Not long before he died, my mother’s maternal uncle, Stanley Werbow (1922–2005), a professor of medieval German at the University of Texas and a former staff sergeant operating in the field with the 849th Signal Intelligence Service at the Battle of Monte Cassino, was persuaded by one of his daughters to dictate some memories of growing up Jewish in Philadelphia and Washington in the early part of the twentieth century. Though fragmentary and rambling, that narrative, as vivid, intelligent, and wry as Stan Werbow himself, provided the spark that kindled this one, along with some crucial bits of atmosphere. Uncle Stan—who stirred the pot that served up The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, too—was among my most supportive and most exacting readers. I hope that he would have been pleased with this monstrous stepchild of those artless reminiscences; I know that, if not, he would never have hesitated to tell me.
Neither Stanley Lovell’s Of Spies and Stratagems, Michael Neufeld’s Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War, Annie Jacobsen’s Operation Paperclip, Bob Ward’s Doctor Space, Dennis Piszkiewicz’s The Nazi Rocketeers, Murray Dubin’s South Philadelphia, nor Gilbert Sanders’s Jewish Baltimore: A Family Album is to blame for this pack of lies. Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concerts, Windy and Carl’s Depths and A Winged Victory for the Sullen’s self-titled first album reliably screened out the voices whenever they stirred in their corners. And when I was looking for a path of escape, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s charming introduction to his The Way of Tarot made a Fool of me.
I am grateful for the help of Steven Barclay, Jennifer Barth, Jonathan Burnham, Sonya Cheuse, Amy Cray, Mary Evans, Simon Frankel, Madalyn Garcia, Courtney Hodell, Adalis Martinez, Maddie Mau, Howie Sanders, E. Beth Thomas, Lydia Weaver, Matt Weiner, and Emily Werbow, and for the inspiration, understanding, and blessed distraction provided by Sophie, Zeke, Rose, and Abe Chabon.
Finally, as at the beginning and at every step along the way: eternal gratitude for the support, encouragement, love, protection, and, above all, for the existence, however improbable, of Ayelet Waldman.
About the Author
Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of the novels The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Summerland, The Final Solution, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Gentlemen of the Road, and Telegraph Avenue; the short story collections A Model World and Werewolves in Their Youth; and the essay collections Maps and Legends and Manhood for Amateurs. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children.
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Also by Michael Chabon
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
A Model World and Other Stories
Wonder Boys
Werewolves in Their Youth
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Summerland
The Final Solution
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
Gentlemen of the Road
Maps and Legends
Manhood for Amateurs
The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man
Telegraph Avenue
Credits
Cover design by Adalis Martinez
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Scout’s honor.
moonglow. Copyright © 2016 by Michael Chabon. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Digital Edition NOVEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780062225573
Print ISBN: 978-0-06222555-9
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* A length of piano wire, of all things, typically concealed inside a shoe- or bootlace.
* My grandfather knew only that the man he had accidentally beaned—fortunately, the intercom had only grazed his skull—declined to press charges. The Daily News identifies his victim as Jiří Nosek, head of the Czechoslovakian delegation to the august body that Alger Hiss had helped to charter. “This is the first time the high-ranking Red has been hit by a flying telephone,” the News reported with a straight face, adding, “Nosek said that as a good Czech he was obliged to laugh off anything that didn’t kill him.”
* Apparently, Lenormand decks owe their origin not to Mlle. Marie Anne Lenormand, the greatest if not the most fraudulent cartomancer of the nineteenth century, but to a game called Das Spiel der Hoffnung, played with dice, that with its thirty-six pictorial cards laid out in a six-by-six grid was a kind of hybrid of tarot and chutes and ladders.
* I later recognized one particularly terrifying fragment as having been nicked from Tod Browning’s The Unknown.
* When I was in graduate school I was startled to find this story’s source in The John Collier Reader—or so I have always believed until this afternoon, when I first riffled, then paged carefully, front to back, back to front, through the local copy (Knopf, 1972) and discovered no trace of such a story anywhere in the book. Either the encounter with my grandmother’s borrowing came in the pages of some other collection or author, or else it happened in a dream, triggered perhaps by my reading Collier’s “Bottle Party” with its deliciously malevolent djinn and immortal last line.
* He had put himself through Drexel by hustling games from New York to Baltimore and as far west as Pittsburgh. “I had no choice,” he told me. “Everything my parents saved went to pay for that brother of mine.”
* For demonstration only.
* I still follow her recipes, typewritten on pale blue index cards, for coq au vin, cream of potato soup, and omelet. I lost or abandoned her impeccably seasoned omelet pan amid the wandering and confusion of objects that followed my divorce.
* And killed her; she died of endometrial cancer in 1975, aged fifty-two.
* My grandfather always made a show of his disdain for von Braun, said to have been one of the models for Southern and Kubrick’s crypto-Nazi Dr. Strangelove. When he mentioned von Braun’s name or quoted something von Braun was reported in the papers to have said, he would lay on a comedy German accent. My grandfather’s company, MRX, had been the principal supplier of rocket and engine designs to Estes, Centuri, Chabon Scientific, and most of the other leading players during the heyday of model rocketry. MRX produced designs based on famous American rockets like the Vanguard, Thor, and Titan but never, in the dozen or so years of its existence, on the Redstone, Jupiter, or Sa
turn rocket families—all of which were developed by von Braun. This silent boycott endured throughout the Apollo era, when everyone wanted to fire a Saturn V. And my grandfather had shocked my parents and puzzled me when on July 20, 1969, after months of displaying fascination and mounting excitement about the imminent manned landing on the Moon, he had abruptly declined to join us and virtually the entire population of Earth in watching Neil Armstrong fulfill the lifelong dream that von Braun and my grandfather had shared. Only my grandmother seemed unsurprised by her husband’s wordless departure from the room. “Apparently,” I remembered her saying, nodding toward the television, “the way they have done it is totally wrong.”
* Picnickers (minus blanket and transistor radio) lifted from a British OO-Gauge model-railroad kit called “Afternoon in the Park.”
* In its new digs on Reisterstown Road in Pikesville. Ahavas Sholom was among the first of the major synagogues in town to make the move from the prewar heart of Jewish Baltimore around Park Circle to the suburban wilds beyond Seven Mile Lane.
* Her teeth had been painstakingly reconstructed with the compliments of a Liberty Heights dentist who afterward retired to Florida, where he turned up at a reading I gave one night, at Books & Books in Coral Gables, to tell me that he never entirely recovered from the shock of the ruin he found inside my grandmother’s mouth.
* Primarily military and automotive, purchased on sale or at a bulk discount.
* In 1962 the Martin Company, now Martin-Marietta and well along in its development of the Titan rocket, purchased Patapsco from my grandfather’s former partner Milton Weinblatt for, according to my grandfather, “maybe two hundred times what Weinblatt paid to buy me out.”
* He was particularly partial to the ones filled with poppy seed, that dollop of mon glowing lustrous as a spoonful of little black pearls.
* Flying mammals, not sporting gear.
* In fact, Oberth, awarded the Kriegverdienstkreuz (“mit Schwerten”) for extraordinary bravery during and after the massive 1943 Hydra raid on Peenemünde, emigrated after the war to the U.S., where he worked on both the Atlas and Saturn rocket programs, became a prominent early UFOlogist, retired to Germany and died at the age of ninety-five, surviving my grandfather by eight months.
* “That was just his excuse,” my mother observed on reading this manuscript, in a dry deadpan that sounded a lot like my grandfather. “He was in hiding from the day we met.”
* I had long since become a resident of Berkeley, California.
* In later life Milton Weinblatt endowed chairs in avionics engineering at Stanford, Cal Tech, and his alma mater, the Stevens Institute.
* In spring and fall, when the latest ready-to-wear designs arrived from Paris, my grandmother would haunt Hutzler’s with a marbled pad that she furtively filled with sketches so that she could re-create the clothes for herself at home.
* It was an art at which she only improved over the years, as a wife and a mother. “Oh no, don’t do that!” I can remember my father shouting as my mother gathered her cloak of absence around herself and another argument devolved inexorably into a harangue. “Look at me, God damn it!”
* She was not just changing her costume, I pointed out to my mother, she was ridding herself, as completely as she could imagine, of the need for a horse. Except for maybe the Wandering Jew or Diogenes, no figure was more famous than Johnny Appleseed for being a pedestrian, for walking around everywhere on his shoeless feet. The very next day she had packed up her horse books, the carved horses, and the skull. It was called magical thinking, I told her. Children who believe they are to blame for their parents’ misfortunes believe they have the power to abate them. My mother thought about it. I waited for her to congratulate me on my insight. “Where’s the magical part?” she said.
* She was undoubtedly aware of the life and martyrdom of her sister Carmelite, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, born Edith Stein in Breslau, gassed at Auschwitz, and eventually canonized in 1998 by Pope John Paul II.
* “I was almost ahead of my time,” my grandfather observed when he recounted this incident to me. Solutions and heuristic approaches to modified versions of the Traveling Salesman Problem are today at the heart of advanced robotic navigation research.
* The KLEE “phantom call sign” incident related as fact by Strangely Enough, and widely reported as fact in newspapers of the mid-fifties, turns out to have been part of a hoax, a midcentury electronic variation on the old “money-printing machine” scam, perpetrated by an enterprising British con artist.
* The Spaceflight Society, of which my grandfather’s favorite author, Willy Ley, had been a founding member and the wealthy young Baron von Braun a kind of boy-genius mascot. Ley, a vocal opponent of Nazism and of the militarization of rocketry, fled Germany for the U.S. in 1935.
* And still, over four decades after flying its last mission, the only vehicle ever built capable of carrying human beings beyond a low earth orbit.
* All the secret headquarters of evil scientists, hidden in volcanoes or disguised as islands, accessible by subterranean railways or retractable sphincters disguised as lakes, which afterward featured in James Bond movies and their imitators—not to mention the real-life Cheyenne Mountain facility, home of NORAD and the presidential nuclear bunker—descend from the Mittelwerk at Nordhausen.
* Throughout the entire period of their deployment, with nagging frequency, the rockets would crash immediately after launch, explode in midflight or before impact, go veering and yawing and pinwheeling wildly out of control, or vanish, leaving no trace and having caused no damage, into thin air or the sea. Sometimes, as my grandfather had learned, a rocket never even made it off the launch pad.
* With terrible inefficiency: Fatalities among the laborers at Nordhausen exceeded those on the ground in Antwerp and London by a ratio of nearly six to one.
* Indeed, though the information was suppressed by von Braun and by the U.S. government nearly all his life, along with the memory of Nordhausen itself, von Braun made many visits to Kohnstein Mountain after September ’43, and he appears to have been directly involved in the selection of inmates possessing technical aptitude (primarily Frenchmen) for transfer to the Mittelwerk from Buchenwald. See Michael Neufeld’s Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (Vintage, 2008).
* Largely a farrago of propaganda and desperation concocted and served up by Joseph Goebbels.
* My grandfather never told my mother what he confessed to me thirty-two years later: that he had been the shooter.
* In all likelihood the house had been clad not in genuine stone but in a molded concrete simulacrum known as Formstone, then in vogue among Baltimore householders.
* Crafted, according to my grandfather, from a silk slip donated by the warden’s wife.
* There was a physical similarity, too, judging from the one photograph of Salinger I knew: thick black hair, pockmarked cheeks, long nose, eyebrow skeptically arched. My grandfather, for his part, always seemed to enjoy it when people told him he looked like the actor Robert Alda.
* But not to a reader of the book by Rudolf Erich Raspe (1736–1794) whose proper title is Gulliver Revived, from which my grandmother (or, it is dimly possible, I suppose, Mr. Casamonaca) appears to have cribbed this lunar episode.
* In an unpublished memoir, “Greystone Notes” (1979), Dr. Medved records that this wallpaper with its protean gestalt was a source of anxiety and at times abject terror to many of Greystone Park’s inmates. He and some of the other doctors on the hospital staff lobbied to have it removed or covered over, but the “devil masks” remained in place until 1972, when the walls were painted “a sebaceous shade of green called ‘avocado,’ which many of us found no less distressing.”
* “The effects were fairly permanent,” my mother observed bitterly when she read this memoir for the first time.
* Patient
* Schizophrenia
* Clearly, this was the point of my grandmother’s pantomime, but there was more to i
t than that. Of the four most important adults in my early childhood, she was the only one who seemed comfortable with my being a child. She fell easily and unself-consciously into make-believe without archness or condescension. Unlike my parents and my grandfather, she never tasked me with public displays of my learnedness, never demanded that I list the fifty states and their capitals or the U.S. presidents in order from Washington to LBJ. When she called me her “petit professeur,” it meant I had been holding forth, lecturing her, correcting her grammar or her shaky grasp of fact. There was a gentle mockery in the pet name.