Very Old Bones (35 page)

“Sure, why not?” said Peter. “Can you imagine him telling Billy not to take this money?”

Billy fell silent.

“I’m going to take some pictures of the table,” Giselle said with perfect timing. “I’ll use your camera and tripod, Orson,” and she went up the back stairs,
knowing exactly where my camera equipment was.

“I feel like an interloper,” Roger said, “but I might as well get it straight. What was Francis doing at the ball park? I thought he lived on the road.”

I pointed to Billy for the answer, and he gave me the back of his hand.

“Don’t bug out on us, Billy,” I said.

“Who’s buggin’ out?”

“Francis came home in 1942 to help the family when he thought Billy was being drafted,” I said. “Francis stayed close to Annie till he died, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, he did,” Billy said.

Giselle came down with the camera and flash and set them up on the tripod in the back parlor. Nobody spoke while she did this. We waited for her to say she was ready, but she’d heard our
conversation and she left the camera standing and came back to the table.

“Francis lived up by Hawkins Stadium, the ball park,” I said, “isn’t that so, Billy?”

“Hoffman’s Hotel,” Billy said. “Eight rooms with a saloon. Old-timey street guys and barflies, newspapermen with no teeth and dyin’ ballplayers, an elephant
graveyard. But Francis was in good shape for a guy who bent his elbow so much, and he went to all the Senators’ home games. Johnny Evers was one of the bosses of the club and he and Francis
both played big-league ball at the same time, so Evers gave Francis a season pass. Those were tough days for baseball, all the young guys gettin’ drafted, and you hadda fill their shoes with
kids, or old guys, or deaf guys, or guys with one arm, or one eye. Francis tells Evers he knows a guy doin’ short time in a Buffalo jail hits the ball a mile and does Evers want him? Evers
says hell yes and hires the guy when he gets out and hires Francis as a coach. Francis, he’s sixty-two and he suits up, ain’t played a game of ball for maybe twenty-eight years and
he’s out there telling kids and cripples never to swing at the first pitch, and how to steal bases and rattle the pitcher, when to play close in, when to go deep. Ripper Collins is
managin’ and he pinch-hits Francis, puts him in for the hit and run, or the sacrifice, because Francis can still bloop it to right once in a while, and he’s champ with the bunt, lays it
down the line, soft, easy, never lost the touch. He runs like a three-legged goat, takes him two weeks to get to first base but it don’t matter. He’s out from the go but the runner gets
to second or third. I seen him do this half a dozen times before they drafted me, December, and I’m gone eight months I’m back out with a bad eye. Francis is coachin’ third, and
they’re writin’ stories about him, and the con he talked Johnny Evers into signin’ is knifed dead on a dance floor hustlin’ somebody’s wife. Dangerous game, baseball.
And there I am in a box behind third and there’s the old man, movin’ like a cricket, and while I’m watchin’ him he falls over in the baseline. You can’t get up?
I’m up and over the fence, on the field, and they got a stretcher comin’, take him down to Memorial. I’m in a cab behind the ambulance but it don’t make no difference.
He’s dead before his chin hits the dirt.”

Giselle said, “The chocolates,” and got up from her chair and went to the kitchen. When she came back with the box of candy I saw she’d been crying. Molly saw
it too.

“Everything all right, dear?” Molly asked.

“Oh, sure,” said Giselle.

“What is it?” Peter asked.

“Nothing,” she said.

“It’s Francis,” I said.

Giselle opened the candy and put it in front of Peter. “There’s strawberry pie for dessert,” she said, “but I know you love chocolate.”

“Francis?” Peter said, looking at her.

“It was more Billy,” she said. “The image I had of him climbing the fence to help his father.”

“Wire fence,” Billy said. “Keeps you from swallowin’ foul balls.”

“Nobody in my family would’ve done that, climbed a fence, or even thought about it,” Giselle said. “We were so full of hate for one another.”

“Your mother?” said Molly. “Your father?”

“When my mother died my oldest brother cremated her the same day with no funeral service, so no friends or family could see her.”

“Stuff like that happened here,” Billy said.

“But today everybody’s at the same table,” Giselle said. “That never happened in my family after I was six and it never could. Hate is a cancer, and even when it fades,
something awful takes its place. I know, because I hate my brothers. I hate them.”

When no one chose to ask her why, she said, “So I want to take a photo now. Turn your chairs and look toward the camera.”

“Oh, good, a picture,” Peg said. “Danny raves about you. He says you take wonderful pictures.”

“Danny is just being friendly,” Giselle said, and I agreed. Danny was compulsively friendly.

“You should be in the picture,” Peter said to Giselle.

“I will be.”

And so another formal photograph in modern Phelan family history came into existence; my second with my father, Peter’s first with Billy and Peg, and so on. The new combinations were
quantifiable. Giselle, eminently photogenic, set the shutter, hurried back to her chair, and imposed a smile on the film that was as natural as sunshine and equally radiant.

We were a family soon to disappear from this form, from these chairs, from this place. The diaspora would be complete in, what, four, three, two years? Barring a miracle, Peter would die in the
months ahead. Molly could go on for years, but even with a housekeeper (and she could afford one) she wouldn’t stay here alone. And Giselle and I? Ah, now, there’s a rub.

Whether or not we would now stay here for an extended time was a new question. But she was responsible for my being here (I see no need to run through the tissue of causation) and therefore
obliquely responsible as well for this day of reunification, this time of our dawning into unity (as Keats put it), if indeed it was unity, if indeed it was dawning; and perhaps she would also be
responsible for us reordering the house to accommodate a modern married couple, with nursery. The very thought of these things was so exotically afield of my present consciousness that I could only
look at it all as a freakish turn of fate. The lives we had known for five years were about to be superseded. But by what?

My personal agenda was to finish the book on Peter’s art, and finish also this memoir, of which Walker Pettijohn had seen two-thirds. He professed to admire it, this time with editorial
associates supporting publication, but a contract awaited completion of the manuscript, and I detected no confidence in Walker that the book would sell more than forty copies. I no longer needed
survival money, but I yearned for proof that I was not chartering to myself in the forest, making no sound.

Giselle said the book made her weep, a rare occurrence (her weeping at Billy climbing the fence was the only time I’d ever seen her in tears). She’d read it the weekend I threaded
her needle’s eye with such rare, if unverifiable, significance, and told me this book was the fulfillment of the intuition that had helped convince her to marry me: that she knew, without
understanding why she knew, the value of the way I wrote and thought about this family. I’d shown her the early version of the book and talked to her about the family as if I’d owned
it, when I was actually drawing out unknown, unspoken impressions of people to whom I had only tenuous connection, none of my impressions really authentic, all of them as much a creation as one of
Peter’s sketches. Yet this talk insinuated itself into some receptive corner of Giselle’s imagination, and she concluded that one day I’d write a meaningful work about the family;
and she wanted to be part of that. And all along I’d thought it was my romantic charm that got her.

“Why didn’t you tell me you liked what I wrote?”

“I didn’t know how to say it. Maybe I didn’t like it so much either. Maybe I only liked how you talked about it. But now you write better. And I think I think
better.”

“My artistic soul drew you to Colonie Street.”

“You might say that.”

It ran through my mind that I might also say it was her desire for a safe haven in which to ride out the pregnancy that drew her here; or the lure of this new money coming my way (in fair
measure because of her work) as a cushion for the future; or her weariness with being a pioneer feminist in a man’s world; or the realization that one-night stands only exacerbate solitude;
or perhaps she’d had advance knowledge that Quinn was about to settle down with one woman. (“Does that change your mind about him, now that he’s getting married?” she asked
me, to which I replied, “Why should it? It didn’t change his when I got married.”)

There was always the possibility that she genuinely perceived her psychic transformation into motherhood as an idea whose time had come. But even if she
was
luxuriating in it (Mother
Giselle: it landed with an oxymoronic bounce in my consciousness), what was her view of remarriage? Perhaps it was as ambivalent as my own view of this particular paternity.

The proposed renaming of the putative grandson, the unnamed fetus, would be the occasion for reaffirming the matrimonial vows and the sacrament; but a year or more ago I had decided that
fathering a child with Giselle could turn into a crime against the unborn, predestining trouble for the product of this all-but-doomed union I had also anesthetized my anguish glands, had learned
how not to be a Giselle addict, how not to fall into a neurasthenic droop when she left the room. I had, in reaction, found abundant, even raucous solace with other women, for, without ever having
proof of Giselle’s infidelity, I believed in it. How not to, knowing her as I had? “I never did anything bad,” she once said with moderate conviction, but that changed nothing for
me; and this vast unknown, this black riddle, I do believe, was the erosive element that had destroyed my acceptance of the marriage as a temporary game of long-distance singles.

But now here she came with her renovated interiors, telling me that she had learned how to think, had learned how to be a mother; in effect, that she had grown into the marriage the way a child
grows into a garment two sizes too large. But she could know little of how her physical condition would transform her in the months ahead, or what it would be like not to work at what she did so
well, or what remarriage and the fusion with this family in the name of a name would do to her, or what our arm’s-length connubiality had done to me. She might even come to think of her own
name (Gisel in Old English, Giall in the Old Irish) as her fate: for the word means “hostage.”

The ring of the telephone broke our concentration on our communal photographic image, and Molly answered it. Alice Shugrue.

“She can’t pick me up,” Molly said when she hung up. “It’s raining so hard the sewers are backed up and the streets are flooded. Her engine got wet and they had to
tow her out of a huge puddle. She’s at her cousin’s in the North End, and she’s not even going to try to go home tonight.”

It was truly a fierce storm. Great sheets of water were flowing off the roof past our windows, and you could barely see Pearl Street.

“So you’ll stay here tonight,” Peter said to Molly.

“If it keeps up we’ll all have to stay,” Peg said.

“If it keeps up,” said Peter, “it won’t come down.”

“Oh dear,” said Molly, “my brother is telling Papa’s jokes.”

“As paterfamilias he’s entitled,” I said.

“As what?” Billy said. “Whataya givin’ us all these twenty-dollar words.”

“Just means the ‘father of the family,’ ” I said. “Also means he’s liberated from his own father—and mother too, you might say. Am I right, Father
Peter?”

“I hope we’re all liberated,” Peter said.

“I’m liberating Molly from the kitchen,” Peg said.

“Don’t be silly,” said Molly

“I’ll help in the kitchen,” Giselle said.

“No you won’t,” Peg said. “You take it easy. I’m drafting Roger to dry dishes.” And I said silently to myself, “Ah ha, Margaret, ah ha.”

“It rained like this,” Peter said, “the day I left home in 1913. You remember that, Billy?”

“You mean the rowboat?” Billy said.

“Right. You and your father rowed down to rescue me.”

“I remember,” Billy said. “We took you to the railroad station. Where were ya goin’?”

“New York, but anywhere would’ve been all right with me. I was just getting out from under. And yet I never really left this place.”

“It can be a trap,” Molly said, and she turned to Giselle. “So be careful, my dear, if Orson decides you should live here. You
are
going through with the second
marriage, aren’t you?”

“It’s not for me to say,” Giselle said. “Are we, Orson?”

“It somehow seems as though deuterogamy is an idea whose time has come,” I said.

“There he goes again,” Billy said.

Molly smiled. “Why am I not surprised?”

Peter was nodding his head at the completion of something, the beginning of something else. It seemed facile to think of the remarriage as a beginning when it was merely the supercharging of an
old steam engine that might or might not make it over the next rise. The new name, the child, the remarriage as confirmation that the first marriage was a bust, which it was, these thoughts also
saddened me: the sadness of the completion of anything, a book, a marriage, a life. Or a sad painting.

“There’s one more painting,” Peter said. “It’s upstairs, and it’s not a pretty picture. I warn you against it, but Orson will show it to anybody who wants to
see it.”

“Have I seen it?” Molly asked.

“No,” Peter said. “Only Orson.”

And so we all, including Giselle, who had photographed it two months ago when it was embryonic, went up to Peter’s studio to see
The Burial,
his major unfinished work. If he lived
on, it would very probably not be his last in the
Malachi Suite.
He’d already made several sketches of Malachi and Crip in hell, and was trying to assign a fitting punishment for them;
but as of today,
The Burial
was as far as he’d gone with his great graphic leaps through those abominable events.