A Song for Mary (31 page)

“Get lost,” Happy said to us.

“Whaddaya mean?” Bobby said, as if Happy insulted three generations of his family.

“You’re not old enough to be in here,” Happy said, wiping his rag across the bar.

“We got our draft cards,” Bobby said, going into his wallet.

Happy gave us what could be thought of as a dirty look as he inspected the cards, but he drafted the beers and placed them before us.

I was sitting up real straight on the barstool, thinking that we’ve been allowed into some special club, maybe like the White House or the mayor’s mansion.

After three beers we were feeling good and decided to go down the street to Abe Atell’s bar on 55th Street. Abe was a middleweight champion of the world, and his place was always packed with the neighborhood athletes, guys who played basketball at the 54th Street Gym or softball in Central Park or baseball up under the bridge.

We shoved our way through the crowd and up to the bar. A tall man was standing with his back to us, his elbow leaning wide across the bar.

“Give us a little room here, buddy,” Bobby says, confident, and in his best tough-guy voice.

The man turned around, and I was shocked.

I watched as Bobby just looked at the man vacantly, as if he didn’t know where he was or who was with him. There was a long pause as Bobby stared out before him. I supposed, at first, that Bobby, being bleary-eyed from Happy’s beer, didn’t see who it was that was next to him.

But I saw right away. It was Bobby’s father.

Finally, it all registered with Bobby, and I could see by the changing color of his face that he was more shocked than I was. He turned quickly, like a Harlem Globetrotter, pushed through the crowd, and ran down the street faster than a guy on roller skates. Mr. Walsh was right behind him, running like he was on the high school track team.

Mr. Walsh caught up to him a whole block away, down by Twomey’s Funeral Parlor on First Avenue, and when I got there, Bobby’s father was letting him have it from one end of the sidewalk to the other.
Bam, whack,
the clouts so loud I could feel them on the other side of the avenue.

The following morning, Bobby’s mother marched him right down to the rectory where she could get someone to give him the pledge.

I began to smile, thinking about Bobby.

“What is funny about this?” Monsignor asks.

“Nothing,” I say.

“That is correct,” he says, “nothing. You have caused your mother nothing but grief, and now we are going to give you a final chance to get yourself together, to fly the straight and narrow.”

“Yes, Monsignor,” I answer in the kind of Catholic school way that got me through nine years of St. John the Evangelist’s.

Monsignor is trying to help my mother, I know that. I figure I owe him some respect for that, anyway, and so I sit up in my chair, stern-faced and at attention.

“Can you play basketball?”

“Yes, Monsignor.”

“That’s something,” he says, smiling. “They like basketball players up there at Hayes.”

“Cardinal Hayes?” I ask, my eyes opening in recognition.

“Cardinal Hayes High School.”

“That is where Billy is,” my mother says.

“Good,” Monsignor Ford says. “All the more reason for them to take a chance on Dennis.”

I am suddenly excited.

It would be great to hang around with my brother. He’s still two years older than me, but the age difference does not matter so much in high school, and maybe I can hang around with him and those guys from the Bronx who are his friends, guys like Buzzy O’Keefe and Tommy Henderson and Jimmy Dixon. I mean, everything can be different in high school with my brother. These guys are the stars, the jocksters, the guys who get the girls, the big shots. I could be a part of them.

Maybe.

I still have the East River Florist. Since I have been playing so much hooky, Mr. Schmidt has given me work three days a week, after I begged him to put me on as full-time as he could. He is paying me forty cents an hour now, three twenty a day, plus some tip money. Not many tips, though, because the maids always answer the doors on Sutton Place and the River House, and if the people leave any money for tips, you can bet the maids pocket it. I don’t blame them, either, because if they are working as maids, they probably need more of everything in their lives.

Like my mother. She could use a new everything, especially a new ironing board. The ironing board she uses is covered with old sheets and stitched together at the bottom, and the sheets are always getting creased, and my mother is always saying Hail Marys to keep from cursing as she irons because she can’t keep a flat bottom on the ironing board.

I don’t think we have anything new in the house, except for the Bible and the Formica table in the kitchen with the four puffy chairs that she bought in a deal that took two years to pay off.

I have been saving my money, though, and I have thirty dollars tucked in an old sneaker under my bed. I saw a ring in Bloomingdale’s, a little gold one with a blue stone. It is fourteen karats, and I just need ten dollars more to get it. My mother used to wear a wedding ring, a plain gold one, but I haven’t seen it in a long time. I don’t know if she lost it or sold it. A new ring would look nice on her hand, and as soon as I have the forty dollars I am going to get it for her.

I wonder if she would like a ring more than a new ironing board.

“The problem is,” Monsignor Ford says, “you have to organize your time if you are going to go to a good school like Hayes. You can’t work at that florist so much, you understand?”

I do understand. Things are changing for me, so I have to make some changes for myself.

After we leave Monsignor Ford, I walk with my mother to 56th Street. I can tell she is feeling better about things because she begins to whistle a Bing Crosby tune that I know. We are walking pretty fast, and she is whistling this tune, and I think of the words.

“You have to accentuate the positive,” it goes, “eliminate the negative, latch onto the affirmative, and don’t mess with Mr. In-Between.”

Chapter Forty

I
am walking up the hill to Kips Bay Camp, in Valhalla, New York. A big canvas bag is over my shoulder. The country air smells like a package of Chinese laundry, clean and soft. The dirt road under my feet makes me think that I am in another country, like Ireland, but Valhalla is just ten miles above the city. Still, it’s greener than Central Park.

Forty shades of green, that’s what Pop said about Ireland.

Pop is already dead a couple of months, but I think about him still, and especially when I see anything green—lawns, hills, forests, valleys, mountains, glens—they all remind me of Pop and his forty shades of green.

I am laughing now, because I remember that I don’t think I have ever understood a complete sentence of Pop’s in my whole life, except for one.

“In Eye-er-land,” he used to say, “dere is ony da farty shades a green ta mak’ a man smile.”

I saw him the day before he died, a tube in his throat to give him some breath. All the pipes he smoked in his seventy-eight years burned his lungs out. I felt sorry for him, lying there, and I wondered if he knew who I was, or if he cared.

“Your grandfather,” my mother told me at his wake, “didn’t have much of a past, but whatever is there should be remembered, those fishing boats in County Cork, the warehouse in Manhattan, those endless roofs in Brooklyn waiting to be tarred and covered, all those Masses he went to, always in the same suspenders he wore for thirty years. Just keep all that in the back of your mind.”

My mother’s father hardly knew any of us, and spent all of his time smoking his pipe and reading the newspaper and drinking his beer. After he fell from that roof, running after that rolling log of tar paper, he never worked again.

He had no pension, no money, no stores laid up but his memories of Ireland. He was lucky to have my Aunt Kitty and my Uncle Andy there to put him up, and to put up with him. After Sunday Mass, a beer and a newspaper and a cushioned kitchen chair was all he wanted in his life, and his grandchildren were like shadows around him.

Billy got me the job of kitchen boy for the summer. He’s a counselor, and he told me that next year, if I did okay at Hayes, I could become a counselor, too.

The kitchen boys’ cabin is at the end of a long row of eight cabins and two double cabins. The cabins are just big enough for eight beds, four on each side, and have canvas shades instead of windows along the sides.

I throw my duffel on a bed, and I lie down to rest from the hike up the hill from the train station. I am still huffing and puffing, bur I light a cigarette, anyway. The kitchen boys always smoke, and for as many years as I have been coming to this camp, since I was six, I don’t remember a kitchen boy who didn’t have a cigarette hanging from the side of his mouth.

A guy named Spango comes in with his suitcase tied together with a wash line. I know him from 55th Street. He has dark skin, a gold tooth, and he just moved into our neighborhood from some country in South America. He has brought with him a record player which plays the new 45 rpm records, and he has a collection of rock and roll.

It is great having Spango and having Frankie Lymon, the Platters, the Four Tops, all of them, always available on the 45s. I can tell there is never going to be a dull moment this summer.

Another guy named Charlie Spaskey comes into the cabin. I know him, too, from Kips Bay. He is from Brooklyn and has just won the Golden Gloves championship for fifteen-year-olds. The thing about Charlie Spaskey is that he is a very cool cat, a good-looking boy whose blond hair comes down over his eyes, and is known for getting any girl he wants. Marilyn Rolleri, Barbara Godotti, Barbara Gabelli, Catherine Gaeta, they were all in love with Charlie. Even Sue Flanagan would go for Charlie.

It is a hot day, but the cool breeze pouring through the window openings makes us feel that a new life is starting. Everything is different here, and so I offer my cigarettes around, and we have our first bullshit session, “Earth Angel” blaring in the background.

The time passes quickly at camp. Some days I have to work in the mess hall, cleaning tables, giving out food to the campers, or washing the floors, and on other days I have to work in the kitchen with Flora, who someone told me was Harry Belafonte’s mother.

People are always making up stories at camp to have fun with the campers, and sometimes the truth mixes in with the stories, and I don’t know what to believe.

Archie said that President Eisenhower’s son is a camper here, but they have to keep it a government secret and so he’s here using a moniker. Most of the campers believe him, and so, in a way, it makes their camp stay special. Archie also said that Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize, and they were going to give it to him here at breakfast next week. Nobody believes that, but Flora could be Harry Belafonte’s mother, for she is very black and she is always singing those calypso songs.

The work in the kitchen with Flora is hard, for all I do all day is Brillo out the pots and pans and wash the floors and the counters over and over. A schedule is posted in the kitchen boys’ cabin telling us who has which job on which day. We sometimes trade the different jobs according to what days we want off. Archie is still the head counselor, and he tries to make things easy for us.

The easiest job is the porch duty, because all you do is stand on the mess hall porch and inspect the campers’ hands to see if they have been washed as they march into the mess hall. Sometimes I pick out a little kid and make him go back to the wash house three times to wash his hands. When he comes back the third time, I have a muddy baseball which I throw to him suddenly. He has no choice but to catch it, and his hands are soaked with mud.

I would never send any of them back to wash their hands after the muddy baseball, but I tell them they better hide their hands from their counselor. The kids are great, and they take all the ribbing in stride. Archie did the same thing to me when I was seven, and I always remember it with a smile on my face.

Now the summer is half over. I have been practicing my set and jump shot every day, and reading as much as I can so that I will be ready to get off to a good start at Hayes. Billy gave me the complete works of Sherlock Holmes and the complete works of Shakespeare. I like Sherlock Holmes better, because he always knows what he is doing, but the characters in the Shakespeare book seem never to. My brother also gave me a paper edition of the
Confessions of Saint Augustine,
after he read it, and I keep carrying it around in my back pocket, half thinking that Archie will be impressed that I have such a book in my back pocket, and half thinking that I might find some time to read it.

Two days ago I was scheduled to work in the kitchen with Flo, and when I woke up I had a stomachache and heaved all over the place. It was a bug of some kind. It felt like Tom Thumb was in my stomach going through it with a lawn mower. I couldn’t think about washing the kitchen floor four times, and Spango knew I was going to be late for work if I didn’t get a move on. It was his day off, and I guess he felt sorry for me.

“You stay here, Dennis,” Spango said, “and I’ll work with Flo today.”

He didn’t say that he would change days off with me, or that I owed him something. He just said that he would do the job for me, and he went off to the kitchen as the sun was rising over Valhalla. I’ll never forget him, that he did that for me.

He died last night.

The whole camp is in shock. He and Charlie Spaskey went to town to have a soda and to check out the lay of the land in the girl department. When they were coming home, they hitched a ride at the bottom of the hill coming up from town.

The driver was drunk, went eighty miles an hour, and slammed into a tree. They say Spaskey will live, but his brain is damaged, a handsome Golden Gloves champion beaten by a drunk and a tree.

All my life I have been thinking about how rough it is for my father to be cooped up in some hospital, and now I am thinking about Spango, dead at fifteen years old.