The Other Side of the World (33 page)

“Such as…?”

“Read my books,” she answered.

“
Again?
”

“Stop it,” she said. “But listen—please?—I did something weird before I went to sleep. Come sit with me.”

We sat on the side of her bed, and she told me that before she went to sleep she'd found herself standing in front of the shrine Caitlin and her mother had made to her and her books.

“I prayed, Charlie—for the first time in nearly thirty years, I prayed—and do you know what I prayed for?”

“My soul.”

“Be serious.
Please?
”

“Tell me.”

“I prayed for a child—I made a wish—and I had a moment when—it was like emerging from a blackout—I suddenly knew my wish was going to be granted. I just
knew
.”

“But how…?”

She was squeezing my arm very hard without seeming to realize she was doing so. “I don't
know
!” she said. “But I found myself thinking of those organizations that give dying kids their dreams-come-true where they get to meet their favorite rock star or movie star or ballplayer…”

“Make-a-Wish,” I said. “That's the name of the organization,
and it's also the title of one of the stories Max never wrote, about someone like you coming to live with him. Maybe that's why…”

“
Damn
!” she said, and got up from the bed. “I shouldn't have told you.
Damn
! Just damn your eyes, O'Sullivan. You are such a child—such a grade-A jerk sometimes! Such a selfish, self-serving total
jerk
!”

I took her hand, tugged lightly, and she sat next to me again. “Hey—it's okay—nothing wrong with wishing for things for ourselves—even praying for them.” I laughed. “Max used to tell a story about a guy in synagogue who prayed to God to send him a thousand dollars, and promised that if God did, he'd give half of it to charity… but if somehow God didn't believe him, he asked God to just send him
his
half.”

“Stop humoring me and trying to make a joke out of everything,” she said. “Your father did that sometimes, and it drove me nuts.”

“Like father like son?”

“Just
stop it
, goddamn you! Stop trying to make things
right
,” she said. “I hate it when people do that. I really do. Let me feel guilty if I want to feel guilty—let me feel embarrassed if I feel embarrassed.
Please?
”

“Sure.”

She went to the table where her books were, picked up the photo of her in her communion dress. “I was pretty, wasn't I?”

“Pretty then, beautiful now,” I said.

“So maybe I'm upset because I'm happy to be home again, and it surprises me to be happy here, and—don't protest or make a joke because if you do I may become violent—I'm happy to be here with you, Charlie.”

 

At breakfast, Seana's mother didn't talk, not even to say ‘good morning,' but she ate steadily—bread and jam, canned
sausages, cookies, cut-up fruit—and stared ahead absently while she chewed.

Then the noise began.

Keira, Mary, and Peggy arrived with their children, and so did Caitlin's four children and
their
children. There was lots of hugging, kissing, and weeping. Caitlin pulled more food from the fridge, freezer, and pantry, and she and her sisters set out food on the kitchen table (each of the sisters had brought something), and on a glass-topped coffee table in the living room. The older children came to me one at a time and told me they were sorry my father had died, but otherwise didn't show much interest in who I was or why I was there.

Seana's mother sat on the couch, the grandchildren taking turns sitting next to her, telling her about what they were doing in school—the younger ones talked about cartoons they loved:
Scooby Doo
,
Bugs Bunny
,
Shrek
,
Road Runner
—and thanking her when, from her purse, she rewarded them with coins. “Be gone small change before I spend ye!” she'd say each time. Mary and Peggy had brought shopping bags with copies of Seana's novels they asked her to sign—for sale at their church bazaars, for their local libraries, for gift-giving—and they were at her with questions about her life—new books? new homes? travel plans?

They remembered my father from the time they'd met him at Seana's Brooklyn Public Library reading, and they remembered that he'd grown up a block or two away, and told me they'd enjoyed talking with him about what things had been like in the neighborhood when he was a boy. Peggy recalled him saying that the Holy Cross schoolyard had been his second home, and there were tears in her eyes when she said she knew that it was because of him that Seana had become a writer, and how she couldn't imagine what it was like to
have
a father of his quality, and then to lose him. One of Seana's nieces—Caitlin's daughter, Alexa, who was in graduate school at Teacher's College—said that she had written an essay on
Plain Jane
for her senior honors
thesis at Fordham University, comparing it to
Jane Eyre
, and that she'd wowed her professor with the fact that Seana was her aunt.

They asked me about what I was doing—had I been living with my father before he died?—and I told them that I'd been living and working in Singapore, and that my best friend had died there not long before my father had passed away. Seana, smiling mischievously, told them that I'd written about my experiences in Singapore, and about my friend's death, which had occurred under mysterious circumstances, and that if she knew anything about matters literary, what I'd written was sure to be published one day soon.

Her sisters congratulated me, asked a few more questions, and then went back to comparing notes on their kids, and complaining about their husbands. They gossiped about relatives and people they'd grown up with—who was getting divorced, who'd come into money, who was dead or dying, who had moved away and to where… and I sat there drinking it all in, and wondering: Was
this
—or the
loss
of this—of extended family living near each other and sharing their ongoing lives on what was, for these sisters and their children, a daily basis—what it was all about? And where were the men, and what part of this world was theirs and bore the impress of who
they
were?

And so it went, into the early afternoon. The women kept setting out food and more food. They washed dishes, gossiped, and looked through photo albums of communions, confirmations, graduations, weddings, and family vacations. They laughed and wiped away tears and traded stories and called their children to them to show them pictures of people and events that had taken place when the children were young, or before the children were born. Seana's mother took a nap upstairs while the older children worked at their laptop computers, and the younger ones played video games on hand-held gizmos, or watched television—there were DVDs there for them: old Walt Disney movies—
Cinderella
,
Bambi
,
Dumbo
,
The Little Mermaid
—and as the hours went by, I noticed that Seana was keeping to herself more and more.

When she said she was going upstairs to check on their mother, I followed.

I touched her arm. “Are you okay?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said, and pulled away from me.

“But you're not,” I said.

“Well aren't you the perceptive one,” she said.

“Come on,” I said. “What's up?”

“What's
up
? Why
we
are, Charlie—we're up here in the
up
stairs hallway of the home in which I
grew
up, and where we are now having a joyous and spontaneous family reunion, and where there are so many memories and feelings crashing around that the Environmental Protection Agency may be called in.”

“And you're
up
-set,” I said.

“Oh Charlie,” she said, her head against my chest. “You
are
a wonder, and I'll be fine after a few years of this. It's not complicated, after all. I forgot a few things, see? I forgot to be who I was supposed to be—a mother, a wife, secretary, a nurse, a teacher, a nun—I'm
in
the family but not
of
it, right? Same old, same old. I'm not
like
them, Charlie. It's why I…”

“So you're different—you're who you are, they're who they are, and what's wrong with that? They love you—
adore
you actually. You're their shining light, the angel who…”

She pulled away again, walked to her mother's room, peeked in, turned back to me.

“They really
are
proud of you and love you, even if they don't understand you, even if…”

“Does that go for you too?”

“No. I understand you. I
get
you.”

“You really think so?” She pressed her body against me, her hands on the back of my neck. “You are my guy,” she said. “Did you know that? But do leave me be for a while. It's all much
more overwhelming than I expected, and, in the life I chose, I did get used to being alone most of the time.”

“You can still be alone as much…”

“Shut up and kiss me,” she said, and I did, and when she backed away, her eyes were suddenly blazing. She grabbed both my arms and started shaking me. “Oh my god,” she said. “Oh my dear fucking God! I forgot, right? Yes! I almost forgot our plan…”

 

When we got to the Holy Cross schoolyard, he was there, as Seana thought he might be. He had never let her or her sisters see where he lived, and had always, from boyhood, called the Holy Cross schoolyard his home-away-from-home. He was sitting by himself, his back against the chain-link fence, watching black guys play basketball.

“What took you so long?” he said, but without smiling. “You hung up on me, so I waited for you, figuring you'd get yourself here by and by. Your wop boyfriends don't hang out here anymore, unless this young man you're with is one of them.”

“This is my friend Charlie Eisner,” Seana said. “He's Max Eisner's son. Max is dead—he passed away two months ago.”

“Ah!” her father said. “Relieved to hear it, young man. No offense, but from the grim look on my daughter's face, I thought you might have come to tell me he died of a sudden this very day.”

“This is my father, Patrick O'Sullivan,” Seana said.

He took off his baseball cap, tipped it toward me. “Now when my time comes,” he said, “the one room I live in being terribly small, all you'll have to do is tuck me in, turn out the lights, lock the door, put handles on the room, and carry it away.”

One of the black guys came over. “This is my daughter,” Seana's father said to him. “And this is her young friend, Charles Eisner.”

“Your father's the man,” the black guy said, and he shook each of our hands. “He's a real card.”

“The joker in the pack,” Seana's father said.

“You got that right,” the black guy said. “This man knows more bad jokes than any man on this earth, and when I say bad, I mean
bad
. We count on him for stuff.”

Seana's father stood, and to my surprise, he was nearly as tall as I was. He wore a blue pin-stripe suit, a green and white repp tie. He was clean-shaven, and what I had taken for high color in his cheeks was, I now saw, rouge.

“So Smitty,” her father asked the black guy, “if you had a donkey and I had a rooster, and your donkey ate my rooster, what would you have?”

“Don't know.”

“You'd have three feet of my cock up your ass.”

Smitty laughed. “He gives us lines we can use with our lady friends too,” he said to Seana, then whispered. “And we take care of him—look out for him—know what I mean?”

“No,” Seana said. “I don't.”

“Have you ever played ‘County Fair' with one of your young lady friends?” Seana's father asked.

“How you do that?” Smitty asked.

“You have her sit on your face, and you guess her weight.”

Smitty laughed again. “See what I mean?” he said.

“No,” Seana said. Then, to her father: “It's time to go. Everyone's waiting.”

“I suspected as much,” her father said. Seana's father picked up his cane—black, with an ivory-white handle in the shape of a cat's head—and we started from the schoolyard, the black guys waving to us.

“Do you know what the difference is between a priest and acne?” her father asked, and when neither of us responded, he answered his own question: “Acne doesn't usually come on a boy's face until after he's twelve years old.”

We walked past the church, one of us to either side of him.

“And you, Mister Eisner—given your origins, you might know the answer to this: What's the difference between a Jew and a pizza?”

I said nothing.

“When you put a pizza in the oven it doesn't scream,” he said.

“Cheesy joke,” I said.

“Don't,” Seana said. “Don't encourage him.”

“Because I'm
in-corrigible
,” her father said. “Ah—and here's an ecumenical favorite: A priest walks up to the bar and orders a drink. Then a rabbi walks up to the bar and orders a drink. Then a horse walks up to the bar, and the bartender asks: ‘Why the long face?'”

“I have a surprise,” Seana said, when we reached her street. “I've planned a trip for you.”

“Still trying to get rid of me, I see,” he said. “But good of you, of course, and I accept your offer, since you must be a wealthy woman from your several best sellers.” He tapped on my shoe with his cane. “Her sentences lack a certain felicity of style, and her timing is off—a matter of cadence there—and we certainly wouldn't think of talking about her work in the same breath with the work of, say, Beckett, or O'Casey, or even Edna O'Brien, though the public does seem to take to her. Still, if you ask me…”