A Song for Mary (37 page)

I’m not going to go to Mass today. I don’t feel good. It’s okay to miss Mass if you’re sick.

I’m still worrying about my arm in a short-sleeved shirt, and I go into our room and throw myself into an old flannel shirt. I leave it unbuttoned as I push the paper aside with my box of corn flakes. I then pour the cereal into a chipped green bowl and look for the coffee can that is filled with the sugar. I can’t find it. I look all around, but I don’t see it.

“Where’s the sugar?” I ask.

“Don’t talk to me,” Billy says.

I really don’t like it that he is talking to me this way.

I open the icebox door. I know it is a refrigerator, but my mother still calls it the icebox, and lately she has started to store the sugar in the icebox. I see the can, and I pour two tablespoons over the cornflakes.

“Don’t give me the bug up in your ass,” I answer Billy as I sit on the chrome and plastic chair.

Billy points a finger at me. “Just watch your mouth, Dennis,” he says, “or I’ll take your teeth out of it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I say.

I put my head down close to the cereal bowl so that I don’t have to look at him. We don’t argue so much, but sometimes he gets the idea that he’s the boss in the house, and I don’t like it. Like when he hit me with the pool stick. He just thinks he has to play the father around here.

“You know,” he says, “you’re not going to get away with everything.”

I don’t know what he is talking about, and so I keep my head down.

“Yeah, yeah,” I say again.

“I played basketball up at Mount St. Vincent’s yesterday,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“And I met Father Jabo.”

He’s talking about Father Jablonski, the dean of discipline at Cardinal Hayes. “Yeah?”

“He told me you haven’t been up at school for more than a month, and so I told Mom.”

“Shit,” I say. “Why’d you do that?”

“ ‘Cause she should know how you’re screwing up.”

“Yeah, yeah, friggin’ squealer.”

Billy raises his voice now. “I told you to watch your mouth.”

I am not going to just take it from him, and so I become a little courageous with sarcasm.

“I need,” I say to him, “a mirror to watch my mouth, and goddammit, why can’t you just mind your own business?”

Now he is yelling. “Because you are a little wise guy, you and the punk brizzers you hang around with.”

My mother now comes running out of her bedroom, wrapping her bathrobe around her on the run, the pink one with the cotton balls and frills.

“Just stop it, you two,” she says. “Stop arguing.”

I put my face into the chipped bowl again as she boils the water for her tea.

“Arguing doesn’t settle anything,” she says.

I am always noticing how small the kitchen is, not much bigger than a dining room table in one of those houses on Sutton Place where I deliver the flowers. And, as I look at my mother, I can see she is cramped in front of the small two-burner stove, between the stove and the commode room door. The paint above her is a faded yellow, and it is flaking in peels from all the steam that has risen from the kettle since the kitchen was painted a few years ago.

I can tell she is upset because she is pursing her lips and shaking the kettle to help the water boil faster. Billy doesn’t say anything, and I am thinking that she will lay into me any minute now about playing hooky.

And so I just sit and try to chew my cornflakes quietly. Even a loud crunch might make her even madder because she hates it if we make any noise at all when we are eating. “Masticate your food,” she is always saying, “masticate your food.” But when we try to chew as much as we can, she says we are making too much noise.

She pours her tea and turns to me. She slams the cup on the white Formica, and the tea spills over. I jump a little at the suddenness of it.

“So what time did you come home last night?” she asks.

“You mean me?” I ask in return, looking up.

And then she lays into me.

“You are such a fast-mouth you are,” she says. “You know I mean you. I don’t mean your brother, who has been out at the railroad since midnight last night working to bring a few extra dollars into the house, and you are nowhere to be found.”

I suddenly think that I not only do not know what time I came home, but I don’t even know where I was, for I only remember the heaviness of my eyes, and the nodding, and the walking all around the neighborhood, and the sitting in the cellar of the candy store on 55th Street, and the nodding, and the walking to Riker’s on 53rd Street, and the nodding, and the bite of a hamburger from someone I don’t remember, and the way the food made my stomach turn like an old engine that was creaking the pistons without any oil, and then an endless stream of nodding, and I don’t know where and I don’t know what time.

I don’t even know who was with us, except I know it was me and Frankie and Mikey and a couple of other guys, cooking up in an alleyway behind the 54th Street Gym. And now my head feels like someone has filled each ear with a grease gun, and I wish she would just lay off.

“So,” she says, “what time did you come home?”

This time her voice is getting louder, and I know she is going to get into the argument she says doesn’t settle anything. I don’t want to be forced to lie again. It seems all I do is lie to my mother, because she’s always asking questions like a detective, and, anyway, I think she can tell what’s a lie before the first sentence is finished.

“I don’t know what time, Mom,” I say, “so just leave off, will ya?”

She pours a half-cup of milk into her tea, and a half-teaspoon of sugar.

I put my head down into my bowl and scoop up the cereal the way the Chinese eat their rice. Maybe this will get her off the subject.

“Raise your head up,” she says. “Don’t eat like a dog.”

“C’mon, Mom.”

“Don’t ‘c’mon Mom’ me,” she says. “Where were you that you don’t know what time you came home?”

“I was just out.”

“What were you doing?”

“Nothing, and just leave me alone, huh?”

“And what went on at the florist’s shop yesterday?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing went on?” she asks. “What did you do there?”

I am thinking that it is just going to get worse for me here, and we haven’t gotten to playing hooky yet. And so I don’t answer.

“Answer me,” she demands. “You say nothing went on?”

“No,” I answer. “Nothing went on.”

“You’re absolutely right nothing went on,” she says, opening the knot on her bathrobe and tying it again. “Because you never went there to begin with. Mr. Schmidt came here looking for you because they had weddings and dinners and you left him high and dry, and you are telling me nothing happened? So you are turning into a little rotten liar, too?”

“I didn’t lie,” I say. “And why can’t you just let me alone? I am the one who has to talk to Mr. Schmidt, not you.”

“And who were you with?”

I am now feeling the skin all over my face begin to tighten, as if a corner was being twisted like a rubber band, and I want to make one of those terrible stretching faces that will make her madder than anything. I just want to get out of the apartment before everything explodes, and I am thinking of Mrs. Fallon trying to belt Mikey all over 56th Street, and how sometimes mothers can go overboard about things.

I wish she would stop, and just drink her tea, and say nothing. But she doesn’t. She is keeping it going.

“So who were you with?” she asks again. “You will not get up from this table until you tell me where you were and who you were with.”

My head is now hurting worse than before, filled with grease and rocks and anything else that weighs a ton. I have got to get out of this argument, out of this house. I can feel my heart pumping like a tommy gun beneath my chest, and I close my eyes.

“Where were you?”

I feel so filled up with something, I don’t know what. Maybe I am just sad, or maybe I am just mad at everybody, but I know I have to stop this, and now. And so I yell.

“MOM,” I yell, “C’MON, HUH? I AM SO FUCKING TIRED OF EVERYONE BEING ON ME, YOU AND BILLY …”

I don’t have time to finish my sentence because Billy is out of the tub in a flash and coming for me.

I know I shouldn’t have cursed. And I know, too, that I have to run. But where can you run in a four-room apartment smaller than a moving truck?

My mother’s room? Maybe I can lock him out.

And so I run as fast as I can and try to slam the door behind me, but my mother has so many coats and clothes hanging on the back of the door that I can’t close it, and Billy has pushed the door open and is now on me, punching like a Golden Gloves contender. The room is big enough only for my mother’s bed and a dresser, and I begin to fall, but I can only fall on the bed, and Billy, all naked and soapy, is on top of me, and I feel my head is heavy and sinking down into the mattress with each punch.

And now my mother is screaming.

“STOP IT!” she is screaming. “STOP IT! DON’T RUIN THIS FAMILY.”

And I wonder if she is talking to me or to Billy.

She is trying to pull Billy away, but he is so wet and slippery that she keeps losing her grip and falling backward, and Billy punches me twice more, and then suddenly he stops, and he turns away and walks back to the kitchen, naked like an Indian hunter, and my mother is just standing there, tears streaming down her face, her hands clutched together, and I watch Billy disappear into our room.

I want to cry out, but I don’t do anything.

I can’t talk.

Here we are, all of us, the whole family in a donnybrook, and I wish I could say something that would make my mother stop crying, but there is nothing I can think of. Maybe if I said I was sorry, but I don’t know what to be sorry about. Playing hooky? Staying out late? C’mon, I am fifteen years old, for Chrissakes.

It is my life, and those guys are my friends, and what else do I have but my life and my friends?

Chapter Forty-eight

I
t is the week before Christmas. Billy just came back from a trip through New England with the Cardinal Hayes basketball team, winning everywhere they went. They have a team of all-city players, Kevin Loughery, Don Newhook, George Gersch, all scholarship bound. He has just walked in the kitchen from a day of delivering Christmas trees for Goldfarb’s Florist on 57th Street. He seems in a great mood, and is laughing.

It is seven-thirty. I have just put in a full day at the East River Florist, now that I have quit school, and I’m finishing the dinner my mother left for us before she went to the telephone company at five. It is a new shift for her, and she won’t be home until one in the morning.

“Hey,” Billy says, “what a day.”

“There are two franks for you in the frying pan,” I say, “and some potato salad in the icebox. What are you laughing about?”

“It’s in the hallway,” Billy says.

“What’s in the hallway?” I ask as I put my dish in the sink.

“Take a look,” he says, “and I’ll get the saw under the bathtub.”

The hallway is completely filled by a huge Christmas tree, its branches cramped against the hallway walls. The tree is lying on its side but it must be fourteen feet high.

Billy is now behind me with the saw in his hand.

“What did you do,” I say, “rob it?”

I am joking. Billy would never steal anything. There are just some things Billy would never do, and stealing is one of them, and cursing. He is too busy studying his Latin and working at all the side jobs to think about getting into trouble. But a lot of Christmas trees ended up in the apartments on my block after falling off trucks or being left mysteriously under a lamppost, and I am thinking maybe someone gave Billy one of these.

“No,” he says. “Mr. Goldfarb himself gave it to me because I worked all day without the truck. I had to carry everything through the streets.”

“Couldn’t Mr. Goldfarb give you one that fit in an apartment instead of one made for a church? And did you get the Mayflower Moving Company to get it here?”

“Michael Harris helped me,” he says, “and it will be okay.”

Billy jumps into the branches and makes his way to the top. He saws away about five feet of tree and stands it up. It looks pregnant, like there are two more trees inside of it. We pull and shimmy the thing through the kitchen door, move the kitchen table onto my mother’s bed for a minute, and drag the thing into the living room. I take the chrome-legged chair that is in the corner and put it on the couch for another minute, as Billy shifts the tree into its place. There is hardly any room to walk into the living room now because there are branches all over the place.

“Saw some of these off,” I say, “and clear a path, or we’ll never get the kitchen table back from Mom’s room into the kitchen.”

Billy gives the tree a haircut, and then, with the kitchen table returned to the kitchen, and the chrome-legged chair shoved in front of the couch, we admire the way Christmas has taken over the apartment.

“I’m going to eat,” Billy says, “and then take a bath. In an hour we’ll decorate the tree together. I promised Mom it would get done.”

“I’m going to go out for a while,” I say.

“Right,” he says. “You just better be here in an hour. I’m not going to do this alone.”

“No sweat, Chet.”

In the candy store on 55 th Street I meet Frankie and Raymond Connors. Frankie looks like he has already scored today. His eyelids are half down over his eyes, and his speech is a little slurred, but he is not nodding. I think when you mainline as much as he does, once a day, anyway, that the nodding wears off in a short time.

“Hey, Dennis,” Frankie says. “Good to see you, man.”

The candy store is long and narrow, and the front window is steamed up from the cigarette smoke and the hissing heat. Newspapers are piled high in the back of the store, and there is a musty smell everywhere. Frankie’s mother is sitting behind the counter reading a
Daily News.
She is a quiet woman, and hardly says anything to anyone except a smiling hello.

Raymond Connors is laughing as he reads from a magazine.

‘”Love for Sale,’ it says,” Raymond says, looking up, “and I’m going to go over to Amsterdam where it says here the girls sit in the storefront windows, and you just walk up and down the street window shopping, and you can take your pick.”