Charming Billy (6 page)

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Authors: Alice McDermott

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

BOOK: Charming Billy
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“How was the trip?” my father was saying, laughing still as if in anticipation of a punch line.
“Behind me now,” Billy said, grinning.
He took my hand, his was cold, and I gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, which was cold, too, and still smelling of Ivory soap and Sensen.
As the train pulled out again, he waved to someone inside—“Barney Callaghan’s son,” he told my father. “Can you imagine? A conductor on the Long Island Railroad.” He turned to me and winked. “The children,” he said, “are taking over the world.” His face was all brightness, small white teeth, blue eyes,
pink cheeks, and red lips, flashing lenses catching the changing light.
At the car, we put Billy’s suitcase in the trunk—glimpse of my father’s tackle box and fishing pole and the green army blanket dusted with sand.
My father offered lunch at the restaurant across the street, and Billy glanced at the place over his shoulder, nodding as if it was something he remembered. The intersection at that hour was nearly empty, and the sudden stillness that followed the departure of every train made the sunlight seem anticipatory, somehow: Dodge City at noon, a showdown pending.
“It’s all the same,” Billy said, even as the midday stillness began to fray around the edges: a light changing somewhere, cars once more headed our way.
“No, it’s different,” my father said. “It’s not like the country anymore, more like any other suburb. We’ll go for a drive, you’ll see.”
Inside the restaurant, the air was frosty and dark, and although nearly every table was taken, there was a hush about the place. I shivered as I sat down, and rubbed my bare arms. Billy leaned toward me. “I’ll tell you what’s happening,” he whispered. He held up one finger, lecturing. His lips were remarkably smooth. His eyes red-rimmed but clear. “Everybody here’s been complaining about the heat all summer long and now they can’t bring themselves to complain about the cold.” He sat back a little, a smile working at the corner of his mouth. “Doesn’t that tell you something about getting your heart’s desire?” Then he motioned to the waiter. “Do you think you can adjust the air a bit?” he said softly, with just a touch of a brogue, a souvenir, no doubt, of his trip to Ireland.
“We’re working on it,” the waiter said, exasperated.
When he walked away, Billy pushed out his chair, stood,
and then made a great show of swinging out of his suit jacket and draping it gallantly over my shoulders, saying to the people around us who had lifted their eyes to him, “A bit chilly in here, isn’t it? Don’t you think?” Getting each one to agree. Forming a union, it seemed. “Well, see now, you brought a sweater,” he said to the older lady right beside us. “You’re the clever one.” The jacket smelled of Old Spice and the Long Island Railroad. Shivering, I pulled it over my elbows and felt as I did a small square weight in one pocket—a breviary or a flask.
By the time the waiter came to take our orders, Billy had learned that the old lady with the sweater had lived out here since 1952 and wouldn’t leave the place for a winter in Florida for all the tea in China. And that her companion, who had spent her childhood in Sag Harbor, felt much the same, although she still had her home in Yonkers.
“Well, I haven’t been out here for nearly thirty years,” he told them. The way he said it, this might have been his childhood home as well. The women were sufficiently sympathetic. Sufficiently puzzled. “My wife enjoys the Rockaways, you see, or used to, anyway, before it changed,” he went on. “She likes a place with a boardwalk. And you know how it is, one summer passes and then another and you find yourself saying, ‘Next year, let’s go out there.’ It’s the prettiest spot on earth as far as I’m concerned, but you know how it is, suddenly it’s been thirty years, even though it seems like yesterday.”
As he spoke, he rolled up his shirtsleeves—his pale forearms were sandy with the remnants of a winter psoriasis—took a fountain pen from his breast pocket, and began to scribble a note on the corner of his paper place mat, all the while seeming to give the ladies beside us his undivided attention. He folded the place mat in half, then in quarters, and then folded a neat triangle at the top and tucked it inside. He wrote a
quick address on the white front—Father somebody or other, it seemed, Albany, New York. He slipped a finger into the breast pocket of his shirt, extracted a single stamp, licked it, and put it in the corner. He placed the envelope at the edge of our table as if a courier might momentarily snatch it away.
“Oh, it’s changed out here,” the woman with the sweater told him. “It’s not like it was in the forties.”
“It is in my dreams,” Billy told them. “Just the same.” He winked, ran his hand through his hair. “But then again, so am I.”
“Oh, aren’t we all?” the sweater lady and her friend both said at once.
Billy smiled at them with something like gratitude, as if he could not imagine being seated beside two more pleasant and perceptive women. He raised his water glass. “God bless dreams,” he said, and the ladies returned his toast. If there were shoes to be had, I suspect he could have sold them a dozen.
When the waiter brought our sandwiches he looked at the empty space before Billy with some perplexity and then quickly shifted the extra place mat at our table to Billy’s place. Throughout the letter writing and the simultaneous conversation with the ladies, my father had been sitting back, grinning, watching his cousin be himself and delighting in it—there was no other word—delighting in him. I glimpsed for the first time what it must have cost my father, during all those years of my childhood when Billy was banned from our home until he could show up sober, those same years when my father’s voice would wake us all in the middle of the night, as he shouted into the phone, “Billy, you’re killing yourself” or, more tempered but more desperate as well, “Just let me know where you are, Billy. Just tell me where you are.”
I moved my elbow against the weight in Billy’s jacket. If it was a flask, it was empty. If it was a breviary, it was rather thin.
“So how’s everyone?” my father asked, leaning forward to lift his sandwich.
Billy launched into a familiar litany: his sister Rosie’s kids (Holy Cross and Katherine Gibbs, Queensborough Community and the telephone company) and Kate’s kids (Regis Fordham Notre Dame Marymount Chase Manhattan) and his mother at eighty, who still liked her nightcap. And who he had seen from the old neighborhood and the office and who had invited them out to Breezy Point next weekend and did you hear Kate’s husband is now CFO of the entire organization, which means another addition to their house in Rye, which is already big enough for anybody, if you ask him, so he said to her, Why not take some of that money and feed the poor rather than redoing a house that’s already well done. It’s not like she’s happy with her life or ever has been, if you know what I mean. She told him she could very well feed the poor and put a new guest wing on her house at the same time, which only goes to show she’s not only missed the point of charity but become as addicted to spending money as her husband is to making it.
“And how was Ireland?” my father asked.
“Cold,” Billy said, shaking his head as if the weather were a moral deficit. “And wet. A miserable place to quit drinking.”
My father smiled, indulgent. “But you quit.” It was not a question.
“I signed on,” Billy said, nodding. “And the day after I signed on I got a car and drove out to County Wicklow. All by myself. To Clonmel.”
“And how was that?” my father asked—I have to say he asked it casually.
Slowly, Billy put his sandwich on his plate and sat back, his fingers touching the edge of the table. “Eva runs a gas station
there,” he said. “With her husband. She has four kids.” He paused. “Eva does.”
My father was stirring his iced tea with a long spoon. He nodded, carefully lifting the spoon and placing it on the tiny plate beneath his glass. He touched the lemon wedge beside it. “I knew that,” he said.
Billy raised his eyebrows and smiled a little. His teeth were perfectly straight and even. Dentures, I remembered my mother telling me once, courtesy of Uncle Sam. “She told me you did,” he said.
My father fiddled with the spoon. Had I asked earlier in the conversation who Billy Sheehy was or Marge Tierney or Eddie Schmidt or Tony D’Agostino I might have been inclined to inquire here about Eva and her gas station and her four kids. But the chicken salad had walnuts in it that I was thinking I really could have done without and it was easy enough to guess that Eva was someone from the neighborhood, from the company, from my grandfather’s sprawling legacy of immigrants and immigrants’ children. Someone Billy might send place-mat letters to.
“I did know,” my father said. “I’m sorry to say.”
And Billy blew some air from between his lips and shook his head and glanced at the cold ceiling above us. Then he winked at me. “When you were christened,” he said, “your father drove us over to the church from your house. Your mother, God rest her soul, stayed at home—women did that in those days, didn’t they”—to my father—“missed out on their own babies’ christenings to stay home and get things ready for the party?”
“They were supposed to still be in confinement,” my father said, and then, acknowledging the truth: “But they were usually getting things ready for the party.”
“So your aunt was holding you,” Billy went on, “your mom’s sister Louise, and she and I went on in with the others while your father here parked the car. You were brand-new to that parish, weren’t you, Dennis? To St. Clare’s?”
I saw my father beginning to grin, anticipating what was to come. “We’d just bought the house the month before.”
Billy turned back to me. “Well, he must have gotten confused parking, because he took longer than we thought he would, and next thing you know, we’re all standing at the baptismal font, waiting for him. And in he comes, at a run, and when he sees us standing up there with the priest he does a little leap to get to us—I guess he thought we were going ahead without him—and splat, lands right on his face at our feet.”
My father was grinning now, looking at his lap, shaking his head.
“I’ve heard this,” I tried to say, but Billy went on.
“Well, everybody says, Good Lord, and when the priest bends down to help him, your father looks up all red in the face and says, ‘I’m just so loaded.’”
“With happiness!” my father said now. “I meant to say, I’m just so loaded with happiness …”
Billy shook his finger at him. “Yeah, but what you said and what everyone heard was ‘I’m so loaded.’” To me again, his eyes suddenly wet with tears, although only my father was laughing. “And just a week later I go into a diner up on Linden Boulevard and there’s the priest who did the baptism—what was his name, Dennis, he was an older man?”
My father shook his head to show he couldn’t recall. “I should remember,” he said. “He gave me such a talking-to when the christening was over.”
“Anyway, there he is in this diner and he comes over to me and he asks, ‘How’s that unfortunate brother of yours?’—he thought we were brothers—and I told him, ‘Still full of the
same stuff, I’m afraid.’” And now Billy, too, began to laugh, a deep, quiet but irrepressible laugh, his eyes shining with their unshed tears. “‘Still full of it,’ I said.” He glanced at my father. “Not exactly a lie, you might say. More a matter of interpretation.”
My father bowed his head again, as if to concede something, but when he looked up his smile showed a shadow being lifted. “All right,” he said, as if he were ready to stand corrected. “All right.” As if he believed he was being forgiven.
 
We took him on the usual big-home tour through the estates of East Hampton and he seemed to remember every one of them from his single summer here after the war. One he identified as the Appleton residence—he had bought a postcard of it way back when. Mosler, Eastman, Bouvier. His favorite was a place on the edge of the beach, above a potato field. “Where’s Pudding Hill Lane?” he asked, and my father turned down it for him, driving slowly. “They called these their cottages,” Billy said at one point, turning to me in the back seat. “Yes.” I nodded as if the irony of it was still interesting. We had the windows open and Billy had one arm raised, holding on to the roof; the other hand was in the left, empty pocket of his jacket.
“Well, it’s still beautiful,” he said as we headed back to the village and the little house. “Nothing’s changed.”
“Just us,” my father said, but Billy had begun to recite slowly, softly, like a man humming a tune to himself, letting the words get caught in the breeze from the window. “‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree …’” It was a matter of some pride to my father, to Billy’s friends and family in general, that he had carried a volume of Yeats with him all through the war. Not that my father, or most of his family, read the poems themselves; more that Billy’s interest absolved
them from any interest of their own. When my generation of cousins began to come back from college with copies of Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti and Sylvia Plath, our parents could sniff, “Oh, poetry, sure. Billy Lynch loves that Irish poet, Yeats (or Yeets)”—with a proud nonchalance that seemed to hint that the poet was a friend of a friend. “‘And I shall have some peace there,’” Billy said.
At the house I quickly changed into my bathing suit and headed out for my daily, transforming swim, stepping past the two of them on the front steps, short glasses of lemonade in their hands and
Time
magazine on my father’s knee: an article about Nixon, poor man (they were saying), poor hounded man, caught in his tangle of lies. Billy had left his jacket and tie in the guest bedroom.

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