Very Old Bones (31 page)

As the time grows closer for it, I’m becoming obsessed by the fact that Giselle is coming here, and that my life is about to change yet again. She now tells me
she’s pregnant, and that she didn’t plan it. It’s July, she’s two months gone, and I did it to her in May, she says, when she came up to take the final photo of Peter for
the
Life
profile she did on him. She was here all weekend, we went at it in my room, what, two, three times? And bingo! She left then to travel for two months, and I didn’t hear from
her until last night, when she said she’d be up today, with an enhanced womb, for the family meeting Peter had invited her to attend.

She also told me that, after five years of it, she’s had enough and is leaving
Life—
as soon as she finishes her current project. She’ll have a baby, then free-lance,
giving
Life
first look at whatever she photographs. She no longer wants to be at the beck and call of magazine editors, now says she’s willing to rejoin the nuptial bed, which
she’d hinted at when last we bathed in the steam of our malfunctional wedlock.

I’d often given her my spiel, that the quotidian life is the most important element of our existence, and although she didn’t accept that in the early days of our marriage, she now
says I was right, that a career is indispensable, but it makes for a very sterile life if that’s all there is. She says she envies me the family ties, and that she’s come to understand
she and I might be divorced now if it weren’t for Molly.

Of course I don’t believe much of what Giselle says. Such conversions are for minds more simple than hers. It will be a major change having her with me all the time, but it is true that
she’s grown closer to the family since the
Life
profile on Peter, and the book project that grew out of it. Walker Pettijohn suggested an art book on Peter, a book suitable for coffee
tables, with Giselle doing the photos, me doing text blocks plus interviews with the artist (he thought the father-son link would enhance the book’s appeal, but I pointed out to him the
awkward disparity in our names), and a critic yet to be chosen analyzing Peter’s work and putting it in historical perspective. Such is the man’s fame, now that he’s close to
death (though not yet moribund), that this was one of four book offers prompted by the
Life
article. Peter has managed to jump through the flaming hoop of high art and come out the other
side as a potential creature of the popular imagination.

I was still at the dining-room table, cheating at cards for Billy’s amusement, when I heard Peter’s hoarse voice call me.

“Orson, can you come up?”

And so I excused myself and went up. Peter was in bed, just reawakened after a mid-morning nap. He’d had his matinee with Adelaide, then attacked his easel until fatigue pulled him back to
his pillow. He looked tousled and very old for his seventy-one years, his gray-haired torso going to bone, his hair and mustache almost solid white, and more scraggly than usual.

When I entered his bedroom he was sitting on the side of the bed gripping the sturdy blackthorn walking stick Michael Phelan had bought in Ireland. His room, the same one he’d slept in all
his life in this house, was full of books, newspapers, and three unfinished sketches, this being his pattern: to keep incomplete work at his bedside, study it before sleep, and wake perhaps to find
a solution that would let him complete it. I thought he might now be ready for a second go at the work-in-progress, but he had another plan.

“Anybody here yet?” he asked.

“Just Billy and myself.”

“So you nailed him.”

“He’s here but he’s itchy to leave.”

“Keep his curiosity aroused and he’ll stay.”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

“Get him to help you move some paintings downstairs.”

“He’s got a cast on his foot.”

“How’d he get here? You carry him?”

“He can walk.”

“If he can walk he can climb stairs.”

“Which paintings do you want?”

“
The Dance, The Conspiracy
, and
The Protector.
”

“Not the new one?”

“No, I don’t want to shock them. Maybe later. Those’ll do for what I have to say.”

“Done.”

I called Billy and he hobbled upstairs immediately. I took him through the rooms, which he hadn’t seen since the day Sarah went crazy because Molly left her alone. Billy and Molly then had
to repair all Sarah’s damage and chaos, and that was the first Billy had ever been above the ground floor. He’d told me more than once he never wanted anything to do with the house, or
its people, after his father’s experience, the exception being Molly, who always gave him five dollars in birthday gold, as she gave others in the family. Like most people who knew her, Billy
projected a ray of love toward Molly “Good old dame,” he called her. He liked to tease her about her hemorrhoids, a problem he also lived with.

“Christ, what a wreck this joint is,” Billy said when he came upstairs.

“It’s not a wreck. It’s an artist’s studio, all of it except my room and Molly’s. And he’s even moving things into her room, now that she’s not using
it.”

“Molly’s not livin’ here no more?”

“Not for months. She’s up at Saratoga with the Shugrues, living in the rooms I used to live in. She couldn’t take care of Peter, couldn’t go up and down the stairs twenty
times a day. She’s got all she can do to take care of herself these days, and so we swapped rooms. I came here, she went there. Alice Shugrue’s her best friend in the world, great
company for her.”

“I didn’t know Molly was sick. I don’t hear what goes on.”

“She’s not sick, just weary. She’s in good enough shape that she’s cooking lunch for us. You like roast lamb?”

“Are you kiddin’?”

“Good.”

“What’s this lunch business all about?”

“About all the Phelans, and their ancestors.”

“Not interested.”

“Don’t be so quick, Billy. We need you, and I really mean that. We need what you know.”

“I don’t know nothin’ you don’t know.”

“You know about your father. You know when he came home in ’42, and what he did. I don’t know any of that. I was in the army already. You see what I’m saying?”

“I see what you’re sayin’, but I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. What’s my father got to do with anything?”

So I showed him all my photos of
The Itinerant
series, in which Francis played the central role. I told him how Francis showed up all of a sudden, then fought with Sarah, and how Peter
tracked him down and asked him to come back, and that I saw this with my own eyes.

“But he didn’t come back,” Billy said.

“No. He kept walking. He didn’t come back to stay till the war. Do you know whether he ever came here in the war period?”

“He wouldn’t put a foot on the stoop.”

“Did he ever talk to Peter, or Molly, or Chick, or anybody?”

“Maybe Pete went to see him at a Senators game when he was coachin’, but if he did my father never mentioned it.”

“He saw you, and Peg, and Annie.”

“That’s why he came home. He called my mother and found out I was goin’ in the army and he said he’d come home and be around if somethin’ needed fixin’. He
took a room up near the ball park. He’d come down to the house once a week and sit with my mother, bring her a pint of vanilla ice cream, or pineapple sherbet, talk an hour, have a meal with
us, then disappear for another week. But he’d come by in a minute if Ma called him. He shoveled snow, cut the grass for her, put up screens and storm windows, fixed a busted asbestos pipe on
the furnace.”

“He was a strange guy.”

“He was an
all-right
guy,” Billy said with an edge to his voice.

“I didn’t say he wasn’t.”

“Everybody else in this joint did.”

“I just told you that wasn’t true. Stick around, Billy. You’ll learn something about your relatives you didn’t know.”

“Yeah,” he said.

But I knew I’d hooked him. I took him into Peter’s studio and found the paintings Peter wanted as props when he delivered his remarks to the assembled kin. Billy looked at the
paintings the way he looked at everything else in the house: not interested. Then we carried them, one by one, down the hallway to the dining room.

That Malachi was still influencing our lives like this supported my idea that we are never without the overcoats, however lice-ridden, of our ancestors. This luncheon was going to be an
expressionistic occasion, offering graphic imaginings of where we came from, what we might expect of ourselves (and our children), and what we might do to our greatest loves, given our inherited
propensities. I tried to imagine whether and, if so, why Malachi was predisposed to disaster, and all I could do was project myself backward into my own disturbed history, into the isolation where
I had been able to triumph privately in social, financial, marital, and artistic realms, no failure possible in that utopia where all eccentricity is justified, where ineffectuality is not only
acceptable, but desirable as a badge of defiance, where there is no need to engage the actual world because the private world is always sufficient to the day. Reality conquered by the ego:
Malachi’s story precisely.

I now like to think that I am coming out of this benighted condition, and in my own peculiar way am again an engaged citizen of the bright day, working within the race. I see evidence of this in
my ability to function in the publishing world without either the hem-kissing subservience of the acolyte, or the wound-licking reverie of the early failure.

I feel pride in my restrained reaction to Giselle’s pregnancy, never once voicing those Strindbergian doubts that had dropped into my mind like henbane: never inquiring whether it truly
was I who seeded her furrow; never offering the suggestion that it was perhaps an anonymous creativist at
Life
, or possibly Quinn the traveler who had left his enduring mark on her during
one of his New York visits. Did I suggest, as the young Strindberg ruffian, Nojd, put it, that “it wouldn’t be much fun slaving all your life for another chap’s brat”? No, I
did not. If it was Quinn who’d done the deed, then at least the Phelan ontogeny was now at work in Giselle’s inner sanctum, and I might become father to my first cousin twice removed.
But I am no more likely to have certitude on any of this than Nojd, or Peter Phelan.

Molly pulled the doorbell and stood on top of the stoop with her arms full of groceries. She turned to the curb, where Alice Shugrue waited behind the wheel of her Chevrolet,
idling until Molly had gained proper access to the homestead; and then I opened the door and took a bag from Molly (“Be careful, there’s breakables,” she said). I hugged her and
bussed her cheek, then waved to Alice.

“Come in and see us when you come back for her,” I said, “and we’ll catch up on all your news.” Alice smiled and waved me down, saying, “You’re not to
be trusted with my news, now that you’re writing a book,” and off she went.

Molly stepped into the hallway and tapped the bag of groceries I was holding. “You’re not to be trusted with breakables either,” she said. “I’ve seen you with
dishes in the hotel kitchen.”

“There are things I never dropped,” I said, “so get your dirty tongue off me.”

Molly, kittenish, kissed my cheek with her arms full as we moved toward the kitchen. “I miss this house,” she said.

“Well, come back to it, then,” I said.

“Easy to say.”

“Easy to do. There’s change afoot in the world.”

“Afoot me foot,” said Molly. “All that’ll change this place is an earthquake.”

“Exactly what we’ve got planned for lunch,” I said.

“It’s a scheme, I knew it. What’s he up to?”

“I’ll tell you when it’s time to tell you.”

I thought Molly looked well, though a bit more frail than when I’d last seen her. Her north-country exile seemed to be sapping her energy, but she was wearing one of her dressy summer
dresses, the pink one, so I sensed she was trying to rekindle her old self for the occasion. We put the groceries on the kitchen table and I then took her by the elbow and moved her toward the
dining room and Billy. Her gaze went instantly to
Banishing the Demons
on the wall, then to
The Conspiracy
, which I’d leaned against the back staircase. She had seen, and fully
understood, the content of both paintings, but made no comment on their presence. She turned and looked at Billy in his plaster cast.

“It’s a long time since I’ve seen your handsome mug, Billy boy,” she said. “I heard you might be here today.”

“That’s more than I heard. Who told ya that?”

“I’m no squealer, kiddo,” Molly said. “And whatever did you do to your leg? Are you all right?”

“I can’t kick,” Billy said. “You’re lookin’ good, Moll. How’s the old bareedis?”

“I’m fine in all respects, and I’ll answer no more impertinent questions.”

“How’s Saratoga?”

“The hotel is busy. The track opens next week.”

“But no more gamblin’ casinos.”

“None that I hear of. It’s not like it used to be.”

“Nothin’ is,” Billy said.

“How many are coming for lunch, Orson? We have to set the table.”