At Weddings and Wakes

by Alice McDermott

  All four girls would be weeping by the time she finished (and on more nights than one the downstairs neighbor pounding at the floor) and as he turned his handsome face into the pillow she would angrily send them back to bed and then, since she hadn’t slept at all and couldn’t afford to try at this hour, she would dress herself for work.

  Watching from the bed they shared, Lucy, their mother, would see the fury in Momma’s movements as she walked between the bureau and the dressing table or sat before her many broad reflections to pin up her hair, muttering to herself all the while, slamming brushes and drawers, and in the failing darkness she would see how the anger seemed to straighten Momma’s spine and set firm her face, how it propelled her out of the room, into the living day. Lying alone on the high bed in the now quickly dispersing darkness, Lucy would see that, given the muddle of life, loss following as it did every gain, and death and disappointment so inevitable, anger was the only appropriate emotion; that for any human being with any sense, any memory or foresight, every breath taken should be tinged with outrage.

  He said, sitting back, that work was as always although he wasn’t traveling much, no farther than Jersey City this year. And his daughter had had her appendix out back in September, missed some school. Oh yeah, she was fine now, nothing to it. His black eyes were hooded by his salt-and-pepper brows and his mouth, like Momma’s, was narrow, his lips thin.

  Their mother asked if there were many people on the ferry tonight and he answered, “Not a soul,” although you’d be surprised, he said, how busy the trains were. And on the Christmas he was there, Aunt May added that Fred had said just the same thing earlier in the day. The two men looked at each other then, recognizing that what they had in common was not the women at the table nor this warm room, but the cold dark public world they had emerged from and would, one within a half an hour of the other, rise to return to.

  “Is that so?” Uncle John asked with a handsome man’s license to feign halfhearted interest. He placed his teacup in its saucer and glanced at his watch. “Speaking of which,” he said. He had not looked directly at the children since his arrival, would not, they realized, give them his full attention if they were set ablaze, but it was the children he addressed now, as if, spying them, he spied a back door through which he could safely make his escape. “I’ve got a reservation on the next ferry.”

  Momma, with papal dignity, did not move from her chair as he stood and, this time, bent to touch his lips to her cheek. He called her Momma dear again and only the older girl noticed how, when he touched her hand, her fingers curled up suddenly to meet his. And yet did not hold. He turned to his sisters, touching his cheek to theirs as well. He patted the children’s heads and shook hands with the men and waved briefly from the dark street below when the children ran into Momma’s bedroom to see which way he would go.

  When they returned to the living room again, Aunt May and her mailman were still standing by the front door and their parents and Aunt Agnes had begun to bind up their presents with bakery string. Momma was still in her chair, a large white handkerchief in her hand now and her hand in her lap, her black eyes furious. The mailman was saying what a glorious Christmas it had been and wasn’t it a shame that all good things must come to an end. When Aunt May brought him his coat and had thrown a sweater over her shoulders so she could walk him down he reached into his pocket and drew out three quarters for the children, although he had already given the girls silver bracelets and the boy a tortoiseshell penknife. He could not remember, he said, when he had last spent Christmas in the company of such fine children and so saying would have made a brilliant exit if he had not hesitated for a moment and leaned past May to call another good night to Mrs. Towne. Agnes froze in front of him and May took his arm and shook her head and their mother made the softest hushing sound, and suddenly confused the man looked up to see their father’s shrug and frown: Now you see what I’m up against. He floundered for a puzzled minute and then, with May’s help, it seemed, recovered and said again a less buoyant good night. The children listened for the sound of their footsteps on the stairs and saw in their minds’ eye the silent two of them descending slowly, their faces lit from below by the single downstairs light. Their father had just lifted the last shopping bag of presents by the time she returned, and what with the children’s wool hats and mufflers and buttoned coats there were only a few minutes for them to admire the gold ring with its single clear stone that Aunt May took from her finger and held out in her palm.

  Outside, beneath the heavy wheels of their car, subways ran, brightly lit trains crowded with people, Fred the mailman among them, regretting the decision he had made six years ago in haste and sorrow, with no idea of what a miracle the future could be, to send his mother’s wedding band to the foreign missions where it would help to form a chalice for some poor young priest. And somewhere on the water whose scent reached them just as the lights and the buildings had fallen away, Uncle John stood alone on the prow of the ferry, his collar upturned and the wind whipping his pants legs, off already on his year-long journey to Stat and nigh land (as the younger girl thought of it), where he had a wife and a family they had not met—not, their father was now saying into the darkness as he drove, because of all the torment John had put Momma through in his wild days, oh no. That was not what had so thoroughly hardened her heart. What had done it, what had made her mad as hell, he said, was that the bastard had stopped. “She feels the same way about God,” he said as their mother chuckled and clucked her tongue and whispered again, “Imagine May married.”

  Suddenly the younger girl raised her head from her mother’s breast and felt the coolness on her flushed cheek. She saw the dark back of her father’s hair and then the silhouette of her brother’s leather cap. She looked across her mother’s coat to her sister as she leaned against the far window and then turned her head around and realized that from the window on her side she could see only small distant lights, single lights that could only mark desolate, uninhabited places. She sat up a little farther, moving with enough urgency to get her mother to shift and turn to her even before she said, “Was Aunt Veronica there?”

  Her sister looked at her from over her shoulder. “Where?” their mother asked.

  “Today,” the girl said and she saw that her brother in the front seat had turned too, sharing her revelation. “She wasn’t there.”

  Their father laughed and said, “She just noticed.”

  Their mother placed her black kid glove on the girl’s cheek and then brought her back under her arm. “She was there,” she said softly, “but she wasn’t feeling well. She had a little virus. She was in her room.”

  The girls caught each other’s eyes shining in the darkness. They hadn’t even noticed. And it was clear from their brother’s silence, from the way he dipped his profile and turned away from them and did not say, I can’t believe you just realized that, that he had not noticed either. Had not noticed that the joyous day had proceeded entirely without Veronica and that, perhaps because of the joy itself, she had not been thought of, she had not been missed, not even by the younger girl, who had given her her loyalty.

  But then, they would tell each other later, much later, as teenagers or adults, when had there ever been a Christmas or an Easter, a gathering of any sort, when one of them had not disappeared, retreated to a bedroom or crossed the outside hallway or torn off down the street (hadn’t Aunt May once spent an entire evening on the fire escape?), just to prove what? That life would indeed go on without them, that they would have no part of the joy. Just to prove, perhaps, no matter that the children on that Christmas had well proved them to be wrong, that like the dead their presence would be all the more inescapable when they were gone.

  THREE MIDWINTER WEEKS of rain and when the clouds finally broke the nuns in their school eyed the sunlight skeptically, despite the brilliance with which it lit the yellow wood of the classroom floor. After lunch the children filed out slowly, through the black steel door and under the
white wing of the nun who held it open. “Ten minutes,” she said, offering no more reason for the shortened recess than the fact that they’d had no recess at all for so long. Outside, the children stood in small groups, hands deep in the pockets of their winter coats. They might only have been waiting to get back in again.

  At one end of the schoolyard a cinder-block incinerator billowed smoke. Here was burned every botched effort of the day, torn sheets of loose-leaf and crumbled bits of construction paper, cracked erasers, broken pens, paper airplanes, the rough caricatures and pierced, initialed hearts that had been ripped from notebooks by quick-eyed teachers pacing the aisles. Here, too, the opened Sunday envelopes went, the junk mail, the dated parish bulletins, the scented notes from home that explained yesterday’s absence or warned of tomorrow’s, crumpled tissues (some stained with lipstick), pencil sharpenings—all turned out of the round steel wastebaskets that the two janitors collected at the end of each day. There were flowers, too, on some occasions, barely wilted flowers from the altar or flattened, muddied ones from the small cemetery behind the church. And palm fronds, once a year, blessed and dried and made obsolete on each new Palm Sunday.

  It was the first good fire the janitors had gotten going in ages and although the gray smoke rose into the sun and against a brilliant winter sky the smell of it was only a headier version of the damp and earthy odor the wet cinder blocks had been breathing into the schoolyard all week, and might have served as some impetus for the story one of the boys, standing in a group of four or five others, began to tell.

  It had to do with his cousins, he said, who lived in Queens.

  He was a light-haired boy, somewhat gaunt. In the sixth-grade class of forty-three he was the sort who only briefly caught the other students’ attention, standing when called on and, no more often right than wrong, slipping into his seat again. Not the class clown or athlete or troublemaker, not the brightest or the dumbest, first or last to come in every morning, to be called on for answers or chosen for games.

  The boys around him as he spoke, Bobby, the oldest child, among them, would have said at that moment that he was a friend of theirs but an hour before would not have named him as one, and he himself was accustomed enough to the brief and easy alliances of the boys his age to be as free as any of them were from much loneliness or self-consciousness. And so his story seemed to them to be unfettered by his particular personality (because if there was anything particular about it they couldn’t have named it) or by any other motive than that it was true.

  In Cambria Heights, where his cousins lived, the houses were very close together. On a morning just after Christmas his aunt was coming down the stairs when she looked through the small stained-glass window of her landing and noticed that a man was sitting in their neighbors’ bay window. She couldn’t see him very well, her own window was small and thick and made of the same stained glass you see in churches, but she got the sense that he was a young man with red or blond hair and that he was sitting with his back to her, looking into the room. She didn’t think anything of it. Maybe it was the man who lived there—although he was bald and usually gone to work by then. Maybe they’d had some unexpected visitors. But a couple of days later she came down the stairs again, this time just after dawn—one of the kids was sick and she needed a teaspoon—and when she climbed back up she happened to look out and there she could see him again, sitting in the neighbors’ window, facing their living room. That day she mentioned it to the lady next door, but she said her family had all been asleep at that hour.

  The next morning his aunt went straight to the stained-glass window and when she saw the man there again went right outside. There was only a driveway between the houses and she marched up it and then stood on tiptoe to look into her neighbors’ side window. No one there. She rang the neighbors’ bell, thinking he might have just gotten up, but there was no one home. She went back to her house and up the three steps to the landing and looked through the glass. He was sitting there.

  All day long she waited for her neighbor to return and while she waited she went again and again to the small stained-glass window on the landing, she walked, again and again, up the narrow driveway to peer into the window there. She studied the light. She thought maybe the figure was a trick of light, of some bend in the colored glass or its frame or in the small bay window where he seemed to sit, but although the day progressed the figure of the man neither shifted nor changed nor faded, gave no indication at all that it was the mere product of shadow or sun.

  A shadow did run under her window once—her neighbors’ car, finally pulling into the driveway. The boy’s aunt ran out to meet her. “You’re going to think I’m crazy,” she said before the woman had even left her car. “Your house is empty, right?”

  The woman looked at her house and said yes and then the boy’s aunt crooked her finger and said, “Would you come here for a minute? I can’t figure this out.”

  The two women went into the house and when the neighbor saw the figure through the glass she said, “My God.”

  “There’s no one there,” the boy’s aunt said. “At least I couldn’t see anyone from the driveway.” But the woman immediately went to the phone and called the police and she had a policeman with her when she walked up her own stoop and opened her front door. When they had searched the house and found it empty they both came back and looked through the stained-glass window again and the policeman pushed back his cap and shook his head and said it was the darnedest thing. He didn’t know what to make of it.

  The neighbor woman said only that she would not spend another night in that house while the figure was there, and when her husband came home from work the boy’s aunt heard them argue for a good half hour before they drove off together with a small suitcase.

  The next morning the neighbor woman appeared at his aunt’s door again, now with a priest behind her where the policeman had been. She asked if she could show Father what they had seen and the boy’s aunt let them in, telling them that the figure had been there all night, silhouetted by the one lamp they had left burning when they fled. The priest looked, stepped back a little, looked again. He asked as the policeman had asked if there was another clear window that would show the same view and the boy’s aunt said no. He looked again. “You’re certain there’s no one in the house?” he asked the neighbor woman.

  “Hasn’t been anyone all day,” she said.

  He, too, spoke of tricks of light, of shadows and curtains and lamps and passing clouds reflected in the glass, but all the while he spoke he was peering through the window and there was little conviction in his voice. Finally he said to the neighbor woman that he saw no need for an exorcism (the boy’s aunt jumped at the word) but he would anyway go bless the house if it would make her feel any better.

  She said it would, but still the boy’s aunt saw her leave again with her suitcase that evening and knew she hadn’t spent a full night there since. And then yesterday the neighbor woman came back with yet another priest, who peered through the window and walked the length of the driveway and returned with the suggestion that the stained glass simply be removed.

  “But what do you think it is, Father?” the boy’s aunt asked. She made a point not to say Who.

  “A trick of light,” the priest said.

  “But it’s there all the time,” the neighbor woman told him. “In all kinds of light.”

  The priest touched the glass, something none of them had thought to do before, and a red stain fell across his fingers. He suddenly rapped the window with his knuckles. “Knock it out,” he said. He almost shouted. Then he turned and walked down the two steps of the landing, across the living room, to the front door, the women right behind him. Just as he was about to leave, the boy’s aunt asked him to bless the house.

  He turned impatiently and held up his hand and there, just where the red light had been reflected on his fingers, they saw a stream of blood from his split knuckle.

  The priest made the sign of the cross an
d then, laughing a little, took out his white handkerchief and mopped the blood.

  The neighbor woman was saying that she was certain now, she would sell the house. “I’m not going to live with this,” she said.

  The priest shoved the handkerchief into his pocket. “You live with far worse,” he said. “We all do.” And then to the boy’s aunt he said, kindly now, patiently, “Take the window out. Donate it to a church if you like. Get something clean and modern-looking. If it’s a burden to you, the parish will help out with the expense.”

  And that’s what was happening this morning, at his aunt’s house. A guy was taking the stained-glass window out and putting a clear one in its place.

  The boy buried his hands into the pockets of his blue pants, his friends watching him carefully. At one point during his story, when he’d mentioned the priest’s blood, they were about to object, but now they only studied him, shifting from foot to foot, wondering briefly who he was and if they’d ever played with him before.

  “Weird,” one of them said.

  From between their shoulders and over the tops of their heads the boy who had told the story saw the black portal of the school slowly open and the white-winged nun with the brass bell step out from inside. She was talking to someone behind her and he knew that as soon as she turned to face them she would wave the bell slowly, freezing them into silence. When she rang the bell a second time they would separate and walk forward and this moment in which he had held their attention would be over forever.