“Ten dollars,” Dennis said.
“Cheapskate,” Claire said, making a joke of it. “He could have given you twenty.”
And then the phone ringing into his dreams at 2, 3 a.m., that godawful hour. Claire not even bothering to open her eyes for it. He stumbled out into the hallway where the phone was, the only light coming from the dim lamps left burning all night in the children’s two rooms. Billy’s thick voice, in midsentence, it seemed, no doubt because Dennis himself had not yet come fully awake in order to catch the first few words, but giving him then, at 2 or 3 a.m., in the darkness, the impression that his cousin had been talking all along, all through the day and night, his steady stream of words an undercurrent to every moment of their existence.
He was thinking, Billy said, about the life she didn’t have. Of all that had been denied her.
Dennis listened first for some sound in the background, some indication of where he was calling from. There was only silence.
Nights in a husband’s arms, children, the movement of the seasons. The changes, melancholy or not, that came with age, with having a good span of years to look back on.
“Where are you, Billy?” Dennis said.
Billy said he was thinking about what a brief life it had been. The brevity of it couldn’t have struck them then, they were young enough themselves, but now, as they themselves grew older, didn’t it become clear that it was only a handful of years that she’d been given, only a blink to call her lifetime. Wasn’t it something that as they themselves grew older, the cruelty of it, the unfairness, became more pronounced, more clear?
“Are you at home?” Dennis asked.
Billy said he was, but Dennis was only sure it was true when he heard the dog moving around on the kitchen floor—this one would have been Trixie—scratching her neck and jiggling her collar.
“And where’s the old man?” Dennis asked.
“In bed,” Billy answered impatiently. Out cold, was how Dennis thought of it.
His own loss of her was one thing, Billy said. He’d long ago stopped thinking of himself in that regard. He’d had life enough himself, hadn’t he? Here he was, a married man with a house of his own and two jobs and friends enough. His life had gone on, hadn’t it? But he wasn’t thinking of himself, you see. Tonight he was thinking only of her, of all she’d been cheated of.
“Go to bed, Billy,” Dennis said.
Tonight the cruelty of it struck him. A girl so young, her childhood behind her, her life—marriage, motherhood—just about to begin. Was she born just to live these brief years and die? Was everything she’d felt and thought so utterly meaningless to her Maker? Where was the sense in it? There was no sense in it.
“Close up the bottle now, Billy,” Dennis said. “Go upstairs to your wife.”
There was a silence. Dennis was familiar enough with these phone calls to know that it could mean Billy had simply put the phone down to reach for another drink or had passed out or, if he was far enough along, had simply forgotten what it was he was saying. He might even have broken the connection. Dennis waited; he heard the muffled ticking of the clock, saw in the dimness the familiar shape of Claire’s hip and shoulder under the dark blanket, felt his children’s breath on the warm close air of the small house, in the middle of the night. There was the pull of indigestion in his gut, the same indigestion that had plagued him since early this morning, when he’d been called in and told that a letter had been found in his personnel file, written some time ago but troubling still …
“We have to rail against it,” Billy said hoarsely.
“Go to bed, Billy.”
“The injustice of it,” Billy said. “The way she was cheated.”
Dennis heard the sound of Billy’s glass hitting the mouthpiece, the heavy swallow. He could almost smell the stuff on his breath.
“We can’t be bribed into silence because we’ve lived long ourselves. We have to remember what she was deprived of.”
“I’m not going to stay on the line with you, Bill,” Dennis said patiently, although he well knew that as soon as he hung up Billy would be dialing someone else, Danny or Ted or one of his priests, keeping them up to all hours as well. “We both have to be at work tomorrow, Billy, that’s all you need to remember. You’re expected at work. You’ll be sick as a dog if you don’t close up the bottle now and go to bed.”
“Death is a terrible thing,” Billy said.
“Death comes to us all,” Dennis told him. “But 7 a.m. will come sooner.”
“Our Lord knew it,” Billy went on. “Our Lord knew it was terrible. Why would He have shed His own blood if death wasn’t terrible?” There was another pause, another sip of whiskey. “You know what makes a mockery of the Crucifixion?” Billy said. “You know what makes it pointless? Anyone saying that death is just an ordinary thing, an ordinary part of life. It happens, you reconcile yourself, you go on. Anyone saying that is saying Our Lord’s coming was to no avail.”
Dennis heard the click of the glass again. “I’m not staying on,” he said.
“What do we need the Redemption for?” Billy asked him. “If death isn’t terrible. If we’re reconciled? Why do we need heaven or hell? It makes no difference. If death doesn’t trouble us, the injustice of it, then we don’t need heaven or hell, do we? It might as well be a lie.”
If ever Dennis had the chance and the inclination to say, “Billy, it was a lie,” he had it now. But it was 3 a.m. and the indigestion was scratching at the back of his throat. And there was work tomorrow, when he would have to go back to his usual desk and his usual routine, loudmouthed McCauley with the Orange Crush–colored hair moving on to management, that single spark of small ambition that had ever flared in him extinguished now. Wife children house now the extent of his success.
“It’s why I won’t go back out to the Island,” Billy said. His voice had lost some of its fierceness: even he, in his cups, knew this was covered territory.
“Jesus,” Dennis whispered, to show Billy he knew it, too.
“I won’t be placated by that beauty,” Billy said. “I’ll do that much for her.”
“Go to bed, Billy,” Dennis said.
There was another silence. “Is it still the same, Dennis?” he asked, his voice tinged with nostalgia. “Holtzman’s place? East Hampton? Three Mile Harbor?”
“It’s still the same.”
“Are you going out there again this summer?”
“Who knows? She’s talking about renting it out.”
“I won’t go there,” Billy said.
“None of us will if she rents it.”
“I won’t see it again.”
“She thinks it’s a waste of money, keeping it empty all year. Now that Holtzman’s gone.”
“I’ll do that much for her, Dennis. I’ll stay away. She never went back and neither will I.”
Dennis paused, trying to convey by his silence, as best he could, the end of his patience. “Close up the bottle now, Billy,” he said softly. “You’ll be dead yourself if you keep up this drinking.”
He heard more silence in return. Another deep swallow. And then: “Are the children asleep, Dennis?”
“Of course,” Dennis said.
“God bless them, they’re a handful, aren’t they?”
Resigned, wide-awake now, Dennis sank into the chair by the old phone table, pulling at the leg of his pajamas as he did, as if he had a crease to preserve. He glanced into his sons’ room and saw the shadows strewn across the floor, sneakers and clothes, books and toys. “Some days,” he said. He crossed his bare ankles before him, tucked his free hand under his elbow, settling in.
“No broken bones this week?” Billy was chuckling.
“Not this week,” Dennis said.
“God bless them,” Billy said again.
And another long pause. Another drink taken. Dennis considered telling him a funny little something one of them had said when Billy began to speak again, his voice growing heavier. “It’s a pact with t
he devil,” he said. “To be reconciled. Our Lord spilling His every drop of blood on the cross to show us death is terrible, a terrible injustice, and all the while we’re telling ourselves that it’s not so bad, after all. You get over it. You get used to it. Life is lovely despite the fact of a young woman dying, her children all unborn. Life’s still good. What’s beautiful stays beautiful. Life goes on pleasantly enough no matter who dies.”
“It does,” Dennis said wearily, although it struck him on this day, at this hour, that it was, for him, another lie.
“What’s that?” Billy said. He was far into it now.
“I said it does,” Dennis told him, raising his voice. Claire stirred, pulling the blanket up over her shoulder with a shadowy hand. “Life goes on, Billy,” he said.
Billy whispered, “I won’t let it.”
“We don’t have much say in the matter,” Dennis said, but Billy was already off the line.
He sat for a few minutes in the dark hallway, a cold draft blowing across his bare feet. He wondered if Maeve would be calling in another hour or two. If he went back to bed would he go back to sleep. He thought of his father, the first and foremost (in those days) of the people he loved who had died. The very thought itself a prayer to the man in heaven, which he had surely earned, if only by dint of the flattery he had poured on God and every detail of His creation for the sixty-odd years he had lived. Or, if God required such things, by dint of the terrible pain he’d endured at the end. Even in compensation for the fact that for all the love he’d poured out for friends and family for all the years that he lived, he was never, let’s face it, loved sufficiently in return. Not by the one being whose love he most sought, anyway.
He thought of his father, as he did so often in those days when his father was first and foremost of those he missed, the very thought of him a prayer of sorts (one that said, I’m weary, Dad, and discouraged; I’ve lost all sense of delight), although truth be told, it struck him that night, at that lonely hour, that his father in death was no more present to him, no more real, no more vivid than Eva was to Billy, in her just-over-the-Atlantic afterlife, pumping gas on the convent road in Clonmel.
Who can trace such things, he said, but it was perhaps the first tremor of the devastation that would strike him, knock him off his feet, in the weeks and months after my mother died. Billy’s thirty years of misdirected prayer, Billy’s tenacious, life-changing belief. His own lie.
FOR ONE OF MY MOTHER’S BIRTHDAYS, my father wrapped a box of fifty matchbooks in bright tissue paper and then inscribed the card: For a mate who is matchless. It drew a great laugh at the dinner table that night, amid the remains of the sugary, elaborately iced cake, the already-opened birthday blouse from Jake’s, and served as catalyst—at least as I recall it—for a discussion about which of them would remarry should anything “happen” to the other, which I suppose would have to place this particular birthday in a time when anything “happening” was such a remote possibility that speculation about it was benign and even pleasurable, a kind of flirtation. When a birthday gift of fifty matchbooks and a carton of cigarettes to go with them held no omen.
Coyly, my mother devised a list. There was a young widower down the street, and the son of the man who owned the delicatessen she shopped in—a good-looking Italian kid, she said, maybe twenty-five. There was the guy she’d taken driving lessons from when they’d first moved out to Rosedale, married, she thought, but she could still look him up. She could look up Bob O’Brien, her old flame, her old fiancé, the one my father stole her away from while he was still in the Navy, off cleaning up the Pacific. And his brother Ken, who’d had a crush on her all along and never did marry himself, as far as she knew. She could go on, she said, grinning, the cigarette held beside her ear, the thick sweet icing still on her plate. The possibilities were endless. She still had some of the old charm.
“Should I go on?” she said, and my father bowed his head, laughing. “No,” he said. “Don’t go on.”
“And what would you do?” she asked him. “Look up Irish Mary?”
My father shook his head, although we had heard him say, often enough, when my mother had run up a big bill at Gertz or A&S, or had forgotten to buy dessert or had dismissed him with a wave of her hand, I should have married Irish Mary.
“There’d be no one else for me,” he said seriously. “I couldn’t marry again. You could. You should. But there’d be no one else for me.”
In the arc of an unremarkable life, a life whose triumphs are small and personal, whose trials are ordinary enough, as tempered in their pain as in their resolution of pain, the claim of exclusivity in love requires both a certain kind of courage and a good dose of delusion. Irish Mary, Eva’s sister, would have been happy enough to accept my father’s ring, I suppose, had Eva not chosen to stay in Ireland and marry Tom. My mother’s first fiancé would have married her gladly if he hadn’t been kept too long overseas by the Navy, if my father hadn’t beaten him home, on points, a full year before. It might have been Cody or John in the car with your father, that day on Long Island. I might have been gone. Those of us who claim exclusivity in love do so with a liar’s courage: there are a hundred opportunities, thousands over the years, for a sense of falsehood to seep in, for all that we imagine as inevitable to become arbitrary, for our history together to reveal itself as only a matter of chance and happenstance, nothing irrepeatable, or irreplaceable, the circumstantial mingling of just one of the so many million with just one more.
In the weeks and months after my mother died my father grew silent about her, never mentioning her name and drawing his head back just a little every time anyone else did. My brothers and I noticed this about him and, without ever discussing it ourselves, simply let him be. We had all seen his reaction at the graveside when my mother’s sister, who read entire books about such things and in church prayed loudly, her eyes closed and her hands raised to the altar, leaned into him and said, “You can cry, Dennis. Big boys do cry.” He had smiled a little, looking over her head and wearing the pained, polite expression the early Christians might have worn as the Romans lit the kindling at their feet. Without ever discussing it, my brothers and I agreed we would not torture our father with our advice or our concern or with any well-meaning injunctions for him to tell us what he was feeling. We would let him be. He could not talk about her, fine. He could not sit through Mass without her, fine.
I was then in my senior year at the Mary Louis Academy. During my mother’s last hospitalization, my father had begun driving me there most mornings, stopping first at the hospital so we could say hello and then taking me to school before he went on to Con Ed, to put in an hour or two—face time—before he went back to the hospital again. He continued to drive me to school after she was gone, a convenience for me, an easy-enough detour for him. There was a morning radio show he liked, a father-and-son team, the father having been in broadcasting since before the war, the son clearly being groomed to take over alone when the time came. They cracked corny jokes and recited odd news items between traffic reports and weather updates and easy-listening ballads, and their soft and amicable banter gave us reason enough to say little to each other throughout the ride.
When I got out, I would slam the door and then lean down to wave goodbye through the car window. He would give a little salute and then drive on, his profile, in the last second I could catch it, tense and determined, leaning into the day, it seemed to me, heading toward what must be done and who must be attended to now that the passionate attention he had turned so exclusively to my mother in the past year of her dying was over and she was gone. Unable, he told me on the night of Billy’s funeral, when we lingered for a few more minutes in the living room of the Rosedale house before he went up to his bed in the room that used to be their own and I went to the one that used to be mine, utterly unable, he said, to convince himself that the attention he had given her in that last year, the closeness they had felt, the assurance that they had achieved something exclusive,
something redemptive in the endurance of their love, had been any more than another well-intentioned deception, another construction, as unbelievable, when you came right down to it, as the spontaneity of a love song in some Broadway musical, the supposedly heartfelt supplication of a well-rehearsed hymn, the bearing any one of Billy’s poems about life and death and love and misery had on the actual way any of us lived from day to day.
He could not convince himself then, he said, in those days and months after her death, that heaven was any more than a well-intentioned deception meant to ease our own sense of foolishness, to ease pain. Despite his own years of vigilant Catholicism, despite his own mother’s deathbed conversion, despite the promises he and my mother had exchanged, he could no longer see death as anything other than the void that met a used-up body, a spent mind. Not a mere moment over which you could sail, buoyed by love, by faith, but the abyss toward which you stumbled inevitably, part of the crowd. Put out a hand, if you like, to help someone along, surround yourself, if you like, with people who love you, who owe you, whose lives you’ve changed, but don’t expect it to make a difference. It will make no difference; eventually, one after the other, every one of you will fall.
“And now?” I asked him, both of us standing, not sitting, aware that there had been enough talking today. “Do you still feel that way now?” Aware, too, that we were edging close to it, to that embarrassing profundity he and Dan had feared, to that point at which too much had been said, but amazed, I suppose much as my father had once been amazed when his mother told him to get Billy to go out there, he’s avoided it for too long—amazed at this kind of conversation, at this stage of the game. A conversation, it occurred to me, that Billy’s life had spurred for us much as it had once spurred it for my father and his dying mother.
Charming Billy Page 20