Reunion (11 page)

Timmy O'Toole up on a kind of platform at the back of the room.

What does a drain commissioner do anyhow? He seemed so perfectly at home with a microphone in front of him, it was like
he'd been a professional M.C. all his life. Ellen and Fred motioning to Buzz and Malinche. A table over in the corner.

Ellen and Fred catty-corner from Buzz and Malinche. And right across from them … ? Fred stared and stared, but couldn't imagine who she was. A little piggy-wiggyish, but well concealed in a nicely ample Granny Smith green apple velour top and matching skirt, her hair a feathery masterpiece of fluffy yellow, makeup applied with a trowel, black dragon-eyes and a slash of blood-colored lipsticked mouth that looked like an open wound. Or her husband next to her, another one of those thin, finely sketched Irishmen who looked like they lived on graphite and gin.

“Mary Alice, Mary Alice Flannagan,” she said with a cloudburst of a smile, “Howya doin', Buzzy?”

The plainest girl in the class, all she'd been was a bottle of pickled sausages. And now this transfiguration …

They'd hung together a lot, not a lot of dates, but he was always over at her house. Her widowed (at least that was the story) mother had liked Buzz. The doctor's son, after all, and her with three daughters to marry off, which she'd never stopped talking about, “And me with three growing daughters to marry off, supporting them with the sweat of these boney hands,” holding up her fat little piggy-wiggy hands that performed miracles on a typewriter keyboard. She'd give demonstrations at the drop of a semi-colon. And it was kind of amazing to see the little porkers perform, a typewriter on a table in the corner of the dining room, like it was there just for demonstrations….

“Your mother?” the first thing Buzz asked.

“That's right, the two of you always got along so famously,” said Mary Alice, this great, bouncy smile thrown at you like a basketball, then a sudden sadness, “she died last year, 86, in a nursing home in Peoria … ”

“A nice place,” he husband said, “right on the river, she'd sit for hours on end looking at the water, Lord knows thinking what,” reaching over and shaking Buzz's hand, “I'm Lloyd, Lloyd Carver … floors … ”

“Floors?” asked Malinche, who refused to just be shelved. The game was in progress, she wanted a piece of the ball.

“You name it, we do it, everything from concrete to tile, straight wood, parquet … me and my oldest son, Finian … ”

“Like in the rainbow!” said Mary Alice, “we named all of our children after movies … ”

Which Ellen couldn't let go by.

“Any Ozes?”

“One,” Mary Alice very serious now, you were now in the sacred forest of her children, no levity allowed, “It's a Hebrew name … it's in the bible and everything … ”

“Ask, Buzz, he oughta know, he's a Jew now,” Fred said loudly enough for most of the room to hear, then getting up and excusing himself, “I think I'll go outside for a smoke … I've got the distinct feeling that this is sacred, No Smoking territory … ”

“A Jew?!?!?” Mary Alice aghast, her husband very carefully tempering her aghastness with a grave ecumenical “wonderful, a wonderful religion … the Jews are our elder brothers, after all.”

“Moslem,” corrected Buzz, “I was a Jew, but when I married Malinche I became a Moslem … ”

“A Moslem?!?!?” Mary Alice even more aghast, her husband not quite sure how to handle the Moslem issue, just nodding up and down, up and down, like a head on a spring, “But don't they all believe in … ”

“One God,” said Malinche, adding a little footnote, “just like the Jews … ”

“Bombs,” said Mary Alice, “I mean they believe in bombs,” her husband jumping like he'd been pinned into his chair with a sword through his gut … ”

“Everyone believes in bombs when it comes to a holy cause. Look at Rabin's murderer justifying everything in terms of Halacha … ”

“Ha-what?” asked Mary Alice as a waiter appeared at the end of the table and passed down a huge basket of garlic-butter-drenched bread all carefully wrapped up in a giant white towel.

“The correct translation of THOU SHALT NOT KILL is THOU SHALT NOT MURDER. And it's not murder if it's war … self-defense … that's the whole principle behind Jihad … ”

A sudden presence behind Buzz, a tall, French Vanilla yogurt presence, and long, thin, cold hands across his eyes, silk-tassel hair slithering across his cheek as whoever it was bent down and violaishly whispered in his ear “Guess who?”

There was a perfume named Stradivarius, wasn't there?

“It must be Mary Jane Cummings,” he said, amazed at how long the link between her perfume and her had endured, when he couldn't remember the names of his own books, his colleagues, his own grandchildren.

“Amazing!” said Mary Alice, “after all these years!”

Turning around. Yeah, it was Mary Jane, tall and blonde and wistful, pale, distant, the woman in the tower on top of the hill, will of the wisp dreams of Arthurian castle nights under canopied beds behind six foot thick stone walls, inviolate, sacred peace, while the world waged war outside.

An embrace, not like Theresa, though, this was much more courtly and controlled, the flesh there only as a vehicle of the spirit …

“So how are you doing?” she asked.

“After fifty years …” Buzz not quite able to stand, much less grasp the wastelands of years between now their last meeting, “you know I always had a special ‘thing' about you,” whispered, as if they were both in some quiet wood, up someplace in a Dantean Paradiso contemplating The Celestial Rose, and her answering in a matched whisper “Me too … only I hid my feelings … ”

“I guess we all did.”

“That's what we were trained to do … ”

“So how's your divorce coming along?” Mary Alice loudly asked Mary Jane.

“Surviving,” Mary Jane said wistfully, Buzz amazed at how well “preserved” she was, hardly a wrinkle, hardly a change, the least changed of the whole pack, “trying not to lean too heavily on my kids … ”

“Oh, I don't worry about that!” said Mary Alice with a blonde bomb-blast of a smile, “I figure I'm one virus they can never get rid of …” ha, ha, ha, ha, “twenty-three grandchildren, and I know all the names, the phone numbers, birthdays … ”

“And all their little pecadillos,” laughed Buzz, “kind of a grandmotherly FBI.”

“That's good, that's good,” said Mary Alice's husband, Mary Alice obviously not someone who took a lot of joshing around. Mary Jane noticing Malinche.

“And this must be … ”

“Wife number four, Malinche … ”

“From?”

“Karachi.”

“Pakistan. I visited the ruins at Moheno Daro once, when my husband and I were still visiting things … ”

Almost a touch of Bostonian on her tongue now, no more of that old South Chicago-Bronx brogue.

“Whatever happened between you two?” asked Mary Alice, all bristling and bustling with curiosity.

“Whatever happens between people,” said Mary Jane, obviously not wanting to talk about it.

“I guess Buzz would be an expert on that,” said Mary Alice, more gutteral, gutsy laughs, her husband suffering, bearing it, like he was talking himself into staying quietly stuck in his seat. Something about sanctity and long-suffering, Buzz suspected, the temporal remission of sin. The Catholics had gotten rid of Limbo, was Purgatory still in place?

“Each case is separate, I don't think you can generalize,” he said as Timmy O'Toole got up on the podium again, “OK, everybody, what we're going to do tonight is accelerate the program a little so it won't run too late, I know you'll all want to get out of here as early as possible because of the heavy snowfall. So let's start out now with Father Grady saying a little Grace
before Meals, although I know you've already started in on that delicious garlic bread. Father Grady just retired from St. Justin Martyr parish two months ago, I hope he hasn't forgotten how to say Grace already,” ha, ha, ha, ha, Mary Jane grabbing Buzz's hand and giving it a little squeeze, still whispering

“Almost one lifetime gone, do you think we can do a little better with the time that's left to us?”

“How about exchanging addresses?”

“There's a directory they're giving out later.”

“OK,” another little peck on the cheek, “Hay golpes en la vida tan fuertes, yo no se,” said Buzz, which got him another little hand-squeeze, and then she was gone, a hundred old photos of her slipping through Buzz's mind like a rapid-fire slide-show, out at the Indiana dunes, in Jackson park, down by the Buckingham fountain, the two of them in front of the Shedd Aquarium, on the front porch of her father's house, at a birthday party at his place, her sitting coyly on one of his mother's bragging green brocade sofas with a teacup in her hand.

The last year or so Buzz had been putting together albums of old photos, like he was trying to shamanistically reactivate the past, and Mary Jane had ended up with a little album all to herself. And he'd even written a title on it in the careful lettering he'd learned when he was in pre-Med (for labeling cat-parts in Comparative Anatomy) at Loyola:

SECRET GARDEN

And now the secret garden was there within reach, divorced and moist, and she sat down at the end of the table and suddenly shifted back into Unreachability.

Next to him somebody's husband looking like one of those life-size dolls made out of old stockings and cotton, one ball for the head, a cylinder for the neck, a great big ball for the torso, two little balls with a bunch of little cylinders attached to them for hands. Mr. Un-talk, totally involved with the garlic bread and nothing else. He'd come there for the fodder and nothing else, period.

Billy (Father) Grady up at the microphone now, looking very unpriestly (even retired) in a dark blue business suit and a mud-colored tie, fumbling around with the height-adjustment ring on the mike, finally getting it just where he wanted (he must have been an inch shorter than Tim O'Toole), getting uncomfortably solemn:

We pray to You, Our Father and Mother,
To bless this food we are about to eat,
To bless us and our progeny and we give
You special thanks for having brought us
All here together for this special moment
.

A big cheer, a clatter of applause, Billy starting to readjust the height of the microphone again but O'Toole right in there blocking him, murmuring, “That's OK, Billy, I can handle it,” Billy let it go, a shy quick smile to The Gang, then sitting quietly down again.

He'd always been kind of a comfortable-in-the-closet personality, Buzz wondering why he hadn't become an accountant or pest-control person instead of forcing himself into something that demanded so much of a public persona …

“What was all that about God the Father and Mother?” Buzz asked Mary Alice.

“Well, you don't mean to tell me that God was a MALE?!?!?” she said, like turning over a playing card, the innocent back suddenly revealing an … Ace of Medusas.

“I don't know,” said Buzz, “I'm kind of an agnostic, whatever it is Out There who made all this, it might be a cosmic dragon of some kind for all anyone knows. This whole universe might be on a table in some other super-species' lab, we might all be just streptococci in the gut of some cosmic elephant … I mean think how the universe must look to a flea on the back on an elephant.”

“What kind of crap … ”

Ms. Blonde Universe suddenly getting all radishy red even through the defensive layers of her makeup, Lloyd patting her on the arm, “OK, honey, you promised, remember, just take it easy, all flowers in God's garden aren't the same … ”

“God's garden, my arse!” she said, getting up like a snowplow backing out of the snowplow garage, banging her chair into the wall, just as Fred came back into the dining room and she plowed by him as he stood there in breezy beatitude, Buzz distinctly smelling the sweet resinous smell of juniper berries in the air, this horrible curse of heightened senses as he got older, ears like a rat, nose like a wolf, eyes like an eagle … accompanied by the mobility of a hippo with Multiple Sclerosis.

Wasn't there a little bulge (silver gin-flask?) in the breast coat pocket of Freddy's Harris tweed? Over the years a few hints dropped here and there about Freddy's “drinking-problem,” but—

Carried it off beautifully.

“That's better,” he said, “a little nicotine-break … what's happening?”

“God the Mother's made a couple of appearances,” said Buzz as Mary Alice stormed out the door, a couple of people noticing (What's wrong with her, for God's sake?) as Timmy O'Toole started in again on a somber note and the first course came in on all sorts of little carts accompanied by all sorts of little clatter. The salad course. Gigantic heaps of lettuce and spinach, tomato-bits, cucumber-bits, onion slices, anchovies, blue cheese, parmesan cheese, red and green pepper-bits, Freddy carefully studying one of the plates he was passing down, “God, it looks like the tornado hit Mrs. Wiggley's Garden Patch,” as Timmy began: “I'd like to take a moment to remember those who are no longer with us—Randy Foreman, Jim O'Hallaron, Moe Belucci, Benny O'Callaghan, and Frank Carmichael who we're not sure about. Missing in Action, so to speak. And if I may usurp some ecclesiastical powers from Father Grady, let me say REQUIEST IN PACE, PER OMNIA SAECULA SAECULUM, AMEN … a moment of silence, please … ”

A moment of not exactly silence, a clinking of plates, the collective sounds of everyone munching and crunching on the salad, Buzzy cursing his supermanish hearing, the hearing that kept him awake at night listening to owls and raccoons, drunks on the street, distant trucks, trains, planes and eagles, some guy
next door (this year) who practiced drums on a padded chunk of a pine-log … but Buzzy could hear him … rata … ratatat-tata … bing, bing, bam … could call the Grand Junction cops for big bands and bawdy beerblast, but felt kind of old man silly to be calling about a padded drummer fifty yards away separated from him by two windows. And he was always afraid of reprisals. Like two years earlier when he'd bitched about a dog out all night across the street yowling, and the animal control people had come out and given the dog's owner (a six four Potawatomi Indian on a special Native American scholarship) a fifty dollar fine, that same night one of the burgeoning junipers in front of Buzz's house that he and Malinche had planted themselves five years earlier, was mutilated, one side of branches all stripped bare so that it looked a fat old lady sawed in half …