“I’m sorry,” said my grandfather. “Maybe it was a little too soon.”
“Too soon is better than too late, dear.”
“Yeah? What if it’s too soon and too late?”
“Oh, it is,” Sally said. “Definitely. Too soon for that type of talk.” She sat down on the bed beside him and gave him a brief but not perfunctory kiss on the lips. “And too late for backing out now, because I like you.”
“Sally . . .” Now was the time at last to talk to her, to tell her about the blood panel and Dr. Mubarak, as my grandfather had come to think of the specialist. Now, before like turned to something stronger and it really was too late.
“How do you feel about rum raisin ice cream?” Sally said.
“I’m the only person I know who likes it.”
“Not anymore. How about Spencer Tracy?”
“In my opinion? The best.”
“I agree. So, channel twelve is showing Boys Town at nine.”
“Yeah? You know, I remember when it came out, it was showing at the Stanley. But somehow I missed it.”
“That’s what I’m telling you,” Sally said. “It’s never too late.”
17
Many years later, when my mother was packing up to move out of the house where my grandfather had died, she came upon some liquor boxes in a crawl space.
“It’s just lot of your old junk,” she reported when she called me.
Knowing that I had a weakness for old junk in general but especially my own, she brought the boxes over one afternoon* to consign them to the mercy of my nostalgia. The first one I opened was a Captain Morgan rum carton that held fifty or sixty letters and postcards from friends, lovers, and writing teachers of the 1980s. Buried under the old mail were some cassette recordings I had made from a friend’s father’s collection of Bob and Ray albums, a baggie that held a loose joint, a Hot Wheels Beatnik Bandit, and my brother’s vinyl copy of Moving Pictures.
“Good box,” I said.
In the next one—Gilbey’s gin—I found a plastic shopping bag from New Rose Records in Paris. It once held either Fire of Love or a Johnny Thunders live album, depending on which visit to New Rose it was from. Now it contained a floppy black felt hat with a wide brim. That, an unopened box of blank TDK cassettes, and an “Aquarian” deck of tarot cards bought at Spencer Gifts in the Columbia Mall when I was thirteen turned out to be all there was in the Gilbey’s box. I scowled at the hat, trying to place it.
“Blond,” my mother said, tweezing a long strand from the nap of the wide felt brim.
Simultaneously, we recalled having seen this hat on the head of my fair-haired ex-wife.
I pointed to the third carton, which once held a dozen bottles of Old Crow. Its cardboard was more brittle than the others’, its typography antiquated, its cartoon crow a raffish Jazz Age dandy. It had been sealed with old-fashioned packing tape, the kind you used to have to moisten with a sponge.
“I’m pretty sure that one’s not mine,” I said. “It looks really old.”
“Oh,” my mother said, slicing through the packing tape with her house key. “Huh.”
I thought I caught a note of unease or at least wariness in her voice, but that may be a detail contributed by hindsight. The first thing to come out of the box were some children’s books, small hardcovers without jackets: The Black Stallion, Misty of Chincoteague and King of the Wind, National Velvet, and one called Come on Seabiscuit! Beneath these lay a manila folder and a zippered fabric pouch. The folder was full of color photographs of thoroughbreds clipped from magazines, pasted onto cardboard backing, and cut out to make horse paper dolls. The zip pouch held the moldering remains of miniature tack my mother had fashioned for her paper horses out of bits of lanyard and leather thong and scraps of what looked like brown Naugahyde.
“That’s what Velvet did,” my mother explained. “In the book. So I made my own. But then your grandpa made these for me.” From the Old Crow box she took nine little wooden horses, each balled up in a page from The Baltimore Sun for November 12, 1952. As she unwrapped each one, she set it on my kitchen table. The horses stood about three inches at the shoulder, carved—the first two with a pocketknife, my mother recalled, the rest with a set of carving tools—from soft lightweight wood. Each had been fitted with a mane and tail made of brush bristles, then painted: bay, chestnut, brown, dappled gray, dun, black, white, piebald, midnight blue. The modeling of the brown and the bay was crude, simplified almost to the point of abstraction, but after the first two my grandfather’s skill had improved along with his tools. There was real likeness if not realism in the arcs of the other horses’ necks, in their streamlined heads and balletic poses.
I held up the blue horse. “Kinda whimsical for Grandpa.”
“That’s Midnight. He knew how to fly.”
“Midnight,” I said. “Ooh.”
I flew Midnight in a figure eight over the heads of the other horses and brought him in for a landing. I was surprised to discover at this late date that some part of the business of her girlhood had been conducted in my mother’s imagination. When she told a story from those days, it was usually an account of something observed, overheard, endured, or undertaken, as though her formative years had been spent entirely in the world outside her own head. In self-portrait she was a child without daydreams, without fears, fantasies, doubts, longings, or unaskable questions. When I was a boy, my most routine flights of fancy and invention always seemed to leave her shaking her head, looking up at God or the kitchen ceiling, making a face that said something along the lines of Where does he get this shit? When I heard about Midnight, it made me wonder if she had been sandbagging all this time, pretending to be ignorant of a language in which she was conversant if not fluent. Concealing her origins, safely assimilated into a daylight country of earthbound horses.
“What else you got in there?” I said.
She glanced into the Old Crow box and looked away. She swept up all the blown blossoms of newsprint and shoved them crinkling down into the box.
“Well,” she said, and I understood that there was something else in the box.
She turned to the little painted remuda on the kitchen table. Her eyebrows tangled above the bridge of her nose, and her mouth was pursed as though the horses presented her with a problem. At first I thought she might be debating whether or not to make a present of them to my younger daughter, who was then on the cusp of the Velvet Brown years. But my mother’s eyes seemed too faraway and fretful for that.
“Well,” she said again. She folded the flaps of the box and picked it up. “I can leave all that here for the kids, if you think they’ll want it.”
“Great.”
“What?”
“No, nothing.”
“I know,” my mother said. I saw her push herself to say the next word. “Horses.”
“A whole box of them.”
“You think that’s weird. Because of my mother.”
“No, I . . . I mean, 1952? So you were ten when all this got packed up?”
“Yes. I went to live with Bubbe and Zayde.” These were her names for my grandfather’s parents, dead long before I was born. “They were over in Camden by then. It was only supposed to be until he found work, but I ended up finishing the school year in Camden. It took him a while to get a job. He ended up in New York.”
“On Radio Row, right? Where the World Trade Center is.”
“He worked for Arrow as a store manager, and then when Arrow started selling parts to companies, he went into sales because the money was better. I went to live with him in Queens.”
“Where was Grandma?” I said, though I guessed the answer to my question the moment I asked it.
“November ’52,” my mother said. “That was the first time.”
“Ah.”