Very Old Bones (29 page)

“You really think that would have made a difference?”

“Virgins think about heaven,” Molly said. “They don’t care about what goes on down here.”

Our neighborhood was in a stage of vanishing tradition, dying to its old self, an influx of Negroes creating a new world order, displacing the old Irish and Germans in the same
way those two groups had displaced the Dutch and English gentry who so shortsightedly thought that bucolic Arbor Hill was to be their private garden forever. And so for this reason, and also
because of the all-but-cloistered life Sarah had led, fewer people came to her wake than were expected, the most notable absence being Chick, who did not even telephone after he received
Molly’s telegram, but merely sent a modest basket of flowers, the card with them bearing nothing other than the names
Chick and Evelyn Phelan
, the first announcement to the family that
Chick had married, and simultaneously an act of distancing Molly took to be spiteful.

“Chick will regret this to his dying day,” Peter said when he read the card, “not because of Sarah, but because he’ll eventually realize what we think of his gesture.
Anger makes people stupid.”

Anger did not make Peter stupid. And surely it was at least anger, perhaps even rage at the power of an abstraction as cruel, remote, and inviolate as God, but not God, that propelled Peter
toward his masterworks. He saw, in the story of Malachi and Lizzie, and then in the way that Kathryn and Sarah had nursed that story and secretly kept it alive, a pattern that need not have
been—a wrong to two generations that might have been preventable, if only . . .

I’ve generalized about cause and effect in this family, but one proximate cause of what made Kathryn, Sarah, Peter, and the rest of us behave in such diverse but
consistent ways was chronicled in that newspaper story Molly saw Sarah reading by candlelight. Molly found the cache of old papers in a crawlspace that opened off the closet of Sarah’s room
(Kathryn’s and Michael’s room before Sarah took it over) into an unusable area of the attic. As children, Molly and Julia had discovered the crawlspace and hidden in it to elude Sarah,
or merely to exist in a secret place no one else could enter; but Sarah caught them coming out of it one day and the secret place lost all value.

Molly found the papers in the small brown leather suitcase Michael Phelan had used when his work on the railroad required him to stay overnight in another city. There were a dozen newspapers in
all, telling day by day the story of Malachi and Lizzie, the marriage destined for enshrinement in a lower circle of hell.

“So this,” Molly said to me when she showed me the papers, “is what she was reading at the last. Gone back to the first.”

What happened with Malachi was hardly the first, but I do believe that that’s how Molly and others in the family thought of it. Molly wasn’t even born when it happened, nor were
Julia and Tommy. Francis was seven, Sarah four, Chick one. Also Kathryn was pregnant with Peter when she went through the Malachi ordeal in 1887.

In the 1930s Peter had found his artistic vision in
The Itinerant
series, but then in subsequent years he foundered badly, dabbling in cityscapes, portraits, and in the new
non-figurative, non-representational abstract mode, whose exercises in symbolic color and form, devoid of the human being, he could admire when done by others, but only loathe as pretentious
failures when he created them himself.

In the weeks after Molly and I showed him the Malachi newspapers, Peter returned to figurative drawing, sketches of people closest to him, and felt instant strength, saw the abstract elements of
these lives not as layers of scumbled space and violated line, but as the cruel specifics of eyes and jaw, the mournful declension of a lip line, the jaunty elevation of a leg. For years he had
sketched the family, either from photographs or memory, or by cajoling his siblings (even Sarah one afternoon) into modeling for him. He never showed any of these works publicly, though he
completed a dozen or more paintings from four or five score of sketches. Perhaps he was waiting for the moment when the visual reunion of his kin would make exhibitional sense.

That came to pass when the family, as he saw it, osmosed its way into his
Malachi Suite
, that manic outpouring of genius (I give him no less) that eventually drew me, and even Giselle,
into its remarkable vortex. He sketched with a passion and painted with a fury that bespoke his fear of time, his full awareness that he had so little of it left in which to complete this now
obsessive work. But he also painted with a sure hand, all errors deemed fortuitous and made part of the painting. His brush never wavered, these works of pain and poignancy stroked into existence
with swiftness, certainty, and a realism that arrested the eyes of the beholder, held them fast.

In early childhood Peter had heard the Malachi events spoken of in cryptic bits by his mother, later heard more from Francis, who was seven when it happened, and in time heard it garbled by
street-corner wags who repeated the mocking rhyme:

When the story took him over, Peter moved out of portrait sketching into scenes of dynamic action and surreal drama that in their early stages emerged as homage to Goya’s
Caprichos,
Disparates
, and
Desastres de Guerra.
But in his extended revelation of the Malachi-and-Lizzie tragedy (and mindful of Goya’s credo that the painter selected from the universe
whatever seemed appropriate, that he chose features from many individuals and their acts, and combined them so ingeniously that he earned the title of inventor and not servile copyist), Peter
imposed his own original vision on scandalous history, creating a body of work that owed only an invisible inspiration of Goya.

He reconstituted the faces and corpora of Lizzie and Malachi and others, the principal room and hearth of the McIlhenny three-room cottage, the rushing waters of the Staatskill that flowed past
it, the dark foreboding of the sycamore grove where dwelled the Good Neighbors, as Crip Devlin arcanely called those binate creatures whose diabolical myths brought on that terrible night in June
of 1887.

His first completed painting,
The Dance
, was of Lizzie by the sycamores, her bare legs and feet visible to mid-thigh in a forward step, or leap, or kick, her left hand hiking the hem of
her skirt to free her legs for the dance. But is it a dance? In the background of the painting is the stand of trees that played such a major role in Lizzie’s life, and to the left of her
looms a shadow of a man or perhaps it is a half-visible tree, in the dusky light. If it is a tree it is beckoning to Lizzie. If it is a man perhaps he is about to dance with her.

But is that a dance she is doing, or is it, as one who saw her there said of it, an invitation to her thighs?

In the painting it is a dance, and it is an invitation.

Why would Lizzie McIlhenny, a plain beauty of divine form and pale brown hair to the middle of her back, choose to dance with a tree, or a shadow, or a man (if man it ever was
or could be) at the edge of a meadow, just as a summer night began its starry course? Aged twenty-six, married five years to Malachi McIlhenny, a man of formidable girth whose chief skill was his
strength, a man of ill luck and no prospects, Lizzie (née Elizabeth Cronin) had within her the spirit of a sensuous bird.

Malachi imposed no limits of space on their marriage, and so she came and went like a woman without a husband, dutiful to their childless home, ever faithful to Malachi and, when the bad luck
came to him, his canny helpmate: first trapping yellow birds in the meadow and selling them to friends for fifty cents each, but leaving that when she found that fashioning rag birds out of colored
cloth, yarn, thread, feathers, and quills was far more profitable; that she could sell them for a dollar, or two, depending on their size and beauty, to the John G. Myers Dry-Goods and Fancy-Goods
Store, which, in turn, would sell them for four and five dollars as fast as Lizzie could make them.

At the end of a week in early June she made and sold sixteen birds, each of a different hue, and earned twenty-seven dollars, more money than Malachi had ever earned from wages in any two weeks,
sometimes three. The money so excited Lizzie that when crossing the meadow on her way home from the store she kicked off her shoes, threw herself into the air, and into the wind, danced until
breath left her, and then collapsed into the tall grass at the edge of the sycamore grove, a breathless victim of jubilation.

When she regained her breath and sat up, brushing bits of grass from her eyelashes, she thought she saw a man’s form in the shadowy interior of the grove, saw him reach his hand toward
her, as if to help her stand. Perhaps it was only the rustling of the leaves, or the sibilance of the night wind, but Lizzie thought she heard the words “the force of a gray horse,” or
so it was later said of her. Then, when she pulled herself erect, she was gripping not the hand of a man but the low-growing branch of a sycamore.

Malachi’s troubles crystallized in a new way when he lost his only cow to a Swedish cardsharp named Lindqvist, a recently arrived lumber handler who joined the regular
stud-poker game at Black Jack McCall’s Lumber District Saloon, and who bested Malachi in a game that saw jacks fall before kings. Lindqvist came to the cow shed behind Malachi’s cottage
and, with notable lack of regret, led Malachi’s only cow into a territorial future beyond the reach of all McIlhennys.

The lost cow seemed to confirm to Malachi that his life would always be a tissue of misfortune. At the urgings of his older brother, Matty, who had come to Albany in 1868 and found work on a
lumber barge, Malachi, age seventeen, had sold all that the family owned and left Ireland in 1870 with his ten-year-old sister, Kathryn, and their ailing father, Eamon, who anticipated good health
and prosperity in the New World. In Albany the three penniless greenhorns settled in with Matty at his Tivoli Hollow shanty on the edge of Arbor Hill. Within six months Matty was in jail on a
seven-year sentence for beating a man to death in a saloon fight, within a year he was dead himself, cause officially unknown, the unofficial word being that a guard, brother of the man Matty
killed, broke Matty’s head with an iron pipe when opportunity arose; and then, within two years, Eamon McIlhenny was dead at fifty-nine of ruined lungs. These dreadful events, coming so soon
after the family’s arrival in the land of promise and plenty, seemed to forebode a dark baggage, a burden as fateful as the one the McIlhennys had tried to leave behind in County
Monaghan.

Malachi did not yield to any fate. He labored ferociously and saved his money. And as he approached marriage he bought a small plot of country land on Staats Lane, a narrow and little-used road
that formed a northern boundary of the vast Fitzgibbon (formerly Staats) estate, and built on it, with his own hands, the three-room cottage that measured seven long paces deep by nine long paces
wide, the size of a devil’s matchbox. In 1882 Malachi moved into the cottage with his bride, the sweet and fair Lizzie Cronin, a first-generational child of Albany.

After five years the marriage was still childless, and Lizzie slowly taught herself to be a seamstress as a way of occupying her time, making clothing for herself and Malachi. But with so few
neighbors she found other sewing work scarce, and her days remained half empty, with Malachi working long and erratic hours. And so Lizzie looked to the birds, the trees, the meadows of the
Fitzgibbon estate, and the Staatskill, a creek with a panoramic cascade, churning waters, and placid pools, for her pleasure. Malachi saw his wife developing into a fey creature of the open air, an
elfin figure given to the sudden eruption of melodies off her tongue that Malachi did not recognize. She began to seem like an otherworldly being to Malachi.

In the spring of 1887, two days after he lost his cow, the waters of the Hudson River, as usual, spilled over their banks and rose into the lumber mills, storage sheds, and piles of logs that
were the elemental architecture of Sage’s lumber yard, where Malachi worked as a handler. One log slipped its berth in the rising waters, knocked Malachi down, and pinned his left shoulder
against a pile of lumber, paralyzing his left arm and reducing the strength in his torso by half, perhaps more. So weakened was he that he could no longer work as a handler, that useless left arm
an enduring enemy.

He found work one-handedly sickling field grass on the Fitzgibbon land, work that provided none of the fellowship that prevailed among lumber handlers. He worked alone, came home alone, brooded
alone until the arrival of his wife, who grew more peculiar with every moment of Malachi’s increasing solitude. He topped her at morning, again at evening after she returned from her
communion with the birds of the field, and he failed to create either new life in Lizzie or invincible erectness in himself.