What I Lived For

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Jerome, dear?—are you all right?”

  Anxious, and fussy, like all women, his aunt peered into his face, gently waking him from his trance. He mumbled a reply. He did not lift his eyes to hers.

  And now he was in the aisle, urged along, Uncle Sean leading the way and it was not Jerome himself but his body on numbed legs shuffling forward to the communion rail where the old priest, eyes ghastly as Death, stood waiting.

  It was the supreme moment of the mass. It was the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. It was a mystery, one of the sacred mysteries. Jerome knew his catechism, Jerome had been taught and had memorized, this is my body and this is my blood, the body of Christ is present in the communion wafer and the blood of Christ is present in the wine drunk by the priest. You must be in a state of grace cleansed and absolved of all sin to take communion to take the body of Christ into your mouth but he was not in a state of grace and would never again be in a state of grace and he did not care, now his father was dead. He’d paid not the slightest attention to the Latin mass, and this too was a sin, his gaze drifting unseeing over the glittering flower-bedecked altar, over the tall slender figure of Jesus Christ crowned in thorns and bright droplets of blood on His plaster forehead, His crimson heart exposed, well fuck Jesus Christ who hadn’t saved Tim Corcoran from dying, fuck God who was helpless or indifferent or not-there, fuck old Father Sullivan with bloodshot eyes, palsied fingers, fuck Bishop Healey who would come to Our Lady of Mercy to say mass for Jerome’s confirmation class next year, yes and fuck Pope John XXIII. A spasm of laughter threatened. But if he laughed he’d shit his pants.

  Tim Corcoran had not died in a state of grace, he’d died in a state of mortal sin, you knew that. Theresa had teased and begged him about going to confession so he could take communion, if for no other reason than to please his mother, the old woman took such things seriously and why not, who knows, play it safe, my God the man hadn’t done his Easter duty from last March, Theresa laughed, call yourself a Catholic?—though in truth she preferred men who showed no great concern for the Church, weak men made her impatient. What if you die in a state of mortal sin, Tim, ever think of that? she’d poked him in the ribs but of course she hadn’t meant any of it, hadn’t believed he would ever die, nor had Tim Corcoran, winking at his son over Theresa’s shoulder as he’d hugged her stopping her hands from slapping at him, Then I’ll go straight to hell, eh?—plenty of Corcorans already there.

  His aunt was guiding him, it seemed she must love him though he was not her child, they were kneeling at the communion rail like a family except instead of his father there was Uncle Sean and instead of his mother there was Aunt Frances and he understood that the house at 8 Schuyler Place of which his parents had been so proud would be sold and he would return to Irish Hill to live with his uncle and aunt, this time on Roosevelt Street which was just around the corner from the old house at 1191 Barrow Street and maybe his mother would come to live there too, and maybe she would not.

  He was kneeling. It would be all right. Behind them others were lined up to take communion, even a solemn high requiem mass was a celebration of the Roman Catholic faith, this is my body and this is my blood, it was what must be done, you did it like the rest and it did not matter because none of it touched you. Jerome let his head fall slightly back as he’d been instructed, it was his body and not him, as the dead man in the coffin was his father’s body and not his father, he shut his eyes obediently and opened his mouth so that the tasteless dry wafer could be placed on his tongue, he heard the old priest muttering the words his father had scorned as a dead language, he smelled the old priest’s breath which was like fumes, it was all right, it was fine, fuck you all, he got through it without laughing, yes and without shitting his pants.

  7

  He understood what was needed from him, yet he could not lie.

  He understood, yes he was the only witness, yet he could not lie.

  He ran away from them, from their eyes, climbing steep stairs to find himself at last at a high window in an unheated attic of his uncle’s house on Roosevelt Street where never in his life had he been before, and so suddenly happy.

  With his fingernails he scraped frost off the windowpane, then breathed on the glass, so that he could see out. Beyond snowy rooftops, beyond the descent of Irish Hill to the lake, were thick, swollen storm clouds at the horizon, above Lake Erie, where lightning winked and flashed with no sound.

  Or maybe not lightning: the glow of the industrial sky, the tall fire-rimmed smokestacks of U.S. Steel, Union City Rubber, the chemical refining plants, floodlit high-tension power lines. It was dusk, quickly darkening to night, the boundaries between earth, lake, and sky were ambiguous. And he was drunk.

  I can’t, he told them, again and again he’d told them, you don’t listen, I didn’t see it, and they said, You saw, Jerome, but you don’t remember, if you were standing by that window and looking out that window you saw, and he told them, his voice rising in despair, and in anger too, I didn’t, it was too dark, it happened too fast, don’t tell me what I saw.

  And finally they gave up, the hell with it, and with him.

  Not that they were angry with him really—an eleven-year-old kid who’d just lost his father. But they saw the futility of it, coaching Tim Corcoran’s son who was too much like Tim Corcoran, bulldog-stubborn, a mind once made up and not to be changed by persuasion.

  Always he would remember their disappointment in him, adult male pity tinged with exasperation and disgust. Fuck you, he thought, wiping roughly at his eyes.

  He thought, Would it bring my father back from the dead, if I lied?

  Downstairs, two floors below, voices rose, beginning to get loud. Occasional laughter. A crowd of them jammed into the house, for the funeral dinner, so-called. It had begun shortly after 1 P.M. and was going strong, indeed gaining momentum, as the day too veered drunkenly to dark. Jerome, fatherless and motherless, had eluded his aunt’s anxious eye and accepted from his uncle a glass one-quarter filled with ale, dark, powerfully bitter, Tim’s favored drink, and many a man favored it, Twelve Horse Ale it was, a barrel of it brought over by Davy Kiernan who owned Seneca House Bar & Grill. He’d drunk it swiftly down and this pleased the men and Uncle Sean laughed and poured him another, this time half-full, and this too Jerome drank, a little more slowly yet not less purposefully.

  Just like his old man, oh sweet fucking Christ.

  Later, unwatched, he drank from glasses set down and forgotten, beer, ale, wine, whiskey, a giddy mix of tastes in the mouth and the surprise of fumes rising like twin white-hot wires through the nasal passages and up into the skull and the yet more profound astonishment of the sensation of heat, burning, going down, coating the throat with fire. He had little appetite for food (so much! a feast! the Corcoran women had prepared most of it but others from the neighborhood had brought a good deal too, the table in the dining room opened to its full length and warmly illuminated by both tall Christmas-red candles and the Irish crystal chandelier overhead, bowls of food, steaming casseroles, roast beef and leg of lamb and a gigantic roast turkey and an enormous Virginia ham, loaves of freshly baked bread) but the appetite for drink, he quickly discovered, had no need to be stimulated: it stimulated itself, a thirst that grew in intensity even as it was seemingly satisfied.

  Through Irish Hill and no doubt through much of Union City in those frigid waning days of 1959 there were few topics of conversation other than the murder of Timothy Patrick Corcoran, the newspapers too were full of it, even among the man’s detractors there was a keen sense of loss and outrage and an impatience that would grow as police reported they were questioning many people, there were indeed suspects, yet no arrests yet, for there were no eyewitnesses to the murder or thus far none had come forward. There were rumors that Tim Corcoran had been gunned down because he’d thumbed his nose, and publicly, at Al Fenske who was president of the Trade Union Council, everyone knew you did not challenge Fenske, or was it that Tim Corcoran had crossed the Teamsters
too many times, and this publicly as well. Or had he reneged on a deal (this, Sean Corcoran furiously rejected) to pay off one of the mob-connected aides in Mayor Buck Glover’s administration after the City Council voted to award the contract for the addition to City Hall, the biggest local contract in years, to Corcoran Brothers Construction Co. . . . for the contract had gone to the Corcorans, as the Union City Journal had revealed in headlines, though their bid had not been the lowest, but, in a short list of six, second highest. (To which implied charge one of Buck Glover’s aides issued the statement: The Mayor knows that quality costs. A low bid means low-quality work.)

  These things Jerome knew, and ran up the stairs to escape knowing. Carrying with him a bottle of Schlitz beer which boldly he’d opened in his aunt’s kitchen, for by late afternoon the crowd was such through the house, the very air porous with the bluish gray smoke of cigarettes and cigars, no one was likely to take notice of anything he did if he acted, not with childish subterfuge, but with adult purposefulness and authority.

  In the attic he groped for a light switch, shut the door with his foot. But no one would be following him. No one knew he was here.

  He stood at the window, he drank, and when the bottle was empty he set it carefully atop an old piece of furniture where somehow it fell and rolled aggressively over his foot.

  Never race a train.

  He giggled, hearing that voice, and drew his sleeve roughly beneath his God-damned nose which was running again. The funeral was over, the specter of Death shunted aside. There were places that knew nothing of it, this attic for instance. The massed storm-heavy clouds with their lightning flashes and their look of mute impacted rage.

  Of Jerome’s mother it was evasively said that she was not quite strong enough for visitors, even for Jerome, and he did not ask a word of her, for he knew better. Even before this catastrophe he knew that you did not freely ask to hear news which you did not want to hear for all good news is told you without your needing to ask.

  Theresa had been hospitalized in the past. How many times Jerome chose not to recall. She’d had what was called, so oddly, mis-carriages, he’d mouthed the strange word aloud, mis-carriages, thinking of a horse-drawn carriage overturned and falling into the road, and each had been more terrible than the one preceding, and had required a lengthier stay in the hospital, so he did not ask a word, he stared down at his feet and stood dry-eyed, sullen. Once, he’d told a friend of his what was wrong with his mother, not knowing fully what the word meant, but having an idea, mis-carriage he’d said, and the other boy had looked at him in fearful derision, A what? what? and shortly the two were laughing wildly and punching each other. And never did Jerome tell any of his friends again why his mother was in the hospital, nor did he ask any adult about her condition except in the most general terms.

  He did recall how, when Mommy was in the hospital those other times, Daddy was likely to get drunk.

  Which would not be happening now, would it.

  When they’d told him Theresa would not be coming home for the funeral, nor was she ready for visitors, Jerome’s muttered response had been a quick O.K.

  He was a little dizzy from drinking but it felt good, it felt just right. He pressed his warm forehead against the windowpane and took true comfort from the freezing glass.

  He understood his uncle and the detectives would not trouble him again about the car he had not seen, all that was over. Yes and fuck them for he knew they’d been complaining bitterly of him beyond his earshot, well it wasn’t to be helped.

  Scared cards can’t win, a scared man can’t love.

  Westward the lake lay flat and dully gleaming. At this distance of about a mile and a half its surface appeared featureless, like tin, though, in the perpetual turmoil of wind out of Canada, it would be rough, choppy. Strings of cheap-looking red and green Christmas lights on Dalkey Street dipped toward the waterfront to dissolve in a snarl of glaring, winking lights at the Millard Fillmore Expressway. Those mutely flashing lights beyond might be lightning, or just the lakeshore factories, he squinted but couldn’t see. And did it matter. Fuck it, it didn’t matter.

  The buoyant sensation in his skull so like a balloon filled not just with helium gas but with light and warmth. And his veins coursing too with light and warmth. So the cold up here in the attic, his breath in puffs of steam, did not matter. He understood why his father had liked to drink and why the men downstairs were drinking and why, when at last guests rose to leave, Sean Corcoran grabbed at their sleeves and bawled at them to sit the hell down, it was early yet. Yes and fucking Christmas too, if anybody remembered.

  How heavy his eyelids suddenly. He slid to the floor, seeing pinwheels of sparkling lights. Thunder erupted but this time it was muffled as in cotton batting and he saw again the shadowy shape of the car, tires spinning against the icy pavement, then taking hold, the car leaping forward. He saw no faces, he saw no license plate numbers, he stared but did not see, he was blind and could not see, yes and paralyzed too, on the cusp of sleep and then over and inside and safe there until such time as a light would be switched on overhead, hours later, and a man’s voice would cry half in reproach, “Poor little bugger, there he is.”

  Part I

  Friday, May 22, 1992

  1

  “Nicest Guy in Union City, New York”

  What the fuck’s holding us up?”

  Bright gusty morning like flags flying, the kind of day you’re God-damned glad just to be alive and breathing and what’s this: a traffic jam?

  Corky’s more incredulous than angry. Hitting his horn with his fist. Held up?—now?

  He’s driving south on Brisbane, a familiar route, in a familiar nerved-up state along this route meaning sex is imminent, delicious in anticipation, and suddenly God damn a Fed Ex van just ahead of his car brakes to a stop, and Jerome Andrew Corcoran, “Corky” to people he trusts, hits the brakes of his newly purchased $35,000 Cadillac De Ville, lowers his window and leans out—“Hey, shithead, what the hell?”

  Corky Corcoran’s what you’d call an aggressive driver. Doesn’t like surprises on the road unless they’re his own.

  The one place a man’s got to be in control for Christ’s sweet sake is his car. Right?

  Beyond the Fed Ex van, though, there’s a snarl of traffic. Looks like a complete fuck-up through the intersection at Fourth, up the block as far as Corky, leaning out his window, squinting, can see. Must be an accident? God damn, just his luck. 10:48 A.M. and he’s on his way to Christina’s, wants to get there by 11 at least since he’s got an important lunch date, fuck it he’s going to be late and it pisses him to be late when it’s somebody else’s fault not his own.

  Out on the street there’s this lone cop, young guy, trying to deal with traffic jammed in four directions. Where’s his backup? The UCPD’s undermanned, last year’s budget cuts hurt like hell, but this is ridiculous: one cop! The problem can’t be street repair, Corky knows this stretch of Brisbane like the back of his hand and there’s no roadwork going on.

  Corky knows his way around Union City, New York, like it’s the back of his hand, it’s his. That time the Mayor told one of his new staff members, new to Union City, at a postelection lunch. You want to know about Union City, go hang out with Corky Corcoran, eh Corky?—he’s your man.

  Jerome Andrew Corcoran, Democrat, City Council member, businessman, a popular guy, “Corky.”

  Forty-three years old. Not young but anyway not old. And he looks a lot younger, a virtual kid sometimes, still.

  Assets at about $2 million. Maybe more?

  On a terrific morning like this, spring in upstate New York after a wet rainy-sleety winter, rainstorms all last week, as far as Corky’s concerned, his life’s just getting started.

  He’s got Christina Kavanaugh, and he’s got plans. Even she doesn’t know about yet.

  That song of the Stones Corky’d be humming under his breath, sophomore year at St. Thomas Aquinas—Time is on my side.

  Traffic mo
ves forward a few jerky yards like hiccups then stops. Shit! Corky’s all but stalled his heart pounding in a fury as if he’s been personally insulted in his gleaming-glittering Caddy that’s the sexiest car he’s ever owned (Corky says this about all his cars and always means it: this one is) on his way to an assignation with Christina Kavanaugh who’s the sexiest woman he’s ever been involved with (Corky says this about all his women and always means it but in absolute truth, Christina is), God damn he’s got to watch it his blood pressure’s up. That weird tightening sensation in the chest, not pain, more like a shadow of pain, or a hint of it, a warning, pain to come.

  But no, don’t think of that now, shithead.

  Where’s he? Brisbane below Fourth? A new mini-plaza off this busy street, developed by a business rival of Corcoran, Inc.’s, and Corky sees with satisfaction two of the stores are vacant, FOR LEASE. Bush’s recession, fucking high interest rates, IRS on everybody’s ass except the big money boys the top Fortune fucks tight as two fingers up the ass with the Administration, don’t tell me this is a free country. Bailing out the savings and loan scumbags, should chop their fingers, ears, balls off, like in—where? Turkey, Burma. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. You don’t fuck around with that kind of justice.

  There’s a Gap store in the Brisbane Mini-Plaza, though—trendy place, that kind of funky-sexy big-sweater look, cotton knits, pants with fly fronts for girls, when Corky was a step-Daddy (sad, how long ago: he misses it) he’d take his lunch break in the fashionable downtown stores, what’s the word, “boutiques,” buying things for Thalia, sometimes for Charlotte though Charlotte’s taste was hard to predict. Shopping for women’s clothes, lingerie, the very word “lingerie” a turn-on, Jesus. Christina lying back on that sofa of hers in the silky-lacy black slip he’d bought for her, sexy as hell and meant half as a joke but, Jesus, it’s no joke the power of a woman like that over a man, Corky’s sick with love for her and anxious something’s going to happen, he’s had bad luck with women Christ knows. And no fault of his own.