Songs in Ordinary Time

by Mary McGarry Morris

  “Asshole,” Norm muttered, nudging Benjy.

  “The wire plant’s always hiring,” she said in a rush of activity between the refrigerator, sink, and stove. “The girl I work with says they’re on two shifts now. You should try there! I can tell you right where it is!” Her voice had a quick brittle ring. She had been slicing bread and putting it on a plate and now she laid a stick of butter on a chipped gold-rimmed saucer. She set them in the middle of the table.

  “Well now, that’s good news on a lovely night with such wondrous vapors in the air.” He looked toward the stove and sniffed. “Beef Bourguignon?”

  “Stew,” she said with a weak shrug.

  “Thank the Lord,” Duvall said.

  The back door squealed open and Alice came into the kitchen. His mother’s head jerked around and she stared. Alice’s cheeks were red and her mouth was red and sore-looking. Alice said a quick hello and tried to hurry into the front room, but Duvall called her back. She stood in the doorway, her fingers grazing her blouse front, checking each button.

  “Ah,” he said, smiling. “The maiden’s cheeks so rouged with love that her eyes, her eyes…” He peered at her. “Her eyes burn holes in the blackest night.”

  “That’s beautiful,” his mother said, looking at Duvall. “Who wrote that? No, Alice, you tell us. Alice is good in English.”

  “I never heard it before,” Alice said, and his mother looked disappointed.

  “Of course not,” Duvall said, buttering a slice of bread with graceful, almost loving strokes. “That is from a ‘Sonnet to Love.’” He looked up at Marie and lowered his voice. “By Omar Duvall, a little-known sonnet by a littler-known poet.” Still staring, he bit into the bread.

  In the other room, Norm howled. “Unbelievable!” he cried. “This is the funniest show I’ve ever seen!”

  “Who’s the lucky young man?” Duvall asked over Norm’s high-pitched laughter.

  “Lester Stoner,” Alice said, blushing.

  Norm had come into the doorway. “You probably know his father,” he said. “He’s the police chief.”

  “Can’t say that I’ve ever had the pleasure, son,” Duvall said, swallowing, licking his lips, then with two fingers crimping crumbs from the corners of his mouth.

  “My name’s Norm,” he said, frowning.

  Duvall nodded. “I know that, son.” He squinted, then flashed a quick smile. “Norman. Not unlike Omar. Norman…Omar without the n’s.”

  “Surprise!” From next door came the shout of many voices with noisemakers and clapping. “Surprise!”

  Across the driveway, they all began to sing “Happy Birthday” to Harvey Klubock, who had just arrived. He stood on his back steps in his stained butcher’s overalls dazedly looking into his own house at all those people, neighbors and friends of his wife, all of them dressed up, younger than he and wonderfully happy that he was another year older.

  Omar Duvall had gone to the window over the sink and parted the water-stained curtain. With a quick push he lifted the window that was never opened, the window that looked directly into the Klubocks’ kitchen. “Happy Birthday”—his deep rich baritone joined the singing, funneling across the driveway—“Happy Birthday, dear Harvey…”

  “Oh don’t,” his mother said, reaching out with one hand but not touching him. Her face was white. “Oh please don’t.”

  As the hot cooking air was sucked through the window, the little kitchen grew cooler.

  Benjy turned off the television and closed his eyes. It sounded as if the party were right in the kitchen, as if the whole street were in there. He wondered what it would be like to have a party in his own house.

  The next day after school Benjy headed downtown with the washing-machine dial in his bookbag. When he came to the park he glanced at the Mayo sisters’ boardinghouse, expecting it to look different now with Omar living there, the way his own house had seemed to change with the exuberant man’s presence. Last night Omar had greased the squealing door hinges and propped up the sagging back step with a brick. “It’s so quiet,” Benjy’s mother had said, opening and closing the door. “I can’t believe all it took was a little lard.”

  “Ingenuity, my dear. It’s my stock-in-trade,” he had said with a wink.

  Maybe Omar was in there now, doing little jobs for the Mayo sisters. It gave him the creeps to think of Omar sleeping in the same room where the Judge had died. He stared at the second-floor window. Maybe even in the same bed! As he crossed the street, he remembered the black man’s angry face that day, and a chill went through him. If his mother knew about the fight he’d witnessed, she wouldn’t like Duvall, and he wanted very much for her to like him.

  He paused on the corner of the park and looked down one of the paths that bisected the broad green square from each of its four corners. Two men pushed lawn mowers in opposite directions. In the damaged quadrant three men raked stones from the freshly rolled loam. In the center of the park a crew of laborers swarmed over the bandstand with paintbrushes and hammers, readying it for the first concert. There was a man in the bucket of a cherry picker feeding electrical lines to two men on the bandstand roof who were hooking up the loudspeakers.

  Benjy came down West Street toward Joey Seldon’s popcorn stand, where one of the laborers stood drinking a bottle of orange soda.

  “I can’t,” the laborer was saying to the blind man in the stand. The laborer kept looking warily around. “This reseeding shit’s set me back days.”

  Joey’s hand groped along the weathered countertop to a hole in one of the boards. “It’s rotten right through,” he said. “And the corner posts are gone too.” He shook a post and the whole stand trembled. He cocked his head expectantly, his eyes rolling in their sockets like milky marbles. “You’re the foreman, Kenny. You can do it if you want.”

  “Look, I told Greenie,” the laborer confided. He stepped closer. “I said, ‘The whole thing’s so much dry rot, one stiff wind’ll take her down,’ and he says, ‘Then let it!’”

  At this, Joey sank heavily onto his stool. “He’s probably right. Just let it go,” he said.

  “Aw c’mon, Joey,” said the laborer. “’Course he’s not right. I’m just saying my hands are tied. I can’t shit on the job without Greenie’s say-so. The man’s an asshole, a little nothin’, but he’s got the power.”

  Joey had been shaking his head. “No,” he sighed. “It’s not just him. Things’re changing. People are getting sick of me.” He laughed bitterly. “And I’m getting sick of them.”

  “C’mon, Joey.” The laborer reached in and patted Joey’s shoulder. “People want you here! Christ, you’re an institution! You’ll see. Sonny’ll get up at the council meeting just like the Judge used to and he’ll talk about your war record and that’ll be that. They’ll vote your space again, and then I’ll be up here first thing the next morning, fixing the old stand all up for another summer.”

  Joey rubbed his eyes, a dismal gesture.

  “It’s all the vandalism. Greenie’s going off the deep end,” the laborer said. “’Course, your radio blasting last year during his grand finale didn’t help much.”

  Joey smiled. “I wish I could take credit for that.” He chuckled. “Damn kids, they really pulled one off that time.”

  During the last concert of the season someone had rigged Joey’s radio up to the loudspeakers. They turned the volume high as it would go and moved the radio off the counter, down behind the stand. By the time Joey located it, Jarden Greene’s violin solo had been completely drowned out by Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire.” Benjy hadn’t been there, but Norm said kids were dancing and even the grown-ups were laughing and cheering and clapping their hands while Jarden Greene fiddled away.

  “The thing is, he thinks the park’s his, so he takes everything personal,” the laborer said.

  As Benjy started past the stand, Joey’s head cocked. “Who’s that?” he called.

  “It’s me. Benjy Fermoyle.”

  “What’ll
it be, Benjy?” Joey asked, his face brightening. He stood up and wiped his hands eagerly on his white apron.

  “Nothing, thanks.”

  “Need some money? If you haven’t got any cans or bottles to return, then you can give me a hand stacking the empties,” Joey said of the cases of empty cans and bottles next to his stand. All the kids brought their empties here because Joey didn’t give them a hard time the way stores did. And if you needed money and Joey liked you, he’d put you to work.

  “They’re all stacked, Joey,” the laborer said warily as if Benjy were trying to take advantage here.

  When Benjy came to the Telephone Building he darted into the doorway as a man lurched across the street. At first he thought it was his father, but it was only Buster Kennedy, a shell-shocked veteran who delivered loud impassioned speeches all day long as he roamed through town. Benjy wondered if Buster’s kids had ever ducked into doorways and dived into hedges at the sound of their father’s voice. In a way Benjy’s father was more a sense of dread than an actual presence. The flesh-and-blood father was never as terrifying as this pervading fear, this long, dark shadow with its staggering footsteps, penitential tears, and vomitous breath always pleading for them to love him, please, please, please; the terrible phone calls, when the only sound on the line was his father’s weeping, his breathless gasping, desperate to tell of his love, that raging, hounding, erratic need, a love of such dizzying polarity it could wrench a smile to a sneer, an embrace to a twisted arm. And yet, he could think of no one who had ever spoken to him of love but his father, whom he did not think he loved, this father, this power he respected and feared the way one does as dark and ungovernable a force as a nightmare or hurricane or plummeting comet.

  Uncle Renie’s appliance store was on a narrow back street between a shoe repair shop that opened only on Saturdays and a card shop that had closed two years ago when Cushing’s Department Store had added its own card and wrapping-paper department. Twirled across Uncle Renie’s window was a faded streamer of red crepe paper, a courtesy purchase from the card shop’s bankruptcy sale.

  Across the street were the parking lot and the glass vestibule that was the rear entrance to Cushing’s Department Store. Customers streamed in and out of Cushing’s, carrying its familiar red bags with the big black C. No one was in the LaChance Appliance Company. Benjy tried the door but it was locked. He peered through the grimy glass, relieved. All the lights were off inside. As he started to turn away, Uncle Renie’s balding head shot up from behind the counter. Smiling eagerly, Uncle Renie unlocked the door. “It’s so good to see you!” he cried, locking the door behind them. Something about his uncle always made Benjy uneasy. It was a kind of stale breathlessness, as if the stout little man were always waiting for some wonder or cataclysm to occur, had always been waiting, would wait forever. He gave his uncle the dial and explained that his mother wanted a new one.

  The store smelled of fish. Benjy looked around. “Where’s the cat?” he asked and just then the door to the basement opened and the enormous cat appeared, strutting to the front of the store, as if he were the boss here and Renie LaChance had better watch his step. He jumped onto the counter, stretching, and arching his back, purring while Benjy stroked his sleek fur.

  “See? He heard you,” his uncle said. “He likes you. Tommy likes you.” Uncle Renie turned the dial over and poked inside with a nutpick.

  “Nice kitty, kitty, kitty,” Benjy whispered against the cat’s neck.

  “He don’t like too many,” his uncle said. “He’s a very excriminating cat, that Tommy is.”

  “He ever run away?” Benjy asked.

  “Oh no! Tommy wouldn’t do that. He’s very homey. And he don’t go out ever.”

  “Where’s he sleep?”

  “Down the cellar,” his uncle said, moving nearer the window for light. He peered into the dial. “He got his own bed and his food and box for bat’room.” He looked up and smiled. “You should see how fancy I made it. You should see. It’s got two pillows in that there velvet and all his toys, his catnip mouse. There,” he grunted, squinting and biting his thick lip as he probed the pick deeper. “Same as last time…just a loose setting…one more turn…” He grinned and held out the dial. “Good as new and no charge, tell your mother.”

  From out on the street came a screech of brakes followed by a roar of drunken curses. Uncle Renie ran to look through the door. “Quick,” he called, gesturing. “Get outta sight. It’s your dad again.” Uncle Renie ran around the counter, grabbed the cat, and sank onto a wooden box that he used to stand on to adjust the ceiling fan or to sit on back here when he had to hide.

  Benjy opened the door at the end of the counter and ran into the bathroom. He could hear the front-door glass rattling as his father shook the knob.

  “Open up! I know you’re in there,” Sam Fermoyle bellowed and pounded on the door. “C’mon, Renie! You son of a bitch, you…” he muttered darkly.

  There was silence, and it was a few moments before he dared open his eyes. When he did, what he saw on the walls of the sour-smelling little bathroom shocked him. Every inch of space was covered with glossy colored pictures of naked ladies. His face flamed. He felt dizzy. He held his breath against the pissy stink as he turned in dizzy wonderment at all those shiny arms and legs and breasts and nipples writhing out toward him.

  His father was still bellowing from the street.

  On the floor beside the toilet was the telephone and the phone book. He sat on the closed lid and picked up the phone book to keep his eyes off the walls. Some of the numbers were underlined and some were circled. Turning a few pages he saw that Klubocks’ number was underlined and next to it his uncle had written Jessie. Next to every underlined number a woman’s first name was written. Bonifante: Eunice, his uncle had printed.

  “If you open the fuckin’ door, I’ll tell you where your fuckin’ dog, whashisname, Riddles is.” His father paused and then he laughed. “Yah, dead fuckin’ Riddles. Your fuckin’ wife, my fuckin’, whashername, sister poisoned him. You hear me, Renie? She gave him rat poison and then she took him out back and she had Howard bury him in her garden. You hear me? We got a real problem on our hands. We gotta stick together, boy. ’Cause she’s after us next….” The door rattled again. “Okay, you ugly little frog, have it your way. But don’t say I din’ warn ya….” As after the quick burst of a storm, the dark voice drifted away. “…she tries to feed you those fuckin’ tomatoes…. Hey!…Watch where you’re…”

  A horn blasted. Tires squealed. Someone shouted. In the distance a siren wailed.

  I hope he’s dead, Benjy thought. I hope he’s dead. I hope he’s dead.

  When he came out of the bathroom his uncle was still sitting on the box. He had his head in his hands. Benjy stood by the nickel-plated cash register, where his uncle had long ago taped pictures of himself and Norm and Alice. Once when he had brought his mother’s shoes into the shop next door, the old cobbler had written LaChance on the ticket. He had thought Benjy was Renie’s son.

  Uncle Renie looked up and took a deep breath. “Well!” he said. He didn’t move.

  Benjy leaned in close to the curled and faded photos. He hated his father for saying that about Uncle Renie’s dog. But he didn’t feel much pity now for his uncle, not with those disgusting pictures plastered on his walls.

  Slowly, with a great sigh, Uncle Renie stood up and fumbled under the counter for his CLOSED sign. He put the cat in the cellar. “We’ll go have pie. I never do that and today I will,” he said, fastening the card on the door. He turned the red plastic hands to 4:30—BE BACK. “C’mon,” he said to the boy. “Whoever comes comes, you know? I wait, they don’t come. If I leave they come. Maybe,” he added, locking the door with three different keys that were attached to a long leather cord snapped to his belt loop. Benjy recognized the cord as Riddles’s old leash. When Riddles disappeared, his uncle had shut down the store for three days to search for him.

  As they walked around the corner,
Benjy was conscious of his uncle’s labored breathing, the wheeze of his lungs with every step. They paused in front of the luncheonette and his uncle said, “You know that bat’room’s a sight. I’m sorry you seen that. The guy that owns my building put those pictures up and I been after him and after him to take ’em off, but he don’t care, I guess. Don’t say nothing, okay, Benjy? Your mother’d kill me, huh?” He opened the door. “You like pie?”

  Benjy nodded, then passed under the cabbagey smell of his uncle’s sweaty arm as he held open the door to the little restaurant. After the glare of the sidewalk it seemed black and white inside with upright gray shadows that materialized into people, all of them men, hunched over the counter and the little white-sparkled Formica tables and booths. Renie paused at every booth to say hello. A few men nodded.

  “Here,” Renie said, pulling out a chair at a small round table set like an afterthought by the swinging door into the kitchen. Benjy spotted Mr. Briscoe at the counter and he slouched to avoid being seen. Uncle Renie bobbed up and down in his seat trying to catch Eunice Bonifante’s eye, but she was at the end of the counter talking over her shoulder to Chief Sonny Stoner, her sister-in-law’s husband, while she made a tuna-fish sandwich.

  “Guess she don’t see me,” Uncle Renie said before he finally got up to place his order at the counter, two apple pies, a coffee, and a milk. Without once looking at him, Eunice served him the pies, the drinks, took his money, rang up the sale on the register, and gave him change, while she continued her animated conversation with the Chief. Benjy noticed how the Chief said hello to Uncle Renie and handed him the napkins he dropped, and when he came back for their drinks, Chief Stoner passed him the sugar bowl.

  Suddenly the plate-glass window shook with a blast of noise as two motorcycles roared down the street. On one of them was Blue Mooney, his pale blond hair blown against his cheek as he skidded around the corner. The Chief shook his head. Last year Mooney and his older brother broke into Eunice’s gas station up on Main Street just a few nights before Blue was supposed to leave for Marine boot camp. His brother, who had actually been inside the station, went back to jail, but Stoner got the D.A. to drop the charges against Blue provided he went straight into the Marines. But now for the last month Mooney had been back in town.