Very Old Bones (34 page)

In this context, what he had intuited from the Malachi story was the presence of a particular kind of thought, a superstitious atmosphere aswirl with those almost-visible demons and
long-forgotten abstractions of evil—votive bats and sacrificial hags, burning flesh and the bones of tortured babies—the dregs of putrefied religion, the fetid remains of a psychotic
social order, these inheritances so torturous to his imagination that he had to paint them to be rid of them.

He had always rejected as extraneous any pragmatic or moralistic element to art, could not abide a didactic artist. Nevertheless, his work already had an effect on the moral history of the
family, and would continue to do so through the inevitable retellings of the story associated with the paintings; and these retellings would surely provide an enduring antidote to the poison
Malachi had injected into the world. The work would stand also as a corrective to the long-held image of Kathryn in the family’s communal mind.

“As much as we loved her, none of us can undo the two generations’ worth of trouble and anguish she caused,” Peter said, and he quoted Francis as saying long ago, “She
didn’t really know nothin’ about how to live.” Peter agreed there was some truth in this, but he added that Kathryn surely knew how
not
to live under the mad inheritance
that had destroyed Malachi and Lizzie; and that the thing she knew best was denial, the antithesis of Malachi’s indulgent madness. After Malachi, Kathryn had even denied herself the pleasure
that had probably been hers with the conception of Peter (the subsequent children were conceived under duress).

And, by convincing her husband to make the deathbed request to Sarah, she had imposed on the girl the scullery-nunnery existence that made Sarah deny and eventually destroy her own life rather
than admit that lives of sensual pleasure were not only possible, but sometimes eagerly pursued outside the cloistered innocence of this house. She became a mad virgin, Sarah, the dying words of
Michael Phelan her dungeon, the courage of her saintly, sinless mother the second-generational iron maiden of her fate.

No chance at all to rescue Sarah. No bequest for Sarah.

No chance to rescue Tommy either. His spinal injury turned into a plague of unpredictable immobility and, when he went back to his job as a sweeper at the filtration plant, the pain struck him
so severely that he collapsed and rolled into the thirty-five-foot depths of one of the plant’s great filtering pools; and, having been unable to learn to swim any more than he could learn to
think, he drowned, another martyr to the family disease.

And not much of a chance to lure the maverick Chick out of his Floridian indignance and back to the family circle. He telephoned Peter from Miami Beach, acknowledged the bequest, offered lively
thanks for what he said would be his hefty down payment on a sporty inboard motorboat he’d been longing to buy, invited his brother to come down and go ocean fishing, said Evelyn sent her
best, and hung up, maybe forever.

By the time lunch was about to be served, the light rain had become heavy, a storm gaining strength, according to Peg’s reading of the weather story in the
Knickerbocker News.

“It’s going to rain all night, and some places might get floods,” she reported. She was at the table, where Peter had told her to sit. The rest of us were standing half in,
half out of the dining room, waiting for Peter to seat us. Molly was still in the kitchen, organizing the meal.

“The Senators won’t play ball tonight,” Billy said.

“George’s Democratic picnic must be rained out too,” Peg said.

“Democrats like the rain,” Billy said.

“The Irish like the rain,” Peter said. “Three days of sunshine and they start praying for thunderstorms.”

The roast lamb lay in slices on the platter in the center of the table, and on the sideboard the leg itself, on another platter, awaited further surgery. Molly had asked me to carve but before I
could begin Peg suggested Billy do it, for he did it so well. And so he did, and when only half finished he asked Molly, “You got any mint jelly to go with this?”

Molly looked in the pantry and the refrigerator, reported back, “No mint jelly, I’m sorry, Billy.”

“There’s mint jelly in the cellar,” I said, and I took the flashlight, opened the trapdoor, and found dusty jars of mint jelly and strawberry jam.

“Sarah put those up,” Molly said, “after the war. We got the strawberries from Tony Looby’s store, and Sarah grew the mint out in the yard.”

“You certainly know your way around this house,” Peg said to me. “How’d you know they were down there?”

“I was fixing something one day and I saw this stuff.”

“This house would fall apart if it wasn’t for Orson,” Molly said. “He also kept the Lake House from collapsing around its own ears. Orson is a treasure.”

“Just waiting to be dug up and spent,” I said.

“You’ll never be spent, Orson,” Giselle said.

“Oooh-la-la,” said Peg, and everyone looked at Giselle, who smiled at me.

“Orson,” said Peter, “take control of your wife.”

“I would prefer not to,” I said. “I like her the way she is.”

“We’re ready to eat,” said Molly, coming in from the kitchen with the potatoes, hot from the oven.

And then, one by one, we sat where Peter placed us, and we were seven, clockwise: Peter sitting where his father had always sat, in the northernmost chair in the room, the first formal
resumption of the patriarchal seating arrangement since Michael Phelan died in 1895; Giselle next to Peter to have the impending grandchild in the closest possible proximity to the grandfather,
then Roger, Peg, me, Molly in Sarah’s chair (her mother’s before it was hers) nearest the kitchen, and Billy at Peter’s right, completing the circle.

Giselle’s pâté, Camembert, and English biscuits lay in tempting array on the sideboard, forgotten, and alien, really, to the cuisine of this house. But we made ready to devour
Sarah’s mint jelly on Molly’s leg of lamb, with the marvelous gravy made from the drippings, small new peas out of the can, the best kind, potatoes mashed by Peg (she said Billy mashed
them better), bread by Peg out of the Federal, and the two bottles of the rich and robust Haut-Brion 1934 (a momentous year for both the Bordeaux and the Phelans) that the extravagant Giselle had
brought. Peter contributed the saying of grace, which he pronounced as follows: “Dig in now or forever hold your fork.”

I suggest that this luncheon was the consequence of a creative act, an exercise of the imagination made tangible, much the same as the writing of this sentence is an idea made
visible by a memoirist. If Peter brought it about, I here create the record that says it happened. If, through the years, I had been slowly imagining myself acquiring this family, then this was its
moment of realization, and perhaps the redirection of us all.

I think of Peter’s creative act (though I am not so modest as to deny my own contribution to the events) as independent of his art, a form of atonement after contemplating what wreckage
was left in the wake of the behavior of the males in the family: Malachi’s lunacy, Michael’s mindless martyring of Sarah, Francis’s absence of so many years, the imploding Chick,
Peter’s own behavior as son, husband, father: in sum, a pattern of abdication, or flight, or exile, with the women left behind to pick up the pieces of fractured life: a historic woman like
Kathryn, an avant-garde virgin renegade like Molly, a working girl like Peg, and, to confirm this theory with an anomaly, there is the case of Giselle.

“I have to say it,” Roger said. “This is the most unusual lunch I’ve ever been to.”

“Perfectly normal little meal,” Peter said. “Last will and testament with lamb gravy.”

“Those here, we’ve never sat down together like this before, never,” Molly said.

“That’s hard to believe,” said Roger. “You look like such a close family.”

“Get your eyes examined,” Billy said.

“Don’t mind my brother,” Peg said. “He’s a perpetual grump.”

“What this gathering is,” I said, looking at Roger, also at Peg to discover where her eyes went, “is the provisional healing of a very old split in this family.”

“What’s that mean, provisional?” Billy asked.

“For the time being,” I said. “More to come later. Like having the first horse in the daily double.”

“Yeah,” said Billy.

“And it’s about time,” Molly said. “We should have done this years ago.”

“The point is it’s done,” said Peg. “I love you for it, Uncle Peter,” she said, and she blew him a kiss.

“I’m not takin’ the money,” Billy said.

Peter looked my way, caught my eye, chuckled. I’d predicted that Billy would say this.

“Don’t be hasty, now, Billy,” said Peter.

“Don’t be stupid, you mean,” said Peg.

“The hell with stupid,” Billy said. “My father couldn’t live here, I don’t want no money outa here.”

“It’s Francis’s money as much as it’s mine,” Peter said. “I made it in good measure because of him.”

“I showed you those photos,” I said to Billy, “
The Itinerant
series, and you know Francis inspired that. Peter only painted it.” Peter gave me a sharp look.
Nothing worse than an ungrateful child.

“And Malachi’s face is the face of Francis in the new paintings. You’ve seen that for yourself,” Peter said. “And that’s where the money for these bequests
really came from.”

“So you paint his picture? What the hell is that? He wasn’t welcome here and all these years neither were we.”

“I came here plenty of times,” Peg said.

“I didn’t, and neither did he,” Billy said.

“You’re gonna ruin it,” Peg said. “You’ll be like Sarah, spoiling it for everybody else.”

“I ain’t spoilin’ nothin’ wasn’t spoiled years ago,” Billy said.

“Have some mint jelly, Billy,” said Molly. “Sweeten your disposition.”

“I’m sayin’ my father never got nothin’ outa this house and neither did we, and I don’t want nothin’ now.”

“You told me Molly gave you gold on your birthday,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“And she gave me gold too,” Peg said.

“You know where I got that gold, Billy?” Molly asked.

“You never said.”

“You remember Cubby Conroy?”

“I remember his kid, Johnny,” Billy said. “They shot him over highjacked booze and dumped him in the gutter.”

“Cubby was a good friend of your father’s. They grew up together on this block.” Molly paused, looked at Roger. “Mr. Dailey,” she said, “do lawyers keep
secrets?”

“If they don’t, they’re not very good lawyers.”

“I can’t tell my story unless you keep it a secret.”

“I’ll carry it silently to my grave,” Roger said.

“Good,” said Molly. “Cubby Conroy was a bootlegger.”

“Right,” said Billy. “He was also a con man. He and Morrie Berman got badges and flashed them at Legs Diamond and convinced him they were dry agents. They almost copped a
truckload of his booze before he caught on.”

“I did hear that,” Molly said. “And then somebody shot Cubby. Perhaps it was Mr. Diamond, who was upset by what they did.”

“Maybe so. Diamond was like that. But how do you know all this tough stuff?”

Billy was smiling, and I marveled at the way Molly had turned him around so quickly. She was wonderful at human relationships and I loved her.

“Well, you know, don’t you,” Molly said, “that they killed Cubby up in Glens Falls in one of those roadhouses. Then they killed Johnny, and the only one left was Charity,
Cubby’s widow, who had a collapse of some sort, afraid they’d come after her, I suppose, or maybe just living alone and drinking alone. I used to cook her a dinner every day and bring
it over, but it didn’t help much. She got sicker and sicker and one day she told me she had this bootleg money she wanted me to have. All her relatives were dead, she didn’t know where
Cubby’s people were, but wherever they were she hated them, and so the money was mine. I thanked her a whole lot and took it home.”

“Where’d she have it hid?” Billy asked.

“Inside an old mattress in the cellar.”

“How much?”

“Twelve thousand dollars,” Molly said, and we all wheezed our awe.

“She let you take twelve thousand home?” Billy asked.

“She did. I had to make six trips in the car with my suitcase. Maybe seven.”

“Wasn’t she afraid of goin’ broke?” Billy asked.

“She wasn’t broke.”

“How’d you know that?”

“When she died,” Molly said, “I found another fifteen thousand in two overstuffed chairs and a sofa. That took twelve trips.”

We all wheezed anew.

“Twenty-seven grand,” Billy said.

“Very good arithmetic, Billy,” Molly said.

“What’d you do with it?” Roger asked.

“Everything I wanted to do,” Molly said. “I went to Philadelphia for two weeks to visit our cousin and I looked at the Liberty Bell, and I bought curtains for the house, and I
went to Keeler’s twice a month and had oysters and lobster, and I paid for the new oil furnace when the coal furnace cracked in half, and I gave money to special people, and I turned it all
into gold and put it in safe-deposit boxes because I didn’t trust paper money.”

“You have any of it left?” Peter asked.

“If I do will you take back my bequest?”

“Of course not,” said Peter.

“I have nineteen thousand.”

We all looked carefully at Molly now, a woman worth scrutiny, the true and quixotic mistress of this house, the secret financial power behind Sarah’s imperious, penurious throne, the
self-sufficient dowager, ready with the quick fix for family trouble, the four hundred dollars she gave me a case in point.

“You know, Billy,” said Molly, “when your father came home during the war I called and invited him for dinner, lunch, anything, just to get him back in the family. But he hung
up on me and wouldn’t answer my calls.”

“I went to see him at the ball park,” Peter said. “He told me he was too busy to talk to me. He wasn’t a forgiving man, your father. Always difficult.”

“I got along with him,” Billy said. “So did Peg.”

“I’m glad somebody did,” Peter said.

“He gave Billy his old baseball glove,” Peg said.