Thomas Mcguane - Gallatin Canyon

I was preoccupied, having just reached the point where Doc Holliday was moving silently behind the corral planks with his sawed-off shotgun. Distantly, my mind was moving to the eventualities facing those men in that dusty patch of earth when the door opened and Uncle Walter summoned me with a crooked finger. I rose slowly to go out. My fears were aroused by the hauteur in the faces of my cousins, then confirmed when I saw my mother and my two aunts. I first pinned my hopes on the slightly skeptical expression of my aunt Dorothy, but when I saw my mother’s pride and the phony look of general forgiveness on the face of my aunt Constance, I knew I was cooked. It was miracle time again. Father Corrigan gazed with detachment, wig tipped up like a jaybird: the services this family expected of me probably struck him as verging on sacrilegious.

I clapped both hands over Uncle Walter’s car keys as they lightly struck my chest. “The Blue Roadmaster in front. Bring your uncle Paul. You’re the guy that can get this done. Get Paul now and bring him here. ”

Constance piped up. “He is your favorite uncle.”

It was a straight shot to Mohican House, and at that hour there was enough room to park a thousand cars. The entire way, I was plagued by mortifying visions of unsuccessful parallel parking, but I was never tested. Spotted by pedestrians my own age— three swarthy males with ducktails — as I climbed out of the car, I adopted a self-effacing posture I hoped would make clear that I was not its spoiled young owner. Once it was locked, I plunged its incriminating keys into my pocket.

Paul answered the door to his apartment promptly, greeting me with the phrase “Just as I expected,” and showed me in with a sweep of his arm. He wore a surprising ascot of subdued paisley foulard that complemented a sort of smoking jacket. His was what was once called a bed-sitting room, which perfectly described it. A toile wall covering with faded merriment of nymphs and sparkling brooks failed to create the intended atmosphere. “How’d you get here, Walt’s car?”

“Yes,” I said, as though it was obvious. Paul had a faint brogue this evening, a bad sign. I glanced around: his bed was beside the window that looked down into an alley and was made with military precision, including the hospital corners he had once demonstrated. There was a battered but comfortable armchair nodded over by a single-bulbed reading lamp, and on the other side a night table that held the only book Paul owned, his exalted Roget’s thesaurus, which he called “the key to success” and which Uncle Walter blamed for his inability to speak directly on any subject. A gray filing cabinet a few feet from the foot of the bed supported an artillery shell that served as a vase for a spray of dried flowers.

Paul poured each of us a drink, and when I courteously declined mine, he said, “Why, then, our evening is at an end.”

“I don’t think I should drink and drive,” I said defensively.

“Do it all the time,” he said, “an essential skill. Never caught unprepared. Learn it while you’re young. Bluestockings have given it a bad name.” He used the same voice on me that he employed in testing insurance pitches, brusque shorthand best for indicating the world of valuable ideas he had for your future, take it or leave it.

I had a sip and, after little pressure, finished my strong drink; whereupon I was coerced to accompany John McCormack and my uncle Paul in “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms,” a performance that, under the responsibility of my family assignment, I found so disturbing that I accepted Paul’s offer of another drink. Next Paul recited a poem about Michael Collins, how he left his armored car to walk laughingly to his death, after which a silence made it clear that Paul was ready to hear my pitch. I was emboldened and terrified by the alcohol, and not entirely sure who Michael Collins was or why walking to his own assassination cheered him up. I suppose this contributed to my disorientation. The record playing in the background was scratchy, and the orchestra accompanying the various tenors sounded like a bunch of steamboats all blowing their whistles; at the same time, I could see the appeal of being drunk.

There was no use telling Paul his mother was dying. Walter had already said that. Not only did I feel utterly burdened, but being here gave me such an enduring case of the creeps that, years later, I voted against Kennedy, switching parties for the only time in my life. I now admit that I feared the loss of my standing as a miracle worker and longed to find a way of preserving my reputation, partly because it was so annoying to my father, who considered my mother’s first home a hotbed of mindless nostalgia and an impediment to her conformity and compliance. I couldn’t appeal to Paul’s values because I didn’t know what they were and because I suspected that beneath his lugubrious independence lay some kind of awful bitterness that, if uncovered, might turn my world upside down.

I had no strategy, and my heart ached. It was important to my grandmother that I deliver Paul to her side, and the only thing I could think to do was to tell him what she meant to me. I began with a head full of pictures, my grandmother folding her evening paper to rise from her rocker and embrace me when I returned from a day in North Park, of the harmony of her household, the smell of pies arising from her second kitchen in the basement, the Sunday drives after Mass when she was taken around the perimeter of her tiny kingdom and to the abandoned mills where she had once worked. I even thought of our life in the Midwest, when I’d longed for her intervention in a family slow to invent rules for their new lives. I was with her on the first visit to her husband’s grave when, looking at the headstone of their little boy right next to my grandfather’s, she said, “I never thought they’d be together so soon.” A half century between burials: “so soon.” She bent to pat the grass in the next space. “No keening,” she had warned her children at my grandfather’s funeral. And indeed, it was a quiet American affair.

I imagined I could touch on a few of these points and move Uncle Paul to accompany me back to Brownell Street, but I barely got started. I was seized by some force I’d barely suspected and astonished myself by choking on tears that spilled down my face while Paul watched impassively.

Once I pulled myself together, Paul stood and turned off the record player. He looked at me with chilling objectivity and then stated his position clearly. Moving to his filing cabinet, he began to rearrange the dried flowers in the artillery shell, awaiting my departure.

Driving the Roadmaster I became immediately hysterical. I saw myself rocketing through the railings of the Brightman Street Bridge and plunging into the nocturnal gloom of the Taunton River below. But the Buick rolled along like a ship and my panic abated.

As I parked in the dark of Brownell Street and turned off the lights, I could see the faces in the window: time to take my medicine. I hoped their seeing me alone would make it unnecessary to explain that I had failed, but Paul could be just behind me in his foreign car. Walter, my mother, and my aunts would not give up so easily. Perhaps my quite legitimate expression of defeat would help, assuming no one noticed my unsteadiness.

Like a jury they were waiting for me in the kitchen. Knowing my grandmother still lived, I was strengthened. Entering the back door, sole entrance for anyone but a priest, gave access to a hallway and the choice of going straight upstairs, to my bedroom, or into the kitchen, where I was expected. The great blue presence of my uncle Gerry opened the door for me. Walter, Dorothy, Constance, and my mother stared without a breath or movement. I could state that I had failed; I could indicate that I had failed; I could make a paper airplane with a handwritten statement that I had failed and sail it at those faces; but until I did I was still a worker of miracles and reluctant to step down. The silence lasted long enough that my uncle Walter elevated his chin sternly, more pressure than I could withstand. I shook my head: no.