My grandfather had just lit his fifth cigarette when the first in what became a long series of unreliable red roadsters, a brand-new Jaguar XK120, rumbled onto the street and stopped in front of the house. Its driver cut the engine and then sat as if marshaling patience or resolve.
Uncle Ray was two years free of the pulpit that had fit him as poorly as the clothes he was wearing now, some kind of English hunting get-up, baggy tweed pants and a tweed jacket with large front panels of plaid wool. In later years he would switch to Alfas and more of a Mastroianni resort-wear vibe, but in snaps from the early fifties, he looks like he’s planning to go off and shoot some partridges or appease Hitler.
Uncle Ray lit a cigarette of his own and then came up the walk to the porch. The smirk and the swagger that had unaccountably chosen this man as the vehicle for their conquest of the world or at least the Delmarva Peninsula had reached some kind of new pinnacle of insufferability.
“So where is she?” he said as he and my grandfather shook hands.
“I don’t know.”
“She didn’t leave a note?”
My grandfather shook his head. He stood up and fished his car keys out of the hip pocket of his jacket.
“Where’s the kid?”
“Upstairs.”
“She ready to go, get her uncle some taffy?”
“Says she doesn’t want to.”
“She’s upset.” Uncle Ray opened the front door. “Hey, Velvet!” he called out. “Post time!”
“Ray, I have to go.”
“So go.”
At that moment another party of trick-or-treaters approached the house, followed by another, and by the time my grandfather was through dispensing pennies, his brother had returned.
“She’s getting her costume on,” Uncle Ray said. He looked down at the split roll of coins. “Pennies.”
“No candy. It got spoiled.”
Uncle Ray took the half-roll and the two intact ones, and my grandfather started down the steps.
“So where are you going?”
“Hospital.”
“You think she’s hurt?” He spoke in a whispery rasp. “You think she hurt herself?”
“I don’t know,” my grandfather said, lowering his voice, too. “What happens when you have a miscarriage?”
“She was pregnant?”
“I . . . I wouldn’t know.”
“You wouldn’t know?”
“I didn’t know. I don’t know.”
“Were you trying?”
My grandparents had been trying to produce a child almost from their first night together, Purim 1947. At the beginning it was an unarticulated hope expressed only in a mutual disregard of birth control, a hope shared by many survivors of war and calamity to counter general death with a particular life, to light a candle in the universal night. Once they were married, they embarked on the project openly and deliberately, with a fixity of purpose that over time had faded in vigor as it became more awkward and painful to them both. The thought that my grandmother might finally have conceived their child was so welcome, so eagerly anticipated for so long, that for an instant the joy of it outweighed the concomitant dismay of understanding that, in this instance, a pregnancy would be only the necessary condition for its loss.
“It’s been discussed,” my grandfather said.
“So she’s upset about that, it’s natural. She’ll just need a little time.”
“I know, I know. I’m sure you’re right.”
The idea returned to him, more clearly, that the state of her mind was connected in some way to her menstrual cycle. Had the improvement in her mood since September been caused by an unsuspected pregnancy? Abruptly, he remembered her having woken him last night. She was sitting up, speaking French, with the odd clarity of someone asleep and dreaming. When he asked her what was the matter, she had switched to English and told him they had to call someone to come take away the furnace in the basement right away. She could not or would not tell him why, but he must trust her that it had to be done or something very bad would result. In a patronizing tone it now made him wince to recall, he had assured her that he would put someone on the task of removing the furnace the very next morning. My grandmother had nodded and a moment later was lying down again, easing back into normal sleep. Or so my grandfather had assumed; certainly he had gone back to sleep. But what if she had been up for the rest of the night after that, poor thing? What if her midnight outburst had marked the ebbing, along with the incipient life inside her, of whatever chemical benefit that pregnancy bestowed? He thought of her lying there, feeling herself sliding inexorably back to the place she had been last summer, frightened, alone, making disordered plans of escape, and it made his heart hurt. What did she think was happening in the basement?
“You look worried,” Uncle Ray said. “Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried,” my grandfather said.
“About what?” said my mother, coming out to the porch. She was wearing some old corduroy overalls over a pair of long johns, carrying a burlap sugar sack. Bare feet, an inverted metal saucepan for a hat.
“No shoes?” my grandfather said.
“I saw the cartoon,” my mother said. “He was barefoot.”
“In this weather.”
“Take it up with Walt Disney.”
“What a little brat you are,” Uncle Ray said tenderly. “Candy Appleseed.”
My mother reached into the sugar sack and took out a book, worn black boards, no jacket. “Here,” she said to my grandfather.
“What’s this?”
“Mama’s book? For you to take to the station? The one she forgot?”
It was a tattered hardback copy of Tales, with the marvelous Redon illustrations, that my grandmother used when she read Poe on The Crypt of Nevermore.
“Right,” my grandfather said.
Uncle Ray’s ear was attuned to the coded conversation of hustlers, cheats, and their confederates. “Nothing against Johnny here,” he said. “But what happened to National Velvet?” He looked from my mother to my grandfather and back. “What?”
“Sore subject,” my grandfather said.*
19
In 1952 in Baltimore an autumn haze was closer to smoke, and though the Moon was high and nearly full, its light hung diffuse and opaque as if moonlight were only an inferior brand of darkness. As he patrolled Forest Park in his car that Halloween, looking for my grandmother—a check of nearby hospitals and police stations had turned up nothing—most of what my grandfather saw was shadow. Then, into a cone of streetlight or a lighted porch, there would burst a doctor and a dead man and a robot and a carrot and Abe Lincoln and a werewolf and a pharaoh and a fly. My grandfather had never seen so many kitchen-broom witches, bedsheet ghosts, popgun sheriffs. A giant baby holding hands with a pint-size gorilla, a tramp with a monocled millionaire. A dreamlike river of children coursing in and out of shadow, pooling on stoops, and out there somewhere a woman with a crack in her brain that was letting in shadows and leaking dreams.
He sat stopped at a traffic signal. A turbulence of historic personages, zoo animals, and career aspirations boiled surrealistically through his headlight beams, Viking horns, a giraffe’s neck, a pink tutu, a Mountie’s campaign hat. My grandfather rolled down his window and called to ask if anyone had happened to see Nevermore, the Night Witch. Of course, they thought he was kidding around.
“Ah!” said the giraffe, dipping its papier-mâché head to sprint the rest of the way across the street in halfway-mock alarm. “The Night Witch!”
“Don’t scare me!” said the Viking.
With every corner my grandfather turned, his hope of spotting my grandmother would rekindle, and at the end of every block his heart would sink anew. After a while he noticed that the coveys and duckling chains of little kids were starting to give way to lurking platoons of older boys without costumes who loped crookedly, dragging cartoon-burglar pillowcases from house to house and flicking furtive eggs at passing cars. When an e
gg was thrown, there would be a burp of tires, shouts of grievance and malediction, coyote yips of laughter. The night turned authentically menacing. My grandfather could not bear the thought of my grandmother abroad in it. Hurting from the inside. Emptied out. She had been pregnant and she had miscarried and then the voice or the thoughts or the memory that tormented her had returned: her hidden history of loss, loss upon loss upon loss unending, flooding back into her body as that tablespoonful of life leaked out. Her true companion. Her lover with his bleached bones showing and his maddened eyes.
The view through the windshield swam. My grandfather pulled over to the curb, blocking someone’s driveway, and cut the engine. He fought against the tears. They were nothing but tears of panic, and of all the emotions there was none more contemptible. He closed his eyes so that he would not have to see his breakdown witnessed by a world that had the strength to make him cry. After a minute he opened his eyes again. He lit a cigarette, and the nicotine seemed to organize his mind. Aughenbaugh’s lighter was cool against his palm, and from its engraved face a comforting gaze seemed to stare back at him through the pince-nez of maltose, the imperturbable gaze of the man who had passed the lighter on to him, two glucose rings hooked together by a glycosidic bond.
He lit another cigarette and began to conduct a review of methodology, as if it were not a lost woman he sought but simply a better means of seeking, a heuristic against loss. The effectiveness of a search of this kind depended on the amount of information available about the area to be searched, the number of searchers, and the cost in time elapsed. He knew Forest Park and the surrounding neighborhoods well enough, but he was alone and in a hurry. Was it best to start at some arbitrary perimeter and work inward toward an indefinite center, or to proceed by quarterings? The grid of streets to be covered was a mishmash of orthogonals and diagonals, and searching it posed interesting problems in topology. Clearly, any useful algorithm for maximizing the number of individual blocks searched at the lowest cost in time would have to integrate a Euclidean metric of distance as covered by transverse streets with a non-Euclidean metric of the zigzag distance imposed by square city blocks. In this instance the topological problem was complicated by the likelihood that the goal was not stationary and, indeed, at this moment might be riding the 33 streetcar or getting into a murderer’s Pontiac or lying like a smashed kite at the foot of the Bromo-Seltzer Tower or sunken, drowned, tugged along the bottom of the Patapsco River by the tide. In the meantime it was almost eleven p.m. He had been driving around uselessly for hours.
He decided to head toward the studios of WAAM. Even when she was struggling with her moods, he thought, the woman never lost sight of her duties and commitments. In a dark period, her pain was usually intensified by the consciousness of falling down on the job as a mother, a wife, an employee, a friend. Sometimes knowing that she had someplace to be or someone depending on her was enough to lift her above the darkness for an hour, for a day, for as long as the job was not done or the errand unaccomplished. However near to the edge of the map she might have sailed today, it was always possible that her Friday-night gig was beacon enough to turn her back. Maybe she was there now, whitening her skin with a sponge of pancake makeup, painting ragged feathers along the ridge of her eyebrows.
As he drove, he lit another cigarette with the flare of the lighter and his thoughts found their way back to heuristics—algorithms that offered shortcuts to solutions of complex problems—and an article he had read in Scientific American about a problem in the mathematics of graphing.
You were a traveling salesman whose territory obliged you to cover n cities, with your heavy sample case and your fallen arches and your weariness of diner food and hotel beds. Because you missed your wife and your daughter, you wanted to visit each city in your territory only once and then return home, having traveled the shortest distance in the least amount of time. There were (n-1)! possible routes, and if n wasn’t too big, say five towns, you could sit down with your map and your distance table and your pencil and your incipient case of heartburn and add it all up and see which of the twenty-four possible routes was the shortest. But once n got up into even the low two digits, the job of calculating the distances for each possible route, even if you were superhumanly quick with a sum, might take hundreds or thousands of years. With only fifteen cities, there were a trillion possible routes. What you wanted, poor wandering and footsore salesman, was some kind of algorithm, an operational shortcut that would let you find the most efficient route without doing a thousand years of math.
So far, it turned out, there was no such algorithm. But my grandfather had read that a cash prize was being offered by the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica to the first person who came up with a workable heuristic that would solve the Traveling Salesman Problem. Its solution, RAND felt, would open up all kinds of possibilities in the burgeoning field of operations research, a field that, as it happened, overlapped with the work he and Weinblatt were doing. He felt the faint stirring of an idea then, an approach to inertial navigation systems that would involve the heuristics of topological algorithms. It was a marvelous idea, and he backed away from it, giving it space; you could blow on a fire to stoke it, but if you blew on a little flame, it would go out.
He headed up into Woodberry toward the studios of WAAM. He imagined that he was the one who solved the Traveling Salesman Problem and collected the cash prize. Clearly, the answer lay in the mathematics of linear functions. He might brush up on his Hamiltonian mechanics, dust off his knowledge of set theory. He saw himself accepting a check for the prize winnings and then—it was not at all unreasonable to imagine—a job offer from his awestruck fellow boffins at RAND. Please, they would beg him, come out to Santa Monica, we need you. Come and work on this application of topology to navigation. Would he go? He pictured them, my grandmother, my mother, and himself standing on the wooden deck of a house near the ocean. California. Nothing but sunshine and horizon, a place without shadows, far from the darkness of Europe and its history, that endless Halloween. He saw them, walking down the beach with their trousers rolled. A child, their child, ran ahead of them, a brash little boy scattering seagulls. His heart swelled. It was all very pretty. It was as pretty as the solution to a problem in topology that would never be solved.
He had reached the television studio up on its hill at the heart of town. It was a composite building, two boxes shoved together, a windowless stucco packing crate that held the studio floor next to a brick shoe box built in the style favored at the time for public schools and libraries, the bricks in long horizontal courses, the windows a horizontal strip. At this hour most of the windows were dark. There were only two cars parked by the entrance; the crew parked in a garage at the back.
In the lobby the night man, Pat, ignored a banquette sofa and a coffee table shaped like a footprint with no toes. A selection of trade publications and magazines lay scattered across the coffee table. Pat was dressed like a policeman but in gray, with a peaked cap and a black necktie. With his blue eyes, gin blossoms, and dignified bearing, he reminded my grandfather of a seedier Bill Donovan. Pat took his job very seriously, believing, according to my grandmother, that when the local cadre got the word from Moscow, they would have orders to seize control of WAAM. To repel the attack, poor Pat had been entrusted with only a letter opener in a leather pen cup, a flashlight, and a key ring (though tonight his arsenal had been supplemented with a pumpkin and a sheaf of Indian corn), which likely explained why he was always kind of a sourpuss.
“I’ve been at my post since eight o’clock, sir,” Pat informed my grandfather. “I have not seen your wife. And you are not the first to come asking. Mr. Roberts been out here twice, see if she got here yet. Mr. Kahn, too.”
My grandfather asked Pat if maybe he could speak with Mr. Roberts (the floor manager) or Mr. Kahn (the director) or, seeing as how they were busy men who already had enough to worry about, if maybe he could just have a look around. Maybe his wife had come in earlier, to find some
prop or a music cue in the record library, and fallen asleep in a chair in the artists’ room. He believed in this possibility as he offered it, but as soon as it left his lips, it sounded unlikely and Pat’s face told him that he was talking nonsense. My grandfather had not only come here expecting to find his wife, he reminded himself. He had also come, complementarily, to strengthen the case for her having really disappeared. My grandfather remembered the book.
“She’s going to need this,” he said. “When she gets here. She’s on her way. Be here any minute.” He held up the collection of Poe.
“Yeah?” Pat said. “What’s on tonight?”
“‘Metzengerstein.’”
“Never read him, he any good?”
“Tune in tonight,” my grandfather said. “Judge for yourself.”
He pointed to the big twenty-one-inch RCA television mounted in a heavy oak cabinet behind Pat’s desk. Permanently tuned to channel 13, presently showing a movie my grandfather didn’t recognize. John Wayne was underwater, bare-chested, fighting a giant octopus with a knife.
“Oh, I don’t watch your missus anymore,” Pat said. “I have to turn down the sound when she comes on. Nice lady. Pretty lady. But she gives me a fantod. Meaning no offense.”
“Pat. Please. I need to find her.”
“Well, all right, then, you have a seat,” Pat said. “I’ll go find Mr. Kahn.”
Pat went through the door that led to the main corridor running between the two halves of the TV station. My grandfather lingered at the counter, running his fingers across the tuck-and-roll surface of the pumpkin. He wondered why one hemisphere of a pumpkin always seemed to be as smooth as polished stone while the other was always streaked and warted with some mysterious cement.