Very Old Bones (26 page)

“Orson was gone two more nights before we found him. Peter had the idea to call Walker Pettijohn, Orson’s editor, who suggested looking in Meriwether
Macbeth’s apartment. He said Orson sometimes worked there among Macbeth’s papers that Macbeth’s widow still kept intact, though she no longer lived there. And Orson was there all
right, and as close to death as he ever will be until his time comes. He was in an alcoholic coma, five whiskey bottles, all empty, strewn around the room. Peter lifted him up and slapped his face
but he didn’t come to, didn’t react at all. Death in life. And if he did live he wouldn’t remember anything of this moment. I went out to a pay phone and called the
ambulance.”

“It was sad that the bird died. I cried so hard. But I’ve been grateful to it ever since, because that’s how I met Walter. The cedar waxwing introduced us.
Walter picked the dead bird up and took it into the hotel and wrapped it in a handkerchief and put it on ice and we called around till we found a place, down home in Albany, that stuffed birds. We
drove down together and gave the waxwing to the little man, who said he’d never stuffed such a small bird before, usually folks only stuff the big ones they shoot, owls and hawks, or their
pet parrots. I still have the bird. I always bring it when I come up here.”

“Who is Walter?”

“Walter Mangan, my husband. He taught Latin in a boys’ high school. He died in 1937.”

“And you miss him still.”

“We were so in love. Nobody loves you like an Irishman. He read me poetry about the bird.

“I went mad for Orson when we met. He wasn’t like anybody else I’d ever known. He made me laugh and he was smart and he was crazy and I loved it.”

“You sent him home alone.”

“He was sick and I knew he’d get well in New York. I had a chance at a career, and I knew if I had to nurse him and abandon the career I’d hate him. And what kind of marriage
would that turn into?”

“Walter was never sick. You must never leave them alone for long. You would’ve gotten your career.”

“Did you ever leave Walter alone?”

“Did I ever leave Walter alone.”

“Orson left me alone and then he went off to drink himself into oblivion. He stole the world for me, put himself in jeopardy, facing jail, really, and then he went off to
die. I love him so for that.”

“You love that he wanted to die for you?”

“He wanted to die for the
image
of me. He was too crazy to see I was only a bright, immature woman out to save herself, which is really all I knew how to do. He wanted to make me
into a goddess and I helped him, because I loved the idea of such a man, and loved what his love did to me.”

“But the love was a lie.”

“You should have seen us in bed.”

“But you didn’t stay in his bed.”

“No.”

“Did he ever understand how you were leading him on?”

“I wasn’t leading him on. I was trying to be equal to his dream. I’d deceive him again if it meant keeping that love alive.”

“Are you brighter than Orson?”

“Would it make any difference if I was?”

“You know something, but love isn’t what you know.”

“I know everything about love.”

“Walter and I made love in a tent the first time. He set up his pup tent in the woods one night after supper, and went out to stay in it as soon as it got dark. I went
down the back stairs and met him in the spot where we watched the birds, and Walter had a flashlight. We went to his tent and he loved me and made my heart bleed with joy . . . like . . . holy and
blessed Jesus . . . like nothing else. There was never
anything
like that, ever before, in anybody’s life I’d ever heard about. Have you? I’d bleed every night if I knew
we’d both feel like that when we were done. Wouldn’t you?”

“Yes. Maybe.”

“He never came right out and asked me to marry him. We were walking on Pearl Street one day and he says to me, ‘How’d you like to be buried with my people?’ I said
I’d like that just fine. But we didn’t marry then, because I couldn’t. We married when I was able and we took a flat up in the Pine Hills, and I was never happier, ever. A year
passed and Tommy fell crossing a street and broke his wrist, and Sarah got sick and couldn’t cook for Chick and him, so I went back home and ran things till Sarah could get on her feet. But
she couldn’t. The doctor tried everything, but she was so weak she couldn’t get out of bed, and she wouldn’t go to the hospital. Walter got impatient with me after two months of
it, me being with her more than I was with him. And we fought. He said Sarah was faking sickness to keep me there, that she never forgave me for taking his attention away from her that day on the
porch. But I couldn’t believe that. Why would she ever do such a thing? Walter never meant anything to her. There was no sense to it. Walter said I should hire a woman to cook and keep house
for two weeks so we could drive to Virginia to see his brother, and also break in my new car. He’d bought it for me, but I hardly drove it. It just sat in the alley on Colonie Street while I
took care of Sarah. Sarah wouldn’t hear of hiring anybody, wouldn’t allow a woman in the house that wasn’t family, so I didn’t go to Virginia. Walter went with one of his
friends from the school, and the friend fell asleep at the wheel and went over a ravine and they were both killed.”

“Orson didn’t die.”

“He might have.”

“No. He has things to do. With or without me.”

“I fell apart when I heard the news. I couldn’t do anything. Walter’s family took over and had his body shipped home. They were furious with me and none of
his sisters even called me. They sent the undertaker to tell me where the wake would be.”

“I wonder which of us will bury the other.”

“I went in and sat for the last hour of the second night of the wake and never spoke to any of them. They were cool to me, nodded at me when I came in, and one came over
and tried to talk, Lila, the youngest, who I always liked. But I didn’t say much, even to her. I just watched, and then when the undertaker came in to tell us to say good night to Walter,
that he had to close up, I went and told Walter this was not good night, that we were leaving this place. Then I told his sisters, ‘I am the widow. He was my husband. I have my own
undertaker, and he’s right there in the hallway.’ And there was Ben Owens, standing there with three helpers, waiting for me to tell him what to do, and I told the others,
‘I’m taking him to our home, and he’ll wake from there, and I hope none of you try to stop me, because I have a letter my lawyer got me from the courts’—I really
didn’t have a letter; I made that up—‘and if you raise one finger against me I’ll have the police on you. I don’t know what you thought you were doing taking Walter,
but a widow is not without her rights.’ They couldn’t believe it. They thought he was theirs. But he’d left them and married me, that’s what marriage is. And so Ben Owens
put him in the coffin I bought for him and carried him out to the hearse and we went to our house and had the second wake. They didn’t come. They drove behind to make sure where we were
going. They thought I was totally mad, but I was never saner in my life. And I sat up with him all night long and then at five in the morning I called Sarah to tell her what I was doing, that she
could come to the church if she wanted, seven o’clock mass at St. Joseph’s, where we were married. And we had the mass, and Sarah got out of her sickbed and never went back to it, and
Chick and Tommy came with her, and Peter would have too, but it was too short notice. And then we went to the cemetery, with Father Mahar saying the prayers at the grave. Us and Billy and his
mother, and all the Quinns, and a few neighbors who’d heard about it were all the ones that came, but then almost nobody knew what I’d done. His family came to the cemetery and stood
off to one side and nobody talked to them. And then we buried Walter in the Phelan family plot, right next door to where I’ll be buried, not with his people at all. We always had too many
empty graves in our family. We always prepared for death, never for life. So I did that for him anyway.”

Giselle focuses her camera, Molly framed in her lens, the now mythical cedar waxwing cupped in her hands. Molly sits in the first rocker in a line of thirty rockers on the Lake
House veranda, the rocker in the same place as when Molly first saw the waxwing fall from the tree, injured but still alive. The tree is still giving shade to the lawn, although Molly says it has
lost many branches since that day nineteen years ago. Part of the tree is visible in the background of the photo (what is not visible is Tommy in his wheelchair, under the tree) about to be taken
by Giselle, who is trying to record some part of the secret being of this sixty-four-year-old woman her husband loves: his aunt, if you can believe that; and Giselle is looking for a clue to what
has generated this love, and what sort of love it could be, and why she is profoundly jealous of it. After all, the woman is thirty-four years older than Orson, forty years older than Giselle, a
fragile and fading page of history, a woman who purports to know everything knowable about love, although she has probably known only one man and was married to him less than two years, which
isn’t much more than Giselle has been married to Orson; and Giselle has known more than one man, to be sure. Not
so
many more, but more. Giselle sees the family resemblance between
Molly and Orson and Peter and she knows that her jealousy is irrational and that Orson is not about to break any taboos, but on the matter of taboos she also knows that there is the possibility of
her own dalliance with Orson’s father. The man is strong-minded, knows who he is. He’s a talent and Giselle respects that above much else. He’s taken with her as well, which she
saw during the hours they spent looking for Orson in the Village bars and coffeehouses and movie theaters. In a Bleecker Street movie he took her hand, held it, told her, “Don’t worry,
he can’t hide forever, we’ll find him,” and kept holding the hand as they sat in the back row looking over the audience. She had sat in back rows before, holding hands, and it was
just like this, and she did not take her hand away. You carry on with a thing like that and if you’re not careful you’ll cross the line. Sitting beside Peter, she felt she understood
his life as a painter, as a bohemian, for in spite of her bourgeois life she was free in the world (working for
Life
was not working, it was soaring), and she was pursuing her photography
the way he pursued his art. They were kindred, if not kin, as Orson may be with Molly. But there is more between those two than blood. Orson says to Molly from his vantage behind Giselle,
“Look at me, Moll, this way,” and Molly turns her head and when she sees him she looks again at the bird and then at the camera, and the smile is there now and Giselle captures it, that
smile: the soft currency of Molly’s soul.

The things we do when we’re alone, without a perch or a perspective, and when there is no light in the corner where we’ve been put. The things we do.

When I left Giselle at the Plaza, I walked the streets until I came to Meriwether Macbeth’s corner. Then I went upstairs and sat in Meriwether’s darkness and drank myself to sleep
with whiskey. I awoke to dismal day and assayed the work I had previously done on Meriwether’s jottings and tittlings, then set about the task of concluding it as Walker Pettijohn had
suggested: expanding the jots, fattening the tittles. I read and culled for two days and two nights, breaking stride only to forage for an editorial survival kit: two sandwiches and three more
bottles of whiskey. I decided I was done with the editing when only half a bottle of whiskey remained, and I knew then I had an excellent chance of dying of malnutrition, darkness, and Macbethic
bathos. I wrote Pettijohn a note, told him to give to Giselle all money due me for this editing, and also to give the manuscript of my novel to the Salvation Army for public auction, any money
realized from its sale to be used to purchase ashes, those ashes to be given free of charge to unpublished authors, who will know how to use them. Then I drank myself quiet.

Giselle is jealous of Molly. The attention she shows me in Molly’s presence is different from the attention she shows me when we are alone. Giselle is always smarter than
I judge her to be, no matter how smart I judge her to be. It doesn’t really matter that she is jealous of Molly, though it’s a change for both of us. It truly does matter that I love
Molly.

A full day had passed before I realized that it was Giselle and Peter who had found me in my alcoholic coma. I opened a sobering eye to see her standing over my hospital bed, a
tube dripping unknown fluid into my arm, my body in original trouble: nothing like this sort of pain ever before.

“You’re still alive, Orson,” was her first sentence.

“That’s not my fault,” I said.

“You idiotic bastard,” she said. “It’s one thing to be crazy, but it’s another thing to be dead.”

“Don’t call me a bastard,” I said, and I lapsed willfully into a coma-like sleep for two more hours. Giselle was still there when I again surfaced.

“You’re getting better,” she told me. “We’re taking you to Albany. You obviously can’t live in this city.”

“Are you coming with me?”

“Yes,” said Giselle.

And I slept then, sweetly, ignorantly

I put undeservedly great faith in hollow objects. What is the purpose of this?

I thought of the Grand View Lake House, which was at the edge of hollowness; all but empty of significance; “dead” would soon be another viable adjective. But it would not
really
die as long as the Shugrues stayed alive, and the loyal handfuls kept coming in season in enough numbers to cover expenses; and it would not die as long as I moved through its
hollowness as helpful artisan, wood-cutter, sweeper of leaves and dead rats, scraper of paint, mower of lawns, outwitter of raccoons, magus of empty rooms.