THEO
IMOGENE’S SIGN glowed OPEN. I entered and said, “Afternoon.”
Pearl nodded from behind the deli counter where she was chopping clams and onions for the Friday chowder. Mrs. B sat at a table and stared out the window, unresponsive.
“Where’s Immie?” I asked.
“She still upstairs,” Pearl snapped, as she scraped the fishy-smelling shells into the trash.
“Thanks.”
I headed up to Imogene’s apartment.
A buttery sunlight sifted into the dining room dusting everything with the smoky haze of a day ready to dissolve into night. Imogene, who sat at the table in silence, was so lost in thought she hadn’t heard me clamber up the staircase. Her framed wedding photo no longer hung on the wall. Instead, Mrs. B’s oil painting of a lone beachcomber on the sandy shoreline was placed prominently in the center, next to the window. In the dusky hues of the room, with her petite silhouette framed by the full-length burgundy drapes, Imogene, too, looked like a painting. There was something haunting about the way she smoked her cigarette—how it completely transformed her. She drank her coffee with one hand and held the cigarette with the other, carefully balancing her inherent baseness—making it look more like a virtue than a vice.
“Immie,” I said. “Whatcha thinkin’?”
“Theo,” she said blowing smoke, then dousing the cigarette in the bubble glass ashtray.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Just needed a break,” she said in a near whisper, still gazing at the ocean.
The tide was receding, grey-black clouds moving in. I studied her face. There was a dimension to her that never existed before. Her eyes once glimmered with a contagious joy and an easily sparked temper. But when I returned from Korea, that joy was gone. Now her eyes were like a bottomless ocean. After losing the baby and worrying whether I was dead or alive, somewhere between sorrow and fear, her eyes lost that sparkle.
Sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of her sitting alone like that, with her coffee and cigarette; it would send a shiver down my spine, frighten me that there was a hole punched in my sister’s soul that I’d never begin to understand.
“Feels like a storm,” she said tucking her cigarettes back in the baggy pocket on her dress. She stood, took a bobby pin from the same pocket, opened it with her teeth, and pinned back a curl of ginger hair. Then she glanced back out the window. “You know, just cold to my bones.” She shivered and pushed through the swinging kitchen door. “And I’m tired. It’s been busy today. How ’bout some tea?”
“Sure . . . tea,” I said. “What were you thinking about?”
“Forgiveness,” she said. “What it means . . . how it feels or if and when I’ve actually done it. How do you know if you’ve forgiven?”
“Ah, forgiveness,” I said. “That’s a tough nut to crack.” I followed her into the kitchen. “What I can tell you is that when you withhold forgiveness, you tether yourself forever to that specific pain. So, cut that cord. Forgive and let go.”
“So when do you know if you’re successful?”
I paused too long.
“You don’t know, do you, Father?”
“Just when I thought I was soundin’ so priestly and all,” I said with a half-laugh. “Well, I know that if you find you’re not thinkin’ about him, or hurtin’ over what happened, and you’ve moved on with your life, then that may be the beginning of letting go. I know that much.”
I noticed Bud’s quenched cigar from last night in the ashtray on the counter.
“Him?” she said. “And you did sound a bit priestly there for a minute.”
“Well, it’s a start,” I said, feeling the tin soldier in my pocket. “Can you forgive Thomas?”
The kettle whistled.
“Can we change the subject?” she asked.
“Okay . . . for now. Pearl’s a little grumpy.”
“She’s been in a mood since Tula asked if the kids had daddies where she came from,” she said, settling the bee-hive honey jar in front of me. “She’ll be fine.” She stared out the window again. “Definitely a storm. Feel it deep in my bones.”
“Well,” I said, “I think you’re right about that puppy.”
“But she said—”
“I talked to Solomon; he thinks a dog is a good idea. He’ll work on it.”
“So is this a plan?” she asked. “Replace my child with another, my husband with a dog?”
“Darn,” I said, “you’ve busted us. Been planning this for a long time now.”
***
I always thought Imogene took to Thomas because he was like Da; nothing nice to say and always brooding. She tried to save Da, but he was drowning too fast. There was no saving, no forgetting, no forgiving for any of us, not then.
As Da slipped helplessly into his grief—Irish whiskey blurring his view of the world—he clung to the past, while Mamaí was forced to forge our future alone. She resented his taking the luxury to grieve as if it was his grief alone. “It is my grief, too!” she shouted more times than one could count. After all, she’d remind him, “It was your fault!” Da crumbled under the weight of those four words, under the weight of the day that cracked our family in two and scattered us to another continent. It was too heavy a burden. Too much to forgive.
Her eyes bore the resentment, the unspoken, constant thought that it should have been Da who those Mc Murtry thugs beat to death. And it should have been Da who took revenge, not her ten-year-old son. No marriage, no two people could ever survive such a thing. Instead, Da died a slow, painful death—guilt ate him alive.
She never forgave him but also never left his side. Though Kiernan was then dust, and I skin and bone, to Mamaí I existed only as his shadow. She never saw me clearly again, and she never forgave Da, like she never forgave all of Ireland for the sins against her beloved sons. Forgiveness is not a family trait.
Mamaí endured her losses, her marriage, and other betrayals in the way a woman confronts a battlefield—rosy-cheeked, fists held high, and ready to fight to the death to protect her own. But Imogene, she was young, so she believed a lie. Like the lie I believed about needing to become a priest, she believed what most children of alcoholics believed—that she didn’t deserve to be loved. When her baby died I think it confirmed that lie inside her; in that bottomless ocean, that lie was set in stone.
Mamaí often had that same stony look; both had lost a child, creating an empty space in them that, to me, would forever be as mysterious as forgiveness and as unreachable as Jupiter.
Would Imogene forgive Thomas for the many crimes he didn’t commit? Forgive him for simply not being the man she expected him to be? Like Mamaí with Da, who fell so short in his husbandhood that to her, his crimes were against all humanity.
Forgiveness . . . a tough nut to crack. Could Andréa ever forgive me for believing lies when she knew the truth? And if she could, what then?