“Oh, no,” May said, carefully, but also throwing caution to the wind. “No, it doesn’t matter. It just seems odd. To do it now, with Lucy and the children just leaving.”
With a sudden snap of cloth Agnes pulled a dish towel from the rack above her, turned, lifted the vase from the sink, and dried its bottom with one round swipe. She turned again, caught May’s eye, and then marched out of the room with the flowers held before her and was met by Lucy’s voice saying, “Oh, Bob hasn’t seen them. Look. They came for May.” In a whisper, “From her mailman.”
The air at her back felt damp, although when she moved closer to the window she realized it was only the unaccustomed coolness. When had summer become fall? She sat at the kitchen table. Agnes returned, poured the coffee, and now refusing to meet her eye, carried the tray away.
May brushed back the curtain to see the courtyard and the lighted rooms of the other apartments and then, on an impulse, pushed back her chair, raised her knee to the sill, and climbed out to the narrow fire escape. She straightened up slowly. She had not stood out here for years. She placed her hands on the black railing and gazed out like a woman on the deck of a ship. The floor of the courtyard, the uneven patches of concrete and dirt, the tall wooden fences like corrugated cardboard that divided them, were lit dimly by the light in each apartment window and by the high, distant moon.
She turned and saw the square metal milk box where they kept extra milk and butter in cold weather, and walking carefully over the grate floor of the fire escape, she moved to it and sat down. She leaned her back against the brick wall. She could no longer distinguish her anger from her sense of humiliation and she closed her eyes for a moment in order to dispel both.
She could hear her brother-in-law’s voice through the open window of the dining room, hear the rise and fall of coffee cups. She felt the breeze under her skirt and wrapped it more tightly around her knees.
When she opened her eyes she saw a man in shirtsleeves in a lighted window of the apartment house behind theirs. Among the many things she would have to consider if she were to let this possibility, this second life, become real, was her own physical inexperience. She would have to consider the odor of starch and smoke and after-shave on her brother-in-law’s collar when he bent to kiss her. She would have to remember the clean odorless fingers of the priests as they touched her forehead and her lips. Remember even the hands of Monsignor Lockhart in her first convent. Every morning he had left the rectory with a slap of Aqua Velva, and then with each Communion wafer placed a mouthful of the scent onto their tongues and into their empty stomachs at six o’clock Mass. She would have to remember her brother Johnny in the year or two before she entered the convent and he left home for good, remember him asleep on the couch in the living room, remember the warm odor of his breath and the long, white hand on his hip.
She gazed up over the uneven line of rooftops and toward the yellow moon and although it was both anger and humiliation that had drawn her out here it was fear that gripped her now. But a giddy kind of fear, a fear with some promise of joy in it. A fear that made her see herself for the first time since she’d entered the Church and taken the veil as a romantic, an enviable figure. Here in the colossal darkness, four floors above the ground, on just the other side of the rooms where she spent her life.
Behind her she heard the children saying, “She’s not in there.” And then the boy repeating, somewhat indignantly, “Look for yourself. She’s not.”
There was some murmuring and then some silence and then the good nights and farewells, the opening and the shutting of the front door.
The roses were in the middle of the dining-room table. She lifted them carefully and returned them to their spot in the living room on her way to help Momma get ready for bed.
VEERING, their mother led them away from the subway and down a series of unfamiliar streets where the gray sidewalks were plastered with wet black leaves and the stone red and deep gray stairs that rose up to the apartment houses beside them seemed both steeper and narrower than those that led to Momma’s. A woman stood in a long window just above the sidewalk, framed from head to foot by thick velvet curtains, so that she appeared to be looking down on them from the edge of a stage. The trees here, placed evenly on the outer edge of the sidewalk, were all caged in narrow spokes of black wrought iron and the black street showed not only bits of yellow cobblestone in worn spots here and there but the occasional steely shine of old trolley tracks as well. Underneath their feet the sidewalk rose and fell in jagged rifts where, she had told them, the growing roots of the trees had risen up and cracked the concrete.
The city, it sometimes seemed to the children, was full of ancient, buried things struggling to resurface.
The church was on a narrow corner, behind a graying stone wall stained like the building itself with dirt black and mossy green. They followed her up the shallow steps and through a heavy wooden door she had only to pull open to know that the Sanctuary beyond the narrow vestibule was empty. She seemed to slump a little. She had hoped for a noon Mass. The vestibule itself was lined with doors, the two through which they had come, the four that led into the church itself, and two more on either end that led no doubt to the hidden, holy places reserved for priests and nuns and souls in transit. There were brown racks of pamphlets and holy cards and Catholic newspapers scattered between them. She paused for a moment to open her purse, which still hung in the crook of her arm, and to extract from beneath her elbow a white chapel cap for herself and two lace handkerchiefs for her daughters, and these she placed on their heads with a delicate flourish, as if preparing to make them disappear.
She held open the inner door and let them pass before her into the church, where they dipped their fingertips into the cold water in the cold stone font, touching bare forehead and woolen shoulders and chest, and following her to the first wooden pew, knelt and blessed themselves again. She stood for a moment before sliding in beside them, stood to survey the high ceiling and the stone walls. The stone here was a paler, cooler gray than that on the outside, a white gray that made the air itself seem bleached.
Just beside the altar there was a huge, certainly life-sized, chalk-white carving of Christ on the cross, and seeing this the children realized that they had been to this church before. Perhaps a number of times before. And that this, then, was the church where their parents had been married.
(It was part of all they knew that calla lilies had been placed on the altar then, to match the white satin lily Aunt Agnes had designed into the tulle skirt of their mother’s gown, and the deep blue velvet one in her own.)
Kneeling beside her, they watched their mother dip her head and press her folded hands into her brow. There was black velvet on the collar and the cuffs of her short tweed coat, a bright gold clasp on the black pocketbook that hung from her arm. She’d been a bride in this church years and years before they were born, when she was still thin and their father wore a khaki uniform. Aunt Agnes had selected this church, not their parish church at all, but, she had claimed, the loveliest, the loftiest in the city, what with its pale stone and rosetta glass and soft, bleached light. Bombs were already falling and young soldiers dying in fields across the ocean, but because Aunt Agnes had taken control the day was perfect. “One perfect day at least” was what their mother said Aunt Agnes had called it. And if during the months of preparation it had seemed at times that Agnes had forgotten that this was a day meant to celebrate love, not elegance—there had been fights, the children understood, terrible rows, right up until the morning of the wedding—then she was forgiven each time their mother recounted for them the glory of that perfect day when she was young and thin and fearless.
When she blessed herself again the children followed her out of the pew and around to the back of the empty church, the boy listening to the sound of his black shoes against the stone floor and imagining himself a priest in a long, black cassock, gifted through his ordination with both the power to change bread and wine into C
hrist’s body and blood and the privilege to stride across his church like this at any hour; the older girl praying furiously—one Our Father, one Hail Mary, one Glory Be—raising with each trio of prayers another soul out of purgatory and into heaven, as the old nun at her school had told her she had, on this day alone, the power to do; the youngest watching her mother carefully as she again reached into her purse, this time extracting three quarters. The children slipped the coins into the metal slot beside the flickering rows of candles (the sound of the coins somehow the exact same taste and texture of the cold air itself), solemnly chose a thin stick from its container of white sand, and with much debate and hesitation, took the flame from one candle and lit another. They knelt and blessed themselves yet again and when enough time had passed stood to join their mother at the side altar where, with their own solemn deliberateness, she was writing her parents’ names in the parish book of the dead.
In Momma’s rooms the heat was turned up too high and the radiator dripped and hissed with the effort to sustain it.
“I can’t imagine,” Aunt May told their mother, “how any marriage can outlast so much remembering. Every slight and insult. You remember everything.”
The children turned the pages of their dull magazines. “If I didn’t,” their mother said steadily, “I would have come back here a long time ago.”
The older girl rolled from her stomach to her back, her magazine held in the air. It was a new Playbill, but for a play that featured only three actors, and so after she’d read through their biographies and studied the list of scenes (a drawing room late one morning, afternoon of the same day, and later that evening, assuring her that time moved no faster on that stage than this one) and then had chosen from the many advertisements the restaurant she preferred—French, three steps down, with strolling violins—she’d begun studying the magazine from various angles and directions, imagining how it would appear to her if she had one eye, was half blind, was bedridden and forced to read with it held straight-armed above her head.
Beside her, her brother turned the pages of another new addition to the magazine pile, a shiny report to stockholders that showed pictures of oil wells and ships at sea and workmen in white helmets. Next to him her sister slept with her cheek on Life magazine’s portrait of Mr. Kennedy, her lips pressed into a puffy o, her small fingers moving.
She rolled over again, onto her elbows, and turning her head studied the pale green wall that had not been there when her aunts and her mother were born, when this living room and Momma’s bedroom were one, or before that, long before that, when a single family lived in all the apartments as one big house. She imagined the city streets had been mostly empty then, rooms everywhere as underpopulated as the one in Aunt Agnes’s new play. How else would it be possible for a single family to afford the luxury of four floors and all this space? She thought it a shame, actually, that the city had become so crowded, ships arriving day after day, as she had learned in school, spilling all kinds of people into the streets and the apartment buildings so that walls had had to be built, large rooms made smaller, just to accommodate them all. She thought it a shame that more of these immigrants hadn’t simply stayed home, stayed where they belonged. Made the best, as her mother was always telling her to do, of a bad situation.
She stood and crossed the rug to the small bare entry that led to Momma’s bedroom door. Before there was a wall there was only a curtain, which Momma had declared shanty Irish the moment she’d arrived as their father’s wife, no longer merely their mother’s sister. It was a part of everything the girl knew about the place, the curtains before the wall and the mother dying in her bed beyond it while Momma and another woman slept head to foot on the couch. While the father sat up in a chair in another corner and then collapsed sometime later on the floor of the hallway outside where the bags of shoes and old hats, the this-and-that and bric-a-brac, might have yielded some perfect touch to yesterday’s Halloween costume (she’d been a flapper) if only she’d been able to sort through it on her last visit. As it was, the costume had been a disappointment, an old clown suit her mother had shredded into a flapper’s dress, and a tissue rose pinned to a headband that kept slipping over her eyebrows and into her eyes. A disappointment when she considered what might have been resurrected from the shopping bags in the dark hallway, from the piles of coats and clothes and magazines that had accumulated there because, their father said, the Towne girls could not bear to part with anything.
(“And hadn’t we,” their mother had once shouted at him, “hadn’t we from the very beginning been parted from enough?”)
She moved the chintz curtain that hung over the shelves built into the narrow foyer. There were rows of towels and sheets and tablecloths and napkins and a shoebox filled with ointments and medicines, a row of Aunt Agnes’s books, none of which, with their thick brown spines and skimpy lettering, promised to be any more colorful or interesting than her magazines.
The child turned and, seeing that Momma’s door was not closed tightly, pushed it quietly with her fingertips. Gone from her awareness and, perhaps for all time, her memory were the souls she had sent like doves into the air this morning in church, although the triumph of her achievement (she was certain they numbered well into the fifties) had stayed with her all the long walk back to Momma’s and the climb up the stairs, so that she had entered the apartment just a few hours ago with the brave stride of one of the girl heroines in her own books: fifty souls admitted to the feast because of her prayers. Fifty souls forgotten now, perhaps for all time, as she pushed open the bedroom door with no other inclination than to fill the afternoon with small movements (this one somewhat better than most because it was, perhaps, forbidden) and saw through the narrow gap in the door Momma stretched out on the high bed, under the white counterpane, and Aunt Veronica in a long, pale robe standing beside her, her face turned to the window and the gray light from it falling on her in such a way that had she still remembered them the older girl might have thought that one of the souls she’d freed this morning had, on the way from purgatory to paradise, revisited the earth.
She turned again and found her brother watching her. “Aunt Veronica’s awake,” she whispered as she knelt close to him among the magazines, whispered because all of Aunt Veronica’s movements struck the children as furtive and unpredictable.
(Too many women in too small a place, they would say later when they were making some effort to understand her; or, later still, too much repression, too much pity, too much bad luck. And then finally, convinced they’d hit the mark at last, too much drink.)
In the dining room Aunt May was saying that she hadn’t told another soul and hoped she hadn’t tempted fate by speaking too soon. On the floor beside them their little sister slept heavily, her fingers moving. And in the bedroom beyond the wall that hadn’t always been there, Aunt Veronica stood beside Momma in the high bed and turned her face toward the window just as Momma, standing beside her dying sister, had turned (part of everything they knew) when from the sudden menacing stillness there arose an awful, lovely, distant cry that had made her scalp bristle.
“It’s wonderful,” their mother said softly. “No, I mean it. It’s wonderful.” And except for the hiss of the steam pipes and the careful clink of teacup and spoon, the apartment fell silent.
And then the boy lifted a magazine and bent it at its center. He caught his sister’s eye, made a feint at throwing it, and then threw it for real, launching it across the room. It hit the brass bucket and fell away. He lifted another one and his sister, seeing the game, took one as well. The magazines opened in midair each time and then slapped to the floor. The younger girl opened her eyes. Her brother and her sister began to retrieve the magazines that had already been thrown and to toss them again, the competition really begun now that two or three magazines stood on edge inside the bucket or against the side. They moved back and forth on their knees, launching, grabbing, launching again. The little one crawled forward to join them and now it was who
could get to each end of the room faster, gather the most magazines, or get the most magazines away from the others.
They began to laugh and slip and giggle. A cover ripped and a National Geographic hit the coffee table and made the wax flowers jingle. Their mother and Aunt May appeared together in the doorway and said, “Children,” but the game had its own momentum now and the rug was a dark field and the long, long afternoon had suddenly lifted so that all that could stop them, and did stop them as their mother and Aunt May advanced into the room, determined, perhaps, to pin their arms, was, in the midst of their wild joy, a sudden black and starry crack of all three heads against one another. The three of them sat back for a few seconds as if struck by dark lightning and then the youngest one, the pain having finally seeped fully into her consciousness, began to wail. The other two felt their eyes fill with tears.
“That’s what happens,” Aunt May said, bending down to them. Their mother pulled the younger girl into her arms. “You see?” she said, by way of comfort. “That’s what happens.”
Half an hour later when Momma emerged from her room, she listened indifferently to the tale, her eyes on the potato and the peeler in her dirty hands. More than forty years ago she had stood above her sleeping sister, who was feverish but not yet dangerously so, still exhausted, they’d assumed, by a difficult birth, and had seen the light grow flat and felt the air become hollow and had heard the distant but unmistakable cry of what no one in the family, retelling the story, would call a banshee, knowing how foolish it would sound. But now she told the three children as they rolled and stretched and braided the pie dough she had set aside for them, “That’s a lesson for you. That was the hand of God.”
In her ledger book their mother had written, “If it’s another girl then I’d like Veronica,” and so named her for the saint who the nuns said was without vanity, who touched the bloodied face of Christ with her veil. A good thing, too, as Momma told it, since their father in his worry and then his grief could think of nothing to call her. Momma herself had found the book beside her sister’s bed, had found the name written on the last page, and, had there been more peace in the household in those days, might have foreseen the girl’s need to someday read it for herself. She might have made some effort to preserve the book in which her mother had named her. But Agnes told of long nights of weeping just after their mother’s death, and after their father and Momma had married, long and boisterous arguments that woke May and Agnes both in their bed.
At Weddings and Wakes Page 8
