A Song for Mary

by Dennis Smith

  “Christ, Jimmy,” I say, “I don’t Want to cop out on you, but let’s get the hell outta here, huh?”

  “Right,” Burton says, “just get out and run like hell.”

  And so we leave the car right there at the red light, sticking out like an elephant in the middle aisle of the supermarket, with the beeping-horn guy now stuck and cursing with every beep. All I can think of as we run back to the baseball field is that this guy must think he is in some circus act with these two kids jumping out of the car in front of him and disappearing around the corner.

  Burton does not say anything as we enter the park. I try to say something, but I still can’t control my speech, I am so scared. There are a few more boys on the field now, and they are about to choose up sides. At least I’ll get a game, and that will take my mind off of how close I am to going to Lincoln Hall for Delinquents. I can hardly catch my breath. Bobby Walsh is there and sees me. He comes over and puts his arm around my shoulder.

  I am still thinking of what would happen if we were caught. Holy shit. I don’t know what would happen. Except for the trouble, and Lincoln Hall. But what would my mother say? God. She would never believe it, that I got in a stolen car. And if she did, she would be so disappointed and sad. And she’d beat me with a hanger or a baseball bat or something.

  “Hey,” Walsh says, “s’matter you?” I guess he sees me shaking.

  Burton comes over and punches me in the arm.

  “Nothin’s s’matter him,” Burton says, laughing. “He’s gonna loand me his baseball glove is all.”

  I look at Burton. I am feeling strangely strengthened, like I did something that was different than anyone else can do, that I have won a sort of trophy in my own mind. I want to smile, to laugh it off like Burton, but, still, I know that I have done something stupid and that I have gotten away with it.

  This time.

  Chapter Thirty

  Finally, I am thirteen, and old enough to go to the teenage canteen at Kips Bay Boys Club, but my mother is acting like I am still twelve or something.

  “I’m in the eighth grade now,” I am saying, “and I don’t know why I can’t stay out until midnight, ‘cause everyone else stays out.”

  I am sitting at the kitchen table, trying to draw a bird in a back page of my schoolbook. I like to draw birds, because they are easy. You just have to start with a circle, and you will always get to something that looks like a bird.

  My mother is at the sink cleaning those little pork chops that she boils with the sauerkraut and potatoes.

  “C’mon, Mom,” I say, protesting. “C’mon. Just until eleven-thirty, then.”

  “You have a lot of nerve,” my mother says finally, “to expect to go gallivanting around, to ask for any favors with the report card you brought home. When you start getting marks like your brother Billy, I will think about giving you any special privileges, but for now you’ll be home here at ten o’clock if you know what’s good for you. Otherwise you can stay home and brood about it.”

  This, I am thinking, is exactly the trouble with trying to make sense with my mother. She’s always saying if I know what’s good for me, as if I don’t know what’s good for me, but when I tell her what’s good for me, she never pays attention. It is only her definition of “good” that we get to talk about in the house.

  Billy is up in the Bronx at school, Cardinal Hayes, and he is probably still at basketball practice. Even on a Friday. He made the varsity team there, and he is only in his second year. He is such a good player. Billy is good at everything, and when he graduated from St. John’s, most of the parents got pretty mad at him because he won so many of the medals, and their kids didn’t get very many. He is good at remembering things, like how many errors Ty Cobb made in his career, or who was the king of England or the king of France when America was discovered by the Vikings, or even before when the Irish came.

  Just recently, Billy won the Boy of the Year at Kips Bay, and they gave him a scholarship to a place called Exeter up in New Hampshire, a boarding school. Mr. McNiven at Kips Bay said it was a good school, but Mom went up to Cardinal Hayes to talk to the principal there, Monsignor Fleming, and he told her that Exeter was a Protestant place, and it would not be good for Billy’s soul to go there. So he is not going. He’s got a scholarship at Cardinal Hayes, anyway, because of the fact that we are on welfare and Billy plays basketball.

  I wonder about Billy’s soul, and if being at this place Exeter would make a Protestant out of him. And then, I wonder, what is a Protestant, and why is it so bad to be one? I have never been inside of a Protestant church, and I don’t think I have ever met a Protestant person except for the Jehovah’s Witnesses who knock on the door every once in a while to give out magazines. I only know that being a Catholic is better. We have to do things, like love God, do good, avoid evil, and provide for the propagation of the faith. I always try to provide for the propagation of the faith, which I think is that you have to be ready to be a martyr, like those guys who had to fight the lions in the movies. But Protestants don’t have to do anything special. They don’t even have to go to church on Sunday if they have something else to do. If we don’t go to church on Sunday, we go right to hell when we die.

  We never miss Mass in our house, and even if we did miss once in a while, I don’t think Billy would be available to be a Protestant, no matter how many teachers at Exeter tried to get him to be one. Anyway, Billy’s too tough, and he’s such a good athlete it would take four or five guys to hold him down if they wanted to make a Protestant out of him.

  I wish my mother would treat me like a teenager.

  “I don’t want to stay home,” I say, trying to draw feathers that look like something other than sticks on the side of the bird. It comes out better if I use the side of my pencil instead of the point.

  “Then be home at ten,” she says, now scrubbing out a big pot, the one where there is only one handle, “and do your homework the way your brother always does his homework before he goes to sleep.”

  She is always telling me that I should get better grades, and I guess she doesn’t have any choice except to use Billy as an example. Sister Alphonsus always does that, and Archie down at Kips does it, too. Everyone thinks Billy is doing great in everything, and it’s easy for them to say I’m not doing so great.

  “Maybc,” my mother says, “if you paid closer attention to your homework, you will begin to apply yourself better to your schooling. You have to build on the stuff God gave you, and I’m not just talking about those blue eyes of yours, either. It’s too bad we can’t put our fingers in our ears to feel our brains, because that might remind us that we had one.”

  She smiles, but I don’t think it is funny. I wish I could tell her how much I think school is a waste of time. That I would rather be out working somewhere, and having a quarter in my pocket to go to the movies or get a hamburger at Riker’s if I want one. But she would just argue with me, and tell me that I don’t know what’s good for me, that I will never get near to meeting my abilities without getting high marks at school.

  Besides, everyone at school is always yelling at you, making you feel like you did something wrong by getting up in the morning. My mother doesn’t realize that there is so much yelling at St. John’s. The nuns yell at you for running in the playground during recess, the principal yells at you if you’re late to lineup, the priests yell at you for pouring too much wine in the chalice, or not enough wine. And everyone yells about getting better marks.

  My mother is very much against yelling. She never lets us yell in the house. “A gentleman never raises his voice” is what she says if we yell.

  Sister Alphonsus doesn’t hit anyone, but she doesn’t let the smallest thing pass without yelling at you, either. And almost everyone stays after school every day for something or other. Like yesterday I had to stay because I got out of the line at lunchtime to tie my shoe.

  “You stay after school, young man,” Sister Alphonsus said as she pushed me back into the li
ne. I feel like I am in some prison movie when I am in school, where everyone is against you, and you know your only job there is to find a way to escape.

  I am sitting on the floor now in the auditorium-size game room of Kips Bay. On the walls are big paintings of dancing teenagers, ten of them, that were done for Kips Bay by students in an art school somewhere. The paintings give the room a feeling of a dance hall or a nightclub, anything but the dull gray-painted game room of Kips. The room is pretty dark, and there are spotlights shining down on the dance floor in the middle of the room.

  Marilyn Rolleri is on the other side of the dance floor, sitting on a chair in the middle of a crowd of girls. I am in my powder-blue sports jacket, and I am talking with Walsh and Scarry, drinking the small bottles of Coke they gave us for free. Archie is at the door, checking the club cards, making sure that everyone who wants to get in is at least thirteen.

  Some slow music starts, and there is a rush of boys going across the dance floor for the girls.

  “I’m going to ask Rolleri to dance,” I say, getting up.

  “Good luck,” Walsh says, rubbing his hand up and down the outside of the Coke bottle.

  “Those Italian girls,” Scarry laughs, “like the sausage.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I say as I walk away and toward Marilyn.

  She looks at Gilda Galli as she gets up to dance with me, saying, “Mind my place.”

  I walk to the middle of the dance floor and turn to see if she followed me. She is there, standing with her hands at her sides, flat against a tight black skirt, which wraps her down to her ankles. It is so tight I can see the outlines of her thighs.

  I don’t know what to say to her, and just grab her around the waist and pull her close to me. The nuns say that you should leave room for the Holy Ghost when you dance, but I don’t think there is enough room between us for one of Uncle Tracy’s toothpicks. Her hair is falling behind her, halfway down her back, in long black curls. I can smell it, and it is like canned peaches. We are dancing, but we are hardly moving at all. She smells so good, and I put my face against hers. My lips slide softly over her cheek.

  I could ask her any number of things, like, “How are things in school?” or “How are your ballet lessons?” or “How do you get along with your parents?” But I wonder how many opportunities like this I am going to get. Just get it over with, I say to myself. I slide my lips up to her ear, and I whisper, “Could I take you home tonight?”

  She knows I like her, like I have been liking her since the fourth grade. But she doesn’t seem impressed. It is almost like I said, “The moon always comes up when the sun goes down.” Knowing I want to take her home is nothing new.

  “I have to go,” she says, “with Barbara Cavazzine and Gilda Galli to Emiliano’s for a pizza after the dance.”

  The three of them, I think, are like the Italian mopsy triplets. I picture myself, just for a moment, saying, “I can’t go. I have to be home before ten, or my mother will kill me.”

  I could never say that to Marilyn. She would think I am a stupid schmo, a kid.

  My mother is a whack job when it comes to time and schedule, and if I’m late, each minute becomes a crime of some kind. “Being on time,” she says, “is as important as wearing clothes. If you’re late all the time, people will see you as nothing more than a little naked oddball.”

  Oh, Marilyn.

  I pull my head back a little to look at her, as I have been looking at her since the fourth grade. I like her more each year, and I am beginning to think about what I am feeling as I hold her so close to me as we dance.

  Johnnie Ray begins to sing “The Little White Cloud That Cried,” and I feel myself up against her thigh, the inside of her thigh. It feels like she is pushing into me. Oh, God. Johnnie Ray sounds like he’s in tears. There are a hundred kids around us, some doing the foxtrot, some doing the fish, but I have Marilyn stiffly around the waist, and we are grinding. She’s doing the grind with me in the middle of the floor, behind a curtain of others. I feel like I won the grand prize in some happiness contest, and I’m hoping that Archie doesn’t see us. You’re not supposed to do the fish, and you’re especially not supposed to do the grind.

  “As I went walking down by the river,” Johnnie Ray is singing, and I am thinking that I would like to take Marilyn down by the river, to sit with her on a 51st Street park bench, to put my hand all over her tight skirt, to watch the Pepsi-Cola sign blink on and off across the river, to kiss her big, red Italian lips, and to move my hand into her blouse, softly, quietly, to feel the cotton of her brassiere.

  I’m not sure if she is pressing into me deliberately. I only know we are grinding slowly, hardly moving anything but our hips on the dance floor. Am I grinding into her, or is she grinding into me? Nothing matters as long as her thighs are against mine, and I can feel her breath on my neck.

  “Why don’t you come to Emiliano’s for a pizza with us?” she asks in a whisper.

  “I can’t,” I say, “ ‘cause I have something to do.”

  “What do you have to do?”

  Her breath is going all over my neck and the side of my face, and her legs are like hot wax against me.

  “Just something to do,” I say, “that’s all.”

  “Something to do?”

  “Yeah, something to do.”

  “What are you,” she says, “a bookie or something, going off with something to do that you can’t say what it is?”

  “Some other time,” I say, “maybe I could go with you.”

  She doesn’t answer, and I am too excited by all the grinding that I don’t think much about how sad it is that I can’t go with them for a pizza pie. All I can think about is how hard I am pressing into her, and how I would like to take her to see the Pepsi-Cola sign.

  Now, though, I am realizing that I can’t go with all my friends, and I am getting very pissed off. I don’t care if it is better to be pissed off than pissed on. Walsh, Scarry, Jurgensen, all of them are going for the pizza, and I have to go home. Just because my report card is not so good.

  And I feel very sharp in my powder-blue jacket, too, and the white shirt with the big collar. My hair is combed in the front into a drop curl. I combed it after I left the house, in the dark of my hallway, because my mother doesn’t like my hair in a drop curl, and says that it makes me look like an Italian. She thinks the Italians all end up in jail because of the way they comb their hair, and so she wouldn’t let me out of the house with my hair combed like that. But I like it, the hair coming down in one big curl in the middle of my forehead, and in the back, combed into a duck’s tail. It makes me feel tough and with it.

  Marilyn Rolleri seems to like it, too, for every time I ask her to dance she dances with me.

  But something is missing. I feel like everything is okay, that I look sharp, feel sharp, be sharp, like the razor blades, and Marilyn Rolleri and the other girls have been noticing me, but, still, I feel like I am naked, that I am standing here with all my friends, and I am absolutely naked without a stitch on, and I am hoping that they don’t see me like this.

  My mother, if you think about it, has ruined my whole night, just because of my report card. And I don’t care what anybody says, it isn’t fair to get punished like this. I could get good grades like Billy if I wanted, don’t they know that?

  It just doesn’t matter to me, the famous report card, is all.

  Martin Block, the disc jockey from the Make Believe Ballroom show on the radio, introduces the special guest he has brought tonight. Block’s been here many times before with Dinah Shore, Tony Bennett, Johnny Mathis, Rosemary Clooney, and big stars like that. Tonight he has Les Paul and Mary Ford. They don’t say anything, but they start to play “How High the Moon,” and everybody begins to move and shake their bodies. Imagine, Les Paul and Mary Ford right here in our dance at Kips Bay Boys Club, just for us kids. Maybe Martin Block used to be a member here, or something like that, but he has brought Les Paul and Mary Ford right here into the club, and all o
f us feel like we were born on Sutton Place and we have front-row seats at Radio City Music Hall.

  Mary Ford is wearing a big crinoline skirt, all black with bangles and beads, and Les Paul has a shoelace instead of a tie, and they are both playing guitars that are bigger than me, and the music is going through the room and through the bodies of all the kids, and everyone is smiling, and I forget for a minute that I can’t go to Emiliano’s with Marilyn after the dance.

  When the dance is over, I can see by the big hall clock that I don’t have time to hang around, and I’ll have to run home if I am going to be there at ten.

  On my way out I see Martin Block. I think about my mother’s harping all the time about being polite, and I know I should say thank you to him. But there are a bunch of other kids around, and they will think I am such a brizzer if I go right in the middle of them to thank Martin Block.

  It’s too bad about Emiliano’s. It doesn’t matter that I don’t have the money to buy some pizza. Someone would give me a bite of theirs, probably.

  I’ll have some money soon, more than my paper money. I am supposed to get a delivery job with the East River Florist. If I could buy my own pizza, I would split it with my friends.

  But I could live without pizza if I had to. It would be okay to just sit there.

  If only, I am thinking as I skip alone down the stairs of Kips Bay, I could see if Marilyn Rolleri would make room for me to sit next to her at Emiliano’s.

  I guess my mother thinks that somewhere between ten and eleven o’clock that, because of a bad report card, I am going to murder someone, or that someone is going to murder me. So I have to leave everyone and be home at ten, if I don’t want to get murdered or if I don’t want to do the murdering.

  It’s not right.

  No one has to go home at ten o’clock. And everyone but me is going to get a chance to see if they can get Marilyn Rolleri down by the river to watch the Pepsi-Cola sign.

  So now I am still alone on Second Avenue. Everyone else is behind me, walking slower, taking their time. I suddenly want to run, and I sprint forward. It’s not that I am late. I am running like mad because I want the wind against my face, and if I didn’t have to be home at ten, I think I could run all the way to the Bronx.