Charming Billy (9 page)

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Authors: Alice McDermott

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

BOOK: Charming Billy
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They parked, and now locusts and the hush of the ocean filled the air along with the odor of honeysuckle and salt water. There was a line of windows across the back of the house and each of these was warmly lit, and on the nearest side a simple set of steps led from the driveway to a darkened door.
These they climbed, whispering, “Is it here?” and peering in before they knocked to a small square hallway lit by a rectangle of curtain-filtered light from the room beyond. There were the familiar shovels and pails, the swim tubes and the hamper. They heard Mary’s voice, and then the inside door was pulled open and there she was in a pale dress, opening the door to let them in.
“We’ll need another minute,” she said. “There’s a mutiny in progress.”
The room they followed her into was huge—easily as large as the apartment where Dennis had been raised. A kitchen with a table as big as a bus and an icebox that could have housed a short family. The room was softly lit now and quiet, but it was possible to imagine the chaos there must have been just an hour or two before. You saw it in the two wooden high chairs, still slightly askew, at the far end of the table, in the five empty milk bottles lined neatly on the metal drying board, the scattered children’s books and crayons and paper airplanes on the window seat at the far end of the room. You smelled it in
the pleasant odor of dishwashing soap and coffee and the lingering scent of some kind of roast.
Eva sat at the near end of the table, her back to them, and as she turned at their entrance they saw she had Sally, the five-year-old, on her lap. Eva, too, wore a dress. It had capped sleeves and a rounded neck and there was nothing more beautiful than the way she turned in her chair and smiled up at them over the little girl’s head. There was a glass of milk and a half-eaten cookie on the table before them.
“All in bed but this one,” Mary said.
“Oh, but she’s going now, isn’t she?” Eva whispered, leaning around to see the little girl’s face. “Now that the boys are here.”
She was a bony little angel in her thin cotton nightgown and her braid. A sprite. And too small, Dennis thought, to be at home in a house this huge. But she nodded and said yes, clearly exhausted, and put her feet to the familiar linoleum.
“‘Down by the salley gardens,’” Billy said in a light brogue as Eva stood and took the little girl’s hand, “‘my love and I did meet …’”
The child smiled up at him, recognizing the poem he had recited to her before, on the beach. “‘She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.’” He put his hand to his heart, emoting. “‘She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree; But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree.’” He winked at Eva over the little girl’s head. “‘She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs; But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears …’”
“Say good night to the gentlemen,” Mary told her, and Sally whispered good night and waved shyly.
“Good night, dear,” they both said, and then watched as Eva led her down a darkened hallway, lit at its far end by the lights in other rooms, and then up the back staircase.
Had he been a poet or a scholar, Billy might have remarked how, in any house, children asleep in far rooms add a sweetness to the air. But he would save the remark for Eva alone, when the children and the house were theirs.
 
Since it was too late for supper, they went into Southampton, to a place Dennis remembered Bridie mentioning—a bartender there the brother of a friend from Woodside. But the bartender this night was a stranger, although an amiable one—another GI who’d been lucky enough to watch the war from an air base in England. He’d seen Glenn Miller there, just before he boarded the plane he disappeared on. And married a girl from Cornwall, who hadn’t joined him yet but was already saying in her letters how much she was going to miss bloody England.
Mary and Eva clucked their tongues. Poor girl.
The bar was cool and dark and it gleamed in sundry places like a jewel; like a jewel it caught light along its polished surfaces, in its brass rail, in the mirror that ran its length and the various glasses and bottles that lined the heavy, stately counter across its back. There was only another couple at a table in the corner and the four of them, until the door opened and a single young man walked in. He sat opposite them, at the far end of the bar, and because the bartender was in the middle of a funny story about a crazed airman and one unloaded bomb, the man sat unserved for a good while, until Dennis, when the story was finished, pointed and nodded.
The bartender wiped a tear of laughter from his eye, threw the bar rag over his shoulder, and turned toward the new man, and then, just as abruptly, pulled the rag down and began slowly to polish an empty foot of bar.
“But I was sorry to miss seeing Paris,” he said. “That’s my
one big regret about the war.” He moved in front of them again. “We had this one fellow,” he said. “Another pilot.” He began to lean his elbow toward the bar, to launch another story, and Dennis, thinking he was either nearsighted or lazy, pointed again and said, “There’s a man who’s been waiting.”
Still leaning down, the bartender looked over his shoulder toward the man, and the man—he was no older than themselves—lifted his hand and raised a finger to indicate he was there, as if he were in a crowd of patrons and not alone at the end of a mostly deserted room.
The bartender turned back to them. “This guy went to Harvard, this pilot I’m talking about, but he was a nice guy just the same, regular. And he comes up to me one morning and he says …”
Now Billy, beginning to feel parched in sympathy for the man (although his own glass had twice and quite generously been refilled), interrupted to say, “I think there’s a man who needs a drink.”
This time the bartender didn’t turn around, just bowed his head and smiled a bit—he was a good-looking guy with a strong chin and thick hair—and picked up his story again.
The girls exchanged a look of both surprise and concern, and then Eva looked at Billy in a way he imagined he would someday find familiar, looking for him to explain. While the bartender continued with his story, the man sat, impassively, his hands folded one upon the other on the bar, and then, without a single look of impatience or anger or disgust, only perhaps a single deep breath, a defeated movement of his shoulders, he swung off the barstool and pushed out the door.
The boy from Harvard, it seemed, would have flown the bartender to Paris after the liberation, as a wedding present, if he’d survived the war.
He straightened up again. “This is my round.” But Dennis put his hand over his glass and pointed to the place where the man had been.
“What is he, a boozer?”
The bartender turned casually, the cocktail shaker in his hand. He seemed unaware until then that the man had gone, and still maddeningly indifferent to having lost a customer. He shook his head, selecting rye for the girls’ old-fashioneds. “We don’t serve Jews,” he said, as neatly as he poured the drink and placed it on the bar before them.
 
They were grateful to get outside, and more grateful still to get back into the salesman’s car and return to the dark and elegant roads of East Hampton. “Well, I think it’s a shame,” Mary said from the front seat. “Good Lord, what did you boys fight for anyway? Has he read about the camps? What was the war all about—that poor man.”
And the other three shook their heads, yes, poor man, but unwilling to let the shame of it, the sluggish, sickening sense of false hope and false promise, invade their idyll in this lovely place.
Billy leaned down toward Eva’s lap, pointing out her window. “Look there,” he said. “That one. That’s my idea of heaven.”
They parked at the Coast Guard beach, and the girls sat together on the bumper while the boys found driftwood and built a small fire. While they were gathered around it, the beach became vast and black, and the thud of the invisible ocean, even with its predictable rhythm, seemed relentlessly startling.
They each put an arm around their girl’s shoulders, and then Dennis lifted the dimming flashlight and asked Mary to take a walk with him down to the shore. Billy and Eva watched the
swaying beam as it moved through the dark and then disappeared over the seawall.
Eva had her shoes off and her white toes were partially buried in the sand. She had her knees raised under her skirt, the skirt’s hem pulled down around her ankles. She leaned forward when the other two had gone, moving out of his arm to stare at the burning wood and say, “When I was a child, I used to pretend I was a little person caught down there, inside the fire. A lost soul.” She moved a finger to trace an imaginary path. “I’d see myself running, up one log and down the other, to escape the flames.”
She turned to him, the firelight on her cheek and her bare arms. “I was certain I was going to hell and I thought it was a good way of practicing—you know, planning how I’d manage in there, how I’d outsmart the devil.”
He laughed. Her eyes were marvelous. “What made you think you weren’t going to heaven?”
She pulled down the corner of her crooked mouth. “Don’t all children think they’re going to hell?”
He shook his head. “All children think they’re going to be saints—probably martyrs. I did.”
“Well then,” she said, raising her head so that for a minute he thought she was addressing someone else, perhaps Dennis and Mary returning, some third person out there in the darkness. “There’s the difference between you and me.”
Kissing her was like inhaling the essence of some vague but powerful alcohol. He recalled his poetry: like taking the wine breath but not the whole wine. He knew it was the literal commingling of her whiskey and his gin, of the smoke from the fire and the sea spray that was too fine to dampen their skin but that had made a delicate veil for her soft hair, one that broke as he moved his fingers through it, perhaps too roughly. But he knew it was something else, too, something that could
not be distilled from its parts; that was the dark flavor of desire, but a desire for something he couldn’t give a word to—for happiness, sure, for sense, for children—for life itself to be as sweet as certain words could make it seem.
“I wish you would marry me,” he told her, surprising himself not because he had broached the subject but because he had not said, “You will.”
“Oh, Billy,” she whispered, and laughed, straightening his glasses and then, coyly, taking them off completely. “End of September and I’m back home.”
Now the darkness around her, and the firelight itself, had softened—even the threatening bang of the ocean had dimmed. “But you’ll come back,” he said.
She held the glasses between them, against her heart. “It costs a lot of money to go back and forth,” she said.
“Then stay,” he told her. “Can’t you just stay?”
She shook her head. “My parents are there,” she said.
“But your sister is here.”
“And three more over there.”
“Then send for them. Send for your parents, too.”
“Oh sure,” she said with a laugh.
“I mean it. That’s how my father’s family did it. Dennis’s father came over first and then brought over his six brothers and his sister, and Lord knows how many more.”
Her head was bent low now; she was tracing his glasses with a finger, holding them in her lap. “I have to go back,” she said. “They’re expecting me.”
He could see the line of her parted hair, her scalp so white against the rich darkness. “I’ll send for you,” he told her. “Can I do that? You go home for a while, and as soon as I save the money I’ll send for you. I’ll bring you back. Can I do that?”
She shook her head only slightly and, with her chin still lowered, whispered, “There’s still my family.”
“I’ll send for them, too,” he said, and because he heard her laugh a little, perhaps saw her smile, he added, laughing as well, “I’ll send for them all, your parents and your sisters and the next-door neighbors if you want me to. Does your town have a pastor—I’ll send for him. A milkman? Him too.” She was laughing now. “Is there a baker you’re particularly fond of? Any nuns? Cousins? We’ll bring them over. We’ll bring them all over.” It was what his life had held for him all along.
Laughing, she raised her shining eyes, her dark brows that nearly ran together above them and proved, as far as he was concerned, that Nature in her overprotectiveness understood what a glorious pair of eyes She had created. “You’re planning to rob a bank or two, are you?”
“Sure,” he said. He took her face in his hands, but even this close he couldn’t tell if it was firelight or tears that made her eyes shine so, or maybe his own muddled vision. He pulled her to him, but carefully this time. There was a vast darkness beyond them and the indifferent pounding of the sea, and adrift in the same world that held their fine future there was accident and disappointment, a sickening sense of false hope and false promise that required all of God’s grace to keep at bay.
Fifty yards away, the dimming flashlight lit a yellowed inch of sea foam and then rolled a little toward the ocean with the water’s retreat. The next wave crashed with such a sound it might have been the great iron door of perdition closing behind him. But Dennis hardly flinched.

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