Tell Me One Thing

by Deena Goldstone

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Deena Goldstone

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  www.nanatalese.com

  DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Random House LLC. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Jacket design by Emily Mahon

  Jacket photograph © Jan Stromme / The Image Bank / Getty Images

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Goldstone, Deena.

  [Short stories. Selections]

  Tell Me One Thing : Stories / Deena Goldstone. —

  First Edition

  pages cm

  I. Title.

  PS3607.O48595A6 2014

  813’.6—dc23 2013029513

  ISBN 978-0-385-53875-6 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-0-385-53876-3 (eBook)

  v3.1

  To Marty, for his steadfast belief

  and

  To Eva, for the gift of her spirit

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  GET YOUR DEAD MAN’S CLOTHES

  IRISH TWINS

  AFTERMATH

  TELL ME ONE THING

  SWEET PEAS

  WHAT WE GIVE

  THE NEIGHBOR

  WISHING

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A Note About the Author

  Get Your Dead Man’s Clothes

  SITTING IN ST. TIMOTHY’S CATHEDRAL DURING his father’s funeral Mass, Jamie has no idea how the rest of his brothers and sisters feel about their father’s death, but he knows what he is feeling—nothing. Of that he is sure. Over the forty-two years of his life he has cultivated nothingness when it comes to his father, assiduously. Number seven in the line of eight children, Jamie had ample opportunity to observe the wrong way to deal with Hugh Casey O’Connor Sr.

  His oldest brother, Hugh Jr., had taken his father on—matched his screaming rants with his own screaming assaults. Their fighting filled up the house with accusations and hateful words and sometimes whacks and punches. Years later, all that rancor seemed to drain away as soon as the two sat down over an open bottle.

  The next brother in the line, Kevin, sidestepped the arguments but not the need for his father’s attention. He played football in the autumn, basketball in the winter, and ran track in the spring, a star in all three, never happier than when his father showed up to watch. And unfailingly sullen and disappointed on the far more frequent occasions when Hugh didn’t. Jamie could see that it mattered far too much to Kevin what the old man thought.

  Drew was born next, and he carved out a niche as his father’s toady. He narrowed his sight to the public persona—the Hugh who went out of his way to help a neighbor build a back porch or the Hugh who drove old Mrs. Brennan to the doctor when her daughter couldn’t get away from work. Drew refused to be disillusioned by the private Hugh who never lifted a finger at home and spent most of the weekends hurling criticisms at his various sons. The heart sees what the heart needs to see, so wherever their father was, Drew was by his side, frequently yelled at for some transgression never spelled out. Whatever the behavior of the old man, it only bonded Drew more closely to him.

  Three girls came next—Moira, Kate, and Ellen—and they didn’t count, Jamie thinks, because his father treated them so differently. Hugh left the girls to their mother to discipline and raise. What did he know about girls, Hugh always said. He allowed them leeway he’d never have allowed his sons, who were, after all, reflections on his own self.

  By the time Jamie came along eleven months after Ellen, there was a whole diorama of behaviors in front of him, all instructive of how not to deal with Hugh Sr.’s temper and drinking and wily charm and basic, underlying need to humiliate his sons lest they get too big for their britches or, more likely, upstage the old man.

  When Marianne was born ten years after Jamie, all bets were off. She was the baby, long after anyone thought there would be more children, and she got the best of everything.

  HIS MOTHER, SITTING BESIDE HIM in St. Timothy’s now, latches onto his hand. She doesn’t turn in her seat or look at him, just grabs his hand for comfort. Somehow he has always known that he is his mother’s favorite. Maybe it is because he was the only one who would sit glued to her side, eyes wide, on those rare occasions when she read to them. Even as a toddler, he would bring her well-worn picture books with loops of Crayola marks over most of the pages and ask to be read to. Sometimes, when she could, his mother would stop whatever she was doing, find an armchair, let him climb into her lap, and spend five minutes reading the book to him. It was only when Jamie was much older that he understood that she cherished these small respites in her day as much as he.

  Jamie can see that she is destroyed by the old man’s death, but it makes no sense to him. Hugh had had little use for women, unless they were young and pretty, and Carrie O’Connor had never been either as far as he could tell. His parents’ wedding picture, sitting in a tarnished frame on top of the bookcase, provides ample evidence. What Jamie sees when he looks at that picture—and he finds himself staring at it more often than he thinks reasonable—is a thin woman wearing a navy blue suit, her sharp features scowling into the camera, her dark hair pulled away from her narrow face, and looking well older than her twenty-two years. Whatever was she thinking? he often wondered but never asked.

  Today his mother is weeping, a creased handkerchief pressed to her lips. He glances over at his eldest sister, Moira, sitting on the other side of Carrie, holding her other hand. She is the sensible one of the bunch. Never a beauty, taking after their father with her sturdy frame and unruly auburn hair, she married a neighborhood boy who’s in the trades, an electrician, and had her five kids quickly. It has always been Moira who checks in daily with their mother. She’ll be the one to make sure Carrie gets on with things once their father is in the ground. Jamie is grateful to her but never says so. In their family there’s little talk of anything that has to do with gratitude or vulnerability.

  Moira seems fine. She long ago figured out the old man was a bullshit artist. But Ellen, sitting farther down the pew, looks like she’s going to faint. Something has happened to her in the years she’s been away. All the flesh seems to have melted off her, and the skin that is left is stretched too tightly across her face and large bones. Her collarbone looks naked. Her wrists are too large. The bones of her pelvis push through her black skirt in a painful thrust.

  Jamie knows Ellen left the United States to be away from their father. Hugh Sr. had cast too large a shadow over every decision Ellen tried to make. In an act of desperation, she fled to Europe, settling in Malaga, a small town in Spain. Jamie doesn’t know much of what she does there. “She’s made a life for herself,” his mother always says. Jamie has no idea what that means. But he figures she must speak Spanish by now, and that is more than the other seven of them have managed to do.

  The woman sitting on the other side of Ellen, who came with her from Spain, looks straight ahead, her fingers busy on a rosary. She is small and older than Ellen and has a faint mustache above her lipsticked mouth. She seems to speak no English, so no one in the family has managed to figure out who she is to Ellen. There is speculation, but no one has asked directly. Contrary to what he guesses his brothers and sisters
think, Jamie has the weird idea she is some kind of nurse or caretaker. It’s the way she keeps Ellen in her proprietary sights and whispers to her from time to time. If he can get Ellen alone later, Jamie thinks, he may be able to ask her, but the chance of some quiet in his mother’s house isn’t likely.

  AT THE CEMETERY, THE BROTHERS AND SISTERS stand in a line at the north side of the grave. No one suggested it, they just fell into the old order—Hugh, Kevin, Drew, Moira, Kate, Ellen, Jamie, and Marianne, the boys dark and sharp featured like their mother, the girls ruddy and large boned like their father. Only Marianne is truly lovely.

  Hugh Sr. would line all eight of his children up in that very same order every Sunday to make sure the boys’ ties were straight, that there were no smart-alecky attitudes evident, and that the girls had combed each other’s hair. Then they’d pile into the family car, a sensible station wagon that came off the assembly line in Detroit, and drive the five minutes to St. Timothy’s for Sunday Mass. Even today Jamie remembers that stuffy, crowded car where his brothers surreptitiously elbowed and punched each other in a vain attempt to get more space, an inch more breathing room, and his father screamed at them to shut up. As an adult he understands that car ride to be the perfect metaphor for his whole childhood.

  Carrie wouldn’t come to the cemetery. She said there was no way she could watch her husband of fifty-four years lowered into the ground. Her children would have to bear witness at their father’s burial. It was her sister, Norah, who took her back to the house—the same narrow house they all grew up in—to help her lay out the food and wait for the children’s return.

  As the oldest son, it falls to Hugh Jr. to pick up the shovel. Jamie can tell he’s barely sober enough to do it. Stumbling a bit, Hugh hefts a mound of damp earth and dumps it into the open grave. The sound of the clods hitting the wooden casket is startlingly loud. Jamie looks around—it’s the stillness of the air in the cemetery that accentuates the sound. They are the only family there. No one else is being buried on this April day, so he can hear the rustle of Kate’s silk dress as she shifts her weight onto her other leg, impatient. She wants this all to be over, bored and restless as she always is.

  It’s warmer than it has a right to be this time of year. The air is lovely and expectant before the grand rush of spring. The breeze only a whisper through the leafless trees, certainly not strong enough to cool the air, and the grandchildren, scattered around the other sides of the open grave, are already shedding sweaters and jackets.

  Drew clears his throat and Jamie looks over quickly to see that Drew is trying hard not to cry. Jamie can’t believe it, after all the grief the old man gave his brother.

  When do you stop loving a parent? Jamie wonders. How much can a child take before that stubborn flame of necessary love sputters and dies? Moira would know the answer to that, he thinks, because she’s busy whispering to her teenage son, Sean, and doesn’t seem to take much notice of the dark brown casket lying just below her feet.

  What happens to you, his train of thought goes, if you never let that feeling in? He can’t remember a time he ever felt anything but fear toward his father. Fear and a desire to get away from him. Even on those nights when Hugh had had just enough to drink so that he was expansive and not so much to drink that he was dangerous, even then Jamie kept his distance. He knew the line could be crossed with lightning speed, well before anyone else could figure out where it was, and that his father would reach out and grab him, force him to stand in front of his blustery, perspiring face as he shook him and yelled accusations that made no sense to a seven-year-old.

  What did it matter that the next morning while his father was drinking his coffee and reading the sports section that he would reach over and ruffle Jamie’s hair with some sort of all-purpose, one-size-fits-all endearment? “There’s my boy” was about as far as Hugh Sr. would go, and even at seven Jamie was sure his father didn’t know which son he was talking to, head in the paper, his attention on the box scores from the day before.

  And then, as the boys grew and their transgressions progressed into teenage rebellion, their father’s punishments escalated accordingly. Hugh Sr. thought nothing of beating his sons until his arm or the belt gave out, or kicking them down the stairs, or even, one time when Jamie was fourteen, chasing him around the house with a butcher knife grabbed from the kitchen counter in a rage.

  “He’d had too much to drink” was his mother’s attempt at an explanation the next morning. “You know how he gets.”

  “I know and so do you,” Jamie’s voice rising in pitch. “So why do you put up with it?”

  “Ahhh, Jamie, you wouldn’t understand” was his mother’s only answer.

  “Would you have let him kill me?” burst out of him before he could think about it. “That’s what he was yelling—that it was my time to die!”

  “You’re making too much of it.” Carrie turned away, packing lunch boxes in the small kitchen.

  “He had a knife!” Jamie fairly screamed.

  “Did he not apologize this morning?”

  “What difference does that make?! He’ll only do it again.”

  And then Marianne came into the kitchen with her hairbrush and two ribbons for Carrie to make her braids and their mother turned gratefully away from Jamie’s accusations, stated and implied. Where were you, he wanted to ask, why didn’t you protect me? But he didn’t, because he understood finally, clear as day, that nothing was going to change in his parents’ house. He shut up about it and began to plot his escape. He set his sights on college as his savior, a goal so far from his father’s world that it felt safe.

  Hugh Jr. wasn’t interested in college at all. To no one’s surprise, he joined his father in the small plumbing business the old man had been running for more than twenty years. That way their ongoing battles could continue. Now they argued about the quality of copper piping or the need for low-flow toilets instead of about grades or curfew, but it didn’t matter—the battles were what they wanted, the particulars were as changeable as the weather.

  Kevin won an athletic scholarship to Holy Cross but never managed to distinguish himself in any sport once he was there. Jamie wasn’t surprised when he got a coaching job at St. Sebastian Prep, not twenty minutes from the house they all grew up in.

  Drew never managed to settle himself into any work. He took over the third-floor dormitory where all four boys were once housed, a ghost now, who came and went without explanation. Carrie shrugged her shoulders when one or another of the children would ask about Drew. “He’s finding himself,” she’d say and change the subject.

  Jamie knew from the night of the kitchen knife attack that he was putting as much distance between himself and his father as he could. He applied only to colleges on the West Coast, those in Oregon, Washington, and California. When he chose San Diego State, where he reasoned the weather would be warm and the academic demands would be manageable, his father flatly refused to give him a dime, not for a school in California that wasn’t even a Catholic college. That was his explanation, but Jamie suspected he just didn’t want to spend any money on him.

  Jamie went anyway. His first semester was paid for by money carefully saved from working summers all through high school, and still he had to work two jobs to make it through. Each semester after that was touch and go. Sometimes he managed the tuition, sometimes he had to drop out and work for a while to be able to reenroll. It took him longer than most to get his degree, but he accomplished it as well as another year of graduate work, which gave him his teaching credential. Now he taught English to middle schoolers at a charter school in San Diego and managed to never go home to visit. His father’s funeral was the exception. He thought about skipping it, had talked to Moira about the fallout if he did, but allowed himself to be persuaded. “You need to do this for her,” she had said, “not for the old bastard. I can’t imagine how she’d get through it without you there.” And Jamie didn’t argue. He knew he had to go.

  AT THE BRICK HOUSE O
N CROSSLEY LANE where they all grew up, cars start arriving, one after another of his brothers and sisters and their families. Everyone parks on the street out of habit. It was a pet peeve of their father’s—finding somebody’s car in the driveway when he wanted to put his car into or take it out of the garage. So the edict—anyone parking in the driveway would be in serious trouble. What that trouble might be was never spelled out, but it didn’t matter—the driveway remained bare.

  As Jamie turns left onto Crossley Lane after his father’s burial, he heads straight for the empty driveway and parks his rental car halfway up, just by the kitchen door.

  Already the house is filling up with noise and far too many people. There is Moira, talking nonstop, bossy as always, ushering her five children into the house with an admonition here and there to watch their manners, her husband, Robbie, bringing up the rear, his preferred place.

  Then Hugh Jr.’s family spills out of their SUV parked at the curb. Tina, his long-suffering wife, having assessed her husband’s condition, is at the wheel. Hugh stumbles out of the passenger’s side as their four adult children make their desultory way up the front path, doing their best to ignore their embarrassing father.

  Kevin and Loretta are already inside. Jamie can hear her chirpy voice exclaiming how beautiful the service was, how the words of Father Malachi lifted her soul, and the day, did you ever see a more beautiful April day?! God, Jamie thinks, doesn’t she ever get tired of being so relentlessly upbeat? Maybe that’s why Kevin has mastered his consistently negative take on almost everything—to have some breathing room of his own. They have three children, all boys, all athletes, one even in the minor league system of some major league baseball team. He’s the only one Kevin talks about, worrying constantly that Mark might suffer a career-ending injury and then what will he do?

  Kate arrives with her two equally bored, but well-dressed, children. When Kate married up and moved to Atlanta, she shed her working-class identity as fast as she could say “I do.” Her husband refused to fly into Buffalo for the funeral. “Buffalo?” he said. “Why would I want to go to Buffalo?” And Kate was relieved. She didn’t want to spend the whole three days making excuses for the ways of her family.