Have you seen enough? she asks, and Duncan nods and touches the glass and although he hasn’t spoken, mother seems to understand this and rests her hand over his, and they stay that way together for a long time until a security guard comes over and tells them to take their hands off the exhibit.
Later at home, after they’ve stopped off at the Windsor Tap, where Mother bought him a burger and fries and herself a highball, she leads him to her bedroom, telling him she has something she wants to show him. There is a look of gleeful anticipation upon her face; her eyes shine blearily.
Look, she says and sweeps her arm back like a magician to reveal the photographs—hundreds upon hundreds of them—she has spread upon her bed.
What are they?
Pictures of us, of you, Duncan—before the Home. I’ve gone through all my old boxes to find them for you.
Duncan stares at the photographs, feels his mother watching him. Most of the pictures have been taken with an old camera and are blurred and indistinct, but clearly, there is a young boy holding his mother’s hand and another where the mother is pushing the boy upon a swing in a park, and another of them hugging each other outside the doors of a church that mother tells him is on Divisadero. And here’s one of you on your birthday, Mother says and points to a photograph of a young boy bent over a birthday cake, caught in the moment before he attempts to blow out its candles, his face aglow in their shimmering light. Duncan turns the photograph over and sees the Fotomat date stamped, SEPTEMBER, 1974.
They’re really us?
Mother nods and smiles. What’s wrong, Duncan?
At the center of the pile there is a black-and-white picture of a young boy, and Duncan reaches for it and holds it to his face. The boy is walking away but looking back over his right shoulder and staring into the camera, as if someone had called his name. What is your name? Duncan asks of the picture. What is your name? The boy’s right hand is clutched by a man’s hand, whose arm, angled upward to the shoulder, is cut by the borders of the photograph, and bodiless. Duncan can tell it is a man’s hand by its size, the thick-boned wrist, the heavily veined backhand, the large wristwatch. He can even make out the time by the sharp-looking black hour and minute hands upon the dial face: It’s three A.M. The boy’s gaze is oddly vacant, and his mouth is parted slightly, as if he is calling to the photographer, asking perhaps why the photographer is not going with them. It is a strange, questioning expression, but the eyes are merely white pinpricks of the camera’s flashbulb. And if this eyeless boy is him, then it must be his mother who is holding the camera and watching him leave with this strange man—could this be the priest Mother entrusted him to when he was six? He can make out the texture of the man’s dark jacket sleeve—heavy-looking, like the wool jacket a priest wears over his clerical shirt, of the type Father Toibin wore in the cooler months. Or could this be his father?
Duncan?
I don’t know. Duncan shrugs.
You don’t know what?
It’s like looking at ghosts.
That’s only because you don’t remember, sweetie, but you will, you will.
Chapter 34
October 1982
Duncan often imagines that he sees Billy and Julie standing on various street corners, watching him from a distance. When he turns, he sees them briefly, an accusatory flickering of light at the corner of his eyes: Julie’s black brilliantine wig from the Home’s production of Whose Baby Are You Now? and her pouting mouth; Billy’s large, blue eyes burning fiercely in their ever-prominent sockets, the fragile, pale dome of his oversize skull—and then they are gone. At other times Duncan has the sense that they are following him, but if they are, they never make a sound, never call out his name. He doesn’t mention their presence to mother—they seem to move too quickly for others to see—and after a time he thinks they might merely be ghosts, materialized into being by the power of his longing. And though they never show themselves fully, he remains convinced that they are there.
It’s a Friday evening that has turned chill. Leaves rustle and scrape along the street and Duncan lies on the couch watching Creature Double Feature on the television, glad for the heat thumping from the radiator. Outside it’s already dark and his mother has closed the outer storm windows against the cold. The narrow windows continue to rattle in their wide frames; the wind bangs and bows the glass. Every now and then a car makes its way slowly up or down the hill, and its lights sweep briefly across the porch and up the far wall, and for a moment it is as if the images upon the television had come writhing alive and his breath momentarily stills. The door buzzer sounds, startling him, for he’s heard no footsteps on the porch, and he rolls off the couch and crawls slowly to the door in the way that he imagines a deformed half-man, half-mutant fly might.
He opens the door and Julie is standing there, pale-faced and grim. Finally, after all this time, one of them has shown themselves! She’s tracked him down, and at any moment, Billy will appear. Duncan’s mouth has already shaped Julie’s name, but then he closes his mouth. This girl’s hair is glistening and long and pulled back tightly from her scalp so that he can see the roots and her eyebrows are much fuller and dark, arched as if in constant thoughtfulness over large, puzzled eyes. And then he realizes that her mouth is fuller also and there is a fine wisp of hair above her lip and at each side of her long neck. He stares at her long forehead, pale and unblemished, so like Julie’s, and back to her eyes, and her mouth, to the lips that are chapped and cracked from biting. There is an odd smell off her, a pungency like old cheese or damp clothes molding in a pile before a laundry basket.
Duncan! Mother says sharply. Stop staring at the poor girl. Mother steps around him and, apologetically, waves the girl forward.
Come in, Magdalene. Don’t let his bad manners stop you. You know, I really do try my best.
The girl steps into the hallway, adjusting a heavy satchel on her shoulder. From its depths she pulls a plastic soup bowl, fogged by heat, and hands it to Mother. That’s okay, Mrs. Bright.
She glances at Duncan, frowning. I go to school with you, she says. I’m in your class.
Duncan nods. I know. I know who you are. I’m sorry. It was dark. I thought you were someone else.
He’s seen this girl on the streets, at the bus stop and on the opposite side of the street as he walks home from school. Sometimes she will be just ahead of him, walking slowly, following the cracks of the sidewalk, and he’ll match his pace to hers so that he can continue watching at a distance. At other times he catches her behind him, seemingly unaware of his presence, her eyes never straying from the broken and fractured concrete.
Every autumn, to make extra money, Magdalene Kopak goes from door to door asking if anyone wants to buy her elderly aunt’s homemade Polish soup and chili for $2.50 a bowl. Magdalene’s parents died in a car wreck on Big Sur Coast Highway when she was eight, and so most seem to buy her soups more out of pity and a sense of obligation than anything else. When the neighbors are finished, they’re expected to leave the plastic Tupperware containers outside their doors so that Magdalene can retrieve them—in much the same way that his mother leaves her empty bottles of Old Mainline 454 on the front porch so that the homeless man can collect them and cash them in for the deposit down at Bradford Avenue Liquors.
I thought you were someone else, Duncan says again, as Magdalene clasps her satchel shut and steps out onto the porch. She’s pretty, he stammers, like you. Magdalene pauses and stares back unsmiling, dark eyes reflecting twilight like nail heads. Lying is a sin, she says, and thumps gracelessly down the porch stairs, her frowzy overcoat billowing about her.
Chapter 35
On rainy days that mist the glass and turn everything gray beyond the window and the bay is covered in fog, Maggie and Duncan sit in the living room before the big bay window and listen to the horns moaning beyond the wharves. There are no men in Maggie’s life but Duncan and Joshua now and she knows Duncan is grateful for this as she spends more time with him reading and ta
lking, and she begins to feel like the girl, the young woman she was—had once been: inquisitive, daring, adventurous, humorous, easy to laugh and smile, and impassioned and pleased by the simple things around her.
She plays music on the old Victor phonograph: arias, operas, madrigals, and in the evenings before night comes down these become spirituals, then Paul Robeson. She’ll imitate his full baritone singing “Old Man River” or “Roddy McCorley,” and she and Duncan will laugh together as she shapes her face to reach the notes deep down in her belly, then Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and, often at the end of the night, before Duncan sleeps, Elvis.
Her voice fills up all the spaces of their house, the narrow corridors she swept, the cold kitchen she mopped, the mildewed bathroom she scrubbed, and Duncan no longer notices the peeling paint, the dripping faucets, the cracked plaster and tile, the dark-water-stained ceilings, the pictures and markings and odors left by other people in the place that they call home but that can never rightly be theirs. It is only later that Duncan realizes how hard his mother has worked at making it a home, or at least, keeping him believing that it is, and how hard she has worked at maintaining the safety this allowed him.
Gray mist comes in off the bay and climbs the narrow side streets. Duncan is in the front room doing his homework on the shag carpet, which, although Maggie has cleaned it countless times, still smells of dog piss, especially on the damp rainy days. Maggie is in her bedroom upstairs and her door is open so that as she sings he feels she is somewhere close by and this makes him feel safe. He sits upon the reading chair by the bay window and looks out over the cloud-shrouded city. Birds wheel carelessly in the street, their wings as sharp and white as bone. Masses of gulls coming in from the bay, huge thrashing clouds of them trailing the fishing boats into port as dusk falls before the window. The image of the birds holds him in silence, and, Duncan feels, that moments upon moments like this must be what make up a life.
Maggie moves back and forth in her room, the floorboards creaking slightly beneath her feet. She is singing the Magnificat, the Virgin Mary’s joyous prayer in response to her cousin, Elizabeth, who recognizes that Mary will become the mother of the Son of God. She sings in Latin plainchant, and then sings it high and sweet in English. Later he knows that she will play Bach’s rendition of the Magnificat on the old Victor, perhaps as she prepares dinner. But he finds nothing in that joyous, resplendently overwrought version that compares to her spoken word-song.
The first time he tells her how lovely it is and asks her what it is, she looks at him in amazement. You never heard the Magnificat in the Home?
He shakes his head, and his mother frowns, kneels to pick a book from the floor. Never? she asks. She seems perplexed, and more than that, she appears stricken.
No, he says. I never heard it until you sang it to me. The Capuchins only prayed; they rarely sang.
Mother bares her teeth and chews on her lower lip as she reaches for her cigarettes.
Slowly, she unwinds the cellophane; a breeze rustles the drapes, and white light shimmers on the tabletop. Suddenly she laughs. Those damned Franciscans. I knew I should have taken you to the Jesuits.
Chapter 36
March 1983
Near midnight beneath the blue lights of the Windsor Tap, Maggie, dressed as a torch singer from the 1930s, is singing the last slow ballads of her set. As she sways slightly to the subtle backbeat from the band, the stage lights sparkle and shine and coalesce upon her form-fitting, blue sequined dress, creating the illusion of sinewy, slick movement. She’s been singing since nine under the hot stage lights, with fifteen-minute breaks every half hour, and her face is covered in a fine sheen of sweat. Sweat beads her upper lip and her red hair clings damply to the sides of her pale face and to her neck and shoulders, like a wick soaked dark with oil. Duncan can hear Joshua on the bar stool beside him breathing deeply. Maggie’s eyes are stretched dark and seductive with kohl, but rarely does she look up at her audience as she sings and only once does she look in Duncan’s direction, smiling briefly.
As Duncan watches her, it seems as if she is experiencing exquisite pain, sadness, and pleasure, and the vacillation between these states has left her exhausted. With the last note, she strikes a pose that he’s seen in old posters and movie stills for singers of that era—she bends her knees, arches her back and raises her gloved arm high, following, chasing, trying to catch up to that elusive note perhaps, as it rises from her throat and drifts up into the steamy air above the lights where tobacco smoke spirals in narrow winding tapers, and she remains in that pose until the note recedes and then dies and the lights go down and the stage is in darkness. It’s as if the room wakes from a dream and only slowly a smattering of applause begins, and then lengthens as Maggie makes her way to the bar.
Sweat shines in the space between her breasts, pressed and bunched by the tight dress, and Duncan is suddenly aware of the physicality of her, of her breath burning so hot he thinks she must have a fever, of the large pores of her face, the kohl streaked about her large eyes, the dampness of her skin, of her breasts and hips, across which the dress stretches, wrinkles, and clings as she moves.
Can I get a hug from my biggest fan?
Duncan leans toward her and she wraps her arms about him and he feels the strength of her, the muscles of her shoulders and back, the damp of her sweat, and a sense of her tension as it is released through the act of hugging him.
Oh my. Sometimes I forget how tiring this can be, she says, plopping herself down on the stool and reaching for a glass of water, and then the bottle of Old Mainline and the shot glass that Clay has left on the bar for her.
What did you think of the show?
I loved it.
Maggie harrumphs, then nods. Well, it’s not the Palais Garnier, but I suppose it’ll do. She raises her glass, the umber liquid sloshing, and Duncan raises his Coke bottle. Smiling, Mother ruffles his hair and then they drink and Duncan watches from over the rim of his bottle as she empties her glass.
She eyes Joshua. Cat got your tongue?
Maggie, Joshua says and smiles serenely. I’m still six thousand miles away. I’m in the war, only it’s 1943, and I’m sitting on the left bank. I’m the only black boy in a mishmash unit that has set up in the burned-out Continental with a platoon full of New Hampshire farm boys who spend half the night crying for their mama and the other half whispering in the dark: Nigger, nigger, nigger, tomorrow Jerry gets you. But y’know, it don’t matter. It don’t mean a thing, because I’m sitting on the left bank in Paris, drinking Pernod and listening to you sing, and when you sing like that, it just don’t matter.
That’s what you’re thinking while I’m singing?
Sure. I imagined it just like you sang it.
Damn. Remind me to sing some sad numbers next time.
No. It was good. It was real fine.
What was your favorite?
You know what my favorite was.
Take my hand, Maggie says. Dance with me.
You know I can’t dance, Maggie.
Come dance with me.
There’s no music, Joshua says, and Maggie tugs playfully at his arms. His body leans from the stool.
Dance with me. C’mon, we’ll make our own music. Listen to that. I can hear it—can’t you?
Maggie woos Joshua until, with a roll of his eyes, he half-slides off the stool and, taking her hand, follows her to the dance floor, the eyes of the other men in the room upon them, blinking vacantly, longingly, desperately. At first they move slowly, with Joshua stumbling slightly, and then, with Mother leading, they move with more assurance. When Joshua looks down at his feet, Maggie whispers something to him and Joshua throws back his head laughing, and Duncan smiles but then sees the scars there, crisscrossing Joshua’s Adam’s apple in a ragged X.
In the kitchen before the sink, Maggie and Joshua stand in darkness holding each other. Maggie strokes his hair, a soft Shhhh, Joshua, Shhhh hissing from between her lips. After a moment, in which it seems
as if both of them have fallen asleep, chests rising and falling deeply, their eyes flutter and they press against each other, stumble to the wall, and begin kissing desperately, their mouths grasping and searching for the other’s just as their hands reach for the other’s face, the other’s body, as if with a great and frightening hunger and each with such pained sounds they might have been wounded animals.
From the shadows of the hallway Duncan watches as the gray shimmering light cast from the streetlights turns their skin ashen and blue. Joshua holds his mother by her hips as they kiss and she takes his bruised face in her hands so tenderly you would think he were capable of breaking. They move against each other in the gloom, as if trying to find a way into the other’s skin, and hold each other so tightly it’s as if they fear losing each other. Duncan understands this fear, holds it close at night in his thoughts and in his heart as he listens to his mother breathing down the hall, the clatter of her whiskey bottle upon the floor, as his senses seek out the minor permutations, imperceptible psychic shifts in the air, those signals that might tell him of her intensions to leave and abandon him again as she had so long ago.
Joshua’s open belt buckle bangs the countertop as their feet scuffle on the tile, and they stumble, breathless, legs and arms entwined, toward the doorway. Duncan’s hand trails against the peeling wainscoting of the hallway in which the haunted light flickers as he slowly retreats to the stairs and to his bedroom. In the morning Joshua will be here and Duncan will wait in the kitchen for him to awaken and see him and reach across the kitchen table, place his large broken hand over Duncan’s and say, My man, Duncan. My man.
This Magnificent Desolation Page 14