A Song for Mary

by Dennis Smith

  chapter thirty-one

  I am lying here under the bunk bed, thinking. It’s dark. All I can see above me is the metal of a bedspring and squares of swollen mattress protruding down.

  Yesterday was a two-time-terrible day. A Friday. A fragrant and feeble friggin’ Friday, and it all makes me want to puke to think about it.

  Diane Gillespie threw up in the girls’ clothes closet, and Sister Alphonsus sent me down to the basement to find Mr. Greendust, the school custodian. I don’t think anyone knows his name, because all you ever hear is the name “custodian.” “Where’s the custodian?” and “Go get the custodian,” which is what Sister Alphonsus said to me. We call him Mr. Greendust because that is what he spreads around the floor when someone gets sick.

  On the way up from the basement I met Marilyn Rolleri in the stairway. I guess she was late for school or something. I thought she was a gift from heaven when I saw her there, kneeling down to pick up a pencil case she had dropped. Her blue gabardine uniform skirt was tight around her round Italian thighs, and her great Italian breasts were pushing out against the white of her school blouse. I knelt down next to her and put my fingers around the pencil case just as she was picking it up. Her large brown Italian eyes were in a dance of some kind, looking me up and down.

  Oh, Marilyn, I was thinking, what am I going to do? You are here in the quiet of the staircase, you with a smile of perfect teeth and a backside molded by an artist.

  We were both standing then, she had her book case by her feet, our fingers were wrapped around her pencil case, and her smile was coming closer to me. No, I was moving closer to her. I don’t know what got into me. I closed my eyes a little and leaned in so close to her I could smell her breath. I thought her breath smelled like what love should smell like, soft and airy and warm. I let go of the pencil case, and it dropped again to the floor. I put my arms around her, and we leaned back onto the wired glass of the staircase wall, and we kissed. I wanted to open my mouth, but she pressed her two beautiful Italian lips together and pushed them hard against my own lips, and they felt like soft and moist pancakes as the breath from her nose covered my face.

  Oh, Marilyn, I thought, this is better than watching the Pepsi-Cola sign. I did not try to open my mouth, but just breathed in her life’s breath and let the wetness of her lips enter my mind so that it will never be forgotten.

  Not a single word was said between us. She gave me that one long kiss, and then she picked up her pencil case and her book case, and she trotted up the stairs so fast that I couldn’t catch her. She was already sitting when I opened the door to Sister Alphonsus’ eighth-grade class.

  I waited for her in the school yard when we broke for lunch. She was walking out of the yard with Barbara Cavazzine, and I asked if I could talk to her.

  They both stopped, and Marilyn came toward me. She whispered.

  “I know,” she said, “that you want to ask me to go out with you, but I am going to go steady with Raymond Connors.”

  “Right.”

  That was all I could get out. “Right.”

  But it wasn’t right, not after being like that with her in the staircase, not after having her lips pressed against mine for, what, a minute at least. One glorious, historic minute. It was like she had given me a hundred dollars and then takes it away after I bought presents for all my friends. And now it feels like I have the tab for the presents but no money, like I have this love in my heart for her but there is no her.

  I wanted to shout, but I remembered what my mother said about being polite all the time. If you are polite in the good times, you will also be polite in the bad times, when it matters the most. And so I didn’t shout, but just turned and tried to get in the punchball game going on in the corner of the school yard.

  Raymond Connors, who had enough red hair and enough teeth for triplets. I like Raymond Connors, but he doesn’t even know how to do the lindy. Why would Marilyn go steady with him when she could, well, get anyone she wanted?

  All afternoon at school I could hardly pay attention to Sister Alphonsus. We were going over the English part of the State Regents examination. Mostly, they were grammar questions, and I was getting all the right answers. At least, when I did them, for I was doing one and skipping one, and every time I skipped one I thought about Marilyn sitting up there in the front of the class.

  Sister Alphonsus kept looking at my answer sheet and shaking her head, and at the end of the day she asked me to stay. It is always a bad sign when the teacher asks you to stay after school, and I sat alone in my seat drumming my fingers until she came back from the dismissal.

  “You’re hopeless, Dennis,” she said as she stood before me, “and I don’t think we will be able to let you graduate unless things are changed around here.”

  I thought of a wisecrack. If you want a change, I wanted to say, put curtains on the windows. But Sister wasn’t in the mood to laugh, and it is always a good rule to say nothing until you find out what is going on.

  “I want to see your mother,” she said.

  “What for?” I asked. I was already agitated, and I suddenly got very nervous. I just knew that my mother would be upset. She so hates it when things are not going right.

  “Your report card was not good,” she said, “and you are falling behind in everything.”

  “I do my homework,” I said.

  “You have not done a complete homework since the term started, Dennis,” she said, “and do not argue with me. Bring your mother in, fifteen minutes before the start of school on Monday morning, no ifs, ands, or buts about it, please. Good afternoon.”

  Good afternoon, I was thinking, bullshit. I was exploding inside. I am so tired of all of it, everyone telling me what I should be doing, nobody doing anything to help me, Father Luke the Capuchin writing me a letter and saying that I should pray for my future vocation for the next few years, Sister Alphonsus saying things have to change, Marilyn Rolleri making out with Raymond Connors, my father walking around in circles in some upstate hospital, I don’t even know where because they keep moving him from place to place, Archie telling me I could be great, but he never says what I could be great at, and my mother crying, sighing, yelling, and pleading with me almost every day to read more, to write more, to spend more time with my homework. It is just too much bullshit to put up with every day.

  “Good afternoon, Sister,” I said quietly, holding my head down, being polite.

  But something inside me was running, running away from Sister Alphonsus as fast as I could, running into some dark forest where you can’t see two inches in front of you. I felt myself walking slowly away from her, but my feet were going fifty miles an hour, and the next thing I knew I had changed my clothes, and I was in my mother’s room, and I was searching through the drawers of her dresser looking for the welfare money that she kept hidden away. She always keeps the money in her drawer until she pays the rent or pays the bill at Rossi’s. I looked everywhere, in every drawer, in every closet. Even on top and below. I needed some money, but I didn’t know why. I only knew that I had to keep running, that I couldn’t stay and talk to my mother, and tell her that Sister Alphonsus wants to tell her that I am not going to graduate, because I only did some of the grammar questions when I wasn’t thinking about Marilyn kissing Raymond Connors with teeth enough for three people.

  I needed a cigarette. I have never smoked a cigarette in my house, but I needed a cigarette, and so I grabbed the carton of Old Golds that my mother had in her bottom drawer, and shook out a pack. I know that she knows how many packs are left, the way mothers just know these things, so I can’t take the whole pack. But I know I can get a cigarette out without her knowing, the way Uncle Tracy would do it, and I carefully opened the bottom end of the cellophane, making sure not to rip it in any way, and then I opened the paper at the bottom of the pack just as carefully. The opened bottom looked like a honeycomb of tobacco, twenty cigarettes all tight together. I pulled out one cigarette from the exact center, knowing that sh
e will open one side of the pack or the other, and she will never see the empty hole in the center of the pack. I ran to the kitchen for the glue bottle, and I glued the paper and then the cellophane back together again, and put the pack back into the carton.

  In the living room, I lit the cigarette and leaned far back into the pillow of the couch. I knew that my mother was cleaning some apartment down on Sutton Place, and so I just relaxed. And I sat there feeling for a minute that I owned the building, that I owned my life.

  But only for a minute.

  What was I going to do? I was thinking. What? I couldn’t tell my mother that I was going to get kicked out of school. I just couldn’t.

  Run away, I thought. I had to run away.

  Anywhere.

  Maybe be a cowboy out west. If I was only older, maybe as old as Billy, I could get a job on a ship and sail the seas like Sinbad. I began to feel so alone there on the couch, smoking that cigarette, but I was thinking about my life. I realized that I didn’t really care about Marilyn Rolleri or Sister Alphonsus or the Regents exam. I just cared about what I was going to do next.

  It is not easy to run away when you are only in the eighth grade, because people spot you right away in the train station. But I had to do it, rather than face my mother and watch her become furious with me.

  And, worse, I didn’t want to see her cry again just because of me.

  If I could run away, everything would turn out okay. Something good might happen somewhere, and I wouldn’t have to explain about why I am not doing what they all expect me to do. I only want to be left alone, and to get a job, and to stay out until eleven, and to earn money so that I can get a pizza at Emiliano’s.

  I knew something lucky would happen, and the first person I met on Second Avenue was Henry Castle. I know him from the baseball games under the Queensboro Bridge, a little guy with big ears, and I have hung around with him a few times. He goes to public school, because his father is a Mohammedan, or a Buddhist, or something where you would think they were Chinese. But they are Irish and Mexican from the West Side, that’s what Henry told me.

  I told him there was a reason God gave him such big ears, so that he could listen better to me, and I told him everything that happened and why I had to run away.

  Henry promised that he would stick by me all the way. I think he liked the excitement of somebody running away. Or maybe he wanted to be better friends with me so that he could hang around with me and Scarry and Walsh. It didn’t matter to me why he would stick by me. It was just lucky.

  But it was a little unlucky that Henry didn’t have any money left from his allowance. So a bus or a train was out of the question. At least I didn’t have to think of where I could take a bus or a train. I don’t even know what stop to get off at when I visit my cousins in Brooklyn.

  We went to the 54th Street Gym, because Henry wanted to work out to get in shape for the Golden Gloves. We hit the bag a little and ran a zillion times the running track that goes around the ceiling of the gym, and then we were hungry.

  I sat on a radiator in the hallway while Henry went in to have dinner at his house. He put a fish stick in a paper napkin and brought it out to me, and I was glad Mrs. Castle didn’t make spaghetti. My mother usually makes spaghetti on Friday instead of fish, and I was thinking that spaghetti would be hard to cart around in a napkin.

  We then went down 53rd Street and watched the older guys play craps, and I grubbed an English muffin off Fatso Cassidy, who was winning. I did this by volunteering to go to Riker’s to get him six English muffins, and then I ate one on the way back to the crap game. He never missed it.

  Barbara Gabelli came around with a girl from 49th Street I didn’t know. Her name is Lillian, and her skin is so dark I thought she had to come from some mountain village in Italy that was close to the sun. Her eyes are jet-black, and her hair is blacker and goes way down below her waist. She is very beautiful in that way you see in the old, dark pictures in the Metropolitan Museum.

  We talked for a while, and then the four of us walked downtown. Henry walked us past 49th Street and past the construction barriers where they are building a tunnel underneath First Avenue for the United Nations building.

  “Let’s see what’s in the U.N. tunnel,” Henry said, and we followed him deep into the hole. I could tell that Henry was going to try to make time with Barbara, and so I sat with Lillian on the steps of an emergency stairs that went up to the street level.

  Lillian was shy and quiet, and so I did all the talking. I told her about Marilyn going out with Raymond, and she told me she could never have a boyfriend, anyway, because her father was strict and he would kill her if she had a boyfriend before she graduated high school, which was four years away.

  I told her that her father would never find out if she would let me be her boyfriend for just a half hour, and then I kissed her. I closed my eyes and put my lips on hers, and she opened her mouth suddenly and I felt her steaming tongue slopping away in my mouth like she has been kissing guys for ten years already, and then she got up.

  My whole body was shaking.

  This was nothing like kissing Marilyn Rolleri.

  “I can’t see you again,” Lillian said, “because I can’t have a boyfriend.”

  And then she yelled out Barbara’s name and her voice echoed through the tunnel until it was covered by Barbara’s voice as Barbara and Henry ran toward us, thinking someone was coming to catch us in the tunnel construction.

  Henry and I left them on the corner of 49th Street, and I shook Lillian’s hand. I watched her walk down the street, her skirt clinging to her legs down to her ankles. I was thinking I will always remember my first real kiss there in the United Nations tunnel, and I was wishing that Lillian was Irish, or at least that she wasn’t Italian, so that she wouldn’t have a father who was so strict, and I could give Lillian another French kiss here in New York on the grounds of the United Nations.

  All Henry could talk about as we went uptown was Barbara Gabelli’s stack, and I didn’t pay much attention to him. I just kept trying to keep Lillian’s taste in my mouth.

  I think Henry felt that I would just go home at eleven o’clock, but I stuck to him like roof tar. There was no way he could get rid of me. After all, who said he would stick by me? I couldn’t be alone at a time like this, and he knew it. So we went back to his house and crept quietly up the creaking tenement stairs.

  Henry lives on the third floor of a building next to the Old Brew House Restaurant on 54th Street. It’s an old building, probably as old as the Civil War, over near Third Avenue, and I was again in the hall as he searched the apartment for somewhere to hide me. Henry has a younger sister and two older sisters. I know their house. There are two bedrooms off the kitchen, and so I took my shoes off and tiptoed into the bedroom, where there were two sets of bunk beds, with maybe six inches between them.

  Henry’s younger sister, Madelaine, was sleeping on the couch in the living room. She is a year younger than we are, and good-looking, too. It would have been a lot easier to just sleep with her, but Henry made me get on the floor and pull myself under the bed like a grease monkey under a car. His sisters were already sleeping. I asked Henry for a pillow, and he threw me a blanket to put under my head.

  I lay there, in the dark and under a bed, and wondered what my life was coming to. I put Lillian out of my mind. I did not know what to think, because everything was all confused. I only knew that I was running away, and if I didn’t, everyone would be sad and angry. No one was going to forgive me, anyway. I was wrong in everybody’s eyes, and I just said to myself that I wasn’t going to think about it anymore.

  So I said my night prayers and made all the blessing requests like nothing had ever happened. I blessed my mother and asked that my father gets okay again and that Uncle Tommy forgets about the airplane crash and is happy.

  And now I am here. Still under the bed. I am just opening my eyes. It is a new day, and I am hoping it will be better than yesterday. Forget about Lil
lian’s taste, I say to myself. I raise up a little and bump my head on the bedspring. Shit. It is like being in a tiny sewer or cave. There is nowhere to move.

  Now I am hearing voices, and I remember where I am. What are those voices? Is my mother here? Where is my mother? Probably sitting in the police station. Oh, shit, she is going to give me blue murder, and now that I’ve been out all night I can never go home.

  I listen for a minute or so. I don’t hear my mother’s voice. The whole Castle family seems to be sitting around the kitchen table. I will just lie quietly here under the bed, waiting for Henry to figure out how I am going to get out without anyone seeing me.

  Henry comes in, and he lies on the floor next to me.

  He whispers.

  “My father,” he says, “will pull my eyes out of my head if he finds out you’re here. It’s like harboring a criminal.”

  “You want me to jump out the window?” I ask.

  “That would work,” Henry says in a whispering laugh. “But that gives me an idea.”

  “Yeah, so?” I ask.

  “I got it,” he says, his eyes sparkling like he invented something. “We’ll have seven seconds, maybe less, so you gotta run like hell. You got it?”

  “I got it,” I answer. “I think.”

  “Run like hell,” he says, “when you hear me making a commotion, but quietly.”

  “Got it,” I say. The Irish-Mexican mind is a mystery to me.

  I don’t have a clue about what is going on.

  I have my shoes in my hands now, lying under the bed, and waiting for something to happen. I hear Henry opening the front window of the apartment.

  And then Henry begins to scream.

  “Holy God,” he is yelling to his family at the top of his lungs, “look at this!”