And lonely. Desperately lonely. With Mike along, these visits had their own bearable rhythm and their own subterranean rewards. He was as uncomfortable in his way here as she was, unsuited to the role of fond son, and there was a kind of camaraderie in watching him ease into cautious rapport with his father, in seeing the awkward tenderness he showed his mother and hearing him banter with his sister. She could ride it out, with Mike here, waiting for the subliminal joy in the amused glances he gave her at moments, the little looks and winks across the room at O’Reilly-isms. Without Mike, she was simply a dutiful fish out of water, delivering the brood for their dose of grand-parenting. She tried to imagine making these ritual visits alone for the rest of her life, if Mike was killed. Seeing Mike like a shadow in his sister’s face, in his father’s quiet stubbornness, in his mother’s eyes. She couldn’t bear the thought.
She remembered her first visit here, about a month after she and Mike had begun to date. In retrospect, she’d been a sunshine-headed naïf, but she’d understood even at eighteen that she was a peace offering of sorts. Mike had fought savagely with his father for permission to join the Marine Corps early, at seventeen; Michael O’Reilly Senior believed he had raised a gifted scholar, not a warrior, and Mike’s determination to fight for South Korea’s freedom had been at least as much a war of independence against his parents’ hopes and expectations as a battle against godless Communism. In the end, Mike Senior had grudgingly signed off on the enlistment papers only on the condition that Mike promise to come back from his mad crusade and finish college, and Mike had gone off to fight his war and duly come home to reenlist in academia. Along with a riotously witty paper on Kipling and empire, Liz was the first tangible evidence of his return to normality after his Korean service.
That first visit had been revelatory: as a peace offering, Liz had realized quickly that she amounted to a Trojan horse. She was not the woman Mike’s parents had pictured for him; she was a flame to people who had been expecting flowers. Mike’s father was a tall, dignified man steeped in Shakespeare and the Old Testament, a natural patrician with courtly manners, utterly placid in his ways. He had Mike’s dry wit and marvelous offhand eloquence but none of Mike’s refreshing irony. Mike’s mother was a tiny, temperate woman who had never learned to drive, prepared to exchange recipes with Liz, to talk about the fine points of gravy and stuffing and leave the serious matters to the menfolk. It was an almost oppressively tranquil, if not complacent, household, and Liz felt too large from the moment she walked into the tiny living room: too loud, too vivid, and altogether too much, with all her jokes and comments going flat and clunking, like birds falling from air that somehow would not support their wings.
She and Mike had arrived fifteen minutes late that first day, to the silent displeasure of the elder O’Reillys. The assumption, blithely uncorrected by Mike, had been that it was Liz’s fault, and the tension had eventually dissolved into indulgent nods to the inevitable vanity of a girl’s prolonged preparations, which had infuriated Liz not only because of the condescension and sheer wrongness of the cliché, but because their tardiness had actually been entirely Mike’s doing: they’d stopped in the park, three minutes from the house, to see the place along Sligo Creek where he had found a fox with a broken leg when he was a boy. Mike had shown Liz the tree where he’d carved his initials to mark the spot. The beech had healed around the wound of his memory, the blocky letters in Mike’s already characteristic printing black with time, sunk deep in the bark, scars among other scars. He told Liz he had taken the fox home wrapped in his sweatshirt and been bitten several times in the process, but he’d never breathed a word to his parents. He’d splinted the fox’s leg and kept it in the basement until it was well, then released it.
There was a self-conscious, almost furtive, passion in Mike’s telling of the story, a sense of something shy and unused to exposure slipping from a mythlike depth. The moment had touched Liz deeply; she’d recognized that it was Mike’s gift of himself to her, a glimpse of the crypto-Spartan in him emerging for the first time from the unlikely matrix of his moderate upbringing. She’d held her tongue with his parents to honor that secret sharing, but she couldn’t help but feel dismay at the way he left her twisting in the wind in that smug little living room, exposed to the indignity of their pigeonholing.
The visit, on the whole, had proven a quiet disaster. Mike had told her that his father adored Shakespeare and led Liz to believe there would be a solid ground of early rapport there; and indeed, Mike Senior’s thick volume of the collected works was soft and battered with rereading, with three thin stripes of dark gray along the page edges marking the locations of Hamlet, The Tempest, and Romeo and Juliet. But they’d run into trouble almost immediately on Richard II, whom the elder O’Reilly apparently considered a Christ figure and martyred philosopher. He’d quoted, without a trace of irony, “…if angels fight, / Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right.” Liz had jumped in with both feet, typically, in spite of herself: “And nothing can we call our own but death; / And that small model of the barren earth / Which serves as paste and cover to our bones,” to which Mike Senior had replied with an air of accepting insult with forbearance, “You may my glories and my state depose, / But not my griefs; still am I king of those.” Mike had let them go at it, amused, noting only that at least in the end Richard had drawn his damned sword and gotten two of the bastards before they got him. Liz suspected Mike had seen both the argument and the stalemate coming, and even that he was pleased: she’d battled his father as an unsuspecting proxy on a kamikaze mission of sorts.
They’d had the first fight of their relationship in Mike’s Chevy on the way back to D.C. that night, and Liz remembered her dismay at succumbing to petulance. Until then she and Mike had been free proud beings together, grown-ups trying the wings of their deepest hopes for themselves, and it was humiliating to see things degenerate so quickly into squabbling over family politics. Mike had finally stopped in Georgetown and bought her ice cream, and they’d laughed together over it in the end, but the damage was done, and the pattern set. Neither of their best selves would ever be at home in that, or any other, living room. She had fallen in love with the warrior in Mike: the fierceness of his integrity and his strange, easy willingness to die for the right thing. As he had loved her actor’s vividness and fire. But those weren’t qualities that promoted domestic peace.
The kids had disappeared long since into the house; the pale face of Mike’s sister, Theresa, a Bethanite nun, appeared now at the tin screen of the outer door, looking concerned, her features a moon echo of Mike’s, framed by a veil of soft blue cotton rather than her usual starched wimple. Her order was easing into the new climate of Vatican II by tentative degrees, and she wore a plain blue dress now rather than her former engulfing robe; the children had been thrilled, on their last visit, to discover that their aunt had ankles. Liz roused herself and got out of the car.
“Are you all right?” Theresa asked, opening the door as Liz reached the porch.
“Just peachy,” Liz said. It was a Mike-ism, meaning, “Are you kidding?” and Theresa smiled in understanding. A year older than Liz, she shared Mike’s subversive sense of humor, which was always a relief to Liz. The siblings were much alike, indeed, in many ways; Theresa had entered the convent straight out of high school, as Mike had gone to boot camp and to war: like watermelon seeds squeezed too tightly, both O’Reilly children had shot off into transcendent vocations at the first opportunity.
Theresa gave Liz a hug. “I’m afraid Angus broke the County Cork angel again,” she said, with a warning note.
Liz groaned. “Jesus. Already?”
“The boy has a gift,” Theresa agreed. “I’ve got a Manhattan made for you.”
“You’re a saint.”
Theresa laughed. “As if that would do any good.”
Liz smiled appreciatively. Her sister-in-law half-turned, ready to enter the house, but this was the moment, and Liz said, “Theresa—”
The
resa paused, with her hand on the door. “Yes?”
“I wanted to give you a heads-up, before I tell your parents: I’m pregnant.”
“Ah!” Theresa said carefully. “Well…Hooray?”
“I’m working up to it. I really don’t see any alternative.”
Theresa glanced inside the door, then met her eyes and smiled. “Then ‘Hooray’ it is, I guess.”
“Yahoo,” Liz said.
“Do you still want the Manhattan?”
“I don’t see how one can hurt.”
“I’ll make you a weak one.”
“Don’t you dare.”
Theresa laughed and gave her a quick hug, then led the way into the house. Liz took a deep breath and followed, to find her mother-in-law fretting over the pieces of the shattered angel, with Angus a step behind her, looking abashed. The white Irish porcelain figure, hand painted with gold trim, shamrocks, and unsettling blue eyes, had been purchased in Cork City, Ireland, the year before Mike was born, on the great journey of his parents’ lives. The sacred heirloom had survived more than thirty years undamaged before the coming of grandchildren, but Angus had broken it three years running now, though he had outdone himself this year and apparently knocked the Erin-go-bragh angel off the coffee table before he’d even removed his coat. Danny already had the traditional model airplane glue out and was trying to reaffix one of the wings of the angel, which was relentlessly playing “An Irish Lullaby” despite its damaged condition.
“Angus, for God’s sake,” Liz said.
“I said I was sorry!”
“Say it again, then.”
“I’m sorry,” Angus said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” Mike’s mother said, though it clearly was not all right.
“I am so sorry,” Liz told her.
“It’s all right,” Anna O’Reilly repeated, still sounding unconvinced. She offered a distracted cheek to her daughter-in-law, and Liz bent to give her a kiss and a hug. Her mother-in-law always reminded Liz of a bird: a sparrow, maybe, nothing but bones and air, with a will of quiet steel. Mike’s mother ran her traditional household in the traditional way, almost invisibly. But at moments like this, there was no doubt that she ran it. No one was going to be happy until she officially lightened up.
“Do we need a chaplain?” Liz asked Danny, who was still attending to the angel.
“No,” he said seriously. “It’s a good clean break. It should stay together fine, once the glue dries.”
“A million-dollar wound,” Theresa offered, from the periphery. Angus giggled gratefully, and Liz shot him a warning look: too soon to celebrate, buster. He sobered at once, and she felt a pang of remorse. She actually felt like hugging him, her little bull in this grandparental china shop.
“Green Dragon, Green Dragon, this is Coffee Table,” Danny said, in his radio voice. “We need a dust-off here, pronto, over.”
“Copy that,” Angus croaked, in his own version of the radio voice. He glanced at Liz, who glanced at Mike’s mother, then nodded tentatively; released into action, Angus fled downstairs to the basement, where the boys kept their toys.
As the angel continued to tinkle “An Irish Lullaby,” Mike Senior appeared, like the cavalry, from the kitchen, holding two Manhattans. He handed one to Liz and one to his wife, with a little extra flourish, which was exactly the right thing to do. O’Reilly family lore had it that Mike’s father made the second-best Manhattans in the world. Theresa made the best. Anna O’Reilly accepted the drink a trifle grudgingly, unwilling to be entirely appeased yet, but she took a sip at once. Liz gave Mike’s father an appreciative kiss on the cheek.
“Happy anniversary,” she offered ruefully, and he smiled.
“War is never a pretty thing,” he said.
Angus reappeared, holding a big green plastic Huey helicopter above his head, making subdued whoomp-whoomp sounds.
“Coffee Table, this is Green Dragon,” he croaked, in his radio voice. “I have purple smoke, over.”
“Affirmative, Green Dragon, goofy grape,” Danny croaked back. “Come on in.”
Angus brought the chopper in low and hovered above the battered nativity scene. Danny loaded the wounded angel, holding the reattached wing tenderly in place, and the two boys headed for the back bedroom, which in recent years had come to serve as Charlie Med for porcelain figurines wounded in action.
“Sic transit gloria angelii,” Mike Senior noted dryly, when the chopper noise had faded, and gave his wife a wink. She smiled back, mock-grimacing at first and then with an oh, you! twinkle in her eye. A good marriage at work, Liz thought: a sweet moment. She hoped Mike could still wink at her like that after thirty-five years.
WITH THE ANGEL evacuated, the decks were cleared for her announcement, and Liz duly made it. She gave it her best theatrical spin and felt that she sold it with appropriate cheer. Theresa was marvelous in her supporting actress role, and the senior O’Reillys were a receptive audience in any case; they loved her best, Liz had always known, as the vehicle of their grandchildren. Anna O’Reilly teared up briefly, then took the Manhattan out of Liz’s hand and brought her a cream soda. Mike Senior settled back in his chair, beamed quiet satisfaction, and quoted something from Proverbs about a quiver full of children.
After the flurry of the news, the weekend routine resumed in merciful uneventfulness. Anna O’Reilly retreated to the kitchen with the single Manhattan she would nurse through the entire afternoon and busied herself with preparing the meal; Liz went in after her, to offer to help, and Mike’s mother gently but firmly threw her out, as she always did. The other adults settled into the living room and consumed their drinks at the ritual O’Reilly rate of one per hour. The inevitable football game appeared on the TV, quietly monitored by Mike Senior from his deep stuffed chair by the fireplace, while Theresa and Liz bore the brunt of the conversation as always, discussing Liz’s pregnancy and how the kids were doing at school and comparing notes from recent letters from Mike. Kathie, who had cried at not being able to spend the weekend with Temperance and her family, had brought music, and she disappeared into the attic bedroom, from which the sounds of Martha and the Vandellas emanated scratchily. Deb-Deb plopped down beside the coffee table to play with Anna O’Reilly’s other prized porcelain figures and soon had the leprechaun chatting happily with the magic cows. After a few subdued missions with the plastic helicopter under the anxious eyes of the adults, Danny and Angus decided they preferred to play in the freer reaches of nearby Sligo Creek Park, and Liz let them go, despite the continued rain. Dealing with their eventual sogginess and even pneumonia seemed preferable to the vast potential for further misadventures inside. Angus could break something in his grandparents’ house just by looking at it, and they were running low on model airplane glue.
By halftime, the small talk in the living room had been exhausted; they watched the rest of the Texas-Notre Dame game desultorily while warm cooking smells filled the house. It always seemed a kind of humiliation to Liz, to be reduced to watching images flicker on a screen. This was one of the times she missed Mike the most; the easy American male patter he exchanged with his father carried these barren afternoons.
Danny and Angus returned from the park, shockingly drenched; they had apparently gotten into the creek. Liz made them take off every article of clothing possible outside, to minimize drippage on the tidy rugs, and put them straight into the bathtub.
By the time the boys reappeared in fresh dry clothes from the stash in the extra bedroom, looking scrubbed and improbably pure, like the newly baptized, dinner was ready. Mike Senior said grace with his usual understated dignity, added a blessing on the baby-to-be, and followed this with an unprecedented prayer for Mike, which awed everyone into silence: for a moment, the deferred reality surfaced through the politeness and the strain. What they had in common, the reason they were together here, the father of these children, the husband of this wife, the son and brother of these parents and this sister, was
at war. Liz met her father-in-law’s eyes and was conscious, painfully, of their essential kinship: both of them had fought Mike on this, fought hard, and both of them had lost. He was out there defending freedom in spite of them.
She reached to touch her father-in-law’s hand; Mike Senior took her hand in his and gave it a quiet squeeze, and Liz’s eyes filled. She felt for an instant the man’s almost elemental goodness, the sturdy, simple faithfulness of his heart. The deep, deep thing in him that in Mike had turned, goddammit, into heroism.
The moment passed; everyone dug in. The football game continued from the living room, a close game in the fourth quarter now, which Mike Senior kept one eye on over his shoulder. There was the usual food awkwardness: none of the children except Deb-Deb would eat the peas or the onions, and Anna O’Reilly’s famous squash casserole was out of the question. Angus kept trying to say what the casserole looked like, in defense of his position, and Liz kept shushing him. She didn’t know what he was going to say, but it didn’t seem likely to her that Angus’s grandmother would appreciate hearing one of her prize recipes, passed down from her own grandmother, compared to whatever Angus had in mind. Angus grew increasingly restive under the suppression but managed to hold his tongue until both grandparents were away from the table, at which point he muttered to Danny, with an air of having been unjustly denied his truth, “It looks like dog vomit.”
“I know,” said his brother, more seasoned in the ways of their grandparents’ home. “But if you move it around on the plate a little, it looks like you ate some.”
AFTER DINNER, the photograph albums came out. It was, Liz knew, partly an homage to her pregnancy, her father-in-law’s way of asserting continuity. The O’Reilly style in general was fond but undemonstrative, but Mike Senior was a quietly passionate family chronicler and a secret sentimentalist, with a loving eye; much of his seldom-spoken love went into taking excellent pictures, and the albums he had assembled over the decades had the sweep and coherence of good novels. The kids particularly loved the black-and-white pictures of the early years of Mike and Liz’s relationship.
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