Very Old Bones (2 page)

“Are you going to have coffee, Orson?” he called out from his room. In other words, are you going to make my breakfast?

“I am,” I said. “Couple of minutes.” And I snapped on the light and sat up from the bed, naked, sweating in the grotesque heat of the morning. I put on a light robe and
slippers and went down the front stairs and retrieved the morning
Times-Union
from the front porch. Eisenhower sending marines into Lebanon for mid-east crisis. Thunderstorms expected today.
Rockefeller front runner for Republican nomination for Governor.

I put the paper on the dining-room table, filled the percolator, put out coffee cups and bread plates, and began plotting the day ahead, a day of significance to the family that had occupied
this house since the last century. We would be gathering, the surviving Phelans and I, at the request of Peter, who was obeying a patriarchal whim that he hoped would redirect everybody’s
life. My principal unfinished task, apart from ridding the house of clutter, was to inveigle my cousin Billy to attend the gathering here, a place he loathed.

I first came here in 1934 for a funeral. Peter passed me off as the son of his landlady, Claire Purcell (which I was and am), whom he had never brought to this house even for tea, though he had
been living with her then in Greenwich Village for more than fifteen years. I liked Albany, liked the relatives, especially my Aunt Molly, who became my nurse after I went crazy for the second
time, and I liked Billy, who always tried to tell the truth about himself, a dangerous but admirable trait. I went to college in Albany before and after the war and came here for dinner now and
again, slowly getting to know this ancestral place and its inhabitants: the Phelans and the McIlhennys, their loves, their work, their disasters.

I came to see how disaster does not always enter the house with thunder, high winds, and a splitting of the earth. Sometimes it burrows under the foundation and, like a field mouse on tiptoe,
and at its own deliberate speed, gnaws away the entire substructure. One needs time to see this happening, of course, and eventually I had plenty of that.

Colonie Street in Arbor Hill was the neighborhood where these people had implanted their lives in the last century. The first Phelans arrived from Ireland in the 1820s to finish digging the Erie
Canal and by mid-century were laborers, lumbermen, railroad men, and homemakers of modestly expanding means. The McIlhennys came in the late 1870s, poor as turkeys and twice as wild.

Michael Phelan inherited twenty-one thousand dollars upon the death of his father, a junior partner in a lumber mill, and in 1879 Michael built this house for his bride, Kathryn McIlhenny,
creating what then seemed a landmark mansion (it was hardly that) on a nearly empty block: two parlors, a dining room, and seven bedrooms, those bedrooms an anticipatory act of notable faith and
irony, for, after several years of marriage, Kathryn began behaving like an all-but-frigid woman. In spite of this, the pair filled the bedrooms with four sons and three daughters, the seven coming
to represent, in my mind, Michael Phelan’s warm-blooded perseverance in the embrace of ice.

The siblings were Peter and Molly; the long-absent Francis; the elder sister, Sarah; the dead sister, Julia; the failed priest, Chick; and the holy moron, Tommy. Peter had fled the house in the
spring of 1913, vowing never to live here again. But the family insinuated itself back into his life after a death in the family, and he came home to care for the remnant kin, Molly and Tommy.

Peter’s pencil sketches of his parents and siblings (but none of his putative son) populated the walls of the downstairs rooms in places Peter thought appropriate: Francis in his baseball
uniform when he played for Washington, hanging beside the china closet, the scene of a major crisis in his life; Julia in her bathing costume, standing in the ankle-deep ocean at Atlantic City,
where her mother took her to spend two months of the summer of 1909, hoping to hasten her recovery from rheumatic fever with sea air, this sketch hanging over the player piano; Sarah, without
pince-nez, in high-necked white blouse, looking not pretty, for that wasn’t possible for the willfully plain Sarah, but with an appealing benevolence that Peter saw in her, this sketch
hanging on the east wall of the front parlor, close to the bric-a-brac Sarah had accumulated through the years, the only non-practical gifts the family ever gave her; for her horizon of pleasure in
anything but the pragmatic was extremely limited. Molly hung in the back parlor also, with one foot on the running board of her new 1937 Dodge, looking very avant-garde for that year.

Peter sketched Chick at sixteen, in the black suit, Panama hat, and priestly collar he wore in the seminary, and hung the sketch in the front hallway, next to the autographed photo of Bishop T.
M. A. Burke, former pastor of St. Joseph’s, whose sermon in 1900, on the fortieth anniversary of the church, inspired the fourteen-year-old Chick to devote his already pious life unreservedly
to God. The parental sketches hung between the two windows of the dining room: Kathryn in the laundry of St. Peter’s Hospital on Broadway, which she worked in as a girl, then supervised for
three years until the birth of Peter, after which she never worked; and Michael in his coveralls, at trackside with his gandy dancers, and with the same engine that killed him sitting benignly on
the tracks behind him.

Only Tommy’s sketch was upstairs (Peter did numerous self-portraits but hung none of them), hanging in his old room, which I occupied when I moved in to take care of Peter. Tommy is
moon-faced and young and has already gone bald in the sketch, and his mouth is screwed rightward in a smile that makes him look both happy and brainless at the same time. Sarah was Tommy’s
caretaker, and though Tommy went to work every day as a sweeper in the North Albany (water) Filtration Plant, a major achievement in coherence for Tom, Sarah viewed it otherwise. She had a theme:
“Oh God let me outlive Tommy, for he can’t survive alone.” But then she died and Tommy didn’t, and Peter became his brother’s keeper.

This was in the fall of 1954 and Peter was nearly destitute, a recurring condition; and so he welcomed a place to live rent-free. He moved up from Greenwich Village and settled back into the
homestead. His old bedroom fronted on Colonie Street and, because its three bay windows offered the best light in the house, he turned it into his studio. He took down all the drapes, curtains, and
dark green shades with which his mother and Sarah had kept out the light of the world for so long, and by so doing he let in not only the sunshine but also the nonplussed gazes of Arbor Hill
rubbernecks who went out of their way to watch crazy old Peter Phelan, artist without a shirt, standing morning and afternoon with his expansive back to the open windows, forever dabbing paint onto
his great canvases. Not like it used to be, the Phelan place.

When I moved into Tommy’s room I swept out the cobwebs and dingbats, took off the old Tommy bedclothes, heavy with dust, and discovered the Tommy treasure under the bed: dozens of packages
just as they’d been when he’d bought them at Whitney’s and Myers’ and other Downtown stores where he spent his wages. I opened one box and found white kid gloves, size four,
petite, lovely, brand new in white tissue paper; opened another and found a beige slip with lace bodice; opened a third, a fourth, found pink panties, a pink brassiere.

“He gave them away to ladies,” Peter told me. “He did that all his life until he ran out of ladies.”

Did you buy on spec, Tom, you old dog? Did you then walk the town till you found the hand, the bodice, the thighs that fit the garment?

—Excuse me, ma’am, but I bought you a little gift.

—A gift, for me? Who are you? I don’t know you.

—That’s all right, ma’am, you don’t have to know me.

And you tip your cap and move on, leaving the woman holding the bra.

“The three Foley sisters up the street,” Peter said. “They were his ladies before the war.” And I tried to imagine what they gave Tommy in return for his gifts. Did they
model the garment? Give him a bit of stocking, a bit of white thigh? Could he have handled more? Whatever the Foley sights, they were not unfamiliar sights to many men in Arbor Hill, or so Peter
said. But then one day Tommy’s Tommy-love went unrequited by all Foleys—the sap bereft—and the gifts piled up under the bed.

I began to create this memoir five years ago among the pines and hemlocks of a summer hotel on the shore of Saratoga Lake, not knowing what its design would be. It began as a
work of memory, passed through stages of fantasy, and emerged, I hope, as an act of the imagination. Freud wrote of imaginative artists that they could, through artistic illusion, produce emotional
effects that seemed real, and so, he said, they could justly be compared to magicians.

Never mind art or justice, but I am a bit of a magician, having been exposed to the wisdom of the hand, the innocence of the eye, at an early age: when my mother was an assistant to Manfredo the
Magnificent, a mediocre illusionist in the age of vaudeville. But I also learned magic by studying Peter Phelan, for, while Manfredo played tricks on the gullible, fantasy-ridden public, Peter
pursued freedom from cheap illusion and untrustworthy instincts by trying for a lifetime to find magic in what was real in the world and in his heart, ultimately reaching a depth of the self that
others rarely achieve. I tried this myself, went through my theatrical double breakdowns in Germany and Manhattan in the process, and have now produced this cautionary tale of diseased
self-contemplation—my own and others’.

I’ve often used my talent as a magician, that is as a card manipulator, to entertain, but only rarely for personal gain. The first time I did that I was finishing my bachelor’s
degree at Albany State after the war and found myself welcome at the tables of Fobie McManus’s blackout poker game on Sheridan Avenue.

Fobie was a mean-spirited erstwhile burglar who ran a saloon that catered chiefly to newspaper people. He furnished them with drink and warmth until closing, then offered them the solace of
dollar-limit poker until dawn. I was working weekends as a nightside rewrite man on the
Times-Union
, trying to pay my tuition. But the wages were puny and I would’ve quit if I
hadn’t discovered Fobie’s game.

It was peopled with printers, reporters, and copy editors who fancied themselves gamesters of a high order. But there was only one minor-league thief (he hid cards) among them, a few anal
retentives who nurtured their secret straights with confessional glee, and an assortment of barflies whose beer intake spurred them to ever greater mismanagement of their hands.

I was light-years beyond them all in handling both the deck and myself, for I had learned from Manfredo that a magician is also an actor; and so I considered my financial gain from those
ink-stained wretches to be fair exchange for a thespian’s risky performance. Some nights I chose to lose heavily at the outset, though good luck would usually stalk my later play. On
occasions I might even drop thirty dollars on the night to prove my vulnerability, but by so doing was then free at the next sitting to fleece again those good- and well-tempered suckers. Thus did
I move ever closer to my degree in education.

I interrupted my college career to enlist in the army in 1942, when I turned eighteen, gained a lieutenancy, and in ’44 I landed at Normandy with replacement troops after the heroes and
martyrs had taken the high ground as well as the beach. I was seldom in danger from then on but could not let go of the universal fantasy that death was a land mine ten steps ahead. I walked the
wrong way to die, it turned out, and after the war I went back to Albany to finish my degree in three years instead of four. After graduation, instead of teaching, I found a job with the Manhattan
publishing house where my father had worked as an illustrator.

Idiotically, I’d stayed in the reserve after the war, so when Korea erupted I turned into a retread. We started at Fort Benning, creating an infantry division from scratch. The Captain who
had been assigned to establish the Public Information Office, the division’s press section, liked my record: precocious scholar, sometime newsman, editor of books, working on a book of my
own, and, on top of it all, a line officer in the big war. What can I say?

We went to Germany instead of Korea, the first troops to go back to Europe since the war, and we headquartered in the Drake
Kaserne
, a comfortable old Nazi Wehrmacht barracks outside
Frankfurt, which brings me to Giselle, my somewhat excruciating wife, and the cause of my using my talent with cards for the second time in my life to enhance my net worth.

The enlisted men of our PIO section were throwing a Christmas party that year (it was 1951) and invited the Captain and me to stop by for a bit of wassail. I was already there when the Captain
arrived with this remarkable beauty on his arm. They’d have a drink, then go to dinner; that was their plan. The men had hired a belly dancer named Eva to elevate the lust factor at the party
and she was dancing when the Captain and Giselle arrived. The troops were yelling at Eva to remove garments, but she wouldn’t even lower a strap. She did a few extra bumps, but that
didn’t cut the mustard with the boys, and half a dozen of them backed her into a corner. Because of who knows what reason, Giselle spoke up.

“Leave her alone,” she said. “I’ll take over.”

The Captain looked stricken as Giselle picked up a high stool from a corner and carried it to the center of the room. All eyes went to her as she sat on the stool with her hands in her lap,
evaluating her audience. Then she undid the two top burtons of her blouse, revealing a contour—the quartering of a small moon. She lifted one leg, pointed her toe, her instep arched inside
her elegant black pump, the heel of her other shoe hooked over the stool’s bottom rung. One up, one down. The upward motion of her right leg moved her skirt a bit above the knee. She swept
the room with her eyes, engaging everyone like a seductive angel: madonna of the high perch.