When she went back into the living room, her dad was already asleep in his chair, and you know it was him she blamed, then, for the slight weave she had noticed in Billy’s walk as he left their door and headed down the hallway toward the stairs that night—her father and his Jameson’s saved for special occasions, such as visits from countrymen like yourself … So there was no one for her to tell, because she knew if she told him while she was pulling off his shoes and his pants, pouring him into his bed, it would be as good as talking to the wall. So she was nearly bursting with the news the next morning. But when she finally told him that Billy Lynch had asked her to the movies for Saturday night, her father merely sniffed and stirred his coffee and said, “No doubt he feels obliged.” He said Billy had once been engaged, you know, just a few short years ago, to an Irish girl who died.
Rosemary quickly turned from the stove and said to us over her shoulder, “Oh, aren’t men cruel?”
But Bridie from the old neighborhood, who had arrived with her famous pound cake just as the Rosary was concluded, smiled kindly at Maeve and said, “I’m sure your dad meant no harm.”
Maeve seemed inclined to leave the subject open to discussion. She had thought, she said, to buy herself something new for Saturday, but after her father said that she decided, Why bother? Any old skirt and sweater would probably do. They saw All About Eve and stopped at Horn & Hardart. She lit a candle in church that Sunday morning, but she didn’t hold out much hope. And yet—the power of prayer—a week or two later, she was at the store and he asked her out again. And then her father asked him to dinner again, and soon they were seeing each other quite regularly. But she knew for certain that she and Billy were an item when they went over to Dennis and Claire’s place for dinner one night—they’d only been married themselves a year or so—a nice little apartment off Prospect Park. Their first child (“your brother Danny”) was just a few months old and Billy had held the sleeping infant against his chest throughout the meal, so that he had to eat with one hand. So that he had to ask her to lean over and help him cut his steak, which she did, of course, feeling him watching her. Even her father had to admit there was something more than obligation between them after that, Irish girl or no.
“For want of a shoe,” the little Legion lady said softly. Everyone turned to her. “How does it go?” She touched the harlequin pattern across her breast. “For want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of a horse, the rider was lost … How’s it go?”
There was a moment of puzzled silence.
“For want of a rider,” Bridie said helpfully, “the battle was lost …”
The rest of us hadn’t stopped frowning.
“I mean, for Maeve,” the Legion lady finally said, holding out her hand, and while we were all more or less convinced that she did not mean to say that for Maeve the battle, the kingdom was lost—although it might well be said—none of us had yet gotten her true meaning. “For Maeve it was just the opposite,” she explained. “For want of a shoe, a boyfriend was found …”
The laughter was sudden and brief, crumbs shaken out of a dish towel. “Oh, I see,” someone said. “Well, that’s true.”
Smiling, nodding, getting it (this is good for her, this kind of conversation—you could see all the women thinking it—this is just the kind of thing she needs), Maeve touched her teacup, the tea surely cold now, and said, leaning forward, “I’ll tell you what I did.”
We all smiled at her.
“I threw my father’s shoe down the incinerator.” Some color had returned to her cheek or, perhaps, was just returning as she spoke. “Not once but twice. If you can believe it. I said, ‘Now, Dad, I don’t know what’s happened to the mate of your good shoes but we’d better get down to Holtzman’s on Saturday or you’ll have nothing to wear to church Sunday morning.’”
“Why in the world?” Kate asked. She had just returned from setting out the good silver on the dining-room table.
“Just to go in there,” Bridie cried. “Just to have an excuse to go into the shoe store.”
Maeve nodded. “Just to see Billy.” Another bout of teariness passed briefly over her face—it was like the shadow of a small cloud moving over the earth—but was quickly gone. “I did it once, early on, before Billy and I had ever exchanged more than a few words, and then I did it again after our first date, because it had been a few months since poor Dad had come home minus a shoe—which he truly did often enough—and I got a little impatient. So I tossed another one down the incinerator, and good Lord, wouldn’t you know it, we came back from Holtzman’s that afternoon and there was Dad’s shoe propped on the banister in the foyer. The super must have found it. It was still pretty new, so he must have thought it had fallen into the incinerator by accident and he put it out there for someone to claim it. I was certain my father would turn right around and take the new pair back to Billy, but when I said, ‘Dad, your shoe,’ he looked at me and said, ‘It isn’t,’ very indignant. He wouldn’t even look at it. He just marched up the stairs as if he didn’t see it, refusing to admit anything. Here it was resurrected and he wouldn’t have any part of it. The thing sat there for a good week or two and then disappeared altogether.”
All the women were chuckling now, thinking of it, and how bright-eyed Maeve had become, telling the tale, and all without a drop of sherry in her bloodstream.
This was good for her. Good memories. And even if she’d given fate a push or two, wasn’t it finally Billy’s good luck that she’d shown up there, in the shoe store like that, so wild about him, so ready to give him her heart that surely it was a compensation of some sort for what he had lost, for the Irish girl. You could see Kate and Rosemary thinking it, the question answered: Maeve had known all along about the Irish girl, and still she had given Billy her heart. What was it the postcard had said? Lovely wife?
“Wasn’t I terrible, though?” she asked us. “Throwing his shoes away like that?”
“You were determined,” the neighbor lady said.
“The things we do when we’re young,” Rosemary said, shaking her head.
“When we’re in love,” the taller Legion lady added, although it was a leap even I couldn’t make to imagine this gaunt and opinionated holy old woman as a girl in love.
“I told Ted Lynch about it,” Maeve continued, “years ago, when he said the best thing I could do for Billy was to leave him. I told him how I’d thrown away those shoes. I wanted him to understand what I’d gone through to get him.”
The women all nodded. Even a plain girl with that kind of determination would be compensation enough for the beautiful Eva.
Suddenly Bridie, who was folding paper napkins, said softly, well, since we were telling tales, she’d tell one herself: Oh, what a crush she’d had on Billy Lynch when she was young. How many hours she had spent at her window waiting for him to walk by. Even up until the time she was dating Tim Schmidt, even after, she would have dropped anyone she knew to take up with Billy Lynch. “Except for Jim, of course.” Jim was her husband.
“Oh, Bridie,” Rosemary said, waving a crocheted pot holder. “Tell us something we don’t already know.”
“Really?” Bridie said softly, “You’re kidding,” but Kate had opened the casserole dish brought by the Indian couple and sniffed it and frowned as if to say not as bad as she expected. She held it under the tall Legion lady’s nose. “Should we warm this up a bit?” she asked, and the tall Legion lady gave it the same kind of nasal inspection. “Sure,” she said.
“It’s some kind of chicken with rice,” Kate said to Maeve, holding it under her nose as well. “I was afraid it would be something spicy.”
“Oh no,” Maeve said. “Lili’s a wonderful cook.” She turned to the neighbor lady. “They’re fine people, aren’t they?” And the lady agreed. “I have wonderful neighbors,” Maeve said to us all. “I’ve been fortunate in that.”
There was a moment of silent assent, and then the neighbor lady, sitting beside her at the small kitchen table, just u
nder the particle-board apples, reached across and patted Maeve’s hand. Maeve covered the lady’s with her own.
“Monday night,” Maeve said, and then corrected herself, “no, Tuesday morning, I called Dorothy here. When? one, two in the morning?”
“It was about two-twenty,” Dorothy said softly.
“I didn’t know,” Maeve said. “I hadn’t slept. There was a wind. Spring weather coming in is what Dorothy said. But it pulled at the windows. I usually dozed, waiting for Billy to come in. I usually said a Rosary and dozed, but not that night. I called Dorothy at about two in the morning. My hands were shaking, honestly, shaking like a leaf, and I asked her if she’d throw a coat on and come over.”
“She didn’t sound like herself,” Dorothy told us. “She was frightened.”
“And you said you were frightened, too, when you came in. Weren’t you?”
Dorothy nodded. “Just crossing our driveways,” she said. “There was something weird about the night. The wind and the warmish air.”
“No doubt it was the hour, too,” Kate said, being reasonable, it seemed.
“It was everything together,” Dorothy said.
“We sat right here until when … seven or so?”
“Till John called.”
“Till her husband called, at about seven. And then I walked her back across. It was raining by then, wasn’t it, Dorothy? All that wind and then a cloudy morning anyway. Of course, Billy hadn’t come in. John offered to call around for me. Even said he’d take the morning off to drive around a bit, but I didn’t want him to trouble. It wasn’t like it hadn’t happened before, Billy not coming in.”
“You said you’d let the police know,” Dorothy said, and to the rest of us, “John made her promise to do that much. And to call Dennis. John said, Now, Maeve, Billy’s a very sick man. He offered to call the VA himself, see if he was there. ‘He’s a very sick man,’ John said.”
“I said I’d call,” Maeve told us. “I intended to. But when I got back to the house I did a few things first. I took a little bath. I washed out a few things.”
“Billy’s good shirt,” Dorothy said.
Maeve nodded. “Billy’s good white shirt.”
“When she told me she’d washed out his good white shirt,” Dorothy said to the rest of us, “I knew she knew. She knew he was gone. She’d known it all through the night.”
“And then the hospital called,” Maeve said. “About nine or so. And I called Dennis at Edison to ask if he could go down there. It was because he hadn’t been admitted, see. They found him on the street, so somebody had to identify him.” She looked at me. “Your poor father had to do it.”
Kate said, “Everything’s ready,” and we all moved into the dining room, where the men were already waiting. Two or three of the women immediately began to urge Maeve to eat something. Maybe some of that nice chicken-and-rice thing, not too spicy. Maybe some of this ham. They followed her around the lace-covered table in the brightly lit dining room. Something substantial now, they said. Something easy on the stomach, too. Bridie’s pound cake, of course. A pound of butter, the way it ought to be made. Old-fashioned ingredients being the best, when you came right down to it, because in the old days you really had to be of some substantial weight, women especially, in order to survive. Such as pioneer women in those covered wagons, or our own mothers making the crossing, although our mother was not a big woman and lived to eighty-three and Dennis’s mother was just a wisp, too, and Uncle Ted’s wife Aunty M. J.—the Lynch men apparently going for the smaller girls and Rosemary’s daughter Jill with her tiny waist and you (me), too, although I see what little portions you’ve put on that plate, good for you, looking at you who would think you’d had two children, you must exercise, Kate does too, you should see the setup she’s got in her basement, Jack La Lanne’s, and so your husband’s home with the little ones?—it’ll be good for him, let him see what it’s like with kids all day, right? men never understand until you ask them to do it and then they say, Well, the kids only act like this with me, it has to be much easier when you’re with them, isn’t that the truth? They’re really thinking, You can’t possibly put up with this day after day, can you? But it was so sweet of you to be here like this. Kevin and Daniel came in last night for the wake, but the girls are both up in New England, you know—both lawyers, have I told you? did you see the flowers they sent? They were fond of Billy, both of them. I know your father appreciates it, your being here with him. He and Billy were so close, like brothers, really—neither one of them having a brother of his own. And Dennis having to go down to the VA to identify Billy like that. What would Maeve have done, over the years, without your father to call on. He was the image of his own father in that, of Uncle Daniel. Always there for whoever needed him—what was it that you called him, Dan? A politician? Well, I don’t know about that, but he did everything for my parents when they first came over. I’d call him a saint and I’m not just saying that. Not a good-looking man, your father was lucky to take after his mother’s side of his family, but goodness poured out of him. I’ve never known anyone else quite like him. You would think he’d been put on this earth just to give the rest of us a hand, to give us some relief—isn’t that just what a saint is? I remember people laughing, whenever I think of him, and I was sixteen when he died. Wherever he went he got people laughing, like Billy in a way, I suppose. Billy without his trouble. Your poor father losing his own dad at eighteen and his mother and his wife within a few years of one another and now Billy, too. I’m sure he’s glad you came in. And tomorrow you’ll go out to the Island with him? Good. Your husband will manage fine, don’t worry about that. All young mothers think their kids can’t survive without them, don’t they? Didn’t you? Soon enough you’ll see. Next thing you know, they’re all grown up and gone from home—isn’t it the truth. Next thing you know, your house is empty again. Look at us, Bridie, Rose, Dorothy, Kate, how many kids altogether? Fifteen, good Lord, sixteen, sixteen kids altogether and not one of them left at home, right? Thank God for that, but see what I’m saying, see how fast it goes? But Kate’s not going home tonight. No sense in her making that long drive back to Rye in the dark. Give Maeve some company, the first night and all. What’s it doing outside? Can you see? It’s been raining since Tuesday, hasn’t it? Rain on a funeral day is supposed to mean a soul going straight to heaven. Did anyone bring the dog in? We should be going so Maeve can get some rest. Has she eaten a bite? Has she eaten anything? Her color’s coming back anyway. It was just the sherry on an empty stomach. And the exhaustion, too, the poor girl. She’ll be fine. Time heals and it’s been a long haul. In many ways this will be a relief. God forgive me for saying so, she’ll have some peace now.
While Rosemary and the Legion ladies cleaned up in the kitchen, Dorothy took Maeve’s hands and asked her to please remember she was there, she and John were there, right next door, any time of the day or night, as always. “Thank you,” Maeve said softly, “thank you, dear,” but in a way that seemed to indicate that she, too, was aware of how little need she would have, now, of aid and assistance in the middle of the night.
“Even if it’s just a bad dream,” Dorothy said.
She glanced at her husband. “Even if it’s just a strange noise or something you need right away from the store. An antacid or something. Just call us. Anything.” She glanced at her husband again. “Even if you’re just feeling lonely,” she said, and then burst into blubbery tears—as much for herself, it seemed, and her own possible, probable long nights of widowhood as for Maeve’s. The stocky husband she had just imagined into his grave put his fingers to her elbow and said, “Now, Mama,” and Dorothy found a crumpled tissue in her pocket and waved it across her face. “I promised myself I wouldn’t do this,” she gasped.
But Maeve was smiling indulgently. She looked tired. The skin seemed to have thinned across her cheekbones, beneath her neck, and yet she seemed, too, to have found another source of strength, or composure, some last well of it th
at would see her through the final ceremonies of the day. “It’s all right,” she said. She briefly took the woman into her arms. “It’s all right,” she said again as they drew apart.
“He was a fine person,” Dorothy was saying through her tears. “Without the drink. He was a sweet soul sober, Maeve. One of the best. Talking to him was like listening to poetry, wasn’t it, John? Even when he was drinking, he was worth listening to. A smart man in his way. A sensitive man, Maeve, when you think about it. Maybe too sensitive for this world, if you know what I mean. A man with his fine feelings. The Lord made him as he was. There was no one to blame. You had your good years with him and that’s what counts, doesn’t it? Remember what you told us tonight about the spinach. And throwing away those shoes. Think of things like that.”
Her husband was slowly drawing her out of the room, nodding goodbyes to everyone he passed. “Maeve’s tired now,” he told his wife. “Let Maeve get her rest.”
“He was a sweet man,” Dorothy was saying, on into the hallway. “If he hadn’t taken to drink. What a shame he ever took a drink.”
When they had gone, the Legion ladies stepped out of the kitchen, drying their hands on dish towels and slipping into their coats. They told Maeve what she had in the way of food in the kitchen. They’d be by first thing in the morning, they said, and no sooner were they out the door (bustling, in their plastic rain hats and short canvas raincoats, their caution in going sideways down the three wet brick steps the only physical indication of their age) than Mac turned to us all and asked, “Don’t any of these holy women have homes and husbands of their own?”
Dan Lynch said, “Apparently not.”
Bridie said, “Ah, but I do,” putting her purse over her plump and freckled arm and taking her coat from the settee in the hallway, which had begun to fill up with the odor of the wet night and the residual perfumes of the women’s headscarves and spring jackets. “And my lady who looks after him will be charging me time and a half because I told her I’d only be here an hour or so,” she looked at her watch, “And now it’s been three.”
Charming Billy Page 16