Very Old Bones (14 page)

“That’s the boy,” said Peter. “I mean the son of my landlady. Orson, say hello to a brother of mine, Francis.”

“How do you do, sir,” I said.

“I don’t know how I do sometimes, kid. Nice t’ meet ya.” And Francis shook my hand. He looked at his own hands then. “Can I wash up a bit?” he said, and he
rubbed his palms together. “Kitchen’d be fine. Still where it used to be?”

“Go upstairs, use the bathroom,” Molly said.

“No need,” said Francis, and he moved to the kitchen, shoved his coat sleeves upward and soaped his hands with a bar of tan common soap. Molly watched him from the kitchen doorway,
handed him a towel.

“Have you had lunch?” she asked.

“ ’bout a week ago,” Francis said.

“I’ll set the table,” she said. “There’s cold chicken, and Sarah’s biscuits.”

“Sounds mighty good,” Francis said.

He walked to the dining room to take his old place, his back to the famous china closet, facing the window on the yard where Katrina’s house had stood before it burned. Now only tall brown
stickweeds inhabited the vacant lot where the house had been.

“You’re limping,” Molly said.

“Bumped my leg a few days ago, but it’s gettin’ better.”

“Let me look at it.”

“Nah, it’s fine. Nothin’ to see, just a black-and-blue mark.”

But the leg was more than black and blue. It was a massive infection whose pain had grown, subsided, grown again. Francis had bathed and bandaged it when he could, but the last bandage had come
off during his climb onto the train up from Hudson, and he threw the soiled cloth out the freight-car door after he’d settled in. The wound was a legacy from being hit with a club by a
flophouse bouncer, and what seemed like a trivial gash turned into an ulceration six inches in length with a purplish center, a gouge from which pus oozed, scaly white skin flaked and peeled, and
flesh vanished. Francis now saw the wound as an insurance policy against life. When times got worse, as they seemed to be doing, he would cultivate the pus, the pain, the purplish-white crust of
poison. What’s a little pain when it leads to the significant exit?

He heard steps on the back stairs, turned to see the feet of his brother Tommy, unmistakable canal boats in soiled white work socks, and behind him brother Chick, wearing galluses on a
collarless shirt, a mile-wide smile on his face as he ogled Francis from midstairs.

“Hey, you old bastard,” Chick said. “How you doin’?” Chick came down the final two steps, pushed Tommy aside, grabbed Francis’s hand, threw an arm around his
shoulder, slapped his back. “You old bastard,” Chick said. “Where you been?”

“How you, old Chickie pie? You’re fat as a pregged-up porker.”

“I can’t believe this, Francis, I can’t believe it. We give up on you years ago. Never thought I’d see your mug in this house again.”

“I thought the same thing.”

“Franny? Franny?” Tommy stood at Francis’s elbow, squinting, focusing. “Franny?”

“Tommy. Howsa boy? Eh? Howsa boy, old Tom-Tom?”

“Franny?”

“It’s me, Tom. It’s me. You remember me?”

“Sure I remember, Franny. How’s things, Franny?”

“Things is like they are, Tom boy.” Francis stood and wrapped his arms around Tommy’s shoulders, then kissed him on the cheek. “You old horse’s ass.”

Tommy smiled.

“Horse’s ass. Franny. You shouldn’t call me a horse’s ass.”

“Why not?” Francis said. “Where’d a horse be without his ass? Think about it.”

“Horse’s ass,” said Tommy in a whisper to Molly “Franny called me a horse’s ass.”

Francis parted Tommy’s right cheek and the room glowed with laughter, and the generosity of abuse.

Peter Phelan looked at his brother and saw himself as he wished he’d been but could never be. He saw a man who pursued his own direction freely, even if it led to the
gutter and the grave. Francis was a wreck of a man, a lost soul on a dead-end street, yet in him was no deference to the awful finality of his condition. He did not seem to notice it. Nor did he
defer to anything else, not the dead mother, or the need to spruce up for the family, or Tommy’s softness. And not Peter. Especially not Peter.

“So what’s with you, Fran?” Chick asked. “You gonna hang around or are you gonna disappear again?”

“Couldn’t quite say,” Francis said. “Just came to see the family.”

“Will you see Annie and the children?” Molly asked. “Peg sent flowers, you know. I’m sure she and George and Annie will be coming.”

“Don’t know about that,” Francis said. “Don’t know what tomorrow’ll bring. If I’m here and they come I guess I’ll see them.”

Francis had been gone from Albany since 1916, a fugitive from wife and children after his infant son, Gerald, fell and died while Francis was changing his diaper. But Francis had been gone from
this
family long before that: from the early days of his marriage to Annie Farrell. No, even before that.

Peter watched Francis chew a chicken leg, saw the lineaments of face, the geometry of gesture that had not significantly changed since childhood. The way he wiped his mouth with his knuckle was
the same as when he’d sat in that seat and eaten cold chicken fifty years ago. Nobody ever changes: a truth Peter had embraced with reluctance. Did anybody really
progress
, or was it
illusory? (Wasn’t the illusion of change another opiate of believers? Carrot and stick, keep ’em movin’.) Certainly it was illusory in art. After twenty-one years Peter has a
one-man show whose meaning he fails to comprehend. Perhaps, he concedes, it has no meaning, and I’ll always be viewed as a pygmy among men.

But he can claim credit for having brought the light to Colonie Street. Top that, brother. There is serious merit in bringing the light. The better to see you with,
mon frère.
Peter: the voyeur still, where Francis is concerned; and then Peter called up Francis’s last days as an intimate member of this household. That was in ’98, and Francis was eighteen.
They were at the table, Mama and all the children sitting then where they are now (Mama’s chair empty now), Sarah then sitting where Papa had sat, for she had become Little Mother, that
status her legacy from Papa, who, on his deathbed after the train accident in ’95, grasped her hand and said to all in the room, “I don’t care who gets married as long as Sarah
stays home with her mother.” Sarah was twelve then. And hadn’t she done admirably well what her father asked in the thirty-nine years since his death? Oh hadn’t she?

They were finishing supper that night in ’98 when Francis carried his plate to the kitchen and announced that he had to go over and work for Mrs. Daugherty, painting all her interior
doors, windows, woodwork, two weeks of evening work at least. Francis then went out the back door and over the fence into the Daugherty back yard. Peter remembered the look on his face as he went:
nothing betrayed, no hint that he was off on another mortally sinful expedition into the house of lust.

Lust thrives in the summertime. “Outdoor fucking weather,” is how Peter heard Francis phrase it one day in front of Lenahan’s grocery with half a dozen other boys, all
Peter’s elders. Peter did not think Francis had ever experienced any full-scale fucking, outdoors or in. Francis wouldn’t risk that, Peter reasoned, wouldn’t chance the damnation
of his immortal soul for all eternity for the sake of “getting his end wet,” another indelible phrase out of Francis. But Peter had gone through his childhood underestimating Francis,
misjudging what he would and wouldn’t do. Also Peter perceived in Katrina Daugherty a sensual streak possessed by no other woman he had ever known, loved her face and her hair and her body
(body so perfectly designed with the proper arcs and upheavals, body he tried to imagine naked so he could draw it and possess its replica long before he’d ever given a thought to a career as
an artist).

And so he waited until summer darkness enveloped Colonie Street, then left the baseball field, where after-supper sport was winding down, and fled across gulley and yard to the apple tree whose
upper branches gave sanctuary and vantage to a voyeur seeking to verify the secrets of life and lust among the Daughertys. He had once watched Katrina and her husband, who were unaware that the
trees had eyes, half disrobe each other, then walk all but naked up the stairs and out of his sight.

For the past three nights he had watched Katrina alone, or Katrina following Francis around the house, sitting by him while he painted, talking, always talking, never touching or kissing or
disrobing, nothing; in sum, that would hold truly serious interest for a spy. But his reading of Francis—that this formidable brother would not be spending his nights painting if all that it
availed him was money; that he had to have another motive to keep him from the baseball games that went on three blocks away every night of the summer that was not ruined by rain—kept the spy
twined among the branches of the apple tree, waiting for the inevitable.

When it came Peter was not expecting its suddenness, even less so what came with it. His eye found Francis on a ladder, painting the window molding in an upstairs bedroom, saw Katrina’s
silhouette in the next room, visible through translucent curtains and moving with a purpose he could not define, saw her then with full clarity when she entered the room where Francis was, this
room curtainless to receive the new paint.

Peter was close enough to throw an apple and hit Francis on the ladder, yet was certain he was concealed by the lush leafing of the tree, certain also that on this moonless night his profound
purpose was served: the cultivation of an internal excitement like nothing he had ever known. The excitement came not only when he saw Francis and Katrina together (even if they only talked), but
more so when she was wandering through the house and talking to herself, or reading a book as she walked, which, irrationally, excited him most: knowing she was oblivious of him and even of her
present moment, seeing her transported as much by a book as he was by her solitary grace.

She came to the window, wrapped in a yellow robe, and with a matching ribbon holding her hair at the back of her neck, and looked out at the night, at Peter, seeing only shadows, and the lights
next door, seeing nowhere near as much as Peter could see with his night eyes. She stood by the window and spoke (to him, he tried to believe), said clearly, “For thou alone, like virtue and
truth, art best in nakedness . . .

“Francis,” she then said.

“Yes, Katrina.”

“Thy virgin’s girdle now untie . . .”

“What’s that, ma’am?”

And she undid the cloth rope that bound her robe about her waist, opened the robe and then let it fall, then undid her ribbon so that her hair fell loose on her shoulders, and Peter for the
first time saw her perfect nakedness, thinking: this can’t be a dream, this must not be a dream, and then she turned her back to him and presented herself to Francis. The branches of the tree
moved and Peter looked down in a fit of fright to see Sarah climbing toward him.

“I’ve been watching you,” she whispered. “What are you looking at?”

“Shhhhh,” said Peter, for Sarah’s whisper rang through the night like the bells of St. Joseph’s Church, and he was sure the naked woman had heard.

But she had not. Katrina pursued her plan, embracing Francis about the knees as he stood on the ladder. Sarah, agile as a monkey, was now beside Peter in the crotch of a branch, and so he could
not look at what his eyes wanted so desperately to see. But Sarah could look, staring with her usual inquisition at her brother and the naked Katrina, and so Peter rejoined the vision, watching her
take her arms from around Francis’s legs and stare up at him as he came down the ladder, then (Sarah unable to restrain a gasp) seeing him kiss her and embrace her naked body. Sarah climbed
down the tree then with greater speed than she had climbed up it. She ran off, not toward home but rather, Peter would later learn, toward the church, to seek out the priest and confess in the
parish house what she had seen, confessing not her own sin but Francis’s, as if his sin were
her
damnation as well as his own.

Peter did not leave the tree and knew Sarah would fault him for this; but he was fearful that this might be his only chance for years to come to witness what it was that people did to each other
when they were naked. He saw Katrina unbutton Francis’s shirt, then unbuckle his belt, saw her walk again to the window to show her full self to Peter, lean over and pick up her robe and then
spread it on the floor, lie on it on her back as Francis, now naked, stood over her, then knelt astraddle her, then finally leaned his full self forward and on top of her into a prolonged kiss.

And thus did Peter Phelan, age eleven, witness with the eye of an artist-to-be the rubrics of profane love. He knew too, for the first time, a nocturnal emission that was not the involuntary
product of his dreams; and when that happened to him he began the careful, soundless climb down from the tree, shamed by his spying and the wetness of his underwear (more afraid now of having to
explain that wetness than of having to give good reason for peering at people from a tree), and regretting even as his feet touched the ground that he had not continued to watch until there was
nothing more to see. He thought of his brother as a figure of awesome courage and achievement—courting damnation by conquering the body of the most beautiful woman in the world—but he
also sensed, even in the callowness of his newborn pubescence, that, however much he admired Francis, he would never be able to forgive him for doing this before his eyes. Never.

Sarah had been watching Peter for two days before she decided to follow him to the apple tree. She had seen the oddness of his behavior, erratic, skulking in places he had no
reason to be (such as the back yard, looking over the Daugherty fence), and in time she put it together as Peter’s secret mission. He was, after all, only a child. But what the child led her
to was the shock of her life.

In the infinite judicial wisdom of her Little Motherhood, Sarah, now fifteen, called a meeting of the witnesses and the accused in order to define the future. Clearly capital punishment for
Francis was what the heavens screamed aloud for; but Sarah was no vessel for that. All she could do was elevate sin to communal knowledge, spoken of openly in the presence of the sinner (sinners,
to be sure, for Peter was not without culpability). So she summoned them to the front steps of St. Joseph’s and, wearing the mantilla that the old Spanish nun had given her in school as a
prize for her essay on chastity (“the virtue without which even good works are dead”), Sarah defined the terms under which she would allow her brothers to continue living in the same
house with her and her mother, and the sainted moron Tommy, and the hapless Chick, and the good sisters, Molly and Julia (who, Sarah knew, had chastity problems of their own, but she chose not to
raise them here), and the terms were these: That Francis would confess that he had been living in the occasion of sin by working for Mrs. Daugherty, whose behavior we must somehow reveal without
being vulgar. We can never tell our mother that you put your hands on her naked body, how could you do such an awful thing?