“Maybe I do feel the migraine coming, little mouse,” she said. “I am going to go lie down. Grandpa, he is stopping to the hospital to see Mommy. Then he will come home and I can get up and make supper for us. It’s okay?”
After she left I sat at the kitchen table awash in guilt and regret that seemed disproportionate to the crime of simply having, for the hundredth time, slipped free of her imprisoning arms. And she must have been crying, I understood now, because she was sad about whatever was happening or had happened to my mother. If only I had endured her embrace a moment or two longer, I might have been able to discover the truth.
I decided I would make her some tea and take it to her with a wet cloth for her forehead. I would sit on the edge of her bed and wait until she felt a little better, and then maybe, at last, someone would tell me what was really going on.
While I waited for the kettle to boil, I went to the deck of cards on the kitchen table and turned over the topmost card. It was the Lady, in her long skirts and hunting coat, standing by a stone bench in a garden. I turned over the second card: the Coffin, adrift on a gaudy bed of flowers, blazoned with an ornate cross.
My grandmother had explained to me that when you were telling fortunes, the Coffin did not necessarily stand for death or dying. It might stand for anything that was coming to an end, or even for something that was beginning. The Coffin had come up twice for me in the course of our time together. Once, in the story that resulted, my grandmother had transformed the Coffin into a little boat employed by the grandmother of Moses to paddle anxiously down the Nile after his basket because she could not let him out of her sight. The other time it came up, the Coffin had become a chest of iron into which a hapless escape artist named Paree Poudini had been foolish enough to have himself sealed and thrown into the Hudson River.
Nevertheless, I hated to see that card turn up.
I pushed my chair back from the table and stood up. I stared down at the deck, knowing that I now had to turn over the third card. I had to turn over the third card, a rough voice whispered in my head, because the first card had been the Lady and the second the Coffin, and if I did not turn over the third card then it would be true, for real and forever, that my mother was dead.*
I don’t know how long I stood there trying to work up the courage to turn over the third card. I heard the creaking of the teakettle. The electricity inside the clock on the wall hummed its unending note—A#, my grandfather had told me. The tap dripped and the drops rang against the tart pan. When I turned the card over, it was going to be the Bouquet, I decided, because my mother was dead, and though I had yet to attend one I understood that for a funeral you needed a lot of flowers. On the other hand, said the whispering (which the clock, the kettle, and the tap could not drown out), if I failed to turn the card over, that would kill my mother. My thoughts circled this paradox like a bee I once saw chasing itself around a lamppost. I pressed my hands against the sides of my head in a vain attempt to slow them. Finally, I reached for the deck.
There was a chiming of keys on a key ring. My grandfather sighed. “Somebody want to come and take the chain off?”
I went to the door to let in my grandfather and his own enveloping smell: raincoat, cigarette smoke, the dusty and metallic innards of a typewriter. I had never been so relieved to see anyone in my life. He did not look like the father of a woman who was dead or even, for that matter, of a woman who no longer had any feet. I wanted to hug him, but I was not sure how he would respond, since from his point of view all he had done was walk through his front door. It was not that he never hugged me, but there needed to be an occasion. He dropped his coat, briefcase, and the jumble of an evening paper on a nearby chair. He asked for a brief summary of my day and I provided one. He was almost always in a cheerful mood in those days, when MRX and he were in their prime, but tonight his manner seemed a little wan. I told him that Mamie had a headache and also that she had been crying but I was not exactly sure why. I said that I was making her a cup of tea.
“That’s nice,” he said. “You’re a good boy, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
He loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar. I followed him back into the kitchen. “What’s dinner? What’s all this?”
There were two dirty plates, two forks, and a tart pan in the sink, but he meant the cards. I could tell by his face that he knew what he was looking at and that seeing the cards made him upset. I decided not to answer either of his questions. I was afraid that he might throw the cards away. Before he could gather them up, I turned over the card that was now topmost on the deck.
It was the Child.
Was I the child? I had to be the child. The Coffin was my coffin, and the Lady was my mother, grieving over the news of my death. I wondered how I was going to die. I suspected strongly that a gang of French puppets would be involved. I saw the puppets inching themselves like worms across the carpet in the guest bedroom, crawling up the side of the bed, creeping across my body in the darkness like groping hands.
“Hey,” my grandfather said, his tone gentle. He crouched down and turned me to face him. “Mike, look at me. Your mother’s fine. Everything’s going to be all right. Okay, she lost the baby, but that’s a misnomer, because it wasn’t really a baby yet at all.”
That was how I learned that my mother had been pregnant, and that the pregnancy had miscarried, though I did not yet fully grasp that or the import in this context of a baby being lost. Someone had forgotten to tell my grandfather that I was not to be told.
“All right?” he said.
He needed me to say it was all right so that we could stop talking about the lost baby and get it over with. I didn’t say anything. Naturally, I had a lot of questions about the loss of babies, but I refused to ask them. I was angry; there had been a brother or a sister, and nobody had said a thing to me about it. Now that brother or sister was dead and nobody had let me know that, either.
My grandfather sat down at the table in the chair my grandmother had been using. He picked up the deck of cards and riffled through them deliberately. “What nonsense,” he said. “She was wasting your time with this?”
“We were playing piquet.”
“I count thirty-six cards,” he said. “What kind of piquet is that?”
I felt I ought to try to protect my grandmother. “Cowboy piquet,” I ventured. It sounded plausible enough to me.
He looked at me. I looked back at him. He nodded. “How about I fry us some salami,” he said.
While he was scrambling the eggs and chopping up three inches of a fat Hebrew National salami, I carried a cup of tea to my grandmother. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, talking softly into the bedroom extension. She sounded angry, with the particular sarcastic intonation that she reserved for my father. I don’t remember, if I ever really caught, what she was saying to him. Hindsight, and a taste for melodrama, and some faint ghost of veritable memory incline me to feel that they were words to this effect: You are not now free to leave them.* When she saw me come in, she gave her head one firm shake. She waved me and the cup of tea away. She mouthed the word Go. I turned and went back down along the hallway. The teacup jingled against the saucer with a sound like a ringing telephone.