“What’s that you called yourself?” Jerry asked.
"My name's Evita now, Daddy."
"Evitanow."
"Well, no . . . just Evita," Evita said.
Muriel was her real name. Muriel, a name that Jerry Riordan, with his wife's pleased permission, had bestowed on her the day of her birth. His mother had had that name, and Jerry himself remembered the day of her funeral in Cork City in 1962, when he had been four years old. The sound of his mother's name. . . Muriel Riordan. . . pronounced with such dignity by the priest, had caused him to liquify with tears that day, and many days since. Just the other Sunday, when he had been saying a prayer for her at Saint Ignatius, his heart had wilted as he recalled how his mother had disappeared one day in an automobile accident on a bridge over the River Blackwater. Terrible wreckage containing his mother's heart. He and his father had left Ireland six months later, and he could not remember anything at all of the place.
His wife Mary could, having arrived in San Francisco as a twenty year-old. But she was uninterested in Ireland. It represented oppression to her.
"Jerry, they want you to believe in all that Celtic Tiger stuff. Prosperity and such. But it hasn’t changed, not a whit. They still treat the women there like…" She turned away, shaking her head. "Well, like not much."
Jerry wished he could get her to see his need to think well of the place. The only thing about it that he remembered was his mother, and for that he had given his daughter her name.
"Why Evita?" he asked Evita.
She was fifteen now and had just come home for dinner. She had spent the afternoon in the park on Haight Street, with a large group of friends. Delinquents, actually. They stood around the entrance to the park looking dangerous. The way they dressed made Jerry think of the Joad family on skateboards.
Jerry remembered with pleasure fooling around with his own friends after football practice at Saint Ignatius High, where he had been the starting fullback. His whole past was intertwined with the memory of guys like Bob Croutier and Al Rinzler, with whom he had played on the varsity. They were still friends, getting together for lunch every few weeks downtown. Only now they talked about their children, or about the foolish struggles of the Catholic church, when all that Pope Benedict had to realize was that the faithful did not have anything against priests and bishops, that they only wished to have a say in their own lives. After all, it's the twenty-first century, isn't it, Your Holiness? Nobody wants to kill stem cells.
Evita's only boyfriend so far, a pale-skinned sixteen year-old named DJ Yo, who had tobacco-stained fingers and wore baggy pants, a sleeveless levi vest, an earring in one lip, and a sideways Boston Red Sox cap, had sat around the house with Evita one Saturday afternoon.
Mary had been at church, helping to put up the decorations for the Easter Sunday Mass. The first thing Jerry had noticed was that all the doors in his house had suddenly been closed. He was fearful of what he would find were he to burst through one of them. He imagined DJ Yo wrapped up in his daughter, her clothing strewn about as she moaned, bubbling, with sensuous excitement in his arms, on a couch. But after an hour he discovered that they had gone out, leaving the doors closed, the house unnaturally secured. He opened all the doors again, grateful that he would not have to pry the two lovers apart.
DJ Yo never came back. Evita did not speak of him again.
Jerry himself was a large man who had to struggle to remain neat. He was a partner at the law firm of Gatsby Pildon and Corregidor in San Francisco and was that rarity in the cantankerous field of corporate law, a kind-hearted man. He worked the sixty-hour weeks expected of him. He managed cases with considerable care and wrote briefs that were notable for their humor and clarity of expression. Also rarities. And he put up with the often acid behavior of his colleagues. He had long ago given up wondering why corporate law seemed to attract so many ill-tempered schmucks and to promote them to senior partner.
Jerry was personally quite rumpled. His mustache filled the middle of his face, below a nose that reminded him actually of Ted Kennedy's nose. Jerry's skin had not yet arrived at the state of pimpled lumpiness of the famous politician's. And he hoped that he'd never appear as formless as Kennedy was, in his enormous suits, a smelly cigar sticking out of his mouth. At fifty, Jerry still had a football player's presence, with very large shoulders. He walked in a slightly pigeon-toed way and, despite his kindliness, he could sometimes display a sort of wounded sadness that his daughter, for one, frequently invoked.
"Evita is the name of the Argentine love goddess," she said. "Or something like that. I guess."
"Argentine!"
"Yes, Daddy, and she's. . ."
"Isn't being Irish good enough?"
"Daddy!"
He was disgruntled. Since Evita had been thirteen, she had caused a deterioration in Jerry's hopes, first with a nose-ring, then with blue hair that looked like a porcupine or a tea-cozy depending on how she wore it, finally with the tattoo.
Jerry especially worried about the tattoo. It was a small bat in flight just below her belly button. He had learned about it a month before when she had come home from school in a low-cut pair of jeans, her tummy, her belly button and the few inches below her belly button exposed for all to see..
"Good Christ! When did she do that?" Jerry had asked after Evita had gone upstairs to do her homework
"Jerry, I don't think you should ask," Mary said.
"Why not?"
She wrung a dishtowel between her hands. "Because she's embarrassed."
"She should be! A bat!"
"No, she's not embarrassed by the tattoo."
"Then, what is it?"
"It's you! She knows you won't understand it."
Jerry shrugged, scratching his head. "She's not embarrassed by a bat flying around her belly button?"
"No. No, Jerry, apparently she isn't."
Now, Evita sat down on the chair across from her father, who closed the newspaper that lay on his lap and let it drop to the floor.
"It doesn't have anything to do with being Irish," Evita said. The long black skirt she wore gave way to black army boots. She had on a quite lovely white silk blouse, unusual for her in that it was so smooth and pressed. There was however also a button pinned to the lapel of the blouse, with a picture of a skull and crossbones and the caption "Buy or Die" down below. She had changed nose rings. This one had a small glass ruby, quite dark red. "I just think it's cool sounding."
"Your name's Muriel."
"I don't like Muriel."
"What's wrong with it?"
"It sounds dorky."
"It's your grandmother's name! It's the only thing I brought with me from Ireland, that name."
"Oh, Daddy. No one at school cares about that Irish stuff."
"They care more about Argentine stuff?"
Evita pursed her lips. Her hands formed a knot, and she sighed with discomfort. "No! But they think it's cool to just change your name like that."
Jerry exhaled. "Muriel. Sweetheart. For all I know that name is as old as anything in Buenos Aires. And it was..."
"I know. It was Grandma's name. You've told me that a million times."
"You don't think that's important?"
"Daddy!"
Evita stood and walked from the room. Jerry stared at the chair in which she had been sitting. For a moment he imagined his mother actually seated in the chair before him. She smiled at him. Her hair was done up in a 1960’s permanent, like Cher’s. She reassured him that little Muriel was just feeling her oats a little, wasn't she, Jerry? The skull and crossbones glittered above his mother's head, the way heaven's light does in the framed pictures of Christ at church rummage sales.
Jerry looked around the church, at the other worshippers in the late-afternoon darkness. There were no other teenagers besides Evita, who knelt before the bank of votive candles to the left of the confessionals. The soles of her army boots came out from beneath her floor-length Guatemalan skirt. They looked like rounded slabs of tire. She also wore a black tank top, and her arms shined in the candlelight. She had slathered her hair with Pomade, and it stood up in spikes.
In the silence, Evita appeared improbably brazen, as though Beelzebub himself had parachuted her into Saint Ignatius through one of the stained-glass windows. Her Mexican silver bracelets clattered against her costume-jewelry bracelets. Her lips were made up in black-purple. The makeup around her eyes made her look haunted.
She leaned forward over her folded hands. The candles glimmered all about her and illuminated the crucifix that hung from the wall, which glowed, diminished, and glowed again, as though it were breathing.
It seemed incongruous to Jerry that Evita dressed so radically—so awfully, he thought—yet seemed so softened by her praying. She and her friends were like leaden nihilists, with their thoughtless, pointed profanity and the way they thumbed their noses at good manners. They did not appear to love anything. Their skateboards crashed about like police clubs in a riot. The squalor of their dress and the dirt beneath their nails brought down upon them the very criticism that seemed to bother them so much. Jerry couldn't figure it out. They talked foully. They looked bad. Yet they seemed to worry a great deal about what everyone thought of them.
But Evita's love of the candle-light and the way she looked up now at the statue of Mother Mary—an airy, gloom-ridden ceramic exuding the grace of God—showed that she cared a great deal for her prayers and for the statue. It was obvious. She crossed herself and stood up from the kneeler.
Jerry's shoulders ached, especially his left one, in front. Also, a kind of grey pain resided just below his heart. He felt short of breath. He crossed himself and lowered his chin onto his crossed hands. Evita returned to the pew.
"Do you know how you look?" he asked as she sat down next to him. His nerves were scattered. He did not want to confront Evita, but he worried about the respect she should give the Church. To look like a gypsy exotic-dancer camp follower while praying beneath the statue of the Mother of God Who, evidently embarrassed Herself, looked out into the distance as though trying to ignore the spectacle at Her feet….
Evita did not reply.
"Couldn't you dress a little…well, differently when you come to church?" She sighed, looking away from her father.
"Couldn't—"
"Daddy, stop it."
"Muriel, I—"
"Somebody'll hear us!"
Jerry felt an argument beginning to swirl, which was not what he wanted. But he headed for it anyway, taken over by a kind of embarrassed rage. She had asked him to bring her to church so that she could light a candle for her grandmother. This was something they had done a few times a year since she had been born. The two of them alone, a moment Jerry could have with his daughter just by himself. She had always felt that the ceremony was hers as well, as though it was she who had the connection with heaven and the angels and her poor, dead grandmother. Just today, Evita had told her father that she wanted to put the needlepoint pillow his mother had made as a girl, Jerry's most prized possession, on her bed next to the end table on which was her own sixth-grade graduation picture.
He had said yes. Jerry had always loved Evita's feelings for his mother. It was as though he stood between the two women, and that their messages to each other passed directly through him. He sometimes imagined them, arm in arm, smiling for some sort of photo. His mother Muriel in a dark blue summer dress with a string of pearls and open-toed white shoes, while his daughter Muriel wore her uniform from Saint Brigid's School, a white blouse, navy-blue skirt, dark-green sweater, and oxford shoes, her curly brown hair tied up in a ponytail. But, of course, now, the photo would feature his mother dressed the same as always, while his daughter looked like a vagabond vampire waif. But the connection was there, nonetheless.
He disliked himself when he criticized Evita. He sounded so much like a disapproving Pope. But it was one of his gripes with Evita and her friends, that they seemed to think that all the world's institutions could just accommodate themselves to whatever the kids thought was cool at the moment. If the Pope didn't like what they were doing, well, fuck the Pope!
Jerry's entire upbringing had been one of faithful measure and accommodation. He liked the Church. It gave color to his faith. The humor of making fun of the priests, the way he shared a kind of language with the priests and nuns that only another Catholic could appreciate, the fact that the two objects that he possessed from his life with his parents in Ireland were the pillow and the crucifix that hung over the writing desk at the foot of the stairs in their home…these things made him happy. So, his daughter's ragged looks, unaltered in any way even though they may be disapproved of at church, now angered him. It was the lack of respect for that sort of thing that angered him the most, the indifference to the decorum he felt God Himself and the holy angels could expect to see. All those saints who had been garroted, pilloried, and fried for the love of God didn't need to have their sacrifice made fun of. But that's what Evita did.
So, while Evita knelt in the pew next to him, her forehead resting against her fingers, Jerry became even more angry with her. His thoughts fumed, clattering about within him in unstated confusion. She cared so little for what he wanted that he felt he was hardly her father anymore.
All he wished was that she dress the way she used to. That she be considerate. Be Muriel. But the silence with which she was treating him made his wishes appear foolish. Kneeling beside him, intentionally avoiding any more conversation, she acted as though her father's criticisms were simply trite. So, he felt trite. Trite and abandoned.
—
His client Cartwright Curtis sat on the leather couch across from Jerry’s desk. Curtis owned the largest printing firm in San Francisco and affected a look of settled tradition in his dark grey suit, dark grey hair, and dark grey tie. His mouth seldom moved, even when he spoke. He was very wealthy and based his agreeableness and self-satisfaction on that fact. Because Jerry worked for such a prestigious law firm, Curtis assumed that he was a Republican. This was not so, but Jerry shielded his Democratic Party liberalism from everyone at work, realizing that he could lose large clients simply by letting slip something inoffensive in support, say, of Hilary Rodham Clinton. So, he kept his yap shut.
He had studied Curtis for years, fascinated by the man's bored stupidity. Curtis used up pencils entirely, for instance, down to the stub. He frequently complained of the fact that he had to supply pencils to his employees. He re-used paperclips. Jerry, so profligate in such matters that he had never once bought a fountain pen, knowing that he would lose the thing in a minute, laughed at Curtis behind his back.
The month before, Curtis had fired an employee, a salesman at the company who had been making, Curtis said, far too much money for his own good. The trouble was that the man was now suing Curtis for wrongful termination, for three million dollars, and the negotiations were not going very well.
"And since he hired this guy Ziff, the best guy in town . . ." Curtis said. "Jerry, I just don't think you guys are protecting my interests."
"Cartwright. . ."
"I mean, what good was that last letter you sent to him?"
A pragmatist, Jerry had sent a letter to Steve Ziff proposing an immediate settlement out of court. There had been just as immediate a reply, a slightly scoffing reply, in which the opposing attorney had referred to Curtis's original action as "remarkably abusive of the written law in these matters." He had referred to Curtis's company, one of the oldest printing firms in San Francisco, as worse than a sweatshop.
The two men were waiting for Jerry's boss, a senior partner named Randall Flint. Curtis had called Flint—a classmate of his from Colgate—earlier that morning to complain about Jerry's handling of the case.
"What are you going to do about this, Jerry?” Curtis said now. “I understand this guy Ziff doesn't lose!"
Jerry waved a hand before him, as though to brush aside the reason for Curtis's fear. He was nervous about the upcoming meeting with Randall.
"I mean, if you don't like a guy, you should just be able to get rid of him," Curtis said.
"Not these days." Jerry leaned over his desk and opened the manila folder before him. "You have to be able to prove that he's not doing a good job." He spread a few of the papers from the folder across the desk. "And this fellow was doing a very good job for you, it looks like."
"Too good, dammit."
"Yes, but his being the most talented salesman on your staff is not reason enough to fire him."
"I wish to hell someone had told me," Curtis moped.
Jerry shrugged. "I'll bet Steve Ziff is very happy no one did."
"Gentlemen." Randall Flint had arrived at the door to Jerry's office. He was a tall man, white-haired, about sixty years old. He wore a very dark blue suit, white shirt, and striped tie in dark burgundy and blue. His skin had the consistency of water. Like Curtis, he had a patrician look —Protestant wealth's look, Jerry thought—of bilious disinterest. Of contempt. But unlike Curtis, Randall was a very bright man.
Jerry had never much liked him. The senior partner's abrasiveness had a lot to do with his wish to control his colleagues. A liberal-seeming smile on Jerry's part, intended to please, very often got a nasty rebuke from Randall by way of reply.
"Come on in, Randall," Jerry said. He pointed to the couch opposite his desk.
"You wanted to see me?" Randall sat down and crossed his legs.
"Yeah, this thing with Steve Ziff isn't going so well," Curtis said. "And I just think Jerry could be a little more...demanding with him."
"Demanding?" Randall asked, turning toward Jerry.
"We've had a few problems that I think we can resolve," Jerry said. He leaned forward over the folder, spreading a few of the papers across his desk. "For example, I. . ."
"What problems, Jerry? You've got to get after a guy like Steve Ziff."
Jerry gathered the papers together again. "Randall, you should let me explain."
"Explain what? You've got to take a guy like this and scare the living shit out of him. You don't ask some kind of favor. That he settle out of the kindness of his heart. That he be nice."
"Wait a minute."
"You wait a minute." Randall stood and put a hand in his pants pocket. "Cartwright Curtis is an important client of ours, and I'm not going to allow any sort of weak-willed…well, waffling on this matter." He moved toward the door. "You take care of this guy Ziff."
"Randall."
"Just do it, Jerry!"
Randall turned toward Curtis. "You doing anything for lunch?"
"I was going to go up to the Bohemian Club."
"I'll go with you," Randall said. "My treat."
"OK."
Randall left the office.
Disgruntled, and not a little hurt, Jerry excused himself so that he could go down the hall to the xerox room. He had to take a walk, to relieve the pressure of Flint’s rebuke. Returning, he felt the pain come back into his arm. It was a grey ache without a throb. There was a kind of tiredness in his chest as well.
"Look, Cartwright, there's a lot we can do," he said as he lay the copies on the desk. "You know, this guy will settle for a lot less than three million."
"Like maybe only one million?" Dejected, Curtis slumped down in his chair.
"A hundred thousand or so." Jerry replied.
"Jerry, that's just not good enough."
Jerry sat down, and quite suddenly became dizzy. He lay his head in one hand. The desk before him swirled away, the objects that were lying on it scattering from his view. They flew off into the air. He felt faint and sat quietly for several seconds. Until finally, abruptly, the movement stopped. Jerry swallowed, electric with fear. The saliva would not move down his throat. He shook his head, and his hands trembled as they rested on the arms of his chair.
"You OK, Jerry?" Curtis asked.
Jerry looked up at him. Curtis remained reserved, his eyes watery and shallow, as always.
"Yeah, I'm OK." He lay his head in the fingers of one hand. He felt that, in a second or two, he would die. His arms were numb, and he wasn't sure that he would be able to stand up. The collar of his shirt burrowed into his neck.
After a moment, though, his fingers started tingling. A dull, wrecked equilibrium returned to him, and the sweat on his face refreshed him, turning suddenly cool. He sighed and leaned forward over the manila folder.
"Jerry?" His secretary Marilyn stood in the doorway to his office. "Your daughter's here."
"Muriel?"
"Yes. Though she told me her name is Evitanow."
"Yeah. Yeah, I know."
"Do you want me to show her in?"
Jerry looked to Marilyn's left, through a tall piece of glass that bordered the doorway to his office. Evita stood in the middle of the secretarial group, next to a copy machine. The coloration of the computers, like slim grey-beige soaps on all the desks, formed a bland frame for Evita herself, who was dressed up like a kind of delicate Fidel Castro, in a pair of fatigue coveralls. There was a ring on each of her fingers. Her hair sprayed from her head bright green.
Jerry glanced at Curtis, who had turned on the couch to look at Evita. He had last seen her at the client picnic in 1996, when Evita was three.
"This is your daughter?" Curtis said.
"Yes." Jerry stood and moved toward the office doorway. Embarrassment flickered through his heart. "Yes, it is."
—
“I told you not to come here without letting me know about it first," he said to her.
He looked over his shoulder and noticed the office manager, a young homosexual black man named Brad, glancing at them over the top of his workstation. His amusement quickly changed to intent contemplation of the work before him on the screen. His fingers sprayed the keys, making a sound like palm trees in a gale. Curtis remained in Jerry's office, on the couch, his legs crossed. The index finger of his right hand rested against his chin. He, too, looked amused, as though some secret of Jerry's had been revealed.
Jerry took Evita aside, heading her up the aisle between the office cubicles. There was laughter, and he was sure that it was not simply the result of office patter. Evita's appearance had revealed a certain libertinism in his family life. He feared that he looked like a father who could not control his kids. He was a closet bohemian. Some kind of "artist-type," the phrase his fellow attorneys used, with noisy snickers, to refer to clients who did not understand the mud-dark language of the legal profession.
The truth was that Jerry was a liberal man. He liked variety. Just not here. Not at Gatsby Pildon and Corregidor.
"Daddy, I only wanted to say hello."
"Muriel—
"I was downtown with some kids, and I just thought—"
"You can't—"
He stumbled, falling to the floor. His chest felt like it was bursting.
"Daddy!"
A storm of voices descended upon him. He was unable to brush them away. His throat filled with gritty liquid, and he vomited on the floor. He could not breathe, and darkness covered him over immediately as his hands twitched in a seizure-like rattle that made him feel that he was being struck, electrified, by death itself.
—
He had a mad dream, in which he was trying to nurse his mother to health. She lay in a destroyed car, dismembered. Her face was turned away, and when he reached out to turn her toward him, she opened her eyes. She couldn't speak. But she smiled at Jerry despite the shards of metal and broken glass that confined her to the burning automobile. Jerry could do nothing to help her. She floated above him, and the pain in his chest made it impossible to move toward her or say anything to her.
He wished to nurse her, so that she would not die. But she died anyway, right in front of him. He was powerless to help, and it was his heart that kept him from saving her.
His heart held him down. In the dream, simply raising a hand was impossible. As his mother's breathing stopped, he felt imprisoned by her breathlessness. A kind of lethargic shackle fell about him, and his mother disappeared.
Jerry felt a hand in his. It was hers, his mother's, rescuing him. He gripped it, although the effort nearly exhausted him. He drifted, floating, almost waking. Her hand caressed his.
And he heard her voice.
"I love you," she said. "Please get better."
It was a voice he had almost never heard. He saw her again, dressed in a brown wool dress with scalloped sleeves, a string of pearls, a slim brown leather belt, and brown pumps. He laughed as he thought that his mother was a movie-star or something.
But, no, it was in fact his house-wife mother that he saw now, for the first time since before she had died. Her hair was done up in green, short-cropped and curly, and she had a costume jewelry diamond attached to the side of her nose. Her eyes glimmered, looking at him with such pleasureful regard that Jerry thought that she could never have died. Never.
It was her eyes that he had forgotten, how creamy brown they were. He tried gripping her hand again, but he could not. He just allowed his own hand to be caressed, and his heart thrilled at her request, the wish that he not die, whispered in tears.
"Daddy. Please," the voice said.
Jerry's upper body felt leaden, as though his sickened heart was the only thing living within it. He wondered what would happen were he able to shift his weight or roll over. But there was no feeling in his chest, other than the residual ache from his heart attack, that extended for brief, terrifying moments down his arms. Otherwise he felt quite dead.
The voice implored him to stay alive. The tears in the voice caused in him a sense of drained, exhausted refreshment.
"Daddy."
He opened his eyes. Evita sat on the hospital bed next to him. She was just attempting to wipe the black mascara from her eyes, and the box of Kleenex that sat on the table by his bed was surrounded by smudges of crumpled grey tissue. When she looked up from the Kleenex in her hand, Jerry saw that Evita really had quite lovely eyes. They were dark brown, and very large. Despite the flecks of eye shadow that still clung to them, he realized that her lashes had become very long. She wore a silk scarf around her hair, tied in back, that fell forward over her left shoulder. The effect of it was to soften her face, to diminish the effrontery of her frizzy green hair.
Evita leaned forward to kiss him, and a tear fell onto his nose.
"Oh. Sorry," she whispered. She reached out with the Kleenex, to clean it off. Like the others, the tissue was damp with her crying. She took his hand again. "I love you, Daddy."
"I know," Jerry replied. Or, at least, he imagined that he replied, although he could not be sure. He felt the responsibility to make sure that she knew he had heard her. His heart scurried for a way to show her, and he gripped her hand.
He loved his daughter now, in this moment, as he had the day she was born. There was an immediate thrill in his heart just to see her. She made him feel like he was floating.
When Evita was born, she lay wrapped in a blanket in Mary's arms, her blue eyes amazed by the view of Jerry's large head hoving into view above her. He had known that newborns were not supposed to have much precision when it came to greetings, but he had felt nonetheless greeted by Evita that day. Nonetheless loved.
He felt the same now.
Copyright ©2012 Terence Clarke. All rights reserved.
—
This story is one from my collection Little Bridget and The Flames of Hell. Available on order everywhere.
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Hello Maurice, Thank you for this. Much appreciated, especially from someone who so personally understands the situation. As it happens, I myself have just one son, and our relationship is an unusual one given a particular situation in his life. If you'd like to see what that is, I hope you'll go to https://terenceclarke.substack.com/p/fathers-sons-and-seizures-parts-1. Please take care. Terry
Beautiful and evocative. Thankyou. My four girls and I share degrees of incomprehension and love. Peace, Maurice.