Very Old Bones Read online

  I think of Peter’s creative act (though I am not so modest as to deny my own contribution to the events) as independent of his art, a form of atonement after contemplating what wreckage was left in the wake of the behavior of the males in the family: Malachi’s lunacy, Michael’s mindless martyring of Sarah, Francis’s absence of so many years, the imploding Chick, Peter’s own behavior as son, husband, father: in sum, a pattern of abdication, or flight, or exile, with the women left behind to pick up the pieces of fractured life: a historic woman like Kathryn, an avant-garde virgin renegade like Molly, a working girl like Peg, and, to confirm this theory with an anomaly, there is the case of Giselle.

  “I have to say it,” Roger said. “This is the most unusual lunch I’ve ever been to.”

  “Perfectly normal little meal,” Peter said. “Last will and testament with lamb gravy.”

  “Those here, we’ve never sat down together like this before, never,” Molly said.

  “That’s hard to believe,” said Roger. “You look like such a close family.”

  “Get your eyes examined,” Billy said.

  “Don’t mind my brother,” Peg said. “He’s a perpetual grump.”

  “What this gathering is,” I said, looking at Roger, also at Peg to discover where her eyes went, “is the provisional healing of a very old split in this family.”

  “What’s that mean, provisional?” Billy asked.

  “For the time being,” I said. “More to come later. Like having the first horse in the daily double.”

  “Yeah,” said Billy.

  “And it’s about time,” Molly said. “We should have done this years ago.”

  “The point is it’s done,” said Peg. “I love you for it, Uncle Peter,” she said, and she blew him a kiss.

  “I’m not takin’ the money,” Billy said.

  Peter looked my way, caught my eye, chuckled. I’d predicted that Billy would say this.

  “Don’t be hasty, now, Billy,” said Peter.

  “Don’t be stupid, you mean,” said Peg.

  “The hell with stupid,” Billy said. “My father couldn’t live here, I don’t want no money outa here.”

  “It’s Francis’s money as much as it’s mine,” Peter said. “I made it in good measure because of him.”

  “I showed you those photos,” I said to Billy, “The Itinerant series, and you know Francis inspired that. Peter only painted it.” Peter gave me a sharp look. Nothing worse than an ungrateful child.

  “And Malachi’s face is the face of Francis in the new paintings. You’ve seen that for yourself,” Peter said. “And that’s where the money for these bequests really came from.”

  “So you paint his picture? What the hell is that? He wasn’t welcome here and all these years neither were we.”

  “I came here plenty of times,” Peg said.

  “I didn’t, and neither did he,” Billy said.

  “You’re gonna ruin it,” Peg said. “You’ll be like Sarah, spoiling it for everybody else.”

  “I ain’t spoilin’ nothin’ wasn’t spoiled years ago,” Billy said.

  “Have some mint jelly, Billy,” said Molly. “Sweeten your disposition.”

  “I’m sayin’ my father never got nothin’ outa this house and neither did we, and I don’t want nothin’ now.”

  “You told me Molly gave you gold on your birthday,” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “And she gave me gold too,” Peg said.

  “You know where I got that gold, Billy?” Molly asked.

  “You never said.”

  “You remember Cubby Conroy?”

  “I remember his kid, Johnny,” Billy said. “They shot him over highjacked booze and dumped him in the gutter.”

  “Cubby was a good friend of your father’s. They grew up together on this block.” Molly paused, looked at Roger. “Mr. Dailey,” she said, “do lawyers keep secrets?”

  “If they don’t, they’re not very good lawyers.”

  “I can’t tell my story unless you keep it a secret.”

  “I’ll carry it silently to my grave,” Roger said.

  “Good,” said Molly. “Cubby Conroy was a bootlegger.”

  “Right,” said Billy. “He was also a con man. He and Morrie Berman got badges and flashed them at Legs Diamond and convinced him they were dry agents. They almost copped a truckload of his booze before he caught on.”

  “I did hear that,” Molly said. “And then somebody shot Cubby. Perhaps it was Mr. Diamond, who was upset by what they did.”

  “Maybe so. Diamond was like that. But how do you know all this tough stuff?”

  Billy was smiling, and I marveled at the way Molly had turned him around so quickly. She was wonderful at human relationships and I loved her.

  “Well, you know, don’t you,” Molly said, “that they killed Cubby up in Glens Falls in one of those roadhouses. Then they killed Johnny, and the only one left was Charity, Cubby’s widow, who had a collapse of some sort, afraid they’d come after her, I suppose, or maybe just living alone and drinking alone. I used to cook her a dinner every day and bring it over, but it didn’t help much. She got sicker and sicker and one day she told me she had this bootleg money she wanted me to have. All her relatives were dead, she didn’t know where Cubby’s people were, but wherever they were she hated them, and so the money was mine. I thanked her a whole lot and took it home.”

  “Where’d she have it hid?” Billy asked.

  “Inside an old mattress in the cellar.”

  “How much?”

  “Twelve thousand dollars,” Molly said, and we all wheezed our awe.

  “She let you take twelve thousand home?” Billy asked.

  “She did. I had to make six trips in the car with my suitcase. Maybe seven.”

  “Wasn’t she afraid of goin’ broke?” Billy asked.

  “She wasn’t broke.”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “When she died,” Molly said, “I found another fifteen thousand in two overstuffed chairs and a sofa. That took twelve trips.”

  We all wheezed anew.

  “Twenty-seven grand,” Billy said.

  “Very good arithmetic, Billy,” Molly said.

  “What’d you do with it?” Roger asked.

  “Everything I wanted to do,” Molly said. “I went to Philadelphia for two weeks to visit our cousin and I looked at the Liberty Bell, and I bought curtains for the house, and I went to Keeler’s twice a month and had oysters and lobster, and I paid for the new oil furnace when the coal furnace cracked in half, and I gave money to special people, and I turned it all into gold and put it in safe-deposit boxes because I didn’t trust paper money.”

  “You have any of it left?” Peter asked.

  “If I do will you take back my bequest?”

  “Of course not,” said Peter.

  “I have nineteen thousand.”

  We all looked carefully at Molly now, a woman worth scrutiny, the true and quixotic mistress of this house, the secret financial power behind Sarah’s imperious, penurious throne, the self-sufficient dowager, ready with the quick fix for family trouble, the four hundred dollars she gave me a case in point.

  “You know, Billy,” said Molly, “when your father came home during the war I called and invited him for dinner, lunch, anything, just to get him back in the family. But he hung up on me and wouldn’t answer my calls.”

  “I went to see him at the ball park,” Peter said. “He told me he was too busy to talk to me. He wasn’t a forgiving man, your father. Always difficult.”

  “I got along with him,” Billy said. “So did Peg.”

  “I’m glad somebody did,” Peter said.

  “He gave Billy his old baseball glove,” Peg said.

  “Sure, why not?” said Peter. “Can you imagine him telling Billy not to take this money?”

  Billy fell silent.

  “I’m going to take some pictures of the table,” Giselle said with perfect timing
. “I’ll use your camera and tripod, Orson,” and she went up the back stairs, knowing exactly where my camera equipment was.

  “I feel like an interloper,” Roger said, “but I might as well get it straight. What was Francis doing at the ball park? I thought he lived on the road.”

  I pointed to Billy for the answer, and he gave me the back of his hand.

  “Don’t bug out on us, Billy,” I said.

  “Who’s buggin’ out?”

  “Francis came home in 1942 to help the family when he thought Billy was being drafted,” I said. “Francis stayed close to Annie till he died, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah, he did,” Billy said.

  Giselle came down with the camera and flash and set them up on the tripod in the back parlor. Nobody spoke while she did this. We waited for her to say she was ready, but she’d heard our conversation and she left the camera standing and came back to the table.

  “Francis lived up by Hawkins Stadium, the ball park,” I said, “isn’t that so, Billy?”

  “Hoffman’s Hotel,” Billy said. “Eight rooms with a saloon. Old-timey street guys and barflies, newspapermen with no teeth and dyin’ ballplayers, an elephant graveyard. But Francis was in good shape for a guy who bent his elbow so much, and he went to all the Senators’ home games. Johnny Evers was one of the bosses of the club and he and Francis both played big-league ball at the same time, so Evers gave Francis a season pass. Those were tough days for baseball, all the young guys gettin’ drafted, and you hadda fill their shoes with kids, or old guys, or deaf guys, or guys with one arm, or one eye. Francis tells Evers he knows a guy doin’ short time in a Buffalo jail hits the ball a mile and does Evers want him? Evers says hell yes and hires the guy when he gets out and hires Francis as a coach. Francis, he’s sixty-two and he suits up, ain’t played a game of ball for maybe twenty-eight years and he’s out there telling kids and cripples never to swing at the first pitch, and how to steal bases and rattle the pitcher, when to play close in, when to go deep. Ripper Collins is managin’ and he pinch-hits Francis, puts him in for the hit and run, or the sacrifice, because Francis can still bloop it to right once in a while, and he’s champ with the bunt, lays it down the line, soft, easy, never lost the touch. He runs like a three-legged goat, takes him two weeks to get to first base but it don’t matter. He’s out from the go but the runner gets to second or third. I seen him do this half a dozen times before they drafted me, December, and I’m gone eight months I’m back out with a bad eye. Francis is coachin’ third, and they’re writin’ stories about him, and the con he talked Johnny Evers into signin’ is knifed dead on a dance floor hustlin’ somebody’s wife. Dangerous game, baseball. And there I am in a box behind third and there’s the old man, movin’ like a cricket, and while I’m watchin’ him he falls over in the baseline. You can’t get up? I’m up and over the fence, on the field, and they got a stretcher comin’, take him down to Memorial. I’m in a cab behind the ambulance but it don’t make no difference. He’s dead before his chin hits the dirt.”

  Giselle said, “The chocolates,” and got up from her chair and went to the kitchen. When she came back with the box of candy I saw she’d been crying. Molly saw it too.

  “Everything all right, dear?” Molly asked.

  “Oh, sure,” said Giselle.

  “What is it?” Peter asked.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “It’s Francis,” I said.

  Giselle opened the candy and put it in front of Peter. “There’s strawberry pie for dessert,” she said, “but I know you love chocolate.”

  “Francis?” Peter said, looking at her.

  “It was more Billy,” she said. “The image I had of him climbing the fence to help his father.”

  “Wire fence,” Billy said. “Keeps you from swallowin’ foul balls.”

  “Nobody in my family would’ve done that, climbed a fence, or even thought about it,” Giselle said. “We were so full of hate for one another.”

  “Your mother?” said Molly. “Your father?”

  “When my mother died my oldest brother cremated her the same day with no funeral service, so no friends or family could see her.”

  “Stuff like that happened here,” Billy said.

  “But today everybody’s at the same table,” Giselle said. “That never happened in my family after I was six and it never could. Hate is a cancer, and even when it fades, something awful takes its place. I know, because I hate my brothers. I hate them.”

  When no one chose to ask her why, she said, “So I want to take a photo now. Turn your chairs and look toward the camera.”

  “Oh, good, a picture,” Peg said. “Danny raves about you. He says you take wonderful pictures.”

  “Danny is just being friendly,” Giselle said, and I agreed. Danny was compulsively friendly.

  “You should be in the picture,” Peter said to Giselle.

  “I will be.”

  And so another formal photograph in modern Phelan family history came into existence; my second with my father, Peter’s first with Billy and Peg, and so on. The new combinations were quantifiable. Giselle, eminently photogenic, set the shutter, hurried back to her chair, and imposed a smile on the film that was as natural as sunshine and equally radiant.

  We were a family soon to disappear from this form, from these chairs, from this place. The diaspora would be complete in, what, four, three, two years? Barring a miracle, Peter would die in the months ahead. Molly could go on for years, but even with a housekeeper (and she could afford one) she wouldn’t stay here alone. And Giselle and I? Ah, now, there’s a rub.

  Whether or not we would now stay here for an extended time was a new question. But she was responsible for my being here (I see no need to run through the tissue of causation) and therefore obliquely responsible as well for this day of reunification, this time of our dawning into unity (as Keats put it), if indeed it was unity, if indeed it was dawning; and perhaps she would also be responsible for us reordering the house to accommodate a modern married couple, with nursery. The very thought of these things was so exotically afield of my present consciousness that I could only look at it all as a freakish turn of fate. The lives we had known for five years were about to be superseded. But by what?

  My personal agenda was to finish the book on Peter’s art, and finish also this memoir, of which Walker Pettijohn had seen two-thirds. He professed to admire it, this time with editorial associates supporting publication, but a contract awaited completion of the manuscript, and I detected no confidence in Walker that the book would sell more than forty copies. I no longer needed survival money, but I yearned for proof that I was not chartering to myself in the forest, making no sound.

  Giselle said the book made her weep, a rare occurrence (her weeping at Billy climbing the fence was the only time I’d ever seen her in tears). She’d read it the weekend I threaded her needle’s eye with such rare, if unverifiable, significance, and told me this book was the fulfillment of the intuition that had helped convince her to marry me: that she knew, without understanding why she knew, the value of the way I wrote and thought about this family. I’d shown her the early version of the book and talked to her about the family as if I’d owned it, when I was actually drawing out unknown, unspoken impressions of people to whom I had only tenuous connection, none of my impressions really authentic, all of them as much a creation as one of Peter’s sketches. Yet this talk insinuated itself into some receptive corner of Giselle’s imagination, and she concluded that one day I’d write a meaningful work about the family; and she wanted to be part of that. And all along I’d thought it was my romantic charm that got her.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you liked what I wrote?”

  “I didn’t know how to say it. Maybe I didn’t like it so much either. Maybe I only liked how you talked about it. But now you write better. And I think I think better.”

  “My artistic soul drew you to Colonie Street.”

  “You might say that.”

>   It ran through my mind that I might also say it was her desire for a safe haven in which to ride out the pregnancy that drew her here; or the lure of this new money coming my way (in fair measure because of her work) as a cushion for the future; or her weariness with being a pioneer feminist in a man’s world; or the realization that one-night stands only exacerbate solitude; or perhaps she’d had advance knowledge that Quinn was about to settle down with one woman. (“Does that change your mind about him, now that he’s getting married?” she asked me, to which I replied, “Why should it? It didn’t change his when I got married.”)

  There was always the possibility that she genuinely perceived her psychic transformation into motherhood as an idea whose time had come. But even if she was luxuriating in it (Mother Giselle: it landed with an oxymoronic bounce in my consciousness), what was her view of remarriage? Perhaps it was as ambivalent as my own view of this particular paternity.

  The proposed renaming of the putative grandson, the unnamed fetus, would be the occasion for reaffirming the matrimonial vows and the sacrament; but a year or more ago I had decided that fathering a child with Giselle could turn into a crime against the unborn, predestining trouble for the product of this all-but-doomed union I had also anesthetized my anguish glands, had learned how not to be a Giselle addict, how not to fall into a neurasthenic droop when she left the room. I had, in reaction, found abundant, even raucous solace with other women, for, without ever having proof of Giselle’s infidelity, I believed in it. How not to, knowing her as I had? “I never did anything bad,” she once said with moderate conviction, but that changed nothing for me; and this vast unknown, this black riddle, I do believe, was the erosive element that had destroyed my acceptance of the marriage as a temporary game of long-distance singles.

  But now here she came with her renovated interiors, telling me that she had learned how to think, had learned how to be a mother; in effect, that she had grown into the marriage the way a child grows into a garment two sizes too large. But she could know little of how her physical condition would transform her in the months ahead, or what it would be like not to work at what she did so well, or what remarriage and the fusion with this family in the name of a name would do to her, or what our arm’s-length connubiality had done to me. She might even come to think of her own name (Gisel in Old English, Giall in the Old Irish) as her fate: for the word means “hostage.”