The Men from the Boys (42 page)

He sighs. “I felt so bad this past winter. Tommy told me he'd been in the hospital. I felt so bad that I didn't know.”

I don't say anything. I don't have to. He was the one who didn't return phone calls.

“He was always so good to me,” Eduardo is saying, looking at me. “I'll go see him this week.”

“That would be good.”

We stand awkwardly again. “Eduardo,” I say finally.

He looks at me as if he knows what is about to come and dreads it. “Yes?”

“I wonder if we could have lunch, or coffee, or whatever.”

He looks away.

“Even simply to put closure on what happened between us.”

He looks directly at me. “Jeff, I've moved on. Can't you accept that? I have fond memories of last summer. But people change. Feelings change. That's just the way things happen.”

“Fine,” I say. “So let's have lunch.”

His father is approaching us again. “Okay,” Eduardo says quickly. “We can have lunch.”

“When?”

“Uh—the day after tomorrow?”

“Fine. Where?”

“I'll come by Javitz's.”

I give him the address, and he moves off toward his father, who waves a warm farewell to me. Eduardo doesn't look around. I'm left feeling neither elation nor disappointment, neither happy nor sad. I just stand there and watch the waves.

Boston, November 1994

Of course, it's my brother who takes charge the moment my father dies.

 
The afternoon we brought Javitz home from the hospital, the pneumonia having been vanquished yet again, my brother called to give me the news. “Jeff,” he said directly, without any pause, “Dad died this morning.”

So here we are now, Lloyd and I, driving to Connecticut, along a particularly monotonous stretch of the Mass Turnpike. I stare out the window, counting the mile markers as we pass. How quickly things happen; how quickly plans are changed. Today we had planned to rent movies and bake brownies, prop Javitz up on the couch and get lost in the camp of
The Women and All About Eve.

“Do you feel like talking, Cat?” Lloyd asks.

I shake my head no.

“Well, I'm here in case you do.”

We drive in silence. Of
course
it was my brother who called, who told me where the funeral was, what time, who had been called before me. Of course it would be him. The keeper of the flame, the caretaker of the family honor. I was sure, even in my grief, that he would be there when we arrived, consoling my mother, instructing the pallbearers, the funeral director, my sister, me. My brother comes alive only in moments of crisis. The rest of the time, he sits barely breathing in front of the television set, like the lizard I had when I was a kid. I didn't know it had died until weeks later, when I reached in to lift it from its branch and it was as hard as ice. But in crises, my brother animates himself. This is, after all, what a
man
should do.

“If your brother ever cracked,” Lloyd has predicted, “he'd go
completely
off the deep end.”

I haven't yet shed any tears. In Boston, upon getting the news, I obsessed about the matters of my life: how long we'd be gone, if Javitz would be all right, whether we should take Mr. Tompkins to Melissa and Rose. “I've left them enough food for a day,” Lloyd assured me. “And Chanel will come in and feed them after that.”

“And they'll all look in on Javitz?”

“Yes, Cat. Stop worrying. Everything is under control.”

We were almost out the door when I remembered something. I stopped, bent down, pulled out the drawer in the little table in the hallway. I reached in with my hand, found my father's ring, rubbed the fake amethyst with my thumb. Did I think it would be gone? Yet I didn't take it out; I couldn't bear to look at it. Then my fingers brushed against the cracked glass of the ceramic dog, and along the smooth surface of the book Eduardo gave me last summer. I closed the drawer quickly. It has become impossible to look inside.

And of course I'm right: when we arrive, my brother is already directing things. He's in the driveway, just about the spot where Junebug was killed, where the man who is now dead dropped a shovel on my old friend's neck. My brother is telling my aunt to park her car up on the grass. He spots me. He's never met Lloyd, not after all these years.

“Kevin,” I say, “this is Lloyd.”

He barely nods at him. He looks instead at me as if to ask how I could so dishonor our father by bringing my homosexual lover to this house. “Jeff,” he says, “Mom's going to need us more than ever now.”

“How is she?”

“Go on in and see her,” he instructs. He turns to Lloyd. “Park the car over there.”

“I'm going into town to get us a room,” Lloyd says.

“You're not staying with Mom?” Kevin asks.

“If you think we should ...” I offer.

“I think you should,” he says.

I level my eyes at my brother. “Lloyd stays with me.”

“Look,” Lloyd says, “I'll go get a room and then we can decide.” That seems to settle things for now. Kevin moves off to embrace my aunt.

I watch as Lloyd leaves and my heart falls. I don't want to be here alone with these people. Not now. It's as if my father's death has made them all even more like strangers to me.

I turn, expecting for a moment that my father will be standing there on the step, holding open the door, saying “Jeffy, it's good to see you,” a twenty-dollar bill rolled up in his palm. Instead, it's his cousin, my aunt Loretta. I haven't seen her in nearly a decade. Her eyes catch me and register discomfort. The gay son has arrived, I hear whispered in my head. That's the gay, one.

Ann Marie embraces me, her hard, pregnant belly between us. “Oh, Jeffy,” she cries. “Poor Daddy. Poor Daddy.”

The house is filled with relatives. A couple of aunts kiss me. “Jeffy,” says one, “you look so much like your father did at your age.”

On the wall is a photograph of my father and me, back from a fishing trip. I'd forgotten about our little forays out in his boat. I hated the whole business: spearing the worms, cleaning the fish. And usually I'd sit there all day with never a bite, since most of the fish in our nearby pond were gone. But that time, the day this particular photo was taken, my father had driven me to a lake about twenty miles outside of town. Every ten minutes or so, I remember, he'd switch rods with me. Each time, I'd discover something nibbling at the end of my line, and we'd haul in a fish. “Gee, Dad,” I said, “I'm having all the luck and you're not getting anything.” Such a bright boy.

I smile despite myself. In the photo, I'm beaming, holding up my booty: thirteen good-sized trout. My father grins impishly behind me.

“Jeffy,” my mother says when she sees me.

We don't say much. I hug her and she strokes my hair. Later, when Lloyd arrives, she thanks him for coming. We don't stay long. Ann Marie is here, and my aunt Loretta plans to spend the night. Kevin makes a face when we leave, but I don't care. We go back to the motel room, and still I don't cry. “Cat, don't hold back,” Lloyd urges, but it's as if I used up all my tears crying about Javitz and little Katie Haaglund. We fall asleep in the breathing position, and I thank God for it.

At the wake, my father is laid out in the casket, surrounded by lilies, which strangely comfort me with their aroma. “He looks good,” Aunt Loretta assesses.

I glare at her. “He looks
dead,”
I tell her.

I think about Javitz back in Boston. He fought back the pneumonia enough to be allowed home, but he's still pretty down. When I called to tell him that my father had died, he asked how old he was.

“Sixty-seven,” I replied.

“And he died in his sleep? Lucky man.”

The funeral is agonizing. Back in the pews of my childhood, as the craggy old priest offers my father's soul to Jesus—the church hasn't changed much. The same old stained-glass windows, purple and blue and vivid red. The one of St. Boniface always intrigued me: the young, sissy-looking boy in a cassock fleeing a group of hooligans throwing stones at him.

I walk my mother out of the church, and her grip on my arm is unbearably weak. Kevin's on her other side, with his wife and his kids. Behind them is Ann Marie, very pregnant, heavy mascara smeared down her face by tears, walking with her long-haired fiancé, who up until Dad's death was just her boyfriend.

My mother surprises me. “Make sure Lloyd rides back in the limousine with the in-laws and the kids,” she instructs. “If Ann Marie's boyfriend can be there, so should Lloyd.”

I look at her for a moment. “All right, Ma. Thank you.”

It's bright and sunny, not at all like the funerals in movies, where it's always raining, horrid torrential downpours. We stand under a warm autumn sky, and the new granite stone sparkles in the sunlight. Mom's name is already there, birth year and maiden name clearly etched, just her death date waiting to be chiseled in. And there's Dad's name: JEFFREY MICHAEL O'BRIEN 1927-1994. It looks so neat and tidy. As if that's all there is to say.

I realize, standing here listening to Father McMurphy intone his final blessing, that I'm Jeffrey Michael O'Brien, Junior. I haven't thought of that in years. Strange how I ended up being Junior, and not Kevin.

The sound of dirt thudding on top of metal hurts my ears.

Back at the house, my niece tells me that
The Wizard of Oz was
on the night before. She's singing: ‘There's a place that I've heard of—' “ She stops, grinning up at me. ”addy says that was your favorite movie, that he used to make witch noises and scare you.“

“It still is my favorite movie,” I tell her.

Most of the people around us are gray-haired friends of my father. “He was a
good
man,” they all keep saying to me, clasping my hands heartily, as if I needed to be convinced of the fact. I just smile.

My mother sits at the kitchen table, smoking with my aunt Loretta. “I loved him, Loretta,” she's saying, in that raspy voice of hers. “I
really
loved him.”

I sit down with them, just as I might have when I was a child. It was always Jeffy and the ladies in the kitchen. Already some of the men have gathered in the living room. Thank God for ESPN. In the old days, what would they have done on days when no sport was being televised? Even Kevin has found a seat there now, too. His work is done. My father is buried. He can return to his chair.

“I wish he'd lived to see Ann Marie get married,” my mother says. “He wanted that so much.”

“And to see the baby,” I say.

“Yes, that too,” she agrees.

“You doing okay?”

“For now.” She puts her hand on mine. Funny how her hands have never changed. They looked old even when I was a kid, with their raised veins and brown spots. I look at mine. They look like hers.

Aunt Loretta gets up and leaves us alone. “I'm glad Lloyd came with you,” my mother says. “I'm glad you have someone to be with you.”

“That means a lot to hear you say that.”

She shrugs. She's watching the grandchildren wrestle on the floor, seemingly already oblivious to the memory of the man who used to sit in the empty chair in the corner. “He always thought he'd failed, you know,” she says at last. “We never got a bigger house. Look how crowded it is in here. We're still driving a 1983 Buick.” She stops, collecting her energy to keep her voice from breaking. “But I loved him. And we were together for forty-three years.”

“That's hardly a sign of failure, if you ask me.”

She looks up at me and smiles. For the first time in more than ten years, my mother and I smile at each other.

Later, after most of the others have left, I walk with my niece through the yard. Ann Marie is with Lloyd. They've been talking for hours. Free psychology, I imagine.

The yard seems so much smaller. Yet the bushes are deeper and the trees tangle into each other over my head. I walk over to a part of the yard that's noticeably higher, a little grassy hill in the middle of nothing.

“This was Gramma's rock garden,” I tell my niece.

“Rock garden? What's that?”

“Oh, she had pansies and petunias and Johnny-jump-ups and marigolds in here, surrounded by rocks. It was really neat.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And she let Ann Marie and me play in here.” We stand on top of the little hill. Crabgrass has overtaken the garden. I feel very vulnerable all of a sudden. I think my niece senses this, and she moves away slowly, inching towards her brother, who's playing with a truck on the patio. I sit down on a patch of crabgrass. Lloyd looks up at me from his conversation with Ann Marie, as if somehow he senses I'm about to crack.

I look to my left, and there's Dad, in the same spot where he once stood, asking me why I'd taken the clothes off my G.I. Joe. “Because I like his hard chest,” I admit finally, and he smiles.

Now I'm digging with my hands gently into the soil under the crabgrass. I think wildly that I'll find her—my little plastic orange witch. My heart begins to pound, and I'm a little kid again. It's like I'm digging inside of me, and it's my flesh that's being caked under my nails.

Of course I don't find anything. I stop digging. Lloyd stands over me now, looking down. I smile, get up, brush off my pants. “It's time to go,” he says gently, and I nod. We make our way over to the others to say good-bye. As we walk, I understand finally why I could never find my witch all those years ago. She's not there. She's in a place that I've heard of—once, in a lullaby.