Requiem, Mass. Read online

  I said, “What are you doing?”

  “I like the noise of my name.”

  His Haws

  I SHOOK AUDREY awake at eight. She swatted my hand away and buried her head beneath her pillow. I tiptoed to Caeli’s bedroom and eased her door shut. I washed up, got dressed, and woke Audrey again at eight-fifteen. She kicked at the blankets and growled. I fixed myself a bowl of Wheaties as quietly as I could. While I ate, I read a compatibility test in Caeli’s ladies’ magazine. Question number one: Are you jealous to the core? Well, I did sometimes wish that I had a three-speed English racer like Eddie Dumphy, a maroon Raleigh, but I never begrudged Eddie his bike, so I supposed I was emulous but not jealous. Not to the core. Number two: Are you smart or shy? Are they mutually exclusive? I wondered. Was there some meaning to smart that I didn’t know about? There’s brain-wave smart, of course. (And I was not that.) There’s smart like, That’s a smart-looking bow tie, Junior. But certainly you can be both fashionable and shy. There’s smart like, I’ve had just about enough of your smart talk, young man. Hmm. Maybe shy was the problem. I knew about shy as in bashful, about shy as in lacking: I believe the guy’s three bricks shy of a load. I knew about shy as in fear. But I still didn’t get it. The test wasn’t so easy as I thought it would be. Eight-thirty.

  I drew Audrey a bath and woke her up again. Audrey knew that if she didn’t get up on the third rousing, I’d have to resort to dripping cold water on her face, and she hated that. She walked to the bathroom with her eyes closed and her arms out in front of her. A sleepwalker. A zombie. She cracked me up. I had to steer her around the chairs and table and past the fridge.

  I went downstairs through the front hallway and into our apartment. I picked up the record album covers off the floor. Rusty Warren, Doug Clark, Redd Foxx. I slipped the covers into the hi-fi cabinet between Mario Lanza and Jack Teagarden. The Ouija board was opened on the coffee table, but the planchette was missing. Wouldn’t this have been nice for Sister and the nurse to walk in on—racy records and fortune-telling equipment? Tell me, Ouija, will Johnny and Audrey be attending St. Simeon’s school come Monday? Big fat no. Not to mention the opened bottles of beer on the floor. I opened the windows. Someone had draped a brunette wig over the globe of the table lamp. Did this mean someone went home hairless? I folded the blanket on the couch.

  Deluxe was dead asleep in his Easter basket on top of the TV. He was limp, a melted cat. I lifted a paw, let it drop. His eviscerated catnip mouse was draped over the side of the basket, its cotton husk still damp with saliva. I whispered in Deluxe’s ear. It twitched. He managed to open his eyes when I said, “Tuna.” His haws were raised to half-mast, which meant he was either sick or unreasonably tranquil, inordinately snug. I scratched him under the chin, and he cooed. Then he purred like an idling diesel. He’d live, I figured. I heard a drawer open in the kitchen. I went in to see Mom.

  A man in a glen plaid suit was opening and shutting the cupboard doors. I said, “Where’s Frances?”

  He turned. He had on this black-and-white op-art necktie, all concentric circles, and when he moved, the circles seemed to spin. He said, “You must be Johnny.”

  “And who are you?”

  He smiled, leaned over the table, and shook my hand. “Keefe Smith.”

  Keefe was balding up front, but had thick, wiry, wild black hair on the sides and back, and a matching brushy mustache. He wore oversized aviator glasses with red frames that kept slipping down his nose, so that he had to lean back to see through the lenses. “Do you have any coffee, Johnny?”

  “Instant.”

  “Cream?”

  “Powdered milk.”

  “Black, then.”

  I put the kettle on.

  “Sugar, I hope.”

  “Fine, superfine, confectioner’s, light brown, dark brown.”

  “White.”

  “Cubed? Crystals?”

  “Cubed.”

  I fetched the sugar bowl. “And what are you?”

  “Friend of your mom’s. We went to St. Simeon’s together a million years ago. I’m a reporter for the Standard-American.”

  I got him a Teamsters mug, a plastic spoon, and the jar of Folgers. I said, “Those are smart-looking shoes, Mr. Smith.”

  “Keefe.”

  They were black tasseled loafers.

  “Thanks. Flagg Brothers. Twenty bucks.”

  I watched the kettle until it whistled.

  He said, “The Sandilands?”

  I poured the water in his mug. He stirred the coffee, smelled it, winced, dropped in three sugar cubes. They wouldn’t melt. He took a tube of Ben-Gay out of his jacket pocket, squeezed a healthy bit into his palm, and then worked the Ben-Gay into his scalp.

  I said, “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going bald, if you hadn’t noticed.”

  “I noticed.”

  “And I’m having a hard time accepting it.”

  “The Ben-Gay?”

  “Is supposed to regrow the hair. Something about the camphor and menthol opening the follicles. Pepper’s supposed to do the same thing.”

  “You could try Tabasco.”

  “I have. And safflower oil, and onions, and Dr. Crinite’s Do-Gro, and evening primrose oil, and hot lavender and balsamic compresses, and sulfur balm and Dead Sea mud. I’ve tried them all.”

  “Try a hat.”

  “I understand I’m playing the fool, trifling with these trash remedies, but I can’t help it. I like my hair too much.”

  I said, “Why are you here?”

  “Drank too much last night.”

  “You don’t want to be late for work.”

  He checked his watch. “Where do they live? The Sandilands.”

  “The west side.”

  “He’s such a big shot I’m surprised I don’t know him.”

  “The Captain hates publicity.”

  “You got anything to eat? A muffin, maybe? Bagel?”

  “Devil Dogs.”

  “Perfect.”

  He got icing on his mustache. I handed him a paper towel.

  “Your mother, she’s a doozy.”

  “She likes to put on a show, pretend she’s unconventional. My father, however, is a certified madman.”

  “White Owl told me Rainy was dead.”

  “She likes to tell stories.”

  “Cancer, she told me. Testicular.”

  “He drives a truck.”

  “That’s an odd thing for her to say.”

  “She gets to appear to be strong that way and yet vulnerable at the same time. Wounded yet…”

  “Plucky?”

  “Invincible.”

  “I assure you there was no funny business between White Owl and me.”

  Keefe took a deep breath, and I could see that he was about to launch into a long explanation about how these peculiar circumstances—a strange balding man in the kitchen, the lie about Mom’s marital status—might lead one to suspect some hanky-panky, but that’s when Mom shuffled into the kitchen in her Kotex slippers. Her hair was up in blue Spoolies and she was smoking. She tugged the belt of her robe and looked at me. She said, “Coffee, presto.” She sat at the table and coughed.

  Keefe said, “Talk about smart-looking footwear.”

  The slippers were Mom’s invention. She was going to patent them. She laid one pad down flat—that’s the one she walked on. The second pad she looped and glued into a strap that she slipped her little foot into. Some people should not be allowed to have a glue gun.

  I reminded her that she had a screen test in a couple of hours. “You should get ready. I’ll clean up.”

  “And I’ll be going.” Keefe pushed his glasses up his nose. He thanked me for the breakfast. I didn’t see him again for another thirty-some years.

  Spilled Milk

  TODAY IS MOTHER’S day, and this morning Spot surprised Annick by leaping on the bed and waking her up with a kiss. The two of them are down at the beach playing surf Frisbee, and I’m here at
my desk interrupting the flow, if not the course, of our story because of something I just remembered about Mom. This happened when I was ten. It was a Saturday morning, and Dad was at work, pumping gas at Desrouges’ Flying A. Audrey sat in her closet reading Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. Mom and I were on the couch listening to Harry Belafonte records and eating Sky Bars. Mom put her arm around my shoulders and kissed the top of my head. Harry had to leave a little girl in Kingston town. Mom told me that when she first learned that she was pregnant, she tried to abort me by holding her mother’s hand and jumping off the kitchen table twenty-five times a day for twenty-five days. She sounded wistful, said she and her mother had never felt so close. She was twenty-two then, Catholic and unmarried. “So you can see what kind of awkward position your coming put me into.”

  “Mom, that’s a sin.”

  “When that didn’t work, your grandmother, bless her heart, made me some pennyroyal tea. It’s what they used in Canada.”

  “She had eighteen brothers and sisters.”

  “She would have had twenty-seven. We tried Queen Anne’s lace seeds, vitamin C, falling down a flight of stairs.”

  “Why would you want to kill me?”

  “Let’s not be melodramatic, Johnny. You weren’t a person then, were you? You were a problem.”

  “So what changed your mind?”

  “Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like, you know. Maybe I wouldn’t have married your father. I could have gone to college, maybe, to secretarial school, gotten my derriere out of this hellhole.”

  “Sorry.”

  “What’s done is done.” She broke off a square of Sky Bar, handed it to me. Vanilla nougat, my least favorite. “Maybe I could have been someone. That’s all I’m saying.”

  I wondered about my father’s role in this noxious business. When Mom told him her secret, making it their secret, did he hesitate in marrying her? Was that pained look on his face what drove her to the kitchen table? As a kid I thought a lot about my close call with nonexistence. What would it have been like not to have been? What or who would have taken my place in this world? What would have been right here in this space where I sit at my desk with my fountain pen in my hand in Dania Beach, Florida? Air? Emptiness? Space? Ether? There would be no desk, of course, and Annick Pascal would be in love with another man, and Spot…poor Spot!

  (By the way, I’m talking about my beloved grandmother Grace, mind you, the woman who loved me more extravagantly and resolutely than anyone ever has. Grace’s husband, Mr. Burt Packard, shop foreman at New England High Carbon, vanished from Requiem when Grace was pregnant with my mother and has not been heard from since. Grace always said, Good riddance to bad garbage, whenever Burt’s name was mentioned, the only ugly comment I ever heard her make about anyone. She practically raised me until I was six and a half, and she died of a not-unexpected heart attack, died on her kitchen floor with a lit Herbert Tareyton cigarette in her fingers.

  Grace had gnarled, arthritic hands, swollen knuckles, twisted fingers. She had been a seamstress all her life, but when I knew her she was having a hard time doing the fine handwork. Whenever she sewed clothing on the Singer machine in her bedroom, I’d sit on the linoleum floor by the treadle and play games of construction and demolition with the darning eggs and bobbins. I can remember the intermittent drill of the machine, the sizzle of rain on the roof and window, and Grace humming one of her songs from the forties.

  I don’t think of myself as a superstitious person [although I do think that if I’m watching the Marlins and they’re ahead, then I can’t change the channel or they’ll blow the lead], but I never break an egg in a dark, shadowed place. I never leave a sliced onion on the counter. Why let discord in the door? And if I drop a spoon, Annick has to pick it up. I know that if I’m interrupted in the making of a bed, I’ll have a sleepless night. I keep to these habits because Grace taught them to me. When I look at the blue flame of a candle I remember how Grace told me the blue meant a spirit was in the room with us, and I remember when she told me that—at the kitchen table, on a summer morning, the two of us eating cantaloupe à la mode, the ice cream dripping down my chin. She had been telling me about her brother Romeo whose birthday it was, and who died of influenza when he was nine.)

  I asked Mom how she felt when I was born.

  “I was in a great deal of pain.”

  “You weren’t happy to see me?”

  “I threw up every morning for seven months.”

  “So then you must have been relieved, at least.”

  She took off the Belafonte and put on the Mario Lanza, The Student Prince. “You had a pointy little head. Your father called you Dinny Dimwit.”

  “Who’s Dinny Dimwit?”

  “A friend of Willie Winkle’s.”

  “Who?”

  “You were not a pretty baby.”

  I keep my parents’ formal black-and-white wedding portrait here on my bookcase between my Jack Kerouac bobble-head doll and my View-Master stereoscope. Rainy and Frances. Mister and missus. Rainy’s in a white shirt, white tuxedo jacket, black slacks, and black shoes. His black bow tie is crooked. He’s wearing a light pink, I would guess, boutonniere. His black hair is combed back in a neat little pompadour. His hands are folded at his waist, left over right. He’s wearing a gold watch, the one he still wears, a Lord Elgin with a second hand where the “6” should be, stares soberly into the camera lens. I once asked Frances why Dad didn’t smile for the photo. She said, His teeth.

  Frances’s short hair is crowned with a rhinestone tiara. A starched lace veil is pulled off her face and falls over her shoulders to her waist. Her gown is satin and lace with a beaded insert at the neck. The sleeves are long. The full skirt is not so unlike a three-tiered wedding cake. She holds a tussie-mussie of tea roses in her hands and a string of rosary beads. Her head is held back; her smile is nervous, reserved, and shows mostly in her wide eyes and her raised brow.

  I stare at the photo and try to look through the eyes to the thoughts and feelings simmering behind them. I see that Dad understands he now has his chance to become a new man, a mature and enterprising breadwinner, and he knows he is up to the challenge. He sees this new life spread before him like a holiday dinner, and he’s as hungry as a wolf. Mom is still a little queasy. She couldn’t eat a thing, thank you. She doesn’t even want to look at food, not even at the lacy wedding cake from Gannon’s Bakery. She’s weary with being the center of attention. She’d like to sneak away, toe her shoes off, sit, put her feet up, and smoke a cigarette. And I know I’m there, too, curled on my back, trying out my parts, stretching my fingers, opening and closing my new mouth.

  Annick’s mom, Nettie, called this morning after Annick and Spot had left for the beach. She thanked us for the flowers. What do you call them? I said, Peruvian lilies. Nettie’s husband Frank Nissen—her third husband, not Annick’s dad—died in his bed last summer, and now she’s finding her romance on the Internet and hoping that some greater-Phoenix-area senior citizen will sweep her off her feet the way Big Frank did. She said, You don’t know what it’s like to be dating against the clock, Johnny. No, I don’t, I said. Big Frank was a brassy, banjo-bellied old goat who slapped waitresses on their asses, picked his teeth with a matchbook, and referred to his genitals as Little Frankie and the Twins. You could be at breakfast with Big Frank and Nettie, and he’d wipe the yolk off his mustache and lips, slap his chubby hand on the table, look over at Nettie, and say, What do you say we pay Little Frankie and the Twins a surprise visit? And Nettie would blush and smile, and the two of them would excuse themselves and pad off down the hallway to their bedroom. Big Frank, I thought, was an acquired taste, like deep-fried Twinkies, but Nettie loved that geezer to death—quite literally, as it turned out.

  Nettie told me about her last-night blind date, how the first thing the guy asked was did she have a car. Yes, I have a car, she told him, a mocha Lincoln Town Car with a sunroof. Is that all you’re interested in? “I let the fool t
ake me to dinner at Lo-Lo’s Chicken and Waffles. And then he got steamed when I wouldn’t let him drive. Said it didn’t look right, the woman at the wheel. He asked me if I could chauffeur him to the VA on Monday morning. Imagine.”

  I was still trying to imagine the dish of chicken and waffles.

  She said, “Before that it was this little Sicilian, came up to my shoulders. Just off the spaghetti boat, this one. Right out of the gate he wants to know how I feel about sex. Where’s the romance anymore, Johnny?”

  “Times have changed,” I told her.

  “After we ate I told him, ‘Have a sweet life, Massimo.’”

  WHEN KEEFE left, Mom said she’d take her bath. I cleared the dishes and wiped down the table. I put an onion in a cereal bowl and put the bowl on the coffee table to cut the stench of smoke. Audrey came in the front door, and Deluxe hopped down from the TV, meowed, chirped, performed his figure-eight dance between Audrey’s legs, and then collapsed in a pile at her feet so that she could stroke his back, rub his belly, scratch his head, and tickle his chin. I opened the windows, turned off the stereo. Audrey pointed at the limp and purring Deluxe and whispered, “Catatonic.” Why didn’t I hear the water running? I said, “She went back to bed.” I asked Audrey to go tell Mom to shake a leg.

  The last time Mom had checked into the hospital, Dad took Audrey and me along to see her. “Your mother’s been driving in the breakdown lane again,” he told us. Audrey had a get-well gift for Mom. She had drawn and colored a picture of a hooded merganser—Audrey’s favorite bird. But the nurses at the front desk wouldn’t let us up to see Mom. Too young. So Dad gave us money and told us to wait for him in the cafeteria. He shrugged. He took the hooded merganser. “She’ll love this, Audrey.”

  Audrey ordered a black cow. I got a strawberry frappe. Audrey said, “Loons aren’t crazy.”