Frankie spoke to him one day about keeping his hands in his pockets, and even this mild criticism, delivered in a low, reasonable tone, was enough to make Stevie jump. He tried in other ways to please Frankie. He tried to moderate his intense, fancy-haunted shamble so that he wouldn’t have to pull himself up on the rein, to break his voice of its squeak, and to imitate his father.
Stevie trying to be tough like Frankie was one of the funniest of his phases, for undoubtedly Frankie was the man Stevie would never be. He was a lean, leathery sort of man, with a long face, cold eyes, and a fish’s mouth. No doubt he had his good points. He made Mrs. Leary give up the daily work and wear a hat and coat instead of the shawl. He made Stevie give up the swill and the messages and learn to read and write, an accomplishment that had apparently been omitted from the education of whatever American millionaire he had been modelling himself on. Frankie had few friends on the road; he was a quiet, self-centered, scornful man. But with his coming the years seemed to drop from Mrs. Leary. I understood at last what she meant when she said that Frankie in their courting days had compared her to the Colleen Bawn. She seemed to become all schoolgirlish and lit up inside, as though, but for modesty, she’d love to take you aside and tell you what Frankie did to her.
You wouldn’t believe the change that came over their little cottage. Of course, a couple of times there were scenes when Mrs. Leary came home with the signs of drink on her. They weren’t scenes as we understood them. Frankie didn’t make smithereens of the house, as my da did when domesticity became too much for him. But for all that, the scenes frightened Stevie. Each time there was one, he burst into tears and begged his father and mother to agree.
And then one night a terrible thing happened. Mrs. Leary came in a bit more expansive than usual. She wasn’t drunk, she told my mother afterward—just friendly. Frankie had been reading the evening paper and he looked up.
“Where were you?” he asked.
“Ah, I ran into Lizzie Desmond at the Cross and we started to talk,” Mrs. Leary said good-humoredly.
“Then ye started to drink, you mean.”
“We had two small ones,” said Mrs. Leary with a shrug of her shoulders. “What harm was there in that? Have you the kettle boiling, Stevie?”
“You know better than anyone what harm is in it,” Frankie said. “I hope you’re not forgetting what it cost you last time?”
“And if it did, wasn’t I well able to get along without you? ’Tisn’t many would be able for what I did, with my child to bring up, and no one to advise me or help me.”
“Whisht now, Ma! Whisht!” Stevie cried in an agony of fear. “You know my da is only speaking for your good.”
“Speaking for my good?” she shouted. With great dignity she drew herself up and addressed Frankie. “How dare you? Is that my thanks after all I did for you—crossing the briny ocean after you, you insignificant little gnat!”
“What’s that you said?” Frankie asked quietly. Without waiting for an answer, he threw down his paper and went up to her with his fists clenched.
“Gnat!” she repeated scornfully, looking him up and down. “Insignificant little gnat, that wouldn’t make a bolt for a back door! How dare you?”
Even before Stevie could guess what he was up to, Frankie had drawn back his fist and given it to her fair in the mouth. He didn’t pull his punch, either. Stevie nearly got sick at the sound. Mrs. Leary gave a shriek that was heard in our house, and then went in a heap on the floor. Stevie shrieked, too, and rushed to her assistance. He lifted her head on his knee. Her mouth was bleeding and her eyes were closed.
“Oh, Ma, look at me, look at me!” he bawled distractedly. “ ’Tis all right. I’m Stevie, your own little boy.”
She opened one red-rimmed eye and looked at him for a moment. Then she closed it carefully, with a moan of pain, as though the sight of him distressed her too much. Stevie looked up at his father, who seemed to be hardly aware of his presence.
“Will I get the priest for her, Da?” asked Stevie. “She’s dying.”
“Get to bed out of this,” Frankie replied in a tone that put the fear of God into Stevie. He crept into bed, leaving his mother still lying on the floor. A little later he heard his father close the bedroom door on himself. His mother still lay there. He was quite certain she was dead until an hour later he heard her pick herself up and make herself a cup of tea. But never before had Stevie allowed his mother to remain like that without assistance. It couldn’t have happened except for Frankie. He was afraid of Frankie.
Stevie woke next morning with all the troubles of the world on his young shoulders. Things were desperate in the home. All the light he had on the subject was contained in a sermon he had once heard in which the preacher said children were a great bond between the parents. Stevie felt it was up to him to be a bond. Purposefully cheerful, he gave Frankie his breakfast and took his mother a cup of tea. After that she insisted on getting up and going out. He begged her to stay in bed, and offered to bring the porter to her, but she wouldn’t. He knew she was going out to get drunk, and at the same time that she was far more frightened than he was. That was what she meant when she said that lovers could never agree. It was her terrible pride that wouldn’t allow her to give in to his father.
In the afternoon, Stevie found her in a pub in town and brought her home. He did everything he could to make her presentable; he made her tea, washed her face, combed her hair, and finally even tried to induce her to hide in our house. At six, Frankie came in, and Stevie bustled around him eagerly and clumsily, laying the table for his supper. In his capacity of bond, he had reverted to type. “You’d like a couple of buttered eggs?” he squeaked. “You would, to be sure. Dwyer’s keeps grand eggs.”
After supper, Frankie grimly got up and took his cap. “You won’t be late, Da?” Stevie asked appealingly. Frankie didn’t answer. Stevie went to the door and watched him all the way down the road. Then he returned and sat opposite his mother by the fire.
“Ah,” he said, “I don’t suppose he’ll come back at all.”
“Let him go,” his mother muttered scornfully. “We did without him before and we can do without him again. Insignificant little gnat!”
“Ah, I dunno,” Stevie said. “ ’Twas nice having him, all the same.”
The dusk fell and they sat there, not speaking.
“You ought to see is he at your Uncle John’s,” Mrs. Leary said suddenly, and Stevie knew the panic was rising again through the drink.
“I’ll try,” he said, “but I wouldn’t have much hope.”
His doubts were fully justified. Whatever way Frankie had of losing himself, he had disappeared again.
· · ·
Little by little the old air of fecklessness and neglect descended on the Learys’ cottage. Mrs. Leary, no longer looking like the Colleen Bawn, went back to the shawl and the daily work for the Delurys, and Stevie to the swill and the messages. Everything was exactly as though Frankie had never returned. Yet in one way it wasn’t. After a year or two, Stevie started to go to night school. That caused us all considerable amusement. It was the daftest of Stevie’s metamorphoses.
But then a really incredible thing happened—Stevie began to study for the priesthood. It seemed that the teacher in the Technical School had spoken to the parish priest, and the parish priest was arranging for Mrs. Leary to have regular work in the presbytery, so that Stevie could attend the seminary. This wasn’t a matter for laughter. In a way, it was a public scandal. Of course, it wouldn’t be like Mrs. Delury’s son who had been to Maynooth; it would only be for the Foreign Mission, but you’d think that even the Foreign Mission would draw the line somewhere. Even my mother, who had great pity for Stevie, was troubled. I was causing her concern enough as it was, for I had lost my faith for the first time. She was an exceedingly pious woman, and I don’t think she ever put it in so many words, but I fancy she felt that if the Catholic Church was having to fall back on people like Stevie, there might be some
grounds for a young fellow losing his faith. I remember the incredulity with which I spoke to Stevie myself when for the first time I met him on the road in his black suit and black soft hat. I could see he knew about my losing my faith. He might even have tried to help me with it, but, of course, being Stevie, he was in a hurry to get back to his Latin roots.
When he said his first Mass in the parish church, we all turned up, a few—like my mother—from piety, the rest from curiosity. Mrs. Delury, her two sons, and her daughter were there. Mrs. Delury, of course, was boiling at the thought of her charwoman’s son being a priest like her own Jeremiah, and she blamed it all on America. Stevie preached on the Good Shepherd, and whether it was just the excitement or the faces of the Delurys all looking up at him from one pew—a sight to daunt the boldest heart—he got mixed up between the ninety-nine and the one. What else could you expect of Stevie? My mother and I went around to the sacristy afterward to get his blessing. (By this time I had got back my faith again and I didn’t lose it a second time till two years afterward.) As we knelt, I could hardly keep my face straight, for at every moment I expected Stevie to say, “Wouldn’t a few pounds of stewing beef be better, Ma’am?”
When we came out of the church, I saw that the Opposition, headed by Mrs. Delury, was holding an overflow meeting on the road down from the chapel. “Poor Father Stephen got a bit mixed in his sums,” said Mrs. Delury in her pleasant way as we passed.
“Ah, the dear knows, wouldn’t anyone get excited on an occasion like that?” said my mother, flushed and angry at this insult to the cloth.
“Ah, well,” said Mrs. Delury comfortably, “I don’t suppose in America they’ll know the difference.”
“Why?” I asked in surprise. “Is he going to America?”
“So it seems,” she replied with a giggle. “I wonder why.”
· · ·
But I knew why, and for days it haunted my mind. I called the night before Stevie went away, and had a cup of tea with Mrs. Leary and him. I cursed myself for not noticing before what a nice, intelligent, sensitive fellow Stevie was. He was nervous and excited by the prospect before him. “Ah, he’ll love it,” his mother said in her deep, snug, husky voice. “ ’Twill be like a new life to him. The dear knows, I might go out to him myself, one of these days.”
“How bad ’twould be now to have you keeping house for him!” I said.
“Japers,” said Father Stephen shyly, “that’d be grand.”
Of course, all three of us knew it was impossible. There are certain luxuries that a young priest must deny himself and one is a mother whose feelings become too much for her. The whole time Stevie was at home, Mrs. Leary was irreproachable, a perfect lady. But next evening, after she had seen him off, a sympathetic policeman brought her home, and my mother put her to bed. “Ah, indeed,” my mother kept saying reproachfully, “what would Father Stephen say if he saw you now?” During the night we heard her shouting, but there was no Stevie to say, “Stay here and I’ll get it for you, Ma.” Stevie at last had become the man his father was, and left us all far away behind him.
October 25, 1947
Jessamyn West
It was initiation night, a candle-lighting ceremony, a big night in the lodge, and through the spring twilight of the California hill town, past the parking meters and the street-corner loungers, the matrons carrying their candles unlit drifted like moths. Not mothlike certainly in their plumpness but varicolored, fluttering, and pleasure-bent.
Emily Cooper (Mrs. W. H. Cooper—William H. Cooper, Inc., Insurance—“See Us B 4 U Burn”) sat with her husband in their car, parked at the curb. Across the street from them, and a little way down, was the Vasconi Building, where the initiation was being held. Emily was herself to be initiated that night, but she didn’t know the Pocahontas women very well and she was sitting for a time with her husband, gathering up courage from his matter-of-factness and checking the suitability of her dress against what she could see of the evening dresses of the other initiates, passing in the fading light. Only the initiates wore evening dresses (formals, formals, Emily reminded herself to say). The established lodge members, the Pocahontases in good standing, went to their meetings in Indian regalia. Emily watched them go by in the twilight, coats thrown back, because the evening was warm, fringes swaying, beaded headbands gleaming, moccasined feet silent on the sidewalk. Emily was proud to recognize some of them.
“There’s Mrs. Asta Bell,” she said to her husband. “She’s Keeper of the Wampum.”
“Keeper of what?” asked Mr. Cooper, himself no lodge man. Emily got into Pocahontas because of her father, Clement McCarthy, a long-time Redman, though not a resident of the state. “Join, join,” her father had always urged her, but Emily would not so long as the children were little.
“Wampum,” said Emily. “Indian for money. She’s treasurer.”
Mrs. Edna Purvis went by, black-haired and straight, most Indianlike of all, and Mrs. Wanda Turner, married to the county sheriff, and Zula Throne, married to no one at all, the only unmarried Pocahontas in the lodge. When Emily had remarked on this to some of the other lodge members, she had been told, “Most single girls are too frivolous for lodge work. Can’t concentrate on ritual and memorizing, let alone beadwork. Spend their time mooning about, thinking of …”
Emily, anxious to appear quick-witted before her sisters-to-be, had suggested in this pause “Men,” and her informer had repeated the word, but it had seemed not quite to fill the bill. “Yes and no,” she had told Emily. “Yes and no.” But Zula Throne was an exception—no mooner, they said, and, though maiden, as brisk in ritual and beadwork as any married lady.
More officers, some of the most important, passed by on the sidewalk. “Look, look,” said Emily, whispering, “but not right away. Now, that’s the Grand Prophetess.”
Mr. Cooper looked. “Couldn’t tell her from an ordinary prophetess,” he said calmly.
“Oh, she’s full of authority,” said Emily. “A power in the lodge, believe me.”
· · ·
It was exciting for Emily to sit in the car with her husband, pointing out to him the town’s leading ladies. It was a novelty, too, for it was he who had usually known everyone and done the pointing. But they were new in Midvale, the insurance office had been open only a couple of months, and Mr. Cooper’s work in opening it had kept him too busy for getting acquainted with the Pocahontas ladies.
“That’s Mrs. Pleasant Jones,” said Emily. “She’s First Scout, and the one with her, the tall one with the red headband, I can’t remember her name but I know she’s the Second Runner.”
Following the Second Runner were the Guards of Tepee and Forest, and Pocahontas, herself—Mrs. Vigila Smiley—with feathers in her headband. Emily knew all three of them and pointed them out as they went by carrying their candles and squares or oblongs of home-baked cake. They passed on foot, by twos and threes, or alighted, singly, from cars driven by their husbands. They were laughing and talking, but their voices were low; an initiation by candlelight was solemn and secret; it was spring, it was almost night.
“They shouldn’t have candles, really,” Emily explained to her husband.
“No candles?” said Mr. Cooper, who had been watching the Second Runner. “Why not?”
“It’s not in the Ritual. But the Grand Prophetess says we’re so far off the beaten track here in the hills that we can plead ignorance in case of criticism.”
“Why, sure,” said Mr. Cooper. “Sure you can. Why not?”
“We shouldn’t be hit-or-miss,” explained Emily. “The lodge treats of the mysteries of life in an orderly manner.”
Mr. Cooper looked at his wife inquiringly.
“That’s what I was told,” she said. “And the candles aren’t part of that order.”
“Maybe they’re part of the mystery,” suggested Mr. Cooper.
Emily supposed that her husband was smiling, but no, he was serious, looking intently into the creamy blooms of the laurel trees that l
ined the sidewalk, and listening to the birds that were singing on into the night because of the springtime.
“It’s the second spring,” said Emily.
In California, the first spring is in November. March only echoes it. In November the first spring is brief and sharp after the early rains. Then the grass flares up like fire; dry stream beds, as dead to the eye as old snakeskins, revive, all their bends and shallows filled with the curve of bright water; quail call; mushrooms push their blunt heads through the sodden leaves under the valley oaks; and at the end of the town’s short streets, early sunsets and winter barley, alike green, meet. Spring is sharp in November—a slap, a blow, a kiss, soon over, soon forgotten, colder weather to follow. In March it is easy, gentle, nothing to wonder at, it will last a long time. Summer will come, the hills be brown and faded, no one able to say just when the rains stopped or the grass withered.
“Counting November, it’s the second spring,” said Mr. Cooper.
“I was counting November,” said Emily, dangling a hand out the car window to test the air. It was still warm, though the sun was down, no color left behind, the sky as drab as a cast-iron skillet. Emily pushed her feet, slim in pointed satin slippers, up the incline of the floor boards until they cleared her full, white marquisette skirt. She reset the white daphne she had pinned in her hair and redampened her handkerchief from the bottle of Hoyt’s perfume she had in her purse.
“Do I look all right?” she inquired anxiously of her husband.
“Fine, fine,” said he. “Couldn’t look better.”
“Do I smell too strong of cologne?”
“Look fine, smell fine.”
With sudden energy, Emily gathered her coat about her shoulders, grasped her candle, prepared to depart. “I always look fine,” she said irritably. “I always look fine and I always smell fine to you. You don’t give me any confidence.”
Mr. Cooper leaned over, detained her with his hand on her arm. “But you do,” he said. “You always do. What do you want me to say? Want me to be a liar?”
The 40s: The Story of a Decade Page 78