At Weddings and Wakes

by Alice McDermott

  “But isn’t it brisk today?” Aunt Agnes offered, moving to the cocktail cart between the rooms, her long, elegant hands made whiter still by the thick black silk of her sleeves. “You should have something to warm you up.” She paused, her arms held gracefully. “Bob,” she said, “will you do the honors?”

  Their father moved quickly toward her, both men seemed like children under her cool and gentle gaze. “Certainly,” he said. “Ladies, what will it be?” Just as Aunt May returned from the bedroom and—would the day never cease to amaze and delight them?—easily took the mailman’s arm. He began to walk forward with her and then paused and bent down to his bag of gifts, taking a long, thin box from the top. Handkerchiefs, even the children knew it, for Momma.

  “Manhattans, please,” Aunt Agnes said, answering for them all.

  At dinner the mailman’s face was flushed again and he praised every morsel of the meal, remarking again and again how many years had passed since he’d had creamed onions such as these, sage dressing, mashed potatoes so light and giblet gravy as rich as this; since he’d had buttermilk biscuits—“Not since the last batch my own mother made, God rest her soul”—as if, the children thought, he’d been in prison or exile. As if he’d been keeping track, year after year, of what he’d been deprived of.

  Their father liked him. They could tell by his own red cheek and his bright eyes as he carved the turkey, by the way he joked with the three of them, winking at the girls as he transferred the meat to their plates, and joked even with their aunts and Momma (“Mrs. Towne”) as he piled their own plates high. The two men had discovered before dinner that they’d seen many of the same cities during the war and so there was that to give them their pleasure in each other, and, another discovery, a mutual youthful infatuation with basketball and crystal radios. There was the sense too, the children understood, that their father at last had someone from the outside to see him among these difficult women, someone who might see, as he sometimes asked his children to, what he was up against here. He spoke over the women’s heads as he stood again to carve second helpings and his buoyancy seemed to include his anticipation of all future commiseration with this man, as well as his awareness of his own expertise, his experience. It would not be long before he would have the pleasure of telling him: I know these gals. Believe me.

  “And how about you, Fred?” he asked from across the table that held all the women in his life. “What can I get for you?” And it might have been this buoyancy, this unaccustomed camaraderie in their father’s voice that made the children notice, suddenly, and for the first time, how striking was the family resemblance between their mother and her sisters and even Momma. There was an unaccustomed stillness about them with Fred here, and because of this, too, the children looked up from their own plates to see that the women had the same coloring under the bright light of the small chandelier, the same high white foreheads and arched brows and, beneath their eyes, the same pale, washed delicate skin, so that their father’s confidence suddenly struck them as mistaken, even foolish. Of course he didn’t know them, who could know them, marked as they were, each identically, by all they had lived.

  “Oh, a little of this and a little of that,” Fred told him, passing the thin dish. He couldn’t count how many years it had been since he’d had a Christmas dinner such as this.

  Aunt Agnes put her knife on the edge of her plate and crossed her fork into her right hand. She placed her left hand on her lap and leaned forward ever so slightly. “And how long ago was it?” she asked. “That you lost your mother.”

  “It will be six years on April the second,” he said, taking the plate again and nodding a thank you. He shifted a little in his seat, placed his elbow on the tablecloth and then slipped it off as he spoke. “She died on Good Friday.”

  “That’s a blessed day to die,” their mother said, but the mailman, accepting more turnips, shook his head. “I’d hoped she’d last to Easter.” He looked around the table. This might have been something he’d never before revealed. “Past the mourning,” he said, and apparently fearing they would think he meant morning, added, “The mournful part. Of Holy Week. The sad part. I’d thought it would be nice if she’d just once more lived through that.”

  She had been sick, it seemed, for a good while, perhaps ever since he’d returned from the war, but had only begun to fail noticeably in her last few years. She was an Irish girl, come here alone at nineteen, much like yourself, Mrs. Towne, and married to a big Swede who died when he, their only child, was nine. No one in this room (except, of course, for the little ones here, who should be grateful for their ignorance) needed to be told what a hard time it was for a widow with children to make a good living, but then the room itself and all the lovely women in it were testimony enough to the strength of character those young Irish girls had. She worked for a wonderful Jewish family on Central Park West and sent him to the Paulist Fathers. After school he’d go up the back elevator and sit in their kitchen with his homework until seven o’clock or so when he and his mother would make the trip together back to Queens. At seven the next morning they’d be back again. When he returned from overseas she was still with the same family, but he saw right away that the three years alone had taken their toll. It might have been the cancer just beginning—“I’ve heard its onset can sometimes take years”—it might have been the loneliness. A GI buddy (he nodded to their father as if he’d just named a mutual friend) told him to apply at the post office and when he got the job he said, “Okay, Mom, now I work for you.” The Jewish family gave her one hundred dollars and took her to lunch at some fancy restaurant. You couldn’t have asked for nicer people.

  “And you’re still in Queens?” Aunt Agnes said. She might have only heard rumor of the place.

  “Still,” he said and then added, “But not in the same apartment.” He shook his head. “No,” and then said no again, as if still resisting the notion. “I wouldn’t stay in the same place once Mom was gone. It didn’t make sense. I mean the building was fine and all, close to the subway, but I took another apartment two flights down. A smaller place.” He held his empty fork in his hand and looked down at the plate of food and for an instant the children felt they recognized him from their own time on the subways. They had seen him there: a florid man riding alone, his eyes closed and his body absorbing every shock of the banging cars, every shift and lurching curve with such gentle, practiced resignation that for a moment they thought it was the subway he was referring to when he looked up again and smiled and, shrugging, told them, “I’m just not one to hang on.

  “There’s a young family in our place now,” he added. “Cubans. Nice people. They still sometimes get our mail. We make a big joke about it, me being with the postal service and all.”

  “That would be Mr. Castro,” Aunt May said softly. She was sitting beside him, their shoulders well apart, but her words seemed effectively to place her hand in his. They had had quiet conversations, she had learned the names of the people in his life. A blush rose under the gold rims of her glasses and the mailman, perhaps blushing too, turned to them all to say, “Yeah, Castro, wouldn’t you know it? They invite me up there every Christmas, but”—he raised his hand and shook his head, some part of that old argument that made him say no, no—“I couldn’t go in there again. Much as I’ve sometimes thought I’d like to. I was a boy there,” and because it seemed he could not go on, Aunt May explained, “Fred’s mother was very ill at the end. Very ill.”

  “Oh, sure,” their father added, supporting his new ally. “That’s cancer for you. It’s a terrible disease.”

  But from her end of the table Momma said, “My husband died right outside this apartment door.” She raised her finger and pointed toward the living room. “My sister, the mother of these girls, died in that far room.” Her head trembled slightly as she spoke but when she nodded it was a firm, single nod and it seemed to show them all at once where their sympathy should lie. For even as he traveled back and forth, his schoolbooks
in his lap and his mother’s warm thigh beside his own, the earth was falling away beneath her feet.

  “I didn’t know,” the mailman said. It was all she had left him to say. “Right here it was?” He shook his head and glanced at May. “That’s part of a story I haven’t heard,” he said and in the moment’s pause that followed it seemed someone might actually begin to tell it. But he added, “God bless you, Mrs. Towne, you’ve had your trouble,” and Aunt Agnes lifted a cut-glass bowl of cranberries. “The children haven’t had any of these,” she said.

  The rule was that only wrapping paper came off at Momma’s apartment. They could peek inside the boxes or look to their hearts’ content at the pictures on the lids but they could take nothing out for fear of lost parts, doll shoes or tiny dice, that Momma or any one of their aunts might step on or stumble over in the darkness that would follow their departure. The children understood the wisdom of this and though they objected to it annually they found, too, that it prolonged the pleasure of their anticipation. After dinner, while the women cleared the table and their father smoked a cigarette in the green armchair the children would study the pile of presents they had opened at the cocktail hour, peering through cellophane at the baby doll they could not yet hold or tracing with a finger (his mouth puffing out for soft, devastating explosions) the picture of a model battleship whose many and complex pieces he could not study until the next morning. It was like getting the gifts but not quite fully getting them, like having their longing for these toys remain temporarily undiminished by their receipt. As they stretched out on the floor around the white tree they were vaguely aware of the fact that Christmas was once again nearly past but for the time being there were their plans for these opened and yet untouched gifts to keep them from the full acknowledgment of the approaching end of the day.

  In the chair above them their father slowly turned the pages of one of the dull magazines, smoking and lifting small pieces of tobacco from his tongue. On the Christmas Fred was there, both men smoked and talked softly about people they had known and the city as it had been when they were young, categorizing both the people and the place by parish names, Saint Vincent’s and Saint Peter’s, Holy Sacrament, Saint Joachim and Ann.

  In the kitchen and the dining room cabinets slammed and pots rattled together, voices rose although they remained, especially on that Christmas that Fred was there, encased in a hard, crusty whisper. At some point Agnes or May or Veronica or their mother would stride silently through the living room and shut a door. At some point the children would catch the breathy sound of tears.

  It was the same every year as whatever it was that had transformed the day now faced the long night and the prospect of tomorrow and the day after. As their father turned the pages of the dull magazines and the children rehearsed strategies for as yet unopened board games, the women seemed to pull the old grievances from kitchen drawers and rattling china cabinets, testing them, it seemed, against the day’s peace and proving in this final hour that it had been a temporary and paltry and unreliable peace.

  Aunt Agnes said she was not looking for gratitude. She had learned long ago never to look for gratitude. Veronica cried throatily, “Well, what about me?” And May once said fiercely, “All this is the past,” seeming to indicate with the cutting, physical motion of her voice the five women in the dining room and their father with his cigarette and even the small children themselves stretched on their stomachs beneath the tree.

  On the Christmas Fred was there Momma said from her chair, “If your own father doesn’t deserve a mention I don’t know what I can ask.”

  Watching their own wide faces in the distorted pink glass of the Christmas balls the children heard her say, “Forgotten, I suppose,” and out of the well of silence that followed this pronouncement came the sniff of tears, the hushed pleas for peace and reconciliation. Still Christmas, someone said. Oh, Momma—they recognized their mother’s voice. Aunt May was explaining something, softly, pleadingly, but the silence that followed her voice spilled out into the living room and silenced the men as well. Even the children saw it was as their father had once described: Old Momma Towne giving her stepdaughters a taste of the silence of the grave.

  Christmas was passing and even before the merry fog of it had cleared they caught the stony shapes of Golgotha. The mournful part.

  And then, in the day’s last, limp miracle, the downstairs buzzer rang.

  It would happen any time after dinner: while their father smoked and the women cleared the table, when they’d returned again to the dining room for pumpkin pie and coffee, peppermint ice cream and Christmas cookies, sometimes after even the dessert dishes had been cleared, but because he always arrived late in the day, after each of the day’s long-anticipated events had passed and Christmas, the last Christmas Day for one long year, was finally used up, the children met him and his box of Fanny Farmer candy with more enthusiasm than they might have shown if the discovery of a chocolate-covered cherry was not the day’s last joy.

  Uncle John was tall and broad with dark hair and dark eyes and white, white skin that seemed to shine as if it was pulled too tautly under the persistent stubble of his beard. He said, “How are you, sis?” to each of the four sisters, and “Hiya, Momma, dear,” to the old woman, and then added each year, “I’d kiss you, but I’d hate for you to get this cold.”

  He would present the box of candy to Momma in her chair and then Aunt Agnes would stand, disregarding whatever argument he had interrupted in much the same way she might snub an old friend, and ask, “What can I get for you, John?”

  Every Christmas he would say, “Just a little ginger ale, sis, please,” although even the children understood—by the hushed pause between her question and his answer, by the general sense of relief that would accompany Aunt Agnes to the cocktail cart—that a more difficult, more troublesome reply was always possible, and remained a possibility for next year as well, even as he accepted his tumbler and raised it to say Merry Christmas.

  His sisters and his mother watched him drink, their anger and their tears and even, on the Christmas Fred was there, that stony silence of the grave suspended now on what seemed the delicate promise of his sobriety. He was a handsome man but handsome in such a broad, exaggerated way that the children found him comical. His eyes were dark and his thick eyebrows bristled and his black hair waved across the top of his head. He had broad cheeks and thin red lips and a strong square jaw and it was part of everything they knew that girls had swooned over him when he was young; girls his own age and younger and girls as old as each of his four sisters.

  He had a wife and a family in Staten Island but as far as the children knew he always appeared here alone and for just this single hour of the year.

  If they were still at the table a place would be cleared for him, a cup of tea offered and accepted, a piece of pumpkin pie. On the Christmas Fred was there Aunt May merely said, “Johnny, this is Mr. Castle,” and the two men shook hands, their uncle showing no more surprise or interest than he might have shown had the mailman been as familiar as everyone else in the room; or had everyone else in the room been as much a stranger.

  Their father, even on that Christmas, retreated in their uncle’s presence, sat back and stared out and said little more than what candy his daughter might choose if it was a cherry she was after from the box Momma had opened and passed around so proudly, passed around as if, he would say later, the reprobate had brought her pure gold.

  But then he was her own baby boy. The son who had been curled in her stomach even as she crouched in the hallway just outside the apartment door and held in her arms her dead husband’s bloody head. Her own son whose birth had held the three oldest girls in speechless terror that she, too, would die and then rewarded them not only with the return of the only living adult who gave them any value but a living baby doll as well, whose hair they curled and carriage they pushed, whose clothes they bought and washed and ironed right up until the time he made their girlfriends swoon and made
Momma, sitting long into the night in the window seat of the bedroom she and Lucy shared, call out to the girls to go downstairs to help their brother up out of the street.

  He was her own baby boy, her joy, more charming and more beautiful than she had ever dared imagine and it seemed it was her unchecked pride in him, her delirious mother love, her failure to acknowledge each time she touched his dark thick hair that if her sister had not died in giving birth to Veronica she never would have had him for her own, that invited disaster. By seventeen he was an incorrigible drunk. She threw him out for good when he was twenty-one.

  And how is Arlene, Aunt Agnes would ask him at the Christmas table, her effort to return the very tail of this day to what it had been, to retain some elegant control, reminding the children themselves of the way they might gather up the chocolate crumbs on a cake plate and press them together with the prongs of their fork, trying to get some last flavor from what in its substance was long gone.

  And did his children enjoy their Christmas?

  He would eat his small piece of pie and drink his tea with a pinky raised. He had the arrested charm of a man who had discovered fairly young that given his looks a little personality went a long way. “Oh, she’s fine,” he said. “Oh yeah, sure, they had a great time.”

  Suspended above their heads was the argument or the tears he had interrupted. Suspended, too, was the memory of those late nights and early mornings when they had thrown their coats over their nightgowns and gone downstairs to peel him from the sidewalk or from the floor of the vestibule and work his dead weight step by step up four floors and across the moonlit or dawn-lit landing and onto the couch in the living room. Momma would be there in her robe, her long graying braid over her shoulder, and if he was conscious enough she would tell him, her steady voice growing louder and shriller with each word, that she was hardening her heart against him: hardening her heart against the time when she would refuse to spend the night waiting at the window, when she would simply lock the door and turn out the light and go to bed, because she had seen enough tragedy in these rooms, her darling sister cold dead and her husband gone before she’d reached him. She was hardening her heart so that she would never have to see him with that same gray pallor on his lovely face when they brought him home with his neck broken or his liver gone or his flesh frozen stiff in some alleyway. He was her own baby boy, her comfort in sorrow, her gift from the dead, and yet she would harden her heart against him to spare herself that. To spare herself the loss of her dearest joy.