wall.
“Shouldn’t he be buried in those?”
“A butterfly won’t be needing shoes.”
In a small room with a narrow table and two chairs, Nolan records her answers on a Death Information Form. James Michael Haggerty: born March 3, 1907, County Meath, Ireland. Spouse Eileen Reagan Haggerty: born October 10, 1918, Milford, Massachusetts, deceased January 7, 1943, Providence, Rhode Island. Miranda knows these places only on maps but their names, along with the dates, are bound into her memory from a page in a book James kept, inscribed with his flourishes, his script more beautiful than hers despite all her practice. Providence is where James said he met Eileen. He was a visiting professor at the university for which she organized collections of scholarly books and papers.
The Form demands the deceased’s children’s names and birthdates.
“Miranda Brighid Haggerty,” she recites, “May 12, 1940, Providence, Rhode Island.” She was named after Prospero’s daughter and a Celtic goddess. Nolan writes the goddess’ name as she pronounced it—Breege. She doesn’t correct him. He waits a moment. “And Cian?”
On a mattress with James saying, “Float, float,” as Danú possessed her womb.
“Miranda will suffice.”
James catching Cian. The pulsating cord, the bloody placenta.
A tight-lipped smile. “We’ll have to talk about that eventually. Father have insurance?”
“Sure I don’t know.”
“No matter. The city will bury him.” He hands her a large, bulky brown envelope. “Some items he had with him.” James’s brown leather billfold, cracked at the fold, his playing cards and two small paper bags. Inside the billfold, the library card and a dollar bill. She’ll wait to open the small bags when Nolan isn’t watching.
She inquires about Nicholas. Nolan says he’s in a place called Quarantine. He can’t say when Miranda will see him again.
She asks, “Why did yourself come if you thought James lived alone?”
“It’s my job to doubt what others tell me.”
• • •
Daddy was home. His briefcase met the floor with a soft plunk. A hanger scraped the rod as he hung up his jacket. Linda waited for him to call out in the voice she pictured rising from a deep, black well.
“James Haggerty died yesterday. A heart attack, apparently. I stopped in at Tony’s for a new wiper and he told me.” Daddy often did that when he got home: started talking without checking if anyone was around to listen, spilling his news at once as if he’d forget if he didn’t. His shoes rattled the furnace grate as he crossed into the dining room where Linda stood behind her chair on the waxed wood floor, ravenous as usual, counting the purple fleurs-de-lis on the wallpaper to distract her mind from her stomach.
Steam rose from the green beans Mother carried out from the kitchen. “I didn’t think he was that old,” she said. She always got gussied up before Daddy came home, putting on nylons and makeup, fixing her hair. If Daddy noticed, he never let on. That evening Mother was in a full-skirted baby blue dress with a wide white belt and her usual black heels. When Linda ate at Tereza’s the week before, Mrs. Dobra had been barefoot. Her nipples showed under her scoop-necked blouse and her legs through a thin wrap-around skirt.
“Late forties, according to Tony.” Daddy took his position behind Mother’s chair, ready to hold it out. His white shirt was damp under the arms, his round face flushed from heat.
“Must’ve been the drink, then,” Mother said.
“Did he die in his house?” Linda asked.
“Hello, kiddo!” Daddy said. “I forgot to give you a hug.”
Linda stepped into the brick warmth of his open arms. He smelled of starch and underarms. “Did he die in that big house?” she said into his chest.
“No, on the Pennsy from New York. He’d gone into the city for some reason. Had bags of strange stuff in his pockets, so they say.”
Linda had ridden the fifteen miles into New York City on the train once with Mother and Daddy. She pictured the man she knew only as Crazy Haggerty on a slippery brown seat, his shoulders swaying with the train’s motion. “What kind of strange stuff?”
“I think that’s everything,” Mother said, surveying the table, leaving Linda’s words to hover in the air like dragonflies. Daddy pulled out Mother’s chair. She sat and smoothed the tablecloth, brushing away invisible crumbs. Daddy took his place opposite her and Linda hers between them. They bowed their heads.
Daddy said, “For what we are about to receive we are truly grateful.”
They removed the linen napkins from under their forks. Custom-made pads and a white linen cloth protected the ski-legged cherry wood table Daddy bought Mother last year for their fifteenth anniversary.
At Tereza’s, Mrs. Dobra had taken two pans right off the stove and set them on the bare wooden table without the slightest concern about scorch marks. “Dig in,” she’d said: to canned corn and stewed tomatoes and hot dog pieces, like chopped up worms, swimming in baked beans. Eight-year-old Allen stuck his hand in a huge bowl of potato chips. No one said grace. The table wasn’t quite big enough for five people. Tereza’s stepfather, Jimmy, straddled the chair between Allen and Linda, his thigh pressing against hers. He was slighter than Daddy but the muscles on his arms stood out more. A construction worker, Tereza had said. They moved whenever he ran out of work.
“What kind of strange stuff?” Linda asked again.
Mother put a thin slice of roast chicken, a small mound of mashed potatoes and a spoonful of green beans on Linda’s plate. A canned peach-half waiting in a small dish on the sideboard would be her dessert. Since Linda had inherited her father’s build and was already overweight at a hundred and forty, she’d have to watch what she ate for the rest of her life. She had her mother’s ash blonde hair, which was lucky because the gray would blend in when she got old and be hardly noticeable. Tereza’s black hair was “a regular rat’s nest,” according to Mother who set Linda’s hair in tidy pin curls every Saturday night.
“Apparently he had a child,” Daddy said, unbuttoning his cuffs. “Possibly two.” He rolled up his sleeves. “Tony had quite a bit to say about that.”
“Really.” Linda recognized the look Mother gave Daddy as a warning. When she was younger, they’d spoken in Pig Latin. Eally-ray.
“What did you do today, Linda?” Daddy asked.
“Hung around with Tereza.”
“Interesting expression, that. Can you be more specific?” To Daddy, slang exposed an indolent mind and profanity a dearth of imagination. A single new word in your vocabulary, he claimed, could help you see the world differently. Each month, Linda memorized the words in Reader’s Digest’s “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.” Daddy might have been impressed if she’d said confabulated, but it wouldn’t have expressed the joy, the shivering bliss, of having a friend who wanted to spend the whole day with you.
“I don’t know. We just talked and stuff.” She didn’t
