Charming Billy

by Alice McDermott

  Upstairs, Maeve was resting. Rosemary and the two women from the Legion of Mary made it clear that she had insisted no one leave on her account—that everyone should stay, have a drink, eat up all the food. She had insisted that it was a comfort to her to have people in the house, but she needed half an hour or so to put her feet up, to rest her eyes in a darkened room. To take the measure, perhaps, of how she felt now that the ordeal was at long last over.

  On the wall above the tiny kitchen table that was covered now with casserole dishes and foil-covered cake pans and bakery boxes, there were three red apples made of pressed wood, one with a smiling pressed-wood worm poking through it: remnants of a back-to-school promotion from Holtzman’s shoe store.

  In the living room, Dan Lynch was describing another funeral: the church full, the aisles full, the vestibule full, even the steps leading out into the street. It had rained that day, too, but the crowd at the cemetery was so thick that their umbrellas had made a solid canopy. And even if you weren’t standing under it, you were so well flanked by other people that only the top of your head and your shoulders could get wet. And out of the crowd, in one silent moment as the coffin was lowered into the grave, Billy Sheehy’s dad, all unrehearsed, began to sing. “Danny Boy,” of course. A lovely tenor that almost sounded like a record being played, what with the raindrops on all the umbrellas. It nearly killed everybody, it was such a moment. And Dan Lynch had said to Dennis when it was over, both of them teenagers then, “Your father would have loved this.” But Dennis pointed across the road to another, smaller group of mourners who were just leaving another grave. “My father would be wondering why we hadn’t invited them over,” he said.

  Out in the street, a passerby had asked Dan Lynch’s own mother if it was a politician they had buried—there were so many people. “My mother told him yes, but the best kind of politician, because he never ran for anything. He’d go out of his way to shake your hand, to see how you were doing. He would give you the shirt off his back if that’s what you said you needed, but he wasn’t running for anything and never had, so he was the best kind of politician.” He nodded to put a fine point on it. “That’s what she said. I’ll never forget it. I thought that was very good.”

  “He was actually a streetcar conductor,” Kate said to the couple from next door. “Over in Brooklyn.” She was wealthy enough to be proud of the fact—to use it as a marker of how far she had brought her own branch of the family—while the couple themselves (two more Irish Americans, the man florid, the woman plump) seemed to indicate by their quick nods of approval and their generous “aahhs” that they themselves might have lied about it, said he was a supervisor with the Transit Authority, at least—add a promotion to his history even if he hadn’t had one in life, what harm?

  “He met Sheila on that trolley,” Kate said, and to the neighbor couple: “Dennis’s mother, our Aunt Sheila. There was a story that all the passengers on the trolley applauded when she first spoke to him.”

  “I remember,” Dan Lynch said.

  “She must have been all of seventeen or eighteen when she married him,” Kate said.

  “And he was well past forty,” Rosemary added.

  The two Legion of Mary ladies had come to stand beside her in the dining-room doorway. “It often happened that way in those days,” the taller one said. It seemed to amount to a dispensation. “You know, the girls so young and the men middle-aged.” She was gray-faced and confident. Even as she leaned casually against the wide doorframe she seemed ready to take over.

  Mac was tapping another broken walnut shell into his thick palm. “So there’s still hope for you, Danny boy,” he said. “You may turn up with some sweet young thing on your arm even yet.”

  But Dan Lynch held up a hand. “I’m long past that possibility,” he said, and laughed and blushed, and then quickly retrieved the teacup and saucer that were about to leave his knee.

  Rosemary was turning away from us, into the darkened dining room behind her. “I think my Michael wants to follow in your footsteps, Danny,” she said, calling as she went to the sideboard where the Waterford decanter and surrounding glasses were nearly obscured behind a dozen framed photographs. “I told him just the other day that his father and I are off to Florida in two more years.” She came back into the living-room light, a picture in her hand. “So if he wants to wait until he’s fifty to have children, he’s going to miss out on two first-class babysitters.”

  Mac selected another walnut from the blue porcelain bowl. “He shouldn’t be in any hurry,” he said, looking over the tops of his glasses. “There’s still time for all that.”

  “He’s thirty-two years old!” Rosemary cried: it was the echo of an ongoing argument. “That’s hardly too soon.”

  Her husband, putting pressure on the silver nutcracker, would not meet her eye.

  She turned to the Legion ladies, handing them the framed photograph. “This is Uncle Dan and Aunt Sheila,” she said pleasantly. “On their wedding day.”

  The ladies looked and nodded and handed it to Dan Lynch to pass on to the neighbor couple. He paused to look at it, too, although among my father’s relatives, the photo was as familiar as a crucifix or the portrait of the Sacred Heart, and as consistently displayed.

  “He was a lovely man,” Dan Lynch said as he passed the picture on.

  There followed a pause that threatened to get awkward, all of us smiling slightly and looking at the floor. “And where did she meet her second husband?” the neighbor woman said softly into it.

  Mac winked at her own husband. “These dames can’t get enough of this stuff, can they?” he said.

  And the man smiled and nodded. “Romance,” he said, rolling his eyes.

  Mac broke another walnut shell.

  “Well, it’s interesting,” the neighbor lady objected, slapping her husband’s knee, smiling.

  “You have to talk about something,” Rosemary said, not.

  “In the shoe store.” Kate spoke like an adult among bickering adolescents. “In Jamaica, the one where Billy used to work.”

  “Ah,” the woman said, nodding. “Jamaica Avenue. It’s Baker’s now. Not that you’d want to go there now.”

  “Not if you’re white,” her husband said, and got Mac to agree with him.

  “She met him during the war,” Kate went on, keeping her nose above any onrush of working-class bigotry, “when she went in there looking for shoes.”

  “Same place Maeve met Billy,” Rosemary added.

  “There was a shrewd one,” Dan Lynch said to the men. “That Holtzman.” He counted off on his fingers, “A German,” as if compiling a list of grievances, “owned his own shop, a big brick house in Jamaica, another out on Long Island, a third place down in Fort Lauderdale. He bought the Long Island house during the Depression, from some poor fool who thought Three Mile Harbor out there was going to be the next Coney Island. Holtzman paid practically nothing for it. Paid for it right out of his billfold, Billy said. Standing in the driveway of the place. Signed the deed on the hood of his car. Shrewd.”

  “Dennis has it now,” Rosemary explained. “It’s a nice little place.”

  “Dennis and Billy were the ones who fixed it up,” Kate reminded them. “Right after the war.”

  In Maeve’s own living room, on her brocade chairs and sofa, under the warm light of her lamps, no one who thought it would dare say, “Eva.” Although Kate could not resist mentioning that Billy had never gone back out there, over the years. Except for that once, when he returned from Ireland. Back in 1975. She’d had a postcard from him.

  “Maeve did, too,” Rosemary said. She said Maeve had a postcard upstairs, stuck in the corner of her mirror, from that trip as well. A picture of Home Sweet Home in East Hampton. She turned to the neighbor couple. “The house from the old song,” she said. Billy had written something very sweet on the back. Beautiful wife or lovely girl. She couldn’t remember the exact words now—it might have been something from one of his poems—but Maeve
had kept the postcard and had shown it to her the other day, Tuesday, after they’d gotten word from Dennis that Billy was gone.

  “Holtzman was another old bachelor,” Kate said, cutting in. “He must have been near sixty when Sheila married him. And he hadn’t been married before.”

  “That we know of.” Dan Lynch smiled wickedly. “Billy said once that he wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Holtzman had a flock of wives buried in the basement.”

  “No,” Rosemary said, fighting the tears that the mention of Tuesday had brought. “Billy liked Mr. Holtzman. He always got along with him.”

  “Dennis didn’t,” Kate said.

  Mac examined the last three walnuts in the dish. The lamplight showed the pale scalp beneath his thinning, graying hair. “Holtzman didn’t marry Billy’s mother,” he said.

  From the kitchen came the sound of the back door opening. Shortchange scurrying inside, my father’s voice speaking to her, saying, “Hold on there, girl” and “Good dog.” The ring of the leash. Water running in the sink and the dog bowl being placed on the linoleum.

  “How did we ever get onto poor Mr. Holtzman?” Kate asked, and Dan Lynch said, “I was talking about Uncle Daniel—if ever there were two men more opposite.”

  We heard the clink of the cookie jar where the dog biscuits were kept and my father calling, “Here, girl.”

  “Well, they both married Aunt Sheila,” Rosemary said, but Dan Lynch waved his hand: a meaningless connection.

  “And they’re all in heaven together,” Kate said with a laugh. “There’s that.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” Dan Lynch murmured, winking at me. “You know what Our Lord said about a rich man getting into heaven.” I saw him throw a glance at Kate, who deflected it nicely by leaning to reach for a shelled walnut and placing it elegantly on her tongue.

  Rosemary turned to the Legion of Mary pair beside her to say, “I’ve often wondered how it works in heaven when there’s a second marriage. I know it sounds silly, but you have to wonder—you know, who comes first.”

  “The first marriage is the binding one,” the tall lady said with an easy expertise. Mac said, “Ha!” to his wife. “See that, you’re stuck,” just as Shortchange, in a post-walk ecstasy, came wriggling through the dining room and into the living room, all cool wet fur and wagging tail and snorting black nose. My father came in behind her, half a dog biscuit still in his hand, just as Maeve appeared in the other doorway, the one that opened onto the dim hall and the stairs. She wore a pale housecoat and was in stocking feet. She had her hand to her throat.

  “Oh, Dennis,” she said, squinting toward him as the dog made a quick circuit of the room, greeting everyone. She put her fingertips to the back of Dan Lynch’s chair. “It’s you.”

  With the excitement the dog brought in with her—the neighbor lady grabbed the arms of her chair and lifted her feet as Shortchange sniffed her ankles (Nice dog, nice dog), and Mac held out a walnut and Kate leaned down to say with puckered lips, “Hello, sweetheart”—it seemed to take a minute for us all to hear what Maeve had said.

  She said, “I thought it was Billy, coming in from a walk.”

  Dan Lynch struggled to his feet, awkwardly balancing his teacup, finally placing it on the coffee table, on top of the pile of walnuts, and all the while saying, “Have a seat, Maeve. Please, have a seat.”

  Shortchange wiggled toward her as she sat down, and Maeve lightly touched the dog’s wet fur. “I thought it was Billy,” Maeve said to my father. “You sounded so much like him.”

  A kind of pain swept my father’s face. He was standing just outside the living-room doorway, still flushed from the walk, his shoulders still vaguely patterned with raindrops, his coat still holding a whiff of the green spring. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Maeve shook her head, her hand now on her heart. “I thought it was Billy,” she said a third time. Even the bit of lipstick she’d worn earlier in the day was gone and her simple housecoat was colorless, white and beige. She seemed as plain as a blank page.

  She looked around the room, her eyes weak. “I was just getting up,” she said. “I hadn’t put the light on yet.” Now she put her fingertips to her forehead and lowered her eyes. “I thought Billy was down here with the dog.”

  Beside me, the next-door-neighbor lady clucked her tongue and said, “Awww,” with the sound of exaggerated sympathy you might offer a child. The Legion of Mary ladies both put their hands to their mouths. And then Maeve began to weep.

  Clearly, this was the moment our presence here was meant to deflect. The moment we’d been waiting for, hoping against, staying around to have a drink and eat up all the food. But we were momentarily stunned by its arrival, unsure of what to do.

  Maeve lowered her face into her own raised hand, the fingers splayed now from forehead to chin (the plain pearl ring), and let out a long, tremulous sigh that was meant perhaps to give her her composure but instead caught in her throat and formed another kind of sigh, terrible and unbidden. “I thought he was here,” she said through it. “I thought he was right downstairs.”

  We stared for a few seconds and then suddenly—as if we had all been caught in that stilled interval between the first thunderclap and the first pelting drops of rain—we began to scurry, moving as though there were windows to close, laundry to be pulled in from the line.

  Kate and Rosemary were immediately beside Maeve’s chair, Kate with a hand on her shoulder, Rosemary patting her knee. The two Legion ladies hurried back to the kitchen, one to boil water, one to fetch a box of tissues. My father grabbed Shortchange by the collar and dragged her out of the room. The lady from next door stood, which seemed a cue for the rest of the men to scatter, as they did, heading for the kitchen just as my father came back through the dining room, where he paused by the sideboard to pour a glass of sherry from the Waterford decanter.

  He stepped forward, holding the crystal sherry glass in two hands, but Rosemary waved it away. “She’s already had quite a bit,” she whispered. Kate reached out and took the glass from him anyway.

  “I thought he was down here with the dog,” Maeve was saying. “I thought it hadn’t happened, after all. It was a dream. He was down here, just coming in.” Her voice twisted a little, nearly vanished. “I thought I’d go down and put the kettle on.”

  Rosemary said, “There now,” kindly enough, but meaning, too, enough of that. “There now.”

  Her sister leaned forward with the glass of sherry. “Take a little sip, Maeve,” she said.

  But Maeve raised her eyes to the two sisters, looking from one to the other, maybe looking for some trace of their brother’s face, maybe only hoping for understanding. And then she looked beyond them to my father. “He’s gone,” she said to him alone. “Our Billy.”

  My father nodded. His eyes were dark and he held his lips together so tightly he might have been breaking the news all over again. “He is” was all he said, because even as he said it Maeve put her fingers to her lips and whispered, “I’m going to be sick.”

  Swiftly the neighbor lady grabbed the blue porcelain bowl, turned out the remaining walnuts, and handed it to Rosemary, who held it under Maeve’s downy chin. “It’s all right,” she told her, shooting a deadly glance at her sister: there was the smell of sherry. “It’s all right, dear.”

  “Poor girl,” the neighbor lady said. The taller Legion lady had returned with the tissue box and was now pulling out tissues, one after the other, as if she were doling out an endless line of rope. She handed them one after the other to Kate, who was holding them beneath the bowl, piling them into Maeve’s lap.

  My father modestly stepped away.

  An aluminum pot was produced from the kitchen, but Maeve, as Rosemary said, had nothing but the sherry in her stomach—hadn’t eaten a bite since Tuesday—and so the sickness quickly passed. When it was over, Maeve sat back against the chair, her hands full of tissues, her face and throat blotched with red but deathly white underneath. “I’m so sorry,” she s
aid with her eyes closed. “I’m so ashamed.”

  Amid the women’s cooing, the two sisters convinced her to stand and go upstairs to rinse her face and change her clothes, to make herself feel better. Maeve nodded, apologizing, coming back to herself, it seemed. Kate took her by the hand.

  When the two of them were gone, we moved around the living room, sweeping up walnut shells and collecting teacups, straightening doilies and cushions. We could hear the men talking softly in the kitchen.

  “The colored people have an expression,” the shorter Legion lady began to say. “‘No one’s called home who isn’t ready.’”

  “She should have eaten something,” the other said.

  “It’s good for her to cry,” the neighbor lady told us. “Not to hold it all back. And what a shock for her, to think she heard him coming in like that.”

  The shorter one paused. She was stout, high-breasted like a wren. Wrenlike, she wore a beige sweater with a maroon-and-brown harlequin pattern across the front and brown stretch pants and tiny beige shoes. “I saw my husband three times after he died,” she said softly. She held an empty teacup and saucer before her, in both hands. It made her look like a woman singing an aria. “In dreams, I mean. The first time he told me about that expression the colored people have. I’d never heard it before. The second time he was sitting right next to me, in church. There were lots of flowers and we were talking about how pretty they were. There was a huge snowstorm the day before his funeral”—turning to me to explain—“this was back in ’78. And we hadn’t had too many flowers there. It had bothered me a lot. That he hadn’t had more flowers. But the dream put my mind at ease.” She paused. There was a threat of tears in her voice. “The third time he just squeezed my hand and walked away.” She took a deep breath, bending to pick up a crumpled napkin. “And that was it,” she said. “I never have been able to dream his face again. I dream about him, but he’s always in the next room, or he’s got his back to me, or he’s just gone out or is just about to come in. I never see him. There were those three times in the beginning and then no more.”