Around five-thirty that Halloween Friday my grandfather was in the kitchen of a rented house on Maine Avenue, in Forest Park. On first walking in the door that evening—home early for a change—he had wrapped three potatoes in foil and stuck them in the oven. Now he had a steak frying in a cast-iron skillet and a pot on the boil for some wax beans. He stood at the range, sleeves rolled, still in suit pants and necktie, wearing an apron patterned with tomatoes on a background of yellow plaid. Pancake turner in one hand, tumbler of Scotch in the other. Every Friday night he poured two fingers of Johnnie Walker over an ice cube. That would be the extent of his consumption for the week.
As he cooked, he lost himself pleasantly in the task of trying to find flaws in a completed design for an improved accelerometer feedback circuit that he and Milton Weinblatt, his partner at Patapsco Engineering, had been working on for the past several weeks. Six months earlier Weinblatt and my grandfather had quit their jobs in the instrumentation division of the Glenn L. Martin Company to open their own shop. Jews, malcontents, and restless men, they were frustrated by the timid pace of iteration at Martin and by having been passed over for promotion year after year while gentiles of lesser ability were made project managers and department heads. He and Weinblatt had sunk all their savings into their venture. The technology of inertial navigation systems, which enabled a rocket or missile to navigate and make course corrections on its own without external input or guidance, was in a fairly primitive state. Weinblatt and my grandfather were betting that the pace of innovation in computer circuit design, already rapid, was going to increase, soon making it possible to build nonmechanical, solid-state, or (as we would say now) digital navigation systems. If their bet turned out to be correct, Patapsco would be ready to take advantage of the innovations, and its proprietors would cash in.*
My grandfather felt in the soles of his feet that there were people climbing the front stoop of the house. The doorbell rang. It was a little early yet for trick-or-treaters, but he presumed that as she had done every Halloween since her first as the Night Witch, my grandmother intended to answer the door in costume. He slid the wax beans into the boiling water and forbade himself to touch the steak until his internal timer had registered the passing of another two minutes. He was aware of a thread of anxiety pulling at his belly when he thought about this year’s front-stoop theatrics, but the truth was, this made him anxious every year. He was uncomfortable with the whole Crypt of Nevermore situation in general. The weird sexuality of the Night Witch (and of the stories she presented on the program, Blackwood, Le Fanu, Lovecraft: Freud would have a field day with the stuff) reflected a little too closely the nature of my grandmother’s sexuality as he experienced it and, worse, the importance of that weirdness, that witchiness, to the hold that she had over him.
The doorbell rang again. He heard a buzz of little voices from the stoop. He flipped the steak and turned down the flame. He went to the front door. The vacant living room troubled him, unaccountably. There was no reason for the living room not to be vacant, but it did not feel empty. The luminous dial grinned on the front of the big RCA console. Its automatic tonearm return did not always work properly, and he heard the stylus worrying the record label skrchskrchskrch. Record sleeves lay scattered across the top of the console.
The record spinning on the RCA’s platter was a ten-inch LP by Pipe Band of His Majesty’s Scots Guard, 2nd Battalion, from an album called Marches, Strathspeys and Reels. Lately, my grandmother had been in the grip of a mania for bagpipes; he did not even attempt to begin to understand it. He lifted the tonearm and switched off the console.
“Honey?” he called up the stairs.
He had not seen my grandmother or my mother since walking in the door, but that was not unusual. Each of them seemed to spend increasingly longer periods alone, my mother in her bedroom, my grandmother in the room that my mother remembered as a “studio” and my grandfather as a “sewing room.” When he was home they would hang around whatever room he happened to be in, but when he was not around they seemed to avoid each other.
He opened the front door, where the cast for an impromptu Peter Pan had assembled by chance: a pirate, an Indian princess, a fairy, and a little fellow in green whom my grandfather supposed was meant to be Robin Hood but made a serviceable Pan.
The accidental Neverlanders offered to withhold from committing a ritually unspecified act of mischief in return for a bribe of candy. My grandfather was ill at ease with this custom, relatively novel in the early 1950s. In the South Philly of his childhood, Halloween was a night when masked Irish hooligans threw eggs and flour bombs and wrote obscenities and slurs in soap on people’s windows. He looked for the bowl, filled with loose pieces of Brach’s Autumn Mix of candy pumpkins, corns, and cat’s-heads, that ought to have been placed by the front door. It was not there.
“Just a minute,” my grandfather said to the trick-or-treaters.
He called again for my grandmother and my mother but got no answer. Maybe they had gone to the store for candy at the last minute.
“Huh,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you kids.”
The children regarded him with careful and, in the case of the fairy, sharp expressions. My grandfather got the idea that his enactment of confusion struck them as insincere. He took his coin purse out of his pocket. He found four quarters inside it. In 1952 a quarter could buy five candy bars. The children went away content.
Back in the kitchen the steak was nearly done. He turned up the gas for another minute, gave it a poke with his finger, then slid it onto a plate. He returned the pan lacquered with amber drippings to the fire and glugged some Johnnie Walker into the pan. There was a hiss and a billowing of vapor that stung his nostrils. He took out Augenbaugh’s lighter and ignited the vapor. As the whoosh of ignition faded to a simmer, he heard somebody scream. The sound arced like a skyrocket and burst with a yawp, almost a sob. My grandfather decided not to be alarmed. It had been an implausible scream, a Hollywood coloratura. Somebody having fun of the season. One of the neighbors scaring the evening’s foot traffic with a haunted house sound effects record album.
He gave the bubbling reduction a couple of stirs to deglaze the pan. He listened. The scream was not repeated or followed by a creaking crypt door, a howling wolf, chains dragging across a dungeon floor. He poured the whiskey reduction over the steak on the plate, buttered the wax beans, and snatched the potatoes out of the oven with a mitt.
Once again there was no reply when he called out, this time adding the information that supper was ready. He had cut the steak into three pieces and buttered his baked potato when my mother—two months past her tenth birthday—walked in, wearing old dungarees and a loden shirt with the tails untucked. He was a little surprised to see that she was not in her Halloween costume: Velvet Brown, winner of the Grand National, in her jodhpurs and her gold and magenta silks. No doubt she had reckoned correctly that if she showed up at the table to run its steeplechase of sauces, condiments, and other hazards in the beautiful costume my grandmother had sewn for her, she would have been sent back to her room to change.
“Where’s your mom?”
My mother glanced at the plate of bleeding steak between the two of them and looked away. Her features were arranged to give an effect of unconcern, but it was easy to see she was upset about something. He recalled that she had planned to go to school as Velvet Brown, for a parade around the neighborhood. He wondered if the costume had suffered some mischance. Maybe she had been teased. Behind the effort of her indifference he sensed consternation. If the problem was the costume, her eyes said that it had been spoiled. Her eyes said that it had been taken from her and torn to shreds.
“What happened?” he said.
She watched his hand and the fork it held convey her chunk of steak to her plate. She shook her head. “Nothing.”
“I thought you would have your costume on.”
Tears rolled like beads along her eyelashes. They scattered when she blinked.
“Did something happen to it? Did you get it dirty?”
“Nothing happened. I changed my mind.”