Ironweed (1984 Pulitzer Prize)

by William Kennedy

  “On second thought,” said Helen, “I want to sing one for Francis for buying me that flower. Does your friend know ‘He’s Me Pal,’ or ‘My Man’?”

  “You hear that, Joe?”

  “I hear,” said Joe the piano man, and he played a few bars of the chorus of “He’s Me Pal” as Helen smiled and stood and walked to the stage with an aplomb and grace befitting her reentry into the world of music, the world she should never have left, oh why ever did you leave it, Helen? She climbed the three steps to the platform, drawn upward by familiar chords that now seemed to her to have always evoked joy, chords not from this one song but from an era of songs, thirty, forty years of songs that celebrated the splendors of love, and loyalty, and friendship, and family, and country, and the natural world. Frivolous Sal was a wild sort of devil, but wasn’t she dead on the level too? Mary was a great pal, heaven-sent on Christmas morning, and love lingers on for her. The new-mown hay, the silvery moon, the home fires burning, these were sanctuaries of Helen’s spirit, songs whose like she had sung from her earliest days, songs that endured for her as long as the classics she had committed to memory so indelibly in her youth, for they spoke to her, not abstractly of the aesthetic peaks of the art she had once hoped to master, but directly, simply, about the everyday currency of the heart and soul. The pale moon will shine on the twining of our hearts. My heart is stolen, lover dear, so please don’t let us part. Oh love, sweet love, oh burning love—the songs told her—you are mine, I am yours, forever and a day. You spoiled the girl I used to be, my hope has gone away. Send me away with a smile, but remember: you’re turning off the sunshine of my life.

  Love.

  A flood tide of pity rose in Helen’s breast. Francis, oh sad man, was her last great love, but he wasn’t her only one. Helen has had a lifetime of sadnesses with her lovers. Her first true love kept her in his fierce embrace for years, but then he loosened that embrace and let her slide down and down until the hope within her died. Hopeless Helen, that’s who she was when she met Francis. And as she stepped up to the microphone on the stage of The Gilded Cage, hearing the piano behind her, Helen was a living explosion of unbearable memory and indomitable joy.

  And she wasn’t a bit nervous either, thank you, for she was a professional who had never let the public intimidate her when she sang in a church, or at musicales, or at weddings, or at Woolworth’s when she sold song sheets, or even on the radio with that audience all over the city every night. Oscar Reo, you’re not the only one who sang for Americans over the airwaves. Helen had her day and she isn’t a bit nervous.

  But she is… all right, yes, she is… a girl enveloped by private confusion, for she feels the rising of joy and sorrow simultaneously and she cannot say whether one or the other will take her over during the next few moments.

  “What’s Helen’s last name?” Oscar asked.

  “Archer,” Francis said. “Helen Archer.”

  “Hey,” said Rudy, “how come you told me she didn’t have a last name?”

  “Because it don’t matter what anybody tells you,” Francis said. “Now shut up and listen.”

  “A real old-time trouper now,” said Oscar into the bar mike, “will give us a song or two for your pleasure, lovely Miss Helen Archer.”

  And then Helen, still wearing that black rag of a coat rather than expose the even more tattered blouse and skirt that she wore beneath it, standing on her spindle legs with her tumorous belly butting the metal stand of the microphone and giving her the look of a woman five months pregnant, casting boldly before the audience this image of womanly disaster and fully aware of the dimensions of this image, Helen then tugged stylishly at her beret, adjusting it forward over one eye. She gripped the microphone with a sureness that postponed her disaster, at least until the end of this tune, and sang then “He’s Me Pal,” a ditty really, short and snappy, sang it with exuberance and wit, with a tilt of the head, a roll of the eyes, a twist of the wrist that suggested the proud virtues. Sure, he’s dead tough, she sang, but his love ain’t no bluff. Wouldn’t he share his last dollar with her? Hey, no millionaire will ever grab Helen. She’d rather have her pal with his fifteen a week. Oh Francis, if you only made just fifteen a week.

  If you only.

  The applause was full and long and gave Helen strength to begin “My Man,” Fanny Brice’s wonderful torch, and Helen Morgan’s too. Two Helens. Oh Helen, you were on the radio, but where did it take you? What fate was it that kept you from the great heights that were yours by right of talent and education? You were born to be a star, so many said it. But it was others who went on to the heights and you were left behind to grow bitter. How you learned to envy those who rose when you did not, those who never deserved it, had no talent, no training. There was Carla, from high school, who could not even carry a tune but who made a movie with Eddie Cantor, and there was Edna, ever so briefly from Woolworth’s, who sang in a Broadway show by Cole Porter because she learned how to wiggle her fanny. But ah, sweetness was Helen’s, for Carla went off a cliff in an automobile, and Edna sliced her wrists and bled her life away in her lover’s bathtub, and Helen laughed last. Helen is singing on a stage this very minute and just listen to the voice she’s left with after all her troubles. Look at those well-dressed people out there hanging on her every note.

  Helen closed her eyes and felt tears forcing their way out and could not say whether she was blissfully happy or fatally sad. At some point it all came together and didn’t make much difference anyway, for sad or happy, happy or sad, life didn’t change for Helen. Oh, her man, how much she loves you. You can’t imagine. Poor girl, all despair now. If she went away she’d come back on her knees. Some day. She’s yours. Forevermore.

  Oh thunder! Thunderous applause! And the elegant people are standing for Helen, when last did that happen? More, more, more, they yell, and she is crying so desperately now for happiness, or is it for loss, that it makes Francis and Pee Wee cry too. And even though people are calling for more, more, more, Helen steps delicately back down the three platform steps and walks proudly over to Francis with her head in the air and her face impossibly wet, and she kisses him on the cheek so all will know that this is the man she was talking about, in case you didn’t notice when we came in together. This is the man.

  By god that was great, Francis says. You’re better’n anybody.

  Helen, says Oscar, that was first-rate. You want a singing job here, you come round tomorrow and I’ll see the boss puts you on the payroll. That’s a grand voice you’ve got there, lady. A grand voice.

  Oh thank you all, says Helen, thank you all so very kindly. It is so pleasant to be appreciated for your Godgiven talent and for your excellent training and for your natural presence. Oh I do thank you, and I shall come again to sing for you, you may be sure.

  Helen closed her eyes and felt tears beginning to force their way out and could not say whether she was blissfully happy or devastatingly sad. Some odd-looking people were applauding politely, but others were staring at her with sullen faces. If they’re sullen, then obviously they didn’t think much of your renditions, Helen. Helen steps delicately back down the three steps, comes over to Francis, and keeps her head erect as he leans over and pecks her cheek.

  “Mighty nice, old gal,” he says.

  “Not bad at all,” Oscar says. “You’ll have to do it again sometime.”

  Helen closed her eyes and felt tears forcing their way out and knew life didn’t change. If she went away she’d come back on her knees. It is so pleasant to be appreciated.

  Helen, you are like a blackbird, when the sun comes out for a little while. Helen, you are like a blackbird made sassy by the sun. But what will happen to you when the sun goes down again?

  I do thank you.

  And I shall come again to sing for you.

  Oh sassy blackbird! Oh!

  III

  Rudy left them to flop someplace, half-drunk on six beers, and Francis, Helen, and Pee Wee walked back along Green Street to Madison
and then west toward the mission. Walk Pee Wee home and go get a room at Palombo’s Hotel, get warm, stretch out, rest them bones. Because Francis and Helen had money: five dollars and seventy-five cents. Two of it Helen had left from what Francis gave her last night; plus three-seventy-five out of his cemetery wages, for he spent little in The Gilded Cage, Oscar buying twice as many drinks as he took money for.

  The city had grown quiet at midnight and the moon was as white as early snow. A few cars moved slowly on Pearl Street but otherwise the streets were silent. Francis turned up his suitcoat collar and shoved his hands into his pants pockets. Alongside the mission the moon illuminated Sandra, who sat where they had left her. They stopped to look at her condition. Francis squatted and shook her.

  “You sobered up yet, lady?”

  Sandra answered him with an enveloping silence. Francis pushed the cowl off her face and in the vivid moonlight saw the toothmarks on her nose and cheek and chin. He shook his head to clear the vision, then saw that one of her fingers and the flesh between forefinger and thumb on her left hand had been chewed.

  “The dogs got her.”

  He looked across the street and saw a red-eyed mongrel waiting in the half-lit corner of an alley and he charged after it, picking up a stone as he went. The cur fled down the alley as Francis turned his ankle on a raised sidewalk brick and sprawled on the pavement. He picked himself up, he now bloodied too by the cur, and sucked the dirt out of the cuts.

  As he crossed the street, goblins came up from Broadway, ragged and masked, and danced around Helen. Pee Wee, bending over Sandra, straightened up as the goblin dance gained in ferocity.

  “Jam and jelly, big fat belly,” the goblins yelled at Helen. And when she drew herself inward they only intensified the chant.

  “Hey you kids,” Francis yelled. “Let her alone.”

  But they danced on and a skull goblin poked Helen in the stomach with a stick. As she swung at the skull with her hand, another goblin grabbed her purse and then all scattered.

  “Little bastards, devils,” Helen cried, running after them. And Francis and Pee Wee too joined the chase, pounding through the night, no longer sure which one wore the skull mask. The goblins ran down alleys, around corners, and fled beyond capture.

  Francis turned back to Helen, who was far behind him. She was weeping, gasping, doubled over in a spasm of loss.

  “Sonsabitches,” Francis said.

  “Oh the money,” Helen said, “the money.”

  “They hurt you with that stick?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “That money ain’t nothin’. Get more tomorrow.”

  “It was.”

  “Was what?”

  “There was fifteen dollars in there besides the other.”

  “Fifteen? Where’d you get fifteen dollars?”

  “Your son Billy gave it to me. The night he found us at Spanish George’s. You were passed out and he gave us forty-five dollars, all the cash he had. I gave you thirty and kept the fifteen.”

  “I went through that pocketbook. I didn’t see it.”

  “I pinned it inside the lining so you wouldn’t drink it up. I wanted our suitcase back. I wanted our room for a week so I could rest.”

  “Goddamn it, woman, now we ain’t got a penny. You and your sneaky goddamn ways.”

  Pee Wee came back from the chase empty-handed.

  “Some tough kids around here,” he said. “You okay, Helen?”

  “Fine, just fine.”

  “You’re not hurt?”

  “Not anyplace you could see.”

  “Sandra,” Pee Wee said. “She’s dead.”

  “She’s more than that,” Francis said. “She’s partly chewed away.”

  “We’ll take her inside so they don’t eat no more of her,” Pee Wee said. “I’ll call the police.”

  “You think it’s all right to bring her inside?” Francis asked. “She’s still got all that poison in her system.”

  Pee Wee said nothing and opened the mission door. Francis picked Sandra up from the dust and carried her inside. He put her down on an old church bench against the wall and covered her face with the scratchy blanket that had become her final gift from the world.

  “If I had my rosary I’d say it for her,” Helen said, sitting on a chair beside the bench and looking at Sandra’s corpse. “But it was in my purse. I’ve carried that rosary for twenty years.”

  “I’ll check the vacant lots and the garbage cans in the mornin’,” Francis said. “It’ll turn up.”

  “I’ll bet Sandra prayed to die,” Helen said.

  “Hey,” said Francis.

  “I would if I was her. Her life wasn’t human anymore.”

  Helen looked at the clock: twelve-ten. Pee Wee was calling the police.

  “Today’s a holy day of obligation,” she said. “It’s All Saints’ Day.”

  “Yup,” said Francis.

  “I want to go to church in the morning.”

  “All right, go to church.”

  “I will. I want to hear mass.”

  “Hear it. That’s tomorrow. What are we gonna do tonight? Where the hell am I gonna put you?”

  “You could stay here,” Pee Wee said. “All the beds are full but you can sleep down here on a bench.”

  “No,” Helen said. “I’d rather not do that. We can go up to Jack’s. He told me I could come back if I wanted.”

  “Jack said that?” Francis asked.

  “Those were his words.”

  “Then let’s shag ass. Jack’s all right. Clara’s a crazy bitch but I like Jack. Always did. You sure he said that?”

  “‘Come back anytime,’ he said as I was going out the door.”

  “All right. Then we’ll move along, old buddy,” Francis said to Pee Wee. “You’ll figure it out with Sandra?”

  “I’ll do the rest,” Pee Wee said.

  “You know her last name?”

  “No. Never heard it.”

  “Don’t make much difference now.”

  “Never did,” Pee Wee said.

  o o o

  Francis and Helen walked up Pearl Street toward State, the absolute center of the city’s life for two centuries. One trolley car climbed State Street’s violent incline and another came toward them, rocking south on Pearl. A man stepped out of the Waldorf Restaurant and covered his throat with his coat collar, shivered once, and walked on. The cold had numbed Francis’s fingertips, frost was blooming on the roofs of parked cars, and the nightwalkers exhaled dancing plumes of vapor. From a manhole in the middle of State Street steam rose and vanished. Francis imagined the subterranean element at the source of this: a huge human head with pipes screwed into its ears, steam rising from a festering skull wound.

  Aldo Campione, walking on the opposite side of North Pearl from Francis and Helen, raised his right hand in the same ambiguous gesture Francis had witnessed at the bar. As Francis speculated on the meaning, the man who had been sitting with Aldo stepped out of the shadows into a streetlight’s glow, and Aldo’s gesture then became clear: it introduced Francis to Dick Doolan, the bum who tried to cut off Francis’s feet with a meat cleaver.

  “I went to the kid’s grave today,” Francis said.

  “What kid?”

  “Gerald.”

  “Oh, you did?” she said. “Then that was the first time, wasn’t it? It must’ve been.”

  “Right.”

  “You’re thinking about him these days. You mentioned him last week.”

  “I never stop thinkin’ about him.”

  “What’s gotten into you?”

  Francis saw the street that lay before him: Pearl Street, the central vessel of this city, city once his, city lost. The commerce along with its walls jarred him: so much new, stores gone out of business he never even heard of. Some things remained: Whitney’s, Myers’, the old First Church, which rose over Clinton Square, the Pruyn Library. As he walked, the cobblestones turned to granite, houses became stores, life aged, died,
renewed itself, and a vision of what had been and what might have been intersected in an eye that could not really remember one or interpret the other. What would you give never to have left, Francis?

  “I said, what’s got into you?”

  “Nothin’s got into me. I’m just thinkin’ about a bunch of stuff. This old street. I used to own this street, once upon a time.”

  “You should’ve sold it when you had the chance.”

  “Money. I ain’t talkin’ about money.”

  “I didn’t think you were. That was a funny.”

  “Wasn’t much funny. I said I saw Gerald’s grave. I talked to him.”

  “Talked? How did you talk?”

  “Stood and talked to the damn grass. Maybe I’m gettin’ nutsy as Rudy. He can’t hold his pants up, they fall over his shoes.”

  “You’re not nutsy, Francis. It’s because you’re here. We shouldn’t be here. We should go someplace else.”

  “Right. That’s where we oughta go. Else.”

  “Don’t drink any more tonight.”

  “Listen here. Don’t you nag my ass.”

  “I want you straight, please. I want you straight.”

  “I’m the straightest thing you’ll see all week. I am so straight. I’m the straightest thing you’ll sweek. The thing that happened on the other side of the street. The thing that happened was Billy told me stuff about Annie. I never told you that. Billy told me stuff about Annie, how she never told I dropped him.”

  “Never told who, the police?”

  “Never nobody. Never a damn soul. Not Billy, not Peg, not her brother, not her sisters. Ain’t that the somethin’est thing you ever heard? I can’t see a woman goin’ through that stuff and not tellin’ nobody about it.”

  “You’ve got a lot to say about those people.”

  “Not much to say.”

  “Maybe you ought to go see them.”

  “No, that wouldn’t do no good.”

  “You’d get it out of your system.”

  “What out of my system?”