At Weddings and Wakes

by Alice McDermott

  Veronica. The nuns had told the four sisters, and in another decade the three children as well, that in Christ’s day a poor woman would have owned only one veil and it would have taken her a great deal of time to weave and sew its cloth, yet Veronica had offered hers without hesitation to comfort the face of our suffering Lord.

  When Aunt Veronica was fifteen, another story went, Momma had taken her to the Red Cross clinic where they studied her own ravaged face and then set her before the humming coils of a sunlamp. Five minutes it was supposed to have been, but thirty had passed before Momma rose from her chair in the waiting room. When the three sisters returned from work that evening they found Veronica stretched out on the green couch, a thin towel that had been soaked in tea covering her face. The burn would eventually peel, Momma told them. They watched her change the cloth, her hands gentle and her voice a whisper as she told Veronica to close her eyes and, if she wished, turn her head away.

  Later, the men and women who interviewed her in the tall Manhattan office buildings where the other girls had found work saw a thin and nervous young woman with a certain bearing and lovely thick hair and a face scarred red and purple. Out on the street, drunks called after her, asking who had won the fight. On the subway as she rode home they leaned closer, their red-rimmed eyes touched with sympathy, and said that she was beautiful, despite her face, beautiful anyway.

  The nuns at school had said that from her patron saint we learn the difference between a kind of pity that involves only a helpless, sorrowful shake of the head and the kind that makes us step forward to offer whatever we can in the way of relief.

  It was Agnes who finally found her a position with a man in her own company, a Mr. Pierce, who was just coming back from retirement. He’d told Agnes that he could not say how long his return to the office would last but he would be willing to take on her untried and, he gathered, somewhat troubled younger sister as his secretary. At the end of her first day he approached Veronica’s desk and took both her hands in his and told her as her cheeks blazed that she should not worry, she’d do fine. He described for Agnes when she asked how the girl’s hands had trembled all day long, and yet her work, even her shorthand, was precise and neat. He said it was a shame about her skin, how it seemed to make her shy, and then added that in his day (Agnes concluded he meant in his class) a girl like Veronica would have stayed home to write poetry or cultivate a garden, to read and sew. Would have had, anyway, the luxury of being left alone.

  Tracing backwards through incident and circumstance the way other families with a more accessible history might trace bloodlines, it was concluded that Mr. Pierce had had a soft and generous heart that had perhaps caused more harm than good in the long run. Veronica worked for him for five years and when he retired permanently he gave her the opportunity to do the same, offering her a severance—from his own pocket, it was said—that seemed a small fortune in those days.

  On the last day she worked she celebrated this good fortune with the office friends she had made. They were a disparate group, the girls either loud and chubby or shy like herself, or homely, or too thin, the men all kept out of the service by bad thyroids or widowed mothers or neighborhood quotas they’d been grateful to see fulfilled. Agnes didn’t approve of them, said they weren’t doing Veronica any favor, taking her to bars and two-bit nightclubs. Lucy and May preferred the local crowd that gathered at the brightly lit dances given by the church or the K of C, where Lucy had met her beau. But Veronica by then had begun to like a drink. She’d begun to like those dark and smoky rooms in those out-of-the-way corners of the city where with the veil of her hat pulled down over her cheeks and a drink in her hand she could speak comfortably to strangers, her words and her thoughts moving easily and the earth not quite so solid beneath her feet.

  On the last day she worked, her office friends led her quietly across the dawn-lit landing and eased her in through the front door, making an escape well before Momma could do more than cluck her tongue at them. That evening when Veronica woke there was only Momma alone in her chair in the dining room. Agnes was at a show, May, by then, in the novitiate, and Lucy had only recently gone to live with her husband, six months after he’d returned from the war. Johnny had already left for good.

  Veronica went to the cocktail cart that Agnes had brought home to lend some sophistication to the newly spacious apartment. She poured herself a little something. As she raised the glass Momma began to speak and Veronica turned her scarred face toward her. At the time Momma truly believed that only men could be drunkards, that the women who took a few too many, while foolish and weak-willed, usually had just cause, so she spoke to the girl now not in anger, as she had once spoken to her son, but out of sympathy, as much aware of foolishness and weak will as she was of just cause. She said she was grateful her sister hadn’t lived to see this.

  She said: “I stood by her bed, you know, just after you were born. It was hot, hotter than Hades. Your father had taken the girls for a stroll, toward the river, he’d said, where they might catch a breeze. You were in the cradle in the other room. I stood by the bed. She was feverish, but who wasn’t in that heat. In a day or two, I figured, she’d be back to herself. And then the light just flattened out, like the life had gone out of it. I looked out the window. The world had never been so quiet. And then I began to hear one sound. I saw the curtain move, although I can tell you there was no breeze. I turned back to Annie. I stood right next to her. She was thirty-eight years old and she had three children and a new baby and a husband, and I had waited seven years to be with her. You and your sisters can talk about your newspaper tragedies, your camps and refugees, but for me this was no less than any of it. For me this was the worst thing. When Mrs. Power came up she scolded me for shutting the window, the old biddy, but all I cared about by then was that she get the doctor. Who would have believed that a time would come when I’d say it was just as well, just as well that Annie died young and missed seeing this, her own last child, the girl she’d named, throwing away the very life she’d given her.”

  At her dressing table, Aunt Veronica brushed her hair and then smoothed it into place with a black velvet band. Her reflection was pale and showed the same large eyes and long firm neck that could be seen in the few childhood photographs scattered throughout the apartment: the same large eyes and long neck that the three children would remember years later when they said, “Too much drink,” hitting the mark at last.

  Even on the brightest days her bedroom was dim, but now in the early and still unaccustomed darkness of All Saints’, the walls seemed to draw themselves in behind her. The room was strewn with cloth, as it had been each time the children had seen it: the heavy drapes at the one window, the sheets and blankets of the unmade bed, the scattered bureau scarves and head scarves and dressing gowns, the various lengths of material that were to become a skirt or a dress. It was where the younger girl believed her fortune remained and Veronica might have believed it too, for all the time she spent there.

  Veronica sat on the embroidered chair before the glass-topped dressing table, her hands held firmly in her lap to keep them steady. If a girl, then Veronica, her mother had written, for the saint who had offered comfort. And then had borne forever the indelible image of his suffering on her veil.

  In the bright light of the living room she squinted a little and smiled and said, “Hello, all,” before accepting the drink from Agnes and taking the youngest child into her arms.

  ONCE OR TWICE each winter they would climb into the family car and retrace in full daylight the route that usually brought them home. It would be Thanksgiving and Christmas when it happened twice in one winter. Christmas only those years that their father, calling them their own little family, insisted they eat their turkey alone. (Giving his children in those years the oddest of holidays, what with the television on all day despite his attempts to interest them in checkers or pick-up sticks, games they played only in their rented cabins in the summer, and with all their neighborhood f
riends gone to grandmothers in Brooklyn or Queens or Jersey; with the strangeness of changing into Sunday clothes at three o’clock in the afternoon to eat a quiet dinner in the dining room with their tight-lipped mother and their weary father, who seemed ready by then to admit that the strife and mournfulness of Momma’s table lent some texture to the day, after all. That the strife and mournfulness had become, after all, the personal, the familial mark his family made on the general celebration.)

  From the three passenger windows the children would watch the winter trees fall away and the buildings slowly rise against the lowering colorless sky. Now, as they entered the labyrinth of city streets and elevated subway tracks, they saw the stores and the buildings and the people in full daylight, so that they began to feel, watching carefully, that they had peeled back the swarming darkness and had glimpsed, at last, the pale underside of what they could now see was this tattered place. Newspapers and broken paper cartons wheeled across the curbs and the holiday silence, the stores with their heavy steel shutters, the empty parking lots, the few stunned people in the street with their coats flapping around them, all added to the sense that what the daylight revealed was puny and empty, a refutation of what had been the night’s illusion. A subway rattled overhead but its sound was weaker than it had been in the darkness, more short-lived, perhaps because they imagined it to be empty. At a stoplight they noticed a small church, squeezed into a row of stores and named by a handful of cramped words that stretched across its entire face on a white handwritten sign. Its single stained-glass window was broken in one corner and repaired with cardboard. Its door was closed and barred. As were the doors of all the shops and the windows and doors of every apartment house. In one of these they saw the branches of a Christmas tree pressed into a pale curtain behind a pane of glass as if the rooms beyond had lacked the space to accommodate it. Under the shadow of the El, in what seemed a concentration of the pale beige light that filled the deserted city, a man pawed at a trash can, lifting and sorting. Two more men in worn gray coats stood at another corner, their hands deep in their pockets. They talked together, shifting their feet, moving their shoulders, laughing, arguing, who could tell? But unaware, certainly, of the miracle that had taken place sometime past midnight, of the way the day had been transformed. A woman in a short coat with cold bare stockinged legs ran along the sidewalk in black high heels. A swag of greenery had come down from a storefront and lay unclaimed at the edge of a curb, a single strand of red plastic ribbon rising and falling above it.

  Earlier, on the highway, they had glanced into the cars on either side of them and seen families like themselves, girls and women in fur collars and hats, boys and men in dark Sunday coats, some with bright presents piled in their back windows, but now they felt that they alone had gotten the good news of the miraculous birth and they sensed vaguely that their new clothes and the shopping bags of wrapped gifts put them at some risk here in this empty, colorless, tattered place—at some risk of being proven mistaken: it had not happened. The angels had not sung last night in the black winter sky and Santa (although only the younger girl still truly believed in him) had not filled their stockings. The morning they had just lived, from the cold living room at dawn with its surprise (despite all their confident expectations, always a surprise) of presents and toys, of all hope realized, to the sweet breakfast in the tiny kitchen and the joyous, overcrowded Mass, had not happened, could not have happened, given the bleak light of this cold, deserted, dirty place.

  “There’s the prison,” their brother said on those Christmas mornings they took this particular route to Momma’s street, and the three children felt the cold that must have whistled through the bars. Felt, looking at the long, square tiles of pale turquoise that ran up the building’s side, like the tiles in a subway station, in dirty public bathrooms, that this was the punishment, then: to be banned forever to a public place, to know nothing else but its barrenness and chill.

  Following this, following the empty street and the prison, the rattle of the empty trains and the bone-colored light of the city, Momma’s place, on this day, was a warm redemption; a confirmation, a restoration, of all that the day had begun with and had, in their spirits at least, been in danger of losing.

  Aunt May opened the door on which Aunt Agnes had hung a small gold wreath and there, moored to the barren world below by the length of brown stairs and the narrow, skylit landing, was the living room transformed. Before the boarded fireplace, where the coffee table had last stood, a white tree strung with small soft pink lights and shining pink beads, hung with pink Christmas balls of a dozen different sizes that caught the shine of the lights and the glint of the small metallic beads and their faces in round distortion as they stood closer to take it all in. The rest of the room was dim and the apartment smelled sweet and warm from days of baking. The children’s presents were piled in three neat groups at the foot of the tree; their parents’ gifts and the presents for each of their aunts were on the large green armchair, behind which Aunt Agnes had placed her Victrola—taken from her room for just this one day. The sounds of Christmas in these rooms moored above the city’s silence were the Vienna Boys’ Choir and the rat-tat-tat of Momma’s pressure cooker and, while she lived, Aunt May’s soft and breathy voice admiring their Christmas clothes, their packages, the pink lights in their eyes.

  It might have been a different place entirely in these first few minutes, a place they had never visited before. The dining-room table was pulled to its full extent and covered with a pure-white cloth and set with the white-and-green Belleek and the rainbow-lit Waterford that were used only on Christmas and Easter. The heavy silverware was the same that they used at every dinner, but its polish was so high that it, too, seemed transformed. Momma was in the kitchen. There was powder on her cool soft cheek when they kissed her and the surprise of pale lipstick, the ruffle of white lace at her throat. It was she, on this day, who poured their Cokes, one inch in each glass, although Aunt May smiled wildly at them from the kitchen doorway as they took their first sip. On the server in the dining room there were cut-glass bowls full of green olives and celery stalks and tiny sweet gherkins, and Aunt May let the children choose from these before she carried them into the living room, where Aunt Agnes in black silk pajamas or a green velvet dress or, once, a quilted satin skirt that touched the floor was reaching to turn on another light, where—oh yes, it might have been another place entirely, another world moored some four stories above that barren, loveless one—their parents sat side by side on the wide horsehair couch, holding hands.

  “Turn around,” Aunt Agnes would say to the girls in their holiday dresses and then always declare before she had given them what they considered sufficient praise, “Oh, but he is always impeccable,” as she accepted their brother’s kiss. There was holly along the mantel behind the white tree, holly in a tall white vase on the cocktail cart. Sitting on the dark carpet they would study the piles of presents they knew they could not touch, trying to determine which pile was whose and what it might contain, while their father and Aunt Agnes discussed the stock market or the company or something the President had said, and Aunt May, on a dining-room chair beside their mother, fretted over them (Are you all right on the floor? Is there a draft? Are you children hungry?) and then, in another year, leaned to whisper something to her sister just as the downstairs buzzer rang and without a word she stood, touched her hair, and went out to meet him.

  He was larger in his dark suit and overcoat, and his big, gloveless hands were reddened by the cold. He had taken the subway from Queens. As they’d heard him crossing the outside landing their mother and father and aunt had stood and hurriedly told the three children to get up and brush out their clothes and so what first greeted him when he entered the room were their three solemn faces and it seemed to be them he meant when he said, first off, “Ah, this is Christmas itself.”

  He, too, carried a shopping bag of gifts and he placed it beside the couch as he shook hands with their mother and th
eir father, saying, How do you do, and received such a tender, Merry Christmas, Fred, from Aunt Agnes that the children as well as their parents glanced at her quickly and in so doing recognized the claim she had made on this day. Most mornings of the year she might leave the apartment at seven and head for her office in Manhattan, or on weekends at noon for her concerts and matinees there, without a thought for the life of the place once she was gone from it. But this day was hers, as were the white tree and the holly and the stiff, glimmering bows of old rose that had been placed on top of every picture frame.

  “Momma’s in the kitchen,” she said softly, directing them because the lovely, transformed day was hers, and Aunt May said, “Oh, yes, let me take you in” (as if, it seemed to the children, the apartment on this new day had expanded, the kitchen grown some distance from where they stood). “I’ll just put down your hat and coat.”

  She hurried into Momma’s bedroom with his coat on her arm, and in that second’s pause after she’d gone, he looked at the children and smiled and winked.

  All of them were still standing. “I imagine the trains were pretty empty this morning,” their mother said, and the mailman rubbed his hands and shook his head. “Well, no,” he said. “You’d be surprised.”