A Song for Mary

by Dennis Smith

  “Annie must’ve gone away, who knows, up to Sing Sing maybe.”

  “With a file in her girdle,” I say. “That guy is gonna escape, Jackie.”

  Jackie laughs a big one and pushes me.

  “Yeah,” he says, “and he’ll end up in bed with his fat mother, too, and then he’ll want to go back to jail.”

  Now I raise my finger to my lips. Jackie is making too much noise with his laughing and carrying-on.

  “The cops are sure to come,” I say, whispering.

  “Who cares?” Jackie says. “I’m going home anyways. Just be quiet in your hallway.”

  Our buildings are all in a row, mine and Annie Dunne’s, and the Morgans’. I watch Jackie as he crosses over two roofs and goes down the stairs in his building, and I cross just one roof in the other direction and go down the stairs in mine, thinking that this has been a crazy thing to do, climbing into someone’s window in the middle of the night. And why do I do these things when I know that for every crazy thing like this I do there are fifty others I’ve done, and fifty more that I’ll probably do tomorrow and the next day? Why am I living outside of the normal? And is it, I wonder, just on the outside of the normal? Or is it below?

  I tiptoe down the stairs, feeling the sweat on my shirt sticking against my jacket. I know that if I meet a policeman in this hall, I will have to explain why I am coming down from the roof and why I am sweating so much.

  I am now on the fourth floor, and I can hear someone below me running up the stairs in twos. I run quickly down the dark narrow hall to my apartment and search for the key under the ripped hall linoleum. I quickly shove the key in the door and swing it open. And then I am flabbergasted. My mother is standing right there before me.

  “Where have you been?” she asks.

  I am completely surprised. Here is my mother standing in the middle of the kitchen, and I am still out of breath. She told me she probably wouldn’t be home, and I promised her that I would be in by eleven-thirty. She is just standing there in her pink bathrobe, her arms folded in front of her. The kitchen light is still moving from side to side, and so the shadows of her face are moving back and forth, making her seem like she is some advertisement sign.

  “I thought,” I answer, “that you were going out to Aunt Kitty’s, that you were staying over.”

  “Well, young man,” she says, “I came home because I want to know where you are spending your time when you go out at night. It is almost one o’clock in the morning. I just had a feeling that you wouldn’t do what you said you were going to do. Where were you?”

  “I was just out.”

  “Who were you with?”

  I know she doesn’t like the Morgan family, because the mother and father come out on the street drunk once in a while. My mother thinks that if you have to be drunk, you should be drunk in your own house and not share it with everyone on 56th Street.

  “Walsh and Scarry and those guys,” I say in a low voice.

  “Did you say Walsh and Scarry,” she says in an angry tone, “and those guys? Huh? Listen, Dennis, tell me who you were with.”

  “I was with them,” I say, lying. “We went to a movie.”

  “Where did you get the money to go to a movie, huh?” I can’t tell her that I have this extra money from the florist, that I’ve been working more than just on Saturday.

  “Scarry treated us all.”

  I know it’s another lie, but I can say Scarry treated us, because she knows that Mr. Scarry has a good job as the bartender at Billy’s on First Avenue, and so there is a lot of money in that family.

  My mother looks very angry, and the shadows moving back and forth across her face seem like a clock ticking away, and that soon it is going to come down to zero and then she is going to explode. She throws her hands out and begins to walk into the living room, but she stops. And she turns again to me, pointing her finger.

  “I don’t believe you, Dennis,” she says, shaking her finger at me. “You were not with Scarry and Walsh, because they would not be out at one o’clock in the morning. And you don’t want to tell me who you were with.”

  “I was so with them,” I say in one last try to get out of it.

  “You weren’t,” she says. “And I’ll say this to you. Tell me who your friends are, and I’ll tell you what you are. And just as you are ashamed to tell me who you were with, you will be ashamed of who you are.”

  “Can I go to bed now?” I say more than ask.

  “Yes,” she says, now with a biting, bitter voice, and that terrible look on her face, disgusted, as if we were passing a subway toilet. “You go to bed now and think about who you are.”

  I turn into our room, and she is following me.

  I just wish she would shut up and leave me alone. She never stops when she is complaining about something. She just keeps going at it all the time. I don’t take my clothes off, but jump up fast into the top bunk and turn my body away from her and into the wall. My head is spinning, and my stomach is turning, and I know that if I can just have some quiet, I can go to sleep and get away from the spinning and the turning. But she is right behind me. She reaches me and gives me a good shove so that my whole body moves.

  “And don’t think,” I hear her say as my body goes flat against the wall, “that I don’t smell the beer along with the cigarettes.”

  Chapter Forty-seven

  A few weeks pass, and my mother doesn’t say much more than hello to me.

  It is now Sunday morning. Early. My brother has just come back from a midnight-to-eight shift throwing the mail sacks for the New York Central Railroad, and he is sitting in the bathtub in the kitchen. I don’t say anything to him as I go to the sink to brush my teeth. The sink is right next to the tub, and I can see the water in the tub making small waves.

  I didn’t get up to do the papers this morning, and I didn’t do the folding last night. Instead I hung out with Frankie and Mikey, and, besides the junk, I also took a few tokes on some pot. My head aches. I am still half asleep, and I wonder since my head feels like it is the size of a watermelon if I will ever get completely awake again. I am also wondering, as I grab the toothbrush, if Billy can see the marks in my arm muscle where I have been jabbing myself, doing my own skin-popping. I should have worn a long-sleeved shirt when I got out of bed.

  My mother is in her room. Thank God. I don’t want to talk to anyone, especially my mother, and especially when she’s not talking to me. She only has questions when she’s not talking to me, and she wants answers and explanations.

  Billy is quiet, which is odd. He usually has something to say, like where did you go last night, or who was that girl I saw you with yesterday, or how come you didn’t get up to deliver the papers this morning? But now he’s quiet.

  The New York Times is on the kitchen table, the thick Sunday paper. Billy may tell people he just reads the sports pages, saying things like “They even tell you what the jai alai players did in Cuba last week.” But I see him when he is reading it, and he reads every page front to back.

  I’m not going to go to Mass today. I don’t feel good. It’s okay to miss Mass if you’re sick.

  I’m still worrying about my arm in a short-sleeved shirt, and I go into our room and throw myself into an old flannel shirt. I leave it unbuttoned as I push the paper aside with my box of corn flakes. I then pour the cereal into a chipped green bowl and look for the coffee can that is filled with the sugar. I can’t find it. I look all around, but I don’t see it.

  “Where’s the sugar?” I ask.

  “Don’t talk to me,” Billy says.

  I really don’t like it that he is talking to me this way.

  I open the icebox door. I know it is a refrigerator, but my mother still calls it the icebox, and lately she has started to store the sugar in the icebox. I see the can, and I pour two tablespoons over the cornflakes.

  “Don’t give me the bug up in your ass,” I answer Billy as I sit on the chrome and plastic chair.

  Billy points a
finger at me. “Just watch your mouth, Dennis,” he says, “or I’ll take your teeth out of it.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I say.

  I put my head down close to the cereal bowl so that I don’t have to look at him. We don’t argue so much, but sometimes he gets the idea that he’s the boss in the house, and I don’t like it. Like when he hit me with the pool stick. He just thinks he has to play the father around here.

  “You know,” he says, “you’re not going to get away with everything.”

  I don’t know what he is talking about, and so I keep my head down.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I say again.

  “I played basketball up at Mount St. Vincent’s yesterday,” he says.

  “Yeah?”

  “And I met Father Jabo.”

  He’s talking about Father Jablonski, the dean of discipline at Cardinal Hayes. “Yeah?”

  “He told me you haven’t been up at school for more than a month, and so I told Mom.”

  “Shit,” I say. “Why’d you do that?”

  “ ‘Cause she should know how you’re screwing up.”

  “Yeah, yeah, friggin’ squealer.”

  Billy raises his voice now. “I told you to watch your mouth.”

  I am not going to just take it from him, and so I become a little courageous with sarcasm.

  “I need,” I say to him, “a mirror to watch my mouth, and goddammit, why can’t you just mind your own business?”

  Now he is yelling. “Because you are a little wise guy, you and the punk brizzers you hang around with.”

  My mother now comes running out of her bedroom, wrapping her bathrobe around her on the run, the pink one with the cotton balls and frills.

  “Just stop it, you two,” she says. “Stop arguing.”

  I put my face into the chipped bowl again as she boils the water for her tea.

  “Arguing doesn’t settle anything,” she says.

  I am always noticing how small the kitchen is, not much bigger than a dining room table in one of those houses on Sutton Place where I deliver the flowers. And, as I look at my mother, I can see she is cramped in front of the small two-burner stove, between the stove and the commode room door. The paint above her is a faded yellow, and it is flaking in peels from all the steam that has risen from the kettle since the kitchen was painted a few years ago.

  I can tell she is upset because she is pursing her lips and shaking the kettle to help the water boil faster. Billy doesn’t say anything, and I am thinking that she will lay into me any minute now about playing hooky.

  And so I just sit and try to chew my cornflakes quietly. Even a loud crunch might make her even madder because she hates it if we make any noise at all when we are eating. “Masticate your food,” she is always saying, “masticate your food.” But when we try to chew as much as we can, she says we are making too much noise.

  She pours her tea and turns to me. She slams the cup on the white Formica, and the tea spills over. I jump a little at the suddenness of it.

  “So what time did you come home last night?” she asks.

  “You mean me?” I ask in return, looking up.

  And then she lays into me.

  “You are such a fast-mouth you are,” she says. “You know I mean you. I don’t mean your brother, who has been out at the railroad since midnight last night working to bring a few extra dollars into the house, and you are nowhere to be found.”

  I suddenly think that I not only do not know what time I came home, but I don’t even know where I was, for I only remember the heaviness of my eyes, and the nodding, and the walking all around the neighborhood, and the sitting in the cellar of the candy store on 55th Street, and the nodding, and the walking to Riker’s on 53rd Street, and the nodding, and the bite of a hamburger from someone I don’t remember, and the way the food made my stomach turn like an old engine that was creaking the pistons without any oil, and then an endless stream of nodding, and I don’t know where and I don’t know what time.

  I don’t even know who was with us, except I know it was me and Frankie and Mikey and a couple of other guys, cooking up in an alleyway behind the 54th Street Gym. And now my head feels like someone has filled each ear with a grease gun, and I wish she would just lay off.

  “So,” she says, “what time did you come home?”

  This time her voice is getting louder, and I know she is going to get into the argument she says doesn’t settle anything. I don’t want to be forced to lie again. It seems all I do is lie to my mother, because she’s always asking questions like a detective, and, anyway, I think she can tell what’s a lie before the first sentence is finished.

  “I don’t know what time, Mom,” I say, “so just leave off, will ya?”

  She pours a half-cup of milk into her tea, and a half-teaspoon of sugar.

  I put my head down into my bowl and scoop up the cereal the way the Chinese eat their rice. Maybe this will get her off the subject.

  “Raise your head up,” she says. “Don’t eat like a dog.”

  “C’mon, Mom.”

  “Don’t ‘c’mon Mom’ me,” she says. “Where were you that you don’t know what time you came home?”

  “I was just out.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “Nothing, and just leave me alone, huh?”

  “And what went on at the florist’s shop yesterday?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing went on?” she asks. “What did you do there?”

  I am thinking that it is just going to get worse for me here, and we haven’t gotten to playing hooky yet. And so I don’t answer.

  “Answer me,” she demands. “You say nothing went on?”

  “No,” I answer. “Nothing went on.”

  “You’re absolutely right nothing went on,” she says, opening the knot on her bathrobe and tying it again. “Because you never went there to begin with. Mr. Schmidt came here looking for you because they had weddings and dinners and you left him high and dry, and you are telling me nothing happened? So you are turning into a little rotten liar, too?”

  “I didn’t lie,” I say. “And why can’t you just let me alone? I am the one who has to talk to Mr. Schmidt, not you.”

  “And who were you with?”

  I am now feeling the skin all over my face begin to tighten, as if a corner was being twisted like a rubber band, and I want to make one of those terrible stretching faces that will make her madder than anything. I just want to get out of the apartment before everything explodes, and I am thinking of Mrs. Fallon trying to belt Mikey all over 56th Street, and how sometimes mothers can go overboard about things.

  I wish she would stop, and just drink her tea, and say nothing. But she doesn’t. She is keeping it going.

  “So who were you with?” she asks again. “You will not get up from this table until you tell me where you were and who you were with.”

  My head is now hurting worse than before, filled with grease and rocks and anything else that weighs a ton. I have got to get out of this argument, out of this house. I can feel my heart pumping like a tommy gun beneath my chest, and I close my eyes.

  “Where were you?”

  I feel so filled up with something, I don’t know what. Maybe I am just sad, or maybe I am just mad at everybody, but I know I have to stop this, and now. And so I yell.

  “MOM,” I yell, “C’MON, HUH? I AM SO FUCKING TIRED OF EVERYONE BEING ON ME, YOU AND BILLY …”

  I don’t have time to finish my sentence because Billy is out of the tub in a flash and coming for me.

  I know I shouldn’t have cursed. And I know, too, that I have to run. But where can you run in a four-room apartment smaller than a moving truck?

  My mother’s room? Maybe I can lock him out.

  And so I run as fast as I can and try to slam the door behind me, but my mother has so many coats and clothes hanging on the back of the door that I can’t close it, and Billy has pushed the door open and is now on me, punching like a Golden Gloves co
ntender. The room is big enough only for my mother’s bed and a dresser, and I begin to fall, but I can only fall on the bed, and Billy, all naked and soapy, is on top of me, and I feel my head is heavy and sinking down into the mattress with each punch.

  And now my mother is screaming.

  “STOP IT!” she is screaming. “STOP IT! DON’T RUIN THIS FAMILY.”

  And I wonder if she is talking to me or to Billy.

  She is trying to pull Billy away, but he is so wet and slippery that she keeps losing her grip and falling backward, and Billy punches me twice more, and then suddenly he stops, and he turns away and walks back to the kitchen, naked like an Indian hunter, and my mother is just standing there, tears streaming down her face, her hands clutched together, and I watch Billy disappear into our room.

  I want to cry out, but I don’t do anything.

  I can’t talk.

  Here we are, all of us, the whole family in a donnybrook, and I wish I could say something that would make my mother stop crying, but there is nothing I can think of. Maybe if I said I was sorry, but I don’t know what to be sorry about. Playing hooky? Staying out late? C’mon, I am fifteen years old, for Chrissakes.

  It is my life, and those guys are my friends, and what else do I have but my life and my friends?

  Chapter Forty-eight

  It is the week before Christmas. Billy just came back from a trip through New England with the Cardinal Hayes basketball team, winning everywhere they went. They have a team of all-city players, Kevin Loughery, Don Newhook, George Gersch, all scholarship bound. He has just walked in the kitchen from a day of delivering Christmas trees for Goldfarb’s Florist on 57th Street. He seems in a great mood, and is laughing.

  It is seven-thirty. I have just put in a full day at the East River Florist, now that I have quit school, and I’m finishing the dinner my mother left for us before she went to the telephone company at five. It is a new shift for her, and she won’t be home until one in the morning.

  “Hey,” Billy says, “what a day.”

  “There are two franks for you in the frying pan,” I say, “and some potato salad in the icebox. What are you laughing about?”