The next day he packs up his clothes and the few mementos of his wife and child and moves out. He drinks to stupor again that night. And the next.
At first it is Ned who provides him care and attention. He comes every morning with hot coffee and buttered rolls to his basement apartment on Rollins Street to see that Cassidy is up and out for work. For weeks, he rouses a hungover Cassidy and gets him moving, never stooping to lecture his young friend on his drinking but only telling him what he thinks is the secret to being a man: a man goes to work. No matter what, a man wakes and washes and works. Cassidy curses and grumbles, but he showers, drinks the coffee, and goes to his counter at the post office with crumbs on his shirt. The work starts to put a wedge between his anger and his day.
For a few months, it seems enough. But when spring comes with its cruel, green reminder of his April wedding day, Cassidy’s grief is reborn, and the violence begins. The county police let him go the first time—he’d punched a fellow patron at Rory’s Place when that man let his disdain for married life be known to those seated at the bar with him—but they take him into custody for his second offense, smashing the windshield of Father Larrie’s car with a stone hurled from two hundred feet away. But before the hearing takes place, Nana intervenes. She asks the priest whether it is better for Cassidy if he loses his job and goes to jail, or does something useful with his talents. He had been a high school standout in baseball, the shortstop on the team that went to the Maryland state championship game his senior year, she tells him. Why not drop charges in exchange for Cassidy’s agreement to coach baseball teams in the Police Athletic League? And let Ned replace the windshield? In the space of the few seconds it takes for Larrie to consider the request, he sees Cassidy standing on the corner two blocks from the rectory parking lot as he, Larrie, drives onto the street. He sees Cassidy bending to retrieve a rock. He sees Cassidy’s arm in a throwing motion. He sees himself in the car, smiling, thinking, “Never in a million years from such a distance.” Then he sees the rock coming at him in a straight line like it’s on a string. He sees himself still smiling when the rock smashes his windshield with a noise like a gunshot. Father Larrie blinks, and he sees the wisdom in Mae O’Brien’s request.
Nana’s suggestion was shrewdly calculated, and proves even more successful than she’d hoped. Cassidy grumbles at first, adamant not to do anything the priestly ass had agreed to. But he finally sees the wisdom in Nana’s argument, that he would lose his job and perhaps even go to jail, if he didn’t take the offer. So, reluctantly he begins coaching junior high students. And loves it as much as his charges love him, even a stubbly-bearded, hungover, Saturday morning him. Especially a stubbly-bearded, hungover him. He has a flair for the game, true, but also a way of dealing with boys on the cusp of adolescence that is something to see. He makes the wind sprints, the games of pepper, the endless fielding of hard grounders and towering fly balls seem like the most important things in the universe for his players to do. His teams win and win and win. And in the winning, he wins the admiration of their parents, many of whom are members of Montgomery County’s police department.
In the months and years that follow, those brown-suited enforcers of the county’s laws have a difficult decision to make when they arrive at Rory’s to find Joe Cassidy at the giving end of a sound beating, or at the receiving end of one: do they jeopardize their own sons’ futures in baseball by hauling their coach into jail, or call Ned and Mae O’Brien to come pick him up? Nana is amazed at the power of baseball. The basement tape ends.
Eileen Marshall is childless and, for the past three years, unmarried. Mercifully, unmarried. She comes and goes as she pleases now. There is no longer a man who needs things—a meal, a conversation, a friend, a lover. She is free to work late, eat late, retire late, without having to offer an excuse or an explanation. Especially this time of the year with all those tedious Christmas parties that rise up like speed bumps, slowing her down as she tries to forge on ahead. “But you have to come with me,” Ray would plead about some partner’s gathering. “I can’t show up alone.” And for those four constraining years she did go with him.
And hated him for it. The chitchat, the talk of trials won, of strategy that won them, of billable hours, of rain makers. And the food, always the same, always eaten standing, eaten with the fingers. But that is over now, finished. And good riddance.
Which is why there is nothing unusual about the lady cardiologist working late in her office the evening of December twenty-third, when everyone else is out having a good time. Even the janitors have grown used to that—they know to collect her trash the last of their shift.
She has retrieved the metal canisters containing my echocardiograms from the film library and has brought them to her office to review. There are two studies done in the newborn period, and then a study from each of my yearly evaluations. She reviews the first and sighs relief when there is nothing arising aberrantly from the aortic arch. The second newborn study likewise is clear. Even more relieved, she spools and plays the echo from age one. And there it is, partly hidden among the plumper pulmonary vessels, but clearly visible, a gray-black wisp coiling into the chest. It is even more apparent on the next three echoes, the artery growing in size and definition as the rest of my body does. The diagnosis is clear and clearly missed.
“But it is not supposed to be there!” she says aloud to herself. “It’s not part of Hilgar’s. It has no right being there!” She thinks of the statistics. A one in one hundred thousand chance of Hilgar’s and a separate one in ten thousand chance of the aberrant artery. The chance of both occurring in the same individual is one in a billion! She takes comfort in the numbers. “I should not be required to search for something as rare as that! Her death was out of my hands.” She ejects the tape from the projector and sits looking at the grayness of it. “Gray,” she says aloud as she taps the eraser of her pencil on the echo’s empty metal canister. The hollow, tiny sound is like the beat of a drum. The silver-gray film from the viewed echoes sits on her desk in a jumble like a nest of snakes. There is a knock on her door.
“Housekeeping,” says the tremolo voice of Henrietta. “Housekeeping, Dr. Marshall.”
In that instant she ceases her drumming. “Come in, Henrietta,” Marshall says. “I’ve been doing some Christmas cleanup. You can take this stuff away. Take it all away.” At the last moment, she retains the second of the two newborn echoes. She first thinks to keep both but argues against the idea. Verisimilitude, she understands, will be her strategy. Tapes are often lost. Even the very first one is gone. Only one can be found in that god-awful film library. Those filing clerks can be the height of incompetence.
On top of the tapes goes the uneaten remnant of her working supper, the glutinous mashed potatoes and gloppy creamed corn soaking the silver celluloid tape, darkening it, making the snaky tape look old, old as the hair of Medusa.
Before leaving that evening, she replaces the sole surviving echo on its proper shelf. In the morning she will ask her secretary to place a written request for all my echoes; she will raise a stink when only one can be found. Very verisimilitude and very discoverable should a suit arise, she thinks as she walks to her car. All that will remain of the lost studies are the dictated reports in the chart and her own imperfect memory of what those images showed. She thinks of her actions as a Christmas present to herself, one she fully deserves. It is a present that will prevent her from suffering the unpleasantness of a lawsuit over a matter so unfair to the treating physician, the discovery of the rarest of rare constellations of anomalies in an already blemished child. No need to get trounced over a slipup like that. Ears and heart and voice and artery and bones and kidney. Who knows what else lay beneath her skin? A mess. The girl was a mess. A mess no one should be responsible for.
Cassidy is too hungover the morning after my death to notice that Father has not come to work. Instead, he swallows aspirin and drinks black coffee while he waits on a long line of holiday-impatient customers. He
manages a few tablespoons of instant noodle soup during his lunch break and has just decided to dash to his car for a quick pick-me-up when the manager calls him to his desk phone. “Joe, it’s Jackson for you. He’s got some bad news. Real bad. You better sit down.” Cassidy’s hand shakes when he reaches for the phone. But it’s been shaking all morning long. His face is gray-green in the cheeks and black about the hollows. His eyes are rimmed with red and look cold and lifeless.
“Ford,” he half whispers. “Where are ya?”
“Joe, I’m home with Kate and BJ. It’s Jess, Joey. It’s Jess. She’s dead.” Cassidy moves the phone a few inches from his ear. The cries he hears are like spikes in his brain.
He waits for the sounds to stop. “What? What are you sayin’ about Jess? She’s dead? She died?”
“Last night, Joey. She got sick last night and just . . . just couldn’t breathe. We did mouth to mouth, everything. But she was all obstructed in her windpipe. By the time EMS got here it was too late. She was dead. They’re doing an . . .” but he breaks off again into sobs. The manager can hear them where he stands at the window. He walks to a stunned Joe Cassidy.
“Gimme that, Joe,” he says taking the phone from Cassidy. “You get over there. Help ’em out.”
Cassidy goes to his Taurus. Somehow his hand is steady when he inserts his key in the ignition. Still, he reaches for the glove compartment before shifting into drive. “Another casket,” he says when he sees the pint tucked away. “How in the name of Christ will we be able ta bury another small casket?” The whiskey warms his throat, burns his belly, all the way to my house.
My parents are sitting in the parlor with Father Larrie when he arrives. At first no one stands when Cassidy enters. Mother and Father sit and stare at him blankly, as if he has been gone a long, long time and they hardly remember him. It is Larrie who stands, who speaks first. “Joe,” he says as he walks down the length of the couch to provide Cassidy space, “sit.” He gestures to his vacated cushion. Then Mother stands and goes to him and Father quickly follows. The three who love me join their grief with an embrace. Cassidy cries the hardest, and I know his tears are for more than me. No one speaks.
Finally, they sit and Mother says, “They think it was the croup that took her. Her windpipe just closed over and she couldn’t breathe. We tried everything we knew, but . . .” Mother sounds exhausted. She recounts my last hours. Her sentences are all short sighs. Cassidy drips his tears on his shirt, not even bothering to wipe them with his hand as they course down his cheeks. He doesn’t speak what they already know, what no one has stated: that he was in his home, in his room, passed out from the drink when I died. Home passed out drunk when he should have been here, reading to me. He remembers what I said to him, the last I said to him, “You will be okay,” and shakes his head in disbelief. He stays with them for an hour, through the phone calls, the people dropping off food, BJ waking from a nap.
When he leaves, Father Larrie walks out with him. “Joe, we’ve had our differences, you and I over the years. . . . That’s the God-honest truth. But I’m asking you, don’t be putting the burden of guilt on either of those two over her death. They’ve borne enough of that already. It’s mercy and compassion that’s needed now.” The priest had said little while they sat in the parlor, and this is the most information he’s parted with since Cassidy arrived. At first Cassidy is prickled that the priest would look to direct his actions. It seems an unfounded affront to the obvious love that all three of them had for me. He is about to protest that no such thought of blame could ever enter his mind, when Larrie continues. “And the same goes for blaming yourself. I know from . . . from CCD how close you were to that girl. What she meant to you, even if I can’t accept your approach to holy dogma. But you loved her and that is enough. Don’t go laying on the blame there either. Cherish her memory. Guilt and blame will only tarnish it and serve to separate you from it and from those who share it. That’s like another death when you cut yourself off from that. I’ll not be repeating any of this unless you bring it up, Joseph.” Surprisingly, the priest offers his hand. Surprisingly, Cassidy takes it.
“I’d like to do a song at her funeral Mass,” Cassidy says. Larrie’s eyes widen. “ ‘Amazing Grace,’ ” Cassidy continues, “before the Kiss of Peace.” Larrie considers the request. “That would be within the rules. Okay, then, ‘Amazing Grace.’”
Cassidy can’t bring himself to say, “Thanks.” He just nods and gets in his car.
*
Later*, the Assembler comes by to collect the day’s* tapes. I tell Him I am shocked over Father Larrie’s wisdom, insight, and concern after all I had heard about him from Cassidy, after all of his meaningless questions in CCD class. I expect one of His stock and cryptic replies, such as “Many were the Prophets in Israel in those days, but God’s word came only to Larrie.” Instead, He regards my new thumbs and inspects them with His Artistic Eye. “It takes longer for some to understand than others.” He leaves for the basement, and I do not see Him for days*.
Nana and Ned arrive later that day. There is another wash of tears. My family goes out in the evening to select a casket. Cassidy stays with BJ. They begin to read The Golden Treasury of Myths and Legends. Cassidy sings BJ to sleep. He tucks her in and goes to my room, where he sits and cries in the dark. He looks up to the ceiling. There are more stars than ever before, from the refraction of the light through his tears.
On Christmas Eve, two days after my death, a caseworker from Child Protective Services comes to the house to interview Mother and Father and to do a site visit. She is a matronly black woman close to Nana’s age. She wears a bright orange turban around her hair and a white-striped black caftan. She comes well armed with forms. Before she talks with either Mother or Father, she walks through the house noting items on her list with the concern a surgeon has for his stitches. There is no fire extinguisher in the kitchen, no smoke alarm in the basement, no flashlight in the cabinets, and Mother’s prenatal vitamins are within easy reach of a child on the kitchen counter. The temperature of the hot-water heater is set dangerously high. The Mister Yuk sticker on the refrigerator is mostly obscured by my old art. No one can see the telephone number of the Poison Control Center. A mouse has left a pellet in the drawer containing the aluminum foil. There are no covers for the electrical sockets in Jeanine’s room.
When finally the three sit together in the parlor, Ms. Smith begins by announcing that she has met with Detective Mattingly. “Frankly, with such a preventable death, he is required to investigate your fitness as parents. As that pertains to the incident involving Jessica, it’s in his bailiwick. But we at CPS have a duty to protect the interests of your younger child, Jeanine. That’s the purpose of this visit. And just where would Jeanine be now?”
“She went to the mall to see Santa. My parents and a friend took her a little while ago,” Mother says. There is no strength in her words. They seem to leak out of her mouth like a stanched stream of water. Two nights of sleep deprivation, a day and a half of self-recrimination, guilt, and drowning grief have taken their tolls on both my parents, so much so that neither is offended by Ms. Smith’s remark concerning their fitness as parents. They are arriving at that very same conclusion themselves. Mother sees me limp and staring in my chair. All she had thought to bring was a damp facecloth
“I will need to see her before I leave. Is there any way to contact the grandparents and have them return?”
Father looks at Mother with a shrug. “We don’t use cell phones in the family, so I don’t see a way of getting to them short of one of us driving over to Macy’s.” He lets his head drop as if he is ashamed.
“Well, then, let us begin with these questionnaires and see where that takes us. Maybe they’ll be home by the time we finish.”
The interview drags out over two hours. They are each asked questions about their education, jobs, family relationships, personal histories of violence suffered and delivered, income and spending, drug and alcohol use, diet, reli
gious affiliations, medical and psychiatric histories, use of emergency rooms. They are culling their memories on this last topic when the front door opens, and Cassidy carries BJ into the room. Nana and Ned follow close behind. Cassidy stands just to the side of the couch where the caseworker sits, and sways. BJ sees the stranger in the room and begins to cry. “Zokay, Zokay, BeeChay,” Cassidy slurs. “She’s nice lady in orage hat.” Mother stands and snatches BJ out of his arms. She fixes Cassidy with a glare. He looks like a lashed puppy, his eyes droopy-lidded and his mouth lax. The caseworker stands, smiling thinly, and says, “I’m Beatrice Smith, caseworker from Child Protective Services of Montgomery County. And you are . . . ?”
Cassidy sits in the kitchen with his face buried in his hands. Ms. Smith has left. Mother has stormed off to BJ’s room with BJ and Nana. Father and Ned have gone to the church to see about the funeral service. In the unlit space behind his eyes, Cassidy sees a single vision and hears again a sole shrieked sentence. It is Mother’s face, wild-eyed with terror, wet with tears, yet somehow set sharp in anger, too, some hot spray coming out of her mouth as she screams: “They can take BJ away from us because of you! They can take BJ away from us because of you!” He feels a turning in the pit of his stomach. He barely gets to the bathroom before the retching begins. It is the caseworker’s broad smiling face he sees as he leans over the toilet and suffers the assault of the day’s shots at the bar and the pulls from his glove-box bottle. The smile never fades as she asks him question after question and dutifully records his slurred answers. “Oh, God!” he moans just before he vomits again. “Oh, holy God!”
My wake waits until the evening of December twenty-sixth. My autopsy prevented a wake the day after I died, and the rules of the Church forbid funerals and wakes on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I am given only a single evening session for the mourners to come because Leary’s is overwhelmed by the log-jammed dead of the holidays. Only an evening in my casket in that room with all those flowers and pictures of me and family and friends. Dozens come, sign the book, find Mother and Father and express their sympathies, wander about marveling at me playing soccer, standing in the waves at the beach, splashing in the bathtub as a baby, reading on Cassidy’s lap, eating cotton candy at the circus. Then they approach my casket and kneel on the hard rubber kneeler. I am dressed in my Communion dress, ironically putting it to good use earlier than expected. The dress is pleated white taffeta and my black rosary beads are wrapped around my eight fingers. If the mourners look closely, they can spot my White Owl ring on the index finger of my left hand. Most never see it because they don’t want to look at my hands. But it is there. It was returned to Father along with my hearing aids when he signed the hospital papers releasing my body to Leary’s. My parents had never seen it on my hand before because I only wore it on special occasions, and even then, only in my room. I had put it on the night of my death because of what had happened with Cassidy that morning. The loud bang of the whiskey glass on wood echoed in my ear all that day, and I put it on.
The Assembler of Parts: A Novel Page 17