Authors: Alice McDermott
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Literary, #United States, #Contemporary Fiction
Charming Billy (13 page)
“Dear Eva,” he would write, and no doubt he could have filled a page with it, the way he loved to repeat her name: “Hello, Eva. How are you, Eva?”
He told her how he spent his days, writing as well as he could, but being careful, too, he said, not to go on too long about ordinary things. He knew better than to say everything he felt. But he also knew that the listing of too many ordinary details was worse. To say what he felt would have been to stifle with one sentence a thousand others. But to say only what he’d done would be like describing a city that blocked out the sun.
He must have thought of the girl in Metz—“I am still here”—because surely it was all he meant to write to Eva, every Sunday as his mother put out her wedding china and Mac and Rosemary bustled in and Kate returned with the baby to timidly knock on her own bedroom door. As somewhere some church rang a distant bell and a bus spit exhaust on the boulevard and Mary took Dennis’s arm as they crossed Park, headed toward Lexington and a bar-and-grill owned by an Irishman who’d been brought over by his father. As the water struck the sand that led to the great house on the hill that Billy and Eva would marvel at again, together, his idea of heaven, before returning to their idyll in Holtzman’s little place, an idyll that would begin whenever the money he was putting away each week, which was increasing itself incrementally,
even now, over at East River Savings, had grown sufficient enough to bring her back.
even now, over at East River Savings, had grown sufficient enough to bring her back.
Unwavering faith: This will not change. I am still here.
But the money was slow in growing.
There were all the wedding presents, after all, the baby gifts and bachelor parties and the office collections and cab fares and cleaning bills. There was the money he gave Kate when she needed a lift after a night of the baby crying and Peter, her scholar of a husband, shouting about the exam he had to take the next day, the studying he’d not yet done. There was the money he lent his cousin Ted when he smashed his car on Queens Boulevard—so his new wife wouldn’t know—and the money he gave his mother when she broke her bridge. There was the special collection for Father Roche’s fiftieth year as a priest.
“You’re more like my father than my father was,” Dennis told him one night at Quinlan’s when he was crying in his beer that he would not have the boat fare by summer, much as he tried.
“In this family,” Billy said, his glass to his heart, “you couldn’t say a kinder word.”
Danny Lynch raised his own drink. “Amen to that,” he said, ever the keeper of the flame.
In those days, Dennis had his territory on the Lower East Side, from Broadway to the river, Houston to Canal, shops full of Jewish and Chinese merchants, streets littered with bums. The bums would pull themselves out of doorways when they saw him coming, rise from the edges of curbs to say, “We’re moving, Officer, we’re moving”—as if any round-faced Irishman in a topcoat and a hat had to be a cop. They’d salute like old soldiers, or hunch their shoulders and cower like serfs in
the Middle Ages, like men who more than once had felt a nightstick crack upon their backs. “We’re moving, Detective.” Dennis would raise a fist at them, touch his overcoat as if he indeed carried a pistol and a badge. “You’d better move, fellows. And keep moving.” Drunks, bums, booze hounds. What you thought of, in those days, when someone said alcoholic.
the Middle Ages, like men who more than once had felt a nightstick crack upon their backs. “We’re moving, Detective.” Dennis would raise a fist at them, touch his overcoat as if he indeed carried a pistol and a badge. “You’d better move, fellows. And keep moving.” Drunks, bums, booze hounds. What you thought of, in those days, when someone said alcoholic.
Four steps down and into a dingy little shop that he’d remembered being closed up even before the war. The door propped open with flattened cardboard boxes, not for air—it was a cold gray day—but light, since the power hadn’t been turned on. There was a narrow counter filled with haphazard piles of shirt boxes, another dozen or so large containers filling all but a thin passageway through the store. There was a barrel spilling straw, an odor of old damp brick and roach powder. He rapped on the counter and called out, and a man appeared from the back. A small, short man in a wool jacket that was too big for him and a fur hat that was too small. His hands were bare and he held them together. They were bright white in the gray place and he rubbed them together because it was cold, of course, but the effect, with his hooked nose and his stooped shoulders, made Dennis think “Shylock.”
“Edison,” he said, warily, because he knew this was a guy who would not take anything he said at face value. The man moved his head like a turtle, getting a better look at him in the gloom of the store. “You the Edison man?”
Dennis put his hand out to introduce himself and saw that the man was missing the middle three fingers of his right hand, and the tips of the last three on his left. He was a Polish Jew, not long in New York. A tailor, he said, before the war, and without indicating his hands gave a vaudevillian shrug. Now a shopkeeper, ladies’ and children’s apparel. Or anyway, as soon as he had the power he would be.
As Dennis had predicted, the man didn’t want to hear anything
he said, and end of next week was too long for him to wait. He was not an old man, not as old as he’d first appeared, but he seemed shrunken inside his big coat and he had a lousy set of dentures that slipped as he spoke and made his breath stale.
he said, and end of next week was too long for him to wait. He was not an old man, not as old as he’d first appeared, but he seemed shrunken inside his big coat and he had a lousy set of dentures that slipped as he spoke and made his breath stale.
“Mr. Lynch,” he said—once he got hold of Dennis’s name he was like a dog with a bone—“consider my situation.”
“Mr. Leibowitz,” Dennis told him, “consider your wiring. Consider your shop going up in smoke.”
The man pretended to be resigned. He looked around the place as if all his struggle, through the war, through the camps, through the long crossing over, had come to this cold pathetic end. He shook his head, as if he was familiar with this, this mundane disappointment delivered by this mundane, earnest, broad-faced man, a disappointment as pervasive and as terrible as the world’s more famous evils. He shrugged and then suddenly turned and gently took Dennis’s hand, holding his wrist in the space between his pinky and thumb on the left. He drilled a folded bill into Dennis’s palm with his right.
“Anything you can do,” Mr. Leibowitz said.
Dennis objected and tried to hand the money back, but the man turned away, waving his gaped hand beside his ear, swatting at the words. He might have said, “It can’t hurt.”
The folded bill was still in his pocket when he got back to the office. He rode the elevator up with Claire Donavan and three other girls, just back from lunch, their fur collars smelling of perfume and cigarette smoke, their bright lipstick fresh and the powder on their cheeks and noses like a dusting of sugar.
“You’re quiet, Mr. Lynch,” Claire Donavan said into his ear as they watched the lights moving behind the numbers for each floor.
“I’m praying for a power failure, Miss Donavan,” he said,
moving only his eyes to look at her, her bright white smile and the gum cracking like sparks behind it. Peppermint. Sugar. Lilac perfume. The war was far enough behind them now: bread was bread once again, not cake. He had a hankering for cake.
moving only his eyes to look at her, her bright white smile and the gum cracking like sparks behind it. Peppermint. Sugar. Lilac perfume. The war was far enough behind them now: bread was bread once again, not cake. He had a hankering for cake.
Billy got on at twelve. “Dennis!” he said, and Dennis said, “Billy boy,” as if he’d spent the morning looking for him. They nearly shook hands. But the eyes of the four women were on them, on Billy more accurately. He was the only one of them not wearing a hat and a coat, and it made him seem finer, somehow, in his gray suit and white shirt and simple tie—the way a priest all in black can seem the more elegant in the midst of brightly colored wedding guests.
“You’ve been out in the field?” Billy asked softly.
“Till just now,” Dennis said.
When they got to their floor, the girls stepped out, but Dennis pinched Billy’s sleeve and made him stay on.
“Who is he?” they heard before the door closed on them again, and Claire Donavan answered, “Cousins.”
Dennis reached into his pocket and pulled out the folded bill. He was surprised to see it was a ten. He handed it to Billy. “Put this in your happily-ever-after fund.”
Billy looked at it sheepishly. “Where’s it from?”
The elevator stopped and Dennis pushed another button for a higher floor. He told him. He said he was going to put it into the poor box at St. Brigid’s but the door was locked. “I think the bums have been coming in and stealing the Communion wine.”
“Catholic bums,” Billy said.
Dennis nodded. “The worst kind. So take it and put it in your happily-ever-after fund.”
Still, Billy hesitated. He told Dennis to put it in the collection basket on Sunday. Dennis said he’d have it spent by Sunday.
Billy said, Spend it. Dennis said he had a rich mother, he didn’t need to spend it. Finally, he pushed the money into Billy’s palm as Mr. Leibowitz had done to him. He said when the time came, when Eva was back here and they were snug in their little cottage in East Hampton, Billy could buy all their baby clothes from Mr. Leibowitz.
Billy said, Spend it. Dennis said he had a rich mother, he didn’t need to spend it. Finally, he pushed the money into Billy’s palm as Mr. Leibowitz had done to him. He said when the time came, when Eva was back here and they were snug in their little cottage in East Hampton, Billy could buy all their baby clothes from Mr. Leibowitz.
“Will it ever happen?” Billy said wistfully, even as he folded the money into his pocket.
Dennis said, “I don’t see why it shouldn’t.” Although, in truth, he saw: indistinctly as yet and as if from the corner of his eye. Think of those ruined, ragged men in the street, Billy among them, in the unimaginable future. Think of Leibowitz’s butchered hands. Think of the promises he had made to Mary at moments when the girl had every right to believe him. When, for as long as it took, he managed to believe himself. With so many other forces at work in the world, brutal, sly, deceiving, unstoppable forces, what could be more foolish than staking your life on an ephemeral feeling, no more than an idea, really, a fancy, the culmination of which is a clumsy bit of nakedness, a few minutes of animal grunting and bumping, a momentary obliteration of thought, of conscience?
Indistinctly, and as if from the corner of his eye, he saw what Billy’s fine dream, Billy’s faith, was going to come to. But he also saw, in his own (his own father’s) romantic heart, that its consummation would become a small redemption for them all.
Holtzman’s head was huge when you came upon him from behind, in the dim back corner of his shoe store, bent over his inventory sheets and fresh from the barber’s, so the only way of telling where his neck stopped and his head began was the seemingly arbitrary place where a shadow of tiny hairs began to sprout from that Germanic column of red-and-purple flesh.
The stockroom smelled of shoe leather and cardboard and, as Dennis came closer, dill pickles and mustard. The overhead lights were remarkably dim; the only brightness came from the single gooseneck lamp that sat on his desk. His sandwich in its wax-paper nest rested on the corner of the desk, just outside the circle of light, and when Dennis saw Holtzman’s fat hand reach for it and lift it to his mouth, he knew for certain that the man still hadn’t heard him come in and that if he cleared his throat and called Holtzman’s name or came a few steps farther and touched his shoulder, he would startle the old Kraut, perhaps send that plug of ham on rye with butter and mustard right into his esophagus.
So Dennis paused, long enough to see Holtzman return the sandwich to the desk, long enough to see that it was chewed and swallowed (he turned an inventory sheet over and sighed and lifted a finger to his mouth to dislodge something from between cheek and gum). Long enough, too, to reconsider what he was doing and to turn around, get back on the train, get back to work. Let Billy’s sweet romance follow its own course.
But the road to hell … and Dennis said, “Excuse me, Mr. Holtzman. I’m sorry to interrupt.”
The man turned, his big head like an old buffalo’s, peering over his flank. And then, when he saw it was Dennis behind him, he swiveled his chair around and wiped his mouth and began to stand.
Dennis held out a hand. “Don’t get up,” he said, although Holtzman was already standing, already saying, “Dennis,” and then, “Is everything all right?” the chubby hand to the heart, the heart lacking even the courage to let him say, “Is your mother all right?”
Dennis knew then that he’d had the right idea, coming here, to him.
Holtzman offered him the metal chair beside his desk. “Please, sit,” he said after Dennis had assured him that his mother was fine, that he had only come to ask a favor. Even in that dim light, Dennis saw two things pass in quick succession over the man’s face: one was the relief that there was no bad news. Second, the sudden suspicion that he was about to be asked for money.
Which Dennis, did, of course, and without too much beating around the bush. He said he wanted to borrow five hundred dollars to give to Billy so he could send for his girl and her mother by summer, find an apartment for them all, and get on with his life. He said Billy would be glad to work in the store on the weekend so that the money would be an advance against salary, not a flat-out loan, and that Billy, and he, would be sure all of it was paid back in a timely manner, with interest.
He said he was certain that Billy would eventually save what he needed himself, without anyone else’s help, but it could take him another year, and a year was a long time for a young girl to wait all alone on the other side of the ocean.
“You met her,” Dennis said. “Last summer. On Long Island. Outside St. Philomena’s.”
Holtzman nodded. “A pretty girl,” he said, and already Dennis could see that he was forming an argument against him: prettiness was a virtue. She would wait for Billy to earn the money himself.
Dennis nodded. “Pretty enough,” he said, countering what he hadn’t spoken. “But for Billy, the moon and stars encircle her head. I don’t know that he can wait.”
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