Very Old Bones

by William Kennedy

  Giselle focuses her camera, Molly framed in her lens, the now mythical cedar waxwing cupped in her hands. Molly sits in the first rocker in a line of thirty rockers on the Lake House veranda, the rocker in the same place as when Molly first saw the waxwing fall from the tree, injured but still alive. The tree is still giving shade to the lawn, although Molly says it has lost many branches since that day nineteen years ago. Part of the tree is visible in the background of the photo (what is not visible is Tommy in his wheelchair, under the tree) about to be taken by Giselle, who is trying to record some part of the secret being of this sixty-four-year-old woman her husband loves: his aunt, if you can believe that; and Giselle is looking for a clue to what has generated this love, and what sort of love it could be, and why she is profoundly jealous of it. After all, the woman is thirty-four years older than Orson, forty years older than Giselle, a fragile and fading page of history, a woman who purports to know everything knowable about love, although she has probably known only one man and was married to him less than two years, which isn’t much more than Giselle has been married to Orson; and Giselle has known more than one man, to be sure. Not so many more, but more. Giselle sees the family resemblance between Molly and Orson and Peter and she knows that her jealousy is irrational and that Orson is not about to break any taboos, but on the matter of taboos she also knows that there is the possibility of her own dalliance with Orson’s father. The man is strong-minded, knows who he is. He’s a talent and Giselle respects that above much else. He’s taken with her as well, which she saw during the hours they spent looking for Orson in the Village bars and coffeehouses and movie theaters. In a Bleecker Street movie he took her hand, held it, told her, “Don’t worry, he can’t hide forever, we’ll find him,” and kept holding the hand as they sat in the back row looking over the audience. She had sat in back rows before, holding hands, and it was just like this, and she did not take her hand away. You carry on with a thing like that and if you’re not careful you’ll cross the line. Sitting beside Peter, she felt she understood his life as a painter, as a bohemian, for in spite of her bourgeois life she was free in the world (working for Life was not working, it was soaring), and she was pursuing her photography the way he pursued his art. They were kindred, if not kin, as Orson may be with Molly. But there is more between those two than blood. Orson says to Molly from his vantage behind Giselle, “Look at me, Moll, this way,” and Molly turns her head and when she sees him she looks again at the bird and then at the camera, and the smile is there now and Giselle captures it, that smile: the soft currency of Molly’s soul.

  The things we do when we’re alone, without a perch or a perspective, and when there is no light in the corner where we’ve been put. The things we do.

  When I left Giselle at the Plaza, I walked the streets until I came to Meriwether Macbeth’s corner. Then I went upstairs and sat in Meriwether’s darkness and drank myself to sleep with whiskey. I awoke to dismal day and assayed the work I had previously done on Meriwether’s jottings and tittlings, then set about the task of concluding it as Walker Pettijohn had suggested: expanding the jots, fattening the tittles. I read and culled for two days and two nights, breaking stride only to forage for an editorial survival kit: two sandwiches and three more bottles of whiskey. I decided I was done with the editing when only half a bottle of whiskey remained, and I knew then I had an excellent chance of dying of malnutrition, darkness, and Macbethic bathos. I wrote Pettijohn a note, told him to give to Giselle all money due me for this editing, and also to give the manuscript of my novel to the Salvation Army for public auction, any money realized from its sale to be used to purchase ashes, those ashes to be given free of charge to unpublished authors, who will know how to use them. Then I drank myself quiet.

  Giselle is jealous of Molly. The attention she shows me in Molly’s presence is different from the attention she shows me when we are alone. Giselle is always smarter than I judge her to be, no matter how smart I judge her to be. It doesn’t really matter that she is jealous of Molly, though it’s a change for both of us. It truly does matter that I love Molly.

  A full day had passed before I realized that it was Giselle and Peter who had found me in my alcoholic coma. I opened a sobering eye to see her standing over my hospital bed, a tube dripping unknown fluid into my arm, my body in original trouble: nothing like this sort of pain ever before.

  “You’re still alive, Orson,” was her first sentence.

  “That’s not my fault,” I said.

  “You idiotic bastard,” she said. “It’s one thing to be crazy, but it’s another thing to be dead.”

  “Don’t call me a bastard,” I said, and I lapsed willfully into a coma-like sleep for two more hours. Giselle was still there when I again surfaced.

  “You’re getting better,” she told me. “We’re taking you to Albany. You obviously can’t live in this city.”

  “Are you coming with me?”

  “Yes,” said Giselle.

  And I slept then, sweetly, ignorantly

  I put undeservedly great faith in hollow objects. What is the purpose of this?

  I thought of the Grand View Lake House, which was at the edge of hollowness; all but empty of significance; “dead” would soon be another viable adjective. But it would not really die as long as the Shugrues stayed alive, and the loyal handfuls kept coming in season in enough numbers to cover expenses; and it would not die as long as I moved through its hollowness as helpful artisan, wood-cutter, sweeper of leaves and dead rats, scraper of paint, mower of lawns, outwitter of raccoons, magus of empty rooms.

  The Phelans had been coming to the Grand View for more than half a century. Pat Shugrue had worked with Michael Phelan on the New York Central, but quit in ’91 to build three cottages on the shore of Saratoga Lake. Michael took his brood of seven (Tommy, the youngest, was one; Francis, the eldest, was twelve) to one of the cottages (three bedrooms) for a week the following summer, the first annual Phelan Saratoga vacation. When Shugrue upgraded the cottages to a Lake House, the Phelans were there for that first season.

  The Phelan boys grew up with Pat Shugrue’s son, Willie, who inherited the hotel and added two wings when Pat and Nora phased themselves out; grew up also with Willie’s wife, Alice, who at first supervised the cooking at the Lake House in the late 1930s, but by the early ’40s was the organized brain behind the business. Alice was also Molly’s closest friend, ever since their days at St. Joseph’s Industrial School, where Catholic girls from Arbor Hill learned cookery and needlework.

  Giselle brought me to Albany in early April, 1953, stayed two nights with me in the Phelan house, and in that time revealed such a restlessness that I insisted she go back to her career. “You weren’t put here on earth to be a nurse,” I told her, “nor could I abide watching you try to become one against your will.”

  It fell to Molly to oversee my reentry into the human race. An instrument of angelical mercy, she soothed my psychic wounds with gentleness, brought me food and the newspapers, told me stories of her life, convinced me I could trust her with my troubles.

  But Molly perceived, as others in the family did not, that my recovery was static; that to recover fully I needed more than this household could offer; and it was she who in the late summer of that year called Alice Shugrue and asked whether she could use me at the hotel, provided I worked for my keep. She said I’d been raised by Peter (the Phelan handyman) and could do carpentry, plumbing, electrical work, and more; that I needed no wages, only a place to stay and something to do with my hands.

  And so now, October, 1954, a year and months after that salvational intercession by Molly, something new can begin. The nights are beyond autumn, and beyond even that by the woods on the lake-shore, cold into the marrow, the morrow, reading Finnegan, yes, carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! And then doesn’t the kerosene for the heater vanish entirely from the world? It does. Himself alone with that book and his own book, a writer and a woodsbee, a man in a manner of wond
ering, what manner of wondering man is this? A man in love with his wife and his-aunt-your-sister, tadomine. Of all love there is, this has been the most strange, leaving nothing undesired, nothing sired, the lover bald to the world, no heir. Was ever a family so sonless, so cold, dark, and bereft of a future as these fallow Phelan fils?

  I was used to being alone here in the cottage, relieved to discover that one did not wither in such solitude; that it really could be a nurturing force. What I did not expect was this onset of winterish night without heat. I put on my overcoat, muffler, hat, and one glove, the other hand free to turn the pages, and I kept reading, ranging now through the book’s final pages, the glorious monologue of Anna Livia Plurabelle: Why I’m all these years within years in soffran, allbeleaved. To hide away the tear, the parted. It’s thinking of all. The brave that gave their. The fair that wore. All them that’s gunne. I’ll begin again in a jiffey. The nik of a nad. How glad you’ll be I waked you! My! How well you’ll feel! For ever after.

  Words alone, language alone, not always penetrable (like women with their mysteries; and how they do fill this life with spectacle and wonder), now filling the reader-and-writer with infeasible particulars, always the great challenge, is it not, to fease the particules and not malfease? Giselle was gone again, yet again, but in transition to something other than what she once was; and who knew how that would come out?

  “I’ll be up next weekend,” she told me.

  “That soon?”

  “I like it up here.”

  “Not much action.”

  “I’m saturated with action,” she said. “I like the calm of this place. I want to photograph it, and Saratoga too.”

  So, you see, that’s a change in Giselle. I make no plans on the basis of it, however. Giselle is as mercurial as the early autumn in Saratoga: sunlit day become gelid night. Apart, we move together slowly into the future. But since coming here I do perceive a future, with or without the woman. Molly did this; brought me to see Alice and Willie Shugrue, Alice a tightly wrapped Irish whirlwind who holds the hotel together by dint of will and want: wanting nothing but this place now, living in the South Cottage with the rheumatoid Willie, a waning wisp of a fellow who can no longer afford artisans to stave off the decay of the buildings, can no longer climb a ladder himself. And all the while your man lives in the North Cottage, reading, learning to write, learning how to be alone. And out our windows we all watch the Lake House begin its struggle through yet another winter, and we wonder: Is this the year it collapses of its own hollowness?

  When I first came to live at the Lake House in 1953, Molly drove me with my baggage, helped settle me into the cottage, helped Alice Shugrue cook dinner for us all, and when Molly was leaving to go home she presented me with forty ten-dollar gold pieces to help finance my life while I waited for my survival advance from Walker Pettijohn. My manipulation of the Meriwether papers had pleased Pettijohn so much that when he learned I was neither dead nor dying he turned me loose to edit the fustian out of a pop-scholarly study of the love theories of Lucretius, Ovid, and Henry Miller.

  The gift of gold from Molly was a stunning surprise, not least because it was gold, but also, as I would discover, because she had been hoarding it for two and a half decades, giving it away, five dollars at a time, to relatives and select friends on special occasions.

  The August racing meet had ended at the Saratoga track, and most of the Lake House’s last guests had gone home, except for a few couples who would stay through Labor Day; and so Molly really didn’t go home that night. She decided to stay overnight when the Shugrues and I suggested it. This was when I first heard the story of the cedar waxwing, and Walter’s sudden courtship of Molly on that late-summer day in 1935.

  I’d been here once before, in the early 1940s, on a long weekend with Peter and Danny Quinn, and knew the place somewhat. But Molly now gave me her own private tour of the grounds and buildings, each weighted with memory

  “Right here,” she said of an area now grown over, “was the clock golf that Walter and I had played every day. Here’s where we played croquet and once I beat him. Here’s the path into the bird sanctuary where we used to meet. There’s the boat house where he first kissed me, and there’s the barn that was our dance hall, isn’t it wonderful? And because it’s so away from the hotel we could play our music all night long if we wanted to, and nobody would yell at us for keeping them awake.”

  The barn had been a cow barn, sturdily converted to a weatherproof building in the early 1930s. It was a cavernous place with exposed beams, its never-painted dance floor now a challenge because of warped boards. The barn was redolent of raw wood and of the pine groves that bordered it outside, and Molly said it was the purest odor she ever knew, that it always turned her memory to those summer days with Walter; that in eighteen years this perfume of love never changed. The place is really just like it always was, she said, the phonograph still there on its table, and the old records (hundreds loose on shelves and in albums), some so old even I remember playing them on the wind-up Victrola. Some were cracked from careless use, but the Shugrues never threw any away, for this music was as much a part of the history of the place as their guest register. You expected the same records to be there, year after year, even the cracked ones.

  Molly took down a pile of them, all scratched, no envelopes to protect them, shuffled through them, and found one. “Here,” she said, and gave it to me to put on the turntable: “When I Grow Too Old to Dream,” by Ray Noble and his orchestra, a waltz. And we sat then in two of the chairs that lined the barn’s walls, and we listened to it all through. Then Molly said, “Put it on again and we’ll waltz,” and so we did. Step, slide, pivot, reverse.

  “It was like this,” she said. “Even when others were here watching, it didn’t matter. We were alone in each other’s arms and just with the holding we made our pact of love.”

  Step, slide, pivot, reverse, my hand on Molly’s back, her full breasts against me, our thighs touching through her dress and my trousers as we spun around the floor, she so young, and I so beyond age of any number, just keepers of love in our arms, we creating love with our presence, my cheek against hers, her hair touching my eyes. When the music stopped I started it again, and we heard the scratchings and skips of the song and we danced to that too, and then I replayed it again, yet again, and neither of us said anything, nor did we fully let go of one another while I moved the needle back to the beginning. Her hair, its yellow all but gone into gray, was what Giselle’s would be like years from now, her body in its age fuller than Giselle’s.

  “Do you love her very much still?” Molly asked.

  “I do. As you still love Walter.”

  “We are serious people about our love.”

  “We love. It’s what we do.”

  And then I kissed her as one kisses one’s love, a long kiss, and then I stopped and we held each other, neither of us there, of course, both of us looking at love, of course. And it looks alike sometimes.

  I turn the page and I find: But you’re changing, acoolsha, you’re changing from me, I can feel . . . Yes, you’re changing, sonhusband, and you’re turning, I can feel you, for a daughterwife from the hills again . . . I pity your oldself I was used to. Now a younger’s there. Try not to part! . . . For she’ll be sweet for you as I was sweet when I came down out of me mother. My great blue bedroom, the air so quiet, scarce a cloud. In peace and silence. I could have stayed up there for always only. It’s something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall.

  “We’ll go make a fire,” Molly said, “and I’ll tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “I’ll tell you about me.”

  I shut off the phonograph and Molly took my arm and we walked to the main entrance of the hotel, up the stairs, and into the main parlor with yesterday’s rustic furniture and scatter rugs and shelves of forgotten books and the great stone fireplace and its stack of wood and old newspapers, and no people but us two, the other guests all in bed. I
moved the screen of the fireplace and built the fire. Molly knew where to find the matches and then we sat on the sofa and watched the fire grow, me keeping my distance from her, yet close, close, and we looked at one another and we smiled at what we saw. I had to touch her face, and then her hair, and then her neck, and I had to let my hand move down to her breast and I touched that, and she said, “Yes, do that,” and I felt the softness and the fullness with just that one hand. She touched my face and ran her fingers through my hair, kissed me with the fullness of her mouth, then took my hand and put it back in my lap.

  “We must find a way not to be naughty,” she said.

  And I read this: I’ll close me eyes. So not to see. Or see only a youth in his florizel, a boy in innocence, peeling a twig, a child beside a weenywhite steed. The child we all love to place our hope in for ever.

  “Walter and I made love every day for a week, sometimes twice a day,” Molly said. “The family hardly saw me and they knew, though they didn’t know exactly what they knew. Sarah hated it, scolded me every day, warned me, ‘You’ll be sorry,’ but I didn’t care. Then we all went home and love was over for the time being, though I found ways to meet him. And I did get in the family way. It’d have been a holy miracle if I hadn’t. Me forty-five and him a year older, latecomers both of us to this, but I never told him. He died without ever knowing. When I was two months in I found ways to stay home, said I was sick and I was. We talked often on the phone and he couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t see him, and I always told him, ‘I will see you, I will when I can.’ I stopped eating so the weight wouldn’t show, had a ketchup sandwich once in a while, and tea, and I was weak. Very. Nobody knew. I never let Sarah or my brothers know anything, didn’t even let them see me unless I had a big robe on. And I could never in a million years tell Sarah. She always said after Tommy was born simple that there shouldn’t be any more Phelan children. That was Mama’s idea, of course. Mama stopped sleeping with Papa after Tommy. No more, no more, it’s a sign, I know it. We all heard them fighting about it. Did I want the baby? No. Not for Mama’s reason but because I wouldn’t want any man marrying me for that, could never raise a child alone, and couldn’t ask for help. And so I started to take things to force the birth: medicines, potions, what I’d heard about through the years, pills I saw advertised once, and I knew I could hurt myself. I knew a girl once took a douche of gin and naphtha to get rid of it and she screamed for two hours, all by herself, until they heard her, and she kept screaming until she died. I wouldn’t be that foolish. I tightened my corset as much as it went, but I kept growing. And then I called Mrs. Watson, the midwife, and asked her what a woman had to do if she was alone and the baby came, and she told me. ‘But don’t stay alone,’ she said. ‘Come and see me.’ I doubted I’d be able. I always thought I’d have it alone. Not a soul in the world I could ask for help. Not a soul. First we feel. Then we fall. It was past four months when it came on its own, a boy, and dead. I cut the cord and mopped the blood when I could, never a scream or a moan out of me, can you believe that? In the night it was. No light till it was over with and I wrapped up the blanket and sheet and the towels and all, and put the baby in the steel box from the closet shelf, where I kept some valuables, and went down the cellar and buried it. I don’t know where I got the strength to dig the hole. We don’t know how strong we are, do we? I called the baby Walter Phelan and baptized him with water from the sink in a teacup and he’s down there still, in a far corner of the cellar, with boxes of horseshoes and jam jars on top of him all these years, God forgive me. You’re the only person in the world knows this. God was with the Phelans, don’t you think? He took the baby but saved us from scandal and he let me have my love back. I was well in a week and Walter came and took me down to Keeler’s for dinner and I remember he ordered a half-dozen clams and when they came he started to eat one and at the same time asked me would I marry him right away, not waste another day, and I said I would before the clam got to his mouth. I will marry you a hundred times, a thousand. And I did.” I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me?