wanting, and when I met his gaze he jerked his head in the direction of the caskets.
“Not much of a wake, is it.”
“It’s not?”
“Well, it’s fine for the way they do them now.” He gave me a sad look. “Ah, you’re too young to know the difference. In my day, we had wakes. We knew how to give the deceased a fitting send-off, you see. That’s the purpose, after all, to show the dead what you thought of them. My father’s wake lasted four days. This was in the Old Country, of course, not here in the land of the Income Tax and the Board of Health. At least if we had a Board of Health, I never knew about it. We held our wakes in the home of the deceased.”
I shot a quick look in the direction of the caskets and tried to picture them in Grandma’s house. This seemed inexpressibly bizarre, and he read my expression.
“Oh, now, we didn’t keep them there forever, lest they go a bit ripe on you, but we showed them their proper respect and after you got used to the fact that they didn’t say anything, why they were lovely company. And this provided the mourners with an opportunity to speak their feelings to ’em, you see. They’d relax with a bit of nice whiskey and work up the nerve to talk to them.”
“To the dead people?”
“Well, who else? But here in America where we’re supposed to be free but still wear the yoke of servitude, why it’s against the law to hold the wake of your kin in his own house, and would you mind telling me where the sense of that is?”
I couldn’t, of course, but he didn’t really want to be interrupted. He went into the next stage of his soliloquy, growing wistful.
“It wasn’t always this way. We had our freedom at one time. When I first came here, in 1911, there was no income tax. There’s a godless idea, lad, taxing the workingman’s wages. Then there was Prohibition.” He snorted, then paused for the sake of drama and nodded to me. “Prohibition, that great evil that fell upon the land, and we all fought it, all the people, it was grand how we all rose up.”
His face grew serious, he could have been speaking of the Easter Rising at the Dublin Post Office or of Charles Parnell, but I believe he was remembering the days when he and my grandfather had attempted to sell gin concocted in the family bathtub, and a thin, cloudy whiskey that Uncle Frank had devised in the garage behind his rooming house, Uncle Frank’s commercial ambitions unfettered by the fact that he was a policeman. It was this ill-advised venture into the world of business that earned Uncle Martin the title of “The Old Reprobate” from my grandma, his sensible sister. He was “The Old Reprobate” and Uncle Frank, who seemed to bring disaster or violence wherever he went, was “The Great Ninny” to his sister.
“It would peel the skin off your arm,” I’d heard Grandma say about Uncle Martin’s bathtub product. “It would melt your eyeballs. People nearly died of it.”
“Oh, they did not,” Uncle Martin would say, and Grandma would just say “Billy Fahey” and nod confidently.
Uncle Martin would swallow and look away with a nervous light in his eye, and eventually say, “That was just a coincidence: he always had a bad gut.”
Once or twice I’d heard them argue this way and she’d mutter about the repulsiveness of drinking something brewed in a common bathtub. When he said it was just fine, she’d say, “Do you drink your bathwater then, Martin? What would our mother have said?”
This would end the debate: the mention of their mother, dead under the sod of County Leitrim more than thirty years, was enough to silence any argument, bring quiet and calm, and I’d heard how my grandmother once, when they were all young, had stopped a fierce brawl outside the drugstore up on Clybourn by this magical incantation. No one else ever brought her up: the use of their mother’s name seemed a trump card available only to Grandma.
Uncle Tom rescued me from Martin with a wave. I went and stood beside him and watched him greet people, even people he didn’t remember. Among these people was a wizened woman I’d never seen before who nodded to us and moved on into the funeral parlor.
“Oh, Christ,” Tom said.
“Who is that lady?”
“Nobody knows, kid. She just shows up at funerals.” And in truth, during the course of my life I was to see her at a dozen or more funerals, her presence always both amusing and vaguely reassuring to me, like a tired but beloved joke.
The high point, if there could be said to be one at a funeral, was the appearance of the MacReady sisters, both of them, including Betty who had long been rumored to be dying. She did not seem to me to be dying or even contemplating it: like her sister Mary, she was hugely rotund, talkative, loud, and aggressive. They were a year apart yet so remarkably alike that they were often referred to in family circles as “the twins,” though I once heard Uncle Mike refer to them as “the battlewagons.” The reference had confused me.
“Oh, here we go,” Mike said.
Tom nodded and I heard him mutter, “Okay, this is just what we needed.”
The MacReady sisters marched together into the funeral parlor, followed at a respectable distance by Joe Collins, Mary’s confused-looking husband—said by my uncles to be the stupidest person in the United States—and Uncle Mike muttered, “The fleet must be in, ’cause there’s the Iowa and the Missouri,” and I could see the resemblance to twin battleships, as they steamed through the mourners and forced a parting of the crowd. They wore matching, tentlike blue coats and twin pillbox hats—Mary’s was adorned by a single dangling flower, while her sister’s had none. In addition to their sizable presence, they brought noise to my parents’ funeral, like a benign wind, and I saw amusement and anticipation on many of the faces around me.
My grandfather exchanged a quick happy look with my uncles, Grandma rolled her eyes (they were her second cousins) and the sisters fell upon the happy crowd, engulfing one and all in their massive embrace. They spoke at the same time and in loud barks, chattered and called to people across the parlor, and the wake grew festive in spite of itself.
When I least expected it, they turned to me and I heard Uncle Tom whisper, “No matter what they do, smile. And don’t try to outrun ’em.”
I did as I was told, though it was difficult. They both reminded me of the loud, mad Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. They squeezed me, savaged my hair, patted me on the head, picked me up, and, inevitably, kissed me, leaving my entire right cheek dripping and lipstick-covered. I shot a glance at my cousin Matt and his wide-eyed horror confirmed my worst fears of how it had looked. Aunt Mary gave me another squeeze and just when I thought my breastbone would cave in, she let me go. The sisters then went on up to the caskets where there was a tense moment as they put a shoulder into one another for space on the kneeler, causing some to fear an outbreak of fisticuffs. Eventually they came to some amicable division of space and proceeded to sob quietly together. Joe Collins stood a respectful distance behind them and looked uneasy.
“Why does Aunt Mary’s husband walk behind her all the time?” I asked Tom.
“He knows it’s safer back there.”
Toward the end of the evening I fell asleep in a chair and Tom took me home and put me to bed.
The following morning they took me to the funeral. At the funeral home the priest led us in prayers, and when they closed my mother’s casket, Grandma Flynn gave in to her grief and
