“Jay, look at this for a minute. I think the stiff’s heading the wrong way.”
Jay walked over to a lighted table where a young man was pasting up the centerfold section of the next morning’s Blade. Jay scanned the page; the mistake was obvious. In one photo of the crash scene, the stretchers were being carried to the right of the page, in another picture, the opposite way.
Jay pried the picture from its moorings. “Tell the guys in the darkroom to flip it. Nice catch, Andy.”
Mary Springer walked into the room and looked at the table.
“Ready?”
“Except for one picture, yeah.”
“When’s the Kennedy spread going?”
“Tomorrow. Charlie said it’ll hold for a day.”
She leaned over to look at the page, reading carefully. Other reporters did a quick once-over, then signed their initials, Mary always read every word. Sometimes she ran her fingers along the columns, as if there was pleasure in the feel of the words. A strand of dark hair fell across her cheek, and she brushed it away, impatiently. It intruded on her work. The lack of vanity in the gesture intrigued Jay. He scanned her face, liking the way the lights from the table accentuated her cheekbones and the strong, tight line of her jaw. It was not really a beautiful face, less a pretty one. He would photograph her someplace with rocks and surf. The strength in that jaw would be absurd in a garden.
She leaned forward to see better, and he noticed the curve of her breasts under the cotton dress she was wearing. He had always thought of her as thin — a false impression, because of her height and small bones. He thought, idly, that she was one of those women who would look better naked than with clothes on. He leaned over the table, enjoying being close to her. “Good story.”
“Thanks. I think I got it. This makes it”— she paused to consider — “better.”
“Better?”
“Serious. Like it should have been. The pictures and the words make it — serious. Does that make sense?”
Her intensity was almost physical; he thought he could hear the air around her hiss with it. He wondered if she would just burn up with it one day. She let out her breath, and her shoulders drooped with fatigue. “I guess it’s just the ‘first fatal’ syndrome, huh?”
“You’ll get over it.”
“I don’t know if I want to. It should be new and terrible every time. If it isn’t, you’ve missed something. I wish I could see everything new and fresh.”
“Even that?”
“Even that.”
“You’d go crazy. You have to block things out, to survive.”
“You don’t. Not when you’re shooting. I’ve watched you. You’re open. Exposed. Like I was today.”
He looked at her, a little awed. How the hell did she know that? Some photographers used the camera as a wall, they felt safe behind it. With him, things blazed and burned through the camera lens. It was a hole the world could leak through. He was trying to think of something to say about that when she laughed and shook her head.
“Jay, I’m sorry, I’m all wound up. I’m going to go home and go to bed. I think I sound a little crazy tonight. See you tomorrow.”
Jay walked to his desk, picked up his Nikon and started towards the door. Mrs. Fitts, the receptionist, said good night to him with the usual veiled invitation. Mrs. Fitts had the hots for him. She liked to jiggle her size 99’s at him as he went by, and he always tried to manage a leer. It was the least he could do. She always gave him his messages on time with the numbers right. If Mrs. Fitts liked you, you got a panoramic view and the right numbers; if she didn’t, you saw buttons and at least three wrong digits.
As he walked out to the car, he thought of Mary saying, “I’m going to go home and go to bed,” and the sentence sprang a sudden, erotic image on him. He was lying, naked, on a bed, and she was naked too, lying between his thighs, her lips on his, and he could feel the pressure of her body along his entire length. Her shoulders were pale, with a sprinkling of freckles across them, and her breasts were full with small, elegant nipples that he could feel against his chest. The image was so sudden and so unexpected that he found himself trembling. At the same time, he felt an overwhelming protective urge towards her. In his mind, he saw her standing by the wreck, wearing her pink dress and her khaki raincoat, her pretty pink shoes sodden with mud, so terrifyingly vulnerable that he was afraid the sky might fall in on her. He had never thought about her that way before. He had hardly thought of her at all. She was just the girl at the next desk, married to some local, who could say fuck and make it sound charming.
What the hell was going on? Probably something to do with pulling aside the curtain, as she called it, seeing death so clear, the fog of everyday living just blown off by death. But what was happening below his belt was familiar enough.
Say the rosary, son, and take cold showers. He chuckled. It was jerk-off time again. He had so many variations on that particular art, he thought, that he could be on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour. He’d be more interesting than the guy who played “Yankee Doodle” on his head with spoons.
There was always Norma. He decided to drive by her house. The lights in her apartment were out. Damn. Norma was chubby, and her blond hair had dark roots, which annoyed him in the same way as somebody scraping his fingers down a blackboard. But she was energetic at least. The first time he took her out, she invited him up to her apartment and started taking her clothes off right away. He was a bit shocked; he’d heard there were women like that, but all the girls he knew took some coaxing and necking first.
Norma liked crotchless panties. Purple ones, with ribbons on them, the sort that would have made Jacqueline shriek with dismay. Once, while she was showering, he saw them on the bed, looking like some peculiar insect that was feasting on the bedclothes, engorged and reddish purple. Norma was a Frederick’s of Hollywood kind of girl. He imagined her wandering into the French boutique from which Jacqueline ordered her underthings, rummaging through the little silk panties and lace camisoles and saying, “Jeez, don’t you have anything here with a split in the crotch and holes in them for the boobs?”
He didn’t like himself much for hanging out with Norma. He didn’t love her, he wasn’t sure if he even liked her. He just used her for crotchless-panty sex. That seemed to be all right with her; she made no claims on him, didn’t seem to need him for anything but a quick fuck. It should have been ideal.
He was suddenly, unaccountably depressed by the thought of Norma, her dark roots and the purple panties and the debased coin of their relationship. The shabbiness of his life surrounded him, oppressive as humidity. Now, the White House only made it worse. It was as if he lived at the edge of a garden where everything was beautiful and exciting, and they let him in once in a while to look around, but he could never stay. He was too old, he had started too late, nothing more was ever going to happen to him. The old feeling returned, like teeth nibbling inside his gut; it was either melancholy or an ulcer, he was not sure. He would spend his life waiting for something wonderful to happen, like his father did, and it never would. He remembered that his father had finally stopped singing, wonderful aching ballads of love and death and the Easter Uprising. There was one he had always liked as a kid. Her hair hung down in ringlets; they called her the queen of the land.
As his father sang, he liked to picture the woman in the song, on a dark, windblown moor, her hair wild in the wind. He saw Norma on a moor, the wind whipping through the Clairol No. 25 blond, scattering the dandruff in her dark roots. Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
He turned the car away from Norma’s apartment and thought again about Mary in her pink dress. He could picture her on a hillside, dark hair blowing. The erotic images returned; he saw her on a bed, her hair spread out across the pillow like a fan. Her hair would taste salty against his lips. There was an inexplicable sense of promise in those images.
He shook his head. That was crazy. His ideal woman (Jacqueline didn’t count, she wasn’t really available) had hair like cornsilk. She looked, in fact, like the woman in the Breck ad — and she drifted around his Manhattan penthouse like a wraith. He had never been in a Manhattan penthouse, but it was very clear in his mind’s eye, the Chrysler Building framed slightly off center in one of the windows and lots of cold steel, modern furniture and white walls. His photographs would hang, just so, on the pristine walls. The Lady in Black — that’s what he called her — would drift about the rooms and run her fingers across the pictures and murmur, “How beautiful.” If she was a little fuzzy in his mind, the frames weren’t; they were either of high-tensile white metal, the screws hidden on the undersides so as not to interfere with the play of the shapes or the explosions of color, or of slender high-grade aluminum that barely kissed the edges of the prints. The Lady in Black did two things; she murmured “How beautiful,” and she took her clothes off. She had milk white skin, no zits or warts, and she too moaned delicately when she fucked; she didn’t bellow like Norma. She didn’t have dandruff. She never had bad breath, and she never was crabby before her period. She never had periods. She was perfect and she was waiting for him, somewhere. Not in fucking Belvedere, Maryland.
The Lady in Black didn’t have white gloves, but that was a nice touch, so he added it. She could take him in her white-gloved hand and caress him, and with her finely tuned artistic sense, she would once again murmur, “How beautiful.” He wasn’t immense, but he wasn’t puny either, and he was, he thought, nicely formed. His penis didn’t stick out at a weird angle or bend in a strange way. Jacqueline, an artiste, would have thought it certainly as nice as the curved leg of a Hepplewhite, and the Lady in Black would agree. He saw them, slim and chic, lunching together, sipping white wine and chatting agreeably about his penis.
He sighed. He had moved up in the world, in his fantasies at least. For one thing, Father Hannigan never appeared in them anymore, to chastise him, as he used to do. In the old days, Jacqueline would have given him only the first delicious nip when Father Hannigan would have stormed in, cast her one of his famous stony glances, and made her put her Oleg Cassini dress back on. He’d have scolded, A nice Catholic girl, too, now, Missy, you stop this and say the rosary, and she would have grabbed the dress and scampered off. Father Hannigan would have called the Lady in Black, who was vaguely Protestant, a common whore, and she would have stalked off in a huff, taking her white gloves with her. Norma would have unhinged Father Hannigan completely. He’d have taken one look at her, in the purple panties and the bra with the nipples peeking through, and he would have fallen to his knees, waving the cross at her, crying out, “Get thee behind me, Satan!”
Norma would have grinned and said, “Hey, kinky! Let’s do it!”
He tried to think about the Lady in Black, but her face, never too clear to begin with, just melted away, dripping like wax, and it was Mary’s face that replaced it. Some unexplored cavern of his mind was in charge now, and it was useless to resist it. He lay astride her on the bed, her breasts gentle against him, and he was kissing her mouth, a kiss at once passionate and infinitely tender. Her mouth was warm and soft, and he kissed it deeply, never wanting to stop, feeling that his entire body and soul was flowing out of himself and into her. He felt again a sense of calm, as if the phantom kiss had the power to heal him.
He shook his head. Things were rattling around tonight. It had been a long time since he had been out on a fatal. He had forgotten the power of death’s face to unhinge him.
He pulled the car up in front of the Victorian house he shared with two reporters from the Blade. One of them, Sam Bernstein, was sitting on the sofa doing the New York Times crossword puzzle.
“What’s a three-letter word for the ruler of a kingdom of fools?” he asked. “JFK.”
“Levity at this hour? Jesus.”
“For Chrissake, Sam, why don’t you give up on that goddamn thing? You spend more time on the fucking Times puzzle than anyone I ever saw.”
“It’s my talisman.”
“Your what?”
“The day I can do the entire Times crossword puzzle, that’s the day I die. I’m safe till then.”
“If you quit doing it you’ll never finish.”
“That’s cheating.”
“Columbia J School rotted your brain. I got a better one. The nine first Fridays.”
“What’s that?”
“You go to Mass and communion the first Friday of every month, and you die in the state of grace.”
“So?”
“Straight up, you heathen. Right to the harp section. You can steal, murder one, sleep with goats, but you go direct to heaven.”
“That’s absurd.”
“You’re jealous because you’re Jewish and you only get to the porch.”
“I don’t want to hear this.”
“Jews aren’t baptized, so they don’t go to heaven proper. There’s this little porch tacked on, for the Jews who lead good lives. God’s Irish, so I figure he doesn’t want people around who don’t drink and who are smarter than He is.”
“They didn’t actually teach you this stuff.”
“I swear to God they did. Did you know that just before the end of the world, all the Jews will be converted?”
“Oy.”
“So if you ever wake up with this wild urge to go to Mass, it’s all over. Trumpet time.”
“I should have voted for Nixon.”
“Nah, it’s time we had a Catholic president. The thumbscrews give the Oval Office a little class. Hey, where’s Roger?”
“Out with Giggles.”
“Oh fuck. How did I get stuck in the room next to Roger? His love life comes right through the walls.”
“I miss the folk singer.”
“Not me. One more night of humpedy-hump followed by ‘We Shall Overcome’ and I would have personally burned a cross on Roger’s bed.”
Sam laughed. “Roger was covering the state NAACP convention yesterday. Nice story, except he called it the National Association for the Prevention of Colored People.”
“Roger’s a great writer, but he’s sort of fuzzy on details. What do you hear from the Post?”
“Al Friendly likes my stuff, they say they got me in mind. Christ, sometimes I think I’ll be stuck in Belvedere the rest of my life.”
“You know where we should be. In Ala-fucking-bama,” Jay said.
“Right. Getting knocked down by fire hoses.”
“Hit with billy clubs by southern sheriffs.”
“Bitten by police dogs.”
“Shot at by white trash.”
“God, that would be great! We’re missing it all, Jay. History is passing us by!”
“Shit, yeah.”
“Want to go down to the Sahara Room? Drown our sorrows.”
“I’m beat. I think I’ll hit the sack.”
“Pretty gory?”
“Not really. Just … depressing.”
He climbed the stairs slowly. Things were still rattling around. No use putting it off. He was going to think about his father tonight. His own life seemed tangled with his father’s, a coil that circled around on itself so that it was impossible to tell where one strand ended and the other began. He had tried, and failed, to give himself absolution.
Bless me Father, I have sinned.
Yes!
I didn’t love my father enough, and he died.
Not loving enough isn’t a sin.
Yes, it’s the worst one.
You were angry at him for getting sick.
It wasn’t fair. I needed him and he got sick.
So you punished him by not loving him.
And he died. I made him die.
You think you have the power of life and death!
No. Yes. I don’t know.
You were only fifteen.
If I had loved him, he wouldn’t have died.
You were fifteen. Ego te absolvo.
No, you can’t.
I absolve you. Accept it.
You can’t.
He remembered.
His fingers spread across the belly of the ball, strong, thin hands, long from joint to joint. His father’s hands. He moved back, looked. He was Johnny Lujack. The crowd sucked in its breath; he threw. A wondrous arc, hanging in the blue, suspended in time and space, and the crowd went “Ahhhhhhhhhh —”
“Jay, those damn kids messed up the catchers’ mitts. I tell ‘em every time, don’t mess with the displays. Juvenile delinquents.”
Johnny Lujack was quick frozen. Jay counted the mitts. “There’s only seven. There were eight when I counted them last time.”
“It was the nigger kids, you bet. I’m going to get a nice store in Silver Spring, that’s where the good people are. Washington has gone to hell. Niggers and riffraff.”
Jay nodded. He was not expected to answer. He owed his presence at AA Blitz Sporting Goods to the fact that Mr. Blitz was his mother’s cousin. He was family, he came cheap and he didn’t steal.
“I been meaning to ask, Jay, how’s your dad?”
“He’s been in bed for a couple of days, but he’ll be up soon.”
“Tell your father I was asking for him. I see some of the drivers down at Haps. They ask for him too. A gentleman, your father. Not like some. Jay, are you going to the game? You can leave early if you are.”
“I’m not going.”
“I thought you liked basketball.”
“I like to play it. I don’t like to watch it.”
“I’m ordering the trophies for the team, ten dollars each. Nothing but the best for St. Anthony’s. That nigger kid is good. How come these nigger kids get so tall?”
Jay started arranging the mitts. The one good thing about AA Blitz was that he could slide his hand across wood and leather and be Lujack or Cousy or DiMaggio. At the game, he was no one. He would watch the players, the gym lights glinting on their bare shoulders, and the envy would inflate inside him until he thought he would simply float to the top of the gym, hanging there like a huge balloon. His father had been All-City, and so Jay had the game in his genes. The coach had asked him, more than once, to come out. But Jay was stuck with AA Blitz in the afternoon. His father was out of the cab more days than he was in it now, and he got nothing for the days he did not drive. It was only his father’s lousy kidneys that stood between Jay and a blue-and-crimson All-Star jacket. Scouts from Maryland and Notre Dame would be in the stands to watch him. He would pick Notre Dame. You could Lose Your Faith at those other places. Sister Mary Catherine always said it that way, in Capital Letters, and Jay had visions of himself Losing It and then rooting about in garbage cans to get it back, finding it someplace between the orange peels and the old newspapers.
“Hey, Jay, you ready?”
Vincent J. Sheehan presented his shining face across the catchers’ mitts. Vinnie always looked scrubbed. The nuns loved him. He could get away with murder.
“Nah, Vinnie, I’m not going.”
Disbelief darkened Vinnie’s face.
“Not goin! You said you were. I came all the way over here!”
“I never said for sure.”
“You said, Jay.”
“Not for sure.”
“Yeah you did. If we beat Gonzaga, we got the Catholic League title.” He jabbed Jay with his elbow. “Maybe after, we can get some action.”
“I dunno.”
Vinnie was always talking about “action,” but of course he would have run in terror from the prospect of the real thing. By sophomore year, some of the more advanced boys had actually felt female flesh, or at least the outside of a fuzzy sweater at places where it bulged. Jay and Vinnie went to movies and still traded baseball cards. They were not advanced.
“Claire Ryan is having a party at her house after the game.”
“Oh, Ryan,” Jay said, dismissively.
“What’s wrong with Ryan? She’s built.”
“She hangs around with Phil Mazzarato and those guys from the team. I bet she’ll just ask seniors.”
“So what? We’ll crash. Seniors. Big deal.”
He was standing in a corner of Claire Ryan’s house, leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette. He looked virile and mysterious.
He had spent a considerable amount of time practicing smoking. He tried Bogart — cool, disdainful puffs. Gable was brisk, in command, the cigarette an afterthought. Alan Ladd was more romantic, a stream of smoke floating through his lips as he eyed some dame who was falling in love with him. Jay often coughed when he inhaled, something Alan Ladd didn’t do much. He’d have to work on that.
Claire Ryan came up to him, her hair falling in small ringlets against her white throat.
“Why are you standing here alone! ”
“Hike to be alone.”
“How strange you are. I never met a man like you.”
“Let’s go.”
“Where!”
“Away from here.”
“I can’t go. ” Her eyes met his. “But I must go with you.”
In actual fact, he had said eleven words to Claire Ryan in his whole life. “Do we have pages 12 to 14 in algebra to do?”
“Yes,” she said.
Someday he was going to grow up and move to a place where they talked like they did in the movies. Nobody in his neighborhood talked like that. “I must go with you, my love.” Mainly they said, “Marie, I want a fucking beer,” and “What do I look like, your damn maid?” In New York they probably talked the other way.
In a large bed in a white room, she lay naked beside him. “Jay, I can’t help myself. Be gentle with me, Jay.”
Picturing Claire naked was a mortal sin, you’d burn in hell for that. The real Claire in the flesh might be worth it, but for a minute’s imagining it wasn’t. So he put one of the naked women he had seen in National Geographic beside him in bed. That was probably only a venial sin, because he didn’t know her, she was colored and she had on a grass skirt and carried a spear. She looked a little weird in his bed under the Notre Dame pennant, especially with the spear, but at least it wasn’t a mortal sin.
“I haven’t got all day, Jay, you coming or not?”
“OK, Vinnie, I’ll fucking go. I got to stop at home first, to tell my folks.”
The rose-colored chair in the living room had been empty for four days. It was a relief not to have to go by that chair and see his father staring out the window. Jay would grip his books and hurry past, guilt trailing him across the hall runner. His father would be OK. People didn’t die from kidneys. All they did was store up piss.
“Hey, Jay, you know where Ryan lives?”
“Yeah.”
“We ought to know, in case we want to crash.”
“Sure we want to crash. You said you wanted to.”
“Well, sure I want to. Crash.”
“It was your idea.”
“Yeah, I’ll do it. I will.”
“You always chicken out, Vinnie. Big talk, no action.”
“Not me, man. I won’t chicken out.”
“Yeah you will.”
“I wonder if Ryan does it with Mazzarato.”
Jay frowned. Carnal speculation was OK for most girls, but not for Claire Ryan. He was certain she was pure. A temple of the Holy Ghost. The thought of Claire Doing It with Phil Mazzarato, who had brows that joined in the center of his forehead and who was covered with so much hair he looked like a gorilla — or so Jay thought when he glanced sideways at him in the locker room — made Jay feel queasy. The colored lady with the spear was more Phil’s type. Gorillas wouldn’t faze her, she living in the jungle and all.
“What’s the matter, Jay, you got a thing for Ryan?”
“I don’t give a shit for Ryan or any of ‘em.”
“Sure, we know, Jay.”
“Don’t be a shithead, Vinnie.”
“We know.”
“Vinnie, you are a real pain in the ass.”
They walked up to the red brick rowhouse where Jay’s family occupied the first two floors. The door was ajar. That was strange. Jay’s mother was afraid of burglars and always kept the door bolted. Jay pushed the door open and walked in. Mrs. Calloway from the third floor was in the living room. His brother’s wife, Irene, a pale, tired-looking young woman, sat on the couch holding her baby. No one said a word.
Jay started to run up the stairs, his feet pounding on the faded daisies on the runner. His momentum carried him into the hall and through the open door of his parents’ room. The people in the room turned to stare at him. His mother was there, and his older brother, Frank, and Father Clevinger, the assistant from the parish. His father was lying in bed, very still. His eyes were closed, his face was pale, and his false teeth were not in. His mouth looked all dry and puckered without his teeth, and his breath made a whooshing sound as it came in and out.
Frank grabbed Jay by the arm and pulled him into the hall.
“Don’t you know better than to come busting in here like it was a fire? Don’t you have any sense, Jay?”
“Frank, he’s not going to — he’s going to be OK, isn’t he?”
“Keep your voice down! We’re saying the Rosary!”
“Why didn’t you call me? I was at the store.”
“He’s been like this for hours. There’s nothing you could have done.”
“She called you. Why didn’t she call me?”
“Stop behaving like a child. Mom has enough sorrow now. Don’t you go adding to it.” Frank always talked that way, as if he had read a book that had sentences in it that grown-ups were supposed to say. Jay thought he was a pain in the butt.
“Why didn’t you put his teeth in, Frank?”
His brother looked disgusted and turned and walked back into the bedroom. Jay followed him and went down to kneel at the end of the bed, as the rhythmic chant of the Rosary hummed along. He joined in. He hated the Rosary because he could only get through three Hail Marys when his mind would start to drift off, sometimes, horror of horrors, to the lady with the spear. Surely it was a mortal sin to be saying “Hail Mary” at the same time you were thinking of the big brown bazungas of a lady from National Geographic.
“Glory be to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”
Jay looked at his father’s face, pale as the bellies of the fish his mother cooked on Fridays. Now, his father’s breath had begun to come out in little puffs through his lips. It sounded like he was breathing the letter P.
Jay stared, unbelieving. This wasn’t happening. People didn’t die when they were forty-eight years old. Any minute all this weird stuff would stop and his father would put on a clean shirt and go downstairs to supper; he always wore a clean shirt to supper.
“Now and at the hour of our death. Amen,” his mother said. She was a small, thin woman who always seemed drained of energy. He thought he remembered a time when she had been wiry and laughing, but he was not sure if he had simply imagined it. His father was tired all the time, too, but under the weariness was an anger that curled the long hands into a fist that clenched and unclenched.
Jay was afraid of his father’s anger, not that it would be used against him, but that it could be there at all. Jay looked at his father’s hands, and a memory flashed into his mind. He thought he remembered the back of a green car as it sped away from where he lay in the street. He was bruised, nothing more, but his father held him at the edge of the street, and Jay felt he would crack in the desperate embrace of those hands.
“World without end. Amen.”
They did not talk much. Words were a chore to both of them. In the past few months there were times when Jay had felt his father’s eyes on him. In a flicker of a second he met his father’s eyes, and they were filled with an anguish that terrified him. What was there in the world that could hurt a man so strong? He did not want to know, so he grabbed up his books and called out, “Bye, Pop,” as he hurried out the door.
The prayers flowed on, and Jay’s knees began to hurt where they pressed against the floor. He tried to concentrate on the words, seeing each one in his mind, but it didn’t work. It never did.
He walked into the living room of the Ryan house. The music stopped. Everyone turned to stare. Phil Mazzarato, his one long eyebrow furrowed, glared at him.
“You don’t belong here.”
Jay gave him a cold look, part Brando, part Bogart, then ignored him. He walked over to Claire Ryan, to lead her to the floor where the couples were dancing. Phil Mazzarato grabbed his shoulder, fay shook the hand away, contemptuously, like Monty Clift had done to John Ireland in Red River. Phil Mazzarato swung, Jay blocked the blow and sent Mazzarato to the floor with one punch, like John Wayne did in The Quiet Man. The rest of the seniors jumped him. He knocked two of them down before they got him, but there were too many, even for him. He lay on the floor in a (small) pool of blood, and Claire screamed and ran to him. She lifted his bruised head, gently, like Natalie Wood did to Tab Hunter in (what was the name of that movie!). She did not care that his blood was staining her black velvet dress.
“Cowards!” She sobbed. “He has more courage than any of you. ” Later, when they had gone, he recovered and she lay in bed beside him and there she was again, the naked lady with the spear…
“World without end. Amen.”
Claire and the lady with the spear vanished, and the green pyramid of his father’s foot beneath the blanket rebuked him silently. Remorse rattled through him. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. Please, God, I’m sorry.”
“May perpetual light shine upon him and upon the souls of all the faithful departed. Amen.”
Jay had heard that prayer as long as he could remember. He always thought of a huge railroad station, bigger even than Union Station, where the souls of all the faithful departed were standing around, holding suitcases. Waiting. His father would be there soon. He looked at his father and thought, I love you, and tried to project the thought inside his father’s head. It would not go in.
“Jay, go and get Father Clevinger a glass of water,” Frank ordered.
Jay walked down the hall to the bedroom. He picked up a clean glass and filled it with water, and then he saw, sitting on the back of the tank, the glass with his father’s teeth in it. He had seen them only a few times before; his father had hardly ever let anyone see him without his teeth since the gum disease had cost him his natural ones years ago. The few times he had seen them, they’d seemed to Jay to be a separate creature. He would not have been surprised if they had hopped out of the glass, clattered over to the rim of the sink and started chatting with him. They were repulsive and interesting at the same time.
It occurred to him that there was still something he could do for his father. He picked up the glass with the fizzy cleaning stuff in it. The teeth seemed to smile at him. He put the glass down. He would never have the nerve to do it, just like he would never have crashed Claire Ryan’s party.
He picked up the glass again, hesitated, then plunged his fingers into the liquid and gently pulled he teeth out of the glass. They were cool and wet, like he imagined a snake would feel.
Then he picked up a washcloth, spread it on his palm, and put the teeth in the center of the washcloth. He walked carefully into the hall, where he nearly ran into Frank coming towards the bathroom.
“Jay, I asked you —” He stopped, looking at the teeth, resting like crown jewels on the washcloth. “What in the name of God are you doing?”
“He ought to have them in. It’s not right that he doesn’t.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“He doesn’t like people to see him without them in.”
“He’s dying, you stupid little jerk. Don’t you know that!”
“You’re the jerk, Frank.”
Frank made a grab for the teeth, and Jay pulled them away. The teeth slid off the washcloth and bounced when they hit the carpet, coming to rest in the center of a faded yellow daisy. They grinned up at them.
There was a sound from the bedroom; his mother’s voice, half a choke, half a cry. Jay picked up the teeth and ran to the bedroom behind Frank. His mother was bending over the bed, her face against her father’s hand. There were no more P’s coming from his father’s throat.
“Lord, receive the soul of thy servant, Frank Broderick. May perpetual light shine upon him and upon the souls of all the faithful departed. Amen.”
Jay walked out of the room, into the hall and down the stairs, past the empty rose-colored chair and out the door. The sun had set, and the perfection of the night stabbed at him. From a radio somewhere on the block Eddie Fisher sang “Lady of Spain.”
He looked down at his father’s teeth in his hands. The undertaker would need them for the wake. They shone in the starry night, accusers. He walked into the alley beside the building, kicking away the litter. He looked up at the sky and saw his father, suitcase in hand, walking towards the train station.
“I love you,” he said.
His father did not turn around.