Read At Weddings and Wakes Online

Authors: Alice McDermott

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BOOK: At Weddings and Wakes
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AS HAD THE ARMY in the years before, the post office swept Fred the mailman from the rooms he shared with his mother and gave him a part in the general history of his generation. His first route had been out in the suburbs, not far, he told the children, from the town where they now lived, and so, although he rode bus and subway back to Woodside every night, he was well aware of the way the suburbs were growing and changing, kids springing up all over the place, new schools and houses and grocery stores every time he turned around. He was well aware of another kind of life.
(“What's your mailman's name?” he asked the children and the boy said, “George,” and the older girl, “It used to be George but now it's Bill.” “Last name?” he asked and from the dining room where she was setting the table their mother said, “George was Kelly. George Kelly. I don't know Bill's name yet. He looks like he might be German.” Fred paused for a moment, considering, and then shook his head. No, he didn't know him.)
Winter was his favorite season then, not spring or fall as you might have guessed, and the snowiest days were the ones he most looked forward to. He'd start out snow-blind, highstepping it like a majorette, but soon enough his vision would
clear and he would come upon his route transformed—by kids like themselves, off from school for the day, building snow forts and rolling snowballs; by their mothers in galoshes and babushkas, clearing his path. The women would straighten up when they saw him, smile and touch a gloved finger to a runny nose—a gesture that the snow and the light and the children calling made seem as delicate and as flirtatious as a raised fan. “Hello, Fred. What did you bring me?”
He'd gotten to know most of the families pretty well, new babies and old quarrels and changes of fortune up or down. He'd always been a good talker, and a good listener as well, something much more rare, and of course he was never opposed to taking his time.
He winked at the children and raised his voice so that it might reach her in Lucy's kitchen, “How else do you suppose I got lucky enough to meet your aunt?”
But of course there was more to it than that, more than the simple luck of his garrulousness and her smile when she met him on the street, but in those first delicate weeks of his engagement he hesitated to consider too fully what foundation this new and tentative happiness was built on. He hesitated to recall, for instance, that final year of his mother's life when at each pleasant pause along his route he would hear himself saying it, saying “It's my mother, you see. Cancer.” Or, “No, not good today,” or “Yes, thank you, ma'am. She's a little better than she was.” Hear himself explaining each time he'd been gone from his route for a day or two that she was in the hospital again or sick from the medication or at home now and doing better, feeling all the while that he was somehow raising her from these sympathetic women's imaginary dead. “Well, she's a fighter,” he would say. “Always has been.”
Standing on the edge of a driveway, on a sidewalk under leafy trees, in the cluttered kitchens where they would offer
him a glass of ice water or a cup of tea, he would hear himself saying, “You know, she came here as a girl, all by herself at nineteen.” He would say, “It was no simple thing to be a widow with a child in those days.” And the women in shorts or dresses or blue jeans with rolled cuffs, the letters and magazines he had brought them still in their hands, a baby asleep in a carriage under the eaves, a dish drainer filled with wet dishes just behind them, would nod and smile and say some simple, comforting thing.
(Later, considering the course that had led him to her, he would marvel to discover how much of his life had been passed in the company of women, in their kitchens. In the Samuels' kitchen on Central Park West where he had done his schoolwork on a wide wooden table while his mother cooked or ironed. The various kitchens of their Woodside neighbors where he used to go in his teens to wait out the first lonely hours of darkness before his mother returned from the city, paying for whatever company he found there with gossip from the building, anecdotes from the neighborhood, jokes, mimicry, a light-footed time step, anything that would make the women in those households, mothers in stained aprons and daughters, fat or fair, laugh. A kitchen in England before the invasion where he'd sat with a woman in a thin robe and found himself wondering if given the choice his mother would disown him for what he'd just done or for the fact that he'd done it with an English girl—although the second and last time they met she told him her mother was actually Irish, a sign, he thought, regardless of what he'd already confessed to the chaplain, of God's own absolution. The kitchens all up and down his suburban route where year after year he paused for a glass of water or a cup of tea, children peering from the doorway, dishes tumbled in a sink, cats and dogs moving about his ankles and the women always friendly, sometimes lovely—one
of them suddenly crying once, out of the blue and as if her heart would break; one of them inviting him in, pouring him coffee, asking him how the weather seemed, a phone all the while wedged between her shoulder and her ear and a small voice rising from it like the sound of a shrill conscience; one showing him a good bit of breast, no accident; another throwing her head back to laugh at some joke he told and sending him the full, impossible image of a life he might have had with a woman in a kitchen such as this, two dog bowls in the corner and a child's drawing taped to the tile wall, the spring sun shining across the stove top. His own kitchen at home where he and his mother had shared a million meals, a million games of cards. Where she had leaned against the windowsill that looked over the brick corner of another building and talked to him at the end of every day.)
“She used to take a glass of buttermilk every night when she was well,” he would say. “Just a single glass of it, in the kitchen before bed. The best time of the day for me.”
He would say, noticing the way the women glanced down at the mail in their hands, or at the dishes behind them, or the Dutch clock on the wall, “She had some wit, she did. Always a story to tell. People in our building used to sit outside, waiting for her to come home, to have a few good laughs with her. Here she was just climbing up out of the subway after working all day—she was a housekeeper and never ashamed of it, she worked for fine people—and she'd be making them laugh.”
He would say, “She came here with little money but she managed to save. Sent me to the Paulist Fathers and paid my way.” He would say, “More brains than most people I know, was what the man she worked for told me. More wisdom.” He would say, in those final days he walked his route, when she no longer knew him clearly and had begun to vomit a thin black
stool, when the nurses had insisted that her hands be tied to the hospital bed and every pause he took when he delivered the mail threatened to get him to the hospital that afternoon just one minute later than he needed to be in order to be by her side at the last, “Not well, not well at all,” adding when his eyes began to tear, “She came here alone at nineteen, you know. Married my father at twenty-one. Widowed—have I told you?—with most of her family still on the other side. Some wit, though. Even the nurses themselves said it. The doctors, too.”
He saw the shimmer of impatience in their sympathetic eyes—the baby was crying, the children would soon be home from school. He saw, in those last days he worked, one or two of them glance up to see him coming and then duck inside. He was aware each time he paused to talk that this few minutes' delay might plague him with regret for the rest of his life, but still he could not move his feet again until he'd said, “I don't doubt you women think she was a burden to me, all the illness and the expense and me never married, but she was my blessing, believe me.”
And with the mail he had brought them still in their hands they said, “I'm sorry,” “I'm sure,” “I'll say a prayer.” They said, “But wasn't she blessed to have a son like you?”
His mother died on Good Friday and he asked for a transfer in the following weeks. Because he saw by then that he had said too much, that he had taken her full life, his full and varied love for her, and compressed it into a single grief, the flat, long lament of a bachelor son, an Irish mother's loyal boy. There were Mass cards and sympathy cards waiting for him all along his suburban route when he finally returned to it, and the discouragement he felt each time he came upon the white envelope in the black mailbox beside each individual door, the discouragement he felt each time he saw the familiar words,
the familiar faces—the Sacred Heart, the Blessed Mother—stamped out on the cards inside, seemed to threaten not only his own clear memory of her but his faith as well, which for the first time in his life struck him as paltry and trite, unequal to the complexity, the singularity, the irrepeatable course of any one life.
He understood only that he needed a change and there was a route in Brooklyn about to come available. He found himself pausing to chat in the broad sun, at the bottom of stoops and the doors of shops. Pausing to chat with old ladies and men on home relief and new immigrants whose speech he mostly only pretended to understand—nodding and touching a shoulder, “Oh yeah, oh yeah, right you are”—and who reminded him of what an ancient story the story of his mother's life had become. He missed the suburban snow days, the cool comfort of the thick leafy trees, regretted all the steps he now had to climb, but was not tempted either, here in this teeming and mostly indifferent place, to ease his heart with long and anxious descriptions of what of course could never sufficiently be defined.
May was there from the beginning, he supposed, a quickly familiar figure hurrying along. He'd tip his hat, “Isn't it a lovely day?” Glance over his shoulder whenever she entered the hallway as he snapped the mail into each box. “There's a package for your place, Miss Towne.”
It seemed significant that neither of them could remember when they'd first seen one another, when they'd first spoken. When he'd begun to recognize winter's arrival by the navy-blue coat she wore. When the green cardigan thrown over her shoulders had become as familiar to him as something he himself might have owned and taken from storage each year to commemorate spring. She once said as he rounded the corner
with his cart that she could set her clock by him. He thought to tell her that for him she set the very seasons.
He touched his cap. He saw his own smiling face reflected in her glasses. There was a check her sister Agnes was waiting for and what did he think was a reasonable time before having the bank put a stop on it? Another day or two, he said, and the next day rang the buzzer when he saw it had arrived. Looking through the glass in the door, he recognized her shoes and her legs and the hem of her skirt as she came down the stairs, bending to see who it might be, and then smiling for him.
She crossed the street with him once, a brown paper bag in her arms. They talked about how cool the air was that day—in five years they had found a great deal to say to one another about the weather. She mentioned a sister on Long Island. He said he'd once had a route out that way. She said she'd spent some time in a town farther out that was simply lovely. Green as can be and smelling of the sea. An endless garden with white swings. And in summer a wall thick with red roses.
“Do you like roses?” he asked. They had paused at the stoop of the corner house. He held a packet of letters cradled in three or four magazines.
“I like all sorts of flowers,” she said. “But roses best, I suppose.”
Over a restaurant dinner, where the delicate light of the chandeliers touched the polished mahogany and the bright silverware and dropped a pale blue gem into her water glass, he said, “I took another place two flights down. And the route in Brooklyn. I only knew I needed a change.” The merry hum of the other diners in that lovely, warm, cavernous place seemed to urge him on his way. “I had no idea I'd be blessed with meeting you.”
From Lucy's kitchen May called, “Isn't he the flatterer?” and then—even the children saw that she could no longer keep him out of her sight—she stepped into the dining room where the table was set with a cloth and the good china as if for a Sunday, although it was only a weekday night. She was smiling. She seemed to have lost the ability to swallow these wide and radiant smiles. The winter darkness had already filled the window behind her and the ceiling light made the hour seem later than it was.
She moved past the table into the living room. “What are you telling these children here?” And then stood behind his chair. She touched its upholstered wing and after hesitating for a moment carefully put her hand on his shoulder. Her skirt and her sweater were both pale blue. Her blouse was white.
“I'm telling them about my life in the postal service,” he said. “Your nephew here thinks he might like to be a mailman.”
The boy looked at her and said, “Well, maybe.” He wanted only to be a priest, but by then he understood the need for some alternative. For something to tell people when they asked that would not cause them to raise their eyebrows or to smile in that secret, sympathetic way that seemed to indicate some awareness on their part of the precise point in his future when his desire would evaporate. Some alternative he himself could turn to, should their sympathies prove accurate, should he find himself, as Aunt May had been, turned away.
BOOK: At Weddings and Wakes
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