At Weddings and Wakes (4 page)

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Authors: Alice McDermott

BOOK: At Weddings and Wakes
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“How a man treats his children is what would be important to me.”
“The children won't always be there. I have to think about me.”
“None of us will always be here,” Aunt May said.
Their mother stood and leaned out the window to feel the white sheets on the line. “You don't have to tell me,” she said. “These are long dry.”
As they drew at the table the children were aware only of the squeal of the clothesline pulley and the snap of the sheets. They didn't look up to see the elegant coordination the two women fell into as they spread out each sheet between them in that narrow space between the dining-room table and Momma's chair, snapped it in wide arms, folded edge to edge, moved together, lifted, snapped, together again, smoothing, one more fold, just as Momma had shown them in their childhood, just as they had been doing since then.
“Don't they smell wonderful?” Aunt May said, putting her face to the neat, square pile of sheets.
“I'm not having the kind of life I wanted,” their mother said.
Aunt May told her, “Just smell these.”
And then the door to Momma's bedroom opened, and hearing the shuffle of feet against the bare floor between the bedroom and the living room, the children raised their heads.
Oblivious to both the hour and the season, Aunt Veronica stood in the doorway of the dining room in a brown velvet robe and black velvet slippers, a black band holding back her thick auburn hair. “Hello, all,” she said. (So she
had
been in there, the youngest child thought, there in the room just beyond Momma's, and so thinking began to learn a lifelong lesson in anticipation and longing.) Aunt Veronica's face was as pale as putty; her skin, like a putty that had been pressed and re-formed again and again, was pockmarked and dimpled, with white scars the size of thumbnails and a puffiness that even the children saw was somehow the result of her own mishandling.
She might have been beautiful; at least her hair and dark
eyes, her slim waist and the lovely slope of her neck and her wide shoulders promised a somehow unachieved beauty. She stood in the doorway, the fingers of one hand on the delicate silver edge of the cocktail cart that was placed between the two rooms, the other, fingers and flat palm, bearing her weight on the doorframe. She smiled at them, surveying the room but not quite—even the children noticed—bringing it into focus.
One by one the children put down their pens and got up to kiss her—she held the cart even as she bent to each—and then she said she would just have a quick bath before dinner and stepped carefully around the cart and into the bathroom, which was just the other side of the hallway.
Now the afternoon began to move, nudged, it seemed, by the sound of the running water in the bath, by the quick glances their mother and Aunt May exchanged, the wafting odor of bath soaps.
Momma reappeared just as Aunt Veronica, in a burst of steam and roses, opened the bathroom door and with her pale skin further pitted by water beads and wet strands of hair, walked, no longer shuffling, through the living room and back through Momma's bedroom.
The two hadn't exchanged a word when they crossed in the living room but as she headed for the kitchen Momma was nodding as if Aunt Veronica had just confirmed something for her. Momma now wore a thin net over her hair and if she had slept at all during her nap there was no sign of it in her face or her step. She didn't shuffle but passed quickly through the dining room and into the kitchen, where she took a white apron from the handle of the refrigerator door and slipped it over her head. Their mother and Aunt May, like acolytes following a cardinal, moved into the small room behind her, bending beside her to reach the potatoes in the bin by the sink, bowing into the refrigerator for the pork chops and the
green beans. Momma tossed flour like holy water, kneading the biscuit dough, dredging the meat.
At the small tin table the children snapped the ends of the green beans and tossed them into a steel colander. The curtain at the window stirred but the breeze that moved it was a hot city breeze as unnatural, as unrefreshing as the wind that coursed through the subway tunnels. They were all perspiring. Before they could finish with the beans, Momma turned, lifted the colander, shook it, chin raised, took assessment, and then set it down again and told them to break all the beans in half as well. She put the pot of dirty potatoes on the table and sat with them. She peeled expertly, dropping the tan peel onto a piece of newspaper, dirtying her hands and each white skinless potato so that by the time she was finished she looked as if she herself had plucked them from the field. She handed the pot to Aunt May, who rinsed them at the sink and then put them on to boil. Their mother fanned herself with a wet dish towel. Aunt May's glasses were rimmed with dots of perspiration that looked under the thick lenses like caught tears.
Momma got up to sprinkle some more flour and cut out the biscuits with a tumbler, when the front door opened and closed. “There's Agnes,” May said just as another door, the one off the living room, opened and closed again.
“At last,” their mother said and left the room.
When she returned she held a silver ice bucket with a hinged handle and a silver set of tongs. She set them in the sink and then went to the refrigerator and withdrew two trays of ice from its small steaming box of a freezer. She brought these to the sink and banged and cracked and muttered under her breath until she had the bucket filled. She ran water into the trays and carefully returned them to the freezer while Aunt May filled the kettle and put it on the stove.
The end of this long dull day was not yet near but it was at
last a possibility and the children sat up a little as they snapped the remaining beans in half and tossed them with some finality into the colander.
Their mother lifted the silver ice bucket. Aunt May lifted her glasses and wiped a Kleenex across her eyes. In single file the children followed the two women into the living room, where the lights seemed to go up by themselves.
The tableau was familiar and enchanting and would be remembered by the children for the rest of their lives with the same nostalgia and bitterness with which they recalled the Latin Mass. Their mother placed the ice bucket on the lacquered surface of the delicate cart as Aunt May moved past her to take the huge green chair in the corner. A door off the living room opened and Aunt Agnes emerged, broad and tall and severe, in a slim black skirt and pale silk blouse, stockings, and flat black slippers embroidered with red and gold. She accepted a kiss from each of the children (her perfume thick and mellow, the perfume that filled theater lobbies and office buildings) and then moved to the silver cart, where she slid open a small door and one by one took out three stubby glasses etched with white lilies. She dropped two pieces of ice into each and then from the crowd of elegant bottles, square and round and dimpled, plucked one that was dark green, with a red-and-silver stopper. She poured ginger ale into each of the three glasses and then handed them one at a time to the children. They took them to the couch just as Aunt Veronica entered the room from Momma's bedroom door. She was dressed now, in a shiny cotton dress of pale beige with small, windblown sailboats circling its wide hem. With some makeup on and the sunlight behind her, her face seemed less abused and her smile for a moment disguised both the scars and the puffiness and made her seem young and fresh and pretty.
She went to the couch and taking the younger girl on her
lap spoke warmly to her three sisters, the vibration of her deep voice, the press of her soft breasts, even the beating of her heart, making themselves felt through the material of the girl's thin summer dress and all along her spine.
This was the aunt she loved most. Her sister preferred Agnes and was watching her now with great care, memorizing the way she poured the liquor into the tall pitcher of ice, stirred it with a glass rod, poured it again through a silver strainer and into each delicately stemmed glass. Her brother preferred May and so it might only have been by default that the youngest one offered her loyalty to Veronica, but once offered, it had stuck fast. Veronica, after all, was the youngest one, too—the youngest child of the dead mother who had lived only a few days after she'd been born. She had no profession like Agnes, no history like May's. She lived, as far as the children understood, in the small dark room off Momma's bedroom, and although they knew she ventured out, she spoke of shopping downtown, of meeting old friends on the subway, of taking in a show, they had never been with her when she'd done so.
Veronica was unfortunate. It was the single word that seemed to follow any mention of her name. Unfortunate to have never known her mother or her father. Unfortunate to have such poor skin. Unfortunate never to have married. She had once worked for a man who had left her some money (“a small fortune, in those days,” it was said), but even this, somehow, had proved unfortunate. Unfortunate. The word alone could elicit a knowing sigh whenever her name was mentioned, although it seemed to the youngest child, who had given her her loyalty, that it implied something the other sisters lacked, and that was a fortune that might have been found. Unfortunate had, at least, the fortune, if only a small fortune, somewhere in it and the youngest child imagined that
it was lost in that dark room, somewhere among the cottons and the silks that draped the bed and the floor and the embroidered chair and the glass-topped dressing table. Lost but existent nevertheless, a fortune some inches away, just under the sand, just under her sleeping hand.
Now Aunt Agnes carried the thin-stemmed glasses with their amber drinks and single round red-cherry eyes around the room, over to Aunt May in the green chair, to their mother as she leaned in the doorway, to Veronica on the couch. She returned the tray to the cart and lifted her own drink. Holding it in the air she asked, “Now, where's Momma?” and all four of them looked to the dining room to the empty chair at its far end.
May was the first to go (it was always the same) and when she returned from the kitchen she had a cup of tea in her hands. Momma was behind her, tucking her white hair into her net. She sat on the chair where May had sat and seemed in her irritation to transform it into a chair in another woman's rooms, rooms that did not quite meet with her approval. She took her tea and sipped it even before May had retrieved her own glass and Agnes had raised hers to say, “Good luck.”
The ginger ale was watery from the melting ice and the water from the glass ran down the children's hands. From where they sat they could see through the dining-room window that only the shadows had changed, not the heat or the light, and even the shadows seemed to be not so much spots of shade as dark shells, dark skins that the heat itself had shed as over the course of the afternoon it had worked itself through the brick of the building and across the walls.
The children put the cool glasses to their lips, their wrists, their throats, while the women fanned themselves and sipped their drinks that had only been touched with ice and spoke, for now, about a show Aunt Agnes had just seen, a trend in
fashion toward shorter skirts, the coming marriage of one of their neighbor's daughters.
For now. When Momma finished her tea she put the cup on its saucer and, with Aunt May's help, slowly stood. “Just fifteen more minutes,” she said and the children saw their mother glance at her slim watch, the tiny chain of its safety latch swinging.
When she had gone Aunt Agnes raised the glass pitcher and carried it from chair to chair, refilling each offered glass (no cherry this time, the children noticed: the older girl marking that this was how it was done, the boy and the younger girl marveling at adult restraint). “Should I?” Aunt Agnes would ask their mother, touching the green bottle of ginger ale, and she would say yes or no, depending on her mood.
“You're only young once,” she would say. “They might as well enjoy it.” Or, “I can't have them with rotting teeth if I'm going to end up on my own.”
They would then either sip more warm ginger ale or chew the small shards of melting ice cubes. The heat would wave through the walls, and try as hard as they could to attend, they could not mark the moment when the fighting began.
“Don't talk to me about vows,” their mother would say to May, and the children would feel themselves jump as if they'd just come awake.
Or Agnes's palm would suddenly slap itself against the black lacquer surface of the cart. “Who has ever thought about me?” she would say. Or, “I pay my own way. I certainly pay my own way.”
Veronica would pull the younger girl more tightly to her waist, as if she planned any moment to make a break for it with the child as her shield. Her voice would be loud and trembling in the child's ear: “That again? Are we rehashing that again?”
Their father had a song that began “Mrs. McCarthy, hale and hearty, well she held a birthday party,” and included a verse that listed the schedule of events: at nine o'clock they all sat down to supper, at ten they cleared the floor to have a dance … at twelve o'clock the fighting it began, and it seemed to the children that the only way they could clearly account for the sudden anger that struck the four sisters at this time of day was that it was somehow prescribed, part of the daily and necessary schedule, merely the routine.
By the time Momma began to carry the hot food out to the table the sisters were finishing their drinks in short draughts and looking in four different directions.

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