I sat beside the bed with an uncomfortable sensation, a kind of premonition of shock, about whatever it was that my grandmother had told Dr. Medved. I had already made the disquieting connection between the play my mother had told me about the night before, in which my grandmother had featured as Queen of the Moon, and a story my grandmother had told me when I was little. I had long since rediscovered the source of that story of my grandmother’s in the pages of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, an edition with the Doré illustrations, which she had given to me as a gift.
“Look, Mike,” my grandfather said, “it took your mom a long time to get over some of the things about Mamie that . . . that were hard on her. I mean, your grandmother always felt like she had been a bad mother, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t see it that way. The way I see it is she lived, she got your mother out of there, she loved her, so in my book that’s mother enough. But I don’t want to give Mom a reason to doubt. So do me a favor. Don’t say anything to your mother about this.”
“Don’t say anything to me about what?” said my mother, entering the room. She looked at me, then at my grandfather, suspicious.
“Grandpa had a beer,” I said. “I think he’s a little bit drunk.”
32
When I was little and we still lived in Flushing, the Whip used to come shambling down our block, a hectic fanfare blowing from its loudspeaker horn. The Whip was a truck with a carnival ride in a wire cage mounted on its flatbed, painted red and yellow like a circus tent. The music that attended its migrations and advertised its arrival had a slapstick wooziness and in hindsight may have been a tarantella. It seemed as long and as looming as a tractor-trailer to me, but it was probably no bigger than a moving van. If you were already in the street playing when the Whip rolled up, you ran in to beg for a quarter. If you were indoors, you heard the drunken music and ran out to meet it with a quarter sweating against your palm.
The Whip Man was a beefy dark-skinned fellow in a billed cap who said little and smiled less, although he did not seem unfriendly. He would relieve you of your change and then help you up three steel stairs to the interior of the cage where the Whip’s six cars waited, alternately red or yellow, arranged on a hidden track in an elongated oval. Sometimes the cars reminded me of tulips and sometimes of painted hands upturned to cup a pair of children. The cars wobbled around the oval, trundling along the straightaways, then picking up speed at each end in a burst that smashed you against the outside of the car or the person beside you. During the slow parts you recovered, and then you got smashed again, and when the ride was over you went back down the stairs. Just before you exited his cage, the Whip Man would reach up to take a piece of Bazooka bubble gum from a shelf over his head and press it into your hand with a murmured benediction.
One day as I came down the stairs from the back of the Whip truck, I was surprised to find my father waiting for me in his suit, tie, and white coat. The rubber-tipped antlers of a stethoscope protruded from a hip pocket. There was a fleck of red on his shirtfront that looked like blood but was more likely to be his lunch: tomato soup, ketchup. I knew that if I asked him, he would say it was blood. I had recently begun to understand that my father only rarely meant what he said and that usually he meant precisely the opposite. If he said it was a gorgeous day, that meant it was snowing or raining. If he said something couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, then something bad had happened to someone who deserved it. When he was imparting information of a factual nature, you could generally take what he said at face value, but even then you had to be careful. I had endured a painful day of teasing by the older kids on the block, after I cited my father’s authority in claiming that the “crunch berries” in Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries cereal were made from actual dehydrated strawberries.
“Does Mommy have a stomach flu?” I said.
The only time I could remember my father having come home in the middle of a workday had been a few months earlier, when my mother fell ill and was too weak from vomiting to look after me. She had seemed fine at breakfast this morning, but I had been at my friend Roland’s house since then, and in the meantime she must have succumbed.
“She had to go to the hospital,” my father said. He unlocked the car on my mother’s side and held open the rear door. I got in. “Mrs. Kartakis drove her.”
“Does she have to have an operation?” I said.
“Yes, but you don’t have to worry, Mike. She’s going to be fine.”
My father was wanting as a father, still less of a businessman, and as a crook he was grossly incompetent, but he seems to have been a very good doctor. Among the gifts he could bring to bear was a fine bedside manner; I don’t think I’ve ever seen finer. Like his mother-in-law telling a story, my father became a different person when he wanted to comfort you. His voice grew deeper and more gentle, and he seemed—uniquely at such moments—to relax. He looked you right in the eye. He knew you had questions; he understood your concerns. In the years that he spent practicing medicine, his patients always loved him. No doubt this manner had its effect on creditors and investors, too. Up to a point.
“It isn’t serious,” he said. “A minor procedure.” He crouched beside the car and buckled my seat belt, even though I had known how to buckle my own seat belt for some time. “Don’t worry, honey.”
“Okay.”
He put his hand with its manicured nails on my shoulder. A clean smell between peppermint and leather escaped the cuff of his lab coat. His class ring with its gemstone and cryptic inscription radiated strength like the ring of Hercules in the cartoons; if you held it to the sky, it might call down lightning. I looked at the glittering stone and the moons of his fingernails. I felt like crying about my mother having to go to the hospital, but I arrested the feeling at the back of my throat and managed to work it down. I asked my father what kind of operation my mother would be having.
“What kind of operation do you think she might be having?” he said.
He closed the door and I was surprised to notice on the seat beside me a small suitcase, ivory leather, with spring-action brass clasps and hinges that creaked when you opened it. Scuffed as an old white oxford shoe, it had been my father’s when he was a boy and was therefore always referred to as my valise, because that was what they had called a suitcase in my father’s family. I took it be a Yiddish word. I was not sure why my father wanted me to guess what kind of operation my mother was having. I wondered if I would be judged on the quality of my answer. I remembered that one of my valise-toting relatives, his late mother’s sister Dottie, had recently gone into the hospital for a foot operation.
“Maybe her feet?” I tried.
“You’re right,” he said. “Very good.”
He switched on the radio, tuned as usual to WQXR. Someone was hitting the keys of a piano hard, in fitful handfuls. My father turned up the volume. We drove down the street, past the Whip. The angry piano tangled momentarily with the drunken trumpet pouring from the speaker horn over the Whip’s cab. My friend Roland and his brother, Pierre, stood at the Whip’s bottommost step, squinting hopefully up at the Whip Man. I realized that I was still holding the piece of bubble gum.
I unwrapped it and put my jaw to work on it. I puzzled over the gag in the Bazooka Joe comic strip, which I was newly capable of reading. I didn’t ask my father about the valise. I assumed that I was going to stay with my mother in the hospital. I wondered if I would have a bed of my own or if I would be sharing a bed with her. I envisioned a room in New York Hospital, where my father had done his residency in orthopedics—the only hospital I really knew. After a while I understood that we were going the wrong way for NYH and must be headed to a different hospital. I knew, of course, that New York City was full of hospitals—Montefiore, Presbyterian, St. Luke’s. Mrs. Kartakis must have taken my mother to one of those. There were Jewish and Catholic hospitals; maybe there were Greek hospitals. Maybe Mrs. Kartakis had taken my mother to the Public Health
Service hospital on Staten Island, where my father was currently posted.
The piano was under heavy attack now—it must have been a Liszt waltz, maybe Rachmaninoff. It was so loud that I would almost have to shout to be heard over it, and my father didn’t like it when I shouted over his music. It annoyed him, and sometimes if I did not shut up, annoyance slipped into anger. He would reach back and uncoil his right arm, slowly at first and then with a sudden snap. His Mighty Hercules ring would crack against my skull, making a sound that I could see, a thunderclap behind my eyeballs. Therefore I did not ask him if we would be riding the Staten Island Ferry to visit my mother. It was only when it became clear that we were headed across the Bronx to Riverdale that I opened my mouth. Even then I waited until the piece ended and a commercial came on before saying what I had to say. “I don’t want to sleep over at Grandpa and Grandma’s.”
“Oh, come on, Mike!” It came out as irritable, halfway to yelling. He lowered his voice. “The puppets are not going to hurt you,” he said, in a controlled tone. “They are toys. You know that.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m just afraid of them.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Mike . . .”
“I just am.”
A new piece began to play on the radio. My father turned down the volume but drove on for a while without saying anything.
“Well, I don’t know what to do about that,” he said.
He sounded more sad than irritated; he sounded disappointed. I was very sorry to disappoint him, but it was hardly my fault that in a hatbox at the top of the closet in the guest bedroom of my grandparents’ apartment, a dozen hand puppets (a rubicund King, a sour-faced Queen, a leering Shepherd, two white and one black Sheep, a sneaky-eyed Fishwife, four Musicians, and a masked Robber with a black beard made horribly from human hair) lay plotting in darkness to kill me while I slept. They had sewn bodies and painted wooden heads carved by a master craftsman in Lille, France. I knew that they had cost my grandparents “an arm and a leg,” which intensified my shame and guilt over being terrified of them and of course merely helped the puppets’ case against me. I tried to think of something I could say to mitigate my father’s disappointment.
“I’m just afraid of them at night,” I said. “In the daytime they don’t bother me at all.”
* * *
The valise was heavy, and I struggled with it across the lobby of the building. The doorman, called Irish George to distinguish him from another doorman known as Tall George, offered me a hand. I declined. I wanted my father to see that in spite of an emotional weakness that made me fear hand puppets, I could at least carry my own valise.
“Big strong fella you got there, Doc,” said Irish George.
My father pushed the up button and stood back appraising me for a moment before lowering his eyes to his Florsheim loafers. “He’s a big boy,” my father agreed.
He still sounded disappointed, I thought, but in a regretful way, as if mostly disappointed in himself. Mistaking incapacity for a philosophy of life, my father did not often apologize, but when he did, he would first look down at his shoes. It hurt my heart to see him hang his head that way. I couldn’t handle it. I did not want him to apologize for whatever was making him feel sorry. I looked at the gondola instead.
There was a beauty salon on the ground floor of my grandparents’ building. It had an Italian name and a Venetian theme and, in the lobby, a sign that was a miniature replica of a gondola. The gondola hung from the ceiling by the elevator. It was nearly two feet long, piano black with red and gold trim, its prow pointed at the hallway that led to the beauty salon. I had been enchanted by this model gondola for as long as I could remember and now—not for the first time—I sought refuge aboard it and began poling slowly in my imagination through waters untroubled by thoughts of the Robber with his veritable beard, or the bad thing happening to my mother that my father was so sorry about, or the chances that, once she and I were alone, my grandmother would find herself in a storytelling mood.
“Is Grandpa home?” I said.
“Of course not. He’s at work.”
“Okay.”
“Why do you ask?”
I said that I had just been wondering. As soon as the elevator doors closed and we started to go up, I felt a djinn of expectancy or dread (there was no difference) flicker to life in my belly. I ran my eyes from the twelfth-floor button to the fourteenth and back. Recently, I had come across a laminated card, printed with the Mourner’s Kaddish in two alphabets, inside a copy of Errol Flynn’s My Wicked, Wicked Ways that had belonged to my other grandfather, my namesake. I wondered if, in spite of the effort made to protect the dummies of the world from their fear of bad luck, some residual thirteenth floor might not linger, hidden like that Kaddish between floors twelve and fourteen.
When we got off the elevator, I let my father carry the suitcase and took his right hand between both of my own. I lagged behind a little, steeling myself for my part in the coming ritual.
The doorbell was mounted under the peephole in a metal frame I could now reach without going up on tiptoe. The way it always worked was that I would ring and, wearing the same look of fresh mischief each time, my father would cover the peephole like a magician palming a coin. A moment later, in a worried voice, my grandmother would call out, “Who is it?” from the other side of the door, even though she knew it could only be us.
The joke was that she was pretending to be worried, but the real joke, at least to my father, was that she was only pretending to pretend. He covered the peephole because he had noticed that his mother-in-law never opened a letter without first holding the envelope to a light, or a door without first peeping through the spyhole. A deadbolt would roll back with a ratcheting sound, a chain would rattle, and my grandparents’ door would swing slowly open—and there would be nobody there.
Here the joke was that it had been a ghost grandmother calling out “Who is it?” My role was to step up and declare in my firmest tone, “There’s no such thing as ghosts!” and my grandmother would then emerge from behind the door and affirm in a reassuring tone that I was absolutely right. Even though I had known for a long time that it was my grandmother hiding herself and not a ghost grandmother, when the invisible hand pulled open the door I often would catch hold of my father’s or mother’s arm or take an involuntary step away. My parents would chuckle or chide me. They failed to understand that it was not the ghost that spooked me, it was the hidden grandmother.
None of that happened this time. My father rang the doorbell. My grandmother opened the door. It was the middle of the afternoon, but she was still wearing her housecoat. This was a kind of slender tent with a Nehru collar that buttoned up the front and fell to her ankles, violently patterned with red and purple op-art oblongs. Today it would seem like the relic of an audacious moment in the history of midcentury design, but at the time I simply accepted it as routine loungewear for a grandmother.
“Go in.” The bangles on her wrists clinked as she waved me into the apartment. “Put your things in the, the cabinet in the bedroom. In the chest of drawers.”
My father handed me the valise. “It’s just a couple of days,” he said. “Grandma will take you to buy a Matchbox car.” He pulled out his billfold and gave me five ones and a five, a considerable sum. He frowned and extracted an additional five-dollar bill from the billfold. This one was frayed, stained, and missing a chip at one corner. He was the son of a print jobber, and until his uncle’s fateful encounter at Jack Dempsey’s with a six-inch human skeleton, his family had clipped coupons, saved Green Stamps in tattered albums, and hoarded pennies in mayonnaise jars. I think there was something unbearable to my father, some imprisoning shame, in the saving of money. It never hung around his wallet very long. But while it was there, he liked it clean and new.
“Dirty,” my grandmother said in mock sympathy as my father handed me the abominable five. “And torn, pouah!”
My father g
rabbed at the back of my head, ruffled my hair, and gave me a gentle shove toward the bedroom. I could feel them waiting until I was out of earshot to start talking about my mother. I took my time getting there. Across the living room windows the Palisades rippled like a stone flag banded with river, trees, and sky. A cast-metal Degas ballerina on a teak console leveled her contemptuous gaze at a balsa-wood model of a Vanguard rocket on a bookshelf by the hall.
When I went into the guest bedroom, my grandmother and my father started talking in low voices. I set the suitcase on the bed and stood in the doorway, trying to eavesdrop. I suspected that my mother was already dead, that the operation on her feet had been a failure or a fiction, and that everyone was conspiring to keep the information from me. Between the hushed tones, my grandmother’s accent, and the elliptical nature of adult conversation, I could not catch the drift. I stared at the worn five-dollar bill in my hand, at the portrait of Abraham Lincoln, whose own mother had died when he was not much older than I was. I felt like I could see the loss in Abraham Lincoln’s eyes.
My father called out a goodbye, and a moment later my grandmother came into the guest bedroom to check on my progress unpacking. I had made no progress. I had been too busy trying to eavesdrop, and anyway, I was confused by my father’s packing technique. He had mistaken pajama tops for pullovers and bathing trunks for short pants. He had packed two handkerchiefs. Handkerchiefs! He had thought to equip me with the fake-ponyskin cowboy vest that had been part of my most recent Halloween costume. There were three pairs of underpants but four pairs of socks, one of them mismatched and one my mother’s.
“Did Mommy die?”
“No, little mouse,” my grandmother said. “You will see her very soon. Now let’s put your things away.”
She took a quick inventory of the contents of the valise. Just before she said it, I knew she was going to say “Oh la la,” an interjection I always enjoyed. She put everything but the buckaroo vest in the chest of drawers and said that we would get some things at Alexander’s when we went to buy me a Matchbox car with all that dirty money.