Once my mother had deposited the beer in front of a greatly relieved Uncle Paul, Aunt Constance began to send in my cousins with a steady parade of dishes. Noticing my father, Paul nodded and said, “Harold.” Constance shooed the cousins along from close behind, with no effect on their speed at all but reinforcing her position as culinary benefactress. She kept her husband behind in the kitchen as a kind of factotum and sous-chef; besides, he wasn’t comfortable in what he not altogether humorously called Harp Central. He could have said it more clearly because no one cared what he said, all part of Constance’s disgrace: she would have enjoyed greater standing if she’d been gang-raped by a hurley squad.
I’m not sure my father enjoyed much esteem either, and I think he knew it. He was well educated, hardworking, and ambitious, yet something set him apart, as though he had renounced a portion of his humanity to achieve his current station and had, moreover, abducted the baby of the family, my mother, to a dreary and stunting world where people made themselves up and were vaguely weightless. I realized with dread that, at this funeral meal, he was likely to take a stand.
“I wonder where she is now,” Paul said, slurping his consommé.
“Where who is?” Walter asked coolly.
“Ma. Where Ma is.”
Dorothy covered her mouth.
“Ma is in heaven,” said Walter.
“You, as a man of science, say she is in heaven?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, good. I hear great things about the place.”
Kathleen made a covert rotary motion with her forefinger at her temple; then, fearing she’d been observed, she pretended to adjust one of the tubular curls. She wouldn’t look at me.
My father half rose from his chair, rather violently, shifting all attention to himself, as he reached across the table for a dish of lemons. “It’s been a long time since I had a chance to enjoy a swordfish steak!” This fell discordantly upon me and anyone else who’d heard his theory of the skillygallee.
My mother said, “Wonderfully done, Constance, a beautiful meal.” Constance gave a self-effacing curtsy. Dorothy stared at her food with white eyeholes and a half-opened mouth, and Gerry rubbed her back consolingly until she picked up her fork and prodded a parsnip. Since I eat too fast when I’m nervous, my mother put her hand on my forearm to slow me down. I looked up at her helplessly, wide eyed.
Walter smiled all round and said, “This would be a good time to remember all the happy times we’ve had at this table, especially when Pa would have been in my place. We saw very little of Ma then. She just came and went from the kitchen, long enough to look after us. She sure looked after us, didn’t she? Generations of us. Me, Connie, Gerry, Mary, and you kids, right, Antoinette?”
Antoinette stood up from her seat. “My grandmother is a saint,” she sang out, in a high mechanical voice. “She is being welcomed by the angels this very minute.”
Paul blew up his cheeks and nodded.
“Kathleen?”
Kathleen rose and gazed around the room with her electric-blue eyes. “Our grandmother—”
I knew I was next, and I felt the ironic expectations of my father, who loved to see me on the hot seat. I never really believed it was the test of character he claimed.
“—brought to our family the highest standards of piety and family concern, especially as to her devotion to Holy Mary Mother of God.” Even knowing they’d been prepped, I asked myself where the two little hussies had come up with this chin music. I hadn’t long to think about it, though; it was my turn.
“Johnny?”
I sat dumbfounded, a weird tingling in my scalp. My father looked at me with a faint smile, and my mother gazed into her lap. Both seemed to understand I wasn’t up to this. I had the whirlies.
“Why don’t you stand up?” Uncle Walter said gently.
I rose slowly, the tightness in my throat making speech impossible. A glance at my father revealed ill-concealed hilarity. Uncle Paul was waggling his empty beer at Constance, who stood in the doorway bearing down on me with her eyes. The cousins looked like winners. Only a brief picture of my grandmother rescuing me from this, which she certainly would have, allowed me to break quietly into inarticulate tears.
Uncle Walter smiled sadly and said, “Thank you, Johnny. That’s how we all really feel. You’ve done us all a big favor—thank you.” As I sat down, my father’s glance said he could hardly believe I’d pulled off this stunt. I could almost hear him saying, Fast one there, M.B., or Smooth.
Uncle Walter turned his gaze to my father but quickly looked away; my father was fussing with the napkin in his lap and plainly intended to say nothing at all about the passing of my grandmother. My mother stared at the side of his head, and I knew that in more private circumstances she would have been ready to raise hell. He surely knew ahead of time how brittle any words of tribute might have seemed. My mother’s family was great at seeing through things, and he wasn’t about to walk into a trap. Paul stood a carrot in the mound of his mashed potatoes and hummed “The Halls of Montezuma,” satire that seemed somehow directed at my father. Kathleen and Antoinette were still smirking at me for crying, and I consoled myself with napalm fantasies as their mother stood between them, urging them to clean their plates while tossing me an artificial look of bafflement that suggested I’d lost a step or two to her darlings.
As Aunt Constance turned somewhat loftily to return to the kitchen and another unwelcome course, my mother, always ingenious when it came to defusing tension with her chaotic sense of humor, asked, “Where you going, Constance?”
She stopped but did not look back. “To the kitchen, Mary. Why?”
“Wherever you’re going”—she pointed to the uncanceled first-class stamp affixed to Aunt Constance’s behind—“it’s going to take more postage than that!”
So we got some relief, and Constance could do no more than smile patiently through the laughter before continuing to haul food. The cousins were bouncing their heels on the rungs of their chairs, and I hoped their waning patience would undo all their prissy decorum. In the past I had seen their pandering, obsequious grins turn into frustrated rage in a blink—ballistic in pinafores—and I could wish for that.
“Gerry, tell us about some crimes.”
“Oh, Mary, nothing so exciting. Mostly just blocking jaywalkers with the horse. Ran down a purse snatcher on Sunday.”
“That must have been satisfying.”
“Yes, yes, it was. They slam into the old ladies to get the purses. We get a lot of broken hips, nice old ladies who might not walk again. When we catch the snatcher we take him up the alley and give him the same, couple shots with a paver.”
We all admired this.
“What’s the horse’s name?” I asked.
Gerry lit up. “Emmett. From a farm in Nova Scotia.” It was clear Gerry preferred Emmett’s company to ours. Embarrassed to reveal so much emotion, he ran his finger around the tight collar of his uniform. “Seventeen-hand chestnut,” he said in a choky voice.
“This is real food,” Paul announced. “It’s certainly not K rations and, by cracky, she’s no international cuisine.”
“What d’you mean international cuisine?” said my father. The rest of the family regarded him alertly. He seemed aggressive.
“Let me give you an example, Harold.” Paul bounded back with startling volubility. “I was taken to a French restaurant in the city of New York with, if memory serves, a five-star rating from acknowledged experts in the field, and I don’t mean Duncan Hines. Because there were four of us, all friends, I was able to sample each celebrated entrée, and I can report to you without prejudice that they all smelled like toilet seats. It gave me the fantods. I prefer a boiled dinner.”
My father seemed ostentatiously bored. I had noticed the faint ripple of cheek muscles as he violently suppressed his yawns. His boredom became so pronounced it looked like grief and was probably taken for that. I knew better. I’d heard an argument start in his bedroom wi
th my mother before dinner in which he stated that my grandmother was being “impetuously canonized,” a claim my mother made no attempt to refute. She just called him a son of a bitch. “Ah,” said he, “the colorful household vernacular.”
Uncle Paul began to wail at the end of the table. It was astonishing. He looked around at his family and sobbed, not bowing or covering his head and face. A theory about traditional keening may have lain behind this, perhaps giving it a somewhat academic tone that didn’t make it any less alarming.
“What’s the matter, Paul?” my mother asked softly, which only raised the volume. I’d never seen anything like this before. I was thrilled at this splendid racket. Uncle Walter stood and placed his hands on Paul’s heaving shoulders, giving them rhythmic squeezes, as the campaign medals tinkled. That seemed to calm Uncle Paul somewhat. Aunt Dorothy had begun a contrapuntal snivel, and Walter gently raised his palm for it to stop. Constance ran to the table with a glass of water, taking the position that Paul had something stuck in his throat. My mother held her cheeks, which streamed hot tears. Dorothy lowered the window, then the shade, and turned the Sunbeam fan up several notches until napkins began to flutter. Paul struggled to his feet, and Walter steered him slowly to the door as though fearing Paul would buckle.
My father jumped up and threw out an arm in Paul’s direction with startling emphasis, a mariner spotting land. “For Christ’s sake, tell him to pull himself together!” He was nearly shouting. There was something experimental in his exasperated tone.
Walter stopped, his back to us and his head bowed. He turned slowly, his head still bent, but when he was faced our way, I saw his eyes blazed.
“You would do well,” he said to my father levelly, “to mind your own business.” A terrible quiet followed.
Once Walter had steered a gasping, heaving Paul from the room, my father sat in the ensuing quiet and wiped his lips with his napkin in thought. “Exactly,” he said as he rose and walked out of the room.
Constance soared in with the hot apple pie. I wondered why she always described things as being fresh from the oven, as she did again now. My mother had a terrific sweet tooth and fell on her slice with relish. Cocking her ear to a slight sound, she said, “He’s heading up the stairs,” and, at a series of thuds, announced, “He’s packing his bag.” She began to race through her pie. At the last mouthful, she grabbed my hand and stood me up. “We’d better see him off, or we’ll never hear the end of it.”
It was a moonless night, and the three of us gazed into the trunk of the sedan. My father slung his leather bag in and gave the Evinrude a comradely wiggle, looked at us, and smiled at the shabby building behind. “Goodbye,” he said.
* * *
—
I thought my mother really had no chance to absorb the death of her own mother as long as my father was around. His general disapproval of her family and the ongoing need to argue about it must have drawn a veil over her feelings. I noticed too that though she had fallen nearly silent after my father’s departure, she was also more efficient now in getting things done around the house, cooking and cleaning. She went to Mass every day, St. Joseph’s, a short walk, and she usually brought me some little treat on the way home. She even had a carpenter come in to see to the sagging second-floor porch. Whatever tension was brewing between her and my aunt Constance must have come to a head, because Constance stormed out on her familiar slogan—“This is the thanks I get!”—and was not seen again before we left for home. Silence was not my mother’s strong suit, but we spent a nearly wordless day where the Westport River opened onto the sea, wading in the salt mud for quahogs. “This is what I loved best when I was a girl” was nearly all she said. The clouds on the horizon made a band of light on the deep green Atlantic, and the breakers that lifted and fell with such gravity might have drowned our conversation, if there had been any. We must not have felt the need.
ALIENS
Homer Newland, a partner and franchise specialist at a Boston law firm, had had a distinguished career and a very long one before retiring at seventy-five, when he was certainly still useful but had become more aware of the frequent need, when meeting new clients, of demonstrating that he still had all his marbles. So he indulged a lifelong dream and returned to live in the West, where he’d grown up but which in his long absence had made the place of his nativity hard to grasp.
For decades he had nursed his dream of going home, but when he moved back his dismay was all-consuming; Montana seemed like a place he had once read about in a dentist’s office, and his daughter who lived there felt the pressure of his impending return. It reminded him of his early days in Boston, when he was always the only person anyone had met named Homer, and the name seemed to suggest risible rural origins. His internist, originally from Wisconsin, was named Elmer, and that seemed to help. Homer was a widower, after enjoying marriage for forty years to CeeCee, a pleasant alcoholic from Point Judith, Rhode Island. Their vacations were spent not in Montana, as he would have liked, but on the island madhouse of Nantucket, which he detested, as he did all seaside places. Too well bred to cause the fuss that might have led to intervention, Homer’s wife had boozed her way right off the planet and was buried among kin in the Point Judith churchyard, and Homer was back home in Montana, not quite comfortable and blaming a scholarship to Harvard Law for turning his life upside down. His waning grief at CeeCee’s death had been marked from the beginning by ambivalence; it was possible that either she or both of them were better off now that she was gone.
Twenty years ago, Homer sent their only child, Cecile, to a dude ranch, hoping to find a kindred spirit in his Montana romance, and it worked. Cecile met a local football star and settled down to raise two children, very much a local, soon treating her own father with that ambiguous humor reserved for out-of-staters. His grandchildren were precocious, in his opinion, and a bit crude, also his opinion. Cecile and her husband, Dean, were fairly crude themselves, always fighting and frequently separated. Homer had to make an effort to keep from finding everything somewhat crude in his old homeplace. Nevertheless, this further motivated him to retire there instead of visiting as he had been doing. He bought a nice place outside town with a view of the Absarokas, a long driveway, and a deep hundred-gallon-a-minute well. In his pleasantly interfering way, Homer could be quite forceful, causing more than a few unpleasant moments in his daughter’s household, an ill-run enterprise at the best of times. He was determined to find his solace in nature but not having much luck at it.
The new quarters became in just a few years quite lonely. But Boston was long behind him, and he didn’t know what to do with himself. Nor could he account for the decades spent in Boston leaving so little trace. He couldn’t go back there, he didn’t have a wife, and he read himself into a hole. He brought himself excruciatingly up to speed on national and world affairs. In two years he would be eighty, and of all things he’d have liked a fresh start. He was remarkably fit for his years; maybe that was the problem. Considering his prospects without the alibi of decrepitude kept him on edge. He snapped at the propane man, not out of the blue—the lout had backed his big truck over a lilac—but a loss of composure uncharacteristic of Homer. He had generally been solicitous, especially of tradespeople on whom he’d come to rely and of the key gossips around the post office. Next, he quit greeting the UPS man and just let him leave things on the porch. He felt that some birds were bullying others at the feeder and started to fret about stepping in, before recognizing that this might just be some geriatric absurdity. He had enough money to keep managed care at bay, and he was determined never to need it.
On his not-infrequent trips back to the city, he felt the extraordinary energy that seemed to emanate from the streets—staying only in hotels with thriving, even booming, lobbies—and on returning home he’d feel dissatisfied with land where all life seemed to have belonged to absent Indians and the blank faces of the neighbors. Believing that the great beauty of the place would have a possibly sweeping impact on
an out-of-towner, he began to think of inviting a lady friend for a visit, a benign calculation that enlivened him considerably. At his age, a smorgasbord of widows lay before him. Surprisingly hale, several had undergone a kind of spiritual tune-up with the departure of their husbands and had become wonderful, even creative, company. There were a few with whom he’d had flings as much as forty years before.
Madeleine Hall was particularly vivid in his memory. He might have been in love with that one. Well, he was and God knows he acted it out. Homer felt that, blessed by longevity, he could be in a position to take advantage of this sentiment, and he elaborated upon the idea without losing sight of the fact that it was really about avoiding loneliness. He dismissed any notion of answering isolation with some fellow sufferer, since the thought of a woman who was herself lonely put him off: needy females had repelled him even in his youth, when neediness was more in style. He married CeeCee for her toughness, but then the drink got her. His greatest disappointment at his wife’s dipsomania had been the decline of her contentiousness as she grew supine and content in addiction. And so he began to stray a bit, his handful of city flings thrilling him with their conflicts and rage. Married in Montana, Cecile had lost all contact with her mother and was strangely unsympathetic to her plight, viewing the addiction strictly as an extravagance not everyone could afford.
It was quiet at home, and then very quiet.
Homer and Madeleine’s wonderful fling back in the fifties included risk-filled lovemaking right under the windows of her husband, Harry, a fund manager and broad-bellied former Princeton football star, and once they’d done it in the very home of Homer’s passed-out CeeCee. Homer had wished Madeleine’s interest in him originated in distaste for Harry. Unfortunately, it was sex and sex only; she adored Harry, but he was now too fat, preoccupied, and plastered to fulfill what she considered a tiny part of her life. Madeleine’s leggy tennis player’s body was full of wanton electricity, and this memory was not entirely absent as Homer greeted a nice-looking old lady as she got off the plane. Her smile was the first thing that caught his eye—it was drawn off center—causing her to remark lightly, “I’ve had a stroke. Is it still okay?”
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