Requiem, Mass. Read online

  “I’m fine, thanks,” I said.

  He said, “How are you, Johnny?”

  “Audrey’s good, too.”

  “Can’t wait to see you,” he said. “I miss you guys. A whole bunch, a bushel and a peck.”

  They were still talking when I went to bed. I could hear Mom’s voice, but not what she was saying. And I was soothed. It was like listening to the radio from the kitchen on a snow day and hearing Dick Larson’s serene and creamy voice on the WREQ Breakfast Club, catching every few of his words as he tells me how aromatic and scrumptious his coffee is this cold morning and how he wants to thank the people at Holiday Doughnuts for schlepping it in. No school in Requiem, he’d say. No school in Spindleville. No school in Boxboro-Foxboro.

  A Show of Affection

  I WOKE UP at four A.M. when I heard a clatter of dishes in the kitchen. Mom was already up and dressed in a yellow sleeveless blouse, red clam diggers, and rhinestone sunglasses. She was sipping coffee, stirring a pot of butterscotch pudding on the stove, and jabbering away a mile a minute about what she and Dad were going to do when he got home: breakfast at the Broadway, shopping at Bradlees, seeing the new Steve McQueen movie at the Loew’s Poli, pizza at the Wonder Bar, blah blah blah. I didn’t mean to, but I startled Mom with my question.

  “Jesus H. Christ, Johnny, don’t ever sneak up on me like that. I could have had a heart attack. My God. And no, I am not talking to Arthur again. Arthur’s in heaven.”

  I peeked in the pantry and saw that she had already made a Swans Down chocolate cake with double fudge frosting and a chocolate cream pie. I said, “Are you going to clean up this mess or am I?”

  “That’s completely up to you,” she said.

  And then it was noon, and Audrey and I sat at the kitchen table with our bowls of pudding. Deluxe, still dusted with flour, watched us from the top of the fridge. Audrey split the pudding skin with a spoon and poured a cruet of cream into the crack. She ate the creamy pudding first and saved the skin for last.

  Dad had gotten home at nine-fifteen. At 9:21 he and Mom slipped into their bedroom, locked the door, stuffed the keyhole with tissue, and had been there ever since. Audrey said, “What do you think they’re doing in there, Johnny Boy?”

  “Probably sleeping. Mom was up all night.”

  “Mom squeals in her sleep now?”

  “Probably dreaming.”

  “I think they’re intercoursing.”

  “What?”

  “Mom and Dad.”

  “They are not.”

  “It’s what moms and dads do.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Everybody knows.”

  And I knew that Audrey was right. Intercourse was indeed what our parents were gleefully up to in there. They were “doing it,” I realized, even if what it was was not completely clear to me. I mean, I understood, or thought I did, the nimble mechanics of intercourse, but not what surely had to be its graceless choreography. I understood what was done—if not exactly how—but not why someone would choose to do it. Sex had always been (for always read eight months) an exhilarating, if somewhat shameful and private activity, a filthy practice referred to in the confessional as “the sin of self-abuse,” a barbarous passion best kept secret, a foolhardy enterprise that would lead inevitably to blindness and madness if Father Carrigan, Veronica’s uncle Robert, were to be believed. So inviting another person to share in your depravity did not seem all that noble or considerate. And I certainly did not care to think about it, didn’t want to picture my mother and father engaged in their naked and preposterous calisthenics. And I may also have been jealous, of course. They had each other to play with. They didn’t seem to need Audrey and me around. I said, “How about a piece of pie?”

  “Alamo,” Audrey said, meaning with ice cream.

  Six months or so earlier, I’d been playing Wiffle Ball in the Iandoli’s parking lot with Paulie Langevin when it started to pour. We ran to the gazebo in the Genatassios’ backyard, and for some reason, while we sat there waiting out the rain, Paulie, who was in high school already, decided to lecture me on sex. He said, “You know your dick?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “It’s called a penis. And a girl’s unit is called a vagina.” He told me I could look up the words in the dictionary and read all about them, which I doubted because I couldn’t even find shit or jizz in my Ivy League Pocket Dictionary. And then Paulie explained copulation, and when I asked him who was the guy who figured this out, he said there was nothing to figure. It just feels so good, you can’t stop yourself.

  “Can’t feel good for a girl.”

  “Ever touch yourself?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then you know what I’m talking about. It’s like touching yourself squared.”

  I asked him how he knew all of this, and he told me they teach it to you in high school, and that was maybe the hardest thing to believe that he had told me. “They have to,” he said. “It’s like the law.”

  Until that stormy afternoon, I’d never heard of intercourse, and then suddenly the topic seemed to be on everyone’s lips. Even in the schoolyard. Had this been going on all the while, and I simply didn’t have the language to admit it to my little world? One night Timmy O’Toole, Vincent Mulhearn, and I were pitching pennies against the school steps. Mulhearn was an A student, a teacher’s pet, a brown nose, not a brainiac, but one of those kids who volunteered to clap the erasers after class and whose homework was always punctual and presentable. College material, the nuns liked to say. And he was the best dancer at St. Simeon’s, star of the Girls’ Club dances, better even than the girls. He wore a sports jacket and bolo tie to the dances and slipped quarters into his white-buck penny loafers. Mulhearn liked to hang out with the knucklewalkers like Caesar Cormier, so he could rile them up and then watch the ensuing carnage. He told Caesar one day that Diz Nadeau called him a lard-ass. Caesar duct-taped Diz four feet up a telephone pole and punched him in the stomach until he puked.

  O’Toole was the funniest kid I knew. He had bright red hair, blue eyes, and a deep, resonant voice. He could sing like an angel, and Mr. Gallipeau was always trying to get him in the church choir, but when Mr. Gallipeau himself spoke or sang, he had these threads of saliva running from his upper lip to the lower lip, and it grossed O’Toole out. O’Toole memorized lines from movies he saw on Boston Movietime and would fall into character at the drop of a hat. You could be sitting in Tony’s Spa drinking a Blennd, and O’Toole would say, “A boy’s best friend is his mother,” or “That’s quite a dress you almost have on.” And he knew things like that the major export of the Katanga Province of the Belgian Congo was copper, and he might bring that up in the middle of a conversation about the Red Sox. Or he’d say hi and then, “Don’t even talk to me if you don’t know that the trailing arbutus is the state flower of Massachusetts.” He’d pretend not to be looking when we walked down the sidewalk, and he’d slam into a light pole, collapse to the ground, bounce back up with an embarrassed smile, make a show of brushing himself off, and say he was okay, no problem at all, thanks. I laughed every time he did it. He carried a starter’s gun in a shoulder holster.

  Mulhearn stood up straight, tugged at his creased dungarees, told us he had a wicked boner. O’Toole said, “His rod and his staff shall leadeth him. But mostly his rod.” I wondered what had brought the boner on, but not enough to ask.

  Mulhearn said, “Got a hankie I could borrow?”

  “Use your socks, needledick.”

  “I’ll get blisters.”

  “On the little mister?”

  “On my feet.”

  “Then you’re pulling the wrong appendage.”

  O’Toole told Mulhearn to think about his mother, and that image seemed to settle him down. I took Mulhearn’s last five cents, and we sat on the steps. O’Toole lit up a Camel and told us he’d fucked his little sister Kathleen, and it was fabulous. I laughed. He didn’t. I could see O’Toole staring into his past about
a foot in front of his face. I don’t think he ever looked any farther than that again.

  “She wouldn’t say so,” he told us, “but I could tell she loved every moment of it.” He bit his knuckle. “Every night from now on…” He pumped his fist like a piston.

  Mulhearn piped up with the news that all African women have pussies with teeth. Said he’d read it in National Pornographic.

  The last time I saw O’Toole he was just back from Vietnam. He’d joined, he said, so he could be there when we lost, could enjoy the humiliation firsthand. He was waiting for the bus in front of City Hall. Told me he was living alone in a room over a tavern on Park Ave. I told him I was at Requiem State studying English. He told me I’d grow up someday. He showed me a business card with his name, number, and a skull and crossbones logo, told me he made a living, a pretty good living he said, breaking people’s legs, arms, necks, you name it. Have club, will travel, he said. I asked him about Kathleen. Skank, he said. All of them. Kathleen, Mona, Nora, Brianna. Skanks.

  A month later I read his obituary in the paper. Timothy X. O’Toole had driven his motorcycle into the side wall of St. Simeon’s Church. No skid marks. Apparently he started at the top of O’Connell, gunned the engine, and aimed for the church. He was doing over a hundred, they figured, when the bike blasted through the picket fence. He leaves his loving parents, Eamon and Bridie O’Toole, and four adoring sisters…

  Vincent Mulhearn became an independent insurance agent. Still is. He sponsors Little League and softball teams. He’s a deacon at St. Simeon’s. You’re in good hands with Vincent Mulhearn.

  I went to the library that afternoon right from talking with Paulie Langevin. I went to the enormous unabridged dictionary on the table by the bust of FDR. Only I’d misheard vagina as regina, and what I found at the entry was a small map of Saskatchewan with a star at its capital. Since then I’ve thought of Saskatchewan as a female province, a province of mystery, and a place I’d like to visit someday. Maybe go to Flin Flon, which straddles the border with the masculine province of Manitoba. I got out an atlas and saw that they had Saskatchewan as yellow, which is completely wrong. They had Alberta—despite the name, a masculine province—correct as green. States, provinces, and countries come in colors just like flavors come in shapes. Massachusetts is lavender. Montana is pink. Wisconsin, red; Minnesota, a slate blue; South Carolina is orange; Missouri is brown. Anyway, mishearing can lead to knowledge, and ever since that day I’ve felt a kinship with the prairie province and have tried to learn as much about it as I can.

  By two o’clock Audrey had had enough. She pushed her cowgirl hat back on her head, grabbed her crayons and a paper bag, and wrote a note: Trapped in kitchen! Help! She slid it beneath the bedroom door. She found a kabob skewer in the junk drawer and poked the tissue out of the keyhole. She knocked. She wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t go away. I joined her. We yelled.

  AUDREY CLAMPED on to Dad’s leg like a starfish on a clam, so he had to walk around the apartment with her attached. Audrey, he said, sweetheart, you’re getting too big for this. The only way he could coax her off the leg was to give her the gift he’d brought back from the trip—an Old Glory lariat, which had a small string you held on to while you swung the red crepe paper streamer which was the lariat proper. When you twirled it in a loop or a figure eight, the lariat hummed. Audrey loved it, and so did Deluxe, who lay on his back and flicked his paw at the streamer every time it swept by his face.

  Dad wore a clean white T-shirt, blue chinos, and tan moccasins. His hair was slicked back with Dr. Gray’s Wave-Set. He had a small triangle of tissue pasted to his chin where he’d nicked himself shaving. He smelled mossy like English Leather. He sipped his coffee and told us how good it was to be home, how much he missed us all. So I said why not take us on your next trip. He said the insurance company wouldn’t go for that. And anyway, you can’t be missing school. School’s too important. I told him that actually it wasn’t so important. All that our nuns seemed to care about was religion and silence. The other day, I said, Sister Casilda didn’t know the capital of North Dakota and didn’t even seem curious to find out. Mom put out her cigarette and said that she was going to make us salmon croquettes for supper. How does that sound? Dad had a better idea, thank God. Let’s celebrate, he said. Let’s go out to eat. Mom went to slip on a dress and grab a sweater. Dad gave me my gift, a Swiss Army knife with a spork, a knife, a nail file, and a pair of scissors attached. Told me he’d gotten a deal on it at Chief Yellowhorse’s Trading Post in New Mexico. Traded an adjustable wrench for the knife and a box of Little Debbie snack cakes.

  We owned a rusted-out tan and white 1959 Ford Custom 300 Business Sedan that Dad had bought from Franco Desrouges for seventy-five bucks. Franco sweetened the deal with a pair of snow tires and a steering wheel knob with a photo of a pinup girl holding a sombrero in front of her naked body. We drove to Speedy’s Drive-In, which was where we almost always ate. We loved eating in the car for some reason. Dad flashed his headlights, and the carhop skated over to us. Audrey ordered her usual boiled hot dogs on grilled rolls with ketchup and relish. I ordered a pint of fried clams. Mom and Dad had lobster rolls. I ate the clams with my Swiss Army spork. When she finished half her roll, Mom opened the car window and lit up a cigarette. This would be one of the last days of Indian summer. Speedy’s would be closing soon for winter.

  Mom told the story—like she always did—of how she and Dad met for the first time one night at Speedy’s. Love at first sight, she said. She pointed. Right over there. Dad was with Rosemary Faford. They’d been down the lake watching the submarine races. Mom had been at White City riding the Whip with Jackie Gillette. “Your father saw me in Jackie’s Chevrolet, and he couldn’t take his eyes off me.”

  Audrey said, “Jackie had a Buick.”

  “She’s right,” Dad said. “Buick Roadmaster Riviera with a sun visor.”

  Mom said, “Jackie and I were going steady, but your old man was just too handsome for his own good.” Mom stared through the window of Speedy’s. “Jackie’s a plumber now. And you know what plumbers make an hour.”

  “What do cowgirls make?” Audrey said.

  “Big trouble for cowboys,” Dad said.

  Mom said, “And Rosemary became a nun after your father broke her heart.”

  Dad smiled and shrugged. “What a waste,” he said.

  “And so when Rosemary went to the girls’ room, I sent Jackie in for cigarettes. I jumped in your father’s jalopy, and we drove off into the sunset.”

  “And they all lived happily ever after,” Dad said.

  Mom said, “When you’re in love, you’re above the law.”

  Then Audrey told us how she likes to plan out her conversations before she has them so that she knows what she’ll say, what the other person will or can say, and in that way, she said, she gets to live the same conversation more than once, so her life is longer than anyone else’s.

  I LOST most of my mementos a couple of years ago when Hurricane Fritzy missed us but a tornado it spawned leveled the neighborhood. I don’t even remember most of what I lost, but every once in a while I’ll recall some keepsake I don’t have anymore, like the photo of Garnet and me on our front steps. I was squinting into the sun, I remember that, and my right elbow was on Garnet’s bare left knee. Her left arm was around my shoulder. Thing 1 took the snapshot, and his long shadow ascended the staircase like a Cubist silhouette. Some things I lost I’m probably better off without—like the giddy photographs of my happy wedding. I still have my Swiss Army knife. In fact, it came in handy after the storm when Annick, Spot, and I camped out in West Lake Park for two weeks before we could move into a FEMA single-wide. And I still have Audrey’s cowgirl boots, a shoe box full of St. Simeon Stylites report cards, and a wicker hamper stuffed with Super 8 home movies. I took the movies out of the closet this morning, got the projector from the garage, aimed it at the fridge, and watched the movie taken at Speedy’s.

  Mom and I are in the car, and Audrey�
�s pretending to be taking our order. She’s got her cowgirl hat strung over her back, and she’s writing down our order on one of those plastic lift-and-erase drawing slates. She bows to us and walks away smiling into Dad’s camera, not even looking where she’s going, and so I keep my eyes on her because I think she might walk into the path of a car, and so I don’t see Mom waving into the camera, throwing a kiss like she’s saying goodbye, going away, don’t see it until this morning, thirty-seven years later. And I see myself staring out the windshield, my hand on the door latch, ready to scoot, if I have to, after Audrey.

  IT WAS Dad’s idea that we all drive out to Brookfield Orchards on the first Sunday in October if it didn’t rain. We’d buy a bushel of Macouns and a couple of Halloween pumpkins, and maybe stop at Hot Dog Annie’s on the way back. So on Sunday morning after nine o’clock Mass, we piled into the car, stopped at Desrouges’s for two bucks’ worth of regular, and drove down the block to the Cat Dragged Inn, where Mom and Dad proposed to launch our festive day with Bloody Marys. They purchased our consent with the promise of State Line potato chips and Polar cola. Mom and Dad sat at the bar, chatting with Rags Rafferty, the bartender. Rags only ever talked about two things: the Red Sox and people who should be shot, an ever-expanding group that included, first and foremost, corrupt politicians, profligate priests, and Communists, as well as people who toss their gum on the sidewalk, people who park in the space that you’ve cleared of snow, hippies, homos, the Beatles, people who drive slowly in the passing lane, Communist sympathizers, peaceniks, Yankees fans, thieves, people who only go to Mass on Christmas and Easter, lawyers, ex-wives, ungrateful children who don’t call their parents, men who swear in front of women, Puerto Ricans, Madalyn Murray, salesmen, people who don’t order their own french fries but then go ahead and eat some of yours, bankers, bad tippers, doctors, welfare cheats, cops on the take, the sons of bitches from the IRS, plumbers, the sanctimonious buttinskis from the Bishop’s Fund, people who drive Japanese cars—“It’s like they never heard of the Bataan Death March”—drug addicts, and women’s libbers. Rags always had something to talk about.