The Devil Is in the Detail

 “Okay, you win.”

Regina Wiley eyed an unfamiliar arrangement of rainbow-colored fireflies in the darkened room. Miniature bulbs, strung across the top of an overstocked bookcase, fell in strands to the floor at either end, like jerky illuminated sideburns. She regarded her husband from comfortable habit. Not counting past lives, they had logged thirteen years of marriage, with no formal attention paid to Christmas—no tree, no carols, and no midnight candlelight service. Old souls, in sync at the start, they had declared New Year’s Eve to be their personal celebration. They had fled from the year-end chaos of the city to raise gloved hands, tilt reddened chins and swig from a bottle of vintage Champagne—their gift to each other—as they greeted possibility on the cold, hard sands of Montauk. This year would find them again wrapped in the susurrus at land’s end, braced for the pulsing sea.

“The lights look great,” she cheered and immediately shuddered. Here it was. That feeling of well-being that sometimes unnerved her.

“I support sustainable marriage,” her husband quipped in a British accent worn at the heel after more than a dozen years in Manhattan. David Hawthorne knew he’d prevailed. He’d made the effort this year. Christmas was always largely ignored at her request. Or rather, at her hedging a bet that if it were left up to him, no move would be made. 

Two young cats skittered around his ankles, chasing an ethereal mouse. They had visited the shelter a month before. Just to look. Still, maybe, not quite over the death that summer of her old cat.

“We can call them fairy lights,” Regina said.

“Besides, it’s their first Christmas,” David insisted.

David held fast to the memories of his family in Leicestershire, where he’d grown up. The clutter and sparkle of cheap decorations lovingly preserved, the fireplace mantle topped by miniature village scenes sunk into blankets of artificial snow. He remembered, fondly, the desiccated turkey and overdone veg, gorging on sponge cake soaked in sherry, always feeling a trifle bombed by the end of the night. The three of them—an insular family—never tempted by the outcropping of aunts and uncles and cousins, and always within taut personal boundaries. The death of his parents contrived to hold these memories in place.

Regina had an unholy attachment to family that she longed to sever, but could not. Christmas, for her, recalled a tree painstakingly trimmed, all the more remarkable because her overdone father was blind drunk by the time he’d perch precariously on the hassock and, ever so delicately, like a sheepish driver submitting to a sobriety test, place the angel atop the tree. There was nothing remotely sweet about her mother, who invariably threw up her hands, angrily insisting on ordering dinner in. Her sister—bitter and vengeful at predicted disappointment—tore through presents with cyclonic force. Regina’s parents were dead. Her sister’s life had been reinvented, Regina sidelined.

“I smell heat,” Regina sniffed. “What the—? Why do they do that? It’s practically summer out.”

“The radiators are off,” David reminded her.

“I know. I know,” she huffed. “But it gets worse every year.” Regina hurried to yank the living room window open from the top a few inches. “Can’t let the terrorists win. Get the phone, would you?”

Recognizing the number, David knew Regina was on the outs with the caller. “It’s Gabe.”

“Let the machine get it,” she shot back. “I don’t have time for his shit.” 

“No message,” David said. “Still pissed at him?”

“Maybe. I don’t know,” she said, “but I don’t want to spoil the moment.”

“Steady on. You know how he is,” David replied.

“How he is,” Regina muttered, “is what pisses me off.”

After Regina had lost her full time editorial position, her husband had put down his guitar full time to pick up the slack. David found work as a security guard. The pay was negligible but he was outdoors a good deal at a wildlife conservancy in Queens, and they needed health insurance. They agreed it was only temporary. 

She’d met Gabriel Price in the aftermath of 9/11, when many with comfortable incomes were forced to recalibrate and take meaner positions with fewer incentives. Gabriel was a couple of decades younger than Regina. He blinked at her radical political views, critical and unwilling to take it all on until he’d recycled the information, tailoring it to his peculiar proselytizing. From a Fundamentalist Christian family, he agonized over what was obvious, confiding in Regina, the older freelancer, with whom he felt safe. Although he was characteristically flamboyant among his social circle, and generally out with his coworkers, he feared the denunciatory edicts of his mother and the church back home in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.

Earlier, Regina and David had spent the day in SoHo, at the offices of God’s Love We Deliver. They’d joined an amiable bunch of volunteers, many of whom they recognized from year to year. They stuffed gifts donated for the homebound into paper shopping bags decorated by school children. Regina knew it didn’t entirely define the holiday for her husband, but he loved the whole New York feel of it.

On Christmas morning, the volunteers would meet at Cleo’s on Ninth Avenue, usually frequented by lifers in the theater. At an hour long before regulars took their customary bar stools, sleepy-eyed altruists gathered around a fearsome confectionery mound provided by a popular doughnut shop. They downed steaming cups of hot coffee. Fortified by sugar and caffeine, they’d head to their assigned neighborhoods to deliver gift-laden shopping bags, along with a prepared holiday meal. They had—and would do so again—visited emaciated young men in tenement walk-ups, grizzled warriors in SROs, resourceful old queens in rent-controlled apartments and low-income women in housing projects, some with children staring wide-eyed at the strangers bearing gifts.

At Regina’s suggestion, Gabriel—not one to be left out—had also signed on to volunteer. He couldn’t “do Christmas” because he was flying home, but he eagerly agreed to help fill the Christmas bags. For weeks around the office of a teen magazine, where he and Regina free-lanced, he’d babbled enthusiastically, basking in the attention he received for his “good deed.’’ He’d failed to mention Regina’s part in it.

As the morning inclined toward afternoon in SoHo, David had had to remind Regina over and over what Gabe was like, that maybe it was a rural thing, his inattention to time.

“To anyone else’s time,” she’d snapped, stuffing a bag. “Girl, you need to get one of them cell phones,” she minced, making David laugh. Afterward, exiting onto Sixth Avenue on an unusually temperate winter afternoon, she recognized Gabe’s car at the curb. He waved frantically, laughing and mouthing the familiar “sorry” refrain, beckoning them to the car. Breathless, Gabe leaned across to the passenger side window.

“Oh my God! You won’t believe what happened. I was so, so, so on time and then—.” Regina studied her watch. He giggled, the prelude to wangling forgiveness. “Let me make it up. Buy you guys a drink?”

They had dismissed Gabe, pleading a prior engagement. Undaunted, he’d called after them, “Have an awesome day folks. Love ya!” Seemingly on the spur of the moment, David had stopped into a hardware store and purchased the lights.

“Tea?” David asked, heading for the kitchen.

“M-m-m, dunno Sweetie.” Regina watched the cats following David, their Piper. She turned to the rows of books and cds shelved like subway riders in rush hour. “Is it too early for a drink?” She picked a cd at random. Her personal timeline ran from doo-wop through to the Beatles and Dylan, to the Sex Pistols, jazz, rockabilly, to the classical music she received as gifts. Though nowadays she rarely listened to any music other than her husband’s.

Mozart’s Exultate Jubilate bubbled from the cd player and filled the room. David hollered from the kitchen, “Haven’t heard that in a while!”

Regina scanned the shelves. Her gaze traversed a lifetime of books, her old friends. She lingered on an author she’d once read avidly. She reached up to stroke the thick spine of Flannery O’Connor before grabbing it off the shelf. “Born disenchanted,” she muttered.

David handed her a full glass of Pinot Noir. “What’s that?”

“Nothing,” she replied, putting the book down. Palming her glass, she said, “Well, I mean the lights look fab.” She smiled, more inwardly, but he got it. She raised her glass to him, to the lights. “Thanks for all this.”

He nuzzled her shoulder, intuitive as ever. “Pecker up, lad. I’ll make us something to eat. Get that wine down your neck.”

It was a generational thing, she reasoned, her upset with Gabriel. She’d had many close gay friends in her life, still did. Years ago, some, younger than she, had struggled painfully

in a more hazardous environment. She became a confidant of sorts until they bashed their way out of the closet and she found she was no longer necessary. It was fine with her. She understood they needed to make their own path. Her close friends were older, bellwethers in their time.

Now was the time, though, that you wanted someone—gay or straight—serious and mad as hell. Someone who put aside feather boas and inconsequential personal drama. Gabe’s circle seemed so self-congratulatory, frothy and liable to disappear when you needed them. She had to be honest with herself. She was angry with Gabe, not so much for his absence earlier, but for something that had happened less recently. 

Just before Thanksgiving, he’d confessed to her that he dreaded the return home, how flustered he would be, so closeted with his family. He and Regina had talked for hours. She’d urged him to come out. Mothers need to know, she told him, and lies just made everyone sick. She had seen it in her own family. He’d returned from the holiday in high gear, ready to take on the world. “Whew-e-e-e!” He knew what it meant to be truly born again. His family was shocked. Shocked! But he had prevailed. Then, in a heartbeat, he’d turned on Regina over some remark she’d made regarding the furor that had resurfaced over “Don’t ask. Don’t tell.” She’d cautioned against being deflected from even greater issues.

“dadt’s lobbed around like a political football,” she said.

His response was instant and lacerating. “You are a hetero! What do you know about it?” To her amazement he unleashed a tirade. “I’ll tell you what you know about it. Nothing. You know nothing about it!” 

She’d come home steaming. “You get too involved,” her husband had chided.

Regina flipped through a hefty volume of letters. “You have to push as hard as the age that pushes against you,” wrote Flannery O’Connor. Maybe she was just worn down by circumstance, unfairly harsh with Gabe. At least he was true to himself, not like that pastor who chastised his congregation for going to social networking sites, calling them “portals to infidelity.” Later it was revealed that he’d had a three-way with his wife and a male church assistant. Gabriel didn’t so much apologize as seduce her with his capacity for fun. Better playmate than friend, she thought.

Caller i.d. prompted Regina to pick up the phone. Her expression caused David to lower the volume on Teresa Stich-Randall, and he watched as Regina’s jubilation disappeared. He picked up that it was something to do with family. She replaced the phone in its cradle. It was late. Taxis were dear, but they would have to get a cab downtown from the Upper East Side to an address in Greenwich Village. She advised David to bring his cell phone. “This is bad. This is very bad,” she said.

In a nondescript, reconverted warehouse on Greenwich Avenue, a thickset, unsmiling policewoman stood sentry at Lucien’s front door. David liked Lucien Edwards well enough, though he saw his wife’s cousin rarely and had never been to his apartment. He knew the cousins had hit a speed bump some time ago and slowed the pace of their relationship. 

Regina presented the requisite paperwork from the local precinct. The officer, somewhat mollified, guided them under the taut strip of caution yellow stretched across the entrance. Inside, Regina and David moved stealthily through the gloom, as museum-like as its place in her memory.

A muted yelp brought the policewoman to Regina’s side. 

“Sorry, Ma’am. Didn’t they tell you at the precinct?”

Regina averted her eyes from the mirrored walls reflecting a king-size bed, from the tangle of burgundy-colored satin sheets enveloping the long, white limbs of her dead cousin. His pronounced jaw was still exaggerated by a delicately drawn line of beard that met a trim goatee at his chin. He was sprawled like an afterthought, one eye open, and mouth agape, unclothed but for black boxer briefs, a full-page Calvin Klein advertisement.

“They haven’t come yet,” said the officer. “It’s a bad night. Lotta parties.”

Regina and David stared uncomprehendingly.

“The Coroner’s office, they should be here soon. I’m only here because the Sixth is having their party. I was sent over from the Seventeenth.”

“The seven—?” Regina started.

“Sutton Place. It’s pretty quiet over there.”

“Oh,” said Regina, eyes downcast. “We just need to pick up some clothes for the, you know, the funeral.” She shivered and the officer acknowledged that she had opened the windows earlier.

“He’s been here a while,” she added, not unkindly.

Regina blanched. “I feel a little weird.”

David hurried Regina to the kitchen and ran cold water from the faucet. Alone, they conversed in lowered tones. Regina knew they had more to do than gather a good suit, shirt and tie from her cousin’s closet. And shoes. Even dead he would need socks and shoes.

Regina studied the dark eyes in the officer’s plainspoken face, an expression that was not altogether official. “Listen, I need to ask you something.” She took in the close-cropped wiry hair, the masculine posture. “There’s things….”

“Ma’am,” the officer counseled, “Do whatever it is you needa do. My mother…” She stopped and gestured toward the vcr. “I’d start over there with that.”

Regina’s younger self—more boisterous and outspoken—had knocked around with Lucien. They were the oddballs in the family and their friendship was a kind of protest. Lucien was fiercely tall and he had a wicked laugh. Used to have, Regina thought. Though he’d been demonstrably out in the city, Lucien shrank into a straight man’s carapace around his widowed mother, Eve. Regina guessed it was the same for him in the school where he’d taught music. He was also organist and choir director at a church in Greenwich Village, but Regina had little time for that aspect of him. She had been urged to a few of his concerts and always came away disconcerted at seeing her Aunt Eve. Afterward, Regina was eager to reward herself with numbing cocktails at the Waverly Inn nearby. The strait-laced imperative of her aunt to “show generosity of spirit and embrace the Lord” drove her nuts. Eve was a bitter, closed-minded, holier-than-thou propagandist. She repelled Regina. Prediction slipped off her aunt’s tongue like a satiated leech. “Burn in hell” was a familiar conclusion. Oddly, Regina was still profoundly affected by an uncharacteristic wobble in her aunt’s voice on the phone earlier when she told Regina about the detective’s call. Lucien had not shown up at school. Her son was dead.

Fueled by dry gin martinis and heart-pounding meth, Lucien had once revealed the contents of a darker closet—bizarre things Regina had gazed at glassy-eyed, things she wanted immediately to forget. 

It was too much information, even for the free-spirited Regina. He’d boasted newly installed bedroom mirrors, satin sheets that, when lit from above, called up a burning bed. She had not understood and discomfort had crept over her like sunburn. How could he do all that good work in the church, teach music to children and still—?

“Because the church is Satan’s workshop,” he’d told her.

When he’d heard Regina was married, Lucien insisted on meeting the lucky guy. They kept their meetings playful and public, usually at Lucien’s favorite Spanish restaurant, where he inevitably ordered the Shrimp Diablo, until those meetings tapered off. 

David announced that he’d found the trash bags. “Let’s get to it,” he said. Resolute, they began with the videos and uncovered a large cache of Polaroid images of young men—too young. Very quickly they discarded the idea of sifting through the lot for anything that wasn’t questionable. There would be no keepsake photos for Aunt Eve. 

They searched through the hall closet. She pulled a conservative dress suit from a hanger, quickly picked a black tie from the rack. A collection of military caps was tossed in the trash; Lucien’s leather motorcycle jacket left untouched. David added a pair of black shoes and socks. Regina held out two dress shirts for appraisal.

“Blue or pink?” she asked.

“Pink,” David replied with a sly grin. 

Lucien’s final dress shirt would be periwinkle blue.

Regina peeked into the bathroom, at the walls papered with old Playbill covers. She cleared the medicine cabinet.

In the bedroom, Regina searched under the bed, careful to avoid looking at her cousin’s body. She found nothing. At the officer’s direction she lifted the seat of a boxy chair at bedside. She spied the contents in the false bottom. Grasping the edge of the bed, she sat down before hastily rethinking her miscalculated move.

David dragged the trash bag to her. She hauled out whips, handcuffs and leather masks, sex toys that were more frightening than playful to her. She interrupted David’s inquiries with, “Don’t ask.”

“Anyway,” David said, “it was his life.”

Regina forced herself to breathe. “Exactly.”

They rummaged through desk drawers. “Quickly,” Regina urged.

“But we don’t want to toss anything his mother might need,” David said. “You know, bills and bank stuff.” He held up a sealed envelope marked personal. “What about this?”

Regina tore it open, suspecting the contents. There it was: instruction to destroy everything listed on the sheet of paper she held in her trembling hands. The false-bottom chair and the videos had already been taken care of. 

“Right.” She exhaled slowly. “Let’s start at the top.”

They were halted by conversation in the front room. Two men, one doughy and pale, the other red-faced and thin, strode into the room like a silent comic duo. They nodded and quickly set about preparing the body. A gurney was retrieved. In a heartbeat her cousin’s body was bagged and gone.

The officer asked how it was going. Regina grimaced, showing her the list. “Okay, Ma’am. Let me know if you need any help.”

Regina pulled back a length of black velvet hung from the ceiling. It revealed a closet door. She stared at the doorknob. Her next move could pitch her down a very dark hole, a tainted Alice.

David ripped the cloth from its moorings and shoved it into a bag. “Let’s just get on with it,” he urged.

Religious vestments hung in the closet like forgotten extras in “The Exorcist.” Gingerly she pushed through them, revealing vestments embroidered with symbols she had shunted from memory a long time ago. On the shelf above stood engraved chalices and thick, black candles roped into bundles, like dynamite. Sealed tightly in the kind of plastic bags that usually housed more innocent items, such as sweaters and woolly hats, were the books she knew to be The Satanic Bible and The Book Of Lucifer. Another shelf held folders with pages and pages of liturgies and musical scores—her cousin’s handiwork—and she flinched when she recognized his feathery handwritten notes scrawled in the margins.

Like a curious child who had made the wrong turn in search of a gingerbread house deep in a frightening forest, she imagined tearing away from the terrible scene as fast as her legs would carry her. She jumped at a gentle nudge from David. “You okay?” he asked. Regina assured him that she was.

David lifted the last of the trash bags into the hall. They watched as the officer sealed the apartment. She lifted one of the bags, directing them to the elevator. “I can’t drop you anywhere. Regulations,” she told them apologetically.

In the street, David took the bag from her. They shook hands awkwardly, surrounded by the jumble of trash bags.

“We need to—,” David started.

“There’s a dumpster around the corner,” the officer advised.

Freed of their burden and clasped tightly to each other, Regina
and David headed toward Christopher Street, seeing no one in the quiet neighborhood normally rollicking with tourists and hardcore inhabitants. They crossed Sheridan Square and spied an all-night coffee shop.

“Coffee?” David asked.

Regina answered quietly, “Yes, please.” 

They sipped tepid coffee in the flyblown interior, picking at a puck-hard round of coffee cake. 

“I’ll call him.”

“Who?” David asked.

“Gabe. I’ll call him after the holidays.”

At the counter a disinterested cashier rang them up. His fingers shot from the register as if it was white-hot.

“Whoa,” he whispered. “Number of the Devil.”

Regina stared, fascinated: $6.66.

Before she could say anything, David slammed a packet of mints on the counter and the cashier readjusted the total. “There you go,” David declared. “We just beat the Devil.”

The taxi sped uptown with the kind of abandon cab drivers embrace in the middle of the night. The radio was tuned to some talk show that enabled shouting. They rode in silence until they reached their corner.

Regina sat up. “Shit!”

David rolled his head, coming out of a comfortable slump, digging for his wallet. “What?”

“The fridge! I didn’t check that. God, there’s probably poppers in there.”

Confused, David responded, “Popovers?”

“No,” she replied. “You know, the disco drug.”

David paid the driver. “Too ’80s. They don’t still do that?” 

Regina imagined aloud her aunt uncapping a small brown bottle of liquid and sniffing out of curiosity. 

A passerby saw them emerge laughing from the taxi, and smiled inwardly at the couple’s gay evening.

Rosemary and Time

Ellie carr listened to the message on her answering machine, gently nudging her cat from her ankles. Her sister’s voice threw her. Annie announced her news before hanging up. Mercy was dead.

The women in Ellie’s family were hardened lifers. They stormed past brothers, husbands, sons and nephews, charging into old age well suited to their armor. The men were dead before they reached the age of reduced subway fare and a guaranteed seat on the bus, before tooth loss and memory loss that followed, before they knew what had hit them. They were driven from the land of the living by denial and fear, bothered to an early grave by the tenacious sex who grew up with them, married them, or carried them in blissful unborn ignorance for nine months. Even relaxed, the women looked angry, mouths set in stern recognition of their plight. Aunt Mercy had survived a century. She had probably not left without a fight.

Rummaging through a desk drawer, Ellie found an old family photograph, one of only a handful she hadn’t tossed. She flattened a ragged tear in the snapshot, scrutinizing
a family gathering. A stranger might easily misinterpret
the faded, scalloped-edged black-and-white photograph, reminiscent of a pre-digital era. Gathered around a dining room table laden with a Thanksgiving feast was a picture-perfect assembly of parents, uncles, aunts and cousins. Ellie’s formidable grandmother sported a chrysanthemum corsage the size of a small child’s head. 

Ellie recalled scenes along dimly lighted corridors in the Museum of Natural History: dioramas of indigenous families seated around the fire, elders narrating ancestral tales, women tanning hides and stringing necklaces of oyster shells, while raven-haired children ran in naked pursuit of a mangy pup—just moments before the bloodshed.

Ellie—now sixty-three—was maybe five or six years old in the photograph. Nothing had changed. She was still the outsider. Ellie’s marriage had replenished the stale cup of familial dysfunction; she’d abandoned the provincial disapproval of her own kind for the pretentious indifference of her Park Avenue in-laws. 

Separated at twenty-nine, she’d sworn off the diminishing returns of family affairs. She’d only called her sister, compelled by relief and the misplaced familiar. After a briefly impassive response to Ellie’s impending divorce, Annie had launched into a tirade, about her job, how jealous her coworkers were, how much better she was than, well, everybody. Something in the force of her sister’s anger caused Ellie to ask, “Is everything all right? I mean, with you?” 

“I…can’t,” Annie stuttered. 

“Sure you can. Tell me,” Ellie said.

Silence on the other end of the line—time-traveler quiet—until Ellie said, “You still there?”

“You knew. You always knew,” Annie mumbled, before the line went dead.

Soon after Ellie’s divorce had become final, her cousin Thom had telephoned out of the blue. She had not spoken with him in some time. She had just begun to breathe easier. When the phone rang then, in early November, she’d known who it was before she answered. 

“Been a while, El. I was thinkin’?” 

Please don’t let it be Thanksgiving.

“Ellie? You there?” 

“Uh huh. Sorry, I’m here. You just caught–.” 

“Let’s do Thanksgiving. I know you’re probably busy.” 

She detected a whiff of sarcasm. 

“But c’mon, hon, you know? Just like the old days. We’ll do it here!” 

Just like the old days. That was before she’d married outside the tribe, when their close friendship was like balm on a wound. She’d called him Tom-Tom. “Here” was doubtless a proud, down-at-heel Victorian—a lopsided fixer-upper—among others of its kind somewhere in New Jersey. 

“Who will be there?” she asked, regretting it immediately. But he took her question as an affirmation and reeled off the usual suspects. His mother—Ellie’s Aunt Mercy—and her sister, Aunt Violet. His brother, David—named after their father—was coming with Russell, of course. Thomas mentioned a few friends from the neighborhood who might drop by after dinner, names unfamiliar to her.

“Nana?” Ellie asked. Nana Carr was in a nursing home on Staten Island. At ninety, she’d lost her intimidating girth but not her punishing reach. She’d chosen the residence for its hellish commute. Three older daughters—Flora, April and Jasmine—had fled far from harm’s way. Only Mercy, Violet, and Ellie’s father, Will, had remained. 

 “Not Nana,” he said, and they laughed conspiratorially, like old allies. “You think Uncle Will can make it?”

Will was the youngest, a prematurely balding man of resigned posture and a submissive nature, so unlike his five strapping sisters. He made the crushing journey from Hartford, Connecticut to Clove Lake Nursing Home every month. He kept his head low for a couple of hours of his mother’s xenophobic harangue, aimed at the staff. He endured her bitter disappointment with men, all men. He could, as he’d often said, make the journey blindfolded. He often made the return trip blind. He’d scope out the necessary watering holes. A spot at the snack counter on the ferry, wolfing a pretzel the size of an inner tube. He’d wash that down with a couple more beers he’d sneaked on board as he searched for the Statue of Liberty, with a rueful heart. In a deli at the bus stop outside of the ferry terminal, he’d grab a tallboy of Rheingold with the ludicrous straw concealed in a brown paper bag. The real return on his good deed was found back in Manhattan, at Dave’s Tavern on Ninth Avenue, where he’d rush through a supper of peanuts and a hard-boiled egg crusted with salt. This necessitated a boilermaker or two before he directed his unsteady gait to Port Authority. 

Her mother had long since left Will to drink himself along the same bottom line in Hartford.

“No, you won’t see my father,” Ellie said.

Thomas hesitated. “Um…okay. So I’m thinking, maybe Annie?” 

In the right mood, Ellie’s younger sister had a glorious laugh, like a giddy chorus of clowns shot from a circus cannon. But Annie was a daisy-strewn minefield. It sometimes happened that her laugh—her infectious giggle—seduced you. Then it was best to proceed with extreme caution. She was four years younger than Ellie. Annie’s rosebud pout had become a perpetual sneer, her doll-like frame grown into a torturously thin body. When she was little, her cheeks had invited pinching. Her sorrowful eyes begged you to pick her up for a cuddle. But then you did. As if she’d burst into flame, she’d scream to be put down. 

“Why not?” Ellie said.

Thomas suggested Ellie make the call. 

Neither Ellie nor Thomas mentioned Garrett, Annie’s seven-year-old son, who had been placed in his father’s custody. Ellie suspected her nephew and brother-in-law had had enough of the anger Annie hemorrhaged. It was off-limits to ask about Garrett, and it broke Ellie’s heart. 

She could hardly blame her cousin’s reticence, just as she could not resist his exuberance. She did not know then that Thomas was coming to conclusions, wrapping things up. 

“Sure. I can do that. Where are you living now?” 

“Super!” Thomas cried. He rattled off an address in Plainfield, New Jersey. “This will be our last move, I swear!”

Ellie laughed. “Let’s do it!” 

On a leaden Thanksgiving morning, Ellie settled into the back seat of a Flash Taxi at the Plainfield bus station. “Do you mind?” she asked the driver, slightly lowering a window. She inhaled the scent of burning firewood; like an undertow, it took her back.

When Ellie was a girl, family gatherings at Thanksgiving and Christmas were a regular affair at her cousins’ home in Cranford, New Jersey. In summer they took it outdoors, converging on the picnic grounds of a little park a few short blocks from their conventional gray-and-white clapboard Colonial with a deep porch fronting three stories. Pink and white begonias trailed from hanging baskets. Beneath the porch, at the top of a lawn freshly mown, popcorn balls of pastel-colored hydrangeas bloomed. A bulky mutt named Skippy had to be prodded from the porch swing. Clean, empty milk bottles waited at the front door—it was everything Ellie’s childhood in public housing in Queens was not.

She lowered the window further, remembering the sharp, intrusive twang of lighter fluid in her nostrils before she’d smell the sweet, smoky charcoal that promised hot dogs and hamburgers. Corn on the cob, almost always forgotten until the foil was scorched and impossible to scrape from desiccated kernels. She remembered her panicked flights from rank outdoor toilets live-wired with treacherous wasps.

From about nine years old or so, her sister Annie went from cheerful to charred in no time. She’d storm from the picnic table, unprovoked, to circle the park again and again. Her reedy legs worked furiously, in sync with balled fists pumping rage. Whenever someone caught sight of her ponytail, laughter erupted. The grownups placed bets on her endurance.

Thomas’s brother David was five years older than Ellie. David, for a time, seemed unable to keep up with the speed of his own growth. As a teen he’d sweetened his grandmother’s sour nature with music. Cousin David’s crew cut bobbed as his fingers flew up and down a bulky accordion. He swayed in too-short chinos to the bubbly dance tunes he’d taught himself to play while watching the Lawrence Welk Show. Nana Carr patted tight spirals of a fresh perm, humming while drowning bees in soda pop bottles, never taking her eye off the park’s perimeter for the unwelcome arrival of a family who might upset a neutral balance with their darker skins. 

Ellie remembered little of their grandmother’s companion. “Uncle” John was a red-faced, genial man who kept out of Nana’s way. He made himself useful by falling asleep under the nearest tree. Ellie, Annie and Thomas never knew their grandfather. Cousin David barely remembered him. Nobody spoke of him. Ellie’s father and Uncle David pitched softball with Aunt Violet’s husband, Joe. With the classic ease of film stars, they slouched in joking conversation, cracked leather mitt on one hand, unfiltered cigarette in the other. They tossed the ball lazily and Ellie couldn’t take her eyes off them. They were men who had fought wars. When Uncle David absently rolled his shirtsleeve above an anchor tattooed on his bicep, Ellie thrilled. He had a butcher shop in Union. Aunt Violet and Uncle Joe were childless. Vi doted on her nieces and nephews as if they were her own. Ellie’s dad and Uncle Joe had secrets.

In the late afternoon, when darkened trees had split the sunlight that stretched like claw marks across the grass, ice cubes rattled in Uncle Joe’s big red metal cooler. Aunt Mercy and her sister Vi smoothed their modest cotton sundresses, directing frosty glances at their husbands digging for cold beers, momentarily turning their attention from Ellen, Ellie’s flirtatious mother, who laughed loudly and wore a midriff-baring halter and clingy pedal pushers. Ellie and Tom-Tom made for the bleachers, where they commandeered their pirate ship, or reinvented it as a fortress, or lay upon the wooden planks at the edge of the softball field, pondering their future. They would never marry. Ever.

Ellie had known from the time of Uncle David’s death, when she was twelve, that those fatherless boys were gay. It was the singular connection she had with both of them. Neither of Ellie’s cousins could wield a bat or throw a ball. Those were the early signs, at least according to Ellie’s father. In the days following Will’s death, not long after the last Thanksgiving, Ellie had been searching through his meager belongings when she’d come across a photo of her father and another young man. They were in Coast Guard whites, embracing like a new couple. Scrawled on the back of the photograph was the message: Love you always. Your “buddy” Stan. 

She’d been missing her cousin Thomas. They’d had only one brief meeting at Uncle Joe’s funeral. Amidst the somber gathering, a very angry Aunt Violet had dropped a bomb: Uncle Joe had fathered a child during the war when he was stationed in Italy. 

Ellie felt it was a good idea to reconnect, now that she was rid of her husband, who’d caused Thomas to accuse her of betrayal. It might be fun. It might be healing. Just as she knew Thomas and his “friend” Tony—as the rest of the family referred to her cousin’s partner—would be revamping another aged beauty’s lackluster complexion, shoring up its creaking interior. They were the anomaly, native New Jerseyans who worked from their garage, restoring furniture, rewiring lamps, mending crockery. They had no inclination to live or work anywhere but New Jersey. They would make do until they opened their own shop. 

“We’re here, miss,” said the driver, interrupting Ellie’s reverie.

Ellie saw Thomas just ahead, his lanky, almost gaunt figure hunched under an umbrella in the pearl-colored sleet. He waved the driver to the curb. In his shirtsleeves he seemed not to notice the cold, and grabbed her bags. 

Behind him rose a stately old Victorian, more down at heel than his other homes had been. It was grand, though. Settled by Quakers, Plainfield’s dilapidated houses came to be discovered by aesthetes—young men who commuted to jobs in Manhattan. Evenings found them reared archly above renovated marble mantelpieces, very dry martini in hand. They decorated their homes with the spirited vengeance of the repressed. On weekends they left no curio unturned. They scoured flea markets in New Jersey and neighboring Pennsylvania for the missing pieces. 

The cousins shared a tentative hug before Thomas loped ahead of her. Ellie grabbed a scarred porch column at the top of the steps. She flicked white paint specks from her hand. Gallon cans of Billiard Green stood beside the front door. Thomas leaned in. She smelled alcohol, cigarettes and neglected teeth. “Sorry I couldn’t pick you up, hon. Tony’s frantic.” He shoved a can with his foot. “This’ll have to go in the garage.”

She followed him into the house. Her cousin’s long-limbed, desultory lope contrasted with Tony’s squat, smoldering jab at life. The Carrs were light-haired, square-jawed Germans. They were mostly escapees from Lutheranism into born-again Christian Fundamentalism. Ellie’s immediate family was the exception, making only desultory church visits—Christmas, Easter, weddings and funerals.

Thomas was a benign pot-smoker who had never left his hippie comfort zone, replete with stoner accoutrements. His thinning hair collected at the back of his neck in a lank ponytail. He doused his mother’s religious fervor with alcohol and more pot. 

There was, again, a monastic guest room, still referred to as “Tony’s room.” Tony was Italian-American, a lapsed Catholic, with a wellspring of jokes that left no race, gender, or creed unscathed. Ellie had found that disturbing at first and then hateful. She remembered why she had avoided these occasions, wincing internally. Nobody mentioned the queen-sized waterbed in the master bedroom. Thomas and Tony—and Thom’s brother, David—remained closeted within the families, allowing only Ellie in. 

At ten in the morning the house was redolent with wet plaster, cigarettes, and roasting turkey. Ellie suspected the turkey would be the only bit of the meal that would not come out of a can or a box. Tony was the cook whose reputation had reached “legendary proportions.” Ellie thought it more apt to call his idea of a dinner party “legendary portions.” Everything was huge: bowls of overdone spaghetti drowned in canned tomato sauce. Rubbery loaves of ready-made garlic bread. There was always an abundance of cheap Chianti dispensed from a box. He never bothered to disguise the jars or the packaging. Ellie marveled at his shameless acceptance of the accolades. 

Tony appeared, clutching a weighty cut glass goblet filled with tomato juice. He eyed Ellie’s deep-pleated men’s trousers, baggy wool cardigan, and the vintage vest she wore over a voluminous, white long-sleeved shirt. Seeing the floppy gray felt hat and the necktie beneath, he bellowed, “Annie!” 

“Um, it’s El? Remember?” She removed her hat, revealing a soft knot of light brown hair on top of her head. 

“Woody Allen, the Je—the comedian. His movie. This what they’re wearing in the big city nowadays?” 

Ellie laughed, “You like?” She followed him into the kitchen.

Packages of frozen sweet potatoes thawed on the counter. Soon enough they would be boiled to a lifeless mash, suffocated under a puffy quilt of miniature marshmallows. 

Tony eyed Ellie’s shopping bag warily. 

“Ellie brought some stuff, Tone,” Thomas offered. 

“From the farmer’s market,” Ellie cheered. She ticked off the contents: fresh spinach—lots of it—garlic, rosemary, and pignoli.Ignoring Tony’s scowl, she showed him the label. “These are pine nuts.” 

“I know what they are.” In his world, pignoli appeared at dessert, baked into sweet round confections. Cookies? Yes. Spinach? Never.

Before Tony could insist that he’d take care of everything, Thomas assured him, “She’ll prepare it.” They shuffled uncomfortably in the cluttered kitchen like manacled pachyderms until Thomas suggested, “Have a Bloody Mary, El. He’s just made a fresh batch.”

By midday the rest of the family had turned up as if for a wake—laden with offerings but unsure of their motives. Aunt Violet brought pies from the Pie Factory. Annie blew in bitching about the traffic from Hartford. She’d made an incredible dessert. “But it got ruined in the car so I just chucked it at a rest stop.” Aunt Mercy had her bible. Cousin David and Russell were the last to arrive. Identically dressed in ill-fitting dark blazers, they looked comically unaware. Ellie had been to their legendary parties in a reconverted warehouse in Greenwich Village. She had seen them in their leathery best. Russell was an executive in an oil company, but Aunt Mercy understood it was her son, the public school teacher, whose name was on the lease. They also had a second bedroom. Russell presented a bottle of rosé. “We had it at a party last week. It’s the rage.” 

It’s in a real bottle, thought Ellie.

Annie stepped back for the expected once-over, smirking with disapproval. “Who are you s’posed to be, El? What’s-her-name, that actress?” 

Ellie knew Annie was disappointed. Impossibly thin in a black ankle-length wool skirt and black turtleneck sweater, Annie thumbed a strand of pearls, staring vacantly at Ellie. 

“I’m comfortable and I like thrift shops,” Ellie said.

Annie, inspecting her manicure and picking at an invisible bit of lint on her sweater, made a note of her older sister’s outfit, one that she would replicate. 

“It’s stupid,” she snipped.

Aunt Mercy inquired after Will. “Is your father all right, only—?”

“Only what? Your brother, Aunt Mercy, you should call him.” 

Her aunt clasped her hands, shaking her head. “You have to learn generosity of spirit, Ellen.” No one ever called her Ellen.

Aunt Vi had cornered her nephew, David. She cupped her glass, relating the story she’d just heard from Annie, how Will’s drinking was getting out of hand. “Fell down in the street! Can you imagine?” David cleared his throat sympathetically. 

Russell sank into the claret-colored velvet sofa after raising the volume on the football game. Ellie thumped down next to him. 

“You hate sports.” 

He raised his glass to hers, smiling thinly. “No I don’t,” he answered definitively. “I love sports.” 

Tony darted among them. A half-filled pitcher of Bloody Marys sloshed in his grip. “C’mon. Dinner’s ready. Who needs a refill?”

They stood around the oval mahogany table covered with a vintage lace medallion tablecloth. On it sat a laughably oversized turkey alongside bowls of oatmeal-colored stuffing, shrunken heads of pale Brussels sprouts and doughy rectangles of biscuits. Canned cranberry sauce shimmered like a blood clot. Elaborate crystal decanters filled with ruby-colored Chianti shone like ambulance lights from the center of the table. Mercy called for heads to be bowed. She prayed. Ellie raised her head, partly in defiance. Mercy’s eyes were closed. Her assertive chin tilted upwards, her palms open and extended before her. Ellie expected the usual grace, giving thanks for what we are about to blah, blah, blah, but her aunt’s sermon caught her off guard. 

“Our president, who has allowed the devil into the White House, guide him O Lord.” 

Ellie shifted uncomfortably, looking around. Jimmy Carter? She expected to signal Thomas, but his chin dug tightly against his chest. His hands gripped the chair before him. 

Mercy sang out tonelessly, “Help us in our fight to take back the souls of our children. Keep them from the devil who would lead them into darkness, away from your teachings.” 

Ellie dropped her head. She chewed her lip, fearful for her restraint. When Mercy thanked the Lord for Ellen’s return to them, Ellie seized up. When Mercy requested that they sit while she read a passage from her bible, Ellie wiped her sweating palms on her lap. Before her aunt had put her bible aside, Ellie had lunged for the nearest decanter. 

“What’s this?” Annie hoisted a platter, sniffing the spinach. She picked at a pine nut. “What are these?” 

“Pignoli. It’s a recipe I thought—,” Ellie offered.

Annie gagged. “Pigwhatsis?” 

“Pigwhatsis!” Tony shrieked. “Annie, you’re killing me.” 

Vi piped in. “Ellie always has to be different, like her moth—.” Mercy shot her sister a warning look but Violet was undeterred. “What? What did I say? She’s just like her mother. Ellen was always…she had to be different…you know?”

Annie put the platter down, untouched. “It smells weird.” 

Ellie spooned a vivid green heap onto her own plate. “That’s fresh rosemary. Not that you’d know.”

 “Speaking of pigs, there was this rabbi.” Tony launched into a rapid-fire round of coarse jokes. Annie’s shrill laughter rose above the others’. It continued throughout the meal, louder with every joke, every glass of wine. Ellie rose. She began gathering dishes, halting Tony’s schtick. “Uh oh,” he muttered, “Ellie doesn’t approve.” 

Ellie had drunk too much. Steadying herself, she said, “Not only are these jokes racist, they suck as jokes—not even funny. I don’t know what you all are laughing about.” 

“You’re not a…you’re not still Jewish, are you El?” 

Ellie stopped on her way to the kitchen with the nearly full platter of spinach. She glared at her sister. “I never was Jewish. What the hell is your problem?” 

Violet, too, had imbibed, ignoring Mercy’s disgust. “You married that…that Jewish man. That means you are, too.” 

Thomas joined Ellie at the kitchen sink, where she’d plunged her hands into hot, soapy water. 

“You’re too sensitive, El.” He picked up a dish and began drying. 

“Too sensitive?” she cried. “I don’t get it, Thomas. You don’t even flinch when he tells fag jokes.” 

Aunt Mercy appeared in the doorway. “Thomas, your friends have arrived. Is everything all right?” He threw down the towel, hurrying past his mother. 

“Ellen, you seem lost. It might help if you sought counsel in—?” Mercy smiled like a dog, lips pulled back, teeth bared. 

“In what?” Ellie scraped the sodden heap of spinach into the trash. “In your fucked-up world? No, Aunt Mercy, everything is not all right.” 

Mercy stiffened. “Okay, Ellen, I’ll leave you to—.” 

 “Don’t call me Ellen.” Ellie glared at her. “No one calls me that.” 

Her aunt turned back to her. Mercy’s eyes narrowed as if on a target. “We’re not having this conversation, Ellen.” 

Ellie headed for the back stairs, her face burning from alcohol and indignation. 

Annie was buttoning her coat, furious. “You always fuck things up, you know that?” 

“And you’re always leaving,” Ellie shot back. 

She skirted around buckets and paint cans, tripping over paint-spattered tarps covering the floor of the narrow hallway. The doorway of the master bedroom at the top of the stairs was sealed with a thick plastic curtain that she pulled aside. Soon Thomas was seated beside her on the waterbed, and they rocked together as she sobbed. He could stand it, he said, because he had to, because the alternative was worse. If he came out to his mother she would not stop until she’d defeated the devil. 

“My brother and Russell take her to plays in the city, you know, the opera, museums. They spoil her with nice restaurants. She doesn’t want to lose that. I don’t want her to lose that.” They sat in silence until Thomas rose and opened a window. “Annie’s gone.” 

Ellie bounced up. She took the joint he offered, inhaling deeply.

With the arrival of her cousin’s friends the party heated up, a lively second act. The dolorous aftermath of the meal lay trampled under the husky tones of Donna Summer. They were feeling the love again. Apart from one of the guests, Ellie was sure they were all gay. She swooned into drunken conversation with the young man. Sal was proudly Italian American, cute in a muscle-bound kind of way. He smelled of cheap cologne. 

“What are you doing with this bunch?” she teased.

He laughed. “You’re the cousin I heard about? The one from the city?” He watched as the soft knot atop her head came undone. Her hair fell to her shoulders in relaxed waves. He was easily ten years younger, and instantly smitten. “I live up the street. These guys are the most fun to be around.” 

Ellie grinned. She whispered into his neck. “I’m fun to be around.” 

Aunt Mercy stood before them, hands on hips. “Pie?”

David and Russell prepared to leave, encouraging Ellie to join them. “You can sleep on the bus,” David urged. “We’ll get you a cab back to your place.” 

“No, I’m staying.” Ellie grabbed Tony’s arm. “He’s been good enough to give up his room, haven’t you, Tone?” 

“It’s okay,” David said 

Ellie laughed. “Yeah. It’s okay. It’s all okay.” She kissed them in turn, crying, “Turn it up! Let’s dance!” Aunt Mercy replaced her apron with her coat. Ellie watched as she hurriedly bundled Violet through the front door. 

Ellie woke to a stinging attack, like a chisel refashioning her brain. It was short-lived relief to discover she was alone in the little bed. She’d dress, call a taxi, and sneak out before they woke. Fragments of the evening broke through the painful aftershocks. She had been the life of the party—danced with Sal and later cheered his dream to someday open a pizza parlor in Atlantic City. She buried her face in her hands, nearly gagging from the smell of cologne.

Mercy stood at the foot of the stairs, dishtowel in hand. “He’s left already,” she announced dryly. 

Ellie slumped on the stair. “How come you’re—? 

“I thought the boys would need help cleaning up. I got here as that young man was leaving.” She studied her niece. “Ellen, you need to—.”

“To what!” Ellie started down the stairs. “I know, I know. I ruined everything.” 

Mercy pulled a small package from the pocket of her apron. “You need to take these back.” She handed her the pignoli, and a fringe of rosemary. “That dish was awful. Nearly ruined Tony’s dinner.”

Here it was, some thirty years later. Ellie still shivered from the memory. She listened to her sister’s message again before deleting it. She had not spoken to Annie since that Thanksgiving. Now Mercy was dead. Her sons had died years ago. Thomas, not long after Ellie’s father. David—and Russell—in the early 80s, within months of each other, from a scourge as deadly as their mother’s intolerance.

Soon she would retire from her job. Instead of editing others’ stories, she might write her own. She had a few good friends. She lived a contented life, alone with her cat. She had booked a flight to Paris in a few days. She smelled roasting potatoes and the aromatic pine-like scent of rosemary. Her dinner was nearly ready.