Mother blushed the cutest pink and smiled. Ned led us all to the living room. Cassidy’s nose had lost its bloom.
“Beautiful flowers, Joe,” Mother said as she placed the vase on the cocktail table. “Can we get you a drink?” She sat on the couch next to Nana and Ned.
“Rye rocks would be nice,” he said, looking at the carpet. He sat with me in the pale green wing chair in the corner, careful to lean a little forward to prevent his head from resting on the ancient lace antimacassar that looked like an exploding star.
“Ford,” Mother said. Father rose from his chair and walked to the kitchen.
“Really, Kate,” Cassidy asked, “how’s it all goin’? Jess really does look the thriving lass, and you do, too. You getting enough help from Ford? I got a two-by-four at my station ta work him over with if he’s been slothful. Ford,” he called into the kitchen, “sloth ranks right below envy on the list of cardinal sins. Good Father Larrie was instructin’ me on them just yesterday. You hear me in there or are you asleep?” He winked at Nana. “Envy, Ford, like every time you see me wrap a package all tight and neat, neat and tight.”
“You did say club soda, Joey?” Father yelled from the kitchen. Even Ned laughed.
“Ford has been great these past weeks. He takes one, sometimes even both, of the nighttime feedings. When he gets home the first thing he does is to wash his hands and take her for a while. And Mom and Dad have been here for more than a week already, helping out. I’m up to my ears in help, really. I’m spoiled.”
“And you, Joe, how are you doing?” Ned asked as Father returned carrying a peacock tray with drinks.
“Meanin’?” Cassidy replied with his head atilt.
“Meaning, how are you doing?” Ned said without the slightest trace of impatience in his voice.
“Very well. Very well, indeed.” Ford handed him his drink. “Better and better all the time.” He sipped. Beads of sweat already glistened on the bottom of the tumbler. He swiped the glass on the coaster Father had set down on the table and held it just over my head. “May I, Kate?” he asked.
“Drink it?”
“No, cool her forehead a little. Like this.” He ran the cold glass over my brow and down my nose. I kicked and cooed and shrieked. The house was warm whenever Nana visited, and that night the oven had added hours of fragrant heat to the rooms. He moved it down my cheeks, to the side of my fat neck, up and over my chin. I lost myself in the sensation, and flapped my arms, moved my feet, roved my eyes to the cold. And began to pool saliva on the floor of my mouth in anticipation of another toast. Nana laughed like a child.
“Joseph Delaney Cassidy, you always did have a way with a baby!” she said from the seat of memory. “You made all mine laugh with your tricks.”
“To laughing babies, then,” he said, raising his glass, “and to the ladies that bore them!” He drank down half the brown liquid in two swallows and set the tumbler on the table. To the silence that followed—no, not silence, really, for now* I can hear the gentle feet of rain on the windows and Mother clearing her throat and Ned scraping the side of his shoe on the carpet under the coffee table and Nana breathing a single deep gulp of air and slowly exhaling— Cassidy added, “Those here and those departed.” I felt his arm around me tighten, make a smaller circle. He looked across the room to the legs of water walking the glass outside. He reached for his drink, hesitated a second, and took a tiny sip. “Kate,” he said, “hold this load for me while I go get my picks from the car. Something about this wet night calls for a song.”
His picks were in an envelope in the glove compartment of his Taurus. A pint of Seagram’s shared the space. He braced himself with two long belts. It would be the first of three trips to the vehicle that night—now for the picks, as the food was served for a new string, and when the plates were being cleared to check if he’d left the dome light on.
During the meal I was passed like a basket of rolls from person to person. Each cradled me in an arm or held me on a lap and jiggled me while eating bites of meat or potato or carrot with a free hand. When Cassidy’s turn came, he put down his fork, tines piercing his gravy, and watched my face until it was time to hand me off. His eyes had that easy look, like a pond without a ripple or wave, and his nose was in full bloom. He played with four fingers and smiled. I sucked the other four, ever hopeful. Before he passed me on, Nana said, “Joe, would you have the time to visit their graves with me while we’re in town? We could say a little prayer and leave a nice bouquet for spring.”
He handed me to Mother. “It’s a date,” he said in a low rumble. “Next Saturday, if it’s dry?”
“It’ll be dry,” Nana said with finality.
He passed on Nana’s hard sauce that went on the bread pudding. Mother limited him to two drinks. He sang for an hour before the meal and for two with the coffee. By the end, the rain had walked off the windows and the wind was blowing dry as chaff.
Three days before they were to return to Florida, Nana and Ned accompanied Mother and me to Dr. Burke’s office for my two-month checkup. Ned drove Father’s car with both big hands at the top of the steering wheel. When he turned a corner, both elbows shot up and out, the right invariably jostling Nana’s left shoulder. She looked back to Mother. “He still does that when he drives. All the time, no matter what it is, he drives like he’s struggling with a twenty-ton monster of a machine.” Her eyebrows arched. “Even a bike, Kate, he rides like that.” She laughed and so did Mother, and Nana patted Ned’s right elbow.
We checked in at the desk and sat in Waiting Room One. There were eight other mothers with their infants already there. Some of the babies slept, some squirmed, and some cried. They all looked overdressed. More than half had on floppy bonnets and all wore sweaters, even though the April weather was warm and sunny.
I was dressed in a diaper, tee shirt, and pull-on sack that Nana had bought especially for doctor’s visits. The sack was big enough to fit me until I would be two years old. “Why go to the bother of dressing them up at home when all they want to do at the doctor’s is to get them naked for the weighing and the shots?” she explained to Mother in the morning as they got me ready.
“I see your point, Ma,” Mother said with little conviction as she slipped the top back onto the gift box she had just opened, the one that contained the pretty green sweater, the matching tights, and a hat. Instead, she slid me into the sack and zipped me up. Only my face showed.
Ned took me to see the fish in the office’s little aquarium. Then his eye caught sight of the bench in Waiting Room Two, and he brought me there to study it with him. It was old and long and gleaming against the far wall. The few patients in that room sat with their mothers on regular chairs, leaving the bench unoccupied. His hand slid down three feet of its fifteen-foot length. He rapped his knuckles on it four times, cocking his head to read the sound’s report. He let the tip of his index finger cross the grain of the wood. He pressed it with his nail, and his breath caught in his throat. He looked down at me with a face full of wonder and said sacramentally, “Red pine.” He dropped to his knees and placed me gently on the floor under the bench, where a second later he joined me. We both looked up to the bench’s underside. “Not a screw, not a nail,” he said appreciatively. He looked my way and said, “Dovetail fit, from mortises and tenons.” His hand caressed a joint. “And here, dowels, perfectly shaved, perfectly spaced.” He unzipped my sack and extracted an arm. He held me up over his chest, supporting my head in his palm, took my hand and let me feel the handiwork. The wood was slick, even the joints cut so tight, if you closed your eyes to the design, it felt like a single block of wood. The board showed the same, tight, wavy grain as the top side of the seat. The ridges tickled my fingertips. “Not one single screw,” he said when we had finally stood.
The mothers in the room watched us as we walked out. “This is a real good place,” Ned said to their quizzical looks.
Nana was miffed when Ned returned to his seat next to her. She looked quickly ar
ound the room and saw it was too late to return my arms to the sack’s secrecy. Ned said, “We checked out an old wood bench on the other side. It’s a beauty.” Nana stared at him. We were called after a few minutes of silent waiting.
The nurse slid the rest of me out of the casing, removed my shirt and diaper and put me on a scale. I had gained almost four pounds. She wrapped a tape around my head and wrote a number in my chart. She slid a ruler under me and stretched out my legs and wrote again.
“Growing like a weed, Mrs. Jackson. You’re doing a real good job.” Then she looked at me. “We’ve got something special for you today, baby girl.” She winked at my mother and said softly, “Shots.” She wrapped me in a pink blanket, handed me to Mother, and brought us to the examining room where for fifteen minutes I studied the cartoon forms of animals painted on the walls. In real life, only monkeys and porpoises smile. On Dr. Burke’s wall, the lips of every species—aardvark to zebra—curved up into big expressions of glee. On the way home, both my thighs aching from that nurse’s promise of something special, I saw those smiling rabbits and puppies and fawns and mice. For the remainder of my life, I would be wary of happy animals.
Burke wore a backwards baseball cap and a pin-striped Yankees shirt. He greeted Mother with a “Kate,” Nana with a “Mrs.,” and Ned with a “Hmm” when he heard him blurt out, even before their handshake had concluded, “You ought to look into switching her two big toes to her hands. Seems like the thing to do. To me, anyway. Shouldn’t be that hard.”
Nana groaned and Mother frowned. Burke said, again, “Hmm.” He tugged the visor of his cap and added, “Well, that’s not such a bad thought.” In those few seconds when everyone in the room arranged themselves around the exam table to watch Burke’s investigation of my growing body, I caught his eyes darting repetitively from my feet to my hands. Finally, the lids narrowed and he nodded a little. “I’ll mention it to Dr. Garraway and see what he thinks.”
He asked about my development and tilted his head in disbelief when Mother told him I was holding objects up to my line of vision and on the verge of turning over from belly to back. “Let’s try this,” he said. He put his hand under my head and neck and brought me to a sitting position. He waited a second for me to stabilize, then he removed his support. I swayed for a moment, first left, then right, then steadied long enough to drip a sticky streak of saliva onto my belly and shriek at its wet tickle. “Very good, Jess,” Burke complimented as his hand went to my back again. “She’s way ahead in her development. Doing things at two months we usually see at four to five. Dr. Garraway’s prediction seems right on.” He eased me carefully down and began his exam. For ten minutes he looked and he listened, pushed and pulled, and pronounced, “Heart’s doing fine. No change in anything there. Kidney’s not palpable. Very advanced in milestones. She’s fit as a fiddle. We’re all expecting big things from her.”
Mother smiled. Ned smiled. Nana smiled. Those cartoon beasts on the taupe walls smiled. The nurse came in with her tray.
Ned drove, so proud of Burke’s endorsement that his elbows jutted wide as swan wings. Nana hugged the passenger-side door and hummed. Mother sat next to me with her eyes half closed. I cried all the way home. It didn’t bother anyone.
Nana carried me into the house and gave me a diaper change. Her gray face was soft as silk and there was a sheeny creaminess in her eyes. She whacked the bottom of the talcum can a second time. “An extra dose of dust for a day well done,” she said. She taped the diaper at the corners. She slipped her hand under my tee shirt and felt my chest over my heart and nodded.
It was the only time I went to a cemetery with Cassidy while I was alive, the Saturday I went with him and my family. I’d return yearly with Nana to visit the grave of her friend, Carina, but Cassidy never again went with us. The Saturday we all went was two days before Nana and Ned flew back to Florida. We were all dressed for Sunday, everybody in black except Cassidy and me. But even Cassidy wore a suit jacket. The next day, Easter, he would come to our home for dinner in a ketchup-wounded sweater and a day’s growth of beard. But that Saturday his face was smooth, and he wore a brown shirt under a bright green jacket. He looked like the sod on the graves in that jacket.
He met us in his car at the entrance to the place. The graves were close enough to walk to. Robins hopped the grass in spurts, came to proper attention, and watched us with single dead-still eyes as we passed. It was nearly ten o’clock, too late for their singing. The low sun stretched their shadows to arrows on the grass. When, startled, they flew away to the budding trees, it looked as if they were being hunted.
Mother pushed my stroller. Father and Cassidy carried flowers. Nana held a prayer book. Ned, empty-handed, was the only one who spoke as we walked. “You’re getting a little bit of a squeak in your brakes, Ford. Let’s check ’em when we get back.” Father nodded his agreement. Cassidy sniffed his roses and looked at me grimly.
We found the plots easily. The headstones were on a slight hill just off the paved drive, under a maple tree that dripped red pollen onto their granite shoulders. From left to right, there were Carina Daley Cassidy, Rose Mary Ferraro Cassidy, and Joseph Delaney Cassidy Jr. There were dates on the stones. Numbers occupied almost all of the space on Joseph’s small stone: 10-23-1984 and 12-22-1984. There was room only for a single additional word, chiseled in tiny letters: Joey. Rose Mary’s bore the same date of death as her son.
Ned lifted me out of my stroller. At first we stood in a line facing the graves. Nana walked up and laid her lilies on Carina’s grave, just beneath the headstone. Cassidy put his flowers on Rose Mary’s. They stepped back to our line. Nana said to the deceased, “I miss you, Carina Dee. I remember all those years. Your smile and your tea. Your laughter and your soda bread. May God bless you in peace, Carina.” She quieted for a moment and then went on. “And God bless Rose Mary and little Joey. We had such a short time to know you, but loved you in full measure still. Rest in peace.” Ned shifted me to his other hip while everyone stared straight ahead. After a while, Father said, “Amen to that, Lord.” “Yes,” said Mother. Ned shifted me again and coughed a little before he added, “Well said, Mae. Well said.” They waited in silence a while before Nana asked, “Joseph, would you add your prayer to ours?”
Cassidy looked down to his feet and ran his hand over his bristly gray hair. “Ta the dead of all the days, good and bad, mother and son and mother, God grant you rest.” Even before he had finished his declaration, he was moving to the headstone. He bent down and reversed the position of his flowers. Now the blossoms lay between Rose Mary and Joey, and the stems, cut by the florist on a sharp angle, touched the fringe of Carina’s grass. Nana sighed and opened her book of prayer. She led us in the Act of Faith and three Hail Marys.
We walked silently back to the cars. As Mother began to arrange my car seat in the back, Cassidy asked excitedly, “Kate, maybe you’d like ta ride with me back ta your place. You and Jess? Give the old folks a little peace on the way. Room ta stretch.”
Mother looked at Nana with an expression half between sorrow and annoyance. But Ned said, “Aw, Cassidy, if it’s about the brakes don’t go on about it. They’re fine. A little dust in the pads is what it’ll be. Don’t go worrying about it.”
Cassidy stepped close to him. “Worrying lasts but a minute, Ned. What can come after goes on and on.” Cassidy’s face was black in the hollows in the bright spring sun. “And not just the grief but the anger. The anger, that’s what strikes the heart, Ned. All for want of worrying.” He turned his blank eyes to Nana. “I’ve not had a drink today, Mae. You can believe that.” She touched his arm and tugged the lapel of his jacket, moving it on his shoulders as the wind shrugs the grass.
“Kate, you and Jess ride with Joe. We need to stop at the bakery on the way anyway. We’ll have a nice cake with our tea.”
In the early morning hours of Easter, Mother came to my cry to feed me. We settled in the chair and she rocked as I nursed. Between the first and second brea
st, she grew taut in her frame and said absently, “He needs to stop blaming his dead ma for it. It wasn’t her fault. She was just driving the car.” She burped me and sat me on her lap. “There was no call to move those flowers. None at all.” Her second breast held on to its milk that Easter morning. It resisted the force of my hungry mouth. She put me down and I slept again. Scarcely two hours later I woke to the Resurrection hungrier than ever before.
There was early Mass in the damp church. Nana had dressed me in my new green sweater and tights. In the pew lying on my back, I watched her pray. She’d turn and look down on me every once in a while, her mouth moving in short bursts like she was chewing words. At one point her lips said, “Maker of Heaven and Earth, all that is seen and unseen.” I held up my hands and clasped them. It made her smile, pinked her cheeks.
She fed me sugar water from a four-ounce bottle when I squirmed during the long procession to Communion. I helped her hold the bottle. For a step or two down the aisle, she took her hand away. I held the bottle steady between my palms. It was very light. She turned her head to Mother processing behind her and whispered.
*
I wonder now* if there weren’t multiple purposes in my unique construction. The Assembler never really told me I’d find only one reason to explain my life, after all. So, yes, why not, then? I was put on Earth to heal both these victims of pain, Cassidy and Nana. A thumb for each, then, and other bones to spare as the need may arise. Truly, there was so much of me to share, to spare, in life. The miracle I see in the making, the Assembler’s miracle with me, through me: He shared even what I did not have. What was not given was what I gave. I see, I see.
4
THE RED SINK
The evening Nana and Ned left, a teacher came to our house to instruct Mother and Father in the art of communicating with the hearing impaired. She came three times a week at first, and later added a Saturday visit to make it an even four. Posture, gesture, eye contact, facial expression, body language; this was their initial curriculum. I watched them practice with Miss Lamb for an hour in the living room. They arched their eyebrows till their foreheads ached for the press of their palms; they squinted and widened, rolled and crinkled their eyes for Miss Lamb’s emotional demand. “Be happy!” she giggled, instantaneously lighting her plump, childlike face with joy as if it had just been plugged in. “Now, disapproval!” she growled and scared me with her countenance cold and clouded like a day of winter rain. “Surprise!” she exclaimed and ran her eyebrows up the masts of her elastic forehead. Halfway through the exercise, Mother said she was dizzy; Father had a rumbling nausea. Miss Lamb allowed a quick break. While Mother and Father boiled water for tea, she looked at me and waited for some action to attack with her quick gimmickry. I passed gas. She sucked her eyes deep into their sockets and tried to blow them out of her flaring nostrils. “Not nice, lady girl,” she said with the close of her lids and a shake of her head.
The Assembler of Parts: A Novel Page 6