THE NEXT DAY, as we walk up the steps to the porch, we can hear that Aunt Kitty’s house is full of people. On the door is a cardboard cutout of the Horn of Plenty. My father walks over to the picture window, raps on it, and waves to someone inside. The front door opens, and my twin cousins, Ann Marie and Mary Anne, come out shrieking “Dickie!” and hug me and kiss my cheeks. Veronica is holding onto my leg, and Robert is looking embarrassed. My brother Joe and my father collect their hugs.
“And you must be Veronica,” says Ann Marie. She squats, and her knees crack. “Agh!” she says. “I’m getting old!”
“Hah! Like hell you are,” says Mary Anne. Joe laughs.
“Now let me see. How old are you?” Ann Marie asks Veronica, who stiffens and hides her face behind my leg. “Oh. You don’t know how old you are? So how about you? How old are you now, Robert?”
“Seven,” he says, looking down. My father puts a hand on his shoulder.
“My lord, you got so big!” says Mary Anne. “I’ll bet you’re gonna be a football player, huh?”
“My dad won’t let me.”
“Oh, he won’t, eh? Well, we’ll just have to work on him a little, won’t we?” She winks at him and twists a knuckle into my ribs.
“Agh! Give me a hand here,” says Ann Marie. She grabs my arm to pull herself up.
“I’m three,” says Veronica, but nobody else hears her, because my aunt is standing in the doorway now, and from behind us my brother shouts, “Uh-oh. Here she is, the Queen Bee!”
My father makes a big fuss looking in the window. “What the hell,” he says. “Just put some turkey in a paper bag for me to take home.”
“What?” Aunt Kitty asks.
“There ain’t no place to sit in there. You couldn’t get another person in there with a crowbar.”
“Go on,” she says, stepping aside and laughing, “You get your big fat fanny in there and quit your damn complaining.”
Robert and Joe are both laughing. Veronica is peering around my leg now, curious. My cousins flank my father and nudge him toward the door. Aunt Kitty takes my face in both her hands and gives me a kiss beside the mouth. She reaches down and with her right arm encircles Robert and pulls him to her for a hug.
“I’m three,” Veronica says.
“You are? Well you are really something, I tell you, really something.” Suddenly she’s looking around; she checks behind her and says, “Where’s Kathi?”
Everyone stops. I assumed my father had told her Kathi wasn’t coming. I try to catch his eye but he wants nothing to do with this. I repeat that she’s gotten behind in her work and needs these few days to catch up.
“Is everything all right?” But before I can answer she decides that we can’t talk in front of the children. “No, never mind,” she says, her finger at her lips. “We’ll talk about it later.”
“We’re fine. Really.”
“Let’s go! Let’s go!” my brother booms, clapping his belly. “Are we gonna eat or what?”
I pick up Veronica, and she presses her face into my collarbone as we crowd through the doorway into the teeming house.
I UNDERSTOOD MY aunt’s question, what she meant by “everything” and “all right,” and my response meant, “Yes, we’re still together, and we plan to stay together.” If she had asked if we were happy, I would not have known how to answer. It was true that Kathi had work to do over the holiday. It was also true that she needed some time alone, some peace; mainly, I think, she needed a rest from me.
“And she stayed with you through all of it, the booze and everything?” my father had asked. What a colossal abridgement that word “everything” represents to me now. Maybe it would have been easier for us if I had simply disappeared for the worst couple of years; instead, I was all too present, not only an emotional invalid in need of patience and care, but an unstable, explosive, accusatory, “red-faced anger-man” who saw rejection in every refusal and betrayal in every misunderstanding. I almost drove her away. Now we were both healing, glad to have survived, but exhausted.
Kathi had a dream once that we were walking through a varied and idyllic landscape, arms around each other, looking for somewhere to make love, and each time we found a place and lay down, a foul and menacing goat was suddenly there. It would snort and grunt and charge us, and we would flee, holding onto each other fearfully, searching again for shelter.
THE LIVING ROOM is full of people and the din of many conversations. Even when it’s empty, this house seems crowded: every available space contains a figurine, a knick-knack, a doll, a china bell, a colored-glass medicine bottle. Or a plant: geraniums, chrysanthemums, African violets, ivy, spider plants, and ferns. Aunt Kitty is wading into the crush of bodies, making room for us in her wake. “Come on, make way, you hooligans. You can’t eat if the cook can’t make it to the kitchen!”
“Mommom? Mommom?” She stops and bends at the waist to listen to a cousin’s child. “Can I please have a piece of candy?”
“No, not now. You’ll spoil your supper. Give me your hand. We’ll find you something.” She turns to me. “What about your kids? Are they hungry?” Veronica turns in my arms and reaches for her. Surprised and pleased, she takes her from me. “Oh, you want to come with old Mommom, do you? What about you there, Robert? Come on in the kitchen if you’re hungry.”
“Hey, Dick!”
I turn, but it’s my father who’s being addressed. I find myself standing with my cousins’ husbands, in a semicircle in front of the television. They’re watching football games. Henry, my cousin Margaret’s husband, has the remote control in his hand, and he’s switching back and forth. Bobby, my cousin Mary Anne’s husband, greets me with a pat on the shoulder. “You look like a guy who could use a beer or something!”
“Coke. But actually, I’m fine.”
“So when did you get here?”
“Last night.”
“Hmmmm. Lotta traffic?”
“Murder.”
“Hmmmm. How long did it take you?”
“Let’s see. Nine. A little over nine hours.”
“Get out. Nine hours?”
“Yeah.”
“Now wait. It couldn’t take you that long. What time did you leave?”
“Excuse me. Coming through.” I step back against one of the tables that have been set end to end the whole length of the room, and Francie walks between us.
“Dick, you know Francie, don’t you?”
“Oh, my lord!” she says. “Just let me take these pies into the kitchen, and I’ll be back.”
I can see my brother Joe, who is somewhere across the room, reflected in a mirrored rack of blown-glass figurines.
“Hey, Henry! Dickie’s trying to tell me it took him nine hours to get down here from Boston!”
Henry calls back, “Glad you made it!” There’s a roar from the fans on the television.
The doorbell rings. More people are pressing into the room. I don’t know them, but it turns out they are my cousin Elizabeth’s grown sons and daughters and their girlfriends and boyfriends. Veronica is tugging at my pants, and I bend to her.
“I got an apple!” she says.
Soon we’re seated on both sides of the long continuous table that extends from just inside the front door through the living room and well into the middle room. My father is seated at the head and my aunt’s chair is at the foot, nearest the kitchen, where the children have their own table. One of the older girls has been persuaded to preside there.
It’s quiet at the table. I figure someone is going to say grace. Aunt Kitty walks in from the kitchen.
“Well, what are you waiting for?”
“We’re waiting for you!”
“No, no! Don’t wait for me! I’m still fussing in the kitchen. Eat!”
Then everyone’s talking again and dishes are moving from hand to hand, back and forth across the table, white meat, dark meat, squash, potatoes baked and mashed, cranberry sauce, white bread and wheat bread, carrots, candied yams, corn, stuffing, butter, gravy, green beans, lima beans, and ham for those who don’t like turkey.
“A ham!” my father says. “Hey, Kitty, what the hell,” he calls out to her. “You’re getting your holidays all mixed up! What’s for dessert, chocolate bunnies?”
“You should taste that, Uncle Richard,” says my cousin Margaret. “That’s Aunt Dolly’s recipe.”
“Well pass it down here then!”
“I tried to make that cake that everybody always liked so much, that chocolate cake of hers? But it never comes out right. I don’t know. I watched her make it once when I was still a girl. She always said I could have the recipe, but every time I reminded her—for years!—she’d say, ‘Oh, yeah, I keep meaning to send you that,’ or ‘I keep meaning to give that to your mother for you,’ but she never did.”
“Well, I’ll see if I can find it for you.”
“And see if you can find the recipe for those baked beans of hers, for me,” says Mary Anne.
“Those beans!” says Ann Marie. “Do you remember how Daddy loved Aunt Dolly’s beans? Good lord!”
“Yeah, but you didn’t want to be around a half-hour later. Whew!” said Margaret.
“I’ll bet they’re up there in heaven right now,” says Henry, “Dolly and Forrest. She’s cooking her baked beans, and he’s got a plate of them, washing them down with a bottle of beer.”
“No. I don’t think they’d let Forrest eat none of them there beans in heaven, not if they know what’s good for them,” Aunt Kitty says. “A piece of Dolly’s chocolate cake, maybe, but not no beans. They’d have everybody begging to go to the other place!”
We all laugh together, and when we stop, it’s quiet. I can hear the children in the kitchen. We give each other puzzled looks. It’s as if someone’s kicked the plug from an outlet.
“What the Sam Hill?” says Aunt Kitty.
“Pass the stuffing down here.”
“Who wants mashed potatoes?”
“Is there any dark meat left?”
“I’m going to the kitchen. Anybody want something?”
“No. You sit down. Let me.”
One of the children comes into the room. “Mommom?” he says. “Is it time for candy?”
“Are all of you finished your supper?”
“I think so.”
“Oh, you think so. Well, you go back and sit down now. Mommom will be right there.”
He runs back into the kitchen, and there’s some arguing at the children’s table.
“You see?” my father says. “You thought I was kidding. She thinks it’s Easter! She’s gonna give them jelly beans and chocolate bunnies. I don’t know, Kitty. I think you must be getting old. You got your holidays mixed up.”
“Oh, shush up.” She goes to him and slaps him playfully on the shoulder. Now everyone’s looking at them. She pinches his cheek, and he blushes and smiles as she says, “My baby brother. Giving his big sister such a hard time!”
IN THAT INSTANT I knew that she was the one who had shamed him into taking down his wedding pictures and the pictures of my brothers; the one who had said, “It looks like a god-damned mortuary in here.” I was reminded once again that for all her Hummels and porcelain kittens and tinkly china bells, she is anything but a sentimentalist. I remembered my uncle Forrest.
I was fourteen or fifteen when he died. My memories of him are earlier than that. I remember making ice cream in a wooden churn with a red handle that he allowed me to turn but that I couldn’t, hard as I tried, without his hand on top of mine. I remember begging him to take me fishing, and gathering worms for him. I remember his housepainter’s brown leather shoes with wedding cake rosettes of plaster and paint all over them. And Bob and I rolling around in the back of his truck on tarps that smelled of paint and linseed oil. And turning the pages of giant books, bigger than either of us, books too heavy to lift, filled with pictures of flowers and birds and colorful patterns that people could choose from to cover their walls.
I remember the bluefish in a row on newspaper in the yard, the overpowering smell of them. Aunt Kitty was angry at “them there damn smelly fish guts.” Bob and I stood at a little distance as Uncle Forrest inserted the point of a bowie knife in each fish and slit it up the belly. Some of them spilled open, something yellow falling out. “Roe,” said Uncle Forrest. “Some people even eat this shit.”
“You watch your language around them there boys!”
When he died, I was given his gear, since none of his five daughters fished. There were lots of old English books on trout and salmon fishing, with black-and-white photographs of men in knickers and tweed caps with wicker creels, smoking pipes and fishing with impossibly long cane rods. The spellings were odd. Fish-hooks were called angles. It was quaint and inviting and useless. To my knowledge, Uncle Forrest had never traveled abroad. The books seemed to be a kind of Wind in the Willows for grown-ups.
“I remember when he went in the hospital for the operation,” my father once told me. “Cancer of the stomach. The operation was at noon, and by twelve-thirty he was in the Recovery Room. I remember Kitty was happy as a little kid. She’s jumping up and down, saying things like ‘It must not have been so bad! They must have nipped it in the bud!’ and, Jesus, I didn’t want to bust her bubble, but it wasn’t hard to figure out. They opened him up and saw there wasn’t nothing they could do. So I went with her to the doctor’s office. Soon as we go in, she throws herself on the poor guy. ‘Thank you, doctor! Thank you! Thank you!’ I’ll never forget the look he gave me, over her shoulder. ‘Mrs. Christman, please sit down,’ he says, and she still doesn’t get it. She’s sitting up straight on the edge of her chair. Like I said, she’s acting like a little kid, all excited, like she’s next in line to get picked for something. And when he tells her what’s what, she just stiffens right up, her mouth shut tight and trembling, no more tears, and she won’t even let me touch her. But there’s this moaning coming from her, even with her mouth shut tight. It’s coming right from her chest, the damndest thing, right from her heart, I guess.
“So she took him home and took care of him, with a house full of kids, and Forrest upstairs, screaming sometimes for hours, screaming and shitting blood and holy Jesus what a mess. And I never saw her feeling sorry for herself. Never.
“When he died, she went out and got a job, boom, just like that. And she brought up her girls. And she still don’t have no rest in her ass. She’s always got to be visiting this one and that, or she’s at bingo, or baby-sitting for one of her daughters. The woman will live to be a hundred.”
DESSERT IS PUMPKIN, squash, cherry, lemon meringue, or mincemeat pie, or ice cream, or the chocolate cake my cousin Margaret has made without my mother’s recipe.
Robert comes in from the kitchen and stands next to me, leaning on my shoulder.
“So, Robert,” says John, Ann Marie’s husband, “I’ll bet you’re a football player.”
“No. My dad’s afraid I’ll get hurt.”
“Now you played football, didn’t you?” John says to me. “Did you play after high school? When you went away to college?”
“No. I guess I just got interested in other things.”
“In other things!” Aunt Kitty says. “Get the hell out. You were interested in the same thing you always was—the girls. Don’t let your daddy kid you, Robert; he was busy chasing the girls. Ain’t that right, Dickie? Tell the truth now.”
“If Robert stays as handsome as he is now, he won’t have to worry,” says Mary Anne. “The girls will all be chasing him.”
Robert and I look at each other. Both of us are blushing. I give him a squeeze, and he shrugs and goes back to the kitchen.
“Willy never liked the mincemeat that you get around here,” says Francie. “When it was time for me to bake, he’d get in the truck and drive all the way to Quakertown to get the kind he liked.”
Poor Francie: nobody picks up her cue, so there’s no commemoration, only Henry, leaning back in his chair, saying, “God, I couldn’t eat another bite.” The men are patting their stomachs. The women are starting to clear the table. And the door to wherever the dead are is shut.