Dermot spoke to his uncles without looking at them. “Who’s in Ireland?” he said.
“I told you, your father. I met this fella from the docks. Met him down at Mutchie’s one afternoon. Fella tells me he knows my brother-in-law. I says to him, which fuckin’ brother-in-law. He told me. Sure enough, it’s Jimmy. He got a job with the ILA in Lauderdale. Port Everglades is the name of the docks there, you know. Well, he got sick or somethin’ in December and he went to Ireland. Stays with whatever’s left of the family, I guess.”
Dermot shrugged. “What the hell does that do for me?”
“Nothin’ at all, what could it mean to you?” his Uncle Tom said.
“Sometimes you wonder if kids need anybody,” Uncle Jack said. “You grew up like a weed, Dermot. A weed. Couldn’t cut you down or pull you out.”
“Who was the fellow that knew he was in Ireland?” Dermot said.
“Fellow name of Murphy. He’s in charge of the Belgian Line piers. Eastside piers. I saw him down at Mutchie’s.”
Slow footsteps, a squeak at a time, sounded on the staircase. His Uncle Tom’s wife lumbered down. Some women Dermot remembered only vaguely, the other side of his aunt’s family, followed her. Everybody began talking and greeting each other. Dermot waited until they all were talking and he slipped upstairs. He was walking past the doorway to the funeral chapel when he saw his mother sitting in the front row. He stopped. He was about to start walking out again when his sister came up to him.
“Are you going?” she said.
“No, just outside for some air,” Dermot said.
“Oh, I thought you were going.”
“No, I wouldn’t walk out.”
“Well, I thought if you were, that we could meet you. There’s no sense staying late tonight if we all have to get up early in the morning.”
“Where?” Dermot said.
“Well, we all were going to this little place right on the road. Just before you go onto the parkway. The whole family was going.”
“What’s the name of the place?”
“Acerno’s. The reason I’m saying it is that I’ve got to get her something to eat. She hasn’t eaten all day.”
“Acerno’s,” Dermot said. “If anything happens and I decide to stay outside in the air, I’ll meet you in Acerno’s.”
“In about an hour, we’re not going to be so much longer,” his sister said.
Dermot went outside and sat in the car. He turned on the radio and smoked cigarettes. He was surprised at how much the small mention of his father bothered him. The name was just mentioned in passing. It moved something around inside him. He could not figure what it was that had moved, or how it had moved. He smoked the cigarette and thought about it. He did not know how long he sat there. But when he saw people starting to move out onto the porch of the funeral parlor, he drove out of the lot. He did not want to talk to anybody. Instead of driving, home to Queens, he simply went around the streets of White Plains. When it was nearly nine o’clock, he came down the hill from the funeral parlor and onto the avenue leading to the parkway, and the restaurant, a small roadhouse, was on the right-hand side. He wanted to keep going, but he pulled in.
When he came through the door, Dermot heard his mother and his sister laughing. They were sitting in a booth. One of Dermot’s uncles was walking away with a big smile. The mother was laughing over a glass of wine which she held, on the ready, at her chin. She was laughing deeply, like a man, and too loud. “Aha … aha … aha.” She threw the laugh out like a challenge. Big, irritated eyes looked around the room. Dermot’s sister was laughing like a high school girl, a high-pitched laugh, a tone higher and it would have been hysterical. The laugh had no fun in it. The sister had hair that was lighter and had more hue than the mother’s. The sister had the mother’s face—large eyes, the sharp nose, and the pointed chin. But it was too full for a girl of twenty-six. The sister was always on a diet and always gained weight
Dermot’s uncles, and three or four others, were at a table against the wall. Dermot started to take his raincoat off. He remembered he had no gun. He kept the coat on and slid into the booth. Right away, he felt his mother’s eyes. The mother and sister were on the opposite side of the booth, the mother directly across from Dermot, glaring at him. Her fat eyes did not blink or move. They glared at her son. Dermot did not say hello. He looked at his uncles against the wall.
The waiter was a young boy in a white coat who handed out small typewritten menus. Dermot reached for one, and his eyes met his mother’s. She had a menu in her hand, but she was still glaring at him.
“How old are you?” Dermot’s sister asked the waiter.
“Seventeen,” the waiter said.
The mother’s eyes finally moved. “Do you attend school?” she said.
“No ma’am.”
“My, you certainly start life in a hurry.”
“Long as I don’t finish it so fast.”
The mother gave this laugh that sounded like a snarl. “Aha … aha … aha.” The sister’s body convulsed. Her laugh was near a shriek.
“On that I’ll have a whisky sour,” the mother said.
“Ma’am?” the waiter said.
“A whisky sour.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but we only serve wine and beer here,” the boy said.
“I said a whisky sour.”
“Bring her an orange soda,” Dermot said.
“Hey, you!” the mother said. She said it with her teeth and her bottom lip. Her fat eyes glared more intensely.
Dermot picked up the menu with his right hand. He leaned across the table so his face almost was touching her and the menu became a screen. “Go ahead, say something,” he said to his mother. “Let me see you say something.”
His eyes were narrow and the words came through his teeth. His sister was whispering something, her eyes wet, and Dermot began to shake. He pushed himself out of the booth and walked over to the table with the uncles. He put his head against the wall with his eyes shut He was breathing as if he had just run half a mile.
One of them at the table asked him if he wanted anything. He kept his eyes closed. “Get me a cup of espresso,” he said.
A few minutes later he felt the cup being put down in front of him. He opened his eyes and picked up the coffee. It was too hot. Dermot glanced across the lisle. The mother had the tablecloth in front of her pulled up. She was knocking her glass of orange soda against the bare wooden table. It was a thick glass and, without the tablecloth to muffle the sound, thick glass hitting right against the wooden table, the glass was making a steady sound that ran through the room. Dermot’s mother was glaring at him with her fat eyes and her bottom lip out. Dermot kept looking into her eyes and the knocking, knocking, knocking was all he could hear and it was getting louder and louder and his temples were throbbing.
The sister had the menu open and she was looking at it. The sleeves of her blouse showed motion from the trembling arms inside.
Nobody at the table with Dermot paid any attention to the mother knocking the glass against the table. Dermot closed his eyes to the throbbing of his temples. When the knocking finally stopped, he opened them. His mother was asleep in the booth with her head against the side of it. His sister was slumped down in the booth with her head thrown back. She had one hand clamped to the back of her neck. She looked up at the ceiling. Dermot went over.
“Can I do anything for you?” he said.
“I can supervise,” his sister said.
“Well, I’m going to go, then.”
One of his sister’s shoulders moved in response. He went back and said good-by to his uncles and left. He got home by ten-fifteen and went to bed at eleven o’clock. He woke up at two o’clock. He was wide awake. He got out of bed and went into the living room and had a cigarette and put on television. The movie on Channel 2 was Captain’s Paradise with Alec Guinness. Dermot was lucky. It was a movie which held him. The movies were not so good in the nights that followed, nights of waking
up at the same time and smoking cigarettes in the living room until light came through the windows.
He tried walking. If he worked days, he walked at night. Walked for miles through Richmond Hill and into Woodhaven and back. He still did not sleep. When he worked at night, he walked in the daytime on the beach.
For the first time, he stopped and asked himself who he was. He looked at the white sand blowing and he remembered the nun in school teaching that the life of a human being was so much less than one grain of sand on a beach. When Dermot looked up at the sky, he saw it solid with people. A mass of people, millions of people, moving slowly across the entire sky. Moving, moving, and yet never moving because there were so many millions of them and so many millions more to come, the millions on the other side of the horizon, that there was no room for anybody to move. They shifted and swayed and exchanged positions but never went anyplace. Dermot Davey stood in the cold by the sea with the sand blowing and he felt his mother next to him, tearing at him, and his sister on the other side of his mind like a weight. The guilt came through him. He did nothing to help either of them. He wondered why he thought about them and not about his own children. He felt guilty about having children. His mother and sister kept coming up first in his mind. He had three daughters and the only thing he could remember automatically about them growing up was the Sunday afternoon he took the two oldest ones to a puppet show at the library in Jamaica. The youngest, Tara, wasn’t three yet and he was leaving her home. She stood on the stoop screaming. When her mother tried to soothe her, Tara stuck her thumb in her ears so she wouldn’t hear. At the same time the rest of her fingers were tearing at her hair to punish them. Dermot’s wife laughed and he laughed with her. He remembered he felt sad under the laugh. He stood on the beach and wondered why it was the only thing he could remember about his three children. He knew it meant he was wrong, the way he had been living. He began to think back, looking for something that would make him feel sorry for himself, that would give him an excuse. As it always did, everything became a red can of Cambell’s soup rolling across the floor of the apartment in Sunnyside. Jesus Christ, Dermot Davey said to himself, I wish knew how to think.
It came quickly, and out of nowhere. Suicide is a mortal sin. He shook his head quickly. He was frightened of himself and he walked off the beach quickly.
On the way back from Rockaway, he stopped at a roadside place. Nobody was inside and he had a bowl of clam bisque at a table while the counterman stared. The day was gone now, and Dermot looked out the window at the start of the night traffic. He thought about his father. He couldn’t remember the face completely. Only the presence. He wondered what the father looked like now. He didn’t know why he was wondering about his father. One guy fucked this whole thing up, he thought. He thought of his mother and his sister in sunlight. How it should be. He got up to go home. Thinking of the house in Richmond Hill gave him a closed-in feeling. He had to be at work at midnight. That made him uneasy too.
The next time he came on the beach he began to lope so he would begin to run out of wind. The job of gulping for air kept his mind busy.
Through February and March and April of 1970, Dermot Davey, troubled, walked the beach whenever he could. One day he came off the beach and walked up 116th Street, past Sullivan’s Hotel and Duffy’s Bar to the Emerald Cottage, a store run by Terry O’Keefe and a woman named Mae. They sell sweaters from Donegal, records from Dublin, tea sets from Belleek, crystal from Waterford, maps of Ireland suitable for framing, and Easter Rebellion Proclamations. To priests, Terry and Mae sell the idea that they are married, which is unsupported by such temporal authorities as the city clerk.
When Dermot came in, Terry was preparing for his major business, the Sunday-night radio show he does out of the back of the store. For one hour, at eight o’clock every Sunday night, Terry O’Keefe sits in the back room and sends out over Station WKIL a constant stream of music, “Mother Malone” by the Liffey Boys, “Irish Soldier Boy” by the Corkmen. Between records he delivers a fierce, thumping hard-sell of tours to the old country. Station WKIL carries Terry O’Keefe’s show as far away as White Plains. Each Sunday night at about seven-thirty, the Irish, those who immigrated or are first-and perhaps second-generation, after that they care not, begin fiddling with radio sets to put on WKIL. All week, WKIL is a black station. To pay respects to integration, WKIL allows Terry O’Keefe his Sunday-night hour.
Terry uses it for his tours. From late May on, the Aer Lingus terminal at Kennedy Airport in New York is packed with people flying to Ireland on special charters. Two and three charters a night leave New York for Shannon. And all during the year, at Christmas and Easter and St. Patrick’s Day, for the All-Ireland Hurling Championships, for the trip to the shrine at Knock, for a special anniversary mass in honor of the Cork City Brigade, Terry O’Keefe puts together charters with travel agents in Woodside in Queens, and Inwood in Manhattan, and the Fordham section of the Bronx.
When Dermot walked into his store this day, Terry O’Keefe was leaning against the wall reading his script for Sunday night’s show.
“Attention the boys in blue! John Mackell, PBA delegate from the Hundred and First Precinct, Far Rockaway, announces a fourteen-day tour for PBA members and families only. One man in each party must have a shield. Fourteen glorious days under bright blue skies for boys in blue and their loved ones. A special free cocktail party in the wonderful Aer Lingus lounge at Kennedy Airport. A first-today drink at Shannon free-duty bar. Fourteen days. One hundred and forty-five dollars. Contact Francis Troy Travel Service, Twining nine-eight-five-three-one. Or go to Francis Troy Travel at seventy-two dash ninety Roosevelt Avenue, Jackson Heights, Queens. Patrolman John Mackell announced that for special inspiration, the Very Reverend Monsignor Michael Carrigan will serve as official chaplain for the tour!” He finished with a shout.
“That was very good,” Mae said. “You’ve got a grand speaking voice.”
“When is it?” Dermot said.
“When do you want to go?” Terry O’Keefe said.
“You don’t have a date yet?” Dermot said.
“What difference is it?” Terry said.
“Well, just for the hell of it.”
“The tour leaves when we got a tour together.”
The next day, when he finished work at the license bureau, Dermot walked through Chinatown and across East Broadway and down to Mutchie’s. The owner was behind the bar, in sunglasses, snapping a bill between his fingers to see if it was good.
“Murphy?” the owner said. He shook his head vaguely.
Dermot ordered a beer. He mentioned his uncle’s name. The owner said, “What are you, a cop too?”
“It’s personal,” Dermot said. “My uncle told me to stop by. It has nothin’ to do with the job.”
The owner walked away to serve people at the end of the bar. He stayed down there and had a drink with the people. Then he came back to Dermot. “He’s usually here, Murphy, he’s usually here at about four o’clock. You won’t catch him no more today. What time is it now?”
“Five-thirty,” Dermot said.
“Oh, you won’t catch him no more today,” the owner said.
Dermot came back the next day. He waited and then the owner told him, “You see, he starts at seven in the morning. So he’s out of there by, who knows, two, three in the afternoon.”
The next morning, Dermot left the house at five-forty-five. He took the car. He drove down the East River Drive and got off at South Street. He pulled in front of the Belgian Line piers at six-twenty-five. He asked a watchman what time Murphy came on. “The Murphy that’s the boss? He be here any time now.”
Fifteen minutes later, the watchman pointed to a man who was getting out of a Buick Electra. He had a hat perched on top of a big head and a blue topcoat pulled up around red jowls.
“Well, there’s nothin’ to it,” Murphy said. “I don’t know the fella, you know. But Mickey Lynch said this fella was layin’ dead in Lauderdale. Tommy Meehan’s
brother-in-law, Mickey told me. Some sort of a musician, right? Mickey Lynch ast me to put him to work, so I called Hughie O’Donnell down Lauderdale and I says, put this fella to work. Which he did. I happen to be down there last month and I say to Hughie, how is Tommy Meehan’s brother-in-law doin’? He tells me the guy got hurt. Fell under a hoist, I think. He got compensation and said, fuck it, I can live on this money in Ireland pretty good. So he went over there until he was feelin’ better. That’s all I know. He went to Ireland. He’s probably better off than all of us.”
At lunchtime at work, Dermot maneuvered the switchboard operator into a call to the ILA office at Fort Lauderdale. The man there had his father’s name and Florida address. Dermot asked him to get the mailing address for the compensation check. When he called back, the man said the checks were being sent to the post office in Bundoran, County Donegal.
“For how long are they supposed to go there?” Dermot asked. “Doesn’t say. That’s the address.”
On the way home, Dermot stopped at Johno’s house. He told him about the PBA tour with the Monsignor.
“What the fuck good is that going to do us?” Johno said.
“I just think we better stay close to this Monsignor. I told you that when we started and you agreed with me.”
Dermot did not want to go alone. He knew Johno could not be moved more than ten yards east of Rockaway Beach. Dermot knew he had to make it important or Johno wouldn’t listen. If he brought up his father, he was sure Johno would laugh. He had to make it Johno’s life or nothing.
“We could feel a lot safer,” he said. “A good insurance.”
“Fine,” Johno said. “How am I going to get there? Swim?”
“It’s only a hundred forty-five dollars,” De?not said.
“Oh, then I’ll borrow it off Rockefeller,” Johno said.
“Well, we’ll see what comes up,” Dermot said. “Where is Bundoran over there, do you know?”
World Without End, Amen Page 10
