Charming Billy

by Alice McDermott

  My father’s eyes were a deep brown. He smiled a little, shaking his head. “Oh no,” he said. “Not now.”

  How lonely they all seemed to me that night, my father’s family and friends, lonely souls every one of them, despite husbands and children and cousins and friends, all their hopes, in the end, their pairings and procreation and their keeping in touch, keeping track, futile in the end, failing in the end to keep them from seeing that nothing they felt, in the end, has made any difference.

  “It was only a brief loss of faith,” he said. “It happens. They say it’s not uncommon.” And then he turned to climb the stairs on the night of the day Billy Lynch was placed in his grave. “I believe everything now,” he said, his back to me. “Again.”

  Of course there was no way of telling if he lied.

  SO BILLY RENTED a car and drove down to see her. The pledge taken, the last drink the one he’d had with Father Ryan on the flight over to Shannon. (Father Jim raising the tiny bottle and smacking his lips and telling Billy, “Dear Lord, if this isn’t the blind leading the blind,” setting the tone, so to speak, for their journey, whose seriousness of purpose—Father Jim was saying in his way—did not have to deprive it of its good humor.) The car was rented in the priest’s name and the license Billy carried was the priest’s as well, since his own had once again been suspended. So it was Father this and Father that at the rent-a-car office, despite the wedding band that he hadn’t bothered to remove, couldn’t remove if he tried, the way his hands were. A married priest, then.

  Not, as Danny Lynch would say, to make too much of such things.

  He’d planned, just as Kate suspected, to visit her grave. He foresaw a grassy plot and a granite stone engraved with her name, and the dates, the last not merely marking the end of her life but the end of his youth and that glorious and astounding possibility that he had once inhabited. He foresaw his own pale fingers, which trembled anyway, tracing the carved numbers and words. He thought of “Danny Boy” (he was in Ireland, after all, and the clouds were low over the fields he was passing, they were casting their shadows on the green and melancholy hills all around him), even hummed it as he drove—“Ye’ll come and find the place where I am lying/And kneel and say an Ave there for me”—which in turn brought him thoughts of Uncle Daniel, and of Billy Sheehy’s dad singing out all unrehearsed at the side of his grave. A moment that might have killed them all. The pain of it no less than the beauty. In his own prayer he would say he had not returned to the house on Long Island either, and never would: such was his sympathy and his outrage, both of them as keen as ever, regardless of the time gone by.

  But first, he thought, he would go to her family. Mother or father if they still lived, Mary certainly, or one of the three younger sisters who would remember him no doubt as the boy, their sister’s fiancé, who had sent them the American shoes. He knew her address by heart, of course, he’d written it out two or three times a year every year since Eva passed away, sending them a card at Christmas and always a line or two in late September, brief notes that said he was thinking of them, remembering Eva, giving Mary his best regards. Never more than a line or two, so he would never be forced to say that he had married, bought a house, carried on. Never really expecting a reply from the old folks and only briefly hurt that Mary hadn’t been in touch with him. But Dennis was tied up with that part of it, he knew, her feelings for him, because even though she went straight home when Eva died, she could not have expected another girl—Claire Donavan—to take up Dennis’s affections so soon. She could not have helped but feel jilted.

  Driving the narrow wrong-sided roads between Dublin and Clonmel—parched, shaky, chilled to the bone by the dampness and the cold although the car’s tiny heater was turned up full blast—he knew he would have to go to her family first and at some point tell them that he had a wife at home, a house, despite the number of times, over the years, he had written them to say Eva was in his heart and his mind and his memory still. He’d taken a wife and bought a house and for a good many years had kept fairly steady at the same two jobs he’d had then—one of them the very job he’d first taken simply to bring her back over.

  No children, he’d say when they asked him. He’d say, A bit of a problem with the drink.

  Clonmel was bigger than he’d imagined it and, as with so many of these Irish cities, not nearly as quaint. He might have been thrilled, or comforted, by the thought that this had been a place well familiar to her, that she’d once strolled these streets as a child, as a young woman, on the day before she left for her first appointment in Chicago—the beginning of her journey toward him—and the day she returned from New York, his diamond on her finger, but he had sense enough to know that the place was not the same city it would have seemed to her then, just before the war and just after it. He passed what looked like a Kentucky Fried Chicken shop, for instance. There was a shabby sense of change, of the modern, all about the place, that had little to do with the backward, quiet little city she had once described for him. He sensed that her ghost would have been as much a stranger here as he was.

  And yet it was surely some sense of her ghost that made his heart beat heavily in his chest when, according to his map, not far from where he should be, he pulled into a gas station just outside town, off to the side so he would not block the pumps, and climbed awkwardly out of the tiny Fiesta to ask for directions. The attendant was a man about his own age, in the ubiquitous Irish cap and a filthy pair of mechanic’s overalls. Billy and Father Jim had already shared a joke about how every set of directions given in Ireland begins “Go down to the church …” and no doubt that was the line he was fully expecting (delivered in its usual thick, nearly incomprehensible, mumbling brogue) when he asked the man how he could find the Kavanaugh place on Boylston Road. But instead the man squinted one eye and said, “An American cousin?” It seemed to Billy to be the beginning of a declarative sentence somehow cut short by a question mark.

  “I beg your pardon?” he said politely.

  The man pushed back his cap, a deeply lined face, the lines drawn deeper with grime. Bad teeth. A once-good-looking face, perhaps. “Are you an American cousin?” he said.

  Billy said no, he was only an old friend.

  The man looked him up and down a bit, not unpleasantly, and then looked beyond him to a car that was just pulling in. The car beeped and the driver called, “Tommy!” and the man asked Billy if he’d mind stepping into the tea shop here, his wife would be inside, at the counter, and she’d be happy to draw a little map for him. It wasn’t far.

  But there was no one at the counter and only a single woman at a table in the corner, a blue-and-white cup before her, the newspaper in front of her face; a white plastic shopping bag at her feet. The place was small, it seemed to have been meant for another purpose—maybe as a place to sell windshield wipers and spare cans of oil, or as a waiting room for the garage next door. The windows were high and narrow and each covered with handmade curtains, blue-and-white cotton gingham. The walls were false stucco, perhaps aiming for a cottage effect, but the floor was pale linoleum, the tables and countertop a beige Formica. There were a plastic rose and a plastic fern in a white milk-glass vase on each table, and a Waterford vase filled with real flowers, tall and weedy things that nevertheless gave a nice effect, beside the register. Altogether, there was something hasty and false about the place—and this was not hindsight, he felt it immediately—as if it had been quickly rearranged to hide its true purpose. As if the woman, casually lifting her cup, intent on The Irish Times, had only seconds before been at the window, looking out for him.

  He said, “I beg your pardon,” and the woman quickly lowered her newspaper, as if she feared she’d been rude. Irish face number four: sharp chin, ruddy cheeks, good long nose, and too many teeth. Not unlike Helen O’Mara at home. He recalled one of Uncle Daniel’s little ditties that ended “So I said, Mrs. Clemmon, you’d make a better lemon than you would a big red rose.”

  “The gentleman o
utside said I should ask in here for directions to Boylston Road,” he told her. “The Kavanaugh place. He said I should ask his wife.”

  “Let me get her for you,” the woman said, standing, smiling enough to show an impressive overbite. “Are you an American cousin?” she asked him over her shoulder as she headed behind the counter.

  “No,” he said. “Although I’m beginning to think I should be.”

  She laughed as if she got his meaning. “Well, the Kavanaughs have three of them, three of the girls who’ve gone over to the States. That’s why I asked. Let me just get Eva for you.”

  She passed through the door behind the counter; he could see a small white enamel stove, a big stainless-steel kettle on top of it, a dishrag tied to its door handle. A shelf with some boxes of wholemeal biscuits, some tins of Earl Grey. A white enamel sink. He heard her say Eva again, and then a door opening, perhaps the back door to the place, and louder now, she cried “Eva!” out the door, into the wind.

  For a moment, before the woman returned, he thought it mere coincidence. He thought it was, by some strange convergence of fact and fate, a sign of sorts, from her—no nothing so elaborate as her face in a glass, her actual voice in his ear as he slept, the kinds of signs he had imagined and hoped for so desperately in those first few months and years after her death, but a sign nonetheless, a mild comfort: to have pulled in here, to have been directed inside, to have asked the one woman who went off to fetch the wife whose name, it so happened, was also Eva. To hear on this day of all days, in this place, her name called out. It was a sign that said, You were right to come here, I am with you still.

  And then the woman returned with Eva herself coming in behind her, the bouquet of ragged wildflowers only briefly blocking her face.

  You could have counted on one hand the seconds it took for the two of them to know each other. Later, sitting with a cup of tea, Eva said for her it was the stoop of his shoulders, and of course those blue eyes. For him (and he, let’s face it, had further to come, thirty years of distorted memory to cross), there was no single thing, certainly nothing physical, not at first, since she was so much heavier now, and the pale shade of her dyed hair no longer matched her mahogany eyes. He simply knew, after that initial tumble into disbelief, he simply knew this was Eva standing before him.

  Well, what a lot of knots there were to untangle. He held out his hand at first, the homely lady still standing there, grinning between them. Held out his hand and said, “Billy Lynch,” and Eva, drying her hands on her apron like some Brigadoon colleen, said, “Billy Lynch, I know it’s you.” Although the blush on her cheeks when she came in from the wind didn’t fade inside the shop. She introduced her friend, Bessie Gordon, and called Billy the boy from New York—like a character listed in a Playbill.

  “Oh sure,” Bessie said, as if she was quite familiar with the entire cast. “The shoes,” she said, nodding. The plot as well. “And all those little notes. I’ve always said I admired you for keeping up.” She elbowed her friend. “And her scared to death to ever send a reply. I’m the one that was always telling her she was terrible not to reply.”

  Eva’s blush grew darker and deeper; she was blushing to her roots. “Oh, Bessie’s full of advice for everyone,” she said in her old, laughing way. “I’m thinking of setting her up in a booth.”

  She offered him a cup of tea and scooted back around the counter to get it. She said she had some nice scones to go with it, or a ham roll, or some crackers and cheese, and when Billy refused all, she took a small chocolate bar from a pile by the register and slipped it onto his saucer. Bessie carried the cup for him to her own table while Eva poured tea for a group of workmen who had just pushed through the door, bringing the smell of dirt and tar and the damp outdoors in with them. Eva knew every one of them by name. And on their heels two mothers, one with a toddler on her hip—she knew them both as well. And then three elderly women, one with a canvas bag decorated with a cactus and the words Flagstaff, Arizona.

  “The teatime rush,” Bessie said—she made it sound like ruse. “No doubt it’ll give Eva a chance to collect her thoughts before she has to speak to you. She’s got a guilty conscience, you know. She’s carried it for years.” She looked at Billy, making sure he understood. Her eyes were a dishwater-gray, the skin around her nose full of scars from old blemishes and open pores. “About the money, we all know the story, the money you sent her to come back to the States. She swore any number of times she was sending it all back to you, but then there’d be another fuel crisis or Tom would get laid up or one of the children. And then she made up her mind to have this shop.” She paused, studying him. It was apparent that her day had taken a delicious turn. “She’s been guilty about it, though,” she went on, leaning toward him. “Every one of us knew it. And your writing to her folks like that only made it worse. Her dad used to say you were calling in her loan.” She drilled her bony fingers along the top of her cold cup. “Honestly, you’d only have to say a single word to her and she’d pay you right back today, straight out of the till.”

  “I’ve never even thought about the money,” Billy said. He was watching Eva, nearing sixty, matronly waist and breast, lean across the counter to chuck the chubby toddler under his chin. “She’s welcome to the money.”

  Bessie Gordon drew her head back, eyeing him. He noticed that there was a wedding ring on her finger; who’d ever believe it, a woman so ugly—a lid for every pot, as his mother used to say. She closed her lips over her mess of teeth and then pulled them into a kind of smile, sympathetic, even pleasant. This was the face, chosen above a lifetime of other faces, some husband sought his solace in. “That’s what I always thought, somehow,” she told him. “That’s just how I imagined you to be.”

  There was a small bell ringing somewhere, a far-off, fairywing, chinging sound that he gradually saw was the plastic rose knocking against the milk-glass vase, both of them set moving by the way his hand was trembling on the table. Bessie saw it, too, and bit her lip, all sympathy. No doubt she knew the true cause and would add that—a drinking problem—to the tale of Eva Kavanaugh’s boy from New York.

  He flexed the hand on the table. It was pale, bloated enough to strain against Maeve’s ring. “A touch of Parkinson’s,” he told her, since he could not stop the tremor.

  She nodded. “What a shame.” And then added, “My mother had it, too.” So that Billy had to wonder who was kidding whom.

  When Eva finally came to the table, a cup for herself, a teapot to warm his, Bessie volunteered to take the counter for a while so they could chat undisturbed. She held out an icy hand. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Lynch,” she said, and gave Eva a look that told her, at least to Billy’s eyes, that here was a man better than she knew.

  “Is this a holiday for you?” Eva asked brightly. It seemed to be the question she had decided on while she poured her customers their tea.

  He said it was.

  “With your family?”

  He said he was with some priests. It was a kind of retreat.

  “Lovely,” she said. Her hair had been lightened to a honey blond and no longer matched her dark eyes, although the eyes themselves had stayed true. Her skin was rough and lined, a new downward turn to her lips, a second chin. She was back from the dead for him, there was that, but there was also half a lifetime of mistaken belief. He told her he was married, with a house, still with Con Ed, and he’d stayed at the shoe store until Mr. Holtzman sold it just before he died in ’64.

  She had four children, all of them grown now, two with babies of their own. One of them moved to the States, to Boston, with an American husband, one in London with the BBC. Two helping out here.

  It wasn’t only her being alive that took some getting used to, it was that she had lived, it was how she had lived.

  She suddenly sat forward. It was a terrible thing she’d done, she said, leaving it to her sister to tell him she was marrying Tom, never sending him back his money. She couldn’t imagine what he must thi
nk of her. She couldn’t imagine what had possessed her back then. “What must you think of me?” she said again, lowering her eyes and catching him trying to steady the cup, spilling tea onto the saucer, darkening the red wrapper of the candy bar. He put it down, put his hands on his lap. He knew he’d stop at the first place he came to once he left here, get himself something to quench this thirst. “It was a long time ago,” he said.

  She said she would write him a check right now, would he let her? She would honestly like to, it had been on her conscience for so long.

  But he said no, no. If it was a pub he first came to, well then, so be it. He could get himself a Coke at least.

  She had her head bowed. She no longer wore a clean part. “I’m sorry, Billy,” she said. “I’ve wanted to tell you so. It was cruel. It’s just that I was afraid it would never happen, Tom getting this business going, us getting a place of our own. You know how it is when you’re young, you’re afraid your life will never get started. I got your money in my hands and I went a little mad.”

  “Dennis told me you died,” Billy said easily. It was all part of a story now, and as story, it was nothing any of them had truly lived. He suspected there was a good joke in it, too, if he turned the tale around a bit, found the right way to look at it. He could see himself in Quinlan’s, his glass to his heart, and Danny Lynch with his face gone red and his shoulders shaking the way they did when you really got him going.

  Eva nodded. “We’d figured as much from your letters. Mary told me that’s what he said he might do.”