The O'Briens (37 page)

Ritual, Part I

F
rankie was in
the sewing room trying to occupy herself with tasks when a maroon van turned the corner from Murray Hill. Slipping under the late summer canopy of leaves, it came to a quiet stop in front of the house.

She stood by the window and watched two men wearing dark suits slide the coffin onto a trolley and start rolling it up the front walk. No one else was home except the maid, Helen, and the cook. Margo had taken Madeleine to the park and their parents were at Central Station to meet Father Tom, who was coming up from Washington to say the funeral Mass.

She didn't hear the doorbell ring. Helen must have been waiting at the front door to let them in. Frankie sat down and resumed picking thread from the seam of the dress she planned to wear. It was one of Margo's and needed to be taken in a couple of inches. They usually sent things out to be altered but there wasn't going to be enough time before the funeral.

Her parents and sister had still not returned an hour later, when she finally started downstairs. It was only her brother, she kept reminding herself. She didn't have to be afraid of him.

The house was dreadfully still and perfectly clean. The grandfather clock stood on the stairway landing like some staunch, domineering patriarch, some would-be emperor of the house, clubbing down her courage with its angry ticking. Helen and the cook were probably napping in their rooms off the kitchen. Frankie heard rain sizzling through the trees, tires seething on Murray Hill Avenue.

Bunches of hothouse lilies were in ugly vases everywhere she looked. Crossing the hall, she stopped at the entrance to the living room. The coffin was set on some sort of iron stand in front of the fireplace. A hulk of polished wood. So false, so unhappy.

She didn't want to go any nearer but she had no choice. She must not give in to livid fear of the thing. She owed her brother that much. She suddenly remembered him in California, rushing and cool, sensitive. In a white T-shirt and dark glasses, at the wheel of their old station wagon. Steering over Casitas Pass, one hand on the wheel, one slender brown arm propped at the window.

Her fingers found the edge of the lid. Testing, she tried to raise it. Only a section was designed to open, and it opened smoothly, on silent hinges. She raised it an inch, two inches. It was surprisingly easy. She raised it all the way.

The inside was lined with white satin, and there he was. Nothing living could ever be that still.

The undertakers had found him a perfect blue air force uniform. What had been done with his desert khaki? Had the hospital burned those clothes or had her father saved them?

His eyes were thoroughly closed. His expression was probably what the undertaker had meant by “peaceful,” but it looked like death to her, nothing else. Like a Russian field or village the Germans had smashed through, trampled and wrecked. You couldn't call him peaceful without being dishonest.

They had done something to his face — powdered it, maybe — and his features had blurred, somehow, softened, so he didn't look as thin anymore. Had they stuffed his cheeks with something? The fierce red gold of his desert tan was gone. His skin was matte. The wild glow of strange ersatz healthiness had been extinguished. There was nothing radiant about him now.

She started whispering,
fuck cunt fuck, cunt fuck shit, cunt
— a challenge or a banshee wail or just an exhalation.

~

When Elise arrived that evening, Iseult had already gathered a dozen photographs of Mike from the volumes in Joe's study and arranged them in her bedroom. Frankie sat at her mother's dressing table brushing her hair while green summer light knocked through the layers of fat leaves on the old maple outside. Her mother and aunt lay alongside each other on the bed, holding hands.

Frankie studied the lush green canopy outside the window. It was stormy weather, oddly cold for late summer, and the leaves were flopping and flailing, showing their pale undersides. It was strange to think of the world still green and growing and smelling of mud, and her brother with no part in it.

Elise said, “I really don't know what we all bothered growing up for if war's all there is. Grattan thinks it'll last three more years at least. I wish we had stayed on the boardwalk. Do you remember the light there?”

“Do you really think the light was so different then?” said Iseult.

“Sure. There was more of it; the shadows weren't so deep, either. It was a washing light.”

“Sea light. Ocean light. I remember the white light in that empty cottage on the canal.”

“It was the light of the world before everything went bad.”

“You don't really believe so, Elise. You're not really a romantic.”

“No, I probably don't. I don't know what I believe. Maybe I never have believed in very much, or in anything at all, except that a certain ratio of time and light and optics will give you an image, and if you splash it on the right paper with the right chemicals, you can fix it. You can stop time. I believe in that, but not a heck of a lot else lately. You should have seen those prancing admirals and field marshals and whatnot at the Chateau Frontenac with their aides de camp polishing their buttons for them. Blood merchants.” Elise had been in Quebec City earlier in the summer photographing Churchill and Roosevelt at their conference.

“It's no use talking like that,” Iseult said. “The war had to be fought. We agreed that it did.”

“I don't remember Joe agreeing,” Elise said.

Iseult swung her legs off the bed, stood up, and walked to the window in her stocking feet.

“Whether he did or not, it doesn't matter,” she said. “Mike would not have been Mike if he hadn't wanted to go.”

Frankie had hardly seen her father since they'd returned home from the hospital the night before. He was holed up in his study. What would he do now? they were all thinking. How would he behave at the funeral, and after?

“What about Johnny?” Elise asked. “Any news?”

“No,” Frankie said. Her sister hadn't had a letter in weeks. Johnny's silence was a torment and Margo couldn't sleep.

“Come and lie down now, sweetie,” Elise said to Iseult. “No one can handle something like this alone.”

“I wish I'd never met him,” her mother said quietly. Her back was to them; she was still looking out the window. “I wish I'd never gone out to the ocean in the first place. I wish I'd stayed in Pasadena, where it was warm and dry and bright.”

Her parents had better find a way of sharing their grief with each other, Frankie thought, or neither of them was going to make it.

“I wish I'd never had children,” her mother said quietly. “I just can't bear it, Elise.”

Frankie suddenly wanted to leave the room. Leave the house. Leave the country, leave her family behind. Be in a foreign city, even a ruined one, with bombs falling. Putting down the hairbrush, she stood up and headed for the door. Her stocking feet made no noise on the rug.

Iseult was still at the window with her back to them. Frankie couldn't tell if her mother was crying or not. Maybe she was just trying to lose herself in the thick, wet rustle of leaves and the cool air floating through the screen.

“Where's your father?” Elise asked as Frankie was opening the door to let herself out.

Frankie shrugged. “The study.”

“He blames me, Elise,” her mother said from the window. “He won't say it but he does, and I know just how he feels. There has to be someone to blame.”

Frankie shut the door quietly and took herself back to her own room. She lay on her bed and stared at the ceiling and clenched her fists. Sometimes she felt like the centre of the world. Other times she felt like a meaningless fragment of something else, a nothing, a dust mote, a scrap of wind with no feelings, no constant direction, no purpose. That was the way she felt now. Her room was no refuge; it was just a box of green light borrowed from the trees outside. She'd never feel desirous again. Her heart was just a piece of meat. She would never get what she wanted — she'd never know what she wanted. So she'd never be satisfied, and it wouldn't matter.

~

Father Tom O'Brien, SJ, was more or less a stranger. Her father used to call him the Little Priest, which had puzzled Frankie when she was small, since Father Tom was so much taller than her father. Now the white-haired priest was a dean at Georgetown University. He was still lean and handsome and resembled Grattan much more than either of them resembled her father. It was as if Joe had taken the weight of his family onto his shoulders and it had shortened, thickened, and bent him while his brothers remained spare, elegant, erect.

During the afternoon visitations Father Tom sipped tea or vermouth and chatted amiably with their multitude of guests, but Frankie noticed that after an hour or so he always managed to slip away. On the second afternoon she followed him upstairs and watched him go down the corridor to the door of her father's study, where he stopped and knocked. There must have been some response, because a moment later he let himself in, closing the door softly behind him.

Slipping off her shoes, she had approached the study door and listened to their murmuring voices inside. If she'd knocked, would her father have let her in? Instead of returning to the gruesome party it would have been much better to lie on his horsehair sofa, the way she used to as a little girl when she'd been ill and unable to go to school and he'd let her stay there all afternoon covered with his Hudson's Bay blanket, watching him working at his desk.

But even as she stood there the doorbell was ringing and more visitors were swarming in at the front door. Her mother and sister needed her. Her loyalty to them was stronger than her need to see her father, so she turned and went back along the corridor, pausing at the top of the stairs to put her shoes back on.

~

Her father was like a summer fog bank lurking up in the Bay of Fundy, impenetrable and dangerous, no telling which direction he would blow. Since the night of Mike's death, when they all returned from the hospital together, crowded in a taxi, he had withdrawn from them completely. He would have nothing to do with greeting their visitors downstairs.

Selfish
, Frankie thought.
Hard-hearted
. Her mother needed him, but he as usual was thinking of no one but himself. Frankie told her sister she was afraid he'd start drinking again and disgrace them all in public at the funeral.

“I don't know why
she
doesn't start drinking,” Margo said. “I'd be knocking them back if I were her, and to hell with Daddy.”

“He's not drinking,” Father Tom had assured them. “He's suffering, as you all are, but I am hopeful he will start to look for the mercy of God. It is there, you know, and if he looks for it, it will find him.”

Tom and her father were getting up at dawn every day to walk across the playing fields in Murray Park and down the hill to the parish church, where the Little Priest said early morning Mass. Afterwards they'd go to a greasy spoon on Victoria Avenue for breakfast.

When Frankie asked Tom if her father had anything to say, the priest told her they talked about the war and about their childhood. “We had a wicked stepfather, and to your father in memory he seems like Satan incarnate. He really was nothing more than a pathetic old drunk, but we saw him abuse our mother and our sisters, and of course that had some effect.”

“Do you think he will go to New York?” Frankie asked.

“I couldn't say,” Father Tom admitted. “When we were young we all looked up to him. He took care of us the best he was able. He lost his faith a long time ago, or thinks he did. I'm telling him the mysteries are incarnate, they live, but he's a hard case, your father. Sometimes he's even got me half-thinking he may be right, that there's nothing more to life than death and numbers.”

~

They entertained two hundred visitors during the two days her brother's body lay at home. Every room downstairs was packed with the hateful white lilies. After Frankie or Margo greeted them at the front door, the visitors were shown into the living room to pay their respects. Whatever that meant. Standing by Mike's open coffin, most people looked uneasy. If they were Catholic, they crossed themselves. If not, they just looked solemn. Females were inclined to dab at a tear or two. Two minutes were sufficient, then the visitors stepped towards the dining room, shrugging off their gloom to join a gay crowd being regaled with salmon sandwiches and egg salad sandwiches, different sorts of cake, cheese straws from Dubois's
pâtisserie
, tea, coffee, and whisky.

On both days the last visitors didn't leave before seven o'clock. Frankie had never experienced the sort of raw tiredness she felt then. Her voice was pitched a half-tone deeper; she sounded to herself like a record playing too slowly. Margo and her mother were the same. If this was mourning, then mourning was mostly voracious tiredness, a longing for rest. But no matter how many hours Frankie lay in her bedroom, sleep was thin and fitful. She hated the garrulous visitors, but being alone in her room was worse.

Both evenings, after the last visitors left, a taxi pulled up outside and disgorged four little nuns. They were from Sacred Heart Convent, and one of them, the white-haired, pink-cheeked Soeur Saint-Nom-de-Marie, had taught Frankie geography and Margo French. When the Sisters arrived, everyone emerged from their bedrooms and trooped downstairs clutching rosary beads. They knelt on the Persian rugs while Father Tom led them through one chaplet of the rosary: the Apostles' Creed, an Our Father, and fifty Hail Marys, the family praying in English, the nuns in French.

Frankie had been saying these prayers all her life; they fit her mouth, and she could recite them without thinking. Thinking always seemed to lead in a blasphemous direction. She could accept that God existed, but why would he care if anyone prayed to him or not? How much adoration could an all-powerful deity need or want before it started to sicken him?