Charming Billy (10 page)
Authors: Alice McDermott
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Literary, #United States, #Contemporary Fiction
He would have something to tell the priest at St. Philomena’s on Saturday.
Two weeks later, Holtzman and his mother came down by train to assess the boys’ progress and, for the shoe salesman’s sake, to get some idea of just when they might return to the city and their real jobs. Holtzman was a generous man in his
way, and he appeared to love his petite wife to distraction, but while half a century of bachelorhood had made him more than ready to indulge her, it had also made him wary. A nation’s gratitude was all well and good, but it, like his, was not to be taken advantage of, and should not be expected, he told his wife at the Jamaica station, to outlast the first gesture. The gesture had been made, they had had their hiatus on Long Island. Uncle Sam might be offering twelve for twelve, but he himself put more stock in a young man’s financial independence.
way, and he appeared to love his petite wife to distraction, but while half a century of bachelorhood had made him more than ready to indulge her, it had also made him wary. A nation’s gratitude was all well and good, but it, like his, was not to be taken advantage of, and should not be expected, he told his wife at the Jamaica station, to outlast the first gesture. The gesture had been made, they had had their hiatus on Long Island. Uncle Sam might be offering twelve for twelve, but he himself put more stock in a young man’s financial independence.
And yet the sight of the restored little house elated him. Billy acted as tour guide, and as he pointed out each improvement they had made, Mr. Holtzman congratulated them both for their skillful way with plaster and paint and fresh wood. He patted his heart with forefinger and thumb—it was a gesture of his that always made Dennis think of someone feeding coins into a machine—and told them how, fifteen years before, he had bought the house on impulse, after seeing an ad in the nether reaches of the newspaper. He’d had no idea then what he’d do with it, he said, he only knew it was a good price, an incredible price, as much as the woman who sold it to him—daughter of the now-bankrupt builder—might once have paid for a new dress. Less. He touched his heart. He only knew that he shouldn’t pass it up, just as you wouldn’t pass up a dime you saw on the sidewalk, even if you had a mason jar filled with them at home. Just as you wouldn’t pass a pile of junk at the curb if you saw something, a chair, a table, a three-legged telephone stand, that was usable and whole. (Which explained, Dennis thought, the one in the hallway of the Jamaica house.) She was throwing the house away; he picked it up.
Dennis’s mother, in the meantime, strolled through the tiny rooms as if she’d expected no less than smooth walls and fresh paint and new fixtures in the tiny bath. “We’re going to have to do something about this furniture if we’re going to rent
next season,” she told her husband, and Holtzman said, “Sure,” in a way that even Dennis could tell—and he hardly knew the man—meant he had no intention of renting at all.
next season,” she told her husband, and Holtzman said, “Sure,” in a way that even Dennis could tell—and he hardly knew the man—meant he had no intention of renting at all.
They drove to the bay, passing as they did the newly risen frame of another bungalow. “I think this place is going to get popular,” Billy told him. “Long Island’s going to start booming, Mr. Holtzman,” he said. “You’re lucky to have your foot in the door.” And Holtzman nodded, fed some more coins to his heart. So well pleased with himself that Dennis couldn’t help but say, glancing into the rearview mirror, “There’re two sides to lucky, aren’t there? There’s the guy who picks up the dime and the guy who drops it, isn’t there?”
But Holtzman wasn’t the sort to imagine himself into anyone else’s life. “You boys did a fine job,” he said again, as if a compliment was what Dennis was fishing for.
At the beach, they watched him hop awkwardly over the shells and rocks that edged the water and then dive into the bay. Was there another GI in America, Dennis wondered, who had returned from the war to find that a fat German had married his mother?
His mother sat beside him on the blanket he had spread out for her, the wool field blanket he had carried across Europe. She watched her husband from under a straw hat and behind dark glasses, inscrutable.
The day was warm and humidly overcast. Mary and Eva were at a Firemen’s Fair with the children. They wouldn’t see them today—which he was beginning to think was just as well. Billy was standing at the foot of the blanket, still wearing his T-shirt and pants and his boots, staring out at the water. He had not said Eva’s name since they had met his mother and Holtzman at the station, which was either a remarkable display of restraint or a devastating string of opportunityless hours. Either way, Dennis thought, that, too, was just as well.
He had learned at an early age to be careful about what he brought his mother—odd paintings or dreams, fanciful plans—not because she had no interest in him (he was her only child and she was in her way an adoring mother), but because in an instant, he knew, she could show him that the painting was unintelligible, the dream nonsense, the plans intemperate or illogical, or fatally incomplete. She would not do so cruelly or blindly or with any sense of mean-spiritedness, but rather in the same careful and loving way another mother might tell a child that the aspirin was not candy and the laundry bleach not fruit punch.
Growing up, Dennis knew that whenever his father left the kitchen table or walked out of the room, he had only to glance at his mother to learn that whatever story the man had just told them was a lie, an exaggeration, a rehearsal for or a rehash of a story he would tell or had told someone else—the passengers in his car or the men in the saloon or whoever happened to be living in their parlor. Dennis had only to glance at his mother to learn that the man, for all the people in New York City who worshipped him, was flawed, difficult, full of too many other people’s lives and not enough of their own, of her own.
What his mother would make of Billy’s rabid infatuation he could only guess, but his sense was that it would grow thin under her steady gaze, become a childish delusion, perhaps even to Billy himself. She would, he knew, put it into perspective for him, remind him that it was summer and he’d just returned from the war; that this girl, this Eva, was a stranger, after all, with plans of her own, back to her own country in another few weeks and, when you came right down to it, on fifty a week from Con Ed (minus train fare and clothing and the rent he’d have to pay his poor mother), how likely was it
that he’d be sending for her anytime soon? His mother would, Dennis knew, open Billy’s eyes for him, diminish things.
that he’d be sending for her anytime soon? His mother would, Dennis knew, open Billy’s eyes for him, diminish things.
But of course two hours without Eva’s name crossing his lips was far more than Billy could stand.
He sat heavily at the foot of the blanket and began to unlace his boots. “Where did they say they were going today?” he asked Dennis over his shoulder. “Montauk?”
Dennis glanced at his mother, who had inclined her head toward them ever so slightly.
“A Firemen’s Fair,” Dennis said.
Billy nodded and smiled. “The children will love that, won’t they. Let’s hope Mary and Eva can keep up.”
Now his mother turned her face, the blind eyes of her dark glasses, fully toward him. Love, Dennis thought, had made Billy not rude but insidious. He knew the discourtesy of this private exchange—the violation of that primary, schoolboy rule of social intercourse, “Is there something you’d like to share with the class?”—would force Dennis’s hand. Force him to explain.
“Some children we met here at the beach,” he told her. “Seven of them, steps and stairs. They come here every afternoon with their nursemaids so they can paddle in the bay. They have a house in the village, but they like to come here because one of the little girls …”
“Sally,” Billy added, unable to resist. He was in love with all of them.
“Sally,” Dennis continued, “is terrified of the waves.”
His mother smiled a little under her dark glasses. She was sitting erectly on the blanket, holding one knee. Her skin was ivory white and downy and scattered with pale freckles. In the shade of her hat she could have been twenty.
“They have a fabulous house,” Billy went on, the opportunity here at last. “Nearly a mansion, and they just use it in the
summer. Pudding Hill Lane is the name of the street. Like something from a nursery rhyme, don’t you think? Seven children in a house on Pudding Hill Lane.”
summer. Pudding Hill Lane is the name of the street. Like something from a nursery rhyme, don’t you think? Seven children in a house on Pudding Hill Lane.”
“You’ve been there?” his mother said pleasantly. Billy blushed from his throat to the roots of his hair—no, from his waist to the roots of his hair; even his white T-shirt seemed to turn pink. “We’ve taken the girls out,” he said. “The nursemaids, what, Dennis, two, three times now?”
“About that,” Dennis said, and pulled his own shirt up over his head. “Are you going to swim?” he asked Billy, cutting short a sentence that began “They’re Irish girls …” Billy still had his glasses on and so had vision enough to catch Dennis’s look.
“All right,” he said, reluctantly pulling off his shirt, reluctantly closing the marvelous door that for a moment had allowed him to say Eva, Sally, Mary, Pudding Hill Lane …
As they waded into the water Dennis said softly, “Don’t tell her any more about the girls.”
Billy looked at him with innocent, myopic eyes. “All right,” he said, and then could not help but add, “Guilt must be a terrible thing.”
Dennis felt the reproach but laughed. It was, after all, Billy’s sweet romance he had thought to preserve.
“Guilt is glorious,” Dennis told him with a wink. “When it’s well earned.” And then dove into the same salt water Holtzman was floating in—making, when you thought about it, a fine stew.
HIS MOTHER ALWAYS IRONED Holtzman’s shirt first, down in the basement of the Jamaica house, on an ironing board she set up once, in April of ’45, and never took down again. She washed their shirts by hand in the sink down there and then ironed them the next morning. Holtzman’s first, she said, because he was, after all, her husband, the owner of this spacious house, sponsor of the feast. Her son’s second, because the iron would be hotter by then and so make a neater collar. Loyalty, to blood or to water, being a complicated thing for his mother.
The routine they fell into after he and Billy returned from Long Island that summer was a balancing act. She’d be in the kitchen when Dennis came down in the morning, making his coffee and buttering his toast, but she’d never eat anything herself. She’d wait for Holtzman. Instead, she’d lean against the counter and watch her son, assessing: the cut of his suit, the knot in his tie, the prospects for his future. Although at that time in her life she had held only two jobs herself—one in a bakery in Brooklyn, one in the mailroom of the gas company—she had a considered opinion about what the workaday world could do to you, and it wasn’t a very high opinion, either, despite her Protestant blood.
In part, she objected to the monotony of nine-to-five, the tedium, the hours and days you ended up wishing away, swinging from one Saturday morning to another like a monkey at the zoo. In part, it was the anonymity: Forget what dreams you’d dreamt the night before, forget the adoring eye that beheld you over breakfast, or even the grief that had been wringing out your soul all night long, because the way she saw it, once you boarded the subway or the bus or joined the crawling stream of automobiles or found your space in the revolving door, the elevator, behind the desk or the counter or the machine, you became what you really were—you became, when you got right down to it, what you really were: one of the so many million, just one more.
As a boy, Dennis had been made to recite “The Village Blacksmith” for every guest and boarder and drinking partner his father brought to the house. He would stand in the middle of the parlor or, in summer, when the place was stifling with immigrants and heat, in the middle of a circle of them up on the roof, and emote: “Under a spreading chestnut tree …”
Whenever he reached the lines
Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night’s repose.
Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night’s repose.
his old dad’s eyes would fill with tears—a full stanza behind the tears that had already sprung to the eyes of every other Irishman in the room as soon as he figured out that the blacksmith’s wife was dead—and when the poem was finished, those were the lines his father would ask him to repeat.
Dennis had only to glance at his mother to learn that she
found no charm in the words, that it sounded to her like monotony. A slow march to an unremarkable end.
found no charm in the words, that it sounded to her like monotony. A slow march to an unremarkable end.
The job at Edison, in fact, had been a gift to his dying father from Bart Carroll and Uncle Jim, who already worked there, back in ’37, when Dennis was eighteen. “The greatest city in the world will always need electricity,” his father had said, well pleased, his face under the hospital lights already a death’s-head. The death’s-door smell of ether. The other visitors around him—brothers, cousins, friends—had agreed. “Dennis will do all right,” they’d said, touching his shoulder, patting his back, turning him a bit so he would not see the way his father drew up his knees under the thin sheets, so he would not see his father, who had loved life, being pulled from it, writhing, by a miserable death.
“Any one of the utilities would be a safe bet,” they told him, turning him away. “But you can’t do better than Edison, Dennis. There’s security, if you stick with them. Stick with the company and you’ll be fine.”
At home, his mother said, Cooper Union, City College, the RCA Institute if electricity’s what you’re interested in. A public-speaking course then. The service, officer’s training. Something else. Something more.
He had humored her, sitting through night classes when he could, joining the Army in ’41, telling her, to her consternation, that there wasn’t much he wanted in the long run. That when he got right down to it, he was happy enough with what he had.
Now, on these mornings after he and Billy had returned from their hiatus on Long Island, she watched him get ready to go to the office, forever ordinary, as far as she was concerned, forever out of uniform and in suits that she thought could have been better tailored (although his shirt was well
pressed). She watched him eat his breakfast, adjust his hat in the mirror in the hall, lift his briefcase and his umbrella, and head out to the bus that would take him to the subway that would take him to the office, precisely as she knew he would be doing for the next forty years, and she would not be able to disguise her regret. He could see it in her face as she watched from the front window: good-natured son, loyal employee like his father, one of the so many million. Just one more.
pressed). She watched him eat his breakfast, adjust his hat in the mirror in the hall, lift his briefcase and his umbrella, and head out to the bus that would take him to the subway that would take him to the office, precisely as she knew he would be doing for the next forty years, and she would not be able to disguise her regret. He could see it in her face as she watched from the front window: good-natured son, loyal employee like his father, one of the so many million. Just one more.
Holtzman would come down the stairs as Dennis went out the door, and he’d always take his time saying good morning to her and putting on his hat and his coat, making sure that Dennis was a good three or four blocks ahead of him before he himself set out to pick up his morning paper at the corner store. If the bus was late, Dennis would see him there, tossing a nickel into the cigar box where Dennis had just tossed his. They’d both raise their respective copies, intent on three-inch headlines and at the ready with an expression of complete surprise (Well, hello, didn’t see you) should either one of them acknowledge the other, which of course neither one of them ever did.
Back at the mansion, Dennis knew, his mother would have the eggs boiling and a plate of sliced bread set out on the stove. When Holtzman came in, he would pin each piece to a long fork and toast it perfectly over the open flame of the gas burner. He did the same for Dennis on weekends. Dennis imagined that it had been the bane of the man’s long bachelorhood: having no one for whom to demonstrate this technique.
(“And you ask me,” my father said, “if I think Danny Lynch is a lonely soul.”)
Every morning, Holtzman and his mother sat catty-corner at the old kitchen table where Dennis had once done his homework, where his father had once sat, recited, sung, put his forehead to the bare wood when the night had been long
and the sun too quick to rise. Sitting catty-corner, Holtzman and his mother talked about money: investments they had made, bills that were owed, profit from the store, and the wholesale price of shoes. Every once in a while Holtzman would reach under the table to pat her knee or she would touch his hand, still talking, so that anyone watching from behind the kitchen’s thick-paned windows would think they’d been pledging love for half an hour over their cooling eggs, not determining the limits of their inventory.
and the sun too quick to rise. Sitting catty-corner, Holtzman and his mother talked about money: investments they had made, bills that were owed, profit from the store, and the wholesale price of shoes. Every once in a while Holtzman would reach under the table to pat her knee or she would touch his hand, still talking, so that anyone watching from behind the kitchen’s thick-paned windows would think they’d been pledging love for half an hour over their cooling eggs, not determining the limits of their inventory.
She was a continual marvel to Holtzman, as far as Dennis could see, this tiny woman who had arrived so unexpectedly into his late middle age. She seemed to think of him as the embodiment of good sense, practicality, relief, the soundest investment she had ever made.
When they had eaten, he would take the paper and a second cup of coffee into the living room or, more discreetly, up the stairs to the hall bath, while she did the dishes and then went down to the basement to start the wash. It always gave her enormous pleasure to consider how her marriage had brought her not merely a house but a basement. A basement all her own. It struck her as a great luxury not to have to maneuver around the baby carriages and footlockers and the deplorable armchairs of a dozen neighbors but to be able to sail, unimpeded, from stair to washtub to clothesline and ironing board—which she had set up in April of 1945, when she first moved in, and would never be required to take down again.
Of course, Holtzman’s basement wasn’t empty, but what it contained was mostly hers—her footlockers and garment bags and end tables. As she had said in her letters to Dennis overseas, Holtzman was terribly reasonable about her things, insisting that since she was the one giving up her apartment (her home, he’d called it), then she should not give up her furniture as well. It hadn’t taken much to accommodate it all: his house
had three times as many rooms as the apartment, and what became redundant, his dining room and kitchen set, for instance, a number of lamps, a bed, he had generously allowed her to offer to her late husband’s relatives. With the war ending, there were plenty of takers among the various cousins, even among those who hadn’t found homes of their own yet, or even spouses. Holtzman’s old kitchen chairs, for instance, ended up in Mary Lynch’s bedroom in Astoria, piled in a column against the wall for what must have been at least three years, maybe four: a monument to hope her father, Uncle Jim, used to call it, until Mary met Jack Casey just in time (she was nearing thirty herself) and the chairs became kitchen chairs once again.
had three times as many rooms as the apartment, and what became redundant, his dining room and kitchen set, for instance, a number of lamps, a bed, he had generously allowed her to offer to her late husband’s relatives. With the war ending, there were plenty of takers among the various cousins, even among those who hadn’t found homes of their own yet, or even spouses. Holtzman’s old kitchen chairs, for instance, ended up in Mary Lynch’s bedroom in Astoria, piled in a column against the wall for what must have been at least three years, maybe four: a monument to hope her father, Uncle Jim, used to call it, until Mary met Jack Casey just in time (she was nearing thirty herself) and the chairs became kitchen chairs once again.
For Dennis’s mother, these excess bits of furniture not only established her new role as benefactress (she, who for so long, throughout her first marriage, in fact, and well before, had been supplicant); they also paid off a debt. She was, to a great extent, beholden to her first husband’s people, who had supported her so generously during the period of his illness and her widowhood and especially in the years after Dennis joined the service. And throughout those years, try as she might to pay them back, or even to temper their generosity with the insistence that her widow’s pension was sufficient, her needs few, they would only hold up their hands and respond with some long and often exaggerated tale of what selfless and bighearted miracle “her Daniel” had once done for them, tales that would more often than not end with tears and a “God bless his soul,” or a “We won’t see another one like him again,” until she, Sheila Lynch, the impoverished widow with the soldier son, would find herself brewing them a cup of tea or pouring out a drop of vermouth or putting an arm across their shoulders to whisper, “There there.”
My father would say this much for his mother: she never
distanced herself from her first husband’s family after she married Holtzman. As much as she might have liked to.
distanced herself from her first husband’s family after she married Holtzman. As much as she might have liked to.
In the basement, she would plug in the iron and pause to see if the lights would flicker—they did, something to ask Dennis about. She’d fill her sprinkler bottle at the sink and take the shirts from the line and iron them: her husband’s and then her son’s.
He had been, without question, Holy Father to the entire clan, her Daniel. Forty-four years old when she met him, with a shock of dark hair falling down into his homely face. Holy Father to the world, if it had let him.
The story went that she had been living at the time off Nostrand Avenue in a small and airless apartment that belonged to her Great-uncle Robert and Aunty Eileen, his dour wife. They didn’t want her there—she had seen the man bite his lip when she reached for a second piece of toast and grip the table, as if he might at any minute leap up to stay her hand if she poured more than a splash of milk into her oatmeal. But their only son had left for Europe and news of his empty bedroom reached Washington Heights, where she had been living with another, younger aunt and uncle, sharing a bed with an eight-year-old cousin—a boy with limbs of lead and the odor of a wet overcoat.
Aunty Eileen had resisted the idea of some sixteen-year-old girl occupying her son’s room (drilling the scent of her hair into his pillow, scattering undergarments, bleeding onto his mattress—she thought of everything, that woman) and relented only after she swore never to dress or undress in the son’s room. She was instead directed to leave her bags in a corner of the pantry and to change her clothes there before her uncle was up in the morning and after he went to bed at night. This she
did willingly—her cousin’s wide feather bed, all to herself, was such a luxury—and seeing her up and all ready for school just as he was shuffling into the kitchen must have given her uncle an inspiration.
did willingly—her cousin’s wide feather bed, all to herself, was such a luxury—and seeing her up and all ready for school just as he was shuffling into the kitchen must have given her uncle an inspiration.
She wasn’t there long when he announced that he’d found a little something for her to do. A couple he knew, countrymen of his, had a bakery on DeKalb, and since the wife was troubled with back problems, they could use a girl to come in first thing in the morning to set out the breads and the cakes. He never said how much she would be paid and she understood without asking that whatever money she made would go straight to him. Her uncle knew that it had been her parents’ dying wish that she stay in school, and he himself had enrolled her at Manual Training the very day she left Washington Heights, but the morning job was a nice way of offsetting what the care of her would cost him without compromising whatever reluctant pact he had made with the dead.
The day before she was to start, she went by the place after school. Only the baker’s wife, Mrs. Dixon, was there, but she was rosy-cheeked and merry and cried out when she saw her, “Oh, but you’re a wee little thing!”
It was like a fairy tale, that first morning. The streets were wet and dark, full of reflections. Somewhat ominous, sure, so early in the morning that it was nighttime still, but also full of promise, adventure. When she came into the empty shop it was warm and dimly lit and full of the scent of baking bread.
All the light came from the back, where the ovens were, but there was enough light to see by, and she found the cap and coat she was to wear folded neatly on the counter. She thought of the elves and the shoemaker. She covered her hair and slipped into the smock. Yesterday, when Mrs. Dixon had showed it to her, it had buckled over her shoes. Now it was hemmed to just the right length, ten inches above her ankles.
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