Walt said that the dead turned into grass, but there was no
grass where they’d buried Simon. He was with the other
Irish on the far side of the river, where it was only dirt and
gravel and names on stones.
Catherine believed Simon had gone to heaven. She had a locket
with his picture and a bit of his hair inside.
“Heaven’s the place for him,” she said. “He was too good for this
world.” She looked uncertainly out the parlor window and into the
street, as if she expected a glittering carriage to wheel along with Simon
on board, serene in his heedless milk-white beauty, waving and
grinning, going gladly to the place where he had always belonged.
“If you think so,” Lucas answered. Catherine fingered the locket.
Her hands were tapered and precise. She could sew stitches too fine
to see.
“And yet he’s with us still,” she said. “Don’t you feel it?” She worried
the locket chain as if it were a rosary.
“I suppose so,” Lucas said. Catherine thought Simon was in the
locket, and in heaven, and with them still. Lucas hoped she didn’t expect
him to be happy about having so many Simons to contend with.
The guests had departed, and Lucas’s father and mother had gone
to bed. It was only Lucas and Catherine in the parlor, with what had
been left behind. Empty plates, the rind of a ham. The ham had been
meant for Catherine’s and Simon’s wedding. It was lucky, then, to
have it for the wake instead.
Lucas said, “I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of
the beginning and the end. But I do not talk of the beginning or the
end.”
He hadn’t meant to speak as the book. He never did, but when he
was excited he couldn’t help himself.
She said, “Oh, Lucas.”
His heart fluttered and thumped against the bone.
“I worry for you,” she said. “You’re so young.”
“I’m almost thirteen,” he said.
“It’s a terrible place. It’s such hard work.”
“I’m lucky. It’s a kindness of them, to give me Simon’s job.”
“And no more school.”
“I don’t need school. I have Walt’s book.”
“You know the whole thing, don’t you?”
“Oh no. There’s much more, it will take me years.”
“You must be careful at the works,” she said. “You must-” She
stopped speaking, though her face didn’t change. She continued offering
her profile, which was as gravely beautiful as that of a woman on a
coin. She continued looking out at the street below, waiting for the
heavenly entourage to parade by with Simon up top, the pride of the
family, a new prince of the dead.
Lucas said, “You must be careful, too.”
“There’s nothing for me to be careful about, my dear. For me it’s
just tomorrow and the next day.”
She slipped the locket chain back over her head. The locket vanished
into her dress. Lucas wanted to tell her-what? He wanted to
tell her that he was inspired and vigilant and recklessly alone, that his
body contained his unsteady heart and something else, something he
felt but could not describe: porous and spiky, shifting with flecks of
thought, with urge and memory; salted with brightness, flickerings of
white and green and pale gold, like stars; something that loved stars
because it was made of the same substance. He needed to tell her it
was impossible, it was unbearable, to be so continually mistaken for a
misshapen boy with a walleye and a pumpkin head and a habit of
speaking in fits.
He said, “I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume.”
It was not what he’d hoped to tell her.
She smiled. At least she wasn’t angry with him. She said, “I should
go now. Will you walk me home?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
Outside, on the street, Catherine slipped her hand into the crook of
his elbow. He tried to steady himself, to stride manfully, though what
he wanted most was to stop striding altogether, to rise up like smoke
and float above the street, which was filled with its evening people,
workingmen returning, newsboys hawking their papers. Mad
Mr. Cain paced on his corner, dressed in his dust-colored coat, snatching
distractedly at whatever crawled in his beard, shouting, “Mischief,
gone and forgotten, what have ye done with the shattered hearts?”
The street was full of its smell, dung and kerosene, acrid smoke-something
somewhere was always burning. If Lucas could rise out of
his body, he would become what he saw and heard and smelled. He
would gather around Catherine as the air did, touch her everywhere.
He would be drawn into her when she breathed.
He said, “The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.”
“Just as you say, my dear,” Catherine said.
A newsboy shouted, “Woman brutally murdered, read all about it!”
Lucas thought he could be a newsboy, but the pay was too low, and he
couldn’t be trusted to call the news, could he? He might lose track of
himself and walk the streets shouting, “Every atom belonging to me as
good belongs to you.” He’d do better at the works. If the impulse overcame
him, he could shout into Simon’s machine. The machine
wouldn’t know or care, any more than Simon had.
Catherine didn’t speak as they walked. Lucas forced himself to remain
silent as well. Her building was three blocks to the north, on
Fifth Street. He walked her up onto the stoop, and they stood there a
moment together, before the battered door.
Catherine said, “Here we are.”
A cart rolled by with a golden landscape painted on its side: two
cows grazing among stunted trees and a third cow looking up at the
name of a dairy, which floated in the golden sky. Was it meant to be
heaven? Would Simon want to be there? If Simon went to heaven
and it proved to be a field filled with reverent cows, which Simon
would he be when he got there? Would he be the whole one, or the
crushed?
A silence gathered between Lucas and Catherine, different from
the quiet in which they’d walked. It was time, Lucas thought, to say
something, and not as the book. He said, “Will you be all right?”
She laughed, a low murmuring laugh he felt in the hairs on his
forearms. “It is I who should ask you that question. Will you be all
right?”
“Yes, yes, I’ll be fine.”
She glanced at a place just above Lucas’s head and settled herself,
a small shifting within her dark dress. It seemed for a moment as if her
dress, with its high collar, its whisper of hidden silk, had a separate
life. It seemed as if Catherine, having briefly considered rising up out
of her dress, had decided instead to remain, to give herself back to her
clothes.
She said, “Had it happened a week later, I’d be a widow, wouldn’t
I? I’m nothing now.”
“No, no. You are wonderful, you are beautiful.”
She laughed again. He looked down at the stoop, noticed that it
contained specks of brightness. Mica? He went briefly into the stone.
He was cold and sparkling, immutable, glad to be walked on.
“I’m an old woman,” she said.
He hesitated. Catherine was well past twenty-five. It had been
talked about when the marriage was announced, for Simon had been
barely twenty. But she was not old in the way she meant. She was not
soured or evacuated, she was not dimmed.
He said, “You are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded.”
She put her fingertips to his cheek. “Sweet boy,” she said.
He said, “Will I see you again?”
“Of course you will. I shall be right here.”
“But it will not be the same.”
“No. It will not be quite the same, I’m afraid.”
“If only …”
She waited to hear what he would say. He waited, too. If only the
machine hadn’t taken Simon. If only he, Lucas, were older and
healthier, with a sounder heart. If only he could marry Catherine
himself. If only he could leave his body and become the dress she
wore.
A silence passed, and she kissed him. She put her lips on his.
When she withdrew he said, “The atmosphere is not a perfume, it
has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless, it is for my mouth forever,
I am in love with it.”
She said, “You must go home and sleep now.”
It was time to leave her. There was nothing more to do or say. Still,
he lingered. He felt as he sometimes did in dreams, that he was on a
stage before an audience, expected to sing or recite.
She turned, took her key from her reticule, put it in the lock.
“Good night,” she said.
“Good night.”
He stepped down. From the sidewalk he said to her retreating
form, “I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise.”
“Good night,” she said again. And she was gone.
He didn’t go home, though home was the rightful place for him. He
went instead to Broadway, where the living walked.
Broadway was itself, always itself, a river of light and life that
flowed through the shades and little fires of the city. Lucas felt, as he
always did when he walked there, a queasy, subvert exaltation, as if he
were a spy sent to another country, a realm of riches. He walked with
elaborate nonchalance, hoping to be as invisible to others as they were
visible to him.
On the sidewalk around him, the last of the shoppers were relinquishing
the street to the first of the revelers. Ladies in dresses the
color of pigeons’ breasts, the color of rain, swished along bearing
parcels, speaking softly to one another from under their feathered
hats. Men in topcoats strode confidently, spreading the bleak perfume
of their cigars, flashing their teeth, slapping the stone with their
licorice boots. Carriages rolled by bearing their mistresses home, and
the newsboys called out, “Woman murdered in Five Points, read all
about it!” Red curtains billowed in the windows of the hotels, under a
sky going a deeper red with the night. Somewhere someone played
“Lilith” on a calliope, though it seemed that the street itself emanated
music, as if by walking with such certainty, such satisfaction, the people
summoned music out of the pavement.
If Simon was in heaven, it might be this. Lucas could imagine the
souls of the departed walking eternally, with music rising from the
cobblestones and curtains putting out their light. But would this be a
heaven for Simon? His brother was (had been) loud and rampant,
glad of his songs and his meals. What else had made him happy? He
hadn’t cared for curtains or dresses. He hadn’t cared about Walt or the
book. What had he wanted that this heaven could provide?
Broadway would be Lucas’s heaven, Broadway and Catherine and
the book. In his heaven he would be everything he saw and heard. He
would be himself and Catherine; he would be the calliope and the
lamps; he would be shoes striking pavement, and he would be the
pavement under the shoes. He would ride with Catherine on the toy
horse from Niedermeyer’s window, which would be the size of an actual
horse but perfect in the way of toys, moving serenely over the cobblestones
on its bright red wheels.
He said, “I am large, l contain multitudes.” A man in a topcoat,
passing by, glanced at him strangely, as people did. The man would be
among the angels in Lucas’s heaven, just as plump and prosperous as
he was on earth, but in the next world he would not consider Lucas
strange. In heaven, Lucas would be beautiful. He’d speak a language
everyone understood.
The rooms when he returned to them were dim and silent. Here were
the stove and the chairs and the carpet, its pattern ghostly in the dark.
Here on the table was the music box that had ruined the family. It still
stood cheerfully on the tabletop, a little casket with a rose carved into
its lid. It could still play “Blow the Candle Out” and “Oh, Breathe
Not His Name” as well as it did the day Mother bought it.
Here, too, were the faces, looking down from the walls, revered
and consulted, dusted regularly: Matthew at the center, six years old,
dark-eyed and primly serious, rehearsing for the influenza that would
make a picture of him a year later. Here was sly Uncle Ian, who found
it humorous that he would one day be only a face on a wall; here the
round satisfied countenance of Grandmother Aileen, who believed
that living was a temporary inconvenience and death her true and
only home. They were all, according to Mother, in heaven, though
what she meant by heaven was an Ireland where no one starved.
Mother would have to make room for Simon’s picture, but the
wall was full. Lucas wondered if one of the older dead would have to
be taken away.
He paused before the door to his parents’ bedroom. He felt their
breathing on the other side, wondered over their dreams. He stood for
a moment, alone in the slumbering darkness, before going into his
and Simon’s room.
Here was their bed, and above the bed the oval from which St.
Brigid looked out, suffering and ecstatic, crowned by a fiery circle that
Lucas had thought, when he was younger, represented her headache.
Here were the pegs on which the clothes were hung, his and Simon’s.
St. Brigid looked sorrowfully at the empty clothes as she would at the
vacant bodies of the faithful after their souls had gone. She seemed to
be wondering, from under her circle of light, Where were the mechanisms
of wish and need that had once worn shirts and trousers? Gone
to heaven. Would it be like Broadway or Ireland? Gone to boxes in the
earth. Gone into pictures and lockets, into rooms that refused to shed
their memories of those who had eaten and argued and dreamed there.
Lucas undressed and got into the bed on Simon’s side. Simon’s pillow
still smelled of Simon. Lucas inhaled. Here were Simon’s humors:
oil and sweat. Here was his undercurrent of tallow and his other
smell, which Lucas could think of only as Simon, a smell that resembled
bread but was not that, was merely the smell of Simon’s body as
it moved and breathed.
And there, visible through the window, were the lighted curtains
of Emily Hoefstaedler across the air shaft. Emily worked with Catherine
at Mannahatta, sewing sleeves onto bodices. She ate Turkish delight
privately, from a silver tin she kept hidden in her room. She
would be eating it now, Lucas thought, over there, behind the curtain.
What would heaven be for Emily, who loved candy and had hungered
for Simon? Would there be a Simon she could eat?
He lit the lamp, took the book from its place under the mattress.
He began reading.
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more
than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green
stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see
and remark, and say Whose?
He read it again and again. Then he closed the book and held it
up, looking at Walt’s likeness, the small bearded face that gazed out
from the paper. Although it was wicked to think so, he could not help
believing that God must resemble Walt, with his shrewd, benevolent
eyes and the edible-looking spill of his beard.
Continues…
Excerpted from SPECIMEN DAYS
by Michael Cunningham
Copyright © 2005 by Mare Vaporum Corp..
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
Copyright © 2005
Mare Vaporum Corp.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-374-29962-5
