Very Old Bones
Authors: William Kennedy
Praise for William Kennedy:
“Kennedy is a writer with something to say, about matters that touch us all, and he says it with uncommon artistry”
Washington Post
“Kennedy’s power is such that the reader will follow him almost anywhere, to the edge of tragedy and back again to redemption”
Wall Street Journal
“Kennedy’s art is an eccentric triumph, a quirky, risk-taking imagination at play upon the solid paving stones, the breweries, the politicos and pool sharks of an
all-too-actual city”
The New York Review of Books
“His smart, sassy dialogue conveys volumes about character. His scene setting makes the city throb with life”
Newsday
“What James Joyce did for Dublin and Saul Bellow did for Chicago, William Kennedy has done for Albany, New York: created a rich and vivid world invisible to the ordinary
eye”
Vanity Fair
“His beguiling yarns are the kind of family myths embellished and retold across a kitchen table late at night, whiskified, raunchy, darkly funny”
Time
“William Kennedy’s
Albany Cycle
is one of the great achievements of modern American writing”
Daily Mail
“William Kennedy is pre-eminent among his generation of writers . . . Kennedy is peerless in the depth and acuity of his sustained vision, and the lost, past world of
Albany says more to us today about the current state, about the heart and soul, of American politics than any recent bestselling, Hollywood-pandering political thriller has ever done”
Spectator
“Kennedy’s writing is a triumph: he tackles topics in a gloriously comic, almost old-fashioned language. You feel Kennedy could write the Albany phone book and
make it utterly entertaining”
Time Out
“Kennedy proves to be truly Shakespearean”
The Sunday Times
“Kennedy is one of our necessary writers”
GQ
ALSO BY WILLIAM KENNEDY
FICTION
The Ink Truck
Legs
Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game
Ironweed
Quinn’s Book
The Flaming Corsage
Roscoe
Changó’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes
NONFICTION
O Albany!
Riding the Yellow Trolley Car
WITH BRENDAN KENNEDY
Charlie Malarkey and the Belly-Button Machine
Charley Malarkey and the Singing Moose
First published in the USA by Viking Penguin Inc.,
a division of Penguin Books USA 1992
This ebook edition published by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2011
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © WJK, Inc. 1992
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of William Kennedy to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-84983-852-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-84983-853-5
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
All reasonable effort had been made to contact the copyright holders of text used in this book. Any copyright holders not contacted should write to Simon & Schuster UK.
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This book is dedicated to the Hard Core (they know who they are), and to certain revered and not-so-revered ancestors of the author (they don’t know who they are, for
they are dead; but they’d know if they ever got their hands on this book).
Any one who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the
light or from going into the light . . . and he who remembers this when he sees any one whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of
man has come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light.
—Plato
The Republic
C
ONTENTS
It is Saturday, July twenty-sixth, 1958, the sun will rise in about twenty-five minutes, the air is still, and even the birds are not yet awake on Colonie Street. There is no
traffic on North Pearl Street, half a block to the east, except for the occasional auto, police prowl car, or the Second Avenue bus marking its hourly trail. A moment ago fire sirens sounded on
upper Arbor Hill, to the west, their wail carrying down on the silent air, interrupting the dreams of the two sleeping occupants of this house, Peter Phelan, a seventy-one-year-old artist, and his
putative son, Orson Purcell, a thirty-four-year-old bastard.
“Orson,” Peter called out, “where are those sirens?”
“Not around here,” I said.
“Good.”
He knew as well as I that the sirens weren’t close. His hearing was excellent. But he was reassuring himself that in case of fire Orson was standing by; for I was now the organizer of his
life (not his art; he was in full command of that), the putative son having become father to the putative father. His health was precarious, a serious heart condition that might take him out at any
instant; and so he abdicated all responsibility for survival and gave himself utterly to his work. I could now hear him moving, sitting up on the side of the bed in his boxer shorts, reaching for
the light and for his cane, shoving his feet into his slippers, readying himself to enter his studio and, by the first light of new morning, address his work-in-progress, a large painting he called
The Burial.
I knew my sleep was at an end on this day, and as I brought myself into consciousness I recapitulated what I could remember of my vanishing dream: Peter in a gymnasium where a team of doctors
had just operated on him and were off to the right conferring about the results, while the patient lay on the operating table, only half there. The operation had consisted of sawing parts off
Peter, the several cuts made at the hip line (his arthritic hips were his enemy), as steaks are cut off a loin. These steaks lay in a pile at the end of Peter’s table. He was in some pain and
chattering to me in an unintelligible language. I reattached the most recent cut of steak to his lower extremity, and it fit perfectly in its former location. But when I let go of it it fell back
atop its fellows. Peter did not seem to notice either my effort or its failure.