Moonglow. Michael Chabon
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and my grandfather had demolished it with a ferocity that approximated hope. Working alone or with my mother passing him nails from a bucket or bracing a plank with her bottom, he had cut, framed, and whitewashed the lumber of the new one, carpentering its Gothic lace under the guidance of another library book. The new porch felt sound and solid under the weight of him. Like the rest of the house, it was not and would never be his property, but in those years his ambition was not to own a piece of the world. Just to keep that piece from falling down or burning up around him would suffice.
The spring afternoon had turned cool, but the back door was open. My grandfather smelled onions, bay leaf, simmering wine. He heard the “Trout” quintet bubbling on the record player in the living room. The kitchen windows streamed with vapor. Behind them darted the shape of my grandmother. She was an excellent cook, never more calm or present than with her hand on the rosewood grip of a razor-sharp Sabatier. In the early fifties, before her first hospitalization, she had been a frequent guest on WAAM’s Home Cooking, giving lessons in French cooking to Baltimore housewives (those with televisions, at any rate) and briefly the host of her own program, La Cuisine, which aired two mornings a week. *
“Look who’s here,” my grandfather said, coming into the heat of the kitchen.
She looked up from her bowl and whisk. She reached around to untie her apron. She had set her hair and put on her pearls. The pearls lay against the ruddy expanse between her throat and the cleft revealed by the scoop neck of her black sweater. The pearls seemed to radiate the absorbed heat of her skin. My grandparents forgave each other with the pragmatism of lovers in a plummeting airplane. There would be ample time for reproach in the event of their survival.
“We have an hour before the school bus,” my grandmother said.
My grandfather took off his shoes, his suit and tie, his curdled white shirt, his socks and garters. My grandmother helped him out of his undershorts. She led him naked up to the bathroom so he could wash away the Tombs.
Hot water was a pleasure, but he did not linger under the shower. When he came into the bedroom, my grandmother had unfurled her naked body on the bed, propped on an elbow. Knowing that he liked the look of it, she had retained the string of pearls.
A photograph of my grandmother posed in a bikini, taken in Florida when she was in her mid-forties, shows a zaftig dame with impressive cleavage and dimpled knees. By then she had undergone the first-generation hormone replacement therapy (HRT) that softened her body and pacified her mind.* When she took my grandfather into her arms on the afternoon of his release from the House of Detention, her abdomen was rounded and firm under the watered silk of her stretch marks. Her waist remained narrow, her wrists and ankles thin. He took one ankle and used it to drag her across the bed. He pinned her upraised legs against him and entered her with his feet planted on the floor. The pearls shone against her skin in the failing daylight.
* * *
As he was getting up from the toilet one morning in March 1990, in the master bathroom of his condominium at the Fontana Village retirement community in Coconut Creek, Florida, my grandfather heard something snap. He woke up bloody on the bathroom floor with a fat lip and a leg fracture. Later the broken bone would prove to be the result of a bone metastasis; it turned out that for the past six months, without telling anyone, he had been declining to undergo treatment for a carcinoid tumor in his gut. But at first all we knew was that he had fallen, and that someone would have to look after him as he recovered from a broken leg.
My mother, a public interest litigator, was in the midst of bringing a class-action suit against a pharmaceutical company whose popular second-generation HRT drug appeared to be giving thousands of women ovarian cancer and killing them before they turned sixty. My younger brother, embarked on a career as an actor in L.A., had just booked a TV pilot, a proposed reboot of the ’70s show Space: 1999. I was about to start a reading tour for the paperback edition of my first novel and was in the midst of an attempt, which turned out to be futile, to salvage something more than the material for a few short stories from the staved-in hull of my first marriage.
There was also the shadowy Lady Friend. Pooling information, we discovered that my grandfather had said little to any of us about her. Her name was Sally. She was an artist. She was a recent widow. None of us had a phone number or even knew her last name.
Sally called my mother on the day after my grandfather’s accident and got right to the point: Though she and my grandfather had been dating only since September and were still getting to know each other, she was willing to help. But she had spent three brutal years nursing her late husband through his illness, decline, and recent death, and frankly, she was not sure she had the strength. My mother thanked Sally and said she understood. She had the sense that Sally already knew my grandfather well enough to imagine that he might not take to being nursed.
So my mother flew to Florida to fetch the man who had been her father since she was not yet five years old. She hoped that by bringing him to Oakland she would be able to arrange for his care and whatever therapy he needed and still be able to do her job. She booked him a first-class seat—over his strenuous objections—for the long trip west, so that he would be more comfortable. She arranged for his mail to be forwarded, and packed a suitcase with his clothes and papers. It was a big suitcase, with plenty of room for personal items, but my grandfather chose to bring only five:
1 Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel by Willy Ley (3rd edition, Viking, 1957), a history of rocket flight up to 1956, combined with a detailed if ultimately mistaken prognostication of a manned mission to the Moon. I knew the book and its author were longtime favorites of my grandfather, but I had never seen this particular copy. It lacked a dust jacket and bore clear evidence—tape stains, a tear on the pastedown where a pocket for the date card had been, new york state dept. of corrections rubber-stamped along the top edge—of its provenance. When I flipped through its pages, I noticed that throughout the book, someone—presumably my grandfather—had used a black marker to blot out certain words. I held up the defaced pages to the bedside lamp. Every blot covered an occurrence of one man’s name: Wernher von Braun.*
2 A Zippo, known as “Aughenbaugh’s lighter,” which he had carried in his right pants pocket for as long as I could remember. He had quit smoking before I was born, but I’d seen him use Aughenbaugh’s lighter many times to light charcoal grills, chimney logs, campfires. On a smooth oval, set into a nickel finish otherwise pebbled to hide scratches, you could make out traces of an engraved representation of an organic molecule, a linked pair of hexagons whose vertices were Cs, Hs, and Os. Over the years I had asked him a few times what molecule was represented, but the answer I received (“Maltose”), or the reason for the answer (“Because it makes donuts taste good”) struck me as so nonsensical and seemed to explain so little—my grandfather didn’t even like donuts—that I finally concluded he was putting me on. As for the Zippo’s eponym, my grandfather would only say that Aughenbaugh had been an Army buddy.
3 A black-and-white photograph of my mother, taken in August 1958. In the photo she was sitting bareback on a lean gray horse. She wore a beach towel around her hips and a one-piece swimsuit that she filled out more thoroughly than might be advisable for a girl not yet sixteen. She and the horse were angled away from the photographer, looking to his left. My mother held an archery bow with an arrow nocked to the drawn bowstring, ready to let fly at a target out of the frame. I had never seen the photo before it showed up among my grandfather’s belongings. Neither he nor my mother would say much about it except that it had been taken at a hotel in Virginia Beach during the period of her life when she was remanded to the custody of Uncle Ray. My mother’s hair was unkempt, and the look in her eyes, taking aim, struck me as murderous.
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