The prioress regarded my grandfather, who sat in the chair knowing that he needed to get up and go to his wife and grab her and take her out of this place, unable to proceed any further in his thought or action than that. He didn’t know where to take her. He did not have the faintest idea where a woman like my grandmother could ever possibly belong.
“What do I do?” my grandfather said. “What do I say to her?”
The prioress waved a hand at Sister Cyril. “Sister Cyril, please return to your duty.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“You may tell her that her husband will be in shortly to see her.”
The prioress waited until Sister Cyril had retreated from the room and the creaking of the floorboards in the hallway had faded away.
“What do you say to her? Well, friend, not as a matter of policy, but just for the moment,” Mother Mary Joseph said, “I might encourage you to lie.”
* * *
The small room was all crosshatchings of shadow like a lesson in shading a sphere, an arc of darkness wrapped around a circle of gray with a bright spot a bit off-center. The bright spot was my grandmother; all the light in the sad little room seemed to be radiating from her. She was sitting up in the iron infirmary bed, hands reposed on the bedsheet where it had been folded back over the wool blanket. No makeup. Hair tied back with an unmistakable severity. He had never seen her look more beautiful.
“You really do understand?”
“Yes, darling. Of course.”
“This is the only place I can be safe.”
“I know.”
“I want us all to be safe. I want our daughter to be safe.”
“Yes.”
“It is too dangerous when I am outside of this place.”
“I understand.”
“Yes, you are a soldier. You understand about a calling. One have to make a sacrifice.”
He knew he ought not interpret or take to heart anything she said while in this state. He could almost hear the prioress advising him so. He knew my grandmother was under the delusion that she was about to take orders as a Carmelite novice, and that the sacrifice implied was of worldly ties and not of their daughter, as on some pagan altar, daubed with the blood of a mare. He could not keep the image out of his head, a knife, my mother’s pale throat. He shuddered. “Okay.”
“It’s really okay?”
“Of course.”
She lifted her arms from the bed and he stepped into them. A smell of castile soap. A hint of mothballs.
“You are so good,” she said. “Thank you.”
He stood hunched over, a crick in his neck. Her cheek was wet against his. On a chest of drawers by the bed, next to what he recognized as her copy of the Fioretti, there was a portrait of Jesus Christ. It was a modern litho, rendered with photographic realism, propped up in a metal eight-by-ten frame. Jesus looked like Guy Madison with a beard and Lauren Bacall’s hair. His gaze was leveled at my grandfather. No doubt his expression was meant to be compassionate, but to my grandfather it looked merely pitying. He remembered how, in the war, he had watched an old priest administer last rites to a dying German civilian and been moved by the Latin words and the message of peace he could sense encoded in them. But this pretty-boy Jesus just gave him the creeps. You had your shot, buster, this Jesus seemed to be saying with those smoldering Guy Madison eyes. You lost her.
My grandfather worked himself free of her arms and drew back until he could look her in the face. If her expression had been vacant, the way books led you to expect—“nobody home”—it might have been easier to bear or at least to accept. When something was gone, it was gone. But my grandmother’s eyes were not vacant, they were filled to overflowing. Her face was busy with all the usual traffic in intelligence and feeling. At some level, surely, she must know that all this vocation business was nonsense, impossible, a charade. She must know that tomorrow, next week, after a couple months of rest and soothing chats with a top psychiatrist, it would pass.
“You know this will pass,” she said, stopping his heart. “I see how you are so sad. Jesus sees, too. He will comfort you.”
“No need,” my grandfather said, resisting the urge to address the picture of Jesus. “I’m fine. We’ll be fine. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She laughed. She thought that was adorable. “It doesn’t work that way, silly.”
He couldn’t take any more. She held on to his hand.
“I want to show you something.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s our sweet baby,” she said.
She reached for the little brown Fioretti and allowed it to fall open between her hands, to a place marked by a playing card. Blue-backed with a pattern of white crescent moons. Deftly, her fingers dealt him the card, but he did not care to see its face and would not turn it over.
* * *
When he got home that night, my grandfather found Uncle Ray and my mother asleep on the couch in front of the television set. It was long past sign-off. Random-sample ants of wild signal swarmed the screen. All the lights were out, and the gray radiance of television static bled the room of color. Uncle Ray was sitting up at one end of the couch with his chin sunk to his chest. My mother lay across the cushions in her corduroy overalls, knees pulled to her chest, head in Uncle Ray’s lap. Her lips were stained a dark shade of what my grandfather presumed, judging from a half-eaten candy apple that lay upside down and stuck to the coffee table, to be red. Uncle Ray’s outstretched right arm lay along the length of my mother’s body from her shoulder to her hip.
It was an innocent, tender scene; it disturbed my grandfather. The glow of the television disturbed him. It made him think of will-o’-the-wisp, the radiance of decay. Ignis fatuus: the light of an old magazine full of old news burning in a trash bin; the flicker of genius insight that had caught in his mind that evening as he was driving around Forest Park looking for my grandmother. He tried to rekindle it now. A phantom boy scampering down the beach at sunset. The RAND Corporation, the Traveling Salesman Problem. Topographic heuristics applied to the problem of dead reckoning in inertial guidance. He chased the foolish fire a moment longer, verging on it . . . and it winked out and was gone, never to return.* What did it matter? It was going to cost a fortune to hospitalize my grandmother, get her the care she needed. The adventure of Patapsco Engineering was over for him. He would have to get Weinblatt to buy him out and find more reliable work, a regular paycheck.
He went to the television. Just before he switched it off, the foam of entropy brimming from the screen seemed to reverse, to organize itself into a familiar pattern. For a few seconds my grandfather stood motionless, the hair standing up on the back of his neck, as a coherent image appeared on the television’s screen. Holes for eyes. Nose a slash of black. Jagged jack-o’-lantern grin. When he read in the paper afterward that for the final transmission of The Crypt of Nevermore, Barry Kahn had taken the butchered pumpkin, put a candle inside, and let the play of the little flame fill the next forty-five minutes of dead air, my grandfather wondered. He wondered if an image could be retained by the phosphor coating of a cathode tube, or if it had bounced off some angle of the atmosphere and returned, an electronic revenant.
He switched off the television. The face lingered in negative on his retinas until, like a will-o’-the-wisp, like a flash of insight, it faded and winked out. After that, until his eyes adjusted, the room was dark.
* * *
“Remember that book I used to love, Strangely Enough?” I asked my mother that afternoon at my kitchen table as we stood looking down at the grinning horse skull with its mad mandala eyes. Strangely Enough by C. B. Colby, a nonfiction collection of pieces about “unexplained” incidents and paranormal events, had been a staple of the Scholastic Book Club in the 1960s and ’70s and among the key texts of my childhood. “There was a piece in there, something kind of similar. A transmission, the call sign of a TV station in Houston, Texas, appeared one day out of the blue on televisions over in Engla
nd, I think it was. But, like, years later, after the station that broadcast it had gone out of business. Nobody knew where the signal came from or where it was before it reappeared.”*
“Huh,” my mother said.
“So maybe what Grandpa saw was something like that.”
My mother looked at me. She’d had a couple of slugs of Drambuie by then, and the look in her eyes did not trouble to be merciful.
“Maybe not,” I said.
She put the skull back into the middle of the stained towel and wrapped it up. She set the bundled skull into the Old Crow box. I found a roll of packing tape, and she sealed the box along every seam as though to prevent any future exposure, or possibly escape, of its contents. She left with the box under her arm and I have not seen it, and we have not discussed it, since.
20
There were a lot of painters living at Fontana Village. They painted detailed oil portraits of World War II aircraft, still lifes with seashells, nostalgia-brown scenes of shtetl weddings. They exhibited their work in the lobby of the Activity Center, at the annual holiday art fair.
Sally Sichel was not that kind of painter. She had studied at Pratt and taught painting at UC Davis with Arneson and Thiebaud. Joan Mitchell was the bridesmaid at her first wedding. Her work was not well known—my grandfather, whose idea of great painting began with Winslow Homer and ended with Analog magazine cover artist Kelly Freas, had never heard of her—but she was hardly unknown. Her canvases hung in museums and on the walls of collectors as far away as Japan. Back when SFMOMA was still in the War Memorial Veterans Building, they used to keep a small Sichel in a dim corner, where I paid it a visit once not long after my grandfather’s death. Like most of Sally’s work from the sixties, it seemed to be rooted in some dense and private mathematics. Its lacework of parabolas and angles—red-orange against titanium white—confused the eye. Retinal afterimages turned the white regions to jumping blue-green neon.
When she met my grandfather, she had been a widow for less than two months, but she had been alone and grieving for much longer than that. Leslie Port, her third husband, had succumbed, slowly at first and then in a dizzying rush, to an unspecified disease that, my grandfather only later came to realize, must have been AIDS. The disease was poorly understood at the time, and Leslie’s care was a prolonged bout of expensive flailing. Though Les had worked for years at Hewlett-Packard—he helped to invent the screen-and-button interface used by ATM machines and gas pumps all over the world—and made a good living, in time his treatment devoured his savings, along with all of Sally’s mental and emotional resources. Along the road to his death were wild switchbacks in diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription. Leslie’s first wife and three adult children, with their spouses and ex-spouses, formed a repertory company of guilt, cluelessness, and resentment that seized upon each reversal to stage marathon productions. Sally told my grandfather she had not touched a paintbrush in three years. “I haven’t had the time,” she said. “Or if I had time, then I didn’t have the energy. I was too tired. I’m still tired.”
They were lying on their backs in my grandfather’s bed, a queen. My grandfather lay on the side (the left) that had been the haunt of his insomnia, dreams, and cares for all the years of his marriage and then widowerhood. In that long-desert region of the mattress there was now, astonishingly, the warm body of a woman and a smell of amber and cloves. It was their second night together. She had begun with her head nestled against his shoulder, but his shoulder was too bony and her cheek was too hot. The name of her perfume was Opium and he found the smell of it alarming, but he liked the rasp of her low voice in the dark. She had been telling him her life story in scattered chapters with footnotes and asides. Her story was seventy-two years long. He still had not made an appointment with the specialist, nor said anything to Sally about the funny numbers on his blood panel—that was all she needed, another sick man on her hands—but he had a feeling he would not live to hear the whole megillah.
“Do you miss it?” my grandfather said. Sweat prickled on his skin as it evaporated in the air-conditioning. He shivered and moved a little nearer to her.
“Not really.” She stopped talking. My grandfather regretted having interrupted the flow of her autobiography with an unnecessary question. Then she said, “I take it back. I do miss it. How interesting, I didn’t realize until you asked me.”
“Sorry.”
“For what?”
“Giving you something new to miss.”
“That’s all right,” Sally said. “God knows it’s better than missing Ramon.”
The next day he drove her to an art supply store in Fort Lauderdale. She bought an easel, a dropcloth, a roll of canvas, stretchers, gesso, brushes, several tubes of cadmium, alizarin, and cobalt paint, and two cartons of titanium in pots, one bleached, one unbleached. He lifted the cartons out of her shopping cart and set them on the counter for the cashier to ring up.
“What’s with all the white?” he said.
Sally raised an eyebrow. Her hair was tied in a scarf patterned with blue and green Matisse cutouts, and she was wearing a faded shirt with a button-down collar, blue pinstripes on white. The collar was unbuttoned enough to betray the scalloped lace trim of her brassiere.
“Think I’m just going to come out and tell you?” she said. “Just like that?”
It had been years since my grandfather had been competently teased by an attractive woman. This turned out to be a thing he had not known that he was missing.
“Is it a secret?”
“Of course it’s a secret. Don’t you know anything about art?”
“Art Carney.”
“Oy. You promised no puns.”
“I know next to nothing about art.”
“Even I don’t know the reason, why all the white. That’s how secret it is.”
They drove back to Fontana Village and my grandfather helped Sally carry her supplies into her house. The still-unfurnished guest bedroom had a sliding glass door that filled it with morning sun. They put all of the supplies in there in an orderly jumble. Sally laughed her raucous laugh.
“This is such bullshit,” she said. “Come back in two weeks, I guarantee you it will all be sitting there like that. Untouched.”
“So long as you don’t go untouched that whole time.”
“My God, you are such a pervert. Stop. Go kill your snake. No.”
My grandfather put his arms around Sally’s hips and pulled her toward him. She was wearing a pair of loose white pasha pants with an elastic waistband. His hands plunged past that and the lace waistband of her panties. He availed himself of two handfuls of her ass. It was not an inordinately large ass, yet the heft of it seemed to connect him to an immense source of gravitation, one for which he was belatedly grateful, as though for a long time he had been weightless and drifting.
“I was planning to feed you first,” Sally said.
“All right,” said my grandfather.
He reached out with a foot to hook the canvas dropcloth, bundled into its plastic package. He slid it across the floor and eased himself down onto it, kneeling on this impromptu cushion at her feet.
“Good Lord,” Sally said, and then, “Oh, my.”
He pulled down her pants and panties and contemplated the graying hair that thatched her belly. It grew sparse but long and very soft against the fingers. He put his cheek to her belly. The soft gray-blond hair rustled in his ear. The smell of her cunt reached his nostrils, not yet familiar, no longer strange. He tried and failed to compare it to the remembered smell of my grandmother’s cunt. It had simply been too long, too goddamn long.
“Feed me,” he said.
“No puns,” Sally reminded him, lowering herself with a certain careless care onto the floor of the borrowed condominium. “You promised.”
21
My grandfather took Diddens to see the rocket in the clearing and reported the basic details of its location and condition. He indicated that he planned to act on further V-2 re
lated intelligence without mentioning von Braun, and left Diddens in charge of bagging and tagging the rocket for shipment west. He left Diddens in ignorance of his actual plans as much and as long as he could. He told himself he would move faster and smarter alone, but the truth was that he was grieving for Aughenbaugh, and like a lot of grieving people who keep a habitual distance from their emotions, he thought that being alone was what he needed.
He shook hands with the old people in turn. He put two cartons of Chesterfields and a cigar of unknown provenance into the old priest’s hands. The priest kissed my grandfather on the cheek and blessed his journey in rapid Latin. Fräulein Judit received two cans of sweetened condensed milk, a box of saltines, and the February 7, 1944, issue of Life, which had mysteriously appeared in my grandfather’s rucksack the day after he and Aughenbaugh followed the 104th Infantry into Köln. The cover was a picture of George Bernard Shaw. In return my grandfather received a cold stare, a granite handshake, and a small, dusty wheel of cheese.
“What the hell?” Diddens said. “Where are you going?” He had woken feeling tender and green at the gills but, having thrown up a few times in the pigsty, polished off the last bottle of wine, and had a tramp through the woods to see the magnificent beast of legend, he seemed back to his old querulous self.
“I’ll be back,” my grandfather lied. “I just want to have a look around. You wait for the transport crew to show, help them get the firecracker loaded.”
My grandfather had given Diddens credit for the find; it was the arrow in the foot that led them to the priest who had led them to the V-2.
“You have a job to do,” Diddens warned my grandfather. “Only reason you’re here in the middle of all this shit.”
“I’m going to get that von Braun,” he said. “That’s my job.”
“Yeah? What are you gonna do when you find him, hey? Kiss him on the lips?” He put on a Southern-belle voice. “‘Sweet Wernher, baby, your rocket gives me such a hard-on. Let me suck it!’”