I let out a long, jagged breath. My mother seemed to be in a trance as she continued the story.
“She gets him up on her shoulder, and I can hear people giggling and snickering away, and before she heads out she turns to me up there on the stage. Know what she said? She said, ‘Donna, play.’ That’s all. Then she marched off.”
I was tingling. “You played?”
“I did. Picked up where I’d left off when he hit the floor.”
She leaned toward me. “Michael, I know you’ve heard cheering in your time, but I think I can say with certainty that even you never heard applause like I heard that day in the little auditorium at the School of the Most Precious Blood.”
She let her head fall, and I was glad for that, because my own eyes had misted up. “You see why I took your music so seriously?” she asked the table. “All those annoying lessons I made you take? I knew the talent was there in the family. It was just a question of nurturing it the right way.”
She looked up again, the both of us trembling.
“I wanted the best for you, Michael. I know I was overprotective. I know I drove you crazy. It’s just that I know firsthand what happens to families where things get…careless.”
“You were never careless, Mom.”
“Yes, I was. We let you go too young. That was our big mistake.”
“That was my choice.”
“It shouldn’t have been. We should have kept you here.”
“I would have run away.”
“Just like…”
She couldn’t finish the sentence, couldn’t bring herself to say the name aloud. So I did it for her.
“Just like Lynn,” I said.
She nodded, swallowed a sob, composed herself, took a jagged breath. “Michael. Why did things go so wrong for you?”
“Mom, it’s like what they say at the Vatican. You know what they say at the Vatican, don’t you?”
“What’s that?”
“Shit happens.”
It was a risky joke to crack, but she actually giggled. I got up and went around to her side of the table and embraced her from behind. The strength in her shoulders was startling, all tense and taut like a jockey in the homestretch. But suddenly she relaxed, as if the horse she’d been riding since the day I was born had finally, finally crossed that damn finish line.
“I think I would have liked your mother.”
“She had balls, Michael. I’ve got them, too.”
I laughed out loud. She reached back to stroke my hair.
“Whatever it is you want with your life, Michael, I’ll try to help you get it.”
This was as close as she could come to a blessing for me and Lynn, and it took all of her considerable courage to say it.
“Thanks, Mom.”
Another rumble of thunder. I gave her one last squeeze before breaking the embrace and returning to my side of the table.
“Hey,” she said. “We finished the silver.”
“Yeah, it looks good.”
“There’s leftover macaroni I can heat up. Let’s put the silver away and I’ll make us some lunch.”
“No.”
“No? You’re not hungry?”
“No, I mean, let’s not put the silver away.” I plucked out two full settings and handed them to her. “I’ll pack up the rest of it while you give these a rinse, Mom. What do you say we eat our lunch with a little style today, huh?”
She beamed, she shined. “I’d say that was a fine idea, Michael.”
And that’s how we ate our lunch that day, reheated (and slightly crusty) macaroni and cheese. All we really needed was one fork, but there was something so soothing about the sight of those other utensils, like sparkling soldiers eager to serve, that it just might have been the greatest meal of my life.
“Who’s better than us, huh, Mom?”
“Not a soul, Michael. Not a blessed soul.”
Of course, those utensils all went right back into the cherrywood box after the meal, and as I set the box under the staircase it occurred to me that my mother would probably like it if I didn’t tell my father what we’d done that day.
Not that he’d be mad. Quite the opposite. It’s just that it would be our little secret, our first little secret, a memory to treasure and protect like the silverware itself.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Two nights after the silverware experience the phone rang at our house, and it was for me. My father was grinning and mouthed the words “It’s her” as he passed me the phone.
“Lynn?”
“Mickey. Could you come over right away?”
“I’m on my way.”
I flew out of the house without a word to anyone, my heart hammering with every step. My patience had paid off. She’d sounded desperate and lonely. She’d come to her senses at last, all because I’d given her the light and the air to realize how much she missed me.
I was out of breath and all but quaking with joy when I reached the Mahoney door, which opened before I had a chance to knock on it. Lynn stood there, ashen-faced and trembling.
“My mother fell out of bed and I can’t lift her.”
I was stunned. I needed a moment to shift gears emotionally, from passion to emergency.
“All right. I’m here.”
“Mickey, thank you.”
“Take me to her.”
For the first time since old man Mahoney had banned me from this house I crossed the threshold into a place I remembered for its gloom. Now it was even worse. The carpets were worn, the furniture sagged, and God knows when the walls had last tasted paint. Leaks in the ceilings had left bubbly, rust-colored patches. It seemed more like an abandoned hunter’s lodge than a house inhabited by a widow and her daughter on the edge of Queens. I remembered that the Captain had liked making fires, roaring fires, and the rug in front of the fireplace had the burn holes to prove it.
The air was tart with a medicinal smell, a blend of Vicks and rubbing alcohol. A coughing sound jolted me. Lynn led me to the next room, which I’d remembered as a dining room in which I’d never been invited to dine, but now it had been sensibly converted into Mrs. Mahoney’s bedroom to avoid all those stairs.
She was on the floor in a tangle of sheets and blankets, lying on her side. A skinny white foot protruded from the tangle, and coils of gray hair starfished out from her head. Her eyes were wide open and serene, staring blankly at the baseboard directly in the line of her gaze.
In the middle of the room was the bed she’d fallen from, a hospital-issue number with cage doors on each side. The side of the bed she’d rolled off had its door down.
I turned to Lynn. “How do we do this?”
“Let me talk to her first.”
She knelt at her mother’s side like a priest preparing to administer last rites.
“Mom, Mickey is here. Remember my friend Mickey?”
Friend. That stung a little. Mrs. Mahoney took a deep breath in response and blinked her eyes.
“Yeah, he’s here to help us. Okay? We’re going to get you back in bed now.”
The toes of her protruding foot curled up as if with a spasm, then relaxed. Lynn turned to me.
“Come on over now, Mickey,” she said in a chirpy, singsong voice. “Let’s get my mom back in bed.”
I squatted beside Lynn to size up the situation. Mrs. Mahoney continued to stare at the baseboard with an eerie serenity, a serenity she’d never exhibited back when she was hauling all those loads of laundry up and down the cellar steps. Or maybe she was just numb from it all, this life in which she’d buried a husband and four sons and seen her runaway daughter return home for the final act….
“How should we do this, Mickey?”
“Let me do it by myself.”
“You can’t lift her all by yourself!”
“What’s she weigh, eighty pounds?”
Lynn shook her head. “Not even.”
“All right, then, let me do it. You get the bed ready.”
As Lynn s
moothed out the one sheet left on the bed I slid my arms beneath Mrs. Mahoney who, incredibly, had fallen asleep during the past few moments. I braced myself for the initial hoist, but there was no need. The woman was as light as a bird, and lifted off the floor as easily as a saint’s ascent to heaven.
I set her down snoring—snoring!—in the same position she’d occupied on the floor. Lynn straightened out the bedding around her body, tucking here and there until it was just right. I half expected her to slip a teddy bear under her arm.
“We keep her down here because of the stairs.”
“I figured.”
“I could have sworn I closed the gate on her side.”
“You probably did.”
“Well, I’m in big trouble if she found a way to get the gate down.” She might have been talking about a clever pet she had to outwit. She yanked up the gate, which locked with a metallic click. Instinctively, and without waking, Mrs. Mahoney reached out a hand and gripped one of the aluminum bars that held her prisoner. Lynn sighed, turned to me.
“All day long she tries to get out of bed.”
“Can she walk?”
“Not without help.”
“Talk?”
“Couple of words a day. She says ‘laundry.’ I bet she wanted to get out of bed so she could do the laundry. Maybe she dreams that this house is still full of people.”
She shivered, shuddered to rid herself of such a horrible thought. “Thank you for this, Mickey. You are sweet.”
I was sick of being told how sweet I was. “You going to buy me a drink?”
“A drink?”
“Yeah. That’s my fee for picking ex-girlfriends’ mothers up off the floor at a moment’s notice. One beer.”
She shook her head. “No beer in the house.”
“What’ve you got?”
“There may be some whiskey.”
“Whiskey it is.”
Lynn stared at me. “And then you’ll leave, won’t you, Mickey? No funny stuff?”
“I’ll drink my whiskey and I’ll leave. I’ve got work tomorrow.”
“So do I.”
I followed her back into the living room, where she told me to wait while she got the drinks. I was stunned by the sight of the fireplace mantel, which I’d somehow missed on the way through earlier.
It was a shrine to the Mahoney boys, framed photographs of each of them in full-dress formal fireman’s attire, backdropped by the American flag. Identical poses, identical camera angles—the fire department must have taken such pictures of all its members so they’d have something to give the newspapers in the event of disaster.
The center photo was larger than the rest, a glossy of the Captain himself, staring grimly at the camera as if the photographer had just cracked a joke about the Irish. There were piles of gold braid on his shoulders and a lot of scrambled eggs on the peak of his cap. The smirk on his lips made it clear that he’d risked his own life countless times to save the lives of people who weren’t good enough to lick his boots.
And of course there was the framed Pulitzer Prize–winning photo of him as the Burning Angel, emerging from that blaze with the child in his arms.
Lynn returned with two glasses and a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s. She’d answered the door wearing loose jeans and a too-big gray T-shirt, but only now did I notice she was barefoot, a detail that delighted me. Not since our last time at Jones Beach had I seen those feet, long and narrow and straight-toed. She plunked herself down on a corner of the couch facing the mantel.
“Come on, John Wayne, have your drink and then hit the trail.”
She reached out a hand to pat the cushion farthest from hers. I put my ass exactly where her hand left an indentation. She set the glasses on the coffee table and poured out two generous shots. This, I realized, was the last of the late Captain’s booze supply.
“This will be our first alcoholic beverage together, Lynn.”
“I guess that’s true.”
I held my glass out, and after hesitating she did clink with me.
I was never much of a whiskey man. The first sip numbed my tongue and made my teeth feel loose. Lynn sipped her drink and pursed her lips as if the stuff were burning a hole in her belly, only if that’s what was happening, why did she down the rest of it in a gulp and again fill her glass?
“Jesus, Lynn, take it easy!”
“What do you think of the shrine?”
“Huh?”
She gestured at the mantel without looking at it. “All the dead Mahoneys. Wasn’t there a rock group called the Dead Mahoneys?”
I swallowed. She was turning tough on me, lifting her shield into place.
“Come on, Mickey, you were a musician! Wasn’t that the name of a band?”
“I think they were called the Dead Kennedys.”
“You’re right, you’re right…. Can you name them all?”
“Can I what?”
She waved a hand toward the mantel. “Name all my dead brothers, and I’ll pour you another drink.”
The horror of it was, she meant it.
“Are you serious? You think I don’t remember your brothers’ names?”
“I’m waiting.”
I got off the couch and went to the mantel, forefinger and thumb cocked like a pistol as I ticked them off. “Frank. Jimmy. Thomas. Brendan.”
“Very good, DeFalco. Hold out your glass.”
“And this big guy in the middle is Walter.”
She finished pouring, set the bottle on the coffee table. “Didn’t ask you for his name, did I?”
“No, but it’s kind of hard to forget the name of the man who kicked me out of this house forever.”
Lynn chuckled. “Ahh, Mickey. You showed him in the end, didn’t you? Little could the Captain have suspected you’d outlive him and one day return to lift his widow back onto her sickbed.”
“Knock it off, Lynn!”
I’d never spoken to her so harshly before, but she didn’t get angry. She knew she’d been out of line. She sighed, ran a hand through her hair.
“Mickey, I’m sorry. I’m just kind of stressed with my mother and everything.”
“I understand.”
She looked at the photos, took a sip of whiskey. “I miss Brendan the most,” she said softly. “He was special. Do you remember him?”
“Remember him? Are you kidding? I remember what you did to make him feel better that time.”
“What time?”
“That time at the ballfield.”
Lynn seemed shocked. She stared at me. “My God. I can’t believe you remember that time at the ballfield.”
I felt myself smile. “I can’t remember what I had for breakfast, Lynn, but I remember that time at the ballfield.”
Brendan Mahoney was the the baby of the family, a sensitive kid with an artistic side that must have been hell to hide in the midst of all that macho Mahoney manhood. Lynn was convinced he had great artistic talent, and bought him a set of watercolor paints and a small easel for his seventh birthday.
But from the moment he was born the fire department was his destiny, like it or not, and the Captain also forced him to play Little League baseball, a game at which his three brothers had excelled.
Brendan was no ballplayer. We were all there to watch him strike out with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth inning one Saturday afternoon, ending the ball game and his team’s hopes for a championship.
“What a pansy,” the Captain muttered as Brendan, poor Brendan remained standing at home plate as if he meant to die there, a willowy ten-year-old weeping big tears that disappeared in the dust as kids from the other team did a victory dance all around him.
Lynn turned to me, fighting back tears of her own. “Do you mind if we don’t go to the movies tonight?”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want to take Brendan out.”
And that’s just what we did. It was a balmy June evening, the sky all rosy and purple with the coming of
night. Lynn had packed a picnic basket, so I knew whatever she had in mind would be taking place outdoors. But where? It was Brendan, still wet-haired from the shower and dark-eyed from defeat, who asked where we were going.
“The ballfield!” Lynn chirped.
He stopped and looked at her as if she’d just smacked his face.
“I don’t want to go there, sis!”
“Lynn,” I said, “this doesn’t seem like the greatest idea in the world.”
She set the picnic basket down and grabbed the two of us in a tight hug.
“You’re going to have to trust me, guys.”
And so we did. By the time we got to the ballfield, the league games were long over. A giggly teenage girl stood in the outfield with her boyfriend, a goofy-looking kid with curly hair and eyeglasses, who knelt in the grass as he fiddled about with the tail of a huge kite.
Lynn pointed at them. “This is going to be good,” she promised. “Come on, we’ll set up the picnic in the outfield.”
For the next hour we sat on the grass, ate bologna sandwiches, and laughed our asses off at the sight of that poor kid trying to get his kite aloft. He’d run with it, trip and fall, then get up and try it again, only to get tangled up in the string. His girlfriend tried to help, and they both got tangled in the string.
Brendan was laughing so hard I thought he was going to rupture himself. Only Lynn could have figured out that this was the way to heal him—take him to the very spot where he’d failed so miserably, and show him how life goes on.
Soon a sliver of a summer moon appeared, and with it came a fresh breeze that was enough to lift the kite into the sky. The three of us cheered and ran over to congratulate the kite boy, who was nice enough to give Brendan a turn handling the kite.
“Just don’t yank it,” the kite boy warned. “I don’t want to lose it.”
Brendan obeyed, his hands steady on the string, feeding it out an inch at a time as if he meant for the kite to reach the moon, which now shined as brightly as Brendan’s eyes….
Lynn sat there on the couch, staring at me through dewy eyes.
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