Maggie Cassidy (14 page)

I was sitting on the slope of that park in back of G.J.'s house, an evening in May, 6:30, not yet dark, still light for some time, Scotcho is with us pitching little pebbles—at petals of May—My love, my sick sense, of Maggie Cassidy had grown into a tumultuous continuous sorrow in my noisy head. The dreams, fantasie varagies, wild drownings of the mind, as in real life I continued to go to school, hot spring mornings now outdoors, practically summer and no more school and I graduate from Lowell High.

In the winter track meets at Boston Garden in the Seaboard Relays I'd run a mad race against Jimmy Spindros of Lowell and others running for St. John Prep, wherever that was;
The Chief
they called Spindros, whose great hawk nose had made him stand in bleak fogs of old football games helmet under arm as captain of the Lowell team—long, tall, strong Greek champion of them all who died in the huge glooms of Iwo Jima. On the cork track of Boston Garden I in my little nail spikes took off with the same luck-jump off the imminent gun bang and flew around the banked turn in my own white lane as fast as I'd ever run in any 30-yard dash and got inside them (the three college runners) on the turn-in lane, probably illegal, behind me I heard them streaking right in my neck but I am flying and hold myself ready to bank into the far turn and wail right around on those nails throwing popcorks at the generation and coming off the board turn to hand my stick to Mickey Maguire who well cognizant of my love affair with Maggie had gone out and eaten big talkative hamburgers with Kazarakis and me in the big Boston night, we all talked of our current girls and problems and endured the harsh neons of that city in 1939 enjoying Greek out-of-the-way lunchcarts near North Station where huge meatloaves were served to us as sandwiches between bread, we'd eat contests—I've never run so fast in all my life, Kazarakis is going to get the stick last and run the gun lap, the final lap—as soon as Joe Melis bullnecked huge battling the runners, with his football hips on banked turns would—whoo!—come roaring in—Kazarakis was going to really grab the stick from his hand, and elongate his long waist for a sudden play of long legs and though not tall 5:9 streak away thin and small but powerful and somehow big and wham after the first turn with his stick, groove into it, whir the great legs underneath his motionless waist, you didnt see his arms, overtake and fly forward of college sprinters—we won—but not because I finished my lap ahead of Spindros of St. Johns, he came around the last turn momentum-ing into his man and passed Indian Chief Warrior bounding strides past me and handed the stick to his own second man—I fumbled and broke up in the stretch lost between the stick and the run—Mickey Maguire had to sail off and pound and fly his way around the mad track with a good eight-yard loss of lead—Kaz, the three of them made it up—Some kind of defeat in that kind of Maggie Cassidy must have brought me down—I'd reached my peak of love and fabulous success for a night or two—when? One night by the radiator in March she'd started huffing and puffing against me unmistakably, it was my turn to be a man—and I didnt know what to do, no idea in my dull crowded-up-with-worlds brain that she wanted me that night; no knowledge of what that is.

Her arms tight around me, her lips biting and foaming in the ocean of my face, her loins harping against mine in a big song of passion, love, joy, the winds of madness had with March run riot through her right through me we were ready for the fecund join with spring—and be man and wife in the Universal reality—I even already pictured my little red window house by the railroad tracks—for us—in muddy walks under brown lamps down Massachusetts Street on soft spring night, when I know all the guys of Lowell are running after trucks of excitement, the chicks are making riddles from a hay-rack with pendant breasts, the whole American night's a-ranked around the horizon.

I'm sitting in the grass of the park with G.J., I'm dreaming straight ahead of me.

Life is sweet, inside of a big cave.

“I'm goin over to see Maggie.” I tell Gus—looking under the big trees out at Lowell over the field across Riverside Street—over its waving weeds we could see two miles away rooftops of Christian Hill shining red in the sun, the Kingdom was more beautiful than ever, my Baghdad Fellaheen rooftops up and down little Pawtucketville were creaming into rose for me—I was the beloved youth—blade of grass in my mouth, lying in the slope after supper, seeing—letting the winds of evenin ripple hugely in the trees above, at home,
patria
, land of birth. No idea some day our Kingdom would be overrun by vaster Kingdoms invisible like superhiways through the dump.

“Dont bother with her Zagg,” G.J. is saying, “I wouldnt lose myself over no broad, let em all go jump in the lake—my ambition in life is to find some way to achieve
peace
. I am I suppose an old Greek philosopher or something Zagg but I'm serious when I say, screw it—Maggie's been doin nothin but playing you woods, if everything you tell me is true—she's done nothin but give you griefs you big babe greek—all of us know it, Lousy, him and Pauline told me, I was hurrying back from Lowell Commercial College and there they were on the corner of Central and Merrimack with Pauline just went in and bought a new dress in Kresge's across the street up there and I was supposed to help them but anyhow—help them with—I say, fooey on it!”

Leaning over to palm up his hand earnestly, on an elbow—Lousy's spittin silently over an evening blade which doesnt even budge as he zeets one—but lifts waving boles as he zeets through his teeth softly, like a man whittling a stick at nightfall, a man closing his snap knife on a wood barrel and you hear it across the breeze at nightfall—I thought G.J. was all wrong, I knew better than he did. I said to myself “Well G.J. doesnt know—we—my family—what I'm like—he cant judge even though she's been so mean and me passing up Pauline Cole just to be—he doesnt know what he's talking about fuggen G.J.” My Ma and Pa'd often told me not to hang around with G.J. For some reason they were afraid of him, “
Yé mauva
” (he's vicious).

“What you mean he's vicious?—He's just like us in the gang—he's all right—”

“
Non.
We know all about him and his vices—he talks about it all the time on the corner—Papa heard about it—what he done with little girls—”

“He doesnt have any little girls!”

“He does
too!
He says he's got a fourteen-year-old girl—He goes around making dirty speech like that, why do you bother with him!”

“G.J. doesnt understand that about me,” I reflected, “my—everything I have to put up with and learn and see—and Maggie loves me.”

I looked into the soft sky and the moon was coming out pale and cradled in the earthly blue, and I was convinced that Maggie loved me.

“Dont believe me then,” says Mouse. “They'll deal you every kind of pitch they can think of Zagg to get a penny out of you—dont worry I know women I saw everything in my own house with relatives plus in-laws and big fights among Greeks of standing in this community of Lowell—you don't know the half of it, Zagg.” Spitting—not like Lousy for eve calms, but for expression, sproosh. “They can take their lousy ga-dam mills down there on that dirty old river dump and stick right up their ass for what I care, Zagg—I'm leaving this Lowell,” jerking his thumb at it, “maybe
you're
not but I am”—looking at me seething with rage, retribution in his popping eyes—G.J. was growing up his own way.

“Okay Mouse.”

“Where you goin now?”

“To Maggie's.”

He just waved his hand. “Get in her pants for me, Zagg.”

I laugh through my nose and started off. I saw G.J. move his palmed hand—blessing good-by—okay.

I roamed off, negotiated whole Lowells walking down the main arterial mainline vein of Lowell, Moody Street now Textile Avenue, sweeping down on clacking shoes to go find my gory-dowry. “G.J.'s wrong as day.”

Night night. Impatient to wait for the bus, I hit Kearney Square on foot a minute ahead of it and jump into the South Lowell bus for roaring wailing rides with the great driver dumping all his passengers most of em in the last streets now just has to bang through out of town tar construction trolley torn-up sewage under outlying streets and blast along just missing holes, posts, fences, to the car barns outside town now turned slick redecorated garage—eying his watch, timetable, his wild interests in time coinciding with mine as I leap off the bus at Massachusetts Street just underpass and be sent skittering on little feet as he continues his roaring journey, goes up the road blinking big red lights—The void of the universe surrounds the lonesome walker—I negotiate along the banks of the Concord, actually just walking in the middle of the street and seeing it through little bungalows, back orchards, abrupt little river down to the little shore, nothing big about the Concord but full of acorns—

Maggie's not down at the end of the street with her dress flapping and us singing
Deep Purple
as in the lonesome romance of winter when we'd melted together under frozen stars—now molten faced stars of easy summer were blearing on our cold love—no more bad cars passing us on good roads—“Jacky,” she'd said, “- – — ―,” untranslatable love words best to keep secret if you can remember em at all—

“But now she aint standing in no road,” I'm telling myself, hurrying up, the light that made G.J. and I see as we talked about her now faded in the west where she was hidden—

“I think she went down through that broken fence, Jack, down that lane—the kids are swimming or talking about swimming tonight.” This is Maggie's kid sister, smiling bashfully at me; in a year they'd be saying she had crushes on me, others, but right now still a little girl and writhing around a post to play hopple dee skotch with Jamie ma mop, appata pippity pappety poo—

After that it was just a question of getting on with the ambitions that my family and I had decided for my life so, I went to New York with my mother and we saw Rolfe Firney at Columbia who'd written after my old high school football coach Tarn Keating had touted or scouted me to his old friend of the Boston dog races Lu Libble, Lu Libble the big Columbia coach, both of them in the “ribbon committees” of the great crazy dog racing night of electrified rabbits in the huge darknesses near Suffolk Downs with its giant gas tank so huge that I keep seeing it by dog tracks and by the sea in my life—I was going to make my pipe-smoking golden-windowed dormitory studies in this great university of the world. I was so proud that when Boston College and Coach Francis Fahey later of Notre Dame tried to get me the following summer I didnt change my mind but stuck to my idea of New York, Columbia, Horace Mann prep school, despite the fact that my poor father wanted me to go to Boston College because it would secure his recent new job in Lowell in a printing plant that did all the jobwork for Boston College, Emil Duluoz once more popular and solid—nevertheless both my Ma and I had minds set on Columbia—The additional details were that of a “football talent search,” another story—

Rolfe Firney received us politely, showed us the athletic offices where the faces of the gentlemen seemed to me immensely and richly and beautifully important, men with white hair, grave, grand, all well-dressed, opulent, courteous. I proudly brought my mother to see all this before she returned to Lowell. She'd traveled to New York to arrange for my room and board with her stepmother in Brooklyn where I was going to live while attending Horace Mann prep thereby riding the subway every morning from Booklyn-of-the-red-heart all the way to Broadway and 242nd Street a total insane twenty miles—I liked it though, because people are interesting in the subway when you're seventeen and you've never savored the big city. I was a really contented kid to see myself at last among the great mountains of glittering buildings. Horace Mann School was built in ivied Tom Brown gray granite on top of a cliff of solid rock—behind it was a beautiful athletic field of green grass—a gym with vines—You saw the immortal clouds of the Bronx floating in the Indian sky and dont tell me it isn't an Indian sky. Below the cliff toward Yonkers lay the vast Van Cortlandt Park for the beautiful decathlon athletes stretching their white aristocratic legs in fields of shrubbery and foliage Jews and Italians of a new heroism of another sort of Kingdom Lowell.

Superstitious of midnight the first night we slept at grandmother's in Brooklyn I lay awake for hours listening for the creak of the ghosts of New York in the house, hearing faintly sounds on the Brooklyn street like lovers late in summer city night giggling in each other's necks by the moon of shipping; it was an altogether different Lowell, and so all opening-out into the big megaphone hole of the world from those Rudy Vallee lips of Merrimack Square and Maine that I knew that it was getting lost like a marble ball rolling down eternity in a bowling alley opening out to darkness down to infinity rockets cells telepathic shock tape.

I lay in bed thinking I was going to be a big hero of New York with rosy features and white teeth—an idiomaniac post-Iddyboy incarnation of the American Super Dream Winner, Go Getter, Wheel,—and white snowy scarf and big topcoat with corsaged girls in tow and no teetotaller I but big journalistic champion of off Times Square (like The Little Theater) as I had seen newspaper tragedists in B movies talking over beers in stale barrooms of neon winking Manhattan night hatbrims lowered like Marc Brandel or Clellon Holmes heroes brown taverns thru the pane glass written Bar & Grille you see the blackracked giant Neon Sign of the Owner of The Paper—Cigar Mouth Mann, grandson of Horace, hardhittin tough jesuitical editor, mainline artist, phlegm screamer of silver blary screens of the Rialto all the times that winter between Maggie and High School I'd played hooky in but now I'm in New York viewing the real thing from a scared bed in Brooklyn, seventeen. Gulp. “G.B. Mannpram, Pub. of the Manhattan Manner Post Evening Star,” planes are flying in with serum, and I'm sitting in the bar heroically brooding over the way I just smashed the waterfront gang and G.B.'ll give me a raise (I see G.J. raising his leg to burp, “All right J.D., the job is yours, b-r-up, and dont cut me out of any of that offshore oil of yours”—) and I head for my penthouse, bored with the loose overcoats, shroudy hatbrims of big alcoholic newspaper new york and change casually into evening clothes (dinner jacket with velvet lapel glossy like London fires in a grate, which shine on it making vellum pools of rich wine-bottomless substance on my wealthy breast), and say hello to my wife, idly—

Through her balcony window you can see New York skyline in the starry night lace-dim behind sheer curtains, the sherry and the cocktails are ready, we can hear a piano tinkling from the Gershwins upstairs, and our fire crackles.

Oh how our fire crackles—how lovely the swan of her throat—I lie bedded in black night sending up white puffs of dialogue balloon for my gold encarvened dreams—Dear Angel Gabriel broods over me, listening. (Logs from old Adirondack in the penthouse, my hunting gun is there, early Jack London rich Frisco heroes of the penthouse have invaded New York via Lowell Mass. the viaduct from landing beaches and cold pines of the St. Lawrence River, over the
mer
the Breton fisher boys are snarling up the nets with salt cracked hand and have to do it all over again—) My whirls of world-seeing race around the room, I gulp to see vast mothers of light swarming around, and to hear my brother tree in no more wilderness outside in Brooklyn scratch a fence in a little Brooklyn August breeze. My dream has in it a wife beautiful beyond belief, not Maggie, some gorgeous new blonde gold sexpot of starry perfection with lovely lace neck, soft long skin, inturned mouth top—I pictured the gorgeous Gene Tierney—and the voice that went with it, Kitty Kallen, Helen O'Connell, a young beautiful American girl getting excited in your arms—

Next day, in any case and aside from the validity of these dreams, my mother and I strolled arm in arm across the grass of the Horace Mann field—bleachers, goalposts, the English Gothic roofs, the headmaster's own rose-covered cottage made of stone—a Kingdom military fort overlooking other worlds—already at seventeen I'd formed the idea to some day draw maps and write the history of another world in another geography of another Africa, another planet of Africas, Spains, pains, shores, swords—I had little knowledge of the world I lived in.

It was a rich school for young Jews ranging from age of eight all the way to sixteen, eight forms in all, you could see them arriving now at the school in limousines with their parents to give it the once over. It was high, warm, beautiful. “O Ti Jean how nice it'll be in this little paradise! Oh boy!
Now
it's making sense!” my mother said decisively. “Now we've got something to be proud of—you're going to be a real little man in this place, it's not just old regular schoolteachers or one of those dirty old places your father went to in Providence one time and always talked about it and now he wants you to do like him—
non
, go here, and go to Columbia, that's the best idee.” In her head my mother saw herself living in New York walking in the big lights of the great exciting world and the great shows, rivers, seas, restaurants, Jack Dempsey, Ziegfeld Follies, Ludwig Baumanns in Brooklyn and the great stores of Fifth Avenue in New York—Already, in my little childhood, she'd brought me to New York to see the subways, Coney Island, the Roxy—I'd at age five slept in the tragic subway of buried people shaking from side to side in the black air of the night.

I had a scholarship at Horace Mann, paying most of my tuition; the rest was up to me, my father, my mother; I helped get a lot of publicity for the school in the newspapers in the fall—there were 10, 12 other guys like myself—“ringers” from high schools everywhere—bruisers, we murdered everybody except Blair (0–6), it was a scandal—the bruisers, they too'd had their loves, tempestuousnesses and sadnesses of sixteen.

“Now you're all set,” said my mother as we walked among the beautiful clean halls, “we're gonna buy you a nice new coat to look nice in this little place that's so
cute
!” My mother was positive in her secret heart that I was to become a big executive of insurance companies. Just like when I made my First Confession, I was a little angel of pure future.