Lying with the Dead

by Michael Mewshaw

  “It’s almost midnight,” I say. “It must be dawn there. Why aren’t you in bed?”

  “I am in bed. Soon as we hang up, I’ll fall asleep. I was worried about your mother. How is she?”

  “Fine as far as I know.” I lower the toilet lid and myself onto it. “She hasn’t deigned to see me yet.”

  “I was afraid she was dying.”

  “Sorry to upset you. She’s just old, and my brother and sister and I have to decide whether she can live independently any longer.”

  “That’s sad. I was reading Anna Akhmatova and—”

  “Anna who?”

  “A Russian poet. She wrote some lines that seemed suitable. Shall I read them to you?”

  “In Russian?”

  “In translation. Like to copy them down?”

  “I don’t have a pen.” I neglect to add that except for toilet paper, there’s nothing to write on.

  “Well, listen and let me know what you think. ‘This woman is ill. / She is all alone. / Her husband is in the grave, her/son in prison: pray for her.’”

  Has Tamzin Googled my family history? In a spasm of pedantry, I correct one error. “Her son’s out of prison now. Otherwise, the quote’s a keeper.” Then after a pause, “I miss you.”

  “I miss you too. I was thinking about our trip to Venice.”

  Suddenly I wish I were anywhere except the bathroom. The last place I care to discuss that weekend is perched on a toilet lid.

  “The city was incredible,” she says. “The sex was incredible.”

  This snaps me to my feet. I picture Hugh Grant doing his boyish, abashed, head-bobbing number. But the mirror over the sink frames a middle-aged man in his undershirt.

  “Do you ever do phone sex?” Tamzin asks.

  “You mean calling a hotline and talking to a tart?”

  “I mean talking to me. Talking dirty.”

  I almost say, I’m too old for that. You’re too young. Instead, I tell her I prefer her in the warm moist flesh.

  “I’ll be thinking about you at the library tomorrow,” she says. “Is there anything I should look up for you?”

  There’s so much I yearn for and wish Tamzin could supply. How do I apologize to Candy? How can I understand Maury? But I tell her, “Mothers seem to be the order of the day. What you don’t often read is something about child abuse from the maternal point of view.”

  “I’ll call if I find a good quote.”

  “Call regardless. Now go to sleep.”

  “You too.”

  • • •

  In the morning I waste the better part of an hour wheedling a pot of weak tea and a couple of soggy buns from room service. When I pull back the drapes, the window is curtained by clouds, and the interstate is clotted with cars whose headlights waver like insect antennae. The fog compounds the anxiety that feeds my impatience. Why not phone Mom and get this over with? Ask what she has in mind? What’s this adagio my family is always dancing?

  But while I dither, Candy calls with news that Mom has granted us an audience later in the day. “First, Maury and I are going to Mass,” she adds. “Then I’ll bring her Communion at the house.”

  “Meet you there.”

  “Oh please, Quinn, come to church with us.”

  “I haven’t been to Mass in years.”

  “All the more reason to go today. It’ll be good for the three of us to be together.”

  “We were together last night.”

  “Do I have to beg? There’s little enough in my life to be proud of. Are you going to deny me the pleasure of being seen in church with my famous brother?”

  I join them at Holy Comforter. Not the grim, faux-Gothic church we attended as kids, but a new one near Candy’s townhouse. In this splendid A-frame of stained wood and tinted glass seating is in the round, and the floor slants toward the altar. No pew has an obstructed view. I’ve performed in plenty of provincial theaters with smaller capacity and poorer acoustics.

  Today the house is packed. Not just with oldsters on the brink of death and children preparing for First Communion, but yuppie couples and smartly dressed singletons. The choir sounds semiprofessional and the musical accompaniment—a piano, a guitar, and a tambourine—worthy of a supper club. Since my recent churchgoing has been restricted to marriages and funerals in fusty bone-chilling Anglican chapels, this is a pleasant surprise, even though the First Reading does appear to have been orchestrated by Candy to chastise me.

  “They became vain in their reasoning,” intones a woman in a purple pleated robe, “and their senseless heart was darkened; professing themselves to be wise they became fools.”

  Grimy as the state of my soul is at present, there was a time—and it lasted well into my adolescence—when I believed in God and Catholic theology every bit as avidly as Candy does. I could recite the complete Baltimore Catechism and I regarded its boiled-down answers as divinely revealed verities. God made me to know, love, and serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him in the next.

  I had no trouble embracing the dogma of the virgin birth of Christ, His resurrection from the dead, and the transubstantiation of wafer and wine into His body and blood. The concept of original sin—the evil that even children do—struck me as self-evident. Given Dad’s murder, how could I conclude otherwise?

  Certain Catholic tenets gained no traction with me, however. I never had the conviction that I was a child of God, secure in my Savior’s love. Worse, I doubted that good works guaranteed me grace. Everything from my humblest hope to my grandest aspirations depended upon a miracle. In this respect, my belief system resembled the bingo parties and games of chance that the church organized to raise cash. With every moral choice I made, I felt I purchased a lottery ticket and prayed that I’d win. Heaven was a jackpot I never counted on.

  Even maternal love, which most people regard as freely given and freely accepted, struck me as a long shot. Mom’s love was always contingent, changeable. As for other kinds of love, maybe if Dad had lived he would have shared his gambling savvy and provided wise counsel about cutting the odds and scoring with women. But the first time I fell in love, I had nobody to depend on and cried out to all the angels and saints for help.

  Deirdre Healy was the eldest of a clan of daughters who boasted the classic features of the Breck shampoo girl—faultless complexions, lustrous russet-colored hair, and green eyes. At sixteen, she had a plush body and suntanned cleavage that couldn’t be restrained by her modest one-piece Jansen swimsuit. My memory is of her tugging at its straps and elasticized leg holes to tuck her exuberant flesh out of sight.

  The Healy sisters congregated daily on a diving platform at a beach not far from the restaurant where we ate last night. While Deirdre sunned herself, her sisters whooped and screeched as teenage boys, in the universal courting ritual, heaved them into the water. I couldn’t comprehend this. Why would any girl be attracted to a cretin who manhandled her into the South River? I kept my distance and cloaked my desire for Deirdre in an elaborate pretense of indifference.

  But she quickly tired of waiting for me to make the first move and took the initiative. She grabbed me with astonishingly strong hands and hurled me into the drink. Before I had a chance to surface, she jumped in on top of me.

  Had I drowned there and then, I’d have died happy. Her skin was slippery with suntan oil. Her swimsuit felt as if it would have peeled off as easily as the fuzz from a ripe peach. Afraid there was no future for us on dry land, I would gladly have remained underwater with her in my arms forever. But after frisking around for a few minutes she climbed back onto the diving platform, and I followed.

  Deirdre Healy went to a Catholic girls’ school in faraway Frederick, Maryland. Her parents had rented a cottage at the shore for the summer. Since she was a temporary resident, I figured it was possible that she hadn’t heard about Dad’s murder. So I impersonated a normal kid.

  Or almost normal. My consuming passion for Deirdre verged on religious fanaticism. Like an anchorite in
the desert subsisting on locusts and honey, I worshipped her. I recited the Rosary every day, praying that she would love me in return. This was another instance of my counting on a miracle when what was called for was direct action. But I had no confidence in myself. It took a mighty leap of faith for me just to peck her on the lips at the height of the Fourth of July fireworks.

  Then after the last rocket’s red glare, she led me to a screened-in gazebo where we watched shooting stars. In an orgy of intimacy, she let me lay my head on her lap. To be cushioned by her plump crossed thighs was veriest heaven—until she asked, “Is it true that your brother murdered your father?”

  The question hollowed me out, and pain poured in. “Yes,” I admitted.

  “And he’s in prison?”

  “He’s out now. He doesn’t live in Maryland.” I wanted to assure her that she was safe; we didn’t have to worry about him.

  “Tell me about what happened.”

  Her small voice sounded sincere, curious, not accusatory. So in a first for me, I opened up, imagining that Deirdre might open up too. No double entendre intended. I would have been happy had she opened her heart.

  On a different level, I suppose I believed that telling her the little I knew about the murder might make me not only sympathetic, but interesting. Not every boy had such a tumultuous backstory, and even fewer had my precocious knack of self-dramatization. I put everything I had into this performance, and confided in Deirdre with all the untutored artistry at my disposal.

  When I finished, instead of applause or follow-up questions, she asked me to move my head. “My legs are asleep,” she said.

  I craved feedback, and when none was forthcoming, I felt crushed. Maybe with time, over the course of a summer of repeat performances, I could have persuaded her that just because Maury was a killer didn’t mean I was undeserving, and just because my nuclear family was damaged didn’t make me radioactive. But at the first whiff of rejection, something inside me clicked off. I abandoned her fragrant lap and left the gazebo. I can’t lie and claim that I wasn’t available for a curtain call. Had she said a word, had she whispered my name, the ice in my heart would have melted, and I would have raced back to her. But she didn’t and I kept on walking.

  At points during Mass, Candy nudges my elbow, reminding me when to sit, stand, and kneel. She should save her signals for Maury, who stays on his knees, head bowed, throughout the service. Even when the congregation rises, clasps hands, and recites the Our Father, he kneels and doesn’t offer anybody a sign of peace. But as parishioners press forward for Communion he joins the queue while I hang back. Is it conceivable that in prison and in the desert all these decades he’s been a sacrament-receiving Catholic?

  They line up before a female Eucharistic minister, a well-padded matron with a champagne-colored permanent. When I was an altar boy, Monsignor Dade stressed that a priest alone had the power to handle the Host with his canonically blessed fingers. These days everybody does it. Everybody except Maury, who clasps his mitts behind his back, sticks out his tongue and accepts the wafer on its quivering tip.

  Candy, who carries what appears to be a gold pillbox, whispers to the woman that she wants one for herself and one for the road. Then they return to the pew, my sister in a trance every bit as profound as my brother’s. I don’t know what to make of them. God only knows what to make of the three of us. A murderer, a limping old maid, and a … what am I? A cynic, someone not quite committed enough to identify himself as an agnostic. Here we are in church again together. If we got anything from Mom, I guess we got this. Much that she tried to smack into us has fallen away, but this remains.

  After Mass, I ask Maury if he’d like to ride with me, thinking Candy might welcome a break. He cocks his head, considers it, then says no. Candy says nothing at all. Bearing the consecrated Host, she maintains a sacerdotal silence.

  In separate cars, we cruise through countryside that has morphed into indistinguishable housing developments with baronial names—Kingwood, Queens Arms, Deer Run. Between the residential areas, strip malls blight a landscape that I recall as open fields, aromatic with honeysuckle and mown grass. Not that I’m the nostalgic type. My childhood and Maryland itself undermine any tendency to romanticize. If I feel anything now, it’s not regret over leaving the state. It’s uneasiness at the idea of being sucked back in.

  Because Candy drives slowly, I soon outdistance her, and despite the fog and the absence of familiar landmarks, I have no trouble finding my way. To my surprise, Mom’s neighborhood—I never think of it as mine—has undergone a sea change of a different sort. It’s gotten better. Tidy yards, flowerpots planted with winter perennials, glinting motorcycles, and foreign cars all suggest prosperity and conscientious upkeep. Although no one is out on this misty morning, it’s easy to imagine the rainbow community holding a block party in summer.

  Only Mom’s house, blistered with age, brings down the aspirational tone of the street. It hasn’t had a lick of maintenance since my last visit. The lawn is as stubbly as my shaved pate. The general state of dereliction distresses me. Where does she spend the money I send? Why not invest some in upkeep? Yet I recognize the real question is how I can let my mother live in these conditions.

  Then again, what choice do I have? I can’t conceive of her leaving this house any more than of her flying to London for a holiday. She’s welded to its ruin and to everything—rancors as well as rare joys—that transpired here.

  Once Candy and Maury roll in, the three of us process single file to the front door, a priestess and her acolytes. Candy knocks, pauses, and knocks again. As we wait, the fog encloses us in a cocoon, a portentous stage effect for some mysterious ceremony. Candy repeats the knocking code, and I begin to fear we’ll have to break the door down.

  Finally a quavering voice asks, “Who is it?”

  “Us,” I shout to save Candy from violating her vow of silence.

  The door swings wide with a creak, and an unrecognizable crone lists before us. To gussy herself up for the occasion, Mom has skid-marked her mouth with bright red lipstick. Only her eyes betray the person imprisoned inside this shrunken effigy. My shock at her disintegration is something I have to hide. It would be ignoble not to. Orestes’ baffled line at seeing his mother after many years wells up in me: I loved her once and now I loathe, I have to loathe—what is she?

  As Candy bears the Eucharist into the house, Maury attempts to sneak in behind her without being noticed. But Mom won’t let him pass. She kisses him on the mouth.

  Then holding her blouse at the collar and shielding her breasts with an arm, she kisses me on the lips, too. This has always been her contradictory style—a wet kiss on the mouth and a crossed arm to avoid body contact. “Hello, stranger,” she says. “Welcome home, wanderer. I’d have rolled out the red carpet, but that’d just swell your head bigger.”

  When the door shuts behind us, air is in short supply and the living room is as rank as a wolf den. My brain brimming over with the Oresteia, another line comes to me, I know the ancient crimes that live within this house. But in fact it doesn’t seem like a killing ground or a murder scene. It’s simply our home. And as with so much of the past, it’s a bewildering mess.

  Amid the disarray, there’s a neatly tended shrine on an end table. At the foot of a crucifix, photos and holy cards fan out—a gallery of saints and family members. Among the snapshots of Candy, Maury, and me, I spot one of Dad beside a Sacred Heart pierced by seven swords. That’s a change. His aura used to be everywhere, but his likeness nowhere visible.

  Mom twitters on about how well Maury and I look, but Candy shushes her and breaks out the pyx. Mom sits on the sofa, I take the rocking chair, and Maury squats on the floor. Candy stays on her feet, speaking with a gravity I’ve never known her to possess. “The peace of the Lord be with you always.”

  Her voice, her words, soothe me, just as they did in childhood when she echoed Mom and urged me to “Go to your happy place.” Candy was it—sister, mother, happy pla
ce all in one. I never had any reason to doubt her love, yet it dawns on me that she might have questioned mine. Too often I’ve taken her for granted.

  “My brothers and sisters,” Candy says, “to prepare ourselves for this celebration, let us call to mind our sins.”

  For me the list is long and I suppose ingratitude and arrogance are my worst offenses. I love the people in this room and I blame them. I regret that we’re not closer; I can’t wait to get away from them.

  Candy prays the confiteor. For an altar boy this was the Himalayas of the Latin Mass. As a third grader, I spent a month learning it by heart. Now, in English translation, it sounds to me like the first of twelve steps in a self-help program. “I confess to Almighty God and to you my brothers and sisters, for what I have done and what I failed to do.”

  Muttering mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, Mom drums the fallen breasts that I’m not sure ever fed me. Ranged in front of her, the three of us don’t appear to pray with and for her, but to her, as if to one of those Irish mummies trapped for centuries in peat moss.

  “I myself am the living bread come down from heaven,” Candy declares. “If anyone eats this bread he shall live forever.”

  The words bring a peculiar glitter to Mom’s eyes. Does she pray to live or to die? I lower my gaze to the folded hands in her lap, the fists that launched a thousand slaps. I suspect she still packs a wallop and don’t believe she’ll check out peacefully.

  My knees crack as I stand for the Lord’s Prayer. Maury uncoils from the floor as smoothly as a column of smoke. I reach over to Mom, and Candy holds her other hand. Then Maury catches me off guard by latching onto my free hand. The electricity that he says surges through him whenever he’s touched now shoots through me, and I am moved against my will, against my rational judgment. That cornball hymn, “May the Circle Be Unbroken,” pops into mind. Having cried on cue for crowds in their thousands and movie audiences in the millions, I shed a few genuine tears in front of my family. All this religion has laid me wide open.

  As Mom accepts the Eucharist, she mumbles, “The Body of Christ,” then works the wafer around in her sawdust-dry mouth. There’s not enough saliva to dissolve the bread. She chews it until finally she manages to force it down with a harsh swallow.