William Kennedy - Very Old Bones

Tommy nodded yes.

“Where’d you learn to do that business with the cane?”

“Charlie,” Tommy said.

“Who?” said Sarah.

“I’ll handle it,” Chick said. “Charlie who?”

“Charlie, the movies.”

“Charlie, Charlie. Charlie Ruggles? Charlie Chan?”

“No,” said Tommy.

“Charlie Grapewin? Charlie McCarthy?”

“No, Charlie with the derby,” Tommy said.

“Charlie Chaplin he means,” Molly said.

“Right. Charlie Chaplin,” Tommy said.

“You saw him do that with a cane?” Chick asked.

“People laughed when he did it. People liked what Charlie did,” Tommy said.

“When’d you see him do that?”

“Saw it with you.”

“Me?” Chick said. “I haven’t seen Charlie Chaplin since the 1920s, silent movies.”

“Down at the Capitol,” Tommy said. “You and me, we saw Charlie, and everybody liked what he did. They laughed. We liked him, you and me did, Chick.”

“Jesus,” Chick said. “He sees somethin’ in the movies and then imitates it twenty-five, thirty years later. I do remember Chaplin used to do that with his cane. Did it all the time. It was funny.”

“It was not,” Sarah said. “Don’t you dare encourage him. It’s a filthy thing he did to her, even if she isn’t any good.”

“There’s nothing wrong with her,” Molly said. “She’s always pleasant to us.”

“She has men in, what I hear.”

“She’s single, what’s wrong with that?”

“I don’t want to talk about it any longer,” Sarah said. “You come upstairs with me, young man.”

“What’re you gonna do?” Chick said.

“I’m going to punish him.”

“Let him alone, won’t ya? He’s scared to death already.”

“You want him to do it again?”

“No, of course I don’t.”

“Then he has to be taught a lesson.”

“He’s scared,” Molly said. “He wet his pants.”

“Get off the love seat,” Sarah said. “Go upstairs and change. You’re a bad boy.”

Tommy quickstepped through the back parlor and went up the back stairs. Chick and Molly exchanged smiles as Sarah went up the front stairs.

“Brazen boy,” Molly said.

“Sixty-three-year-old brazen boy,” Chick said.

There is a photograph taken of Molly by Giselle in early September, 1954, sitting on the porch of the Grand View Lake House on Saratoga Lake, cupping a bird in her hands. She is looking with an oblique glance at the camera, a small smile visible at the corners of her mouth but not in her eyes. The photo is black and white and arrests the viewer with its oddness and its mystery: first the bird, a cedar waxwing whose tan, yellow, and red colors are not discernible, but whose black facial mask is vivid; and then the puzzling expression on the face of this obviously once-beautiful woman in her sixty-fifth year.

A facile interpretation of the photo is that the woman is perhaps saddened by the fact that the bird is injured, for it must be injured or else it would fly away. But this interpretation is not accurate. The memories and secrets that the bird evoked in Molly were what put the smile on her lips and the solemnity in her eyes; and it was this contradiction that Giselle captured in the picture, again proving her talent for recognizing the moment of cryptic truth in people she chose to photograph. Molly had been declining into melancholia before the photo was taken, the onset of decline dating back to the day Tommy was arrested for imitating Charlie Chaplin

On that day, after the policeman left the Phelan home, Tommy went up to his bedroom to remove the underpants that his terror had caused him to wet. In the front parlor, Chick, awash in anger, pity, frustration, anxiety, and other emotions too convoluted to define in a single word, straightened his necktie, snatched up his seersucker sports jacket, and announced to Molly that he was going to dinner and a movie with Evelyn, goddamn it, and maybe he’d be home later and maybe he wouldn’t.

When Chick left, a sudden isolation enveloped Molly: alone again in the company of Sarah, who could raise at will the barricades between herself and the rest of the family: a perverse strength in the woman to do what no one else wanted done but was always done nevertheless. Sarah would spank Tommy, as her mother had spanked all the children for their transgressions of rule. Tommy would cry openly, would wail and sob in his imposed shame, imposed because he was incapable of generating shame in himself, was without the guile, or the moral imperatives that induced it in others, was, in fact, a whole and pure spirit who had had the Commandments, and the punishment for transgressing them, slapped into his buttocks for six decades, but who still had no more understanding of them than when he was an infant. All he knew was that he should avoid the prohibited deeds that provoked spankings. Raising a woman’s skirt with a cane had never been prohibited, but now he would realize he could never do it again. Now, truly; for his crying had begun and Molly knew Sarah was at her work.

The situation was old, Molly’s guilt was old, the themes that provided the skeleton of the events taking place this minute were older than Molly herself, and she was sick of them all, sick of her helplessness in the face of them. She heard the sobs and loathed them. It was like kicking a dog for chasing a bitch in heat. Tommy had instincts that no amount of punishment would turn aside; they would always find a new outlet. But what of your instincts, Molly? Did you ever find another outlet for your stunted passion? It seems you did not, alas. No future for it. Animal with instincts amputated. But no. They were still there. Orson had raised them again last year, had he not? Bright and loving young man, prodding your memory of pleasure, revisiting feelings long in their grave. Orson is Peter’s. Even Chick said he probably was. “Orson,” Chick said, “anytime you need a place to hang your hat you’re welcome here.” Chick so easygoing, the trouble she gives him. He said he was sick of this stinking street. I know he was going to say this stinking house too, and this stinking family. These stinking brothers and sisters. Chick doesn’t mean it.

But he does.

We all do.

Molly laid her head back on the sofa and closed her eyes to shut out Tommy’s sobbing and Sarah’s screaming. She tried to replace those sounds with the face of Walter as he stood tall before her, waiting for her kiss, expecting it, inviting it. Walter loves Molly’s kisses. Loved. Don’t pity yourself, Molly Remember poor Julia, dead at twenty-two, Julia who never knew passion, Julia who was kissed by boys twice in twenty-two years and neither kiss meant any more than a penny’s worth of peppermints. I was truly kissed, Julia. Your sister knew kisses and love and more. Much more. Never again. Other things. Never again.

Molly plunged into the blackest part of her memory to hide, to shut out the thoughts that were coming back now. So much wrong. So many evil things the result of love. Why should it be that we are gifted with love and then the consequences are so. .

Tommy squealed and Molly rose up from her black depths, sat upright on the sofa, heard the squeal a second time, a third, the squeal of an animal in agony, and she was racing up the stairs in seconds toward the wretched sounds. She saw Tommy face down on his bed, Sarah striking his naked buttocks — she had never hit him naked before, never; nobody was ever hit naked, ever — her hand coming down again and again with the two-foot rule (and Molly saw that Sarah was hitting him not with the rule’s flatness but with its wide edge and screaming, “filthy boy, brazen boy, filthy boy, brazen boy”), the Tommy squeals and Sarah screams beyond Molly’s endurance.