Charming Billy

by Alice McDermott

  But what Mary had to tell him was all about Eva.

  This was the same week that Maeve, trying to orchestrate her own fate, came into the store by herself. It was a Thursday night, just beginning to get dark, and Smitty was working alone. By way of making conversation, he told her that he wasn’t sure if he’d lost his young assistant or not. Mr. Holtzman had simply told him this morning that Billy wouldn’t be in tonight. “We’ll have to see if he shows up on Saturday morning,” Smitty told her, releasing her heel and allowing her to place her foot on the ground and wiggle her toes a bit, leaning over her lap to look at the new shoes and to tell him, finally (no surprise here), that perhaps she wasn’t that fond of them, after all.

  Gently holding her ankle, he removed the new shoe and returned it to its box. To save her more embarrassment (she was already blushing to the hairline) he didn’t even offer to show her another pair. He simply said as he slipped her foot back into the tan-and-white spectators—well worn now and out of season—that there were always new styles coming in. She should stop by again sometime.

  He pushed his footstool aside and held out his hand to help her up, thus lending her—it was a favor he did for every female customer—a moment of regal grace as she stood.

  “Try us again,” he said gently.

  He was a dapper little man with thinning hair and a dark mustache. She was twenty-eight or so, in a brown tweed three-quarter-length coat and a gray skirt and shoes that should have been retired after Labor Day. She had combed her hair into fluffy curls that just brushed her shoulders, and her lipstick was fresh enough to have left a mark on her front tooth. Smitty had been selling shoes for twenty-five years, ten at A&S, fifteen with Holtzman. He was married with no children and, at this stage of the game, little love, but he had memory enough to know what it had cost her, walking in all by herself, no preoccupying old man or bold girl friend to hide behind. He asked Dennis later if it didn’t seem to him to be the exact way of the world that the very night she decided to take the risk, to throw the dice or spin the wheel and see just what might come out of being by herself in the shoe store with Billy, the two of them (with any luck) all alone, would be the very night, the first so far, that Billy didn’t show up.

  Smitty thought to tell her as he walked her to the door that there was a girl over in Ireland who had his diamond ring, but who could heap that kind of humiliation on anyone? There was no time for it anyway, because once she had gotten through the obligatory trying on of just one pair, once she had discovered that Billy was not, indeed, in there, she was out the door. Perhaps believing that the time saved on this fruitless visit could be added to the next when, surely, by the law of averages if nothing else, she would not miss him again.

  It was the very next morning when Holtzman came in that Smitty learned the reason for Billy’s absence: his fiancée in Ireland had passed away. Pneumonia. It was just like the man to mention the news only after it had had some effect on the running of the store. Holtzman himself, and Billy, it seemed, had known since Monday or Tuesday.

  “He won’t be back working here, then,” Smitty said. “With no wedding to save for.”

  But Holtzman shook his head. “He’ll be back.” He patted down a hiccup, touching his heart, the gesture making him appear to be soothing himself, reassuring himself. He liked Billy, knew the ladies liked him as well. Business was booming. “He just wanted last night off. He’ll be here Saturday. He’ll stay on.”

  Confirming what Smitty had begun to suspect, watching Holtzman carefully record Billy’s hours but never seeing a pay envelope pass between them: Billy was working off a debt.

  “What a blow for him, poor fellow,” Smitty said.

  Holtzman turned his hand back and forth, as if there were a number of ways to look at the situation. “Life goes on,” he said.

  As promised, Billy was in the store again that Saturday morning, paler perhaps, perhaps thinner. Maybe a new puffiness around his eyes, a whiff of alcohol on his breath. “I’m sorry for your loss,” Smitty said, and Billy gripped his arm just above the wrist and said, “Thank you, Mr. Smith. I wish you had met her,” before his voice broke. There was such perfect trust, such perfect helplessness in Billy’s brief touch (Smitty had felt something like it only once before when he’d given his arm to a blind woman on the subway stairs), that Smitty, although he barely came to Billy’s shoulder, immediately placed his hand under Billy’s elbow, as if to offer more support. “He was at odd ends,” Smitty told Dennis when Dennis next came by the store. “I’ve always said that it’s the ones who are always joking who feel things more deeply than the rest of us. It’s something I’ve always said.”

  Smitty began, in the next months and years, to step back whenever a young woman came into the store while Billy was there, certain that sooner or later, the urge to live being what it was (he winked when he said this to Dennis, as close as he could come to indicating that he was talking about sex), the grief would pass and one of the young women who came in would catch his eye.

  When Maeve returned sometime in January with her shuffling old father once more in tow, Smitty ducked into the stockroom until Billy was finished with his current customer, and when he peeked out onto the floor he saw that Billy had the old man’s shoe off and was trying to get him measured—the man grumbling all the while, the girl cajoling. Billy patiently lifting the man’s thick foot onto the wooden measure and watching it slide off again.

  “He’s a piece of work,” Smitty said when Billy stepped into the stockroom to pull the man’s size.

  “You can smell the beer on him,” Billy told him. “He must have had a quart with his corn flakes.”

  There was a bit of business with the shoehorn: the old man making an awkward circuit of the store with the silver shoehorn still stuck into his heel, up under his pant leg, and Billy going after him in a loping, stoop-shouldered run, trying to retrieve it. The girl watching, beginning to smile. Billy catching her eye and smiling as well. A start.

  But of course it was the old man he befriended first, Maeve standing by like some storybook princess awaiting her fate as Billy discovered that the old man’s family on his mother’s side was from Mallow as well and that he himself had more than once ridden on the streetcar in Brooklyn with that storytelling Irishman everyone was so fond of—that was your uncle, was it? There was the war to discuss and the Yankees and the Dodgers. The radio sermons of Bishop Sheen. The inconvenience, for a man his age and with his stomach problems, of the midnight fast before Sunday Mass and the people he’d known, over the years, who had worked for Con Ed, had worked two jobs the way Billy was doing, had worked for the NYPD, as he himself had done. “When Maeve, my girl here,” indicating her downcast eyes and the parted brown hair, “was eight years old, her mother passed away on us”—and you can imagine the boundless sympathy in Billy’s blue eyes, boundless and unhesitating and, best of all, untempered by the count of intervening years, the years since that everyone else the old man knew handed to him like a shot of diluted whiskey, a cup of tepid tea, as if the time passed since her dying was a kind of comfort. Billy, of course, understood that there was no comfort, not when the love you’d felt had been fierce, and true.

  They sat almost knee to knee, Billy on his footstool, the box of new shoes in his lap. The old man in the worn red-leather chair, his hands on the cool steel of the armrests and the tears springing to his eyes—always red-rimmed and rheumy—the handkerchief going to the nose—always swollen and cherryred—as he repeated the story of his wife’s life, his own insult and devotion, while Billy, with all the patience, all the time in the world, listened with the attentiveness of an avid apprentice, an admiring acolyte, listened as if he were receiving instruction, if even then he needed any instruction, in the perseverance of grief.

  Looking on, Maeve saw her father’s future with this kind and attentive young man before she had the courage to imagine her own. Or rather, being nun-taught, lives-of-the-saints-saturated (the quiet, handmaiden saints who, if they
had not chosen the better part, were freed by their bustling about with food and drink and dishes from ever having to form a sentence, or even a clear thought, about how they loved Him and why), she saw that only through her father’s life, which was all the life she had planned to know, would he gain any part in hers.

  Maeve’s, of course, was not an unusual case. “Unusual for your generation now,” as my father put it, “but not for ours.” The girl child wedded to the widowed father. Speaking of Maeve, my father had once said that although the joke is always the Irishman, the Irish bachelor, ever faithful to his dear mother, take a look at an unmarried Irishwoman’s attachment to her old dad if you want to see something truly ferocious. It was, I suppose, the very image I’d fought against myself, in the years after my own mother died, when I went off to Canisius instead of staying at home and going to St. John’s or Queens or Malloy, when I took only short breaks during the summer so that my father would know I had a life of my own, despite him, despite the weight that hit my heart stomach chest bones every time I thought of him alone, waking alone, going off to the office, shopping, eating, coming into the house at 4 a.m. after getting one of Maeve’s calls, after getting Billy off the floor or out of his car or into the hospital, if that’s what was needed. Even when I married Matt and we headed for Seattle. Lives of our own, we said. Self-sacrifice having been recognized as a delusion by then, not a virtue. Self-consciousness more the vogue.

  Maeve was only eight when her mother died—my father getting the story in her tiny kitchen, over all those cups of tea and slivers of cake she had served him after they’d gotten Billy into bed, over all those nights she had summoned him. There had been another child, an older sister, who died of lead poisoning when Maeve was very small. A policeman’s daughter, Maeve had gotten some sense early on of the precariousness of life, the risk taken by simply walking out the apartment door. Her mother, all false courage, touched her father’s back, the hem of his coat, as he went out, saving the intake of breath, the sign of the cross, for the moment she saw him gain the street. Anything might happen, and did, and Maeve felt the heavy weight of her grieving father’s hand on her shoulder. He might have shipped her off to female relatives, but he managed instead to trade in his beat for a desk job so he could stay alive for her. The nuns at her school were more than happy to take the child in for as many hours as he needed them to, and Maeve spoke often—or as often as she spoke of anything—of the pleasant afternoons she had spent in the tiny courtyard of the convent beside her school (vine-covered walls, a single oak, a statue of St. Francis above a concrete birdbath, one of the Virgin in the crook of the tree) or in its seldom-visited front room, where the silence was palpable, luxurious, punctuated as it was by the soft steps of the sisters going through the hall or up the stairs or stopping in to bring her a glass of ginger ale and some digestive biscuits on a saucer. There would be frost on the windows, her schoolwork spread before her on a narrow, lemon-scented desk, her handwriting, the lovely round perfection of it, her greatest vanity.

  There was no question, when she finished school, of having to find a job—which made her the envy of most of her girl friends, who were struggling with stenography and switchboards, and getting to the subway by eight. There was no question, either, that she would join the nuns for good. She did the shopping and cleaned the house and cooked his meals. Lipstick was for weekends, a movie with the girls, a Saturday afternoon at the stores along Jamaica Avenue. Her father drank most evenings, but it was a man’s right and, with a wife in her grave, his only solace. And when things got out of hand—when, in his cups, he growled at her or cursed her or waved his arms about as if her love and attention were cobwebs she’d draped around him—there were the nuns to go to, who would listen quietly and advise prayer, but also make sure that the pastor crooked his finger at the old man next time he and Maeve were at Mass. So she had the attention of men, too; her father when he was feeling fond of her and the priests when he was giving her trouble, and the butcher and the fellow at the newsstand, and even on occasion some boys she had known from school, not the best-looking ones, of course, the homely mostly, the bad-skinned and wet-palmed, the untalkative (which meant a long night of short questions and short answers for them both) who saw in her plainness, her lack of prospects, their own advantage. Billy she first laid eyes on as he leaned to place a pair of new shoes in Holtzman’s window on Jamaica Avenue, his hand held over his heart to hold back his tie. He looked up and smiled, but she knew even then that he would have smiled at anyone.

  Bringing her father to the store was her way of showing Billy her life in one sweeping glance. Bringing her girl friend was a flirtation with despair—if he fell in love with her talkative friend, Maeve would, at least, in her lifetime, know him. Walking in alone was a dream, but as it turned out, it was another girl’s dream. She was the plain one with the father, the one who without him would have become a nun. She was the one who, having chosen this part, must stand steadily by as his future was formed for her.

  NO ONE GATHERED in Maeve’s living room that evening could have recalled it either, not accurately anyway: how young they had been then. How much these things had mattered.

  Mac, Rosemary’s husband, who had once been as young himself (in the cramped apartment, in the childhood bed of his young bride), sat on the brocade-under-plastic-slipcovers couch, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his pant legs neatly tucked above the knee. He had assigned himself the task of cracking the walnuts that had been set out in a porcelain bowl on the coffee table and spreading the pieces of meat out on a paper napkin. He leaned over his work like a watchmaker. He had already walked down to the corner deli once for more rolls, and again for a bottle of ginger ale. He had stood on a chair to change a lightbulb in the kitchen and swept the wet walk with a broom from Billy’s garage, and now he cracked walnuts as if to keep up with a relentless demand, although the pile he had accumulated had already begun to overflow the paper napkin.

  Billy’s sister Rosemary was moving back and forth from the kitchen to the living room, pausing at intervals to glance out the front windows, hoping to intercept any visitor—as she had intercepted us—who might ring the doorbell or knock on the door and disturb Maeve. There was another couple in the living room with Mac, next-door neighbors, and Kate was there, although still without her wealthy husband. Two women friends of Maeve’s from the Legion of Mary had installed themselves in the kitchen.

  An Indian couple from across the street stopped by with a covered dish, but couldn’t be convinced to stay. Two men from Edison and their wives were just leaving as we walked in. Dan Lynch arrived by bus with a box of bakery cookies. He was changed out of his suit but looked that much more polished in a pressed sport shirt and tattersall pants. He took a seat in the living room as well and placed his teacup and saucer on his knee.

  The narrow house was a gallery of Billy’s life that evening—how could anyone help but think it? From the curb where we parked to the three brick steps to the cool hallway, dim as a church, that led past the living room and the staircase to the kitchen and the back yard where Shortchange, Billy’s motley mutt, had begun to whine as soon as she heard my father’s voice.

  How could my father keep from thinking of it: the sight of Billy’s car pulled up over the curb and the berm or left fishtailed out into the street, of the brick-edged gash above Billy’s eye, the pale soles of his shoes as he sprawled in the dim hallway, of Maeve standing over her husband in her pink chenille robe: “If you can just get him under the arms, Dennis.”

  How could he help but think of her maddening calm on those nights when she went into the kitchen to put the kettle on after they’d managed to drag Billy into bed—the drunk hauled up the stairs and pulled out of his clothes, wounds dabbed at with a cotton ball soaked in peroxide, shoes wiped clean with a wet cloth and set out on the front steps to dry, just another housewifely task completed.

  “Would you like a little sliver of cake with that, Dennis?”

  (How could he help
but think of my mother on those nights, at home, still healthy, sound asleep in their bed while he sat with Maeve and discussed a solution, a cure. Or of all the nights in the past decade when he came back to our house after Maeve had summoned him, and found himself there all alone.)

  It had always been my father’s contention that Maeve was as satisfied with the appearance of sobriety as she would have been with the sobriety itself, more so, actually, since real and permanent sobriety would have meant the end of these mad nights, these long days of nursing him and waiting for him, and then what would occupy her time?

  From the phone that hung on the wall in the tiny kitchen, she would tell my father when he called, “Oh, Billy went up to bed already, Dennis. I’m sure he’s asleep by now …” or “He just left to take Shortchange for a walk,” letting an hour or two, or even the rest of the night, go by before she called him back to ask if he would please come over and get Billy out of the street or off the floor or, once, away from the door of her bedroom, where she had barricaded herself against him.

  Or he might hang up, convinced she was lying (turning to my mother to say so), and suddenly the phone would ring while the receiver was still under his hand and there would be Billy’s voice, a little breathless but still sober: “Just got in,” the rattle of the leash behind him and the click of the dog’s paws against the linoleum. “Let me just get her her biscuit.”

  Billy’s voice over the telephone, this telephone: how could he help but think of it?

  We’d been in the house only a few minutes, had walked only from curb to front hall and into the kitchen, when my father reached for the leash that hung from a hook by the back door and said he’d take the poor animal for a walk.