William Kennedy - Very Old Bones

Molly looked in the pantry and the refrigerator, reported back, “No mint jelly, I’m sorry, Billy.”

“There’s mint jelly in the cellar,” I said, and I took the flashlight, opened the trapdoor, and found dusty jars of mint jelly and strawberry jam.

“Sarah put those up,” Molly said, “after the war. We got the strawberries from Tony Looby’s store, and Sarah grew the mint out in the yard.”

“You certainly know your way around this house,” Peg said to me. “How’d you know they were down there?”

“I was fixing something one day and I saw this stuff.”

“This house would fall apart if it wasn’t for Orson,” Molly said. “He also kept the Lake House from collapsing around its own ears. Orson is a treasure.”

“Just waiting to be dug up and spent,” I said.

“You’ll never be spent, Orson,” Giselle said.

“Oooh-la-la,” said Peg, and everyone looked at Giselle, who smiled at me.

“Orson,” said Peter, “take control of your wife.”

“I would prefer not to,” I said. “I like her the way she is.”

“We’re ready to eat,” said Molly, coming in from the kitchen with the potatoes, hot from the oven.

And then, one by one, we sat where Peter placed us, and we were seven, clockwise: Peter sitting where his father had always sat, in the northernmost chair in the room, the first formal resumption of the patriarchal seating arrangement since Michael Phelan died in 1895; Giselle next to Peter to have the impending grandchild in the closest possible proximity to the grandfather, then Roger, Peg, me, Molly in Sarah’s chair (her mother’s before it was hers) nearest the kitchen, and Billy at Peter’s right, completing the circle.

Giselle’s pâté, Camembert, and English biscuits lay in tempting array on the sideboard, forgotten, and alien, really, to the cuisine of this house. But we made ready to devour Sarah’s mint jelly on Molly’s leg of lamb, with the marvelous gravy made from the drippings, small new peas out of the can, the best kind, potatoes mashed by Peg (she said Billy mashed them better), bread by Peg out of the Federal, and the two bottles of the rich and robust Haut-Brion 1934 (a momentous year for both the Bordeaux and the Phelans) that the extravagant Giselle had brought. Peter contributed the saying of grace, which he pronounced as follows: “Dig in now or forever hold your fork.”

I suggest that this luncheon was the consequence of a creative act, an exercise of the imagination made tangible, much the same as the writing of this sentence is an idea made visible by a memoirist. If Peter brought it about, I here create the record that says it happened. If, through the years, I had been slowly imagining myself acquiring this family, then this was its moment of realization, and perhaps the redirection of us all.

I think of Peter’s creative act (though I am not so modest as to deny my own contribution to the events) as independent of his art, a form of atonement after contemplating what wreckage was left in the wake of the behavior of the males in the family: Malachi’s lunacy, Michael’s mindless martyring of Sarah, Francis’s absence of so many years, the imploding Chick, Peter’s own behavior as son, husband, father: in sum, a pattern of abdication, or flight, or exile, with the women left behind to pick up the pieces of fractured life: a historic woman like Kathryn, an avant-garde virgin renegade like Molly, a working girl like Peg, and, to confirm this theory with an anomaly, there is the case of Giselle.

“I have to say it,” Roger said. “This is the most unusual lunch I’ve ever been to.”

“Perfectly normal little meal,” Peter said. “Last will and testament with lamb gravy.”

“Those here, we’ve never sat down together like this before, never,” Molly said.

“That’s hard to believe,” said Roger. “You look like such a close family.”

“Get your eyes examined,” Billy said.

“Don’t mind my brother,” Peg said. “He’s a perpetual grump.”

“What this gathering is,” I said, looking at Roger, also at Peg to discover where her eyes went, “is the provisional healing of a very old split in this family.”

“What’s that mean, provisional?” Billy asked.

“For the time being,” I said. “More to come later. Like having the first horse in the daily double.”

“Yeah,” said Billy.

“And it’s about time,” Molly said. “We should have done this years ago.”

“The point is it’s done,” said Peg. “I love you for it, Uncle Peter,” she said, and she blew him a kiss.

“I’m not takin’ the money,” Billy said.

Peter looked my way, caught my eye, chuckled. I’d predicted that Billy would say this.

“Don’t be hasty, now, Billy,” said Peter.

“Don’t be stupid, you mean,” said Peg.

“The hell with stupid,” Billy said. “My father couldn’t live here, I don’t want no money outa here.”

“It’s Francis’s money as much as it’s mine,” Peter said. “I made it in good measure because of him.”

“I showed you those photos,” I said to Billy, “ The Itinerant series, and you know Francis inspired that. Peter only painted it.” Peter gave me a sharp look. Nothing worse than an ungrateful child.

“And Malachi’s face is the face of Francis in the new paintings. You’ve seen that for yourself,” Peter said. “And that’s where the money for these bequests really came from.”

“So you paint his picture? What the hell is that? He wasn’t welcome here and all these years neither were we.”

“I came here plenty of times,” Peg said.

“I didn’t, and neither did he,” Billy said.

“You’re gonna ruin it,” Peg said. “You’ll be like Sarah, spoiling it for everybody else.”

“I ain’t spoilin’ nothin’ wasn’t spoiled years ago,” Billy said.

“Have some mint jelly, Billy,” said Molly. “Sweeten your disposition.”

“I’m sayin’ my father never got nothin’ outa this house and neither did we, and I don’t want nothin’ now.”

“You told me Molly gave you gold on your birthday,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“And she gave me gold too,” Peg said.

“You know where I got that gold, Billy?” Molly asked.

“You never said.”

“You remember Cubby Conroy?”

“I remember his kid, Johnny,” Billy said. “They shot him over highjacked booze and dumped him in the gutter.”

“Cubby was a good friend of your father’s. They grew up together on this block.” Molly paused, looked at Roger. “Mr. Dailey,” she said, “do lawyers keep secrets?”

“If they don’t, they’re not very good lawyers.”

“I can’t tell my story unless you keep it a secret.”

“I’ll carry it silently to my grave,” Roger said.

“Good,” said Molly. “Cubby Conroy was a bootlegger.”

“Right,” said Billy. “He was also a con man. He and Morrie Berman got badges and flashed them at Legs Diamond and convinced him they were dry agents. They almost copped a truckload of his booze before he caught on.”

“I did hear that,” Molly said. “And then somebody shot Cubby. Perhaps it was Mr. Diamond, who was upset by what they did.”

“Maybe so. Diamond was like that. But how do you know all this tough stuff?”

Billy was smiling, and I marveled at the way Molly had turned him around so quickly. She was wonderful at human relationships and I loved her.

“Well, you know, don’t you,” Molly said, “that they killed Cubby up in Glens Falls in one of those roadhouses. Then they killed Johnny, and the only one left was Charity, Cubby’s widow, who had a collapse of some sort, afraid they’d come after her, I suppose, or maybe just living alone and drinking alone. I used to cook her a dinner every day and bring it over, but it didn’t help much. She got sicker and sicker and one day she told me she had this bootleg money she wanted me to have. All her relatives were dead, she didn’t know where Cubby’s people were, but wherever they were she hated them, and so the money was mine. I thanked her a whole lot and took it home.”