“Hey, were they—?”
My mother pursed her lips. She looked innocently at the ceiling.
“Oh my God,” I said, “I so knew it.”
“She was really in love with him.”
“Uh-oh. Your voice got all filled with doom.”
“Well, he broke her heart.” She shook her head. “Fucking Reynard.” Her tone was not entirely lacking in affection. “He was charming and fun, but he was a liar and a cheater and a dog. He was as bad as your father. Better in some ways, worse in others. Don’t you be like him.”
“Okay,” I said. I knew that I could not have been that kind of man if I had devoted half of every day to the effort. Part of me never wanted to be anything else.
“He broke my heart, too.” She might have been talking to herself.
“What?” I said.
I felt myself sinking into the lunar sofa that was the last thing my parents had purchased together before my father’s disappearance. As a boy of the 1970s I had stood by and watched as my mother, like some patriotic young hothead after Fort Sumter or Pearl Harbor, had enlisted in the corps of liberated women. Among those who served under that banner, openness was held to be the consequence and not just the precondition of adventure. I had heard a thing or two during those years that shocked me. In time I grew used to and even began to look forward to, I suppose, being shocked. Around the time of Reagan’s election, however, my mother had settled down. I was out of practice. She sat there pie-eyed with her mouth hanging open. After a minute I realized that she was imitating me. I closed my mouth.
“You didn’t, you know, sleep with Uncle Ray, right?” I said.
“He wasn’t that much older than me. Or it never seemed like he was.” She tipped the teacup of Scotch to drain whatever was left in it. “Anyway, he wasn’t really my uncle.”
“Still,” I said. “I mean, Mom, you were a minor. You were a kid.”
“True,” my mother said, refastening the clasp that sealed up the black-and-white planet of her girlhood and other lost things. “It was a crime.” Her voice held bitterness and affection. “The man was definitely a criminal.”
“Did he . . . ?”
“There was alcohol involved. To be honest, I don’t really remember much. But I guess I must not have been too happy about it, because the next day I shot him in the eye.”
“You what?”
“With a bow and arrow.”
“Were you sitting on a horse at the time?”
“I told him I didn’t want that photographer taking my picture,” she said.
“Damn, Mom.” I pictured Uncle Ray in a pair of Bermudas and a guayabera shirt, reeling across a hotel lawn with his hands cupped around the shaft of the arrow that was sticking out of his face.
“I guess I was angry. I guess at that point I was angry about everything.”
I felt the cold bite of the arrowhead, a burst of red in my left eye. I shuddered.
“I know,” said my mother.
“Well,” I said, in a more philosophical tone. I was over the shock of it now and the more I thought about her act of retaliation, the less it surprised me. Uncle Ray had a reputation for shrewdness but he must not have understood my mother very well or he would never have let her anywhere near a bow and arrow. “I mean, you kind of got seriously fucked over.”
“I got a head start on fucked over,” my mother said. “Then your dad kind of finished me off.”
“Same here.” I held up my hand palm outward and after a moment she gave me a soft high-five.
“But I can’t have been that angry at your grandpa,” she said. “Or I would have told him about me and Ray. And I never did.”
“Maybe you didn’t need to.”
“You think he knows?”
“There’s five things he brings with him from Florida, that picture is one of them?”
“I thought that was a little weird. Maybe Ray confessed at some point.”
“Maybe knowing you shot Uncle Ray with an arrow made Grandpa feel a little better about, his word, abandoning you with him.”
“That is the correct word.”
“I guess it kind of showed that you knew how to, like, handle yourself.”
“Hmm,” she said. She put a hand on my arm. “Still. Just in case. Don’t tell him, okay? Maybe that was the only picture he could find, we didn’t have much time to pack.”
“Okay,” I said. “I won’t tell him that I know that you know that he knows what nobody wants to talk about.”
“What’s the point of talking about it?” my mother said. “Everybody already knows.”
30
They arrived too late for lunch and whatever part of it had been garnished with slices of crabapple. It was early September 1958. The afternoon lay gray and heavy over Morristown. The east was a lustrous pile of thunderheads; to the west loomed Greystone Park, another thunderhead massed against the sky. Lightning flickered in the periphery of my grandfather’s vision, but when he looked straight on at the clouds, it was never there. He wondered if this furtive lightning might be happening inside him and not over downtown Newark. He had not seen, held, or fucked my grandmother in fourteen months, and despite the sullen presence of their teenage daughter beside him in the car, his thoughts for the past hour or more had been of the plum of my grandmother’s lower lip between his teeth, of the down on her ass, of reaching around to cup her breasts as he entered her from behind, of burying his nose in the cool salt parting of her hair as she lay with her head on his chest and a leg jackknifed across his abdomen.
He was at the wheel of a 1958 Buick Riviera purchased on Broadway three days before for a little over three thousand dollars cash. Its engine boomed up the green tunnel of elms that lined the road into Morristown. In the hip pocket of his new slacks were five hundred-dollar bills, nine fifties, two twenties, and change of a ten. My grandfather’s underwear, shirts, socks, shoes, belt, wristwatch, and money clip were as new as the slacks. He had considered buying a suit but had opted instead for two pair of slacks, chocolate and dark navy, and a tropical-weight worsted sport coat in a muted gold windowpane plaid. Pale peach shirt worn without a tie, collar open. He was a free man with money in his pocket and a new hardtop coupe. He was the new-minted managing partner of MRX, Inc., with Sam Chabon for a partner and principal investor and a contract to supply Chabon Scientific with five thousand 1:20-scale solid-fueled Aerobee-Hi rockets. Even the bottled voltage of desire for my grandmother was a source of pleasure as it lit up his brain. He had never come closer in his life to something he was prepared to call happiness. But at the moment there was one set of y coordinates keeping my grandfather asymptotically from intersecting with that untouchable x axis.
“Could you please just attempt to drive normally?” my mother said.
“I’m going the speed limit.”
“You might be averaging the speed limit. But you keep doing that thing where you tap the gas, take your foot off. Fast. Slow. Fast. Slow. Fast.” My mother made a fist of her right hand and pushed it forward, pulled it back. There was an unsettling likeness in this gesture to the recent trend of his thoughts. He felt apprehended. “It’s like you are trying to make me vomit.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I won’t do it anymore.”
Her head was tilted back against the headrest and she had her eyes closed. She sat wedged against the passenger door, hugging her knees in their stiff dungarees to her chest, her ankles under rolled cuffs a tale of summer written by sticker bushes, mosquitoes, and fingernails. The soles of her blue Sperry boat shoes had printed a moire of wavelets in white dust on the oxblood leather seat. Back in the new apartment he’d rented in Parkchester, on the new bed with a pink chenille spread, a sleeveless gingham sundress guaranteed by a Macy’s salesclerk to be universally desirable to girls of sixteen lay untried beside a pair of open-toed flats still in their box. She had not even taken the dress off its hanger. Like everything he said and did, it appeared to revolt her. The first thing she had said
to him after they’d gotten the preliminary inanities out of the way was:
“I thought you were supposed to be there longer.”
He had explained that because of his spotless record (bearing only the invisible spots of an accidental homicide and violating curfew with an exploit in the walls), his new partner, who did business with the Department of Corrections, had been able to put in a good word for him and help win him early release. Later that day my grandfather had taken my mother to see the new offices of MRX. He had leased half a floor in a ten-year-old building on Cortlandt Street, downtown, a couple of blocks from the Arrow Radio shop he had managed in the mid-fifties. When they got there, Uncle Sammy was just giving a tour of the premises to his brother and his nephew, a dark-eyed good-looking kid, crown prince of his family, not yet twenty and already in medical school. His small stature, smart clothes, lustrous fingernails, and something indefinable (“maybe he just looked like a hustler”) reminded my grandfather of Ray—before the mysterious eye patch, of course. What was the story there? The Chabon kid had that Reynardian way of looking inattentive when he was measuring someone—in this case, my mother—to the millimeter. My mother returned my father’s attentive inattention with a display of her skill at striking unposed poses. After five minutes they had slipped out without anyone noticing. My grandfather found them out on a fire escape, smoking and “just talking.”
Despite rulings handed down over the centuries by our sages concurring that handsome young medical students be given the benefit of the doubt, my grandfather could not help being annoyed. “You didn’t even see the testing room,” he had complained afterward. “You didn’t see the wind tunnel.”
“It smelled like old peanuts in there,” my mother had replied.
He had deposited with his brother for safekeeping a girl who smelled of Lifebuoy and library paste and retrieved a young woman who smelled of cigarettes and Ban. He did not blame Ray for this alteration, however, for this strange and gawky changeling with her big bust and her eyes passing merciless judgment on everything they settled upon apart from lapdogs and babies. He did not simply attribute the change in my mother to the glandular inevitability of adolescent rebellion. He knew that he was responsible. His failure to control his own anger on that day in the offices of Feathercombs, Inc., was the source of the anger that seeped out of her every time she spoke to him or looked at him. In the thirty-seven hours they had spent together since their reunion, at the Schrafft’s on Fordham Road, he had managed to keep them out of an outright argument. But there had been these regular low-level discharges, a plasma of anger that seemed to cling to her like St. Elmo’s fire. Maybe that, he thought, was the flickering at the corner of his eye.
“Why did you make me eat all that food?”
“You have to eat.”
“I do eat, just not breakfast. Uncle Ray never eats breakfast, either.”
“Most important meal of the day.”
“I told you, my stomach can’t handle food in the morning.”
He had attempted to surprise her, on their way down from the Bronx, with breakfast at the Howard Johnson’s he remembered her having loved so much a couple of years before. It had not been his intention to cajole and then effectively coerce her into eating a short stack of chocolate-chip pancakes, but that was the way it had worked out.
“I know, honey. You did. I’m sorry.”
“I said I only wanted coffee.”
“And a cigarette.”
“Oh, the horror,” said my mother. “Oh, the everlasting shame.”
My grandfather was still compiling an inventory of all the unwelcome changes in his daughter wrought during her thirteen months under his brother’s careless care. Sarcasm and smoking headed the list so far.
As they turned in to the hospital’s parking lot, the sun broke through the clouds and lent a confectionery splendor to the heaped-up arches and swags of Greystone Park. It was not a regular visiting day, and he found a spot close to the grand steps of the central building. He cut the engine. The clack of sprinklers filled the car. The wide empty lawns were veiled in shifting iridescence. One of the rivulets in the flow of his imaginings that morning had been the sight of my grandmother rising to her feet on the topmost step of the main building, in the belted navy blue dress she had been wearing the last time he’d seen her. She had lifted a tentative hand, then dropped it and come tearing down the steps toward him. He would burst from the Buick, leaving the engine running and the door open, and go to her. She would leap into his arms and scissor her legs around his waist. The contact of their mouths would be the fixed point around which the world, the day, and the state hospital would rotate.
The steps were empty. My mother lowered her chin and opened her eyes. She took a pack of Marlboro cigarettes from her handbag and put one between her lips. They were tipped with red paper to hide the print of a lady’s lipstick, but my grandfather had succeeded, by dint of pleading that rapidly turned abject, in persuading my mother to leave her face unpainted, just for today, until they had all had a chance to adjust. “I already adjusted,” she had said flatly.
Automatically, he took Aughenbaugh’s lighter from his pocket and lit my mother’s cigarette, then averted his face so he would not have to see how adeptly she handled the business of smoking it. She made a virtuous show of directing her smoke out the window of the Riviera. My grandfather saw that the cigarette was trembling in her fingers.
“How is she really?” my mother said. “Please don’t say, ‘We’ll have to see.’”
As repeated by my mother, the words hung from the hooks of ironizing quotation marks, but my grandfather could find no weak points in the assessment.
“Did they shock her?”
“Who told you that? Ray?”
She nodded. She was crying. He reached for her, but she pushed him away. She jabbed at the cigarette lighter, pulled it out, and before he could stop her, touched the heating element with the tip of her index finger.
“Real nice,” she said. She poked the lighter back into its slot. “They sold you a broken car.”
“They did not shock her,” he said. He was reasonably certain that this was the case. “As far as I can tell, the only thing they did is give her some hormones.”
Over the phone the doctor had said that a year ago my grandmother had gone into early menopause, with a consequent intensification of her symptoms. They had tried a new treatment, a drug just on the market called Premarin.
“I don’t know,” my mother said. “I mean, if she’s how she is because of the things that happened to her in her life, it seems like you would have to shock it out of her somehow.”
My grandfather said that he didn’t know much about electroshock therapy, but he didn’t really think that was how it worked.
“Look at that place,” my mother said, staring up through the windows at the battlements of Greystone. “Ugh. I can’t go in. I don’t want to see her in there. You go in, okay, and get her? And I’ll wait in the car? Please? Dad, I’m sorry I’ve been such a pill. I want to see Mama, but I don’t want to go in there.”
My grandfather reached for the dashboard lighter. He did not want to force my mother to have to see her mother in a madhouse, and he did not want my grandmother to walk out of the madhouse after eleven months and see him standing there alone. He could not decide which of the two would represent the bigger failure on his part. He brought his fingertip near the element and felt the heat of it well before he let it touch his skin. There was a hiss, and the car filled with a nauseous odor like the smell of a tooth under the drill.
“Fixed,” he said.
He moved the car to a shaded parking space and rolled the windows down. He got out of the car and slammed the door. He was almost to the steps leading up to the front doors of Greystone when he heard the scrape of her Topsiders against the pavement behind him. At the bottommost step, he turned and she was standing there. They looked up at the high oak doors entangled in vines of wrought iron and shared a moment of
awe or dread or at the very least hesitation. He felt like he ought to take her hand—he felt that he wanted to—but he was afraid that when he reached for her, as on the day they first met, she would turn him down and leave him with his hand stuck out. He was still trying to decide if he could risk the disappointment when he felt the butterfly flutter of her fingers against his palm.
* * *
A woman wearing a white cardigan and white tennis shoes came out of the reception office on the far side of a sliding pane of glass. The glass was veined with wire mesh. She was not a nurse, but her short white hair had the upswept wings of a nurse’s hat. She asked my grandfather to wait in the lobby for the doctor, Medved, who had been treating my grandmother. Everything was fine in the way of my grandmother’s recovery, and not to worry; there was some aspect of her care that the doctor wanted to discuss.
“Come, dear,” she said to my mother. “I’ll take you along to the theater.”
Her kindly manner was lost on my mother, who, on entering the lobby of the hospital, had awakened like a sleepwalker on a roof to find herself one step shy of an abyss. She was afraid to move. She remembered a scene from a movie she had seen in which a soldier trod on a land mine that would detonate only if he lifted his foot. She was afraid to speak, listen, or breathe. The lobby was very grand. It was framed by a double stairway rising to a colonnaded mezzanine. It had a crystal chandelier, a chessboard of marble for a floor, and, masked by Pine-Sol and narcissi in pots, a bloom of human feces in the air.
“I don’t want to go to the theater. I’m just here to get my mom.”
“Your mother is in the theater, sweetie,” the woman said. “It’s dress rehearsal for the play. She has been very involved.”
“But we’re taking her home today,” my grandfather said.
“Oh yes. She knows that.”
My grandfather was hurt, and his face must have shown it; the pity on the woman’s face was plain to see.