A Song for Mary

by Dennis Smith

  But I know my father is not dead. They feed him every day in the hospital, so he will be around. Maybe my mother could meet some good man, and they could forget that my father is in the hospital and will never come out. Being Catholic, though, my mother could never get a divorce. Anyway, nobody ever gets a divorce. We don’t know anyone who got a divorce, even Aunt Kitty, whose husband went out for milk and bread one day and never came back. People on my block get married and then they live there for life. Even Annie Dunne is still married to the guy in Sing Sing. Some things just never change for people. For some people.

  I don’t want to be like that, to try to be the same as the people on the block. If things are not going the way you want them to go, maybe you have to be different.

  My mother, I think, is caught in this rut of having to be like everybody else, and I wish she could think she was different from the rest, better able to take care of herself without caring what anyone on the block thinks about it.

  I remember lying on my mother’s bed where I had gone to read a book on a lazy Sunday afternoon. I was a kid, and I could hear my mother and my Aunt Helen talking in the living room. The radio was going, and my Uncle Bob and Uncle Buddy were singing songs in the kitchen, but I could still hear my mother talking about Tommy Quigley, the man she used to go out with then. I didn’t like Quigley even before he kicked the door in, and I paid extra attention to hear every word she was saying about him.

  “So he asked you to marry him?” I heard my Aunt Helen say.

  “He said he wants to buy a delicatessen,” my mother answered, “and that he could afford to marry me and take care of the children, too.”

  “What did you say, Mary?”

  My Uncle Buddy’s voice was in the background. “Toor-a-loor-a-loor-a.”

  My mother took a long time to answer my Aunt Helen.

  “It can’t be,” I heard her say finally.

  It was a great relief to me, because I didn’t want to see Quigley more than once a month, anyway.

  “Why not, Mary?” my Aunt Helen asked. “It might be good to have a man around the house.”

  “It is not right,” my mother said, “because I was put in this situation with two small boys for God knows what reason, and I just have to stick with it.”

  “You could get a divorce,” Aunt Helen said.

  “I never thought about it,” my mother said. “My children have a father, and they don’t need another one. And, until something changes, that is the way it will be.”

  “Things won’t change, Mary,” Aunt Helen said, “unless you want them to.”

  I remember my Aunt Helen’s voice as she said this. It was like the way the priest says the last words of the sermon at Mass, winding the whole thing up.

  “I suppose each of us knows that we can get whatever we want,” my mother said, “depending on what we want to do to get it.”

  “Getting married again,” Aunt Helen said, “could help you out.”

  “Oh, Helen,” my mother said, “this man Tommy is not a bad man, but he drinks too much, and I don’t see that he cares about my children. So he’s not the one that makes this worth thinking about.”

  “Do you think any man will make it worth your while?” Aunt Helen asked.

  “It is hard to say,” my mother answered in a lower, much harder-to-hear voice. “I only know that Jesus, Mary, and Joseph and everyone else would tell you that it is a waste of good time to think about it until it happens.”

  “That’s an I-Irish lulllll-a-bye,” Uncle Buddy was singing over my mother’s voice, and all I heard after this was my Aunt Helen laughing at something my mother said. I knew then that my mother was in no danger of getting a divorce, because she wouldn’t joke about it if she was.

  Father O’Rourke is now waving goodbye to the fancy woman and gives me a wave, too, as I pass by. I wonder if he will go into the rectory now and meet Monsignor Ford, and if he will tell Monsignor Ford that he saw me on First Avenue and that I did not look like I was doing too well at Cardinal Hayes High School. I am feeling that I might as well hang a sign across my chest saying, “I have not been so good for high school and high school has not been so good for me.”

  I want to pay attention, but maybe not to what people want me to pay attention to. If I could just study what I want to study, instead of math and science and religion. If I could just read stories by Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and O. Henry, or if someone would just pay me thirty dollars a week to go to school. But I’m not doing anything that I like to do, and I don’t know why I should stay with it.

  Brother Gabriel in algebra, who flung a set of keys at me the first day of class, is one of the problems. I guess I was hamming it up with some of the guys in the back of the class, and the keys, about thirty of them on a small ring, missed my nose by an inch. I knew right away that Brother Gabriel, an Irish Christian Brother, had a screw loose, and that I had to watch my step with him.

  I am now walking slowly up the stairs to my house, worrying about what my mother will say when she learns what I am deciding about Hayes and working at the florist, when I tell her that I am just a boys’ club basketball player and that I will never be a doctor.

  I am chewing the last of my jelly doughnut as I open the door, and the brightness of the kitchen jumps out into the dark hallway. My mother and my brother are by the small green stove, and they raise their heads to look at me. Billy had gone to the midnight Mass down at St. Agnes after his basketball game last night, and my mother went to the nine o’clock this morning. Billy is in his undershirt, and my mother has the old pink robe tied tightly around her thin waist. Her hair is combed in long waves coming over her shoulders, and she is wearing a shimmering red lipstick. The bright morning light makes her look like she is all lighted up, like she is Rita Hayworth in a movie about the East Side of New York. She smiles a little when she sees me. I can always see how much she cares about me when she smiles like this. She has a spatula in her hand, turning an egg.

  I kiss her cheek and punch my brother on the arm.

  “You guys beat the Mount?” I ask.

  “Hayes, sixty-four,” Billy answers, “Mount St. Michael, fifty-nine. What are you eating?”

  “The collection.”

  “What do you mean,” my mother asks, “the collection?” She is not smiling anymore.

  “Father O’Rourke,” I say, “said he wanted to hear only paper in the collection basket, so I gave the money to the poor people at the French bakery.”

  “For what?” my mother asks.

  “A jelly doughnut,” I answer.

  “You have a lot of nerve,” she says. “Did you really go to church?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I did go, and that’s what he said, paper only. Did you want me to write him a note?”

  “Don’t be a smart aleck,” she says. “What was the Gospel about?”

  “The Gospel?” I say, trying to remember. “I don’t know, it was about religion.”

  “Did you go to Mass, or didn’t you?”

  “I was there.”

  “And you don’t know the Gospel?”

  “I know it,” I say. Then, after a long pause, I add, “Maybe.”

  I don’t like her checking up on me this way. She never checked up on me before.

  “It was about the angel Gabriel,” I say, “coming to visit Mary to get her ready to have Jesus.”

  “Okay,” my mother says, satisfied. “So you were there, but you should have put the money in the poor box.”

  She is now pointing her finger at me, and I think of the blue stone on that gold ring I saw, and of that woman’s fur coat on First Avenue. If she had that blue stone on her finger now, she would be flashing it in the morning sunlight.

  “Don’t you know,” she continues, “that when you give something away, even a dime, you have it forever? And where’s your jelly doughnut now?”

  I am thinking that I want to change the subject because an argument might interfere with the Sunday egg and the roll.
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  We only have eggs on Sunday, and I always get mine sunny-side up. There is nothing like dipping a buttered roll into the egg yellow on a Sunday morning, and I am not going to say anything that will put that in jeopardy.

  “You’re right,” I say, “and I’ll put a dime of my own in the poor box next time I’m in church.”

  Part of my deal with Monsignor Ford when he got me into Hayes was that I would quit working so much at the florist, and so now I am relying again on the money from newspaper delivery, and the folding money, too, when I can get it. Billy usually does the folding, and Scarry is always there, and I’ll get some work if someone doesn’t show up. We get thirty-five cents an hour for putting the papers together on Saturday nights or early Sunday mornings. There are thousands of newspapers all piled up on the sidewalk of First Avenue, and they come in sections that have to be folded together, a job that makes your fingers black. But it gives you muscles in the hands.

  “How many points you score?” I ask.

  “Eight,” Billy says. He’s reading the New York Times that I brought home last night.

  Virginia came around last night, and we just hung around a little on the street corner until Scarry had to leave to fold the newspapers. We walked him to the newspaper stand on 57th Street. Billy wasn’t there, he was off playing basketball, but a few other guys did show. There was no work for me, and so I asked Virginia to walk with me down to the 51st Street park.

  She was wearing one of those black felt skirts that spread out like a tent, a pile of crinoline beneath, and a black sweater which exposed, but just a little, the white brassiere she was wearing. She had a red silk bandana around her neck. She always has a bandana around her neck.

  We were looking across Welfare Island at the blinking Pepsi sign, and I was kissing her.

  “Do you still like me?” I asked her as I rubbed my hand up and down her back.

  What a terrible word this word like is. It can stand for all kinds of agreements sometimes, but other times it just means nothing more than the way you like breakfast in the morning.

  She didn’t answer, and I waited for a woman with four yelping dogs to pass by before I kissed her again.

  “Well,” I asked again, bringing my rubbing hand around to her front, “do you?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I still like you.”

  And I brought my rubbing hand across her stomach, shifting slow and then fast, trying to make my way up toward her breasts, constantly worried that she’ll tell me to stop, but I find the courage inside and I slide my hand up over the outside of her sweater, in one fast movement until I get to her breast, and then suddenly my hand is fully over her breast, and for one small moment I thought I was approaching heaven.

  She grabbed my hand suddenly and brought it into her other hand, and we sat there, my rubbing hand cupped in her grasp.

  “But,” she said, “I like somebody else, too.”

  Goddammit, I thought. See. This word like. You never know what it means.

  Virginia is such a terrific girl, and I wanted so much to ask her to go with me. I wanted to say, “Let’s just go together, Virginia, and the guys can talk about Virginia and Dennis the way they talk about Gail and Joey, or Maureen and Vinny, or Margaret and Dante.”

  But here she was in the blinking light of the Pepsi sign telling me that she also liked someone else, and I was wondering about the degree of “like” she was talking about. Was I at a fifty percent like? Or maybe the percent was more?

  “Who do you like?” I asked.

  “I can’t say,” she answered.

  “It’s a state secret?” I ask.

  “Well,” she said, “if you keep it a secret, it’s Bobby Seelaw.”

  “But,” I said in a kind of protest, “he’s going out with someone.”

  “My cousin Maryanne,” she said. “But Maryanne really likes Raymond Connors.”

  Oh, goddammit, I thought, Raymond Connors again.

  I didn’t say much after that, but I began to wonder where Marilyn Rolleri was hanging around recently. I haven’t seen her around.

  “Eight points,” I say to Billy, still sitting at the kitchen table, “I would have done better.”

  “In your sleep,” he says.

  “Where’s the Sunday News?”

  “Behind your honor’s ass, m’lord,” my mother says, reaching for the newspaper that is on the floor beneath my chair.

  My mother is smiling again. Good, the Sunday egg is secure.

  Flipping through the newspaper after breakfast, I am thinking about the angel Gabriel from the gospel, and how misnamed Brother Gabriel from school is. They should have given Brother Gabriel a black hat and named him Simon Legree, for he never misses a chance to do something rotten to people.

  I saw him take a kid and push him against a sill where there was an open window, and punch him over and over again until the kid was almost out the window, like Ameche’s father, and on his way three stories down.

  Last week I heard a story about an Irish Christian Brother holding a boy out of a school window by his ankles, and I am beginning to believe it.

  Being in Brother Gabriel’s class is like being in a torture chamber. The thing of it is that I don’t know a to b about algebra, because to find x is as interesting to me as looking for a piece of used toilet paper in the East River. That is not Brorher Gabriel’s fault, I know, but I really have to watch myself with him. He’s not a person you can trust in any conditions. Especially if you don’t know how to make an equation.

  And so every day when I go to Brother Gabriel’s class, I usually get a whack across the back of the head when I am standing in front of the blackboard without a clue as to what is the next step after taking the chalk in my hand.

  I know that there is something wrong with a situation where the person in control has hatred for everyone, where everyone gets whacked around except those who know how to find the cursed x. And I know, too, that this is something I don’t have to put up with, that I can fight back.

  At least, I can do things on my own terms.

  “What are you going to do?” my mother asks, standing at the kitchen sink and looking at me through the medicine cabinet mirror.

  What am I going to do? I repeat her question in my mind. There is only one answer. I am quitting school. It’s in my mind now, solidly.

  “I guess,” I say to her, “I’ll meet Walsh and Scarry and Jurgensen up on 6lst Street and York Avenue.”

  I haven’t told anyone, but I don’t think it will be long before my mother finds out, and then I’ll have to get another JAB card. She had to take me twice all the way uptown to the Juvenile Aid Bureau office, and she won’t be happy going up there again.

  “What’s there?” she asks.

  “They put up a basketball court there, in the park.”

  It is lucky we still haven’t gotten a telephone, because when you have a telephone they can find your mother right away. But I always get the mail, and I have to make sure that my mother doesn’t see any mail from Cardinal Hayes High School.

  “Maybe I’ll play with you,” Billy says.

  “We’re playing two-on-two,” I say.

  It isn’t just because of Brother Gabriel that I have decided this. I could put Brother Gabriel in my back pocket if I wanted to, learn some equations, ask for some help after class, and play his game on his territory.

  “Scarry and I could play you three,” Billy says, “and we could spot you eighteen points in a twenty-point game.”

  I just think it is all a waste of time, and I don’t know why I should continue to punish myself when I can just be on my own and go to work.

  “Yeah, sure,” I say.

  I hate it that I don’t have any money for cigarettes, or to go to the movies, or to have a milk shake once in a while. But I would be kidding myself if I just wanted to earn money. It is more than that.

  “Who’s got a ball?” Billy asks.

  I want to be in control of my own life. Every time I think about
my father being locked up in that hospital I keep saying to myself that I am never going to let my life be locked up like that.

  Uh-uh, I will never let that happen to me.

  “Scarry,” I say.

  Maybe Mr. Schmidt will take me back full-time at the florist. I was fifteen years old last month, and I should be earning my way to somewhere.

  “You want me to play?” Billy asks.

  “Put your sneakers on,” I say, “and let’s go.”

  Chapter Forty-three

  Frankie has entered his father’s candy store. I am in the back of the store playing the pinball machine. It is early on a Saturday morning.

  I haven’t been going much to Kips lately because I began to hang around with the guys in the candy store on 55th Street. The guys here, Frankie and Nicky and Mikey, don’t go to school, either, and they never think about scholarships, or taking time to do homework and research papers and that kind of thing. We just hang together, like a club, every day and night.

  I like the way we’re all friends. It’s different from the way Scarry and Walsh and Jurgensen are friends. Here on 55th Street, all the guys have quit school, and everyone is trying to figure out what they’re doing, and trying to get work here and there.

  I am back working at the florist, and when I got to work this morning, Mr. Schmidt asked me if I could come back at one and then work until eight because there was a wedding or something they were doing. And so I am here to kill a couple of hours.

  “Hey,” Frankie says as he sees me.

  “I got this machine beat,” I say, banging on the side of the pin-ball.

  “How come you’re not at work?” Frankie asks.

  “I don’t have to be there until one or so.”

  I guess I could have gone home and sat around, or I could have gone to Kips to play Ping-Pong or pool. But I am feeling that I belong here, that the guys on 55th Street care more about each other than they do about themselves.

  “Hey, great,” Frankie says. “How’d you like to come up to 120th and score some horse with us? We’ll be back way before noon.”

  Score some horse? I wonder what that is. But if it is on 120th Street, that is Harlem, and it must have something to do with getting high.