William H. Hallahan - (8 page)

He heard them again: hoofbeats, only this time there was something
new--the sound of several horses, growing louder and louder, and now
he heard with them the sound of a carriage, its steel-rimmed wheels
clattering on cobblestones, coming closer, and the air was suddenly
damp and there was a fog filling the attic, making everything
indistinct. Even if he shut his eyes he could not block out the
vision. The horses were running flat out and the carriage springs
were protesting rhythmically but the clattering wheels were making
the loudest noise, thundering frantically. He put his hands over his
ears as the vision loomed out of the blackness and grew until the
approaching carriage towered over him. Brendan threw an arm over his
face, expecting to be run over. But the horses stopped right in front
of him, the whole entourage in black in a black background.

He raised his head and stared at the carriage. The horses stamped
their metal shoes on cobblestones. Was it for him, the carriage? He
sat up in his cot and looked. The driver was an indistinct lump up on
top with a whip and a handful of reins. Then Brendan looked at the
horses. Six of them. All black. All headless. And he saw now that the
driver above his turned-up coat collar was also headless.

Then the carriage door swung open. Brendan said the confiteor, "O
my God, I'm heartily sorry for having offended Thee." Then he
heard voices.

From the fog his mother stepped into view slowly in a very pretty
old gown, and behind her came his father, and his father smiled at
his mother to reassure her, and she took his hand and smiled at him.
They were talking indistinctly and he heard his father say "Brendan."
He didn't want to get into the carriage. "I must tell Brendan
the secret," he said quite clearly. His mother shook her head
and pulled him toward the carriage. Then she stepped up and in, and
his father stepped in behind her and pulled the door shut. He leaned
out of the carriage window and seemed to look directly at Brendan.
"Purple!" he cried.

The driver cracked his whip and the horses leaped into a gallop
and the carriage rushed off into the fog, steel rims ringing on
cobbles, steel horseshoes striking sparks and thundering. The din was
terrific and gradually receded in the fog, grew fainter and finally
died away. A palpable silence flowed back into the attic. Brendan
looked at the other four boys.

They were all asleep. Some time had passed, for the moon was high
over the house now and dawn couldn't be far.

He sat cross-legged on his cot, hearing the solemn pacing of the
waves and the peaceful breathing of the others, knowing that they had
not heard anything, that they could not have heard anything even if
they had been awake. He never felt more alone and apart. He was
convinced his mother and father had just died.
 
 

The next morning was the longest of his life. His parents were due
to arrive around 10 a.m., just as the puppet show was to start. He
didn't recall later much about the hours that intervened. He must
have eaten breakfast. They all dined together at seven-thirty every
morning in the high-ceilinged dining room and it was usually a noisy
affair, and on that Saturday the sideshow must have had them all
excited.

He told himself over and over that it was a nightmare, that it had
nothing to do with his parents, and he almost half-believed it. He
sat by a dune fence down the beach, away from his uncle's house,
watching the main road that led from the bridge to the mainland,
studying every car. And every time he saw one like his father's, he
would start to rise hopefully only to be disappointed.

By nine o'clock the sideshow was in full swing. People gathered
around the house and watched. Uncle Matty had put on his clown's
outfit--the same every year, an old pair of red-flannel long Johns
with sausage ballons pushed into the upper arms to make him look like
the circus strong man. Brendan saw Jackie on stilts and some of the
others but he didn't take his eyes off the roadway, for long.

At ten he couldn't sit still any longer and walked back to the
house. His legs were trembling. Jackie came running up with a fist in
the air.

"I did it! I blew them all away. Did you see it? Where the
hell were you? I walked on stilts in the surf!"

Annie waited until quarter after ten to start the puppet show.

"Never mind, Brendan," she said. "I'll put a
special show on for your parents when they arrive." Her theater
was set up at the side of the house near the driveway.

But just as the curtain opened and the angel began his quarrel
with the devil, a car turned into the Larkin drive and Brendan's
heart gave a joyful leap, then flagged. It was the wrong car. And
when it stopped, it was Aunt Maeve who got out--his father's favorite
sister--and with her was his father's brother, Malachi. They walked
directly toward the house without a glance at the sideshow,
grave-faced. They weren't supposed to be there.

A few minutes later, Aunt Maeve came out on the porch. She looked
up and down the beach, then studied the group around the puppet
stage. When she saw Brendan, she raised her hand and silently pointed
at him. Her beckoning finger told him everything.
 
 

In his kitchen Matty Larkin hurriedly played the host while his
mouth still hung open in shock. He took armsful of books from the
table and chairs and dumped them in his den. Then he got out some
cans of beer and as an afterthought put out a bottle of whiskey on
the table.

These were Jim Davitt's people--sister and brother. Family. He
seated the brother, Malachi, at the kitchen table. Then he looked out
of his kitchen window to see the sister Maeve. There beyond the
festive crowds strolling on the beach and
minin
g around the
World's Worst Sideshow, beyond the fluttering bunting and packaged
mirth, he could see Maeve talking to Brendan.

"Don't look! Don't look!" Malachi Davitt pulled the
curtain over the window. "Thank God I didn't have to tell him.
Thank God."

Matty Larkin pushed a glass of beer into his hand. "Wait,"
Matty said, and he poured a stiff shot of whiskey into it.

Malachi sat in silence, waiting for Maeve to come back.

Matty's wife, Gloria, was making tea. She turned from the stove
tearfully and asked in a trembling voice, "How--did--I--mean--"
She held out two groping hands.

"In a fog," Malachi answered. "On the Connecticut
Turnpike. It was a ten-car pileup."

Gloria Larkin bit her finger to stop the tears. "Were they--I
mean, how long--"

"They were both killed instantly. No suffering, thank God."

Matty Larkin watched Malachi bow his head, showing a half-bald
crown. He had aged since Matty had last seen him, and now his
stricken face looked dreadful. In that large Davitt family the only
one who had ever given Malachi a run for his money was Jim.

When Maeve returned to the house, she walked as if she were
wounded. She stood in the kitchen doorway and stared at the faces
that stared back at her mutely.

"I feel like I just shot him," she said. She looked
through the huge multi-paned kitchen window at the beach. It was
jammed with strollers in bathing suits, a perfect sun-filled day. Far
down the beach she could just see Brendan staring at the waves. She
dared not tell the others what Brendan had said to her. Malachi in
particular would prance around the room like a hanging judge. When
she had beckoned Brendan, the boy had stood at the bottom of the
wooden porch steps and looked up at her and said, "I know. They
were both killed this morning in a car in a fog somewhere."

That afternoon, Brendan went to live
with his aunt Maeve.

Aunt Maeve had been married to a great tun of a man by the name of
Hardy O'Grady and hardy he was. He had bushy black hair, great white
teeth, a loud voice and a booming laugh that carried for miles, they
said. He was impatient with small quantities of anything, especially
beer. Wherever he went, he waved away the usual bar glass of beer and
demanded pints, from which he would scoff off a half in one pull. He
was the awe of the patrons in countless bars in New York--a man
admirably suited to his occupation: beer salesman.

Hardy O'Grady was a marvelous raconteur with an endless fund of
stories, a master of timing with a gift for outrageous exaggeration.
And he loved to hear a good story as much as tell one. He ate as he
drank--in excess, with gusto and joy. Aunt Maeve was the very apple
of his eye and they made an incongrous pair--he, enormous, as though
he'd swallowed a barrel; and she, though not small, seeming petite
beside his bulk. Imagine the great mirth in the Davitt family when
from that union Aunt Maeve gave birth to Terry. Terrence Davitt
O'Grady, at your service. In the crib he was long as a worm, his aunt
Maggie said, with a whiny little cry and an unhappy expression on his
face--born with it and never lost it. Terry never smiled except when
he got something and then only until he realized it wasn't enough. It
was never enough. He had no friends. He disapproved of everyone and
of everything. He was also a tattletale and was decidedly antisocial.
Imagine. With a father like that. Worst of all, from Hardy's
standpoint, the boy had no sense of humor at all. The rest of the
family often forgot to invite him to birthday parties. Behind his
back they called him Ratface.

When Terry was in his teens, he manifested, to everyone's
amazement, a gift for trade. He had a passion--just one--for postage
stamps and bought and sold and traded them with a dedication that
made him known to all the stamp dealers up and down the east coast
from Washington to Boston. He had a real nose for the market, and by
the time he was eighteen he had established his own stamp dealership
in the basement of his home. He went through college at Columbia
University, majoring in business. When he came out, he was already so
well established as a stamp dealer, he never considered for a moment
doing anything else. He opened a suite of offices in the old
Marbridge Building near Penn Station on Thirty-fourth Street, which
was populated mainly with shoe wholesalers' showrooms. He was
well-to-do before he was twenty-five.

While Aunt Maeve and Uncle Hardy were watching this humorless,
furtive, unhappy little old man grow affluent, he surprised them one
day by bringing a woman to dinner. She was eight years his senior and
had a figure as flat as an ironing board. She was one of those women
who always seem to have a cold sore at the corner of their mouths and
a dissatisfied set to their lips. She had the eyes of a bird that
never showed any expression. She rarely spoke. But she was an
excellent catalog editor, knew the stamp business from childhood (her
father was the proprietor of a small stamp shop on Staten Island),
and Terry had hired her to start a mail-order stamp catalog to be
sent all over the world. It was to prove enormously successful. She
made a perfect mate for Terry. The cash register was marrying the
printing press. Hardy would laugh often at the bride's name: Joy.

The wedding was a hopelessly dull affair that didn't get
interesting until Terry and his bride left for their honeymoon--at
Niagara Falls--by Greyhound bus. Hardy spread the story that they had
actually hired two other people to go on their honeymoon for them
while they went back to the office, and secretly, passionately, with
the lights out, so no one might see, fingered the stamps.

Two years later, Hardy died as he had lived, laughing. He was in
his own home, in his kitchen in shirt sleeves and braces, pouring
pints from a full keg of ale to the visiting Davitts, when he fell to
laughing so hard at a joke Malachi told, he ruptured a blood vessel
in his throat and suffocated and died.

"To have died thus," the priest told Aunt Maeve, "was
a kiss from God." Some of the family wished that God had kissed
Terry and left the delightful man and his always-ready keg of ale on
earth for a few more years.

When Hardy died, Maeve was at sixes and sevens, restless, lonely
and secretly grieving for the man who had filled her life "like
a quart in a pint bottle."

Hardy had been dead little over a year when Maeve brought
fifteen-year-old Brendan to her home. And the first thing she did
after closing the door was to take him into the kitchen, brew him a
cup of tea and say, "I'm not doing you a favor, taking you in.
There will be no debts of gratitude. I've been fond of you since you
were born and I'm delighted to have you fill up my home with life and
vitality. I hope you'll be happy here. It's your home for the rest of
your life. And we're going to be the best of friends."

Aunt Maeve's house was as clean and polished as a lighthouse lamp.
The story was that it had belonged to a ship captain, some said a
ferryboat captain, who'd had it built on the Brooklyn Heights so he
could have a view of the entire harbor. It was made from beautiful
rose-colored bricks taken from a famous brewery that was torn down at
the time that the old Fulton Street ferry to lower Manhattan stopped.
"And that was even before my time," Aunt Maeve told him.
The roof was slate and there were working fireplaces in every room.

The house had nautical touches throughout. It was even built like
a ship. The floors were thick ship's planks, teak, taken in salvage
from the
Edna J
., a celebrated clipper ship that had partially
burned and sunk in the Erie Basin. The flooring was fitted by a
ship's adz and hand-pegged. Like a ship's deck, it gleamed like
glass. There were Delft tiles around each fireplace, and they all
dealt with nautical scenes. The windows were all oversize and
many-paned to fill the house with light even on the dullest winter
day. In the brick-paved backyard garden there was a heavy brass stand
for a ship's telescope.

Aunt Maeve told him one day, "I don't care who gets what in
the rest of the world. Let them have whole continents, give them
enough money to fill an elevator shaft in the Empire State Building.
All I want is this house."