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  For Eva Harrison

  SHE had enough irony to nourish an entire block of underprivileged children; on herself it had a less than helpful effect since she generally used it to saw at her own head instead of at the bars surrounding her life.

  Her mother, a violent soul in a gentle body, had committed suicide in April, having spent the previous ten years withdrawing from life to a point where she could fail to notice that this was the incorrect season for despair. It was, as they say in another not entirely unrelated context, a long hot summer, the fact being that summers not spent at the seashore are invariably both, and they didn’t go to the seashore that year because the house at the seashore had always been haunted anyway, not an object in it unworthy of three flashbacks, and of all the events that can give ghosts dominance in one’s life, the death of one’s mother is probably the most effective. So they stayed home in the three-year-old raised ranch that didn’t remind anyone of anything except maybe the future. This put her husband, who had proposed to her during their first visit to the house at the seashore, into a semi-permanent fury in spite of the fact that it was he who had chosen that very raised ranch in that very suburb on the theory that in such dull surroundings one or the other of his arts must flourish. A philosophy since somewhat tarnished in her eyes by the fact that on the day they’d moved, film making had joined the long list of things like painting and shaving that he didn’t do any more.

  All that summer and into the early fall she couldn’t sleep unless the bedroom door was open in addition to the windows, which of course made it impossible to use the air conditioning. This was all right with her since the one night that summer they’d turned it on she had become convinced that the room had detached itself from the rest of the house, including both bathrooms, and was flying through space with an insufficient oxygen supply.

  She was pregnant, due to have her baby—or babies, as the doctor ascertained in July—on October thirty-first. In August the cat, having been romping in a patch of poison ivy, went to sleep against her back as she lay on her side in bed. For several days she scratched what she took to be a particularly loathsome mosquito bite and a week later most of the visible parts of her body and one or two invisible ones as well were covered with the maddening rash. She could not be given a shot of cortisone because she was pregnant. She could not take oral medication because, her mother having orally medicated herself out of existence, she had a tendency to become hysterical at the suggestion that she take so much as an aspirin into her mouth. On the rare occasion when she fell asleep for a few minutes, she invariably dreamed that her mother was scratching her back and then she would wake up crying.

  She weighed, at this juncture, two hundred and fifty pounds, having gained an even seventy-five pounds in the first seven months of her pregnancy. Since she was just an inch under six feet tall she cut a fairly impressive figure but it was hard for her to find clothes. She made herself two dresses out of tablecloths while she could get just close enough to the sewing machine to see the stitches but this still left her with a wardrobe problem in the hot weather, a problem she finally solved by spending all her time at home and naked. Something about her shape made her appear to be sitting down even when she was walking.

  At the end of September her husband went on a camping trip with some old school ties. A sudden end to Indian summer brought them back to the house, where Margaret was preparing for winter by digging up from the garden and potting every plant that any expert in the history of flower encyclopedias had claimed could survive if it wintered indoors. When they entered she was hanging a wax begonia in a rope basket on a hook in the window wall. She was naked. A few dried remnants of the poison ivy rash still clung to her giant, provolone-like breasts and her massive stomach, giving her something of the look of a relief map. Her husband’s friends stared at her, their jaws slack, their eyes glazed, for so long that she finally let the basket and pot drop to the floor to break their collective trance. What was perhaps most disturbing was that Roger’s expression wasn’t different from his friends’. If he had shown no sexual interest in her since the time when she had begun to swell, he had at least taken her for granted, never looking at her as though she were part of a freak show. She went into the bedroom and closed the door behind her and stayed that way through the night, not realizing until the following morning that the very fact of the closed door was a small milestone. In the morning she put on one of her tablecloths, stepped carefully over the various sleeping bodies that littered the living-room rug, took Roger’s motorcycle key from his pocket without disturbing him and, with her pocketbook and the key in hand, left home.

  MANY people in her condition would have been disconcerted by the difficulty of a long ride on such a small and bumpy vehicle but Margaret had a very high threshold of pain everywhere except in her brain. An unforeseen result of the upbringing which had instilled in her the idea that females didn’t actually exist below the neck except as an appendage for the hands, which were to be kept busy at all times. (One of her cousins had been more disastrously affected by this same philosophy and was given to rushing off to doctors with equal concern for hangnails, splinters or large lumps in the breast, being willing when she got to their offices only to say that something was hurting somewhere down there.)

  Margaret had no clear idea of where she would go. She had little cash but she did have her checkbook and an indecent or decent, depending on one’s point of view, supply of credit cards. She stopped for gas and to cash a check at the gas station in the village, where she picked up also a supply of road maps which she put in her bike bag and never looked at again. Her idea was just to get away. On the first night she slept in the woods off a highway in Dutchess County, eating wild berries when she got hungry. Unfortunately the berries were mildly poisonous so that by the following morning she had an acute case of diarrhea, a disease which would have been almost welcome were she at home, relieving as it did the constipation which was the normal iron cross of pregnancy. At this time, however, it had the effect of making her think in terms of destination.

  There wasn’t really anyplace she wanted to go. Except that in the months following her mother’s death she’d thought for the first time since leaving it about the house and the street where she’d grown up. Of course she’d been back occasionally to visit her parents but it was the kind of place that didn’t stay in your mind once your body was removed from it. A dull brownstone in a dim street of like houses, it had been little more than a spot to set out from to explore interesting places. Like the Back Bay mansion that had been her mother’s childhood home and which her family had been forced to give up after losing its department store during the Depression. But that wasn’t her own personal memory place to visit, really; the memory belonged to her mother.

  Margaret’s mother had been sixteen at the time of the Great Crash and seventeen when she met Margaret’s father, a twenty-eight-year-old Boston Irish traffic cop who had prevented her from absentmindedly stepping in front of a large truck, thus setting up a symbolic foundation for the fantasy of salvation which would enable her to deceive herself for long enough to marry him, if not for many weeks longer.

  Some families have a way of adjusting history so that they seem to have been more intimately involved in the great events of the day than they in fact were, the news stories of a period becoming the reasons for personal actions when in point of fact their
relation was no closer than the morning papers. Even when there is a legitimate cause and effect sequence, the two on occasion become reversed. And so it was that in the minds of Margaret’s mother’s parents the two major crushing blows of an era were not only seen to be related but were somewhat strangely reversed, and years later a stranger listening to Margaret’s grandmother discussing that period might get the impression that it was some great floodgate Margaret’s mother had opened when she married a Papist that had made it possible for the Crash to occur.

  After their marriage Margaret’s mother and father had moved to the ground-floor apartment on Beacon Street where they’d remained through Margaret’s growing up and through her mother’s suicide, and where her father still lived, able to sleep in the bed where he’d found his wife’s body only because he was as much a stranger to his own feelings as he’d ever been to hers.

  She’d been to Boston only once since her mother’s death, and not inside the house at all, but it had occurred to her once in a while that she would like to see it again. Maybe to see if it looked any different, now that her mother was dead. Prettier or uglier. Bigger or smaller. Dead or alive. That was all. Curiosity.

  The house at the Cape was different. It had been given to Margaret’s mother’s aunt as a wedding present some years before the Crash and was untouched when the rest of the family’s possessions were lost. Margaret’s happiest childhood memories were of summers at the beach with her cousins. She and her mother went for the season, the illnesses that had dogged Margaret’s mother from the time she’d given birth always mysteriously leaving her for the duration; her father would join them toward the end of August, his arrival in that pristine Wasps’ nest always somehow as spectacular as if a particularly monstrous tuna head had been washed up on the beach. Everyone else drew back into their skins just a little, and on the rare occasions when they were invited to tea there was a strange hesitation in the air, as though the hostess suspected it would be politic to offer him something stronger.

  The fact was that he was a teetotaler, his only addiction being to tea. One of his favorite stories was about his first visit to a restaurant in this country, when he had been served a cup of pale tea with the tea bag still in it and had bellowed at the waitress, “What’s this filthy rag doin’ in me tea?” Like his other stories, this one had been received with an uncomfortable silence. It wasn’t that there was anything exactly wrong with the things he said, it was just that somehow words that would have sounded perfectly all right on some lips sounded not quite clean on his.

  The ruddiness of his cheeks, the loudness of his voice, the roll of his brogue—whatever it was that made his harmless anecdotes sound to them like dirty jokes—his initial reaction had been to become louder and heartier, as though he could break down their defenses so that when he subsided to his natural level of exuberance he would have become magically acceptable to them. Intimidated, he had failed to see that their defenses didn’t control warmth but concealed the lack of it. And so, the cycle completed, his jovial offensive failing as it had been doomed to, he had given up and lapsed into a nearly permanent silence, taking on, in point of fact, the general aspect of that poor gray tea bag which had been his introduction to the culinary life style of twentieth-century America.

  Maybe she would visit her father. She’d seen him only once since her mother’s death—about a month after the funeral. He had taken her and Roger to Howard Johnson’s for dinner. (Roger found her parents more tolerable than his own. His manner toward her mother had come as close to courtliness as any manner he’d ever had; to her father he was pleasant if condescending. Like one of the more benevolent uncles.) She’d been a little frightened before that last visit of how her father might be, but her fears had turned out to be groundless for he had undergone no visible change in that month, certainly no change comparable to the one after his forced retirement from the police force, when he had been in a deep and foggy depression for over a year. He had loved being a policeman even when he was pounding a beat and when they’d put him behind a station-house desk to make entries in his beautiful script each night he had loved it even more. He loved to write; even her mother had been unable to fault his penmanship. His fine Italian hand, she had called it, thus managing not to credit even that to his Irishness or his Catholic education.

  It was her father who had flashed through Margaret’s mind as she stood over the fallen begonia, being stared at by Roger and his old school ties. Nor was it the first time she had identified with him in this connection. She was her father’s daughter, after all, and as far back as she could remember some of that tuna-head ambience had washed off on her. No one of her mother’s family could imagine a child who, given the alternatives of speaking normally or picking up an Irish brogue, would choose the latter, while that was in fact what Margaret quite unconsciously had done. Nor was it easy for her aunts and uncles to see why a voice should be quite so loud, legs so long, a laugh so raucous, clothes on inside out so often, milk glasses knocked over so frequently, tables bumped into with such regularity, food chewed with such gusto as to give the unfortunate impression that pleasure was involved. Their children, her cousins, adored Margaret for reasons she could only understand much later on. For them her gusto had been the fresh breath blowing through lives which considering their wind-swept seashore ease were remarkably stale and dry. She thought up games that were enough fun to be well worth the trouble they got into for playing them. She made up ghost stories that held them in thrall. Until the boys began reaching their teens, she was the tallest of the cousins, and it was she who was called upon to retrieve kites from trees that no one else could get a foothold to. (Her cousins were even fascinated by her father; their parents’ attitude had conveyed the sense of him as a curiosity without passing on the negative quality of their absorption.) When they visited Margaret (a cousin or two was occasionally permitted this treat but was seldom more than dropped at the front door) they were intrigued with something about the way Margaret lived, but Margaret could never understand just what that something was. Was it a strange quality to their possessions or simply their relative lack of them? Was it a special order to her life or the lack of order? Was it her freedom or the lack of those kinds of freedom that came with money, of which most of their parents had managed to re-accumulate a reasonable amount? Most likely it had to do with the fact that she had been given a great deal of independence from the time she was quite young. With a definite sense of how things were to be done for a child of her particular (fallen) status, Margaret’s parents might not have permitted her to roam the streets of Boston on her own as early as she had. With either money or energy, her mother might have sent a nanny or gone along herself. Since they had neither, Margaret had freedom. Her father, when he woke up in the evening to have breakfast and go to work, might sputter some about the dangers to a young girl on the streets of Boston, but he was usually asleep when she left the house and her mother didn’t have the will to stop her.

  She crossed the border into Massachusetts and began riding east toward Boston. He lived still at the seedy end of Beacon Street, far from every other Irish cop in Boston but within psychological spitting distance of Roxbury, the implicit reminder that he was something more than his wife’s family thought him. The street looked the same. Of course. It was only that she in relation to the street was different. She parked the motorcycle in front of the wrought-iron front rail and walked laboriously up the front steps. A young girl answered the doorbell, well maybe not so young but with the smooth, surrealistically rosy cheeks and round near-plumpness one associated with young girls from the old sod a week before they got married. Margaret stared at her blankly. The girl stared at Margaret blankly.

  “Who is it, Maggie?” Her father’s voice called from inside, causing Margaret great confusion because he’d never called her Maggie before and besides, why would he be asking her. . .

  “I’m not cerrtain, Mrrr. McDonough,” the colleen purred gently. A gentle colleen named Maggie,
her father had gotten to do for him. To do what for him? He was as neat as a pin, cleaned up after himself constantly, and the three or four foods that he would eat he knew how to prepare for himself.

  She stood paralyzed by hostility and confusion. She could not, would not explain herself to this stranger. This . . . could her father actually be screwing this girl? So soon? Cheeks so rosy, eyes so demure? How many months was it since her mother’s death? Was it even half a year? No, not quite. It would be almost funny. Except that irony had its limits. Or should have. Some sort of statute of limitations to keep irony from spilling over into new graves. (Her mother, terrified of burial, had requested cremation; her father had disobeyed.)

  She moved through the door; the girl drew back instinctively. She moved past the girl into the half-dark (as always) living room, where her father sat in his easy chair, reading the Herald, his feet up on the Ottoman, whose cover was newly embroidered.

  Fill in the missing item in this picture.

  Her father looked up and startled so hugely that the teacup in its little saucer on the drum table rattled. It was gratifying to see some tangible evidence of a guilty conscience; so little of what went on inside him was visible or had been visible in years. Buried alive, his emanations seldom reached them through the earth of his flesh. He had cried for a week when her mother died. “The poorrrr creaturrre, ahhhh, the pooorrr crreaturre,” was what he’d said the whole time, never moved by the necessity to question what beyond the lack of money had impoverished her, or why he had brushed off Margaret when on her visit to Boston the year before she had asked him if they had to store such an incredible inventory of old sleeping pills when her mother was constantly asking why she should continue to live? It was unthinkable to him, a lapsed but rabid Catholic, that his wife should commit suicide. But in this context, what did unthinkable mean?