Strings Attached (13 page)

Sixteen

 

Providence, Rhode Island
September 1949

I’d just started junior year of high school, but I already knew that this year would be the same as the others — a half-distracted glance at my books at night before bed, a stab at homework. If I made myself listen in class, I didn’t have to work much outside of it to pull a C average. Da didn’t talk to us about college; if we managed to graduate from high school, that was achievement enough for him. He didn’t know that Muddie went to Thayer Street on weekends, pretending to be a Pembroke girl. Pembroke was the sister school to Brown, and Muddie wore kilts and cardigans and brushed her hair until it shone, hoping some Brown freshman would ask her what courses she was taking. Then she would spend the afternoon drinking a soda with him and lying. She’d learned the names of professors and courses, and she’d groan about classes and studies until it was time to go down the hill and shop for dinner.

Da also didn’t know that Jamie had quit the basketball team and was staying late in the art room, drawing with Mr. Hulce. He didn’t know that Jamie checked out art books from the library and hid them under his bed.

As for me, I always ducked out of study hall in order to practice my dance routines in the gym. As long as we were safe, looked presentable, and were home by nine, Da left us alone.

For a long time, Da had escaped the Irish curse — the whiskey bottle was only for Saturday nights and guests. But since both Delia and Elena had gone, he’d begun to wander down to Wickenden Street in the evenings for company, and that meant drink. He’d arrive home late and have trouble taking off his shoes. We didn’t know what to do about it, so we didn’t say a word about it, even to each other. He was never mean; he was either sleepy or silly, wrapping my sweater around his head and pretending it was a turban and he was Bing Crosby, or getting sentimental and crying at dinner just from looking around the table. Once I caught him standing in the doorway of Delia’s old room, staring, weaving, and crying.

It was Jamie who had the job of fetching him on the nights he couldn’t stop. Jamie, who slung an arm around him and helped him home, took off his shoes, wiped his face with a cloth, got him strong tea in the morning. One night the phone rang and I heard Jamie speaking softly, and then the front door closing. Within the hour, he was back, and I heard him putting Da to bed. In another minute he came to my room and sat on the edge of my bed. Muddie was asleep, so he whispered his hello.

“Is Da okay?” I asked.

“He took all his clothes off in Murphy’s Bar,” Jamie said.

“All of them?” I began to laugh — I couldn’t help it— and Jamie joined in.

“He was naked as the day he was born, standing there on Wickenden. Somebody called the police, but we’re lucky,
because it was Johnny Tatum who came. You know, Da plays cards with him sometimes? So Johnny says, ‘Mac, go inside and put something on.’ And so Da disappears back into the bar and comes out again — wearing somebody’s tie.”

I laughed again, imagining the scene. Jamie flopped back on the pillow, facing the ceiling. “You should have seen it, Kit. All the bar was there, laughing and clapping and whistling, and Johnny Tatum had to laugh, too.” He shook his head. “He’s lucky he wasn’t arrested.”

“What can we do? He’s bound and determined to humiliate us. At least he’s a crowd-pleaser. What would make him do such a thing, get so blind drunk like that?”

“The thing is,” Jamie said, “I heard the news earlier. Elena got married today.”

 

With Delia gone, we were poor again, truly poor where we had to worry about rent and food. Da brought home a salary from the American Screw factory but it wasn’t enough, so we all had after-school and weekend jobs. I found it was easier to wear my leotards to school underneath the blouses I couldn’t be bothered to iron. Sometimes I’d even borrow something of Jamie’s, or hold up my skirts with one of his ties. Girls whispered behind my back. Boys thought I was fast and asked me on dates, and I always said no. After a while they left me alone, too.

I walked home each night to save on carfare. That evening, I was coming from my voice lesson. I wanted to think about the radio show I was doing on Saturday and go over the song “It’s Magic” in my head. I had a new teacher now, and I’d learned I was a contralto. Just today she’d told
me to stop imitating Doris Day and find my own style. “Listen to the words, not just the notes!” she kept saying, raising her hands from the piano keys. I thought I
had
been listening. I knew I wasn’t getting it.

I carried a bag with the first of the fall pears, brought home for dessert, because I’d probably missed dinner. Muddie would have kept something warm for me. She had taken over the cooking duties since we’d hit high school. She had given up on making the dishes from Elena we’d loved, and was making stews and fried potatoes and chicken. If it wasn’t as good as Elena’s cooking, at least it wasn’t as bad as Da’s.

I passed the gates of Brown and headed east. The university was expanding with the swell of new students and was knocking down buildings for dormitories, one after the other, making their way across College Hill and pressing into Fox Point. The factories were closing and moving outside the city, where land was cheap. Highways were being built, old roads widened for the cars that were being manufactured again. Squeezed from all sides, Fox Point was falling back into poverty, missing out on the postwar boom. Neighbors were moving out, going after the jobs. Da had heard talk that they might pave over the river, just so cars could cross more easily. A river turned into a highway. Da had swum in that river when he was a boy. And before him, people had fished in it. People had sailed away to Africa right from the harbor. Providence was turning its back on its heart.

I could hear the calls of the college boys as they tossed a football back and forth on the lawn of a fraternity house. That never changed — fresh crops of boys with haircuts and good shoes.

Suddenly, an object sailed into my peripheral vision and I almost dropped my bag of pears as I just managed to catch
the football. Years of street games had given me good reflexes. The whoop across the street congratulated me, and I fired the ball back to one of the four boys on the lawn.

“Did you see those hands, Jack?”

“Exceptionally fine.”

“Did you know angels played football?”

“I didn’t know angels had red hair.”

To my dismay, they were now heading toward me, tossing the football easily back and forth as they walked.

I started walking quickly down the hill, but of course they followed me. I realized that it was getting late, that it was chilly, that everybody had gone in to dinner or to study. Power Street, the border of College Hill and Fox Point, was still blocks away.

“Why, oh why, doesn’t our team have such an arm? Such a face, such a walk, such a —”

“Move aside, boy. Methinks the comely coed mistakes your raillery for true wit.”

Coed? They thought I was a Pembroke girl. If only I’d been Muddie, I would’ve been pleased as anything.

“What light on yon window breaks? Is that a smile?”

“We almost had windows breaking, if she hadn’t caught your pass.”

A guffaw, a certain jockeying of position around me. One of them threw the football and another dropped it. I still hadn’t looked at their faces.

“Angels don’t smile, they glow.” This voice was lower, and closer to me — too close, in fact. I could smell grass and perspiration. “Come on, bright angel, don’t break our hearts. Speak.”

The four of them had surrounded me now, with one walking backward, facing me. They were just boys, dressed in the kinds of clothes that these kinds of boys wore, pressed
chinos, loafers, crewneck sweaters with knotted ties underneath. Trying to impress me with their talk, showing off their fine educations with silly quotes from Shakespeare. I couldn’t tell one from the other, and they were in my way. I tried to walk around the one in front, but he only laughed.

I stopped. “Listen, you have a swell line, but it’s not for me. I have to get somewhere.”

“Fair damsel, Providence is a dark and frightening land.”

“Find some other distressed damsel, all right?” I gave them a quick smile as I tried to brush past, trying to be a good sport. Mistake.

“Hey, not so fast. We’re just trying to make friends.”

“Yeah, what’s the rush?” The voice was low and insinuating, and the boy made a show of looking at my legs.

No, they hadn’t mistaken me for a Pembroke girl. I knew that now. I was wearing what I usually wore to dance class, black tights and leotard under a skirt and cardigan, my bare feet in scuffed shoes. My hair was in a bun loosened from class, stray ends spilling out, waving around my face. I didn’t have the brushed perfection of a Pembroke girl.

One of the boys nudged the other one aside. “Hey, dad, the girl isn’t interested.” He took my arm. “She’s looking for real class. Come on, beautiful, why so standoffish?”

We had stopped next to an empty lot, a construction site for a new building for the university. Suddenly, they were all around me in a circle, blocking me in. For the first time, I felt afraid. Their faces blurred into one face with the same expression. I tried to push my way through, but they stood shoulder to shoulder.

“Just let me go,” I said. My voice shook a little.

“But we’re just getting acquainted. We’re just being friendly.”

“Gentlemen.”

I saw another boy appear through the gloom.

“I think this young lady is trying to go about her business,” he said. “Why don’t you do the same?”

“Who do you think you are?” One of the boys turned halfway to the new boy, then turned back in contempt.

The other boy stood easily, his hands at his sides. “I think she’d like you to go.”

Something about him was familiar. Black hair, thick and uncombed, a little longer than the other boys wore theirs. A white shirt, open at the throat, with no necktie. Dark, dark eyes… and then I knew, even though I hadn’t seen him in four years.

“Hello, Billy.”

He nodded at me briefly. I wasn’t sure if he knew who I was.

“You know this character? Billy Macaroni?”

Billy didn’t react. Instead, he smiled at me, and I smiled back. I knew he remembered me then. His gaze shifted to the boys and it turned hard. His hands hung loosely at his sides, but suddenly the atmosphere tightened, as though he’d made a fist.

“Time for a drink, boys,” one of the boys said, and they ambled away, careful not to hurry.

I let out a breath and turned back to Billy. “Thanks for that,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

“I could have taken them, though.”

He laughed, then stood uncertainly for a moment, his hands in his pockets. “Maybe I should walk you… just in case.”

I dug into the bag and held out a pear toward him. “I didn’t know you went to Brown.”

He took it but didn’t bite into it. “I’m a sophomore. I’m on the boxing team. That’s why they took off.”

“You just made a few enemies.”

“That’s all right — they wouldn’t be my friends anyway. I’m a townie, and I’m Italian,” he said, biting into the pear. “And they know who my father is. Billy Macaroni — they don’t even bother saying it behind my back. The way they look at me — or, I mean, the way they don’t look — it’s like their glances slide off. Like I’m a mirror, and if they don’t see themselves, they don’t see anything.”

“I thought I’d be invisible, too.”

“You? That could never happen.”

To cover my embarrassment, I bent down and picked up the forgotten football. I hefted it in one hand and then hurled it, hard and straight, toward the construction site — a clear, spinning pass into the darkness.

“How about that?” he murmured. “The girl’s got an arm.”

“I can climb trees, too.”

“I remember.” He took a bite. “I remember that day I met you. I liked you because you liked my pictures. You said, ‘If I could do that, I’d do it all the time.’ Before that”—he shrugged —“you were my enemy.”

“Little old me?” I said it flirtatiously, but there was a seriousness behind his eyes. “What do you mean?”

His gaze went blank for a minute. Then he grinned. “You were a girl. Believe me, I’ve changed.”

“That wasn’t the first time we met, you know,” I said. “The first time was on the Fourth of July. I was wearing red, white, and blue. And eating ice cream. I was with my aunt and my dad.”

“I don’t remember that,” he said.

“I was nine. Skinny as a beanpole. All knees and elbows.”

“I bet you were a knockout.”

We began to walk down the hill, eating our fragrant pears and talking. All the while I was wondering how to keep walking forever, circling around College Hill, never getting to the narrowing streets and bumpy sidewalks of Fox Point.

When he touched my elbow as we crossed the street, I felt a shimmy down through every nerve. I knew I’d found it, and I didn’t even know its name. I felt it in my body, the way my bones were suddenly held together by air, not muscle. What would happen next, I didn’t know, but I knew it would have to happen. I would make it happen. I was a motherless child, and I knew that the deepest of tragedies was simple: to love, and not to be loved in return.