“He was good with the children,” Bridie from the neighborhood said quickly, steering our thoughts down a more wholesome route. “He fitted all of mine, from infant shoes on. He had a way with children.”
“And he met Maeve there,” cousin Rosemary said.
Sister Rosemary confirmed it. “He met Maeve there. She always came in with her father. Getting him shoed, Billy said, was like fitting a mule, and no sooner would she be in to buy him a pair than they’d be back because he’d lost one of them. It didn’t take Billy long to realize he’d lost one under a barstool somewhere.”
“But Billy managed to ask her out,” Bridie said.
“To the movies. You could have knocked me over with a feather when he told me he was taking her out to the movies. It had been what, Kate? Four or five years since the Irish girl?”
“Five years. It was 1950 and they were married three years later, in 1953.”
“Thirty years, then,” Mickey Quinn said.
Kate nodded. “It would have been thirty years in September.”
“That’s a good long run,” said Mickey Quinn.
And all eyes went to Maeve, who, it seemed, had not touched her food but with her hands in her lap was leaning to listen to Ted, another of Billy’s cousins, as he crouched beside her chair, speaking earnestly.
“She never had an easy time of it,” sister Rosemary said, “especially recently. You know, toward the end.”
“Toward the end it was a foregone conclusion,” Kate said. “I think it was worse for her at the beginning, when she had her father and her husband to keep track of.”
“She’s doing beautifully today.”
“Oh, she’s strong.”
“You have to hand it to her. She’s got a lot of courage.”
And a certain beauty, perhaps, looking up now to say something to my father, and to Father Ryan beside him, her pale hand in a fist on the white tablecloth. And if courage also meant beauty, then her presence in the shoe store was Billy’s salvation, or at least his second chance that through willfulness and indifference he had let slip. But if she was as plain as they’d always said her to be during all the years Billy was alive, a plain girl approaching thirty with an alcoholic old father to take care of and no prospects—if Eva had been the beauty—then Maeve was only a faint consolation, a futile attempt to mend an irreparably broken heart. A moment’s grace, a flash of optimism, not enough for a lifetime.
“I didn’t know,” cousin Rosemary whispered. “Was Billy having trouble even in the beginning? Even when they were first married?”
We all turned to Kate, whose memory had already proven keen. She was the older sister, the only one of them gathered here who had attained real wealth (although it had already been well noted that her husband wasn’t here today, hadn’t come last night), and so she could speak with some authority, while the rest might only venture a guess.
“Well, he always drank,” Kate said. “But for a very long time it seemed he drank harmlessly. I remember him feeling no pain when he was on leave, before he went overseas, but that was understandable. I remember the night he came home and told us that Eva had passed away. He went straight to bed afterwards and I called Dennis to see if I could learn anything more and Dennis said they’d both had quite a lot to drink the night before, which was understandable, too. It was probably as hard for Dennis to tell him as it was for Billy to hear the news.”
His sister Rosemary said, “I remember he had one too many at Jill’s christening. I was worried about him riding the subway home.”
“But for years he never missed a day of work,” Kate told us. “And he was there to open the shoe store every Saturday morning from the time he started into the early sixties, when Mr. Holtzman finally sold the place to Baker’s. I don’t think Mr. Holtzman ever knew he drank. Certainly no one at Edison knew until near the end.”
But Mickey Quinn held up his hand. “They knew,” he said wisely.
“But not until fairly recently,” Kate said. “Maybe when he went into the hospital in ’73, the same year my Kevin graduated from Regis.”
But Mickey Quinn frowned and shook his head slightly, apologetically, as if over something that was only slightly askew. “They knew,” he said again. “We all knew. I left Irving Place in ’68 and the fellows in the office knew Billy was a drinker even then. They covered for him, mostly in the afternoon. He’d go out on a call after lunch and not come back to the office and they’d cover for him. Everyone liked him. They were glad to do it.”
“I think Smitty might have covered for him, too,” his sister Rosemary said. “In the shoe store. Do you remember Smitty? Mr. Holtzman’s assistant—the little bald man?” He was remembered. “I went in there one Saturday, we were looking for Betty’s First Communion shoes, and Billy was just coming in from lunch. I had the feeling he’d had a few. I mean, he was fine, and the kids were always happy to see him, but I noticed Smitty did all the measuring and got out all the shoes. Billy mostly sat. Which wasn’t like him. He was sucking a peppermint.”
“When was this?” Kate asked as her wealthy husband, trained at Fordham Law, might do.
Rosemary paused to calculate. “Betty was in second grade. 1962.” Almost in apology: “He was drinking in ’62.”
Dan Lynch raised his hands. “Well, what does it mean? He was drinking before that, too. Down at Quinlan’s. Saturdays after work. Sunday evenings. Hell, I was always there, too, and my liver’s fine.”
“So when did it become a problem?” cousin Rosemary asked.
“He started AA in the late sixties,” Kate told her. “And then again around ’71 or ’2.”
“He took the pledge on that Ireland trip. That was ’75.”
“What good did it do?”
“I thought it would stick. Maeve did, too.”
Dan Lynch was chuckling, his hand around his small glass. “I remember Billy saying that AA was a Protestant thing, when you came right down to it. Started by a bunch of Protestants. He said he didn’t like the chummy way some of them were always calling Our Lord by his first name. I drove him to the first meeting and waited to take him home, ’cause Maeve didn’t want him driving, and when he came out he said you could tell who the Catholics were because they’d all been bowing their heads every ten seconds while the Protestants bantered on about Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
(And sure enough, up and down our stretch of table, heads bobbed at the name.)
Sister Rosemary said, “He didn’t like them calling God a Higher Power, either—which I guess was the official AA term. Nondenominational, you know. He said it only proved that none of them had a sense of humor. He said you’d have to be God Himself to get higher than most of these guys had been.”
There was a bit of low laughter. “Billy had an irreverent streak,” Mickey Quinn said. “I liked that about him.”
“The way Father Joyce explained it to me,” Dan Lynch went on, “the pledge was the Catholic take on AA. He said it was like Holy Orders itself—you signed on and there was no going back. An unbreakable oath never to take another drink. Billy thought it was the real thing.”
“But he broke it.”
“There’s plenty of priests that break their Holy Orders, too,” Dan Lynch told them.
“Well, it got him over to Ireland, anyway,” cousin Rosemary said. “I tried to talk him and Maeve into going over any number of times, but I never could do it.”
“Maeve isn’t one to travel,” sister Rosemary said. “She’s a homebody. Always has been.”
Kate leaned toward us all, folding her hands on the table: a tasteful ring of diamonds, a gold bracelet, a professional manicure. “I often wondered,” she said slowly. “I never had the heart to ask him, but I wondered if Billy went to visit the town Eva came from. While he was there.”
Her sister shook her head. “Billy would have said so if he had. He wasn’t one to keep things to himself.”
Kate paused only a moment to consider this. “But he might not have wanted it to g
et back to Maeve, you know,” she said. “He might have thought she wouldn’t want to hear about a pilgrimage like that.”
“Who would?”
“She knew about Eva?” Bridie said, whispering too, adding, “Thank you,” as the waiter took her empty plate.
“I’m sure,” Kate said. “Thank you.” And then: “Actually, I don’t know. I’d imagine she knew something about her.”
“He must have told her something.”
“Dennis would know,” Mickey Quinn said. “They were always real close.”
But Dan Lynch objected. “I was the best man at Billy’s wedding,” he said. “We were pretty close, too.”
“Well, did he tell Maeve about the Irish girl?”
Dan waved his hand impatiently. “I’m sure he told her something. You know, it’s not the sort of thing men talk about. And I’ll say this for Billy, you never heard him mention that girl again, once he married Maeve.”
“Ask Dennis,” cousin Rosemary whispered.
The selected dessert was brought in: two scoops of vanilla ice cream in cold stainless-steel bowls. Hands in laps to make the poor man’s job easier as he reached between their shoulders. Thank you.
“I remember watching Maeve come down the aisle,” Dan Lynch said, lifting his spoon, holding it like a scepter. “She was on her old man’s arm, but it was clear as you watched her that she was shoring him up, you know, keeping him straight. She was smiling as sweetly as any bride, but there was a determination in the way she walked, you know, the way she held her shoulder up against his, like it was a wall about to topple. She took hold of his arm when they got to the first pew, I mean a good grip, right here.” He demonstrated, taking hold of his own forearm, spoon and all. “The old man banged his foot against the kneeling bench—you could hear it all over the church—and for a minute it looked like he’d go down headfirst. But she got him in there and got him seated. She maneuvered him. By sheer force of will, I’d say. And then she gave a little nod, as if to say, Well, that’s done, and came up the steps to marry Billy.” He sipped his beer. “Ready to take him on, is what I remember thinking. She was a plain girl, but determined.”
“Very quiet,” Mickey Quinn said. “Go over there for dinner and Billy would do most of the talking.”
“He was lucky to find her,” sister Rosemary said. “My mother always said there’s nothing more pathetic than an old bachelor who’s not a priest. That’s what she thought Billy would be, after the Irish girl. An old bachelor. No offense, Danny.”
And Dan Lynch laughed, blushed a little across his bald dome. Sipped his beer and shrugged. None taken—the story here being that Danny Lynch was such a connoisseur of beauty and behavior that no flawed wife could have pleased him and no flawless one could have been found.
“Did you ever meet her?” Bridie from the old neighborhood whispered. “The Irish girl?”
The two sisters exchanged a look across the table—the kind of look they might have exchanged had they been eyeing the last bite of a shared piece of cake. “She came to the apartment,” Kate said, scooping it up. “It was just before she went back home. Billy borrowed Mr. Holtzman’s car to go into the city to get her.”
“She was very pretty,” Rosemary added, taking a crumb. “Like Susan Hayward.”
“Oh, I didn’t think so,” Kate said. “But she had nice hair, dark auburn. And big brown eyes. She wasn’t very tall, even a little chubby. Billy brought her for Sunday dinner and then couldn’t eat a bite himself. He was so—I don’t know what—so delicate with her. The way he spoke to her, and watched her and listened to her. She did have a nice voice, you know, the poor girl” (a reminder to us all that she had died young), “with her brogue and all. My mother’s brogue got thicker just listening to her. They were good-looking together, Eva and Billy. A handsome pair. Better looking together than singly, somehow. He was lovestruck, that’s for sure. We kidded him when he got home, after he’d taken her back to the city. We put his plate out on the dining-room table when we heard him coming up. We’d saved it. He’d hardly eaten a bite. We said, ‘What was wrong with your dinner, Billy?’” She began to laugh. “We said, ‘How are you going to marry this poor girl if her mere presence takes your appetite away? Billy,’ we said, ‘she’ll be at your dinner table every day, breakfast too, when are you going to eat? You’ll starve. You’ll waste away to nothing. You’ll have to sneak over here just to calm down enough to have your dinner.’ We gave him such a hard time.”
“And do you remember what Momma said?” sister Rosemary asked. Kate swallowed her smile, looked blank. Professional makeup, too. “No.”
Well pleased, Rosemary said to my end of the table, “You know my mother thought herself a kind of psychic.” She was getting her share of the story, after all. “She read cards and had dreams. And she said after Billy left that when she touched the girl’s hand she felt four quick pulses in her own stomach, like baby kicks, which meant they’d have four children.”
“Or that your mother had indigestion,” Mickey Quinn said.
“More likely,” Kate said. “You know how my mother cooked.”
“She wasn’t a much better prophet.”
But Bridie shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “It might have been true. I mean, you could say if the girl had lived, that’s how many children they might have had.”
Dan Lynch said solemnly, “Which would have made this a different day.”
“It would have been a different life,” Bridie said.
Mickey Quinn shook his head and leaned back in his chair, as if to avoid all such speculation. “I’ll have that cup of coffee now, please, when you get the chance,” he said to the waiter’s back.
“A different life,” Dan Lynch repeated, and raised his beer.
The light through the window behind Maeve had begun to change now. A trace of shadow coming between the dark trunks of the trees, the clouds breaking up, perhaps.
“I don’t agree with that,” sister Rosemary said softly. “I’ve done a lot of reading in this regard, with Billy the way he was. Alcoholism isn’t a decision, it’s a disease, and Billy would have had the disease whether he married the Irish girl or Maeve, whether he’d had kids or not. It wouldn’t have been such a different life, believe me. Every alcoholic’s life is pretty much the same.”
“Now I don’t agree,” Dan Lynch said under his breath, and Kate added, “It’s not always fatal.”
“I say it’s a matter of will,” Dan Lynch said, speaking up, keeping Kate from running away with the talk once again. “I drank side by side with Billy Lynch for nearly forty years. My liver’s fine. Billy never had the will to stop.”
Sister Rosemary frowned, shaking her head. “That’s not fair. When he went to Ireland, when he took the pledge, he was truly determined. He told me so. You know what faith Billy had. And you know how seriously he took that trip. He was truly determined that time. But the disease had him in its grip.” She raised a fist, showing them.
Dan Lynch poured himself and Mickey Quinn another beer. “Well, let me tell you what he told me,” he said. “Down at Quinlan’s, maybe a year or two after the Irish girl died. He told me,” he said, lifting his glass, pointing around it, “that every year was a weight on his shoulders. Every hour was, he said.” He pointed to Kate. “Remember when you said he was like a man waiting for a bus, when he was waiting to get her back here? Well, when you said that I thought: It never changed. He was still waiting, years after she’d died. But he was waiting to go to her now. Ever since the night Dennis told him the news, he was waiting to die. I’m sure of it.”
“But there was Maeve,” Bridie from the neighborhood cried.
“That’s not fair to Maeve,” sister Rosemary said.
Dan Lynch shook his head. “I’m not saying a word against Maeve. She had a lot to handle, that’s for sure. But if you ask me, Billy had a foot in the hereafter even before he met Maeve.” He glanced up the table and then leaned forward, lowering his voice because the gues
ts were beginning to thin out, Billy’s friends and relatives getting up to have a few more words with Maeve, to go to the bathroom, or to get another drink before departing.
“We went to Mass together once. Feast of the Assumption. August 15. We’d both stopped into Quinlan’s after work, a blazing hot day if there ever was one, hot as Hades, and both of us realized at the same time what the date was. We hightailed it over to 6:30 Mass at St. Sebastian’s and, I don’t know, I glanced at Billy, just after Communion. It struck me that it wasn’t any thought of Our Lord or the Blessed Mother that put that look on his face. It was the girl. The Irish girl. When he turned his eyes to heaven, that’s who he saw.”
“Oh, nonsense,” sister Rosemary whispered.
Mickey Quinn studied the ceiling. Down the table, a few heads turned, perhaps sensing a fight.
Dan Lynch took a sip of his beer, pursed his lips around the taste. “What’s nonsense is all this disease business,” he said. “Maybe for some people it’s a disease. But maybe for some there are things that happen in their lives that they just can’t live with. Things that take the sweetness out of everything. Maybe for some it’s a sadness they can’t get rid of or a disappointment that won’t go away. And you know what I say to those people? I say good luck to those people.” He raised his glass, raised his chin. “I say maybe they’re not as smart and sensible and accepting as every one of us,” indicating every one of us with a sweep of his beer, “but they’re loyal. They’re loyal to their own feelings. They’re loyal to the first plans they made—just like Billy was loyal to Holtzman and the job he gave him. And like he would have been loyal to her if she had lived and come back here and they’d gotten married. Just like he was loyal to Maeve: Billy never breathed another word about that girl after he married Maeve. But the girl was first, and for Billy she would always be first. That’s the kind of guy he was. Maeve couldn’t change him.”
“I think he went to her grave when he was in Ireland,” Kate said suddenly. “I just have the feeling that sometime while he was over there he went to the town she was from and visited her grave. I think it was the whole reason he made the trip.”
Charming Billy Page 2