Moonglow
4 A model “moon garden,” constructed from the lid of a to-go coffee cup, pieces salvaged from commercial model airplane and tank kits, a dozen small capacitors and four links of a metal wristwatch band, glued together and spray-painted Tamiya “Light Ghost Grey.” It belonged to LAV One, my grandfather’s scale-model lunar outpost, which he had spent the years since my grandmother’s death building and reconfiguring. With its tunnels, pods, aerials, dishes, and domes, the LAV One model on its craggy scale-model lunar surface covered most of the dining room table in his condo back in Florida. “He only wanted the Moon garden,” my mother told me. “I had to kind of tweeze it out from the rest of it.”
5 A publicity photograph, in a Lucite box frame, of the last crew of the space shuttle Challenger. In this photograph astronauts Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, and Ronald McNair sat at a table with their helmets in front of them like fishbowls from which they planned to draw lucky numbers. Behind them stood Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, and Judith Resnik, cradling their helmets in their hands. The crew’s flight suits, like the shiny cloth that covered the table, were a variation on the blue of the Florida sky in which they would soon be lost. Their seven smiles mocked them, at least to my eye. At one end of the blue table, like a human skull in a still life, stood a scale model of Challenger strapped to its fuel tank and booster rockets. In the photograph, the model shuttle looked like a child’s toy, albeit a splendid one. It was hard to see the fine detail that my grandfather had put into this particular commission, how the cargo bay doors opened to reveal the remote manipulator arm, how the engine nozzles could be made to pivot. You could pull open the nose of the fuselage and look into the crew cabin, rendered in faithful detail down to the buttons and switches of the instrument panels and the “Sally Ride curtain” over the toilet.
Even if his scale model had not been selected by NASA for inclusion in the official mission portrait, my grandfather likely would have planned to attend the launch on January 28, 1986. He was a habitué of Cape Canaveral who drove up for almost every shuttle firing, as if trying to make up for his boycott—painful to him to have to maintain, I knew—of every Apollo mission. But that Tuesday corresponded to the eleventh yahrzeit of my grandmother’s death. At 11:39 a.m., when an O-ring failed and the shuttle began to break apart, my grandfather was at her grave in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. He didn’t learn of the disaster until he got back to his motor lodge in Center City and turned on the television.
He sat without moving, without blinking or breathing, as a flower of fire bloomed on a stem of vapor. In that and subsequent replays he watched fragments of the disintegrated spacecraft snake across the sky, wandering, doubling back, as if blindly searching for one another in the blue.
As soon as I heard the news—I was then in graduate school at UC Irvine—I tracked him down through my mother. I had expected that when I reached him, my grandfather might sound low, even mournful, but I ought to have known better.
“Too goddamn cold!” he said. “Thirty-six degrees at launch. Idiot bureaucrats.”
“Why didn’t they scrub it?”
“Because they’re pencil pushers. Judy knew better than to launch in weather like that.”
The astronaut Judith Resnik was a particular favorite of my grandfather’s. She was a brilliant engineer who had, on a prior mission, become the first Jewess in space. Her tangle of wild black curls had enacted medusa feats in zero gravity.
“Poor Judy,” my grandfather said. I could hear the voice of a television reporter in the background, shouting to be heard over the wind gusting along a stretch of Florida beach.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be with you,” I said. “How was it?”
“How was the cemetery?”
“Dumb question.”
“It was very festive.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Frankly? The grave looked untidy. I was shocked.”
The wind whipped up along the beach on the motel TV.
“Grandpa? You there?”
“Yeah.”
“You okay?”
“No.”
“I know you miss her. I wish she were still here.”
“I’m glad she isn’t. If she saw what a mess her grave is, she’d be furious and she’d blame me. Because I insisted on that cemetery.”
“Oh.”
“Everyone else is already buried there, it was already paid for a long time ago.”
I knew my grandfather didn’t mean that he was glad my grandmother had died. I knew how much he missed her. I didn’t know, because he had not yet told me, that inside the crew cabin of his Challenger model, one of the webbed panels enclosing the sleep niches could be lifted on a hinge to reveal two miniature human figures. They had been the original occupants of LAV One’s moon garden before my grandfather enlarged the scope of that structure’s function. A man and a woman, five eighths of an inch tall, lay together in a sleep niche, naked in each other’s arms.* The male figure spread his body like a shield across the female; the female figure’s long hair was painted a vivid shade of auburn.
My grandfather never revealed the intention behind this “Easter egg”—not to me, at least. It may have been a gag or, never one to let an empty grave or a $3.99 model kit go to waste, my grandfather may simply have been economizing. When I look at the Challenger mission photograph now, I don’t see the seven smilers, pretty Judy Resnick, or even, really, the model itself. I see the hidden lovers, fates entangled like their bodies, waiting for release from the gravity that held them down all their lives.
* * *
She touched his leg, and he woke up. The world around him was his bedroom and not a jail cell. My grandmother was taking her skirt and sweater from the valet on which she had neatly hung them. “Ten minutes,” she said.
My grandfather put on a blue work shirt and a pair of chinos and went downstairs to find his mud-caked work boots. My grandmother had resumed work on her interrupted coq au vin. She stood at the stove with her head inclined over a wooden spoon that brimmed with steam. He came up behind her and touched his lips to her nape. She shivered. He felt that she expected him to say something. They had spoken very little so far, and he was not sure what he meant to say or what she needed to hear. He wrestled fiercely against the urge to say nothing at all. In his powerlessness to undo what had already been done or avert what lay ahead, he resorted to the usual inanity.
“We’ll be fine,” he told her. “It’ll all be fine.”
She did not contradict him, did not assent. She took a sip from the spoon. She made a sound that committed her to nothing. “Go,” she said. “She is expecting to see you.”
My grandfather waited at the top of the drive to meet the school bus, ready with the Zagnut bar. The sky was promisingly blue. To occupy himself, my grandfather constructed an almanac of nights lost to the House of Detention. The moon would be at three quarters and waning. Tonight, after he had eaten his wife’s good coq au vin and dried and put away the dishes, he and my mother would rejoin Oliver Twist in his interminable sufferings. My grandfather would lie beside his daughter and then his wife, in turn, until their breathing gathered into sleep. Then he would go to the top of the hill behind the house, with his telescope and a thermos of tea, and lose himself for an hour or two in contemplation of the Sea of Serenity; Algol and Deneb; Eridanus, the river of stars.
“It will all be fine,” he said aloud.
When the bus pulled up, he watched my mother, fourteen and lanky, slouch her way along the aisle, down the steps. When her feet touched ground, she burst into a run. He pressed his nose against her hair and breathed in her school smell, a smell like the flavor of a postage stamp. Against her better judgment, he persuaded my mother to devour the entire candy bar before they got to the bottom of the drive, where the hickory tree fingered the sky, awaiting my grandmother’s next attempt on its life.
The candy bar spoiled my mother’s appetite for dinner, but in the interest of peace, not wanting to betray my grandfather, she forced herself to clean her plate.
6
My grandfather saw my grandmother for the first time in February 1947, at Ahavas Sholom synagogue.* She had been posed beside a potted palm, in a fox stole and sunglasses, under a banner that read try your luck! The fur was on loan from the president of the Sisterhood. The dark glasses had been provided free of charge by the president’s husband, an ophthalmologist, to treat a case of photophobia brought on by chronic malnutrition. I assume that the text painted on the bedsheet banner, part of the decor for Congregation Ahavas Sholom’s inaugural “Night in Monte Carlo,” was coincidence. The pose, however, had been calculated with utmost strategy.
Without consulting her, the sisterhood had decided that even though she was a widow encumbered with a four-year-old daughter, my grandmother, transferred safely to Baltimore from a DP camp in Austria, was the leading candidate for the position of wife to the new rabbi. Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society canteens and then the kitchens of Park Circle and Forest Park had conspired to ensure that my grandmother regained her shape, her color, and what the president always referred to as “that gorgeous head of hair.” My grandmother was courteous, conversant with literature and art. She had ambitions and the talent, it was said, to be an actress on the stage. Her feline face and French accent, at times impenetrable, led more than one admirer to compare her to Simone Simon. In spite of suffering and loss, she laughed often, smiled easily. She strode into rooms with actressy shoulders and the humble swagger of a girl who had come of age among hardworking nuns.
A few times, it was true, she had come out with utterances that made no sense whatsoever, in French or English. It was also true that when she was not smiling, she fell into taut silences, seemed to listen for footsteps on the other side of doors, studied shadows in the corners of rooms. When taken to a Baltimore public library for the first time, it was reported, she had made straight for the recordings of Highland reels. The first two peculiarities were put down to her being a relative newcomer to English and a girl who had endured and survived the unspeakable. (Nobody could account for the love of bagpipes.) If one sometimes sensed a weird crackle around her, a scorching like dust on a solenoid, it was believed by the Sisterhood—and seconded by many of their husbands—that this mysteriously added to her allure.
The new rabbi, freshly graduated first in his class from the Jewish Theological Seminary, had charmed everyone with his brilliance and élan, his tailored suits and his faint delicious odor, unexpected in a rabbi, of gardenias. But he displayed a troubling streak of self-will. All his life he had been the pride of his family and the joy of his teachers. As a result he had learned to prefer his own ideas to those of other people, even with regard to subjects, such as the woman he ought to marry, about which he could be expected to know very little. Overt matchmaking attempts, each to a thoroughly eligible candidate, had not turned out well. The Sisterhood caucused and agreed to authorize the use of wiles.
To ensure that the target of the operation could not fail to notice her when he put in his scheduled appearance at “Night in Monte Carlo,” the Sisterhood had posed my grandmother beside the rented palm tree just by the main door of the synagogue’s reception room. Two Sisterhood members were deployed here to pin my grandmother down. Mrs. Waxman, married to a judge, had been the chief sponsor of my grandmother’s petition for refugee status. Mrs. Zellner, among the first Jewish graduates of Bryn Mawr, spoke excellent French. Playing on my grandmother’s sense of obligation and her hunger to speak her mother tongue, the women were prepared to hold her on the spot for however long it took the rabbi to arrive, at which point they would merely put my grandmother in his way, so that afterward—a key to the strategy—he could operate under the impression that he had discovered his future bride for himself.
The rabbi was late. The reception room filled with congregants who knew nothing of the Sisterhood’s maneuverings and were eager for the evening to begin. The chair of the fund-raising committee stepped to the dais. He had prepared a welcome, studded with mildly off-color puns about spades and craps, but when the microphone gave him a mild electric shock, he was obliged to break off his speech. The Sisterhood president shoved her husband toward the dais, where the hired musicians, Jews dressed as fanciful Cubans, loitered with their instruments. The ophthalmologist crouched down beside the chairman of the fund-raising committee. He took the man’s pulse and helped him unbutton his collar. Other male congregants offered assistance in the form of impromptu puns on the words shock, current, spark, what a revolting development this was, and so forth.
The fifteen-year-old sound technician struggled to locate and swap in a new mike, a task in which he was hampered by his mother’s constant reminders that he ought to hurry. A scrum kicked up around the table of dairy appetizers, awakening old antipathies and reinforcing new ones. Meanwhile the thong of small talk and college French that the Sisterhood tiger hunters were using to lash their goat to its stake stretched ever thinner. A second microphone was found and tested. The board president was certified fit to conclude his speech.
“Please,” he enjoined all those who had come to try their luck that night, “lose as much and as often as you possibly can.”
The lights were lowered. The dance band generated a supper-club ambiance. Over the cha-cha-cha, the chatter, and the rattle of dice and roulette balls, my grandmother’s handlers found it impossible to maintain their grip on her. She took a package of Herbert Tareytons from her borrowed beaded clutch.
“I find it is very warm in this room,” she said, still unsuspecting her status as prey but conscious of the strain on the conversational tether. “Excuse me, please. Maybe I will have a look at the beautiful moon.”
All at once the moon of Mrs. Zellner’s face was suffused with delight. In her relief she may have tipped her hand slightly.
“Mais voilà le rabbin!” she cried.
* * *
All day my grandfather had busied himself finding reasons not to accompany Uncle Ray to “Night in Monte Carlo.” He was not ready to mix with “regular people.” He was uncomfortable making small talk with strangers. He lacked the funds and the appropriate attire. He had no use for synagogues. He would just get in his brother’s way. Each of these reasons, with the aplomb of a born dialectician, Uncle Ray discounted, dismissed, disarmed, or batted to one side. He appreciated the challenge a return to civilian life must represent, he said, but in the end you just had to hold your breath and jump into the pool. Nobody, apart from traveling salesmen and the people who accosted you in bus terminals, was comfortable making small talk with strangers. He would happily stake my grandfather for the evening, to be repaid by the winnings or at a later date. He owned a very nice blazer, Harris tweed, that was much too big in the shoulders for him. A synagogue, when you came right down to it, was only a building; great Jews from Abraham to Hillel had never laid eyes on one. And everyone, by design and almost by definition, was in a rabbi’s way.
When the time came to leave for the synagogue, the only card my grandfather still held was to make himself disagreeable. Pick a fight and hope to be uninvited.
The problem with this approach was Uncle Ray’s satisfaction with himself and his opinions. Whatever position you adopted, Uncle Ray alighted on higher ground. Attacks on his person or character could have no basis in fact; the kid just laughed them off. My grandfather hit him with surliness, scorn, wet-blanket inertia. Uncle Ray floated effortlessly above it all. But in the parking lot of Ahavas Sholom, as they were about to get out of his brother’s brand-new Mercury coupe—Ray already had his door open—my grandfather, in his desperation to give offense, stumbled at last on a viable approach.
In the winter of 1947, no one—least of all Uncle Ray—was conscious of the creeping unbelief that afterward began to trouble my great-uncle and ultimately led him to exchange his pulpit for the pool halls and racetracks of Baltimore, Wilmington, and Havre de Grace. My grandfather seemed to have picked up on some early vibration of the crisis to come. From childhood he had suspected Uncle Ray of faking “the whole ‘boy tzaddik’ thing,” to gain the attention and approval first of their parents, then of the greater Jewish world. A sibling’s ESP guided my grandfather’s hand as it reached for the quiver, let fly the shaft.
“You don’t see the irony?” he said. “‘Night in Monte Carlo’? You don’t see how disingenuous that is? The whole joint’s already a fucking casino, Ray. A sideshow tent. Remember, upstairs from Pat’s Steak, that crew came in and opened a betting office? Those grifters from Buffalo who fleeced Frank Osterberg? That’s you. You’re running a wire store. Taking bets on races you’re never going to have to pay off because you already know the result. The marks come in, you take their money. Promise them what, forgiveness, eternity, a line item in God’s account book? Then you just sit back and wait for the blow-off. Give them a few last words of mumbo-jumbo, plant their chump bodies in the ground.”
It was a long speech for my grandfather, who felt his argument take on more weight and conviction as it carried him along. Uncle Ray eased shut the driver’s-side door with an angry punctilio. He twisted around in his seat to face my grandfather. His elbow mashed the Mercury’s horn. His freckles vanished into the overall redness of his face. “How dare you?” he promisingly began.
With that opening horn blast and an encouraging flicker of guilt in his eyes, Uncle Ray mounted to the saddle of his high horse. He cited the humble piety of their long-suffering parents and grandparents, the good deeds and intentions of his congregants, the faithfulness and martyrdom of Jews the world over, the integrity of the rabbinate, the accomplishments of five thousand years. From there he moved on to Maimonides, Hank Greenberg, Moses, Adonai. Evidently pleased with the effect it made, he pounded the horn a couple more times for emphasis. At one point he grew so heated that his saliva flecked the lapel of the Harris tweed jacket my grandfather had borrowed. But then, having instanced the Lord God of Hosts, Uncle Ray paused. He narrowed his eyes. My grandfather, he realized, had offered no resistance or counterarguments. He just sat there with spiderlike patience, letting Uncle Ray rage.
“You almost had me.” Uncle Ray grew calm, his tone measured. “You are coming in there with me,” he said, “and you are going to be glad that you did. And do you know how I know you’re coming in there with me?”
“How?”
“Because that is the Holy One’s plan for you.”
“Oh, really, God has a plan for me? About goddamn time.”
Home a month, my grandfather was out of work, depressed, and scuffling. His college degree had been gathering dust for six years. His experience in Europe qualified him for nothing that was legal in peacetime. His Philadelphia homecoming had seemed to disappoint all participants, in particular his parents, whose keenest disappointment lay in discovering that, despite the captain’s bars and the decorations for actions he could not discuss, they were still disappointed in him.
“Everything that has happened to you in your life before now,” Uncle Ray said, “was part of the plan. And tonight it’s all going to come together and make sense.”
“You know this.”
“I do.”
“God slips you the inside dope.”
Uncle Ray ran his hand along the tuck-and-roll upholstery under his thigh, his smooth chin adorned with the minute smirk of a man with a fix in.
“Christ, you are so full of it, Ray!”
“Yeah? So let’s make a bet,” Uncle Ray said. Only moments after his pious outburst, along the very lines my grandfather had employed to needle him, my great-uncle pointed unwittingly toward the exit door through which he and the custom Brunswick pool stick would afterward pass. “Five hundred dollars says you walk into that shul, in the first half hour—no, in the first ten minutes—the Holy One’s plan for you will be revealed. The reason you needed to show up tonight.”
“What horseshit,” my grandfather said. “Brother, you are on.”
His discharge pay had been snarled in red tape, and he didn’t have anything close to five hundred dollars, but he figured you had to like his odds.
* * *
My grandmother turned toward the doors of the reception room, curious to see the new-crowned princeling of Jewish Baltimore. She caught a glimpse of a slender young man in a navy blazer with buttons like gold coins. Under a velvet yarmulke, also navy blue, he wore his ginger hair half an inch too long. Entering the room, he was mobbed by a group of men (among them Judge Waxman) who teased and fussed over him like uncles ushering a virgin nephew into a brothel. The rabbi was soon lost from view. Mrs. Waxman coughed up a Yiddish imprecation or description of what lay in store for her husband when they got home.
“I don’t know,” my grandmother heard the rabbi say. He was making a show of reluctance, letting the men pull him by the wrists into the room. “Gentlemen, I have my doubts.”
As he was swept, redolent of gardenia, past my grandmother, she heard him apologizing for his tardiness. “It wasn’t my fault,” he said. “Blame my date.”
“The brother,” Mrs. Zellner said. She sounded doubtful of the identification, as if the visible facts did not conform with what she had been told. “A decorated war hero.”
My grandmother saw my grandfather lingering in the hallway outside the reception room, looking as if he harbored doubts far graver than his brother’s. He kept his hands straightjacketed so fiercely in his pockets that they had begun to pull open the fly of his trousers. His knit necktie was ill-knotted, and his brown tweed blazer, worn over a chambray shirt that needed ironing, was too tight at the shoulders. Everything—the music, the lights, the rattle of wheels and dice, the outbursts of joy or disgust from the tables, his clothes, his skin—seemed to fit the man too tightly. Only his eyes had found a way to escape. They leaped to my grandmother from the hollows of his face as though from the windows of a burning house.
“He could stand a little more decoration,” said Mrs. Waxman.
* * *
For all the resistance he had put up to attending that evening’s event, my grandfather had given no thought to what it would be like when he got there. It was worse than he could have imagined. “Night in Monte Carlo”! A sequined half-moon, swags of ten-watt stars, paper carnations and potted palms, all carted in to cloak machinery that had been rigged to grind everyone down to zero sooner or later: To my grandfather, postwar, it seemed a ham-fisted synopsis of the world as he had come to understand it.
He sidled a little way into the room, hands stuffed into the pockets of his workman’s pants, feeling fit for nothing. He lowered his head to avert his eyes from the gaudiness and blare, the unseemliness of his unscathed homeland and countrymen, the unseemliness of Baltimore and its thirty thousand well-fed Jews.
The girl in the black dress walked right up to him. He had not spoken to a desirable woman who was not at some level his enemy or a whore since 1944.
“I was not ready for her,” he told me. “I was totally unprepared.”
She was wearing sunglasses indoors, at night. Around her shoulders the remains of what had been a fox sank its teeth into itself. She came confidently but hedging a little, head cocked to one side, as if only eighty-five percent certain they had met before and prepared to acknowledge her mistake. Between the fox stole and the bateau neck of the cocktail dress (on loan from the board president’s daughter) blazed an inch of bare white collarbone.