Songs in Ordinary Time

by Mary McGarry Morris

  “Nothing.” He flicked his hand as if at some insect. “I turned off her radio so I can hear the phone. I’m expecting a call.”

  “You’d best keep one thing in mind, Sam. The day she leaves here, you leave, too.” She banged her fist on the table.

  He stretched back with a lazy smile. “Actually I’m thinking of firing her pretty soon, anyway.” He picked up his papers.

  Her eyes narrowed. It sickened her to see him so amused and relaxed after his seven-week sojourn; the picture of health, better (she hated to admit) than he’d looked in years, and why not: his every whim having been catered to, with an entire staff wringing their hands over his selfish miseries while she was the one up night after night with their mother, changing diapers and kneading baby oil into her tissue-thin flesh that had never suffered bedsores or chafing.

  She stood there, trembling. Who did he think he was, sitting at her dining-room table (yes, hers in spite of any documents, hers for the price, the duty paid in dark hours, long silent days, months, in years, a lifetime, her life), dismissing her with such smug confidence when one call to the police could send him back there. She told him this. He shrugged and said she was standing in his light. His light! Who were these people, Jozia, Renie, her brother, all fending her off, reaching past her. She refused to move, but he would not look up. In the other room, her mother’s voice skittered with girlish nonsense, her sunless white hand groping through the bars for painted eggs and grosgrain ribbons for her hair. It was with greater love and tenderness ever yielded anyone that she’d bathed and fed and changed the towel-sized diapers of that withered child. And when the girl’s voice sank into the dark folds of her mother’s churlish demands, she’d stalk out of the room, refusing to answer or come until the child’s soft cries returned to fill the barren space behind the bars and her loneliness. It was the child she more easily loved, the child lost in time, not the senile woman, for that was mere duty to a memory, to a mother who called her by her brother’s name and even now, after everything, after all his failure and cruelty, still wept for him.

  She stared at the back of her brother’s head, her eyes dim with tears. They were turning on her. She had held this house and the apartments and this mockery of a family together by the sheer force of her will. She had kept a roof over their heads. She had kept her mother alive, not only because with her death everything would be lost to Sam’s children, but because they were all she had, these cold, ungrateful people. Demanding, devouring her strength, they had scraped and sucked her dry.

  Her hand trembled when lifting so much as a cup from its saucer. Things fell from her grasp. She felt breathless now as she hurried to the back of the house. Her mother clapped her bony blue hands as she passed by the crib. She needed to tell Jozia something, something about Carson, a vile tale heard years ago. Jozia stared uncomprehendingly at her. “No. No,” she finally said, thickly, her hand at her breast. “That ain’t true, Miz LaChance. Grondine never fornicated a goat. He never kept goats. Just pigs, Miz LaChance.”

  “It was a pig, then,” she insisted, heart racing. “I remember now. It was a pig!”

  Jozia blinked, thought a minute. “He wouldn’t do that. Probably something to do with his first wife. Grondine says she was messier’n any pig he ever kept.” She tried to laugh, but tears spilled down her ruddy cheeks. “I can’t believe you just said that to me, Miz LaChance. All this time I been staying on because of you, because I thought we were like sisters almost.” She had been untying her apron. She put it on the counter and then she left.

  Five-forty, almost dinnertime. Renie glanced at his watch as he climbed the steps to the Fermoyle house. After all these years it was still known as the Fermoyle house, not the LaChance house. He had always been Helen Fermoyle’s husband, Renie, a wart on the back of her hand, a minor affliction.

  Even here at the kitchen table his place was one of deference, in the chair on Helen’s left. Sam nodded when he sat down. None of them spoke as they ate. As usual the food was pasty, murky. Renie had little appetite. She would not look at him. She hated him for his foul secret expelled like gas in her bedroom. He stirred his watery summer squash into his mashed potatoes and was ashamed. With the heat wave letting up, sales were slow again, and no one gave a damn what Renie LaChance thought about anything. There was a shopping center coming to town. At the Chamber meeting he’d tried to warn his fellow merchants that people wouldn’t come downtown anymore, but their biggest concern had been Joey’s popcorn stand’s being an eyesore in the park.

  Helen picked at her dinner. She got up and scraped her plate into the garbage. She filled the sink with water. Sam, seeing her wait for his half-eaten plate, sat back and lit a cigarette, daring her to take away his plate before he was finished. Renie ate quickly, stuffing his mouth and chewing so loudly that Helen glanced disgustedly at him. He swallowed in a gulp and then began to choke. Sam whacked him on the back and Helen removed his plate.

  Renie stared into his coffee, wondering how he had endured this stifling family all these years. Helen squished her dishrag in the soapy sink water. She had sapped him of youth. He had been a sensitive young man, though few had ever guessed it. His short thick fingers had betrayed him, his stocky torso had betrayed him, his runty legs had betrayed him. He had been a tender young man trapped in this coarse body when he first met Helen. His eyes searched the shelf of cups above her head. They were so precariously stacked, one tilted into the other, that for a moment he was sure they would fall.

  Perhaps that had been it. He could bear no calamity, yet calamity had pursued him from birth, and with blind singleness of purpose he’d tried to outdistance it. And when confronted, he’d masked it, renamed it with lies.

  He remembered when he first saw Helen alone on the bus at night. Hours earlier he’d pushed past his father as he waved the accusing letter in his face, bellowing that he’d gotten a girl in trouble and now he’d pay. Riding alone, without money or destination, he’d finally introduced himself to the quiet woman, who went on nibbling her dry biscuit and would not look at him. Everything about the courtship seemed to surprise them both. When they were married he had been so proud of her tapered fingers, her long, lovely neck, and careful manners: she proved what his thick fingers and clumsy tongue could not, that he was somebody.

  Sometimes he thought that was the reason he had stayed with her all these years, that in spite of her brother, she was still respected in town, which gave him status. But it was more than that, more and therefore less, diminishing him. It was because he feared calamity too much to leave her. And so he had endured her sterility and her disdain with the secret comfort that somewhere there existed a child, who would be grown now with thick fingers and little brown eyes, his child living among strangers and waiting to be found.

  It had happened in New York City when he was selling can openers door to door. Afterward, the woman had written in care of his company, which forwarded the crudely printed letter to his father. She was pregnant, desperate, alone, she said. Would he please do something, send her money for the hospital. Even then, he more clearly remembered demonstrating the nickel-plated can opener with all its gadgets, the bottle-cap opener, the knife sharpener, the two screwdriver heads, the dazzling corkscrew, than he remembered her face or any conversation they might have had. She had been a large woman, her heavy bones lunging against him, her breath smothering him with sour intensity. It had been a dark room. They had been drinking. It had happened quickly, passionately, though he had come to think of it as violently, in a damp creaking bed. Beatrice was all he remembered of her name.

  He looked up now as Helen berated Sam for stubbing out his cigarette in the bowl of mashed potatoes. She’d planned on reheating them for tomorrow night’s dinner. Sam laughed and said that’s exactly why he’d done it. They bickered like children while, from the other side of the door, Bridget’s voice rose in the agitated chatter their arguments always aroused. Helen charged out of the kitchen. “God, Renie,” Sam sighed as he put his pl
ate in the sink. “You’ve really got to do something about your wife’s disposition.” Sam went out on the back steps to smoke another cigarette.

  Renie closed his eyes. The Golden Toastee salesman could never be the son of Renie LaChance and nameless, faceless Beatrice who drank too much and welcomed strangers to her bed. No, that son surely hid his sausage fingers in his pockets when he met refined, delicate people. But what if the son had sprung from a fine, delicate gene? It was possible: genes, eggs, sperm, something in that dark thrust, that zigzagging randomness, endowing him with such a child. He wondered if the son was married, had children of his own, lived not far from here. He smiled, imagining himself walking into that neat little house and filling it with every manner of appliance, all new, all free, with lifetime guarantees.

  The salesman had said he was adopted; then how would he know that Renie was his father; then again, maybe he didn’t want to tip his hand too soon. But what if he hated his father, hated the coward who had sired a bastard and left him to cry alone, his only solace Beatrice on her musty bed in that lightless room. Perhaps the son had spent all these years plotting his revenge. Renie’s hand trembled on the tabletop.

  It was eleven o’clock and Joey Seldon was still in his popcorn stand. He paused in his cleaning and cocked his head. He thought he’d heard branches snapping where the forsythia grew, but the only sound now was crickets. With a sigh he hitched up his sagging pants, which were weighted down by all the coins in his pockets. Tonight’s crowd had been the biggest so far this summer.

  He bent over the cooler and fished out the last two sodas from the elbow-deep water. All the ice had melted. He felt down the side of the cooler and unscrewed the metal plug, then smiled as he wiped his arms dry. In spite of the ruckus at the end of the concert it had been a grand night, just like the old days. “Come on, Joey, close up. As it is, there’s going to be hell to pay,” Sonny had snapped, last time he passed by. None of the commotion had been Joey’s fault, but the Chief’s patience had obviously worn as thin as everyone else’s.

  In recent years whenever Joey had offered to retire rather than submit everyone to the bitter rigors of the annual license renewal, the Judge wouldn’t hear of it. Joey wasn’t just the Judge’s old friend, he was also his last cause. In his final quavery oration before the aldermen, the Judge had declared Joey’s popcorn stand as much a landmark as the bronze statue of Ethan Allen, both symbols of the community’s goodness and strength. Joey hadn’t been surprised at the buzz that ran through the members. There were still people who thought he’d been up at Ark Towler’s still that night collecting hush money, when in truth his only crime had been love.

  He sank wearily onto his stool. Lately he thought of her more and more, Winnie Towler, so young then with her tongue in his mouth. Sweet Winnie. She thought he’d planned the explosion to get rid of Ark so he could have her all to himself. But by God’s all-witnessing eye it had been Ark who turned the flame a notch higher, then lurched at him with a drunken vengeance that for an instant had seemed just another crude and blundering misstep in a friendship that went way far back before Winnie, sweaty and jumping from his arms, from the bed, at the first creak of her husband’s loaded-down truck chugging up the road. Her long, high-boned face was the last image, the last vision he remembered having, even though he’d gone straight down to the still at the back of the barn when she jumped from the bed, so Ark would think it was him he’d come to see and not her, sweet Winnie with her heat-frazzled hair caught in his mouth, and her eyes on his through the moonlight, frightened to hear Ark back. He tricked me, she hissed. I don’t know why he’s doing this.

  Shh Shh Shh—I’ll go down the barn and head him off.

  I do what he says, but he don’t even know what he wants anymore.

  Probably just forgot something.

  He’ll beat me, she said, covering her ears as if she were hearing his heavy boots on the stairs. That’s all he wants. That’s all he really wants.

  She was young, and Ark was his age, so once he started with her, love convinced him all she was to her husband was a drawing card, his bait. Pretty young thing, three babies in three years, not a sag or flab anywhere, the only blemishes the violet menacing blooms of Ark’s legendary temper on her soft sweet flesh. But when he was thinking straight, he knew Ark Towler didn’t need any other attraction than his whiskey, the best in that part of the state. Times were mean and, fortuitously, Ark’s best friend had been Chief Joey Seldon. Or was he? Ark had demanded that night, as he turned so suddenly from the bright jet at the end of the copper coil that he hadn’t seen Ark’s club until it cracked against his chest, knocking the wind out of him. It wasn’t his whiskey, was it? Ark panted, whizzing the club past his head. It wasn’t his booze and his friendship that kept the Chief from shutting him down. Because all that time Seldon’d been fucking his wife, leaving his smell in her to mock him when he crawled into his own bed dog-tired night after night, until he couldn’t take it anymore, no more, no sir, he was going out of his mind because it was way past duty now, that was clear, more than a chore, so he’d circled back because Jesus Jesus Christ, it was just too steep a price to pay anymore.

  The two men had wrestled and grappled, staggering in one’s drunken, the other’s guilty, embrace as they toppled stools and barrels and crates of empty bottles stacked for the new batch. Suddenly there was a poof, a flare of light, then flash after flash after flash as the spilled alcohol erupted in fiery hissing puddles across the wide-planked floor, and Joey dove for the door, heat-borne through the orange blast and the concussive roar. She knelt over him, shrieking that he’d killed Ark, hadn’t he? God, she never meant that, never meant any harm to come to the father of her three baby girls. So that was that and no one ever knew the truth, maybe not even her, sweet Winnie, who went a little crazy afterward, or maybe always was, and he’d been as blind then as now, only then it had been love, the last he would ever know of it. Besides, to be fair, what young widow wouldn’t be frantic, having lost not only the support of her husband (as well as any hope of it with a blind lover), but also all of Ark’s money, burned under a floorboard where he’d hidden it from the thieving revenue agents and the pretty young wife he’d known from the start he couldn’t trust, and so had put her to the test.

  Sweet, sweet Winnie’s face, still luminous as a shimmering moon in this lifetime of nights. So after all he’d been through, all he’d lost, tonight’s trouble was nothing. He laughed. Damn boys, they’d done it again right when Jarden Greene started playing “Good Night, Irene” on his violin. Once again they’d managed to slip his radio out from between the broken boards and set it up on his roof, where he couldn’t get at it. Right before they took off, they turned the volume up full blast on The Platters singing “The Great Pretender.”

  After the concert Greene banged his fist on the counter and told him to start counting the days; his time was up; the free ride was over. On Sonny’s last trip by, he’d begged Joey not to give Greene and his cohorts any more ammunition. He’d assured Sonny he’d be closing soon. Sonny said he’d wait and give him a ride home, but then the cruiser radio sputtered with the report of an accident up on the access road: car on its roof, teenagers inside. The cruiser door slammed and Sonny raced off, siren screaming.

  After Joey wiped down the inside of the cooler, he propped up the lid with a stick to air it out. He checked the outlets one last time to make sure all his plugs were disconnected. Smiling, he wound the cord around the radio and put it under the counter. Poor Greene. What a fool. Now there was a man who had not lived enough. Joey sat on his stool and began to count his money before he put it into the cigar box. He continued to take his time. This was all he needed anymore, the clear night air, the soft rustle of the leaves, the black sky he imagined pierced with stars.

  Dressed in black, Robert Haddad peered out from the tangled forsythia. Sweat stung his eyes as he watched Joey Seldon. His hands shook. It was the waiting.

  At eleven-ten the telephone jangled thro
ugh the dark rectory. Sound asleep for the last hour, Monsignor Burke put the pillow over his head and waited for someone to answer it. When the ringing finally stopped, he rolled onto his side and fell asleep. Again the phone began to ring, this time louder, louder. Louder.

  Monsignor picked up the phone, his gruff answer causing Sister Mary Patrick, the nursing-home supervisor, to stammer in apology, especially since poor Mrs. Ahearne had been through this twice before, but now there could be no doubt. The old woman was drifting in and out of consciousness. With her kidneys failing, this was surely the end. “Finally, the poor dear,” the nun whispered, as if the call were being made from the old woman’s bedside. “I tried to wait, with the late hour and all, but she’s going fast, Monsignor. And besides, it’s Father Gannon she’s asking for.”

  He was relieved, if not a little hurt. A silly woman, given to nervous giggling in the confessional, Mrs. Ahearne had been his parishioner for years.

  “Father Gannon’s been with her the last two times,” the nun explained. “Such a kind young man, holding her hand and all, but surely I don’t think that’ll be enough this time.”

  He assured her Father Gannon would be right up.

  “Sorry to wake you,” Sister said. “I know what you’ve been through lately, Monsignor, with the poor Hinds family.”

  “They’ve had more than their share lately,” he sighed. Most of his free time these past few weeks had been spent at the lake with his cousin Nora and her husband, Cleve, though it seemed Cleve was having to be in town most nights these last few weeks. Nora said it was just all too painful for him, although the boy was in remission now.

  “The poor thing, and him being their only son. Bernard, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Bernard Thomas, actually.”

  “Sure and that’s right, after you, Monsignor. I’d forgotten. Tell me now, is it…is it that?”