Very Old Bones Read online

  She came to the window, wrapped in a yellow robe, and with a matching ribbon holding her hair at the back of her neck, and looked out at the night, at Peter, seeing only shadows, and the lights next door, seeing nowhere near as much as Peter could see with his night eyes. She stood by the window and spoke (to him, he tried to believe), said clearly, “For thou alone, like virtue and truth, art best in nakedness . . .

  “Francis,” she then said.

  “Yes, Katrina.”

  “Thy virgin’s girdle now untie . . .”

  “What’s that, ma’am?”

  And she undid the cloth rope that bound her robe about her waist, opened the robe and then let it fall, then undid her ribbon so that her hair fell loose on her shoulders, and Peter for the first time saw her perfect nakedness, thinking: this can’t be a dream, this must not be a dream, and then she turned her back to him and presented herself to Francis. The branches of the tree moved and Peter looked down in a fit of fright to see Sarah climbing toward him.

  “I’ve been watching you,” she whispered. “What are you looking at?”

  “Shhhhh,” said Peter, for Sarah’s whisper rang through the night like the bells of St. Joseph’s Church, and he was sure the naked woman had heard.

  But she had not. Katrina pursued her plan, embracing Francis about the knees as he stood on the ladder. Sarah, agile as a monkey, was now beside Peter in the crotch of a branch, and so he could not look at what his eyes wanted so desperately to see. But Sarah could look, staring with her usual inquisition at her brother and the naked Katrina, and so Peter rejoined the vision, watching her take her arms from around Francis’s legs and stare up at him as he came down the ladder, then (Sarah unable to restrain a gasp) seeing him kiss her and embrace her naked body. Sarah climbed down the tree then with greater speed than she had climbed up it. She ran off, not toward home but rather, Peter would later learn, toward the church, to seek out the priest and confess in the parish house what she had seen, confessing not her own sin but Francis’s, as if his sin were her damnation as well as his own.

  Peter did not leave the tree and knew Sarah would fault him for this; but he was fearful that this might be his only chance for years to come to witness what it was that people did to each other when they were naked. He saw Katrina unbutton Francis’s shirt, then unbuckle his belt, saw her walk again to the window to show her full self to Peter, lean over and pick up her robe and then spread it on the floor, lie on it on her back as Francis, now naked, stood over her, then knelt astraddle her, then finally leaned his full self forward and on top of her into a prolonged kiss.

  And thus did Peter Phelan, age eleven, witness with the eye of an artist-to-be the rubrics of profane love. He knew too, for the first time, a nocturnal emission that was not the involuntary product of his dreams; and when that happened to him he began the careful, soundless climb down from the tree, shamed by his spying and the wetness of his underwear (more afraid now of having to explain that wetness than of having to give good reason for peering at people from a tree), and regretting even as his feet touched the ground that he had not continued to watch until there was nothing more to see. He thought of his brother as a figure of awesome courage and achievement—courting damnation by conquering the body of the most beautiful woman in the world—but he also sensed, even in the callowness of his newborn pubescence, that, however much he admired Francis, he would never be able to forgive him for doing this before his eyes. Never.

  Sarah had been watching Peter for two days before she decided to follow him to the apple tree. She had seen the oddness of his behavior, erratic, skulking in places he had no reason to be (such as the back yard, looking over the Daugherty fence), and in time she put it together as Peter’s secret mission. He was, after all, only a child. But what the child led her to was the shock of her life.

  In the infinite judicial wisdom of her Little Motherhood, Sarah, now fifteen, called a meeting of the witnesses and the accused in order to define the future. Clearly capital punishment for Francis was what the heavens screamed aloud for; but Sarah was no vessel for that. All she could do was elevate sin to communal knowledge, spoken of openly in the presence of the sinner (sinners, to be sure, for Peter was not without culpability). So she summoned them to the front steps of St. Joseph’s and, wearing the mantilla that the old Spanish nun had given her in school as a prize for her essay on chastity (“the virtue without which even good works are dead”), Sarah defined the terms under which she would allow her brothers to continue living in the same house with her and her mother, and the sainted moron Tommy, and the hapless Chick, and the good sisters, Molly and Julia (who, Sarah knew, had chastity problems of their own, but she chose not to raise them here), and the terms were these: That Francis would confess that he had been living in the occasion of sin by working for Mrs. Daugherty, whose behavior we must somehow reveal without being vulgar. We can never tell our mother that you put your hands on her naked body, how could you do such an awful thing?

  “Listen,” Francis said, “don’t knock it till you tried it,” whereupon Sarah ran up the stairs into the church and did not talk to either brother for three days, after which time she raised the issue at the dinner table.

  “Mama,” Sarah said to all assembled siblings, “Francis has something to tell you.”

  “No I don’t,” Francis said.

  “You’ll tell her or I will,” Sarah said.

  “I got nothin’ to say,” Francis said.

  “Then Peter will tell,” Sarah said.

  “Not me,” Peter said.

  “Will somebody tell me what this is about?” Kathryn Phelan asked. Her other children, Chick, Julia, Molly, and Tommy, looked bewildered at their mother’s question.

  “It’s what Francis is doing,” Sarah said. But she could say no more.

  “Sarah doesn’t think I oughta work for Katrina,” Francis said. “I think Sarah oughta mind her own business.”

  “Why not work for her?” Kathryn asked.

  “There’s more than work going on over there,” Sarah said.

  “And what might that mean?”

  “Are you going to tell her?” Sarah asked Francis.

  Francis stared into Sarah’s eyes, his face crimson, his mouth a line of rage.

  “Well?” said Kathryn.

  “She put her arms around him,” Sarah said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” Francis said.

  “Why did she do that?”

  “She likes the way I work,” Francis said.

  “He’s lying,” Sarah said.

  “How do you know?” Kathryn asked. “Did you see her do this?”

  “Yes, and so did Peter.”

  “I don’t know what I saw,” Peter said.

  “Don’t lie,” Sarah said.

  “Everybody’s a liar but Sarah,” Peter said.

  “What were you doing watching over there?” Kathryn asked Sarah.

  “I followed Peter. He’s the one who was watching.”

  “You’re a lousy rat, Sarah,” Peter said. “A real lousy rat.”

  “Never mind name-calling. I want to know what went on What is she talking about, Francis?”

  “Nothin’. I work for her, that’s all. She’s a nice person.”

  “She was naked,” Sarah said.

  “Naked!” Kathryn said, and she stood up and grabbed Francis by the ear. “What’ve you been doing, young man?”

  Francis stood and jerked his head out of his mother’s grip. “I walked into her room when she was dressin’,” he said. “It was a mistake.”

  “He’s lying again,” Sarah said. “He was painting and she took her robe off and was naked and then she threw her arms around him and he did the same thing to her.”

  “Is that true?” Kathryn asked, her face inches from Francis.

  “She’s a little crazy sometimes,” Francis said. “She does funny things.”

  “Taking her clothes off in front of you? You
consider that funny?”

  “She doesn’t know what she’s doin’ sometimes. But she’s really all right.”

  “He put his arms around her and they kissed for a long time,” Sarah said.

  “You bitch,” Francis said. “You stinkin’ little sister bitch.”

  Kathryn swung her left hand upward and caught Francis under the jaw. The blow knocked him off balance and he fell into the china closet, smashing its glass door, shattering plates, cups, glasses, then falling in a bleeding heap on the floor.

  Thirty-six years gone and here he is back again, Peter thought, and there is the china closet, and here we all are (Sarah will come down from her room eventually; she will have to face the reality of his return), and here minus Julia are the non-conspirators, Molly, Chick, Tom-Tom, Orson, the added starter, about the same age I was when all this happened, and Francis, who is no more repentant today of whatever sin than he was when Mama knocked him down with her left hook.

  “I thought Sarah was comin’ down,” Francis said.

  “She’ll be down,” Molly said. “She’s getting dressed for tonight.”

  “You look pretty, Moll. Real, real pretty. You got a beau? Somebody sweet on you?”

  Molly put her eyes down to her plate. “Not really,” she said.

  “How about Sarah? She didn’t marry, did she?”

  “No,” said Molly.

  “I ran into Floyd Wagner down in Baltimore. I’m on my way to Georgia and old Floyd, he’s a cop now, was gonna arrest me. Then he seen who I was and instead of arrestin’ me he bought me a beer and we cut it up about the old days. He said he went out a few times with Sarah.”

  “That’s so,” said Molly. “Sarah broke it off.”

  “So Floyd said.”

  “Never mind about Floyd Wagner,” said Sarah, descending the back stairs into the room. She was in total mourning, even to the black combs that held her hair, her dress a high-necked, ankle-length replica of the recurring dress that Kathryn Phelan had worn most of her life, always made by the perfect, homemade dressmaker, Sarah. It was less a mourning garment than a maternal uniform—black cotton in the summer, black wool in winter—that asserted that unbelievable resistance to anything that smacked of vanity, though not even that: of lightness, of elevation. Her children and relatives had tried to sway her with gifts of floral-patterned dresses, colored skirts and blouses, but the gifts remained in boxes for years until finally Kathryn gave them to the Little Sisters of the Poor.

  Francis looked at Sarah and retreated in time. Here was the mother incarnate in Sarah, now fifty-one, a willful duplicate; and Francis remembered that Sarah had even wanted to call herself Sate when they were young, because people called their mother Kate; but Mama would have none of that. Sarah would be Sarah, which was no hindrance at all to emulation, as this presence now proved; uncanny resemblance, even to the combing and parting of the hair and the black-and-white cameo brooch that Kathryn always wore at her throat.

  “Hello, Sarah,” Francis said. “How you been?”

  “Fine, thank you.”

  “Good. That’s good.”

  “Sarah looks like Mama,” Tommy said.

  “I noticed that,” Francis said.

  “So you’re back,” Sarah said to Francis. “You’re looking well.”

  “Is that so?” Francis said. “I wouldn’ta said so.”

  “Francis can be a bearer,” Chick said. “I just thought of that. Then we only need one more.”

  “Francis won’t be here,” Sarah said. “Francis isn’t staying.”

  “What?” said Peter.

  “He’s not staying,” Sarah said. “He’s not a part of this family and hasn’t been for over thirty years. Feed him if you like, but that’s all he gets out of us.”

  “Sarah,” Molly said, “that’s wrong.”

  “No,” said Sarah, “nothing wrong except that he’s back among us and I won’t have it. Not on the day my mother is waking.”

  “Right,” Francis said. “I seen her wakin’. I seen her dead, and now I see her again, not dead at all. Nothin’ changed here since I left the first time, and now I remember why I left. Sarah’s got a way of joggin’ your memory.”

  “Sarah doesn’t run this house,” Peter said.

  “Right,” Chick said. “Absolutely right. Sarah don’t run nobody.”

  “It’s okay,” Francis said. “Not a thing anybody’s gotta worry about. I’m a travelin’ man, and that’s all I am. Never counted on anything more than seein’ she was really dead. I figure, she’s dead, I’m free. Know what I mean, Chickie pie?”

  “No.”

  “What’s gone’s gone, and I figure, good riddance. She wanted me dead is the way I figure it. Ain’t that right, Sarah?”

  “You were dead for years. You’re dead now. Why don’t you go live in the cemetery?”

  “You know, you turned out just right, Sarah,” Francis said. “Just like I knew you would. You ain’t got a speck o’ the real goods in you. You ain’t got one little bit of Papa. You got it all from the other side of the family, all from that Malachi crowd. You’re somebody they oughta cut up and figure out, ’cause you ain’t hardly human, Sarah.”

  “You’re a tramp, Francis. You were a tramp when you were a child. You and your Katrina.”

  Francis turned his eyes from Sarah and faced Peter, who could not take his eyes from Francis. Francis smiled, a man in control of his life. Oh yes.

  “She remembers Katrina, Pete. Got a memory like a elephant, this sister of ours. You remember Katrina too?”

  “Everybody remembers Katrina,” Peter said.

  “Unforgettable lady,” Francis said.

  “Don’t bring that old filth back in here,” Sarah said.

  “Filth,” Francis said, “that’s Sarah’s favorite word. Where you’d be without filth I can’t even figure, Sarah. You and filth—some double play. Old Floyd Wagner told me how you and him talked about filth all them years ago.”

  “Make him leave,” Sarah said to the entire table.

  “Floyd said the last time he saw Sarah . . .”

  “Never mind anything Floyd Wagner said,” Sarah said.

  “Sarah, let him talk,” Peter said.

  “What about Floyd Wagner?” Chick asked.

  “Old Floyd. He came to see Sarah one night and she threatened to stab him with a pair of scissors.”

  “What?” Molly said.

  “It’s a lie,” Sarah said.

  “Floyd said she was afraid he might kiss her and start doin’ other filthy stuff, so she snatched up the scissors and told him to keep his distance or she’d stab him in the belly.”

  “Oh, you foul thing,” Sarah said, and she pushed her chair back and walked to the living room.

  “Floyd swears it,” Francis said (and in the front parlor Sarah, standing beside the corpse of her mother, covered her ears with both hands to fend off Francis’s words).

  “Floyd said he never did get to kiss Sarah, and after the scissors business he sorta lost interest.”

  “I think we can change the subject,” Peter said.

  “Suits me,” Francis said.

  All eating, all talk at the table stopped. The front door bell changed the mood and, as Molly went to answer it, Chick said, “That’s probably Joe Mahar. He said he’d come early.” And Chick too left the table.

  Francis drank the last of his tea, popped his last crust of bread into his mouth, and smiled at Peter. “Always great to come back home,” he said.

  “I got to go to the bathroom,” Tommy said, and he went up the back stairs.

  “Just you and me, Pete,” Francis said, ignoring my presence.

  Francis saw Molly, Sarah, and Chick talking to a priest in the living room and he could recognize Joe Mahar, whose name he could never have brought to mind if Chick hadn’t mentioned it, but he knew he was the boy who had gone into the seminary with Chick out of high school. Joe had obviously carried it off, but poor Chickie pie came home after three years (the
first year Francis played for Chattanooga, blessin’ himself every time he came to bat, and them rednecks yellin’, “Kill the Irishman,” but he kept on blessin’ even though he didn’t buy that holy stuff no more), and Chick’s return plunged Mama into the weeping depths of secularity. No priests in the Phelan family, alas. Mama never to know the glory of having mothered a vicar of Christ.

  “I see you got a new ceilin’ light,” Francis said, looking at the new fixture.

  “Installed this afternoon,” Peter said. “How do you like it?”

  “Nice and ritzy. Who picked it out, you?”

  “Orson and I did, didn’t we, Orse?” And I nodded.

  “You still doin’ newspaper work?”

  “No, I make my living as an artist, such as it is.”

  “Artist. By God that’s a new one. Artist. What kind of artist?”

  “A painter.”

  “That’s good,” Francis said. “I like paintin’s. My most favorite saloon had a paintin’ back of the bar. Only reason I hung out there was to look at it. Eased my mind, you know what I mean?”

  “What was it?”

  “Birds, mostly,” Francis said. “Birds and a naked woman. Reminded me of Katrina.” Francis winked at Peter.

  Peter laughed, shook his head at Francis’s philistinism. But it was an involuntary and unjustified response, and he knew it; knew that if Francis had set his mind to it he could have been an artist, or a writer, or a master mechanic. Anything Francis wanted he could have had. But of course he never wanted anything. Artist of the open road. Hero of Whitmanesque America: I hear America singing—about naked ladies.

  “Peter,” Molly called, “Father Joe wants to know about the funeral mass. Just for a minute. He’ll be right back, Fran.”

  Francis nodded at Molly, sweet sister, as Peter went to the front parlor. Francis looked at me and smiled. Alone at the table of his youth, made a hemispheric sweep of the room. No need to look behind him at the china closet. He knew what that looked like. He saw only one thing in the room that surprised him: the picture of the family taken at Papa’s forty-fifth birthday party at Saratoga Lake, where they had a camp that summer, the summer of the year Papa died. There was Francis at fifteen and Tommy as a baby. Francis would not approach it, not look closely at what was then; better off without any vision of a past that had led to these days of isolation from both past and future. Gone. Stay gone. Die. Go live in the cemetery.