The Walking People

by Mary Beth Keane

  "And Lily?"

  "Either one, really. Either one and you can't lose."

  "So you wouldn't mind Lily?"

  "After my mother?" Greta asked. "Why would I mind?" And she wouldn't mind, she realized as she spoke. Another Lily in Greta's life to fill that long-empty chair would be welcome, and for the first time since she learned that Eavan was pregnant, it hit her that there would be another person in the family soon. Not just an idea, a name tossed back and forth, an empty bassinet, but a person who ate at her table and felt as at home with her as her own children had.

  Eavan turned back to the window and, in a habit recently formed, pressed her hand to her belly, spread her fingers wide like a starfish, took a deep breath.

  They spoke at the same time. "Will I run into town for flowers?" asked Eavan.

  "Do you think your father has any idea?" asked Greta.

  "I think flowers would be nice," Eavan said, and turned so fast she knocked the Windex off the ledge and sent it flying over the railing and onto the grass.

  Greta stepped up close to her daughter. "You're flushed," she said, pressing the back of her hand to Eavan's cheek.

  "I just hope it goes okay," Eavan said.

  "Why wouldn't it go okay?" Greta asked, squeezing Eavan's hand. "We have food, don't we? And music, thanks to you? We have a crowd of people all bent on keeping the surprise. Don't worry so much. It's bad for the baby."

  James arrived at one o'clock with a cup of coffee in one hand, an oversize cake box in the other, and, tucked under his arm, the pictures he had blown up at the copy shop and mounted on cardboard.

  "Jesus," Eavan said when she saw him, and rushed to hold open the screen door. "Ever hear of making two trips?" she asked, taking the cake from him.

  Unlike Eavan, who seemed worried and distracted, James was keyed up. Looking him up and down, Greta was glad to see that he owned an iron after all. He'd pressed his khakis and his button-down shirt. He'd also gotten a haircut and bought a new belt. As usual, from the moment he stepped through the front door, it felt as if the house were on tilt and everything within it sliding toward him. "Listen up," he said, as if he were talking to his class of fifth graders. "We have some work to do." He wanted the party to be perfect and had put himself in charge of what he called the extra touches. The blown-up pictures, along with a giant diagram of the tunnel as it would appear when finished in the year 2020, with a sticker that said YOU ARE HERE, to mark where it stood on Michael's last day. The sheet cake had Michael's caricature done in icing.

  The pictures were of Michael at a union picnic playing tug-of-war, Michael lying on the couch in the old apartment with his leg and arm in a cast, Michael outside a site in the year 1982, Michael in his work gear, barely recognizable in his blackened, mud-drenched clothes, the dark hole of the tunnel stretched out behind him. When Eavan and James were little, they loved that one, thought it was hysterical, and Greta gathered from listening to them talk that they thought it was something that had happened only once, the day Daddy was covered in mud, Daddy filthy dirty, Daddy with muck all over his face.

  "He mightn't like that one," Greta said, pushing it aside. "Maybe we better leave it."

  "Mom, stop," James said, pushing it back where it was. "People will think it's funny."

  "You know, never once did your father come home with a speck of dirt on him," Greta said, taking up the picture and bringing it close to her glasses. "Never once. He's a very clean person."

  James cleared his throat, nodded at Eavan to put the pictures away. "We know that, Mom. That's exactly why it's so great."

  "Yes, but—"

  "Okay," James interrupted. "So I called last night—did he mention it?—and asked him some B.S. about how to fix a hole in Sheetrock, and I don't think he suspects a thing."

  Eavan pulled up a chair and sat down. She put her head in her hands.

  "Will he be mad?" James asked. "Mom? What do you think?"

  Greta stood behind Eavan and pulled the hair away from her daughter's face. "I feel sick," Eavan said, then shook her head when she saw James and Greta glance down at her belly. "No, not that." She groaned into her hand. Greta couldn't think why the kids should be so nervous. She, after all, had thought up the idea, and she was the one he'd take it out on if it turned out that he was being serious all these years when he forbade them to ever throw him a surprise party. He issued the warning whenever they went to a surprise party thrown for someone else. It's cruel, he insisted. What was fun about giving a person the shock of his life? It's not to honor the person, it's to laugh at him. And is reaching a particular age really a cause for celebration? Just breathing in and out for a certain amount of time? He'd reminded her after the last surprise — a sixtieth birthday thrown for the wife of a former sandhog—that he didn't even know exactly when he was born, as if she weren't already well aware. That's how silly birthdays were. Probably in early April. Maybe in late March. Probably in 1945, but possibly 1944. It was a circumstance the kids would never in their whole lives get sick of thinking about. "How can you not know when you were born?" they'd demand, the tone in their voices changing little from childhood to adulthood.

  But this wasn't a birthday party. It was a retirement party, the first among their small group of friends, and so something Michael had not specifically outlawed except under the general umbrella of surprises. Also, Michael just wasn't that intimidating. At worst he would smile through it and take a week to recover. If he got presents, he'd refuse to go near them, putting his hand to his forehead and shaking his head. "All that money," he'd say, looking at the pile. And then one by one the kids would coax him to pick just one and open it. Then another. Then another, until the whole pile was unwrapped and at his feet.

  They had the food prepared by three o'clock, and anything that didn't have to be refrigerated was left out on the dining-room table. The refrigerator was packed to the brim, so James brought the cake down to the garage, the coolest room in the house. Eavan put out a few photo albums next to the blown-up pictures and Greta's gift—a nine-piece gardening set complete with seeds for starting an herb garden. At three-thirty Greta changed into her party clothes: white slacks, red sandals, a short-sleeved black cotton sweater with a red stitch along the collar. They had another half hour to kill before people would start to arrive. Michael—with Ned Powers's help—wouldn't be home until five.

  Back in the kitchen, sitting at the table and eating the ends of the soda bread and waiting for the hands of the clock to move, Greta began to take more notice of how odd Eavan and James were behaving. Twice now she'd seen Eavan look at her brother with widened eyes, as if urging him forward. It was as if they were teenagers again, trying to send each other messages with kicks under the table.

  "Nicole is coming, right?" Greta asked. Nicole and James had been dating almost two years, making it James's longest relationship by a year and ten months. As Michael put it, she was a sound girl, and Greta wouldn't mind if all this looking and signaling each other had to do with some engagement plan they wanted to let her in on.

  James pulled his eyes away from his sister. "Oh, yeah. She'll be there." Same as always. No extra look of significance. No flutter of surprise.

  "And Gary?" Greta asked, looking at Eavan.

  "Of course," Eavan said, and Greta noticed it again, how she tossed the words out casually, then looked straight back at her brother. Go on, the look said, tell her.

  "Stop staring at me," Eavan said to Greta without taking her eyes off James. "Your eyes in those glasses bug me out."

  "I'm not staring. Maybe that's your conscience making you think I'm staring. Keeping secrets from your mother." She turned to James and stared at him instead. Of her three children, he looked the most like her. She'd never thought of herself as pretty, but her features on his face had turned out to be quite handsome.

  "Cut it out," he said. "Seriously. Didn't you get glasses that don't make your eyes look so weird?"

  "They broke. This morning."

  "Th
ey just broke?" Eavan asked.

  "Yep, just broke. Don't change the subject."

  Eavan looked at James. "Let's just tell her."

  "No! Are you crazy?" James pushed away from the table. "Nice, Eavan. Nice going."

  Greta looked back and forth between them as they glared at each other. Eavan, the middle child. Her sensible, dependable girl. James, her unshaven, bed-headed boy. Julia, the oldest, the absentee daughter, the workaholic, the one who called in the middle of the night not realizing the time.

  "That's enough," Greta said, putting on her most serious expression. "What's going on?"

  "Okay, well, we wanted it to be a surprise—" Eavan began.

  "Eavan, you are such a pain in the ass," James interrupted.

  "Easy now," Greta said, taking hold of James's wrist.

  "Well, this is crazy, James. It's too much. We shouldn't have done it."

  "Done what?" Greta asked. They ignored her.

  "Something like this"—Eavan pleaded with her brother—"it's not the surprise that's the big deal. It shouldn't be a surprise. Plus—"

  "Plus what?" James demanded.

  "It's not our business, really. I was talking to Gary last night, and he agrees. It's not really our business."

  "I'm going to kill you. I'm serious," James said.

  "James, your sister is expecting a child."

  "I think we should tell her, and if she thinks it's a bad idea, we'll cancel the whole thing." Eavan turned to Greta. "I don't know if we can cancel, really, but we'll figure something out. We'll handle it. Well, Julia will have to handle it I guess. At this point"—Eavan looked at her watch—"she's the only one who can handle it."

  As Greta waited for her daughter's long preamble to end, as she looked back and forth between her children's flushed faces and the excitement that played in the air between them, she decided two things. First, whatever it was, they'd taken a big chance. It was something they'd thought about for a long time, argued about, probably decided on and re-decided a number of times before going through with it. Second, they were afraid.

  "Spit it out, girl," Greta said. "I never heard such a speech in all my life."

  "Seriously," James said.

  "You shut up," Eavan said to James. "This was your big idea. It's your head if they hate it. Not mine."

  "And if they love it," James pointed out.

  "The Lord save us," Greta said. "Will someone just tell me what it is?"

  Eavan got up and walked across the kitchen to where she left her purse. She drew out a long envelope. Even from across the room, even wearing glasses she was no longer used to, Greta could make out the airmail stamp on the upper-right-hand corner. She recognized the Irish postmark.

  "What's that?" Greta asked, looking at the envelope as if she'd never seen one before.

  "It's a letter," Eavan said, placing it on the table. Greta crossed her arms and leaned over to inspect it. She peered at it as if it were a specimen in a cage. She pushed her glasses up on her nose and leaned closer. Everything in her body, every nerve, every vein, every ounce of blood felt in that moment like it began and ended in the pit of her stomach. It's not what I think it is, Greta thought. Silly woman—now their nerves have gone and rubbed off on me. It's not what I think it is, because there's no way they would be that brazen. Had they found out somehow? Done an investigation behind my back? No. Not possible, not after all these years. It was the first big decision she and Michael had made as parents, and they'd stuck to it. Their story was simple. Michael had helped Greta and Johanna with their luggage when they boarded the ship in 1963. He and Greta quickly fell in love. They were careless, and Greta got pregnant with Julia. When they realized what had happened Greta and Michael moved in together, and Johanna went on to California. They've not regretted it a single day since. If the children wanted more information — too bad. There were things parents didn't have to explain to children. American parents explained everything to their children — why they're angry, why they're hurt, why they make every little itsy-bitsy decision. They explain and explain until the child is satisfied. Greta and Michael had explained only as much as they wanted to explain, and placed the rest firmly off limits. The children had an aunt and an uncle in Ireland and two uncles in Australia. Michael and Greta had emigrated from Ireland and would never go back.

  "I can see it's a letter, Eavan. Why was it sent to me at your address?"

  "We got in touch with them," James said, more tentative now that he'd seen Greta's reaction. "In Ballyroan. Johanna. Aunt Johanna, I guess. We wrote a letter, and she wrote back. So we wrote another letter to tell her about the party. We thought it might be a good excuse to, you know —"

  "Excuse me?" Greta felt as if she were treading air. "I've told you a thousand times about your Aunt Johanna and Uncle Tom. They don't travel. Haven't I told you all of that? They can't leave the farm. And the house is tiny, so they can't have visitors. It's just the two of them there, and they don't have —"

  "It's not the two of them, actually," Eavan said. "Johanna is married and has two sons, twenty-five and twenty-three. And Tom is still there. And you know, Mom, we're old enough now to have heard of B and Bs. Inns? Hotels? Come on. Besides, they built a new house more than fifteen years ago. Johanna says they have plenty of room."

  "How do you know all of that?"

  Eavan nudged the envelope closer to Greta. "We just thought we'd make it easier for you. Don't you think it's time? I mean, this is silly, isn't it? She's your only sister. Our aunt. Those boys are our cousins. There are flights between Shannon and New York half a dozen times a day. What could have happened that you can't get over?"

  "Nothing happened. I've told you. They're busy with the farm, and we're—"

  Eavan held up a hand to stop her. "Mom, please."

  Johanna with two sons. Greta looked at the curtain and thought, That's a curtain. She looked at the clock and thought, That's a clock. Where had they moved the barn to? Greta wondered. And then: Why would they have moved the barn? Had they put the new house in the place of the old one or built it right alongside?

  "So what does all this mean?" Greta asked, picking up the envelope and turning it over in her hands. It was addressed to Mrs. Greta Ward at Eavan's home address. The name on the return address said Mrs. Johanna Rafferty. I don't know any Johanna Rafferty, Greta wanted to say.

  "Open it," said James. Outside on the street, a car slowed to a stop, and a moment later two car doors slammed.

  "Has Julia been writing to her too?" Greta asked.

  "It was a joint effort," James said. "Now open it."

  "No," said Greta, and she held the envelope out for him to take. The light coming through the window dimmed and brightened again. She noticed a small drawing on the back flap of the envelope. Blue pen. A constellation. Orion's hunting dogs. Big Tom's nighttime map when the sky was dry enough to see the stars. Without wanting to or trying, Greta pictured the others: Monahan's whaling ship, the fisherman's beard, the donkey's tail. Not one of them real, Greta had learned long ago when Julia was taught about the stars in school. There are no constellations by those names, Julia had informed her plainly. Not in America, Greta had corrected her. Not that you can see from America, maybe, but in Ireland, yes. In Ireland they have the donkey's tail and Monahan's ship and Orion's hunting dogs. Stars were stars, Julia had said, no matter where you're standing. And besides, the constellations were made up anyway. Made up long ago by people who didn't know any better.

  "Okay, Ma. Then I'm going to open it for you," James said. And as easily as he might have picked up a book in a bookstore and turned to the first page, he slid his finger under the flap and ripped it open. He removed the lined page, only one, and unfolded it.

  "Here," he said, smoothing it out before he handed it over.

  Greta took it without looking at it. "So they'll be here at four? Like the others? All of them? The sons and husband and all?"

  "No, just Johanna and Tom," James said. "Julia's at the airport waiting for
them as we speak."

  Greta turned to find Eavan crying. Big, silent streams ran down her plump cheeks. She dabbed her face with one of the CON-GRADULATIONS party napkins Greta had picked up on clearance at the party store, not realizing until James told her that when they spelled it with a d, it was for a graduation, not a retirement. A play on words, he'd called it, and Greta had suggested that since there was only one word, it was more of a play on letters.

  "We shouldn't have," Eavan said, pressing carefully around her eyes to avoid smearing her makeup. "I knew it, and I went along with it anyway."

  "No, you shouldn't have," Greta agreed, and handed her a tissue.

  Greta sank back in her chair and tried to absorb what she'd been told. Johanna was in New York, on her way to see them. Julia was picking her up at the airport. There was no meeting at Saks. Greta reached out for the water jug and filled a paper cup with water. She swallowed it in one long gulp and poured another. All the youthful energy she'd felt that morning shriveled, and now, feeling James's and Eavan's eyes on her, she felt far older than fifty-nine.

  "You'll be happy, we think," Eavan stuttered. "You know. After."

  Greta couldn't think of a single thing to say in response, and she felt she couldn't have responded anyway, her tongue as heavy as it was, her jaw as brittle. She ran her hand along the edge of the table as she stood. She could be back in Ballyroan, blind but ignorant of her blindness, Johanna just a blur bouncing up ahead, telling her to hurry it up, for God's sake hurry it up.

  As the walls of her kitchen seemed to expand and contract, Greta's thoughts flew back, way back, to the day Padraic, Jack, and Little Tom had let her and Johanna join in on their game of dare. One by one they'd stood with their backs to the lip of the high sea ledge, the waves slamming against the rocks far below, and were directed by the others to move back, back, farther back. The challenge was in believing there was enough room behind for yet another step. When it was Greta's turn, she stood at the marked spot and waited for her brothers and sister to instruct her. "You've loads of room," they called as they urged her to take another step, but they couldn't control the wind, pushing her this way and that with no more effort than it took to push the tall grass, to bend it flat on its back. "That's the wind all the way from Canada," one of the boys had called, and another had corrected him: "No, from America."