Since my grandmother’s death, my father had spent two weeks every summer at the Long Island house and then rented it back to Mr. West, the man he still referred to as “my mother’s tenant,” for the rest of the year. The understanding was that when my father was ready to retire in another eight or ten years, he would sell our house in Rosedale and move here permanently. The joke was that Mr. West would then return to his wife and three sons, whom he had deserted a dozen years before.
My own mother had died of lung cancer in the spring of ’73. The solitary life my father now led could still, at times, strike my heart (my arms, my shoulders, the pit of my stomach) with an unbearable weight, but each time we were together I saw, too, that the life suited him well enough. He had always had a tremendous capacity for accommodation and contentment, whether alone with a newspaper or at a dinner table filled with friends and family. I suppose his mother had taught him not to expect much from life and so it was easy enough for him to see each day as an endless parade of unexpected pleasures. She said it as a caution against excess, but my father said it with a kind of amazed gratitude: enough was as good as a feast.
I suppose there’s not much sense in trying to measure the breadth and depth of your own parents’ romance, the course and tenacity of their love. Your parents’ or anybody else’s, for that matter. I know an older couple who have so convinced their grown children of the charm and endurance of their passionate history—married young and poor, separated by war, reunited to become dedicated and hardworking young parents, loving partners in the building of a business, patient guardians of teenagers, payers of tuition, and finally (looking proudly into each other’s eyes) grateful, rich, and still passionate retirees and grandparents—that their children have had nothing but disappointment and grief in their own love lives and now, in middle age, look at their aging and still smug progenitors with envy and despair.
My parents, I have to believe, had a marriage that ran the typical course from early infatuation to serious love to affection occasionally diminished by impatience and disagreement, bolstered by interdependence, fanned now and then by fondness, by humor. That they loved each other is a given, I suppose, although I suppose, too, that there were months, maybe years, when their love for one another might have disappeared altogether and their lives proceeded only out of habit or the failure to imagine any other alternative.
A good-enough, a typical kind of mid-twentieth-century marriage that suddenly blossomed into something else in the year she was dying. I hesitate to use the word about a time that was filled with so much pain, that was for me only awful, but I think it was during my mother’s illness that my parents became passionate about one another. Their meeting, their courtship, their years raising children, every ordinary day they had spent together until then all became merely the running start they had taken to vault this moment. To sail, gracefully and in tandem, across the abyss.
It made it easier that they both believed in the simplest kind of afterlife—that my father could say to her, even in those last days, joking but without irony, “You’re going to get tired of hearing from me. I’ll be asking you for this that and the other thing twenty-four hours a day. Jesus, you’ll be saying, here comes another prayer from Dennis.” And my mother would reply, her voice hoarse with pain, “Jesus might advise you to take in a movie once in a while. Give your poor wife a rest. She’s in heaven, after all.”
It was a joke, but they believed it, and they believed, too, I think, that their love, their loyalty to one another, was no longer a matter of chance or happenstance but a condition of their existence no more voluntary or escapable than the pace of their blood, the influx of perception. There was, I thought, a perverse joy about their closeness in that year, as my father, for the first and only time in his life, turned his back on the scores of friends and relatives who had come to depend on him as they had once depended on his father and thought only of her. (Refusing even Billy’s calls. Putting a pillow over the phone in our upstairs hallway before he went to bed and telling me to ignore the thing should I hear it ringing in the middle of the night.) There was, in their anticipation of what was to come, a queer self-satisfaction. It was clear now that they would love each other until the last moment of her life—hadn’t that been the goal from the beginning? They would love each other even beyond the days they had lived together; was there any greater triumph?
At eighteen, I was not so sure. At eighteen, I wanted only a mother who would be there in the flesh to see me graduate and get married and have children of my own. Who could keep my father from living the rest of his life alone, nagging his dead wife with a thousand daily prayers.
On the morning Billy arrived, my father and I had our usual breakfast on the front-porch steps. We were careful in those days to do everything in a usual way. It was different when I visited him at home, when he had his job to go to and I had my room and my friends, enough vestiges, for both of us, of our lives as they were before my mother died to help us through an hour or two without missing her. But out on Long Island our being alone together served first and foremost to remind us of her absence and we clung to routine (or I clung to what I was certain was my father’s routine when I was gone) as if it had been prescribed.
Every morning he would wake at seven and do Army-issue calisthenics either in his room or out on the back porch. He would shower and dress and then go to the kitchen to get breakfast. I would get up when I heard him put the kettle on. By the time I was showered and dressed, the cereal would be poured and the juice squeezed and the tray ready to be taken outside, where we would sit on the front steps if the weather was fine so I could dry my hair in the sun.
The property was not much, but at that time of the year the weeds and brambles that edged the front lawn were full of Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susans and the honeysuckle along the side yard was lush. Across our mostly untraveled street there was a vacant field, also a tangle of weeds and wildflowers, that held at its center the crumbling cinder-block foundation for a house that was never built. Beyond that, there were some trees, the bay, the blue sky.
The grass at my feet was as green as it would get and the sandy soil was already warmed by the sun. I leaned back against the step, resisted flicking off the piece of cracked green paint at my elbow (my father was on the step above me, watching). I tilted my head back to catch the sun on my face, recognizing as I did the perpetual hope of a sun-shot transformation that certain young men might notice when I returned to school next week—the tan, the sun-streaked hair, the slimming effects of a daily swim …
When I opened my eyes again it was to the sound of a car pulling into our gravel driveway. It pulled in only far enough to get its rear bumper out of the road, and even the way its engine died and the driver’s door opened seemed tentative. Slowly, Mr. West climbed out and walked toward us, looking all the while like a man on the verge of retreat. He was lanky, older than my father, I thought, but muscular and well tanned. He carried a cigarette cupped in his palm and held close to his thigh, and this made him seem even more furtive and cautious as he approached. I had met him only two or three times since my childhood, once down at Montauk, where he kept his boat, once on the street in Amagansett, although the matchbooks and magazines and mementos he’d left in the house each year made me feel I knew him better. He was, as my father liked to say, a Bonacker, a real Bonacker; a colloquialism that for my father meant Mr. West was a hick.
My father called good morning even before Mr. West had quite reached us, and when he touched his dark captain’s hat and apologized for interrupting our breakfast, my father cried, “Not at all, not at all,” jovial, friendly, sitting on the top step with his cereal bowl and spoon like Old King Cole. “What can I do for you?”
Mr. West pointed to the back of the property, to the clapboard garage where each year he stored his spare clothes and personal things for the two weeks of my father’s vacation. “There are a few odds and ends I need to get at,” he said politely. “If you don’t min
d.” And my father waved his spoon. “No, no, no, of course not, go right ahead. No need to ask. Have you got your key?”
Mr. West nodded, holding up a ring of them in the palm of his hand.
“Then go right ahead. Take your time.” Ever the benevolent landlord.
But as Mr. West crossed the side yard and unlocked and opened the wide door and began to rummage through his things (we heard him whistling, mumbling to himself), my father sat stiffly, uneasily, without sipping his tea or finishing his cereal or saying a word, more tenant himself than landed gentry. The house and property still more his mother’s tenant’s than our own.
And then a sudden blast of music came from the car at the end of the driveway, a sudden zipping riff of talk and static, violin, rock. Both my father and I looked over, but I know I saw him first, through the sunlight and shadow that played across the windshield: a boy in the front passenger seat, leaning to adjust the radio. As he sat up again, he put his arm out through the open window to tap the car’s roof. But then he stopped and suddenly raised his hand, the fingers spread, a dark band, braided leather, slipping down his wrist, in a gesture that seemed first and foremost to say: No harm. I raised my hand in the same way.
And there it was: our greeting. Our own children, in that first eternity, must have pricked up their ears.
“One of his boys,” my father said. Cody or John or Matt, I knew from the names penciled on the back of the pantry door. Matt the tallest in 1967. “He’s staying with his wife.”
It was my father’s belief that Mr. West would not have left his wife and three sons in 1964 if on the day he stormed out of their house in Amagansett my grandmother had not been there offering a furnished rental at a year-round, reasonable rate. What he would have done, what he should have done, my father claimed, was to storm out of his house, drive to the IGA, pick up a six-pack, drink it on his boat, which was then in dry dock in Three Mile Harbor, fall asleep, and then crawl home the next morning, hungover and remorseful and chilled to the bone. But what changed this scenario, changed forever the lives of Mr. and Mrs. West and their three children, was the index card on which my grandmother had written Year-round rental, reasonable, furnished, and stuck to the bulletin board just inside the entrance to the store, the index card that Mr. West had grabbed on his way out, six-pack under his arm, setting the thumbtacks flying.
Whatever guilt my father felt about evicting Mr. West in eight or ten years’ time when he sold our house in Rosedale and moved out to Long Island permanently was assuaged by his belief that as soon as he did so Mr. West would return to his wife and now-grown children.
The man emerged from the garage carrying a jacket and some loose papers under his arm. He called a thank you and got into his car and backed out slowly, his son turning toward the window only briefly as they passed the house again.
Inside, as was our routine, my father and I did the dishes and straightened up. We briefly debated what to do with the wine and beer in the refrigerator, the Scotch in the cupboard, and then my father, with a wave of his hand, said, “Let them be. It’s up to him, not us.” But then he added that it wouldn’t hurt us to lay off the stuff ourselves until Billy was gone.
As was our routine, we drove to the A&P in East Hampton to pick up the ingredients for tonight’s dinner—something to grill outside and something sweet for dessert. Then we headed for the train station, twenty minutes early.
It was one of those perfect eastern Long Island days. It was mid-week and so the village had settled into that polished lull it always acquired in the time between Sunday night and Thursday afternoon, when the weekenders began to arrive again. The sky was a beautiful, oceangoing shade of blue, with perfect white puffs of clouds, and the geraniums and impatiens planted around the stationhouse were lush. There was the sweet smell of hay and grass in the air, a touch of salt ocean. On the platform, I leaned to look down the tracks and saw the place, flocked by dark green trees, where the earth curved and merged the two black lines of tracks: infinity. How could anyone who had seen the illustration in grammar-school textbooks fail to think of the word?
A woman joined us on the platform, a tall woman in a thin dress, a bouquet of wildflowers held in the crook of her arm. And then two young men, tanned and sockless and dressed in expensive shades of pale yellow and pink. Then three girls in tennis whites and gold jewelry, another textbook illustration, but this time the caption would have read Hamptons Debutantes.
I wore cutoffs and sandals and a university T-shirt, my father a well-worn polyester polo shirt and gray gabardine suit pants, a beige baseball cap stained at the bill and around the sweatband, so that I suppose our illustration would be marked Natives of Queens.
“He’ll notice a big difference,” my father was saying about Billy. “After thirty years.” And then: “He sure as hell better be sober.”
“So what if he’s not?” I asked. “Now that he’s made this pledge. He goes straight to hell?”
My father glanced at me, seeing the apostate that I was. (Seeing, too, I suppose, his mother’s one-cornered smile.) “I don’t know,” he said, to spare himself my sarcasm. We had long ago given up arguing about the niceties of our Church.
We felt the change in the air before we heard it confirmed by the far-off whistle of the train. Now all of us on the platform became attentive. Those at the back stepped forward, those at the edge stepped back. There was another blast of the whistle and then the black engine blotting out the light. There was the screeching of the brakes until, in what might have been mistaken for silence, the train came to a full rest before us, panting, it seemed, huge. We heard the conductor’s voice, saw the shape of him moving past the windows. Another swung out of the middle car and looked up and down the platform as if he had arrived in an uncertain and hostile environment. Then he let go of the handrail and stepped out, turning to assist the passengers who had already gathered behind him.
Billy descended sideways, his black satchel coming first, black shoes and white socks and a Southern gentleman’s pale blue seersucker suit. He smiled and waved and then placed his suitcase on the ground and waited for us to meet him.
He was taller than my father, but slightly stooped. He’d been thin all his life and the heaviness, the bloatedness, that age and alcohol had brought to his frame seemed irrelevant somehow; he still held himself like a thin man. You would still describe him as such. His dark hair was combed straight back from his forehead, still marked by the impression of his wet toothcomb. He wore the rimless glasses that you once saw only on priests and nuns, and his blue eyes were pale gray, nearly pearl. He smiled a little as he waited for us to approach him, touched his red tie, as elegant as a pope, but then, just as my father put out his hand and said, “Hey, Googenheimer,” a wicked humor tumbled into his face. He grinned, they both grinned, shaking hands, laughing even, although neither had said any more than that yet. His cheeks and nose were bright pink with broken capillaries and spider veins, marks of his dissipation, sure, but, on Billy, subtly charming, almost intentionally so—like a touch of rouge and powder on a handsome actor’s face.
“How was the trip?” my father was saying, laughing still as if in anticipation of a punch line.
“Behind me now,” Billy said, grinning.
He took my hand, his was cold, and I gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, which was cold, too, and still smelling of Ivory soap and Sensen.
As the train pulled out again, he waved to someone inside—“Barney Callaghan’s son,” he told my father. “Can you imagine? A conductor on the Long Island Railroad.” He turned to me and winked. “The children,” he said, “are taking over the world.” His face was all brightness, small white teeth, blue eyes, pink cheeks, and red lips, flashing lenses catching the changing light.
At the car, we put Billy’s suitcase in the trunk—glimpse of my father’s tackle box and fishing pole and the green army blanket dusted with sand.
My father offered lunch at the restaurant across the street, and Billy glanced at t
he place over his shoulder, nodding as if it was something he remembered. The intersection at that hour was nearly empty, and the sudden stillness that followed the departure of every train made the sunlight seem anticipatory, somehow: Dodge City at noon, a showdown pending.
“It’s all the same,” Billy said, even as the midday stillness began to fray around the edges: a light changing somewhere, cars once more headed our way.
“No, it’s different,” my father said. “It’s not like the country anymore, more like any other suburb. We’ll go for a drive, you’ll see.”
Inside the restaurant, the air was frosty and dark, and although nearly every table was taken, there was a hush about the place. I shivered as I sat down, and rubbed my bare arms. Billy leaned toward me. “I’ll tell you what’s happening,” he whispered. He held up one finger, lecturing. His lips were remarkably smooth. His eyes red-rimmed but clear. “Everybody here’s been complaining about the heat all summer long and now they can’t bring themselves to complain about the cold.” He sat back a little, a smile working at the corner of his mouth. “Doesn’t that tell you something about getting your heart’s desire?” Then he motioned to the waiter. “Do you think you can adjust the air a bit?” he said softly, with just a touch of a brogue, a souvenir, no doubt, of his trip to Ireland.
“We’re working on it,” the waiter said, exasperated.
When he walked away, Billy pushed out his chair, stood, and then made a great show of swinging out of his suit jacket and draping it gallantly over my shoulders, saying to the people around us who had lifted their eyes to him, “A bit chilly in here, isn’t it? Don’t you think?” Getting each one to agree. Forming a union, it seemed. “Well, see now, you brought a sweater,” he said to the older lady right beside us. “You’re the clever one.” The jacket smelled of Old Spice and the Long Island Railroad. Shivering, I pulled it over my elbows and felt as I did a small square weight in one pocket—a breviary or a flask.
Charming Billy Page 5