“You think Dad’s there yet?” I asked.
“Probably.” she said. “Get undressed. I can iron for you real quick.”
The doorbell rang. The limo was outside. It was time to go.
“Forget it,” I said. “Who’s got a better reason to look bad than I do?”
I pulled my leather jacket on over my suit, grabbed my coffee, and followed my sister out the front door. The sunlight blinded me, and I searched my pockets for my sunglasses. I couldn’t find them, had no idea where I’d left them. There was no time to go back inside and search. I ducked into the limo as quick as I could, sloshing precious drops of coffee onto the seat. I was grateful for the tinted windows.
ST. STEPHEN’S WAS EMPTY when we got there. Empty, unless you counted my father. His casket rested in front of the altar, surrounded by the flowers and shamrocks brought over from the funeral home. The flowers from my father’s office sat off to the side, where they wouldn’t block the congregation’s view of the priest. I dipped my fingers into the well of holy water by the door and blessed myself, more in the hopes the roof of the church wouldn’t collapse on my head than for what I was about to do.
Father McDonald, already dressed in his robes, appeared out of some alcove behind the altar. He placed a Bible on the lectern and gave us a modest wave. When I waved back, he gestured for us to approach. I glanced at my sister and we walked, hand in hand, up the aisle. Father shook hands with both of us. Two altar boys fluttered about, lighting candles and sneaking glances at my sister and me.
“Are we ready?” Father asked. He folded his hands across his belly. “Is there anything I can do for you before we begin?”
“We’re ready,” Julia said.
“Good,” Father McDonald said. “As I understand it, John Jr., you’ll be eulogizing your father. You’re prepared? Would you like me to have a look at your notes?”
“Oh, well, I think I’m all set,” I said. “Thanks.”
Father nodded. He knew I didn’t have word one written down. “Will there be anyone else speaking on your father’s behalf this morning?”
“Just me,” I said.
“That’s fine,” Father said. “Take your time. Don’t be afraid. Speak from your heart.”
“I will,” I said, wondering if I would go oh-for-three.
“We’ll wait a few more minutes for the others to arrive,” he said, “and then we’ll begin.” He made the sign of the cross over us. “God bless you, children. Be strong.” We thanked him and promised we would. He disappeared back into his hideaway.
Julia excused herself to the restroom, leaving me standing alone with the casket. I looked around. I couldn’t hear the priest or the altar boys.
So there he was. In there. Silent and still. Like I’d never, ever known him to be in life. There he was. Closed up in the big brown box I’d helped pick out for him. I watched my hand reach out and touch the casket. I swept my hand along the lid, dancing my fingers over the cool, smooth wood. Here lies my father. Here. Lies. My father. Just inches below my hand he was, and utterly unreachable. I wanted to open the lid. Not because I wanted to be sure he was in there, but because I knew he was. Not to touch him. I wanted to look at him, but not to see how badly he was hurt. I was about to speak to him for the first time in years, and I really wanted to see his face when I did it. I wished there was a way he could see mine.
I turned around and saw Molly sitting in the first pew, watching me. I hadn’t even heard her arrive. She patted the space beside her then held out her hand. I lifted my hand from the coffin, stepped down from the altar, and slipped my fingers through hers. She didn’t say a word as I sat beside her. Julia joined us moments later, kissing Molly on the cheek, then sitting on my other side. Nobody spoke. In unison, each slid her arm across my shoulders. I felt folded in the wings of a great bird.
As we waited for Father to come out, I could hear the creaking of the church door, the shuffling of footsteps as others arrived and took their seats. I didn’t turn to look. Neighbors, maybe. Possibly a few guys from the office. What did it matter? I didn’t care who else was there. The last of who I wanted and needed, Jimmy and Rose, arrived just as the service began. They sat in the front pew with the rest of us.
When my time came, I made the short walk to the altar. I gave the casket a wide berth. I spent my first few seconds at the ambo watching the blood drain from my knuckles as my hands gripped its sides. I moved the Bible down onto a shelf and stared at the blank space where my notes would’ve gone, had I brought any. I could see the casket out of the corner of my eye, just behind me, almost over my shoulder. I recognized a few of the faces before me from the wake; most were strangers. Fontana and his wife were there. Waters sat alone in the back.
I looked up at the ceiling, trying to catch a breath and clear my head, breathing in the perfume of the flowers, and the sour scent of my own nervous perspiration. I knew the people sitting in front of me would think I was fighting back tears. That was all right with me. As long as they couldn’t tell I was trying not to laugh. Years of Catholic school, years of Irish Catholic guilt, a lifetime of Irish temper. I looked over and down at my dead father, flat on his back in the casket. I found I had no trouble seeing his face. So here we were. The father, the only son. Two devils. What a sloppy, intolerable pair we’d been. What a fucking mess we’d made. How in God’s name did we end up at the altar together?
A multitude of sins between us, so many of them unforgiven. If I ever went to confession, I’d have to book that dark closet for a two-week engagement. I swallowed hard. I couldn’t look away from him. There was only one of us left now to do any forgiving. How many of the ugly things that had lived within us would die on their own, of old age? How many would I have to kill? It was all on me now, the two of us. I was us in the world now. This was what I had inherited in his death.
I looked out at the small gathering of people in the church. Some fidgeted in their seats. I needed to start speaking. I covered my mouth with my hand, squeezed my jaw, scratched at my stubble. It was tempting to finally have a public forum at which I could attack my father and have him unable to attack me back. I had what I’d fantasized about for years. I had my chance to get even.
I patted my suit jacket, looking for my cigarettes. Should I ask for a little sacrificial wine? Then I could really do it up. I could. A smoke for my nerves. Pour out a little wine on the altar. One for my homies. Take a wee nip myself. Drop a few F-bombs during the eulogy. I could do it. I glanced over at Father McDonald. He looked nervous. Did he know what I was thinking? Would the priest have the spine to cut me off? To make a scene, if I really forced his hand? It’d make a hell of a story back at the rectory. It was probably what everyone expected. It was what my father would’ve expected for sure. But what about the rest of us?
I looked at my sister. Her eyes were big, her mouth rigid and colorless. She and Molly held hands across my seat. In the empty space between them, I saw it would one day be me on an altar. Not at the ambo, but in the casket. Would they be there then, holding hands? Who would be at the podium for me? What would I have left behind for them to remember, to say about me? I took a deep breath. My pulse pounded in my temples. My eyes burning, I looked at Molly, and Julia, and Jimmy and Rose, looking back at me. What I said wouldn’t ever matter to my father. He didn’t expect anything from me; he was gone. It was my sister, and my friends, and me, it was those of us still here who would have to live with what I did with these moments, and the moments and days and years to follow. The living would have to contend with the fallout, if I chose to be ugly. The dead keep their own counsel.
Slowly, Julia swept a lock of hair from her right eye and pinned it behind her ear. She straightened in her seat. She knew what I was thinking, every last thing. I knew that she was waiting, a hard, painful knot in her stomach, for my choice. She was waiting for me to decide where my loyalties would lie—with the living or with the dead. Across the silent church, we held each other’s eyes. I folded my hands on the pod
ium, but they wouldn’t settle. I stuffed them in my pockets. I decided to do what my father never did when given the chance to inflict pain. I passed.
We could go, the three of us, one day without making a mess. We could. A thin line of sweat broke out on my forehead. I took a deep, deep breath.
“Though I am his only son,” I said, “there is not much I can tell you about my father that you don’t already know. I can tell you these things. My father was a New Yorker. He was born here and raised here. He lived his whole life here, growing up in Brooklyn, working in Manhattan, raising his children on Staten Island. He rooted for the Mets in Queens, booed the Yankees in the Bronx. He was a lot like the city of New York, and in that way, he was a lot like the rest of us.
“There are sides of him we know, and wish we didn’t. There are sides of him we didn’t know, and wish we did. There are things about him we wish weren’t true. There are things about him we hope are true. There were things about him, things he did, that had he lived to be two hundred years old, we would never understand. And now, there is much about him we will never know, or understand, or be able to figure out. The person who knew him best, for better or worse, my mother, left us even before he did. I, for one, never took the time to ask her about him. For a long time I was dumb and scared enough to think I had him figured out. I wonder as I stand here if I haven’t made a terrible mistake in that.
“My father put all he had into making his way through the world the way he felt was best, no matter who disagreed with him. Life was a . . . a . . . full-contact sport for him. That attitude was his strength on some days, his weakness on others. Sometimes it benefited him. Sometimes it pained and punished those of us close to him, and maybe him, too. But along his . . . turbulent . . . path through life, my father did bind us into a family.”
I paused and swallowed, my mouth and throat dry. I looked at my sister.
“Julia, I know,” I said, “is here for our mother as well as our father. I am here today first for my sister. My sister has always done her best to be close to me, even from far away,” and I smiled at her, “no easy task, for sure. Our mother, Susan, was the warm one, the nurturing one, but it was my father, it is my father who binds us together.
“Like the city, when we just look at the many different, contradicting parts of my father on their own, it is impossible to see how they all fit together into one man. It defies logic. It doesn’t make any sense. But if we do the best we can to stand back and see him as a life, one life, maybe we can see that, though we may not understand how, the parts did fit together. Not always, maybe not ever neat or pretty, but the parts made a whole. They made a life. And that life is what we are left with now that he’s gone. What we do with it, how we carry him forward from here is up to us.
“So what I’m going to try to do, when I remember him, is to stand high enough and look long enough to see the whole man, the whole life. All I ask of you, in his memory, is that you try to do the same.”
I brought my hands out of my pockets and let them rest on the podium. I searched for the next thing to say. Then I realized, surprised, that I was done. I wondered how much of what I had said I would remember, how much of it I would still believe if I did remember. I guessed I’d find out, when I thought of this day. But that was for the future. There was nothing left to do right then but go back to my seat.
AFTER THE SERVICE, Julia and I climbed into the limo and followed the hearse as it delivered my father to the same sprawling cemetery where my mother and her parents were laid to rest. I spent the ride with my eyes closed and my head back against the seat. Julia rested her head on my shoulder. She twisted a rosary through her fingers but she didn’t pray. She just quietly cried. Molly and Jimmy and Rose followed in their cars. Nobody else came with us.
After Father talked of ashes to ashes and dust to dust, I watched, my arm across Julia’s shoulders, our friends gathered behind us, as the casket was lowered into the ground. I felt my stomach sink with it. The scene reminded me of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The last scene. Where the ark is sealed in an anonymous brown box and wheeled into the back of an enormous warehouse. All that awesome power, hidden away in a plain brown box and forgotten.
Like my father. Carefully sealed in a box of his own, lowered into a hole in the ground and buried. Packaged clean and neat, and put away. All that had emanated from him, bled or poured out of him into the world and into me; the fury, the frustration, the flailing violence—it was all gone. It walked no more halls, charged no more air, boiled no more blood. Not even, at least for the day, mine.
Julia broke away from me to thank and to pay the priest. I walked a few steps off to the side and lit a cigarette. Molly, Jimmy, and Rose approached the grave. Each plucked a flower from the arrangements. At the grave, one at a time, they dropped the flower in, and blessed themselves. They gathered at a respectful distance to wait for Julia and me.
Julia took two flowers. She dropped one into our father’s grave. She carried the other to our mother’s headstone, a few feet away. She laid the flower down at the foot of the stone, then knelt and prayed, her eyes squeezed shut. A bird sang in the trees. It was the only sound. When Julia was finished, she stood and made the sign of the cross. Then she kissed her fingertips and wiggled them at the headstone, a little grin curling the corners of her mouth.
I didn’t take a flower. I walked to the edge of the grave and looked down at the casket. Burial seemed to me a cruel ritual. Cheap. We bury garbage. Why do we bury each other? What made burial any more than throwing someone away? A plain box and a pile of dirt. Some greenery over the top, just to pretty up the ugly truth. Just enough dirt to keep you from stinking up the neighborhood. Was this what we got for our troubles? For our fury and pain? For our agony? For the love and home we made? Was this what awaited us? The same fate as the garbage we dragged to the curb. Was there a way to cheat that fate?
From the pocket of my suit jacket, I pulled the photo of my father and me on the ferry. One more time, I studied the two of us, burning the scene into my mind, making it into a memory, something, one thing I could carry away from the edge of his grave. Other scenes materialized behind my eyes. He and I at the top of the Towers. His football team, his wedding day, he and my sister on a carousel pony. The fights with my mother, the fights with me. My father and Fontana. The scenes and the memories, good and bad, ran and swirled together. Like the colors of a kaleidoscope, all the images and colors blurred at the edges where they touched. I could not think of one moment, it seemed, without seeing all the others.
In the pocket of my leather jacket I found the scrap of police tape I’d taken from the murder scene. I wrapped the photo in the tape, tying the tape in a knot. I held the bundle in my fist. With the same fist, I tore a bunch of shamrocks from their pot. I kissed my fist. Then I took a deep breath and tossed the whole lot into the grave. Stray shamrocks stuck to my fingers. I shook them off and watched them spiral slowly down and settle on top of the casket. I got down on one knee, my leather jacket creaking at the shoulders, my cigarette burning low between my fingers. I spent a few long, last moments looking down at my father and his son.
I wasn’t throwing them away, I decided. I was just changing the way they continued to live.
SIXTEEN
JULIA AND I MET THE OTHERS BACK AT THE CHURCH. JIMMY SAT on the hood of his car, the girls standing at either knee. Except for them, the parking lot was empty. The church was locked up and dark. As I got out of the car, I caught a whiff of exhaust from the traffic cruising by us on Annadale Road, the rest of the island going about their normal afternoon business. Otherwise, it was a beautiful spring day.
“Now what?” Jimmy asked as Julia and I approached.
We looked to one another for ideas, none of us having given the rest of the day much thought. It was a good feeling, having the day wide open and free before me. I held up my car keys.
“Get in the car,” I said. “There’s something we need to do.”
Nobody moved.
/> “Trust me,” I said.
Jimmy bit first, hopping down from his hood, shrugging at Rose and climbing into the backseat of the Galaxie. Rose got in beside him, shaking her head. My sister patted my shoulder, opened the passenger-side door for Molly, and squeezed in beside Rose. I stopped Molly before she got in the car.
“Long overdue as this is,” I said, “it’s still gonna take some nerve.”
“I’m up for anything,” Molly said, taking her seat beside mine. “Besides, I always was tougher than you.”
Fresh Kills Page 32