Charming Billy

by Alice McDermott

  “How is Jim?” Mac said soberly. Bridie waved a hand as if to show him there was no need for such solemnity. “He’s doing all right, thank you,” she said. “He doesn’t always know me, that’s the hard part. But as long as I can keep him home and keep him happy—things could be worse. He’s more or less in his own little world.” She shrugged. “Sometimes I envy him.” She leaned to kiss Maeve, and then Rosemary and Kate. “God bless,” she said to each of them, and then turning to us all: “I’m not going to make a speech. That was Billy’s forte. The hard part’s going to be going to the mailbox every day without hoping there’s a note from him.” To which everyone agreed, drawing in a breath as they nodded, as if they had not yet taken this into account but should have, would have, sooner or later. Bridie kissed me and my father and Mac, and with a “You, too, Danny,” Dan Lynch.

  “You’ll be all right driving home?” my father said with his hand on her back.

  “I’m fine.” She shook her thick ring of keys. “I’ve got my siren and my Mace. I’m armed and ready. And it’s not that late.” My father said he would walk her to her car at least.

  “She’s a riot,” Rosemary said when Bridie was gone, clearly meaning something else.

  “She’s had a hard row to hoe,” Kate said, directing her sister toward it. “Her girl with the drugs and Jim with Alzheimer’s. And those babies she lost.”

  “And Tim Schmidt,” Rosemary said, “in the war.”

  “She’s a marvel,” Maeve said, and Kate touched her shoulder and told her, “You, too, my girl.”

  Maeve laughed a little. “A marvel of what?” she said. Her shoulders seemed boneless.

  “Of endurance,” Kate said.

  “Of patience,” Rosemary added. “And loyalty.”

  Maeve smiled, dipping her head. It was clear that it pleased her, to have this much recognized and acknowledged. Her endurance, her patience, her long suffering. That same determination that had once made her throw her father’s good shoes down the incinerator had made her a marvel at this, at being Billy’s wife.

  As Maeve took her leave of us herself, she paused on the stairs, her hand on the simple railing, and said to my father, “Thank you, especially, Dennis. I know how hard this has been for you.” (Dan Lynch smiling sympathetically beside him, reserving his own tearful What about me? for another time, tomorrow night at Quinlan’s, perhaps, with his cronies and a drink.) My father nodded. “Call if you need me,” he said, repeating Dorothy’s mistake, forgetting, as she had, that the mad nights were over.

  For a moment the familiar weight struck me: I wondered how much lonelier my father’s nights would be now, uninterrupted by crisis.

  Billy’s sisters, handmaidens still, followed her up the stairs, and a few minutes later Rosemary came down again to put her own coat on and gather up her husband. When Kate came down in her stocking feet to lock the door behind us, we followed Mac and Rosemary out. Dan Lynch, his jacket collar turned up and his feelings hurt by Maeve’s last remark, began to walk to the bus stop in the light rain, under the orange streetlights, carrying the plastic grocery bag Rosemary had pressed on him, a supper or two’s worth of leftovers. But my father called him back and said, almost impatiently, that he would of course drive him home. What did he think?

  In the car, Dan straightened his collar and quickly recovered his good humor by asking us, Wasn’t the Monsignor something? Wasn’t he incredible? The embodiment of every good thing about the priesthood. He said he was certain there were plenty of fine rabbis and ministers, but there was something about a priest, a good priest, that those others couldn’t match. A holiness. A closeness to God. “Don’t you feel it the minute he walks into a room?” My father admitted he did. Dan twisted in his seat to see me. I admitted I did, too.

  Well satisfied, he said, “It’s a life lived on another plane, you see. A life that’s all God, nothing else.” He paused, but there was something false about the way he did, something theatrical. It seemed clear that everything he was about to say was well formed in his mind, well memorized, perhaps, a speech he had already worked out in every detail, that had, until now, lacked only an audience. “Think about it,” he said. “A rabbi or a minister closes up his church or synagogue after a service and goes home to dinner with his wife and kids. He pays his bills,” tapping his index finger on the car’s dashboard, beating out the rhythm of an imaginary day, “does the grocery shopping, tosses a ball with his son, right? What’s to distinguish him from anybody else, with any other kind of job? But a priest can take off his collar, play a round of golf, go to a ball game—he’s still always different. It’s a consecrated life, see, not just a consecrated profession. I mean, take the Pope, for instance, even non-Catholics are excited to meet him, aren’t they? They know he’s something special. Holy.” He shook his head. “Now they’re talking about changing things, but I hope they never do. It would be a mistake. We’ll lose that, Dennis. The Church will lose the very thing that makes its priests a cut above.”

  I wondered if he meant celibacy.

  “You’re right,” my father was saying. “Absolutely.”

  “I don’t mean it isn’t a sacrifice.” I supposed he did. “It’s a tremendous sacrifice. We had a young fellow, just out of the seminary, come to our parish a few years back, nice as could be, but he didn’t last. He couldn’t take it. Eventually he left and got himself married. So I know it’s a sacrifice. But get rid of it and the priests will become just like everyone, wait and see. You’ll do as well to confess to your barber.”

  My father was nodding, smiling, wondering, no doubt, as I was, about Dan Lynch’s own single state. “Sure,” he said.

  “You can’t have both eyes on heaven when there’s a wife and a mortgage and new shoes for the kiddies to buy. It only stands to reason you can’t.”

  “You’re right,” my father said. “I didn’t.”

  “It only stands to reason,” Dan Lynch said again. And then he turned a little, toward my father, lowered his voice just a bit, not enough to keep me from hearing him but to acknowledge, perhaps, that the company was mixed. “But I tell you, it gets my goat to hear the way people talk about it. It gets to me. You know, you can give up anything else these days, give up all kinds of foods to stay healthy, you know, salt, eggs. Or maybe give up sleep so you can be out jogging down the street at 6 a.m. You can give up an old wife for a new one, or a home life so you can run around the world like Henry Kissinger—oh sure, give up anything like that and it’s just fine, it’s just the ticket. But let the talk turn to Catholic priests and everybody’s smiling behind their hands. Snickering. They’re all out to make it something perverted. A man enters so fully into his faith that it changes the very fabric of his life, the very fabric, Dennis, do you see what I’m saying, and this society can’t tolerate it. They want to see it as something bad. Our Lord’s okay as a story, you know, Christmas, Easter, something to talk about on a Sunday morning, but take it to heart, take Him to heart, have your belief change the very fabric of your life and oh ho”—he held his palm out toward the dashboard, shook it—“that’s going too far for them. They’ve got to look for the dirt in it, not the glory. They say, It’s an unnatural thing, giving that up, a man can’t give that up, not for the sake of what’s really only a pretty story.”

  “No one says that about the Pope,” my father said, goading him, I thought.

  “No, not about the Pope,” Dan Lynch said, ever earnest. “Not in the papers, anyway. They’re careful about that. He’s a celebrity, after all. And he’s a robust man. He skis, you know.”

  “Yes,” my father said.

  “But they’ll say it readily enough about any ordinary priest, won’t they? They can sense the holiness, but they don’t understand it, so the first thing they want to do is mess it up a bit, kick some dirt on it, throw some sand on the fire. Sure, it’s a great relief and comfort to the rest of us to find out no one’s any better than we are, right? A man like the Monsignor walks into a room, and you know, it threat
ens some people.”

  “Sure,” my father said, a touch of weariness in it. He’d had enough of Dan Lynch, I could tell.

  Sensing this, not quite taking offense, Dan Lynch crossed his arms in front of his chest and settled farther into his seat. He turned to look out the window, the wet dark streets lit by orange phosphorus. You could see by the way he turned back to my father, and paused, and looked, that he had struck on the thought some seconds before he said it. “Billy had something of that air about him, didn’t he?” he asked softly. “That holiness, when he walked into a room. Don’t you think?”

  “Something of it,” my father said, and then: “Look at this.” There was an empty parking space right in front of Dan’s building. “That’s luck,” he said as he pulled into it.

  Dan Lynch reached down to gather up his plastic bag. He was flustered for a few seconds by his search for the door handle and then again by the unfastening of his seat belt, but when he was fully prepared for his leave-taking, he paused and said with a sigh, “It’s the hardest night for Maeve, isn’t it? The first night with Billy in his grave.” He turned to the window. “It might as well rain.” Beside us, his apartment building, pre-war Queens, six stories, dark brick, without cupola or awning or ornamentation of any kind, seemed as forlorn and hopeless as a penitentiary.

  Dan Lynch cleared his throat. “Would you come in for a nightcap?” he asked. Without hesitation, my father turned off the engine and reached behind his seat for the club for the steering wheel.

  “You don’t mind?” he whispered to me as we followed Dan Lynch across the sidewalk and up the barren path. “No,” I said, my father’s daughter, and stood beside him as we watched Dan Lynch let himself into his apartment building with his own key.

  “IN MY BOOK OF Irish names,” Dan Lynch said, “Maeve means ‘the intoxicating one.’”

  My father nodded. “There’s an irony,” he said.

  “And Eva,” Dan went on. “Eva, I suppose, would be some form of Eve. The first woman.”

  My father nodded again, slowly, his lips drawn a bit as if Dan Lynch had made a good point. As if in response to a good point, my father said, “There you go.”

  They both sipped their drinks—two fingers of Scotch in stubby glasses, plenty of ice. Serving them, Dan had poured three and then seemed taken aback when my father lifted the first and handed it to me. It might have been an aging bachelor’s surprise to think that a woman—especially one he had known as a child—would accept anything stronger than sherry (“Would you rather a ginger ale?” he’d said), but it left me with the feeling that the glass had been meant for someone else. For Billy, perhaps. That I was sipping Billy’s drink.

  Dan Lynch’s living room was dim—dim enough to make the double set of rain-spattered windows seem bright. The furniture was ancient: leather-topped desk where he had poured our drinks; claw-footed chairs, broad couch. Some of them his own mother’s pieces, he said. Threadbare Oriental. There were neat stacks of National Geographic and Time and U. S. News and World Report piled against the bowed legs of every end table, and the tables themselves were piled with books, histories and biographies, from the Queensborough Public Library mostly. Winston Churchill and the Desert Fox, the War in the Pacific, D-Day, Guadalcanal, the Enola Gay, F. D. R., and Truman. There was a rattan magazine rack crowded with two weeks’ worth of precisely folded newspapers. Today’s Daily News as well as a St. Anthony Messenger—a cover story about celibacy and the priesthood—were on the coffee table between us.

  There was the odor, especially when we’d first entered, of aftershave and the soap he had used in the shower he must have taken between the funeral lunch and the visit to Maeve’s, but it was giving way now, as we sat, to the various scents—curry, onion, garlic—of some immigrant neighbor’s late supper.

  “Not to make too much of such things,” Dan continued, seeming to believe suddenly that my father and I might do just that. “It’s only something that occurred to me today, when Kate brought up that girl’s name again: Eve—Eva. And when I got home, I looked up Maeve.”

  My father nodded again, shrugged a little as well, as if to say he would be careful. He would not make too much of such things.

  “It’s just that on a day like this,” Dan Lynch said, “you find yourself looking at everything. In a new light, if you know what I mean. You want to make some sense of it all.”

  “It’s true,” my father said.

  Both men sat silently for a moment, cautious, it seemed, weighing words. Neither one of them would want to appear to be trying to say something profound—that was for the priest, of course—and both equally feared growing sentimental. And yet something needed to be said, on a night like this. There was the splatter of rain—like fingertips tapping against the windowpanes. The Scotch was mellow but with a bite. Each sip raised a kind of veil that was both a warmth across the cheeks and a welling in the eyes. A way of seeing, perhaps. Perhaps the very thing that Billy would have found so appealing, had the drink been his.

  Not to make too much of such things.

  “I never did meet her,” Dan said. “That Irish girl. She was long gone back home by the time I was discharged. She was always just a story to me. You and Billy out there on Long Island that summer while I’m still getting eaten alive in the Pacific. Insect-proof fatigues, they told us.” He smiled. “What a time that was.” He turned to me. “Those A-bombs saved the lives of a lot of GIs, you know. Killed a lot of Japanese, sure. A lot of innocent people, too. But don’t let the liberals kid you, none of them ever walked through a jungle sniffing for Japs. That’s what we did, you know, sniffed for them. See if you could smell cigarette smoke or, you know, defecation. That’s how you’d know they were there. You couldn’t see anything but lousy jungle. Those bombs kept an awful lot of GIs from dying in those jungles, you know. Those bombs let a lot of young guys go home in one piece.”

  I nodded. I recalled that Dan Lynch had once been known as a great letter writer, too, although his were always addressed to the editors of Time and Newsweek, the presidents of networks. I recalled that he was especially vigilant about slurs against Irish Americans and had once received a personally signed apology from Danny Kaye for a sketch he had done on TV about a drunken leprechaun. A one-man Irish-American anti-defamation league, my grandmother had called Dan Lynch at the time, out on Long Island that last summer when he’d come out for the day and brought the letter along. The rest of the Irish, she’d said, hear a slur against them and instead of being insulted get all guilty thinking that it’s true. Kick a Jew in New York, she’d said, and one in Tel Aviv says “Ouch.” But kick any Irishman and the rest of them shut their mouths and cover their backsides, thinking they’re more deserving. Hadn’t Danny Lynch, after all (when you got to the bottom of it), brought the letter in which Danny Kaye admitted all Irishmen were not drunks down to Quinlan’s? hadn’t he spread it out on the bar?

  Dan shifted in his seat, recrossed his legs. “I remember meeting Maeve, though,” he went on. “I remember the first time Billy brought her into Quinlan’s. It was a Sunday afternoon. They’d been over to one of those tea dances they used to have at the K. of C. This must have been in the early fifties. There was a real downpour and any number of people from the dance were coming in.”

  I sipped Billy’s drink. Another Queens rain, then: the raindrops themselves flashing black and silver in the air, darkening the sidewalk and the gray street and raising the smoky, dirty odor of wet asphalt and wet steel, the darkness of the afternoon making the neon lights in the various small storefronts, drugstore and Chinese restaurant and Quinlan’s Bar and Grill, seem brighter than usual, even romantic, making the streets under and around the elevated seem a city unto themselves rather than the mere runoff—as they had always seemed to be to me—from Manhattan’s surplus. Billy and Maeve, still younger-looking than anyone would remember them, hurrying along.

  “I remember I saw Billy heading toward the bar with this girl in front of him, and my first thought was
that she was someone he’d met out on the street or just inside the door. I thought maybe she was a stranger who needed to find a telephone and he was just helping her out. You weren’t used to seeing Billy with a girl. It took me a few minutes to get it straight: that he’d actually taken her to the dance, picked her up at her house and brought her the orchid she was wearing. I must have seemed pretty thick, but it came as a surprise to me. You weren’t used to it in those days. Not with Billy. You were pretty sure he was a fellow who’d stay single.”

  Just as Billy must have been sure of it himself by then, five, six years since his summer on Long Island. And yet here was Maeve’s very real elbow against his palm, yielding to his slightest pressure. Let me introduce you to my cousin. Here was another girl speaking into his ear—she’d just have a ginger ale, thank you—her breath mingled with the scent of the hothouse orchid on her shoulder, the one he’d brought her. Her face would seem dim in the new light of the crowded barroom, he would be aware of its downy paleness, her plain blue eyes. Thank you, Billy—maybe a little tremor as she lifted the glass and put it to her lips, a tremor of self-consciousness as she lifted her eyes to him over its rim.

  Dan Lynch leaned forward a bit, cupping the stubby glass in both hands. “She was no beauty, was she? Maeve. A plain girl. I was going with Carol Wilson then, you know. Butch Wilson’s sister, do you remember her?”

  My father said he did. There was a beauty.

  Dan sniffed a little. Her mouth was a bit too wide, he said. Not the brightest light either. He glanced at me as if to say there was a tale to tell, if it was just my father here alone. I suspected it would be a tale my father already knew.

  “But Maeve seemed to be a good-enough sort,” Dan Lynch said. “It didn’t take much to see that she was wild about Billy. I don’t know what Billy thought of her at that point, but she sure thought he was something.”