His mother wept on her folded arms at the kitchen table as he took off his good clothes. He wasn’t going downtown to his graduation either. The Jesuits could mail him the diploma.
But he was angry, angrier than he’d ever been in his life, and for the first time in his life, he called her a drunk and a slut. He shivered and cried.
Emily and Jacob sobbed in the other room.
His mother began to bawl. She said she wanted to kill herself. They struggled together over a kitchen knife. “Stop it, stop it,” he said between his clenched teeth. “All right, I’ll get the damn booze,” he said, and he went out for a six-pack and a bottle of wine, and a flask of bourbon. Now she had the seemingly endless supply that she wanted.
After she drank a beer, she begged him to lie down on the bed beside her. She drank the wine in gulps. She cried and asked him to say the rosary with her. “It’s a craving in the blood,” she said. He didn’t answer. He’d taken her to meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous many a time. She’d never stay even for fifteen minutes.
Finally he settled next to her. And they said the rosary together. In a low voice, devoid of drama or complaint, she told him how her father had died of the drink, a man he never knew, and his father before him. She told him about all those uncles who had gone before who’d been drunkards. “It’s a craving in the blood,” she said again. “A positive craving in the blood. You have to stay with me, Toby. You have to say the rosary with me again. Dear God, help me, help me, help me.”
“Listen, Ma,” he said to her. “I’m going to make more and more money playing music. This summer I have a full-time job playing at the restaurant. All summer I’ll be making money every night seven nights a week. Don’t you see what that means? I’ll be making more than ever.”
He went on as her eyes glazed over and the wine made her stuporous.
“Ma, I’m going to get a degree from the Conservatory. I’ll be able to teach music. Maybe I’ll even be able to make a record sometime, you know. But I’ll get my degree in music, Ma. I’ll be able to teach. You have to hang on. You have to believe in me.”
She stared at him with eyes like marbles.
“Look, after this coming week, I’ll have enough to get a woman to come in, to do the laundry and all and help Emily and Jacob with their homework. I’ll work all the time. I’ll play outside before the restaurant opens.” He put his hands on her shoulders and her mouth worked itself into a skewed smile. “I’m a man now, Ma. I’m going to do it!”
She slowly slipped into sleep. It was past nine o’clock.
Do angels really lack knowledge of the heart? I wept as I listened to him and watched him.
He went on and on talking to her as she slept, about how they’d move out of this crummy little apartment. Emily and Jacob would still go to Holy Name School, he’d drive them in the car he was going to buy. He already had his eye on it. “Ma, when I perform at the Conservatory for the first time, I want you to be there. I want you and Emily and Jacob to be in the balcony. That won’t be long at all. My teacher’s helping me now. I’ll get the tickets for us all to come. Ma, I’m going to make things all right, you understand? Ma, I’ll get you a doctor, a doctor who knows what to do.”
In her drunken sleep, she murmured. “Yes dear, yes dear, yes dear.”
Around eleven o’clock, he gave her another beer and she went dead asleep. He left the wine beside her. He saw to it Emily and Jacob were in their pajamas and tucked in, and then he put on the fine black tuxedo and boiled shirt he’d bought for graduation. They were, of course, the finest of the garments he had. And he’d bought them outright because he knew that he could use them on the street to good effect, and maybe even in the better restaurants.
He went downtown to play for money.
There were parties all over the city that night for the Jesuit graduates. They were not for Toby.
He parked himself very near to the most famous bars on Bourbon Street, and there he opened his case, and began to play. He sank his heart and soul into the saddest litanies of woe ever penned by Roy Orbison. And soon the twenty-dollar bills came flying at him.
What a spectacle he was, already at his full height, and so finely dressed compared to the ragged street musicians seated here or there, or the mumblers simply begging for coins, or the ragged but brilliant little tap dancers.
He played “Danny Boy” at least six times that night for one couple alone, and they gave him a hundred-dollar bill that he slipped into his wallet. He played all the ripping crowd-pleasers he knew, and if they clapped for the bluegrass then off he went, the country fiddler with the lute, and they jigged around him. He put everything out of his mind, except his music.
When early morning came, he went into the St. Louis Cathedral. He prayed the psalm he had so loved from his grandmother’s Catholic Bible:
Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I am stuck fast in the mire of the deep, and there is nowhere to set my foot. I am come into deep waters, and the waves overwhelm me. I have grown weary from crying, my throat has become hoarse; my eyes have failed while I await my God.
Finally, he whispered, “Dear God, will you not end this pain!”
He had over six hundred dollars now to pay the bills. He was way ahead. But what did it matter if he couldn’t save her?
“Dear God,” he prayed. “I don’t want for her to die. I’m sorry I prayed for her to die. Dear Lord, save her.”
A beggar came up to him as he left the cathedral. She was poorly dressed and murmured under her breath of her need for medicine to save a dying child. He knew she was lying. He’d seen her many a time, and heard her tell the same story. He stared at her for a long time, then silenced her with a wave of his hand and a smile, and he gave her twenty dollars.
Tired as he was, he walked through the Quarter rather than spend the few bucks for a cab, and he rode the St. Charles car up home, staring dumbly out the window.
He wanted desperately to see Liona. He knew that she had come last night to see him graduate—she and her parents, in fact—and he wanted to explain to her why he had not been there.
He remembered that they had had plans afterwards, but now it seemed remote and he was too tired to think of what he would say to her when he finally spoke to her. He thought of her large loving eyes, of the ready wit and sharp intellect she never concealed, and her ringing laugh. He thought of all the wondrous traits she had, and he knew that as the college years passed, he would surely lose her. She had a scholarship at the Conservatory too, but how could he compete with the young men who would inevitably surround her?
She had a glorious voice, and in the production at Jesuit, she had seemed a natural star, loving the stage, and graciously but confidently accepting applause and flowers and compliments.
He didn’t understand why she had bothered with him at all. And he felt he had to draw back, let her go, and yet he almost cried thinking about her.
As the rattling clanking streetcar moved uptown, he hugged his lute and even went to sleep against it for a little while. But he woke with a start at his stop, and got off and dragged his feet as he went down the pavement.
As soon as he entered the apartment he knew something was wrong.
He found Jacob and Emily drowned in the bathtub. And she, with her wrists slit, lay dead on the bed, the blood soaking the spread and half of the pillow.
For a long time, he stared at the bodies of his brother and sister. The water had drained out but their pajamas were in moist wrinkles. He could see the bruises all over Jacob. What a fight he had put up. But the face of Emily at the other end of the tub was smooth and perfect, with eyes closed. Maybe she hadn’t been awake when their mother had drowned her. There was blood in the water. There was blood on the waterspout where Jacob must have cracked his head as she pushed him down.
The kitchen knife lay beside his mother. She’d all but chopped off her left hand, so deep was the wound, but she’d bled to death from both wrists.
All this had
happened hours ago, he knew it.
The blood was dry or at best sticky.
Yet still he lifted his brother out of the tub and actually tried to breathe life into him. His brother’s body was icy cold, or so it seemed. And it was soggy.
He couldn’t bear to touch his mother or his sister.
His mother lay with her lids half shut, her mouth open. She looked already dried out, like a husk. A husk, he thought, exactly. He stared at the rosary in the blood. The blood was all over the painted wood floor.
Only the smell of wine hung over all these pitiable visions. Only the smell of the malt in the beer. Outside cars passed. A block away, there came the roar of the passing streetcar.
Toby went into the living room, and sat for a long time with his lute on his lap.
Why hadn’t he known such a thing could happen? Why had he left Jacob and Emily alone with her? Dear God, why had he not seen that it would come to this? Jacob was only ten years old. How in the name of Heaven had Toby let this happen to them?
It was all his fault. He had no doubt of it. That she might hurt herself, yes, of this he’d thought, and God forgive him, maybe he had even prayed for that in the cathedral. But this? His brother and sister dead? His breathing stopped again. For a moment he thought he’d never be able to breathe again. He stood up and only then did the breath come out of him in a dry soundless sob.
Listlessly he stared at the mean apartment with its ugly mismatched furnishings, its old oak desk and cheap flowered chairs, and all the world to him seemed filthy and gray and he felt a fear and then a growing terror.
His heart pounded. He stared at the drugstore prints of flowers in their ugly frames—these foolish things he’d bought—ranged around the papered walls of the apartment. He stared at the flimsy curtains he’d bought as well, and the cheap white window shades behind them.
He didn’t want to go into the bedroom and see the print of the guardian angel. He felt he would rip it to pieces if he saw it. He would not ever again, ever, raise his eyes to such a thing.
A gloom followed the pain. A gloom came when the pain could not be sustained. It covered every object that he beheld, and concepts such as warmth and love seemed unreal to him, or forever beyond reach, as he sat in the midst of this ugliness and ruin.
Sometime or other during the hours he sat there, he heard the answering machine on the phone. It was Liona calling him. He knew that he could not pick up the phone. He knew that he could never see her again, or speak to her, or tell her about what had happened.
He didn’t pray. It didn’t even occur to him. It didn’t even occur to him to talk to the angel at his side, or the Lord to whom he’d prayed only an hour and a half ago. He’d never see his brother and sister alive again, or his mother, or his father, or anyone he knew. This is what he thought. They were dead, irrevocably dead. He believed in nothing. If someone had come to him at that moment, as his guardian angel sought to do, and told him, You will see them all again, he might have spat at that person in a perfect fury.
All day he remained in the apartment with his dead family ranged around him. He kept the bathroom and bedroom doors open, because he didn’t want the bodies to be alone. It seemed horribly disrespectful.
Liona called twice more, and the second time he was half dozing and wasn’t sure whether or not he had really heard her.
Finally he fell deep asleep on the sofa, and when he first opened his eyes, he forgot what had happened, and he thought they were all alive and things were as usual. At once, the truth came back to him with the force of a hammer.
He changed into his blazer and khakis and packed up all his fine clothes. He got them into the suitcase his mother had taken to the hospital years ago when she’d had her babies. He took all the cash from the hiding places.
He kissed his little brother. Rolling up his sleeve, he reached down into the soiled bathtub to put a kiss with his fingers on his sister’s cheek. Then he kissed his mother’s shoulder. Again he stared at the rosary. She hadn’t been saying it as she died. It was just there, caught in the snarled spread, forgotten.
He picked it up, took it into the bathroom, and ran the basin water over it until it was clean. Then he dried it on a towel and put it in his pocket.
Everybody looked very dead now, very empty. There was no odor yet, but they were very dead. The rigidity of his mother’s face absorbed him. The body of Jacob on the floor was dry and wrinkled.
Then, as he turned to go, he went back to his desk. He wanted to take two books with him. He took his prayer book, and he took the book called The Angels by Fr. Pascal Parente.
I observed this. I observed it with keen interest.
I noticed the way that he packed these treasured books in the bulging suitcase. He thought about other religious books that he loved, including a Lives of the Saints, but he had no room for them.
He took the streetcar downtown and, outside the first hotel he reached, he caught a cab to the airport.
Only once, it crossed his mind to call the police, to report what had happened. But then he felt such rage that he put these thoughts out of his mind forever.
He went to New York. Nobody could find you in New York, he figured.
On the plane, he clutched his lute as if something might happen to it. He stared out the window and he knew a misery so deep that it didn’t seem possible life could ever hold a particle of joy again.
Not even murmuring melodies to himself of the songs he most liked to play meant anything to him. In his ears, he heard a din as if the imps of Hell were making a horrid music to drive him out of his mind. He whispered to himself to silence it. He slipped his hand into his pocket, found his rosary, and prayed the words but he didn’t meditate upon the mysteries. “Hail Mary,” he whispered under his breath, “… now and at the hour of our death. Amen.” These are just words, he thought. He could not imagine eternity.
When the stewardess asked him if he wanted a soft drink, he answered, “Someone will bury them.” She gave him a Coke with ice. He didn’t sleep. It was only two and a half hours to New York but the plane circled for more than that before it finally landed.
He thought about his mother. What could he have done? Where could he have put her? He had been looking for places, doctors, some way, any way to buy time until he could save everyone. Maybe he hadn’t moved fast enough, been clever enough. Maybe he should have told his teachers at school.
Didn’t matter now, he told himself.
It was evening. The dark giant buildings of the East Side of the city seemed infernal. The sheer noise of the city astonished him. It enclosed him in the bouncing taxi, or battered him at the stoplights. Behind a thick window of plastic the driver was a mere ghost to him.
Finally banging on the plastic, he told the man he needed a cheap hotel. He was afraid the man would think he was a child and take him to some policeman. He didn’t realize that at six foot four inches of height and with the grim expression on his face, he didn’t look like a child at all. The hotel was not as bad as he’d expected.
He thought about bad things as he walked the streets in search of a job. He carried his lute with him.
He thought of the afternoons when he was little and he would come home and find both of his parents drunk. His father was a bad policeman, and everyone knew it. None of his mother’s people could stand him. Only his own mother had pleaded with him over and over to treat his wife and children better.
Even when Toby was small, he knew his father bullied the loose women in the French Quarter, forcing favors out of them before he would “let them off.” He’d heard his father brag about that kind of thing with the few other cops who had come over for beer and poker. They’d shared those stories. When the other men said that his father ought to be proud of a boy like Toby, his father had said, “Who, you mean Pretty Face over there? My little girl?”
Now and then when he’d been very drunk, his father had taunted Toby, pushing him, asking to see what Toby had between his legs. Sometimes Toby
had gotten a beer or two from the icebox for his father to move him along to the time when he’d pass out and doze with his arms crossed on the table.
Toby had been glad when his father went to prison. His father had always been coarse and cold, and had a shapeless and red face. He was mean and ugly and he looked mean and ugly. The handsome young man he’d been in photographs had turned into an obese and red-faced drunk with jowls and a roughened voice. Toby was glad when his father was stabbed. He couldn’t remember any funeral.
Toby’s mother had always been pretty. In those days, she’d been sweet. And her favorite words for her son had been “my sweet boy.”
Toby resembled her in face and manner, and he’d never ceased to be proud of that, no matter what had happened. He never ceased to be proud of his increasing height, and he took pride in the way he dressed to wring the money from the tourists.
Now as he walked through the streets of New York, trying to ignore the great booming noises that accosted him at every turn, trying to weave amongst the people without being knocked about, he thought over and over again, I was never enough for her, never enough. Nothing I did was ever enough. Nothing. Never had anything he had done been enough for anyone, except perhaps his music teacher. He thought of her now and he wished he could call her and tell her how much he loved her. But he knew he wouldn’t do this.
The long dreary day of New York suddenly switched dramatically to evening. Cheerful lights went on everywhere. Store awnings sparkled with lights. Couples moved swiftly along to movie theaters or to stage plays. It wasn’t hard to realize that he was in the Theater District and he loved looking in the windows of the restaurants. But he wasn’t hungry. The thought of food revolted him.