“It only came out once you knew him, though. Also, maybe the most lovable thing of all?”
I waited. It seemed to me that there were an awful lot of things she had loved about this man with whom she was not in love.
“He didn’t mind that I made fun of him if he was being ridiculous. And he was so ridiculous with his little affectations. Using a, what do you call it, a graduated cylinder for a measuring cup.”
“I always thought that was cool.”
“Brewing his coffee in an Erlenmeyer flask.”
“He made really good coffee that way.”
“That lighter.”
“There was a story behind it.”
“I’m sure. All of his stories were stuck behind something. Do you know about the snake hunt?”
“A little.”
“Like he was Captain Ahab. Like John Wayne in that movie.”
“The Searchers.”
“Because of an old flatulent cat. And passing it off as gallantry to boot.”
“He liked having a concrete goal.”
“And the rockets. The models everywhere. The whole space thing. Driving two hundred miles with his binoculars to watch them shoot a metal can into orbit. That was funny to me.”
“Not to him, it was very serious.”
“That’s what was funny about it.” She helped herself to a forkful of my lechón. “Mm. Did your grandmother tease him?”
“Sometimes,” I said. I couldn’t really remember. “Definitely.”
“He needed to fight. To wrestle. He needed to feel like he was working harder, carrying more weight on his shoulders, than anybody else. Everything had to be a wrestling match. Jacob with the angel. Even cancer, he was going to fight it on his own. He didn’t say a word about it to me. Did you know?”
“We had no idea.”
“To be honest, the man had a tendency to play the martyr.”
“He was comfortable in the role,” I said.
Sally called for the check. “It was hard to be your grandfather,” she said. “But maybe I made it a little bit easier for him, I don’t know.” She got a little teary. “God forbid he could have made it a little easier on me.”
When the waiter brought the check, she tried to pay it, but I told her I would just bill my publisher for the dinner.
“Oh ho,” she said. “You got it easy, kid.”
36
At Oakland my mother put her father’s body on a plane to be flown back to Philadelphia for the funeral and burial. The service was held at Montefiore Cemetery, where he was laid beside my grandmother and his parents and brother.* My brother took a leave from the set of Space: 2099* and flew in from LA. The rabbi who officiated over my grandmother’s funeral had retired. The new rabbi was not much older than I was and appeared to be in something of a hurry. Some old friends and acquaintances showed up, a few Moonblatts and Newmans who were still around. Appreciative things were said. Then we all pitched our shovelful of dirt onto the casket with a sound like a gust of rain against a window. A first cousin of my grandfather’s who lived out in Wynnewood provided her house for the post-funeral gathering. We knocked back shots of slivovitz and I heard sketchy and conflicting accounts of some of the foregoing incidents. I heard a few cute or clever things my brother or I had said as boys. Then my brother had to grab a plane back to L.A. After it was over my mother and I drove to the hotel near the airport where we were spending the night.
We were sharing a room with two queen beds. We went over some of the things we had seen or heard in the course of the day and then my mother put out the light. I had sensed some kind of agitation in her all day that I attributed to grief or tension. As we lay in the dark I could feel it gathering. She rolled one way and then the other. Her arms made sounds like harsh whispers across the sheets of her bed. She couldn’t sleep, so I couldn’t sleep.
“Mike, are you awake?”
“Yeah.”
“I wanted to ask you about something.”
“Okay.” I knew what she wanted to ask me, or at any rate when she came out with it, I was not surprised. I had been turning it over and brooding over it since that day.
“Last week,” she said, “I walked in on you and Dad, and he was telling you not to tell me something.”
“Yeah.”
“So, what was it you weren’t supposed to tell?”
Her tone tried for insouciant but ended up closer to jittery. It sounded like she was steeling herself; it sounded like she had her suspicions.
Of course, at the time I didn’t know anything about the story my grandmother had told Dr. Medved; my visit to Mantoloking in the wake of Hurricane Sandy was still fourteen years off. All I knew, that night at the Philadelphia Airport Marriott, was that my grandmother had given her doctor an account of herself, of her life in Europe during the war, that differed—in dramatic fashion, it seemed—from the account she had given my grandfather, or at least cast it in a new and disturbing light. Dr. Medved had seemed to think, at least, that when my grandfather heard the new story, he was going to be disturbed. Implicitly, my grandmother had lied to my grandfather, and to my mother, and that was what my grandfather hadn’t wanted me to tell my mother. He worried that simply knowing my grandmother had lied, regardless of the nature of the lie, might undo all my mother’s fragile work of forgiveness. That was all I knew.
Was it even possible to forgive the dead? Was forgiveness an emotion, or a transaction that required a partner? I had made a promise to someone who would never see it kept. I wanted to respect my grandfather’s wish, and it would have been no trouble to evade my mother’s question. Keeping secrets was the family business. But it was a business, it seemed to me, that none of us had ever profited from.
“It was something she told the psychiatrist at Greystone about herself,” I said. “But he didn’t know what.”
I told her the story of Dr. Medved as my grandfather had told it to me. She laughed when I got to the part where my grandfather decided that he didn’t want to know. In the darkness of the motel room, her laughter had a forlorn sound.
“She was always making things up when I was little,” my mother said after I was done. “I used to catch her out all the time. She called them ‘stories.’ ‘Oh!’” She put on her mother’s accent, the rasp and pitch of her voice. “‘You’re right, I told a story.’”
In the dark she sounded so much like my grandmother that the hair rose along my forearms.
“She just used to tell me plain old stories,” I said. “When I used to stay with them in Riverdale.”
Outside the door of our motel room, the ice machine appeared to be in some kind of distress. It took me a while to hear the sound of my mother snuffling softly in the dark.
“Do you think they were ever happy?”
“Definitely,” I said.
“Definitely?”
“For sure.”
“She went crazy. His business failed. They couldn’t have children of their own. He went to prison. HRT gave her cancer. I shot his brother in the eye and then married a man who cost him his business. When were they happy?”
“In the cracks?” I said.
“In the cracks.”
“Yeah.”
The next morning we had to get up early to catch our respective planes. My mother set her alarm to give herself fifteen minutes longer than I felt I would need to be ready, but when my own alarm went off she was still in her nightgown, sitting on the edge of her bed. She had the piece of LAV One my grandfather had brought to California, the first piece, the moon garden. She was holding it up to her eye and looking in at the OO-scale versions of us, among the tiny hydroponic roses and carrots.
“Why’d you bring that?”