I sat down at the kitchen table. My grandfather had turned on the radio and tuned it to the news. It was the usual obscurities of statistics and disaster. He was banging pans, rifling drawers, and slamming cabinets shut. Sometimes the news had that effect on him, in particular when it concerned Richard Nixon, but when the ads came on, this time he kept on banging and slamming. It occurred to me that, like my grandmother, he might be angry about the lost baby and my father’s apparent role in its loss, but all of that was unclear to me. On the off chance that he was mad about the fortune-telling cards, however, I decided to throw him off the scent.
Sometimes after he had played a round of solitaire, my grandfather used the cards to build a tower (though he always called it a “house”) of cards. There were two ways to do it, a good way and a bad way. Most people did it the bad way, which formed a part of the understanding of human behavior that my grandfather passed on to me along with his lessons in playing-card construction methods. With the bad way, you tilted pairs of cards against each other like precarious lean-tos and formed them into rows of triangles that you stacked, each story narrower by one lean-to than the one below it, to make one big triangle. This method was inherently unstable, and even if you executed flawlessly, you could build only a few stories high before the thing collapsed under its own weight.
The good way was to stand four cards on their long edges, forming a pinwheel configuration that made a square cell where they came together. If you laid a card flat across the central square, you got a sturdy box that could support the weight of many stories. Each radiating vane of the pinwheel could in turn be interlocked with three fresh cards, and so by going outward and upward you could erect something of substance and loft. Some of the cards I used hid, and others revealed, their faces: the Mice, the Clover, the Scythe. I thought of the stories that my grandmother had built for me out of those cards when they had turned up in the past. I saw that my tower was made of stories in two senses of the word.
I experienced this not as a pun but as an enigmatic metaphor. I assumed there must be a reason that buildings were said to be made out of narratives or, conversely, that narratives were seen to be the stacked components of mysterious towers in some way I couldn’t grasp. Maybe it had something to do, I thought, with the Tower of Babel. I wanted to ask my grandfather, but then I would have to explain to him exactly how my grandmother made use of the cards. I felt that he would approve of her telling stories, or at least the kind of stories she used to tell me, even less than he evidently approved of her telling fortunes.
“Look at that,” he said, casting a critical eye up and down my tower. He was holding a couple of plates and forks.
“It’s easy,” I assured him. “These cards are really good for building with. That’s why Mamie lets me use them.”
“Oh, is that why?” He started to set two places at the opposite end of the Formica table.
“Yes. Be careful. You’ll knock it down.”
“It’s going to have to come down sometime.”
“No.”
A counter furnished with a pair of barstools divided the kitchen from the dining room. He set two places there instead of on the table, where my tower aspired.
“That’s what houses of cards do,” my grandfather said, returning to the stove for the pan of salami and eggs. “It’s proverbial.”
“What’s proverbial mean?”
“You know what proverbial means.”
He held out the frying pan so I could see it. He did his salami and eggs pancake-style, pouring the scrambled eggs around the fried salami, letting it set and get brown on the bottom, then flipping the “pancake” to brown on the other side.
“How many degrees in a circle?” he asked me.
“Three hundred and sixty.”
“Correct. How many degrees do you want?”
“A hundred and twenty.”
He cut me a fat wedge and slid it onto my plate. We sat at the counter with our food. The radio erected its tower of accidents, crime, money, love, good and bad fortune, and war. I looked at my house of cards and reflected on the proverbial inevitability of its collapse.
“Why aren’t you eating?” my grandfather said.
Having only lately consumed an entire tarte tatin was another secret I felt that my grandmother would prefer I didn’t betray. I didn’t answer.
“Your dad will be here tomorrow,” my grandfather said, guessing at the reason for my unaccustomed pensiveness and silence. “To take you home. You’ll see Mommy. She’s really all right.”
“Okay.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“So eat.”
“Why didn’t God want them to build the Tower of Babel?” I said. “Why did He make it so everybody couldn’t understand each other?”
“You know I don’t believe in God.”
“I know.”
“Probably there was just a ziggurat, you know what a ziggurat is? Over in Mesopotamia. Maybe it was in ruins. Maybe it was only halfway built, left unfinished. And they made up a story to explain what happened to it, why it looked incomplete.”
“Oh.”
“You understand what I’m saying?”
I understood: Everything got ruined and nothing was ever finished. The world, like the Tower of Babel or my grandmother’s deck of cards, was made out of stories, and it was always on the verge of collapse. That was proverbial.
“Maybe God doesn’t want this tower,” my grandmother theorized. She was standing in the middle of the living room, holding my grandfather’s coat and briefcase and the crumpled mess of his newspaper. “Because from the top of it, people they can look inside of His house and see He is a big pork.”
My grandfather smiled for the first time since walking in the door. He acknowledged that there might be something to her theory. He offered my grandmother some of the salami and eggs on his plate. She shook her head and made a face, but she came over and plucked a bit of salami from the plate and popped it into her mouth. She stood very close to my grandfather, leaning her hip against his shoulder. “Mmm,” she said. She looked at me without looking at me. “Poor little one.”
My grandfather got down off the stool and put his arms around my grandmother. They held on to each other for what seemed to me to be a very long time. She murmured something into his ear, too low for me to catch, and he nodded and said, “I know. Me, too.”
Then she seemed to recover herself. She reached out to me for a second time that afternoon. I got down from my stool and went to my grandparents. I took her left hand in my right, and my grandfather did the same with my left hand. With his left hand, he reached for my grandmother and we made a brief circle before letting go.
“He’s fine,” my grandfather said. “I told him everything’s going to be fine.”
“He isn’t fine,” my grandmother said. “He’s terrified because of those puppets you bought! They are so horrible. He’s the nervous wrecks all day long because he is so afraid to go to sleep in there.”
I had said nothing to my grandmother, at any time since their arrival from Lille, France, about my fear of the puppets.
She frowned and let go of our hands. “Oh no.” She had noticed the house of cards, and now she glanced from it to my grandfather. Their eyes locked and held, and I saw they were conducting some kind of discussion about the cards and me without saying anything at all. My grandmother looked at me, a little sadly, I thought. Then she went to the kitchen table and blew on the cards like the Big Bad Wolf. The tower collapsed and rattled to the tabletop.
“See?” said my grandfather.
My grandmother gathered up the cards and slid them into their box. I don’t know what became of them; I never saw them again. After he finished his dinner, my grandfather went into the guest bedroom. He took the hatbox out of the closet and carried it in the elevator to the storage space in the basement of the building.
The next day my father came to retrieve me, and together we picked up my mother from the hospital. I told her I knew about the lost baby, and she said that it was so new it hadn’t really been a baby at all.
The following year my father left the Public Health Service for the short-lived job with the Senators baseball club, and we left New York for good. I saw my grandmother much less frequently; when I did see her, she was fragile and ill. We never cooked or played cards. She sat wrapped in blankets and stared at the television or watched the sky outside the window. And then one day when I was eleven years old, she died and was buried in Montefiore Cemetery, leaving me her legacy of voices in the dark.
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