“Floyd swears it,” Francis said (and in the front parlor Sarah, standing beside the corpse of her mother, covered her ears with both hands to fend off Francis’s words).
“Floyd said he never did get to kiss Sarah, and after the scissors business he sorta lost interest.”
“I think we can change the subject,” Peter said.
“Suits me,” Francis said.
All eating, all talk at the table stopped. The front door bell changed the mood and, as Molly went to answer it, Chick said, “That’s probably Joe Mahar. He said he’d come early.” And Chick too left the table.
Francis drank the last of his tea, popped his last crust of bread into his mouth, and smiled at Peter. “Always great to come back home,” he said.
“I got to go to the bathroom,” Tommy said, and he went up the back stairs.
“Just you and me, Pete,” Francis said, ignoring my presence.
Francis saw Molly, Sarah, and Chick talking to a priest in the living room and he could recognize Joe Mahar, whose name he could never have brought to mind if Chick hadn’t mentioned it, but he knew he was the boy who had gone into the seminary with Chick out of high school. Joe had obviously carried it off, but poor Chickie pie came home after three years (the first year Francis played for Chattanooga, blessin’ himself every time he came to bat, and them rednecks yellin’, “Kill the Irishman,” but he kept on blessin’ even though he didn’t buy that holy stuff no more), and Chick’s return plunged Mama into the weeping depths of secularity. No priests in the Phelan family, alas. Mama never to know the glory of having mothered a vicar of Christ.
“I see you got a new ceilin’ light,” Francis said, looking at the new fixture.
“Installed this afternoon,” Peter said. “How do you like it?”
“Nice and ritzy. Who picked it out, you?”
“Orson and I did, didn’t we, Orse?” And I nodded.
“You still doin’ newspaper work?”
“No, I make my living as an artist, such as it is.”
“Artist. By God that’s a new one. Artist. What kind of artist?”
“A painter.”
“That’s good,” Francis said. “I like paintin’s. My most favorite saloon had a paintin’ back of the bar. Only reason I hung out there was to look at it. Eased my mind, you know what I mean?”
“What was it?”
“Birds, mostly,” Francis said. “Birds and a naked woman. Reminded me of Katrina.” Francis winked at Peter.
Peter laughed, shook his head at Francis’s philistinism. But it was an involuntary and unjustified response, and he knew it; knew that if Francis had set his mind to it he could have been an artist, or a writer, or a master mechanic. Anything Francis wanted he could have had. But of course he never wanted anything. Artist of the open road. Hero of Whitmanesque America: I hear America singing — about naked ladies.
“Peter,” Molly called, “Father Joe wants to know about the funeral mass. Just for a minute. He’ll be right back, Fran.”
Francis nodded at Molly, sweet sister, as Peter went to the front parlor. Francis looked at me and smiled. Alone at the table of his youth, made a hemispheric sweep of the room. No need to look behind him at the china closet. He knew what that looked like. He saw only one thing in the room that surprised him: the picture of the family taken at Papa’s forty-fifth birthday party at Saratoga Lake, where they had a camp that summer, the summer of the year Papa died. There was Francis at fifteen and Tommy as a baby. Francis would not approach it, not look closely at what was then; better off without any vision of a past that had led to these days of isolation from both past and future. Gone. Stay gone. Die. Go live in the cemetery.
Francis got up and saw that only I was looking at him. He made a silent shushing motion to me, then found his hat and coat on the hallway wall hooks, where Molly had hung them. He went through the kitchen and out the back door into the yard, and I followed him. We both looked at the dead automobile in the carriage barn, a 1923 Essex, up on blocks.
“That your car, kid?” he asked me.
“No sir. I’m not old enough to own a car.”
“Good,” he said. “No point in ownin’ that one anyway. Ain’t worth nothin’.”
Then he smiled, threw me a so-long wave, and walked out of the alley and down Colonie Street, heading toward the railroad tracks, his home away from home.
I watched him limp toward the street and knew he was going away, perhaps forever, which was precocious of me to think that, and which saddened me. He was an imposing figure of a man, even with his dirty clothes. His heavy-duty smile made you like his looks, and like him, even though he was beat up, and kind of old.
Now, reconstituting that moment twenty-four years later, I remember that my sadness at the loss of his presence was the first time I was certain that my father really was Peter, and that I really did belong in this family. I had seen something in the man’s face that resembled what I saw in my own face in the mirror: a kindred intangible, something lurking in the eyes, and in that smile, and in the tilt of the head — nothing you could say was genetic, but something you knew you wanted to acknowledge because it was valuable when you saw it, even though you couldn’t say what it was. And you didn’t want to lose it.
Francis turned at the front of the house and walked out of my sight, and so I then went and sat in the old car. As if to fill the void, a girl my own age entered the alley with a small black mongrel at her heel and came toward the carriage barn. She looked up into the car’s front window and saw me pretending to drive.
“Do you know how to make that thing go?” the girl asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“Then you shouldn’t be up there. You could have an accident.”
“This car can’t move,” I said. “It’s on blocks.”
The girl looked at the blocks and said, “Oh, I see.” And then she opened the door and slid in alongside me. She was obviously a waif, her hair a stringy mess, her plaid jacket held at the throat with a safety pin, her feet in buttonless high-button shoes long out of fashion. But what overrode all things forlorn about her was her eyes: large and black beneath black brows and focused on me with an intensity that I now know was in excess of what her years should allow. This made me uneasy.
“Is that your dog?” I asked.
“He belongs to all of us.”
“All of who? Who are you? What are you doing here?”
“I was sent here,” she said.
“Who sent you?”
“My people. They want me to find something valuable and bring it back.”
“Valuable how?”
“I don’t know yet. They didn’t tell me.”
“Then how do you know where to look?”
“I don’t know where to look. I don’t know anything about this place. Would you like to help me?”
“Help you look for something you don’t know what it is or where it might be?”
“Yes.”
I was befuddled, and while I thought about how ridiculous this girl was I saw Molly come out the back door.
“Orson,” she called out, “did you see Francis?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, sticking my head out the car window. “He went out the alley and down the street.”
Peter came out then, shoving his arms into his coat, and, when Molly told him what I had said, he too went toward the street.
“I have to go now,” I said to the girl.
“I’ll go with you,” she said, and she left the Essex and followed me, as I was following Peter, the mongrel keeping pace behind us. When I reached the street I saw Peter already at the corner, looking in all directions, then heading toward Downtown on the run. I jogged and the girl jogged beside me.