Moonglow. Michael Chabon

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      I came into my patrimony of secrets in the late 1960s, in Flushing, Queens. At the time my grandparents were still living in the Bronx, and generally, if my parents needed to be free of me for more than a few hours, I would be deposited in Riverdale. Like the space program, my grandfather’s business was then at its peak, and though later he became a strong presence in my life, in those days my clearest memory of him is that he was seldom around.

      My grandparents and their Martian zoo of Danish furniture shared seven rooms in the Skyview, overlooking the Hudson. They lived on the thirteenth floor, though it was styled the fourteenth because, my grandfather explained, the world was full of dummies who believed in lucky charms. It was bad luck, my grandfather said, to be a dummy. My grandmother also scoffed. Though she personally had no particular fear of the number thirteen, she knew that bad luck could never be fooled by such a simple-minded stratagem.

      Left to ourselves my grandmother and I might go to see a movie, one of the interminable candy-colored epics of the day: Doctor Doolittle, The Gnome-Mobile, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. She liked to shop every morning for that evening’s dinner; consequently, we spent a lot of time in grocery stores, where she taught me to look for tomatoes that still had a smell of hot sun in their stems, and then in her kitchen, where she taught me the rudiments and entrusted me with knives. If I have inherited it from her, then she must have found a mindful mindlessness in the routines and procedures of the kitchen. It tired her to read aloud in English, but she had a lot of French poems by heart and sometimes recited them to me in the ghostly language of her loss; I formed the impression that French poetry trafficked mainly in wistful rain and violins. She taught me colors, numbers, the names of animals: Ours. Chat. Cochon.

      There were days, however, when being left with my grandmother was not very different from being left alone. She lay on the sofa or on her bed with the curtains drawn and a cool cloth folded over her eyes. These days had their own lexicon: cafard, algie, crise de foie. In 1966 (the date of my earliest memories of her) she was only forty-three, but the war, she said, had ruined her stomach, her sinuses, the joints of her bones (she never said anything about what the war might have done to her mind). If she had promised to look after me on one of her bad days, she would rally long enough to persuade my parents, or herself, that she was up to the task. But then it—something—would come over her and we would leave the movie theater halfway through the show, conclude the recital after a single poem, walk out of the supermarket abandoning an entire cart of groceries in the middle of the aisle. I don’t think I really minded, exactly. When she took to her bed—and only then—I was allowed to watch television. Once she was down for the count, my only responsibility would be from time to time to run a little cool water on the washcloth, wring it out, and drape it over her face like a flag on a coffin.

      Outside of the kitchen my grandmother’s favorite pastime was cards. She detested the games Americans considered suitable for children: war, concentration, go fish. She found gin rummy dull and interminable. The card games of her own childhood were all trick-taking games that rewarded acuity and deception. When I was old enough to add and subtract in my head—around the time I learned to read—she taught me how to play piquet. It was not long before I could nearly hold my own against her, though when I was older my grandfather told me that she was always careful to make mistakes.

      Piquet is played with a shortened deck of thirty-two cards, and before we could begin, my grandmother would strip a pack of Bicycles or Bees of all the cards from deuce to six. This was an operation she performed with a certain heedlessness. When someone came home after a long day at the office, say, hoping to relax with a few hands of solitaire, and went to the drawer in the cabinet where games were kept, he was likely to find half a dozen plundered decks awash in an indiscriminate surf of pip cards. Those were the only occasions when I ever saw my grandfather openly express irritation with my grandmother, whom he otherwise coddled and indulged.

      “It drove me nuts,” he remembered. “I used to say, ‘One deck! Is that too much to ask? Could there be one goddamn deck that isn’t ruined?’” He made a duck’s bill of his lips, narrowed his eyes, hoisted his shoulders. “‘Boh.’” I remembered this echt-gallicism of my grandmother’s. “She wasn’t ruining the deck, if you please, she was correcting it.” He put on the Texan-in-Paris accent he used whenever he spoke French. “See-non, come-awn fair une pe-teet par-tee?”

      One afternoon when my grandmother sent me to get a deck so we could make a few parties, I discovered that since my last visit the drawer had been cleaned out and restocked with several new packs of poker decks, sealed and in their wrappers. It would be a worse outrage to my grandfather than usual, it seemed to me, to “ruin” one of these brand-new packs.

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