“No, he wouldn’t, would he,” Uncle Ray said.
My grandfather kept his head down, his eyes hidden behind the brim of his hat. He tromped up the porch steps and tried to bull past my mother and Uncle Ray without saying a word.
“Hey, sourpuss,” Uncle Ray said. He stepped into his brother’s path. He waited until my grandfather looked up from under the brim of his fedora. “You can’t even manage a hello?”
My grandfather paused. He nodded without meeting his brother’s gaze. “Hello,” he said.
“That’s it? That’s all I get?”
“Move it,” my grandfather said softly.
Uncle Ray stepped aside with a show of mock alarm. My grandfather went through the door with the luggage.
“We’re putting her in the attic,” Uncle Ray called after him. “Good luck getting all that up the ladder. I’d help you if you weren’t such a jerk.”
My grandfather reminded his brother that he didn’t need help. Uncle Ray rolled his eyes at my mother. She wanted to smile but could not manage it. She was already apprehensive about having to sleep in an attic. She had not been told that the attic was reached by a ladder. This worried her, too. What if she had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night?
“Good thing he’s not sticking around,” Uncle Ray said. “Himself and Mrs. Einstein under the same roof? Marciano versus Moore, duking it out for the heavyweight sourpuss title.”
“He’s going to prison,” my mother said, remembering now that in spite of the affection and sense of mild wonder Uncle Ray inspired in her, there had always been something about him that got on her nerves. He was not a serious person. “If he weren’t going to prison, neither of us would have to be here at all.”
Uncle Ray looked as if she had slapped him. My mother felt instantly sorry. She forced herself to smile. “Anyway,” she said. “I’d put my money on Daddy.”
“For the sourpuss title?”
“Definitely.”
“How much?”
“Five dollars?”
“You’re on,” Uncle Ray said. They shook on it.
Mrs. Einstein fed them. The fifteen dollars a week she charged Uncle Ray for a room with its own bathroom on the second floor of her house did not include meals. Mrs. Einstein took no interest in food. On the rare occasions when she cooked, the results were nothing anybody would pay money to eat. Though not observant, she shopped at a kosher butcher. She would buy the cheapest cuts, all string and gristle, sear them, then submerge them in a signature brown gravy that reminded my mother of Jell-O, only salty and hot. The vegetables were boiled until safely gray. Once a week Mrs. Einstein forced herself to sit down and eat a piece of fried beef liver with grilled onions, and if Uncle Ray and my mother were around, she forced them to eat it, too. Her husband and son had always refused to touch liver, and they were dead, and she was alive.
On that first night, however, she served an excellent dairy supper. She had stopped at an appetizing store and brought home smoked whitefish, pickled herring, a dozen deviled eggs. She put out cottage cheese and some sliced celery and carrots. For dessert there was a marvel of a cake, a slender block frosted with chocolate that revealed, when Mrs. Einstein sliced it open, gaudy layers of pink, green, and yellow separated by ribbons of raspberry jam. Mrs. Einstein had no illusions about her table—she had no illusions about anything except maybe the tonic properties of beef liver. But she knew where my grandfather would be headed after he departed her house. She felt that his last free meal ought to be edible, at least.
“You’re very kind,” my grandfather said, pushing away his plate.
“Not really,” Mrs. Einstein said. She looked at my mother, who was just then contemplating asking for a second slice of ribbon cake. “One is enough,” Mrs. Einstein said.
My mother nodded. She put her fork down.
“Maybe your brother told you, I have doubts about this arrangement,” Mrs. Einstein said. “I have a hard time picturing Reynard looking after a child, and I worry that the burden is going to fall on me. I don’t much care for children. I had one of my own. That was more than sufficient.”
My grandfather turned on his brother. “You said it was fine with her.”
“Fine is a relative term,” Uncle Ray observed. “Maybe I ought to have said, as fine as anything ever gets with this one.”
My mother told me that she still remembered the heat spreading across her cheeks as she listened to this exchange. A spasm of restlessness took hold in her legs, a kind of panic of the muscles. She ran through a handful of smart or angry or cold remarks she might toss at Mrs. Einstein on the subject of children and their feelings toward Mrs. Einstein. She reconfirmed with herself the certainty that she had nowhere else to go.
“I don’t need it to be fine,” Mrs. Einstein said. “Obviously, the girl needs a home.”
It was not yet eight o’clock when my grandfather took his hat from a peg in the front hall. My mother tried to stay put on Mrs. Einstein’s sofa. The sofa was upholstered in pale pink chenille sealed in a layer of clear vinyl. Under her circle skirt, my mother could feel her bare thighs sticking to the vinyl slipcover, and she pretended that the adhesion would be sufficient. But in the end she tore loose and ran to her father. He suffered her to put her arms around his waist and her cheek against his shirtfront. When he saw that she was not going to make a scene, he took hold of her head with both hands and raised her face to his.
“If I thought you were not up to this, I would not ask you to do it,” he said. “Do you understand?”
My mother nodded. A tear spilled from her left eye, streaked down her temple, and chimed inside her right ear.
“You’re tough,” he said. “Like me.”
He lowered his lips to her forehead and left the scratch of his whiskers on it. Hours afterward, lying on a folding cot in Mrs. Einstein’s attic, trying to fall asleep, she could feel the abrasion of his kiss radiating heat across her forehead like a sunburn. It was only then, in the dark and the smell of old luggage and galoshes, that it occurred to my mother she should have asked my grandfather what he would have done if he’d thought she wasn’t up to the ordeal. She lay there in the dark, picturing to herself all the bright forms his mercy might have taken if only she had not been so tough.
25
On the original charge of aggravated assault, my grandfather might have been looking at five years. But by 1957 New York was already struggling with the judicial backlog that, at the end of the sixties, brought its court system to the point of collapse. As a veteran and a family man with no criminal record, my grandfather was persuaded to waive his right to a trial and plead guilty to a lesser charge of simple assault. He was sentenced to twenty months in Wallkill Prison.