Songs in Ordinary Time (11 page)

In a way being rid of Howard’s awkward attention was a relief, and yet he never passed by without feeling bad about his silence. He did not turn the corner. This was his father’s street and he would not walk here when his father was drinking.

The church bells rang four times and he started to run, spurred on by the sudden hope that Klubocks’ dog might have retrieved the glove. Maybe it was beside him in the driveway right now or in the lilac bush, and if he ran really fast, he could get it down to the baseball field….

“What’s your big rush?” someone hollered. He glanced back to see Norm, his hands in his pockets as he kicked a stone along the sidewalk. His chest ached. Norm hadn’t even gone to the game. Of course not. Without his glove he couldn’t play. Benjy waited for the thump on the back he deserved.

“Guess who I just saw?” Norm said, catching up with him. He gave the stone a final kick into the gutter. “That peddler Duvall, walking along with a big loaf of bread under his arm.”

The minute his mother got home from work Benjy told her about Uncle Renie’s store being closed. “I’ll bring the dial tomorrow,” he promised.

She nodded absently and began peeling vegetables and chopping them into a stew that she put in the pressure cooker. Next, she made five bowls of chocolate pudding. He slipped into the front room and turned the television on low.

“Benjy!” she called from the kitchen. He took a deep breath before going in. So this was it. Mr. Briscoe must have told her. She glanced into the front SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 49

room. Norm was upstairs and Alice wasn’t home yet. She bent close, and his head ran with sweat. “Did Mr. Duvall call or come by?”

When he said no, she turned down the burner on the stove. She got out the stubby broom and swept the kitchen floor, and then she opened the front door and swept out dirt from the rug. She tried to straighten the lampshade but it was still crooked. She went into the bathroom, where she stayed for a long time. When she came out, her thick dark hair had been brushed flat and her lips were red with lipstick and she smelled of a heavy perfume he would always associate with the sadness of his mother’s waiting.

Norm had come down from his room and was sitting on the couch with Benjy.

“Did you go see about that job today?” his mother asked. She and Norm were barely speaking.

“I did,” Norm said, his eyes on the television. “But town hall was closed.

The Judge’s funeral.”

“You’ll go tomorrow then?”

“Yah, I’ll go tomorrow,” Norm sighed.

“You damn well better,” she said.

“I said I would!”

“Mr. Hendricks called me at work. He said the dentist’s going to charge fifty-six dollars.” She pointed at him. “That’s fifty-six you pay. Not me.”

“I know that!”

“Don’t be so damn smart!”

“I’m not! But how come you just take Hendricks’s side? How come you never asked me what happened? What am I? What do you think, I’m some jerk that goes around beating people up for no reason?” His face was red.

“I think you’re a hothead!” she said, her chin out like his, her face as red in their strange commingling of pleasure and rage. “A bullhead who doesn’t think, who just starts swinging!”

“Yah?” he answered with every charge. “Yah? I just walked up to Hendricks and for no reason I hit him, huh? Is that what you think?” He kept glancing at Benjy.

“That’s what I think!” his mother said.

“Well then you’re st…wrong!” Norm caught himself.

“Then tell me!”

“He said something about Dad. They were all laughing about him being drunk.”

“Oh God,” she sighed. “Oh God, God, God.”

Out on the street, car doors began to open and bang shut. The Klubocks were having a party. It was Mr. Klubock’s fortieth birthday. Mrs. Klubock was twenty-eight. Louie had told Benjy that his mother had been planning this party for a long time.

Marie stood behind the curtain with the light off, watching the cars arrive.

“Some nerve,” she muttered as two cars pulled in front of their house, their wheels up on the grass. “Don’t give a damn about anybody else….” She leaned closer to the window and quickly ran her fingers through her hair, 50 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

and then he was at the door with a stick of Italian bread wrapped in white paper, still knocking as she opened the door. Sighing at the wonderful smells from her kitchen, he apologized for being late, but the most wonderful thing had happened. He’d found a room in a boardinghouse run by two old women.

“The Mayo sisters,” she said, taking the bread.

“Why, yes,” Omar said. “And they’re letting me stay a night or two until I find work.” He sighed. “Or run out of money.”

“Work?” she said. “Are you looking for a job? Here? In Atkinson?”

Norm looked toward the kitchen.

“A man’s got to work,” Duvall sighed as he sat down at the table. “Isn’t that what life’s all about?”

“Asshole,” Norm muttered, nudging Benjy.

“The wire plant’s always hiring,” she said in a rush of activity between the refrigerator, sink, and stove. “The girl I work with says they’re on two shifts now. You should try there! I can tell you right where it is!” Her voice had a quick brittle ring. She had been slicing bread and putting it on a plate and now she laid a stick of butter on a chipped gold-rimmed saucer. She set them in the middle of the table.

“Well now, that’s good news on a lovely night with such wondrous vapors in the air.” He looked toward the stove and sniffed. “Beef Bourguignon?”

“Stew,” she said with a weak shrug.

“Thank the Lord,” Duvall said.

The back door squealed open and Alice came into the kitchen. His mother’s head jerked around and she stared. Alice’s cheeks were red and her mouth was red and sore-looking. Alice said a quick hello and tried to hurry into the front room, but Duvall called her back. She stood in the doorway, her fingers grazing her blouse front, checking each button.

“Ah,” he said, smiling. “The maiden’s cheeks so rouged with love that her eyes, her eyes…” He peered at her. “Her eyes burn holes in the blackest night.”

“That’s beautiful,” his mother said, looking at Duvall. “Who wrote that?

No, Alice, you tell us. Alice is good in English.”

“I never heard it before,” Alice said, and his mother looked disappointed.

“Of course not,” Duvall said, buttering a slice of bread with graceful, almost loving strokes. “That is from a ‘Sonnet to Love.’” He looked up at Marie and lowered his voice. “By Omar Duvall, a little-known sonnet by a littler-known poet.” Still staring, he bit into the bread.

In the other room, Norm howled. “Unbelievable!” he cried. “This is the funniest show I’ve ever seen!”

“Who’s the lucky young man?” Duvall asked over Norm’s high-pitched laughter.

“Lester Stoner,” Alice said, blushing.

Norm had come into the doorway. “You probably know his father,” he said. “He’s the police chief.”

“Can’t say that I’ve ever had the pleasure, son,” Duvall said, swallowing, SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 51

licking his lips, then with two fingers crimping crumbs from the corners of his mouth.

“My name’s Norm,” he said, frowning.

Duvall nodded. “I know that, son.” He squinted, then flashed a quick smile. “Norman. Not unlike Omar. Norman…Omar without the
n
’s.”

“Surprise!” From next door came the shout of many voices with noise-makers and clapping. “Surprise!”

Across the driveway, they all began to sing “Happy Birthday” to Harvey Klubock, who had just arrived. He stood on his back steps in his stained butcher’s overalls dazedly looking into his own house at all those people, neighbors and friends of his wife, all of them dressed up, younger than he and wonderfully happy that he was another year older.

Omar Duvall had gone to the window over the sink and parted the water-stained curtain. With a quick push he lifted the window that was never opened, the window that looked directly into the Klubocks’ kitchen. “Happy Birthday”—his deep rich baritone joined the singing, funneling across the driveway—“Happy Birthday, dear Harvey…”

“Oh don’t,” his mother said, reaching out with one hand but not touching him. Her face was white. “Oh please don’t.”

As the hot cooking air was sucked through the window, the little kitchen grew cooler.

Benjy turned off the television and closed his eyes. It sounded as if the party were right in the kitchen, as if the whole street were in there. He wondered what it would be like to have a party in his own house.

The next day after school Benjy headed downtown with the washing-machine dial in his bookbag. When he came to the park he glanced at the Mayo sisters’ boardinghouse, expecting it to look different now with Omar living there, the way his own house had seemed to change with the exuber-ant man’s presence. Last night Omar had greased the squealing door hinges and propped up the sagging back step with a brick. “It’s so quiet,” Benjy’s mother had said, opening and closing the door. “I can’t believe all it took was a little lard.”

“Ingenuity, my dear. It’s my stock-in-trade,” he had said with a wink.

Maybe Omar was in there now, doing little jobs for the Mayo sisters. It gave him the creeps to think of Omar sleeping in the same room where the Judge had died. He stared at the second-floor window. Maybe even in the same bed! As he crossed the street, he remembered the black man’s angry face that day, and a chill went through him. If his mother knew about the fight he’d witnessed, she wouldn’t like Duvall, and he wanted very much for her to like him.

He paused on the corner of the park and looked down one of the paths that bisected the broad green square from each of its four corners. Two men pushed lawn mowers in opposite directions. In the damaged quadrant three men raked stones from the freshly rolled loam. In the center of the park a crew of laborers swarmed over the bandstand with paintbrushes and 52 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

hammers, readying it for the first concert. There was a man in the bucket of a cherry picker feeding electrical lines to two men on the bandstand roof who were hooking up the loudspeakers.

Benjy came down West Street toward Joey Seldon’s popcorn stand, where one of the laborers stood drinking a bottle of orange soda.

“I can’t,” the laborer was saying to the blind man in the stand. The laborer kept looking warily around. “This reseeding shit’s set me back days.”

Joey’s hand groped along the weathered countertop to a hole in one of the boards. “It’s rotten right through,” he said. “And the corner posts are gone too.” He shook a post and the whole stand trembled. He cocked his head expectantly, his eyes rolling in their sockets like milky marbles. “You’re the foreman, Kenny. You can do it if you want.”

“Look, I told Greenie,” the laborer confided. He stepped closer. “I said,

‘The whole thing’s so much dry rot, one stiff wind’ll take her down,’ and he says, ‘Then let it!’”

At this, Joey sank heavily onto his stool. “He’s probably right. Just let it go,” he said.

“Aw c’mon, Joey,” said the laborer. “’Course he’s not right. I’m just saying my hands are tied. I can’t shit on the job without Greenie’s say-so. The man’s an asshole, a little nothin’, but he’s got the power.”

Joey had been shaking his head. “No,” he sighed. “It’s not just him.

Things’re changing. People are getting sick of me.” He laughed bitterly.

“And I’m getting sick of them.”

“C’mon, Joey.” The laborer reached in and patted Joey’s shoulder. “People want you here! Christ, you’re an institution! You’ll see. Sonny’ll get up at the council meeting just like the Judge used to and he’ll talk about your war record and that’ll be that. They’ll vote your space again, and then I’ll be up here first thing the next morning, fixing the old stand all up for another summer.”

Joey rubbed his eyes, a dismal gesture.

“It’s all the vandalism. Greenie’s going off the deep end,” the laborer said.

“’Course, your radio blasting last year during his grand finale didn’t help much.”

Joey smiled. “I wish I could take credit for that.” He chuckled. “Damn kids, they really pulled one off that time.”

During the last concert of the season someone had rigged Joey’s radio up to the loudspeakers. They turned the volume high as it would go and moved the radio off the counter, down behind the stand. By the time Joey located it, Jarden Greene’s violin solo had been completely drowned out by Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Great Balls of Fire.” Benjy hadn’t been there, but Norm said kids were dancing and even the grown-ups were laughing and cheering and clapping their hands while Jarden Greene fiddled away.

“The thing is, he thinks the park’s his, so he takes everything personal,”

the laborer said.

As Benjy started past the stand, Joey’s head cocked. “Who’s that?” he called.

SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 53

“It’s me. Benjy Fermoyle.”

“What’ll it be, Benjy?” Joey asked, his face brightening. He stood up and wiped his hands eagerly on his white apron.

“Nothing, thanks.”

“Need some money? If you haven’t got any cans or bottles to return, then you can give me a hand stacking the empties,” Joey said of the cases of empty cans and bottles next to his stand. All the kids brought their empties here because Joey didn’t give them a hard time the way stores did. And if you needed money and Joey liked you, he’d put you to work.

“They’re all stacked, Joey,” the laborer said warily as if Benjy were trying to take advantage here.

When Benjy came to the Telephone Building he darted into the doorway as a man lurched across the street. At first he thought it was his father, but it was only Buster Kennedy, a shell-shocked veteran who delivered loud impassioned speeches all day long as he roamed through town. Benjy wondered if Buster’s kids had ever ducked into doorways and dived into hedges at the sound of their father’s voice. In a way Benjy’s father was more a sense of dread than an actual presence. The flesh-and-blood father was never as terrifying as this pervading fear, this long, dark shadow with its staggering footsteps, penitential tears, and vomitous breath always pleading for them to love him, please, please, please; the terrible phone calls, when the only sound on the line was his father’s weeping, his breathless gasping, desperate to tell of his love, that raging, hounding, erratic need, a love of such dizzying polarity it could wrench a smile to a sneer, an embrace to a twisted arm. And yet, he could think of no one who had ever spoken to him of love but his father, whom he did not think he loved, this father, this power he respected and feared the way one does as dark and ungovernable a force as a nightmare or hurricane or plummeting comet.