A Song for Mary

by Dennis Smith

  The policeman tells Artie to stop, and we go up on the sidewalk of the highway. It is just like I have seen in the movies, and I watch closely as the policeman slowly gets off his motorcycle, and slowly takes his gloves off, and slowly walks over to Artie. It is like he practiced it a hundred times.

  The policeman leans over into the window.

  “You know how dangerous that is?” the policeman asks. His voice is pretty snotty.

  “What is that, Officer?” Artie says. “I don’t think I was speeding or anything.”

  “The boy,” the officer says.

  The policeman is now pointing at me, and as Artie turns to look at me I can feel myself shrinking up.

  “You mean Dennis?” my mother says.

  Artie is staring at me. “What did you do?” he says in a voice that is like he is yelling at me.

  “I didn’t do anything,” I say.

  Looking at them, I wonder if anyone is going to be on my side, and I begin to get the feeling that I might be like the last guy picked in a choose-up for a ballgame. No one ever really cares about the last guy picked in a choose-up.

  They are all now staring at me, and I don’t know what I’ve done.

  “He had his head out the window,” the policeman says.

  “You had your head out the window?” Artie repeats.

  “You should get an act together,” I say. I don’t like the way they are treating me.

  “Don’t be smart, young man,” my mother says.

  The “young man” stuff again, it always leads to trouble. And so I keep quiet.

  The policeman gives Artie a warning to control the passengers in his car, and puts his gloves back on.

  “I’m sorry, Officer,” Artie says.

  “I’m sorry, Artie,” my mother says.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” I say, even though I don’t think I’ve done anything so bad. But I know it will make her feel better. People always feel better when you say you’re sorry, and instead of saying hello to people, sometimes I think we should just say I’m sorry when we meet them.

  There is a silence in the car as we drive forward. The car is hot. But I think the policeman scared Artie, and he made us close all the windows, except for the window by him. This window doesn’t make too much noise because it’s not open far enough to make noise, and it’s not open far enough to cool us off, either.

  “It’s very dangerous to put your head out of the window,” Artie says after a while. “Twelve years old, you should know better.”

  I don’t say anything, but I am hoping he doesn’t become like a record.

  There is more silence. I know that Artie wants to say more, but he is waiting for my mother to say something. He has known her for just a short time. I know he doesn’t want to make her upset, and so he waits for her to say something. He wants her to be on his side, I bet.

  But my mother doesn’t say anything.

  Mom made me dress up to go for a ride in the car, and I am wearing a clean white shirt and a pair of corduroy pants, the same blue ones I wear to school. I take the end of my shirt out of my pants and wipe the sweat from my forehead.

  I wish it was my father driving the car instead of Artie. Sometimes I feel so alone when I think about my father. I see other boys at church or going to the subway with their fathers, and I wish that I could do what they do, even if my father had to be on crutches or be in a wheelchair or something.

  And it must be so lonely for him, too, because I don’t think my mother has been up there to see him for more than a year. Maybe she is trying to forget him, I don’t know.

  How hard it must be for him to be lying in that hospital all the time, with no place to go. I imagine that he must be very patient to put up with that, just sitting in bed the way I do when I have a cold, listening to the radio, reading magazines, or drinking bowl after bowl of soup. You can only read so many magazines, listen to so much radio, or eat so much soup. After that, there is nothing to do. You have to be very tough to put up with being in a bed twenty-four hours a day.

  I don’t ever want to be cooped up like that, like here in this hot car, or like at school, pushed into lines all the time to go into rooms with closed door and windows, hands out of pockets, head straight up like there’s a board stuck in your neck.

  I can’t talk to anyone about it. Even Billy. Sometimes I wonder what Billy thinks about it, about our father being so cooped up all the time, but I know that if I ever say anything, I will just get him pissed off that I brought it up. If he wanted to say something about it, he would just say it. I’m just the youngest in the family, and everybody expects me to keep my mouth shut, I think.

  There is just this forget-all-about-it attitude that covers our lives like wallpaper.

  But here is Mom with this Artie guy, and I don’t know what to think about him. He is not such a bad guy, and at least he doesn’t get drunk like Quigley did. But he has no right to yell at me, not for anything.

  He’s an Italian, and my mother never really talked so nice about the Italians on the block. She used to call them the guineas, but I haven’t heard her say that since she met Artie.

  Sometimes I think she should marry somebody like this Artie, and then she wouldn’t have to work so hard cleaning all the apartments. She wouldn’t have to hide the money she earns from the welfare, either.

  I know, though, she could never get married again, because we are Catholic, and being a Catholic means that you only get married once. Maybe, if she was born someone else, a Protestant or a Jew maybe, she would have a better deal, but she says that it’s bad luck to wish that you were someone else. You could change yourself, maybe, make yourself better, but you should do it with the body that God gave you. That’s what she says. Maybe things will change for her someday. Maybe things will get better enough so that she can get up from her hands and knees on Sutton Place.

  Damn. I love my mother so much, and I can’t understand why God doesn’t change things for her.

  It is now very hot in the backseat, and I want to ask Artie to let me open the window so we can get some air. But I don’t want to talk, not after he yelled at me.

  Mom looks pretty hot, too, but she has been very quiet. Sometimes when she gets quiet, she can be quiet for days at a time.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I am lying in my bed now, the top bunk. It is summer, hot and muggy, and I have a wet rag around my neck. I always wear a wet rag around my neck when I go to bed in the summertime, for it soaks up the sweat.

  I am staring into our kitchen. The kitchen has just a little light, which comes from the apartment across the alleyway, and I am watching the shadows across the icebox change as Mr. Gibson or Mrs. Gibson across the alleyway moves around in their own kitchen. It is eerie to watch, for it is like our neighbors are in my kitchen and a part of our lives. I have been lying here, awake, for more than an hour, watching the shadows. A mouse runs across the floor, stops for a second to look around, and then runs under the icebox.

  It’s so quiet, but once in a while I can hear dishes or pots and pans being banged together, or maybe somebody’s loud voice saying that they can’t find something or other. I hear Mr. Gibson cursing, but about what I don’t know.

  But, suddenly, there is a weird grunting and slurping sound, and I strain my ears to hear where it is coming from. It can’t be from the outside of my window, because we can’t even get my bedroom window opened, what with the hundred coats of paint on it. No. It is right here, from inside, from the living room. It must be my mother and Artie. They must be making out or something, that’s where the sounds are coming from. But what are they doing? Are they kissing? Would they be doing anything else? Oh, no, my mother wouldn’t do anything else. I don’t think so. Not with our father in the hospital and everything. God, I don’t think so.

  All this makes me very nervous and twitchity, and I feel like getting up and walking around the apartment, but I know my mother wouldn’t like that. She’d say I wasn’t minding my own business. God. Why
do we have to live like this? Why couldn’t our father just have been killed when he fell off that truck, if that is the story, anyway. Maybe there is something else wrong with him, like maybe he is blind and my mother is afraid to tell us about it. Maybe his skin is falling off with some weird disease, or who knows?

  But sometimes, like now, I don’t really care about it at all. I only care about why we have to worry about these things all the time, about not having a father, about a nut like Quigley or this Artie guy in the living room with my mother. I just wish things would get different for her, so that we could stop all these worries, and she could get unmarried and get married and we could have a father in the house like everybody else.

  I don’t like what is going on, and I begin to think about saying my night prayers, thinking Blessed Maria Goretti could hear me way up in heaven if I whispered. But you don’t even have to whisper to pray. You can do it in your mind and it is as good. I am still thinking about all these religious things, about praying, about getting everyone in heaven to help us out a little.

  Blessed Maria would like me, I know, if she could hear me. She’s a saint now—the Pope just made her one—and she must have great powers. I wonder if she does hear me. There is nothing wrong with taking a chance, though, and I begin to whisper. “I know it’s tough, Blessed Maria Goretti,” I am more mouthing the words than whispering, “and you had to go through a lot just to be with God in heaven, but could you take care of my mother so’s I don’t have to listen to all these sounds coming from the living room?”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Sometimes, on Sundays, all the aunts and the uncles come over. They get together to sing or to talk politics. “Diddley-do and the Generals through,” that is what Uncle Bob sings, because he doesn’t like Ike. It is always a day for Irish songs and the chances of the Democrats and some salami and bologna sandwiches and lots of pretzels.

  Billy and I look forward to these days with my aunts and the uncles because the cousins are good stickball players, and we get a game going on 56th Street. There are about ten of them. They come from Brooklyn and Queens, the cousins, and coming into the city is a hotshot thing for them. City guys, they think, are somehow tougher, and the 56th Street girls are prettier. I don’t care much about that because I still don’t pay much attention to girls, except when I think about them, and except whenever I see Sue Flanagan or Marilyn Rolleri.

  Billy and my cousin Bobby are fourteen and always after the girls, always making time with them, and sometimes I follow them down to the river where they go with the girls to watch the Pepsi-Cola sign blink on and off. The 51st park down by the river is always dark, because there are so many trees there, and they sit there, the two of them, with whatever girls they can get to watch the Pepsi-Cola sign with them, and they try to feel them up.

  Once I was sitting down there in the park with Walsh and Jur-gensen and we saw someone—it was so dark we couldn’t tell who—unbutton the blouse of a girl and feel around her brassiere. I think about this a lot, but I can never get the chance or the courage to ask a girl to walk to the river with me.

  I am only twelve, but I wish I was thirteen, because the girls don’t mind walking down by the river with a teenager.

  There is not much room in the kitchen, and the four kitchen chairs and the one from Mommy’s room seemed squeezed. The women along with Mom’s cousin Tim sit in the chairs, and the rest stand around, leaning on the stove or the icebox. Uncle Andy is sitting on the top of the bathtub right next to the kitchen sink.

  I can tell when all the uncles are beginning to feel good. “Feeling good” is the way Mom says everyone is when the party is in the middle. It is a good time, I am thinking, as Uncle Bob pulls me aside and asks me how I am doing in school. I know I hate school, but I don’t want to say this to anyone. It is like being on welfare, and you have to keep it a secret.

  “Okay,” I answer him, “I guess.”

  “That’s the boy,” Uncle Bob says, “the only way to go. Always do good in school. You could get to be a bishop and kiss all them nuns.”

  Uncle Bob is a bartender and makes fun of everything. He wouldn’t talk about kissing nuns if he saw what Sister Urban looked like.

  Uncle Bob then slips me a dollar bill, new and crunchy. It is not my birthday or my Confirmation day or anything. He just slips me the dollar, and I feel funny about it, almost like I was the guy in front of Bloomingdale’s, the crippled guy, selling pencils and comic books for as much as you can give him. No price or anything, but you just know he needs the money.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  I take the dollar to our little room and put it in my top drawer. Later on I can give it to my mother.

  It is getting late, and the keg of beer that Uncle Andy plopped in the sink is almost empty, but Mom says it’s okay because she has some bottles of Ballantine in the icebox.

  They are all singing “At a Cottage Door” for the millionth time, and I know it by heart now, and “God Bless You and Keep You Mother Macree” and “Let Erin Remember.”

  I always sing “The Rose of Tralee” whenever anyone asks me. The first verse, anyway, and the chorus, because I never learned the second. It is my song, my party song, and everyone always has to do a party song.

  “C’mon, Dennis,” Aunt Kitty says, “give us a song.”

  Hardly anyone, I guess, has ever learned the second verse, and I think that’s true for most Irish songs.

  “Yeah,” my cousin Eileen says, “belt it out, will ya?”

  It doesn’t take much encouragement to get me in the middle of the kitchen, though, even for the one verse. My left hand is on the keg of beer in the sink, my right on the end of the kitchen table that is filled from one end to the other with glasses and bowls of potato chips and thin pretzels. The aunts and uncles all around, and the cousins, Arlene and Helene and Bobby and Freddy and Johnny and Larry and Ronnie and Eileen and Brian and Rosie and Joey and Billy, and my brother Billy, too. All standing in this kitchen where you wouldn’t think more than three people could stand.

  I have a high, clear, choirboy’s voice, and I sing away at “The Rose of Tralee” the way I sing away at the Gloria or the Kyrie at the eleven o’clock High Mass. I get through the first verse easy enough, and then I get to the chorus, which I know my mother loves. I try to make every word count.

  She was lovely and fair

  As the rose in the summer,

  But t’was not her beauty alone that won me.

  Oh, no, t’was the truth in her eyes ever dawning

  That made me love Mary

  The Rose of Tralee.

  It is my favorite because it always makes me wonder how someone can know when they see the truth in someone’s eyes. Most people I know have eyes that make you want to hide, stern eyes, like all the nuns except Sister Stella, who is always laughing. I guess my mother’s eyes have the truth in them, especially when they shine with the wetness of a tear or two. Maybe that is why she cries when sad things happen, or when she gets fed up with something, these tenement tears that she says are not really important, but that just come with the territory.

  They all clap and cheer when I am done, and Uncle Bob tries to give me a cigar, but I laugh it off as Aunt Kitty gives me a kiss. It all makes me feel good, like I have done something that no one else can do.

  “That Dennis,” Aunt Helen says, “I wonder who his Rose of Tralee is.”

  She grabs me and begins to give me a kiss. I try to be friendly, but I think I’m too old to be getting kissed like this by everyone.

  I look at my mother, and she’s got her hands together as if she’s praying.

  “It’s my mother’s song,” I say. “She’s the Rose of Tralee.”

  Everyone laughs, and my mother says, “Blarney.”

  But I look at her as she says this. She’s beaming. It’s like I just gave her a Christmas present.

  Everyone sings in the family. Uncle Bill sings “Phil the Fluter’s Ball,” and everyone tries to sing along as he sl
aps his knee and stamps his foot. Mom sings “Paddy McGinty’s Goat,” because it is the one song her own mother taught her as a kid. It’s longer than a sermon in church. I like listening to her voice. She only sings when she is with the family like this. She never sings around the house. But she whistles sometimes.

  “God, Mary,” Uncle Bob asks, “how do you remember all them verses?”

  “Nothing else to do, maybe,” Mom answers.

  Uncle Andy sings “Danny Boy.”

  When he is finished, Aunt Kitty complains.

  “It is such a sad song,” she says, “leaving flowers on the grave and all. Let’s just sing about the good times.”

  “Are there good times really?” Mom says. “Sometimes I think there’s just different times, maybe a little good, maybe a little not so good, but I don’t know if there are real good times, like in a long period, the times of Christ or the times of Henry VIII.”

  “Oh, come on, Mary,” Aunt Helen says. “There’s lots of good times. We are all here, and that’s something.”

  “Well,” Mom replies, “good or bad, you still have to get through the day, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Aunt Helen says, “and the queen of England has to get through the day, too. But I bet we are having a better time of it.”

  Mom’s cousin Tim is drunk and falls out of his chair. He must have had half the keg. He is a big man, and there is a commotion as my uncles try to lift him back into the chair.

  My cousin Johnny grabs my wrist and pulls me into the hallway.

  “Let’s go Peeping Tom,” Johnny says.

  “You mean spying?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” Johnny says, “and it’s dark now. Ya gotta do it when it’s dark, up on the roof. You can see lots of things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like girls, stupid,” he says, shoving me down the hallway.

  We are on the roof, and the sign on the door going out to the roof is in big letters: NO ONE ALLOWED ON ROOF. It looks like it means business.

  I never come up on the roof, except a couple of times, very hot nights when I slept there on a blanket with Mommy and Billy.