Maggie Cassidy (13 page)

Little paradises take their time. Little parties end.

My father was only beginning to raise hell in the diner, I went in for some tail end to my day, but only yawn a few times in the greenish light and scarfed three hamburgers with ketchup and raw onions while everybody carried on the music and the roar of a good old Saturday or Blizzard night in New England, at dawn bottles were opened, shiftings of parties took place, on Gershom Avenue at gray six o'clock when only the old ghosts of Pawtucketville walk wending their white way in black veils to church, there was heard from inside the tenements deep a sudden shrieking high laugh from some old gal in some roundtable black iron range kitchen and windows rattling black little boy cant sleep in his pillow, will be bleary for the blizzard in the morning—Me too I'll go to sleep now and make that black angel in the pillow void open—the world is not void open—“Go ahead Jacky me boy,” my father even said rolling down off some big laugh with Ned Layne the wrestler who was part owner of the lunchcart, “go to bed if that's what you wanta do, and all you been doing is yawning, too much excitement for the kiddos tonight”—and Ned Layne would die in the war—nobody'd wrestled in the right arena around there—my sister's friend, the little chum of my sister's girlhood who was going to marry him was barking up a wrong tree in the serious reality of the open world. The tree that was with root of these realities had already threaded knuckly fingers in the bleak.

“Okay Pa, I'm going to bed.”

“Did you like your party?”

“
Oui
.”

“Good—Dont tell anybody if they ask ya that I had a coupla drinks at the house, I dont wanta be obliged to kid laws.” Before coming home to supper every night my father used to have his two or three shots of whisky in the Club across the way, it was the great time when I could see him head from there to the barbershop straight across the street, the long spacious handling of the scene of this with him inside strawhat hung up in summers' nights as I'm racing along on sneakers where we lived two blocks down, I was two years younger, see him unbelievingly rich in the shop with a magazine and a white barber shroud and the man knee-ing to his work as he shaves. “Good night kiddo, and if you wanta marry Maggie you'll never pick a prettier girl, she's Irish as the day is long and a damn good little scout as far as I can see.”

“It's a warm coat I have,” says Bloodworth walking in the cold north red dusks of March in Massachusetts near the New Hampshire line, “but it's not a warm coat tonight,” making a sour joke and sullen, and suddenly I realize he's a great old skeptic who's thought deeply on the weather and uses it in his speech or has such horrid findings swear with it. “Christ, pretty soon the thaw'll be out.”

April came. It joined with March in forming mud in the woods, long flying streamers of flags pennoned from the circus flagpole Post-No-Bills advertisements of May. Summer'd reach into the corners of spring and mop em all dry—the essential cricket would crawl from his rock. My birthday party was over, I grew more fond of Maggie now as she grew less fond of me, or surer. The season had swung on some invisible pivot of its own.

Thing was—Maggie wanted me to be more firm and binding in my contractual marriages of mate and heart with her—she wanted me to stop acting like a schoolboy and get ready to be busy in the world, make headways for her and our brood, and breed. Spring rank suggested this in breezes of prim river that now I began to enjoy as the iced ruts in Maggie's Massachusetts Street began to uncongeal, crystal, crack, and swim—“Frick frack” would wave the goodlooking hoodlum on the corner of Aiken and Moody Street and still your May'd come. “Damfool” will be the lark saying on a branch and I know that juices and syrup sops would pulse come throbbing springtime—“Never know would ye the wood was damp on the bottom” would be saying the old champions out in pine fields. I'd walk all over Lowell aweing and ooing my measures to the brain. Doves too coo. The wind like harp'll blow blah blah over Lowell.

Now I'm going to find out how my love for Maggie fares. Not too well.

I had no “Maggie what shall I do?” to ask myself and like a schoolboy finally decided that to hell with her my Ritz crackers and peanut butter would disappear. I pouted like a big baby over the thought of losing my home and going off into unknown suicides of weddings and honeymoons—“Honey,” Maggie says, “it's okay, just go on going to school I dont wanta stop you or interfere with your career, you know what to do better than I do. You know, maybe you wouldnt be so practical to live with.” It's a warmish late March night; I'm through the blazing moon the March witches are racing their shrouds and brooms, whippets come after, yapping across the bleak, the leaves dont fly they're mashed underfoot, a seething wet beast is rolling its back in the earth, you're about to realize King Baron of the sweet mountains was not going to be coronated in this Kingdom pine sap—I saw blue birds trembling on wet black boughs, “flute!!”

Fluting spring was racing through the corridors and ritual alleys of my sacred brain in holy life and making me wake and resurge to the business of being and becoming a man. I drew deep breaths, cut shortcut quicksteps over the loose crunch cinders of the back-of-Textile dumpside river-viewing gravel drive—the tremendous views of Lowell from this ball perch of night, the countless sad tragic waters down there, over shapes of dead bushes and rat-inhabited wrecks of Reos Chandlers Pee Pee Poo machines of long ago, and the bad sand, stinking of sewage—this I could smell in spring tonights coming back from Maggie, spring'd send the stale fender with its sweet rot swills caked underneath and I'd know—this would be mixed with sweet breath river's voice Awing at me over the lake of the bend—From Lakeview clear I could literally smell the pinecones getting ready for dry gladsummers on the ground, the azaleas were ballooning again Mrs. Faterty's garden, Rattigan's saloon next door would only send suds and breezy foam smells in the coming months—you couldnt mistake spring from the mop handles ratata-ing on porches of ladies—“There's my Pa now,” Maggie is saying soon, as she walks down from the corner where the South Lowell stores and bars were and passed the joint where Mr. Cassidy's downing his boilermakers before going home to sleep. “So I said ‘We'll reach in get six, kick one, kick two, kick em right in the lead then we'll spot to clear and shove the rest!'—'What?' he sez to me ‘I cant understand all that in one sitting—' ‘Well for krissakes' I said ‘you're gettin paid same as I am aintcha? And I been railing around here for seventeen years aint I? So you expect me to stop here and explain that to you again. Just keep your mouth shut and your eyes open—you'll learn—”‘ Maggie walks by hearing this speech and smiles, goes home to tell her mother—Dark laughter. Out comes a little kid on the porch, and the moon. Among the brown Fellaheen lights of life I'm hurrying, off the bus at the cemetery corner and right down through a railroad overpass and big scrabbly lamplit plaza of two roads converging roughly and across that the pitch into that black barrel of Massachusetts Street South Lowell Night which has trellises, clinging vines, curly locks.

Spring blows in my nose, in my airy brain—The call of the railroad train is howdah'd on the horizon. Bending her head to me—“So you really dont want to get mixed up with someone like me—You may think so now but I dont think . . . it'll . . . work . . . out. . . .” I couldnt believe her, just hung around to neck some more. Unbelievably grim my view of life and the cemetery, Maggie thinks I'm just a lost thought dope trying to remember what he was going to say. I have three separate things to attend to in the arrangement of my mind with the tumblers falling and falling into place and the safe door opening slowly so slowly it was a lifetime—besides seeing she wouldnt love me now, I spent my time haggling over whether I should go see her or not. She just sat around and didnt care.

These teeth I also threw into the balmy redolent wind. Hands in pockets I trudged to the ghost. In the same way I'd trudge the streets of Chicago in the night a few years later. Same way you see slanters coming through a storm from or to work, war, whorehouse door—

Everything went on as usual in the city itself—except that it was always changing, like me—though the chagrin of the reddy dusk up on Paddy McGillicuddy's street in the Acre up on the hill was mighty the same every time—and something eternal brooded in the sad red chimneys of the mills, ah these heavenward Empire knobs of a great civilization in a valley. The Kingdom of Lowell was bounded and tended thereto, from the paisans of the caucus out in (Michikokus) Methu-
enn
(Methuen),—?$Z&&!!*!—on out.

“You dont love me,” she'd say with my lips in her throat. Okay, I said nothing. I had a lot of sawdust to work on in my poor kewpie doll. Sometimes, like my little sister used to do, I'd pretend to be asleep when Maggie said mad things. I didnt know what to do.

One night—impossibly sad how came my shadow—seeking the balm and ruby of her arms, lips—we had a date, had arranged it on the telephone. For weeks I'd been finding it harder and harder to get dates, she had developed another crush—Roger Rousseau, who used to play shortstop for the Kimballs in the Lowell Twi League at the same time his own unbelievable father with paunch and glasses played third base beside him and stooped to delicately lift his grounders off the grass without having to squat—They lived in the country, were probably rich barons of this Kingdom Lowell with medieval wall guards in their apple orchard stonewall—Ran a dairy—Bloodworth had, with his attentiveness, closeness to me, smooth grace and warm sincere elegance filled her March hare months—but now we had to deal with the villains of May.

Roger R. was coming around more and more. Fewer times she'd let me come and see him try to come in—there was a swing in the loamous backyard, she and Roger sat in it, I'd never—Her little sisters looked at me differently; her mother looked more pained; the old man just went to work and had no idea who I was. Bessy Jones was away more. The baseball was coming in: I'd made a new friendship, with Ole Larsen the pitcher, for the season, and because he lived on Bessy's street in a wood window wall a pebble's throw from her rickety washline and they'd in the green pale slur of youngling grass exchange comments over the Tom Sawyer unwhitewashed fence . . . “Gee Maggie's giving Jack a hard time—”

“Yeah?” Larsen was 6 foot 4, blond, had shown interest in Maggie but in the long dark histories of her neighborhood he'd always laughed at her and never ever took to be serious—Something Maggie mourned, she liked him—He was likeable—“Well let him concentrate on baseball with me, we're gonna have a great team this year.” He believed in us—sincere respect for our friendship—“You gotta learn to hit that curve—”

The first day of Lowell High School practice I ran with Freddy O'Higgins in deep left as the coach Rusty Whitewood belted out a fungo ball that Freddy wasnt gonna make but I was going to show that I could catch it, to Ole who was standing beside the coach telling him about me and chatting in general, I was all unknown in baseball, I ran over the soft new grass clods and slanted and got behind and beyond O'Higgins in his own left field (from my center) and tapped the ground till that ball from high heaven came slowing down and hugening for the ground arc over my head—I reached the backhand glove and got it running away from the plate . . . I brought it down almost stumbling, tucking it in my belly, O'Higgins was not sure what I had just done behind him, I heard Larsen Whoop! at the fungo bat—Beautiful catch, beautiful spring—but I kept missing those curve balls at the plate. When Ole pitched batting practice he made sure to see I'd get just high hard easy easies that I could belt to left—curves had me flailing silent plop tragedies, foot in the bucket—fast balls I turned into new fast balls going the other way and pulled and soaring—sometimes I'd hit 420-foot marks mentioned by everyone and when we came to play in the fenced-in park I hit homeruns regularly in over center-feld fence in batting practice but the real game, the serious pitch, the chewing pitcher, the razzing catcher, the crafty ball spinning in—“You're out!” the bat pulling my wrists out as I squat after it benumbed.

Larsen and I were buddies—I made catches for him—we were goin to defeat Maggie. “Give her nothin! Let her worry! Let her call you up! Dont mind her—pay no attention—you got ball to play, boy! She'll come around again!” Ole gave me advice. We rushed out to Shedd Park after the third bell in drowsy late April afternoons and clutched our gloves and spikes; it was heartbreaking because it was so close to South Lowell, I'd look oyer the trees above the cinder track for L.H.S. outdoor track, beyond the last tennis courts, in the grieving birch, the first roofs of Maggie's neighborhood Lowell—Then at night, after supper, I'd come along the river—well she got tired of all that. Finally the night we had a date, she broke it herself and just wandered off to talk to Roger R. in the bushes by the railroad bridge—in the sexy sand—

It was too much for me, my heart broke.

“You're a sissy,” I thought. “Here's the girl you love that you saw in the chorus line of the Keith's Theater in 1927 or 28 when you were five or six and you fell in love with her thighs, her dark eyes—the angel of tinsel God'd dropped you from them wings—Maggie—hit on the skull, dont let her give you that sass.” But—“She's the only—”

“Pay no attention to it!” my father said leaving to work out of town again in his death-diving night . . . in seven years he'd be no more. . . . The sun would shine on his nose no more—“You're too young for that stuff. Get other interests in life!” We're standing waiting for the bus on Moody Street, we've been to the show before he leaves town, the Merrimack Square where as of yore the rainy Rin-tin-tin darkness the Fu Manchu balconies the spats of actors but now we'd seen the new crackling movie of the moment—“It wasnt any too good,” my father's saying with a complete dedicated sneer. “They try to pass the thing off, you know—Well aside from that, kiddo, dont repent so. You make mistakes and break your spirit worryin about it. You're the only one worried! Oh I know
cette maudite vie ennuyante est impossible
” (this ga-dam boring life is impossible). “I know it! What can we do? Just say, I'll be thinking all the time there's nothing but darkness and death, but I'd bet I've got to be busy with the wife and kids—All right—they cant make any better rafts than that!” He squeezed my arm, I saw the sad curl of his lips, the frank serious blue eyes in the big red face, the bigman grin about to asthmatically wheeze him coughing into a big laugh, and a bending down—For in the end Ti Jean was abandoned to his doom—and I stood and realized it. “I can do nothing in this—Say, now that track is over are you gonna make baseball your main sport? Well—I won't be here to see it, dammit. Ah,” A brokendown sigh, “something was damn well supposed to happen that damn well didnt—”

“Where?'

Another sigh: “I dont know. . . . Maybe I thought we'd be closer this year—I dont know. Not only shows—trips, talks—we didnt do much—never do—Ah dammit son it's a terrible thing not being able to help you but you do understand dont you God's left us all alone in our own skins to fare better or worse—hah? So—you say where.”—Another sigh. “I dont know.”—“
Pauvre
Ti Jean, we got troubles eh?” Shake of head on around and back.