Charming Billy

by Alice McDermott

  Solemnly, authoritatively, sweeping a tissue over the surface of the coffee table, the taller Legion lady nodded and said, “I believe it’s always three.”

  Rosemary agreed. “That’s what they say.”

  There was a knock at the front door—three short raps that might have come from beneath a conjurer’s table—and when my father opened it, we heard his soft voice saying, “Monsignor.” A single look went around the women in the room. You could feel the subject changing. Rosemary leaned over and turned on another light.

  The priest came into the living room just as the other three men came through the dining room to meet him. He shook hands all around. He was a heavy, scrubbed-looking man whose throat seemed to strain against his white collar just as his shoulders and broad chest seemed to strain against his black jacket and shirtfront. Even his shiny scalp looked taut against his skull. And yet, for all this, there was an air of tremendous ease about him as he shook hands all around like a politician (although he never ran for anything), making eye contact, Glad to see you, his palm warm and dry and encompassing. The taller Legion lady went to brew him his cup of tea and I was dispatched by my father to go upstairs and let Maeve know.

  The stairs were carpeted, the same pale gray pile as in the living room. There was a wrought-iron rail, open to the hallway halfway up and then closed off by a wall. On the landing there was a round table draped with a pale blue cloth and covered with Hummel children, some of whom had black veins running across their legs and shoulders and through their necks, clearly places where they had been broken and then carefully repaired. Above this table was an oil portrait of the Christ Child that to the uninitiated would seem to be a portrait of a beautiful and dark-skinned prepubescent girl. A framed, cross-stitched copy of the Irish blessing and another of the prayer of St. Francis on the wall between the two bedrooms. The bathroom door at the head of the stairs was closed and I could hear water running behind it.

  I glanced into Maeve’s bedroom. Kate was sitting on the edge of the bed, on a lovely ice-blue satin quilt that still bore the mark of where Maeve must have been napping when she heard Billy coming in. She held a life-sized baby doll in her lap, cradling it.

  “Monsignor’s here,” I said, and Kate looked up. “Good,” she said. She lifted the doll. It was dressed in a white crocheted sweater and cap and a long, yellowing christening gown. A tiny blue medal on a scrap of pale blue ribbon was pinned to its collar. “This was Maeve’s,” she said. “This gown. She was christened in it.”

  She turned to place the doll where it belonged, in the center of the bed, between their two pillows. “Get this,” Kate said, rearranging the doll’s gown. “Maeve was just telling me that at the luncheon today Ted Lynch went on about an order of nuns that takes widows. He said he’d give her the name of the Mother House if she was interested.” Kate rolled her eyes, blue eyes like Billy’s. They seemed remarkably quick under the weight of her expensive eyeshadow. Her mouth had Billy’s wry thinness. “Can you imagine?” she said. “An hour after a woman buries her husband, he’s talking about her entering a convent? Can you imagine the gall?”

  I shook my head. I had no trouble imagining it. “What did Maeve think?” I asked.

  Kate waved her hand. Some of the makeup had settled into the creases around her eyes, the lines that framed her mouth. “Oh, you know Maeve, she told him she’d think about it.” She reached out to smooth the christening dress over the doll’s tiny booties. “It’s the idea of being alone now, of course, that’s getting to her, but I said, ‘Come on, when did Ted Lynch become this rabid Catholic?’” She glanced toward the door, lowered her voice. “It’s one of the problems with these ex-alcoholics,” she said. “They still have to be rabid about something.”

  She picked up the doll again. She seemed incapable of leaving it alone. “They should have had children,” she said suddenly. “Billy and Maeve. They were both so fond of children.”

  Behind her, the closet door was opened, showing the empty arms and shoulders of Billy’s suits and shirts, his shoes lined up on the floor. There were two windows in the far wall, both of them draped with pale blue chintz over white sheers. On the dresser between them was a photograph of Maeve and Billy coming down the aisle on their wedding day—Billy looking off to the side, acknowledging someone in a pew, it seemed, Maeve with her head down, her own smile nearly hidden. There was another, old-fashioned photograph of a pretty young woman in a high lace collar, Maeve’s mother, surely, and another framed snapshot—in pre-Kodachrome color, the tones slightly off—of Maeve’s redheaded father looking startled, immobile, in one of the living-room chairs. Billy’s postcard from Long Island was stuck into the lower-left-hand corner of the mirror—Home Sweet Home.

  “Not that it would have changed what happened, but it would be something for Maeve, now,” Kate was saying. “To have a few children around.” She smoothed the doll’s gown, brushed at the bonnet, cradling it with what seemed half her attention, an old habit of motherhood. “You can’t help but wonder—what’s she got now?”

  We heard the bathroom door opening at the end of the hall. “As if I should talk,” Kate whispered. And then she put the doll back on the pillow. She said she’d tell Maeve the Monsignor was here.

  Downstairs, the priest had everyone in the living room laughing softly, teacups and saucers on their knees. The coffee table now held a plate of Dan Lynch’s bakery cookies and another of small tea sandwiches, some ham and some cheese. Although he sat in one corner of the couch, legs crossed casually, thighs straining against the black fabric of his pants, elbow up over the plastic-covered armrest, the Monsignor was the center of everyone’s attention. He had been recalling Billy. A Holy Name Society meeting and the speaker going on for so long about the significance of the Pascal feast that Billy had leaned over and whispered into the Monsignor’s ear that the hind leg of the Lamb of God with a little mint jelly sounded good to him.

  When Maeve descended the stairs a few minutes later, her sister-in-law behind her like a handmaiden, everyone stood as if for a meeting of dignitaries. Maeve put both her hands out for the priest and the priest stepped toward her easily, confidently, like an expert, a pro, like a slugger going to the plate or a surgeon to the operating table, a renowned attorney rising for his closing arguments. We all felt it, felt the tremendous sense of relief that we finally had among us someone who knew what he was doing.

  She wore brown slacks and a white sweater now, but nice ones, only a step down from her funeral dress. Not ready yet, perhaps, to put on her everyday clothes, to let Billy’s death begin to be something less than an occasion.

  “How are you, Maeve, my dear?” the priest said, taking her hands (she still clutched a tissue in one of them) with perfect gentleness and sympathy and an understanding that was bolstered—you saw it in his physical ease, his lingering smile—by his utter faith that death was not what we believed it to be tonight, not at all. He apologized for not having made it to the funeral this morning, he’d been called to the hospital (another soul rising, he implied), but she had been in his prayers all day long. “How are you, then?” he said, and once again Maeve put a tissue to her eyes and began to cry.

  This time, none of us stirred. We simply stood, watching, as he put his arm around her shoulder and led her to the couch and sat beside her, his large hand covering both her own. Slowly, we all took our seats. It occurred to me that we were like a defeated bucket brigade, our wet and empty buckets dangling from our arms as we watched the fire chief drown a blaze that only minutes before we had merely splashed at.

  “I thought I heard him coming in,” she said. “Earlier this evening.” And he nodded, expert in these matters, letting her speak, tell him what she’d felt, lying down in their darkened room, drifting off a bit, hearing the back door open and the dog coming in and the sound of his voice, and getting up and coming down here as if their lives were merely going on. And then realizing that he was gone. “Gone, Father,” she said. The terror of it struck her then.
His life was over. Hers was not.

  The priest nodded as she spoke. Everything in his face and his manner said he knew. He knew what she said, wanted to say, would say next. He had sat like this, his manner said, with so many other widows, so many times before. When he finally replied it was with an authority that superseded all our experience of Billy, superseded even Maeve’s, my father’s, his sisters’ long years. He was like a physician carrying reports to a waiting family, suddenly more expert than any of them about the dying man. More expert, everything in the priest’s gracious manner seemed to say, because only he understood that death was nothing that it seemed to be, to us, tonight.

  “Not over, Maeve,” he said softly, scolding her, but fondly, gently. “We are not abandoned, Maeve,” he said. “You know that.”

  She bowed her head. Her tears, free-falling now, struck her lap, the back of his hand.

  “Billy’s life goes on, in Christ.”

  With her head still down, she said again, “I thought I heard him coming in.”

  The priest nodded politely. “I understand,” he said.

  “I thought he was here,” she repeated.

  He pursed his lips, biding his time, it seemed. “It was another shock,” he said. “But think of the joy he’s found today, Maeve,” he added softly, smiling. “The old reprobate. Think of the peace. Gone to his rest, Maeve,” he said, “with the hope of rising again. The promise of rising again, Maeve, in the fulfillment of time. Think of that, if you can.”

  Maeve lifted her head, but did not raise her eyes. You could see in the stubborn set of her jaw that it was not a figurative life that she wanted for Billy at this moment but a literal one, his literal presence, coming in with the dog as she dozed, opening the cookie jar where they kept the dog biscuits, hanging the chain on the hook by the back door. Their life together, even as it was, simply going on. It was the same literal presence the Legion lady had spoken of earlier, the literal presence, even in a dream, that contained the actual sound of his voice in her ear (“The colored people have an expression …”) and the actual weight of him beside her, admiring the flowers, putting her mind at ease. She wanted the real pressure of his hand against hers.

  “It’s a terrible thing, Father,” Maeve said softly, her chin raised, her eyes cast down. “To come this far in life only to find that nothing you’ve felt has made any difference.”

  A sigh, quickly stifled, seemed to come from the women in the room. The priest raised his hand as if to quiet them.

  “Listen to me,” he said patiently, “listen now.” He waited until she had raised her eyes, her expression showing him, showing us all, that she would not be convinced. “We could all tell ourselves tonight that we didn’t do enough, Maeve. I had the thought myself when Dennis called me the other day and told me Billy was gone, and how they found him. I thought, Dear Lord, what could I have done? We could all of us say today that if we loved him it was a poor sort of love, or else his life wouldn’t have ended as it did. But you know, if I said it to you, Maeve, if I said that I failed him, or if Dennis said it, or Father Jim, or Danny or Rose or Kate, if any one of Billy’s friends said it, you’d be the first to tell us it wasn’t true. And you’d mean it. And you’d be right. Billy succumbed to an illness we couldn’t cure in time. It wasn’t a failure of our affections, it was a triumph of the disease. That’s the very thing you would tell any one of us and it’s the thing you have to believe yourself. Of course, it mattered. Everything you felt, everything you did for Billy mattered, regardless of how it turned out.” He bent his head a little to catch her downcast eyes. “I’m not kidding you about this, Maeve,” he said. “I’m not making this up.” He gripped both her hands in his, lifted them slightly. “You must believe this,” he whispered.

  She did not return his gaze. “I suppose I do,” she said.

  Rosemary stood in the doorway beside her husband, their shoulders nearly touching, their faces, both of them, drawn, as if they were accepting a reprimand. Kate sat in the chair beside the neighbor lady with her head bent, studying her polished nails, her diamond anniversary ring. The neighbor lady’s husband had put his hand on her shoulder and was admiring, as were the two Legion ladies, admiring the man at his good work while Dan Lynch searched his pockets and then pulled out a large handkerchief and wiped both his eyes with it. He refolded the thing in some complex and elaborate pattern that reduced it to the size of a playing card and then wiped his eyes with it again. I turned to glance at my father, who stood just behind me, and saw some trace of the same look he had worn in the car today: that old annoyance, nearly trivialized by time. Or perhaps something troublesome, nearly healed. It was either the near-triumph of faith or the nearly liberating letting go of it. He looked down at me and nodded, as if I should attend to what the Monsignor was saying, as if his own experience, or age, excused him from the discourse, but I should attend.

  Abruptly, before Maeve could say another word, the priest asked us all to say a Rosary with him, understanding (of course) that there was only so much more that could be said, that the repetitiveness of the prayers, the hushed drone of repeated, and by its numbing repetition, nearly wordless, supplication, was the only antidote, tonight, for Maeve’s hopelessness. Rosemary began to get to her knees and he told her, good-naturedly, that he wasn’t intending to kneel and would feel far more comfortable if she would simply get herself a chair. Chairs were carried in from the dining room and a kind of circle formed, although this was not the sort of Catholic gathering where anyone would think to join hands.

  IT WAS THE SPRING of 1950 when Billy first came to Sunday supper—the old man issuing the invitation and Maeve in her nervousness dropping the whole bowl of steamed spinach onto the kitchen floor just as they were all about to sit down at the dining-room table. She scooped it back into the serving bowl—what else was there to do, there were only boiled potatoes and mashed turnips without it?—fighting with the dog all the while (Lucky was his name, her father would never be without a dog in the house, a mix-breed terrier always underfoot and mad for butter), unable to keep the animal’s quick tongue from the spoon and the bowl and the spinach itself.

  She put the bowl out on the table, the spinach still steaming, and watched Billy and her father help themselves and never said a word about it until years, absolutely years, later when she was serving Billy a bowl of boiled spinach with his dinner and suddenly couldn’t help but laugh, and confess, and get Billy laughing about it, too. One night over dinner, not so very long ago. Billy sober because it was midday (they had liked having their Sunday dinner around three or four and then just a sandwich or something at around seven) and clean-shaven because he had gone to Mass with her that morning, and although he was only a week or two out of the VA and the fall he’d taken that had put him there, that time, was still evident from the fading yellow bruise on his forehead, although his face had grown thicker over the years, especially around the eyes and the chin, and his skin had begun to scale and peel and wear raw at his waistline and his wrists; although there was more silence between them, in those days, than talk, and she held in her memory, by then, a thousand and one moments she would never recount, things he had said to her, terrible things he had done, ways she had seen him (toothless, incoherent, half-clothed, bloodied, soiled, weeping) that she couldn’t begin to tell, because even just putting it into words would kill her—a time, for instance (she will say it just this once), right before he went back to AA in ’72, maybe the very thing that got him back to the meetings again, when she came down to the kitchen in the middle of the night and asked him to get himself to bed; she could see he was about to pass out and hoped he’d get himself up the stairs first. She leaned down to him at the table and said Billy into his ear (she knew enough to be firm with him, she knew that much), Billy (louder), and when he didn’t budge, she turned away from him and started toward the stairs. “Dennis won’t come, you know,” she said from the hallway, talking to herself, as far as she was concerned. “He’s got enough on his min
d with Claire, he won’t come even if you call him, Billy. Even Dennis has had enough of you. Even Dennis has troubles of his own.” And the next thing she knew he had her by the throat. He was so much taller than she, and by then he had grown so heavy. His glasses were off. His face—well, it might have been a total stranger that had broken into the house. “Billy, you’ll kill me,” she’d said, clawing at his hand. And then he was weeping at her feet. And then he was unconscious on the floor and she had to call the couple next door because Dennis in those days had troubles of his own.

  There was a rill of deep laughter from the men in the living room, but the women in the kitchen were silent.

  Although, Maeve said softly, they’d had such a good laugh over the story of the spilled spinach that afternoon, a Sunday not long ago, that she saw again, for a minute (Oh, you know how it is), how handsome he was. Saw again those good looks that she had from the first been so taken with. She remembered again what it had done to her, to her nerves, to her beating heart, to have had Billy Lynch there, the boy from the shoe store, in the flesh, at her own table that first evening her father invited him to dinner.

  “He was a handsome man,” Bridie from the neighborhood said quietly.

  In Maeve’s kitchen, in Bayside, the day fading, the Monsignor gone off to make another call, and the women bustling about, putting together from the disparate supply of casseroles and cakes a nice little buffet, Maeve leaned over her milkless cup of weak tea and, smiling, said in her soft and patient voice that it wasn’t until he was leaving their house that night, until he was right to the door with his coat on and his hat in his hands, that he asked her if she would like to go to the movies with him on Saturday. Naturally, she said she would, thinking of course, all the while—you know how it is—What will I wear? She had her best dress on, as it was, a gray wool with a slash of black velvet in the skirt.