All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  It wasn’t until my mother started wearing tailor-made buckskin suits with beading on the sleeves and came home with a hickey on her neck that my father turned really sullen and silent. He had nothing to say. It looked like whatever he’d had to say had been taken from him. He’d sit there and stare at her and she’d stare at him but he didn’t do anything. She’d brush her teeth and then hunker down over a plate of dry toast, looking more and more morose. She’d brush her teeth again. Late one afternoon I saw in her eyes for the first time the laughter like a skull laughs. Knowing laughter, the laughter of someone who’s come unlatched. Finally he said to her, “What’s that on your neck?” and she said, “Love bites, love bites back.” Every day, she ordered boxes of fresh-cut flowers. She kept putting flowers all over the house. “Why don’t you order in some coffins, too?” he said. He looked like he was going to cry. I felt sorry for him, and hated him. I didn’t want to feel sorry for my father. She put on and then took off her racing gloves, going nowhere. He started prowling the house, opening dresser drawers, sifting through her underclothes, opening closets, not looking for anything, just sifting, like he was rehearsing his training at cop school, sometimes talking out loud. She said, “I loved you, maybe I still love you, but I don’t care.” He took his putter out of his golf bag and went into the living room. “You don’t care. You don’t fucking care.” There was a lime-green portable plastic putting hole on the rug in front of the fireplace. He dropped a ball on the rug and lined up a putt. “If it’s any consolation,” she said, “it’s a woman.” He stroked the ball straight into the hole.

  “A woman,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “Eleanor McGuane.”

  “Eleanor fuckin’ McGuane?”

  “Yes.”

  He broke her head with his putting iron, blood all over his white shirt and the white rug. He called the police, warning me not to interfere. “Don’t fucking interfere. Don’t get in the way.” When the police came, and the ambulance men, too, he was sitting up close to the television set though it wasn’t on, staring into the blank grey tube, and he was listening to shepherd flutes, softly humming along with Zamfir. I wanted to haul the old lawnmower up into the room and mow everything there was on the floor around the room to make him stop his humming. I could feel a silent scream in space, my space, a scream of outrage. I knew nothing was going to correct itself, no seam was going to be healed, nothing crooked was going to end up straight. He just sat stiff-lipped, hardly said a word to the police, and they treated him with something that looked like baffled awe. I was suffocating, swallowing words although I didn’t have anything to say, almost hysterical, as they wheeled my mother out on a stretcher. She was still breathing. I could see I was going to be all alone. Whether she lived or not. Alone. As my father stood up to go to the patrol car, I cried, “Don’t worry about me, Dad,” and he said, “I am not worried about you, I’m worried about me.” A cop standing beside me said without looking at me, “The goddamn selfish fuckhead,” and I said, “No, no, he doesn’t mean it like that, not like that. That’s just Shakey Jake talking.”

  I think, My father tried to kill my mother, and then I am swamped by shame, which makes me laugh, and then I fall silent. I limp home.

  “Despair is silent. But even silence has a meaning if the eyes speak. And if despair speaks, then we are not alone.” My mother’s eyes are on me, my father’s eyes are on her. I watch as they watch me.

  We are not alone. We are a family.

  SILENT MUSIC

  He woke in the morning and had a little orange juice. He went to the front sunroom of the old family house. He sat in his ladder-back chair and stared at the rag rug and then he went up to the window and stood close to the glass, looking into the pane, listening to the birdsong along the back of my earbone, the soundless sound Mother said was heaven-sent, sitting in her hair curlers in front of the window with the worn lace curtains frittered to pieces from too much sunlight and washing, staring through strings of light and pinholes at the black dog out there on the other side of the window,

  and unless your eye hears the dog’s lower lip dripping spittle, his tongue hanging there between two white teeth, unless you hear his breathing how can you know the heat of him on your hand like the heat from the firebox when I was a boy, Ansel Mohr in his mid-thirties, and Mother had her own birdsong along the back of her earbone, tapping it out on her little triangle in the old folks’ band like an inkling of something left out of her life when she knew what was left out was love, except she always called me her love child since a father was nowhere, never known by me, so I guess what was left out was the word of love spoken, which he had heard on a cold winter night when he was a child, the firebox in the kitchen stove blazing, and she was huddled over the telephone, talking in a low voice: “I am grateful, you know that, but it’s been hard, so alone, and never your voice even, let alone a touch.”

  Ansel had gone into his bedroom, to the bunk bed his mother had bought on sale, saying, “It’ll give you an extra place to play, like a sandbox, a little bed-box in the sky,” and sometimes he slept on the bottom, sometimes on top, always aware there was an empty box above or below, and he found his teddy bear under the bed. He loved his teddy bear. He slept with the bear every night. Then he went to the bathroom. He took his mother’s only bottle of perfume and doused the bear. He waited until she had hung up the phone, sitting in the shadows with her head in her hand, staring at the floor. He gave her the bear. Surprised, she held the bear at arm’s length, startled by the scent, and then, seeing the empty bottle in his hand, she flew into a fury. She squeezed the bear and it cried out. She opened the firebox door and hurled the bear into the fire, where, for a second, he saw it come alive as a torch, on its back, and he closed his eyes as she slammed the door and went to bed.

  Early in the cold morning, when the fire was out and before she woke, he opened the grate and sifted the ashes and found a small round silver voice-box filled with little holes, which he wrapped in a white handkerchief because he thought it was the teddy bear’s heart, and sometimes I listened as if the pockmarked moon could speak, a peering eye blinking as baffled as my mother, the echo eye of her sitting there sucking on her pain like an all-day sucker, sweat-faced in front of the fire, full of disdain, of disappointment, or sitting in a deck chair in the garden, splay-legged in the shade of huge sunflowers, smiling and whispering to herself. Years later I offered her the silver voice-box while she was knitting, the needles clicking like clocks gone crazy, syncopated to the stitch dropped, and she laid down the knitting and said, “What’s that?” turning it over and reading Acme Toy Company, patent pending, always this impending dread, sometimes looking down at my feet to see if my legs are there, spinning around to see if suddenly he’s there, the faceless face between my hands lips moving, staring into nowhere in the silence between my hands, turning around to see that one day she wasn’t there either, and when she died the Requiem Mass was celebrated in a stone church. It rained. The slate roof glistened through the black branches of maples. There were a dozen parish people he did not know: white-faced women in loose sack suits, a man with his trouser cuffs rolled into his socks, and the smell of Old Spice, Cepacol, and incense, and there were old ladies, and men from the rest home carrying white straw boaters. They held on to each other’s hands at the ringing of the bells, the suffering Christ with His arms wide open, leaping off the cross, ecstatic, and choirboys sang as Ansel came down the aisle behind Father Cooper and the tight-lipped professional pallbearers, a dryness at the core, remembering his mother long before she had begun carrying bundles under her arms, back when she had, over a cup of tea, told him, “Life is all patchwork,

  and if your father had ever married me that would have been the end of the Mohrs. But here you are, you’re a Mohr, and that means there’s meaning still in this house, though it’s not much of a house, frame and all, but the fire in t
he kitchen is nice. I always liked an open fire,” an open wound, suppuration of silent words, a long line of fathers foreskinning for all they were worth, unknown, unsaid, alone in ice-cold space as we’re all alone in the absence of God with only His mother, the mother of God, out there in black face, alone herself, the queen of the world, and when he was a boy, he’d found that nearly all the women on the street were secret drinkers, and sometimes they screamed at each other and stomped around their front lawns. Sons and fathers were dead from the war and women were left alone. Young boys sometimes found wine corks between pillows on a sofa, or Mrs. Gladdery in her rose bushes on her hands and knees, little thorn cuts on her bare arms, saying, “No, no, naughty boy,” soft yet firm when she sunbathed on the flat tin roof of the back of her house and she had him run his hand along the inside of her thighs into the hollow but never let him touch her like she touched him,

  and one day she rubbed him, saying didn’t he do that before going to sleep like her little Stuart did, and she said he had to promise he’d never tell Stuart about being up on the roof, “But of course you don’t talk to anyone, do you?” and she laughed, her robe hanging from a spike, like the old limp red inner tubes in the garage down the lane, dead snakes, where, after the war Mother found a snakeskin floating in the rain barrel and three dead birds and she put the skin into the stove and nailed the birds to the porch wall and the skeletons were hanging there all summer whenever I went past a fat middle-aged man down the lane who always sat on a three-legged stool in front of a garage, loose-mouthed and laughing quietly, wearing a string undershirt, and making endless paper planes out of a pile of newspapers at the end of the lane by the underpass, a damp stretch of darkness under railroad tracks and thirty or forty trains went through every day and he used to stand under the bridge, the rumbling of the freight train wheels making him tremble and shake, the weight of the sound almost painful and yet he wanted it, and when it went away he scrambled up the gravel embankment and stood watching the caboose disappear, and maybe Father was a caboose man, and one day his mother said, “I will say this, he could play the piano like the devil,” showing me a pile of sheet music, grey walls of paper like the grey walls of Silverwood’s, a long dairy building with loading doors and ramps back when milk wagons were horse-drawn and the short street was covered with spilled milk – sour and yellow-white – curdled cheese and horse piss and dung, road apples the other boys had called them, with sparrows feeding on the dung, and then a man usually appeared leading a line of horses and Ansel stared at the shaggy hair around their hoofs and their slow walk with sometimes huge erections, and the men gawked and turned away, frowning. The horses looked as if they were laughing, their lips curled back like the laughing man making paper airplanes and up the hill there was a huge castle stone house behind walls, and he knew from his mother that a man named Pellatt had bankrupted himself building that house, though he wasn’t sure then what bankrupted meant and anyway

  it was the name Pellatt I liked because I wanted a pellet gun and maybe when my father showed up I might shoot him in the leg, not to kill, only to wound, and when sometimes Stuart and I went on scouting missions through the brush along the walls, they got to the top of the hill, to a garden of flowers in diamond patterns. One day a lady appeared in a long dress and Stuart whispered, “Look at that. A princess, a real princess.” As she turned around Stuart said, “Oh shit, some princess,” because, with her hooded eyes, she seemed tired and worn down, and she looked to Ansel just like his mother and the women who drank too much because they were sitting by themselves waving lace handkerchiefs at children, and all his life with every woman he met he smiled sadly as if he understood their loneliness and need for a little comfort. He became good at comforting lonely women, though he was not sure he had ever been able to comfort his mother, because even as a child with his head against her breast he had heard her heart pounding and had looked up, listening to her whisper about the colour of dawn before the sun, and the same grey, except with lustre and a little pink, that she had seen in pearls when she worked for a while in a jewellery store, and glass how she loved glass and a blue vase she’d bought, an egg-blue that turned rose in the sunlight, and she said, “That’s the way life could be if we only had the strength, and I’ve all the wonder in the world but no strength.” Then before she went to the rest home she said, “And the truth is, I’ve loved my disappointment, kept it close like fine silk and now I’m going to lie down in it. A silken shroud is not to be sneezed at,”

  and he walked out of the church behind the casket into pouring rain, and a high east wind blew the rain into the headlights of the few cars going along the road toward the cemetery, past Red-bone’s Bar-B-Q, an old movie house turned into All-New Asian Age Rubbing Parlour, a stone war memorial to the fallen in the Korean War, and Heritage Used Cars. She was buried beside headstones covered with wet fallen leaves, neon crosses, and a plastic Sacred Heart on a tin prop. The hard rain was slanting. Father Cooper said the prayers, and coming from where she’d eventually ended up, the members of her old folks’ band knelt in the pouring rain. A woman said to her friend, “She was a true Christian in the Christian community.”

  “Oh, and outside, too,” her friend added.

  Father Cooper and the old men and women stood close and chanted, “Hear us, O Lord… Hear us,” as they bent head first into the rain under black umbrellas suddenly blown up and inside-out by the wind, up into the air like huge black tulips, and in the cat’s eye a dead bird, like once at the lake the trees lichen-lined down the north side of the trunks, lace, mildewed green, always lace in decaying grace, and the fox snake in the low-hanging branch curled around a bird’s nest like an old bicycle tire looped on top of itself, waiting cold in the strong sunlight, the nest, her nest, her bare breasts, that naked young girl one time and how she stood there still sticks in my mind, high-heeled, calf muscles hard and me hard, smiling little girl, and me hunching down in front of her sucking on her breast, the little indent in the nipple, her fingers inside my collar fingering my hair and my middle finger hooking up inside her, warm, thumb on her hair almost silky until she says, “I’ll do you there on the white rug. You see, I like you,” and I could hear worms in the walls and Mother singing rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub, and why were dirty old drinking men called rubby-dubs afloat in a washtub, thankful for her down there prayerful between my legs wondering what to do what to do, not so much who, as why, why at all am I anywhere in this whole world actually here in the kitchen where he sat down with one of his mother’s hat boxes. But he didn’t open it. He folded his arms and listened, wondering if the voice he heard could be his own. The phone sat angled off the hook. He heard the low hum and then the warning bleeps. He didn’t know why he kept the phone now that she was dead. It was of no use to him. He hung up the phone.

  There was a saucer on the table, a slice of dry toast, orange peels in a cup, a loose mound of envelopes and bills, an old wind-up alarm clock with a little bell on top, and a big moon-faced magnifying glass. When he opened the hat box he found a newspaper picture of his mother as a young woman, the newsprint yellow and crumbling, with no date, no explanation. The clipping had been closely cropped. She stood smiling in a dark dress with many pleats. He held the magnifying glass close to the paper. She looked happy. There was a crease and a stain on it from a raisin in the bottom of the box. There were torn pieces of blank paper, an earring, a narrow black velvet sash, a dried-up wrist corsage, and a folded piece of lined schoolbook music paper.

  There were no notes. No clefs. No sharps. He walked down the hall to the living room and stood by the long narrow windows. There was a plate-glass mirror over the mantelpiece. His hand rested on the brocaded back of his mother’s old easy chair. Then he picked up one of her pressed-glass bowls, the pale shades of pink in the glass turning dusky rose and violet in the light strange for a woman who settled for so little to like so much changing light, and he sat humming, staring at a line of small portraits on the mantelpiece, found earlier i
n another one of her hat boxes. He didn’t know who they were. There were no names written on the backs, nothing, the grace light of zero, life saved so that it might die, like Mother, quiet and calm as grass, which she stood on, heels thick and round on her walking boots leaving little holes, zeros, a voice-box for worms in the grass, her black boots, polished, a walking woman, always forgetful of everything except when she walked alone at nights when she deliberately stepped on a sidewalk crack, whack, when she came down hard with the shoe leather, unafraid, like she was daring bad luck to take a shot at her, the way she also always walked under ladders, and brought home the black cat, cradling it even though she was allergic to cats. She had this narrow sense of herself, fierce like the sharp tin propeller blades we used to whiz up in the air when we were kids,

  like when one day Billy Mitchell whipped through the garden with a short-handled broom pole, cutting everything in sight down and Mother cuffed him so hard she split his lip, because she wasn’t going to let him get away with doing whatever he wanted to do. Billy was always getting his way, something he had learned from his grandmother, old Mrs. Hunter, so fussy and proper with her silver spokes on her polished-up gentility Ford, back when there were also wagons on the streets, horse-drawn, Silverwood’s wagons, and horseballs on the street, and her grandson Billy, he used to, when he wanted his own way as a child, stand on the street and rub road apples down all over his head til Mrs. Hunter, screaming, gave him anything he wanted. He’d stood there smiling, smeared in shit, and that’s the way all the Billys make their choice, smearing themselves in shit in the sunlight so they can do their damage, and though nearly two feet of snow had fallen that week in the season’s last March storm, he went out for a long walk browsing through the stores, watching cops in their white crash helmets like punk hoods and hopheads, their wraparound face visors, shining plastic eyes deflecting all light,