At Weddings and Wakes

by Alice McDermott

  The milk in their glasses was lukewarm. The food was passed and before each plate was filled the children began to feel the beads of perspiration running down their spines, down their calves from behind their knees. Even the silverware felt warm, the heavy food on the end of their forks weighing against the thick, elaborate handles.

  Whatever argument had arisen at the cocktail hour, whatever affront had been made, carried over now into either the silence of the dinner table or the urging by aunts on all sides to take a little more, eat a little more, drink up their milk, sit straighter now, use your napkin, finish everything if you want dessert.

  Momma said, “The heat was like this the night your mother died. We were afraid we’d all suffocate. Your father slept on the chair in there and it was the first night of all the nights we’d been here that he finally agreed to take off his collar and untie his shoes. He was such a formal man.

  “I slept on the couch with Mrs. Power from downstairs. Head to foot. We must have been exhausted, or else I don’t see how we could have slept, it was so hot.”

  The children ran the prongs of their forks through the mashed potatoes, through the applesauce, around the fried bits of flour and pork grease. They wished for ice cream and tall glasses of ice water.

  Quietly, Aunt May and Aunt Agnes rose to clear the table, and their mother whispered that they could go sit inside.

  They walked through to Momma’s bedroom and once again took their places at the window—the two girls sharing one this time—to watch the way the sun, turning orange now and reaching only the top floor of the building across the schoolyard, set brief flames in the windows of buildings far beyond them. There were more cars going by in the street, some taxis even, and a few more people walked along the sidewalk, each with a newspaper or a long loaf of bread or a grocery bag under an arm.

  It was not yet time for him to arrive but they imagined anyway seeing their father’s car come down the street. They wouldn’t wait to see him park but run out to the dining room to say he was here, could they go out and meet him—and what with their mother’s hesitation and their own struggle with the many locks on the door, they would get out of the apartment just as the buzzer downstairs rang or, if he came in through the downstairs door with some neighbor who knew him, just as his brown felt hat appeared between the balusters at the top of the stairs. They would run across the darkened landing full of shadows and treasure and meet his arms just as he ascended.

  Someone in the room behind them was crying. There was the clink of glass against ice cubes but even from here the children knew that one sound was indifferent to the other and each came from a separate part of the room. There was a murmur that seemed to poke occasionally at the weeping, to press into it the way a finger presses into something soft yet unyielding.

  When the room was silent again their mother came to the door—they could not tell if she had been the one—and said, “Come out and have some ice cream.”

  It was the kind that Momma made herself and it was so cool and sweet, so festive with its shreds of fresh peaches or shards of strawberry and blueberry, that it seemed to indicate some joy that lay buried in the old lady’s personality—something girlish, something celebratory. After the hot meal and amid the silent aftermath of the fight it seemed to the children a moment, a wink, of relief. It was served in soup bowls on the linen tablecloth and only their mother ate with them. Momma was in her chair again by the window and Aunt May was in the kitchen. Veronica sat at the end of the table with another brown drink. Aunt Agnes had disappeared.

  Now the conversation limped back to where it had been at the beginning of the cocktail hour. Wearily and with little enthusiasm, with little attempt to hide the effort they were making to hide what they really felt, their mother and her sister spoke about ordinary things, calling out to May to ask how much she was paying for ice cream at the A&P or what was the name of the principal at Saint Peter’s. Coming always at the end of each effort at bright discussion to a silent place that made them sigh and quietly close their eyes, as if in despair over the futility of ordinary things to relieve them of the burden of their sadness, their unhappiness: and then—“Has anyone heard from Joan Lombardi lately?”—going on.

  The footstep on the stair was a fabulous promise three seconds long that burst into miraculous fulfillment with their father’s familiar rap at the door. The children were there first and their mother had to reach over their heads to get the lock unfastened. “You should always ask who it is,” Aunt May was saying behind them, drying her hands on a dish towel, but already the door was flung open and they were in the dull and stifling hallway touching the light wool of his suit, pulling his hands, his arms, delivered, delivered. They led him into the living room, took his brown felt hat. Delivered. He greeted May and Veronica and leaned carefully to kiss their mother’s cheek (she, coy after the day’s long lament, blushed, they could see it, and turned her head away to avoid a smile).

  Knowing the routine, he followed the women into the dining room, where he greeted Momma (he called her Mrs. Towne), and listened to how she was feeling with such solicitousness a stranger might have thought he’d been called in to offer a cure. With that same solicitousness he lifted the broken table fan from the windowsill or examined the frayed wire of an iron or sat at the table with the series of letters she had gotten from Blue Cross or Social Security while Aunt May put on coffee and the children, the end in sight, kicked their heels against the rungs of the dining-room chairs, waiting.

  It would be growing dark by the time they finally stood together at the door, their mother once again with her pocketbook in the crook of her arm and a shopping bag now (always) resting against it. A bag filled with a loaf of soda bread or a tin of butter cookies, a blouse Agnes had bought that proved the wrong color for her, or a little something, a game, a book, two dresses and a plaid shirt, that May had picked up for the children—a bag filled with something, anything it seemed, that their mother was required each time to bring home with her from here and seemed, to the children at least, to ensure her return.

  The children themselves carried the small folded squares of dollar bills that Aunt May had pushed into their palms. They were buoyant, jubilant in their goodbyes, jiggling and waving and calling, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” across the landing and down the first flight of brown stairs. Aunt May would be at the window when they hit the street, sometimes Veronica or Agnes as well, and the children would wave wildly to them in the still and humid air. “See you later, alligator. After a while, crocodile.” Delivered.

  Their parents wouldn’t exchange a word as they walked to where their father had parked the car, but their mother, for all her lamentations, had redone her makeup and brushed back her hair. They could smell her talc again amid the early-evening city smells of garbage and cooling spices and exhaust.

  The steel-blue car squeezed front to back between two dark strangers in the pale halo of a city streetlight might have leapt like a dog at their approach.

  Familiar click of its lock, familiar summer feel of its thin terry-cloth seat cover, familiar snap of the thin strip of elastic that held it across the back of the front seat.

  Now another journey not unlike their headlong rush through the subway tunnels, but this one, now that their father was with them, made in the soft capsule of the pale blue car as it drove slowly through the darkened streets. Each at a window, the children heard their own voices saying, See you later, alligator, as they passed men in shirtsleeves sitting on stone steps in front of apartment houses, passed dark children calling madly after the one on a noisy scooter (the noise like machine-gun fire driven into the sidewalk) made of fruit boxes and rollerskate wheels. See you later, alligator, to the hole of subway steps with its everlasting wind, to the stores now covered with grates and grilles in preparation for the dangerous night. To choked intersections, hot brick, sidewalk.

  In full darkness now past dimly lit side streets that showed themselves and their rows of steps, their shadows o
f moving figures each for just one second as they were passed. Along, for a while, the dark columns of the El and the occasional thud of the invisible train it carried. Gashes of light, the glow of a clock in a tower, yellow as the summer moon. The mark of letters against a black sky: EAST RIVER SAVINGS BANK in white; in blue and white and red, HOME OF EX-LAX. Windows of light where a man stood before a fan, a woman leaned on her elbows or reached up for a shade, where a pale curtain waved like a ghost in the cool currents of an electric fan. Glimpses of someone at a table, someone before the blue light of a TV—each with a life span of just a second or two, no more, as they drove past, the younger girl tormenting herself with this notion: What if you were suddenly left here, what if you found yourself there on that dark street, alone. And imagined herself stepping through the darkness there, down that black street or that one, stepping between those patches of light and hearing at her feet the rattle of bones.

  She turned her head into her mother’s firm shoulder, the car moving faster now, adding its own light to what seemed a general flight from the city. At their windows the other two made out the hillside of gray monuments that seemed to rise up from under the highway they were on as if it were an outcropping of the city itself, a vestige of the land the brownstones and the factories and the tall buildings had first been placed on.

  And then the land flattened black and through the cracks in their windows they could smell the air’s first change: the smell of swamp, bilge, salt ocean. It touched their skin with a damp coolness that seemed at once to gather the city’s soot into rings at their necks and wrists and in the creases behind their elbows. They searched the darkness and made out the distant lights and then saw the darkness slowly form itself into houses and trees and schoolyards lit by pale lamps. The road became smooth beneath the tires, their eyes felt heavy. In the stirring silence of the car’s first pause they heard crickets, the watery rustle of leaves, of thick trees touching one another just above their heads. Now the ride was slow and silent and easy, the turns feeling each time like those final turns, slow and arbitrary and without destination, that their minds took in the moments before sleep.

  The air at last cooling, the day’s long wait nearly over. At a final stoplight their father said into the silence, into the aimless turns their thoughts were taking: “You know, people are dying to get in there.”

  And they smiled, vague in everything but their comfort and their weariness. Only vaguely aware (they heard their mother gathering up her pocketbook and her shopping bag) that for now they have left the dead behind them.

  LAST IN JULY, first in August. He made the sign of the cross above their heads whenever he said it, smiling and mocking but also refusing to let his own irony alter his belief that this was indeed the way he blessed them. One week in July and one in August.

  The geography of their struggle, then, was west to east. She, Lucy, his wife, pulling them in to the thickest, most thickly populated part of the Island, to the swarming city where they’d both been raised; he, when his two weeks opened up before him like a trick door in what had seemed all year to be the solid wall of daily work, taking them out to the farthest, greenest reaches of the Island, to the very tip of the two long fingers that would seem to direct their eyes, as he himself would do each evening, to the wide expanse of the sea.

  Every year it was a different cottage, never any bigger than Momma’s rooms in the city and always, it seemed to the children, built for the most part with wire mesh screens: screen porch front and back, screen doors, patched window screens. There was the mildew each year, the cedar scent of empty bureau drawers, damp throw rugs on wood or curling linoleum. Always the chipped and mismatched dishes, the odd collection of silverware, a kitchen table that needed a matchbook under one leg; a sock under the bed and a Reader’s Digest in the cupboard the only trace of the family that had vacated just two hours before.

  Mrs. Smiley was the landlord on the south shore, Mr. Porter the owner on the north. On the July Saturday when they arrived they would stop first, always, at the landlord’s house to pick up the key, and what to the children had seemed a long, monotonous car ride was suddenly obliterated by this new short journey between this detour and their final destination. Mr. Porter or his wife would hand out the key from behind their own screen door. Their house had the bay behind it and a wide green lawn in front where a family of stone gnomes watched humorlessly the endless struggle of a wooden goose with a wheel of paddle wings trying to take flight. There were Chinese lanterns strung across the patio at the back of the house—the children could see a corner of them from the gravel drive—and in the front a badminton net and a croquet set and a poured concrete bird bath that held at its center, like a prized egg, a sparkling turquoise globe as big as a bowling ball. It was a place, it seemed to the children, that endlessly celebrated its own contentment with itself and so made them see in Mr. or Mrs. Porter’s quick wave, after one of them had handed their father the key, a kind of pity. Made them see, in the way Mr. or Mrs. Porter, having handed over the key and quickly waved, suddenly disappeared again into the house, that neither would leave the Porters’ own compound for anything, certainly not for the poky little cabin their father now headed them toward.

  Mrs. Smiley, on the other hand, although she owned what seemed to be an endless number of cottages between Three Mile Harbor and Montauk, lived herself in a small apartment above her real-estate office. She was a huge woman with a face that reminded the children of a jolly illustration of the blowing wind, all pink and pale blue, round cheeks and puckered lips and thin white hair like puffs of cloud. She usually met them at their car, was out her door or down her stairs almost as soon as they pulled up, the key on its thin white string already in her hand. She would peer through the windows, exclaim over how much they all had grown, and then with a startling rush of warm air and sunlight, calico and flesh, pile herself in beside them for the ride to the cottage. Her skin, the wide flank of her arm as she reached to grab the back of the front seat, was surprisingly cool when it passed their own bare arms and cheeks and her presence in the car, although it caused them to smash themselves against the door and each other, seemed to take the staleness from the air as well.

  She laughed easily and had them all smiling, well pleased with themselves, by the time they pulled down the dirt road or into the gravel drive. She would unlock the cottage herself and then stand back as they filed in, calling out questions as the family went from room to room—Did they clean that stove for you? Did they bring that extra cot? I bet they forgot the firewood. I told them to bring in some firewood—making the children wonder just who they were and why she was so convinced they had failed her.

  She would stay long enough to see the bags brought in, the fishing gear and toys and boxes of linens, hanging about not so much to ensure the safety of her house or the appropriateness of her tenants (their mother and father seemed implicitly to understand) but only to savor these first hours of a new vacation. When all was unloaded their father would appear before her as she sat at the kitchen table examining some game or toy the children had shyly offered to show her, or leaned against the mantel and exclaimed over the lovely color of their sheets or towels, and there would be a flicker of disappointment in her eyes as she saw all was unpacked and he was ready to drive her home. They asked her but she never stayed, although her looks seemed to linger on them all as she said goodbye, do call if there’s anything you need, enjoy, enjoy and pray for good weather.

  If Mr. Porter’s quick send-off made them start their vacations feeling paltry and unenviable, Mrs. Smiley’s elaborate, reluctant leave-taking made them turn to each other, to their toys and linens and their salty little cottage with a new sense of pride and enchantment. Made them feel as expansive, as lucky, as a much larger family might feel in a many-storied clapboard mansion by the sea.

  And yet their father would rent from neither one of them consistently, nor ever take the same cottage two years in a row. This had nothing to do, as Mr. Porter and Mrs. Smi
ley both no doubt sometimes supposed, with a quest to find something better or something cheaper. He could extol the virtues of the cottage they were in—the large outdoor shower, the proximity to the beach—and at the same time remember with great fondness another cottage they’d had a year or two before and easily could have had again. Sitting in one he would say of the other, wasn’t that a pretty setting, with the trees and the lawn, or wasn’t that one with the sleeping porch just great? and yet seem perfectly surprised when their mother suggested that they should have taken that one again.

  He liked variety, he would say. He liked a different point of view. He liked the wealth and the elegance of the South Shore in some years and the hominess of the North in others. He liked Mr. Porter, he liked Mrs. Smiley, and he liked not to have to deal with either one of them year after year.

  And while the children accepted each and every one of these explanations as reasonable and true (and preferred themselves the novelty of a different cottage each summer) they suspected too, perhaps because of their mother’s sullen response and the consistency with which she found last year’s place so much better than this one, that the different cottages were yet another result of what according to their mother was their father’s chief malady and source of all her grief: he was not the man she’d married.

  It had all to do with the war, of course. He was a young soldier when they’d married, and when he returned from overseas he was someone else. Who he was or what he’d been was never clear to the children, nor could they ever, even as adults, get a good sense of what it was that had changed him.

  He’d been in the infantry, he’d been all through the European Theater. He blamed the army for a case of shingles and a shiny scar across his right elbow and a lifelong aversion to Spam. He would not go camping, not even in the pop-up trailer a neighbor had once opened in a driveway, giving the children a marvelous, musty-smelling afternoon on lumpy mattresses under mellow, canvas-filtered sunlight, because, he said, he’d had enough of that in the army. He spoke of the war as easily as he spoke of anything and as often as the company would allow, but the stories he told were benign anecdotes about boyish pranks or clever moments of resourcefulness, nothing life-threatening or heartrending, nothing that could account for what it was that had made him a different man.