“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.
After a moment the Jew draped the loden coat over the girl’s shoulders, settled the lapels around her neck with a few deft movements, and went back into the building. When the Jew opened the door again, a gust of air lifted the hem of the caftan, revealing a pair of bright red slippers with upcurving toes. My grandfather was even more surprised by the slippers than by the Jew’s presence at Ahavas Sholom, but you could have filled a book with the things he did not know or frankly care to know about Orthodox Jews and what went on underneath their clothing.
“I didn’t realize they made Jewish Eskimos,” my grandfather said to the little girl when he got to the front door of the shul.
She looked up at him. Heart-shaped face, lips chapped and puffy, upturned little shikse nose. Bottle-green eyes dry of tears. It must have been the cold after all.
“What?” she said.
“Aren’t you cold?”
She slid her arms into the sleeves of the loden coat. She nodded.
“So why are you sitting out here?”
“I’m not allowed inside for two hours.”
“Oh? Why is that?”
“Because I was bad.”
“So you have to sit outside in the cold for two hours?”
“Yes.”
“You must have been especially bad.”