Law and Order

by Uhnak, Dorothy

  “What the hell does that mean? Look, where do you get off, saying something like that? Your mother and I have a good life together. You and Patrick had a good home.”

  She nodded and started washing cups and saucers.

  Mary Ellen looked up at him and the two kids, large-eyed, expectant, tense, glanced from their storybook, leaned a little closer into her, one on each side of her. Mary Ellen signaled to him, just a slight pursing of her lips to indicate their innocent presence.

  “Look,” he told his wife, “I’m going to take that TV set down to Mom’s. If Maureen wants to stay overnight, she’s welcome.”

  Mary Ellen released her breath slowly, drew her arms tighter around her grandchildren, looked young enough, scared enough, small enough to be their mother. They nestled protectively close to her. “Won’t that be fun? Timmy, you and Patty can sleep in Uncle Patrick’s room. The room he had when he was just a little boy, like you.”

  “Mary Ellen,” he said carefully, “just for tonight.”

  Brian leaned his head back against the old familiar chair, stretched his legs to the hassock, closed his eyes and could almost feel time slip away. His mother’s voice came from the kitchen. There were the scuffling sounds of boys, the warning note in his mother’s voice; an argument in high thin voices: “It was him; he did it.”

  “No, it was him, not me.”

  “Go on in now and tell Uncle Brian good night,” his mother instructed and he pulled himself up as the two boys entered the living room.

  Jesus, they were practically black: dark-brown faces, bright-black eyes suddenly gone shy when confronted by him. His mother casually shoved them forward.

  “Come on now, say your good nights properly.”

  “Good night, Uncle Brian,” said Juan, the oldest, twelve.

  “Good night, Uncle Brian.” That was José, his brother, just ten.

  Uncle Brian. Christ. Well, yeah, I guess they have to call me something and mister was too formal and he’d be damned if they’d just casually call him by his first name.

  “Good night, boys. You guys been behaving yourselves? Not getting into any trouble?”

  They nodded earnestly, poked at each other, jabbed and chased and darted into the bedroom. His mother smiled and looked after them for a minute, listened to them hit the bed in flying leaps.

  “Mind those bedsprings in there, you hear?”

  “Okay, Grandma.” Giggles, scuffles, punches, grunts.

  “Well, they’re a fine pair, aren’t they?” she said fondly.

  He leaned back and considered her. “Aren’t they too much for you, Mom? They seem like real live wires.”

  “Oh, Brian, it was something terrible before they came. The quiet after Maria and Rose and Mathilda went back to their mother. Though I’ll tell you, God’s truth, I much prefer to have boys about than girls. I don’t mind the rough-and-tumble; God knows you boys were holy terrors. But with girls”—she touched a stray lock of white hair and with a firm hand put it back into place—“ah, the girls. It’s argue and bicker all day long. Oh, and they can be that mean to each other, and the tears flowing and the hurt feelings. They’re good boys, poor little fellas. Kit and Murray had them up to the lake for the whole weekend with their own brood so they’re all wound up and exhausted now. They’ll settle down in a short while, you’ll see.”

  Kit had brought the first kid home as though it was a wounded bird. A little girl, two years old, no English, no father, the mother put away with T.B. and the kid with nowhere to go. Hell, he told Kit, all the kids in the foundling hospital have nowhere else to go, but Kit said, “This one is something special, Brian,” and she said, “Mom needs something too, Brian. That apartment is so damned empty.”

  Kit’s house was never empty. A large, old frame house in the Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx. She and her husband, Dr. Murray Weinstein, filled that house with an assortment of strays, a mixed group of foundlings, some of whom they adopted and some who stayed until ill or departed parents were able to care for them. Kit’s career as a social worker among the poor of the Bronx put her in touch with the needy of all kinds. Although she’d quit her job at the foundling hospital, staying home and taking care of stray kids who had a way of collecting stray animals didn’t seem enough. Kit became active in politics as a way to combat the problems which caused the abundance of children she found in dire need of services which weren’t available or adequate. She was winding up her third term as state congresswoman for her district and planning to run for the state senate.

  Brian had been against his mother taking in children. She was too old, for Christ’s sake; she was seventy years old. He’d been after her for years to give up the apartment and come and live with them. They had more than enough room, what with Maureen married, Patrick off to the service, then off to his own life. He didn’t like the idea of her living on Ryer Avenue anymore. Hell, the way the neighborhood changed, you could hardly see white for black and Puerto Rican. There was talk of closing down St. Simon’s because the new parishioners couldn’t support it. Hell, they couldn’t support themselves, half of them were on welfare.

  He’d have thought his mother would be glad to have some peace and quiet up in Riverdale. All her life, she’d been so surrounded by all of them, all their commotion, but Kit said, “Let her try it, Brian. I’ve just got a feeling about it.”

  Well, his mother took to it all right and they moved in and out of her life in a steady stream. Let Kit tell her there was a bunch of little sisters or brothers who were going to be split up and his mother somehow managed to find the room: “It’s fine; it’ll work out. We’ll manage just fine. It keeps me busy and, oh, Brian, it fills the house again.”

  He wondered if sometimes when she sat up at night, her hands busy with the sewing and the knitting and the ironing of small clothes, he wondered if she ever pretended that the soft child noises from the other rooms were her own children: Roseanne, dreaming of romance; Kit, laughing in her sleep at her own secret triumphs; Martin, quiet and peaceful; Kevin, tossing and turning; and himself. He wondered what memory she had of him at ten, twelve years old.

  “I got the letter from Roseanne with their Billy’s wedding pictures,” she said. “It’s somewhere around here. Now where did I put it?”

  “I know, Ma, you showed me before.”

  “Did I? Did I now? Isn’t that terrible? I must be getting simple, saying the same things twice. Well, she’s a nice-looking girl, all tan and healthy. I saw in a magazine the other day, they’re all like that in California. They grow up like oranges out there, it said in the magazine, all fine and healthy. Well, Billy’s bride looked like one of the magazine girls, and he so tall himself, so I guess it’s true enough.”

  She polished her eyeglasses on her apron, smeared them so that when she put them back on they glistened with something oily. She squinted and said, “You know who I saw, Brian, the other day just outside of Alexander’s on Fordham Road?”

  “Give them here, Mom. I’ll clean them for you.”

  “Eh? Oh, yes, well. Do you remember Mrs. Phelan? Oh, you do, Brian. You remember Buddy Phelan; you were in his class all through school. Go on now, you were.”

  He shook his head, held the glasses to the light, attacked them with a clean handkerchief. “Kevin was in Buddy Phelan’s class, not me.”

  “Oh,” she said thoughtfully, “was Buddy younger than you? That’s funny.”

  “He was always younger than me, so what’s so funny?”

  “Oh, you.” She reached over and slapped his knee at his teasing. “Well, I saw Mrs. Phelan anyway and she told me that she’s living right down the street from Anna Caprobella, Brian. You remember Anna that was sweet on our poor John? They live in Yonkers, the Phelans, and that’s where Anna lives now, only of course she’s not Caprobella but some other long Italian name I’ve forgotten. She’s four or five children, all boys, Mrs. Phelan said, and her husband is an electrician. I guess her children are mostly grown now.” She reached for the
glasses, hesitated for a moment before putting them on. “It’s a funny thing, isn’t it, Brian, how things come out?” She put her glasses on and touched her white hair off her thin cheek. “I’ll make you some nice strong tea. You just lean back there now and relax a while. You look a bit tired. I’ll bring it when it’s ready and some nice nutcake I made fresh just this morning.”

  He settled back into the chair: the old chair, covered and recovered, old stuffing ripped out, renewed, replaced. It was funny about the chair, the way she held on to it. All the other furniture had been discarded and replaced through the years, but not the chair and the hassock. He’d never seen his mother sit in it. It had been his father’s; then his; then all the kids, whoever got there first; but his mother never sat in it.

  Christ Almighty, the ceiling patterns never changed; plastered and scraped and smoothed and painted over, they came back persistent as time, forced themselves back into this room. The minute he saw them, traced and recognized and remembered them, he could be transported back as though the world began and ended here in this room, this apartment, this home base. Maybe that was why she wouldn’t leave. It was too filled with familiar patterns; she could travel back and hold on to whatever meant most to her.

  He didn’t really know what her memories were, what all the events were that centered here in this place. His father’s wake, of course. His grandmother died in this room; just she and his mother alone, here, during the war. But there were other events, conversations, decisions, sorrows and pleasures here in this room that only she knew about.

  She’d sat at the little lamp table against the wall and written her letters to them all through the war years, keeping them up to date: —Nana died two nights ago, at home. She hadn’t been sick and it was peaceful and she seemed to know what was happening. She was very old and the new priest, Father Kelly, said Mass. I’d always thought Father Donlon would be around forever, I guess. But Father Kelly is quite nice.

  —Billy Delaney was given a medal over there, somewhere in Italy his letter says.

  —Roseanne and the children (her little girl’s a beauty, dark curly hair and Roseanne’s eyes) are going to live with me the while Billy’s at war. There’s no sense at all to her keeping her place with the house empty, now you’ve all gone.

  —Kit will graduate school this June and was thinking about nursing school.

  —Your cousin Billy O’Malley was killed at a place called Guadalcanal.

  —Your brother Martin has been assigned a parish somewhere in Brooklyn; I’m not sure where, it’s such a complicated place.

  —Your brother Kevin was home on leave and he looks to be taller than you but still too thin, those uniforms make him look so scrawny.

  —My brother Jimmie John is dead.

  —Matthew’s gone. It was his heart. My sister Ellen is not the same, first Billy, then Matt She’s gotten thin, and used to be so hearty.

  —Your Mary Ellen had the baby last night, a lovely small girl, and she looks just like you did at birth, Brian, so alike it was amazing. The old man had forty fits, he was that mad for a grandson, the old fool...

  There were huge gaps in her life that he never thought about, could not account for, periods of time, years, collections of sorrows, illnesses, worries, losses. And all the time, she had lived here, never left. Seen them all leave, her children, her grandchildren, her sister gone off to live with a daughter-in-law and son in Jersey and wasting away and dying. All familiar faces gone, leaving behind change.

  Large apartments that had been filled with huge families were divided into small apartments that were filled with huge families and all of them strangers. No one came back, nobody’s children came back from their houses in the suburbs.

  There was a handful of them left, the old neighbors, and when they met on the street, outside the stores, hurrying along in the late afternoon, anxious to get home before it got dark (there was another lady got hit in the face and her pocketbook grabbed right around the corner on Valentine Avenue, wasn’t it terrible though?), they exchanged information and gossip and news and none of it was good. They seized new information voraciously and passed it along at every opportunity to whoever would listen.

  “Do you remember Mrs. Hagan, Brian?” She came in from the kitchen, wiped her hands on her apron. “The one used to live at 2108 and had that fat son Michael? Sure you do, you were there when he fell down the stairs and broke the dozen eggs that time, great clumsy boy he was. Well, she was hit by a car and killed, Mrs. Hagan was, right on the Grand Concourse, poor soul. Nearly eighty she was, what a shame.”

  His mother spoke of people he had not seen or heard of for years and hardly remembered ever existed. Yet they were still a current part of her life, had a place in her existence, and with a sense of shame he would pretend: Yes, of course he remembered Mrs. Kirshner with the lame daughter; Mrs. O’Donnell with the redheaded husband; Mrs. Gallenberg with the funny way of talking.

  It struck him sometimes that other sons must listen to other old mothers ramble on, and included in their reflections, his mother’s name must evoke a similar reaction.

  “Do you remember David Fineman?” He leaned forward and helped her with the tea tray. “Well, I saw Mrs. Farragher, you know, the butcher’s wife, and she told me that David Fineman is a very famous plastic surgeon.” She rubbed her chin thoughtfully for a moment, head to one side. “Plastic surgeon was it now? That’s the one does all the tricks to the movie stars’ faces? Yes, that was it, a plastic surgeon.”

  Brian carefully tested the tea, which was scalding. “Now how would Mrs. Farragher know that? The Finemans moved away from here years ago.”

  “Well, she saw it in one of the magazines. There was an article about all those plastic surgeons and the things they do to make people look younger, for heaven’s sake. And there was this picture of him, Mrs. Farragher said, Dr. David Fineman. She said she recognized him right off the bat. A bit stout, Mrs. Farragher said. Oh, Brian, they’ve four families living in Dr. Fineman’s old house. Isn’t that a shame, that house all crammed full up that way? What’s wrong? What? You get a scrap of shell in your tooth, dear?”

  He dug out the sharp, jagged edge of walnut shell.

  She leaned forward anxiously. “Oh, you didn’t break a tooth, did you?”

  He felt a wave of guilt for her concern. “It’s okay, Mom. No harm done, really. Listen, are you sure you don’t want me to drop the TV set off at the parish house for you?”

  “No, no, it’s fine here, Brian, and thanks for donating it. The fair’s not for a week yet and in the meantime I’ll let the boys have it in their room for the fun of it.”

  He felt a curious, senseless but painful resentment toward them, those boys, whispering to each other in Spanish, in his old bedroom, laughing and poking and jostling and having their ears and nails checked every day by his mother.

  “How will you get it to the parish house then?”

  “Oh, there’s ways. Now don’t you be quizzing me like that,” she said sharply.

  It occurred to him that she had managed so many things in her life without his assistance. He watched her worn, tired face as she bent over her darning. It was an open, honest, innocent face, her eyes clear and bright beneath her glasses, narrowed a bit as she threaded her needle. Her hands were rough and red and sinewy and callused; her fingers were scarred with innumerable old burn marks and line-thin white marks of knife cuts where blade had gone through bread and flesh when, for an instant, she had turned her head toward a child’s cry or a ringing bell.

  She was his strongest connection to his beginnings; being her son made him forever her child, for as long as she lived. In no other presence could he feel precisely as he felt when he was with her.

  She looked up at him quizzically, her head to one side as though she’d missed something he’d said. “Yes, dear?”

  He smiled, rose, glanced at his wristwatch, though he didn’t have to do that. She never detained him.

  “Well, good-by, dear,”
she said and then, as always, she added, “My love to Mary Ellen and have you heard from Kevin lately? Why don’t you give him a call? And try to drop a note at least to California. Roseanne would be so surprised. Give my love to Maureen and Patrick and...” She named them all, recited her litany, reminded him of their remaining connections to each other, made her necessary attempt to hold something of all of them together.

  He kissed her cheek and squeezed her hand. His mother never questioned who she was, who she was supposed to be, what life was supposed to mean, what it was all about.

  She just lived and that in itself seemed enough for her.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  IT WAS A FAST trip from the neat brick one-family attached house in Woodside where Eileen O’Flaherty lived with her parents and two brothers to the large apartment building in Forest Hills where Eileen shared a four-room apartment, on a rotating basis, with six of her stewardess friends. The small red sports car which she drove was owned jointly by Eileen and two other girls.

  “It all works out somehow,” she explained to Patrick. “I have a share in apartments in L.A., London, Saigon and I used to have a share in this really dreamy villa in Saint Thomas but I don’t do that flight anymore. For the last fifteen months, it’s been almost straight back and forth with you boys.”

  The apartment, on the eighteenth floor, was huge and modern and filled with a curiously impersonal collection of furniture and accessories that clearly defined it as a stopping-off point for transients. It didn’t have the cared-for, pulled-together look of a home, though most of the furnishings—sectionals, chairs, tables, lamps, wall arrangements, draperies, carpets—were expensive and in bland good taste. The well-stocked bar and tremendous number of glasses of all sizes indicated that large numbers of people were entertained on a regular basis.

  Eileen made quick, casual introductions; each girl in turn introduced whoever she had brought to the party. There were more than twenty people drinking, eating, munching from large trays of dips and steaming platters of exotic foods. They were scattered throughout the apartment in clusters, on the floor, at the informally laid dining table, leaning against the bar, lounging on the terrace.