Songdogs (17 page)

I would rise from my chair, step out the door, look at the Wyoming sky, the thump of creation, and then I’d take another step forward on to the edge of the porch, and I would walk my way slowly into old photographs.

*   *   *

The first of them is a street, a Bronx tenement street, hermetically sealed at the end of the 1950s. The street loops itself into a red-brick cul-de-sac. At the end of the road there’s a commotion. It’s a summer’s day and boys are wearing bathing togs and running back and forth through a geyser of water erupting from a broken fire hydrant. Their hair is very short, their bodies scrawny and white. One teenager, with a few tufts of hair in bloom on his chest, is in the middle of a huge leap through the water, arms held out wide, his fingers spread, a roar on his lips, eyebrows arched, rack of ribs exposed. The girls aren’t allowed to put on bathing suits – this is a Catholic street – but some of them run through the water anyway, in long dresses which cling to their thighs. Along the side of the street a football is in mid-motion, heading towards a girl who looks shocked. A woman with a face like a trout peers from beyond the edge of the spray.

In the far background of the photograph a group of men and women are gathered on the steps outside a house. Only by walking into the photograph, going beyond the rim and up very close, can you make out their faces. They are Irish immigrants. Their clothes and expressions tell you that. Flat hats and grey trousers held up with suspenders. Some of them are sharing cigarettes, laughing, breaking out a melodeon, peeling labels off bottles that come from jacket pockets. They are fetching Galway and Dublin and Leitrim and Donegal from the bottom end of these bottles – and toasts are being made, or have been made. A toast to new arrivals who come hugging their suitcases with ash-wood hurleys strapped on the side. A toast to strange billboards that flash out new neon signs over the Bronx. A toast to a boxer who puts away journeymen heavyweights. A toast to the fire hydrant and the leaping boy. And maybe a toast to the big grey figure of Eisenhower, who will soon put a big chunk of metal up high in the air.

They have no names when I walk up to meet them, these immigrants. But I know their jobs – a list which, when converted to spittle at the edge of a tongue, could fill a keg – mechanics, maids, doormen, waitresses, line cooks, roofers, plumbers, garbage men, dishwashers, furnace foreman, doughnut maker in the morning, security guard at night, pint-puller, scrap buyer, dogcatcher, junk seller, shoeshiner, secretary, policeman who doesn’t ticket his own, fireman with a sprig of plastic shamrock in his helmet, landscaper, taxi driver, peddler, telephonist. They are watching their children play in the water. ‘He’s a wild one, that same fella.’ ‘Wouldn’t she break your heart?’ ‘Look at the head of hair on him.’ The men remember a time when they were boys. They made footballs from the bladders of pigs, but the shape of footballs has changed in this country, no longer round. Their sons often come home in colourful high-school jackets and it’s a strange language that they speak, quarterbacks and sackings. The men are wondering whether the ball, in its mid-flight twirl, will be caught. The women watch their daughters down by the fire hydrant and worry about how high their skirts are being lifted. The new leather shoes might get damp and unshape themselves. One mother is worried that the ball is heading towards her daughter, and maybe a joke rises up in her mind that her daughter is so clumsy that she hasn’t even caught the measles yet, how could she catch anything else?

Mam is wedged in between two rather fat women. Her blouse is white and opened down to the fourth button so that a man in a flat hat above her is leaning over, trying to peep down into the cleavage. It might be a bit bony for his taste. She has lost a lot of weight in the Bronx. She has a tendency to sit at the dinner table and push the food around on her plate, the fork clanging tinnily. Her arms are cartilaginous. A hip-bone juts from the dress. Her neck is a brown stalk of rhubarb with its long striations. The dark hair is pulled back, ribboned in red. She is on the bottom stoop with her hands placed carefully in her lap, one over the other. They are hands that have been doing laundry all day. She works with a family from Tipperary who still keep the letters ‘
CHINESE LAUNDRY
’ over the door, inspiring jokes about the slanty eyes and yellow skin of the Irish rednecks. Mam’s eyes are drawn down to her hands. Long and water-wrinkled, they have been scrubbing for many hours. Remnants of white washing powder under the nails. The tops of the fingers are puffy and the skin is loose from so much water. It is strange the patterns that are made in her hands. The fingerprint lines seem to become much more prominent, so that the rings at the top of each finger are bigger to the eye. Maps on her fingers. Far away, a boy named Miguel could lodge dirt in the fingernails and make a work of art from it. Mexican earth, the good earth.

A salesman has called earlier that evening, selling hand cream. She has bought a bottle of it. Salesmen are always calling at their door, at night. They have very short hair and perfect trouser creases and fabulous pitches in their voices – selling vacuum cleaners, knife sharpeners, wireless radios, kitchen tiles, kettles, ironing boards – and a lot of notes change fists. A great street for salesmen. People here talk a lot about new kitchen machinery. The lemon scent on her hands rises up to her nostrils, and she is glad that she bought it, although money is fairly tight these days. Money is like that flock of birds that arrived last night just as an old Hoagy Carmichael song jumped out of the radio. The birds arrived on the very first strain of ‘Ol’ Buttermilk Sky,’ flittered through it, left when the song ended. When they took off there were a lot of bird droppings on the ground outside the door. Money is like that flock of birds, Mam might think. You notice it when it’s not around. But if you have enough money you can get away, fly off, as many do.

Removal trucks sometimes arrive, and many jealous stares follow the lifting of the furniture, off to a street in a wealthy part of Brooklyn, or Queens, or Long Island, a road lined with trees and motor cars, where there might be a few Italians or Jews as well. Or even some of her own.

Mam is just about smiling as she looks down at her hands. It is not an unhappy smile, just a little lost on her face. Maybe she’s wondering what she’s doing here. Wondering what has led her to this. Wondering if life is manufactured by a sense of place, if happiness is dependent on soil, if it is an accident of circumstance that a woman is born in a certain country, and that the weather that gives birth to the soil also gives birth to the unfathomable intricacies of the heart. Wondering if there is a contagion to sadness. Or an entropy to love. Or maybe Mam isn’t thinking this way at all. Maybe she is wondering about the sheer banalities of her day, what she will cook for dinner, what end of the kitchen table she will do her ironing on, when she will get time to wash the white tablecloth, if she should put some aloe on her husband’s hands, hands that are now out of the photograph, pressing down on a button that will open a shutter.

The old man is hot-roofing these days because he cannot make enough money from his photographs for them to live on. He hates the job, but it’s all he can find. The Wyoming photographs come back from publishers with courteous notes, not even signed. Mam doesn’t like the idea of him being on a roof. Brutal work, carrying buckets of hot tar. She doesn’t like the man who runs the company either, Mangan, a sly-eyed man who drives around in an old Ford truck, ladders jutting from it. The company is called Koala-T Roofing Company, with a picture painted on the side, an impish koala holding a bucket. Mangan doesn’t pay very well and when my father comes home she has to scrape the globs of dried tar from his forearms. ‘Koala-T, me arse!’ he shouts. Sometimes he curses and slams his fists down on the table – ‘I want to take photos! Not do this shit! Do you understand me!’ and she must soothe him and sometimes get in front of his camera. She is wondering if perhaps he will take more photographs tonight and be happy for that. I stand in front of her and ask: Are ya happy, Mam? She doesn’t reply. But there is something in her that says: Well, yes, I am happy here, I suppose I’m happy, but I’d be happier elsewhere.

I drift off from the group again and hear the leaping boy still screaming in delight by the fire hydrant.

Not a lot is going on in Mam’s life. Sometimes, on a day off from the laundry, she goes into New York City on the subway and tries on red hats in the Fifth Avenue department stores, wanders around through acres of perfume and cosmetics and fineries. The ladies behind the counter soon realise she isn’t buying and leave her alone. She moves gracefully through the stores, fingering things, acquiring them for the briefest of moments, lays them down again, moves out into the street, where she walks through the traffic to sit in the rear of St Patrick’s Cathedral. In the silence she reincarnates herself – nothing too romantic, a grackle maybe. She settles down on a telegraph pole in her hometown, looks around. Swoops down and takes the host from the mestizo priest’s fingers. Takes off again into coloured winds. Revisits a house. Darts along dry streets. Strange to be a bird. Strange how hollow your bones become.

And how curious it is that she hasn’t heard from Cici in so long. The last time Cici wrote, she was on a train heading west, slamming through flatlands. She scribbled from a boxcar, where light filtered through in slants, and a mad red-faced hobo shared Spam sandwiches with her. It was a short letter and Mam read it so often that she began to incant parts of it in her mind like a church prayer:
I miss you very much, Juanita, keep smiling, it paints the world well, I will see you very soon.
There is something about Cici that makes the world worth living. Mam thinks about her often – it’s not so much that she wants to kiss her again as just simply see her, reassure herself that Cici really existed, that there was a time of such splendid happiness, that there might be one again.

Most of Mam’s other times are spent in quiet exactitude in her apartment, cleaning, arranging, putting things back in their proper places, meticulous, proud. When she talks she has the strangest lilt of half-Irish, half-Mexican accent. People seem to enjoy her company. She has stories to tell about chickens and a far-off country. And another world of fires and a tower. Yet the secret part of her – the photos in their bedroom – is well hidden from view, behind lace curtains on the third floor, where pigeons sometimes nestle at the windowsill. The only time that her husband seems to be truly at peace is when he’s taking those photos. They’re not obscene, not in any way. They make him content. It’s a small enough price for Mam to pay, and it’s an attention of sorts. He is still in love with her. He still makes a temple from her body – even though it’s much like a minaret now.

She remains looking at her hands as I ghost my way through the photograph and try to say things to the people around her. They are busy with their bottles and their dreams of appliances, so I step back through the shot and up the street. For time immemorial, that boy will be leaping. And I will never know if the ball was caught. And the trout-faced woman will continue to stare.

I move on down towards the end of the cul-de-sac, nod to my father as his fingers press on the shutter button, but he doesn’t nod back. I step out again, on to a black rim and into a night scene.

It is 1960, and a few young men are dancing with my mother. There is a radio set up under a windowsill and an Elvis Presley song is swivelling from it. It is apparent in the euphoric movement of the young men’s hips that a new decade is just under way. They have the beginnings of copycat quiffs on their heads. A boy with a harelip purses his mouth, as if he might kiss the moon, my mother dancing just a few feet from him. The boy wears drainpipe trousers, a purple shirt, pomade in his hair, and he is twirling imaginary hula-hoops around his groin. She is clicking her fingers. All along the cul-de-sac, bunting is up for the election of a man whose portrait sits on virtually every wall, green, white, and orange ribbons hung underneath his chin like a colourful goatee – John F. Kennedy with his perfect teeth, vying on the walls with the Pope and the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It must be a happy night for Mam, because her cheeks are flush with alcohol and her face is made-up, eyelashes curled, mascara carefully applied. Her eyes are open very wide and brown. Her thin body is in the middle of a twist, so that one shoulder is lower than the other and her chest nudges up against her blouse. I walk out there to go dancing. It’s hot and muggy, a humid night in late autumn. I twirl my hips, too. I move with abandon. She says to me: When are you going to get rid of that stupid earring, Conor? I take it out and give it to her, and she smiles.

I ask and she says that nothing much has changed. The laundry has grown bigger and new employees have been taken on. Other girls doing the scrubbing now. My father is still on the roofs, and the tar docks itself under his fingers. His forty-second birthday was spent above the Bronx – jokes being made about Marilyn Monroe and those who like it hot. Cici has written to her, raving about marijuana, but she hasn’t visited yet. Cici would like it here, out moving in the night, with moths flaring around under lamplights, dancers in a bouquet around a radio, the grind of hips, the swivel of words. It’s her sort of place – except Cici might be aware that there’s even newer music on its way, runnelling along over the continent, newer ideas, newer dances. Mam has a bead of sweat on her brow. Maybe she will wait for it to negotiate its way down her face to where she can tongue it. Or maybe not. Maybe she will wipe it off with a quick flick of the hand. Or maybe it will stay there eternally, a bead of sweat to say: I was dancing once, when I was thirty-three years old, and I didn’t have a care in the world.

Outside the photograph, my father is slickly dressed in a white shirt that smells of barsmoke. His dark tie is open and the long end of it reaches past his waist. Hair is quite thin now, furrows of it across his scalp. He is glad to watch his wife dance. He is afraid that life is becoming staid, he doesn’t like the roofs. There are days when he goes searching for other jobs, something in a press syndicate, or a newspaper, but all he ever gets are a few freelance shifts. He just wants to take his photographs, but there’s not much opportunity for that. The world rotates on an axis of what-ifs? What if we were somewhere else? What if we sauntered off and just didn’t come back?