Ironweed (1984 Pulitzer Prize)

by William Kennedy

  “Give us a cigarette, Pee,” the young man said.

  “Don’t have any.”

  “Well roll one.”

  “I said I don’t have any tobacco.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’ll have to leave now, Little Red,” the preacher said.

  Helen stood up and came over to Little Red and put a cigarette in his hand. He took it and said nothing. Helen struck a match and lit it for him, then sat back down.

  “I don’t have anyplace to go,” Little Red said, blowing smoke past the preacher.

  “You should have thought of that before you started drinking. You are a contumacious young man.”

  “I got noplace to put that bag. And I got a pencil and paper upstairs.”

  “Leave it here. Come and get your pencil and paper when you get that poison out of your system and you can talk sense about yourself.”

  “My pants are in there.”

  “They’ll be all right. Nobody here will touch your pants.”

  “Can I have a cup of coffee?”

  “If you found money for beer, you can find money for coffee.”

  “Where can I go?”

  “I couldn’t begin to imagine. Come back sober and you may have some food. Now get a move on.”

  Little Red grabbed the doorknob, opened the door, and took a step. Then he stepped back in and pointed at his suitcase.

  “I got cigarettes there,” he said.

  “Then get your cigarettes.”

  Little Red undid the belt that held the suitcase together and rummaged for a pack of Camels. He rebuckled the belt and stood up.

  “If I come back tomorrow…”

  “We’ll see about tomorrow,” said the preacher, who grabbed the doorknob himself and pulled it to as he ushered Little Red out into the night.

  “Don’t lose my pants,” Little Red called through the glass of the closing door.

  o o o

  Francis, wearing his new socks, was first out of the mission, first to cast an anxious glance around the corner of the building at Sandra, who sat propped where he had left her, her eyes sewn as tightly closed by the darkness as the eyes of a diurnal bird. Francis touched her firmly with a finger and she moved, but without opening her eyes. He looked up at the full moon, a silver cinder illuminating this night for bleeding women and frothing madmen, and which warmed him with the enormous shadow it thrust forward in his own path. When Sandra moved he leaned over and put the back of his hand against her cheek and felt the ice of her flesh.

  “You got an old blanket or some old rags, any old bum’s coat to throw over her?” he asked Pee Wee, who stood in the shadows considering the encounter.

  “I could get something,” Pee Wee said, and he loosened his keys and opened the door of the darkened mission: all lights off save the kitchen, which would remain bright until eleven, lockout time. Pee Wee opened the door and entered as Rudy, Helen, and Francis huddled around Sandra, watching her breathe. Francis had watched two dozen people suspire into death, all of them bums except for his father, and Gerald.

  “Maybe if we cut her throat the ambulance’d take her,” Francis said.

  “She doesn’t want an ambulance,” Helen said. “She wants to sleep it all away. I’ll bet she doesn’t even feel cold.”

  “She’s a cake of ice.”

  Sandra moved, turning her head toward the voices but without opening her eyes. “You got no wine?” she asked.

  “No wine, honey,” Helen said.

  Pee Wee came out with a stone-gray rag that might once have been a blanket and wrapped its rough doubleness around Sandra. He tucked it into the neck of her sweater, and with one end formed a cowl behind her head, giving her the look of a monastic beggar in sackcloth.

  “I don’t want to look at her no more,” Francis said, and he walked east on Madison, the deepening chill aggravating his limp. Helen and Pee Wee fell in behind him, and Rudy after that.

  “You ever know her, Pee Wee?” Francis asked. “I mean when she was in shape?”

  “Sure. Everybody knew her. You took your turn. Then she got to givin’ love parties, is what she called ‘em. but she’d turn mean, first love you up and then bite you bad. Half-ruined enough guys so only strangers’d go with her. Then she stopped that and hung out with one bum name of Freddy and they specialized in one another about a year till he went somewheres and she didn’t.”

  “Nobody suffers like a lover left behind,” Helen said.

  “Well that’s a crock,” Francis said. “Lots suffer ain’t ever been in love even once.”

  “They don’t suffer like those who have,” said Helen.

  “Yeah. Where’s this joint, Pee Wee, Green Street?”

  “Right. Couple of blocks. Where the old Gayety Theater used to be.”

  “I used to go there. Watch them ladies’ ankles and cancanny crotches.”

  “Be nice, Francis,” Helen said.

  “I’m nice. I’m the nicest thing you’ll see all week.”

  Goblins came at them on Green Street, hooded spooks, a Charlie Chaplin in whiteface, with derby, cane, and tash, and a girl wearing an enormous old bonnet with a fullsized bird on top of it.

  “They gonna get us!” Francis said. “Look out!” He threw his arms in the air and shook himself in a fearful dance. The children laughed and spooked boo at him.

  “Gee it’s a nice night,” Helen said. “Cold but nice and clear, isn’t it, Fran?”

  “It’s nice,” Francis said. “It’s all nice.”

  o o o

  The Gilded Cage door opened into the old Gayety lobby, now the back end of a saloon that mimicked and mocked the Bowery pubs of forty years gone. Francis stood looking toward a pair of monumental, half-wrapped breasts that heaved beneath a hennaed wig and scarlet lips. The owner of these spectacular possessions was delivering outward from an elevated platform a song of anguish in the city: You would not insult me, sir, if Jack were only here, in a voice so devoid of musical quality that it mocked its own mockery.

  “She’s terrible,” Helen said. “Awful.”

  “She ain’t that good,” Francis said.

  They stepped across a floor strewn with sawdust, lit by ancient chandeliers and sconces, all electric now, toward a long walnut bar with a shining brass bar rail and three gleaming spittoons. Behind the half-busy bar a man with high collar, string tie, and arm garters drew schooners of beer from a tap, and at tables of no significant location sat men and women Francis recognized: whores, bums, barflies. Among them, at other tables, sat men in business suits, and women with fox scarves and flyaway hats, whose presence was such that their tables this night were landmarks of social significance merely because they were sitting at them. Thus, The Gilded Cage was a museum of unnatural sociality, and the smile of the barman welcomed Francis, Helen, and Rudy, bums all, and Pee Wee, their clean-shirted friend, to the tableau.

  “Table, folks?”

  “Not while there’s a bar rail,” Francis said.

  “Step up, brother. What’s your quaff?”

  “Ginger ale,” said Pee Wee.

  “I believe I’ll have the same,” said Helen.

  “That beer looks tantalizin’,” Francis said.

  “You said you wouldn’t drink,” Helen said.

  “I said wine.”

  The barman slid a schooner with a high collar across the bar to Francis and looked to Rudy, who ordered the same. The piano player struck up a medley of “She May Have Seen Better Days” and “My Sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon” and urged those in the audience who knew the lyrics to join in song.

  “You look like a friend of mine,” Francis told the barman, drilling him with a smile and a stare. The barman, with a full head of silver waves and an eloquent white mustache, stared back long enough to ignite a memory. He looked from Francis to Pee Wee, who was also smiling:

  “I think I know you two turks,” the barman said.

  “You thinkin’ right,” Francis said, “except the last time I seen you, you
wasn’t sportin’ that pussy-tickler.”

  The barman stroked his silvery lip. “You guys got me drunk in New York.”

  “You got us drunk in every bar on Third Avenue,” Pee Wee said.

  The barman stuck out his hand to Francis.

  “Francis Phelan,” said Francis, “and this here is Rudy the Kraut. He’s all right but he’s nuts.”

  “My kind of fella,” Oscar said.

  “Pee Wee Packer,” Pee Wee said with his hand out.

  “I remember,” said Oscar.

  “And this is Helen,” said Francis. “She hangs out with me, but damned if I know why.”

  “Oscar Reo’s what I still go by, folks, and I really do remember you boys. But I don’t drink anymore.”

  “Hey, me neither,” said Pee Wee.

  “I ain’t turned it off yet,” Francis said. “I’m waitin’ till I retire.”

  “He retired forty years ago,” Pee Wee said.

  “That ain’t true. I worked all day today. Gettin’ rich. How you like my new duds?”

  “You’re a sport,” Oscar said. “Can’t tell you from those swells over there.”

  “Swells and bums, there ain’t no difference,” Francis said.

  “Except swells like to look like swells,” Oscar said, “and bums like to look like bums. Am I right?”

  “You’re a smart fella,” Francis said.

  “You still singin’, Oscar?” Pee Wee asked.

  “For my supper.”

  “Well goddamn it,” Francis said, “give us a tune.”

  “Since you’re so polite about it,” Oscar said. And he turned to the piano man and said: “‘Sixteen’ “; and instantly there came from the piano the strains of “Sweet Sixteen.”

  “Oh that’s a wonderful song,” Helen said. “I remember you singing that on the radio.”

  “How durable of you, my dear.”

  Oscar sang into the bar microphone and, with great resonance and no discernible loss of control from his years with the drink, he turned time back to the age of the village green. The voice was as commonplace to an American ear as Jolson’s, or Morton Downey’s; and even Francis, who rarely listened to the radio, or ever had a radio to listen to in either the early or the modern age, remembered its pitch and its tremolo from the New York binge, when this voice by itself was a chorale of continuous joy for all in earshot, or so it seemed to Francis at a distance of years. And further, the attention that the bums, the swells, the waiters, were giving the man, proved that this drunk was not dead, not dying, but living an epilogue to a notable life. And yet, and yet… here he was, disguised behind a mustache, another cripple, his ancient, weary eyes revealing to Francis the scars of a blood brother, a man for whom life had been a promise unkept in spite of great success, a promise now and forever unkeepable. The man was singing a song that had grown old not from time but from wear. The song is frayed. The song is worn out.

  The insight raised in Francis a compulsion to confess his every transgression of natural, moral, or civil law; to relentlessly examine and expose every flaw of his own character, however minor. What was it, Oscar, that did you in? Would you like to tell us all about it? Do you know? It wasn’t Gerald who did me. It wasn’t drink and it wasn’t baseball and it wasn’t really Mama. What was it that went bust, Oscar, and how come nobody ever found out how to fix it for us?

  When Oscar segued perfectly into a second song, his talent seemed awesome to Francis, and the irrelevance of talent to Oscar’s broken life even more of a mystery. How does somebody get this good and why doesn’t it mean anything? Francis considered his own talent on the ball field of a hazy, sunlit yesterday: how he could follow the line of the ball from every crack of the bat, zap after it like a chicken hawk after a chick, how he would stroke and pocket its speed no matter whether it was lined at him or sizzled erratically toward him through the grass. He would stroke it with the predatory curve of his glove and begin with his right hand even then, whether he was running or falling, to reach into that leather pocket, spear the chick with his educated talons, and whip it across to first or second base, or wherever it needed to go and you’re out, man, you’re out. No ball player anywhere moved his body any better than Franny Phelan, a damn fieldin’ machine, fastest ever was.

  Francis remembered the color and shape of his glove, its odor of oil and sweat and leather, and he wondered if Annie had kept it. Apart from his memory and a couple of clippings, it would be all that remained of a spent career that had blossomed and then peaked in the big leagues far too long after the best years were gone, but which brought with the peaking the promise that some belated and overdue glory was possible, that somewhere there was a hosannah to be cried in the name of Francis Phelan, one of the best sonsabitches ever to kick a toe into third base.

  Oscar’s voice quavered with beastly loss on a climactic line of the song: Blinding tears falling as he thinks of his lost pearl, broken heart calling, oh yes, calling, dear old girl. Francis turned to Helen and saw her crying splendid, cathartic tears: Helen, with the image of inexpungeable sorrow in her cortex, with a lifelong devotion to forlorn love, was weeping richly for all the pearls lost since love’s old sweet song first was sung.

  “Oh that was so beautiful, so beautiful,” Helen said to Oscar when he rejoined them at the beer spigot. “That’s absolutely one of my all-time favorites. I used to sing it myself.”

  “A singer?” said Oscar. “Where was that?”

  “Oh everywhere. Concerts, the radio. I used to sing on the air every night, but that was an age ago.”

  “You should do us a tune.”

  “Oh never,” said Helen.

  “Customers sing here all the time,” Oscar said.

  “No, no,” said Helen, “the way I look.”

  “You look as good as anybody here,” Francis said.

  “I could never,” said Helen. But she was readying herself to do what she could never, pushing her hair behind her ear, straightening her collar, smoothing her much more than ample front.

  “What’ll it be?” Oscar said. “Joe knows ‘em all.”

  “Let me think awhile.”

  Francis saw that Aldo Campione was sitting at a table at the far end of the room and had someone with him. That son of a bitch is following me, is what Francis thought. He fixed his glance on the table and saw Aldo move his hand in an ambiguous gesture. What are you telling me, dead man, and who’s that with you? Aldo wore a white flower in the lapel of his white flannel suitcoat, a new addition since the bus. Goddamn dead people travelin’ in packs, buyin’ flowers. Francis studied the other man without recognition and felt the urge to walk over and take a closer look. But what if nobody’s sittin’ there? What if nobody sees these bozos but me? The flower girl came along with a full tray of white gardenias.

  “Buy a flower, sir?” she asked Francis.

  “Why not? How much?”

  “Just a quarter.”

  “Give us one.”

  He fished a quarter out of his pants and pinned the gardenia on Helen’s lapel with a pin the girl handed him. “It’s been a while since I bought you flowers,” he said. “You gonna sing up there for us, you gotta put on the dog a little.”

  Helen leaned over and kissed Francis on the mouth, which always made him blush when she did it in public. She was always a first-rate heller between the sheets, when there was sheets, when there was somethin’ to do between them.

  “Francis always bought me flowers,” she said. “He’d get money and first thing he’d do was buy me a dozen roses, or a white orchid even. He didn’t care what he did with the money as long as I got my flowers first. You did that for me, didn’t you, Fran?”

  “Sure did,” said Francis, but he could not remember buying an orchid, didn’t know what orchids looked like.

  “We were lovebirds,” Helen said to Oscar, who was smiling at the spectacle of bum love at his bar. “We had a beautiful apartment up on Hamilton Street. We had all the dishes anybody’d ever need. We had a sofa
and a big bed and sheets and pillowcases. There wasn’t anything we didn’t have, isn’t that right, Fran?”

  “That’s right,” Francis said, trying to remember the place.

  “We had flowerpots full of geraniums that we kept alive all winter long. Francis loved geraniums. And we had an icebox crammed full of food. We ate so well, both of us had to go on a diet. That was such a wonderful time.”

  “When was that?” Pee Wee asked. “I didn’t know you ever stayed anyplace that long.”

  “What long?”

  “I don’t know. Months musta been if you had an apartment.”

  “I was here awhile, six weeks maybe, once.”

  “Oh we had it much longer than that,” Helen said.

  “Helen knows,” Francis said. “She remembers. I can’t call one day different from another.”

  “It was the drink,” Helen said. “Francis wouldn’t stop drinking and then we couldn’t pay the rent and we had to give up our pillowcases and our dishes. It was Haviland china, the very best you could buy. When you buy, buy the best, my father taught me. We had solid mahogany chairs and my beautiful upright piano my brother had been keeping. He didn’t want to give it up, it was so nice, but it was mine. Paderewski played on it once when he was in Albany in nineteen-oh-nine. I sang all my songs on it.”

  “She played pretty fancy piano,” Francis said. “That’s no joke. Why don’t you sing us a song, Helen?”

  “Oh I guess I will.”

  “What’s your pleasure?” Oscar asked.

  “I don’t know. ‘In the Good Old Summertime,’ maybe.”

  “Right time to sing it,” Francis said, “now that we’re freezin’ our ass out there.”