If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go (7 page)

“Too fucking cold,” Mitch said, shaking his head. “Listen though, let me ask you something: You love your kids?”

“Leave my kids out of this,” the fat voice said.

“You love ’em?” Mitch asked again.

“I said—”

“Yeah, yeah, I love my kids,” the other voice said. “So what? What’s that got to do with anything?”

“You ever criticize ’em?” Mitch asked. “Yell at ’em? Hit ’em, maybe?”

There was silence at the other end of the bar. Someone snorted and said, “This fucking guy—”

“Tell ’em get a haircut, get better grades, turn the music down?” Mitch asked. “Ground ’em for cutting school? Smack ’em upside the
head for sassing their mother? Tell ’em, ‘You get knocked up, don’t bother coming home’?”

Silence, still, at the other end of the bar.

“You ever wish you never had ’em?” Mitch asked.

“Shut it down, now, you son of a bitch,” one of the men said. “Shut it down right now, or—”

“You still love ’em?” Mitch asked.

More silence. A lighter flared. Someone raised his mug to his lips and took a long drink. I couldn’t make out their faces in the dim light. I couldn’t tell the color of their eyes.

“Yeah, you still love ’em,” Mitch said, stubbing out his Camel. “You can talk all that shit about ’em, but you still love ’em.”

“The fuck’s he talking about?” one of the men said.

Mitch laughed, and the sound of it was warm and rich. He drained his drink and got up from his stool, leaning against the bar for balance. “The fuck am I talking about,” he said, shaking his head.

“Go fuck yourself, you commie prick,” the fat voice said loudly.

“If I could’ve done that, I wouldn’t have gotten out of bed this morning,” Mitch said.

Two of the men began moving forward. They were big and pretty bald with beer guts hanging over their tool belts. I didn’t recognize them. I was glad they didn’t appear to be somebody’s father or uncle. Somebody’s brother I might have to recognize.

“Let’s take it down a notch,” Len said quietly from behind the bar.

“Guy’s got a big mouth,” the fat voice said.

Mitch stepped forward, farther into the light. The younger construction worker with more hair looked down at Mitch’s stump. He put his hand on the fat man’s arm. He nodded toward Mitch’s wooden leg. Mitch never covered it up. He wore his pants rolled up to just below his knee, where the wooden leg began. He watched the men looking. He smiled so that his face creased up. His eyes were the brightest thing in the room.

“Don’t let that stop you,” he said softly.

“Let’s take it down a notch,” Len said. “Let’s everybody relax and have another drink. On the house.” Everybody liked Len. He knew how to run a bar right. He had silver hair but his face was young. He’d been laid off the Sandhogs, which was why he tended bar at the lounge at The Starlight Hotel.

“Sure,” the younger construction worker said. “Sure.” He turned back to the bar, to the place where the other men were standing. The fat man waited a minute longer before walking back to his place at the bar.

Len served the construction workers first. When he began making Mitch’s boilermaker, Mitch put up his hand and shook his head no. He threw some bills on the bar and picked up his jacket with the bottle of Gordon’s in the pocket and began walking toward the door that led to the rooms in the hotel. He’d left his cane on the back of his chair, but neither Len nor I called after him to take it. He whistled “The Star-Spangled Banner” as he walked through the door. You could hear him whistling as he walked up the stairs to his room, one step at a time.

“Guy’s got an attitude problem,” the fat voice said.

“Lay off, Jimmy,” one of the men said.

“Hey, he’s not the only one, is all I’m saying,” the fat man said. “He’s not the only one came back—”

“Everything all right over there?” Len said sharply. “Your drinks okay? Taste all right?” He stared down the bar at the men, his arms stretched out behind him. Len kept a bat behind the bar. On the shelf just opposite the taps for the draft beer.

“We’re good,” one of the men finally said.

“All right then,” Len said. He stared at the construction workers until they began talking among themselves. Then he came down the bar and took my glass and filled it with fresh ice and ginger ale. He nodded toward Mitch’s cane, and I handed it over the bar to him. Len put it on the shelf where he kept the baseball bat. The younger construction worker walked over to the jukebox and put money in. Tony Bennett
started singing “Fly Me to the Moon.” The construction worker stood over the jukebox, his eyes closed, snapping his fingers in time to the music.

Len leaned his elbows on the bar and sighed. “Sometimes I hear him at night, screaming,” he said. “After everyone’s gone, when I’m closing up. Screaming himself to sleep. And then it’s quiet for a while and then he starts back up again.” Len pushed himself off the bar, shaking his head. “My brother-in-law, same thing,” he said. “Same damn thing, ever since he got home. My sister sleeps in the kids’ room. They’re scared to death of him. Of their own father.” The door to the lounge opened and a man and a woman walked in, laughing. I’d never seen them before, just like I’d never seen the construction workers or any of these other daytime people. It was a whole different world, being in the lounge during daylight.

“No one’s sleeping in that house,” Len said, watching the couple sit down toward the middle of the bar. “Walking around like a bunch of zombies. The kids, everybody. They can’t get him to stop because he doesn’t even know he’s doing it. He wakes up in the morning, doesn’t remember a thing.” He shook his head and sighed again. He kept his eyes on the couple, waiting until they were fully settled, until the woman flounced her skirt over the barstool for the final time. Then he walked down the bar to serve them.

the fourth feeney sister

G
eorgie groaned, but the nurse wasn’t paying attention.

“I cannot believe girls are still standing around mooning over Luke McCallister,” he said. “It defies . . . well, I don’t know what it defies. I mean, he is beautiful. Can you light me up, please?”

The nurse shook her head and left the room.

“Bitch,” Georgie said.

I put two Marlboros in my mouth, lit them both, and put one between his lips. Georgie sucked the smoke as though it was oxygen. I took the cigarette from his mouth and let him exhale. “Want me to smoke it for you, too?” I joked.

“My, my, aren’t we mouthy now that we’re no longer jailbait,” Georgie said.

One time last winter, before she married James and moved away, I brought Marcel over to Georgie’s to hang out. It was his day off from the bus company, where he’d gotten a job after graduating two years ago. We were in his room, drinking coffee and smoking our brains out. Georgie’s hair was long and stringy and covered his face. He knelt before a poster of Rod Stewart taped to his wall. “Look at him,” he said, his eyes glowing.
He began salaaming and chanting, “Rod, Rod, you are God.” He couldn’t take his eyes off the poster. Marcel had met Georgie before, but after that morning, she didn’t want to go over there again. “Sorry, man,” she apologized. “But he, like, creeps me out.”

“Sara Pettingill used to have a big thing for Luke,” Georgie said. “She’d come around Eddy’s in her jeans and deck sneakers, and let out this Janis Joplin yell, screaming, ‘Luke!’ at the top of her lungs. Then when Luke came around, she’d go all sugar water and wouldn’t open her mouth, just like someone else I know. What’s with all you girls, mooning around in silence? You got to sing it out, honey chile. ‘Oh my man, I love him so,’” Georgie sang from his hospital bed, “‘he’ll never know . . .’” He had seen
Funny Girl
twelve times and worn out two albums. Barbra Streisand was right up there with Rod Stewart as far as he was concerned. I put the cigarette back in his mouth. He dragged again, then leaned his head back on the pillows.

“Luke went out with Sara, didn’t he?” I said, feeling a blade turn under my skin. Sara Pettingill was one of the city people who came down for the summer. It was her arm I’d wanted to cut off when I’d seen it draped across his back at the movies, when I should have been watching
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
. I had to ask if Butch and Sundance had died at the end and everyone looked at me like I had two heads. “The scary thing is, she doesn’t even do drugs,” Liz had said, rolling her eyes.

“Yes, yes, I do seem to remember her stumbling over to him one drunken night,” Georgie said. Georgie knew everything about everyone in the Trunk; that’s why I’d wanted to speak to him. We’d made plans to have breakfast at Leo’s Luncheonette before I went to work, and then I’d gotten the call from the hospital. His eyes were still purple and swollen. This was the first day that he could actually see. Two black eyes, a broken collarbone, broken ribs, sunset bruises all over his face and neck. But they’d let his mouth alone; no split lips, teeth intact. “The
better to blow you with, my dear,” Georgie said, after making me hold up a mirror so he could see his face. “And please don’t act all shocked and bothered. You’re eighteen now, there are things you should know.”

When Georgie was little, his mother left and he hasn’t seen her since. She tried to kill him and his brother, Bobby, by feeding them ink instead of milk in their baby bottles. Georgie used to spit it out, throw it up, anything but swallow it, but Bobby was the better baby and he drank it all down and never grew to his full height. They called him the Dwarf, even though he was a really sweet kid with a wonderful smile. He would smile even when people called him names, when they shoved him in the hall or tried to trip him on the bus.

“‘You’re not a kid anymore,’” Georgie croaked. “‘You’re not a kid anymore . . .’”

I met Georgie when I was in tenth grade and he was a senior. He pretended to be in love with me and followed me around and teased me when I came looking for him so I could bum a cigarette. “What’d you do, smell the smoke?” he’d say, hiding behind the chemistry labs. People made fun of him but only behind his back because he hung out with the Hitters, a group of tough, tough kids who were older than our people and gave new meaning to the phrase, “They’d just as soon kill you as look at you.” Georgie was not tough but he was best friends with Moira Feeney and her sisters, Deirdre and Fiona, who were Hitter queens, shared a penchant for pissing in wine bottles when they were drunk on the beach, and lived down the block from the house Georgie lived in with Bobby and his father and grandmother, who everyone called Sissie. It was an oddly barren house, sparsely furnished with dingy walls, but cozy somehow because they used the fireplace a lot to save on heat. Sometimes after school I’d go home with Georgie and watch
The 4:30 Movie
, and on Sunday afternoons we’d watch old films like
All About Eve
and
On the Waterfront
. On Sundays, his father would sit in the corduroy recliner, drinking Budweiser and barking, “Another nail in your coffin!” every time one of us lit a cigarette. He wore white socks with black shoes shined
to a high gloss that gleamed under the living room lights. Sissie would serve us tea and chocolate chip cookies baked from a frozen Pillsbury roll. Those private times at Georgie’s house were my favorite times with him, because in public he acted in certain ways that embarrassed me, and the people he hung out with made me nervous.

All around Elephant Beach things were changing, but the Hitter kids stayed the same. Even after they graduated and started working in the city or going to secretarial school, they hung out at MarioEstelle’s, a hole-in-the-wall luncheonette that looked like it belonged in Florida. It was a short brick building painted pale orange with green trim and had a tiny enclosed space on the side where people could sit and eat. Mario and Estelle lived in an apartment above the luncheonette that had jalousied windows and a stucco porch and a beach umbrella they kept up all year round. They sold pizzas and pork Parmesan heroes and big, fluffy meatballs served in a napkin for a nickel, ten cents with sauce served in a Styrofoam cup. It was something, on a cold afternoon in January, to feel the steam heat hit you as you walked into the little luncheonette and bit into one of Mario’s meatballs. The taste was warm and tangy and filling and made you forget how much people sucked most of the time. Unfortunately, you couldn’t go there very often, because you didn’t want to stand around waiting for Estelle to ladle your meatball from the big, black cast-iron kettle with twenty pairs of eyes on you, their collective silence freezing you out, or worse, let your eyes wander in the wrong direction for a split second too long and hear Fiona Feeney or one of her sisters say, “What the fuck you looking at?” Easier instead to cop an egg roll or a Lucky Lunch at Ten Dragons takeout farther up Lighthouse Avenue. It might not taste like home, but at least you could enjoy your food without all that vicious scrutiny.

The Hitters loved two things in life: fighting and dancing. They would fight anyone, anytime, and even though Jimmy Murphy and some of his friends carried switchblades, the girls were worse than the boys. They fought the black kids, they fought the hippies, they fought
strangers who stopped at red lights and rolled down their windows to ask for directions. When they weren’t kicking someone’s ass or getting drunk on the beach or at Dave’s Dive farther down the Trunk, they were dancing. Dancing had the same effect on the Hitters as quaaludes had on Billy and Voodoo; it tranquilized that inner coil of violence that lay crouched and ready to spring at the slightest provocation. We used to watch them at the St. Timothy dances, draped over one another like blankets, Jimmy Murphy’s hand cupping Deirdre Feeney’s ass in ways she never would have allowed on the school bus or at MarioEstelle’s. Deirdre was the beautiful one, quieter than her sisters and less inclined to take offense at pretty much anything. Moira was quiet, too, until she had a few drinks; she’d been banned from the dances after Father Tom had had to practically wrestle her out the door when she’d tried doing a striptease to the tune of “Sherry Baby.” She’d gotten as far as unbuttoning her blouse so you could see the twin cups of her black brassiere. Fiona would be curled into Mickey Fallon’s arms, docile as a kitten, so you’d never guess she was capable of screaming, “Get the nigger bitches!” while leading a charge across the cafeteria that had even Mr. Farnikan, the assistant principal, backed against the wall to get out of her way. Sometimes, at the beach, they’d turn the transistor radio to the oldies station and twirl one another around to Sam Cooke and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, standing in a circle while Mickey and Fiona, who were the best dancers, did a solo number. Or they’d slow dance with their eyes closed, their bare ankles sinking into the sand. If people on neighboring beach blankets who didn’t know any better asked them to please turn down the music so they could get their kid to sleep or something, one of the Hitters was sure to turn the music all the way up so you could hear it in New Jersey, then say, “Excuse me? Sorry, can’t hear you, what was that again?”

Fiona Feeney had dyed black hair teased into a frothy bubble that cascaded down her back. She wore black eyeliner that winged at the corners, making her eyes look as though they could fly out of her face at
a moment’s notice. She sometimes came to school drunk, but the teachers were too afraid to suspend her and they knew it wouldn’t do any good. Sometimes I’d catch her watching me in the smoking bathroom, a little smile on her face, but the only thing she ever said to me was “Be good to Georgie. Don’t hurt him.” She said it nicely enough, but I felt my heart banging against my spine; I had seen Fiona in action on more than one occasion.

After what happened to Georgie, she had marched up to Jimmy Murphy in front of MarioEstelle’s and smacked him right across the face, even though he was engaged to her sister Deirdre. “Go ahead, Jimmy,” she said. “Go ahead, hit me. Right here, in front of everybody. Right up your alley, right? How drunk did you have to be? How drunk did all a youse have to be, to do what you did?” It was a funny thing to say, because the Hitter boys never needed liquor to throw anyone a beating. Jimmy was pretty crazy himself, but Fiona was crazy and tough and fearless, and you could see he was scared and trying not to show it.

“Leave it alone, Fiona, you know what’s good for you,” he told her.

“You leave him alone,” she said. “You hear me, Jimmy?”

“Or what?” Jimmy sneered. “What, he coming after me with the faggot army patrol?”

Fiona’s eyes narrowed. She took a step closer to Jimmy until she was almost touching his chest. She looked up into his face and said very quietly, “He knows who he is. You know who you are, Jimmy?”

“Shut the fuck up, Fiona,” Jimmy said loudly.

“You leave him alone,” she repeated, and it was Jimmy Murphy who turned first and walked away.

Georgie sighed when I told him. “I wish she hadn’t of done that,” he said.

“She’s looking out for you,” I said. “Being a good friend.” I had run into Fiona in the hospital lobby. She was wearing a blue dress with a scoop neck that showed her freckled chest. Behind her sunglasses her eyes were threaded and bloodshot, and when she turned to leave, I
caught a whiff of stale sweat and something else, something greasy and unclean. She worked at Donnelly’s Insurance Agency on Buoy Boulevard and Georgie had told me she was taking night classes at Carver Community College. At the door she turned and beckoned me with a crooked finger. My throat began closing up, but I followed her out the glass doors into the sunlight. In front of the hospital, she took a can of Schaefer beer from her bag, popped the tab and took a sip. She held it out to me. “No thanks,” I said politely. It was eleven thirty in the morning and I was going to work at the A&P straight from the hospital. I hoped it was her day off from the insurance agency. I hoped she wasn’t going back to work looking like she’d slept on the beach after pulling an all-nighter.

“You know what’s going on here?” she asked me suddenly. “You know what this is about?”

“Kind of,” I said. On those Sunday afternoons at his house, Georgie said some things. “They can’t ask their good little Catholic girlfriends,” he told me. “So they ask me instead. I mean, let’s face it, they don’t call me the fourth Feeney sister for nothing.” Some of it I didn’t understand, some of it I didn’t want to.

Fiona sighed. “Dimwit probably said something, one of his smart-ass remarks,” she said. “He doesn’t know how to be careful.” She drained the beer, then idly crushed the can with one hand. She pointed a finger at me. “You be careful,” she said, then turned and walked toward the parking lot.

Georgie tried to sit up, groaned, and sank back down again. “Well, I guess this little incident brings it all the way home,” he said. “Time for the Manhattan transfer.” He talked about moving to the city all the time, even had a separate savings account aside from what he gave his grandmother to run the house. She didn’t know he was in the hospital. He’d instructed his brother to tell their father and Sissie that he was working double shifts and sleeping at a coworker’s apartment that was closer to
the bus station. He’d think of something later to explain the bruises. Bobby wept when he saw his brother lying in the hospital bed, huge, leaky tears that threatened to swallow his face. His small shoulders heaved under the weight of his sobs. After he left, Georgie had turned away, his own eyes wet. “I always wanted to save him,” he sighed. “But shit, who’s going to save me?”

“Everyone else is moving down here to get away from the city,” I said, pouring water from the plastic blue pitcher beside his bed. I lifted the cup to his lips.

“Exactly why I’m moving out, darling,” he said. “I’ll finally be able to use my talents where they’ll be appreciated. I can get a walk-up in the Village and decorate the way I’ve always wanted to without being afraid of giving Daddy a heart attack. Red Chinese screens, thrift-shop flamingos, art deco glass . . . it will be simply fabulous. And after this latest debacle, I’m so looking forward to the kindness of strangers, I can’t tell you.” He closed his eyes. His face against the pillows looked very small and white. I put my hand up to push his hair back from his forehead. There was a welt that hadn’t been there before, a fragile pink bump that seemed to be getting larger as I watched. When I touched it, Georgie whimpered. “Does that hurt?” I asked him. He shivered. The bump seemed to be growing bigger, harder, by the second. “I’m going to call the nurse,” I said, pressing the buzzer by the bed.