Two days before my grandfather surrendered to the New York State Department of Corrections, he drove my mother from New Jersey to Baltimore to entrust her to his brother’s care. It was by no means the ideal situation, but nothing ever was, and he felt he had no choice. His mother and father had died of cancer within a couple of months of each other in the winter of 1954.
“Keep your eyes peeled,” my grandfather told my mother. “It’s going to be on your side of the street.”
My mother had not seen Baltimore in five years, and it looked strange to her. The row houses had two stories clad in white siding upstairs, redbrick down. They made my mother think of gums crowded with teeth. Most of them had flat roofs, but every so often one had a peaked attic. Those were the eyeteeth. The houses had shallow porches held up by white pillars. They ran on for blocks unvaryingly, like a vista you might drive past in a dream.
“I forgot the number,” my mother said.
My grandfather sighed. He took his right hand off the wheel to fish his wallet from the breast pocket of his jacket. A matchbook from Howard Johnson’s fell out of the wallet into the area by his feet. He swore. He returned the wallet to its pocket. His tone was calm, but that meant nothing. “Find it,” he said.
My mother leaned across the seat and felt around on the floor among the pedals and her father’s black wing tips until her fingers kicked against the match cover. “Found it.”
The comb of matches had been torn away cleanly along with the strip where you struck a light. She turned the match cover over to the side on which my grandfather had jotted down an address. My mother read the numbers aloud, but they failed to register. She was remembering the Howard Johnson’s restaurant where my grandfather had taken her one particularly fine Saturday not long before. Their nearest neighbor, Mrs. Lopes, had unexpectedly dropped by the house that day, bringing along two albums of photos from a recent visit to her sister in Altoona. My grandmother had shown what struck my mother at the time as remarkable if not excessive interest in the Pennsylvanian travels of Mrs. Lopes. My mother was thrilled when my grandfather, who harbored little patience for their neighbor, abruptly proposed a father-daughter outing.
He drove my mother out to visit a petting zoo with goats, sheep, and an irritable alpaca named for Yma Sumac. My mother knew that at fourteen she was too old to enjoy a petting zoo. She had enjoyed it nonetheless. There were no other visitors, and the animals seemed eager for company. They rushed to greet my mother and never let her out of their sight. In the enormous barn there had been a tire swing lashed to the highest rafter, and at the end of the visit the farmer had set up empty soup cans along a fence. My mother, always a bit of a deadeye, had shot all but one of them off with a .22 rifle. On the way back from the petting zoo, they stopped at Howard Johnson’s, where my grandfather had consented to my mother ordering a lunch of french fries with a side of peppermint ice cream.
The day was hot, but inside the Howard Johnson’s her bare arms and legs had prickled as her sweat cooled in the air-conditioning. There was frost on the scalloped metal ice cream dish. My grandfather had made a comic show of disgust as he watched my mother languidly dip each fry into the pink mound of ice cream before eating it. But she could see something else moving behind his face, some deeper pain or preoccupation. After a while he got up to go to the men’s room. He came back with a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes. He was not a habitual smoker, but there were months when he would go through two packs a day.
The lighter engraved with a molecular diagram was out of fuel, an oversight she could not remember ever having seen him commit. Their waitress had brought the book of matches in their aqua, white, and orange cover. My grandfather lit a cigarette and settled back in the booth. The look in his eyes of painful assessment appeared to have departed. He complimented my mother on her marksmanship and then, unusually, told her a story from his boyhood. It was a brief tale but a good one. It concerned a friend of my grandfather’s, a boy called Moish, who had been shot by another boy with a .22 rifle. The tale concluded satisfyingly with a bloody fingertip wrapped in a sheet of newspaper and carried home in the victim’s pocket.*
When they got home that afternoon from their outing, the radio in the living room was playing big-band rhumba music, but the house was empty. There was an envelope on the kitchen table, propped against a candlewick vase that held white peonies cut from the back garden. My grandmother had written my mother’s name on the outside of the envelope. Her penmanship, improved by nuns, made every word look like notes to be played on a celesta. In the envelope my mother found a red feather wrapped inside a letter informing her that her mother had decided, for the good of the family, to return herself for treatment at Greystone. The meaning or origin of the red feather was information my mother never ascertained.
My grandfather swore again and stepped on the brake. “You were supposed to be looking,” he said.
“I was looking.”
When you drove it in reverse, the car made a sound that my mother imagined to be the whirring of her father’s displeasure. My grandfather craned his head around and backed them past three houses with his right arm slung across the top of the seat back. He stopped in front of a house with an attic story. Its porch was hedged with bare azalea bushes. Instead of brick and siding, it appeared to have been clad in a grid made of hundreds of cut stones, brown, purple-brown, and gray. Its porch had lost or been deprived of its pillars. In their place someone had installed trellises of wrought iron, entwined by wrought-iron vines. In one of the two windows that looked onto the porch my mother saw a woman’s wide face before a muslin curtain fell across it.
My grandfather cut the engine. My mother grabbed handfuls of the skirt of her jumper and squeezed. Her eyes burned. Tears dripped from her chin to the Peter Pan collar of her blouse. It was so quiet in the car that she could hear the patter of the tears. My grandfather made a soft click with his tongue, irritation or pity. My mother pinned her scant hopes on pity.
“I have no choice in the matter,” my grandfather said. “Forgive me.”
“No,” said my mother. Her daring surprised her. Her heart was thudding against her breastbone.
My grandfather opened the door on his side and got out of the car. “Fair enough,” he said.
He put on his gray worsted suit jacket and shot his cuffs. He straightened the knot of his gray and black tie. He studied the stone face of the house.* He came around the front of the car and opened my mother’s door on his way back to the trunk. My mother wiped her face on her sleeve and climbed out. She followed him to the trunk of the Crosley, which held two suitcases of clothes, a train case with her toilet articles and her glass animal collection, her portable record player, and a box of 45 rpm records, among them “Wake Up Little Susie,” new that week, and “Dark Moon” by Gale Storm.
“Let me worry about this stuff,” my grandfather said. “You go ring the bell.”
My mother stood on the concrete checkerboard looking at the stone house. It had felt so good to say no. She contemplated saying it again, but Uncle Ray beat her to it.
“No!” He was standing on the topmost porch step. He was wearing a sky-blue suit piped in white, and a green necktie patterned with gold circles over a gold shirt. He was taking her in, making a show of it, his arms folded across his bony chest, looking her up and down. He shook his head, his mouth turned up at one corner as though ready, in a moment, to smile. “Unbelievable,” he said. “Impossible.”
My mother had not seen very much of Uncle Ray since the move from Baltimore in 1952. Since then he had grown more outrageous, and she loved him for it. The improbability of his cars, his clothes, and of the gifts he brought her—a brown-skinned doll wearing a hat of wooden fruit and a red dress embroidered with the word havana, a canvas sack stamped golden nugget containing a vial filled with gold dust—scandalized my grandfather in a way that paradoxically also seemed to bring him pleasure. When Uncle Ray came around, he and my grandmother would do the talking. My grandfather would just sit listening at the table or, once, on a blanket spread under the hickory tree. Uncle Ray’s stories of his life featured people with suggestive or humorous nicknames and towns or neighborhoods with questionable reputations. To narrate that life’s incidents and activities required an impenetrable jargon. The talk went over my mother’s head so completely that nobody bothered to shoo her away. When Uncle Ray got to the end of a story, my grandfather would sink his chin into his hand and say something like “I don’t believe it” or “That’s appalling” or simply “Oy, Reynard, why?” But sometimes he would be smiling.
“Hi, Uncle Ray,” my mother said.
“Hello, dollface.”
She went up the steps and put her arms around Ray’s neck and kissed him on the cheek. It was smoother than her father’s cheek. As always, he smelled of gardenia and tobacco ash. She did not have to go up on tiptoe to kiss him. Not yet fifteen, she was two inches taller than he was.
“Look at you! Nobody told me you were already done growing up,” he said. “This is going to be a piece of cake. My work is done!”
My mother did not reply.
“Right?” Uncle Ray said. “I’m looking forward to this, aren’t you?”
“I guess.”
“Sure you are, baby. This is going to be fun.”
There was a flat metal mailbox by the front door with a wire bracket to hold the evening paper. The name on the mailbox was einstein. My mother had been told that this was the name of Uncle Ray’s landlady, but seeing it spelled out on the mailbox gave her an uneasy feeling. It was a name long since affixed to matters of crucial importance that she knew she was never going to understand.
“You said a girl.”
The voice was pitched low, masculine. It belonged to the woman my mother had seen at the window. She seemed old to my mother at the time, but in retrospect my mother thought she must not have been sixty. Her black hair was grained with silver. It jutted out on either side of her head in two fins that curved upward at the tips, the toes of a pair of Persian slippers. She was wearing what appeared to be a lab coat over a blouse printed with chrysanthemums and a brown skirt. She drew a thread of some bitter odor along with her when she came out onto the porch.
“Mrs. Einstein,” Uncle Ray told my mother. “This is a girl, Mrs. E. She’s only . . . How old are you now, sweetheart?”
“Fourteen.”
Mrs. Einstein looked my mother up and down, her hands folded across her chest. My mother decided that the odor was coming from Mrs. Einstein. Later my mother would learn that her uncle’s landlady worked as a receptionist at a veterinary hospital out in Pikesville. A smell compounded from carbolic and the secretions of animals’ fear glands followed Mrs. Einstein wherever she went.
“Fourteen,” Mrs. Einstein said. “Nonsense.” She turned to Ray. “What do you take me for?”
“I can produce her birth documents,” Uncle Ray said with smoothness and assurance, worrying my mother, who was not sure she owned any birth documents. “If you really think it’s necessary.”
The summer before, as a hurricane was about to hit the Gulf Coast of Texas, my mother had seen a picture in the newspaper of people in its path nailing sheets of plywood over the windows of their houses. A similar procedure now seemed to be undertaken by Mrs. Einstein with the expression in her eyes.
“It’s all necessary when you’re involved,” she said to Uncle Ray. “I have to take every precaution.”
“Now, Mrs. E.”
“When you’re involved I read the fine print.” She shook her head infinitesimally, as if a fuller expression of disapproval might implicate her in whatever mischief her boarder had gotten himself into. Then she went back into the house.
“What did she mean, ‘You said a girl’?” my mother asked her uncle. “Does she think I’m a boy?”
Uncle Ray’s teeth were veined with gold. When he smiled, you felt he was giving you a glimpse of the wares he planned to sell you.
“No, sweetheart,” he said, “she thought you were a woman.” He started to ruffle her hair, then changed his mind and settled for a pat on the shoulder. “Don’t let her— Well, well.”
He was looking past my mother at my grandfather, coming up the walk with one of my mother’s suitcases under each arm, holding the record player with his left hand and the train case and box of records with his right.
“Shame on you, Mandrake,” Uncle Ray said to my mother. “Making Lothar here carry all your bags.”
“He wouldn’t let me help.”
“No, he wouldn’t, would he,” Uncle Ray said.
My grandfather kept his head down, his eyes hidden behind the brim of his hat. He tromped up the porch steps and tried to bull past my mother and Uncle Ray without saying a word.
“Hey, sourpuss,” Uncle Ray said. He stepped into his brother’s path. He waited until my grandfather looked up from under the brim of his fedora. “You can’t even manage a hello?”
My grandfather paused. He nodded without meeting his brother’s gaze. “Hello,” he said.
“That’s it? That’s all I get?”
“Move it,” my grandfather said softly.
Uncle Ray stepped aside with a show of mock alarm. My grandfather went through the door with the luggage.
“We’re putting her in the attic,” Uncle Ray called after him. “Good luck getting all that up the ladder. I’d help you if you weren’t such a jerk.”
My grandfather reminded his brother that he didn’t need help. Uncle Ray rolled his eyes at my mother. She wanted to smile but could not manage it. She was already apprehensive about having to sleep in an attic. She had not been told that the attic was reached by a ladder. This worried her, too. What if she had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night?
“Good thing he’s not sticking around,” Uncle Ray said. “Himself and Mrs. Einstein under the same roof? Marciano versus Moore, duking it out for the heavyweight sourpuss title.”
“He’s going to prison,” my mother said, remembering now that in spite of the affection and sense of mild wonder Uncle Ray inspired in her, there had always been something about him that got on her nerves. He was not a serious person. “If he weren’t going to prison, neither of us would have to be here at all.”
Uncle Ray looked as if she had slapped him. My mother felt instantly sorry. She forced herself to smile. “Anyway,” she said. “I’d put my money on Daddy.”
“For the sourpuss title?”
“Definitely.”
“How much?”
“Five dollars?”
“You’re on,” Uncle Ray said. They shook on it.
Mrs. Einstein fed them. The fifteen dollars a week she charged Uncle Ray for a room with its own bathroom on the second floor of her house did not include meals. Mrs. Einstein took no interest in food. On the rare occasions when she cooked, the results were nothing anybody would pay money to eat. Though not observant, she shopped at a kosher butcher. She would buy the cheapest cuts, all string and gristle, sear them, then submerge them in a signature brown gravy that reminded my mother of Jell-O, only salty and hot. The vegetables were boiled until safely gray. Once a week Mrs. Einstein forced herself to sit down and eat a piece of fried beef liver with grilled onions, and if Uncle Ray and my mother were around, she forced them to eat it, too. Her husband and son had always refused to touch liver, and they were dead, and she was alive.
On that first night, however, she served an excellent dairy supper. She had stopped at an appetizing store and brought home smoked whitefish, pickled herring, a dozen deviled eggs. She put out cottage cheese and some sliced celery and carrots. For dessert there was a marvel of a cake, a slender block frosted with chocolate that revealed, when Mrs. Einstein sliced it open, gaudy layers of pink, green, and yellow separated by ribbons of raspberry jam. Mrs. Einstein had no illusions about her table—she had no illusions about anything except maybe the tonic properties of beef liver. But she knew where my grandfather would be headed after he departed her house. She felt that his last free meal ought to be edible, at least.
“You’re very kind,” my grandfather said, pushing away his plate.
“Not really,” Mrs. Einstein said. She looked at my mother, who was just then contemplating asking for a second slice of ribbon cake. “One is enough,” Mrs. Einstein said.
My mother nodded. She put her fork down.
“Maybe your brother told you, I have doubts about this arrangement,” Mrs. Einstein said. “I have a hard time picturing Reynard looking after a child, and I worry that the burden is going to fall on me. I don’t much care for children. I had one of my own. That was more than sufficient.”
My grandfather turned on his brother. “You said it was fine with her.”
“Fine is a relative term,” Uncle Ray observed. “Maybe I ought to have said, as fine as anything ever gets with this one.”
My mother told me that she still remembered the heat spreading across her cheeks as she listened to this exchange. A spasm of restlessness took hold in her legs, a kind of panic of the muscles. She ran through a handful of smart or angry or cold remarks she might toss at Mrs. Einstein on the subject of children and their feelings toward Mrs. Einstein. She reconfirmed with herself the certainty that she had nowhere else to go.
“I don’t need it to be fine,” Mrs. Einstein said. “Obviously, the girl needs a home.”
It was not yet eight o’clock when my grandfather took his hat from a peg in the front hall. My mother tried to stay put on Mrs. Einstein’s sofa. The sofa was upholstered in pale pink chenille sealed in a layer of clear vinyl. Under her circle skirt, my mother could feel her bare thighs sticking to the vinyl slipcover, and she pretended that the adhesion would be sufficient. But in the end she tore loose and ran to her father. He suffered her to put her arms around his waist and her cheek against his shirtfront. When he saw that she was not going to make a scene, he took hold of her head with both hands and raised her face to his.
“If I thought you were not up to this, I would not ask you to do it,” he said. “Do you understand?”
My mother nodded. A tear spilled from her left eye, streaked down her temple, and chimed inside her right ear.
“You’re tough,” he said. “Like me.”
He lowered his lips to her forehead and left the scratch of his whiskers on it. Hours afterward, lying on a folding cot in Mrs. Einstein’s attic, trying to fall asleep, she could feel the abrasion of his kiss radiating heat across her forehead like a sunburn. It was only then, in the dark and the smell of old luggage and galoshes, that it occurred to my mother she should have asked my grandfather what he would have done if he’d thought she wasn’t up to the ordeal. She lay there in the dark, picturing to herself all the bright forms his mercy might have taken if only she had not been so tough.