I stood up, went back to the stove, said it was too hot to argue. We changed the subject, and I served dinner, feeling more alone than I had in a long time.
But sometimes I could almost make myself forget that other unsavory, guilty, secretive Wynn, and in Mexico she virtually disappeared. Yes, we would be married someday. We would have children. Patrick wanted a daughter. Maybe two. What about me? Whatever comes along, I said around a lump in my throat. A son, maybe. A son who looks like you.
Back in Boston with our little tin trucks and our serapes and my lovely turquoise necklace, we decided that we had to live together. My parents’ reaction was mixed: They could see how happy Patrick and I were, and I know they were relieved that things were working out for me. They even sent us a check so we could buy some decent furniture. But my mother wrote to me in a letter, “Don’t let Patrick bury you. Your work is just as important as his.” My father said we were too young for such a commitment, we should wait a couple of years, and in the next breath asked why we had to live together, what was wrong with just getting married?
But when I called Anna Rosa, she was delighted. “Kids are smart today. Don’t rush into marriage. Get to know each other first.”
“I thought Catholics weren’t supposed to approve of stuff like this,” I said.
“What’s right for one person isn’t right for another,” my grandmother said. “That’s what the church can’t seem to get through its thick skull. You kids are going to be okay.”
“If you didn’t approve, I don’t think I could do it,” I told her.
“You’re my honeybunch, Wynn,” she said. “And don’t you forget it.”
I put Patrick on the phone, and she said, “Good luck, doll. God bless you.”
Patrick said his Irish Catholic Uncle Austin might be a problem, and so we made an overnight trip to Livingstonville to break it to him.
We drove there in a rented truck—Patrick was hoping to find some choice rusty junk to bring back. I had met Uncle Austin once, when we stopped in to see him en route, somewhat circuitously, to New York City for a weekend. I was intrigued by the fact that this solitary man, inexperienced with children and a natural loner, had successfully raised the little orphaned boy who turned out to be Patrick. I wanted to know him better.
But he was a daunting figure to me. That first time we visited, on a bright winter afternoon, the three of us were awkward and a bit shy. We sat on seedy upholstered chairs in the living room and talked, fitfully. Uncle Austin had trouble meeting my eyes; my presence seemed to embarrass him. He offered us beer, then tea, then some of the baked beans he was cooking, all of which we declined. He seemed hurt by this, and I felt intrusive and apologetic the whole time we were there, which was about an hour. I was also distracted by the stark beauty of the landscape through his windows: the golden stubble of the fields poking above the white snow cover, the blacks and grays of the distant hills, the shabby houses with thin breaths of smoke coming from their chimneys, and, above it all, the fiercely blue sky. It reminded me of Maine, but it was quieter, less dramatic, and as Patrick and his uncle made dutiful chatter about the junkyard and Patrick’s scholarship and some cousins back in County Cork, I kept imagining how I would paint it.
On the second visit, things loosened up. It was as if Uncle Austin had given himself a talking to and had resolved to accept the fact that Patrick was grown up now, he was a man with a girlfriend, and the girlfriend was a presence to be reckoned with. Gradually, I realized he had also had a few drinks. But it didn’t matter. He was charming. He shook my hand warmly and said he was glad to see me, and the three of us took a tour of the junk yard, Uncle Austin pointing out certain prized sights—like the skeleton of a Model T that had been rusting there since World War II—as if we were at Disneyland. Eventually, Patrick and I went out and brought back two pizzas and a six-pack. Uncle Austin drank whiskey along with his Budweiser, keeping a brimming shot glass on the table circled by the fingers of his left hand. He drank beer and smoked cigarettes with his right.
“We came to tell you we’re going to move in together, Uncle,” Patrick said. “I hope you won’t mind. And we came to take away some metal. I saw a couple of interesting pieces out there I thought I might be able to give a home to.”
Uncle Austin smiled. He was a small, wiry man with a pot belly and Patrick’s light brown eyes. When he smiled, there was a gap between his front teeth. His hair was as thick as Patrick’s, but wavy instead of straight. He looked like a picture of a leprechaun in a book I’d had as a child.
“Are you accusing me of not being broad-minded, laddie?” he asked. “Are you calling me an old fogy? Why should I mind it if you’ve found the right girl? And it seems to me you have. As for the junk,” he added with a wink at me, “take whatever you like. You always have, why stop now?”
“Then you won’t mind if Wynn and I sleep in the same room while we’re here?” Patrick asked.
“I’d think it was pretty strange if you didn’t.”
Patrick stared at him. “You’re sure?”
“Sure I’m sure!” His uncle’s eyes twinkled. “What’s the matter with you, Paddy my boy? Where’d you get these old-fashioned notions?”
We finished the pizza and the beer, and Patrick went up to bed early, tired out. I stayed up chatting with Uncle Austin. He got talking about the old days, and I found my chance to ask him how he had come to adopt Patrick. Had he had doubts? I wondered. Had anyone tried to talk him out of it? “Wasn’t it strange to have Patrick left to you?” I asked. “Suddenly to have a five-year-old boy in the house?”
Uncle Austin pondered that, and then he said, “It seemed strange that my only sister was gone, just like that. Smashed up that green Nash Rambler they drove—they lost control going around a curve, and crashed into a wall of rock. No seat belts in those days. They had to cut the damned car open like a tin to get them out. My sister Katie and her husband, Ted.”
My eyes filled. “God, I’m sorry,” I said, as if it had been yesterday.
Uncle Austin took a sip of whiskey. “They were good people,” he said. “Ted Foss was a blacksmith, you know—a huge fellow, bigger than Patrick, and strong as a bear. It must be in the blood, Patrick and his fascination with all that metal stuff. The rusted part of it I guess he gets from me.” He chuckled. Then he shook his head and was silent a moment. “And Katie—well, she was a pretty young thing, and full of fun. I was that fond of them both, it was like a light going out. But having young Patrick come here to live only seemed strange for a time. There was no choice, really. The poor little fellow didn’t have anybody else. The only other relatives were in Ireland, and a shiftless lot of good-for-nothings they were, too. I got used to the situation quickly enough.”
The old, nagging guilt made its prompt appearance, as I knew it would. “That was—it was wonderful of you, to do that.”
“Nothing of the kind! I was glad to do it. Besides, you know how Patrick is.” He smiled. Uncle Austin had a wonderful smile, frank and a little goofy because of the gap in his teeth. “He’s a likable lad.”
“That he is,” I agreed. I had to wipe my eyes.
Uncle Austin’s fingers left his shot glass and reached across the table to pat my hand. “I’m glad to see you’re tenderhearted,” he said. “And you’re a good mate for that boy, I can tell. I’ve never had a mate myself, nothing that took, if you know what I’m saying. But I’ve got a feel for these things.” He picked up his glass again and sipped. “I’m a Catholic, you understand. Not much of one, but I’ll never shake it, I know that by now. And I’m well aware that all this, this living in sin, is not what the pope would consider a good idea. But—” He paused. “Well, you two are in it for life, aren’t you?” I said that I was pretty certain we were. “All right, then,” Uncle Austin said. “I can’t see a problem. Good luck to the both of you. And now I’m going to do something that’s not like me at all. Completely uncharacteristic. Maybe a first.”
He got up and went to a cupboa
rd over the sink where he found a second shot glass. He brought it over to the table and filled it, then pushed it across to me. “I’m a cheap old bastard,” he said, “but I’m going to give you a taste of my Jameson’s. Twenty-some dollars a bottle and damned hard to find in these parts. Go ahead. It won’t hurt you. Put it down where the flies won’t get it.”
I drank it down, and only with difficulty kept myself from coughing at the taste of the fiery, smoky stuff. But I immediately felt more cheerful; the guilt diminished, fizzled to nothing.
Uncle Austin looked at me expectantly. “What’s the verdict?”
“It’s lovely,” I managed to say, and he smiled approvingly and poured me another one.
Uncle Austin and I stayed up half the night drinking whiskey and talking about Patrick’s youth. I learned about the time he rescued a dog from the well, the art prizes he won at his school, the comic books he made in which his dead parents appeared as superheroes, the deficiencies of his old girlfriend Deborah, the way he persuaded the owner of the body shop in town to give him welding lessons because he couldn’t get them at the high school, the crazy art he had begun to make from rusted auto parts and old tools. I listened, enthralled, to this, far into the night. And I’m afraid that in the process I acquired a taste for Irish whiskey.
When I finally stumbled up the stairs, I lay there beside Patrick, my head spinning, the dark room full of tiny, quivering points of light. My last muddled, drunken thought was that the terrible decision I had made five years before was part of what had led me here: to this house, to Uncle Austin whistling softly as he puttered in the kitchen, to my love snoring softly beside me in his old metal bed. And so it couldn’t have been all bad—could it?
I woke the next morning with a hangover from hell.
“You what?” Patrick roared with laughter when we awoke at seven. He called down the stairs, “Uncle! You debaucher of young women! Why did you let her do that?”
“What was I going to do, I ask you?” his uncle called back. “Refuse a lady when she begs for a drink?”
“Please!” I moaned. “My head.”
Still grinning, Patrick left me to suffer and headed out to the salvage yard. He and his uncle hoisted into the truck the rusted metal pieces Patrick had picked out: a large piece of corrugated tin, a couple of oil drums, and a tractor seat that dated from the thirties, plus what looked like some blades from an ancient windmill. When they were done, Patrick came upstairs. “A gold mine,” he said. “I just loaded a gold mine into the back of the truck.”
I sat up in bed, my head pounding, and mumbled something incoherent.
“Wynnooka,” Patrick said. “For you.” He handed me a mug of black coffee and perched beside me while I sipped. Then he put his hand on my bare leg. “Woggo, Wynnooka?” he asked.
“Are you crazy? I can hardly focus my eyes together, and you want to have sex!”
“Ssh,” he said, grinning. “Not so loud.” He leaned over and kissed me. “It’s just that you’re so cute when you’re hungover.”
The two of them ate a hearty breakfast—I think Uncle Austin actually made flapjacks with maple syrup—while I tried not to look. I drank more black coffee and took aspirin and groaned. But by the time we left I felt better. We backed the truck out of the driveway, honked the horn at Uncle Austin waving to us from the porch, and then Patrick reached over and took me by the shoulders. “Admit it,” he said, shaking me, trying to hide his smile. “Life is damned good, Wynn. Admit it!”
I laughed and admitted it, and we sat for a long moment with our arms around each other before we drove our truckful of rust back to Boston, singing old songs that we translated into Feekish.
• • •
In September, we gave up our two tiny spaces and found a larger, grandly grungy apartment on the Fenway that had a back terrace where we could sit and play the Boston Spanish-language station on our radio and pretend we were still in Mexico. It was good being together in that apartment, but Patrick sometimes did become morose: He brooded, as he had warned me. Our very happiness, he said, made him uncomfortable and scared.
“I’m not used to this kind of happiness,” he said once. It was the orphan talking, the cast-off child. “What would I ever do if it was taken away?”
I felt cold suddenly: The black void opened before me. What would I do? Where would I be without him?
“It won’t be taken away,” I said. “How could it? We have each other forever, Patrick.”
“How do we know that?” he asked, when he was in one of these moods. “How can we know such a thing?”
I stroked the back of his neck. “Because we love each other,” I whispered. “And because it’s our mission to love each other in all our countless and inexhaustible manifestations.” I kissed him. “Isn’t that the way it goes?”
He smiled. “Something like that.”
These crises never lasted. We were both busy, working hard, and Patrick, as always, was obsessed with his sculpture. He rented a studio in a warehouse down by the boatyards, and he routinely got up at dawn so he could spend a couple of hours there before his first class. Marietta was right about his intensity. He was a cheerfully unapologetic workaholic. Sometimes he drove me crazy, coming in at three or four in the morning after working all day. There were times I wouldn’t see him for thirty-six hours at a time. Or he would be silent for long periods, sitting tensely at the kitchen table or on the terrace, frowning as if hell had opened before him. Then he would jump up and say, “Holy Jesus, I think I’ve figured it out, Wynn,” and be off again. But he was the star of the school.
• • •
That November, Anna Rosa fell on a patch of ice and broke her hip, and died in the hospital of pneumonia. I hadn’t been able to see her before the end—everything happened so quickly—and when Patrick and I took the train to New York for her funeral none of it seemed real to me. Even her little neighborhood church was like a picturesque movie set, with its stained glass and statues of obscure Italian saints—someplace my grandmother might have taken me when she was alive, whispering loudly about how pretty it all was and lighting a candle for the soul of my grandfather.
The funeral was surprisingly well attended. My grandmother had a lot of friends in the neighborhood, and there was a contingent of Upper East Side ladies she had sewed for. My Uncle Henry, widowed and rather reclusive—we hardly ever saw him—was there from Florida. He and my father embraced, tears streaming down their faces. In the middle of the Requiem Mass, Anna Rosa’s old beau Roy broke into loud sobs. This was somehow shocking: Roy was a large, overweight, gray-haired man who hardly ever spoke; next to my tiny grandmother he had been like a huge, kindly tree, or a small mountain. He was sitting beside me in the pew. I put an arm around him and tried to comfort him, but seeing him collapse was like seeing a monument crash to the ground: It made me realize that my grandmother was gone, and in a moment I was crying as hard as he was, and the two of us just sat there and wept.
After the funeral, Patrick and I, along with Roy and my parents and my Uncle Henry and a few neighbors, went up to my grandmother’s apartment. We crowded into her living room and ate Italian cookies from a bakery and opened a bottle of her sweet yellow wine. All I could think was that I would never be in that apartment again, never smell those smells and eat that food and curl up against my grandmother’s plump back while she talked me to sleep. I looked down into the backyard of the Bleecker Street restaurant we had never been to: The garden was white with snow, the tables gone, the strings of lights put away until spring.
A few weeks later my father sent me a box of Anna Rosa’s costume jewelry—sparkly beads, all her pierced earrings, some lovely old Bakelite bracelets—and an envelope of photographs. That was all there was.
Then my parents left West Dunster. My father sold his business, and they moved to Florida for my mother’s health. They had been talking vaguely about moving south, but when they actually did it, it was a shock. In the past few years, my mother had developed a be
wildering array of minor medical problems—the persistent cough, shortness of breath, headaches. They all stemmed from a chronic bronchial condition that worsened during the frigid Maine winters, when she was almost always sick. I knew she had given up the business of greeting card photography; she told me she was tired of it. She was now seventy, and it was time to retire. I had no idea her health was bad enough for them to take such a drastic step.
They said they didn’t mind leaving Maine—they had nothing to keep them there—but I knew it was actually quite difficult for them to go. It wasn’t my parents’ way to dwell on such things, however. My uncle had a condo in Fort Myers; my parents knew people in Miami. They had visited the Keys, and when they heard about a little pink stucco house for sale on Key Largo, with a view of the water, they flew down and, impulsively, bought it. They acquired an old wooden boat, took up saltwater fishing, grew orchids and avocados in the backyard. My mother’s health seemed to improve for a time.
They came to Boston to see us during the summer of Watergate, and we watched the hearings in their air-conditioned hotel room. Patrick and I went to Florida that Christmas—a peculiar tropical Christmas without my grandmother. They took us fishing, and we all went whale-watching—my mother in jeans she had embroidered herself with flowers and ladybugs. I painted my parents and Patrick sitting on the veranda playing a furious game of poker. My mother made a time exposure photograph of the four of us standing in front of their boat, the Anna—Patrick in a beaded headband, my long crazy hair blowing in the wind, my parents standing between us, grinning, with their hands on our shoulders. I still have those photographs; we all seem to glow with happiness and well-being. My mother looks absurdly healthy.
But her symptoms came back. For a while, her doctors were convinced she had developed emphysema, but eventually—belatedly—the problem was diagnosed as lung cancer.
No one expected it to be terminal. My parents planned a summer trip to Italy, my mother renewed her driver’s license for the next five years. At Christmas, one lung was removed, and she seemed better, though she was very weak. Then she got sick again, worse than before. The cancer had moved rapidly: The other lung was found to be affected, and it had spread to her liver. She was given six months; she didn’t live five.
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