Songs in Ordinary Time

by Mary McGarry Morris

  “Yah, I know what you mean,” Haddad sighed, returning to the counter, where he stood back, away from the cat. “I’m at the point now, I don’t even trust banks, everything’s so controlled and regulated.”

  “Me neither,” Renie agreed with a vigorous nod.

  “The way I figure it, they’re gonna spy on me, I’m just gonna have to play it a little closer to the vest, that’s all.” He winked and patted his back pocket. “You know what I’m saying, right?”

  “Yah, yah!” Renie cried, grateful for the camaraderie.

  “You have to!” Haddad said. “They don’t give you any other choice.” He looked around. “I got a place, a box right in the store for certain transactions. Cash,” he muttered, clearing his throat behind his hand. “If you know what I mean.”

  “Me, too!” Renie laughed.

  “Mine’s under the rug. I just lift up a floorboard,” confided Haddad.

  “Mine’s down—” He caught himself, his eyes on the cellar door. “I almost forgot. You want the MixMaid?”

  Haddad said he did, but the problem was, it was just too expensive. Renie offered to knock five dollars off the price, them both being fellow downtown merchants. “Thirty-four ninety-nine,” he said as the cat jumped off the counter, its thick paws meeting the floor in a soft thud.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Haddad said, moving out of the cat’s way. “Things’re slow so far this week. Give me a few more days and I’ll be in.”

  “Sure thing,” Renie said. “I’ll even put your name on it.” He was still printing ROBERT HADDAD on the empty box when the door closed. “The trick is,” Renie instructed the cat, who had jumped back onto the counter and sat watching him, “to be flexible, and not be afraid to give a little.” Tom began to purr. Renie smiled and the purring grew louder and louder. It filled the store, the streets outside, like a great engine churning out such longing that he could barely walk. He locked the front door, then staggered into the bathroom, into the reek of glossy heat, his ears ringing, ring, ring, ringing, while just outside the door the cat purred, as he waited, yearning for a woman’s voice to answer, to speak to him.

  “Hello?”

  “Oh hello.” He closed his eyes. This one was new. She’d come into the store last week looking at stoves. “Hello, you beautiful thing, you.”

  “Oh Lord, listen to you.” She laughed nervously.

  “It’s you I like to listen to. Your voice is so sweet. It’s sweet, sweet as honey.”

  “Lord!” She sounded different.

  “And you got beautiful skin. It looks like there’s dew on it, you know, like on grass first thing in the morning.” The pause came like a flutter in the silence.

  “Do I know you?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you calling me?”

  “Because I like to talk to you.”

  “But I’ve never talked to you before.”

  “Is this Mrs. Brewster?”

  “No.”

  “Well, who are you, then?”

  “I’m not going to tell you! What do you want to know for?”

  “I just want to talk to you.”

  “Why? Don’t you have anyone else to talk to, a wife, a girlfriend, somebody?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I really can’t talk. My baby’s awake.”

  “Oh I’m sorry. You go take care of the baby.”

  “She’s crying.”

  “Then you gotta go.”

  “Don’t you have any friends?”

  He paused to think. “Not really. I know people, but not like friends, you know?”

  “Can you hold on a minute while I get the baby?”

  “Yes. Oh yes, I can hold. You go get the baby.”

  When she came back she was out of breath. She said she was in the kitchen warming a bottle. He could hear the soft cooing. He pictured her jiggling the baby on her hip while she stood in front of the stove watching the water boil under the bottle.

  “How old’s the baby?”

  “Seven and a half months.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Kathi-jean. That’s K with an I, dash, small j.”

  Kathi-jean. He told her that was a beautiful name. She thanked him and said her husband’s family didn’t like it, but then they didn’t like her, either, so she guessed it didn’t really matter. When he asked her why they didn’t like her, she said it was a long story. But basically it was because she had thrown him out last year, two months before the baby was born.

  “Why’d you do that?” He could hear a wooden chair scraping over the floor.

  “There. That’s better,” she sighed. “I’m sitting down now. Ooo, she can’t wait, the little pig.” She asked him if he could hear her sucking. He said no, and so she held the phone to the baby’s mouth. “Did you hear it?” she asked, coming back on.

  “Yes!” he laughed, overwhelmed with giddiness. “Yes! It was so loud, I…I…I…”

  “She’s such a little pig. I just hope she’s skinny as her father. He’s like a beanpole.”

  “Why’d you do that, make him leave?” he asked to avoid having to mispronounce throw as trow the way he usually did.

  “Because he’s a bum. The whole time we were together he never stopped seeing all his old girlfriends. So I just got sick of it.”

  “Why’d you marry him?”

  “’Cause I was PG.”

  “PG?”

  “Pregnant! What, you never heard of that? Jeez, here I am with an obscene phone caller, and I’m doing all the talking.”

  “I’m not an obscene phone caller.”

  “Yes, you are. You said you call ladies you don’t even know, and you say things, right?”

  “Yah, but never…never bad things.”

  “Well, what kind of things, then?” There was a catch in her voice, an eagerness.

  He shrugged and closed his eyes, ashamed of all the glistening breasts and parted thighs, the lush mounds of kinky hair.

  “Well?”

  “Just…just mostly things about them. Like what pretty eyes they got and things like that.”

  “I got hazel eyes and long eyelashes, dark like my hair. My hair’s brunette, but some people say black it’s so dark. Hello? You still there?”

  “Yeah,” he said, grinning. “I’m still here.”

  “Okay, so now you tell me something. Tell me something about you.”

  “I got brown eyes and brown hair,” he said, touching the sparse strands on the back of his head.

  She asked if he was tall. He said he wasn’t tall, and he wasn’t short, just kind of regular. He told her about Riddles and about Tom and all the animals he’d grown up with on his father’s farm in Quebec. He told her about his father and the little he could recall of his mother, the warm cream she would pour over his oatmeal and the way she patted water up her throat and rosy cheeks on hot days. He told her things he hadn’t thought of in years, the go-cart his father made him, then let him help paint red, the torture to speak English in school when his brain worked in French. He’d had a lucky charm, a rabbit’s foot that his mother said would let the English words slide over his tongue.

  “Do you still have it?”

  “No. I gave it to a girl. Her name was Solie. She was the first girl I ever kissed.”

  “What a sap!” She laughed, and now he laughed with her.

  There was so much he had forgotten. Once there had been another life than this, happier, hopeful. There had been a playful boy, a shy romantic young man. Once he had been loved. There had been friends, the two Brien boys up the road. They called him Bobo. He had worn black boots and a leather jacket with a sheepskin collar. One day a girl named Edith had ridden on his bike, her arms around his waist, her cheek against his back.

  “Oh jeez. She just spit up all over the place. It’s running down my arm even. Call me back in a few minutes, okay?”

  “Yah,” he said. “I will. I will!”

  Her phone clicked. “Wait!” he shouted
into the buzzing receiver. “I don’t know your number! I don’t know your name! I don’t know who you are!” he cried.

  After so many years of forcing thoughts of his children from his consciousness, Sam didn’t know what to think about Alice’s entering the convent. Helen had heard it from Mrs. Arkaday when she brought a bag of tomatoes over to the rectory for the Monsignor. Of course it wasn’t official, but when the Monsignor had asked, Father Gannon had confided that he was helping Alice with her vocation. Mrs. Arkaday said she shouldn’t say anything, but she knew Helen would be “thrilled with the news.” If anyone deserved a member of the religious in her life, it was Helen LaChance. Mrs. Arkaday asked her to please pass on her congratulations to Sam. At first he’d been depressed, embarrassed not to have known, then proud. And now he was frightened. Somehow this was his fault. He had forced his daughter into an austere and sterile existence. Just when he was rebuilding his life she would leave and become a stranger to him. But wasn’t she already a stranger? He had pushed her away. He still remembered that day at Applegate and the stricken look on her face as he hurried into the dining room.

  He wanted to call Marie before he left for work. He started past the crib, where his mother sat propped against pillows, her eyes closed, as Helen tried to feed her. Every day her breathing worsened with wheezing so torturously long and deep that her jaw would tremble and her teeth would rattle. He was sure she was dying, but Helen insisted it was the same cold she herself had endured all week. Yesterday he had watched Helen trying to spoon-feed broth into that gaping mouth. Her trembling chin and neck had glistened with the yellow liquid. She was in a coma, he had told his sister, who insisted their mother’s deep sleep was the result of being awake at night when he was at work. Then feed her at night when she’s awake, he told Helen, but don’t submit her to such indignities. Helen insisted she had tried, but when Bridget was awake she wouldn’t open her mouth. Then at least use an eyedropper or something, he had said, surprised now to find his advice heeded as Helen squirted broth from an eyedropper down the back of Bridget’s throat. She kept gagging and choking.

  “Hello?” answered Marie on the first ring.

  “It’s me,” he said softly. He didn’t want Helen to hear him. Just a few feet away, light glowed around the door to Renie’s room, where a ball game sputtered from the radio.

  “Omar? Omar, where are you?”

  “It’s Sam.” For a moment he was confused; then he remembered who Omar was.

  “Oh,” she said in a flat voice.

  “You sound tired,” he said, forestalling news of Alice, wanting at least a few moments of pleasant conversation.

  Not tired, she told him, but exhausted. Her car had broken down and she was having to drive Norm’s junk, and then Astrid had quit last week, so now she had the bookkeeping to do as well as her own work.

  Astrid? He couldn’t put a face to the name. Entire months had been lost. He felt his confidence ebb. If he told her about Alice, she would blame him. He’d never been a father to them. What did he expect? He tried to tell her about his job. Now that he had established his own rhythm with the loader, the hours passed quickly. The night watchman continued to be a problem, but—

  “Sam,” she interrupted. “What about the money? Did you talk to Helen? Is that why you’re calling?”

  “Well, I’ve been working on the figures to show her.” He thought he heard Marie groan. He cupped the mouthpiece with his hand. “Mother’s very sick,” he whispered. “Helen says no, but I think she’s in a coma.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “This may be it,” he said, throwing the old hook, anything to keep her believing, anything but action.

  “I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry, Sam. And whatever happens you can’t let it destroy you.”

  “It won’t.” He sighed, flushing with the old warmth of her attention. He couldn’t remember when he’d last heard caring words from her. He closed his eyes.

  “You’ve been doing so well.”

  “I know,” he said, smiling.

  “You’ve really been trying.”

  “I have,” he said, grateful for her acknowledgment.

  “She’s lived a long life, and these last few years haven’t been pleasant ones.”

  “No, they haven’t.”

  “How’s Helen handling it?’

  “Oh typically. It’s just a cold, she says, that’s all.”

  “Maybe she’s right. Of course, at her age even a cold could be…terrible.”

  “Marie, I called to find out about something. I heard something. It’s about Alice….”

  “What?” she cut in. “What about her?”

  He repeated what the Monsignor’s housekeeper had told Helen.

  “Oh my God,” Marie groaned. “No, that’s impossible. It can’t be true.”

  “But that’s what the priest said. That’s what he told the Monsignor.”

  “I wondered why he was giving her rides and coming around so much. And here I was beginning to think he was, well…Oh God, what’s wrong with her?”

  “Well, she’s always been a quiet kind of kid, a good girl, a—”

  “A coward!” Marie spat, and his ear rang with the familiar sibilance. “Always trying to find the easy way out.”

  “Marie! She’s not a bad person because she wants to become a nun.”

  “She doesn’t want to become a nun!” she said with a bitter laugh he remembered only too well. “She just doesn’t want to have to work. She just doesn’t want to have to go to college. She just doesn’t want to have to listen to me anymore!”

  “No, Marie.”

  “It’s true. She wants to hide, just like the rest of them. They haven’t got a backbone between them, the three of them. Well, I’m sick of being the only one who cares, the only one who tries. Oh God…” There was a long, wet sob, and then she hung up.

  “Top of the seventh, and the Yankees lead eight to three,” Renie’s radio announced in a sudden swell of clarity from his room.

  Sam laid out four pieces of bread for tonight’s sandwiches, the four thin slices of ham, two of Swiss cheese. He spread the thinnest skim of mustard on it all, then wrapped the sandwiches in waxed paper and put them in the same brown bag used every night to achieve the constancy, monotony enough to keep from feeling the grooves or seeing the strings. If Alice wanted to hide, the convent was one hell of a better choice than booze. He returned the ham to the refrigerator and wiped crumbs from the counter. He covered the butter dish and switched off the light over the sink. Now that Alice wouldn’t be needing money for school, his campaign of annoyance was over. Imagine, Sam Fermoyle’s daughter, a nun. He grinned. Now wouldn’t that make people sit up and take notice.

  On Sunday the church was only half filled for the eleven o’clock Mass. Because of the heat most people had gone to the early Masses and were now probably sitting on the beaches at the lakes and ponds.

  The Consecration over, Father Gannon turned to face the congregants. Accompanied by the altar boy, he carried the Host-filled chalice down the wide crimson-carpeted steps to the marble Communion rail. As he placed the small white Host on each quivering tongue, he would glance up from time to time. When he came to the end of the rail, he turned back to begin again. Pausing, he smiled, relieved to see Alice in the last pew, her head bent over her folded hands. Last night he had talked her into at least attending Mass, even if she would not receive Communion. What they shared was not only beautiful but sacred, he had told her. He might think so, she had countered, but the Church said it was a sin. Some things transcend the Church’s scope, he had said. What? he had wanted her to ask, what things, so that he could tell her. Love did. Love! Instead she had burrowed into that frustrating remoteness of hers.

  “Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi,” he murmured over a kneeling child with long, dark pigtails. Seeing Alice look up, he paused, still holding the Host above the child’s head.

  The child stuck out her tongue.

  He
couldn’t help but smile. Alice’s pale face glowed from the shadowed depths below the choir loft like a keyhole of light from which he could not look away.

  The child looked up.

  Alice bent so far forward that her forehead met her clenched hands.

  “Father!” the child whispered loudly.

  All along the rail, the communicants stared up at him.

  “Why won’t you give me Communion?” the child asked.

  The heat filled every room in the Stoner house but Carol’s. Here the windows were closed, the shades and curtains drawn. On the cluttered bureau a silver fan oscillated in a gentle rattle between the closed door and the small mound in the bed. For the past hour she had been trying to wet her lips with her tongue, but she couldn’t. The door opened. It was Sonny. He tiptoed in and leaned over the bed. His cool fingertips trickled down her cheeks. Her eyes moved from the glinting badge on his chest to the wide belt and holster at his hip, the black gun butt. Kill me. Take it out, shoot me, she was screaming.

  “You’re a good girl,” he whispered in the maddening silence.

  Do it! Do it! Like that deer that was hit up on the Post Road.

  They had found it writhing in the stony gully, a bloody gash in its side, legs twitching, its mournful eyes following the quick wordless arc of Sonny’s aim. Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look now, Carol. Closing her eyes her head had jerked back with each blast. Pow! Pow! Pow!

  The door closed after him with a whoosh of air and light.

  I am a poor dumb creature too, she screamed. But in the quiet no one heard.

  The hood was raised and Norm was cleaning the spark plugs with gasoline. He spent all his free time working on the engine. Now that this had become the family car he felt an enormous responsibility to keep it running. His mother might have to wait for Omar’s soap, her investment that had impoverished them, but it was his car that got her back and forth to work every day.

  He had been daydreaming about Astrid Haddad. He’d almost convinced himself that Benjy had misinterpreted everything. But then when Astrid quit her job, his mother said she couldn’t help thinking it had something to do with her. She said Astrid couldn’t seem to look her straight in the eye anymore. Norm knew what it was. She’d quit because of him.