Songs in Ordinary Time (16 page)

Benjy rang the doorbell, then held his breath, waiting. He hated these missions to his father. Norm refused to go on them anymore and his mother wouldn’t think of asking Alice. Relieved when no one answered, he was tempted to leave the envelope in the mailbox, but his mother had insisted he make sure his father got it, and not Aunt Helen. He knocked on the door. Still no one came. Someone had to be inside with his grandmother, who throughout his memory had been senile and bedridden.

The three of them used to visit here every Sunday after Mass. But that had ended when Aunt Helen accused Norm of stealing her mission box.

She said there were five dollars’ worth of dimes in it, enough to feed two Chinese babies for one year. His mother went crazy. She told Helen she had a hell of a nerve accusing her son of thievery when she, Helen, was the 74 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

biggest thief in the whole world. And, Benjy knew, a liar, too; there had been only thirty-one dimes in the box. Visions of those two Chinese babies’

shrunken cheeks and bloated, starving bellies so tormented him that he finally slipped the money into Sister Mary Agatha’s mission box at school.

When the nun discovered the money, she told the class that among them sat a true Catholic, a giver who desired no recognition and no extra recess star on his tally sheet.

He knocked again, then listened. He could hear the drone of a vacuum cleaner. He ran off to the back door, where he knocked even louder. Still no one came. He could see the bars of his grandmother’s crib through the window. Growing close to the house was a gnarled locust tree. He climbed onto a lower branch and tried to see in her window, but he was too low.

Holding his breath, he climbed higher, then eased along a newly leafed limb until he could lean both hands on the sill.

There behind the bars his grandmother huddled in her pale bedclothes, her face narrow and small, her nose a sharp little beak. Her startled eyes darted toward his and she shivered. The gauzy bed jacket ruffled at her throat and her blue lips moved.

“Samuel!” she said suddenly, pointing at the window. “You get down now!”

“Wha…? What the hell!” came Benjy’s father’s voice from the rocker at the foot of the crib. He had been sleeping. “Shit,” he groaned, bracing his head on his hand.

Benjy drew back from the window so quickly that he almost fell. His father’s blood-veined eyes peered blearily past the bars, and the old dread stirred in Benjy’s heart of the hot foul breath and the clutch of those long, hard fingers demanding love and loyalty or even the change he always thought he heard jingling in his sons’ pockets. Benjy held up the envelope.

His father leaned closer, but Benjy had slid down the tree and was already at the back door, laying the envelope on the threshold. He ran down the driveway.

H
elen LaChance slipped the envelope into her apron pocket. Just then the inside door opened and her brother sagged against the frame.

“Where’d he go?” he slurred, wincing in the sun.

“Who?”

“Benjy.”

“He’s not here,” she said, heading back to her garden.

“I just saw him.” Sam gestured. “Up in the tree there…”

She rolled her eyes and sighed.

Stepping past her, Sam bellowed, “Benjy! Benjy! Benjy!”

“Get inside!” she hissed. Across the street the rectory door was opening.

Howard Menka looked out.

Sam looked up at the tree, then scratched his head and went back inside.

Helen drove her rusty trowel deep into the warm black soil. In all the yard only this patch of earth was fertile enough to yield. This was all she SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 75

had saved from the sea of weeds that by summer’s end would again be vined in a tumble of jungly growth. It was all Howard Menka’s fault. Now he was trying to turn his sister against her. But so far, Jozia was still loyal.

“Thank God,” she sighed, crossing herself quickly with the trowel. She leaned back and pulled another tomato seedling from the flat. She set the plant in the newly dug hole and scooped soil over its thin white roots. She smiled. The Jet Stars were always the first to bloom and ripen. This year the Monsignor would have her juicy tomatoes before anyone else’s.

Last summer Sam had staggered out here and fallen into the garden, crushing all her Jet Stars. Iris McAvoy’s Beefsteak tomatoes had gotten to the rectory before hers. So this year, to be on the safe side, she had ordered a roll of chicken wire and metal stakes. Six dollars’ worth. Six more dollars added to the tally of her brother’s sins.

She sat back on her heels and ripped open her sister-in-law’s letter.
Dear
Sam
, she read, shaking her head at the profane groveling, the threatening accusations…. Her eyes widened.
I am hiring a lawyer to look into that trust
fund
, Marie had written. Helen’s mind quickly computed each account. In her file box was every receipt, every bill received since her first day as her brother’s guardian.

That money is yours and therefore also your children’s. If you won’t help me
with Alice’s tuition money, Sam, then my lawyer will take you and that sister
of yours to court. I have been advised that we will end up with every cent of
that ten thousand dollars
.

Let her
, Helen thought, as she shredded the letter. With her trowel she dug another hole, into which she pressed the pieces. “Let her hire ten lawyers,” she muttered. Everything was perfectly legal and aboveboard. She had followed the old Judge’s counsel to a T. Her records were perfect. Every penny had been accounted for. “I am above reproach,” she whispered, and as she stood up, that old bile seeped into her throat to think that this house of her childhood would eventually be her brother’s and not hers. With her mother’s death she would be homeless.
Odd
, she thought, looking toward the buckled roofing shingles,
odd that Marie hadn’t said a word about the house
and the tenements going to Sam and his children. Maybe Marie didn’t know
. She hoped not, because once Sam found out, her life would be a nightmare.

Well, he won’t get much, she thought, her shrewd eyes scanning the peeling paint and rotting clapboard. Let it fall to pieces. He had never cared, so why should she?

F
rom the back door of the rectory, Howard Menka had watched Benjy Fermoyle run down the driveway and up the street. As the boy ran down Main Street, Howard shambled down the rectory steps with a step stool and a bucket of soapy water in which floated his big yellow sponge.

He set everything down next to the Monsignor’s car.

The Monsignor wanted his car clean for the high school graduation tonight. Howard dipped the fat sponge in and out of the water bucket until 76 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

it was squishy with soap bubbles and then he climbed up on the stool and began to scrub the roof of the long, black Oldsmobile. The Monsignor had bought this sponge for him last year in Greece. When he had showed it to Jozia, she said she wouldn’t be proud if Mrs. LaChance gave her a mop for a present. In fact, she’d be insulted. Now even his special sponge made him sad. All day long, everything had made him sad. He averted his gaze from the Fermoyle house, where Jozia might be watching him this very moment.

He came off the step stool with a groan. Last night’s fight with his sister had left him with more of an ache from his heart than from the lump on his head.

The Menka twins had been together all their fifty-one years. They lived in a spotless but gaudy little apartment over the Holy Articles Shoppe, and they were the store’s best customers. They now possessed almost every saint’s statue the store sold, and in front of each was a red-glassed votive candle that they lit on Sundays and holy days. Jozia’s favorite was the Infant Jesus of Prague, because she could dress it in so many different outfits, linen gowns and satin robes with high stiff collars that they bought from their landlady. Howard’s favorite was Saint Joseph because people were all the time saying how simple Saint Joseph was. And that’s what people said about him, too.

The church bells rang three times and Howard looked around, thinking he’d forgotten to bring something out. For weeks now he’d had this sense of loss. It had started that morning Jozia wouldn’t let him sit with her at Mass. Howard had always loved church: it was the only place he felt safe, and church never changed. Now everything seemed to be changing. Sunday Mass used to be his favorite time because they could get all dressed up, and after, they’d buy doughnuts on the way home. But even Sundays had gotten spoiled ever since Jozia had told him to buy doughnuts just for himself because she was watching her weight. Howard asked her who she was watching wait. And he stood there in front of the bakery looking up and down the street while Jozia rolled her eyes and said what she meant was, she didn’t want to get fat and doughnuts make you fat. So then, of course, he didn’t feel like eating doughnuts all by himself, and so Sunday hadn’t felt like Sunday. And now he wasn’t even going to enjoy washing the Monsignor’s car, because he kept thinking what she’d said about the sponge.

He moved the step stool and began to scrub the other side of the car’s roof. Soapy bubbles rose from his fingers like glass rings. He smiled. There were still two nice times to look forward to: the Fourth of July band concert in two weeks and then his very favorite, their bus trip. Once a month he and Jozia dressed up in their Sunday clothes and took a bus to the state hospital in Waterbury to see their only living relative, a redheaded cousin named Perda.

Almost as pleasurable as the trip was all the shopping they did beforehand at the dime store for penny candy, brightly colored pinwheels, plastic thimbles, and Howard’s favorite, wooden squeeze bars with a little tumbling man inside. These they passed among the patients in the ward, partly be-SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 77

cause they liked them, but mostly to show off their affluence and independence.

The visits were far more important to the twins than they were to Perda, who would lie curled in her bed, her sour face to the wall. “Like a wilty old carrot,” they would giggle on the bus home, laughing and gossiping about the different patients, so that by the time they stepped back into their apartment, they would be feeling not only good about themselves, but close to each other.

He looked up, suddenly troubled by the memory of Jozia staring out the bus window all the way back last month. When they got home she had gone straight to bed. He stood now with the sponge dripping down his side. So even the trips were changing. It was all the pigman Grondine Carson’s fault.

If Jozia could only get a job somewhere else, then she wouldn’t be so handy to Carson and then she’d be just his twin sister again and things could go back to the way they used to be.

He climbed off the step stool and went to the faucet on the side of the rectory. He unlooped the thick black hose and pulled it down the driveway.

As he sprayed the soapy car, he stared up at the Fermoyle house. Last winter the paint had lifted on the gingerbread trim of the roofline. Now the peeling had spread like a blistery rash along the clapboards. He knew that the corner section of the porch floor sagged with dry rot. He looked away miserably.

If he had stayed on as Mrs. LaChance’s handyman, maybe Jozia wouldn’t have gotten so friendly with Carson. But everything had started changing after Mrs. LaChance made him poison that poor dog. After that he couldn’t look Mr. LaChance in the eye, he felt like such a murderer, and he couldn’t stand being near Sam, who’d pester him about it every time he got drunk.

All his bad dreams had started then, too, and then their rent had gone up and Mrs. LaChance refused to give him a raise. Well, one good thing had happened and that was this job for the Monsignor, who paid better than Mrs. LaChance did. But then everybody paid better than her, he had tried again last night to tell his sister.

Jozia had been cooking while Howard told her how that rich Nora Hinds had been to the rectory for some relic the Monsignor had gotten special for her son, who was in the hospital again in Boston. Howard had explained how he was mulching the geranium bed under the study window when he heard Mrs. Hinds talking about her brother’s new business. He had just quit the family department store to open a factory that made—

“Toilet paper,” Jozia had said, flipping the sizzling hamburg patties.

“Grondine already tole me. He says it’s gonna open up the end of summer.”

“I’ll betcha’d make ten times there what she pays you,” Howard said.

“Like I was telling Grondine the other day, Miz LaChance and me been together so long money ain’t really the point,” she said.

“If money ain’t the point with the little we got, I dunno what is,” Howard said, determined to ignore all mention of the pigman.

“Feelings, that’s what.” Jozia sniffed. “And caring ’bout people.”

78 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

“Well I guess you’re just about dumb now as you were then,” Howard said.

“Look who’s calling dumb; you didn’t even pass haitch grade!”

“Mebbe not, but I ain’t so dumb to make googly eyes at a pigman!” he said.

“Shut up!”

“You shut up!”

“Stupid ass!”

“Stupid ass yourself! And the next time you get all perfumied up for that Carson, ask him if it ain’t true what people say him and his pigs do, one to the other….”

That’s when the greasy spatula hit the side of his head, so hard the lump was up before the stars were out of his eyes, and then she took off like a bat out of hell. He had staggered to the window and, to his horror, saw Carson’s garbage truck stop in front of the Holy Articles Shoppe downstairs. His chest had tightened with pain as he watched Carson jump down from the truck. Carson tucked his splashy orange shirt into his pants, creased like they’d just come off the ironing board. Never had the old pigman looked so fancy. Carson had opened the truck door and helped Jozia in, and then as he walked around to his side, he had spit on his fingers and smoothed back his white hair. When she had returned at ten o’clock she went straight to her room. Howard had brought her cocoa and kept saying how sorry he was, but she had just laid with her back to him, staring at the wall. After a while he gave up and went to bed and had the worst dream of his life: he was walking up and down the dime-store aisles, trying to pick out presents, but everything he saw was either ugly or broken. Then this terrible pain started in his chest and hadn’t let up once all day.