When we got to Bedford Avenue and stood in front of Erasmus Hall High School, where Max had gone, Seana talked again about hanging out with Italian guys when she was growing up, and told me they’d been her first lovers.
“They were football, baseball, and soccer players, most of them,” she said, “and they lifted weights, and they were in great shape, and they were always in a rush. Sometimes we’d do it in the schoolyard when it was dark, me bent over and bracing myself against the wall—usually the wall where they’d chalked in the strike zone for stickball—them coming into me from behind. They took turns some nights. I was very American in this, Charlie—in wanting to be well-liked—and afterwards they’d ask if I wanted one of them to walk me home, to be with me in case any niggers—their word—tried to molest me, which seemed to them the very worst thing that could happen to a girl, even an Irish girl they’d just screwed.”
Like the church, Erasmus appeared to have been well maintained. Built in the style of British universities, with four buildings, turrets at the corners, forming a rectangle that enclosed an inner courtyard, it looked like a medieval castle. I told her that the first time I’d come here Max had remarked on how incredible it was to find a replica of Oxford University smack in the middle of a lower middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood. He’d talked about how much he owed to his education at Erasmus: to being taught by men who, more than a handful with doctorates, had become high school teachers during the depression in order to support their families.
We headed back toward the Holy Cross church, and when I said that I knew she hadn’t been back here for a while, but didn’t she once own an apartment in Brooklyn, she let go of my arm.
“Yes, I own an apartment in Brooklyn,” she said. “In Carroll Gardens. I also own a condo in Boston, a home in Taos, New Mexico, and a tastefully furnished flat in Paris.”
“Really?”
“Thanks to my two books, and shrewd investments, I am a fairly wealthy woman,” she said. “Isn’t that why, even though I’m almost old enough to be your mother, you’ve been hot for my crotch?”
“Oh come on,” I said. “I know this—going home—is hard for you, but…”
“And I don’t need your two-bit sympathy or condescension,” she snapped. “How the hell would you know what is or isn’t hard for me?”
“Stop it,” I said. “Just stop it, okay, or…”
“Or what? You’ll throw me off a balcony?”
“If I can find one around here,” I said. “Sure. Though a fire escape might do.”
“Thank you, Charlie,” she said. “Thanks for pushing back. Despite your story—you and Nick and whatever did or didn’t happen at the party—I wasn’t sure you had it in you.”
“But you are nuts,” I said. “Mean too.”
“I can be,” she said. “You’ve got that right.”
“Mean to yourself first of all,” I said.
“Above all,” she said.
“Do you really have an apartment in Brooklyn?”
“I told you I did.”
“And three others?”
“That’s right.”
“But why?” I asked. “Why so many different places?”
“Guess.”
“So nobody can find you?”
“Maybe.”
“But I found you.” I pulled her close, and spoke the words that came to me next: “Finders keepers…?”
We were passing the Holy Cross schoolyard again, and she set her overnight bag down, then pushed me, step by step, until my back was up against the chain-link fence.
“Finders what?!” she said, her face close to mine. “Because if you could find any sense in your head, you’d keep your sentimental sentiments to yourself and realize that this woman you claim to care about, and who has, rash act, admitted she cares for you, is having a distinctly and remarkably hard time now. And why do you think that is, Mister Eisner?”
“Hey—slow down,” I said. “I was just…”
“You were just being your usual innocent, faux-naif, ignorant self, but it won’t wash this time, son, because it’s all coming down the pike and going up the pike at the same time and nobody’s directing traffic. Everything, buster—your father in the grave, my mother on her way there, my father too mean to die, my beloved sisters-in-waiting with their expanding litters of Catholic brats, my unwritten novels, and my whole fucking life, can’t you see? Can’t you see? Are you fucking blind, or a moron, or what?”
“I’m Charles Eisner, and I’m your friend,” I said.
“My friend?!” she said. She grabbed me by the shoulders, shoved me against the fence. “My friend?! Then stop trying to cheer me up with your banal, bumbling, belittling Brooklyn banter. And tell me this—what would it take to get you to just shut up and stop asking questions and judging every goddamned thing I think and do…?”
“But I wasn’t…”
She pulled me to her, then slammed me against the fence. “Can you please just shut your fucking mouth?” she said. “Or, as we used to say in these parts—where I grew up, young man—why don’t you shut your ass and give your mouth a chance, because I don’t need words now, can you understand that? I don’t need sympathy, or empathy, or solicitude, or compassion, or condolence, or contrition, or consolation, or any other word beginning with the letter C, because actions speak louder than words, right?”
And saying this she slammed me against the fence again, and when she did, cheers went up from inside the schoolyard, some of the black guys yelling at her to let me have it, to bust my mouth, and chop up my balls, and wipe up the sidewalk with what was left.
She looked past me. “Maybe later,” she said to them calmly, then turned back to me. “I own four homes,” she said. “One-two-three-four, and, as it happens, I can not be found in any of them today, but when I can, know this: that I am writing a different novel in each of them, see, and maybe I’m a different person in each of them, and maybe I have a different lover, or set of lovers in each of them, and what’s it to you? What’s it to you or anyone else if I ever finish one of these goddamned novels or I don’t? You tell me that, you goddamned Jew bastard who’s still wet behind the ears—you son-of-a-bitch-motherfucking-fart-slurping-scum-bag-of-a-Kotex-sniffing-cocksucking kike…”
The black guys on the other side of the fence whooped and hollered, and when they did, I pushed at Seana with both hands, and to my surprise, she gave way—no resistance at all—and beamed her most gorgeous smile at me.
“Hey—that was pretty fucking good, don’t you think?” she said. She waved to the guys in the schoolyard. “See you around, you handsome black mothers!” she called. She picked up her bag, I picked up mine, and her free arm draped around my shoulder, we started walking down the street again.
“I am a piece of work, right?” she said. “You have to admit it.”
“I admit it. You are definitely a piece of work.”
“And not dull, right?”
“And not dull,” I said. “A little fucked-up maybe. And volatile. Quite volatile.”
“Labile would be the more accurate term,” she said.
“Labile,” I said. “Good word.”
“With labia like mine, how not, right?”
“There’s something to that.”
“Do you think I’m wasting good lines now, spouting out all this stuff—that I’m throwing away precious soliloquies?”
“No,” I said. “The way I see it, you’re setting your words free so they can wander happily in the ether.”
“Point well taken,” she said. “And there’s also this: if I can live the stuff, why write it? Henry Miller liked to talk about that—about how you often come up with your best lines and stories when you’re taking a crap, for example, and how afterwards you can never remember them or retrieve them. Like dreams or daydreams that arrive with astonishing clarity, and then are gone forever a second or two later.”
“Before, when you were sleeping in the train, I dreamt that you and I fell in love
with each other,” I began, “and that when you woke and saw me, you didn’t know if…”
“Shh,” she said, and put a finger to my mouth. “Don’t get me started again, okay? I do adore you, Charlie, and I adore Henry Miller too, and so did George Orwell, and so did your dad. But now it’s time to visit Mom. You’re in for a treat. She can be a real pistol.”
“Like Eugenia?”
“At least.”
When the door opened, a short, wiry white-haired woman grabbed Seana and pulled her into the house. “Oh my God, oh my dear God,” the woman exclaimed. “It’s you—it’s really you! Oh my God oh my God oh my dear God…!”
Seana held to the woman and the two of them rocked back and forth in each other’s arms for a while, after which Seana introduced me, telling me the woman was her sister Caitlin, and telling Caitlin that I was her friend Charlie Eisner.
“Then you’d be the great Max Eisner’s son,” Caitlin said, and kissed both my cheeks, then wiped at my cheeks with the backs of her hands and apologized for slobbering on me.
“But shh,” she said. “Mum’s upstairs sleeping.”
Seana touched Caitlin’s face, under her left eye, which seemed frozen in a half-open position.
“What happened?” Seana asked.
“Stroke,” Caitlin said. “Minor, so they say.”
Caitlin closed the door behind us, put a finger to her lips, and led us into a room that was small and musty, framed photos and dried flower arrangements everywhere, crocheted doilies on the back of a red-tufted couch, and on the backs and arms of two large easy chairs.
“They stented my carotid, and while I was in the hospital—better safe than sorry—I had them tie off my tubes,” she said. She turned to me. “I had four children in six years, well into my forties, but tell me how you are, my child.”
“I’m happy to be here,” I said. “Seana’s spoken about you often.”
“We’ll have none of that,” she said, waving away my politeness and pointing to one of the easy chairs. I sat and she took my hands in both of hers. “You’ve had quite the loss, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I read about your dear father’s passing in The New York Times. I had the honor of meeting him once, when Seana gave a reading at the main library here in Brooklyn. He was very proud of her, and so were we.”
“No you weren’t,” Seana said.
“You’d be surprised,” Caitlin said.
“Do tell,” Seana said.
“No need to be snide,” Caitlin said. “And I urge you not to be that way with Mum either. In fact, I’ll ask you to promise to behave yourself.”
“And if I don’t?”
“I know you still have your own place, dear, but since you’ve come here before going there—” she gestured to our bags “—it would be good if you’d stay over with us.”
“So I can watch Mom, and you can be off-duty?”
“There’s no need for such,” Caitlin said. “Mum loves you very much. We all do, even though—”
“Even though I’m the queen of sluts?” Seana said. “I used that in Triangle, you may recall. The mother calls her daughter ‘the queen of sluts’—‘the reigning queen of sluts.’ It’s one of the few autobiographical moments in my fiction traceable to my early years.”
“In your book you gave the line to Mum, though it was our father who named you that,” Caitlin said. “But my dear Seana—and let our friend Charles be a witness—let us agree that that’s all water under the bridge and bygones be bygones, because I’m truly happy you’ve come home, and we are proud of you, and we’ve all said things—or written things—we wish we could take back, but that’s why God invented forgiveness, don’t you think?”
“Not in my book,” she said.
“‘Not in my book,’” Caitlin said. “That’s very good. Very literal, I’d say.” She spoke to me. “My sister certainly has a way with words, wouldn’t you say, Charles?”
“Call me Charlie,” I said.
“Of course, Charles,” she said.
“‘Not in my book,’” Seana said. “I like it. When I write my memoirs, that will be the title. What do you think?”
“I think you’ll do whatever you please, same as always,” Caitlin said. “Same as he did.”
“He?” I asked.
“Our father,” Seana said. “Patrick Michael O’Sullivan, whose name is never spoken here.”
“And with reason,” Caitlin said. “And how is he, you’ll ask next, so I’ll say at once that I wouldn’t know. I haven’t seen the sod in ages.”
Seana took out her cell phone. “We can change that,” she said. “I came prepared.”
Caitlin tried to snatch the phone from Seana’s hand. “Don’t you dare!” she said.
“As I told Charlie on our way down here, I’ve been thinking it’s time for a grand family reunion,” Seana said. “And, as you just said, bygones are bygones, and water under the bridge, and forgiveness too, yes? There’s always forgiveness, isn’t that what you said? Isn’t that what we were taught?”
“Don’t do it,” Caitlin said.
“Why not?” Seana said. “We’re still family, and he’s still our father, and good Catholics that they are, he and our mum are still married, aren’t they?”
“Stop it,” Caitlin said. “It will kill her.”
“Till death do they part then, though perhaps, if she gets lucky, he’ll go there first,” Seana said. “And with her affliction—Alzheimer’s—and all the years gone by, she probably won’t recognize the old shitbag anyway.”
“Stop it. Stop it at once. Stop provoking me. Stop being…”
“Stop being Seana?”
“May God forgive him for all he did,” Caitlin said.
“Ah, but our Lord can’t do that without proper confession, contrition, and penance.”
“Enough, Seana. Show some respect.”
“For him?”
“You know what I mean. Just you stop it now. Stop being so contrary, so…”
Seana put up her hand, cutting Caitlin off. “Is this Patrick Michael O’Sullivan—the Patrick Michael O’Sullivan?” she asked, the cell phone at her ear. “It is…? Did I wake you…? I see—no bother, you say, because you had to get up to answer the phone anyway…? Well, that’s an old one, isn’t it… and who is this, you ask…? Why this is your long-lost daughter, Seana…”
Caitlin stood. Seana stepped aside to let her pass, and Caitlin glared at her, and then, with a quick swipe, knocked the cell phone out of Seana’s hands. The phone bounced once, hit a wall, and split open, its innards tumbling out.
Seana picked up a piece of the phone, placed it against her ear, and grinned. “All gone!” she said. “So I guess that means we’ll have to go fetch him. Are you with me, Charlie?”
“Sure,” I said.
“If you go to get him, don’t come back,” Caitlin said.
Seana hesitated. “Do you mean that?” she asked.
Caitlin took a deep breath, exhaled, shook her head. “Of course not. But come here to me now.” She spread her arms and Seana went to her. “I still love you, you know. We all do.”
“He doesn’t.”
“‘All’ was not intended to be an all-inclusive term,” Caitlin said. “That one never loved anyone other than himself. We know that. You’re hardly alone there.”
“True enough,” Seana said. “Still…”
“And no matter your decision—to stay or to go—I’ll be staying the night here,” Caitlin said. She took Seana by the hand, and they sat on the couch, side by side. “Keira’s with the children, hers and mine, God bless her. I left them at her house for a sleepover because my Hank’s working night shift, and we take turns watching Mum now. We always had a talent for making do, didn’t we?”
“We still do, it seems,” Seana said.
“There are five of us, you know,” she said to me. “I’m the oldest, and Seana’s the baby, and there are three between us—Keira, Mary, and Margar
et—Peggy we call her. Five sisters, each one come into the world smarter and more beautiful than the one before.”
“So I’ve heard,” I said.
Caitlin pointed to the ceiling. “And when it comes to Mum, you’re in for a surprise. The Alzheimer’s, or whatever you choose to call it, has made some inroads for sure. Her mind may not be what it once was, but its decline has been accompanied by some unforeseen benefits.”
“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” Seana said.
“Sometimes,” Caitlin said. “Though not often, in my experience. Mostly, I find Him quite transparent. He rewards good and punishes evil.”
“In this life?” Seana said.
“In this life often, in the life-to-be eternally.”
“And here on earth,” Seana said, “there’s the blessed Irish trinity, of course: shame, guilt, and humiliation.”
“I’ve read your two books, you know,” Caitlin said, “so little you say will shock me. And I’ve also read several books by your beloved Graham Greene, and what I take away from them is that straying from the fold can itself be the surest expression of faith, and that our Lord, in his abundant mercy, often pays more attention to His sinners than He does, say, to our Ladies of Sodality.”
Seana covered her mouth to keep from laughing out loud.
“Have your fun,” Caitlin said. “But please try not to laugh at us. If we mind our manners, we can get through most things. And…” She cocked her head to the side, pointed to the ceiling “…and yes, she’s moving about, so I’ll clean her up and bring her down, and then we can show you the surprise we prepared.”
“What surprise?”
“In the event you came for a visit, which we’ve been counting on, we’ve kept it in readiness. There’s not a day goes by, mind you, we don’t think of you and remember you in our prayers.”
Caitlin kissed me on the forehead. “And you too, dear child,” she said. “We won’t soon forget you and your dear father.”
Caitlin and their mother were the same height, had the same short, cropped white hair, the same large hazel eyes. They stood at the entrance to the living room.
The Other Side of the World Page 23
