Old Newgate Road

by Keith Scribner

Kirk’s an altar boy and gives Cole the evil eye when they clop into the pew during the penitential rite. Father Mally remains aloof at first, but finally his glare falls on them, too. “I have sinned through my own fault,” Cole mumbles along with everyone else, “in what I have done, and in what I have failed to do.” At least half the families come to church fatherless, and he supposes some of them are fishing with pals, talking on ham radios, or…what else do men do? He has no clue. His father’s probably sinking a sledgehammer into the walls of their front room, making a heap of lath and plaster for his sons to contend with after mass. His mother presses a coin into each of their hands for the basket, then drops in two crumpled dollar bills. “Lord, I am not worthy.” They take communion, they kneel, they pray. Ridiculous. Stupendously boring. Father Mally’s sermonizing, his little insights into human nature, his tips for virtuous living drawn from the Gospel are so fluffy that Cole feels contempt for everyone who wastes an hour of their weekend to be here.

  Yet despite the inanity, he lines up and takes communion and holds the wafer solemnly on his tongue, bowing his head, kneeling and clasping his hands. And he prays. He asks God to make them stop. Whatever it takes. It’s the only thing he prays for.

  And rising from his knees he feels a little refreshed, a little stronger. Like he’s done something. “Peace be with you,” he says to his mother with a kiss, to Kelly and Ian with a hug, to Mr. Hayes in the pew behind him, shaking his hand, to the Reynolds boys and their grandmother in front, and even to Father Mally, robed and paternal, his knee clicking with each stride down the aisle. He takes Cole’s hand between his own. “Peace be with you, Father.”

  By noon they look like slaves in a gypsum mine, their powdered faces streaked with sweat. Ian’s got plaster dust in his eyebrows and hair, straining to lug his side of the garbage can. He looks like an old man.

  They’ve worked quietly and steadily, no groans or complaints. Kelly has been rolling primer on the ceiling and walls of the buttery, setting nails in the trim, spackling and sanding. They’re so cooperative because they’re waiting for what comes next, which is the van pulling into the driveway with the little Old World man from Hartford, here a week ago, returning to pick up the highboy. Their mother meets him at the funeral door, and the boys follow their father. Kelly doesn’t emerge from the buttery, knowing it will only make things worse if she’s present to witness his defeat.

  “On a Sunday!” their mother exclaims.

  “My Sabbath is Saturday,” he says, and Cole realizes he’s Jewish. Maybe not Italian at all. Cole hadn’t noticed the little tassels before, even after going into the shop several times.

  “It’s just not right,” his father says. “Doesn’t fit where we’d hoped to place it.”

  And now they hear another vehicle: Tilly’s Cadillac pulling in behind the van. Everyone, even the antique dealer, senses that nothing can proceed until Tilly enters the room, that she is central to any drama that might unfold. So they stand around silently, shifting, staring off, just waiting. And then she steps through the door and they begin again.

  “Mother. What a lovely surprise.”

  “Such a beautiful piece,” she says. She introduces herself to the dealer and then says, providing her bona fides, “Marks and Tilly Limited.” She shakes his hand. “Some damage on that one foot,” she notes, then slides open a drawer and runs her fingers over the dovetails. “It’s American?” she says.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She moves her fingertips over the molding at the top and then down one side, like a tailor fitting a man with a suit. “The veneer has bubbled out here, you see.”

  “It’s two hundred years old,” he says.

  In her high heels she walks slowly, appraisingly around it, then says, without looking at their father, “I hope you didn’t pay over three hundred for it.”

  No one says a word. Tilly pivots one foot on the point of a heel, and finally their mother says, “It’s going back is what’s happening here. Phil decided it wasn’t quite right.”

  Tilly sniffs at the air, knowing there’s more to the story, but no one says a thing.

  She turns back to the highboy, flicks a fingernail in a gap that’s opened up in one of the joints, slides her thumb the length of a scratch. She sighs, pushing a drawer closed tight. “I could probably take it off your hands,” she says, then turns to their mother. “We’d all enjoy an iced tea.”

  The male Callahans troop out at this pause and get back to work. The afternoon is hot and slow going. Now and again their father glances out the window to see whether the Cadillac and the antique dealer’s van are still in the driveway, and eventually he turns the radio up—classical music from Hartford—as if he wants to drown them out, even though they’re beyond earshot in the far side of the house. He rips out a hunk of lath, mutters, his face twitching. He bashes the wall with the sledgehammer, pinches his finger, groans, bashes the wall again. Other than the outbursts, grunts, and mumbles, he’s silent for an hour. Ian and Cole are, too. They know the drill: load the can, hump it out back to the dump pile, break the plaster away from the lath, then heap the lath up separately to pound out the nails another day.

  Late in the afternoon, on one of the last trips outside, Cole stops short as he’s coming into the kitchen. “Je vais te rendre plus tendre”—his mother’s stabbing a steak on the counter with a fork; a sprinkle of tenderizer, then stab-stab-stab—“tendre et bonne et délicieuse”—and another sprinkle, her voice singsongy like she’s tickling a baby—“délicieuse pour ma famille,” the dishes in the cupboards rattling with each thrust of the fork.

  Sunday dinner. Their father cuts the steak onto their plates, then she spoons on mashed potatoes and wax beans.

  “Such timing,” she says. “In the Berkshires, just this morning, Tilly was in a shop in Stockbridge that doesn’t hold a candle to Marks and Tilly, and she sees a highboy displaying tea towels—you know, draped over open drawers, stacked inside. That one was a repro, so as usual Tilly has outdone the competition. And she let your antique dealer know who’s who. She went over that highboy inch by inch and in the end he delivered it to her shop for free, gave us back all that you paid, and she bought it herself for fifty dollars less.” She takes a folded bill out of her pocket and snaps it open: a fifty-dollar bill. The three kids gawk at it. Cole has never seen one. “That,” she says, slipping the money back in her pocket, “is how you do business.” She pours gravy on her mashed potatoes. “Now”—she points her fork at her husband—“Tilly had some thoughts about Paris hotels.”

  * * *

  —

  Another week passes and his father takes a turn for the worse, forgetting more words than he remembers, wandering most evenings out into the charred and rotting fields so one of them has to run after him; and his increasing, even aggressive incontinence requires Cole to coax him into the shower sometimes twice a day, which thankfully demands less and less arm twisting. He seems to like the rubdown and the closeness of their bodies under the warm water, and it occurs to Cole that his father probably hasn’t been touched at all for a long, long time.

  He’s as sharp as ever at the keyboard and playing even more, though always the same piece. “The soundtrack of the summer,” Daniel calls it. It’s pretty peaceful, having that soothing, familiar melody swirling in the background. And the wrong notes are now so expected that they sound just right.

  Cole has made little or no progress with the VA. They have resent forms that didn’t arrive the first time and are suspiciously delayed again. He suspects his father might have intercepted them, and searched his room and the garbage last night but came up with nothing. Likewise, the incompetency paperwork’s completely stalled, pending the requisite doctors’ exams that won’t happen until he’s submitted the forms to the VA.

  He’s been talking to Nikki more frequently, every couple nights. He calls her after he gets in bed, hoping she won’t be
at Tony’s, and he’s delighted that more and more she isn’t. Daniel is too, although he tries to play it cool. He can hear Cole’s muffled voice through the bedroom wall if he’s on the phone at night, and in the morning while Cole is making him a crepe or scrambling eggs, he’ll casually ask, “Cómo está mi madre?”

  And tonight he calls her again, and again she answers. “How’s Daniel?” she asks.

  “Good, I think. He’s home more. Getting a little bored with LK, I’m afraid. He still loves the work though, and he won’t admit it, but I think he likes banking some money.”

  “What’s he going to do with it?”

  “Buy a Corvette.”

  She laughs. “LK really is an inspiration.”

  “Nah. The regular-kid thing’s run its course.”

  “He texted me something like that.”

  “I think we should still encourage him to hang out with LK. He’s hardly a great role model, but at least he’s a different kind of kid for Daniel to get to know before he’s back with his old crowd in Portland.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I agree.”

  They’re silent for a minute, and he fears the conversation has run dry. He’s not sure how much he should say about what he’s been thinking while lying awake in the heat at night, when he’s troweling mud on the drywall seams and rolling on paint, while he’s mashing potatoes for his father and son, when he’s squatting down to scrub his father’s legs or massaging the muscles around his shoulder blades as hot water courses down his back, how he washes his own body afterwards then directs the shower head to rinse them both, and how he’s noticed—their knobby calves, their slightly bowed legs, long thighs, and bony hips—how similar their bodies are.

  Instead he says, “Can I ask you a favor?”

  “Mmm.” Not a yes, nor a no.

  The bed is comfortable, his body worn to a frazzle from the day of work, the night cooling off just enough. “Would you sing me a song?”

  “You mean like now? On the phone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s sort of weird. I mean, I guess so. What song?”

  “Any song. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Well, let’s see.” She hems and haws. “You never asked me to sing before.” She’s clearly embarrassed, but he can hear that she’s smiling so hard she’s squinting, her face flushed. She giggles nervously, takes a deep breath, then a second one, then begins.

  “Born with the moon in Cancer. Choose her a name she will answer to…”

  Her voice is wavery, as it never is. She’s performing. She never performs, she just sings. “Call her green and the winters cannot fade her…”

  She eases down into the wellspring of her voice. Cole switches off the lamp on his nightstand and slides down in bed, pressing the phone to his ear.

  19

  Tilly goes to the Berkshires the first Sunday of every month. He has always known this about her, and Andrew will continue to drive her even after Cole moves into her house. He’ll come over in his own car and they’ll head off in the Cadillac for the day. Over the years, “going to the Berkshires” has summoned up images of crab salad at the Turner Inn, followed by drinks in a wicker rocker on their magnificent porch, a sharp-eyed strut through quaint stores, slow drives past rock walls and over covered bridges, an afternoon on the lawn at Tanglewood.

  On Sunday Cole’s woken by an anvil dropping on his head. “Chop, chop,” Tilly calls from the bottom of the stairs. She kept him up drinking late last night; when he quit pouring, she took over topping them off, her hand never steadier than when it’s wrapped around a bottle. It turns out that Andrew injured his knee so badly in a race yesterday they kept him overnight in the hospital for surgery.

  Cole is behind the wheel by ten, stopping at the Farm Shop for two coffees, adding sugar and cream to Tilly’s, then tearing sip holes in the lids with his front teeth. Driving, he takes a swallow, and when it’s halfway down he knows it could go either way—to his stomach or back up again. He stows the cup in the holder he bought to hang off the door—plastic and orange and despised by Tilly for its truck-driver cheapness. She sneers at it and lights a cigarette. He powers down her window an inch and she puts it back up. He cracks it again and locks the controls. Knowing what he’s done, she doesn’t try the button again but simply blows a cloud of smoke at him.

  He drives past miles of tobacco fields north of town, the nets removed, everything stored neatly in the sheds, and past the 92 Compound, where Puerto Rican pickers and their families live in the late spring and summer months, paint peeling off the clapboards on bulky buildings that must have once looked grand, like the lakeside family hotel next to the roller rink had looked before Cole’s time. Barbecue pits, horseshoes, and tetherball off in the trees. Family. At the moment it’s just him and Tilly, and he again resolves to regain his brother’s trust.

  But he realizes within minutes that of course this compound—built for seasonal workers from Puerto Rico and Jamaica—was never anything like a hotel. How easy it is to project an imagined life onto someone else.

  He’s able to hold down the coffee by taking tiny sips, and his body has achieved a tottery peace with itself. He stops for gas in Southwick and when—with his hand on the nozzle—the tank burps out overpowering fumes, he pukes up the coffee in three insistent heaves into the garbage, blows his nose with a blue paper towel, and goes inside to pay, his headache now blinding.

  “I’d better park for a few minutes,” he tells Tilly when he teeters back in the car, “just to shut my eyes.”

  “No,” she says, “you’ll drive. Grandpapa used to tell your uncle that if you want to play like a man, you can damn well be a man.”

  She directs him from one meandering state highway to another as he repeats to himself “Over the river and through the woods…” like a mantra to keep both head and stomach from erupting while they roll and wind through the foothills into the Berkshires, and he keeps thinking they’ll come upon one of the gracious historic towns he’s visited once or twice. But soon they’re passing auto-repair shops, a grungy motel, and an asphalt contractor on the outskirts of a scruffy mill town: crumbling smokestacks, sooty brick factories with bashed-out windows, a McDonald’s and a Jack in the Box side by side. The main street’s pretty much closed up on a Sunday, though a few blocks later there’s a busy laundromat between vacant storefronts. They stop at a red light, where on one corner there’s the beautiful old marquee of a long-defunct movie theater, the Egyptian, and on the other a grand art-deco performing-arts theater, shuttered for decades.

  “What are we doing here?” he asks.

  “Nosy, nosy,” she says. “You can drop me at those blinking lights.”

  “That bar?”

  She flips down the visor mirror and dabs powder from a compact on her cheeks. “It’s a pub.”

  “It’s called Vic’s Bar and Grill and there’s a flashing neon Schlitz sign.”

  “There’ve been a lot of names through the years.”

  He pulls up to the curb and stares at the black iron bars over the windows. “Kind of a dive, too.”

  “You’re entitled to your opinion,” she says, opening the door. “Three o’clock sharp. Right here.”

  Watching her walk away—actually rather elegant in white high heels and a rose-colored dress—he thinks that if he weren’t so miserable he might try to stop her. The place isn’t merely seedy; it looks dangerous. But if he stands, his head so polluted with residue liquor, he’d probably fall over. And if he made it down the sidewalk as far as the front door, one waft from the beer-sticky floor would be the end of him.

  Tilly’s about to step inside when a blue van rattles up to the curb and its horn toots. She turns. A man about her age hops out and hustles toward her, grinning as broadly as she is. Since the stroke, or his mother’s death, he hasn’t seen her beam like that. Hell, he’s never seen Tilly beam l
ike that. They kiss each other on the cheek, not a peck but a long slow kiss, practically nuzzling. He’s in a white shirt, his hair combed back with oil, and what Cole finds most extraordinary are the dozen or so keys dangling from a round steel case clipped to his belt. Although she must know Cole’s sitting thirty feet away in the car, she doesn’t even give him a glance. Together they go through the door, Tilly on his arm. Stenciled on the side of the van is “Bob Dunn Welding.”

  Cole sits there stunned for five minutes. He grabs fistfuls of his hair, partly for the ripping headache and partly in disbelief. Is this where Andrew’s been bringing her every month all these years? It doesn’t make any sense. Finally he shifts into drive and inches forward, wondering what he can do to kill two-and-a-half hours, and now he can see there’s a patio on the side of the bar where they’re sitting at a picnic table. The waitress is setting down what looks like a glass of water for Bob Dunn and surely an iced tea—lemon wedge on the rim, tall black straw—for her. This is Tilly, by God, who orders her first drink before sitting down and her second as the waitress delivers the first. She pinches the lemon and shakes down a sugar packet. Tilly, iced tea, in a bar. Wow.

  He hits the gas and loops back through town to the McDonald’s, where he orders a Coke. Reaching in his pocket for change, he finds an even better cure: a sizable roach from the night he smoked with Linda. Back in the Coupe de Ville, he torches it up and gets two good hits, immediately soothing, before burning his fingers. The flutter of nausea subsides, the fist in his head unclenches. He drives the mile back to “the pub,” parking shy of where she’ll see the yellow car from the patio. He reclines the seat.

  He dreams of Tilly standing in the moonlight at his bedroom door looking like a ghost—Cole, Cole—and when he opens his eyes she’s right there in the backseat, the sun lighting up the smoke all around her, the tip of a cigarette glowing orange.

  “Cole!”

  “Ready,” he says. He slept for two hours. “Why are you sitting in back?”