At Weddings and Wakes

by Alice McDermott

  It was an indication, too, of what despair they had talked each other out of across all those nights when they had been able to talk each other out of nothing else.

  Sitting now in her ancient, terry-cloth-covered chair—as it seemed to the three children she had always been sitting—Momma watched them sip their tea and spread the soda bread with butter. There was a cloth on the table now and a spray of gladiolas in a blue vase. Their mother and Aunt May had gone to meet Agnes in the city, to shop for what they kept referring to as a trousseau, which the children gathered was merely a nightgown and a robe, and although she had promised to be back well before dinner, her absence, and Aunt May’s, had unbalanced the three of them and made them shy. They had spent the last hour in complete silence, pretending to do their homework in the dark living room while Momma baked her bread. When she called them out it was to a table already set with teacups and dessert plates and they pulled out the heavy chairs and sat down at their places without a word as Momma poured the tea.

  They might have grown into adults in the past hour, might have lost their mother and their aunt not only for this single afternoon but for all time, so great was their feeling of obligation and loneliness as they sat and said thank you and picked up their napkins and their spoons.

  Momma took her own cup of tea to her chair. The children didn’t dare look at her or at one another. Without that generation of grownups, of mother and aunts, who had until now blocked and buffeted all their contact with her, they had no sense of what was expected.

  “Take some soda bread,” she said. And they did. “Take some butter.” She watched them—there might have been a smile on her lips—and then she sipped her tea and returned the cup to its saucer and said, “Well, what do you think of all this?”

  They turned to her and she nodded at the gladiolas and although the sharpness of her question and the firmness of her nod told them their answers should be quick and precise the long hour of silence and all their uncertainty made their tongues thick. They looked dumbly at one another and shrugged and mentioned that it was nice, they guessed. It was pretty nice.

  “Last week it was daisies,” Momma said. She raised her white brows and her dark eyes flashed. “It’s becoming quite a courtship, don’t you think?”

  Yeah, they mumbled. Yeah, it was.

  On the mantel above the dining-room fireplace a gold anniversary clock spun under a glass dome. There was a small oval frame that contained the face of their grandfather, an old-fashioned-looking man with thin features and a mass of dark hair, and another, rectangular one that showed their mother and her sisters as children, each in a white dress with a large white bow in her hair, black stockings and high black shoes. Agnes was seated with Veronica on her lap and their mother and Aunt May were on either side, each reaching to touch the baby’s elbows. A third, smaller frame stood on the opposite side and showed a startled, black-eyed infant in a long christening dress. Uncle John, they knew.

  “Unnecessary, too,” Momma said. “When you think about it. I mean, flowers every week, what with the date set and her with a ring already. Wouldn’t you say he’s overdoing it?”

  The children looked at her and although she smiled her thin smile they felt the full burden of their new adulthood in her gaze. She wanted something from them but they could not give it, or even say what it was.

  “Every week?” the boy asked, making some attempt to meet her expectations. His voice was tinged with outraged disbelief. “He sends flowers every week?”

  “Every,” Momma said with some satisfaction. She turned to place her cup and saucer on the telephone table beside her. “We still had the daisies in the living room when these came. I only threw them out yesterday.”

  “I like daisies,” the younger girl offered and Momma said, “Do you?” She brushed her hand over her lap, once, twice, three times. She shook her wrist as if to push back a sleeve.

  “Thirty-nine cents a bunch,” she said. She placed her left hand on her right wrist and paused to let the declaration sink in. The pale skin at her throat quivered. “Unless you can find them in a field somewhere. Thirty-nine cents a bunch. Nothing’s cheaper.” She smiled and her eyes were shining. “It was the end of the month,” she said. “Don’t think I didn’t notice. First of the month it was roses, last of the month daisies. And this week, first of the month again, these.” She gestured toward the flowers. “A man who runs out of money at the end of the month is no manager,” she said, her voice rising, trembling slightly. “Don’t tell me he is.”

  And the children agreed without speaking that they would not, no, they would certainly not tell her he was. “Um,” they said. “Oh.” Until Momma began to doubt Lucy’s stories of brilliant report cards.

  She straightened her shoulders and tapped her fingers to the worn armrest. “And now they’re talking about buying a house on Long Island,” she said. “All of us moving out to Long Island with the grass and the trees. A regular vision of heaven.” She pulled her broad bare arms across her middle, holding them there as if she were preparing to receive a full, frontal blow. “They’re talking about a thirty-year mortgage when here’s a man who can’t manage his money for thirty days, sending flowers like this when, after all, she’s agreed and the date’s been set and neither of them is so young that they can think the future will take care of itself. He certainly waited long enough to get himself married, it wouldn’t hurt him to show a little more caution now. That’s what I think.”

  The children looked into their teacups, swirled the dregs of sugar and milk. They hadn’t a single thought for the return of their mother, much less their father, so thoroughly, so desolately grown up did they seem, what with the burden of this old woman’s sudden anger, the burden of good if unhappy sense that she made. The older girl glanced up at the gladiolas, the extravagant flutes of pink and yellow and orange, the tall green stems. In her adult life she would always associate them with some folly.

  “It’s a vision of heaven,” Momma said again. “To listen to the two of them you’d think they were sixteen, trees and a lawn and flower beds. And May wants one of those white garden swings like they had at Mercy.”

  The children adjusted their teaspoons, placing them more securely in their saucers. They touched the napkins on their laps. In the window beside her the flat brown face of the next building stared out at them, not a sign of anyone else stirring in its rooms. What they could see of the sky was gray, and while this morning as they’d waited with their mother for the bus they had noticed a mellow taste in the gritty wind, had felt, despite the wool collars they had turned up against their cheeks, some thin breath of spring, now, in these rooms, they couldn’t say what the season was, although as she was leaving this morning Aunt May had said, “Summer’s just around the corner.”

  “I don’t see it,” Momma said. “Not when a man’s so free with his money.” She took a white handkerchief from her apron and wiped some damp flour from underneath her wedding ring. “Grass and flowers and trees,” she said. “Sounds like a cemetery to me.” She studied her fingertips and then waved both hands away, as if they could be dismissed. “No one has to tell me about the country,” she said. “I was born out in the country”—did they know that? And they nodded, yes, yes, it was part of everything they knew. A farm, she said, and now her hands were raised to shield her from the memory. An awful place, she said, but smiling, nearly laughing, as if at the foolishness of anyone who would think otherwise. Just awful. Dirt and mud and dumb animals (sheep the worst of them, nothing at all in their eyes), nights black as pitch, and illness and accident as common as the cold rain. She was five years old when her widowed mother packed them all up, her and her sister Annie—the only two of her five children who were still left—and moved to the city, where she married a terrible man for lack, it seemed, of anything better to do. It was because of him that Annie left for New York as soon as their mother died. Seven years later she herself had followed and so young and naïve and stupid she was at the time that she�
��d spent nearly every penny she carried in the chocolate shop they had on board, none of the friends she’d made bothering to tell her that she would have to show she had a certain amount of money on her when she arrived, just to be let in. Annie’s husband found her in a holding room just off the dock, eating the last piece of chocolate and crying her heart out because she was sure she’d be sent back and never see her sister’s face again, after all the years she’d waited and the crossing she’d made, after she’d come this close.

  The children nodded, smiling because she was smiling. It was part of everything they knew.

  She still had her sea legs the first time she crossed the street outside but she figured it was just the way the land here moved. She figured she’d get used to it. Her sister’s husband, carrying her bag, held the door open and then followed her across the entry and up the stairs. At the third floor she heard her sister’s voice, “Here’s Mary,” and looked up to see her leaning over the rail.

  She looked at the three children, their chins reflecting the white cloth and the bouquet of gladiolas between them trembling in its vase, trembling, she saw, because of the way the older girl was swinging her legs beneath the table. If she were to excuse them now, she knew, they would bound from the room.

  Two weeks later their Aunt Veronica was born, she said. A beautiful baby that her mother never gained strength enough even to hold—she poked the thick arm of her chair and nodded again as she had nodded at the vase of flowers—now what did they think of that?

  The children straightened themselves, startled by her tone. What would they think of losing their own mother at this age? she asked them. Having her suddenly gone?

  They considered it; on this afternoon, abandoned as they were, it seemed quite possible. Terribly, frighteningly possible. The smaller girl felt her eyes fill with tears.

  What did they think? Momma said—think of such a world, was what they knew she meant—when a woman leaves a baby she’s never had a chance to hold and three more children, the eldest only six, who were nevertheless old enough, let me tell you, to ask for her again and again, saying, When will she be back, when will we see her again, and crying out in the middle of the night, so that their father would have to come down the stairs in the darkness to fetch her from the room she rented from Mrs. Power on the parlor floor. She’d put on her robe and her slippers and follow him back up the stairs and find one or all of them calling for their mother, crying to beat the band. She’d take them in her arms, what else could she do, and if the baby was awake she’d get her a bottle. But he wouldn’t go back to bed, as many times as she told him to. He’d wait until they were all asleep again, so he could walk her back down the stairs. Sometimes it would be morning by then. And Mrs. Power would be giving the two of them such a look when she came back in, as if they’d been out dancing. “The old biddy,” Momma said and wiped the handkerchief across her lips as if she tasted something bitter.

  She looked at the children, who were sitting cautiously now, with shallow breaths, as near as they would ever come to the possibility of never seeing their mother again, of having been swept forever into that current of loss after loss that was adulthood.

  “That was my courtship,” Momma said. “Not flowers every week and mooning around on Long Island.” She raised the handkerchief in her hand. “But let me tell you we had a fine marriage, despite it. Very fine.” And then she smiled at them, although they were frowning still at this despicable world where mothers died and left young children to cry in the darkness. “The only thing I ever held against him,” she said, “was that he made me believe the worst was over.”

  And then she suddenly stood, the three children now dizzy enough to be the crumbs tumbling from her apron. She straightened her broad shoulders and pushed a strand of pure-white hair into her hair net. She waved a thick arm. “Make yourselves useful now,” she said, “and clear the table.”

  It was dinnertime when their mother and Aunt May and Aunt Agnes returned with shopping bags and a silver hatbox that both girls coveted wildly.

  At the cocktail hour Aunt May complained that Lucy, after all, had had lilies at her wedding and Aunt Agnes rolled her eyes and said Lucy, after all, had been a young bride.

  THEIR BROTHER returned from school one afternoon with a note from the priest. All month he’d been serving as altar boy at the 6:15 Mass and the note said he was a good boy, always prompt and courteous, with a clean pressed cassock and shined shoes. He spoke his Latin clearly.

  Their parents read the note silently and then gave it back to him to keep, saying only that they were proud of the good job he was doing, careful not to turn his head with too much praise. The next morning his sister Margaret appeared in the living room at twenty minutes to six, dressed in her plaid uniform and ready for school. Lent was nearly over but still she told her startled mother that she had decided to attend Mass every day until Easter.

  Her brother seemed glad for the company, although she knew that had she been the one with the priest’s note in her pocket and the black shiny shoes and the white cassock in sparkling dry-cleaner cellophane held over her shoulder by two hooked fingers and draped like Gabriel’s wings across her back, she would have preferred perfect solitude. He pointed things out to her as they walked in near darkness toward the church, acquainting her with the early-morning streets: a pink tatter of clouds at the horizon, a last star, the crocuses that broke the dirt or a wet hedge that was always filled with sparrows at this hour. He paused and touched her arm and said, “Smell the bread?” And she did. It seemed astonishing: the warm smell of the bakery a good two miles from where they stood. “I always go over after Mass to get a roll.”

  She said she would go, too, and was feeling well pleased with her holy morning when they passed the house with the flagstone path that always reminded her of Necco wafers. Her brother, she knew, had sworn off candy for Lent, while she had only pretended to.

  At Mass she was more discouraged than ever by the sight of him on the brightly lit altar in the dim and mostly deserted church, by the grace of his movements, the pale beauty of his face, the swift, certain sound of his Latin. By the way he held his hand to the white breast of his cassock and held the gold plate just under her chin at Communion. Holiness, sainthood, was upon him, resting easily, and she was discouraged by all the catching up she had to do.

  When she met him at the side door of the church she said she’d walk up to the bakery with him but she wouldn’t buy a roll. She would fast until lunchtime.

  Now the pale sky and the high clouds had come into their full early-morning light and the traffic on the avenue had begun to buzz. They cut behind the church, along the weathered stockade fence that enclosed the convent’s garden (and through which they might glimpse in a few hours’ time a clothesline full of long johns: the very image both she and her brother conjured whenever their father sang: When you see the BVDs swaying gently in the breeze, then you’ll know that springtime is here). They paused in the parking lot that was their playground to place their book bags and lunch boxes on the ground where their classes lined up each morning. She had never been first in line before, but she savored the pleasure of this thought for only a moment, the moment it took for the light at the corner to change and for her brother to put his hand out and to look both ways before he crossed with her. She would give it up, she resolved. Offer her place in line to one of her classmates. With the tiny Communion wafer poised delicately in her stomach, she would be studious today, and attentive. She would not pass notes or talk in the lunch line. She would be the first to volunteer to share her sandwich with anyone who had forgotten theirs.

  Her teacher that year was a homely young woman whose last name was so long and unpronounceable that the students were allowed simply to call her Miss Joan. She was wide-bottomed and thick-legged, with long, protruding teeth that were always marked with lipstick. She was strict and unpleasant and bored. She spent the last fifteen minutes of every school day teasing and spraying her thick brown hair and w
ould at any given moment between eight-thirty and three suddenly retrace her dark lipstick, puckering and smacking and curling her lips, filling the wastepaper basket with white tissues that carried, like some halfhearted version of Veronica’s veil, a perfect red replica of her full mouth.

  It was considered pure bad luck to end up in Miss Joan’s class, and although no moan had gone up back in September when Sister Fontbonne said, “Fifth-graders who had Sister Helene last year will have Miss Joan this year,” there had been a breathless silence, a strange stillness that was the result of fifty-two ten-year-olds bowing their heads to accept ill fate. As Margaret tried to extend her new Lenten generosity to the young woman who would within the hour stand before them, she came up blank. Walking along the morning sidewalk, her stomach rumbling, her brother’s shiny, priest-praised shoes flashing under her eyes, she considered the woman’s needs and found them to be legion: she needed a pretty face, shapely legs, a smaller rump beneath her straight tweed skirts. She needed braces for her teeth, less jaw, an endearing sense of humor. She needed a loyal student or two to defend her when the imitators started their acts in the schoolyard (smoothing an invisible lipstick over their puckered lips and—this was Margaret’s own contribution to the scene—waving their rear ends from side to side). Because she was not a nun she needed a husband, as impossible as that seemed, even to Margaret, who had watched Aunt May and Fred dance so prettily together at their wedding.

  She and her brother passed the corner parking lot of the Presbyterian church, crossed another side street, and then the catty-cornered doorway of a small bar (about which their father would say, with the same consistency that he made his cemetery joke but with a far more serious air, “In all the years that we’ve lived here I’ve never passed through those doors,” filling his children with a vague admiration and a cautious sense of gratitude for what it was he had managed to avoid). Then a deli with newspapers piled out front and a swinging glass door that puffed out the sharp odor of salami. Crossed again and stepped together into the white bakery. Their impression was that it was entirely white, from the white tile floor to the white walls to the tall refrigerator case filled with ice-cream cakes covered in white frosting, to the five-tiered wedding cake in the front window. But of course there were many other colors as well: the brown breads and rolls in bins behind the counter, the chocolate layer cakes, the red jelly centers of butter cookies, the silver globe on the ceiling from which an endless supply of bakery string unraveled. Still, their first impression was of whiteness, and the two children blinked their eyes and stood enchanted for a moment as children in fairy tales are said to do, coming upon a dream.