Read At Weddings and Wakes Online
Authors: Alice McDermott
At Weddings and Wakes (2 page)
The children and their mother walked through the last car, to the door beside the motorman, whose glass looked out (if they cupped their fingers to their eyes) into the long, dark tunnel that lay all before them in twists and turns and an occasional patch of green or red or yellow light. This had been
the purpose of their trek and when she had reached between them to make sure the door was shut tightly (as, some weeks before, the conductor himself had done, filling her with gratitude at his thoughtfulness and shame that she in the sure-footed confidence she felt whenever she crossed back over the city line had not even imagined the tragedy of the door falling open and spilling one or all of her children out into the screeching darkness), she took the nearest seat and opened her paper, glancing as she skimmed each piece at the swaying rumps of her three as they cupped their fingers to their eyes and pressed their noses to the glassâthey'd be smudged with dirt when they turned aroundâand tried to determine where the dark tunnel, which now passed under the width of the river, was leading.
the purpose of their trek and when she had reached between them to make sure the door was shut tightly (as, some weeks before, the conductor himself had done, filling her with gratitude at his thoughtfulness and shame that she in the sure-footed confidence she felt whenever she crossed back over the city line had not even imagined the tragedy of the door falling open and spilling one or all of her children out into the screeching darkness), she took the nearest seat and opened her paper, glancing as she skimmed each piece at the swaying rumps of her three as they cupped their fingers to their eyes and pressed their noses to the glassâthey'd be smudged with dirt when they turned aroundâand tried to determine where the dark tunnel, which now passed under the width of the river, was leading.
On the platform again, making, as she called it, the connection, her children spun the knobs and pulled the levers on the candy machines fastened to every other steel beam, until she gave them each a nickel for Chicletsâtwo rattling like loose teeth in a tiny cardboard pack. When the next train pulled into the station they took seats immediately because the ride was too short for the race to the front. The older boy and girl sat on the red seat facing front and she and her younger daughter on the cane one that faced the door, the straw pricking at the backs of the little girl's bare knees. The children's mouths were going, the beige slip of minty gum occasionally showing itself under the fine clamp of their front teeth.
They studied the other passengers. In their experience, the subway offered so wide a variety of people that they would not have been surprised to learn that the trains garnered their passengers from the dark tunnels and the damp tiled walls as well as from the people in the street and that any number of them, although they boarded the train at one station and got
off at the next, never rose back up through the revolving bars and into the light.
off at the next, never rose back up through the revolving bars and into the light.
They had once seen four midgets, and a man with his sleeve pinned to his shoulder. A woman whose skin was as splotched as a leopard's. They had seen a grown man sound asleep with his head thrown back and his large yellow teeth fallen a good half inch away from his gums. They had seen another grown man throw up in a wastebasket (they had thought until then that only children threw up). They had seen a girl, a woman really, with large breasts and hairy legs, dressed in a pinafore and anklet socks and black patent-leather shoes and sitting on her mother's lap, just the way, as it so happened, the younger girl, in much the same shoes, sat on hers. (“She's retarded, dear,” their mother had whispered when they stopped at the station, but the news did nothing to alleviate the child's sense that she was somehow being made fun of.)
They'd had blind people slide their canes against their toes and deaf people, smiling wildly, place cards that illustrated the sign-language alphabet on their knees. They'd seen men with long beards and women who were not nuns in robes and veils. They'd had their heads patted by toothless old crones straight out of nightmares, women with claws for hands and mournful, repetitive coos for speech.
In the time it took to go the four stops on the second train, they watched the doors and their fellow passengers carefully, their noses smudged, their gum shifting quickly between their teeth, until they saw their mother gather her purse and tug at her gloves and knew it was time to place their feet firmly on the ground, to tuck their gum deep into their jaws, roll their comic books, and make whatever other preparation they would need to be fully ready to pounce at the train's next full instant of stillness toward the gaping doors.
Up now, another flight of dirty stairs toward the hot, noisy,
pigeon-spattered light of Brooklyn in summer. Though they still chewed their gum, it cracked now with the fine black (or so they imagined the color) pieces of grit that the subway's constant underground breeze had slipped between their lips, and when, at another corner, their mother held out a tissue and her cupped palm they placed the small flavorless pebbles of gum in it without protest.
pigeon-spattered light of Brooklyn in summer. Though they still chewed their gum, it cracked now with the fine black (or so they imagined the color) pieces of grit that the subway's constant underground breeze had slipped between their lips, and when, at another corner, their mother held out a tissue and her cupped palm they placed the small flavorless pebbles of gum in it without protest.
What greeted them first, despite the noise and the grit and the heat of the sun, was olfactory: diesel fuel and cooking grease and foreign spices, tar and asphalt and the limp, dirty, metallic smell of the train that followed beneath their feet as they walked, blowing itself across their ankles at every subway grate. Then the sounds: language too quick to be sensible speech, so quick that those who spoke it, women and children and men, Puerto Ricans and Lebanese and Russians, perspired heavily with the effort. The traffic, of course, trucks and cabs and horns and somewhere at the soft bottom of these their mother's heels against the sidewalk. Then whatever their eyes could take in as they walked quickly along: fat women sitting on crates, talking and sweating, smiling as they passed, a policeman on a horse, a man with an apron pushing a silver cart full of bottles topped with green nipples and filled with bright red or orange or turquoise-blue waterâpushing it in what seemed slow motion as he pulled his feet from the quicksand of the road and, lifting his knees high, placed each foot, toes first, heavily back down again.
They hurried down three stone steps, following her into a narrow cavern with a sinking wooden floor and walls that seemed to be covered with flour. Here the light came from two narrow basement windows, and the heatâit was hotter than anyplace they'd ever beenâfrom the huge brown stove between them, but once again it was the smell that first overtook the three: the warm, prickly rough-textured smell of the
loaves of flatbread that the baker, who knew their mother by name, had known her it seemed in some secret lifetime, shoveled hot into a brown paper bag.
loaves of flatbread that the baker, who knew their mother by name, had known her it seemed in some secret lifetime, shoveled hot into a brown paper bag.
On the street she broke three pieces in the bag and handed it to them warm and floury, the inside full of stalactites of dough and air pockets like baked bubbles. “This is the kind of bread,” she said, “that Christ ate at the Last Supper.” And then finished the loaf herself, her gloves off, and her pace slowed just that much to tell them that she was home after all and as happyâshe allowed them to walk a few paces ahead of herâas she'd ever be.
At the apartment the boy was sent up the wide steep stone steps to ring the bell until her sister's face appeared in a top-floor window. There was the flutter of the lace curtain, the two long, pale hands trying the sash, and then, palms turned toward them, the glass itself, until the window slid open just the two inches required to fit between it and the sill the single key in the thin white handkerchief. The children struggled to watch it the four stories it fell and then raced (the boy having returned from the door and the doorbell at a wide-legged run) to be the first to retrieve it from the courtyard or the basement stairs, from among the garbage cans and the baby carriages covered with old shower curtains and planks of wood.
Key in hand, they climbed the steps again and let themselves in through the double glass door framed in heavy wood, across a tiled vestibule that held the cool stone smell of a church, and then into the dim hallway where the air was brown with the reflection of the dark wooden floor and the staircase, with the odor of stewing beef and boiled onions. And yet it was cooler here, cooler than the last part of the morning that they had left on the sidewalk. They climbed the stairs behind their motherâfollowing her example without
being told to do so by holding their bare hands as she held her gloved one, just two inches above the wide dusty rail of the banister. One flight and across a narrow hallway with silent doors on either end, another flight, their mother's shoes tapping on each tread and the dull yellow light now passing through an opaque lozenge of white skylight. An identical hallway (voices from behind the far door, again those rushed incomprehensible syllables struck throughout with startling exclamations), another flight, the light growing stronger until it spread itself like a blurred hand over the tops of each of the children's smooth heads. Here on the fourth floor under the dulled and hazy light there was only a single door and the hallway on either side of it was filled with a clutch of cardboard boxes and paper bags. Boxes filled with shoes and Christmas decorations and scraps of material, bags stuffed with magazines and old hats, a clutter of stored and discarded knickknacks and bric-bracs (or so their mother called it) that drew the children to imagine every time some impossible rainy day when their shy request to go inspect the boxes in the hall would be met with something more benign than their mother's or their aunts' appalled consternation.
being told to do so by holding their bare hands as she held her gloved one, just two inches above the wide dusty rail of the banister. One flight and across a narrow hallway with silent doors on either end, another flight, their mother's shoes tapping on each tread and the dull yellow light now passing through an opaque lozenge of white skylight. An identical hallway (voices from behind the far door, again those rushed incomprehensible syllables struck throughout with startling exclamations), another flight, the light growing stronger until it spread itself like a blurred hand over the tops of each of the children's smooth heads. Here on the fourth floor under the dulled and hazy light there was only a single door and the hallway on either side of it was filled with a clutch of cardboard boxes and paper bags. Boxes filled with shoes and Christmas decorations and scraps of material, bags stuffed with magazines and old hats, a clutter of stored and discarded knickknacks and bric-bracs (or so their mother called it) that drew the children to imagine every time some impossible rainy day when their shy request to go inspect the boxes in the hall would be met with something more benign than their mother's or their aunts' appalled consternation.
The single door gave off the purr and rattle that made it seem thick and animate to the children, with an internal life all its own. There was the scratch of the delicate chain, the metallic slither of its bolts, the tumble and click of its lock, and then, slowly, the creak of its hinges.
The face that appeared between the door and its frame was thinner than their mother's and so, for the children, offered no resemblanceâdespite the same pale blue eyes and light skin and narrow mouth that was, as was their mother's, fighting to resist a grin.
“Well, well,” Aunt May said, as if she truly had not expected to see them there. “Here you are!” She smelled like a
nun, had been one in fact, and although she wore a shirtwaist dress like their mother's (hers a darker print, small pink roses in lined rows against a navy background) she held herself like a nun as she bent to kiss themâheld her bodice with the back of her hand as if to keep a crucifix from swinging into their heads, held back her skirt with the other as if, like a nun, she had veil and sleeve and bib and scapular and long skirt to keep from coming between them.
nun, had been one in fact, and although she wore a shirtwaist dress like their mother's (hers a darker print, small pink roses in lined rows against a navy background) she held herself like a nun as she bent to kiss themâheld her bodice with the back of her hand as if to keep a crucifix from swinging into their heads, held back her skirt with the other as if, like a nun, she had veil and sleeve and bib and scapular and long skirt to keep from coming between them.
The children kissed her with the same perfunctory air with which they wiped their feet at the door or genuflected in church, and were delighted, always surprised and delighted, to hear her laugh as soon as the last of them had gone past her, to hear her laugh and hit her palms together and shudder for just one second with her pleasure, with what they easily recognized as her pleasure at seeing them.
Although their mother made these journeys to determine her own fate, to resolve each time her own unhappiness or indecision, they had also heard her say to their father as he drove them home (the decision, for that day at least, made once again), “I go there as much for May as for Momma.”
Knowing the routine, the children passed through the narrow living room, across a narrow hallway that after their trek through the length of the subway train seemed cool and surprisingly steady, into, as if it were another subway car, the dining room with its imposing, romantic, highly polished table and eight regal chairs, and there, at the end of the room, before a window that looked out onto the back of identical buildings and a dazzling white line of sun-drenched sheets, in a large soft chair that was covered with terry-cloth but that somehow managed to overwhelm the authority of even the wide-armed end chairs and the broad glass bosom of the hutch, was Momma.
Even the children, whose idea of pretty involved curly
ponytails and bangs and puffy silver-pink dresses, recognized that she was beautiful. White face and soft white hair as wide and imposing as a cloud, and eyes so dark they seemed to be made of some element that had nothing to do with any of the familiar elements that made up flesh and bone, lip and skin. Her eyes didn't change to see them, only her mouth smiled. They each kissed her soft, cold cheek and their mother, kissing her, too, offered the bag of Syrian bread so shyly that the children forgot instantly the confident way she had turned into the bakery and greeted the baker by name and ordered the very freshest bread he hadâthe way she had broken the bread inside the bag and told them, distributing it, This is the bread that Christ ate.
ponytails and bangs and puffy silver-pink dresses, recognized that she was beautiful. White face and soft white hair as wide and imposing as a cloud, and eyes so dark they seemed to be made of some element that had nothing to do with any of the familiar elements that made up flesh and bone, lip and skin. Her eyes didn't change to see them, only her mouth smiled. They each kissed her soft, cold cheek and their mother, kissing her, too, offered the bag of Syrian bread so shyly that the children forgot instantly the confident way she had turned into the bakery and greeted the baker by name and ordered the very freshest bread he hadâthe way she had broken the bread inside the bag and told them, distributing it, This is the bread that Christ ate.
Aunt May was suddenly behind them. “Let me make some sandwiches with it while it's still warm.”
Knowing the routine, the children followed her into the narrow kitchen and watched without a word as she took butter and ham from the refrigerator and then a large glass bottle of Coke. She poured the Coke into three tumblers and then placed one tumbler before each of them at the white metal table. Putting it down softly so there would be no click of glass and steel, glancing toward the door as she carefully restopped the bottle, and warning them, every time, with her fingers to her lips, to do the same.
They understood, and savored the soda because of it, that it was not their mother she was afraid of.
From the dining room came their mother's voice embarked, already, on its lament. They understood only that it involved the course of their parents' snagged and unsuitable happiness and that the day would be long. They ate their sandwiches, thick with butter, on a linen tablecloth in the dining room while Aunt May, keeping an eye on them, talked about the weather and the news.
When they were excused they took their comics from the coffee table in the living room, and passing through another narrow vestibule (there was a mouse hole in the corner of the woodwork in this one and a thin cupboard covered with a long piece of chintz), they entered the bright front bedroom, where the older boy and girl took each of the two window seats, the window in one still open the inch or so Aunt May had needed to slip the key underneath. The smallest child sat for a moment before the three mirrors at the dressing table, trying to gauge the distance between herself and the smallest, farthest reflection of a dark-haired little girl.
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