William Kennedy - Very Old Bones

“I’ve been traveling.”

“It’s all right. We mustn’t dwell on maternal neglect. Tell me something important. How sure are you that my father is really my father?”

“Absolutely sure.”

“Manfredo had nothing to do with me?”

“Nothing.”

“He had something to do with you.”

“In a moment of weakness. You shouldn’t have seen that.”

“Where is he now? Do you still see him?”

“Not for fifteen years or more. He has palsy and can’t do his stage act anymore. He does card tricks at veterans’ hospitals.”

“Peter thinks Manfredo was the one. Nothing convinces him otherwise.”

“It’s his way, to be difficult.”

“He really is consistent about it.”

“I gave up trying to persuade him when you were a baby. Doesn’t he see how much you look like him? It’s quite uncanny, the resemblance.”

“His sister Molly tells him the same thing, but he refuses to believe.”

“It’s rotten that he still does this to you. And you’ve grown so handsome since I saw you last. Has he told you about all his women, how he even brought them home? He thought every man I knew was my lover, so that’s the way he behaved. A severe case of over-compensation if there ever was one. Is he still the king of tarts?”

“He sees several women. I don’t think they’re tarts.”

“Take a closer look.”

“It’s difficult getting close to him. I never even know what to call him. I’ve spent my whole life not calling him Dad. I don’t think he’d answer if I ever did call him that, or Pa, or Papa. I never call him anything.”

“It’s so depressing. The Phelans are crazed people. They always have been.”

“No more so than the rest of the world.”

“Oh yes. There’s a history of madmen in their past.”

“You’re making that up.”

“Get your father to tell you about his Uncle Malachi.”

“I’ve heard him mentioned, but not with any specifics. They don’t like to dredge him up.”

“Of course not. He was certifiable.”

“What did he do?”

“I’m not sure. But I know it wasn’t good for anybody’s health. Ask your father.”

She finished her Manhattan and touched a napkin to her lips, and I saw in her face beauty in decline, the artful makeup not quite camouflaging the furrows in her cheeks that I couldn’t remember seeing five years ago. She pushed her glass away and reached for her purse.

“I must dash, darling. I have a dinner party.”

“You’re such a butterfly, Mother. I didn’t even get to ask what I wanted to ask you.”

“Ask away.”

“It’s awkward.”

“You can ask me anything.”

“All right, anything. Can I move in with you? Temporarily. Peter works all hours of the day and night and I can’t sleep. It’s rather a small apartment.”

“Yes it is.”

“It truly is cramped.”

“I’m sure.”

“What do you think?”

“Oh darling, I don’t think so. I have any number of people coming through all the time. Friends, clients. You’d hate it.”

“Probably so.”

“You’re far better off with your father.”

“Perhaps that’s true.”

“Do you have money?”

“I can cover the drinks.”

She placed on the table, in front of me, a folded one-hundred-dollar bill she had been holding in her hand.

“Buy yourself a shirt. Something stylish.”

She stood up, leaned over, and kissed me on the cheek.

“And do get some rest,” she said. “You look worn out. Call me some night and we’ll have dinner.”

Dearest Moonflake,

I write you from the dregs of my father’s teapot. We live together in an armed camp, tea leaves and silence being our weapons of choice. Neither of us drink anymore, he out of fear that the rivers of hooch he has already drunk have given his muse cirrhosis, I because the jigsaw puzzle that is my life becomes increasingly difficult to solve when several pieces of the puzzle are invisible. You, for instance. It is coming onto six months, your contract is up, and when are you coming back?

I cheer your early photographic success from this remote bleacher seat, slowly gnawing away my own pericardium. I miss you with every inch of that bloody sack and all it contains. I live in a world without love, without affection, without joy. I have taken to sleeping for twenty-four-hour stretches whenever I can manage it, so as to lose a day and bring the time of your arrival closer. The job affords me small pleasure, but it does fill the hours with reading that does not remind me of my own inability to write. The author I’m editing is a micturator of language, a thirsty, leaky puppy whose saving quality is his cautionary, unstated message to me never to write out of the ego; in exalting himself he wets the bed, the floor, the ceiling below.

I finally visited with Mother Belinda this week. We met for a drink and I examined her being and found her in full, late-blooming flower, not that she hadn’t bloomed in earlier seasons, but now she has the advantage of looking as young as she was in the previous blossom, quite an achievement for the old girl. She is utterly without guilt concerning her abandoned child and husband. She thinks him mad, and though I would also like to judge him so, I cannot; and she thinks me “scattered,” which I suppose is how I appear to those unable to perceive any purpose in my chaos. There is purpose, of course. .

It was at this point, while pacing the room and considering how to value my chaos on paper, that I went downstairs to the mailbox and found Giselle’s letter. It was brief: “Dearest Orson, I’m arriving at Idlewild Tuesday at 3 p.m. on Air France. Please meet me with love. Life magazine wants me to work for them. Thrilling?”

The letter was six days in arriving, and so I had only one day to make the apartment livable. My stomach was suddenly full of acid, my head ached, I was weary to the point of collapse, and relentlessly sleepy.

I began moving things, carrying a three-foot standing file of Peter’s finished and unfinished canvases out of my bedroom and into his studio, which may once have been a living room. Tubes of paint, boxes of tubes, jars of old brushes, boxes of jars, table sculptures, easels, palettes, rolls of canvas, and half-made frames had also spilled into my room from the studio. Whatever the artist used or created eventually found its way into every corner and closet, onto every table and shelf in the four-room apartment. He threw away nothing.

I swept the floor, washed dirty dishes, hid dirty laundry, stacked my scatter of books and manuscripts, made up the sofa bed on which I slept and which I would give to Giselle for sleeping. I would sleep on the floor, use the throw rug and two blankets as a mattress, it’ll be fine; and Giselle and I would reconsummate our marriage on the sofa bed, wide enough for one-on-one, wide enough for love. We’d often done it in more cramped accommodations.

“What the hell happened here?” Peter asked when he entered the apartment, finding his studio devoid of disorder and dustballs, his own bed in the corner of the studio made with fresh pillowcase, clean sheet turned down with precision, blanket tucked army style.

“My wife is coming home,” I said.

“Home? You call this home?”

“What else would I call it?”

“Anything but home.”

“It’s not your home?”

“Colonie Street is my home. This is my studio.”

“Your studio is my home. I have no other.”

“But it’s not your wife’s home.”

“Home is where I hang my hat and my wife,” I said.

“That remains to be seen,” Peter said. “You know she can’t live here.”

“Why not? There’s plenty of room.”