Once Peggy was safely deposited in Woodlawn, Francis was free to spend the night with Michael in the living room—“Fat chance of that!” Francis scoffed—or return to the Plaza.
Rosemary seemed as resigned to this course of events as Martin was. She knew Peggy, and knew that trying to keep her from going her own way would only stiffen her sister’s resolve. It had been like this for years, back to the days when they shared a bedroom and Rosemary took it on herself to shield Peggy’s shenanigans from their parents. Nights when the house had the hollowed-out calm of a bell that has finally stopped ringing, Peggy could open the door, slide through a span no wider than a fist, and move from inside the house to outside in the interval between one breath and another. From their bedroom, Rosemary imagined her sister’s bare feet on the flagstone path, Peggy with her shoes in her hand and a boy waiting, always a boy waiting, around the corner or in a car that would coast for two or three houses before roaring to life—every boy a Romeo snatching his Juliet from under Mr. Capulet’s whiskey-blasted nose.
Peggy was always back in bed before Rosemary woke up, having drifted in as quietly as she’d left, and when the girls were called to breakfast, Peggy was the one who was chipper, refreshed, and rested. Rosemary would be worn down by a lousy night’s sleep, her dreams tortured by what-ifs—because if Peggy was the carefree Juliet, then Rosemary was the nurse, the maidservant, the worrywart older sister.
FRANCIS AND THE blonde were gone and Rosemary had gone to bed. In the living room, Michael sat up with Martin, who was gamely trying to mime a series of questions. Would you like a drink? was easy enough, but how was he to suggest a cup of tea? After a flurry of halfhearted attempts to shape a kettle with his hands, he decided it was best to go to the kitchen for the real thing. Martin paused at the wireless on his way out of the room and switched it on. The light came up on the dial, but after he’d fidgeted with the knob he caught himself and, embarrassed, switched it off.
Michael shook his head, waved his hands in front of him, tried to suggest it was all right, that Martin should listen, but his brother didn’t seem to catch his meaning and instead sat heavily in an armchair upholstered in a nubby blue fabric.
This was all getting to be too much. There was so much Michael wanted to talk to Martin about, but when had Martin ever really listened to Michael? They hadn’t been face to face in ten years, and back then Michael had been only a little spiv and Martin already fixated on his dream of America. Michael had tried through his letters to give his brother a sense of his life and of himself, but that attempt had been banjaxed by unbroken codes and bollixed lines of communication. Martin might have read the words, but he didn’t really read the letters. If he had looked closely, the code would have offered itself up for the cracking. Michael couldn’t make it too obvious, for fear that Brother Zozimus or one of the other priests charged with monitoring the correspondence of the seminarians for blasphemous, prurient, vulgar, scatological, or otherwise unwholesome content would consign the letter to the basement furnace. Still, Michael had hoped the tone of his letters would be enough to alert his brother—his actual, flesh-and-blood brother—to the presence of hidden messages lurking in the typewritten pages: the perils into which Martin placed his soul by attending the cinema (a place whose interplay of light and darkness approximates the fires of hell and the shadow cast by the refusal of God’s mercy); the sinful nature of jazz music (a bestial rhythm which inspires gyrations that taunt all notions of Christian purity and mimic the seizures of the possessed whom Christ Our Lord exorcised); and the flesh-and spirit-rotting qualities of strong drink (a poison that seduces the body and debases the soul and deprives men of the ability to govern, with firm hand, their animal nature). Martin couldn’t think he was serious about any of it. Michael figured his brother would have a good laugh at each month’s tortured missive, and then enjoy some cryptographic fun unearthing Michael’s dispatches from the front lines of pastoral education: PRIESTS OLD AND DAFT, STUDENTS YOUNG AND DAFT, or HAVE I MADE A MISTAKE? PLEASE ADVISE, or MY GIRL, MY GIRL, WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?
Michael began to realize with the passage of time and the receipt of too many stale, codeless replies that while they may have been born of the same parents, he and Martin were strangers. Even when they’d lived under the same roof, Martin was always off practicing in some empty shed, or in the shell of the great house over the hill, a once-grand manse that the locals had burned during the war to settle accounts with their landlord. And when Martin wasn’t blowing that clarinet of his, or wrestling with the pub’s rickety upright—the only piano in town—then he was working to put aside a bankroll for his American plan. Now here they were, face to face, and both were struggling with anything more complicated than a yes-or-no question. More than that, Michael couldn’t deny the way his own brother fidgeted in his chair, uneasy with the presence in his own home of poor, young, damaged, God-mad Michael.
It was too much. Michael stood quickly—and so unexpectedly that Martin flinched—and moved to the wireless. He punched the button, and the golden half-circle of the numbered dial glowed. One hand was on the webbing that covered the speaker and when the signal popped, Michael felt a pulse under his fingers. He turned the volume knob and the pulse became a thrumming—his hand was like an insect’s antennae. He could feel the music, the pounding of the drums, the buzz of the horns, pinpricks from a piano. He closed his eyes. He didn’t want any interference. He imagined that if he could force all sense impressions to enter through a single door that he could concentrate the experience and feel it more vividly. Sound was nothing more than vibrations and here those vibrations came into his hands, as if he were a blind man reading the humped code of a Braille page. He could have hummed the tune. He could have sung along. And then he lost it.