The Visitors

by Patrick O'Keeffe

  I turned from our reflections. Hannah stared at the floor.

  —It will be easier when you marry and have your children, I said.

  And I said it in such a cold way. Said it the way he’d say it.

  • • •

  Less than a week later, Brendan and I were staying in a motel room not far from Logan Airport. During the day we rode the T and got off at stations along the way and wandered the streets. At night we lay on the motel beds and studied maps of the city, read the Boston-Irish newspapers, watched television, and drank duty-free rum from plastic cups. When the rum bottles were empty we rented space in a flat off Highland Avenue in Somerville through an ad in one of those newspapers.

  The Davis Square T stop was a fifteen-minute walk from the flat, which was on the middle floor of a narrow three-story. The house next door looked the same. The houses had decks. And a deck was magic to us. The apartment was a one-bedroom. A carpenter from Cork lived there. He was illegal, and had been living out here a few years. Brendan and I rolled out our sleeping bags on the paint-splattered wooden floor in the sitting room. We bought a clock alarm and pillows. With regard to finding jobs, the Corkman told us to visit this bar on Central Square. Sure to find a lead there. And he kept telling us how lucky we were to have papers.

  We visited that bar on Central Square. That was a place we’d come to love. We met people there from home. We met Americans, Europeans, Mexicans, and South Americans, and one Saturday night, I ran into a man from Dublin. Eamon was his name. He wore a sleeveless leather jacket with a skull and crossbones on its back. He and I chatted while pissing, and while I was drying my hands, he offered me a job painting houses in Concord. Six or seven big houses, inside and out. And he had a few more jobs lined up after that. The hourly wage was sound and under the table. I told Eamon I had no experience painting. Not to worry. A monkey can paint. I’d paint the outside. Pick you up at the Dunkin Donuts on Porter Square at half-six on Monday morning. Brendan met someone in the bar who offered him a job as a printer. We were set.

  The accident happened on a Friday morning. This was around the end of July, about four months after I’d started. Eamon, myself, and the other painter, whose name I don’t remember, ate doughnuts and drank coffee on the front porch of the house we were painting. We sat on wicker chairs and made jokes about the thick cushions. The Mexican gardener was mowing the lawn on the left side of the driveway. The mail carrier was walking up that long and wide driveway. We had never seen a female postman before, not to mention she was black. Her name was Tina, I remember that, and we chatted with her every morning for a few minutes. She liked our accents. We liked hers. The jokes went over and back. After Tina had left, Eamon said his team was playing hurling in Dorchester the next day. The other painter and I said we’d go. I had no interest in hurling, but seeing a match in Boston might be cool. Eamon said that afterward we’d head to this new Irish place in Brighton. A girl he knew from home bartended there. She’d set us up with free beers. The gardener was watering the flower beds along the driveway. He taught me vulgar words in Spanish. I taught him some in English. The house was a white three-story colonial. It had elegant bay windows and those lovely old shutters. Or that’s the way I recall it. Like it was Howard’s End. In the shaded backyard was a red brick patio and a small fountain fed by a constant stream from a fat stone boy’s penis. I don’t remember ever seeing the couple that lived in the house.

  Eamon and I got on ladders at the shaded gable end. Three or four tall maples grew there. Our ladders were ten feet apart. He was painting the shingles. I was scraping old paint from them. The other painter was painting one of the two downstairs bathrooms. Eamon and I talked about the heat, like we did every day. He went on for a while about how he’d lost his hole in a poker game two nights ago, before he told me that every summer, when he was a child, he visited his aunt, uncle, and cousins in County Dublin. The aunt used to take Eamon and her children for picnics in the foothills of the Dublin Mountains. The day Eamon’s youngest cousin turned eighteen, his aunt left letters for her husband and children. She put a few things in a bag and took the boat to Liverpool. She never again came home. For years the aunt had visited her sister in Liverpool. The aunt had met a woman there very early on. This woman and Eamon’s aunt fell in love and began to correspond in secret. They were in love for twenty years before the aunt left the family. She waited to raise the children first. Eamon said he never once blamed his aunt for leaving on account of his uncle being a complete bollocks.

  I told Eamon about Aunt Tess. That she never married. That she was a matron in a Dublin hospital, and every summer she visited my family for a week, and my father brought me with him to pick her up at Limerick Junction. Me because I was her godson. And I told him that my aunt’s hair was the color of copper, she had fine manners, wore bright red lipstick, dresses with exotic patterns, and that my father and she spoke little on the drive home from the Junction. Only my aunt inquiring how their sister was faring out in the City Home. Fine. Grand. And I told him that my aunt Tess smiled when she turned around in the front seat to ask me how I was doing in school. What subjects did I like? What was I going to be when I grew up?

  And I told him Aunt Tess flung herself under a city bus across the street from the Garden of Remembrance, that my aunt Hannah told me this before I left for Dublin, and Aunt Hannah passed away a few months later. And I told him that when I first arrived in Dublin I’d sit in the Garden of Remembrance on my days off work and gaze into the dirty pool and then look up at the Children of Lir changing into swans, and when I sat there I tried very hard not to think about Aunt Tess flinging herself under one of those red city buses lined up across the way. No. I saw her standing in the July sunlight at Limerick Junction. She was waiting for my father to pick her up. He was forever late for everything. She wore her beautiful clothes. At her feet were two suitcases and the bag I later brought to Dublin. That a so-called friend later stole. The medal still pinned inside the bag. I wish that fucking thief luck.

  And I told him Coleman Daly stood beside my aunt and she and Coleman chatted and smoked and their smoke made its lazy way across the tracks and vanished into the bushes and the meadows. Coleman’s navy blue uniform coat was open. His hat lay upside down on the bench behind him, his right hand deep in his pocket, shoulders back, the noble belly stuck out. Coleman addressed my aunt as Miss.

  But I never got the chance to tell Eamon I’d visited Aunt Tess’s grave in Glasnevin, that Aunt Hannah had only told half of it, which didn’t surprise me, but I don’t know if Aunt Hannah even knew, and now I’ll never know if any of them at home ever knew, but about a month before I left for Boston, I visited the hospital where my aunt once worked, and was put in touch with a woman who was best friends with my aunt.

  Mary was retired. We met on a park bench in Drumcondra. The bench was against the tall stone wall of Saint Patrick’s College. Mary brought her dog—bronze hair, the height, head, and folded ears of a terrier, and the thick, long body of some other breed. The dog’s name was Daisy. I shook hands with Mary and looked down and rubbed Daisy’s back. Maybe I turned to Daisy because I felt guilty. Or maybe I was afraid of what Mary was going to tell me.

  Mary said my aunt Tess was the solitary sort. She gave her life to her patients. She loved the hospital. Never once missed a day’s work. And next Mary said my aunt became involved with a married Dublin man she tended to in the hospital. And it was then I stopped rubbing Daisy’s back and looked up at Mary.

  —Tess fell in the big way, Jim, Mary said. —And not long after, he stopped talking to her. Would have nothing to do with her anymore. It broke Tess’s heart.

  This man was mending after a motorcycle accident. And my aunt gave their child up for adoption. The boy was born a month after the man and Tess stopped talking. This boy was now a man, and Mary opened her purse and shoved into my hand a slip of paper with his phone number on it. I shook hands with Mary and said I was heading
off to the States. Mary squeezed my hands, wished me luck, said that no one was as brave as Tess, and the only good thing about the young people leaving again was that you had the chance to tell things. Tell because what did any of it matter to those who were going away.

  And I never got the chance to tell Eamon that two days before I left for Boston I took a bus to Clontarf to see my aunt’s son. His house was at the end of a tree-lined street. He was somewhere in his thirties, a mathematics professor at UCD. Mary had told me that. And he had red wavy hair. I saw it for myself. The same color hair as my father’s. Or I imagined that’s what my father’s hair looked like when he was this man’s age. A lighter shade than my sister Tess’s hair.

  And my cousin had the blue eyes and the thin, long bottom lip of my father. My cousin did say he knew from a young age that he was adopted, but he had no desire to meet my aunt until his adoptive mother finally convinced him that it was the proper thing. My aunt and he met twice, in the space of three weeks. This was ten or twelve years before. I never mentioned my aunt’s death to him. And I didn’t say that the time they met would have been around the time she died. I don’t even know if he knew how my aunt had died. My cousin’s name was Sean.

  And I never got the chance to tell Eamon that Sean had agreed to see me only out of politeness. Like the best way to be rid of me was to see me. The family who raised him was more than kind. He was blessed with them, Sean said. His mother and father were his real mother and father. I was sitting on a couch in his sitting room. His wife and two children were playing in the kitchen. Crashing plastic blocks followed by the children’s yelps. When I’d rang the doorbell the wife answered. Stout, college-educated, country-raised, which you knew by the way she spoke, she didn’t look at me when she led me to that sitting room couch and left. Five minutes later, Sean arrived with the tea tray. Collar and tie, the shirt creased and buttoned at the wrists. He put the tray on the coffee table between us. I stood when the door opened. We awkwardly shook hands. He sat into his armchair and rested his arms along its plump arms. His fingertips clawed at the fabric and I made this jokey remark about how nice it was to see a cousin I never knew existed. He didn’t find my remark one bit funny. He looked out the window at the sea. His face turned pale, the fingertips clawed away. I’d made the remark because I was nervous. Sitting on that couch. Rubbing my palms together. Like I might wipe away my dead aunt’s blood. But my hands would stay stained with her blood every day from that one on. Like it was me and not some stranger who knelt beside her on North Frederick Street after the bus did its dirty work. My beautiful aunt, who said no to the plot. No to this one long, dull wank of a life.

  And not once during that short visit did Sean smile.

  But who can blame him?

  —A very sad woman. Suffering for her mistakes, Sean said in the end.

  —But she would have been delighted to see you, I said. —She would have looked forward to it for such a long time—

  —A woman who couldn’t control herself. I didn’t have much to say to her—

  —She took me and my brothers and sisters for walks in the fields when she visited in summer, I said. —She knew the names of the wildflowers. Every one of them. Very hardworking. Kept to herself. So I’m told.

  —My children need to be in bed, he said.

  He stood and opened his sitting room door.

  —Passionate was what she was, I said.

  I was standing, talking to his back. Then I looked down at my opened hands. They were shaking. My sore thumb was throbbing.

  —That’s a very fancy way of putting her appetites, he said.

  Beyond him his lavender wallpapered hallway. I made fists of my hands and shoved them down my pants pockets. I faced the sea and grunted like an animal.

  —The smell of the sea is lovely, I said.

  But the smell was foul.

  —I don’t mean to be mean, but I’d like if we never talked and never saw each other ever again, he said.

  —You don’t ever have to worry about that, I said to the sea.

  A shout came from Eamon. I looked over to see a shower of yellow jackets swarming around his face and many more shooting out from underneath the shingles. Yellow jackets crawled up and down his bare arms and climbed through his long hair. They made a ferocious sound. A sound as loud as me shouting that his ladder was tottering. And the paintbrush fell from his hand and the bucket of paint clattered onto the stone path. And when he fell backward I was still shouting.

  On his way down his head hit a crotch in one of the maples, and the instant it hit, his legs jerked out, like in a tap dance, and when he landed on the stone path, I was watching the bloodstain on the maple, and if his body made a sound when it hit the path, I did not hear it, and I don’t remember climbing down the ladder, but when I was on the ground, the other painter was kneeling by him. He was crying and begging.

  I ran in the back door and dialed 911 on the hall phone, and then ran down a corridor along a narrow rug and stood on a sunlit wooden floor in a room lined with stuffed wooden bookcases and carefully walked around a glass coffee table covered with magazines, and picked up a caramel-colored cushion from a long and finely wrinkled leather couch that sat before a stone fireplace, and when I turned from the couch I stopped to look at a framed poster on the left side of the fireplace. For three or four minutes I stared. Squeezing the cushion under my arm. Though I often think I never saw that poster in that house. That the poster had caught my eye in some store window I passed on a Boston street, and in the mess called time it ended up here. The poster was a painting by Rothko. I found this out three years later when I was turning the heavy pages of an art book late one night in the library of a community college I attended for two years when I first arrived in Michigan. There was blue and green in the painting. I leaned over and kissed it.

  Outside, the other painter had folded up a drop cloth and covered Eamon up to the neck. Paint from the can was splashed all over the place. I gently lifted Eamon’s head and fixed the cushion underneath it. His pupils moved rapidly, and when I laid his head back, blood spread along the cushion. I wiped my bloody fingers on the edge of the drop cloth. I remember thinking that was one fucking cushion no one would ever again sit on, lay their head on, or lay their back against. The other painter was saying a Hail Mary. The gardener was kneeling and saying it in Spanish. I didn’t know then that his prayer was the Hail Mary. The ambulance sped up the driveway. Sunlight glimmered in the still maple leaves. The fresh coat of paint on the house looked ravishing. And the fat stone boy pissed away at his leisurely pace, like he was keeping time.

  7.

  Zoë walked over to him and said her name. They shook hands. When he said his name he tugged at the bill of the cap. Zoë reached into the tote bag for her sunglasses. She slipped them on and stepped out of the shadow of the house, into the bright sunlight. He picked up the backpack and the flowers. I had opened wide the two car doors. There was a whiff of flour when I did, but there was no flour dust on any of the seats. That morning I’d taken the car to the gas station and filled the tank, checked the fluids, and done a mighty hoovering job. Zoë politely asked him if he’d rather sit in back or up front. He said back, and then Zoë and he had a few words about directions. She turned from him and stared at me across the car roof, and she smiled when she said she would navigate.

  —Fine by me, I don’t have a clue, my dear, I said.

  She placed the tote bag at her feet. He moved into the middle of the backseat. I watched him in the rearview mirror. The white t-shirt beneath Una’s red shirt. The hair around the ears newly clipped. And I remember thinking when I backed down the driveway that afternoon that I had dreamed up the conversation he and I had about Kevin Lyons—needs and wants you to go see him—but when the car was in the street I knew our conversation had been real, like the two sloppy lines of cars and SUVs parked beneath the dusty maples. Zoë rolled her window down.
I rolled mine. There was a tape in the deck. It had been jammed in there for a while. I put the volume on low. In the mirror, he rolled up his sleeves and curled his right arm around the backpack and drew it to him. The flowers were sprawled across his lap.

  I drove under the long roof of maples, turned right at the end of the street, made a left at the United Methodist church, where the tiger lilies were fading, then another right and another left, and at the bottom of that steep street the freight train lights flashed and the barrier came down.

  The freight train came through town at the same time every afternoon. I used to hear it from that flat. And when it came through at 12:40 in the morning, I often heard it. Zoë half-turned and asked him if he traveled much by train. He said he could not remember the last time he was on one, he took the bus. His face in the mirror, when he was speaking, made me think that for some to live was to be constantly fucked over. And I hated it in me: that in one breath I pitied him, but in the other I despised him, because of that message he’d brought to my doorstep. Zoë was talking about her aunt, her mother’s sister, who had moved from a Chicago suburb to Florida. Zoë hadn’t seen the aunt in a long time. Then Zoë turned and asked him his aunt’s age. He said he couldn’t remember. The train cars clattered past. Many were badly rusted, but many had this beautiful graffiti. In what cities or towns did they do it? What time of the day or night did they chance it?

  I’d made a plan to ring Stephen, Hannah, and Tess. I hadn’t spoken to any of them in a very long time—but Hannah might know something about Kevin Lyons, because news about us who’d left often found its way back, though whether the news was true or not was another story. And Stephen was best friends with Seamus Lyons in National and vocational school, but I wasn’t sure if they kept in touch after Seamus and Tommy moved to London to work in hotels, and Stephen ended up going from Manchester to Berlin, then to Sydney, with a blond Australian woman he’d met late one night on a train during an ecstasy trip in Prague. And I needed to ring Tess. Tess always rang more than the others did. She’d rung around Easter—but you were busy with school and the bakery.