Requiem, Mass. Read online

  On the last Saturday of September, in our kitchen at her thirty-fifth birthday party, my mother, Frances, still recognized Audrey and me, but she didn’t seem to like us all that much, didn’t find us clever or endearing, despite our effervescent efforts. Audrey folded the “Happy Birthday” napkins into little sleeping bags—Mom thought they looked like coffins—and snuggled the plastic utensils inside. I scrambled eggs in one frying pan, fried bologna in another, grilled bread in a third. Mom sat at her place, smoking a Pall Mall, flicking her ashes onto the linoleum floor. She complained about the elastic chin strap on her party hat. It chafed her skin. The pointy hat matched her heliotrope robe. I turned the bologna, stepped away from the splattering grease. Audrey switched the radio to the country station that she liked. Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Audrey asked Mom to dance the Cowboy Twist with her. Mom slurped her coffee, looked at the telephone, and said, “Where did you come from?” Audrey danced alone.

  I said, “Mom, he’ll call. Don’t worry. They’re in a different time zone out there in Colorado.”

  “Is that right, Einstein?”

  Audrey said, “Mom, you need to be sweet on your birthday.” She clicked her boot heels together.

  Mom said, “I named you after Audrey Hepburn, and you are nothing like her, young lady.”

  Audrey spun once so that her blue gabardine Annie Oakley skirt opened, lifted, and wrapped itself around her legs. “Who’s Audrey Hepburn?”

  “By the time little Audrey Hepburn was your age, she had already sung ‘White Cliffs of Dover’ for the British royal family. That’s who Audrey Hepburn is.”

  “I’ll sing for the royal family.”

  “I doubt they’ll want to hear ‘Take Me Back to Tulsa.’”

  “We bought you a present.”

  Mom picked a speck of tobacco from the tip of her tongue. “A present? I’d rather have a future.” She waved smoke away from her eyes.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Ask Chef Einstein over there.”

  Dad had been on the road for five weeks. He had left town in a driving rainstorm, hauling a truckload of scallops to Kansas. From Kansas he’d drive his next load west. After he left, Mom, as usual, lost what little interest she’d had in cooking, cleaning, in getting dressed for the day. Audrey and I kept Dad’s postcards on the fridge: Rupert, Idaho, Christmas City, USA; Welcome to the Oak Tree Inn, Vaughn, New Mexico; University Student Center, Eugene, Oregon; Pony Express House, Austin, Nevada; St. George, Utah, Gateway to Zion. Audrey thought it was a hoot that all the towns had first and last names, but how did George become a saint? Dad’s messages were brief. He’d tell us how many miles he’d logged since the last card, and he’d tell us how he missed us, hated to be away, couldn’t wait to be home.

  Dad was an independent long-haul trucker, and in those days it seemed he spent two months on the road for every week he spent with us. That’s normal, he told us. Someone’s got to pay the bills, he said. Someone’s got to bring home the bacon, keep the wolf from the door, pay the piper. Dad had the habit of repeating the same thing in several different ways. This can get on your nerves. Maybe you know people like that. Anyway, for all that Dad worked, we never seemed to have much money.

  Audrey freshened Mom’s coffee, poured glasses of cherry ZaRex for her and me and a bowl of milk for Deluxe, our malleable cat. Deluxe sat in Audrey’s old high chair, a tin Little Red Riding Hood teacup of Friskies in the tray in front of him. He looked at the milk and then at Audrey. He blinked and meowed.

  “You’re welcome,” she said.

  Mom thought cats were evil, were emissaries from the dark side, but had learned to tolerate Deluxe because he didn’t act much like a cat when she was around. Deluxe ate his Friskies one nugget at a time. He’d pick up a chunk in his left paw, bring the paw to his mouth, and crunch. He’d pose in any position you arranged him in. He loved playing marbles and a rather pandemoniac game of checkers, played possum, fetched spitballs, and swam in the bathtub. Audrey took him for walks in a baby stroller up and down O’Connell Street. Sometimes when she did, she’d dress Deluxe in a silver cape (and then he was Super Deluxe) and he’d deluxuriate in his sedan chair, cradling his fluffy catnip mouse.

  ONE DAY when Audrey was seven, I was in the apartment—Mom was getting her hair done at Bev’s Unisex—when I heard the back doorbell ring. Audrey stood there on the porch with an emaciated brindled coon cat puddled in her arms. He was purring so ecstatically, he couldn’t move. His mouth was opened and his eyes half closed. Audrey told me that the cat had told her he’d been walking all over Requiem searching for a gray house with a blue tricycle in the yard.

  “Can we keep him, Johnny Boy?”

  “He might belong to someone.”

  The cat looked up at Audrey. She said, “He told me he’s alone in the world.”

  “Maybe he’s lying.”

  “How can you say that? Look at his face. Look at his little pink sandpaper tongue.”

  The cat looked at me stalwartly, blinked twice, widened his mouth in a mute meow.

  I said, “What do we tell Mom?”

  “That he’s been here all along.”

  WHEN I served the food, Mom rolled her eyes. “This crap again?”

  I said, “If you want birthday cake, you have to eat every bite of your supper.”

  Mom squirted mustard on her eggs, poured ketchup on her bologna, and spread peanut butter on her grilled bread. Audrey made a bologna and egg sandwich, cut it into triangles.

  I said, “So who did you name me after, Mom?”

  “Your father’s father.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Grabbed my ass every chance he got.”

  “What did he do for work?”

  “He drank.”

  Audrey told us that Nestor Fulta grabbed her ass in the schoolyard. Mom said if he does it again, kick him in the cojones. Audrey said she didn’t mind it, actually. I told her she should mind it.

  Mom rolled her bologna into a tube and ate it like a cannoli, the ketchup dripping down her chin, oozing out the other end, plopping onto her robe. Deluxe crunched a Friskies nugget. We heard Caeli Beauchemin upstairs walking across her kitchen. Deluxe put his front paws on the tray and stood. He looked at Audrey. He looked at Mom. He looked at the crucifix over the pantry door. He looked at me. Audrey said, “Number Nine: Embrace the silence.”

  Audrey was a huge fan of Dr. Valentine Bondurant. Dr. Bondurant operated the School for Champions in Dallas, Texas, and he was the star of a Sunday morning infomercial where he promoted his thirty-three Secrets for Success. Audrey ordered his book and memorized the secrets, his bondurants, determined as she was to win friends, influence people, and make something stunning of herself.

  Mom said, “Did you notice today?”

  I said, “Notice what?”

  “The petulant clerk at Sterling’s. The hobo in the window at Charlie’s. The bus driver. All the same person.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Bad disguises—it’s like he wanted me to know.”

  “Why would anyone go through all that trouble?”

  “It’s not obvious?”

  “Did you take your medicine today, Mom?”

  She blew smoke in my face. “You’re starting to look like your father.”

  Audrey lit the candle, put out the light, and carried the chocolate cake to the table. We sang “Happy Birthday.” Mom held her hands over her ears and smiled. Then she blew out the candle, picked it out of the cake, and licked the frosting from the stem. She broke off a piece of the candle and chewed it. Audrey held up her glass of ZaRex. “To Frances, long may she wave.” We toasted. Mom cut the cake, and Audrey served.

  Mom said, “Did you bake the cake, Johnny?”

  “Bought it.”

  “At Iandoli’s Market,” Audrey said.

  We were raised to believe that any food bought at a store or a restaurant was superior to anything you could possibly make at home.
Those people were professionals, after all. Poor people cook food. Rich people order it. Poor people bake their own pastries—who else but the idle poor would have that much time on their hands?

  I couldn’t afford the cakes at Iandoli’s, but I had no alternative. A Twinkie with a candle would have been pathetic. I went near closing and asked Mrs. DePasquale if I might have a discount on a birthday cake for my mother.

  “Your mother’s White Owl, right?”

  “Yes.” People called Mom White Owl because she looked like the woman in the cigar commercials who wore a white feathered headdress.

  “And you want to buy her a cake?”

  “I only have a dollar.” I didn’t, of course, tell her I’d taken that dollar a dime at a time from my mother’s pocketbook. Getting the money was easy; keeping it was difficult.

  “I haven’t seen White Owl in a dog’s age.”

  I explained that the cakes on display were about to become day-old cakes and couldn’t be sold as fresh tomorrow, so instead of tossing them into the Dumpster, why not make a little profit? Mrs. D. said whatever they didn’t sell went to the nuns at St. Simeon’s. I was in the eighth grade at St. Simeon Stylites School, and now I knew that the dear sisters weren’t sharing their goodies with the boys and girls. I said, “Don’t you think Sister Sylvanus and Sister Mary Clare have had enough cake already? They’ll be diabetics if you keep feeding them.”

  I was in luck. Mrs. D. showed me a cake she’d decorated earlier. Happy Birthday, Eleanor. No one had picked it up. Mrs. D. smoothed away the Eleanor with a frosting knife. We wondered what could have happened to Eleanor’s erstwhile benefactor. Mrs. D. figured Eleanor’s no-account husband had ordered it, wanted to surprise her, do something considerate for once in his trifling life. He was probably in the doghouse now or would be soon because he didn’t buy that gold necklace she wanted at Sharfman’s. So this morning he of little brain got the bright idea of making it up to Eleanor with a birthday cake. Moron. Then he felt so proud of himself he stopped off at the Cat Dragged Inn for a quick one—to celebrate his beneficence.

  I said, “You’ve been giving this some thought.”

  She looked at her watch. “By now he’s on his sixth highball. By now he knows it’s too late to even bother going home.”

  I got the cake for free.

  Mom opened her gift, a bottle of Jean Naté après le bain. She dabbed a little behind her ears, behind Audrey’s and Deluxe’s ears. Deluxe shook his head and sneezed. The kitchen chimed with citrus and pepper. We all had a second piece of cake. Mom asked how the Sandiland twins were doing. I told her they were fine, last I saw them.

  “Will the Sandilands be around this weekend?”

  “I’ll ask.”

  “I’m thinking of having a little party now that I have the proper eau de toilette. An adult party. I was thinking that maybe you two could sleep over at the Sandilands’.”

  Audrey said, “Little Cher is so cute.”

  “I thought the twins were George and Gracie,” Mom said.

  Audrey shook her head. “Sonny and Cher.”

  I told Mom that I’d check with the Captain, even though I wasn’t sure that leaving Mom alone at a party was such a good idea.

  Audrey said, “Sonny told us a poem he made up. Want to hear it?”

  “Shoot.”

  “‘My Two Birds’ by Sonny Sandiland. The mother bird ate two worms and died. The father bird did not die. He hit the pole, but he did not die. He flew away. The end.”

  “It doesn’t rhyme.”

  I said, “Sonny is stretching his poetic wings.”

  Deluxe sniffed his cake, nudged it with his paw toward the side of the tray. Audrey put her head on Mom’s shoulder. Deluxe nudged the cake a little farther, looked at me watching him, meowed. The phone didn’t ring. I didn’t know it just then, but this was the last good night the three of us would ever have in our home.

  There were no Sandilands, by the way. No flesh-and-blood Sandilands. I made them up. They were going to be the Marches, August and Jan and their four charming daughters, April, May, June, and Julie, but Audrey didn’t want all those girls around and did want a less military name. At first there were just Earl and Ivy Sandiland and their basset hound, Alfalfa, whom Audrey and I would care for when the Sandilands were supposedly out of town, which always coincided with Mom’s more erratic episodes. But then Audrey wanted children, so the Sandilands had twins. It was an unplanned pregnancy, but they were thrilled. So now we babysat instead of dogsat. Not long after the children were born, Alfalfa was struck and killed by a garbage truck on Harvey Street. I blamed myself for the death, but Mrs. Sandiland, bless her heart, told me she’d never been able to break the dog of the habit of chasing garbage trucks.

  When Audrey and I needed to be out of the house, like when Mom would shake Audrey and scream in her face, the phone would ring, and I’d answer it, tell Mom the Sandilands needed us pronto—they’d decided on the spur of the moment to go dancing at the Club Trocodero. They’d be out late and we’d need to sleep over. Sometimes in summer, the Sandilands took us with them on vacation to Nantucket. Earl Sandiland was a captain of industry. He owned Sandiland Manufacturing, the world’s largest maker of quality dental equipment. Everyone who knew him called him Captain, including his wife, and he called her his First Mate.

  Going to the Sandilands’ usually meant sneaking upstairs to Caeli’s apartment. Her full name was actually Regina Caeli, but she went by Caeli, pronounced Chay-lee. She was a legal secretary for a big-shot downtown attorney named Nunziato Ferraro, whose photo she kept on the dresser in her bedroom. In the photo, Attorney Ferraro stands on the sidewalk outside the Black Orchid, his cashmere overcoat draped over his shoulders. Caeli kept a key for us under the slatted doormat in her back hall. In the old days before Caeli moved in, we’d go to the cellar, which was cool in the summer and warm in the winter if we laid our sleeping bags by the furnace. That way we could sneak upstairs if Mom went out and use the toilet, play with Deluxe, raid the fridge. If Caeli was entertaining a gentleman caller, we stayed downstairs with the Morrisseys, Red, Violet, and Blackie. Red was a retired meter reader for the city water department. He had a goiter on his neck the size of a cantaloupe and liked to sit out on the front steps listening to the Red Sox broadcast. In winter, he spent his days ice fishing. Violet sat in her armchair and read six romance novels a day. Every day. They worshiped their boy Blackie, an independent filmmaker. We slept in what had been their daughter Garnet’s room. When Mom asked where all the babysitting money went, we said right into our college fund accounts that the Captain had set up for us at the Requiem Five Cent Savings Bank.

  Mom said, “College?” and then she laughed. “My, my.” She tapped me on the nose with her finger, cocked her head, made her Shirley Temple face, and said, “My wittle dawings have qweat big pwetensions.” Deluxe pushed the cake over the rim of the tray, pulled his ears back, and stared at me.

  I SLIPPED the burning cigarette out of Mom’s fingers, took a puff, and coughed. I dropped the butt into Mom’s bowl of melted chocolate royal ice cream. I pulled the afghan up to her neck and turned off the TV. She groaned and opened her eyes. “I was watching Johnny Carson.” And then she closed them. Dad never did call to wish her a happy birthday, to let her know when he’d be home, to say how much he missed her, missed all of us. I closed my eyes and saw him at the movies, sitting up front with a box of popcorn in his lap. He’s laughing like mad at the movie. I can’t see what he sees, just the light from the screen reflecting off his face. He’s laughing so hard there are tears in his eyes. I wondered if Dad thought about me and what I might be doing while he was on the road. Like he’s driving his rig across the desert and he sees a forest of saguaro cacti, and he thinks, Johnny would love to see this. I need to take him with me on my next trip. Johnny and Audrey. Hell, the whole family. Make it a vacation. And he looks across the seat and pictures me sitting there studying the road atlas, estimating our time of arrival.

  I c
hecked on Audrey before I went to bed. She was wide awake. “Audrey, you have to sleep sometime.”

  “Where do you think Dad is tonight?”

  “At the movies.”

  “He never takes us to the movies.”

  Deluxe stuck his head out of the pillowcase, meowed. Audrey dangled her rosary beads at him. He swatted the crucifix.

  “What if they put her in the hospital again?”

  “Dad’ll come get us.”

  “How will he know?”

  Deluxe grabbed the beads in his paws, rolled over, and fell off the bed. He shook his head, let out a throaty meow.

  “Parents have a sixth sense.”

  “Don’t jerk my chain, Johnny Boy.”

  The Nuns Didn’t Teach You to Write Like This

  SISTER CASILDA SAT at her desk, turned her chair to face the windows, rested her cheek on her fist, and stared out at Requiem. We students were supposed to be writing the answers to the “Let Us Pray” questions at the end of Chapter 30 in the Baltimore Catechism, the chapter on contrition: Elizabeth says: “Anyone who commits even one mortal sin does more harm than hundreds and hundreds of earthquakes ever could do.” Elizabeth isright. Which are thefourreasons we should have contrition for mortal sins? My job, my duty, was to turn back a page and copy out the answer to catechism question #176: We should have contrition for mortal sin because it is the greatest of all evils, gravely offends God, keeps us out of heaven, and condemns us forever to hell. Why would someone, some Father Michael A. McGuire in this case, want children to believe that their willfully missing Mass one Sunday is more devastating than the destruction of cities, the deaths of hundreds of thousands, is equivalent to the rise of fascism, is more vile than Harry Frazee’s selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees for thirty pieces of silver?