He held out the frying pan so I could see it. He did his salami and eggs pancake-style, pouring the scrambled eggs around the fried salami, letting it set and get brown on the bottom, then flipping the “pancake” to brown on the other side.
“How many degrees in a circle?” he asked me.
“Three hundred and sixty.”
“Correct. How many degrees do you want?”
“A hundred and twenty.”
He cut me a fat wedge and slid it onto my plate. We sat at the counter with our food. The radio erected its tower of accidents, crime, money, love, good and bad fortune, and war. I looked at my house of cards and reflected on the proverbial inevitability of its collapse.
“Why aren’t you eating?” my grandfather said.
Having only lately consumed an entire tarte tatin was another secret I felt that my grandmother would prefer I didn’t betray. I didn’t answer.
“Your dad will be here tomorrow,” my grandfather said, guessing at the reason for my unaccustomed pensiveness and silence. “To take you home. You’ll see Mommy. She’s really all right.”
“Okay.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“So eat.”
“Why didn’t God want them to build the Tower of Babel?” I said. “Why did He make it so everybody couldn’t understand each other?”
“You know I don’t believe in God.”
“I know.”
“Probably there was just a ziggurat, you know what a ziggurat is? Over in Mesopotamia. Maybe it was in ruins. Maybe it was only halfway built, left unfinished. And they made up a story to explain what happened to it, why it looked incomplete.”
“Oh.”
“You understand what I’m saying?”
I understood: Everything got ruined and nothing was ever finished. The world, like the Tower of Babel or my grandmother’s deck of cards, was made out of stories, and it was always on the verge of collapse. That was proverbial.
“Maybe God doesn’t want this tower,” my grandmother theorized. She was standing in the middle of the living room, holding my grandfather’s coat and briefcase and the crumpled mess of his newspaper. “Because from the top of it, people they can look inside of His house and see He is a big pork.”
My grandfather smiled for the first time since walking in the door. He acknowledged that there might be something to her theory. He offered my grandmother some of the salami and eggs on his plate. She shook her head and made a face, but she came over and plucked a bit of salami from the plate and popped it into her mouth. She stood very close to my grandfather, leaning her hip against his shoulder. “Mmm,” she said. She looked at me without looking at me. “Poor little one.”
My grandfather got down off the stool and put his arms around my grandmother. They held on to each other for what seemed to me to be a very long time. She murmured something into his ear, too low for me to catch, and he nodded and said, “I know. Me, too.”
Then she seemed to recover herself. She reached out to me for a second time that afternoon. I got down from my stool and went to my grandparents. I took her left hand in my right, and my grandfather did the same with my left hand. With his left hand, he reached for my grandmother and we made a brief circle before letting go.
“He’s fine,” my grandfather said. “I told him everything’s going to be fine.”
“He isn’t fine,” my grandmother said. “He’s terrified because of those puppets you bought! They are so horrible. He’s the nervous wrecks all day long because he is so afraid to go to sleep in there.”
I had said nothing to my grandmother, at any time since their arrival from Lille, France, about my fear of the puppets.
She frowned and let go of our hands. “Oh no.” She had noticed the house of cards, and now she glanced from it to my grandfather. Their eyes locked and held, and I saw they were conducting some kind of discussion about the cards and me without saying anything at all. My grandmother looked at me, a little sadly, I thought. Then she went to the kitchen table and blew on the cards like the Big Bad Wolf. The tower collapsed and rattled to the tabletop.
“See?” said my grandfather.
My grandmother gathered up the cards and slid them into their box. I don’t know what became of them; I never saw them again. After he finished his dinner, my grandfather went into the guest bedroom. He took the hatbox out of the closet and carried it in the elevator to the storage space in the basement of the building.
The next day my father came to retrieve me, and together we picked up my mother from the hospital. I told her I knew about the lost baby, and she said that it was so new it hadn’t really been a baby at all.
The following year my father left the Public Health Service for the short-lived job with the Senators baseball club, and we left New York for good. I saw my grandmother much less frequently; when I did see her, she was fragile and ill. We never cooked or played cards. She sat wrapped in blankets and stared at the television or watched the sky outside the window. And then one day when I was eleven years old, she died and was buried in Montefiore Cemetery, leaving me her legacy of voices in the dark.
33
Toward the end of the mourning period my grandfather attended the Twelfth Space Congress, in Cocoa Beach, Florida.
On the opening Saturday the first panel discussion was held over coffee and Danish in the Egret Room of the Atlantis Beach Lodge. An engineer on the team developing the new space shuttle led off his session by denying that he had ever referred to NASA’s astronaut corps as “a buncha flying truck drivers.” His accent had been engineered in Flatbush. His necktie and lapels were as wide as tire sidewalls. He wore round granny glasses and his sandy hair in a puffball. Astronauts were heroes, he said, that was obvious. And they would remain heroes right up to the day the Space Transportation System (STS) became operational. After that, “flying truck drivers” would be a fair description. Everybody in the Egret Room cracked up.
My grandfather laughed, too. He was on his way out the door with hot coffee from the catering table in a Styrofoam cup, already running late for his weekly appointment with grief.
“Space travel is still an incredibly exciting adventure in 1975,” the young engineer said. “But don’t worry, because at NASA we’re doing everything we can to change that.”
My grandfather laughed again, lingering in the doorway. In his view, heroism (if there was such a thing) would always be the residue of training. If you had been well trained, then adventure was something you hoped to avoid.
At the sound of his laughter, a woman sitting in the last row of chairs turned around and smiled at him. She patted the seat of the empty chair beside her and lifted an eyebrow. She was fifty, but her hand was youthful, the nails painted geranium pink. She was a vice president of accounting at Walt Disney World and recording secretary of the committee that put on this annual aerospace congress. She lived in Orlando. She had a daughter at Duke and an ex-husband who had flown jets for the navy in Vietnam. She wore L’Air du Temps. She also wore panty hose, which, until the previous evening, my grandfather had never encountered at close range, my grandmother having stuck till the last—February 10, 1974, (probable) age fifty-two—with girdle and garter belt. A high school classmate of Tony Bennett. An amateur photographer. Owner of a late-model Mercury Cougar the color of a spoonful of sweetened condensed milk.
He riffled through this deck of facts, trying to force the ace of the woman’s name. He was appalled to realize that he had forgotten it since the night before. The name of the first woman he had slept with since losing his wife, the first since 1944 who was not my grandmother! The woman gave the empty chair another pat, like she was attempting to lure a recalcitrant pussycat. My grandfather could feel his cheeks and the back of his neck prickling. He felt like he might have to be sick. He shook his head, hoping the look on his face came off wistful but fearing that it clearly read as nausea. He turned to go, using the cup of hot coffee as a focus of attention, of the will to r
efrain from vomiting. He escorted stomach and brimming cup along the carpeted corridor, a man in no kind of hurry. Past the Panther Room, past the Manatee Room, out into the lobby of the motor lodge.
She caught up to him by the registration table. It was stacked with bound copies of the proceedings from last year’s congress, at which the guest speaker had been Gene Roddenberry. Their tryst had begun at the Friday-night cocktail reception, held in Ramon’s Rainbow Room atop a space-age modernist bank in downtown Cocoa Beach, with a mutual confession of love for Star Trek. My grandfather had attended the annual space congress for ten straight years as co-owner and director of product development for MRX, Inc., and had skipped nine straight cocktail receptions until last night’s. He could not entirely dismiss the possibility that even in the midst of mourning my grandmother, he had been on the prowl for female company that year. But an annual conference of professionals and amateurs of rocketry and space travel was a pretty stupid place to go prowling, even at Ramon’s Rainbow Room.
“You okay, mister?” She had brought him a plastic lid for the coffee cup and a banana. She made a quick survey of his face, his hairline tingling with sweat, yesterday’s knot reused for his necktie. “You look pretty green. Hold this.”
She handed him the banana. She took a tissue from the hip pocket of the raw silk blazer, more or less the color of her fingernails, that she must have changed into that morning after slipping unnoticed out of his room. At seven o’clock his alarm had gone off, and when he reached for her in a place where for so many months there had been only cold linens, the trace of her warmth and lingering odor of L’Air du Temps made the bed feel emptier than usual; he had lived for eleven months with bereavement, but he had never felt so bereft.
“I know it’s probably the last thing you feel like doing, but if you ate that banana, you would feel better.” She dabbed at his clammy brow with the tissue. “Potassium. Electrolytes.”
He peeled the banana, ate half of it. Almost immediately, he felt better. “Oh,” he said, feeling like an idiot for not having realized sooner. “I have a hangover.”
“Guess it’s been a while.”
It was not a question but a laminate of implication and sass. Last night he had in all probability consumed more alcohol than cumulatively in all the years since V-E Day. Clearly, she knew more about him and his life than he could remember having told her. He made a quick probe at his memory, and guessed that some portion of the previous evening was likely never to be fully accounted for. He hoped that he had not sexually disappointed this good woman. He hoped that he had not cried on her shoulder. He feared that he might have done both.
“You better go,” she said. She looked at her wristwatch, a man’s big Accutron Astronaut. The lady was a space nut all the way. “Melbourne is a good half hour, depending on the traffic.”
Among the things he could not remember having told her, apparently, was that he would be missing that morning’s session on “The Space Shuttle (STS): A Progress Report” to drive down to Melbourne, Florida, a place he had never been, to say kaddish for my grandmother. He had found Beth Isaac listed in the Yellow Pages.
“Here,” she said. She took the cup of coffee from him and tenderly fitted it with the lid she had brought. A drop splashed the meat of her thumb and she said, “Ow.” She licked away the droplet and handed the cup back to him. “Aramaic, right?”
It seemed he had gone into a fair amount of detail about the nature of Jewish customs relating to death and mourning. “That’s right,” he said.
“And where do they speak Aramaic again?”
“Nowhere.”*
She gave his right arm a squeeze just above the elbow. He was not pleased to detect a certain amount of pity in her eyes. She brushed his cheek with her lips. “Finish your banana,” she said.
That afternoon, after he had returned from his errand in Melbourne, he would catch a glimpse of her as she was walking into the Atlantis Beach Lodge’s banquet room to attend the award luncheon. She formed part of a crowd of admirers and well-wishers, including all four of the other female attendees, around the imposing silver-haired gentleman who had come to Cocoa Beach to collect the award in question. That glimpse would turn out to be, as far my grandfather could remember afterward, the last time he ever saw her. And yet she would turn out to have been a key figure in shaping the subsequent course of his life.
He finished the banana she had given him as he was walking out to his car, and that was when he suddenly remembered her name, though by the time he got around to telling me the story, he had forgotten it again.*
* * *
“Every Saturday, for a year,” my grandfather told me. “No matter where I was. And I was a lot of places. Your dad and Ray, let me tell you, they had really spread that mess of theirs around.”
It was a warm afternoon. At his request I had helped him out onto the patio he liked to observe, through the window, from his rented hospital bed. The abutilon was in flower, hung with a thousand plump red lanterns. The birdfeeder had been getting a lot of action, and the pebbled concrete beneath it was scattered with seed. “They managed to get themselves sued in four states. New York, New Jersey, Maryland, and Pennsylvania.”
“Delaware.”
“That’s right. Delaware. How did you know that?”
“I used to snoop.”
It was the only way I ever reliably found out anything as a boy.
“You remember one time, or maybe you don’t remember. The summer you and your brother stayed with us.”
“Mom was studying for the bar.”
“The two of you were playing outside. And he, I guess he must have stepped in some dog poop. Without knowing.”
“Vaguely.”
“After a while you and he come inside, you’re done playing. He goes into the kitchen. He goes into the living room, the TV room. Up the stairs, down the stairs. The bathroom. The garage. He goes into the coat closet! Like he’s giving a house tour. Every room, there’s a stinky little brown footprint.”
I laughed.
“See?” he said. “You’re not the only one with the fancy metaphors.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m talking about the mess your father and my goddamn brother made.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
“I mean, your mother’s just starting out with her law degree. Now her credit’s going to be destroyed? She’s going to lose her house? At first I went around, D.C., Baltimore. I was just trying to find out how much shit there was and how far they had tracked it. Then I started trying to get on top of it, negotiate with the IRS. Negotiate with the ones suing them. Sam Chabon was suing your father, did you know that?”
“Yeah.”
“His own uncle, suing him.”
“A proud moment.”
“I’m sorry,” my grandfather said. “He’s your father, you should love him.”
“I shouldn’t,” I said. “But I do.”
“Anyway, no matter where I was, if it was a Saturday, I would go and say kaddish. Adath Jeshurun or maybe B’nai Abraham in Philly. Ahavas Sholom in Baltimore, of course. Rodef Sholom in Pittsburgh. Beth El in Silver Spring.”
“You took me to Beth El.”
“A couple of times.”
The momzer appeared over the top of the roof and began to case the joint.
“I really don’t know why I was doing it, to be honest. Week after week, shlepping out Reisterstown Road or wherever to say a prayer.”
“You must have gotten something out of it.”
“I must have wanted to get something out of it, anyway.” He stuck out his tongue. “Moment of weakness.”
The momzer inched his way down the roof.
“Look at this guy.”
“I know. I kind of just want to give him some damn birdseed.”
“He wouldn’t know what to do if you did,” my grandfather said. “He would think you put poison in it.”
“You think he’s that smart?”
“He’s a
momzer.”
We didn’t say anything for a while, and he closed his eyes. He had already told me that he could feel the sun “in his bones” and that the warmth of it was “pleasant.”
“We’re good at death, I will say that,” he said.
“Jews?”
“It’s ‘Do this, do that. Don’t do that.’ That’s what you need, somebody just to tell you what to do. Tear a ribbon, cover the mirror. Sit around for a week. Grow your beard for a month. And then for eleven months, every week you go to a synagogue, you stand up, and you just . . . it’s . . . I don’t know.”
He closed his eyes again. A faint breeze stirred his soft white forelock. “If your wife, your brother, or God forbid, your child dies. It leaves a big hole in your life. It’s much better not to pretend there’s no hole. Not to try to, what do they say nowadays, get over it.”
I reflected that it seemed to be in the nature of human beings to spend the first part of their lives mocking the clichés and conventions of their elders and the final part mocking the clichés and conventions of the young.
“So you, you know, when it’s time for the kaddish. You stand up in front of everybody, and you point to the hole, and you say, ‘Look at this. This is what I’m living with, this hole. Eleven months, every week. It doesn’t go away, you don’t ‘put it behind you.’”
“That’s another one.”
“And then after a while you get used to it. I mean, that’s the theory. That’s why I went every week, no matter where I was, so I would get used to it. It worked that way with my parents. I guess I thought it would work with your grandmother, too.”
* * *
Congregation Beth Isaac was housed in a midcentury modernist chalet whose A-frame gables of azure blue betrayed its original career as an International House of Pancakes. Indeed, the shul was known locally, my grandfather learned, as Beth IHOP. In a showcase on a wall just inside the front entrance, among some newspaper clippings eulogizing the generosity and community spirit of various congregants living and dead, my grandfather noticed a trophy topped by a gold shaygets with a racquet. Beside it was a photo of a beefy young Jew shaking hands with a lanky fellow, both men wearing white polo shirts and white shorts. The lean-faced athlete was said to be British Open champion Geoff Hunt. The strapping Jew on the other end of the handshake was identified as Rabbi Lance Teppler.