Charming Billy (19 page)

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Authors: Alice McDermott

Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Literary, #United States, #Contemporary Fiction

BOOK: Charming Billy
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I wondered if he meant celibacy.
“You’re right,” my father was saying. “Absolutely.”
“I don’t mean it isn’t a sacrifice.” I supposed he did. “It’s a tremendous sacrifice. We had a young fellow, just out of the seminary, come to our parish a few years back, nice as could be, but he didn’t last. He couldn’t take it. Eventually he left and got himself married. So I know it’s a sacrifice. But get rid
of it and the priests will become just like everyone, wait and see. You’ll do as well to confess to your barber.”
My father was nodding, smiling, wondering, no doubt, as I was, about Dan Lynch’s own single state. “Sure,” he said.
“You can’t have both eyes on heaven when there’s a wife and a mortgage and new shoes for the kiddies to buy. It only stands to reason you can’t.”
“You’re right,” my father said. “I didn’t.”
“It only stands to reason,” Dan Lynch said again. And then he turned a little, toward my father, lowered his voice just a bit, not enough to keep me from hearing him but to acknowledge, perhaps, that the company was mixed. “But I tell you, it gets my goat to hear the way people talk about it. It gets to me. You know, you can give up anything else these days, give up all kinds of foods to stay healthy, you know, salt, eggs. Or maybe give up sleep so you can be out jogging down the street at 6 a.m. You can give up an old wife for a new one, or a home life so you can run around the world like Henry Kissinger—oh sure, give up anything like that and it’s just fine, it’s just the ticket. But let the talk turn to Catholic priests and everybody’s smiling behind their hands. Snickering. They’re all out to make it something perverted. A man enters so fully into his faith that it changes the very fabric of his life, the very fabric, Dennis, do you see what I’m saying, and this society can’t tolerate it. They want to see it as something bad. Our Lord’s okay as a story, you know, Christmas, Easter, something to talk about on a Sunday morning, but take it to heart, take Him to heart, have your belief change the very fabric of your life and oh ho”—he held his palm out toward the dashboard, shook it—“that’s going too far for them. They’ve got to look for the dirt in it, not the glory. They say, It’s an unnatural thing, giving that up, a man can’t give
that
up, not for the sake of what’s really only a pretty story.”
“No one says that about the Pope,” my father said, goading him, I thought.
“No, not about the Pope,” Dan Lynch said, ever earnest. “Not in the papers, anyway. They’re careful about that. He’s a celebrity, after all. And he’s a robust man. He skis, you know.”
“Yes,” my father said.
“But they’ll say it readily enough about any ordinary priest, won’t they? They can sense the holiness, but they don’t understand it, so the first thing they want to do is mess it up a bit, kick some dirt on it, throw some sand on the fire. Sure, it’s a great relief and comfort to the rest of us to find out no one’s any better than we are, right? A man like the Monsignor walks into a room, and you know, it threatens some people.”
“Sure,” my father said, a touch of weariness in it. He’d had enough of Dan Lynch, I could tell.
Sensing this, not quite taking offense, Dan Lynch crossed his arms in front of his chest and settled farther into his seat. He turned to look out the window, the wet dark streets lit by orange phosphorus. You could see by the way he turned back to my father, and paused, and looked, that he had struck on the thought some seconds before he said it. “Billy had something of that air about him, didn’t he?” he asked softly. “That holiness, when he walked into a room. Don’t you think?”
“Something of it,” my father said, and then: “Look at this.” There was an empty parking space right in front of Dan’s building. “That’s luck,” he said as he pulled into it.
Dan Lynch reached down to gather up his plastic bag. He was flustered for a few seconds by his search for the door handle and then again by the unfastening of his seat belt, but when he was fully prepared for his leave-taking, he paused and said with a sigh, “It’s the hardest night for Maeve, isn’t it? The first night with Billy in his grave.” He turned to the window. “It might as well rain.” Beside us, his apartment building, pre-war
Queens, six stories, dark brick, without cupola or awning or ornamentation of any kind, seemed as forlorn and hopeless as a penitentiary.
Dan Lynch cleared his throat. “Would you come in for a nightcap?” he asked. Without hesitation, my father turned off the engine and reached behind his seat for the club for the steering wheel.
“You don’t mind?” he whispered to me as we followed Dan Lynch across the sidewalk and up the barren path. “No,” I said, my father’s daughter, and stood beside him as we watched Dan Lynch let himself into his apartment building with his own key.
 
 
“IN MY BOOK OF Irish names,” Dan Lynch said, “Maeve means ‘the intoxicating one.’”
My father nodded. “There’s an irony,” he said.
“And Eva,” Dan went on. “Eva, I suppose, would be some form of Eve. The first woman.”
My father nodded again, slowly, his lips drawn a bit as if Dan Lynch had made a good point. As if in response to a good point, my father said, “There you go.”
They both sipped their drinks—two fingers of Scotch in stubby glasses, plenty of ice. Serving them, Dan had poured three and then seemed taken aback when my father lifted the first and handed it to me. It might have been an aging bachelor’s surprise to think that a woman—especially one he had known as a child—would accept anything stronger than sherry (“Would you rather a ginger ale?” he’d said), but it left me with the feeling that the glass had been meant for someone else. For Billy, perhaps. That I was sipping Billy’s drink.
Dan Lynch’s living room was dim—dim enough to make the double set of rain-spattered windows seem bright. The furniture was ancient: leather-topped desk where he had poured our drinks; claw-footed chairs, broad couch. Some of them his own mother’s pieces, he said. Threadbare Oriental. There
were neat stacks of
National Geographic
and
Time
and
U. S. News and World Report
piled against the bowed legs of every end table, and the tables themselves were piled with books, histories and biographies, from the Queensborough Public Library mostly. Winston Churchill and the Desert Fox, the War in the Pacific, D-Day, Guadalcanal, the
Enola Gay
, F. D. R., and Truman. There was a rattan magazine rack crowded with two weeks’ worth of precisely folded newspapers. Today’s
Daily News
as well as a
St. Anthony Messenger
—a cover story about celibacy and the priesthood—were on the coffee table between us.
There was the odor, especially when we’d first entered, of aftershave and the soap he had used in the shower he must have taken between the funeral lunch and the visit to Maeve’s, but it was giving way now, as we sat, to the various scents—curry, onion, garlic—of some immigrant neighbor’s late supper.
“Not to make too much of such things,” Dan continued, seeming to believe suddenly that my father and I might do just that. “It’s only something that occurred to me today, when Kate brought up that girl’s name again: Eve—Eva. And when I got home, I looked up Maeve.”
My father nodded again, shrugged a little as well, as if to say he would be careful. He would not make too much of such things.
“It’s just that on a day like this,” Dan Lynch said, “you find yourself looking at everything. In a new light, if you know what I mean. You want to make some sense of it all.”
“It’s true,” my father said.
Both men sat silently for a moment, cautious, it seemed, weighing words. Neither one of them would want to appear to be trying to say something profound—that was for the priest, of course—and both equally feared growing sentimental. And yet something needed to be said, on a night like this.
There was the splatter of rain—like fingertips tapping against the windowpanes. The Scotch was mellow but with a bite. Each sip raised a kind of veil that was both a warmth across the cheeks and a welling in the eyes. A way of seeing, perhaps. Perhaps the very thing that Billy would have found so appealing, had the drink been his.
Not to make too much of such things.
“I never did meet her,” Dan said. “That Irish girl. She was long gone back home by the time I was discharged. She was always just a story to me. You and Billy out there on Long Island that summer while I’m still getting eaten alive in the Pacific. Insect-proof fatigues, they told us.” He smiled. “What a time that was.” He turned to me. “Those A-bombs saved the lives of a lot of GIs, you know. Killed a lot of Japanese, sure. A lot of innocent people, too. But don’t let the liberals kid you, none of them ever walked through a jungle sniffing for Japs. That’s what we did, you know, sniffed for them. See if you could smell cigarette smoke or, you know, defecation. That’s how you’d know they were there. You couldn’t see anything but lousy jungle. Those bombs kept an awful lot of GIs from dying in those jungles, you know. Those bombs let a lot of young guys go home in one piece.”
I nodded. I recalled that Dan Lynch had once been known as a great letter writer, too, although his were always addressed to the editors of
Time
and
Newsweek,
the presidents of networks. I recalled that he was especially vigilant about slurs against Irish Americans and had once received a personally signed apology from Danny Kaye for a sketch he had done on TV about a drunken leprechaun. A one-man Irish-American anti-defamation league, my grandmother had called Dan Lynch at the time, out on Long Island that last summer when he’d come out for the day and brought the letter along. The rest of the Irish, she’d said, hear a slur against them and instead of
being insulted get all guilty thinking that it’s true. Kick a Jew in New York, she’d said, and one in Tel Aviv says “Ouch.” But kick any Irishman and the rest of them shut their mouths and cover their backsides, thinking they’re more deserving. Hadn’t Danny Lynch, after all (when you got to the bottom of it), brought the letter in which Danny Kaye admitted all Irishmen were not drunks down to Quinlan’s? hadn’t he spread it out on the bar?
Dan shifted in his seat, recrossed his legs. “I remember meeting Maeve, though,” he went on. “I remember the first time Billy brought her into Quinlan’s. It was a Sunday afternoon. They’d been over to one of those tea dances they used to have at the K. of C. This must have been in the early fifties. There was a real downpour and any number of people from the dance were coming in.”
I sipped Billy’s drink. Another Queens rain, then: the raindrops themselves flashing black and silver in the air, darkening the sidewalk and the gray street and raising the smoky, dirty odor of wet asphalt and wet steel, the darkness of the afternoon making the neon lights in the various small storefronts, drugstore and Chinese restaurant and Quinlan’s Bar and Grill, seem brighter than usual, even romantic, making the streets under and around the elevated seem a city unto themselves rather than the mere runoff—as they had always seemed to be to me—from Manhattan’s surplus. Billy and Maeve, still younger-looking than anyone would remember them, hurrying along.
“I remember I saw Billy heading toward the bar with this girl in front of him, and my first thought was that she was someone he’d met out on the street or just inside the door. I thought maybe she was a stranger who needed to find a telephone and he was just helping her out. You weren’t used to seeing Billy with a girl. It took me a few minutes to get it straight: that he’d actually taken her to the dance, picked her
up at her house and brought her the orchid she was wearing. I must have seemed pretty thick, but it came as a surprise to me. You weren’t used to it in those days. Not with Billy. You were pretty sure he was a fellow who’d stay single.”
Just as Billy must have been sure of it himself by then, five, six years since his summer on Long Island. And yet here was Maeve’s very real elbow against his palm, yielding to his slightest pressure. Let me introduce you to my cousin. Here was another girl speaking into his ear—she’d just have a ginger ale, thank you—her breath mingled with the scent of the hothouse orchid on her shoulder, the one he’d brought her. Her face would seem dim in the new light of the crowded barroom, he would be aware of its downy paleness, her plain blue eyes. Thank you, Billy—maybe a little tremor as she lifted the glass and put it to her lips, a tremor of self-consciousness as she lifted her eyes to him over its rim.
Dan Lynch leaned forward a bit, cupping the stubby glass in both hands. “She was no beauty, was she? Maeve. A plain girl. I was going with Carol Wilson then, you know. Butch Wilson’s sister, do you remember her?”
My father said he did. There was a beauty.
Dan sniffed a little. Her mouth was a bit too wide, he said. Not the brightest light either. He glanced at me as if to say there was a tale to tell, if it was just my father here alone. I suspected it would be a tale my father already knew.
“But Maeve seemed to be a good-enough sort,” Dan Lynch said. “It didn’t take much to see that she was wild about Billy. I don’t know what Billy thought of her at that point, but she sure thought he was something.”
Touching his own glass to hers in the bar where the crowd, just like the other couples at the tea dance that afternoon, was growing younger than them both. Time was passing. The christenings were beginning to outnumber the weddings among his
family and his friends, the children born since the war, the nieces and nephews and cousins once removed becoming toddlers now, schoolchildren, startling him with their weight, their language, their blossoming lives. He touched her glass and sipped his whiskey and felt the watery veil cover his eyes. What could he have thought of Maeve, after the Irish girl, after that other future, the brightest of them, had shattered in his hand: Here was safety, here was compensation, here was yet another life, the one that had been waiting for him all along, even while he’d been busy imagining his life with Eva. “Pale brows, still hands and dim hair”—he would have found the lines in Yeats. “I had a beautiful friend / And dreamed that the old despair / Would end in love in the end—”
“When they finally decided to get married, I have to say it was another surprise to me. I never thought it had gotten to that point. Billy never even said that he was thinking of marriage. But I think maybe he was superstitious by then. I think he was afraid to say much to anyone about his plans. After what happened before.”
“Could be,” my father said.
Dan Lynch nodded and said, “I’m sure it’s true.”
Or did he think, leaning down to her pale face, the lipstick nearly gone from her dry lips, that here was the will to live, or the will to procreate, or simply the will to be joined to another, rising up in him again, all unbidden. Here was the familiar longing for peace, for sense, for happiness of some sort or another showing itself again in the form of this mild woman. Here it was, bidding him to go on, make plans, wed—weakening his resolve. His resolve to be true to his first intentions.
“All Billy says to me is ‘Would you be my best man?’ and I said, ‘Sure. Who’s the bride?’” Dan Lynch laughed, remembering. “I suppose he would have asked you if Claire hadn’t been expecting.”
He said it somewhat slyly and then seemed pleased when my father told him, “I don’t think so. You were the man for the job.”
Dan nodded to agree. “He showed me the ring. Just a plain pearl, not a diamond this time, which I suppose was more superstition still.” He doubled his chin, looking into his drink. “I remember the way she shored up her old man, coming down the aisle.”
My father smiled, nodding, showing that he remembered it, too.
“She did the same for Billy, when the time came. Maneuvered him when he couldn’t maneuver himself.”
“She was good at it,” my father said.
Dan Lynch thought for a moment. A bit of wind picked up some raindrops and hit them against the glass, like pebbles thrown by a persistent suitor. “It was me who told Billy not to stay in the apartment with the two of them,” Dan said softly, going on. “After he and Maeve were married. I knew he had some money saved. Working for Holtzman and all. I said, Buy yourself your own house and move Maeve and her old dad into it—or else you’ll always be a visitor in their place. We were sitting in the back, at those little tables Quinlan had back there for a while, with the little lamps that had those scorched shades. Billy said Quinlan had gotten the whole set of them, along with the new waitress, at a fire sale somewhere. June was her name, the waitress. I took her out a few times. She did seem a little singed.” He raised his eyebrows toward my father, shook his head again: another tale unfit for mixed company. “I said to Billy,” he went on, “Tell yourself this is a way of the Irish girl giving something back to you. You took the job with Holtzman because of her, now use what money you’ve made at it to start out with Maeve. I don’t know, maybe I was wrong to bring her up, the Irish girl, I mean. Billy never mentioned
her himself.” He shrugged. “But that’s what I said. And Billy took my advice. He took my advice that time anyway.”
Holtzman’s money providing yet another down payment, then, this time for the house in Bayside. A narrow pale-brick house on a street lined with a dozen others, a small house with three high brick steps and a wrought-iron railing and a long white driveway that led to a narrow yard. They gave her old father his own room upstairs, moving into it the same bed and dresser and nightstand he had once purchased for his own young bride. The old black police scanner placed over the doily that covered the nightstand mumbling and squawking through most hours of the day that Maeve would spend cleaning and shopping and chatting with the neighbors while Billy was at Con Ed five days a week and Holtzman’s Thursday nights and Saturdays, and even the two weeks of his summer vacation, since he would not go out there again.
(“You and Maeve come out some weekend,” Dennis would say when they met each other on the street or in the lobby or in the elevator at Edison, or when Billy and Maeve came by for supper or had Dennis and Claire over to their place. “Come mid-week,” Dennis would offer. “Take a couple of vacation days. We’ll be there with the children the first two weeks in July, you and Maeve come on out. Bring the old man, we’ll make room.”

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