Maggie Cassidy (4 page)

I see her head bowed in thinking of me, by the river, her beautiful eyes searching inside for the proper famous thought of me she loved. Ah my angel—my new angel, black, follows me now—I exchanged the angel of life for the other. Before the crucifix of Jesus in the house I stood attentively, sure of many things, I was going to see the tears of God and already I saw them in that countenance elongated white in plaster that gave life—gave life bitten, finished, droop-eyed, the hands nailed, the poor feet also nailed, folded, like winter cold feet of the poor Mexican worker you see in the street waiting for the guys to come with the barrels to empty the rags the crap and keeps one foot on the other to keep warm—Ah—The head bent, like the moon, like my picture of Maggie, mine and God's; the dolors of a Dante, at sixteen, when we dont know conscience or what we're doing.

When I was younger, ten, I'd pray at the crucifix for the love of my Ernie Malo, a little boy in parochial school, son of a judge, who because he was like my dead brother Gerard I loved with as sublime a love—with the strangeness of childhood in it, for instance I'd pray at the picture of my brother Gerard, dead at nine when I was four, to insure the friendship, respect and grace of Ernie Malo—I wanted little Ernie to give me his hand, simply, and say to me, “Ti Jean, you you're nice!” And—“Ti Jean, we'll be friends always, we'll go hunting together in Africa when we finish school ha?” I found him as beautiful as seven times the pick because his rosy cheeks and white teeth and the eyes of a woman dreaming, of an angel maybe, bit my heart; children love each other like lovers, we dont look at their little dramas in the course of our adult days. The picture—, also at the crucifix I prayed. Every day at school it was one ruse after another to make me loved by my boy; I watched him when we all stood in line in the schoolyard, the Brother up front was delivering his speech, his prayer in the cold zero, redness of Heaven behind him, the big steam and balloon and ballturd of horses in the little alley that crossed the school property (Saint Joseph's Parochial), the ragmen were coming at the same time we were marching to class. Dont think we werent afraid! They had greasy hats, they grinned in dirty holes on top of tenements. . . . I was crazy then, my head ran fantastic ideas from seven morning till ten night like a little Rimbaud in his racks cracked. Ah the poetry I'd written at ten—letters to Maggie—afternoons walking to school I'd imagine movie cameras turned on me, the Complete Life of a Parochial School Boy, his thoughts, way he jumps against fences.—Voila, at sixteen, Maggie—the crucifix—there, God knew I had love troubles that were big and real now with his plastic statued head just neckbroke leaned over as sad as ever, more sad than ever. “You found yourself your little darknesses?” said God to me, silently, with his statue head, before it my hands clasped waiting. “Grew up with your little
gidigne
?” (dingdong). At the age of seven a priest had asked me in the confessional “And you played with your
little gidigne?
”

“Yes
mon père
.”

“Well therefore, if you played with your little
gidigne
say a whole rosary and after that do ten
Notre Pères
and ten
Salut Marie's
in front of the altar and after that you can go.” The Church carried me from one Saviour to another; who's done that for me since?—why the tears?—God spoke to me from the crucifix:—“Now it is morning and the good people are talking next door and the light comes in through the shade—my child, you find yourself in the world of mystery and pain not understandable—I know, angel—it is for your good, we shall save you, because we find your soul as important as the soul of the others in the world—but you must suffer for that, in effect my child, you must die, you must die in pain, with cries, frights, despairs—the ambiguities! the terrors!—the lights, heavy, breakable, the fatigues, ah—”

I listened in the silence of my mother's house to divine how God was going to arrange the success of my love with Maggie. Now I could see her tears too. Something there was, that was not, nothing, just the consciousness that God awaits us.

“Mixing up in the affairs of the world isnt for God,” I told myself hurrying to school, ready for another day.

Here was a typical day, I'd get up in the morning, seven, my mother'd call, I'd smell the breakfast of toast and gruel, the windows were frozen an inch of snowy ice the whole glass illuminated rose by the transformations of the ocean of winter outside. I'd jump out of the sheets so warm soft, I wanted to stay buried all day with Maggie and maybe also just the darkness and the death of
no time
; I'd jump into my incontestable clothes; inescapable cold shoes, cold socks that I threw on the oil stove to warm. Why did people stop wearing long underwear?—it's a bitch to put on little undershirts in the morning—I'd throw my warm pajamas on the bed—My room was lit by the morning the color of a rose coal a half-hour dropped from the grate, my things all there like the Victrola, the toy pool table, the toy green desk, the linoleum all raised one side and sitting on books to make banks for the pool balls and raced track meets when I had time but I didnt any more—My tragic closet, my jacket hung in a dampness like powder from fresh plaster lost locked like adobe closets Casbah roof civilizations; the papers covered with my printed handwritings, on the floor, among shoes, bats, gloves, sorrows of pasts. . . . My cat who'd slept with me all night and was now thrown awake in the empty semi-warm bed was trying to hide himself in near the pillow and sleep a little more but smelled the bacon and hurried to begin his day, to the floor, plap, disappearing like a sound with little swift feet; sometimes he was gone when
seven
o'clock woke me, already out making crazy little tracks in the new snow and little yellow balls of pipi and shivering his teeth to see the birds in trees as cold as iron. “Peeteepeet!” the birds said; I look outside briefly before leaving my room, in a window hole, the roofs are pure, white, the trees frozen mad, the cold houses smoking thinly, docile-eyed in winter.

You have to put up with life.

In the tenement it was high, you could see downstairs the roofs of Gardner Street and the big field and the trail people used gray rose dawns five o'clock January to go flatulate in church. There were old women of the block who went to church every dawn, and late afternoon; and sometimes again evening; old, prayery, understanding of something that little children dont understand and in their tragedy so close you'd think to the tomb that you saw already their profiles sitting in rose satin the color of their rose-morns of life and expectoration but the scent of other things rising from the hearts of flowers that die at the end of autumn and we've thrown them on the fence. It was the women of interminable novenas, lovers of funerals, when somebody died they knew it right away and hurried to church, to the house of death and to the priest possibly; when they themselves died the other old women did the same thing, it was the cups of sugar in eternity—There's the trail; and winter important morning opening stores and people
hallo
! and I go ready to go to school. It's a
mélt-mélon
of morning everywhere.

I'd have breakfast.

My father was usually away on his out-of-town job running a linotype for some printer—Andover, near the little crew-cuts there who had no idea of the darkness inherent in the earth if they didnt see that sad big man crossing the night to go make his 40-hour week—so he was not at our kitchen table, usually just my mother, cooking, and my sister, getting ready for her job at So and So's or
The Citizen
, she was a bookbinder—Grave facts of worklife were explained to me but I was too proud in purple love to listen—Ahead of me, nothing but the New York
Times
, Maggie, and the great world night and morning of the shrouds on twig and leaf, by lakes—“Ti Jean!” they called me—I was a big lout, ate enormous breakfasts, suppers, afternoon snacks (milk, one quart: peanut butter and crackers, 1/2 pound). “Ti Jean!”—when my father was home, “
Ti Pousse
!” he called me, chuckling (Little Thumb). Now oatmeal breakfasts in the rosiness—

“Well how's your love affair with Maggie Cassidy coming along?” my sister'd ask, grinning from behind a sandwich, “or did she give you the air because of Moe Cole!”

“You mean Pauline? Why Pauline?”

“You dont know how jealous women get—that's all they think about—You'll see—”

“I dont see anything.”

“
Tiens
,” my mother's saying, “here's some bacon with toast I made a big batch this morning because yesterday you finished em all up and you was fightin at the end for the last time like you used to do over Kremel, never mind the jealous girls and the tennis courts, it's gonna be awright if you just stick to your guns there like a real French Canadian boy the way I brought you up to respect decency—listen, Ti Jean, you'll never be sorry if you always follow a clean life. You dont have to believe me, you know.” And she'd sit and we'd all eat. At the last minute I'd stand undecided in my room, looking at the little radio I just got and in which I'd just started listening to Glenn Miller and Jimmy Dorsey and romantic songs that tore my heart out . . .
My Reverie, Heart and Soul
, Bob Eberle, Ray Eberle, all the blue sighing America was racked up behind me in the night that was all mine and the glory of the tenderness of the trembling kiss of Maggie and all love as only teenagers know it and like perfect blue ballrooms. I wrung my hands Shakespeareanly at my closet door; crossing the bathroom to grab a towel my eyes misted from sudden romantic notions of myself sweeping Maggie off a pink dancefloor onto a pier with a moon shining, into a slick convertible, a close kiss long and sincere (just a little to the right).

I'd just started shaving; one night my sister had surprised me combing my hair making a little tuck in my crown for a wave—“Oh boy, look at the Romeo!” It was surprising; two months before I'd been a boy, coming home from fall football practice in iron dusks wrapped in my jacket and earmuff cap, bent, offnights I'd spot pins at the alley with twelve-year-old boys, at three cents a string—20 strings, 60 cents, usually I made that or a buck—Just a boy, I'd only recently cried because I lost my hat while playing in a WPA League basketball game won at the last second by a sensational toss by Billy Artaud almost rivaling the time at the Boys' Club tie-score with one second to go against a Greek team tigrishly named I made a one-hand last-whistle jump shot out of the scrambling pack from about the foul line and the ball hung in the basket a horrid second for everybody to see, bagged, the game over, Zagg and his tricks—an inborn showman—everlasting hero. The hat now forgotten.

“By Ma,” kissing my mother on the cheek, starting off for school, she herself worked part time in the shoe factory with her grave sense of life sitting grim and tireless at the skiving machine holding stubborn shoe leathers to a blade, her fingertips blackened, years on end of it from fourteen on, other girls like her up and down the machines—the whole family working, 1939 was a tail-end Depression year about to be overshadowed by events in Poland.

I got my lunch, prepared the night before by Ma, slices of bread and butter; nothing was more delicious than these slices at noon after four hours almost interesting sunny classroom absorbed in personalities of teachers like Joe Maple with his eloquent statements in English 3 or old Mrs. McGillicuddy the astronomy (inseparable)—bread and butter and delicious, hot mashed potatoes, nothing else, at the roaring basement tables my lunch cost 10¢ a day—The pièce de résistance was my magnificent chocolate-covered ice cream stick, everyone in school 95% licked on them greedily every noon, on benches, in the huge cellar halls, on the sidewalks—recess—I'd sometimes in my grace like the grace that got me Maggie get thick ice cream almost an inch wide, by some mistake in the ice cream factory with rich unbelievable thick chocolate layer that also by mistake was larded and curled right on—by same industrial per-chance, I'd get feeble anemic sticks a half-inch, already half melted, paper-thin chocolate falling on the sidewalk of Kirk Street as we'd Harry McCarthy, Lousy, Bill Artaud and me lick our sticks ceremoniously greedy in the winter sun my mind a million miles from romance—So I'd bring my bread and butter lunch, to be stuffed quickly in my homeroom desk—kiss Mother—and take off, on foot, to stride as fast as I could, like everybody else, down Moody past the posts of Textile to the great bridge to Moody tenements and down the hill into the city, gray, prosperous, puffing in the morn. And along the way the soldiers'd fall in, G.J. off Riverside going to his business course in Lowell High where he learned typing and bookkeeping and made fantasies around the luscious girls who were going to be sexy secretaries, he'd begun wearing necktie and suit, he'd say “Zagg that Miss Gordon is going to take that expression of cool indifference off her face one of these days and let her panties slip on the floor for me, mark my words—and it'll be in one of those empty rooms one of these afternoons”—but instead of actual sexual conquests he'd wind up at two in the afternoon with his books in the Rialto B movie—alone, faced by the reality of Franchot Tone and Bruce Cabot and Alice Faye and Don Ameche grinning smiling at Tyrone etc. and old men and old women living on relief wide-eyed in the show. Too, Lousy'd come angling to my walk from Riverside; then, incredibly, Billy Artaud'd overtake us all from the rear striding madly down from the upper outskirt hill of Moody and just as we reached the canal downtown we'd see all of us that Iddyboy was way ahead and was already leaning out of his freshman homeroom window dutifully obeying the teacher's request to open window—“Eeediboy!” he'd yell, and disappear in, he was the most willing student in LHS and had the lowest marks and otherwise he would have been able to play football and would have killed everybody broken Maiden guards in half with one clip of his granite elbow—Open homeroom window in Lowell, rose morn and birds upon the Boott Mill canal—Later it was going to be the open window morn at Columbia University the pigeonshit on the sill of Mark Van Doren and the Shakespeare of drunken sleeps under an Avon apple tree, ah—

Down Moody we'd sweep, primish, young, mad. Crossing us like a streamlet were the Bartlett Junior High School kids taking the riverbank route to the White Bridge and Wannalancitt Street which'd been our route for “How many years Mouse? Remember the winter it was so cold they had frostbites in the Principal's office with doctors?—”

“And the time we had that snowball war on Wannalancitt—”

“The crazy guys come to school with bikes, no kiddin Louse they had more trouble going up that hill from side to side than if they'd walk—”

“I used to walk home every noon me and Eddy Desmond wrapped in each other's arms falling on the ground—he was the laziest guy in the world, he didnt want to go to school in the afternoon, he wanted me to throw him in the river, I had to carry him—sleepy, he was like my cat, crazy—”

“Ah the old days!” Mouse'd pout black and brooding. “All I ask is a chance in this ga-dam world to earn a decent living and support my mother and see that all her needs are answered—”

“Where's Scotty workin now?”

“Didnt you hear?—out in Chelmsford, they're building a big war airplane base, Scotty and ail the old WPA bums go out and dig up trees and cut em down and clear the ground—he's making a million dollars a week—he gets up at four o'clock in the morning—Fuggen Scotcho—I love Scotcho—Dont catch
him
going to no high school and no business school courses, Kid Faro wants his money
now
—”

We came to the bridge. The winter trickle between the jagged canyons of rock below, the pools of ice formed, rosy matin on the froth of little rapids, cold—far off, the bungalows of Centreville, and the snowy hump meadow, and hints of New Hampshire forests deep in where big men in mackinaws now with axes and boots and cigarettes and laughs drove old Reos through rutted dirt strips among pinestumps, to the house, the shack, the dream of wild New England in our hearts—

“You're quiet, Zagg—that damn Maggie Cassidy's got you boy, s'got you boy!”

“Dont let no broad get you, Zagg—love aint worth it—what's love,
nothin
.” G.J. was against it. Not Lousy.

“No, love is
great
Mouse—something to think about—go to church and pray Zagg You Babe! Marry her! Screw her! Zeet? Have a good one for me!”

“Zagg,” advised Gus seriously, “screw her then leave her take it from an old seadog,—women are no good, forever ‘tis written in the stars—Ah!” turning away, black—“Kick em in the pants, put em in their place—There's enough misery in this world, laugh, cry, sing, tomorrow is nothing—Dont let her get you down, Zagguth.”

“I wont, Mouso.”

“Zeet! Look here comes Billy Artaud—already for another day rubbing his hands together—” Sure enough Billy Artaud who lived with his mother and every morning didnt rise from his bed but leaped out grinning came up rubbing his hands, you could hear the cold wiry sound of his zeal across the street.

“Hey, you guys, wait up—Let the chess champion walk!”

“
You're
the chess champion? Ho Ho.”

“What?—”

“With my bombarding tactics I can beat you all—”

“Zeet? Look at his books!”

—Wrangling, goofing, we stride without physical pause to school past Saint Jean Baptiste Church ponderous Chartres Cathedral of the slums, past gas stations, tenements, Vinny Bergeracs—(“Fuggen Vinny's still sleepin . . . they wouldnt even take him in vocational school . . . all this morning he'll read Thrilling True Love stories and eat them Drake's Devil Cakes with the white cream in the middle . . . he never eats food, he lives on cakes. . . . Ah ga-dammit I know we played hooky yesterday but my soul cries out for Vinny this gray sad morning.”

“We better be careful—two days in a row?”

“Did you hear him yestiddy?—he said he was going to get sexmad now and stick his head in the toilet bowl!”)—past the City Hall, the library in back with already some old bums gathering smoking butts at the door of the newspaper room waiting for nine o'clock opening time—past Prince Street (“Zowie, only last summer think of the games we had there, Zagg, the homeruns, the triples, the great Scotch pitching shutouts—life is so
big
!”)—(“life my dear Lousy is immerelensum!”)—past the YWCA, the canal bridge, the entrance street to the great cotton mills with all up down the morning-rosy cobbles the tight serried Colonial doors of a mid-nineteenth-century housing block for textile workers celebrated in some of Dickens' memoirs, the sad crapulous look of old redbrick sagging doorfronts and almost a century of work in the mills, gloom in the night.

And we came then mixing into the hundreds of students milling around the high school sidewalks and lawns waiting for the first bell which would be not heard outside but announced from within in a rumbling desperate-faced flying rumor so that sometimes when I was nightmarishly late I hurried all alone across the great deserted spaces only minutes ago scene of hundredfold grabbings now mopped out clean all the principals cubby-holed inside the silent high school windows in the morning's first classes, a mortifying great space of guilts, many times dreamed, sidewalk, grass. “I'm going back to school,” dreams the old invalid in his innocent pillow, blind of time.