Songs in Ordinary Time (21 page)

“Bastard!” Marie screamed as she lunged, trying to drag him to the door.

As if with a sudden unmanacled strength, he reared back, shoving her away.

She grabbed the knife from the table and held it out in front of her. “You ruin everything. You ruin every goddamn thing I’ve ever had!”

Sam teetered, blinking curiously at her.

“Mom!” Alice screamed.

“Don’t!” Norm was shouting. “I’ll get him out! I’ll get the bastard out,”

Norm called as he swooped his father through the open door. Outside, there was Norm’s angry voice and then the car started with a roar.

“He’s gone,” Benjy kept saying. “He’s gone, Mom!” He took the knife and threw it into the sink.

She sagged into Alice’s arms. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she moaned as Alice helped her into a chair.

“It’s okay, Mom,” Alice kept saying as she patted down her mother’s hair.

“No, it’s not,” she wept. “Nothing’s ever right! Nothing! Ever!” she sobbed into her hands. “Not even for your graduation.”

“You don’t have to go,” Alice was saying. “You just rest. You stay here.”

She lifted her head. Of course she’d go. She’d face them all, goddamn it.

N
orm knocked on the door, at the same time trying to support his limp father against his shoulder. Above them a window opened and Aunt Helen’s narrow face pressed against the screen. “Take him to your mother, or to jail, or dump him somewhere like the trash he is! He stole my rents and I wash my hands of him!” she called down.

“
Her
rents!” his father muttered.

“Aunt Helen, open the door or I’m going to kick it in!” Norm threatened.

“Don’t you be fresh, Norman, or I’ll come down there and slap your face!”

she hissed.

He let his father sink to a mumbling heap on the porch floor while he beat on the door with his fists. When she still didn’t come, he rammed into it with his shoulder.

“Tha’s-a-boy,” his father said. “Give it to the old bag, Normy! She can’t push us around.”

He reared back and hit the door, this time so hard the frame cracked. As the door opened slowly, Uncle Renie’s pale face appeared over the chain.

SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 99

“Just take him away, Norm,” he whispered. “Bring him back at eleven.

She’ll be asleep then, and I’ll let him in.”

“Uncle Renie, I can’t!” Norm begged. “Please open the door!”

“Renie!” warned his aunt’s shrill voice. “Don’t you dare let that trash in my house!”

Sam raised his fist and shook it at his sister. “Get the hell out of my room, you skinny bitch!”

“Your room!” she shrieked down. “Not anymore, mister!”

“Uncle Renie!” he pleaded.

“Here,” his uncle whispered. A five-dollar bill fluttered out through the closing door.

He had driven all over town, and he still didn’t know what to do with his father, who alternated between incoherence and vile threats at passing motorists. A few minutes ago, Norm had almost given him Uncle Renie’s five and let him off in front of Hammie’s. Now he was driving past the park.

The church bells were ringing. Seven o’clock. Graduation started in a half hour. He jammed on the brakes. “C’mon!” he said, hauling his father onto the sidewalk. He looked around. Except for Joey in his popcorn stand, the park was empty.

“I wanna go home,” his father whimpered as Norm maneuvered him through the shadowy park and up the steep bandstand steps.

“Just sit here,” Norm grunted, easing him onto the concrete floor of the bandstand.

“Don’t leave me,” his father begged, throwing his arms around his waist.

“Please, Normy…”

“C’mon, Dad,” he said, prying away his hands. “I’ll be right back!”

“Promise?”

“I promise,” Norm said.

“I love you, Normy,” his father choked.

“Okay, Dad,” he said, turning quickly from this helpless man who hadn’t been sober in weeks, this father who had lost control of his own life, yet still, bewilderingly, remained so fast at the helm of everyone else’s.

T
he hot gymnasium was jammed with families. Benjy sat between his mother and Norm. Up on the stage, Lester Stoner stood at the podium reading his valedictory address. Benjy looked up at the clock. So far, the speech had lasted fifteen minutes. People were coughing, fanning themselves with programs as their feet shuffled under the creaking metal chairs. Lester’s father leaned against the side wall with his arms folded. Even he looked bored, Benjy thought as Lester’s voice pitched higher. “And into this new world, walk bravely with Christ always on your right and the most blessed Virgin on your left. And when temptation and adversity cross your path, you will find strength in your most holy guides and salvation at the end of this long, arduous journey we call life.”

The audience burst into grateful applause. Lester bowed his head humbly, 100 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

then with the back of his hand wiped his eyes. The audience clapped louder as he returned to his seat.

“Poor thing,” Marie Fermoyle whispered on one side of Benjy, clapping furiously.

“Jeez, what a creep,” Norm groaned and slid down in his chair. His mother reached across Benjy and pinched the soft underflesh of Norm’s arm. “Sit up!” she said through clenched teeth.

“Cut it out!” Norm whispered loudly.

Between them Benjy froze, fully expecting a flurry of punches to pass before him. There was an uneasy wait now, because Monsignor Burke had fallen asleep in his chair behind the podium. His young curate, Father Gannon, was trying to wake him up. During the lull the graduates on the stage smirked and elbowed one another, causing fat Jim Cox to slide from his end seat onto the floor. From the front row Lester Stoner turned and shook his head disapprovingly at his classmates. Sister Jean Andrew, the principal, stormed out of the wings and faced the class with her hands on her hips.

Roused, the Monsignor hiked the skirt of his voluminous cassock and lumbered up to the podium. Sister Andrew returned to her post. The Monsignor adjusted his thick black-rimmed glasses, then took a deep breath into the microphone. “Well,” he began in that faint brogue with which he delivered all sermons and speeches. “I suppose you’re all saying to yourselves now, ‘Look at the old duffer. Time, maybe, we put him out to pasture; can’t even keep his eyes open.’” The Monsignor shook his head ruefully, and the audience roared with laughter. “But as dear old Da used to say to me mother after Mass, ‘Sure’n it wasn’t napping you caught me at, Meg, but meditating.’” He folded his arms high on his paunch in hearty laughter with the audience. After a moment he raised his hands for silence and said solemnly, “And that’s just what I was doing, ladies and gentlemen.

Meditating! Marveling at the uniqueness of this singular group of young men and women, these fine young graduates of Saint Mary’s High School.”

Moments later as the Monsignor began to pass out the diplomas, flashbulbs popped and a few home movie cameras whirred. The Monsignor patted his sweaty forehead. In the twenty-one years he had presided over these graduation ceremonies, nothing had changed; not the faces or the names, he thought. In a few months, a year or two, they would be trooping their troubles into his rectory, their babies into his baptistry. He looked up and forced a smile.

“Alice Fermoyle,” he called, peering over his glasses as she came unsteadily across the stage on her new white heels. Like the mother, he thought irritably: skinny, suspicious, vaguely menacing, Marie Fermoyle was one of the parish’s few divorcées and the only one still brazen enough to attend Sunday Mass. Sometimes at the beginning of Communion, he had seen a look come over her, a flash of hunger, of a desperation so intense that he would find himself rushing through the distribution of Hosts, fearful that the next quivering tongue above the rail would be Marie Fermoyle’s. And SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 101

then what would he do? Denounce her? Ignore her? Sometimes he imagined himself slapping her. She would shout some profanity. He would slap her again and again….

“Thank you, Monsignor,” Alice Fermoyle was saying, as she accepted her diploma. She blushed and quickly switched the tassle on her cap and had just started back to her seat when a slurred voice rose from the back of the gym.

“That’s beautiful…tha’s really, really beautiful,” Sam Fermoyle cried.

W
ith their car blocked they were stuck in the parking lot. Benjy sat in back, his mother and Alice rigid in the front seat. The minute the ceremony ended, Norm had left to find his father.

“I hate him,” Alice groaned. She took a deep breath, fighting tears as her classmates milled around outside having their pictures taken.

“It’s all right,” Marie said, staring over the wheel as two squealing girls ran by the car.

“I’m not going to the dance. I just want to go home.”

“No, that only makes it worse,” Marie said. “Believe me.”

“I’m not going!”

“Yes you are!”

Lester was making his way through the cars, looking for Alice.

“Oh God,” Alice groaned with his approach. He tapped on her window.

“I don’t feel well,” Alice told him, barely opening the window. “I’m just going to go home.”

“No, you promised me, Alice,” Lester begged. “I don’t want to go alone.

It’ll be all right, Alice. Please! You have to! You said you would!”

“Get out of this car!” Marie ordered in a low voice. “Right now!”

“No!” Alice shook her head. “I can’t.”

“Please, Alice! This is such a special night!” Lester said, his mouth at the narrow opening.

“He’s right,” Marie said, turning now, glaring. “Alice, if you don’t open that door and get out of this car, I’ll open it and I’ll drag you out in front of everyone, damn it, and you know I will.”

“Please? Please, Alice?” Lester begged.

“Just open the door. Open the goddamn door and everything will be all right,” Marie said, her low voice steady and sure like a dark path they were compelled to follow.

Benjy stared down at the floor. The door opened. When it closed he heard a sob catch in his mother’s throat.

“Help me, sweet Jesus, please help me!” she gasped, watching Alice follow Lester, her shoulders slumped, head down.

What about Alice, Benjy thought. How could his mother do that? How could she make Alice go out there in front of all those people? Sometimes he thought his mother just didn’t care. She just didn’t love them enough.

102 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

W
hen the fire whistle blew the ten-of-nine curfew, Norm had looked everywhere for his father, even Hammie’s Bar and Grill. Now he climbed West Street toward the park lights and the tinny music of Joey’s radio at the top of the hill.

“Here, have a bag, Norm,” Joey said, holding out a grease-streaked bag of popcorn.

“No thanks, Joey,” Norm said, still out of breath as he scanned the shadows of the trees and the bandstand in the middle of the park. Before the night was over he was going to beat the shit out of that no-good, fucking drunk. Poor Alice, humiliated like that in front of all her classmates and their families and every fucking teacher in the fucking school. His fists rapped a marching beat on the countertop. “My father been around?”

“He’s long gone now, kid. Probably sleeping it off somewhere. Here,”

Joey said, gesturing with the popcorn. “On the house.” He smiled and his eyes rolled to whites.

As Norm took the popcorn Joey’s hand groped up his arm to his shoulder.

“You don’t want to find him now, Norm. What good’s it going to do?”

“I gotta go now, Joey. Thanks,” Norm said, easing from the embarrassingly urgent grip.

Joey’s hand tapped along the countertop for his rag. “Be seeing you, kid,”

Joey called out.

“Yah, Joey, be seeing ya.” Norm tried to laugh. It was expected.

He walked through the park eating the popcorn. Joey was right. He didn’t want to find him. If he did he might kill him. He took off his tie and stuffed it into his pocket. To hell with his father. To hell with all of them, he thought as he turned up the path toward Main Street. It wasn’t his fault his father had showed up at the house tonight. It wasn’t his fault his father had gone to the graduation. He was sick of being blamed; sick of his mother slamming doors and banging windows shut so the neighbors couldn’t hear, when, of course, the crashing-down windows were their signal to listen. He was sick of her pulling that crummy bathrobe tight as a noose around her neck as she turned those dark-circled eyes on him, those eyes that accused and at the same time expected something, needed everything from him, but nothing from the others, because they were the victims while he was supposed to be her one great hope in life or something….

Suddenly he stopped. At the corner on the hood of his car sat Blue Mooney, his hair slicked back hard as a helmet, his sullen profile sharp under the streetlamp. Mooney was talking to three punks who lounged on the hood of the souped-up gray Chevy. His heart stirring with fear, Norm stepped behind a tree and felt on the ground for a rock. Then he slipped back into the shadows and threw the rock as hard and as high as he could, over the treetops; it was sailing, whizzing, then coming down, still coming while he ran across the street. Just as he darted into the narrow strip of darkness between two houses, he heard the rock’s
thunk
on metal and an outrage of curses, then the slamming of car doors as an engine started, and SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 103

he ran, ran panting through backyards and over a picket fence, through bushes, past trees and frantic dogs.

When he finally emerged from the branch-battering leafy darkness he was beside the library. His chest pounded and his eyes burned as a car came down the street, then slowed behind him. He kept walking, his fists sweating in his pockets.

“Hey, Normy-baby!” Weeb called, grinning.

Norm jumped into Weeb’s father’s car. “Hey, you dirty bastard,” he said with a poke at Weeb’s ribs.

“How’d you do with Creller? Was she as good as I said?”

“Better,” Norm sighed, watching for Mooney or the gray Chevy.

“Yah?” Weeb was breathless.

Norm turned on the radio. Fats Domino was singing “I’m Walkin’.” Norm played the dashboard like a piano and sang loudly, shaking his head from side to side.