My grandmother’s domain was a room off my grandparents’ bedroom that must have been a porch once. It was small and low-ceilinged, with a ribbon of mullioned windows running around three sides. My grandmother had found room in it for a sewing machine, a small worktable, a floor lamp, and a dressmaker’s dummy.* To the left of the door as you came in, my grandfather had built some shelves for my grandmother’s notions, her supplies, and her disorderly row of paperbacks, most with French titles. On the wall to the right of the door, over a steel typist’s table, hung a bulletin board shingled with art postcards and photos clipped from magazines. Neither my mother nor my grandfather could provide me with much in the way of specific works or artists (apart from van Gogh and a Delacroix tiger), but they remembered the imagery of the postcards and clippings as “creepy” (my mother) or “typical” (my grandfather): still lifes of meat, coin-operated automatons that told fortunes, a family of musical dwarfs who had survived Auschwitz. One morning the previous June my grandmother had found a luna moth expiring with languid wingbeats on a tree in the backyard. That got stuck to the bulletin board, too, its viridescence fading with time to dull dollar green.
The relative order or disorder of my grandmother’s “studio” was as reliable a gauge as any of the tenor of her mind. There were others: whether or not she greeted him by name when he walked in the door or called out a goodbye on her own departure. Whether she was in the middle of her cycle or a week before the end. If she brought him coffee in bed, that was a good sign. If she felt appreciated by the world. If there were cut flowers in the vases and jars; if the flowers were fresh: good signs. Empty vases were bad and dead flowers worse. If she touched her fingers to the back of his neck as though noticing it for the first time—as though noticing him for the first time—that could be a good sign. If it was not February. If she did not get out her deck of fortune-telling cards and waste hours laying them out in crosses and grids. If she did not linger in the cave mouths of Catholic churches but only passed them by. If she was not lost for the hundredth time in Vincent’s letters to Theo or the Fioretti of Saint Francis. If it was not a Sunday; Sundays were the worst.
Every day had been a Sunday during that summer of 1952. Days of lassitude, nights of insomnia. Horrific dreams whose contents she refused to divulge, swallowing them whole on waking like a spy who feared capture. The sewing room filled with stacks of magazines she never got around to clipping, with sacks of grapes and cherries that rotted when she forgot to eat them and left the whole upstairs of the house smelling of vinegar. She would hang an old shawl across the doorway and stay in there for hours at a time. With a show of black humor, she would confess that she was in hiding but would never say from what or whom and did not really seem to be joking.
She checked out the usual bunch of weird records from the Pratt library—Indonesians banging on the local plumbing with hammers, G. I. Gurdjieff droning away at his harmonium, those fucking bagpipes—and played them over and over on a portable record player. She rarely ate and never cooked. When she emerged from behind the shawl and went out, she became a magnet for proselytizers and truth possessors. Copies of The Watchtower and The Theosophist, tracts and pamphlets dense with references to soul travel and vril, replaced the sacks of rotting fruit. In late August my grandmother covered the sewing room’s windowpanes with squares of black paper so that she could not be observed by the shadowy whickering thing of which my grandfather then knew relatively little and understood less.
The night before my mother started fourth grade, two policemen had brought my grandmother home, barefoot and wearing a man’s fishing jacket. Somebody had seen her, partly unclothed and moving erratically, down by the harbor and thought she might be contemplating or risking suicide. Just as the police had arrived on the scene, she was seen to set fire to the pages of a book and throw it into the water. From the description supplied by the witness to police, my grandfather recognized the book as having been one of the marbled notebooks in which his wife’s sketches of the latest Paris prêt-à-porter looks alternated with her notes, reflections, and dreams, jotted hastily in French and reading, as far as my grandfather could tell, like hallucinatory telegrams. The cops thought about bringing her to Hopkins for observation. Once she’d set her notebook on fire and thrown it into the harbor, however, she no longer seemed distressed or unbalanced. She was cool, contrite, embarrassed by her behavior and state of undress, and lovely. One of the policemen recognized her from television. He loaned her the fisherman’s jacket, and they brought her home. After that night she had seemed distinctly sane and unburdened. She lost herself in mothering. She returned to my grandfather’s bed and opened her legs to him with her accustomed readiness. She had tidied up her sewing room.
Now, abruptly, it was a mess again.
Three empty bags of Brach’s Autumn Mix lay on the floor, slit open, amid mounds and scatterings of vivid candy. The worktable was strewn with her fortune-telling cards, the ones she had been given in the DP camp at Wittenau by the requisite old gypsy witch woman never seen again. Faceup, facedown in a flat pile, as if built into a tower and then knocked down. A snarl of brown fabric jammed the platen of the sewing machine. A full cup of tea with milk, the surface opalescent with congealed fat. An open bottle of aspirin. Three inches of ash that had been a cigarette, preserved in the notch of an ashtray like fossilized proof that my grandmother had abandoned the job in haste.
Incomplete on the floor in the center of the room, amid the scattered candies, lay the Pie. At the moment it looked more like a kite than a horse, a strange coracle of brown oilcloth stretched over bent tomato stakes. An oval frame that curved upward at one end, partly covered in oilcloth skin. The green stakes slid into and were held in place by thin sleeves my grandmother had sewn into the fabric. They were lashed together at key junctures with wire ties.
In its partial state it took my grandfather a moment to understand: the oval of the body, the upcurving of the neck. It was something you might see in some old-fashioned mummer show, a pantomime horse to be worn around the hips. My grandfather had just formulated the thought I wonder what she planned to do for the head when he noticed the bucktoothed skull sitting on the typist’s table under the bulletin board. A bone zeppelin, bleached, splintery as driftwood. Formerly the property of a small horse or pony.
18
“It’s really just the eyes,” I said. “Mostly.”
My mother didn’t say anything. She was looking down at the horse skull on my kitchen table. She pinched her chin between three fingers as if to keep from averting her face.
“I mean, it’s all of it, obviously. But especially the eyes.”
The skull lay on the outspread towel in which it had spent the past fifty years, folded and stuffed into the Old Crow box, under my mother’s books and the painted wooden horses wrapped in newspaper. The towel must have been white once, but time and humidity had dyed it with streaks of brown and rust red. A broken nib of mildew had spattered it with black.
In the sunlight coming through the kitchen window against the dingy towel, the unwrapped thing was radiant with strangeness. The incisors protruded to form a cruel beak, as if the skull had belonged to some monster bird of the Pleistocene. The jaws on either side, with their ridged molars, grinned like a pair of gaping zippers. The nose bone narrowed over the nasal cavity to a wicked prong. And into each orbit my grandmother had socketed a millefiori paperweight, multicolored cells honeycombed within a dome of clear glass. When I was a kid, the millefiori glass my grandmother kept around her apartment had always reminded me of bright handfuls of fancy hard candies. Cast in the unlikely role of eyeballs, however, the paperweights were like the kaleidoscopes of madness itself.
“I can’t believe she thought you would wear it,” I said. “How was it even supposed to attach to the neck?”
“I don’t know if it was.”
“But didn’t she make it for your costume?”
“That’s what my father thought.”
“But you didn’t?”
“If you were making someone a horse costume out of sticks and fabric, is that how you would do the head?”
“No. But maybe this was, like, how she saw it. Her version. The Night Witch version.”
My mother was having none of it. “The silks she sewed me were so pretty! Perfect copies of the ones Elizabeth Taylor wears in the movie. They didn’t have, I don’t know, batwings on them or anything.”
“Yeah, no, I get it.”
“They were beautiful. I loved them. She knew how to make me a Pie.”