“Found on the street, then,” Dan Lynch said, but it was clear that in his every telling of it in the future it would remain died in the street. “Found on the street like some bum instead of dying in his bed like Maeve’s father did, because Billy had had the sense to feed him his whiskey at home and let him talk.” Dan looked into his drink. “I tell you, Dennis, I’ve got some guilt about it all tonight. I think we should have done the same for Billy. Never mind this trying to trick him into staying sober, forcing him into it. You telling him he couldn’t come over to the house to see the kids and me convincing Quinlan not to serve him. Jesus, there was a humiliation for the poor guy. And then Ted siccing his AA buddies on him like storm troopers. There’s no drunk like a reformed drunk, Billy said. He made a joke out of it, sure, but they drove him crazy, puffing away on their cigarettes and glassy-eyed from all the coffee they guzzled at those meetings. They hounded him. And then Father Jim—who had a problem himself, you know—dragging him over to Ireland. His sisters wagging their fingers at him, the two husbands, too, although you can’t tell me Peter Sullivan isn’t in the same boat. And Maeve and her novenas. What were we thinking?” He looked up at my father. “We should have sat him here”—he pointed to the empty space of couch beside him—“and fed him his whiskey and let him talk. There was a pain in him that only alcohol eased. Who were we to tell him to give up the drink and live with the pain?”
My father held out his hand, palm up, a gesture that for me recalled and encompassed my life’s entire experience of him, a plea for reasonableness. “That’s not what we told him, Dan,” he said.
“Essentially, it is,” Dan Lynch answered. Stubborn.
“It’s not,” my father said. “He might have lived another twenty years if we’d gotten him to quit.”
“He might not have wanted to,” Dan Lynch said.
They were silent again, each one looking into opposite corners of the room, once more weighing words. I sensed that they both understood that this was not an argument either of them was up to pursuing or, for that matter, winning. Dan Lynch would not want to prove, finally, that they should have stood by, ready to pour, while Billy drank himself to death. My father would not want to hear Dan Lynch concede that Billy—their Billy, with his letters and his jokes, his loyalty and his broken heart—could have been cured of his affliction by rote, set back into his life by the simple application of some formula meant for everyone else. I moved the ice around in Billy’s drink. Give the man that much credit.
Dan Lynch said, “You know, Billy never mentioned her again after he married Maeve.” He lifted an eyebrow. “At least not to me,” he added. “In all the nights we met and had a drink or two together, you know, before things got bad with him, you never heard him say a word about that girl, despite all he’d said about her before he met Maeve.”
But my father sipped his drink, admitted nothing.
Dan Lynch sat back abruptly. “His sisters asked me today, Did Maeve know anything about her, the Irish girl? I told them I couldn’t say.” He seemed a little sheepish, as if he were reluctant to part with his authority—he, after all, had been the best man. “I said she must have known something.”
My father shrugged. “Her old man had told her something. Billy had told him, early on.”
“Much?” Dan asked, one smooth eyebrow still raised. With his bald head cocked and the stubby glass in his fist he looked like a cartoon prizefighter.
“As much as there was to know, I suppose,” my father said.
“She can’t have liked it.”
My father smiled. “Claire was engaged once, too, remember. To one of those fellows who might not have come home if we hadn’t dropped the bomb. I can’t say it ever bothered either of us.”
“But Billy didn’t give up the girl. She was taken from him,” Dan said. “That would make a big difference to a woman.”
My father shrugged, lifted his drink. I wondered for a moment if he would say, Eva never died. Turn up the lights in Dan Lynch’s little place and let the irony flood the room. It was only a lie. If you’re looking for sense, Dan, you’re not going to find it here. But what he said was “We’re talking ancient history, Danny. Billy gave Maeve enough to think about day after day. She wouldn’t have to go back that far to find something to fret over.”
They were silent again, their glasses nearly empty. I drank from mine and listened to the rain, to a distant siren somewhere, to a few shouted words from down in the street, Spanish, Farsi. The two men looked into their drinks, ignoring it all, concentrating, it seemed to me, concentrating on conjuring something that they both understood would be fleeting, momentary, something that would be glimpsed only briefly if they managed to glimpse it at all. A way to make sense. Or else a way to tell the story that would make them believe it was sensible.
“Were they happy?” Dan said finally. “Billy and Maeve. Do you think? Were they ever close?” He would not look either of us in the eye, as if the question had embarrassed him.
“She put up with him,” my father said, knowing it wasn’t an answer.
“She chose to,” Dan Lynch said. Now he raised his head. “She chose him, and as far as I can see he fit her to a T. Her old man all over again. Someone to maneuver, to shore up. An alcoholic with a shadow across his heart. An alcoholic because he had a shadow across his heart, the way I see it.” He shook his head, squinting into the dim room. “I don’t begrudge her her tears, of course, but I wonder, too. Would she have known what to do with a sober man, with the full force of the affection of a sober man who’d never loved another?”
Now it was my father’s turn to lower his eyes. “Who can say?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” Dan Lynch said, sitting back, a definitive nod. “I don’t think she would have known, Dennis. I don’t think Billy just as himself, without the girl there first, this Eva, I don’t think Maeve would have found him so easy to maneuver. He’d had half the life taken out of him when that girl died and that could well have been just the thing that made him right for Maeve. Sure,” he said—he raised his hand from his thigh and then placed it back down again—“sure, she put up with him all these years, but in other ways Billy asked very little of her. I’m certain he asked very little of her.” He glanced quickly at me, trying to recall, it seemed, whether I was twenty-eight or twelve. “There were no children,” he said. He nearly whispered it, as if the fact had been a secret. “And Billy loved children.”
My father shook his head impatiently. He seemed annoyed. It might have been his natural disinclination to wholeheartedly agree with Dan Lynch about anything. It might have been his reluctance to consider the possibility that the lie he’d told Billy all those years ago was not merely the cause of thirty years of pointless grief but the very thing that had made Billy’s life with Maeve possible, and fruitless.
“Billy wanted too much,” my father said finally. He leaned to put his glass on the coffee table, on top of the St. Anthony Messenger. It was both a way to dismiss the conversation and to show he was ready to take his leave. “He had some strange thoughts about the world, Danny, you know he did. About the way the world should be. You wouldn’t have tolerated it in most other people. You would have said, ‘Oh come on now.’”
He stood. I stood, too, Billy’s drink still in my hand. My father’s voice said he was at the end of his patience. His voice said, “Let’s get to the bottom of things.”
“Maeve made the same mistake we all did, Dan. She not only put up with him, she hoped he was right, in all his strange notions. She hoped the world would somehow turn out to be just the way he believed it to be. She hoped somehow that he’d turn out to be right in the end, with all his hanging on to the past. All his loyalty to the dead. Even if it meant she’d have no life of her own.” He swatted the air.
“Billy didn’t need someone to pour him his drinks, he needed someone to tell him that living isn’t poetry. It isn’t prayer. To tell him and convince him. And none of us could do it, Danny, because eve
ry one of us thought that as long as Billy believed it was, as long as he kept himself believing it, then maybe it could still be true. Jesus Christ, Danny,” he said, and then stopped. In the silence that followed, I fully expected him to say, It was a lie. It was a lie and Billy knew it.
Dan Lynch sat in his seat, the empty glass on his tattersall knee, his piles of books and magazines, his mother’s own pieces. He looked at my father, his mouth closed, his eyes surprised and maybe a little hurt, but forgiving him already for this outburst, because, you know (he would tell them down at Quinlan’s), it was hard on Dennis, having to identify Billy and all, it had been a hard week all around.
My father would not tell Dan Lynch the truth. I knew simply by looking from one to the other that he would never tell Dan Lynch the truth. It was, after all, yet another sweet romance to preserve.
“Jesus Christ,” my father said again, but softly now, that old, fading annoyance on his face. “Sometimes the less said the better, do you know what I mean?”
Dan nodded, clearly disappointed to have the conversation pulled out from under him like this (I had the sense that he’d have liked to talk all night), but forgiving my father already.
“Sure,” he said. “Let’s put it to rest for tonight. Billy’s ears must be burning.”
My father smiled. “Gone but not forgotten,” he said.
HE’D LEFT THE FLUSHING OFFICE at midmorning, driving in the rain to the VA hospital, where the girl at the information desk had said, “You’re welcome, Officer,” after she’d given him directions to the morgue. “Have a nice day, Detective,” she’d called out when he left (the ordeal, at long last, over). She was smiling, he said, but with an edge to it. A young woman, Hispanic of some sort. No doubt with a boyfriend on Rikers Island.
That morning Maeve’s neighborhood was sodden with the rain, the shingles and roofs a shade darker, surely, than they would have been in dry weather. Silver puddles in every pothole. A small river flowing along the crumbling curb. There were cardboard bunny rabbits and Easter eggs hung in storm windows here and there, marking the homes where children lived, or visited. Dorothy, the neighbor lady, was already over. Maeve was on the phone, and one of Billy’s white shirts was already washed out and on a hanger, dripping dry into the kitchen sink. The undertaker’s number was already written out, and the number for the rectory. She’d had nights enough, he supposed, to rehearse her every step should the worst occur, so that now that it had finally happened, it was all, for Maeve, part of an old routine. “She knew,” Dorothy whispered, as if knowing, in Billy’s case, required any prescience.
Sitting at her kitchen table, Dennis devised a list, writing on the back of an empty, windowed envelope, of the friends and relations he would call himself, and then copied it over again so Maeve would know they’d been taken care of. He called Kate and Rosemary from the phone in the kitchen. And half a dozen Lynch cousins. He brought Billy’s best blue suit to the dry cleaners on the corner. And then there seemed for the moment nothing else for him to do but to go back to work.
It was shock that Billy had actually died of, not the cirrhosis, although the cirrhosis was certainly far advanced. Shock, as Dennis understood it, from his stomach being filled up with blood. He’d been found collapsed on the street, in Flushing, just off Main Street. Leaving some two-bit gin mill with his car keys in his hand—still in his hand when they found him, although his wallet was gone. It was a patrol car that found him (we’re moving, Officer), not dead yet but dying. Dead three hours after they got him to the emergency room, one of the nurses there finally recognizing him and able to give him a name. Not Billy—Dennis’s first thought when he saw him. A colored man, thank God.
When he left Maeve’s, he took a minute to swing by Bridie’s ; it wasn’t much out of the way. Standing at the top of her narrow stoop, he saw the curtain that covered the door glass move and had to shout through the wood. Bridie was out at the grocery store—it was the lady who sometimes took care of Jim and she had strict instructions not to let anybody in. He said that she should tell Bridie he’d call her later, he would not stand there in the rain, shouting the news. But of course by the time he called her, Bridie was able to say, “Oh, Dennis, I heard. I called Maeve. I had a feeling that was why you’d stopped by.” When in truth he had stopped by mostly to see the shock on Bridie’s face when he told her Billy was gone, the disbelief. Standing over Billy in that cold room (and soon enough the fat colored man they had shown him was transformed, by the familiar curve of his hairline, the shape of an ear, the smooth lips, into Billy himself), he had felt his hands form into fists and had turned to the young attendant to say, furiously, “Isn’t this a damnable thing?” But how could the poor man respond? No doubt he saw such things every day—the husks of every kind of life carted out and carted away. Details like who he was, how he died, how the dusting of psoriasis on his bare leg recalled a bit of sea salt that had been there once, long ago, irrelevant now, barely interesting. What could the poor man say? Dennis had gone to Bridie’s house in the hope of seeing in Bridie’s eyes the acknowledgment, the shock—untempered by any premonition—that this was Billy they were talking about, Billy who had collapsed on the street (you could see the mark of the sidewalk on his dark cheek, one of those freckled bruises Dennis had last seen on his children’s knees), Billy whose life had ended this way. Billy Lynch. Googenheimer. Our Billy who had left us in this terrible and willful way.
Dennis had a call to make in St. Alban’s, a Baptist church with a string of adjectives before its name: First Ethiopian Pentecostal Afro-Asian whatever whatever—so much exclusivity that you might expect the door of the chapel to be no bigger than a needle’s eye. The pastor was the intellectual sort. A tall and handsome black man in his early thirties. Full of himself and his calling, his eyes always falling on a spot three or four inches above Dennis’s head, his own head always drawn back a bit as he spoke, as if racism were a scent Dennis gave off. (As if it never occurred to the man that most of Dennis’s customers these days, for years now, since he’d left Irving Place for the office in Queens, were colored.) And Dennis, to tell the truth, busy recalling all the while they spoke one of Billy’s stories, about walking down a street in New York with his mother’s sister, who was just off the boat, and a colored man passing them by, and then, minutes later, another, who was walking briskly. Billy’s aunt had looked over her shoulder at the second man as he went by and then leaned to Billy, a boy then, and said, “He’ll have to walk faster than that if he’s going to catch up with his friend.”
The pastor wanted to run a new separate line in for the nursery school and up the amperage in the sacristy (did they call it that?) and choir loft for a new sound system and music synthesizer. There was no urgency for the first, but the second “optimally” should be completed by the beginning of May, which was an anniversary of some sort. Dennis said his usual—The best we can—and dropped another “Reverend” into the conversation to show that he respected the man and his diplomas and his good work despite the fact that he himself was white and authentically Christian (i.e., Roman Catholic) and old enough to be this particular reverend’s father.
He was surprised when the man walked him all the way to the door of the little church, thinking that perhaps he had, with his calculated deference, won him over. The rain was still coming down in sheets. The gray day still the one in which Billy Lynch had died. Dennis put on his hat and turned to shake the minister’s hand and instantly felt the corner of a neatly folded bill prick his palm. “First week of May,” the reverend said. “It’s really a must.” Now, finally, he brought his dark eyes down to Dennis’s. He smiled, but not kindly, more as if (if you can picture it) he had looked into Dennis’s shallow soul, had heard every “Damn nigger” he had ever breathed—over the newspaper, at the wheel of his car—as if he knew the narrow, ordinary, and ineffectual course of his life, of Billy’s life, of the life of everyone like him. The superior smile of someone ennobled by true suffering, justifiable rage. Someone
whose pain amounted to something. Whose love saved lives. Dennis nodded. He found himself searching for a joke to make, as if a joke might prove he was more than the sum of the things the man was sure he knew about him. “Dig we must,” he said. But the S.O.B. had already turned away.
Standing on the sidewalk beside his car, Dennis unfolded the bill. A ten. There you go, Billy. And then dropped it on the sidewalk for some kid to find.
Here’s the thing, he said (we were on our way home, in the dark, in the now steady, heavy rain): Back in the sixties, when it was still Dig We Must, when it looked for certain that he’d be promoted to manager, a nearly twenty-year-old letter was produced from his personnel file. A letter from a Mr. Jacob R. Leibowitz, Jake—from whom, by then, he had bought four layette sets and maybe twenty pairs of footed pajamas, good wool Sunday coats, and at least a half dozen birthday blouses for your mother. The letter said that three weeks ago money was exchanged between him and a certain young man in your employ, a certain Mr. Lynch, with the understanding that as a result of said payment service would be provided in a timely manner, and yet service had only this morning been restored.
Dennis supposed he hadn’t been called up on the carpet for it back then because he had plenty of friends in Personnel in those days—Mary Casey was there and his cousin Mal, Uncle Jim’s son—but with the possibility of the promotion, the powers that be took a second look and found the letter that Jake had written in 1946 and so passed him over.
“We’re passing you over this time,” they said, apologizing, but there was little doubt in his mind then that it was for good.
That evening he took the subway home as usual, picked up the car as usual at Lefferts Boulevard, and drove the rest of the way to Rosedale. The kids were crowded into the kitchen, as usual, their mother at the stove frying fish, the dog underfoot. Homework and baths and prayers, not to mention the back of his hand to one or the other of them, and then the evening paper and a smoke before he’s winding the clock again. Claire said, Oh, don’t let it bother you, but there was the extra money as well as the boost it might have given his ego, and there were four college tuitions to think of. Not to mention the mark the letter left on his good name, his honesty, and the taint it might give to his friendship with Jake, whom you really couldn’t blame in the long run because he had written the letter when Dennis was a stranger to him and the bitter taste of all he’d been through in the war was still on his tongue. “How much was it?” Claire asked.
Charming Billy Page 19