Halfway Home (29 page)

Daniel shrugged, modest to a fault, but you could tell she'd struck the right note. At last, someone to give him some hardball counsel on where he should show up for school at the end of Easter break.

As Susan and Kathleen exited through the swing door, I was amazed how ethereal the latter looked in her habit, especially compared to the civvies I'd seen her in before, butch as a telephone lineman. I could hear them going upstairs to be private, and assumed my brother had covered his nakedness. Daniel was meanwhile regrouping in a heap his Ricky Gun paraphernalia. I turned to Mona as she unwrapped the trench coat, letting it slink on the back of a chair.

"I thought she said ex."

"Oh yes. Very ex." Mona hauled open the refrigerator door and pulled out the milk.

"Well, then?" I persisted. "Isn't there some kind of law about impersonating an officer? A hundred million years in purgatory?"

"So who are you, Miss J? The Inquisition?" She poured out half the quart in a saucepan on the stove. "Get out of those pants, will you? They're soaked. Daniel, I'm making hot chocolate."

I realized I was still wearing the black slicker, the last one of us suited up and ready to fight fire and flood. I shrugged it off and hung it back on the coatrack. Indeed, my green fatigues were horribly clammy. As I undid the buttons I half turned away, no locker room exhibitionist like Brian. Even though no one was watching: Mona crouched at the table with Daniel, letting him spill the excited tale of his encounter with the music god.

I shinnied the pants to my ankles and stepped out of them, bareass, feeling at last a throb of frostbite in my foot. I ducked behind the kitchen door, crammed the wet pants in the washer, then opened the dryer to grab a clean pair of sweats. As I drew them on, then knee socks over, I yielded to the coziness of the moment—however manufactured, however perverse in light of the
sturm und drang
just passed. Miss Mona served up the hot chocolate in big chipped mugs, producing yet another tin of shortbread from her bag.

Oh well, I thought as we supped like a trio in
Pooh,
you took the R & R where you could get it.

Afterward, Daniel excused himself to go to his room. As he gathered the CD's in his arms, Mona happened to ask if he had a machine to play them. He shook his head no, but didn't appear especially troubled by the contradiction. The raw consumer goods were comfort enough just now.

When he scooted upstairs, Mona and I drifted in to sit by the fire, as the rain threw itself in curtains at the west windows.
Sotto voce,

Mona told me all the machinations of her three-way contact with Gray and Kathleen. It was Gray apparently who pushed the nun disguise, having heard the intractable squalling in the night from Cora's room. Kathleen, it turned out, had jumped at the chance, a bit of a drag queen herself.

I lay with my head in Mona's lap, letting her stroke my hair, delighted to think what a crackerjack team we all made. The waiting drew out to an hour, Kathleen upstairs with Susan and Brian, but we didn't mind. Even as I dozed I waxed sentimental, Mona patting me like a big sister. There were never enough times like this. Mostly we ran in and out of the storm, a hasty kiss in passing. But this was all I ever wanted, a lover in my pocket and a best buddy like Mona, so attuned she could finish my sentences for me. A man could get to be very greedy, shooting the dice for time to savor it all.

When Kathleen came down I sat up, the two of us blinking at her expectantly, but not breathing a word. We let her stroll to the hearth and warm her hands, looking contemplatively into the flames. I was so used to her as a nun now, I could hardly recall the dyke in flannel. As she turned to us her eyes swept admiringly over the fireplace stones, the tiger's-eye paneling, the wrought-iron sconces. Then she looked at us with a deep shrug. "It's up to the two of them now."

"Did you get them talking?" Mona asked.

Sister tilted her veiled head and held up her finger and thumb a half inch apart. "A little," she said wryly. "I left them praying. They're good Catholics."

But here I couldn't tell if she was being ironic or not. I blurted out: "Are you?"

She laughed lightly, a teacher the student thinks he has stumped. "No, dear. I thought I made myself abundantly clear. I believe in Miss Jesus."

"What about God?" And why did I sound so earnest?

"Oh." She rolled her eyes and frowned, as if this was more than she signed on for. "I let God take care of the universe," she said, waving a vague hand at the rain outside, but more dismissive than anything. She couldn't be bothered with the universe. "Me, I stick to taking care of battered women. God has not dropped by lately, unless I was out for coffee." In that moment, the depth of her own estrangement from the church seemed bottomless.

Yet her ebullient good humor remained somehow intact. "However," she declared vigorously, holding up a triumphant forefinger, "I think I can get her into a group in Minneapolis. Run by some Catholic Workers. Pretty radical types if you're coming from horsey Connecticut, but I think she can handle the stretch."

"Wait," I protested, scrambling to keep up, "isn't there some way to keep them all together?"

She shrugged again: up to them. But I saw where her sympathies leaned, to let them split, if only because her own skills lay in the healing of women alone. Still, she pushed no agenda, separatist or otherwise. She was simply here among us, nursing the feelings along, without any judgment call. That was perhaps the least Catholic thing about her—no moral high ground.

"He talked about you and your father," she said, her voice quickening now in my defense. Correction: she had no problem judging the violence in men. "Sounds pretty awful."

I neither spoke nor nodded, nothing being required. As Mona laid a quiet hand between my shoulders, I looked into the fire, feeling a small triumph of vindication, just having somebody else know. It also gave me secret pleasure that my brother had been teller of the tale. I had a moment's fix on my father's face, puffed and surly, that endless snarl of racist poison, his all-consuming hatred of everything not Irish working-class. Did I hate him anymore? It didn't compute. I'd sowed his grave so long with salt, a sort of perpetual curse that went on without me, like the Masses of Remembrance my mother used to pay up for thousands of years, mail order from the Trappists.

"I'd better go see Daniel," said Kathleen, "before he thinks I forgot him. I swear, I feel like a waitress in this outfit." She pulled at the hips of the shapeless blue dress. "When they went polyester, that was the last straw."

"He keeps it all buried," I said.

"They all do," she replied automatically. "But I'll tell you one good thing. I used to teach second and third grade. So I know exactly where he is in long division." Actually rubbing her hands together, as if she was getting the chalk off. She tossed her head with spirit, balking at the veil, and moved to the stairs again.

"Kathleen—thank you—"

"Oh, don't even try," she retorted, striking a languid pose across the banister, gazing heavenward. "It is my mission, after all. And besides—" She grinned down at me slyly. "I've already got it figured how you return the favor. A small command performance for my girls."

"It'll be easy," said Mona, the pat on my shoulder suddenly getting awfully chummy.

"My drop-in group," explained Kathleen, "except I call it the dropped-on. I'm always trying to teach them how to be angry. You're the perfect thing."

With that she floated off to her next consultation, knowing she had me trapped, tit for tat. Mona sat there like a mouse, figuring I might blow a piston. But I couldn't have been more equanimous, trusting Sister's instincts. I already had the gig figured as a sort of USO show, like Mona's beloved Miss Dietrich performing for the combat troops. "We'll do it some Monday night," I said, because AGORA was dark Mondays.

Mona nodded, in a slight daze to find me so amenable. "You really
are
in love," she remarked, as if I'd had a conversion.

But I was somewhere else. "Just when you guys arrived, Brian was standing there naked."

"Please—don't think we didn't get a good look."

"I realized something today. I spent fifteen years trying to find that exact body and drag it into my bed." I happened to be looking at the jigsaw
David,
spread out before us on the coffee table, but the full-blown Brian flooded my mind, more real than the men I groped to recall. "Teddy Burr, for one. Those same big shoulders and flame-red hair. It didn't even matter that we lived on different planets. He did every drug he could get his hands on, and screamed at me and had tantrums. But for a little while there, it was like fucking Brian."

I shook my head in wonder, touched by a finger of self-disgust like ice along my spine. "Welcome to my dysfunction."

Mona laughed ruefully. "But he is beautiful," she insisted. "Who could blame you for mixing
that
up with love? Hey listen, Daphne's my cousin Amy, right down to the nipples."

I sighed. "It takes so long."

Mona sighed even bigger. It sounded like a contest. "At least you found someone."

"Perilously close to the finish line."

She didn't try to answer. We stayed curled up for another long time, waiting to see who would come down next. When the footfalls came, I recognized Brian's step. Without a signal Mona was up and hurrying toward the kitchen, as if she had something burning in the oven. As I turned to smile at my brother I was surprised to see the windows already dusky, throwing back the firelight. The days just flew and vanished, I thought, with an ache that wanted to hold them still, all my double family, letting nobody leave. Brian came to stand behind the sofa, wearing a sweater from Cora's closet, something old of Gray's. I could smell the camphor. I couldn't read his face.

After a moment of fire watching, he said, "Thanks for calling Sister Kathleen. We're so far from..."He left it unfinished, but I could see the sturdy Gothic spire, the monsignor in his picture hat, the long slope of graves behind Saint Augustine's, the Fordham brothers cheering. God, in a word.

"She sees a lot of families," I observed, not wanting to blow Kathleen's cover, unsure how much she'd revealed.

"They'll leave Monday for Minneapolis," Brian announced calmly, and I felt a stab of failure sharper than anything I could remember. Not Kathleen's fault, though I'd hoped she'd turn it around; and surely not mine. But there was a flaw we shared as a family, all the way back to my dad's old man in the wheelchair, drooling like a bulldog—a lack of faith that anything would ever come out right. The only hope, the only unqualified triumph, was Brian on the ballfield. And that was packed in mothballs long ago, jittery and flickering as the old eight-millimeter strips of film, recording shutouts and touchdowns. Otherwise we were a clan of losers.

"Will she let you see him?"

"Sure, but I won't." His voice was tough as a staff sergeant's. "Not for a couple years anyway. I want them to get settled up there like I never existed. Or else they're always gonna be running from my name." All thought through, completely unemotional. I could even tell his strength was coming from
acting
strong. "Fuck, if I survive two years out there," he said, gesturing with a vague hand at the storm outside, where he'd howled like Lear. "Hey, who knows? Maybe we'll live happily ever after."

For the first time I picked up the frisson of excitement as he contemplated being on his own,
out there.
Nothing could convince him he wasn't a marked man. Yet there was a perverse relish about the cat-and-mouse, dodging the hit squad he'd unleashed, dispatched by the bad characters he'd been in bed with. Who knew, maybe he was right. In my mind he was already running, hand to mouth and off on the next train. But what struck me just now was how much he wanted to earn his family back. Somehow, being a wandering nobody was a sort of quest to come home.

"Whatever I can do," I offered, feeling less than useless. "I'm in love with your kid. He's the best."

"I'm sure you know the feeling's mutual."

Well, yes. "Will you leave right after they do?"

"Couple days."

He was standing directly behind me now, one hand resting lightly on the back of the sofa. As I lolled my head to the side his hand was magnified, grizzled with red hair and coursed by rippling veins, massive as the warrior on the table before me. I leaned toward him and touched his wrist with my forehead, rubbing against him gently. For a moment he didn't move, accepting the contact shyly. Then, returning the intimacy, he shifted his hand and rested it lightly on my head, sheltering me.

I was overcome with feeling, to think we had tamed together the brother who used to hurt me so indifferently. I had no illusion about what lay ahead. We both still had miles to go, out there in remorseless weather—but no longer reeling under one another's baggage. Brian and I were home free.

"We should talk about us some time," he said, "before I go."

"You mean before I go," I retorted, teasing him with my demise, almost playful.

"You know what I used to think? That I made you gay. Like it was all my fault." He spilled out a soft self-mocking laugh, and his fingers rustled my hair. "Like I tempted you."

I would have spoken. I would have laughed with him. But something in me had suddenly drifted, and I was blank. And yet not quite the same as before, since I'd never noticed these episodes till they were over—two minutes lost, five at the most. This time the blank was in my body and not my head. I was still completely present, hanging on my brother's words, nestled in his hand, but my nerves were shut off and my limbs like driftwood. I lay in a slump against the back cushions, frozen.

At first I didn't even panic. More than anything I was embarrassed that I had no words to answer Brian. Yet he didn't seem in the least troubled by my silence. After all, as he'd just finished saying, we could talk about us anytime. I could feel him twirl a lock of my hair between finger and thumb, no inhibitions. Then he turned away, leaving me to doze by the fire.