be okay, Danny, you’ll be all right.” Then, after a brief hesitation, “We’ll take care of you.”
They attempted to keep the details from me but it was all they talked about, every telephone call was about this terrible thing, and I soon learned how they had died: a head-on collision at the intersection of Belmont and Clark. A drunk teenager had tried to beat the red light on Belmont, the worst and final mistake in his young life, for the collision had killed him as well. My father was dead when the ambulance arrived. My mother, thrown from the car, had died on the way to the hospital.
On nights when sleep came slowly, I lay in bed quaking with a child’s rage at them all, at my mother for leaving me, at this dead boy for killing my parents, at my father for what seemed his incompetence—the news bore frequent accounts of other accidents whose victims survived, and I thought he should have been able to save himself, or at least my mother.
There had been a brief, tearful wake for my brother Johnny that I can hardly recall. My sole surviving image from it is the horror of my mother, beautiful and disconsolate in a plain black dress—there is nothing so terrifying to a child as the sight of a parent crying. But my parents’ wake was my first real experience of the rituals of death. They all tried to keep me from it as well as they could—my grandmother was convinced it was harmful for me to see both my parents in their caskets—but Uncle Tom insisted that I be present for some of it, and I was glad. I had a brief moment of elation when I approached their twin caskets: I was going to see them again. And I knew it was them: Uncle Mike had made a brief sortie into theology while they were getting me dressed, explaining about souls and spirits but it all sounded like gibberish to a seven-year-old boy, and he gave it up almost immediately. These two figures in the caskets were my parents, it was them but life had left them. I raised a hand to touch my mother’s fingers, clasped around a rosary of my grandma’s and then I stopped.
“No, go on,” I heard Uncle Tom’s voice. “It’s okay, they’re your parents, nobody else’s.” He let his eyes linger on his dead sister’s face, wet his lips, and then stood back to let me by.
I touched her fingers and they were cold and the skin felt strange, rubbery. I moved over to my father and he felt the same, and for some reason I was consoled by this, that they were experiencing this thing together. I had a momentary urge to climb in with them, as I’d climbed so often into their bed. I wanted to talk to them but was self-conscious. In the end, I knelt down and said an “Our Father” and a “Hail Mary,” and stared at them for a while, ’til my uncle put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Come on, Dan, some of your cousins are here.” In the background I could hear my grandmother crying and talking about me.
I watched their reactions as they entered, the Flynns and Dorseys, saw how they embraced one another like old friends and then watched their faces fall as they remembered the enormity of this double dose of the world’s trouble. More than once I saw them peer in disbelief at the twin coffins at the chapel’s far end.
On the far side I saw my Grandma Dorsey in the protective embrace of her beautiful daughter Teresa, or Sister Fidelity as she was now—widely viewed by the two families as both saint and eccentric because she had already achieved two rare states in life: she was a nun just returned from working in the foreign missions, and she had gone to college.
As nearly as I could understand it, going to college was an odd thing for a girl to do, and the other—“Joining the Lord’s household,” as Grandma Flynn put it—put her on a different plane from the rest of us. In an Irish household one could come no closer to sainthood than to become a nun; it did not bring the glory and neighborhood celebrity conferred on boys who voiced the determination to become a priest, but it was viewed in a different way. Seminarians played ball and boxed, priests went to ballgames and even liked a shot of Jim Beam now and then, but a girl who went into the convent renounced the world, even the neighborhood. We didn’t understand them and so they took on a special place in the pantheon, like astrophysicists.
For the rest of it, I was glad they’d let me come, for as near as I could make out, a wake was a family party done up in dark clothing: every relative I had on earth was there, three generations of Irish immigrants, and half the neighborhood. There were even black people, three women and a young man who had known my mother from the big A&P where she worked. They spoke to my grandparents and I saw that both my grandmothers were glad to see these black people, but Grandpa Flynn seemed uncomfortable with them. Grandpa Dorsey was dead, so there was no reaction from him.
All around the long room, wherever I looked, I found adults gazing at me with sad eyes or simple curiosity. My cousin Jeff, five years older, widely read and worldly, explained my situation to me.
“You’re an orphan now.”
“I am?”
“Yeah. Your parents are both dead, see.” Here he gestured to the caskets, lest I forget the cause of the gathering. “So they’re all kinda sorry for you, and you’re interesting to ’em.” He shrugged as though this made no sense whatsoever, and then added, “It’s neat to be an orphan, though.”
“How come?”
His mouth made a little “o” and a faint gleam of excitement came into his eyes as he warmed to his task. “Well, you’ll probably get more presents and stuff on your birthday because they feel sorry for you. When’s your birthday?”
“March 27.”
“Oh.” His face fell. “They’ll probably forget by then. Act real sad when that time comes. Christmas, too.” I assured him that I would do whatever was necessary. He thought for a moment and added, “Don’t eat. They always think something’s wrong when you don’t eat.”
I looked to the front of the room where the Dorseys stood to one side and the Flynns to the other, and visitors and mourners stopped to speak to them all. While the adults were thus occupied, I joined my cousins, especially Matt, and did what children have always done at wakes, namely, played tag, explored the funeral home, and invaded the privacy of other families in mourning.
There was a second chapel in the building, and a wake in progress in this one as well, and we stole in and stared at the deceased in that one, a man named Albert Schuss, according to the sign at the entrance—and I can no sooner forget his name than the occasion when I learned it—a shrunken-faced old man whose funeral clothes bagged on him. We compared him with his wife, a short fat lady who sat a few feet from his casket, and decided that Albert’s wife had precipitated his demise by refusing to share her food. For her part, Mrs. Schuss was pleased to see us: she seemed to think we were distant nephews.
When we returned to the proper chapel, I found myself caught in the dour gaze of Grandma’s brother, my great-uncle Martin. Despite their humor and love of song, the Irish have a tendency to moroseness, indeed they revel in it; some would say the pursuit of lugubriousness is a national mission no less important than the cause of Irish Freedom, and there is in each Irish family one person who gives himself over fully to the development of this ancient and honored Celtic trait. Uncle Martin’s long solitary life had given so fine an edge to his fatalism that his presence at a party was feared, like snow at Easter.
Not a cynic so much as a professional grumbler, he believed—so I had learned both from eavesdropping on my relatives and from Uncle Martin’s unprompted ruminations—that the world had come steadily unraveled since the days of the ancient Greeks, that most of the miracles in the Bible were exaggerated or sanitized—for example, he believed that Moses had indeed parted the Red Sea but that the ensuing flood had killed not only Pharaoh’s Army but a good portion of the Israelites, in particular the aged,
