It was midsummer the morning his car pulled in, but he was not on it. There was a general backing down the stairs. “Where’s Daniel?” someone asked, debating whether to go forward or to wait.
“Out today,” the strange man said.
Resignedly, they boarded, and just as they were seated, Daniel himself swung up into the car, looking ridiculous in a brown suit and a straw hat with a green-and-yellow-striped band. He was flushed and breathless.
The other passengers greeted him as if he were a returning hero, but he ducked his head shyly and took the seat just behind her.
“Any hurricanes?” he asked Alma, but with unutterable sadness, as if he had just been gutted of all humor and all resolve. She giggled and squeezed her arms together, turning in her seat to see him. “Not yet,” she said.
His brown eyes were on the back of Sheila’s neck.
“Your day on the town, Daniel?” a passenger asked him.
“You might say that.” But nothing more for them. Not this day.
“Out and about with Paddy?” a woman asked from across the aisle.
“No,” he said softly. “Not me.”
When she got up to leave the car, she turned to him—what a lost soul he seemed, in his brown suit and his good hat. She saw that whatever it was he had imagined he would say or do had been washed out of all possibility, just the way the color was washed from his face.
The next day, he was himself again, although he reddened even before she passed him. His cousin Paddy was getting married, he told them. Lucky man. To a redhead, no less. Not very big, but with a fine face. He was having some trouble with the ring, however—he’s thick, is Paddy—with the size of the ring, and so he took a two-cent washer and a ham bone down to the jeweler …
Everyone’s eyes going to her as he spoke. She watching only the street: a girl unlike any other.
In September, the women in the office were warned that they might have to make way for the returning veterans. On a Friday night in October she came home to find Mr. and Mrs. Dixon in the living room, him with his suit on and his hair slicked back as if he had come courting, her heavier than she had been, her moon face hanging wider and lower than usual over its cushion of soft chins. When she went into her bedroom to take off her hat, she saw that the mattress had been stripped, the pillows and blankets heaped across the opened window.
The son was coming home (on Aunty Eileen’s yellow face, joy looked like a stomach disorder) and she would have to find another place for herself. The Dixons had a little extra room in their apartment above the store—tiny, Mrs. Dixon said, but neat—and with a child on the way (Mrs. Dixon touched her wide waist) they would need someone to help them full-time. So it could all work out very nicely.
Over dinner, Mr. Dixon moved his black little teeth to say, “You’re not eating.”
And Uncle Robert laughed and said she usually ate plenty.
On the trolley car that Monday, she followed Alma’s swaying backside up the stairs and then said, “Hello, Daniel,” with an angel’s smile. “How are you today?” There was a pause (she was certain) and then, from somewhere in the car, a smattering of applause.
“I’m fine, thank you, miss,” Daniel said. “It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is,” she told him, although it was cold and damp with a spitting rain. “Just lovely.” Passing old Mr. Ellsworth in his seat, she swore she saw a tear in his eye. Not dead yet, after all.
The rest of the story went that on her second morning as a young bride she stepped out of her bedroom and found two characters asleep on the living-room floor. They wore mismatched parts of dirty suits and used their battered satchels for pillows and they slept with their hands tucked between their thighs, like hobos. There was a warm, barnyard odor in the air.
She stepped back, startled, and bumped into Daniel (“your dad,” she said in the kitchen in Woodside when the word alone was enough to make Dennis’s heart ache with his own loss), who was right behind her. “Who are they?” she had asked.
“Paddy” was the answer.
She claimed she never again had the place all to herself and would not have it to herself until Dennis went off to Fort Dix.
She never had his attention all to herself again, either, my father said, not even when he was dying and the parade of Paddys in and out of the ward where he lay so impressed all the nurses that one of them had asked—or so he’d heard told—Is he a politician?
But now she had this sturdy house, all brick, three bedrooms upstairs and a full basement and foot after foot of baseboard to dust and floor to polish. A tiny garage out back, a small yard with a tree, a front hedge. You could say it was the influence of her tidy German husband that transformed her from the indifferent housekeeper she had been while Dennis was growing up into the cleaning dervish she became as Mrs. Holtzman, but the more likely explanation seemed to be that cleaning Holtzman’s house was her way of pacing off her acreage, tallying her assets, running her hands through her pile of gold doubloons. There was a laundry list of reasons why she had married again and not one of them had anything to do with love, but with enough space (when you came right down to it), enough baseboard and yard and empty room, enough heat in the winter and sufficient windows to open for a cross breeze in summer, love was an easy thing to do without.
For some of us, anyway.
In those days, Billy was at Irving Place, too—and it wasn’t unusual for Dennis to run into him in the morning, on the subway or out on the street. Strangers watching them in those days would have thought they were long-lost comrades-in-arms, a couple of ex-GIs, maybe brothers, who had not seen each other since before the invasion. Dennis would catch a glimpse of light off Billy’s glasses and shove his way through the standing commuters in his car to shout, “Hey, Bill!” Or he’d hear his own name out on the street and turn to see Billy bobbing through the traffic, heading toward him. “How are you?” “How’s things?” Shaking hands and slapping their fresh newspapers on each other’s back. “Good to see you.”
It would take an act of will to picture him now as he was then: to put aside every image that had come in between, including that dark, stiffly bloated remnant of his face that was Billy in death, and remember him clearly: thin and handsome in those days, the dipped brim of his fedora over the blue eyes and the rimless glasses, a nick of dried blood on his smooth cheek, a red blush from the cold. A lingering scent of the church he had just come from on his overcoat, and a taste of the Eucharist still on his breath as they stood together in the crowded subway car, hand over hand on the same white pole, exchanging shouted bits of news or falling into silence as the train rattled and screeched and tried to knock them off their feet. As glad for each other’s company as if they’d long been deprived of it.
(“The way your brothers used to be,” my father said. In their teens and early twenties, when a buddy or two would come by the house and they’d all stand in the living room for a few minutes before they went out, grinning, knocking shoulders, laughing at everything because the world that just moments before had seemed the source of only aggravation and concern had suddenly become easy and diverting, theirs for the taking. “‘Pity the girls,’ I used to tell your mother when they’d gone”—tires screeching out of the driveway and the furniture they had dwarfed beginning to crawl out of the corners again. “‘Pity the poor girls,’” as my parents went back to their newspapers or Friday-night TV shows and tried to keep the smell of the boys’ aftershave in their nostrils, because they could not, as they would have preferred, stand out in the street to look after the taillights. “‘The girls,’ your mother would always say, ‘can take care of themselves.’”)
The daily Masses were a new thing with Billy, and tied up with Eva no doubt, although the relatives thought it had something to do with the war. He would not have been the first in the neighborhood to have come back with a new need for religion, a new sense that only the daily, formal petition for mercy would get them through the rest of their lives.
But what Billy was asking for in those days was not mercy, or maybe it was mercy of another kind. The mercy of time. He needed time—weeks at work and bits of his salary tucked away and saved—but he needed to stop time as well. He needed the world to hold its breath for a while; for all affections, all hopes, all plans for the future to stop in their tracks for a while, to remain as they were, all across the city. For all of us to be true to our own intentions.
The church itself would have obliged: the good sound of the familiar Latin, the same women every morning saying their beads, the red sanctuary lamp, and the candles beneath the statues of the Virgin and St. Joseph, steadfast and true.
Even old Father Roche, an insomniac who said the six o’clock Mass every morning, because, Billy knew from his own days as an altar boy, he would be sound asleep in the sacristy by eight. Unchanging.
And yet: from his sister Kate’s bedroom at any hour of the night there came her husband’s hushed and angry voice, and more often than not when Billy left for Mass she would be on the couch in the living room with Danny, her baby, in her arms. She would be crying softly.
“Are you all right?” Billy would whisper, awkwardly, embarrassed for her.
She would wave him away. “I’m fine.”
The poor child, nearly two but wrapped like an infant against the drafts, wide-eyed, watching them both.
On the drainboard in the kitchen, shades of his father when he was alive, there would be a bottle of gin and an empty glass, his mother’s antidote for a widow’s long nights.
After Mass, on the platform at the Woodside station, among the pressing crowd of strangers headed toward the train, Billy would hear his name called out and turn. Or, walking toward the office, he’d see a hat on a head and above a pair of shoulders that he would recognize as Dennis’s. They’d slap each other with their newspapers and grin madly at the not-at-all-unlikely happenstance of meeting. “How are you?” “What’s up?” “How’s Mary?” “What do you hear from Eva?” “Eva’s fine, had a letter on Tuesday.” At last and the first of the day: “Eva’s fine.” Even the mention of her name, the shouting of it over the subway’s roar, an act of courage, a reaffirmation of faith.
These were the days when everyone they knew was getting married or having babies. When it was not unusual for the hat to be passed around the office two or three times a day, a big diamond glittering on the finger of the girl who handed out the card and the pen.
“Is this for you?” Dennis would always kid her before he signed. “Come on, when is it going to be for you?”
She was a pretty blonde, round-faced and small-mouthed. A great white smile that had a kind of bonus in it: the electric click of snapped gum. She was engaged to her high-school sweetheart, who was still in the Navy.
“What do you want to marry a sailor for?” he’d ask her as he signed his name to the card. “Who’s going to be the Sunshine Girl when you leave?”
She’d grin (snap, snap) and lean over to take the card and the pen from his hand. “I want to marry a sailor,” she’d say. “So I’m not the Sunshine Girl when I’m sixty-three.”
Claire Donavan was her name. From Brooklyn via Stenography.
That fall and all through the winter and spring they visited more churches and synagogues than Dennis could have imagined—following hand-printed maps or hastily copied instructions, riding the subway in good suits or driving with Billy or Danny or Mike, or with his mother and Holtzman in the old car. Or crowded into a taxi with a group from the office, dry-mouthed and laughing over what they couldn’t remember about the night before. There was always the smell of bay rum and Vitalis and Chanel. The hangover breaking up like dark ice in the fall sunlight or a bracing winter rain, or in the triumph of finding St. Charles Borromeo in Brooklyn or Faith United Methodist in Hastings or Beth El in Little Neck, Queens, with twenty minutes—time for a quick cup of coffee—to spare.
And then the stepping inside, resisting the habit, in the Protestant churches, of reaching for the holy-water font (although, more often than not, they blessed themselves anyway, the ushers in their morning suits smiling to see it: with a face like that how could he do otherwise?), and slipping the yarmulke on in the synagogues, self-conscious but game (the jokes in the Yiddish accent would come later), the point of the ceremony, of their gathering like this in their best clothes and their polished shoes being everywhere the same.
For Billy, it was sustenance. Even the churches and synagogues themselves provided sustenance: crowded among apartment buildings or brownstones, sitting among trees or parking lots, appearing as you climbed up out of the subway or made the last of a dozen wrong turns through suburban streets or flipped the map upside down and looked through the windshield to say, “It should be here.” The number and variety of them sustained him. The sense that in every town, up to the Bronx and out to Staten Island and even far into New Jersey, the need for faith, for that which was steadfast and true, had given rise to these holy places. These cathedrals and sanctuaries and catering-hall altars before which Grace from Stenography might stand, or Jack from Service or Peggy Lynch, Uncle Mike’s pretty daughter, or her sister Rosemary, who was not the pretty one, or Tommy from the neighborhood or cousin Ted (straight as an arrow in his morning suit, you had to hand it to him, considering how comatose with drink he’d been the night before). Stand and say, “This will not change.”
On Sunday evenings while Dennis was going into Manhattan to meet Mary (taking the subway when he had resolved to sin no more, Holtzman’s car when just one more was the current resolution), Billy wrote to Eva. Still in his suit pants and the clean shirt he’d worn to Mass. His mother—God help her, she was a miserable cook—would be toughening up a roast in the oven and cooking the color out of Brussels sprouts and green beans (figuring that flavor was not inherent in the vegetables themselves but acquired after long simmering when they were doused in their serving bowls with butter and salt). Rosie and Mac, her husband, would be at his mother’s or the movies, Kate down to Uncle Ted’s with the baby so her husband could study.
“Dear Eva,” he would write, and no doubt he could have filled a page with it, the way he loved to repeat her name: “Hello, Eva. How are you, Eva?”
He told her how he spent his days, writing as well as he could, but being careful, too, he said, not to go on too long about ordinary things. He knew better than to say everything he felt. But he also knew that the listing of too many ordinary details was worse. To say what he felt would have been to stifle with one sentence a thousand others. But to say only what he’d done would be like describing a city that blocked out the sun.
He must have thought of the girl in Metz—“I am still here”—because surely it was all he meant to write to Eva, every Sunday as his mother put out her wedding china and Mac and Rosemary bustled in and Kate returned with the baby to timidly knock on her own bedroom door. As somewhere some church rang a distant bell and a bus spit exhaust on the boulevard and Mary took Dennis’s arm as they crossed Park, headed toward Lexington and a bar-and-grill owned by an Irishman who’d been brought over by his father. As the water struck the sand that led to the great house on the hill that Billy and Eva would marvel at again, together, his idea of heaven, before returning to their idyll in Holtzman’s little place, an idyll that would begin whenever the money he was putting away each week, which was increasing itself incrementally, even now, over at East River Savings, had grown sufficient enough to bring her back.
Unwavering faith: This will not change. I am still here.
But the money was slow in growing.
There were all the wedding presents, after all, the baby gifts and bachelor parties and the office collections and cab fares and cleaning bills. There was the money he gave Kate when she needed a lift after a night of the baby crying and Peter, her scholar of a husband, shouting about the exam he had to take the next day, the studying he’d not yet done. There was the money he lent his cousin Ted when he smashed his car on Queens Boulevard—so his new wife wouldn’t k
now—and the money he gave his mother when she broke her bridge. There was the special collection for Father Roche’s fiftieth year as a priest.
“You’re more like my father than my father was,” Dennis told him one night at Quinlan’s when he was crying in his beer that he would not have the boat fare by summer, much as he tried.
“In this family,” Billy said, his glass to his heart, “you couldn’t say a kinder word.”
Danny Lynch raised his own drink. “Amen to that,” he said, ever the keeper of the flame.
In those days, Dennis had his territory on the Lower East Side, from Broadway to the river, Houston to Canal, shops full of Jewish and Chinese merchants, streets littered with bums. The bums would pull themselves out of doorways when they saw him coming, rise from the edges of curbs to say, “We’re moving, Officer, we’re moving”—as if any round-faced Irishman in a topcoat and a hat had to be a cop. They’d salute like old soldiers, or hunch their shoulders and cower like serfs in the Middle Ages, like men who more than once had felt a nightstick crack upon their backs. “We’re moving, Detective.” Dennis would raise a fist at them, touch his overcoat as if he indeed carried a pistol and a badge. “You’d better move, fellows. And keep moving.” Drunks, bums, booze hounds. What you thought of, in those days, when someone said alcoholic.
Four steps down and into a dingy little shop that he’d remembered being closed up even before the war. The door propped open with flattened cardboard boxes, not for air—it was a cold gray day—but light, since the power hadn’t been turned on. There was a narrow counter filled with haphazard piles of shirt boxes, another dozen or so large containers filling all but a thin passageway through the store. There was a barrel spilling straw, an odor of old damp brick and roach powder. He rapped on the counter and called out, and a man appeared from the back. A small, short man in a wool jacket that was too big for him and a fur hat that was too small. His hands were bare and he held them together. They were bright white in the gray place and he rubbed them together because it was cold, of course, but the effect, with his hooked nose and his stooped shoulders, made Dennis think “Shylock.”
Charming Billy Page 11