Authors: Doreen Finn
CHAPTER 5
T
he solicitor’s letter is a surprise. I’ve been expecting a phone call, a summons to a dry office in a Georgian house, where I’d sit on my hands watching cars on the street outside and the last of the Spanish students meandering along the paths. Not so. The embossed envelope sits imperiously on the hall mat, a relic of times past.
My mother’s solicitor requests a meeting with Maude and me, at our convenience, to read her will and put her estate to rights. Her estate. I could almost laugh if I wasn’t so wary.
I don’t expect much. Given my mother’s ardent lack of affection for me, I can’t presume upon her changing her mind at the last minute and leaving me her worldly goods. I don’t know if she had savings, or anything of worth beyond the house. A couple of years ago and it would have sold for a couple of million. Obscene, the amounts paid for houses. And now look at it all.
It’s unfathomable how little I knew of her, how far she kept herself from me. I, in turn, learned to keep myself from her, to turn away from questions, avert my face when doors were opened. I liked windows, because my mother’s face wasn’t at them.
If I hadn’t been so terrified of her, I could have learned to hate her.
Maude is nervous about the meeting. Her arthritis is acting up again so the solicitor has agreed to make a house call.
‘This is highly irregular, you know,’ his desiccated secretary advised coldly over the phone when I rang her. ‘Mr Bergin is a very busy man, not a family doctor.’ I imagine her, all rules and rigidity, upright and uptight at her keyboard.
My mother would not have allowed such an attitude. I, on the other hand, meekly accepted the dictum of the frosty female, unwilling to enter into an argument with a woman so much older and more experienced in life than me.
No wonder my mother walked all over me. I allowed myself to be the mat upon which she wiped the feet of her disdain. I was too afraid not to.
My brother never understood what it was like for me with her. He tried, but he couldn’t have known how I shrank from our mother and her loathing. She loved him, Andrew, her beautiful son. Maybe
love
is too strong a word for what my mother was capable of feeling, but in her own isolated way she was obsessed with my brother. The crumbs of affection I sought never fell my way.
Mr Bergin is due to arrive this morning. Maude came upstairs an hour ago to ‘tidy up’. I watch her push the sweeping brush over the wooden floorboards, run a duster over the visible surfaces.
Her arm is warm, soft under my hand. ‘Maudie, sit down. I’ll do this.’
She shakes her head. No.
‘At least let me help.’
‘I’m quicker on my own,’ she insists, pausing to wipe her forehead with the back of her hand. Her fingertips tremble. It’s another scorcher of a day, more like New York in September than dreary old Dublin. The hall door is wide open, but no air stirs and the heat hangs heavily around us. Outside, the day is yellow, stagnant with humidity. My linen shirt sticks to my back and I tug at it. I need more clothes. In my rush I only packed enough for a couple of weeks.
‘Maybe we should hire someone,’ I suggest.
Maude’s face is a still life of disbelief. ‘Do you mean pay someone to clean the house?’
‘Why not?’
‘Esther would never have allowed it.’ Maude starts sweeping again, her vigour pointed, exaggerated. ‘Never. We do our own housework.’
‘But you’re 89, Maude.’ And Esther is no longer here to decide things.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ She glares at me.
I shrug. ‘Nothing. It doesn’t mean a thing. But maybe you should think about paying someone to come in and do your housework. That’s all.’
‘I suppose that’s the way they do it in New York.’ She almost sniffs with disapproval.
It is, actually. My apartment is a shoebox, but I have Isabel, a Dominican girl who comes in once a week to clean. I felt slightly guilty the first time she arrived, five years ago, but I got over it quickly. Isabel earns her money, and I am happy to pay her. She used to clean for Isaac. He gave me her number.
It’s funny, but I still pick up the phone when it rings, thinking it will be him. Which is crazy, of course, because Isaac has no idea where I live in Dublin, or even that I’m here. I was vague in my request for a sabbatical, and he was in no position to argue or to question what I would do with the time. Of course, he bent rules to allow my late application, probably had to justify it to someone above him, but it’s not my worry. Our correspondence was conducted via email and by letters slipped under his office door as I exited the building. I denied him a meeting with me, a chance to explain. He was too happy to oblige me, too guilty to say no. Someone will replace me easily, probably a postdoctoral researcher eager for some experience.
‘Maude, I’ll pay. But I think you should consider it.’
She sweeps past me, all 89 years of her.
I know she’s just trying to fill the time till Mr Bergin confirms what my mother’s will contains. She’s worried. Maude has no home of her own. Her husband gambled everything they owned, leaving her homeless, destitute, when he died at 58 of a heart attack. She has nothing to worry about. My mother will surely leave her the house. Eventually I’ll go back to New York, to my job, my research. Easy though it is to breathe with my mother not around, this isn’t home. Not this shiny city, this receptacle of half-finished buildings, the place from which I ran.
Maude has been up since dawn, pruning, weeding, picking herbs and now cleaning the house. It’s only ten o’clock, and I would still be in bed if it weren’t for this meeting. I am a spiderweb of pain, that vague all-body ache that results from drinking too much late into the night. I finished off the congealed contents of the drinks tray in the living room, smoked some of the weed I smuggled accidentally in the bottom of my suitcase, a tiny packet left over from God knows when. I don’t even know how it got into my case. I passed out on the floor as dawn silvered the sky and slipped in through the window. Maude’s key in the hall door roused me. I’d wanted to get up when I heard her, but I couldn’t lift my cheek from the carpet. She didn’t say a word about it, but I still felt grubby for being that way in front of her, as though I were a teenager and drinking against parental wishes. Maybe if she came out and confronted me, insisted that I have a problem, it might be easier. But I come from a house where nothing is confronted head-on, problems are discussed in hushed tones behind closed doors, and voices brighten when the subject of the conversation comes into the room. This house is well practised in discretion. It holds its secrets like port in a corked bottle.
It makes it easier for me to drink and get high.
Mr Bergin arrives in a flurry of tidiness. He is small, neat and compact. Utterly trustworthy, which I suppose is why my mother chose him. He busies himself with files and sheaves of paper, while Maude fusses with a heavy silver tray of tea and sliced cake. It won’t make any difference whether we feed the solicitor or not, but Maude isn’t like me. I remove the antique tray from her grip and place it onto the dining room table. My hands on her shoulders, I manoeuvre her into a chair before dropping onto one myself.
A headache sighs somewhere in the back of my skull. I pull at a thread on the tablecloth. I wish I could lay my head down and sleep until this whole gathering is over.
I’m exhausted. My hair is bundled into a knot at the back of my head, and I’m thinner than I’ve been in a long time. I’m running every day to keep myself from thinking too much, but I do know that what I long for is to escape into the cool, scented spaces in poetry. I don’t want to be here, in this hot room, waiting to hear how my mother is laughing at me from another dimension.
Maude is bright, expectant, but it’s just a disguise. I’ve watched her today, seen how she smoothes her hair, brushes invisible wrinkles from her clothes. The tremor in her hand raises its level of activity, and I see her calming it with the other hand, hiding it. Mr Bergin won’t judge her on how she looks, but it’s the small actions that keep her busy, stop her mind from wandering into substandard care homes for the elderly who cannot afford anything else. I understand her fear and the shapes it takes inside her head, but I also know she’ll be provided for. My mother may not have cared what happened to me, but Maude was the most important person in her life.
I attempted to reassure her. ‘I’m the one who’ll be left out, Maude. You’ll be fine. You’ve nothing to worry about.’
‘But Esther died suddenly. I don’t know if her will was up to date, if she even had a will.’ Maude had retied her apron, thumbed a mark on the kitchen table.
Mr Bergin now shuffles the papers and makes a tidy stack on the table. His smile is expectant as he regards us. ‘Well, ladies, I do wish we were meeting under happier circumstances, but Mrs Perry has been exceptionally clear in her wishes, so this won’t take too long.’ He pats the papers. ‘Let us commence. Maude Mary Gilmartin?’
Maude nods and tucks an imaginary strand of hair behind her ear. Her bun is tightly wound at the back of her head. She keeps her eyes on Bergin.
‘Eva Catherine Perry?’
This is ridiculous. He’s not selecting a jury.
‘Eva?’ He raises his eyebrows.
I pull at the thread on the tablecloth. The pipes gurgle upstairs. One of the window shutters hasn’t been secured and it creaks slightly. This house is full of noises. ‘Here.’
‘Good, good.’
I want to focus on what this man has to say, but it’s so difficult. The room is too warm, despite the open windows. The hot air hangs heavy and thick around us. The flowers Maude picked earlier are already wilting. Two petals lie on the sideboard like two yellow commas. Mr Bergin talks about the will and its codicils. I rub my temples and sip the tea Maude has placed in front of me. I pick at the fruit cake.
‘... and most importantly, the house.’
Details of my mother’s modest savings have slipped by me, but I am alert now.
The house is for me. The house is for me under the strictest condition that Maude will live here for as long as she likes or until her death. As though I would suggest anything else. Maude covers her face with her hands. ‘Thank you, God, thank you, Esther,’ she says, over and over. The room is flooded with her relief. It pools on the polished wood of the table, runs over the edges. I reach across and touch her arm. She grips my hand tightly and squeezes her eyes shut.
Thank you, God.
I don’t think God has much to do with it to be honest, but for once I choose to keep this particular view to myself. I don’t think God has much to do with anything, really.
I should have reassured Maude earlier. The one person my mother had looked after was Maude. Maybe it was because they were both widows, or maybe it was something more, but my mother had loved Maude. It made her less of a monster I suppose, although it didn’t deter her from fucking me up completely.
Isaac used to complain that I lived at an emotional remove from him. How I laughed at his Central Park West psychoanalytical pretensions. I was having an affair with a married man, wasn’t I? Not
affair,
my love, was his reply. A
relationship.
We’re having a
relationship.
It turns out, after all that, that it was only an affair. For him, anyway. And how I’d loved him.
Yet now I have a house in Dublin, where I don’t particularly want to be, and I can’t sell it because of Maude. So I suppose my mother did get one last dig at me. This house is not the keeper of a happy childhood. It does not sing out its welcome. I don’t rest easily here.
We say our goodbyes to Mr Bergin on the doorstep and watch as he climbs into his shiny black car and backs it carefully out onto the main road.
Maude still looks stressed. I take her arm gently.
‘Come on, Maude. Make me a cocktail.’
I know it’s far too early to start drinking, but maybe I’ll just have one. I need one, if only to help me smoothe out the tangles in my head, all those shrieking dervishes that won’t let me be.
CHAPTER 6
S
o. My choice is clear. New York, or something constructive in Dublin. A job, preferably. Something short-term. My mother’s funeral was nearly three weeks ago, and now I’m in the lingering phase of my return. Time to get proactive, make decisions. My ticket is open-ended, so I have options, but inertia keeps its nails digging into me, dragging me down.
A girl I know, a research fellow, wants somewhere to stay for a few months, maybe longer. I can sublet my place to her and cover my rent. I reply to her email before I have time to ponder. My place is hers, all 500 square feet of it, caught between the warring Puerto Ricans on one side and the Dominicans on the other. From my fifth-floor window I can lean out and see the Latter Day Saints’ meeting house on the corner of First Avenue and Second Street, the second-hand bookstore next door, the bodega run by a Cuban widow and her disabled son. Graffiti tags sprayed on the dingy redbrick by kids from the projects on Avenue D do nothing to lessen the appeal for me. A Latino man with a squeegee and a bucket balanced on a length of wood across his shoulders cleans the walls, the doors, day after day. I don’t know who employs him. Hardly the city. But he is there, every day, dutifully erasing the giant penises and cartoon breasts left there most nights by the disaffected kids with time on their hands and no better way to expend their anger. There is nothing in Dublin that could even vaguely rival the multihued vibrancy of the East Village. I console myself with the reminder of how much quieter it is. I don’t wake at night to metal bins being thrown around as homeless men fight over someone else’s discarded food, don’t worry about being caught on the subway in the wrong neighbourhood at the wrong time. The consolation is meagre, but in this moment it distracts me.
Early evening settles its folds lightly around me. Maude is at her bridge game, and I’m alone in the garden. September is almost gone, yet summer is taking its time in leaving, procrastinating in warm, still days and orange sunsets. The house glows red in the dissipating light. I neck a bottle of beer.
I’m drinking way too much. I know there’s a meeting I could go to, but I lack the conviction. I’ve been through it all many times, the meetings, the sponsors, but I always return to the welcoming embrace of booze.
I was 16 when I first got drunk. I’d heard my mother go to bed, and the house was quiet except for the noises in my head. My brother had been dead two weeks and I hadn’t slept properly since. I couldn’t bring myself to speak his name to my mother. I couldn’t stop his name being shouted out loud in my imagination, and I slid out of bed and crept down the stairs, thinking I might leave the house, wander away forever into the ebony night. Disappear, just like my brother had done.
I remember it was dark, and how strange it felt, being up while my mother slept. The front room had some light from outside, and the drinks tray with its modest contents sat on the small table in the corner, where it still sits. Same tray, almost the same selection of bottles.
The sherry looked cloudy and reminded me of my mother sipping tightly from a tiny glass on Sundays and at Christmas, one inch in the bottom of the glass lasting her the whole evening, afraid of being loosened by one drop more. I chose the brandy and drank it straight from the bottle. It burned the back of my throat, forced tears into my eyes, and I almost choked on its strength. I coughed into a cushion so my mother, upstairs in bed, wouldn’t hear me, then drank again. Despite its fire the brandy tasted familiar, like something I’d been waiting my whole life to try. When it hit my bloodstream it slowed me, quieted my brother’s name to a whisper, steadied me. I sipped till the fire in my throat was unbearable, forcing me to put the bottle down. Something drove me, something I couldn’t comprehend, and still don’t. My mother had a brother who drank himself to death before I was born. Maybe I’m like him. Maybe there is flux between generations, rogue genes hijacked on the DNA highway and carried on. Maybe.
Almost accidentally I’d found something that helped me. Something that worked. And it was so simple. For the first few months it was easy to restrain myself. Fear of being caught stifled even the strongest urges to drink. Just the thought of my mother’s rage tipping over me was enough to keep me from emptying every bottle in the house. Eventually, of course, I stopped caring. I did it all: watered down the contents of the bottles at home, stole from the supermarket – the big one near my school, never the small local one where I was known by name – pilfered money from my mother’s purse to pay for it when I was too scared to steal, scavenged Maude’s pension pennies. I daydreamed about getting drunk, about the glorious buzz alcohol drove through my veins, blunting my edges, editing my memory. I drank alone, always, and hugged my grubby secret to me. It was easy to go into myself, pretend the rest of the world had faded. I could count on booze to get me out of anything at all. I simply stopped caring.
Now, though, I don’t have that wonderful abandon of youth. I know what it does to me, know that something is embedded so deeply in me that I can’t just have one drink and be done with it. I’ve read the health warnings, know the signs of physical ruin. I’ve been to AA, collected my chips, fallen off more wagons that I can count, but I know that when things go wrong for me my silent friend is always there, waiting. Its hushed expectation follows me, its eyes watching perpetually. My guardian angel, clothed in black.
This dark thing in me appals me. It sleeps so soundly that I can forget it’s there. Then it rises and I hide behind a curtain of booze.
I need to work. Otherwise, I’ll have to go back to New York, and I’m not sure I’m ready just yet. I can’t face the prospect of trudging through the want ads, calling up old contacts, holding out my begging bowl. My sabbatical has kicked in, my replacement already attending meetings in my place, marking undergraduate essays, drinking coffee in the shabby faculty lounge. I want to be there in so many ways, but this break is needed. And I don’t want to run into Isaac. That’s the main thing. A little while longer won’t harm me.
Today’s paper has thrown out a possibility: a boys’ school needs an English teacher. Full hours, within walking distance, until Christmas. In other words, perfect for me.