Very Old Bones

One

When Kathryn Phelan died in her sleep of oblivion on December 9, 1934, her son and my father, Peter, after twenty-one years of part-time exile from his mother’s influence, was at the brink of the success to which his exile had led him. The Greenwich Village gallery that had paid him seventy-five dollars for every painting he created during his first two years in New York, and which doubled that amount after he returned from the Great War, decided that the time for Peter’s elevation into the stratosphere of artistic repute and solvency was at hand, and so its owners gave over all their wall space to an exclusive showing of his work. Peter’s mother would neither know, nor, if she had known, care, whether Peter ever lifted a paintbrush. But her death, and his one-man show, were benchmarks of liberation for this son and erstwhile artist manqué.

Peter moved to the Village in 1913 after a fight with Kathryn and his sister Sarah over the Daugherty family. Until 1912 the Daughertys had lived in the house next door to the Phelan homestead on Colonie Street; but that year the Daugherty house burned and its only occupant of the moment, Katrina Daugherty, died on the sidewalk in her husband’s arms, victim of smoke, anguish, and a prolonged marital emptiness.

One year later, on the anniversary of Katrina’s death, her husband, Edward, an established playwright, would celebrate her by staging the play in which their idyllic marriage and blatant infidelities were dissected. This play, The Flaming Corsage, would run for two nights on the stage of Albany’s premier theater, Harmanus Bleecker Hall, and would be assaulted unto death by critics, and by civil and ecclesiastical authorities, as a menace to the purity of the community. During this fated year the playwright would thus not only lose his wife, and see his lifetime accumulation of papers and unpublished plays incinerated, but would also find his career halted, and his voice silenced at the peak of its eloquence.

Edward Daugherty would recover from this assault, but my father would not, quite. Exposed for a decade and a half to the chorale of vitriol directed against Edward and Katrina Daugherty by his mother and sister—“a family of filth. . an evil man. . a low woman. . a vile slut. . a corrupter of innocents”—Peter at long last counterattacked, defending Katrina, whom he had coveted as long as he could remember, as a splendid woman, whatever her peccadilloes, and the exemplary mother of his closest friend, Martin Daugherty; also defending Edward as a genuine artist and the only real writer Albany had produced in the new century, this latter defense being as much an expression of the passion for art that lay within Peter’s own heart as it was empathy for a friend. Peter stood up from the dining-room table, which gave a view onto the ashes and embers of the Daugherty house, and told his sister she would shrivel from the vinegar in her veins, told his mother she was a wicked-tongued bigot whose poisoned thought came up from the cellars of hell, and told both that he would listen to them not a minute longer.

He climbed the stairs to his bedroom, pulled his steamer trunk out from the attic crawlspace, packed it (as he had planned to do five years earlier, when a similar impulse to escape was on him), filled it with art implements, shirts, socks, and umbrage, hoisted the trunk onto his shoulder, and then in the midst of a rainstorm that would not only drench him to his underwear and the brink of pneumonia, but would precipitate the worst flood in Albany’s modern history, walked twelve blocks to Keeler’s Hotel for Men Only, at Maiden Lane and Broadway, and there slept his first night of freedom from the matriarchal whipsong.

The next morning his brother Francis, with his son, Billy, came for Peter in a rowboat, and they rowed up the two-foot-deep river that Broadway had become, to Union Station, where Peter boarded the New York train. By prearrangement he settled in at the apartment of Edward Daugherty on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, those quarters not used by Edward during the year that he had stayed in Albany to stage his play, and now the temporary home of Edward’s son, Martin. It was Martin who had convinced Peter that his future lay here among the artists, writers, political rebels, freethinkers, unshockable women, and assorted social misfits and fugitives who were amorphously shaping Manhattan’s new bohemian order.

Peter found work illustrating reprints of children’s editions of James Fenimore Cooper, Jack London, and Mark Twain novels, and used a corner of the Daugherty kitchen to set up his easel to begin anew the work of his life. But it would be a year before he was able to think of himself as a genuine member of the bohemian brigade; for he was incapable of fully representing himself, even to himself, as an artist, that word too imperious for his provincially crippled soul. And so he ate, drank, and worshipped with the Village’s Irish working class, into whose midst the bohemians were relentlessly intruding.

These Irish, who looked so very like his neighbors on Arbor Hill in Albany, but were so very unlike them in speech, formed the core of subjects for Peter’s early paintings. He sketched people, if they’d let him, then grew brassy enough to carry his sketch pad to the saloon or the park and sketched what he saw, whether the subjects liked it or not. From hundreds of sketches his imagination would let one, then another, single themselves out for delineation in oil, his theme always being: this is evidence that yesterday did exist; this is what yesterday looked like.

One early choice was the face of Claire Purcell, a nineteen-year-old beauty from Brooklyn with a cascade of dark red hair, brown eyes, and milk-white skin, who resembled he knew not whom, but someone; and her curiosity about his sketch of her feeding pigeons in Washington Square on a spring morning in 1914 began the relationship that would dominate both their lives and lead to the erratic romance that would be interrupted first by the Great War (Peter enlisted in 1917, became a wagoner with the 304th Ammunition Train, ferried shells and bullets to troops in the Argonne, was hit at St.-Mihiel by shrapnel which dislodged his helmet, ripped his gas mask in two, and knocked him into a shell hole from which he was eventually carried to the hospital and evacuated back to New York, the episode earning him a disability pension, two medals, and frontal semi-baldness from the gas), and interrupted the second time by my birth out of wedlock in 1924. Claire gave me her own name, Purcell, first name Orson, for Peter would neither marry her nor allow his own name to be given to me, uncertain as he was of the source of my conception.

The man Peter suspected of siring me was Rico Luca, a vaudeville magician known to audiences as Manfredo the Magnificent, who had hired Claire to be his assistant (known to audiences as The Beautiful Belinda) in 1923, two years after Peter moved into the boarding house on Waverly Place run by Claire’s widowed mother. Peter and Claire pursued their romance in separate bedrooms until Claire’s mother died and they then moved in together, marriage always a subject only for future discussion; for would not marriage negate the freedom that Peter had come to the city to find?

A decade of life amid the pagan romps of la vie bohème had conditioned him to think of fidelity as an abstraction out of his past, and yet he practiced it, and expected it from Claire without ever speaking of it. Then, when travel to the vaudeville houses of the eastern seaboard became part of Claire’s life as well as the means of support for the boarding house that no longer accepted boarders, and whose upkeep and mortgage were beyond Peter’s income, Peter entered into fits of jealousy. He was certain that a woman as comely as Claire, whose body clad in tights was a cause for whistles and hoots from any audience, would be unable to fend off forever the advances of the handsome Manfredo and the stage-door lotharios Peter imagined waiting for her at every whistle stop.

When she announced her pregnancy, Peter broke silence on fidelity and suggested Manfredo as just as likely a parent as himself. Claire first wept at the accusation, then grew furious when Peter persisted, and at last retreated into silence and a separate bedroom; and so the subject was tabled. Jealousy only fattened Peter’s passion for Claire, and after some days she acceded to it. In this way they continued their lives until my birth, the cloud of bastardy always hovering even after I grew to resemble childhood tintypes of Peter (and even of his brother Francis), and even though Martin Daugherty insisted Peter had no worries, for clearly I had been made in the Phelan image. Without legal or moral ties, without faith in itself, this anomalous, double-named family persisted, jealousy, wounded love, and fear of error (in Peter) being the bonding elements of a tie that would not break.

Kathryn Phelan died in her sleep, presumably of a stroke, this, her second shock, coming on opening-night-minus-two of Peter’s one-man show. For the next several days The Beautiful Belinda would be prancing on the boards somewhere in Boston, and therefore it was decided that I should stay in New York rather than travel with my mother, artistic revelation being more valuable to my young life than backstage privilege. But then arose Peter’s dilemma: since the one-man show and its opening could not be canceled on behalf of a corpse, so long-standing had its planning been, would the artist, then, present himself among his works and bask in whatever glory accrues to such presence, or would he return to Colonie Street to bask in the cold exudation of a dead mother?

Several months after his breach with Kathryn and Sarah in 1913, Peter had returned to the house for fortnightly overnight visits, and also contributed to the support of the family with pittances that increased as his ability to sell paintings improved. The healing of the breach with the family had come so soon after the separation that Peter perceived that rancor was never the cause of the break, but merely the ruse by which he had gained momentum to pursue his art; and in perceiving this he understood that, even in aspiration, art is a way of gaining some measure of control over life.

And so, really, the dilemma’s solution was foregone; for kinship maintained the major share of control over Peter’s life, and his art, in the end, could only bear witness to this. He would go home.

Two

Because of the pre-sale of two of his paintings Peter left Manhattan with four hundred dollars in his pocket, the most money he had ever held in his hand. The dawning of this realization spurred him to show the money to me when we settled into our seats on the Lake Shore Limited out of Grand Central Station.

“Four hundred dollars there, boy,” he said. “Feast your eyes. The sky’s the limit on this trip.”

I took the money into my own hand, counted it (fifties and twenties), tapped it on my knee to even its edges as I would a pack of cards, folded it, felt its thickness and heft.

“It’s nice,” I said. “What are you going to buy with it?”

“I’m going to buy the light of the world and bring it home,” Peter said.

“Where’s the light of the world?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” Peter said, “we’ll have to go shopping.”

I smelled the money, then gave it back to Peter, and we watched the streets of New York whiz by our window.

Peter had small alternative to bringing me with him to the wake, for my mother would be away through the weekend, and there was no one to leave me with (I was ten) except an untrustworthy neighbor. And though the poison thought of bastardy never stopped giving pain to Peter’s gizzard, he was also coming to the conclusion that he really might, after all, be my father; and what sort of father would that be if he kept me apart from the blood kin I had never met, especially if he allowed me to miss out on the ultimate silencing of the whipsong?

And so he had packed my bag, and we rode in a taxi from the Village to Grand Central Station, my first taxi, and walked across the heavenly vaulted concourse of the station with its luminous artificial sky that bathed me in awe and wonder. We rode the train north out of the city and along the banks of the great Hudson, monitored the grandness of its waters and natural wonders, and emerged into another vast and dwarfing room, Albany’s Union Station, this entire experience creating in my mind a vision of the American way that I would carry throughout my life: capitalism as a room full of rivers and mountains through which you rode in great comfort in the vehicle of your choice, your pockets bulging with money: an acute form of happiness.

Peter, holding me by the hand, walked out of the station and with evident purpose strode two blocks down Broadway from Union Station to the Van Heusen, Charles store (next door to where Keeler’s Hotel for Men Only had been until it burned in 1919), the store a source of elegance and social amenity for many years, the place you went when you didn’t know the difference between a butter knife and a fish knife (and you had better learn if you wanted your marriage to remain socially solvent), and where Peter suspected he would find the light he meant to bring home to Colonie Street.

He found the familiar face of Rance Redmond, who had been selling silver and china and vases and linens in this store for thirty years, and Peter told him precisely what he wanted: three chandeliers of similar, non-matching styles, plus sufficient wiring to bring power to them from the street; and an electrician to install them.

Rance Redmond, his pince-nez spectacles pressed into use to guide Peter’s glance aloft to the broad display of suspended chandeliers, ceiling fixtures, and wall sconces, pointed out the new designs: chrome and milky glass globes of the Art Deco mode; clear glass etched with roses in the Art Nouveau mode; one-time gas chandeliers with a hanging bowl, pendant gasoliers transformed to electroliers.

“No, no gas, not even a memory of gas,” Peter said. “We’re finished with gas.” And he chose the milky Art Deco because it seemed the most modern and also reminded him of Claire’s skin in the sunlight, and chose two others that seemed compatible with the first: the Claire fixture to give light in the front parlor, the second for the back parlor, the third for the dining room.

Jotting down their prices in his sales book, Rance Redmond spoke without raising his glance. “I can have these delivered by the middle of next week.”

“No, I need them today or it’s no sale,” Peter said.

“Today?” said Rance, his pince-nez falling to the end of their ribbon. “That’s not possible.”

“How long would it take to put them in a box?” Peter asked.

“Ten, fifteen minutes, I suppose,” said Rance.

“How long would it take to put them in the back of one of your trucks?”

“But that’s it, the trucks are busy.”

“Then put them in a taxi,” Peter said. “I’ll pay the fare.”

“Well, I suppose we could do. .”

“And an electrician. There’s no power in the house. It’s still lit by gaslight.”

“Is that right?”

“No, it’s not right, but that’s how it is, and that’s why I want an electrician. Have you got one?”

“I don’t know. And there’s the power company. You can’t just. .”

“I’ll pay the electrician extra. I’ll call the power company myself.”

Rance’s pince-nez had gone on, off, and on again, a manic measure of his fluster at such impetuousity in these sedate showrooms, but he handed Peter the telephone and then, clutching the sales slip that totaled more than one hundred and ninety dollars for the three fixtures, the largest sale he had made all week, Rance retreated to the store’s artisan quarters to search out an electrician, and found one who approved of extra money; found also a taxi, into whose trunk and front seat two chandelier boxes were placed while Peter and I clambered into the rear seat with the third box. The taxi then led the way to Colonie Street, the electrician following in his truck with as much wire as any imagination could reasonably measure, and the two vehicles parked in front of the Phelan house. The power company’s man would arrive within two hours.

Only with the death of his mother was Peter now able to challenge the light on Colonie Street. It was fitting that she died in early December, for on these days the exterior world matched the pale gray and sunless interior of the house, night coming on almost as a relief from the daytime sky that hovered over the city like a shroud. Peter remembered his own mood always being depressingly bleak during this time of year, days getting shorter, and darker; and not until January’s false spring would the season of desperation begin to fade with the fading of this miasmic light.

He had not known he would buy the chandeliers until he showed me the money on the train; but he knew then that he could buy them and would, for at long last it was time. He knew also that Sarah would fight him on the matter and that Molly and Chick would join him in overriding her objections. But Mama’s grip on the past had been released finally, she having been as dark-willed as the biddy of story who refused an indoor, running-water toilet saying, I wouldn’t have one of them filthy things in the house, and equally adamantly Kathryn refused electric current as being diabolical; and so the children rarely brought visitors home, so shamed were they that their house, its clutter, its mood, even the odor of its air, had slowly become a museum of everybody else’s rejected past.

With my help, Peter carried the Claire chandelier up the front stoop, opened the door with his key, and entered with the call, “Peter is here.” He and I then carried the boxes into the front parlor as the electrician hauled his gear and wire into the house. Chairs and side tables, including Peter’s leather armchair, footstool, pipe stand, and ash tray, had been moved from in front of the parlor’s bay window, the designated area for coffin and corpse, though no corpse had occupied it for thirty-nine years, not since Peter’s father waked here after stepping backward into the path of a slow-moving locomotive in 1895. Peter cut the twine on one box, put his hand inside, then turned to see his sisters, Sarah and Molly, in the doorway watching him.

“What are you doing?” Sarah asked. “What is that box? Who is this boy, and that man there?”

“The man is our electrician. The boy is my landlady’s son, Orson. Orson Purcell. Say hello to Sarah and Molly, Orson. My sisters.”

I saw two women who seemed at first to be twins, so alike was their dress: long-sleeved, high-necked white blouses, full dark skirts well below the knee, hair done in the same style: upswept into a soft crown, pinned in a bun at the back of the neck. But in glancing from one to the other I saw nothing else in their faces that matched: Sarah, with dark hair going gray, small round spectacles, hazel eyes very close together, long nose, pursed mouth, cheeks on the verge of sinking: here was plainness; and Molly, the same hazel eyes, but a longer, more finely pointed nose, finer symmetry and greater breadth to the eyes and mouth, and a fullness to the lips, and her hair still a pure, burnished yellow: here was beauty.

“How do you do,” I said. “I’m pleased to meet you.”

“And we you,” said Molly

“He speaks well,” said Sarah.

“His mother is very bright,” Peter said, “and he and I do our share of talking, don’t we, Orson?”

I nodded and smiled and looked at my father, who seemed so utterly unlike his sisters. There he stood, hand inside the chandelier box, still in his slouch hat and all-weather raincoat, his hair halfway down his neck and as unkempt as his handlebar mustache, his black corduroy shirt and twisted brown tie hanging like the end of a noose, the totality of his clothing, seen in the context of this house, a uniform of rebellion.

Everything I remember from this room on the day the light of the world arrived, had a fragility to it, the Queen Anne table, the china tea set, the French antique sofa and love seat, the dragonfly lamps, the Louis Quinze chairs that seemed incapable of supporting adults. And the room was dustless: wood and vases and figurines and even the white marble bust of a beautiful woman on her five-foot pedestal (Peter had given it to Julia on her eighteenth birthday) scrubbed and shining, all tables oiled, all brass polished, all floors waxed, all things gleaming, even in that rationed fragment of gray December light that was allowed entry past the mauve drapes.

“What is in that box?” Sarah asked.

Peter, squatting, his right hand still in the box’s mysterious interior, suddenly lifted the chandelier into freedom (like a magician, I could say), and with his other hand pulled away the tissue paper that surrounded it, then held it aloft. Presto!

“Fiat lux!” Peter said.

“What?”

“Light,” said Peter. “Electric light. To replace that monstrosity.” And he gestured toward the pendant gasolier on the parlor ceiling. “That ugly thing’s been here since before Cleveland was President. Light. New light in this house, Sarah.”

“We don’t want it,” said Sarah.

“How well I know that, dear sister. But we shall have light on the corpse of our mother, light unlike any that ever found its way into this arcane cave of gloom.”

“I love it,” said Molly. “It’s so pretty. Look at it, Sarah, look how it shines.”

“Wait till you see it lit,” Peter said.

“If you put it up I’ll have it taken down as soon as you leave,” Sarah said.

“And if you do that,” said Peter, “I shall come home with a club and break every piece of your beloved pottery glassware, and bric-a-brac. Believe me, Sarah, I am serious.”

“You’re a villain,” she said, and she walked into the hallway and up the front stairs.

“Don’t mind,” Molly said. “I’ll take care of her.” And she walked to Peter and kissed his cheek, studied the chandelier which with his right arm Peter still held half aloft. She touched the shining chrome rims around the bottom of the globes, touched the ball-shaped switches under each globe.

“Isn’t it beautiful,” said Molly.

“It’s all of that,” Peter said. “It will give us pleasure. It will banish our shame at being the leftover household. It will put a sheen on your beautiful hair, my sweet sister, and it will satisfy my craving to be done with gloom and come home to respectable radiance.”

I looked at the light around me for the first time in my life. Never had I considered it a topic worth conflict, or enthusiasm. Light was; and that was that. What more could you ask of it? It was bright or it was dim. You saw in it or you didn’t see. If you didn’t then it was dark. But now came revelation: that there were gradations, brightness to be measured not only in volume but in value. More brightness was better. Amazing.

The doorbell sounded, a pull-bell ding-dong. Molly answered the bell and accepted from the delivery man a small basket of white and purple flowers, brought them to the back parlor, and set them atop the player piano (which had replaced the Chickering upright that Julia Phelan played until she died; and music in this house died with her until Peter exchanged the Chickering for the player and bought piano rolls of the same songs Julia had played since they were children together).

“I know they’re from Mame Bayly,” Molly said. “She’s always the first flowers at every wake, always a day early. By the time we get to the cemetery they’ll be brown and wilted.”

The electrician had decided that the emergency installation of the chandeliers could be done only by running wire along the ceiling and through the outer wall to the nearest power pole and Peter said fine, run it anyplace you like, just get the power in here; and took off his coat and hat at last, and with his own tool chest began undoing the gasolier and capping the pipe that carried its gas. Since the death of his father Peter had been the master mechanic of the family, even in absentia, consulted via telephone on every plumbing and structural crisis, consulted when the back porch railing fell off, consulted on retarring the roof and on installing storm windows when the price of gas escalated in 1921.

I explored the downstairs rooms, finding photographs of my father when he was a youth (wearing a high collar and a short tie; he never dressed like that anymore), and photos of the women I’d just seen, but as girls in bathing suits (with their mother, was it? mother in black long-sleeved high-necked beachwear that came to her shoetop), and I saw a cut-glass dish full of apples and oranges and grapes on the dining-room table and a photo of twenty men posing beside a locomotive, and over the piano a photo of a woman who looked like the beautiful Molly but more beautiful still, and younger, with her hair parted in the middle, and when Peter saw me looking at it he said, “That’s my sister Julia, Orse,” and he whispered in my ear, “Don’t tell anybody, but she was my love, my favorite,” and he said Julia had played the piano. He opened the seat of the piano bench and took out a scroll of paper titled “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree.”

“She played this one all the time. We both loved it.”

He opened a sliding door on the piano’s upright front and inserted the roll, then sat at the piano and pumped its two pedals with his feet, and the roll moved as I watched with wonderment. Paper that makes music? Then Peter stood up and sat me in his place and told me to put my feet on the pedals and press, first left, then right, and I did and saw the paper move, and then I heard music, saw the keys on the piano depress themselves, and I said, “It’s magic!”

“Not quite,” said Peter, and I kept pumping and then my feet weakened, as did the song, and Peter said, “Faster, kid, keep a steady rhythm,” and after a while the jerkiness went out of the song and out of my feet and the piano made beautiful music again and Peter sang along.

I can hear the dull buzz of the bee

In the blossom that you gave to me,

With a heart that is true,

I’ll be waiting for you

In the shade of the old apple tree.

“Are you insane? Are you out of your mind?”

It was Sarah, back with her black mood, black skirt, fierce voice, and I stopped my feet and Peter said, “For chrissake, Sarah, I’m invoking Julia. Don’t you think she has a right to be here today? Are you going to keep this wake all to yourself?” And Sarah again could not answer, and fled to the kitchen, slamming the door behind her.

“Continue, Orse,” Peter said, and, as I moved my feet, music again rose in the rooms where light and death were on the way. The phone rang in the back parlor and Molly came down the stairs two at a time to answer it, then reported to all auditors that it was Ben Owens, the undertaker, and that he’d be here within the hour; which meant that Mama Kathryn would be returning to the front parlor to be observed in her death rigors, powdered and coiffed as she rarely had been in life; and to me it meant a question mark, for this was my entrance into the world of death.

Again the doorbell sounded and I placed myself in the angular hallway that ran from front door to back parlor, hiding behind wicker filigree decked with clusters of china, people in breeches and wigs and hoopskirts, and dogs and cats with flat bottoms, and then I saw a man with a happy and perfectly round face beneath a bald dome take a cigar out of his mouth and say to Peter, “I got your mother here.”

And Peter said, “Bring her in, she’s welcome,” and from the smiles that followed this exchange and from all the smiles and music and ongoing electrification, I would take home from this day my first impression of death: that it was an occasion for music, levity, light, and love.

“How’ve you been, Ben?” Peter asked.

“If I was any better,” said Ben, looking for a place to rid himself of the half-inch ash on his cigar, “I’d call the doctor to find out what ailed me.”

“In the window,” Peter said. And Ben swung his portly self toward the street and motioned to the four men standing at the back end of the hearse, and home came Kathryn Phelan, her last visitation in the flesh. Just ahead of her came another man with the catafalque, a four-wheeled accordionesque platform which stretched to meet the space, and upon which Kathryn and her mahogany coffin came to rest, the coffin’s closed cover gleaming in the sunlight (no electricity yet).

The onlookers now included Ben Owens, Molly, Sarah, Peter, me, and the electrician, who was on a ladder in the middle of the room installing the Claire chandelier, and who said, “Do you want this thing workin’ tonight?” and Peter said, “We do,” and the electrician said, “Well, then, I ain’t movin’ off a here,” and Peter said, “There’s no reason you should. Make yourself at home up there,” and so they moved the coffin around his ladder and the advent of the light proceeded as planned.

The family then retreated to the back parlor as Peter closed the sliding doors between the two parlors and waved a go-ahead sign to Ben Owens. And then the tableau that I would carry with me created itself: Peter sitting at the piano, Sarah standing by the kitchen door off the back parlor with folded arms, Molly settling into the armless horsehair ladies’ chair beside the piano and staring at Peter as he pumped up the music. I, sensing tension and trying desperately to make myself disappear, retreated to a far corner of the back parlor where I could observe the expanse of tradition and sibling relationships manifested in objects and body postures, and listen to love manifested in music, and perceive, I knew not how, the ineffable element that seeped under the closed parlor doors when the coffin was opened; all this fixing forever in me the image of life extended beyond death, and fixing too the precise moment of the advent of the light.

The electricity would insinuate itself from the power line on the outside pole, through the front wall, across the ceiling, and into the chandelier at the electrician’s touch, and the onset of the light would startle Ben Owens so that the comb he was using to touch up Kathryn Phelan’s hair would fly out of his hand and into a shadowy area behind the coffin, and Ben would say, “Cripes, what was that?”

And light would seep under the sliding doors to be greeted by Peter’s remark: “It’s here,” and the apple-tree song would end as light began.

The sliding doors would open onto the new tableau of undertaker, electrician, siblings, and myself, all of us staring at the corpse that was so regally resplendent in high-necked magenta burial gown and pink-taffeta-lined coffin, and Mame Bayly’s flowers would give sweet fragrance to Kathryn Phelan’s final performance — her first under the bright lights — on this very old stage.

Three

Chick Phelan took a half-day off from his job as a linotypist in the Times-Union’s composing room for this first night of the wake, the night the family and a few select friends would have the corpse all to themselves. He brought home four bottles of Schenley’s whiskey and a box of White Owl cigars for the wakegoers, and announced his partial list of bearers for the funeral: the McIlhenny brothers, Dave and Gerry, nephews of Kathryn recently off the boat from County Monaghan; Martin Daugherty, Barney Dillon from across the street, and two more to be recruited at the wake.

Food began to arrive. Betty Simmons sent her teenage son over with a turkey and stuffing; the Ryan sisters baked a ham and made their famous potato salad and delivered it themselves but didn’t come in, would wait for the wake’s second night, when friends called. Flowers came: six baskets at once, one from George and Peg Quinn and family, plus the pillow of red roses from the Phelan children, with the word “Mama” in gold letters on a ribbon. When the deliveryman handed Peter the last basket of flowers and went back down the stoop to his truck, a figure came limping across the street and stood at the bottom step, hands in pockets, fedora at a rakish tilt, clothes old and grimed, and this man looked upward into Peter’s eyes.

“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Peter said.

“Ya always have been,” the man said with a small smile.

Peter put the flowers aside and extended his hand. “Come on in,” he said, and the man came up the three steps, wiped the soles of his shoes on the doormat, and stepped inside, gripping Peter in a strong handshake. Peter closed the door, holding the man’s shoulder, and walked him down the hallway to the back parlor where Molly was giving a last-minute dusting to the furniture.

“Say hello to your brother, Moll,” Peter said, and she turned and looked and gaped and dropped the feather duster, and then ran four steps and threw her arms around the man and said “Fran,” and looked at him again and cried and kissed him and cried some more. “Fran, Fran. We thought you were dead.”

“Maybe I am,” Francis Phelan said.

He looked toward the front parlor and saw the corpse of his mother in her final silence. He stared at her.

“Go on in,” Molly said. “Go in and see her.”

“I’ll get to it,” Francis said, and he continued to stare.

“I’ll tell the others you’re here,” Molly said and she went toward the back stairs.

“How’d you find out?” Peter asked.

Francis broke his stare and looked at Peter. “I was in a lunchroom down in Hudson. Been stayin’ down there all fall, pickin’ apples, fixin’ up trucks for the owner, and this fella next to me gets up and leaves the Albany newspaper. I never do read a damn newspaper, but I pick this one up and turn the page and there’s the obit. I look at it and I figure right off this fella left that paper so’s I could see that, and I say to myself, Francis; maybe it’s time to go back and see people, and I took the next train that come by.”

Francis turned back toward the coffin and Peter read the look on his face: The bitch is dead. . lower away. Francis’s honesty in the teeth of unpleasant truth was galling to Peter; always had been. Hypocrisy is a sometime virtue, but then again fraudulence can stifle, even smother. Hadn’t Peter’s stifling of his own anger cost him years of bondage to this woman, this house?

“What’s goin’ through your head?” Peter asked.

“I was just thinkin’ how much she missed by bein’ the way she was,” Francis said. “She didn’t really know nothin’ about how to live.”

“Of course you’re the expert on that,” Peter said. “You’re a walking example.”

Francis nodded, looked down at his ragged attire, his shoes with even the uppers falling apart.

“Ain’t sayin’ I ever figured out how it was done, but I still know more’n she did. I got nothin’ against her anymore. She done what she hadda do all her life, and somethin’ gotta be said for that. I just never bought it, and neither did you.”

“Things got better when I moved to New York,” Peter said.

“That’s what I mean,” Francis said. He looked again at his mother, nodded once, that’s that, then turned his back to her.

Molly came in carrying two of the six flower baskets from the front hall. She set them on the floor near the head of the coffin.

“Everybody’ll be right down,” Molly said.

“Who’s everybody?” said Francis.

“Sarah and Tommy and Chick. They’re all home. Tommy’s a bit confused.”

“That figures,” said Francis.

Francis saw me edge into the room and sit in an empty chair. “Who’s the kid?” he asked.

“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?

“Listen,” Francis said, “don’t knock it till you tried it,” whereupon Sarah ran up the stairs into the church and did not talk to either brother for three days, after which time she raised the issue at the dinner table.

“Mama,” Sarah said to all assembled siblings, “Francis has something to tell you.”

“No I don’t,” Francis said.

“You’ll tell her or I will,” Sarah said.

“I got nothin’ to say,” Francis said.

“Then Peter will tell,” Sarah said.

“Not me,” Peter said.

“Will somebody tell me what this is about?” Kathryn Phelan asked. Her other children, Chick, Julia, Molly, and Tommy, looked bewildered at their mother’s question.

“It’s what Francis is doing,” Sarah said. But she could say no more.

“Sarah doesn’t think I oughta work for Katrina,” Francis said. “I think Sarah oughta mind her own business.”

“Why not work for her?” Kathryn asked.

“There’s more than work going on over there,” Sarah said.

“And what might that mean?”

“Are you going to tell her?” Sarah asked Francis.

Francis stared into Sarah’s eyes, his face crimson, his mouth a line of rage.

“Well?” said Kathryn.

“She put her arms around him,” Sarah said.

“What does that mean?”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Francis said.

“Why did she do that?”

“She likes the way I work,” Francis said.

“He’s lying,” Sarah said.

“How do you know?” Kathryn asked. “Did you see her do this?”

“Yes, and so did Peter.”

“I don’t know what I saw,” Peter said.

“Don’t lie,” Sarah said.

“Everybody’s a liar but Sarah,” Peter said.

“What were you doing watching over there?” Kathryn asked Sarah.

“I followed Peter. He’s the one who was watching.”

“You’re a lousy rat, Sarah,” Peter said. “A real lousy rat.”

“Never mind name-calling. I want to know what went on What is she talking about, Francis?”

“Nothin’. I work for her, that’s all. She’s a nice person.”

“She was naked,” Sarah said.

“Naked!” Kathryn said, and she stood up and grabbed Francis by the ear. “What’ve you been doing, young man?”

Francis stood and jerked his head out of his mother’s grip. “I walked into her room when she was dressin’,” he said. “It was a mistake.”

“He’s lying again,” Sarah said. “He was painting and she took her robe off and was naked and then she threw her arms around him and he did the same thing to her.”

“Is that true?” Kathryn asked, her face inches from Francis.

“She’s a little crazy sometimes,” Francis said. “She does funny things.”

“Taking her clothes off in front of you? You consider that funny?”

“She doesn’t know what she’s doin’ sometimes. But she’s really all right.”

“He put his arms around her and they kissed for a long time,” Sarah said.

“You bitch,” Francis said. “You stinkin’ little sister bitch.”

Kathryn swung her left hand upward and caught Francis under the jaw. The blow knocked him off balance and he fell into the china closet, smashing its glass door, shattering plates, cups, glasses, then falling in a bleeding heap on the floor.

Four

Thirty-six years gone and here he is back again, Peter thought, and there is the china closet, and here we all are (Sarah will come down from her room eventually; she will have to face the reality of his return), and here minus Julia are the non-conspirators, Molly, Chick, Tom-Tom, Orson, the added starter, about the same age I was when all this happened, and Francis, who is no more repentant today of whatever sin than he was when Mama knocked him down with her left hook.

“I thought Sarah was comin’ down,” Francis said.

“She’ll be down,” Molly said. “She’s getting dressed for tonight.”

“You look pretty, Moll. Real, real pretty. You got a beau? Somebody sweet on you?”

Molly put her eyes down to her plate. “Not really,” she said.

“How about Sarah? She didn’t marry, did she?”

“No,” said Molly.

“I ran into Floyd Wagner down in Baltimore. I’m on my way to Georgia and old Floyd, he’s a cop now, was gonna arrest me. Then he seen who I was and instead of arrestin’ me he bought me a beer and we cut it up about the old days. He said he went out a few times with Sarah.”

“That’s so,” said Molly. “Sarah broke it off.”

“So Floyd said.”

“Never mind about Floyd Wagner,” said Sarah, descending the back stairs into the room. She was in total mourning, even to the black combs that held her hair, her dress a high-necked, ankle-length replica of the recurring dress that Kathryn Phelan had worn most of her life, always made by the perfect, homemade dressmaker, Sarah. It was less a mourning garment than a maternal uniform — black cotton in the summer, black wool in winter — that asserted that unbelievable resistance to anything that smacked of vanity, though not even that: of lightness, of elevation. Her children and relatives had tried to sway her with gifts of floral-patterned dresses, colored skirts and blouses, but the gifts remained in boxes for years until finally Kathryn gave them to the Little Sisters of the Poor.

Francis looked at Sarah and retreated in time. Here was the mother incarnate in Sarah, now fifty-one, a willful duplicate; and Francis remembered that Sarah had even wanted to call herself Sate when they were young, because people called their mother Kate; but Mama would have none of that. Sarah would be Sarah, which was no hindrance at all to emulation, as this presence now proved; uncanny resemblance, even to the combing and parting of the hair and the black-and-white cameo brooch that Kathryn always wore at her throat.

“Hello, Sarah,” Francis said. “How you been?”

“Fine, thank you.”

“Good. That’s good.”

“Sarah looks like Mama,” Tommy said.

“I noticed that,” Francis said.

“So you’re back,” Sarah said to Francis. “You’re looking well.”

“Is that so?” Francis said. “I wouldn’ta said so.”

“Francis can be a bearer,” Chick said. “I just thought of that. Then we only need one more.”

“Francis won’t be here,” Sarah said. “Francis isn’t staying.”

“What?” said Peter.

“He’s not staying,” Sarah said. “He’s not a part of this family and hasn’t been for over thirty years. Feed him if you like, but that’s all he gets out of us.”

“Sarah,” Molly said, “that’s wrong.”

“No,” said Sarah, “nothing wrong except that he’s back among us and I won’t have it. Not on the day my mother is waking.”

“Right,” Francis said. “I seen her wakin’. I seen her dead, and now I see her again, not dead at all. Nothin’ changed here since I left the first time, and now I remember why I left. Sarah’s got a way of joggin’ your memory.”

“Sarah doesn’t run this house,” Peter said.

“Right,” Chick said. “Absolutely right. Sarah don’t run nobody.”

“It’s okay,” Francis said. “Not a thing anybody’s gotta worry about. I’m a travelin’ man, and that’s all I am. Never counted on anything more than seein’ she was really dead. I figure, she’s dead, I’m free. Know what I mean, Chickie pie?”

“No.”

“What’s gone’s gone, and I figure, good riddance. She wanted me dead is the way I figure it. Ain’t that right, Sarah?”

“You were dead for years. You’re dead now. Why don’t you go live in the cemetery?”

“You know, you turned out just right, Sarah,” Francis said. “Just like I knew you would. You ain’t got a speck o’ the real goods in you. You ain’t got one little bit of Papa. You got it all from the other side of the family, all from that Malachi crowd. You’re somebody they oughta cut up and figure out, ’cause you ain’t hardly human, Sarah.”

“You’re a tramp, Francis. You were a tramp when you were a child. You and your Katrina.”

Francis turned his eyes from Sarah and faced Peter, who could not take his eyes from Francis. Francis smiled, a man in control of his life. Oh yes.

“She remembers Katrina, Pete. Got a memory like a elephant, this sister of ours. You remember Katrina too?”

“Everybody remembers Katrina,” Peter said.

“Unforgettable lady,” Francis said.

“Don’t bring that old filth back in here,” Sarah said.

“Filth,” Francis said, “that’s Sarah’s favorite word. Where you’d be without filth I can’t even figure, Sarah. You and filth — some double play. Old Floyd Wagner told me how you and him talked about filth all them years ago.”

“Make him leave,” Sarah said to the entire table.

“Floyd said the last time he saw Sarah. .”

“Never mind anything Floyd Wagner said,” Sarah said.

“Sarah, let him talk,” Peter said.

“What about Floyd Wagner?” Chick asked.

“Old Floyd. He came to see Sarah one night and she threatened to stab him with a pair of scissors.”

“What?” Molly said.

“It’s a lie,” Sarah said.

“Floyd said she was afraid he might kiss her and start doin’ other filthy stuff, so she snatched up the scissors and told him to keep his distance or she’d stab him in the belly.”

“Oh, you foul thing,” Sarah said, and she pushed her chair back and walked to the living room.

“Floyd swears it,” Francis said (and in the front parlor Sarah, standing beside the corpse of her mother, covered her ears with both hands to fend off Francis’s words).

“Floyd said he never did get to kiss Sarah, and after the scissors business he sorta lost interest.”

“I think we can change the subject,” Peter said.

“Suits me,” Francis said.

All eating, all talk at the table stopped. The front door bell changed the mood and, as Molly went to answer it, Chick said, “That’s probably Joe Mahar. He said he’d come early.” And Chick too left the table.

Francis drank the last of his tea, popped his last crust of bread into his mouth, and smiled at Peter. “Always great to come back home,” he said.

“I got to go to the bathroom,” Tommy said, and he went up the back stairs.

“Just you and me, Pete,” Francis said, ignoring my presence.

Francis saw Molly, Sarah, and Chick talking to a priest in the living room and he could recognize Joe Mahar, whose name he could never have brought to mind if Chick hadn’t mentioned it, but he knew he was the boy who had gone into the seminary with Chick out of high school. Joe had obviously carried it off, but poor Chickie pie came home after three years (the first year Francis played for Chattanooga, blessin’ himself every time he came to bat, and them rednecks yellin’, “Kill the Irishman,” but he kept on blessin’ even though he didn’t buy that holy stuff no more), and Chick’s return plunged Mama into the weeping depths of secularity. No priests in the Phelan family, alas. Mama never to know the glory of having mothered a vicar of Christ.

“I see you got a new ceilin’ light,” Francis said, looking at the new fixture.

“Installed this afternoon,” Peter said. “How do you like it?”

“Nice and ritzy. Who picked it out, you?”

“Orson and I did, didn’t we, Orse?” And I nodded.

“You still doin’ newspaper work?”

“No, I make my living as an artist, such as it is.”

“Artist. By God that’s a new one. Artist. What kind of artist?”

“A painter.”

“That’s good,” Francis said. “I like paintin’s. My most favorite saloon had a paintin’ back of the bar. Only reason I hung out there was to look at it. Eased my mind, you know what I mean?”

“What was it?”

“Birds, mostly,” Francis said. “Birds and a naked woman. Reminded me of Katrina.” Francis winked at Peter.

Peter laughed, shook his head at Francis’s philistinism. But it was an involuntary and unjustified response, and he knew it; knew that if Francis had set his mind to it he could have been an artist, or a writer, or a master mechanic. Anything Francis wanted he could have had. But of course he never wanted anything. Artist of the open road. Hero of Whitmanesque America: I hear America singing — about naked ladies.

“Peter,” Molly called, “Father Joe wants to know about the funeral mass. Just for a minute. He’ll be right back, Fran.”

Francis nodded at Molly, sweet sister, as Peter went to the front parlor. Francis looked at me and smiled. Alone at the table of his youth, made a hemispheric sweep of the room. No need to look behind him at the china closet. He knew what that looked like. He saw only one thing in the room that surprised him: the picture of the family taken at Papa’s forty-fifth birthday party at Saratoga Lake, where they had a camp that summer, the summer of the year Papa died. There was Francis at fifteen and Tommy as a baby. Francis would not approach it, not look closely at what was then; better off without any vision of a past that had led to these days of isolation from both past and future. Gone. Stay gone. Die. Go live in the cemetery.

Francis got up and saw that only I was looking at him. He made a silent shushing motion to me, then found his hat and coat on the hallway wall hooks, where Molly had hung them. He went through the kitchen and out the back door into the yard, and I followed him. We both looked at the dead automobile in the carriage barn, a 1923 Essex, up on blocks.

“That your car, kid?” he asked me.

“No sir. I’m not old enough to own a car.”

“Good,” he said. “No point in ownin’ that one anyway. Ain’t worth nothin’.”

Then he smiled, threw me a so-long wave, and walked out of the alley and down Colonie Street, heading toward the railroad tracks, his home away from home.

I watched him limp toward the street and knew he was going away, perhaps forever, which was precocious of me to think that, and which saddened me. He was an imposing figure of a man, even with his dirty clothes. His heavy-duty smile made you like his looks, and like him, even though he was beat up, and kind of old.

Now, reconstituting that moment twenty-four years later, I remember that my sadness at the loss of his presence was the first time I was certain that my father really was Peter, and that I really did belong in this family. I had seen something in the man’s face that resembled what I saw in my own face in the mirror: a kindred intangible, something lurking in the eyes, and in that smile, and in the tilt of the head — nothing you could say was genetic, but something you knew you wanted to acknowledge because it was valuable when you saw it, even though you couldn’t say what it was. And you didn’t want to lose it.

Francis turned at the front of the house and walked out of my sight, and so I then went and sat in the old car. As if to fill the void, a girl my own age entered the alley with a small black mongrel at her heel and came toward the carriage barn. She looked up into the car’s front window and saw me pretending to drive.

“Do you know how to make that thing go?” the girl asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Then you shouldn’t be up there. You could have an accident.”

“This car can’t move,” I said. “It’s on blocks.”

The girl looked at the blocks and said, “Oh, I see.” And then she opened the door and slid in alongside me. She was obviously a waif, her hair a stringy mess, her plaid jacket held at the throat with a safety pin, her feet in buttonless high-button shoes long out of fashion. But what overrode all things forlorn about her was her eyes: large and black beneath black brows and focused on me with an intensity that I now know was in excess of what her years should allow. This made me uneasy.

“Is that your dog?” I asked.

“He belongs to all of us.”

“All of who? Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“I was sent here,” she said.

“Who sent you?”

“My people. They want me to find something valuable and bring it back.”

“Valuable how?”

“I don’t know yet. They didn’t tell me.”

“Then how do you know where to look?”

“I don’t know where to look. I don’t know anything about this place. Would you like to help me?”

“Help you look for something you don’t know what it is or where it might be?”

“Yes.”

I was befuddled, and while I thought about how ridiculous this girl was I saw Molly come out the back door.

“Orson,” she called out, “did you see Francis?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, sticking my head out the car window. “He went out the alley and down the street.”

Peter came out then, shoving his arms into his coat, and, when Molly told him what I had said, he too went toward the street.

“I have to go now,” I said to the girl.

“I’ll go with you,” she said, and she left the Essex and followed me, as I was following Peter, the mongrel keeping pace behind us. When I reached the street I saw Peter already at the corner, looking in all directions, then heading toward Downtown on the run. I jogged and the girl jogged beside me.

“Are you looking for the man in the hat and the old clothes?” the girl asked.

“Yes, how did you know?”

“He didn’t go that way,” she said, pointing toward Peter. “He went straight ahead.” And she gestured toward the river.

I stopped and wondered whether the girl was lying, or knew something.

“He was limping,” she said.

“All right,” I said and I resumed jogging toward the river, wondering what I would do or say if I found Francis when Peter was not around. At least I could say Peter was looking for him, and Molly too.

We ran past an old hospital, empty now, with posters pasted haphazardly on its walls advertising the O. C. Tucker Shows, a carnival with high divers, games, rides, a fortuneteller, a freak show, dancers galore. On another wall I saw a minstrel-show poster of a man in blackface, and yet another of Fredric March in Death Takes a Holiday.

“That’s where I live,” the dark-eyed girl said.

“In that empty building?”

“No, in the carnival.”

“Where is it now, around here?”

“Down that street,” the girl said, but she did not change her direction to go toward the carnival, if it was there, which I doubted, for this wasn’t the right weather for carnivals or circuses. It was too cold for outdoor shows, and it was probably going to snow. I was not cold, because I was running. But I knew when I stopped I would feel chilled beneath my sweat.

“I think he went down there,” the girl said, and she ran ahead of me and down a dead-end street, beyond which lay the river flats at the edge of the old Lumber District. To this day I cannot give a cogent reason why I followed this girl, trusted her to lead me to a stranger she had seen only once, if that. But I felt that the child should not be resisted if I wanted to find Francis.

“How do you know he came this way?” I asked.

“I saw him,” the girl said.

“You couldn’t have seen him down here.”

“That’s what you say,” the girl said.

“I think you’re a little crazy,” I said, to which the girl did not reply.

We left the paved streets of the city and ran on a dirt path toward the railroad tracks, across fields of weeds and trash, and I saw in the distance half a dozen shacks that hoboes had built, saw people moving near them. Then I saw eight freight cars on a siding, with more people sitting by fires, cooking something.

“That’s where I live,” the girl said, and Orson saw the lettering painted on the cars: O. C. Tucker Shows.

“You live on the tracks?”

“We’re waiting for a steam engine to take us south,” the girl said. “We have to bribe the railroad men.”

I understood nothing about this girl. We ran in silence and then I saw Francis, walking on the flats with his limp. And how he had gotten this far walking at that speed was a mystery. Perhaps the girl and I had run in a roundabout circle to get here, though I doubted it.

“There he is,” I said, and I stopped running.

“You see?” the girl said.

We were uphill from Francis, fifty feet from him, on a slope covered with trees and high weeds, and I then chose to hide myself and watch Francis as he walked north along the tracks, his limp worse than when I last observed him. I felt myself in the presence of hidden meaning (was that what the dark-eyed girl was looking for?) both in my decision to hide, and in the vision that lay before me; and I shivered with the chill of comprehension that something woeful could happen that would mark me. In the presence of malevolence I understood that this is what you feel like before the woeful thing happens. I turned to the girl and saw her petting a kitten, stroking its head with her long, dirty fingernails. Her dog was nowhere to be seen. From the pocket of her jacket a naked doll with only one leg protruded.

“Where did the cat come from?” I asked, and I realized I was whispering.

“He found me,” the girl said.

“And the doll?”

“It was in the car that’s up on blocks.”

“Then it doesn’t belong to you.”

“No, it’s yours,” she said.

“I don’t own any dolls,” I said.

“It’s yours because I give it to you,” the girl said, and she handed me the one-legged doll, which I assumed had belonged to Molly, or Sarah, or maybe the long-gone Julia. I put the doll on the ground and looked at Francis, who had stopped walking and was staring up the empty track, nothing to be seen. I felt the chill I knew would come. I heard noise to my right, someone walking, and turned to see Peter not thirty feet away, standing still and mostly concealed by bushes, looking toward Francis, who was standing beside the tracks. Peter, the dark-eyed child, and I now formed Francis’s silent audience in the weeds.

Francis is a peasant, Peter thought. He is a polar bear. He can live in the snow. He is a walker, look at him walk with that game leg. What did you do to your leg, Francis? Francis is a buzzard, feeding on the dead. Francis is a man who never lost his looks, though he is in terrible condition. You cannot lose the shape of your face unless you lose all your flesh, or stretch it with fat, like Chick. Look at the way Francis wears his hat. In destitution he exudes style. He walks along the gray gravel of the track bed. He casts his shadow on the silverbrown tracks. He walks past a track signal light whose color I cannot see. The weeds where he walks are dun, are fawn, are raw umber, khaki, walnut, bronze, and copper. The sky is the color of lead, soon to be the color of mice. Bosch, The Landloper. Look, he sits on the switch box. He raises the leg of his trousers that are the color of lampblack gone to smoke, and he studies the wound that makes him limp. Not in my line of sight. He nods and decides that his leg has improved, though it pains him. He wipes sweat from his forehead, or is it an itch? He puts his hat on again, stands and walks, stops. Why walk? He will have to run when the train comes. I can see him running with his gimp gait, clever enough to grab the step-iron of the ladder and hoist himself aloft with arm strength alone, perhaps help from a push with the good leg, and up he goes, off he goes to the future in the noplace village of his nowhere world. Away we go, Francis, away we go, swinging from the rope on the hill, flying down into the mud pond. Do not miss the water or you will break your bones. I never missed. Francis taught me how not to miss. Can he see me now? He cannot, yet he can teach me still. The tracks converge in a distant fusion I cannot see from here, but I see them narrowing, darkening as they go, see the yellow lights of a lumber yard still busy, lights of a house so solitary, lights of a burnt-ocher fire (other fires toward the city, carny fire probably fake like everything about carnies), and I see you, Francis, in your termination, the end of family tie, the beginning of nothing. You will carry on, Francis. You will find a way not to die in the midst of your nothingness. You will feel the triumph of the spirit as you leave us in the dust of your memory, obliterating us as you go toward oblivion and the bottom of the jug. Be of good cheer, Francis. Wondrous drunkenness lurks in your future. You will recover from the awfulness of your finality and you will go on to the heights of the degraded imagination, always conjuring yet another rung on which to hoist yourself to new depths. Francis, in your suite of mice and dun, in the majority of your umberness, in the psychotic melancholy of your spirit, I salute you as my brother in the death of our history. You more than I knew how to murder it. You more than I knew how to arrive at the future. In solitude you are victorious, you son of a bitch, you son of a bitch, will you never give me peace? Son-of-a-bitch brother, why is it you do not die?

Francis put his foot on the track and felt the train before he could see it, or hear it. You goddamn leg, you rotted on me. Let them rot. Why’d it have to be me? Why not? Not a time to go for the religion. Sin and punishment, all that shit. Don’t clutter your head, Francis. This is tricky. You don’t want to miss. One time and we’re on the way. Hey, boys, I’m goin’ for a ride. You’d think a guy’d get an invite to at least sleep over after how the fuck many years. Too many to count. Don’t bother. But they give you a chicken leg, and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. Woulda seen Annie if this’d worked, if there was a place to stay and go slow, do a visit and get the lay of the land, don’t push it too fast, but you can’t goddamn go home lookin’ like this, goddamn bum and filthy, got a chicken leg in his belly and that’s all he’s got. And lookin’ out the window at Katrina. Jesus, lady, you don’t go away easy, do you? Like a life you lived afore you was alive. A way of lookin’ at women that keeps you on the edge of the goddamn furnace, dangerous, them women, God bless all of ’em, and I don’t leave out none, all welcome here. Welcome, ladies, welcome. Anything I can do for you while you wait? Spurt up a couple of kids? How’d ya like that, Helen? You can’t have no kids. And Bessie, you were some bundle, I’ll tell the world, wouldn’t of been the same world without that month, or was it a week? Who gives a barrel of shit? Not Francis. Francis knows there’s no. . I see it. I got a minute. A minute? Less? Step lively, Mr. Francis, ’cause the time is now. Chicken leg here you go wherever the hell you’re goin’, chicken leg step lively step.

When Papa died, Peter thought, there was Francis with him. Francis had everything.

When Papa died he stepped onto the track backwards and didn’t know the engine

When Papa died he took my hand and said to me, “Fear Christ.”

When Papa died

Francis is stepping onto the track

I scream.

Peter heard Orson yell and saw him running toward the track yelling a scream that had no words and he saw Francis turn and look not toward him not seeing him running toward the train and saw Francis stop look toward the train as if he and it were making no sound as if he were a figure in a dream where nobody hears what you most desperately want to say as if you were a nonexistent nothing nowhere and he even so steps off the track bed and looks toward you with a surprise in his eye and the train goes by and you can stop all that yelling now, Orson.

Not dead yet, Francis said silently, and he stepped off the track bed and out of the path of the fast freight, and said aloud, “Fuck that nonsense,” and heard the screaming then and turned to it, saw the boy and Peter both coming toward him, both. They been watchin’, the two of them, that’s a pair, the boy can’t even talk, just there.

“Are you all right?” Peter asked.

“I ain’t been all right in ten years,” Francis said. “Whatcha doin’ down here, keepin’ an eye on me?”

“You left.”

“You figured that out.”

“You left the house.”

“You been watchin’. You both been watchin’.”

“No,” I said.

“No,” Peter said.

“Did ya have a good time?” Francis asked. “How’d I do?”

Only now has it begun to snow

Only now

I remember backing away mumbling scream, I did scream as soon as, and I saw the cat with its front left leg bleeding and the naked doll with both its legs gone now and the dark-eyed child gone

snow now

now snow