Live with the trauma experienced while serving in Europe during World War II. Such flights allow him to survive childhood in a Philadelphia slum. On the surface, Chabon’s American-born grandfather isn’t as conflicted he approaches life with low expectations, “to minimize the impact of the inevitable disappointment.” But like most self-styled pessimists, Chabon’s grandfather is prone to “flights of preposterous idealism.” And she was so afraid of having that come out.” She’s “tormented,” Mike tells us, by “her hidden history of loss, loss upon loss upon loss unending.” “On the outside she was beautiful, but on the inside she felt ugly,” he tells us later. His grandmother also creates fictions about her dark European past, as a means of coping with her American present. She creates and conveys stories there as well as at home, where she tells Mike tales that give him nightmares. It was as if he had been waiting for my company, but I believe now that he simply knew he was running out of time.As it happens, Chabon’s grandmother does battle madness – while nevertheless managing stints on stage and on television. He started talking almost the minute I sat down in the chair by his bed. He had been installed in my mother's guest bedroom for almost two weeks, and by the time I arrived in Oakland he was getting nearly twenty milligrams a day. A lot of Germans were busy knocking holes in the Berlin Wall around that time, and I showed up to say goodbye to my grandfather just as Dilaudid was bringing its soft hammer to bear on his habit of silence: Out flowed a record of his misadventures, his ambiguous luck, his feats and failures of timing and nerve. There was scant hope of forgiveness, but my grand-father did not sound as if he expected, or even wanted, to find any.Īt the end of my grandfather's life, his doctor prescribed a powerful hydromorphone against the pain of bone cancer. I sup-pose he was also saying it to my mother, fourteen at the time, and to my grandmother, though arguably she was as much to blame as my grandfather. "Forgive me," he said to Miss Mangel and to the president. When one of his rages wore off, you could see regret flooding his eyes like seawater. He plucked out the letter opener and laid it on the president's desk. My grandfather turned to face Miss Mangel.
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