Cloudbursts

by Thomas McGuane

  Paul poured each of us a drink, and when I courteously declined mine, he said, “Why, then, our evening is at an end.”

  “I don’t think I should drink and drive,” I said defensively.

  “Do it all the time,” he said, “an essential skill. Never caught unprepared. Learn it while you’re young. Bluestockings have given it a bad name.” He used the same voice on me that he employed in testing insurance pitches, brusque shorthand best for indicating the world of valuable ideas he had for your future, take it or leave it.

  I had a sip and, after little pressure, finished my strong drink; whereupon I was coerced to accompany John McCormack and my uncle Paul in “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms,” a performance that, under the responsibility of my family assignment, I found so disturbing that I accepted Paul’s offer of another drink. Next Paul recited a poem about Michael Collins, how he left his armored car to walk laughingly to his death, after which a silence made it clear that Paul was ready to hear my pitch. I was emboldened and terrified by the alcohol, and not entirely sure who Michael Collins was or why walking to his own assassination cheered him up. I suppose this contributed to my disorientation. The record playing in the background was scratchy, and the orchestra accompanying the various tenors sounded like a bunch of steamboats all blowing their whistles; at the same time, I could see the appeal of being drunk.

  There was no use telling Paul his mother was dying. Walter had already said that. Not only did I feel utterly burdened, but being here gave me such an enduring case of the creeps that, years later, I voted against Kennedy, switching parties for the only time in my life. I now admit that I feared the loss of my standing as a miracle worker and longed to find a way of preserving my reputation, partly because it was so annoying to my father, who considered my mother’s first home a hotbed of mindless nostalgia and an impediment to her conformity and compliance. I couldn’t appeal to Paul’s values because I didn’t know what they were and because I suspected that beneath his lugubrious independence lay some kind of awful bitterness that, if uncovered, might turn my world upside down.

  I had no strategy, and my heart ached. It was important to my grandmother that I deliver Paul to her side, and the only thing I could think to do was to tell him what she meant to me. I began with a head full of pictures, my grandmother folding her evening paper to rise from her rocker and embrace me when I returned from a day in North Park, of the harmony of her household, the smell of pies arising from her second kitchen in the basement, the Sunday drives after Mass when she was taken around the perimeter of her tiny kingdom and to the abandoned mills where she had once worked. I even thought of our life in the Midwest, when I’d longed for her intervention in a family slow to invent rules for their new lives. I was with her on the first visit to her husband’s grave when, looking at the headstone of their little boy right next to my grandfather’s, she said, “I never thought they’d be together so soon.” A half century between burials: “so soon.” She bent to pat the grass in the next space. “No keening,” she had warned her children at my grandfather’s funeral. And indeed, it was a quiet American affair.

  I imagined I could touch on a few of these points and move Uncle Paul to accompany me back to Brownell Street, but I never got started. I was seized by a force I’d barely suspected and astonished myself by choking on tears that spilled down my face while Paul watched impassively.

  Once I pulled myself together, Paul stood and turned off the record player. He looked at me with chilling objectivity and then stated his position clearly. Moving to his filing cabinet, he began to rearrange the dried flowers in the artillery shell, awaiting my departure.

  Driving the Roadmaster I became immediately hysterical. I saw myself rocketing through the railings of the Brightman Street Bridge and plunging into the nocturnal gloom of the Taunton River below. But the Buick rolled along like a ship, and my panic abated.

  As I parked in the dark of Brownell Street and turned off the lights, I could see the faces in the window: time to take my medicine. I hoped their seeing me alone would make it unnecessary to explain that I had failed, but Paul could be just behind me in his foreign car. Walter, my mother, and my aunts would not give up so easily. Perhaps my quite legitimate expression of defeat would help, assuming no one noticed my unsteadiness.

  Like a jury they were waiting for me in the kitchen. Knowing my grandmother still lived, I was strengthened. Entering the back door, sole entrance for anyone but a priest, gave access to a hallway and the choice of going straight upstairs, to my bedroom, or into the kitchen, where I was expected. The great blue presence of my uncle Gerry opened the door for me. Walter, Dorothy, Constance, and my mother stared without a breath or movement. I could state that I had failed; I could indicate that I had failed; I could make a paper airplane with a handwritten statement that I had failed and sail it at those faces; but until I did I was still a worker of miracles and reluctant to step down. The silence lasted long enough that my uncle Walter elevated his chin sternly, more pressure than I could withstand. I shook my head: no.

  I didn’t look up until Walter summoned me to the bookless library. His fingers rested lightly on my shoulder as though I might not be able to find my way. Once we were behind closed doors, he reached an open hand for his car keys, which I deposited therein. “Have you been drinking?” I nodded, meek but with rising surliness, concealed in the booze that was now thrumming in my eardrums. “I suppose it was a condition of your negotiations.” I nodded again, this time modestly. “Well,” said Walter, “I would like to know exactly what Paul said.” I felt reluctant to convey this information, perhaps out of lingering loyalty to my favorite uncle, who had so often thrown the baseball on the tenement rooftops for me to field, but in the end I felt it wasn’t mine to keep.

  “He said to tell you all that…that sick people depress him.”

  I returned to my room reconciled to my lost sainthood. For now, there was the OK Corral and its several possible outcomes. But that night, my grandmother died at last and nothing in the story of Wyatt Earp suggested an appropriate response, as he of course was dead, too.

  * * *

  —

  For the several days of the viewing, the wake, the funeral Mass, it was as if we were troops following orders. My mother kept slipping off, trying to check on my father’s progress. First it was a flat, then they wouldn’t take a check for gas, then a distributor cap, then the magneto, and later, when she told Uncle Gerry about the bad magneto, he said, with all his big-cop innocence, “Jeez, Mary, they haven’t had magnetos in twenty years!”

  My father arrived on the day of the wake, a hot day more like August than late September. Greetings were fulsome, given the gravity of the occasion, Dorothy frayed with grief and worry and Constance somehow politicizing it and making the demise of my grandmother refer mostly to her own need for importance despite having married a Protestant. My father always seemed extraordinarily brisk, compared with my mother’s relatives, and more capable of defusing social awkwardness with sunny confidence. He hugged my mother so long that her sisters grew uncomfortable and abandoned the porch. As the baby of the family, she might be more “advanced,” but it was not their job to bear witness to the decline of standards. It was my turn with my father, and my mother followed her sisters indoors.

  “Come here, Johnny,” he said, leading me to the trunk of his big sedan, which he opened with a broad revelatory gesture. There was his leather suitcase with its securing straps and, next to it, a ten-horsepower Evinrude outboard motor. Looking over his shoulder left and right as though fencing loot, he said, “These worthies are all indoors men, unlike you and me. They see the sky about twice a year. Now that the inevitable has come to pass, we’re going to rent a rowboat, attach this beauty to the transom, and run down to Fogland for some floundering.”

  I told him I could hardly wait, and he mussed my hair in approval. Later, I felt a pang at omitting to suggest that Grandma’s departure was an impediment to floundering. I
helped my father take his bag to Paul’s old room and stayed with him for a short time because he seemed to forget that I was still there. He hung his clothes carefully and placed a bottle of Schenley’s blended whiskey on the dresser. He lined up three pairs of shoes, in the order of their formality, walked to the window overlooking Almy Street, and heaved a desolate sigh. I left the room.

  I suppose he was nearly forty by then and wore his liberation from what he considered the ghetto Irish with a kind of strutting pride. The circumstance of my grandmother’s death was such that he would be forgiven for being a Republican and for condescending to the family with his obviously mechanical warmth. He was still remembered bitterly for summoning the family to the Padanaram docks to admire a Beetle Cat with a special sail emblazoned with I LIKE IKE. He now received news of Paul’s disgrace with a serious, nodding smile. Aunt Constance, rushing about to prepare the funeral dinner for the family, brusquely and with poorly concealed malice gave him the job of opening a huge wooden barrel full of oysters. Standing next to me in the backyard, he confided, “Here I am in fifty-dollar Church’s of London shoes, a ninety-dollar Dobbs hat, a three-hundred-dollar J. Press suit, shucking oysters. When will I ever escape all this?”

  I was afraid to tell him that I was enjoying myself. He pointedly reminded me that he always made note of whose side I was on. “This group”—they were always a group—“ain’t too keen on getting out of their familiar tank town.” He liked bad English for irony but was normally painfully correct about his diction. He viewed himself as an outdoorsman, almost a frontiersman, based solely on having taught canoeing at a summer camp in Maine. “You’ll find this outfit,” he said, gesturing to my grandmother’s house, “in street shoes.” For my mother’s family, the outdoors came in just one version: a baseball diamond. But his view of my mother’s family could be infectious, and I went to our first meal with him now viewing them as a group, nervously calibrating the array of forces around the table.

  My father never seemed particularly interested in me, except when my alliance offered him some advantage, or at least comfort, in disquieting settings like this household. My grandfather thought he looked like an Indian and once greeted him with, “Well, if it isn’t Jim Thorpe! How are your times in the four-forty, chief? Leaving them in the dust?” Or, more succinctly, “How.”

  My grandfather drove the back wheels on the majestic American-LaFrance hook and ladder. “A good place for him,” said my father. “Well to the rear.”

  I knew his stay here would be a trial, though it seemed the only voice that carried up through the floor, causing him to flinch, was Father Corrigan’s. Religion was an empty vessel to my father, a contemptible relic of the origins he hoped to escape.

  “Now the keening begins,” he said. “Your grandmother was a fine woman, but all the noise in the world isn’t going to get her anywhere any faster. When you hear them in the parlor tuning up, you may think they’ve gone crazy. This stuff’s about to go the way of the Model T. You’ll be able to tell your kids about it. The sooner it’s over, the sooner I can go back to America and try to make a buck.”

  “Will I see Grandma again?”

  “That’s the sixty-four-dollar question, isn’t it? Ask Father Corrigan. Old Padre Corrigan never had a doubt in his life. He’ll tell you it’s only a matter of time. Me, I’m not so sure. He’ll have Grandma crooking a beckoning finger from the hereafter even if you can’t see it and he can. Poor fellow spent his life making promises to weavers with TB and loom mechanics with broken bodies. I guess he started believing it himself. You ought to hear him describe heaven. It sounds like Filene’s Department Store.”

  Then he went off on the Irish. “Among the many misconceptions about the Irish,” he said, “is that they have a sense of humor. They do not have a sense of humor. They have a sense of ridicule. The Ritz Brothers have a sense of humor”—I had no idea who the Ritz Brothers were, but he held them in exalted esteem—“Menasha Skulnik has a sense of humor. You think the Irish have a sense of humor? Read James Joyce. You’ll have to when you go to college. I did. You’ll ask yourself, Will this book never end?”

  I always tried to agree with my father, even when I didn’t understand him. “I see what you mean,” I said, with an aching sort of smile.

  “Here’s a famous one,” he said as the wailing started downstairs. “ ‘If it weren’t for whiskey, the Irish would rule the world.’ Do I like this. They’re only charming when they’re drunk. When they’re sober, they’re not only not ruling the world, they’re ridiculing its hopes and dreams.” This was entirely true of my father himself. He was a merry boozer but a bleak observer of reality when sober. The present moment was a perfect example. He saw no legitimate grief in the response to my grandmother’s death, only posturing and inappropriate tribal memory. “Rule the world, my behind,” he added. “ ‘If it weren’t for blubber, Fatty Arbuckle would set the world record in the high jump.’ ”

  My relatives were certainly not ruling the world, and they went about their lives with high spirits. While their certainties like everyone else’s were soon to be extinguished by the passage of time, their ebullience was permanent, and I say this having seen two of them expire from cancer. My father, on the other hand, was grimly obsessed with his health, and for some reason I associate this with his flight from his origins. I recall him explaining to my mother that he had missed making his Easter Duty on the advice of his eye-ear-nose-and-throat specialist to avoid crowds.

  I went downstairs and sat among my relatives, some of whom hadn’t seen each other for a long time, especially the ones from Lawrence, who seemed to have in common straitened finances and sat in their overcoats watching the circulation of plates of finger food. My aunt Taffy, from Providence, wept copiously and in a manner that reminded everyone, I was sure, of the melodramatic nature so annoying to my grandmother that she pretended that Taffy longed to star in a soap opera. The Sullivans were there from across the street. Uncle Gerry, wearing his mounted policeman’s uniform with its crossed straps and whistle deployed just under his left shoulder, stared straight ahead and moved his lips in authentic prayer. My physician uncle Walter maintained a look of dignified pragmatism, and I’m sure he knew we looked to him for deportment hints. We believed he understood life and death through actual experience and, unconvinced by Father Corrigan’s merry certainties, wished he would say something about the afterlife.

  Saddest of all was Aunt Dorothy, because her household meddling had expired with my grandmother and she was now wandering about without a self to give meaning to her acts. I thought of her with white holes for eyes, as in the standard depiction of zombies. She looked blank and confused and made clueless efforts to find chairs, answer the phone, and offer horrifying comfort to people she barely knew. Finally, Walter commanded, “You need a rest. I’m sure everyone will excuse you.” At this she let out a somewhat lunar cry that made poor Mr. Sullivan, a surgical arch outlining the former position of his cigar, grab his wife and run for the door.

  Aunt Constance served the funeral dinner with a kind of pageantry, abetted by her daughters, the two little shits Kathleen and Antoinette. Watching their stately entrance for each course, learned in that narcissistic training ground of First Communion, I could have, as Joseph Goebbels once remarked, “reached for my Luger.” The meal was a tribute to my grandmother and featured all her favorite dishes—swordfish (my father confided these small steaks were doubtless from a skillygallee, an obsolete term for the less desirable white marlin), corn on the cob, parsnips, and apple pie—and represented a maudlin idea of grieving. “They’re gonna milk it,” he said, when he heard the menu.

  We were seated, Walter at the head of the table, my mother, father, and I in a row, Dorothy sniveling into the canned consommé preceding the main course, Kathleen and Antoinette, half crouched in their pinafores and ready for duty, Gerry upright as a man of the law. As Walter said grace, I watched my mother closely; her melancholy smile was less occasional than chemical,
produced by the pills she took, ostensibly to raise an abnormally low blood pressure, as well as straight shooters from the vodka tucked in her suitcase. Like many of their generation, my parents believed in the absolute odorlessness of vodka and applied to its consumption none of the restraint of the blends whose broadly familiar aroma marked the user like a traffic light. My father sported his customary deniable supercilious smile. When cornered, he’d lay it to gastric distress or the unaccountable prelude to heartbreak, as when my mother walked out on him and he couldn’t wipe the grin off his face and had to explain it.

  The front door was carelessly slammed shut and Uncle Paul walked in, wearing his drab woolen officer’s uniform with obvious moth holes, and commented that we looked a bit gloomy. Father Corrigan rose to his feet, held his napkin between thumb and forefinger, and dropped it to the table. With infinitesimal authority, Walter indicated with his eyes that Father Corrigan was to take his seat again promptly. Constance appeared behind Paul and, leaning around him, said in a shrill voice, “Just making certain there’s a place set.”

  “Grab me a beer from the fridge,” said Paul. Constance froze, but my mother leaped up and chirped nonchalantly that she knew right where it was. My father patted her butt, eyes half lidded with private irony as she swept past, and Paul smiled at his favorite relative, my mother; Uncle Gerry, rendered huge in his uniform by the smallness of the room, strode to the sideboard to turn on the big Sunbeam fan. He’d begun to sweat. Seated again, he asked Walter about various old folks of our acquaintance. Most got good health reports, except Mary Louise Dwyer and Arthur Kelly, who had, he said in a significant voice, “been in to see me.” As to Mr. Sullivan’s lip cancer, “You couldn’t hurt him with a tire iron.”

  “A corker,” Gerry agreed.