He understood that it was possible to define the word fool as “one who takes on a job without knowing its true extent or difficulty,” but after all, that had been standard procedure in the Army Corps of Engineers. If there was anything like wisdom to be gained in this world, maybe it was to be found in the hopeful, hopeless motto of the Corps: Essayons. So, he didn’t know how big or hard a job he was getting himself into with this woman. At least he knew where to begin: with her hips pressed against him, her legs wrapped around him, her body encompassed by his arms.
* * *
Since “Night in Monte Carlo,” my grandfather had seen my grandmother three times.
The first time was as the result of a kind of reverse ambush engineered by Uncle Ray. Mrs. Waxman, recovering swiftly from the failure of the Sisterhood’s first plot to ensnare the new rabbi, had invited him to a “casual supper” at the Waxmans’ floor-through apartment in the Riviera, on Eutaw Place, to which, secretly, she had also invited my grandmother. Uncle Ray was hip by now to the conspiracy against him, however, and aware that his brother had blundered head over heels into the trap the Sisterhood had laid. Accepting the invitation, Uncle Ray showed up with my grandfather in tow, counting on a display of brotherly solicitude for the decorated vet with the thousand-yard stare to earn him the forgiveness of the Waxmans.
Awkwardnesses followed. A seating arrangement devised for pre-dinner drinks in the intimate drawing room of the vast apartment, where two Joseph Urban armchairs encouragingly faced an exceedingly narrow Hagenbund love seat, was spoiled both visually and tactically by the hasty interpolation of a crewel-work Eastlake side chair from the front parlor. Also, a leaf and a place had to be added to a kitchen table that was just the size, and had been set, for four. Also, the cook was obliged to reapportion fifty exorbitant grams of beluga caviar on the toast points with cream cheese that were the hors d’oeuvre. But the greatest awkwardness that night, undoubtedly, was my grandfather. Positioned alone on one side of the kitchen table, across from his brother and at an angle to my grandmother, he barely spoke, introduced food into his mouth at mechanical intervals, and stared at my grandmother without art or restraint. When she caught him staring, he would even more artlessly look down at the food on his plate with a show of puzzlement, as if he kept forgetting what supper was and how it was supposed to work.
What puzzled him, in fact, was my grandmother. When an engineer encounters his destiny or doom, it always takes the form of a puzzle.
The elegant girl he remembered from “Night in Monte Carlo” had been lively and cosmopolitan but odd and flighty and possibly a bit of a nut. She had, for God’s sake, zipped up his fly in a synagogue! The woman at the Waxmans’ kitchen table was no less beautiful than that girl but otherwise completely different in manner, in style, in energy. No more interested in the young rabbi than he was in her, she had chosen to wear a drab woolen suit-dress of an outmoded military cut. She filled it out nicely but could not enliven it. Her conversation was measured, tentative, careful, even grave. It gave no evidence of nuttiness. It was more polished, couched more in American English than two weeks before.
The absence of playfulness and flirtation in her manner brought out the languid solemnity of her feline face and eyes. The tangles of her hair had been combed and pinned close to her scalp and seemed more russet than auburn, with a sheen like the coat of a chestnut horse. The laugh he remembered as raspy, verging on braying, was a demure chuckle. At “Night in Monte Carlo,” my grandfather had pegged (maybe even a little bit dismissed) her as a fetching but scatterbrained gamine trying to relinquish her dark and painful history into the hands of hairstylists, dentists, and couturiers. A bird of passage, hollow-boned. The woman he met at the Waxmans’ that second evening seemed heavy at her core, subject to some crushing gravity. She was a vessel built to hold the pain of her history, but it had cracked her, and radiant darkness leaked out through the crack. When the conversation touched on the Carmelite convent where she had been hidden during the war, my grandmother’s voice grew husky. It throbbed with sadness. Uncle Ray passed her his handkerchief, and they all watched her dab at her eyes as the kitchen filled with silence and the smell of gardenia.
My grandfather was troubled and fascinated by this alteration from the girl of ten days before. Had the flirtatious gamine in the Ingrid Bergman sunglasses been a pose adopted for the evening, while this shapely vessel leaking sadness approximated something closer to the truth of her self? Or was it the other way around? Maybe neither version was the “truth.” Maybe “self” was a free variable with no bounded value. Maybe every time you met her, she would be somebody else. He became vaguely aware that he was experiencing pain, a pulsing in his left shin, and realized that his brother was kicking him under the table. Inferring or registering that Mrs. Waxman or Judge Waxman had just asked him a question, my grandfather looked helplessly from one to the other. No help was forthcoming from either direction. Uncle Ray was obliged to intervene.
“Electrical engineering,” he said in a dry tone of voice, sounding exasperated but not unamused. “He has a BS from Drexel Tech. And yes, Judge, he is very much looking for employment, sensitive as he is to the fact that his long-suffering kid brother would dearly love to have his couch back.”
Until very recently, my grandfather, on hearing this remark, would have shot back with something along the lines of Hey, you know what? I can be gone tomorrow, and would have meant it. For weeks he had woken up on Uncle Ray’s couch every morning not knowing why he was still in Baltimore, and lay down on it again every night telling himself it was time to move on.
“I’m interested in rocketry,” he was astonished to hear himself declare. “Inertial guidance systems, telemetry. I’d like to find work out at Glenn Martin, if I could. I hear they might be starting to do some things in that area.”
Mrs. Waxman looked impressed, or maybe she was just taken aback; it was by far my grandfather’s longest utterance of the evening. Judge Waxman said that, as it happened, one of his former law partners had a brother who was a vice president of the Martin Company. Perhaps there was something he could do to help my grandfather.
“Are they building space rockets out there?” Uncle Ray said. During the war, Glenn Martin had built a vast plant at Middle River in the northeastern wastes of Baltimore to manufacture thousands of B-26 Marauders and Mariner seaplanes. “Because let me tell you something, this brother of mine, with his inertia and his telepathy? He might look like a chunk of cement with a flattop. But he wants to fly to the moon.”
Apart from this and my grandmother choking up about the sisters of Carmel, my grandfather had no clear recollection, forty-two years later, of anything else said by anyone at the table that night. The only other conversation he remembered came after dessert and coffee had been served. His feelings about my grandmother at this point were a confusion of curiosity, pity, ambition, desire. He felt that he needed, for the sake of clarity, to escape her gravity for a minute or two, for as long as it would take to smoke a cigarette. He slipped away from the table and, looking for some kind of back stair or terrace, found his way to a large porch enclosed with glass. It was unheated but furnished with wicker and an étagère to hold plants and on a spring afternoon must be a pleasant place to sit and have money and be a judge. It had a closed-up smell. He opened one of the casement windows, hoping to find some purchase in the cold night air.
He had just lit a Pall Mall when the door clanged open. It was my grandmother, cloaked in a thick fur coat, sleeves dangling empty at her sides. The coat, like Mrs. Waxman, came enveloped in a formidable vapor of Tabu. It must have cost the judge as much as the 1947 Cadillac Sixty he had sent around to pick up his guests.
“Hello.”
“Oh, uh, hiya.”
She looked longingly at the cigarette between his lips. He passed it to her and lit another for himself. When he looked up again from the spark and flare of butane, still a little cross-eyed, he saw her shudder once, a traveling wave that passed from her hips to her shoulders