Rosemary shook her head, appealed to Mickey Quinn, who was intent on dissolving the sugar in his coffee. “He went with Father Ryan to take the pledge,” she said patiently. “To make the retreat. To quit drinking.”
But Kate said, “Oh, Rose, think about it. Ireland’s not the only place that has retreats for alcoholics. He could have made one over here. Maybe he thought if he went to her grave he could put something to rest, finally. Put his feelings for her to rest so then he could quit drinking.”
“But he couldn’t,” Dan Lynch said sadly, and poured another little beer.
“He couldn’t,” Kate agreed. “Which is why it didn’t stick, as determined as he was.”
But Rosemary’s mouth was set. “No,” she said firmly. “Look, there are faster and more pleasant ways of killing yourself. I tell you, I’ve read everything there is about this. Alcoholism is a disease, it’s genetic. Our own father ruined his liver as well and probably would have died the same way if he hadn’t gotten cancer. And Uncle John in Philadelphia was an alcoholic. And two of his sons—Chuck and Peter—go to AA. And Ted. And Mary Casey and Helen Lynch. And Dennis’s father was no teetotaler either.”
“Uncle Daniel died of cancer,” Dan Lynch said indignantly. “He was no drunk.” He turned to Bridie and Mickey Quinn. “He brought his six brothers and a sister over here and God knows how many other friends and relations. All on a motorman’s salary.”
“He was a saint,” Bridie from the neighborhood said, nodding. “My mother always said so.”
“Okay,” Rosemary said. “God bless Uncle Daniel, but my point is that our family has what they call a genetic predisposition to both cancer and alcoholism. Billy had it in his genes.”
“When he came back from Ireland,” Kate said softly, stroking the stem of her glass. “June of ’75—I remember because my Daniel had just graduated from Fordham—he went straight out to Long Island. Out to the little house. Dennis was there, it wasn’t long after he’d lost Claire. Remember how he used to rent the place back from his mother’s tenant so he could spend his vacation? Well, Billy wasn’t home for more than a day when he took the train out—and he hadn’t been there in years.”
“Meaning?” Rosemary asked coolly.
“Meaning he went back to the place he first met her. Eva. He was trying to work something out.”
“Oh, honestly,” Rosemary said. “It had been nearly thirty years. What was there to work out? It was a shame that she died, but Billy had had thirty years of living since then. I mean, come on, name me anything that’s going to stay with you that strongly for thirty years.”
Which seemed to silence our end of the table for a moment, as if the thing we would mention had only momentarily slipped our minds.
Cousin Rosemary poked her swizzle stick into the remaining ice in her glass. “It’s all water under the bridge,” she said, as if water from under the bridge was the very thing the tall glass contained. “What’s the point of even discussing all this now? Billy was here and now he’s gone, and I for one just can’t believe it. Despite his troubles.” Tears now. “I’ll miss him. I’ll miss his voice over the phone. I’ll miss his smiling face.”
“Hear, hear,” Mickey Quinn said.
But Dan Lynch raised his beer again. He was whispering, his voice fierce. “I just don’t think it credits a man’s life to say he was in the clutches of a disease and that’s what ruined him. Say he was too loyal. Say he was disappointed. Say he made way too much of the Irish girl and afterwards couldn’t look life square in the face. But give him some credit for feeling, for having a hand in his own fate. Don’t say it was a disease that blindsided him and wiped out everything he was.” He bit off a drink, his face flushed. “Do the man that favor, please.”
The clouds were indeed breaking up and a feeble bit of sunshine was striking Maeve’s hair—you couldn’t say lighting it up, but striking it and revealing it for what it was: a dull brown getting coarser with gray, and yet showing what it was so clearly that you could see a kind of appeal in it. Maybe it was just the honesty of it. A kind of beauty that was not a transformation of her simple features but an assertion of them, an insistence that they were no more than what they appeared.
My father stood beside her, his napkin in one hand, reaching behind her to say goodbye to another cousin, Ted from Flushing, who went to AA in order to die of cancer, not cirrhosis. Ted’s little wife was right behind him, one hand on his back.
In the next half hour, my father would pay the bill and distribute the tips and take Maeve’s arm when she walked out to the limousine that would carry her home to Bayside. He would promise to stop in to see her later in the evening, just to make sure she was all right. He would shake hands with everyone, thanking them for coming, agreeing it was unbelievable, unbelievable still. In our car, crossing the bridge, he would listen with a slight smile when I told him about the debate that had gone on at our end of the table.
“Well, here’s the saddest part,” he would say, finally, wearily, as if he were speaking of an old annoyance that time had nearly trivialized, but not quite: “Here’s the most pathetic part of all. Eva never died. It was a lie. Just between the two of us, Eva lived.”
TELLING THE STORY, my father easily slipped from past to present: Billy was, Billy is, Billy drank, Billy drinks. Billy sets his heart on something.
In the front seat of Mr. Holtzman’s car, on Seventieth Street, just off Park Avenue, my father watched Mary, Eva’s sister, worry a small handkerchief, Irish linen (naturally), embroidered in one corner with three small shamrocks. Emblematic, sure, now, looking back, but in truth the children, her charges, had sewn it for her. She had shown them how to make the stitches. They had made one for their mother and their aunt. And one for her.
Her fingernails were round and white and always made him think that she had just come from giving all seven of them their baths, as she probably had. It was late September, late afternoon. The light the same that hung over the city now as we crossed the bridge into Queens.
“They’re shamrocks,” she said, showing him because he had asked her. She spread out the damp fabric. Her skirt was good wool, her sweater cashmere, hand-me-downs from her employer. “The children made it for me. I showed them the stitch. They made one for their mother and one for her sister up in Riverdale. And then they made one for me. Shamrocks.”
“I know what they are,” he said. And then added, “God, you’re a silly woman.”
The look on her face told him she was anything but. “Don’t kill the messenger,” she whispered.
It was Mr. Holtzman’s car, an old humpbacked Ford: the wide cloth front seat, the old rationing sticker in the corner of the windshield that asked, Is this trip necessary? Something of the smell of the man’s hair pomade on the back of the seat and the fabric around the window.
She said, “What will you tell him?” and if you’re looking to blame someone for the lie, then you could as well blame her for putting it just that way: What will you tell him? As if there were options to choose from.
“I’d like to tell him she’s dead,” he said.
“She’s dead to me.”
This was Irish hyperbole, of course. This was the Irish penchant for pursuing any mention of death, any metaphor, any threat, the way a seal goes after a tossed mackerel. Because he’d had no real intention then. No plan. This was just talk.
“I knew about Tom,” she said, the hometown boy Eva had married. “But I knew she liked Billy, too. She always said how sweet he was. She always talked about his great letters. I never would have believed she’d steal his money.” To make a down payment, she had said, on a gas station on the convent road outside Clonmel.
He leaned across her lap, across the good wool skirt, the soft cashmere, the still-lovely dregs of her employer’s bottle of Chanel—and pulled at the bone-white handle of the car door. The handkerchief was in her hand, balled in her fist again. The tears starting again.
“I wish she had died,” Mary said. “It wou
ld have been better.” It was the Irish penchant for the word, sure, but also the fact that she was young enough to think that such talk proved her feelings were profound. “She’s as good as dead to me now.”
Leaning, he pushed the car door open with his fingertips. He still had one hand on the steering wheel. She put her hand on his arm, the linen handkerchief between them. “Will you call me?” she said.
He said he would. He kissed her. And then leaned to push the door open again, all the way now, so that it swung out over the sidewalk. So that there was nothing else for her to do but to get out, unassisted, and to walk with her head bent and her handkerchief to her eye, unescorted, back to the building’s service door, where she’d been waiting for him just half an hour before.
Such rudeness meant something in those days. It’s all ignorance now, but then it was intentional and it meant something to both of them. It meant the end of the thing.
Even climbing the stairs to Billy’s apartment that evening, he had no real plan. He only knew he didn’t want to deliver the blow with Billy’s two sisters and their husbands and Aunt Ellen, his mother, around. Imagine the night: your life’s plans blasted, the baby crying in the next room, your sister and her young husband stirring in their bed, your widowed mother tapping at your bedroom door hour after hour saying, “Are you all right? Would you like a cup of tea?” Saying from behind the closed door, “Billy, there’ll be plenty of other girls, believe me.”
When Dennis had left Mary in the city that evening, he first went home to Jamaica, where earlier in the day Holtzman had wondered out loud if the little Long Island house had done all right in last night’s storm. He’d grabbed his Dopp kit and a suit, a pressed shirt and a tie, and then told Holtzman he would drive out there tonight, just to see how the little house had fared.
Surprised, Holtzman licked his lips and ran a hand down his belly. He was a jowly German with slick hair and earlobes that could have held an entire thumbprint. My mother’s husband.
“That’s awfully kind of you, Dennis,” Holtzman said slowly, full of hesitation. Wondering, no doubt, if there was a girl involved here, perhaps the very same girl who had called the house that afternoon. Wondering, no doubt, about the miles driven and the wear and tear on the machine and how many more years of accommodating her grown son would have to go into this marriage.
Dennis’s mother was on the other side of the living room, going through the Sunday papers, smoking. She paused to watch the two of them.
“I’ll take Billy along,” Dennis said—no doubt killing the light in the projector that showed Holtzman some pretty young blonde stark naked against the brown upholstery of his car. There would be no such nonsense if Billy went along.
“Billy always loves a ride out there.”
And Billy, opening the apartment door, grinned to see Dennis. There was a fountain pen in his hand, he was just getting off a note. He wore the trousers and the white shirt he had worn to Mass that morning. A drive sounded great, come in, come in. His sister Kate on the living-room couch with the baby, whispering that her husband had the bedroom, he was studying. Rosie and Mac, her husband, out to the movies because Kate’s husband (shhh) was studying. Billy’s mother coming from the kitchen with a book in her hands, whispering hello, reminding them to keep it low because poor Peter was in there studying.
The lie—still the only lie he’d intended to tell that evening— forming itself nicely around its little grain of truth: the storm last night. Mr. Holtzman, he said, had asked if the two of them would take the time to drive out there tonight to check on the place. They could spend the night and drive back in the morning, go straight to the office.
At the curb, they turned to see Billy’s mother running down the stairs and into the vestibule with a brown paper sack full of rolls and butter and slices of the overcooked Sunday ham. What will you eat in the morning, way out there?
Dennis put the bag on the floor of the back seat, next to the bottle of vermouth and the bottle of rye he’d borrowed from Holtzman’s cabinet. They both got in, the green light of the dashboard catching Billy’s glasses.
His mother’s vision of eastern Long Island, Billy said, was of wild black ducks and desolate potato fields and a mad, foaming sea. She’d never understand what he saw in it.
“Maybe she has a point,” Dennis said.
He set landmarks for himself, places at which he would begin: once they reached the Jericho Turnpike, the Sunrise Highway, once they crossed into Suffolk. “I saw Mary today,” he would say. “She had a letter from Eva. She got married, Bill, last month. To a boy she’d known since she was a child. She’s spent your money. Put it into a gas station, if you can imagine. Probably hocked the shoes you sent her. Probably hocked your ring. It’s a damnable thing, Billy, a damnable thing.”
But his courage failed him. His thoughts, to be frank, going more and more to the other people he would have to tell once he’d given Billy the news. His mother first and foremost, who would say, What a shame, with that light in her eyes that would say, as well, I knew it all along. Who would then ask about Holtzman’s money.
There was Holtzman. The man had already composed a long list of things that he believed Dennis and Billy and most of their generation were incapable of doing: running a business, making a fortune, shaking free of the lesson they’d learned in the service that having someone take care of you was equal to taking care of yourself. Creating a future.
Writing the check he had given to Dennis to give to Billy to send to Eva so she could come back before the summer was over, Holtzman had said, “You boys will never have any money if you spend everything before it’s earned.”
“This is an advance, sir,” Dennis had told him. “Billy will earn it back in no time at the store.”
Holtzman had looked wise, a maddening look in a man so dull. “But first he’ll spend it,” he had said.
Holtzman would have to be told.
And the fellows in the office. All of them knew about Eva, Billy hardly able to go twenty minutes without working around to saying her name. The girls in the office, too, many of whom (your mother included) had once had an eye for him. Many of whom, no doubt, would find the story of Eva’s betrayal slowly changing the way they saw him: if she preferred Tom, might not I?
(His mother telling him through his closed bedroom door, “Billy, there will be plenty of other girls.”)
The rest of the family would have to hear about it, and Billy would have to endure for some months, maybe years, both their sympathy and their studied silence whenever the subject of love and marriage arose. The neighborhood would have to know, too. Including Bridie, whom Billy was talking about now as they passed through Speonk—another point at which he had promised himself he would begin.
Bridie, it seemed, was engaged at last, to be married to a fellow named Jim Fox, from Staten Island, around Christmas. Which would make … Billy counted out loud, naming each couple off … the seventeenth wedding he’d been to this year.
“Everyone always thought she was holding out for you,” Dennis said.
But Billy shook his head. Kate said Bridie would have married Tim Schmidt if he’d lived. They’d had an understanding, Kate said. Kate herself had sat up all night with Bridie the day the news came that he’d been killed. In Italy, in the winter of ’43. Kate’s own husband in the same division and unheard from for six weeks or more. Wasn’t it easy to forget sometimes what the war had been like for the people at home? You know, Mike Breen was in the Battle of the Bulge as well. Saw him at Quinlan’s. He had a hell of a war …
The night grew deeper and the headlights showed just the one dark stretch of road that carried them toward that mad sea. Better she had drowned in it, Dennis thought. Better the women gather around Billy in real mourning, sit up with him all night if they liked, moaning about fate and loss and the inevitability of death, than have them turn their gummy sympathy, their studied silence on him every time there’s a mention of love and marriage. A gas station on the conv
ent road. Better he be brokenhearted than trailed all the rest of his life by a sense of his own foolishness.
He told him the lie in the rutted, rain-filled driveway of the little Long Island house. The headlights showed only a single branch, its leaves already touched with color, that had fallen across the side yard. (He was surprised to see it, as if he had made up the fact of last night’s storm as well as Holtzman’s request that they come out here to check its effect, as if, were he to touch it, he would discover it was made of paper and paste.) Everything else around them was in utter darkness. Billy had just gotten the flashlight from the glove compartment. It was the roof he was most concerned about, he said. Considering all the ceiling plaster he’d slapped around last summer, the last thing he wanted to see was that it had all ended up on the floor.
“I saw Mary today,” Dennis began. “She had a letter from home. About Eva.” The details came easily enough, without much planning. Pneumonia, he said, the country being as damp as the relatives always said it was. She’d been sick for weeks, he added, which would explain why she hadn’t written him for so long.
Billy sat for a moment, stunned, and then pulled his glasses off from around his ears and touched thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. And then he blessed himself and cursed and said quietly that it was a damnable place, a piss-poor primitive country. He asked if they had at least gotten her to a hospital.
“I don’t know,” Dennis said, meaning, of course, that he hadn’t thought the story through that far. He was stunned himself, at the audacity of what he had done, was doing. The breadth and depth of the lie he was telling, the world he was creating that even now he saw he would not be able to sustain. There would be a tremendous number of details, a tremendous number of opportunities for mistakes, misjudgment, for a sense of falsehood, inaccuracy, to creep in and bring the whole thing down. Billy would get a letter from her (let’s hope with a check inside), or he’d run into Mary on the street, or Mary’s employer, or he’d rush over to Ireland to throw himself on her grave, or she’d come back here with her husband and feel compelled to give him a call, to apologize. It was an audacious, outlandish thing he was doing, and he knew the workaday world, the world without illusion (except Church-sanctioned) or nonsense (except alcohol-bred) that was the world of Irish Catholic Queens New York, didn’t much abide audacious and outlandish. Not for long, anyway.
Charming Billy Page 3