A Song for Mary

by Dennis Smith

  I have no great interest in being money hungry or in the accumulation of things, but I don’t know of any other way to make a judgment about how I’m doing. I suppose I could measure my happiness, but somehow that often seems to be directly tied into the amount of cash in the pocket.

  I know that money can’t buy happiness, but without it you can’t buy anything.

  I was flat broke after I bought that little gold ring for my mother, and she was flat broke when I gave it to her. Sure, she would have been just as happy if I gave her a little pencil drawing I made, but I was made happier by having the forty bucks to buy her the ring. The thing about true happiness, I guess, is to recognize that both of us would have been just as happy if we put the money for the ring in the poor box, for the thought of doing something generous for another is what carries the day. If you can find a scale to weigh the value, you’ll find that a generous thought is always heavier than gold.

  I’ve just cashed my railroad check and my pockets are flush with money. I’ll be able to pay my mother back for Patches in just a couple of months, and everything seems to be going great.

  My mother is still working for Ma Bell, and still doing the ironing for neighbors.

  Billy left Hunter College, but he started up again at New York University. He’s working full-time at Kips Bay as the gym instructor, but I have the best-paying job in the family.

  “The Irish are getting up in the world,” my mother said at breakfast this morning, folding over the pages of the News.

  “You bet,” I said.

  My mother laughed. “I’m talking about Senator Kennedy,” she said. “He’s running for president.”

  “He’s no Al Smith,” Billy said.

  “But he is Irish,” my mother said.

  “So was Al Smith,” my brother answered.

  “If he can get me on the police department or the fire department,” I said, “I’ll vote for him.”

  There is enough money in the family now to buy all the clothes we need and go to a movie whenever we want. Everyone is working, and, so to speak, there is a chicken in every pot.

  Billy told me recently that New York University is trying out a special program for people like me who have no high school, but who have a General Education Development certificate from the military. I’m going down to Washington Square tomorrow to see about it.

  There is just an hour or so until quitting time.

  People who work for the railroad, I have found, have developed a lot of sloppy attitudes about work.

  At least, I have never seen anything like the shirking that goes on in Grand Central Station, where every afternoon like clockwork the whole working corps slips into the dark train cars, sitting idle in the terminal, for a lazybones nap. Some mechanics and their helpers even lay themselves out in nice clean sheets in the Pullman cars, the sleeper cars, for the last two hours every day.

  It is all pretty boring to me, and since there is nothing for me to do, I have been carrying around a paperback book so that I can sit under a light on the back tracks to read until the workers come out of the railroad cars at ten to four.

  It is like a retreating army at ten to four every afternoon as the plumbers, electricians, steamfitters, carpenters, the railroad cops, pipe coverers, and maintenance men pile out of the Pullmans. I know that this kind of nesting can get you fired, and I don’t want any part of it.

  But today, my mechanic, Jimmy Niven, doesn’t go to the Pullmans, and he takes me to the north end of track 16. He hands me his flashlight and gives me an order.

  “Go down under the track,” he says, “and find my tool bag, a canvas one. It should be right beneath us.”

  A helper has to do what his mechanic says, and I don’t think much of it.

  I jump down on the tracks and look for one of the small entrances beneath the platform, squares cut into the concrete walls of the platform above. The steam and water pipes and the electrical conduit run beneath these platforms in Grand Central Station, and I guess Niven was working there before I came on the job.

  I put the flashlight on and crawl into the hole. There is just room enough for a man to get around on his hands and knees. It is tropical-jungle damp because of the heat of the steam pipes, and I suddenly begin to sweat. I aim the flashlight quickly left to right, and I see a tool bag about twenty-five feet down the long and narrow chamber, on its side on the dusty, brick-strewn floor of hard-compacted earth.

  I am more than ten feet into this crawl space when I realize I am hearing a strange noise, a sort of fluttering sound. It is a weird sound, something I have never before heard, and I throw my light beam upward, and I am stopped like glue in my crawl by what I see.

  The walls and the ceiling above are covered with water bugs, not a clear inch of concrete shows through, and they are vibrating and crawling over one another like ants. Not one is less than two inches long, and many have antennae which go another two inches. I have never seen anything like this, and I am frozen.

  There could be a pot of gold next to that tool bag, I am thinking, and I would give it up in a second. I just have to get out of here because I know that this shaking ceiling, like the walls full of roaches I used to think about as a boy in my top bunk, is going to fall down right on top of me, and they will carry me away the way ants can carry a dead fly.

  I have to get out of here, I am thinking, before it crumbles and it is raining water bugs.

  God.

  I remember picking up that beer bottle when I was a kid, putting it to my mouth for the last drop of beer left by the aunts and uncles who had been singing Irish songs, and that scurrying roach falling into my mouth, spitting it out, thinking that I would die in a minute, the roach germs running rampant through my body. I know I have to get out of this scourge, this plague, before I pass out, and tell Jimmy Niven that he will have to crawl for his own tool bag, that he can stick this job in with his dirty laundry, that I don’t care what he does, but I’m not going in this torture chamber to get a bag of tools someone forgot.

  God.

  The sound is like a purring interrupted by coughing from a consumptive cat. I am still frozen.

  I can’t tell Niven that I won’t do it. I can’t risk my job. I am making all this money, I am paying back my mother, and this is the first real shaft of light I have had over my life in New York, the first job I have found since I came home from Nevada. These jobs are hard to get, and I wouldn’t have gotten this one if Denny Reade hadn’t knocked on the door to say that he heard I was home and looking for a job. “A messenger from the angels,” my mother called him.

  Denny Reade isn’t more than a few years older than me, and I don’t even know him that well, but he got me this job because people on 56th Street help each other out, like the Pennsylvania Dutch who put up each other’s barns. If I back out of this corridor, I will disappoint my mother, and Denny Reade will think that I’m a loser, and everybody on 56th Street, the whole neighborhood, will think me a yellow-striped loser.

  I can’t back out.

  But I’m frozen here. I can’t go in, either.

  I remember now what my mother said when she had me make an hour’s worth of stretched faces. “Cross your finger, one on the other, and press down as hard as you can. And say ‘stop,’ over and over.”

  But now I want to say “go,” and not “stop.”

  Now I have one finger crossed onto the other, pressing down like a vise, my eyes closed.

  “Go, go, go, go, go,” I am saying out loud as I inch nearer and nearer to the tool bag, feeling out before me, not wanting to open my eyes, knowing that to see a water bug on me is going to be harder to take than thinking one is on me. I can live with the thought as long as I keep my eyes closed.

  I am not thinking at all now of the vibrations above and around me. I am wondering if the builders put the water bugs under these tracks because they knew the Irish would be working for the railroad.

  Finally, I feel the tool bag, and I turn quickly, dragging it behind me. F
inally, I open my eyes, and I see the light at the opening door, and scurry as fast as I can, feeling my insides fluttering now like there are a million winged things in my stomach, flapping their two million wings trying to fly out.

  Now I am out on the track again, and I look to see if there are any trains coming. The third rail is across from me, and I have to remember that even if I am covered with water bugs, I will have to keep watching that rail. I drop the tool bag and wipe my hands all over my body like I am wet and have fallen into a sand pit. I look all around, and I do not see a single bug. Not one. I take three deep breaths to bring my blood pressure down as I throw the heavy canvas tool bag up on the track.

  Jimmy is lighting a cigarette, and he watches me climb up on the platform out of the corner of his eye. I know that he knows there are millions of water bugs down below us, and he is just waiting for me to say something.

  But I don’t say anything.

  I just carry his bag up the track because that’s my job. We are silent until we enter the great open space of the Grand Central Terminal.

  “Well?” Jimmy says, a little grin on either side of the cigarette hanging from his mouth.

  “Well, what?” I answer.

  “Any trouble finding the bag?”

  “No,” I say, “no trouble at all.”

  I am laughing to myself as we walk, thinking that the consequence of a bad experience can be beneficial beyond understanding or explanation. Maybe I had to go in there with the water bugs, but nowhere does it say that I have to give him the satisfaction of knowing I almost pissed in my pants.

  I am now driving a cab, stopped at a light at the corner of 134th Street and Lenox Avenue. Most cabdrivers pass blacks by if they are trying to hail a cab, even in the rain and snow, but I don’t think that is right.

  I remember something Billy said to me when we were both boys. I was thirteen, maybe fourteen. We were walking down to a game we had planned at the basketball courts just below the United Nations building, and a bum came up to me with a ditched cigarette in his hand. The guy had not bathed in months, was a little drunk, and had an open sore over his eye.

  “Gimme a light,” the bum said, stopping us in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the General Assembly Building.

  “Get lost,” I said, and I continued walking around him.

  But my brother stopped.

  “Dennis,” he said, “do you have matches in your pocket?”

  He knew I had matches in my pocket because I just started smoking in front of him and I had a butt going down First Avenue.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Give the guy a light,” Billy demanded.

  I shrugged my shoulders and lit the bum’s ditcher.

  My brother was silent then, for the next two blocks, until we got to the basketball court. He dribbled the ball twice before he spoke.

  “You have to give everyone the benefit of the doubt,” he said, “if you don’t know any more than you see.”

  I never said anything to my brother in return then, but I think of that now when I see people like these two guys in the back of my cab. It is my last fare of the night. I picked them up down on 14th Street, and they have taken me way up here in the heart of Harlem. They look pretty tough, but for all I know they could be scientists working on the cure for cancer.

  Not likely, but I don’t know any more than I see.

  I hear the back door opening and I turn around.

  “Wait here,” one of the men says, “ ‘cause we have to be in this place to get us some money, some cab fare.”

  They don’t stop to look back as I watch them go into a crowded bar on the avenue. I have the meter running, and it is already almost ten dollars. I wait, and I wait, and it is now almost twelve dollars. I will only make a dollar of this twelve dollars, but the cab company is going to want the whole twelve first.

  They won’t care if I get beat for the fare.

  “It’s your problem, pally,” the dispatcher will say. “You should have got a cop.”

  I stop the meter and press one finger on top of the other to concentrate. This is a lot of money to lose. I lock the cab and walk into the bar.

  Jazzy music is playing loud and people are yelling at one another to be heard above the noise. People turn to look at me as I go down the aisle past the bar, looking for my fares. I don’t care what anyone says or does, because I know that I cannot afford to lose a night’s wage like this. I have to make a stab at trying to get my money, even if, I am thinking, somebody makes a stab at me.

  I see my fare, deep in conversation with another man. I don’t see the other guy who was also in the cab.

  But a scone on the dish, as my mother used to say, is always better than one in the oven.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, interrupting the man in his conversation, “but I guess you forgot about me.”

  “What you want?” the man says.

  “What you want?” the other man says.

  “I want my cab fare,” I answer, trying hard to keep my chin up. “Twelve bucks.”

  “Man,” the one I don’t know says to my fare, “you owe this man for a taxi ride?”

  “I don’t know,” my fare says, “maybe Horace owes him.”

  “Man, Horace is gone, and now you pay this man his money, hear.”

  My fare now looks at me, up and down.

  “How much?” he asks.

  “Twelve.”

  He takes twelve dollars from the bar and hands it to me.

  I shove the money in my pocket and skip out of the bar like I had a winning sweeps ticket.

  Then, back in the cab, driving down Lenox Avenue with my off-duty light on, I had a thought.

  You should’ve, I scolded myself, asked for a tip.

  I am now in the street watching Donald Doran fold the moving blankets. He is sweating heavily, and I am feeling guilty that I am so cool and collected. All the furniture is in and up, including the big Magnavox TV that Uncle Andy gave us when Aunt Kitty got him to buy her a new one. It’s the third TV Uncle Andy has given us. It’s as big as a jukebox, but the screen is just ten inches across. Not that it matters, for I watch TV even less than my mother, and I have never seen Billy watch anything other than a game, any kind of game.

  It was the only day Billy could organize the move, and I had a final examination at New York University. I felt I was letting my brother down, but he understood. He is turning out to be a professional student himself, and no one knows the importance of a final examination better than Billy. If you fail a course, the loss will put you in the hole for almost a hundred and fifty bucks. You could get a moving company to move a palace for that kind of money.

  But now a neighborhood moving job like this one costs just a case of beer and a half dozen heroes from Rossi’s. All you have to do is round up the guys on their downtime.

  Billy, I knew, wasn’t going to rearrange it because of my final exam schedule. He already had Mike Harris, Vinny Gaezo, and Tommy Henderson rounded up, and Donald Doran was bringing his father’s truck.

  We have moved just two blocks away, to 54th Street off Second Avenue. It is still up three flights. I was hoping my mother would find something on a lower floor, but she told me it was a good deal, “a classy apartment” for fifty-six dollars a month, and rent-controlled ‘til death do you part.

  My mother is under the sink as I enter the apartment for the first time. She is scrubbing away as Billy and the others are moving the furniture around to make everything fit. It’s another railroad apartment, and a little smaller than apartment 26 on 56th Street. I am wandering around, looking to see what happened to the bunk beds, so at least I will have somewhere to throw my books.

  “Not a roach in the place,” my mother says, popping out from under the sink, “and if you look out the back window, you will see a tree, green leaves and all.”

  Sure enough, out the kitchen window there is a tall backyard tree.

  I know a sagebrush from a cactus, but I am uncertain as to what th
is tree is. It could be a sycamore or an oak for all I know, but in New York they are called backyard trees, which is easy to remember, and this one is full and waving slightly in a breeze. It adds something bright and fresh to the apartment, and I can almost smell its fragrance. My mother is smiling from ear to ear. She is drying her hands with the bottom of her apron.

  “How,” she asks, “did you do on the test?”

  “A hundred.”

  “You got a hundred?”

  “No,” I laugh, “that’s how many questions there were.”

  “C’mon,” she says, “how did you do?”

  “Flying colors, Mom, is all I know.” I raised a finger and continued, “The professor asked the one question with which I was thoroughly acquainted.”

  “What’s that, big shot?” Billy breaks in.

  “ ‘What is the difference between truth and beauty?’ the professor asked, and you know what I wrote?”

  “What did you write?” my mother asks.

  “I wrote that the truth is I don’t know any of the answers, and the beauty is I don’t give a damn.”

  “You didn’t?” my mother says.

  I laugh. It’s always so easy to pull my mother into a joke.

  “I didn’t, Mom,” I say. “It was all Greek to me, but I knew about the wine-dark sea and poor Mrs. Oedipus, so I guess I got a B.”

  “Oh, I am so proud of you,” my mother says. “But I’d be prouder if there was an A.”

  “Well,” Billy says, “it’s okay to get out of a moving job for a B, I guess.”

  These are salad days for me, even though I got caught in the layoff by the railroad and have to drive a cab when I can get one in the shape-up, or work as a chauffeur for the limousine company if they have a job when I call them.

  I am not making a decent salary by a long shot, but I am reading everything in and about literature I can get my hands on, and sensing that I am changing with every page I read.

  It is now a September morning, and I have read that the City of New York is accepting filings to take the police and the fire depatment examinations. I am in the middle of breakfast, and I have an early morning class, but the news sparks an enthusiasm inside me that I have hardly known. I am going to the department of personnel first thing today. I dress fast, and then I do something I haven’t been doing much lately. I grab my mother around her slender shoulders and give her a kiss on the cheek.