By the time the waiter came to take our orders, Billy had learned that the old lady with the sweater had lived out here since 1952 and wouldn’t leave the place for a winter in Florida for all the tea in China. And that her companion, who had spent her childhood in Sag Harbor, felt much the same, although she still had her home in Yonkers.
“Well, I haven’t been out here for nearly thirty years,” he told them. The way he said it, this might have been his childhood home as well. The women were sufficiently sympathetic. Sufficiently puzzled. “My wife enjoys the Rockaways, you see, or used to, anyway, before it changed,” he went on. “She likes a place with a boardwalk. And you know how it is, one summer passes and then another and you find yourself saying, ‘Next year, let’s go out there.’ It’s the prettiest spot on earth as far as I’m concerned, but you know how it is, suddenly it’s been thirty years, even though it seems like yesterday.”
As he spoke, he rolled up his shirtsleeves—his pale forearms were sandy with the remnants of a winter psoriasis—took a fountain pen from his breast pocket, and began to scribble a note on the corner of his paper place mat, all the while seeming to give the ladies beside us his undivided attention. He folded the place mat in half, then in quarters, and then folded a neat triangle at the top and tucked it inside. He wrote a quick address on the white front—Father somebody or other, it seemed, Albany, New York. He slipped a finger into the breast pocket of his shirt, extracted a single stamp, licked it, and put it in the corner. He placed the envelope at the edge of our table as if a courier might momentarily snatch it away.
“Oh, it’s changed out here,” the woman with the sweater told him. “It’s not like it was in the forties.”
“It is in my dreams,” Billy told them. “Just the same.” He winked, ran his hand through his hair. “But then again, so am I.”
“Oh, aren’t we all?” the sweater lady and her friend both said at once.
Billy smiled at them with something like gratitude, as if he could not imagine being seated beside two more pleasant and perceptive women. He raised his water glass. “God bless dreams,” he said, and the ladies returned his toast. If there were shoes to be had, I suspect he could have sold them a dozen.
When the waiter brought our sandwiches he looked at the empty space before Billy with some perplexity and then quickly shifted the extra place mat at our table to Billy’s place. Throughout the letter writing and the simultaneous conversation with the ladies, my father had been sitting back, grinning, watching his cousin be himself and delighting in it—there was no other word—delighting in him. I glimpsed for the first time what it must have cost my father, during all those years of my childhood when Billy was banned from our home until he could show up sober, those same years when my father’s voice would wake us all in the middle of the night, as he shouted into the phone, “Billy, you’re killing yourself” or, more tempered but more desperate as well, “Just let me know where you are, Billy. Just tell me where you are.”
I moved my elbow against the weight in Billy’s jacket. If it was a flask, it was empty. If it was a breviary, it was rather thin.
“So how’s everyone?” my father asked, leaning forward to lift his sandwich.
Billy launched into a familiar litany: his sister Rosie’s kids (Holy Cross and Katherine Gibbs, Queensborough Community and the telephone company) and Kate’s kids (Regis Fordham Notre Dame Marymount Chase Manhattan) and his mother at eighty, who still liked her nightcap. And who he had seen from the old neighborhood and the office and who had invited them out to Breezy Point next weekend and did you hear Kate’s husband is now CFO of the entire organization, which means another addition to their house in Rye, which is already big enough for anybody, if you ask him, so he said to her, Why not take some of that money and feed the poor rather than redoing a house that’s already well done. It’s not like she’s happy with her life or ever has been, if you know what I mean. She told him she could very well feed the poor and put a new guest wing on her house at the same time, which only goes to show she’s not only missed the point of charity but become as addicted to spending money as her husband is to making it.
“And how was Ireland?” my father asked.
“Cold,” Billy said, shaking his head as if the weather were a moral deficit. “And wet. A miserable place to quit drinking.”
My father smiled, indulgent. “But you quit.” It was not a question.
“I signed on,” Billy said, nodding. “And the day after I signed on I got a car and drove out to County Wicklow. All by myself. To Clonmel.”
“And how was that?” my father asked—I have to say he asked it casually.
Slowly, Billy put his sandwich on his plate and sat back, his fingers touching the edge of the table. “Eva runs a gas station there,” he said. “With her husband. She has four kids.” He paused. “Eva does.”
My father was stirring his iced tea with a long spoon. He nodded, carefully lifting the spoon and placing it on the tiny plate beneath his glass. He touched the lemon wedge beside it. “I knew that,” he said.
Billy raised his eyebrows and smiled a little. His teeth were perfectly straight and even. Dentures, I remembered my mother telling me once, courtesy of Uncle Sam. “She told me you did,” he said.
My father fiddled with the spoon. Had I asked earlier in the conversation who Billy Sheehy was or Marge Tierney or Eddie Schmidt or Tony D’Agostino I might have been inclined to inquire here about Eva and her gas station and her four kids. But the chicken salad had walnuts in it that I was thinking I really could have done without and it was easy enough to guess that Eva was someone from the neighborhood, from the company, from my grandfather’s sprawling legacy of immigrants and immigrants’ children. Someone Billy might send place-mat letters to.
“I did know,” my father said. “I’m sorry to say.”
And Billy blew some air from between his lips and shook his head and glanced at the cold ceiling above us. Then he winked at me. “When you were christened,” he said, “your father drove us over to the church from your house. Your mother, God rest her soul, stayed at home—women did that in those days, didn’t they”—to my father—“missed out on their own babies’ christenings to stay home and get things ready for the party?”
“They were supposed to still be in confinement,” my father said, and then, acknowledging the truth: “But they were usually getting things ready for the party.”
“So your aunt was holding you,” Billy went on, “your mom’s sister Louise, and she and I went on in with the others while your father here parked the car. You were brand-new to that parish, weren’t you, Dennis? To St. Clare’s?”
I saw my father beginning to grin, anticipating what was to come. “We’d just bought the house the month before.”
Billy turned back to me. “Well, he must have gotten confused parking, because he took longer than we thought he would, and next thing you know, we’re all standing at the baptismal font, waiting for him. And in he comes, at a run, and when he sees us standing up there with the priest he does a little leap to get to us—I guess he thought we were going ahead without him—and splat, lands right on his face at our feet.”
My father was grinning now, looking at his lap, shaking his head.
“I’ve heard this,” I tried to say, but Billy went on.
“Well, everybody says, Good Lord, and when the priest bends down to help him, your father looks up all red in the face and says, ‘I’m just so loaded.’”
“With happiness!” my father said now. “I meant to say, I’m just so loaded with happiness …”
Billy shook his finger at him. “Yeah, but what you said and what everyone heard was ‘I’m so loaded.’” To me again, his eyes suddenly wet with tears, although only my father was laughing. “And just a week later I go into a diner up on Linden Boulevard and there’s the priest who did the baptism—what was his name, Dennis, he was an older man?”
My father shook his head to show he couldn’t recall. “I shou
ld remember,” he said. “He gave me such a talking-to when the christening was over.”
“Anyway, there he is in this diner and he comes over to me and he asks, ‘How’s that unfortunate brother of yours?’—he thought we were brothers—and I told him, ‘Still full of the same stuff, I’m afraid.’” And now Billy, too, began to laugh, a deep, quiet but irrepressible laugh, his eyes shining with their unshed tears. “‘Still full of it,’ I said.” He glanced at my father. “Not exactly a lie, you might say. More a matter of interpretation.”
My father bowed his head again, as if to concede something, but when he looked up his smile showed a shadow being lifted. “All right,” he said, as if he were ready to stand corrected. “All right.” As if he believed he was being forgiven.
We took him on the usual big-home tour through the estates of East Hampton and he seemed to remember every one of them from his single summer here after the war. One he identified as the Appleton residence—he had bought a postcard of it way back when. Mosler, Eastman, Bouvier. His favorite was a place on the edge of the beach, above a potato field. “Where’s Pudding Hill Lane?” he asked, and my father turned down it for him, driving slowly. “They called these their cottages,” Billy said at one point, turning to me in the back seat. “Yes.” I nodded as if the irony of it was still interesting. We had the windows open and Billy had one arm raised, holding on to the roof; the other hand was in the left, empty pocket of his jacket.
“Well, it’s still beautiful,” he said as we headed back to the village and the little house. “Nothing’s changed.”
“Just us,” my father said, but Billy had begun to recite slowly, softly, like a man humming a tune to himself, letting the words get caught in the breeze from the window. “‘I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree …’” It was a matter of some pride to my father, to Billy’s friends and family in general, that he had carried a volume of Yeats with him all through the war. Not that my father, or most of his family, read the poems themselves; more that Billy’s interest absolved them from any interest of their own. When my generation of cousins began to come back from college with copies of Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti and Sylvia Plath, our parents could sniff, “Oh, poetry, sure. Billy Lynch loves that Irish poet, Yeats (or Yeets)”—with a proud nonchalance that seemed to hint that the poet was a friend of a friend. “‘And I shall have some peace there,’” Billy said.
At the house I quickly changed into my bathing suit and headed out for my daily, transforming swim, stepping past the two of them on the front steps, short glasses of lemonade in their hands and Time magazine on my father’s knee: an article about Nixon, poor man (they were saying), poor hounded man, caught in his tangle of lies. Billy had left his jacket and tie in the guest bedroom.
The bay was about a mile and a half away, through streets that were, as my father had said, becoming more and more suburban. As he’d pointed out each time we’d walked this route together, thirty years ago there was hardly a house between ours and the bay, and the road that was tarred now was mostly dirt then. He and Billy himself that first summer they were back from overseas had widened part of it with the scythe Mr. Holtzman had lent them.
Now there were as many houses, as many cars on the tarred road as you might find in any of Long Island’s greener suburbs. And although most of the houses here, with their leanto carports and decorative lobster pots, with nautical flags and badminton sets in sandy tree-shaded yards, were clearly summer homes, beach cottages in the less ironic sense of the word, there were a number as well that had pale aluminum siding and custom-made drapes in bay windows and full two-car garages, as sturdy and suburban and dull as any in Rosedale or Franklin Square. Places for year-round living, for six o’clock dinners of macaroni and cheese and hurried mornings of getting to work and meeting the school bus. Suburban sprawl overtaking summer romance, as far as I could see. The chances for any of us living that rare two weeks in high summer, in a wild place by the sea, a hiatus, as Billy and my father had called it after the war, diminishing and diminishing.
When I heard a car behind me, I moved to the dusty edge of the road, as I’d gotten into the habit of doing on this walk. I shot an angry look over my shoulder when I felt the warmth of its engine on the back of my legs. It was, after all, my life coming at me, my future that was threatening to run me down—who wouldn’t give it a dirty look?
I slowed further, even stepped onto the sandy edge of the road, into the tall weeds and the grass. Finally, I turned. It was Mr. West’s car and Matthew or Cody or John was driving, leaning across the front seat to call out the window and offer a ride.
He (Matthew, you) was due to meet a friend at the lobster dock in twenty minutes, so we were spared the memory of a first conversation on the same sunny bay beach where Billy met Eva in those first weeks he was home from the war. We sat in the car instead, the broad front seat. There was the scent of stale cigarettes and old joints and the sweet smell of the beach towel I held on my lap. You were tan and wore the leather band around your right wrist. Just out of Stony Brook. Worked a charter fishing boat all summer. Wanted to own one of your own. Wanted to see the West Coast. Never went into the city, didn’t like it. Couldn’t imagine living in a place like Rosedale, going to college way up in Buffalo. A Bonacker, a real Bonacker. But your mouth was wry and your eyes dark brown. I suspected you would age into your father’s face exactly, but without the furtive brows. You ducked your head when you laughed, like someone who has flubbed his lines onstage, someone needing to correct himself.
We agreed to go out that night. Walking back from the bay—I’d stayed longer than usual, accruing benefits, I thought—I wondered if my father would be offended. I knew what my mother would have said: a date was for her my primary social obligation and superseded all other claims. Even in her final days she insisted I go out if someone asked me. “Go,” she had said, frowning as if she could not believe my hesitation, as if to say, Haven’t I taught you anything? When she couldn’t speak, she merely waved her hand, sweeping me out: go.
They were sitting on lawn chairs now, my father and Billy, on the sparse grass in front of the house. As I came down the road, my father was leaning forward, his forearms on his knees, his head bent, listening like a diligent priest. Billy was leaning forward, too, but with his arms folded across his chest and his back straight. They both looked up when my sandal hit the gravel driveway, but they were too lost, it seemed—in conversation? in the past? in recrimination?—to fully notice or recognize me until I was almost beside them. Or close enough to see that my father was shaking his head, ever so slightly, refusing, refusing something that Billy wanted him to take. And that Billy, holding himself carefully, speaking slowly, softly, even as he turned to smile at me, had already had quite a bit to drink.
OF THE (LET’S FACE IT) half dozen or so basic versions of the Irish physiognomy, they had two of them: Billy thin-faced with black hair and pale blue eyes behind his rimless glasses; Dennis with broad cheeks, eternally flushed, and dark eyes and fair hair that had only begun to thin under his combat helmet, somewhere, he claimed, in northern France. One every inch the poet or the scholar, the other a perfect young cop or barman. The aesthete priest and the jolly chaplain.
But in fact they had both gone to the RCA Institute before the war and had left steady jobs at Con Ed to enlist. In July 1945, they both had plans to return there in the fall, or as soon as the Long Island house was finished, as soon as they were ready to end this hiatus—they called it that—between their lives as they were and whatever it was their lives were to become.
Their charge had been to make the place livable again after nearly a decade of abandonment. To update the plumbing and the electrical, chase out the mice and the wasps, repair or replace whatever parts of the floor or the ceiling, the windows or the doors needed repair or replacement. The directive had come from Holtzman, the shoe salesman, as if an afterthought, over dinner the second night Dennis was home (although it was not home to him, it was the salesman�
�s house, even though he sat at his mother’s dining-room table). He offered the project as if in a burst of inspiration, even said something like “Here’s an idea for you boys …” although Dennis knew that in his kit in an upstairs bedroom (not his room, although the bed was the one he had slept in as a child) he had the letter his mother had sent him, the laundry list of reasons to remarry. He knew by the anxious glance Holtzman shot her, even as he pretended to be inspired, that the project had been his mother’s idea all along.
On the afternoon of their arrival, they parked the car in the rutted and overgrown driveway and in shirtsleeves and fedoras and army boots cut through the knee-high grass and the weeds with the scythe and the clippers Holtzman had lent them. City-bred, they made quite a show of it, testing their arms and the heat and their resolve, and sending the tall grass, the bees and grasshoppers and zithering beetles every which way as they made a good path across the sandy soil to the three peeling steps at the front door. They pulled the screen off its hinges with the first tug.
The key Holtzman had given them was attached to a chain that was attached to a metal shoehorn engraved with the name and the address of his Jamaica Avenue store. It was only this, this awkward key chain, that made them fumble a bit. The door itself opened easily, the way it would in a movie or a dream, as if the lock hadn’t been real at all, or as if the hinges had been well oiled. The place was musty and warm and you could see dust motes in the sunlight that came through the kitchen window as clearly as you could see the sink and the stove and the sagging gray couch.
Now the vague thoughts Dennis had been having about every place he’d been to since his return from overseas took form and he said to Billy, “This has been here,” as if Billy would know what he meant. What he meant was, this house has been here, just like this, all the while he had been locked in the adventure and tedium of the war. This had been here, just as it was (like the Chrysler Building, his mother’s new home, the Jamaica Avenue El), all the while and at each and every moment he had been away.
Charming Billy Page 6