When I was in college, before a poetry reading at the old Gustine’s bar on Forbes Avenue, some prankster had advised me to look up from the page now and then, to make “eye contact.” It turned out there was no surer way to make you lose your place in the text, persuade the audience that you were some kind of freak, or crush your soul. If the turnout was light, your soul got crushed by the sight of empty chairs. If by chance or misprint there was a decent showing, then it was crushed by its own unerring instinct to contact only the eyes in a face that was busy frowning, yawning, or looking vaguely ill. As the interval ballooned since the last botched attempt, I would grow increasingly tense, and finally look up at an arbitrary moment, giving peculiar weight to a random therefore or, inevitably, a word like snatch, nuts, or blown. By the time I hit Coral Gables, I had learned to mark four or five appropriate words at different points in whatever text I was reading. I would look up on cue and pray that my gaze alighted on somebody who was having an okay time or was kind enough to fake it.
That night at Books & Books, when I looked up in observance of mark number two, I saw a beautiful woman standing by the door where Salzedo Street met Aragon Avenue. She was looking back at me in a friendly but appraising way. She had the eyes of a noticer, cool but not chilly, unsentimental but not hard. The eyes of a painter, I thought. Silver hair streaked with dark gray and swept up into an untidy bun, born with a suntan, and some bold architecture in her nose and cheeks. My grandfather had said Katharine Hepburn because of the cheekbones, but I would have gone with Anjelica Huston. At mark number three, when I looked up again, she was gone. My soul and I alike experienced a certain degree of crushedness.
She didn’t reappear during the reading or afterward, when I was signing a few books. I heard about the horror of my grandmother’s dentition. I heard about how annoying my grandfather’s attention to modeling detail was when all you were trying to make was basically a Roman candle that would go really high and not explode. I accepted a few belated condolences. Then I said goodbye to Mitch Kaplan and took off. I was staying at a hotel on Ponce de Leon Boulevard—more of a glorified motor lodge—and I figured I might as well walk. I hadn’t gone even a block when I felt a touch on my arm, heard a woman calling me Mike.
“I thought that might have been you,” I said.
We shook hands, but then she said, “No,” so we hugged each other, standing out there on the sidewalk along the Miracle Mile. She had the hourglass shape that my grandfather always favored, but she felt much lighter than she looked. The bones of her shoulders flexed like clothespins under her blouse. I got a noseful of oranges and cloves. I remembered my grandfather saying that Sally had a heavy hand with the Opium spritz.
“I almost didn’t have the nerve,” she told me after she had let go of me. She took a Kleenex from a red knapsack-style leather purse and used it dry her eyes. I said maybe I would help myself to a Kleenex, too. “I would have just hated myself.”
“Actually, I thought you left.”
“I did. After I heard a little of what you were reading, I went and had a cup of coffee.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You were fine. I’m just visual. I can’t take things in through the ear.”
“Ah.”
“Frankly, I might be getting a little bit deaf. Are you hungry? Could you eat?”
We found her car, a stately Mercedes 280 the color of a camel-hair coat. A Hewlett-Packard parking decal faded in a corner of the rear window. The interior was drenched in Opium, and under that a smell of sun-damaged leather, and under that an acrid whiff of vitamins. Sally drove us to a Cuban restaurant she said she liked, but when we got there she only picked at her fried fish. When I ordered the lechón, she had said what the hell, she would have the pork, too. But the waiter had not reached the kitchen before she called him back and said she would have the fish after all.
“I was raised kosher, but after I left home I ate pork for the next fifty years. Suddenly, I can’t do it anymore. Even bacon! So what’s that about?”
I said I didn’t really have a theory to offer, but that was a lie. Something similar had happened to my grandfather at the end of his life, and I figured it had something to do with mortality. That didn’t seem like the polite thing to say to an old lady I had only just met. In the end she went and said it herself.
“No atheists in foxholes, right?” She looked around at the fake brick walls, the red Formica, the wrought-iron chandeliers. “I must be in a foxhole.”
“At least it’s a foxhole where you can get lechón.”
“Do you think God gives a shit what people eat?”
“I would hope He has better things to do with His time.”
“Ha. You know who you sound like?”
She had cut up her fish into neat little squares. She loaded some black beans and rice onto her fork and added one of the squares of fish. Then, when she had it all ready to go, she put down the fork with a chink. The bite she had prepared sat uneaten for the rest of the meal.
“I wasn’t in love with him,” she said. “For the record.”
“No?”
“Maybe I was getting there. We were going pretty hot and heavy for a couple of old people, I guess. But we only had six months.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s not very long.”
“When you’re seventy-two? It’s like six weeks when you’re fifteen. Then he went and got cancer.”
“You were making him too happy. He was having none of that.”
“That would be funny if it weren’t true. Do you smoke?”
“Trying to quit.”
“Me, too.”
She flagged the waiter, handed him a five, and asked him in serviceable Spanish to go next door to the liquor store and buy her a pack of Trues. In the end she settled for bumming one of his Winstons.
“Muchas gracias, corazón.”
“A la orden, señora.”
He patted his pockets for a light. I came out with Aughenbaugh’s lighter, which my mother had passed on to me. Sally noticed it. She angled her face away from me and blew out a long turbulence of smoke.
“Also, I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but he was not an easy man to love. I don’t mean that he wasn’t lovable.”
“No?”
“He was very lovable. Intelligent. Nice-looking, had those big shoulders. Pretty fit for his age but not, you know, one of these geezers running around in the ninety-degree heat, with the headband and the heavy-hands. Also, the man could fix anything. I mean anything. I have this, you know, CD thingy. A ‘boom box.’ It kept skipping. He fixed that. Those things have lasers inside.”
No one held my grandfather’s technical knowledge and dexterity in higher esteem than I did, but I doubted they extended to the repair of lasers. I just nodded.
“He even had a sense of humor in there somewhere.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“A dark one.”
“Very dark.”
“It only came out once you knew him, though. Also, maybe the most lovable thing of all?”
I waited. It seemed to me that there were an awful lot of things she had loved about this man with whom she was not in love.
“He didn’t mind that I made fun of him if he was being ridiculous. And he was so ridiculous with his little affectations. Using a, what do you call it, a graduated cylinder for a measuring cup.”
“I always thought that was cool.”
“Brewing his coffee in an Erlenmeyer flask.”
“He made really good coffee that way.”
“That lighter.”
“There was a story behind it.”
“I’m sure. All of his stories were stuck behind something. Do you know about the snake hunt?”
“A little.”
“Like he was Captain Ahab. Like John Wayne in that movie.”
“The Searchers.”
“Because of an old flatulent cat. And passing it off as gallantry to boot.”
“He liked having a concrete
goal.”
“And the rockets. The models everywhere. The whole space thing. Driving two hundred miles with his binoculars to watch them shoot a metal can into orbit. That was funny to me.”
“Not to him, it was very serious.”
“That’s what was funny about it.” She helped herself to a forkful of my lechón. “Mm. Did your grandmother tease him?”
“Sometimes,” I said. I couldn’t really remember. “Definitely.”
“He needed to fight. To wrestle. He needed to feel like he was working harder, carrying more weight on his shoulders, than anybody else. Everything had to be a wrestling match. Jacob with the angel. Even cancer, he was going to fight it on his own. He didn’t say a word about it to me. Did you know?”
“We had no idea.”
“To be honest, the man had a tendency to play the martyr.”
“He was comfortable in the role,” I said.
Sally called for the check. “It was hard to be your grandfather,” she said. “But maybe I made it a little bit easier for him, I don’t know.” She got a little teary. “God forbid he could have made it a little easier on me.”
When the waiter brought the check, she tried to pay it, but I told her I would just bill my publisher for the dinner.
“Oh ho,” she said. “You got it easy, kid.”
36
At Oakland my mother put her father’s body on a plane to be flown back to Philadelphia for the funeral and burial. The service was held at Montefiore Cemetery, where he was laid beside my grandmother and his parents and brother.* My brother took a leave from the set of Space: 2099* and flew in from LA. The rabbi who officiated over my grandmother’s funeral had retired. The new rabbi was not much older than I was and appeared to be in something of a hurry. Some old friends and acquaintances showed up, a few Moonblatts and Newmans who were still around. Appreciative things were said. Then we all pitched our shovelful of dirt onto the casket with a sound like a gust of rain against a window. A first cousin of my grandfather’s who lived out in Wynnewood provided her house for the post-funeral gathering. We knocked back shots of slivovitz and I heard sketchy and conflicting accounts of some of the foregoing incidents. I heard a few cute or clever things my brother or I had said as boys. Then my brother had to grab a plane back to L.A. After it was over my mother and I drove to the hotel near the airport where we were spending the night.
We were sharing a room with two queen beds. We went over some of the things we had seen or heard in the course of the day and then my mother put out the light. I had sensed some kind of agitation in her all day that I attributed to grief or tension. As we lay in the dark I could feel it gathering. She rolled one way and then the other. Her arms made sounds like harsh whispers across the sheets of her bed. She couldn’t sleep, so I couldn’t sleep.
“Mike, are you awake?”
“Yeah.”
“I wanted to ask you about something.”
“Okay.” I knew what she wanted to ask me, or at any rate when she came out with it, I was not surprised. I had been turning it over and brooding over it since that day.
“Last week,” she said, “I walked in on you and Dad, and he was telling you not to tell me something.”
“Yeah.”
“So, what was it you weren’t supposed to tell?”
Her tone tried for insouciant but ended up closer to jittery. It sounded like she was steeling herself; it sounded like she had her suspicions.
Of course, at the time I didn’t know anything about the story my grandmother had told Dr. Medved; my visit to Mantoloking in the wake of Hurricane Sandy was still fourteen years off. All I knew, that night at the Philadelphia Airport Marriott, was that my grandmother had given her doctor an account of herself, of her life in Europe during the war, that differed—in dramatic fashion, it seemed—from the account she had given my grandfather, or at least cast it in a new and disturbing light. Dr. Medved had seemed to think, at least, that when my grandfather heard the new story, he was going to be disturbed. Implicitly, my grandmother had lied to my grandfather, and to my mother, and that was what my grandfather hadn’t wanted me to tell my mother. He worried that simply knowing my grandmother had lied, regardless of the nature of the lie, might undo all my mother’s fragile work of forgiveness. That was all I knew.
Was it even possible to forgive the dead? Was forgiveness an emotion, or a transaction that required a partner? I had made a promise to someone who would never see it kept. I wanted to respect my grandfather’s wish, and it would have been no trouble to evade my mother’s question. Keeping secrets was the family business. But it was a business, it seemed to me, that none of us had ever profited from.
“It was something she told the psychiatrist at Greystone about herself,” I said. “But he didn’t know what.”
I told her the story of Dr. Medved as my grandfather had told it to me. She laughed when I got to the part where my grandfather decided that he didn’t want to know. In the darkness of the motel room, her laughter had a forlorn sound.
“She was always making things up when I was little,” my mother said after I was done. “I used to catch her out all the time. She called them ‘stories.’ ‘Oh!’” She put on her mother’s accent, the rasp and pitch of her voice. “‘You’re right, I told a story.’”
In the dark she sounded so much like my grandmother that the hair rose along my forearms.
“She just used to tell me plain old stories,” I said. “When I used to stay with them in Riverdale.”
Outside the door of our motel room, the ice machine appeared to be in some kind of distress. It took me a while to hear the sound of my mother snuffling softly in the dark.
“Do you think they were ever happy?”
“Definitely,” I said.
“Definitely?”
“For sure.”
“She went crazy. His business failed. They couldn’t have children of their own. He went to prison. HRT gave her cancer. I shot his brother in the eye and then married a man who cost him his business. When were they happy?”
“In the cracks?” I said.
“In the cracks.”
“Yeah.”
The next morning we had to get up early to catch our respective planes. My mother set her alarm to give herself fifteen minutes longer than I felt I would need to be ready, but when my own alarm went off she was still in her nightgown, sitting on the edge of her bed. She had the piece of LAV One my grandfather had brought to California, the first piece, the moon garden. She was holding it up to her eye and looking in at the OO-scale versions of us, among the tiny hydroponic roses and carrots.
“Why’d you bring that?”
“I did this crazy thing where I packed a bag with his stuff, the book, the pictures. Like he was just going home to Fontana Village after a nice long visit.”
I got up and she passed me the spray-painted disk. I peered in through the uptilted flap of the hatch at the little people my grandfather had hoped and failed and succeeded to shelter and keep safe. The three-quarter-inch grandparents on their gravity couch, the three-quarter-inch mother in a G-chair with her half-inch preteen son in the chair beside her and her pea of a second-grader perched on her lap. Everyone wearing comfortable but practical blue coveralls and grip slippers. The lush tops of the carrots, the lipstick-kiss roses. The detail was rudimentary at that scale, so my grandfather had painted the faces with skin tones and left it at that. At first the blankness of our faces always used to seem weird if not symbolic in some way I didn’t care to contemplate, but now I was used to it. You could imagine smiles into those blanks. You could write any kind of story across them that you pleased.
* * *
My grandfather stopped talking a day before he died. In the course of what turned out to be our last real conversation, I happened to ask if he had ever again crossed paths with von Braun after the time in Cocoa Beach. My grandfather shook his head. It hurt to shake his head. He tried to push himself up into a sitting position with a grunt of im
patience. I helped him adjust the bed so that the back was more vertical, but he said that was worse. So I lowered the back to a more oblique angle than the original one. He said that was double worse. I raised the bed, fluffed the pillows, slid a pillow under his knees. That put too much pressure on his heels. The pain medication, he said, was making him feel like he wanted to crawl out of his skin. And it wasn’t like it made the pain go away; it just helped you swim across it without sinking. We gave up trying to make him more comfortable.
“Nah, I never saw von Braun again,” he said. “He died a couple years later. I forget what the cause was, something painful. I heard he was in a hell of a lot of pain.”
I waited, thinking he might be about to append something along the lines of All of which he richly deserved or So maybe there is a God after all.
He didn’t say anything. He lay there with his eyes closed for a long time after that, sculling along the surface of the sea of pain a little nearer toward his story’s end or maybe, if that great eschatologist Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun turned out to be right, toward the story on the opposite shore that was waiting to begin.
Acknowledgments
Walter Gates Gill (collection manager for the Health branch of the New Jersey State Archives, Trenton), Judy Fosca and Evan Alkabetz (respectively research librarians at the John F. Kennedy Space Center Library, Cape Canaveral and the CIA Library, Langley), Esther Stecher (née Mangel), Jessica Sichel, Barry Kahn, and Lorraine Medved-Engel, if they existed, would have been instrumental to the completion of this work. Ian Faloona and Justine Frischmann most decidedly do exist, and their kindness and hospitality repeatedly saved this book’s life. The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, would seem in its unstinting perfection to be impossible and yet it, too, miraculously exists, as do Phil Pavel and all the staff at the highly unlikely Chateau Marmont, Hollywood.