by Barry Hannah
The brooch was standing up like the handle of a dagger. It had unclasped. It had not behaved. The pin of it was sunk three inches in her bosom. Where it went into her was purple and mouth-looking. An unlucky bargain—the biggest bauble ever offered on the counters of the Emporium, uptown. It had been designed for a crazy czarina who could yank it off her chest and fend back lechers in the alley.
Mother Rooney surged up on her haunch bones. She worked her lips together to make them twinkle with spittle. She shucked off her ugly shoes by rubbing each ankle against the other, folded in her legs under the moon in blue roses of her hip, pushed herself against the stairwell. In general, she arranged the corpse so that upon discovery it would not look dry, so that it would not look murdered or surprised in ugliness.
At least, she thought, no bag of fluid inside her has ruptured. No unspeakable emission like that. She wondered about the brooch. Do you pull it out? The body would be prettier without it. But her boys had made her conscious of her body. She was a sack whose seams were breaking, full of organs, of bitter and sour fermenting fluids. Her body threatened to break forth into public every second.
Concerning the brooch, she feared blood, a hissing of air, perhaps a rowdy blood bubble so big it would lift her out of the hall, through the doorway, into the street.
Oh, such alarm, such wild notoriety!
Oh, Mother Rooney hurt like a soldier.
She remembered from the movies at the Royal: Don’t talk. Each word a drop of blood into the lungs. And what about thinking? Mother Rooney had always conceived of mental activity as a whirlpool of ideas spinning one’s core. Wouldn’t that action send blood-falls to her lungs and elsewhere? She imagined her body filling up with blood because she was really thinking.
The deep itch of the pin came now.
She saw the pin running, shish-kebabing, through her heart, lungs, spleen, pancreas, liver, esophagus, thorax, crop, gizzard, gullet—remembering all that apparatus, wet, hot and furcated, she had pulled out of chickens in the 1930s. Then she thought of the breast, drumstick, pulley bone, and oh!—that hurt thinking that, because the pulley bone snapped and often punched into the hand.
So thinking it could be either way—a lung wound or shish kebab—she guessed she had better stop this whirlpool mental activity, for safety. It could be that shish kebab wasn’t definitely fatal because, once the pin was pulled out, all the organs might flap back to their places and heal. But she dreaded feeling them do this inside her, and so she left the pin alone.
It came to her then that she might make her brain like a scroll, and that by just the tiniest bit of mental activity she might pull it down in tiny snatches at a time and dwell on the inch that was offered by the smallest little tug of the will, like the scrolled maps in schoolrooms. Perhaps she could survive then, tensing her body in a petite, just a petty, hope.
First was Hoover, the son of a sewage-parts dealer who fled Ireland in 1915; Roman Catholic Hoover Rooney, bewildered by snot and asthma. Then there was Hoover Second, his working son in overalls. Wasn’t there something holy about the unsanitariness of their brick and board cottage on Road of Remembrance Street? How the yard grass was shaggy, and the old creamed tea from breakfast time was found in chipped cups with five or six cigarettes floating on top like bleached creatures from a cow pond’s bottom; their black Ford with plumbing manuals in the back seat which smelled like a gymnasium with a melting-butter smell over that. Sometimes Hoover stopped at stop signs—I remember once in front of the King Edward Hotel—and a wine bottle rolled under my bare foot. I was tired, and when Hoover drove up to the lumberyard where I was a secretary, I would hop in and pull my shoes and stockings right off. Then one day Hoover grabbed my foot, and holding it in his lap, he took what he told me was his dead mama’s ring and put it on my little toe and said, “Baaaa!” I told him it degraded her memory. And he eased my foot out of his lap, started the car, and I had to hold my foot in the air to keep the ring from falling on the dirty floorboard, because Hoover grabbed my body and held me really hurtfully, so I couldn’t get my hands free. How he laughed, making his face orange. With those desperado sideburns and slit eyes, he looked like something from Halloween. He had a hot metal body odor that came up close to the degree of unpleasantness. He smeared my mouth with his hairy lips and chin. I felt like I was eating down steel filings, and forgot I was thirty and he just a boy of early twenties. I laughed.
For being Annie Broome of Brandon, Mississippi, supposed to be at my Aunt Lily’s promptly after work every day to eat our supper together, supposed to attend Wednesday-night church with her this evening. I saw my daddy drilling Hoover with a glare like at a snake doctor or a vegetarian. But I never told Mother or Daddy much at all, just sent them one of Hoover’s postcards with an airplane picture of the shores of Ireland on it, and told them I’d been converted and that Hoover was the one. Then, back in the car with Hoover, I quiver in that red moan against his marvelous hard tongue.
Plus all the other strange hours I felt like the robber queen. I called in sick to the lumberyard. Hoover picked me up at eight. He and his papa didn’t start off the day till ten.
She lay cold in the hall of the old house. She waved her ring finger at the whirlpool. Stop. Blood, she thought, fell out of her mind into her lungs. If she could just shape her mind with a timid effort requiring no breath, she could beckon the scroll, easing it down in millimeters. Flies had found her. She fought them, thinking.
That malt cereal that the old man ate every morning, it got on his cuffs and his newspapers from Dublin, and he wore his napkins like a bib, tucked under his neck, which glucked with the tea and cereal. His yellow cheeks and red beard, they should’ve sent him home to shave at one o’clock, but he was not American yet; more like a Mongolian with his thin eye slits; then his brogue so thick you imagined he carried heavy cereal always in his throat, had to choke back a slug of it to talk. He did not care and tinkled loudly with the door of the bathroom open while he talked to Hoover and me about religions, the mediocre number of them. It shocked him. There were only a hundred-odd Catholics in all Jackson then, 1916. Hoover courted me on the settee. I waited for the old man to flush, but he never did. I thought about that yellow water still lying there and saw green Ireland floating in it. The hairy lawn of the house, and Hoover’s body odor, and the whole milky stink of the house, they cut on me very sharp. And Hoover’s breath was of some iron pipeline.
I was happy, sucked right into the Church, because I got its feeling. In St. Thomas’s it was clean, dark, cooling and beautiful, with wood rafters of cedar, gloomy green pictures of Jesus, St. Thomas and the Jordan River in glass. Also, it was tiny and humiliating. It was a thrill to cover your head with a scarf because you were such a low unclean sex, going back to Eve, I guess, making man slaver in lust for you and not be the steward he was meant to be. You were so deadly, you might loop in the poor man kneeling next to you with your hair. I saw Hoover bending on the velvet rail. I felt peculiarly trickful, that this foreign cluck would moo and prance for a look at my garters, that his slick hair would dry and stand up in heat for me. In St. Thomas’s I was thrown on that heap of navels, hair and rouge that makes the flesh-pile Woman, which even the monks have to trudge through waist-deep, I thought, before they finally ascend to sacredness. God told me this, and I blushed, knowing my power.
So I thought, that day when Hoover and I sat on his couch at one o’clock, thirty years old and smoking my first cigarette and drinking tea, that when he began playing sneakydevious at my parts, with a whipped look on his face, this wasn’t Catholic or Irish from what I knew of them, and that it was more Mississippi Methodist in Brandon, Mississippi, with the retreat at Lake Pelahatchie and Grady Rankin working at me with his pitiful finger, and I told Hoover my opinion, leaving out Grady and so on. We both jumped through our eyes at each other then. We were soggy and rumpled as when you are led to things, and I let him, I did, let him do the full act, hurting on his bed beyond what God allows a woman to hurt. God pin
ched off all but a thimble-worth of pleasure in that act for me. I mean, as long as I had Hoover my husband. But I let out oaths of pleasure and Hoover in that silly position . . . sometimes I take my mind up to the moon and see Hoover in that position, moving, with nothing under him. I laugh. The hunching doodlebug, ha ha ha! I was in this filthy house doing this, with an Irish Catholic. He said America was an experiment. He said I was safe in the oldest religion of historical mankind. On his bed I believed him: my hurt and fear turned to comfort.
Oh, but Papa Rooney wasn’t proud of his boy for getting his wings on me. The old man was really there at the door watching us. He’d become more an American. He’d come in to shave, and was here on us viewing Hoover in that silly position and me too. He called me names I’ll never forgive, and Hoover too. He cried, and threw cups on the floor, and lay down on the couch, talking about what he’d seen and on and on. I was numb awhile, but then I started moving, low-pedaling around the house, while Hoover sat on the bed looking at his bare feet. I found the broom and swept up the teacups and then swept the rug right beside Papa Rooney, put all the dirty lost glassware in the sink, filled it with hot water. I mopped the tiles in the kitchen and flew into the bathroom at the bowl and sink. I scraped them all with only a towel and water, then found the soap and started using that everywhere. I went back in the halls, I fingered the dust out of the space heater. I found a bowl of cereal under the bed with socks and collars lying in it. I made the old man’s room spanking-clean. I made a pile for his stained underwear in the back closet. Then it was four o’clock in the afternoon. I sat down by Papa Rooney, who was still on the couch. He looked tearfully at me. “Annie, my boibee!” he said, and smothered me into his arms, asking forgiveness for what he had said. We went and sat by Hoover, while the old fellow told us about our marriage. I was scared. There seemed no other way, with Papa Rooney and his arms over our shoulders.
Except for Papa Rooney watching us all the way up the aisle, I doubt we would’ve married; we did. Through the ceremony we were both scared of—with Father Remus talking words of comfort over our heads to Mother and Daddy, who hung back and were shocked—we tied the knot.
Mother Rooney’s head stood wide open in the twirl of remembrance. Blood, eye juice and brain fluid roared down to her lungs, she thought. Too hard, too hard, her thoughts. There were noises in the house as the wind blew on the windows, which were loose in their putty. The hallway was dark. It was her box. No light now; her coffin space.
Mother Rooney shrieked, “Be loud on the organ! Pull my old corpse by a team of dogs with a rope to my toe down Capitol Street, and let Governor White peep out of his mansion and tell them to drag that old sourpuss Annie to the Pearl River Swamp. Oh, be heavy on the organ!” She shocked herself, and she remembered that Papa Rooney had died insane too, thinking that Jackson was Dublin.
The hell with the scroll! “Everything!” she howled.
The old man went crazy in a geographic way at the last, at St. Dominic’s Hospital. He shouted out the names of Dublin and Chicago and Jackson streets as if he was recalling one town he knew well. He injured his son Hoover, behaving this way. Hoover became lost; he saw the blind eyes of his daddy and heard the names of the streets. His daddy didn’t know where they were. But Annie also recalled the sane old fellow at his last, how he’d fallen in love with her; loved her cleanliness and order; loved America, because he was getting rich easily and enlarged the sewage-parts house so that now Hoover was a plumbing contractor too. Papa Rooney told her he was in love with peace and money and her—Annie.
Annie made Hoover build her a house, a house that would really be a place, so Hoover would know where he was. He seemed to, when the house was up. There was actually no reason for Hoover to go insane, because, unlike his father, he loved the aspects of his job. He loved clear water running through a clot-free pipe. He loved the wonder of nastiness rinsed and heaved forever out of sight; he loved the dribbling water replacing it in the bowl, loved the fact that water ran hot and cold; he loved thermostats. He adored digging down to a pipe, breaking it and dragging the mineral crud and roots from it, and watching the water flush through, spangling. He got high and witty watching that one day at twilight, and the slogan came to him, like a smash to Hoover’s mind: “The Plumber’s Friend.” That was how he advertised his firm in the Clarion Ledger for twenty years.
Hoover went jumping hard and erect to the gingerbread house with yellow towers, driving home with his first ad in his pocket. On Titpea, he saw the house lit up in all quarters; knew his gentle Annie waited in one room. He knew he must have the wings full of baby sons, soon. Annie opened the door for him. He took her body. He was almost gagged by the odor of flowers and her supper of spaghetti, which was very new then, but he blasted her; bucked her upstairs, and perished hunching her to the point he didn’t know when his orgasm was, but kept on hunching in a trance. He knew she was frail as a peaflower. He liked to snap her and squeeze her.
Oh! Certainly, how much, how so, so much Hoover wanted to be both a plumber’s friend and a father, every evening. And Hoover Second came, finally, hurting more than any of those books told, because those books were written by men in some far-off tower, and they couldn’t know. The intern leaned on her stomach. Great Lord! The nuns held her. They giggled. “He’s looking for another baby, dear.”
There could be no doubt that Hoover was. Again and again, and something was wrong. Not just that Mother Rooney couldn’t have any more babies, as she couldn’t, but Hoover’s desire to be both a plumber’s friend and a father was destroying her. The dearie loved plumbing, but he got to see less of it every year. The company was big and he had to employ many men in the expansion. He could do nothing but sit at his desk and inventory and buy and sell, in his business suit, and he didn’t have the old man’s love for pure money. How many times, she asked, how many times did I see him leaning over the toilet bowl smiling at the water? How many times did he deliberately break some rod or other in the tanks at home, or rip something out that wasn’t brand new, so he could drive down to the place in the night for a part? How many times did he look at me as if I was brand new too, and had worked once, then fagged off?
Bless his heart, he had to remember the night of what we both thought was Hoover Second’s right vigorous making, the night he came home with his first ad in his pocket. Oh, I knew in my heart without doubt that was when, because the pains of the entrance and the exit almost matched up. Pity his name, poor Hoover had to remember that he had had a little dirt from the pipeline on his breeches that night, and that he stunk some from heaving away and watching the men work. Lovely, wronged, one-son Hoover Rooney, heaving away and mating me, he had smeared my legs with mending compound off his ankles. Charming Hoover, who began showing up late in twilight absolutely negrified with pitch spots and sweat beads and his business suit done in forever with gunk. I knew what the dear was doing, that he was leaving the office at noon to parade out on one of his jobs among his plumbers, who probably didn’t want him out there. He peered into the deepest and filthiest work going, careful to lift a pipe for some Negro, stumble against the roofing tar, for luck and because he desired so to be a plumber’s friend. He came in manly and proud of his day’s work’s grime, looking like he wanted to break my back. Through the years he tried different combinations of filth and ruined bundles of suits, for luck, but he had no more with me. I had shoved out the boy that I had, for mercy’s sake, and I tried to tell him so with my hurting eyes. It would not take—get in that silly position till Christ came!
Then Hoover went insane, yes, long before Hoover Second was killed and the house began tilting. In the middle thirties, when he was losing money every day, he almost gave me up and turned on the house. He sat on the dainty loveseat in the lobby when he came in, and soiled that, then lay back in the studio upstairs on my Persian divan with cornets and red iris on it, rolling the suet off his breeches until the pretty pattern was blurred; slept silently away in both wings with his rusty cheeks hard on the
linen, for I could see the half a face Hoover left behind in the mornings, the big fans of palm grease where his hands had known my guest towels, and the wallpaper of clover flowers, but especially on my lovely fat pillows, everywhere. Oh, Hoover, you were late for supper again, hung down so heavy with dirt. You were private and sulky and unhungry. You were so ugly and angry when I opened one of the doors on you, as if you’d been found out in your love’s rendezvous. Pretty soon you had the house back like the cottage on Road of Remembrance, where you could’ve grown agricultural products on the floor.
You had a place again, dearest, and I had none, but only Hoover Second that you almost forgot, wanting Third through Four Thousandth. I loved, loved. What could I do, though? Little Hoover. I see him most of all for his feet and little toes, hot and dimpling from the bath water, and his steamy curling hair, his tiny wet marks on my rug. It was always him just coming from the water that I . . . like a fish you pull up, wondering what? And there the marvelous slippery rascal is, breathing something else than you breathe. Christ, the horror as he grew up and I saw he did, he did breathe something else. Oh, in the earlier days when Big Hoover attacked me in gangs, every one of them more mindless and slaughtering, hurting, ahhhhh; when he draped on me afterward, nicking his dirty fingernails together, and he was heavy as the island of Ireland and had just tried to mash the whole country into me, and he would smoke then, rough-housing his cigarettes and letting them fall in pieces all over the bed. Well, I see too Hoover Second nestling by me after his bath, and think that my little baby, who didn’t even know he had his man’s business between his legs, was left to me when I was almost too tired to look at him and love. But I did, and I cupped his infant’s peabud in my hand and held the softest most harmless unhurting thing in the world, and fell asleep in beauty.