This is what becomes of chatter, he mutters to himself. A bit of idle conversation with an old woman, a stray remark concerning foolishness in which he did not fully believe himself. The living remember the dead, he believes, but the dead are no less dead because of it. What did it matter if his mother croaked out a few last words as she teetered toward her end?
And yet…
The last time he held his mother, she seemed to know him all too well. She saw him as exhausted by her and her troubles. He lifted her into her bed and she gave him a look that said he had betrayed her. He wondered if she died that night out of spite.
As if he had not served her to the last. As if her emotions were anything but the product of an increasingly plaque-clogged brain. He knows he should forget it and knows that he will not.
Hennessey opens the door and is embraced by the smell of liquor, perfume and smoke. He nods to Thomas behind the bar, who sets down a glass of scotch for him. “Not working, I hope,” he says to Hennessey.
“Too late for business.”
“There’s business and there’s business.”
Hennessey has given up on pretending that everything Thomas says makes sense.
The Mirage is an adult establishment, where not even the waitresses are under the age of forty. The decor is of the old school, full of intricate carvings that, especially after a third scotch, invite dreamy contemplation. A nude hangs above the bar mirror, a thick-thighed, dark beauty, lounging on a divan in what seems to be a desert tent. The painting is so entombed in smoke and dust that it appears to be made completely from shades of sepia.
Hennessey looks over the room, nodding at the others who, like him, are regulars. When he was younger Hennessey sometimes thought he might move to Chicago, or San Francisco, or New York. Someplace that matched his sense of the person he ought to be. What was it that kept him here? Lack of ambition? Fear?
He created a plausible explanation for himself. His work depended on connections, intuition, nuance. Hennessey made a living by the force of his feelings. He could dare be so confident, or so he told himself, only in the place he had known all his life.
Decades ago an uncle had left him twenty-five thousand dollars in his will. Most of the money disappeared, God knows where. But five thousand of it went to a friend, Tony Dimici, who needed cash to buy a pair of trucks. He intended to run a milk and egg delivery operation. Dimici, not foreseeing his own success, offered Hennessey stock instead of a straight repayment. To Dimici’s surprise, though not necessarily to Hennessey’s, he built an empire by adding ice cream, frozen meat, and other staples for the convenience-crazy housewives of the Fifties. Hennessey, his money repaid several times over, learned to keep his eyes open for similar opportunities. Before the term “venture capitalist” came into common usage, he was one.
He picked so many winners over the years that to say Hennessey was your angel was to be stamped with a seal of approval. The bankers to whom Hennessey directed you treated your proposal with respect. City officials were more likely to issue the variance you required. Inspectors finished their work promptly. Your city councilman returned your phone calls. Hennessey recommended architects, engineers, contractors and suppliers, all of them eager to return a favor to the man who had once been so generous to them. To be financed by Hennessey was to enter a realm.
Hennessey notices Dimici, who is having a quiet meal with his wife. Dimici gives him a salute and a smile. Near Dimici, stuck away in the corner, is a single woman with a book propped open beside her plate, reading in the light of the candle at her table. Hennessey has not seen her before. Her gray hair is cut in a no-nonsense manner, just barely grazing her shoulders. She wears a knee-length black knit dress with a turtleneck collar. The incongruity of her reading glasses, worn at the tip of her nose, appeals to him.
Thomas watches the narrowing of Hennessey’s attention. When Hennessey walks into The Mirage, Thomas has often observed, it is as if a light shines on him. But why? His appearance is pleasing enough, yet there were usually better looking men in the place. Thomas among them, if he said so himself. Hennessey is well-dressed, of course, though in that he is hardly alone. His nose looks as if he had been in several fights too many as a boy. But if Hennessey leans in toward you, and your eyes meet his, you forget briefly that there is anyone left in the world except the two of you. Hennessey not only hears what you say, but seems to understand. It is a gift, like perfect pitch, or a sense of color. Thomas is hardly surprised when around midnight Hennessey and the woman in the black turtleneck leave quietly via the back door.
“What happened to Hennessey?” Tony Dimici asks his wife a few minutes later. “I wanted to talk to him.”
She rolls her eyes. “What do you think?” she says.
≈
Tony Dimici does not want Hennessey’s life, though he enjoys considering it. Dimici has been married to Judy for thirty-six years. She is the kind of woman who, when she was young, was described as “a real firecracker.” Short, busty, red-haired, sassy, she is the dominant fact of his life. For all that Hennessey has, which is a considerable amount in Dimici’s estimation, he would not trade that for the satisfaction he takes in going home with his wife.
Nonetheless, while Hennessey chatted up the woman at the next table over, Dimici could not help but steal a glance whenever he was able. “Stop that,” Judy whispered, giving his shin a crack with the sharp toe of her high heels.
“Stop what?” he replied.
“Okay, don’t stop. Go over and sit down. You might as well.”
“All right, all right.”
Dimici and Hennessey have known each other since they were six. They went to the same Catholic grade school, the same high school. Having grown up with him, Dimici takes for granted Hennessey’s odd abilities. When Judy lost her wedding ring, for example, Dimici knew to call his old friend.
They had been married a couple years and already had two kids in an apartment barely big enough for a bachelor and a goldfish. The sole object of beauty in Judy’s life was her wedding ring. Everything else was hand-me-down or covered with baby drool. After Judy lost the ring, Dimici knew she did not want him to promise that it would show up eventually. She wanted it back, now.
Fifteen minutes after he arrived, Hennessey used the tip of his shoe to push aside a diaper that had fallen beside the toilet. Beneath it, wedged into a crack in the tiles, was Judy’s ring. “I tore the house apart,” Judy said. “How did you know where to look?”
Hennessey had done nothing more than to sit her down at the kitchen table, swipe the surface clean with a warm dishtowel, and bring her a glass of ice water. They had talked about her day. She could hardly say why this was so calming. His tone was soothing, his focus on her absolute. Even his breathing seemed to be in time with hers. Then he excused himself and returned a moment later with her ring.
“Are you two playing a joke on me?” she asked suspiciously.
“What am I?” Dimici replied. “Nuts?”
What surprised Judy was that her husband simply accepted that Hennessey would find the ring. He shrugged dismissively when she grilled him. “He’s always been like that,” Dimici said.
When Judy retailed the story to their friends, she learned it was old news to those who had grown up with Hennessey. “Billy’s lost and found,” they called it, as if it were a type of public service. Just as Dimici was known for his temper as a youth, so Hennessey was known for his odd abilities within his circle of friends.
A few years later, when Judy feared that her husband had lost not some bauble but his mind, she called Hennessey for help.
They had finally managed to move from their apartment to a small house in a shabby part of town, down the block from a church where the bells seemed never to stop ringing. Their front door was three feet from the sidewalk. Instead of a garage in the back, they had a mother-in-law apartment that Dimici rented to the first driver he had hired, Buddy, an endlessly recovering alcoholic. Dimici and Judy routinely fought over w
hether Buddy should be fired. Judy called him an accident waiting to happen. Dimici claimed, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that Buddy would soon reform, if he had not already done so.
“I’m trying to be understanding here,” Dimici told Judy.
“You’re trying to be a sucker.”
The disagreement between Judy and Dimici regarding Buddy turned into arguments loud enough to penetrate even Buddy’s addled brain. He would then appear at their door, pinching the bridge of his thick nose and staring at his feet as he told Judy she was one hundred percent correct. He had no business driving their trucks, no business at all, even though each morning he woke at dawn to recite a rosary, which he offered up to the Virgin Mary herself in hope of another day of sobriety. No, no, Buddy insisted, the risk to Dimici Delivery was so great that he had no choice but to quit.
“Listen to him, Tony,” Judy hissed. “The man is telling you the truth. Let him quit.”
Dimici believed in redemption. He was certain that, given enough time, Buddy would change.
Inevitably, Buddy, drunk, wrecked a truck. In the process he also killed a dog and slammed a boy on a bike into the drug store wall. The truck burst into flames. The store burned, not quite to the ground. The good news was that the boy got away with a broken leg. His father, another of Dimici’s childhood pals, settled for Dimici paying the kid’s medical expenses and delivering a free year’s worth of groceries. The insurance just barely covered the drug store, and that only because Dimici’s attorney made an artful account of his prior knowledge. Judy gave Dimici an ultimatum: fire Buddy or find a new wife. Dimici reluctantly cut Buddy loose, though he allowed him to stay in the apartment until he found work. “You are the biggest sap,” Judy exclaimed, certain they would never see another nickel in rent.
She had that right, though not for the reason she imagined. Buddy, drunk again, threw himself off a bridge and into the river. The scrawled note he left on his kitchen said, “Tony, I have been a dog.”
“For once he wasn’t lying,” said Judy.
“Say what you will,” Dimici replied quietly, “Buddy had his problems, sure, but he deserves some respect.”
“Respect! It was dumb luck he didn’t kill that kid. For that he deserves respect?”
“I’m saying he was a human being, that’s all. He was a human being.”
“You earn respect, Tony.”
“Maybe you should leave me alone,” he said softly.
For days Dimici would not go to work. When he did, finally, he couldn’t concentrate. He came home and sat at the table in Buddy’s apartment, surveying the pathetic remains of Buddy’s life. Judy, fearing that even dead Buddy would nonetheless manage to take from them their few modest gains, decided she could not simply wait for Tony to get better. She talked to their priest, who mouthed pious gibberish. He talked to her father, who said, “You want me to tell the son-of-a-bitch to get a grip? I’ll tell him to get a grip!” Not knowing where else to turn — this being the era before therapists had set up shop on every corner — she called Hennessey. He said he would stop by that evening.
The sun hovered just above the trees on a steaming June evening. Hennessey insisted that they go out to Buddy’s little house. Hennessey threw open the windows and both doors. He held Dimici’s hands in his.
“Buddy wasn’t a dog,” Dimici said for the thousandth time. Judy’s hand quivered with the urge to slap him.
“Can you make us a pitcher of tea, Judy?” said Hennessey. “No need to hurry.”
She might have been insulted, except that she couldn’t bear more blubbering. She went back to the house.
When she returned, Hennessey stood behind Dimici, kneading his shoulders. Her husband’s head lolled so loosely on his shoulders that for an instant she wondered if Tony were dead, his corpse held up only by Hennessey’s grip.
“Here’s something to drink,” she said, setting the tray on the table.
She saw tears in her husband’s eyes.
“You okay?” she asked.
“It’s all right,” Dimici said softly. Hennessey left without his tea.
Judy never got a decent explanation from her husband about what happened while she was gone. It was a version of the trick with the ring, that was all she could figure. Whatever it was that Dimici lost when Buddy went off the bridge, Hennessey had returned. She accepted the fact of it. She wasn’t the type to linger over means, so long as the end suited her.
≈
Hennessey is an early riser. He opens the hotel room door quietly and picks up the newspaper. Then he turns on the coffee pot and takes the paper to the table beside the window, which overlooks a small park. Carefully shoveled paths curve around a fountain, drained for winter and now filled with snow.
He glances at Barbara. She is curled into a ball. Her hair falls over her face. She’s pulled the blanket to her chin. She is from Atlanta, traveling on business to one of the bio-med firms that have sprung up in the corn fields at the edge of town. “I want you to know I don’t make a practice of this sort of thing,” she said the night before, pulling her knit dress over her head. Her accent appealed to Hennessey. “I hardly know what’s come over me.”
In the morning light Hennessey picks up the dress and hangs it in the closet. He scans the paper. He is more interested in watching the sun rise. It comes up over the frozen river, behind the hotel, and lights the courthouse bell tower. The morning is clear and cold.
Barbara opens her eyes, startled when she sees him. Then she smiles. “Hey,” she says in her soft drawl. She grew up near Vidalia, on an onion farm. “Until I was six years old I thought the whole world smelled like a salad,” she told Hennessey the night before.
“Your coffee.” He hands her a cup and sits on the edge of the bed.
She takes it gratefully. Her husband, back when she was married, would never have bothered. As she passes Hennessey on her way to the bathroom he reaches out to stop her, kissing her bare thigh. “Come back,” he says. “We’ll watch the sun come up.”
He listens to the shower run. The sunlight creeps slowly down the clock tower. He plays over the night before, which had passed so agreeably that Hennessey had managed not to give his mother or Mrs. Brimsley a thought.
He recognizes that he is procrastinating.
At the end his mother was able to do little more than to sit. She had been active all her life. Fussing with her knick-knacks, hanging the towels just so, making sure the rugs were laundered on a schedule and the floors routinely waxed. The habits of a lifetime would not disappear just because she was unable to walk. If Hennessey sat in the same room with her he barely got the newspaper open before she asked, “Billy, dear, do my Hümmels need dusting?” She could not rest until he got up and examined her collection of mawkish porcelain figurines. It would not do to glance at them and say they looked fine. No. He must set down the paper, put an eye up next to their upturned little noses and rosy cheeks, and acknowledge the truth. Surely they required dusting. “Let me see one, Billy,” she would add. She would squint at the figure and say, “Not just a dusting, I’d say. A good, thorough washing.” And so he was obliged to take them all to the kitchen and line them up on the counter, a horrible parade of the maudlin. There he would rinse and dry each one, having first moved his mother beside the sink to supervise.
An hour later, when he rolled her back to the parlor and once again picked up his paper, she might notice that the crocheted doilies covering the chairs’ arms looked soiled. There could be no rest until he gathered them up, put them in the wash, and set spare doilies in their place.
He thought he would strangle her, and with the next breath he felt like a worm. His own mother, trying to pass her last days with dignity, and he too busy, too important, to be troubled. He began to notice himself when the Hümmels were dusty. He saw that the violets needed watering. Something always needed doing. What a burden it was, to live her life.
When she had a slight stroke and the doctor recommended nursing care, h
e thought he might kiss the man.
“Don’t tell me it’s for my own good,” his mother said. “Just tell me where.”
He mentioned the Sheltering Arms. She simply sighed.
Hennessey is grateful for the interruption when Barbara emerges from the bathroom. She is wrapped like a gift in one of the hotel’s thick white towels. “You haven’t moved,” she says. She pauses for a moment to consider. “Just as well.” She drops the towel and pushes Hennessey back on the unmade bed. For the mindlessness of all that follows, Hennessey is immensely grateful.
≈
What was that? Mrs. Hennessey wonders. What is happening here?
The siren-wail of her confusion, her disappointment, has diminished. Proving, I suppose, that we get used to anything. To the absence of a heavenly choir, to the meagerness of her eternal reward. Instead, this. A netherworld. Not without its advantages. No taxes, no water bills, no aches and pains. No bills from the doctors or the life insurance agents, the worst having come to pass. Whether we are as dead as we will ever be is an open question, but not one that occupies Mrs. Hennessey at the moment. For now she is simply perplexed.
She has just witnessed her dear Billy knock the lamp off the bedside table with his bare foot. She is seeing, at last, scenes that she struggled for decades not to imagine. Not two legs but four. The damp towel dropped beside the bed. A tangle of sheets that manages not quite to cover that bare breast, nor the grimacing, euphoric face on that… that… that… well, whatever she is. Nor the vivid flush spreading now across her own sweet Billy’s naked back. There is nothing quite like death to make you confront the realities of life, which Mrs. Hennessey is now discovering. There is no clinging to your willful delusions.
This is a nightmare, she decides.
It’s just his life, I suggest as gently as I am able.
What? Who’s that? Mrs. Hennessey hopes for the best as she fears the worst.
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