For a moment, he sounded serious, and Eileen wanted to say, Daddy, I think she would, but instead she just said, Now that is a terrible investment, and asked him whether cherry red or navy suited her better.
She could buy used and save for the future, or she could make a statement about where she thought her life was heading, and shape the perceptions of others about that trajectory, and maybe sway the future by courting it.
What the hell do you think Im going to tell you? her father said.
She went with cherry red.
She was at the table when her mother got in from work.
Studying again?
Eileen barely grunted in reply. In shedding herself of her effects, her mother had dropped her keys on Eileens splayed notebook. There were so many keys packed onto the interlocking rings; each represented a room, or several, that her mother had to clean. Eileen slid them off the notebook as if they were coated in pathogens.
Why dont you put those books aside for five minutes, her mother said. You can drive me and my friends.
Drive where? Which friends?
My meeting friends.
Meeting friends, Eileen thought crankily. She almost makes it sound pleasant.
Take my car, she said, not looking up from her book.
Im nervous to drive it.
Her mother had only had her license for a year, and she was shaky on the road. The Tempest was still brand-new.
Ive got a test.
We started a car pool, her mother said. I said Id pick everyone up this week.
And how had you planned on doing this, exactly?
Come on, her mother said. Its getting late.
The first stop was in Jackson Heights. She was surprised to pull up outside one of the co-ops; shed always imagined that people of means were spared some of the sadder aspects of mans nature. As soon as her mother left the car, Eileen took out her textbook. She was planning to study at every stop, even with others in the car. There wasnt time for the squeamish propriety of small talk; the fact that she had submitted to this depressing task was enough.
When her mother returned, there was a brightness in her voice.
Hiram, she said to the man getting in the backseat, this is my daughter, Eileen.
So I guess youre Charon tonight.
Eileen, she said.
Charon. The ferryman. On the river Styx.
Oh, she said. Right.
Shuttling the dead.
He had bumped his hairpiece on the doorframe in getting in; instead of adjusting it with a furtive hand, he had taken it off completely and was resetting it with such nonchalance that it seemed he wore it not to disguise his baldness but to bring it out in the open.
Youre very much alive, Hiram, her mother said, beginning to titter. Though I cant say the same for that rug youre wearing.
Im supposed to give you a tip, he said. How about this: avoid men in borrowed hair.
Sound advice, Eileen said.
Tell it to my wife. Not that I had this when she met me. You should have seen the locks. I was Samson.
In the rearview mirror she watched him look contemplatively out the window. He returned her gaze alertly, as if he was used to being watched.
Beware of women bearing scissors, he said, chuckling. He was in on some private joke that made even the heaviest things weightless. Beware of three-drink lunches.
One-drink lunches, her mother said.
Well, if were going to hell, at least were doing it in style. This is a beaut.
Thank you, Eileen said.
Youve got it backwards, her mother said. Were leaving hell.
Yes, yes, he said agreeably. Were in purgatory, but were hopeful. Or if were not hopeful, at least were not succumbing to despair. Or if were succumbing to despair, at least were in this beautiful car.
Her mother was buoyant as she rang bells and led her meeting friends to the car, where she peppered them with chatter to put them at ease. Eileen couldnt bring herself to open the book even when it was only Hiram in the car. She ended up having a marvelous time. In even a few minutes with some of them she could see they radiated hard-won perspective. She made three trips; then she parked up the block and watched in the mirror as her mother and the final quartet, a spectrum of widths and heights, disappeared down into the church basement.
On the way home, after theyd dropped everyone off, her mother blew smoke through the cracked window and talked with a quick and ceaseless fluency. Upbeat as her mother seemed, Eileen saw that the corners of her mouth were being pulled down, as though by a baited hook. She could tell that her mother didnt entirely believe in her own forgiveness. Eileen wasnt sure she believed in it herself, even though shed been the one to grant it, through tears, after her mother had sat her down at the kitchen table and unearthed mistakes Eileen had successfully buried and said how sorry she was for them. Her mother had worked hard to kill the past, but it clung to life in Eileens mind, in the thought that this apparently solid form might dissolve back into the liquid that had seeped into every corner of her childhood, bringing disorder and rot. The smell of the past, that irrepressible smoke, was spoiling the air between them, where, in the absence of others to filter it, an acrid cloud now hung.
Roll that down further, please.
Without a word, her mother did as asked. She stared straight ahead, smoking and avoiding Eileens gaze as she used to at the height of her drinking days. Eileen pulled over and got out to roll down the rear windows. She stood briefly outside the car gazing at the back of her mothers head, which for a strangely exhilarating moment looked as if it belonged to someone else. Whatever her mother was going through, Eileen would allow herself to care only so much about it. She had her own life to worry about. Life was what you made of it. Some of the houses shed dropped these people off at would have been enough for her, so why couldnt they be enough for them? If she lived in one of these houses, she wouldnt need to get into another womans car and head to a damp lower church for a meeting. She could look at her fireplace, her leather sofa, her book-lined drawing room; she could listen to silence above her head; she could peer in on empty bedrooms lying in wait for fresh-faced visitors, pleasantly useless otherwise. It would all be enough for her to put a drink down for. And yet there these people were. The fact that they were there, that everything they owned wasnt enough somehow, disturbed her, suggesting a bottomlessness to certain kinds of unhappiness. She shook the thought from her head like dust from an Oriental rug and decided that a house would have to be enough.
6
She spent the entire fall of 1963 trying to convince her cousin Pat to apply to college. Then December rolled in and the application deadlines were around the corner, and many of them had already come and gone. She went to him to make one final appeal.
Im not college material, Pat said, his big feet up on the coffee table in her aunt Kittys apartment, where Eileen sat with her knees together under the pressed pleats of her cotton skirt.
Bull.
Ive never been big on school. He leaned over and tapped ashes into a coffee cup, stretched back again.
You could have been a great student. Youre smarter than all those boys.
You need to give up on this idea of me as a Future Leader of America.
The truth was, she already had. He was smart enough to make it to his senior year without doing a lick of homework, and he possessed an intuitive ability to make men champion his causes that reminded her of her fathers own. He was pissing away his apparently unbearable promise at underage bars, but she didnt care about that anymore. All she wanted was to keep him safe.
You could get As in your sleep, she said, if you gave it a tiny bit of effort. She crossed her legs and played with the pack of cigarettes. She resisted blowing away the smoke that was traveling in her direction.
I cant sit and study. I just get restless.
Ill do the applications for you.
I need to move. I cant be cooped up. He snubbed out his cigarette and folded his hands behind his head.
Youll have plenty of chances to move in Vietnam, she said bitterly. Until youre in the ground, that is.
He turned eighteen that February, 1964, and she tried to get him to marry the girl he was dating, but he wouldnt do it. When he graduated in June and received the notice to report for his physical, she was terrified, because he was a perfect specimen, big and strong and almost impossibly hale, with 20/10 vision, practically, and great knees despite the family curse, so there was zero chance of his getting declared 4F. She tried to get him to enlist in the National Guard to avoid a dangerous posting, and then after the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August she was sure hed find some college to enroll in, but instead a couple of weeks later he went to the recruiter for the Marines.
Hed been on the winning side of every fistfight hed ever been in, so he mightve thought he could simply stare down whatever trouble was to come. He went to Parris Island for basic, got further training as an antitank assaultman, and was assigned to Camp Lejeune, where he stayed until June of 1965, when he volunteered to go over after the first waves of the ground war had landed in South Vietnam.
He called before he left. She couldnt picture him in a crew cut at the other end of the phone, wearing that one outfit they all seemed to wear, a polo shirt and chinos, as if they all shopped in the same store. All she could see in her minds eye was him standing in his St. Sebastians blazer, five grades behind her, shifting impatiently from foot to foot while she fixed his tie. He was the closest shed ever had to a brother.
Youd better stay alive, she said.
There are some scared-looking fellas I could hand the phone to if you want to give them a little pep talk. This is Pat youre talking to. Pat Tumulty. Ill see you in a while.
Fine.
Tell your father Ill make him proud, he said.
Her father had filled her cousins head with so much patriotic rhetoric that he thought he was embarking on a noble adventure.
Dont you even think about trying to impress him, she said. Hed never say so, but hes scared to death that somethings going to happen to you.