William Kennedy - Very Old Bones

When Malachi heard these revelations he immediately undertook a thorough but surreptitious study of his wife, and for the first time he realized that she had shrunk in height by four inches, that the mark on her left thigh could well be an extra nipple. He remembered that she brought a succubus to their bed and encouraged him to copulate with it until he was bloody. Also, Crip swore to him that, on the night he watched Lizzie dancing on the Neighbors’ hill, her partner, the shadowy creature, had the webbed feet of a goose.

And so Malachi made ready to launch his counterattack against the demon (and all its hellish consorts) that inhabited his wife’s body.

As the time grows closer for it, I’m becoming obsessed by the fact that Giselle is coming here, and that my life is about to change yet again. She now tells me she’s pregnant, and that she didn’t plan it. It’s July, she’s two months gone, and I did it to her in May, she says, when she came up to take the final photo of Peter for the Life profile she did on him. She was here all weekend, we went at it in my room, what, two, three times? And bingo! She left then to travel for two months, and I didn’t hear from her until last night, when she said she’d be up today, with an enhanced womb, for the family meeting Peter had invited her to attend.

She also told me that, after five years of it, she’s had enough and is leaving Life— as soon as she finishes her current project. She’ll have a baby, then free-lance, giving Life first look at whatever she photographs. She no longer wants to be at the beck and call of magazine editors, now says she’s willing to rejoin the nuptial bed, which she’d hinted at when last we bathed in the steam of our malfunctional wedlock.

I’d often given her my spiel, that the quotidian life is the most important element of our existence, and although she didn’t accept that in the early days of our marriage, she now says I was right, that a career is indispensable, but it makes for a very sterile life if that’s all there is. She says she envies me the family ties, and that she’s come to understand she and I might be divorced now if it weren’t for Molly.

Of course I don’t believe much of what Giselle says. Such conversions are for minds more simple than hers. It will be a major change having her with me all the time, but it is true that she’s grown closer to the family since the Life profile on Peter, and the book project that grew out of it. Walker Pettijohn suggested an art book on Peter, a book suitable for coffee tables, with Giselle doing the photos, me doing text blocks plus interviews with the artist (he thought the father-son link would enhance the book’s appeal, but I pointed out to him the awkward disparity in our names), and a critic yet to be chosen analyzing Peter’s work and putting it in historical perspective. Such is the man’s fame, now that he’s close to death (though not yet moribund), that this was one of four book offers prompted by the Life article. Peter has managed to jump through the flaming hoop of high art and come out the other side as a potential creature of the popular imagination.

I was still at the dining-room table, cheating at cards for Billy’s amusement, when I heard Peter’s hoarse voice call me.

“Orson, can you come up?”

And so I excused myself and went up. Peter was in bed, just reawakened after a mid-morning nap. He’d had his matinee with Adelaide, then attacked his easel until fatigue pulled him back to his pillow. He looked tousled and very old for his seventy-one years, his gray-haired torso going to bone, his hair and mustache almost solid white, and more scraggly than usual.

When I entered his bedroom he was sitting on the side of the bed gripping the sturdy blackthorn walking stick Michael Phelan had bought in Ireland. His room, the same one he’d slept in all his life in this house, was full of books, newspapers, and three unfinished sketches, this being his pattern: to keep incomplete work at his bedside, study it before sleep, and wake perhaps to find a solution that would let him complete it. I thought he might now be ready for a second go at the work-in-progress, but he had another plan.

“Anybody here yet?” he asked.

“Just Billy and myself.”

“So you nailed him.”

“He’s here but he’s itchy to leave.”

“Keep his curiosity aroused and he’ll stay.”

“That’s what I’m doing.”

“Get him to help you move some paintings downstairs.”

“He’s got a cast on his foot.”

“How’d he get here? You carry him?”

“He can walk.”

“If he can walk he can climb stairs.”

“Which paintings do you want?”

“ The Dance, The Conspiracy , and The Protector. ”

“Not the new one?”

“No, I don’t want to shock them. Maybe later. Those’ll do for what I have to say.”

“Done.”

I called Billy and he hobbled upstairs immediately. I took him through the rooms, which he hadn’t seen since the day Sarah went crazy because Molly left her alone. Billy and Molly then had to repair all Sarah’s damage and chaos, and that was the first Billy had ever been above the ground floor. He’d told me more than once he never wanted anything to do with the house, or its people, after his father’s experience, the exception being Molly, who always gave him five dollars in birthday gold, as she gave others in the family. Like most people who knew her, Billy projected a ray of love toward Molly “Good old dame,” he called her. He liked to tease her about her hemorrhoids, a problem he also lived with.

“Christ, what a wreck this joint is,” Billy said when he came upstairs.

“It’s not a wreck. It’s an artist’s studio, all of it except my room and Molly’s. And he’s even moving things into her room, now that she’s not using it.”

“Molly’s not livin’ here no more?”

“Not for months. She’s up at Saratoga with the Shugrues, living in the rooms I used to live in. She couldn’t take care of Peter, couldn’t go up and down the stairs twenty times a day. She’s got all she can do to take care of herself these days, and so we swapped rooms. I came here, she went there. Alice Shugrue’s her best friend in the world, great company for her.”

“I didn’t know Molly was sick. I don’t hear what goes on.”

“She’s not sick, just weary. She’s in good enough shape that she’s cooking lunch for us. You like roast lamb?”

“Are you kiddin’?”

“Good.”

“What’s this lunch business all about?”

“About all the Phelans, and their ancestors.”

“Not interested.”

“Don’t be so quick, Billy. We need you, and I really mean that. We need what you know.”

“I don’t know nothin’ you don’t know.”

“You know about your father. You know when he came home in ’42, and what he did. I don’t know any of that. I was in the army already. You see what I’m saying?”

“I see what you’re sayin’, but I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. What’s my father got to do with anything?”

So I showed him all my photos of The Itinerant series, in which Francis played the central role. I told him how Francis showed up all of a sudden, then fought with Sarah, and how Peter tracked him down and asked him to come back, and that I saw this with my own eyes.

“But he didn’t come back,” Billy said.

“No. He kept walking. He didn’t come back to stay till the war. Do you know whether he ever came here in the war period?”

“He wouldn’t put a foot on the stoop.”

“Did he ever talk to Peter, or Molly, or Chick, or anybody?”