by Barry Hannah
Oh, Mother Rooney wished Mr. Silas and all the young men back now, filling the wings and the upstairs with cigar and cigarette smoke, music, whoops, nonsense, coming down and arranging themselves noisily around her table to eat what they called her Texas pie—because it was so ugly, they said. And she, scooping out the brown stringy beef and dumplings and setting it on their plates with insulted vigor, flak! Oh, they kept her at the edge of weeping or of praying; she was hurt in her cook’s heart.
Some juice spattered on Mr. Delph, the young pharmacist, and he announced, wiping it away: “Fellows, Mother Rooney is not being a Christian again.”
They made her uncertain of even her best dishes, her squash casserole, her oyster patties. When they first had begun this business, she lingered in the kitchen while tears ran off her cheeks into her milky desserts.
But for them just to be here she wished, calling her anything they wanted to. Let them mimic Father Putee behind his back as he advises my poor carnal body, the two of us seated on the couch in the dining room.
Mother Rooney regained the picture of that rascal Mr. Worley, the student at Millsaps College. He was loitering up the stairway listening to Father Putee, and she saw him, dressed only in underwear for her benefit. When Father Putee would finish a sentence, Mr. Worley would snap the waist of his underwear and look upward to heaven. Finally, Father Putee, an old person himself, heard the underwear snap, and turned. But by then Worley was gone, and Harry Monroe was in his place, sitting fully dressed, waving his hand. “Hi, padre. I’m just chaperoning you two.”
Let them, let them, she wished.
Let them take me to another movie at the Royal Theater, telling me it is an epic of the Catholic faith, and then we sit down and see all of that Bulgarian woman in her nightgown prissing about until that sordid beast eats her neck, the moon in the window. Let them ride me by St. Thomas’s Church, as Mr. Worley says in the backseat to Mr. Hammack, the young man who tunes organs, and asking it again to Mr. Delph: “Don’t you hate a fish-eater? Hammack, Delph, don’t you?” They go on and on, pretending to be rural hard-shells, then stop the car under the shadowy cross in the street. “Let’s kill a fish-eater.” They ask me to find them one, describing how they will torture one like they did in the Middle Ages, only nastier, and especially an old woman fish-eater. Maybe let her live for a few weeks until she has to beat on the door with her own leg bone to be heard from the street.
Then let them all come down to the table in their underwear, all except Mr. Monroe, who is in on the joke so far as to have his shirt off. I’m in the kitchen and see Mr. Silas stand up and say this: “Predinner game tonight! Here it is! If any old, creeping, venerealized, moss-covered turtle of a Catholic scab-eating bimbo discarded from Pope Gregory’s lap and rejected by the leprous wino in back of the Twentieth Century Pool Hall comes in here serving up any scum-sucking plate of oysters of a fish-eating Friday night, we all pull off our jockey shorts and wave them over our heads, okay?” “Yahhhhh!” the rest of them agree, and I peep around and see Mr. Silas putting the written-up piece of paper in his elastic underwear. I wait, wait, not sure of anything except I am getting the treatment from them for asking each one if he was a Catholic by any chance when they first boarded with me. Then: “But where is our sweet Mother Rooney?” I hear Mr. Silas chiming, lilting. “With her charming glad old heart, the beam in her eye of a reconciled old age? Her mushrooms and asparagus, blessed by the Lord? Her twinkling calluses, proud to tote the ponderous barge of householdery? Benedictions and proverbs during the neat repast, and an Irish air or two over the piano afterwards, to bed at nine?” says Harry Monroe. “To flush at six,” says Bobby Dove Fleece.
I sneak in, for I did want music in the house, and had bought the secondhand piano for the corner over there. I know well that Mr. Hammack can play. I did hope in my heart that someone could play and young men would sing around it. At least they are not doing what Mr. Silas threatened they would. And I ask, “Are you really going to sing some Irish songs afterwards?”—passing the fried oysters. Blind drooping of the eyes as if they’d never seen me before. Mr. Silas, who works at Wright’s Music Store and is a college graduate, asks, “Do the Irish have a music, Harry?” Mr. Monroe took a lot of courses in music at his college. “They have a uniform national fart,” Mr. Monroe replies.
I’m already crying, steaming red in the face over the hot oysters. I don’t care about Irish; I’m not Irish, for mercy’s sake, nor originally Roman Catholic. I just wanted music, any kind of music. I just wanted music, and I tell them that.
“Sorry,” Mr. Monroe ventures to say. And they all eat quickly in silence, running back to the wings and upstairs without a word. Next day they all come back from work and school and don’t give me a word. Only Mr. Monroe comes down at evening to eat some soup left from lunch.
But then, of course, the call from the police the next night, saying they know, they have been following the crude public display of nudity I allow in my boardinghouse, and that there have been complaints about vulgarism. Then I know it must be Mr. Silas, whose light is on. I see as I put down the phone and look up at the left wing. Just to check, just to be sure, still scared from perhaps hanging up on the real police, I walk up there, though it takes a lot of breath.
But knocking, there is no answer, and I open the door and right in the way is Mr. Silas naked, stiff and surprised, but he seems to be proud at the same time. But how did he do it?
I ease the door to. There’s only one phone in the house, mine. Mr. Silas cries out vulgarly behind the door; he’s lifting his weights, his barbells—and what sounds, what agony or pleasure of his body.
Yes, let my boys come back to me with all that. Even Harriman Monroe, who drove them all from the house, who told my boys to leave. Let slim Harry, who turned just a wee bit prig on us all, come back. Dear heart, though, he was hurt by the loss of a musical career. And Bobby Fleece mentioned to me privately that Harry Monroe was not making it as a medical student, either. Harry does not take care of his health in the meantime. He breaks out with red spots on the face. I tried to feed him, diet him on good vegetables at night. I asked him what he ate in the day, and he answered me. Women, he said. Whereas Mr. Silas used to sneak down to eat everything I have left. It was a secret between us, how much Mr. Silas ate. It went to six pounds a day.
The brooch was standing up like the handle of a dagger. It had unclasped. It had not behaved. The pin of it was sunk three inches in her bosom. Where it went into her was purple and mouth-looking. An unlucky bargain—the biggest bauble ever offered on the counters of the Emporium, uptown. It had been designed for a crazy czarina who could yank it off her chest and fend back lechers in the alley.
Mother Rooney surged up on her haunch bones. She worked her lips together to make them twinkle with spittle. She shucked off her ugly shoes by rubbing each ankle against the other, folded in her legs under the moon in blue roses of her hip, pushed herself against the stairwell. In general, she arranged the corpse so that upon discovery it would not look dry, so that it would not look murdered or surprised in ugliness.
At least, she thought, no bag of fluid inside her has ruptured. No unspeakable emission like that. She wondered about the brooch. Do you pull it out? The body would be prettier without it. But her boys had made her conscious of her body. She was a sack whose seams were breaking, full of organs, of bitter and sour fermenting fluids. Her body threatened to break forth into public every second.
Concerning the brooch, she feared blood, a hissing of air, perhaps a rowdy blood bubble so big it would lift her out of the hall, through the doorway, into the street.
Oh, such alarm, such wild notoriety!
Oh, Mother Rooney hurt like a soldier.
She remembered from the movies at the Royal: Don’t talk. Each word a drop of blood into the lungs. And what about thinking? Mother Rooney had always conceived of mental activity as a whirlpool of ideas spinning one’s core. Wouldn’t that action send blood-falls to her lungs and elsewhere?
She imagined her body filling up with blood because she was really thinking.
The deep itch of the pin came now.
She saw the pin running, shish-kebabing, through her heart, lungs, spleen, pancreas, liver, esophagus, thorax, crop, gizzard, gullet—remembering all that apparatus, wet, hot and furcated, she had pulled out of chickens in the 1930s. Then she thought of the breast, drumstick, pulley bone, and oh!—that hurt thinking that, because the pulley bone snapped and often punched into the hand.
So thinking it could be either way—a lung wound or shish kebab—she guessed she had better stop this whirlpool mental activity, for safety. It could be that shish kebab wasn’t definitely fatal because, once the pin was pulled out, all the organs might flap back to their places and heal. But she dreaded feeling them do this inside her, and so she left the pin alone.
It came to her then that she might make her brain like a scroll, and that by just the tiniest bit of mental activity she might pull it down in tiny snatches at a time and dwell on the inch that was offered by the smallest little tug of the will, like the scrolled maps in schoolrooms. Perhaps she could survive then, tensing her body in a petite, just a petty, hope.
First was Hoover, the son of a sewage-parts dealer who fled Ireland in 1915; Roman Catholic Hoover Rooney, bewildered by snot and asthma. Then there was Hoover Second, his working son in overalls. Wasn’t there something holy about the unsanitariness of their brick and board cottage on Road of Remembrance Street? How the yard grass was shaggy, and the old creamed tea from breakfast time was found in chipped cups with five or six cigarettes floating on top like bleached creatures from a cow pond’s bottom; their black Ford with plumbing manuals in the backseat which smelled like a gymnasium with a melting-butter smell over that. Sometimes Hoover stopped at stop signs—I remember once in front of the King Edward Hotel—and a wine bottle rolled under my bare foot. I was tired, and when Hoover drove up to the lumberyard where I was a secretary, I would hop in and pull my shoes and stockings right off. Then one day Hoover grabbed my foot, and holding it in his lap, he took what he told me was his dead mama’s ring and put it on my little toe and said, “Baaaa!” I told him it degraded her memory. And he eased my foot out of his lap, started the car, and I had to hold my foot in the air to keep the ring from falling on the dirty floorboard, because Hoover grabbed my body and held me really hurtfully, so I couldn’t get my hands free. How he laughed, making his face orange. With those desperado sideburns and slit eyes, he looked like something from Halloween. He had a hot metal body odor that came up close to the degree of unpleasantness. He smeared my mouth with his hairy lips and chin. I felt like I was eating down steel filings, and forgot I was thirty and he just a boy of early twenties. I laughed.
For being Annie Broome of Brandon, Mississippi, supposed to be at my Aunt Lily’s promptly after work every day to eat our supper together, supposed to attend Wednesday night church with her this evening. I saw my daddy drilling Hoover with a glare like at a snake doctor or a vegetarian. But I never told Mother or Daddy much at all, just sent them one of Hoover’s postcards with an airplane picture of the shores of Ireland on it, and told them I’d been converted and that Hoover was the one. Then, back in the car with Hoover, I quiver in that red moan against his marvelous hard tongue.
Plus all the other strange hours I felt like the robber queen. I called in sick to the lumberyard. Hoover picked me up at eight. He and his papa didn’t start off the day till ten.
She lay cold in the hall of the old house. She waved her ring finger at the whirlpool. Stop. Blood, she thought, fell out of her mind into her lungs. If she could just shape her mind with a timid effort requiring no breath, she could beckon the scroll, easing it down in millimeters. Flies had found her. She fought them, thinking.
That malt cereal that the old man ate every morning, it got on his cuffs and his newspapers from Dublin, and he wore his napkin like a bib, tucked under his neck, which glucked with the tea and cereal. His yellow cheeks and red beard, they should’ve sent him home to shave at one o’clock, but he was not American yet; more like a Mongolian with his thin eye slits; then his brogue so thick you imagined he carried heavy cereal always in his throat, had to choke back a slug of it to talk. He did not care and tinkled loudly with the door of the bathroom open while he talked to Hoover and me about religions, the mediocre number of them. It shocked him. There were only a hundred-odd Catholics in all Jackson then, 1916. Hoover courted me on the settee. I waited for the old man to flush, but he never did. I thought about that yellow water still lying there and saw green Ireland floating in it. The hairy lawn of the house, and Hoover’s body odor, and the whole milky stink of the house, they cut on me very sharp. And Hoover’s breath was of some iron pipeline.
I was happy, sucked right into the church, because I got its feeling. In St. Thomas’s it was clean, dark, cooling and beautiful, with wood rafters of cedar, gloomy green pictures of Jesus, St. Thomas and the Jordan River in glass. Also, it was tiny and humiliating. It was a thrill to cover your head with a scarf because you were such a low unclean sex, going back to Eve, I guess, making man slaver in lust for you and not be the steward he was meant to be. You were so deadly, you might loop in the poor man kneeling next to you with your hair. I saw Hoover bending on the velvet rail. I felt peculiarly trickful, that this foreign cluck would moo and prance for a look at my garters, that his slick hair would dry and stand up in heat for me. In St. Thomas’s I was thrown on that heap of navels, hair and rouge that makes the flesh-pile Woman, which even the monks have to trudge through waist-deep, I thought, before they finally ascend to sacredness. God told me this, and I blushed, knowing my power.
So I thought, that day when Hoover and I sat on his couch at one o’clock, thirty years old and smoking my first cigarette and drinking tea, that when he began playing sneaky-devious at my parts, with a whipped look on his face, this wasn’t Catholic or Irish from what I knew of them, and that it was more Mississippi Methodist in Brandon, Mississippi, with the retreat at Lake Pelahatchie and Grady Rankin working at me with his pitiful finger, and I told Hoover my opinion, leaving out Grady and so on. We both jumped through our eyes at each other then. We were soggy and rumpled as when you are led to things, and I let him, I did, let him do the full act, hurting on his bed beyond what God allows a woman to hurt. God pinched off all but a thimble-worth of pleasure in that act for me. I mean, as long as I had Hoover my husband. But I let out oaths of pleasure and Hoover in that silly position . . . sometimes I take my mind up to the moon and see Hoover in that position, moving, with nothing under him. I laugh. The hunching doodlebug, ha ha ha! I was in this filthy house doing this, with an Irish Catholic. He said America was an experiment. He said I was safe in the oldest religion of historical mankind. On his bed I believed him: my hurt and fear turned to comfort.
Oh, but Papa Rooney wasn’t proud of his boy for getting his wings on me. The old man was really there at the door watching us. He’d become more an American. He’d come in to shave, and was here on us viewing Hoover in that silly position and me too. He called me names I’ll never forgive, and Hoover too. He cried, and threw cups on the floor, and lay down on the couch, talking about what he’d seen and on and on. I was numb awhile, but then I started moving, low-pedaling around the house, while Hoover sat on the bed looking at his bare feet. I found the broom and swept up the teacups and then swept the rug right beside Papa Rooney, put all the dirty lost glassware in the sink, filled it with hot water. I mopped the tiles in the kitchen and flew into the bathroom at the bowl and sink. I scraped them all with only a towel and water, then found the soap and started using that everywhere. I went back in the halls, I fingered the dust out of the space heater. I found a bowl of cereal under the bed with socks and collars lying in it. I made the old man’s room spanking clean. I made a pile for his stained underwear in the back closet. Then it was four o’clock in the afternoon. I sat down by Papa Rooney, who was still on the couch. He looked tearfully at me. “Annie, my boibee!” he said, a
nd smothered me into his arms, asking forgiveness for what he had said. We went and sat by Hoover, while the old fellow told us about our marriage. I was scared. There seemed no other way, with Papa Rooney and his arms over our shoulders.
Except for Papa Rooney watching us all the way up the aisle, I doubt we would’ve married; we did. Through the ceremony we were both scared of—with Father Remus talking words of comfort over our heads to Mother and Daddy, who hung back and were shocked—we tied the knot.
Mother Rooney’s head stood wide open in the twirl of remembrance. Blood, eye juice and brain fluid roared down to her lungs, she thought. Too hard, too hard, her thoughts. There were noises in the house as the wind blew on the windows, which were loose in their putty. The hallway was dark. It was her box. No light now; her coffin space.
Mother Rooney shrieked, “Be loud on the organ! Pull my old corpse by a team of dogs with a rope to my toe down Capitol Street, and let Governor White peep out of his mansion and tell them to drag that old sourpuss Annie to the Pearl River Swamp. Oh, be heavy on the organ!” She shocked herself, and she remembered that Papa Rooney had died insane too, thinking that Jackson was Dublin.
The hell with the scroll! “Everything!” she howled.
The old man went crazy in a geographic way at the last, at St. Dominic’s Hospital. He shouted out the names of Dublin and Chicago and Jackson streets as if he was recalling one town he knew well. He injured his son Hoover, behaving this way. Hoover became lost; he saw the blind eyes of his daddy and heard the names of the streets. His daddy didn’t know where they were. But Annie also recalled the sane old fellow at his last, how he’d fallen in love with her; loved her cleanliness and order; loved America, because he was getting rich easily and enlarged the sewage-parts house so that now Hoover was a plumbing contractor too. Papa Rooney told her he was in love with peace and money and her—Annie.
