Charming Billy (7 page)

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Authors: Alice McDermott

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

BOOK: Charming Billy
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The bay was about a mile and a half away, through streets that were, as my father had said, becoming more and more suburban. As he’d pointed out each time we’d walked this route together, thirty years ago there was hardly a house between ours and the bay, and the road that was tarred now was mostly dirt then. He and Billy himself that first summer they were back from overseas had widened part of it with the scythe Mr. Holtzman had lent them.
Now there were as many houses, as many cars on the tarred road as you might find in any of Long Island’s greener suburbs. And although most of the houses here, with their leanto carports and decorative lobster pots, with nautical flags and badminton sets in sandy tree-shaded yards, were clearly summer homes, beach cottages in the less ironic sense of the word, there were a number as well that had pale aluminum siding and custom-made drapes in bay windows and full two-car garages, as sturdy and suburban and dull as any in Rosedale or Franklin Square. Places for year-round living, for six o’clock dinners of macaroni and cheese and hurried mornings of getting
to work and meeting the school bus. Suburban sprawl overtaking summer romance, as far as I could see. The chances for any of us living that rare two weeks in high summer, in a wild place by the sea, a hiatus, as Billy and my father had called it after the war, diminishing and diminishing.
When I heard a car behind me, I moved to the dusty edge of the road, as I’d gotten into the habit of doing on this walk. I shot an angry look over my shoulder when I felt the warmth of its engine on the back of my legs. It was, after all, my life coming at me, my future that was threatening to run me down—who wouldn’t give it a dirty look?
I slowed further, even stepped onto the sandy edge of the road, into the tall weeds and the grass. Finally, I turned. It was Mr. West’s car and Matthew or Cody or John was driving, leaning across the front seat to call out the window and offer a ride.
He (Matthew, you) was due to meet a friend at the lobster dock in twenty minutes, so we were spared the memory of a first conversation on the same sunny bay beach where Billy met Eva in those first weeks he was home from the war. We sat in the car instead, the broad front seat. There was the scent of stale cigarettes and old joints and the sweet smell of the beach towel I held on my lap. You were tan and wore the leather band around your right wrist. Just out of Stony Brook. Worked a charter fishing boat all summer. Wanted to own one of your own. Wanted to see the West Coast. Never went into the city, didn’t like it. Couldn’t imagine living in a place like Rosedale, going to college way up in Buffalo. A Bonacker, a real Bonacker. But your mouth was wry and your eyes dark brown. I suspected you would age into your father’s face exactly, but without the furtive brows. You ducked your head when you laughed, like someone who has flubbed his lines onstage, someone needing to correct himself.
We agreed to go out that night. Walking back from the bay—I’d stayed longer than usual, accruing benefits, I thought—I wondered if my father would be offended. I knew what my mother would have said: a date was for her my primary social obligation and superseded all other claims. Even in her final days she insisted I go out if someone asked me. “Go,” she had said, frowning as if she could not believe my hesitation, as if to say, Haven’t I taught you anything? When she couldn’t speak, she merely waved her hand, sweeping me out:
go
.
They were sitting on lawn chairs now, my father and Billy, on the sparse grass in front of the house. As I came down the road, my father was leaning forward, his forearms on his knees, his head bent, listening like a diligent priest. Billy was leaning forward, too, but with his arms folded across his chest and his back straight. They both looked up when my sandal hit the gravel driveway, but they were too lost, it seemed—in conversation? in the past? in recrimination?—to fully notice or recognize me until I was almost beside them. Or close enough to see that my father was shaking his head, ever so slightly, refusing, refusing something that Billy wanted him to take. And that Billy, holding himself carefully, speaking slowly, softly, even as he turned to smile at me, had already had quite a bit to drink.
 
 
OF THE (LET’S FACE IT) half dozen or so basic versions of the Irish physiognomy, they had two of them: Billy thin-faced with black hair and pale blue eyes behind his rimless glasses; Dennis with broad cheeks, eternally flushed, and dark eyes and fair hair that had only begun to thin under his combat helmet, somewhere, he claimed, in northern France. One every inch the poet or the scholar, the other a perfect young cop or barman. The aesthete priest and the jolly chaplain.
But in fact they had both gone to the RCA Institute before the war and had left steady jobs at Con Ed to enlist. In July 1945, they both had plans to return there in the fall, or as soon as the Long Island house was finished, as soon as they were ready to end this hiatus—they called it that—between their lives as they were and whatever it was their lives were to become.
Their charge had been to make the place livable again after nearly a decade of abandonment. To update the plumbing and the electrical, chase out the mice and the wasps, repair or replace whatever parts of the floor or the ceiling, the windows or the doors needed repair or replacement. The directive had come from Holtzman, the shoe salesman, as if an afterthought, over dinner the second night Dennis was home (although it was not home to him, it was the salesman’s house, even though
he sat at his mother’s dining-room table). He offered the project as if in a burst of inspiration, even said something like “Here’s an idea for you boys …” although Dennis knew that in his kit in an upstairs bedroom (not his room, although the bed was the one he had slept in as a child) he had the letter his mother had sent him, the laundry list of reasons to remarry. He knew by the anxious glance Holtzman shot her, even as he pretended to be inspired, that the project had been his mother’s idea all along.
On the afternoon of their arrival, they parked the car in the rutted and overgrown driveway and in shirtsleeves and fedoras and army boots cut through the knee-high grass and the weeds with the scythe and the clippers Holtzman had lent them. City-bred, they made quite a show of it, testing their arms and the heat and their resolve, and sending the tall grass, the bees and grasshoppers and zithering beetles every which way as they made a good path across the sandy soil to the three peeling steps at the front door. They pulled the screen off its hinges with the first tug.
The key Holtzman had given them was attached to a chain that was attached to a metal shoehorn engraved with the name and the address of his Jamaica Avenue store. It was only this, this awkward key chain, that made them fumble a bit. The door itself opened easily, the way it would in a movie or a dream, as if the lock hadn’t been real at all, or as if the hinges had been well oiled. The place was musty and warm and you could see dust motes in the sunlight that came through the kitchen window as clearly as you could see the sink and the stove and the sagging gray couch.
Now the vague thoughts Dennis had been having about every place he’d been to since his return from overseas took form and he said to Billy, “This has been here,” as if Billy would know what he meant. What he meant was, this house
has been here, just like this, all the while he had been locked in the adventure and tedium of the war. This had been here, just as it was (like the Chrysler Building, his mother’s new home, the Jamaica Avenue El), all the while and at each and every moment he had been away.
“Since the twenties, I suppose,” Billy said, not getting it.
“Forever,” Dennis told him.
But Billy got it later, after they’d found a restaurant in East Hampton for dinner and then, because neither of them had been here before and because the charm of the village gave them the sense that the roads that led from it offered something more, they toured the place in Holtzman’s car. It had all been here. The elegant trees that lined the broad streets, the great green lawns that grew, even as they were slowly passing, greener and deeper in the twilight so you could almost make yourself believe that night was seeping in through their roots, not moving across the sky above them. The houses—when had they ever seen such houses, how was it they hadn’t known they were out here? Grand and complex palaces,
cottages
wood-shingled or white, with gazebos in their gardens and great pillared porches that curved like bows and widow’s walks and gabled attic rooms from which you could probably glimpse both the silver spires of the city and the black ocean edge of the earth.
They moaned to see the darkened places that had not yet been opened for the season—“No one even there”—and whispered, “Take a look at that,” when one was lit like a steamship from stem to stern. But what killed them, what really killed them, were the houses that looked out over the ocean, that had for their front or back yards a dark lush carpet of beautifully mown grass and then, running down from the other side, as if front and back had been built on different planets, magnificent dunes, sea grass, white beach and sea.
“Leave me there when I’m dead,” Billy said of one of
them—a large house on a wide lawn with a starry backdrop of sky that even in near darkness seemed to contain the reflected sound and sparkle of the ocean. “Prop me up on the porch with a pitcher of martinis and a plate of oysters on the half shell and I’ll be at peace for all eternity. Amen.”
They made their way home in darkness, under the thick leaves along Main Street and out toward the sandier and less elegant regions of the Springs and Three Mile Harbor. They made several wrong turns and even in the driveway sat squinting at the little house for a few minutes before they decided it was the right place, after all.
They agreed to sleep in the car that night, since the mattresses were mildewed and the mice well ensconced. With GI resourcefulness they hung T-shirts over the opened windows and secured the edges with electrical tape in order to keep out most of the bugs.
They smoked for half an hour, Dennis in the front seat, Billy in back. “I never knew,” Billy said at one point, his glasses in his hand, his hand resting on his forehead, “I never knew what it was like out here.” It was what he would write on his postcards tomorrow, creating artifacts. “Isn’t that something? I had no idea those places were out here.”
“It’s something,” Dennis said. “Bridie was here once,” he added. “She came out to Southampton with someone. She said it was really something.”
“It is,” Billy said. He paused. “It almost makes you wonder what else you don’t know about yet.”
Dennis frowned for a moment and then said, “Plenty,” with a laugh. But although Billy looked the part he was no poet or scholar and could not explain: what else did he not know about yet that would strike him as the village tonight had struck him—strike him in that very first moment of apprehending, of seeing and smelling and tasting, as something he
could not, from that moment on, get enough of and could never ever again live without.
By the end of their first week they had a routine and a sufficient knowledge of the roads to find the dump and the bay beach, the cheaper restaurants and the hardware stores. They did the heaviest work early in the morning and then ducked inside before noon to wire and paint and plaster. Around four or five, when the sunlight began to edge from white to yellow, they took their towels from the clothesline they had rigged between two trees out back and walked with them draped around their necks the mile and a half to the bay. They cleared a shortcut with Holtzman’s scythe. The beach there was rocky at the shoreline, littered with shells, but the water was warmer than the ocean, and since neither of them was much of a swimmer, they both welcomed the chance to just float and dive and touch their toes to the bottom at will.
Some nights they stopped into a bar off the Springs road. They both drank too much the first and second time, but only Billy, engaged in long conversation with the bartender and an ugly old Bonacker who could not hear enough about the war, drank too much the third and fourth.
Billy drunk, in those days, was charming and sentimental. He spoke quietly, one hand in his pocket and the other around his glass, his glass more often than not pressed to his heart. There was tremendous affection in Billy’s eyes, or at least they held a tremendous offer of affection, a tremendous willingness to find whomever he was talking to bright and witty and better than most. Dennis came to believe in those days that you could measure a person’s vanity simply by watching how long it took him to catch on to the fact that Billy hadn’t recognized his inherent and long-underappreciated charm, he’d drawn it out with his own great expectations or simply imagined it, whole cloth.
They talked about the war: the characters in their divisions, Midwesterners always the crudest, didn’t you notice, something to do with living around farm animals, no doubt; the officers good and bad, the morning just before they returned, when a group coming out of first mess claimed they were serving cake for breakfast, which turned out to be only bread, fresh bread. The tar-paper shack Dennis and two other fellows had constructed, warmer than the tents, the Pilsen Hilton. Their luck in avoiding the Pacific. Their quests for souvenirs. Patton and Ike and F. D. R., the lying old smoothy. The kids begging chocolate and chewing gum. The French girls, all of them beautiful, one coming to Switching Central in Metz, where Billy was operating near the end, to ask if a message could be sent to her fiancé, another GI gone north. She said she even knew his code name, Vampire, which made two or three of the other boys laugh out loud. She was a dark-haired girl with great big dark eyes. She wore a white handkerchief knotted around her neck, as lovely as diamonds. The message she asked Billy to send was simply: “I am still here.”
 
Their shoulders and arms and the backs of their necks burned and freckled and peeled, and after dinner each evening they walked through the village with toothpicks in their mouths or drove past the great houses on the surrounding streets, noticing the changes in them, how they looked in the rain, in clear twilight, how well they bore even the oppressive air of the hotter days and marveling, marveling still, that this Eden was here, at the other end of the same island on which they had spent their lives.
One afternoon just before VJ Day a family was spread across a blanket on the widest crescent of bay beach—at least they thought it was a family as they approached from the road. But as they dropped their towels and bent to unlace their already
loosely laced boots, to slip off the socks they wore under them and the pants they wore over their swim trunks, they quickly changed their assessment. Six children, the oldest no more than nine, and two women, girls, actually, who were not old enough to be mothers to them all.
They nodded a greeting to the girls and the children as they made their way to the water and then, swimming out with as much form as they had ever shown for as much distance as they dared to go, floated a bit under the paling sky, glancing as they did, in subtle, sidelong glances, at the group on the shore, at the girls especially, one standing now at the water’s edge, a pail and shovel in her hand and two little ones at her feet. The other, only a little plumper, on the blanket still and wearing an old-fashioned swim cap over her curly hair that from the water’s distance—at least for Billy, whose glasses were in his pants pocket on the sand—seemed like an aura of royal-blue light.
Five of the children were knee-deep in the water now, dipping their outspread hands just as the one girl was instructing them to do, fingers splayed like starfish, washing off the sand. Then one of the children, the tallest boy, stepped out of the water with his splayed hands held high, as if he were a surgeon, as if the sand might leap up at any minute and cover them again and called, “Eva,” toward the blanket, “Eva,” although it was impossible to tell if he meant the girl in the swim cap or the sixth child, who sat beside her, because at that moment a huge black touring car pulled up from the road and in a sudden gathering of pails and shovels and shells and picnic baskets and cover-ups and blankets—a sudden momentum that died the minute everything was off the sand and they made, in incredibly slow motion, the trek from beach to car—they were gone.
The two swam a little closer, to a shallower, more comfortable distance from the shore, and then climbed out of the
water completely. They reached their towels and in an economy of terry cloth that they had learned in the service dried face and arms and shoulders with one end, chest and legs with the other, and then sat on the dry middle on the sand to smoke a cigarette and then, flicking their feet with one sock and then the other, put on socks and boots for the walk home.
The road was hot and Dennis had both his pants and his towel draped over his shoulders to protect his latest burn. He could feel as he walked the salt drying on his legs and on his face and arms. He could see a line of it on the pale hair of his cousin’s calf.
They were virgins, both of them. Before the war, all the girls they’d known had seemed to be another cousin’s schoolmate or the daughter of an aunt’s best friend, and while desire had presented itself often enough, the tight quarters and the rigorous decorum of that time and place had failed to offer opportunity for more than an accidental brush or a chaste kiss. And later, when opportunity did abound, when they were handsome in their uniforms and perfectly fit, they were only weeks or days away from shipping out and the looming possibility of their own deaths made even the desire to commit, at this late date, that kind of mortal sin seem as foolish and as fleeting as the mad longing to hurl yourself, willy-nilly, from some great height—the parachute jump at Coney Island, for instance, or the observation deck of the Empire State Building—or to raise your head from the mud during a live ammo drill at boot camp, just because you had the urge.

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