A Song for Mary

by Dennis Smith

  But there are others to thank as well. My mother always reminded me that I had to say thank you for any little good that came into my life. Who do I thank now for getting me through? I haven’t asked my mother, but I am certain she would say that I should start with God.

  And then?

  A city that paid the rent and put an egg on the table for us when we needed it?

  A church?

  A boys’ club on 52nd Street?

  I met a lot of caring people on the concrete streets of New York, and I guess they will never know that I sensed that they cared. I never said thank you to any of them.

  They were just good and decent New Yorkers doing their jobs, and I don’t think they expected thank yous at the end of the day.

  Now I am thinking of summing up the twenty-five years I’ve lived through, and the first thing that comes to mind is the face of my mother, and I can see all those tenement tears rolling down the soft, sculpted cheeks of her face.

  It is the only real regret I carry with me.

  I know that a good life can change on a dime, and it does for many people. An accident, an illness, or a death can change everything in the life of a family. My family and I have been lucky, and I have been especially lucky. I guess all those prayers my mother said were heard, because the tomorrows, without a doubt, are a lot brighter than the yesterdays.

  I’m an Irish Catholic kid from the tenements, and I learned a lot with the help of people like Archie and Father O’Rourke and Monsignor Ford. I learned that in America you just have to have a sense of what’s fair, and to keep your chin up as you try to make a life. Here a gas station attendant is as good as a banker. We have Jacksonian democracy on our side, and our pants are donned one leg at a time like anyone else, popes or presidents.

  I guess I learned from Archie in the Kips Bay Boys Club that we must believe that we all start from a playing field that is level enough for us to build something on. And, on that field, you just have to believe in yourself.

  “Get out there and do something with yourself,” Archie would scold. “Blow a trumpet. Yell, if you have to. Make yourself known.”

  There is not a moment that I think I didn’t get a fair shot at every opportunity.

  Look, I have a mother who never took her eyes off me. She gave us the liturgy of work, and she taught us the litany of learning without thinking twice about it.

  And I was lucky to be born in this country.

  The long-range possibilities that come with these facts are more than enough to build a future.

  I remember reading Benjamin Franklins autobiography and The Diary of Anne Frank and thinking that somewhere within the thoughts and passions of these two books can be found all a person needs to know about life.

  For myself, I think there are three things about living a life that make sense to remember.

  The first is the proverbial adage about working hard, which is so entrenched in American mythology that it hardly needs mentioning, yet it’s the undeniable foundation to build anything.

  The second is to believe passionately that everything is possible if you follow the advice of the first.

  The third is spiritual, something that comes with time, thinking about people and our relationship to each and every person we have met, what that means to us, and how it affects our day-to-day living. This is the thing that brings quality to a life.

  Like any father, I hope my children will figure it all out better than I have. At least they will know that I thought it important to try to figure it out.

  They might ask me, “What is this ‘it’ you are always talking about?”

  “Life,” I will say, “just life.”

  I guess it’s not worth much if it’s not worth the time to take a look at it.

  I know my life was hanging for too many years by a very thin thread, like the sword of Damocles, threatening to crash into and destroy the thin structure of my future.

  But I know that I am not living so precariously now, the dangers of fire fighting notwithstanding. My feet have become planted into the concrete of New York, and I have a newfound stability I trust.

  You can always tell how much someone cares about his future by how much he cares about his present. In the same way my mother used to smile at me, that smile of regard and confidence, I am now smiling at myself, and giving myself a wink in the mirror once in a while.

  I am doing what I want to do, and I realize how important that is and how lucky I am that I can do this. I have changed, and I am changing. There is no one right system of behavior in the world, and there shouldn’t be, but what is the point of talking about literature or history or religion if we don’t believe we should get a little better in all things as we go through our years? Our lives, like our morality, our sense of fairness, and the quality of our love, should improve measurably from decade to decade, and I am thinking that if I don’t sense this about myself, I am missing out on the real excitement of it all.

  So here I am looking up at the towering, yellow-bricked building of Engine Company 82.

  And I’m hoping I have whatever I need to fight the fires that I know will be before me. I guess that is mostly courage, which is not a personality trait you can train for in a few months at a training school.

  Courage is like character, something you build up in small degrees from the day you are born.

  There are a hundred things I might think of, but I’m now seeing my mother’s face, in her apartment, probably reading the paper and having a cup of tea, and I wish she was here, even for a moment, as a smile slides across my lips and as the blood begins to gush through my veins, to see how happy I am.

  Suddenly, as I am thinking these things, the huge red doors of Engine Company 82 and Ladder Company 31 fly open, and the trucks come out like drag racers, big and powerful, careening around the corner, speeding up 169th Street, air horns and sirens blaring all the way. All around, the bongos are beating out their quick rhythms, the crowds are snapping their fingers and feet to the music or rushing about from one side of a litter-strewn street to another. I watch the trucks until they disappear from view, off to some unknown emergency in our country’s most forgotten, falling-apart, crime-ridden neighborhood. It is like the doors have been opened to a new world, one I have not seen before.

  God.

  This is going to be exciting.

  Reading Group Guide

  On Reading by Dennis Smith

  When I think of the thousands of reading groups now meeting regularly, not only in America, but throughout the world, I think back to those multitudinous hours I spent with my fellow firefighters between alarms in the kitchen of the firehouse watching TV, drinking coffee, talking city and department politics, joking, and just hanging out. If only I’d been sagacious enough to create a reading club within that group of active and quick-thinking firefighters. Oh, how much more fun and producrive that down time would have been!

  You probably noticed in A Song for Mary how often I made reference to the books I read at various periods in my early life. I loved books in the way I loved ice cream, for nothing compares to the youthful vitality and yearning that a youngster brings to the act of picking up a book. The love of reading is not a natural phenomenon, but a learned behavior that develops in substance and measure as time and books go by.

  Surely by that definition, the love of reading grows as one gets older, but I’m not so sure if the enthusiasm I brought to reading when I was a boy can ever be matched. Such was the influence of my mother, who never sat down without a book or a magazine in her hands. I’m certain I watched her reading even before I was able to describe what I saw, and that image has stayed with me these many years.

  An early love of books brought me to an early love of writing. With every book I read came the demand of inquiry, and I remember on some days I spent as much time with the dictionary as with the book I was reading. I don’t know exactly when it was, but sometime in my teenage years I realized that I had a larger vocabulary than just about all
of my friends, and I intuited that the ability to say what you mean was enhanced by the amount of words you could call upon. I also knew this ability would be useful in my life, but I wasn’t sure how.

  When I was growing up on East 56th Street, getting along with others didn’t require language skills so much as the ability to bring a man home in stickball or ro handle your dukes should the need arise.School was not central to our lives, and few kids on the block ever made it all the way through college. To finish high school was quite an accomplishment, something that made your family proud indeed.

  At sixteen, though, I had already quit school and was working at a florist shop. Somehow I knew that my education wasn’t over, that I still had more to learn if I was to get along in this world. I didn’t want to deliver flowers for the rest of my life, but I had no idea what I wanted to be. Like many people I knew, I just wanted a well-paying job and the freedom to enjoy myself as I pleased. We never talked of succeeding, for it was enough to get by. Success was something that was accidental, and happened to other people. There was no misery as long as there was a job.

  I bought a notebook while I was working for the florist. I had an idea for a story that would satirize our local politicians, and that’s all I remember of it. What I remember more clearly is the act of buying the notebook. I was just sixteen years old, and I suppose it was then that I decided I wanted to be a writer. I don’t remember a specific story inscribed in that notebook, nor what became of the notebook itself. It remains curious to me that I thought to buy a notebook, a positive act in itself, while the rest of my life was in turmoil.

  Yet still, during this time that I’d abandoned schooling and was working at the most menial job, reading a book was as natural to me as a luncheon sandwich in a brown paper bag. I read every day, and would occasionally scurry off to the library to consult cited books or the almanac or encyclopedia. I became interested in, well, just about everything. This is the first, and perhaps only, requisite for a person who wants to be a writer. Looking back, I feel privileged that I was so motivated at such a young age. I’m certain I have my mother to thank for that, along with the nuns who taught the skills of sentence construction and the librarian down at Kips Bay Boys Club, who made books so accessible.

  If we go through our libraries we’ll find that all books can be separated into two groups: those that provide data and those that provide joy. All books provide information of one kind or another, and usually we can find the information easily arranged in our libraries. To learn that Rome is in Italy we can look in the geography section; that all roads lead to Rome sends us to the history section; to see the influence of modern-day Rome in the world we might look under the Roman Catholic Church in the religion section; and to learn how to make Spaghetti la Romano we will go to the food section. In all of these books we will find data that will help us in understanding the world.

  And then, there are the books, happy or sad, that provide pure joy in the reading.

  Brendan Behan once said that most people have nationalities but the Irish and the Jews seem to have psychoses. I often think of this in relation to my own writing, for it’s not enough to have just a cursory understanding of the character I might be writing about. I have to know his or her educational and social background and family’s history. In my novels, most of my characters are Irish-American, and since the Irish had been a subjugated and mistreated people for 800 years I can see what Brendan Behan meant by psychosis, how the Irish might share a social and psychological affinity with the Jews, and how any or all of this information might shape my character’s view of the world.

  To me, the understanding of characters is at once the challenge and the excitement of literature. Can any of us ever forget, in Moby Dick, Ishmael’s alarmed first sighting of Queequeg in New Bedford’s Spouter Inn? Or, in Crime and Punishment, the rambling of Raskol-nikov’s thoughts as he crept those 730 steps to the pawnbroker’s apartment? It is a skillful writer who creates characters—even historical characters—with issues that relate to you and me, and to apply those issues to the here and now.

  Oh, the joy I continue to get from reading—there is nothing like learning about the world’s people, and to learn about myself.

  I’ve published ten books thus far, every one originating in some idea I found in my wanderings, some of those wanderings literary. From the wellsprings of experience and reading, I’ve managed to craft fictional stories, vignettes, memoirs, even some data-sharing nonfiction books—all of which, I hope, have been helpful to readers. I also hope I’ve provided some joy.

  If I had the opportunity to do it all over again, I don’t think I’d change a comma, except, perhaps, that I’d start a reading club in my firehouse on that dingy cobblestone street in the South Bronx. I’d find some way to get those firefighters away from the cards and the television and into a group discussion about something we’ve all read. And what book would we start with? I know the book I’d vote for, but I’ll leave it up to you, dear reader, to determine which book it should be.

  Questions for Discussion

  1. In the prologue, Dennis talks about finding the memory that “resides in the swelling of the heart” and “speeds the blood.” Which memory seemed to have the most positive effect on Dennis? The most negative? Which memory affected you the most?

  2. The subtitle is “An Irish-American Memory.” In what ways is this a particularly Irish book? How is it distinctly American?

  3. Dennis had strong role models in his life: his mother, his priest, Billy, Archie at the Kips Bay Boys Club. How did each of these role models affect his behavior? How did their effect on him change as he grew older? How would their influence be different if Dennis had grown up in the 1990s, not the 1950s?

  4. The Catholic church plays a large role early on in Dennis’ life, especially being an altar boy and the story of Saint Maria Goretti. What was the significance of the Saint Maria story? How did being an altar boy affect him? What are the positive and negative aspects of his experiences with the church?

  5. At one point, Dennis is rescued from a fire escape by a fireman. Later we find out his life is changed when he joins the NYFD. How did the incident on the fire escape influence his choice? Tell about a moment in your own life that, although it seemed insignificant at the time, altered your future in a meaningful way.

  6. The absence of Dennis’ father is a recurring theme in the book. What actions were a direct result of his father’s absence? How did he try to fill the void in his life with other male role models? How was his relationship with Billy affected? How did it influence how he saw his mother, as a single mother and as a woman? How did it affect her over the years, in her relationship with other men and with her sons?

  7. New York City is its own character in this book: the welfare it provides the Smiths, Dennis’ travels through Kips Bay, into Harlem, to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, to the public library, etc. How would his life have been different had he grown up in a rural, instead of urban, area? What do you think they would have done if the welfare system had not helped them? How did his mother try to get Dennis to make the most of the city? At what point did he finally understand the meaning of her “tenement tears”? Do you think life in a small town would have been easier or more difficult for Dennis and his family?

  8. Dennis’ relationship with his mother is the central theme of the memoir. Which scenes are the most representative of her guidance? What does the ring symbolize? What does the song “Rose of Tralee” symbolize for Dennis and his mother? How did her purchase of the aviator jacket make you feel? What do you think that meant to Dennis? Why was she so adamant about not telling anyone they were poor? How do you think she felt when she saw Dennis spiraling into crime as a teenager? When her husband went to the hospital?

  9.Dennis’ life changes when he gets in a street brawl and is ordered to join the Air Force. What do you think would have happened to him had he not gotten into the fight? Would he have turned his life around eventually? What other things in
his life would have helped to turn him around?

  10. When Dennis joins the fire department, he has a moment to reflect on what has brought him to Engine Co. 82. What lesson was the most important that he learned? Who helped bring him to that point in his life? Share a moment in your own life when you knew you could achieve your dream, no matter what transpired before then.