Charming Billy

by Alice McDermott

  Touching his own glass to hers in the bar where the crowd, just like the other couples at the tea dance that afternoon, was growing younger than them both. Time was passing. The christenings were beginning to outnumber the weddings among his family and his friends, the children born since the war, the nieces and nephews and cousins once removed becoming toddlers now, schoolchildren, startling him with their weight, their language, their blossoming lives. He touched her glass and sipped his whiskey and felt the watery veil cover his eyes. What could he have thought of Maeve, after the Irish girl, after that other future, the brightest of them, had shattered in his hand: Here was safety, here was compensation, here was yet another life, the one that had been waiting for him all along, even while he’d been busy imagining his life with Eva. “Pale brows, still hands and dim hair”—he would have found the lines in Yeats. “I had a beautiful friend / And dreamed that the old despair / Would end in love in the end—”

  “When they finally decided to get married, I have to say it was another surprise to me. I never thought it had gotten to that point. Billy never even said that he was thinking of marriage. But I think maybe he was superstitious by then. I think he was afraid to say much to anyone about his plans. After what happened before.”

  “Could be,” my father said.

  Dan Lynch nodded and said, “I’m sure it’s true.”

  Or did he think, leaning down to her pale face, the lipstick nearly gone from her dry lips, that here was the will to live, or the will to procreate, or simply the will to be joined to another, rising up in him again, all unbidden. Here was the familiar longing for peace, for sense, for happiness of some sort or another showing itself again in the form of this mild woman. Here it was, bidding him to go on, make plans, wed—weakening his resolve. His resolve to be true to his first intentions.

  “All Billy says to me is ‘Would you be my best man?’ and I said, ‘Sure. Who’s the bride?’” Dan Lynch laughed, remembering. “I suppose he would have asked you if Claire hadn’t been expecting.”

  He said it somewhat slyly and then seemed pleased when my father told him, “I don’t think so. You were the man for the job.”

  Dan nodded to agree. “He showed me the ring. Just a plain pearl, not a diamond this time, which I suppose was more superstition still.” He doubled his chin, looking into his drink. “I remember the way she shored up her old man, coming down the aisle.”

  My father smiled, nodding, showing that he remembered it, too.

  “She did the same for Billy, when the time came. Maneuvered him when he couldn’t maneuver himself.”

  “She was good at it,” my father said.

  Dan Lynch thought for a moment. A bit of wind picked up some raindrops and hit them against the glass, like pebbles thrown by a persistent suitor. “It was me who told Billy not to stay in the apartment with the two of them,” Dan said softly, going on. “After he and Maeve were married. I knew he had some money saved. Working for Holtzman and all. I said, Buy yourself your own house and move Maeve and her old dad into it—or else you’ll always be a visitor in their place. We were sitting in the back, at those little tables Quinlan had back there for a while, with the little lamps that had those scorched shades. Billy said Quinlan had gotten the whole set of them, along with the new waitress, at a fire sale somewhere. June was her name, the waitress. I took her out a few times. She did seem a little singed.” He raised his eyebrows toward my father, shook his head again: another tale unfit for mixed company. “I said to Billy,” he went on, “Tell yourself this is a way of the Irish girl giving something back to you. You took the job with Holtzman because of her, now use what money you’ve made at it to start out with Maeve. I don’t know, maybe I was wrong to bring her up, the Irish girl, I mean. Billy never mentioned her himself.” He shrugged. “But that’s what I said. And Billy took my advice. He took my advice that time anyway.”

  Holtzman’s money providing yet another down payment, then, this time for the house in Bayside. A narrow pale-brick house on a street lined with a dozen others, a small house with three high brick steps and a wrought-iron railing and a long white driveway that led to a narrow yard. They gave her old father his own room upstairs, moving into it the same bed and dresser and nightstand he had once purchased for his own young bride. The old black police scanner placed over the doily that covered the nightstand mumbling and squawking through most hours of the day that Maeve would spend cleaning and shopping and chatting with the neighbors while Billy was at Con Ed five days a week and Holtzman’s Thursday nights and Saturdays, and even the two weeks of his summer vacation, since he would not go out there again.

  (“You and Maeve come out some weekend,” Dennis would say when they met each other on the street or in the lobby or in the elevator at Edison, or when Billy and Maeve came by for supper or had Dennis and Claire over to their place. “Come mid-week,” Dennis would offer. “Take a couple of vacation days. We’ll be there with the children the first two weeks in July, you and Maeve come on out. Bring the old man, we’ll make room.”

  But Billy would say no, shaking his head. “Thank you, Dennis, but no,” he’d say softly. “I won’t go out there.” No need to ask him why.)

  Dan Lynch said, “The real fly in the ointment as far as I could see was her old man. A drunk, pure and simple. And Billy so full of sympathy for him from the first, the way he’d lost his wife and a child and all. Billy thought it was reason enough for the man to drink. Reason enough for no one to deny him his whiskey, even though it was killing him.” To me: “You only had to take one look at Maeve’s old man to know that the drink was killing him.” To my father: “Remember how he was, in his old slippers, the skin all mottled. That nose. Three sheets to the wind by four in the afternoon.” He shook his head, shivered a little. “Maeve looking after him day after day. Not the best company for a newly married couple.”

  And yet Maeve’s ordinary days alone with her father in the Bayside house could not have been much different from what they had been back in the apartment, before Billy, so much of the day, now as then, being predicated upon the dog. Her father coming into the kitchen to let the dog out in the morning and then pushing himself out of the living-room chair and into his clothes to take him for his first walk of the day; giving the animal his treat and putting the paper and the can of beer aside to give Trixie or Teddy or Joker a good scratch on the belly or to examine whatever it was that the dog was scratching at himself. Pouring the dog food at five o’clock and cutting up the chicken liver and gizzards that he would scatter on top while Maeve went upstairs to change her dress and comb her hair for Billy’s return.

  When she came down again, the old man would be in his easy chair in the living room, the dog licking his chops at his feet. He’d look up at her, noting the changes, the lipstick and the touch of rouge. Surely he loved his daughter. Surely he would have said if asked that he wanted to see her happy. But he also had some stake himself in believing in the immutability of first affections, of promises made to the dead. No doubt he waged a kind of battle with himself before he said (no model of self-control), “Does Billy ever mention that other girl, the Irish one?” or “Did you know she was a redhead?”

  Glancing in the mirror in the tiny powder room, Maeve might well have thought, Why bother?

  By seven her old man might have already polished off a six-pack or fortified himself with more than one glass of Scotch, and Billy might have stopped off at Quinlan’s after work, or had his lunch at some city bar-and-grill, but nevertheless, early on at least, there would be the ritual of a cocktail hour before Maeve served the chops or the cutlets or the casserole, the three of them raising their glasses, Good luck, Good luck, before they sat down—in the kitchen during the winter, at the lace-covered dining-room table come summer—the drink moving them along toward another closing of another day and Billy doing most of the talking, since he was the one who had been out working, collecting anecdotes and jokes and running into old friends in the dark and sparkling places wh
ere he took his leisure. Watching Maeve and her father watching him, you would be hard-pressed to tell what it was that gave them the most pleasure: Billy himself expending all this charm on just the two of them or their own satisfaction that one of them had managed to procure this entertainment for the other. You would be hard-pressed to tell, watching Billy at the head of the table, before his little family, talking and talking, making them laugh, the disappointment that lingered at his heart’s core, disappointment and disbelief, disbelief that the faith he had sworn to an unrealized future should be so simply, so easily betrayed. “She looked into my heart one day / And saw your image was there / She has gone weeping away.”

  Then there would be the ten o’clock walk—the old man slipping a can or two into the kangaroo pockets of his coat, Billy going along for the fresh air and then—as the old man’s legs gave out—going by himself, a cold beer can cupped behind his hand.

  Walking through the neighborhood together, Billy and his father-in-law would have had little interest stirred by the lights in other living-room windows or the sound of other voices, shouts of an argument, the sobbing of a child, since all their talk ended up being about the past, about a time in the old man’s life when he was a robust and redheaded young cop, the father of two little girls, when the city was what it used to be and the woman who made his life what it was still walked the earth. Billy adding his own recollections of what had once been but was no more. Billy sympathizing and telling him so.

  Her father’s physical decline, the slowing circulation, the water retention, the falls with their attendant concussions and sprains, the collapsed lung, the seeping capillaries, would have provided Maeve with enough to occupy her mind, consulting doctors now as she had once gone to the nuns, who went to the priest, getting the doctors, as the priest had done, to warn and reprimand him. Redheaded and fair-skinned, Maeve’s father wore his dissipation boldly, blatantly, the same way, my father now said to Dan Lynch, he wore his heart on his sleeve.

  But Billy called him Mr. Kehoe and took on the task of getting him up the stairs at night and into his bed. Maeve would be listening from their own bedroom with its Blessed Mother colors and the stiff-limbed baby doll that was either a stubborn hanging on to childishness or a balm for her inability to bear a child; a reassuring glance at the past or compensation for what had not been provided by the future. On the dresser before her, the wedding photo taken only minutes after they had made their vows. This will not change. Listening still as Billy made his way back downstairs again to pour himself another drink and lift the phone from the wall, or (Maeve still listening) lift his car keys and head out the door.

  The drinking, down at Quinlan’s, on his walks with her father, downstairs in the kitchen after she had gone to bed, would have been for her as much a part of Billy’s personality as his slow smile, his multitude of cousins and friends, the letters and postcards that seemed to appear beneath his hand, to flow from his fingertips, in a nearly unbidden act of prestidigitation. It was just Billy’s way: this need to keep in touch, to keep talking, to be called by name when he entered the crowded barroom, slapped on the back, Glad to see you, have a seat. The drink a warmth across the cheeks, a watery veil that only brought into relief the gleam on the bar, the light in the mirror, the sparkle of a bottle, silver-topped, amber-filled, as it was plucked from its spot among the rows and rows of bright, silver-topped bottles and poured out again. The telltale aftertaste in the back of his throat that could only mean the one drink would have to be followed by another as the talk and the laughter turned, spiraled, not into the heart of his loneliness—he would not mention her now that he was a married man, he was that loyal—but toward the world where that loneliness existed, the world where change and cruelty, separation and loss, pity and sorrow refused to be forgotten, or forgiven, the world seen as it should be seen, through a veil of tears, where Uncle Daniel’s life could be examined, or Bridie’s troubles, his mother’s loneliness and his father-in-law’s grief, where the passing of time, the cruelty of war, the failure of hope, the death of the young could be discussed and examined (a young President, over the years, the young sons of cousins and of neighbors and friends, young children right over here in Kew Gardens, taken from their beds). A world where love (more difficult still) could be spoken of by a hand on the shoulder, a fresh drink placed on the bar, Good to see you, through welling tears, real ones now, Ah, Billy, it’s always good to see you. Dark, sparkling, sprinkled with moments when the sound and smell and sight of the place, the taste at the back of his throat, transported him, however briefly, to a summer night long ago when he was young and life was all promise and she was there to turn to, to drink in, this was also the world where his faith met him, became actual, no longer as mere promise or possibility but as inevitable and true. No less than the cathedrals and churches and synagogues scattered throughout the city that had once sustained and amazed him, now the various bars he stopped into, for lunch, after work, between calls for Con Ed, and most evenings as the day came to a close, reminded him that what he sought, what he longed for, was universal and constant. Quinlan’s was the best of them, sure, but each bar he went into offered the same familiar light and scent, the same company, the same talk. And in each of them, the force of his faith, of his Church, a force he could only glimpse briefly while sober—maybe for a second or two after Communion when he knelt and bowed his head, or for that brief instant when he pushed aside the heavy curtain and stepped into the dark confessional, or in the first rising scent of the incense at Benediction—became clear and steady and as fully true as the vivid past or the as-yet-unseen but inevitable future. A true redemption—it was a favorite word of his, after a few, Dan Lynch and my father agreed, a favorite topic—a redemption that was not merely a pretty story grown up around a good man but a fact that changed the very fiber of the day, the moment. Drunk, when Billy turned his eyes to heaven, heaven was there. (Dan Lynch himself had seen it in Billy’s eyes, he said again, years before, August 15, Feast of the Assumption, when they’d hightailed it over to Mass.) Heaven was there, utterly necessary, utterly sensible, the only possible reconciliation of the way he must live day by day and the certainty he’d felt that life meant something greater. The only redemption, the only compensation for the disappointment, the cruelty and pain that plagued the living, for love itself, because when he turned his eyes to heaven, heaven was there and Eva was in it.

  Waiting up for him, Maeve would say a Rosary and think of the Bing Crosby song, counting her blessings instead of sheep: money was no problem and the house and yard more than she’d ever dreamed of; he never missed a day of work at either job and even in his cups never raised a hand toward her (not for years, anyway), hardly raised his voice, and never failed to give her his arm when they went out. He was kind to her father. He was a handsome man. And although the hour might be late and he might not make it up the stairs on his own, although she might have to call Dennis to help her get him in from the lawn or up off the floor, still he came home every night, eventually, managing always—it might have been planned—to stay conscious until he had at least stopped the car somewhere near the driveway or the curb.

  She could manage his legs if Dennis could just get him under the arms. She could place herself between his knees, her elbows locked beneath his calves, her hips bearing whatever weight she could not bear on her forearms and maneuver him up the stairs, the landing the trickiest part, the little round table with the Hummel children being upset more than once (my father muttering, on his way back down again, “Couldn’t you find another spot for that, Maeve?” telling my mother the next morning, reminding Dan Lynch now, of “her damn figurines”). She would be breathless by the time she got him to the bed, the backs of her legs black-and-blue from where his heels might have caught her, her arms weary, rubbed pink by the rough gabardine of his pant legs. Together they would undress him as well as they could, Maeve being the more adept, having cared so long for her old father. Dennis suspecting sometimes that Billy’s d
etermined unconsciousness was willful, even planned, a door he had sought and had stepped through and pulled closed behind him.

  His body remained thin, the same long, thin legs and hairless chest, the same pale skin, chalk-white except for the raw patches of psoriasis and the nearly theatrically ruddy cheeks, so he looked for all the world in that moment before Maeve pulled the sheet up over him like some broken martyr, a tortured and heaven-bound saint. Billy Lynch in the flesh, in her own home.

  Calmly, she would go downstairs and put the kettle on. A little sliver of cake with that, Dennis? Dennis sitting down with her in the tiny kitchen at all hours of the night to give her some company, to discuss a cure (AA, a drying-out hospital, a pill he’d read about that makes it impossible to hold down a drink), to let the hot liquid soothe the grief in his throat that told him that Billy, just like her old father, was determined to die on them. And that Maeve was determined to hang on to any kind of life at all as long as Billy was in it. The appearance of sobriety alone good enough. Good enough.

  “From the very beginning,” Dan Lynch went on, “Billy didn’t buy the AA bit, even for the old man. He didn’t buy this getting up and admitting that each and every one of them, every drunk, is exactly the same. He didn’t buy this trying to freeze people out in order to make them quit, either. ‘Billy’s got to hit rock bottom before he’ll quit,’ Ted Lynch told me.” He shook his head. “Jesus,” he said softly, “nice sentiment. But look what Billy did: Billy sat with the old man and poured him his drinks and listened to his tale of woe because he knew that’s what the old man needed. He sympathized.” Dan paused, squinted into his drink. “I only wish we’d had sense enough to do the same for Billy,” he said. “Maybe then he wouldn’t have died out on the street the way he did.”

  My father said, “He didn’t die on the street. He died in the hospital.”