Thomas Mcguane - Gallatin Canyon

My relatives were certainly not ruling the world, and they went about their lives with high spirits. While their certainties like everyone else’s were soon to be extinguished by the passage of time, their ebullience was permanent, and I say this having seen two of them expire from cancer. My father, on the other hand, was grimly obsessed with his health, and for some reason I associate this with his flight from his origins. I recall him explaining to my mother that he had missed making his Easter Duty on the advice of his eye-ear-nose-and-throat specialist to avoid crowds.

I went downstairs and sat among my relatives, some of whom hadn’t seen each other for a long time, especially the ones from Lawrence, who seemed to have in common straitened finances and sat in their overcoats watching the circulation of plates of finger food. My aunt Dorothy, from Providence, wept copiously and in a manner that reminded everyone, I was sure, of the melodramatic nature so annoying to my grandmother that she pretended that Taffy longed to star in a soap opera. The Sullivans were there from across the street. Uncle Gerry, wearing his mounted policeman’s uniform with its crossed straps and whistle deployed just under his left shoulder, stared straight ahead and moved his lips in authentic prayer. My physician uncle Walter maintained a look of dignified pragmatism, and I’m sure he knew we looked to him for deportment hints. We believed he understood life and death through actual experience and, unconvinced by Father Corrigan’s merry certainties, wished he would say something about the afterlife.

Saddest of all was Aunt Dorothy, because her household meddling had expired with my grandmother and she was now wandering about without a self to give meaning to her acts. I thought of her with white holes for eyes, as in the standard depiction of zombies. She looked blank and confused and made clueless efforts to find chairs, answer the phone, and offer horrifying comfort to people she barely knew. Finally, Walter commanded, “You need a rest. I’m sure everyone will excuse you.” At this she let out a somewhat lunar cry that made poor Mr. Sullivan, a surgical arch outlining the former position of his cigar, grab his wife and run for the door.

Aunt Constance served the funeral dinner with a kind of pageantry, abetted by her daughters, the two little shits Kathleen and Antoinette. Watching their stately entrance for each course, learned in that narcissistic training ground of First Communion, I could have, as Josef Goebbels once remarked, “reached for my Luger.” The meal was a tribute to my grandmother and featured all her favorite dishes — swordfish (my father confided these small steaks were doubtless from a skillygallee, an obsolete term for the less desirable white marlin), corn on the cob, parsnips, and apple pie — and represented a maudlin idea of grieving. “They’re gonna milk it,” he said, when he heard the menu.

We were seated, Walter at the head of the table, my mother, father, and I in a row, Dorothy sniveling into the canned consommé preceding the main course, Kathleen and Antoinette, half crouched in their pinafores and ready for duty, Gerry upright as a man of the law. As Walter said grace, I watched my mother closely; her melancholy smile was less occasional than chemical, produced by the pills she took, ostensibly to raise an abnormally low blood pressure, as well as straight shooters from the vodka tucked in her suitcase. Like many of their generation, my parents believed in the absolute odorlessness of vodka and applied to its consumption none of the restraint of the blends whose broadly familiar aroma marked the user like a traffic light. My father sported his customary deniable supercilious smile. When cornered, he’d lay it to gastric distress or the unaccountable prelude to heartbreak, as when my mother walked out on him and he couldn’t wipe the grin off his face and had to explain it.

The front door was carelessly slammed shut and Uncle Paul walked in, wearing his drab woolen officer’s uniform with obvious moth holes, and commented that we looked a bit gloomy. Father Corrigan rose to his feet, held his napkin between thumb and forefinger, and dropped it to the table. With infinitesimal authority, Walter indicated with his eyes that Father Corrigan was to take his seat again promptly. Constance appeared behind Paul and, leaning around him, said in a shrill voice, “Just making certain there’s a place set.”

“Grab me a beer from the fridge,” said Paul. Constance froze but my mother leaped up and chirped nonchalantly that she knew right where it was. My father patted her butt, eyes half-lidded with private irony as she swept past, and Paul smiled at his favorite relative, my mother; Uncle Gerry, rendered huge in his uniform by the smallness of the room, strode to the sideboard to turn on the big Sunbeam fan. He’d begun to sweat. Seated again, he asked Walter about various old folks of our acquaintance. Most got good health reports, except Mary Louise Dwyer and Arthur Kelly, who had, he said in a significant voice, “been in to see me.” As to lip cancer Mr. Sullivan, “You couldn’t hurt him with a tire iron.”

“A corker,” Gerry agreed.

Once my mother had deposited the beer in front of a greatly relieved Uncle Paul, Aunt Constance began to send in my cousins with a steady parade of dishes. Noticing my father, Paul nodded and said, “Harold.” Constance shooed the cousins along from close behind, with no effect on their speed at all but reinforcing her position as culinary benefactress. She kept her husband behind in the kitchen as a kind of factotum and sous-chef; besides, he wasn’t comfortable in what he not altogether humorously called Harp Central. He could have said it more clearly because no one cared what he said, all part of Constance’s disgrace: she would have enjoyed greater standing if she’d been gang-raped by a hurley squad.

I’m not sure my father enjoyed much esteem either, and I think he knew it. He was well educated, hardworking, and ambitious, yet something set him apart, as though he had renounced a portion of his humanity to achieve his current station and had, moreover, abducted the baby of the family, my mother, to a dreary and stunting world where people made themselves up and were vaguely weightless. I realized with dread that, at this funeral meal, he was likely to take a stand.

“I wonder where she is now,” Paul said, slurping his consommé.

“Where who is?” Walter asked coolly.

“Ma. Where Ma is.”

Dorothy covered her mouth.

“Ma is in heaven,” said Walter.

“You, as a man of science, say she is in heaven?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, good. I hear great things about the place.”

Kathleen made a covert rotary motion with her forefinger at her temple; then, fearing she’d been observed, she pretended to adjust one of the tubular curls. She wouldn’t look at me.

My father half rose from his chair, rather violently, shifting all attention to himself, as he reached across the table for a dish of lemons. “It’s been a long time since I had a chance to enjoy a swordfish steak!” This fell discordantly upon me and anyone else who’d heard his theory of the skillygallee.

My mother said, “Wonderfully done, Constance, a beautiful meal.” Constance gave a self-effacing curtsy. Dorothy stared at her food with white eyeholes and a half-opened mouth, and Gerry rubbed her back consolingly until she picked up her fork and prodded a parsnip. Since I eat too fast when I’m nervous, my mother put her hand on my forearm to slow me down. I looked up at her helplessly, wide-eyed.

Walter smiled all round and said, “This would be a good time to remember all the happy times we’ve had at this table, especially when Pa would have been in my place. We saw very little of Ma then. She just came and went from the kitchen, long enough to look after us. She sure looked after us, didn’t she? Generations of us. Me, Connie, Gerry, Mary, and you kids, right, Antoinette?”