Very Old Bones Read Free Page B

Giselle, the days when I had no time for any other game but her. Now I tracked
down Popp at the officers’ club and bought him a drink.
    “I thought you were getting a poker game together,” I said.
    “I did ask a few guys. Are you ready?”
    “I could use a little action.”
    “I thought you had this beauty, this cover-girl type.”
    “Hanging out with you mugs, I’ll appreciate her even more.”
    “I’ll round up a crowd for Friday night,” Popp said.
    So I practiced. There’d never been a time I hadn’t, really. Manfredo’s wisdom was that once you lose your touch it will never come back with quite the same delicacy. Any talent
must be husbanded or else we diminish in the breach; and so I spent two hours a week, maybe three, handling the cards, cutting them for aces, dealing seconds, bottoms, reading the deck when I
shuffled. I practiced in bed, in the latrine, anytime I was alone. Almost nobody after Fobie’s knew about me and cards. My magic was still in my hat.
    Popp told the Captain there’d be a game and I’d be playing, and the Captain brought it up the next day in the office.
    “Cards? You mean you aren’t seeing Giselle anymore?”
    “Matter of fact I am,” I said.
    “I don’t see her anymore.”
    “Is that so?”
    “You damn well know it’s so.”
    “I don’t follow you around, Captain.”
    “You follow Giselle around.”
    “I wouldn’t deny it.”
    “She likes ’em young.”
    “She’s young.” She was twenty.
    “I miss her,” he said.
    “I’d miss her too.”
    “You took her away from me.”
    “That’s not how it happens. People do what they want.”
    “She liked me.”
    “We all like you, Captain.”
    “You do good work, Orson. It’s a good thing you do good work.”
    “I try not to disappoint.”
    “That’s smart. Never disappoint. What time is the game?”
    “Seven o’clock.”
    “I’ll see you across the table,” he said.
    It sounded like an invitation to a duel.
    “Is the coffee ready, Orson?” my father called.
    “It is,” I said. “Come on down.”
    I heard him shuffling toward the stairs in his slippers, and I remembered when as a child I shat in one of his slippers, a moment of my precocious psychosis. It is a thief’s traditional
trick to shit in the victim’s lair, and I had been a thief of vision—of my father’s and mother’s private life. The occasion was an argument over love. Whose property was
Claire Purcell? Was she owned body and soul by Peter, her live-in lover, or was she the intimate assistant to Manfredo the Magnificent?
    I awoke in the middle of the night to find my father home after a two-week absence, heard his voice, moved toward it comprehending no words, closed on the parental bedroom to see my naked father
standing over my supine, naked mother, and hear him say: “Why don’t you take your cunt back to Manfredo and have him give you another one?”
    I, at the age of eight, had never heard the word “cunt” uttered other than once in schoolboy talk: Why do they call it a cunt? . . . You ever see one? . . . Yeah . . . Well, then,
what else would you call it? Nor did I understand the import of the phrase “another one,” until time had passed and I had dwelled sufficiently on the overheard words to conclude that my
father had been talking about me, the only one there was: Orson Purcell, son without siblings (living or dead) of Claire Purcell-never-Phelan. I was “son,” “sonny,”
“Orse,” and “Orsy-Horsey” to Peter Phelan, the only father I’d ever known. But when I at last understood the meaning of his assault on my mother (I soon began to use
the term “father” in an ambiguous way, and eventually abandoned it), then it occurred to me that bastardy might be an enduring theme of my life. I grew angry at Peter for not ( if not) being my father, grew angry also at Manfredo, who was unacceptable as a father.
    This latter anger prevailed after I entered a dressing room of the Palace Theater in