Moonglow

by Michael Chabon

I had yet to hear about the attack on the president of Feathercombs, Inc., so I could not point out to him that I sensed a motif of defenestration beginning to emerge in his autobiography.

I asked my grandmother if she was a witch. I had the odd sensation that it was a question I had been holding at the back of my tongue for a long time.

To claim or represent that I retain an exact or even approximate recollection of what anyone said so long ago would be to commit the memoirist’s great sin.

The shirt had scandalized some of his fellow villagers, but my grandfather had no regard for anyone who could be scandalized by a shirt.

Technically, Purim had fallen on a Friday that year, but due to some Sabbath pettifoggery and the city of Baltimore not having been walled during the time of Joshua, it was to be celebrated today.

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.

“It’s just the illusion of control,” Aughenbaugh said with his accustomed gentleness. “You know that, right? There is no actual control. It’s all just probabilities and contingencies, wriggling around like cats in a bag.”

Behind the rubble pile Diddens clutched his foot and diverted his thoughts from the pain by describing in Alabaman detail the unnatural use that my grandfather had made of my great-grandmother.

Troops were few and scattered, and to a passerby it might appear that the invasion had been conducted not by soldiers but by clouds of smoke, the gray sky pouring into the roofless houses, and a hunger so profound it had gnawed the houses to their foundations and the trees to stumps. Here and there a baker or a butcher had opened for business, but this apparent optimism or bravado was nothing more than the robotics of habit. There was nothing to buy, nothing to sell, nothing to eat. Smoke had left the eye sockets of houses with black eyebrows of astonishment.

One night the month before, back on the other side of the Belgian border, Aughenbaugh had delivered a lecture on the etymology of the word war. He said that he had looked it up and it came from an ancient Indo-European root signifying confusion.

I was surprised to discover at this late date that some part of the business of her girlhood had been conducted in my mother’s imagination.

The blue horse dipped and banked through the air between them. She was finished with the conversation. Where other, less tractable children might have openly rebelled or thrown a tantrum, my mother had learned to withdraw, to abstain, to retreat from a scene of conflict without moving a muscle.* My grandfather knew better than to waste any more breath trying to persuade her. When she checked out, there was nothing to be done but compel her physically or else back down.

“I’m disappointed in myself. In my life. All my life, everything I tried, I only got halfway there. You try to take advantage of the time you have. That’s what they tell you to do. But when you’re old, you look back and you see all you did, with all that time, is waste it. All you have is a story of things you never started or couldn’t finish. Things you fought with all your heart to build that didn’t last or fought with all your heart to get rid of and they’re all still around. I’m ashamed of myself.”

On balance, most of the time, in the ordinary course of life, it was probably best to say what was in your heart, to share what was on your mind, to tell the people you loved that you loved them, to ask those you had harmed to forgive you and to confront those who had hurt you with the truth about the damage they had done. When it came to things that needed to be said, speech was always preferable to silence, but it was of no use at all in the presence of the unspeakable.

Usually, you could rely on Americans to believe the worst about their heroes, but nobody wanted to hear that America’s ascent to the Moon had been made with a ladder of bones.

The ideals of justice, of openness, of protecting the weak—of fundamental decency—for which he had fought, and Alvin Aughenbaugh and so many others had died, meant nothing to the country that espoused them. They were encumbrances to be circumvented in the exercise of power.

That afternoon in the office of Dr. Leo Medved, he had chosen to continue to believe, not to question, what my grandmother had always told him about her wartime history. Under the circumstances, skepticism had felt like a kind of madness; to choose belief was the only way forward.

Chabon has been thinking about nearly his entire life—that we all need to find our tribes, and often it takes some longer than others. Waldman said she has long viewed Chabon’s relationship with his kids as another manifestation of his desire to have his own tribe. “We had all these children so that he could have more members of his club,”