Very Old Bones

by William Kennedy

  I speak with some authority when I say that it is a major struggle for anyone to annihilate his or her own ego, to cure the disease of self-contemplation, for as you will see there is ample attention paid to myself in this memoir. But I believe it could not be otherwise, for only through what I was, and became, could the family be made visible, to me, to anyone. And so I invoke Keats, without any claim to art of my own, both to drain myself of myself, and to project myself into realms of the family where I have no credentials for being, but am there even so; for I do know the people in this memoir, know where and how they lived, or live still.

  I know, for instance, what is going on in the Quinn house on North Pearl Street in North Albany this morning at a little past five o’clock. Two sleeping men are nearly naked, and three sleeping women are ritually modest in their shorty summer nightgowns. In each of three bedrooms a crucifix hangs on a nail over the sleepers’ beds and, in a luminous print looking down at Peg and George Quinn in their double bed, the Christ exposes his sacred heart, that heart encircled by tongues of fire.

  The house normally rouses itself from slumber at seven o’clock, except on Sunday, when late rising is the rule. As the milkman sets foot on the front stoop next door at this crepuscular hour, that house’s resident chow disturbs all light sleepers here with his murderous bark from the back yard. Under the quietest of circumstances it is not easy to achieve sleep on this infernal morning, but after the chow’s bark, George Quinn, vigorous still at seventy-one, raises himself on one elbow, rolls himself onto his wife’s body, and then, with high comfort and the expertise that comes with practiced affection, he rides the lovely beast of love.

  Dead heat was saturating the room, the sheet and pillowcases under the two bodies soaked from the long and humid night, no breeze at all coming in the fully opened window, no leaf moving on the trees of North Pearl Street; nor was any cross-ventilation possible, for the bedroom door was closed now in these moments of hot waking love, all nightclothes strewn on the floor beside the bed, the top sheet kicked away.

  As they moved in their naked heat toward mutual climax the door creaked open, its faint crack a thunderclap to both lovers. George knelt abruptly up from his wife’s soft and sodden body, grabbed for his pajama bottoms as Peg felt for the lost topsheet to cover herself; and the door creaked again, the gap between its edge and its jamb widening, the hall light striping the room with a sliver of brilliance, then a board’s width; and there, in the foot-wide opening, appeared Annie Phelan’s face, ghostly inquisitor with flowing white hair, her face growing larger and more visible as she pushed the door open and stared into the bedroom of interrupted love.

  “What is it, Mama?” Peg asked.

  Behind the door George was stepping into his pajamas, and Peg, with the use of one deft arm, the other holding the found sheet in front of her breasts, was threading herself into her nightgown.

  “What time is it, Margaret?” Annie asked.

  “It’s too early,” said Peg. “Go back to bed.”

  “We have to make the coffee and set the table.”

  “Later, Mama. It isn’t even five-thirty yet. Nobody’s up except you.”

  From his darkened bedroom Billy Phelan inquired: “Is Ma all right?”

  “She’s all right,” Peg said. “She’s just off schedule again.”

  Billy raised his head, flipped his pillow to put the wet side down, and tried to go back to sleep, thinking of how he used to work the window in Morty Pappas’s horseroom, but no more.

  Standing in the doorway of the third bedroom, where she and Annie Phelan slept in twin beds, Agnes Dempsey, wearing a pink knee-length nightgown, and yawning and scratching her head with both hands, said to Peg, “I didn’t hear her get up, she doesn’t have her slippers on”; and then to Annie Phelan: “What kind of an Irishman are you that you don’t put your slippers on when you walk around the house?”

  “Oh you shut up,” Annie said.

  “Go in and get your slippers if you want to walk around.”

  Annie went into the bedroom. “The bitch,” she muttered. “The bitch.”

  “I heard you,” Agnes said.

  “You did not,” said Annie.

  “I could stay up and make the coffee,” Agnes said.

  “No, it’s too early,” said Peg. “She’d stay up too, and then we’d never get her back on schedule.”

  “You go to bed,” said Agnes. “I’ll keep her in the room. I’ll put the chair in front of the door.”

  George was already back in bed, eyes closed and trying for sleep as Peg lay on her back beside him and hoisted her nightgown to thigh level to let her legs breathe. Her interrupted climax would probably nag her at odd moments for the rest of the day, but she wouldn’t dispel that now with her own touch. She wondered when the day of no more climaxes would arrive, wondered whether it would be her failure or George’s. How long before George was as senile as Mama? When was Mama’s last orgasm? When did she last feel Poppy’s hand on her? Peg had no memory of anything sexual in Annie’s life, never caught them at it the way Danny caught her and George up at the lake. We thought he was swimming for the afternoon, but in he came, George doing great, and me on the verge. He opens the door with the key and we both look at him. “I didn’t know you were sleeping,” he says, and out he goes, and that’s that for that.

  Peg charted the day to come: office till noon, the boss, and Basil, probably. Work will be light, all their attention on the strike vote in the shop this morning. I hope there’s no fights. Then Roger. He wants to drive me down to Peter’s luncheon. It’d be easy to go along with Roger. He has a way about him, and funny too. Smart and funny and so young. It’s so silly. The important thing is to turn George around.

  “Are you asleep, George?”

  “Nobody can sleep in this stuff. It’s like sleeping in pea soup.”

  “We have to buy this house.”

  “We do like hell.”

  “Think about it, damn it all, think about it! Where could we ever again find this much space for that kind of money?”

  “Who needs all this space? Danny’s not home anymore.”

  “He comes home sometimes. And we still have Mama.”

  “Yeah, and we also got Agnes. Jesus Christ.”

  “She’s a big help.”

  “She’s also another mouth.”

  “If she wasn’t here we’d have to pay somebody to watch Mama, unless you want to stay home and do it.”

  “Why can’t Billy take care of his own mother?”

  “Billy can’t do that sort of thing. And he wouldn’t. The personal things, I mean.”

  “You always got an answer,” George said.

  “So do you. And the answer’s always no.”

  Peg pushed herself up from the bed, pulled off her nightgown, thrust herself into a cotton robe, and strode briskly to the bathroom, leaving the bedroom door ajar. The hall light would fall directly into George’s eyes. Good. George stood up, walked to the door and closed it, sat back on the bed, and looked at his dim reflection in the dresser mirror.

  “You’re gonna die in the poorhouse of bullshit and other people’s generosity,” he said to himself.

  In her chair by the parlor window Annie Phelan monitored the passing of neighbors, sipping her first cup of tea of the day from the wheeled serving table, popping white grapes into her mouth, chewing them with great vigor, coming to an end of chewing, organizing her lips and tongue, and then spitting the grape seeds onto the oriental rug.

  Billy, in the kitchen breakfast nook, was reading the baseball results (the Red Sox and the Albany Senators had both lost) in the morning Times-Union, his right leg stretched kitchenward, its plaster ankle cast covered by the leg of his navy-blue Palm Beach trousers, the toes of his shoeless foot covered by half a white sock, his hickory cane standing in the corner of the nook next to a paper bag containing his right shoe.

  Agnes Dempsey, practical nurse and Billy’s special friend, who’d been a now-and-then overnight gues
t for years, and who became a full-time live-in member of the household a year ago April, when Annie’s feebleness and vagueness were becoming a family problem, Agnes Dempsey at forty stood at the counter by the sink, breaking soft-boiled eggs into coffee cups with broken handles.

  Peg, dressed perfectly, as usual, in high heels and blue flowered dress, stood at the gas stove pouring a cup of coffee, the only breakfast she would allow herself, except for one bite of Billy’s toast, she in such a high-energized condition that we must intuit some private frenzy in her yet to be revealed.

  Agnes brought Annie her breakfast before serving anyone else, stirred up the eggs with a teaspoon, topped them off with a touch of butter, salt, and pepper, then set them in front of Annie along with two pieces of toast. Annie looked at the eggs.

  “They got bugs,” she said.

  “What’s got bugs?”

  “Those things. Get the bugs off.”

  “That’s not bugs, Annie. That’s pepper.”

  Annie tried to shove the pepper to one side with a spoon.

  “I don’t eat bugs,” she said.

  “That’s a new one,” Agnes said when she set Billy’s eggs in front of him on the oilcloth-covered table. “She thinks pepper is bugs.”

  “Then don’t give her any pepper,” Billy said.

  “Well, naturally,” said Agnes, and Peg saw a pout in Agnes’s lips and knew it had more than pepper in it. They all ate in silence until Agnes said, “I’ve got to get a room someplace.”

  “You don’t have to go noplace,” Billy said.

  “Well, I do, and you know I do.”

  “Let’s not create a crisis,” Peg said.

  “I’m not creating a crisis,” Agnes said. “I’m saying I’ve got to get out of here. Father McDevitt said it, not me. But I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

  “Then why didn’t you ever say anything?” said Billy.

  “Because I didn’t know how to say it.”

  “Well, you’ve said it now,” said Peg. “Do you mean it, or is this just a little low-level blackmail?”

  “What’s that mean, blackmail?”

  “Agnes,” said Peg, “go on with your tale of woe.”

  “I’m saying only what the Father said. That we can’t go on living this way, because it doesn’t look moral.”

  “Very little in this life looks moral to me,” Peg said. “When are you leaving?”

  “She’s not leaving,” Billy said. “Who’ll take care of Ma?”

  “We can’t let Ma interfere with Agnes’s new moral look,” Peg said.

  “You heard the Father,” Agnes said. “ ‘How long have you been here, my dear?’ A little over a year, Father.’ I felt like I was in confession. ‘You did that? How many times did you do it, dear?’ They always want the arithmetic.”

  “I’m surprised the Vatican hasn’t sent in a team of investigators to get to the bottom of this,” Peg said.

  “Whataya talkin’ about, this?” Billy said. “There’s nothin’ goin’ on.”

  “Then you don’t have anything to worry about,” said Peg.

  “Worry? Why should I worry?”

  “You shouldn’t,” Peg said. “You’re clean.”

  “Look, I know what you’re gertin’ at,” Billy said, “and I’m not gertin’ married, so change the subject.”

  “Changed. When do you move out, Ag?”

  “ ‘We don’t want to give scandal,’ the priest says. What does he think we do here?”

  “He imagines what you do,” said Peg. “It probably keeps him peppy. What else did he say?”

  “He says we have to create the sacrament.”

  “What sacrament?” Billy said.

  “I don’t think he meant baptism,” said Peg. “Do you?”

  “I don’t know what he means sacrament,” Billy insisted.

  “No more profane love in the afternoon, maybe? Make it sacred?”

  “You’d better watch what you say,” Agnes said.

  “You better organize this act you’ve got going here,” Peg said. “And you too,” she said to Billy “I really don’t give a rap what the priest says, or the bishop either. This is our house and we do what we like in it. But I think you ought to make a decision about your own lives for a change. I’ve got to get to work.” She bolted her coffee and stood up.

  “I’ll call about supper,” she told Agnes. “I’ve got that luncheon with Peter and Orson. The lawyer’s picking me up and I suppose the whole gang will be there. I want to go down early and help with the lunch.”

  “We’ve got a roasting chicken and lamb chops,” Agnes said.

  “Better be careful about lamb chops,” George Quinn said, coming through the swinging door into the kitchen. “That’s why Annie had her stroke. Always showin’ off eatin’ lamb-chop fat.”

  “I’m going where there’s no lamb chops,” Peg said. She gave George a quick kiss and went out.

  The phone rang and George, the closest to it, answered: “Hello there, who’s calling this early? . . . Who? . . . Oh, yeah . . . Well, no, Peg’s gone to work. Any message? . . . Yeah, Billy’s right here,” and he handed Billy the phone with the words, “It’s Orson, that floo-doo.”

  “What’s the prospect, Orson?” Billy said into the phone.

  “I need to get out of this goddamn house,” I said. “What are you up to?”

  “I gotta go to the doctor’s.”

  “When?”

  “This morning.”

  “I’ll take you,” I said.

  “What’s your problem down there?” Billy asked.

  “It’s a big day today. I need to get out from under for a while.”

  “So come have breakfast and we’ll go down to Sport Schindler’s for an eye-opener. I gotta meet a guy there owes me money.”

  “Always a pleasant prospect,” I said. “I’ll see you in five minutes.”

  “You can’t get here sooner?”

  George Quinn sprinkled a teaspoon of sugar on his eggs, his tie tied tight on his lightly starched collar on this day that was headed into the high nineties: sartorial propriety, impervious to weather.

  “So how’s the numbers business, George?” I asked as I sat across the breakfast table from him and Billy.

  “It don’t exist,” George said.

  “What?”

  “Where you been, Orson?” Billy said. “George has been out of business for a year.”

  “I thought that was temporary,” I said.

  “A few of the big boys went to work by phone after it all closed down. But not me,” George said.

  “I blame Dewey for starting it,” Billy said. “That son of a bitch, what the hell’s the town gonna do without numbers? Without Broadway.”

  “Broadway? Broadway’s not gone.”

  “It ain’t gone,” Billy said, “but it ain’t got no life to it. You can’t get arrested on Broadway anymore. Town is tough as Clancy’s nuts. Even if you get a bet down you don’t know the payoff. No phone line with the information anymore. You gotta wait for tomorrow’s newspaper. I blame Kefauver.”

  “Forget I asked,” I said. “Tell me about the house, George. Peg says you may buy this place after all these years.”

  “Peg said that?”

  “She said you might cash an insurance policy. Seven grand for this house sounds like the bargain of the century.”

  “Not buyin’,” George said.

  “It’s fifteen hundred down,” Billy said.

  “Fifteen hundred down the bowl,” George said. “Who’s got money to buy houses when you’re seventy-one years old? I’m not waitin’ for my ship to come in. It’s not comin’ and I know it.”

  “What’re you gonna do, move?” I asked.

  “Yeah. We’ll find a place.”

  “Probably not at this rent,” Billy said.

  “Then we’ll pay what it takes,” George said.

  “Why not put that into owning the house?” I said. “It’d make more sense.”

  “I�
�m not buyin’ a house!” George yelled, standing up from the table. “Has everybody got that? No house. Period.”

  “You ready to go, Orson?” Billy asked softly, reaching for his cane.

  “I guess I’m ready. I haven’t had any coffee but I guess I’m ready.”

  “Let him have his coffee,” Agnes said.

  “I don’t know if I’ll make it for dinner,” George said to Agnes. “Depends on when the picnic ends.”

  “Picnic? I thought it was a political meeting,” Agnes said.

  “It’s a political picnic.”

  “What’s not political in this town?” Billy said.

  “Buyin’ a house,” George said.

  Agnes collected Annie’s breakfast dishes and her untouched eggs and put them on the counter by the sink, gave Peg’s African violets by the windowsill of the nook their weekly watering, then sat across from me to finish her second cup of coffee. As she sat, Billy rose up on his cane.

  “I gotta do a wee-wee before we leave,” he said.

  “Good,” I said. “Time to worry is when you can’t.”

  “Stop that talk,” Agnes said.

  I stared at her and decided she was a looker. Lucky Billy. Agnes had bottled blond hair, the color of which she changed whimsically, or maybe it was seasonally. She’d put on a few pounds since I’d last seen her, but she could handle them. She looked crisp and fresh in a red-and-white-check house dress with a box neck and two-inch straps over bare shoulders.

  “I couldn’t butt in on that conversation about the house,” Agnes said, “but I’d be glad to give a hand with the down payment. I’ve got some dollars tucked away.”

  “That’s real nice, Agnes,” I said. “Did you tell Peg?”

  “Nobody yet. I’m just sayin’ it now ’cause it occurred to me. But if Billy hears he’ll think I’m proposin’.”

  “Have you done that before?”

  “Twenty times, how about. But he can’t see himself married. He’s been single too long.”

  “Everybody’s single till they marry.”