Last Rites
The funeral director motions him into the first car, a stretch, with his sisters. Maggie, Kate, Bridget, and Moira are waiting inside. Kate has a fist full of tissues in her lap, and Conor has no doubt they’re dry, though she manages a sniffle. Bridget and Maggie are silent, watchful. Maggie, heavier than she was last time he saw her, seems uncomfortable in her black woolen dress, keeps tugging at the hem. Each time he glances up, he finds her observing him, protective as ever, as if ready to grab him if he tries to bolt. Moira removes a paperback from her bag and begins reading.
“What’s that you’ve got there?” says Bridget, sounding as if she wants an explanation, not the title.
“Edna O’Brien,” says Moira, without raising her head from the page. Conor wonders if her red scarf is a statement or simply the only one at hand this morning.
“For Chrissake, we’re burying our father,” says Bridget. “Maybe you could pay attention?” The collar of her beige raincoat is turned up on one side, and Conor wants to ask her if she’s working undercover to enforce some code of conduct for the children of the damned.
Conor slides over to make room for Liam and Peter.
“Leave her be,” Maggie tells Bridget.
“What’s this?” Liam says to Conor. “They’re startin’ without me?”
Conor smiles at his brother. His sisters have been relatively kind to each other so far, considering the distressing amount of time they’ve had to be in their father’s presence. Maggie was the first to point out that his being dead made it only slightly less irritating.
“What’s up, Moira?” says Liam. “You disrespectin’ Dad’s memory?”
“Which memory would that be?” Moira says.
“Can we just have a peaceful ride?” says Peter. “We’re through the worst of it.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” says Liam, pointing a finger at the cars moving into position. “The hordes have arrived to watch the show. Like I haven’t choked on enough perfume already?”
“You’ll survive,” says Bridget.
“That one there—with the head like a bulldog. You see her?” Liam says, planting an elbow in Peter’s ribcage. “She had me in a choke hold. Kevin had to pull her off me.”
“You’re a chick magnet, Liam,” says Maggie.
“Yeah,” says Peter, “especially the ones over sixty.”
Conor glances out the window. Cars are lined up now behind theirs, filled with cousins and nieces and nephews who don’t know much more about Pete Donnegan than his name. When their uncle Tommy died, the swarm of strangers appeared then too, with their familiar tribal eyes and chins and builds. Conor was fourteen; Bridget was already out of high school. Their father and his brother Pearce staggered home afterward, once they’d sufficiently toasted Tommy’s passing. They sang rebel songs well into the night, mostly about a cause nobody understood anymore. It wasn’t a bad night, considering how drunk they were. Nothing smashed up. Nobody bleeding. But Bridget wouldn’t serve them dinner, wouldn’t stay in the same room. She had her rules by then, ways to show him when she disapproved. Conor knew even then such boundaries were pointless.
His first few weeks with his father were the worst. He would lie there at night, wondering why he’d come, remembering the gym near his house, going there for a late swim. He called Julie a few times in the beginning. She was the only one who didn’t give him a hard time about what he was doing. After a while, he couldn’t call anymore. He belonged to death. He thought of her skin, but he could feel only his father’s; the old man’s fetid smell displaced the memory of her perfume. September came. October. His father wasn’t dead, so he had to eat. Conor had to cook. He’d get sick. Conor had to clean him. They listened to baseball together on the radio. “You want to listen to the game, Dad?” “Go ahead,” his father would say. “Put it on if you want,” as if he were indifferent about it. But it had to be an act. Nothing meant more to him than baseball. Baseball made him talk. The only real conversations he and Conor ever had were about the Yankees.
That’s how Conor thought the talking might start. With baseball. Something, anything, would break the silence—somebody throwing himself against an outfield wall for a fly ball or digging his cleats into an ankle for a base. And then maybe his father would get around to asking him about his life. Or maybe he’d finally get around to explaining what went wrong with his own. Conor would have welcomed anything that would get them past feeling like they were waiting for a bus. But the Yankees were having a mediocre season—at least by his father’s standards—and the old man had nothing to say.
