Very Old Bones Read online

  One.

  I turned the page.

  The things we do when we’re alone.

  In the year after Molly and I fell in love with each other’s failed love, I could at last say without equivocation that I had acquired a family, although a failing one. Sarah and Tommy passed on, Molly fell into her melancholy, and my father, mad with art, and obsessed with his imagery of pernicious life—this rage of creative excess being the condition to which he had aspired all his artistic career—nearly died of a heart attack. That attack reduced him to part-time madman, immobilized and weak, but insistent on working an hour a day, at least. It was because of his condition, and Molly’s, that I eventually moved down from Saratoga to become magister of the Phelan house on Colonie Street.

  Sarah died first. Molly encountered the beginnings of her sister’s decline upon her return from her and Tommy’s Labor Day visit with Giselle and me at the Grand View. She found the interior of the Colonie Street house in total darkness at late afternoon, every window barricaded against the light by black drapes Sarah had nailed to the walls. Sarah had also unplugged all lamps, and removed all bulbs from the ceiling fixtures Peter had installed twenty years earlier. Molly found her in her room, sitting in her chair reading, by the light of a solitary candle, an old yellowed newspaper. Sarah seemed not to hear Molly enter the bedroom, but when she saw her she folded the newspaper and put it in the drawer of her bedside table. Then she blew out the candle, moved onto the bed, and pulled the covers up to her chin.

  “What happened, Sarah?” Molly asked. “Are you sick?”

  “You left me alone,” Sarah said.

  “I asked you to come with us. We went to Saratoga.”

  “I know where you went.”

  “Billy helped me bring Tommy’s wheelchair into the house. He’s downstairs. Don’t you want to say hello? Don’t you want to see Tommy?”

  “No. You left me alone,” Sarah said, and that’s all she said for two days.

  Billy and Molly plugged in the lamps, put the bulbs back in the chandeliers, pulled the nails out of the drapes and woodwork, some of which had splintered, the first serious damage to it since the house was built seventy-five years earlier. As Molly was trying to understand what could have possessed Sarah to do such a thing, she realized that being left by herself was reason enough; for it came to Molly that never in her life had Sarah spent one night alone in this house. Molly knew that she herself could be alone forever, would be alone forever, with or without other people, and that it wouldn’t kill her; intensify the sadness she was never without, yes; but I am not going to die from such a thing, is how she put it when we talked about Sarah.

  The decline of Sarah seemed uncharacteristically abrupt. We all thought she would struggle more vigorously against the cabal of forces that had beset her, but we misread her plan. All her strength and will centered on the downward rush to death, and she clenched her jaws against even minimal nourishment, ripping out of her arms the tubes that carried the life-sustaining fluids Dr. Lynch had ordered for her. She had a deadline for her death. She calculated her weakness until it was the equivalent of a newborn: helpless, pulled into a realm not of its own choosing, the newborn and the imminently moribund bound for an encounter at the symbiotic boundary of life and death. And she died two hours into November 17, 1954, her mother’s ninety-fourth birthday.

  Sarah left explicit instructions for her wake. She was to be laid out in the same style dress that Kathryn Phelan wore to her grave, and in the same style coffin, which was to be placed in the same position in the front parlor. A solemn high funeral mass should be said for her, as with Kathryn Phelan, and with Father Mahar, the pastor, to be the celebrant. She left the bankbook of the family savings account in the drawer of her bedside table, and it revealed a balance of $840.22. Sarah had no bank account of her own. What little money she earned sewing she always deposited to the family account.

  Molly did not find the newspaper Sarah had put in the bedside drawer, nor had it been thrown away. Molly resolved to search for it when the funeral was over. She also chose to countermand Sarah’s request for the ancestral dress.

  “She’ll wear her good Sunday dress,” Molly said. “I won’t have us a laughing stock, people thinking we’re old-fashioned.”

  Tommy saw Ben Owens and another man carrying Sarah’s body down the front stairs and out to the waiting hearse.

  “What’re they doing, Molly?” Tommy asked.

  “They’re taking Sarah,” Molly said.

  “Where they taking her?”

  “To the funeral home,” Molly said, and she sat down beside Tommy on the sofa. “Sarah died, Tom.”

  “She did?”

  “She died this morning.”

  “Will they bury her?”

  “Yes, they will.”

  “Why’d she die?”

  “She was sad,” Molly said.

  “What was she sad about?”

  “Oh a lot of things, Tom.”

  “Is she dead? Really, really dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t think she’d die.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “Will you die, Moll?”

  “Some day.”

  “How about me? Will I die?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Me too,” Tommy said. “I don’t think I wanna die.”

  Molly called Peter and he said he’d be up the next day. When she called Peg to tell her the news Peg immediately came down and helped clean the house. I also came down after Molly called me, and made plans to stay over through the funeral.

  Ben Owens brought Sarah home at early evening. There would only be one night of waking, the two-night wake going the way of gaslight and woodstoves. Molly had ordered two pieces of flowers and had them delivered immediately, which I found odd, for surely they’d look fresher if they were delivered the day of the wake. We imposed order and polish on the house, then ate the turkey sandwiches Peg brought for us. When Peg went home Molly put Tommy to bed, and then she and I sat alone in the back parlor, I expecting the full story behind Sarah’s death. But Molly only sat with her hands folded in her lap, still wearing her kitchen apron, staring at the coffin in the front parlor.

  “I should do it now,” she said. “I may not have another chance after Peter gets here.”

  “Chance for what? What should you do now?”

  “Bury my baby,” she said. “Put him in hallowed ground.”

  “Jesus, Moll, are you sure? You want to go back and relive that whole thing?”

  “I relive it every day of my life,” she said.

  “You mean you want Ben Owens to go down the cellar and dig up the bones and buy a grave and have a mass and all that? It could turn into a police matter. Can you seriously want that?”

  “That’s not what I want. Do you love me the way you did the night we danced?”

  “I do, Moll,” I said, “I think it’s a permanent condition.”

  “I thought so. That’s why I want you to dig up the baby for me.”

  Access to the cellar was through a trapdoor in the kitchen floor. The stairway was of narrow, warped boards, without a banister, and one achieved the bottom either in darkness or with a flashlight. The place had obviously been designed by a lunatic, the foundation a crazy collage of brick and field-stone, the dirt floor never leveled, the place never wired for electricity, despite the former need for access to the now defunct coal furnace (oil now heated the house). The cellar gave off the cloistered odor of coal dust, dry earth, and crumbling mortar from the foundation walls, which were in a decrepitude parallel to that of the denizens of this house. Dozens of empty jelly and Ball jars lay in boxes on shelves, and beside them dusty rows of pickled cauliflower, tomatoes, onions, preserved fruit and jellies, and I wondered were these still edible, and how long had they survived in this dismal grotto?

  Molly followed me down the steps, more surefooted than I, more used to the stairs’ rickety incline. Some light from the kitchen shone thr
ough the open trapdoor, and so we could see each other dimly. She looked back up to the light.

  “Imagine me holding the box with the baby, and finding my way with a flashlight because I didn’t dare put on the kitchen light, and then coming down those stairs in my condition. I don’t know how I did it.”

  “You’re a strong-minded woman.”

  “Not strong-minded enough.”

  She took the flashlight from me and shone its beam into the area behind the stairs. Three more boxes of jars, a box of tools, a crank for an old automobile, a box of horseshoes, a few lengths of pipe, rusty plumbing fixtures, and a backless chair occupied the space. Molly shone the light onto the horseshoes.

  “That’s the spot,” she said, and she reached into the coal bin, lifted a spade off a nail, and handed it to me. I moved the horseshoes and began to dig. It was a shallow grave. I struck the box on the spade’s third thrust.

  “Is it just one box, nothing else?”

  “It was wrapped in a towel.”

  I scraped dirt away, exposing the box and small, decayed fragments of cloth no longer recognizable as anything in particular.

  “No towel here any more,” I said.

  The light disappeared from the grave and I turned and saw Molly facing away, shining the light on a far wall.

  “I need the light, Moll,” I said.

  She focused it on the dig but again looked away.

  “I don’t want to see it,” she said.

  “You won’t have to.”

  I raised the box with one end of the spade, then lifted it out with my hand. Only with its touch did the next question arise: What do we do with it? Hallowed ground where? And how? Climb the cemetery fence at night, babe in hand and the spade strapped to my back? But Molly had already thought it through.

  “We’ll put the baby in the coffin with Sarah,” she said.

  I could only whistle my admiration at the tidiness of this.

  “Put the box on her chest and fold her hands over it,” I said, brushing dirt from the box.

  Molly took off her apron and handed it to me.

  “Wrap the baby in this, and then put the box back in the ground,” she said. “I can’t watch. Bring it up to the kitchen when you finish.” And up the stairs she went.

  I spread her apron on the lowest empty shelf and set the box beside it. In close light I saw the box was of a type that locked with a key, and it was locked, or sealed by rust under its eighteen-year-old layer of silt. I found a hammer and chisel in the tool box, easily broke the lock, and raised the top to see the remnants of a cloth of indeterminate type: a muslin pillowcase? a linen blouse? I tipped the box upside down to empty its contents onto the apron, but it would not release, the remains wedded to the interior rust. I did not want to touch anything, more out of sacredness than revulsion or fear of corruption. I nudged the edges of the cloth with the chisel and, as gently as the task demanded that I do this, scraped the swaddling cloth out of its coffin. It was far more intact than the towel, its underside discernible as linen, tanned by time and stained by blood and afterbirth. There was almost no shape to the remains of the child: no torso, no shoulders or rib cage, no limbs, no bones at all that I could see except the half-curve of the tiny skull that raised a doll-like protuberance under the cloth. I would make no inspection of what lay beneath the linen. I folded the apron around it and the odor that arose from the closure was neither of blood nor decayed flesh, but rather a singular emanation more powerful than the fused odors of earth and disintegrating metal: a pungent assault on the senses by the mortal remains of love.

  In the kitchen Molly had prepared the burial packaging: a length of brown wrapping paper, a roll of Scotch tape and another of adhesive tape, and a white linen napkin with the scrolled letter P on one corner. I took the remains out of the apron and put them in the wrapping paper, this movement revealing that there remained nothing but human dust and the fraction of skull, and I wrapped and sealed this completely with the tape. I wrapped it then within the napkin, exposing the letter P, and wrapped that twice around with adhesive tape. The entire package was about the size of a poppyseed roll from the Grand Lunch, and when I finished with it Molly took a small purse from the top of the refrigerator, put the remains inside it, and handed it to me.

  “You decide where to put it,” she said.

  The logical place was under Sarah’s head. I raised the head cushion, and Sarah as well, and fitted the purse snugly into the space. The change in Sarah’s angle of supinity was negligible.

  “Do you think people will be able to smell anything?” Molly asked.

  “Your flowers should take care of that. Isn’t that why you ordered them?”

  “It is.”

  “You’ve thought about this a long time.”

  “For years. I knew I’d send Walter along with whoever went next in the family. I prayed I wouldn’t go first.”

  “What do you think Sarah would say if she knew she was having company in her coffin?”

  “She’d find fault. She found fault with everything.”

  “It gives a new meaning to ‘virgin with child.’ “

  “We all would’ve been happier if Sarah wasn’t a virgin.”

  “You really think that would have made a difference?”

  “Virgins think about heaven,” Molly said. “They don’t care about what goes on down here.”

  Our neighborhood was in a stage of vanishing tradition, dying to its old self, an influx of Negroes creating a new world order, displacing the old Irish and Germans in the same way those two groups had displaced the Dutch and English gentry who so shortsightedly thought that bucolic Arbor Hill was to be their private garden forever. And so for this reason, and also because of the all-but-cloistered life Sarah had led, fewer people came to her wake than were expected, the most notable absence being Chick, who did not even telephone after he received Molly’s telegram, but merely sent a modest basket of flowers, the card with them bearing nothing other than the names Chick and Evelyn Phelan, the first announcement to the family that Chick had married, and simultaneously an act of distancing Molly took to be spiteful.

  “Chick will regret this to his dying day,” Peter said when he read the card, “not because of Sarah, but because he’ll eventually realize what we think of his gesture. Anger makes people stupid.”

  Anger did not make Peter stupid. And surely it was at least anger, perhaps even rage at the power of an abstraction as cruel, remote, and inviolate as God, but not God, that propelled Peter toward his masterworks. He saw, in the story of Malachi and Lizzie, and then in the way that Kathryn and Sarah had nursed that story and secretly kept it alive, a pattern that need not have been—a wrong to two generations that might have been preventable, if only . . .

  I’ve generalized about cause and effect in this family, but one proximate cause of what made Kathryn, Sarah, Peter, and the rest of us behave in such diverse but consistent ways was chronicled in that newspaper story Molly saw Sarah reading by candlelight. Molly found the cache of old papers in a crawlspace that opened off the closet of Sarah’s room (Kathryn’s and Michael’s room before Sarah took it over) into an unusable area of the attic. As children, Molly and Julia had discovered the crawlspace and hidden in it to elude Sarah, or merely to exist in a secret place no one else could enter; but Sarah caught them coming out of it one day and the secret place lost all value.

  Molly found the papers in the small brown leather suitcase Michael Phelan had used when his work on the railroad required him to stay overnight in another city. There were a dozen newspapers in all, telling day by day the story of Malachi and Lizzie, the marriage destined for enshrinement in a lower circle of hell.