could not help but admire, by using a kitchen spoon to fling cotton balls larded in Vaseline, like tiny gouts of Greek fire, directly into the treehouse.)
The second thing my grandfather felt was rage. The persistence of his wife’s madness was an insult, an act of defiance, a repudiation of the past two years of relative peace in their marriage. From the top of his hill my grandfather shouted my grandmother’s name like God summoning a prophet to a mountain of reckoning. Even five hundred feet from the roar of the flames, his voice in his own ears sounded thin and feeble. Its very feebleness increased his anger.
He strode down the hill at a vengeful clip. If he didn’t find her already burned up and dead, then he intended to kill my grandmother. He held off on making the decision as to how the killing would be done until he got his hands on her and discovered which method promised the sweetest deliverance.
By the time he reached the bottom of the hill, the tree was englobed in gases, spewing a long orange jet. It looked, my grandfather said, like a comet on an old map of the heavens. Between him and the tree hung a curtain of heat that turned his cheeks red for days afterward and singed the tips of his hair. His anger dissipated as he contemplated the shimmering curtain, a heart of fire pumping its lifeblood into the sky. There was nothing for him to do but stand there and marvel.
* * *
My mother remembered none of this.
“Just the next morning,” she said. “The tree was this shriveled black stump. Like a burnt wick on a candle.”
She had changed out of her work pantsuit into a turtleneck and jeans. She had more work to do on the class-action suit, but she was taking a break to knit a stocking cap for her father, who often complained that his head felt cold. When she was through, it would have gold and crimson stripes and a green pom-pom. It was not the kind of hat anybody would want to die in, but maybe that was the point.
Every night after work my mother came in and sat with my grandfather while I cooked dinner and got a tray ready for him with some Jell-O and a cup of lemon tea. My grandfather had expressed impatience at the constant presence by his bedside of one of us or the night nurse. He understood we were there because we were afraid he might die when no one was in the room. He had promised us that he would cling to life, in spite of pain and all cancers primary and secondary, until at last, one day, the doorbell would ring, somebody would have gone to the toilet, and we would be forced in spite of our precautions to leave him unattended. Then, and only then, would he permit himself to die.
“Your mother dosed you with Benadryl,” my grandfather told her. “You slept through the whole thing. I think she used to put a pill in some pudding. She was always knocking you out, any time you couldn’t sleep.”
I watched the truth of this surface in my mother’s eyes.
“Wow,” she said. Her recollection of these years was riddled, an empty quadrant of space lit by infrequent stars. “I used to eat a lot of tapioca pudding.”
I could tell she thought this explained why she had lost so much history from that period of her life, but I wanted to point out that amnesia, whether induced by drugs or by trauma, did not explain everything. It did not explain, for example, the constant gaps and erasures that she introduced into her accounts of the things that she did remember. My brother and I had grown up knowing that the destiny of our family was tied in some way to that of Alger Hiss. We knew that our grandfather had gone to prison, our grandmother to a state hospital. We knew that the time our mother had spent in the care of Uncle Ray had left her with a grasp of the intricacies of pari-mutuel betting, a couple of gaudy trick shots at nine-ball, and an abhorrence for racetracks, poolrooms, and their denizens. Those were all things worth knowing, I supposed, but they didn’t add up to much. If her children studied her silence as she had studied their grandfather’s, they could hope to learn only that silence, that old folk remedy, was at best a partial antidote to pain.
“Where was Mamie?” I asked my grandfather. “While the tree was burning down?”
My grandfather looked at my mother and out came his tongue, as if in distaste at my idiotic question. “She was watching it burn,” he said.
* * *
Like most wonders, the fire in the hickory tree was of short duration, and when its meal was through, it winked out like a candle snuffed. The suddenness of its departure, my grandfather said, was a measure of how thoroughly it had consumed the available fuel. One minute it was there, a comet plunged to the earth, dazzling the January darkness, its heat so intense that it stopped my grandfather in his tracks. The next minute it was gone, along with the tree fort, the tree, and the cult of gentle New Jersey ecstatics who had planted it long ago. A few flames crackled here and there along the nubs that once were branches. Then they flickered out, too, leaving smoke, a whistle of steam, and a light snowfall of ashes.
My grandfather found my grandmother sitting barefoot on the porch steps in a thin nightgown, outside the front door that was never used. Her cheeks were gray with ash, her eyelashes and eyebrows singed, her mouth expressionless.
“Never mind,” he said to her and to himself. He sat down beside her on the top step of the porch. The skin of her bare shoulders was cold, but she took no notice of the chill or of the arm that he put around her. After a while he got up and called the fire department. Then he came back and sat with her until the truck showed up, lights and sirens and seven men in boots and helmets with nothing in particular to do.
“Well, somebody went bananas,” one of the firemen said.
As my grandfather recalled the fireman’s diagnosis, so many years later, his eyes filled with tears, as if to drown the fire of his own bitter memory. He closed his eyes against them.
“Dad?” my mother said after my grandfather had been lying still and quiet for a while with his eyes closed. Resting, sleeping, scudding across a soft gray sky of Dilaudid. We watched his chest with practiced eyes for signs of respiration. “Are you tired? Do you feel like eating something?”
“Grandpa,” I said, trying to sound chipper. “Come on, let me make you something.”
He opened his eyes. I saw that the fire of memory had returned, inextinguishable.
“Tapioca pudding for everyone,” he said. “And lots of it.”
I remember my mother telling me, when she was in the midst of settling my grandfather’s estate, that fifty percent of a person’s medical expenses are incurred in the last six months of life. My grandfather’s history of himself was distributed even more disproportionately: Ninety percent of everything he ever told me about his life, I heard during its final ten days. Out of a scant handful of memories that he had shared with me when I was growing up, one of the few I heard more than once was of his first glimpse of my mother. He always put it more or less the same way: “The first time I saw your mother, she was crying her eyes out.”
This hardly qualified as reminiscence, since he never really enlarged upon it or added any detail. It was offered more in the way of an ironic commentary on some fresh instance of my mother’s stoicism, pragmatism, or levelheadedness, of her being a tough cookie, a cool customer.
“They think they can crack her,” I remember him saying during the days she was fighting (with his assistance) to disentangle herself legally and financially from the mess my father had made of
