Authors: Alice McDermott
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Literary, #United States, #Contemporary Fiction
Charming Billy (4 page)
He took the flashlight, told Billy he’d give him a few minutes alone. He reached into the back for the food and the
drinks and made his way across the muddy path to the little house.
drinks and made his way across the muddy path to the little house.
All was intact, no water stains that he could see, no inordinate dampness. No mildew yet, which might or might not be because of the lumps of charcoal his mother had scattered along the baseboards when they’d closed the place up after Labor Day. Just three weeks ago now. When they were still saying Billy and Eva would be back before winter for their honeymoon.
He mixed a pitcher of drinks, made some sandwiches with the stringy slices of ham. At one point he heard the car door slam, but it was some minutes before he heard Billy’s footsteps on the path. He didn’t come in. He sat on the front steps as they had done nearly every night when they were first back from the war. The light from the living room shone through the screen and onto Billy’s white shirt.
Dennis carried the drinks outside then, the plate of sandwiches balanced on top of one of them. He pushed the screen door open with his foot and Billy moved a little to make room for him. Billy took the drink. Dennis put the plate of sandwiches on the steps between them.
He asked Dennis to repeat the details, the letter, the pneumonia, the length of her illness—which Billy himself said would explain why he hadn’t had a letter from her all summer.
“Her parents would have written to you themselves,” Dennis added, looking into the darkness of the yard and the road, covering his tracks, “but they thought it would be better if they told Mary first and Mary thought it best that I tell you. She’ll be going back over herself now, I suppose.”
“You’ll miss her,” Billy whispered, and Dennis shook his head. Nothing he could say in that regard struck him as authentic.
He put his hand to the back of Billy’s neck at one point. Refilled both their glasses more than once. Later, he led him into the house and put him to bed.
It was the next morning, on their way back to the city, when Billy said he couldn’t understand how Dennis had managed to keep from telling him the news the whole time he was at their apartment the night before, the whole way out to Long Island. How he’d managed to drive and chat, to keep from telling him until they had reached the place. He didn’t say he admired or even appreciated Dennis’s restraint. He simply said he couldn’t understand how he’d managed.
We were in our own driveway by now, and again my father was smiling, shaking his head at that old annoyance. He said it was a very long time ago. They’d been younger than he was now capable of remembering them.
“Did he ever find out?” I asked him. “That you lied about it?”
He nodded. “In 1975,” he said. “When he was over there. He met her again. Had a cup of tea with her in the little shop she’d added to the gas station. I guess it had turned into quite a successful operation. She had four kids, too. All grown by then. He said she was still good-looking.”
“Did she pay him back?”
“I guess she offered to. More out of embarrassment than anything else. Of course, he wouldn’t take it.”
“Was he mad, when he found out?”
“At her? Never.”
“At you.”
He considered this. “On the one hand,” he said, “she was back from the dead. There was that. On the other, he’d lived thirty years with a mistaken belief. With that grief. But no, he wasn’t angry. He ended up kidding me about it almost. We realized that it had all happened a long time ago.”
He pulled open the door.
“Do you wish you’d told him the truth?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, without hesitation. “I suppose.” He smiled again. “It’s a bad business. A lie like that.” And then he was climbing out of the car, the thin gray cloth of his suit jacket buckling between his shoulders. We went in the side door, into the kitchen. Our coffee cups and juice glasses were still in the sink. He’d left the radio on; it had become a habit, I think. I followed him through the kitchen into the dining room, where he stood before the mirror over the sideboard, pulling off his tie, raising his chin to unbutton his collar.
“Did you ever tell Mom?” I asked.
“I never told anyone,” he said. “And Billy never told anyone, either, as far as I know. That was his choice, I thought. When I went down to the VA Tuesday morning, though, I was glad it had come out, back in ’75. I was glad he didn’t go through his whole life deceived about it. Didn’t die thinking about some lovely reunion in the sweet hereafter.”
“You think he would have? That’s what Dan Lynch was saying, that he was waiting all his life to meet her in heaven.”
Working with two hands, my father pulled off his tie, unknotted it, folded it in thirds, and placed it on the lace doily that covered the sideboard. “That’s Danny Lynch for you” was all he said. He turned, leaned his two palms behind him, on the edge of the server. He spoke as if providing an antidote to Dan Lynch’s utter nonsense. “I shouldn’t have done it, I suppose. I should have told him the truth. He would have gotten over it and met Maeve anyway. He would have found something else to moon about when he drank. Rosie was right, an alcoholic can always find a reason but never needs one. I thought I was preserving his innocence, I guess. But I should have remembered that when Billy sets his heart on something there’s no changing him. He’s loyal. He’s got this faith—which
is probably why he drinks. The problem is, it’s hard to be a liar and a believer yourself, at the same time. I didn’t see it until your mother died, and it gave me some trouble then. I don’t know if you remember.”
is probably why he drinks. The problem is, it’s hard to be a liar and a believer yourself, at the same time. I didn’t see it until your mother died, and it gave me some trouble then. I don’t know if you remember.”
I lowered my head. I remembered. And my father pushed himself away from the server, where he’d been leaning. Too much said. He headed upstairs to change. I went to the kitchen to stand there for a minute looking for something to do. I put the kettle on—a genetic trait. When I called up to him, he said he’d just have a piece of toast or something before he went over to Maeve’s.
THE LONG ISLAND HOUSE was my father’s inheritance from a mother who, in a recapitulation that must have left even the heavenly host momentarily voiceless, decided during the closing days of her life to make an end run at heaven. It was not that she had been a bad woman until then. She had simply been indifferent, to her two husbands and her son, to her grandchildren, to most of the simple and complex joys of the life she had been given.
The house became hers during her second marriage, and according to my father, the only pleasure she ever got from it was her ability to withhold invitations to visit. The house itself was a modest affair, updated by my father and Billy right after the war, and except for an occasional dusting, an occasional coat of paint, hardly touched again until the early eighties. It had a single room divided into a living room and kitchen, with three tiny bedrooms stuck like postage stamps along the side. The small plot of land it sat on was mostly scrub, but there was a bay beach within walking distance and, especially at night, the tang of sea salt in the air, and for my grandmother’s friends and family from Brooklyn and Queens it was a toehold in a world of spacious lawns and famous artists and summer colonies where wealthy people had once called their
mansions
cottages
—of days at the shore that did not involve changing trains for Seagirt or waiting in line for two hours at the Jones Beach tolls.
mansions
cottages
—of days at the shore that did not involve changing trains for Seagirt or waiting in line for two hours at the Jones Beach tolls.
The man she had inherited it from, Holtzman, her second husband, had bought it during the Depression from another city dweller down on his luck and then with money problems of his own had all but abandoned it for nearly a decade. Toward the end of that decade, a petite redhead somewhere in her late forties began to visit his store on Jamaica Avenue, looking for size fours. With her tiny heel resting in the palm of his hand, he learned she was a widow with a son overseas. He took her phone number in order to call her when something new in her size came in. He took her to lunch, allowing her to leave her box of shoes behind the counter while his assistant ran the store. He gave her some stockings, and a handbag. He took her to dinner and, driving past the house in Jamaica that had been his childhood home, had said that he also owned another place, a little bungalow out on Long Island.
She mentioned the house in a letter that reached my father while he was overseas. A regular laundry list, he said, of reasons why she should remarry. The house on Long Island was right up there near the top.
He said there wasn’t anything at all about love.
She was, according to my father, the most unsentimental woman he had ever known or even heard of. He blamed this mostly on her childhood. The only child of Scottish immigrants with delusions of grandeur, she had been raised in genteel poverty, given ballet and riding lessons, lessons in deportment and French and violin, until tuberculosis made her an orphan at twelve. She spent the next six years being passed from one already-overburdened relative to another and at eighteen had married a forty-four-year-old streetcar conductor so full of
blarney (as my father told it) and wild verse, of Tennyson and the Bard and Gilbert and Sullivan, that he’d had to import every brother and sister, cousin uncle niece and nephew from the other side simply to have enough ears in which to deposit it all. Which made him Holy Father to a tenement’s worth of Irish immigrants but kept his wife and son mostly impoverished and never—what with one wetback mick after another being reeled in from the other side and slapped down on their couch—alone in their own home.
blarney (as my father told it) and wild verse, of Tennyson and the Bard and Gilbert and Sullivan, that he’d had to import every brother and sister, cousin uncle niece and nephew from the other side simply to have enough ears in which to deposit it all. Which made him Holy Father to a tenement’s worth of Irish immigrants but kept his wife and son mostly impoverished and never—what with one wetback mick after another being reeled in from the other side and slapped down on their couch—alone in their own home.
My mother might have been different, my father was fond of saying, if her life had been different (I was a teenager before I began to point out that this was true of us all), and I think that throughout his own life my father harbored in his heart a vision of his mother as a happy and pampered child whose bright eyes saw only the purest intentions.
As it was, as he knew her and as I knew her, she was a Geiger counter for insincerity, phoniness, half-truths. She could dismantle a pose with a glance and deflate the most romantic notion with a single word. She had no patience for poetry, Broadway musicals, presidential politics, or the pomp of her religion—although my father, his father’s son, loved these things in direct proportion to her disdain—and she sought truth so single-mindedly that under her steady gaze exaggeration, self-delusion, bravado simply dried up and blew away, as did hope, nonsense, and any ungrounded giddiness.
Her philosophy of life seemed to be to get to the bottom of things, the plain, unadorned, mostly concrete and colorless bottom of things, and from there to seek to swat away any passing fancy that might cloud the hard-won clarity of her vision. Because she was also intelligent and witty, and because all her cynicism was bolstered by a keen logic, she gained in her later years a reputation as a sage, but one whose advice friends
and family would seek only at the tail end of some experience when they were ready to be either reconciled to their disappointment or disabused of any vestige of hope for some unexpected change.
and family would seek only at the tail end of some experience when they were ready to be either reconciled to their disappointment or disabused of any vestige of hope for some unexpected change.
When Holtzman died in 1964, she found a year-round tenant for the Long Island place, because it was at the time the economically sensible thing to do. (Swatting away any sweet recollection of summer weekends spent there with her husband and her young grandchildren since—swat—the one was dead and the others growing so quickly that such weekends wouldn’t be continuing much longer anyway, and if they were to continue, at the expense of the steady income a year-round tenant could provide, they would really be more of the same, wouldn’t they?—days at the beach and cookouts on the back-yard grill, taking strolls through the village, marshmallows to the campfire, bread heels to the duck pond, and really, when you got to the bottom of it, how many memories of pleasant summer days on Long Island does one person need? Isn’t enough as good as a feast?)
Eventually, all mention of the house seemed to disappear and my parents began to suspect that she had quietly sold the place to her year-round tenant and found some far more practical and profitable way to store the money that had been tied up in it for so long. We had begun to spend our vacations in the Adirondacks by then, had even stopped reassuring ourselves that the mountains were far preferable to the shore. Children of a certain age are pleased to encounter nostalgia, I think, and the summer days we had spent with my father’s mother in the Long Island house moved easily into our family’s short but expanding list of things we used to do but did no more.
And so it was with some amazement that I learned on the afternoon of her funeral in 1971 that she had left the Long Island
house to my father. My mother told me the news as we left the restaurant where her funeral luncheon had been held. I remember the greedy triumph I’d felt: a house, a piece of land, all unexpected and unsought and, most satisfying of all, unearned—the greedy and self-satisfied triumph of a lazy heir.
house to my father. My mother told me the news as we left the restaurant where her funeral luncheon had been held. I remember the greedy triumph I’d felt: a house, a piece of land, all unexpected and unsought and, most satisfying of all, unearned—the greedy and self-satisfied triumph of a lazy heir.
But my mother’s triumph was that the inheritance was part of a package of changes my grandmother had made to her estate in the weeks before she died, a part of her deathbed conversion. The Long Island house, it turned out, was the only thing my father was getting. The rest of my grandmother’s money, which was really Holtzman’s money, was to go to the Church she had had, until then, no use for, to a number of charities whose mailings and TV solicitations she had always held up as proof positive of their misappropriation of funds, and even to her mixed-race former neighbors in Jamaica who took in foster children—for profit, she had always claimed. My mother was Catholic enough to be grinning as she told me all this, as if the satisfaction she felt in learning that my grandmother did, indeed, fear God was well worth the substantial sum of money that she had just described away. Money that otherwise would have been our family’s alone.
My brothers and I saw it differently, of course. We saw our college tuitions dispersed. We saw her surprising change of heart not so much as a deathbed conversion but as a final-hour placing of bets, a closing-time rush (as my oldest brother, the philosophy major, put it) to get a piece of the action in Pascal’s wager. A woman as clear-sighted as my grandmother would not go to meet her maker empty-handed, sure. But, we were certain, a woman as clear-sighted as my grandmother would know, too, that what she was going to meet might just as well be the void of a spent body and a finished mind. She was merely covering her options.
My father claimed it was an indication of the soft, even
romantic heart she had carried and hidden all along. In support of this, he described how in those last days, after she had made her sweet intentions known, she had also said one morning when the hospital chaplain left her room, “Don’t they send them to hospitals because there’s something queer in their pasts?” Still her ornery self. But she had added, too, when she told him he was to have the Long Island house, “Get Billy to visit you there. He’s avoided the place for too long.”
romantic heart she had carried and hidden all along. In support of this, he described how in those last days, after she had made her sweet intentions known, she had also said one morning when the hospital chaplain left her room, “Don’t they send them to hospitals because there’s something queer in their pasts?” Still her ornery self. But she had added, too, when she told him he was to have the Long Island house, “Get Billy to visit you there. He’s avoided the place for too long.”
I knew that in life she had pretty much ignored Billy, although with no more passion or purposefulness than she had displayed in ignoring us all, and so, by way of explanation, my father told me, perhaps for the first time and in a much abbreviated form, the tale of Billy’s brief romance, and engagement, to a girl he’d met out there, right after the war. A girl who died of pneumonia before they could marry.
Billy was for me then merely one of my father’s legion of cousins, distinguished not so much by his alcoholism (it had seemed to me that there were more alcoholics among them than there were Republicans, or even redheads) as by his wife, Maeve, who without many relations of her own relied so heavily on my father whenever Billy was giving her trouble. I suppose I made some connection, or that as my father told the story there was some connection implied, between that ancient disappointment and Billy’s current need to drink, but as I said, that side of his family was full enough of alcoholics who had as far as anyone could tell married the girls of their dreams to make such a connection compelling.
“You think he’s been avoiding the place?” he’d said to his mother, more intrigued by the fact of this kind of conversation, at this late date, than by any observation she might make about Billy.
“I think you know he has,” she said. “And I’m sure you know why.”
“Revenge,” my father told us now. “Stubbornness.” So he could say, whenever he was asked out there or whenever someone else had come, “I won’t go back myself,” and wordlessly remind them all of what he had suffered, found and lost, all those years ago. He never had to say the girl’s name. He merely had to hold up a hand when he was invited and whisper a gracious No, no, in order to remind them all.
“Get Billy to go out there again,” my father’s mother said. “Make him bring his wife.”
“My mother understood,” he said, proving further that she had not been all she had seemed, that her cool exterior had hidden all along a warm heart. “She had Billy on her mind. Billy and Maeve, and that summer he’d spent out at the Long Island house, all those years ago. My mother had thought about him without ever seeming to. She’d thought about any number of things we never knew.”
Of course, what he did not say then was that she, too, had been deceived. That despite her lifelong disdain for delusion and romance and teary-eyed reminiscence, she had ended her life recalling Billy’s summer idyll on Long Island and his pretty (or so the story went), much-loved girl who had died; she had sought a remedy for him, even as she went about securing her own soul.
Billy did return to the Long Island house, in the summer of 1975. It was early July and my father and I met him at the train station in East Hampton. I was on a break between summer semesters at college. Having, perhaps, inherited my grandmother’s distaste for too much of a good thing, I had decided to get through college in the shortest time possible and had taken courses during every summer and winter break. I was due to finish that December, a year and a half ahead of time.
Since my grandmother’s death, my father had spent two
weeks every summer at the Long Island house and then rented it back to Mr. West, the man he still referred to as “my mother’s tenant,” for the rest of the year. The understanding was that when my father was ready to retire in another eight or ten years, he would sell our house in Rosedale and move here permanently. The joke was that Mr. West would then return to his wife and three sons, whom he had deserted a dozen years before.
weeks every summer at the Long Island house and then rented it back to Mr. West, the man he still referred to as “my mother’s tenant,” for the rest of the year. The understanding was that when my father was ready to retire in another eight or ten years, he would sell our house in Rosedale and move here permanently. The joke was that Mr. West would then return to his wife and three sons, whom he had deserted a dozen years before.
My own mother had died of lung cancer in the spring of ’73. The solitary life my father now led could still, at times, strike my heart (my arms, my shoulders, the pit of my stomach) with an unbearable weight, but each time we were together I saw, too, that the life suited him well enough. He had always had a tremendous capacity for accommodation and contentment, whether alone with a newspaper or at a dinner table filled with friends and family. I suppose his mother had taught him not to expect much from life and so it was easy enough for him to see each day as an endless parade of unexpected pleasures. She said it as a caution against excess, but my father said it with a kind of amazed gratitude: enough
was
as good as a feast.
was
as good as a feast.
I suppose there’s not much sense in trying to measure the breadth and depth of your own parents’ romance, the course and tenacity of their love. Your parents’ or anybody else’s, for that matter. I know an older couple who have so convinced their grown children of the charm and endurance of their passionate history—married young and poor, separated by war, reunited to become dedicated and hardworking young parents, loving partners in the building of a business, patient guardians of teenagers, payers of tuition, and finally (looking proudly into each other’s eyes) grateful, rich, and still passionate retirees and grandparents—that their children have had nothing but disappointment and grief in their own love lives and now, in
middle age, look at their aging and still smug progenitors with envy and despair.
middle age, look at their aging and still smug progenitors with envy and despair.
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