by Mary Gordon
And so, of course, it was shocking when Billy came home from a night with Roberta. I can see now that Veronica must have tried to incorporate her son's girlfriend into the fabric of her frail domestic life. She would ask about Roberta in a tentative, good-humored way, and Billy would reply in vague terms, but without bad spirits. I don't know if the women ever met, but Roberta must have tried in some ways to ingratiate herself, for I remember a birthday card she sent Veronica. On the front of the card, a smiling sausage said, “I wish you the happiest birthday ever.” On the inside of the card, the same sausage, now fatter and smilier, said, “And that's no Baloney!”
It seemed to me then that the birthday card was a clue to what was between Billy and Roberta, for Billy was by profession a cartoonist. He drew bosomy showgirls in the laps of sailors, or forlorn sex-starved schlemiels looking with longing at signs saying “Exotic Dancers.” I don't know whether Billy made a living from cartooning before I was old enough to notice such things, but by the time I could understand, it was clear to me that he lived off his mother. She taught third grade in a public school in Harlem; she was a passionate teacher and she loved her work. I realize now that she never talked about her students’ being black; given her nature, it is possible she didn't notice. When she came home from school, Billy was often still in bed. This did distress her. When she mentioned the fact to my mother, it was the only time I ever heard anything in her voice to suggest that something in her life had gone awry.
By the time I was twelve, Roberta was off the scene for good and Billy had hit the skids in earnest. He'd lost his looks; the dashing, slightly wicked ladies’ man had turned into a fat mick with two days’ growth of beard most of the days he cared to come out of his room. I don't know how often he left his room when he and his mother were alone in the apartment, but when my mother and I arrived, he was never visible, nor could he be counted upon to appear. When he did join us, he was affable and sometimes witty, but his interest in us was limited, and he clearly longed to be back in his room.
The year I turned fifteen, I spent a week with Veronica and Billy while my mother was in the hospital for an appendectomy. I realized gradually that I'd become interesting to Billy; it was my first hint that I might in any way engage a grown-up male. And although I could see that Billy was no prize in the particularities of his condition, his membership in the estate of adult malehood had its potency. I flirted with him— it was dreadful of me, of course, but then who ever thought of teenage girls as anything but savage. He took me bowling and bought me a beer. I didn't like it after the first few daring sips and asked for a Coke. He laughed and said I was a cheap date. I was alarmed and not a little bit insulted. I knew it was sex I was playing with, and not in its nicest aspects. I didn't know that calling someone a “cheap date” was a joke or a compliment; I was mistaken in the meaning of the words, but the unease I felt was right.
Billy and I walked out of the bowling alley, feeling the smoky blue air we'd just left behind to be the norm. Even the tainted air of the Bronx seemed too pure for Billy and me; I felt that we were seething with corruption. As we walked down the street, we ran into some of Billy's friends. They were as corpulent as he, and as ill-shaven; only it seemed they had been born to the bodies they were now inhabiting; it was clear to me that Billy had stepped down into his.
“Hey, Len, I want you to meet my girlfriend,” Billy said, putting his arm around my shoulder.
Some genius made me go along with Billy; I was outraged at his suggestion, but I wanted to protect him from his friends. Clearly, if there were sides, I belonged on Billy's.
His friend Len, who wore a short-sleeved checked shirt and had a tattoo of an anchor on his forearm, snorted, “Guess you're robbing the cradle, for a change.”
“I'm only kidding, Len,” he said. “This is my mother's best friend's kid. I used to change her diapers.”
These words angered me as his suggestion of our coupling hadn't. Both were false, but one falsehood elevated me to an honorific, if shameful position; the other simply reduced me to a child. And since I was much closer to being a child than a sexual adventuress, I resented Billy's revision. I wanted to tell them that it wasn't true that Billy'd changed my diapers, that he'd never done a helpful thing in his life. But Billy hadn't moved his hand off my shoulder, and I felt the urgency of his need for my loyalty thrum through his fingers. And so I looked sullen, but didn't move away.
“I bet you'd like to change her diapers now,” Len snorted. His two friends snorted along with him, caricatures of simpleminded, fleshly hearted sidekicks.
“Knock it off, Len,” Billy said, stepping between the men and me, suddenly my gallant protector.
“Okay, Billy,” Len said. “I didn't mean nothing by it. Just run along home to your mommy and forget it.”
Then they were gone, moving away from us in a collective shift of bulk. For a moment, I was afraid Billy was going to cry.
“No one understands what it's like for me,” he said, not looking at me. “Living with my mother. Living off her. I know I'm a mess but I can't help it. She made me a mess and the army finished the job. You know I'm on veteran's disability. You know that, don't you? I don't live off my mother. I pay my share of the rent. And don't you forget it,” he said, shaking his finger at me.
“I won't,” I said, in a frightened voice. I'd never lived with adult males; their rage was as foreign to me as space talk, and as terrifying.
“Listen, I'm sorry. I'm not myself these days. You know what I used to be like. Do I seem myself to you?”
“No,” I said. I had no idea what could possibly be the right answer to that question.
“Let's go get a soda,” he said. “I think you understand me. And by the way, don't say anything to my mother about meeting up with Len. She doesn't understand that kind of thing. You know, she was never in the army,” he said, as if he were clearing up a misapprehension.
We went into an ice-cream parlor and both ordered hot fudge sundaes. Billy told me about his disability; it was lupus; he'd contracted it in Biloxi; he'd never even been sent overseas because of it. It meant he could never go out in the sun, he said; too much sun could make him look like a monster in half an hour. He never quite explained what would happen and I hadn't the nerve to ask.
“I like talking to you,” he said. “You know how to listen. Always remember this: there's nothing more attractive to a man than a woman who really knows how to listen to him.”
This was precisely the sort of information I most wanted; it made me willing to listen to him, to hang on through the long, self-pitying narrations to the bright, occasional sentence that would let me into the secret world of men. After a week, my mother came home from the hospital. Veronica was so grateful to me for “getting Billy out of himself” that she bought me a volume of Christina Rossetti. I'd asked for E. E. Cummings, but she said she'd wait till Christmas for that. Meanwhile, wouldn't I try Christina Rossetti, try to make a friend of her? I did as Veronica said, I read Christina Rossetti, but it was fifteen years before I could see her as anything but maudlin. Veronica kept her word, though, even after I told her I didn't like Christina Rossetti. She gave me Cummings's collected poems as a Christmas gift. I explained to her that I liked Cummings better because he wasn't a phony. I could have died when I saw the look on her face. Never had anybody looked so sad, so wounded, so unhopeful. And I had done it. I could never take it back. I had done what Billy must have done a thousand times, and it disturbed me to feel so much kinship with him.
Soon after my time at Billy and Veronica's, I got my first boyfriend. It wouldn't have occurred to me to be grateful to Billy; I couldn't have known that it was his attentions that had given me the confidence to present myself as a desirable female. And so with the perfect heartlessness of a young girl in love for the first time, I couldn't bring myself to speak to Billy. I wouldn't go with my mother to Veronica's house. If Billy phoned and asked for me, I commanded my mother to say I was in the shower, or sick or sleeping.
“Tell him I'm with my boyfriend,” I said meanly to my mother, wanting at once to punish Billy for his presumptions, and to flaunt my status before his damaged countenance. Teenagers are pack animals; instinctively they turn on the wounded member and fall upon him, then run off. Occasionally, I would answer the phone when Billy called and I'd be forced into a conversation. Realizing the perfunctoriness of my presence, Billy would try to get my attention by telling dirty jokes. How completely he misunderstood our fragile, temporary bond! It wasn't the brute facts of sex I was interested in, had ever been interested in. What I'd valued in Billy's conversation was a clue to the rules of courtship. That courtship could potentially end in the kind of thing Billy told jokes about and could only outrage me. I was disgusted, and I lost what little faith I had in him as a source of information that could do me any good.
Veronica died when I was twenty; Billy, then, must have been forty-two years old. The cable between his house and ours was cruelly cut; he had no reason, really, to regularly get in touch with us. On holidays, his birthday, my mother made obligatory calls, but the news of his life was too dispiriting to encourage any but the smallest contact. For, as far as we could figure, he did nothing. He had no work, no friends. He said his mother had been right, his friends were no good. He said he felt better off just keeping to himself. We heard from neighbors of his that he'd grown obese, that he sometimes passed out at the local bar and had to be carried home— no mean feat since he was reported to weigh two hundred seventy-five pounds. The neighbors said he'd been told he was diabetic, so he was eating and drinking himself to death.
The last time I spoke to him was the night before my wedding. He'd been invited, but he hadn't sent back the little card that said “ will attend.” We were sure that he wouldn't come; perhaps we wouldn't have invited him if we'd thought there was a chance of his coming. We only heard from him when he was drunk; he'd call and talk about his mother with a sentimental tenderness the sources of which had never been obvious while his mother had lived. His relationship to her had been marked by a grudging deference that could turn to rudeness like the crack of a whip. And she had curved herself into a shape that would obtrude into his life as little as possible until he needed her reassurance that his failures were attributable not to his own deficiencies but to the sheer corruption of the brutish world.
Billy was the last person I wanted to speak to on the night before my wedding. I'd decided I hated my veil; I'd been hysterical for hours, and not in much mood to be polite. But I knew that this large and complicated wedding could only be paid for by my doing my bride's job of gracious-ness. Think of Veronica, my mother said, but what she meant was, think of all I've just done for you. And she had done everything, and done it well; it was surprising that she'd done it at all considering how much she disliked my fiance.
I could tell Billy was drunk the moment he started speaking.
“I'll bet you're a pretty little bride,” he said.
“All brides are pretty, Billy,” I said impatiently.
“And what's the lucky man like?”
“Handsome, smart, and madly in love with me.”
“And what's he like in bed? Oh, I forgot, you're not supposed to know that. White for a virgin. White. But what color's the groom wearing?”
“Black, Billy. The men don't matter at a wedding.”
“Just tell me one thing, honey. I just want you to tell me one thing. Did I ever have a chance?”
“A chance?”
“A chance with you. I mean, did you ever think about me?”
I felt filled up with disgust. To imagine that that gross, drunken creature thought of taking the place of my perfect, princely husband-to-be! I couldn't bear to talk to him another second.
“I've got to go, Billy. I've got a lot to do.”
“Sure, honey. I'll call you up sometime.”
“Sure, Billy, my mother has my new number.”
But of course he never called, and I would never call him. He knew of my divorce; my mother made a round of what she felt were de rigueur informing calls; it took a year, but in the end she got through everyone in her address book.
I think of Billy now as I make dinner for the children. I think of him eating by himself on holidays, in furtiveness, in shame, off the landlady's plate. I wonder why he didn't kill himself straight out. What could life have been to him, what could his waking after noon each day have signaled but one more round of fresh defeats? I wonder, too, with the inevitable egotism of the living, if he thought of me after I was divorced, if he imagined a place for himself here, with my sons, in a house as fatherless as his had been. And I hate the thought of him thinking of me, of us, like that.
I would like to blame somebody. Billy or Veronica. Roberta or the landlady. I would like, even, to take the burden of his ruin on myself, to imagine that had I not stayed in their house when I was fifteen, his life might have been different. I would like to point to one specific moment, one incident embedded in his history and say: Here everything went wrong.
But I cannot find a moment solid, powerful enough to blame. It seems impossible that anything could have been other than it was. I call my sons for dinner. Irritable, I tell them they should make more friends. They are fourteen, twelve, and ten: they regard my suggestion with various tones of incomprehension. Too soon after supper, it seems to me, they disappear into their rooms.
I realize I must say something to them. I don't want to; anger takes me over: I blame their father for his absence. Were he here now I could say, “What should we do? What do I have to tell them?” There is no one to turn to. My mother is in her room now in the home run by the Visitation Sisters, in the plain, unyielding senile fog that has become her habitation, and will always be, until her death. There is no one but me to speak to the children. There is no one who knew Billy and knows them now but me.
The apartment seems too big although our problem in reality is that we are quite cramped. But the ceilings loom, the walls push out, refusing shelter, the no-wax linoleum glares up. I walk into their bedroom where they sit in the unreal half-light of TV, aquarium, beneath the ever-changing posters: now Police, Graig Nettles, Sting. I tell them I would like to talk to them, when they are ready. Astonishingly, they turn off the TV. They have been waiting.
“I wanted to tell you about Billy,” I tell them. And I do say something, tell the outlines of his life, abstract the epochs, as if I were giving a lecture on prehistory: the Pleistocene, the Paleolithic. I speak about the army days, and his cartooning, and the final, long demise.
“He sounds like a complete fuckup to me,” says my oldest son. “A real loser.”
“You're being a little hard,” I say. “Things weren't easy for him.” I neglect to fill in the details; it would not be tactful to speak to three fatherless boys about the devastations of a father's abandonment.
“So, things are hard for everyone. Big deal,” my oldest son says. He is the unforgiving one. My strongest ally in refusing to forgive his father.
“Why do you think it happened to him?” asks my second son, the scientist.
“I don't know,” I tell him. “That's what's hard to figure out.”
But all this time I have known that the worried eyes of the youngest were fixed on us, needing reassurance, frightened of the spectacle of Billy's life, seeing it, of the three of them, most vividly.
“It couldn't happen to people like us, though, could it?” he asks. He is speaking for the group.
They gather from the far corners of their diverse positions here, with me in the still center. Do they want to know the truth? Will the truth help them?
I am thinking of Veronica. I think that what she did was tell the truth to Billy, but too early, and too much. The world is cruel, she told him, it is frightening, and it will hurt you. She told him this with every caress, with every word of praise and spoon of medicine. And he believed her. Well, of course he would. She was telling the truth; she was his mother.
I will not tell these boys th
e truth. To protect them, I will dishonor Billy. I will make him out a monster and a sport. I will deny his commonality to the three who sit before me, waiting for an answer. Not the truth, but something that will let them live their lives.
“No,” I tell them. “It doesn't happen to people like you. Billy wasn't like you. He was not like you at all.”
Safe
I
The morning starts with a child's crying. By arrangement I ignore it, by arrangement, my husband, who does not see the morning as I do— the embezzler of all cherished wealth, thief of all most rare and precious— gets the child and brings her to me. Still asleep, I offer her my breast, and she, with that anchoritic obsession open only to saints and infants, eats, and does not think to be offended that her mother does not offer her the courtesy of even a perfunctory attention, but sleeps on. There is a photograph of the two of us in this position. My eyes are closed, the blankets are around my chin. My daughter, six months old, puts down the breast to laugh into the camera's eye. Already she knows it is a good joke: that she is vulnerable, utterly, and that the person who has pledged to keep her from all harm, can do, in fact, so little to protect her. Is a person, actually, who can swear that never in her life has she awakened of her own accord. Yet, miraculously, she feels safe with me, my daughter, and settles in between my breast and arm for morning kisses. This is the nicest way I know to wake up. I have never understood people who like to be awakened with sex: what one wants, upon awakening, is something gradual, predictable, and sex is just the opposite, with all its rushed surprises.