Flesh and Blood

by Michael Cunningham

  “Are you feeling any better?” Billy asked her.

  “I don’t know. Maybe a little.”

  “Can you face the service?”

  “I suppose.”

  They turned and started back toward the mortuary. Billy said, “He’s just an old man. Try and remember that.”

  She said. “Remember how he used to beat you up?”

  “And remember how you used to tell me he didn’t know what he was doing?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was all a long time ago,” Billy said.

  “It was, wasn’t it?”

  “He’s an old man now, and whether or not he knew what he was doing when we were kids, he’s just about out of his mind with guilt about what happened. We can probably let him off the hook a little, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose.”

  “It would be better for you, too. I don’t want to seem like I’m giving advice, or anything.”

  “No. I know what you’re saying.”

  They walked back to the mortuary, up the flagstone path, past the discreet iron sign with the owners’ names—two brothers—done in scrolled lettering. Inside, the foyer and the green lobby had not changed. They would be like this forever. Billy escorted her into the viewing room, and when they entered, a wave of hushed recognition ran through the crowd of mourners. She could feel it. She thought of her wedding day, the moment when the march had started and she’d stepped down the aisle in her dress and veil. Todd came immediately to her, as did her mother.

  “Are you all right?” Todd asked, and at the same time her mother said, “Honey, what’s going on?”

  “I’m okay,” she answered. “I just needed some air.”

  “Sit down,” Todd said. “Over here.”

  “No. I’m all right, really.”

  She reassured them as best she could, though her true attention was fixed on her father, who waited for her at the head of the aisle, near Ben’s casket. She disengaged herself from Billy and Todd and her mother. She walked down the aisle to her father.

  “Susie?” he said. His face was worn and expectant, full of ravaged hope. He was dense and shame-faced in his somber suit, haggard under his suntan, jowled. He had never looked so old.

  “Hello, Dad,” she said.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what to think.”

  She stepped up to him, took his jaw firmly in her hands. She knew how crazy she must look, how vengeful, by the panic she saw skate across his eyes.

  “Susan?” he said in a small voice.

  She decided. Still holding his jaw, she put her mouth on his. She kept her eyes open. Soon he tried to pull away but she kept her mouth on his. She held her mouth in place and she continued looking into his eyes until she saw that the knowledge had entered him. Then she held her mouth over his a little longer, until she felt sure he knew he was not forgiven.

  1994/ He had the pictures, but he never looked at them. He had them. That was enough.

  He had the house and he had the pictures. He had land with a garden on it. He stood at the edge of his garden. He watched the constellations turning over the bare vines and the black scraps of the leaves. A winter moon had risen.

  Ben was buried. Zoe was buried. His youngest and strangest child. His most familiar child. She had knelt here, right here, and held a tomato she’d believed to be clean. She’d worn a dark silk dress into the ground.

  He had failed. He hadn’t loved enough, or had loved too much. He couldn’t follow it, not quite. He could list his failings but they didn’t add up to this, the empty earth and the sky filled with bright little points of ice.

  The house rose behind him. Inside were the pictures. He thought of the house as containing the pictures. That was its purpose now. That was why its boards lay solidly, one upon another, and its windows were kept closed and its curtains drawn.

  West of here, Mary lived her life of order. She’d wanted to name their youngest child Joan. She’d wanted to name her Barbara.

  She’d wanted safety for her, ordinary beauty, and now Constantine wondered: Had Mary dreamed of this garden at night, this cold moon? Had she hoped Zoe would live more certainly under another name?

  He said their names, quietly, over the garden. He said, “Mary. Susan. Billy. Zoe.”

  “Constantine?”

  He turned. It was Magda, standing pale and stern as a second moon.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Come in,” she said. “It’s cold out here.”

  He shrugged. He gestured with his hands at the moon and the frozen garden.

  “Never mind about that,” she told him. “Come on, now.”

  “I’m not ready,” he said. “Not yet.”

  “Don’t be foolish.”

  “All the stars are out tonight. You can see the Seven Sisters.”

  She frowned up at the sky. “It’s freezing,” she said. “Come in the house.”

  “Soon.”

  “Now.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes. Now.”

  She stood with her arms folded over her breasts. “Now,” she said again.

  “All right,” he answered.

  “That’s a good boy,” she said.

  “Right. A good boy.”

  “Come on. Let’s put you to bed.”

  “I’m not ready to go to bed.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right”

  “AD right?” she said.

  “Yes,” he answered. “Let’s put me to bed.”

  “Come on, then.”

  “I’m coming.”

  She held out her arm and he took it. He walked carefully back with her toward the darkness of the house, where the pictures were and his bed lay in a square of moonlight.

  “Magda?” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you love me, baby?”

  “Shh.”

  “Do you? Do you love me?”

  “Be quiet,” she said. He obeyed her.

  1995/ Fat waves rolled lazily up against the Battery, broke blue-black and glittering, with a faint sound of exhalation. The sky over Manhattan held an immense and agitated light, here gray threaded with yellow, there an unsteady, aquatic green. In the harbor the Statue of Liberty held its book as tiny people stood inside its head, looking out.

  Mary sat on the bench with Jamal and Harry, facing the harbor and the statue. Jamal wore his Walkman, nodded to the music. The bass line leaked out, a staticky thump/thump/quarter-thump.

  “It’s nice here,” she said. “I’ve never been to the Battery before, isn’t that funny? In all these years.”

  “I’ve been making Jamal and Will show me the sights,” Harry told her. “Since I’m not from New York, I don’t have to obey the rules about corny tourist attractions. Last week we went to the Empire State Building, right, Jamal?”

  “What?”

  “We went to the Empire State Building last weekend.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Harry knew nothing but to speak and act. His life was too unexpected, he couldn’t let himself worry. If he’d started wondering, he’d have lost his nerve. He’d have lashed himself to his old habits; he’d have said no. He didn’t want to say no. So he didn’t wonder, he didn’t worry. He got the new job in New York, rented the apartment. He insisted on being shown the sights.

  “That’s Ellis Island out there, isn’t it?” Mary said.

  “Yeah,” said Harry. “That’s it.”

  “Constantine didn’t go through there,” Mary said. “By the time he came to the States, Ellis Island was closed. He just landed at a dock somewhere on the West Side, I’ve never been sure where. We never talked all that much about his life before he came here.”

  “They’ve fixed it up,” Harry said.

  “I know.”

  “It’s a tourist attraction now. You can walk through
the rooms where all those people were inspected to see if they were healthy enough to be allowed in here to work as day laborers for money no native-born American would accept. Then you can go have lunch in the restaurant.”

  “I’d like to see it someday. Ellis Island.”

  “We can go today if you want. We have all afternoon.”

  Mary said, “What do you think, Jamal? Do you want to see Ellis Island?”

  “What?”

  “Do you want to go see Ellis Island?”

  Jamal shrugged, jiggled his feet to the music. He looked at his feet as if they might, at any moment, do something marvelous and unexpected.

  “Maybe Ellis Island is a little too tame,” Harry said. “Maybe we should go shopping in the East Village, and then have a pizza.”

  “Okay,” Jamal said.

  “You spoil him,” Mary said.

  “I know,” Harry answered. “There’s nothing I can do about it.”

  Mary was seized by emotion, and she did not speak. She sat with Jamal and Harry. She knew herself as a woman of sixty-three, wearing slacks and a cotton sweater and a strand of pearls given to her by someone impossible whom she had loved. So little remained. Jamal’s music thumped, and she could feel his agitation along the slats of the bench. She watched gulls careen through the cloudy air. She saw Will coming back, carrying soda in paper cups. There was a sky full of shifting light and there were these people, this boy who was as closed to her, as impenetrable, as either of her daughters had been. There were drinks in red cups.

  So much remained.

  “Here comes Will,” Harry said.

  “Mm-hm.”

  Mary thought, I can love this. I can try. I can try to love it. There’s nothing else for me to do.

  “Okay,” Will said. “Coke, Diet Coke, Diet Coke.”

  “Thanks, honey,” Mary said.

  “Thanks, Dad,” said Harry.

  Jamal accepted his drink without speaking, without leaving the music.

  “You’re welcome, Jamal,” Will said.

  Boats churned through the water. Pillows of air blown in off the harbor turned the leaves of the trees.

  Harry said, “We’ve decided to abandon all notions of going out to the Statue of Liberty or Ellis Island. We’ve decided to go shopping in the East Village, and then get a pizza.”

  “You spoil him,” Will said.

  “I know.”

  Will reached over and ran his fingers through Jamal’s hair. Jamal pulled his head away, pretending an attack of rhythm.

  “So,” Will said. “Shall we go up to the East Village?”

  “Okay,” Jamal said.

  “Spoiled, spoiled,” Will murmured.

  Jamal stood up and shifted from leg to leg, in sunglasses and a pair of pants so enormous Will wondered how he kept them up. Jamal asked, “What are those big blocks over there?”

  “A memorial,” Harry told him. “I don’t know what war.”

  “Want to go take a look?” Will asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jamal said.

  “Let’s look,” Will said. “That’ll be our nod to education and general self-improvement for today, all right?”

  “I think it’s World War II,” Mary said.

  “What?”

  “Those stones. I think they’re a memorial to the men who died in World War II.”

  “And the women?” Jamal asked.

  “Well, yes. I suppose there must have been some women, too.”

  They walked up the esplanade toward the stone tablets. Trees shivered with their new leaves, silver green in the cloudy light. They climbed a bank of stairs to a broad plaza flanked by two rows of tall, concrete-colored marble slabs incised with thousands of names. At the landward end an immense bronze eagle spread its heavy wings. They walked quietly among the stones. Jamal ran his hand over a roster of names, feeling the squeak his hand made. He swayed to the music.

  In another year, Constantine will lie in a hospital bed watching the white summer sky through the window as he begins to die from the stroke he’s suffered. He will be aware of his feet under a white blanket, and of a gray feather blowing by beyond the glass. Magda will sit beside him. She won’t say anything when he whispers, “Momma.” She won’t contradict him and she won’t answer. She will let him take her hand, and will listen as he repeats the word. She will sit in silence, waiting.

  Soon after Constantine dies, Susan will leave her husband. She will find a job in the sales department of a printing company, and will eventually marry one of the men who own the company, a man much older than herself. Her new husband, a widower with grown sons, will take his sons out the night before the wedding and tell them, in a voice he is scarcely able to control, that he had believed his life would hold no new pleasures, nothing beyond the daily particulars of ink and paper, until he met this woman.

  The sons will wish him well, and secretly despise him for betraying their dead mother. He will love Susan with a quiet tenacity that does not end, and Susan will give birth, at the age of forty-nine, to a girl. She will insist on naming the baby Zoe.

  Will and Harry and Jamal will live in New York together until Jamal leaves for Berkeley at eighteen. While Jamal is still young, Mary will sell her house and buy an apartment in the city. She will wait for him in her apartment when he gets out of school and will try, not often successfully, to keep him there until Will and Harry are home from their jobs. After Jamal leaves for college, she will live another twenty-two years in intermittent spells of contentment and loneliness. She will know, at moments, a perfect joy made of simple things: a teacup throwing its shadow on a windowsill, a book she takes to the park on a warm September afternoon.

  Will and Harry will stay together, not always easily, for the rest of their lives. Will will have an affair, be forgiven, and then have another. He and Harry will part for almost a year, in their early fifties, and then begin dating again. As Will’s muscles soften and his skin goes opaque with age, he will remain faithful.

  Harry will die first, at seventy-eight. When he falls ill, Jamal will fly east from California with his wife and his son to be with him. They’ll stay for a few days and then Will will tell them to go back, return to their lives, they’ve said goodbye to Harry and there’s nothing else they can do. Will will kiss Jamal, who is weeping. He’ll tell Jamal he was a good son, and that Harry knew he loved him, it didn’t matter about visits. After Jamal and his family have gone, Will, nearly deaf, will sit another several days with Harry. He’ll whisper to him, lay his spotted hand over Harry’s wasted one. At the end, when Harry is shivering from an inner cold the heat of the room can’t touch, Will will carefully ease his own body into bed beside Harry’s and hold him, trying to give whatever warmth he can. He won’t be certain if Harry knows he’s there. He will tell Harry, softly, speaking close to his ear, that it’s all right now, he can go. It would be a good time to go. There will be no telling whether Harry can hear him. Harry will live another twelve hours, and slip away late at night, while Will sleeps nearby in the other bed.

  Will will live another seven years. As he dies, Jamal will return to stay with him. Jamal won’t hire a nurse. He’ll feed Will himself, wipe his chin, change the foul linens. He’ll grow impatient with Will’s helplessness. He’ll curse, inwardly, but he’ll do everything that’s needed. He’ll feed and wash Will and when Will is able to talk he’ll talk to him. He’ll talk to Will about the fears he feels for his children. The boy from his first marriage runs wild, has no ambition. The little girl, born when Jamal himself faces the close of middle age, exhausts him with her fits of temperament, the magnitude of her will. Jamal will talk about his second wife, whom he loves with a desperation that wounds him, exalts him, drains him of energy. Will will nod, listening and not listening. He’ll be thinking of Jamal, not the facts Jamal restlessly narrates but the living fact of him, here in the room. He’ll think of the living presences of Jamal and Harry, who has not been much affected by his body’s death. He’ll be visited by everyon
e he’s known and he’ll see that they’ve been burned clean of their traits, all the meannesses and failures, all the virtues. There will be company, a certain satisfaction. There will be a trembling, as if the room itself is shedding its qualities—bed, table, picture on the wall—and melting into a ferocious light that has no name.

  Now, right now, Jamal performs a loose-limbed, solitary dance among the stone tablets. When he fills his head with music he doesn’t think about his mother and Cassandra. He doesn’t think about Ben. He goes to another place. Will and Harry stand together, silently reading the names of strangers. They try to absorb themselves in the list because neither of them can imagine how he’ll get through this afternoon or the next day. Mary runs her finger into the corners of a stranger’s name, looks out at the harbor. If she read every name she would probably recognize somebody, a son of a friend of her mother’s or a slightly older boy she’d longed for in high school. She drinks from the cup her son has brought her. She fingers the pearls at her throat.

  Will squeezes Harry’s hand. He has lived to this point, and he feels grateful. He’s lived to be a forty-two-year-old man who loves and is loved by another and who must pose, somehow, as father to a shocked, grieving thirteen-year-old boy. Here they are together, he and Harry, feigning interest in a roster of deceased strangers, about to spend a few hours going from store to store. Will knows how much Jamal wants a new pair of white Nikes. He knows Mary will buy them for him. He knows that, for Jamal, much suffering pales beside the vision of new white Nikes. A new pair of shoes will save him. In the right shoes he can jump out of harm’s way, walk an immaculate walk.

  Will reads a few names, silently. George E. Swink, Leonard J. Szulc, William E. Talley. Men half his age, most likely—young men who fell burning from the sky or were shot or drowned or crushed in a war that has already lost its edges and become a fact of history. He imagines the names of his own dead, carved into the face of a stone, and he thinks of buying shoes for Jamal. This is what the living do, he tells himself. We perform the little errands, and visit the stones.