Maggie Cassidy (11 page)

My birthday party was coming up but I wasn't supposed to know about it—all planned by my sister, to be had in a little cottage up the Pawtucketville hill near the church, her girlfriend's house. It was all supposed to be hidden from me. Presents were bought—little Emersonette radio so auspicious then but later to be little radiator radio of my father's dull flops in cheap hotels in the years to come of his wandering work—Baseball glove, supposed to be mark and symbol of the coming baseball season and all of us to play ball, bought for my birthday by Bloodworth probably—neckties—Everybody was invited by my sister:—Maggie, Bloodworth, Lousy, Iddyboy, a few of her friends, my parents, girls from the neighborhood the boys would bring with them—I wasnt supposed to know about it but I did.

Bloodworth told me.

One night our friendship deepened immensely and sensationally in front of the Giant Store, across from the Silk Mills, the canal, in front of Boys' Club, we'd been talking since practice where he came sometimes to see me run and now aimlessly walking to continue talk had reached the compromise split-up point of “I go home this way you go home that way”—to supper—It was already dark, cold winter, the streetlamps of the street bright like diamonds in cold howly grit winds, unpleasant—We hung there just talking—And about Maggie, baseball, everything—To keep warm we just suddenly began playing imaginary catch from about five feet from each other showing our also demonstrative technique styles of catch and throw, the leisurely windup, the throw—“Big leaguers always lob the ball easy” said Charley “you go to Fenway Park and you see the guys before game time just pitching it in easy not one guy throwing to snap and it looks like no effort at all but they can throw the ball far with the same easy lob, from years of easy lobbing—This means ‘Dont throw your arm out”‘—

“Charley, you shoulda been a big leaguer.”

“I'm gonna be—I hope—I'd sure love it—Taffy'll make it—Taff will—”

In histories of their own in the Lowell Highlands Bloodworth and Taffy Truman had bent their heads together over their tremendous personalities and hope, ambitions, reading papers over each other's shoulders, rushing to games, broadcasts, known each other's most personal impossible interior hang-up pose core like they'd know their own or the marks of their own wounds—In coldwind nights stalked in jackets talking, like Scotchmen in an Edinburgh of the New World—Both of them worked on the railroad in Billerica, and their fathers too—

“Taff will make it—big leagues—I aint worried, Bill—Here's the way I wind up and throw—”

“Here's how my crazy pal G.J. Rigopoulos?—pitches, he's the craziest guy in the world” I yelled to him across the winds and showed him, the Bob Feller exaggerated windup of almost falling back to the ground to throw, long leg up.

On Moody Street we're pitching the invisible game the week of my birthday party, now we were imitating a great battery, I was squatted down with imaginary catcher's mitt, we had ghost batters up and whole innings to play. “Two and O, two on, weary Charley Bloodworth pitching a crucial ninth—peppery sensational Jack Duluoz behind plate—here's the pitch—I think you should know they're gonna throw a party for ya—your sister—”

“Who?
me
?”

“Yeah, boy. Maybe you'd drop dead from excitement or shock or something, I dont know—I dont like surprises myself—so when March twelfth comes just take it easy and you'll see—Your sister and M.C. Number One've been talking on the phone for weeks. You got lots of nice presents boy—including one I aint gonna tell you about—”

My mother and father were deeply involved in the big party too, it was arranged for cakes, for a newspaper reporter to be there, games. I didnt look forward to it because of the immensity of everything. I half guessed that I would have to act surprised and as if I didnt know when everybody'd yell “Happy Birthday!” I bit my lips . . . proud.

The big night came.

Everybody was off to the party to await my arrival. I sat alone in the kitchen waiting for Iddyboy to come—“eediboy, come on, my brother Jimmy want to see you about something!” Jimmy Bissonette, the man of the house where the shindig was about to bang—friends of my sister—Outside a huge blizzard has started, by midnight it will have paralyzed Lowell and be making history 20 inches deep, vast, prophetic. How sad and funny that my parents are hiding with fun hats and our own house is empty—I have all the lights out, wait by the window among empty window shades, dark lost coats—I'm all dressed to go in my high school football sweater with the “38” on it for 1938 and a great sewn-in “L” for “Lowell” a little football sewn in redly in the gray thread of the “L”—an undershirt beneath, no collar—I want to have my picture taken by the photographers they'll call from the local papers, I foreknow—Everybody else will wear coats, vests, ties—I'm going to look like an absurd child whose gray dream of vanity even love cannot penetrate.

I look out the window at the tremendous storm gathering.

Through it, eager gleeful big good Iddyboy's plodding gravely to the plan—I see him in specky sweeps across the Gershom arc lamp rounding the corner, bent, his shoes leave little idiotness dots in snow, goodness tramps in the ghost and glee of it—my chest stabs deep sweet transcendent pain to see it, him, the snow, the night—across the furying murks thirty persons are hiding to scream me Happy Birthday, Maggie among them—Iddyboy rolling along in the slanty glooms, his big sleeky grin in sleet, teeth shining small separate gleams, rosy, glad, shadows in his rugged ruddy hardbone nose—an old pro guard of beef and iron slung low to murder when smash-football breaks the ruddy turfs—his busty knuckle knob of fists inbent in stiff sartorial partygoing gloves—“Bash I boo!” he says—he reaches out a snap punch and bashes the picket fence clean off the base—says “Grargh” and goes
vlup
and pelts his picket off—as oft he'd under cold midnight streetlamps dared me to try it,
pow
!—life in the nailed-in picketpost holds still, my knuckles burn, I try two more times, “Hard! sharp! ye boy!”—some oldwood frozenness cracks, the picket flies off—we range along the fence casting tooth after tooth out of it,
crack
, Old Man Plouffe who lived across from our favorite parkfence a strange old idler who'd all he do is open windows in the middle of the Lowell Night and admonish the boys “
allez-vous-en mes maudits vandales
!” with his stocking cap and rheumy rosy eyes alone in his brown house by forlorn coffin strips velvet and spittoons he'd hear the crack of our pickets at 2
A.M.
—Iddyboy's dark leer at the thought of it—“Hoo Gee!” yelled Iddyboy the night the French Canadian Mayor won the Lowell election, Arsenault O golden name, Iddyboy in political excitement leaped up from our fifteen-year-old pinochle game when my parents were out in the dense Lowell night and crammed his fist through the plaster of the kitchen wall, a prodigious wallop enough to kill Jack Dempsey gloveless like that—the plaster caved in on the other side in the radio mahogany table room—when my mother came home horrified she was convinced he was a maniac and worse—“He put his fist through it? His boot!” Knuckle marks were sunk in the deep wall. “How did he do that! I tell you they're all crazy the Bissonettes—they've got the damnedest men in that family—the father—” Iddyboy, calmed down now—momentarily stops at the wood fence below, I see him turn anxious haggardness four flights up in the soft spit snow to see—“What? No light? Jacky aint dey? Where's that damn He Thee Boy! I'm gonna break that neck! Argh”—He plunges across the street and under my sight at the tenement doors, powerful, silently sore, I hear him barge in the halls, Iddyboy is swimming up to me in the gloom of a dream so huge I see there is no end to it, to me, to him, to Maggie, to life, to wife, to world—

“Kid you big Marine!”—our greetings at the door.

“Come on boy, my brother Jimmy wants to see something about you—”

“What?”

“Oh”—trying to look unconcerned, with heavy tragic eyes falling—“he's nothing, you babe. Come!”

He explodes laughing “Hee!” He squeezes my knee, we sit facing, hard iron racks enclose my knee as we sleek teeth at each other in the continuation of the Eediboy Marines burlying down the planks of the bridge—I feel like saying “I know about the party, Ye Boy” but I dont want to disappoint his big believing heart—We look at each other, old friends. “Come on you lad. Hat! Coat! Less go!”

We bend to the blizzard, go up Moody—Suddenly the moon wheels pale in a crack of penetrative clouds—“Look, the moon!” I cry—“Iddyboy you still believe that man in the moon with the basket of twigs?”

“Those black shapes not eyes! Not a basket of twigs, a
bundle
!.—It's wood—
du bois
—Your eye dont believe what you see? It's you moon, kiddo Ti Janny, all the hopeful people knows that!”

“
Pourquoi un homme dans la lune? Weyondonc
!” (Why a man in the moon? Come on!)

“Ey, ey,” ominous to stop, leaning hand on knee, “dont talk like that—it's true
weyondonc
. You're afraid you? You's crazy? Ah?
Tu crais pas
? You dont believe? On your birthday? Dont you do believe?” Iddyboy who in church on Sundays stood straight as a post in front pews of Sainte Jeanne d'Arc turning bulging red faces when loud noises disturbed the silent priest in his silent altar—Iddyboy wanted no pretense in this world.

“It's not true all that!”—firm atheistic adolescent denials I make.

“Non non non! A man in the moon needs that bundle of wood!” he says angrily—shudders hugely in his mighty chest—“Ah gee-boy!”—simple-minded, without alteration sprung from the blood of the pure paisans of the North, the noises issuing from his throat the refined gutturals of an eloquence to tell—“Me I believe in
Le Bon Dieu
, Jacky”—palm up—“He bless me, make me, save me—” He takes my arm, friendly—“Hey!” he yells suddenly remembering the swishy sissy girl of Gershom Avenue who flew along the kiddie sidewalks of dust red ridden dusk flapping his behind with one dainty wink at the hole in the sky, Iddyboy says “I'm So So Su Su that kid there we see flashipott arouns—I'm a sissy boy too!” and he wiggles off with his powerful butt like iron cannons in coat storms and minces with his nail of a finger in the cold night—He comes back, puts his arm around me again, laughs, conducts me up the street and to the party believing in me—says, loud so you can hear two blocks up, “Argh, we are
good
friends, ey?”—he shakes me, makes me see love in Heaven, makes me ope my stupidness and innocence eyes—his cheeks rich, red, hotnecked to go and sleek up the world through his happy teeth—“See, you babe?”

We climb the steps of the little bungalow, there's just a kitchen light inside, we go in, Jimmy his older brother is smiling at us from the middle of the linoleum—There's a kitchen, livingroom, diningroom, one extra bedroom made by the childless young couple into a rumpus type room—Strange silence—

“Take off your coat and rubbers Jack,” they both instruct me. I do so.

Out of the rumpus room comes a great shriek of voices “Happy Birthday!!!” My father bursts out, followed by my mother from another room, Bloodworth and Maggie from another, my sister Nin behind, Jimmy's wife Jeannette, Lousy, Taffy Truman, Ed Eno, others—a swim of faces in my eternity—the house roars. “Wheee!” fiendishly shouting Jimmy is opening a quart of whisky, pushing it at me—I take a burning swig to roars—A great cake emerges, with candles—The opening festivities—I blow them out—Cheers! We're standing yelling eating cake in the kitchen—

“Give the guest of honor a big piece there! Put some weight on him for next fall!”—laughter, a girl's screech of delight from beyond, I've had no time to say hello to Ma or Pa or Maggie in the crowd excitement, the too-much world—I see Iddyboy trying to be social like in movies the cake in his big paw laughing with Martha Alberge his girl and he lets out a big explosive Phnu! of laughter that kicks in his big battering-ram belly and blasts up his throat and out comes spewing a streamer of snivel all over the cake—nobody sees, he falls, kneels on the floor, holds his belly laughing—His fantastic brother Jimmy is screaming excitedly some dirty joke, my father is doing the same thing near the stove, the house-top shivers maniacally in the great now-howling swept-over blizzard, heat beats at the windows, I grab Maggie by the waist, I yell—Door opens, fresh arrivers—red shouting faces turn to it as new people fall in. Roars of approval, applauses, raisings of bottles—“Oh Ti Jean,” my Ma is shouting in my ear, “there was supposed to be millions of your school friends here tonight!—Ti Nin fixed you a grand party—not half of em came—you shoulda seen the list she made with Maggie—”

“Maggie too?”

“Sure! Oh Jacky”—mournfully gripping me, flushed, her best cotton dress, white ribbon in her hair, she adjusts my T-shirt under the huge hot idiotboy sweater, “it's an awful storm, the radio's saying it's the biggest in years—” Then gleefully: “Sssst gimme a big kiss and hug, and hey shh dont tell nobody but here's a five spot I'm slippin you aye?—
tiens
—that's for your seventeenth birthday take in a good show and a big spree on ice cream, invite Maggie to come with you—Ah pet?”

“Boo hoo hee ha ha!” Jimmy Bissonette let out his mad maniac laugh you could hear three blocks away soaring over the blabbers and hubbubings, I stared in amazement, they'd told me this man many a night in wild Lowell afterhours'd challenge anyman to have a bigger one that he had and show how he could shove seven or eight or nine or ten quarters off a table with his piece, all amid roaring laughters of wildparty Canadians of lake cottage clubs in crazy lurid summer with ivy blue moon on the lake or winter when the piano music, smoke, shouting and leaping took place behind bleak shutters and pale reeds creak in stiff ice (the unused divingboard)—to bets, screeches, Tolstoyan hurrahs and huzzahs of revel night—Jimmy insane for girls—on strong squat legs he rushed with wildsweat joy around the wooden bars of Moody, in clubs at spectral orange houseparties with telegraph wires outside the bay window (Ford Street, Cheever Street)—his ears stuck out—he raced anxiously—his feet rapidly scissored fast little steps—you'd see just the proud raised head the bursting gargling eediboy joy then the long-waist body underneath pumped along by whirring feet . . . spats sometimes, lost Saturday nights of French Canadian ecstasy—

And there's my father, in the press he's only roared, coughed, shouted his own partying words from behind knotted groups of the kitchen—he's in this big new brown suit, his face is dark and almost brick red, his collar wilting, necktie raggedly hopelessly rattysnarled and twisted at his tortured sweaty neck—“Ha ha dont give me that stuff Maggie!” arms around her squeezing her, patting her behind “I know you never showed them the way to wear a bathingsuit I sure am sure you should of!” (Huge cough)—the which Maggie weathers unblinking like detonations—At the windows watchers Aw and OO the storm—

“Gonna be a pippin.”

“Look at those big thick flakes falling straight down. Sure sign.”

“Yeah with a high wind comin up always means a big whopper—”

“Well let's have a little song someone!—Hey Jimmy sing em your horse song your dirty song!”

“A high school party! Take it easy! Moo hoo hoo hwee ha ha!”

Vinny, G.J., Scotty show up, in big coats, scarfs, with girls, late—the storm—Friends of the family pour in whooping, snow flakes, bottles—the party's wild. Charley Bloodworth's three buddies Red Moran, Hal Quinn and Taffy Truman from the Highlands grimly sit in a corner, the French Canadians yell in French, the boys hear it with rat-tat-tat disbelief, composts and rim-posts, jabberous, impossible—my father yelling “Okay let's talk English so we can chat with Bloody and the boys here—buncha ballplayers you know—say Red, wasnt your father the old Jim Hogan that had that meat market up on whattayacallit Square off Westford Street, you know the one I mean—”

“No,” shouting back, “no Mister Duluoz it's an old relative of ours had that store—Luke Moran not Hogan—”

“I remember him—had that little store a few years earlier near West Street—old Maria was his wife—he had jews harps hanging on his wall—Years we traded there. Centreville.”

“I dont know who that is—“Red's skeptical. “No—”

They cant come to an understanding who Red's father is—Taffy Truman the great young pitcher sits, hands closely joined, waits.

Beside him Harold Quinn the hero of Bloodworth's breed and hill, I'd seen him calf-bulgant on second base in dusty Twi League eves on South Common, the crack of the bat, ball skitters in rough patch grass of second base, Harold Quinn's stepped over and scooped it up with an authoritative glove, has swept it off to first quickly beginning a double play, hustles back to his keystone sack, taps it with a cleated foot, waits, the runner slides to him in field dust clouds, he clombs up the low throw in his glove for the downward unassuming putout tap on the fellow's shoulder, pulls back his left foot turnaway from kicking spikes, spits silently between teeth as the dust starts spreading, his little spit spurt hangs in midair, falling into the dust, the man is OUT—Beside him Red Moran bends forward in his chair holding a small strawhat toy from the rattles of the party—

Bang, crash, all my Lowell raving wild.