Ironweed (1984 Pulitzer Prize)

by William Kennedy

  “That had nothing to do with it,” Annie said.

  “Her teeth,” Billy said. “She’s got the most gorgeous teeth in North America. Better-lookin’ teeth than Joan Crawford. What a smile! You ain’t seen her smile yet, but that’s a fantastic smile. Like Times Square is what it is. She coulda been on billboards coast to coast. We’d be hipdeep in toothpaste, and cash too. But no.” And he jerked a thumb at his mother.

  “She had a job,” Annie said. “She didn’t need that. I never liked that fellow that wanted to sign her up.”

  “He was all right,” Billy said. “I checked him out. He was legitimate.”

  “How could you know what he was?”

  “How could I know anything? I’m a goddamn genius.”

  “Clean up your mouth, genius. She would’ve had to go to New York for pictures.”

  “And she’d of never come back, right?”

  “Maybe she would, maybe she wouldn’t.”

  “Now you got it,” Billy said to his father. “Mama likes to keep all the birds in the nest.”

  “Can’t say as I blame her,” Francis said.

  “No,” Billy said.

  “I never liked that fellow,” Annie said. “That’s what it really was. I didn’t trust him.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “And she brought a paycheck home every week,” Annie said. “Even when the tool company closed awhile, the owner put her to work as a cashier in a trading port he owned. Trading port and indoor golf. An enormous place. They almost brought Rudy Vallee there once. Peg got wonderful experience.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “Cigarette?” Billy asked Francis.

  “Sure,” Francis said.

  Annie stood up and went to the refrigerator in the pantry. She came back with the butter dish and put it on the dining-room table. Peg came through the swinging door, into the silence. She poked the potatoes with a fork, looked at the turkey, which was turning deep brown, and closed the oven door without basting it. She rummaged in the utensil drawer and found a can opener and punched it through a can of peas and put them in a pan to boil.

  “Turkey smells real good,” Francis said to her.

  “Uh-huh, I bought a plum pudding,” she said to all, showing them the can. She looked at her father. “Mama said you used to like it for dessert on holidays.”

  “I surely did. With that white sugar sauce. Mighty sweet.”

  “The sauce recipe’s on the label,” Annie said. “Give it here and I’ll make it.”

  “I’ll make it,” Peg said.

  “It’s nice you remembered that,” Francis said.

  “It’s no trouble,” Peg said. “The pudding’s already cooked. All you do is heat it up in the can.”

  Francis studied her and saw the venom was gone from her eyes. This lady goes up and down like a thermometer. When she saw him studying her she smiled slightly, not a billboard smile, not a smile to make anybody rich in toothpaste, but there it was. What the hell, she’s got a right. Up and down, up and down. She come by it naturally.

  “I got a letter maybe you’d all like to hear while that stuffis cookin’ up,” he said, and he took the yellowed envelope with a canceled two-cent stamp on it out of his inside coat pocket. On the back, written in his own hand, was: First letter from Margaret.

  “I got this a few years back, quite a few,” he said, and from the envelope he took out three small trifolded sheets of yellowed lined paper. “Come to me up in Canada in nineteen-ten, when I was with Toronto.” He unfolded the sheets and moved them into the best possible light at longest possible arm’s length, and then he read:,

  “‘Dear Poppy, I suppose you never think that you have a daughter that is waiting for a letter since you went away. I was so mad because you did not think of me that I was going to join the circus that was here last Friday. I am doing my lesson and there is an arithmetic example here that I cannot get. See if you can get it. I hope your leg is better and that you have good luck with the team. Do not run too much with your legs or you will have to be carried home. Mama and Billy are good. Mama has fourteen new little chickens out and she has two more hens sitting. There is a wild west circus coming the eighth. Won’t you come home and see it? I am going to it. Billy is just going to bed and Mama is sitting on the bed watching me. Do not forget to answer this. I suppose you are having a lovely time. Do not let me find you with another girl or I will pull her hair. Yours truly, Peggy.’“

  “Isn’t that funny,” Peg said, the fork still in her hand. “I don’t remember writing that.”

  “Probably lots you don’t remember about them days.” Francis said. “You was only about eleven.”

  “Where did you ever find it?”

  “Up in the trunk. Been saved all these years up there. Only letter I ever saved.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “It’s a provable fact. All the papers I got in the world was in that trunk, except one other place I got a few more clips. But no letters noplace. It’s a good old letter, I’d say.”

  “I’d say so too,” Annie said. She and Billy were both staring at Peg.

  “I remember Toronto in nineteen-ten,” Francis said. “The game was full of crooks them days. Crooked umpire named Bates, one night it was deep dark but he wouldn’t call the game. Folks was throwin’ tomatoes and mudballs at him but he wouldn’t call it ‘cause we was winnin’ and he was in with the other team. Pudge Howard was catchin’ that night and he walks out and has a three-way confab on the mound with me and old Highpockets Wilson, who was pitchin’. Pudge comes back and squats behind the plate and Highpockets lets go a blazer and the ump calls it a ball, though nobody could see nothin’ it was so dark. And Pudge turns to him and says: ‘You call that pitch a ball?’ ‘I did,’ says the ump. ‘If that was a ball I’ll eat it,’ says Pudge. ‘Then you better get eatin’,’ says the ump. And Pudge, he holds the ball up and takes a big bite out of it, ‘cause it ain’t no ball at all, it’s a yellow apple I give Highpockets to throw. And of course that won us the game and the ump went down in history as Blindy Bates, who couldn’t tell a baseball from a damn apple. Bates turned into a bookie after that. He was crooked at that too.”

  “That’s a great story,” Billy said. “Funny stuff in them old days.”

  “Funny stuff happenin’ all the time,” Francis said.

  Peg was suddenly tearful. She put the fork on the sink and went to her father, whose hands were folded on the table. She sat beside him and put her right hand on top of his.

  After a while George Quinn came home from Troy, Annie served the turkey, and then the entire Phelan family sat down to dinner.

  VII

  “I look like a bum, don’t I?” Rudy said.

  “You are a bum,” Francis said. “But you’re a pretty good bum if you wanna be.”

  “You know why people call you a bum?”

  “I can’t understand why.”

  “They feel better when they say it.”

  “The truth ain’t gonna hurt you,” Francis said. “If you’re a bum, you’re a bum.”

  “It hurt a lotta bums. Ain’t many of the old ones left.”

  “There’s new ones comin’ along,” Francis said.

  “A lot of good men died. Good mechanics, machinists, lumberjacks.”

  “Some of ‘em ain’t dead,” Francis said. “You and me, we ain’t dead.”

  “They say there’s no God,” Rudy said. “But there must be a God. He protects bums. They get up out of the snow and they go up and get a drink. Look at you, brand-new clothes. But look at me. I’m only a bum. A no-good bum.”

  “You ain’t that bad,” Francis said. “You’re a bum, but you ain’t that bad.”

  They were walking down South Pearl Street toward Palombo’s Hotel. It was ten-thirty, a clear night. full of stars but very cold: winter’s harbinger. Francis had left the family just before ten o’clock and taken a bus downtown. He went straight to the mission before they locked it for the night, and found Pee Wee alone in
the kitchen, drinking leftover coffee. Pee Wee said he hadn’t seen, or heard from, Helen all day.

  “But Rudy was in lookin’ for you,” Pee Wee told Francis. “He’s either up at the railroad station gettin’ warm or holed up in some old house down on Broadway. He says you’d know which one. But look, Francis, from what I hear, the cops been raidin’ them old pots just about every night. Lotta guys usually eat here ain’t been around and I figure they’re all in jail. They must be repaintin’ the place out there and need extra help.”

  “I don’t know why the hell they gotta do that,” Francis said. “Bums don’t hurt nobody.”

  “Maybe it’s just cops don’t like bums no more.”

  Francis checked out the old house first, for it was close to the mission. He stepped through its doorless entrance into a damp, deep-black stairwell. He waited until his eyes adjusted to the darkness and then he carefully climbed the stairs, stepping over bunches of crumpled newspaper and fallen plaster and a Negro who was curled up on the first landing. He stepped through broken glass, empty wine and soda bottles, cardboard boxes. human droppings. Streetlights illuminated stalagmites of pigeon leavings on a windowsill. Francis saw a second sleeping man curled up near the hole he heard a fellow named Michigan Mac fell through last week. Francis sidestepped the man and the hole and then found Rudy in a room by himself, lying on a slab of board away from the broken window, with a newspaper on his shoulder for a blanket.

  “Hey bum,” Francis said, “you lookin’ for me?”

  Rudy blinked and looked up from his slab.

  “Who the hell you talkin’ to?” Rudy said. “What are you, some kinda G-man?”

  “Get your ass up off the floor, you dizzy kraut.”

  “Hey, is that you, Francis?”

  “No, it’s Buffalo Bill. I come up here lookin’ for Indians.”

  Rudy sat up and threw the newspaper off himself

  “Pee Wee says you was lookin’ for me,” Francis said.

  “I didn’t have noplace to flop, no money, no jug, nobody around. I had a jug but it ran out.” Rudy fell back on the slab and wept instant tears over his condition. “I’ll kill myself, I got the tendency,” he said. “I’m last.”

  “Hey,” Francis said. “Get up. You ain’t bright enough to kill yourself You gotta fight. you gotta be tough. I can’t even find Helen. You seen Helen anyplace? Think about that woman on the bum somewheres on a night like this. Jesus I feel sorry for her.”

  “Where the wind don’t blow,” Rudy said.

  “Yeah. No wind. Let’s go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Outa here. You stay here, you wind up in jail tonight. Pee Wee says they’re cleanin’ out all these joints.”

  “Go to jail, at least it’s warm. Get six months and be out in time for the flowers.”

  “No jail for Francis. Francis is free and he’s gonna stay free.”

  They walked down the stairs and back to Madison because Francis decided Helen must have found money somewhere or else she’d have come looking for him. Maybe she called her brother and got a chunk. Or maybe she was holding out even more than she said. Canny old dame. And sooner or later, with dough, she’d hit Palombo’s because of the suitcase.

  “Where we goin’?”

  “What the hell’s the difference? Little walk’ll keep your blood flowin’.”

  “Where’d you get them clothes?”

  “Found ‘em.”

  “Found ‘em? Where’d you find ‘em?”

  “Up a tree.”

  “A tree?”

  “Yeah. A tree. Grew everything. Suits, shoes, bow ties.”

  “You never tell me nothin’ that’s true.”

  “Hell, it’s all true,” Francis said. “Every stinkin’ damn thing you can think of is true.”

  o o o

  At Palombo’s they met old man Donovan just getting ready to go off duty, making way for the night clerk. It was a little before eleven and he was putting the desk in order. Yes, he told Francis, Helen was here. Checked in late this morning. Yeah, sure she’s all right. Looked right perky. Walked up them stairs lookin’ the same as always. Took the room you always take.

  “All right,” said Francis, and he took out the ten-dollar bill Billy gave him. “You got change of this?” Donovan made change and then Francis handed him two dollars.

  “You give her this in the mornin’,” he said, “and make sure she gets somethin’ to eat. If I hear she didn’t get it, I’ll come back here and pull out all your teeth.”

  “She’ll get it,” Donovan said. “I like Helen.”

  “Check her out now,” Francis said. “Don’t tell her I’m here. Just see is she okay and does she need anything. Don’t say I sent you or nothin’ like that. Just check her out.”

  So Donovan knocked on Helen’s door at eleven o’clock and found out she needed nothing at all, and he came back and told Francis.

  “You tell her in the mornin’ I’ll be around sometime during the day,” Francis said. “And if she don’t see me and she wants me, you tell her to leave me a message where she’ll be. Leave it with Pee Wee down at the mission. You know Pee Wee?”

  “I know the mission,” Donovan said.

  “She claim the suitcase?” Francis asked.

  “Claimed it and paid for two nights in the room.”

  “She got money from home, all right,” Francis said. “But you give her that deuce anyway.”

  Francis and Rudy walked north on Pearl Street then, Francis keeping the pace brisk. In a shopwindow Francis saw three mannequins in formal dresses beckoning to him. He waved at them.

  “Now where we goin’?” Rudy asked.

  “The all-night bootlegger’s,” Francis said. “Get us a couple of jugs and then go get a flop and get some shuteye.”

  “Hey,” Rudy said. “Now you’re sayin’ somethin’ I wanna hear. Where’d you find all this money?”

  “Up in a tree.”

  “Same tree that grows bow ties?”

  “Yep,” said Francis. “Same tree.”

  Francis bought two quarts of muscatel at the upstairs bootlegger’s on Beaver Street and two pints of Green River whiskey.

  “Rotgut,” he said when the bootlegger handed him the whiskey, “but it does what it’s supposed to do.”

  Francis paid the bootlegger and pocketed the change: two dollars and thirty cents left. He gave a quart of the musky and a pint of the whiskey to Rudy and when they stepped outside the bootlegger’s they both tipped up their wine.

  And so Francis began to drink for the first time in a week.

  o o o

  The flop was run by a bottom-heavy old woman with piano legs, the widow of somebody named Fennessey, who had died so long ago nobody remembered his first name.

  “Hey Ma,” Rudy said when she opened the door for them.

  “My name’s Mrs. Fennessey,” she said. “That’s what I go by.”

  “I knew that,” Rudy said.

  “Then call me that. Only the niggers call me Ma.”

  “All right, sweetheart,” Francis said. “Anybody call you sweetheart? We want a couple of flops.”

  She let them in and took their money, a dollar for two flops, and then led them upstairs to a large room that used to be two or three rooms but now, with the interior walls gone, was a dormitory with a dozen filthy cots, only one occupied by a sleeping form. The room was lit by what Francis judged to be a three-watt bulb.

  “Hey,” he said, “too much light in here. It’ll blind us all.”

  “Your friend don’t like it here, he can go somewhere else,” Mrs. Fennessey told Rudy.

  “Who wouldn’t like this joint?” Francis said, and he bounced on the cot next to the sleeping man.

  “Hey bum,” he said, reaching over and shaking the sleeper. “You want a drink?”

  A man with enormous week-old scabs on his nose and forehead turned to face Francis.

  “Hey,” said Francis. “It’s the Moose.”

  “Yeah, it’s
me,” Moose said.

  “Moose who?” asked Rudy.

  “Moose what’s the difference,” Francis said.

  “Moose Backer,” Moose said.

  “That there’s Rudy,” Francis said. “He’s crazier than a cross-eyed bedbug, but he’s all right.”

  “You sharped up some since I seen you last,” Moose said to Francis. “Even wearin’ a tie. You bump into prosperity?”

  “He found a tree that grows ten-dollar bills,” Rudy said.

  Francis walked around the cot and handed Moose his wine. Moose took a swallow and nodded his thanks.

  “Why’d you wake me up?” Moose asked.

  “Woke you up to give you a drink.”

  “It was dark when I went to sleep. Dark and cold.”

  “Jesus Christ, I know. Fingers cold, toes cold. Cold in here right now. Here, have another drink and warm up. You want some whiskey? I got some of that too.”

  “I’m all right. I got an edge. You got enough for yourself?”

  “Have a drink, goddamn it. Don’t be afraid to live.” And Moose took one glug of the Green River.

  “I thought you was gonna trade pants with me,” Moose said.

  “I was. Pair I had was practically new, but too small.”

  “Where are they? You said they were thirty-eight, thirtyone, and that’s just right.”

  “You want these?”

  “Sure,” said Moose.

  “If I give ‘em to you, then I ain’t got no pants,” Francis said.

  “I’ll give you mine,” Moose said.

  “Why you tradin’ your new pants?” Rudy asked.

  “That’s right,” said Francis, standing up and looking at his own legs. “Why am I? No, you ain’t gonna get these. Fuck you, I need these pants. Don’t tell me what I need. Go get your own pants.”

  “I’ll buy ‘em,” Moose said. “How much you want? I got another week’s work sandin’ floors.”

  “Well shine ‘em,” Francis said. “They ain’t for sale.”

  “Sandin’, not shinin’. I sand ‘em. I don’t shine ‘em.”