“What? You don’t want to be National Velvet? Why?”
Her reply was rapid and muttered so as to render it unintelligible, but there was nothing unusual in that. Lately, she did not really speak words to him so much as spirit them hastily and furtively out of her mouth like a bank robber tossing his gun and stocking mask out the window of a getaway car.
“Mumblemumblemumble,” he said, as if quoting her.
“I said I’m not going trick-or-treating! Okay?”
She was regarding the bleeding steak on her plate with unconcealed revulsion. She looked like she might be about to throw up.
“So I heard somebody scream about maybe ten minutes ago,” my grandfather said. “Now I’m wondering if that might have been you.”
*
That morning my grandmother had sent my mother off to school with an assurance that Velvet Brown would have her Pie. Even as the promise was tendered, my mother could not help feeling that something dreadful lay coiled at its bottom. Her mother, she knew, had endured terrible things during the war and after. She had been taken from her family, and then her family had been taken from her. The Nazis had also killed the handsome and heroic young doctor who was my mother’s real father and who was usually played, in her imagination, by James Mason. Her mother had fought her way through the confusions and indignities of life as a refugee, through homesickness, shock, mourning, professional struggle, and the storms of exaltation and fury that blew through her head with the inconstant rhythm of hurricanes. All this while never losing the air of cheerful bitterness that, for my mother, defined bravery. When my grandmother promised my mother a “Hallowsween horse,” her tone had been terribly cheerful. She would allow that she was not wild about horses—“I don’t have to love them,” she would tell my mother, “because you love them enough for both of us”—but my mother suspected that in fact my grandmother had a horror of them.
If my grandmother was walking downtown and saw that a mounted policeman or an arabber with his horse-drawn fruit wagon lay in her path, she would cross to the other side of the street. When she could not avoid contact with horses, my grandmother would hold herself still the way people did when it hurt too much to move, and take breaths in small sips through her nostrils until the animal had passed her. If they happened to pass on a drive one of the many horse farms in the countryside around Baltimore, my grandmother would lower her voice or stop talking entirely, as if she thought the horses in the pasture might be listening.
All day at school—my mother was in Mrs. Hampt’s fourth grade class at Liberty Elementary—though she tried not to think about it, her thoughts kept returning to the horse she had been promised or, rather, to the dread that mysteriously was its passenger. It was like when you lost a tooth and your tongue kept finding and probing at the tang of blood in the gap. She knew from experience that whatever its nature, the horse her mother constructed for her would manage to be both beautiful and disappointing. She hoped (though this seemed unlikely) that it would not also be strange.
Parading with her classmates in her gaudy silks through the streets of Forest Park after lunch, Velvet Brown had felt an odd bereavement, an emptiness between her knees. She felt unhorsed. For this sense of loss my mother blamed my grandfather, who had made the original promise to provide her with a Pie for Halloween.
“I didn’t even want a horse,” my mother told my grandfather. She was lying facedown on her bed, having abandoned her supper, still in her dungarees and wool shirt. “I was fine.”
“I apologize,” my grandfather said. “I thought that I would have the time.”
Emboldened by his success with the set of carved and painted horses, my grandfather had proposed to complete my mother’s costume that year with a stick horse whose wooden head would be modeled on that of the horse from the movie version of National Velvet. From the start the impulse was unduly freighted with guilt. Back at Martin my grandfather’s work had often cut in to his time with my mother, but since going out on his own, he was almost never home. The theory behind the stick horse was that if my mother consulted on her horse’s design and helped with its construction, my grandfather would no longer be neglecting her. Like many promises born of a guilty conscience, this one had fallen prey to the failing it was intended to rectify. The push to develop a closed-loop accelerometer meant that my grandfather rarely got home before eight, usually closer to eight-thirty, my mother’s bedtime. In the last two weeks, as he and Weinblatt found their designs taking a promising tack, his work on the Pie had all but come to a halt.
“A stupid head on a stupid broomstick,” my mother said. Her eyelashes were soaked with tears, and fury blotched her cheeks. Filaments of snot cobwebbed her face to her pillow. “Like I’m a baby. Like I would ever want my friends to see me with that.”
“I know.” My grandfather was standing by the side of bed, looking down at her. “I’m sorry.”
“You and your stupid idea—”
“Enough.”
“I was fine without a horse!”
“Enough.”
My grandfather rarely raised or felt the need to raise his voice with my mother. As if to compensate for the erratic and unpredictable behavior of my grandmother, my mother had fashioned herself, by will and instinct, into the most tractable child in the city of Baltimore. She left off yelling at him and lay crooning into the crook of her arm.
“What happened?” my grandfather said. “Where is your mother?”
“I don’t know.” Now the poor girl just sounded tired. “She wasn’t here when I got home. A record was playing. Her handbag was gone. I did my homework. I cleaned my room. I heard you come home. I wanted to see what she made. I went to look.”
“And?”
My mother pressed her lips together. Her chin trembled. She shook her head and then buried her face in the pillow. She was not giving anything else away.
My grandfather stood a moment, looking down at her. He wondered if the bigger misfortune was to have the crazy woman for a mother, or the father who was crazy enough to love her. He wanted to stroke my mother’s hair or give her shoulder a pat, but he felt angry with her for throwing his failure in his face. His hands dangled at his sides like inoperable tools. He knew he was being selfish and unfair to a child whose only mistake had been to put her trust in him.
“I’ll look into it,” he said to the back of my mother’s head. He wondered if he had ever said anything so useless.