*
The valise was heavy, and I struggled with it across the lobby of the building. The doorman, called Irish George to distinguish him from another doorman known as Tall George, offered me a hand. I declined. I wanted my father to see that in spite of an emotional weakness that made me fear hand puppets, I could at least carry my own valise.
“Big strong fella you got there, Doc,” said Irish George.
My father pushed the up button and stood back appraising me for a moment before lowering his eyes to his Florsheim loafers. “He’s a big boy,” my father agreed.
He still sounded disappointed, I thought, but in a regretful way, as if mostly disappointed in himself. Mistaking incapacity for a philosophy of life, my father did not often apologize, but when he did, he would first look down at his shoes. It hurt my heart to see him hang his head that way. I couldn’t handle it. I did not want him to apologize for whatever was making him feel sorry. I looked at the gondola instead.
There was a beauty salon on the ground floor of my grandparents’ building. It had an Italian name and a Venetian theme and, in the lobby, a sign that was a miniature replica of a gondola. The gondola hung from the ceiling by the elevator. It was nearly two feet long, piano black with red and gold trim, its prow pointed at the hallway that led to the beauty salon. I had been enchanted by this model gondola for as long as I could remember and now—not for the first time—I sought refuge aboard it and began poling slowly in my imagination through waters untroubled by thoughts of the Robber with his veritable beard, or the bad thing happening to my mother that my father was so sorry about, or the chances that, once she and I were alone, my grandmother would find herself in a storytelling mood.
“Is Grandpa home?” I said.
“Of course not. He’s at work.”
“Okay.”
“Why do you ask?”
I said that I had just been wondering. As soon as the elevator doors closed and we started to go up, I felt a djinn of expectancy or dread (there was no difference) flicker to life in my belly. I ran my eyes from the twelfth-floor button to the fourteenth and back. Recently, I had come across a laminated card, printed with the Mourner’s Kaddish in two alphabets, inside a copy of Errol Flynn’s My Wicked, Wicked Ways that had belonged to my other grandfather, my namesake. I wondered if, in spite of the effort made to protect the dummies of the world from their fear of bad luck, some residual thirteenth floor might not linger, hidden like that Kaddish between floors twelve and fourteen.
When we got off the elevator, I let my father carry the suitcase and took his right hand between both of my own. I lagged behind a little, steeling myself for my part in the coming ritual.
The doorbell was mounted under the peephole in a metal frame I could now reach without going up on tiptoe. The way it always worked was that I would ring and, wearing the same look of fresh mischief each time, my father would cover the peephole like a magician palming a coin. A moment later, in a worried voice, my grandmother would call out, “Who is it?” from the other side of the door, even though she knew it could only be us.
The joke was that she was pretending to be worried, but the real joke, at least to my father, was that she was only pretending to pretend. He covered the peephole because he had noticed that his mother-in-law never opened a letter without first holding the envelope to a light, or a door without first peeping through the spyhole. A deadbolt would roll back with a ratcheting sound, a chain would rattle, and my grandparents’ door would swing slowly open—and there would be nobody there.
Here the joke was that it had been a ghost grandmother calling out “Who is it?” My role was to step up and declare in my firmest tone, “There’s no such thing as ghosts!” and my grandmother would then emerge from behind the door and affirm in a reassuring tone that I was absolutely right. Even though I had known for a long time that it was my grandmother hiding herself and not a ghost grandmother, when the invisible hand pulled open the door I often would catch hold of my father’s or mother’s arm or take an involuntary step away. My parents would chuckle or chide me. They failed to understand that it was not the ghost that spooked me, it was the hidden grandmother.
None of that happened this time. My father rang the doorbell. My grandmother opened the door. It was the middle of the afternoon, but she was still wearing her housecoat. This was a kind of slender tent with a Nehru collar that buttoned up the front and fell to her ankles, violently patterned with red and purple op-art oblongs. Today it would seem like the relic of an audacious moment in the history of midcentury design, but at the time I simply accepted it as routine loungewear for a grandmother.
“Go in.” The bangles on her wrists clinked as she waved me into the apartment. “Put your things in the, the cabinet in the bedroom. In the chest of drawers.”
My father handed me the valise. “It’s just a couple of days,” he said. “Grandma will take you to buy a Matchbox car.” He pulled out his billfold and gave me five ones and a five, a considerable sum. He frowned and extracted an additional five-dollar bill from the billfold. This one was frayed, stained, and missing a chip at one corner. He was the son of a print jobber, and until his uncle’s fateful encounter at Jack Dempsey’s with a six-inch human skeleton, his family had clipped coupons, saved Green Stamps in tattered albums, and hoarded pennies in mayonnaise jars. I think there was something unbearable to my father, some imprisoning shame, in the saving of money. It never hung around his wallet very long. But while it was there, he liked it clean and new.
“Dirty,” my grandmother said in mock sympathy as my father handed me the abominable five. “And torn, pouah!”
My father grabbed at the back of my head, ruffled my hair, and gave me a gentle shove toward the bedroom. I could feel them waiting until I was out of earshot to start talking about my mother. I took my time getting there. Across the living room windows the Palisades rippled like a stone flag banded with river, trees, and sky. A cast-metal Degas ballerina on a teak console leveled her contemptuous gaze at a balsa-wood model of a Vanguard rocket on a bookshelf by the hall.
When I went into the guest bedroom, my grandmother and my father started talking in low voices. I set the suitcase on the bed and stood in the doorway, trying to eavesdrop. I suspected that my mother was already dead, that the operation on her feet had been a failure or a fiction, and that everyone was conspiring to keep the information from me. Between the hushed tones, my grandmother’s accent, and the elliptical nature of adult conversation, I could not catch the drift. I stared at the worn five-dollar bill in my hand, at the portrait of Abraham Lincoln, whose own mother had died when he was not much older than I was. I felt like I could see the loss in Abraham Lincoln’s eyes.
My father called out a goodbye, and a moment later my grandmother came into the guest bedroom to check on my progress unpacking. I had made no progress. I had been too busy trying to eavesdrop, and anyway, I was confused by my father’s packing technique. He had mistaken pajama tops for pullovers and bathing trunks for short pants. He had packed two handkerchiefs. Handkerchiefs! He had thought to equip me with the fake-ponyskin cowboy vest that had been part of my most recent Halloween costume. There were three pairs of underpants but four pairs of socks, one of them mismatched and one my mother’s.
“Did Mommy die?”