When she said she was going upstairs to check on their mother, I followed.
I touched her arm. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said, and pulled away from me.
“But you’re not,” I said.
“Well aren’t you the perceptive one,” she said.
“Come on,” I said. “What’s up?”
“What’s up? Why we are, Charlie—we’re up here in the upstairs hallway of the home in which I grew up, and where we are now having a joyous and spontaneous family reunion, and where there are so many memories and feelings crashing around that the Environmental Protection Agency may be called in.”
“And you’re up-set,” I said.
“Oh Charlie,” she said, her head against my chest. “You are a wonder, and I’ll be fine after a few years of this. It’s not complicated, after all. I forgot a few things, see? I forgot to be who I was supposed to be—a mother, a wife, secretary, a nurse, a teacher, a nun—I’m in the family but not of it, right? Same old, same old. I’m not like them, Charlie. It’s why I…”
“So you’re different—you’re who you are, they’re who they are, and what’s wrong with that? They love you—adore you actually. You’re their shining light, the angel who…”
She pulled away again, walked to her mother’s room, peeked in, turned back to me.
“They really are proud of you and love you, even if they don’t understand you, even if…”
“Does that go for you too?”
“No. I understand you. I get you.”
“You really think so?” She pressed her body against me, her hands on the back of my neck. “You are my guy,” she said. “Did you know that? But do leave me be for a while. It’s all much more overwhelming than I expected, and, in the life I chose, I did get used to being alone most of the time.”
“You can still be alone as much…”
“Shut up and kiss me,” she said, and I did, and when she backed away, her eyes were suddenly blazing. She grabbed both my arms and started shaking me. “Oh my god,” she said. “Oh my dear fucking God! I forgot, right? Yes! I almost forgot our plan…”
When we got to the Holy Cross schoolyard, he was there, as Seana thought he might be. He had never let her or her sisters see where he lived, and had always, from boyhood, called the Holy Cross schoolyard his home-away-from-home. He was sitting by himself, his back against the chain-link fence, watching black guys play basketball.
“What took you so long?” he said, but without smiling. “You hung up on me, so I waited for you, figuring you’d get yourself here by and by. Your wop boyfriends don’t hang out here anymore, unless this young man you’re with is one of them.”
“This is my friend Charlie Eisner,” Seana said. “He’s Max Eisner’s son. Max is dead—he passed away two months ago.”
“Ah!” her father said. “Relieved to hear it, young man. No offense, but from the grim look on my daughter’s face, I thought you might have come to tell me he died of a sudden this very day.”
“This is my father, Patrick O’Sullivan,” Seana said.
He took off his baseball cap, tipped it toward me. “Now when my time comes,” he said, “the one room I live in being terribly small, all you’ll have to do is tuck me in, turn out the lights, lock the door, put handles on the room, and carry it away.”
One of the black guys came over. “This is my daughter,” Seana’s father said to him. “And this is her young friend, Charles Eisner.”
“Your father’s the man,” the black guy said, and he shook each of our hands. “He’s a real card.”
“The joker in the pack,” Seana’s father said.
“You got that right,” the black guy said. “This man knows more bad jokes than any man on this earth, and when I say bad, I mean bad. We count on him for stuff.”
Seana’s father stood, and to my surprise, he was nearly as tall as I was. He wore a blue pin-stripe suit, a green and white repp tie. He was clean-shaven, and what I had taken for high color in his cheeks was, I now saw, rouge.
“So Smitty,” her father asked the black guy, “if you had a donkey and I had a rooster, and your donkey ate my rooster, what would you have?”
“Don’t know.”
“You’d have three feet of my cock up your ass.”
Smitty laughed. “He gives us lines we can use with our lady friends too,” he said to Seana, then whispered. “And we take care of him—look out for him—know what I mean?”
“No,” Seana said. “I don’t.”
“Have you ever played ‘County Fair’ with one of your young lady friends?” Seana’s father asked.
“How you do that?” Smitty asked.
“You have her sit on your face, and you guess her weight.”
Smitty laughed again. “See what I mean?” he said.
“No,” Seana said. Then, to her father: “It’s time to go. Everyone’s waiting.”
“I suspected as much,” her father said. Seana’s father picked up his cane—black, with an ivory-white handle in the shape of a cat’s head—and we started from the schoolyard, the black guys waving to us.
“Do you know what the difference is between a priest and acne?” her father asked, and when neither of us responded, he answered his own question: “Acne doesn’t usually come on a boy’s face until after he’s twelve years old.”
We walked past the church, one of us to either side of him.
“And you, Mister Eisner—given your origins, you might know the answer to this: What’s the difference between a Jew and a pizza?”
I said nothing.
“When you put a pizza in the oven it doesn’t scream,” he said.
“Cheesy joke,” I said.
“Don’t,” Seana said. “Don’t encourage him.”
“Because I’m in-corrigible,” her father said. “Ah—and here’s an ecumenical favorite: A priest walks up to the bar and orders a drink. Then a rabbi walks up to the bar and orders a drink. Then a horse walks up to the bar, and the bartender asks: ‘Why the long face?’”
“I have a surprise,” Seana said, when we reached her street. “I’ve planned a trip for you.”
“Still trying to get rid of me, I see,” he said. “But good of you, of course, and I accept your offer, since you must be a wealthy woman from your several best sellers.” He tapped on my shoe with his cane. “Her sentences lack a certain felicity of style, and her timing is off—a matter of cadence there—and we certainly wouldn’t think of talking about her work in the same breath with the work of, say, Beckett, or O’Casey, or even Edna O’Brien, though the public does seem to take to her. Still, if you ask me…”
“Nobody has,” I said.
“What you might do,” her father said, “is to think of me as a refugee from one of those cheerful William Kennedy novels.”
“You wish,” Seana said, and she opened the door.
“Not that I’m unappreciative of the effort—the sacrifice—you’ve made in coming here and bringing me home,” he said. “As for the trip you so graciously offered, I’m game, of course, and you’ll let me know the itinerary when you have it, please, so I can make plans accordingly.”
We entered the house, and walked through the foyer into the living room. Seana’s sisters were there with some of the children. When they saw us, they stopped what they were doing, but none of them stood, and none of them spoke.
Seana’s father tipped his cap. “Well, isn’t it lovely to be here once again, and to receive your warm welcome.” He looked around, in mock bewilderment. “Oh—am I in the wrong theater? This isn’t 10 Downing Street?”
“Hello Dad,” Caitlin said, and she came to him, kissed him on the cheek, and Keira, Mary, and Peggy did the same. Then their mother came forward, smiling brightly, but when she went to embrace him, he recoiled.
“She never gave me sons,” he said, tapping on the floor with his cane to keep her away from him. “A spiteful woman in spite of her seeming charms.” He took off h
is cap, held it to his chest, inclined his head slightly. “I am Patrick Michael O’Sullivan,” he said.
“Why I once had a husband with that name!” Seana’s mother pushed his cane out of the way. “He was a handsome devil, and the ladies loved him too much, you see, which was the bane of my existence, though I have to confess that I could understand why they had an eye for the brute.”
“And not only an eye, my dear,” he said, and then, to Seana. “Oh my—she really has lost it, hasn’t she? She was the fairest of them all, you know. She was stunning in her youth—a rare, exquisite beauty.” He pointed his cane at Seana. “Like you, my dear. You got the best of each of us, you know.”
“Say hello to your grandchildren,” Seana said, “and then I’ll take you upstairs and show you the surprise.”
Her sisters brought their children and grandchildren to him, one at a time, and the older children remembered him, Caitlin explained to me, since he had shown up through the years at ritual occasions: baptisms, communions, confirmations, graduations, weddings, funerals.
“Thank you,” Seana said to me while the children were introducing themselves.
“For what?”
“For your story—what else? It inspired me.”
“But what’s this about a trip? You never mentioned anything…”
“Patience, Charlie,” she said. “Patience.”
“Sure. But now that I’ve met the man, I can’t help but wonder: Did he ever…?”
“Never,” Seana said. “He was too clever for that kind of vulgarity. If only he had, though, for it might have made overt what was covert—what was all innuendo and leering and nastiness…”
Her father was holding forth, wiggling his cane in the air. “…so when the man kept insisting that he was a moth—‘I’m a moth! I’m a moth! I’m a moth!’—the doctor finally said, ‘Now look, Timothy, you’re not a moth, but if you insist on believing you are, then I really think you should see a psychiatrist,’ to which Timothy replied, ‘Of course—I was on my way there, but I saw the light on in your office.’”
There was a brief moment of silence, and then a few of the children laughed. Seana’s father, sitting on the couch, his grandchildren around him and on the floor in front of him, beamed with pleasure.
“Family happiness,” Seana said.
“Makes the eyes sore,” Caitlin said, an arm around Seana.
“I’ll say,” Peggy said. “But you did get him here, and I suppose that’s something. We are family, after all.”
“‘After all’ is right,” Seana said. “And what a rich and wondrous phrase that is! Think of what James could do with it…”
“James who?” Peggy asked.
“Henry James—the Irishman Henry James, about whom—after all—Charlie’s father has written with grace and intelligence,” Seana said.
Seana’s mother sat down beside Seana’s father. “My husband had a cane like yours,” she said, “and he could do a marvelous soft shoe number with it. He could have been another Fred Astaire if he hadn’t been such a lazy and mean-hearted bastard.”
“Gene Kelly would have been a more ethnically correct fit.”
“In your dreams,” Seana’s mother said.
“But let me finish the story I was telling the children,” he said. “And so one night, alone yet again, and in a rage, Molly left their flat and went down to Sheehan’s bar, and there she found her husband, drinking with his friends the way he was wont to do, and he embraced her and kept urging her to join with them. She relented finally and took a sip and spat it out. ‘By God, that’s awful stuff!’ she said, and he responded, ‘And here you’ve been thinking I’m down here having a good time every night…’”
“Oh that one’s so old it has hair on it,” Seana’s mother said.
“Well, ‘hair today… gone tomorrow’ is what I always say,” Seana’s father said.
“Now my own husband worked for the Brooklyn Union Gas Company,” Seana’s mother said. “He was a meter reader, which allowed him entry into many homes and many women.”
“As it happens, I too worked for the Brooklyn Union Gas Company,” Seana’s father said.
“My husband did theater now and then—a few turns when they tried to revive vaudeville—and he liked to call himself a song-and-gas man,” Seana’s mother said. “His name was Patrick Michael O’Sullivan.”
“My name is Patrick Michael O’Sullivan,” Seana’s father said.
“What a coincidence,” Seana’s mother said.
Keira announced that it was time for tea—milk and cookies too—and for whoever wanted some to come into the kitchen.
“Come with me,” Seana said to her father. “It’s time.”
“Quite the autocrat you have here, son,” he said to me. “Always liked to order people around, she did. If she’d been a boy, she would have been a chip off the old block, I dare say.”
We walked up the stairs, and Seana led her father into her bedroom.
“This is what my sisters made for me,” she said.
“Awfully tacky, wouldn’t you say?”
“No,” she said. “But you might.”
“Is this the surprise you referred to? I thought you talked about arranging for a trip…” He picked up Plain Jane, then set it back on the table, face down. “Well, you have brought us all together, though to what end is unclear. Still, the Lord works in mysterious ways, they say.”
“He may, but I don’t,” Seana said. “For I’m more like you than is good for you.”
“I’m glad to hear of it,” he said. “It will get you through many a thorny garden.”
“I hope so,” Seana said. “We’ll go back downstairs now.”
When we were at the top of the stairs, Seana asked her father to give her his cane, said he could use the banister for making his way downstairs. Then she called out: “Caitlin, Peggy—you should dial 911—I think there’s going to be an accident!”
Her father, looking puzzled, stepped down, and when he did Seana took him by the arm.
“Here—on second thought, you might need the cane for your trip,” she said, and she thrust the cane at him, but below his open hand, so that when he reached for it, and she put her free hand on his back as if to steady him, he tripped on the cane, lost his balance, and tumbled down the staircase.
Seana stood next to me. “We’re even now, Charlie,” she said. “But at least I had the good sense to keep it in the family.”
Her sisters and some of their children were at the bottom of the stairs, Keira screaming, the children gaping, Caitlin on the phone.
When we turned onto my street in Northampton—it was past ten in the evening—I saw that someone was sitting on my porch, slowly rocking back and forth in a rocking chair the way Max had often done on summer evenings. We parked the car in the driveway by the side of the house, then went to the porch, and the man stood—it was Lorenzo—and without looking at Seana, and without offering his hand to either of us, he began speaking.
“I tried to reach each of you by telephone, but without success,” Lorenzo said, “and so I drove down. I’m staying in town, at the Hotel Northampton, so you needn’t worry about observing civilities.”
The scar on his lower lip, in the dim light from the street lamp, looked like a small gray worm. I unlocked the front door, and invited him to come in.
“There is no need,” he said. “My business will be brief.”
We remained standing while he told us that two days earlier, Gabe had jammed all the silverware he could find into a microwave oven, turned it on, and blew up the kitchen. He had waited until Anna and Trish were away—while Trish was taking Anna to a play-date—before he did it. Trish was now in a psych ward at a hospital in Camden, for observation, and for more information it would be best that we talk with Eugenia. She was taking care of the children while Trish was gone, and Gabe, who continued to insist he intended no harm and had been working on an experiment in preparation for the next Fourth of July celebration, had be
en taken away by people from the local social service agency and was in a safe, secure place, and—he had been given assurances by people he knew—would not face criminal charges. Lorenzo had engaged a lawyer with whom both he and Eugenia had conferred. Having discovered the change Trish had made in her will, they had concluded it would be best if Seana and I took care of the children until Trish was well again.
“If she’s ever well again,” Seana said.
“Well that’s true too, isn’t it,” Lorenzo said without looking at Seana. Then he offered me his sympathy on my father’s death, and left.
Early the next morning, we headed north. The highways were deserted, and we made it to Ogunquit, where we stopped in a seaside diner for breakfast, in under two hours. After breakfast, we stayed on Old Route 1 as much as we could in order to be near the ocean. Despite Max’s death, Nick’s death, and Seana’s father’s fall—Caitlin called at one in the morning to tell us that the doctors at Maimonides hospital said he’d suffered multiple fractures and various internal injuries, but that he would live—and despite what might lie in wait for us in Maine, it felt as if we were setting out on a mini-vacation—a long weekend by the sea—at a time when, the brilliant autumn colors gone, northern New England would be especially peaceful.
We were quiet on the drive, and seemed to have arrived, separately, at the decision not to talk about Seana’s father, or Lorenzo, or Trish, or the possibility that we might become Gabe’s and Anna’s legal guardians—or about the fact that what Seana had prayed for might soon be coming true. When we talked, we talked mostly about Seana’s sisters, her nieces and nephews, and her mother.
The Other Side of the World Page 25