Very Old Bones

One

As the time grows closer for it, I’m becoming obsessed by the fact that Giselle is coming here, and that my life is about to change yet again. She now tells me she’s pregnant, and that she didn’t plan it. It’s July, she’s two months gone, and I did it to her in May, she says, when she came up to take the final photo of Peter for the Life profile she did on him. She was here all weekend, we went at it in my room, what, two, three times? And bingo! She left then to travel for two months, and I didn’t hear from her until last night, when she said she’d be up today, with an enhanced womb, for the family meeting Peter had invited her to attend.

She also told me that, after five years of it, she’s had enough and is leaving Life—as soon as she finishes her current project. She’ll have a baby, then free-lance, giving Life first look at whatever she photographs. She no longer wants to be at the beck and call of magazine editors, now says she’s willing to rejoin the nuptial bed, which she’d hinted at when last we bathed in the steam of our malfunctional wedlock.

I’d often given her my spiel, that the quotidian life is the most important element of our existence, and although she didn’t accept that in the early days of our marriage, she now says I was right, that a career is indispensable, but it makes for a very sterile life if that’s all there is. She says she envies me the family ties, and that she’s come to understand she and I might be divorced now if it weren’t for Molly.

Of course I don’t believe much of what Giselle says. Such conversions are for minds more simple than hers. It will be a major change having her with me all the time, but it is true that she’s grown closer to the family since the Life profile on Peter, and the book project that grew out of it. Walker Pettijohn suggested an art book on Peter, a book suitable for coffee tables, with Giselle doing the photos, me doing text blocks plus interviews with the artist (he thought the father-son link would enhance the book’s appeal, but I pointed out to him the awkward disparity in our names), and a critic yet to be chosen analyzing Peter’s work and putting it in historical perspective. Such is the man’s fame, now that he’s close to death (though not yet moribund), that this was one of four book offers prompted by the Life article. Peter has managed to jump through the flaming hoop of high art and come out the other side as a potential creature of the popular imagination.

I was still at the dining-room table, cheating at cards for Billy’s amusement, when I heard Peter’s hoarse voice call me.

“Orson, can you come up?”

And so I excused myself and went up. Peter was in bed, just reawakened after a mid-morning nap. He’d had his matinee with Adelaide, then attacked his easel until fatigue pulled him back to his pillow. He looked tousled and very old for his seventy-one years, his gray-haired torso going to bone, his hair and mustache almost solid white, and more scraggly than usual.

When I entered his bedroom he was sitting on the side of the bed gripping the sturdy blackthorn walking stick Michael Phelan had bought in Ireland. His room, the same one he’d slept in all his life in this house, was full of books, newspapers, and three unfinished sketches, this being his pattern: to keep incomplete work at his bedside, study it before sleep, and wake perhaps to find a solution that would let him complete it. I thought he might now be ready for a second go at the work-in-progress, but he had another plan.

“Anybody here yet?” he asked.

“Just Billy and myself.”

“So you nailed him.”

“He’s here but he’s itchy to leave.”

“Keep his curiosity aroused and he’ll stay.”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

“Get him to help you move some paintings downstairs.”

“He’s got a cast on his foot.”

“How’d he get here? You carry him?”

“He can walk.”

“If he can walk he can climb stairs.”

“Which paintings do you want?”

“The Dance, The Conspiracy, and The Protector.”

“Not the new one?”

“No, I don’t want to shock them. Maybe later. Those’ll do for what I have to say.”

“Done.”

I called Billy and he hobbled upstairs immediately. I took him through the rooms, which he hadn’t seen since the day Sarah went crazy because Molly left her alone. Billy and Molly then had to repair all Sarah’s damage and chaos, and that was the first Billy had ever been above the ground floor. He’d told me more than once he never wanted anything to do with the house, or its people, after his father’s experience, the exception being Molly, who always gave him five dollars in birthday gold, as she gave others in the family. Like most people who knew her, Billy projected a ray of love toward Molly “Good old dame,” he called her. He liked to tease her about her hemorrhoids, a problem he also lived with.

“Christ, what a wreck this joint is,” Billy said when he came upstairs.

“It’s not a wreck. It’s an artist’s studio, all of it except my room and Molly’s. And he’s even moving things into her room, now that she’s not using it.”

“Molly’s not livin’ here no more?”

“Not for months. She’s up at Saratoga with the Shugrues, living in the rooms I used to live in. She couldn’t take care of Peter, couldn’t go up and down the stairs twenty times a day. She’s got all she can do to take care of herself these days, and so we swapped rooms. I came here, she went there. Alice Shugrue’s her best friend in the world, great company for her.”

“I didn’t know Molly was sick. I don’t hear what goes on.”

“She’s not sick, just weary. She’s in good enough shape that she’s cooking lunch for us. You like roast lamb?”

“Are you kiddin’?”

“Good.”

“What’s this lunch business all about?”

“About all the Phelans, and their ancestors.”

“Not interested.”

“Don’t be so quick, Billy. We need you, and I really mean that. We need what you know.”

“I don’t know nothin’ you don’t know.”

“You know about your father. You know when he came home in ’42, and what he did. I don’t know any of that. I was in the army already. You see what I’m saying?”

“I see what you’re sayin’, but I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. What’s my father got to do with anything?”

So I showed him all my photos of The Itinerant series, in which Francis played the central role. I told him how Francis showed up all of a sudden, then fought with Sarah, and how Peter tracked him down and asked him to come back, and that I saw this with my own eyes.

“But he didn’t come back,” Billy said.

“No. He kept walking. He didn’t come back to stay till the war. Do you know whether he ever came here in the war period?”

“He wouldn’t put a foot on the stoop.”

“Did he ever talk to Peter, or Molly, or Chick, or anybody?”

“Maybe Pete went to see him at a Senators game when he was coachin’, but if he did my father never mentioned it.”

“He saw you, and Peg, and Annie.”

“That’s why he came home. He called my mother and found out I was goin’ in the army and he said he’d come home and be around if somethin’ needed fixin’. He took a room up near the ball park. He’d come down to the house once a week and sit with my mother, bring her a pint of vanilla ice cream, or pineapple sherbet, talk an hour, have a meal with us, then disappear for another week. But he’d come by in a minute if Ma called him. He shoveled snow, cut the grass for her, put up screens and storm windows, fixed a busted asbestos pipe on the furnace.”

“He was a strange guy.”

“He was an all-right guy,” Billy said with an edge to his voice.

“I didn’t say he wasn’t.”

“Everybody else in this joint did.”

“I just told you that wasn’t true. Stick around, Billy. You’ll learn something about your relatives you didn’t know.”

“Yeah,” he said.

But I knew I’d hooked him. I took him into Peter’s studio and found the paintings Peter wanted as props when he delivered his remarks to the assembled kin. Billy looked at the paintings the way he looked at everything else in the house: not interested. Then we carried them, one by one, down the hallway to the dining room.

That Malachi was still influencing our lives like this supported my idea that we are never without the overcoats, however lice-ridden, of our ancestors. This luncheon was going to be an expressionistic occasion, offering graphic imaginings of where we came from, what we might expect of ourselves (and our children), and what we might do to our greatest loves, given our inherited propensities. I tried to imagine whether and, if so, why Malachi was predisposed to disaster, and all I could do was project myself backward into my own disturbed history, into the isolation where I had been able to triumph privately in social, financial, marital, and artistic realms, no failure possible in that utopia where all eccentricity is justified, where ineffectuality is not only acceptable, but desirable as a badge of defiance, where there is no need to engage the actual world because the private world is always sufficient to the day. Reality conquered by the ego: Malachi’s story precisely.

I now like to think that I am coming out of this benighted condition, and in my own peculiar way am again an engaged citizen of the bright day, working within the race. I see evidence of this in my ability to function in the publishing world without either the hem-kissing subservience of the acolyte, or the wound-licking reverie of the early failure.

I feel pride in my restrained reaction to Giselle’s pregnancy, never once voicing those Strindbergian doubts that had dropped into my mind like henbane: never inquiring whether it truly was I who seeded her furrow; never offering the suggestion that it was perhaps an anonymous creativist at Life, or possibly Quinn the traveler who had left his enduring mark on her during one of his New York visits. Did I suggest, as the young Strindberg ruffian, Nojd, put it, that “it wouldn’t be much fun slaving all your life for another chap’s brat”? No, I did not. If it was Quinn who’d done the deed, then at least the Phelan ontogeny was now at work in Giselle’s inner sanctum, and I might become father to my first cousin twice removed. But I am no more likely to have certitude on any of this than Nojd, or Peter Phelan.

Molly pulled the doorbell and stood on top of the stoop with her arms full of groceries. She turned to the curb, where Alice Shugrue waited behind the wheel of her Chevrolet, idling until Molly had gained proper access to the homestead; and then I opened the door and took a bag from Molly (“Be careful, there’s breakables,” she said). I hugged her and bussed her cheek, then waved to Alice.

“Come in and see us when you come back for her,” I said, “and we’ll catch up on all your news.” Alice smiled and waved me down, saying, “You’re not to be trusted with my news, now that you’re writing a book,” and off she went.

Molly stepped into the hallway and tapped the bag of groceries I was holding. “You’re not to be trusted with breakables either,” she said. “I’ve seen you with dishes in the hotel kitchen.”

“There are things I never dropped,” I said, “so get your dirty tongue off me.”

Molly, kittenish, kissed my cheek with her arms full as we moved toward the kitchen. “I miss this house,” she said.

“Well, come back to it, then,” I said.

“Easy to say.”

“Easy to do. There’s change afoot in the world.”

“Afoot me foot,” said Molly. “All that’ll change this place is an earthquake.”

“Exactly what we’ve got planned for lunch,” I said.

“It’s a scheme, I knew it. What’s he up to?”

“I’ll tell you when it’s time to tell you.”

I thought Molly looked well, though a bit more frail than when I’d last seen her. Her north-country exile seemed to be sapping her energy, but she was wearing one of her dressy summer dresses, the pink one, so I sensed she was trying to rekindle her old self for the occasion. We put the groceries on the kitchen table and I then took her by the elbow and moved her toward the dining room and Billy. Her gaze went instantly to Banishing the Demons on the wall, then to The Conspiracy, which I’d leaned against the back staircase. She had seen, and fully understood, the content of both paintings, but made no comment on their presence. She turned and looked at Billy in his plaster cast.

“It’s a long time since I’ve seen your handsome mug, Billy boy,” she said. “I heard you might be here today.”

“That’s more than I heard. Who told ya that?”

“I’m no squealer, kiddo,” Molly said. “And whatever did you do to your leg? Are you all right?”

“I can’t kick,” Billy said. “You’re lookin’ good, Moll. How’s the old bareedis?”

“I’m fine in all respects, and I’ll answer no more impertinent questions.”

“How’s Saratoga?”

“The hotel is busy. The track opens next week.”

“But no more gamblin’ casinos.”

“None that I hear of. It’s not like it used to be.”

“Nothin’ is,” Billy said.

“How many are coming for lunch, Orson? We have to set the table.”

“Us three and Peter, and Peg is coming with Roger Dailey, the lawyer, and Giselle. Seven.”

“Giselle is coming?”

“Peter invited her. She’s been up fairly often lately.”

“How is she?”

“She’s pregnant. I guess that makes it eight.”

“Oh,” said Molly, “oh.” And she looked at me with that hybrid smile of hers: knowing smile of love, and comprehension, and loss.

“First tremor of the earthquake,” I said.

“Hey,” Billy said, “you gonna be a papa.”

“Looks that way,” I said.

“The lawyer,” said Molly “Why is the lawyer coming?”

“I’ll tell you when it’s time to tell you,” I said.

“Well, I’ll tell you what it’s time for. It’s time to make lunch. Bring me the potato dish, two big platters, a vegetable dish, and the pickle and jelly dishes. And the bread plate. And set the table with whatever’s left of the good china.”

Molly’s reference was to the remnants of a set of china that Peter had bought for Kathryn with his mustering-out pay from the first war, a belated acknowledgment that he had been partly responsible for Francis’s fall into the china closet. And I wondered how much of that episode in his father’s life Billy knew, and I decided he probably knew nothing at all.

“Have you taken a good look at these paintings?” I asked Billy, indicating The Conspiracy and the Demons.

“Unhhh,” Billy said, and he craned his neck to look at both, then moved his chair for a better look, and he stared.

“That guy looks like my father,” he said, indicating Malachi in The Conspiracy.

“Right. And a little like my father too,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Billy. “What the hell is it?”

“It’s Peter’s vision. Your father’s been important to him all his life. He’s painted him many times.”

“This is the first one I saw.”

“Not the last. He’s in that one too,” and I pointed to the Demons painting.

“Who’s that guy supposed to be? It ain’t really my father.”

“It’s your great-uncle, Malachi McIlhenny.”

“I heard of him. Wasn’t he nuts?”

“Totally, but there’s more to it.”

“Yeah,” Billy said, “when people go nuts they got a reason.”

“You never uttered a truer word,” I said.

I heard footsteps on the porch and went to see who was coming. But it was only the afternoon paper, stuck between the jamb and the doorknob by the thoughtful paperboy to keep it dry. It had been cloudy for an hour and now a fine drizzle was beginning. I was closing the door when I saw a taxi turning off Pearl Street onto Colonie, and I thought, Giselle, accurately. She paid the cabbie and slid out of the back seat with her arms full, offering me her knees in the drizzle, constantly smiling, moving with small steps back into my life. I held the door for her, and she kept going down the hallway to the kitchen.

“Don’t I even get a hello?”

“Yes,” she said. “Follow me.”

And so I did, as I always have, and in the hallway she gave me a serious kiss and went into the back parlor to deposit one of her bags next to the player piano. She said hello to Billy without introducing herself and delivered her gifts for the meal (goose-liver pâté, a wheel of Camembert, English tea biscuits, two bottles of Haut-Brion, and two pounds of Whitman’s chocolates for Peter) to Molly in the kitchen.

“That’s Giselle,” I said to Billy, and I handed him the afternoon paper. He nodded and looked at the front page.

“They got a story on the shootin’,” Billy said. “They picked up Johnny Rizzo at the railroad station, leavin’ town, and Morty’s in the hospital. He might lose a leg.”

“That’s a tough one.”

“Yeah, but he loses a leg means the card game’s off. That son of a bitch’ll do anything not to pay me what he owes.”

“If they have to reschedule the game let me know. I’ll go with you anytime.”

“Nah, forget that. I’ll do it on my own.”

“All right, whatever you say.”

Giselle came in from the kitchen. “You’re Billy,” she said. “I’ve seen your picture.”

Billy stood up and shook her hand.

“I’m Billy,” he said, “and you’re pregnant.”

“My news precedes me,” she said, and with both hands she arced a bulbous abdomen onto herself. I then took my first look at her body, which was sheathed in a smart white linen dress that gave no indication of the two months of new life that functioned beneath it.

“A kid in the family,” said Billy. “That’s something new.”

Giselle had pulled her hair back tight in a ponytail, more severe than I’d ever seen her look. Was she already shedding glamour to befit her incipient motherhood? Throttling down her sex appeal for the sake of the family gathering? I heard the closing of a car door and then saw through the parlor window Peg getting out of a Cadillac convertible (its top up), abetted by a soulful caress of her elbow by Roger, the lawyer, that bespoke something beyond a lawyer-client relationship. I noted Peg’s coy smile, the retreat of her elbow, and their mounting of the stairs together (Peg carrying a fat bag of fresh snowflake rolls and a strawberry pie from the Federal Bakery), and this instant gave me more insight into the femininity of my cousin Margaret than I had ever had heretofore. I could see the appeal she held for Roger, a man twenty-two years her junior, who was to be married in three weeks. But impending marriage was not an obstruction to fun for Roger, who en route to this luncheon meeting offered Peg an afternoon of pleasure at a hotel of her choice, a movie (Indiscreet was playing at the Strand), or an evening at an out-of-town summer theater (Silk Stockings was playing at Sacandaga, and he told Peg she had elegant legs, and she does).

Peg told me all this when I taunted her with what I had seen as they arrived, adding that she had declined the offers, even though she thought Roger was “a doll.” And I believe her, cannot think of her as an adulterous woman, though of course what do I know? Also, I marveled at how quickly she offered up all this information to me, such frankness unheard of in this family, wherein affectionate elbow-stroking, had it been observed by Kathryn or Sarah, would have led to unexplained excommunication of both pairs of elbows from these sanctified rooms, not to mention the cancellation of lunch.

Peter came down the front stairs to the parlor and sat in his leather chair, which was still where I’d seen it in 1934, though hardly in the same condition. He had tried to transfigure his appearance, banish the scraggle by wetting and combing his hair, perhaps even trimming his mustache; and, despite the heat of the day, wore an open-collared white shirt with a tan paisley neckerchief, brown corduroy sport coat with leather elbows, tan pants, and paint-speckled dress shoes.

“Who’s here?” he said as he was easing himself into the chair, favoring his bad hip.

“Everybody,” I said, and we moved toward him and took all the available seats in the room. I brought a dining-room chair for Molly, who came in wearing her apron, drying her hands on a kitchen towel. Peter surveyed the assemblage with a constant smile, then fixed on Giselle.

“And how is Mother Gigi?” he asked. I had never heard anyone call Giselle Gigi before.

“She’s sick every morning,” Giselle said, “but otherwise fine.”

“Margaret, how’s the family?”

“About the same,” Peg said, “except for Danny. He called me at the office this morning to say he’s getting married.”

I looked at Giselle, who blinked at the news about Quinn. I wonder why? She did not look at me.

“A Cuban girl,” Peg said.

“New blood in the family,” Peter said.

“Is she a Catholic?” Molly asked.

“Who gives a royal goddamn?” Peter said.

“All I know,” Peg said, “is that he’s very much in love.”

“I should hope so,” said Peter. “Roger, I’m glad you could arrange your schedule to be here. And, Billy, it’s good to see you. It really is good to see you.”

“Yeah, well,” Billy said, and he worked up half a smile.

“Molly, you’re losing weight, but you look grand.”

“And so do you,” said Molly, “with your kerchief.”

“But you should take off that apron. A day of some formality requires the proper costume.” And as Molly untied her apron he looked at me. “And you should have a tie on for your guests, Orson.”

“I’ll dress for lunch,” I said.

I was wearing my usual shirtsleeves, slacks, and loafers; and who needs more in this weather? The answer is Peter, who was demanding proper tribute be paid to the patriarchal rite he was now conducting, and which I had organized. When it became clear that he would be getting a great deal of money for his Malachi Suite, he said to me offhandedly, “I don’t want to keep all that damn money. I won’t live long enough to make use of it. And when I go they’ll probably take half of it in taxes.”

“What’s your alternative to being well off?”

“Give it away.”

“To needy painters?”

“The family.”

It began with that; then I called Peg to get a lawyer, for she had legal contacts I lacked. Enter Roger Dailey, perennial eligible bachelor, three-handicap golfer at Wolfert’s Roost Country Club, a junior partner in one of the city’s best law firms, member of an old Irish family with links to Arbor Hill when it was the neighborhood of the lumber barons and other millionaires. I talked him into coming to the house to see Peter, then left them alone. That was a month ago, and now here he was in his creamy Palm Beach suit, bringing us legal tidings.

I hadn’t invited Giselle, for I’d evolved into thinking we were all but finished. But Peter took the matter out of my hands and invited her himself, which fixed the day of the event. It then fell to me to round up the others, which was a problem mainly with Roger, because today’s visit cut into his golf schedule (the rain would have canceled it in any case), and with Billy, who, as we all knew, loathed this house. But I got around everything and here we were, wondering what was about to happen, imagining what was in Peter’s mind, imagining Peter.

“You have the goods, Roger?” Peter asked.

“I do,” said Roger, taking a document from the legal-sized envelope he’d brought with him.

“Then let’s not drag it out, just go ahead and read it.”

“This arrangement isn’t unheard of, but it’s a bit unorthodox,” Roger began. “Then again we shouldn’t expect conformity from a major artist like Peter Phelan, whose last will and testament I’m about to read to you. Peter has decided its provisions should be made public not posthumously but today, here and now.” And then Roger read Peter’s ideas translated into legalese:

“Because money has never been a source of anxiety in me, and because the pursuit of money was never what this family was about, I, Peter Joseph Phelan, have chosen to divide my modest, newfound wealth among my siblings, and the heirs of my siblings, for I do believe that my career turn toward financial reward and artistic recognition, which, however belated, has made me feel blessed with good fortune, has been a consequence of my knowledge of this family. And because I further believe that out of the collective evil to which so many members of this family have been heir, heiress, and victim (the scope of which I have only in very late years begun to understand) there can come some collective good, and because one known form of good is the easing of the financial woe that periodically besets us all, I therefore make the following bequests:

“To my brother, Charles Edward Phelan, the sum of eleven thousand five hundred dollars;

“To my sister, Mary Kathleen Phelan, the sum of eleven thousand five hundred dollars;

“To my nephew, William Francis Phelan, the son of my late brother Francis Aloysius Phelan, the sum of five thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars;

“To my niece, Margaret Mary Phelan, the daughter of my late brother Francis Aloysius Phelan, the sum of five thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars;

“To my former concubine, Claire Theresa Purcell, in acknowledgment of two reasonably good years, and two decades of thoroughly unsatisfactory relationships, the sum of two dollars;

“Further, concerning Orson Michael Purcell, my unacknowledged son by Claire Theresa Purcell, I do now fully and publicly acknowledge him as my true and only son, and appoint him the sole benefactor and executor of the remainder of my estate, after the bequests specified in this will have been distributed, and do invest him also with artistic and financial control over the future of all forty-seven finished, unsold paintings of mine, thirty-six other unfinished works of mine, and any new works I may undertake before my death, all profits from any sale or exhibition of these works, or any other of my worldly goods, holdings, or inheritances, to accrue to Orson alone, provided that he legally change his name to Orson Michael Phelan, and that he thereafter remarry, forthwith, his present wife, Giselle Marais Purcell, to insure that her unborn child of this moment, July the twenty-sixth, nineteen hundred and fifty-eight, will legally bear the Phelan name; and that if this issue be not a male child, that Orson pursue yet again the conception of a male heir with his wife of the instant, or, if that marriage is terminated, with a subsequent legal spouse, in order to insure at least the possibility of the Phelan name continuing beyond Orson’s own demise, this latter contingent action thus ending his responsibility for the Phelan line; for more than this no man should be asked to do.”

In the silence that followed the reading we glanced where we had to, me at Giselle, all the others at Peter; and Peg spoke up first to say, “Uncle Peter, thank you, thank you. I don’t think you know how much this will mean to our family.” Fifteen hundred down: easy as apple pie.

Molly walked over to Peter and kissed him on the cheek, said, “You have a good heart,” and went back to the kitchen tying on her apron. Billy stared at Peter with what I took to be puzzlement: Why is this guy givin’ money away? And why to me? But Billy made no statement except with his eyes.

I caught Peter’s eye and I nodded at him. And then he nodded.

Giselle stared at me, and in her look I saw more comprehension of what the will had said about us than I myself possessed at this moment; for while I’d known Peter planned to dispense money, and suspected I would get a bit of it, no thought of a paternity clause ever crossed my mind. I believed he would die without acknowledging me, and I had decided long ago that that was all right. Who needed legitimacy? The answer again was Peter. He needed it now that he was going public. He needed to tidy up his life, organize his death.

He had not expected the professional and financial success that was now coming to him at such a late hour. But it happened that a few perspicacious gallery owners and museum people began to see that his work, despite the varied modes and genres in which he had painted and drawn, had about it a prevailing quality that now seemed to be singular. Recognition came to him as does the fixative an artist acquires at death: No more innovation for you, my friend; we read you at last. This handful of influential Peter-watchers saw him neither as sectarian of any art movement of his era, nor as yet another gadfly among trends. Now they saw an artist who had vaulted beyond his matrix, fused the surreal, the natural, the abstract, and the figurative, and produced an oeuvre that was as cumulatively coherent as his motivation had been in creating the work.

Peter Phelan, obsessive artist of Colonie Street, subsumed in the history of his family, all but smothered under his ancestors’ blanket of time, had willfully engaged it all, transformed history into art, being impelled to create, and purely, what Picasso had called “convincing lies”; for Peter believed that these lies would stand as a fierce array of at least partial Phelan truths — not moral truths, but truths of significant motion: the arresting of the natural world at an instant of kinetic and fantastic revelation; the wisdom of Lizzie’s lofted leg in her dance with the shadows; the wizardly acceptance of chicken droppings by the demented Crip Devlin; the madly collective flailing of arms in Banishing the Demons.

This latter painting, the largest in the Malachi Suite, treats of the collective Peter mentioned in his will. By the light of an oil lamp, a candle, and a fire in the McIlhenny hearth (shadowed homage to La Tour), the players in the Malachi drama are enacting their contrary rituals: Kathryn Phelan (abundantly pregnant with Peter, the arriving artist) is sitting on the bed in the background, holding the hand of the beset Lizzie, who is supine in her calico chemise, blue flannel nightgown, and black stockings, her hair splayed wildly on her pillow; and the Malachi minions — the wizard Crip Devlin; Crip’s daughter, Mab (the image of the child who led me to Francis at the railroad tracks); Lizzie’s father, old Ned Cronin, who badly needed a shave; Malachi’s ancient cousin, Minnie Dorgan, with her dropsical stomach, and her stupid son, Colm, whose hair was a nest of cowlicks; and, central to it all, Malachi himself, with his wild curls and his wilder eyes, all these clustered figures pushing upward and outward with their arms (Colm gripping a lighted candle in his right hand and thrusting upward with his left), ridding the house of any demons that may have been summoned by the archdemon that Lizzie had become. The entrance door and two windows of the house are open to the night, and those errant demons, who well know that this room is inimical to their kind, are surely flying fearfully out and away, back to their covens of hellish darkness.

Malachi had gathered his counsel, his blood kin, and his inlaws about him for a communion of indignation at what was happening to Lizzie, and also to people his house with witnesses to his joust with the evil forces. He’d begun that joust with interrogation of Lizzie.

“What is your name?”

“Lizzie McIlhenny You know that.”

“Is that your full name?”

“Lizzie Cronin McIlhenny In God’s name, Malachi, why are you asking me this?”

“We’ll see what you think of God’s name. Why are you four inches shorter than you used to be?”

“I’m not. I’m the same size I always was.”

“Why are you asking her these things?” Kathryn Phelan asked.

“To find out who she is.”

“Can’t you see who she is? Have you lost your sight?”

“Just hold your gob, woman, and see for yourself who she is. Don’t I know my wife when I see her? And this one isn’t her.”

“Well, she is.”

“Are you Lizzie McIlhenny, my wife?”

“Of course I am, Malachi. Can’t you see it’s me? Who else do you think I am?”

“Do you believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost?”

“I do, Malachi, I do.”

“You do what?”

“I believe in God the Father, Son, Holy Ghost.”

“She didn’t repeat it exactly,” said Crip Devlin.

“Let me ask her,” said Ned Cronin. “Are you the daughter of Ned Cronin, in the name of God?”

“I am, Dada.”

“She didn’t repeat it,” said Crip.

“Repeat it,” said Malachi.

“Dada.”

“Not that, repeat what he said.”

“I don’t know what he said.”

“Ah, she’s crafty,” said Crip.

“You’ll repeat it or I’ll have at you,” said Malachi. He grabbed her and ripped her nightgown, then pushed her backward onto the bed. When she tried to get up he held her down:

“Ask her where she lives,” said Crip.

“Do you live up on the hill with the Good Neighbors?”

“I live here with you, Malachi.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m Lizzie, your wife.”

“You’re four inches shorter than my wife.”

“I’m not. I’m this same size since I was a girl.”

“You really are insane, Malachi,” said Kathryn. “You’re torturing her.”

“We’ll see who’s insane. Do you believe in Satan?”

“I don’t know,” Lizzie said.

“Crafty again,” said Crip.

“By the Jesus,” Malachi said, “we’ll get the truth out of you,” and from the table he took the cup of milky potion he and Crip had prepared for this encounter, set it on the bedside table, and lifted a spoonful to Lizzie’s mouth. “Take it,” he said.

She smelled it and turned her head. “It’s awful.”

“Drink it,” Malachi said, lifting the cup to her lips. Lizzie pushed it away and some of the potion spilled onto her nightgown.

“Oh you’ll take it, you witch,” Malachi said, shoving the cup to her lips and pouring it. Some of the fluid entered her mouth and she screamed and spat it out.

“She won’t take it,” said Crip. “And if any of it falls on the floor she’s gone forever.”

“She’ll take it or I’ll break both her arms,” said Malachi. “Hold her legs, Colm.” And the dimwit flung himself crosswise on the bed, atop Lizzie’s legs.

“Like this?” Colm asked.

“That’s it,” said Malachi.

“There’s rewards in heaven for them that beats the devil,” said old Minnie Dorgan, rocking her body on a straight chair in the corner, plaiting and unplaiting two strips of cloth as she watched the exorcism. She blessed herself repeatedly, and dipped her fingers into a jar of holy Easter water she had brought with her. She sprinkled the water at Lizzie and then at Malachi.

“If you get the drink into her, the witch is dead,” said Crip.

“We’ll get it,” said Malachi.

“That’s enough of this crazy talk,” Kathryn said, putting herself between Malachi and Lizzie.

“Get out of my way, Kathryn.”

“I’ll get out and get the police if you don’t leave her be.”

Malachi walked to the door, locked it, and pocketed the key.

“You’ll go noplace till I say you will,” he said. “And neither will anybody else in this house. Build up the fire, Mab.” And Crip Devlin’s child, silent and sullen, threw twigs and a log on the dying fire. It crackled and flared, creating new light in the bleak room, into which not even the faintest ray of a moonbeam would penetrate tonight.

Kathryn whispered into Lizzie’s ear, “I won’t let him hurt you, darlin’, I won’t let him hurt you.” And she stroked the distraught Lizzie’s forehead and saw that her eyes were rolling backward out of their rightful place.

“You’re a vile, vile man to do this to her,” Kathryn said.

Malachi looked at the women and walked to the hearth. He picked up a long twig and held the end of it in the fire until it flamed; then he pulled it out and shook out the flame and walked toward the bed.

“You bring that near her,” said Kathryn, “you’ll have to burn me too, Malachi,” but he quickly put the stick between his teeth, grabbed his sister with his good right arm, and flung her off the bed and into the lap of Minnie Dorgan, who sprinkled holy water on her. “Mother of God,” said Minnie. “Mother of God.”

“You’ll not be burning her, Malachi,” said Ned Cronin. “You won’t burn my daughter.”

“It’s not your daughter that’s here, it’s not the wife I married. It’s a hag and a witch that I’m sleeping with.”

“It’s my daughter, I’m thinking now,” Ned said.

“Have you no faith, man?” said Malachi. “Don’t you know a demon when it’s in front of your eyes?”

And he had the twig in his hand again, and he lighted it again, blew out its flame again, and put it in front of Lizzie’s face.

“Now will you drink what I give you?”

When she threw her head from side to side to be rid of the idea he touched her on the forehead with the burning stick, and she screamed her woe to heaven. “Now you’ll take it,” he said, and with terrified eyes she stared at the madman her husband had become; and she knew no choice was left to her.

“Leave her be!” screamed Kathryn, and she tried to move toward Lizzie. But Minnie Dorgan and Ned Cronin held her.

“Give her the drink, Mab,” Malachi said, and the child raised the cup to Lizzie, who stiffened at the odor of it and, retching dryly, said weakly, “Please, Malachi.”

“Drink it, you hag, or I’ll kill you.”

And she took the cup and drank and screamed again as the foul concoction went down her throat, screamed and spat and drank again, then fell back on the bed as the cup’s remnants splattered on the floor.

“It’s done,” said Malachi.

“And it’s spilled,” said Crip. “There’s no telling what it means.”

Colm, lying across Lizzie’s legs, sat up. “I’m goin’ home now,” he said.

“Indeed you’re not,” said Malachi. “You’ll stay till we’re done with this.”

And Colm fell back on the bed with a weakness.

“When will we be done?” Ned Cronin asked. “For the love of Jesus end this thing.”

“We’ll end it when I’ve got my wife back,” Malachi said.

“How will you know?” asked Ned.

“We’ll see the demon leave her,” Crip said. “But time is short. Ask her again.”

“In the name of God and heaven,” Malachi said, “are you Lizzie McIlhenny, my wife?”

All in the room watched every inch of Lizzie, watching for the exit of the demon. But Lizzie neither moved nor spoke. She stared at the wall.

“We’ve got to go to the fire,” said Malachi. “We’ve no choice.”

“It’ll soon be midnight,” said Crip, “and then she’s gone for sure, never to come back.”

“We’ll carry her, Colm,” said Malachi, and the dimwit rolled off Lizzie’s legs. Then he and Malachi carried the now limp figure toward the hearth as Mab stoked the fire with a poker. Lizzie’s nightgown was off her shoulder and Malachi ripped it away and it fell on the floor. Mab moved the grate back and Malachi sat Lizzie on it so she faced the fire.

“Are you goin’ to make a pork chop out of me, Malachi?” she asked. “Won’t you give me a chance?” And on the dark side of the room the women fell on their knees in prayer.

“Do you know what I’m doin’ here, Ned Cronin?” Malachi called out.

“Jesus, Mary, and holy St. Joseph,” said Ned, “I pray you know what you’re doing.” And he knelt beside the women.

Malachi leaned Lizzie toward the fire and when it touched her it set her calico chemise aflame. Kathryn Phelan wailed and screamed at her brother, “You’ll live in hell forever for this night, Malachi McIlhenny. It’s you who’s the demon here. It’s you that’s doing murder to this woman.”

Malachi let go of Lizzie and she fell away from the fire, burning. He watched, with Crip beside him, and Colm holding the now unconscious Lizzie by one arm.

“Away she go, up the chimney,” Malachi said. “Away she go!” And he waved his good arm into the flame.

“I saw nothing go,” said Crip.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women,” said Kathryn on her knees.

“Come home, Lizzie McIlhenny!” yelled Malachi, waving his arm, watching his wife’s body. The room was filling with smoke from Lizzie’s burning clothes and flesh.

“Beast!” screamed Kathryn.

“Do you think that’s Lizzie that’s lyin’ there?” Malachi asked.

“I saw nothing leave her,” said Crip.

“More fire,” said Malachi, and Colm leaned Lizzie back toward the flames. Another edge of her chemise caught fire and now half her torso was exposed, the flesh charring from below her left breast to her hip.

“Let her down,” said Malachi, and from the floor beside the fireplace he took a can of paraffin oil and threw it onto Lizzie’s stomach. Her chemise exploded in flame.

“Away she go!” yelled Malachi, waving his arm. “Away she go!” And he threw more oil on her.

Kathryn Phelan ran to the wildly flaming Lizzie and threw herself on top of her, snuffing the fire, burning herself, and sobbing with the grief known in heaven when angels die.

The last painting Peter put on exhibit for his luncheon guests was The Protector, a portrait of Kathryn Phelan smothering the flames on Lizzie’s clothing, her own maternity dress aflame at one corner, the smoke obscuring half her face, the other half lit by firelight. Kathryn’s burns were not severe but her act did precipitate, two days later, the premature birth of Peter Phelan, child of fire and brimstone, terror and madness, illusion and delusion, ingredients all of his art.

I had asked him why he chose to resurrect Malachi, such a dreadful figure in the family’s life, and he said he could not answer with any accuracy, that the Malachi he was painting wasn’t the Malachi of history, that, in whatever ways his paintings reflected reality, they would fall far short of the specifics of that reality, which was always the fate of anything imagined. “We try to embrace the universe,” Peter said, “but we end up throwing our arms around the local dunghill.” And yet he felt that whatever he imagined would somehow reflect what was elusive in the historic reality, elusive because its familiarity and its ubiquity in real space and time would make it invisible to all but the imagining eye.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Democrats like the rain,” Billy said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Get your eyes examined,” Billy said.

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

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

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

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

“Yeah,” said Billy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“And she gave me gold too,” Peg said.

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

“You never said.”

“You remember Cubby Conroy?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Inside an old mattress in the cellar.”

“How much?”

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

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

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

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

“She wasn’t broke.”

“How’d you know that?”

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

We all wheezed anew.

“Twenty-seven grand,” Billy said.

“Very good arithmetic, Billy,” Molly said.

“What’d you do with it?” Roger asked.

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

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

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

“Of course not,” said Peter.

“I have nineteen thousand.”

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

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

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

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

“I’m glad somebody did,” Peter said.

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

“Sure, why not?” said Peter. “Can you imagine him telling Billy not to take this money?”

Billy fell silent.

“I’m going to take some pictures of the table,” Giselle said with perfect timing. “I’ll use your camera and tripod, Orson,” and she went up the back stairs, knowing exactly where my camera equipment was.

“I feel like an interloper,” Roger said, “but I might as well get it straight. What was Francis doing at the ball park? I thought he lived on the road.”

I pointed to Billy for the answer, and he gave me the back of his hand.

“Don’t bug out on us, Billy,” I said.

“Who’s buggin’ out?”

“Francis came home in 1942 to help the family when he thought Billy was being drafted,” I said. “Francis stayed close to Annie till he died, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, he did,” Billy said.

Giselle came down with the camera and flash and set them up on the tripod in the back parlor. Nobody spoke while she did this. We waited for her to say she was ready, but she’d heard our conversation and she left the camera standing and came back to the table.

“Francis lived up by Hawkins Stadium, the ball park,” I said, “isn’t that so, Billy?”

“Hoffman’s Hotel,” Billy said. “Eight rooms with a saloon. Old-timey street guys and barflies, newspapermen with no teeth and dyin’ ballplayers, an elephant graveyard. But Francis was in good shape for a guy who bent his elbow so much, and he went to all the Senators’ home games. Johnny Evers was one of the bosses of the club and he and Francis both played big-league ball at the same time, so Evers gave Francis a season pass. Those were tough days for baseball, all the young guys gettin’ drafted, and you hadda fill their shoes with kids, or old guys, or deaf guys, or guys with one arm, or one eye. Francis tells Evers he knows a guy doin’ short time in a Buffalo jail hits the ball a mile and does Evers want him? Evers says hell yes and hires the guy when he gets out and hires Francis as a coach. Francis, he’s sixty-two and he suits up, ain’t played a game of ball for maybe twenty-eight years and he’s out there telling kids and cripples never to swing at the first pitch, and how to steal bases and rattle the pitcher, when to play close in, when to go deep. Ripper Collins is managin’ and he pinch-hits Francis, puts him in for the hit and run, or the sacrifice, because Francis can still bloop it to right once in a while, and he’s champ with the bunt, lays it down the line, soft, easy, never lost the touch. He runs like a three-legged goat, takes him two weeks to get to first base but it don’t matter. He’s out from the go but the runner gets to second or third. I seen him do this half a dozen times before they drafted me, December, and I’m gone eight months I’m back out with a bad eye. Francis is coachin’ third, and they’re writin’ stories about him, and the con he talked Johnny Evers into signin’ is knifed dead on a dance floor hustlin’ somebody’s wife. Dangerous game, baseball. And there I am in a box behind third and there’s the old man, movin’ like a cricket, and while I’m watchin’ him he falls over in the baseline. You can’t get up? I’m up and over the fence, on the field, and they got a stretcher comin’, take him down to Memorial. I’m in a cab behind the ambulance but it don’t make no difference. He’s dead before his chin hits the dirt.”

Giselle said, “The chocolates,” and got up from her chair and went to the kitchen. When she came back with the box of candy I saw she’d been crying. Molly saw it too.

“Everything all right, dear?” Molly asked.

“Oh, sure,” said Giselle.

“What is it?” Peter asked.

“Nothing,” she said.

“It’s Francis,” I said.

Giselle opened the candy and put it in front of Peter. “There’s strawberry pie for dessert,” she said, “but I know you love chocolate.”

“Francis?” Peter said, looking at her.

“It was more Billy,” she said. “The image I had of him climbing the fence to help his father.”

“Wire fence,” Billy said. “Keeps you from swallowin’ foul balls.”

“Nobody in my family would’ve done that, climbed a fence, or even thought about it,” Giselle said. “We were so full of hate for one another.”

“Your mother?” said Molly. “Your father?”

“When my mother died my oldest brother cremated her the same day with no funeral service, so no friends or family could see her.”

“Stuff like that happened here,” Billy said.

“But today everybody’s at the same table,” Giselle said. “That never happened in my family after I was six and it never could. Hate is a cancer, and even when it fades, something awful takes its place. I know, because I hate my brothers. I hate them.”

When no one chose to ask her why, she said, “So I want to take a photo now. Turn your chairs and look toward the camera.”

“Oh, good, a picture,” Peg said. “Danny raves about you. He says you take wonderful pictures.”

“Danny is just being friendly,” Giselle said, and I agreed. Danny was compulsively friendly.

“You should be in the picture,” Peter said to Giselle.

“I will be.”

And so another formal photograph in modern Phelan family history came into existence; my second with my father, Peter’s first with Billy and Peg, and so on. The new combinations were quantifiable. Giselle, eminently photogenic, set the shutter, hurried back to her chair, and imposed a smile on the film that was as natural as sunshine and equally radiant.

We were a family soon to disappear from this form, from these chairs, from this place. The diaspora would be complete in, what, four, three, two years? Barring a miracle, Peter would die in the months ahead. Molly could go on for years, but even with a housekeeper (and she could afford one) she wouldn’t stay here alone. And Giselle and I? Ah, now, there’s a rub.

Whether or not we would now stay here for an extended time was a new question. But she was responsible for my being here (I see no need to run through the tissue of causation) and therefore obliquely responsible as well for this day of reunification, this time of our dawning into unity (as Keats put it), if indeed it was unity, if indeed it was dawning; and perhaps she would also be responsible for us reordering the house to accommodate a modern married couple, with nursery. The very thought of these things was so exotically afield of my present consciousness that I could only look at it all as a freakish turn of fate. The lives we had known for five years were about to be superseded. But by what?

My personal agenda was to finish the book on Peter’s art, and finish also this memoir, of which Walker Pettijohn had seen two-thirds. He professed to admire it, this time with editorial associates supporting publication, but a contract awaited completion of the manuscript, and I detected no confidence in Walker that the book would sell more than forty copies. I no longer needed survival money, but I yearned for proof that I was not chartering to myself in the forest, making no sound.

Giselle said the book made her weep, a rare occurrence (her weeping at Billy climbing the fence was the only time I’d ever seen her in tears). She’d read it the weekend I threaded her needle’s eye with such rare, if unverifiable, significance, and told me this book was the fulfillment of the intuition that had helped convince her to marry me: that she knew, without understanding why she knew, the value of the way I wrote and thought about this family. I’d shown her the early version of the book and talked to her about the family as if I’d owned it, when I was actually drawing out unknown, unspoken impressions of people to whom I had only tenuous connection, none of my impressions really authentic, all of them as much a creation as one of Peter’s sketches. Yet this talk insinuated itself into some receptive corner of Giselle’s imagination, and she concluded that one day I’d write a meaningful work about the family; and she wanted to be part of that. And all along I’d thought it was my romantic charm that got her.

“Why didn’t you tell me you liked what I wrote?”

“I didn’t know how to say it. Maybe I didn’t like it so much either. Maybe I only liked how you talked about it. But now you write better. And I think I think better.”

“My artistic soul drew you to Colonie Street.”

“You might say that.”

It ran through my mind that I might also say it was her desire for a safe haven in which to ride out the pregnancy that drew her here; or the lure of this new money coming my way (in fair measure because of her work) as a cushion for the future; or her weariness with being a pioneer feminist in a man’s world; or the realization that one-night stands only exacerbate solitude; or perhaps she’d had advance knowledge that Quinn was about to settle down with one woman. (“Does that change your mind about him, now that he’s getting married?” she asked me, to which I replied, “Why should it? It didn’t change his when I got married.”)

There was always the possibility that she genuinely perceived her psychic transformation into motherhood as an idea whose time had come. But even if she was luxuriating in it (Mother Giselle: it landed with an oxymoronic bounce in my consciousness), what was her view of remarriage? Perhaps it was as ambivalent as my own view of this particular paternity.

The proposed renaming of the putative grandson, the unnamed fetus, would be the occasion for reaffirming the matrimonial vows and the sacrament; but a year or more ago I had decided that fathering a child with Giselle could turn into a crime against the unborn, predestining trouble for the product of this all-but-doomed union I had also anesthetized my anguish glands, had learned how not to be a Giselle addict, how not to fall into a neurasthenic droop when she left the room. I had, in reaction, found abundant, even raucous solace with other women, for, without ever having proof of Giselle’s infidelity, I believed in it. How not to, knowing her as I had? “I never did anything bad,” she once said with moderate conviction, but that changed nothing for me; and this vast unknown, this black riddle, I do believe, was the erosive element that had destroyed my acceptance of the marriage as a temporary game of long-distance singles.

But now here she came with her renovated interiors, telling me that she had learned how to think, had learned how to be a mother; in effect, that she had grown into the marriage the way a child grows into a garment two sizes too large. But she could know little of how her physical condition would transform her in the months ahead, or what it would be like not to work at what she did so well, or what remarriage and the fusion with this family in the name of a name would do to her, or what our arm’s-length connubiality had done to me. She might even come to think of her own name (Gisel in Old English, Giall in the Old Irish) as her fate: for the word means “hostage.”

The ring of the telephone broke our concentration on our communal photographic image, and Molly answered it. Alice Shugrue.

“She can’t pick me up,” Molly said when she hung up. “It’s raining so hard the sewers are backed up and the streets are flooded. Her engine got wet and they had to tow her out of a huge puddle. She’s at her cousin’s in the North End, and she’s not even going to try to go home tonight.”

It was truly a fierce storm. Great sheets of water were flowing off the roof past our windows, and you could barely see Pearl Street.

“So you’ll stay here tonight,” Peter said to Molly.

“If it keeps up we’ll all have to stay,” Peg said.

“If it keeps up,” said Peter, “it won’t come down.”

“Oh dear,” said Molly, “my brother is telling Papa’s jokes.”

“As paterfamilias he’s entitled,” I said.

“As what?” Billy said. “Whataya givin’ us all these twenty-dollar words.”

“Just means the ‘father of the family,’ ” I said. “Also means he’s liberated from his own father — and mother too, you might say. Am I right, Father Peter?”

“I hope we’re all liberated,” Peter said.

“I’m liberating Molly from the kitchen,” Peg said.

“Don’t be silly,” said Molly

“I’ll help in the kitchen,” Giselle said.

“No you won’t,” Peg said. “You take it easy. I’m drafting Roger to dry dishes.” And I said silently to myself, “Ah ha, Margaret, ah ha.”

“It rained like this,” Peter said, “the day I left home in 1913. You remember that, Billy?”

“You mean the rowboat?” Billy said.

“Right. You and your father rowed down to rescue me.”

“I remember,” Billy said. “We took you to the railroad station. Where were ya goin’?”

“New York, but anywhere would’ve been all right with me. I was just getting out from under. And yet I never really left this place.”

“It can be a trap,” Molly said, and she turned to Giselle. “So be careful, my dear, if Orson decides you should live here. You are going through with the second marriage, aren’t you?”

“It’s not for me to say,” Giselle said. “Are we, Orson?”

“It somehow seems as though deuterogamy is an idea whose time has come,” I said.

“There he goes again,” Billy said.

Molly smiled. “Why am I not surprised?”

Peter was nodding his head at the completion of something, the beginning of something else. It seemed facile to think of the remarriage as a beginning when it was merely the supercharging of an old steam engine that might or might not make it over the next rise. The new name, the child, the remarriage as confirmation that the first marriage was a bust, which it was, these thoughts also saddened me: the sadness of the completion of anything, a book, a marriage, a life. Or a sad painting.

“There’s one more painting,” Peter said. “It’s upstairs, and it’s not a pretty picture. I warn you against it, but Orson will show it to anybody who wants to see it.”

“Have I seen it?” Molly asked.

“No,” Peter said. “Only Orson.”

And so we all, including Giselle, who had photographed it two months ago when it was embryonic, went up to Peter’s studio to see The Burial, his major unfinished work. If he lived on, it would very probably not be his last in the Malachi Suite. He’d already made several sketches of Malachi and Crip in hell, and was trying to assign a fitting punishment for them; but as of today, The Burial was as far as he’d gone with his great graphic leaps through those abominable events.

It is raining in the painting, and Colm Dorgan, with the point of a spade, and Malachi McIlhenny, with his muddy right brogan, are pushing the half-folded corpse of Lizzie into her muddy grave, which is too short for her. The grave’s borders are a sea of mud and Malachi and Colm are drenched. Lizzie is naked except for her black stockings and a burlap bag over her head. Colm is pushing her feet into the grave. Malachi is stepping on her right breast with his foot. The left side of her chest is a broad, raw crevasse of flesh, her charred rib cage and parts of her internal organs protruding, the flesh burned off two fingers of her left hand, leaving the burned bones visible.

A small cottage, Malachi’s, wherein the other witnesses to Lizzie’s burning are locked and awaiting the return of Malachi, is visible in the distant background, as are a sky and a landscape full of demonic figures, including the lithe form of Lizzie dancing on a hill with a web-footed creature with the head of a goat.

Piles of dirt beside the grave will be heaped on Lizzie and on the secluded grave, which is at the side of a ditch, with a high fence on one side and trees on the other. When the grave is covered with dirt it will be hidden by leaves and twigs, and Lizzie will lie scrunched in it for five days before searchers find her corrupted body, tortured even in death.

Upon his return from the grave to the cottage, Malachi will, with a long knife in his hand, swear all present to secrecy, and will invent the story to be circulated: that Lizzie ran away from the house in a crazed condition the previous night. Malachi will be especially threatening to his sister, Kathryn, whose throat he swears he will cut if she peeps a word of what happened. When Kathryn swears this out of fear, Malachi will then scrape his trouser leg with the blade of his knife and say, “Oh Kate, that’s the juice and substance of poor Lizzie I’m scraping.”

And Kathryn will say, “Malachi, even if you scrape off your skin, God will not let the stain be off you. You’re damned, my brother, and I hope the devils in hell never let you draw a painless breath.”

Upon public revelation of this story, neighbors will sack and burn Malachi’s house, and Malachi and Crip Devlin will be tried and convicted of murder and sentenced to twenty years in jail. Colm Dorgan will be sentenced to ten years, will serve all ten, and emerge toothless, hairless, mindless, and without a family. Ned Cronin will be given, and will serve, one year in prison, and live six more months before dying of public shame. Minnie Dorgan, though guilty of conspiracy to murder, will be set free because of her advanced age, and will sell all that she owns to move away from Albany.

In the first six months of his incarceration Crip Devlin will sicken from the pox, develop intolerable headaches and lightning pains to the legs. He will vomit and become incontinent, will develop ulcers of the heels, soles, toes, and buttocks, blockage of the penis, and rubbery tumors in the testicles. At the moment when his memory vanishes and he can no longer remember who he is or what he did to Lizzie, he will die of suppressed urine and an exploded brain.

In 1890, during the third year of his sentence, Malachi, with leather thongs he created in the shoe shop of the Albany penitentiary, will hang himself in his cell, swearing to the moment of his death that it was not Lizzie but a demon that he burned, and he will be buried in a potter’s field. On the day after his burial his grave will be violated and his corpse stabbed through the heart with a wooden dagger in the shape of a cross, a suitable implement for destroying the soul of a heretic.

Kathryn Phelan will be the chief witness against Malachi. Already the mother of Francis, Sarah, and Charles, she will give birth to Peter within two weeks of Lizzie’s death. She will also have three subsequent children, in this order: Julia, Mary (Molly), and Thomas.

Mab Devlin will become a charge of the city, but will escape confinement and become a vanished child.

The family’s mood, after viewing the painting and listening to my recounting of the details, was so bleak that Giselle suggested putting on some music, and she then unwrapped the gift she’d found in a second-hand store and bought for the house: three player-piano scrolls of the songs “They Always, Always Pick on Me,” “After the Ball,” and “Won’t You Be My Little Girl.” I put on the first one under the hopeful gaze of Julia, whom Peter had etherealized in the sketch of her at the seashore, about age twenty-one, a year away from death, abounding in her virginal glory; although I noted Peter had emphasized the ample bust line that was common to all the Phelan girls. But even with Julia as a prod, I could not bring myself to pump the piano’s pedals, could not so easily turn my mind from Lizzie to music.

George Quinn called to tell Peg he had asked Patsy McCall for work, something he had never done before; for city and county jobs paid only pittances, and George always believed that the ban on gambling was temporary that the okay would come down from on high one sunny day and all the gamblers in town would go back to work. But he could afford this fantasy no longer, and so he finally popped the question, and Patsy told him to go down to Democratic-party headquarters in the morning and talk to Tanner Smith, and they’d probably put him to work canvassing the Ninth Ward for the next election Peg said the prospect of a political job so excited George that when she told him about her bequest from Peter and her plan to buy the house he said only, “That’s great, I gotta go. Patsy’s giving me a ride to my car.”

Peter finally relaxed, took off his neckerchief and his coat, and sat alone at the table, smiling. I leaned across and asked him, “After all these years, what do I call you? Papa?”

He considered that, then shook his head no. “Sounds like an alias,” he said.

Billy stood up from the table and, with cane and gimp leg, hobbled into the front parlor.

“Shall we adjourn?” I said to Peter.

“You go ahead. I’ll sit here a minute with the chocolates.”

So I joined Billy, and when I did he said, “I ain’t even gonna collect my elephant bet if they take that bum’s leg off.”

“You were pretty sure they weren’t elephants.”

“One of the workers was up there came by Brady’s saloon. All them guys knew the bones was owned by a mastodon, whatever the hell that is. It’s big like an elephant, but it ain’t an elephant.”

“You’re pretty shrewd, Billy. You shrewd enough to use that money to get married? Money was the main obstacle, wasn’t it?”

“Who said I was takin’ the money?”

“Nobody.”

“Right,” Billy said.

“Maybe we could have a double wedding,” I said, and that made Billy laugh.

Doing people favors isn’t always easy.

If I really was a magician and could command the spirits the way Malachi thought he could, I’d build a skeleton that would have Lizzie’s ribs and fingers, Tommy’s chipped backbone, Francis’s all-but-gangrenous leg with the bone showing, Billy’s broken ankle, Sarah’s near-fleshless arms with bones pushing through skin and with tubes dangling, Peter’s arthritic hips, Walter Phelan’s partial skull, Meister Geld’s toe and thumb, the handless armbone that my sugar whore loved to suck, and I’d have the creature dance to the 1911 tune Giselle brought us to lighten things up with music from the past. Remember the lyric?

They always, always pick on me,

They never, never let me be.

I’m so very lonesome, I’m so sad,

It’s a long time since I’ve been glad.

I know what I’ll do, bye and bye.

I’ll eat some worms and then I’ll die.

And when I’m gone, just wait and see.

They’ll all be sorry that they picked on me.

It’s about four o’clock in the afternoon now, and outside the rain is as torrential as it was at three. Colonie Street is a river. Here, in the midst of this performance by nature, we have no reversal, no ironic sunshine about to dawn. The day is crepuscularly gray, as it seems to have been forever in the life of this family; and there is something so profound in that grayness, in that cloud of unexpungeable horror and loss, that, even when the sun finally does come our way, we grieve at the change, and we pray for thunderstorms.

Poor hubristic Malachi, think of it. When you cross the border out of the real world, as he did, the way back, if you can find it, is perilous, at best; and not only for yourself. I think of the itinerant Francis, walking abroad in a malevolent world, never knowing what lay beneath the exile his mother and sister had forced upon him; and of the subterranean Molly, burying and resurrecting her sins, and living on to regret everything forever; and of myself, Orson Phelan-to-be, fugitive from the isolato’s disease, about to reinvent marriage with an ambiguous wife of a second dubious dimension; and of all the others in this family: collective of the thwarted spirit, of the communal psyche that so desperately wants not to be plural.

I am one with the universe, we Phelans say; but I am one.

The universe answers us with black riddles of the past that refuse to yield their secrets: lost faiths and barren dogmas that weave the web and the winter that the poet of order had seen: the web is woven and you have to wear it, the winter is made and you have to bear it. . It is all that you are, the final dwarf of you.

I remember Molly telling me that her mother was always afraid her daughters would meet someone, and in a single night would ruin their lives. But it takes longer than that.

I left the contemplative Billy and walked to the dining room. I watched my father choosing between a chocolate-covered nougat and a vanilla cream. In the kitchen I saw Giselle drying the dishes alongside Molly and Peg and Roger, the four of them discussing a prolonged kiss that Cary Grant had given Ingrid Bergman in a movie, and I took my cue from that. I gripped Giselle’s face in my right hand and kissed her, did the same to Molly, kissed the radiant Peg, shook Roger’s hand, and I then said to them, “It’s all that we are.”

They looked at me as if I had gone back into isolation, but when I smiled at them they knew I was as sane as any of them.