Tell Me One Thing

by Deena Goldstone

  Through the leaded glass windows of the dining room, Jamie can see Marianne bent over the heavy wooden table that served as the dinnertime battleground every night of their lives. She holds her youngest in one arm and rearranges platters with the other. She’s the only one who married smart, Jamie thinks. Everyone loves her husband, Kent, unassuming but solid, generous and slyly funny. They have a set of twins and two younger children, all under six.

  As Jamie enters the crowded kitchen, he stands for a minute and takes stock of his extended family. Five married, but only one married well. Three single—Drew, Ellen, and himself. Is that about average for a large family, he wonders, one happy marriage out of eight? Are most members of large families victims of the same kind of train wreck that he now understands his family to have been? It’s possible that many families, large or small, are train wrecks, but he doesn’t know. Never close to forming a family of his own, never attaching himself as a surrogate member to any other family, he has had little to compare the O’Connors to. He knows only what he felt growing up in this cramped, chaotic house they all congregate in now. And he knows only because he has been away, because the perspective of the West Coast has let him see his early years with fresh eyes.

  He believes he sees more than his brothers and sisters, but he doesn’t know what to do with this sight. Like everything else, he files it away and presents to the world a slightly bland facade, polite but not very approachable, competent but never impressive. It’s almost as if he used up all his intensity growing up and now lives in the narrow band of emotions that’s left over.

  He can’t say the same for the rest of his siblings. Already, Hugh Jr.’s voice carries over the scores of others packed in the small kitchen, loud and insistent and more than a little drunk.

  “You’re not listening to me!” he yells at Moira, who yells right back at him.

  “Because you’re drunk and you’re not making any sense!”

  “Who the hell are you to criticize me?!” Hugh yells before Tina is at his side, talking softly to him, trying to ease him out of the kitchen, but he’s having none of it.

  “You can barely stand up—I thought you were going to topple into the open grave when you hefted that shovel! That’s what you wanted, isn’t it, locked in with Dad for all eternity?!”

  “Shut up!” is yelled even louder than Moira’s elevated voice. This is from Drew, who has been leaning against the kitchen counter, downing beer after beer. “Don’t talk about Dad like that!”

  “Why not?” And this is from Kate, who has dropped her bored and superior attitude and descended into the maddening, loud muddle that is the O’Connor clan arguing. Apparently, the urge to participate is irresistible. “You think he’s so powerful he can hear us from the grave?! You do, don’t you? You’ve never seen him for the small man he really was!”

  “Who told you to come home?!” Drew screams at her as Jamie eases himself out of the hot and claustrophobic space and into the dining room.

  Unbothered by the opera that’s taking place in the kitchen, the grandchildren are helping themselves to food—ham slices and a variety of precut cheeses, potato salad, a roast turkey that one of his sisters brought, probably Moira.

  “The old man deserves some respect, this day of all days!” Jamie can hear Drew scream above the din and the answering hawking laugh from Moira.

  And then Ellen is at his elbow. “Mom’s lying down. She asked for you,” she says quietly.

  “Okay.” But he stops her before she can slip away, a hand on her brittle arm. Just eleven months between them and a shared tenderness for each other that couldn’t be expressed anywhere else in their chaotic house, Jamie and Ellen relied on each other. “Did you want to come back for this?” he asks her now.

  She looks at him sharply. “It’s not a matter of want, is it?”

  “Ellen, are things all right with you?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Who’s the woman with you?”

  “Estella.”

  “Come on, Ellen.”

  And she knows exactly what he means—I didn’t ask her name, I need to know who she is to you—but Ellen shakes her head at him. “Someone I need right now” is all she says, is all she can say. Then, “Go on in to Mom. She’s waiting.”

  INSIDE HIS PARENTS’ BEDROOM, the heavy drapes are drawn against the late afternoon light. Their old wooden bed, bought with Hugh’s first paycheck as a married man, is positioned against the far wall. When Jamie opens the door he immediately sees his mother lying on top of the spread, feet crossed at the ankles, her good shoes still on, a wrist over her closed eyes as if she has a headache. Even as Jamie closes the door, he can still hear the kitchen debate escalate further as Hugh gets drunker and Drew gets louder and Moira won’t let the boys bulldoze her.

  Jamie sits beside his mother gently on the bed. “Do you have a headache?”

  “I never believed this day would come.”

  “What? You thought Dad was immortal?” Jamie says it with as much lightness in his voice as he can muster.

  Carrie opens her eyes and looks at her best-loved son. “No, I was sure I would go before he did.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t.”

  She shakes her head back and forth—she doesn’t agree with him. Today her grief is too large to encompass.

  “I need you to do something for me.”

  “Anything, Mom.”

  “Take his clothes. Take them out of here. Now. I can’t look at them hanging there while your father is in the ground.”

  “All right, I will. Just tell me what you want me to do with—”

  “Take them to St. Timothy’s,” she says as she rolls onto her side, away from him, away from what she knows will happen next. She can’t watch it. “They’ll give them to people in need.”

  Jamie nods, but she can’t see him. He opens the closet door and stares at what’s in front of him. If someone didn’t know his father, he’d be able to guess a great deal from the clothes hanging there. All day long, for over fifty years, Hugh Sr. wore overalls and T-shirts for his work as a plumber, but when he dressed in his own clothes they had to be expensive and finely made. The clothes hanging in front of Jamie’s eyes seem fit for a man well above the station Hugh Sr. occupied in life. It was a startling aspect of his father—that he outfitted himself in such splendor and that he was so fastidious about his personal care. Jamie has memories of his father coming in from work and cleaning his hands in the mudroom sink, meticulously washing them over and over with his special soap and cleaning his nails with a brush he kept there just for that purpose.

  Carrie thought it was a kindness that Hugh performed each night—to wash away the day’s filth. Jamie always saw it as one more aspect of his father’s narcissism, a sort of preening. And to Jamie, the clothes say that, too. Silk shirts in soft colors—ocher, beige, dove gray—and cashmere sweaters in rich, dark tones. Hand-tailored shoes of supple Italian leather. Each item carefully bought and meant to last forever. That way, slowly, Hugh had accumulated a wardrobe of beautiful things. No one would know that he spent his days mucking out blocked toilets or flat on his back in the crawl space of a house wrestling with corroded pipes. No one would know that he screamed at his wife or beat his kids. No, here was a man who bought only the finest, who deserved only the best.

  Jamie grabs an armful of the shirts and makes his way out of the bedroom. His brothers and sisters are too busy arguing in the kitchen to pay him much mind. He knows if he asked for help the job would go more quickly, but he doesn’t. He just makes the many trips he has to make from the bedroom to the open trunk of his car quietly, wanting the singular satisfaction of taking out of the house all this personal evidence of his father’s life.

  Back in the bedroom, the closet now empty, he opens the top drawer of his father’s bureau and contemplates the neatly folded pajama sets. Hugh made Carrie iron his pajamas, and each set is pristine and wrinkle free. As Jamie reaches into the drawer, he uncovers a very old
pair, washed and ironed so many times that the images of horses on them have faded to shadows of their former selves. The reds have become faded browns and the blues are all but violet, and yet, immediately, the sight of the pajamas floods him with a moment in his childhood long forgotten.

  There is his father, in those very pajamas, brightly colored then, sprawled in front of the television, in the middle of the night, his legs straight in front of him, his bony feet bare and splayed, his arms hanging off the side of the easy chair he had always claimed as his own. Of course, there’s a bottle of beer in his right hand, the empties scattered on the rug—Jamie can see the image as if it’s a movie scene playing in his head. The television is flickering with some middle-of-the-night black-and-white movie, and there he is, maybe three years old, running into the room, terrified, he remembers now. He even remembers the nightmare that propelled him out of bed and down the two flights of stairs, something big and clawlike coming through the bedroom window. And in his memory he watches his three-year-old self crying, hiccuping really, his heart beating far too fast as he scrambles into his father’s lap, whimpering, “Daddy, Daddy!” Don’t do it, he wants to say, in a vain attempt to stave off what he knows is coming. He understands now, of course, that asking for comfort from his father was the wrong thing to do.

  Hugh Sr. sputters awake, still drunk, and pushes his son’s small body off of him before he even knows what he’s doing. But it’s the words Jamie remembers now, so many years later, words he would hear again and again—“You little shit, get out of my sight!”

  Such a small moment, but it has Jamie bent over the dresser, forehead resting on the top, grieving for that small, frightened boy. This is why I don’t come home, he tells himself, the past is too present here.

  As if his mother is reading his thoughts, she says to him now, without turning over, her face to the wall, “He loved you children, Jamie, you know that.”

  And he feels it—a surge of anger, like a lit match, roaring through him. It snaps his body straight. Love?! What is she talking about?! What grotesque universe does she live in that she can call what his father gave him, love? Dead and buried and she’s still defending him. At the expense of the truth … at the expense of her children.

  Jamie scoops up the contents of the drawer and leaves the room; his mother’s body stretched out on the bed, doesn’t move.

  Outside, he flings the pajamas on top of all the other clothes in his car trunk, starts to slam the lid closed, and then—an inspiration. He stops. Slowly now, with the calm that deeply embedded anger can bring, Jamie grabs one of his father’s very expensive suit jackets and holds it up.

  “Dead man’s clothes!” he yells. “Get your dead man’s clothes!”

  One of the nephews, kicking a soccer ball back and forth on the front lawn, hears him and comes up the driveway.

  “Hey, what’s going on, Uncle Jamie?”

  Jamie throws the jacket at him. “Take it,” Jamie says, “and a shirt to go with it.” He grabs one at random and tosses it also. “How ’bout a tie, or two—all silk, looks good with the shirt.”

  He shoves the ties into his nephew’s arms. “Cool” is all the teenager says, but then there are more nephews there, grabbing clothes from the open trunk. Sweaters are pulled over heads, a silk dressing gown is grabbed by one of his nieces, shoes are slipped onto feet. And through it all, Jamie is shouting, “Dead man’s clothes, come and get ’em!”

  The back door opens and some of his brothers and sisters are there. Drew is outraged but Moira is laughing and grabs something, anything now, it doesn’t matter, putting it on, parading down the driveway. Bits and pieces of Hugh Sr. thrown around from child to child, cousin to cousin, put on, exchanged, traded with another cousin, scraps of Hugh’s dignity walking across the front lawn. Hugh Jr. wants the hats—fine, gray fedoras that he claims for his own. The pajamas go, armfuls of them, and even his father’s underwear is grabbed by someone.

  “Put ’em on, take ’em off. Trade ’em. Sell ’em. Whatever you want, but get ’em now—your dead man’s clothes!” Jamie yells.

  And it’s then that he looks up and sees his mother standing in the open kitchen doorway, ashen, horrified at the blasphemy of what he’s doing. Her eyes hold his and Jamie doesn’t flinch, doesn’t look away. There is no guilt in him. He wants her to know that he’s doing this with pleasure, with gusto, with revenge. “Get your dead man’s clothes!”

  Irish Twins

  VERY EARLY ON A SUNDAY MORNING, BEFORE the sun is even up, on the one-year anniversary of their father’s death, Ellen O’Connor arrives on her brother’s doorstep and rings the bell. Despite having lived in San Diego for the past thirteen years, Jamie O’Connor can think of no one he would be glad to see at 5:17 a.m. He assumes someone’s made a mistake, turns over, and goes back to sleep.

  Standing in front of the third door in an identical line of weathered gray doors of the Casa Nuevo Villa, condo units that didn’t even look “nuevo” when they were built in the eighties, Ellen checks her cell phone for Jamie’s address. She’s exhausted; maybe she’s made a mistake. Having flown all night from Spain, where she has exiled herself for the past seven years, Ellen’s not sure she’s at the right unit. She is. She rings the bell again.

  Jaime groans in his bed. It’s Sunday, he wants to shout. Can’t they—an undefined, amorphous “they” that encompasses almost the whole world—leave me alone?! Then he hears “Jamie?” and the familiarity of the voice pulls him out of bed.

  From his second-floor bedroom window he can look down on his front doorstep, and there she is, his sister Ellen, standing at the door, one small duffel bag in hand. Well, at least she’s alive is his first thought. The last time he saw her he wouldn’t have made a bet on that possibility.

  He opens the window, sticks his head out, “Ellen,” and she steps back so she can see him and then gives him that smile he remembers so well from their childhood, the one that promised something slightly naughty.

  “Surprise,” she says. And he just nods. “What are the chances of you letting me in?”

  “Slim to none,” he says as he reaches for his jeans and whatever T-shirt he had thrown on the floor the night before.

  When he swings open the front door, he is relieved to see that she looks so much better. A year ago, as the eight O’Connor children gathered in Buffalo to bury their father, something had been seriously wrong, but she wouldn’t speak about it. She had reminded him of pictures he had seen of hollow-eyed people, dying of malnutrition. And then there was that strange woman who arrived with Ellen, spoke only Spanish, and never left his sister’s side.

  Now he can see she’s gained back some weight, not a lot, but enough so she doesn’t look like she belongs in Darfur. And he can see that her expression is more animated, there’s the promise of some fun in her eyes that reassures him she’s much closer to the Ellen he had grown up with, the Ellen he had relied on to get him through. It wasn’t just the scant eleven months that separated them that made them so close. It was their unspoken pact that they both saw the same thing—the perpetual calamity that was the O’Connor family.

  Once Jamie left Buffalo and had some distance, he often wondered if all large families shared the O’Connors’ habit of carelessness and neglect. Was it just that there were too many children for any two parents to really ride herd on? In his family, the struggle was to get through each day with everyone dressed, the older kids off to school, and with some kind of food on the table at dinnertime. Figuring out which child needed what specific attention or taking the emotional temperature of any one of them was way beyond the scope of either his mother or father. Hugh Sr. was too busy drinking and his mother, Carrie, was too busy, period, simply tending to the maintenance of so many bodies.

  But there was more, and Jamie came to understand this only as an adult. There was his father’s narcissism and casual cruelty. How he got pleasure from calling his sons “you little shits.” How, in the privacy of his own house, the words were hu
rled with scorn and derision, often accompanied with a back-of-the-hand slap, almost an afterthought, that always landed across a cheek or tender lip. How, in public, he’d announce with a broad smile and sometimes a hand clapped across a listener’s shoulder, “I’ve got so many of these little shits running around, I can’t remember all their names.” There’d be laughter. A joke, Hugh was always ready with a joke. Nobody minded that in one sentence he’d managed to label his sons as worthless and obliterate their identities. Nobody, that is, except his sons.

  What it took Jamie much longer to understand was his mother’s complicity, her complete denial of the raucous damage inflicted on each of them by her husband. Jamie’s childhood battles were all with his father, but as an adult now, at the beginning of his forties, he’s come to realize that it is his mother who never, not once, stepped in to protect him against his father’s assaults. He’s certain now that Carrie O’Connor’s crime was the greater one.

  Jamie has figured these things out for himself. Moving across the country to the West Coast helped. Knowing people who had been analyzed and therapy-ed gave him some language, but he has never discussed his conclusions with any of his siblings—about their childhood, the damage done, the most culpable parent. It’s not that the children of the O’Connor clan don’t talk to one another. They do. They shout, they argue, they discuss people they know, but they never delve beneath the surface. They skirt “judgment” as ungenerous. And any discussion of another’s behavior is labeled judgment. So all eight of the O’Connor siblings have their own version of what life was like growing up in that narrow brick house in Buffalo, but no one has compared notes. Until now. Ellen has come halfway around the world for just that purpose.