Last Things Read online

  “Jessica intends to write a novel about the family.”

  Jessica’s small success as a novelist was the heaviest cross Andrew bore. He taught creative writing but had published only two stories, in quarterlies that had never made it through their first year. From sophomore year of high school he had dreamt of being a writer, but by senior year he had published nothing in the school magazine, the Penna, except one short essay on Scott Fitzgerald. Meanwhile, Jessica, two years his junior, dashed off sonnets, a verse play, and short stories that caught the attention of the Chicago Tribune because their older brother, Raymond, had sent them to the literary editor. She began to receive inquiries from literary agents. Andrew adopted a condescending attitude toward his sister’s writing. She herself seemed to regard her own success as a bit of a joke. She had published a series of poems the first lines of which were taken from famous pieces: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”; “She lived among untrodden ways”; “Out of the cradle endlessly rocking.” It seemed a species of cheating, trading on the achievements of others. The one beginning “Where the bee sucks, there suck I” was vetoed by the faculty advisor, an effete chemist who fancied himself a renaissance man and dismissed Hemingway as a primitive. Andrew longed to be a writer like Hemingway or Fitzgerald, a celebrity, his name on everyone’s lips. Now he had to contend with the fact that the name Bernardo seemed owned by Jessica so far as writing went.

  “You try too hard,” she said to Andrew when she found an unfinished story of his.

  “Writing should not come easily.”

  “It does for me.”

  Jessica was beautiful; even Andrew saw that. Thick yellow hair, an olive complexion, full lips, and almond eyes that mesmerized even in dust jacket photographs. She did not need fiction in order to be popular, yet she had never married. Sometimes he felt that she had been more affected by Raymond’s defection from the priesthood than anyone, even their parents.

  “I’d become a nun if I could find a convent that wasn’t out of Boccacio.”

  Hope flared up in him. If she had a vocation, perhaps to an enclosed order, she would put away her pen and fade from the field. He had come to believe that her success was the main cause of his writer’s block. Jessica scoffed at the idea of writer’s block.

  “Just do it, for heaven’s sake. It’s just words on a page, one after the other.”

  He had pored over her novels in search of flaws. Where No Storms Come, her first, had been a bildungsroman, but in it she had invented a family as different from their own as imaginable. Her second, We Waited While She Passed, was set in a nursing home and drew on a summer job as a nurse’s aide. He told her that in its way it reminded him of The Poorhouse Fair. She didn’t know it. She claimed to read very little.

  “Updike.”

  “What’s Updike?” She gnawed on an imaginary carrot and gave an imitation of Bugs Bunny. Perhaps he was meant to be a critic, Edmund Wilson rather than Fitzgerald. He imagined a monograph on the fiction of the twenties and thirties but despaired at the thought that it had been done already a thousand times.

  Across from him at his table in the cafeteria sat Mabel Gorman, a student whose prose had the polish of someone twice her age. She was an unlovely girl, thick black hair that rose wildly from her narrow head, a unisex body that seemed more limbs than torso. She sat sideways in her chair like a pretzel, legs crossed, hugging herself, blowing hair out of her eyes.

  “I like your story,” Andrew said.

  Her smile was her best feature, toothy and full, radiant. “Thank you.”

  “I think you should submit it for publication.” Andrew was the faculty advisor for Scriptor, the renamed student literary annual.

  “I have!”

  “You have?”

  She had sent it to The New Yorker. Jessica’s first published story had been in The New Yorker. It turned out that this was no accident.

  “I didn’t realize she was your sister.”

  “Bernardo is not that common a name.”

  “But someone so famous!”

  His cross bit into his shoulder. It was cruel that even his own students looked past him to Jessica.

  “That’s a tough market to crack.”

  All his own submissions to The New Yorker had come back, in Thurber’s phrase, like a serve in tennis. He had the sudden certainty that Mabel’s story would be accepted. It was a soulful vignette about a young girl who continued to collect dolls into womanhood, the drama subdued, pregnant with suggestion, a story that clung to the imagination long after being read. Andrew had studied it, wondering what the secret was. Was he doomed to become the pupil of his pupils?

  “Your class is the best I have ever taken,” Mabel said, her smile coming and going uncertainly.

  Students were given to unsolicited praise, usually when finals approached, but Mabel seemed to be speaking from the heart.

  “What else are you taking?” Did he want to know what the competition was, in what field he was first? Mabel’s smile disappeared.

  “Do you know Professor Cassirer?”

  “What do you think of him?”

  Her eyes widened, she looked over both shoulders, she leaned toward him. “Is he crazy?”

  It is a vice peculiar to the academic to elicit criticism of colleagues from students, but Mabel poured forth her view of Cassirer unprompted.

  “Do you know he mentioned you in class?”

  “Did he?”

  “I looked up your stories and read them, just to spite him. I liked them.” She might have said more, but she was honest. “I asked him what he had written. I looked that up too. It’s all gibberish.”

  Mike Pistoia had suggested that anyone who did such violence to literature as Cassirer could be physically violent too.

  “Andrew, he would hate us no matter how we voted.”

  “It’s all bombast. Besides, what could he do to us?”

  “Don’t get me started. How’s Gloria?”

  Later Andrew would see his colleague’s question as a warning. Now to Mabel Gorman he said, “So you don’t think my stories are gibberish.”

  “Oh no. I can see why you are such a good teacher.”

  This was heady indeed, cushioning the surprise that she was awaiting word from The New Yorker about her story.

  Later in his office he wrote a line, “A sundial on a cloudy day,” and stared at it. Like the opening of one of Jessica’s early poems it seemed to cry out for a second line and a third. He would send it to Poetry. But the second line would not come. Foster was an oppressive presence. Andrew wrote another line, “Life in an olfactory,” then pushed his notebook away and thought of Aunt Eleanor’s call.

  “So what?” he asked when she expressed her alarm that Jessica intended to base a novel on the Bernardo family. It seemed so unpromising a theme that he welcomed it. His impulse was to encourage Jessica rather than dissuade her.

  “I talked to the pastor of St. Hilary’s about it, begging him to intervene. Father Dowling.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Andrew, she must not write that novel.”

  “She’s already written her growing up novel.”

  “But this will be about your parents. And your uncles.”

  “And aunts?”

  Was Eleanor worried that some indiscretion of her own might come to light? Andrew smiled. Widowhood had turned Eleanor into a maiden aunt. She remembered everyone’s birthday, sending a sentimental card. She was an obligatory guest for Thanksgiving dinner. She was dismayed that none of the Bernardos had married.

  “Raymond’s married.”

  “Andrew!”

  Was that it? Did she fear Jessica would write of her brother the runaway priest? He was feeling better all the time. What a dead end Jessica was headed for. He agreed to talk to her.

  “How is your father?”

  “All right.”

  “All right! He has cancer.”

  “Prostate cancer. All men his age have prostate cancer. They us
ually die of something else.”

  “I wish he would go to Mayo.”

  “He prefers Miracle Whip.”

  “I don’t understand you.” Stupidly he tried to explain the bad joke. She made moist disapproving sounds into the phone. At that moment Gloria emerged from the bathroom on a cloud of steam and Andrew crossed his lips with his finger. No need to shock Aunt Eleanor.

  3

  Fulvio Bernardo still lived in the huge house on Preswick in which he had raised his family and whose many rooms made it easy for Margaret and himself to avoid one another. Once this had been a neighborhood in which the newly affluent aspired to live, but with the westward expansion that had sent the white residents of Chicago fleeing, new roads had been built to accommodate their coming and going. As a result Fox River was now framed in freeways, and the once quiet neighborhood was assailed by the constant hum of traffic from all sides. But the Bernardos stayed on; Margaret because of St. Hilary’s, Fulvio out of inertia. He was an old man with prostate cancer who spent his days contemplating the ruin of his life. His children had given him no grandchildren. Jessica seemed content to write silly stories. Andrew had never grown up and paid quick visits. As for Raymond … Fulvio groaned aloud. My son the priest. How proud they had been when Raymond was ordained. And then one day he had run off to California. Of course he had not told them of his plans. And he had never tried to explain. They never heard from him. It was Andrew who brought them the news, a note from Raymond too ashamed to write directly to his parents.

  “It’s all on the up and up,” Andrew said.

  “Running away?”

  “Oh, he’ll be laicized.”

  Fulvio had taken this to be a euphemism for the conjugal act and snorted accordingly.

  “Then he can be married,” Andrew explained. Margaret looked as if she were standing at the foot of the cross.

  “Married!” Fulvio cried. “He’s a priest.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “How can you stop being a priest?”

  Fulvio had made his living coaxing plants and trees from Illinois soil to adorn the lawns of suburbia, but it was out of respect for his own father that he cultivated the tomato patch out next to the garage, fighting the blight and bugs, waiting for fruit that was all but given away in the market by the time his own was ripe. He might have been nurturing the memory of his father when he fussed away at the plants as the old man had done, as if his family would starve without his tomatoes. Fulvio had been more than successful in business, but he had never had the luck his father had. Oh, he had made money but look at his goddamn children. He had given them every advantage. Maybe that was the problem: all those years of Catholic education and it was doubtful any of them went to Mass anymore. Except Jessica, of course, her mother’s child. Well, he had stopped going himself, out of spite, as a complaint against God. At Raymond’s first low Mass, offered for his parents, Fulvio began to think of it as an investment. Now he was assured of endless Masses after he went, a daily commemoration by Raymond, standing at the altar. All his sins would be washed away. He had not wanted to hear what his son was doing in California, but Andrew had told him.

  “Counselor! Who is he to counsel anyone? He should go to a monastery and do penance.”

  That was what fallen priests had always done in the past, a penitential stay with the monks while they got their moral houses in order. Now Fulvio punished God by staying away from church. Margaret begged him to go with her but he refused. She was a mother and could forgive anything, but Fulvio would never accept what Raymond had done. Did the boy know or care that his father had cancer?

  When young Paul Rocco, the doctor, had told Fulvio the results of the biopsy three years ago it was like a death sentence, and he welcomed it, certain it would change everything. His children would rally around his sickbed; Raymond would come back, sorrowful and apologetic; Jessica would find a husband and have children; and Andrew … Marge had wept when she told him that Andrew was living with a woman, unmarried, no prospect of children, a goddamn pagan. But the prostate cancer had been treated as if it were a bad cold. Even Rocco downplayed it.

  “Chances are you’ll die of something else before it gets really serious.”

  He had had the operation, but another biopsy revealed that the cancer still lurked in his rear end, slowly eating away his life. Fulvio’s father had died of prostate cancer, that was clear now when he knew about the disease, but his father had gone to no doctor and had borne his ailment in silence until it brought him low. He was dead within a week of the diagnosis. But not even Margaret regarded her husband as a man whose days were numbered. Fulvio had stopped taking his medicine, regularly renewing the prescription but flushing the daily dose down the toilet. The medicine didn’t cure anything. There was no cure.

  He stirred in the lawn chair he had put in the shade of an oak tree. The plastic ribbons stretched across the metal frame of the chair ate into the diseased flesh. Sitting there with the breeze rustling his tomato plants he would close his eyes and imagine the cancer consuming him. What the hell did he care? What did his children care? Margaret would mourn him, but she mourned everyone, attending every funeral at St. Hilary’s as if she were a personal friend of the deceased. What else is being old but practicing to be dead?

  There were voices from the house, and he opened his eyes to see Margaret and Eleanor coming across the lawn. It was too late to scramble out of the chair and hide in the garage.

  “Well, don’t you look peaceful,” Eleanor said.

  She had seemed a stranger ever since Joseph’s death. She married Alfred Wygant, too good to marry another Italian. She was still smitten with Fulvio, but while he continued to respond, he had lost interest in her. Not that he let her forget their stolen moments. They had meant more to her than they had to him, but that is the way it was with women. And she had written him silly letters. Well, God is not mocked. Eleanor was childless. So she had adopted his children, helping to spoil them. She had bought a chalice for Raymond when he was ordained. Did she wonder what had happened to it? Maybe he had it in a trophy case in his counselor’s office.

  “I talked with Andrew this morning about Jessica’s new novel,” Eleanor said.

  “I never read any of them.”

  “Fulvio, she plans to write about us.”

  “Us?”

  “The Bernardos, you, Joseph. Even Alfred.”

  “What’s there to write?”

  Margaret went back to the house for iced tea, and Eleanor pulled a lawn chair next to his. “She has no shame; she will make us look like fools.”

  “Maybe we are.”

  “I don’t want her to write about Alfred.”

  “I thought it was about the Bernardos.”

  “She wanted to pump me about the way he died.”

  Fulvio said nothing for a minute. “I am dying myself, you know.”

  “Oh don’t say that.”

  “I have cancer.”

  “But they say prostate cancer can be controlled.”

  “So can breathing until it stops.”

  “Don’t be morbid.”

  “How’s your health?”

  “Good.”

  “So you can afford to be jolly.”

  “I am not jolly. I am worried sick about Jessica. I shouldn’t have to tell you why.” She paused. “I spoke to Father Dowling about it. He agreed to talk with her.”

  “That ought to help.”

  “He is a very wise man.”

  Fulvio knew the pastor of St. Hilary’s only by name. Margaret too sang his praises. There had been Franciscans in the parish when Fulvio still went to Mass, happy little elves always after your money.

  “Has Jessica talked with you about it?”

  Jessica had been here a week ago, sat next him as Eleanor did and talked about growing up and the benefit it was to have a family like theirs. It gave a framework to her life, she said. She seemed serious.

  “Why aren’t you married?” he’d asked.

&n
bsp; She laughed. “I haven’t met Mr. Right.”

  “There may be no men left by the time you do.”

  “Everything’s different now.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “I mean young men. Young women too. Nobody believes anything anymore, nobody trusts the future, no one wants a family. Just an arrangement.”

  “Marry one and he’ll want children.”

  “Even Catholics have lost any sense of what life is all about. They’re like everyone else now.”

  “Do you ever hear from Raymond?”

  “He asks about you.”

  “Did you tell him I’m dying?”

  “You’re not dying!”

  “Will you guarantee that?”

  “Daddy, what you have is bad, but it isn’t terminal. I’ve asked. The medicine you take controls it. You have years ahead of you.”

  For a moment that prospect had stirred him. More time. But for what? To putter over his tomato plants and doze in the yard and wonder what had gone wrong with his children? Jessica was the best of the lot, he knew that, but a man puts his main hope in his sons and look what he had there.

  “Tell me about your life,” she had said. And he had, to his own surprise. He was flattered that she wanted to know, and once he had started he realized how little she did know. Did he think his children had inherited his memories too?

  “Now I know where I inherited my gift for storytelling.”

  “Don’t you believe me?”

  “Of course I believe you. Who would know better than you?”

  He told Eleanor that it was natural for Jessica to want to know about her family. “She paid someone to do our genealogy.”

  “There, you see. She isn’t just interested in what you care to recall. She will make use of everything, records, newspaper stories …” A pause. “Letters.”

  Aha. “What do we have to hide?”

  Suddenly Eleanor began to cry, for God’s sake, right there in the backyard, with Margaret coming from the house with the iced tea.

  “What did you tell her?” he asked.

  Eleanor was trying to gain control of herself so that Margaret wouldn’t see she had been crying. But Margaret was intent on the full glasses on the tray she carried. Besides, Margaret had never been curious, thank God.