A Song for Mary

by Dennis Smith

  “Your brother didn’t hit you with a pool stick.” Betty looks like she really is surprised this time.

  I roll up my sleeve and show Betty the bruise that is still on my arm, the one that I don’t think will ever go away. I don’t say anything, but I wonder why she would think that I said something that wasn’t true.

  “Well,” Betty says, “brothers fight sometimes. Look at the Morgan brothers. They fight a lot, but they are always together, aren’t they?”

  “I suppose,” I answer. “But I don’t know if she told Billy, and I don’t want to ask him.”

  Betty gets up from her chair now and puts her arms around me. I try to move away a little, but she holds me firm, and as I feel her pressing me into her I just relax there until she holds me out by the shoulders.

  “Maybe,” she says, “you should ask. You have these questions in your mind, and they will have nowhere to go unless you let them out of your mouth, and there is no one better than your mother to ask about them.”

  She gives me another little hug and takes a book from her desk. It is called Tom Sawyer. She hands it to me, and I look at it. It is pretty ragged, but the cover has a picture of a boy without shoes, and he’s painting a fence.

  “You’ll like it,” she says, “I promise. And you don’t have to read it here. Take it home for a week.”

  I run out of the library and jump down the black marble stairs in twos. It is a surprise to me that Kips Bay has all these men, in the pool, the gym, the woodworking shop, the clay and the jewelry shops, and the game room, and, besides all that, they have a woman like Betty who can help you out if you are in a jam with homework or have trouble with a drunken father or something.

  I wouldn’t mind so much if I had a drunken father, though. At least he’d be home.

  I am thinking again about what a big neighborhood this is as I turn the corner on 52nd Street and walk up Second Avenue. The East Fifties, from here to the Queensboro Bridge, from Sutton Place over to Third Avenue. I know guys, and girls, too, on every street, almost in every building. Over a hundred people, I suppose. I wonder where they go when they need to talk to someone about something that is bothering them. Maybe they can go to a police station if they don’t belong to Kips. Maybe to a church, if they don’t mind confession.

  I throw Tom Sawyer on the kitchen table. I am going to also tell my mother about all the books I’ve been reading at Kips. The kitchen light is out, and I can see her legs in the living room. She is sitting on the couch, reading a magazine. She is always reading something whenever she sits down. She hardly ever watches the television. This one is the second television Uncle Andy has given us, but the first one worked a little better. The new one is probably older and has too many lines rolling from the top to the bottom.

  My mother has been pretty mad at me since I ran away, and I wonder how she’ll act with me now. Mothers, I think, usually forget about it when their kids hurt their feelings, but when it comes to running away, I don’t know.

  I sit next to her. She kisses me but doesn’t say anything. She is staring at me, and I wonder if she smells the cigarette smoke of the one cigarette I had before I went to Kips. A long time passes as she continues to stare at me, as if I was a painting at the Metropolitan or a statue.

  “How are you?” she says finally.

  I lean in next to her, and I inhale the smell of Clorox coming from her white blouse. Anything white in my house smells of bleach, because my mother is such a stickler about getting things clean. Her hands, too, usually smell of Clorox, because when she is not reading she is always with her hands in the sink, washing shirts and things for people. It is a hard smell, but it is such a clean smell that it is relaxing. And I do need to relax as I figure out a way to ask her about my father being in the hospital.

  “Okay,” I answer.

  “I’ve been reading this interesting story about the Pope,” she says. “Let me read it to you.”

  Good. If she wants to read to me, that means running away is something she is forgetting about.

  My mother loves to read to us. When we were kids, my mother used to read the Letters to the Editor and the Inquiring Photographer columns to us every day, and get excited about the things she was reading.

  “Yes,” she would say, “I agree, and we should all write to President Truman about that,” or “That is such a load of baloney that they could get rich by selling it in Brooklyn.”

  “How come, Mommy?” I once asked her.

  “People love baloney in Brooklyn,” she said.

  And so she is reading now about how the Pope was the first Pope ever to come to America, when he was a monsignor or something, and her voice is light and singsong. She has a real New York accent, and when she wants to say bottle, she says ba-ull. The nuns are always harping about the New York accent, like saying toid for third, and that the bosses at the insurance companies will never give us jobs if we have New York accents. But I love to hear my mother read, and especially when she says ba-ull.

  Now, though, I am trying to figure out a way to get her to stop reading. I am not certain how I can bring the subject of the hospital up, but I know I want to say something before Billy gets home. He is allowed to stay out an hour later than I can if he is finished with his homework.

  I guess I will just interrupt her, although she will probably say that I am being impolite. The only thing my mother thinks is worse than wearing a dirty shirt is being impolite. “Thank you” are my mother’s favorite words, and “yes, please,” and “may I this” and “may I that,” and excuse me, pardon me, and get on your feet if a lady enters the room or else you’ll be like all the ragamuffins who live over on Third Avenue and turn into a statue glued to your chair, and don’t forget to take your hat off indoors, because gentlemen never wear a hat with a roof over their heads.

  Finally, I work up the courage to risk being impolite. It is not easy because I don’t really want to talk to her about this. I don’t want her to have to admit that she has been lying. “You will never have any friends if you lie,” that’s what she always says.

  “Mom,” I begin with a hesitation, “could I make you a cup of tea?”

  She puts the magazine down beside her and takes her glasses off.

  “You should say excuse me,” she says. I knew she would say that.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “Excuse me, your most worshipful lady.”

  She laughs now and pats my leg.

  “No thanks, Dennis,” she says. “I could never sleep if I had tea now.”

  I shift some on the couch and then say, “Could I ask you something?”

  “Sure,” she answers.

  “Did you ever have a conversation with Daddy about me? I mean, doesn’t he want to see me? Does he ever ask about me?”

  “Of course he does, honey,” she says. “But they don’t let kids in the hospital there. I told you a hundred times.”

  I was hoping she wouldn’t say that again, even now when I’m thirteen, and I can’t just let her say it again and leave it alone. It’s been too many years of saying this, and me believing it, too.

  “I know, Mom,” I say, shaking my head, “but you never told me he was in a mental place.”

  I can feel all the muscles in her body get tight, and she picks the magazine up again and begins to flip through it. She doesn’t look at me, but keeps flipping the pages. Two minutes must pass. It is so silent, no noise at all except these pages in the magazine being flipped.

  Finally, she stops.

  “Who told you that?” she demands.

  “I heard it,” I say.

  “Where did you hear it?”

  “I heard Aunt Kitty talking to Uncle Tracy, that’s all. And I told Betty about it down at the Kips library, and she said I should just talk to you about it.”

  My mother turns on the couch and faces me.

  “You told Betty,” she says, “about your father being in an insane asylum?”

  “I told her you told me he was in the hospital becau
se he hurt his legs.”

  I can almost feel how upset she is, because the couch seems to be shaking.

  “Dennis,” she says, her voice getting louder now, “you must never tell anyone these things, about your father, or about us being on welfare, or about not having any money. Or anything in our lives. This is our secret. It’s our lives. People are always trying to butt in.”

  She stops now and points her finger at me.

  “Nobody,” she says, “should know our business. Do you understand, Dennis?”

  She makes this ugly face when she is mad at me, like she is disgusted with something, like there is some dead fish around or something that smells wicked. I am so sorry that she is angry with me, and I am sorry now that I said anything to Betty. How would Betty know that my mother would get so mad at me and that everything in our family is such a big secret? And that people are trying to know our business?

  I am feeling ashamed now, and I don’t know why. There is no reason for me to be ashamed, but still that is what I feel. I don’t say anything more, but I get up from the couch and go into the kitchen and turn the light on. I grab Tom Sawyer from the table and go into my room and throw the book on the upper bunk. I can read, maybe, and calm down.

  Why are we so different, goddammit? Different from everyone I know. Why do we have to have all these secrets that separate everyone, including us here in apartment 26? Why should I have to feel so apart from my mother?

  I am in my pajamas and reading as my brother comes home. He doesn’t say anything and quickly gets into the bottom bunk.

  I am wondering if I should ask him what he knows about Daddy and about the mental asylum. He has never mentioned it to me. But what if he doesn’t know? What if he never heard anyone talking about poor Daddy getting beat up in the shower at some mental asylum? What will he think if he doesn’t know? Will I make him sick with worrying about it?

  “Turn the light out, will you?” Billy says.

  I can’t read, anyway, and so I turn the light out. But I know I’m not going to get any sleep, not when I have all these questions. Like Betty said, they will have nowhere to go unless I let them out of my mouth.

  “Billy,” I say, “what do you know about our father?”

  There. I’ve said it, asked it. I can’t do anything about it now.

  “He’s in a mental institution,” Billy says, and I can hear him pulling the sheet up over his head.

  “How come you never told me?” I ask.

  “There’s never any reason to talk about it, Dennis,” he says. “And a long time ago, Uncle Andy told me that I shouldn’t talk to anyone about it, so I didn’t.”

  “Uncle Andy told you that?”

  “Yeah,” Billy says. “He told me about the hospital and all, and then said not to talk about it.”

  “Shit,” I say.

  “Why,” Billy says, “what’s the matter?”

  “How old were you?”

  “I don’t know, eight, maybe nine.”

  “Shit, you knew all this time and never said anything?”

  “We never talk about it, Dennis.”

  I am climbing down from the top bunk now.

  “Shit,” I say, over and over, as I walk through the kitchen and the living room and into my mother’s bedroom.

  I pull the light cord, and my mother jumps up.

  “What’s the matter?” she asks.

  “Could you get up?” I ask.

  “What’s the matter?” she asks again, sitting up in the bed.

  “I just want to know one thing, Mom,” I say, standing there in my pajamas. “Why didn’t you tell me about it a long time ago? Why didn’t you think I was old enough to know about my own father?”

  I can see her shoulders going into a slump. She suddenly looks so tired, and she begins to whisper. “Oh, Dennis, Dennis, Dennis.”

  “Well?” I ask, folding my arms.

  “I just never thought,” she said, “that you wouldn’t feel bad if you knew. I didn’t want you to feel bad, Dennis.”

  “That’s not it, Mom,” I say. “I don’t care about feeling bad or not. I just want to know why you don’t trust me?”

  My mother looks away for a second, and she says, “I do trust you, I trust both of you. What do you want to know, what do you want me to tell you?”

  “Is he okay, is he hurt, is he getting beat up?” I ask these questions like they are bouncing off the sides of a pinball machine.

  My mother smiles at these questions. “Yes,” she says, “he is not in that awful Greenland hospital anymore but up in Poughkeepsie State and the people there are very nice to him. Believe me, I have seen them being nice many times.”

  “All right, good, Mom,” I say, turning. “I’m sorry to wake you up.

  “You didn’t wake me up, Dennis,” she says.

  “Good, Mom,” I say, “because I wouldn’t want to disturb you.”

  I go to our room and climb back to the top bunk. I pull the sheet up and adjust my eyes to the dark. Billy doesn’t say anything at all, and I leave him to his own thoughts.

  God, I am thinking.

  Shit.

  God.

  Anyway, I’m thinking, at least I’m not alone in all of this anymore.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Billy is a junior counselor at Kips Bay Summer Camp this year, and so I’m home alone. It is a hot night, and I have a wet rag around my neck, and I’m trying to sleep on the floor. Anything to cool off. My mother is asleep, and probably dreaming about how mad at me she is, because she found a couple of the tiniest pieces of tobacco in my shirt pocket.

  She treats me like I’m in the third grade. And she never would have found it if she didn’t have to iron my polo shirts all the time. I’m the only guy on the street who has ironed polo shirts.

  Goddammit, I hate that I can’t get out of this being a kid.

  She made such a big thing about it, smelling my breath, smelling my shirt, smelling everything around me, searching for the dreaded tobacco stench. I wanted to say that she could be smelling her own cigarettes if she smelled anything at all. But it’s better to keep cool and collected.

  “Tom Harris,” I said to her, making up a fast story, “put his wallet in my shirt pocket yesterday when he got up at bat, when we were playing stickball in the street, so it wouldn’t fall out of his pocket, in case he had to run fast if he hit a homer down over two sewers, and so I guess he had some tobacco in his wallet or something.”

  It’s not a complete lie. We were playing stickball, and Tom did put his wallet in my shirt pocket, next to my cigarettes.

  “Go to bed,” she said, “just go to bed. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I can’t go to bed, Mom.”

  “Just go to bed.”

  “Mom, it’s only seven o’clock, and it doesn’t even get dark until nine.”

  “Okay, then,” she said, her arm gliding like an ice-skater over the ironing board, “just read a book first and wait until it gets dark. Then go to bed. You are making a spectacle of yourself, thirteen years old and smoking like you were a truck driver or a stevedore.”

  Sometimes I don’t understand the way my mother develops her thoughts. She is always saying that I am making a spectacle of myself, like I am in the center ring at the circus, and I wonder how I am such a spectacle. And she says it’s because I am being like a truck driver or a stevedore, who are not such spectacles. Nothing goes together. It would be like seeing monkey wrenches instead of knives and forks on the linen napkins at Joe’s Original Restaurant. And so I just picked up All Quiet on the Western Front, the book Betty gave me a few days ago, and I read about dirty foxholes and dying soldiers until my eyes hurt.

  I wish I was back at camp. At Kips Bay Camp up in Valhalla, New York, everything is bright and green and clear, and there is no mother to be on you about this and that. And even if there was a mother, there would be no time to listen to her complaints because you are always off somewhere hunting frogs or snakes, or playing flag
football, or making lanyards for key chains and bracelets and necklaces.

  I’ve been going to Kips Bay Camp for two weeks every summer since I was six years old. I think they give it to my mother for free, because I could never stay for a long three-week trip. If I had a three-week trip, I would still be there.

  The first time I went to camp I went because I won first place in a “why I want to go to camp” essay contest. I was in the first grade, and I wrote a composition which was about a page long. I remember I wrote that I wanted to get away from the cars, because you can’t play stickball in the street with all the cars coming through 56th Street, and that I had never been out of New York City except when I was four and went to Canada on a train when my Uncle Ronald died there, and my Aunt May paid for my mother to take Billy and me to the funeral so’s all the relatives could see us.

  The winning composition was more a letter than a composition, and I guess they sent it to everyone in the neighborhood. A director guy must have read it, and so he sent me a camp package, which, besides having cookies and candy that I had to share, also had a baseball glove and a baseball hat. My Uncle Phil had bought Billy a baseball glove for Christmas, but I just got a sweater.

  But this package came as a complete surprise, and I yelled when I opened it. That baseball glove was the best present I ever got, and I used it all the time for years until Uncle Phil bought me a professional one.

  But it came with some bad luck, because the man who sent it, this director, decided to stop in the camp one day to pay me a visit. He had another big box of candy and cookies, and he went looking for me.

  Archie was the head counselor that year, and he and Archie searched for an hour, but they couldn’t find me, for that was the day my counselor made me make my bed three times before I got the hospital corners right, and I was so mad at him that I decided to run away. I took a flashlight, even though it was before lunch, and went into the woods. I still remember how frightened I was, because I got lost in five minutes, and it seemed like I was in the woods all day before they found me.