Nine Women (5 page)

Now three concrete steps up to the walk. The lawn was still green, there’d been no frosts, and the yellow mums were full and glowing in their beds. There were even a few dozen pink roses on the climber against the house.

It was a marvel, this garden. Her parents’ pride. Since his retirement, her father spent his days out here, working until the hard winter freezes forced him inside and returning with the first feel of spring in the air, brushing aside the last melting patches of snow.

They take more care of the garden, she thought, than they ever did of me.

That goddamned garden, Edward called it. In the first months of their marriage, when Edward tried very hard to be friendly with her parents, he’d sent them a present, a special lightweight battery-powered weed trimmer. “It’s for their goddamn garden,” he said. “Even if they can’t stand me, they got to like this.” He’d been wrong.

Her parents had never used the trimmer. They hadn’t even given it to one of the parish fairs at St. Joseph’s Church. They had simply thrown it out. When Mary Margaret and Edward came for dinner the following Wednesday, they found the trimmer, unopened in its bright red and yellow carton, lying across the trash cans at curbside.

Collection wasn’t until Monday, Mary Margaret thought dully. Her parents weren’t just throwing away an unwanted present. They had intended only one thing—for Edward to see it.… He picked up the trimmer, holding it delicately as china, turning it, examining it carefully. He brushed off a few bits of grass before putting it in the trunk of their car.

“I am not going in there,” he said quietly to Mary Margaret. “Will you come home with me or will you go on?”

She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. She fumbled for words and found none.

He nodded. “I’ve had enough. I am not going into that house again, and I am not going to see them again, not even at their funerals. I will come back and pick you up whatever time you say. Next week you can have the car and come by yourself.”

So it was settled. If her parents noticed his absence, they never mentioned it. It was as if he had never existed.

Now on another Wednesday evening, she bent to examine the dahlias, their heavy burgundy heads staked against the wind. Her father had a hand with dahlias, they were always magnificent. The red and yellow combination—dahlias and mums—was her mother’s choice, repeated year after year.

And that was another thing, a strange thing. Her parents always agreed.

Everything was settled with a flick of an eye, a shrug of the shoulder—never an argument. Together they moved smoothly and silently through their days, as if they had taken a train and knew precisely where the track led.

Mary Margaret pushed open the door (her parents kept it unlocked until they went to bed) and stepped into the dim living room.

It had been brighter when she was a child, when the print curtains and the chair covers were new. Over the years darkening wood-paneled walls had absorbed their colors and turned everything into a very dense forest shade.

She’d thought of that image, years ago, when she was in high school. It still pleased her: forest shade. Not gloomy. But the regal dimness of a great forest…

As always her parents sat at the table by the window. Cards were neatly stacked in the very center of the table, but they weren’t playing. They never played this time of day—only in the evenings for an hour or so before bed. (Her mother always used the bathroom first, while her father riffled the cards through a game of solitaire.)

Her mother was sewing—a long white piece of cloth stretched across her lap to fall in soft folds on the floor. The Altar Society. Again. How many altar cloths had her mother made over the years? And how could a church wear out so many linens?

Pencil in hand, her father was studying the
Daily Racing Form.
Soon he would carefully reconsider his findings, write down his conclusions, and phone his bookie. He was a good handicapper and a very lucky one; he won forty or fifty dollars a week. Steadily, week after week. He rarely went to the track. He didn’t like crowds, he said, and all those mutuel windows were a temptation to bet too much. He liked things just the way they were. His winnings took them to dinner and a movie once a week. Which was more than his pension would ever have done.

“Hello,” Mary Margaret said.

“You’re here,” her mother said.

Her father waved the tip of his pencil at her and went on reading.

Mary Margaret slipped off her coat.

“You didn’t need that,” her mother said. “It’s not cold yet.”

“It might be by the time I drive home.”

“Not this time of year.”

She folded the coat carefully on the corner of the couch. She put her purse on the coffee table, next to her father’s World War II helmet with the gaping hole in its top.
Looks like some kind of can opener, huh?
he’d say now and then.
Never even parted my hair, can you believe it?
The same blast left a load of shrapnel in his back.
They missed killing me, but they sure fixed my ass,
he’d say.

For years little metal pieces worked their way out, and he’d been in the Veterans Hospital half a dozen times. There hadn’t been any trouble for years now; the bits of metal and dirt must be gone at last. Still, whenever the weather was warm, he’d scratch at the long bluish-purple scars crisscrossing the backs of his thighs. They’d never quite healed.

Mary Margaret picked up the shattered helmet, now rusting ever so faintly, and fingered the ragged edges, thinking: Funny thing, luck and the difference between living and dying.

Her mother’s first husband was in that same infantry company. His name was George Maley; his picture, smiling, uniformed, cap at an angle, hung on the dining room wall, all that was left of his life wrapped around by a fancy gold frame. PFC Maley had been standing next to PFC Borges when German shells began falling.… George Patrick Maley died (atomized, blown into dust, returned to earth with a speed greater than the grave’s), and Alwyn Peter Borges lived and married his buddy’s widow and sired a child.

If he’d lived, I’d be Mary Margaret Maley. I’d have different blood but the same name because my mother always planned to call her daughter Mary Margaret after her own mother.

When she was very little, long before she went to school, she used to imagine herself Mary Margaret Maley. And that the man in the picture, tall, thin, dark-haired, wide-eyed, handsome, eternally young, was her real father. Even though she knew it wasn’t so.

Her father stood up very slowly, belt buckle catching the edge of the table and shaking it. He made a final check of the
Racing Form,
nodded to himself, and went to phone the bookie. The floorboards creaked under his feet.

Mary Margaret sat down next to her mother. “Another altar cloth?”

Her mother nodded. “There’s only twenty members in the Altar Society and most of them don’t do anything.”

“People have a lot to do, they don’t have the extra time.”

“Last Sunday there wasn’t a single bunch of flowers on the altar, not one on the main altar.”

“Ma, you could have brought flowers. The garden’s full of them.”

Her mother stopped the methodical drawing and tying of threads. “I don’t bring flowers,” she said flatly.

In the long silence that followed, Mary Margaret thought: That is perfectly true. You sew, you have for years, you will sew your way into heaven, faithful servant of Jesus. But you have a limit. God can have the linen, but the garden belongs to you and my father.

“I don’t even have flowers in the house,” her mother said, head bent to the drawnwork again.

That was also true. The flowers stayed on bush or vine or plant, stayed through their cycle of days and development, withered and died. And were immediately clipped and carried away.

Her father came back, floor timbers groaning again. “I got to put another support in that cellar,” he said.

“Or go on a diet.”

“Two forty. Not all that much.”

“Wait till you can’t bend over in the garden any more.”

“I can bend over plenty good.” He showed her. He could touch his ankles with ease. “Not too bad for an old man.” He sat down again, scratching at the scars on the backs of his thighs.

“You want some tea?” her mother asked.

“Sure,” she said. “What have you got. Iced or hot?”

“Iced this time of year. It’s nowhere near cold yet.”

“And I didn’t have to wear my coat, huh?” Mary Margaret called after her.

“She don’t like to think winter’s coming,” her father said. “She stands out in the yard and she don’t see any signs in the leaves.”

“I don’t much like it either.”

“My luck’s better in winter,” he said. “A lot better. Why do you suppose that is?”

There were long pauses now. Mary Margaret could feel herself slowing down, fitting into the pace of this house. At work she was efficient and quick and bustling, heels rattling on the office floors. She drove the highways like a racer, changing lanes, brake lights flashing, impatient, restless. In this house, she found silences appearing between her words, comfortable silences, like soft beds to rest your thoughts on.

“Florida,” he said. “I do great at Calder. And Louisiana.”

“I don’t know why, Pa.”

Her mother came back with three glasses of iced tea rattling on the metal tray. “No lemon this week. Said it was the truck strike or something like that.”

“It’s okay, Ma. I don’t really care about the lemon.”

“You always take lemon.” Her mother picked up her work again.

Her father twirled the ice in his glass. His nails were dirt-rimmed, he never was able to scrub them clean. “Yeah,” he said. “All my luck’s in the south. Like the day at Gulfstream when they disqualify the winner and they hand me thirty-eight dollars and forty cents. You remember that, honey?”

Her mother’s name was Christine, but he never called her that. Always honey. Maybe it had something to do with the long dead husband and friend, George Maley.

Her mother nodded absentmindedly, counting her threads. A faint odor of cooking drifted into the room. She had turned on the oven while making the tea. Tuna fish casserole. They always had tuna fish casserole before the novena on Wednesdays.

“I like those southern tracks. None of that skidding around on the ice like at Aqueduct.”

She drank her iced tea slowly. Her mother had added orange juice in place of the missing lemon.

“Sometimes my luck’s rotten though. Like Amato turning mule on me.”

That caught her attention. “I didn’t know that, Pa.”

“He muled. Owed me a hundred and ninety-four dollars.”

She clucked with surprise. “You don’t bet that much.”

He shook his head, sadly. “My best week ever. Jesus, the prices. I don’t even want to think about it.”

“What happened to him? Amato?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have nothing to do with him any more.”

He is not even curious, Mary Margaret thought. The bookie he used for twenty years doesn’t pay off, and he doesn’t wonder what happened to him.

“When was that?” Mary Margaret said. “You didn’t tell me about it.”

He drank his iced tea, wiped his mouth with one finger. “Years ago. The Slob was still coming here then.”

“Him,” her mother echoed.

She felt the usual anger grow and turn to sharp stomachache. Him. Or the Slob. They never used his name, as if he didn’t have one. Edward MacIntyre. Her husband by the rites of the Catholic Church.

“I guess there wouldn’t have been time to tell me,” she said, keeping her voice perfectly even. “Not when every Wednesday was a fight.”

She was the one arguing, defending, pleading. Edward said nothing, only played with the food on his plate until it was time for the novena and the silence it brought.

Evenings driving home they hardly said a word, each fearful of the other’s misery.

Mary Margaret said: “He came because you were my parents and I wanted him to come.”

Her mother smiled patiently at her. Her father drank the last of his tea.

“You want some more tea, Al?” her mother asked.

They hadn’t even come to her wedding. She’d hoped they would, until the last minute she’d hoped, right up to the minute Father Robichaux began the ceremony. Edward’s parents were there, and his two brothers and their wives, and his sister and her husband and their grown son, and his unmarried sister who’d flown from Milwaukee especially for the ceremony.

In the rectory parlor that afternoon there hadn’t been a single person of her blood.

I minded that most, she thought.

Stirring restlessly in her chair, Mary Margaret said, “You know, I never knew why you called him the Slob.”

(She felt disloyal saying the word aloud.)

Her father laughed, her mother chuckled. Her father said, “The way he just sat there, mealy-mouthed, like he was ready to cry. He just plain looked like a slob.”

Oh, she thought wearily, oh oh oh oh.

“We didn’t care about him one way or the other,” her mother said. Which was a very long speech for her.

And me, Mary Margaret thought, did you care nothing for me? You’re my parents and you raised me and you sent me to school and you bought my clothes and took me to catechism classes. But there’s got to be more than that.

“You want to watch the evening news?” she asked, abruptly changing the subject.

“Enough news in the paper,” her father said.

So she crossed the room and watched by herself.

“If you gotta watch, keep it low,” her father said.

She watched the flickering images, conscious now of something happening within her, of a pain that was not quite that, of a loneliness that was near to happiness.

She was not used to thinking about her feelings. They were just there, they were part of things. No more to be studied than the sky when it rained or the wind when it blew. If you worked hard and were good, there’d be nothing to trouble your thoughts.

But that didn’t seem to be so.

Lately she’d started thinking about herself, she could even see so clearly.… The small child: black plaits down her back and skinny legs covered with half-healed scabs. The older child: the plaits crisscrossed on top her head, the scarred knees covered by longer skirts. Her Communion: white dress and veil and a crown of white flowers on the thick coil of hair. Then her hair was short and curly and there were boys and movies and high school and her first paycheck and the first clothes she had ever bought without her mother’s help. Then she was nineteen and finished business school and a full-time employee of the Consolidated Service Company. She was neat and reliable and worked very hard to increase the speed and accuracy of her typing and shorthand. (She practiced every evening at home, after supper, dating only on Friday and Saturday.) She was careful to learn everybody’s name and to be smiling and deferential and never never gossip. By the time she was twenty-three she was secretary to the senior vice-president. Soon she would have a fancy title like Executive Assistant and a very nice salary and she would really be somebody. When she was twenty-four she married Edward MacIntyre. He was twenty-eight, a CPA who worked in the same building. They met in line at the building’s cafeteria, and they married a few months later.