Deena Goldstone - Tell Me One Thing

Already the house is filling up with noise and far too many people. There is Moira, talking nonstop, bossy as always, ushering her five children into the house with an admonition here and there to watch their manners, her husband, Robbie, bringing up the rear, his preferred place.

Then Hugh Jr.’s family spills out of their SUV parked at the curb. Tina, his long-suffering wife, having assessed her husband’s condition, is at the wheel. Hugh stumbles out of the passenger’s side as their four adult children make their desultory way up the front path, doing their best to ignore their embarrassing father.

Kevin and Loretta are already inside. Jamie can hear her chirpy voice exclaiming how beautiful the service was, how the words of Father Malachi lifted her soul, and the day, did you ever see a more beautiful April day?! God , Jamie thinks, doesn’t she ever get tired of being so relentlessly upbeat? Maybe that’s why Kevin has mastered his consistently negative take on almost everything — to have some breathing room of his own. They have three children, all boys, all athletes, one even in the minor league system of some major league baseball team. He’s the only one Kevin talks about, worrying constantly that Mark might suffer a career-ending injury and then what will he do?

Kate arrives with her two equally bored, but well-dressed, children. When Kate married up and moved to Atlanta, she shed her working-class identity as fast as she could say “I do.” Her husband refused to fly into Buffalo for the funeral. “Buffalo?” he said. “Why would I want to go to Buffalo?” And Kate was relieved. She didn’t want to spend the whole three days making excuses for the ways of her family.

Through the leaded glass windows of the dining room, Jamie can see Marianne bent over the heavy wooden table that served as the dinnertime battleground every night of their lives. She holds her youngest in one arm and rearranges platters with the other. She’s the only one who married smart , Jamie thinks. Everyone loves her husband, Kent, unassuming but solid, generous and slyly funny. They have a set of twins and two younger children, all under six.

As Jamie enters the crowded kitchen, he stands for a minute and takes stock of his extended family. Five married, but only one married well. Three single — Drew, Ellen, and himself. Is that about average for a large family , he wonders, one happy marriage out of eight? Are most members of large families victims of the same kind of train wreck that he now understands his family to have been? It’s possible that many families, large or small, are train wrecks, but he doesn’t know. Never close to forming a family of his own, never attaching himself as a surrogate member to any other family, he has had little to compare the O’Connors to. He knows only what he felt growing up in this cramped, chaotic house they all congregate in now. And he knows only because he has been away, because the perspective of the West Coast has let him see his early years with fresh eyes.

He believes he sees more than his brothers and sisters, but he doesn’t know what to do with this sight. Like everything else, he files it away and presents to the world a slightly bland facade, polite but not very approachable, competent but never impressive. It’s almost as if he used up all his intensity growing up and now lives in the narrow band of emotions that’s left over.

He can’t say the same for the rest of his siblings. Already, Hugh Jr.’s voice carries over the scores of others packed in the small kitchen, loud and insistent and more than a little drunk.

“You’re not listening to me!” he yells at Moira, who yells right back at him.

“Because you’re drunk and you’re not making any sense!”

“Who the hell are you to criticize me?!” Hugh yells before Tina is at his side, talking softly to him, trying to ease him out of the kitchen, but he’s having none of it.

“You can barely stand up — I thought you were going to topple into the open grave when you hefted that shovel! That’s what you wanted, isn’t it, locked in with Dad for all eternity?!”

“Shut up!” is yelled even louder than Moira’s elevated voice. This is from Drew, who has been leaning against the kitchen counter, downing beer after beer. “Don’t talk about Dad like that!”

“Why not?” And this is from Kate, who has dropped her bored and superior attitude and descended into the maddening, loud muddle that is the O’Connor clan arguing. Apparently, the urge to participate is irresistible. “You think he’s so powerful he can hear us from the grave?! You do, don’t you? You’ve never seen him for the small man he really was!”

“Who told you to come home?!” Drew screams at her as Jamie eases himself out of the hot and claustrophobic space and into the dining room.

Unbothered by the opera that’s taking place in the kitchen, the grandchildren are helping themselves to food — ham slices and a variety of precut cheeses, potato salad, a roast turkey that one of his sisters brought, probably Moira.

“The old man deserves some respect, this day of all days!” Jamie can hear Drew scream above the din and the answering hawking laugh from Moira.

And then Ellen is at his elbow. “Mom’s lying down. She asked for you,” she says quietly.

“Okay.” But he stops her before she can slip away, a hand on her brittle arm. Just eleven months between them and a shared tenderness for each other that couldn’t be expressed anywhere else in their chaotic house, Jamie and Ellen relied on each other. “Did you want to come back for this?” he asks her now.

She looks at him sharply. “It’s not a matter of want, is it?”

“Ellen, are things all right with you?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Who’s the woman with you?”

“Estella.”

“Come on, Ellen.”

And she knows exactly what he means— I didn’t ask her name, I need to know who she is to you —but Ellen shakes her head at him. “Someone I need right now” is all she says, is all she can say. Then, “Go on in to Mom. She’s waiting.”

INSIDE HIS PARENTS’ BEDROOM, the heavy drapes are drawn against the late afternoon light. Their old wooden bed, bought with Hugh’s first paycheck as a married man, is positioned against the far wall. When Jamie opens the door he immediately sees his mother lying on top of the spread, feet crossed at the ankles, her good shoes still on, a wrist over her closed eyes as if she has a headache. Even as Jamie closes the door, he can still hear the kitchen debate escalate further as Hugh gets drunker and Drew gets louder and Moira won’t let the boys bulldoze her.

Jamie sits beside his mother gently on the bed. “Do you have a headache?”

“I never believed this day would come.”

“What? You thought Dad was immortal?” Jamie says it with as much lightness in his voice as he can muster.

Carrie opens her eyes and looks at her best-loved son. “No, I was sure I would go before he did.”

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

She shakes her head back and forth — she doesn’t agree with him. Today her grief is too large to encompass.

“I need you to do something for me.”

“Anything, Mom.”

“Take his clothes. Take them out of here. Now. I can’t look at them hanging there while your father is in the ground.”

“All right, I will. Just tell me what you want me to do with—”

“Take them to St. Timothy’s,” she says as she rolls onto her side, away from him, away from what she knows will happen next. She can’t watch it. “They’ll give them to people in need.”

Jamie nods, but she can’t see him. He opens the closet door and stares at what’s in front of him. If someone didn’t know his father, he’d be able to guess a great deal from the clothes hanging there. All day long, for over fifty years, Hugh Sr. wore overalls and T-shirts for his work as a plumber, but when he dressed in his own clothes they had to be expensive and finely made. The clothes hanging in front of Jamie’s eyes seem fit for a man well above the station Hugh Sr. occupied in life. It was a startling aspect of his father — that he outfitted himself in such splendor and that he was so fastidious about his personal care. Jamie has memories of his father coming in from work and cleaning his hands in the mudroom sink, meticulously washing them over and over with his special soap and cleaning his nails with a brush he kept there just for that purpose.