Very Old Bones

One

In the early spring of 1953, and with blinding illumination on through the fall of 1954, Peter Phelan came to perceive this: that individuals, families, or societies that willfully suppress their history will face a season of reckoning, one certain to arrive obliquely, in a dark place, and at a hostile hour, with consequences for the innocent as well as for the conspirators. Peter saw this first in my collapse, and then in the rolling boil of divine vengeance visited upon his brothers and sisters in these years.

In much the way that he had left Colonie Street in 1913 to escape what he saw as the shallow morality of his mother, only to discover that a tissue of other reasons had contributed to his move (and her behavior), so in November, 1954, did he return home to cope yet again with the Phelan family shallows, again pushed to doing so by ancillary reasons: the death and departure of so many friends from his changing Greenwich Village neighborhood and his near isolation as a result of this, his diminishing bank account, deficient income, and the appealing prospect of free rent in Albany, his growing problem with arthritic hips, which prevented him from standing at his easel and had sat him prematurely in the novice invalid’s chair, his unflagging love for his brothers and sisters, and, not least, his distance from me, about whom he had begun to fret in unreasonably paternal ways.

Peter’s return home was brought on by a series of events that began with a modestly scandalous public moment; but also by the climax of long and bitter discord in the lives of Sarah, Tommy, and Chick Phelan, and finally by the death of Sarah. The return would also transform Peter’s work radically and set him on a quest not only to understand the chain of causation that had led the family to a crisis of sanity and survival, but also to memorialize it in art.

For Chick the year 1954 was full of crisis, a climactic time in his life. A failed priest in Sarah’s eyes, Chick had been introduced to Evelyn Hurley, a handsome cosmetics saleslady at the John G. Myers Department Store, during a New Year’s Eve party at the Knights of Columbus in 1937, by the Times-Union newspaper columnist Martin Daugherty. The introduction was followed first by Chick’s privileged glimpse of Evelyn Hurley eliminating a wrinkle in her silk stocking by the most modest elevation of her skirt, that elevation the equivalent to Chick of a wild aphrodisiac; and second, by Chick’s intense and private conversation with Evelyn immediately thereafter, during which he became acutely aware of the audible friction created when she crossed her legs under the table, her silk stockings sliding one upon the other and creating, in Chick’s heart and soul, the phenomenon of love at first sound.

Chick then pursued her with ardent respect and found his ardor reciprocated, but found also that Evelyn, a widow, was a woman of the world in ways that Chick only hoped to be a man of the world; and so for seventeen years the Chick-and-Evelyn courtship frequently approached, but never arrived at, ardor’s ultimate destination. Chick was too loyal a Catholic to use prophylactics, Evelyn too alert to possibility to allow access to herself without them.

Marriage was, of course, the answer, but impediments prevailed, principally in Chick, who, even after he bought Evelyn an engagement ring in the tenth year of their courtship, chose to believe he was seeing her circumspectly. None in the city except himself thought it much of a secret, not even his sister Sarah, the chief impediment, who for years refused to acknowledge that Evelyn existed on the planet, and announced often at dinner that the Phelan credo, in the abstract, allowed no truck with widows, or divorcees, or women of loose character. Sarah, at a neighbor’s wake, overheard a man describe someone she assumed to be Evelyn as “loose as ashes and twice as dusty” and, understanding the import of the statement without grasping its particulars, thereafter actively did all she could to discourage Chick from his pursuit, never, for instance, allowing him to bring Evelyn into the house during the seventeen-year courtship.

It was during the very early twilight of a June evening in 1954 that Chick found himself in a duel of screams with Sarah, he reacting to Evelyn’s ultimatum that if he did not marry her she would leave Albany and go alone to Miami Beach to take work as the hostess of a luxurious new Collins Avenue delicatessen that was about to be opened by a friend who had moved to Florida and, with prudent investment, found himself with money to burn. And how better to burn it than cooking corned beef and blintzes?

Sarah and Chick each lacked novelty in their arguments — the much-discussed moral position on widows and designing women, the depravity of men’s desires, the holy priesthood (“Once a priest, always a priest”), maternal wishes, Catholic antipathy to Florida and especially Miami Beach, and, the ultimate appeal, family loyalty: “What will become of us if you leave?”—being Sarah’s enduring salvos; and Chick’s — his fury at being thought of as a priest (“I was never a priest, only a seminarian”), the right of men, even Albany Irishmen, to marry, the right not to be interfered with by sisters, the love for Evelyn (newly announced within the past week), the last chance for happiness, the only love he’d ever known in this goddamned life (“Don’t you swear at me over your concubine”), and the ultimate truth: that he was goddamn sick and tired of being a slave to this family, goddamn sick and tired of not being appreciated, goddamn sick and tired of this stinking town and this stinking street and. . and there Chick’s tirade was interrupted by the front door bell; and he opened it to see a policeman standing on the stoop holding Tommy by the arm.

“Mr. Phelan?”

“Yes.”

“Is this man your brother?”

“He is. What’s the problem?”

“Well, he’s more or less under arrest. It’d be better to talk inside.”

Chick saw another policeman sitting in the squad car parked in front of the house and recognized Eddie Huberty, who used to play left field for Arbor Hill in the Twilight League. Chick waved a small hello to Eddie and backed into the house to let Tommy and the policeman into the parlor.

Molly, who had been upstairs in her room trying to shield her ears against Sarah’s and Chick’s eternal arguing, came down the stairs at the sound of the doorbell, and stopped behind Sarah as the policeman entered and took off his hat. He stood beside Tommy, who could look only at the floor, while Chick, in his shirtsleeves and suspenders, commanded the moment.

“Has he done something, officer?” Chick asked.

“It seems he has. We had a complaint from a woman on Ten Broeck Street that he followed her home from Downtown.”

“He always walks on Ten Broeck Street,” Chick said. “All his life. Did he do anything to the woman?”

“It seems he did,” the policeman said, and Chick detected a small smile on the man.

“It was Letty Buckley, wasn’t it?” Sarah said.

“Matter of fact it was,” said the officer. “How’d you know?”

“I know that one,” said Sarah. “She’s a troublemaker.”

“I don’t know about that,” said the officer. “She called us and said your brother followed her two days in a row, always walking behind her, so the third day we followed along and saw him behind her, sure enough, carrying a cane, and when she got to her front stoop he hooked the neck of the cane under her skirt and lifted it up, up to her hips, and she screamed. He tipped his hat to her and kind of twirled his cane, and then he walked away. That’s when we picked him up.”

“Did you do that?” Sarah asked Tommy, poking his shoulder with one finger.

Tommy made no acknowledgment, stared at the floor.

“Did you, brazen boy? Did you?” Sarah screamed, and Tommy, crying, nodded yes.

“Don’t yell,” Molly said, pushing past Sarah and taking Tommy by the arm. “Come and sit down, Tom,” she said, and she led him to the love seat and sat beside him.

“Is he under arrest?” Chick asked.

“Not yet,” the policeman said, and added in a whisper, “Mrs. Buckley hasn’t filed a complaint, and I’m not sure she really wants to. Probably get in the papers, you know, if she does. She just thinks he oughta be kept under control.”

“We can guarantee that, officer,” Chick said.

“You bet your life we can,” Sarah said.

Tommy whimpered.

The policeman offered a faint smile to Chick and Sarah. “More of a joke, really. He didn’t hurt her, and nobody saw what he done except us. And, o’ course, Miss Buckley. Quite a surprise to her, musta been.” And he laughed. “Just keep him close to home.”

Chick nodded and smiled, and as they walked out to the stoop the policeman said softly to Chick, “Really was funny. Her skirt went about as high as it could go. He’s pretty clever with that cane.”

“We’ll see it doesn’t happen again, officer. And you wanna bring over a coupla tickets to the Police Communion Breakfast I’ll buy ’em from you.”

“I’ll do that,” the policeman said, and he got back in the prowl car. Chick waved again to Eddie Huberty.

Tommy’s head was still bowed, his sisters watching him in silence, when Chick reentered the parlor, feeling that the policeman’s smile had broken the tension. Chick tried to convey that in his tone. “Tom, what the hell did you do that for?”

Tommy shook his head.

“You know Miss Buckley? You ever been in her house?”

“No,” Tommy said.

“You just like her looks, is that it?”

Tommy nodded yes.

“Where’d you learn to do that business with the cane?”

“Charlie,” Tommy said.

“Who?” said Sarah.

“I’ll handle it,” Chick said. “Charlie who?”

“Charlie, the movies.”

“Charlie, Charlie. Charlie Ruggles? Charlie Chan?”

“No,” said Tommy.

“Charlie Grapewin? Charlie McCarthy?”

“No, Charlie with the derby,” Tommy said.

“Charlie Chaplin he means,” Molly said.

“Right. Charlie Chaplin,” Tommy said.

“You saw him do that with a cane?” Chick asked.

“People laughed when he did it. People liked what Charlie did,” Tommy said.

“When’d you see him do that?”

“Saw it with you.”

“Me?” Chick said. “I haven’t seen Charlie Chaplin since the 1920s, silent movies.”

“Down at the Capitol,” Tommy said. “You and me, we saw Charlie, and everybody liked what he did. They laughed. We liked him, you and me did, Chick.”

“Jesus,” Chick said. “He sees somethin’ in the movies and then imitates it twenty-five, thirty years later. I do remember Chaplin used to do that with his cane. Did it all the time. It was funny.”

“It was not,” Sarah said. “Don’t you dare encourage him. It’s a filthy thing he did to her, even if she isn’t any good.”

“There’s nothing wrong with her,” Molly said. “She’s always pleasant to us.”

“She has men in, what I hear.”

“She’s single, what’s wrong with that?”

“I don’t want to talk about it any longer,” Sarah said. “You come upstairs with me, young man.”

“What’re you gonna do?” Chick said.

“I’m going to punish him.”

“Let him alone, won’t ya? He’s scared to death already.”

“You want him to do it again?”

“No, of course I don’t.”

“Then he has to be taught a lesson.”

“He’s scared,” Molly said. “He wet his pants.”

“Get off the love seat,” Sarah said. “Go upstairs and change. You’re a bad boy.”

Tommy quickstepped through the back parlor and went up the back stairs. Chick and Molly exchanged smiles as Sarah went up the front stairs.

“Brazen boy,” Molly said.

“Sixty-three-year-old brazen boy,” Chick said.

There is a photograph taken of Molly by Giselle in early September, 1954, sitting on the porch of the Grand View Lake House on Saratoga Lake, cupping a bird in her hands. She is looking with an oblique glance at the camera, a small smile visible at the corners of her mouth but not in her eyes. The photo is black and white and arrests the viewer with its oddness and its mystery: first the bird, a cedar waxwing whose tan, yellow, and red colors are not discernible, but whose black facial mask is vivid; and then the puzzling expression on the face of this obviously once-beautiful woman in her sixty-fifth year.

A facile interpretation of the photo is that the woman is perhaps saddened by the fact that the bird is injured, for it must be injured or else it would fly away. But this interpretation is not accurate. The memories and secrets that the bird evoked in Molly were what put the smile on her lips and the solemnity in her eyes; and it was this contradiction that Giselle captured in the picture, again proving her talent for recognizing the moment of cryptic truth in people she chose to photograph. Molly had been declining into melancholia before the photo was taken, the onset of decline dating back to the day Tommy was arrested for imitating Charlie Chaplin

On that day, after the policeman left the Phelan home, Tommy went up to his bedroom to remove the underpants that his terror had caused him to wet. In the front parlor, Chick, awash in anger, pity, frustration, anxiety, and other emotions too convoluted to define in a single word, straightened his necktie, snatched up his seersucker sports jacket, and announced to Molly that he was going to dinner and a movie with Evelyn, goddamn it, and maybe he’d be home later and maybe he wouldn’t.

When Chick left, a sudden isolation enveloped Molly: alone again in the company of Sarah, who could raise at will the barricades between herself and the rest of the family: a perverse strength in the woman to do what no one else wanted done but was always done nevertheless. Sarah would spank Tommy, as her mother had spanked all the children for their transgressions of rule. Tommy would cry openly, would wail and sob in his imposed shame, imposed because he was incapable of generating shame in himself, was without the guile, or the moral imperatives that induced it in others, was, in fact, a whole and pure spirit who had had the Commandments, and the punishment for transgressing them, slapped into his buttocks for six decades, but who still had no more understanding of them than when he was an infant. All he knew was that he should avoid the prohibited deeds that provoked spankings. Raising a woman’s skirt with a cane had never been prohibited, but now he would realize he could never do it again. Now, truly; for his crying had begun and Molly knew Sarah was at her work.

The situation was old, Molly’s guilt was old, the themes that provided the skeleton of the events taking place this minute were older than Molly herself, and she was sick of them all, sick of her helplessness in the face of them. She heard the sobs and loathed them. It was like kicking a dog for chasing a bitch in heat. Tommy had instincts that no amount of punishment would turn aside; they would always find a new outlet. But what of your instincts, Molly? Did you ever find another outlet for your stunted passion? It seems you did not, alas. No future for it. Animal with instincts amputated. But no. They were still there. Orson had raised them again last year, had he not? Bright and loving young man, prodding your memory of pleasure, revisiting feelings long in their grave. Orson is Peter’s. Even Chick said he probably was. “Orson,” Chick said, “anytime you need a place to hang your hat you’re welcome here.” Chick so easygoing, the trouble she gives him. He said he was sick of this stinking street. I know he was going to say this stinking house too, and this stinking family. These stinking brothers and sisters. Chick doesn’t mean it.

But he does.

We all do.

Molly laid her head back on the sofa and closed her eyes to shut out Tommy’s sobbing and Sarah’s screaming. She tried to replace those sounds with the face of Walter as he stood tall before her, waiting for her kiss, expecting it, inviting it. Walter loves Molly’s kisses. Loved. Don’t pity yourself, Molly Remember poor Julia, dead at twenty-two, Julia who never knew passion, Julia who was kissed by boys twice in twenty-two years and neither kiss meant any more than a penny’s worth of peppermints. I was truly kissed, Julia. Your sister knew kisses and love and more. Much more. Never again. Other things. Never again.

Molly plunged into the blackest part of her memory to hide, to shut out the thoughts that were coming back now. So much wrong. So many evil things the result of love. Why should it be that we are gifted with love and then the consequences are so. .

Tommy squealed and Molly rose up from her black depths, sat upright on the sofa, heard the squeal a second time, a third, the squeal of an animal in agony, and she was racing up the stairs in seconds toward the wretched sounds. She saw Tommy face down on his bed, Sarah striking his naked buttocks — she had never hit him naked before, never; nobody was ever hit naked, ever — her hand coming down again and again with the two-foot rule (and Molly saw that Sarah was hitting him not with the rule’s flatness but with its wide edge and screaming, “filthy boy, brazen boy, filthy boy, brazen boy”), the Tommy squeals and Sarah screams beyond Molly’s endurance.

But as Molly moved toward Sarah to snatch away the ruler Tommy suddenly rolled onto his back and with both feet kicked Sarah in the stomach as she was raising the ruler yet again, and Sarah flew backward across the room, her back colliding with Tommy’s three-drawer dresser, knocking his clown lamp to the floor and throwing the room into darkness. And Sarah sat suddenly on the floor, breathless, her glasses gone, her expression not pained as much as incredulous that such a thing could happen to her.

So began Sarah’s awareness of her mortality. In her rage, Sarah damaged Tommy’s spine so severely that he could not walk, could not stand or lie straight, could not bend over, could only rest and sleep sitting on cushions. Dr. Lynch, the family physician for thirty years, prescribed pain pills, a wheelchair, and X-rays, and accepted without question the explanation that Tommy had been attacked on the street by wild kids who hit him with sticks. Tommy would not eat or drink, would accept nothing from Sarah, and so Molly assumed control of his life and convinced him to take some bread pudding and tea. She put whiskey in the tea to soothe this grown-up child who never drank whiskey, or even beer or wine, in a house where it went without saying that a drop of the creature improved every living thing, including dogs and fish.

Tommy calmed down and Molly busied herself so totally with him that she could, for hours at a time, forget how dreadfully hostile she was to this house, this family, especially to the absurd and brutal Sarah, who could not only do such a thing but who could stand for the doing for decades, Sarah who felt no remorse, only mortal pangs of ingratitude that she should be isolated by her family after giving her life over to its care and feeding, its salvation from damnation.

Chick was the first to isolate her. When he learned what she had done to Tommy he immediately picked up the telephone, called Evelyn, proposed to her and was accepted, told her he would give two weeks’ notice at the Times-Union and take whatever severance pay he had coming, then they would go to Miami as she wanted, she could work at the deli, he’d get a job somewhere, and they’d start a new life and never look back.

He said all this in earshot of Sarah, who was sitting in front of the television watching “Death Valley Days,” a western series to which she gave loyalty because it advertised 20 Mule Team Borax scouring powder, which Sarah used for cleaning, as had her mother before her. Sarah said nothing to Chick when he hung up, did not acknowledge that he was in the room. He walked in front of the television and said to her, “Sarah, you and your mad ways are out of my life. And Tommy’s life too.”

The latter threat was not to be carried out. Chick had concocted an instant pipe dream that he would take Tommy to Florida with him, care for him, let him grow old in the sun. But Tommy could not move, and would not; said he didn’t want to leave Colonie Street in such nice weather. Tommy, in a week, seemed to have forgotten the beating Sarah gave him. He did not really remember why he couldn’t walk right, yet he shunned Sarah even so, leaving the room when she entered. He did not talk to her about the beating, or about Letitia Buckley, and when Molly tested him and asked what happened to his back he thought a while and said some bad boys hit him with sticks down on Pearl Street.

After six weeks in the wheelchair and sleeping on the sofa in the back parlor to avoid going up and down stairs, Tommy began to improve. Despite this, Molly felt herself sliding back into the melancholy mood that had enveloped her after Walter’s death. She barely talked to Sarah, who had withdrawn into her cocoon of injured merit, and nurtured herself with silence and television. Also, with Chick being gone, probably forever, the house never seemed emptier to Molly.

She took short walks in the neighborhood, visited with neighbors, Martha McCall across the street, who was supervising the movers who would take her and Patsy and their household of forty-four years out of the neighborhood and up to a new house on Whitehall Road, and Libby Dolan, who said she was selling her house to a Negro woman. Would Molly know anybody on the block in another year?

Molly also bumped into Letty Buckley, to whom she had apologized coming out of church the first Sunday after Tommy’s cane trick, and found Letty sweet, even forgiving, knowing how simple Tommy was, a bit abashed it was a simpleton who had done that to her, and even worried for him. Will you have to put him away? No, never, said Molly. And she came home in a fog of emptiness.

Coming into the house made it worse. Talk to Tommy? Talk to Sarah? Talk to the walls? She called her niece, Peg Quinn, just to hear a family voice, and Peg was strong, as always. Molly updated her, leaving out the cause of Tommy’s injury, and Peg immediately offered to come down and visit, or take Molly to supper Downtown, or a movie maybe? But no, that wouldn’t solve anything. And then, after a half-hour of speculating on what would become of Chick in Florida, and analyzing Sarah’s sullen isolation, Peg said, “Why don’t you go up to Saratoga and spend some time at the hotel? The weather’s beautiful, and Orson’s there, isn’t he?”

“He is,” said Molly.

“Then call him and tell him to get a room ready for you, and one for Tommy, and for Sarah if she wants to go. Get a change of scenery. Do it, Molly, do it.”

Do it. Molly understood the advice. Do it, Molly, Walter told her, Chick told her, Peter told her. And did she do it? In her way. But she didn’t weigh much. Ha-ha.

“Maybe I will,” Molly said. The hotel, the lake, Orson. “But Tommy needs his wheelchair. I couldn’t handle it alone.”

“I’ll send Billy down to give you a hand getting him and the chair into the car,” Peg said. “And Orson can help you at the other end.”

Molly called Austin McCarroll at the Texaco station and told him to come and take her car down off blocks and make it drivable. Walter had given her the car, a 1937 Dodge, and taught her to drive it. In seventeen years Molly had driven less than four thousand miles, drove it back and forth to Saratoga, took Sarah and Tommy for drives in the evening to get ice-cream cones, went riding Sundays after the war. This year she didn’t even bother to take it off blocks when the good spring weather came. No place to go anymore.

But now Molly could see herself again at the wheel, driving up Route 9; going up the hill into the Grand View driveway, a thrilling prospect, something she hadn’t done as a vacationer in years. Even though so much time had passed, the Grand View had never been out of her mind for long, and whenever she did find herself turning into its driveway she knew that it would be like going home again, going home to love.

Two

The Grand View Lake House: An Old Brochure

Situated on the eastern shore of Saratoga Lake, fifteen minute ride from railroad station, our car and porter meet your train; the hotel and cottages offer beautiful vista, eighty rods from and no feet above lakeshore, avoiding excessive dampness at night, free from miasma and malaria; convalescents accommodated, consumptives not entertained. Rolling lawns, shade trees, canoeing, boating, fishing, bathing, tennis court, croquet, clock golf, eighteen-hole golf course nearby, bird sanctuary in woods, small game and bird hunting in season, tents available for camping in nearby woods, thousands of flowers, garage on premises, motor parties welcome. Dining room screened, strictly home cooking, all eggs, milk, cream, poultry, and vegetables from our own farm. Wide, 200-foot long veranda, two fireplaces, casino for dancing, piano, phonograph, talking pictures every Sunday night, shower baths, inside toilets, long distance telephone connection, cars carry our guests to nearby Catholic and other churches. Proprietors Patrick and Nora Shugrue, William Shugrue full partner. Hotel open from June 1st to October, 105 rooms, three cottages, special rate by the week, write for terms.

Molly and Giselle: A Colloquy, September, 1954

“I must tell you about love,” Molly said.

“I must tell you about marriage,” Giselle said.

“You seem to know nothing about love.”

“I know everything.”

“It would not seem so.”

“Peter loves you.”

“And I him. But he loved Julia more. I wonder did he ever love Claire.”

“And Orson loves you.”

“And I him,” said Molly.

“I haven’t loved much in my life, but I know I love Orson with a full heart,” Giselle said.

“It would not seem so.”

“You should know me, should be in my head. Then you would understand.”

“You left him alone last year.”

“We’d been apart for six months, but even so we were always together.”

“It would not seem so.”

“You are old. You don’t understand the young.”

“You must never leave them alone for long if you love them,” Molly said.

“Then you live for them, not yourself.”

“You seem to know nothing about love.”

“You should have seen us together.”

“It looks alike sometimes. It looks alike.”

“You should have seen us together at the Plaza.”

“You were not together then.”

“But we were,” Giselle said. “Even there in The Candy Box with his stripper I felt no jealousy. There was a woman in Germany he went with one night, and he must have had others in New York, but I was never jealous of any of them. But this night I loved him and yet I was jealous of the vision he had of me, for it wasn’t me. That loving, successful, talented, noble woman, that was his invention of me. Orson hallucinating again. Orson of the brilliant imagination. Orson the fabulous lover, like none of the others. Orson the marvelous, loyal dog of a man.”

“And that is what you think love is?” Molly asked.

“I knew he might go away from me, but I also knew it wasn’t me he was leaving but the idea of me. And when I looked at his face I wanted to photograph what I saw. There was an uncertainty in his eye, a calmness, with that old wildness banished. There was something in him I didn’t understand.”

“As he didn’t understand you.”

“When we left The Candy Box after the shooting we took a cab back to the Plaza. He saw me to the elevator, then went out for a walk, to clear his brain, he said. He didn’t come back, and after an hour I feared he wouldn’t, so I got dressed again and scoured the lobby and the hotel bars, because I couldn’t believe he’d left me. I preferred the Life editor’s apartment, where my things were, if I was going to spend the night alone, but I still thought there was a small chance Orson would return. And I knew he knew I’d wait for him in the hotel. And so I did. I phoned Peter and found Orson had neither been there nor called. Peter said he knew an all-night bar where Orson sometimes went and offered to go there alone, or with me if I wanted. He said he’d call Claire, but I knew that would achieve nothing, and it did.”

“We were up at Saratoga Lake for three weeks. Mama was dead six months and it was a suffocating summer. We were sitting on the veranda talking about I don’t know what, and I saw that a new arrival, a good-looking fellow who had struck up a conversation with Sarah yesterday, was talking with her again. Then I saw a bird fly into a tree on the lawn, and it must’ve hit something, because it fell to the ground. I ran out to get it and picked it up and started to cry. The newcomer squatted down beside me and said, ‘May I see it?’ And I showed him this beautiful creature that he said was a cedar waxwing. ‘It seems to have an injured wing,’ he said. ‘We can help him.’ I asked how that was possible and he said, ‘We’ll keep him alive while he gets well.’ And that’s what we did for the rest of the week. We fed him and made a nest for him in the birdcage the hotel gave us and he became the pet of the guests. I loved him so, that little creature. Everybody came to my room to see him. We took him out of the cage and he did fly a little inside the room at the end of the week, but not very well. On the tenth day he seemed ready and, when I carried him to the veranda, a dozen guests and waitresses came out to watch him go. I released him over the porch railing and he flew so well, right up into the same tree he’d fallen from. We were all so happy. He perched there in the tree for a minute and then he fell again, not injured, but dead.”

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

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

“Who is Walter?”

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

“And you miss him still.”

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

“ ‘. . A sparrow is dead, my lady’s sparrow,

my own lady’s delight, her sweetest plaything,

dear to her as her eyes — and dearer even. .

I’ll attend you, O evil gods of darkness.

All things beautiful end in you forever.

You have taken away my pretty sparrow,

Shame upon you. And, pitiful poor sparrow,

it is you that have set my lady weeping,

Dear eyes, heavy with tears and red with sorrow.’ ”

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

“You sent him home alone.”

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

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

“Did you ever leave Walter alone?”

“Did I ever leave Walter alone.”

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

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

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

“But the love was a lie.”

“You should have seen us in bed.”

“But you didn’t stay in his bed.”

“No.”

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

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

“Are you brighter than Orson?”

“Would it make any difference if I was?”

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

“I know everything about love.”

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

“Yes. Maybe.”

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

“Orson didn’t die.”

“He might have.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s not my fault,” I said.

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

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

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

“Are you coming with me?”

“Yes,” said Giselle.

And I slept then, sweetly, ignorantly

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

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

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?

One.

I turned the page.

The things we do when we’re alone.

Three

In the year after Molly and I fell in love with each other’s failed love, I could at last say without equivocation that I had acquired a family, although a failing one. Sarah and Tommy passed on, Molly fell into her melancholy, and my father, mad with art, and obsessed with his imagery of pernicious life — this rage of creative excess being the condition to which he had aspired all his artistic career — nearly died of a heart attack. That attack reduced him to part-time madman, immobilized and weak, but insistent on working an hour a day, at least. It was because of his condition, and Molly’s, that I eventually moved down from Saratoga to become magister of the Phelan house on Colonie Street.

Sarah died first. Molly encountered the beginnings of her sister’s decline upon her return from her and Tommy’s Labor Day visit with Giselle and me at the Grand View. She found the interior of the Colonie Street house in total darkness at late afternoon, every window barricaded against the light by black drapes Sarah had nailed to the walls. Sarah had also unplugged all lamps, and removed all bulbs from the ceiling fixtures Peter had installed twenty years earlier. Molly found her in her room, sitting in her chair reading, by the light of a solitary candle, an old yellowed newspaper. Sarah seemed not to hear Molly enter the bedroom, but when she saw her she folded the newspaper and put it in the drawer of her bedside table. Then she blew out the candle, moved onto the bed, and pulled the covers up to her chin.

“What happened, Sarah?” Molly asked. “Are you sick?”

“You left me alone,” Sarah said.

“I asked you to come with us. We went to Saratoga.”

“I know where you went.”

“Billy helped me bring Tommy’s wheelchair into the house. He’s downstairs. Don’t you want to say hello? Don’t you want to see Tommy?”

“No. You left me alone,” Sarah said, and that’s all she said for two days.

Billy and Molly plugged in the lamps, put the bulbs back in the chandeliers, pulled the nails out of the drapes and woodwork, some of which had splintered, the first serious damage to it since the house was built seventy-five years earlier. As Molly was trying to understand what could have possessed Sarah to do such a thing, she realized that being left by herself was reason enough; for it came to Molly that never in her life had Sarah spent one night alone in this house. Molly knew that she herself could be alone forever, would be alone forever, with or without other people, and that it wouldn’t kill her; intensify the sadness she was never without, yes; but I am not going to die from such a thing, is how she put it when we talked about Sarah.

The decline of Sarah seemed uncharacteristically abrupt. We all thought she would struggle more vigorously against the cabal of forces that had beset her, but we misread her plan. All her strength and will centered on the downward rush to death, and she clenched her jaws against even minimal nourishment, ripping out of her arms the tubes that carried the life-sustaining fluids Dr. Lynch had ordered for her. She had a deadline for her death. She calculated her weakness until it was the equivalent of a newborn: helpless, pulled into a realm not of its own choosing, the newborn and the imminently moribund bound for an encounter at the symbiotic boundary of life and death. And she died two hours into November 17, 1954, her mother’s ninety-fourth birthday.

Sarah left explicit instructions for her wake. She was to be laid out in the same style dress that Kathryn Phelan wore to her grave, and in the same style coffin, which was to be placed in the same position in the front parlor. A solemn high funeral mass should be said for her, as with Kathryn Phelan, and with Father Mahar, the pastor, to be the celebrant. She left the bankbook of the family savings account in the drawer of her bedside table, and it revealed a balance of $840.22. Sarah had no bank account of her own. What little money she earned sewing she always deposited to the family account.

Molly did not find the newspaper Sarah had put in the bedside drawer, nor had it been thrown away. Molly resolved to search for it when the funeral was over. She also chose to countermand Sarah’s request for the ancestral dress.

“She’ll wear her good Sunday dress,” Molly said. “I won’t have us a laughing stock, people thinking we’re old-fashioned.”

Tommy saw Ben Owens and another man carrying Sarah’s body down the front stairs and out to the waiting hearse.

“What’re they doing, Molly?” Tommy asked.

“They’re taking Sarah,” Molly said.

“Where they taking her?”

“To the funeral home,” Molly said, and she sat down beside Tommy on the sofa. “Sarah died, Tom.”

“She did?”

“She died this morning.”

“Will they bury her?”

“Yes, they will.”

“Why’d she die?”

“She was sad,” Molly said.

“What was she sad about?”

“Oh a lot of things, Tom.”

“Is she dead? Really, really dead?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t think she’d die.”

“Neither did I.”

“Will you die, Moll?”

“Some day.”

“How about me? Will I die?”

“I hope not.”

“Me too,” Tommy said. “I don’t think I wanna die.”

Molly called Peter and he said he’d be up the next day. When she called Peg to tell her the news Peg immediately came down and helped clean the house. I also came down after Molly called me, and made plans to stay over through the funeral.

Ben Owens brought Sarah home at early evening. There would only be one night of waking, the two-night wake going the way of gaslight and woodstoves. Molly had ordered two pieces of flowers and had them delivered immediately, which I found odd, for surely they’d look fresher if they were delivered the day of the wake. We imposed order and polish on the house, then ate the turkey sandwiches Peg brought for us. When Peg went home Molly put Tommy to bed, and then she and I sat alone in the back parlor, I expecting the full story behind Sarah’s death. But Molly only sat with her hands folded in her lap, still wearing her kitchen apron, staring at the coffin in the front parlor.

“I should do it now,” she said. “I may not have another chance after Peter gets here.”

“Chance for what? What should you do now?”

“Bury my baby,” she said. “Put him in hallowed ground.”

“Jesus, Moll, are you sure? You want to go back and relive that whole thing?”

“I relive it every day of my life,” she said.

“You mean you want Ben Owens to go down the cellar and dig up the bones and buy a grave and have a mass and all that? It could turn into a police matter. Can you seriously want that?”

“That’s not what I want. Do you love me the way you did the night we danced?”

“I do, Moll,” I said, “I think it’s a permanent condition.”

“I thought so. That’s why I want you to dig up the baby for me.”

Access to the cellar was through a trapdoor in the kitchen floor. The stairway was of narrow, warped boards, without a banister, and one achieved the bottom either in darkness or with a flashlight. The place had obviously been designed by a lunatic, the foundation a crazy collage of brick and field-stone, the dirt floor never leveled, the place never wired for electricity, despite the former need for access to the now defunct coal furnace (oil now heated the house). The cellar gave off the cloistered odor of coal dust, dry earth, and crumbling mortar from the foundation walls, which were in a decrepitude parallel to that of the denizens of this house. Dozens of empty jelly and Ball jars lay in boxes on shelves, and beside them dusty rows of pickled cauliflower, tomatoes, onions, preserved fruit and jellies, and I wondered were these still edible, and how long had they survived in this dismal grotto?

Molly followed me down the steps, more surefooted than I, more used to the stairs’ rickety incline. Some light from the kitchen shone through the open trapdoor, and so we could see each other dimly. She looked back up to the light.

“Imagine me holding the box with the baby, and finding my way with a flashlight because I didn’t dare put on the kitchen light, and then coming down those stairs in my condition. I don’t know how I did it.”

“You’re a strong-minded woman.”

“Not strong-minded enough.”

She took the flashlight from me and shone its beam into the area behind the stairs. Three more boxes of jars, a box of tools, a crank for an old automobile, a box of horseshoes, a few lengths of pipe, rusty plumbing fixtures, and a backless chair occupied the space. Molly shone the light onto the horseshoes.

“That’s the spot,” she said, and she reached into the coal bin, lifted a spade off a nail, and handed it to me. I moved the horseshoes and began to dig. It was a shallow grave. I struck the box on the spade’s third thrust.

“Is it just one box, nothing else?”

“It was wrapped in a towel.”

I scraped dirt away, exposing the box and small, decayed fragments of cloth no longer recognizable as anything in particular.

“No towel here any more,” I said.

The light disappeared from the grave and I turned and saw Molly facing away, shining the light on a far wall.

“I need the light, Moll,” I said.

She focused it on the dig but again looked away.

“I don’t want to see it,” she said.

“You won’t have to.”

I raised the box with one end of the spade, then lifted it out with my hand. Only with its touch did the next question arise: What do we do with it? Hallowed ground where? And how? Climb the cemetery fence at night, babe in hand and the spade strapped to my back? But Molly had already thought it through.

“We’ll put the baby in the coffin with Sarah,” she said.

I could only whistle my admiration at the tidiness of this.

“Put the box on her chest and fold her hands over it,” I said, brushing dirt from the box.

Molly took off her apron and handed it to me.

“Wrap the baby in this, and then put the box back in the ground,” she said. “I can’t watch. Bring it up to the kitchen when you finish.” And up the stairs she went.

I spread her apron on the lowest empty shelf and set the box beside it. In close light I saw the box was of a type that locked with a key, and it was locked, or sealed by rust under its eighteen-year-old layer of silt. I found a hammer and chisel in the tool box, easily broke the lock, and raised the top to see the remnants of a cloth of indeterminate type: a muslin pillowcase? a linen blouse? I tipped the box upside down to empty its contents onto the apron, but it would not release, the remains wedded to the interior rust. I did not want to touch anything, more out of sacredness than revulsion or fear of corruption. I nudged the edges of the cloth with the chisel and, as gently as the task demanded that I do this, scraped the swaddling cloth out of its coffin. It was far more intact than the towel, its underside discernible as linen, tanned by time and stained by blood and afterbirth. There was almost no shape to the remains of the child: no torso, no shoulders or rib cage, no limbs, no bones at all that I could see except the half-curve of the tiny skull that raised a doll-like protuberance under the cloth. I would make no inspection of what lay beneath the linen. I folded the apron around it and the odor that arose from the closure was neither of blood nor decayed flesh, but rather a singular emanation more powerful than the fused odors of earth and disintegrating metal: a pungent assault on the senses by the mortal remains of love.

In the kitchen Molly had prepared the burial packaging: a length of brown wrapping paper, a roll of Scotch tape and another of adhesive tape, and a white linen napkin with the scrolled letter P on one corner. I took the remains out of the apron and put them in the wrapping paper, this movement revealing that there remained nothing but human dust and the fraction of skull, and I wrapped and sealed this completely with the tape. I wrapped it then within the napkin, exposing the letter P, and wrapped that twice around with adhesive tape. The entire package was about the size of a poppyseed roll from the Grand Lunch, and when I finished with it Molly took a small purse from the top of the refrigerator, put the remains inside it, and handed it to me.

“You decide where to put it,” she said.

The logical place was under Sarah’s head. I raised the head cushion, and Sarah as well, and fitted the purse snugly into the space. The change in Sarah’s angle of supinity was negligible.

“Do you think people will be able to smell anything?” Molly asked.

“Your flowers should take care of that. Isn’t that why you ordered them?”

“It is.”

“You’ve thought about this a long time.”

“For years. I knew I’d send Walter along with whoever went next in the family. I prayed I wouldn’t go first.”

“What do you think Sarah would say if she knew she was having company in her coffin?”

“She’d find fault. She found fault with everything.”

“It gives a new meaning to ‘virgin with child.’ “

“We all would’ve been happier if Sarah wasn’t a virgin.”

“You really think that would have made a difference?”

“Virgins think about heaven,” Molly said. “They don’t care about what goes on down here.”

Our neighborhood was in a stage of vanishing tradition, dying to its old self, an influx of Negroes creating a new world order, displacing the old Irish and Germans in the same way those two groups had displaced the Dutch and English gentry who so shortsightedly thought that bucolic Arbor Hill was to be their private garden forever. And so for this reason, and also because of the all-but-cloistered life Sarah had led, fewer people came to her wake than were expected, the most notable absence being Chick, who did not even telephone after he received Molly’s telegram, but merely sent a modest basket of flowers, the card with them bearing nothing other than the names Chick and Evelyn Phelan, the first announcement to the family that Chick had married, and simultaneously an act of distancing Molly took to be spiteful.

“Chick will regret this to his dying day,” Peter said when he read the card, “not because of Sarah, but because he’ll eventually realize what we think of his gesture. Anger makes people stupid.”

Anger did not make Peter stupid. And surely it was at least anger, perhaps even rage at the power of an abstraction as cruel, remote, and inviolate as God, but not God, that propelled Peter toward his masterworks. He saw, in the story of Malachi and Lizzie, and then in the way that Kathryn and Sarah had nursed that story and secretly kept it alive, a pattern that need not have been — a wrong to two generations that might have been preventable, if only. .

I’ve generalized about cause and effect in this family, but one proximate cause of what made Kathryn, Sarah, Peter, and the rest of us behave in such diverse but consistent ways was chronicled in that newspaper story Molly saw Sarah reading by candlelight. Molly found the cache of old papers in a crawlspace that opened off the closet of Sarah’s room (Kathryn’s and Michael’s room before Sarah took it over) into an unusable area of the attic. As children, Molly and Julia had discovered the crawlspace and hidden in it to elude Sarah, or merely to exist in a secret place no one else could enter; but Sarah caught them coming out of it one day and the secret place lost all value.

Molly found the papers in the small brown leather suitcase Michael Phelan had used when his work on the railroad required him to stay overnight in another city. There were a dozen newspapers in all, telling day by day the story of Malachi and Lizzie, the marriage destined for enshrinement in a lower circle of hell.

“So this,” Molly said to me when she showed me the papers, “is what she was reading at the last. Gone back to the first.”

What happened with Malachi was hardly the first, but I do believe that that’s how Molly and others in the family thought of it. Molly wasn’t even born when it happened, nor were Julia and Tommy. Francis was seven, Sarah four, Chick one. Also Kathryn was pregnant with Peter when she went through the Malachi ordeal in 1887.

In the 1930s Peter had found his artistic vision in The Itinerant series, but then in subsequent years he foundered badly, dabbling in cityscapes, portraits, and in the new non-figurative, non-representational abstract mode, whose exercises in symbolic color and form, devoid of the human being, he could admire when done by others, but only loathe as pretentious failures when he created them himself.

In the weeks after Molly and I showed him the Malachi newspapers, Peter returned to figurative drawing, sketches of people closest to him, and felt instant strength, saw the abstract elements of these lives not as layers of scumbled space and violated line, but as the cruel specifics of eyes and jaw, the mournful declension of a lip line, the jaunty elevation of a leg. For years he had sketched the family, either from photographs or memory, or by cajoling his siblings (even Sarah one afternoon) into modeling for him. He never showed any of these works publicly, though he completed a dozen or more paintings from four or five score of sketches. Perhaps he was waiting for the moment when the visual reunion of his kin would make exhibitional sense.

That came to pass when the family, as he saw it, osmosed its way into his Malachi Suite, that manic outpouring of genius (I give him no less) that eventually drew me, and even Giselle, into its remarkable vortex. He sketched with a passion and painted with a fury that bespoke his fear of time, his full awareness that he had so little of it left in which to complete this now obsessive work. But he also painted with a sure hand, all errors deemed fortuitous and made part of the painting. His brush never wavered, these works of pain and poignancy stroked into existence with swiftness, certainty, and a realism that arrested the eyes of the beholder, held them fast.

In early childhood Peter had heard the Malachi events spoken of in cryptic bits by his mother, later heard more from Francis, who was seven when it happened, and in time heard it garbled by street-corner wags who repeated the mocking rhyme:

If you happen to be a Neighbor,

If you happen to be a witch,

Stay the hell away from Malachi,

That loony son of a bitch.

When the story took him over, Peter moved out of portrait sketching into scenes of dynamic action and surreal drama that in their early stages emerged as homage to Goya’s Caprichos, Disparates, and Desastres de Guerra. But in his extended revelation of the Malachi-and-Lizzie tragedy (and mindful of Goya’s credo that the painter selected from the universe whatever seemed appropriate, that he chose features from many individuals and their acts, and combined them so ingeniously that he earned the title of inventor and not servile copyist), Peter imposed his own original vision on scandalous history, creating a body of work that owed only an invisible inspiration of Goya.

He reconstituted the faces and corpora of Lizzie and Malachi and others, the principal room and hearth of the McIlhenny three-room cottage, the rushing waters of the Staatskill that flowed past it, the dark foreboding of the sycamore grove where dwelled the Good Neighbors, as Crip Devlin arcanely called those binate creatures whose diabolical myths brought on that terrible night in June of 1887.

His first completed painting, The Dance, was of Lizzie by the sycamores, her bare legs and feet visible to mid-thigh in a forward step, or leap, or kick, her left hand hiking the hem of her skirt to free her legs for the dance. But is it a dance? In the background of the painting is the stand of trees that played such a major role in Lizzie’s life, and to the left of her looms a shadow of a man or perhaps it is a half-visible tree, in the dusky light. If it is a tree it is beckoning to Lizzie. If it is a man perhaps he is about to dance with her.

But is that a dance she is doing, or is it, as one who saw her there said of it, an invitation to her thighs?

In the painting it is a dance, and it is an invitation.

Four

Why would Lizzie McIlhenny, a plain beauty of divine form and pale brown hair to the middle of her back, choose to dance with a tree, or a shadow, or a man (if man it ever was or could be) at the edge of a meadow, just as a summer night began its starry course? Aged twenty-six, married five years to Malachi McIlhenny, a man of formidable girth whose chief skill was his strength, a man of ill luck and no prospects, Lizzie (née Elizabeth Cronin) had within her the spirit of a sensuous bird.

Malachi imposed no limits of space on their marriage, and so she came and went like a woman without a husband, dutiful to their childless home, ever faithful to Malachi and, when the bad luck came to him, his canny helpmate: first trapping yellow birds in the meadow and selling them to friends for fifty cents each, but leaving that when she found that fashioning rag birds out of colored cloth, yarn, thread, feathers, and quills was far more profitable; that she could sell them for a dollar, or two, depending on their size and beauty, to the John G. Myers Dry-Goods and Fancy-Goods Store, which, in turn, would sell them for four and five dollars as fast as Lizzie could make them.

At the end of a week in early June she made and sold sixteen birds, each of a different hue, and earned twenty-seven dollars, more money than Malachi had ever earned from wages in any two weeks, sometimes three. The money so excited Lizzie that when crossing the meadow on her way home from the store she kicked off her shoes, threw herself into the air, and into the wind, danced until breath left her, and then collapsed into the tall grass at the edge of the sycamore grove, a breathless victim of jubilation.

When she regained her breath and sat up, brushing bits of grass from her eyelashes, she thought she saw a man’s form in the shadowy interior of the grove, saw him reach his hand toward her, as if to help her stand. Perhaps it was only the rustling of the leaves, or the sibilance of the night wind, but Lizzie thought she heard the words “the force of a gray horse,” or so it was later said of her. Then, when she pulled herself erect, she was gripping not the hand of a man but the low-growing branch of a sycamore.

Malachi’s troubles crystallized in a new way when he lost his only cow to a Swedish cardsharp named Lindqvist, a recently arrived lumber handler who joined the regular stud-poker game at Black Jack McCall’s Lumber District Saloon, and who bested Malachi in a game that saw jacks fall before kings. Lindqvist came to the cow shed behind Malachi’s cottage and, with notable lack of regret, led Malachi’s only cow into a territorial future beyond the reach of all McIlhennys.

The lost cow seemed to confirm to Malachi that his life would always be a tissue of misfortune. At the urgings of his older brother, Matty, who had come to Albany in 1868 and found work on a lumber barge, Malachi, age seventeen, had sold all that the family owned and left Ireland in 1870 with his ten-year-old sister, Kathryn, and their ailing father, Eamon, who anticipated good health and prosperity in the New World. In Albany the three penniless greenhorns settled in with Matty at his Tivoli Hollow shanty on the edge of Arbor Hill. Within six months Matty was in jail on a seven-year sentence for beating a man to death in a saloon fight, within a year he was dead himself, cause officially unknown, the unofficial word being that a guard, brother of the man Matty killed, broke Matty’s head with an iron pipe when opportunity arose; and then, within two years, Eamon McIlhenny was dead at fifty-nine of ruined lungs. These dreadful events, coming so soon after the family’s arrival in the land of promise and plenty, seemed to forebode a dark baggage, a burden as fateful as the one the McIlhennys had tried to leave behind in County Monaghan.

Malachi did not yield to any fate. He labored ferociously and saved his money. And as he approached marriage he bought a small plot of country land on Staats Lane, a narrow and little-used road that formed a northern boundary of the vast Fitzgibbon (formerly Staats) estate, and built on it, with his own hands, the three-room cottage that measured seven long paces deep by nine long paces wide, the size of a devil’s matchbox. In 1882 Malachi moved into the cottage with his bride, the sweet and fair Lizzie Cronin, a first-generational child of Albany.

After five years the marriage was still childless, and Lizzie slowly taught herself to be a seamstress as a way of occupying her time, making clothing for herself and Malachi. But with so few neighbors she found other sewing work scarce, and her days remained half empty, with Malachi working long and erratic hours. And so Lizzie looked to the birds, the trees, the meadows of the Fitzgibbon estate, and the Staatskill, a creek with a panoramic cascade, churning waters, and placid pools, for her pleasure. Malachi saw his wife developing into a fey creature of the open air, an elfin figure given to the sudden eruption of melodies off her tongue that Malachi did not recognize. She began to seem like an otherworldly being to Malachi.

In the spring of 1887, two days after he lost his cow, the waters of the Hudson River, as usual, spilled over their banks and rose into the lumber mills, storage sheds, and piles of logs that were the elemental architecture of Sage’s lumber yard, where Malachi worked as a handler. One log slipped its berth in the rising waters, knocked Malachi down, and pinned his left shoulder against a pile of lumber, paralyzing his left arm and reducing the strength in his torso by half, perhaps more. So weakened was he that he could no longer work as a handler, that useless left arm an enduring enemy.

He found work one-handedly sickling field grass on the Fitzgibbon land, work that provided none of the fellowship that prevailed among lumber handlers. He worked alone, came home alone, brooded alone until the arrival of his wife, who grew more peculiar with every moment of Malachi’s increasing solitude. He topped her at morning, again at evening after she returned from her communion with the birds of the field, and he failed to create either new life in Lizzie or invincible erectness in himself.

To test himself against nature he sought out the woman known to the canalers and lumber handlers as the Whore of Limerick, her reputation as an overused fuckboat appealing to Malachi’s free-floating concupiscence. After several iniquitous successes that proved the problem existed wholly in Lizzie, Malachi abandoned the fuckboat and sought solace again in Lizzie’s embrace, which cuddled his passion and put it to sleep. He entered heavily into the drink then, not only the ale that so relieved and enlivened him, but also the potsheen that Crip Devlin brewed in his shed.

Drink in such quantity, a departure for Malachi, moved him to exotic behavior. He lay on his marriage bed and contemplated the encunted life. Cunt was life, he decided. Lizzie came to him as he entered into a spermatic frenzy, naked before her and God, ready to ride forever into the moist black depths of venery indeed even now riding the newly arrived body of a woman he had never seen, whose cunt changed color and shape with every nuance of the light, whose lewd postures brimmed his vessel. Ah love, ah fuckery how you enhance the imperial power of sin! When he was done with her, the woman begged for another ride, and he rode her with new frenzy; and when he was done again she begged again and he did her again, and then a fourth ride, and a fifth; and, as he gave her all the lift and pull that was left to him, his member grew bloody in his hand. When the woman saw this she vanished, and Lizzie wept.

The following morning, when he awoke, Malachi found not only his wife already gone from the house, he found himself also bereft of his privities, all facets of them, the groin of his stomach and thighs as hairless, seamless, and flat as those groins on the heavenly angels that adorned the walls of Sacred Heart Church. Here was a curse on a man, if ever a curse was. God was down on Malachi now — God, or the devil, one.

Malachi clothed himself, drained half a jug of potsheen, all he had, then pulled the bedcovers over his head. He would hide himself while he considered what manner of force would deprive a man not only of his blood kin, his strength, his labor, and his cow, but now, also, his only privities. He would hide himself and contemplate how a man was to go about living without privities; more important, he would think about ways of launching a counterattack on God, or the devil, or whoever had taken them, and he would fight that thief of life with all his strength to put those privities back where they belonged.

In the painting he called The Conspiracy, Peter Phelan created the faces of Malachi and Crip Devlin as they sit in Malachi’s primitive kitchen with their noses a foot apart, the condiments and implements of their plan on the table in front of them, or on the floor, or hanging over the fireplace. The bed is visible in the background, a crucifix on the wall above it.

Malachi is in a collarless shirt, waistcoat and trousers of the same gray tweed, and heavy brogans, his left arm hanging limp. Crip Devlin wears a cutaway coat in tatters, a wing collar too large for his neck, a bow tie awkwardly tied.

These men are only thirty-four and forty, Malachi the younger of the two, but they are portraits of psychic and physical trouble. Malachi’s face is heavily furrowed, his head an unruly mass of black curls, his black eyes and brows with the look of the wild dog in them. Crip is bald, with a perpetual frown of intensity behind his spectacles, a half-gray mustache, and sallow flesh. He is moving toward emaciation from the illness to which he has paid scant attention, for at this time he considers all trouble and trauma to be the lot of every man born to walk among devils.

Crip was in a late stage of his pox veneris, not knowing how close he was to death, when he brought his mystical prowess to bear on the lives of Lizzie and Malachi. He had studied for the priesthood briefly as a young man, and later taught primary school, but was unsuited for it, lacking in patience toward eight-year-old children who could not perceive the truth. In recent years he had worked as a lumber handler with Malachi, and in the winter they cut ice together on the river. But his disease in late months kept him from working and he lived off the sale of his homemade liquor, which, by common standards, was undrinkable, but had the redeeming quality of being cheap.

Crip had brought the recipe for the potsheen with him from Ireland, as he had brought his wisdom about the Good Neighbors, those wee folk who, he insisted, inhabited a hilly grove of sycamore trees and hawthorn bushes not far from Malachi’s cottage. Crip was a widower who lived with his nine-year-old daughter, Mab; and he taught her all the lore of the Good Neighbors that he himself had learned from his mother, who once kept one of the wee creatures (a flute player) in the house for six months, fed it bread and milk on a spoon, and let it sleep in the drawer with the knives and forks. And didn’t Crip’s mother have good luck the rest of her life for her generous act? Indeed she did.

When Malachi listened to Crip Devlin talk, something happened to his mind. He saw things he knew he’d never seen before, understood mysteries he had no conscious key to. When Crip stopped talking Malachi also felt eased, relieved to be back in his own world, but felt also a new effulgence of spirit, a potential for vigorous action that just might give back a bit of its own to the foul beast that was skulking so relentlessly after his body and his soul.

In Ireland, Crip boasted, he’d been called the Wizard, the Cunningman who could outwit the Good Neighbors. And when Malachi heard this he confided to Crip that he had lost his privities.

“Did you ever lose them before?” Crip asked Malachi.

“Never.”

“Was there pain when they went?”

“None. I didn’t know they were gone till I looked.”

“It’s a shocking thing.”

“I’m more shocked than others,” Malachi said.

“I’ve heard of this,” said Crip. “Somebody has put the glamour on you.”

“Glamour, is it?”

“A spell of a kind. The Neighbors could do it. I read of a man who lost his privities and thought he knew who did it, and it was a witch and he went to her. He told her his trouble and also told her she had the most beautiful bosoms in the village, for he knew how witches love flattery. And she took him out to a tree and told him to climb up it and he’d find what he needed. When he did that he found a great nest full of hay and oats in the treetop, and two dozen privities of one size and the other lying in it. And the man says I’ll take this big one, and the witch says no, that belongs to the bishop. So the man took the next-smaller size and put it in his pocket, and when he got to the bottom of the tree and touched the ground with his foot, the witch disappeared and his privity was on him. And he never lost it again.”

“You’re thinkin’, is it, that a witch did this to me?” Malachi asked.

“It well could be. Do you know any witches yourself?”

“None.”

“Have you had any in the family?”

“None that I know of.”

“And your wife’s family?”

“I’ve never heard it spoken of.”

“They don’t speak of it, don’t you know.”

“I’ll ask her,” said Malachi.

“I saw her up on the Neighbors’ hill two days ago.”

“Is that so?”

“It’s so, and she was dancing.”

“Dancing, you say.”

“I do. Dancing with her skirts in the air.”

“No.”

“Didn’t I see it myself, and the shape of a man in the woods watching her?”

“The shape of a man?”

“Not a man atall, I’d say.”

“Then what?”

“One of the Neighbors. A creature, I’d call it.”

“Lizzie dancing with a creature? You saw that. And were you at the potsheen?”

“I was not.”

“Did you go to her?”

“I did not. You don’t go near them when they’re in that mood.”

“What mood?”

“The mood to capture. That’s how they carry on, capturing people like us to fatten their population. They like to cozy up to them that come near them, and before you know it somebody’s gone and you don’t even know they’re gone, for the creatures leave changelings in place of the ones they take. But there’s no worth atall to them things. They melt, they die, they fly away, and if they don’t, you have to know how to be rid of them.”

“You know how to do that, do you?”

“I’ve heard how it’s done. I have the recipes.”

Two books lie on the table in Peter’s Conspiracy painting.

The first is the Malleus Maleficarum. Its subtitle, not visible in the painting, is The Hammer of Witches Which Destroyeth Witches and Their Heresy as with a Two-edged Sword. The book is a fifteenth-century theological analysis of the anarchical political forces that for centuries sought the overthrow of civilization through witchcraft, plus abundant remedies for this evil; and it is a work that had motivated Crip Devlin since the days of his priestly intent, for its divinely inspired misogyny conformed to Crip’s own outlook, especially after his infection with the pox by his wife. And did she give it to him, the witch? Well, she did. Didn’t she die of it herself, and die before Crip? Was that proof or was it not?

Malachi, when he listened to Crip’s wisdom, handed down from the sages of history, felt like a chosen man, one who would yet again do battle with the dark spirits, the lot of the true warrior in every age. Malachi accepted the role without complaint, for its rules and its goals were as familiar to him as the streets and the fields of Albany. He agreed with them, he understood them, and he knew from his wound that he had been singled out for this challenge. As the Malleus pointed out so clearly, devils existed only with God’s permission, and Malachi perceived that God had allowed these devilish things to happen to him, allowed his life to be taken away piece by piece, in the same way He had allowed Job and Jesus and the martyred saints to be warrior sufferers for His sake.

Without ever having heard the phrase, and with small capacity for understanding it if he had, Malachi had become an ascetic idealist, as obsessed by his enemy as Peter would be by his art; and when you look at the eyes Peter gave the man, you know that both Malachi and Peter understood that the world was inimical to them and to their plans of order and harmony, that their lives existed at the edge of disaster, madness, and betrayal, and that a man of strength and honor would struggle with the dark armies until he triumphed or died on the battlefield.

Malachi truly believed he would win this struggle with the black villain. He had done as the Malleus counseled, had said his Aves and his Our Fathers, had made the Stations of the Cross on his knees, had talked to the priest and confessed his sins (not his loss for that was an affliction, not a sin), and had gone to mass so often that the women of the parish thought he must be either very guilty, or dying. But, in truth, he was coming to understand that some sort of action that went beyond heavenly recourse was called for, action beyond what was known on earth — except by a chosen few whose courage was boundless and whose weapons were mighty.

The second book on the table in the painting is a slim volume that is open to a sketch of a plant with leaves and berries that any herbalist would recognize as foxglove. Also in the painting Crip is holding a chicken by the neck with his left hand and from its anus is receiving droppings in his right palm, some of these already floating in a bowl of new milk on the table.

Crip, before the moment shown in the painting, has enlightened Malachi on the things witches fear most, things that cure enchantment and banish the witch back to her own devilish world: foxglove and mugwort, white mullen and spearwort, verbena and elf grass, the four-leaf clover and the scarlet berries of the rowan oak, green and yellow flowers, cow parsnip and docken, a drawn sword, the gall of a crow, the tooth of a dead man, rusty nails and pins, the music of a Jew’s harp, a red string around the neck, the smoke of burned elder and ash wood, the smoke of a burned fish liver, spirting into your own shirt, pissing through a wedding ring, and fire.

Crip mixed half a dozen potions for Malachi and he drank them; the two men burned ash wood and fish liver; they found foxglove and cow parsnip and made a paste of it and Malachi went off by himself and rubbed that on his groin. He thought of pissing through his mother’s wedding ring, but then he remembered he had nothing to piss with. More things were done, all of them failing to restore Malachi’s privities.

Crip then moved to the next logical step: an inquiry into the behavior and the physical properties of the women around Malachi (his sister Kathryn, the Whore of Limerick, Lizzie), for it was well known that witches sometimes assumed the shape of living people, especially women. Even so, they could be found out, for they always had marks and traits that were not human. Crip knew of one witch who had an extra nipple on her stomach, and another with nipples on each buttock. A third witch always lived with two creatures sucking her, a red one at her left breast, a white one at the inward walls of her secrets.

When Malachi heard these revelations he immediately undertook a thorough but surreptitious study of his wife, and for the first time he realized that she had shrunk in height by four inches, that the mark on her left thigh could well be an extra nipple. He remembered that she brought a succubus to their bed and encouraged him to copulate with it until he was bloody. Also, Crip swore to him that, on the night he watched Lizzie dancing on the Neighbors’ hill, her partner, the shadowy creature, had the webbed feet of a goose.

And so Malachi made ready to launch his counterattack against the demon (and all its hellish consorts) that inhabited his wife’s body.