Maggie Cassidy (7 page)

Walking home the last mile as all Lowell snored I imagined myself a far traveler looking for a place to sleep—“Well, pretty soon I'll have to turn in at one of these houses and go to bed, I cant go on much further”—and I'd clack along on the crunchy snows and grits of sidewalks, past moonlight-whitened wash-hung courts of Moody tenements, past taxi-cab stands with a one red light in night, past hamburger lunchcarts with inscrutable shadows munching within in smoke and heat obscured by vapors of the written glass—For the sixth time in the day I'd come to the great bridge a hundred feet over the river and see down there the tiny milky rivulets of icy Time gurgling in the rockjags, the reflection of starry paradises in profound black pools, the squawk of strange birds eating mist—Clack went the trees of Riverside as I hushed and nose pinched stumbled on home—“I guess I'll have to turn in this house here—no, the next one—Well, I guess I'll take the fifth one—That's what—I'll just walk in and go right to sleep cause the whole world has invited me to sleep in their house so it doesnt matter what house I go to—”

And I'd turn into 736 Moody and go upstairs and go in the door left unlocked by my family and hear my father's profound snore in their bedroom and go to my spectral room with the big bed and
Jack Jump Over the Candlestick
on the wall and say to myself, “Well, this is a nice place, I think I'll sleep in this bed, these people seem nice”—and with strange self-induced whacky but deeply comfortable wonder I'd undress and go to bed and look in the dark at darkness—and fall asleep in the lap of warm life there.

And in the morning my eyes wouldnt unglue, at breakfast I'd decide to play hooky again, go to Vinny's and take a nap. All the winter world goldened and shined white—

Vinny's was the big scene of suicide hookies, we'd have wild parties all day screaming—“Come on G.J., play hooky with me today” I'd say at the corner of Riverside and he would and so would Lousy.

“Zagg, you cant talk me out of it!”

Sometimes Scotty'd come, and one time Skunk, and finally with Vinny we began passing up the sprawlings and eatings and yelling with the radio in his house when sometimes we'd have big fights and knock down curtains and it was a job to clean up for the millworking mother—talking about girls instead, listening to Harry James, writing screwy letters to everybody—We began hitting the Club de Paisan poolhall which was a shack in the Aiken Street dump behind the tenements of Little Canada—Here an old ninety-year-old man with perfect bowed legs stood by a potbelly stove with an old French Canadian red Indian handkerchief to his nose and watched us (red eyes) tossing nickles on the torn pool table for who gets the break. The wind howled and moaned at the hinges; it was huge snow storms we'd pass there, the great gale of snows would whip past the plate-glass windows in one horizontal wild line from Canada coming, from the Sweeps of Baffin Bay—and we were alone in the Club. Nobody else would think of going to such a beat old shack—it was for local winos of Cheever and the river bank probably to in the evening come in with stinking pipes humble old guys spitting in planks—
Le Club de Paisan
—Club of Oldfashioned Peasants—Vinny screeched and danced around on the loose old boards through which the blizzard cold seeped but the stove held out, the old man stoked it, stocked it and kicked it, he knew how to make a fire like he knew how to eat.

“Hey Pop!” they'd call him. Scotty and I, respectful, called him “
L'Père
” and he always knew the weather. For years of our lost numb childhoods he'd been sitting in wooden tenement lazy afternoon doorways of Moody and Lilley on the Lowell Fellaheen French Day—babies had yo-deled, his old ears had heard generations come and go, croaking. Every game we played we threw him a nickel. “Okay my break Scott!”

“Ah go on—that nickel was leaning—”

“Kick him, you babe, kick him—”

They overturn a chair and a bucket, the old man doesnt even bat an eyelash. Our glory's all wild in the gray storm of shacks and dumps outside—our histories weighted down in the middle with unbelievable freights of moment by moment drowsy life hours that our mothers have carried on their eyelashes since our inceptions from their aprons and the first heroic events of infancy. Beautiful Vinny's glory lay in his eyes, health, screams. “If you guys dont stop shaking that table the way you have been doing I'll be gadammed for about ask Mouse a halfa fuggen hour I'm gonna get my boxing gloves and my rubbers and load em full of bolts and screws and swing from the floor as hard as I can with all my weight and kick myself in the ass if I dont brain both of you flat on the floor, like cows' shining azzholes, dead.” And we saw that he was going to do it if we didn't stop shaking the table. Scotty didnt even have to mention anything, we saw flashes of murder in his somber thunderstorm eyes. Lousy was a streak of terrible lightning if something should suddenly happen, you wouldn't see him and the air wouldnt split—suave litotical transsubstantiations of a thrush—I was a self-satisfied dreaming bull supine on the bench or lost in thought shooting at the table—eying my Coca-Cola. G.J.'s Greekly rage was buried in his kind politeness and in his humor and goodness:—he'd have slit the Sicilian from top to bottom in other Mediterraneas, showing but yellow of his eyes.

Meanwhile my father was walking along the redbrick walls of commercial Lowell, in the blizzard, looking for a job. He walked into the dark dank printing plant—Rolfe's.

“Say Jim, how've you been, I want to know if you've got an opening here for a good linotyper with years of experience—”

“Emil! Great Jesus, Emil!”

“Hi Jim.”

“Where in the hell you been? Hey Charley, look, Emil—Crazy Emil—what you been doin in Andover I hear—”

“Oh yeah, working well framblin and dandlin around looking for something to do—Still got a wife, y'know, and two kids, Jacky's in high school running with the track team this winter—Say, I see old Cogan aint here any more.”

“No, he died last April.”

“Ya dont say-y . . . Well I'll be dammed.
He
was over seventy wasnt he?”—both in dark satisfied agreement—“Well old poor Cogan many's the time I saw him pushing and rushing that old wagon around, you'd think a man could work his life out just workin—”

“That's right, Emil—” Quick muse—“In fect Emil—” (and now the job's sewed up because Rolfe hasnt got anybody else he knows in New England he'd rather have right now than Emil Duluoz and with the rush season on) “—last Saturday night I worked for the
Tele
, they called me up ‘bout six o'clock, their regular man was sick and layin off so I said ‘Okay' and I went up and boy I melted lead and turned out more galleys a ten-ton truck and it was about six o'clock in the morning when I finished and the back of my neck, and my feet numb from sitting all night—”

“I know Jim—Only last week it was old fartface come up to me and wanted me to go to a show with him then a game over to Bill Wilson's room in the hotel down there see this is all in Lawrence he'd drive me from Andover we had—Oh we saw a lot of nice gals dancing there ya know, hoopsidoo, that Gem Club, on Hollis Street, we had a few beers, I said to Bill ‘I gotta finish this copy if you dont mind Bill looks to me like it'll take me to well nigh near midnight'—”

Meanwhile a kid is waiting with papers in his hand for the two old bucks the boss and the big fat man to stop talking but they wont—

Emil, a half-hour later, steps out into the snow, coughs hugely, cigar-a-mouth, and minces off like Babe Ruth or W. C. Fields with the same pout and little short steps but also with a leering pathetical grin looking at everybody and digging all the streets of Lowell with his eyes.

“Oh for krissakes, there goes that old Charley McConnell he's had that damn Model-T Ford ever since I got mine in 1929 and that was at Lakeview for the picnic there and even then he'd have that same look of pitiful defeat in his face, still and all he's made out all right from what I hear—That job in City Hall pays him fairly well and certainly hasnt killed him and he's got a house in the Highlands—
I
never had anything against McConnell”—(scoffing with himself, coughing)—“Well it's all in the way the rain barrel rolls over I guess, they'll spill em out one by one to the hole in the ground out by Edson's Cemetery and we'll take no more trips to Boston that way . . . The years, the years, that I've seen . . . eat . . . the faces . . . of respectable . . . and . . . disrespectable people . . . in this town . . . they cant . . . tell me . . . I don't know who's heir to Heaven, hell, riches, gold and all the immense uncounted cash registers and poorpot pissplots of every grave from here to the Roman diosee and back by golly I've seen and heard it all. When they put me away they better not spend too much money,
I
wont appreciate it from my bed of clay—
They'd
better learn that now. Ha ha ha ha! What a town when you come to think of it—
Lowell
—” He heaved a sigh. “Well it's where my little woman hung her curtains, I guess. The sucker was in the kitchen sittin by the radio, name of Emil. I guess the old lady had it coming to her, to inherit a beast and at the same time I guess she didnt do too bad with the pieces of—grass—I was able to lay around her picnic. My wife Angry—Okay.
God
, tell me if anything goes wrong and you dont want me to go on that way. I'm just tryna please. If I cant please You, and the world, and Ti Jean too, then I cant please the lion and the angel and the lamb all at the same time neither. Thank you God, and get those Democrats outa there before this country goes to hell!”

By now he'd be talking out loud to himself and cutting through the snow head bent, teeth gricked to the sleet, hatbrim down, coat whitening, in the wonderful mysterious hours of an ordinary day in ordinary life in ordinary cold blue life.

Rushing from the Club de Paisan at one o'clock, the day's school over, with G.J. and the gang striding, I'd run into my father rounding the corner of the Moody Street Bridge right in the howl-shroud of the gale itself blowing over the city's bridges, and on across the snowy boards we'd bowl home, the gang in front, Pa and I in back, jawing and jabbering.

“Goin to track practice at four—”

“I'll be there for the opening scene Satty night—Say, how ‘bout goin down together?”

“Sure. We'll ride down with Louis Morin and Emil Ladeau in the bus—”

“Ah Ti Jean, I'm glad ta see ya making good on the track team, it makes my old heart proud by golly. I got a job at Rolfe's this afternoon—looks like I'll be around awhile—Old Gloomy Puss—well I'll have my upsets, but pay no attention to me. I'll be ranting about the government, about the way America has changed since I was a boy. Dont pay it any attention, kiddo—but maybe when you grow older you'll understand my feelings.”

“Yeah, Pa.”

“Whattaya think of that—ha ha ha—”

“Say Pa!”

“What kiddo?” turning to me eagerly with laughter and shining eyes.

“Did you know who finally beat that Whitney colt down in Florida.”

“Yeah, I know, I had one-fifty across the board on him in the club, the bum—Yeah, k—Ti J—Jack—” (stammering to find my name) “yeah kiddo,” seriously, far away, broodingly squeezing my arm, realizing I'm just a child. “Yeah me boy—yeah sonny—my kid—” and in his eyes a mysterious mist, dense with tears, springing from the secret earth of his being and always dark, unknown, come of itself, like there is no reason for a river.

“It'll come, Jack—” and in his countenance you saw he meant just death—“What'll be with it? Maybe you gotta know a lot of people in Heaven to make life succeed. It'll come. You dont have to know a soul to know what I know—to expect what I'm expecting—to feel yourself alive and dying in your chest every minute of the livelong day—When you're young you wanta cry, when you're old you wanta die. But that's too deep for you now,
Ti mon Pousse
” (Little My Thumb).

Wednesday night came slowly.

“Sit here, by me.”

It's Maggie, solemn, her legs crossed, hands folded on her lap, on the couch, in the parlor, fullblast overhead lights, her cousin is going to show us how his magic trick works. It's some kid thing out of a kit book, I'm bored (like by television), but Maggie is dead serious and skeptical and watching every move Tommy makes because as she says, “He's such a devil, you gotta watch him, he'll play the
meanest
tricks and tease ya, he's almost a sneak”—Tommy the handsome popular boy cousin that all the Cassidy girls love and look up to and roar and laugh in parlors and kitchens as he performs and does headstands of activity, a good kid, shining eyes, his hair falling in them, full of glee, the little kids alrady sent to bed are peeking from the top of the stairs where the wallpaper is lit a dim rose by the nightlamp—So I watch Maggie watch Tommy—out of the corner of my eye. Tonight she's more beautiful than ever, she has a little white rose or flower of some kind in her hair, to the left, her hair comes down on both sides of her brow almost over the corners of her eyes, her lips pursed (chewing gum) to watch and doubt. She has a lace collar, very neat, she went to church that afternoon and to Mrs. O'Garra down Chelmsford Road to get that cakemix for the party. She has a crucifix on her dress breast; lace ends on her short sleeves; little bracelets on both wrists; hands crossed, sweet white ringers I eye with immortal longing to hold in mine and have to wait—fingers I know well, cold slightly, moving, nudging a little as she laughs but primly stay folded in her hands—her legs crossed show sweet knees, no stockings, the well-formed calf below, the hint of snowy legs, the little dress pathetically draping off this ladylike arrangement of herself. Her hair hangs, black and heavy, soft, smooth, curly, to her back—the white flesh and the sullen unbelieving river eyes more beautiful than the eyes of all the sun-eyed blondes of MGM, Scandinavia and the western world—The milk of the brow, the pear of the face, the solid silky proud erect neck of the young girl—I take her all in for the hundredth time that night.

“Oh
Tommy
—stop fooling with it and let's see the trick!” she cries, turning exasperated away.

“Yes!” cries Bessy Jones, and little Janie and the mother Cassidy seated with us partly reading the paper and Maggie's brother Roy the railroad brakeman like his father is standing in the door with a loose smile, eating a sandwich, his hands black-in with grime of his job, his teeth pearly white, in his dark eyes the some Irish contemptuous disbelief of tricks and games and yet the same greedy avid interest—so that he too yelled out now “Ah Tom you bull thrower do that red handkerchief one again—This one's bull, I seen what you did—”

I smile to show that I'm interested in everything but in the brown wallpapered parlor of eternity my heart only beats for her so sweet just a pace away, my life.

“Hey,” turning to me the drowning devouring scrutinizing coverage of black merry sad eyes in their incredible snow cameo skin, “you didnt see him that time, you were lookin at the floor.”

“Lookin at the floor?” laughed the comedian magician. “All my work is going for fraught! Watch this Roy!”

“Yeah.”

“Do it!” screeched Maggie.

“Maggie!”—the mother—“dont yell so! Ye'll have the neighbors think we drown cats in here, Luke McGarrity and his upsidedown clay pipe if ever I saw him in this picture in this magazine!” and her matronly big body shaking slowly with laughter. In my bleakness I even accepted the fact Maggie might look like her mother some day, big and fat.

“Come on, you J-a-c-k! You missed it again! Let me show you a trick I did last year for Bessy's uncle the night he walked out and tripped on the milk can and Ma's chair that was painted was on the porch and he fell on it and broke it—Lookout!” jumping up from the pose so sweet, to run around the room chasing her cousin, like a little eager flushed girl now, a minute ago a portrait of a lady in a cameo ring, with crucifix.

Later—on the porch alone—before going in—necking furiously because Bessy was still inside giggling with Jimmy McFee—“Oh go home! Go home! Go home!” she pulled at me angrily as I held her laughing in my arms, I'd said something that irritated her—her flashes of indignation, poutings, rougeings in nature, of cheek, the lovely frown and forewarning and return of her white smile—

“Okay I'll go”—but I come back again, start kidding her and kissing her again, overdo everything, and she gets mad again but really mad this time and that makes me sore and we pout and look away—“I'll see ya Monday afternoon, ah?”

“Hmf—” (she'd wanted me to see her Saturday night but that was the track meet night and I'd end up at midnight with my Pop in some soda fountain downtown talking with all the guys about the meet and who the high scorer was—big eager-teeth guys with newspapers in cafeterias of the night, Lowell style, a small city well famed for its great cafeteria and soda-fountain devotees, as evidenced and publicized extensively in the local paper in a column written by James G. Santos who'd once worked with my Pa in small newspaper days and was a distant cousin also to G.J.)—Maggie would have to reason me out of a Rex Ballroom dance on that night because not I'd be weary from the races and overly hung-up with my father but I'd be so late to the dance it wouldnt be worth the price of admission—not wanting Maggie to think me a cheapskate I never mention this—and she thinks I really want to sneak out with Pauline Cole like a real smalltown hotshot maybe in fast cars at 1
A.M.
on black tar tragedies out by Lakeview—“Dont come then.”

“It's better—I'll be 11:30 before I'm even out of the showers,” I plead.

“Bloodworth'll be at the Rex.”

“Charley?” I was surprised; Charley was an old football team friend who'd only met Maggie accidentally when I ran into him accidentally at a dance one night—His open interest in Maggie I didnt take seriously, she always flirted—He in fact discussed her with me seriously.

“M.C.,” he called her, initials, “old M.C.'ll be mad if she knows you didnt show up to track practice the other day, son, Bill—” (he also called me Bill, for Bill Demon)—“us demons and them demonettes is got to stick together”—some talk out of a Popeye cartoon running every night in the Lowell
Sun
the local paper “so us demons is got to watch out for the demonettes, M.C. Number Two” (he took such a vast interest in my affairs he called Moe Cole M.C. Number Two, and the initials fitted—all in the joy mornings of high school life here's these wild complexities happening our minds exploding)—

“It's okay Charley—you take over M.C. Number Two and I'll meet you in Heaven.” We joked about it; once he took me to his house and showed me his scrapbook full of pasted pictures of baseball stars of 1920's and 1930's with incredibly old stars whose bones are long interred in crumbling files in the archives of red sun sinking in the Ninth Inning with Nobody On—Seriously, with bleak youngkid dis-knowledge of the incredible ruin of the years and the death they have wreaked on the flesh and jawbones of men including baseball stars, he'd in his scrapbook of 1939 stick the old wan visages of Cincinnati left fielders of the Depression years who just made it from the minors (JOHNNY DEERING wasnt even a jockey yet), names of old players, Dusty Cooke, Whitey Moore—Kiki Cuyler—Johnny Cooney—Heinie Manush—lost forever the still figure in right center with a tanned taut expression on solid legs waiting for the crack of the bat as a little shrill creamy whistle splits the atmosphere stadium hush, the bottomless thapping dull plop of the ball in the catcher's mitt and right after it the umpire's
ump-euoo
! And the guy that's been ya-yagging all afternoon from third base box again says “Ya-yag!” with strange forlorn little voice through cupped hands at the batter with bat back tense and an airplane drones—which I'd see and hear all sadly white-flour pasted in his book of books on his parlor rug in the Highlands. Then we'd rush over to Timmy Clancy's house to play Benny Goodman Artie Shaw records, Clancy'd be the catcher on the spring Lowell High School team and in time President of the United States the way he was politicking the school, the city, had once been Junior Day Mayor of Lowell with big picture of him officiating at a desk, his a name I'd seen with awe in Lowell High School baseball boxscores the year before—all of which was shouting talk in record-playing afternoons and new fresh life excitements of the inevitable High School Springtime in America. I liked Bloodworth and in the spring we were going to play outfield together on that Lowell team, he whose name for years (
Bloodworth
) had mystified me when I saw it in Lowell High and Lowell Twi League boxscore—admired him and he was going to show me how to hit a curve when the first green bedsprings of turf began to show among the brown scrags of Lowell Highlands grass (out in left: with the football lines still showing in)—I liked the way he'd say “Oh that guy can
belt
em a mile, seventeen triples last year Bill! And wait'll you see Taffy Truman pitch
this
year, he's been great but this is his year!” Everything was opening up, Taffy Truman was a stylish southpaw with a gape in his front teeth and an incredibly suave draped body, just the way a pitcher should look, Lefty Grove in a loose suit—and he was good, Boston in the National League was after him—Bloodworth's interest in Maggie seemed to roll over my head and not serious because I wouldnt notice them and I trusted her to love only me. So she was going to meet him Saturday while I ran in track.

“I'll take M.C. Number One home and take good care of her,” Charley'd wink at me—he had a faintly hooked nose and a funny pointed jaw and also separations in the front teeth and a glamorous looseness that made him sensationally look like a center fielder, Bloodworth cf, leadoff man—fast, he cracked electrifying singles into right with one arc-y swing of his southpaw bat . . . made of some paler ash than the others. Ash was the color of his hair too.

“Okay Bill, I'll take M.C. Number One home and see no guys follow her in cars and try to pick her up,” and here'd turn away snuffing into himself as if apparently he was really making a joke and pulling my leg or talking the way he always did but with so mock a seriousness I believed and trusted and looked at him like the lamb—hate is older than love. I had no objection to acting like a lamb because my mother'd told me so many stories about my little brother died at nine who was so lamby, Gerard, would rescue mice from traps and bring back to health in little cardboard box hospitals that were also cathedrals of holy reverence to which his little face with the soft fall of melancholy hair, over melancholy eyes, turned, impossibly hoping—he made everybody cry when he died, terribly from within. O Russia! Saints in America too!

“Then go home,” says Maggie, “I dont care if I dont see you till Sunday.”

“Sunday I'll be early—”

“Ah—” waving her hand bitterly, and then suddenly becoming unaccountably tender and sad. “Ah Jack—sometimes I get so tired . . .”

“Of?—”

“Ah never mind.” Looking away, with a little pain expression on the corner of her loose, dull smile of heavy womanness . . . too much to carry . . . the freight of her tired, head-nodding understandings of everything that was going on—a woman looks at a river with an expression not-to-be-named. Her rippling mysterious moods, philosophic, rich, faintly bestial like the torture of skulls and breasts of cats, like the drowning of idiots which is what we've come to expect of our spring now, hand loose doubting on hip balanced with head tossing just a little darklashed lowered disbelief and nay, loose ugly grin of self-satisfied womanly idiocy-flesh, curl of travesty-cruelty, I'd want to rip her mouth out and murder her, sudden interior welling-up of tenderness profound, paining, dark, forming milky frowns on forehead, raising moons by the conjuration-fingers up from the bottom of the well which is the womb, nature, black sod, time, death, birth. “Ah go home—Jack—let me sleep. I'm gonna sleep tonight.”

“No Maggie, I don't wanta leave when you feel this way—”

“Yes you do—I dont feel any particular way.”

“Yes you do—”

“Particular feeling? Just because I just happen sick and tired—of this—and that—what I expect—what
you
expea—I just wanta quit and go home—”

“You are home. There's your door.”

Looking at it with a rich frown and a fnuf, “Sure. Home. Okay. Sleep.”

“Arent you home?”

“Dream it some other time, so what if it's my home I dont have to get all overexcited about it—”

“I wasnt—”

“You never nothing. Oh Jack—” (pain in her cry)—“go home—stay—do something—I cant
stand
it hanging around day after day not knowing what to do with myself and whether I should get married or not or just—blah—nothing—Oh fer
kri
-sakes, aint you gonna go yet!” (as I'm grabbing her to kiss her)—“Leave me alone!”

Pushing my hand off.

I turn around and walk off into the night.

Four houses down, my neck burning and strangling, in the still winter star solitude she says, distinctly, “Ha ha,” and I hear her going in the house, the click of the door, the “ha ha” not laughed but spoken signifies not only she's not through with me but it worked to get rid of me tonight.

I cant face my own conclusions.

I drag along in wonder, hatred, stunned, realizing it's nothing; I go by the cemetery so bemused with these witchery-tortures of whether this, that, Maggie, I dont notice the ghosts, the tombstones, it's just the backdrop now to my anxious hunchings over knuckles.

Three miles home again I walk, in midwinter midnight, this time not fast, or joyous, but dispirited with nowhere to go and nothing in back—all the night does at the end of a street is increase its distance—