In 1952 in Baltimore an autumn haze was closer to smoke, and though the Moon was high and nearly full, its light hung diffuse and opaque as if moonlight were only an inferior brand of darkness. As he patrolled Forest Park in his car that Halloween, looking for my grandmother—a check of nearby hospitals and police stations had turned up nothing—most of what my grandfather saw was shadow. Then, into a cone of streetlight or a lighted porch, there would burst a doctor and a dead man and a robot and a carrot and Abe Lincoln and a werewolf and a pharaoh and a fly. My grandfather had never seen so many kitchen-broom witches, bedsheet ghosts, popgun sheriffs. A giant baby holding hands with a pint-size gorilla, a tramp with a monocled millionaire. A dreamlike river of children coursing in and out of shadow, pooling on stoops, and out there somewhere a woman with a crack in her brain that was letting in shadows and leaking dreams.
He sat stopped at a traffic signal. A turbulence of historic personages, zoo animals, and career aspirations boiled surrealistically through his headlight beams, Viking horns, a giraffe’s neck, a pink tutu, a Mountie’s campaign hat. My grandfather rolled down his window and called to ask if anyone had happened to see Nevermore, the Night Witch. Of course, they thought he was kidding around.
“Ah!” said the giraffe, dipping its papier-mâché head to sprint the rest of the way across the street in halfway-mock alarm. “The Night Witch!”
“Don’t scare me!” said the Viking.
With every corner my grandfather turned, his hope of spotting my grandmother would rekindle, and at the end of every block his heart would sink anew. After a while he noticed that the coveys and duckling chains of little kids were starting to give way to lurking platoons of older boys without costumes who loped crookedly, dragging cartoon-burglar pillowcases from house to house and flicking furtive eggs at passing cars. When an egg was thrown, there would be a burp of tires, shouts of grievance and malediction, coyote yips of laughter. The night turned authentically menacing. My grandfather could not bear the thought of my grandmother abroad in it. Hurting from the inside. Emptied out. She had been pregnant and she had miscarried and then the voice or the thoughts or the memory that tormented her had returned: her hidden history of loss, loss upon loss upon loss unending, flooding back into her body as that tablespoonful of life leaked out. Her true companion. Her lover with his bleached bones showing and his maddened eyes.
The view through the windshield swam. My grandfather pulled over to the curb, blocking someone’s driveway, and cut the engine. He fought against the tears. They were nothing but tears of panic, and of all the emotions there was none more contemptible. He closed his eyes so that he would not have to see his breakdown witnessed by a world that had the strength to make him cry. After a minute he opened his eyes again. He lit a cigarette, and the nicotine seemed to organize his mind. Aughenbaugh’s lighter was cool against his palm, and from its engraved face a comforting gaze seemed to stare back at him through the pince-nez of maltose, the imperturbable gaze of the man who had passed the lighter on to him, two glucose rings hooked together by a glycosidic bond.
He lit another cigarette and began to conduct a review of methodology, as if it were not a lost woman he sought but simply a better means of seeking, a heuristic against loss. The effectiveness of a search of this kind depended on the amount of information available about the area to be searched, the number of searchers, and the cost in time elapsed. He knew Forest Park and the surrounding neighborhoods well enough, but he was alone and in a hurry. Was it best to start at some arbitrary perimeter and work inward toward an indefinite center, or to proceed by quarterings? The grid of streets to be covered was a mishmash of orthogonals and diagonals, and searching it posed interesting problems in topology. Clearly, any useful algorithm for maximizing the number of individual blocks searched at the lowest cost in time would have to integrate a Euclidean metric of distance as covered by transverse streets with a non-Euclidean metric of the zigzag distance imposed by square city blocks. In this instance the topological problem was complicated by the likelihood that the goal was not stationary and, indeed, at this moment might be riding the 33 streetcar or getting into a murderer’s Pontiac or lying like a smashed kite at the foot of the Bromo-Seltzer Tower or sunken, drowned, tugged along the bottom of the Patapsco River by the tide. In the meantime it was almost eleven p.m. He had been driving around uselessly for hours.
He decided to head toward the studios of WAAM. Even when she was struggling with her moods, he thought, the woman never lost sight of her duties and commitments. In a dark period, her pain was usually intensified by the consciousness of falling down on the job as a mother, a wife, an employee, a friend. Sometimes knowing that she had someplace to be or someone depending on her was enough to lift her above the darkness for an hour, for a day, for as long as the job was not done or the errand unaccomplished. However near to the edge of the map she might have sailed today, it was always possible that her Friday-night gig was beacon enough to turn her back. Maybe she was there now, whitening her skin with a sponge of pancake makeup, painting ragged feathers along the ridge of her eyebrows.
As he drove, he lit another cigarette with the flare of the lighter and his thoughts found their way back to heuristics—algorithms that offered shortcuts to solutions of complex problems—and an article he had read in Scientific American about a problem in the mathematics of graphing.
You were a traveling salesman whose territory obliged you to cover n cities, with your heavy sample case and your fallen arches and your weariness of diner food and hotel beds. Because you missed your wife and your daughter, you wanted to visit each city in your territory only once and then return home, having traveled the shortest distance in the least amount of time. There were (n-1)! possible routes, and if n wasn’t too big, say five towns, you could sit down with your map and your distance table and your pencil and your incipient case of heartburn and add it all up and see which of the twenty-four possible routes was the shortest. But once n got up into even the low two digits, the job of calculating the distances for each possible route, even if you were superhumanly quick with a sum, might take hundreds or thousands of years. With only fifteen cities, there were a trillion possible routes. What you wanted, poor wandering and footsore salesman, was some kind of algorithm, an operational shortcut that would let you find the most efficient route without doing a thousand years of math.
So far, it turned out, there was no such algorithm. But my grandfather had read that a cash prize was being offered by the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica to the first person who came up with a workable heuristic that would solve the Traveling Salesman Problem. Its solution, RAND felt, would open up all kinds of possibilities in the burgeoning field of operations research, a field that, as it happened, overlapped with the work he and Weinblatt were doing. He felt the faint stirring of an idea then, an approach to inertial navigation systems that would involve the heuristics of topological algorithms. It was a marvelous idea, and he backed away from it, giving it space; you could blow on a fire to stoke it, but if you blew on a little flame, it would go out.
He headed up into Woodberry toward the studios of WAAM. He imagined that he was the one who solved the Traveling Salesman Problem and collected the cash prize. Clearly, the answer lay in the mathematics of linear functions. He might brush up on his Hamiltonian mechanics, dust off his knowledge of set theory. He saw himself accepting a check for the prize winnings and then—it was not at all unreasonable to imagine—a job offer from his awestruck fellow boffins at RAND. Please, they would beg him, come out to Santa Monica, we need you. Come and work on this application of topology to navigation. Would he go? He pictured them, my grandmother, my mother, and himself standing on the wooden deck of a house near the ocean. California. Nothing but sunshine and horizon, a place without shadows, far from the darkness of Europe and its history, that endless Halloween. He saw them, walking down the beach with their trousers rolled. A child, their child, ran ahead of them, a brash little boy scattering seagulls. His heart swelled. It was all very pretty. It was as pretty as the solution to a problem in topology that would never be solved.
He had reached the television studio up on its hill at the heart of town. It was a composite building, two boxes shoved together, a windowless stucco packing crate that held the studio floor next to a brick shoe box built in the style favored at the time for public schools and libraries, the bricks in long horizontal courses, the windows a horizontal strip. At this hour most of the windows were dark. There were only two cars parked by the entrance; the crew parked in a garage at the back.
In the lobby the night man, Pat, ignored a banquette sofa and a coffee table shaped like a footprint with no toes. A selection of trade publications and magazines lay scattered across the coffee table. Pat was dressed like a policeman but in gray, with a peaked cap and a black necktie. With his blue eyes, gin blossoms, and dignified bearing, he reminded my grandfather of a seedier Bill Donovan. Pat took his job very seriously, believing, according to my grandmother, that when the local cadre got the word from Moscow, they would have orders to seize control of WAAM. To repel the attack, poor Pat had been entrusted with only a letter opener in a leather pen cup, a flashlight, and a key ring (though tonight his arsenal had been supplemented with a pumpkin and a sheaf of Indian corn), which likely explained why he was always kind of a sourpuss.
“I’ve been at my post since eight o’clock, sir,” Pat informed my grandfather. “I have not seen your wife. And you are not the first to come asking. Mr. Roberts been out here twice, see if she got here yet. Mr. Kahn, too.”
My grandfather asked Pat if maybe he could speak with Mr. Roberts (the floor manager) or Mr. Kahn (the director) or, seeing as how they were busy men who already had enough to worry about, if maybe he could just have a look around. Maybe his wife had come in earlier, to find some prop or a music cue in the record library, and fallen asleep in a chair in the artists’ room. He believed in this possibility as he offered it, but as soon as it left his lips, it sounded unlikely and Pat’s face told him that he was talking nonsense. My grandfather had not only come here expecting to find his wife, he reminded himself. He had also come, complementarily, to strengthen the case for her having really disappeared. My grandfather remembered the book.
“She’s going to need this,” he said. “When she gets here. She’s on her way. Be here any minute.” He held up the collection of Poe.
“Yeah?” Pat said. “What’s on tonight?”
“‘Metzengerstein.’”
“Never read him, he any good?”
“Tune in tonight,” my grandfather said. “Judge for yourself.”
He pointed to the big twenty-one-inch RCA television mounted in a heavy oak cabinet behind Pat’s desk. Permanently tuned to channel 13, presently showing a movie my grandfather didn’t recognize. John Wayne was underwater, bare-chested, fighting a giant octopus with a knife.
“Oh, I don’t watch your missus anymore,” Pat said. “I have to turn down the sound when she comes on. Nice lady. Pretty lady. But she gives me a fantod. Meaning no offense.”
“Pat. Please. I need to find her.”
“Well, all right, then, you have a seat,” Pat said. “I’ll go find Mr. Kahn.”
Pat went through the door that led to the main corridor running between the two halves of the TV station. My grandfather lingered at the counter, running his fingers across the tuck-and-roll surface of the pumpkin. He wondered why one hemisphere of a pumpkin always seemed to be as smooth as polished stone while the other was always streaked and warted with some mysterious cement.
After a minute Pat had not returned. My grandfather went to the banquette with its legs of bent rebar, and though sitting was the last thing he wanted to do, he forced himself to sit. He shuffled through the magazines: Broadcast News, Sponsor, Advertising Age, a Ring, a couple of old New Yorkers. One New Yorker somebody had left open to an advertisement with a cartoon drawing of a dismayed fisherman reeling in a boot. My grandfather sympathized. Then, in the column of text that ran down the page alongside the advertisement, his gaze caught on the hook of a capital V, separated by a hyphen from the numeral 2.
The article was entitled “A Romantic Urge.” Its author’s name was Daniel Lang. Over the course of several pages in the middle of the issue for the week of April 21, 1951—over a year and a half ago—Lang revealed to the literate, Dunhills-smoking, Triple Sec–drinking American public that the man behind Germany’s fearsome V-2 rocket was now living happily in Huntsville, Alabama, and working as a top scientist along with many other former Nazi “men of science” in the U.S. Army’s guided missile program. My grandfather had heard reports of something like this, with no mention of Wernher von Braun, and they had been vague enough for him to dismiss from his mind. It appeared, however, that not only von Braun but the better part of the German rocket program—more than a hundred men captured by the U.S. military’s wartime Operation Paperclip—had been transplanted to El Paso and then to Huntsville, where they were now being paid excellent salaries, learning to eat tamales and grits, driving around in their Chevys wearing cowboy hats and providing the United States with a missile capable of putting a nuclear warhead in the middle of downtown Moscow. Lang characterized Operation Paperclip as having been a treasure hunt and its operatives as “talent scouts.”
Lang was charmed by von Braun, with his blond hair and his buoyant manner and his protestations of innocent indifference to the strange ways of generals and führers. Von Braun was quoted to the effect that it made as much sense to blame a rocket scientist, who had wanted only to “blaze a trail to other planets,” for the deaths and destruction caused by the V-2 as it did to blame Einstein for the A-bomb. Lang characterized the man my grandfather knew to have held the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer (major) as a civilian, a man of peace, a reluctant warrior with his head in the clouds; he referred to the mechanized slave pit Nordhausen where the V-2 rockets had been assembled as a “production plant” staffed by Russian POWs.
“This is not good,” Barry Kahn said. My grandfather looked up. The director was a good-looking kid, one of those new postwar intellectual young Jews who dressed like a hoodlum in motorcycle jackets, rolled dungarees, never a tie. Behind him Pat stood shaking his head, looking at once reproachful and satisfied, as if he had predicted that nothing good would come of him going off to look for Mr. Kahn, or of my grandfather marrying a woman like my grandmother. “Where the hell is she, man? What am I supposed to put on the air in twenty-five minutes?”
The telephone behind the reception counter rang and rang again. Pat went around behind the counter and answered on the fourth ring, “WAAM.” He listened. His yellowed eyes, forked with pink, rolled toward my grandfather. “He’s right here.” Pat handed my grandfather the receiver. “It’s your brother.”
Less than a minute later, having spoken fewer than five words to the individual on the other end of the call, the husband of Nevermore, the Night Witch, hung up the phone. He turned to Barry Kahn. The tough-looking young Jew took a step backward, stumbling a little in his haste. His gaze was fixed on the point of the letter opener my grandfather held in his right hand. The blade of the letter opener was smeared, as with gore, with a film of orange pulp. “Easy, now,” said Barry Kahn.
In 2014, when I interviewed Kahn at his daughter’s home in Owings Mills, Maryland, the phrase he used to describe my grandfather at this moment was almost identical to the one employed by the anonymous witness who would be quoted on May 25, 1957, in the New York Daily News: I’ve never seen anyone so angry in my life.
My grandfather took a folded handkerchief from his hip pocket and used it to wipe the pulp from the blade of the letter opener, then dropped it back in the leather pen cup. He turned to Barry Kahn and handed him the pumpkin. “Here you go,” he said. While he’d been on the phone hearing the news that Uncle Ray tracked him down to pass along, my grandfather had used the letter opener to carve—punch out, really—a ragged parody of a human face. It had holes for eyes, a slit for a nose, a bent, moronic leer.
“What’s this?” Kahn didn’t want to take the pumpkin. He took it nevertheless.
“Her understudy,” my grandfather said.
He went to the coffee table and picked up the April 21, 1951, issue of The New Yorker. He held it up and took Aughenbaugh’s lighter from his pocket and set fire to a corner of the magazine. When the magazine had caught, he dropped it in a metal wastebasket by the station’s front door. “Happy Halloween,” he said.
A fire blazed up in the wastebasket. The metal rumbled with heat and then fell silent as the flame died away.
* * *
The Carmel, corner of Caroline and Biddle. An eminence of brick behind an iron gate in a high brick wall. Windows like slits behind heavy jalousies, steep roof castellated with dormers. A house of refuge or penitence but either way a house built to estrange its occupants from the world. On the roof the tall white cross, that high diver with arms outspread.
My grandfather had been instructed to use the back door. He parked the car on Caroline and found the alleyway promised by the prioress of the Carmel. It was an old East Baltimore alleyway paved unevenly in stones that made him wobbly at the ankles. The prioress had said to look for a steel door with a granite step. Beside the door he would see a little crank for the doorbell; on no account was he to crank it. At this hour of the night, she had told him, the Carmel was ruled by silence, or under a rule of silence, or words to that effect. They would hear him coming before he even had time to knock.
The prioress had struck him over the phone as a woman accustomed to taking matters in hand. “It was hard to know how best to serve your wife when she got here,” she had told him when he’d called the number she’d left with Uncle Ray. “I settled on a cup of tea and a pillow.”
Everything was as the prioress had promised: steel door with a sheen of moonlight, wide stone step for the leaving of deliveries, donations, and foundlings. Crank like the handle on a pepper mill below a plaque that bore the duplicitous suggestion turn. As my grandfather raised his hand to knock, a bolt slid back and the door swung inward. In the open doorway, surrounded by shadow, a round face hung pale and disembodied, a full moon painted on a theater drop.
“Mother Mary Joseph?”
The face twisted with amusement, annoyance, or disdain. Its owner drew back a step, and my grandfather saw that she was barely out of her teens and likely nobody’s mother in any sense of the word. It was the flowing brown scapular that had made her face seem to hang bodiless in the dark. The scapular gave off a clean smell of lavender and steam. The young nun invited him in with an awkward chopping gesture, like someone trying to wave away a bee. He stepped over the threshold of the Carmel.
Snow shovels, sandbags, a hand truck, rolls of strapping tape, some old bicycles, all labeled, everything stacked on shelves or hung from hooks. A menagerie of overshoes, Wellingtons, and galoshes. And a second nun, an ancient woman, swarthy and whiskered and crooked like a finger. The moment my grandfather came through, this tiny personage hurled herself at the heavy door and shoved it to, and the young nun drove home the deadbolt. With the breach sealed, the air in the Carmel’s basement corridor seemed to thicken with silence. It was like putting in a pair of earplugs. You could hear yourself swallowing, the click of your neck bones. The nuns slid past him, keeping their eyes downcast, away from the service entry.
“I’m here to see my wife,” my grandfather said.
His voice was a blare, a racket. He started to apologize, but the nuns were moving away from him down a hallway of painted cinder block. Bare bulbs, a green and white chessboard of linoleum polished to a high shine, as from constant sweeping by the hems of habits. The nuns were heading toward a stairwell at the far end. They went with a kind of slow urgency, like they were carrying iron kettles full of boiling water. At the bottom of the stairwell they stopped. This was as far as they planned to travel in my grandfather’s company. The old nun unbent one gnarled hand and uplifted its palm. My grandfather nodded; pointlessly, since they had yet to look at him. He started up the stairs. The unspoken apology lingered at the tip of his tongue.
“I’m sorry,” he said when he reached the first-floor landing.
The prioress was waiting for him, a handsome woman tented in a great volume of brown serge like a pylon planted in the doorway to block his path. Her voice was barely louder than a whisper yet not the least bit soft. It carried. It expected to be heard.
“Are you now?” she said. “And why would that be?”
She had three inches and thirty pounds on him, and she looked him right in the eye. She wore a pair of men’s eyeglasses, circular black frames with thick lenses.
“For the intrusion,” my grandfather said. “For the late hour.”
“There’s nothing to apologize for. I told you to come.”
He followed her down another hallway. The flooring here was some kind of hardwood, spotless and redolent of beeswax. Her habit trailed the same good smell of serge freshly laundered and ironed. She led him past unmarked doors, a radiator, a statuette of some naked martyr in ecstasy or torment, a framed portrait of a beautiful nun interrupted, while writing in a book with a quill pen, by the appearance of a giant human heart in the blue sky over her head. The airborne heart was being pierced by a giant arrow; maybe she was writing about that. The pipes of the radiator rang with steam hammers, and the hallway was uncomfortably warm. Down toward the end of the hall was a door with a tin plaque that read infirmary, black letters on white enamel.
“Wait,” the prioress said. Again she interposed her body between my grandfather and the place where he needed to go. She opened the infirmary door enough to look in, and gave a little grunt, somewhere between enlightenment and annoyance. She closed the door and turned to face my grandfather. Behind the lenses of her eyeglasses, the look in her eyes was compassionate without being friendly. “Come with me, please.”
“Is she in there?”
“Yes. Come with me.”
“Sister—”
“Please.” She was pointing to the next door down the hall. It stood ajar. “You have a decision to make and right now too little information for making it.”
By chance or instinct, she had hit on the type of reasoning that could move my grandfather. After a moment of hesitation, he gave in and followed her into the room next to the infirmary. It was unmarked. She switched on a bare light overhead, revealing a desk and two bentwood chairs, a tall shelf crowded with dull-looking texts, an empty mesh wastebasket, and a metal filing cabinet. The surface of the desk was bare but for a blotter, a dreadnought telephone of the 1930s, and a framed photograph of that era’s pope sitting smugly on a throne, wearing a hat that looked like a white yarmulke. My grandfather took the seat across from hers.
“It’s a very long time, I’ve no doubt, since a man set foot in this room,” she said, her tone disapproving and a touch melancholy. “Ordinarily you and I ought to be separated by a screen of some kind.”
“Is that the information I’m going to need to make my decision?”
The smart remark seemed to take them both a little by surprise. The prioress looked at him through half-lowered eyelids. “Maybe so,” she said mysteriously after a moment. “Now, I gave your wife some tea.”
“You mentioned that.”
“Valerian tea. It has sedative properties.”
“Yes.”
“And now she’s gone and fallen asleep.”
“Ah.”
“She was wrung out. I know you’re anxious to see her, my friend. But tonight we must let her sleep.”
“Sister—”
“Of course it’s inconvenient, you came all the way over here, and I’m sure you’re very concerned. Of course you are. I see it on your face. But you’ll agree, won’t you, that it would be an unkindness to wake her? Please. Go home. Come back in the morning or as soon as you can tomorrow. We’ll look after her until then.”
“Sister, I, uh, truly, I appreciate the concern and the care you’ve already taken with her. But I just want to take her home. Tonight. Now.”
“I see. And are you sure that she’ll want to go home with you?”
“What are you getting at?”
“Don’t take offense, please. I may be a nun, but I am also a woman and thus very sure that I know much more about men in general and husbands in particular than you do. My question was reasonable. If she wants so very much to be at home with you, then why isn’t she there at home with you right now?”
It was a fair question, he had to admit.
“She went out, she, uh, left. She was upset.”
“Friend, let me tell you something. Your wife wasn’t ‘upset.’ She was out of her cotton-picking mind.” She seemed to listen to the echo of the phrase as it faded. She looked satisfied by the sound of it. “Did you actually see her, did you witness her behavior, at any point this evening?”
“No.”
“Did you hear her? Did you hear the language that came flying out of her mouth?”
“I was at work,” my grandfather said. “When I got home, she had already left, I didn’t realize right away.”
“I see,” the prioress said. “Listen, do you know how I found you tonight? How I happen to know your name, how I came to have your telephone number?”
“I assumed . . . I figured she asked you to call.”
“She did not say one word about you, as a matter of fact. Not in my hearing. I knew your name because, hmm, when was it, maybe two or three months back, your wife left a check for five hundred dollars in our charity box. Drawn on your joint checking account. I never cashed it. It was so much money. I felt it might be taking advantage. In any case, I kept the check. Your name was printed on it. That’s how I knew how to reach you.”
“You’re saying she’s been here before.”
“Your wife has been coming to our special ‘Sisters in Prayer’ service, it’s open to all women of faith, one Sunday a month for, oh, it must be a year now.”
The compassion that had never entirely left her eyes, even when she was exercised and aggravated with my grandfather, now seemed to give way to outright pity.
“You didn’t know,” she said.
“No.”
“But you do know . . . Forgive me, my friend. You do know that your wife isn’t just ‘upset.’ You do understand that she’s mentally ill?”
He did understand it, but he had never said the words, aloud or to himself, or even permitted himself to squarely think the thought.
“The things she was saying tonight, oh!” The prioress closed her eyes and shook her head a little. “Calling herself a witch. A ‘night witch,’ if you please. Calling herself liar, bad mother, whore. And worse. Telling me, ‘I killed my baby tonight.’ Saying she had, if you please, been violated, sexually, by a horse that had no skin, and that after it was over, she went to the toilet, and looked in, and saw her baby floating in there.” These words came out in a rush as if the prioress could not wait to get them out of her mouth and be done with them. “You’ve never heard talk like that from her?”
“She never . . . She never put it . . . like that.”
“Finally, well, I had enough, I suppose. I’m sitting with her, right beside her. I give her the tea, and I tell her, ‘Now, that’s enough. No more of that talk. And she does calm down. And she looks at me, and she takes my hands in hers. ‘I feel safe here,’ she says. ‘I only feel safe here. I want to stay. I have a vocation, Mother,’ she says. ‘I’m called.’”
My grandfather surprised both of them. He laughed. “That is crazy,” he said. “First of all, she’s married, to me. Second of all, she has a daughter who’s eleven years old. And third, she’s a Jew.”
The prioress wanted to remind him that many women born Jewish had lived out their lives in orders.* He could see it on her face. No doubt there were plenty of nuns who had children, and ex-husbands, too.
“It’s not necessarily crazy,” the prioress said. “But in this instance, I happen to agree with you. She may very well have a vocation. It isn’t for me and you to say if she does or she doesn’t. She can’t stay here, though, not like this. And yet, please, my friend, let’s be honest with each other and with ourselves: She can’t go home, either.”
My grandfather started to protest, but she raised a pale hand. Her palm at the base of each finger was studded with callouses like ivory buttons. My grandfather closed his mouth.
“I’m not a psychiatrist,” the prioress said, “and you are her husband, and so naturally and rightly it must be your decision, and I will defer to it as I must. But I am a trained nurse, I’ll have you know. And I do have experience in these matters. And I can tell you without a nickel’s worth of doubt that your wife needs to be under a doctor’s care. A psychiatrist’s care. Your wife needs to be in a mental hospital, friend, getting medical treatment, while I and all the sisters in this house pray for her recovery.”
A floorboard creaked. The prioress looked up and my grandfather turned to the door. A nun stood in the doorway, small, thin, something mouselike in her long nose and the front teeth that showed in the parting of her lips. She lowered her eyes to the floor when my grandfather looked at her.
“Is she awake, Sister Cyril?”
Sister Cyril nodded. “And she seems . . . happy!” She looked up, a flash of defiance in her voice, and met my grandfather’s gaze.
“Sister Cyril!”
Sister Cyril lowered her head again. “She says she wants to tell him . . . about her vocation.”
The prioress regarded my grandfather, who sat in the chair knowing that he needed to get up and go to his wife and grab her and take her out of this place, unable to proceed any further in his thought or action than that. He didn’t know where to take her. He did not have the faintest idea where a woman like my grandmother could ever possibly belong.
“What do I do?” my grandfather said. “What do I say to her?”
The prioress waved a hand at Sister Cyril. “Sister Cyril, please return to your duty.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“You may tell her that her husband will be in shortly to see her.”
The prioress waited until Sister Cyril had retreated from the room and the creaking of the floorboards in the hallway had faded away.
“What do you say to her? Well, friend, not as a matter of policy, but just for the moment,” Mother Mary Joseph said, “I might encourage you to lie.”
* * *
The small room was all crosshatchings of shadow like a lesson in shading a sphere, an arc of darkness wrapped around a circle of gray with a bright spot a bit off-center. The bright spot was my grandmother; all the light in the sad little room seemed to be radiating from her. She was sitting up in the iron infirmary bed, hands reposed on the bedsheet where it had been folded back over the wool blanket. No makeup. Hair tied back with an unmistakable severity. He had never seen her look more beautiful.
“You really do understand?”
“Yes, darling. Of course.”
“This is the only place I can be safe.”
“I know.”
“I want us all to be safe. I want our daughter to be safe.”
“Yes.”
“It is too dangerous when I am outside of this place.”
“I understand.”
“Yes, you are a soldier. You understand about a calling. One have to make a sacrifice.”
He knew he ought not interpret or take to heart anything she said while in this state. He could almost hear the prioress advising him so. He knew my grandmother was under the delusion that she was about to take orders as a Carmelite novice, and that the sacrifice implied was of worldly ties and not of their daughter, as on some pagan altar, daubed with the blood of a mare. He could not keep the image out of his head, a knife, my mother’s pale throat. He shuddered. “Okay.”
“It’s really okay?”
“Of course.”
She lifted her arms from the bed and he stepped into them. A smell of castile soap. A hint of mothballs.
“You are so good,” she said. “Thank you.”
He stood hunched over, a crick in his neck. Her cheek was wet against his. On a chest of drawers by the bed, next to what he recognized as her copy of the Fioretti, there was a portrait of Jesus Christ. It was a modern litho, rendered with photographic realism, propped up in a metal eight-by-ten frame. Jesus looked like Guy Madison with a beard and Lauren Bacall’s hair. His gaze was leveled at my grandfather. No doubt his expression was meant to be compassionate, but to my grandfather it looked merely pitying. He remembered how, in the war, he had watched an old priest administer last rites to a dying German civilian and been moved by the Latin words and the message of peace he could sense encoded in them. But this pretty-boy Jesus just gave him the creeps. You had your shot, buster, this Jesus seemed to be saying with those smoldering Guy Madison eyes. You lost her.
My grandfather worked himself free of her arms and drew back until he could look her in the face. If her expression had been vacant, the way books led you to expect—“nobody home”—it might have been easier to bear or at least to accept. When something was gone, it was gone. But my grandmother’s eyes were not vacant, they were filled to overflowing. Her face was busy with all the usual traffic in intelligence and feeling. At some level, surely, she must know that all this vocation business was nonsense, impossible, a charade. She must know that tomorrow, next week, after a couple months of rest and soothing chats with a top psychiatrist, it would pass.
“You know this will pass,” she said, stopping his heart. “I see how you are so sad. Jesus sees, too. He will comfort you.”
“No need,” my grandfather said, resisting the urge to address the picture of Jesus. “I’m fine. We’ll be fine. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She laughed. She thought that was adorable. “It doesn’t work that way, silly.”
He couldn’t take any more. She held on to his hand.
“I want to show you something.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s our sweet baby,” she said.
She reached for the little brown Fioretti and allowed it to fall open between her hands, to a place marked by a playing card. Blue-backed with a pattern of white crescent moons. Deftly, her fingers dealt him the card, but he did not care to see its face and would not turn it over.
* * *
When he got home that night, my grandfather found Uncle Ray and my mother asleep on the couch in front of the television set. It was long past sign-off. Random-sample ants of wild signal swarmed the screen. All the lights were out, and the gray radiance of television static bled the room of color. Uncle Ray was sitting up at one end of the couch with his chin sunk to his chest. My mother lay across the cushions in her corduroy overalls, knees pulled to her chest, head in Uncle Ray’s lap. Her lips were stained a dark shade of what my grandfather presumed, judging from a half-eaten candy apple that lay upside down and stuck to the coffee table, to be red. Uncle Ray’s outstretched right arm lay along the length of my mother’s body from her shoulder to her hip.
It was an innocent, tender scene; it disturbed my grandfather. The glow of the television disturbed him. It made him think of will-o’-the-wisp, the radiance of decay. Ignis fatuus: the light of an old magazine full of old news burning in a trash bin; the flicker of genius insight that had caught in his mind that evening as he was driving around Forest Park looking for my grandmother. He tried to rekindle it now. A phantom boy scampering down the beach at sunset. The RAND Corporation, the Traveling Salesman Problem. Topographic heuristics applied to the problem of dead reckoning in inertial guidance. He chased the foolish fire a moment longer, verging on it . . . and it winked out and was gone, never to return.* What did it matter? It was going to cost a fortune to hospitalize my grandmother, get her the care she needed. The adventure of Patapsco Engineering was over for him. He would have to get Weinblatt to buy him out and find more reliable work, a regular paycheck.
He went to the television. Just before he switched it off, the foam of entropy brimming from the screen seemed to reverse, to organize itself into a familiar pattern. For a few seconds my grandfather stood motionless, the hair standing up on the back of his neck, as a coherent image appeared on the television’s screen. Holes for eyes. Nose a slash of black. Jagged jack-o’-lantern grin. When he read in the paper afterward that for the final transmission of The Crypt of Nevermore, Barry Kahn had taken the butchered pumpkin, put a candle inside, and let the play of the little flame fill the next forty-five minutes of dead air, my grandfather wondered. He wondered if an image could be retained by the phosphor coating of a cathode tube, or if it had bounced off some angle of the atmosphere and returned, an electronic revenant.
He switched off the television. The face lingered in negative on his retinas until, like a will-o’-the-wisp, like a flash of insight, it faded and winked out. After that, until his eyes adjusted, the room was dark.
* * *
“Remember that book I used to love, Strangely Enough?” I asked my mother that afternoon at my kitchen table as we stood looking down at the grinning horse skull with its mad mandala eyes. Strangely Enough by C. B. Colby, a nonfiction collection of pieces about “unexplained” incidents and paranormal events, had been a staple of the Scholastic Book Club in the 1960s and ’70s and among the key texts of my childhood. “There was a piece in there, something kind of similar. A transmission, the call sign of a TV station in Houston, Texas, appeared one day out of the blue on televisions over in England, I think it was. But, like, years later, after the station that broadcast it had gone out of business. Nobody knew where the signal came from or where it was before it reappeared.”*
“Huh,” my mother said.
“So maybe what Grandpa saw was something like that.”
My mother looked at me. She’d had a couple of slugs of Drambuie by then, and the look in her eyes did not trouble to be merciful.
“Maybe not,” I said.
She put the skull back into the middle of the stained towel and wrapped it up. She set the bundled skull into the Old Crow box. I found a roll of packing tape, and she sealed the box along every seam as though to prevent any future exposure, or possibly escape, of its contents. She left with the box under her arm and I have not seen it, and we have not discussed it, since.