Moonglow

This hardly qualified as reminiscence, since he never really enlarged upon it or added any detail. It was offered more in the way of an ironic commentary on some fresh instance of my mother’s stoicism, pragmatism, or levelheadedness, of her being a tough cookie, a cool customer.

“They think they can crack her,” I remember him saying during the days she was fighting (with his assistance) to disentangle herself legally and financially from the mess my father had made of our lives, “but she won’t crack.” After a pronouncement of this kind my grandfather would often shake his head and add, savoring the irony, “Hard to believe the first time I saw her, she was crying her little eyes out, poor thing.”

The first time my grandfather saw my mother was a Sunday afternoon in early March 1947, a couple of weeks after “Night in Monte Carlo.” He rode the number 5 streetcar from his brother’s house in Park Circle to Ahavas Sholom, which was about to begin its observation of Purim. Technically, Purim had fallen on a Friday that year, but due to some Sabbath pettifoggery and the city of Baltimore not having been walled during the time of Joshua, it was to be celebrated today.

My grandfather had no interest in the Jewish calendar or Uncle Ray’s explanation thereof, and as for Purim itself, he could take it or leave it. Unlike the other Jewish holidays, it had been fun when he was a kid, and he still gave it credit for that. But somewhere between the Ardennes and the Harz mountains, my grandfather had lost the taste or the capacity for celebrating an enemy’s defeat, and it struck him as cheap and painfully mistaken to draw all the neat parallels that Ray planned to draw in his sermon between the would-be exterminator Haman and the bona-fide exterminator Hitler. Jewish wiles and bad luck (aka “God”) had put a stop to Haman’s plans; Hitler had simply run out of time.

The annual celebrations of God’s mercy, justice, and power, the feasts or fasts undertaken in praise of His Name, the miracles He was supposed to have thrown our way over the centuries—in my grandfather’s mind, it was all nullified by the thing he had not yet learned to call the Holocaust. In Egypt, in Shushan, in the time of Judah Maccabee, God had intervened to deliver us with a mighty hand and outstretched arm; big deal. When we were sent to the ovens, God had sat with His outstretched thumb up His mighty ass and let us burn. In 1947 there was, to my grandfather, one reason to continue calling oneself a Jew, to go on being Jewish before the world: as a way of telling Hitler Fuck you.

He was not on his way to Ahavas Sholom to celebrate Purim, endure his brother’s preaching, or stamp his feet every time Haman’s name was read from the Megillah. He was not even going for the hamantaschen, though naturally, he would not say no.* He was going to the synagogue that afternoon because Uncle Ray had assured him that my grandmother would be there, and my grandfather was hoping to get into my grandmother’s panties. The woman had passed through the fire without being consumed, but she had, my grandfather understood, been damaged. So he had decided that he was going to save her. Getting into her panties was a necessary first step.

From the first that was a part of his attraction to her: not her brokenness but her potential for being mended and, even more, the challenge that mending her would pose. He thought that if he took on the job of loving this broken woman, some measure of sense or purpose might be returned to his life. He thought that in mending her, he might also be mended. Ever since the late winter and spring of 1945 my grandfather had been suffering from a form of spiritual aphasia. No matter how many times he pored over them, he had trouble assigning sense or value to the things he had seen and done during the war. He had been assured many times by experts and authorities that his wartime actions had served a larger purpose and, furthermore, that some new purpose would be found for him in the after-war. Until the night he met my grandmother, he had put no credit in such assurances; now, as he returned to the synagogue on a mission of lust, he was more inclined to believe them. His lust itself felt like a form of belief.

He understood that it was possible to define the word fool as “one who takes on a job without knowing its true extent or difficulty,” but after all, that had been standard procedure in the Army Corps of Engineers. If there was anything like wisdom to be gained in this world, maybe it was to be found in the hopeful, hopeless motto of the Corps: Essayons. So, he didn’t know how big or hard a job he was getting himself into with this woman. At least he knew where to begin: with her hips pressed against him, her legs wrapped around him, her body encompassed by his arms.

* * *

Since “Night in Monte Carlo,” my grandfather had seen my grandmother three times.

The first time was as the result of a kind of reverse ambush engineered by Uncle Ray. Mrs. Waxman, recovering swiftly from the failure of the Sisterhood’s first plot to ensnare the new rabbi, had invited him to a “casual supper” at the Waxmans’ floor-through apartment in the Riviera, on Eutaw Place, to which, secretly, she had also invited my grandmother. Uncle Ray was hip by now to the conspiracy against him, however, and aware that his brother had blundered head over heels into the trap the Sisterhood had laid. Accepting the invitation, Uncle Ray showed up with my grandfather in tow, counting on a display of brotherly solicitude for the decorated vet with the thousand-yard stare to earn him the forgiveness of the Waxmans.

Awkwardnesses followed. A seating arrangement devised for pre-dinner drinks in the intimate drawing room of the vast apartment, where two Joseph Urban armchairs encouragingly faced an exceedingly narrow Hagenbund love seat, was spoiled both visually and tactically by the hasty interpolation of a crewel-work Eastlake side chair from the front parlor. Also, a leaf and a place had to be added to a kitchen table that was just the size, and had been set, for four. Also, the cook was obliged to reapportion fifty exorbitant grams of beluga caviar on the toast points with cream cheese that were the hors d’oeuvre. But the greatest awkwardness that night, undoubtedly, was my grandfather. Positioned alone on one side of the kitchen table, across from his brother and at an angle to my grandmother, he barely spoke, introduced food into his mouth at mechanical intervals, and stared at my grandmother without art or restraint. When she caught him staring, he would even more artlessly look down at the food on his plate with a show of puzzlement, as if he kept forgetting what supper was and how it was supposed to work.

What puzzled him, in fact, was my grandmother. When an engineer encounters his destiny or doom, it always takes the form of a puzzle.

The elegant girl he remembered from “Night in Monte Carlo” had been lively and cosmopolitan but odd and flighty and possibly a bit of a nut. She had, for God’s sake, zipped up his fly in a synagogue! The woman at the Waxmans’ kitchen table was no less beautiful than that girl but otherwise completely different in manner, in style, in energy. No more interested in the young rabbi than he was in her, she had chosen to wear a drab woolen suit-dress of an outmoded military cut. She filled it out nicely but could not enliven it. Her conversation was measured, tentative, careful, even grave. It gave no evidence of nuttiness. It was more polished, couched more in American English than two weeks before.

The absence of playfulness and flirtation in her manner brought out the languid solemnity of her feline face and eyes. The tangles of her hair had been combed and pinned close to her scalp and seemed more russet than auburn, with a sheen like the coat of a chestnut horse. The laugh he remembered as raspy, verging on braying, was a demure chuckle. At “Night in Monte Carlo,” my grandfather had pegged (maybe even a little bit dismissed) her as a fetching but scatterbrained gamine trying to relinquish her dark and painful history into the hands of hairstylists, dentists, and couturiers. A bird of passage, hollow-boned. The woman he met at the Waxmans’ that second evening seemed heavy at her core, subject to some crushing gravity. She was a vessel built to hold the pain of her history, but it had cracked her, and radiant darkness leaked out through the crack. When the conversation touched on the Carmelite convent where she had been hidden during the war, my grandmother’s voice grew husky. It throbbed with sadness. Uncle Ray passed her his handkerchief, and they all watched her dab at her eyes as the kitchen filled with silence and the smell of gardenia.

My grandfather was troubled and fascinated by this alteration from the girl of ten days before. Had the flirtatious gamine in the Ingrid Bergman sunglasses been a pose adopted for the evening, while this shapely vessel leaking sadness approximated something closer to the truth of her self? Or was it the other way around? Maybe neither version was the “truth.” Maybe “self” was a free variable with no bounded value. Maybe every time you met her, she would be somebody else. He became vaguely aware that he was experiencing pain, a pulsing in his left shin, and realized that his brother was kicking him under the table. Inferring or registering that Mrs. Waxman or Judge Waxman had just asked him a question, my grandfather looked helplessly from one to the other. No help was forthcoming from either direction. Uncle Ray was obliged to intervene.

“Electrical engineering,” he said in a dry tone of voice, sounding exasperated but not unamused. “He has a BS from Drexel Tech. And yes, Judge, he is very much looking for employment, sensitive as he is to the fact that his long-suffering kid brother would dearly love to have his couch back.”

Until very recently, my grandfather, on hearing this remark, would have shot back with something along the lines of Hey, you know what? I can be gone tomorrow, and would have meant it. For weeks he had woken up on Uncle Ray’s couch every morning not knowing why he was still in Baltimore, and lay down on it again every night telling himself it was time to move on.

“I’m interested in rocketry,” he was astonished to hear himself declare. “Inertial guidance systems, telemetry. I’d like to find work out at Glenn Martin, if I could. I hear they might be starting to do some things in that area.”

Mrs. Waxman looked impressed, or maybe she was just taken aback; it was by far my grandfather’s longest utterance of the evening. Judge Waxman said that, as it happened, one of his former law partners had a brother who was a vice president of the Martin Company. Perhaps there was something he could do to help my grandfather.

“Are they building space rockets out there?” Uncle Ray said. During the war, Glenn Martin had built a vast plant at Middle River in the northeastern wastes of Baltimore to manufacture thousands of B-26 Marauders and Mariner seaplanes. “Because let me tell you something, this brother of mine, with his inertia and his telepathy? He might look like a chunk of cement with a flattop. But he wants to fly to the moon.”

Apart from this and my grandmother choking up about the sisters of Carmel, my grandfather had no clear recollection, forty-two years later, of anything else said by anyone at the table that night. The only other conversation he remembered came after dessert and coffee had been served. His feelings about my grandmother at this point were a confusion of curiosity, pity, ambition, desire. He felt that he needed, for the sake of clarity, to escape her gravity for a minute or two, for as long as it would take to smoke a cigarette. He slipped away from the table and, looking for some kind of back stair or terrace, found his way to a large porch enclosed with glass. It was unheated but furnished with wicker and an étagère to hold plants and on a spring afternoon must be a pleasant place to sit and have money and be a judge. It had a closed-up smell. He opened one of the casement windows, hoping to find some purchase in the cold night air.

He had just lit a Pall Mall when the door clanged open. It was my grandmother, cloaked in a thick fur coat, sleeves dangling empty at her sides. The coat, like Mrs. Waxman, came enveloped in a formidable vapor of Tabu. It must have cost the judge as much as the 1947 Cadillac Sixty he had sent around to pick up his guests.

“Hello.”

“Oh, uh, hiya.”

She looked longingly at the cigarette between his lips. He passed it to her and lit another for himself. When he looked up again from the spark and flare of butane, still a little cross-eyed, he saw her shudder once, a traveling wave that passed from her hips to her shoulders and then across her face in a ripple of dismay.

“You okay?”

My grandmother made a funny sound, somewhere between embarrassed laughter and a yelp of pain, then ducked out from under Mrs. Waxman’s coat like it was on fire. At the same time she tossed it in the general direction of my grandfather like she was the burning building and it was up to him, a fireman waiting with his life net, to save it. He caught the coat by the collar. She put a hand to her chest, swallowed, and took a drag on the cigarette. She looked sheepish.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Only I really don’t like fur.”

“Oh?”

“When they cut away the skins . . . ? I have seen it.”

“Yeah?”

“And I never liked it.”

That was the first time she told him about the family tannery, in Lille, near the Belgian border. In her schoolgirl English, with almost nothing in the way of expression or emotion, she depicted a childhood haunted by blood and putrefaction and the piss stink of the tanning vats, by horses in the slaughter lot screaming like girls. She described the flaying of hides in terms of vivid color. Silver blade. Red blood. Blue membrane. Golden fat. White bone.

He held the coat up between them. In the moonlit dark of the glassed-in porch, it seemed to shimmer with a ghost of animal motion.

“That is hotter,” she said.

“Oh, yeah?” He had no idea what she was talking about but felt abruptly that he was back on familiar territory with her, with the girl from “Night in Monte Carlo” telling him how his head would look good on a fence.

“Many hotters. Mrs. Waxman says it takes fifteen or twenty hotters.”

My grandfather could not help it. He laughed. “Otters,” he said.

“You know what this is, a hotter?”

“I’m pretty sure that was otter in the soup tonight.”

She frowned, less with her mouth than with her thick Jennifer Jones eyebrows. He liked what her eyebrows did, particularly when she frowned.

“Oh, you are teasing me,” she concluded.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, teasing me is not bad.”

“Really?”

“Yes, when you do it. I like if you do it.”

My grandfather felt himself blush. The only light came from moonglow and a lamp at the far end of the drawing room. He wondered if it was enough for her to see that he was blushing.

“I like you,” he said.

“I like you, too.” She said it in half a second and then added less than half a second later, “I have a little girl, did you know this?”

“Right,” my grandfather said, caught off guard. So there were two of them, two who would need saving. Essayons. “How old?”

“Four years. Five years in September.”

“And your, uh, the father?”

“I murdered him.” When she saw my grandfather’s face, she burst out laughing, then covered her mouth with her hand. She started to choke on the smoke of her cigarette. “No! I’m sorry . . . !” At first she kept on laughing, but as the coughing fit persisted, it seemed maybe she had started to cry. My grandfather couldn’t tell. She held her breath, let it out. She pulled herself together. “That was a joke but not funny, so why I was laughing?”

That was a tough one to answer. My grandfather let it pass. She stubbed out the cigarette in a pot on the étagère that held dirt and a withered stalk.

“The father is dead,” she said. “In the war.”

She walked over to the casement window my grandfather had opened and put her face through into the cold air. She looked up at the Moon, a day or two past its first quarter. She was convulsed by another shudder, then another. She was definitely crying now, and probably cold as hell. He slung the fur coat over one of the wicker chairs. He took off his blazer. It was the same one he had borrowed from his brother to wear to “Night in Monte Carlo.” He lowered the blazer over her shoulders. She leaned in to it as if it were a stream of hot water from a shower head. She kept on leaning backward until she fell against him. He felt the shock of contact. The weight of her against his chest felt like something she had decided to entrust to him. He wanted badly, wanted only, to be worthy of that trust, although apparently his penis, stirring, had its own ideas on the subject.

“I want to fly to the Moon, too,” she said. “Take me with you.”

“Sure thing,” my grandfather said. “I’ll figure it out.”

The next time he saw her, she was coming out of Silber’s bakery holding a box tied with candy-striped string. She did not see him. He followed her down Park Heights to Belvedere and then to the ragged lower end of Narcissus Avenue, keeping a careful distance, and watched her disappear with the box into the upstairs unit of a two-family house that was better maintained than its neighbors (and turned out to be a rental property of Judge Waxman’s). The following night, around two in the morning, he got up off of Uncle Ray’s couch, where he could not sleep for thinking of her. He got dressed and took the keys to his brother’s Mercury and drove over to the two-family house on Narcissus. There was a light on in a window upstairs. His heart caught on some hook inside him. He nosed to the curb, and cut the lights. It was another chilly night, but the lighted window was open and she was leaning on the sill, smoking a cigarette and looking up at the Moon. He wondered if she was looking at the Moon and feeling the cold air and remembering the promise he had made her, his chest unyielding against the weight of her.

My grandfather heard a child’s calling voice, too faint and far away for him to hear distress or complaint or urgency in it. My grandmother turned her head sharply toward the room behind her, stubbing out the cigarette against the windowsill. Sparks rained down into the shrubbery below.

* * *

As he approached Ahavas Sholom that Purim Sunday with a clear sense of mission if not of operational plan, he saw a little girl sitting alone on a stone bench outside the glass doors, knees pulled to her chin, arms encircling her legs at the ankles. She was rocking back and forth, no more than three degrees in either direction, and making low sounds that at first, from a distance, my grandfather took for singing. She had on a green dress, green tights, and black patent-leather Mary Janes. The dress had cap sleeves that left her arms bare, and even with the tights she must be awfully cold—my grandfather was wearing a hat, a scarf, and a wool topcoat over a cardigan sweater. He supposed that when he was three or four years old he might have felt like crying his eyes out, too, bare-armed in forty-degree weather on a cold stone bench, but he liked to think that he would have had the sense to get up and go inside where it was warm.

One of the synagogue front doors banged open. The girl stopped rocking and sat up straight. A Jew came out of the building, holding a small loden coat. The Jew had on an enormous shtreiml, a black caftan whose hem swept the concrete, and a beard like Edmund Gwenn’s in Miracle on 34th Street. My grandfather was surprised to see a Jew of this variety attending services at Ahavas Sholom, where the women sat with the men and the rabbi was a fast-talking dandy who could not even raise a decent five o’clock shadow. The Jew in the big fur hat ignored or seemed not to hear my grandfather coming up the walk, and the girl ignored the Jew except to the degree that she was no longer crying her eyes out. She was no longer crying at all.

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