Charming Billy

by Alice McDermott

  And then I saw him address the card to Maeve.

  THE LONG ISLAND HOUSE was squat, rectangular, redshingled, and green-roofed, the shingles rough to the touch but sparkling in sunlight, flecked with mica. There were two windows in front, trimmed in deep green, a door between them, also green. Three wooden steps painted to match the door, the paint well peeled now, mostly showing bare board.

  The lawn, in April, was pale green, the blades of grass wet and thin, newborn. Even the low weeds that edged the property seemed freshly sprouted, as did the tangle of honeysuckle vine that covered the wire fence along the side and that would, in summer, be tangled itself with the hum of bees. The gravel driveway was scattered with puddles. The road out front was still black from all the rain that had guaranteed Billy’s swift ascent into heaven, but it was drying out now, a no-longer-solid brushstroke that by noon would have feathered back into dust along its edges. A road that on the hottest days gave off the same sharp odor it had had the moment it was spread. And swimming heat waves, of course, earth agitating air.

  The suburban homes and sandy cottages were mostly silent, lights on in only one or two of them: another Saturday morning gained. The crescent of bay beach was deserted, the rocks and shells collected at its edges, the dark wash of lapping water running over them and back again.

  The lot across the street was still empty and still contained at its heart the remains of a crumbling foundation for a house that was never built, so well grown over by now that even in April the property was all fledgling weeds and dried stalks and last year’s leaves.

  This had always been the view from the front steps of the Long Island house: the pale green lot, the tree line, the blue sky that in certain kinds of sunlight seemed to be reflecting the mirror flashes of sunlight off the bay.

  There was a screen door at the top of the steps, patched, as all screen doors in summer homes seem to be patched, against wire-cutting mosquitoes with a two-inch square of mesh—upper-right-hand corner of the top screen (always). A heavy green door behind it.

  The door opened onto a narrow room, a breath of mildew, of ocean dampness. A small rag rug at the door, another larger one under the heavy coffee table. Three damp Reader’s Digests on top, and a blue-and-white schedule for the Long Island Railroad, East Hampton station. A wood-framed couch with tweed cushions worn white along the edges. A dark rocker, a plaid wingback. A table and lamp beside it, the base of the lamp a shellacked coil of rope. An old Cinzano ashtray, an ancient, useless pack of matches from Jungle Pete’s. A wrought-iron floor lamp. There was a trace of last summer’s sand on the wood floor, under the couch. A trace of dust in every corner. Charcoal along the baseboards meant to discourage mildew.

  At the other end of the room, and open to it, the kitchen with its heavy Formica table and red countertops and domed refrigerator. The sink was against the back wall, under a long row of narrow windows hung high enough to block the view for all dishwashers 5’2” and under. A back-yard door beside the sink that contained the only curtained window in the house, all others being covered by yellowed shades. Another door beside the refrigerator that led to a narrow corridor that led to the three bedrooms. The only bath at the end of these, chipped white porcelain fixtures, the sink wobbly on steel mosquito legs, the cracked gray linoleum.

  Across the hall, the largest bedroom by an inch or two and the brightest due to a second window was painted yellow and decorated with eight wooden shoe-store daisies tacked by my grandmother in an unfathomable constellation across the far wall. A tall dresser with a long bureau scarf. A night table with a milk-glass lamp, a magazine opened and folded back to show a white page filled with black print, unrelieved by photographs, a pair of reading glasses placed over the page, placed there the night before because it was too late to finish and there were too many words and it was all about how much the citizenry loved the President, who was just an actor when you got right down to it, an actor reading them his lines.

  On the double bed, dark mahogany headboard, no footboard, white chenille spread folded back, thin floral sheets washed pale, my father opened his eyes to the same room he had gone to sleep in. The same room he had gone to sleep in: then the shadowy circle of the milk-glass lamp, now sun-shot early morning, ebb and flow of it as the breeze sucked in the bottom of the yellow shade and then let it go again (a child in a swing) to snap back against the sash. The very sound that had awakened him. Distant ringing of the buoys in the bay (Oh, but she’s a girl). Scent of new grass and of ocean, of mildew, of the Long Island house, of eastern Long Island. I am still here.

  He swung his feet out of the bed and sat for a moment. Nothing changed but the light, the magazine on the table, eyeglasses there, clothes in the chair, daisies, dresser, Dopp kit on the bureau because his daughter was here with him and liked to keep her makeup bag on the back of the toilet.

  It was there when he made his way across the hall, pale pink and blue, plump. He nudged it gently when he lifted the lid.

  Back in the room he raised the shade up above the open window so the snap of it wouldn’t wake her—and then heard the same sound, faint but persistent, coming from the shade and window in her room next door. They had both kept the windows open all night, then, despite the cold air. There was still mist on the gray grass, mist all along the vine-covered fence. There was no place in the world he’d rather wake to.

  He stood for a moment between the dresser and the bed and offered himself as some elemental part of understanding: the same room he had gone to sleep in, consciousness dropped and then picked up again, only the light changed. The return of day.

  In the kitchen, he put the kettle on. Cut oranges and squeezed them under his palm on an old-fashioned glass juicer. The very one, in fact, his mother had used when he was young, in the apartment in Woodside. The very one, washed up on this shore somehow after what he imagined had been a long, newspaper-wrapped odyssey, box-bound, from that tiny kitchen in Queens to the basement of Holtzman’s house in Jamaica (years passing there, light in the narrow basement window and then darkness, light again, a thousand times over while he himself returned from overseas, met Mary, met Claire, married, had children) until someone—himself? Holtzman? his mother?—hoisted the box marked Kitchen Things and brought it out here to the Long Island house, where it dropped out of his sight for years and then returned again as something he shared with Mr. West while he was still “my mother’s tenant” and not yet “my daughter’s father-in-law” and then found himself on this morning in April, the second morning with Billy in his grave, surprised and even delighted by the thing, by the things that ride out time.

  He poured the juice into two short, thick glasses, washed and dried his hands. He pulled open the back door—frame sticking, curtain swinging—on a stage the whole wall would have moved with it. He stepped out onto the narrow back porch, where the brushstrokes in the dark green paint were his own, and Billy’s. Marvelous sweet spring air of eastern Long Island. New grass and sweet blossom and tang of sea salt. In the bright green of the pale trees, high up, narrow shafts of yellow sunlight, theatrical as well. The sound-track birdsong: gulls and sparrows and distant crows.

  He did a few calisthenics. His arms winter pale, the fine hairs on them mostly gray, certainly grayer than Claire had ever seen them. By sundown his arms will have turned a ruddy brown, what with the work he had planned, clippers and scythe and scraping some paint. He touched his waist, his shoulder, raised his hands above his head, looking for all the world like a man giving praise. The return of day.

  Inside, the plumbing was moaning and clunking, the sound of water rushing through the walls as if the place had been framed in pipes, not lumber. His daughter in the shower.

  He took the breakfast tray from under the counter, placed cups and saucers on it, bowls, cereal, sugar, spoons, a carton of milk, a jar of jam. He toasted four slices of bread and poured water into the teapot just as she came into the kitchen, barefoot, sweatpants and an old T-shirt, her hair wet and smelling of shampoo.
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  “Good morning, Glory,” he said, and she said, “Good morning,” the towel draped around her shoulders. She had already been out for a run, she said, down to the beach and back, and he realized that the shade he’d heard had been snapping in an empty room. Tomorrow they’d drive back to Rosedale. Tomorrow evening she’d fly home.

  He lifted the tray and she walked ahead of him through the living room. She once more unlocked the green door, pulled it open, sunlight and birdsong transforming a long shaft of the damp, dark room. She stepped outside, holding the screen open for him.

  He said, “Thank you, ma’am,” and then caught the door with his elbow to let her go first. She went to the bottom step and then turned to take the tray from him, but he said, “I’ve got it,” and let the screen door close behind him as he stepped down and turned to place the tray carefully, crockery rattling, on the top step. He sat beside it. She sat below him, at his feet, shaking out her hair, running her fingers through it, and wafting a shampoo that was some false yet strenuous version of the scent of the spring air. He lifted the teacup and poured for her. She reached back.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re most welcome.”

  She sipped from the cup. The breeze that had woken him had grown weaker in the sun, but something of the cold dawn still lingered. One did not dare say to a grown daughter, a married woman with children of her own, Are you warm enough? Do you need a sweater? Wouldn’t you rather wear shoes?

  He said, “You’ll have to give the in-laws a call while you’re here.”

  I said yes, I had already told them I’d stop by.

  “There’s a happy pair,” my father said, meaning Mr. West and his wife, united again now that their three boys had grown, and flown. Nesting again, as you yourself had said, in the Amagansett house, nesting among the ruins. What was more tenacious, you’d said, than the desire to be connected, especially in old age, more tenacious than fact, than memory. Your parents would turn away, wide-eyed, whenever you or your brothers said, But you hated … They’d only needed space, they would tell you, turning our own words against us. They’d only gone through a rough patch in their marriage that had, unlucky for you boys, more or less corresponded to your childhoods …

  Sitting on the steps of the Long Island house, Billy two days in his grave, my father and I discussed what the little house needed to have done to get it in shape for summer, for his retirement next year, when he would put the Rosedale house on the market and live out here permanently. Another overhaul, long overdue. Insulation, plumbing, heating, paint. Redoing and then supplementing all that work he and Billy had done years ago. New furniture. A real garden, once he was out here permanently, plenty of visitors, too, what with a good six months to schedule them, April through September at least, maybe October, too. My three brothers and their families would each take a turn, and he hoped I’d come in from the coast with the children. Take at least a week or two.

  My father sat on the step above me, the step he would begin to scrape and sand that very afternoon, and looking toward the blue sky above the bay and the crescent beach behind the treeline, he described for me all the ways he would spend his time in this lovely place, still old Holtzman’s place when you came right down to it, his surprise inheritance from a mother who hadn’t put much stock in elaborate emotion but nevertheless had married twice and loved him and had said at the end, having scattered Holtzman’s money to the charitable winds, Bring Billy out there, with his wife, because when you got right down to it, there were all kinds of things in her heart and in her mind that we never knew. There was, for instance, her capacity to believe. There was as well her capacity to be deceived, since you can’t have one without the other, each one side of the other.

  He’d have the Quinns out, my father said, Mickey will be retiring soon, too, and all the various Lynches, sure, Danny, too, and Bridie when she needed a break in a beautiful place from taking care of poor Jim. He’d have the Caseys out and both sets of our Rosedale neighbors, my mother’s sister Louise with her family, although she drove him crazy. And, he said, he’d ask Maeve.

  I looked at him over my shoulder. I’d been thinking, as he counted off the names, how clear it was that Billy’s was missing from the list, although Billy over the years would not come, and I thought then that my father mentioned her name just for that, for Billy’s sake. He said, Maeve’s never been out this way, as far as I know. She should see it. She would enjoy it.

  I nodded. Sure, I said. I could imagine her, I supposed, getting off the train at the East Hampton station, tentative and slow, her hand on the rail beside the steps (the plain pearl ring) for much longer than was necessary, lingering there until the conductor offered her his own hand to help her down. (Dorothy or maybe Bridie behind her, since it would not do for her to come out here all alone.) A simple dress, or a pant suit for traveling, her round face and her short hair. My father would take her bag, take her for lunch across the street, take her on the usual tour past the beautiful houses (cottages, he’d say) that neither one of them would have ever thought to own, or even to enter, but would be content, as we’d all been content, to merely pass by and admire. Billy’s idea of heaven, he’d tell her—the idea itself sufficient alone.

  Early evening in the lawn chairs on the sparse lawn, a cocktail, then dinner in town, or maybe something on the grill. The far bedroom, for privacy’s sake, with the bed turned down. Fresh, worn towels from the Rosedale house on the dresser for her. A laugh over the smiling pressed-wood seahorse on the wall—another decoration from Holtzman’s store.

  Holtzman with his literal wealth the one in the long run who had changed the lives of them all (“Even my daughter,” he would say. “She met Matt out here, you know.”) Figurative wealth changing nothing, in the long run, except maybe the stories that were told.

  “If it comes to a choice between love and money,” my father would tell Maeve, repeating an old joke, “take money.”

  And then bringing her back to the station on Sunday afternoon, after Mass and a bit of breakfast. The gorgeous people on the platform with her, most of them young, all of them transformed by a weekend in the sun, fruit and wildflowers in their arms.

  Maeve would be working by then, two years, three years, after Billy’s death. A little job Ted Lynch found for her with the archdiocese once she’d convinced him that whatever inclination she’d had to enter a convent had disappeared long ago. The sweet Indian couple meeting her at the Bayside station and driving her home to the narrow house where she now lived alone with the dog; peacefully, she would have to say. Where she would begin to wonder, no doubt, when Dennis would invite her out again, because it was so lovely out there and because Billy had so loved the place, regardless of how vigorously and for how long he had deprived himself of it. He had, after all, deprived himself of much that he loved best, poor man.

  Hoping he would invite her out again, because when she and Dennis sat at the table last night with a piece of toast and a cup of tea, the dead were there with them, just outside the circle of light. Billy and Claire, not forgotten, no less mourned, but silent, for now, in dreams their faces always turned away, so that the course of other lives, the lives of those they’d loved, could be completed, could go on.

  Surely just as the Irish girl, whom Billy had loved when he was young, just back from the war, had eventually turned her face away.

  No less remembered, no less mourned. My father would say it himself in another six or seven years’ time, as we sat together on these steps again and I watched our children playing croquet on the lawn (wondering, counting, how many more years would such summers continue, my father alive, our children still children, how many more were enough). No less loved now as then, my father would say, breaking the news, but still life goes on. Some relief is required. Some compensation.

  I would look at him over my shoulder. Was it penance, I’d want to ask him, was it compensation for an old and well-intentioned lie, for the life it had deprived her of? Or was it m
erely taking care, more taking care? A hand held out once again to whoever happened to be nearby.

  I couldn’t ask, of course. And it was impossible to say. His capacity for sympathy was no less than Billy’s for self-denial. Their faith, both of them—all of them, I suppose—was no less keen than their suspicion that in the end they might be proven wrong. And their certainty that they would continue to believe anyway.

  They were married in March of 1991, my father and Maeve. At the little church in East Hampton, Most Holy Trinity now, no longer St. Philomena’s—the poor woman having been tossed out of the canon of saints in the mid-sixties because some doubt had arisen about whether or not she had actually lived. As if, in that wide-ranging anthology of stories that was the lives of the saints—that was, as well, my father’s faith and Billy’s and some part of my own—what was actual, as opposed to what was imagined, as opposed to what was believed, made, when you got right down to it, any difference at all.

  Author’s Acknowledgments

  I am grateful to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for providing a quiet place; to Kevin E. McDermott for research assistance; and to Harriet Wasserman and Jonathan Galassi for friendship, wisdom, and infinite patience.

  Praise for Charming Billy

  “Eloquent … heartbreaking … McDermott is brilliant.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “There’s no one like Alice McDermott for catching the ebullient particulars of the Irish-American sensibility, and in this superbly drawn, bittersweet tale of a captivating alcoholic, Charming Billy, her touch is light as a feather, her perceptions purely accurate.”

  —Elle

  “An astoundingly beautiful novel about the persistence of love, the perseverance of grief, and all-but-unbearable loneliness, as well as faith, loyalty, and redemption.”