It was at this point that Bernadette fell quiet. She leaned her head against her husband’s shoulder and for awhile they simply waited in the low, gold light of early evening, as if someone else might walk through the front door and finish the story for her. “Well?” Doyle said. He was interested now. He wanted to know.
“Things go downhill from here,” Bernadette said. “There’s no redemption.”
“You only have to tell it once,” he said.
Doreen Clark, now Mrs. Billy Lovell, had come to see in one night that her happiness, her marriage, and her children had all been based on thievery and willful deception. The Catholic Church had been robbed and so had she, but there could be no extrication for her now, no returning to her youthful dreams. She lifted the statue of her own likeness into her arms, touching the cheek that had once been her cheek. There was no imagining how empty the apartment would be now. She bagged it gently in one of the wedding pillow-cases her mother had tatted with lace, a case she had wrapped in tissue paper and stored in a chest at the foot of her bed without ever once laying her head on it. Then she sent the great-grandfather out of the house and into the horrible darkness. “Take it back,” was all she said.
Of course he couldn’t take it back, any more than he could take back a leaf in a cluttered autumn forest to the rightful tree from which it fell. Ireland was crowded with pubs and crowded with churches and all he was sure of was that eight years before he had stumbled out of one of them and into the other. He did not know which saint the church was named for. How could he walk to every one of them in the country asking the question door to door, “Have I stolen this from you?” So he walked to no place in particular. He thought about his sins and his intentions, one of which was quite bad and the other of which was pure. He carried the Virgin in his arms like a child and from time to time he would pull the pillowcase back from her beautiful face and weep for the love of his wife. Then he would go home. That was more or less the way it went for the rest of their lives, she turned him out and he came back again. Every time he walked down his own street his children would rush to meet him, their dirty little hands stretching up towards his neck. “Da, did you bring her home?” they’d cry. His wife would let him stay two days or two months or sometimes even two years until she couldn’t stand it anymore, living with the burden of their sins. But she was like the children, too, and her heart always stuttered with joy and relief to see the bulky shape inside the pillowcase as her husband started back up the stairs. She would lift the statue from his arms and carry Mary Mother of God back to the dresser, studying the face that had been her face, the serene and tender face that she had outgrown. Had that ever been the color of her hair? Then she would cross herself and say a prayer.
“And she didn’t give it back to the church?” Doyle said. “I mean her own church.”
“Well,” Bernadette said. “It didn’t belong to them, not them specifically. And the Lovells were all pretty attached to it. In the end she gave it to my grandmother Loretta, the one with the short leg, and all of her siblings were so furious that Loretta had to pack up the statue and her family and take the boat to Boston.”
“It might have been a bit of an overreaction.”
She shook her head. “People in my family take this very seriously. When Loretta moved to Florida she gave the statue to my mother, and from there, well…” She pointed again.
Doyle kissed her hair. He kissed the narrow path of skin beside her eye. “That isn’t such a bad story. There are certainly worse ones out there.”
But Bernadette was true to her word and Doyle never heard her tell the statue’s full history again. Later on there was a shorter, cheerier version she used for the boys as a bedtime story that did not involve theft, and when a guest would comment on a peculiar likeness between Bernadette and the Virgin in the years that the statue stayed in the living room she never gave out anything more than a slight, flattered smile.
From the moment of their childhood in which Bernadette’s sisters figured out who looked like the statue they had sung a never-ending chorus of petulance behind her: Bernadette’s the lucky one, so she couldn’t help but feel it was true. She had the statue after all, the image of herself and her mother and her mother’s mother before her all the way back to Ireland. How many hours had she lain on her stomach staring at those blue robes as a child, touching her finger ever so lightly to the sharp edge of the halo as she prayed for better grades, prayed for better boys, prayed to find money on the sidewalk?
Once she was married, Bernadette managed to give up praying to the statue for years. She sometimes prayed to a vague idea of God, more out of respect to her Uncle Sullivan than anything else. If he thought there was something to faith then there must be something to faith. After their son Sullivan was born and was baptized, the religion of her childhood started to creep back into her daily life, maybe because there was more to pray for, that her boy would stay healthy, that he would be safe. She did not pray for Doyle to be elected to the City Council, though sometimes she prayed unconsciously for the speeches and the fund-raising dinners to come to an end. She did not understand her husband’s love of politics but she prayed for him to have what he wanted because she loved him. She prayed for what she wanted as well—the day she would have her own redheaded daughter to pass the statue on to—and then she simply prayed for another child. She prayed for her pregnancy to hold to term and then she prayed for another chance at pregnancy, and then another and another, but the praying didn’t get her anywhere. She prayed for the strength and the wisdom to be satisfied by all that she had, a beautiful son, a loving husband. She prayed to accept God’s will. She prayed to stop praying, a pastime that never failed to make her feel selfish and childish, but she could not stop. By then Sullivan was twelve years old, independent and wild, and Doyle was starting to talk about running for mayor. They had spent two years on the adoption wait-list, standing in line with everybody else. She did not ask for anything as ridiculous as a redhead or a girl, just a baby. Any baby would be fine. Bernadette’s religion was the large, boisterous families she had come from and she believed in them deeply. She had meant to put two beds in every room in the house. She believed that Sullivan needed siblings as badly as she needed more children to love. She waited and looked to her statue, and she prayed.
Happiness compresses time, makes it dense and bright, pocket-sized. Of those four good years between Teddy’s arrival and Bernadette’s death, Doyle can somehow assemble only about two weeks’ worth of memories: Teddy coming to them when he was five days old, and then the agency calling back only a few days later to say that the mother had changed her mind, not that she wanted her baby back but that she had decided her sons should stay together. Would they consider taking his brother in addition, a good boy who was fourteen months? It was exactly the windfall Bernadette had dreamed of, something too good, too rich to even pray for.
Did Doyle want another child? Another two? By the time they arrived he could no longer remember. Early in their marriage he had wanted to fill up the house as much as Bernadette, but in the years those children failed to materialize he ceased to want them for their own sake. In those years all he wanted was for his wife to be happy. So when the little boys arrived he did not think, Finally I have all the children I want, he thought, Now Bernadette can be happy. Seeing Bernadette happy after so many disappointments was Doyle’s truest desire, and that was how he came to love the boys themselves. He loved them for the joy they brought Bernadette. For four short years the house was full. The Virgin moved into the little boys’ room and watched them from the dresser while they slept. It was in January after the extravagant rush of Christmas that Teddy got a cold. There was nothing unusual about that. Teddy always caught things first. Then Tip’s cold leapt into strep throat and Sullivan started to cough. Sullivan got strep throat and then it went to Doyle, and they passed it around like that, one to the other, back and forth, with Bernadette doling out antibiotics and taking temperatures and running hers
elf down, further and further down as she climbed the stairs with Popsicles and bright, shivering bowls of Jell-O. In taking the children to the doctor she never went to see a doctor herself. It was the pediatrician who touched her neck. He reached up from Tip, who was sitting patiently on the table, turning the pages of a picture book, and put his hand on Bernadette’s neck without asking her first.
“Do you feel this?” he said, touching the lump that was there.
Chapter 2
IN THE BASEMENT OF THE MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY, TIP STOOD ALONE WITH THE FISHES. Threats of bad weather that had not yet materialized sent everyone else home early, and while he was quietly fond of the people he worked with there was always something thrilling about having the place to himself. He walked through the catacombs of dead fishes, filing back the jars that had been taken out for study that day. Over the dull thrum of fluorescent lights overhead, Tip kept listening for the sound of his brother coming down the hallway. All he heard were his own feet on the cement floor, the squeal of tennis shoes and the musical clink of the glass jars touching in his basket. Teddy was late, a fact so basic and essential to his nature that Tip could hardly believe he had ever expected it could be otherwise. His brother was late. The sun would come up in the East. One would think he could remember that.
“Just meet me and Da at the lecture,” he had said on the phone that morning, thinking then at least one of them would be on time.
“But I’ll be at the museum by five and the lecture doesn’t start until seven.” Teddy had sounded perfectly logical. “I’ll just sit at your desk and study while you work.”
A two hour margin of error, even Teddy could manage that. But now it was six forty-five. If Tip left this very minute he’d barely be on time himself, and he couldn’t do that anyway because then Teddy would have walked all the way to the museum just to find a note taped to the door saying he’d left. Teddy had lost his last four cell phones and had not pursued a fifth, so there was no way to head him off. It wasn’t that Tip minded being late exactly. He didn’t have the slightest interest in hearing what Jesse Jackson had to say. It was only the knowledge that their father would already be in the auditorium by now looking at his watch that made Tip feel uncomfortable about the time. How much better the night would have been if the sky had thrown down the bank of snow that was predicted and locked him in with the fishes.
He took a jar containing eight small warmouths from his basket and put them back on the shelf where they belonged. There were six rooms in the Department of Ichthyology, which was located beneath the museum, six brick-walled cells in the subterranean hive, each one a maze of metal shelving, fishes stacked floor to ceiling like bins of nails in a hardware store, 1.3 million dead fishes suspended in alcohol. A dozen or more tiny fish clustered together in small jars, single fish folded over in larger jars, huge fish alone in metal boxes. There were fish that had been recently discovered in the Amazon and a fish dating back as far as the 1700s. Put a jar in the wrong spot and you can pretty much say goodbye to it altogether. Tip followed the numbers with a librarian’s precision, setting his basket on the floor so that he could handle the jar more carefully when he returned it to its proper location. Tip Doyle had a position of importance in the lab, even if his father didn’t see it that way. Historically, the recataloguing of fishes was work for graduate students. That this job had come to Tip, a senior, was a sign of his seriousness and demonstrated his sense of responsibility.
“Does the country need another ichthyologist?” his father would have said had he been following Tip through his rounds. Tip was looking for the empty spot to which the next jar, eleven small bluegills, should be returned. “Would the country lay down its foreign wars, its need for health care and education, in order to turn its collective gaze to the splendors of the cod?” Tip stopped for a moment, using the buzz of the lights to work the voice out of his head. His father liked to say he paid more than forty thousand dollars a year to one of the finest universities in the world to give his son the right to peer into glass jars at dead fish. While Jesse Jackson’s son went to Congress, his own son had wandered into the stacks of the Mayr Library, never to be heard from again.
Every jar Tip replaced introduced him to a group of specimens he had never seen before. Whenever he put a fish back he stopped to pick up three or four of its neighbors and contemplate their connections, and inevitably those connections led him to other fish, which might lead him to someday making a real scientific discovery of his own. The warmouth, for example, was in a bin next to some nearly translucent banded pygmy sunfish. Normally, had there been more time, that would have been enough to make him put the bluegill down on the floor and lift up all the sunfish. Once he got going, Tip could often manage to shoot through half a night, finally turning the lights out behind him and locking up with his own key.
Tip’s father resented his son’s love of fishes. He thought that the fishes and possibly even science were a waste of Tip’s serious consideration if he wasn’t even willing to go to medical school, but Tip knew the exact point of origin of this interest and his father was completely to blame. It was Doyle who had driven them over the Sagamore Bridge and down the straight and narrow shot of Route 6 when he and Teddy were little. Sullivan, the oldest of the three boys, was twelve years older than Tip and much too grown-up for trips to the beach, and so they left him in his bedroom with the headphones on. On the drive, the two little boys asked their father questions about the ocean: What made the waves and why was it salty and where did the seagulls sleep at night? They did not ask to stop at the ice cream stands and taffy shacks that dotted the Cape with bright distractions. All they wanted was to get to the water. Everything about those perfect afternoons stayed with Tip, the parking lot blown over with sand, the tall sea grass bunched by the wooden steps that led down to the water, the matching red swim trunks he and his brother wore, and Doyle holding their hands. It was Doyle who settled them at the edge of the tide pools and there, for their benefit, identified every living thing in that shallow slice of ocean. Those were the earliest summers in Tip’s memory, long before he had ever heard of Carl Linnaeus. On those sunny days with the wild roses blooming red against the dunes to their right and the ocean sliding back and forth over the sand to their left, his father was the inventor of taxonomy, the namer of living things. He instilled in Tip the sincere belief that there was nothing more fascinating than a tommycod and a string of kelp. Every day at the beach was gorgeous: in rain and sun, with noisy crowds carrying bright towels and in utter desertion, they found the same clear, cold water over the small pulsing universe, a fully comprehensible world.
Had Doyle been asked to tell this story he would have included the fishes but assigned them a much smaller role in history. He would admit that his youth had been marked by a great interest in marine life, but that it came along with an interest in the Red Sox and Latin, twentieth-century American novels, Schubert, the Democratic Party and the Catholic Church. His plan had been to pass all of those interests and dozens more along to the boys in equal measure in hopes of making them well-rounded, well-educated citizens. He did not mean for any of his sons to become ichthyologists. He had meant for them, at least one of them, to be the president of the United States.
From far away Tip heard a banging on the door and then the sound of his own name called out again and again. Teddy made a lot of noise in the lab ever since the time he startled Tip, coming up behind him unexpectedly and causing him to drop a jar. It had been neither forgiven nor forgotten. Tip took his basket down the hallway towards the sound of his brother’s voice, turning off lights behind him as he went.
“Tip,” Teddy called.
“Late,” the brother answered back.
At six feet three inches, Teddy, a year younger, was the taller of the two, though Tip was more inclined to stand up straight and so made up for the difference. “I’m sorry,” Teddy said, the expression on his face genuinely sorry and surprised, as if he had never been late before. “I fo
rgot to check the clock.”
“You always forget.”
“I had to go see Uncle Sullivan.”
Tip sighed and pointed to the door. “Go.” He regretted leaving behind seven jars unshelved, not to mention the fact that it was reading period and exams were one week away. Tip did well on his tests because he studied for them. Everyone seemed to think his grades came in with no effort on his part. He grabbed his red jacket from the coat tree and threaded one arm through a sleeve while stuffing his books into his backpack.
“Is that the coat you wore?” Teddy said, his own parka was zippered from his knees to his chin. “It’s freezing.”
“That’s the coat I wore.” Tip should not have let his tone be short. Teddy was the better of the two of them, making them late so that he could visit their ancient uncle in the home downtown where old priests were stashed away, but still the whole thing grated on him. It grated on him even more when Teddy told him their uncle had sent his love.
“You told me that after you saw him yesterday.” He wiped his hand across the last row of light switches, casting the kingdom of fishes abruptly into darkness. Teddy stepped behind his brother through the open door and followed him down the hall.
“It’s crazy down there,” Teddy said, shaking his head. “It’s completely out of control. There were so many people lined up to see him when I got there today I could barely get to his room. Sick people, people in wheelchairs, women with screaming babies.”
“A regular miracle at Lourdes.”
Teddy was talking faster now and he raised his volume slightly as if it needed to keep pace with his words. “Sister Claire told me a news crew came today to do a human-interest story. It was bad enough when they put it in the paper. Once it’s on television no one is ever going to leave him alone. It’s like he’s being crushed by a stampede of sick people. If I’m not there to make them go he never gets any rest.”