Songs in Ordinary Time (66 page)

Helen sent a money order off the next day. She said little to Sam, tolerating his presence in her home, in her life, as another of the inevitable conundrums with which God had burdened her. Two of her apartments were empty;

“the” apartments, she corrected herself, bile seeping into her throat as she thought of Jozia Menka, who was threatening to quit if Sam said one more word to her. Besides, she’d whispered shyly to Helen, she and Grondine Carson were thinking of getting married. He wanted to sell his garbage truck and the pig farm and move into a retirement trailer park in Florida.

And after thirty years with the Fermoyles she needed a change, according to Carson, who had hiked his collection fee twenty-five cents a barrel, knowing full well there wasn’t a thing Helen could say or do about it. And now on top of everything else there was Renie suddenly, in this heat, an authority in all matters, expounding on the weather, religion, politics, the SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 321

way his wife treated him. Particularly the way his wife treated him. He was threatening to move back into her bedroom. Let her try hanging her clothes in the pantry closet and see how she liked smelling all the time of vinegar and fish. Last night he had burst into the house weeping and carrying on like a crazy man about the son he claimed he had seeded in the belly of a whore in New York City almost thirty years ago. He had thrown himself across her body and tried to pry her legs apart. For once in his life, he moaned, he was going to act like a man. Something had snapped inside to make her laugh, and that was when he circled his thick hands around her neck, whispering that it was the only decent thing about her, this fine long neck he had admired when he first saw her years ago.

She sighed now, her fingers pausing on the cold black beads of her rosary.

Across the room Sam’s head hung over the columns of figures he’d been adding and subtracting for the past hour. She tried not to smile. Her mind, ever the swifter calculator, clicked over a longer column of figures, sums that bridged years and far outspanned his meager accounting of how every cent of their mother’s ten-thousand-dollar trust had been spent. She knew, remembered every penny, every nickel and dime he’d ever begged, lied for, or pilfered from her.

He raked his fingers through his thinning hair. He bit his lip, scribbled out one whole row, began again.

The last bead slid between her thumb and forefinger…
as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen
. She laid the rosary tenderly in its silver case. The rosary, blessed by the Pope, had been given to her by the Monsignor when she donated money for the new sacristy doors. A two-inch thickness of oak, they bore her name engraved on a small brass plate that even years from now would continue to bear pure and fleshless testimony, as no child could, to her sanctity.

Suddenly a horn sounded outside. Sam rushed to the window and looked out, still afraid that they’d come to take him back to the hospital. She smiled.

His money was gone, the last of it in the money order to Dr. Litchfield, who would never see her brother again. Sam could have saved himself the trouble of running away. She had planned on telling Litchfield at the end of that same week to release her brother, because his money had run out. She owed Sam nothing, not a penny. God would be good to her. She had kept her mother alive well beyond her time. And for the past ten years she had kept her brother off the streets. Hadn’t the Monsignor himself pronounced her a living saint, declaring her path to heavenly reward well paved?

She got up and went outside, eager to pluck weeds from her vegetables.

The garden now took up most of the yard. Every spring she dug up another foot or two, for an additional row of carrots or beets. Because it was too much food for just the three of them, she sent most of it to the rectory. She stooped between the cabbage heads and for a moment felt dizzy. Bees blazed across her vision. The velvety beans trembled with heaviness. Renie lied.

He had no child, no son of his own. It was all this attention from the newspaper. Late last night she’d heard him whispering into the phone, insisting 322 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

“it couldn’t be too late.” Then he’d slumped over the kitchen table staring at his own blurry baby picture.

The tomatoes were dazzling, but ripening too soon. Already some had split their skin, engorged with her care and the relentless sun. The annual panic seized her. She was never ready for the tomatoes that were almost obscene in their abundance. She was never quite sure what to do with them all. She stood up and straightened her shoulders. She felt old. Her flesh shrank on her bones while her breasts hardened to stone, she thought, as she labored up through the trapped heat of the porch stairs to the kitchen.

Inside, Jozia sluiced the wet rag mop over the dull linoleum. At first Helen thought the ammonia fumes had reddened Jozia’s eyes until she heard the phlegmy sob. She pushed open the door and started past the crib, where her mother dozed, propped against pillows, chin on her chest. Her mother’s eyes opened wide. “Please wash the rags,” she begged in a tremulous voice, thin as a net snagged on some vivid moment in dreams or memory. “Don’t throw them out. Please wash them.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Please! Oh please, please, please!”

“We’re washing them!” she snapped, pushing open the door. She bore down on her brother, still hunched over his papers. “What did you say to Jozia?” she demanded. “She’s in there crying”

“Nothing.” He flicked his hand as if at some insect. “I turned off her radio so I can hear the phone. I’m expecting a call.”

“You’d best keep one thing in mind, Sam. The day she leaves here, you leave, too.” She banged her fist on the table.

He stretched back with a lazy smile. “Actually I’m thinking of firing her pretty soon, anyway.” He picked up his papers.

Her eyes narrowed. It sickened her to see him so amused and relaxed after his seven-week sojourn; the picture of health, better (she hated to admit) than he’d looked in years, and why not: his every whim having been catered to, with an entire staff wringing their hands over his selfish miseries while she was the one up night after night with their mother, changing diapers and kneading baby oil into her tissue-thin flesh that had never suffered bedsores or chafing.

She stood there, trembling. Who did he think he was, sitting at her dining-room table (yes, hers in spite of any documents, hers for the price, the duty paid in dark hours, long silent days, months, in years, a lifetime, her life), dismissing her with such smug confidence when one call to the police could send him back there. She told him this. He shrugged and said she was standing in his light. His light! Who were these people, Jozia, Renie, her brother, all fending her off, reaching past her. She refused to move, but he would not look up. In the other room, her mother’s voice skittered with girlish nonsense, her sunless white hand groping through the bars for painted eggs and grosgrain ribbons for her hair. It was with greater love and tenderness ever yielded anyone that she’d bathed and fed and changed the towel-sized diapers of that withered child. And when the girl’s voice SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 323

sank into the dark folds of her mother’s churlish demands, she’d stalk out of the room, refusing to answer or come until the child’s soft cries returned to fill the barren space behind the bars and her loneliness. It was the child she more easily loved, the child lost in time, not the senile woman, for that was mere duty to a memory, to a mother who called her by her brother’s name and even now, after everything, after all his failure and cruelty, still wept for him.

She stared at the back of her brother’s head, her eyes dim with tears. They were turning on her. She had held this house and the apartments and this mockery of a family together by the sheer force of her will. She had kept a roof over their heads. She had kept her mother alive, not only because with her death everything would be lost to Sam’s children, but because they were all she had, these cold, ungrateful people. Demanding, devouring her strength, they had scraped and sucked her dry.

Her hand trembled when lifting so much as a cup from its saucer. Things fell from her grasp. She felt breathless now as she hurried to the back of the house. Her mother clapped her bony blue hands as she passed by the crib.

She needed to tell Jozia something, something about Carson, a vile tale heard years ago. Jozia stared uncomprehendingly at her. “No. No,” she finally said, thickly, her hand at her breast. “That ain’t true, Miz LaChance.

Grondine never fornicated a goat. He never kept goats. Just pigs, Miz LaChance.”

“It was a pig, then,” she insisted, heart racing. “I remember now. It was a pig!”

Jozia blinked, thought a minute. “He wouldn’t do that. Probably something to do with his first wife. Grondine says she was messier’n any pig he ever kept.” She tried to laugh, but tears spilled down her ruddy cheeks. “I can’t believe you just said that to me, Miz LaChance. All this time I been staying on because of you, because I thought we were like sisters almost.”

She had been untying her apron. She put it on the counter and then she left.

F
ive-forty, almost dinnertime. Renie glanced at his watch as he climbed the steps to the Fermoyle house. After all these years it was still known as the Fermoyle house, not the LaChance house. He had always been Helen Fermoyle’s husband, Renie, a wart on the back of her hand, a minor affliction.

Even here at the kitchen table his place was one of deference, in the chair on Helen’s left. Sam nodded when he sat down. None of them spoke as they ate. As usual the food was pasty, murky. Renie had little appetite. She would not look at him. She hated him for his foul secret expelled like gas in her bedroom. He stirred his watery summer squash into his mashed potatoes and was ashamed. With the heat wave letting up, sales were slow again, and no one gave a damn what Renie LaChance thought about anything.

There was a shopping center coming to town. At the Chamber meeting he’d tried to warn his fellow merchants that people wouldn’t come downtown anymore, but their biggest concern had been Joey’s popcorn stand’s being an eyesore in the park.

324 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

Helen picked at her dinner. She got up and scraped her plate into the garbage. She filled the sink with water. Sam, seeing her wait for his half-eaten plate, sat back and lit a cigarette, daring her to take away his plate before he was finished. Renie ate quickly, stuffing his mouth and chewing so loudly that Helen glanced disgustedly at him. He swallowed in a gulp and then began to choke. Sam whacked him on the back and Helen removed his plate.

Renie stared into his coffee, wondering how he had endured this stifling family all these years. Helen squished her dishrag in the soapy sink water.

She had sapped him of youth. He had been a sensitive young man, though few had ever guessed it. His short thick fingers had betrayed him, his stocky torso had betrayed him, his runty legs had betrayed him. He had been a tender young man trapped in this coarse body when he first met Helen. His eyes searched the shelf of cups above her head. They were so precariously stacked, one tilted into the other, that for a moment he was sure they would fall.

Perhaps that had been it. He could bear no calamity, yet calamity had pursued him from birth, and with blind singleness of purpose he’d tried to outdistance it. And when confronted, he’d masked it, renamed it with lies.

He remembered when he first saw Helen alone on the bus at night. Hours earlier he’d pushed past his father as he waved the accusing letter in his face, bellowing that he’d gotten a girl in trouble and now he’d pay. Riding alone, without money or destination, he’d finally introduced himself to the quiet woman, who went on nibbling her dry biscuit and would not look at him. Everything about the courtship seemed to surprise them both. When they were married he had been so proud of her tapered fingers, her long, lovely neck, and careful manners: she proved what his thick fingers and clumsy tongue could not, that he was somebody.

Sometimes he thought that was the reason he had stayed with her all these years, that in spite of her brother, she was still respected in town, which gave him status. But it was more than that, more and therefore less, diminishing him. It was because he feared calamity too much to leave her.

And so he had endured her sterility and her disdain with the secret comfort that somewhere there existed a child, who would be grown now with thick fingers and little brown eyes, his child living among strangers and waiting to be found.

It had happened in New York City when he was selling can openers door to door. Afterward, the woman had written in care of his company, which forwarded the crudely printed letter to his father. She was pregnant, desperate, alone, she said. Would he please do something, send her money for the hospital. Even then, he more clearly remembered demonstrating the nickel-plated can opener with all its gadgets, the bottle-cap opener, the knife sharpener, the two screwdriver heads, the dazzling corkscrew, than he remembered her face or any conversation they might have had. She had been a large woman, her heavy bones lunging against him, her breath smothering him with sour intensity. It had been a dark room. They had been drinking.

SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 325

It had happened quickly, passionately, though he had come to think of it as violently, in a damp creaking bed. Beatrice was all he remembered of her name.

He looked up now as Helen berated Sam for stubbing out his cigarette in the bowl of mashed potatoes. She’d planned on reheating them for tomorrow night’s dinner. Sam laughed and said that’s exactly why he’d done it.

They bickered like children while, from the other side of the door, Bridget’s voice rose in the agitated chatter their arguments always aroused. Helen charged out of the kitchen. “God, Renie,” Sam sighed as he put his plate in the sink. “You’ve really got to do something about your wife’s disposition.”

Sam went out on the back steps to smoke another cigarette.

Renie closed his eyes. The Golden Toastee salesman could never be the son of Renie LaChance and nameless, faceless Beatrice who drank too much and welcomed strangers to her bed. No, that son surely hid his sausage fingers in his pockets when he met refined, delicate people. But what if the son had sprung from a fine, delicate gene? It was possible: genes, eggs, sperm, something in that dark thrust, that zigzagging randomness, endowing him with such a child. He wondered if the son was married, had children of his own, lived not far from here. He smiled, imagining himself walking into that neat little house and filling it with every manner of appliance, all new, all free, with lifetime guarantees.