“I was at the Foodmaster,” John Mullins said above the rain and arpeggios. “I thought it was the old nerves.”
Victim Was a Writer
Rita Damiano Kernaghan, whose death was the only one reported in yesterday’s earthquake in Ipswich, was a popular lecturer on the local New Age circuit and the author of three books on inspirational topics. She was 68 years old.
Kernaghan was perhaps best known for the battle she and the Town of Ipswich had waged since 1986 concerning the pyramidal structure she erected on the roof of her home, a farmhouse built within the town limits of Ipswich in 1765 and enlarged in 1623 under the direction of George Stonemarsh, a leading post-Revolutionary era architect.
In 1987 the Ipswich Town Meeting conceded that a clerical error had resulted in the granting of a building permit for the pyramid, and acted to retroactively enforce the local landmarks-preservation code and ordered the removal of the pyramid. Kernaghan sued the town in 1988 and later refused an out-of-court settlement under which the town would have paid the cost of removing the pyramid and restoring the house to its original 1823 design.
Kernaghan maintained that her right to build the pyramid —a geometrical form held by some to exert healing and preservative influences—is a First Amendment issue, rooted in the separation of church and state. The case, still unresolved, has become a cause celebre in the north-suburban New Age community.
Kernaghan, whose printed works include “Beginning Life at 60,” “Star Children,” and the recently published “Princess of Italy,” was the widow of Boston attorney John Alfred Kernaghan. She is survived by a step-daughter, Melanie Holland of Cleveland.
Higher and higher the soprano’s fundamentals rose, a slow upward spiral of hysteria. Louis was frowning, his pinky on the bridge of his glasses, his fingertips on his hairline, his thumb on his jaw. The thing he couldn’t stop looking at was his mother’s name. Not because the Globe had stuck her in Cleveland but for the name’s sheer personal resonant presence in print on paper. Melanie Holland: this was his mother, peculiarly reduced. Two words in a Boston paper.
Still frowning, and also beginning now to shiver, as if when the raindrops hit the windowpanes behind him their chill came right on through, he looked again at the boxed article about the Reverend Philip Stites. “Up Tremont Street” it said, “and across the Common to the steps of the State House.” The facts were consistent with what Louis himself had seen of the march—con sistent in a deep way, because the article, like memory, like dreams, reduced the event to an idea, illuminated not by twilight and streetlight but by its own light, in the darkness of his head: he saw it because he knew that this was what had happened, because he knew that this was how things had been. And therefore it seemed to him that it could only be raining this morning. The rain had to be there to make this day different, to bar any return to yesterday afternoon and the particular conditions of atmosphere and light through which those marchers had been marching, the blue northern clarity of light in greater Boston when the earthquake struck. The rain made the morning real, so unshakably present that it was hard to believe there’d even been an earthquake; to believe the accidents had occurred anywhere but on paper.
Stacked against one wall of the bedroom were his cartons of radio equipment, which he’d faithfully shipped from Evanston to Houston and from Houston to Boston and never unpacked. He worked his fingernail under the duct tape holding the top carton closed. Strength failed him. He staggered to his futon, one foot slipping on the open Globe, crashed heavily and lay face down until long after the arpeggios had stopped.
Sunday night he had dinner with his family in a fish restaurant on the harbor. He was surprised to hear that his mother and Eileen took it for granted that Rita Kernaghan had fallen to her death less because an earthquake shoved her than because she was blind drunk at the time. Then again, they’d known her and he hadn’t. The word was she’d fallen off a barstool, which sounded like a joke in bad taste but was apparently the literal truth. She was being cremated privately on Wednesday morning, her ashes hurled from a pier in Rockport on the afternoon of same, and her life celebrated the next day at a memorial service that Louis was expected to take time off from work to attend. His mother, obviously impatient with the whole deceased-disposal process, referred to the service as “the thing on Thursday.”
It wasn’t until shortly before “the thing” that he saw his parents again. He’d done Dan Drexel’s board work until ten in the morning, and then, possibly a little hurt that his mother hadn’t planned any other get-togethers or shown any interest in where he lived and worked (“hurt,” however, maybe not the word for his feelings towards a family in which people rarely had the resources to take or fake a personal interest in anyone’s life but their own, “regret” or “bitterness” or “general sadness” maybe being more like it), drove straight to their hotel, a newish medium-rise by the river in Cambridge, just off Harvard Square. It would later transpire that his mother had made his father spend two afternoons in Widener Library so they could write off his half of the trip. Outside their door, at the end of a hushed hallway, Louis raised his hand but didn’t knock. He lowered it again.
“Eileen, that’s not the point.”
“Well, what is the point.”
“The point is to show some consideration for my feelings and try to understand things from my side. This has been an extremely upsetting—Yes! Yes!—an extremely upsetting week! So you might at least have had the consideration to wait—”
“You’re happy she’s dead! You’re happy!”
“That’s a very muffle muffle muffle to any person, muffle your mother. A very un-Christian thing.”
“It’s true”
“I have to get dressed now.”
“It’s true. You’re happy!”
“I must get dressed. Although I can’t help wondering—well, muffle muffle muffle a young man who would put his casual girlfriend—”
“His what?!” Eileen’s high voice went twice as high. “His casual girlfriend up to—”
“His—!? What are you talking about? This has nothing to do with Peter. And for your information—”
“Oh Eileen.”
“For your information—”
Here Louis, with a gesture of disgust, threw his fist against the door a couple times. Eileen let him in. Tears had muddied her eyeliner.
“Who is it?” their mother said from behind the bathroom door.
“It’s Louis,” Eileen said grimly.
“Hi Louis, I’m dressing.”
Eileen retreated towards the window, which looked out over the river at her business school. She was wearing the same bulky sweater she’d had on the last time Louis saw her. Today it looked as if she’d been sleeping in it.
“Where’s Dad?” Louis said.
“He’s at the pool. What are you doing here so early?”
Louis thought a moment. “What are you doing here so early?”
She made a ghastly teenaged face at him, tongue and gums showing, and turned to face the window. Louis scratched his ear thoughtfully. Then, shifting gears, he prowled, he snooped. On one of the hotel room’s many luggage surfaces, lying like junk mail amid car keys and open Trident packages, he found a pair of official-looking documents, a police report and a medical examiner’s report, the back sides of which his mother had been using to jot down names and phone numbers. He looked at the official sides while Eileen carefully rubbed the skin around her eyes and their mother punctuated long bathroom silences with dressing and grooming noises. The police report consisted principally of the