‘Do you think I ought to call her?’ Emily asked Howard.
‘What for? Just because of the Christmas card? No, honey. If she’s in any kind of trouble she’ll call you.’
‘Okay. I suppose you’re right.’
And then late one night in May of 1968 – three months, as Emily figured out later, before Sarah’s forty-seventh birthday – the ringing phone brought Emily stumbling out of bed.
‘Aunt Emily?’
‘Peter?’
‘No, it’s Tony – Tony Junior… I’m afraid your sister passed away today.’
And the first thing that occurred to her, even before the news sank in, was that it was just like Tony Junior to have said ‘passed away’ instead of ‘died.’
‘What did she – die of?’ she inquired after a moment.
‘She’d been suffering from a liver ailment for a long time,’ he said huskily, ‘so it was mostly that, complicated by a fall she took in the house.’
‘I see.’ And Emily heard her own voice sink to the hushed solemnity with which people receive the news of death in the movies. None of this seemed real. ‘How’s your father taking it?’
‘Oh, he’s – holding up pretty well.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘give him my – you know – give him my love.’
Chapter 2
Howard’s car was being repaired, so they had to go out to the funeral on the train.
‘Change a jamake,’ the conductor told them.
All the way to St. Charles, staring through a dirty window at the slowly wheeling suburbs, Emily gave herself over to memories of her sister. Sarah at twenty, elegantly dressed in borrowed clothes and complaining that she didn’t care about the silly Easter parade; Sarah at sixteen with braces on her teeth, bending over the sink each night to wash her sweaters; Sarah at twelve; Sarah at nine.
At nine or ten, Sarah had been much the more imaginative of the girls. She could take a ten-cent book of Wool-worth paper dolls, cut out the dolls and their tabbed clothing without ever going over the lines, and invest each dressed doll with a personality of its own. She would decide which of the girl dolls was the prettiest and most popular (and if she felt her dress wasn’t nice enough she would design and make a better one, using crayons or watercolor paints); then she would fold all the other dolls forward at the hips to make them sit down as an audience; she would hold the performer upright, make her tremble very slightly the way real singers do, and have her sing ‘Welcome, Sweet Springtime’ or ‘Look for the Silver Lining,’ to both of which she knew all the words.
‘You okay, Emily?’ Howard asked, touching her arm.
‘Sure,’ she said. ‘I’m fine.’
Young Eric met them at the station, wearing mirror sunglasses and dressed in a cheap dark suit from which his big wrists hung like slabs of meat.
‘Is Peter here yet?’ she asked him.
‘Everybody’s here,’ he said as he steered them expertly through traffic.
This was going to be awful. The only thing to do was get through it, get it over with somehow, and try to remember that Howard Dunninger was there with her. He rode alone in the back seat of Eric’s car, but by turning her head very slightly she could see the well-pressed Oxford-gray flannel of his trousers, and that was comforting.
‘There isn’t gonna be a real funeral,’ Eric said at the wheel. ‘We’re just gonna have a little service at the – you know – at the graveside.’
Then they were all walking on fresh grass among tombstones, under a blue sky, and it occurred to Emily that the Wilsons must really have been an important family after all, if they had a private burial plot in one of the most crowded sections of Long Island. Sarah’s open grave was covered with a gray tarpaulin. Her closed coffin, lying on the contraption that would lower it into the earth, looked quite small – she had never been very big except in childhood memories. Not far away, one of the newer-looking tombstones read ‘Edna; beloved wife of Geoffrey,’ and that was the first Emily knew that old Edna had died: it was funny Sarah hadn’t told her. She made a mental note to ask Sarah about it after the ceremony, before it struck her that she could never ask Sarah anything again. Very shyly, like a child seeking her father’s forgiveness, she put her fingers through Howard’s arm. She could almost hear Sarah’s voice saying ‘It’s okay, Emmy. It’s okay.’
To their left a big, soft-looking man stood weeping, or rather working his lips in an effort at self-control and blinking his red eyes; close beside him was a matronly young woman with a toddling infant and an older boy and girl clinging to her skirt. It was Tony Junior with his wife and baby and stepchildren. The minister was there too, clasping his small prayer book while they waited for the other mourners to arrive.
Several car doors slammed in the distance and soon a cluster of men appeared, walking quickly. Tony was in the middle, in animated conversation with another man. He seemed to be laughing and talking at the same time, and he repeatedly made the same gesture he had used years ago in telling Jack Flanders about the takeoff speed of Magnum jet fighters (‘Shoom!’) – knifing the flat of his hand straight ahead from his temple. The man beside him smiled and nodded, and once he cuffed Tony’s shoulder with his fist. From their clothes and bearing – starchy and solid, lower-middle class – Emily assumed that these other men were some of Tony’s co-workers at the Magnum plant; behind them came Peter and another group, solemn young men of about his own age who looked like graduate students.
Tony was still talking when he came up to where Emily and Howard stood. ‘… Straight ahead, right?’ he demanded of the man beside him. ‘No looking back’ – he made the hand-and-temple gesture – ‘everything straight ahead.’
‘Right, Tony,’ the man said. ‘That’s it.’
‘Oh, I say,’ Tony said, blinking. ‘Hello, Emmy.’ The hollows of his eyes were red and swollen, as if he’d vigorously ground his fists into them for a long time.
‘Hello, Tony.’
Then he saw Howard and shook hands with him. ‘Nice to see you, Mr. Howinger. I say, one of our men went over to your firm last month; I told him “I know the legal counsel there; might be useful for you.” P’raps you’ll run into him; hell of a nice chap named – or no, wait. That was Union Carbide.’
‘Well,’ Howard said, ‘they’re pretty much the same thing.’
And Tony turned his inflamed eyes on Emily again. He seemed to be trying to tell her something for which he lacked the words. ‘I say,’ he said, bringing the flat of his hand up beside one eye. ‘Straight ahead. No looking back; no looking sideways—’ The hand shot forward. ‘Straight ahead.’
‘Right, Tony,’ she said.
When the ceremony began the Magnum men and the graduate students stood back at a respectful distance. Peter, whose eyes and mouth looked free of any emotion but concern, led his father off to one side of the grave and held him firmly by the upper arm as if to keep him from falling. As the minister’s voice intoned the ecclesiastical words Tony’s jaws fell open and several strands of spittle clung and trembled between his lips.
‘… Earth to earth,’ the minister was saying, ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust…’ and he crumbled a handful of dirt on the top of Sarah’s coffin to symbolize her burial.
Then it was over, and they were all walking out of the cemetery. Peter had turned his father over to the Magnum men; now he fell into step with Emily and Howard and said ‘You’re coming back to the house with us for a while, aren’t you? Here, we’ll go in my car.’
Except that his hands shook a little on the ignition key and the steering wheel, he seemed wholly in control of himself. ‘Those younger guys are friends of mine from the seminary,’ he said as he drove. ‘I didn’t ask them to come; they found out about it and came out on their own. It always surprises me how kind people are.’
‘Mm,’ Emily said. She wanted to say How did she die, Peter? Tell me the truth; instead she turned her head to watch the bright supermarkets and filling stations slide past. ‘Peter,’ she said
after a while. ‘Is your grandfather well?’
‘Oh, he’s fine, Aunt Emmy. He wanted to come out today, but he didn’t feel up to it. He’s been in a nursing home for some time, you see.’
The old house looked even more gaunt and forbidding than Emily had remembered it. One of Tony Junior’s stepchildren opened the door for them, giggled, and ran away to hide in the musty living room; the rest of the party was assembled around the dining-room table, which was strewn with sandwich makings and with bottles of beer and soda. It was a noisy gathering.
‘… And this guy,’ one of the Magnum men was saying, punching Tony heartily on the shoulder, ‘this guy catches one measly little blowfish, and he makes such a big deal out of it I thought he’s gonna tip the boat over.’
Tony, his eyes still swollen, rolled with the punch in a spasm of laughter and raised a can of beer to his lips.
‘Can I get you something, Aunt Emmy?’ Peter asked.
‘No, thanks. Well, yes – I’ll take a beer, if you have enough.’
‘You, sir?’
‘Nothing for now, thanks,’ Howard said. ‘I’m fine.’
‘No, but I’ll never forget this one time we went out,’ the man from Magnum said. Flushed with the success of his first fishing story, he launched into another without seeming to notice that he’d lost most of his audience. ‘Who-all was with us that time, Tony? You, me, Fred Slovick – I forget. Anyway, we…’
‘Anybody else on the liverwurst?’ Tony Junior inquired. He was taking sandwich orders. ‘You want the regular mustard on that, or the baby-shit?’ His wife, who had apparently put the baby down for a nap, was trying to wipe spilled Coca-Cola from the dress of a peevish five-year-old.
‘Tell me one thing, though.’ One of the seminary students, a pleasant-looking boy with a Southern accent, directed a shy smile at Tony Junior. ‘One thing I don’t understand. How come you didn’t beat up on your brother more when you were kids?’
‘Oh, I tried,’ Tony Junior said, spreading mayonnaise on rye bread. ‘I tried plenty of times, but it wasn’t easy. I mean he’s little, but he’s wiry.’
‘… So I says “I got five bucks,’” the Magnum man was shouting. ‘“I got five bucks says Wilson don’t catch nothin’ all day.’”
Ah, Christ, Marty,’ Tony said, laughing and shaking his head in happy exasperation. ‘You’ll be telling that story when we’re all dead.’
Peter went to answer the phone; when he came back he said ‘It’s for you, Dad.’
Still glowing in the aftermath of Marty’s story (of which the punch line was that he’d caught more blowfish than anyone else in the boat that day), Tony narrowed his eyes over a shot glass of whiskey and said ‘Who is it, Pete?’
‘It’s Sergeant Ryan. You know; over at the station.’
Tony knocked back his whiskey and grimaced at the sweet pain of its taste. ‘Police,’ he muttered, getting to his feet. ‘Damned police think I killed my wife.’
‘Oh, now, Dad, come on,’ Peter said in a mollifying way as he followed his father out of the room. ‘You know better than that. I’ve told you and told you, it’s only a routine investigation.’
Tony’s talk with Sergeant Ryan didn’t last long; when he rejoined the party he had another drink – two bottles of whiskey were being passed around the table now – and the shouts and laughter went on far into the late afternoon.
Dark blue shadows filled the house when Emily got up to make her way to the bathroom. In the hallway she stumbled and nearly fell; righting herself, she found she had collided with a small cabinet bearing old copies of the Daily News stacked three feet high. On the way back she passed a framed photograph, the picture of Tony and Sarah on Easter Sunday of 1941. It was hanging awry, as if from the impact of some heavy blow that had shuddered the wall. Carefully, with unsteady fingers, she reached up and straightened it.
Lights were being turned on against the heavily gathering dusk.
‘… No, but what I want to know,’ the Magnum man was saying to Tony Junior, ‘what I want to know is what kind of a job you guys can do for me.’
‘The best, Marty,’ Tony Junior assured him. ‘You can ask anybody: we’re the best mechanics in this part of Suffolk County.’
‘Because I mean from my standpoint of view,’ Marty persisted, ‘from my standpoint of view that’s the only – you know – the only consideration.’
‘Ma,’ one of the children whined. ‘Hey, Ma, c’we go home now?’
‘I say, come and have a drink,’ Tony said to a hesitant group of seminary students. ‘Don’t you chaps ever drink?’
‘Thank you, sir,’ one of them said. ‘A little bourbon and water.’
‘Are you all right, Emily?’ Howard inquired, looking up from his conversation with another of the Magnum men.
‘I’m fine. Can I get you a drink?’
‘I’ve got one, thanks.’
Through it all Eric stood leaning alone against the kitchen doorjamb, silent and inscrutable behind his mirror sunglasses, like a young security guard hired to keep the party from getting out of hand.
Tony Junior’s wife took the children home without saying goodbye to anyone; not long after that the seminary students left, and then all the Magnum men but Marty made their departure.
‘… Listen, Tony,’ Marty said. ‘You gotta eat, right? Let’s everybody go grab a steak at Manny’s.’
And in several cars, after some drink-fuddled preliminary bickering about who would ride with whom, the mourners roared down the highway to a floodlit California-style restaurant called Manny Feldon’s Chop House.
It was so dark inside the place that they could scarcely see across the table as they raised their heavy cocktail glasses. Peter was sober: he sat close beside his father, as if this ceremony too, like the one in the graveyard, might require his assistance. Marty and Tony Junior were once again deep in their talk of business, though now it seemed to have taken a philosophical turn. There was no substitute for honest workmanship in any field, Marty was saying, while Tony Junior nodded slowly and steadily to show he couldn’t agree more. ‘I mean any field, whether it’s mechanics or carpentry or shoemaking or you name it. Am I right?’
Emily held her edge of the table firmly in both hands because it had become the only steady surface in sight: everything else was shifting and turning. Beside her in the deep upholstery against the wall – and the wall was unsteady too – Howard was putting away enough liquor to suggest that this might be the third or fourth night since she’d known him that he would go to bed drunk.
Eric sat close to no one, and he was the only one who ate heartily when the giant steaks arrived. He ate with the rhythmic passion of a starving man, hunched over his plate as if to guarantee that it wouldn’t be snatched away.
‘… No, but the older I get,’ Marty was saying, ‘– and mind you, I figure I’ve only got maybe fifteen years tops – the older I get the more I stop and think. I mean you see these kids today running around with their long hair and their crummy jeans and their crazy ideas, and what do they know? Am I right? I mean what do they know?’
In the end Howard proved sober enough to fish the timetable out of his pocket, study it in the wavering glow of his cigarette lighter and determine that they had fifteen minutes to catch the last train.
‘Keep in touch, Aunt Emmy,’ Peter said, rising to wish them goodbye, and he shook hands with Howard. ‘Thanks for coming out, sir.’
Tony struggled out of his chair, swaying. He mumbled something inaudible to Howard, wiped his mouth and looked undecided about whether to give Emily a kiss on the cheek. Instead he held her hand for a second, not quite looking her in the eyes; then he let go, brought his own hand slowly up to his temple and shot it forward. ‘Straight ahead,’ he said.
It took Emily a long time to realize that Sarah was dead. Sometimes, waking from a dream of childhood filled with Sarah’s face and Sarah’s voice, she would go and study her own face in the bright bathroom mirror until she found assurance th
at it was still the face of Sarah’s sister, and that it didn’t look old.
‘Howard?’ she said once when they were lying in bed, waiting for sleep. ‘Do you know something? I really wish you could have known Sarah in the old days, before everything went to pieces. She was lovely.’
‘Mm,’ he said.
‘Lovely and bright and full of life – and this may sound silly, but I think if you’d known her then it might’ve helped you to know me better.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I think I know you pretty well.’
‘No you don’t,’ she said.
‘Mm?’
‘You don’t really. We hardly ever talk.’
‘Are you kidding? We talk all the damn time, Emily.’
‘You never want to hear about my childhood or anything.’
‘Sure I do. I know all about your childhood. Besides, everybody’s childhood is pretty much alike.’
‘How can you say that? Only the most obtuse, insensitive person in the world could say a thing like that.’
‘Okay, okay, okay,’ he said sleepily. ‘Tell me a story about your childhood. Make it heartbreaking.’
‘Ugh!’ And she rolled away from him. You’re impossible. ‘You’re a Neanderthal.’
‘Mm.’
Another time, when they were coming back from a drive in the country at dusk, she said ‘How can you be so sure it was cirrhosis, Howard?’
‘I’m not sure; I just said it was most likely, considering the way she drank.’
‘But then there’s that fishy business of the “fall she took in the house.” And the police calling up, and Tony saying “The police think I killed my wife.” I’ll bet he did, Howard. I’ll bet he flew into a drunken rage and hit her with a chair or something.’
‘They didn’t arrest him, did they? If they’d had any evidence they’d have arrested him.’
‘Well, but he and the boys could’ve concealed the evidence.’
‘Honey, we’ve been over all this a hundred times. It’s just one of those things you’ll never know. Life is full of things like that.’
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