Two
Those who do the great heroic work of being human never work solely from experience. My father, for instance, could never have painted his Malachi Suite, that remarkable body of paintings and sketches that made him famous, without having projected himself into the lives of the people who had lived and died so absurdly, so tragically, in the days before and after his own birth. I am not implying here that any historical reconstruction is heroic, but rather that imaginative work of the first rank must come about through its creator’s subordination of the self, and also from the absorption into that self of what has gone on beyond or before its own existence.
Clearly there is no way to absorb the history of even one other being wholly into oneself; but the continuity of the spirit relies on an imagination like my father’s, which makes the long-dead world, with a fine suddenness, as Keats put it, fly back to us with its joys and its terrors and its wisdom. Keats invented the term “negative capability” to define what he saw in the true poetical character: a quality of being that “has no self — it is everything and nothing. . it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low. .” The poet should be able to throw his soul into any person, or object, that he confronts, and then speak out of that person, or object. “When I am in a room with people,” wrote Keats, “if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain. . the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me [so] that I am in a very little time annihilated. .”
I speak with some authority when I say that it is a major struggle for anyone to annihilate his or her own ego, to cure the disease of self-contemplation, for as you will see there is ample attention paid to myself in this memoir. But I believe it could not be otherwise, for only through what I was, and became, could the family be made visible, to me, to anyone. And so I invoke Keats, without any claim to art of my own, both to drain myself of myself, and to project myself into realms of the family where I have no credentials for being, but am there even so; for I do know the people in this memoir, know where and how they lived, or live still.
I know, for instance, what is going on in the Quinn house on North Pearl Street in North Albany this morning at a little past five o’clock. Two sleeping men are nearly naked, and three sleeping women are ritually modest in their shorty summer nightgowns. In each of three bedrooms a crucifix hangs on a nail over the sleepers’ beds and, in a luminous print looking down at Peg and George Quinn in their double bed, the Christ exposes his sacred heart, that heart encircled by tongues of fire.
The house normally rouses itself from slumber at seven o’clock, except on Sunday, when late rising is the rule. As the milkman sets foot on the front stoop next door at this crepuscular hour, that house’s resident chow disturbs all light sleepers here with his murderous bark from the back yard. Under the quietest of circumstances it is not easy to achieve sleep on this infernal morning, but after the chow’s bark, George Quinn, vigorous still at seventy-one, raises himself on one elbow, rolls himself onto his wife’s body, and then, with high comfort and the expertise that comes with practiced affection, he rides the lovely beast of love.
Dead heat was saturating the room, the sheet and pillowcases under the two bodies soaked from the long and humid night, no breeze at all coming in the fully opened window, no leaf moving on the trees of North Pearl Street; nor was any cross-ventilation possible, for the bedroom door was closed now in these moments of hot waking love, all nightclothes strewn on the floor beside the bed, the top sheet kicked away.
As they moved in their naked heat toward mutual climax the door creaked open, its faint crack a thunderclap to both lovers. George knelt abruptly up from his wife’s soft and sodden body, grabbed for his pajama bottoms as Peg felt for the lost topsheet to cover herself; and the door creaked again, the gap between its edge and its jamb widening, the hall light striping the room with a sliver of brilliance, then a board’s width; and there, in the foot-wide opening, appeared Annie Phelan’s face, ghostly inquisitor with flowing white hair, her face growing larger and more visible as she pushed the door open and stared into the bedroom of interrupted love.
“What is it, Mama?” Peg asked.
Behind the door George was stepping into his pajamas, and Peg, with the use of one deft arm, the other holding the found sheet in front of her breasts, was threading herself into her nightgown.
“What time is it, Margaret?” Annie asked.
“It’s too early,” said Peg. “Go back to bed.”
“We have to make the coffee and set the table.”
“Later, Mama. It isn’t even five-thirty yet. Nobody’s up except you.”
From his darkened bedroom Billy Phelan inquired: “Is Ma all right?”
“She’s all right,” Peg said. “She’s just off schedule again.”
Billy raised his head, flipped his pillow to put the wet side down, and tried to go back to sleep, thinking of how he used to work the window in Morty Pappas’s horseroom, but no more.
Standing in the doorway of the third bedroom, where she and Annie Phelan slept in twin beds, Agnes Dempsey, wearing a pink knee-length nightgown, and yawning and scratching her head with both hands, said to Peg, “I didn’t hear her get up, she doesn’t have her slippers on”; and then to Annie Phelan: “What kind of an Irishman are you that you don’t put your slippers on when you walk around the house?”
“Oh you shut up,” Annie said.
“Go in and get your slippers if you want to walk around.”
Annie went into the bedroom. “The bitch,” she muttered. “The bitch.”
“I heard you,” Agnes said.
“You did not,” said Annie.
“I could stay up and make the coffee,” Agnes said.
“No, it’s too early,” said Peg. “She’d stay up too, and then we’d never get her back on schedule.”
“You go to bed,” said Agnes. “I’ll keep her in the room. I’ll put the chair in front of the door.”
George was already back in bed, eyes closed and trying for sleep as Peg lay on her back beside him and hoisted her nightgown to thigh level to let her legs breathe. Her interrupted climax would probably nag her at odd moments for the rest of the day, but she wouldn’t dispel that now with her own touch. She wondered when the day of no more climaxes would arrive, wondered whether it would be her failure or George’s. How long before George was as senile as Mama? When was Mama’s last orgasm? When did she last feel Poppy’s hand on her? Peg had no memory of anything sexual in Annie’s life, never caught them at it the way Danny caught her and George up at the lake. We thought he was swimming for the afternoon, but in he came, George doing great, and me on the verge. He opens the door with the key and we both look at him. “I didn’t know you were sleeping,” he says, and out he goes, and that’s that for that.
Peg charted the day to come: office till noon, the boss, and Basil, probably. Work will be light, all their attention on the strike vote in the shop this morning. I hope there’s no fights. Then Roger. He wants to drive me down to Peter’s luncheon. It’d be easy to go along with Roger. He has a way about him, and funny too. Smart and funny and so young. It’s so silly. The important thing is to turn George around.
“Are you asleep, George?”
“Nobody can sleep in this stuff. It’s like sleeping in pea soup.”
“We have to buy this house.”
“We do like hell.”
“Think about it, damn it all, think about it! Where could we ever again find this much space for that kind of money?”
“Who needs all this space? Danny’s not home anymore.”