No chance at all to rescue Sarah. No bequest for Sarah.
No chance to rescue Tommy either. His spinal injury turned into a plague of unpredictable immobility and, when he went back to his job as a sweeper at the filtration plant, the pain struck him so severely that he collapsed and rolled into the thirty-five-foot depths of one of the plant’s great filtering pools; and, having been unable to learn to swim any more than he could learn to think, he drowned, another martyr to the family disease.
And not much of a chance to lure the maverick Chick out of his Floridian indignance and back to the family circle. He telephoned Peter from Miami Beach, acknowledged the bequest, offered lively thanks for what he said would be his hefty down payment on a sporty inboard motorboat he’d been longing to buy, invited his brother to come down and go ocean fishing, said Evelyn sent her best, and hung up, maybe forever.
By the time lunch was about to be served, the light rain had become heavy, a storm gaining strength, according to Peg’s reading of the weather story in the Knickerbocker News.
“It’s going to rain all night, and some places might get floods,” she reported. She was at the table, where Peter had told her to sit. The rest of us were standing half in, half out of the dining room, waiting for Peter to seat us. Molly was still in the kitchen, organizing the meal.
“The Senators won’t play ball tonight,” Billy said.
“George’s Democratic picnic must be rained out too,” Peg said.
“Democrats like the rain,” Billy said.
“The Irish like the rain,” Peter said. “Three days of sunshine and they start praying for thunderstorms.”
The roast lamb lay in slices on the platter in the center of the table, and on the sideboard the leg itself, on another platter, awaited further surgery. Molly had asked me to carve but before I could begin Peg suggested Billy do it, for he did it so well. And so he did, and when only half finished he asked Molly, “You got any mint jelly to go with this?”
Molly looked in the pantry and the refrigerator, reported back, “No mint jelly, I’m sorry, Billy.”
“There’s mint jelly in the cellar,” I said, and I took the flashlight, opened the trapdoor, and found dusty jars of mint jelly and strawberry jam.
“Sarah put those up,” Molly said, “after the war. We got the strawberries from Tony Looby’s store, and Sarah grew the mint out in the yard.”
“You certainly know your way around this house,” Peg said to me. “How’d you know they were down there?”
“I was fixing something one day and I saw this stuff.”
“This house would fall apart if it wasn’t for Orson,” Molly said. “He also kept the Lake House from collapsing around its own ears. Orson is a treasure.”
“Just waiting to be dug up and spent,” I said.
“You’ll never be spent, Orson,” Giselle said.
“Oooh-la-la,” said Peg, and everyone looked at Giselle, who smiled at me.
“Orson,” said Peter, “take control of your wife.”
“I would prefer not to,” I said. “I like her the way she is.”
“We’re ready to eat,” said Molly, coming in from the kitchen with the potatoes, hot from the oven.
And then, one by one, we sat where Peter placed us, and we were seven, clockwise: Peter sitting where his father had always sat, in the northernmost chair in the room, the first formal resumption of the patriarchal seating arrangement since Michael Phelan died in 1895; Giselle next to Peter to have the impending grandchild in the closest possible proximity to the grandfather, then Roger, Peg, me, Molly in Sarah’s chair (her mother’s before it was hers) nearest the kitchen, and Billy at Peter’s right, completing the circle.
Giselle’s pâté, Camembert, and English biscuits lay in tempting array on the sideboard, forgotten, and alien, really, to the cuisine of this house. But we made ready to devour Sarah’s mint jelly on Molly’s leg of lamb, with the marvelous gravy made from the drippings, small new peas out of the can, the best kind, potatoes mashed by Peg (she said Billy mashed them better), bread by Peg out of the Federal, and the two bottles of the rich and robust Haut-Brion 1934 (a momentous year for both the Bordeaux and the Phelans) that the extravagant Giselle had brought. Peter contributed the saying of grace, which he pronounced as follows: “Dig in now or forever hold your fork.”
I suggest that this luncheon was the consequence of a creative act, an exercise of the imagination made tangible, much the same as the writing of this sentence is an idea made visible by a memoirist. If Peter brought it about, I here create the record that says it happened. If, through the years, I had been slowly imagining myself acquiring this family, then this was its moment of realization, and perhaps the redirection of us all.
I think of Peter’s creative act (though I am not so modest as to deny my own contribution to the events) as independent of his art, a form of atonement after contemplating what wreckage was left in the wake of the behavior of the males in the family: Malachi’s lunacy, Michael’s mindless martyring of Sarah, Francis’s absence of so many years, the imploding Chick, Peter’s own behavior as son, husband, father: in sum, a pattern of abdication, or flight, or exile, with the women left behind to pick up the pieces of fractured life: a historic woman like Kathryn, an avant-garde virgin renegade like Molly, a working girl like Peg, and, to confirm this theory with an anomaly, there is the case of Giselle.
“I have to say it,” Roger said. “This is the most unusual lunch I’ve ever been to.”
“Perfectly normal little meal,” Peter said. “Last will and testament with lamb gravy.”
“Those here, we’ve never sat down together like this before, never,” Molly said.
“That’s hard to believe,” said Roger. “You look like such a close family.”
“Get your eyes examined,” Billy said.
“Don’t mind my brother,” Peg said. “He’s a perpetual grump.”
“What this gathering is,” I said, looking at Roger, also at Peg to discover where her eyes went, “is the provisional healing of a very old split in this family.”
“What’s that mean, provisional?” Billy asked.
“For the time being,” I said. “More to come later. Like having the first horse in the daily double.”
“Yeah,” said Billy.
“And it’s about time,” Molly said. “We should have done this years ago.”
“The point is it’s done,” said Peg. “I love you for it, Uncle Peter,” she said, and she blew him a kiss.
“I’m not takin’ the money,” Billy said.
Peter looked my way, caught my eye, chuckled. I’d predicted that Billy would say this.
“Don’t be hasty, now, Billy,” said Peter.
“Don’t be stupid, you mean,” said Peg.
“The hell with stupid,” Billy said. “My father couldn’t live here, I don’t want no money outa here.”
“It’s Francis’s money as much as it’s mine,” Peter said. “I made it in good measure because of him.”
“I showed you those photos,” I said to Billy, “The Itinerant series, and you know Francis inspired that. Peter only painted it.” Peter gave me a sharp look. Nothing worse than an ungrateful child.
“And Malachi’s face is the face of Francis in the new paintings. You’ve seen that for yourself,” Peter said. “And that’s where the money for these bequests really came from.”
“So you paint his picture? What the hell is that? He wasn’t welcome here and all these years neither were we.”