Moonglow. Michael Chabon
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paint, under a dense black brow. Apart from a shadow of stubble universal on either side of the chin, an invisible rule appeared to have apportioned evenly the male and female of her nature. My grandfather had heard but disbelieved neighborhood reports of sideshow hermaphrodites, cat girls, ape girls, four-legged women who must be mounted like tables. He might have reconsidered his doubt if not for the fact that he saw, filling both sides of the loose flannel wrapper from the neck down, only womanly curvature and shadow.
“The price of a peep is one nickel, Shunk Street,” she said. “I believe you may owe me a dime.”
My grandfather looked down at his shoes. They were not much to look at. “Come on,” he said, reaching for her arm. Even through the flannel of her sleeve, he could feel fever on her skin.
She shook loose of his grip with a jerk of her arm.
“He won’t come back this way for a while. But we have to go now,” my grandfather said. There were whiskers on the chins of his own aunts: big deal. He was here by the power of a wish on an evening star. “Come on!”
“Aren’t you funny,” she said. She peeked out of the doorway, looked to either side. She lowered her voice in a show of co-conspiracy. “Trying to rescue me.”
From her lips it sounded like the most peabrained idea ever conceived. She left the door hanging open and went back inside. She sat down on a cot and pulled a stiff blanket around her. In the light of a candle guttering on an overturned jar lid, panels of black switches and gauges glinted. Creasey’s knapsack lay neglected on the floor.
“Are you going to take me home to your mama and papa?” she suggested in a voice that made him momentarily dislike her. “A drug-sick whore full of TB?”
“I can take you to a hospital.”
“Aren’t you funny,” she said, more tenderly this time. “You already know I can unlock the door from the inside, honey. I’m not a prisoner here.”
My grandfather felt there was more to her imprisonment than a lock and key, but he did not know how to put that feeling into words. She reached into the knapsack and pulled out a package of Old Golds. Something about the pomp with which she set fire to her cigarette made her seem younger than he had thought.
“Your pal Creasey already rescued me,” she said. “He could have left me lying there right where he found me, half dead with my face in a pile of cinders. Right where those Ealing boys red-lighted me.”
She told him that from the age of eleven she had been traveling in the sideshow of the Entwhistle–Ealing Bros. Circus, out of Peru, Indiana. She had been born a girl, in Ocala, Florida, but at puberty, nature had refashioned her with a mustache and chin fuzz.
“I went over big for quite a little while, but lately, I’m getting all this action from my girl department.” She folded her arms under her breasts. “Body’s been goofing with me all my life.”
My grandfather wanted to say that he felt the same way about his brain, that organ whose flights of preposterous idealism were matched only by its reveries of unfettered violence. But he thought it would be wrong to compare his troubles to hers.
“I guess that’s the reason I started on the junk,” she said. “A hermaphrodite was something. It has a little poetry. There is just no poetry in a bearded lady.”
She had been nodding, she said, dead to the world, when management at last saw fit to throw her off the circus train as it pulled out of the yard, bound for Altoona.
“Creasey found my valise where those assholes had pitched it. Conveyed me to these comfortable lodgings.” She adjusted her legs and, before she gathered the blanket more tightly, caught my grandfather trying to see into the shadow between them. “Creasey is a bastard, true. But he brings me food, and smokes, and magazines. And candles to read by. The only thing he won’t bring me is a fix. Pretty soon it’ll be all the same to me, anyway. Meantime he doesn’t charge me more rent than I’m willing to pay.”
My grandfather contemplated the ashes of his plan. He felt she was telling him she was going to die, and that she planned on doing it here, in this room that jumped in the candlelight. Her chest blood was all over a crumpled chamois rag, and on the woolen blanket, and on the lapels of the robe.
“Creasey has his points,” she said. “And I’m sure the folks on Shunk Street would be happy to know that he has been kind enough to leave me in possession of my virginity. In the technical sense.” She squirmed against the cot illustratively. “Railroad men. They are practical fellows. Always find a way around.”
That started her barking into her scrap of chamois, which bloodied it some more. The violence of her coughing shook the blanket loose, baring her legs to my grandfather’s inspection. My grandfather felt very sorry for her, but he could not keep his gaze away from the inner darkness of her robe. The spasm passed. She folded the bloodstained part of the chamois into the remnant that was still clean.
“Have a look, Shunk Street,” she said. She hoisted the hem of the tartan robe, opened her legs, and spread them wide. The pale band of belly, the shock of dark fur, the pink of her labia would endure in his memory, flying like a flag, until he died. “On the house.”
He could feel the turmoil in his cheeks, throat, rib cage, loins. He could see that she saw it and was enjoying it. She closed her eyes and raised her hips a little higher. “Go ahead, sweetheart. Touch it if you want to.”
My grandfather found that his lips and tongue could not form a reply. He went over and put his hand against the patch of hair between her legs. He held it there, sampling it with rigid fingers like he was taking a temperature or pulse. The night, the summer, all time and history came to a halt.
Her eyes snapped open. She lurched forward and shoved him aside, covering her mouth with the bare hand while the painted one groped for the chamois. My grandfather took a crisp white handkerchief from the back pocket of his cutoff corduroys. He presented her with this evidence of the hopefulness invested in him by his mother, every morning afresh, when she sent him out into the world. The girl crushed the handkerchief in her fist without seeming to notice it was there. My grandfather watched her body tear itself apart from the inside for what felt like a long time. He worried she might be about to die right then, in front of him. Presently, she sighed and fell backward against the cot. Her forehead shone in the light from her stub of candle. She breathed with caution. Her eyes were half open and fixed on my grandfather, but minutes went by before she took notice of him again.
“Go home,” she said.
He eased the day’s inviolate handkerchief from her fist. Like a road map he unfolded it and laid it against her brow. He sealed up the flaps of her robe around her and dragged the awful blanket up to her chin with its babyish dimple. Then he went to the door, where he stopped, looking back at her. The heat of her clung like an odor to his fingertips.
“Come back sometime, Shunk Street,” she said. “Maybe I’ll let you rescue me yet.”
When my grandfather finally made it home well after dark, there was a patrolman in the kitchen. My grandfather confessed to nothing and provided no information. My great-grandfather, egged on by the patrolman, gave my grandfather a slap across the face to see how he liked it. My grandfather said he liked it fine. He felt he had earned a measure of pain through his failure to rescue the girl. He considered informing the patrolman about her, but she was by her own admission a drug fiend and a whore, and he would rather die than rat her out. Whichever course he chose, he felt, he would betray her. So he answered to his nature and said nothing.
The patrolman returned to his beat. My grandfather was subjected to lectures, threats, accusations. He bore up under them with his usual stoicism, was sent to bed hungry, and kept the secret of the two-sided girl in the train yard for the next sixty years. The following day he was put to work in the store, working before and after school on weekdays and all day Sunday. He was not able to make it back to Greenwich Yard until late the following Saturday afternoon, after shul. It was getting dark, and the weather had turned wet the night before. Along the tracks the reflected sky lay pooled between the wooden