They arrived too late for lunch and whatever part of it had been garnished with slices of crabapple. It was early September 1958. The afternoon lay gray and heavy over Morristown. The east was a lustrous pile of thunderheads; to the west loomed Greystone Park, another thunderhead massed against the sky. Lightning flickered in the periphery of my grandfather’s vision, but when he looked straight on at the clouds, it was never there. He wondered if this furtive lightning might be happening inside him and not over downtown Newark. He had not seen, held, or fucked my grandmother in fourteen months, and despite the sullen presence of their teenage daughter beside him in the car, his thoughts for the past hour or more had been of the plum of my grandmother’s lower lip between his teeth, of the down on her ass, of reaching around to cup her breasts as he entered her from behind, of burying his nose in the cool salt parting of her hair as she lay with her head on his chest and a leg jackknifed across his abdomen.
He was at the wheel of a 1958 Buick Riviera purchased on Broadway three days before for a little over three thousand dollars cash. Its engine boomed up the green tunnel of elms that lined the road into Morristown. In the hip pocket of his new slacks were five hundred-dollar bills, nine fifties, two twenties, and change of a ten. My grandfather’s underwear, shirts, socks, shoes, belt, wristwatch, and money clip were as new as the slacks. He had considered buying a suit but had opted instead for two pair of slacks, chocolate and dark navy, and a tropical-weight worsted sport coat in a muted gold windowpane plaid. Pale peach shirt worn without a tie, collar open. He was a free man with money in his pocket and a new hardtop coupe. He was the new-minted managing partner of MRX, Inc., with Sam Chabon for a partner and principal investor and a contract to supply Chabon Scientific with five thousand 1:20-scale solid-fueled Aerobee-Hi rockets. Even the bottled voltage of desire for my grandmother was a source of pleasure as it lit up his brain. He had never come closer in his life to something he was prepared to call happiness. But at the moment there was one set of y coordinates keeping my grandfather asymptotically from intersecting with that untouchable x axis.
“Could you please just attempt to drive normally?” my mother said.
“I’m going the speed limit.”
“You might be averaging the speed limit. But you keep doing that thing where you tap the gas, take your foot off. Fast. Slow. Fast. Slow. Fast.” My mother made a fist of her right hand and pushed it forward, pulled it back. There was an unsettling likeness in this gesture to the recent trend of his thoughts. He felt apprehended. “It’s like you are trying to make me vomit.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I won’t do it anymore.”
Her head was tilted back against the headrest and she had her eyes closed. She sat wedged against the passenger door, hugging her knees in their stiff dungarees to her chest, her ankles under rolled cuffs a tale of summer written by sticker bushes, mosquitoes, and fingernails. The soles of her blue Sperry boat shoes had printed a moire of wavelets in white dust on the oxblood leather seat. Back in the new apartment he’d rented in Parkchester, on the new bed with a pink chenille spread, a sleeveless gingham sundress guaranteed by a Macy’s salesclerk to be universally desirable to girls of sixteen lay untried beside a pair of open-toed flats still in their box. She had not even taken the dress off its hanger. Like everything he said and did, it appeared to revolt her. The first thing she had said to him after they’d gotten the preliminary inanities out of the way was:
“I thought you were supposed to be there longer.”
He had explained that because of his spotless record (bearing only the invisible spots of an accidental homicide and violating curfew with an exploit in the walls), his new partner, who did business with the Department of Corrections, had been able to put in a good word for him and help win him early release. Later that day my grandfather had taken my mother to see the new offices of MRX. He had leased half a floor in a ten-year-old building on Cortlandt Street, downtown, a couple of blocks from the Arrow Radio shop he had managed in the mid-fifties. When they got there, Uncle Sammy was just giving a tour of the premises to his brother and his nephew, a dark-eyed good-looking kid, crown prince of his family, not yet twenty and already in medical school. His small stature, smart clothes, lustrous fingernails, and something indefinable (“maybe he just looked like a hustler”) reminded my grandfather of Ray—before the mysterious eye patch, of course. What was the story there? The Chabon kid had that Reynardian way of looking inattentive when he was measuring someone—in this case, my mother—to the millimeter. My mother returned my father’s attentive inattention with a display of her skill at striking unposed poses. After five minutes they had slipped out without anyone noticing. My grandfather found them out on a fire escape, smoking and “just talking.”
Despite rulings handed down over the centuries by our sages concurring that handsome young medical students be given the benefit of the doubt, my grandfather could not help being annoyed. “You didn’t even see the testing room,” he had complained afterward. “You didn’t see the wind tunnel.”
“It smelled like old peanuts in there,” my mother had replied.
He had deposited with his brother for safekeeping a girl who smelled of Lifebuoy and library paste and retrieved a young woman who smelled of cigarettes and Ban. He did not blame Ray for this alteration, however, for this strange and gawky changeling with her big bust and her eyes passing merciless judgment on everything they settled upon apart from lapdogs and babies. He did not simply attribute the change in my mother to the glandular inevitability of adolescent rebellion. He knew that he was responsible. His failure to control his own anger on that day in the offices of Feathercombs, Inc., was the source of the anger that seeped out of her every time she spoke to him or looked at him. In the thirty-seven hours they had spent together since their reunion, at the Schrafft’s on Fordham Road, he had managed to keep them out of an outright argument. But there had been these regular low-level discharges, a plasma of anger that seemed to cling to her like St. Elmo’s fire. Maybe that, he thought, was the flickering at the corner of his eye.
“Why did you make me eat all that food?”
“You have to eat.”
“I do eat, just not breakfast. Uncle Ray never eats breakfast, either.”
“Most important meal of the day.”
“I told you, my stomach can’t handle food in the morning.”
He had attempted to surprise her, on their way down from the Bronx, with breakfast at the Howard Johnson’s he remembered her having loved so much a couple of years before. It had not been his intention to cajole and then effectively coerce her into eating a short stack of chocolate-chip pancakes, but that was the way it had worked out.
“I know, honey. You did. I’m sorry.”
“I said I only wanted coffee.”
“And a cigarette.”
“Oh, the horror,” said my mother. “Oh, the everlasting shame.”