Songs in Ordinary Time (3 page)

“…on warpath…”

“And tell him this—he’ll like this. Tell him Greene says it’s the end of an era….”

“End of an era…,” May repeated dully, her gaze settling on the Judge’s contorted hands, the fingertips just beginning to blacken.

“Tell him it’s a matter of life and death,” Joey shouted over the rumble of Grondine Carson’s garbage truck as it accelerated up West Street.

“A matter of life and death,” came May’s vaporous whisper. There was a click, but she stood listening to the dial tone, steadied by its urgent drone.

SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 9

A
few blocks away in the School of Holy Innocents, Benjy Fermoyle glanced out the window to see his father staggering through the schoolyard below. In the front of the room Sister Martin snapped her pointer against the green continent on the canvas map. They were supposed to know this for tomorrow’s exam; the major exports and imports of each country as well as their capitals. What she wanted them to learn was not just miles and oceans away, but worlds, lifetimes removed from Benjy, when all he could perceive of distance and other lives was the father who came looking for his younger son only when he was drunk, the father who at any moment might come bursting through that doorway.

“The capital of Venezuela is…” Sister Martin nodded at Linda Braller’s waving hand.

“Caracas,” Linda answered.

“The capital of Uruguay is…” Sister Martin looked at him. Just then the bell rang, and all heads bowed with the departure prayer. Benjy stared in horror as Mr. Lee, the school’s janitor and crossing guard, came out of the building and hurried after his father. Mr. Lee grabbed his father by the arm and managed to steer him back onto the sidewalk. Just as his father stepped into the road, a car turned the corner. Benjy looked up to see Sister Martin’s lips moving with the class prayer as she stared out at the schoolyard. Her eyes widened with the squeal of brakes. A man was shouting. Benjy lowered his head.

“Please, dear God,” he prayed, “it’s okay if he’s dead. But not here.

Anyplace but here.”

The second bell rang, and Benjy rose slowly as his classmates jostled up the aisles for the door.

“Benjamin! Wait!” called Sister Martin with a glance toward the window.

“Look at that guy out there,” Jack Flaherty called, pausing at the window.

He pointed. “Mr. Lee’s helping him up. Look, he’s so drunk he can’t even stand up. Let’s go see!” Flaherty cried, his newly deep voice cracking with delight.

When they were gone Sister Martin closed the door. He squirmed as she came down the aisle. The long black beads at her waist rattled against the desk as she sat in the chair next to his. She was a young nun with a deeply pocked face and bushy eyebrows that massed over the bridge of her large nose. He’d known from the first day of school that she didn’t like him. She was always singling him out, calling on him when he didn’t even have his hand raised. Try, she would urge, at least just try. Most of the time he knew the answers, but hated the silence in that terrible moment of everyone staring at him. She had finally given up. She wet her finger now and rubbed at an ink smudge on the desktop. He tried to remember if he’d done anything wrong today, but he knew he hadn’t. He never did. The classroom smelled of chalk dust and the heat of her black wool, warm brown apple cores, the limp remnants of bologna crescents and peanut butter and jelly crusts and lead pencil shavings that filled the black metal wastebasket.

10 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

“Benjamin,” she said, then paused, her coarse face reddening. Sweat leaked from under her stiff white wimple as she stared at him. “I just want you to know…I…I want you to know that I…I understand. I know how hard it can be to have someone…to have such a situation going on in your life. But you’re not the only one, Benjamin.” She tried to smile. “Believe me when I tell you that. We all have these, these crosses to bear. Do you know what I’m saying?”

He both nodded and shrugged, which seemed to irritate her. The shouting grew louder in the schoolyard. A horn tooted. He glanced down, relieved not to see his father.

“Look at me! Don’t look away. Look at my eyes. See my face. Do you see?

Do you know what I’m saying? I’m homely.”

He was shocked. He stared at her.

“It’s a fact of life. I’m a homely person, aren’t I?”

“No,” he said, and she smiled.

“It’s my affliction, my cross to bear, just as your father’s condition is his affliction, his cross to bear. Benjamin, I said, look at me.”

He tried to keep his gaze on the solid furry line of her eyebrows.

“I want to help you, that’s all. But you have to let me help you. Please, Benjamin,” she said softly. She leaned closer. “Now, I know your father has a drinking problem, and when I saw him out there…”

“That wasn’t my father.”

“…and how you seemed to shrink up…”

“That wasn’t him.”

She sighed, blinking. “Yes, it was. I know that was your father.”

He shook his head. “No, it wasn’t.”

She bit her lip and sniffed, and he was afraid she was going to cry. She reached across the aisle and put her hand over his.

“It’s all right, Benjamin,” she said softly. “Whatever he is has nothing to do with what kind of person you are. Do you know what I’m saying?”

“But that wasn’t him,” he said, grateful when her hand slipped away.

Benjy came up the street from school, walking close to the dusty hedges.

In their yards, dogs lazed in pools of sunlight, panting under their wintery coats. Cars full of teenagers cruised the streets, windows down, convertible tops peeled back, radios blasting, voices shrill and heedless. From everywhere came music and motion and young mothers wielding squeaky baby buggies past porch rails bannered with bright scatter rugs, beaten and airing now in the first lilac’s welling sweetness.

He stopped dead. Ahead on the corner was Jack Flaherty with his hands cupped to his mouth. Flaherty stood in a circle of older boys, one of whom was Bobby Busco, sixteen years old, the same age as Norm, Benjy’s older brother, but twice Norm’s size. Busco was lighting Jack’s cigarette. “Suck it,” Busco kept saying. “That’s it, deep! Deeper!” The younger boy’s face purpled until he spit the cigarette onto the ground in a spasm of choking SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 11

and coughing. The older boys roared, laughing as Busco thumped Jack’s back so viciously that he dropped to his knees, gasping for breath.

Benjy started to walk fast. Just a few more yards and he would be around the corner.

“Lemme try it again,” Jack begged. “I took too much!”

“Yah…Sure, Flaherty…Go buy your own….”

“C’mon! That ain’t fair. Gimme one!”

“So long, creep,” one of them called as they turned to go.

“Wait! Hey, wait, you said you’d…. Hey, see that guy?”

Benjy’s father was coming toward him.

“That’s Norm Fermoyle’s father.”

“Yah, I know, and look, that’s his brother.”

Benjy froze.

“Benjy!” his father called. “Jesus Christ, Benjy,” his father cried, throwing his arms around him. He reeked of liquor and sweat. His eyes were raw and his cheeks were dark with stubble. “You gotta help me. I gotta go see the fucking Judge, and I don’t feel so good right now.”

The boys watched from across the street. Someone was laughing.

“I can’t,” Benjy said. He pulled away and his father grabbed his arm, twisting it as he jerked him back. “I can’t,” he said again, and his father slapped the side of his head.

“What do you mean you can’t,” his father bellowed and hit him again.

“I’m your father, and I need your fucking help, you fucking little weasel you…”

But now he pulled back with all his strength and was running as fast as he could from the shameful reach of that bawling howl and the boys’ stunned laughter.

A
lice Fermoyle, Benjy’s sister, had gone straight from school to Cushing’s Department Store. She sat there now in the personnel office, picking the cuticle on her thumb as she watched Miss Curtis glance at the application she had just filled out. Alice smiled her nervous, gulping smile while Miss Curtis explained that the only summer opening left was in Cosmetics. “What we need is a girl with, well…you know, to demonstrate the makeup…we need someone who’s a little more…a little older.”

“Alice’s thumb began to bleed. She sucked at it, then reached quickly for her books, which fell onto the floor as she stood up to go.

“Have you tried the Taylor Shop? They always seem to need…”

Alice nodded and backed toward the door.

“Well then, what about Birdsee’s Sweets…. You did?…What about the library? That might be more…Oh. Well, what can I say? Better luck next time,” she called after Alice, then closed the door and sighed. “But I doubt it.”

The white-haired receptionist rolled her eyes and whispered, “I didn’t want to say anything, but that was Alice Fermoyle, you know, Sam Fermoyle’s daughter?”

12 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

“Oh!” said Miss Curtis, looking toward the door. “And Marie, the secretary from Briscoe’s Sporting Goods, that’s her mother, right?”

“I didn’t want to say anything,” the receptionist said, “but Lord knows, the last thing you’d want is him in here drunk, trying to see the daughter, the way he does his wife over at Briscoe’s.”

“Or the mother on my back,” Miss Curtis added. “I see her in church, and she’s always got this look, like she’s just waiting for somebody to cross her.”

“Well,” the receptionist said, “poor thing’s had a time of it, I guess. But then again, she asked for it, running around with a thirty-year-old man when she was still in high school.”

“You’re kidding!” Miss Curtis said.

“That’s the truth,” the receptionist said. “I remember. Everybody does.

’Course, no one ever says much, we all felt so bad for Mr. Cushing and our poor Nora. It was one week before the big wedding, and Sam Fermoyle runs off and marries a teenage girl.”

L
ester Stoner was waiting for Alice in front of the store. “Well?” He grinned hopefully. “Did you get it?” he asked, falling in step beside her.

Eyes wide, she shook her head no. Her face still burned.

“My father knows the Cushings,” Less was saying. “Maybe he could put in a word.”

She wished he’d shut up, always acting so superior to everyone else, when he could be such a creep sometimes, always hanging around the nuns.

He could make her feel so inadequate. That was it, if he said one more word she’d break up with him.

“Come on, Alice, don’t feel bad. There’s a lot of jobs in town. You’ll see.”

She walked faster. It wasn’t his fault. She couldn’t believe she’d just done that, gone in there for a job, into Cushing’s, where of course they’d all known. She could tell, especially that old lady with her patronizing smile:
I used to play bridge with your grandmother Fermoyle
. Say it! Say,
You’re Sam’s
daughter
. Damn! Why had she done that? Why couldn’t she ever stand up to her mother? “Cushing’s!” she’d almost shrieked this morning, standing over her mother as she swept up the broken glass. He got drunk. He kicked in the cellar window and put his fist through the back door pane, so now she’d pay. Her, the one whose fault it all was, would always be. “Cushing’s,”

her mother’s dead voice repeated, not even looking up, daring her to argue, daring her to be ashamed, daring her to be afraid, for fear was the worst offense. Cowards were afraid, and damn it, Marie Fermoyle wasn’t working her ass off to raise cowards, so if her younger son Benjy was afraid of water, then he’d damn well spend every day this summer at the public pool, and if her daughter was afraid of what people might think, then she’d march straight into Cushing’s to offer herself, Alice Fermoyle, Sam’s daughter; Sam and Marie; the worm in her mother’s unwed belly, the reason for it all—her, the shameful, sinful, lustful reason. Her brother Norm was lucky.

SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 13

He wasn’t afraid of anything. She envied him his good looks, his strength, his confidence, his quick brutality, his rawness that was so much like hers, their mother’s.

“How about Birdsee’s?” Lester was saying as they waited for the light to change.

She shook her head.

“The luncheonette!” he said as they passed Eunice Bonifante’s restaurant on the corner. Eunice was his aunt. She was a widow now, and, so the rumor went, having an affair with Lester’s father, her dear sister-in-law’s husband.

“I’d hate that,” she said. “All those people at the counter staring at you.”

“They don’t stare
at
anyone,” he said. “They just stare. Like my father does. He chews and he stares.” He looked at her and seemed to realize for the first time how upset she was. “What’s wrong, Al?”

“I hate this town!” she said, walking faster now, because her eyes were filling with tears. “I hate these dinky stores and these crummy streets and people watching you every minute; like right now, every place we go by, somebody’s looking out, saying, ‘There’s that Fermoyle girl, what’s her name, she never says two words, and that’s Lester with her, his father’s Sonny Stoner, the chief of police, and Lester is valedictorian of his class, such a smart boy, wonder what he sees in her!’”

Lester laughed. “They don’t say that!”

She looked at him. “Did you ever wonder what it would be like to be invisible? You could do anything you wanted and go anyplace and no one’d know.”

Lester stepped in front of her now and whispered, “Yah, and you could see what everyone else was doing. Can you imagine, being invisible up at the Flatts, looking in all the windows at the parkers.” He grinned, his small bright eyes glowing the way they had in his darkened kitchen when he had her listen to the calls coming over his father’s police radio. “It’s better than TV,” he had whispered above the static. “It’s almost like being God,” he’d said, laughing.

A garbage truck rumbled down the hill, leaking rancid juices from its seams, its stench everywhere.

“I could get a job at the lake!” she said suddenly. “Mary Agnes said there’s a couple of waitressing jobs at the hotel. She said I could….”

“No!” Lester said, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk. “I’ll never see you!” His voice quivered, reminding her of a chemistry class last year when some kids switched beakers on Les, and when he put his on the Bunsen burner, the smoky explosion of ashes blackened his face.