This Magnificent Desolation

by Thomas O'Malley

  Chapter 43

  December 1983

  From his St. Paul hospital, Billy sends Duncan a postcard and a letter in an envelope. The post card shows an ice breaker on the Mississippi River and the St. Paul towers dusted with snow in the background. A Christmas setting with snow on the streets and rooftops and blue and green lights frozen and alight in every storefront window. The card says Seasons Greetings and on the back Billy has written in his poor penmanship:

  Happy Holidays from the most livable city in America.

  Just makes you want to come live here, don’t it?

  They haven’t broken me yet, Duncan!

  Yours,

  Billy

  In the letter Billy has drawn a small map of his ward, and he writes about what he eats and where he sleeps and the room that contains the dyna-chamber where he receives monthly isotope bombardments. The final spot on his map seems to be in one of the southern hallways on the sixteenth floor, at a window looking out upon the wide Minnesota plains beyond stretching into an indeterminable distance. Duncan assumes that this must point toward the Home, and he imagines Billy late at night—while the other children sleep and nurses quietly pad the tiled hallways and distant monitors beep and muted, garbled voices tremor from the ward’s intercoms—sitting alone before his snow-frosted window, the city lights cast upon the glass and his wide-eyed old face reflected back to him, searching the darkness for the distant flicker of lightning spidering across the vast Iron Range beyond the Home, and perhaps he hears the soft brass peal of church bells from the minaret resounding outward into the far towns across Thule’s frozen valleys, and as Duncan stares at the card, he wishes he was sitting in the dark with him and watching over him so that he might sleep.

  Later that evening during Mass at St. Mary of the Wharves, Mother takes his hand.

  I know you miss your friends, she says. Would it help if we called the Home and spoke to them, to see how they are?

  She seems surprised when he shakes his head and says no.

  Why not, sweetie?

  I don’t want to know that they’re still there and that their parents haven’t come back for them like me. And I don’t want to remind them of that. I already said goodbye once. If their parents come for them, they’ll call me.

  Are you waiting for that?

  I don’t know. Sometimes.

  Honey, I’m sure they’re very happy for you and that they’d love to hear from you.

  Duncan shakes his head again. The priest raises the Eucharist in his hands, Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem, and the altar boy rings the bell.

  No, they’re not happy for me, he says and blesses himself. But that’s all right. If I was them, I wouldn’t be happy for me either.

  In the rectory, as Mother waits outside, he requests a pair of Mass cards for the dead, and when the old priest who is no longer capable of performing Mass asks him who the cards are for, he tells him that they’re for Billy and Julie and under The Departed he writes their full names:

  Billy Bowen, Julie Connors

  He does this every Friday after the Stations of the Cross, and on Sunday he sits in a rear pew of the church and listens to the priest calling out Billy’s and Julie’s names and the congregation bowing their heads and offering up their prayers, and the sound of their names spoken in a low, sorrowful timbre by a hundred voices trembling in his belly and then rising higher with all the names of the other faithful departed and reverberating off the polished stone balusters and columns in the nave like a great clanging of bells that reminds him of Brother Canice swinging from the ropes of the bell tower in the late hours of the night, and he wonders who Brother Canice tells his story to now that he is no longer there or if perhaps he speaks it to himself before the pulsating embers of the woodstove in the dark kitchen and if his story is any less real without anyone to hear it.

  Chapter 44

  Christmas Eve 1983

  Snow falling slowly down over the humpbacked city and the soft hiss of car tires churning on the street outside. Christmas lights blinking from porches, the front of houses, along glistening rooftops. Plastic Christmas trees decorated and blazing in living room windows up and down the street. On lots with small front yards: rotund snowmen, Santa Claus and his reindeer, the Virgin Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus in their manger surrounded by cows and sheep and the Three Wise Men, the glow of their interior bulbs shining through the plastic where the paint has been worn away.

  In the corner of the living room, a pine tree, brought that morning by Joshua from a plot down on Divisadero, sparkles and glitters with multicolored miniature lights that Duncan and Magdalene placed in staggered rows; it fills the room with the scent of pine sap. On the television a video of the 1968 Apollo 8 live Christmas Eve lunar orbit broadcast that Duncan has pleaded to put on with the promise that he would keep the sound low.

  Joshua wears a full apron as he brings out the turkey and lays it on the table to Duncan’s and Magdalene’s applause. He turns off the lights so they can watch the snow drifting softly down through the dark upon the electric-lit street, spinning in whorls between parked cars and the spaces between houses, brushing the windows and sticking to the glass with a strange, almost angelic geometry.

  The table is covered with a red and green tablecloth and at its center blazes Maggie’s giant, ornate candelabra, surrounded by holly and containing a dozen wax-encrusted gilded stems upon which white tapers flicker, casting an incandescent light in the dark room. Maggie says it was given to her as a gift from an Italian set director on Verdi’s Requiem at La Scala, but winks as she says it.

  Damn, Maggie, Joshua says. I never knew you were such a thief. Looks like you bled those poor suckers dry. He nods to the heavy red velvet drapes with intricate gold scrollwork that she’s hung on either side of the window. I suppose those were a gift too?

  Maggie grins. Oh yes, all gifts. You see, I was a special talent and they knew I deserved these things. They couldn’t bear for me to leave and not give me something!

  Yeah, after the lights were out and the doors were locked. What did you do? Smuggle them out under your dress?

  Now, now. Magdalene doesn’t need to hear any more of your sordid suggestions. Instead of blabbing why don’t you do something useful and cut the turkey, you turkey.

  She pats Magdalene upon her hand, and squeezes. I’m sorry your aunt couldn’t make it, Magdalene.

  That’s okay, Mrs. Bright. She’s at the community center with her friends. She goes every Christmas—I think she was glad that I had somewhere else to go this year. We’re going to open presents together later.

  Good. We can drive you over to pick her up, if you like.

  Yes, thank you.

  Would you do us the honor of a blessing, Magdalene?

  Sure, Mrs. Bright.

  They hold hands and Duncan watches Magdalene, feels her hand sweaty in his. Magdalene closes her eyes and whispers hoarsely: Thank you, God, for everything you give us. Thank you for this meal and for us all being together.

  Amen, he says softly and his mother looks over and smiles and he stares at all their faces—Maggie, Joshua, and Magdalene—brightly lit by candlelight.

  Magdalene opens her eyes and blushes when she sees Duncan staring at her.

  Thank you, Magdalene, Maggie says. That was wonderful.

  She scoops some mashed potatoes and squash onto her plate and passes the bowl to Joshua, and for a moment, there is only the sound of bowls upon wood and cutlery and knives scraping plates.

  Outside, revelers and carolers are singing “Silent Night” and ringing bells as they walk the street and cars honk their horns and Duncan thinks of a Christmastime when the astronauts recited Genesis as they crossed over the meridians of the earth turning below them and thanked God for all their blessings.

  After dinner they pull crackers and don colored paper hats, and Maggie refills their glass—wine for her and Joshua; apple cider for Duncan and Magdalene. In the living room, beside the tree,
they open small presents. For Duncan, the entire set of NASA Apollo patches and a small box of vintage train schedules of the Midwestern lines, the Union Pacific, the Missouri Pacific, and the Grand.

  For Magdalene a small boom box. And here, Maggie says and hands Magdalene a green bankbook. Joshua and I opened an account in your name and put fifty dollars in it—you have to go down and give them some of the personal info I didn’t have so that only you have access to it. It’s not much, but it’s a start.

  Thank you, thank you! Magdalene says and stands and gives both Joshua and Maggie a hug.

  You’re welcome, sweetie.

  Joshua laughs. Don’t spend it all in one place, okay?

  Mother pulls Duncan to her and squeezes him against her side; he wraps his arms about her, feels the hard bulge of her belly, as if a child made of stone slept curled in her womb. He opens his arms to Magdalene and she grasps him and suddenly kisses him on the lips. She parts the hair that has fallen before her face and he stares into her dark, unblinking eyes. Her lips are wet and her breath is hot and Duncan can feel the taste and sensation of her upon his mouth, and he touches his mouth and holds his fingers there. Magdalene looks at him wide-eyed, surprised it seems, and then Joshua and Maggie pulls them both to them in a hug and Maggie begins to sing “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and they reach out to hold each other’s hands and Duncan laughs and tries to hold this moment in his thoughts and in his heart before it is gone.

  He begins to sing and looks to Mother. She’s mouthing the words but not singing, and when he pauses, she smiles at him and nods and moves her mouth, and Duncan knows that she wants to hear them singing instead and to take joy in their voices. Her face, cast brightly in the glow of candlelight, is the way he remembers her from his dreams in the Home, when he struggled through the snow toward the Festival of Lights Holiday Train, or perhaps after all these years he has transplanted her image upon that dream so that it was always this woman before him who he waited for even as he thought her dead.

  Through the falling snow outside the night shows itself in an illusory manner, with the city seemingly so far off and distant and unreal that time here seems to pause. From the wharves bells sound for Christmas Mass. The television flickers with images of the 1968 Christmas Eve broadcast from lunar orbit and they all look toward it: the swirling, cloud-covered Earth as seen from the command module and then turning slowly to show the bright, empty face of the moon. The astronauts each take turns reciting the opening passages from Genesis, and at its end the voice of Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman filled with emotion even through the static: “From the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.”

  Chapter 45

  February 1984

  Nighttime and the second shift in the oncology terminal ward at St. Luke’s, where the dying count the minutes and hours listening to the meager span of their heartbeats: a single wail of pain from a patient’s room, the soft shuffling of slippers upon tile, the muted sound of prayer from Mrs. Polaski’s bedside, where the family priest is performing the last rites, a telephone ringing at the empty nurse’s station. From partially open doorways that look in upon dark rooms comes the sound of monitors and IV pumps clicking and beeping softly, methodically. Maggie sits in the dark and stares at Deirdre Malone asleep on her bed, breathing raggedly through a respirator. On the railing of the bed a PCEA pump, which allows her to self-administer morphine at the push of a button. From a radio on the nightstand comes the soft sound of big band music from World War II. She recognizes “A Sleepy Lagoon” and then Jo Stafford’s “Long Ago and Far Away” and then perhaps Benny Goodman or Harry James.

  Earlier in the day, Maggie had sat with Deirdre after her latest biopsy; she’d cried herself to sleep and now her cheeks are streaked and sullied. Tenderly, Maggie wipes them with a warm, damp cloth, lifts the mouthpiece of the respirator, and wipes it clean, softly sings the Latin from the Requiem Mass, for she can never be sure that Deirdre can’t hear her, and hopes that it provides some small measure of comfort: Inparadisum deducant te Angeli; in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres, et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Ierusalem.

  She takes Deirdre’s vitals, records them on the patient log at the bottom of the bed, stares at her face so that she can memorize it for when she’s gone; she tries to do this with all of her patients, especially those who have died alone without family or loved ones, as if this small act can somehow allow them to live in the world after they’re gone, and by doing so she is promising that she will never let go, that she will never leave them. Her head is filled with the faces of hundreds of dead and she often feels so powerless and sad it is as if a great weight were placed upon her heart that she feels will never lift; but if she can keep their memory alive, then they will not be alone, no matter where they are, where they have gone on to. And when she and Duncan attend Mass at St. Mary of the Wharves, she will imagine their faces and light a candle for them and pray for an end to their suffering.

  She pulls a chair up to the bed and takes Deirdre’s hand now: She will be here when she wakes and here with her when she receives news of the biopsy—she will not leave her. Maggie closes her eyes, lets the dim pulse in Deirdre’s hand inform her breathing. Deirdre’s monitor clicks and beeps softly. From the hallway comes the sound of slippered feet, the loose clattering wheel of a gurney, a page for a doctor from the nurse’s station reverberating forlornly through the empty halls, and then the silence of the night, which somehow seems worse, capturing as it does in the absence of noise and hectic industry the solemn weight of pain and suffering and loss. So much loss.

  Maggie rubs at her eyes. She is eight again and staring up at the adults passing about her, their footsteps continually thumping up the back stairs from the landing to the third floor of the apartment on Bartlett Street just outside Boston’s Dudley Square. The sullen heat of late summer and even the birds silent in the trees outside the window.

  Tar-streaked ceilings still smelling of other people’s smoke, the broken latch hook by the back screen door that jangles soft and metallic as people come and go, the smell of boiled foods, and a fan turning impotently in the window of her mother’s bedroom, where Mother was lying with closed eyes and dressed in her pastel blue floral summer dress, the spit that glistened her lips in the final rictus of pain now dried, and those same lips that had kissed her goodnight a mere night ago already seeming shriveled and pale despite the recently applied lipstick, like two slivers of worm left upon the sidewalk in the hot sun, and no breeze at the window—the lace curtains flat as a board—to push the strange smell of her out. But where was her father?

  Men, holding bottles of beer or glasses of spirits, attired in their mourning wear: black pants and jackets, crumpled white shirts, and thin black ties—she smelled their aftershave and cologne, cigarettes and sweat, a sense of her father in all that, as if many of them had just come from their daily labors. Pushing in and about them she desperately searched for him, an unexplainable panic rising in her chest, first in the kitchen, then the crowded small living room overlooking the street, the bathroom, and finally her mother’s bedroom, where she stood looking at her mother, and then to her aunts and female cousins sitting on chairs arranged about the bed, red-eyed and crying softly.

  She expected to feel his heavy hand on her shoulder and for him to pull him to her, to hear his voice in song, some manner of lullaby, soothing and yet heartbreaking, filled with the loss of past generations of his people—hundreds upon hundreds of years of it, and that loss came to life with his voice at night as he crooned her to sleep when he and her mother came in from the Dudley Street Opera House or the Rose Croix, and his breath warm with stout and whiskey. The comfort and shelter of her father’s songs, which captured such tragedy and yet were so filled with passion it trilled beneath her skin, reassured her that as long as he was near, nothing could harm her, and if he were here to sing now, surely her mother would awaken. Why wasn’t h
e here? Why wasn’t he by her mother’s bed?

  Where’s Daddy? she asked Aunt Una, the one with the lantern jaw and the sharp nose and the sweat beading above her upper lip and the red hair like Maggie and her mother.

  I looked all about the place, Maggie said, but I can’t find him anywhere—did he go down to the square? And the women in the room stared at her with such pity that she felt she couldn’t breathe and Aunt Margaret reached out her hand and then pulled her onto her lap, held Maggie’s head against her shoulder and began to cry, her great bosom heaving, but this brought Maggie no comfort—she only wanted to pull away from this woman and demand that they all tell her where he was; she wanted to scream: Where’s my father! I need my father! And as if she knew this, Aunt Margaret’s words came to her slowly, hiccupping with grief: He’s left dear child, sure his heart is broke with your mother’s death. He left this morning before dawn. I’m so sorry, my dear. I’m so very sorry.

  It’s near two A.M. when Maggie leaves the hospital via the emergency room. A young man with long, disheveled hair and high on PCP is bleeding out onto the floor and hollering about angels. He’s fallen from a second-floor balcony onto a wrought iron railing, impaling his eye socket, stomach, and leg, and yet somehow he is upright, talking and walking, searching the room with his one blazing eye and clutching his guts spilling from the cavity in his abdomen. She stares at the purple intestine, the deep red of muscle, the strings of tendon and white bone as two nurses and a surgeon frantically work to hold him down upon a table and stop the hemorrhaging.

  At home Maggie heats up leftovers in the kitchen, pours herself a whiskey. She pads the hallway, looks in on Duncan, sleeping, turned away toward the wall, the light from the hall casting slivers of refracted light upon his ceiling of stars and constellations. Static pops and bursts from the old Vulcanite radio glowing amber at his bedside, like an eye in the dark, and from which comes the sudden, brief sound of someone talking. She waits, listens to Duncan’s breathing, and then, satisfied, goes to change. In the bedroom the television is on, casting shadows upon the wall, and Joshua is on his back, arms stretched wide, and at first she thinks he’s asleep. She leans over the bed, kisses him on the cheek. He’s looking at her in the dark; she can see his eyes glistening with the light cast from the television.