Very Old Bones (27 page)

The Phelans had been coming to the Grand View for more than half a century. Pat Shugrue had worked with Michael Phelan on the New York Central, but quit in ’91 to build three cottages on
the shore of Saratoga Lake. Michael took his brood of seven (Tommy, the youngest, was one; Francis, the eldest, was twelve) to one of the cottages (three bedrooms) for a week the following summer,
the first annual Phelan Saratoga vacation. When Shugrue upgraded the cottages to a Lake House, the Phelans were there for that first season.

The Phelan boys grew up with Pat Shugrue’s son, Willie, who inherited the hotel and added two wings when Pat and Nora phased themselves out; grew up also with Willie’s wife, Alice,
who at first supervised the cooking at the Lake House in the late 1930s, but by the early ’40s was the organized brain behind the business. Alice was also Molly’s closest friend, ever
since their days at St. Joseph’s Industrial School, where Catholic girls from Arbor Hill learned cookery and needlework.

Giselle brought me to Albany in early April, 1953, stayed two nights with me in the Phelan house, and in that time revealed such a restlessness that I insisted she go back to her career.
“You weren’t put here on earth to be a nurse,” I told her, “nor could I abide watching you try to become one against your will.”

It fell to Molly to oversee my reentry into the human race. An instrument of angelical mercy, she soothed my psychic wounds with gentleness, brought me food and the newspapers, told me stories
of her life, convinced me I could trust her with my troubles.

But Molly perceived, as others in the family did not, that my recovery was static; that to recover fully I needed more than this household could offer; and it was she who in the late summer of
that year called Alice Shugrue and asked whether she could use me at the hotel, provided I worked for my keep. She said I’d been raised by Peter (the Phelan handyman) and could do carpentry,
plumbing, electrical work, and more; that I needed no wages, only a place to stay and something to do with my hands.

And so now, October, 1954, a year and months after that salvational intercession by Molly, something new can begin. The nights are beyond autumn, and beyond even that by the
woods on the lake-shore, cold into the marrow, the morrow, reading
Finnegan
, yes,
carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair!
And then doesn’t the kerosene for
the heater vanish entirely from the world? It does. Himself alone with that book and his own book, a writer and a woodsbee, a man in a manner of wondering, what manner of wondering man is this? A
man in love with his wife and his-aunt-your-sister, tadomine. Of all love there is, this has been the most strange, leaving nothing undesired, nothing sired, the lover bald to the world, no heir.
Was ever a family so sonless, so cold, dark, and bereft of a future as these fallow Phelan
fils?

I was used to being alone here in the cottage, relieved to discover that one did not wither in such solitude; that it really could be a nurturing force. What I did not expect was this onset of
winterish night without heat. I put on my overcoat, muffler, hat, and one glove, the other hand free to turn the pages, and I kept reading, ranging now through the book’s final pages, the
glorious monologue of Anna Livia Plurabelle:
Why I’m all these years within years in soffran, allbeleaved. To hide away the tear, the parted. It’s thinking of all. The brave that
gave their. The fair that wore. All them that’s gunne. I’ll begin again in a jiffey. The nik of a nad. How glad you’ll be I waked you! My! How well you’ll feel! For ever
after.

Words alone, language alone, not always penetrable (like women with their mysteries; and how they do fill this life with spectacle and wonder), now filling the reader-and-writer with
infeasible particulars, always the great challenge, is it not, to fease the particules and not malfease? Giselle was gone again, yet again, but in transition to something other than what she once
was; and who knew how that would come out?

“I’ll be up next weekend,” she told me.

“That soon?”

“I like it up here.”

“Not much action.”

“I’m saturated with action,” she said. “I like the calm of this place. I want to photograph it, and Saratoga too.”

So, you see, that’s a change in Giselle. I make no plans on the basis of it, however. Giselle is as mercurial as the early autumn in Saratoga: sunlit day become gelid night. Apart, we move
together slowly into the future. But since coming here I do perceive a future, with or without the woman. Molly did this; brought me to see Alice and Willie Shugrue, Alice a tightly wrapped Irish
whirlwind who holds the hotel together by dint of will and want: wanting nothing but this place now, living in the South Cottage with the rheumatoid Willie, a waning wisp of a fellow who can no
longer afford artisans to stave off the decay of the buildings, can no longer climb a ladder himself. And all the while your man lives in the North Cottage, reading, learning to write, learning how
to be alone. And out our windows we all watch the Lake House begin its struggle through yet another winter, and we wonder: Is this the year it collapses of its own hollowness?

When I first came to live at the Lake House in 1953, Molly drove me with my baggage, helped settle me into the cottage, helped Alice Shugrue cook dinner for us all, and when
Molly was leaving to go home she presented me with forty ten-dollar gold pieces to help finance my life while I waited for my survival advance from Walker Pettijohn. My manipulation of the
Meriwether papers had pleased Pettijohn so much that when he learned I was neither dead nor dying he turned me loose to edit the fustian out of a pop-scholarly study of the love theories of
Lucretius, Ovid, and Henry Miller.

The gift of gold from Molly was a stunning surprise, not least because it was gold, but also, as I would discover, because she had been hoarding it for two and a half decades, giving it away,
five dollars at a time, to relatives and select friends on special occasions.

The August racing meet had ended at the Saratoga track, and most of the Lake House’s last guests had gone home, except for a few couples who would stay through Labor Day; and so Molly
really didn’t go home that night. She decided to stay overnight when the Shugrues and I suggested it. This was when I first heard the story of the cedar waxwing, and Walter’s sudden
courtship of Molly on that late-summer day in 1935.

I’d been here once before, in the early 1940s, on a long weekend with Peter and Danny Quinn, and knew the place somewhat. But Molly now gave me her own private tour of the grounds and
buildings, each weighted with memory

“Right here,” she said of an area now grown over, “was the clock golf that Walter and I had played every day. Here’s where we played croquet and once I beat him.
Here’s the path into the bird sanctuary where we used to meet. There’s the boat house where he first kissed me, and there’s the barn that was our dance hall, isn’t it
wonderful? And because it’s so away from the hotel we could play our music all night long if we wanted to, and nobody would yell at us for keeping them awake.”

The barn had been a cow barn, sturdily converted to a weatherproof building in the early 1930s. It was a cavernous place with exposed beams, its never-painted dance floor now a challenge because
of warped boards. The barn was redolent of raw wood and of the pine groves that bordered it outside, and Molly said it was the purest odor she ever knew, that it always turned her memory to those
summer days with Walter; that in eighteen years this perfume of love never changed. The place is really just like it always was, she said, the phonograph still there on its table, and the old
records (hundreds loose on shelves and in albums), some so old even I remember playing them on the wind-up Victrola. Some were cracked from careless use, but the Shugrues never threw any away, for
this music was as much a part of the history of the place as their guest register. You expected the same records to be there, year after year, even the cracked ones.

Molly took down a pile of them, all scratched, no envelopes to protect them, shuffled through them, and found one. “Here,” she said, and gave it to me to put on the turntable:
“When I Grow Too Old to Dream,” by Ray Noble and his orchestra, a waltz. And we sat then in two of the chairs that lined the barn’s walls, and we listened to it all through. Then
Molly said, “Put it on again and we’ll waltz,” and so we did. Step, slide, pivot, reverse.

“It was like this,” she said. “Even when others were here watching, it didn’t matter. We were alone in each other’s arms and just with the holding we made our pact
of love.”

Step, slide, pivot, reverse, my hand on Molly’s back, her full breasts against me, our thighs touching through her dress and my trousers as we spun around the floor, she so young, and I so
beyond age of any number, just keepers of love in our arms, we creating love with our presence, my cheek against hers, her hair touching my eyes. When the music stopped I started it again, and we
heard the scratchings and skips of the song and we danced to that too, and then I replayed it again, yet again, and neither of us said anything, nor did we fully let go of one another while I moved
the needle back to the beginning. Her hair, its yellow all but gone into gray, was what Giselle’s would be like years from now, her body in its age fuller than Giselle’s.

“Do you love her very much still?” Molly asked.

“I do. As you still love Walter.”

“We are serious people about our love.”

“We love. It’s what we do.”

And then I kissed her as one kisses one’s love, a long kiss, and then I stopped and we held each other, neither of us there, of course, both of us looking at love, of course. And it looks
alike sometimes.

I turn the page and I find:
But you’re changing, acoolsha, you’re changing from me, I can feel . . . Yes, you’re changing, sonhusband, and you’re
turning, I can feel you, for a daughterwife from the hills again . . . I pity your oldself I was used to. Now a younger’s there. Try not to part! . . . For she’ll be sweet for you as I
was sweet when I came down out of me mother. My great blue bedroom, the air so quiet, scarce a cloud. In peace and silence. I could have stayed up there for always only. It’s something fails
us. First we feel. Then we fall.

“We’ll go make a fire,” Molly said, “and I’ll tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

“I’ll tell you about me.”

I shut off the phonograph and Molly took my arm and we walked to the main entrance of the hotel, up the stairs, and into the main parlor with yesterday’s rustic furniture and scatter rugs
and shelves of forgotten books and the great stone fireplace and its stack of wood and old newspapers, and no people but us two, the other guests all in bed. I moved the screen of the fireplace and
built the fire. Molly knew where to find the matches and then we sat on the sofa and watched the fire grow, me keeping my distance from her, yet close, close, and we looked at one another and we
smiled at what we saw. I had to touch her face, and then her hair, and then her neck, and I had to let my hand move down to her breast and I touched that, and she said, “Yes, do that,”
and I felt the softness and the fullness with just that one hand. She touched my face and ran her fingers through my hair, kissed me with the fullness of her mouth, then took my hand and put it
back in my lap.

“We must find a way not to be naughty,” she said.

And I read this:
I’ll close me eyes. So not to see. Or see only a youth in his florizel, a boy in innocence, peeling a twig, a child beside a weenywhite steed. The
child we all love to place our hope in for ever.

“Walter and I made love every day for a week, sometimes twice a day,” Molly said. “The family hardly saw me and they knew, though they didn’t know
exactly what they knew. Sarah hated it, scolded me every day, warned me, ‘You’ll be sorry,’ but I didn’t care. Then we all went home and love was over for the time being,
though I found ways to meet him. And I did get in the family way. It’d have been a holy miracle if I hadn’t. Me forty-five and him a year older, latecomers both of us to this, but I
never told him. He died without ever knowing. When I was two months in I found ways to stay home, said I was sick and I was. We talked often on the phone and he couldn’t understand why I
wouldn’t see him, and I always told him, ‘I will see you, I will when I can.’ I stopped eating so the weight wouldn’t show, had a ketchup sandwich once in a while, and tea,
and I was weak. Very. Nobody knew. I never let Sarah or my brothers know anything, didn’t even let them see me unless I had a big robe on. And I could never in a million years tell Sarah. She
always said after Tommy was born simple that there shouldn’t be any more Phelan children. That was Mama’s idea, of course. Mama stopped sleeping with Papa after Tommy. No more, no more,
it’s a sign, I know it. We all heard them fighting about it. Did I want the baby? No. Not for Mama’s reason but because I wouldn’t want any man marrying me for that, could never
raise a child alone, and couldn’t ask for help. And so I started to take things to force the birth: medicines, potions, what I’d heard about through the years, pills I saw advertised
once, and I knew I could hurt myself. I knew a girl once took a douche of gin and naphtha to get rid of it and she screamed for two hours, all by herself, until they heard her, and she kept
screaming until she died. I wouldn’t be that foolish. I tightened my corset as much as it went, but I kept growing. And then I called Mrs. Watson, the midwife, and asked her what a woman had
to do if she was alone and the baby came, and she told me. ‘But don’t stay alone,’ she said. ‘Come and see me.’ I doubted I’d be able. I always thought I’d
have it alone. Not a soul in the world I could ask for help. Not a soul.
First we feel. Then we fall.
It was past four months when it came on its own, a boy, and dead. I cut the cord and
mopped the blood when I could, never a scream or a moan out of me, can you believe that? In the night it was. No light till it was over with and I wrapped up the blanket and sheet and the towels
and all, and put the baby in the steel box from the closet shelf, where I kept some valuables, and went down the cellar and buried it. I don’t know where I got the strength to dig the hole.
We don’t know how strong we are, do we? I called the baby Walter Phelan and baptized him with water from the sink in a teacup and he’s down there still, in a far corner of the cellar,
with boxes of horseshoes and jam jars on top of him all these years, God forgive me. You’re the only person in the world knows this. God was with the Phelans, don’t you think? He took
the baby but saved us from scandal and he let me have my love back. I was well in a week and Walter came and took me down to Keeler’s for dinner and I remember he ordered a half-dozen clams
and when they came he started to eat one and at the same time asked me would I marry him right away, not waste another day, and I said I would before the clam got to his mouth. I will marry you a
hundred times, a thousand. And I did.”
I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me?