Billy nodded, too. “Did he?” He smiled a little. He couldn’t risk another try at the cup although his throat was parched. “Like something out of Romeo and Juliet, hey?” He might even order a single shot, just one, to steady himself for the drive to Shannon. Because the oath he’d taken was part of a story, too, when you came right down to it. Nothing, when you came right down to it, was unbreakable, unchangeable, under threat of eternal damnation. Who was kidding whom?
“Well, we’re both still here,” Eva said.
“There’s the pity of it,” he told her, feigning a brogue to make her smile. One shot for the road and maybe a beer at the airport before he met up with Father Jim. A single glass of stout. Even Father Jim might excuse him, pledge or no, if he knew what he’d been through this afternoon. If he could begin to appreciate this soaking sense of foolishness.
She said she’d known him immediately, as soon as she came through the door: the stoop of his shoulders, those blue eyes. She knew him as if no time had passed at all since the days they had spent on Long Island.
Sitting back from the table, his hands still in his lap, he said he’d be going out there again himself, to visit Dennis in Holtzman’s little place, as soon as he returned to New York. He said he did so enjoy it out there, loveliest place on earth.
“How is Dennis?” she asked, and he told her. He said, “And Mary?”
Something came into her face then, something that had not been there before, during those days they had spent on Long Island, anger and determination and disgust, an old bitterness—something the span of years had taught her. Mary, she said, pulling herself up as if to keep her nose above it. Mary she doesn’t hear from. Not since back then, if you want to know the truth. Not since Mary stopped hearing from Dennis. Since he broke off with her. Mary wrote to her at one point back then to say that Dennis might even tell Billy she had died rather than let him know she had merely been cruel. You’re as good as dead to me, too, Mary wrote. You’ve ruined everything for me. “If you can imagine,” Eva said, with that new bitterness in her face, in her voice, coming in strong and familiar and true, “a sister saying such a thing to her own flesh and blood. As if it was all my fault Dennis wanted no more to do with her. I wrote back to her and said Dennis was only doing what any decent man would do. It wasn’t me who told her to be so loose and free with him.” Her skin was dry now, lined, hinting at the dust it would, in another two or three decades, become. In truth this time. It was awkward, Billy thought, more awkwardness, to hear these angry words, these girlish concerns, on the lips of a plump old grandmother who long ago should have attained wisdom enough to dismiss this spleen. An old woman who should have wisdom enough to know that passion gone cold, gone way beyond its prime, was a pathetic thing. “She stopped writing me after that. My younger sister sees her in New York on occasion. She went to college, City College—the Mr. and Mrs. helped her out—and she ended up taking a job as a teacher, somewhere near a city named Binghamton. Never married—” with some satisfaction.
“And you’re not in touch?” Billy asked.
She shook her head. He might have said, until now, that time had not much changed her. “I’m as good as dead to her,” she said haughtily. “And she to me, I might add.”
At Holtzman’s place, in the two webbed lawn chairs they had set up on the sparse grass of the front lawn because the low steps where they had sat for so many nights when they were young were now too hard on their aging backs and sent pins and needles into their legs, Billy leaned forward, three sheets to the wind, and told Dennis that bitterness, then, was all that was left to it. Two old sisters locked in a silent transatlantic feud because of words exchanged about some boys they knew, thirty years ago—because one (you might say) had given too much and the other had given too little. That was it—all that remained of their lovely idyll in this lovely place. Faith inspired by anger outstripping any inspired by affection. There it was. There was the way it had ended. Nothing but bitterness, truth be told. Or pettiness at best.
What was it the poet said? More substance in our enmities than in our love.
My father shook his head. He leaned forward himself, his forearms on his knees. “You’ve been done more harm than good by your poetry,” he said.
He knew he should send him packing. But Billy had refilled the flask in his pocket from the bottle he’d carried in his case and he was too far gone to be put back on the train. Not that Dennis had the strength now to do it. In the morning he’d send him off with a lecture he could already hear himself deliver, the one about killing yourself and maybe killing someone else as well. Think of Maeve. Think of Rosemary and Kate. Think of poor Father Jim and the trouble he took for you. Think of your friends, Billy. Think of me. He’d never said it before and would surely never say it again, but just this once he might tell him, Think of me, Billy. Without Claire, without even faith or fancy enough left to send her my thoughts, never mind my prayers. Put aside your nonsense, Billy, put aside the past and think of those who really love you, who’ve loved you all along. Every one of us living proof, Billy, that it’s a powerless thing, this loving one another, nothing like what you had imagined. Except in the way it persists.
“I’m sorry, Billy” was what he said instead, shaking his head. “If it’s an apology you’re after, I’m sorry. I should have told you the truth long ago. But so much time passed. I suppose I began to think that it no longer mattered.”
Billy sat erect, bleary-eyed, incurable. And yet still there lingered—was my father only imagining it?—that old longing to admire in Billy’s blue eyes, Billy’s own persistent love. “It was quite a thing to pull off, over all these years,” he said softly.
Dennis agreed.
“Quite a story to tell.”
My father nodded, leaning forward, the sparse grass at his feet still sun-warmed although the day was changing, approaching evening. The whiff of tar from the heated black road fading enough now to let the sweetness of the scented air once again come through. Air that was the very memory of that time itself, all those years ago. That was now the very scent of longing.
“Was it difficult?” Billy said with his thin smile.
“Only at first,” my father told him. “After a while I suppose I believed it myself.”
Billy nodded. “Mary never married,” he said again, handing him something.
“And she was a pretty girl, too,” my father said, refusing it. “Just goes to show you. You can never tell.”
I approached from the road and only caught their attention when I had crossed the gravel driveway.
My father looked up, Billy turned a bit in his chair. I began talking right away, so I would not have to look into Billy’s wet eyes, into my father’s dark and troubled ones.
I met Matt West, I said, Mr. West’s oldest son, the kid in the car this morning. Down at the beach, I said, not wanting to conjure the wide car, the lingering scent of marijuana. I was going to go out with him at seven, if the two of them didn’t mind. Maybe a movie or something. I hoped they didn’t mind.
My father sat back. “Billy’s just here for the evening,” he said severely. “It’s not a good night to make other plans.”
But Billy waved a hand, as my mother might have done. “Go,” he said, and to my father: “Let her go. Why in the world would she want to spend an evening with a couple of old geezers?” He gestured toward the lawn and the road, the lengthening shadows and the still-blue sky. “On a night like this,” he said, “a summer night in this lovely place.” He looked at me, barely able to go on. “Go,” he said, the tears welling, ready to spill. “Have a lovely night, dear, with your boy. Go.”
That was the night we discovered where our childhoods merged: on a summer evening, one of the last, I suppose, we had spent with my grandmother at the Long Island place. My brothers and I were playing a netless game of badminton in one corner of the yard, while my mother and father and grandmother sat in a semicircle of webbed lawn chairs in another. Fragrant late-summer evenin
g, the sky streaked with brightness, pink and purple and gold, a touch of the bay in the cooling air that was itself touched with the very first hint of fall. There was a pitcher of martinis on an aluminum snack tray before them, a cracked plate of clams on the half shell beside it, each one dotted with a bit of red cocktail sauce, decorated with a slice of lemon. All they knew of heaven.
We could see the driveway from where we played, and so it must have been our slowing down and turning to look that first alerted my grandmother to her visitor, or maybe the sound of the wheels against the gravel. He got out of the car with the index card in his hand and seemed about to show it to us, as if to ask for directions, before he noticed that there were adults on the premises as well. My father getting out of his chair to meet him; my grandmother, knowing more, right behind. She overtook my father just as Mr. West was removing his cap and immediately directed him back around to the front of the house. We heard their voices inside through the screen in the kitchen windows and then again in the back bedroom. She seemed to be doing most of the talking. Her voice had grown huskier in her old age, still a redhead’s voice although, spurning hair dye as she had spurned all self-deception, she had let her hair go white. My mother looked to my father and my father shrugged. They exchanged a few words. He stood to top off their drinks. When my grandmother came back around the corner of the house, she had a number of ten-dollar bills in her hand and Mr. West had already once again started his engine.
He drove back to your house in Amagansett, where the long, loud argument that for you was your parents’ marriage began again. He came in while you and your brothers were at the dinner table with your mother—something with catsup, you said, as you remembered it; as you remembered it, every meal of your childhood smelled of catsup (and then ducked your head to laugh, or because you had made me laugh). Your mother turned her back to him, this was the routine, and neither you nor your brothers were fooled by the icy silence—in a moment, you knew, it would crack. Your father went banging into the walkup attic, came banging down again with two suitcases, went banging into their bedroom. When he came through the kitchen again with the first suitcase, your mother asked, “What’s this?” coolly, and he said, “I’m leaving.” Oh sure, she mouthed to you and your brothers, who instantly wanted neither to take her side nor to believe him. She turned her back again when he returned, but when he came through the kitchen with the second suitcase, she sprang from her chair and followed him, through the kitchen door, down the steps, across the side lawn to the car.
There may be families, you said, who would lower their voices in the open air (mine, for instance, I told you, who at about this same time on that same night were listening quietly over our grilled round steaks to my grandmother’s explanation regarding the sensibility of renting out the place all year, fond memories notwithstanding), but yours wasn’t one of them. They were at each other a good ten minutes out on the side lawn, and then your father swung into the kitchen again, your mother right behind, trying to catch him by the back of his shirt. Both of them, with their eyes so bright and their jaws so set, with everything about them, you said, tunneled into their anger, unaware of, it seemed, blind to the three boys still at the table, over the remnants of another catsup dinner. Back into the bedroom. You was the operative word in these arguments, you said. You flung like a spitball. You peeled off and flung back again. Me? You! If they had only been able to decide which one of them was you they might have known for certain and at last which one of them was to blame. They might have resolved something. (Ducking your head again to smile. I liked your mouth, your dark eyes, the leather bracelet on your slim wrist.)
Your father spent the night, perhaps the next dozen of them, on his boat, because it was September at least—at least school had started again—before he actually brought you and your brothers to the little house he had rented. You hated it, of course, the musty rooms and the blood-red shingles and the sense that whatever latent capacity your father had to become a stranger was now realized as he moved around the tiny kitchen, opening cabinets and drawers and mumbling, Now, where does she keep … frying eggs and bacon and serving them to you on faded china plates that were not his, not your mother’s, that my mother had picked up, as a matter of fact, at the Opportunity Shop in East Hampton for a dollar or two (the remnant of another upheaval in yet another household) another summer years ago. You hated the little house because it was proof positive, or so it had seemed to you then, that your parents’ marriage was over, that the days of the five of you living together were over. That the anger and the shouting would never, as you had always believed, somehow resolve itself into love again, peace. Don’t even think about it, you told Cody and John. Don’t even hope.
You slept in the room with the particle-board Buster Brown and Tighe on the wall. My room, I said, that’s where I always stay—“We’ve already slept in the same bed, then,” you said, smiling, cutting all kinds of corners. Our amazement was at what we hadn’t known until now, the parallels in our past no more delightful than what we were beginning to suspect our futures would contain, had contained for us all along, though we hadn’t known.
This was the lesson it taught you, you said—we were already on our way, clothes falling off, as they did in those days, the sound of the ocean somewhere above us, the humid night, the same stars, our own summer idyll—this was your particular take on your particular broken home: that in the absence of love, the evaporation, the disintegration, the tossing out of the equation of love, came peace. This was your particular take: you had one or the other, paid for one with the other.
I agreed. It was, in those days, the way we all spoke about love: world-wise, open-eyed, without illusion. Lying, of course. Because what we truly believed at that moment—would believe on and off again for the rest of our lives—was that the whole history of Holtzman’s little house—from its bankrupt builder to my grandmother’s greed to your parents’ bitter marriage—was, on this night, with our own meeting, redeemed.
In the morning, at the breakfast table, Billy was bloodshot but too skillful a drinker to seem hung over. He had showered and shaved with an electric razor and his hair was wet, combed back. The open collar of his pale blue shirt showed the aging throat, the blotched skin of his neck. Nothing in his face or in his manner indicated that he had heard a word of the talking-to my father had given him, in his room, before Billy, or I for that matter (listening to my father’s voice coming from behind the wall where Buster Brown and Tighe were still hung), had even gotten out of bed. Killing himself and lying to everyone, and what about the trouble Father Jim went to, and what about AA again; it worked for Ted and for Mary Casey and for Uncle Jim, why not? Why not?
Billy’s black satchel was already by the front door when he came into the kitchen. Seeing it there, he said, “Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?”
My father was at the stove, frying eggs. He turned, smiling, and for a moment I thought he might relent. But he was as adept as his cousin was at keeping himself from what he most enjoyed. “There’s an 11:17 train,” he said.
At the table, Billy took a spoonful of coffee and lost half of it as it made its shaky way to his mouth, dabbling his plate and his lap and the front of his shirt. He swiped at himself with his napkin and then removed a small pack of postcards and a fountain pen from his breast pocket. He put both on the table beside his plate.
“Another thing about Ireland,” he said. “We’re all over there. All our faces.” To me: “I saw your dad driving a Guinness truck in Dublin. And his dad was moving a herd of sheep across the road up in the northwest.”
He uncapped the pen and held it in one hand, but then put it down again when it was clear his trembling fingers could not manage it yet.
“I saw my mother,” he went on. “Good Lord, I saw my mother in nearly every shop I went into, usually behind the counter. And my father’s face was on one of the priests who said Mass at the retreat house.”
He lifted the cards, shuffled through them. Th
e duck pond. Home Sweet Home. The Maidstone Club. A sunset on the beach at Amagansett.
“Everybody,” he was saying. “You and Danny and Claire. Both my sisters. Mac rented us a car at the airport. Ted Lynch was right behind us at a hurling match, and I’m sorry to say, Dennis, that he was pie-eyed for sure.” He winked at me. “Easy does it, my foot,” he said.
My father was smiling, an old habit. He couldn’t help but get a kick out of Billy, even Billy hung over, lying to everyone, Billy incurable.
Billy placed the cards on the table again, white side up. He took another spoonful of coffee, steadier now than with the last.
“I didn’t see anyone who resembled Kate’s Peter, though,” he said. “Which only proves what I’ve always said about that black-Irish bit being a lie. Sulinowsky turned to Sullivan, if you ask me.”
He lifted the pen, turned the card over again to look at the photograph. Home Sweet Home. “Maeve, of course,” he said. “And her father. Her father’s face was a dime a dozen over there. Uncle Jim. Bridie Shea as a girl again.” He began to write, slowly, carefully keeping control. “Wouldn’t that be a gift for poor Bridie, to be a girl again? Sitting up there in her mother’s window the way she used to. Not a care in the world. I told Father Jim that it was like a taste of the hereafter, going over there. I must have seen some version of every Irishman I know.”
“What about yourself?” my father said. “Anyone look like you?”
Billy looked up from his postcard. He had written a single line across, two spindly words, as far as I could see.
“Oh sure,” he said. “I was this young fellow in Clonmel. A regular legend around the gas station.” My father laughed a little and Billy looked at me. “Get your father to tell you the tale,” he said, although of course I never did, not then, my own future coming at me as it was. And I was too busy trying to make out what was written on the card under his hand. Beautiful friend, it looked like, just the two words.
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