“Oh, all right,” she told her brother and walked back to the schoolyard with the flower in her arm and the sweet bread in her mouth.
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Standing first in line, she presented the flowers to Miss Joan the way a child would present them to a queenâtaking one step forward and one step back, making the young woman bend elegantly (perhaps the first elegant movement she had ever made) to accept them.
A moment ago Miss Joan had stepped out of the school with her brown coat flapping open and her face a brown study in getting the day over with, but now she paused and said a red-lipped “Oh,” showing her huge teeth. She put her face close enough to the trumpets of pink and orange and yellow to catch some of their shade on her skin. Lined up behind her, the rest of the class watched in awe as Miss Joan led them inside with the flowers in her arms: a sudden May processional in the midst of Lent. Once inside, she placed the flowers on her desk and returned from the coat closet not with the brush and hair spray and small round mirror that she usually set up on her desk, but with a glass vase they had never seen before. She filled it at the sink in the back of the room and then placed it on her desk.
“Margaret,” she said, pleasantly, “would you like to help me?”
The child scrambled happily from her seat. Miss Joan handed her the scissors from the top drawer of her desk and instructed her to snip off the end of each stem. This she did,
diligently, and then handed each stem to Miss Joan, who placed it carefully in the tall vase.
“These are lovely,” Miss Joan said, moving the flowers in their vase. “Just lovely.” Her fingernails were long, as bright and as red as her lipstick. The backs of her hands were plump. “Wherever did you get these?”
Filled with the grace of her own bestowed blessing, Margaret said, “From the cemetery,” well before it occurred to her to lie.
Miss Joan stopped short, hands held high. She looked at the girl, briefly bared her ugly teeth. “You're kidding,” she said.
There was a ripple of laughter from the class behind them.
“No,” the child said, still at a loss to come up with anything else. She pointed vaguely toward the window. “Out there.”
Miss Joan stepped back, suddenly moving her short red fingers in the air as if she had touched a cobweb. “For God's sake,” she whispered under her breath and then, without another glance at the child, told her to sit down. Then she lifted the last two stems and without snipping their ends quickly stabbed them into the vase. She lifted the vase filled with tall flowers and carried them at arm's length to the coat closet. She placed them on the floor inside and quickly closed the door. She brushed her hands together and when she returned to the desk she eyed the crumbs of black dirt that the flowers had left there as if they were crawling toward her. Then she brushed these into her palm, and brushed her palms together over the wastepaper basket. She returned to the back of the classroom to wash her hands at the sink and then dried them elaborately. She came to the front again, pulled at the ribbed waist of her sweater and pulled with delicate red-tipped fingers the two seams of her wide tweed skirt. She
cleared her throat. Telling the class to do the same, she put her ugly face into a book.
A good three minutes passed before she heard the caught breath and she waited at least one more before she raised her head. It was the Dailey girl, of course, quietly sobbing, a ripple of nods and elbow nudges spreading out to the children all around her. Miss Joan settled these down with a stare but still the child, fists to her temples and head bent to her book (and it was a textbook from the District that she was marking with her tears), sucked and sobbed.
Good Lord, Miss Joan thought, would she really have to explain to the child that flowers plucked from a fresh grave were repulsive? Was it really necessary to spell that out to her?
“Margaret,” she said and had to say it again, more sharply, before the child, without raising her head, slowly stood, shoulders heaving as she fought to collect her breath. Tears dripped to her shoes.
“Do you want to go to the bathroom, Margaret?” Miss Joan said with infinite, eye-rolling patience. There was another tremor of laughter from a far corner of the room. The girl seemed to nod.
“Go, then,” she said and then watched silently as the girl, hands in fists and shoulders hunched, walked quickly up the aisle and across the front of the room, the fluorescent light shining on her dark hair, the plaid skirt barely moving against her hips. And it may have been the dark shining hair and the slim hips, it may have only been her own reluctance to acknowledge the disappointment she had felt when she realized that the flowers had not been bought for her, planned for her, that made Miss Joan tell the class with the girl just outside the door, “From the cemetery, no less.”
Breathing painfully now, the class's sudden laughter rolling at her heels, the girl headed for the bathroom and pushed at
the door. She knew in an instant that the place was empty. It was gray and green and smelled of disinfectant and old paint and the floor seemed to vibrate dimly with the droning recitation of the fourth-grade class downstairs. She went to one of the small sinks and scooped some cold water onto her face and then grabbed a harsh brown paper towel.
There was no mirror in here, it had been decided that mirrors would only make the girls dallyâand even the paper-towel dispenser had been slapped with a dozen coats of pale green paint. But there was a window that sometimes reflected, and she went to it now to see her face.
She saw instead her mother in her white car coat and gray skirt, a small white hat covering her ears, walking on the sidewalk opposite the school's fence, going to the bus that would take her to the subway, going to Momma's, as she did every day now to make up for May.
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HE SAID he was from Kildare, she wrote, and I said Cork by way of Mallow. And when I told him about Dad he laughed and said wasn't that just like a woman, 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. Then he told me his own reasons for leaving and he was full of them. Before I knew it he was shouting and banging his fist on the rail. His face turned so red I thought he'd throw himself into the sea. He hated them all, every politician in the country, and half the population too, it seemed. And with reason, I never heard anybody with so many reasons. It must have been all he thought about. I didn't like him much, but while I stood there, still holding the handkerchief he'd lent me, as big as a tablecloth, the sickness began to pass and for the first time I wasn't thinking about that awful sea. I was thinking how maybe once we got there he'd marry me. Love being so much harder to find reason for than enmity.
She wrote: I've stopped praying for them. For the babies my mother lost when we lived in the country, Monica and James and little Tommy (I won't write their names again). Because I can't hold them both in my mind, my own sweet baby's face and theirs. I am sorry for them, sorry for their tiny
souls and for my mother's grief, but I can't hold them at the same time, my mother's sad life and the joy I've got in my own. If it's a sin, I'm sorry for it. My sweet girl's little face is all I want to think of.
Jack's angry, she wrote. He'd wanted Mavis after his mother, God rest her soul, but I said it was a donkey's name. What a tongue I have. I put down Mary, for my sister. I'd already told her in a letter that I would. When he gets home tonight I'll tell him we can call her May. Sweet as can be.
And on another page: Dad's nieces were here again today. They mean well I suppose, but aren't they a pair of moles? Tweedledum and Tweedledee. I told them I'd taken the girls out yesterday to feel the snow. In your condition? they said. It wasn't a bit slippery, I said. But the neighbors! So there it was. They weren't worried about me falling but the neighbors seeing what a size I am, not nine months after May. They've got sweeter dispositions than their uncle and they don't drink as much, as far as I can tell, but still the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. I wonder how long it's been since either one of them has seen a bar of soap.
Another: Agnes will be the brilliant one. Already she knows how she wants things to be done and she's got more control over the other two than I have. I'm waiting for the day Jack tries to tell her what to think.
And this: Dad died three weeks ago Thursday and Mary was left to do all the arranging. How was it that I left her alone with him, sailing off as I did without a care in the world? I shame myself sometimes to think of all I can close my eyes to. And this morning Mrs. Power, the widow downstairs, learned her son had died, the one who was hurt in the war. Her only child. God forgive me, but my first thought when I heard was that she might have a room for Mary, now that Dad's gone and she's free to come. I'll light a candle for
the boy, but wouldn't that be something, Mary here? The two of us together again.
And: Jack was sitting up last night, having a cigarette by the window. Are you all right, I said, and he said yes, but he didn't turn around. He'd opened the window and there was a lovely breeze but I was still angry and so I didn't say anything else. Today I feel I've lost something. I don't know what. Just one night, I suppose.
Mary's here, she wrote. I'd forgotten how strong she is and how pretty. She shared my bed with me, poor Jack sent to the couch, and we talked until sunrise, the baby all the while twisting and turning. I put her hand on my belly to feel it and she said she remembered doing this with our mother. I told her she could stay here as long as she liked but she wants to spend tomorrow night at Mrs. Power's. She couldn't move her bowels, she said, with a man as handsome as Jack so near. I thought I'd have an accident myself we laughed so hard at that. There's a woman from church who knows a family on the Heights who may need a girl come the first of the year, so if it all works out I'll have Mary for myself till then. The girls were shy with her and I don't think she knew what to say to them, she's so used to the company of old men, Dad and his cronies, but it won't take long. She has only the money she sent ahead but we'll help out, Jack won't mind much. We'll manage. I am perfectly content. Or I will be when this bouncing baby is born. If it's another girl, I'd like Veronica. If it's a boy he'll be John, of course. For a certain boy I met coming over. Which reminds me to write down what happened with Mary and the chocolates, on the boat. Another time, though. This babe wants me in my bed.
And then a dozen pages more, unfilled. Agnes closed the book, its pages already begun to grow brittle with the thick ink. All night she'd heard Momma and their father brawl.
They called her Momma now and now her cool, broad arms, for all the times she'd held them in these past months, were more familiar than the fading memory of their mother's own. “You won't forget her?” their father once asked, in the beginning, but, really, what a thing to ask a child. In truth she wanted them all to forget since she knew now, all these months gone past, there was no other remedy. She wanted, young as she was, a return to the decorum the family had once known. No more sudden weeping and sloppy women breezing in to press her against their breasts. No more sympathy meals, as Momma called them, brought by curious neighbors who she said came only to see how they were getting along. “And where is it you're sleeping?” they asked Momma when she was still downstairs. “And what is this?” they said now. “A wall?” She wanted the door shut on them again. She wanted her family to once more be its own.
She searched the room for another place to hide the book. She had only a few more minutes before Momma returned from the store. Her eyes fell on the rug and the green chair. The fireplace. The skeleton of the new wall.
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MAY'S WEDDING took place on the last Saturday morning of July at 10 a.m., when the streets had not yet dried and the summer sunlight still seemed fresh and weightless in the thick green leaves of the trees. The wedding party arrived in two cars. May and Lucy and their brother John were in the first (May's arm in its pale white sleeve held to the window throughout the ride as she gripped the plush strap), Momma and Veronica and Agnes in the second, with the three children perched carefully on the jump seats. The girls wore their Easter dresses, the boy his navy-blue Confirmation suit that was already too short in the sleeves. On the floor of their bedrooms at home there were opened suitcases packed with summer clothes and in the front hallway two cardboard boxes filled with newly ironed sheets and towels that had hung in the sun all of yesterday afternoon, and the fresh sense of adventure and change, of meticulous preparedness, that the sight and the smell of these things had given them when they woke and dressed and followed their mother out the front door was with them still: glorious, miraculous, timeless day on the edge of the year's best journeyâtheir first wedding.
The sunlight through the limousine windows fell at intervals upon the three women's clothes and hands and gave some
new, clearer quality to each face as it was turned to the passing streets. Had May been here she would have been watching the children, gauging their delight in this elegant backwards ride, but Momma and Veronica and Agnes only smiled at them occasionally and then looked on ahead. There was a sense that they were anticipating, looking out for, not only the approach of the church but of the very hour that had for long been expected. With their bottoms on the narrow seats, their fingers wrapped under the lip of each as if they feared it might at any minute spring closed on them, the children, too, were aware only of the hour they were headed toward; the streets they passed were indistinct shades of sunlight and shadow and sound, too distant from their own joy to be real.
When the car glided to a stop, Aunt Agnes held out a gloved hand and said, “Wait. The bride first.” They waited and, looking over their shoulders, saw the chauffeur from the first car open the door and reach in to help Aunt May out. She wore a slim, off-white suit and a hat with a small veil and she stumbled a little as she stepped away from the car to look up at the church, the chauffeur turning just in time to catch her shoulder and her wrist and then, with astounding, bent-kneed alacrity, the small bridal bouquet that suddenly flew up out of her hand. He caught the bouquet against his heart and stood laughing with it, Aunt May laughing, too, and touching his arm, until their mother began to step out and he moved to help her. Once on the sidewalk their mother touched Aunt May's shoulder and both women looked down at the turned ankle and the uneven concrete and Aunt May's low white heels. Then Uncle John stepped out and their own chauffeur opened the limousine's door.
The church was the same one their mother had been married in and so they knew they had been to it any number of times before, but their having arrived at it in such a manner
and on such a day made it seem utterly transformed. The girls placed their hands into the wide dry palm of the chauffeur and then stood on the sidewalk with Momma and Aunt Veronica as Agnes went forward to give some last-minute instructions to their mother and the bride. Uncle John held out his elbow and Aunt May slipped her hand beneath it, looked at the sky or at the church steeple and then began to go toward the steps. At the last minute she turned and smiled at the children and then waved with her bouquet that they should come along, as if the day was a gift from her to them, after all.
Their mother followed and then Aunt Agnes turned to move them all forward.
Inside the dark vestibule they noticed first that May and their mother had disappeared and then, with such a shock of recognition that the younger girl shouted a happy “Hey!” that echoed into the sacristy (and drew a cautious look from both Uncle John and Agnes), their father grinning at them from the doorway. He held out both his arms and the two girls walked with him down the long aisle and through a garden of smiling, nodding faces. Their brother trailed behind them and at the last minute their father paused and indicated that he should step into the pew first so the girls could be on the end, “to see better,” he whispered. And then he put his fingers to his lips and turned back down the aisle. Dutifully, and with the sound of his footsteps still echoing through the church, the children knelt and blessed themselves and said a quick and formless prayer before sliding back into their seats. Now, as if on a draught, the smell of the place came to them, the smell of snuffed candles and old incense, fresh roses and cold stone. The altar cloth was pure white trimmed with gold and on it was the same arrangement of baby's breath and white roses that had been placed on the coffee table at Momma's place this
morning, although this morning the flowers were the last thing they noticed, given how the living room when they climbed the stairs (the key thrown out on this day by Momma herself) was filled with Agnes and Veronica in lovely clothes and Uncle John in his suit and a woman and a teenaged girl and boy whom, no one ever acknowledged, they had never met before.
Their father brought Aunt Veronica to the pew behind them and as she knelt to say her prayer at their back they were aware of the sweet, peppermint smell of her breath. “You all look so lovely,” she whispered into their hair and then placed her gloved hand on the back of their bench and raised herself into her seat. Aunt Agnes came next. She wore a linen suit of deep rose and her dark, boldly graying hair was pulled back under a small rose hat. Coming down the aisle on their father's arm she nodded from side to side, acknowledging, it seemed to them, not only friends and acquaintances and relatives (Uncle John's wife, Aunt Arlene, and her two children among them) but all the time and effort and care she herself had given the day. She stepped into the pew with Veronica, briefly whispered something to their father, who nodded eagerly and said, “All right,” told the staring children, “Eyes front,” and then, with what seemed an imperceptible tilt of her head, brought the white-robed priest and his two altar boys and even, they suspected, the unseen organist to some kind of attention.
Momma came now on their father's arm in a dress of gray-blue lace, a large, pink, trembling orchid pinned to her shoulder. Her white hair had been curled and brushed out softly from her face and the lace cap she wore was set at what seemed a jaunty angle. She was smiling her thin smile and her eyes shone as deep and as black as ever. Her shoes were black, too, brand-new and shiny but still the same heavy lace-ups she
wore at home. The children felt somewhat relieved by this, relieved that she had not, like May, appeared this morning in delicate heels. Theirs might have become another family altogether if amid this summer-morning sight of Uncle John and his smiling wife and near-grown children, of Aunt May wearing makeup and Veronica stepping into the sun, bending into a luxurious car, Momma had appeared in a young woman's shoes.
She did not kneel, only sat, broad and erect, on the seat in front of them. When he saw she was settled, their father went to the altar rail and, with an expertise that the two girls took as one more wonderful indication of the depth of his experience, began suddenly to unroll the white carpet down the length of the stone aisle. The priest and the altar boys stepped to the front of the altar. Fred and another man, who, in the same dark suit and with the same cautious, collar-tugging, elbow-lifting manner, seemed to the children to be his twin, stepped from a room just behind the pale white, life-sized Christ on the cross.
The organ struck a somber note and then, rising, a tempered but optimistic series of chords and all of them began to stand. And then the familiar march, the sound from cartoons and back-yard games now played straight and seriously and at a volume that sent goosebumps down from each of the sisters' puffed sleeves. Their mother came first. She was smiling and yet it was easy enough to see that it was not her real smile and that the small bouquet she was carrying trembled.
The children had never seen their mother in such a roleâall eyes on her with shoes dyed the same pale lavender color as her dressâand this momentary celebrity made them hope, as she approached on the thin white sheet of carpet, that when she passed them she would wave or wink or even reach out her hand to indicate to all the strangers gathered here that
they were hers. The smaller girl stepped up on the soft cushion of the kneeling bench and leaned forward, but her mother with her trembling bouquet and her fixed smile only stared straight ahead, leaving them to recognize the familiar freckles on her bare forearms, the familiar curl of her dark hair as details of a treasure that had once been exclusively their own.
And then came the bride. Aunt May walked carefully beside her brother, her hand in his arm. She had brought the veil of her hat down over her eyes, so that the gold rims of her glasses sparkled behind it. She was smiling slightly, cautiously, it seemed, and the two older children were reminded especially of the way she had looked as a nun, of the delicate and uncertain way she would smile at them before, in some single moment when they were off by themselves, producing a gift from her robes. They saw in her careful smile, her veiled eyes, that same guarded delight: joy held in cupped hands against her heart.
But then as she approached them she looked fully into their faces, just as their mother had failed to do, and her smile became broad, open. She nearly laughed (her shoulders and her breath giving in to it, collapsing for a second as if she would laugh, although she made no sound), and then carried the vision of their young and astonished and much-loved faces across the last few feet she had to go, to the foot of the altar, where she turned to kiss her brother at the altar rail (his taut cheek smelling of alcohol, but bay rum or Bacardi she couldn't tell) and then passed through its gate, where Fred, looking wonderfully neat and dapper, stepped forward and took her arm, putting his bare hand over her gloved one just as she'd hoped he would do, while they climbed the last few steps toward the priest.
The two girls could not deny that they'd been disappointed this morning when Aunt May stepped out of Aunt
Agnes's bedroom and was not wearing a long, lace dress with a train and a thick veil, and were now disappointed again to learn that the priest would not merely get to the heart of the matter, the Do you's and the I do's, but put them all through an entire, interminable High Mass as well. They listened to their brother recite without hesitation the complex Latin of the Confiteor and knelt and stood with the bells. Creeping up the side of the church, their father had joined them from the other side of the pew and he sang each hymn in his familiar tenor. In front of them, Uncle John leaned a little to the right and knelt with a great deal of caution, but also turned to take his mother's arm each time they had to stand.
The Epistle was Saint Paul's, all the empty things he was without love. The Gospel was the Marriage Feast at Cana. When he had finished reading it, the priest kissed the Bible and intoned a solemn “In the name of the Father ⦔ He was a stubby, white-haired man with only a trace of a brogue and he had met the groom at Mary Immaculate Hospital, where he had been chaplain in the last years of Fred's mother's life. On the day she died, the priest had just come into the room when Fred, his chair drawn up beside her bed and his hand on her arm, looked up and said, with more peace and resignation than the priest himself knew he could have managed, “Father, I think she's slipped away.”
All week the priest had wondered if he should refer to this in his sermon today. He recalled it had been Good Friday. He recalled he had said, after the nurses had come in to confirm it, “Not slipped away, Fred, but risen,” and been impressed once again how even for those with the barest shred of faith (and at the time he counted himself as one of them) Christ's story offered parallel and metaphor and a way for us to speak to one another.
All week long he wondered if he should speak of this now.
Both Fred and May had asked that their parents be named at the Memento and this he would do, but, he wondered, would it be appropriate to say in his sermon, too, that so much of what these two had lost in their parents' deaths had been returned to them in each other? The bride's aunt, the old lady in the front pew who, it occurred to him, was fingering her rosaries as if she were conversing with the Blessed Mother right over his head, not expecting to hear anything of value from him anyway, might take some offense if he were to hint that May had been bereft until now. And the children behind herâlook at that moon-faced one in the flowered hat, off in dreamland by the look of itâmight be confused by too much talk of death and dying on such a day.
“Our Lord,” he said, settling for some shortened version of the standard, what with the day's approaching heat and the Funeral Mass scheduled at noon, “began his public ministry at a marriage feast, changing, at his beloved mother's request, plain water into the finest wine. Ahead of him were the three arduous years of his ministry and many more miracles, more spectacular, more breath-taking miracles: the healing of lepers, the casting out of devils, the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Ahead of him in three years' time was the last meal he would share with his disciples, when he would once again raise a cup of wine in love and commemoration, changing it this time into his own precious blood.” He turned to the couple now seated in two high-backed chairs behind himâ“Fred and May”âturned to the congregation again, “Dear friends in Christ. Each of us has in our future our own last time when we will dine with friends, taste the fruits of the earth for a final time. Each of us has as we leave here today our own arduous way to follow toward death. But it is from such moments as these that we, following our Saviour's example, find the courage to go forward. Love sustains us. Our Lord
understood this at Cana. He understood it at the Last Supper. He understands it now as he blesses our difficult way with the gift of love. Love that sustains us as we, each of us, make our inexorable journey toward those final moments. Love that will, through his most precious Blood, bring us life again. Everlasting life in the love of Christ. In the name of the Father ⦔