A Song for Mary

by Dennis Smith

  I just wish she wouldn’t be so sad.

  No one is saying anything. We all just look at each other and listen to my mother sobbing.

  “We are going to have to give him a JAB card,” Mr. Donahue says, finally breaking the ice.

  “What does that mean?” I ask. I am trying to speak in a friendly voice, but I am madder than anything that my mother is crying. I guess these are those tenement tears she talks about, bad times that just come natural sometimes. Everyone knows that things could be better for all of us if we all lived on Sutton Place. The Walshes, the Scarrys, the Jurgensens, everybody. But everything would be the same for me no matter where we lived. If I could only get her to understand that—that I would still play hooky from school, because school is just not for me. It’s a coop. You have no control over your life there. Look at my father, cooped up, he has no control over his life. We just get ordered around from minute to minute, do this, do that. I want to do something else, to work full-time at the florist on 53rd Street. At least I’ll have my own money, and I can have a leather jacket if I want one.

  “It means,” Mr. Donahue says, “that you are fourteen years old and have to go to the Juvenile Aid Bureau regularly until you are six-teen.”

  “Where is that?” my mother asks between her sniffing.

  “Up on 116th Street.”

  “They couldn’t make it easier?” my mother asks. I know she is thinking that she has only so much time between working at the phone company and still doing apartments and all the ironing for Mr. Shurtliff next door.

  “It is the way it is,” Mr. Donahue says. “And he can quit school if he wants at sixteen, but until then the Juvenile Aid Bureau will be responsible for him going to school.”

  I know I can’t wait until I am sixteen.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Frankie is waiting for me in Riker’s on 53rd Street. I am getting paid thirty cents an hour at the florist, and I just got paid three dollars for three hours on Friday and seven hours on Saturday. I’ll give my mother half, but I am still flush, and I order a hamburger on an English.

  “You want something?” I ask him. You have to ask if you have the money.

  “No,” Frankie says. “I am going to keep my stomach empty. You shouldn’t have too much in your stomach if we are going to toke on some smoke.”

  Frankie is laughing.

  “I was on a boat once,” I say. “Went fishing with Henry Casteneda and his father. Everyone got sick but me, ’cause I got an iron stomach.”

  After my hamburger, we walk down to 48th Street, where another Dennis, this one named Buckley, set up a club room in the cellar of his building. There is a lot of furniture around the room. It looks like it was taken from the street before the garbage trucks got there. A string light is hanging from the ceiling, and it is still swinging, and makes all the shadows in the room swing, too. Buckley is funny-looking, with a big wide mouth with a nose that almost comes over his lips. And he’s got a lot of pimples, like he has a disease. But his clothes are sharp, and his shoes look like they come from Flagg Brothers.

  “Where did you get such cool vines?” I ask him. I am just trying to make conversation as I sit in a heavy brown sofa with a hundred cigarette burns in it.

  Frankie has taken a bag from his jacket, and he opens it. He also opens a package of paper and pulls a piece out, folds it, and places it between his fingers. He then pours some of the pot out of the bag and onto the paper carefully, so that none of it drops to the floor.

  It all reminds me of Gabby Hayes rolling a cigarette in the movies.

  “The fags,” Buckley says.

  “What’s that mean?” I ask.

  “I would never let them near me,” Frankie says.

  “It’s easy money,” Buckley says. “It’s all bullshit, anyway, ’cause I never let them go on top of me or anything.”

  I am getting nervous as I watch Frankie put the cigarette in his mouth and wet it fully so that it is closed all around the edges. It is all pretty sloppy with Frankie’s spit all over it.

  I am beginning to wonder what the hell I’m doing with these guys, when I could be around 56th Street waiting to see if Virginia comes around.

  I don’t like Buckley’s talk. I have heard about guys who hang around Third Avenue by Clark’s Bar, who walk up and down the street until some man offers them money to let them get kissed and worse in an alleyway. It is pretty sick, if you ask me, pretty sick and weird.

  It makes me remember Mr. Dempsey, and I haven’t remembered him in a long time. What kind of a man can do that to a kid? And what kind of a kid would do that willingly with a man?

  Guys like Scarry and Walsh would never even know about this kind of stuff, making it with fags and smoking pot. I wish it was just Frankie and me here alone, so that I could swear him to secrecy like a blood brother or something. I don’t want anyone to know that I am here with these guys doing this.

  More secrets. Everything’s a goddamn secret in my life.

  I don’t know this guy Buckley, and he gives me the creeps. I wish we could just get it all over with.

  Frankie lights the cigarette and takes a deep puff, holding it in. He passes it to Buckley, who does the same, and then hands it to me. I take a little drag.

  I am hoping that my brother especially never finds out about this because he would tell my mother for sure. He’d say, “You have to do something with Dennis, send him to reform school or something, because he never does homework, and he never even goes to school.”

  I could never do anything wrong to my brother, but I know he would tell on me for something as bad as this.

  I am holding my breath, the smoke inside of me, and I don’t feel anything.

  I am expecting to feel something, but there is nothing. Good. I feel relieved that it doesn’t affect me, and so I hand it over to Frankie.

  “If I could get a job, I wouldn’t let the fags near me,” Buckley says, “but nobody wants to hire me.”

  I am thinking that I don’t believe him. Everyone I know who wants a job can find one in my neighborhood. Even someone as funny-looking as him.

  “I don’t need a job,” Frankie says, “because I just help my old man on the truck once in a while and he gives me the working wage, a buck ten an hour. Pretty good, huh?”

  “A buck ten an hour,” I repeat. “I could have made eleven instead of three for yesterday and all day today.”

  Maybe I could get to know Frankie better, and get to know his father, too. Maybe his father will let me help out on the truck.

  Frankie takes another long drag and hands it off to Buckley. Some guys are so lucky, I am thinking, that they have fathers who give them a buck ten an hour.

  I can’t even keep my newspaper money.

  Even now with my mother working and off the welfare, she still says that I have to give her the newspaper money, because it’s not much, three dollars, sometimes four.

  “Food and clothes,” my mother says, “don’t come out of the sky when you need them.”

  The cigarette is again between my thumb and forefinger. This time I take a deep puff, and I hold it in until I choke. I give it to Frankie, and then it hits me. I don’t see colors that are on fire, but everything begins to spin, and the spinning is so out of control that I don’t think I can sit up straight on the sofa. My stomach is trying to keep up with the spinning, and I can feel my breathing getting faster and faster, and I am suddenly scared and trembling, thinking that something awful is about to happen, that maybe the door will fly open and a thousand cops will rush in and beat us good until we are black-and-blue and bloody, and they will tell Billy, and Billy will tell my mother, and my stomach can’t take the spinning anymore, and the hamburger on an English is now pushing up through my throat and pouring through my mouth, and Buckley is cursing like crazy, pulling me out of his clubhouse and into the dark, smelly cellar, where he shoves me into the blackness of a corner, where I am not hearing the sweet music of the inside of a phonograph, but I do hear Buck
ley laughing and a rat scurrying over some garbage as I hold my stomach and roll over into a knot and pray to God that the spinning will stop.

  But it doesn’t. It just spins and spins, and I am hoping it will be over soon.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Monsignor Ford looks over his desk at me. My mother and I are in the rectory of St. Johns on 55th Street. There is a musty smell here, as if no one has opened a window in thirty years. The carpet is so thick, thicker than a blackboard eraser, but softer than a paintbrush.

  We are all sitting on big leather chairs, the kind you see judges sitting on in the movies. There is a painting on the wall, with a brass sign under it that says it is Saint Thomas More, a man from olden days who looks so real I think he can talk. I am thinking that I could paint like that if someone would teach me. I get up and put my finger on the painting, to try to feel the paint under my fingers.

  “Sit down, Dennis,” Monsignor Ford says.

  “Yes, sir,” I say. Father Ford was just made a monsignor, and I know he is doing my mother a favor by taking the time to meet with us here.

  He shifts a few papers across his desk, things my mother had given him.

  “Do you think you want to try again?” he asks, folding his hands on the top of the desk.

  He used to be my favorite priest, but then he took over the Catholic Charities, they made him a monsignor, and we don’t see him so much anymore. He has a little stripe of red at the bottom of his collar and on the wrists of his cassock, a stripe like a military man.

  “Yes,” I answer, “I guess so.”

  “Your record shows,” he says, lifting a paper, “that you haven’t been at school more than twelve days in two terms. Not much different from saying you’ve never been at school at all, for I doubt in those twelve memorable days they ever once had your attention.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t think they cared about me being there or not.”

  “Mr. Donahue cared,” my mother says.

  She smiles, and I know that she does not want to get into an argument with me, especially in front of Monsignor Ford.

  I guess she was very surprised that the High School of Aviation Trades sent her a letter saying that I should find another high school to go to. That maybe Mr. Donahue would do something to make things right. I was surprised, too, that Mr. Donahue didn’t make things easier on us, even if I attended classes for only twelve days during the whole year. Maybe he tried, and somebody forgot. Still, I’m surprised, because nobody gets kicked out of a public school, that’s what I thought. But here we are with Monsignor Ford, trying to find a high school to go to.

  Sitting here, I begin to think of Bobby Walsh, who sat in this chair just a month ago when his mother had him here to take the pledge, an oath where you promise before God that you will stay away from the booze. At fifteen years old, we guessed that Bobby is the youngest member of St. John’s parish ever to take the pledge. All because sometimes New York can be the smallest town on the face of the earth.

  It happened when Marty and Francis Harris loaned us their draft cards, but only for the night, a Friday night after the Kips Bay dance. The Harris twins were eighteen, and we thought we could just pass for the legal age. We looked pretty snappy, Bobby and I did, mature, we thought, and after the dance was over and most of the kids went to Emiliano’s, we went to Happy’s Bar and Grill on Second Avenue. We were acting the parts of the Harris twins, though we looked nothing like each other. But neither did the Harris twins. They looked like Mutt and Jeff, and if they could pass for twins, then so could we.

  My mother was working the four-to-midnight shift at the telephone company, and so I could stay out until twelve, the latest.

  We walked into Happy’s Bar and found two seats at the bar and ordered two fifteen-cent beers.

  “Get lost,” Happy said to us.

  “Whaddaya mean?” Bobby said, as if Happy insulted three generations of his family.

  “You’re not old enough to be in here,” Happy said, wiping his rag across the bar.

  “We got our draft cards,” Bobby said, going into his wallet.

  Happy gave us what could be thought of as a dirty look as he inspected the cards, but he drafted the beers and placed them before us.

  I was sitting up real straight on the barstool, thinking that we’ve been allowed into some special club, maybe like the White House or the mayor’s mansion.

  After three beers we were feeling good and decided to go down the street to Abe Atell’s bar on 55th Street. Abe was a middleweight champion of the world, and his place was always packed with the neighborhood athletes, guys who played basketball at the 54th Street Gym or softball in Central Park or baseball up under the bridge.

  We shoved our way through the crowd and up to the bar. A tall man was standing with his back to us, his elbow leaning wide across the bar.

  “Give us a little room here, buddy,” Bobby says, confident, and in his best tough-guy voice.

  The man turned around, and I was shocked.

  I watched as Bobby just looked at the man vacantly, as if he didn’t know where he was or who was with him. There was a long pause as Bobby stared out before him. I supposed, at first, that Bobby, being bleary-eyed from Happy’s beer, didn’t see who it was that was next to him.

  But I saw right away. It was Bobby’s father.

  Finally, it all registered with Bobby, and I could see by the changing color of his face that he was more shocked than I was. He turned quickly, like a Harlem Globetrotter, pushed through the crowd, and ran down the street faster than a guy on roller skates. Mr. Walsh was right behind him, running like he was on the high school track team.

  Mr. Walsh caught up to him a whole block away, down by Twomey’s Funeral Parlor on First Avenue, and when I got there, Bobby’s father was letting him have it from one end of the sidewalk to the other. Bam, whack, the clouts so loud I could feel them on the other side of the avenue.

  The following morning, Bobby’s mother marched him right down to the rectory where she could get someone to give him the pledge.

  I began to smile, thinking about Bobby.

  “What is funny about this?” Monsignor asks.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  “That is correct,” he says, “nothing. You have caused your mother nothing but grief, and now we are going to give you a final chance to get yourself together, to fly the straight and narrow.”

  “Yes, Monsignor,” I answer in the kind of Catholic school way that got me through nine years of St. John the Evangelist’s.

  Monsignor is trying to help my mother, I know that. I figure I owe him some respect for that, anyway, and so I sit up in my chair, stern-faced and at attention.

  “Can you play basketball?”

  “Yes, Monsignor.”

  “That’s something,” he says, smiling. “They like basketball players up there at Hayes.”

  “Cardinal Hayes?” I ask, my eyes opening in recognition.

  “Cardinal Hayes High School.”

  “That is where Billy is,” my mother says.

  “Good,” Monsignor Ford says. “All the more reason for them to take a chance on Dennis.”

  I am suddenly excited.

  It would be great to hang around with my brother. He’s still two years older than me, but the age difference does not matter so much in high school, and maybe I can hang around with him and those guys from the Bronx who are his friends, guys like Buzzy O’Keefe and Tommy Henderson and Jimmy Dixon. I mean, everything can be different in high school with my brother. These guys are the stars, the jocksters, the guys who get the girls, the big shots. I could be a part of them.

  Maybe.

  I still have the East River Florist. Since I have been playing so much hooky, Mr. Schmidt has given me work three days a week, after I begged him to put me on as full-time as he could. He is paying me forty cents an hour now, three twenty a day, plus some tip money. Not many tips, though, because the maids always answer the doors on Sutton Place
and the River House, and if the people leave any money for tips, you can bet the maids pocket it. I don’t blame them, either, because if they are working as maids, they probably need more of everything in their lives.

  Like my mother. She could use a new everything, especially a new ironing board. The ironing board she uses is covered with old sheets and stitched together at the bottom, and the sheets are always getting creased, and my mother is always saying Hail Marys to keep from cursing as she irons because she can’t keep a flat bottom on the ironing board.

  I don’t think we have anything new in the house, except for the Bible and the Formica table in the kitchen with the four puffy chairs that she bought in a deal that took two years to pay off.

  I have been saving my money, though, and I have thirty dollars tucked in an old sneaker under my bed. I saw a ring in Bloomingdale’s, a little gold one with a blue stone. It is fourteen karats, and I just need ten dollars more to get it. My mother used to wear a wedding ring, a plain gold one, but I haven’t seen it in a long time. I don’t know if she lost it or sold it. A new ring would look nice on her hand, and as soon as I have the forty dollars I am going to get it for her.

  I wonder if she would like a ring more than a new ironing board.

  “The problem is,” Monsignor Ford says, “you have to organize your time if you are going to go to a good school like Hayes. You can’t work at that florist so much, you understand?”

  I do understand. Things are changing for me, so I have to make some changes for myself.

  After we leave Monsignor Ford, I walk with my mother to 56th Street. I can tell she is feeling better about things because she begins to whistle a Bing Crosby tune that I know. We are walking pretty fast, and she is whistling this tune, and I think of the words.

  “You have to accentuate the positive,” it goes, “eliminate the negative, latch onto the affirmative, and don’t mess with Mr. In-Between.”