Scenes

...Ed and I got off relatively easy at that...

...It is a hard thing to admit, but it was a cold fact that for hatred and crushed love and desperate romanticism, as long as the next few minutes we were all, all of the family from the she drew breath...

...Rome and its mysteries...

...apparently unslakable family thirst...

...She was at her best at wakes...

...The wife and eight-year-old daughter, and not, as the headstone cornea bank...

...Homes wrecked, wretchedly clownish...

...He had had his drink freshened a few times on the flight, I remembered my mother's words about coming back from and when he arrived at Bailey's he was fairly well along...

...My grandmother, a convert from of my brother and sisters and me...

...Commonweal: 80...

...She eight years old...

...He was buried the day after my grandmother in the much wanted to hear...

...the cop behind the wheel growled...

...have delusions of couturiership, and the attic supply of old boas and laces and mildewing ribbons was endless...

...attention...

...Several of her friends showed up in black coats and sealed and unsealed and stapled shut and unstapled a half- solemnly handed over cards turned up at the edges, exactly as dozen times as if she had been unable to allow even the she would have done, and I had the uneasy feeling she was just instructions for her burial to remain at rest...

...When she died we found complete instructions in an The next day and through the evening the family and friends envelope...

...lived into their nineties...

...I never saw my I was extremely embarrassed...

...And then in the car on the way home from the cemetery baby (Carol, age forty-two, with six children of her own, no she would make some grandly dismissive remark about the husband, he having left her for a twenty-year-old bimbo) to the deceased that did not jibe at all with her largely professed oldest, Barbara (staring with disbelief at the papers she held in sorrow...

...We sometimes visited soundlessly in beside his sleeping wife, the only wife in the there on Sundays when we were growing up, and while my eyes of the church...

...Carol to count, but one that never failed to strike just the right note, asked, and she began to cry...

...He did not say a word...

...The envelope had bqen glued and reopened and came...

...friend without being swallowed up even momentarily by Barbara and I were the only ones still living in St...

...I'd rather see a pretty girl...

...funeral...

...At wakes I was always tongue-tied with grief, embar- her hands), and including Ed and Ann and Patricia and myself, rassment and simply not knowing what to say, but she came we were all sore as hell at her, at our own mother, dead nqt into her own...

...And I no sooner recognized my apostasy than I Somewhere along the line she had become fascinated with lapsed from it-mourners were slipping from their pews to the idea of giving her body to medical science...

...said, in 1936, the same day as her mother, but that very day, In a sense-hell, in every sense-she was overdrawn at the the same day as his daughter, who refused to let his damned bank...

...I had Through the use of costumes-the clothes that she insisted just celebrated a festive First Communion, had barely joined you wear could not be described as anything other than the church really, and I thought it was a fine thing, grand and costumes-she was able to extend her capacity for the creation dramatic and warm...

...In St...

...When you sallied forth from by the time I was nine years old I was full of implacable the house for your first formal dance dressed in your grandresolutions, against drinking and loose women and apostasy, father's (the other one, her father having walked off that day, temptations which did not exist foS me except in my firm thank God, with all his clothes on his back) cape or ill-fitting renunciation of them...

...With the track room, with my mother snapping, "Hold still" through a record of that gene always in mind, her worst scenes were mouthful of pins...

...The break-up of her home was My grandfather had been raised a Catholic, but he remarried the central fact of her life, and it became important in the lives somewhere along the line...

...It never "I think this matter can be handled quite nicely if the girls failed to bring down the house...

...On nights when my father stopped for a few drinks on My grandmother was in another hospital across town in the way home, he enjoyed declaiming Vergil when he beSouth St...

...been the day her father left...

...And that was his weakness...

...You could have been killed...

...but she had good lines too...

...always said in 1908 in Atlanta when he walked off from his "The body bank," Barbara said, "the kidney bank...

...element...

...The meeting tated and surprised her...

...Nearby was the Donovan family plot where her own mother "Oh, for God's sake," Carol cried...

...Some ringing statement...

...Until they went through the same thing, and mother would say when I forgot to do my chores or came home they all did...

...medical school, she had also willed her eyes to the eye bank We left her in the grave beside her husband, our father...

...familiar elements, elements that resonated with unhappy "You should have brought along one of your girls," he memories from her brief home life...

...I shuddered at the thought of my grandfather, at his didn't fancy herself a cloak-and-suiter...

...ways accompanied, though, by that ghost at the feast, the My father said something sharp but that was just going grandfather who walked off one day...

...My sisters, who understood the Episcopal Church at the time of her wedding, never did...

...Get I'm afraid, and like her father perhaps, rather than in the in...

...instructions, her body was promised to the university medical May the martyrs come to welcome you school...

...In our family the children were expected to do a lot of HER DRAMATIC powers were only seen at their best in the sitting around waiting, and it never occurred to me until years presence of death, though...

...The convent must have been coming home from one of his escapades and had been slipped derangingly lonely for a young girl...

...My brothers and sisters thought it was all "You're rotten spoiled, just like your grandfather," my extremely funny...

...A foul-smelling After all, there were only so many moldering morning coats in liquid...

...And then other papers had And take you to the holy city, been signed.Although she had willed her entire body to the The new and eternal Jerusalem...

...Being overdrawn in her checking account had been an rotten-spoiled charming good-for-nothing soul be at peace, but everyday occurrence with her, one which had driven my father tormented his soul awake, kept it without peace, through crazy...

...Not that we didn't house...

...We were frantic...

...although my mother did not tell her...

...had died a few definitive hours before her mother, my mother Her fury was doubly irrational because she herself drank a said, "As far as I am concerned my father died when I was highball or two in the study with my father before dinner...

...When the grave to haunt me if I ever fell away from the church, and everyone had assembled, we held a family conference in a for the first time I realized that I was now a fallen-away small room off the parlors...

...He knew much of the grandmother somehow knew that George Donovan was dying "Aenead" by heart...

...Louis...

...And I sympathize even more now that The others were scattered as far as California...

...Ed walked resolutely, if a trifle was saved for the widow...

...Embarrassment was an emomother's father, never saw a picture of him, although I am said tion never far from the surface when I was growing up, an to resemble him, but every time I have stepped up to a bar emotion exactly as powerful as love, because it was its indivisanywhere he is there, along with the others from my father's ible adjunct...

...She could not hear a word, but she was familiar with their arguments from the times he came home late, and she was awakened by raised voices...

...No the feminine mind far better than I, thought the memory of the one in his family had close ties with my grandfather after 1908...

...My mother was droppings before that full-length mirror in the upstairs sitting extraordinarily strict and watchful with all of us...

...When Carol fell asleep on the tile of the third floor with a bad report card...

...After the priest came in Once he got no further than "Arma virumque cano" when the evening to administer the Last Sacraments, she told my my mother lifted a stack of china, crashed the plates down on mother, "I'm damned if I'm going to die and make an honest the floor and went off to drive the roads...

...drink, we did, all six of us, but we drank something like her, "Richard Slater...

...Love of women-creatures as commonplace as my capes and muskrat greatcoats were gone, that was it...

...He was handsome too-handsome and witty and carrier drew alongside to ask if they were the boat in distress...

...charming and popular with everyone-men and women...

...relaxed declamatory way of our own father...

...The ineffable sadness of her face spoke volumes, twelve hours...

...years...

...Because funerals are now almost the only reached the undertakers to work out the funeral arrangements...

...What didn't she think of...

...They tended to tell funny stories, they sang a little, and from time to time they would "build up" or "freshen" their STEPHEN DARST, a previous contributor to Commonweal, has written drinks...

...Louis on the same day in the winter of 1936...

...offstage, her mouth full of pins, dressing people for her own For thirty years the family had been buried from Bailey's wake...

...We passed him in the hall where he was searching I think she spent most of that time preparing for her own for the night number for the university in a phone book...

...She outlived him by fifteen years, and broke up...

...Funeral Home, and she instructed us ("I would not consider myself dead unless...

...Atlanta railroad station and the unmanageable emotions it When he was dying my mother visited him once in the hospi- raised gave our mother her headlong romanticism and her tal, their first meeting since the Atlanta station...

...through the motions...

...A moment later he was dialing On my mother's side of the family, they tended to die rather the phone out in the hall...

...My mother did not go to the wake or to the mother talked to the old nuns in the cloister through a grate my church or to the cemetery...

...along my brother, Ed, thinking her father would like tb see his Sometimes those scenes were almost predictable because of grandson...

...I had no intention of ever leaving it...

...The fifth ness one midnight to find Ed peacefully camping by an Ozark in a family of six children has to get out and hustle with far river...

...brothers and sisters and I would sit silently on hard wooden chairs and watch the afternoons grow long on the highly waxed I HEARD all this by the time I reached the age my mother had floors of the corridors and listen to the bells calling the nuns...

...freshened the one they had and it was easy to imagine that there Commonweal: 78 had indeed been only that single drink in the whole history of had been deprived of through the family breakup...

...will just step aside," he said...

...But of scenes virtually geometrically...

...the first sign of trouble had something to do with the uniforms...

...I believe she thought At the funeral of a great aunt emotions would play across her of us as the younger brothers and sisters whose company she face that would have done credit to Mater Dolorosa at Gol16 February] 979: 79 gotha...

...My father's death at sixty-nine devas- his own dead body...

...A I think my mother's penchant for ringing in officialdom at dying fall after that last word...

...An apWHEN YOU suspect some truly disastrous gene might put in pearance by any of my sisters at the humblest picnic was an appearance through your children at any moment, it is preceded by days of lettings-out and tuckings-in and hemprobably only natural to be on your guard...

...Why couldn't she just and father lay, the father who died not as my mother had have a funeral like everyone else...

...She sisters...

...Taking the widow's hands in her unsteadily, over to Barbara and snatched the instructions from own, looking the poor woman in the eye, she would quietly her hand...

...She had watched from the window of a train in the Atlanta railroad station while her mother and father paced back and forth beside the train...

...triggered by disappearances, even momentary disappearances...

...They never had another drink, they simply built up or for the New York Times, Harper's and other journals...

...But she pursued the idea and, according to her ". .. may the angels lead you into paradise...

...to hold the wake there, although it I HAVE always sympathized with non-Catholics at Catholic was in a deteriorating section of the city and people no longer funerals, with their desire to honor the memory of the dead liked to go down there at night...

...Uniforms made the scenes doubly embarrassing for us because "If you ever leave the Catholic Church," she would warn doubly melodramatic, exactly the point as far as she was me, "I will come back from the grave to haunt you...

...She kept us my father's family, a drink periodically requiring a little build- sitting around at night and on weekends simply, I think, to be ing up, freshening, serving down through the generations the able to come around periodically to count us...

...This sermon invariably led to talk of my immortal soul...

...Catholic...

...Everyone knew what he was going to young...

...A STORY SCENES BY STEPHEN DARST MY MOTHER'S MOTHER and father, after being estranged for 28 years, died in St...

...My father's side of the family all drank Donovan plot in Calvary Cemetery with only the one brother well...

...later what it was that we were waiting for...

...My grandfather had walked off one day in 1908 when my mother was eight years old...

...She brought weakness for the dramatic scene...

...Papers had been signed...

...Cold apostasy which could amount to little more than that attic, and when they and the decrepit dinner jackets and bravado...

...Or, rather, he did not say a word in English...

...When my grandfather's brother .. Troiae qui primus," he went on, "ab oris Italiam Leo called on my mother at home later to tell her that her father fato...

...Louis my mother was placed in boarding school at the Visitation Convent, and she remained there, except for summers, until graduation in 1918 while her mother supported them by traveling about the United States and representing the family...

...One I heard her give too many times "Why can't we just do things like other people...

...I had heard her move up for Communion, and I rose to rejoin the faithful...

...intone, "Alphonse never hurt a soul in all his life...

...She had always expected to die before my father whose do, make a scene with the medical school and the body banks, family was filled with great uncles and grandfathers who had telling them that they would get his mother's body only over...

...When the squad car deposited me at our house my side, uncles end cousins, some now dead, some still very much mother ran down the walk crying, "We thought you had been alive, wonderful drinking companions, the best of men, al- kidnapped...

...She died at eight I have ceased going to Mass, and the new Mass is no longer the in the morning, and it was six that evening before everyone Mass I grew up with...

...She really hated and feared drinking, and she screaming, red light flashing, intercepted me a block from the instilled that fear in each of her children...

...A pleasant summer afternoon's sail on Chesapeake Bay more ingenuity than I ever possessed in order to become rotten was interrupted for Barbara and a boy friend when an aircraft spoiled...

...She tended to The arrangements were as simple as if he had been exe- straighten people out with "frank" observations that no one cuted...

...Those were her last words...

...and her kidneys to the kidney bank...

...drank a little less than he did, but not as well...

...concerned, with the uniforms serving as costumes...

...In all honesty, it was the furthest thing from my mind...

...When my mother visited her later, my latedly reached the dinner table...

...It was as if George Donovan were just Canada organizing concerts...

...Louis...

...There was a certain dash to that-I was bathroom she woke to see a fireman climbing in the window to delighted to be thought of as rotten spoiled rather than careless save her...

...And somehow the very absence of genuine beaver top hat and seedy dinner jacket, you felt genuine sinful allure added to their mystery...

...Drinking was one such said...

...mention the notion from time to time, but I had paid no At the cemetery the service was reassuringly familiar...

...eternal salvation out the window-for what...

...Masses I attend, they have become not only memorials to the Ed had come from Denver where he had been living for twenty dead but also memorials to Mass itself, requiem for Requiems...

...man of George Donovan...

...She did, however, light-hearted evil...

...My mother sent the State Police through the wilderor dumb, but I knew the description did not really fit...

...One spring Saturday after a few hours of baseball in the park Because of her father my mother did not like people who I was walking back home with friends when a squad car, siren drank heavily...