He realized as he offered this praise that he had no idea if it was accurate. She had never been anything but compliant and well mannered, however, and he assumed, though he had not paid much attention lately, that this remained the case. Her first-quarter report card had boasted the usual cordillera of As.
“So,” he said, “if you want to go with your friends, because you’ve been such a good girl lately, how about we say, whatever you bring home, you can eat. No matter what. As much chazzerai as you can stand. All right? You can have it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. All of it. Until the whole bag is gone.”
Before the razor blade scares of the 1960s, before industrial confectioners cottoned on to the market for small, individually wrapped pieces of brand-name candy, the loot a kid brought home from trick-or-treating was made by the lady of the house where it was given out: popcorn balls, candy and caramel apples, cookies, marshmallow treats, toffees. Such items quickly went stale or lost their appeal and, after a week or two, whatever a kid had not managed to consume was ready to be thrown away. Since, as a firm rule, my mother was never permitted more than one treat per day, the bulk of what she collected on Halloween ended up in the garbage can. My grandfather’s extravagant offer had no precedent. It was transparently a bribe.
“What’s wrong with Mama?” my mother said. Her voice deepened to a woeful contralto.
“Nothing.”
“I know it’s something bad.”
“Nothing is wrong, she forgot her book.”
My mother nodded as though reassured. She shuddered. My grandfather handed her a handkerchief. She wiped her eyes and blew her nose and handed it back to him. He put it, snot and all, into his pocket.
“I know you’re lying to me,” she said.
“Oh, is that right?”
“And I’m not going.”
“No?”
“I don’t want to. I hate candy apples, anyway.”
“So you’ll trade with your friends. You like popcorn balls.”
“It’s bad for your teeth. Your saliva turns the sugar to acid, the acid dissolves the enamel, and you get a cavity and have to get a filling, with a drill and a bunch of shots in your mouth, I don’t want that.”
“So you’ll brush.”
She held the blue horse up to her face at eye level and moved it through the air in arcs and dives. She half closed her eyes, a technique he remembered from his own childhood, making the horse and its flight more real through some enchantment of perspective and the lensing effect of lids and lashes.
“Look. Honey. I have to go out, and I can’t leave you here alone. With all the people coming to the door? You don’t know who’s going to show up. All kinds of hooligans out causing trouble tonight, you remember last year they smashed every pumpkin on the block.”
The blue horse dipped and banked through the air between them. She was finished with the conversation. Where other, less tractable children might have openly rebelled or thrown a tantrum, my mother had learned to withdraw, to abstain, to retreat from a scene of conflict without moving a muscle.* My grandfather knew better than to waste any more breath trying to persuade her. When she checked out, there was nothing to be done but compel her physically or else back down. My grandfather loved my mother and was reasonably certain that she loved him in return, but there was some negotiated basis to their relationship that she understood more clearly than he did. His fatherhood was a kind of grant that she bestowed on him, a tenancy of which she was the lessor.
“Actually, the sugar gets eaten by bacteria that live in the mouth,” my grandfather could not prevent himself from pointing out before he turned and left her alone in the bedroom. “The bacteria excrete the acid that eats the teeth.”
He went downstairs to the kitchen and made seven telephone calls. The first call was to the switchboard of WAAM; no one at the station had seen my grandmother since Tuesday morning’s broadcast of La Cuisine. Next he dialed the number on a card left behind, in case they ever needed any help, by Officer Sharkey, the policeman who had loaned my grandmother his Pendleton fishing jacket and kept her out of the psych ward. Officer Sharkey had the night off. The next five calls my grandfather made, in turn, were to a pool hall in East Baltimore, a bar in Fells Point, the home of a woman who sounded disgracefully drunk, the home of a woman who sounded abominably sober, and, thanks to the latter, another pool hall out in Dundalk.
A knock on the door, a carillon of little voices on the porch.
The candy still lay scattered on the floor of the sewing room. My grandfather knew that he ought to take a bowl up there and retrieve it, but he did not want to have to look, or avoid looking, at the horse skull. He dug around in his trouser pockets. He was out of quarters. He had three nickels and four pennies, but there turned out to be four trick-or-treaters, the Grumman children from two doors down, disguised as a shepherd and his three-sheep flock. Clifford Grumman, accurately, was fleeced in black. My grandfather pocketed the nickels and deposited the pennies in the children’s palms, taking no notice of whether the Grummans went away pleased or not. In 1952 a penny could buy you a piece of bubblegum, a candy cigarette, or a licorice whip.
He found three fifty-cent rolls of pennies in a kitchen drawer. He put on his suit jacket, made sure he had his wallet and car keys, and went out to the front porch to wait. He sat down on the metal glider, lit a cigarette. The hinges of the glider were rusted and creaked atmospherically in the dark.
In the half hour that followed, three cowboys, two Indians, a Mad Hatter and White Rabbit, Jesse and Frank James, a queen (“Just a queen”), and a number of hoboes, along with five mothers, two fathers, and a dog wearing a Pierrot hat came tripping up the porch steps. Once my grandfather had gauged the pace of visitors, he increased his payment to two pennies per trick-or-treater, flicking them from the roll with his thumbnail into each waiting palm. He did not consider but in hindsight would concede that he might not by his manner or his fare be spreading waves of Halloween joy.
My grandfather had just lit his fifth cigarette when the first in what became a long series of unreliable red roadsters, a brand-new Jaguar XK120, rumbled onto the street and stopped in front of the house. Its driver cut the engine and then sat as if marshaling patience or resolve.
Uncle Ray was two years free of the pulpit that had fit him as poorly as the clothes he was wearing now, some kind of English hunting get-up, baggy tweed pants and a tweed jacket with large front panels of plaid wool. In later years he would switch to Alfas and more of a Mastroianni resort-wear vibe, but in snaps from the early fifties, he looks like he’s planning to go off and shoot some partridges or appease Hitler.
Uncle Ray lit a cigarette of his own and then came up the walk to the porch. The smirk and the swagger that had unaccountably chosen this man as the vehicle for their conquest of the world or at least the Delmarva Peninsula had reached some kind of new pinnacle of insufferability.
“So where is she?” he said as he and my grandfather shook hands.
“I don’t know.”
“She didn’t leave a note?”
My grandfather shook his head. He stood up and fished his car keys out of the hip pocket of his jacket.
“Where’s the kid?”
“Upstairs.”
“She ready to go, get her uncle some taffy?”
“Says she doesn’t want to.”
“She’s upset.” Uncle Ray opened the front door. “Hey, Velvet!” he called out. “Post time!”
“Ray, I have to go.”
“So go.”
At that moment another party of trick-or-treaters approached the house, followed by another, and by the time my grandfather was through dispensing pennies, his brother had returned.
“She’s getting her costume on,” Uncle Ray said. He looked down at the split roll of coins. “Pennies.”
“No candy. It got spoiled.”
Uncle Ray took the half-roll and the two intact ones, and my grandfather started down the steps.
“So where are you going?”
“Hospital.”
“You think she’s hurt?” He spoke in a whispery rasp. “You think she hurt herself?”
“I don’t know,” my grandfather said, lowering his voice, too. “What happens when you have a miscarriage?”