Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  My mother had always seemed fearless; if she wasn’t, she concealed her fear with spontaneous belligerence. But she strove for obedient perfection under my grandmother’s eyes and when she fell short, usually in household matters like cooking or cleaning or religious matters like forgetting First Fridays, she responded to my grandmother’s well-concealed wrath like an educated dog, performing as directed but with the faint slink of force training. This behavior was disturbing and made me ambivalent about my grandmother, who treated me like a prince. Behind the geniality of this tiny woman, I saw the iron fist. I wasn’t sure I liked it.

  Paul moved in and out of the house over the years, even had temperate spells. I remember some very pleasant times when my mother and I visited: he threw a baseball onto the complex of roofs for me to field with my Marty Marion infielder’s mitt and tried to instill in me his passionate Irish sentimentality and diasporic mythology. The rest of the family was feverishly American and did not care to celebrate the Irish connection; in fact, Uncle Walter on traveling to Ireland announced that the place was highly disorganized and insufficiently hygienic, and that the garrulity of the people was annoying, especially the sharp cracks that were mechanical and tiresome and always about other people.

  But Paul had archaic Gaelic jigs on 78s that he played at tremendous volume from his room next to his mother’s, and, when drunk, he could roar along to various all-too-familiar ballads—“Mother Machree,” “The Wearing of the Green,” “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” and so on—giving me a whack when I accompanied the great John McCormack with such invented lyrics as “my vile Irish toes” or “God bless you, you pest, you, Mother Machree.”

  Sometimes he tired of his old records and said it wasn’t the potato famine that had driven the Irish from the land; they had left to escape the music. It really depended on what the Bushmills was up to. He also used me to practice his insurance pitch. “Good morning, Wilbur,” he would begin—not my name—and it was always “morning” in these pitches even though he was incapable of rising early enough to make a morning pitch. Wilbur was an imaginary Yankee farmer, dull, credulous, yet wily. “Wilbur, we’ve known each other a good many years and, God willing, more to come with, let’s hope, much prosperity and happiness. I know you to be a man, Wilbur, whose family stands just below the saints in his esteem, a man who thinks of everything to protect them from…from—Christ!—protect them from, uh—the unforeseen! Christ, of course! The unforeseen! But ask yourself, have you really thought of everything?” Here is where the other shoe was meant to drop, but, more often than not, Paul allowed himself an uncontrolled snort of hilarity before refilling his “martini.” This was never a martini; it was invariably a jolt of Bushmills, but he called it a martini, and the delicacy of the concept compelled him to hold the libation between thumb and forefinger, which uncertain grasp sometimes caused the drink to crash to the floor, a “tragedy.”

  The fact that Paul and I got on so well would be remembered during my seventeenth year, when I was called upon to perform one more miracle. By my humoring him during his Irish spells, I had earned his faith. He’d taken me to see the Red Sox, Plymouth Rock, Bunker Hill, and Old Ironsides; he bought me lobster rolls at Al Mac’s Diner, a Penn Senator surf-casting reel, coffee cabinets, and vanilla Cokes by the hundred. He made me call a drinking fountain a “bubbler,” in the Rhode Island style.

  Eventually, Paul moved back to his digs at Mohican House, evicted by Uncle Walter, who had replaced my grandfather for such duties. My grandmother was also a disciplinarian, but when it came to her youngest son she reverted to type and viewed him as troubled, broken by the war, while the rest of her offspring were expected to follow clear but inflexible rules. Irish tenors were replaced by radio broadcasts of ball games. For every holiday and the whole of summer, my mother continued to drag me from what she viewed as our place of exile in the Midwest to Brownell Street, which I might not have liked but for our almost daily trips to Horseneck Beach, where I had the occasional red-faced meeting with a girl in a bathing suit. I also made a new friend on Hood Street next to North Park, Brucie Blaylock, who could defend me against Meatball and his allies. Brucie was a tough athletic boy with scuffed knuckles and a perpetually runny nose whose beautiful eighteen-year-old sister had just married a policeman. The couple was still living in my friend’s home awaiting an apartment and, while snooping through their belongings, we discovered a gross of condoms, which we counted, being unsure how many were in a gross. “This cop,” said my friend, gazing at the mountain of tiny packages, “is gonna stick it in my sister a hundred and forty-four times!” My mind spun not altogether unpleasantly at this carnal prospect, and my fear of bathing-suit girls at Horseneck Beach rose starkly. From time to time, we would recount the condoms; by the time the number dropped below a hundred, my friend was suffering and I wandered around as if etherized by the information.

  My aunts continued to adore and pamper me while reminding anyone who would listen of my capacity for working miracles. This would have been long forgotten but for the fact that the encouragement came directly from their mother, especially inciting my aunt Dorothy, who waitressed long hours at the Nonpareil diner downtown, and my aunt Constance, a substitute teacher who lived two houses away with her husband, a glazier. My uncle Gerry, who had joined the Boston mounted police solely to acquire a horse, was rarely around. Uncle Walter said the horse was all the family Gerry ever wanted. Dorothy’s husband, Bob, made himself scarce, too, finding the constant joking around my grandparents’ house exasperating. Theirs was a mixed marriage, the first in our family, as Bob was an English immigrant, a jick. It was customary for those of Irish extraction to mimic the accents of such people by singing out, “It’s not the ’eavy ’aulin that ’urts the ’osses’ ’ooves. It’s the ’ammer, ’ammer, ’ammer on the old ’ighway.” My grandmother outlawed this ditty out of deference to Bob, who, after all, might one day convert.

  I seemed to have been forgotten during the early moments of the crisis, even by my mother. I seized on my brief obscurity to cook up reasons why I was now exempt from the miracle business: one, I was not the same boy who had stirred my grandmother to rise after the death of her husband; and two, it was not a miracle in the first place, except in the minds of my mother and her crazy sisters. I now sequestered myself in my room with Road & Track, Dave Brubeck Fantasy label 45s, and True West magazine. I was greatly absorbed by the events leading up to the gunfight at the OK Corral. No longer able to enchant me with accounts of the big baboon by the light of the moon combing his auburn hair, my mother tried upgrading my reading habits by offering me a dollar to read Penrod and Sam. I declined. But all this was distraction; I feared my call would come and I worked at facing it. I worried that by keeping to myself and playing the anchorite, I gave credence to my imputed saintlike powers; it behooved me to mingle with my relatives and strive to seem unexceptional, even casual. Being incapable of grasping the possible demise of my grandmother, I had no problem sauntering around the house seeing to everyone’s comfort. No one suspected the terror in my heart. At one point, as I suavely offered to make cocktails, my mother jerked me aside and asked me if I thought this was the Stork Club. Thereafter, my attempts to disappear consisted of idly scratching my head or patting my lips wearily as I gazed out upon Brownell Street, where every parking spot was taken by my relatives’ cars, all except Paul’s, which he called a “foreign” car. Anyone pointing out that it was a dilapidated Ford was told, “It is entirely foreign to me.” That car was not here, and if it was not over at the Mohican it could be as far afield as New Bedford or Somerset, whose watering holes provided what he called “acceptable consanguinity.” These were terrible stewpots mentioned in the paper from time to time in an unflattering light, the one in New Bedford being, according to Uncle Walter, a bucket of blood haunted by raving scallopers and their molls.

  My aunt Constance functioned as a kind of hall monitor. She had no legitimate authority, but she enforced the general rules as laid down
by her mother, and at a time like this she saw to comings and goings, the hanging of visitors’ hats, and the drawing of blinds and the pulling of draperies; she liked to catch me out in little infractions, since I had, besides the unearned affection of my grandmother, the fewest accrued rights around the place. This had to be undertaken discreetly, or there would be my mother to contend with, younger than Constance but spoiling for a fight with her. I’d once heard my father say that Aunt Constance’s ankles were thick. One day she came to my room where, out of quiet desperation, I was committing self-abuse in consideration of the rate condoms were being consumed up on Hood Street by the homeless cop and his teenage bride. She told me through the door that she would be taking me to see my grandmother. There was a platitudinous tone she used, even when she addressed me as Elvis or when she reminded me that others needed the bathroom too or wouldn’t it be nice if I picked up a few of my things so that others didn’t have to do it for me. When I emerged, she gave me a stare that insinuated either that she knew what I’d just been doing or that I was unaware of the gravity of the situation. Is it Miracle Time? I wondered. I already had enough to fear, because I couldn’t grasp what was happening to my grandmother. Well, I told myself, we aren’t there yet.

  As if I lacked sufficient power in my legs, Aunt Constance gave me a last little push into my grandmother’s bedroom, then followed me inside. My mother was already there, red eyed and helpless. She was far the prettiest of the sisters and had been indoctrinated somehow in the idea, perhaps by the whole family, that handling crises would not be her strong suit. Years later, she would tell me that at the moment I’m now describing she wanted to curl up on the floor and break down completely; however, even semiconscious, her mother still had strong authority, and such behavior could fall under the proscribed category of “shenanigans.”

  My grandmother spoke my name with groggy satisfaction, her face lit by the candles surrounding a figurine of the Virgin Mary that rested on her bedside table, a cheerful statue, trophy sized and a lovely Bahamian blue. My mother appeared to have been there awhile, and sorrow transfigured her face in a way that I’d never seen it before, which upset me thoroughly. Aunt Constance fidgeted around, disturbed that my grandmother’s mouth remained open. My mother caught Constance’s briskness, and when she gently tried to close my grandmother’s mouth, my mother hissed under her breath, “Don’t touch her!” Constance’s hand rested in midair, her eyes meeting my mother’s with a kind of warning. It was like one of the showdowns I’d been investigating. Our awkward vigil didn’t last much longer, as Uncle Walter soon arrived and shooed us out. We waited on the first floor for half an hour until Walter came down. He walked straight through us, speaking only as he went out the door: “I’ll get the priest.” He had a deep voice, and everyone in the family knew he was the law.

  It was summertime. Our parish priest, Father Corrigan, had gone to the Cape for a few days, so we wound up with some alien in a round collar, Father Cox, whom Walter kept on call in the parlor, reminding us that Extreme Unction did not reside in persons. Meanwhile, a bulletin was sent out for Corrigan, who appeared the next morning with a raging sunburn and loftily dismissed his surrogate. Father Corrigan took me aside, to a quiet spot past the stove. I was alert. He looked at me gravely and asked if I had noticed that Birdie Tebbetts had been promoted to starting catcher for the Cleveland Indians. I admitted ignorance in a way that suggested that at another time I would have been better informed. Father Corrigan reminded me, “Birdie went to Providence College with your uncle Paul—say, where is Paul?”

  “He couldn’t make it,” I replied impulsively, based on no particular knowledge. Everyone was relieved that Paul had declined to be here, although Aunt Constance had conveyed my grandmother’s condition to him by a note to his landlord.

  “What’d you do that for?” my mother demanded.

  “Ma asked me to,” said Constance contentedly.

  Father Corrigan, handsome enough that his departure for the seminary had sown heartache, was a priest of old-fashioned certainties who saw nothing cheerless in the present circumstances. He had gone completely bald, not even any eyebrows, but he wore a wig, a small vanity that was considered to have humanized him. He had a redhead’s complexion, and the wig was auburn. It didn’t fit particularly well: the hairline was too emphatic around the front, and when he bent over, as he was usually careful not to do, it pried up from behind and exposed an eerie sanctum of white scalp.

  As my grandmother’s confessor, he knew she was bound for the ultimate destination, a place whose glory was beyond the descriptive powers of the most effusive travel agent. We fed off his optimism, sort of. He and Uncle Walter consulted away from the rest of us, who tried to read their lips from across the wide kitchen. Uncle Walter worshipped his mother, and it could not have been easy for him to recognize that she was ending her life in his professional hands.

  Aunt Constance now brought her two girls, my cousins Kathleen and Antoinette, who viewed me as a corrupt hoodlum because of the then-ubiquitous blue suede shoes I wore. My uncle Gerry finally showed up too, in his glossy black trooper boots and Boston police uniform, which seemed thrillingly archaic, like something Black Jack Pershing might have worn. But Gerry was so shy and sweet, he could barely speak. “He gets it from the horse,” said Walter. I retired quietly to my room, where I resumed my study of the Old West, a place where do-gooders and mad dogs alike lived free of ambiguity and insidious family tensions. At the moment, the Earps and the Clantons were beginning the open movements of their mortal ballet.

  By evening, our two authorities agreed that my grandmother would not live much longer, though she was conscious enough to make one thing clear: she wished to see her baby, Paul, before she died. My mother got on the phone and confirmed that my father had set out by automobile. “He’ll be here in no time!” she said into thin air.

  Uncle Walter departed for the Mohican. Bickering the whole time, Aunt Dorothy and my mother made a desultory attempt at cooking supper on the big gas stove from which my grandmother had so long and so majestically ruled: this time, macaroni and cheese. We were seated before our identical platters, my cousins studying my deployment of the silverware, when Uncle Walter returned and, entering the dining room, announced to us all, “He says no.” After a suspicious glance at the macaroni, he turned significantly to the adults, who rose as one and left the dining room, leaving me with my cousins. We heard “bloody bugger” through the door.

  Kathleen, who had snapping blue eyes and jet-black hair in tubular curls that hung alongside her face, announced, “We’re awfully sad over at our house.” Antoinette, a plainer brunette with a thin downturned mouth, looked on and remarked, “It’s too bad your father isn’t here to help. Why is it he never comes?”

  I couldn’t tell her that the household melodrama was unbearable to him or that he was busy, in my mother’s absence, making the two-backed beast with his secretary. Instead, I replied, “He has a job. He’s on his way now. How fast do you expect him to drive?” Both smiled: anyone who couldn’t broil in an old mill town all summer long was to be pitied. I remembered with satisfaction the day this pair appeared at Horseneck Beach. They looked like two sticks in their bathing suits, no butts but the same superior smiles. Naturally, they started a shell collection, everything lined up according to some system.

  I was preoccupied, having just reached the point where Doc Holliday was moving silently behind the corral planks with his sawed-off shotgun. Distantly, my mind was moving to the eventualities facing those men in that dusty patch of earth when the door opened and Uncle Walter summoned me with a crooked finger. I rose slowly to go out. My fears were aroused by the hauteur in the faces of my cousins, then confirmed when I saw my mother and my two aunts. I first pinned my hopes on the slightly skeptical expression of my aunt Dorothy, but when I saw my mother’s pride and the phony look of general forgiveness on the face of my aunt Constance, I knew I was cooked. It was miracle time again. Father Corrigan gazed with detachm
ent, wig tipped up like a jaybird: the services this family expected of me probably struck him as verging on sacrilegious.

  I clapped both hands over Uncle Walter’s car keys as they lightly struck my chest. “The Blue Roadmaster in front. Bring your uncle Paul. You’re the guy that can get this done. Get Paul now and bring him here.”

  Constance piped up. “He is your favorite uncle.”

  It was a straight shot to Mohican House, and at that hour there was enough room to park a thousand cars. The entire way, I was plagued by mortifying visions of unsuccessful parallel parking, but I was never tested. Spotted by pedestrians my own age—three swarthy males with ducktails—as I climbed out of the car, I adopted a self-effacing posture I hoped would make clear that I was not its spoiled young owner. Once it was locked, I plunged its incriminating keys into my pocket.

  Paul answered the door to his apartment promptly, greeting me with the phrase “Just as I expected,” and showed me in with a sweep of his arm. He wore a surprising ascot of subdued paisley foulard that complemented a sort of smoking jacket. His was what was once called a bed-sitting room, which perfectly described it. A toile wall covering with faded merriment of nymphs and sparkling brooks failed to create the intended atmosphere. “How’d you get here, Walt’s car?”

  “Yes,” I said, as though it was obvious. Paul had a faint brogue this evening, a bad sign. I glanced around: his bed was beside the window that looked down into an alley and was made with military precision, including the hospital corners he had once demonstrated. There was a battered but comfortable armchair nodded over by a single-bulbed reading lamp, and on the other side a night table that held the only book Paul owned, his exalted Roget’s Thesaurus, which he called “the key to success” and which Uncle Walter blamed for his inability to speak directly on any subject. A gray filing cabinet a few feet from the foot of the bed supported an artillery shell that served as a vase for a spray of dried flowers.