Very Old Bones (13 page)

“Isn’t it beautiful,” said Molly.

“It’s all of that,” Peter said. “It will give us pleasure. It will banish our shame at being the leftover household. It will put a sheen on your beautiful hair, my sweet
sister, and it will satisfy my craving to be done with gloom and come home to respectable radiance.”

I looked at the light around me for the first time in my life. Never had I considered it a topic worth conflict, or enthusiasm. Light was; and that was that. What more could you ask of it? It
was bright or it was dim. You saw in it or you didn’t see. If you didn’t then it was dark. But now came revelation: that there were gradations, brightness to be measured not only in
volume but in value. More brightness was better. Amazing.

The doorbell sounded, a pull-bell ding-dong. Molly answered the bell and accepted from the delivery man a small basket of white and purple flowers, brought them to the back parlor, and set them
atop the player piano (which had replaced the Chickering upright that Julia Phelan played until she died; and music in this house died with her until Peter exchanged the Chickering for the player
and bought piano rolls of the same songs Julia had played since they were children together).

“I know they’re from Mame Bayly,” Molly said. “She’s always the first flowers at every wake, always a day early. By the time we get to the cemetery they’ll be
brown and wilted.”

The electrician had decided that the emergency installation of the chandeliers could be done only by running wire along the ceiling and through the outer wall to the nearest power pole and Peter
said fine, run it anyplace you like, just get the power in here; and took off his coat and hat at last, and with his own tool chest began undoing the gasolier and capping the pipe that carried its
gas. Since the death of his father Peter had been the master mechanic of the family, even in absentia, consulted via telephone on every plumbing and structural crisis, consulted when the back porch
railing fell off, consulted on retarring the roof and on installing storm windows when the price of gas escalated in 1921.

I explored the downstairs rooms, finding photographs of my father when he was a youth (wearing a high collar and a short tie; he never dressed like that anymore), and photos of the women
I’d just seen, but as girls in bathing suits (with their mother, was it? mother in black long-sleeved high-necked beachwear that came to her shoetop), and I saw a cut-glass dish full of
apples and oranges and grapes on the dining-room table and a photo of twenty men posing beside a locomotive, and over the piano a photo of a woman who looked like the beautiful Molly but more
beautiful still, and younger, with her hair parted in the middle, and when Peter saw me looking at it he said, “That’s my sister Julia, Orse,” and he whispered in my ear,
“Don’t tell anybody, but she was my love, my favorite,” and he said Julia had played the piano. He opened the seat of the piano bench and took out a scroll of paper titled
“In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree.”

“She played this one all the time. We both loved it.”

He opened a sliding door on the piano’s upright front and inserted the roll, then sat at the piano and pumped its two pedals with his feet, and the roll moved as I watched with wonderment.
Paper that makes music? Then Peter stood up and sat me in his place and told me to put my feet on the pedals and press, first left, then right, and I did and saw the paper move, and then I heard
music, saw the keys on the piano depress themselves, and I said, “It’s magic!”

“Not quite,” said Peter, and I kept pumping and then my feet weakened, as did the song, and Peter said, “Faster, kid, keep a steady rhythm,” and after a while the
jerkiness went out of the song and out of my feet and the piano made beautiful music again and Peter sang along.

“Are you insane? Are you out of your mind?”

It was Sarah, back with her black mood, black skirt, fierce voice, and I stopped my feet and Peter said, “For chrissake, Sarah, I’m invoking Julia. Don’t you think she has a
right to be here today? Are you going to keep this wake all to yourself?” And Sarah again could not answer, and fled to the kitchen, slamming the door behind her.

“Continue, Orse,” Peter said, and, as I moved my feet, music again rose in the rooms where light and death were on the way. The phone rang in the back parlor and Molly came down the
stairs two at a time to answer it, then reported to all auditors that it was Ben Owens, the undertaker, and that he’d be here within the hour; which meant that Mama Kathryn would be returning
to the front parlor to be observed in her death rigors, powdered and coiffed as she rarely had been in life; and to me it meant a question mark, for this was my entrance into the world of
death.

Again the doorbell sounded and I placed myself in the angular hallway that ran from front door to back parlor, hiding behind wicker filigree decked with clusters of china, people in breeches and
wigs and hoopskirts, and dogs and cats with flat bottoms, and then I saw a man with a happy and perfectly round face beneath a bald dome take a cigar out of his mouth and say to Peter, “I got
your mother here.”

And Peter said, “Bring her in, she’s welcome,” and from the smiles that followed this exchange and from all the smiles and music and ongoing electrification, I would take home
from this day my first impression of death: that it was an occasion for music, levity, light, and love.

“How’ve you been, Ben?” Peter asked.

“If I was any better,” said Ben, looking for a place to rid himself of the half-inch ash on his cigar, “I’d call the doctor to find out what ailed me.”

“In the window,” Peter said. And Ben swung his portly self toward the street and motioned to the four men standing at the back end of the hearse, and home came Kathryn Phelan, her
last visitation in the flesh. Just ahead of her came another man with the catafalque, a four-wheeled accordionesque platform which stretched to meet the space, and upon which Kathryn and her
mahogany coffin came to rest, the coffin’s closed cover gleaming in the sunlight (no electricity yet).

The onlookers now included Ben Owens, Molly, Sarah, Peter, me, and the electrician, who was on a ladder in the middle of the room installing the Claire chandelier, and who said, “Do you
want this thing workin’ tonight?” and Peter said, “We do,” and the electrician said, “Well, then, I ain’t movin’ off a here,” and Peter said,
“There’s no reason you should. Make yourself at home up there,” and so they moved the coffin around his ladder and the advent of the light proceeded as planned.

The family then retreated to the back parlor as Peter closed the sliding doors between the two parlors and waved a go-ahead sign to Ben Owens. And then the tableau that I would carry with me
created itself: Peter sitting at the piano, Sarah standing by the kitchen door off the back parlor with folded arms, Molly settling into the armless horsehair ladies’ chair beside the piano
and staring at Peter as he pumped up the music. I, sensing tension and trying desperately to make myself disappear, retreated to a far corner of the back parlor where I could observe the expanse of
tradition and sibling relationships manifested in objects and body postures, and listen to love manifested in music, and perceive, I knew not how, the ineffable element that seeped under the closed
parlor doors when the coffin was opened; all this fixing forever in me the image of life extended beyond death, and fixing too the precise moment of the advent of the light.

The electricity would insinuate itself from the power line on the outside pole, through the front wall, across the ceiling, and into the chandelier at the electrician’s touch, and the
onset of the light would startle Ben Owens so that the comb he was using to touch up Kathryn Phelan’s hair would fly out of his hand and into a shadowy area behind the coffin, and Ben would
say, “Cripes, what was that?”

And light would seep under the sliding doors to be greeted by Peter’s remark: “It’s here,” and the apple-tree song would end as light began.

The sliding doors would open onto the new tableau of undertaker, electrician, siblings, and myself, all of us staring at the corpse that was so regally resplendent in high-necked magenta burial
gown and pink-taffeta-lined coffin, and Mame Bayly’s flowers would give sweet fragrance to Kathryn Phelan’s final performance—her first under the bright lights—on this very
old stage.

Chick Phelan took a half-day off from his job as a linotypist in the
Times-Union’s
composing room for this first night of the wake, the night the family and a few
select friends would have the corpse all to themselves. He brought home four bottles of Schenley’s whiskey and a box of White Owl cigars for the wakegoers, and announced his partial list of
bearers for the funeral: the McIlhenny brothers, Dave and Gerry, nephews of Kathryn recently off the boat from County Monaghan; Martin Daugherty, Barney Dillon from across the street, and two more
to be recruited at the wake.

Food began to arrive. Betty Simmons sent her teenage son over with a turkey and stuffing; the Ryan sisters baked a ham and made their famous potato salad and delivered it themselves but
didn’t come in, would wait for the wake’s second night, when friends called. Flowers came: six baskets at once, one from George and Peg Quinn and family, plus the pillow of red roses
from the Phelan children, with the word “Mama” in gold letters on a ribbon. When the deliveryman handed Peter the last basket of flowers and went back down the stoop to his truck, a
figure came limping across the street and stood at the bottom step, hands in pockets, fedora at a rakish tilt, clothes old and grimed, and this man looked upward into Peter’s eyes.

“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Peter said.

“Ya always have been,” the man said with a small smile.

Peter put the flowers aside and extended his hand. “Come on in,” he said, and the man came up the three steps, wiped the soles of his shoes on the doormat, and stepped inside,
gripping Peter in a strong handshake. Peter closed the door, holding the man’s shoulder, and walked him down the hallway to the back parlor where Molly was giving a last-minute dusting to the
furniture.

“Say hello to your brother, Moll,” Peter said, and she turned and looked and gaped and dropped the feather duster, and then ran four steps and threw her arms around the man and said
“Fran,” and looked at him again and cried and kissed him and cried some more. “Fran, Fran. We thought you were dead.”

“Maybe I am,” Francis Phelan said.

He looked toward the front parlor and saw the corpse of his mother in her final silence. He stared at her.

“Go on in,” Molly said. “Go in and see her.”

“I’ll get to it,” Francis said, and he continued to stare.

“I’ll tell the others you’re here,” Molly said and she went toward the back stairs.

“How’d you find out?” Peter asked.

Francis broke his stare and looked at Peter. “I was in a lunchroom down in Hudson. Been stayin’ down there all fall, pickin’ apples, fixin’ up trucks for the owner, and
this fella next to me gets up and leaves the Albany newspaper. I never do read a damn newspaper, but I pick this one up and turn the page and there’s the obit. I look at it and I figure right
off this fella left that paper so’s I could see that, and I say to myself, Francis; maybe it’s time to go back and see people, and I took the next train that come by.”

Francis turned back toward the coffin and Peter read the look on his face: The bitch is dead . . . lower away. Francis’s honesty in the teeth of unpleasant truth was galling to Peter;
always had been. Hypocrisy is a sometime virtue, but then again fraudulence can stifle, even smother. Hadn’t Peter’s stifling of his own anger cost him years of bondage to this woman,
this house?

“What’s goin’ through your head?” Peter asked.

“I was just thinkin’ how much she missed by bein’ the way she was,” Francis said. “She didn’t really know nothin’ about how to live.”

“Of course you’re the expert on that,” Peter said. “You’re a walking example.”

Francis nodded, looked down at his ragged attire, his shoes with even the uppers falling apart.

“Ain’t sayin’ I ever figured out how it was done, but I still know more’n she did. I got nothin’ against her anymore. She done what she hadda do all her life, and
somethin’ gotta be said for that. I just never bought it, and neither did you.”

“Things got better when I moved to New York,” Peter said.

“That’s what I mean,” Francis said. He looked again at his mother, nodded once, that’s that, then turned his back to her.

Molly came in carrying two of the six flower baskets from the front hall. She set them on the floor near the head of the coffin.

“Everybody’ll be right down,” Molly said.

“Who’s everybody?” said Francis.

“Sarah and Tommy and Chick. They’re all home. Tommy’s a bit confused.”

“That figures,” said Francis.

Francis saw me edge into the room and sit in an empty chair. “Who’s the kid?” he asked.