Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry

by Elizabeth McCracken

  By the end of the week, Tiny’s arm said GET WELL in letters of all different sizes.

  “Well,” he said. “It’s a little boring.”

  “It’s going to get more interesting.”

  “It better,” he told me, smiling. “Tomorrow you can put on a horseshoe for luck. Get fancy. Put on a heart for love.”

  “Okay,” I said. But he died in the night, left without my name or love, with only my good wishes on his arm.

  “What’s going to happen to you now?” my mother asked me. “What if you want to get married again? What man will want you when someone else has been scribbling all over you?”

  A month after Tiny died, Mama told me she was going to start inviting nice young men to our Sunday lunches. She bought me new outfits, unrevealing ones, and told me that we should keep my figure secret—she always referred to it as my figure, as if, over the years, I had put on a few things that could easily be taken off. I go to keep her happy, and sit on one side of the sofa while the fat divorced sons of her friends flirt with her instead of me, knowing that’ll get them further. Sometimes I eat fudge and don’t say one word all afternoon.

  Every day I get up and go to work at the library, dressed in short skirts, short sleeves, no stockings. The director has told me that I’m frightening people.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her. “These are my widow’s weeds.”

  Three weeks ago I got a letter from a young man on the coast, a tattooist who said that Tiny was a great artist and that I was proof of it. He wanted to take my photo, see the whole gallery. I packed him a box of Tiny’s things, old flash sheets and needles and pages of El Greco, and told him to study those. He called me and said I was better than any museum. I told him that I apologized, that I understood, but really: I am not a museum, not yet, I’m a love letter, a love letter.

  Some Have Entertained Angels, Unaware

  I

  My parents were not handy people. They understood nothing of plumbing, were mystified by the laying of linoleum, followed electrical lines terrified of what was at the other end. Our Victorian was cheap because it needed so much work: the stained-glass windows held only a few colored panes between their crossed fingers; the wood doors between the dining room and living room had to be threatened before they’d slide open. When I was very small, the house seemed always about to explode. Sometimes it did, in a minor way: a flood in the basement, a fire in the chimney, the birth of my brother, Jackie. When my mother died of a cerebral hemorrhage—I was six and Jackie three—Dad explained it this way: bad plumbing, faulty wiring. Beyond repair.

  Two months later, Dad started to take in strays, mostly the human sort: drunks, debtors, divorcées, deadbeats. He had a strange admiration for people unable to earn a living, gave the strangers he met in bars musty bedrooms we never even went into. The strangers began to fix things. They started with their own rooms, then crept through the house, ripping up and nailing down. Bobby Noonan, a forty-year-old flute player who refused what he thought of as demeaning gigs—under a roof, say, or for a definite fee—knew how to make a hot-water faucet live up to its promise, and handled people as smoothly. It was Bobby, smoking a pipe, who directed the poet with the waist-length hair and Fu Manchu mustache to clamber onto the roof and reshingle; it was Bobby who kept the elderly lady painter away from the paint buckets, knowing she was frequently inspired to pornographic murals. For a while Dad walked around the house, stopping to steady a ladder, hold nails in his hand. He hummed, a fond half smile on his face. Things, it could not be denied, were getting done. Mike Ianelli, the poet, worked wood into furniture and bookshelves; Gertrude, our muralist, was, at sixty-five, a startlingly good welder. I still remember the joy of discovering that the upstairs bathroom had an actual door and, what was more amazing, a toilet you could flush and flush.

  Our house grew thick with people. In the kitchen, Suzanne Peterson, pale and bitter as aspirin, stirred the dimpled pots that held our meals. Kenneth Graves, graduate student forever, meditated on the dining room table twice a day and even so was nervous enough to threaten to kill a passing Avon lady. Bobby considered him delicate, and gave him baby-sitting duty.

  Jackie and I were moved to new bedrooms in the recently refurbished attic. Mine was papered with flowers and had doll furniture Mike had made from scraps of old wood. Jackie’s room was blue, with a stark rocking horse that had a mop for a mane and a marble for its one eye—Mike again. For the first month, I slept badly: sometime before, a screech owl had flown under the eaves, and all I could remember was the flapping and Dad’s swearing. Jackie says now that Dad gave our real rooms away and banished us. But our beds were quiet and safe; only trees paced over our ceilings. I forgot the screech owl soon enough and slept better than I ever have since, there beneath the clasped hands of the roof.

  Some boarders stayed for years; others came and went quickly. Every night for a month, a fat young man named Candy cried himself to sleep in his room. Denny Horkan moved his lumpy Irish body into the corners of the house for seven weeks, leaving behind first religious tracts and then pointed personal notes (“Your on the road to hell,” the last one said. “Guess its just as well”). A man whose name we never knew—we called him Mr. Nobody—moved in and out the same day, taking with him Suzanne’s extensive spice rack. Dad considered the dullards his only mistakes. He pictured Mr. Nobody in a seedy hotel room downtown, rubbing his hands and bald head, surrounded by thin twigs of saffron, insolent cumin, whispering, “Lovely; sweet.” He imagined Denny Horkan at the gates of heaven, explaining that he tried, he tried, but there were so many sinners, and so stubborn. When a room emptied, Dad sat at the kitchen table and invented boarders for it, gave them wooden legs, trunks rattling with butterfly collections and murdered wives.

  Photographs started to clutter the mantelpiece: Jackie and Bobby at Halloween, candles beneath their chins; Jackie, at four, rushing through Cabot Woods on Mike’s shoulders; me, at seven, on Kenneth Graves’s lap in the heat of summer, both of us too skinny, elbows and knees our roundest parts, looking as if nothing could save us.

  Dad hated those people so inconsiderate as to move in, move out, never making a noise, a scene, a mark, a complaint. A good story when you left was the only rent he insisted on.

  For instance: one day at 5 A.M., a figure packed a grip, stole out the front door, and got almost all the way down the porch stairs before falling, sending clothing and bottles flying. The house woke up, one dark window at a time, and watched the fugitive pile damp shattered things into the open suitcase, then limp away, dripping cable-knit sweaters, whiskey, cusswords. The next morning we found a check for five thousand dollars on the kitchen table and half a tooth on the front walk.

  That figure was my father.

  Need more information? Dad was a librarian; he’d tell you: cross-reference. The books in his bedroom did that for you. If you looked in one, it sent you to another, which was an index to a third, which led you to a four-volume set, a yearbook, a bibliography. Even when you thought you were closing in, the last book spun you in circles inside itself: see this footnote, that article.

  My father, who had no references, was just as dizzying. He himself said that facts could always be tracked down. Find the Latin root: conjugate, decline.

  My father conjugated: go, going, lost.

  My first memory takes place somewhere dark, with light the color of honey, and as sticky. I sit low to the ground—on a curb?—and listen to a dozen voices, themselves like honey, thick and unfathomably sweet. One of my father’s dusty shoes is parked beside me, and I tie and untie it. After a while my fingers ache with the effort.

  A few years later, I realized: I was on the footrail of the Kinvaraugh pub, listening to my father get drunk.

  Before the boarders came, the bars were Dad’s best baby-sitters. At three and six, Jackie and I frequented the Black Rose, the Plough and the Stars, George’s, the Silhouette. Dad took us on his days off when the barkeeps wouldn’t mind, Sundays when we could spin on the
stools or sit right on the bar, taking occasional sips of ale from the big-mouthed glasses offered to us. Jackie liked the taste so much that beer was one of his first words. The only time Dad’s mother, a teetotaler, visited us, Jackie responded to the mid-morning crack of a can by yelling the word, loud; he rushed to the kitchen, revealing Dad in the pantry, trying to hide a fresh case of Miller behind his slim hips.

  Of course, if you tell this story in front of Jackie now, he insists it never happened.

  Dad was thin then—maybe still is—and as chinless and gloomy as a clarinet. His voice was low and musical, trilled by a stutter; it squealed with air when he was upset. My mother was as squat and brassy as Dad was narrow and reedy; the one thing I remember her saying is, “For God’s sake, Peter, talk like a grown man.”

  Dad was a good librarian, obsessed with things other people never thought of. He loved obscure comedians of the twenties and thirties, put their pictures up in his room, watched their brittle black-and-white movies on the wall as they rattled through his projector. His favorite was a burlesque team that had one member who wore greasepaint glasses drawn right on his face. They had a good story: after falling out of fame, the fellow without the glasses got depressed and was committed to a sanatorium. Two years later, he seemed better, and his partner—who was doing well as a single—came to pick him up. In the car, the asylum insignificant in the rearview mirror, they fantasized about a comeback: the halls they would play, new movies, new fame. Maybe they even believed it. Suddenly, the depressed man pointed to the slick stripes of a barber’s pole and asked his partner to stop: he wanted an old-fashioned shave, a pampering. Probably, his friend made a joke—surely after two years it would be nice to hold a sharp object in your hand—but pulled up to the curb anyhow. Inside the shop, just after the barber had lathered the pink peak of chin, the man jumped up and with one gesture grabbed the razor and slit his own throat from side to side.

  This was Dad’s favorite bedtime story.

  And that’s all I have of my father: spools of film featuring the long dead, and facts from other people’s lives. Dad handed out bits of biography the way most folks slip children candy or loose change. He kept a supply: the life of Louis Wain, mad English cat painter; the death toll of the Great Boston Molasses Flood; the way St. Catherine of Siena once caught the severed head of a sinner who, as is usual, found God seconds before the ax struck his neck, the blow so hard it jugged his ears.

  Dad kept his stories more and more to himself the longer the boarders stayed, the more work they got done. He rarely went into the rooms as they were fixed, and instead stuck to those he had always used: the kitchen, the downstairs bath, his bedroom. One late evening the boarders managed to talk him into the front parlor for a visit. Bobby told stories of his youth in South Boston, full of brogues and snatches of lullabies. Mike, our long-haired poet, jumped up and acted out some childhood crisis, speaking the parts of his fat Italian papa, his full-blooded Cherokee mother, and one sister who, inexplicably, was part Samoan. Other boarders told their stories. Finally, at a lull, Mike said to Dad, “Your turn, Pete.”

  Dad cleared his throat. “One day, young John Stuart Mill said to his father . . .”

  “No,” Mike said. “A story about your own family.”

  “There aren’t any,” said Dad.

  “Sure there are.”

  “Really,” Dad said. “I don’t remember.”

  “Any story,” Bobby said. “We’re interested.”

  “Look,” said Dad, madder than I’d ever seen him before. “I don’t own any, okay? The family tree”—he took a deep breath,—“begins with me.”

  Knowing that he’d never leave anything unresearched, I’m sure that he climbed that tree and found nothing: honest lawyers, old age, paid debts. I met his mother that one time, and she was the only relative I ever saw. His parents, I suspect, were dull, habitual churchgoers who never did anything of note and might still live somewhere in Connecticut. Dad had to make do with hand-me-downs from people in books: the roguish, the doomed-from-birth, the boisterous and misused. He wanted his children to have better. That’s why he took in the boarders; that’s why he left. Jackie says that I give Dad too much credit, that the truth of the matter is Dad had no control over our peculiar childhood. I say that each explosion, each unfamiliar man gargling in our bathroom, was a present to help us get along with strangers in bars. Jackie doesn’t drink. I am firm in my belief.

  Because really, what other explanation is there? Dad never seemed to like any of those bodies buzzing through the house. He only sat at the kitchen table when everybody was gone or when someone was pouring good whiskey or cheap beer. Mornings, he stood up at the kitchen counter, watching his cigarette burn in the ashtray.

  One morning Mike had an especially wicked hangover. He watched Candy, our weeper, who as usual was absurdly cheerful at breakfast. Candy poured sugar over everything, including bacon, humming to himself. I was eating instant oatmeal, which I had made myself with water from the tap. Mike put his hand on my shoulder and pointed at Candy’s plate.

  “Look at that,” he whispered.

  I loved Mike best of all the boarders—he had beautiful blue eyes—so to be agreeable, I said, “Bleah,” as loudly as possible.

  “Disgusting, isn’t it, Annie,” Mike said.

  “Cut your hair,” said Candy, as if it were a compliment. “That’s even more disgusting.”

  “My hair matches my mustache perfectly,” said Mike. “Besides, I’m not going to die of hair. But that stuff’ll kill you.”

  “Michael,” said Candy, and you could hear his good mood leaving him, “could we not talk about death first thing in the morning?”

  “I just don’t want this lovely child to think that’s a normal way to eat.”

  Candy put his fork down and stood to face Mike, smiling nervously. “Listen—”

  “Are you looking for a fight?” Mike asked.

  Even I could tell it was a joke, but Candy’s big eyes got even bigger. He was made up entirely of circles, the way they teach you to draw cartoons from a book: round head, belly, haircut, knees, and a little round sailor’s knot of a nose with no bridge whatsoever. I couldn’t imagine how his glasses stayed up. He was trying to make himself look taller and tougher now, and only made himself seem even rounder. “Listen, Mike—”

  “Forget it, Chubs,” said Mike. “Eat what you want.”

  Candy turned to face my father, who still stood at the counter. “Pete,” said Candy. “Make Mike stop.”

  My father, who hadn’t been paying attention, looked up from his coffee. Finally, he said, “Fend for yourself. I’m not your father. Do I look like I’m in charge?” He waved his hand around the kitchen. “Does any of this look like it belongs to me?”

  And it’s true, my father rarely said, this is mine. He claimed very little: not stories, not furniture, not children. He wore bow ties because they reminded him of famous people who wore bow ties; he always wanted to name our pets after famous animals in literature.

  “But they’re ours,” Jackie and I would say.

  Not long before Dad left, he, Jackie, and I sat in the kitchen. Jackie and I were doing a huge jigsaw puzzle; Dad sat across from us, trying to figure out where to set down his beer.

  Suzanne came in wearing a dress that I immediately recognized as belonging to my mother. Suzanne was skinny; the waist hung down to her hips.

  “I found this in the downstairs closet,” she said. “Do you think I could keep it?”

  She turned a little; I could smell my mother coming off the fabric in waves.

  “By all means,” my father said after a minute. “It belonged to someone who used to live here.”

  Two days later, Bobby, our flute player, had to ask Dad to please stop fixing things. My father, despite the people with skilled hands and know-how, still installed phones that bounced off the walls on the first ring and had caulked the bathroom so indiscriminately, and with such enthusiasm, that all that was needed was
a little bride and groom up by the showerhead. Didn’t he realize, Bobby asked him, that he was beginning to break working things instead of merely making already-broken things worse? Dad was a mind person, said Bobby, and should concentrate on the living things, of which there were plenty.

  This was the November I was eleven, and there was not only Candy weeping in his room, but Lucky, an affable and doomed retriever with a rare appetite that had already claimed two neighborhood kittens, a sprinkler system, and an elderly poodle named Queen Marie. Also Anastasia, a Russian wolfhound, who lounged on the fainting couch all day, displaying, according to Mike, all ten of Ann Landers’s Signs that Your Child Is on Drugs; Kenneth Graves’s three finches, Sidney, Sidney, and Sidney-Lou; Gert’s cat, Tommy, a genius, she said, who, having learned to ride on her shoulders, had taken to leaping off the fridge onto any passing head. There were Suzanne’s potted palms; avocado pits sprouting in the windowsills; a few gangly, uninvited spiders; and two sad and witty children who seemed pretty well taken care of by everybody but their father. You could almost see Dad in the front hall, turning slowly, surrounded by living things, knowing that he could fix none of them.

  II

  “You can’t blame him,” Bobby said the morning Dad left, feeling personally responsible.

  Kenneth Graves disagreed with Bobby and said that he could blame Dad, absolutely. Kenneth Graves had a talent for blame.

  Jackie and I sat at the kitchen table, not quite knowing what the fuss was about, listening to Suzanne and the bacon curse at each other. Gertrude clonked in, dressed as usual—patterned capris splattered with paint and a puffy-sleeved sweater with beads in the knit. Old as she was (and she seemed very old to me then), she was skinny as a twelve-year-old. Most mornings, she was the first one awake in the house. Today, she looked around and said, “Good morning, Sunshine! This is more like it.”

  Mike, pulling himself onto the counter, said, “The master of the castle has deserted.” He brushed English muffin crumbs out of his mustache.