The Business of Naming Things

First Published in the United States in 2014 by

Bellevue Literary Press, New York

F
OR
I
NFORMATION
, C
ONTACT
:

Bellevue Literary Press

NYU School of Medicine

550 First Avenue

OBV A612

New York, NY 10016

Copyright © 2015 by Michael Coffey

Earlier versions of the following stories appeared in these publications: “Moon Over Quabbin,”
Bomb
; “Sunlight,”
Conjunctions
; “Sons” and “I Thought You Were Dale,”
New England Review
.

The two poems on
page 200
are the work of Robert Michael Gallagher (1927–1993).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Coffey, Michael, 1954–

[Short stories. Selections]

The business of naming things / Michael Coffey. — First edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-934137-87-1 (ebook) 1.
  
Psychological fiction.
  
I. Title.

PS3553.O362A6 2015

813'.54—dc23

2014025375

This is a work of fiction. Characters, events, and places (even those that are actual) are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.

Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.

Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc
.

FIRST EDITION

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For Becca

What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours
.

—Stephen Dedalus

C
ONTENTS

Moon Over Quabbin

The Business of Naming Things

Sunlight

I Thought You Were Dale

Inn of the Nations

The Newman Boys

Sons

Finishing
Ulysses

Acknowledgments

M
OON
O
VER
Q
UABBIN

T
HE WOMAN IS IN
I
OWA NOW
, I hear. She moved there with her husband shortly after, and now she sees. She has my eyes—a cobalt blue, opaque as marbles. She blinks them fine in my sight.

When I see the woman in Iowa, I see those eyes. They aren't mine literally; they are the eyes of my boy. I saw myself reflected in them for so many hours—thousands, could it be? My face blued, my hair orbing back, gray and wild, deeper into Matthew's irises. What would I see in those eyes in her face? I'll never know. I'll never know her.

I think of those eyes now in Iowa, in that Iowa woman's head, looking keenly over morning fields, perhaps the steam of her coffee wetting her lashes.

She has children of her own, I like to think, this woman, and of course there are problems, I can only imagine, and must. There are always problems with children, with her boy.

Not everyone has such problems as I have had, but still there are problems enough for us all, and she'll have hers even if now she can see and doesn't have that problem anymore. Most of these troubles she and her husband will surmount—the bad falls, the whooping cough scare, the man who almost talks her boy into a Greyhound bus but for the intervention of the driver, the rolled car from which he is
safely thrown, a fistfight in which he breaks a jaw and has an ear boxed purple. And then his jailing for possible arson, which'll bring his mother from Iowa back here to Amherst, where her boy has gone to school, at Deerfield, her blue eyes now wavering toward middle age, paler now, giving a little light, as if ice had melted in a blue drink. She will look at her shoes, waiting to see her son. And I might see him, too. His name will be Mark.

A man will come through and call her name—Mrs. White. The man is a counselor, he says, attached to the sheriff's office. He tells Mrs. White he feels her boy is innocent of any involvement in the fire. As he talks, she can only stare. He is a warm man with large features and hands. The woman bets that all his attachments are large, and she flushes with shame at such a thought at such a time. As do I.

He tells her it was a political thing—“Everything's political,” she blurts out. He tells her that some kids are “after burning Amherst Hall,” and she wonders at this Irish grammar; her husband would know: He's a Finnegan.

“Jeffrey Amherst,” says the counselor, by way of reminding her. “The thing about the smallpox blankets?” She knows; she remembers it: the decimated Indians. He thinks to introduce himself: “I am Mr. Green.”

Mrs. White can sense muscles shifting in Mr. Green's chest as he thinks and breathes and speaks. And as he listens for her.

“A political thing” is all she can say, touching again the words he has given her. A silence rings on the cold cement floor of the waiting room. The sharp clock ticks: life getting shorter.

Finally, she hugs Mr. Green. He himself has nothing more to say. Against his wide chest she can hear the deep soundings of his heart, thudding like drums in a cavern filled with water
and stones. Behind it she can hear the coursing of his blood. She wants to sleep there, right there in his blood.

B
EFORE MOVING TO
I
OWA
, Mrs. White—Vera—lived in a town that is now underwater—the town of Dana, east of where I am now, maybe five miles. The state bought up four towns altogether, offering so-called market prices for homes and businesses, razing as much as they saw fit of what was left after a decent interval of looting and removal before the damming of the Quabbin River. In a year's time, the stopped river would fill the valley with water destined for the suburbs of Boston.

Mrs. White, out there in Iowa, west of Dubuque, would often imagine their basement back home, the one now solid with sludge, a small, packed room at the bottom of a vast lake; at other times it would suit her to think of their old family rec room, which her husband had built, its paneled walls and dry bar and slate pool table sitting unchanged in a cube of clear lake water—though they sold the table, that's how I see it. Along the walls the ends of large pipes visible through fractured cinder blocks like little portholes onto solid subterranean black, this the rare, strange lake with a bed of sunken sewer systems and leech fields. Often Mrs. White would think, This is an image of her mind.