for her. He was coming to her rescue.
A door banged shut, and Creasey came out of the little house and rejoined his evening route. He was no longer carrying the knapsack. He crossed a set of tracks, a hitch of stiffness in his walk, and vanished among the cars.
My grandfather climbed down from the signal bridge. His path home did not run past the little house. But old Abraham had ruled correctly from his corner of the parlor: Nothing could be done for a boy who would throw a kitten out of a window onto a Philadelphia pavement just to see what would happen if he did.
My grandfather approached the little house with its gridded black windows. For a full minute he stood and watched it. He put his ear to the door. Over the electrical hum, he heard a human sound: choking, or laughter, or sobs.
He knocked. The sound broke off. The house’s mysterious clockwork clicked. From the marshaling yard came the trumpeting of lashed-up engines, ready to drag a long load west. He knocked again.
“Who’s there?”
My grandfather gave his first and last name. On reflection he appended his address. There followed a prolonged spell of unmistakable coughing from the other side of the door. When it passed, he heard a stirring, the creak of a bed or chair.
A girl peered out, hiding the right half of her face behind the door that she gripped with both hands, looking ready to slam it shut. The visible half of her head was a mat of peroxide tangles. Around the left eye, under a delicate eyebrow, paint mingled with mascara in cakes and blotches. She wore the fingernails on her left hand long, lacquered in black cherry. The nails on her right hand were bitten and bare of paint. She was wrapped loosely in a man’s tartan bathrobe. If she was surprised to see him, she did not show it. If she had been crying, she was not crying anymore. But my grandfather understood Creasey the way you come to understand a man who repeatedly kicks your ass. The details of the hurt that Creasey might have done to this girl during his visit remained obscure, but my grandfather felt the outrage all the more vividly for his ignorance. He saw it in the ruin of her eye paint. He smelled it, a taint of Javela water and armpit in the air that leaked from behind the half-open door.
“Well?” she said. “State your business, Shunk Street.”
“I saw him come in there,” my grandfather said. “That Creasey bastard.”
It was a word not to be used in the hearing of adults, especially women, but in this instance it felt fitting. The girl’s face came out from behind the door like the moon from behind a factory wall. She took a better look at him.
“He is a bastard,” she said. “You’re right about that.”
He saw that the hair on the right side of her part was cropped as short as his own, as though to rid that half of lice. On the right side of her upper lip she had raised enough whisker to form the handlebar of a mustache. Her right eye was free of paint, under a dense black brow. Apart from a shadow of stubble universal on either side of the chin, an invisible rule appeared to have apportioned evenly the male and female of her nature. My grandfather had heard but disbelieved neighborhood reports of sideshow hermaphrodites, cat girls, ape girls, four-legged women who must be mounted like tables. He might have reconsidered his doubt if not for the fact that he saw, filling both sides of the loose flannel wrapper from the neck down, only womanly curvature and shadow.
“The price of a peep is one nickel, Shunk Street,” she said. “I believe you may owe me a dime.”
My grandfather looked down at his shoes. They were not much to look at. “Come on,” he said, reaching for her arm. Even through the flannel of her sleeve, he could feel fever on her skin.
She shook loose of his grip with a jerk of her a
rm.
“He won’t come back this way for a while. But we have to go now,” my grandfather said. There were whiskers on the chins of his own aunts: big deal. He was here by the power of a wish on an evening star. “Come on!”
“Aren’t you funny,” she said. She peeked out of the doorway, looked to either side. She lowered her voice in a show of co-conspiracy. “Trying to rescue me.”
From her lips it sounded like the most peabrained idea ever conceived. She left the door hanging open and went back inside. She sat down on a cot and pulled a stiff blanket around her. In the light of a candle guttering on an overturned jar lid, panels of black switches and gauges glinted. Creasey’s knapsack lay neglected on the floor.
“Are you going to take me home to your mama and papa?” she suggested in a voice that made him momentarily dislike her. “A drug-sick whore full of TB?”
“I can take you to a hospital.”
“Aren’t you funny,” she said, more tenderly this time. “You already know I can unlock the door from the inside, honey. I’m not a prisoner here.”
My grandfather felt there was more to her imprisonment than a lock and key, but he did not know how to put that feeling into words. She reached into the knapsack and pulled out a package of Old Golds. Something about the pomp with which she set fire to her cigarette made her seem younger than he had thought.
“Your pal Creasey already rescued me,” she said. “He could have left me lying there right where he found me, half dead with my face in a pile of cinders. Right where those Ealing boys red-lighted me.”
She told him that from the age of eleven she had been traveling in the sideshow of the Entwhistle–Ealing Bros. Circus, out of Peru, Indiana. She had been born a girl, in Ocala, Florida, but at puberty, nature had refashioned her with a mustache and chin fuzz.
“I went over big for quite a little while, but lately, I’m getting all this action from my girl department.” She folded her arms under her breasts. “Body’s been goofing with me all my life.”
My grandfather wanted to say that he felt the same way about his brain, that organ whose flights of preposterous idealism were matched only by its reveries of unfettered violence. But he thought it would be wrong to compare his troubles to hers.
“I guess that’s the reason I started on the junk,” she said. “A hermaphrodite was something. It has a little poetry. There is just no poetry in a bearded lady.”
She had been nodding, she said, dead to the world, when management at last saw fit to throw her off the circus train as it pulled out of the yard, bound for Altoona.
“Creasey found my valise where those assholes had pitched it. Conveyed me to these comfortable lodgings.” She adjusted her legs and, before she gathered the blanket more tightly, caught my grandfather trying to see into the shadow between them. “Creasey is a bastard, true. But he brings me food, and smokes, and magazines. And candles to read by. The only thing he won’t bring me is a fix. Pretty soon it’ll be all the same to me, anyway. Meantime he doesn’t charge me more rent than I’m willing to pay.”
My grandfather contemplated the ashes of his plan. He felt she was telling him she was going to die, and that she planned on doing it here, in this room that jumped in the candlelight. Her chest blood was all over a crumpled chamois rag, and on the woolen blanket, and on the lapels of the robe.
“Creasey has his points,” she said. “And I’m sure the folks on Shunk Street would be happy to know that he has been kind enough to leave me in possession of my virginity. In the technical sense.” She squirmed against the cot illustratively. “Railroad men. They are practical fellows. Always find a way around.”
That started her barking into her scrap of chamois, which bloodied it some more. The violence of her coughing shook the blanket loose, baring her legs to my grandfather’s inspection. My grandfather felt very sorry for her, but he could not keep his gaze away from the inner darkness of her robe. The spasm passed. She folded the bloodstained part of the chamois into the remnant that was still clean.
“Have a look, Shunk Street,” she said. She hoisted the hem of the tartan robe, opened her legs, and spread them wide. The pale band of belly, the shock of dark fur, the pink of her labia would endure in his memory, flying like a flag, until he died. “On the house.”
He could feel the turmoil in his cheeks, throat, rib cage, loins. He could see that she saw it and was enjoying it. She closed her eyes and raised her hips a little higher. “Go ahead, sweetheart. Touch it if you want to.”
My grandfather found that his lips and tongue could not form a reply. He went over and put his hand against the patch of hair between her legs. He held it there, sampling it with rigid fingers like he was taking a temperature or pulse. The night, the summer, all time and history came to a halt.
Her eyes snapped open. She lurched forward and shoved him aside, covering her mouth with the bare hand while the painted one groped for the chamois. My grandfather took a crisp white handkerchief from the back pocket of his cutoff corduroys. He presented her with this evidence of the hopefulness invested in him by his mother, every morning afresh, when she sent him out into the world. The girl crushed the handkerchief in her fist without seeming to notice it was there. My grandfather watched her body tear itself apart from the inside for what felt like a long time. He worried she might be about to die right then, in front of him. Presently, she sighed and fell backward against the cot. Her forehead shone in the light from her stub of candle. She breathed with caution. Her eyes were half open and fixed on my grandfather, but minutes went by before she took notice of him again.
“Go home,” she said.
He eased the day’s inviolate handkerchief from her fist. Like a road map he unfolded it and laid it against her brow. He sealed up the flaps of her robe around her and dragged the awful blanket up to her chin with its babyish dimple. Then he went to the door, where he stopped, looking back at her. The heat of her clung like an odor to his fingertips.
“Come back sometime, Shunk Street,” she said. “Maybe I’ll let you rescue me yet.”
When my grandfather finally made it home well after dark, there was a patrolman in the kitchen. My grandfather confessed to nothing and provided no information. My great-grandfather, egged on by the patrolman, gave my grandfather a slap across the face to see how he liked it. My grandfather said he liked it fine. He felt he had earned a measure of pain through his failure to rescue the girl. He considered informing the patrolman about her, but she was by her own admission a drug fiend and a whore, and he would rather die than rat her out. Whichever course he chose, he felt, he would betray her. So he answered to his nature and said nothing.
The patrolman returned to his beat. My grandfather was subjected to lectures, threats, accusations. He bore up under them with his usual stoicism, was sent to bed hungry, and kept the secret of the two-sided girl in the train yard for the next sixty years. The following day he was put to work in the store, working before and after school on weekdays and all day Sunday. He was not able to make it back to Greenwich Yard until late the following Saturday afternoon, after shul. It was getting dark, and the weather had turned wet the night before. Along the tracks the reflected sky lay pooled between the wooden ties like pans of quicksilver. He knocked on the door of the little house until his hand rang with the pain of knocking.
3
I came into my patrimony of secrets in the late 1960s, in Flushing, Queens. At the time my grandparents were still living in the Bronx, and generally, if my parents needed to be free of me for more than a few hours, I would be deposited in Riverdale. Like the space program, my grandfather’s business was then at its peak, and though later he became a strong presence in my life, in those days my clearest memory of him is that he was seldom around.
My grandparents and their Martian zoo of Danish furniture shared seven rooms in the Skyview, overlooking the Hudson. They lived on the thirteenth floor, though it was styled the fourteenth because, my grandfather explained, the world was full of dummies
who believed in lucky charms. It was bad luck, my grandfather said, to be a dummy. My grandmother also scoffed. Though she personally had no particular fear of the number thirteen, she knew that bad luck could never be fooled by such a simple-minded stratagem.
Left to ourselves my grandmother and I might go to see a movie, one of the interminable candy-colored epics of the day: Doctor Doolittle, The Gnome-Mobile, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. She liked to shop every morning for that evening’s dinner; consequently, we spent a lot of time in grocery stores, where she taught me to look for tomatoes that still had a smell of hot sun in their stems, and then in her kitchen, where she taught me the rudiments and entrusted me with knives. If I have inherited it from her, then she must have found a mindful mindlessness in the routines and procedures of the kitchen. It tired her to read aloud in English, but she had a lot of French poems by heart and sometimes recited them to me in the ghostly language of her loss; I formed the impression that French poetry trafficked mainly in wistful rain and violins. She taught me colors, numbers, the names of animals: Ours. Chat. Cochon.
There were days, however, when being left with my grandmother was not very different from being left alone. She lay on the sofa or on her bed with the curtains drawn and a cool cloth folded over her eyes. These days had their own lexicon: cafard, algie, crise de foie. In 1966 (the date of my earliest memories of her) she was only forty-three, but the war, she said, had ruined her stomach, her sinuses, the joints of her bones (she never said anything about what the war might have done to her mind). If she had promised to look after me on one of her bad days, she would rally long enough to persuade my parents, or herself, that she was up to the task. But then it—something—would come over her and we would leave the movie theater halfway through the show, conclude the recital after a single poem, walk out of the supermarket abandoning an entire cart of groceries in the middle of the aisle. I don’t think I really minded, exactly. When she took to her bed—and only then—I was allowed to watch television. Once she was down for the count, my only responsibility would be from time to time to run a little cool water on the washcloth, wring it out, and drape it over her face like a flag on a coffin.