Inside is cool and dark. An old woman in a black shawl kneels at a pew near the front, saying the rosary, the click of beads and her whispers just audible in the silence. To the right of the altar, a black iron grid holds dozens of candles in votive glasses, several of them lit, a shimmer of pulsing flames. A small sign on the wall reads Votives for the living, 5 pence. Votives for the dead, 10 pence.
Brigitte watches as I take a match from a niche, light it on an existing flame, and whisper “Tracy” as I touch it to a new wick. I look at Brigitte and whisper the words she taught me: “Mein Schwester.” The flame is small, blue, and low at first, but in a moment rouses itself tall and emits a ribbon of smoke. When it settles into itself, I light one for Sheila and one for Jerry, each time saying their names, then slide three five-pence pieces into the offering slot.
•
I look at an old-fashioned picture of a girl dressed for Holy Communion in a scalloped lace veil, silky white dress, white stockings, and white shoes. Her ankles are thin but she is plump about the middle, an unhappy contraction around the lips. It is a misty image, more silvery than black-and-white. In the background, an alcove in a chapel, filled with lilies.
I stare into the girl’s eyes, which stare back into mine.
“This is not you,” I blurt out.
My mother laughs. “It is me,” she says.
•
Brigitte lights two candles, whispering a name for each one. “Reiner. Ada.” She then counts her coins, and puts what I think is probably too many into the slot.
A few minutes pass in meditation and when I touch her arm, gesturing that we should go, she recoils. Her eyes are filled with tears, her mouth set and trembling.
I look back at the flames and we remain, with only the sounds of the old woman’s whispered sighs and clicking beads.
Before Brigitte gets on the bus, I ask, “Who are Reiner and Ada?”
She peers into my eyes. “Dead,” she says. “My . . . dead.”
I point to her wedding ring. “Your husband? Dead?”
She tightens her mouth and shakes her head no. The door opens and she boards the bus. She waves from the window as the bus rounds the corner and disappears.
•
My mother kisses me on the temple on her way into the kitchen to make dinner. I stand in the doorway and watch her taking out pots and pans, opening cans and chopping lettuce as my sisters sit at the table coloring. When steam rises from the pot as it boils, I watch her put down a spoon, cross her arms, and stare out the window into the backyard.
•
The picture of beloved Uncle Michael is in my mother’s nightstand drawer with a novena and a handkerchief embroidered with tiny purple flowers.
It is a formal pose, the way he stands holding his hat, eyes fixed to the camera, expression intent and thoughtful. My mother was his favorite.
•
I am home sick from school. My mother and father left for work and Nanny is in charge. Tracy and Sheila, still too young for school, are home also. I sleep the first hours of the morning away and awaken later with a pounding head. I wonder if there are two Nannies. Will the naked Nanny appear in my room while the other one is in the living room?
I get out of bed and find her in the living room with the curtain closed on the window, ironing and watching a movie on television. Afraid she will send me back to bed, I stay in the hallway, watching a commercial for Alka-Seltzer, a cartoon cutout of a smiling stomach dancing across the screen.
At the ironing board, Nanny mutters under her breath: “Goddamn son of a bitch piece of shit.” This time I hear every word. She is focused on one of my father’s shirts, which lies open before her, its sleeves hanging. Bringing the iron down hard on it, she holds it there and then spits onto the shirt, mumbles something, and picks up the iron, holding it high a moment before pounding it down again. She looks calm as she holds it there, her jaw set forward. When smoke and a burned smell rise up from the iron, I rush into the room. Startled, she gasps, and her jaw moves back and seems to disappear into the soft folds of her neck. Her eyes narrow and she looks worried and ashamed, as if she is not the same person she was a few seconds before.
“Get back to bed,” she urges. “You’re sick.”
She walks in front of the ironing board, trying to hide the burned shirt, and before I can get out of the way I vomit on the floor, some of it spattering Nanny’s calves and feet.
As I scream for my mother, Nanny cleans me and gives me ginger ale, then lets me come back into the living room and lie down on the couch. I stare on and off at the television.
•
The day after Brigitte is gone, I start asking around at the hostel if anyone is traveling north to Yeats country. Someone mentions that the two New Zealanders might be. I am aware of this couple. At dinner yesterday evening, I watched the uneasy dynamic between them: gray-eyed Ian, dark-haired and handsome, clearly smitten with petite, blonde, very fickle Caroline. One moment she snuggles up to Ian, and the next she’s pushing him angrily away.
I approach them and ask if I might hitchhike with them to Yeats country.
Caroline’s eyes brighten. “Yes!” she cries. Her excitement feels over the top, while Ian looks cross and says nothing.
But first, Caroline tells me, they are going south for a quick tour of the Ring of Kerry, which encircles the Iveragh Peninsula.
When I hesitate, Caroline persuades me to join them. I suspect that she wants me there as a kind of buffer between her and Ian. “We’ll travel with you to Yeats country, but you can’t leave this area without seeing the Ring of Kerry!”
•
I know the risk in telling my mother things I have seen. Even though she might start talking about dying and being a soldier, and she might scream and yell so Tracy and Sheila will hide in the linen cabinet and Jerry will have to go out and run in circles, pretending to shoot an invisible enemy with a machine gun, I need to tell her, and say in a calm, resigned voice, “Nanny burned Daddy’s shirt with the iron.”
Nanny purses her lips. “It was an accident.”
“No, it wasn’t,” I say. “She spit at it and said bad words, and then burned it on purpose.”
My mother remains quiet, her expression in the shadow difficult to read.
“Sometimes the iron is too hot and it burns things. Besides, you were sick. You don’t remember what really happened,” Nanny says.
“Yes, I do,” I say.
Nanny pauses, then clucks her tongue, mutters something. She stands up and leaves the room.
“One night when you and Daddy weren’t here, I saw Nanny walking around without any clothes on, going in all the rooms.”
My mother peers into my face, her forehead furrowing. She looks like she wants to ask something but waits a while, then says, “Do you know what she was doing?”
“Spreading her molecules all over the house,” I say.
•
Nanny has gone to the East to live with Uncle Jack and his wife. But even though she is gone, she has spread her molecules throughout the house, and most of them are in her room. No matter how much my mother airs out her room, there are still so many molecules in there, I can imagine them forming another Nanny.
I rush past Nanny’s old room when I walk in the hall, afraid that if I look, I’ll see her naked, holding a cigarette and exhaling smoke.
•
With Nanny gone, we travel to a national park or an Indian pueblo almost every weekend.
Mom buys a new white bedspread for her and Dad. Candlewick, she calls it, a kind of chenille, with clusters of raised threads that look like the wicks of candles. In the evening, the white bedspread gives off its own light.
•
We hike a trail along a lake, from Killarney to the hilltop town of Killorglin, the land green and lush, cows grazing among rocks and ruined walls, over which nettles, foxglove, and blackberry vines grow in profusion.
Killorglin, a beautiful, compact little town with colorful houses, is
flanked on either side by lakes. The bed-and-breakfast Ian finds is on a narrow, steeply ascending street.
“Let’s say we’re married,” Ian says, touching Caroline’s arm.
She pulls away. “We don’t have to do that!” Caroline says. “I’m sure they’ll give us our own room, and Regina hers.”
We knock and the landlady, a matronly figure with mild hazel eyes, ushers us into a small, bare foyer with blue floral wallpaper. I speak up first, asking for a single room. When Ian asks for a double, the landlady, seeing no ring on Caroline’s finger, sets her mouth.
We follow her up a narrow carpeted staircase. “You two,” she says to Caroline and me. “This is your room.”
She looks at Ian, then says, “We’re putting you downstairs.”
•
On Mother’s Day Dad gets the idea to go to the shelter and adopt a cat to give to Mom. He says that Susie won’t like it at first but that she will learn to accept the cat.
We want a kitten, but Dad says it’s better to rescue an older cat. We choose a male orange tabby. Mom names him Happy, short for Happy Mother’s Day. Mom sits with him on the couch, petting him, and he purrs like a motor, gazing up at her.
“He’s in love with you,” Sheila says, and we all laugh because it seems true.
“I think he knows he’s been rescued,” Tracy says.
Mom calls him a sweet boy and he stands on her lap with his paws on her shoulders, rubbing his face against her chin, the rumble of his purr steady and loud.
“What a sweet boy!” Mom keeps saying, her face lit, her eyes half-closed.
•
For Father’s Day, Mom buys Dad a chair, a big dark green comfortable chair that swivels. It sits in the center of the den facing the television, a place of honor.
•
In a beautiful little town called Sneem, on a green on the estuary of the Ardsheelhane River, I walk away from Caroline and Ian, who are embroiled in a nasty fight. I’m tired of the two of them.
It begins to rain. These storms that break and pass in minutes, that I no longer cover my head against, feel like a part of me now.
•
I am on the way back to my desk at school when I am stopped in my tracks by an image in a classmate’s open book. At first I think it must be a picture of a sea creature, a shrimp or a sea horse, a frail network of veins visible under its translucent skin. It seems to float suspended though it is connected to a looping cord that rises up out of the frame of the picture, like the submerged stem of a lily pad. The creature is lit but hangs in darkness, small bright flecks around it. I take a step closer and my stomach clenches. There is something vaguely human about its overblown head and tiny praying hands.
“What is that?” I ask the girl who’s looking at it.
“It’s a baby in its mother’s stomach.”
“How did they take this picture?” I whisper.
“I don’t know.” She shrugs.
Another girl walks to the table, glances at it, and giggles.
Why are they not stunned?
I bend forward to study it more closely. An odor rises from the page, probably produced by the ink and the shiny treated paper, but there is another smell that seems more human mixed into it, like sweat.
•
Mom and Dad sit together on the edge of the white bed with the candlewick cover. They wear the same soft smile.
•
It is snowing. While I search for my gloves, the phone rings and somehow I know that it is Nanny. My mother, father, and siblings are already outside in the snow. I pick up the receiver and say, “Hello.”
“Who’s this?” Nanny yells. “Reggie? Tracy?”
I hesitate. “Reggie.”
“What? I can’t hear you. Let me talk to your mother,” she demands.
I hesitate.
“Reggie! Can you hear me? Go get your mother!”
I put the receiver down on the table and go toward the front door, but don’t open it. Instead, I go to the window and look outside. While my father scrapes the car windows, my mother, wearing her black hat and thick red coat, kneels with my brother and sisters, pushing a big wall of snow into a shape.
Soon, I hear Nanny’s voice yelling from inside the receiver, strained and high-pitched. I start to laugh in an uncomfortable way that feels like a nervous contraction of the stomach muscles. Nanny screams, “Get your mother!” as if she can see me standing there, defying her. I walk to the phone and softly hang it up. I rush outside, where I fall to my knees next to my mother and start gathering snow. I imagine the phone ringing and ringing inside, where there is no one to hear it.
•
Tracy and I kneel on the couch pressing our faces to the cold window, watching cars pass, their windows fogged and frosted. We imagine that no one is driving them.
School has been canceled, and my mother and father stay home from work. I see them sitting on the edge of their bed with their arms around each other, not speaking, their eyes closed. They’re unaware of me standing there watching them through the doorway. I don’t feel as if I can enter. I cannot say what I sense in that embrace that makes me feel sad.
•
Nanny has been gone for more than a year and Mom asks Dad if she can come back and live with us. Dad agrees.
•
The whole family used to go to church together every Sunday. But after Nanny’s back she never comes, and Mom stops coming, too, leaving it to Dad to take us. Dad drops us off most of the time, then picks us up afterward, his face flushed, his eyes damp and glistening. He instructs us not to tell Mom that he didn’t attend. A few Sundays we have to wait for him in the empty parking lot after all the other parishioners have driven home.
•
“I want the least expensive coffin,” Mom says. “And girls, I want you to scour the Salvation Army, and the Goodwill, even the Saint Vincent de Paul Society, for a military jacket.”
“Barbara, for God’s sake,” my father pleads with her, but this makes her angrier.
“For God’s sake is right,” she yells. “I want a goddamn military jacket, and it doesn’t even have to fit.”
•
After leaving Caroline and Ian, I walk into the town and spot two bicycles with Killarney stickers leaning against a wall outside a restaurant. Inside it’s quaint, brick walls and hanging lamps. Two Welsh girls are the only customers. They tell me I shouldn’t leave the area without seeing Valentia Island, that I should go to Caherciveen a few miles to the west and wait for the ferry across.
“There’s going to be a fair there tonight,” a waitress who overhears us talking says. “And there’s a hostel on the island where you can stay.” The Welsh girls are meeting someone in Killarney and have to leave soon, but I consider going. The waitress says that if I wait an hour she will give me a ride.
•
It is overcast and threatening rain. I walk down the length of the pier, where I lean my heavy backpack against a stack of empty wooden crates. A white boat is docked, rocking on the waves. The name Johnny Ruth is painted in red script on its side. I peer through gray mist at the island across the bay. An hour or more goes by, a light rain sweeping in.
The figures of two men approach from the road. As they get closer I see that they are both about my age. One of them, with longish light brown hair and a jaunty bounce to his step, calls out to me, “Waiting on the ferry, are you?”
They are Irish—James and Denis.
I nod. “Yes. I’ve been here a long time.”
“It might be a while still. It’ll not come until the sky is clearer,” James says. “American, are you?”
“Yes.”
Denis is wearing a red sweatshirt. He is tall and strong-looking with wavy dark auburn hair, cut shorter than his friend’s. He says nothing and he doesn’t smile.
•
When Nanny returns to live with us, she is gaunt, much older-looking. I’m not afraid of her in the same way.
She stops bothering to comb her gray
tufts of hair, which have taken on a grizzled quality. She still covers her face with Noxzema at night, but no longer uses her compact and lipstick and relegates the jewelry she never wears to her top dresser drawer.
The first day she is back, Nanny sits in Dad’s green swiveling chair in the den. After a few hours it is clear that she has claimed it and it no longer belongs to my father. Her hearing is worse than it was and she spends almost all her time in the chair with the television on loud, chain-smoking, the room shrill with commercial jingles and peals of canned laughter. The kitchen and the dining area are open to the den, and Nanny can swivel around any time she wants and survey what’s happening.
The living room, across the hall, is a quiet refuge in comparison, separate from Nanny and the noise of the den. Mom likes to sit in there alone in her brown chair, drinking coffee or making lists.
•
The ritual of Nanny’s pills becomes a big, nightly production. They have to be lined up in three Dixie cups and brought in to her on a tray. “The pills, Ba’bra. The pills,” Nanny calls from her bedroom as she waits for them.
Mom has bought gelatin capsules and Tracy and I are enlisted once a week to fill lots of them with powdered milk in my mother and father’s bathroom. Nanny gets four of these, two nervine capsules, and two aspirin. Tracy and I like the sneakiness of all of this.
“Pills for the pill,” we say and laugh.
“Fixing pills for the giant pill.”
•
“Seventy-six years old!” Nanny cries.
“Seventy-six trombones!” Mom echoes.
Tracy and I laugh hard at this and repeat it with Mom’s inflection.
•
Long before any of us can see or even hear Dad’s brown Chevy coming, our new puppy, Rory, knows and starts panting and whining. He’s only three months old but he’s already bigger than Susie, and stands on his hind legs, paws pressed to the screen door, barking, tail wagging out of control. He has a particular affection for Dad.
Poor Susie finds him irritating, but puts up with him. None of us can resist Rory. We all want to play with him, pet and tickle him and throw things for him to run after.
Ghost Songs Page 11