Chapter 16 - Where the Truth Lies

IT WAS A LOVELY HOUSE. Really just such a lovely, gracious house. Someone went to great trouble with it, each day. Troubled over the flower beds along the walk. Troubled with trimming back the privet hedges. It was the kind of house where someone came out each morning with a broom and swept away the dust on the porch, then repeated the same task at midday. It was certainly not an upper-class home, but it had more intrinsic class than many a millionaire’s mullion-windowed mausoleum.

I rang the doorbell by turning a little metal wheel in the door.

The door opened and the lovely smell of sweet flowers and flowering vines from the front yard was met by the aroma of well-oiled wood and cherry potpourri from within. It was like stepping from a wild garden into a warm plum pudding.

The woman who opened the door looked kindly but fearful, as if she wondered what bad news I might be bringing and if there was any way to stop me from delivering it.

“Yes?” She’d realized she’d forgotten to smile and did so. “Hello.”

“Mrs. O’Flaherty?”

“Yes.”

“My name’s Kerry O’Connor, I’m the one writing a book…”

She nodded and told me to come in. It had been a relatively easy trip, taking the commuter train to New Rochelle (the local service took exactly forty-five minutes, as guaranteed in the song written by Mrs. O’Flaherty’s uncle) and then a Bluebird Taxi to her door.

She offered me tea or coffee. It was quite warm out, and I opted for tea, thinking it would be iced. She brought me a hot cup of Constant Comment. Still, the house was tolerably cool, despite the absence of air-conditioning. I commented on this.

“High ceilings, stone floor, plenty of cross-ventilation,” explained the mother of Maureen O’Flaherty. “Of course in the winter I have the devil to pay. But I just wear more layers. Cardigans. You can always put more on, my father used to say, but there’s a limit to how much you can take off before the police step in.” She started to laugh, but the mention of the police put a sad little appoggiatura on her melodic line, and she looked away. “So you’re doing a book about those men?” she asked. She put no undue emphasis on “those men,” but it was clear from her face that she regretted having to say such unclean words.

“About Vince Collins, first and foremost,” I said, giving her my most updated answer. “I’ll be asking him a lot of questions, and I wanted to know if there were some you’d like to have answered yourself.”

It was as good (and as honest) a way as I’d been able to find to talk with her about her daughter. I thought I’d taken a decent tack on the matter.

She peered into me. “Not to seem rude, Miss O’Connor, but why is it that you are the one who will get to ask these questions?”

I’d explained to her on the phone, but I guess it hadn’t properly registered. “This won’t be a legal proceeding, Mrs. O’Flaherty. It’s not what they call a ‘deposition.’ ”

She looked a bit peeved. “I know what a deposition is. I mean, why does your publisher think you’re the one who should do this?”

“Actually, the book was my idea. I pushed for it.”

“And do you have some personal involvement? Did you know either of these men before you proposed writing this book?”

I hoped answering the second question would seem to be answering both. “I never knew either of them before my publisher gave me the green light. And as to why me… my publisher knows I don’t ask soft questions of celebrities. The deal that I’ve negotiated with Vince Collins… Well, I’ve made it clear to him that I will be asking some very direct questions, and if I do my job right, I might even get some direct answers. I thought, on behalf of you and your daughter, I might be able to slip in a few questions that you might have for him.” I leaned forward. “I’m trying to be a friend here, Mrs. O’Flaherty.”

She stood and asked if I’d come outside with her for a moment. I followed her through a kitchen in which everything knew its place and out into an equally well-organized yard. There were four or five trees, perhaps a few too many for the small square lawn, but they all seemed to coexist just fine. A warm afternoon breeze stirred their overlapping layers of leaves, rustling them like crinoline.

She walked me over to a good-sized tree dotted with little, yellowish peaches. Apparently not a one had fallen to the ground. She patted its trunk lovingly. “Maureen and I planted this on her fifth birthday. Her father did most of the digging. She’d be thirty-eight. I’m sixty-three myself. If she were alive now, we’d be able to talk about things back and forth like two women, like you and I are doing, except that she’d be older than you, of course. After Maureen, they told me I couldn’t have any other children, but one can be more than enough, believe me. Especially if you get to keep her.”

She led me back into the house and up a narrow staircase that cowered against a dark wall papered in a brown flowered pattern. At the top of the stairs, off a landing, was a bathroom, flanked on either side by two bedrooms of equal size that ran the width of the house. “That was my daughter’s room,” she said, nodding to my left. I moved toward the doorway but she shook her head. “Her things have all been packed away. It’s the guest room now, but it must be, oh gosh, six years since I had a guest and then it was just for Frank’s funeral.”

I asked how her husband had died. She gave a diminutive smile. “Very thoughtfully, I must say. He told me to go visit my cousin in Chicago. She’s single, in her late nineties now, and besides perpetuating our celebrated family name, I have no idea what keeps her going. While I was gone, Frank drove around and around the county until the gas tank on our old DeSoto was at three-quarters empty. Then he drove it into the garage, shut the door, and left the motor running. He had the radio tuned to the classical station, QXR, playing so loudly that it covered the sound of the car motor. Then he unfolded one of the canvas lawn chairs we used to take on picnics and made himself comfortable right near the tailpipe. By the time the car ran out of gas, he was dead. This was on a Sunday. He’d arranged for Con Edison to come on Monday to check our gas meter—which he’d told them was broken—and when they opened the garage door, they discovered his body, with a bottle of John Jameson in his lap. He didn’t want any of our neighbors to be the ones to find him. He was very thoughtful in how he did it. Much like he’d been before Maureen passed away.”

I conveyed my sympathy, but she shook her head. “Oh, it’s all right. After she died, he went a bit ‘off’ in his head. It got so that I really didn’t know him any longer. He slept in her room a great deal, on top of the covers. In the middle of my own grief, I discovered there was this strange man living here, roaming about the house, falling, accidentally breaking things. I felt like I’d taken in a boarder. A boarder who was allowed to let himself into my bedroom.”

Her bedroom smelled clean, perhaps of wood soap. Austere, without making a show of its bareness; it could have been the room of a nun.

She walked me over to a windowed door that opened out onto a little perch that was too small to call a terrace and not romantic enough to be a balcony. It was intimately shaded by the limbs of the peach tree she’d shown me moments before. “Higher than the house now, and yet I planted it with her,” she smiled. She reached out and easily stole one of the yellow peaches from an encroaching bough; it made a lovely popping sound as she wrested it away from its mother branch.

“Frank, at the worst of his depression, if we’re going to call it that, did a rather awful thing one night while I was asleep. He dug up the earth around the peach tree, without harming the tree of course. Then he took the urn that had Maureen’s ashes in it, which we kept downstairs, and spread the ashes around its roots. Then he put the earth back where he’d overturned it, and watered the ground lightly with our rotary sprinkler, moving it about the tree over the course of the next two days.”

She walked over to a bureau where there was a score of framed photographs of Maureen: baby picture, kindergarten, ballet recital, junior high cheerleader, serious and waxen-faced high school graduate. Laid flat on the table were report cards, prize ribbons for best essay, student leader, a letter of acceptance from Hunter College, a postcard Maureen had sent her parents from Florida with an amusing return address that I noted, a photograph of her in room-service uniform in front of the Versailles Hotel… This was Mary O’Flaherty’s miniature shrine for her daughter. She shrugged and looked back out at the tree. “Frank got the idea that Maureen’s ashes were now a part of that tree, and the tree bore fruit… When he was really drunk, he’d eat one peach after another, hoping that somehow, if he ate enough of them, Maureen would be inside him, inside his mind, and that she would then be alive through him. That’s when I knew it would be all right if he wanted to take his own life.”

She set the peach down on the bureau by Maureen’s photos. “So… that’s my daughter,” she said, indicating the yellow fruit. It was as if she were introducing me. “That’s what I have of her, Kerry.”

I nodded.

“Are you Catholic?” she asked.

“I was christened and confirmed in the Catholic faith,” I put forward.

“Then perhaps you will understand my dilemma. I would like to see my daughter again. You can imagine a mother wanting to see her daughter again?”

I said I could.

“Well, then I am going to have to hope for an afterlife, aren’t I? Luckily, my faith offers one. But suicide would condemn me to Hell, as you know. Therefore, I can’t kill myself, much as I might have wanted to these fifteen and a half years. A daughter needs her mother. And so I have to live out this life our Father has provided me, as free from sin as I can manage, although of course we all of us sin in one way or another. I’m hoping that when I die, I’ll be with my daughter again, although by the tenets of my faith this will mean I will never see my husband again, who has consigned himself to Hell, may God have bountiful mercy on him.”

She had led me back down the narrow stairs, carrying the peach with her. Her demeanor was in no way bizarre. She was just explaining things, laying out for me what she had to do within the constraints of certain logical and ethical assumptions. She went again through the kitchen and out into the yard.

Just outside the back door, a garden spade rested in an empty flower pot, alongside a pair of gardening gloves. She put on the gloves and moved to the foot of the peach tree, all the while continuing, conversationally:

“My added dilemma is that some people think my daughter may have committed suicide. I don’t for a moment believe this, but what if they’re right? Then she is in Hell, with my husband, and the life I’m trying to lead may lead me to Heaven’s grace, where I’ll hear their screams of torment but be unable to help them. Surely that would make a Hell of any Heaven. You understand.”

She was kneeling now at the foot of the peach tree and digging a small hole with the spade. She dropped the peach into the hole and smiled up at me. “Once Frank had planted the idea in my head that Maureen was now part of the tree, I couldn’t let the fruit rot on the ground, to be pecked at or carried away by the birds, like vultures would do to carrion. So I have to bury every peach that falls. Which helps replenish the tree.”

I watched her as she covered over the peach with dirt.

“That must be a tremendous amount of work,” I said sympathetically.

“Next month it will take every minute of my day,” she said, patting the earth flat. “It keeps me occupied. I’m grateful to God for that.”

She got up, put the spade back in the empty flower pot, wiped her hands on a thin towel in the kitchen, and led me to the front door. I thanked her for her valuable time. She nodded slowly.

“My daughter was studying to be an English teacher. She went to Miami Beach for a spring vacation. After that, all we got from her for a few years were postcards and phone calls. When she died, I received a check with a typed letter calling it an ‘anonymous gift of bereavement.’ ”

“May I ask the amount of the check?”

“Fifty thousand dollars.” She laughed bitterly. “If it were a hundred times that, what good would it do? I put it in a savings account, and when I die, it will all go to the church.”

“Do you remember the account the check was drawn on?”

“It was what they call a bank check. The note itself was typewritten on plain paper. Frank kept it. Later he said he’d thrown it away.” She opened the front door, and indicated the path. “So, Miss O’Connor, I can tell you the question I would most like you to ask Mr. Vince Collins, or anyone else who might have the answer to it, for that matter. I hope you’ll commit it to memory. It’s a question that I hope you never have to ask yourself. Why did my daughter die?”

I said I would ask the question and told her where she could contact me if she wanted to. I thanked her for her time and apologized if I’d stirred up any painful feelings. She said I hadn’t stirred up a thing.

I walked down the path and for a long time after that. I could have called the Bluebird Taxi company from the O’Flaherty house, but I opted not to. I simply walked downhill on the assumption that towns are rarely uphill of the residential area.

My slow descent eventually brought me onto Huguenot Street, where I saw a sign directing me to the train station. As I walked through New Rochelle’s rendition of an urban ghetto, I realized that there is no such thing as the right side of the tracks. Respectable people live nowhere near the tracks.

I didn’t ask when the next train was, but merely stood on the Manhattan-bound platform until one pulled in. I may have waited for twenty or thirty minutes. There was an additional charge for purchasing my ticket on the train.

I looked out the window. When Maureen O’Flaherty was born, a great deal of New Rochelle had still been farmland. That had all gone away, but someone here was still working the soil with her own two hands.