Within Arm's Reach (3 page)

We lived in three different hotel suites while I was growing up, in three different cities. One in Atlantic City, one in New York City, and the last in St. Louis. It was in that hotel suite that Patrick courted me, and it was in that hotel suite that I left my parents behind when I headed east as a new wife.

I met my husband when I was twenty-three years old, and already an old maid. My two sisters had long since married. I lived with my mother and father in the hotel my father ran. I had graduated from college the year before, and upon my return, the few friends I had left from the area called me a snob within my hearing and ignored me when I spoke to them directly. I didn’t care. I was proud of my degree, a Bachelor of the Arts in Nutrition. I was content to live a life that consisted of going to church each morning with Mother and eating dinner with her and my father each night. I was never one who needed much company.

My parents were both from Ireland, but my father seemed to have become American the minute his feet hit Massachusetts soil. He was tall and he stood up straight. He always wore a three-piece suit, rarely drank, and had a firm handshake. He was a successful man who managed four-star hotels in major cities. He had met Franklin Delano Roosevelt and played golf with Babe Ruth. He was a wonderful father.

My mother, on the other hand, had only seemed to grow more Irish, and more eccentric, with each year in the States. Her brogue became so strong that only our family could understand her. During thunderstorms, she hid in the coat closet and prayed at the top of her lungs. She carried a rosary in every pocket; most days she had two or three on her at a time. She would nervously touch the front pocket of her dress, and then her handbag, and then her closed right palm, checking on, reaching for, the ever-present beads. Seated at the breakfast table in our hotel suite, she would often address the empty chair by the window as if it were filled by whomever she was missing most from Ireland just then. Her mother, or her sister Nancy, or her girlhood friend Diandra. “Look, girls,” she would say, “see the smile your aunt Nancy has on her face? She always did love my tea best. Say good morning to her, girls. Mind your manners, won’t you.”

My father would play along. If he’d just walked into the room, he would act pleased to have the chance to chat with Nancy. He behaved as though my mother had done him a favor by delivering her to our hotel suite. “How’s the weather in old potato land?” he would say to the empty chair by the window. “Can’t say that I miss the gray skies, but I do miss your lovely face, Nancy lass. And I can’t tell you how much Lorna longs for your company.”

I knew my father did not really believe that my aunt was sitting there under the ray of sunlight, the way my mother did. And as much as I loved him, I could never understand why he pretended to share her delusions. Why did he appear to love my mother
more
for providing him with her silly games and fantasies? Why did he encourage her? It made no sense. When my mother insisted that I address Aunt Nancy, or Diandra, or some other person I had never even laid eyes on, much less spoken to, all I could do was smile stiffly at the empty chair. I was never rude, but I refused to play along.

On my thirteenth birthday, when my father had taken me out alone for an ice cream, I asked him why he didn’t lay down the law with Mother and tell her she was acting crazy.

“You’re not doing her any favors, Papa.” I sat up straight on the counter stool, so pleased that I was finally an adult, and could finally have this discussion with my father. We could speak openly, as one grown-up who had put up with my mother for many years to another. “She thinks it’s acceptable to act the way she does because you don’t tell her otherwise. If you told her to stop it, she would. Then we could be a normal family. We could talk about normal things. We wouldn’t be forced to offer tea and dinner rolls to her, to her”—I struggled for the right word—“her ghosts.”

My father put his elbows on the counter, then folded his hands under his chin. His movements were measured and calm. “Another root beer when you have a moment please, ma’am,” he said to the waitress. “Catharine, your mother simply brings more life to the room. She is not crazy. She’s Irish in a way you and I are not. You must treat her with respect.”

I gasped. I was never reprimanded. I never did anything wrong. I couldn’t bear for him to think I did. “I love Mother,” I said. “I
do
respect her.”

But the second part was a lie, and I never got over feeling badly about that. I tried to make up for the lack of respect by loving her even more. I concentrated on how to love her better. I showed her my love every day by running errands, by buying a single yellow daisy to sit in a cup on the windowsill. I gave orders to and fielded complaints from the hotel maids, because I knew Mother hated to look at or talk to black people. I kept her company while my father was downstairs in the offices. I stayed home long after my sisters had married and left. It seemed clear that I would have to give up my entire life in order to prove I respected my mother. And I was prepared to do that.

But then Patrick appeared, and he offered me a way out.

I met Patrick McLaughlin in the dining room of the hotel. I knew my father had engineered the meeting. Patrick was a young lawyer from New Jersey, in town on business. He met my father’s qualifications for a son-in-law: He was Irish and he could support me. His parents were poor immigrants who ran a grocery store in Paterson and had sacrificed everything to put their sons through school. But there was no Paterson and no grocery store in Patrick McLaughlin’s walk. He was cocky. He carried himself like he thought he was the President, the cat’s meow, and the next in line for the throne all rolled into one. I didn’t think much of him, until I saw him with my mother.

The first evening he visited our hotel suite, my mother told a story about her home (a story she started reciting before I was born, and which seemed to go on for as long as she was alive, without end) and in the middle Patrick joined in. He spoke about Ireland, too, even though he had never been there. He said his mother was from County Wicklow, and my mother beamed. She leaned forward, her hands folded over her heart, and told him she had spoken to her old next-door neighbor Diandra that morning over tea. Diandra had sat right there—and my mother pointed at that damned empty chair I wished every day someone would take a match to. Patrick nodded; his eyes lit up. I gave him a sharp look and saw that he understood that Diandra had not really been here. Like my father, he was playing along, not missing a beat. Patrick told me later that at that moment he had felt like he was home.

I never saw Patrick drink during his stay in St. Louis, so it was only in his interaction with my mother that I noticed his Irishness. I thought of what my father had told me ten years earlier, and knew that Patrick was crazy Irish in the same way my mother was. Yet he was smart, too, a lawyer, and sensible. He had a down payment on a house in a town called Ridgewood in New Jersey. He was thirty years old. He was ready to marry. I couldn’t get over the fact that he was equally comfortable talking money with Father and leprechauns with Mother. He presented a package in which I could accept the traits he shared with my mother. I realized, the first evening he sat in our suite, his hat on his knee, that the answer I had never even imagined existed lay in Patrick McLaughlin. I would be able to love, and, most importantly, respect my mother through him.

We married three months later, in front of thirteen guests, at St. Paul’s Church, two blocks from the hotel. Patrick wore white gloves and a morning suit. I wore a floor-length dress with tiny buttons running from the nape of my neck down to the hem. We left for New Jersey the next morning in the middle of a thunderstorm. My father drove us to the train station, and as we pulled away from the hotel I waved out the back window of the car in the direction of the suite’s windows, even though I knew my mother would be nowhere near the window in this kind of weather. She would be deep in the closet with the door shut, her face buried in my father’s overcoat, her rosary beads clutched to her chest. My mother’s prayers and violent claps of thunder swept me out of St. Louis.

I planned to go back for a visit that Christmas, but by then I was too far along with the baby to travel. And then came Kelly and Patrick Jr. and life became so that I was rarely able to leave the house for a few hours, much less cross the country for a few days. Father came to visit when my first child died, but Mother didn’t make the trip. I never saw her again.

LOUIS

I have just walked out of a pointless meeting with the mayor, Vince Carrelli, and the town council when the accident happens. I am standing on the steps of the Municipal Building, trying to decide if it’s worth going back in to have another word with Vince, who is acting like an idiot because I caught him drinking again last week, when I recognize Catharine’s gray Lincoln heading down the street.

The license plate reads MAC 6. Every Lincoln Town Car Patrick McLaughlin bought had that same license plate, the only difference being which number car it was. When he died, MAC 5 had been parked in the garage. I prepare to wave to my mother-in-law as soon as she is close enough. I figure she’s on her way home from Ryan’s. Her youngest son lives just over the railroad tracks, in a run-down building across from Finch Park.

As the car draws close enough for me to see Catharine’s gray curls and her silver-rimmed glasses, I think she has caught sight of me as well, because she’s slowing down. But almost immediately I realize she’s slowing down too rapidly. She’s driving down the center of a busy road where cars regularly exceed the speed limit. A minivan is gaining on her from behind; I can’t tell if the driver has noticed the Lincoln’s deceleration. And then, unbelievably, Catharine comes to a stop. She parks the car right where it is.

It’s all over in a second. I watch Catharine take her hands off the wheel as if she has decided she is done driving, and then the minivan is on top of her. The driver tries to swerve at the last moment, but he isn’t able to clear her completely, he clips the fender of the Lincoln.

I am running across the street before the minivan makes contact, afraid Catharine is going to step out of the car into the traffic that is now passing the Lincoln on either side. I put up my hands, palms out, to signal the other drivers to stop. I pull the car door open and lean in. Catharine is sitting neatly in front of the steering wheel, as tiny as a child, her purse gathered on her lap. There is blood trickling down her forehead.

“Louis,” she says. “What in the world are you doing here?”

I DRIVE FAST, but paying close attention to the road, while glancing over to make sure Catharine is still conscious, is not enough to distract me from where we’re headed. The last time I was at Valley Hospital was two months earlier, and on that occasion I arrived in an ambulance with a young man who was already dead. It is not a place or a memory I want to revisit, and unfortunately I am now speeding toward both.

When we turn into the hospital’s parking lot, I pull over to let an ambulance wail past, red lights flashing. I help Catharine into the emergency room and immediately see the orderly, a chubby red-haired boy, who helped carry Eddie into the hospital. I notice the round scuffed clock above the reception desk that seemed to be stuck at three-thirty that afternoon.

When Eddie was carried into the ER, doctors and nurses surrounded us. People shouted into my ear, across the body. His wife was there, too, in her white uniform, standing on the edge of the fray, although I didn’t know until later that it was his wife. That she was a nurse at the hospital who was on duty and had heard the call about the accident, and the name of the victim.

Today I have to stand at the reception desk for ten minutes before I can get anyone to even speak to me. Catharine and I then have to sit on the orange plastic chairs they allot to people who aren’t bleeding copiously or in some other way being obvious about dying. Catharine’s forehead has a rudimentary bandage on it now and the cut has stopped bleeding, which makes me feel a little better about the situation. She selects a magazine and holds it in her lap. I look down and count the floor tiles. There are sixty-eight tiles in the half of the room we are sitting in.

“You’re walking slower than me,” Catharine says once they direct us to an exam room.

I look down at her. Despite her resistance, the nurse insisted she be pushed to the room in a wheelchair. “You’re not walking,” I say.

“You know what I mean,” she says. “You’re moving like an old man. And why are you screwing your head around like that? Are you looking for someone?”

I almost say,
I am an old man,
but this would just provoke her to argue and there’s no point in that. She’s annoyed at me for bringing her here, so she’s looking for a fight. I stay out of her way by wandering in and out of the exam room until Lila shows up and Catharine kicks me out for good.

I leave the room feeling stronger for the sight of my daughter in her white coat. My beautiful daughter, the future doctor. She makes the hospital look safer to me, more manageable. I feel well enough now to wander the halls. I stop an orderly and ask for directions, trying to ignore the fact that my heart jumps a little every time a nurse turns toward me. I blur my vision as I walk, not looking at faces. What would I do, what would I say, if I ran into Eddie’s wife? Maybe if I had known I would end up here this afternoon I would have prepared something, but as it stands now I am not prepared. All I am prepared to do right now is to find the goddamn chapel. I move through the halls—a left, a right, and two more lefts—quickly, trying to look purposeful and collected.

But any composure I have shatters when I turn into the chapel and see the oversized wooden crucifix hung over the tiny altar. I have spent my lifetime attending church, and every crucifix looks different. On some, Jesus has the look of a sweet boy; on others, he is an emaciated man in his sixties. In the church I attended growing up, Jesus had a face as jolly as Santa Claus. The crucifix in the hospital chapel is one I haven’t seen before. In this one Jesus has the facial expression and the posture of Eddie Ortiz on the last day of his life.

Right there on the wall is the figure of Eddie lying in a patch of tall grass, curled up on his side as if he has gone to sleep. His flannel shirt tucked into his jeans. His tool belt still fastened around his waist. His dark hair cut short. I can see part of his young man’s face. His expression is relaxed. He clearly has no idea what he just lost. On the contrary, his face appears wide open, bared toward a bright future.

My crew had been replacing a roof on a medium-sized Colonial. It was a simple, straightforward job. A couple weeks in duration, tops. Three men on the roof, me checking in a few times a day from the ground. The work was going according to schedule, with no significant hold-ups. Eddie Ortiz had been working for me for six months. He was really good with his hands, and smart, too, a rare combination in a construction worker. He was only Gracie’s age, but he had a wife and two little kids, and I knew he had ambitions to move up and gain more responsibility. I’d decided that when this job was finished, I’d give him a raise and he could help me do some supervising. There was too much work for just me to handle by then; Eddie had come along at the perfect time.

But on that cloudless, dry Wednesday afternoon I decided to climb up on the roof to check the men’s work. Eddie was showing me a small flaw in the roof’s structure when he took a step toward the edge and lost his footing. It happened so quickly that none of us even had a chance to throw an arm out, or yell for help. I will never get over how fast it happened. One minute I was sitting on my heels eating a sandwich and listening to Eddie. The next minute I was standing on the edge of the roof, looking down at the young man lying in a patch of tall grass. His voice still rang in the air.

I am on my knees in one of the pews, but I have not yet uttered a prayer. Eddie is dead on the cross in front of me, Catharine is hurt down the hall. I don’t know why I continue to try to fix things. There’s no point, but I can’t seem to get that through my thick head. It was because I tried to help Vince that the foolish man sabotaged the town council meeting this afternoon and made everyone in the room uncomfortable. I guess you could call Vince and me friends, but it’s the kind of friendship that grows out of shared history rather than mutual respect. I’ve been keeping an eye out for him this past year, since his wife, Cynthia, passed away. Several times, in a wine-induced fog, he has yelled at me about the fact that I am buying up all the land in sight and trying to take this town of Ramsey away from him. After each blowup Vince is embarrassed, and we go through a few awkward weeks, like this one. He probably ran right from the meeting to his barbershop on Main Street, where he will sit with the down-and-out group of guys who are his regulars and who firmly believe the mayor can do no wrong, even if that means him drinking himself into oblivion.

I can’t entirely blame Vince for his behavior. I don’t know how I would react, or what kind of life I would lead, if I lost Kelly. And yet the truth is that I am in danger of finding out. My wife is barely speaking to me, and I can’t blame her. She tried to help me after Eddie’s funeral, but I pushed her away. I’ve continued to push her away. Lately, I have taken to sleeping on the couch in the den, though neither one of us has mentioned that fact out loud. I feel safer there, in the small dark room with the flickering light of television, than I do in our master bedroom. I don’t fit well on the couch, but I am able to sleep L-shaped with my legs on the coffee table. It’s actually fairly comfortable. I keep the news on all night, the volume low. With the muffled noise in my ears I seem to dream less often and fall asleep more easily. The television keeps me from making up pictures in my head. From hearing voices I don’t want to hear. From replaying over and over the afternoon Eddie died.

There is a light pressure on my shoulder, and I jump. I am on my feet and face-to-face with the person before I recognize the nurse who checked Catharine in.

“Is she okay?” I ask. I wonder how long I’ve been in here. Ten minutes? An hour?

“Mrs. McLaughlin’s been checked out. You can both go.”

I follow the nurse down the hall. She is a large woman, rectangular-shaped. A white hat perches on her curls like a boat trying to hold on amid treacherous waves. I pose a question to her back. “Do you know if Nurse Ortiz is on duty?”

She doesn’t turn around. “No nurse by that name in this hospital.”

“Are you sure? I know she works here.”

“Not under that name. Is she married?”

“She was.” The words are lodged deep in my throat. It takes a cough to get them out. “She was married.”

“Maybe she works under her maiden name. Know that?”

I know where she lives. I know that she is bringing up two small children on her own. I know that she appears to be doing all right, from what I’ve been able to see. “No.”

The nurse shrugs with her entire upper body, but the hat still stays in place and I realize I am done following her. I am in the room with Catharine and my daughter, who looks as pale and tired as I feel.

ON THE WAY home from the hospital, I say, in as casual a tone as I can muster, “How are we going to deal with this? Will you make an appointment with a specialist, or should I?”

“There’s nothing to deal with, Louis. The doctor said I’m fine. I have a bump on my head, that’s all.”

I like my mother-in-law, and for over thirty years I’ve made it a policy not to argue with her. But today seems like as good a day as any to break that rule. I say, “Lila saw your chart. She said the doctor thinks you might have had a tiny stroke.”

A minute goes by with me looking at the road and Catharine looking out the window.

“Might have,” she says finally. “I’ve never set any stock by ‘might haves.’ I might have become a nun. You might have grown up someplace else and never met my daughter. There’s no point to that kind of talk.”

I glance over at her. “Well, I think you should go back for tests, just to be on the safe side.”

“I’ll see my doctor.”

“O’Malley? That old coot? For God’s sake, Catharine, the man’s practically blind and deaf. I know Kelly has a doctor she likes. We’ll make you an appointment with her. What’s important is that we take care of this.”

Catharine’s voice slams down. “No, Louis.
I
will take care of this. I don’t want to discuss it. Tell Kelly what you must, but whatever happens from here on in will be my decision. Now, believe it or not, I have a headache. I’d like to ride in silence.”

Her face as expressionless as a slab of Sheetrock, Catharine refuses to say another word.

MY MOTHER-IN-LAW scared the hell out of me the first time I met her. I learned that day that there was no influencing her, and little point in arguing with her.

Kelly had invited me to her parents’ house for a Sunday lunch, but it seemed more like she had invited me into a train station. Young adults scattered with a few teenagers seemed to be everywhere at once. Pat and Johnny clapped me on the back and looked me up and down. Meggy came into the living room with a short skirt on, and her father sent her back to her room to change. Ryan and Theresa, the shy ones, each shook my hand and offered me a soda or lemonade. Kelly was shy in those days, too, though less retiring. She stayed close to my side while she made introductions; I could feel how physically anxious she was for them to like me. We were having an early lunch so Patrick could head out to the golf course. Everyone except me had just come from Mass.