Read At Weddings and Wakes Online

Authors: Alice McDermott

At Weddings and Wakes (13 page)

BOOK: At Weddings and Wakes
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“He'll be good at anything he does,” Aunt May said. And then added, “I think I'd like to be a mailman, too, if I could work in some of those neighborhoods we saw today.”
They had spent the afternoon looking at houses. To rent or buy, the children gathered from what their mother had told them in the few rushed minutes between the time they'd come home from school to the spotless, ready-for-company
house (slipcovers and newspapers removed) and the time Aunt May and her mailman had appeared at the front door.
It was all preliminary, of course, Aunt May had said, but oh, they had found some wonderful towns and neighborhoods and had even seen a place with a
For Sale
sign that might do nicely. A bungalow, she called it, and the children pictured their own summer cottages, miles from here. A nice yard and a fence and walking distance to a bus stop that could take Fred to the railroad if he couldn't manage to get another route out this way.
“Only just to get the first inkling of an idea,” she said later when their father came home from the office and it was explained once again why they were here. “Just to see what's available. To see how feasible it might be. To see, you know, if we might find something we'd both like. Nothing very big, of course. Three bedrooms and a garage and a place for a garden. Nothing definite, just a look-see.”
Their father, who because of the company did not remove his jacket or his tie, mixed martinis. Their mother passed around a plate of crackers spread with bright pimento cheese. The two men in the living room seemed to the children to absorb its space and they recognized for the first time how small their own home might be: three bedrooms and a garage and a place for a garden. It occurred to them for the first time that their parents had once entered it as strangers, before either of the girls was born, having a look-see, testing the possibility. On one wall were two landscapes that their father loved: a stream in winter, a meadow in spring, and on another, their mother's choice, a series of pictures of little girls in old-fashioned bonnets. The drapes were pale green over off-white sheers. There was a floral couch, two green chairs, a dark rug bordered with pink roses. Two end tables with white doilies under beige lamps. A coffee table with another doily where
their mother placed the tray of crackers and a pile of embroidered cocktail napkins. A television in the far corner. A brass bucket filled with magazines. It occurred to them for the first time that each of these details had not always been here. That they'd been accumulated, carefully perhaps.
Their father raised his glass to Aunt May and her mailman and said his usual “Good luck,” which May and Fred and their mother softly repeated, “Good luck,” “Good luck,” “Good luck,” and then put their glasses to their lips.
Aunt May spoke softly. “A place that's walking distance to some stores, of course,” she said. “And to a church, if that can be. For Momma's sake. It's hard to tell this time of year just how green a place might be but I was looking for streets that were lined with trees. I love it when they touch each other.” She placed her fingertips together. “You know, in summer. A kind of canopy over the roadway.”
“Garden City,” their father suggested. “Or Valley Stream.” Rosedale if they weren't determined to cross the city line. Bellerose. Floral Park. All had some pretty streets.
Aunt May laughed. The children knew it was the kind of laugh she had once reserved for them. “Such names!” she said. “When you think about it. So pretty.” Her cheeks were flushed.
Their mother turned away a little, avoiding all eyes. “Oh, May,” she said. She might have been annoyed. “You'd think you'd never heard of them before.”
 
Driving home that evening, May sat silently beside her mailman, the fingers of her left hand wrapped lightly around the vinyl armrest inside the door. Fred's car was ten years old but seemed brand-new, the plush upholstery spotless, the dashboard without dust or decoration. He kept it in a narrow garage just behind his apartment building and drove it mostly
on weekends, to go to the cemetery or the department stores, or to the homes of cousins or post-office friends who lived on the Island or up in the Bronx. He said this morning that he'd barely put fifty thousand miles on it.
She glanced at him from across the seat. He drove carefully, she was grateful for that, leaning forward a little and with both hands on the wheel. He wore a brown felt hat and beneath it his profile seemed large and pale and—she was grateful for this, too—utterly familiar. Even in the darkness, in the strangeness of these unknown streets and passing lights.
“Are you warm enough?” he asked and without taking his eyes from the road he reached to touch the dashboard where the heater was.
“Oh yes,” she said. “Just fine.” He nodded and returned his hand to the wheel. Five minutes after they'd left Lucy's street she was lost and disoriented, although she had stood with Fred in the driveway as Bob, pointing and nodding, had explained the way. She looked out at the houses they were passing, dark rows of them lit by dim, quaint-looking lamps; lawns and sidewalks and in summer a canopy of trees, perhaps. She tried to imagine herself at home in one of these, locking up the house at night and in the morning pulling up the shades.
They turned onto a wider, brighter street and she recognized the grocery store she had once, on another visit, walked the children to, and then turned again and once more everything seemed strange. She saw, tightening her grasp on the armrest, that they were joining a highway, picking up speed, the turn signal ticking carefully as Fred leaned closer to the wheel, studying the outside mirror, and then sat back again as they joined the rapid flow of sparse traffic.
Now the rows of houses with their porch lights and streetlights and lamps in curtained rooms were more distant from them and as they crossed an overpass there was only a sudden
darkness and then, in the midst of it, the spotlit entrance to a church, Christ or some saint perhaps, beckoning from a well-lit alcove above the door. Then darkness again.
She glanced at Fred once more and was once more grateful to see that she knew him; that the darkness and the unfamiliar streets and the car they had never before ridden in alone together at night had not for a moment made him seem strange.
The highway rose. She was looking down now, into apartment buildings, across the tops of bare trees. Left off here she would be utterly lost, she wouldn't even be able to name the place. Fred signaled again, leaning so far forward that his hat brushed the sun visor, both hands at the top of the wheel. The traffic was growing heavier, growing into a swarm of rushing headlights, and the tall lights along the road began to obscure what there was on either side. She had never learned to drive but she knew that had she ever tried such roads as this would have defeated her: the pace, the sound, the darkness cut by red and white light, the second-by-second potential for catastrophe.
Leaning away from the cold window she began a prayer, a quick Hail Mary, and couldn't help but think how ironic it would be, their taking the car out today to explore the notion of a house, a new life, ending in an accident here, injury or death—ending in the terrible regret that they had not let the day remain ordinary, a part of the old life that had served them well enough until now. The old life that was as immune to accident and irony as it was to too much happiness.
She looked at Fred again. She saw him raise his eyes to the rearview mirror and then return them to the road ahead.
Six years ago when she'd left the convent she had understood fully that it was not because she'd lost her vocation, only settled into it too perfectly. She understood that it was because
she had come to love too dearly the life she was leading, the early Masses and the simple meals and, in those years she taught, the small faces of her students. She'd loved her habit, the elegant long sleeves and the starched wimple, the skirts that brushed her heels and the great, extravagant pair of rosary beads that had swung from her belt. She'd loved her deep pockets and her small leather breviary and the way men on the street would touch their hats and call her Sister. She had entered the convent thinking she would give her life to God but found when she was there that her life grew more and more dear to her, that she had given it to no one but herself. She confessed this time and time again, and was finally advised to give up the teaching and request instead to train as a nurse, which she did. And then recognized in her patients, the old priests and nuns no less than the others, her own tenacious desire to live forever. She fasted and went without sleep and took on the household's humblest tasks and still she knew she guarded her daily life, each of her own breaths and the very beat of her heart. Still she knew she no longer desired heaven, the sight of her dead parents or the face of the living God held no appeal, and even the torment this caused her, the hours of prayer and confession and counsel, seemed part of a rich and complex life; a life impossible to part with.
Mercy, the convent on the Island, had been meant as a rest cure. She had by then developed ulcers and a nervous rash and had grown dangerously thin. But she knew on her first evening there that at the very hour of her death this place would be the single thing she'd most long for: an endless garden and the smell of the sea and a trellised wall thick with red roses.
Fred signaled again, looking over his shoulder to the left now, the city with all its lighted outcroppings of office building and apartment, church and factory, looming up beside
them. He signaled again, moving them toward an exit, and soon she was recognizing certain landmarks, the hospital, another schoolyard, the shops. Only now did they begin to speak, softly and in brief phrases, about what a long day it had been. She whispered another prayer, of thanks this time, as they came around her own corner.
He double-parked in front of her building and said he would only walk up with her. He had work tomorrow and anyway didn't want to be putting the car away too late. The garage was off an alley and not terribly well lit and it was best not to be back there after most of the lights from the apartments had gone out. Of course, she said, he should be careful.
He walked up the stairs behind her and they crossed the cluttered landing together. Already the day that had passed and all their intentions for it seemed like a dream, but still she knew it was a simple enough dream, the mildest of miracles, and so she could not help but think that they would indeed manage to steal away with it. At the door she put her gloved hand to his cheek and asked, as was her routine, that he give her three rings when he got in, just so she'd know he was safe.
 
 
ONCE, AS A young woman, Momma spread a damp dish towel over the wide lip of the sink and then stood on tiptoe to slip a box of soap powder onto the shelf above her. There was a clothesline strung across the length of the narrow kitchen and from it hung eight pair of wet black stockings. She ducked under them, lifting the floral apron over her head, placed the apron on the back of a chair, and then glanced through the kitchen window. A dog was barking somewhere, but still she found the darkness that evening to be something like her memory of the darkness at sea. She had a sense—she would have it all her life—that she'd been left off in these rooms as abruptly as the darkness at her window fell away from the light.
She straightened the white Madonna on the sill, then the saltshaker and the jar of spoons on the wooden table below it.
In the dining room Jack had the newspaper spread before him at the head of the table and as she passed he reached out and took her wrist and said, “Mary, sit down.”
She stood for a minute between him and the server that held her sister's table linen and wedding silver and ledger books of household accounts, that held in its narrow drawer, among hair ribbons and holy cards, balls and jacks and skate
keys, the three black armbands that she herself had sewn for him just a year before. “Listen to this,” he said. He began to read to her. She had had little education and was herself a hesitant reader but he read smoothly and clearly, without a finger on the page. She pulled out a chair and sat beside him.
It was an evening in late winter and the girls were all in bed. The kitchen was full of the odor of damp wool but here she could smell the fresh-cut lumber, the scent of that skeleton wall whose bones showed palely against the floral curtain her sister had hung to divide the living room. It had been a warm day, the first humid prelude to spring, and she had washed clothes and cleaned windows, so that now her hands were bleached and swollen, the lines of each fingerprint easy to read in the bright light: the swirl and circle and deep vertical line that was the irrepeatable pattern of herself. She touched her fingertips together, touched them to the table's smooth wood. His own hands were short and square, the skin beneath the web of dark hair paler than her own. The nails broad and pink and closely cut. He wore no wedding ring, although three days before they had become husband and wife.
He finished the piece and then told her, his eyes still scanning the paper, that it only went to prove what he'd always said, that the Irish would rule the world if they weren't so easily corrupted, and then he read out another headline as if it might confirm his opinion. But it was a different piece entirely, about the Navy Yard, and when he'd read it all he licked his finger and turned the page and said that what the boys in Tammany Hall didn't fully realize was that Brooklyn, not Manhattan, would soon be to the world what Rome had once been. He scanned the page again (he had not once, since the moment she sat down, looked her in the eye) and then once more began to read.
She sat quietly, feeling the smooth wood against her fingertips. It didn't occur to her to wonder if this was something he had done for her sister. She understood him well enough by then to know that had he ever done this for her he would not repeat it. That he would take elaborate care to distinguish the life he had had with Annie from this one—not discarding any memory of her, but making sure each one remained hidden, the way he had taken to hiding the ledger book she had written her thoughts in—so they would not be reminded.
He finished the piece and moved his eyes across to the opposite page. He said, scanning the print as if he were reading it, that Hylan was a decent man as far as he could see, a former motorman like himself, and he didn't agree with the people who were trying to make him out to be a raving fool. You had to be careful, he said, the high-ups would always underestimate the common man's intelligence. (“Jack loves politics,” her sister had written in a letter, “and when I told him I only left home because of Dad he laughed. ‘Just like a woman,' he said. ‘The whole country going to rack and ruin and all she sees is the drunk in the parlor.' I said the drunk in the parlor was reason enough for me.”) He began to explain, still speaking to the air between them, how the mayor had come to be elected, what part a certain Mr. Hearst had played, a Mr. Murphy and a Mr. Smith, men he himself might have known well, the way he spoke. When he had finished his oratory, he suddenly looked down at the paper before him and quickly turned its pages. He read her the society column and a brief description of a show. He folded the paper neatly and announced, as he had done every other night when he had read only to himself, that he was going to bed.
The next evening he called out while she was still in the kitchen. “Here's something,” he said, as if she had sent him on
a search, and he read her a long piece about a union riot in the Midwest. She came into the dining room as he finished praising union organizers everywhere and sat down just as he began to read again. His head was too large for his thin shoulders. His brown hair was thick and in need of a trim. A flush ran from beneath it, along the back of his neck and into his collar, even though his voice was measured and calm.
On the third night she brought her sewing basket to the table with her and on the fourth he suggested, as if it were only a fleeting thought, that he move one of the living-room chairs in here so she would be more comfortable.
She said that would be fine, and on the fifth night, sitting just behind him as he railed against the traction interests of the transit line, she said for the first time: I don't agree with you.
He turned to look at her, his elbow on the back of his chair, the newspaper still open on the table before him. “No?” he said.
“No,” she said. She held a black stocking in one hand and a black darning ball in the other. “Not at all. I don't agree with you in the least.”
He moved the heavy chair out from under the table and turned to look at her more fully. He was smiling but the red flush had risen to his cheeks. “Why is that?” he said softly.
She was aware of a certain risk, risk enough to make her heart beat faster. She of course knew little about what the article had described and she had until now kept her every conversation with him polite and courteous and careful. But the need to disagree rose up in her like appetite.
She slipped the ball into the stocking and moved it down the thin leg. “You're not considering the position of the owners,” she said. “You're not thinking about the men who created the jobs in the first place. They must have their due.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Gods of industry?” he asked. “Source of all good and all ill?”
She felt her own face flush. Nor had he ever spoken to her in such a narrow voice.
“I'm not talking about blasphemy,” she said. “I'm saying that the working people should pause to consider what they'd do if they had no work at all.”
“And then become slaves to show their gratitude?” he asked.
“Or starve to death and be grateful to no one.”
“Nonsense!” he cried and she raised the darning ball and straightened her spine. “I know what I've seen,” she told him.
And so it began. It hardly mattered what they argued about, just as it hardly mattered what she truly felt or how little she knew or how well she understood that if she would only listen to reason (as he began, night after night, to ask her to do) he would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was wrong, way off the mark, utterly mistaken; she disagreed. Whether they discussed the Mayor or the President, the Pope, the Prime Minister, the price of beef, she said, “No.” She sat back, spine straight, head erect. No, not at all. I don't agree with you at all. She shook her head, jabbed the sewing needle in and out, tapped the arms of her chair. “I can't agree.” “I cannot accept.” “Absolutely not.” “No, no, no.” She pursued whatever contradiction she had latched onto with a wild, determined, stubborn single-mindedness that at times made him slap the table and spring from his chair.
They were opinions she'd never known she had, opinions that formed themselves only as he began to speak his own and as this need to disagree, to raise her voice in utter disagreement, came on her like hunger. She began to read the paper herself, before he came in from the car barns. She began to ask
her neighbors what did they think. She slapped the armrest and shook her head and straightened her spine. “Now then,” she said to him. “That's what I think.”
And he would lean forward with his hands curled into fists and say, “Wrong, wrong. You've got it all wrong,” waking Agnes and May in the near bedroom. “Honest to goodness,” he would cry in frustration and anger while his daughters looked to one another in the dark. And then, with a heave of his shoulders, a shake of his head, he would explain his opinion again. “Listen,” he would say. He would try once more to convince her, if only because by then he had discovered it too, had discovered in himself her own need to object, to stand stubbornly against something. He had discovered in a life so easily shifted, battered, turned about, this overwhelming need to be, in impersonal argument if nothing else, immovable.
One night he sat back in his chair, his dark hair all askew from where earlier in the evening he had grasped at it with both hands, and he looked at her, at her fine, broad, serious face, her eyes, and said, “My own contrary Mary. My own.”
When the wall was complete and for the first time their hands met and locked in darkness he whispered it again, perhaps expecting her to resist (perhaps recalling the bedding of another wife), although by then the hours of reading and of argument had made his hands so familiar to her that the notion of resisting never entered her mind.
And it was another kind of argument, no doubt. This moving together in the very room where his young wife, her sister, had died and taken all charm, all good fortune, from both their lives. It was an argument, a stand of sorts, as contrary and contentious as any either of them had taken against the other in the past two months; as fully oblivious to reason, to the facts, as any she had ever taken against him.
It was an indication, too, of what despair they had talked each other out of across all those nights when they had been able to talk each other out of nothing else.
 
Sitting now in her ancient, terry-cloth-covered chair—as it seemed to the three children she had always been sitting—Momma watched them sip their tea and spread the soda bread with butter. There was a cloth on the table now and a spray of gladiolas in a blue vase. Their mother and Aunt May had gone to meet Agnes in the city, to shop for what they kept referring to as a trousseau, which the children gathered was merely a nightgown and a robe, and although she had promised to be back well before dinner, her absence, and Aunt May's, had unbalanced the three of them and made them shy. They had spent the last hour in complete silence, pretending to do their homework in the dark living room while Momma baked her bread. When she called them out it was to a table already set with teacups and dessert plates and they pulled out the heavy chairs and sat down at their places without a word as Momma poured the tea.
They might have grown into adults in the past hour, might have lost their mother and their aunt not only for this single afternoon but for all time, so great was their feeling of obligation and loneliness as they sat and said thank you and picked up their napkins and their spoons.
Momma took her own cup of tea to her chair. The children didn't dare look at her or at one another. Without that generation of grownups, of mother and aunts, who had until now blocked and buffeted all their contact with her, they had no sense of what was expected.
“Take some soda bread,” she said. And they did. “Take some butter.” She watched them—there might have been a
smile on her lips—and then she sipped her tea and returned the cup to its saucer and said, “Well, what do you think of all this?”
They turned to her and she nodded at the gladiolas and although the sharpness of her question and the firmness of her nod told them their answers should be quick and precise the long hour of silence and all their uncertainty made their tongues thick. They looked dumbly at one another and shrugged and mentioned that it was nice, they guessed. It was pretty nice.
“Last week it was daisies,” Momma said. She raised her white brows and her dark eyes flashed. “It's becoming quite a courtship, don't you think?”
Yeah, they mumbled. Yeah, it was.
On the mantel above the dining-room fireplace a gold anniversary clock spun under a glass dome. There was a small oval frame that contained the face of their grandfather, an old-fashioned-looking man with thin features and a mass of dark hair, and another, rectangular one that showed their mother and her sisters as children, each in a white dress with a large white bow in her hair, black stockings and high black shoes. Agnes was seated with Veronica on her lap and their mother and Aunt May were on either side, each reaching to touch the baby's elbows. A third, smaller frame stood on the opposite side and showed a startled, black-eyed infant in a long christening dress. Uncle John, they knew.
“Unnecessary, too,” Momma said. “When you think about it. I mean, flowers every week, what with the date set and her with a ring already. Wouldn't you say he's overdoing it?”
BOOK: At Weddings and Wakes
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