Every so often I’d catch my mother standing in the middle of her bare living room, that pound of silence she called it, looking as if one of her children were missing.
Tall, dark of hair and eye, lovely white complexion she said was a toast to Cork’s clear air, where she was born, she was not one for using many gestures to express herself. Only if you stared hard, would you see a firmness tighten on her jaw, set her lips; mind made up, deed to be done. That too-silent room, that useless cubicle, would someday be filled.
She’d stop part way across that room to peer out the front window and look over her shoulder. One would think she was being followed and had vowed to lose herself in silence, my tall, lovely, warm, obstinate mother, usually without gestures.
Late at night, there had been arguments about furniture, the very need of it in the first place, an extravagance, we don’t live in a barn, the almost inexhaustible supply of hand-made doilies my grandmother had crocheted for what seemed a hundred years gathering only the dust of history in old hat boxes.
Mother rarely raised her voice, but the smooth, rhythmic engine of her purring came through the other five rooms as if she were keeping her speed steadily at five miles an hour. To a word, she was intractable.
Eventually, from a salesman, a puffy new sofa, two large red-and-blue easy chairs, a coffee table, and an end table made their way up three flights to our cold-water flat. My mother, an absolute magician who could put a supper meal on the table from an empty larder, produced a dark red rug from her bedroom closet, a rug none of us had seen before, and Asian for sure. Age old, elegant and delicate doilies came out of long darkness.
Her room at last shone; she shone; and Simon, the supplier, parted company with the dire challenge, “I’ll be back next Saturday morning for the first payment.” $2.15 a week, for life it seemed.
For the best part of a year, Simon came Saturday mornings. My mother would reach into an oatmeal box where she kept change. Never once did she pay Simon his $2.15 with anything but coin. Her accounting never fazed him, and the creditable entry was posted in his little book that we all dreamed about reading someday. For a while, I was obsessed with its real contents.
Simon was a challenge, though, and took noting. He never sweat or cursed a late entry, never came up three flights without pausing a dozen times. He’d smile at my mother, look in at the front room, nod his appreciation, accept her coin, and make the entry in his little book.
“Be careful how you remember Simon.” Her voice was low, carrying no inflection, no tone to be deciphered. She was, acutely, a judge at warning, at guidance. “I found him. He didn’t find me.”
Into my young life, seriousness had been incorporated.
Then Simon didn’t come for two weeks. One day, after pounding on our apartment door, making all kinds of noises in his throat, a long, lanky, collector of sorts introduced his foot between the door and the stout jamb when my mother had said she had no money for him that day.
He yelled, “I know you’ve got money. Simon said you always paid him and you’re going to pay me. I’m not coming around this hole for nothing! Now give me my money!”
On the front porch, looking down over the peaceful square, no help anywhere in sight, my survival training kicked into high gear. I tugged feverishly at each baluster of the porch railing looking for a loose weapon. None came free. My mother had begun screaming for him to leave, pushing at the other side of the door, holding the fort high on the third floor. I took one more look down to the street before I knew I’d have to catapult onto his back in a few seconds.
Suddenly my father appeared below. “Dad!” I yelled, panic in my voice, setting off the alarm, “Some guy’s got his foot in the door and mom’s crying.”
You know what irony is, full-fledged irony? Lanky’s foot was still in the door and my mother was still pushing on the other side He heard the roars of a lion three floors below him, heavy feet on the steps, the roaring ascending as if from the pit of hell itself. And he can’t get his foot out from that improvident vise because my mother holds firm to her station.
Oh, he struggled then, did the lanky one. “Let go, damn you, you absolute bitch you! Let go!” and the lion is closer and the sounds are hell themselves and suddenly, in a movie, there’s this madman rising from the bowels of the earth and a final roar exits the heart of Vesuvius.
“Let go, Helen!” yelled my father, his hands reaching like talons, an energy pulsing about him more terrible than electricity. Down three flights of stairs went Lanky, pummeled every step of the way, pillar to post to baluster to the final newel near the ground floor.
Lanky never came back.
Twenty five years later, my mother within a day of her death, placed in my hands my father’s metal box whose contents I had never seen. In it I found his Marine Corps discharge creased together in gray-yellow folds, a Corps commendation, two Nicaraguan Service Medals circa Chesty Puller, a postcard from Captain James Devereaux (later at Wake Island) that said, “Jim, do you remember the night Atlanta got treed?”, a note from the first grade teacher in Charlestown, Miss Finn, begging my mother that we not move away until she had taught all the Sheehans, and Simon’s little book, Lanky’s loss no doubt, with nine blank spaces yet to be marked for coin.
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