Once inside, the children hung their coats on the hooks at the back of the classroom, aware of the smell of the cold and the incinerator smoke and the warmth of their own bodies that lingered on the wool. They went to their desks. Sister Illuminata said they should take out their geography books and they all leaned over, as if suddenly felled, to reach into the compartment beneath their seats and grope for the wide, squarish text. Bending, Bobby, the oldest child, noticed the thin skim of dust and hair and dirt that covered the golden floor, the gray-white calf of the girl in front of him. He straightened up again, feeling the blood in his face.
The nun began to read to them from behind her desk and he and his classmates fell into a warm stupor well before she reached the end of the first page. The smell of the outdoors was fading now, giving way to the scent of their breaths, their milky skin, their warmed woolen pants and jumpers, digested apples and sandwiches. The print before him and the small color photo of a walled city melted and blurred. The electric clock on the wall above the blackboard hummed and trembled as it struggled through the last ten seconds of each minute. Had he been the priest in the story he would have spoken to the figure in the glass. He would have blessed himself and said, “Are you a soul? Can’t you escape?” “From such moments as these …” he would have told the frightened women behind him.
He thought of Mr. Castle and all those Sundays after Aunt May died when he would come to their house alone, sit silently with them through dinner. The boy knew that had he himself been the priest called to that house he would have spoken to the figure in the glass in the same manly tone his father had finally used. “Fred, what is it you want us to do for you? Fred, what is it you want us to say?”
Outside, the smoke rose from the incinerator, carrying with it small flakes of black ash that seemed to rush ahead on the updraft, darting and spinning and melting to nothing as they fell, or to merely a dark dusty stain that the children in the lower grades, out for their ten minutes of play, brushed from one another’s hair and skin.
A scent, a scene, a story from his brave youth; from a time when he had believed himself to be holy, and mortal.
AS HAD THE ARMY in the years before, the post office swept Fred the mailman from the rooms he shared with his mother and gave him a part in the general history of his generation. His first route had been out in the suburbs, not far, he told the children, from the town where they now lived, and so, although he rode bus and subway back to Woodside every night, he was well aware of the way the suburbs were growing and changing, kids springing up all over the place, new schools and houses and grocery stores every time he turned around. He was well aware of another kind of life.
(“What’s your mailman’s name?” he asked the children and the boy said, “George,” and the older girl, “It used to be George but now it’s Bill.” “Last name?” he asked and from the dining room where she was setting the table their mother said, “George was Kelly. George Kelly. I don’t know Bill’s name yet. He looks like he might be German.” Fred paused for a moment, considering, and then shook his head. No, he didn’t know him.)
Winter was his favorite season then, not spring or fall as you might have guessed, and the snowiest days were the ones he most looked forward to. He’d start out snow-blind, highstepping it like a majorette, but soon enough his vision would clear and he would come upon his route transformed—by kids like themselves, off from school for the day, building snow forts and rolling snowballs; by their mothers in galoshes and babushkas, clearing his path. The women would straighten up when they saw him, smile and touch a gloved finger to a runny nose—a gesture that the snow and the light and the children calling made seem as delicate and as flirtatious as a raised fan. “Hello, Fred. What did you bring me?”
He’d gotten to know most of the families pretty well, new babies and old quarrels and changes of fortune up or down. He’d always been a good talker, and a good listener as well, something much more rare, and of course he was never opposed to taking his time.
He winked at the children and raised his voice so that it might reach her in Lucy’s kitchen, “How else do you suppose I got lucky enough to meet your aunt?”
But of course there was more to it than that, more than the simple luck of his garrulousness and her smile when she met him on the street, but in those first delicate weeks of his engagement he hesitated to consider too fully what foundation this new and tentative happiness was built on. He hesitated to recall, for instance, that final year of his mother’s life when at each pleasant pause along his route he would hear himself saying it, saying “It’s my mother, you see. Cancer.” Or, “No, not good today,” or “Yes, thank you, ma’am. She’s a little better than she was.” Hear himself explaining each time he’d been gone from his route for a day or two that she was in the hospital again or sick from the medication or at home now and doing better, feeling all the while that he was somehow raising her from these sympathetic women’s imaginary dead. “Well, she’s a fighter,” he would say. “Always has been.”
Standing on the edge of a driveway, on a sidewalk under leafy trees, in the cluttered kitchens where they would offer him a glass of ice water or a cup of tea, he would hear himself saying, “You know, she came here as a girl, all by herself at nineteen.” He would say, “It was no simple thing to be a widow with a child in those days.” And the women in shorts or dresses or blue jeans with rolled cuffs, the letters and magazines he had brought them still in their hands, a baby asleep in a carriage under the eaves, a dish drainer filled with wet dishes just behind them, would nod and smile and say some simple, comforting thing.
(Later, considering the course that had led him to her, he would marvel to discover how much of his life had been passed in the company of women, in their kitchens. In the Samuels’ kitchen on Central Park West where he had done his schoolwork on a wide wooden table while his mother cooked or ironed. The various kitchens of their Woodside neighbors where he used to go in his teens to wait out the first lonely hours of darkness before his mother returned from the city, paying for whatever company he found there with gossip from the building, anecdotes from the neighborhood, jokes, mimicry, a light-footed time step, anything that would make the women in those households, mothers in stained aprons and daughters, fat or fair, laugh. A kitchen in England before the invasion where he’d sat with a woman in a thin robe and found himself wondering if given the choice his mother would disown him for what he’d just done or for the fact that he’d done it with an English girl—although the second and last time they met she told him her mother was actually Irish, a sign, he thought, regardless of what he’d already confessed to the chaplain, of God’s own absolution. The kitchens all up and down his suburban route where year after year he paused for a glass of water or a cup of tea, children peering from the doorway, dishes tumbled in a sink, cats and dogs moving about his ankles and the women always friendly, sometimes lovely—one of them suddenly crying once, out of the blue and as if her heart would break; one of them inviting him in, pouring him coffee, asking him how the weather seemed, a phone all the while wedged between her shoulder and her ear and a small voice rising from it like the sound of a shrill conscience; one showing him a good bit of breast, no accident; another throwing her head back to laugh at some joke he told and sending him the full, impossible image of a life he might have had with a woman in a kitchen such as this, two dog bowls in the corner and a child’s drawing taped to the tile wall, the spring sun shining across the stove top. His own kitchen at home where he and his mother had shared a million meals, a million games of cards. Where she had leaned against the windowsill that looked over the brick corner of another building and talked to him at the end of every day.)
“She used to take a glass of buttermilk every night when she was well,” he would say. “Just a single glass of it, in the kitchen before bed. The best time of the day for me.”
He would say, noticing the way the women glanced down at the mail in their hands, or at the dishes behind them, or the
Dutch clock on the wall, “She had some wit, she did. Always a story to tell. People in our building used to sit outside, waiting for her to come home, to have a few good laughs with her. Here she was just climbing up out of the subway after working all day—she was a housekeeper and never ashamed of it, she worked for fine people—and she’d be making them laugh.”
He would say, “She came here with little money but she managed to save. Sent me to the Paulist Fathers and paid my way.” He would say, “More brains than most people I know, was what the man she worked for told me. More wisdom.” He would say, in those final days he walked his route, when she no longer knew him clearly and had begun to vomit a thin black stool, when the nurses had insisted that her hands be tied to the hospital bed and every pause he took when he delivered the mail threatened to get him to the hospital that afternoon just one minute later than he needed to be in order to be by her side at the last, “Not well, not well at all,” adding when his eyes began to tear, “She came here alone at nineteen, you know. Married my father at twenty-one. Widowed—have I told you?—with most of her family still on the other side. Some wit, though. Even the nurses themselves said it. The doctors, too.”
He saw the shimmer of impatience in their sympathetic eyes—the baby was crying, the children would soon be home from school. He saw, in those last days he worked, one or two of them glance up to see him coming and then duck inside. He was aware each time he paused to talk that this few minutes’ delay might plague him with regret for the rest of his life, but still he could not move his feet again until he’d said, “I don’t doubt you women think she was a burden to me, all the illness and the expense and me never married, but she was my blessing, believe me.”
And with the mail he had brought them still in their hands they said, “I’m sorry,” “I’m sure,” “I’ll say a prayer.” They said, “But wasn’t she blessed to have a son like you?”
His mother died on Good Friday and he asked for a transfer in the following weeks. Because he saw by then that he had said too much, that he had taken her full life, his full and varied love for her, and compressed it into a single grief, the flat, long lament of a bachelor son, an Irish mother’s loyal boy. There were Mass cards and sympathy cards waiting for him all along his suburban route when he finally returned to it, and the discouragement he felt each time he came upon the white envelope in the black mailbox beside each individual door, the discouragement he felt each time he saw the familiar words, the familiar faces—the Sacred Heart, the Blessed Mother—stamped out on the cards inside, seemed to threaten not only his own clear memory of her but his faith as well, which for the first time in his life struck him as paltry and trite, unequal to the complexity, the singularity, the irrepeatable course of any one life.
He understood only that he needed a change and there was a route in Brooklyn about to come available. He found himself pausing to chat in the broad sun, at the bottom of stoops and the doors of shops. Pausing to chat with old ladies and men on home relief and new immigrants whose speech he mostly only pretended to understand—nodding and touching a shoulder, “Oh yeah, oh yeah, right you are”—and who reminded him of what an ancient story the story of his mother’s life had become. He missed the suburban snow days, the cool comfort of the thick leafy trees, regretted all the steps he now had to climb, but was not tempted either, here in this teeming and mostly indifferent place, to ease his heart with long and anxious descriptions of what of course could never sufficiently be defined.
May was there from the beginning, he supposed, a quickly familiar figure hurrying along. He’d tip his hat, “Isn’t it a lovely day?” Glance over his shoulder whenever she entered the hallway as he snapped the mail into each box. “There’s a package for your place, Miss Towne.”
It seemed significant that neither of them could remember when they’d first seen one another, when they’d first spoken. When he’d begun to recognize winter’s arrival by the navy-blue coat she wore. When the green cardigan thrown over her shoulders had become as familiar to him as something he himself might have owned and taken from storage each year to commemorate spring. She once said as he rounded the corner with his cart that she could set her clock by him. He thought to tell her that for him she set the very seasons.
He touched his cap. He saw his own smiling face reflected in her glasses. There was a check her sister Agnes was waiting for and what did he think was a reasonable time before having the bank put a stop on it? Another day or two, he said, and the next day rang the buzzer when he saw it had arrived. Looking through the glass in the door, he recognized her shoes and her legs and the hem of her skirt as she came down the stairs, bending to see who it might be, and then smiling for him.
She crossed the street with him once, a brown paper bag in her arms. They talked about how cool the air was that day—in five years they had found a great deal to say to one another about the weather. She mentioned a sister on Long Island. He said he’d once had a route out that way. She said she’d spent some time in a town farther out that was simply lovely. Green as can be and smelling of the sea. An endless garden with white swings. And in summer a wall thick with red roses.
“Do you like roses?” he asked. They had paused at the stoop of the corner house. He held a packet of letters cradled in three or four magazines.
“I like all sorts of flowers,” she said. “But roses best, I suppose.”
Over a restaurant dinner, where the delicate light of the chandeliers touched the polished mahogany and the bright silverware and dropped a pale blue gem into her water glass, he said, “I took another place two flights down. And the route in Brooklyn. I only knew I needed a change.” The merry hum of the other diners in that lovely, warm, cavernous place seemed to urge him on his way. “I had no idea I’d be blessed with meeting you.”
From Lucy’s kitchen May called, “Isn’t he the flatterer?” and then—even the children saw that she could no longer keep him out of her sight—she stepped into the dining room where the table was set with a cloth and the good china as if for a Sunday, although it was only a weekday night. She was smiling. She seemed to have lost the ability to swallow these wide and radiant smiles. The winter darkness had already filled the window behind her and the ceiling light made the hour seem later than it was.
She moved past the table into the living room. “What are you telling these children here?” And then stood behind his chair. She touched its upholstered wing and after hesitating for a moment carefully put her hand on his shoulder. Her skirt and her sweater were both pale blue. Her blouse was white.
“I’m telling them about my life in the postal service,” he said. “Your nephew here thinks he might like to be a mailman.”
The boy looked at her and said, “Well, maybe.” He wanted only to be a priest, but by then he understood the need for some alternative. For something to tell people when they asked that would not cause them to raise their eyebrows or to smile in that secret, sympathetic way that seemed to indicate some awareness on their part of the precise point in his future when his desire would evaporate. Some alternative he himself could turn to, should their sympathies prove accurate, should he find himself, as Aunt May had been, turned away.
“He’ll be good at anything he does,” Aunt May said. And then added, “I think I’d like to be a mailman, too, if I could work in some of those neighborhoods we saw today.”
They had spent the afternoon looking at houses. To rent or buy, the children gathered from what their mother had told them in the few rushed minutes between the time they’d come home from school to the spotless, ready-for-company house (slipcovers and newspapers removed) and the time Aunt May and her mailman had appeared at the front door.
It was all preliminary, of course, Aunt May had said, but oh, they had found some wonderful towns and neighborhoods and had even seen a place with a For Sale sign that might do nicely. A bungalow, she called it, and the children pictured their own summer cottages, miles from here. A nice yard and a fence and walking dista
nce to a bus stop that could take Fred to the railroad if he couldn’t manage to get another route out this way.
“Only just to get the first inkling of an idea,” she said later when their father came home from the office and it was explained once again why they were here. “Just to see what’s available. To see how feasible it might be. To see, you know, if we might find something we’d both like. Nothing very big, of course. Three bedrooms and a garage and a place for a garden. Nothing definite, just a look-see.”
Their father, who because of the company did not remove his jacket or his tie, mixed martinis. Their mother passed around a plate of crackers spread with bright pimento cheese. The two men in the living room seemed to the children to absorb its space and they recognized for the first time how small their own home might be: three bedrooms and a garage and a place for a garden. It occurred to them for the first time that their parents had once entered it as strangers, before either of the girls was born, having a look-see, testing the possibility. On one wall were two landscapes that their father loved: a stream in winter, a meadow in spring, and on another, their mother’s choice, a series of pictures of little girls in old-fashioned bonnets. The drapes were pale green over off-white sheers. There was a floral couch, two green chairs, a dark rug bordered with pink roses. Two end tables with white doilies under beige lamps. A coffee table with another doily where their mother placed the tray of crackers and a pile of embroidered cocktail napkins. A television in the far corner. A brass bucket filled with magazines. It occurred to them for the first time that each of these details had not always been here. That they’d been accumulated, carefully perhaps.
At Weddings and Wakes Page 12
