Requiem, Mass. Read online

  I looked across the room at the TV, at the ironically named Will and Grace, and thought what if they lived in Livia and knew my barefoot young mother? In Livia they could own twenty times the house they had in Manhattan, of course, but then they would not be Will and Grace, would they? Place is character in a way that time, maybe, is not. In thirty years, Will and Grace will still be Will and Grace. Would the actors ever consider doing a reunion show in thirty years, so they could know how their other selves were doing? They’re sixty-something and still look better than most of us. Sleek and comely. Let’s say Grace has just lost her husband. And maybe the death was humorous, like he’d had a conversion experience, was slain in the spirit, and he was being baptized by a rock ’n’ roll preacher in a pool at a Baptist church in Waco, Texas, and the preacher reached for the microphone while they were both up to their armpits in water, and they were electrocuted. The Lord works in mysterious ways, and who are we to question his wisdom? Will has survived—although that may be too optimistic a word—he has endured, lived through a protracted battle with colon cancer. They meet for dinner and cocktails at Will’s place in Riverdale. They reminisce, which gives the producers a chance to air footage from vintage shows. They haven’t seen each other in, what has it been, Grace, five years? How did we let that happen?

  I sat there and every few minutes felt myself on the verge of tears, felt uncomfortably frangible and brittle. The music stopped, and I heard ringing in my ear. When I picked up my pen, my index finger and my thumb trembled. This had never happened before. A new surprise every day. I put down the pen, looked at the palsied hand. My heel buzzed. Anything I wrote now would be mawkish. I knew it. I’ve been here before.

  Of course, I could have gone to bed and cuddled with Annick, but I wouldn’t be able to sleep, and Annick sleeps the sleep of the dead or the innocent, and soon I’d be kicking the sheets, punching the pillow, the flimsy goddamn pillow—it’s like sleeping with my head on a washcloth—soon I’d be back there with Mom, going over and over some wretched scene or other in my head, hoping that if I remember it differently this time, then maybe the future just passed will change, maybe all our family’s lives will be bountiful if only I can see now what I missed then, going over the day Mom carved my father’s name into her forearm with a blue double-edged razor blade, and I had to paint iodine on her arm with a pastry brush and wrap it in a clean dish towel, and then call Dr. Christian Reininger, who asked me what I’d done to upset her, and when I reminded him that she’d slashed RAINY not JOHNNY, he clucked his tongue and told me to put her on the phone. Do you realize what time it is? he said. Better to sit up then and write. Sometimes you have to start with the drivel. You have to plant your seeds in shit if you want your flowers to bloom.

  But I was still writing shit in the morning, even after I’d changed pens, drunk a pot of coffee, switched ink from black to peacock blue, walked around the block, seen the sunrise, put away the Office Depot tablet and used the Evidence-brand tablet. So I stopped writing and read an essay on Atlantic salmon by Edward Behr. The author was visiting salmon farms along the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick. I came to the clause, “we drove a few minutes along the unspoiled shore,” and I suddenly saw very clearly from his road an unmentioned whitewashed house at the top of a treeless hill overlooking a rocky, wave-tossed cove, and I realized that I had been there, and I knew what Behr did not, that the house, long abandoned by its family, had been converted to a restaurant, and I remembered the dark and rusted interior, the cozy bar, the linen tablecloths on the pine tables in the two small dining rooms, one a step higher than the other, the print of Théodore Rousseau’s Market in Normandy over the mantel, a crackling fire in the fireplace, the fragrance of cedar logs. I felt like I’d been there with someone else, but I could not remember whom. The kitchen has a back door that opens to a view of the expansive bay. The two-lane blacktop, down the hill where Behr drives, leads, I know, to a forested highway where one might expect to find fir, pine, and spruce, but I see aspen, maybe from another memory, a drive through Colorado, perhaps. And then I wasn’t so sure that this memory was accurate. I’ve been to New Brunswick, but never to the coast. Could I be remembering County Clare instead? Mendocino? Mount Desert Island? Maybe the images were not from memory but from a dream or a book or a song or a movie. (You see the trouble with memoir.) There’s no sign to name the restaurant, and I don’t recall a name. I do remember that it closed several years ago, but I don’t know how I know. Out of business due to an economic downturn and an exodus of young people to Montreal, to Toronto, to Vancouver. There’s a path behind the restaurant that runs along a cliff, and I know if I follow it (perhaps I have) I’ll come to a two-story farmhouse. And on my way I’ll see a man in a tweed greatcoat, cap, and wool scarf, standing there, staring out over the water. He’ll look like Samuel Beckett. I’ll say hello and smile because I’m American and I can’t help it. He’ll ignore me. He’ll take a paper from his greatcoat pocket, unfold it, read it, refold it, repocket it.

  ON THE Wednesday after Dad left for Dallas, while Mom was off lying to Dr. Christian Reininger and Audrey was, I hoped, safely slumped at her desk in her fourth-grade classroom, I skipped school—Caeli called in my excuse (the grippe, Sister, wicked bad)—and went along with Blackie and Miss Teaspoon to the St. Anthony Nursing Home on Casimir Street to film an interview with the oldest person in Requiem, maybe the oldest person in the world, for all we knew. Blackie wanted to keep Nora McCabe alive after she died. And, who knows, maybe we could use some of the footage in The Devious Dr. Diabolus. She could be the Queen of the Laurentian Shield or something. We loaded the camera, film, and sound and lighting equipment into Miss Teaspoon’s Rambler. Nora Maureen McCabe was born in County Kerry, Ireland, on the day that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by the actor John Wilkes Booth.

  I loved movies. Blackie believed in them. Movies made me cry. I’d go into the theater in the bright sunshine of the afternoon, and I’d come out into the darkness, and that’s why I thought I felt sad. Darkness meant impending bedtime, and I resented sleep as life stolen from me. Blackie told me that we cry at movies because the screen goes black and the lights come up, and we look around and find ourselves back in the same disappointing world we were in two hours ago. For a while, he said, we got to live a richer life, and then in a flash here we were back in Bleaksville. But Bleaksville, Blackie said, was an illusion. What’s on the screen, that, my friend, is real. Film is forever. Film does not change, is not subject to whim and circumstance. That’s why you can trust it. Film builds its own truth. It preserves what we did not see and hear as well as what we did see and hear. It’s honest and reliable in a way that memory and dream can never be.

  The nursing home had adopted a greyhound as a community pet. His racing name had been Fleetafoot, but everyone there called him Baby. Baby’s presence and timid behavior were meant to calm the patients and elicit their tender impulses. Baby had grown up chasing rabbits in the Oklahoma Panhandle, and Baby could not climb stairs, so he turned out to be more of an inconvenience than they’d bargained for. He spent most of his day curled under the receptionist’s desk, snoring, farting, and twitching in his sleep. Baby followed us to Nora’s room, his nails clicking on the tile floor, his head low, his tail tucked and curved to a hook.

  Nora slept while we set up the equipment. The attendant Brad told us she slept eighteen hours a day. The heat in the room was jacked up to ninety degrees. Nora wore a sweater over her hospital gown and a green wool hat with a shamrock on the front. Blackie took off his cardigan. When Nora woke, Brad fed her a few spoonfuls of raspberry gelatin. She drank a sip of her cold tea. Blackie introduced himself.

  “Emmet your da?” she said.

  “My granda,” he said.

  “I knew Emmet.”

  “From Kerry?”

  “From the AOH.”

  Nora told us that the secret to her longevity was that she never married. “A married woman could not last.” She closed her eyes. “My sister Bondi
married an O’Dwyer and had seventeen kids. Can you believe it? My sister Ellie had thirteen by Frank O’Mara. Neither of the girls could keep their knees together. Both of them dead now forty or fifty years. I hardly remember what they looked like.” Nora told us her ma took in laundry, died of consumption, never made it to America.

  Blackie said, “Tell us about your da.”

  “He died by the side of the road.”

  Blackie showed her a photo of President Kennedy.

  Nora took a magnifying glass from the bedside table and studied the photo. She nodded. “I know him. Who is he?”

  “JFK. He was president.”

  “Looks like a boy I knew in Kerry. Something O’Donovan. A layabout with lovely eyes and frisky hands. Always going on about knickers and knockers. I miss him.”

  Blackie said, “What do you think happens when we die, Nora?”

  “I don’t. Think about it.”

  “Maybe you’ll live another twenty years.”

  “The boredom will kill me soon if the cancer don’t.”

  “You have cancer?”

  “In my dreams.”

  “Anything you’d like to do before you pass?”

  “I’d like to go back to Kerry. But who would take me? And who would I know when I got there?” She told us she’d outlived her family in Ireland and in Requiem except for the shiftless nieces and nephews who never visit. “We’ll all be forgotten, won’t we?”

  Nora dozed off several times in midsentence, and when she did, Miss Teaspoon sat in the comfy chair by the window, and Baby sat beside her with his brown head in her lap. Miss Teaspoon scratched his tapered muzzle and sang “All the Pretty Little Horses.” When we eventually left the room, Baby followed us down the hall to the foyer. You could see that he was trying to casually insinuate himself into our little entourage, that he wanted us to take him home or at least away. Outside, he stood on the front porch beside Brad and whimpered, barked, wagged his ropy tail, and whined. Miss Teaspoon threw him a kiss and promised to visit. She sang, “Go to sleep-y, little Baby,” and waved goodbye.

  We’d parked the car down the block in front of a brown and mocha triple-decker at #47. I didn’t know it then, of course, but in twelve years I’d be living in the third-floor apartment in this tenement. As we packed the equipment into the Rambler, three girls in pigtails, obviously sisters, walked toward us in matching camel-hair coats and turquoise scarves. A blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. When they saw us, they whispered to each other, giggled, ran up the steps, and disappeared through the front door into the house. I met the red-haired sister again six years later in the registration line at Requiem State College. She told me her name was Anne. I asked her why it said MARTHA on her student ID. She was given Martha, she said, but chose not to use it. In fact, her real first name turned out to be Mary. She legally changed it to Emma, shortened it to Em. I called her Alice. She called me Jack. At any rate I was smitten. I asked her if I could look at her class schedule and then signed up for all of her classes. I majored in Alice. I began to walk by her house several times a day, hoping she would be looking out her window, sitting on her piazza, working in her garden, and she would see me and call out my name, and I would appear incredulous and would say, “You live here!” and she would invite me inside to meet her sisters, to eat gingerbread, to browse through her books. I never told her about seeing her that day years ago, never told her how her laughter had disconcerted me. We dated through college. We married. She pursued a teaching career. I read books, wrote stories, floated from job to job: taxi driver, extruding machine operator, janitor, shipping clerk, short-order cook. When it became clear that I had no fiscal ambitions and insufficient ardor and that she could not live with who we were and who she was, our marriage ended. Here’s how we lost our hold.

  In those early days when Alice was playing at being Ruby Tuesday, her allure involved a slightly mannered, ironic innocence and a studied whimsy. “I’m sorry,” she might say when we awoke in her bed, “but I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced. I’m Siam, like the country. And you are…?” She told me that all of her previous beaus had been uncomplicated athletes named Jimmy, if you can believe that, all seven of them, all genial Catholic-school boys, fiercely devoted to her but intellectually circumscribed, the sort of earnest and eager young fellows who would drop to the floor in a heartbeat and give you twenty snappy push-ups if you so much as intimated that maybe they couldn’t do ten. She told me that courtship with a Jimmy was not unlike training a seal to balance a ball on his nose. She said, You probably couldn’t write me a sonnet, I’ll bet.

  After we married, Alice settled in to her new role as the missus. “This is all I’ve ever wanted,” she told me, “a home of my own.” She smiled and rested her head on my shoulder. “Let’s buy a cat and a wood stove.” She cleaned, she cooked, she shopped, she entertained, she kept up appearances. But when the domestic role ultimately proved unfulfilling or unsettling or both, when the novelty wore off and it became clear that I was not about to strike it rich in the manual labor business, and we would not be moving into the house in Truro that she’d fallen in love with, and not long after she’d read The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Alice began to reinvent her homespun self as a tragic heroine. Those sweet and amusing boyfriends suddenly became dope-snorting, girlfriend-abusing delinquents who had alternately punched and screwed her into submission.

  Her unbearable yet inexorable attraction to bad boys became the customary subject of her after-dinner conversation with friends and acquaintances. One Jimmy, we heard over coffee and date-nut bread, forced a loaded pistol into her mouth (it’s how she got the chipped tooth), spun the barrel, and squeezed the trigger. Another Jimmy, the Gregg Allman look-alike to whom she would be engaged tossed her out of his speeding pickup on the expressway (it’s how she got the ugly scar on her elbow). I chose not to challenge her stories so as not to embarrass her in front of guests. And what did I know, really? Maybe the jovial Jimmys were the lie. And maybe I didn’t want to know the truth. And what was the harm in a few fantasies? Who doesn’t want to seem outrageous and louche? When I asked her one night in bed if she wanted me to get rough during sex, she laughed.

  I said, “What’s so funny?”

  She said, “Just act like you’re interested.”

  “I don’t understand you, Alice.”

  “I know.”

  I sat up. “You seem to prefer your made-up life to our real life.”

  “You think it’s made up?”

  “Stop this!”

  “It’s all one life.”

  “I know you, Alice.”

  “You don’t even know yourself.”

  “Your life isn’t tragic.”

  “Why would I need tragic when I already have ordinary?” And then she touched my shoulder. “Sometimes you treat me like a doll or a statue or something. I’m flesh and blood. I don’t want to be on a pedestal. I want to be on the floor.”

  “Don’t degrade yourself.”

  “Jesus, what did they do to you?”

  She accused me of lacking passion, said if she’d wanted chivalry, she’d have married some elderly industrialist. I told her that for marriage you need compassion as well as passion, and respect and kindness. She shook her head, put on her sleeping mask, and turned away from me.

  Alice would make things up about me and announce them to our friends. One night she said that I thought The Feminine Mystique was irrelevant and histrionic, which forced me to deny it resoundingly, at which point she held up her hands defensively, maybe even flinched, said she was sorry she even brought it up, and cast a sidelong glance at our friends, like, Whoa, what’s up with His Majesty! She cleared away the dishes while our guests looked for their coats and hats. When I confronted her later, she said she was having some fun, trying to get a rise out of our politically correct friends, and it worked like a dream.

  “At my expense, Alice.”

  “You can afford it.”

  If she heard a
n intriguing nugget of gossip or, more often, if she read a slice of a novel that tickled her, she would claim the rumored or literary life as her own. She read about an artist’s model, and that same night she told us about her experiences as a nude model for a handsome and dissolute Italian painter and about how she became addicted to exhibitionism. She’d been the other woman in several affairs and wasn’t concerned about her betrayal. She was also addicted, we found out on another evening, to gambling, and her losses forced her to take a job as an exotic dancer in a windowless club on Route 12, and that led to three-ways with generous regulars and to a brief affair with another dancer—you know how it goes. “Only a woman knows what a woman needs,” she told me and the Robertsons. Char choked on her triple-berry crisp, and Brew looked at me, like, You poor bastard.

  Way back when, one snowy Sunday morning when Alice and I were first living together, we were curled at either end of the couch with coffees and afghans and sections of the Boston Globe. Alice said, “Oh, my God!” and put down her paper.

  “What is it?”