A Song for Mary

by Dennis Smith

  “He would remember you,” she says, “and forget me, because the wires for his short-term memory were completely cut somehow.”

  “How did that happen, Mom?” I ask. “How did you find out?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, holding her palms out, “nobody knows, really. They call it catatonic.”

  “How …” I say, “how … I mean, how did it actually happen, how did you know?”

  “I had no idea anything was wrong,” she says, looking down at her hands. “Everything was so normal. We were living in Sterling Place in Brooklyn. You had just been born in the Jewish Hospital and christened in St. Theresa’s. Billy was just a little over two.”

  She stops now and looks at me, smiling.

  “I remember,” she continues, “you and Billy were both in the same carriage, and we were out for a walk. I had you stuffed in that carriage like socks in a sock drawer, and when I got home I rang the bell for your father to come down to help me, and I rang and rang.

  “It was his day off from the Railway Express, and I was hopping mad that he never came down, and so I asked some man on the street, a passerby, to help me up the two flights, and I took you boys one in each arm and carried you up the stairs, and the man carried the carriage. He left the carriage in the hall, and I opened the door. I saw your father’s legs in the living room as I thanked the man for helping.”

  Her expression became serious as she talked, but now it becomes animated, like she is telling an old joke that she has learned to tell really well.

  “I guess it was a funny scene,” she says, “because I saw him sitting in the big, blue velvet chair, and I began right away to complain about him not coming down to help me. ‘Here I am,’ I was saying to him, ‘all alone with these boys, and here are you sitting on your lordship’s ass and giving me no help at all.’”

  As she is talking I can see a tear in the corner of each of her eyes, but she is laughing as she talks.

  “And then I started to raise my voice a little,” she goes on, “because he wasn’t answering. ‘Well, say something,’ I said, ‘and don’t sit there like a wrapped package.’

  “And then I went into the living room from the kitchen and saw him sitting there, his hands grabbing the arms of the chair as if he was falling off a cliff, and his eyes staring out in front of him like he saw a ghost or an army of bad angels. Oh, Dennis, I was so frightened.”

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “I have never seen a person like that,” she says, “just completely frozen to that chair, unable to speak or utter a sound. ‘What’s the matter, John?’ I kept asking over and over. ‘What’s the matter?’

  “But he couldn’t move even his mouth. And so I went to a neighbor and asked him to run to the bar where your Uncle Bob worked, so that I could get some help. Uncle Bob came, and then the doctors and the police, and then the ambulance came. He was, completely, a different person forever after that, never knowing where he was or what was wrong.”

  “God, Mom,” I say, putting my hand on her arm. “That was pretty hard on you, huh?”

  She takes the handkerchief again from her pocketbook and dabs at her eyes.

  “Well, I would say,” she says, “it was harder on your father.”

  Her voice now is cracked and small, and she breaks into a laugh.

  “Yeah,” I say quietly, not knowing if I should laugh, too.

  I wish I had something to drink, for suddenly my throat has become dry and sticky. It feels as if a two-by-four is going through it when I swallow.

  “So,” she says calmly, “it was just the three of us after that.”

  “What about the relatives?” I ask.

  “Kitty and Helen had families of their own,” she says, “and your Uncle Buddy was working three jobs so that he could get married.”

  “How about Grandma Hogan,” I say, “and your father?”

  “They were around,” she says, “but being emigrants from Ireland, they believed that everyone had to take care of themselves. You lived what you were born into. Anyway, they lived on the other side of Brooklyn, and my mother was sick, dying really.”

  She pauses for what seems like an hour.

  “So,” she says finally, “it was just me and you two little guys.”

  “Well,” I say, trying to make her feel good, “you did okay.”

  “Did I, Dennis?” she asks.

  I’m not sure she wants me to answer, but I answer, anyway.

  “I mean,” I say, “Billy is in college, and I am going into the air force, and we both know how to read and write. This all came from you.

  There are just a few people, maybe a dozen, on the train going down to New York. It is late in the afternoon. I have been clearing my throat and coughing, because my mouth is still dry. My mother gets up and walks to the end of the car where she fills up a paper cup with water from the spigot. Everybody watches her as she moves past them. She takes a sip and brings the cup to me.

  “This will make you feel better,” she says.

  She sits again and puts her pocketbook on her lap. I know I am not going to spend much more time with her alone like this before I go off to Texas, and there are so many things I would like to ask her, about how she grew up next to a firehouse in Brooklyn, about graduating from high school, about what boyfriends she might have had, about how she and her brother and two sisters lived in a two-bedroom apartment, about how she met my father, about her wedding day.

  But she seems so relaxed now that I don’t want to bother her. She has settled back and closed her eyes and seems to be keeping some inner rhythm in tune with the clacking of the wheels against the tracks.

  I think she is sleeping, but without opening her eyes she begins to whisper.

  “Dennis,” she says, “would you do me a favor?”

  “Sure, Mom,” I answer, “anything.”

  “Would you sing me,” she asks, “’The Rose of Tralee’?”

  God, I’m thinking, I don’t want to be singing on a train in front of the whole world. Maybe if I just don’t answer her, she’ll fall asleep, and forget all about asking me to sing in the middle of a crowd, even if it is just a dozen.

  “’The Rose of Tralee,’” she whispers.

  She must be thinking about all those Sunday afternoons sitting around a keg of beer on 56th Street.

  It’s funny how people are, and what makes them happy.

  I am looking at my mother now, and thinking that the only time I saw her being really happy was when I sang that song for her one day, and then again on that night she took us to Joe’s Original Restaurant. And it seemed she was pretty happy when I gave her that ring.

  Three times is not many in a life.

  I felt so close to her those times, like she knew her life was safe with me and she trusted me completely.

  I never gave her much reason to trust me after that.

  But she brought me here with her today. She could have forgotten all about it. But she didn’t. She told my father that I was a man now. She wanted me in that hospital with her. She trusted me to be there with her.

  And so here I am, seventeen years old and about to leave home for God knows how close to forever, and I take a deep breath to sing this song for my mother.

  I strain my voice to be above the clacking of the train, and I know that the whole train is looking at me. But I look over at my mother as I sing the first verse of “The Rose of Tralee.”

  The pale moon was rising

  Above the green mountains

  The sun was declining Beneath the green sea

  As I strayed with my love

  O’er the pure crystal fountain

  That stood in the beautiful

  Vale of Tralee.

  Her eyes are still closed, and I believe she is happy behind the smile on her face. She seems, for the moment anyway, to have forgotten all those tenement tears I caused her over the years, and her smile makes me sing louder as I enter the refrain.

  I don’t care what the peo
ple on this train are thinking.

  fifty-two

  It is now three years since I rode that train to New York with my mother, and the air force came and went.

  And I am talking to a horse.

  It seems the time has sped by so quickly, and I still haven’t made anything of myself. In fact, I think I’ve gone backward a little.

  I’ll be twenty years old soon, and as sure as I can feel the Nevada wind pushing against my face, I know that I have to make a change somewhere.

  It’s a clear day, and before me I can see forever over generations of mountain peaks. And I am talking to this horse.

  It’s not just any horse.

  It’s my horse, and it’s funny how life can shift you onto roads you never expected to be.

  “Easy, Patches,” I am whispering as I pull back on the reins.

  We both heard that unmistakable hollow rattle. We both know that it is there, a rattlesnake in the shale rocks somewhere. Patches can sense where it is, but I don’t see it, and the horse is shifting like crazy beneath me.

  “Whoa, big fella,” I say, kicking out the tapaderas hanging from the stirrups, trying to control him, but he’s completely going the other way from where I am heading. I grab onto the cantle behind me, a three-inch cantle where the back of the saddle comes up, and it gives me a better balance. I don’t want to get thrown and end up eye-to-eye with a rattler.

  But I also don’t want to give Patches an inch, because if you let them have an inch, horses will take the whole north forty. And so I’m now bouncing off the saddle shoulder and trying to be more determined than he is. I throw my spurs back and dig into his hindquarter, and I begin to pull back on the reins with both glove-covered hands.

  “Whoa, you son of a …”

  And now I see the snake, a four-footer, dart off down the mountainside, and I think all three of us will begin to breathe a little smoother, anyway.

  I bought Patches about a year ago, and I’ve been working as a cowboy whenever I get the chance. He’s a gelding, and because he’s a little wind-broke, he’s not as easy to handle as a well-trained cow pony. Every noise to him, even the wind pushing the grasses together, is like an opening gate to a thoroughbred, and he just wants to run flat out. Loping is a skill we are still working on, but I have come to love this impatient horse, every brown and white patch that runs through his coat.

  I’m now working as a per diem ranch hand, riding through the open range in these northern Nevada hills about twelve miles from the town of Gerlach. There is no feeling I know of, inspired anywhere else in the world, like what I am now feeling on this high, shale-rock-covered mountain. I can’t see anyone before or behind for ten, maybe twenty miles, and so I’m as alone as I’ve ever been.

  I see some cows and calves ahead, about thirty or so, grazing on a flat about a mile or so distant. Patches and I will just amble pretty easy like in that direction, because I don’t want to scare them off. It’s hard enough to rope them when they are corralled, and here they have half a state to roam. So you can see why I don’t want them running.

  I have an old and torn straw hat pulled down low over my eyes to protect my Irish skin from the sun. It’s desert-hot up here close to the sun, and I was sure to pack a couple of long-sleeved shirts for the week, along with a change of underwear and a toothbrush.

  “You don’t need a toothbrush,” is what Dave Iverson said as we packed our things in the truck, “as long as there is some grazing grass in the hills. Just chew a little grass, and it’s goddamn better than Den-tyne gum, you bet.”

  People on 56th Street never talked like this, but people on 56th Street don’t have a thousand head grazing on open range, either.

  We drove as far as we could in the truck, an old government-surplus weapons carrier, the kind that ranchers up here buy for the hills. Dave is the boss, and there are four of us who have packed into the hills for a week. Even with a four-wheel-drive vehicle, though, we could drive just so far, and then we had to ride into the hills for about three hours before we found the high corral, made about twenty years ago of sticks and rope, where we could put the horses.

  I don’t know how much Dave will be paying us, but I guess it’ll be ten dollars a day or so, which isn’t so bad if you’re spending most of the time lazing in a saddle.

  There is not much to do but think, and, until we get to those animals, I have a lot to think about.

  There’s nothing and nowhere in life that can be as free and easygoing as this life in Nevada. I’ve come to like it here, and feel relaxed like a native. I’ve had good times, especially during rodeo season, when the girls are all skinny and in jeans that seem painted on the skin of their backsides and their fronts, when there is endless two-stepping dances, interrupted just occasionally by a drunken cowboy who feels an inner need to start a community brawl, and everybody, men and women alike, is wearing a silver belt buckle as big as a bumper on a Lincoln Continental.

  People work the full daylight hours every day of the week except Sunday, and on every Saturday night they have to remember what is expected of them in mixed company, and some forget completely. Some go stallion-wild, and some sit on a dance-hall bench, speechless, tapping their feet to the music and waiting for something unusual to happen.

  There is a party going on in Nevada every Saturday night, born and planned of a week’s lonely labor. There are always lots of whiskey and beer, and pretty girls who like to kiss and dance and no more than that. And I have had amusing times and learning times here, seven days a week for almost three years.

  But now I have to think.

  The air force made me a radar operator at the Fallon Naval Air Station, just sixty miles east of Reno, and I liked the job well enough. But the hours were not great, and I had to work the midnight-to-eight shift for one week a month. Our country’s distant early warning system never sleeps, and I dutifully watched out through the nights for enemy planes from Quemoy and Matsu and other communist hotbeds, each revolution on the radar screen going out five hundred miles and taking sixty seconds to go around.

  It was monotonous work, but you are not given many choices in the military. You fall into an empty slot when you graduate basic training, and that is that, and my empty slot was in this desert aircraft control and warning squad.

  Who knows how things would’ve turned out if I fell into a Boston, a Los Angeles, or an Italy slot, or if the bus from Las Vegas had not been exactly on time?

  I had been to an Indian powwow in Carson City. Paiute Indians from all over the state came to dance, meet each other, and trade, a colorful event with more feathers than on a chicken farm. And more energy than a prison riot. Dancing, singing, and those constant tom-toms always in the air. It was thoroughly enjoyable, and it was hard leaving the spectacle, especially since the daylong festivities would go well into the morning hours.

  But I knew I had to be back at the base in Fallon at midnight, and the nine-thirty bus from Las Vegas would have done it for me.

  There is no excuse that I got to the bus depot five minutes late. It doesn’t matter that I was told that this was the only day in decades that the bus was on time. Now I remember simply a regret, and I chalk it up to a bit of bad luck.

  I was more than an hour late for the midnight shift at the radar operations building, and here is where the bad luck comes in. This was the same night that orders came in for me to transfer to the United States Air Force Base in Bermuda.

  I had not been home in two years because I could not afford the transportation. This transfer would not only have taken me into one of the world’s greatest playgrounds, but it would have paid my way to New York to see my family and friends.

  The captain on duty that night was someone I hardly knew, a hardnose who did not care about some Indian jamboree in Carson City or a bus that I missed by just minutes. He redlined the transfer order and submitted a request for company discipline to the company commander, something called an Article 15.

  That was a year ago, and up until then
I was a pretty good airman, did my job, and had no difficulties with anyone or anything.

  But now, sitting here on top of Patches, the rest of America stretched out before me in a thousand colors, I am thinking that I have failed again, that the rest of my life looks to be in dark colors and shadows and has none of this clear excitement I see in this vista before me.

  I have no skills, I’m almost twenty years old, and I’m living from hand to mouth with a dollar here and a dollar there, bucking bales of hay or milking cows or riding the hills looking for sucking calves, living with friends a week here and a week there.

  The only thing I have working for me is that I still have a lot of freedom in my life. I’m still free to make choices for myself. But what’s the point of having the freedom to make choices if there are no choices lined up?

  The military system was not for me. It had such unappealable control over my life. And that captain who redlined my transfer orders, I don’t know how I should think about him. He was just doing his job, but maybe he didn’t have to do it so well. Maybe he could have found even the smallest excuse if he looked at my whole record, and not just that one night.

  I had great good fortune presented to me in one hour, the possibility of going home and then on to Bermuda, which was replaced by a furnace of bad luck in the next hour. If only the bus had been a little late. If only there had been another captain on duty that night. If only my transfer order had come in the day before.

  All these ifs that turned my life around from being an ordinary live-by-the-rules airman to being a guy from the streets of New York who would go back to living by his own rule, the rule that says I am always right and everyone else is always wrong.

  So have as good a time as you possibly can and the hell with everything else.

  And I did have a good time. It seemed there was a parry every night in the town of Fallon with wild cowboys and great-looking women. I still have never had a permanent, go-steady girlfriend, but there is always someone to dance with, and hug when the moon is up. Maybe it is the times, and maybe it is Nevada women, but I can never seem to get past the hugging part out here.