Very Old Bones

by William Kennedy

  Kathryn Phelan died in her sleep, presumably of a stroke, this, her second shock, coming on opening-night-minus-two of Peter’s one-man show. For the next several days The Beautiful Belinda would be prancing on the boards somewhere in Boston, and therefore it was decided that I should stay in New York rather than travel with my mother, artistic revelation being more valuable to my young life than backstage privilege. But then arose Peter’s dilemma: since the one-man show and its opening could not be canceled on behalf of a corpse, so long-standing had its planning been, would the artist, then, present himself among his works and bask in whatever glory accrues to such presence, or would he return to Colonie Street to bask in the cold exudation of a dead mother?

  Several months after his breach with Kathryn and Sarah in 1913, Peter had returned to the house for fortnightly overnight visits, and also contributed to the support of the family with pittances that increased as his ability to sell paintings improved. The healing of the breach with the family had come so soon after the separation that Peter perceived that rancor was never the cause of the break, but merely the ruse by which he had gained momentum to pursue his art; and in perceiving this he understood that, even in aspiration, art is a way of gaining some measure of control over life.

  And so, really, the dilemma’s solution was foregone; for kinship maintained the major share of control over Peter’s life, and his art, in the end, could only bear witness to this. He would go home.

  Because of the pre-sale of two of his paintings Peter left Manhattan with four hundred dollars in his pocket, the most money he had ever held in his hand. The dawning of this realization spurred him to show the money to me when we settled into our seats on the Lake Shore Limited out of Grand Central Station.

  “Four hundred dollars there, boy,” he said. “Feast your eyes. The sky’s the limit on this trip.”

  I took the money into my own hand, counted it (fifties and twenties), tapped it on my knee to even its edges as I would a pack of cards, folded it, felt its thickness and heft.

  “It’s nice,” I said. “What are you going to buy with it?”

  “I’m going to buy the light of the world and bring it home,” Peter said.

  “Where’s the light of the world?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Peter said, “we’ll have to go shopping.”

  I smelled the money, then gave it back to Peter, and we watched the streets of New York whiz by our window.

  Peter had small alternative to bringing me with him to the wake, for my mother would be away through the weekend, and there was no one to leave me with (I was ten) except an untrustworthy neighbor. And though the poison thought of bastardy never stopped giving pain to Peter’s gizzard, he was also coming to the conclusion that he really might, after all, be my father; and what sort of father would that be if he kept me apart from the blood kin I had never met, especially if he allowed me to miss out on the ultimate silencing of the whipsong?

  And so he had packed my bag, and we rode in a taxi from the Village to Grand Central Station, my first taxi, and walked across the heavenly vaulted concourse of the station with its luminous artificial sky that bathed me in awe and wonder. We rode the train north out of the city and along the banks of the great Hudson, monitored the grandness of its waters and natural wonders, and emerged into another vast and dwarfing room, Albany’s Union Station, this entire experience creating in my mind a vision of the American way that I would carry throughout my life: capitalism as a room full of rivers and mountains through which you rode in great comfort in the vehicle of your choice, your pockets bulging with money: an acute form of happiness.

  Peter, holding me by the hand, walked out of the station and with evident purpose strode two blocks down Broadway from Union Station to the Van Heusen, Charles store (next door to where Keeler’s Hotel for Men Only had been until it burned in 1919), the store a source of elegance and social amenity for many years, the place you went when you didn’t know the difference between a butter knife and a fish knife (and you had better learn if you wanted your marriage to remain socially solvent), and where Peter suspected he would find the light he meant to bring home to Colonie Street.

  He found the familiar face of Rance Redmond, who had been selling silver and china and vases and linens in this store for thirty years, and Peter told him precisely what he wanted: three chandeliers of similar, non-matching styles, plus sufficient wiring to bring power to them from the street; and an electrician to install them.

  Rance Redmond, his pince-nez spectacles pressed into use to guide Peter’s glance aloft to the broad display of suspended chandeliers, ceiling fixtures, and wall sconces, pointed out the new designs: chrome and milky glass globes of the Art Deco mode; clear glass etched with roses in the Art Nouveau mode; one-time gas chandeliers with a hanging bowl, pendant gasoliers transformed to electroliers.

  “No, no gas, not even a memory of gas,” Peter said. “We’re finished with gas.” And he chose the milky Art Deco because it seemed the most modern and also reminded him of Claire’s skin in the sunlight, and chose two others that seemed compatible with the first: the Claire fixture to give light in the front parlor, the second for the back parlor, the third for the dining room.

  Jotting down their prices in his sales book, Rance Redmond spoke without raising his glance. “I can have these delivered by the middle of next week.”

  “No, I need them today or it’s no sale,” Peter said.

  “Today?” said Rance, his pince-nez falling to the end of their ribbon. “That’s not possible.”

  “How long would it take to put them in a box?” Peter asked.

  “Ten, fifteen minutes, I suppose,” said Rance.

  “How long would it take to put them in the back of one of your trucks?”

  “But that’s it, the trucks are busy.”

  “Then put them in a taxi,” Peter said. “I’ll pay the fare.”

  “Well, I suppose we could do . . .”

  “And an electrician. There’s no power in the house. It’s still lit by gaslight.”

  “Is that right?”

  “No, it’s not right, but that’s how it is, and that’s why I want an electrician. Have you got one?”

  “I don’t know. And there’s the power company. You can’t just . . .”

  “I’ll pay the electrician extra. I’ll call the power company myself.”

  Rance’s pince-nez had gone on, off, and on again, a manic measure of his fluster at such impetuousity in these sedate showrooms, but he handed Peter the telephone and then, clutching the sales slip that totaled more than one hundred and ninety dollars for the three fixtures, the largest sale he had made all week, Rance retreated to the store’s artisan quarters to search out an electrician, and found one who approved of extra money; found also a taxi, into whose trunk and front seat two chandelier boxes were placed while Peter and I clambered into the rear seat with the third box. The taxi then led the way to Colonie Street, the electrician following in his truck with as much wire as any imagination could reasonably measure, and the two vehicles parked in front of the Phelan house. The power company’s man would arrive within two hours.

  Only with the death of his mother was Peter now able to challenge the light on Colonie Street. It was fitting that she died in early December, for on these days the exterior world matched the pale gray and sunless interior of the house, night coming on almost as a relief from the daytime sky that hovered over the city like a shroud. Peter remembered his own mood always being depressingly bleak during this time of year, days getting shorter, and darker; and not until January’s false spring would the season of desperation begin to fade with the fading of this miasmic light.

  He had not known he would buy the chandeliers until he showed me the money on the train; but he knew then that he could buy them and would, for at long last it was time. He knew also that Sarah would fight him on the matter and that Molly and Chick would join him in overriding her objections. But Mama’s grip on the past had been rele
ased finally, she having been as dark-willed as the biddy of story who refused an indoor, running-water toilet saying, I wouldn’t have one of them filthy things in the house, and equally adamantly Kathryn refused electric current as being diabolical; and so the children rarely brought visitors home, so shamed were they that their house, its clutter, its mood, even the odor of its air, had slowly become a museum of everybody else’s rejected past.

  With my help, Peter carried the Claire chandelier up the front stoop, opened the door with his key, and entered with the call, “Peter is here.” He and I then carried the boxes into the front parlor as the electrician hauled his gear and wire into the house. Chairs and side tables, including Peter’s leather armchair, footstool, pipe stand, and ash tray, had been moved from in front of the parlor’s bay window, the designated area for coffin and corpse, though no corpse had occupied it for thirty-nine years, not since Peter’s father waked here after stepping backward into the path of a slow-moving locomotive in 1895. Peter cut the twine on one box, put his hand inside, then turned to see his sisters, Sarah and Molly, in the doorway watching him.

  “What are you doing?” Sarah asked. “What is that box? Who is this boy, and that man there?”

  “The man is our electrician. The boy is my landlady’s son, Orson. Orson Purcell. Say hello to Sarah and Molly, Orson. My sisters.”

  I saw two women who seemed at first to be twins, so alike was their dress: long-sleeved, high-necked white blouses, full dark skirts well below the knee, hair done in the same style: upswept into a soft crown, pinned in a bun at the back of the neck. But in glancing from one to the other I saw nothing else in their faces that matched: Sarah, with dark hair going gray, small round spectacles, hazel eyes very close together, long nose, pursed mouth, cheeks on the verge of sinking: here was plainness; and Molly, the same hazel eyes, but a longer, more finely pointed nose, finer symmetry and greater breadth to the eyes and mouth, and a fullness to the lips, and her hair still a pure, burnished yellow: here was beauty.

  “How do you do,” I said. “I’m pleased to meet you.”

  “And we you,” said Molly

  “He speaks well,” said Sarah.

  “His mother is very bright,” Peter said, “and he and I do our share of talking, don’t we, Orson?”

  I nodded and smiled and looked at my father, who seemed so utterly unlike his sisters. There he stood, hand inside the chandelier box, still in his slouch hat and all-weather raincoat, his hair halfway down his neck and as unkempt as his handlebar mustache, his black corduroy shirt and twisted brown tie hanging like the end of a noose, the totality of his clothing, seen in the context of this house, a uniform of rebellion.

  Everything I remember from this room on the day the light of the world arrived, had a fragility to it, the Queen Anne table, the china tea set, the French antique sofa and love seat, the dragonfly lamps, the Louis Quinze chairs that seemed incapable of supporting adults. And the room was dustless: wood and vases and figurines and even the white marble bust of a beautiful woman on her five-foot pedestal (Peter had given it to Julia on her eighteenth birthday) scrubbed and shining, all tables oiled, all brass polished, all floors waxed, all things gleaming, even in that rationed fragment of gray December light that was allowed entry past the mauve drapes.

  “What is in that box?” Sarah asked.

  Peter, squatting, his right hand still in the box’s mysterious interior, suddenly lifted the chandelier into freedom (like a magician, I could say), and with his other hand pulled away the tissue paper that surrounded it, then held it aloft. Presto!

  “Fiat lux!” Peter said.

  “What?”

  “Light,” said Peter. “Electric light. To replace that monstrosity.” And he gestured toward the pendant gasolier on the parlor ceiling. “That ugly thing’s been here since before Cleveland was President. Light. New light in this house, Sarah.”

  “We don’t want it,” said Sarah.

  “How well I know that, dear sister. But we shall have light on the corpse of our mother, light unlike any that ever found its way into this arcane cave of gloom.”

  “I love it,” said Molly. “It’s so pretty. Look at it, Sarah, look how it shines.”

  “Wait till you see it lit,” Peter said.

  “If you put it up I’ll have it taken down as soon as you leave,” Sarah said.

  “And if you do that,” said Peter, “I shall come home with a club and break every piece of your beloved pottery glassware, and bric-a-brac. Believe me, Sarah, I am serious.”

  “You’re a villain,” she said, and she walked into the hallway and up the front stairs.

  “Don’t mind,” Molly said. “I’ll take care of her.” And she walked to Peter and kissed his cheek, studied the chandelier which with his right arm Peter still held half aloft. She touched the shining chrome rims around the bottom of the globes, touched the ball-shaped switches under each globe.

  “Isn’t it beautiful,” said Molly.

  “It’s all of that,” Peter said. “It will give us pleasure. It will banish our shame at being the leftover household. It will put a sheen on your beautiful hair, my sweet sister, and it will satisfy my craving to be done with gloom and come home to respectable radiance.”

  I looked at the light around me for the first time in my life. Never had I considered it a topic worth conflict, or enthusiasm. Light was; and that was that. What more could you ask of it? It was bright or it was dim. You saw in it or you didn’t see. If you didn’t then it was dark. But now came revelation: that there were gradations, brightness to be measured not only in volume but in value. More brightness was better. Amazing.

  The doorbell sounded, a pull-bell ding-dong. Molly answered the bell and accepted from the delivery man a small basket of white and purple flowers, brought them to the back parlor, and set them atop the player piano (which had replaced the Chickering upright that Julia Phelan played until she died; and music in this house died with her until Peter exchanged the Chickering for the player and bought piano rolls of the same songs Julia had played since they were children together).

  “I know they’re from Mame Bayly,” Molly said. “She’s always the first flowers at every wake, always a day early. By the time we get to the cemetery they’ll be brown and wilted.”

  The electrician had decided that the emergency installation of the chandeliers could be done only by running wire along the ceiling and through the outer wall to the nearest power pole and Peter said fine, run it anyplace you like, just get the power in here; and took off his coat and hat at last, and with his own tool chest began undoing the gasolier and capping the pipe that carried its gas. Since the death of his father Peter had been the master mechanic of the family, even in absentia, consulted via telephone on every plumbing and structural crisis, consulted when the back porch railing fell off, consulted on retarring the roof and on installing storm windows when the price of gas escalated in 1921.

  I explored the downstairs rooms, finding photographs of my father when he was a youth (wearing a high collar and a short tie; he never dressed like that anymore), and photos of the women I’d just seen, but as girls in bathing suits (with their mother, was it? mother in black long-sleeved high-necked beachwear that came to her shoetop), and I saw a cut-glass dish full of apples and oranges and grapes on the dining-room table and a photo of twenty men posing beside a locomotive, and over the piano a photo of a woman who looked like the beautiful Molly but more beautiful still, and younger, with her hair parted in the middle, and when Peter saw me looking at it he said, “That’s my sister Julia, Orse,” and he whispered in my ear, “Don’t tell anybody, but she was my love, my favorite,” and he said Julia had played the piano. He opened the seat of the piano bench and took out a scroll of paper titled “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree.”

  “She played this one all the time. We both loved it.”

  He opened a sliding door on the piano’s upright front and inserted the roll, then sat at the piano and pumped its two pedals with
his feet, and the roll moved as I watched with wonderment. Paper that makes music? Then Peter stood up and sat me in his place and told me to put my feet on the pedals and press, first left, then right, and I did and saw the paper move, and then I heard music, saw the keys on the piano depress themselves, and I said, “It’s magic!”

  “Not quite,” said Peter, and I kept pumping and then my feet weakened, as did the song, and Peter said, “Faster, kid, keep a steady rhythm,” and after a while the jerkiness went out of the song and out of my feet and the piano made beautiful music again and Peter sang along.

  I can hear the dull buzz of the bee

  In the blossom that you gave to me,

  With a heart that is true,

  I’ll be waiting for you

  In the shade of the old apple tree.

  “Are you insane? Are you out of your mind?”

  It was Sarah, back with her black mood, black skirt, fierce voice, and I stopped my feet and Peter said, “For chrissake, Sarah, I’m invoking Julia. Don’t you think she has a right to be here today? Are you going to keep this wake all to yourself?” And Sarah again could not answer, and fled to the kitchen, slamming the door behind her.

  “Continue, Orse,” Peter said, and, as I moved my feet, music again rose in the rooms where light and death were on the way. The phone rang in the back parlor and Molly came down the stairs two at a time to answer it, then reported to all auditors that it was Ben Owens, the undertaker, and that he’d be here within the hour; which meant that Mama Kathryn would be returning to the front parlor to be observed in her death rigors, powdered and coiffed as she rarely had been in life; and to me it meant a question mark, for this was my entrance into the world of death.