Tell Me One Thing (2 page)

It’s warmer than it has a right to be this time of year. The air is lovely and expectant before the grand rush of spring. The breeze
only a whisper through the leafless trees, certainly not strong enough to cool the air, and the grandchildren, scattered around the other sides of the open grave, are already shedding sweaters and jackets.

Drew clears his throat and Jamie looks over quickly to see that Drew is trying hard not to cry. Jamie can’t believe it, after all the grief the old man gave his brother.

When do you stop loving a parent?
Jamie wonders. How much can a child take before that stubborn flame of necessary love sputters and dies? Moira would know the answer to that, he thinks, because she’s busy whispering to her teenage son, Sean, and doesn’t seem to take much notice of the dark brown casket lying just below her feet.

What happens to you
, his train of thought goes,
if you never let that feeling in?
He can’t remember a time he ever felt anything but fear toward his father. Fear and a desire to get away from him. Even on those nights when Hugh had had just enough to drink so that he was expansive and not so much to drink that he was dangerous, even then Jamie kept his distance. He knew the line could be crossed with lightning speed, well before anyone else could figure out where it was, and that his father would reach out and grab him, force him to stand in front of his blustery, perspiring face as he shook him and yelled accusations that made no sense to a seven-year-old.

What did it matter that the next morning while his father was drinking his coffee and reading the sports section that he would reach over and ruffle Jamie’s hair with some sort of all-purpose, one-size-fits-all endearment? “There’s my boy” was about as far as Hugh Sr. would go, and even at seven Jamie was sure his father didn’t know which son he was talking to, head in the paper, his attention on the box scores from the day before.

And then, as the boys grew and their transgressions progressed
into teenage rebellion, their father’s punishments escalated accordingly. Hugh Sr. thought nothing of beating his sons until his arm or the belt gave out, or kicking them down the stairs, or even, one time when Jamie was fourteen, chasing him around the house with a butcher knife grabbed from the kitchen counter in a rage.

“He’d had too much to drink” was his mother’s attempt at an explanation the next morning. “You know how he gets.”

“I know and so do you,” Jamie’s voice rising in pitch. “So why do you put up with it?”

“Ahhh, Jamie, you wouldn’t understand” was his mother’s only answer.

“Would you have let him kill me?” burst out of him before he could think about it. “That’s what he was yelling—that it was my time to die!”

“You’re making too much of it.” Carrie turned away, packing lunch boxes in the small kitchen.

“He had a knife!” Jamie fairly screamed.

“Did he not apologize this morning?”

“What difference does that make?! He’ll only do it again.”

And then Marianne came into the kitchen with her hairbrush and two ribbons for Carrie to make her braids and their mother turned gratefully away from Jamie’s accusations, stated and implied.
Where were you
, he wanted to ask,
why didn’t you protect me?
But he didn’t, because he understood finally, clear as day, that nothing was going to change in his parents’ house. He shut up about it and began to plot his escape. He set his sights on college as his savior, a goal so far from his father’s world that it felt safe.

Hugh Jr. wasn’t interested in college at all. To no one’s surprise, he joined his father in the small plumbing business the old man had been running for more than twenty years. That way their ongoing battles could continue. Now they argued about the
quality of copper piping or the need for low-flow toilets instead of about grades or curfew, but it didn’t matter—the battles were what they wanted, the particulars were as changeable as the weather.

Kevin won an athletic scholarship to Holy Cross but never managed to distinguish himself in any sport once he was there. Jamie wasn’t surprised when he got a coaching job at St. Sebastian Prep, not twenty minutes from the house they all grew up in.

Drew never managed to settle himself into any work. He took over the third-floor dormitory where all four boys were once housed, a ghost now, who came and went without explanation. Carrie shrugged her shoulders when one or another of the children would ask about Drew. “He’s finding himself,” she’d say and change the subject.

Jamie knew from the night of the kitchen knife attack that he was putting as much distance between himself and his father as he could. He applied only to colleges on the West Coast, those in Oregon, Washington, and California. When he chose San Diego State, where he reasoned the weather would be warm and the academic demands would be manageable, his father flatly refused to give him a dime, not for a school in California that wasn’t even a Catholic college. That was his explanation, but Jamie suspected he just didn’t want to spend any money on him.

Jamie went anyway. His first semester was paid for by money carefully saved from working summers all through high school, and still he had to work two jobs to make it through. Each semester after that was touch and go. Sometimes he managed the tuition, sometimes he had to drop out and work for a while to be able to reenroll. It took him longer than most to get his degree, but he accomplished it as well as another year of graduate work, which gave him his teaching credential. Now he taught English to middle schoolers at a charter school in San Diego and managed to
never go home to visit. His father’s funeral was the exception. He thought about skipping it, had talked to Moira about the fallout if he did, but allowed himself to be persuaded. “You need to do this for her,” she had said, “not for the old bastard. I can’t imagine how she’d get through it without you there.” And Jamie didn’t argue. He knew he had to go.

AT THE BRICK HOUSE ON CROSSLEY LANE
where they all grew up, cars start arriving, one after another of his brothers and sisters and their families. Everyone parks on the street out of habit. It was a pet peeve of their father’s—finding somebody’s car in the driveway when he wanted to put his car into or take it out of the garage. So the edict—anyone parking in the driveway would be in serious trouble. What that trouble might be was never spelled out, but it didn’t matter—the driveway remained bare.

As Jamie turns left onto Crossley Lane after his father’s burial, he heads straight for the empty driveway and parks his rental car halfway up, just by the kitchen door.

Already the house is filling up with noise and far too many people. There is Moira, talking nonstop, bossy as always, ushering her five children into the house with an admonition here and there to watch their manners, her husband, Robbie, bringing up the rear, his preferred place.

Then Hugh Jr.’s family spills out of their SUV parked at the curb. Tina, his long-suffering wife, having assessed her husband’s condition, is at the wheel. Hugh stumbles out of the passenger’s side as their four adult children make their desultory way up the front path, doing their best to ignore their embarrassing father.

Kevin and Loretta are already inside. Jamie can hear her chirpy voice exclaiming how beautiful the service was, how the words of Father Malachi lifted her soul, and the day, did you ever see a
more beautiful April day?!
God
, Jamie thinks,
doesn’t she ever get tired of being so relentlessly upbeat?
Maybe that’s why Kevin has mastered his consistently negative take on almost everything—to have some breathing room of his own. They have three children, all boys, all athletes, one even in the minor league system of some major league baseball team. He’s the only one Kevin talks about, worrying constantly that Mark might suffer a career-ending injury and then what will he do?

Kate arrives with her two equally bored, but well-dressed, children. When Kate married up and moved to Atlanta, she shed her working-class identity as fast as she could say “I do.” Her husband refused to fly into Buffalo for the funeral. “Buffalo?” he said. “Why would I want to go to Buffalo?” And Kate was relieved. She didn’t want to spend the whole three days making excuses for the ways of her family.

Through the leaded glass windows of the dining room, Jamie can see Marianne bent over the heavy wooden table that served as the dinnertime battleground every night of their lives. She holds her youngest in one arm and rearranges platters with the other.
She’s the only one who married smart
, Jamie thinks. Everyone loves her husband, Kent, unassuming but solid, generous and slyly funny. They have a set of twins and two younger children, all under six.

As Jamie enters the crowded kitchen, he stands for a minute and takes stock of his extended family. Five married, but only one married well. Three single—Drew, Ellen, and himself.
Is that about average for a large family
, he wonders,
one happy marriage out of eight?
Are most members of large families victims of the same kind of train wreck that he now understands his family to have been? It’s possible that many families, large or small, are train wrecks, but he doesn’t know. Never close to forming a family of his own, never attaching himself as a surrogate member to
any other family, he has had little to compare the O’Connors to. He knows only what he felt growing up in this cramped, chaotic house they all congregate in now. And he knows only because he has been away, because the perspective of the West Coast has let him see his early years with fresh eyes.

He believes he sees more than his brothers and sisters, but he doesn’t know what to do with this sight. Like everything else, he files it away and presents to the world a slightly bland facade, polite but not very approachable, competent but never impressive. It’s almost as if he used up all his intensity growing up and now lives in the narrow band of emotions that’s left over.

He can’t say the same for the rest of his siblings. Already, Hugh Jr.’s voice carries over the scores of others packed in the small kitchen, loud and insistent and more than a little drunk.

“You’re not listening to me!” he yells at Moira, who yells right back at him.

“Because you’re drunk and you’re not making any sense!”

“Who the hell are you to criticize me?!” Hugh yells before Tina is at his side, talking softly to him, trying to ease him out of the kitchen, but he’s having none of it.

“You can barely stand up—I thought you were going to topple into the open grave when you hefted that shovel! That’s what you wanted, isn’t it, locked in with Dad for all eternity?!”

“Shut up!” is yelled even louder than Moira’s elevated voice. This is from Drew, who has been leaning against the kitchen counter, downing beer after beer. “Don’t talk about Dad like that!”

“Why not?” And this is from Kate, who has dropped her bored and superior attitude and descended into the maddening, loud muddle that is the O’Connor clan arguing. Apparently, the urge to participate is irresistible. “You think he’s so powerful he can hear us from the grave?! You do, don’t you? You’ve never seen him for the small man he really was!”

“Who told you to come home?!” Drew screams at her as Jamie eases himself out of the hot and claustrophobic space and into the dining room.

Unbothered by the opera that’s taking place in the kitchen, the grandchildren are helping themselves to food—ham slices and a variety of precut cheeses, potato salad, a roast turkey that one of his sisters brought, probably Moira.

“The old man deserves some respect, this day of all days!” Jamie can hear Drew scream above the din and the answering hawking laugh from Moira.

And then Ellen is at his elbow. “Mom’s lying down. She asked for you,” she says quietly.

“Okay.” But he stops her before she can slip away, a hand on her brittle arm. Just eleven months between them and a shared tenderness for each other that couldn’t be expressed anywhere else in their chaotic house, Jamie and Ellen relied on each other. “Did you want to come back for this?” he asks her now.

She looks at him sharply. “It’s not a matter of want, is it?”

“Ellen, are things all right with you?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Who’s the woman with you?”

“Estella.”

“Come on, Ellen.”

And she knows exactly what he means—
I didn’t ask her name, I need to know who she is to you
—but Ellen shakes her head at him. “Someone I need right now” is all she says, is all she can say. Then, “Go on in to Mom. She’s waiting.”

INSIDE HIS PARENTS’ BEDROOM
, the heavy drapes are drawn against the late afternoon light. Their old wooden bed, bought with Hugh’s first paycheck as a married man, is positioned against
the far wall. When Jamie opens the door he immediately sees his mother lying on top of the spread, feet crossed at the ankles, her good shoes still on, a wrist over her closed eyes as if she has a headache. Even as Jamie closes the door, he can still hear the kitchen debate escalate further as Hugh gets drunker and Drew gets louder and Moira won’t let the boys bulldoze her.

Jamie sits beside his mother gently on the bed. “Do you have a headache?”

“I never believed this day would come.”

“What? You thought Dad was immortal?” Jamie says it with as much lightness in his voice as he can muster.

Carrie opens her eyes and looks at her best-loved son. “No, I was sure I would go before he did.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

She shakes her head back and forth—she doesn’t agree with him. Today her grief is too large to encompass.

“I need you to do something for me.”

“Anything, Mom.”

“Take his clothes. Take them out of here. Now. I can’t look at them hanging there while your father is in the ground.”

“All right, I will. Just tell me what you want me to do with—”

“Take them to St. Timothy’s,” she says as she rolls onto her side, away from him, away from what she knows will happen next. She can’t watch it. “They’ll give them to people in need.”

Jamie nods, but she can’t see him. He opens the closet door and stares at what’s in front of him. If someone didn’t know his father, he’d be able to guess a great deal from the clothes hanging there. All day long, for over fifty years, Hugh Sr. wore overalls and T-shirts for his work as a plumber, but when he dressed in his own clothes they had to be expensive and finely made. The clothes hanging in front of Jamie’s eyes seem fit for a man well above the station Hugh Sr. occupied in life. It was a startling aspect of
his father—that he outfitted himself in such splendor and that he was so fastidious about his personal care. Jamie has memories of his father coming in from work and cleaning his hands in the mudroom sink, meticulously washing them over and over with his special soap and cleaning his nails with a brush he kept there just for that purpose.