“She was pregnant?”
“I . . . I wouldn’t know.”
“You wouldn’t know?”
“I didn’t know. I don’t know.”
“Were you trying?”
My grandparents had been trying to produce a child almost from their first night together, Purim 1947. At the beginning it was an unarticulated hope expressed only in a mutual disregard of birth control, a hope shared by many survivors of war and calamity to counter general death with a particular life, to light a candle in the universal night. Once they were married, they embarked on the project openly and deliberately, with a fixity of purpose that over time had faded in vigor as it became more awkward and painful to them both. The thought that my grandmother might finally have conceived their child was so welcome, so eagerly anticipated for so long, that for an instant the joy of it outweighed the concomitant dismay of understanding that, in this instance, a pregnancy would be only the necessary condition for its loss.
“It’s been discussed,” my grandfather said.
“So she’s upset about that, it’s natural. She’ll just need a little time.”
“I know, I know. I’m sure you’re right.”
The idea returned to him, more clearly, that the state of her mind was connected in some way to her menstrual cycle. Had the improvement in her mood since September been caused by an unsuspected pregnancy? Abruptly, he remembered her having woken him last night. She was sitting up, speaking French, with the odd clarity of someone asleep and dreaming. When he asked her what was the matter, she had switched to English and told him they had to call someone to come take away the furnace in the basement right away. She could not or would not tell him why, but he must trust her that it had to be done or something very bad would result. In a patronizing tone it now made him wince to recall, he had assured her that he would put someone on the task of removing the furnace the very next morning. My grandmother had nodded and a moment later was lying down again, easing back into normal sleep. Or so my grandfather had assumed; certainly he had gone back to sleep. But what if she had been up for the rest of the night after that, poor thing? What if her midnight outburst had marked the ebbing, along with the incipient life inside her, of whatever chemical benefit that pregnancy bestowed? He thought of her lying there, feeling herself sliding inexorably back to the place she had been last summer, frightened, alone, making disordered plans of escape, and it made his heart hurt. What did she think was happening in the basement?
“You look worried,” Uncle Ray said. “Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried,” my grandfather said.
“About what?” said my mother, coming out to the porch. She was wearing some old corduroy overalls over a pair of long johns, carrying a burlap sugar sack. Bare feet, an inverted metal saucepan for a hat.
“No shoes?” my grandfather said.
“I saw the cartoon,” my mother said. “He was barefoot.”
“In this weather.”
“Take it up with Walt Disney.”
“What a little brat you are,” Uncle Ray said tenderly. “Candy Appleseed.”
My mother reached into the sugar sack and took out a book, worn black boards, no jacket. “Here,” she said to my grandfather.
“What’s this?”
“Mama’s book? For you to take to the station? The one she forgot?”
It was a tattered hardback copy of Tales, with the marvelous Redon illustrations, that my grandmother used when she read Poe on The Crypt of Nevermore.
“Right,” my grandfather said.
Uncle Ray’s ear was attuned to the coded conversation of hustlers, cheats, and their confederates. “Nothing against Johnny here,” he said. “But what happened to National Velvet?” He looked from my mother to my grandfather and back. “What?”
“Sore subject,” my grandfather said.*
19
In 1952 in Baltimore an autumn haze was closer to smoke, and though the Moon was high and nearly full, its light hung diffuse and opaque as if moonlight were only an inferior brand of darkness. As he patrolled Forest Park in his car that Halloween, looking for my grandmother—a check of nearby hospitals and police stations had turned up nothing—most of what my grandfather saw was shadow. Then, into a cone of streetlight or a lighted porch, there would burst a doctor and a dead man and a robot and a carrot and Abe Lincoln and a werewolf and a pharaoh and a fly. My grandfather had never seen so many kitchen-broom witches, bedsheet ghosts, popgun sheriffs. A giant baby holding hands with a pint-size gorilla, a tramp with a monocled millionaire. A dreamlike river of children coursing in and out of shadow, pooling on stoops, and out there somewhere a woman with a crack in her brain that was letting in shadows and leaking dreams.
He sat stopped at a traffic signal. A turbulence of historic personages, zoo animals, and career aspirations boiled surrealistically through his headlight beams, Viking horns, a giraffe’s neck, a pink tutu, a Mountie’s campaign hat. My grandfather rolled down his window and called to ask if anyone had happened to see Nevermore, the Night Witch. Of course, they thought he was kidding around.
“Ah!” said the giraffe, dipping its papier-maché head to sprint the rest of the way across the street in halfway-mock alarm. “The Night Witch!”
“Don’t scare me!” said the Viking.
With every corner my grandfather turned, his hope of spotting my grandmother would rekindle, and at the end of every block his heart would sink anew. After a while he noticed that the coveys and duckling chains of little kids were starting to give way to lurking platoons of older boys without costumes who loped crookedly, dragging cartoon-burglar pillowcases from house to house and flicking furtive eggs at passing cars. When an egg was thrown, there would be a burp of tires, shouts of grievance and malediction, coyote yips of laughter. The night turned authentically menacing. My grandfather could not bear the thought of my grandmother abroad in it. Hurting from the inside. Emptied out. She had been pregnant and she had miscarried and then the voice or the thoughts or the memory that tormented her had returned: her hidden history of loss, loss upon loss upon loss unending, flooding back into her body as that tablespoonful of life leaked out. Her true companion. Her lover with his bleached bones showing and his maddened eyes.