Obit Read online

  “Monty, this is my brother Patrick. Pat, meet Montague Collins.” We shook hands. Patrick Burke was probably six feet tall, an inch or so shorter than Brennan. He had a stereotypically Irish face, clear blue eyes and sandy blond hair. He wore a soft blue crewneck sweater over a shirt and tie. Patrick was a much more approachable-looking man than his older brother.

  “What will you have, Monty? There’s cold beer in the fridge.”

  “That would be fine, Patrick, thanks.”

  “Brennan?”

  “Same.”

  I followed them into the kitchen, which had a linoleum floor patterned in large blue and grey squares. The table was of grey and white Formica with a strip of chrome around the edge. Six of the chairs matched; two did not. The kitchen had not suffered any upgrades since the 1950s, and was the better for it.

  “What brings you to New York, Monty?”

  “I had a long trial scheduled and the matter was settled. An unexpected holiday. I’ve never had a chance to spend more than a few days in New York.” I didn’t say my last visit was to probe into Brennan’s background while Brennan, who was in the city with me, remained oblivious to what I was doing when we weren’t together.

  “Monty and his family are coming to the wedding,” Brennan put in.

  “Even though I’ve never met the bride and groom. The bride is Katie . . .”

  “Right. Daughter of our brother Terry and his wife, Sheila. The groom is Niccolo. And you’ll be more than welcome. Now, what are your thoughts on this dog-eared obituary, Monty?” he asked, as he set the beer down and pulled up a chair to join us at the table.

  “I think you’re being very clever in your interpretations, but I’m wondering whether you’re being a little creative as well.”

  “I’ve pretty well come to that conclusion myself,” he said.

  “It could be about your father but it could just as easily be what it purports to be, the obituary of Cathal Murphy. Has it been determined whether this Murphy actually existed?”

  “The name meant nothing to Teresa or Declan, or so they claimed. I couldn’t find any reference to him but my efforts consisted of calling a couple of funeral homes and looking in the Queens phone book. As far as I know the funeral arrangements, which were to follow, never appeared in the paper. But I wasn’t very systematic about it.”

  “Your father’s reaction?”

  “I thought he was going to drop right then and there. But there could be another explanation for that, an organic one. Physical.”

  “Do you remember whether he reacted as soon as he began to read, or was it halfway through, near the end, or what?”

  Patrick looked thoughtful. “He started to read it aloud. In a stagy brogue, as a matter of fact, with an editorial comment or two thrown in. ‘Cathal Murphy, God rest his porr oul soul, flew up to meet his maker at the age of seventy-three —’ But he was speaking softly by the time he got to the sons’ names and he clammed up entirely after reading about the brother, Benedict. It was then, if my memory is serving me at all well, that he began turning grey in the face. But his behaviour could have been a reaction to the story of this other man’s life; it may well have struck a chord with Declan, reminded him of disturbing things in his own past. Whatever it was, Mam was staring up at him in alarm.”

  “Now, your mother,” I said. “Could you tell whether she had any reaction to the article itself, or did her concern just reflect the change in your dad?”

  Patrick shook his head. “I don’t know. My eyes were on Declan. It was only when he finished reading that I noticed the expression on her face. I took Dec by the arm and tried to sit him down. He was having none of it.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Brennan put in.

  “What does your mother say about the obit?”

  The brothers looked at each other. “She’s not saying,” answered Brennan shortly, “which speaks volumes in my mind.”

  “No wonder she kept mum with you grilling her like that.”

  “Patrick, you’ve had how many weeks to try to prise some information out of the woman, and haven’t made any progress.”

  “Well, you didn’t help matters any. You were brutal!”

  “I wasn’t brutal. She’s my mother!” Brennan snapped. “I was direct, that’s all.”

  Patrick looked at me. “Direct, he calls it. ‘Mam, you can’t have lived with the old man all these years and remained in —’ how did you say it? ‘— a cloud of unknowing. You’re no fool, neither are we. So tell us what you know.’”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Brennan demanded.

  “There are gentler, more oblique ways to bring her around. If only you had the patience —”

  “I’m here for a limited time. This write-up, if it pertains to Declan, is not only an allegory of his past, it’s also a death announcement. We’d all do well to bear that in mind.”

  “All right, all right.” Patrick raised his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “But this was written three months ago, in December. He’s been coming and going as he always does; nobody’s touched him or threatened him.”

  “As far as we know,” Brennan said. The brothers fell silent and we all sipped our beer.

  “Let’s just ease up on our old mam till after the wedding,” Patrick suggested. “She’s looking forward to it so much. After that, go ahead, haul her into the confession box.” He got up and put his empty glass on the counter.

  “I hear you, Pat,” Brennan said. “We’ll leave her in peace till after the wedding, then Monty will put her on the stand and cross-examine her. I’ve seen him at it. We’ll have what we want from her then.”

  “I notice you two haven’t said a word about interrogating Declan himself.”

  They looked at me in unified astonishment, as if I had just shown unmistakable signs of madness. “Have you met our father?” Patrick asked.

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Well, then. What do you think we’d have to do to him, to get him to talk?”

  “Something that would put you in breach of the Geneva Conventions?”

  They nodded together, as if to encourage the classroom dunce who had finally put two and two together and come up with something close enough to four that they could all go home. “He’ll never talk,” they said as one.

  When Patrick excused himself to go meet his parents at the home of the bride, Brennan turned to the subject that was uppermost in his mind: a certain female blues singer we had heard in Colly’s bar on Queens Boulevard during our brief stay in New York the year before. She had held him spellbound from the instant she opened her mouth. He had found out she was still performing with the house band at Colly’s, and these would be her last two nights before moving to Chicago. On our first visit to the bar, we had struck up an acquaintance with two women. Or, more accurately, I struck up an acquaintance with a red-haired, green-eyed woman named Rosemary, and Brennan had given her friend the brush-off. The friend had then thrown a spanner into my hopes of a night with Rosemary. I wondered whether I had the gall to pick up the phone and call her. I hadn’t thought of it till now, given that one of the goals of this trip was a reconciliation with my wife. But when I fastened on the telephone conversation between Maura and Giacomo, I decided to give Rosemary a ring after all. I called her from the Burkes’ house, but she could not come out tonight. She might, however, be able to swing it tomorrow.

  Burke and I had another beer, then decided to have dinner in Little Italy, at a trattoria called La Mia Suocera. We put away a bottle and a half of Tuscan wine and a magnificent multi-course meal; Burke pulled a portly cigar from his pocket, lit it up and smoked contentedly for a few moments. Then the familiar newspaper clipping emerged and was flattened out on the table.

  “Time to get back to the Dead Mick Scrolls, Montague. Brother Patrick seems to be losing his religion on this, but I intend to persevere. Because, of course, I’m right and he’s wrong.”

  “I meant to ask you: what does Patrick do?”

 
“He’s a psychiatrist.”

  “Really! What’s his approach?”

  “Common sense. He’s a very level-headed sort of fellow and he takes that into his therapy.”

  “How does religion fit into his world view? I’ve never had the impression psychiatry and Catholicism were rollicking bedfellows.”

  Burke looked surprised. “He’s more Catholic than I am! Everybody thought he’d be the priest in the family.”

  “Now he’s a priest of the mind.”

  “Mmmm. Now pay attention here, Collins. I’m wondering why it says Cathal was never shy about sharing a song or a drink and, if you said no, he’d share it with you anyway. That doesn’t sound like the old man. He likes a drink and a song, true, but he was never a drinker to the extent you’d note it in his biography. And he was never one of those overbearing party lads who’d hound you into drinking even if you didn’t want to. Then it says: ‘When the members of a generation pass away, the family is often left with little more than its memories; the telling details are locked away in a trunk and never get out of the attic. A better way — Cathal’s way — was to celebrate and live the past as if it formed part of the present, as indeed it does.’ Obviously, something in the past has never gone away, and whatever it is accounts for this affront right here.” He jabbed at the paper as if he were poking its author in the chest.

  There was something he had just read that set off a little tingle at the outer edges of my consciousness. I tried to bring it to the centre of my mind but I was interrupted by Burke, who had had enough. “I’m heading over to that bar,” he announced.

  The blues bar, he meant. “You go ahead. I’ll call it a night, and catch tomorrow’s performance. See you back at the hotel.”

  We went our separate ways. I hit the sack early but woke when I heard him come in at one-thirty or two, then dropped off again.

  When I got up the next morning Burke was gone. I spent the day walking around the west side of Manhattan, stopping for a snack or a beer now and then, and thoroughly enjoying myself. But my mind was on the evening ahead; I had reached Rosemary and we had a date.

  The blues bar, Colly’s, was on Queens Boulevard, a five-minute walk from the Burkes’ house. We got there ahead of Rosemary, whose arrival time would depend on getting her son, William, settled for the night. The bar staff all greeted Brennan as a regular and had a Jameson’s poured for him before his bum hit the chair. I had a beer.

  “So Burke. Was she happy to see you again?”

  “Who wouldn’t be? No —” he put up a warning hand, as the image of the disastrous evening with Sandra came back to us both “— don’t answer that. Cassie gave the appearance of one who was not overly distressed to see me back in town.”

  “How did she sound?”

  “She had me all ears.”

  “It was just your ears that pricked up, eh?”

  Silence. Then, after a good long swig of whiskey: “We chatted a bit between sets.”

  “Oh?”

  “Oh yourself.”

  “Has she recorded anything yet?”

  “No, but she hopes to when she gets to Chicago. This move to Chicago she sees as a life-changing event. She had trouble with drugs and booze, and hit bottom a few years ago. She has two boys; their father took them and left. She fought her way back through rehab and work, and she’s been clean for three years. Can’t wait to be with her kids in Chicago, and make up for lost time.”

  “She told you all this between sets?”

  “No, she told me all this when I took her out for a bite to eat afterwards.”

  “Really! And did she tell you this in your role as kindly Father Burke, or —”

  “She doesn’t know what I do,” he said shortly. “We were talking about her, not me.”

  “So you’re just a mysterious stranger who pops up every once in a while to be serenaded —”

  “You’re getting a little annoying here, Collins. Go order me another Irish, will you? Once she comes out, I don’t want to sit in front of her, swilling all night. Her having given it up.”

  “So you’re going to get a few under your belt now.”

  “Correct. Now hop to it and buy us a round.”

  I got up to do the fetching, but I took vocal revenge by singing a few lines of “Long Cool Woman”, a song about a man who had a life-altering moment when he heard a woman singing in a bar.

  He affected not to hear.

  “Ah,” I heard him say then, and he rose to his feet. “Rosemary, is it?”

  “Rosie!” She’d had her luxurious red hair cut into wavy layers since I saw her last, and a scarlet sweater set off her creamy skin with its light smattering of freckles across the nose. She smiled and plopped into her seat with a sigh of exhaustion. “What can I get for you?”

  “A glass of white wine, Monty, whatever looks decent. I nearly didn’t get here. William was feeling sick and, well, it goes on and on. How are you, Brennan?”

  “The very best. Thank you.”

  I got us all drinks, and we talked until the band, South of Blue, came on and did very passable work on some old blues standards. A few of the songs I did with my own band back in Halifax. Brennan went to the bar and ordered a ginger ale. It was not until the next set that Cassie made her appearance. She had long ebony hair and lazy, half-closed dark eyes. She was not conventionally pretty but she had the look of a siren who could lure many a worthy ship onto the rocks. I estimated her age as late thirties or early forties. Her voice smoked and smouldered, and occasionally flashed to great soaring heights. It had its effect on Burke again; he looked like a man whose vital signs had measurably altered.

  The set ended with a surprisingly toned-down version of the Janis Joplin number “Get It While You Can.” Quiet, low, and wistful all the way through, very effective. Burke lit up a cigarette and sucked the smoke deep into his lungs as Cassie walked off with the band and reappeared with a glass of what looked like grape juice. She stopped at a couple of tables and chatted with the patrons. I noticed she was friendly to them, but kept her distance.

  “Why didn’t she come over to see us?” I needled Burke.

  “She will,” he informed me, as he stubbed out his cigarette and took a sip of ginger ale.

  And she did. “Evening, Brennan,” she said in a husky voice. “I hope I don’t sound metallic on the high notes tonight.”

  He leaned back in his seat and looked up at her. “You sound like liquid gold on the high notes tonight, Cassie. Meet my good friend Montague, and this is Rosemary. They were with me last year when I heard you for the first time.”

  “Right. I remember now. And wasn’t there someone else?”

  Burke held her gaze and smiled. “There was nobody else.”

  I asked about her blues career, and she gave us a little history. Then she added: “It can be a crazy life and that started to wear thin after a while. Bad for the health. I’m hoping to settle down a bit. This will be my last set. I’d better go gargle something so I can get through it.” She slapped the table in front of Burke, spilling his drink. “Wouldn’t want to sound raspy on the fortissimos.” She left us then to go backstage.

  “What did you do, Brennan? Sit here last night and critique her work?”

  “I just suggested she go easy on her voice today. She sounded tired last night.”

  “So, why didn’t you let her go home to beddy-bye nice and early, instead of dining at the fashionably late hour of midnight? But perhaps she’ll have an early night tonight.”

  “Perhaps she will,” he answered impassively.

  We chatted about this and that until Cassie came out for her final set and worked her magic on us all again. Her last number, she announced with a quick glance at Burke, would be her female — but not ladylike — version of “It’s a Man’s World.” The song had left us stupefied last year when we heard it. Once again, her incendiary vocals issued a challenge to anyone in the room who might think he was living in a man’s world.

  It turned out
that Cassie and Brennan had made plans to head to their now regular spot for something to eat after she said her goodbyes around the bar. Rosemary and I stayed for one more drink. When we got to the restaurant we saw that things had progressed. Brennan was squeezed in beside Cassie in a booth and had his arm around her. Whatever he was whispering in her ear triggered an irresistible, throaty laugh. They didn’t notice our arrival. Brennan turned Cassie’s face towards him and kissed her on the mouth. By the time she opened her eyes and saw us standing there, they were practically horizontal on the bench. She gave him a gentle push in the chest; he righted himself, took a deep breath, and acknowledged our presence with a nod.

  We made inconsequential conversation but, when the waitress arrived, Rosemary and I decided not to order anything to eat. It was clear that Brennan’s mind was elsewhere. He had some part of himself in contact with Cassie at all times, and I realized he had not so much as touched her arm while she was working, while she was in public view in the bar. I realized as well that nothing had happened between them before tonight, and that he would be exactly where he wanted to be long, long before the crack of dawn.

  My ambitions were more modest. I had billed the date with Rosemary as “getting together for drinks,” which was as far as I was going to go with Maura and the kids due back the next day, and a possible détente on the horizon. Though when I thought again of Giacomo . . . But no, she wouldn’t have arranged a rendezvous in Philadelphia, not with Tom and Normie there. The solution to my dilemma presented itself when Rosemary mentioned a midnight movie she wanted to see. We drove to New Jersey in her car, took in the movie, and picked up some food at a drive-through. I looked in my wallet and saw that I did not have enough cash to cover the $11.62 food bill. Smooth! But that’s what credit cards are for. We parked and ate while gazing across the Hudson River at the skyline of lower Manhattan.