“You want to go?” he said. And she said, “Yeah.”
He told Chris he was leaving and Chris looked at Beverly, the sombrero pushed back on his head, and said, “Vaya con Dios.”
After the rowdy wedding in Yonkers that June, there would be his annual backyard barbecues—famous for the Gennie Cream Ale he served long after any of them still wanted to drink it. There would be his three kids, one with problems, his tacky affair with another teacher which almost cost him everything, and then didn’t. There’d be the quick cancer at forty-two and the heft of his own coffin as they got him down the steps of his church. The party later, in his backyard once again, where they decided that if they weren’t the middle children born at mid-century to middle-class parents and sent from middling, mid-island high schools to mediocre colleges all across the state, they were close enough.
Michael walked around the bar and took the girl’s hand. It was soft and cold and she pulled back for just a minute as she turned to put down her beer. He recalled that he also liked the way he could feel her bones, rib bones, hip bones, the small bones of her fingers through the smooth skin.
There was a heavy smell of upstate winter in the air—the smell of frozen mud, low clouds, heating oil. There was the faint spill of red neon light on Damien’s narrow steps. They walked through it. He put his arm around her. The alien eyes bobbed in his face. “Dogs,” she said, looking past him. He turned. There were four or five neighborhood dogs along the side of Damien’s back door, where he kept his garbage cans. Michael heard their low growling before he could distinguish what it was they were pulling at. At first he thought it was a dummy, a Halloween dummy from someone’s front porch. They were dragging it a bit, tearing at it. But then he saw that it was too solid and too stiff, no newspaper stuffing, and a pale hand showed beneath a dark sleeve. He wore a suit jacket and pants and a white shirt, no shoes, just like they say. The hair was thin and gray and long enough to catch on the hard mud beneath its head. As they moved closer, they saw there was still flesh on the face, the nose, the chin, the sockets for the eyes, but in the dark it looked more like carved bone. A mutt with wiry haunches was tugging at something that turned out to be the man’s tie, slowly, in jerky stops and starts, the way dogs do, pulling the body into the dim yard.
She said, “Oh, God,” but she was so skinny it didn’t take any effort at all to turn her away with his elbow and hip, back toward the sidewalk and his car. Under his arm, he could feel the tremor in her shoulders. He could see it in the movement of the bobbing eyes. “Assholes,” was all he said.
He didn’t turn on a single light in his room. They made love and then slept and then began to hear his housemates staggering in, talk and laughter, a waft of dope and then popcorn. It would be the same next year. At one point, Chris opened Michael’s door for a second and then quickly turned away, shutting it. A few minutes later, they heard Jim Croce through the walls.
On the wall beside them were the glowing marks of the pictures she had drawn on Friday. In long sweeping strokes of chalk she had sketched a kind of Eden, tall stalks of grass and leafy flowers and, scattered among them, the figures of men and women—long thighs and bellies, penises, breasts, arms—all entangled, or pressed together, faces indicated only by a nose or an eye or a lock of hair. Some of it had rubbed off already, or had already faded, but there was enough to see what she had aimed for: something, he thought, between pretty and crude, between a cartoon and a vision. Something you could dismiss as a joke as readily as you could claim it as the precise illustration of everything you wanted.
They were lying side by side, naked in the dark, and the old house, as it did every night, was steadily growing colder. The drawings made him think of the satyrs and nymphs on Chris’s dope box, and then of Caroline opening her parka for Ralph, that motley crew of cherubim and seraphim all around her. Hail, Holy Queen. Mother of Mercy. Our life, our sweetness and our hope.
He thought how even after you’d disentangled yourself from everything else, the words stayed with you:
To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us, and after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb…
Words you could dismiss as a joke as readily as you could claim them as the precise definition of everything you wanted.
Sleepless, he raised his head to look at the clock. There was a flashlight on his bed table. Shades of his brother. He picked it up and turned it on.
He told her, the light on the ceiling, his hand on her thigh, that he’d have to get up at 5:45 to get to school. Get up and shower and put on the old student-teacher costume, cords and dress shirt and tie. He told her he could take her home now or in the morning. “On my way out,” he said, “to face the inbreeds.”
She only stirred and then slowly climbed over him, spread herself over him, no weight at all.
MARY KEANE looked for signs of grace, good fortune, or simple evenhandedness but found none. Tony Persichetti in church this morning, home again anyway, from wherever it was he had disappeared to, but looking like an overly made-up prodigal son, what with the wild hair and the beard and the thin hunched frame beneath his camouflage coat and gray T-shirt. His father beside him—the bulk of those arms still there but the hair gray and thinned, the shoulders stooped. Another boy from the parish who’d returned unscathed, but then died in a car wreck last month at 3 a.m. on the Montauk Highway—going well over a hundred miles an hour was what the rumors said, drugs, alcohol, even suicide the rumors said. (There had been a broken engagement.) An article in the Long Island Press about a father lost in the South Pacific in ’44 and a son, a navy pilot, three years lost in the prison camps of North Vietnam. There were the Krafts down the street—Larry no more than thirteen when the knot appeared on his knee, not yet sixteen when the cancer killed him. His brother, home in his uniform for the funeral, head shorn, stoical, refusing all entreaties to claim hardship leave (or was it, she wondered, heartsick?), to request transfer, to desert, to flee. He was back in the States now, somewhere down south, safe again. But what had it cost his mother while he was away? And what comfort could there be in supposing that the one loss saved her from the second?
Jake from Philadelphia, nineteen or twenty at his short war, and her husband—having already gained the luxury of thirty-five years—making his unspoken promise to the boy. But what did it portend: Was it a blessing or a bad omen? Had they gained their son a guardian angel or the bitter irony of a repeated fate?
Pauline at dinner that Sunday said, “I light a candle at St. Patrick’s every day. For Jacob. Just like we did during the war.”
On the table beside Pauline’s plate was the glass with the dregs of her third Manhattan. (Too many by two, Mary Keane had told her husband in the kitchen when he came out to carve the roast, but, he said, he had asked and she had accepted, what more could he do?) Only one of the three round slices of meat he had put on her plate had been disturbed. She had merely run her fork through the turnips, although Mary had prepared them precisely for her. Daintily, she’d taken only small tastes of mashed potatoes throughout the meal, although she’d also kept an eye on Clare’s plate, as was her habit, urging her to finish her corn and take some more gravy and put more butter on that roll. “Okay,” the girl responded, simply, pleasantly. How old had she been when she’d discovered the knack of dealing with Pauline, her mother wondered. Or had she been born with the knowledge? Annie, on the other hand, got through every meal with Pauline in a slow burn.
“Annie’s not one for finishing her milk these days,” Pauline declared, her fingers touching the stem of her cocktail glass. “Is she worried about her figure?”
“No she’s not,” Annie said. “She’s just knows when she’s had enough.” And suffered for her rudeness her parents’ grim looks across the Sunday lace tablecloth. Now that both her brothers were gone from the house, Pauline’s pres
ence at dinner made Annie think of them all, her father included, as old maids.
“All the girls her age are constantly dieting,” Mary said pleasantly, to show her elder daughter how it should be done. “They can’t be too skinny.”
At the door that evening as Pauline got into her fur-collared coat there was the usual back and forth about how she could easily get herself home and how it was no trouble at all for John to take her—ending, as it usually did, with the compromise of a lift to the bus stop, at least, but only if Clare could come along.
In the vestibule after she left, there was the lingering scent of her perfume, a whiff of mothballs from her fur, and something else—the good wool of her skirt warmed by her hour on the upholstered dining-room chair? Annie, on her way upstairs to read Faulkner, said to herself, “the odor of aging female flesh,” and found some recompense in the phrase for the long, annoying dinner.
Her mother, in the kitchen with the dishes, understood that the question that made her stand stock-still, the water running over her hands, rose out of her sudden solitude, out of the momentarily silenced house, the midwinter darkness at the window over the sink. She understood—since she had had these moments a dozen times at least since Jacob went over—that there was no premonition in it, only a sudden surfacing of what was, of course, a constant fear: What was he doing right now, as she rinsed out the good crystal in the sink, wearing the blouse she’d worn to Mass this morning, although she’d put on slacks before dinner, the house silent around her, the boys’ room empty above her, Annie reading, Clare in the car with her husband and Pauline, what was Jacob doing right now, on the other side of the world (world without grace, without fair measure, without evenhandedness, as far as she could tell)? What was he doing, her firstborn, her mildest child, and did he need her?
Had they wrested from that stranger, the other Jacob, a blessing for their son, or was it all sentimentality and superstition on her husband’s part—that blood-borne fascination with the dead—that had made him tell her on that first day of her life as a mother, It’s just something I’d like to do? Did the fates howl with laughter at the irony of it all or had some good fortune been secured?
She took Pauline’s empty glass from the counter beside her and dipped it in the soapy water and resolved to think instead (it was how she would get through Jacob’s time in Vietnam) of what could possibly have been better, given all the occasions of her life, than that morning in the hospital with little Jacob in her arms. Our baby grand. The thrill and disbelief of finding herself a mother. Even recalling it now, she could vaguely smell the ether in the air, the particular sweet odor of a newborn’s scalp. And then Michael and Annie and little Clare’s breathless entrance into the world. Mr. Persichetti’s strong arms.
But one moment nudges the other out of the way. It was something to regret. It was something to be grateful for. She rinsed the glass and placed it with the others in the dish drainer. On the windowsill above the sink was the small replica of the Pietà in its clear plastic dome—Annie’s Christmas gift to her the year they had seen it. She dried her hands, turned to gather the plates from the kitchen table. There was enough of the roast for the girls’ sandwiches tomorrow. Pauline had been garrulous tonight—the three drinks had done it. She was no thinner than she used to be, but age was making her gaunt, hollowing her cheeks, darkening the circles under her eyes. Mary Keane carried the dishes to the sink. Upstairs, Annie turned a page. Across the hall, her brothers’ room was empty. On the boulevard, the bus behind them lit the rearview mirror above Clare’s head. Pauline presented her cheek to the girl for a kiss and then held up her gloved hand and told John Keane to stay where he was, she could open her own door, thank you.
There were seven people on the bus, all sitting separately, most of them leaning against windows, a few clasping, straight-armed, the back of the seat in front, none of them white. The light inside was a stale and ugly light, too bright, given how dark it was outside. Pauline knew it wasn’t kind to her face, this light, that it lit the fine hairs on her cheek and chin and the powder that clung to them. Turning to the black window, she saw her own reflection more clearly than the neon signs and streetlights they were passing by. She looked older than she believed herself to be.
But how Clare’s skin glowed, and how pleased she had been with the gifts Pauline had brought her today. Even Annie had seemed pleased with the loopy earrings that were certainly not to Pauline’s taste, but that the girl at Lord & Taylor had said were just right for teenagers. (“Something for my niece,” Pauline had said, a little white lie that she had been telling salesclerks and strangers for so long now, she no longer noticed it herself, or questioned its meaning. Something for my little niece, for my nephew in college, for my sister’s boy in Vietnam.) She was a black girl, the one behind the counter at Lord & Taylor—which wasn’t as nice as it used to be—and Pauline had asked for her advice in defiance of her own expectation that the girl wouldn’t know anything, would most likely respond with a dumb or indignant look, as if puzzled by Pauline’s strange notion that the people behind the counter were supposed to help the people on the other side. (Or so she had put it at dinner tonight, telling the story.) But it turned out the girl was actually quite gracious, looked something like Leslie Uggams, and so added to the pleasure of the nice conversation they’d had (“Something for my niece. A teenager.”), and to the satisfaction that Annie had indeed approved of the gift, was the nice story she was able to make out of it all at the dinner table tonight, one that led to all kinds of reminiscence about how gracious salesclerks used to be and remember when you could just say, I think I’ll have it sent?
Beyond the black glass of the window beside her, Pauline saw the blurred strips of neon signs, the dulled nightlights of shuttered storefronts, many of them with black grates across their windows and doors. Nighttime had a different color now, on this familiar route from Nassau to Queens, different from what it had had years ago when streetlights burned a soft yellow, and you could—hadn’t they said it at dinner tonight—feel safe riding the subway at any hour. That was over now. There was a drunk at the back of the bus, muttering angrily to himself. There was a fat Spanish woman nodding to sleep across the aisle. The familiar world was slowly being overrun by strangers. The smell of odd spices drifted into her apartment at all hours now, even clung to her clothes. Courtesy—a man holding a door for you, tipping a hat—was long gone. You could not take it for granted that anyone spoke English.
When she changed at Jamaica, the second bus was empty, its door left open, its engine idling. She sat on it alone for ten minutes, chilled, headachy from the diesel fuel, before she got off to ask the dispatcher if the driver was going to come. “He’s coming,” the man said, waving her away. When she returned to the bus, there were two people sitting in the front and she said to them, with great dignity, “I’ve already waited here twenty minutes and there’s no sign of a driver.” They looked at her impassively—a black woman and a young black man—and then looked over her shoulder to the driver, also black, who was swinging up the stairs. He ducked into his seat and as she turned to hand him her transfer he took his time stowing his things, adjusting his mirrors, taking off his gloves, and then he sat for a second more with both hands on his thighs, staring straight ahead. She had to say, “Here,” and thrust the paper at him. He took it disdainfully, not turning to meet her eye. The other two passengers got up to hand him theirs and he said thank you to both of them. They passed her, going back to their seats, the boy smirking, like good students turning up their noses at the one who had just gotten the reprimand. She was alone here. Middle-aged, aging, a woman alone, making her way between her few safe havens—the Keanes’ house, her office, her own apartment—through the ugly, amber-colored night.
She sat down at the far end of the first long seat, her back to the window, her gloved hand on the silver pole. The air of the bus was still chilled from the door being left open so long. Because the door had been left open for so long, the air insi
de smelled strongly of diesel fuel. She sat forward on the edge of the molded plastic and leaned down as he made a wide turn out of the terminal. And then another. Although she knew this route as well as any, she suddenly found herself disoriented and she looked out the far window and then over her shoulder and then heard herself say, shouting at him over the wheeze of the bus, “Don’t you go down Jamaica Avenue?”
He may have said, “Yeah,” his arms moving in wide arcs over the big wheel. He might have said nothing at all. She waited, leaning down to see where they were. Once she recognized something, anything, she would sit back and say, pleasantly enough, “Oh, I’m all turned around,” and the black lady on the other side might say, “Happens to me all the time.” Or the driver might say, “I just made a wrong turn,” apologizing. “We’re back on track now.” But this was no longer the route she knew (they should have passed a Bohack’s by now) and when she asked him, somewhat alarmed, “Is this the Q54?” his answer was once again garbled. She looked to the woman across the aisle, who said, “Huhn huhn,” which she hoped meant yes but could have meant she didn’t know. “I don’t know what ‘huhn huhn’ means,” she said, out loud, but not, she was certain, loud enough for the woman to hear. She looked out again, over her shoulder, and then reached up for the buzzer over her head, fumbling for it with her glove. She stood. “He doesn’t know where he’s going,” she said. She was sick to her stomach from the time she had waited in the cold, and the diesel odor had made her dizzy. She reached for the pole by the door. “You’re not going the right way,” she told him, shouting to be heard over the engine, “I’m getting off.” There was another wide turn, she held on, leaning down now to look through the glass in the door. Where were they? “You’d better let me off,” she said. And in the same moment that she saw the familiar storefront of Green Point Savings go by (and perhaps, recognizing it, relaxed her grip a bit) the bus swung into the curb and the driver pulled the doors open and she felt herself thrown forward and her feet, moving to regain her balance, stepped instead into the well of the stairs. She cried out, lunged forward, missed the handrail and then felt herself collapse, giving in to the fall, the harsh bang of the rubber tread against her hip, against her thighs, her good coat and good skirt, surprised herself at all the noise she made, against the fiberglass and the steel and the oof of her heavy flesh, her arm and her shoulder and her face against the curb. Blind pain, and then there was the feel of the cold air against her stockings, against the bare flesh at the top of her thighs. She struggled to pull down her hem, to cover herself but her arm was pinned, her body immobile. She was aware of voices, none of them urgent, it seemed. Spanish, perhaps laughter, strangers conferring above her in what she hoped was a dream. She would have cried out, if she could. There was dirt in her mouth and the taste of blood. And then a hand, soft and large, calloused, or perhaps it was a glove, touching the good wool of her skirt, pulling its warmth down over her bare legs.
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