The Last Romantics(3)
Down the small hill, Father Johns spoke in a dull, deep voice. From a distance, finally, I could make out the words:
“Too soon . . .”
“Great burden . . .”
“Do not ask . . .”
Noni’s head was bowed; she hadn’t noticed my absence. Noni was Catholic and felt it in her knees that ached from all the praying but not, she realized that day, in her heart. This was the last time she would entertain the rituals of organized religion, the last day she would bow her head to the words of a man wearing white.
From my position on the hill, the mourners looked similar to the crows, only bigger and quieter, perched on the yellowish green of the spring grass that cut abruptly to the darkness of earth beside the casket. I thought of how little space there was on our father’s stone. How unassuming it was, how meager, nothing like Garrison H. Clark’s showy marble mausoleum. Standing beneath a stranger’s name, gazing down at my father’s funeral, for the first time that day I began to cry.
*
We lived in a yellow house, a three-story Colonial on a street lined with arching maples and oaks that threw down acorns in the spring and curling red and orange leaves in the fall. There was a steep, clattery staircase leading to the bedrooms upstairs and a basement that smelled faintly of mold and scorched sheets. In the backyard we had a metal swing set, and a sandbox used regularly by the neighborhood cats, and flower beds of nasturtium, lavender, gardenia, and clematis tended diligently by Noni.
After our father’s funeral, people began to arrive at the yellow house. Everyone from church and others, too, people I had never seen before, people who knew my name and crouched to say it: “Fiona! Darling Fi!”
Our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Granger, took the plates covered in plastic wrap, the Tupperware containers in pastel shades, and bustled away to place them on the dining-room table. It struck me as odd to see Mrs. Granger perform this role, which seemed more properly to belong to Noni. But she remained on the orange couch, a white handkerchief moving from face to lap, face to lap, as strangers knelt before her, bowing their heads as though she bestowed upon them some sort of honor. She had never looked less like our mother.
The black of Noni’s dress, the orange of the couch, and the white of the handkerchief reminded me of Halloween, and I felt a strange, empty excitement. A near hysteria. Plus all the food. Everywhere! Bowls of green grapes and Chex Mix and hard butterscotch candies and potato chips. Platters of ham-and-cheese sandwiches cut into neat triangles, cubes of watermelon that leaked pink juice onto the white tablecloth. I grabbed what I could and ate it quickly, unsure as to what was permitted here, what would be allowed.
It soon became clear that anything was allowed when your father has died. I spied Joe beneath a table with an entire bowl of hard candies and three cans of Coca-Cola. Caroline took off her tights and sprawled on the floor, singing to herself; Renee sat on a rocking chair and picked with great concentration at an elbow scab, ignoring the adult who stood before her, saying her name again and again in a calm, sympathetic voice.
I ran crazily around the room. I slapped various bottoms and did not apologize. I picked my nose and wiped my finger on the coffee table. No one stopped me or spoke to me or noticed me at all. The freedom was exhausting. I climbed unsteadily into Renee’s lap. She wore a stiff black dress and black tights that she pulled at as I settled against her. With a shoeless toe, she rocked the chair back and forth, back and forth. The movement soothed me like a ship on the sea or a car on a bumpy road. This is how I would always imagine Renee: as a steadiness in times of turmoil.
I was on Renee’s lap when it began. I don’t know what triggered Joe’s fury. I know only that he got hold of a fireplace poker, sooty at its tip, cast iron, heavy. About the length of a baseball bat.
Joe began in the dining room and moved steadily, ferociously through the house. He did not strike people, only things. There was the sound of wood splintering, glass shattering, dull thumps and sickening crashes as he brought the poker down again and again on a table, a chair, those many bowls and platters of food. The noise startled me, but I didn’t cry. I listened. We all listened. Muted conversations and quiet tears gave way to a nervous, cowardly hush.
Crash. Into the living room he came. The crystal bowl full of hard candies, the porcelain table lamp with a linen shade, Noni’s collection of delicate glassware cats—all crashed and shattered to the floor. Joe paused before the piano, and then he took aim at the photographs that stood on top: pictures of what we, the Skinners, had been until that day. Six together. Ellis and Antonia, Renee and Caroline and Joe and little Fiona. Crash. Six together on windswept New England beaches and before tinselly Christmas trees, grinning and mugging, arms over shoulders, holding hands. Crash. We were gap-toothed children and anonymous infants, full-cheeked within our swaddles. Our parents were proud and exhausted, bright, blameless, beautiful even in their polyester and plaid. Crash. All of it, gone.
I waited for someone to stop Joe, but no one did. The room echoed with the noise of his destruction, grunts and strained inhalations, but otherwise there was silence. No one spoke. No one moved to stop him. Even Noni remained on the couch, her face pale and stricken. I wondered then, and I would wonder for the rest of my life: why did our mother not take the poker from Joe’s grasp, wrap her arms around him, tell him that everything would be okay?
Finally Joe paused. At seven years old, he already stood four feet tall. A borrowed black suit showed his pale ankles and pale, knobby wrists. Plaster dust had settled in his hair, onto the shoulders of his suit, ghosting his skin. With a free hand, he wiped sweat from his forehead.