Rance Redmond, his pince-nez spectacles pressed into use to guide Peter’s glance aloft to the broad display of suspended chandeliers, ceiling fixtures, and wall sconces, pointed out the new designs: chrome and milky glass globes of the Art Deco mode; clear glass etched with roses in the Art Nouveau mode; one-time gas chandeliers with a hanging bowl, pendant gasoliers transformed to electroliers.
“No, no gas, not even a memory of gas,” Peter said. “We’re finished with gas.” And he chose the milky Art Deco because it seemed the most modern and also reminded him of Claire’s skin in the sunlight, and chose two others that seemed compatible with the first: the Claire fixture to give light in the front parlor, the second for the back parlor, the third for the dining room.
Jotting down their prices in his sales book, Rance Redmond spoke without raising his glance. “I can have these delivered by the middle of next week.”
“No, I need them today or it’s no sale,” Peter said.
“Today?” said Rance, his pince-nez falling to the end of their ribbon. “That’s not possible.”
“How long would it take to put them in a box?” Peter asked.
“Ten, fifteen minutes, I suppose,” said Rance.
“How long would it take to put them in the back of one of your trucks?”
“But that’s it, the trucks are busy.”
“Then put them in a taxi,” Peter said. “I’ll pay the fare.”
“Well, I suppose we could do. .”
“And an electrician. There’s no power in the house. It’s still lit by gaslight.”
“Is that right?”
“No, it’s not right, but that’s how it is, and that’s why I want an electrician. Have you got one?”
“I don’t know. And there’s the power company. You can’t just. .”
“I’ll pay the electrician extra. I’ll call the power company myself.”
Rance’s pince-nez had gone on, off, and on again, a manic measure of his fluster at such impetuousity in these sedate showrooms, but he handed Peter the telephone and then, clutching the sales slip that totaled more than one hundred and ninety dollars for the three fixtures, the largest sale he had made all week, Rance retreated to the store’s artisan quarters to search out an electrician, and found one who approved of extra money; found also a taxi, into whose trunk and front seat two chandelier boxes were placed while Peter and I clambered into the rear seat with the third box. The taxi then led the way to Colonie Street, the electrician following in his truck with as much wire as any imagination could reasonably measure, and the two vehicles parked in front of the Phelan house. The power company’s man would arrive within two hours.
Only with the death of his mother was Peter now able to challenge the light on Colonie Street. It was fitting that she died in early December, for on these days the exterior world matched the pale gray and sunless interior of the house, night coming on almost as a relief from the daytime sky that hovered over the city like a shroud. Peter remembered his own mood always being depressingly bleak during this time of year, days getting shorter, and darker; and not until January’s false spring would the season of desperation begin to fade with the fading of this miasmic light.
He had not known he would buy the chandeliers until he showed me the money on the train; but he knew then that he could buy them and would, for at long last it was time. He knew also that Sarah would fight him on the matter and that Molly and Chick would join him in overriding her objections. But Mama’s grip on the past had been released finally, she having been as dark-willed as the biddy of story who refused an indoor, running-water toilet saying, I wouldn’t have one of them filthy things in the house, and equally adamantly Kathryn refused electric current as being diabolical; and so the children rarely brought visitors home, so shamed were they that their house, its clutter, its mood, even the odor of its air, had slowly become a museum of everybody else’s rejected past.
With my help, Peter carried the Claire chandelier up the front stoop, opened the door with his key, and entered with the call, “Peter is here.” He and I then carried the boxes into the front parlor as the electrician hauled his gear and wire into the house. Chairs and side tables, including Peter’s leather armchair, footstool, pipe stand, and ash tray, had been moved from in front of the parlor’s bay window, the designated area for coffin and corpse, though no corpse had occupied it for thirty-nine years, not since Peter’s father waked here after stepping backward into the path of a slow-moving locomotive in 1895. Peter cut the twine on one box, put his hand inside, then turned to see his sisters, Sarah and Molly, in the doorway watching him.
“What are you doing?” Sarah asked. “What is that box? Who is this boy, and that man there?”
“The man is our electrician. The boy is my landlady’s son, Orson. Orson Purcell. Say hello to Sarah and Molly, Orson. My sisters.”
I saw two women who seemed at first to be twins, so alike was their dress: long-sleeved, high-necked white blouses, full dark skirts well below the knee, hair done in the same style: upswept into a soft crown, pinned in a bun at the back of the neck. But in glancing from one to the other I saw nothing else in their faces that matched: Sarah, with dark hair going gray, small round spectacles, hazel eyes very close together, long nose, pursed mouth, cheeks on the verge of sinking: here was plainness; and Molly, the same hazel eyes, but a longer, more finely pointed nose, finer symmetry and greater breadth to the eyes and mouth, and a fullness to the lips, and her hair still a pure, burnished yellow: here was beauty.
“How do you do,” I said. “I’m pleased to meet you.”
“And we you,” said Molly
“He speaks well,” said Sarah.
“His mother is very bright,” Peter said, “and he and I do our share of talking, don’t we, Orson?”
I nodded and smiled and looked at my father, who seemed so utterly unlike his sisters. There he stood, hand inside the chandelier box, still in his slouch hat and all-weather raincoat, his hair halfway down his neck and as unkempt as his handlebar mustache, his black corduroy shirt and twisted brown tie hanging like the end of a noose, the totality of his clothing, seen in the context of this house, a uniform of rebellion.
Everything I remember from this room on the day the light of the world arrived, had a fragility to it, the Queen Anne table, the china tea set, the French antique sofa and love seat, the dragonfly lamps, the Louis Quinze chairs that seemed incapable of supporting adults. And the room was dustless: wood and vases and figurines and even the white marble bust of a beautiful woman on her five-foot pedestal (Peter had given it to Julia on her eighteenth birthday) scrubbed and shining, all tables oiled, all brass polished, all floors waxed, all things gleaming, even in that rationed fragment of gray December light that was allowed entry past the mauve drapes.
“What is in that box?” Sarah asked.
Peter, squatting, his right hand still in the box’s mysterious interior, suddenly lifted the chandelier into freedom (like a magician, I could say), and with his other hand pulled away the tissue paper that surrounded it, then held it aloft. Presto!
“Fiat lux!” Peter said.
“What?”
“Light,” said Peter. “Electric light. To replace that monstrosity.” And he gestured toward the pendant gasolier on the parlor ceiling. “That ugly thing’s been here since before Cleveland was President. Light. New light in this house, Sarah.”
“We don’t want it,” said Sarah.
“How well I know that, dear sister. But we shall have light on the corpse of our mother, light unlike any that ever found its way into this arcane cave of gloom.”
“I love it,” said Molly. “It’s so pretty. Look at it, Sarah, look how it shines.”