The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (5 page)

In the silence that followed, he picked the cigar tip from his mouth and thought of what more to say. Father added, looking down on the photo, unable to take his friend’s gaze, “She’s deaf, too, they say.”

Cassidy retrieved the rolling stogie from the counter. He pushed it like a knife against Father’s heart. “I meant it. She’s really pretty.” He added, a second later, “Anything. Anything at all. You let me know, and I’ll do it.”

Another pretender of the kind kind. Their numbers would swell to the size of a chorus.

I was all in white for my baptism at two weeks, except for pink mittens Father insisted I wear against the cold of the church’s vestibule. New snow lay smooth and cold as blue skin on the streets that Sunday when we drove to the church. The baptismal font was in the back, and it was chilly and dark out there. But the church smelled sweet from the melt of beeswax and stir of ladies’ talc and the old settled incense of a thousand High Masses. Aunt Miriam and Uncle Jack, Mother’s younger siblings, held me and laughed as my nose twitched to the new smells like a rabbit’s. Cassidy hovered nearby.

His hands and arms jumped out as if to catch me every time Aunt Miriam adjusted my position in her arms. He was worried because she was only eighteen. His concern was even more valid because the pink mittens had stolen my grasp. Even before Father Larrie had begun the service, Miriam tilted me backwards over the baptismal font. I stared up at the ceiling lights. There were only two in that large space, but the glare prevented me from seeing the artwork painted up there—the golden lamb hung round the shepherd’s neck, a fleece I would study endlessly on Sundays as I grew older, finding in that swirly coat images of apostles and saints and at least three renowned baseball players. By the age of six I vowed someday to find a step-ladder so I could climb close enough to read the artist’s name. But it is hard to come by a fourteen-foot ladder in a Catholic church.

The priest opened the book and asked the questions. The standing group of relatives and friends recited the answers for me. Apparently, I rejected Satan and his work and all his pomp. Cassidy’s eyebrows went high as his receding hairline at that word. I saw him shake his head and look up to the reading priest. I caught his eye, and he squinted as if in pain. At that moment I passed a seedy stool with a long, loud grunt and a fishy swish. My impudence made Father Larrie stumble over his words and lose his place. He looked up from his book, flustered and cross. Before he could resume his incantations, Cassidy began to laugh. Then Aunt Miriam’s head turned away and she held her breath. In the next moment, she withdrew her right arm, the one cradling my bottom, to look for leaks, and I began to slip into the waters of rebirth. Cassidy lunged and caught me. “No more pomp for you, missy,” he joked as he handed me back to Aunt Miriam. My spit-up towel now hung on her dry arm. Her face was as green as old copper.

At the party in our house, Cassidy wouldn’t put me down or hand me off to anyone except my mother when I loosed my “feed me” cry or, much later, when the guests pressed him for tunes from his guitar. He held me like a football tight in the crook of his left arm for hours, and drank rye whiskey on ice from a glass in his right hand all the while. “Naw, naw, we’re good” was all he said when a friend offered to relieve him. “We’re good, me and her. We’re good.” He smelled like wet wool, black licorice, and cheap cigars at the joint of his shoulder. He looked down on me every few minutes and smiled and whispered wryly, “Pompous ass that Father Larrie, and you showed the likes of him. Showed him good. You see what I’m sayin’?” His gapped yellow teeth filled his mouth and looked not at all out of place against his grog-blossom nose and weak gray eyes. He breathed his whiskey breath on me. “I think you do. Think you see it all,” he said after another nip and a chaser of my gaze.

There were forty or more guests that day, and their bodies heated our house better than the oil burner in the basement ever could. Men took off jackets and sweaters, removed ties, rolled up sleeves. Women sweated and fanned faces and busied themselves about the tables. Toddlers walked and fell, laughed and cried, while older children ran in packs from room to room and no one said, “Slow down.” The morning’s frost on the windows turned to slush and slipped slowly down the panes in thin sheets of white lattice.

Food was served—a huge ham, navy beans baked with crisped hunks of salt pork, potato salad, coleslaw, and a big pan of corned beef hash brought by Cassidy and handed to Mother with a wink. “It stretches. Feeds a crowd,” he whispered at the door.

Cassidy sent Mother to the dining room with the guests to get her plate. He sat on the couch holding me and talking with Father about the pending increase in the cost of first class stamps, the burden of junk mail, the new U.S. Postal sealing tape they’d started to use. Cassidy was recalling the days of “good old cotton string” when he looked down to my face and saw the sheen of sweat on my skin. I tried to bat my sweaty nose with my hand, but the pink mittens disrupted my accuracy, and I managed only to stir a little warm air across my brow. I squirmed and fretted and batted again.

“You heatin’ up too much, Jessy? You gettin’ to be a spud in the oven all dressed up like that?” He took his whiskey glass and pressed its bottom to my forehead. It was wonderfully cool, and I ceased my search for comfort immediately. He slid the sweating tumbler across my brow, down my left cheek, over the bridge of my nose, and down my right cheek. I watched his face.

“Her black eyes sure bore inta ya, don’t they, Ford? She’s not missin’ a thing with them eyes.” He looked over to Father. “I think she’s too warm with them mitts on, Ford. How’s about we take them off?”

Father hesitated. His face clouded over, he licked his lips. “Ford,” Cassidy said, “Ford, she’s hot. And with them eyes of hers, she’s not missing a thing.”

Father untied the thin white ribbon on my left wrist, Joe Cassidy the one on the right, setting hands free to roam the weave of his jacket, the bumps of vein on the back of his hand, the thick ridges on his fingernails.

“Hey, go in and eat with your wife while I finish my booze. We’re good here right now.”

“Joe,” said Father, his finger ringing his shirt collar, “it’s . . . she’s . . .”

“I haven’t held one since Joey was born, ya know. So it feels real good. Real nice, just to sit here with this little load in my arm. Ya know? Thirteen, almost fourteen years now. Ya know?”

“Yeah. Sure, I know. Thanks,” said Father. He took his cocktail napkin and blotted my face. “You be nice for your Uncle Joe,” he told me as he left. It was the first time in my life he spoke to me the way Mother always had from birth, as if it mattered, and was somehow communicated to my consciousness. Solid words, words not missing parts. Cassidy’s concern and affection had touched his troubled heart, made it beat right if only for a bit. That was the first time Cassidy did so, but not the last.

Cassidy held me silently for a while, staring off into the mid-distance of the empty room. The ice was full off the windows now, and the afternoon sun made the snow hurt the eyes. Cassidy’s welled up a little, but the tears were gone in a few blinks. He hefted me with his arm as if he were trying to guess my weight or see if I made a sloshing sound when shaken like a ripe melon off a pile at the grocery store. He sighed and said, “He was a little fatter than you, I expect. Maybe a few ounces more, Joey was.” I slipped my right hand into my mouth and, while my tongue darted over and around the fingers like a crazy puppy, I curled the fingers of my left hand around the thumb of the hand holding me, and squeezed. He took my eyes again then, and smiled. “You don’t miss nothin’ with them eyes of yours. See what I’m sayin’?” He blinked away the last trace of tears.

I saw.

“Such a big box they put him in. I always thought it would have been better if they coulda put him in with his ma. You know, tucked up against her like he’d just fallen asleep after takin’ a feed. It was like he was lost in there, alone in that big box. But Father Larrie wouldn’t have it. Too much pomp. Two people in one casket. Not ‘conventional,’ he said. Borders on heresy, he said. Heresy for a ma ta love a baby son, is it? I ask. Joseph, the ass replies ta me, you just don’t know all the
rules.
Rules? Love is the rule!” He paused for a few breaths and his eyes looked far away, old and far away. “But you showed him today. You did.” He sipped his drink and swallowed. My hand came out of my mouth. He looked at the glistening fingers. He studied the spot missing the thumb. He looked to the room’s entrance to be sure we were alone, stood, placed his drink on the coffee table, and lowered my slick hand into his whiskey, withdrew it, and put it to my lips. “In memory of little Joey and Rose Mary Cassidy,” he whispered. “A toast ta them.” He drank from his glass as I inserted my liquored fingers into my mouth. The burn of the alcohol tamed my tongue’s wild thrusting. Instead, it slid slowly over the digits, one by one, tasting the toast a knuckle at a time.

I hear his songs now* whenever I want. All I have to do is think his name and the music plays. That day, Charlie Warren asked for “My Wild Irish Rose.” Cassidy strummed his guitar to find his low key and began to croon. He walked to where Mother held me, and he sang right at me. I watched his words, easy words they were, so deliberately cadenced, and I could feel the thrum of his music in my bones. I kicked a little at this marrow harmonic, and Mother began to dance with me. Half across the carpet, Paddy Murphy took me from her and spun to the wall. His wife Peggy relieved him. She put me in burp position, high on her shoulder, so I could see the four corners of the room as we twirled. Children in conical party hats came onto the carpet and danced like chickens walking on hot coals. Peggy sang as she moved. I couldn’t see the words she sang as she held me hard and close, but I felt them rise like waves from her chest. I danced this sea of words with everyone that day, and everyone sang a marrow song, even Father, to the shivering notes off Cassidy’s fingers.

The hours passed. Cassidy’s voice grew raspy, and his face was in desperate need of the bottom of his iced whiskey tumbler. When finally he put down his guitar, he held his left hand—the one that had dutifully fretted the strings without reprieve—in a tight claw. Paddy Murphy poured him a stiff one from the bottle on the table. Cassidy hoisted it in his right hand and drank it down in five gulps, each swallow accompanied by the miraculous incremental opening of the frozen hand. People clapped.

You really don’t need thumbs to play guitar. Or clap. And four fingers of whiskey is plenty for me.

*

The more I watch the Assembler’s tapes of my life, the more I see my purpose. Cassidy, set free of the bonds of his sorrow by his love for me. My imperfection the key to his heart, my missing bones somehow whittled by the Assembler to fit precisely into the hole of his loss. Thumbs that are keys, bones that heal, give life, give love. Yes, I really begin to see now*. Cassidy unties my bonds with his hands, I unlock his heart with mine. My life, a life of purpose and intent to liberate the captive from the prison of his sorrow. Isaiah. The Assembler makes of my life Isaiah. I see it now*. But the films continue.

The night of my baptism, Mother developed the flu. She wasn’t very sick, but Father demanded she stay in bed through the night so she would be well rested for the day. He fed me bottles of pumped breast milk. I woke at two and again at five. The ceiling loomed over me with the green-glowing stars like angel eyes staring down at me. I tracked them left to right across my crib, waiting for a blink or a wink, and then I cried when my hunger grew hard. Father came with milk just too warm and rocked me in the chair. He sang “Amazing Grace” in his song voice that had marbles in it while I sucked. He burped me twice and each loud eructation took his quiet blessing. Quiet blessing. Twice again, no loud, hollow casting of words for Mother to hear. Simply a soft and full “Bless you, Jess” for each bubble I brought. It was good to see the solid quietness come off his lips. Unbidden that night, he took my hand. By the light of the corner lamp, I took his eyes and, unbidden, he took my hand, the whiskeyed one. I burped again. For three nights Mother rested and Father’s grasp and stare grew stronger in the semidark.

I feel a debt of gratitude to influenza for giving me Father’s hands and eyes, even though at seven, it would steal my breath.

“How did she do?” Mother asked when he returned to bed at two thirty that first night.

“You should be asleep,” he said. “Four ounces and a smidge,” he added proudly.

“Did you burp her?”

“Jesus, naw, I held her upside down and squeezed the gas out. Did I burp her!”

They lay quietly for a full minute, and he said, “I shouldn’t have put those mittens on her for church. I, you know, all the people going in and out, gawking . . . I thought it would be better. And the guests and all.” He sighed in the dark.

“Ford, it was cold in the church. And back home you took them off. And look what went on. Everyone loves her. I felt so . . . so good when they were passing her around, stepping out to Cassidy’s songs.”

“It was him that suggested we take ’em off. She was sweating and hot, he said. So off they come. I did one. He did one. And now everybody’s seen it. Seen them.”

“Yes. Yes, they have.” She lay quiet again for three breaths and moved her hand to his chest. His hair fit between her fingers in thick rows. “Thank you for that,” she said tugging a little. “It’s not
what
she is. Just
how.
They all know that, Ford. We do, too.”

“Just how,” he repeated. But the darkness in their bedroom, the place of my incomplete conception, again got him to thinking, “Just how is she going to learn a trade or make friends or wipe her own ass? Christ, just how?”

He awoke at five for the next feed and again he spoke in a half whisper, and I sucked and burped and presented him with a stool the size of a twenty-dollar roll of stamps. “Whew,” he said at the changing table. “What did Uncle Joe feed you at the party, missy? Whew-ee!” I stared at him with my hand in my mouth.

My father’s hollow words were a full year in filling in. The words at two and at five in the dim room grew solid night over night as if we only built in blackness with the dark as cement. Softer grew his song, and solid too, in those hours of passing dark rocking. He had a fair voice for a tune, if rough and grumbly and not as stretched as Cassidy’s, which could pull a note taut till it seemed to break and then wrap the torn ends around your heart and pull that to a tear. Cassidy sang “Dark Eyed Molly” at my funeral mass with not a drink in him to steady his nerves, and in the end Father Larrie had to wait until the noise from blown noses had settled before he could proceed. “Peace be wit’ you, too, Father,” Cassidy mumbled when finally the priest could continue the service.