"Mama sounds loud," Maisie said happily, at the end of it, from deep in her pudding.
"She was," Marcus said, and raised his glass an inch, to nobody in particular and to everybody at the table. "She was the loudest thing in this house. It's taken us a while to catch up."
Chapter 25: Spring Cleaning
The cameras came off the garden wall on the first fine Saturday of spring, and Shay took them down himself, one by one, from the top of a ladder, with the children as his ground crew.
It had been their job β his and the cameras' β for two years: the wall, the lenses, the red eyes that watched the garden through every season of its death and all of its resurrection. Now Shay unbolted each one with the unhurried care of a man disarming something he respected, and lowered them in the bucket, and Jack received each one like an unexploded shell and laid it in the grass, and Maisie kept the screws in a jam jar with a label she had made for the purpose: SCREWS (IMPORTANT).
"Mind the ladder," Marcus said from the path, in the tone of a man who has supervised a thousand operations and is finding this one unexpectedly difficult to watch.
"I've climbed worse, sir," Shay said, "for worse reasons."
The last camera came down. The wall stood there being a wall β brick, ivy coming back, the line where the sunflowers would go in again from Maisie's envelope β and Shay climbed down and stood with his hands empty, and the strangest expression crossed the great man's face: the expression of a soldier at a parade's end, not sure whether to salute or go home.
"Garden looks bigger," he said at last.
"It is," said Maisie, with authority. "It was being watched. Now it's just ours."
Inside, the study surrendered next. The maps came down first β the big street maps with their pins and their pencilled territories, the charts of a coastline of fear that Marcus had navigated by for thirty years. He took them down himself, without ceremony, and rolled them like old weather charts, and behind where they had hung the paint was a cleaner rectangle, the ghost of the old life in a paler shade.
In their place, by committee and by stepladder, went the school photographs. Jack's class photograph, thirty children and one Doyle, front row, grinning with a missing tooth. Maisie's nursery-school portrait, in which she had refused, comprehensively, to look at the camera. The programme from the school play, framed by Mrs. K in a frame too grand for it, which everyone agreed suited the programme exactly. Marcus hung the last one crooked, considered it, and left it crooked, an act of domestic statesmanship that Nora privately ranked among the bravest of his career.
"There," he said. "Now the room knows what it's for."
The dining room was painted the colour the children chose, which was how the dining room of a Beacon Hill brownstone came to be, by full democratic process, a warm sunflower yellow β "the inside colour," Maisie explained to the decorator, who had gone pale and then, to his credit, thoughtful. Painting took three days and one catastrophe. Frankie supervised from a chair in the doorway with his cane across his knees and gave advice of steadily decreasing usefulness. Mrs. K laid down the law about the floor, the skirting, and the moral character of drop-cloths, and was found on the second afternoon, by Nora, alone in the empty yellow room with a small brush, painting the last hidden stripe behind the dresser, humming β the cook-housekeeper of twenty years putting her own hand, at last, on Eleanor's house's new colour.
And the staff were given their Sundays.
It had been Mrs. K who announced it, in the end β Marcus having decreed it, she implemented it with the full force of house law, rosters drawn up like treaties. Her own first Sunday off in twenty years she spent at Mass, at her sister's in Dorchester, and back at the brownstone by four o'clock because, as she informed the empty kitchen with great dignity, there was a leg of lamb that did not know the new oven's temper. "It is a beginning," she conceded to Nora. "A woman does not learn rest in one Sunday. It took me twenty years to learn the other thing."
Shay's Sundays, and his Saturdays, had found their own use by then.
Jack's soccer team played at a municipal field in South Boston with goals that leaned and lines that had been chalked by an optimist, and their coach was a wall of a man in a tracksuit and a coach's vest that fitted him like a postage stamp, with a whistle he blew with total commitment and frequent inaccuracy. Shay did not know the offside rule. Shay had been briefed on the offside rule by Jack, in the car, twice, and had elected to coach by a higher law, which was effort. He called the children by their full names like roll at a regiment. He referred to the goalkeeper as "the last man" and to half-time oranges as "rations," and the team β seven- and eight- and nine-year-olds, every one β would have walked into traffic for him, and in one memorable match nearly did, pursuing a ball he had encouraged beyond the boundary of the sport.
Jack played midfield, all knees and purpose, and when he scored β a scuffed, glorious, entirely accidental goal that went in off his shin β it was not to the parents' line that he looked. It was to the touchline, where his coach stood with both arms raised like a man signalling a ship, roaring his full name.
Marcus watched from among the other parents, with a thermos, in an ordinary coat, unrecognised by everyone except one grandfather who did a double-take and decided, wisely, that his eyes were old. No one came near. No one was afraid. A woman beside him offered him a biscuit from a tin, in the manner of a person arming an ally against the second half, and he took it, and ate it, and stood in the spring sun watching his son be nine.
That evening, in the garden, Maisie emptied the envelope onto the kitchen table β her seeds, her name on the paper in the teacher's-best letters β and the household stood around the small brown spill of them like people around a foundation stone.
"Same wall?" Jack said.
"Same wall," said Maisie. "They know the way up now."
And Marcus, looking at the dismantled fortress β the bare garden wall, the yellow room glowing in the dusk behind them, the study window lit and full of school photographs β understood that no enemy had ever taken his house apart. It had been done by hand, from inside, by the people who lived in it, on purpose, at the pace of love: one camera, one map, one Sunday at a time.