A Song for Mary (39 page)
I mean, I am still only fifteen years old, but I guess she thinks I have done this with thousands of girls. This is the 1950s, right? And in 1955 lots of guys do this, some of them almost every day. Things are changing in the world. The Korean War is over, and everybody is working hard in the neighborhoods, and they all need to have a good time on the weekends. The bars are always full, and the dances my brother goes to up at the Jaeger House on 86th Street are always packed. Everyone is drinking and making out in the corners. It’s not like it used to be anymore where the girls all run home to their mothers when a guy tries to kiss them or grab them. Guys just do it whenever they get a chance, right?
But I need just a little rest here, a couple of minutes is all. She looks so pretty in her white brassiere, prettier, even, than Sue Flanagan.
I just remember a sweet darkness, and now Buckley is shaking me like a wild man.
“Come on, Dennis,” he is saying. “I hafta go, and you hafta get outta here, you unnerstand?”
“What happened?” I ask. “Where is Loretta?”
“She’s gone, man,” Buckley says, pulling my arm, “like you are gonna be. Let’s go, huh? My old man is coming home any minute, and you gotta get outta here.”
I look at the clock, and realize I have to be at work in the florist in another hour, so I feel lucky that Buckley is waking me.
I am now inserting the key in the door of apartment 26, and my mother is standing right there as I walk in. I wonder if she doesn’t stand there most of her life. She is dressed in a skirt and a sweater, and her hands are fisted and on her hips.
“Where were you?”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I say. “I fell asleep at a friend’s house, I swear to God.”
It is just a little lie, because Buckley really isn’t a friend.
“You fell asleep?” she asks. “At whose house?”
“Buckley,” I say. “At Buckley’s house on 48th Street.”
“Who were you with?”
“I was with Frankie and those guys from the candy store on 55th Street.”
I don’t know what else to say that isn’t a bald-faced story.
“You were, were you?”
“Yes, Mom,” I say. “I swear.” I was with them, anyway.
“We’ll see about that right now,” she says, “and you can come or you won’t, but I don’t know this Frankie from a head of cabbage. I’m going around to 55th Street, and I’ll find out who he is, anyway.”
Goddammit, I am thinking, she is going off into one of her tirades. Why can’t she just leave things alone?
“C’mon, Mom,” I say, “please. Just forget about it.”
Billy now appears at the door of our bedroom, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.
“Where were you?” Billy asks.
“C’mon, Billy,” I say, sitting down in a kitchen chair. “I’ve been through this already.”
“Listen, Dennis,” Billy says, now grabbing me by the sleeve of my coat, pulling hard on it, “if it wasn’t Christmas Eve, I would give you something that you would never forget. Go look at the Christmas tree, and see how it doesn’t have a stick of tinsel on it because you were too damned selfish to come home and be responsible.”
My mother puts her hand on Billy’s back.
“Leave him alone, Billy,” she says. “I am going around to that candy store on 55th Street and see what kind of a person this Frankie is.
I beg my mother the whole way down First Avenue, all the way to the candy store.
“Don’t do this,” I beg.
I am completely embarrassed now as she opens the candy store door. I see Frankie and his father at the back of the store, shoving cases of empty soda bottles from one side of the store to the other. Frankie’s mother is at the front, and she smiles at my mother. She is such a nice woman, and I hope my mother doesn’t say anything to hurt her feelings.
“Where is this Frankie?” my mother says.
She looks so determined, like she is out hunting or something.
Frankie’s mother is still smiling. “You mean,” she says, “my son, Frankie?”
“I guess so,” my mother says, “the one who my son has been hanging around with.”
“He’s right back there.” Frankie’s mother points.
She is still pointing as Frankie and his father come out of the back shadows.
“Are you Frankie?” my mother says.
I am hoping that Frankie will be polite, because I know that I can’t let anybody, not even Frankie, be impolite with my mother.
“Yes, I am, Mrs. Smith,” Frankie says.
“Were you with Dennis last night?” my mother asks like she is investigating a crime like Charlie Chan.
“Yeah,” Frankie says, “most of the time.”
“Until what time?” she asks.
Frankie’s father now walks out of the shadow.
“What’s the problem here?” he asks. He’s a short man with a big Italian nose. I don’t know him very well, because he is always on his truck delivering things like furniture for the antique dealers.
“There is no problem here,” my mother says. “I just want to know what time you left him.”
You can tell by his face that Frankie is being very polite. I guess he hasn’t taken any drugs yet today. It is a small piece of luck, because my mother could tell with the drop of a feather if something isn’t right in someone’s eyes.
“It was late,” Frankie says, stealing a fast glance at me. “And then I think he went to sleep over at someone’s house.”
“Whose house?”
I don’t know why my mother thinks that Frankie should know everything about my life.
“I don’t know,” Frankie says. “He just left, is all.”
I am mortified that my mother is here like a cop from the 17th Precinct. I just wish we could go home.
“C’mon, Mom,” I say. I put my hand into her folded arm and try to edge her away. I can tell she doesn’t know what else to say, and I just want to get her out of the candy store.
Her eyes are a little wet, and sparkling, and I am hoping that she doesn’t start to bawl in front of everyone.
“C’mon, Mom,” I say. “C’mon.”
I
t didn’t take much to quit Cardinal Hayes. My mother had to go up to the Grand Concourse with me, and we sat in Monsignor Fleming’s office.
“When will you be sixteen?” Monsignor asked.
“A few months,” I answered.
“You won’t have much of a future,” the monsignor said, “when you quit school. An education is the safest thing to put between us and despair.”
“Monsignor Ford is getting me a job when I turn sixteen,” I said. “At Catholic Charities.”
“That’s something,” Monsignor Fleming says. “It’s good you have a friend in Monsignor Ford.”
And that’s all there was to it to quit high school—no fanfare, no trouble, no pledge in the rectory office. I just left Cardinal Hayes for the last time, and that was that.
Now I am one of two office boys at the Catholic Charities building on 22nd Street. It takes hardly any effort or ability to sort and deliver the mail up and down the six floors of the building, and I am getting seventy-five cents an hour, which is not bad. Thirty bucks a week. I give my mother fifteen, and I can buy whatever kind of shoes I want from now on.
I’m still working on Saturday’s at the florist, and I’m glad to have the extra money. I don’t know why I’m glad, though. I don’t have anything special I want to do with the money. I just put it away, about ten bucks a week.
Working two jobs and being on my own is what I want. I am controlling my life, and if you don’t count my mother, Mr. Schmidt at the florist, and my boss Mr. Lacy at Catholic Charities, and maybe Monsignor Ford, I don’t have anybody to answer to. I can do as I want.
I am standing in the back of the church now. I’ve been missing Mass a lot lately, and I am making a stop-in.
“Just stop in once in a while between Sundays,” I remember Sister Stella saying, “and that’s the quickest way to heaven.”
No matter what is going on in my life, I always try to make room for going to church. I’m an Irish Catholic, I guess, is the best way of explaining why I like to be in there. You never hear someone say, “That person is an Italian Catholic” or “That person is a Spanish Catholic.” But ask someone with an Irish name in New York what religion he is and I bet he’ll say, “I’m an Irish Catholic.” It’s as if the Irish have their own brand of religion, different from the other hundreds of millions of Catholics in the world. And I think staying close to God is the only thing that makes any sense about being separate, about being Irish Catholic.
I don’t have anything to especially pray for, and so I am sitting in a back pew, sort of basking in the soft evening light, the smell of fading incense, and the wild mix of colors coming down from the saints and the angels on the ceiling and walls. It is like basking in the sun at Coney Island, when you don’t think about hardly anything, but just let the warmth sink into you.
Suddenly, someone comes in my pew and sits next to me. The church is nearly empty, and I jump out of my thoughtless daydream. It’s Father O’Rourke, and he gives me a big pat on the back.
“We miss you at the altar boys, Dennis,” he says.
“Just getting old, Father,” I say, “growing up.”
“Level to level, huh?”
“Right,” I say, “kid to teenager, grammar school to high school, and high school to working.”
“Right,” he says. “I heard you quit school and are now down with Monsignor Ford. How is it?”
“It’s okay,” I answer. “Okay.”
“Why’d you quit school?”
“I failed everything,” I say, “because I hardly went to class. And instead of going into my third year, I would have to do my first year all over again. I’d be old enough to vote by the time I graduate.”
Father O’Rourke laughs.
“I know what you mean,” he says. “Most days I’m trying to catch up with what I was supposed to do yesterday, but could I give you some advice?”
“Sure, Father.”
“Keep reading books, and being interested in what’s going on in the world around you. No matter what’s going on in your life, always care about what you are putting inside your mind. It’s what’s up here”—he is now pointing at my head—”that will let you grow, level to level.”
“I would start with Hemingway,” Billy says. It’s a Sunday afternoon, and we are shooting baskets up at the 61st Street park.
“I already read some Hemingway,” I say.
“That’s what I am doing,” Billy continues. “I’m reading all of Hemingway, all of Faulkner, and all of Sinclair Lewis. You read all these books and you’ll know something of how America got to be like it is.
“Which one should I start with?”
“It doesn’t matter, really,” he says, taking a jump shot from the sideline. “You just have to have an attitude about it, and then you’ll do it.”
Billy is in Hunter College now. Hunter is a free city college, but you have to pass a pretty hard test to get in there.
He got a scholarship to Oberlin College in Ohio, but first he had to get up just a little bit of money to go, to cover the book and lab fees, something like a hundred bucks.
My mother didn’t have the money to give him, and so he didn’t go. I wonder, though, if it was because she just didn’t want him so far away from us. It was a disappointment to Billy, and I guess a setback, but he never complained about it. But lately I notice something about Billy that I never saw before. He’s been spending a lot of time down at Jasper’s Bar, across the street from Happy’s on Second Avenue, and sometimes he doesn’t come home until it closes at three
A.M.
L
ast night was a close call,” I say to Frankie, leaning into the velvet crunch of the backseat.
He is driving his father’s car, and we are going out to Rockaway Beach. His father has gone on an all-day commercial moving job and won’t be home until late tonight. I don’t think he knows that Frankie took the car.
“You can do time if you get caught with a rod,” Nicky the Greek says.
“That Bobby Sutton is something, huh?” Frankie says.
“I didn’t know he had a zip gun,” I say. “I was wondering why we went all the way almost to Queens on the 59th Street Bridge, and then he takes this gun out of his pocket and shoots it off into the sky. I’m glad there were no airplanes flying over.”
“Yeah,” Frankie says, swerving in and out of the traffic. “And the Keegan brothers should be happy they weren’t there on 65th Street, either, or else Sutton would have let them have it. See how tough they are then, huh?”
I am wishing that Frankie would slow up a little, not only because he doesn’t have a driver’s license, and if the cops come he’ll be in big Dutch, but because I feel like I am on a boat in an ocean storm, going back and forth like we are on the top of some drunken waves.
The Keegan brothers are boxers, Golden Gloves champs, and nobody to fool around with. But their sister Eleanor had a problem at the Kips Bay dance with someone from 55th Street. I think it was Gillespie or John-boy Daly, or someone who said the wrong thing and kept pulling her in like a vise while they were dancing, and she blew her stack. Her brothers came down to the candy store the next day and said that everyone on 55th Street was a punk unless we came up to 65th Street to fight it out with them.
It doesn’t matter how these things start, because it is the end that counts and not the beginning.
The Keegan brothers are like myths up on 65th Street. No one I know has ever seen them fight, but their reputations say they are as tough as they come, as tough as Floyd Patterson. This is why Frankie said we couldn’t let them get away with putting us on notice like that, and why Frankie called Bobby Sutton to come in from Astoria, Queens. Sutton had a reputation of his own, and completely dominated the Machine and Metal Trades High School when Frankie went there, the toughest guy in a tough turf.
After testing the zip gun, twenty of us marched up First Avenue to 65th Street, two abreast, like we were in St. John’s grammar school. I liked being lined up with all the guys, like going into a war or something, all of us being a part of something big, bigger than any one of us alone, part of something that people would respect.
When we turned the corner there, we saw four guys standing on a stoop, and Sutton went right up to them and started punching. He was in a green quilted jacket, and the back of his jacket looked like a green wall bobbing from side to side.
