Requiem, Mass.

by John Dufresne

  “If you see Charlie, we’re waiting for him in the room.”

  A guy passed us in the hall. He wore a T-shirt that said I’M NOT A GYNECOLOGIST, BUT I’LL TAKE A LOOK. He held a lit cigarette about six inches in front of his face and leaned his head toward it as he walked. Like a carrot on a stick.

  When we got in the room I asked Mom about the fat man, what was up with him. Exhibitionist or something?

  “That’s Fausto Rossi. He’s with the DMH. He’s our social worker.”

  “He’s in charge?”

  “In a manner of speaking. People here dress like rodeo clowns.”

  As if to prove her point, a man Mom called The Fox stuck his head in the room. He whistled and waved. Mom introduced us. He had Cole Porter lyrics written on his khaki pants. “Miss Otis Regrets,” the whole song. He also had written his address, phone number, and the total miles he had walked in 1968: 11,874. He’d torn the sleeves off his gray sweatshirt so that the world could see his tattoos. A crucified Jesus on one arm, a blood-dripping dagger on the other.

  Charlie’s surname was indeed Brown like the comic character. Mom showed me a photo of Charlie. Beatle haircut, beads, yellow-tinted specs at the end of his nose, bongos between his knees. He’s in a cemetery. Mom smiled at the picture and told me how sweet Charlie was. “We’re engaged.”

  “You’re married.”

  “I’m a new person now, Johnny. White Owl married Rainy.”

  “You don’t even know this guy.”

  “I knew him in another life.”

  “Now you’re scaring me.”

  “You don’t think this is the only life we live, do you? That would be pointless, wouldn’t it? You need to read the Diamond Sutra.”

  The aroma of patchouli arrived before Charlie did. He came in all smiles and gave a hug to Mom. He bowed to me, shook my hand. His hair was now down to his waist. He was wearing a green plaid kilt with knee socks and a tank-top T-shirt. He took a tube of ChapStick from the little purse around his waist and applied it to his lips.

  Mom told me that Charlie had been a psychology professor at Lewis University down the street. We sat at the table.

  “I had a little disagreement with the chairman. Long story short—they’re living in the Dark Ages over there.”

  “And then his wife walked out on him.”

  “And I had a little breakdown. My way of healing.”

  “And Charlie is already out on his own. He’s just here waiting for me. Isn’t that romantic?”

  I said, “Why are you dressed in the Scottish costume?”

  “Well, laddie, I was a crofter in Aberdeen my last trip through.”

  And then somehow we got talking about the NASA moon mission scheduled for the summer. Charlie explained how the moon was our ancestral home but had been destroyed by a nuclear war. And all the time he was talking about this, he was looking at me out of the corner of his eye. You’d have thought we’d learned our lesson, he said. We had to start all over from square one on earth. And if we keep going insane like we are, the earth will end up a barren, pockmarked planet like the moon. And I said that if that happens then the dead will have no place to come back to for the next life.

  He said, “I know you. We’ve met before, Angus, in another life.”

  I looked at Mom. She smiled.

  He said, “Angus Twigg. We were mates. Worked for the same laird.”

  “No, we didn’t.”

  “Donal Muir. That’s me. Ring a bell?”

  “How could it?”

  “Do you remember the afternoon with the laird’s daughters down at the Spey?”

  “No.”

  “I wouldn’t admit it, either. You’re serious, though, you don’t remember?”

  Mom said, “You should come to our regression group.”

  He said, “A little hypnosis will bring it all back. You’ll see.” And then he stepped back and looked me over. “It’s so great to see you again.”

  Charlie said he needed to leave for a dental appointment. We walked out onto the porch. I saw a man with an eye patch and spurs on his boots slapping a woman. Charlie told me to ignore it.

  “He’s hitting her.”

  “You a cop? A doctor? No, you’re not. This is not your affair.” He kissed Mom and said so long. The woman on the sidewalk told the man with the eye patch she was sorry. He said, “All right, then,” and they embraced.

  I said, “Will we be invited to your wedding?”

  “There’s my funeral first.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Remember when I thought I was rotting away? Turns out I really was. Metaphorically. Anyway, this’ll be a symbolic burial. You’re invited, of course.”

  THE FUNERAL took place on Easter morning. Mom’s invitation said, Dear Sane People: When you’re crazy, you can’t die, even if you want to, even if you try to. No relief; you suffer instead. Well, I’m no longer crazy, so I’ll be buried at 10 A.M. by the lilacs in Elizabeth Bishop Park. Stevie thought this whole production was macabre and melodramatic, not to say disrespectful and even blasphemous. Dad shook his head. I went to Mass alone—I had enough on my mind without the stress of eternal damnation weighing on me because I had committed a mortal sin—and then to my mother’s mock funeral. When I arrived, the residents of the halfway house were gathered by the grave. Charlie had built a plywood coffin, and The Fox had dug a shallow grave. He leaned on his shovel. Mom was already in the coffin, hands folded, eyes closed. I said, Hi, Mom! Charlie put his hand on my shoulder and said, She’s in a better place now. Fausto, still dressed in his sheet, but wearing sandals, cleared his throat. I guessed that the woman with the startled eyes, bravura makeup, and rosary beads was Pat, and the unshaven gentleman at her side, Azad. He had hooded, darkly circled eyes and the nub of a lit cigarette in his mouth. His gratuitous galoshes were unbuckled and his brown slacks were tucked into them. He wore a herringbone topcoat and a lamb’s-wool hat. Charlie slid the lid onto the coffin. I was happy to see no hammer in his hand. Fausto said, “Friends, we are here this glorious morning to acknowledge the passing of our dear friend. We are bereft, bothered, and bewildered. Every death is a birth; every birth a death. Frances is dead! Long live Frances! Her death and rebirth are delightful, delicious, de-lovely.” Or something like that.

  We were asked to throw a clump of earth onto the coffin. I wondered what the long-term effect of this service might have on me. I knew it was all make-believe, a Marat/Sade fantasy, but I wondered why these adults weren’t taking life seriously. And then I remembered they weren’t all that normal, were they? But then who was? My teachers? Intelligent women dressed in medieval peasant costumes, living together in a big house, humbling themselves before the fussy parish priests, and venting their frustrations on captive children? A father with two families?

  Charlie and The Fox lifted the coffin lid, and Mom sat up and looked around like she was stunned. Charlie gave her his hand and she stepped out of the coffin. The Fox leaned the lid and then the coffin against a lilac bush. Mom sniffed her arm, narrowed her eyes, and sniffed again. The maggots were gone, she said; the putrefaction had ended. Everyone applauded. Such was the milieu.

  Fausto looked into the empty grave and said, “We could roast a pig in there.”

  “Or a dog,” Azad said.

  Pat said, “I could eat a horse.”

  “I have,” Charlie said.

  “I ate a monkey,” The Fox said.

  “That’s not right,” Pat said.

  “We cooked it.”

  “We?” Fausto said.

  “Me and another zookeeper.”

  Mom told me goodbye, and they all headed off to this Catholic Worker place on Congress Alley called the House on the Rock for an Easter dinner.

  On my walk back, I cut over to Ionic Ave. and past the Boys’ Club, which I normally would have avoided because of the knucklewalkers who hung out on the front steps. But even if they had pummeled me, I wouldn’t have felt it. I was already so distress
ed by my mother’s blasphemous dumb show that my bones were humming. My whole body trembled, from cells to skin. I thought this was what a clapped bell must feel like. I’d been hammered by Mom’s indifference…no, by her sterling contempt. How could she have chosen those abject fools over Audrey and me? I thought I’d either break apart or leave the ground. I started running down Beacon to Madison, past Esper’s Ice House, and down Washington to the railroad bridge with the Oilzum Man painted on it. Just his head with an orange driving cap and a pair of goggles. An upper lip like a bird in flight. He looked like a man of mystery. And I always kind of thought or hoped he was looking out for me. I caught my breath. He told me that Mom’s pistons were knocking right now. I’d need patience, and she’d need an oil change. That’s a metaphor, he said. Love, he said, is the cream of Pennsylvania crude. No more chatter, no more ping, no more stalling out. All right, then.

  I came out to Ash Street, where there were, improbably, two gas streetlamps, and they were burning still at noon on this empty block. Sometimes I thought I was the only one who knew about them. Dad used to sing a song about an old lamplighter who “made the night a little brighter.” He told me the songwriter was from Requiem, and I wondered if these relics were here as a sort of tribute to the man. They just hadn’t gotten around to putting up a plaque on the brick wall of the abandoned tenement building there. The lamplighter, as I remembered, had a lonely heart. The brick wall was a canvas of pentimenti. At the top of the building over the blank windows, ROOMS was written in white block letters. Beneath that an ad for Tom Moore cigars, America’s favorite. Behind the MOORE and still faintly visible, COCA-COLA 5¢. And to the side of those ads, REAGAN BROTHERS SALOON, WINES AND LIQUORS.

  Water Street was what remained of the city’s old Jewish neighborhood and the only place there would likely be activity on a Sunday morning. I stopped at Epstein’s Feed and Grain to look at the bunnies and chicks like I always did. I ended up buying two peeping yellow chicks for a dollar. One for Audrey, one for Drake. Sheppie Epstein put the chicks in a lunch bag, and I tore a couple of small holes so the chicks could breathe. Audrey called hers Durango, Drake called his Drake Junior. We let the chicks loose on the kitchen floor. Deluxe came blasting into the room and slid into the fridge. He started clicking and then chirruping and yowling, shaking his butt and twitching his tail. He pulled his ears back and crouched. I caught him in mid-assault and put him in Audrey’s room, where he threw himself against the door and howled. We put the chicks in a shoe box and put the box out on the back porch. Dad said he’d build a catproof cage in the morning, but in the morning the chicks were dead. The cold, Stevie figured. We tried to bury the dead before the kids woke up, but we heard their feet on the kitchen floor. At first they suspected Deluxe, but we assured them Deluxe couldn’t have opened the door. When they stopped crying, they made Popsicle-stick crosses for the graves. We buried Durango and Junior in the backyard and went to Charlie’s for doughnuts and chocolate milks.

  In Their Summer Dresses

  ALL FIFTY-FOUR graduating Stormy Petrels from the eighth-grade class of ’69 and their families, some of the dads and uncles already drunk or stoned, assembled outside St. Simeon Stylites church at nine A.M. on the first day of summer. We students lined up as we had rehearsed, in alphabetical order by height, as Sister Philomena, our drill instructor, had it, and by gender. We followed a procession of seventeen nuns (including the reclusive, one-eyed Sister Fidelis, the convent’s cook) and four priests up the aisle to our pews, boys on the right, girls to the left, as Mr. Gallipeau played “Pomp and Circumstance” on the pipe organ. The girls wore their cheery summer dresses and the boys, maroon blazers and black ties. I also wore white cotton gloves and cordovan scuffs. I was suffering through an excruciating case of poison ivory, as Audrey called it, from my toes to my neck. Beneath my white oxford shirt and black chinos, my skin was blotted with calamine lotion and smeared with Rhus-lo cream. And still the shiny blisters oozed their toxic resin, and the bright rash burned me till I wanted to scream. And I knew if I started scratching the demonic itch, I would never stop. I prayed for relief instead. Earlier, Blackie had offered me a Benadryl and brandy cocktail, to dull the senses, he said, but I foolishly passed. I sat in the front pew between Eddie Dumphy and Richie McMahon. They each gave me plenty of space. Eddie had splashed himself with Jade East, and the smell set me to sneezing. Richie was writing HATE on his knuckles with a ball-point pen.

  Requiem’s auxiliary bishop Martin Scanlon, a hefty, officious fellow, gave the graduation address. He rocked on his heels as he spoke and closed his eyes at the end of sentences. He told us that this sacred and solemn ceremony marked the end of our innocence. He had a large gold and onyx ring on his left pinky. Today, he said, we would step out into the disagreeable world as young Catholic men and women, as soldiers of Christ, and we would immediately come under siege by the Satanic forces of Secular Humanism and Popular Culture. He pulled a handkerchief from the sleeve of his cassock and wiped his brow. We would need vigilance and fortitude to survive. We would need to take the offensive against the heathens who would strip us of our Faith. I looked around. Did this make sense to anyone? Some of us, he said—and here he paused and made eye contact with various students—some of us would lose our Faith, especially those of us whose shortsighted parents had seen fit to enroll us in public schools along with Protestants, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, pagans, and atheists. Some of you girls will become godless whores in no time at all.

  Someone behind me stifled a laugh. Richie McMahon said, “Ramona Espy,” in a stage whisper. The blood rose to Bishop Scanlon’s enormous head; his eyes widened; he lifted up on his toes, fumed, and erupted. He said, The fall from grace has already begun, I see. Richie whispered, “From Grace Canio,” and jerked off the air with his tattooed hand. Bishop Scanlon said, Our future drug-smoking reprobates, our sons of Belial, think that indecency is funny, think moral turpitude is funny, think eternal damnation is funny, think blasphemy is funny, think depravity is funny. You impenitent savages, you barbarous deviates, you would thrust daggers into your dear mothers’ hearts. (“Breasts,” Richie whispered.) And then the bishop gave us our diplomas.

  After the uncomfortable, interminable, but liberating ceremony, we gathered on the school steps for our class photo. Big smiles. I saw Bishop Scanlon, chewing on a cigar, get into a black Lincoln and drive away. I couldn’t know it, but this would be the last time I would ever see some of my classmates. Donald Mulrey was struck by lightning two days later while playing golf at Green Hill with his father. That winter Claire Walsh fell through the ice at Coes Pond and drowned. Other disappearances were less dramatic, but no less surprising. You’re with the same people every day for eight years, and then, presto!, they’re gone. Many of us stayed at St. Simeon’s for high school. Others went on to public schools. I went off to Holy Martyrs Prep, for what reasons, I don’t know. I suppose because it was out of the neighborhood and I was looking for adventure. It was an all-male school and had an esteemed academic reputation, which I would soon learn was undeserved. And no nuns. The teaching brothers (Xaverians) were rumored to be severe disciplinarians, and discipline, I was told, built character. So I spent four miserable years (don’t ask me why I stayed) being punched, poked, slapped, shoved, and verbally humiliated while being told how special I was, how fortunate, how cared for, how respected and loved. So why couldn’t I be good? I left high school a battered wife. But that’s another story.

  Smooch Penney also went to Martyrs. He didn’t take well to being sucker-punched. He showed up at school one morning with brass knuckles and went looking for the assistant headmaster. Mrs. Spillaine, the secretary, told Smooch to get to his class. Brother is busy, she said, too busy for the likes of you. Smooch sat in a chair in the front office and lit up a cigarette. That got her attention. When Brother Delmore, a six-foot seven-inch cross-eyed thug, came lumbering out of his office, Smooch slipped on the knuckles and coldcocked him. Broke his cheekbone. Laid him out flat on the Astra
khan rug. Mrs. Spillaine called the cops. Smooch picked up his book bag and walked out the door. He finished his last two years at Al Banx High, graduated as class valedictorian. Then he spent a year at Georgetown, a year at Boston College, and a year at a Carmelite seminary in Georgia, where he slept on a marble slab, took a vow of silence, and gobbled up mass quantities of LSD, which I shipped to him in weekly care packages. He did a tour of duty in Vietnam, came home, and opened a real estate business. I said, “Why real estate, Smooch?”

  “Barry,” he corrected me. “I stopped asking the big questions.”

  “Why?”

  “I want answers. I decided to make my future, not wait for it to happen. Now, what kind of home are you looking for, Johnny?”

  “I’m not, Barry.”

  “Everyone is.”

  WE WENT to the house for a backyard party. Stevie had made a devil’s food cake with a marzipan diploma and my name in brown icing on the diploma. The aunts, uncles, and cousins from Lowell and Holyoke were already there being entertained by Caeli and Violet. I hadn’t seen my cousin Louie since I was five and he was the age I was now. He was still as sullen as I remembered him. I said, Hi, Louie. He said, Who the fuck are you, Bugs Bunny? He meant the white gloves. I said, Poison ivy. Step away, freak, he said. Louie was not in school and was not in the Army, either, because he had tried to rob a liquor store in Lowell, and the clerk clocked him with a quart bottle of ’Gansett. He served thirteen months in Concord.

  My cousin Dev shoved one of the little Ludys and snatched a comic book from her hands. The little Ludy, Brenda, I think it was, ran crying to her mom, my aunt Maggie. Dev was a year younger than I was and completely out of control. Always had been. There was something organically wrong with him, I was sure, but I never found out what. He had a sloping forehead, icy blue eyes, a wide face, a large lower lip, and a brutal temper. I had seen him head-butt his dad because his dad, Uncle Roland, who was blind, by the way, had told him he could not have a fourth honey dip doughnut. Over the years Dev had clubbed me with a Tonka backhoe, a transistor radio, and a glass bank. He never smiled, and his gaze never seemed to advance beyond his reach. His was a shrunken and frightening world. (And now I’m going to dream about him tonight.)