“It’s really just the eyes,” I said. “Mostly.”
My mother didn’t say anything. She was looking down at the horse skull on my kitchen table. She pinched her chin between three fingers as if to keep from averting her face.
“I mean, it’s all of it, obviously. But especially the eyes.”
The skull lay on the outspread towel in which it had spent the past fifty years, folded and stuffed into the Old Crow box, under my mother’s books and the painted wooden horses wrapped in newspaper. The towel must have been white once, but time and humidity had dyed it with streaks of brown and rust red. A broken nib of mildew had spattered it with black.
In the sunlight coming through the kitchen window against the dingy towel, the unwrapped thing was radiant with strangeness. The incisors protruded to form a cruel beak, as if the skull had belonged to some monster bird of the Pleistocene. The jaws on either side, with their ridged molars, grinned like a pair of gaping zippers. The nose bone narrowed over the nasal cavity to a wicked prong. And into each orbit my grandmother had socketed a millefiori paperweight, multicolored cells honeycombed within a dome of clear glass. When I was a kid, the millefiori glass my grandmother kept around her apartment had always reminded me of bright handfuls of fancy hard candies. Cast in the unlikely role of eyeballs, however, the paperweights were like the kaleidoscopes of madness itself.
“I can’t believe she thought you would wear it,” I said. “How was it even supposed to attach to the neck?”
“I don’t know if it was.”
“But didn’t she make it for your costume?”
“That’s what my father thought.”
“But you didn’t?”
“If you were making someone a horse costume out of sticks and fabric, is that how you would do the head?”
“No. But maybe this was, like, how she saw it. Her version. The Night Witch version.”
My mother was having none of it. “The silks she sewed me were so pretty! Perfect copies of the ones Elizabeth Taylor wears in the movie. They didn’t have, I don’t know, batwings on them or anything.”
“Yeah, no, I get it.”
“They were beautiful. I loved them. She knew how to make me a Pie.”
“So if it wasn’t part of the costume, what was it for?”
“At the time, I think what I thought was that my mother, she sort of . . . She had all these pamphlets and tracts lying around that she had collected. Religious tracts, Catholic prayer cards, but also things about Atlantis, Mayan religion, the, what is it, ‘transmigration of souls.’ All kinds of nonsense like that. It felt to me like that thing”—she pointed vaguely at the skull—“came out of all that religious mystical crap.”
“You mean, like, it was almost kind of a, something she prayed to? An idol?”
“Not, I don’t know, I mean, I was ten years old, I guess I thought—”
“You thought she was worshipping a horse god.”
“I don’t know if I went quite that far in my thinking.”
“But now?”
“Now I don’t think about it.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You don’t approve. You think I should just keep dredging it all up all the time.”
“Not all the time. Just, like, every ten years or so.”
My lame attempt to lighten the moment failed. She was looking at the skull straight on, and I saw that it was simply hateful to her.
“Mom,” I said. “Forget it.”
She made a Gallic noise of my grandmother’s for which there is no good onomatopoeia, so I suppose harrumph will have to do. If she were a woman of my generation, she might have said As if.
“I understand,” I said.
“Oh? Okay.”
“That sounded patronizing.”
“You want to know what I think now?”
She surprised me by grabbing the skull, swooping it off the table, and shoving it toward me, snout first. I jumped back, knocking over a kitchen chair. It’s possible that I may have screamed.
“She wasn’t worshipping the Skinless Horse with this thing. She was trying to ward it off.”
“Whoa,” I said. “Mom.” I picked up the chair I had knocked over. “You scared me.”
“Right,” my mother said.
* * *
On the fir floor in the upstairs hall at the edge of the Chinese runner, my grandfather noticed a drop that looked like blood. It took the print of his finger and left a taste of salt on his tongue. In the doorway to the upstairs bathroom, a droplet had starred the wooden transition strip between fir and tile. In the bathroom across the grid of black and white tile, four asterisks pointed like the handle of the Dipper to a blood Arcturus in the space between the toilet and the bathtub. My grandfather’s heart lurched. He turned to confront the bathtub.
It appeared to be empty, clean, and dry, but he forced himself to stare at it long and hard. He felt that if it contained my grandmother’s body steeped in a tea of her lifeblood and Baltimore tap water, he could not trust his eyes to report nor brain to comprehend the fact. Shock could be a kind of plate armor. He gave horror, pain, and loss all the time they needed to pierce it. But there was nothing, only the shine on white porcelain and her flask of Emeraude bath oil, its note of benzoin a lingering sting in the air.
My grandfather went to the toilet and lifted the seat. On the underside of the left-hand branch of its U, at the tip, he found a comma, a little fish of blood. He folded some toilet paper, dipped the paper in the bowl, and wiped away the little fish. He ran some water on a washcloth and wiped away the stains on the floor. Then he stared down at the crossword-puzzle tile. Ruminating, only half aware that he was also taking a long-deferred piss, he considered clues and hints. He ransacked his store of experience of my grandmother and her behavior. He penciled in a few possibilities:
Following on this third possibility, he caught the flickering of a fourth at the horizon of his thoughts, but like a lightning strike, it was gone by the time he looked its way. In the meantime, in some other part of his mind, my grandfather’s pessimism and the brute-force denial that he deployed in place of optimism contended over the question of whether he was making a mountain of a molehill here. Big deal, a few drops of blood, a hastily improvised and unhappily conceived horse costume, an absence that was not usual but hardly unheard of, especially when my grandmother had a show to do that night . . .
He shook off this line of thinking and its appeal to his reptile-brain optimism. Something was wrong, felt wrong. He had known it as soon as he’d seen the bagpipe records on the console. In general, my grandmother in the grip of a mood was inclined to hole up, shut down, or curl inward. But sometimes the woman would just bolt. Taking off that night when the police picked her up, ill-shod, ill-dressed, booking along the sidewalk with a forward cant and her arms held fixed at her sides, conversing with invisibilities of pain, presenting like a classic urban nutcase, flying her Night Witch hair like the flag of madness.
My grandfather went back into my mother’s bedroom. She was sitting up, rocking back and forth at the edge of her bed, holding the carved horse that, working in the driveway one evening long after dark, he had inadvertently painted blue instead of black. He had been annoyed by the fuckup; naturally, that one turned out to be the favorite, the one on which she bestowed the power of flight. The girl was a labyrinth to him; only by chance and error did he ever stumble blindly into her heart.
Her face was puffy and she wore a stoical expression. The rocking reminded him of the little girl he had met for the first time on a bench in the cold outside Ahavas Sholom. Defiantly serving out the inhumane term of a punishment she had imposed on herself, confusing obedience with rebellion and vindication with endurance.
“Come,” he told her. “Put your costume on. We’ll find your friends and you’ll go with them.”
My mother shook her head.
“I have to go out,” he said. He decided to lie to her. “Your mother’s up at the studio, she forgot the book she’s going to read tonight. I need to take it to her.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Eh, you know, Pat’ll be working the desk tonight, you know how he is about kids hanging around.”
“I’ll wait in the car.”
“You don’t want to go trick-or-treating?”
“No.”
“Okay, listen. I tell you what. Your behavior, recently, your manners. Your schoolwork. I’ve been meaning to tell you. They’ve really been very good.”
He realized as he offered this praise that he had no idea if it was accurate. She had never been anything but compliant and well mannered, however, and he assumed, though he had not paid much attention lately, that this remained the case. Her first-quarter report card had boasted the usual cordillera of As.
“So,” he said, “if you want to go with your friends, because you’ve been such a good girl lately, how about we say, whatever you bring home, you can eat. No matter what. As much chazzerai as you can stand. All right? You can have it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. All of it. Until the whole bag is gone.”
Before the razor blade scares of the 1960s, before industrial confectioners cottoned on to the market for small, individually wrapped pieces of brand-name candy, the loot a kid brought home from trick-or-treating was made by the lady of the house where it was given out: popcorn balls, candy and caramel apples, cookies, marshmallow treats, toffees. Such items quickly went stale or lost their appeal and, after a week or two, whatever a kid had not managed to consume was ready to be thrown away. Since, as a firm rule, my mother was never permitted more than one treat per day, the bulk of what she collected on Halloween ended up in the garbage can. My grandfather’s extravagant offer had no precedent. It was transparently a bribe.
“What’s wrong with Mama?” my mother said. Her voice deepened to a woeful contralto.
“Nothing.”
“I know it’s something bad.”
“Nothing is wrong, she forgot her book.”
My mother nodded as though reassured. She shuddered. My grandfather handed her a handkerchief. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose and handed it back to him. He put it, snot and all, into his pocket.
“I know you’re lying to me,” she said.
“Oh, is that right?”
“And I’m not going.”
“No?”
“I don’t want to. I hate candy apples, anyway.”
“So you’ll trade with your friends. You like popcorn balls.”
“It’s bad for your teeth. Your saliva turns the sugar to acid, the acid dissolves the enamel, and you get a cavity and have to get a filling, with a drill and a bunch of shots in your mouth, I don’t want that.”
“So you’ll brush.”
She held the blue horse up to her face at eye level and moved it through the air in arcs and dives. She half closed her eyes, a technique he remembered from his own childhood, making the horse and its flight more real through some enchantment of perspective and the lensing effect of lids and lashes.
“Look. Honey. I have to go out, and I can’t leave you here alone. With all the people coming to the door? You don’t know who’s going to show up. All kinds of hooligans out causing trouble tonight, you remember last year they smashed every pumpkin on the block.”
The blue horse dipped and banked through the air between them. She was finished with the conversation. Where other, less tractable children might have openly rebelled or thrown a tantrum, my mother had learned to withdraw, to abstain, to retreat from a scene of conflict without moving a muscle.* My grandfather knew better than to waste any more breath trying to persuade her. When she checked out, there was nothing to be done but compel her physically or else back down. My grandfather loved my mother and was reasonably certain that she loved him in return, but there was some negotiated basis to their relationship that she understood more clearly than he did. His fatherhood was a kind of grant that she bestowed on him, a tenancy of which she was the lessor.
“Actually, the sugar gets eaten by bacteria that live in the mouth,” my grandfather could not prevent himself from pointing out before he turned and left her alone in the bedroom. “The bacteria excrete the acid that eats the teeth.”
He went downstairs to the kitchen and made seven telephone calls. The first call was to the switchboard of WAAM; no one at the station had seen my grandmother since Tuesday morning’s broadcast of La Cuisine. Next he dialed the number on a card left behind, in case they ever needed any help, by Officer Sharkey, the policeman who had loaned my grandmother his Pendleton fishing jacket and kept her out of the psych ward. Officer Sharkey had the night off. The next five calls my grandfather made, in turn, were to a pool hall in East Baltimore, a bar in Fells Point, the home of a woman who sounded disgracefully drunk, the home of a woman who sounded abominably sober, and, thanks to the latter, another pool hall out in Dundalk.
A knock on the door, a carillon of little voices on the porch.
The candy still lay scattered on the floor of the sewing room. My grandfather knew that he ought to take a bowl up there and retrieve it, but he did not want to have to look, or avoid looking, at the horse skull. He dug around in his trouser pockets. He was out of quarters. He had three nickels and four pennies, but there turned out to be four trick-or-treaters, the Grumman children from two doors down, disguised as a shepherd and his three-sheep flock. Clifford Grumman, accurately, was fleeced in black. My grandfather pocketed the nickels and deposited the pennies in the children’s palms, taking no notice of whether the Grummans went away pleased or not. In 1952 a penny could buy you a piece of bubblegum, a candy cigarette, or a licorice whip.
He found three fifty-cent rolls of pennies in a kitchen drawer. He put on his suit jacket, made sure he had his wallet and car keys, and went out to the front porch to wait. He sat down on the metal glider, lit a cigarette. The hinges of the glider were rusted and creaked atmospherically in the dark.
In the half hour that followed, three cowboys, two Indians, a Mad Hatter and White Rabbit, Jesse and Frank James, a queen (“Just a queen”), and a number of hoboes, along with five mothers, two fathers, and a dog wearing a Pierrot hat came tripping up the porch steps. Once my grandfather had gauged the pace of visitors, he increased his payment to two pennies per trick-or-treater, flicking them from the roll with his thumbnail into each waiting palm. He did not consider but in hindsight would concede that he might not by his manner or his fare be spreading waves of Halloween joy.
My grandfather had just lit his fifth cigarette when the first in what became a long series of unreliable red roadsters, a brand-new Jaguar XK120, rumbled onto the street and stopped in front of the house. Its driver cut the engine and then sat as if marshaling patience or resolve.
Uncle Ray was two years free of the pulpit that had fit him as poorly as the clothes he was wearing now, some kind of English hunting get-up, baggy tweed pants and a tweed jacket with large front panels of plaid wool. In later years he would switch to Alfas and more of a Mastroianni resort-wear vibe, but in snaps from the early fifties, he looks like he’s planning to go off and shoot some partridges or appease Hitler.
Uncle Ray lit a cigarette of his own and then came up the walk to the porch. The smirk and the swagger that had unaccountably chosen this man as the vehicle for their conquest of the world or at least the Delmarva Peninsula had reached some kind of new pinnacle of insufferability.
“So where is she?” he said as he and my grandfather shook hands.
“I don’t know.”
“She didn’t leave a note?”
My grandfather shook his head. He stood up and fished his car keys out of the hip pocket of his jacket.
“Where’s the kid?”
“Upstairs.”
“She ready to go, get her uncle some taffy?”
“Says she doesn’t want to.”
“She’s upset.” Uncle Ray opened the front door. “Hey, Velvet!” he called out. “Post time!”
“Ray, I have to go.”
“So go.”
At that moment another party of trick-or-treaters approached the house, followed by another, and by the time my grandfather was through dispensing pennies, his brother had returned.
“She’s getting her costume on,” Uncle Ray said. He looked down at the split roll of coins. “Pennies.”
“No candy. It got spoiled.”
Uncle Ray took the half-roll and the two intact ones, and my grandfather started down the steps.
“So where are you going?”
“Hospital.”
“You think she’s hurt?” He spoke in a whispery rasp. “You think she hurt herself?”
“I don’t know,” my grandfather said, lowering his voice, too. “What happens when you have a miscarriage?”
“She was pregnant?”
“I . . . I wouldn’t know.”
“You wouldn’t know?”
“I didn’t know. I don’t know.”
“Were you trying?”
My grandparents had been trying to produce a child almost from their first night together, Purim 1947. At the beginning it was an unarticulated hope expressed only in a mutual disregard of birth control, a hope shared by many survivors of war and calamity to counter general death with a particular life, to light a candle in the universal night. Once they were married, they embarked on the project openly and deliberately, with a fixity of purpose that over time had faded in vigor as it became more awkward and painful to them both. The thought that my grandmother might finally have conceived their child was so welcome, so eagerly anticipated for so long, that for an instant the joy of it outweighed the concomitant dismay of understanding that, in this instance, a pregnancy would be only the necessary condition for its loss.
“It’s been discussed,” my grandfather said.
“So she’s upset about that, it’s natural. She’ll just need a little time.”
“I know, I know. I’m sure you’re right.”
The idea returned to him, more clearly, that the state of her mind was connected in some way to her menstrual cycle. Had the improvement in her mood since September been caused by an unsuspected pregnancy? Abruptly, he remembered her having woken him last night. She was sitting up, speaking French, with the odd clarity of someone asleep and dreaming. When he asked her what was the matter, she had switched to English and told him they had to call someone to come take away the furnace in the basement right away. She could not or would not tell him why, but he must trust her that it had to be done or something very bad would result. In a patronizing tone it now made him wince to recall, he had assured her that he would put someone on the task of removing the furnace the very next morning. My grandmother had nodded and a moment later was lying down again, easing back into normal sleep. Or so my grandfather had assumed; certainly he had gone back to sleep. But what if she had been up for the rest of the night after that, poor thing? What if her midnight outburst had marked the ebbing, along with the incipient life inside her, of whatever chemical benefit that pregnancy bestowed? He thought of her lying there, feeling herself sliding inexorably back to the place she had been last summer, frightened, alone, making disordered plans of escape, and it made his heart hurt. What did she think was happening in the basement?
“You look worried,” Uncle Ray said. “Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried,” my grandfather said.
“About what?” said my mother, coming out to the porch. She was wearing some old corduroy overalls over a pair of long johns, carrying a burlap sugar sack. Bare feet, an inverted metal saucepan for a hat.
“No shoes?” my grandfather said.
“I saw the cartoon,” my mother said. “He was barefoot.”
“In this weather.”
“Take it up with Walt Disney.”
“What a little brat you are,” Uncle Ray said tenderly. “Candy Appleseed.”
My mother reached into the sugar sack and took out a book, worn black boards, no jacket. “Here,” she said to my grandfather.
“What’s this?”
“Mama’s book? For you to take to the station? The one she forgot?”
It was a tattered hardback copy of Tales, with the marvelous Redon illustrations, that my grandmother used when she read Poe on The Crypt of Nevermore.
“Right,” my grandfather said.
Uncle Ray’s ear was attuned to the coded conversation of hustlers, cheats, and their confederates. “Nothing against Johnny here,” he said. “But what happened to National Velvet?” He looked from my mother to my grandfather and back. “What?”
“Sore subject,” my grandfather said.*