Certain neighbors and acquaintances were shocked, after Ilse’s funeral, by Kaspar’s near-immediate resumption of work; but no one who knew him well questioned the depth of his grief. My grandfather may have been a reasonable man, blessed with mental fortitude and common sense, but he harbored a talent for guilt that went beyond all reason. He’d brought about his first wife’s death, he was sure, by failing to recognize the danger that his brother’s madness posed, and then by hauling her across the ocean; and his complicity in Ilse’s death was even clearer.
Quietly, imperceptibly, without confiding in a soul, Kaspar began to see relations between the sexes as a thing to be avoided. Though he lacked a tyrant’s nature, his pain made him a man to be deferred to: over time, visits to 153 Voorhees Avenue — even by other children — grew less and less frequent. The house became a lonely place, shrouded and somber, where conversation took place in a hush. The baby didn’t mind, of course, not knowing any better; and Enzian and Gentian didn’t mind — just the opposite, in fact — because they had the baby.
* * *
The baby entered their lives like a flood or a plague or the death of some biblical king: a twitch of God’s will that changed history forever. The twins had begun taking Torah instruction on Thursday afternoons and they were unafraid to think in sacred terms. Enzian suspected that she and her sister might themselves be a species of angel, seraphim put among men for a purpose both high-minded and obscure, in which case the baby was probably some sort of herald. Their stepmother had been a vague, muted thing, hard to bring into focus; the baby stood out electrically from his surroundings, beatific and bright, as if God’s fingertips rested on the crown of his head. Gentian was slightly less church-drunk than her sister, but she agreed that the baby was a creature of wonder. No one else paid attention — Kaspar seemed half-asleep most of the time, and Buffalo Bill had never had the slightest use for children — so care of the baby devolved onto them.
The twins had drawn up a list of potential names before they’d ever set eyes on their brother, as if they’d known that the choice would be left up to them. Enzian had been in favor of something Talmudic, in keeping with the child’s significance: Moses, for example, or Nebuchadnezzar. But Gentian (always the more practical of the two) argued that too messianic a name could be risky. Names were dangerous things: names singled you out from the crowd. Hadn’t their own father changed his name — and theirs, too — when they’d arrived in New York City? Oma and Opa Silbermann, on the other hand, had kept theirs the same. And Oma and Opa Silbermann were dead.
“They’re not dead,” Enzian said, brandishing a rattle at the baby. “Papa got a letter at Passover.”
“Postmarked last year, Enzie. I heard Papa tell Ilse—”
“Ilse’s dead,” Enzian declared, in that grown-up way of hers that ended every argument. “Oma and Opa aren’t. They just moved to Poland, that’s all. The same way that we moved to here.”
Gentian took the rattle back. “Who told you that?”
“You know who.”
“Ottokar?”
Enzian bit her lip and said nothing. Ottokar was a little flying thing with hooked legs that lived in the ginkgo tree outside their bedroom. On certain warm nights he’d come in through the window and cling to Enzian’s ear like a fat clip-on earring and tell her a story. Sometimes Enzian would pass what he told her along, but most of the time she kept it to herself. Papa said it was a thing like a locust — a pest. But everything Ottokar told them turned out to be true.
“I’ve got another idea for what to call the baby,” Enzian said. “Peanut. That’s what he looks like.”
Gentian wasn’t listening. “What else did Ottokar tell you?”
“That we should stop talking German. He says people don’t like it.”
“I don’t like it,” said Gentian. She was always quick to agree with Ottokar’s suggestions, always taking his side, in the hope that he might one day talk to her instead. She and Enzie hadn’t spoken German in a long time, anyway, not even with Uncle Willy or their father. “What else?”
“We have to take care of him.”
“Who?”
“Peanut, of course. He’s going to be famous.” Enzian shut her eyes like a cat, which was as close as she got to a smile. “But you knew that already.”
“I knew that already,” said Gentian. “He’s going to be famous.” Enzian was right — she was right almost always. How could the baby be anything else?
* * *
There’s nothing like writing a family history, Mrs. Haven, for shining a light into the fusty darkness. Take my dad, for example. Orson isn’t even out of diapers yet, narrative-wise — he’s barely been named! — and already he seems less alien to me, less inscrutable, less forbidding. He was sphinxlike for most of my childhood, a textbook case of the Sequestered Father: in quarantine for no apparent reason, existing at a small but definite remove, as his own father had done. He emerged from the basement, as far as I can remember, for one of only three reasons: to eat frozen yogurt, to fight with the Kraut (as he’d taken, more or less affectionately, to calling his wife) or to watch NCAA ball in the den. I would put in hours beside him on the couch, matching him scoop for scoop, before he’d privilege me with so much as a glance. But sometimes, if the game was going well — or catastrophically badly — he’d suddenly jerk upright, drag a hand across his face and stare at me as though I’d just dropped from the sky. I lived for those moments, at least when I was small.
“Look at that goddamn toss,” he groaned one Rose Bowl afternoon — I’d just turned ten, Mrs. Haven, if memory serves — as the Trojans (his favorites) were being steamrolled by Michigan State. “Look at that cuntsniffer chuck that pigksin. That’s what you call a Hail Mary pass, Waldy. It means you fucking lose.”
“I know what a Hail Mary is, Orson.”
“All right, smarty knickers. What you don’t know, however, is this.” He paused for effect. “That football is a goddamn time machine.”
I had his attention now — as much of it as I was likely to get — and I framed my next question with care. “How is a football like a time machine, exactly?”
“In two ways,” he growled, his watery gray eyes finding mine at last. “You won’t contest the fact, I hope, that the football — even when that shitbird McNamara throws it — is in motion. What happens to an object in motion?”
I hesitated. “It ends up somewhere else?”
“Horsecocky, son. You can do better. Do your thinking dance for me and pray for rain.”
I closed my eyes and tried to visualize the answer. “Because time passes more slowly—”
“—for an object in motion. Good. But there’s another reason. That ball’s not only moving forward, is it? It’s also moving up.”
I said nothing, Mrs. Haven, because I didn’t need to. There was no stopping Orson once he’d hit escape velocity.
“Have I told you about the Lipschitz Protocol? No? One of the most elegant experiments in history. I nearly named you Lipschitz on account of it.”
I thanked him for reconsidering.
“You’re welcome. Now listen up: one of the Patent Clerk’s early predictions was that time should run more slowly near something really big, like the earth, on account of gravity. Can you guess why?”