Any Minute I Can Split (32 page)

“Margaret, me dear!” he said, suddenly remembering his early Barry Fitzgerald. “And Rogerrrr! How are ya, me boy? You're lookin' just fine, I haaaardly recognized ya, children!”

“We brought your granddaughters to see you, Father!” How fucking quaint she sounded. Elsie Dinsmore coming home to Daddy. He looked at the twins.

“Ah, yes,” he said, “a fine pair of girls.” Something in his manner reminding her of the classic Thanksgiving Magnificent Bird line. “Yes, of course, Margaret, ya wrote me about them.”

You never answered.

Rosie watched him sleepily. Rue lunged toward him with a wooden spool in her fist; he stepped back hastily.

“Rosemary,” she said, “Rue, this is your grandpa.”

“Rosemary,” he said. “A beautiful name.”

“Do you want to kiss them, Daddy?”
Daddy
? Why was she having such trouble with what to call him?

“Yes, of course,” he said, but made no move to do so. Impulsively Margaret leaned forward and kissed his cheek.

“Yes,” he said, “we'd better go inside.” As though until her loss of self-control he'd counted on holding court on the stoop.

They went into the house. The living room got about two hours of sun in the early morning and wasn't as dark as usual. Margaret and Roger sat on the sofa, the twins on their laps.

“Have you had breakfast?” her father asked.

“Yes,” Margaret said.

“You'll excuse me then,” her father said. “I feel The Headache coming on.”

The Headache had as distinct a personality and cause as The Curse. It was what visited her father at 7:16, 12:01 and 6:01 if there was no food in front of him at those times.

“I'll have a cup of tea,” Margaret said.

He left them. There was no sign of the colleen but there were subtle changes in the room. Bright new fiberglass curtains at the windows; a ghastly red glass vase filled with plastic gladiolas on the sideboard; lace antimacassars on the sofa and easy chairs. Her father came in with his bowl of oatmeal, dish of toast and two cups of tea on a tray. He gave Margaret her tea and sat with the tray in the chair that swiveled toward the TV set. For the next few minutes he concentrated on his breakfast. She glanced at Roger; he grinned broadly. Rue was squirming so Margaret let her down on the rug. Rue promptly teetered over to her grandfather and grabbed a piece of toast from the tray; her grandfather, with a startled exclamation, grabbed it back. Roger laughed but Margaret nearly cried except that a second later Rue grabbed the other piece of toast from the plate and began jamming it into her mouth before he could take it again.

“The child's got to learn some manners, Margaret.”

“The child's ten months old, Dad. Maybe you should've let her have the damn toast.”

“Mind your language,” he said abstractly, finishing his oatmeal and putting the empty bowl on the sideboard.

“Sorry, Dad.” She sighed. “Do you mind if I make them some toast?”

Why? They weren't hungry, they'd eaten huge breakfasts.

“I suppose it's all right,” he said. “I can always get more for lunch.”

Why in all the great fucking world of places to go had she wanted to come here? The connection. Making the connection. But all they were connected by was a sick joke. Rue finished the toast and began investigating the room. She picked up a
Ladies' Home Journal
from the coffee table and dropped it on the floor. Margaret picked it up and put it on the coffee table.

“Can't you put her in something?” her father asked.

“What'd you have in mind? A cage?”

“Come on, Rue,” Roger said, putting Rosie next to Margaret on the couch, where she docilely remained. “I'll make you some toast.” He stooped over to hold Rue's hand and guide her into the kitchen. Margaret bit off the nail of her right index finger.

“Are ya still bitin' yer nails, then, Margaret,” her father said, shaking his head. He finished his tea, put the tray on the sideboard. Then he looked at Rosie for the first time since they'd come indoors.

“You're a pretty one, aren't ya.”

“Actually,” Margaret said, “they're identical. No one can tell them apart, not even me. For all I know this one may really be in the kitchen right now.” She waited. Nothing. Hostile tones could be ignored indefinitely; he needed something concrete and important like a dirty word to latch on to before he could get mad. She chewed off the nail of her right pinky.

“Such a terrible habit for a young woman,” he said.

“You didn't like it much when I was a kid, either.”
Anyway, I only do it when I'm here.

Silence. He was watching Rosie. He looked almost nostalgic.

“I'll tell ya, Margaret,” he said after a while, “I'd love to see them baptized.”

“WHAT?” Her mind was briefly blown into the various corners of the room.

“It would be a great comfort to me to see them baptized.”

“You seem pretty comfortable already,” she said, recovering quickly.
More comfortable than my mother is. More comfortable than I am.

“It's the church, Margaret,” he said, as though she'd paid him a compliment. “I've been going again, regular-like.”

“What brought that on?” she asked. As if she couldn't
figure it out for herself. Guilt had driven people to stranger places than their own church.

“It came over me one day,” he said solemnly, “that it was where I belonged. No reflection on anyone, Margaret, but I'd have been a happier man if I'd learned that lesson early in life.”

Of course you would never have existed, Margaret, but you were always such a troublesome girl, anyway. The first few years of your life your mother, the poooorrr creaturrre, was laid up with a skin disease of the groin, no one knew what caused it but the fact of the matter was that she never had anything like that before you were born and so you see Margaret it seems only reasonable to say it would have been better for everyone if you'd never been born. Aaahhhhhhhh, the poor creaturrrrrre.

She had a tremendous urge to scream or cry or break something but of course she didn't do any of those things, she just sat there.

Roger came back with Rue.

“Roger,” she said, “my father wants the girls to be baptized.”

“Okay,” Roger said. “Should we leave 'em here and pick 'em up in a few days?”

Her father looked so petrified she had to laugh. Roger took the toast from Rue, broke off a piece for Rosie, gave it back.

“Are you serious about not minding?” Margaret asked him.

“Sure,” he said. “It'll roll off their backs like water.”

“Not on the sofa, please,” her father said.

She looked at him, bewildered.

“The toast. She's got the toast crumbling on the sofa.”

Margaret stood Rosie on the rug where she could lean against the low coffee table as she ate. Once again her eyes fell on the
Ladies' Home Journal.
The
Ladies' Home Journal!
It hadn't registered before.

“Whose magazine is this, Dad?”

“It's a fine magazine, Margaret,” her father said.

“Yes, but who gets it?”

“Thousands of people get it. Have you seen the beauuutiful article on the Kennedys?”

“Daddy,” Margaret said, “did you go to the store yourself and buy this magazine?”

He stared at her blankly.

“And if you didn't, WHO DID?” The prosecution rests. Silence. Roger watched. Toast crumbled. Behind the triple-layer fiberglass curtains of her father's eyes, little things slipped and slid, searching for a way out, but they found none and so eventually he spoke.

“She did.”

“She?” Triumphantly pained. She had found the scab on her heart and peeled it off. “Who's
she?”

“Now, Margaret, you're acting foolish.”

“Who is she?” Making up in aggression now what she'd lacked before. “Who? Rose Kennedy? The Virgin Mary? Your . . . your
concubine?”

“Damn it, Margaret!” he exploded, and she should have been prepared then for she had never heard the mildest curse from his lips in her entire life, “you've got to stop using that language!”

“It's just a word,” she said. “Why are you so scared of words? It's a word for someone who lives with you without being married.”

“Father Dempsey wouldn't let her,” her father said, lapsing into sullenness.

“Huh?” She was confused. As though she'd wandered into the wrong argument. Roger came over and sat down next to her and put his arm around her and that, too, should have told her something. “Father Dempsey wouldn't let her what?”

“Wouldn't let her live here without being married.”

“Are you talking about the girl who was here?” Roger asked in a low voice.

“The girl who was here,” Margaret said. “The young Irish girl who was here the last time I—” Finally it sunk in. She stared at him, wild-eyed: “Are you telling me that you were married to her the last time I was here?”

“I certainly was not,” he said indignantly.

“Then
when?”
She demanded.

“October third,” he said, as though naming a much later time, while in point of fact it was perhaps a week after she'd been there.

“There was no choice in the matter,” he said.

“Where is this girl?” Roger asked.

“She sleeps late,” her father said. “It's the pollution, her eyes smart if she wakes up early.”

“Five months!” Margaret said, the nausea nearly overcoming her now. “Five fucking months after Mommy died!”

It jolted him to his feet. “Leave this house! You can't use language like that in this house!”

“She was dead five months when I was here!”

“I didn't want to do it but the girl had to be protected.”

What about me? Who protects me? Roger will protect me. Roger's arm is around me and he isn't laughing even though all this is very funny.

“Doesn't everybody wait a year?”

“I'm not a man to live alone, Margaret.”

My mother wasn't a woman to live alone but she always did.

“And Father Dempsey felt . . . well it's not as though the Church recognized my first marriage.”

That snapped it. The thing, whatever it was, whatever it was made of, the thing that had bound her to him for all the years, in spite of the odds, in spite of her vision of him, in spite of
himself,
it snapped. She stood up and picked up Rosie. Roger took Rue.

“Fuck you,” she shouted, looking down at her father with a full and righteous rage. “Fuck you, Dad, and fuck the little cunt in the bedroom and fuck your farts in the bathroom and fuck your lousy policeman's badge. Fuck you, that's all.” And as he stood there frozen in a position of horror that was more satisfying than any fury could have been, his mouth open, the color gone from his face for the only time in her memory, his shoulders looking as though they'd been boned, his
arms at once stiff and dangling at his sides, she marched past him and out of the house with Roger and the girls.

R
OGER
started the car.

Her nausea was gone but it had been replaced by exhaustion and a feeling of emptiness, as though she'd actually thrown up.

“I'm proud of you,” Roger said.

“Really?” she asked dully. “You mean for telling him off?”

“Sure.”

“Roger,” she asked after a while, “aside from all the stuff you let out on your parents, the jokes and everything . . . have you ever really told them off in what you thought of as a final way?”

“Uh uh,” Roger said. “I always left an opening.”

“Consciously?”

“Consciously.”

“Because of money?”

“Because of money.”

She sighed. “It's so ironic.”

“That point has been made much of,” he said.

“I know, I know,” she said. “Still, it's very ironic . . . Not that I ever want to see him again.”

T
HEY
parked in the house lot, next to a new Oldsmobile. It was nine in the morning. They walked through the gate back to the beach. There were three teenage boys stretched out in the sand, sunbathing. If they were her cousins or nephews they'd gone through enough growth or acculturation since she'd last seen them to be unrecognizable to her. She and Roger sat on the sea wall for a while, letting the girls play rapturously in the sand. They'd never seen sand before! After a few minutes Rue teetered over the sand to the edge of the water. They'd never seen the ocean before! The tide was fairly high and it lapped at Rue's feet as she stood there, looking down, swaying as the receding
waves washed sand from under her feet. Rosie crawled to a spot a few feet in back of her sister where she could watch the water without being touched by it.