Sitting among them, I sometimes recalled the whispering girls on the stoops of my childhood. I sometimes felt just as lost about the tales they proposed. But there was a sense, too, in their sorting out of recollection and rumor, of gossip, anecdote, story—and even in their disappointment when a body came to the funeral parlor, a stranger or out-of-towner whom none of them could produce a single word for—of some duty on their part, Mrs. Fagin and her attendants, to weave a biography of sorts for the newly dead.
I say duty, but there was nothing heavy or morbid about these conversations; there was, rather, an eager, industrious, even entertaining, pleasantness in all of it, which is probably why the apartment always seemed to me to be full of light and the aftermath of some laughter. Or maybe it was just the cups of sweet tea that they served me. “What’s going on downstairs?” Mrs. Fagin would ask, wanting me to name the recent dead. And when I did, she and her compatriots would lean together to tell as best they could the story of the life—breathing words onto cold embers was how I sometimes thought of it, and, one way or another, getting them to glow.
This is how I came to know the fate of Big Lucy, whose mother was waked at Fagin’s in the early forties. Mrs. Meany was a huge woman, with a goiter in her neck that Fagin had powdered as heavily as he had powdered her fat cheeks. But the results were unsatisfactory. Even with the makeup, there remained something awful about the globe of purple, translucent flesh squashed beneath her chin. After the first night of the wake, Fagin had gone downstairs and come back with a broad swathe of pale green chiffon that he wrapped around her head and neck so elaborately that when the family returned the next day Mrs. Meany no longer resembled “her unfortunate self”—as Mr. Fagin put it—but a kind of mummified dowager queen, which pleased them all immensely. The Meany family was what my mother would have called shanty Irish: large and broad-faced men and women, hardly well scrubbed, with a kind of dumb shyness to them as they entered Fagin’s neat parlor and only reluctantly let me take their hats and coats. They whispered awkwardly to one another through the first hour of the wake, but then, as they grew accustomed to the place, began to sprawl and to laugh and to treat Fagin’s chairs and lamps and good rugs with a kind of proprietary pride, pointing out a painting on the wall or the quality of the drapes to various visitors as if they themselves had selected and paid for them. Which, Mr. Fagin reminded me when I mentioned this to him, they more or less had.
Mrs. Meany, I learned in Mrs. Fagin’s upstairs room, had made the trip—by subway, ferry, bus, and bus—to her daughter’s Staten Island asylum every Sunday—every Sunday, it was repeated, rain or shine, for all the years since Big Lucy had vanished from the neighborhood. Lugging, the ladies said, her considerable weight and her thick legs and a shopping bag full of the cakes she had baked (not to mention the swaying baggage—as I thought of it—of that goiter) all the way out to that godforsaken place just to sit for a few hours with the girl, now a woman, who in her derangement spoke only of the most vulgar things. The poor woman, they said, poor Mrs. Meany, cried herself home every Sunday, bus, bus, ferry, subway, unable to look at any of her fellow passengers, man or woman or child, the flesh of their hands and arms and legs, their bodies beneath their clothes, without the terrible images evoked by her daughter’s dirty words rising to her mind like bile to the throat.
Because the devil uses dirty words, Mrs. Fagin added, instructing me, her tiny finger held in the air, to make us believe that we’re only the sum and substance of ugly things.
But Mrs. Meany, see, the women went on, leaning forward, despite how her heart was broken, pulled herself together, anyway, to put on a good face for the rest of the family at home. And she went back, Sunday after Sunday, right up until the Sunday before she died. Mrs. Meany put her beautiful love—a mother’s love—against the terrible scenes that brewed like sewage in that poor girl’s troubled mind. She persevered, she baked her cakes, she hauled herself (the goiter swinging) on and off the ferry, and she sat, brokenhearted, holding her daughter’s hand, even as Lucy shouted her terrible words, proving to anyone with eyes to see that a mother’s love was a beautiful, light, relentless thing that the devil could not diminish.
Collectively, the women sat back, smiling at one another and the glowing conclusion they had wrought out of Mrs. Meany’s travail.
And I, out of a certain shyness, or the deference I always felt in the presence of nuns, or perhaps out of respect for Mrs. Fagin’s decorum and bright rooms, didn’t bring myself to ask them, what would happen to Lucy now that her mother was in the ground?
Here, too, I learned the true story of Redmond Hogan’s mother. Redmond was Walter Harnett’s contemporary, one of the stickball-playing boys when I was young—one of the crowd, perhaps, who had played that brief and awful trick on Bill Corrigan when the ambulance stopped at the wrong house. He was killed at Normandy, and not six months later, his mother was waked at Fagin’s. Of course, a connection was made—Mrs. Hogan had six older children, but Redmond was her youngest, and thus, it was said, the apple of her eye. She died of a broken heart, was the consensus. It was said at her wake that when the news came of Redmond’s death, Mrs. Hogan struggled to get into her hat and coat. She was determined, come hell or high water, to head for Penn Station and the train to Washington, D.C., where she was going to march straight up to the White House and give Mr. Roosevelt what for. It was Florence, her oldest daughter—a broad redheaded woman who even in middle age had skin like porcelain—who told the story at the wake, getting everyone to laugh at her mother’s determination and how skillfully Florence had talked her out of her plan. They sat down and wrote a letter to the President instead, describing Redmond and what had been lost. Fifty-two pages of it. Pretty remarkable, Florence said, considering Redmond was only twenty-five.
Florence Hogan was a big, redheaded woman with beautiful skin and large brown eyes and a cashmere coat with a wide fur collar that I had tried on in Fagin’s cloakroom after I took it from her in the vestibule. It smelled wonderfully of the cold, of cigarette smoke, and of some gorgeous, spicy perfume.
In Mrs. Fagin’s living room the women leaned together as I repeated Florence’s story about the letter, and then they passed a look, from one to another—it was eye to eye, but it was as clear to me as if it were going hand to hand—before someone said, “Wasn’t Florence the beauty, when she was a girl?” It was agreed. Mrs. Fagin said, “An Irish rose,” although I knew from the wake that there were German cousins on Mrs. Hogan’s side. “A wild Irish tose,” another old lady said, and there was some rueful laughter.
Florence Hogan when young, the tale began, could have charmed the birds out of the trees. But she was a big girl who grew up fast and couldn’t have been more than sixteen when she started going with an older man from no one knew where—White Plains, one of the Sisters offered with some authority, saying it as if the words carried the same impossible implications they would have held had she said Timbuktu or Siberia, or some other far-off place of sand or snow.
Oh, but he was good-looking, Mrs. Fagin said. Very tall and dark-haired. James Redmond was his name. There wasn’t a soul in the neighborhood who could help but notice the two of them when they walked down the street together, arm in arm … they must have kept company for a good year or so, going out together night after night … and here came among the women in Mrs. Fagin’s living room the silence and the long nod.