Moonglow by Michael Chabon
I asked her what I should do about the vest. She told me I should put it on because she had a presentiment that we might need to be cowboys today, and if I wore the vest it would establish a mood.
“This will be our inspiration,” she said, the first time I can remember having heard the word used. “I am inspired.”
She went into her bedroom, and when she came back she was wearing a Pierre Cardin shearling “cowboy coat” and a pair of Ferragamo “cowboy shoes” with chased-silver clasps on their stacked heels. She said that I should put the valise in the closet, but I ended up leaving it just outside the closet door. On the other side, in the hatbox, the masked Robber and his confederates bided their time.
* * *
I was known (by me) as the Cheyenne Kid. My sidekick or (as she put it) “kickside” styled herself Tumblesweed Bill. Tumblesweed Bill had curious ideas about how cowboys talked, what they did, and the cowboy way of life. Her cowboy accent sounded like Buckwheat on The Little Rascals. Her cowboy walk looked like a sailor hornpipe performed in slow motion. She had assimilated the notion that cowpoke was another word for cowboy, and as we trotted to the bus from the Skyview to Fordham Road and Grand Concourse, she did a lot of poking among our imaginary herd with an invisible picador’s lance (which she called an “arpoon”).
The Cheyenne Kid and Tumblesweed Bill went to Alexander’s and bought T-shirts, underpants and a pair of shorts, and a Matchbox car (a Land Rover like they drove on Daktari, brown plastic luggage packed on its roof). Then Cheyenne and his kickside came home and baked a tarte tatin. As always when she was in this kind of mood, the time passed swiftly. I forgot to worry about my mother for long stretches of the afternoon.*
The blue over New Jersey deepened and then faded. My grandfather was still at the office. Earlier there had been talk about what he might want for his supper when he got home, but when Bill and Cheyenne ate an entire tarte tatin, the question of the night’s menu lost its urgency. Tumblesweed Bill, to my dismay, seemed to vanish along with the daylight and my grandmother’s half of the pie. Her voice darkened. Her eyes went sad. A new mood was gathering the folds of its cloak around her. I had seen it happen before.
“Whatcha wanta do now, Bill?” I tried.
My grandmother didn’t reply but at first seemed to be considering the possible responses. After a moment she began to pinch and press at a certain spot at the base of her skull. She got up from the table, and from the expression on her face you would have said that she had just delivered herself of an opinion in the matter of what we ought to do next, even though she had said nothing at all. I had seen that happen before, too. She stood in the middle of the kitchen frowning, as if she had forgotten why she stood up. She opened a drawer, then another. She started rooting around until she found a tin of her Wintermans cigarillos. She clasped the tin in both hands and made a grateful sound but then once again seemed to lose track of her intentions. She laid the tin of Wintermans against the place at the back of her neck.
“Mamie?” I said.
I was surprised by how shaky and small my voice sounded. I was not afraid of my grandmother, exactly; I was never afraid of her except at those times when she was actively trying to scare me. I felt abandoned by her, or by my faithful kickside, and as the sky darkened outside the windows and night came down, I started to think about the puppets again. I did not want to think about the puppets or to be afraid of them, but before long it would be time for bed and already, in the imagined dark of their closet, I could see the shine on their lidless glass eyes. I could hear their voices whispering that my mother was dead. Before she had sent me out to play that morning, my mother had offered to tie my sneakers for me, even though she knew I could tie them myself. At the time I had rebuffed her, but now her offer struck me as ominous. Knowing that she was about to die, she had wanted only to tie her little boy’s shoes for him one last time. And I had refused her!
“I want to hear a story,” I said to my grandmother. I saw that I had surprised her; I had surprised myself. For my grandmother, enticing a story from the deck of fortune-telling cards was not like baking, going to the movies, or playing piquet. Her stories were like moods or fevers: They came over her.
“You want to hear a story,” my grandmother said.
I nodded. In fact, I didn’t want to hear a story at all. Between my mother’s operation and the half-intelligible rustlings from the closet, I had plenty to unsettle me already. She looked doubtful, and I hoped fiercely that she was going to decline, but she just looked at me, rubbing the tin of Wintermans against her nape. I decided to issue a retraction, but it got stuck in my throat and I could not seem to dislodge it.
“Little mouse,” my grandmother said. “Don’t cry.” She came to me, put a hand on top of my head, and tilted my face to hers. The hand slid down to caress my cheek. “I know you are worried, but don’t worry. All right?”
“Yeah.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Go. Go and get the cards.”
I went very slowly to find the tin of almond kisses and returned to the kitchen more slowly still. By the time I got back, I had managed to console myself with the idea that at least now my grandmother would not be abandoning me, which, of course, I now see, must have been the impulse behind my asking for a story in the first place. When she acted out the parts and did all the different voices, it would be like a continuation of her turn as Tumblesweed Bill. And for however long it lasted, the story would prolong the hours until I was sent to bed, and the voices she gave to her characters would drown out the whisperings and insinuations from the hatbox in the closet.
I gave the fortune-telling cards to my grandmother and sat down across the table from her. I watched her compose herself around the deck of cards, as if it held a quantity of something rare and important. Our eyes met, and then with a nod she broke open the deck and decanted its contents in a torrent from one hand to the other. The deck of cards became a wide elastic band that she stretched and snapped and stretched again. She riffled the cards with her thumbs and sprang them with a flourish. Then she set the deck on the table in front of me. I cut it. I cut it again. I reached for the topmost card.
Abruptly, she covered my hand with hers. Her wedding ring struck my knuckles and I cried out.
“No,” she said. “Never mind.”
I looked up, my fingers stinging, feeling reprimanded. Her cheeks were wet with tears. I could not remember having seen my grandmother cry. For some reason the sight displeased me. “Do you have a migraine?”
She shook her head. She opened her arms, and with a powerful reluctance I got up and took a step in her direction. She grabbed me and pulled me to her chest. My grandmother’s embrace was something implacable and impersonal. It was like an undertow or the impact of a concrete sidewalk. Her amber miasma of Chanel was too much, a mouthful of honey.
“You’re choking me!” I said.
“Oh!” She let go. “I’m sorry!”
She was smiling. There was something about her smile and the flush in her cheeks that made me feel I had done something unforgivable. Her hand went to the place on the back of her neck.
“Maybe I do feel the migraine coming, little mouse,” she said. “I am going to go lie down. Grandpa, he is stopping to the hospital to see Mommy. Then he will come home and I can get up and make supper for us. It’s okay?”
After she left I sat at the kitchen table awash in guilt and regret that seemed disproportionate to the crime of simply having, for the hundredth time, slipped free of her imprisoning arms. And she must have been crying, I understood now, because she was sad about whatever was happening or had happened to my mother. If only I had endured her embrace a moment or two longer, I might have been able to discover the truth.
I decided I would make her some tea and take it to her with a wet cloth for her forehead. I would sit on the edge of her bed and wait until she felt a little better, and then maybe, at last, someone would tell me what was really going on.
While I waited for the kettle to boil, I went to the deck of cards on the kitchen table and turned over the topmost card. It was the Lady, in her long skirts and hunting coat, standing by a stone bench in a garden. I turned over the second card: the Coffin, adrift on a gaudy bed of flowers, blazoned with an ornate cross.
My grandmother had explained to me that when you were telling fortunes, the Coffin did not necessarily stand for death or dying. It might stand for anything that was coming to an end, or even for something that was beginning. The Coffin had come up twice for me in the course of our time together. Once, in the story that resulted, my grandmother had transformed the Coffin into a little boat employed by the grandmother of Moses to paddle anxiously down the Nile after his basket because she could not let him out of her sight. The other time it came up, the Coffin had become a chest of iron into which a hapless escape artist named Paree Poudini had been foolish enough to have himself sealed and thrown into the Hudson River.
Nevertheless, I hated to see that card turn up.
I pushed my chair back from the table and stood up. I stared down at the deck, knowing that I now had to turn over the third card. I had to turn over the third card, a rough voice whispered in my head, because the first card had been the Lady and the second the Coffin, and if I did not turn over the third card then it would be true, for real and forever, that my mother was dead.*
I don’t know how long I stood there trying to work up the courage to turn over the third card. I heard the creaking of the teakettle. The electricity inside the clock on the wall hummed its unending note—A#, my grandfather had told me. The tap dripped and the drops rang against the tart pan. When I turned the card over, it was going to be the Bouquet, I decided, because my mother was dead, and though I had yet to attend one I understood that for a funeral you needed a lot of flowers. On the other hand, said the whispering (which the clock, the kettle, and the tap could not drown out), if I failed to turn the card over, that would kill my mother. My thoughts circled this paradox like a bee I once saw chasing itself around a lamppost. I pressed my hands against the sides of my head in a vain attempt to slow them. Finally, I reached for the deck.
There was a chiming of keys on a key ring. My grandfather sighed. “Somebody want to come and take the chain off?”
I went to the door to let in my grandfather and his own enveloping smell: raincoat, cigarette smoke, the dusty and metallic innards of a typewriter. I had never been so relieved to see anyone in my life. He did not look like the father of a woman who was dead or even, for that matter, of a woman who no longer had any feet. I wanted to hug him, but I was not sure how he would respond, since from his point of view all he had done was walk through his front door. It was not that he never hugged me, but there needed to be an occasion. He dropped his coat, briefcase, and the jumble of an evening paper on a nearby chair. He asked for a brief summary of my day and I provided one. He was almost always in a cheerful mood in those days, when MRX and he were in their prime, but tonight his manner seemed a little wan. I told him that Mamie had a headache and also that she had been crying but I was not exactly sure why. I said that I was making her a cup of tea.
“That’s nice,” he said. “You’re a good boy, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
He loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar. I followed him back into the kitchen. “What’s dinner? What’s all this?”
There were two dirty plates, two forks, and a tart pan in the sink, but he meant the cards. I could tell by his face that he knew what he was looking at and that seeing the cards made him upset. I decided not to answer either of his questions. I was afraid that he might throw the cards away. Before he could gather them up, I turned over the card that was now topmost on the deck.
It was the Child.
Was I the child? I had to be the child. The Coffin was my coffin, and the Lady was my mother, grieving over the news of my death. I wondered how I was going to die. I suspected strongly that a gang of French puppets would be involved. I saw the puppets inching themselves like worms across the carpet in the guest bedroom, crawling up the side of the bed, creeping across my body in the darkness like groping hands.
“Hey,” my grandfather said, his tone gentle. He crouched down and turned me to face him. “Mike, look at me. Your mother’s fine. Everything’s going to be all right. Okay, she lost the baby, but that’s a misnomer, because it wasn’t really a baby yet at all.”
That was how I learned that my mother had been pregnant, and that the pregnancy had miscarried, though I did not yet fully grasp that or the import in this context of a baby being lost. Someone had forgotten to tell my grandfather that I was not to be told.
“All right?” he said.
He needed me to say it was all right so that we could stop talking about the lost baby and get it over with. I didn’t say anything. Naturally, I had a lot of questions about the loss of babies, but I refused to ask them. I was angry; there had been a brother or a sister, and nobody had said a thing to me about it. Now that brother or sister was dead and nobody had let me know that, either.
My grandfather sat down at the table in the chair my grandmother had been using. He picked up the deck of cards and riffled through them deliberately. “What nonsense,” he said. “She was wasting your time with this?”
“We were playing piquet.”
“I count thirty-six cards,” he said. “What kind of piquet is that?”
I felt I ought to try to protect my grandmother. “Cowboy piquet,” I ventured. It sounded plausible enough to me.
He looked at me. I looked back at him. He nodded. “How about I fry us some salami,” he said.
While he was scrambling the eggs and chopping up three inches of a fat Hebrew National salami, I carried a cup of tea to my grandmother. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, talking softly into the bedroom extension. She sounded angry, with the particular sarcastic intonation that she reserved for my father. I don’t remember, if I ever really caught, what she was saying to him. Hindsight, and a taste for melodrama, and some faint ghost of veritable memory incline me to feel that they were words to this effect: You are not now free to leave them.* When she saw me come in, she gave her head one firm shake. She waved me and the cup of tea away. She mouthed the word Go. I turned and went back down along the hallway. The teacup jingled against the saucer with a sound like a ringing telephone.
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
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.”