Authors: Alice McDermott
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Literary, #United States, #Contemporary Fiction
Charming Billy (14 page)
Holtzman shrugged a little, touching thumb and forefinger to his chest. Dennis saw his eyes glance longingly at his thick sandwich.
“Eat, please,” he said. “Don’t let me stop you.”
Eagerly, Holtzman took hold of the sandwich, sending, as he did, another longing glance toward his inventory sheet. Dennis began to wonder if he should have gone to his mother instead. But he’d been certain that his chances with Holtzman were better. The man had, after all, given up what had seemed a comfortable and complacent bachelorhood to take on a penniless wife and her grown son; he had opened his home to them, his cottage on Long Island; he had moved his ancestral furniture to the basement or distributed it to her relations in order to accommodate her secondhand junk. He had readjusted his morning routine, rewritten his will, instituted what was called a “family discount” at his store (which was essentially 20 percent off for anyone who was identified as part of Daniel Lynch’s sprawling legacy), and increased his own grocery bill by at least 50 percent. He had complicated his life. All because a tiny woman had entered his shoe store looking for size fours. All because she had placed her stockinged foot in the palm of his hand.
He had, according to Billy’s mother, who was there, wept copiously, gratefully, as he recited his wedding vows in the dim front room of the rectory.
Holtzman took another bite of sandwich, passed his tongue over his teeth, chewed, put the napkin to his thin lips. He never had managed to look Dennis straight in the eye.
My mother’s husband
. Finally, he said, “I’m not a wealthy man.”
My mother’s husband
. Finally, he said, “I’m not a wealthy man.”
Dennis nodded, murmuring like a priest. He understood that, he said.
“I’m not made of money,” he said. Dennis understood that, too. “It’s an awful lot of money,” he added while Dennis continued to nod. “I don’t know that I have access to that much money myself.”
Dennis pursed his lips sympathetically. He was always struck
by the irony of it. His father’s wealth, which was purely figurative, had always been boldly proclaimed. Holtzman’s, a literal fact, was relentlessly denied.
by the irony of it. His father’s wealth, which was purely figurative, had always been boldly proclaimed. Holtzman’s, a literal fact, was relentlessly denied.
“The business is still recovering from the war years,” he said. “Long-time customers came in and told me that they wouldn’t shop here anymore because of what went on in Europe. There was leather rationing, you know. I had these damn corduroy shoes to sell. I lost a lot of business.”
He looked at the big sandwich in his hand, seemed to consider whether or not it contradicted his lean-times story, bit into it anyway.
“Billy might be an asset, then,” Dennis told him as he chewed. “It might impress your customers to know you’re helping out a former GI.”
Holtzman considered this, seemed to like it, but then shrugged it off lest Dennis begin to think he had an advantage.
“He’s a good-looking guy,” Dennis went on. “Soft-spoken. People like him. Women like him.”
Holtzman shrugged again as if to say Dennis didn’t understand the shoe business.
“If you would think of it as an investment, not a loan.”
“It’s a lot of money,” Holtzman said.
“It’s what I figure he really needs.”
“And when would he be in here? Just Saturdays?”
“Isn’t Saturday your busiest day?”
Holtzman shook his head. “He’ll take a long time to earn back five hundred dollars just working on Saturdays.”
“He’ll be paying you off from his salary at Edison, too,” Dennis said. “And I’ll be helping him out.”
Holtzman put the sandwich down, daintily wiped his fingertips and then his mouth. Turned a little in his chair, as if, Dennis thought, he was about to dismiss him. But then he
said, working that tongue into his cheeks, looking over his papers, “I’m thinking of staying open Thursday nights. Gimbel’s does it.”
said, working that tongue into his cheeks, looking over his papers, “I’m thinking of staying open Thursday nights. Gimbel’s does it.”
“Billy could be here Thursday nights,” Dennis said. “Billy could be here by 5:30 easy.”
Holtzman sucked his teeth again, turned to another inventory sheet on the desk before him. It was clear he was becoming more and more interested as he feigned growing indifference. Not nearly as sly as he believed himself to be. “What does he know about shoes?” he said.
Dennis laughed. “How much is there to know?” and then quickly amended it. “Smitty can show him what he needs, I’m sure.”
Holtzman looked up from his desk. “He’s willing to do this?”
Dennis grinned. He hadn’t mentioned any of this to Billy yet. “Are you kidding?” he said. “He’s dying to do this. He’s nuts about this girl. It’ll be nearly a year. He’s dying to see her.”
Casually Holtzman leaned down to slide out the bottom drawer of his desk. “I’ll give him a dollar an hour to begin. Thursdays till nine. Saturday nine to six. Twelve-fifty a week. Fifty dollars a month.” He lifted a heavy check ledger from the drawer, tossed it onto his desk. Flipped it open. “He adds whatever he can from his regular salary once a month.”
“What kind of interest do you want?” Dennis said.
Holtzman waved the pen he had lifted. “This is family,” he said. And then he added as he wrote, exacting another kind of payment, “You boys will never have any money if you spend everything you make before it’s earned.” He might have been talking to a child.
Dennis felt the warmth in his cheeks. “This is an advance, Mr. Holtzman,” he reminded him. “Billy will earn it.”
Holtzman lifted his head to give Dennis a shrewd look—a skin-deep look if there ever was one. “But first he’ll spend it,” he said.
Billy was at his desk when Dennis got back to the office. He put the check in front of him. “Here you go,” he said, and understood for the first time why it was that his father had bankrupted himself and estranged his wife and filled their tiny apartment with far-flung relatives from the other side: simply to know this power, this expansiveness. Simply to be able to say, as he said to Billy that day in the office on Irving Place, “Here you go.” Here’s your life.
Full of himself, and of Billy’s sweet, blushing gratitude, he decided that day, too, that he would marry Mary when Eva came. Make a good confession for a change, say yes and mean it, rather than have it turn into another instant sin when the priest behind the dark screen asked him if he planned to marry this girl he was having his way with. He’d give her a ring on the day Billy married Eva. Find them a place of their own. Get his life started. Why not? He could afford it, he had a rich mother. Why not? Bread was what you wanted over the long haul, when you got right down to it. When you got right down to it, you wouldn’t want a lifetime of cake. And it would make for a fine summer.
BILLY WIRED THE MONEY to Eva in April and in his next letter asked her to send him her shoe size and the sizes of her younger sisters so he could pick up something for them at the store. This she did, including in her last note to him a folded sheet of butcher paper that contained a tracing of her right foot and each right foot of her three younger siblings. She said she knew that shoe sizes were different in the States and thought this was the best way to be sure of a good fit. She said, too, that she was making this letter a short one—she wanted to catch the postman—and would write more later. She said she was busy making plans.
In the shoe store that Saturday morning, Billy spread the brown paper out on the counter so Smitty, Mr. Holtzman’s assistant, could determine each size. Smitty advised oxfords for the sisters, and by lunchtime Billy himself had selected a pair of tan-and-white spectators for Eva. He had sold a pair to a woman that morning, a young woman who had come in intending only to get her old father fitted with a pair of wingtips. The shoes had made even her thick ankles seem elegant and sporty.
The same girl returned twice that summer, once more with her father, once with a talkative girl friend who did all the trying on and buying. This was the summer that Billy, holding his
breath, was going through the mail his mother had left out on the sideboard each evening and finding nothing, as he told them down at Quinlan’s, nothing at all from Eva. The same summer that Dennis had begun to keep a tally of all the simple things a Brooklyn-born girl knew that an Irish-born girl had to have explained to her.
breath, was going through the mail his mother had left out on the sideboard each evening and finding nothing, as he told them down at Quinlan’s, nothing at all from Eva. The same summer that Dennis had begun to keep a tally of all the simple things a Brooklyn-born girl knew that an Irish-born girl had to have explained to her.
Like the prohibition against a girl calling a fellow on the telephone. On a Sunday afternoon in late September of 1946, Holtzman told Dennis there was a young lady on the phone and with a disapproving shake of his head handed him the receiver. Dennis sat beside the three-legged telephone table Holtzman had once retrieved from a pile of junk at someone else’s curb. An hour later he met Mary at the service entrance of her building, on Seventieth Street, just off Park. He was thinking that if she was expecting a child, then he would, of course, marry her immediately, and tell himself that it was the hand of God (his father consulting) moving him toward a future that he only understood now he never honestly wanted. A future in which his own bad luck was the other side of Claire Donavan’s sailor’s opportunity.
But what Mary had to tell him was all about Eva.
This was the same week that Maeve, trying to orchestrate her own fate, came into the store by herself. It was a Thursday night, just beginning to get dark, and Smitty was working alone. By way of making conversation, he told her that he wasn’t sure if he’d lost his young assistant or not. Mr. Holtzman had simply told him this morning that Billy wouldn’t be in tonight. “We’ll have to see if he shows up on Saturday morning,” Smitty told her, releasing her heel and allowing her to place her foot on the ground and wiggle her toes a bit, leaning over her lap to look at the new shoes and to tell him, finally (no surprise here), that perhaps she wasn’t that fond of them, after all.
Gently holding her ankle, he removed the new shoe and returned it to its box. To save her more embarrassment (she was already blushing to the hairline) he didn’t even offer to show her another pair. He simply said as he slipped her foot back into the tan-and-white spectators—well worn now and out of season—that there were always new styles coming in. She should stop by again sometime.
He pushed his footstool aside and held out his hand to help her up, thus lending her—it was a favor he did for every female customer—a moment of regal grace as she stood.
“Try us again,” he said gently.
He was a dapper little man with thinning hair and a dark mustache. She was twenty-eight or so, in a brown tweed three-quarter-length coat and a gray skirt and shoes that should have been retired after Labor Day. She had combed her hair into fluffy curls that just brushed her shoulders, and her lipstick was fresh enough to have left a mark on her front tooth. Smitty had been selling shoes for twenty-five years, ten at A&S, fifteen with Holtzman. He was married with no children and, at this stage of the game, little love, but he had memory enough to know what it had cost her, walking in all by herself, no preoccupying old man or bold girl friend to hide behind. He asked Dennis later if it didn’t seem to him to be the exact way of the world that the very night she decided to take the risk, to throw the dice or spin the wheel and see just what might come out of being by herself in the shoe store with Billy, the two of them (with any luck) all alone, would be the very night, the first so far, that Billy didn’t show up.
Smitty thought to tell her as he walked her to the door that there was a girl over in Ireland who had his diamond ring, but who could heap that kind of humiliation on anyone? There was no time for it anyway, because once she had gotten through the obligatory trying on of just one pair, once she had
discovered that Billy was not, indeed, in there, she was out the door. Perhaps believing that the time saved on this fruitless visit could be added to the next when, surely, by the law of averages if nothing else, she would not miss him again.
discovered that Billy was not, indeed, in there, she was out the door. Perhaps believing that the time saved on this fruitless visit could be added to the next when, surely, by the law of averages if nothing else, she would not miss him again.
It was the very next morning when Holtzman came in that Smitty learned the reason for Billy’s absence: his fiancée in Ireland had passed away. Pneumonia. It was just like the man to mention the news only after it had had some effect on the running of the store. Holtzman himself, and Billy, it seemed, had known since Monday or Tuesday.
“He won’t be back working here, then,” Smitty said. “With no wedding to save for.”
But Holtzman shook his head. “He’ll be back.” He patted down a hiccup, touching his heart, the gesture making him appear to be soothing himself, reassuring himself. He liked Billy, knew the ladies liked him as well. Business was booming. “He just wanted last night off. He’ll be here Saturday. He’ll stay on.”
Confirming what Smitty had begun to suspect, watching Holtzman carefully record Billy’s hours but never seeing a pay envelope pass between them: Billy was working off a debt.
“What a blow for him, poor fellow,” Smitty said.
Holtzman turned his hand back and forth, as if there were a number of ways to look at the situation. “Life goes on,” he said.
As promised, Billy was in the store again that Saturday morning, paler perhaps, perhaps thinner. Maybe a new puffiness around his eyes, a whiff of alcohol on his breath. “I’m sorry for your loss,” Smitty said, and Billy gripped his arm just above the wrist and said, “Thank you, Mr. Smith. I wish you had met her,” before his voice broke. There was such perfect trust, such perfect helplessness in Billy’s brief touch (Smitty had felt something like it only once before when he’d given
his arm to a blind woman on the subway stairs), that Smitty, although he barely came to Billy’s shoulder, immediately placed his hand under Billy’s elbow, as if to offer more support. “He was at odd ends,” Smitty told Dennis when Dennis next came by the store. “I’ve always said that it’s the ones who are always joking who feel things more deeply than the rest of us. It’s something I’ve always said.”
his arm to a blind woman on the subway stairs), that Smitty, although he barely came to Billy’s shoulder, immediately placed his hand under Billy’s elbow, as if to offer more support. “He was at odd ends,” Smitty told Dennis when Dennis next came by the store. “I’ve always said that it’s the ones who are always joking who feel things more deeply than the rest of us. It’s something I’ve always said.”
Smitty began, in the next months and years, to step back whenever a young woman came into the store while Billy was there, certain that sooner or later, the urge to live being what it was (he winked when he said this to Dennis, as close as he could come to indicating that he was talking about sex), the grief would pass and one of the young women who came in would catch his eye.
When Maeve returned sometime in January with her shuffling old father once more in tow, Smitty ducked into the stockroom until Billy was finished with his current customer, and when he peeked out onto the floor he saw that Billy had the old man’s shoe off and was trying to get him measured—the man grumbling all the while, the girl cajoling. Billy patiently lifting the man’s thick foot onto the wooden measure and watching it slide off again.
“He’s a piece of work,” Smitty said when Billy stepped into the stockroom to pull the man’s size.
“You can smell the beer on him,” Billy told him. “He must have had a quart with his corn flakes.”
There was a bit of business with the shoehorn: the old man making an awkward circuit of the store with the silver shoehorn still stuck into his heel, up under his pant leg, and Billy going after him in a loping, stoop-shouldered run, trying to retrieve it. The girl watching, beginning to smile. Billy catching her eye and smiling as well. A start.
But of course it was the old man he befriended first,
Maeve standing by like some storybook princess awaiting her fate as Billy discovered that the old man’s family on his mother’s side was from Mallow as well and that he himself had more than once ridden on the streetcar in Brooklyn with that storytelling Irishman everyone was so fond of—that was your uncle, was it? There was the war to discuss and the Yankees and the Dodgers. The radio sermons of Bishop Sheen. The inconvenience, for a man his age and with his stomach problems, of the midnight fast before Sunday Mass and the people he’d known, over the years, who had worked for Con Ed, had worked two jobs the way Billy was doing, had worked for the NYPD, as he himself had done. “When Maeve, my girl here,” indicating her downcast eyes and the parted brown hair, “was eight years old, her mother passed away on us”—and you can imagine the boundless sympathy in Billy’s blue eyes, boundless and unhesitating and, best of all, untempered by the count of intervening years, the years since that everyone else the old man knew handed to him like a shot of diluted whiskey, a cup of tepid tea, as if the time passed since her dying was a kind of comfort. Billy, of course, understood that there was no comfort, not when the love you’d felt had been fierce, and true.
Maeve standing by like some storybook princess awaiting her fate as Billy discovered that the old man’s family on his mother’s side was from Mallow as well and that he himself had more than once ridden on the streetcar in Brooklyn with that storytelling Irishman everyone was so fond of—that was your uncle, was it? There was the war to discuss and the Yankees and the Dodgers. The radio sermons of Bishop Sheen. The inconvenience, for a man his age and with his stomach problems, of the midnight fast before Sunday Mass and the people he’d known, over the years, who had worked for Con Ed, had worked two jobs the way Billy was doing, had worked for the NYPD, as he himself had done. “When Maeve, my girl here,” indicating her downcast eyes and the parted brown hair, “was eight years old, her mother passed away on us”—and you can imagine the boundless sympathy in Billy’s blue eyes, boundless and unhesitating and, best of all, untempered by the count of intervening years, the years since that everyone else the old man knew handed to him like a shot of diluted whiskey, a cup of tepid tea, as if the time passed since her dying was a kind of comfort. Billy, of course, understood that there was no comfort, not when the love you’d felt had been fierce, and true.
They sat almost knee to knee, Billy on his footstool, the box of new shoes in his lap. The old man in the worn red-leather chair, his hands on the cool steel of the armrests and the tears springing to his eyes—always red-rimmed and rheumy—the handkerchief going to the nose—always swollen and cherryred—as he repeated the story of his wife’s life, his own insult and devotion, while Billy, with all the patience, all the time in the world, listened with the attentiveness of an avid apprentice, an admiring acolyte, listened as if he were receiving instruction, if even then he needed any instruction, in the perseverance of grief.
Looking on, Maeve saw her father’s future with this kind
and attentive young man before she had the courage to imagine her own. Or rather, being nun-taught, lives-of-the-saints-saturated (the quiet, handmaiden saints who, if they had not chosen the better part, were freed by their bustling about with food and drink and dishes from ever having to form a sentence, or even a clear thought, about how they loved Him and why), she saw that only through her father’s life, which was all the life she had planned to know, would he gain any part in hers.
and attentive young man before she had the courage to imagine her own. Or rather, being nun-taught, lives-of-the-saints-saturated (the quiet, handmaiden saints who, if they had not chosen the better part, were freed by their bustling about with food and drink and dishes from ever having to form a sentence, or even a clear thought, about how they loved Him and why), she saw that only through her father’s life, which was all the life she had planned to know, would he gain any part in hers.
Maeve’s, of course, was not an unusual case. “Unusual for your generation now,” as my father put it, “but not for ours.” The girl child wedded to the widowed father. Speaking of Maeve, my father had once said that although the joke is always the Irishman, the Irish bachelor, ever faithful to his dear mother, take a look at an unmarried Irishwoman’s attachment to her old dad if you want to see something truly ferocious. It was, I suppose, the very image I’d fought against myself, in the years after my own mother died, when I went off to Canisius instead of staying at home and going to St. John’s or Queens or Malloy, when I took only short breaks during the summer so that my father would know I had a life of my own, despite him, despite the weight that hit my heart stomach chest bones every time I thought of him alone, waking alone, going off to the office, shopping, eating, coming into the house at 4 a.m. after getting one of Maeve’s calls, after getting Billy off the floor or out of his car or into the hospital, if that’s what was needed. Even when I married Matt and we headed for Seattle. Lives of our own, we said. Self-sacrifice having been recognized as a delusion by then, not a virtue. Self-consciousness more the vogue.
Maeve was only eight when her mother died—my father getting the story in her tiny kitchen, over all those cups of tea
and slivers of cake she had served him after they’d gotten Billy into bed, over all those nights she had summoned him. There had been another child, an older sister, who died of lead poisoning when Maeve was very small. A policeman’s daughter, Maeve had gotten some sense early on of the precariousness of life, the risk taken by simply walking out the apartment door. Her mother, all false courage, touched her father’s back, the hem of his coat, as he went out, saving the intake of breath, the sign of the cross, for the moment she saw him gain the street. Anything might happen, and did, and Maeve felt the heavy weight of her grieving father’s hand on her shoulder. He might have shipped her off to female relatives, but he managed instead to trade in his beat for a desk job so he could stay alive for her. The nuns at her school were more than happy to take the child in for as many hours as he needed them to, and Maeve spoke often—or as often as she spoke of anything—of the pleasant afternoons she had spent in the tiny courtyard of the convent beside her school (vine-covered walls, a single oak, a statue of St. Francis above a concrete birdbath, one of the Virgin in the crook of the tree) or in its seldom-visited front room, where the silence was palpable, luxurious, punctuated as it was by the soft steps of the sisters going through the hall or up the stairs or stopping in to bring her a glass of ginger ale and some digestive biscuits on a saucer. There would be frost on the windows, her schoolwork spread before her on a narrow, lemon-scented desk, her handwriting, the lovely round perfection of it, her greatest vanity.
and slivers of cake she had served him after they’d gotten Billy into bed, over all those nights she had summoned him. There had been another child, an older sister, who died of lead poisoning when Maeve was very small. A policeman’s daughter, Maeve had gotten some sense early on of the precariousness of life, the risk taken by simply walking out the apartment door. Her mother, all false courage, touched her father’s back, the hem of his coat, as he went out, saving the intake of breath, the sign of the cross, for the moment she saw him gain the street. Anything might happen, and did, and Maeve felt the heavy weight of her grieving father’s hand on her shoulder. He might have shipped her off to female relatives, but he managed instead to trade in his beat for a desk job so he could stay alive for her. The nuns at her school were more than happy to take the child in for as many hours as he needed them to, and Maeve spoke often—or as often as she spoke of anything—of the pleasant afternoons she had spent in the tiny courtyard of the convent beside her school (vine-covered walls, a single oak, a statue of St. Francis above a concrete birdbath, one of the Virgin in the crook of the tree) or in its seldom-visited front room, where the silence was palpable, luxurious, punctuated as it was by the soft steps of the sisters going through the hall or up the stairs or stopping in to bring her a glass of ginger ale and some digestive biscuits on a saucer. There would be frost on the windows, her schoolwork spread before her on a narrow, lemon-scented desk, her handwriting, the lovely round perfection of it, her greatest vanity.
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