She Loved Me Once, and Other Stories [1 ed.] 9781612771496, 9780873385763

Citation preview

She LovedMe Once and Other Stories

ALSO BY LE STER GORAN

FICTION

The Paratrooper ofMechanicAvenue Maria Light The Candy Butcher's Farewell The Stranger in the Snow The Demon in the Sun Parlor The KeeperofSecrets Mrs. Beautiful Tales from the Irish Club

AUTOBIOGR APHY

The BrightStreets ofSurfiide: The Memoir ofa Friendship with Isaac Basbeuis Singer

She ,(gved cMe Once AND OTHER STORIES

by Lester Goran

THE KENT STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS KENT, OHIO, & LONDON, ENGLAND

© 1997 by Lester Goran ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 97-10220 ISBN 0-87338-576-4 Manufactured in the United States ofAmerica

04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97

543 2

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Goran, Lester. She loved me once and other stories / by Lester Goran. p.

cm.

ISBN 0-87338-576-4 (cloth: alk. paper) 1.

Irish Americans-Pennsylvania-Pittsburgh-Societies and clubsFiction.

2. Pittsburgh (Pa.)-Sociallife and customs-Fiction.

3. Jewish men-Pennsylvania-Pittsburgh-Fiction. PS3557·063S54 813'·54- dc2I

I. Title.

1997 97-10220

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.

ForDeedee

I say, I'm going to write a story about a school mistress, an atheist-she adores Darwin, is convinced of the necessity for fighting the prejudices and superstitions of the people, and herself goes to the bath-house at midnight to scald a black cat to get a wishbone for attracting a man and arousing his love-there is such a bone, you know .... -Anton Chekhov to Maxim Gorky in Gorky, On Literature

~

Contents

Introduction

Xl

PART ONE: LOCAL IRREGULARITIES 1

Evenings with Right Racklin 2

6

Our Billy

19

3

She Loved Me Once

4

Helping Desmond

49

Moonlight Sonata

61

31

Today the War Is Over 7

The Big Snow

85

75

3

Contents PART TWO: COSTLY MISAPPREHENSIONS

The Moment

8

9 10

95

The Secret Smile

1°7

The Redeemer of Soho

II

An Excess of Quality

135

12 An Old Country Wife 13 14

Build Me a Castle

119

155 165

The Story of Cora and Wild Bill After Mary

15

185

195

PART THREE: ORDINARY DUPLICITIES

16

Presidents Come and Go but a County Job Is Forever 17 18

Dancing

233

Outside, on the Roof 19

20

215

Spellbinder

247

265

The Professional Pallbearers Union

. x·

275

Introduction

ONE NIGHT in June 1996, I felt myself a flawed ghost from Thomas Mann's well of the past when I appeared at a meeting of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, Division 9, at Lasek's Bar and Grill in Pittsburgh, there to talk about my recent book Tales from the Irish Club. The solidity of the venerable loft of my memory on Oakland Avenue had given way to a series of temporary homes for Division 9. A few months after I was there, Lasek's itself, a landmark in the city, closed its doors forever. Division 9 was welcomed to St. Michael's Polish Hall across Bates Street and took temporary haven there. Mann speaks in the prologue to his monumental tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers of the reckoning of distances between us and the past. He says that for contemporary people, gazing back to biblical times is like gazing down a well only a fraction of the

• Xl·

Introduction

distance to the bottom. Below Joseph and his brothers and Potiphar and his wife are the awesome chasms of time before one senses the beginning. In the past I write about-a relatively short reckoning of distance-we could not dream of our approaching separation from each other or our houses sitting with boarded-up windows and tin cans, broken bottles, and abandoned automobile tires in the front yards, our streets dissected into new configurations, as if we had lost a war. In the afternoons of our memories, summer is as long as a lifetime. In that well of the past, who swaggered better on Forbes Street and daily did the things, in the shadow of our uncertain futures, than we did? But it was generally, even without history's demands, an unresolved story played out in Oakland: in the land of plenty, why did too many of us wind up gray-haired and counting the minutes to retirement somewhere, unhappy, after all the merriment of each other's company and being annointed champions by our proximity to Forbes Field and a great university our neighbor as well as a famous concert hall? Hadn't heroes on Forbes Street who frequented our bars fought for world championships, knocked baseballs four hundred and fifty feet, crashed into enemies from Green Bay and Detroit, and led mighty symphonic orchestras? That man with the tousled gray hair humming to himself as he waited with an entourage for a cab at Fifth and Thackery on a fine spring night was Arturo Toscanini, but what music was there for the lonely girl carrying a violin case up Chesterfield Road or the rest of us when the street was empty again and only the wind rattled the leaves? At night we sang ourselves in the Irish Club, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, Division 9. If I had said among the Irish as . xu .

Introduction

we drank our long circuitous road through our youth Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights that I was the secretary ofwar, Mahatma Gandhi, or Lawrence of Arabia, I would have been acknowledged and honored. My friends and I treated each other's claims to fame with the reverence due a body ofyoung men with only the most tenuous grasp of where they belonged in society. It was enough to know that God was in His Heaven and generosity lay in all four corners of the loft where Division 9 would reside forever. I was for the first time nightly under the prehistoric overhead fans able to utter the words: I'm going to write novels. While the clock and calendar took their toll, in our narrative we eluded days and decades and remained somewhere forever in boyhood beyond dying cells and responsibility. While the mysteries ofour futures hung about the old streets of Oakland like the combination of fog off the park at our borders and the steel mills from the South Side, we covertly aspired to hold the world at bay with ebullience and laughter. Somewhere between the haunted sidewalks and mighty contests fought in the past without our participation we became even younger than our bright, young years in the tapestry of our adventures, lost in talk as if it would redeem us. We talked ourselves hoarse, we listened ourselves deaf. I learned how to write by listening, by talking marathon for eight hours. I sensed disappointment at Lasek'swhen I confessed that most stories in my collection had been made up, rarely much in them being connected to anything I recognized as having happened back then. But that's what fiction writers do: they imagine stories that may later become more real than what really happened to people of blood and bone. And as for the stories with a kernel of the actual in them: I had brought from the well of the past tales • XU1 •

Introduction

so wild and pure that they may have been inventions. For an audience who loved stories and for me who loved to tell them it was a grand night. In the old days, of course, people went their own ways as they do now, disappeared, died in strange places, were even almost lost to memory, but that was not the truth of it then. The fact was that all history and futures of the men and women in those years born to Dunseith, Terrace, Robinson, Chesterfield Road, and Darraugh Street were known to start here on the old cobblestones and culminate here somehow as if all judgment that was and was to come -lay only in the old houses, the stones, and the memories of the old people on their porches on Robinson. There was the Word too, and it was all-the Trinity, the Eucharist, Communion, and the Mass-eternal, luminous, concrete like an Egyptian pyramid or a mountain beneath the seas never to be altered by time or humanity. I was asked questions. Who was the most colorful person back then? Had I heard of a certain Halloween night in 1943, a woman asked, when her parents had met at the Irish Club, later to marry and raise six children? (No, I hadn't, but at the core of that meeting in costume during the war years when millions wore the official costumes of army, navy, and marines there lay for me some wonderful prospects for a story.) The ghost witness was asked to participate, however peripherally, in the celebration of the truth of who the audience was. I had walked with giants in years when things were sure; yet now we know that the faint sound we heard back then was the sidewalks trembling beneath our feet, the sign in the dying red skies over the Jones and Laughlin Steel Mill in whose shadow Lasek's lay was that our fires were sinking to ash. The recording secretary, Fran Walsh, whom I had probably • XIV·

Introduction

passed on our streets a thousand times but had not known as a boy, held aloft my 1949 membership card to the Irish Club, as curious an artifact as the man from the past standing-well, almost standing-in front of the group. He read the rules on the back of the card to peals oflaughter from the assembly, the women's auxiliary attending too. "Your guest, if any, is your guest, not the Association's, and you alone are responsible for his conduct." I feared for my card; people held it a long time and studied it, reciting the names of the club's bygone officers. I determined to laminate it as soon as possible. The next morning I went down to Oakland Avenue with Leo, a friend since I was fourteen years old, and we stood in front of the building where my Irish Club had been. I pressed against the glass door to look up the steps where I had undertaken so many happy trips upward and perhaps even more exuberant journeys back down. I was asked at the Division 9 meeting at Lasek's whether I had actually seen people pitched down the long flight of stairs to the club, and I said, "Well, very often people had ice on their rubber sales from outside in the slush, and it was possible someone skidded on the steps and fell back down to the street." A tiny white-haired man whose name I didn't catch leaned into me after I was done speaking and said, "Boy, I have to read that book ofyours! Skidded on the ice on their shoes and pitched down, did they? Don't leave till I buy you a drink." Perhaps he did: given the merriment and talk, I don't remember. On the lonely street where Leo and I stood looking up at the place where the Irish Club had been, a man standing on the corner separated himself from two other men and approached us. In the more than half a century that had passed since I was . xv·

Introduction

young enough not to need stairs to ascend upper stories, the Irish Club had undoubtedly been replaced by a variety of enterprises after it closed its doors in 1965. The man in a strong accent, perhaps Greek, asked: "You like to rent the place upstairs? I can get you a sweet deal." He gave me a card. "What do you say? This place, another place? We have good deals allover Pittsburgh." But as a writer, I already have a lease on the Irish Club: the bar is under contract in my mind for life with the rest of my boyhood and the people taking permanent residence there. The Irish Club I seek to resurrect from the fogs of history, the men and women, the adventures in daylight, and the moonlit madness are as possessed by me as I am by them. When I went to have my card and four duplicates laminated, I discovered a young man with a sense of history behind the counter. He was reluctant at first, because the job they do in duplication centers at their best is perfect and he would be creating phony IDs, but I explained we'd have to go back in time fifty years for the card to be valid, and that is impossible except by the words we write and our blessed memories, and he relented. I think of that young man at the duplicating machine as an agent of history, because memories are after all, no matter how real to us, facsimiles, and so is fiction a fabrication, representations of life, including these stories pretty and green and gray and black, made corporeal for anyone who cares to walk our streets and climb our slippery stairs. Only through imagination now can we look once more with Mann's observer over the rim of the well of the past and discern there the people so distant and still like us, until, bewildered and giddy, we can see no farther and there is only the dark and light at the beginning.

• XVI·

She LovedMe Once and Other Stories

PART ONE

.(peal Irregularities

ONE

Evenings with Right 'R.gcklin

who had quit practicing law full time because he tended to take injustice personally, had been seduced into becoming a watchdog and treasurer for three dissolute women and a shiftless young man, the Carney family: two daughters, a mother and son. It was the call of doing a good deed that carried him into the responsibility for the scheming pack. The kind heart business, he thought, can ruin your life quick as lust or gluttony. He had known the Carney husband and father in the old days, a man deserving better than to have the bunch carrying his name after he died disgracing his decency. In June 1978, he volunteers to elevate the sorry troop of Carneys and take them to a good dinner on him with a certain Aunt Brigid Grey visiting them from Detroit. It is the anniversary of the death of his own father, departed too young, and Daly is DALY RACKLIN,

LocalIrregularities

thinking long thoughts on life and death, good and evil, a very bad sign for him. The death of a good man has gone unnoticed by all except his eldest son. Neither his sister nor two brothers have called, and he has not called them. It is to him a night of evading the sorrows of a kind father gone and no shadow of his worth left on streets desperate with chicanery and malice. His father, Boyce, on his first outing as an attorney after Duquesne, had gone to volunteer in West Virginia for a small, bitter coal strike that poisoned the atmosphere in the hollow where the strikers and operators fought to a standstill. But at the time there were shots exchanged, the miners armed, the company hiring strike police, and Boyce Racklin had gone to file briefs and petitions in support of their futile strike. He stayed to carry blankets and food he collected in cans in Pittsburgh, shoes, old clothing, milk for babies, and worked himself into despair and exhaustion, there being no end to what the miners and their families needed. "It was an empty sack with a hole in the bottom," he said. "You couldn't pour enough in, it came out the other side. But more and more, it was more of everything they needed and all of it was the things people in caves had in some fashion." He was arrested in a small town, Beckley or Chambers, Daly didn't remember, on a felony charge for leaning on a pole or throwing a candy wrapper into a public garbage can that was brought into evidence, it and the wrapper to demonstrate contempt for the law by a big city attorney with no respect for small-town morals. "It was scary," Boyce said. "Those local judges down there were throwing out hard labor sentences for wrongful breathing in those years." When the courtroom where Boyce was defending himselfhad been called to order, the judge said, "Boyce Racklin."

Evenings with Right Rack/in

Three miners stood up and two of their wives with them. The judge said, "Just a minute, this is Boyce Racklin I'm calling to trial: public intoxication, littering, vagrancy, incitement to riot, and resisting arrest without violence." "It's me, I'm Boyce Racklin," one of the miners said. "Don't be ridiculous, I know you," the judge said. "Your name is Amos Starberry. I know you." "I'm changing my name this minute to Boyce Racklin. Legally this afternoon." The other miners nodded. The judge, in something of a fury, banged his gavel and shouted the words that rang down like legend: "I want the Right Racklin. Give me the Right Racklin!" The case evaporated of its own accord, Boyce Racklin convicted but given probation as long as he desisted breathing in West Virginia; and, as the strike was over, the poverty continuing unabated, the wretched no happier, no sadder either, Racklin, the first Right Racklin, took his solo bus ride back to Pittsburgh, an apparent loser in his first case. But the trial and the judge's demand preceded him. Wherever he went in Pittsburgh, particularly in the bars in Oakland, there would come a low chant, so soft as almost not to be heard distinctly, as men and women gently tapped their glasseson the bar or on table tops when he entered a room. "Right Racklin, Right Racklin, I want the Right Racklin." After awhile, the soft chant stopped on his every appearance, but the name and its distinguished pedigree clung to Boyce and trailed him where he stood and sat and was transferred like a royal title to his son Daly, a burden, an obligation, a warning, and a fate. In that grand moment of love and testimony in West

LocalIrregularities

Virginia there fell a spiritual legacy on the Racklins: the name followed all the days of his short life the father in all his decency, a generosity as wide as it was long, an inheritance to his son. Daly was called Right Racklin even as a boy. His father, famous for representing the cast low and anonymous, had died seemingly without funds to be buried, leaving money to lepers and shelters for people who had no consistent champion except the first Right Racklin. He had gone to court for old men who had no teeth and rescued babies from foster homes without indoor plumbing. A union attorney for the United Mine Workers when he managed to hold a steady account, he had carried a picket sign in front of the Federal Building in downtown Pittsburgh until he was reminded he was an officer of the court. It is a heavy burden Daly bears, to be the son of a good father when there is no relief today anywhere from the angers that boiled on all sides. Having put aside a little by designing contracts for Pittsburgh Plate Glass, retiring early, he took only clients now who had no one else. "Pay me with a chicken," was his favorite joke, knowing that between ingratitude and penury a literal chicken mostly would be more than he could expect in payment. Still, there was always the wayward son of an old boy whose widow called Daly at midnight, and, not able to refuse the tears in her voice, he discovered in the next dawn he had found another soul for whom he was the first, last, and only defender at Juvenile Court. Daly knows the Carney women and the young man by intention are dishonest, crooked, narrow, and deceiving, prone to lie even when there is little advantage in it. He has never met Aunt Brigid from Detroit so he cannot condemn her from personal acquaintance, but he knows his odds. Aunt Brigid is ten to one to be the worst woman in her congregation where she worships ·6·

Evenings with Right Racklin

in Detroit, a trial to her parish priest and neighbors. But Mark Carney had been an easy touch in his time, a companion from St. Agnes days in Oakland, long hours of dreams and talk with Daly; and Daly, starting with an occasional visit to their apartment, like a man wallowing in quicksand, has gone from looking in on the family, checking locks on their windows or studying pipes for a gas leak, to contributing monthly to their rent and food bills. It was, he realized, a strange twist to his life: Daly Racklin, eluding for sixty years the burdens of domesticity, now finds himself the chief support of two young women, near prostitutes in looseness of comings and goings, and a mother alternately screaming or silent as a bedpost and morose. And more of poor Carney's legacy, the boy was a wrap-up of the mother and daughters, loud or mum, and, as people used to say of a certain type, a born thief. But these days, Daly asks himself, what do words like that mean when your president of the country lies when he affirms he's not a crook? Daly lectures the girls, drives the mother to a mental health clinic once a week, taking calls from her the other six days, and periodically bails out the boy from reform school. Mark Carney would have committed suicide rather than let pneumonia blessedly take him had he foreseen the fate of his immediate descendants. Mark, once aspiring to be a lawyer like Daly and his father, had become an honest pharmacist, never owning his own shop, traveling vast distances to work in hospitals the other side of the county. He drank next to nothing with alcohol in it and held as his highest promise of a life well lived the prospect ofgetting his son one day into law school or at least into the Pittsburgh Fire Department and the daughters safely and securely married. As he brushed his white hair, each into place, Daly thought he would rather clean out a hundred stables than try to meet even

LocalIrregularities

Mark Carney's modest dreams with that impossible clan. Still, Mark was an old pal, a neighbor, a man who knew when the common cold needed aspirin and what looked like pneumonia and saved hundreds of people big medical bills over the years. There is a bar near the Carney family apartment where Daly occasionally stops. Tonight he must enjoy in solitude two glasses of white wine, a matter of nerves and remembering the first Right Racklin too strongly. The bartender there is a man named O'Malley, and O'Malley speaks often of Daly's father, seeming to have noted every good deed forgotten by the world. O'Malley had worked in any number ofsaloons in Oakland in his time and from one or another he came to know everyone. Daly would like to hear about his father tonight; he wants to feel like a good man's son-that things that his father represented, no need for fine words on the subject, were not buried with old-fashioned popes or the Latin Mass. Plenty of room for decency in the world, he thinks, no matter the language or the president in Washington. But O'Malley is busy with a baseball crowd in the bar and can only wave to Daly as he mixes drinks. Daly salutes him and goes to the door, not ordering anything in the jammed bar. He is pensive on the sidewalk. He climbs the steps to Mark Carney's old apartment and tries to assemble the women and the boy. He has in mind a festive dinner. Feeling forlorn, he will raise the spirits of his woeful charges. Who else would serve them anything but dog food? And that is where kindness must begin: where it is least expected and unwarranted. No one holds back charity and love from the beautiful and graceful and bright. Only the lost Carney types are told don't-Iet-the-door-hit-youin-the-ass-on-the-way-out. Truculent and sullen, doomed to be themselves cast forever in stone, none of the Carneys are eager when Daly arrives; none of them are prepared to leave or seem ·8·

Evenings with Right Rack/in

as if they ever will depart with Daly eventually. They stare at him like people suspicious of his motivations: he has been their caretaker for two years, and they wait to hear the catch. It's this, he wants to say: You ain't dogs, you know, come around without the bark, the growl, and the bite. Aunt Brigid is a short, old, angry woman with a cane, a recent widow, who says, "Where're we going?" as if Daly has put a gun to her head with a peculiar demand. Daly says, "I'd like to show you all a good time tonight, Poli's in Squirrel Hill, a little treat for your visit, Aunt Brigid." Heather Rose, the younger daughter, says, "Uncle Daly, Aunt Brigid says she has allergies." Heather Rose is sixteen, and Daly supposes she is already notorious on famous corners on Forbes Street where certain records on sexual misconduct are collected. Daly says, "We'll watch out for this good woman's allergies," and he calls for a cab. The sisters claim they clean Daly's apartment in small payment for his kindness to the family but steal his shirts and socks for their boyfriends and younger brother, Kevin. Daly cannot swear to it, but he thinks on an occasional rainy afternoon they bring men there. He has nothing of great value in the place; he considers his lost shirts, cufHinks, and socks part of his contribution to the memory of the late pharmacist. At Poli's there is a crowd and people almost on the sidewalk and the restaurant takes no reservations: a very bad beginning. "All my kids had allergies," Aunt Brigid shouts over the conversation of the people waiting for tables in the foyer. Daly sits alone at the bar. He abandons the idea of two glasses of white wine. He drinks three vodka and tonics. Old times and dead, invisible friends hover close to him tonight on a bad anniversary. He courts his memories, the dead people; he thinks

LocalIrregularities

deeply about them, pressing to remember specific smiles and faces touched by sunlight. The sisters and the boy sprawl about on upholstered benches, and Aunt Brigid storms around the restaurant thumping her cane, bending to look at what people are eating. Kevin has said to Daly he must talk to Daly about an emergency, whispered into Daly's ear in the taxicab, and in that direction, Daly knows, lies trouble later. But it is the mother Daly periodically leaves the bar to observe. If she becomes enraged-at a slight or a look from stranger or friendshe'll throw things. "My husband died a year ago," Aunt Brigid says as they are finally seated, and Daly asks, "Was he sick long?" "Why do you ask?" Aunt Brigid shouts. "Just a question," Daly says, with a smile broad on his pink face. He often wonders if it is that frank, open look about him, often feigned in terror, that has saved him over the years from being punched. Tonight, he is not sure his record will survive. "See here, Racklin," Aunt Brigid says, "I'm not up to putting together medical histories for strangers." She has several prominent warts on her chin, and Daly does not look there. "Uncle Daly's not a stranger," Eileen, the elder daughter, says. "He's a stranger to me," Aunt Brigid says. "Let him go somewhere else he wants to be a detective." "Let's order," Daly says, wallowing in false joviality, thinking it is a penance he pays tonight for a lifetime crime of domestic noncommittal. "It's too late at night to be ordering food," Aunt Brigid says. "Even if they served us this minute, I'm going to have to sleep sitting up. I have an esophageal hernia. Food can come up on me and choke me to death. I'm sure Mr. Racklin wouldn't ·10·

Evenings with Right Racklin

care, but I'm not out to injure myself. I'm not eating tonight, thank you." But she reads the menu aloud, pointing out what is acceptable to her there, the items on the list dangerous to her allergies or esophagus. Daly orders a coffee milkshake, not hungry, while everyone else except Aunt Brigid orders large dishes of fried shrimp and crab cakes and potatoes. Watching each order, Aunt Brigid silently shakes her head at each request. When Daly's milkshake comes, Aunt Brigid takes a sudden gulp from his glass, pauses, and says, "I'll have the same. If we get out of this trap soon enough, I'll take a pill for the damage. I'm allergic to milk, you know." Snatching food from others' plates, she eats french-fried potatoes, a hush puppy, four shrimp, and halfa crab cake. Her mouth filled with food, she says, "I envy you all eating here like farm animals. I eat like you do and it's curtains. But enjoy yourselves; life is short enough, ask me. Eating like this, devil take the hindmost, was what led to my hemorrhoids in the first place, and then the operation, and then the prayers of the whole congregation that brought me back from death's doorstep." Daly says, "The human spirit is dauntless. Aunt Brigid, as you can attest, it can overcome the worst ofphysical adversity. We all respect you, dear woman, for your suffering." "I went to doctors," Aunt Brigid says, "who told me the excruciating pain in my spine was imaginary. I spent two thousand dollars for X-rays." "Maybe," Kevin says, "losing your husband caused it. A psychologist told me I had headaches because our father died young." "This talk is giving me a headache," his mother says, alarming Daly. Mrs. Carney has been unnaturally quiet; she is either . II .

LocalIrregularities

not listening or waiting for the right moment to shout that the waiter is giving other people at the table larger portions. "I'll tell you something, Kevin," Aunt Brigid says, "my pain wasn't imaginary. It was real." Daly remembers now the tie Kevin wears. It once was a favorite of his. He speaks quickly. "Imaginary pains!" he says. "Doctors talk a lot ofmumbo jumbo. You're quite right, Aunt Brigid." Mrs. Carney then threw the flowers on the table at Aunt Brigid, followed by the ice in a glass of Coca-Cola she had been drinking. "I never liked you!" she cries. "Now, you're insulting Mark's memory. Kevin gets headaches because Mark died young and so do I. Mark caused all our problems, and you're adding to them." It is the moment Daly has dreaded and it calls to all the shamelessness and artifice in his years of successful mediation. He leaps to dust and wipe offAunt Brigid, one hand flailing behind him to restrain Mrs. Carney in her indignation. He whispers to Aunt Brigid: "Griefhas unhinged the good soul; stronger people than this poor woman have cracked under less. Forgive her. Call up mercy, Aunt Brigid. Mercy here, mercy for a griefstricken widow." And he turns to Mrs. Carney as the others help Aunt Brigid, soothing her clothing, wiping at the ice. "Alice," he murmurs to Mrs. Carney, "the old woman is off her senses, she hardly knows what an insult she's presented to poor Mark. But think of him now-he'd find forgiveness here. Forgiveness is the word. Don't let the old rat bring you down to her level. Forgiveness, think of Mark, your beloved husband and my best friend." He smiles, he nods. He waves away waiters, no trouble, no trouble, an accident with the flowers and the ice. The moment passes, Daly offers apologies. "She's sorry for the misunderstand-

·12 .

Evenings with Right Rack/in

ing," Daly says to Aunt Brigid. Then to Mrs. Carney: "A regrettable turn of phrase with no malice behind it." Eventually everyone finds someone to whom they can apologize. Daly loudly orders dessert. The mood becomes expansive. Everyone demands exotic cakes and pastries. Mrs. Carney says once, "No one can tell me about my headaches," and Aunt Brigid says, "Eating chocolate pie at this hour of the night is like taking poison." Daly says to the restaurant at large, "You're right, that's right," agreeing, accepting everyone at the table for what the evening, a catastrophe, has really meant. His record is intact. He has lived sixty-two years and never been punched by man or woman in the pursuit of peace. But while Daly tries to bundle the troop of hapless remnants of a family in mock civility into a taxicab, pretending another errand, young Kevin reminds him he has business with him. "I had a lovely evening," Aunt Brigid says, shaking Daly's hand before the cab departs. "It was a pleasure to meet you. When you're in Detroit you know where to come for an evening of family." "I do, I do, yes, I do." Daly waves at the cab as it pulls into traffic on Murray Avenue. He turns to the boy. "I have some things to see to," he says. "Is this something we can discuss briefly?" "Well, discuss, yes, briefly. Short and sweet: there's a fellow going to kill me if I don't give him four hundred dollars." "Four hundred dollars!You're saying, 'Four hundred dollars'?" "Four hundred dollars." "This is a bank you robbed making a settlement?" "No, nothing illegal. Not like a bank, more personal."

. 13 .

Local Irregularities

Daly restrains himself: there is nothing about this miserable boy that does not shout between-the-cracks, square-peg, life-inthe-ashcan. He will not state the obvious to the boy about himself. A judge at Juvenile Hall has called Daly aside after he has come in to represent the boy, then thirteen, for burning down a tree on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh. "Mr. Racklin," the judge says in the privacy of his chambers, "this is a losing cause. He's going to be serving time and soon: the boy's got to be removed from that unwholesome environment. You're only postponing the inevitable." And Daly nodded. "No doubt there's great truth in what you say, Judge. Great wisdom." Then, foxy, appraising, the judge asks: "What's your interest in these people?" Preparing to tell the truth-it was an old pal, one of the best, the man's memory deserves better-he stumbles into silence. It is not the whole truth; and he will not lie today. "Mr. Racklin?" No way to say it. But words come anyhow. "There's no one else, Your Honor, and I guess I've been elected." "Uncle Daly," the boy says, "I'm going to get killed for that four hundred dollars." "Tell me," Daly says. The sky overhead, dark and filled with stars, is shining with the face of the first Right Racklin. He hears his father in the grind of a distant streetcar. If he puts his hands out to his sides, Daly thinks, somewhere close he will touch him. He breathes deeply; his father is on the air tonight, making himself known to his son. "I borrowed a ring from a guy, intending to give it back, and someone stole it, and the guy who owned the ring said it was four hundred dollars, give back the ring, or go swimming in the Monongahela River."

Evenings with Right Rack/in

"Do you swim, Kevin?" "I don't, Uncle Daly." "Then you shouldn't steal rings. How much did you get for the ring?" The boy is fifteen now. He searches desperately for an adequate evasion. "How much?" the boy asks. "For the ring?" "Never mind." "It was stolen from me." "I said, never mind." "What am I going to do?" "Call the guy and tell him you'll get him a hundred and fifty." "No, he ain't going to go for it. I can't do that." "He'll go for it." "No, he ain't. What do I say if he says, 'You're chop suey, Kevin.'" "Tell him you'll get him another fifty." Daly takes a hundred and fifty dollars from his pocket and hands it to Kevin. "Now, son," he says, "your first thought is you are going to take this money and go to Cleveland. Or somewhere. Don't. If there's really a guy going to kill you, think to yourself, your life is worth a hundred and fifty at least. If there's no guy, no ring, nothing, take the money as a gift. But don't leave town. Your mother and your sisters need you. They need all the help they can get. Don't desert them, it's not what your father would want." The boy puts the money into his pocket quickly. "The bastard will have to take the hundred and fifty," he says. "There ain't no more coming to that bastard." Daly is relieved. The boy's pleasure with the money is apparent. He has outwitted someone in a life of being a goat, and the

LocalIrregularities

sum is small for the elevation Daly has witnessed. Can a million dollars buy such joy given to the wrong person at the wrong time? Daly feels himself fortunate. At small price he has liberated the neat, constrained part of himself that yearns to see the helpless know small pleasures, what the rest of the world comes to by birth. But he himself must be alone now. He shakes hands with the boy and begins the long walk back down Forbes to Oakland. He rejoices in the memory of his father, tries to think of details, his hands and the lines on his face. In the soft June night, strolling down Forbes, he feels his father at his side, hears his footsteps, knows that the first Right Racklin accepts the tribute in being remembered kindly. He drinks alone at the bar at the Metropole. O'Malley is busy cleaning up. The white wine, delayed, is good and cold. He tries to hold on to his father. Memory, he thinks, is a broom with straws missing. "Sit awhile, Right," O'Malley says. "I've still a few glasses to wash, and I'll have one with you." As a sophomore at Pitt, O'Malley, a halfback, had once scored two touchdowns against Maryland. He broke his knee the next week, and it was the end of his career. "I'm thinking tonight of my father," Daly said. "It's fifteen years since he died, tonight." O'Malley's nose is broken in two places. His brow is heavy with thick eyebrows. "When I look at you now," O'Malley says, "sitting there, I see your father. You could be him. Same color in his face, hair white as yours. You're the picture of him, big shoulders, just a prince." He and the bartender have talked about his father for years. The bartender has made him a saint, a man who walked on water, a friend to the poor, lighting up rooms when he appeared at ·16 .

Evenings with Right Rack/in

the door. But the man O'Malley describes tonight is not his father. It is another saint of the streets around Forbes Field, the Carnegie Museum, and the Oakland of thousands of Irishmen peering around corners to discover if what's true lay there. Daly's father, the real man, is nothing like his son. The first Right Racklin was short, no pink face there, no white hair, mostly bald with a few dark strands. All these years and O'Malley had another person in mind. Annoyed, Daly starts to explain, to admonish O'Malley on the treacherousness of his memory. But he stops. He gazes around the empty bar and feels a sudden comfort. The feeling of his father, close on the streets, has not left him. He's in the long, vertical light that falls from the neon signs in the windows down the whiskey and wine bottles behind the bar. O'Malley's broken nose holds him, and the familiar man wiping at glassesspeaks to Daly ofan old cause, revived with each twist ofthe bartender's wrist as he swipes clean another shot glass. Daly holds close the warmth ofa well-loved face, and he wants to buy O'Malley drinks until dawn lights up the streets outside and car bumpers reflect the sun in its new day. Why, the two of us are celebrating goodness that doesn't need a man attached, goodness so pure in the air that it inhabits one man or another, no matter. Myoid man was fine as they come, but there was another somewhere just as good, and who would want there to be less good when there's so little of it on the sidewalk. Daly waves his hand for another wine. He sits, enthralled, a willing captive of the present comfort in the Metropole, Outside the night wears shoes of iron, but in here there are good men to spare.

TWO

Our

~illy

tragedy at Dunston Alley occurred, a Harpe accused a Sykes publicly of murder, and one of Marta Sykes'sgirls broke her two-year engagement to a Harpe who worked in a law office downtown. Immediately the Harpes and Sykeseswere split asunder, as if an invisible zigzagging barricade had been set up between the families and all their friends, running into restaurants where people ate chili at dawn, the Irish Club itself, down Forbes, and into the barrooms on the side streets off Fifth. I myself was not conscripted to soldier in the warfare, being neither a cousin, an uncle, a Harpe, a Sykes, nor even Irish, Catholic, or one who carried about an expression which might be construed as favorable to the Harpe or Sykes side. I heard the sad tale recited by moonlight the day it happened when I left the Irish Club drunk and staggering at four in the morning with Cleet, who was a far removed cousin of the dead

WHEN THE

LocalIrregularities

boy, Billy Harpe, and later daily by snowfall when I sat about with other louts at the overheated Irish Club and watched on a television set the Pittsburgh Steelers play in their first losing years. The tragedy was simple enough: Terrence Sykes, a security guard with the Three Rivers Alarm Service, had shot to death Billy Harpe, who was driving the getaway car for two warehouse bandits. The dead boy was seventeen, a wild youth who had given his family trouble all his short life but had never been known as a thief. The Harpe family proudly said that the dead boy hadn't a weapon on him when he was cut down by the guard Sykes. They said he had been an altar boy, and his sister, a nun who had written a thesis on St. Teresa ofAvila, said once she saw in his face a glow that indicated to her a profoundly religious vocation someday. I hadn't noticed the calling, but I had seen the high flushed cheeks and quick mischievous eyes, a roaring boy who entertained on street corners and leaped about and shouted and called after passing girls. "Does your mother know you're carrying marijuana, Susie?" and "Ho, there, Olive, I've got something for you." Suitcoat collar turned up against no wind abroad, he was an anonymous boy among other corner shouters, no worse, no better. But who knows the final cut of the driver of a getaway car? Hadn't Pal Mahoney reminded me that St. Teresa had observed, "God deliver us from sullen saints"? At issue in Billy's death was whether in driving the car toward the security guard, Terrence Sykes, Billy had come directly at Sykes in the narrow alley behind the warehouse or had swerved to miss him or had merely sought to elude him. In testimony before a magistrate Sykes said he saw quite clearly the driver's intent face behind the wheel as the stolen Buick came at him. ·20·

Our Billy

The distance was sixty feet, and he fired three times and ran. The car spun out of control and was slowed by the alley's walls and then came to a stop. Terry Sykes was a liar, the boy's mother, Kate Alice, said at the hearing. He had fired directly at her son not in panic but cold-bloodedly, not missing once but hitting young Billy in the forehead between the eyes and two other shots not far from it. "Without supernatural control and malice, there's not a Sykes on our hill who could hit the side of a barn unless they had two wooden planks to steady their aim," she said. "On duty and off, that one particularly had the family curse, drinking. He was born to a drunken woman who was inebriated to delirium the night he was conceived and stone drunk the hour he was born. I was present in their home on both occasions. The father was in the doorway somewhere, lost to alcohol as he had been the past thirty years. Do not insult my intelligence by telling me about Terry Sykes's aim." The magistrate found for Terrence, and the lines were drawn. It was revealed by Billy's father that he had been approached by a certain local politician to accept five thousand dollars to coerce his wife not to testify against Terrence. "'You'll lose,' he told me," the elder Harpe said. "Security guards and police don't assassinate their own, only boys like our Billy out on a harmless joy ride for all anyone knew." The animosity was stirred weekly by the Irish Club overhead fans beating out their aimless rhythms on Saturday nights. The Sykeses sat in a far corner. The Harpes came late and left early, sitting by the jukebox, each family playing songs on the Wurlitzer that became as private and ferocious as marching anthems of a conquering army as the sounds drifted out over people's feet shuffiing in dance on the spare wooden floor. The Harpes played ·21 .

LocalIrregularities

Eddy Howard crooning "To Each His Own" and glared about in triumph as the melody climbed the green walls and danced on the beer pitchers and forced the Sykeses to sit rigidly at their tables until a song of theirs could be martialed. The Sykeses played "Oh, My Papa" in retaliation, and the Harpes stood gravely in a group and at the first notes walked to the door and majestically descended the stairs to Oakland Avenue. It was no particular holiday the night the ghost ofyoung Billy Harpe was seen, so no one could say, "I remember it was St. Patrick's Day in 1952 when the ghost of young Harpe sat there at the end of the bar when I first came in to get a start before the crowd rampaged in like they always do." Nor Christmas nor New Year's Eve, when the oldest friends sometimes fought and ancient enemies embraced at the communion they felt in enemies they shared who were even worse than present company. I myself never saw the spirit, but when the club was empty that night in the fall, or almost so, it was reported by Paul Kerry, a bartender-who was a cousin and knew young Harpe wellthat in the corner of his eye he caught the wraith standing at the bar, walking across the large dark room and playing "To Each His Own" on the jukebox. When Paul blinked and looked steadily into the gloom he saw nothing except the bare tables waiting for the night's trade, but the jukebox glowed and Eddy Howard mysteriously sang with no human agency to insert a coin and press the button and cause the record to drop and play in the silent club. Paul, who had a nervous disability pension from the battles in France and Germany, said nothing at first. But when others reported seeing young Harpe on the steps to the club, sitting in meditative silence in a corner near the bandstand where a trioIn accordion, a bass, and a drum-sometimes played on holi·22·

Our Billy

days, there was little doubt that the slain boy had come back to where all his people, friend and foe alike, were. Always, it was said, he vanished quickly when anyone stared too long as if he came for a purpose of his own and not to involve any of the living, but to what purpose? I asked myself. Did someone cross that great chasm between the quick and the dead to playa tune on a jukebox, drink an Iron City beer, sit idly in a corner, and watch the first few flakes of the coming winter tumbling past the second-floor windows to die before they struck earth as the boy himself had perished before he lived? The Sykes family resolutely attended the Irish Club every Saturday night, and most of them came Sunday, talking and dancing among themselves, by their easy manner laughing away the Harpe ghost tale, Terrence Sykes, the guard who had a sweet tenor, one night near dawn climbing to the bandstand and singing "Danny Boy" in several verses until my eyes were moist with tears at the longing and promise. Pal Mahoney used to sit for part of the evening at a table with Cleet and me and other people who would come and go and argue metaphysical matters. He had long since convinced me of the rightness of his arguments or rather that he would win them against my feeble efforts. A tall, burly young man with a sweeping forehead, he had been trained by Jesuits and attended Duquesne at night. "The question is," he said, "what's the ghost's purpose? I don't think we have the equipment to study young Harpe. I never understood him on this planet and I don't see him any less complicated wherever he's coming from. We can only deal with what we have: it would be as impossible to discover the natural basis of what makes a ghost as it would be to investigate the core of Mars. But what he's doing around here is fit subject. This is the earth."

Local Irregularities

"Maybe haunting Terrence Sykes," Cleet said. Cleet still harbored the desire to be a dentist after his football laurels at Pitt: rake in hordes of patients by a well-known name in a local career, the Steelers if all went well in college ball. He had been drinking beer at the Irish Club since he was sixteen. He did not believe in ghosts, and he had sponsored me for a social membership there. His parents and great-grandparents were Irish, and he told me that with one drop of Irish blood in me I could probably turn out to be the writer I yearned to be. But, as it was, he wasn't at all sure about my chances. "No," Pal said, "this apparition is all too public. Why not sit on Terry's bedpost if you're a haunting spirit and raise a row there in the middle of the night?" "But Terry's in a different bar every weekday night," a boy named Connelly said. "And he's here every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night. How's young Harpe going to catch him in private?" "There's not a man or woman alive that isn't susceptible to a ghost visit at some peculiar hour," Pal said. "No, the place a ghost comes to or the time is as revealing as who the ghost is. My grandmother reported that a ghostly hand was laid on her shoulder the very moment her mother died. That's a sensible ghost: giving a warning, or assurance. You know, a visitation at death's door." He took a long swallow of beer from a special glass he brought to the club on Saturday nights and said, "Of course, I consider it all idle superstition, figments, bogeys from people who believe in flying saucers. But it's interesting to speculate on the rules governing even impossible phenomena." He moved to another table like a pool champ trying out visiting contenders: he conjectured on various mystical subjects all night and sometimes left with Cleet and me at dawn to eat chili ·24·

Our Billy

before the three of us started the long climb home up Robinson Street. Accompanied in the slow ascent to the housing projects where Cleet and I lived by Pal, Duns Scotus, and St. Thomas, our Sunday mornings were filled to bursting with importance. The ghost, if such it was, continued to appear in unlikely places around the Irish Club as if where the two divided families were directly arraigned against each other was where he wanted to visit restlessly from his eternal repose. Veterans of the Korean War were already home from the conflict, resuming their places at their old tables and chairs in the Irish Club, the ghost not elevating their gloom or raising wonder after their recent experiences. "I shot a man without arms in battle," Ronnie Mason said morosely one night, staring down into his beer. A boy known as the Big Duck, to differentiate him from another boy known simply as Duck, said, "Without arms? How'd he get out there on the battlefield? Did he have legs? What harm was he going to do to you?" "No arms!" Ronnie said with exasperation. "No arms." "I'm not deat" the Big Duck, who was very short, said. "Don't shout at me." He flapped his arms. "He had no arms, I hear you." "No weapons," Pal Mahoney said. "He carried no weapons." "Don't explain," Ronnie said. "Is the ghost here tonight?" "People never say what they mean," the Big Duck said, "and I'm not responsible for misunderstanding." The ghost tales went on for three months until the fall had run its course in the gray skies and chimneys across Oakland Avenue and winter darkness had set in. When the light vanished before dinner on the streets outside it became obvious to people-or so they said-that young Harpe had chosen one of the Harpes to visit most regularly. This was Bernard Harpe, a young man of

LocalIrregularities

about twenty-seven or so, forever held by mental illness in the grip of being a slow six or seven year old. Hair spiky, wrapped in a gray mackinaw, and with a scarf around him that someone always rushed to tie in a draft or loosen in the heat, he sat silently as a plaster Buddha listening to the music or watching the dancers. Except as Pal Mahoney and others noted, when the spirit of the young Harpe was about, Bernard became animated and turned to stare at the wraith, once standing and walking about the huge room as if following someone who beckoned to him. No one saw the ghost that the afflicted boy followed. Bernard was something of a difficulty for patrons at the Irish Club to begin with, but after awhile it did not seem an ordinary night unless one said hello to him, nodded, said, "How's it going, Bernard?" and had the Harpe accompanying him smile beatifically over the boy's head. When he wandered about the club, occasionally dipping into sorneone's beer, sitting in a chair away from the family, he never tried to leave the Irish Club. He would go as far as the door, where old Doyle, the doorman, would mutter, "Damn nuisance," but aloud say, "Well, Bernard, taking a walk, I see." Once turning to me, Doyle, who did not approve of social memberships at the club, said, "Cursed babysitters for the damned is what we are around here, Israelites, fools, and communists off the street." Another time, when he and I were alone, he asked me, "Do you ever think you'll never see your family in Heaven? I have no hope for any of you." When I told Cleet, who had had a scout from the Chicago Bears call him that week, what Doyle had said, Cleet said, "I'm going to miss you up there myself" and almost fell from the chair in general merriment. Bernard would stand wistfully looking at the long stairs down to the street until someone came to retrieve him and lead him

Our Billy

back to the lights and music, until the night the wraith of Billy Harpe pushed him down the stairs. Rory Kirk, a cousin of the security guard Sykes, had started down the stairs, and he said that Bernard was there above him one moment on the landing and the next was flying through space, as if pushed by an invisible hand, twisting, turning, and bouncing to the foot of the stairs at the street entrance. Terrence Sykes, at that moment, came to the top of the stairs, buttoning his overcoat against the bitter cold outside, when he heard Kirk shout, "The boy flew, Bernard is dead." Terrence leaped in two bounds down the stairs and saw that Bernard wasn't dead. Picking up the heavy boy, he carried him as if he were rare crystal through a snow hard as whips which had been falling all day. The streets were ice: it could have been the cruel craters of the moon out of doors. Terrence walked stoically the long miles to the emergency room of the Montefiore Hospital on Fifth. He lowered over the boy, wrapping him in his overcoat as he walked, bathed in sweat, which froze on his face and in his hair. When the Sykeses realized that Bernard had fallen down the stairs they rushed out into Oakland Avenue and trailed behind Terrence and the boy. Some hours later, when it was determined that Bernard would live, Matt Farley, a nephew of Kate Alice Harpe, the boy's mother, came to her and said he had spoken to Rory Kirk and it was time to call off the hatred. Billy Harpe's mother said she had never held anything against any of the Sykeses. They were not responsible for what happened in Dunston Alley, but she could not forgive Terrence Sykes. The two families resumed talking to each other, even dancing together on St. Patrick's Day in 1953, and about two weeks after that, Phil, Billy Harpe's father, sat at our table for a few minutes

LocalIrregularities

before going to work at the post office at midnight, and he said: "He came to our house, Terrence, and I let him in and he threw himself on his knees at my wife's feet and she's not a hard woman-she cried for his mother and father. And he said to her, 'Your boy came back from the beyond to give me a chance to prove to you that I haven't slept a night since it happened. I go over it, mother, and I see it like a moving picture in my head. Maybe there was no murderous intention and the car was out of control and it was my life and I did not see right but I swear to you if I was there in that alley now I'd turn the gun to my own head rather than kill that boy. He knows it and he came back to let me prove there's no hate in my heart.' 'What's right is right,' my wife said, 'but there's this minute no forgiveness in me for you.' But she ruffled his hair as he knelt by her chair and her meaning was clear." Pal Mahoney said later that Terrence's supposition was as good a conjecture as any, but how was one to explain the devil who must have lurked in Dunston Alley that night and caused it all. "And who's to say," he added, daring me with his black stare to answer, "whether it wasn't the devil in Billy Harpe's form who didn't come around here and then push the poor boy down the steps, hoping to pour more fuel on the fire? Terrence might have been accused by evil minds of shoving the boy, you know." "Well," Cleet said, "Mrs. Harpe will forgive Terrence and something good came out of it even if it was the devil behind it in the first place." "I'll tell you," Cleet, honoring his relationship to the dead boy, said. "Our Billy was a restless boy or he wouldn't have been in the place where he was killed, and he's restless even afterward, coming around here and hanging on and befuddling us. No more to it than Billy's nature." ·28 .

Our Billy

"What do you think?" Pal asked me, poised to prove me wrong. Before I could answer, an old man named Canty who had been following the discussion from an adjoining table stood up and said, "I'll tell you one thing to think about when you start to poke around with the beyond." He leaned on our table for support, face lined with quick pleasure in his thoughts-Mahoney said later that it was with delight that he could navigate to the stairs at that hour-and he looked from one of us to the other. He had been an elevator operator at the old Gulf Building before his long retirement, once automatic lifts had been installed. He said, "Boys, hear that wind outside and see the snow piling up, it'll be up to your knees before the gang ofyou stagger home. It's either ghosts leaping about and howling on their mysterious business or nothing here at all down below but wind and snow. Now, give me a ghost every time. Does anyone have a match? My pipe keeps going out." There were five of us at the table, and Ronnie Mason said after a long silence, "Maybe the wind's crying for all the people who went to hell last summer."

TH RE E

She .(pvedc.Me Once

HE MARRIED her for eternity, but it was no more than six years in her mind that the bonds needed to stay in place before she declared she was done. She was no prize at first, young and carrying burdens of no great beauty and difficulty of personality, argumentative, not as some would see it a triumph for any man; but as she grew older Ada became, even with the mark on her cheek, running down her neck, something else, softer, kinder, to men and women both. Not that as far as he knew the problem lay there, with a man stealing her. It was him, pure and simple, a hard blow to take. Marrying her had seemed to him somehow a great sacrifice, to be rewarded by her loyalty forever, the mark on her face a blemish that would have made men hesitate, then withdraw. A young woman with no money, at war with everyone, her widowed mother, women, men she said despised her for the mark, . 31

.

LocalIrregularities

no education, out of school at sixteen, meeting Barry Whelan many years later, with still no great prospects in her factory work. And he, in his mind a knight riding up to save her on a white horse or better, marrying her, blemish and all, expecting to be recognized, at least by her, for the charity in his heart for a misfit girl. It was not pretty, the mark, a discoloration of her skin with dark brown at its edges and large and then white the rest of its body, freckled inside the white with deep, brown flecks. People looked at it, then looked away, bothered by it enough that they did not want Ada to catch them at observing it. Barry caught them, though, staring long and brazenly at any of them with bad manners enough to be rude in their inspection. Love growing for her, habit, her ways changing to obvious concern for him, he learned not to think about her blemish. But he did know-he was no fool-she owed him something, and he thought it was a marriage to last forever. While the rest of the worshipers at St. Agnes prayed that our soldiers and sailors would come home from the new war, he bent his own head and tried to put it to God that what was troubling him was intruding between him and his best of intentions toward the servicemen of his country at war with the Germans and Japanese. It was his wife. Not after six years of marriage now in legal terms Mrs. Barry Whelan, having almost the minute the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, two and a half weeks before Christmas, allowed their divorce to become final, but whatever she was, in his heart, she was forever married to him. He could not pray for large things. Just small, maybe beneath God's notice, but all Barry wanted from his prayers was her return. The world situation would take care of itself. Good would triumph. God saw to that. But Ada's return was another case.

She Loved Me Once

He and she, their marriage and love, could slip through the cracks, no one the wiser, she thinking she had made the right move, packing one final suitcase, and he dying daily like an apple inside, brown and soft and seemingly red and bright to the stranger's eye. They had no children-maybe that was it. But that was no crime, and there was always hope. How does a woman walk awayfrom years with a man? Prayers ascending over the roofs and smokestacks, the haze over Pittsburgh, the time passing as each new, unfair loss in the South Pacific made it seem a turnaround must come. The Japanese would be defeated, the bad months of the war would soon be inevitably and quickly forgotten. But if mighty battleships at Pearl Harbor could sink to the bottom of the ocean, turn over on their sides like a man seeking a more comfortable position in sleep, why wouldn't his puny personal prayers evaporate like dew in the morning? Till now, Barry thought, his calls for help to the supernatural might as well have been sunken ships rusting on the floor of cold, salty seas. She had not enough experience with men or the world to fill a teacup. And in his mind she remained the girl he had known at first, not too smart for him ever, understanding him and his moods, the two of them, because of his willingness to accept her as she was, marred forever, a fortress against an outside both of them knew knocked on the door of their marriage. It was them, Ada and him, better, worse, everything, only one to be left alone when death called the other to eternity. This early departure might as well have been the end of life. She had gone but was not dead. Where did that leave him if not in a tomb that resembled living but was not it? "My mother and father weren't the happiest people I could mention," he told her when the subject of marriage came up first between them. "But they stayed together. They stuck."

LocalIrregularities

"Mine neither," she said. "But sticking is what I know too." "Eternal," he said. "For the rest of life on this earth. And then into what God has to offer forever." From the start of married life it was poetry in the air embracing them, a rightness that touched happy mornings and nights of joy. He kissed her cheek, he forgave her everything not perfect in her face or character. "Barry, I could die listening to you and thinking of us forever. It's a way of making our own fate." "And there's surely not much of that given to a person." "Except for us, Mr. and Mrs. Barry Mark Whalen, or Ada and Barry on the Christmas cards." She was friendly enough after the divorce: had him to dinner six weeks apart like clockwork, always with someone else there. Not a threat, no new boyfriend, her uncle Stephen, Mary, an aunt, Michael, a friend of theirs from his job. Barry came. He laughed, made jokes, left, never alone with her. "Listen, Ada," he'd say if he could catch her without someone within earshot, "whatever it is, I'll change it. Cut my hair into squares, get another job. Was that it? Too interested in advertising-keep in mind, though, I never finished college, and the pay's okay. I work with guys with degrees, but if that was it, good-bye, advertising. But you never hinted that was it, you said you were proud of me, more than once, sure, many times more than once. So what was it? You can't tell a person, That's it, I want a divorce, when, for God's sake, the subject we were discussing was socks on the floor and crumbs I was leaving in our bed from my habit of crackers and reading before I went to sleep. I needed that reading at night, Ada, but if that was it, good-bye reading. It was just to put all the things behind me I read all day at Fletcher-Graves. Say good-bye to the reading and the job, whatever you say.

She Loved Me Once

"Just tell me: what was it? Remember, I might have made a few sacrifices for you too." The war turned in the Pacific by the end of 1942, a matter of time now until the Japanese understood they were beaten, in the books, written somewhere as good as fact. But still nothing he wanted happened. Ada did not call one night and say, "Barry, this has been some horrible dream-I'm walking in my sleep and I took you with me-let me back. For Jesus' sake, and all we've been through, let's stop this." He'd be in a cab in five minutes, the two of them together for all time in twenty minutes. But she didn't call. The Japanese retreated island to island, defeated at sea and on land. His prayers went nowhere, lost in the boiling mill clouds over Pittsburgh, red and white with steel being cast on the ground below. He had not given up prayers or attending Mass, but he did not believe in miracles. They had too much of the twisted tongue about them. Why this and not that? Barry asked his mother. He had married late. He was thirty-nine, but Ada was thirty-two-sshe should know better. His mother was still his most loyal friend, closer it turned out than a wife, who broke up with him after six years. "The Hebrew people could have as well all drowned themselves," he told his mother. "What if one twisted an ankle or another fell short ofbreath running between the parted seas? Then when the water came crashing down the Red Sea would have taken them too? And what did they do to deserve it? And the mark on Ada's face: where was the miracle to take that away from her and let her skin be like snow?" Still, one night when the phone rang at five after six one morning, the telephone's ring had the feel of a miracle about it in the two-room apartment where Barry lived on Craig Street. He ran

LocalIrregularities

to answer, hopeful of something good there-Ada's loneliness in the night had brought her to her senses-then fearful that it was his mother's heart. The voice was that of a stranger. It was about his mother. She had been struck earlier that evening by a trolley in Wilkinsburg where she had gone to play bingo. None of the women with her knew Barry's bachelor address. She had lived an hour, then died. He stood in his bare feet listening to his heart. He felt alone with only it in its mad thumping. He put his hand to his chest as if to quiet his heart. He had no one now: a brother with no trace left behind him, somewhere in Ohio, no cousins. Only an ex-wife. Perhaps this tragedy would bring them together, but she did not come to the funeral, unforgivable with no pardon for it, but he was in no position to bargain. What was worse in a woman? Not attending an ex-mother-in-law's funeral or deserting the son? He brooded for five weeks while the tides of war turned in Europe and the Pacific. His mother had left him ten thousand dollars and the house on Chesterfield Road, worth another ten thousand. He would call Ada. She had known of his mother's death but had not called him or invited him to dinner in months. He would tell her he now had twenty thousand dollars, cash in hand, however sad the source, a miracle. They could start over, somewhere else, out west if Pittsburgh had too many unpleasant associations. A good opening: change in the air, opportunity for the two of them to resume the love of a lifetime. Her phone had been disconnected. He looked at the dull plastic receiver and box in his apartment. He dialed the time. There was a voice there. He hung up. "How could you?" he asked the telephone.

She LovedMe Once

He did not go to church that Sunday. He walked in the park and went to a movie at the J. P. Harris downtown. In the movies someone alwayswon, and there was no question at the end when the lights came on. No Barry Whalen beyond prayers was ever up there on the screen. It was a war movie. Van Johnson gave the Nazis hell, and Barry left the theater still in daylight, troubled about himself but knowing right would win in the war. He walked down to the Brass Rail on Penn and ate a hamburger and listened to an old man talk to a soldier. No alcohol on Sundays. He could not bear the Irish Club today. They all had answers for everything, even in their confusion indicating there was an answer to things, and he knew better. There were no answers. He went to Ada's apartment house the next day after work. Her name was still on one of the mailboxes in the lobby. Had she changed her telephone number to avoid him? The day after, he did not go to work but woke early and took a bus out to Regent Square, where she lived. It was barely daylight, and he waited outside the apartment house for her to leave for work. She was, as he expected, surprised to see him. "What are you doing here?" she asked, as if they were strangers meeting at a bus stop. "You disconnected your phone." "Barry, I'm sorry. 1 wasn't thinking of you. It was someone else-someone else has been bothering me, a man. Of course, you wouldn't be able to reach me either." "Just to stand outside your door as if we hadn't been married for six years." "I don't have a phone. I don't need a phone." "Who's bothering you?" "A nuisance; he'll get the point."

LocalIrregularities

"You've been seeing him, haven't you?" "Barry, I'm not married to you." "You see how well you do without me, men you have to change your phone about. Listen to reason: I married you to save you from that." "Here's my bus," she said and turned away from him, leaving him alone on the sidewalk with the miracle of his inheritance gathered around him, now detestable even to him, like a shameful old coat he wore. He gave her up as a hazard one stumbles over in life. He flirted with women at the agency and danced with sorneone's out-oftown aunt at the Irish Club. Ada came into his thoughts, and he put her away consciously. Never quite gone but receding, he thought of marriage again, a fresh start, his mother's money, his age, not terribly old, and Ada, who would live to regret her abandonment of the only man who would love her as he had. They had known each other for three years before they married, and with the six years of marriage nine years of their lives had been connected to each other, a long time, a long, long time. He would have called her mother to intercede, but she had been estranged for years from her daughter, no promise there; so it was to be, Set sail with your own life, Barry, turned out it was all ships that pass in the night after all. He tried the Irish Club, and there was in the noise and dancing at the Ancient Order ofHibernians a calming effect on Barry. But when he went home to his tiny apartment the loneliness that set in was as bad as a mouth filled with aching teeth. He put his head under a tap in the bathroom and let the water run into his hair and down his neck as if there was something in his head to be washed away if only enough water were poured on it. He dried

She Loved Me Once

his head after half an hour. Whatever was heavy there with memory and loss was still a weight. He fell into bed. Days passed, and Ada was there in every waking hour, unfinished and incomplete. And the war mocked him. Bad news turning good everywhere one looked, and for Barry Whalen, you name it, things stayed as awful as ever. Dreams came to him, people hovering about his bed or the couch where he lay. They were like visits even when there were merely hills or familiar streets. The dreams arrived with the sweep of guests making themselves comfortable around him. Usually by morning there had been too many details to remember, people and things from the past dancing around him, so he forgot all of it except the sense of a crowded room. His mother returned. She warned him about his conduct. She said it was selfish; if Ada had died, well, he would have a right to such regrets, but living, even with her choice, one hardly to be expected from a Catholic, it still was what she wanted. He was disappointed that his mother was not on his side. He had no doubt it was the real woman, his mother, who had come. She was no dream. A man knew his own mother. Where could he find understanding in a world against him? He thought he was becoming peculiar. People avoided him at work. They faded away when he turned the conversation-with both men and women-to how a person could do that to another after six years. He had not planned to discuss Ada. She was just there, and she nightly rode his dreams like a hostess to the other phantoms who came and went. In 1944 when his phone rang at a few minutes after midnight he did not rush to it for news of impending good fortune. In his dreams he was often interrupted from sleep by the sound of the

LocalIrregularities

telephone's ringing, only to discover it was part of a dream and not the world of the waking. When he realized the phone was somewhere in wakefulness he answered it. It was Ada's Uncle Steve. "Ada's not expected to live through the night," he said. "My God," Barry asked. "Is this a bad dream?" "I wish it were: you'd better get over here. Montefiore emergency room." "What happened? Please, what happened? Did she try to take her own life?" "No, the facts aren't clear-it was a man." Barry wailed, "I told her! I told her!" "Barry, she can't talk. No one knows what happened!" "I warned her!" The phone hummed with the dial tone. The man had hung up on him. But he had no time for small talk anyhow. She would recover. He would be there for her. She would know. She would at last understand; they would remarry and be happy again. He changed to street clothes, put on an overcoat against the late winter cold, and took a cab at the corner of Craig and Forbes to the hospital. At the emergency exit, leaving, he saw Doc Pierce. "Doc," he called, the man a sure sign things were soon to be under control. Doc Pierce looked up, startled. The hour was late, and knowing Doc, he was probably as close to being absent with alcohol as he was standing at the hospital door. He was, people said it, top to bottom, the most intelligent man ever to ascend from the street to the Irish Club. The man read books with titles no one could make out the meaning of, sat there by the light of one saloon or another as if he were reading a menu in things or subjects no one had ever heard discussed. He had once been a

She Loved Me Once

well-known physician, regarded, it was said, as one of the best, wealthy-perhaps twenty years ago-then gave it up when his wife left and became a man well loved in every bar in Oakland, excellent pay, good company when he was mostly sober, quick to pick up the tab for fools and the famous equally. "Doc," Barry said, "there's a lot I have to ask you, but I'm in an emergency right now. Doc, I have to talk to you, understand? But you have to excuse me now." "I'll not know more later than now, but is there something in there in the hospital I can help with this minute?" "No, it's my own problem: I'm in the middle of things, a certain situation ain't the end like I thought but the middle. I thought it was the end, you know? But things sprung to life like a miracle." "It's only the end once," Doc said there mysteriously in the hospital driveway, thinking over what he had said and vanishing into a taxicab with equal mufHed meaning and purpose. "Doc!" Barry called. The man's words, not all that profound, seemed to be at that moment and in a hospital driveway divinely inspired. But the cab was gone; Barry would thank him another time for lifting up his courage. Inside the bright corridors and walls painted flat green Barry said, "I'm her husband" to the young woman in a white dress at the entrance to the emergency room. "Mrs. Whalen." He did not wait for an answer. He dashed into the drawn curtained area where Uncle Steve stood. He was a tall man with hair slicked back, every strand pressed against his skull. He had a drinker's face, cheeks red-veined and his nose full. His eyes were liquidy. He looked at Barry as if he were a beggar out of a doorway who had startled him.

LocalIrregularities

"She's going to die," he said. "No, she's not, this is all going to turn out for the best." "Are you crazy?" "Man, have you no faith at a time like this?" "He cut her throat before he threw her." Barry said, "It don't matter. It's no way to talk at a time like this-don't you see things work out for the best somehow? I'm here. She and me are together again." The two men sat uneasily on benches, looking up at each person who passed. Sometime after five that morning, a nurse came out to where the two men were sitting on a bench and said, "She's lost a lot of blood, but she's stable now. Things are improving." Barry said, "She's fine then? There's no chance of her dying?" "The doctor will talk to you." Barry took her arm. "Tell me: is there a chance she'll die? How is she?" "She's doing fine after what she's been through." Barry charged behind the curtain when the nurse left. And there she was, Ada, wrapped in bandages, but her face, bruised and oily with ointment, unmistakably her. He went to the bed and kissed her cheek. "Things will be better now," he said. "The worst is over for both of us. We're going to see our way to finding each other again. We'll buy a house of our own. I'll take care of you. None of this should have happened." She opened her eyes. They did not focus. "Barry?" she asked. "Yes, it's me, sweetheart." "Barry?" "Yes, I'm here, you knew I'd be here." "Barry?" "Always here for you."

She LovedMe Once

He soared with knowing she had called for him first, had almost smiled when she recognized him. He felt the weight of a lifetime lifted from his shoulders. How strange was fate that it wound itself toward its own ends like a river flowing to the sea. "Sleep now," he said, "and when you wake, not now, a long time from now, when you wake you and I will make plans. Such plans, what plans, what a future." She said plainly, clearly-he would remember it forever: "Yes." The man who had assaulted her might have been someone she knew. The details of the beating were lost in the darkness that fell on her recollection of the terror. Barry talked to the police. They were reluctant to come to a conclusion. But the attack had been savage.A kidney had been permanently injured, and when the man had thrown her down the stairs from her third-floor apartment the concussions she received caused irreparable damage to her hearing and sight. Both her legs were broken. She drifted in and out of consciousness the first week in the hospital. Barry made plans and came to see her every day. But the doctors said she did not want to see him. She did not want any visitors. He would respect that, but after a week he saw that her mother, to whom she had not spoken in years, came and went in the room. Barry had not spoken to the woman either during those years, but now he stopped her one day in the corridor and asked, "How is she? I must see her. She wants to see me." "You're mistaken. She wants to see no one." "That's a lie." "You upset her. Go away." Later that afternoon he crept into Ada's room, where his former wife lay sleeping. He bent over her, enjoying the closeness. "Ada," he whispered, "Ada, it's Barry."

LocalIrregularities

She opened her eyes and said, "I don't want to talk to you." "Plans," he said desperately, "the first night, I was here for you. We spoke of plans for us, together. I'll protect you, the same as always." "Please go away, Barry, go away." "But you agreed the first night, it was from your heart." "Go away, I don't want to talk to you. Maybe later, maybe someday. Not now. Maybe never." Her mother came in with an orderly and said, "That's him." Shortly after he had been refused entrance to talk to his own wife he found himself one day in the Pitt Tavern with old Doc Pierce sitting at the bar by himself. Doc looked old and tired even with all the living well, an apartment at the Webster Hall Hotel and plenty of money to spend. He was familiar in every bar in Oakland. People still frequently asked him medical advice. "I was in a terrible state when you saw me, there at the hospital," Barry said. "It was my wife. She'd been hurt, it was violence done to her; not my wife really, it's a habit, we're divorced." "I was there from habit myself," Doc said. "A woman collapsed in front of the University Grill and I rode in the ambulance with her, stood around out of habit of aiding the afflicted but looking these days, I guess, like a medicine man hustling for a fee and was put out when the interns came." "You brought the woman through?" "Beyond me. She was dead in the ambulance." Barry then asked, "This anesthetic people get, you've seen people under it. When they come to, do they speak the truth? Is it their true subconscious feelings they're stating, you know, when they mumble afterward?" Doc became cranky, this subconscious business trailed him down Forbes, into the Pitt Tavern, up the stairs to the Irish Club,

She LovedMe Once

always asked as if it was an answer beyond answers. "Well," he said, "if a person says something out of their subconscious, say something like that could happen, anesthetic or not, it's not necessarily a fact. It's not real any more than conscious is, you see." "But does the person believe it, I mean, underneath, is it a true meaning of what's in their, say, soul?" "Soul now?" "You know what I mean." "Barry, I don't. But I'll tell you this: things are going on in us that's like electrical lines to telephone numbers nobody in their right minds dialed, you get my meaning? People and things we don't want to hear from." "What are you saying?" Barry asked, sliding from his bar stool. "You're saying the truth isn't there in a human being? Nowhere to look for it, not anesthetic, not hypnotism, a woman speaking from her heart to her husband?" "Maybe, maybe, maybe," Doc said. "I cured people of pneumonia and liver disease and broken legs, and it was all maybe. It's maybe." Barry said, "Thanks, Doc" and abruptly walked away, swaying slightly, not glancing at other people in the bar. No answers wherever he turned: but she loved him once, and wasn't that on record somewhere? After the day an orderly took him by the arm, not roughly but gently as one walks away a boisterous child from a situation too large for its comprehension, he never saw Ada again. She left the hospital. He went out to Regent Square to patrol the block on which she had lived, thinking he might by dogged investigation find the man who had injured her. For a month he stood in rain and shine as spring came, observing her doorway and men neighbors. He discovered any number of possible suspects, but as he

LocalIrregularities

approached them, looking keenly into their faces, he saw nothing there to convict them. They stared back at him or looked away. Her name was never again on her mailbox in the foyer. She had apparently moved from Pittsburgh-he could not be sure, her life was blank to him, no person there at all where once she'd been. He gave up on an April evening, the streets dark with rain. It blew off Frick Park in the distance and into his face, rain so insistent he would not have been able to open his eyes against it to find in the darkness the very man who had beaten Ada if the monster approached him in the night and said, "I did it, what now?" He was soaked through his raincoat, his shoes heavy with water and the weight of a loss too heavy to bear, and he wished somehow the rain in its rage would carry him away with it, down curbs, into sewers, out to rivers or oceans. Was this the way his kindness to her was to be rewarded, dissolved to less than a person because he had thought there might be some gratitude from a woman he had raised? Barry watched the world war jeer at him, Allied tanks streaming into a fallen Berlin, the Japanese signing a peace treaty on an American battleship. Over the years he watched the astonishing sight of a man landing on the moon and television sets with screens the size of a wall. He had no number for Ada anywhere. She was no longer there in what Barry recognized as the real world. Perhaps such things happen in the perverse universe where women keep their damned secrets from men, he thought over the decades. She had changed her name to elude him. Or she had married again and lived under that name, altering everything about herself, and he hoped, as he prayed frequently at St. Agnes with no interest in what spiritual agency listened or heard, that when she looked

She LovedMe Once

into the mirror on some mornings she saw clearly the mark on her face and remembered the man who had loved her despite its ugliness and was sorry. He said angrily to God at Easter, head bent in prayer at St. Agnes thirty years after she had lied to him in the hospital: "She made me sour on miracles, and for that I'll never forgive her."

·47·

FOUR

Helping 'Desmond

had not been a close family. But after her husband passed away and her brother, Desmond, a widower, had been long on his own, Freda had invited him to live with her. Retired from years as a supermarket manager, first with Kroger and then A & P, he had turned out to be on close proximity fussy as a cat. He was particular in dress and a bear about the exactness of his weekly recreational habits, and he expected his food prepared to a turn. In ten months, to compound her miseries, he had a stroke. Freda, herself sixty-seven and aching in every bone, a victim of family love not ever really known, fell heir to an old man of seventy-one she hardly knew and sick in the bargain. He could walk short distances. She could understand him if he spoke slowly. With very minimal aid from Freda he could wash himself and attend to his other needs. Except, an embarrassing thing to even consider, one other, Freda decided. THE HEWITTS

LocalIrregularities

The poor man was going to expire, growing every day more gray in the face, less interested in living, if there was no female company-of a certain sort-for him. It was a delicate way to say it, she told Maude Calahan, her friend of fifty-three years. She meant plain out: The connubial act. Maude nodded soberly at the precision of her friend's thinking. All too often it came down to that, didn't it? Freda did not tell Maude her plan for saving her brother's life. Between herself and Maude she knew the two of them understood as much about men as if they had been called suddenly to draw the boundaries of Egypt: the results would have been the same. Put Cairo in Canada, for all they knew on the subject. Freda had not reasoned out in these matters her late husband of more than forty years, or the two sons who had deserted her for wives with the wit of sparrows; and Maude had been childless in a long marriage and dropped her chin down into her neck when the subject of men and women and beds came up as if she expected a punch in the jaw at the mention. Now Desmond had tottered into the mystery for them. "You see," Mrs. Calahan said, "it's that they don't know themselveswhat they want. They know they want it, oh, yes. But what and when, that's the puzzle. Want it, then ten minutes later it's not what he wanted at all. Heading for bed, slumping like he wasn't going to make the last three steps at the top of the landing, then like a divine revelation it comes to him: that's exactly what he wants. Where's the who or the when to it? Only the what, it's what they always want." Freda had been nodding her head in agreement but stopped. Sitting in Maude's kitchen, the street outside on Chesterfield Road bright with sunlight off the roofs of the houses descend-

.5° .

HelpingDesmond

ing to Fifth Avenue, it seemed wrong to malign the dead. Surely where their husbands were now, where they would never walk these steep hills again or climb the steps to their bedrooms, that was the last thing on their minds. "What can I do, Maude? I can't let Desmond die for the simple fact he's not able to catch a cab and take himself where he used to go every Thursday night." Maude leaned over the kitchen table and took her arm insistently. "Let him die," she said. "The beast!" "I can't." "Men die for country and they die for God. Let this one join the saints for a lack of the extramarital act. Serves him right. Old pig." Freda had heard that in New York men called special places and they sent, for hire, a woman. It hardly seemed likely there were such places in Pittsburgh. Maybe someday as the world went to hell, but in 1949 the telephone directory had nothing listed under harlots, prostitutes, or trollops. Not that it would not have been disguised under a fancy name to fool the bishops and parish priests looking for the subject of a weekly sermon: but, using all her guile and sense of the rottenness of things, she still could not get to the bottom of how someone might list a whore for rent. She called an employment agency and said she needed a maid-well, a housekeeper, sort of a nurse perhaps to be kind to her elderly brother. "A kind person, you understand," she said. "A refined lady, but someone who knows a little bit about life." The first woman who came had wrinkles running along her face where her ears were attached to her cheeks. "How old are you?" Freda asked the woman.

LocalIrregularities

"Fifty 1 -one. " "That's a good age, a very good age, lots of good times ahead, but your hair, you know your hair has gray in it. You don't want to give the wrong impression. Even ladies high up on the social ladder, they touch up their hair these days." "What that has to do with me tending house here is like I come for dancing in a hula skirt. I ain't. I come to tend house. What's on your mind?" "Nothing, I guess. Nothing at all. I wanted someone younger." "Don't insult women in my profession with your nonsense." The woman stood and added, "Take a look at yourself in the mirror before you vilify your fellow human beings." The main problem here, Freda saw instantly, was that if she did find a woman willing to help out Desmond in his hour of need, would Desmond find her attractive enough to compete with the chippies he used to visit on Thursday nights? Freda put on a railroader's cap the next day and in a light rain took a trolley from Oakland and a walk through the red light district of the North Side. She wore an old mackinaw of her late husband. Bundled up like a man on the prowl, she tried to catch a glimpse of the women at certain windows. They seemed like waitresses or perhaps clerks in five-and-tens, or women behind the counters in bakeries: they seemed damned near like everybody else. "Where the hell have you been?" Desmond asked when she came home. After his disabling he slept in a small room on the first floor. "Oh, just out." "Dressed up for Halloween and without an umbrella, what's wrong with you?" "Don't stir yourself up. You don't look well, Desmond."

HelpingDesmond

"How can I prosper when my sister has gone crazy and leaves me alone in the house to go wandering the streets in a downpour?" She loved him. Watching him daily sit stolidly before the picture window, observing people outside, the porches across the street, sunlight and then shadow, she was filled with a ferocity of love so acute it might have been a knife in her chest. Cleanshaven every morning, regularly as if taking his place at work, more ashy with each day: he was all that she had lost, not understood, or failed at as he sat resolutely at his lonely perch. Freda one night hired a cabdriver to take her to prostitutes. She would not leave the cab as the man pulled up to the curb at various parking places in front of houses and apartment places. Going inside would have been equivalent to visiting a brothel herself. She interviewed the women outside. Too weathered, hair too eccentric to bring into her house, one or two drunk even as they swayed at the car window-she told the driver after each, "Find me another," and after two hours was out thirty dollars and no closer to her goal of resurrecting her brother. At the Ancient Order of Hibernians Freda boldly approached a certain young woman who was known to appear at the club on St. Patrick's Day with a different man than the one who escorted her on Valentine's Day, not the same man from New Year's Eve, a fourth man at Christmas. The young woman had two children and a husband-her story-killed in the Pacific, and she was known as Eleanor's Lorna, because of a remarkable coincidence. Among the patrons of the Irish Club was another young woman who also had the unusual name Lorna. The other woman, Lorna O'Malley, had a husband in place, children with respectable birth certificates, and no shadow clouding her unique first name . . 53 .

LocalIrregularities

Eleanor's Lorna was called that because of the first name of her aunt, Eleanor Dale (no great reputation for steadfastness to one man either), to distinguish her from the good family woman. At age thirty, invoking her aunt to designate her seemingly from another woman was, as Freda knew, calling down on the young woman all the misadventures trailing generations of Dale women: lovers killed in barrooms, strange falls on well-lit streets, a litany of obscure misadventures, and a judgment. Seeing her alone at a table the Saturday night after she had made her ridiculous taxicab journey, Freda sat with her and directly said she had a sick brother who needed female company. Desperation put brass to her tongue. "You mean to dance, like that?" Lorna asked. "He can't dance, he's not that well." "Then for what?" "For wherever it goes." "What do you think I am? You can't talk to me this way." "I'd look on it as a favor, asked in respect, accepted in honorable intentions, a kind of blessing; and the pay would be nothing compared to what's in my heart filled with gratitude. It can't be much to ask. Humor him, you know how they are. There's money in it, but don't do anything your conscience won't let you." "I'm not promising anything." Lorna and Desmond seemed to hit it off from the start. He told stories of the old days in the supermarket and the Hewitt family. After dinner, Freda tore herself away. She had never seen him so happy. Claiming there was old Mrs. Claughton over on Robinson she'd promised to look in on, she quickly departed.

HelpingDesmond

She strolled the block on Terrace Street for forty minutes, a January night but pleasantly cold. She saw no one and remembered how as a girl she had sat on the stone wall that bordered the Mount Mercy Academy on Terrace and could not imagine being this alone-and now Desmond to save, saving herself too. On her return Lorna and Desmond were cheerful, the house as bright as when she left. Desmond shuffled off to his room after the young woman departed. He said good night, something he did not do with frequency. Lorna came the next three Sundays. Freda passed a twenty-dollar bill to her each time. For all she knew the young woman had done nothing to earn it. Whatever it was, Freda was not there when it happened, slipping away after dinner as if it were an old family tradition. On the fourth Sunday, Desmond, after noon Mass, asked, "Is it your plan to bring that woman here for dinner again and then disappear like the wind blew you away? I run out of politeness in this life. My temper is short." "You don't like Lorna?" "Why are you asking now?" "I mean, I thought she had a way: she brought you out of yourself." "Let me stay in myself, if that's my fancy." "As you wish, Desmond." "I saw the money changing hands," he said. From his chair, he raised his fist. "It was a health reason," she said. "I have my morals. I did it for your good."

LocalIrregularities

He trembled in every muscle and bone, and she was afraid for him. "I don't need my sister to be pandering for me," he said. Freda retreated, and they did not speak, except in passing, for two weeks. Then one morning in March there appeared at the front door a man who introduced himself as Tom Brennan, a former assistant manager who had worked years ago with Desmond at Kroger's. He was retired now too. Freda showed him in with a wave at Desmond at the window, gladly and quickly. Desmond seemed happy. He smiled at Brennan, then at Freda. "Old Tom," he said. "You remembered me after all this time." "Living in Pittsburgh now too-beat that for a coincidence." They had worked together in Ohio for more than six years. "Old Tom," Desmond said, shaking hands again, his eyes moist. "The times we had." "Yes, the times we had," Desmond said. "But we could have been shoveling coal, Tom. We were young, you see. That was the point of the times. It wasn't them. It was us. We were what was good. Not the times." Desmond confided when Tom left he had never really liked the man, but these days he was a happy sight. Tom came for dinner on Sunday, and Freda left them alone, running down Forbes to Maude's with glee. "He's got something now," she said. "Maude, there's something in life for the man." After a month of visits, Tom arrived to take Desmond for an outing on a Thursday. "We'll take in a movie, I guess," Desmond said. "Maybe a beer after if Tom has the patience to limp along with me." "Good movie at the Strand," Tom said. He was a widower too and wore a bowtie and black-and-white shoes. Freda watched the two of them slowly walk to Tom's car.

HelpingDesmond

Tom held open the door for Desmond. They could have, even with Desmond's uncertain gait, been fourteen years old for the mischief in their departure. That was it then: Freda had stumbled on one ofthe great truths ofmanhood. It wasn't easewith women they wanted particularly. It wasn't setting it up for them that did it-she could hardly restrain herself from shouting out the news down Forbes to Maude after the two men had made their elaborate departure. They did the same dance out on Chesterfield Road three Thursdays in a row. Proud. Fastidious. Made too easy for them and they jerked their heads about like a baby rejecting a bottle. No, it had to have that hunt to it. Some pursuit anyhow-some feeling, Freda thought, that they had brought the prey down to earth, had gone out and captured it. Two little boys dressed up like men going somewhere all on their own to the whores. She dried her hands on her apron after they left on the third Thursday and on a cold April night ran down to Oakland and knocked on Maude's door. "What is it?" Maude asked. "You look like your ship's come in." "It's the hunt and the secrecy," Freda said all in a rush. She took Maude by the shoulders. "It's the keeping it to themselves they want more than the, you know, actual doing of the thing itself." Maude stepped back and considered. "I do believe you have something here," she said. "Come in and have a piece of pineapple cake." They were happy for a month with their newfound knowledge. They sliced it like carrots, long side and into discs; they diced it like onions for a stew, savoring their victory in a game they both realized only then they had been playing and losing for decades.

Local Irregularities

But on an afternoon in May, unseasonably warm, windows open as if to catch a breeze on the hottest day of August, a day for lemonade and not wisdom: on that queer warm day all their hard-acquired truth came crashing down as surely as the years had sent their unerring message of incomprehension. Opening the screen door, Maude saw that Freda was in a state. Her face was flushed with heat and trouble. "Freda, Freda, you've been running. Is it Desmond? Is he well?" Before even entering the spare parlor, Freda told her all, tears in the sweat on her cheeks. "I said to him this morning, 'Desmond, are you sick? Your friend Tom hasn't been here in awhile. You've gone pale. Your eyes are running.' "He says, 'The man tells the same stories over as if he gets a dollar every time he repeats one. Never liked him.'" Maude stared, stricken, at her newly won answers dissipating on the hot day. "And Father Farrell?" Maude asked. "He goes to Mass, then he says, 'Let Father Farrell worry about his own soul.' Is that any way for a person to talk about the hereafter, with one foot in it?" The day was glazed for Maude, impenetrable. "Toes anyhow into limbo, Freda," she said weakly. The thought of Desmond on the edge of eternity brought more tears to Freda's eyes. Trapped in his chair, no priest, no friends, no family but her, was enough to cause howling at his mystery rather than her gentle sobbing. "He's like a soldier, Maude," she said, "an old soldier in rags and bent over waiting. He sits there on the edge knowing the enemy is coming to take him away in chains. I watch and I don't know what to do."

HelpingDesmond

"For now," Maude said, "we'll go into the kitchen, it's cooler there. And we'll sit for a few minutes and neither of us will speak and I'll bring this fan out there and turn it on us and we'll shake this heat." "Maude, he's been looking like grim death since he stopped going to those places on Thursdays, dying away like a flower denied sunshine. I hate to say he looks almost gone. 'Desmond,' I asked, 'is there something you need?' "He turns to me like he's going to rise from his chair and offer me assault. 'Yes, there is,' he says. 'Freda, keep away from me. A man has a right to his own unhappiness. It's all I ask, allow me that at the end.' " "What did it mean?" Maude asked. "Sit and I'll bring you lemonade. It's hot, it's very hot and you've been running in the street. What did it mean?" "I wasn't interfering with his unhappiness, was I, Maude? Isn't it an obligation to help other people? Don't we have an obligation?" No answer lay in the summer heat, good, sweet Maude, or her own quaking chest, and she sat back in a kitchen chair waiting for lemonade and the noisy fan to cool her troubled thoughts.

F I V E

c.514oonlight Sonata

AT THE end of 1948 Gregory Magruder bought a new Plymouth,

a small, two-door coupe of a pale green color. No one else on Dunseith Street had a new car, and he parked it in front of his house, the emergency brake on, facing upward on the steep hilL He could be seen at night standing before an upstairs window, half-hidden by the curtains, observing his car, not so much guarding it-although it was obvious that his intentions lay there too-but thinking seriously about the Plymouth. He was a solitary young man to begin with, marked by a displacement at his shoulders that could cruelly be called a hunchback by children-which they did-but was more readily seen as a peculiarity of breadth at the shoulders, a broadness, a trick of posture that made Gregory seem stiff or upright or cautious. He was known as all of these things in the neighborhood: he was a careful visitor even to places he went every day, seldom committing ·61 .

LocalIrregularities

himself by a spontaneous laugh or a quick gesture to liking something, disliking it, or, for the most part, being aware of it. He was, it was said, a typical only son. His mother was a widow and had bought Gregory a second-hand Baldwin piano when he was five, and the child, oddly broad-shouldered even then, sat erect at the piano and played as ifhe had been rehearsing in some auditorium available to him before his birth. He was very good at the piano, and while the scales and repetitions were sometimes annoying there was a great feeling of affection for Gregory among his neighbors. People sitting out on summer nights were pleased to report to each other or a visitor: "That's Gregory Magruder, he's a musical prodigy, he's going to be heard from." Schubert, Haydn, Mendelssohn, and Chopin, their reveries fell down Dunseith in sweet obbligato to the voices of Bob Prince and Rosy Rosewell announcing the Pirates games. A person walking up Dunseith could never miss the outcome of a pitch in a Pirates game, the familiar voices describing each play faithfully and the walker as at home in the contest as if he sat in his living room listening. Only at the Magruders' did one see his mother, a short woman and stout but without Gregory's shoulders, sitting proudly in the dark on a porch swing she barely allowed to creak, rocking, lost in the sounds of Gregory from inside. All the triumph in Beethoven, the gaiety in Mozart: at 311 Dunseith the music marched and murmured, whispered its insinuations of passion and release and triumph. It was a house charged with more happening and promise than the other houses around it, but the exhaltation and the power of the Baldwin ringing through the neighborhood did not seem to touch the piano player. Gregory seldom smiled. He walked about in Oakland in his angled erect carriage, joined others for Cokes at

Moonlight Sonata

the Sun Drug on Atwood in high school or milkshakes at the Isaly's on Forbes, but was withdrawn as ice-it was assumed because of his musical genius or his shoulders. He tried out for the Pittsburgh Symphony at sixteen. He was told by the assistant director to return the next year. At seventeen, he was told the same thing. His mother explained to neighbors that Gregory could probably go to someplace like Detroit or New Orleans to play in other symphonies, but his heart lay in Pittsburgh; since a child she had taken him to performances at the Syria Mosque with Fritz Kreisler and then William Steinberg conducting. The boy had developed a passion for playing only with his hometown orchestra. Gregory lay at night in his room listening to records and thinking he would one day, all in a rush, be consumed by loneliness as uncomprehending and swift as ants devouring a prisoner tortured by Bedouins in the Sahara sands. He had been told for so long by priests and nuns and neighbors that he was blessed that he wondered how, like the saints, he would be called to pay for his God-given gifts. When he was rejected by the Pittsburgh Symphony one part of him smarted at the injustice, but something else was relieved: if he were truly not a most extraordinary vessel out of which the sonorities of God's voice could sound, then his compensatory payment for his talent would not be great either. Perhaps it was all up to him now, and he bought the Plymouth with the last of the money his father had left him. The first youth on Dunseith to own a new car. At his job in the Pittsburgher Hotel, where he was a room clerk, he sat sardonic and correct, informative, shaved and trim, even handsome, no one before the desk where he sat realizing the broad shoulders were somewhat freakish when he walked. And now with the car two days old he went by himself

LocalIrregularities

to the University Grill on Forbes. He was hoping to find there one of the easy girls who attended Pitt or Carnegie Tech. Whatever music he played at his piano, he himself heard only his longing, but it was not his night for girls. He sadly watched them depart in twos or with young men, until at one in the morning, his Plymouth parked on Craig Street a block up, he was almost alone in the bar. After much thought, he swung around on his bar stool. He said abruptly to a waitress he had noticed: "Say, what time do you get off?" The waitress was Peggy Shannon's sister, a woman who later told the story a thousand times at the Irish Club, which people from Dunseith and Oakland attended just to hear such devastations. "How do you know my husband isn't waiting for me?" Peggy's sister asked, not being married, a part of the evening's joke. "I'll wait for him too," Gregory said. "Where will you take us?" "Ah, come on," Gregory said, "you're not married." "No, I'm not, but I think you're very forward. I'm not a pickup, you know. I work here." "I respect that," Gregory said. "Then you shouldn't talk to me as if I were a pick-up." "I'm sorry," Gregory said. "Will you meet me when the place closes?" "Where will you take me?" Bewildered, Gregory asked, "Where?" "Yes, where? You're meeting me. Will we stand in the street outside the University Grill until daybreak?" Gregory, who had not gone past certain points in his thinking, said, "We'll drive."

Moonlight Sonata

"Where?" "Drive, drive," Gregory cried, "in my new Plymouth. You'll sit in the front seat with me and we'll drive." "Is that where you'll take me?" "Yes," Gregory said, all of it now confusing, not right. The waitress said softly. "You just bought a new car, is that it?" "Yes," Gregory said unhappily. "I'll take you for a ride." "You see him," the waitress said, pointing to the bartender. "That one has a new car, a Cadillac, and you see him," she pointed to a man at the end of the bar. "I'll wager he has a new car. Young fellow, a new car ain't a novelty like a spaceship come to earth from Mars." Before she could finish, she saw the look of panic on his face and said something else. "I'm sure it's a beautiful car. What kind did you say?" Always mannerly, erect as if he had been struck and held back a staggering, Gregory said, "A Plymouth." He put one foot before the other slowly and walked out the door to Forbes, but not before the waitress called, "Does it have four wheels?" He never went back to the University Grill. He drove around that night and came home at four. He played a Beethoven sonata, his fingers long and perfect on the keys; he went to sleep and was restless. The woman had insulted something dear to him, and he did not know how to refute his own foolishness. There was no promise in meeting anyone at his music teacher's house in Carrick. Mr. Marcotti took few students. All that changed there was that Gregory arrived in his new car, parked it close, and walked up the stairs. He did not have to take two trolleys to get there. He began to go to concerts at the Syria Mosque by himself, early, standing about in the foyer as if waiting for someone

LocalIrregularities

and nodding then or at intermission to young women. A few he liked, but they spoke to him briefly, then returned to their seats, while he thought of their legs and perfume, lost in them until the music from the orchestra could claim him. With this strategy, having talked over coffee only once with an older womanwho was homely, knew nothing about music, and would not let him speak-Gregory met Penny McGhee. She met him after the concert, an all-Chopin program, and listened intently as they walked out and talked later. She played the violin. He marveled at her soft chin and pale blue eyes. She was shorter than he was by several inches, and he felt large and capable when he held open the door for her to the restaurant at the Webster Hall Hotel. She liked his Plymouth. "Is it new?" she asked. "I don't know much about cars." He took her for a ride on Sunday, down toward Bellafonte, a beautiful spring day with the trees alongside the highway beginning to bloom. On an open stretch, with a great sprawling vista before them, the town of California, Pennsylvania, below, they stood near a railing and looked out. "Do you think of Wagner when you stand here?" he asked. "Yes," she said, "now that you speak of it. It's Wagner, the crags and hills, the wildness." They drove back to Pittsburgh, Gregory as in love with Penny as he was with his new car. She had a gentleness to her, and like other people he knew who were musicians she seemed to look inwardly even when she wasn't playing. It gave her a religious cast. He spoke to her of his failures with the Pittsburgh Symphony. She said, "I had a friend who tried out and he didn't make it either. But Gregory, he went up to Boston and they took him without a second audition. Don't take the Pittsburgh Symphony ·66·

MoonlightSonata

seriously; it's all politics-you know that." Gregory wasn't sure, but it made him feel fine, as they hurtled along at sixty miles an hour, to think she was on his side. In the following weeks he met her in Oakland after her music lessons and carried her violin case. He felt strong and protective. He put the case gingerly into the back seat of the Plymouth and the two of them rode somewhere, out to South Park to walk on the footpaths, to Highland to look at the animals, down one highway, out to Carnegie to eat at the Heidelberg Race Track. None of this, he thought, could be happening without my car. At work he was as confident as ever, on top of things. He bought another sports coat ofthe type he had tailor-made: in the shoulders across the back, by special padding, it made him look, except to someone scrutinizing him, like a man with straight broad shoulders. The padding made his back seem almost perfectly level across. He kissed Penny quickly on the cheek on departing each time, moving away before she mistook his intentions. But when he decided the time was right, sitting on the golf course in the Plymouth at midnight after a concert, she said, "Don't, Gregory, I don't see you that way" and began to cry. He sat back. The concert had stirred things in him. It was Berlioz, and the erratic crashes and cries and sighs had caused him to want to run, or dance, or hold Penny close-and scream! "Don't cry," he said awkwardly, moving away from her. "I can't help it," she said. "I love you," he said, feeling as insincere as an actor playing a part. "I do," he affirmed. "I do. I don't have much experience. I don't know what to say." She said nothing, and he asked, "Are you angry with me?" "A little," she said. "But isn't that what men and women do?"

LocalIrregularities

"Yes," she said, too ready with an answer for his uncertain feelings, "but we're not men and women. We're Gregory and Penny. We're better than men and women." He took her the following week to the Irish Club, where they danced and she was lively.After a concert the following week, he simply seized her as she stood waiting for him to open the door to his car and kissed her full on the lips. She turned and walked away. "Wait," he said, hurrying to catch up to her as she walked quickly down Bellefield Avenue. "I didn't mean anything." "I'll take a streetcar home," she said. "Please," he said, "let me take you home." They drove to her house in Carrick, and he let her out, and she said, "Good night" and left quickly. When he called her she said she thought it would be a mistake to continue seeing him. He said, "I won't do it again." They went to a Beethoven concert, all nineteenth-century music, and afterward drove up dark streets. He parked out in East Liberty and they ate waffles and talked about Beethoven until one, and he drove her home. She said, "Good night," lightly touching his hand, and left. He played the piano softly until dawn, moving from one Beethoven piece to another. Penny had said the "Moonlight" Sonata made her cry: there was something so terribly final about it. He heard mostly longing and did not call her the next day. And she did not call him. When he finally did call, a month later, as summer was beginning, she was friendly. She asked why he hadn't called, and he said, "We're getting nowhere." "Oh, that," she said. "If that's on your mind, then we really aren't getting anywhere. Gregory, I'm going to get engaged to that fellow in Boston. I've known him for ten years." Bravely, Gregory said, "I'll call you. I wish you well." . 68·

Moonlight Sonata

"Gregory, I really enjoy being with you: I feel so relaxed when we drive. It's like another world." He put her with the University Grill in his mind: a place never to go to again. He tore up the programs of concerts he had attended with her. He hung around downtown after work and drank at the Union Bar, watched other people, walked late at night to his car in his upright stance. He parked the Plymouth before his house, pulled tightly on the emergency brake, and went inside to sit in the living room looking at the Baldwin. He did not feel like playing. Too much music was running in his head. One night, coming home in the summer, his Plymouth in its power and promise luring him, he stopped his car on Robinson. Walking up Robinson-it was late-he saw a young woman named Irene Sweeney. She was a notorious figure on the Dunseith Street hill. She strolled about at all hours; sometimes she got into a car with young men and was driven to Schenley Park. Other times she shouted at them as they pulled up to the curb, "You better beat it or I'll call the cops." She worked in a laundry on the South Side, and it was said she had sex even with her two stepbrothers. Everyone before Joyce's Pharmacy on Robinson had a tale about an amazing encounter with Irene. She was always about in Oakland, out past the park toward Squirrel Hill, in the other direction walking across the Brady Street Bridge. She had no pattern to her days-except the hot, misty laundry-and no logic to her nights. She lived with an ancient father who beat her. Walking quickly, Gregory caught up with her. "Taking a little walk?" Gregory asked. "What's it to you?" "I'm walking myself," he said.

LocalIrregularities

"I don't need company," she said, and then, "Don't you have a new car?" "Yes," he said, "a Plymouth." "How come you're on the shoe patrol? If I had a car I'd ride in it." She looked at him sideways with a sly smile. "I like Plymouths." "Come on," he said, taking her elbow. "I'm parked down here." In the dead of night, he held open the door of the car and drove wildly up Fifth to Penn, swung over to Forbes, and drove out Forbes to Frick Park. But he did not know the place, and it frightened him in the dark with its black bushes and possibilities for exposure. He feared less a marauder beating him to death in the strange park than the news leaking out that he had gone to the park with Irene Sweeney. "How old are you?" he asked, his mind racing with places to go. "Seventeen," she said. "How about you?" "I'll be twenty," Gregory said. "You really like to play the piano?" "Yes, I do, but it's like everything else. It's a habit too." "A habit playing the piano! You're crazy. I heard you were crazy." Finally, he decided on the one place he suddenly felt safe with, the cemetery that lay on top ofthe hill, up Dunseith. It was about four blocks from where Dunseith ended on Morgan, and he was sure she knew this place too. It was where children from Dunseith and Morgan and Robinson went to explore each other. But Gregory, trapped by his gift, had never gone. He had been drawn there but would have felt ridiculous wandering among the tombstones himself.

Moonlight Sonata

She did not object when he took her inside the old gate. The gate sagged. There was no caretaker. No one had been buried there in years. Walking, he took her hand. She shoved it away. But she continued walking with him, farther into the cemetery. He stopped at a small knoll, shaded and still not fully grown with summer grass. "Let's sit down," he said. She sat comfortably. He could see her legs in the dark. They seemed brilliantly white. He stroked her leg and kissed her. She lay back and he leaned forward on her, kissing her hard. "What are you doing?" she asked, sitting up. "Nothing," Gregory said. "Watch yourself," she said. He put his arm around her and felt her breast. She let his hand rest there a moment and roughly moved it aside. "Don't do that!" she said. They sat in silence, and she asked, "Do you play the piano all the time?" "Yes," he said, and pushed her back and kissed her hard. He put his hand between her legs. This time she stood. She put her hands on her hips. "You one of them?" she asked. Looking up, Gregory said, "I don't know what you mean." "You heard bad things about me." "No," he said, "nothing bad." "1 got to go," she said and turned. Lunging after her from a sitting position, he caught her skirt, kneeling to keep his balance. "Hey," she said, "watch the merchandise." "Don't go," he gasped, holding on, clasping her about the legs. "Listen," she said, "I don't do it with abnormals, you understand?"

LocalIrregularities

Gregory released her. He saw her walk off into the darkness. "A girl takes a ride in a car," she said, "that don't mean she sells herself." The Morgan Street Cemetery is gone now, and Gregory could not go there if he wanted to. Not the corpses or the tombstones but the cemetery itself: it is bulldozed and shoved out ofthe path of tennis courts and buildings in medicine and the athletic department of the University of Pittsburgh. Gregory was not unhappy to see it buried. He never knew its name, nor did any of the other boys who dreaded its ghosts. The strange lights of their youth, Gregory thought, the unexplained shadows, the eerie rattlings and coughs when no human agency was there to explain the throat that was the source: they had only to look over their shoulders, and there lay the old burial grounds. There were few other places to go, Gregory thought. The well-trimmed grounds of Pitt, the classical buildings offered little shelter. Among tombstones rotting with age, names obliterated by rain and wind, youthful first passions flared, the birth of desire, the genesis of lifetime habits burst forth as if no other human being had ever gone down that path: there it happened over the dead bodies of strangers. Memories of springtime exuberance lay in the dead leaves of the old winter, among the scents of dogwood and wildflowers, whatever truth that lay in naked bodies connecting became known for the first time. None of the young men who had gone there, Gregory thought, in griefunder the shadow that fell on him from knowing there would be nothing to remember, had owned a splendid car like his 1948 Plymouth. He disconsolately walked out of the cemetery alone. One day, shortly after he had gone to the cemetery with Irene, he found a sizable dent in the car door on the passenger's side of his Plymouth. He ran the car that night until there was no gas

Moonlight Sonata

in it. He pushed it to the top of Dunseith Street, near the old cemetery. He opened the windows of the car and lit matches and threw them on the car seat. In his awkward, erect stance, not bending at all, he ran home. From an attic on the top floor of his house he watched the flames from the Plymouth light up windows across Dunseith. When the flames had died and the windows across the street held only night in them and the reflections of stars, he went downstairs and played Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata on the Baldwin. He was sure Beethoven would have understood him at this moment. He heard the finality that Penny spoke of. It was a famous fire, and people wondered what jealous thief had stolen Gregory's new car and set it ablaze. Only Gregory knows that he has put on a funeral pyre all ofhis earthly aspirations and that whatever good fortune is in store for him will come in the next world. He will take no more chances wanting happiness on Dunseith Street or anywhere else. Who knows, Gregory thinks, what further punishments might wait for him when he has already paid so dearly for such small prizes.

·73 .

SI X

'Today the War Is Over

sat at the kitchen table with the news on the radio washing over him, unshaven, not working for a week in celebration perhaps of the war ending. The bristles on his face were white now, turned snowy over the years as he triumphed drunkenly over one war or another-the defeat of a dispatcher at Yellow Cab where he worked, Roosevelt dying, the end of World War II that day. "Well, Johnny," he said, "we whipped the Nat-zis, and now we kill the British and then turn the old machine guns on your goddamned unions." "Right, Pop," Johnny said, "and then the fairies at Pitt." "It's not funny, kid. But what the hell, it's your world, not mine. Bastards did me in: it's up to you, and you're more like them than not. Go to hell with them, Johnny." "Okay, Pop, but first I'll go to work." HIS FATHER

·75 .

LocalIrregularities

"All you go to hell," Pop said to the invisible horde who plagued him daily with their insinuations. When Johnny went to straighten the linoleum on the table where the old man sat, his father had fallen asleep, tilted back, chin to heaven in a wooden chair. Well, his mother wasn't there to see it: dead now three years, a further insult to his father, who periodically cursed her for abandoning him when he wasn't reminding his only son his mother had been a saint. Johnny had not been drafted because of his leg and allowed to peacefully die blown to shreds by a shell fragment in North Africa. The world war was for four years a distant abstraction. He heard in Oakland of the young men who died from Robinson and Terrace and of course wished theatrically that he could meet death in a submarine or in a flaming aircraft shot down over Berlin but knew the feeling of selflessness was there because it was not possible. He could afford to dream big; it was in his temperament. He had taken a job selling candy and soda pop in the aisle of the Casino Burlesque Theater on Diamond Street, and it was the closest he could come to high adventure without risking anything. It was not stated, but when the war was over the candy butchers who had gone into service and defense work in Pittsburgh's factories would return to their old jobs at the Casino. And Johnny Bain would leave the half-naked women, the music, the raspy-voiced comedians, Diamond Street forever. He was in his second year at Pitt, an aunt's legacy putting him improbably in classrooms where no Bains had ever sat, maybe a playwright hidden away somewhere in him, but for now his education was all ofwhat he had learned in the burlesque theater. Mostly it was that the combined wisdom of Father Farrell and the nuns at St. Agnes had been wrong, not in what they were right in, the seven

Today the War Is Over

deadly sins and how to wrestle them to at least a standstill, but that the world would somehow turn bleak and ugly at ribaldry, lechery, lust, and dumb laughter. No, it had its joys, and Johnny was pleased that he had learned it before it was too late and he died not knowing. There walked the length of Diamond prostitutes from the North Side shopping in the Woolworth store and Donohue's. And they traveled sometimes in twos and waved at Johnny and he waved back casually, feeling himself evaporate not with love for them but romance at being accepted as the sort of young man who waved at whores and was known to them. And occasionally a pimp stopped to talk to him, there on Diamond come to redeem a watch in one of the area's pawnshops, while Johnny stood out on the sidewalk between shows. "Show any good this week, Irish?" "I like it." "Georgia Southern." "She packs them in," Johnny said, as ifstanding on a sidewalk checkered in reds and blacks from neons everywhere and talking to a man who made his living selling women's bodies were the most normal thing in the world for a former altar boy. That was the enemy: not knowing what was out there, out on Diamond and the cheap music of the Casino orchestra and the sequined girls dancing, before one turned one's back on it for a good life or one more acceptable to people Johnny loved and trusted. He had come to think piety came in many packages, some even gaudy. And for now gaudiness, long denied him as a child of government housing projects, the welfare rolls, and a father not often sober, was to be closed away again from him by changing times. He did not know how to say to himself that he had hardly thought of the war as something real. Can a person pray over

LocalIrregularities

what he saw in the newsreels when the boom-boom ofthe Casino orchestra's drums called him to the immediate truth of bright, flashing lights on bare-shouldered women? Ray Krieg, the leader of the Casino five-piece band, was leaning on a post and talking to one of the showgirls the night the war was declared over in Europe. She was a tall woman with makeup that made her look fifteen years old from twenty rows back, twenty-five at ten rows, fifty up close. But she stood bold and big-chested in a loose pink sweater at the back of the theater, and Krieg, who was very short, was blocking her. Her showname was Dolly Delight and her real name was Anna Pescover. "Let me ask you something, Dolly," Krieg said, licking his small lips. He was pale and mottled and his hair was coiffed to fit around his head like a halo. "If the right man were to come along," he said, "a six-footer with diamond rings on three fingers of his hands, a medium-sized millionaire's ranch down in Texas, twenty thousand acres, guy who gave to charity and respected women for ladies, and he promised you there'd be no funny stuff for the first eighteen months of your marriage, would you consider marrying again?" "No." Krieg often played piano with the bands at the Stanley when a musician was missing. It was said he had been asked to travel personally by Russ Morgan. "Dolly, what if I was to tell you I was that man from Texas," Krieg said, "and there'd be no funny stuff between us for the first three years and I'd never come nearer to you than an acre?" "I have to go," Dolly said. "What if I promised five years, five solid years?" "What's the catch, Ray?"

Today the war Is Over

"Catch! We first go on a three-day trial honeymoon up to New Kensington, does that sound like a catch?" "I'd rather go up to New Kensington with a dwarf," Dolly said. "I'd rather go up to New Kensington with a snake or the hunchback of Notre Dame." Swinging around to avoid Krieg, she pointed to Johnny and said, "I'd rather go up to New Kensington with him." She walked away angrily to the entrance, her high heels clicking on the tile floor near the cashier's booth. Krieg leaned against the back wall and said, "With even the cracks about the dwarfs and the hunchback of Notre Dame you did better than me." "I noticed," Johnny said. "I'll tell you something," the bandleader at the Casino said, "that woman is crazy about me." Walking down Diamond, the piano player asked Johnny what his plans were now that the war was over in Europe. "I think I'll go into panhandling," Johnny said. "Or coal mining. I think I got a gift for both." Krieg said, "You know, the war wasn't bad for everybody." "Bad if you were in it." "Not on the shores ofthe Allegheny River in downtown Pittsburgh," Krieg said. "I was in it, kind of. Women, good money, a chance to do something: I'm thinking of all the musicians coming home. The war ending ain't an unmixed blessing, not that I'd want it to go on another minute. But it ending ain't good for everybody." "Lot of suffering," Johnny said. "There's always a lot of suffering," Krieg said, "one way or another."

LocalIrregularities

"Maybe the war with Japan will go on for another five years," Johnny said. "Maybe," Krieg said, thoughtful, then, "not that I'd want it to go on a minute longer. But you know, kid, this means the end to the biggest romance of my life." "You're young, Ray, who knows? There may be another war." "Her husband is in Europe," Ray said sadly, "the first to come home. I'd marry her, but she doesn't love me, she loves him." Krieg and Johnny turned into Donahue's cafeteria, while the organ at the Diamond Rink down the square distinctly played "Happy Days Are Here Again." They bought coffee and sat at a table with crumbled tissues and other coffee cups still on it. "I played out at the veterans hospital," Ray said. "I donated my time. I went out there once a month and I played for the veterans. I'll tell you the truth, I didn't start World War II." They finished their coffee and went back out on Diamond. At the show that night soldiers and civilians popped balloons and shot each other with water pistols. Strangers drank from each other's whiskey bottles, passing them down the rows. Between the shows, Krieg said, "I guess it's over, the big part of the war, the ride." "Yeah," Johnny said, wondering why he considered himself better than the bandleader. "We aren't ever going to have it so good, right?" "Yeah." "The women, you know, it was us or nothing, right?" "Ray, you're talking to the quarterback on the team with the two-foot-two players." "I mean, we're done." "Ray, I'm nineteen." "So what?" ·80·

Today the ~r Is Over

After the show Johnny went to a bar at the end of Diamond, near Market, with three other candy butchers and Ray. There was a mood of solemnity about the men. Some had been out of work for years before the war: they liked their jobs in burlesque. The men each left alone, quietly, until there was silence in the bar from no one at all talking, the sadness of change, a melancholy in the uncertainty of newness. About two that morning, the day the war ended in Europe, Johnny put his arm around Ray Krieg's narrow shoulders. They sat in the bar on Market Street at the foot of Diamond with a young downtown pimp named Nate. Nate was twenty-one; he smiled a sweet, sardonic, successful pimp's smile. What more was there to know than what he knew of human frailty and misadventure? Johnny thought. He listened too to Krieg's long descent into tears and recriminations. When Ray said, "My life's like dirty water running into the gutter," Johnny put his hand on his shoulder and said, "Come on, Ray, it's only a world war ending." The day Admiral Doenitz ordered the German V-boats to cease action and Hermann Goring turned himself into the American authorities and the surrender documents were signed in Europe, the pimp-whose day was just beginning-smiled to himself and took the fall of the Third Reich for what it was worth to him, Johnny thought, a preoccupied smile. He had said to Johnny once when they talked about the subject of the Germans winning the war and coming to Pittsburgh, two young men, late at night, leaning on a streetlight post, "What I sell is like bread; I don't ever run out of buyers. In my business we don't lose no wars." He had considered a German victory, and he had concluded as fog gathered in the streetlights above them, "If the Germans, or the Japanese, doesn't matter, ·81 .

LocalIrregularities

get off the train at the Union Station, or whatever place they ship them into Pittsburgh from Berlin, I figure when they march up Diamond I'm waiting for them. I'm a millionaire before they leave downtown. They're here ten days and I'm elected minister of something, whoring, I'm the minister of whoring." Ray said, "I feel like crying. I lost the love of my life tonight." He left the bar, and Johnny said to Nate, "Well, we won." "Lot of black market tires I got to find buyers for," he said. "Silk stockings, tires, cigarettes, sugar in five-pound bags, lot of people are going to be hurt by the Germans folding so quick. Let me do something for you, Johnny, celebrate the end of the war. I'll call Sylvia, the one with the mole on her cheek. My treat." "No, no thanks," Johnny said. He was still a virgin. He had sworn to himself his first time would be with a woman he loved, deeply, completely, forever, one only and then never another woman. "Don't cry," Nate said. "It's only a war. There'll be others." "I'm sad for other things." As he walked up Diamond to take the last Terrace Village bus home to the government housing projects he watched the men and the women still on the streets in the cool May evening and the storefronts, studied it all intently, soldiers, sailors, and then as from the outside himself as if he were a stranger. The night felt for the moment like a last act and even later than that: soon stagehands would come to take away the street where he walked and replace it with a set that was for the play after the war. He breathed in deeply the prospect of that new set. He was unburdened. Free of thinking, he worried not much about anyone but himself, and he could begin the first act no better than pimps, whores, or old bandleaders and that was a relief, he thought, for an altar boy at heart.

Today the

~r

Is Over

His father still sat miraculously at the kitchen table where he had left him that morning. He stared at Johnny with no great comprehension of who had floated into his drunkard's dreams. Johnny took him by the rib cage and lifted him and half-supported, half-dragged his father to bed, the sense of a large rag doll there in the movement, and thought, Wars end, but there's no third act to this play. "What is it?" his father asked in a blur as he fell into bed, wondering why he was descending and where. "Nothing, Pop," Johnny said. "It's nothing."

SEVEN

The

~igSnow

IN THE brief, great snow of 1957 there were trapped in the Irish Club one December night three people who did not know each other. Young Harp Doster, one of the men, stranded there as the snow became impossible to navigate-it was he who told me of the night's adventures-had come in to see if his younger brother Mack was there, loitered, had a white wine, and found himself with the other man and woman as company for more than eight hours. The woman was known as Iron City Ruth in celebration of her favorite drink and as a tribute to the legend of her never having been observed completely sober within the memory of the most ancient sages at the Ancient Order of Hibernians, Division 9-or anywhere along Forbes Street where the drunks and others gathered in saloons and restaurants. She used to sit, when her evenings had rendered her legs powerless

LocalIrregularities

to carry her, on the sidewalk or lean against a pole until a policeman came to take her away. Not welcome at the AOH, in fact, barred for life (more in fear that she would topple to her death down the long flight of stairs to the place than any moral issue about her drinking), the night of the snowfall she had slipped in and sat in a corner unnoticed as responsible people left to avoid the fast-falling snow. The other man there was named Arnold Armisted, and he did not drink at all. What was he doing in the Irish Club, famous for drink to cause merriment, drink to ward off depression, and drink to calm hilarity too easily run rampant? The truth was he was not alone there in sitting for hours and not touching a drop. The air often rang with friendship for the misbegotten, the jukebox light embraced strangers and made them kin, the smoke held promise, and in that company there were no small expectations. Often even when I was sober I was gripped by the spell years running and would return tomorrow if such consummate camaraderie had not for me vanished from the world when the place closed its doors forever. When Paul Kerry, the bartender-many nights the last one abroad to aid the wounded and disheveled-left for a temporary moment to help an old woman, an aunt of Dickie Trent, find her way to a cab, found none, and was stranded with her until a police car came for the two of them in the snow, Armisted was forgotten as he sat in one corner ofthe Irish Club lost in thought. He had not noticed everyone had left and would not have cared had he been aware of it. Iron City Ruth, for her part, mumbled into the night, accosting and accusing phantoms; it was not necessary to her for many years to have anyone there to hear of her complaints. She offered them up to strangers as well as empty air. ·86·

The Big Snow That meant Doster, a young man home from Notre Dame, stood alone at the bar to ponder his immediate future. We all admired Young Harp Doster, one of the sharpest minds at the Ancient Order of Hibernians, Division 9, precise in language, quick with numbers and percentages in his head. He knew the batting averages of every Pirate infielder from the great days when the team played on the North Side before Forbes Field was opened. He was going to finish at Notre Dame, with all that such a journey to Indiana meant, beautifully barbered, friendly, white shirt and tie at noon and midnight when he returned home for Christmas, the envy of all, and he studied accounting. There was talk of huge salaries at the profession by the boys in Oakland, possibilities with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, managing your own limited funds into millions with knowledge of debits and credits. Kerry had told him to keep his eye on the bar, he would return shortly, and when he did not Young Harp, watching the snow outside the windows fall in thick waves, knew the reason. He called his brother Mack, but the club's one phone was out of order, not a casualty of the storm but generally inoperative. He had a key for Mack to open the front door at their aunt Lillian's house, where Mack was to stay for three days, tending their wealthy aunt's seven cats and four dogs. Young Harp and Mack were her only heirs, and they were known to love their aunt, the dogs and cats, even recognizing there was a certain eccentricity to keeping a menagerie in a private home. Young Harp saw nothing but disaster ahead. Mack would not be able to get through the snow and, once at their aunt's house (she was in Boston visiting her sister), would discover he had no key. To break a window would admit the snow to inundate Aunt Lillian's costly rugs and draperies. To stand idly by would be to court havoc among the pets. Outside, the snow against the

LocalIrregularities

Irish Club front door was seven feet high in a monumental drift. Young Harp pushed against it, but there might as well have been chains ofsteel that held him fast to the AOH. Perhaps there were other snows that fantastically quick and deep, but nothing within Young Harp's memory would ever compete with it. Looking about him at Iron City Ruth in one corner and Arnold in another, neither of whom he knew, Ruth of course by sight and reputation, he became angry. "Look at the two of you," he called. "You don't give a damn that there's people who have somewhere to be, that there's no sense to sitting in a place and having nowhere else to go." "Did either of them answer?" I asked. He and I were sitting at the bar in the Irish Club about six years after these events. Billy O'Brien had been with us at the bar and ruefully shook his head, his concerns elsewhere, and said before he left, "If these old walls could talk, wouldn't that be something?" We had waited for further clarification from Billy, but he just shook his head again and left us. But Billy's remark and the present night around us, laughter in the smoke, two women dancing a polka, maybe the bright April night outdoors filled with promise but memory too reminded Young Harp of the great snowfall. "Well," he said, "Armisted called to me, 'I don't believe I've had the pleasure of your name,' he said from the corner. Civil, correct, it was draw up a chair and let's chat, to say, Look what a lovely evening this turned out to be after all. "I said to him, 'And you're not going to have the pleasure either.' He said, 'That's too bad, you seem like a good guy. I just thought we'd talk for a while.' Then from the corner Iron City Ruth said, 'I have no home. The streets are my home.' "

·88 .

The Big Snow

Young Harp hunched over his drink. "I wasn't too nice, was I?" he asked. "I don't know. I sympathize with everybody there." "I saw my brother out in the snow, killing himself getting out to Forest Hills and not having the right key. I saw the cats and dogs getting hungrier and going for each other, knocking over vases, taking each other by the throat, clawing out eyes." "What did you do?" "I sat at the bar for two hours drinking white wine, and then I called to Armisted, 'Why is it you have no place else to be?' and he said, 'You're wrong, I do. I just like it better here.'" "Young Harp," I said, "this is a crazy night you're describing." "About an hour later Iron City Ruth gets up and starts to dance. She says, 'Ain't the music fine!' and of course there is no music, there is no sound at all except the wind outside. I put my head down, Clifton, and I began to cry, not for attention-Lord knows there's nobody there to give me attention I'd want-just in despair. I worked my way through Notre Dame, laying sewer pipe, mixing cement, dirty stuff to get somewhere. What others had come easy I had to do ten times more for. I'd study up there at school until I fell asleep but not with my head on a desk but damned falling off a chair in the South Bend library and causing people to look at me. And here I was: this is what it came to, Iron City Ruth doing a waltz from an insane asylum and Arnold Armisted staring straight ahead with a happy little smile and in my mind cats clawing dogs and dogs tearing out the throats of cats." "Did your hair turn white in the one night?" He laughed. "No, the things that happen to some of us don't allow for white hair in a night. Otherwise, we'd all be white-

LocalIrregularities

haired from centuries back. But, no, the evening wasn't over. She's out there curtsying and bowing and singing, 'Lover, come back to me,' and Arnold stands up, his hands out, and walks out to the floor. 'May I have this dance,' he asks, and she says, 'Yes, if you know how to act like a fucken gentleman.' He says, 'Yes, oh, yes, I'm always a gentleman. Ask anyone.' Well, they dance, her with her stockings down around her ankles and tripping over the men's shoes she's wearing and him up to about her nose with the top of his head." "What a night!" "Wait a minute: while they're dancing she's calling out profanity to invisible people. Bastard this and that and worse: it's at nuns who did her injustices and maybe a daughter, who could tell? And cops and bartenders. He's dancing along swooping and bowing with her as if they were at the Schenley Hotel. I thought I was going to lose my mind at the spectacle. I sat there, wondering what does a sane person do under such circumstances? And what I did was I went to the jukebox. It was still operating. I put in a quarter. I punched in a Doris Day song, another by Vaughn Monroe, something else. You see, I was holding on to my sanity-mad people out there on the dance floor not caring about snow, not needing music to dance. "I put on the music, and to show them how lunatic their conduct was, I began to dance, by myself, to the songs on the jukebox. Of course, neither one of them looked over to me. Armisted was a plumber's assistant, you know; for all I could tell this was the night of his life. He lived alone in a house his mother had left him, and here he was dancing, maybe the first time in his life. And there we were, the three of us, neither of them paying any attention to the music or me. Just dancing, him shuffling along, one foot tripping over the other and Iron City

The Big Snow

Ruth talking to the skies and the roof, arguing and mumbling curses, and her head and eyes rolling not always in the same direction. I finished my dance, pleased with myself for showing the world I was going to be a certified public accountant or whatever I was trying to prove. Then I went to the jukebox and played another quarter's worth and again and again. When I ran out of quarters I hit the till behind the bar and took out fistfuls and put them into the jukebox. I two-stepped, did a fox trot, hands holding an invisible woman. Oh, I was good, never better, Clifton, acting like a maniac to show how sane I was. Sweat was pouring off me. They were dancing without music- l' m a rational person, I played music for my solo dance. I showed them I wasn't like them. The wine and the snow outside and her and him and nothing making sense, I was having the time of my life. I guess I was as free as I ever was or ever will be again." I felt 1 was intruding now. Young Harp's eyes shone bright with the memory. "Well," I asked, "the other dancers. How'd they do?" "Kept going for hours," he said, "until she finally ended the marathon by sitting down on the floor right in the middle of a hail of curses. Then she curled up and went to sleep, right there on the floor." "And what did he do?" "He turns to me and says, 'I wish the snow would go on all night, all day and all night.' He goes hack to his table in the corner. I ate all the hardboiled eggs behind the bar-I don't know what the other two lived on. 1 couldn't wake her, and he refused an egg I offered him. Paul Kerry came with the fire department in the morning and put up a ladder to a window and carried us down to the street. The front door had snow in front of it for a week."

LocalIrregularities

I put on my windbreaker and said, "That was some snow. I hardly remember it." He said, "I'll leave with you." We walked outside, and I asked, "Did Armisted ever say anything more to you?" "Not that night; but about a month later he walked up to me quickly where I was waiting for a streetcar at Forbes and Atwood and he looks up at me and says, 'You ain't a very friendly guy,' and he keeps walking like he never spoke, done with me once and for all." The air was thin with the new spring and the lights in buildings were stark and every window sash was plain and dark as if the streets were marked out in some clear design and waiting to be read in squares of brightness etched in squares of black. A wind rustled newspapers down Oakland Avenue. On Forbes I could see the lights of the Cathedral of Learning at Pitt ascending as part of some geometric truth in rectangles of light to be unraveled. "Not a friendly guy," Young Harp said. "He said I wasn't friendly, not crazy like him he meant." "What did you say to him?" "What could I say? He was right. The cats didn't claw the dogs and the dogs didn't bite the cats. My brother got a key from the lady next door and fed the animals. I should have been somewhere else that night, instead of ruining a good time for people who don't have that many of them."

PART TWO

Costly cY'vfisapprehensions

E I G H T

'The 0'vfoment

BENNY CM1E to Oakland trailing the scattered dust of his old neighborhood with him. The Hill District was being torn down in large sounds of wrecking balls against old walls and chimneys crashing to concrete pavements in rumbles and roars. But Benny also carried with him to Oakland all the suspicions and terrors of the unknown that came with the dire poverty of the Hill, living on the edge, the angle shooting and take-what's-not-nailed-down philosophy. He moved with his grandmother into three rooms on a street in Oakland named Joe Hammer Square for a serviceman from the neighborhood who had recently been killed in France, and Benny could not believe his luck. Among the Irish where he now circulated he was considered a member in good standing of any group he fell into: at a table in the Irish Club, along the counter at the Sun Drug, before

Costly Misapprehensions

the smoke shop and Gus Miller's newsstand. When they went downtown to a movie he sat with the best of them on a streetcar, laughing as loud as the loudest, and not called on at all to be funny, or noisy, or to prove himself. In the Polish, Jewish, and black Hill District he had never felt at home: being short in body and spindly, even called Big Head by bullies in street basketball games, left out, cheated at marbles and card games on the steps of the Irene Kaufmann Settlement and too frail to utter a complaint. He came into this new good luck in one stroke; he had courted in a brief two weeks a local girl named Celeste Costello, been welcomed, and in days announced their engagement. With her he acquired as loyal compatriots her three brothers, an array of cousins, the goodwill of the elder Costellos-one was an assistant to the Director of Public Safety in Pittsburgh-and easy passage wherever he went, with or without Celeste on his thin arm. She was perhaps twenty-three and not readily marriageable. She was taller than Benny, and acne scars had rendered her cheeks ruined to a perpetually sad expression, although she was a happy young woman with bright, clear eyes and a quick, wide smile. But she had been left over or overlooked, or whatever the sages from Central Catholic High School called it, to refine the terrible fact that Celeste Costello would never marry unless it was, as the sour doorman, Dougherty, put it, to a mental case or a Jew. Benny, for his part, felt that Heaven had blessed him. He was almost seventeen when he arrived in Oakland with his old grandmother, she looking as morose and tranquil as the queen of spades in a deck of cards, and within a month he had acquired a sweetheart, scores of friends, an orphan but now with Celeste's mother and father replacing his own parents, new grandparents, places to be and the sweet, congenial atmo-

The Moment

sphere of long tales, bravado, and laughter until dawn with his new friends, who called him Benjamin and not Big Head. Pal Mahoney, who was related to Thelma, a first cousin of Celeste, and known the length ofOakland from Panther Hollow to the Fairfax Apartments and St. Paul's Cathedral as a scholar who could win arguments with his Jesuit teachers at Central Catholic High, when he saw Benny on Forbes in the afternoons called to him and led him down the avenue into Forbes Field past friendly ticket takers to watch the Pirates. Benny sat with a rowdy neighborhood group in an empty box. He felt himself alive in the green grass of the outfield, the far fences, the skies overhead. Mahoney's warm acceptance shone on him like an official word down from the altar of St. Agnes. Benny lived in this golden time through his senior year at Schenley High School. At lunchtime room was made for him at the table with Oakland friends, and after school he was the center of a group jostling and ragging each other as they made their way down to Forbes. Sometimes they went into Schenley Park, and Benny stood by while the other boys called out to girls, no one needing to ask about his reticence: on Saturday nights Celeste with silver earrings and Benny in a tie he had borrowed from her brother Clutch walked down Forbes, greeting friends on each corner, Halket and Oakland, Coltart and Atwood, and going into the Sun Drug for a coffee, then downtown for Glenn Miller or Tommy Dorsey at the Stanley, then back to Oakland and the Irish Club at midnight to sit like a respectable married couple while boys and their occasional dates drifted by, and no one had to ask why Benny hung back when the others hooted and jived and cajoled stray girls. He had it, as they said, made in the shade. From all that anyone observed, Celeste's brothers did not act as if they had dropped in anyone's estimation by traveling with

Costly Misapprehensions

Benny and having their sister dally with him until two in the morning at the Irish Club, then leave with Benny, and half an hour later, as custom had it, Benny return to the club to drink until dawn with the other regulars. Benny stood his drinks. He worked part time as an assistant manager at the Strand Theater on Forbes, and only someone unfamiliar with Benny or Celeste or the Costello brothers, jakey, Ray, and Clutch, would discredit Benny by making sounds in the theater at the screen or each other or wrestle in the aisle. Benny was lavish with free passes-given out by the Strand usually to people who put up a theater poster in their shop windows-and bartenders bought him drinks and shouted, "Benny-o!" when he entered a saloon. He thought at the time he would know no greater moments in his life: that all that the long, full years ahead could hold for him would be the promise that this good time continue, slowly linger on in salutations and shouts, greetings and good cheer surround him until, old and almost infirm, he and Celeste would sit at the Irish Club like Celeste's grandparents and nod and smile at the world, which had somehow turned out right. Benny had one relative aside from his grandmother, a brother of his late father, and when Rusty Tapchin was discharged from the army in 1945 he came directly to Pittsburgh to see his nephew. After an evening with Celeste and Benny, visiting at bars and the Sun Drug, walking about downtown on Liberty Avenue-it was spring and the air was cool and vibrant-he sat with Benny after Celeste had left the Irish Club and laughed and joked with the regulars. However, the next day he spoke his mind: "What do you need it for?" Rusty asked. "You're seventeen and you're already a man with a millstone around your neck. I do not mean Celeste. I am speaking generally of the principle ofyoung people

The Moment

marrying. I married at twenty-two before I left for the army and at twenty-six I'm a divorced man with a child somewhere in a town I don't know the name of. Is that justice? I don't wish it on you, Benny, but someone must tell you, and you have no father to speak to you. Give it up before your life is poisoned the way mine was." Rusty Tapchin was a cook by trade and was on his way to Las Vegas: he had already worked, as young as he was, in Atlantic City, Toronto, and New York. "Remember," he said, "I'm not speaking of Celeste. She's a peach. I would marry her myself: but the principle is a bad one and, you know, when it all comes down to what life's about, it's all principle. Good-bye. Whatever you do, you'll have my respect. But don't make a mistake it'll take you fifteen years to undo." He took the train that day for Nevada. For several days Benny felt honored that someone had cared for him and given him advice, but he thought that Rusty Tapchin did not know how sorrowful life had been for him before Oakland and how good it was now. He went over arguments in his mind and was convinced that if he and his uncle had talked longer he could have persuaded him. Then he became angry with his father's brother: the cook did not know him well enough to intrude on his life. He did not know Celeste or the fellows at the Irish Club, and he had not grown up an orphan, pushed around by anyone who weighed ten pounds more than he did. Now he had strong, always present brothers, Ray, Clutch, and Jakey]akey had a Marine Corps tattoo on his right bicep-and no one bothered him but everyone spoke well to him and friendly and kind. But when he went over the arguments in his mind he would like to throw at his uncle, after a month it became apparent to Benny it was Oakland and the Irish Club and Celeste's grandparents and brothers and friendly bartenders who stood at

Costly Misapprehensions

the forefront of his thoughts and not Celeste. She was in her way all he wanted, but he had never been engaged before. Perhaps she was not only a millstone around a young man's neck but personally the wrong woman for him. That week he gave a pass to one of the Carr sisters and told her to sit near the back of the theater and after the last movie led her up to the projection booth where the projectionist had a disheveled cot with an old army blanket. Benny could not, of course, be seen on the street with either of the Carr sisters, but he knew that mounting her in the dark theater, the thrill even of her ruined breath and too soft flesh, had damaged Celeste Costello for him forever. If this could happen-the pleasure that only books wrote about, with someone like Catherine Carr-then marriage was impossible for him now: he had never tried a woman before except once, and that was a prostitute and he feared sweating on her, and he had determined to keep himself pure for Celeste as she told him she stayed for him. But degraded Catherine Carr, who went into alleys and the backs of trolleys with motormen at the end oftheir run at midnight, had demonstrated to Benny that there was more to men and women than his romance with Celeste had led him to expect. He thought Celeste looked like an angel when she explained to him that all she was or hoped to be lay in waiting for her future husband. And knowing Benny now, she said, she was gratified she had waited. The sisters at St. Agnes were right. Benny knew, watching Catherine Carr make her way down the steps of the Strand to Forbes outside in her shapeless padded coat, that he was going to be a man too easily satisfied. If Catherine could offer such flight, then he needed no wife schooled in divinity to please his meager expectations. He did not sleep

. 100'

The Moment

that night. He thought of nothing but Catherine Carr's smooth shoulders. He scrutinized young women as they passed him on Forbes and Coltart and as he ran across the Boulevard of the Allies. If a wretched girl like Catherine Carr could contain such wonder and bottomless pleasure, then who knew what wonder lay behind each ordinary face he passed? He studied them, seeing no hint beyond what he had always seen. But now he knew. He would find out more. Benny found things to do after school and avoided Celeste, and when she asked him after a long silence one night if there was anything wrong and later if there was someone else, he honestly answered no. It was his own nature, he decided, not anything between them, not other women. Friday night, they went to sit in the back booth at Gammon's Waffie Shop, where Benny had gone Sunday mornings to eat chili with Beersy and Brick Collins, both of whom lived on Joe Hammer Square, and neither Celeste nor Benny knew what to say to each other. Finally, Celeste said, "I don't like Joan Crawford," a favorite of Benny at the Strand, and Benny said quickly, "Neither do I." It was better than nothing between them, and people on the street still hailed them as sweethearts, but Benny felt like an impostor. He did not take her hand as they walked. Her brothers-not Ray, who later became a priest-wanted to pummel Benny and make him keep his promise to their sister, but Celeste was outraged that they would even talk about such tactics. "I still love him," she said quietly. "He'll come around to his senses." But Benny began to avoid seeing her altogether, never quite explaining.

·101 .

Costly Misapprehensions

Christmas 1946, leaving the Irish Club at the entrance on Oakland, Celeste said, "You're not going to marry me, are you, Benjamin?" He said, "No." "You don't love me?" she asked. "I didn't say that," he said. He loved it all, each snowflake in the darkness and the lights in the windows under the blinds across the street; he could hug Batman, the newsboy on the corner who wore a long black cape at Christmastime and all the people in all the diners on Forbes and Fifth bent over their coffee at the counters. He could throw himself at the feet of Celeste's grandfather upstairs in the club, a man named Cortigan, and tell him: "Sit just as you are until both of us die and tell me again and again how Zim Fitzgerald in your village slept with the pigs one night and the priest found him on Sunday morning." Benny knew love when he felt it. "I do love you, Celeste," he said. "No," she said. "You're a strange person." "We'll try," he said, not wanting to give up his moment among the Irish. He had known Celeste for almost a year: there would never be such times again. No one would call to him in a bar or break ranks on an Oakland corner to allow him room to laugh with them. She turned and walked away. "Wait, Celeste," he called, hurrying to catch her. "Please, don't make it worse." At work the next night he walked down the aisle to be sure the door to the alley behind the Strand was closed and someone tripped him. Carrying his flashlight, in his uniform with his large shoulders and bright brass buttons, he stumbled and fell and rolled. As he tumbled trying to catch his balance an old fear ·102·

The Moment

came over him, that in the darkness he was surrounded by enemies. In his last year in Oakland the fear had subsided to a memory, but now as he staggered down the aisle the terror returned complete and everywhere in the dark theater. Righting himself halfway down the aisle, he stood and looked up the aisle, knowing it was probably a boy strange to him who sat in an aisle seat. Bent, brushing himself, he ignored the boy and continued on to the back door. He shook. He knew that he had nowhere to turn and he was outweighed once more as he had been in the dark theaters and alleys of the Hill District where he had been called Big Head. He felt teary; he knew he would have to leave Oakland soon. The next night, seeing Celeste before her doorstep with her cousin Thelma, he boldly advanced to apologize, but Celeste said, "Don't speak to me. Don't call me. Don't write." "Wait," Benny said. Thelma, who was the same age as Celeste but married, said, "Someone has pride, even if you haven't any manhood, Benjamin." The two walked away from him without turning to observe him alone on the sidewalk. Benny fell back; watching Celeste, seeing her again once or twice before he stopped coming up to Forbes from Joe Hammer Square, he hardly recognized her. She wore black like one in mourning and was pale, and he was too frightened to talk to her. He heard before he left Pittsburgh to join his uncle in Las Vegas that she had become engaged again. An older man, back from the war, a widower and a distant cousin, Benny thought he remembered him, a man named Brian with sparse reddish hair and red hairs on the backs of his hands. Benny hoped, deep inside himself, that Celeste would be happy. She would raise the . r03 .

Costly Misapprehensions

man's children from his first marriage and have the husband she deserved. Benny also hoped that none of the boys he had known in Oakland hated him now. He persuaded himself that if they did dislike him for the time being it was because he had broken off with Celeste Costello, but in the beginning they had let him become one of them because they liked him for himself. He had fit. They would not have spoken of their mysteries and triumphs to someone who was merely going to marry a local girl: Benny had been as fierce as anyone in condemning England in Ireland, had cheered like a madman for the Irish Club in their annual Thanksgiving Day football game with Oakland Community, and had worn a large shamrock in his lapel on St. Patrick's Day to school and work and remembered how strangers at the bar of the Irish Club had embraced him and he sang all night with them. He is pleased with his memories when he was seventeen more than anything else in this life but never sees Celeste's face when he remembers how it was, years ago, in Oakland. He went in time from a door-to-door seller of pots and pans to taking over the company when it went bankrupt and step by step building a business. Benny is reasonably satisfied with the kitchen utensils business he has built up. He knows something is lacking, a time spoiled and incomplete behind him. He employs a hundredforty-eight salesmen, and his pots and pans, kettles and tongs with elaborate handles are known throughout all the states of the United States east of the Mississippi. He has plans to expand and thinks he will probably die in California, far from Pittsburgh, where he was born. He has two children and he sent them to two of the best schools in New England, after walking around tree-shaded campuses and being assured that bullying and pushing around of younger pupils by older, stronger ones . 1° 4

.

The Moment

was against the principles of the schools. He divorced his wife of twenty years and does not regret her absence or the settlement. He is content to live alone, well regarded by the people he nods to on an elevator in his condominiums in Hartford and Mission Hills and by his salesmen and other employees, whom he gives a substantial bonus and incentives to ensure their affection. He has a vague air of sadness about him and keeps a picture ofErrol Flynn as Robin Hood on his office wall. He seldom thinks of Celeste and when he does he remembers more the bright, clean camaraderie and friendship of the boys along Oakland Avenue and Darraugh and how the Irish loved him once and how solidly Celeste's grandparents sat weekly in their steady chairs at the Irish Club as if good times never passed. For her part, Celeste remembers daily, sometimes for weeks at a time, Benny's delicate hands and wrists and his high forehead and small mouth and tiny teeth and wishes she could see him just once to see if he's changed much over the years.

" 1° 5 "

NINE

The Secret Smile

in her heart at nineteen technically a virgin, three times too lost in the situation to retreat without waking the dead by screams or, worse, calling for the police to butt in on a personal problem. She felt the innocence in herselfbecause there had been no love at all on her part, no feeling about the whole event but a victory in each man as he raced to his finish. Were the acts to count eternally against her? No, never. Doris knew what virgin was, and she was one. Give her a lie detector test and see the results. In her fingertips, her bloodstream-her heart-she was unspoiled, pure, no matter who judged and failed to understand. She became fast friends and teamed up with a girl she worked with at Shraft's downtown. The girl was a college student and a hostess in the restaurant where Doris was a cashier. Between them-Megan, her friend, rich with courses in psychology-

SHE WAS

. 1° 7

.

Costly Misapprehensions

they worked out the rules of the game. Give as little as you could, kissing, even a touch here or there, and then quick withdrawal when it went too far: and if the guy was okay he'd stop, see you again, and respect you enough to pay for a combination fried fish dinner at Gammon's and an orchid at Easter. She trusted Megan, but Megan was so damned popular. Was she putting out on the sly? At nineteen Doris knew there was something about her that made men desperately love her or find her intriguing anyhow. The Ward house was six blocks from St. Agnes. A young priest, a pathetic figure bent forward with his neck coming from somewhere between his collarbones, came to board with Doris and her father. The church gave her father fifty dollars a month for his keep. The priest worked in a youth program in East Liberty but helped Father Farrell at St. Agnes too, and Doris knew the ungainly young priest, like other men, was hypnotized by the unearthly quality in her. Her father said to her with his mocking laugh, "Maybe you'll run away with Father Cutliffe" and pointed to the absent priest's door. But of course a woman's father could not see the mysterious web she wove around men. Men were bedeviled and alarmed by their own emotions and never knew what to say, and because of their paralysis she was left alone in the world on Valentine's Day, Easter, and Christmas. At nineteen, in 1951, it broke her heart. She heard her heart snapping in the sound of their old house creaking and the wind blowing the raw branches of the winter-chilled trees. The Reverend Cutliffe boarded with the Wards for eighteen months, but his flickity-flick walk, the sudden turtle turn of his neck, the green eyes with the scarlet rims pervaded Doris's life forever. A priest, he knew. ·108 .

The Secret Smile

He startled her twilights sitting on a garbage can dangling his short legs, scaring her in the approaching dark until she dropped a garbage bag and ran. Doris and her father once had a detective board with them, a man her father had met at the Irish Club and considered for all of being sixty a marriage prospect, and an old woman who smelled like cabbage boiling, and a young man who stole an expensive Bible of her mother. But none of them followed her hourly down her days like Father Cutliffe. He had a baritone voice with courtly priest's manners and a bronchial condition that had hospitalized him and caused him to set adrift his last parish in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, an hour and a half away. Where he finally went from the Wards' Doris never knew, one day not being there and in his place the detective, who wore a chalky white powder on his face, and he left, and the smelly old lady came and then died. But Father Cutliffe remained in the house, in shadows and sounds and drapes swaying in a movement with no breeze to stir them. One day, while the priest still roomed down the hall from her, Doris observed in fear and delight that she could see in the spring, through trees with no leaves, a certain house down on far Fifth Avenue. No mistake: it was a flourishing whorehouse. Not a high-powered business with Oldsmobiles and Lincolns roaring up and blocking parking places on the sidewalk. It was a mother and three daughters, and the mother, though in her fifties, had breasts like watermelons leaping even over the distance of ten blocks, and the daughters, ranging in age from perhaps nineteen to early thirties, were great unreal breast women, walking afloat in nakedness like women out of time and space in a world seemingly without chairs, beds, doors, mirrors, only passing in nudity and meaningless gestures past one of two windows. Women without clothes as easy in the night as if no man mattered! If . 1° 9

'

Costly Misapprehensions

Doris watched for two hours she might get to see each of them at least once in the bright window. That they could strut around even among themselves and never once catch their breaths that they had said the wrong thing or had otherwise been misunderstood: a marvel and almost on her own dreary doorstep. She walked down Robinson and then Fifth, down to Soho to see them closer. She could then from her own room know better each of their faces and bodies. Across the street, observing them, she wanted to call out to them, but her message was to be a warning, and these women had no need to be cautioned about anything. While her room was still one night-it was perhaps one in the morning and the mother and daughters were dancing on the night in fresh, flowing darkness and whores' freedoms of arms waving and laughter-she looked up at a sound. In a deep, liturgical voice, Father Cutliffe said, "Well, I am disappointed, Doris." He could not see what she saw, but the priest knew. She lay still. In another room her father slept. In her window red lights from the mills across the river on the South Side pulsed against the walls. The priest appeared in the doorway with red glows, vanished, appeared again. He stood near a dresser, its top nearly level with his bent head. Doris slid over on to her back. "What are you talking about?" she asked. He waited a few seconds. "That you should waste your powers like this," he said and was gone from the doorway. Doris and her friend Megan went to a different bar every night. Megan was taller than Doris and fairly blond with a slow, meaningful smile that Doris soon made her own. With this smile and ·110 .

The Secret Smile

her own innate strength, Doris thought she would quickly sweep everything before her on her road to success, husband, children, admiration, but men continued to flock to Megan. They surrounded her. Mesmerized by that peculiar quality in Doris, they seemed-it was mad-to ignore her. She barely had a ride home most evenings, someone driving Megan generously dropping off Doris. As she stood at her front door one evening on her route to meet Megan, Doris saw Father Cutliffe studying her in the small hallway at the entrance to her house. "What are you looking at?" she asked, hand on the doorknob, unable to restrain her confusion and anger. "You are enchantment," he said. "What?" "You're a Lorelei." She tried to see him more clearly by the entrance hallway's dim light. "Speak English," she said. "A Rhine maiden, one of those women who make men lose their senses. They call to sailors and the men crash their boat and drown. No man can resist them." "You're nuts," she said. The next week he departed. And Doris fell into scrutinizing herself in the bathroom mirror. She could not really see an enchantress there, but if he saw it perhaps it was something that hovered about her beyond her knowledge of the power. And men did act entranced around her, silent and watchful, sometimes wary, at other times apprehensive for no reason. "You are wasting your powers," Father Cutliffe came to say to her between sleep and waking, often more real than he had been as an actual man in her room. . III .

Costly Misapprehensions

Doris sat smiling in bars in Castle Shannon and Munhall, Troy Hill and Brentwood, with the deeply mysterious face that would be incomprehensible to everyone except the few sensitive enough to recognize the magical challenge of it. It was a smile that Megan sort of had down to perfection, Doris thought, but it brought her only numbers of the usual unfeeling men a person found in bars. Doris's smile had the full weight of the unknowable about it. She smiled her mysterious smile all day long and into the night. She did not practice it in the mirror. She knew she'd be a picture of foolishness to herself, but who knew what the priest saw there in a power beyond herself? Nights at places where there was dancing and no men to dance with Doris danced with Megan or other women. They laughed and sang together as if they had traveled the length of Pittsburgh to see each other. There are women, she wanted to tell them over the polka beat, who walk naked on Fifth Avenue, and I've seen them. You don't know what kind of world there is, there's everything here. And I know about it! "Is there something about me?" she asked Megan plaintively between dances. "Yes," Megan said-it was a frequent question. "It's hard to describe, but you're a different kind of person, unique." "A lot of good it does me." "Doris, you're profound. Don't ever forget that." "How? How profound?" "I can't put my finger on it, but it's there." It was a long night, and they were in a new bar in Whitehallnot to be visited again-and there were only a few men there,

·112 .

The Secret Smile

all too old. But hearing Megan saywhat she knew to be true gave her reassurance. With or without Megan, she took streetcars every night out to far places like the South Hills, Edgewood, and Swissvale, Carrick, Dormont, places on Noblestown Road. She knew the bars on Oakland like the palm ofher hand. Sometimes she transferred trolleys more than once a night, always aware that on any given night anything might happen. Smiling calmly to herself to quiet her mounting excitement, she searched for the adventures waiting for a sorceress. In the bar of the Roosevelt Hotel downtown it all seemed a wonderful turnaround. She met a young man with slim, tapered fingers and a thin neck, and he wore an open-collared white shirt and a suit of the sleekest gray mohair. His name was Jace, and he looked into her eyes and laughed as if they shared a secret. She went upstairs with him to a room he borrowed from a friend. He put on her thick glasses and pretended he was stumbling around in the dark. This time she understood love completely. She was, in her mind, no longer a virgin. She stopped going out to bars at night with Megan. Thrilled with the happy ending to her short life, she gaveJace every week fifty dollars of the eighty-six she earned. He put it into a joint savings account for the two of them at the Mellon National Bank on Wood Street. They were going to buy a car, then marry and buy a house in Monroeville and have three children. It was April 1953 when they met, and he said in a year's time they would be married. He worked at his father's meatpacking plant on the North Side, managing the workers, going out of town on business, and devising advertising. The plant was in financial trouble, and Jace had been called in to save it. He asked her not to tell anyone about their marital plans because

. 113 .

Costly Misapprehensions

he had an ex-wife who would move in on their mutual savings account. She did tell Megan, but not about the passbook Jace dutifully showed her every week or the car or the house. She said only that they planned to have three children and she was lucky and in love. She did not introduce Megan to Jace. She was afraid Megan would steal him, a once-in-a-lifetime man. She could not see the whores through the trees in the fullblooming summer, and she lost the habit of observing them. In October, Jace taught her a scheme to lift some cash for themselves from Shraft's. Between small short changes to customers and not running up accurate figures on the cash register and destroying the checks, she put together on average a full one hundred and fifty dollars more a week to give Jace. He said he knew it was not a plan to go on forever, but the only good thing that had happened to him in Pittsburgh was Doris. They would soon start a new life in sunny California. "But for God's sake," he said, "don't say anything to anybody about any of this." She stole the money until March the following year, and when she asked Jace when they would be married-"You said a year" -he said, "May, June, you name it." "Can I tell people now-I mean, about the wedding?" "Call the president." In April she took the streetcar down to the lobby of the Roosevelt to meet him for their weekly night together, and she waited until midnight. She looked for him in the Purple Cow, a restaurant in the hotel, having met him there a few times, and he was not there either. She asked a tall, beefy man she saw often around the hotel if he knew Jace Alexander. "[ace Smyzik? The guy with really dark hair?"

·114·

The Secret Smile

"Alexander." "I know a lace Smyzik. They call him Midnight." "Where is he?" "I don't know: he comes and he goes." Doris went Monday morning to the Mellon Bank. There was no account there in his name, her name, or the name Smyzik. She hung around the lobby of the Roosevelt the next two weeks and asked strangers if they knew a lace Alexander or lace Smyzik. By description same man: no one knew where he lived, no one knew where he'd gone. At the restaurant everyone was sorry to hear her father required serious surgery and she would have to quit immediately. She took the trolley to Oakland and then to the Terrace Village Two bus. Walking home down Aliquippa Street, she prepared her confession, but no one called, no police came to the door. She went to confession, but she could not return the money. It had been taken away from her by a merciless thief. After confession she called Megan and told her the wedding was off: she had been swindled. On the other end ofthe phone Megan began to weep. "This shouldn't have happened to you," Megan said, "not to a fine person like you." She did not tell Megan about the thefts: a person was really alone in the world. She has had many lovers she thinks on her twenty-third birthday as she sits alone in the Old Oak Tavern in Hazelwood. She has gone there because she does not want anyone to see she has been crying and it is an old drunk's bar where she knows no one. And she thinks the same thoughts of many lovers in Edward's Bar when she is twenty-four years old. Getting men to keep their

. 115 •

Costly Misapprehensions

hands off doesn't land them and putting out does not get her the frilly apron, the garden of marigolds, and a color television set. She does enjoy much about her evenings. She usually knows the pianist or the man playing the organ when the place has live music, and someone plays "Happy Birthday" for her, and customers sing along. Now she can drink and hardly remember things about the night before. And when the mood strikes her she spends months turning men down and feeling the sweet pleasure in their dumb look. On trolleys home on such nights she says to herself, "My body is my own, thanks for nothing." At twenty-five she thinks she's had many lovers and the same thing at twenty-six. She is tired of the ghostly priest sitting by her bed, and sometimes she talks to him. She knows she is angry with Father Cutliffe but doesn't remember what she said to him the hour between the time of sleep and the desperation ofmorning in the window. The whores' house is torn down, and she sees only the blackness of the river from her window at night. "What's that?" a college student asks, pointing to Doris sitting by herself in a back booth at the Junction Tavern, smiling her fatal welcome to the world. "Comes with the furniture." "Anything doing?" "Couldn't prove it by me, I have a weak stomach." The student decides that with those monster-from-Mars thick glasses it's not worth the beer and time, and that look on her face as if she's a kid eating ice cream for the first time. Like, oh what a surprise this all is. Trapped by her sense ofher terrible charm, Doris smiled, causing men to advance on her like caught rabbits or, repelled by the unearthly heat from her, quickly retreat, defeated. Mistress ofevery spell in the night, she made men crash on the island where . 116 .

The Secret Smile

she ruled, destroyed, victims ofher enchantment. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. Doomed to be a heartbreaker in the lost bars of Pittsburgh by something beyond her control. Wrapped in mystery, she adjusted in seemingly deep preoccupation a thin, white summer shawl and abruptly gazed up to catch who among them was staring at her slightest movement.

. II? .

TEN

The ~deemer ofSoho

By MAY 1948, Lockhart knew it was going to be a bad year all around. Not that the receipts in Lil and Lockhart's were down; things were good there, plenty of drinkers, the sandwich trade more than holding its own. Only unfortunate circumstances picking him to land on. He had shown a woman out in January, and she claimed he twisted her arm and humiliated her and found a lawyer to take the case. Well, he had insurance; but then the new coolers arrived and they kept beer only cold enough to remind people the beer was not really cold. He had them replaced. And then in April a wandering preacher, a man in a filthy scarf and torn gloves no one knew, had set his sights on Lil and Lockhart's Bar and Grill and would not be persuaded to find some other place to redeem souls. Lockhart was a Lutheran and Lil, his wife, a Catholic, and there was never any friction between them on the subject, but the preacher caused them to argue.

·119 .

Costly Misapprehensions

"I don't want it," Lockhart said. "It gives me a funny feeling. The guy comes into our place and all he sees are souls heading for damnation. It's disrespectful. Let him choose some other place, there's plenty, you know, need looking into, not just our place, maybe not our place at alL" "You're taking it too seriously, AI," she said. "Are things going so good you have to look for trouble?" "It found me," Lockhart said. "It walked in and starts to sing and chant and throw itself on its knees and tells me I'm a sinful man and doomed and all that shit. I say, 'Listen, there's no hard feelings, take that up to Oakland, there's plenty there needs you.' And he says, 'The Lord sent me here, called me from Whittington, Oklahoma, to come here to Pittsburgh, and I followed the voice and it led me here to Soho and your saloon.' You know I can be patient. I says, 'Would a donation help? Something to take you out to Chicago or maybe back to Oklahoma?' He says, 'Not till my work is done here.'" "So put him out, you put out plenty." "I put him out and he stands on the sidewalk and chants, 'Soho is doomed,' like there ain't a soul, living or dead, who don't already have that information. It's a bad year, Lil, going to get worse." Someone at Lil and Lockhart's Bar and Grill-it might have been Kevin Spriggs, who read a lot-remarked that the streets and houses of the neighborhood were like the crooked teeth in the mouth of an old man too poor to have ever visited a dentist. There was a rubbed-off feeling to the place, noted by more than one person not necessarily a day laborer like Spriggs, who carried about in his back pocket a torn paperback book of one kind or another-a used, decayed, beaten, dark, unlit, cracked procession of weed-overgrown empty lots. A curious district: a brisk . 120'

The RedeemerofSoho ten-minute walk from there and the drinkers in Lil and Lockhart's Bar and Grill could stand before the majestic Schenley Hotel in Oakland, the part-time home once of Victor Herbert, the celebrated feasting grounds of Lillian Russell and Diamond Jim Brady and Babe Ruth and President Warren Harding. But no music of an operetta floated down to Soho on the modern night air of 1948, no starling in flight alighted knowingly there. There was the celebrated Brady Street Bridge from Forbes to the South Side from Soho; and under the bridge, at good prices, prostitutes entertained summer and winter johns from all directions in Pittsburgh. And the other famous landmark, small but loved, Lil and Lockhart's, offered the same beer in bottles sold in bars in Oakland but always at rates lower than current traffic. Lockhart, who had a local reputation as a former football player and was big, tolerated no rowdiness, kept the bar swept and polished even with the neighborhood threatening to collapse on his saloon, and as a result was host to a full house every night, even in Soho, where every doorway was a threat or a promise of dangerous pleasure. He allowed no loud or abusive language. At the first sign of a fight, he looked up sharply over the Wall Street Journal he sat reading on a stool behind the bar, and the quarrel subsided. He threw out-of-line types into the street: no redress, no appeal, no discussions. And he never loosened the tie at the collar of his daily white shirt. He did allow whores in the place, but only with a toleration for their personal drinking or permission to enjoy the heat in the winter or the big fans in the summer. They were after all local women, and their cousins or even husbands ofsome legal degree were permitted at Lil and Lockhart's: fairness demanded no sanctions on a woman whose trade had no part in the bar. But the minute something commercial passed it was a quiet word ·121 .

Costly Misapprehensions

from Lockhart directly into the woman's ear and she was banished, perhaps for months, maybe forever. Lil and Lockhart's Bar and Grill, however, had acquired a hard-to-shake unsavory reputation through no fault of Lil and AI Lockhart. They were each in a second marriage and well regarded and no one spoke of them personally when discussing the tragedy at their bar. But two men who had begun a fight with each other in 1944 down around Locust Street, an easy two miles away from Lil and Lockhart's, trouble over a woman, had run down Fifth, one pursuing the other with a pistol. The man with the gun fired two shots, and the other man, dodging between cars and behind garbage cans, managed for forty minutes to elude death. They each ran full throttle on a cool fall night toward Oakland, the one man shouting, "Police! Someone call the police!" The other man, the one with the gun, cursed the fleeing man. He shouted obscenities, aiming and changing his mind at various turns in the sidewalk. People left their doorsteps for the inside of their houses; murders on the sidewalks were, of course, no irregular occurrence in Soho, but the long-distance chase was. Anywhere on the great run almost anyone could have been killed by the man with the gun. Lockhart, telling the story over the years-until he forbade all mention of it in his bar or presence outside-said it was part of a long litany of hard luck things that had happened to him. He had broken his collarbone before he really had a chance at a college scholarship; his father had fallen to his death painting the Wabash Avenue Bridge downtown. His sister had died of diphtheria, one of the last people so afflicted in the United States; but Lockhart had learned you can't give in to fate, even when it's bad. Just keep going on about your business: he had ·122 .

The Redeemer ofSoho

supported his mother and five sisters, paid in full for the burial of his sister, quietly given up football without a backward glance. When his first wife left, he married Lil, knowing she had several spots on her reputation. "No life outside the marriage that don't include me or the bar," he told her. "That's all: I do the same, nothing I'm not asking of you." She had agreed, he bought the bar, and there they were until the running man had thrown himself into Lil and Lockhart's and there been apprehended by the gunman chasing him. Trying to leap the bar where the startled Lockhart watched, the one man, an out-of-work plasterer named Owens, had been shot dead by the other man, four bullets, all in fatal places. "Bastard couldn't have had a better aim down on Dinwiddie or in one of those joints down on Fifth," he said when he still spoke of it, no one thinking for a minute he was joking. "Suddenly got his aim in my bar, and bang! I'm running a killer's bar." "But it was close up he finally got him," someone might say. "Had the plasterer cornered like a rat in here." "Yeah, yeah," Lockhart said. "And all the witnesses said he had the man by the throat on the ground, all of them that said he fired the first shot right into his facewere wrong. Everybody's right except me. I'm telling you I'm picked for things like that: the bastard put four shots into the man, all killers, and had a knife at his throat with him on the ground and fired a bullet into his face and couldn't put him awaydown on Fifth. Not until my bar, then I'm a local landmark. Lil and Lockhart's, come there and get murdered, and I don't even allow no profanity on the premises." The story ran for four days in the newspapers, and Lockhart said patiently to each reporter and photographer: "Never saw . 12 3

.

Costly Misapprehensions

either man in my life, strangers, could have happened anywhere. Accident it was my place, ask anybody, this is a place people bring their wives and girlfriends. My own wife is here most of the time." In a meditative mood one afternoon, Lil a problem and the preacher on his mind, Lockhart told Kevin Spriggs something that had bothered him for years. "It's this," he said, the two of them sitting in the darkened bar one morning about eleven 0' clock. "I think of everything going on around me and I have the feeling I'm missing the point of it to myself." "You're no fool, AI," Kevin said, then about twenty-two and not yet convinced he was going to dig postholes in hard rock the rest of his life. "You miss it, then it's something most, maybe everybody, would miss." "No, it's a personal thing I think I'm missing, not anything important like a meaning to the country or other people-just something I should have seen, sort of known, but didn't catch at the time. And later it turned out that the little thing I overlooked, didn't catch, you know, turned out to be what it was all about, what was happening that would turn me around for good in one direction or another." "A hint." "That's it, a hint. A tip on what's coming, but I was looking somewhere else." "Everybody has that feeling," Kevin said. "Kind of 'Had I but known.'" "No, that's not it: it's not anything anyone can do anything about. It's something there, you miss it-and sometimes you see it but don't recognize it-but it's already what's in the cards, already written about what's to follow. I just missed it, and look-

. 12 4

.

The Redeemer ofSoho

ing back I should have known the sign for what it was, the beginning of something else." "Can't change it if you did know?" "I don't know I'd want to change it, that's not what I'm getting at: I can't change it because it's already happening by the time you get that hint." "Losing me, AI." "Nothing ever happened to me I didn't know it from a mile away, but I missed it." "You'll drive yourself crazy with that line of thought: you'll spend all your time looking for things you weren't supposed to see in the first place." "You're a smart kid, Kevin. But the problem is sometimes a person does see." The first wife: it was an indecipherable telephone number and address on a pad near the telephone-indentations on a blank page under where she had written the number on another page, then torn off the first page. Why hadn't she as she always did collect four numbers on a page, or more? It wasn't like her-or him-to tear off the top page with only one address or phone number there. She never mentioned the call to him. Looking at the impression of the number on the blank page, waiting for her to explain, that indecipherable number on the pad, he knew it was over. When she left six months later, it was no surprise, although all he had to go on was that blank pad. With only an old man sitting at a back table at the bar and Lockhart tired of observing the preacher through the window pacing out in front, Lockhart went to the front door and called, "Say, you there, Driscoll, come in here a minute, I want a word with you."

. 12 5 .

Costly Misapprehensions

"Are you going to throw me out on the sidewalk again?" "No, come in, it's hot out there." Lockhart offered the man a drink. "Nothing," he said. "Have a Pepsi." "Nothing in this place; it's an abomination." Lockhart handed the man across the bar five twenty-dollar bills. "This is for you," he said. "Use it any way you like, the Lord's work, a trip maybe to your family in Oklahoma. Buy yourself another shirt. That one's falling off. Anything, okay?" "Where I'm going I'm going to be dressed in stars." "Okay, okay, I got you-but for a while could you do your earthly business somewhere else?" "I don't choose where I go: I've been sent." "You know you're going to drive me crazy, and then I'm not going to be responsible." "Everyone is responsible for everything they do." "Then why ain't you responsible for blocking my sidewalk?" "I'm sent." "I'm a little crazy now, Driscoll, do you get my meaning?" "It's only my bones you'll be breaking, my soul belongs to God." Lockhart ran around the other side of the bar. He seized the man by the collar of his filthy shirt. "What's God think of that?" he asked, shaking him. "It's what He whispered in my ear to do. He told me to rattle your teeth. He told me to tell you to find someone truly evil to chew on. I'm a straight shooter, you bastard: I never took a dime didn't belong to me. There ain't no whores in here, there's nobody picking drunks' pockets in Lil and Lockhart's. I go to church on Sundays, you hear?" He picked up Driscoll and carried him to the door and threw him out on to the sidewalk. ·126 .

The Redeemer ofSoho

The preacher looked up at him and said, "I told you I was going to be chucked out on the street again. But it's not going to do you any good. I'm going to be wearing satins and silks where I'm going, and you're going to be wearing rags in the next world, and burning till your eyeballs pop." He stood and began his chant about hell and damnation and the sorrows about to befall Lil and Lockhart's, and AI Lockhart poured himself a glass ofvodka, something he seldom did during working hours. That summer in 1948, after work, Kevin Spriggs and three other men of varying ages used to come to the bar regularly when they had unloaded their trucks at one of the warehouses in Soho. They drank from four to six in the evening, then went for dinner, and afterward reassembled at Lil and Lockhart's. They never were seen drunk or staggering, but only someone unfamiliar with Soho, the men, or the winds that blew through the last drafty houses, broken-backed and threadbare in carpet and wallpaper, would ever assess them sober. Married or single, they ate, listened to the evening news, tumbled again back out to the sidewalk and Lil and Lockhart's for gaiety of jukebox, voices raised in announcement of people in place, and presiding old Lockhart, tougher than nails and running a clean place. They joked among themselves about the crazy preacher theyoccasionally saw and heard on the sidewalk and tried to kid Lockhart about it; but he glowered. "It's not funny," he said. "The man is out there reciting sacred things: I know the Bible, he has no right to do that. I'd call the cops, but the next day it's 'Killer Bar Damned by Minister of the Gospel.'" Freeze and Benny drank white wine, and Toots and Kevin nothing but beer, Iron City. They mostly dug postholes through the day, mixed cement, and were thirsty, and they talked about . 12 7

'

Costly Misapprehensions

muddy or hard ground, women who had acted like they were ready on this job or that, baseball, and their boss, a man named Fischer whose every word they analyzed to show what a fool he was. Their days were hot and numb, salty with sweat in their mouths, but their nights were pleasant and high. By day they were dirty and stained with the oily pipes they carried on their shoulders, but nights they wore clean, crisp shirts, short-sleeved and starched. And around ten at night Lockhart grilled sausage sandwiches with onions, peppers, and his own sauce, and everyone ordered up, one last benediction before returning to the old mother, the cheerless wife, or the empty apartment on Buena Vista, Fifth, or Van Buren Street in Soho. The day after Lockhart had dumped the preacher on the sidewalk, the man became impossibly loud, coming to the door of the bar and shouting in: "Say good-bye to AI Lockhart, you're not going to see him till hell. Say good-bye everybody!" When the four friends came to Lil and Lockhart's after work, Lockhart was trembling with rage. "He's been at it all day," he said. "Forget it, AI," Kevin said. "He ain't bothering nothing." "It's the floor show down here," Freeze said. "For myself I come down to hear it." "You ought to charge," Toots, a very fat man, said. "I'm not in the mood," Lockhart said. "I'm not in the mood. This isn't a circus I'm running. I'm a man making a living. I'm a man with responsibilities to run a fair business. It's a business that sells alcohol and it attracts an undesirable element; but I'm an honest businessman, no worse than if I ran an honest furniture store, a straight bar." Later, when night started to fall outside on the crumpled houses of Soho and the regulars had taken their break before ·128 .

The Redeemer ofSoho

evening trade, Lockhart called Lil. "There's a feeling I have," he said, "that something strange is in the air, something changed about me. I'm not myself. This guy is getting to me too much." "AI, you need a rest." "Lil, is everything all right with you?" He caught the pause before she answered. "Why wouldn't it be?" she asked. Because, he thought, it's my opinion that when you go to visit your sister in McKees Rocks that's not all you do. Maybe it's a perfume I noticed you wearing, something I gave you for Christmas, and when I asked you about it you acted like I'd discovered you stole my mother's jewelry. You wore the perfume the next two weeks you went out to Brenda's, calming suspicion, and never again. You visit Brenda like you say, but you go someplace else too. Somewhere near Brenda so you have time for both places. I feel it in your clothes, I see it in how your eyes go back over it, whatever it is the rest of the day. I think it's a guy. It has to be a guy. "I don't know, but if I start to think about it too much I'll tell you." "Tell me what?" "You're right, I'm tired." It was a conversation that took no longer than five minutes, and perhaps in that time he had not turned away from the front door more than thirty seconds to deal with the telephone behind the bar. Mysteriously then there came to reside in those seconds at Lil and Lockhart's the things that sweep away before themselves everything ordinary that were marks of a bar in fine shape, drinks cold, wine unadulterated, the right change even to a drunk not able to count to five, a place where someone could, for an hour, bring a kid and know that the child was as safe here . 12 9

.

Costly Misapprehensions

as any house in Soho. They had no name, but Lockhart knew their sound. Kevin left the men's room that night and shouted, "Lockhart! Look at this." Running, Lockhart knew he would see something terrific, and behind him came the rest of Fisher's crew of posthole diggers, a man named Sidney with a hearing aid, a woman who sobbed in expectation, "Oh my God, oh my God." And there for all the world, pointed out by Kevin almost proudly in large black letters scrawled over the mirror and walls of the small restroom, were the words: "LOCKHART REPENT HELL WAITS DRISCOLL THE REDEEMER." Everywhere there was a space to write on the same message appeared, letters sometimes six inches high in black paint. At first, Lockhart was calm. He ran into a room behind the bar and brought out a bucket of whitewash. As he painted with a large, flat brush he said, "Have it gone in twenty minutes. No more. There we go, like new." But he shook with his efforts. He could not paint over the words. They came through the whitewash. It would take more whitewash, two, even three times more. Then he began to mumble, "How'd the bastard get in and out without me seeing him, the lousy bastard." He went behind the bar, adjusted his apron. "Drinks for everybody," he said and tried to laugh hard. "It was your envy for the bars up in Oakland," Toots said, testing Lockhart's good will. "The preacher came because of envy. He knows you covet those Oakland bars." "No," Freeze said, "it was wrath was his sin. You got an awful temper, AI."

. 13°'

The Redeemer ofSoho

Lockhart forced another laugh. "Yeah, wrath," he said. "Do I look mad? But if I catch that little bastard he's a dead pigeon. I'll show you wrath." As the evening wore on, Kevin suggested it was pride, Mr. AI Lockhart thinking he had the best bar in the world and unless he repented hell waited his demise. "That's it, that's it," Lockhart said, fighting to keep himself together under the onslaught. "Bar's closed; my character ain't up for discussion like a welcome mat for muddy shoes. Good night and drop dead, all of you, get the hell out of here. Finish, finish quick and out." "It's history," Freeze said. "Driscoll the Redeemer caused this bar to close." "Out, out, all of you out." Lockhart had only two days to ponder Driscoll's mysterious ability to invade his bar and grill. The business with Lil could not be avoided. "Lil," he said, "1 ain't just tired, I'm smart. You go to your sister's every Tuesday, and I'm not deaf and dumb. Before we start question and answer time, tell me directly: yes, it's something you're doing. Then we can part the best offriends, because if it's something, I'll know-and then it's enemies forever, or a long time anyhow." "It's something, AI." He said, "Okay." "It's not what I want: just okay. I want to explain. You're not an easy guy to live with." "Okay, you run around because it's my fault. Now, okay?" "Go to hell, AI." He went down to the bar, closed for Sunday. He looked up the street for Driscoll and then down Forbes. Just to ask him

. 131

.

Costly Misapprehensions

how he did that trick, getting into the bar, doing that painting, and getting out without anyone seeing it, he thought. He sat sipping vodka on the customer's side of the bar, regretting the loss of Lil and maybe the bar too; but he had known it was all gone anyhow from the day when the preacher came to Pittsburgh from Oklahoma and settled on Lil and Lockhart's to do his magic. It was because he said he was sent by a voice: that should have told someone plenty. Invisible words on a blank pad, a voice no one else hears; they whisper the truth ofwhat's to come. About five, wondering if Lil would be home or had moved out, or would it be him to leave, he heard that Driscoll was dead. "Yeah?" he asked. It was a man named Dary who told him, not reliable on details but close enough on the big picture. Then in the middle of the recitation Kevin and Freeze came in to add what they knew. The preacher was found dead in a 1936 Ford he slept in in one of the overgrown lots near the Brady Street Bridge. The cause of death was unknown, Dary said. He had seen the light on inside the bar and thought Lockhart would like to know. Kevin nodded, and Freeze, waiting patiently, asked, "Then you haven't heard?" Lockhart said, "Only that the man's dead." Kevin said, "He left a will, a piece of paper they found in the car. He left you the car. I saw the paper with my own eyes." "It's going to make quite a story," Lockhart said. "Have a drink." He poured old Dary a vodka and Freeze and Kevin wine and beer. He drank his own vodka fast and poured himself another. "Well," he said. "It will probably make a good story in tomorrow's paper. Left me the car." "Thanks, AI," Dary said. "What do you suppose that psalmsinger died of?" .13 2

.

The Redeemer ofSoho "Nothing special, his job here was done. He got me." "Yeah, AI, got you?" Kevin asked. "Between the eyes like the plasterer was killed right where you're standing." In rain or shine, Lil and Lockhart's Bar and Grill had never closed ten minutes before it was possible that one more muscatel could be sold, one last Iron City. In snow four feet high and blocking the front door in the winter of 1939, Lockhart himself, joined by regulars waiting for entrance, had shoveled himself in. All day other loyalists came to join him in a place that for good or ill respected its business hours. Sick and woozy after a heart attack, he had come virtually in hospital bedclothes to open the door to the bar at its usual time, his vital signs in relapse at the thought Lil would oversleep. His recovery by the hour was a marvel as long as he knew it was business as usual at Lil and Lockhart's Bar and Grill. But Monday night he again closed early: twice in the span of a week. He locked the front door with a flourish and turned out the lights two hours early, Forbes Street empty and ominous in the night that fell on the sidewalks and street in front of the now dark bar. As the customers went their separate ways, the cobblestones abetted the disorder on the night and ran together under their feet, distant like earth turned to water. Doorways were silent and grim, all Soho suddenly an uncertain place. The air became thick with prophecy and largeness the night everyone knew the shabby little man in the red tassel hat came to Lockhart's on his Heaven-sent mission and interjected planetary considerations into a quiet bar on Forbes Street .

. 133 .

ELEVEN

tAn Excess of~ality

who looked to the world like a sure success, one of the brightest to come out of Moon Township, was caught cheating in a first-year, night-school law class at Duquesne. He was so befuddled by the questions that he hardly knew which notes to grasp for inside his vest. First, he reached for the torts questions, then the constitutional law, and he came out, he thought, like a case in a psychology book, a man trying to get caught. He all but confessed. Shifting, noisy, dropping the stiff cards on the floor, bending to pick them up, and nearly falling from his chair, he was almost pleased to be summoned to the front of the room by the proctor, a young lay brother with a beard. He was dismissed from school by one of the assistant deans a week later, a priest named Cannon who told him he was sorry for his mother and father. FRANKIE DODGE,

. 135 .

Costly Misapprehensions

That was too much for Frankie. "I put myself here, Father," he said. "Me, myself, and I. My father's been dead twelve years and my mother doesn't know law school from corned beef and cabbage. I put myself here and I got myself thrown out. And I'm going to put myself backmaybe not to Duquesne Law School, but I'm going to study law somewhere. I'm marked, Father, I'm touched with a golden charm: I've got brains and looks, and this is a temporary setback." The priest, who always had eternity he could use against a person, Frankie thought, said, "I'm still sorry for your father. This doesn't gladden his soul, Francis." He was allowed to reapply in two years, reasonable enough, but instead he got married to a young dark Lithuanian girl who lived next door to his family in Moon Township. He had known her since they were children. After six months of marriage he hated her, but by then she was five months pregnant, and he waited for the baby to see if the yoke of bad luck that had temporarily settled on him would be lifted with the child. Elizabeth, his wife, was silent and moody and spoke to her mother in Lithuanian, and Frankie felt closed out everywhere. He couldn't, for the time being, go to law school, and his job was a dead end. He worked as a law clerk with Pearson, Davis and Company in the Grant Building downtown on the understanding he was to be offered a lawyer's position when he passed the bar exam. But there was to be no bar exam in his immediate future. He held on to his job as a law clerk, and he supposed he should be grateful. It was still one foot in the law. To strangers he could describe himself as a lawyer, and no one except a few priests at Duquesne knew the real circumstances. And he trusted them. Father Cannon had said the cheating scandal would be wiped from his rec. 136 .

An Excess of Quality

ord in two years; and when two years had passed from the fatal moment he had juggled around index cards at a first-year test Frankie began to say, even at work, that he had dropped out of Duquesne because of his mother's health. He spoke of his mother's health at length at Pearson, Davis and no one knew better, cared, or corrected him. He wore a white shirt and a tie to work every day, ate lunch at Danny's on the first-floor restaurant once a week, strolled about Fourth Avenue and Diamond Street on his lunch hour with a young attorney or two, and came to think of himself as a lawyer in all but certain technicalities. When he came home at night to Oakland, a three-room apartment on Coltart Street where he had moved with Elizabeth and his infant daughter, it was held as a family belief that Frankie Dodge was a practicing attorney. He dressed the part. He thought it. Elizabeth, he realized, hardly knew the difference. They had little to say to each other. One night, tipsy and unaccountably bold, at the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a fraternal club he went to once a month, he became weary of the dull faces at his table. He saw them through a blurred half-light, but he thought it was a truthful vision. He had not grown up with them, and he did not know their common jokes or pasts. They were all Democrats, speaking ill of the Republican Party, and in a silence that fell after Bill Owens said the fat cats wanted depressions to make their money worth more, hardly feeling the words forming, Frankie said, "Is that so? Let me tell you something, friends. Mter the government spreads around all this welfare money and all the chiselers have two chickens in every pot, you boys will still be hanging around waiting for a job in the mayor's office or on a list for the fire department or the state liquor stores. Civilizations have fallen on this issue, the extraordinary man versus the hand-out artist. ·137 .

Costly Misapprehensions

And I'll tell you why you will get little of the grease: because there's more of them than there is of you. You can do your little dance and you'll get a bone-but them! There's millions of them. They'll put in your Democratic presidents, your Democrat mayor, or give the job to your Democrat ward chairmanthere's colored ones now-and you'll be acquiring none of it after all. On the scales of what counts in politics you weigh very little. By force of numbers they will contain you, out-vote you, bury you in their offspring, and out-beg you." Frankie's eyes filled with tears at his own eloquence and the looks on their faces, and he said, "You'll be the bottom stones for the pyramids they'll build." "Say, Binky," a man on his left said. "What is it you do for a living?" "I'm a lawyer," Frankie said proudly. A man he knew as Sullivan, sitting facing him, reached across the table and put out his hand. "You can handle my lawsuits any day, Cicero," he said, shaking hands. "Have another drink," another man said. Normally reticent to reveal his deeper thoughts, Frankie, spurred by beer and red wine, talked for another hour, then walked home, drunk with himself and his possibilities. When the government housing projects opened up for him in 1944 he moved there with his wife and child. The rent was fifteen dollars, adjusted to his small income, but the water and heat came with it and the electricity. He paid three dollars a month for a telephone. He did not pass a physical for the draft. His right knee buckled at unexpected times. Sometimes he could run for a bus or even as a boy catch a football with his brother, but other times he would walk across a room and his knee would collapse and send him toppling. He could have made five times .13 8 .

An Excess ofQuality

what he was earning with Pearson, Davis and Company if he had gone into war work, but he would have to relinquish his tie and shirt and come home at night with oil under his fingernails. For their part, his employers were grateful. He liked their respect. He let his neighbors make the big money. Under lids halfclosed, he studied them as if they were, he thought, microbes under a microscope in Biology 100 at Duquesne, where he had almost received an A. He allowed himself a small smile when he looked at them. He had fair coloring, was not tall but compact, walked despite his knee with authority, and presented, he thought, still the appearance of a man who had arrived. He thought of himself as a man waiting for a breakthrough. He suffered his neighbors as part of the long price ofhaving an elder brother who made two hundred a week and expenses traveling for a liquor company-it was he who sent their mother in Moon Township money to live on-a wrong marriage to a dull woman, a youthful indiscretion at a test after a brilliant undergraduate career at Duquesne. He had worked as a stockboy at Woolworths, a flower trimmer, and a busboy and had sold encyclopedias door to door to pay for his college education. Now, he thought, he lived with people beneath him. The hilarity and the friendships of the war years ended soon in Terrace Village Two, the place deteriorating as the veterans' families left and were replaced by old people and down-and-outers. And then they were replaced after the war monthly by young men attending college at Pitt. He could not bear them: all their sneering promise, their young families, their swaggering preoccupation with their own schooling. They did not talk to Frankie any more than they talked to the old people or the rioting drunks with their apartments full of children. Then, when Mavis, his daughter, was fifteen, Elizabeth gave birth to a boy. ·139 .

Costly Misapprehensions

Frankie was humiliated, as if he had been caught once more with those telltale index cards. He did not care at all for Elizabeth, particularly in that way; and here he was, smiled at, maybe joked about. He kept his small, tight smile. He thought of Biology 101 even as he listened to his neighbors outdoors on the courtyard benches. The next year, a cruel joke after almost eighteen years, another baby was born, this time a girl, and they named her Jeane. It was at Elizabeth's insistence. She had chosen James for the boy and now wanted a name with a J to go with it. Frankie could not bear her. He had mistakenly imagined it was his cheating at school that had ruined him, he thought. It was Elizabeth to begin with, the dark Lithuanian blighting his future like a huge impassable boulder in his path on an exceedingly narrow road. His daughter came to him a month before her graduation from high school as he sat reading the paper, his collar undone, in the red reading jacket he wore in the evenings, and said, "I'm leaving when I graduate, Dad." "Leaving where?" he asked, trying to put together his smile of assurance, friendliness, comfort. "I'll start with Detroit." "Detroit? What's in Detroit?" "Delma has an aunt there." "There's a million people in Detroit, why pick Delma's aunt?" "It's just to get started. Then Delma and I will go out on our own. " She was more like her mother than a Dodge, a beefyshouldered girl with dark hair that never seemed clean to Frankie. If she had boyfriends, then they did not come to the apartment. She was interested in gymnastics and was on the team at school. He hoped she would be a cheerleader, but she . 14°·

An Excess ofQuality

seemed to have no interest in it, a chunky young woman, thick legs and neck, dark and lost in loose clothing. "Well, I'm against it," he said, "but I know that doesn't mean a thing to you." They had never been close. She had spoken Lithuanian before she spoke English. He had struck her a few times, but she had looked at him as he did, not crying, and he gave it up. He left the room when she was noisy and the apartment if Elizabeth could not quiet her. He walked. He walked everywhere. He walked miles, thinking it was at least good for his health; but, on his return to the little dark girl and her mother, he knew why it was that he paced the empty streets of Terrace Village Two. "I'm not going to get stuck here," Mavis said. "Here! You mean with me?" "No, Terrace Village Two." "These people aren't good enough for you? I'm not: you're mother's not?" "I want more out of life." "I'll tell you something," he said. "Life isn't a lot of good things waiting for you like you see on television. It's hard, sister, it's mean, and it doesn't care who you are. I guess I raised you wrong by covering up how miserable it is, but I'm telling you now. It's a bunch of cats fighting in a burlap sack. That's what. It's not our apartment, where I cover over everything." She left the day after graduation and went to kiss him as he sat in a chair. He waved her away. "You don't honor me," he said, and when she went out into the hallway, he shouted after her, "You have no regard for your mother or me!" He did not miss her. The apartment had been crowded with all of them there. Elizabeth had talked about them moving to a bigger place, but Frankie thought the time wasn't right. The fact was, watching the young students in the apartments, some of .141 .

Costly Misapprehensions

the old juices had started to run in him. He could reenter law school, even Duquesne. A man getting a law school degree at forty, well, forty-three, wasn't so old. There had been such men about when he had gone the first time, and, looking back, they were admirable, probably at this moment heading prestigious law firms and nobody the wiser. He walked miles in various directions, trying to sort things out, down to Oakland, in the other direction to the Hill District, a slum to the south. He even took Elizabeth and the two babies to Schenley Park one Sunday on the bus; he did not brood over a disloyal daughter. When Frankie Dodge began to spy on Micki Aukland in 1954 he felt as if he had come home after many years of traveling on uncharted seas. He followed her to the Terrace Village Two bus, observing to whom she spoke and who spoke with heartiness to her, sometimes on to the bus itself to where she worked downtown at Gimbels in gift wrapping, or down Robinson to the Pitt Tavern alone, or with her drunken husband after dinner. He cannily sat on one of the backless wooden benches in the common courtyard between their apartment buildings and watched until midnight her place on the second floor. He noted everyone who came to the Aukland apartment. He observed who came on Wednesday nights to play Hearts. He noted the visitors on Sunday nights who came to shout obscenities and blaspheme against God and the Holy Trinity in alcoholic stupefaction, thinking they were having religious discussions. Tracking the woman, being certain of her meager comings and goings, was a great comfort to him. He had been puzzled by people like her since boyhood. He found in the frail woman with shapeless white legs, knock-kneed, and able somehow to support five children the very core of the mystery that surrounded him. How did

.142

.

An Excess ofQuality

they thrive? They never for all their weaknesses vanished into dust and tears at their own futility. They went on year after year in their worthless joys while he felt himself more invisible with each passing day. They had a pact to cheer each other, of course-but then superior people did not run from them either. Their faces lit up at each new notoriety. He himself, almost a lawyer, never was applauded or caught someone looking at him in unexpected admiration. No one made a move toward him. Micki Aukland and hers were like blotters soaking up all the fame and fortune meant to be his, and in following her there was an answer. She visited other neighbors' apartments, and no one questioned her about the screams and obscenities when she and her husband fought. She carried bruises. His arm was in a cast once from when she had hit him in the elbow with a chair. Yet, they reconciled. They held hands. Her children dressed well and were clean and her husband did not work, claiming weak lungs. Their only income was her pitiful job. Frankie studied her, seldom nodding, never visiting her apartment. 'When he saw her in the Pitt Tavern he ignored her sitting at the bar, always vaguely unconnected to the people and the place. The few times he went to the Irish Club he found her and her husband Kurt there, as he would have expected, drunk in a corner, too perplexed to dance, too bewildered to get home. He watched to see who called a taxicab for them. One day, following her as she took a bus, he saw that she was wearing a long coat he had never seen before. It was a cool spring night but too warm for the coat. On impulse, he rode the same bus with her downtown. She had always taken the bus to Oakland in the evening when she hadn't walked down to the Pitt

·143 .

Costly Misapprehensions

Tavern with her husband. Downtown, she transferred to a trolley to the North Side. He sat in the rear of the streetcar, apparently not looking up from his newspaper. She alighted on Federal Street and walked two blocks to a church where a notice for a bingo game was on a post outside. He returned home without looking in the church. She had simply gone to play bingo; perhaps she met someone from work there. But the next night once more she was dressed in the long coat. He took the bus with her this time to Oakland and then the trolley when she transferred to East Liberty. She never looked about her as she walked or sat on the streetcar: it was the maddening mystery of her. How could she have people laugh at her jokes or be sympathetic to her in all her miseries when she never focused her attention anywhere? In East Liberty, he walked behind her until she entered an Elks Lodge on Highland Avenue with a sign outside reading, "Bingo Tonight." He boldly walked into the hall and strolled about; he was not stopped. He saw Micki seated at a long table with other women, and he left. Later, he turned about restlessly in his sleep, felt himself fully awake, and went to sit outside on a bench and wait her arrival. At ten after one she stepped out of a taxi, and he stood and went indoors when he saw the light go on in her apartment. At work he was erratic, not hearing what was said to him, observing the other people in the office carefully. They would approve of Micki. They would applaud and cheer her. She would share with them foolish triumphs that only they could savor, and he, an extraordinary man, would be left in the cold. He tried to walk to calm himself. He had gained weight and his shirt pinched him at the collar; even his shoes felt tight. He knew no other way to release himself from the incessant

·144·

An Excess of Quality

thoughts of Micki Aukland and her success in life and his own seeming failure except to walk great distances. He saw Micki in the long coat every night and he knew where she went. He did not follow her. The flat government housing buildings lay in Mayan a pale brown ocean of mud like squat cheese boxes sailed out to sea by an uninterested child. High on a hill, the mud ran in rivulets into the serpentine streets. Small trees planted there in the early spring had not taken root but floated away as the mud shifted with rain on the melting ground. Frankie daily walked around Robinson Court, thinking. Taking a long flight ofwooden stairs down to Center Avenue, he walked twenty minutes down to the Hill District, mostly black people now. He liked to think of himself as an anthropologist or a historian, learning things for some future use; but his thoughts that spring churned like clothes in the window ofa washing machine. Over and over, he thought about Micki as he walked. He tried to hear what the people on the streets said to each other, but he could not understand them. He walked through them and they barely turned to glance at him. He was sure he knew which places were whorehouses and at what house people sold cocaine, but after awhile it seemed every place on Center could be accused of some illicit activity. He like to think he was keeping up; but eventually it dawned on him: he was just foolishly driven to see what black people's sexual lives were like, and he stopped walking there after dinner in the late daylight. He waited nightly to see Micki leave on her bingo mission. He thought of himself as a man with a lot to say who kept his own counsel; but after trying once or twice to explain to one of the secretaries at the office what his neighbors were like-or the blacks he saw on his

·145 .

Costly Misapprehensions

nightly walks-and seeing at first her patient look, then boredom cross her face, he gave it up. She wouldn't understand, nobody would really understand, unless they were people with the kind of innate good sense, and maybe refinement, he possessed by birth. He was quality. He was a knight with ideals forced to live with ignorant peasants. There was no mistaking the good fortune which fell on the Aukland family across the court. The children dressed in new clothes, Frankie determined, from Kaufmann's, new shoes so stiff the children walked in them gingerly, and Kurt, the father, wore a straw hat with a brightly flowered headband. Micki herself wore white sun-backed dresses, exposing to the world, Frankie thought, a disgusting pale back and shoulders stooped in an inelegant posture. She quit her job at Gimbels. Kurt bought a 1950 Pontiac and on Sundays took his three youngest children and other neighborhood boys and girls out to a picnic at South Park. The Auklands held parties on Sunday afternoon, and to Frankie's rage one day Elizabeth took over to their apartment little Jeane and Jimmy, dressed identically in white-andblue sailor suits. He stood watching his wife walk the toddlers across the court, too furious to speak, not knowing how to put it to his withdrawn wife, who turned away when he tried to clarify some point, and saw Kurt wave at him. He had never spoken to the man. "Hey, Frankie!" Kurt called, using his name as if they had been intimates for years. "Come on over and have a glass of wine." In his straw hat, undershirt, and suspenders he stood like a bobbing demon out of all that Frankie loathed. Frankie turned away into his own apartment, pretending he hadn't heard. He tried to put the scrawny figure out of his mind. The next week he followed Micki into the bingo halls and churches where she went to play nightly. He saw no signals ex-

An Excess of Quality

changed, no special people to whom she spoke, but every night she won. She won five hundred dollars one night, a thousand the next, at the North Side she won an automobile; in Charleroi, a distance of an hour on the trolley, she won another thousand dollars. Frankie trembled with his find. Mrs. MickiAukland was a shill for a bingo operators' flimflam game. The operators used her to pretend there were big winners. Welfare cheating, black marketing during the war years (white shirts, cigarettes, automobile tires, even soap), stealing children's toys from each other, lewd displays using the streets for public toilets, some even whoring and pimping two apartment houses down from him during the war, fraud on their veterans' check, deceptions on their income to the housing authorities, scurvy language before minors, and sidewalk intoxication: Frankie knew the whole litany of deceits and crimes he lived with, and now he had one of the worst offenders by the throat. It was a moment to savor, he thought, after a week of tracking Micki to bingo games. He sat up all night. Where to begin? To think, he lay in bed, alternately amused and ferocious, I thought for one minute back there she and her family had accomplished worthwhile things. When I knew them: I knew all of them. At work in the morning he called first the Pittsburgh Housing Authority at its downtown offices. He reported a family at 481 Robinson Court who flaunted their wealth. Whatever they paid for rent wasn't enough; he was certain, he said, speaking through a handkerchief, they made more money than was allowed to live in public housing altogether. Feeling elated at the lunch hour, he bought a bag of roasted peanuts at Donahues and sauntered down Diamond Street, stopping to look at the women's poster pictures at the entrance to the Casino Theater and throwing his peanut shells into the street. Buoyant, his handkerchief over the ·147·

Costly Misapprehensions

mouthpiece, he called Channel 2 and Channel II after lunch and reported a bunko game involving certain bingo operators and a woman named Micki Aukland. He then called the Pittsburgh Press and the Post-Gazette and gave as many details as he could from his week's investigations. He refused to give his name, laughing with poise instead. Impatiently, he watched the television news at six and eleven for some sign of his researches. Bingo was an important business in Pittsburgh. People went to one place or another most nights of the week. He tore through the newspapers, the Post-Gazette when it came out at eight at night, the Press at four. He called the office of the housing authority on Burrows Street in Terrace Village Two and asked if anything had been done about the family who underreported their income at 481 Robinson. Three days later-the best in his life, he thought, to finally confront the foe-the Press ran a big story on the bingo scam. Micki Aukland's picture was there, in one of her sun-backed dresses, looking up at the photographer as he took her picture in Sewickly. She had been followed by a reporter for ten days; he confirmed what Frankie had told them. He went to his window to study the apartment across the court. Nothing unusual stirred that night or during the next six weeks. Nicole, the eldest daughter, walked to school mornings as ifher mother's picture and her shabby crimes had not been revealed for all the world to see for weeks on end. Kevin, the next eldest, went out on his paper route in the afternoon. Micki herself stopped to talk to neighbors. Frankie could not know what was discussed. Was it possible she planned to never mention the subject? Would no one do anything about this family that so typified what was happening to the world?

.148 .

An Excess ofQuality

In the fall Eisenhower was reelected. The Democrats had not come to his door for years asking him to vote. They knew him. Yes, they did. But he knew them too. Frankie began to think in the Eisenhower landslide that he might consider in 1957reapplying to law school, perhaps at Pitt. He could get some splendid references from well-connected people he knew from Pearson, Davis and Company. His heart soared in October when Micki was sentenced to a month in jail, a mother of five, her children about her weeping, clutching her in a picture in the paper. The operators were given six months and a ten-thousand-dollar fine. Frankie put on his most serious face and spoke-to the man's amazement-to an upstairs neighbor named Tom Hardy the next day. "You know it's a damned shame a woman like that can't be more responsible," Frankie said. Hardy, who was a chef and perhaps more trusted by Frankie than he should have been, because his clothes were always clean and starched, said, "I'd of done the same thing; hell, that woman's first responsibility is to her family-who'd she hurt?" Frankie thought she should have known better. "Well," Hardy asked, as Frankie nodded with his inscrutable smile, "who'd she hurt?" "You have something there," Frankie said, turning it to his advantage, "no one but jackasses like herself." He spun on his heel and strolled away from the cook. Let him mull that over as he scrubs his pots and pans, Frankie thought. But Frankie was there in the Irish Club the night Micki came home, serving ten short days because she had no crimes on her record and five children and an ailing husband, and she was treated like a monarch returning from exile. At her table where

·149 .

Costly Misapprehensions

she sat with her drunken husband, to Frankie's mounting fury, people came as if paying court to a wise woman. They bent over the table, kissing her cheek, whispering in her ear, clutching her hand with a religious relish: touching her for strength for themselves rather than to encourage her. Frankie drank beer until he could hardly walk. He staggered down the long flight of stairs, bumping strangers. Head down, he plodded home up Robinson Street in a light snow. "God damn you," he said to her window and fell into a deep sleep, disturbed at times by imagining he was still at the bar at the Ancient Order of Hibernians and she was still being anointed across the room from him, wafted up in angel wings, cheered, lifted, flower petals drifting down as she gazed about in her sweet stupid expression that focused nowhere. That night Micki shot her husband with an old pistol that lay around their apartment. Hearing the news from Elizabeth in the morning, Frankie knew there was right in the nightmare the woman forced on him. "Did she kill him?" Frankie shrieked, jumping from the bed. "No, no, in the arm," Elizabeth said, clutching her own forearm to show him. "She's a murderess," Frankie said. "She'll have to be put away now. Her children aren't safe. No one is safe." "He was hitting her," Elizabeth said. "He was beating the children." "It should have been a double murder," Frankie said, standing bewildered. He knew little would change, and he felt tears in his eyes. She and Kurt would go on forever: the leaves would blow in autumn across the courtyard, on the far hills trees would blossom in the spring, and the Auklands would be there in snow, rain, greenery, striding about on ground they owned. And did not deserve. .15° .

An Excess ofQuality

Micki and Kurt broke up after the shooting. He came only on Sundays to see the children, and she was not in the apartment when he arrived or left. Christmastime, Frankie could see the tree lights lit in the Aukland apartment. He felt empty. There was little he could do about Micki. People came to her apartment. She sat at a table in the Pitt Tavern with neighbors and laughed. Frankie did not venture out New Year's Eve. He hoped his daughter would call. He heard from her twice a year. But she did not call that night. He knew she lied to him about what she did in Detroit. There was nothing he could do about anything. Frankie stood and went to the window to watch the last of the New Year's revelry across the brown, muddy span between the government housing buildings. A few apartments were still brightly lit. Upstairs, children who skated on the bare stone floors were quiet, but people talked and laughed above him. They cursed, and he heard every syllable. Through his door he could hear his children stirring and Elizabeth murmuring gently in her sleep. Frankie watched the black sky over the buildings as it turned pink and gray and listened to the radio music from other places welcoming 1957. Two days later, he felt the sudden elation of an unexpected victory after certain loss when he heard that a young man had moved into the Auklands'. "Are you sure," he asked Elizabeth, "that it's not someone with Nicole? She's old enough. She's seventeen. Among those people that's ancient. Are you sure?" Micki had moved a young lover into the apartment, a man, it appeared to Frankie, young enough to be one of her sons. Frankie weighed her immoral move as pleasure mounted in him. While there was never a great outcry about people living together, here there was the shooting and the bad record and the • 15 1 .

Costly Misapprehensions

bingo games and the young children. And she was still married. The man wore a bombardier's jacket and played out in the snow with Micki's children, and Frankie loved them all. They were his, Micki and the rest. Busily, he spent days calling the Juvenile Court, the judge who had sentenced her in the bingo scam, the housing authority, the Pittsburgh Press. He walked about pleased, went to the Carnegie Museum to sit alone in the statuary, and bought balloons for Jeane and Jimmy with whom he played tag in his living room. He jumped about and whirled the children around. As the happy month closed, he was interrupted one night while he was watching the six o'clock news by a knock at his door. A man he did not know stood there with a petition. "Some of us neighbors are putting together a petition for Micki Aukland," the man said. "They're kicking her out. They're talking about taking the three youngest kids from her." "Well, I usually don't sign things," Frankie said. "Everyone is signing," the man said, taking off a glove and shaking hands. "My name is Milt Cooper. I'm a cab driver." "I hardly know the woman," Frankie said, and Elizabeth came to the door. "I'll sign," she said, wrote her name down quickly, and retreated. "Kurt, her husband," the man said, "came back. There was a young fellow living there for a while-her nephew, I think. He's moved out. Kurt's back. It was a misunderstanding." "I'll be happy to sign," Frankie said and wrote his name very large, patting the man's shoulder. "I wish you luck." The next day he did not go to work. He put on a heavy overcoat against the cold and a pair of snow boots. He muffied himself in a scarf, and when Elizabeth asked, "Where are you going?" he said, "To attend to business." .15 2

.

An Excess of Quality

It was a twenty-minute walk down Burrows to the local authority office. He prepared in his mind his indictment. He would mention that Micki served wine to Nicole's underage friends when they came to the apartment. He would say she kept the children out of school. It was a gray day with the skies overhead bursting and roiling with snow and rain. The ground was icy underfoot. Though the hour was early it might have been dusk on a terrible winter's day. A few lights from Christmas still burned in apartment windows, but, as he walked, the sidewalk seemed black beneath his feet. Steady, he thought, steady, lining up his ducks for the kill. But at the one-story building where the authority's Terrace Village Two offices were located he saw perhaps twenty people milling about. In the twilight-morning light they looked bearish with their large coats and slow, ponderous gestures. "Frankie," one called. It was Kurt. He wore no hat. His face was white but splotched with red streaks, down his nose, across his forehead. Even at that hour he was drunk. There was spittle at the corners of his mouth. His cheeks were covered with soft white bristles. Frankie had never stood close to the man before. On the wind Frankie caught the smell of a wet cloth overcoat, the scent of an old ashtray, was it wine or beer? Sweat, skin dry and tired. Frankie moved back as the man-he was quite tall-came toward him, cadaverous in his huge overcoat, his hands bluish in the cold. "They seen it our way, Frankie," he cried. "We come down in a body and they say they'll be no action on Micki and me and the kids." Feeling the wet, black sidewalk beneath his feet moving, Frankie said, "That's good, that's very good. I came down to see what I could do." . 153 .

Costly Misapprehensions

His own deception did not soothe him. The tall scarecrow advancing on him, unpredictable at best, would read him, solve him for the witness he had been against the man and his family. Kurt's face changed to white as he came closer, lost its grayness, and Frankie felt plump and small, enfolded in the cold of the day and the righteousness of Kurt's slipping as he skidded purposefully on the ice toward him. Was his hand in a fist now? Why was his other hand in his pocket? Frankie said feebly over his heart and the wind on Burrows, "I came down to help." Kurt threw his arms around Frankie, whispering confidentially into his ear, "You ain't a bad guy-you got your ways. But, no kidding, Frankie, you ain't. Just loosen up a little, don't let the little things get to you. You got to see the big picture. No, you ain't." From a reservoir of kindness so deep that Frankie blanched at the distance between himself and its bottomless goodness, Kurt looked at him through bleary eyes and put his arm firmly around the other man's shoulder. "No, you ain't," Kurt said, chilling him with his defeat at his enemy's hands, "you ain't such a bad guy."

·154·

TWELVE

LAn Old Country Wife

late as a war bride, Minnie Muldroon knew she hadn't made even a second-rate catch. She had known Tyrone Salter by the name the u.S. Army had called him when they stationed him in Dublin where she lived. But on arrival in America, on Robinson Street, where she and Tyrone lived with his family in a two-story house with an attic, she discovered he was known to everyone-even as a boy-as Draw Flies. She did not care for the name and the small smile that accompanied it when someone addressed him. She knew, given the sort of man Tyrone was, what the name meant. He was, as everyone but she-impressed with his uniform and shy smile in Ireland, a Yankknew, lazy, amiable enough, but not overly weighted down with the brainpower, soft, credulous, decent, and certain never to have found a wife unless it was a country-girl-come-to-the-city like herself in Dublin. COMING OVER

. 155 .

Costly Misapprehensions

She had stayed during the war with a sister there, working in a tea shop, dutifully sending home half her salary to her parents, when as if dropped from the skies came young Tyrone Salter with tales of America and every man with his own car and soon washing machines in every garage. Already twenty-four, she married him, and after the victory in Japan, a long two years later, she came to America. She had not been there a month when in 1947, the spring with all its American blossoms on trees and the Easter processions at the grand cathedral in Oakland, she knew with a certainty that the Muldroon luck had pursued her. The father in Cork had fallen from a horse when she was a child and walked, if such it was, with a sideways motion, and when he talked to anyone glanced up at them from the other's belt. Her mother had grown lame in the fingers: she could hold nothing except as an awkward machine might, tilting her body in its entirety to grasp a tea cup. Adventure had been at the fairs in her village, the flirting and teasing, the sale after hours of wait of their pathetic ewes standing about like Minnie herself, sad-eyed as the bullocks gazing out of their pens. She had not been the belle of the market fairs, but she attributed it to her shyness, waiting for worldly knowledge to catch up with her and with the knowledge love and change work for the better. Setting out from County Cork to Dublin to make her fortune with a short stay at her sister's, Minnie discovered her sister was married to a shiftless bookie who seldom came home to the two-room flat with her and the children. Minnie tended the children for three years while her sister at nights found work in a local pub, and then Corporal Tyrone Salter came into the tea shop with several of his mates, and in her heart the deal was struck on the spot. The bookie was a short man, small-boned and tight-lipped, who had been a

An Old Country Wife

jockey once, and in Tyrone she saw something different, better, and expansive that spoke America to her: he laughed at Irish customs, their horses and carts, their language, and she understood the jokes, even agreed with them and laughed and thought she knew for sure she had been meant for something better. But once in America she did not need one of Pittsburgh's mountainsides to slide down on her to know she had stumbled into a bad match. Tyrone spent his evenings with his friends, chums of boyhood who congregated at Joyce's Pharmacy to plan the night ahead as dark fell just as if France had not once been defeated by the Nazis and Hiroshima bombed with atomic blasts and they themselves not traveled around the globe as soldiers in a great war. Whether it was New Guinea they had been or on the high seas, in Germany or the Arctic, the moment the war ended they ran like rabbits in a field back to their street corners, snugs in Oakland, the Irish Club, and the same lads they had known from the first grade on. Their wives, for those that took the time to get married, might have been a mountaintop faintly remembered on a three-day pass in Switzerland. The brides were left to their own devices, even the girls back home who had waited for them, but in Minnie's case she fell into even an inferior status to them, as she quickly understood. She was left to clean the Salter house while the mother listened to the radio in her room and the father went to work and to do the washing and the family ironing, to walk down to the Giant Eagle and carry the grocery bags up the long Robinson Street hill. Tyrone went to work, his old job in a garage, and sometimes did not come home until nine. She knew it wasn't another woman. What woman could compete with the endless conviviality of the returned boys from Oakland? On Oakland's ·157·

Costly Misapprehensions

streets a woman had to elbow her way past them as they took their summer ease in stories, jokes, and long accounts of bygone sports events and curiosities of their time. The bars were threedeep with them, talking about England and Ireland, Spain and Africa, as if it had all been staged to be unwrapped and reenacted at Coyne's, Edward's, the Oakland Cafe, and the Irish Club. Minnie seldom had known such grief: she wrote her mother and sister long letters and wept and dutifully followed Tyrone about when he did give her his time, an evening once a month, Mass on Sundays, an occasional night on the front porch at the small house on Robinson. For three years running, she attended the annual Thanksgiving Day football game between two teams called Oakland Community and the Irish Club. They fought their battles on a muddy field turned to ice behind the Meyron Avenue Public School. They punched each other and clawed. There were few rules: fistfights broke out on every play. Minnie watched in her third year there until she could bear it no longer and went to sit by herself on one of the empty benches far removed from the field. She did not care who won. It was this barbarian and savage rage that lay on the football field and the players. The cold air made her fingers ache with pains unlike any she had known at home; her feet felt encased in ice. If she had anywhere to go in Pittsburgh she would have run there. "Don't take it to heart," a young woman sitting on a far bench said. "They'll survive." "Damn them," Minnie said. She recognized the young woman, She saw her about, in Oakland, at the Giant Eagle, at the Irish Club. Her name was Irene Murphy, and Minnie said, "I guess I shouldn't say that." "Say what you please," the girl said. "This is America." "I'm an American," Minnie said in a huff.

An Old Country Wife

"I don't mean anything by what I said," Irene said, "but your mind is your own." "No one said it wasn't." The other girl stood and said, "No harm intended," and went back to where the others watching the game were standing. Minnie felt like a frozen woodland creature brought to earth by a shotgun in a lonely bog. Did her foreignness stand out? Was she known where she walked as an alien? Ireland is no crime, she thought, and then, Damn me! For me it was. She brooded about her free mind for two weeks, knowing herself to be large in the shoulders, taller than average, thick across the forehead, and with eyes of no distinction. But she hadn't thought the Irish country girl shone so clearly through her Cork and Dublin ways. She had strange feelings. She wanted a child, but Tyrone did not want a family yet. He was adamant. "We don't just have kids in America," he said. She went to Father Farrell and asked him about the contraception they had used for three years. "Well, what would you have done in Ireland?" he asked her, not unkindly. "I wouldn't have heard a word of it from my husband." "It was your conscience speaking. You didn't leave your soul in Ireland, did you?" Minnie insisted one night that there be no further birth control, but Tyrone at first argued with her and then stopped having sex with her. He waited downstairs until she slept and then came to bed. A month passed, two, three. She had not known he did not want a family with such desperation. Practicing birth control, she had felt American and free, but she did not know. She felt old-fashioned and unsure of what she was. Tyrone, for his part, did not seem to notice. He never embraced her, and she studied herself in the mirror for the signs of something marked ·159 .

Costly Misapprehensions

and doomed. She was ashamed to tell Father Farrell about the new turn to events: a husband practicing birth control by celibacy. Well, if it was bad it was going to happen to Minnie Muldroon, the daughter of bent old Tim in Cork. She looked for a sign of improvement, sitting alone at night listening to the downstairs radio, dressing herself to go shopping down at the Giant Eagle as if she were going to a ball, and redoing her hair ten times a day, and then the family bought a television set, a Dumont that sat in the living room like the child she wanted. She and her mother-in-law watched it all day and into the night. Tyrone watched the Friday night fights with her but afterward drifted down to the Irish Club to watch football with his friends. She and her mother-in-law seldom spoke: everything went on as unhappily as before, but now Minnie sat up late watching movies and ads for used cars. When it seemed to her the whole world lay still, from the slow and dreamlike Liffy River in Dublin, to the blue-green dome of the Four Courts, to the houses perched on the hills surrounding Pittsburgh, she felt she alone was awake in the drowsing universe. She went to bed near dawn every night, somehow oddly comforted that she had made a connection to things beyond Muldroon sadness in the flickering shadows on the Dumont. She woke to watch again, and then the television set broke. The picture narrowed from the top and bottom and drew in on itself and vanished. It was the night for Monsignor Sheehan. She watched the blank screen in horror as if a judgment had been made on her and all her kin scraping by in Ireland. Small walled fields stood before her eyes and a sickly draft horse the Muldroons had once owned, and she felt trapped and confined in being who she was and no other. She sat that night, a summer's night with a languid heat on the air, while her mother-in-law took the trolley out to Wilkinsburg for a bingo ·160·

An Old Country Wife

game there with two cronies, Tyrone not home yet-and not arriving till after midnight-and her father-in-law at that moment sitting in the company of Milton Berle in Coyne's. She had turned down the invitation to bingo. It seemed to her a long distance to have come to sit about with biddies who thought themselves superior to her because she was recently from the old country. She was lost in her thoughts when she became aware that someone stood in the path to the small house. "Good evening," he said. "1'm on my way to the pharmacy. Can I get you something?" He was a short blond man with green eyes, eyes overflowing, and thick arms: his name was Joe Rapp, and he looked at women as if he and they shared a secret. Minnie had not cared for him and his insinuating smile. He always jumped up to let women be seated and bounded up stairs to open doors, but his eyesnever left them, mirthful, confident. He bounced off women all day long, and Minnie was sure that with enough smiles and stares he found some through his day making him welcome. "No thank you, Joe," she said. "You're not watching television tonight," he said. "Every night I walk past your house and I see you in there about this time watching television. It's Father Sheehan tonight, you never miss him." Rapp lived three doors up the street with his wife and two children. His wife was sickly and seldom ventured out: Joe Rapp was hale and, like the others on Robinson in sound health and high spirits beyond the normal, never stayed home at night. "You should have been a detective, Joe." "I am," he said, "and I know you're not happy." "It's the television that's broken." "Let me have a look," he said and bounded up the few stairs and past the wooden screen door. ·161 .

Costly Misapprehensions

Minnie followed silently, and Rapp turned the set around and opened the back, and Minnie sat on the couch watching. After twenty minutes, humming to himself, Rapp announced it was a coil and he would find another in the morning. Gripped by the sight of the blond hair on his arms bleached and whitened by the sun, his arms and neck red, she said, "Stay for a cup of tea." He followed her to the kitchen, and the first time he came up behind her and pulled her close she wrestled away, but her "Stop that" was feeble and did not fool him. He stood back and came toward her again, and this time when she asked, "What do you think you're doing?" he muttered softly, "Minnie, I've had my eye on you." He pulled shut the drapes in the living room and locked the front door and came and kissed her where she stood. Her knees trembled, and he fearlessly threw off all his clothes and stood muscular and naked, a man apparently without a fear in this world or the next, and she took off her blouse slowly and said, "Turn out the lights." He said, "No," and hugged her and ran his hands over her removing her skirt and pushing her back on the couch. Later, her first thought was that she may very well have commenced her family that night with the repulsive Joe Rapp on the couch. He stood over her and bent and kissed her. "Minnie, you're a treasure," he said. "When's the rest coming back?" She lay back luxuriously, naked and hot where he had touched her and where she burned with flames Joe Rapp hadn't extinguished. "The mother's at bingo," she said. "Stay for your tea." "The old fellow?" "Wherever God takes you all at night." "And Tyrone?"

·162·

An Old Country Wife

"Him?" she asked, the long chain of bad luck, shattered as surely as the Dumont so silent and broken in the living room. "He stays out until midnight at the earliest." "Well, I'll have that tea then." She reached up to him. "Joe, you're a good fellow after all," she said, meaning that being American was taking your opportunities when they presented themselves, and she had never felt more beautifuL Once, walking on Nassau Street in Dublin, a grand lady in jewelry had stepped from a limousine to enter a shop, and Minnie had known that the man with her, a thin, well-dressed toff with a mustache and a green suit, was not her husband and that the two of them knew no laws, obeyed no orders but their own whims. Minnie had thought the spectacle was a hallucination: how, in her country of short grass and spare cottages and a father who lurched when he walked and a mother who turned in her painful tracks like a marionette, could such people exist? Ah, America. "You're sure Tyrone won't be coming home?" Joe Rapp asked, all muscles and eager to please, but apprehensive. "Draw Flies is a good steady fellow," Minnie said. "He can be counted on." She squeezed Joe's broad hand: she'd soon get him to wear a mustache. Sitting at the kitchen table over tea, they were startled by a sound at the door. It was Tyrone Salter himself. Angry and red-faced, Salter asked, "What's he doing here?" "Joe came in to fix the television." "There was nothing wrong with the set when I left." "That's all you know."

Costly Misapprehensions

"Get out!" Draw Flies said, pointing to the door. As Joe Rapp stood and moved to the door, Salter poked him. Rapp took a quick fighter's crouch and cocked his fist but changed his mind. In a fast movement with the palm ofhis hand he pushed Salter in the chest. Draw Flies hit him in the face. "Wife stealer," Tyrone Salter said. Rapp punched him into the small living room. From the front door of the house, Minnie's mother-in-law jumped into the living room. Seeing her son on the floor, she swung her purse and hit Joe Rapp in the face. "You all gone crazy?" Minnie cried. A slow pleasure crept over her for the grand night it had become. A loving Joe Rapp lately in her arms and meaning it and her husband battling for her without a shred of evidence she had done harm, only his jealousy driving him, and his mother respectfully punishing the stranger in the house. All for her. Joe Rapp ran out the door. "Murderer!" her mother-in-law shouted after him. Minnie knelt dutifully over her husband and murmured, in charge, "Poor boy, took a hard one for the little wife, didn't you now, sweetest."

THIRTEEN

7Juild