The Visitors (20 page)

—Look, Tom and Tess, we have a visitor, my mother turned to them and said.

My father then looked at me. The corner of his mouth slipped down.

—Whoever you are, you’re welcome, he said.

—Oh, a visitor, you’re more than welcome, Aunt Tess said.

She was looking at me and smiling the way my parents were.

—I should offer the visitor a cup of tea, my mother said.

Then I was back again in the dark corridor. Standing right outside their shut door. At the end of the corridor, where the kitchen door was, was a shining set of eyes. The eyes I saw in the elderly woman’s driveway a few nights before. And the eyes rose up to where they were around my height. I blinked and I was that boy running and laughing down the platform at Limerick Junction to Aunt Tess. My father was behind me. I don’t know how far but far enough. And I picked up my dead aunt’s bags and she said, Jimmy, you don’t have to do that. I gasped and looked up at her and said, But I want to. I want to. She turned to Coleman Daly and smiled. Coleman’s teeth were cigarette yellow. And then I was standing in the empty schoolyard. Kevin Lyons and I faced each other like in a Western. That tone and cast of light. A train whistle blowing in the distance. At our feet the withered elm leaves. At the side of that schoolyard, the stout branches of four or five elms grew over a tall wall. He came to me and put his hands on my waist. He pulled me to him and kissed my lips. I put my hands on his waist and kissed his lips. He shoved his tongue into my mouth. I shoved
mine into his. And we ground ourselves into each other until we were exactly the same person.

When I sat on the edge of Zoë’s bed and pulled my pants up, that’s how those images had arranged themselves, even though I don’t know if it happened in that exact pattern. Already I’d fixed them. Not so much unlike when you are awake and what you see you fix into what you can manage and make sense of. And so those dead and living people sat in that room. My mother said that. And my father and Aunt Tess said what they said. And I ran down the platform to Aunt Tess the way I once did. And Kevin Lyons and I met in the empty schoolyard and we kissed and became the same person. Definitely the schoolyard. The rustling elm leaves. The gravel shifting underneath my feet. And in their bedroom they drank their tea from cups and saucers my mother brought out only when the parish priest visited. Which at most was once a year. The failed priest who lived in Vermont posted those willow-pattern cups and saucers to her. My mother often said they were too beautiful to use, and she washed and cared for them like she once did her babies. Back when she understood and liked us more. When she changed our nappies then wiped and powdered us. When we suckled and bit her and grabbed her hair in our fists. But my mother would open the two doors of the kitchen cabinet to the right of the sink. She’d fold her arms, take a step back, and admire her cups and saucers. When she did that I imagined she was staring at a dead body in an open casket.

I tidied the bedclothes around Zoë. I was careful not to wake her. She had left ten bucks on the night table for the gin. I pocketed it. The air felt chilly. I turned the air conditioner down and sat back on the edge of the bed and stared down at her lovely face. I smoothed her black hair.
A stór
, I whispered, like my father used to once say to Tess.

The air in the street was warm. Birds darted from the trees on one side of the street to the cables on the other side. Then they flew straight back. The lawns were neat and clean. A few sprinklers were already going full blast. The ugly photographs of politicians, their names, their
parties, had all faded in the sun. A boy was flinging newspapers onto lawns and porches. He skillfully maneuvered his bike up onto the footpath then back onto the street. I passed five joggers and a few people in leisure wear walking their dogs. In the cool shadow of the Methodist church I stared at the wilted tiger lilies and regretted not having been more watchful, because every year I looked forward to the tiger lilies blooming, like in spring, when the snow and ice vanished, I longed to see and smell the lilacs. I could be happy then. Happy to use that one thing to forget the others. I walked by the old woman’s house. A Dumpster was parked in the driveway. The yellow truck was gone. So were the lights on the porch roof. The son took them home to Chicago. Or they were in the Dumpster with his father’s trash.

In the flat I made coffee. It was one of the days I didn’t have to be at the bakery until 9:00, and not at 4:00 a.m. to measure the flour, butter, eggs, buttermilk, brown sugar, baking soda, salt, macadamia nuts, dark or white chocolate chips in the big bright metal containers that were shaped like tulips. And I didn’t have to wheel the containers under the mixer that churned those ingredients with a whisk you might anchor a small ship with. And I didn’t have to cut the cookie dough in the cutting machine, arrange the cut dough on the trays, then slide the trays into the oven. And while those trays circled the oven I’d stand at the bakery window, hands on hips, the way my father stood alone in the fields, and that glorious smell rose at the same time as the fiery red sun rose over the golf course across the road from the then empty parking lot of the strip mall.

The nine o’clock shift was different. I’d push the trembling heaps of dough into the cutting machine, shut the lid, press down hard on the handle, then open up the lid and fling armfuls of cut dough along the long wooden table, and the mothers who worked there full-time, and the high school and college kids doing summer jobs, laughed and joked and kneaded the dough into loaves. I’d arrange the loaves on the trays, and I and the mother who gave me the pot kept an eye on the loaves in the oven while we chatted and swept the floor and cleaned the table for
the next round of bread. That bakery job might be the nicest one I’ve ever had.

I listened to the news on the radio. Then I washed myself at the toilet sink and changed into bakery clothes that when laundered still smelled powerfully of flour. I opened out the door, hooked the screen door, and sat in the chair. I went through the books and picked up the Good Book and opened it to the page I’d marked after I’d finished talking with Tess the evening before.

It is better to go to the house of mourning,

than to go to the house of feasting: for that is

the end of all men; and the living will lay it

to his heart.

I looked up to see Walter at the screen door. Sunlight glowed on the gravel at his feet. He was wearing the shoes he wore the first two times I saw him. And he was wearing the other shirt Una gave me, the one with the blue in it. The sleeves were rolled up. The baseball cap was on. The backpack was over the shoulder. I put the Good Book down.

—You’re up early, man, I said.

—Guess I am, man, he said.

He took the cap off and pushed it into his back pocket. I crossed the floor and unhooked the door and told him to sit in the chair. When he was sitting I asked if I should call him Walter or Jeremy.

—Walter, he said.

—I’m sorry to hear about your kid, I said. —I am, and I don’t know what else to say, only that I won’t hold the lie about your aunt against you.

—Grateful, man, he said.

—If the telephone pole wasn’t there, the woman said.

—Bullshit, he said.

—Bullshit is forever the right answer, but you’ll have coffee, I said.

When I handed him the cup he thanked me. I said sorry when I told him I had to be at work soon.

—Talked to Mr. Lyons yesterday, he said.

—I’m going, man. The mind’s made up, I said.

—Have the tickets and information here, man, he said.

He reached down and rubbed the soiled backpack like it were a blind person’s dog.

—That’s easy enough then, man, I said.

—Said to mention John Garfield.

—He did now, did he. Ever heard of John Garfield?

—Not so sure, he said.

—Actor. Forties. Fifties. Mr. Lyons’s father and my old man watched his films on television on Friday nights when I was growing up. Joseph McCarthy’s mother was born in the county where I was born. Garfield was blacklisted, so go figure. But where exactly does Mr. Lyons live?

—North of New York City. More than an hour. Down an unpaved road. Ain’t far from the river—

—Ha! Between Boston and Brooklyn, I said.

—Tell him to expect you in four days, man, he said.

—Four days will work, man. I just need to throw a few things into a bag. And I have to talk to my boss at the bakery.

He unzipped the backpack and pulled out a large taped manila envelope. He handed it over to me, and I held it to my ear, shook it, and then glanced at it back and front. There was nothing written on it. I threw it onto the futon bed and looked away from it.

—He says everything you need is in there, man.

—Thanks, man. Do you want a cigarette?

—No, grateful, he said.

—I’m sorry again about it. You want more coffee?

He said yes. I filled his cup. I turned the radio off. When I sat again I offered him a cigarette. He said no.

—How’s she doing? he asked.

—The elderly woman? I said.

—Your girl, he said.

—Oh, Zoë. It’s Greek, you know. Means life, yes, life, but Zoë’s good, and she’s not my girl. Zoë’s not anyone’s girl. And the elderly woman is in an old folk’s home in Chicago. All her life is all mixed up in her head, so her son told me, but as we speak she is eating breakfast and blissfully looking out over Lake Michigan—

—A real sweet lady, man, he said.

—Zoë is that, man. She liked you, she did. She enjoyed our day out very much, but I have to knead bread soon.

He finished the coffee and stood. I stood. He slipped the backpack on and pulled the cap from his back pocket and put it on. He adjusted the bill. I followed him to the door. When he was outside I hooked the screen door. He took a few steps and turned his back to me. He stared down at the gravel.

—It was about wanting to leave and never about where you were heading, I said. —That place only exists in the head. But you probably know that better than anyone.

—Don’t know what you’re talking about, man, he said.

—Sorry for saying it, then. But what do you do when you get sick?

—Don’t get sick, he said.

—Some good news, man, I said. —Did Mr. Lyons mention a brother in London?

—Don’t talk to him that way, he said.

—But what exactly does Mr. Lyons do now for a living?

—Makes money, I guess, he said.

—A noble profession, I said. —He offered me a job once. Years ago, in Boston. But it wasn’t the job I wanted. What I wanted was to go away. I wanted a new start. Away from everyone who knew me. The starts are brilliant. What comes after, who the fuck knows.

—Wish I never found out about my kid, man, he said.

—It’s awful news, man—

—He said I should come back here and see him and her, man. Make
things right. Told him I tried to do it once before, what I told you and your girl in the car yesterday—

—Apple picking up north, I said.

—Yes, man. Then he called me a—hell, man.

—He called you a what, man?

—Said I was weak. A coward, man. And he laughed. Just wish I never found it out.

—He was being a jester. He can be that, but finding out is the right thing, man.

—Ain’t, man. Wished he never told me to come back here. Wished he never called me those things. I ain’t ever been such a good person. He ain’t one either.

—I won’t argue with you on your opinion of him. Nor will I go into it, but you’re also very upset at the moment, man. You’ve had a hard blow. We gotta deal.

—Still gotta deal with the bird and do some other work for him.

—The whippoorwill, man, I’d forgotten.

—Thought I could make it right but only made it worse, man.

—It’s better to know, man. In the end it is, or so they always say.

—It ain’t better, man. Won’t ever get better now. Know now that’s the way it is. Can’t ever again live it any other way.

—I don’t want to be rude to you, man, but I’m going to be late for work, and I shouldn’t be when I’m asking the boss for time off, but will I ever again see you?

He turned and stared at me.

—You talk exactly like him, man, he said.

—You told me that a few nights ago, I said. —But I used to despise him, and probably envy him, man, if you want to know. When I was young, I did.

After I said it I looked down. I did because my face turned red. Red like the fat stupid boy that Kevin Lyons shouted and laughed at and ran after in the schoolyard. When I looked up Walter was smiling. The
only time I recall seeing him smile. And it gave me the chills. This big, brutal, shameless smile. The missing and the rotting teeth showing you something you had already seen and knew. I unhooked the screen door and stepped outside. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to say something kind, or if I just wanted him to go away so that I could go to work. It felt chilly standing beside him in the shadow of that brick house, though the sunlight on the grass looked bright and warm. I stood for four or five minutes, flicking my cigarette ash onto the gravel, neither of us speaking. And when he walked steadily down the driveway I got that smell I got from him the first night he visited. He walked around the corner of the house, and the moment he was about to vanish, I called out good-bye. I did it loudly. He heard me. He must have. He did. But he said nothing. And he never looked back.

Anton was building a stone wall at the end of the long, sloping yard. Behind him the stream flowed under a narrow cement bridge with crumbling low walls. The gravel path began at the bridge and wound around the yard and up the side of the house to a two-car garage with a wide deck atop it that joined a front porch. I was standing on the porch and watching Anton. Birds sang and butterflies flew here and there. On all sides of me grew mighty trees.

Two hours before, Anton had introduced himself at an airport gate in Newburgh. I followed him to the parking garage. He drove east on Interstate 84, and when the steep tree-covered hills appeared on the other side of the magnificent six-lane bridge I asked him the name of the bridge and the hills.

—Newburgh-Beacon, the Hudson Highlands, we’re crossing the Hudson.

The steel rods flashed past and far below gleamed the wide river. There were small boats and a long barge heading toward New York City. Anton said he’d known these parts of the river his whole life.

He turned south on Route 9, and less than an hour later he led me to a room that was down a short hall from a kitchen with a new stove and fridge. The room walls were painted mocha. There was a single bed, a nightstand, a gooseneck lamp, a wardrobe with knots in the wood, and an old school desk and chair at one of the two windows. I dropped my bag on the bed and went to the desk window and remarked upon the light falling through the trees. He said the trees
stretched for miles beyond that window, that the house sat on the edge of a state park. I turned from the window and asked if Kevin Lyons was around.

—He’s somewhere. Beer in the fridge, and stuff for a sandwich. I got work to do.

•   •   •

Anton slapped mortar between the stones.

—Reminds me of the father, Kevin said.

He stood where the porch met the deck, his right hand in the pocket of his faded khaki shorts. The other hand rested on a gas grill whose cover was coated with withered pine needles.

—Kevin, I’m very sorry to hear about Seamus.

—Thanks, Jimmy. We don’t have to talk about it now, if you don’t mind.

—Whatever you like, I said.

I walked over. We watched each other. His t-shirt had the logo of a lumber company. The hiking shoes looked expensive. The hair was shorter, the face a little heavier, though the body looked the same. And the father’s eyes that I hadn’t thought about in so long. We shook hands. He said he was sorry he didn’t hear the van drive up, he was working in the basement, and he asked how long I could stay.

—Four days, I said.

—The first wedding was a fantastic day, he said, and smiled.

—I got the urge to go, I said.

—Water under the bridge, Jimmy, he said. —I know your father passed away around that time. I wanted to get ahold of you, but now I should take the workman a beer. Follow me.

He went first through the sliding glass door on the deck. I stood on the mat inside the door. He went behind the kitchen counter and opened the fridge. The walls of that big room were white and bare. Five railway beams ran across the ceiling. A thick red-brick wall butted out halfway. The kitchen was on the left side. On the right a raised fireplace built into the wall, and a coffee table before the fireplace. Across from it a green
couch under the porch window. Next to the couch, a matching armchair, a bookcase with a few books, and a stereo. Floor lamps. Big and small rugs. At the window to my left, a wooden table and four chairs. On the table, a bowl piled with fruit. And that entire room was filled with sunlight. It poured in the wide, bare windows. It flooded the wooden floor and the walls. I felt like I had entered a sanctuary.

He was rummaging through a drawer, searching for a bottle opener.

—No curtains, I said.

—No need with the trees, he said. —The nearest house is on 301. We’re about five miles from the village of Cold Spring.

He crossed the floor with three bottles of beers. He handed me one, and I thanked him.

—You know Walter’s name is really Jeremy, I said.

We went through the sliding door. When we were outside, he pulled the screen to.

—Walter showed up at a house I was renovating over a year and a half ago, he said. —He needed work. I needed a job done that afternoon. He did it. He’s good with his hands, when he’s in the mood.

We walked down the wooden stairs on the right side of the deck, then down the gravel driveway. He left a beer on a pile of stones beside Anton, who didn’t look up. We headed toward the stream. The loud water rushed over the rocks. There were two big rocks you could hop over on. Under the cement bridge the water foamed.

—Walter painted that room you’re sleeping in, he said. —He painted the front room and fixed up the basement. I built the bookshelf and sanded the floors in the big room myself. I asked Walter to mow the yard, but then I thought, Who gives a fuck up here where there’s no one to see it but me. And I asked him to paint the porch and the deck. He’ll do it when he needs the money—

—He said something about the whippoorwill, I said.

—That bastard wakes me up every night. You’ll hear it, he said, and he laughed.

—I can’t wait to hear it, I said. —But Walter had a child who died
about twenty years ago. He left around then. He never knew the child had died until I drove him out there last week.

—That’s a tough one. I do my very best to keep him in work.

—He told me things about his life, I said.

—You’re way more into hearing those things than I am, he said. —I have a reliable crew. Walter is the weakest one. He always looks a bit lost, like you never know what’s going on with him. He comes and goes, but I feel sorry for him, so I keep him in jobs.

—And he’s your messenger, I said.

—Only in your case, Jimmy, he said, and laughed again. —Someone on the crew told me he had family out where you are that he hadn’t seen in years. It wasn’t hard for me to find out where you lived. But I said to Walter that it might be good for him to pay his family a visit. I had to do a bit of prodding, but I offered to pay his way out there and back, and I offered to pay him a good bit more if he paid you a visit.

—I think your money went to a church, I said.

—I couldn’t care less where it went. I wanted to see you, Jimmy, he said.

We walked the stream bank to a broken-down stone wall, which he said was a boundary line. No bank on the stream beyond the wall. Just water flowing over rocks and twisted tree roots. Next we headed up through the yard. Butterflies dallied like they had forever. A shower of well-fed robins flew out of the long grass.

—Let’s head back to the porch, he said. —That’s the best place at this hour of the day.

He sat into a wicker chair next to the grill. I sat into one beside him. It felt cooler under the roof. I asked how his mother was handling things.

—I spent three days with her not so long ago, he said. —She’s having a hard time, but the mother is tough. Tommy is going to move home and live with her. Seamus was buried in London. It was the best way to handle it.

—Hannah mentioned that, I said.

—No one could save Seamus, he said. —I gave up on him years ago. The father used to say that Seamus was more fragile than the rest of us, and the mother never wanted Seamus to go to London. She went mad when he made his plan to go, but when Seamus got something into his head you couldn’t stop him. He was wearing no shoes, no shirt, and no underpants—wearing only a pair of dirty designer jeans and lying on the top step of a church. Facing the big wooden door. And in spite of all his years of coke and vodka he was fat. They say he died from the cold during the night. I’d say he didn’t feel much of anything, cold or what the fuck have you.

—I talked to Stephen. They were great friends at one time, I said.

—I’ve no idea where Stephen is.

—Well settled outside of Sydney, I said.

—He went a long ways, but Una is building a new house where the cottage is.

—Hannah mentioned that, too.

—At Seamus’s funeral she and I shook hands for the first time in years. We’re getting on better now. She gave the rest of us some money a few years ago. She wanted that place. She always did. The mother wanted to see it gone years ago, but Una had her way. I couldn’t give a fuck if I ever saw that place again. Then last year Una divorced the husband. I’m not sure they know that back there, so keep that one to yourself.

—Rarely do we talk, I said.

—She and the former husband own a few supermarkets in London. She looks after them. She’s very good at it. She and him never had children. But I’ve no idea what she’s doing building a house there. She couldn’t wait to get the fuck away.

I asked how often he came up here. He said two or three weekends a month. He’d like to live only up here, but the upkeep of his buildings and handling tenants kept him very busy, and he had his eye on some more buildings up Route 9, in Beacon.

—The nineties were good to me, he then said. —And I married the
right person, but we’re glad not to be married anymore, but she’s my best friend. She talks to my mother on the phone every few weeks. She’s able to talk to them in a way I never could. Americans are good like that, the women are. I learned about this business from her, but I was good at it and I worked.

—You said in Boston she was a lawyer.

—She still practices, but buying those tenements in Dublin when I did was a good move, then selling them not too long ago was an even better one. You heard what’s happening back there with real estate, so that’s how I got this place. The first time I drove down the gravel road and over that bridge I opened the car window and saw and heard the stream. Then I looked up the yard at this porch and this tidy wooden house and the big window behind you and I knew I had found it.

He said his main place was about an hour south. A twenty-minute drive from the train and the river. He and the first wife had bought three broken-down buildings in the area a few years back and renovated them. She and their two children lived near Boston. He drove to see the children twice a month, or they visited him. He was dying to show all of them this place, but he wanted to get the wall built first, and there was a fire pit in the trees out the back that Anton was going to repair when he was done with the wall.

He said the second marriage didn’t last a year. He still didn’t know why he did it, but no children, so he didn’t have to deal with her anymore. She was a lunatic, a fraud, the lowest sort of snob. None of this he found out until he married her. She was teaching some nonsense to do with writing fiction at a private school far upstate.

—But they must be all proud of you becoming a professor. I know I am, he said.

—Let’s not go into that, I said.

—That’s fine, Jimmy.

I looked up at the dusty boards on the porch ceiling. The rusted hooks for flowerpots and lights. He went to the railing and looked down across the yard.

—I remember your mother giving me a green apple, he said. —She peeled the skin off of it with a knife that had a handle covered in white tape like a bandage.

—Wonder what the fuck became of that knife, I said.

—She handed me the apple, but there was still strips of skin on it, and she took it back and peeled off the last of the skin and gutted out the core. Then she sliced the apple into small pieces and told me to hold my hands up. She sprinkled sugar on the pieces. The fathers were sitting at the range and talking away. She had fed them the tea.

I shook the empty beer bottle and bowed my head.

—I’ll buy beer tomorrow, I said.

He turned from the railing. I looked up.

—You don’t have to buy anything, he said. —And you’re welcome to everything that’s here.

I thanked him. He said he had to ring his foreman, and he walked around the corner, and when the sliding door opened I left the porch and stood at the deck railing. Anton’s van was gone. I hadn’t heard it because of the stream and the talking. At the edge of the path, the thick wall of trees. And the voice inside the house felt like it was years ago, but then it was at the sliding door. At my feet the deck floor was smeared with birdshit and littered with fat dead moths whose lime-green wings looked too big for their bodies. The sliding door opened and I turned.

—I think Walter’s very upset, I said. —I thought I should tell you that.

—It’s understandable that he would be, Jimmy.

—But he sort of worried me, Kevin—

—I can handle Walter, Jimmy. Don’t worry about him. You’re tired. Sleep for a bit. You’ve been doing all that traveling.

I turned and stared into the trees.

—He told me the truth about the woman, but I didn’t believe him, I said.

—What woman, Jimmy.

—Nothing, Kevin. I liked talking to him. That’s all. When I think about it now, I did.

•   •   •

—Jimmy, are you awake? Are you awake?

The room was dark. The air felt damp and cold. He was standing in the doorway. The stretched hand gripped the doorknob. Light in the hall made his body fully dark. He said he had made supper. I rolled off the bed and fumbled for my pants and shirt. I asked for a few minutes. He said to take my time and he quietly shut the door. Dark again and the smell of rotting trees and the sound of freezing water flowing over stones. Tess and Hannah were chatting and laughing. They were bringing buckets of clay to our mother’s flower garden. The dark, rich clay from the foundation Michael dug to build the pump house. Then the scent of yellow dahlias. But I didn’t know if dahlias smelled. Their yellow heads turned heavy then toppled. Their pointy petals littered the garden. But the mind was also in this other place. I was in a car with Zoë. She was driving through an American city. I didn’t know the city. Poor people lining up outside liquor stores, and decrepit, neon-lit corner stores with bars on all the windows. Zoë and I were laughing. We passed a big clock. It was six in the evening. Sunlight cast on the red bricks of the tall buildings we drove past. Then it was night and Zoë was telling me a story. We were in the same city in the same car and Zoë had to be somewhere, but she had to leave me off first, and she had to finish telling me the story. She stopped the car in the middle of a dark and empty street with broken streetlights. She switched off the car lights and went on telling her story. I couldn’t listen to it because I was anxious and I kept saying that she should turn the lights back on and keep driving because a car would crash into us. And I did not know what I was doing to make a living. And I didn’t know how old I was. And I had no idea who I was in that empty American city with sunlight shining on red-brick buildings.