Heaven's Embroidered Cloths(Barry) On his deathbed Mary McCarthy’s father sputtered, “You should have married the Jew.” The freckle-faced Irishman had always been a notorious practical jokester, a master of utterly tasteless and moronic one-liners, and never once in his seventy-plus years had the defiant braggart apologized to anyone, admitted a mistake or human frailty. “I was dead wrong… you should have married the goddamn Jew,” he repeated. His raspy voiced betrayed a note of mild consternation, resentment even, but whether the emotion was directed at his daughter or a belated act of contrition was unclear.

“It’s too late for that, don’t you think?” Mary noted, adjusting the nasal oxygen so that her father could derive the maximum benefit. There was no reply. The oxygen catheter was more formality than serious medical intervention, and seven hours later at two in the morning Patty McCarthy died peacefully in his sleep.

At the Moriarty Funeral Parlor attendance was scarce. Only a handful of mourners clustered about the open casket. Mary noted a paternal aunt and uncle. Toward the middle of the empty room two elderly women who had no relationship whatsoever to the deceased were whimpering rather stridently and blotting their eyes with soggy Kleenex. Professional mourners – the dead man’s daughter recognized the eccentric, old-maid sisters who frequented the local funeral homes for morbid entertainment.

The local parish priest entered the room, made the sign of the cross and lingered alongside the casket for a brief moment before retreating to the back of the room. Once the seats filled, he would offer a blessing for the departed, a handful of Hail Marys and hurry back to the rectory. One by one the dead man’s former coworkers, mostly bricklayers and construction workers, trickled into the vestibule. They knelt in front of the casket, offered up silent prayers before patting Mary’s hand and expressing their condolences.


‘Patty McCarthy was a swell man, a fantastic mason! His jokes were corny as hell but he was a true friend. There was no finer Irishman on earth than…’ Mary glanced over at the casket where her father, impervious to the scanty trickle of well-wishers, lay with a habitual scornful smile. Having unceremoniously moved on to the next world, Patty McCarthy, the practical jokester, was still at odds with the temporal universe. Even from the edge of the open grave, the Irishman insisted on a disdainful air.

“Hello, Mary.” A masculine voice jolted her rather rudely out of her melancholy reveries. “I’m so sorry for your loss.” Pushing the dark-framed glasses up on the bridge of his nose, Aaron Goldman was standing in front of her, his lips curled in a gentle smile. The lanky man possessed clean-cut, if somewhat studious, features with curly brown hair and a wispy beard that refused to flourish much in any direction beyond the upper lip.

Mary felt her leg buckle, but was able to regain both her wits and her physical balance. She swept the room with her eyes. Except for a few drinking buddies, brick layers and professional mourners, the funeral parlor remained virtually empty. Even the priest, who had been waiting for the room to fill up, threw in the towel minutes earlier, rushing through his devotionals before fleeing the premises.

Mary glanced over at the casket, where her father’s rigid smile had faded perceptibly. A hint of uncertainty lingered about the dead man’s thin lips. “What’s it been… eight years?”

“More like a decade,” Aaron corrected. “I wanted to call but under the circumstances…”

“My father… he said I should have married you.” She blurted the words all in a heap.

“What‘s that?”

“The day before he died,” Mary explained, “my dad said that he was dead wrong and I should have married you.” She swallowed and her malleable features cycled through a series of unflattering expressions. “Those were his exact words.” Cocking her head to one side, she stared at Aaron with a bittersweet, conspiratorial grin. “Do you think he meant it?”

A prolong silence was followed by a deep sigh. “Probably not… I don’t know.” There was another short pause as he digested the musty facts. “So the old bird finally came around.” Aaron’s caustic tone belied a veiled, self-effacing humor. “I should have stood up to him.”

“Wouldn’t have made a difference,” Mary replied. “Jews, blacks, Protestants… my father was an equal-opportunity bigot.” Her hands fluttered, a self-effacing gesture, in front of her plump torso. “I never dropped the thirty pounds I gained after out breakup.”

“And, if you hadn’t noticed, my hair in the front is ancient history… male pattern balding,” Aaron joked. “I went to see your father.”

Mary felt the breath catch in her throat. “When was that?”

“Ten years ago… that August, following his ultimatum.”

Again, Mary’s neck pivoted a full ninety degrees. Was her imagination playing tricks on her or had the corpse’s smile vanished altogether now, replaced by a look of consternation bordering on full-fledged panic? Mary placed a hand on his shoulder. “We can’t really talk here. Come with me.”

She led the way out into the lobby. Near the rear of the building was a cozy room with moss green wallpaper and a handful of elegant end tables and chairs. “This room is reserved exclusively for next-of-kin.” Shutting the door noiselessly and locking it behind her, she took a seat on a plush sofa. “Now tell me about you meeting with my father.”

* * * * *

A decade earlier, the third Saturday in October, sixteen year-old Mary McCarthy called out sick to Ryan’s Diner, where she waitressed weekends. Aaron was in the back of the restaurant bundling place settings when a waitress stuck her head in the door. “Some guy’s asking for you. He’s waiting out by the dumpster.”

Aaron grabbed his jacket and hurried into the parking lot, where Patty McCarthy was leaning up against a Ford pickup truck with a battered tailgate. The man smiled broadly when Aaron appeared. “Friend of a friend tells me you been keeping time with my lovely daughter.”

Aaron didn’t know what to say. The middle-aged man’s unctuous smile and breezy manner had the feel of a feral tomcat toying with a mouse. “I ain’t got nothin’ against your kind.” He waved his hand in a theatrical gesture. “People of the Book - that’s what they call your kinfolk.” Lowering his eyes, Patty McCarthy stared intently at a pair of dust covered, steel-toed work boots. “Well, unfortunately, my people much prefer a different book altogether.”

“Jews,” Aaron muttered, “my people are Jews.”

“Yeah, whatever…” The syrupy smile dissipated, dribbled away to nothing and the pale blues eyes turned harsh as an inch-thick slab of hickory. “If my daughter continues seeing you, she’ll need to find new accommodations.”

The shock of seeing Patty McCarthy was wearing off and a wary resentment settling in its place. “You’d throw your teenage daughter out in the street because she dates a Jew?”

“I’m not an unreasonable sort,” he deftly brushed the remark aside. “The choice is Mary’s and, as a god-fearing Christian, I’m sure my darling daughter will do the honorable thing.”

“And if she doesn’t?”

The man cocked his head to one side considering his options.

Stepping back, Patty McCarthy rubbed the sunburned back of his neck and his lips twisted imperceptibly in a sadistic smirk. “It’s over between the two of you!” He climbed into the cab of the truck, fired up the engine and drove away.

Following her father’s visit, Mary McCarthy never returned to Ryan’s Diner. The girl quit without notice. The grotesque absurdity about throwing his young daughter out in the cold may have been all bluster but the end result was still the same. The romance was ruined, made ugly, defiled and laughable. Aaron never saw the freckle-faced, Irish girl again.

* * * * *

A solid oak, grandfather clock perched in the corner of the tiny room, struck the quarter hour, triggering a set of musical chimes in a modal motif. When Aaron paused, Mary noted, “But there’s more… you said you went somewhere to meet my father.”

“Yes, I was just getting to that part.”

Mary glanced distractedly at the clock. “Unfortunately I need to get back to the receiving line. What with the wake and tomorrow’s funeral, I’ve still got dozens of loose ends to tidy up. Perhaps you could stop by my house this Saturday so we can pick up where you left off.”

* * * * *

Shortly after ten o’clock the following Saturday, Aaron arrived at a modest split-level ranch house. “Teddy, my significant other,” Mary joked, indicating a small, black and white Lhasa apso growling at him from the bedroom doorway. Mary gestured at his left hand. “You never married?”

“Never had the luxury.”

“Wish I could say the same.” In the street they heard the crunch and grinding of gears as the truck which gathered the recyclables pulled up to the property. The sound of bottles and plastic cascading into the bin was followed by another metallic grunt as the diesel truck lurched further down the road. “My first husband was a nasty drunk, the second preferred to spend his weekends at the race track. They made my life a living hell.”

“Well, thankfully that’s all in the past,” Aaron replied.

“What do Jews say about the next world… the pearly gates?”

“Not much” The dog, which had finally recovered from his initial anxiety, was sniffing Aaron’s pant leg and making moist, snuffling sounds. “The rabbis have remarkably little to say about the hereafter. We live in the here and now; the rest takes care of itself.”

“But what if things get botched up along the way?”

He grinned at her good-naturedly. “Junk in the trunk.” With a poised thumb and index finger Aaron stroked the hair covering his upper lip in a repetitive gesture. “It makes no difference. Modern Judaism generally teaches that humans are born sin-free, untainted. Even if they choose to screw things up later and bring endless suffering on themselves, everyone has a certain amount of control over their fate.” His grin deepened. “It’s sort of the opposite of original sin.”

“Now you’re making fun of Catholics,” Mary teased.

“There is a religious book, the Shulchan Aruch,” Aaron continued, “that sets down a list of rules people can follow in order to live happy, productive lives.”

“How many rules?”

“Six-hundred and thirteen.”

“Sounds like a lot of work,” she quipped.

“You don’t have to know more than a half dozen or so. If you just follow the spirit of the teachings, everything else eventually falls in place.”

She placed a coffee cup in the sink and grabbed a leash draped over the back of a chair. “Teddy hasn’t been outside to do his business since this morning. Let’s go for a walk in the park, and you can finish the story you were telling me at the wake.”

* * * * *

The Brandenberg Athletic Field three blocks away sported a soccer field, three baseball diamonds and a walking trail through wooded groves of pine, oak and sugar maples. No sooner had they arrived then a Toyota van with a blown muffler pulled into the parking lot. “Here comes trouble,” Mary noted, as a middle-aged man threw open the passenger side door and three, tiny Chihuahuas hurtled out of the vehicle, yipping, yapping and tangling the elaborate leash system that held them as a single unit. Teddy immediately began kicking at the ground furtively with his hind legs sending up a spray of loose dirt, leaves and pebbles.

“He doesn’t like them very much.” Mary tugged the Lhasa apso off toward a set of children’s swings as the howling mob caught sight of the Lhasa and became even more agitated. “We go through this at least twice a week.” Struggling to regain control, the owner of the deranged dogs cracked a toothy grin and waved energetically. “Nice guy but his dogs are demonic.”

Aaron watched as Teddy sniffed at an outcropping of thorny bushes and peed on a rotting stump before sauntering off in search of new interests. “How was the funeral?”

“Hardly anyone showed up… a few old-timers from the brick layer’s union, the two crackpot sisters who attend every anonymous funeral and hardly any relatives.”

“That’s sad.”

“At the wake people always feel obligated to praise the deceased. They tell you what a swell guy he was… so thoughtful, considerate, funny and clever. But my father wasn’t a nice person… not really.”

They wandered past a basketball court, where a half dozen teens in jeans and sweatshirts were hurtling about the blacktop in an impromptu pick-up game. As they approached a children’s playground with a plastic tunnel slide and jungle gym, the Chihuahuas came into view again and immediately went into attack mode, baring their fangs and howling at the top of their diminutive lungs.

“My significant other suffers from a Napoleon complex.” She pointed at Teddy who was snarling and straining at the leash. “It wouldn’t matter if the Chihuahuas were pit bulls, mastiffs or German Sheppard. Teddy’s the alpha-dog.”

Alongside one of the baseball diamonds, they sat down on a bench in back of home plate. A man was pitching balls from a plastic bucket to his son in the batting box. “Fatal flaws,” Mary addressed her words in the general direction of the third base bag. “Each of my former spouses was riddled with fatal flaws.”

“We’re all mortal, fallible,” Aaron noted in a conciliatory tone.

“Yes, I know that, but my husbands took ‘dysfunctional’ to a new level.”

“You didn’t realize that before you married them?”

Mary shrugged. “When we dated everything was heavenly; it was like the men in my life weren’t interested in marriage so much as interviewing for an executive position in a Fortune 500 company… not a real vocation but a nebulous job in the abstract.”

“You want to be a brain surgeon,” Aaron quipped. “No education or prior experience required. Here’s your scalpel now get to work.”

Mary shook her head fitfully, as though ridding herself of a bitter aftertaste. “In each instance, I mistook a vice for harmless foible.”

On the baseball diamond the father was lobbing pitches in an underhand fashion. The boy, who looked to be in his early teens, cocked the bat with masculine bravura and swung aggressively at a low pitch. “Eyes down. Stop jerking your head,” the father hollered. “Keep focused until the bat makes contact with the ball!”

Crack! A ball skittered across the infield dirt into left field. Following each swing, the pitcher fished a new ball from the plastic pail, but now the container was empty and the twosome meandered about the field refilling the bucket. “I was still a virgin… a parochial school innocent when we met. Then everything fell to pieces.” She nodded bitterly then cleared her throat. “It was An Drochshoal.”

“Bad life,” Aaron mumbled softly, picking up on the thread of her previous remark.”

“You remembered?”

“Yes, of course.”

Once, when Aaron demanded to know why he couldn’t come to the house and meet her family, Mary said, “Do you know what happened to the Irish people under British rule?”

“I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything.”

“The potato famine,” she blithely ignored his protests, “was a period of starvation in Ireland during the eighteen hundreds. A million Irish died during the blight; a million more immigrated to America. But there was plenty of food and no one deserved to suffer.”

“And why’s that?”

“The land was owned by English absentee landlords. They grew wheat, which wasn’t damaged by the fungus. They raised cattle, dairy cows, sheep, pigs and chickens. But all the produce was for export.” “So the Irish starved and lived in squalor while the English, who were already wealthy, became even richer.” Mary cracked an acerbic smile. “It’s what we call An Drochshoal. The last word she pronounced with a Gaelic twist.”

“Which mean?”

“An Drochshoal,… the bad life.”

“The Irish potato famine wasn’t a Jewish conspiracy. It was a goddamn fungus.”

“Try telling that to Patty McCarthy.”

“Irish history be damned!” Aaron flung the argument back in her face. “Jews had their own ‘bad life’, what with the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and Nazi holocaust.”

“The only thing my father hates worse than the English is Jews.”

Aaron placed a kiss on the velvety skin where the neck curled up under her throat. “I’m basically agnostic. I’ll tell him that, when I finally meet your crusty old man.”

She pushed him away. “That’s not funny.”

“So what can we do?”

“I don’t know… haven’t planned that far ahead.”

They were sitting at a rear booth in Ryan’s Diner. “This is America, the land of the melting pot. We shouldn’t have to sneak around like common criminals.”

“My father doesn’t know from the Statue of Liberty; his national hero isn’t George Washington. He worships people like Charles Stewart Parnell, the Irish patriot who went about collecting money for bread and lead. He idolizes J.M. Synge, Sean O’Casey and Padraic Colum… the Irish nationalists”

* * * * *

On another occasion, Mary said, “William Butler Yeats… does the name mean anything to you?”

“The Irish poet,” Aaron replied.

“In eighteen eighty-nine,” Mary continued, “Yeats met Maude Gonne, a twenty-three year-old Irish revolutionary, suffragette and actress. Yeats became infatuated with her beauty and outspoken manner. Two years later he proposed marriage but was rejected.”

“Yeats claimed that from the moment he met the woman ‘the troubling of my life began.’” Mary McCarthy shook her auburn head up and down confirming the truthfulness of the facts. “Yeats begged her to marry him three more times over the next few years but was turned away and three years into the new century, Maude married the Irish freedom fighter, Major John McBride.”

“And how did that work out?”

“Not good. McBride was eventually executed by the British for his role in the nineteen sixteen Easter Uprising.” Without warning, Mary reached out with a taut index finger and thumped Aaron harshly in the chest. “In Patty McCarthy’s sequel to the story,” the young girl sputtered with lethal fury, “you’re the pitiful and loveless Yeats, not John McBride.”

A week after Mary told him about Maude Gonne, Aaron Goldman visited the public library and found a poem that the poet wrote in tribute to his lost love.

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with gold and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

* * * * *

“We passed an Olive Garden not far from here.” Still lingering at the Brandenberg Athletic Field, Aaron rose to his feet. “I’d like to take you out to dinner.”

“You still didn’t tell me about meeting my father,” Mary reminded him for the third time.

“I can explain everything at supper.”

Mary stared at the dog, which had lain down on the grass and was watching a gray squirrel scampering about the wooded area. “Then we best start home, so I can settle Teddy in for the rest of the day.”


At the house, Mary set out bowls of dog food and fresh water. In the bathroom she powdered her nose and freshened her lipstick, while Aaron looked on with a genial expression. “I always felt safe with you.”

“We were just kids,” Aaron noted, “too naive to know from any funny stuff.”

The woman came and stood in front of him, so close that he could feel her breath on his cheek. “And this… what we have been doing for the past couple of hours,” she splayed her hands, palms raised, “feels like an extension of that distant past.”

“With one exception,” Aaron countered. “We don’t have your father to contend with.”

“You should have married the Jew.” She repeated verbatim what she told him earlier at the musty funeral home. “That’s what he told me, as though the deathbed confession absolved him of complicity in a crime.”

“What crime?”

“Destroying our future happiness.”

* * * * *

At the Olive Garden restaurant, Aaron ordered the Zuppa Toscana while Mary settled on the chicken piccata. The waiter went off and returned a minute later with bread sticks and a bowl of tossed salad. Diagonally across from their table, a young couple seated in a booth was midway through their meal. The lovebirds talked fervently in hushed tones. The brunette laughed at something her mate said and the twosome, oblivious to the throng of customers, leaned closer over the table.

“Those two,” Aaron gestured with a flick of his head, “are about the same age we were the last time we spent time together.”

Mary broke a breadstick in half and raised the warm roll to her lips, “And now, ten years older and wiser, what friendly advice would you offer them?”

Heaping his plate with salad, Aaron replied, “I’d tell them that whether you believe in Jesus, Allah, Buddha or some toothless swami in a geriatric diaper, love your soul mate to distraction and don’t worry about incidentals. God put us here to be blissfully happy; it’s your immutable birthright. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“Anything else?”

Aaron lowered his eyes and thought a moment. Reaching into his pocket he withdrew his wallet and fished about until he located a crumpled slip of paper, which he handed across the table. “I’d show them this.”

Mary studied the faded script, handwritten with a stubby pencil. “It’s the poem Yeats wrote in tribute to Maude Gonne.” Her voice barely rose above a whisper.

“God put us here to be blissfully happy.” Mary lingered over his earlier words. “And were you happy?”

“After we broke up, I swore off the opposite sex… took a romantic sabbatical of sorts and only dated sporadically after that.”

“Anyone special?”

“They were all special and it was never a matter of confusing vices with harmless foible.”

Mary blushed. “Now you’re poking fun of me.”

“One relationship lasted five years… another three. Each woman was precious in her own right. Now I’ve earned the rare privilege to cherish you a second time.” Aaron stabbed at a cherry tomato. “And you… were you happy?”

Mary glanced at the young couple who, caught up in the romantic euphoria, were still chattering away. “They aren’t even old enough to drink,” she deflected the conversation elsewhere.

“Excuse me?”

“That young boy is sipping lemonade and she’s got one of those fruity Italian sodas.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“I loved each of my husbands until it became too much work, too painful and then -” She let the thought peter out in ambiguity. “I treasured you much like these two in the corner booth.” She gestured covertly with her eyes. Reaching across the table she slipped her hand over his slender wrist and, as an afterthought added, “I cherish you still.”

The food finally arrived. Aaron stirred his soup. The russet potatoes had been sliced into thin wedges, the shredded kale, Swiss chard, minced garlic and Italian sausage, swimming in a white broth that sent up a heady, herbal aroma. “I went to see your father,” Aaron spoke somberly, measuring his words. “When all was lost, our dreams trashed and sodomized, I decided to make one last appeal.”

* * * * *

The day after Patty McCarthy’s visit to Ryan’s Diner, Aaron drove south on Interstate 95 through the gritty mill town of Pawtucket, past the Rhode Island State House. He parked on a side street across from the Acorn Tap and hoofed it over to the Federal Hill district. For the past six months, Patty McCarthy, a union mason, was working a long-term construction job on Valley Street near downtown Providence. A federally-funded high-rise building for the elderly, the massive venture would run full-throttle straight through to the end of the year.

The rough shell of the multi-story complex was fenced off from the public by a six-foot, chain link fence. Fifty feet away a heavy-set man with a short handle shovel was transferring freshly mixed mortar from a motorized mixer to a metal trough. When the trough was three-quarters full, with the soupy gray sludge, it was transferred onto a wooden pallet and then, with the aid of a crane, hoisted forty feet into the air to the uppermost level of the building, where a crew of workmen was laying sixteen-inch, split ribbed blocks.

“Patty McCarthy?” Aaron called out.

The workman brandishing the shovel approached the fence, raised a stubby finger caked with half-dried mortar and pointed at a clot of men to the far right of the topmost landing. “Third from the right.” The man removed his hard hat and wiped his forehead with a blue handkerchief. “His crew won’t be coming down on break for a good half hour or so.” The worker went back to the mixer. Stabbing with the blade of his shovel at a sixty-pound bag of mortar mix which lay on the ground, he ripped the protective cover away and began shoveling the soft powder into the spinning barrel of the mixer.

Third from the right… Aaron peered up into the skeletal building, where the masons worked in pairs. Slathering the top and leading edge of the highest row, they reached down and grabbed opposite ends of a block, gently easing it into place against its mate.

Tap. Tap. Tap. They thumped the split-rib block with the heel of their trowels. Bending over the edge of the building, one of the workmen trimmed the excess mortar away, letting it fall harmlessly four stories to the ground. Every two or three blocks they paused to check their handiwork with a 48-inch level.

Another few minutes and the crew would be taking their break. What exactly did Aaron Goldman have in mind to say, when Patty McCarthy was finally standing in front of him? “I love your daughter, Mary, and my intentions are honorable.” No, that wouldn’t work. Perhaps he could appeal to the Irishman’s poetic nature and mention the heavens’ embroidered cloths, the importance of treading ever-so-softly on cherished dreams.

Hooweeeee! A shrill whistle abruptly separated Aaron from his mawkish stupor. When Patty McCarthy rode down in a bucket truck, an impromptu elevator, following the noon whistle, a workman informed him that a skinny kid was waiting to speak to him.

“I don’t see nobody,” the Irishman sputtered.

“Over there by the fence… been waiting the better part of half an hour.” The squat fellow manning the mixer gestured with his eyes but no one was there.”

* * * * *

“So you never confronted my father,” Mary said.

“Nothing was to be gained. It was an act of desperation. Aaron wiped his mouth with the cloth napkin. “When the whistle blew, I cut my loses and went home.”

She laughed softly but it was not a particularly pleasant sound. “You did the right thing. I’ve seen how vindictive my father could become when put on the defensive. He would have spit in your face.”

When the meal was done, Aaron pushed his plate aside. “Desert?”

“Couldn’t eat another bite.” Aaron swiveled in his seat to signal the waitress that they were done. “Anyone waiting for you at home?” Mary asked.

“Just a stripped tabby that’s probably curled up on the living room couch.”

“Then spend the night with me.”

Aaron’s features melted in a generous grin. “I was hoping you’d ask.”

“And if I hadn’t?”

“I’d have waited to the last possible moment and then begged you to let me stay the night.” Leaving a generous tip, Aaron paid the bill, and they went out into an evening night shot through with gold and silver light, the blue and the dim and the dark cloths of night and light and of the half light of their damaged but undiminished dreams.

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