When I was little and we still lived in Flushing, the Whip used to come shambling down our block, a hectic fanfare blowing from its loudspeaker horn. The Whip was a truck with a carnival ride in a wire cage mounted on its flatbed, painted red and yellow like a circus tent. The music that attended its migrations and advertised its arrival had a slapstick wooziness and in hindsight may have been a tarantella. It seemed as long and as looming as a tractor-trailer to me, but it was probably no bigger than a moving van. If you were already in the street playing when the Whip rolled up, you ran in to beg for a quarter. If you were indoors, you heard the drunken music and ran out to meet it with a quarter sweating against your palm.
The Whip Man was a beefy dark-skinned fellow in a billed cap who said little and smiled less, although he did not seem unfriendly. He would relieve you of your change and then help you up three steel stairs to the interior of the cage where the Whip’s six cars waited, alternately red or yellow, arranged on a hidden track in an elongated oval. Sometimes the cars reminded me of tulips and sometimes of painted hands upturned to cup a pair of children. The cars wobbled around the oval, trundling along the straightaways, then picking up speed at each end in a burst that smashed you against the outside of the car or the person beside you. During the slow parts you recovered, and then you got smashed again, and when the ride was over you went back down the stairs. Just before you exited his cage, the Whip Man would reach up to take a piece of Bazooka bubble gum from a shelf over his head and press it into your hand with a murmured benediction.
One day as I came down the stairs from the back of the Whip truck, I was surprised to find my father waiting for me in his suit, tie, and white coat. The rubber-tipped antlers of a stethoscope protruded from a hip pocket. There was a fleck of red on his shirtfront that looked like blood but was more likely to be his lunch: tomato soup, ketchup. I knew that if I asked him, he would say it was blood. I had recently begun to understand that my father only rarely meant what he said and that usually he meant precisely the opposite. If he said it was a gorgeous day, that meant it was snowing or raining. If he said something couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, then something bad had happened to someone who deserved it. When he was imparting information of a factual nature, you could generally take what he said at face value, but even then you had to be careful. I had endured a painful day of teasing by the older kids on the block, after I cited my father’s authority in claiming that the “crunch berries” in Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries cereal were made from actual dehydrated strawberries.
“Does Mommy have a stomach flu?” I said.
The only time I could remember my father having come home in the middle of a workday had been a few months earlier, when my mother fell ill and was too weak from vomiting to look after me. She had seemed fine at breakfast this morning, but I had been at my friend Roland’s house since then, and in the meantime she must have succumbed.
“She had to go to the hospital,” my father said. He unlocked the car on my mother’s side and held open the rear door. I got in. “Mrs. Kartakis drove her.”
“Does she have to have an operation?” I said.
“Yes, but you don’t have to worry, Mike. She’s going to be fine.”
My father was wanting as a father, still less of a businessman, and as a crook he was grossly incompetent, but he seems to have been a very good doctor. Among the gifts he could bring to bear was a fine bedside manner; I don’t think I’ve ever seen finer. Like his mother-in-law telling a story, my father became a different person when he wanted to comfort you. His voice grew deeper and more gentle, and he seemed—uniquely at such moments—to relax. He looked you right in the eye. He knew you had questions; he understood your concerns. In the years that he spent practicing medicine, his patients always loved him. No doubt this manner had its effect on creditors and investors, too. Up to a point.
“It isn’t serious,” he said. “A minor procedure.” He crouched beside the car and buckled my seat belt, even though I had known how to buckle my own seat belt for some time. “Don’t worry, honey.”
“Okay.”
He put his hand with its manicured nails on my shoulder. A clean smell between peppermint and leather escaped the cuff of his lab coat. His class ring with its gemstone and cryptic inscription radiated strength like the ring of Hercules in the cartoons; if you held it to the sky, it might call down lightning. I looked at the glittering stone and the moons of his fingernails. I felt like crying about my mother having to go to the hospital, but I arrested the feeling at the back of my throat and managed to work it down. I asked my father what kind of operation my mother would be having.
“What kind of operation do you think she might be having?” he said.
He closed the door and I was surprised to notice on the seat beside me a small suitcase, ivory leather, with spring-action brass clasps and hinges that creaked when you opened it. Scuffed as an old white oxford shoe, it had been my father’s when he was a boy and was therefore always referred to as my valise, because that was what they had called a suitcase in my father’s family. I took it be a Yiddish word. I was not sure why my father wanted me to guess what kind of operation my mother was having. I wondered if I would be judged on the quality of my answer. I remembered that one of my valise-toting relatives, his late mother’s sister Dottie, had recently gone into the hospital for a foot operation.
“Maybe her feet?” I tried.
“You’re right,” he said. “Very good.”
He switched on the radio, tuned as usual to WQXR. Someone was hitting the keys of a piano hard, in fitful handfuls. My father turned up the volume. We drove down the street, past the Whip. The angry piano tangled momentarily with the drunken trumpet pouring from the speaker horn over the Whip’s cab. My friend Roland and his brother, Pierre, stood at the Whip’s bottommost step, squinting hopefully up at the Whip Man. I realized that I was still holding the piece of bubble gum.
I unwrapped it and put my jaw to work on it. I puzzled over the gag in the Bazooka Joe comic strip, which I was newly capable of reading. I didn’t ask my father about the valise. I assumed that I was going to stay with my mother in the hospital. I wondered if I would have a bed of my own or if I would be sharing a bed with her. I envisioned a room in New York Hospital, where my father had done his residency in orthopedics—the only hospital I really knew. After a while I understood that we were going the wrong way for NYH and must be headed to a different hospital. I knew, of course, that New York City was full of hospitals—Montefiore, Presbyterian, St. Luke’s. Mrs. Kartakis must have taken my mother to one of those. There were Jewish and Catholic hospitals; maybe there were Greek hospitals. Maybe Mrs. Kartakis had taken my mother to the Public Health Service hospital on Staten Island, where my father was currently posted.
The piano was under heavy attack now—it must have been a Liszt waltz, maybe Rachmaninoff. It was so loud that I would almost have to shout to be heard over it, and my father didn’t like it when I shouted over his music. It annoyed him, and sometimes if I did not shut up, annoyance slipped into anger. He would reach back and uncoil his right arm, slowly at first and then with a sudden snap. His Mighty Hercules ring would crack against my skull, making a sound that I could see, a thunderclap behind my eyeballs. Therefore I did not ask him if we would be riding the Staten Island Ferry to visit my mother. It was only when it became clear that we were headed across the Bronx to Riverdale that I opened my mouth. Even then I waited until the piece ended and a commercial came on before saying what I had to say. “I don’t want to sleep over at Grandpa and Grandma’s.”
“Oh, come on, Mike!” It came out as irritable, halfway to yelling. He lowered his voice. “The puppets are not going to hurt you,” he said, in a controlled tone. “They are toys. You know that.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m just afraid of them.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Mike . . .”
“I just am.”
A new piece began to play on the radio. My father turned down the volume but drove on for a while without saying anything.
“Well, I don’t know what to do about that,” he said.
He sounded more sad than irritated; he sounded disappointed. I was very sorry to disappoint him, but it was hardly my fault that in a hatbox at the top of the closet in the guest bedroom of my grandparents’ apartment, a dozen hand puppets (a rubicund King, a sour-faced Queen, a leering Shepherd, two white and one black Sheep, a sneaky-eyed Fishwife, four Musicians, and a masked Robber with a black beard made horribly from human hair) lay plotting in darkness to kill me while I slept. They had sewn bodies and painted wooden heads carved by a master craftsman in Lille, France. I knew that they had cost my grandparents “an arm and a leg,” which intensified my shame and guilt over being terrified of them and of course merely helped the puppets’ case against me. I tried to think of something I could say to mitigate my father’s disappointment.
“I’m just afraid of them at night,” I said. “In the daytime they don’t bother me at all.”
* * *
The valise was heavy, and I struggled with it across the lobby of the building. The doorman, called Irish George to distinguish him from another doorman known as Tall George, offered me a hand. I declined. I wanted my father to see that in spite of an emotional weakness that made me fear hand puppets, I could at least carry my own valise.
“Big strong fella you got there, Doc,” said Irish George.
My father pushed the up button and stood back appraising me for a moment before lowering his eyes to his Florsheim loafers. “He’s a big boy,” my father agreed.
He still sounded disappointed, I thought, but in a regretful way, as if mostly disappointed in himself. Mistaking incapacity for a philosophy of life, my father did not often apologize, but when he did, he would first look down at his shoes. It hurt my heart to see him hang his head that way. I couldn’t handle it. I did not want him to apologize for whatever was making him feel sorry. I looked at the gondola instead.
There was a beauty salon on the ground floor of my grandparents’ building. It had an Italian name and a Venetian theme and, in the lobby, a sign that was a miniature replica of a gondola. The gondola hung from the ceiling by the elevator. It was nearly two feet long, piano black with red and gold trim, its prow pointed at the hallway that led to the beauty salon. I had been enchanted by this model gondola for as long as I could remember and now—not for the first time—I sought refuge aboard it and began poling slowly in my imagination through waters untroubled by thoughts of the Robber with his veritable beard, or the bad thing happening to my mother that my father was so sorry about, or the chances that, once she and I were alone, my grandmother would find herself in a storytelling mood.
“Is Grandpa home?” I said.
“Of course not. He’s at work.”
“Okay.”
“Why do you ask?”
I said that I had just been wondering. As soon as the elevator doors closed and we started to go up, I felt a djinn of expectancy or dread (there was no difference) flicker to life in my belly. I ran my eyes from the twelfth-floor button to the fourteenth and back. Recently, I had come across a laminated card, printed with the Mourner’s Kaddish in two alphabets, inside a copy of Errol Flynn’s My Wicked, Wicked Ways that had belonged to my other grandfather, my namesake. I wondered if, in spite of the effort made to protect the dummies of the world from their fear of bad luck, some residual thirteenth floor might not linger, hidden like that Kaddish between floors twelve and fourteen.
When we got off the elevator, I let my father carry the suitcase and took his right hand between both of my own. I lagged behind a little, steeling myself for my part in the coming ritual.
The doorbell was mounted under the peephole in a metal frame I could now reach without going up on tiptoe. The way it always worked was that I would ring and, wearing the same look of fresh mischief each time, my father would cover the peephole like a magician palming a coin. A moment later, in a worried voice, my grandmother would call out, “Who is it?” from the other side of the door, even though she knew it could only be us.
The joke was that she was pretending to be worried, but the real joke, at least to my father, was that she was only pretending to pretend. He covered the peephole because he had noticed that his mother-in-law never opened a letter without first holding the envelope to a light, or a door without first peeping through the spyhole. A deadbolt would roll back with a ratcheting sound, a chain would rattle, and my grandparents’ door would swing slowly open—and there would be nobody there.
Here the joke was that it had been a ghost grandmother calling out “Who is it?” My role was to step up and declare in my firmest tone, “There’s no such thing as ghosts!” and my grandmother would then emerge from behind the door and affirm in a reassuring tone that I was absolutely right. Even though I had known for a long time that it was my grandmother hiding herself and not a ghost grandmother, when the invisible hand pulled open the door I often would catch hold of my father’s or mother’s arm or take an involuntary step away. My parents would chuckle or chide me. They failed to understand that it was not the ghost that spooked me, it was the hidden grandmother.
None of that happened this time. My father rang the doorbell. My grandmother opened the door. It was the middle of the afternoon, but she was still wearing her housecoat. This was a kind of slender tent with a Nehru collar that buttoned up the front and fell to her ankles, violently patterned with red and purple op-art oblongs. Today it would seem like the relic of an audacious moment in the history of midcentury design, but at the time I simply accepted it as routine loungewear for a grandmother.
“Go in.” The bangles on her wrists clinked as she waved me into the apartment. “Put your things in the, the cabinet in the bedroom. In the chest of drawers.”
My father handed me the valise. “It’s just a couple of days,” he said. “Grandma will take you to buy a Matchbox car.” He pulled out his billfold and gave me five ones and a five, a considerable sum. He frowned and extracted an additional five-dollar bill from the billfold. This one was frayed, stained, and missing a chip at one corner. He was the son of a print jobber, and until his uncle’s fateful encounter at Jack Dempsey’s with a six-inch human skeleton, his family had clipped coupons, saved Green Stamps in tattered albums, and hoarded pennies in mayonnaise jars. I think there was something unbearable to my father, some imprisoning shame, in the saving of money. It never hung around his wallet very long. But while it was there, he liked it clean and new.
“Dirty,” my grandmother said in mock sympathy as my father handed me the abominable five. “And torn, pouah!”
My father grabbed at the back of my head, ruffled my hair, and gave me a gentle shove toward the bedroom. I could feel them waiting until I was out of earshot to start talking about my mother. I took my time getting there. Across the living room windows the Palisades rippled like a stone flag banded with river, trees, and sky. A cast-metal Degas ballerina on a teak console leveled her contemptuous gaze at a balsa-wood model of a Vanguard rocket on a bookshelf by the hall.
When I went into the guest bedroom, my grandmother and my father started talking in low voices. I set the suitcase on the bed and stood in the doorway, trying to eavesdrop. I suspected that my mother was already dead, that the operation on her feet had been a failure or a fiction, and that everyone was conspiring to keep the information from me. Between the hushed tones, my grandmother’s accent, and the elliptical nature of adult conversation, I could not catch the drift. I stared at the worn five-dollar bill in my hand, at the portrait of Abraham Lincoln, whose own mother had died when he was not much older than I was. I felt like I could see the loss in Abraham Lincoln’s eyes.
My father called out a goodbye, and a moment later my grandmother came into the guest bedroom to check on my progress unpacking. I had made no progress. I had been too busy trying to eavesdrop, and anyway, I was confused by my father’s packing technique. He had mistaken pajama tops for pullovers and bathing trunks for short pants. He had packed two handkerchiefs. Handkerchiefs! He had thought to equip me with the fake-ponyskin cowboy vest that had been part of my most recent Halloween costume. There were three pairs of underpants but four pairs of socks, one of them mismatched and one my mother’s.
“Did Mommy die?”
“No, little mouse,” my grandmother said. “You will see her very soon. Now let’s put your things away.”
She took a quick inventory of the contents of the valise. Just before she said it, I knew she was going to say “Oh la la,” an interjection I always enjoyed. She put everything but the buckaroo vest in the chest of drawers and said that we would get some things at Alexander’s when we went to buy me a Matchbox car with all that dirty money.
I asked her what I should do about the vest. She told me I should put it on because she had a presentiment that we might need to be cowboys today, and if I wore the vest it would establish a mood.
“This will be our inspiration,” she said, the first time I can remember having heard the word used. “I am inspired.”
She went into her bedroom, and when she came back she was wearing a Pierre Cardin shearling “cowboy coat” and a pair of Ferragamo “cowboy shoes” with chased-silver clasps on their stacked heels. She said that I should put the valise in the closet, but I ended up leaving it just outside the closet door. On the other side, in the hatbox, the masked Robber and his confederates bided their time.
* * *
I was known (by me) as the Cheyenne Kid. My sidekick or (as she put it) “kickside” styled herself Tumblesweed Bill. Tumblesweed Bill had curious ideas about how cowboys talked, what they did, and the cowboy way of life. Her cowboy accent sounded like Buckwheat on The Little Rascals. Her cowboy walk looked like a sailor hornpipe performed in slow motion. She had assimilated the notion that cowpoke was another word for cowboy, and as we trotted to the bus from the Skyview to Fordham Road and Grand Concourse, she did a lot of poking among our imaginary herd with an invisible picador’s lance (which she called an “arpoon”).
The Cheyenne Kid and Tumblesweed Bill went to Alexander’s and bought T-shirts, underpants and a pair of shorts, and a Matchbox car (a Land Rover like they drove on Daktari, brown plastic luggage packed on its roof). Then Cheyenne and his kickside came home and baked a tarte tatin. As always when she was in this kind of mood, the time passed swiftly. I forgot to worry about my mother for long stretches of the afternoon.*
The blue over New Jersey deepened and then faded. My grandfather was still at the office. Earlier there had been talk about what he might want for his supper when he got home, but when Bill and Cheyenne ate an entire tarte tatin, the question of the night’s menu lost its urgency. Tumblesweed Bill, to my dismay, seemed to vanish along with the daylight and my grandmother’s half of the pie. Her voice darkened. Her eyes went sad. A new mood was gathering the folds of its cloak around her. I had seen it happen before.
“Whatcha wanta do now, Bill?” I tried.
My grandmother didn’t reply but at first seemed to be considering the possible responses. After a moment she began to pinch and press at a certain spot at the base of her skull. She got up from the table, and from the expression on her face you would have said that she had just delivered herself of an opinion in the matter of what we ought to do next, even though she had said nothing at all. I had seen that happen before, too. She stood in the middle of the kitchen frowning, as if she had forgotten why she stood up. She opened a drawer, then another. She started rooting around until she found a tin of her Wintermans cigarillos. She clasped the tin in both hands and made a grateful sound but then once again seemed to lose track of her intentions. She laid the tin of Wintermans against the place at the back of her neck.
“Mamie?” I said.
I was surprised by how shaky and small my voice sounded. I was not afraid of my grandmother, exactly; I was never afraid of her except at those times when she was actively trying to scare me. I felt abandoned by her, or by my faithful kickside, and as the sky darkened outside the windows and night came down, I started to think about the puppets again. I did not want to think about the puppets or to be afraid of them, but before long it would be time for bed and already, in the imagined dark of their closet, I could see the shine on their lidless glass eyes. I could hear their voices whispering that my mother was dead. Before she had sent me out to play that morning, my mother had offered to tie my sneakers for me, even though she knew I could tie them myself. At the time I had rebuffed her, but now her offer struck me as ominous. Knowing that she was about to die, she had wanted only to tie her little boy’s shoes for him one last time. And I had refused her!
“I want to hear a story,” I said to my grandmother. I saw that I had surprised her; I had surprised myself. For my grandmother, enticing a story from the deck of fortune-telling cards was not like baking, going to the movies, or playing piquet. Her stories were like moods or fevers: They came over her.
“You want to hear a story,” my grandmother said.
I nodded. In fact, I didn’t want to hear a story at all. Between my mother’s operation and the half-intelligible rustlings from the closet, I had plenty to unsettle me already. She looked doubtful, and I hoped fiercely that she was going to decline, but she just looked at me, rubbing the tin of Wintermans against her nape. I decided to issue a retraction, but it got stuck in my throat and I could not seem to dislodge it.
“Little mouse,” my grandmother said. “Don’t cry.” She came to me, put a hand on top of my head, and tilted my face to hers. The hand slid down to caress my cheek. “I know you are worried, but don’t worry. All right?”
“Yeah.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Go. Go and get the cards.”
I went very slowly to find the tin of almond kisses and returned to the kitchen more slowly still. By the time I got back, I had managed to console myself with the idea that at least now my grandmother would not be abandoning me, which, of course, I now see, must have been the impulse behind my asking for a story in the first place. When she acted out the parts and did all the different voices, it would be like a continuation of her turn as Tumblesweed Bill. And for however long it lasted, the story would prolong the hours until I was sent to bed, and the voices she gave to her characters would drown out the whisperings and insinuations from the hatbox in the closet.
I gave the fortune-telling cards to my grandmother and sat down across the table from her. I watched her compose herself around the deck of cards, as if it held a quantity of something rare and important. Our eyes met, and then with a nod she broke open the deck and decanted its contents in a torrent from one hand to the other. The deck of cards became a wide elastic band that she stretched and snapped and stretched again. She riffled the cards with her thumbs and sprang them with a flourish. Then she set the deck on the table in front of me. I cut it. I cut it again. I reached for the topmost card.
Abruptly, she covered my hand with hers. Her wedding ring struck my knuckles and I cried out.
“No,” she said. “Never mind.”
I looked up, my fingers stinging, feeling reprimanded. Her cheeks were wet with tears. I could not remember having seen my grandmother cry. For some reason the sight displeased me. “Do you have a migraine?”
She shook her head. She opened her arms, and with a powerful reluctance I got up and took a step in her direction. She grabbed me and pulled me to her chest. My grandmother’s embrace was something implacable and impersonal. It was like an undertow or the impact of a concrete sidewalk. Her amber miasma of Chanel was too much, a mouthful of honey.
“You’re choking me!” I said.
“Oh!” She let go. “I’m sorry!”
She was smiling. There was something about her smile and the flush in her cheeks that made me feel I had done something unforgivable. Her hand went to the place on the back of her neck.
“Maybe I do feel the migraine coming, little mouse,” she said. “I am going to go lie down. Grandpa, he is stopping to the hospital to see Mommy. Then he will come home and I can get up and make supper for us. It’s okay?”
After she left I sat at the kitchen table awash in guilt and regret that seemed disproportionate to the crime of simply having, for the hundredth time, slipped free of her imprisoning arms. And she must have been crying, I understood now, because she was sad about whatever was happening or had happened to my mother. If only I had endured her embrace a moment or two longer, I might have been able to discover the truth.
I decided I would make her some tea and take it to her with a wet cloth for her forehead. I would sit on the edge of her bed and wait until she felt a little better, and then maybe, at last, someone would tell me what was really going on.
While I waited for the kettle to boil, I went to the deck of cards on the kitchen table and turned over the topmost card. It was the Lady, in her long skirts and hunting coat, standing by a stone bench in a garden. I turned over the second card: the Coffin, adrift on a gaudy bed of flowers, blazoned with an ornate cross.
My grandmother had explained to me that when you were telling fortunes, the Coffin did not necessarily stand for death or dying. It might stand for anything that was coming to an end, or even for something that was beginning. The Coffin had come up twice for me in the course of our time together. Once, in the story that resulted, my grandmother had transformed the Coffin into a little boat employed by the grandmother of Moses to paddle anxiously down the Nile after his basket because she could not let him out of her sight. The other time it came up, the Coffin had become a chest of iron into which a hapless escape artist named Paree Poudini had been foolish enough to have himself sealed and thrown into the Hudson River.
Nevertheless, I hated to see that card turn up.
I pushed my chair back from the table and stood up. I stared down at the deck, knowing that I now had to turn over the third card. I had to turn over the third card, a rough voice whispered in my head, because the first card had been the Lady and the second the Coffin, and if I did not turn over the third card then it would be true, for real and forever, that my mother was dead.*
I don’t know how long I stood there trying to work up the courage to turn over the third card. I heard the creaking of the teakettle. The electricity inside the clock on the wall hummed its unending note—A#, my grandfather had told me. The tap dripped and the drops rang against the tart pan. When I turned the card over, it was going to be the Bouquet, I decided, because my mother was dead, and though I had yet to attend one I understood that for a funeral you needed a lot of flowers. On the other hand, said the whispering (which the clock, the kettle, and the tap could not drown out), if I failed to turn the card over, that would kill my mother. My thoughts circled this paradox like a bee I once saw chasing itself around a lamppost. I pressed my hands against the sides of my head in a vain attempt to slow them. Finally, I reached for the deck.
There was a chiming of keys on a key ring. My grandfather sighed. “Somebody want to come and take the chain off?”
I went to the door to let in my grandfather and his own enveloping smell: raincoat, cigarette smoke, the dusty and metallic innards of a typewriter. I had never been so relieved to see anyone in my life. He did not look like the father of a woman who was dead or even, for that matter, of a woman who no longer had any feet. I wanted to hug him, but I was not sure how he would respond, since from his point of view all he had done was walk through his front door. It was not that he never hugged me, but there needed to be an occasion. He dropped his coat, briefcase, and the jumble of an evening paper on a nearby chair. He asked for a brief summary of my day and I provided one. He was almost always in a cheerful mood in those days, when MRX and he were in their prime, but tonight his manner seemed a little wan. I told him that Mamie had a headache and also that she had been crying but I was not exactly sure why. I said that I was making her a cup of tea.
“That’s nice,” he said. “You’re a good boy, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
He loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar. I followed him back into the kitchen. “What’s dinner? What’s all this?”
There were two dirty plates, two forks, and a tart pan in the sink, but he meant the cards. I could tell by his face that he knew what he was looking at and that seeing the cards made him upset. I decided not to answer either of his questions. I was afraid that he might throw the cards away. Before he could gather them up, I turned over the card that was now topmost on the deck.
It was the Child.
Was I the child? I had to be the child. The Coffin was my coffin, and the Lady was my mother, grieving over the news of my death. I wondered how I was going to die. I suspected strongly that a gang of French puppets would be involved. I saw the puppets inching themselves like worms across the carpet in the guest bedroom, crawling up the side of the bed, creeping across my body in the darkness like groping hands.
“Hey,” my grandfather said, his tone gentle. He crouched down and turned me to face him. “Mike, look at me. Your mother’s fine. Everything’s going to be all right. Okay, she lost the baby, but that’s a misnomer, because it wasn’t really a baby yet at all.”
That was how I learned that my mother had been pregnant, and that the pregnancy had miscarried, though I did not yet fully grasp that or the import in this context of a baby being lost. Someone had forgotten to tell my grandfather that I was not to be told.
“All right?” he said.
He needed me to say it was all right so that we could stop talking about the lost baby and get it over with. I didn’t say anything. Naturally, I had a lot of questions about the loss of babies, but I refused to ask them. I was angry; there had been a brother or a sister, and nobody had said a thing to me about it. Now that brother or sister was dead and nobody had let me know that, either.
My grandfather sat down at the table in the chair my grandmother had been using. He picked up the deck of cards and riffled through them deliberately. “What nonsense,” he said. “She was wasting your time with this?”
“We were playing piquet.”
“I count thirty-six cards,” he said. “What kind of piquet is that?”
I felt I ought to try to protect my grandmother. “Cowboy piquet,” I ventured. It sounded plausible enough to me.
He looked at me. I looked back at him. He nodded. “How about I fry us some salami,” he said.
While he was scrambling the eggs and chopping up three inches of a fat Hebrew National salami, I carried a cup of tea to my grandmother. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, talking softly into the bedroom extension. She sounded angry, with the particular sarcastic intonation that she reserved for my father. I don’t remember, if I ever really caught, what she was saying to him. Hindsight, and a taste for melodrama, and some faint ghost of veritable memory incline me to feel that they were words to this effect: You are not now free to leave them.* When she saw me come in, she gave her head one firm shake. She waved me and the cup of tea away. She mouthed the word Go. I turned and went back down along the hallway. The teacup jingled against the saucer with a sound like a ringing telephone.
I sat down at the kitchen table. My grandfather had turned on the radio and tuned it to the news. It was the usual obscurities of statistics and disaster. He was banging pans, rifling drawers, and slamming cabinets shut. Sometimes the news had that effect on him, in particular when it concerned Richard Nixon, but when the ads came on, this time he kept on banging and slamming. It occurred to me that, like my grandmother, he might be angry about the lost baby and my father’s apparent role in its loss, but all of that was unclear to me. On the off chance that he was mad about the fortune-telling cards, however, I decided to throw him off the scent.
Sometimes after he had played a round of solitaire, my grandfather used the cards to build a tower (though he always called it a “house”) of cards. There were two ways to do it, a good way and a bad way. Most people did it the bad way, which formed a part of the understanding of human behavior that my grandfather passed on to me along with his lessons in playing-card construction methods. With the bad way, you tilted pairs of cards against each other like precarious lean-tos and formed them into rows of triangles that you stacked, each story narrower by one lean-to than the one below it, to make one big triangle. This method was inherently unstable, and even if you executed flawlessly, you could build only a few stories high before the thing collapsed under its own weight.
The good way was to stand four cards on their long edges, forming a pinwheel configuration that made a square cell where they came together. If you laid a card flat across the central square, you got a sturdy box that could support the weight of many stories. Each radiating vane of the pinwheel could in turn be interlocked with three fresh cards, and so by going outward and upward you could erect something of substance and loft. Some of the cards I used hid, and others revealed, their faces: the Mice, the Clover, the Scythe. I thought of the stories that my grandmother had built for me out of those cards when they had turned up in the past. I saw that my tower was made of stories in two senses of the word.
I experienced this not as a pun but as an enigmatic metaphor. I assumed there must be a reason that buildings were said to be made out of narratives or, conversely, that narratives were seen to be the stacked components of mysterious towers in some way I couldn’t grasp. Maybe it had something to do, I thought, with the Tower of Babel. I wanted to ask my grandfather, but then I would have to explain to him exactly how my grandmother made use of the cards. I felt that he would approve of her telling stories, or at least the kind of stories she used to tell me, even less than he evidently approved of her telling fortunes.
“Look at that,” he said, casting a critical eye up and down my tower. He was holding a couple of plates and forks.
“It’s easy,” I assured him. “These cards are really good for building with. That’s why Mamie lets me use them.”
“Oh, is that why?” He started to set two places at the opposite end of the Formica table.
“Yes. Be careful. You’ll knock it down.”
“It’s going to have to come down sometime.”
“No.”
A counter furnished with a pair of barstools divided the kitchen from the dining room. He set two places there instead of on the table, where my tower aspired.
“That’s what houses of cards do,” my grandfather said, returning to the stove for the pan of salami and eggs. “It’s proverbial.”
“What’s proverbial mean?”
“You know what proverbial means.”
He held out the frying pan so I could see it. He did his salami and eggs pancake-style, pouring the scrambled eggs around the fried salami, letting it set and get brown on the bottom, then flipping the “pancake” to brown on the other side.
“How many degrees in a circle?” he asked me.
“Three hundred and sixty.”
“Correct. How many degrees do you want?”
“A hundred and twenty.”
He cut me a fat wedge and slid it onto my plate. We sat at the counter with our food. The radio erected its tower of accidents, crime, money, love, good and bad fortune, and war. I looked at my house of cards and reflected on the proverbial inevitability of its collapse.
“Why aren’t you eating?” my grandfather said.
Having only lately consumed an entire tarte tatin was another secret I felt that my grandmother would prefer I didn’t betray. I didn’t answer.
“Your dad will be here tomorrow,” my grandfather said, guessing at the reason for my unaccustomed pensiveness and silence. “To take you home. You’ll see Mommy. She’s really all right.”
“Okay.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“So eat.”
“Why didn’t God want them to build the Tower of Babel?” I said. “Why did He make it so everybody couldn’t understand each other?”
“You know I don’t believe in God.”
“I know.”
“Probably there was just a ziggurat, you know what a ziggurat is? Over in Mesopotamia. Maybe it was in ruins. Maybe it was only halfway built, left unfinished. And they made up a story to explain what happened to it, why it looked incomplete.”
“Oh.”
“You understand what I’m saying?”
I understood: Everything got ruined and nothing was ever finished. The world, like the Tower of Babel or my grandmother’s deck of cards, was made out of stories, and it was always on the verge of collapse. That was proverbial.
“Maybe God doesn’t want this tower,” my grandmother theorized. She was standing in the middle of the living room, holding my grandfather’s coat and briefcase and the crumpled mess of his newspaper. “Because from the top of it, people they can look inside of His house and see He is a big pork.”
My grandfather smiled for the first time since walking in the door. He acknowledged that there might be something to her theory. He offered my grandmother some of the salami and eggs on his plate. She shook her head and made a face, but she came over and plucked a bit of salami from the plate and popped it into her mouth. She stood very close to my grandfather, leaning her hip against his shoulder. “Mmm,” she said. She looked at me without looking at me. “Poor little one.”
My grandfather got down off the stool and put his arms around my grandmother. They held on to each other for what seemed to me to be a very long time. She murmured something into his ear, too low for me to catch, and he nodded and said, “I know. Me, too.”
Then she seemed to recover herself. She reached out to me for a second time that afternoon. I got down from my stool and went to my grandparents. I took her left hand in my right, and my grandfather did the same with my left hand. With his left hand, he reached for my grandmother and we made a brief circle before letting go.
“He’s fine,” my grandfather said. “I told him everything’s going to be fine.”
“He isn’t fine,” my grandmother said. “He’s terrified because of those puppets you bought! They are so horrible. He’s the nervous wrecks all day long because he is so afraid to go to sleep in there.”
I had said nothing to my grandmother, at any time since their arrival from Lille, France, about my fear of the puppets.
She frowned and let go of our hands. “Oh no.” She had noticed the house of cards, and now she glanced from it to my grandfather. Their eyes locked and held, and I saw they were conducting some kind of discussion about the cards and me without saying anything at all. My grandmother looked at me, a little sadly, I thought. Then she went to the kitchen table and blew on the cards like the Big Bad Wolf. The tower collapsed and rattled to the tabletop.
“See?” said my grandfather.
My grandmother gathered up the cards and slid them into their box. I don’t know what became of them; I never saw them again. After he finished his dinner, my grandfather went into the guest bedroom. He took the hatbox out of the closet and carried it in the elevator to the storage space in the basement of the building.
The next day my father came to retrieve me, and together we picked up my mother from the hospital. I told her I knew about the lost baby, and she said that it was so new it hadn’t really been a baby at all.
The following year my father left the Public Health Service for the short-lived job with the Senators baseball club, and we left New York for good. I saw my grandmother much less frequently; when I did see her, she was fragile and ill. We never cooked or played cards. She sat wrapped in blankets and stared at the television or watched the sky outside the window. And then one day when I was eleven years old, she died and was buried in Montefiore Cemetery, leaving me her legacy of voices in the dark.