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 think 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.”
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 evening, 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.