Aunt Constance served the funeral dinner with a kind of pageantry, abetted by her daughters, the two little shits Kathleen and Antoinette. Watching their stately entrance for each course, learned in that narcissistic training ground of First Communion, I could have, as Josef Goebbels once remarked, “reached for my Luger.” The meal was a tribute to my grandmother and featured all her favorite dishes — swordfish (my father confided these small steaks were doubtless from a skillygallee, an obsolete term for the less desirable white marlin), corn on the cob, parsnips, and apple pie — and represented a maudlin idea of grieving. “They’re gonna milk it,” he said, when he heard the menu.
We were seated, Walter at the head of the table, my mother, father, and I in a row, Dorothy sniveling into the canned consommé preceding the main course, Kathleen and Antoinette, half crouched in their pinafores and ready for duty, Gerry upright as a man of the law. As Walter said grace, I watched my mother closely; her melancholy smile was less occasional than chemical, produced by the pills she took, ostensibly to raise an abnormally low blood pressure, as well as straight shooters from the vodka tucked in her suitcase. Like many of their generation, my parents believed in the absolute odorlessness of vodka and applied to its consumption none of the restraint of the blends whose broadly familiar aroma marked the user like a traffic light. My father sported his customary deniable supercilious smile. When cornered, he’d lay it to gastric distress or the unaccountable prelude to heartbreak, as when my mother walked out on him and he couldn’t wipe the grin off his face and had to explain it.
The front door was carelessly slammed shut and Uncle Paul walked in, wearing his drab woolen officer’s uniform with obvious moth holes, and commented that we looked a bit gloomy. Father Corrigan rose to his feet, held his napkin between thumb and forefinger, and dropped it to the table. With infinitesimal authority, Walter indicated with his eyes that Father Corrigan was to take his seat again promptly. Constance appeared behind Paul and, leaning around him, said in a shrill voice, “Just making certain there’s a place set.”
“Grab me a beer from the fridge,” said Paul. Constance froze but my mother leaped up and chirped nonchalantly that she knew right where it was. My father patted her butt, eyes half-lidded with private irony as she swept past, and Paul smiled at his favorite relative, my mother; Uncle Gerry, rendered huge in his uniform by the smallness of the room, strode to the sideboard to turn on the big Sunbeam fan. He’d begun to sweat. Seated again, he asked Walter about various old folks of our acquaintance. Most got good health reports, except Mary Louise Dwyer and Arthur Kelly, who had, he said in a significant voice, “been in to see me.” As to lip cancer Mr. Sullivan, “You couldn’t hurt him with a tire iron.”
“A corker,” Gerry agreed.
Once my mother had deposited the beer in front of a greatly relieved Uncle Paul, Aunt Constance began to send in my cousins with a steady parade of dishes. Noticing my father, Paul nodded and said, “Harold.” Constance shooed the cousins along from close behind, with no effect on their speed at all but reinforcing her position as culinary benefactress. She kept her husband behind in the kitchen as a kind of factotum and sous-chef; besides, he wasn’t comfortable in what he not altogether humorously called Harp Central. He could have said it more clearly because no one cared what he said, all part of Constance’s disgrace: she would have enjoyed greater standing if she’d been gang-raped by a hurley squad.
I’m not sure my father enjoyed much esteem either, and I think he knew it. He was well educated, hardworking, and ambitious, yet something set him apart, as though he had renounced a portion of his humanity to achieve his current station and had, moreover, abducted the baby of the family, my mother, to a dreary and stunting world where people made themselves up and were vaguely weightless. I realized with dread that, at this funeral meal, he was likely to take a stand.
“I wonder where she is now,” Paul said, slurping his consommé.
“Where who is?” Walter asked coolly.
“Ma. Where Ma is.”
Dorothy covered her mouth.
“Ma is in heaven,” said Walter.
“You, as a man of science, say she is in heaven?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, good. I hear great things about the place.”
Kathleen made a covert rotary motion with her forefinger at her temple; then, fearing she’d been observed, she pretended to adjust one of the tubular curls. She wouldn’t look at me.
My father half rose from his chair, rather violently, shifting all attention to himself, as he reached across the table for a dish of lemons. “It’s been a long time since I had a chance to enjoy a swordfish steak!” This fell discordantly upon me and anyone else who’d heard his theory of the skillygallee.
My mother said, “Wonderfully done, Constance, a beautiful meal.” Constance gave a self-effacing curtsy. Dorothy stared at her food with white eyeholes and a half-opened mouth, and Gerry rubbed her back consolingly until she picked up her fork and prodded a parsnip. Since I eat too fast when I’m nervous, my mother put her hand on my forearm to slow me down. I looked up at her helplessly, wide-eyed.
Walter smiled all round and said, “This would be a good time to remember all the happy times we’ve had at this table, especially when Pa would have been in my place. We saw very little of Ma then. She just came and went from the kitchen, long enough to look after us. She sure looked after us, didn’t she? Generations of us. Me, Connie, Gerry, Mary, and you kids, right, Antoinette?”
Antoinette stood up from her seat. “My grandmother is a saint,” she sang out, in a high mechanical voice. “She is being welcomed by the angels this very minute.”
Paul blew up his cheeks and nodded.
“Kathleen?”
Kathleen rose and gazed around the room with her electric blue eyes. “Our grandmother—”
I knew I was next, and I felt the ironic expectations of my father, who loved to see me on the hot seat. I never really believed it was the test of character he claimed.
“—brought to our family the highest standards of piety and family concern, especially as to her devotion to Holy Mary Mother of God.” Even knowing they’d been prepped, I asked myself where the two little hussies had come up with this chin music. I hadn’t long to think about it, though; it was my turn.
“Johnny?”
I sat dumbfounded, a weird tingling in my scalp. My father looked at me with a faint smile and my mother gazed into her lap. Both seemed to understand I wasn’t up to this. I had the whirlies.
“Why don’t you stand up?” Uncle Walter said gently.
I rose slowly, the tightness in my throat making speech impossible. A glance at my father revealed ill-concealed hilarity. Uncle Paul was waggling his empty beer at Constance, who stood in the doorway bearing down on me with her eyes. The cousins looked like winners. Only a brief picture of my grandmother rescuing me from this, which she certainly would have, allowed me to break quietly into inarticulate tears.
Uncle Walter smiled sadly and said, “Thank you, Johnny. That’s how we all really feel. You’ve done us all a big favor— thank you.” As I sat down, my father’s glance said he could hardly believe I’d pulled off this stunt. I could almost hear him saying, “Fast one there, M.B.,” or, “Smooth.”