Part 26 (1/2)

I wasn't home when the call came saying that Billy had died. The woman left the message with my son. Extraordinary, really, to leave such a message with a boy, a ten-year-old. ”Just tell your mother Bill McGovern died. I'm his landlady. We found her number in his room, it was the only one we found there. But there's nothing that she needs to do. We buried him already. Just to let her know.” She said that Billy had become a hermit in his room. She told my son that they'd kept asking him to come downstairs, for holidays and things, but he'd always say no. ”Just send me up a plate,” he'd say.

My son reported all this flatly; he is the serious one of the three, the youngest; it was unfortunate the woman got him. He would worry. Worry that someone he never heard of died with his mother's phone number in his room. He is a modern child, the son of modern, divorced parents; he would imagine Billy was my lover. And so I wanted to tell him about Billy, to relieve him, for it would be awful for a boy like him to think of a dead person as his mother's lover. But I didn't know where to begin the story. Or how to tell it once I'd started. To make a story of a life, you had to shape it, and there was no shape to Billy's life, that was the problem. I thanked my son and sent him to his room to join his brothers.

I'd known Billy all my life. His mother was my mother's best friend. I loved Veronica McGovern. She brought into my childhood books, cla.s.sical records, prints of the old masters, and a hint that there was somewhere a world- which she had once inhabited and now only imagined- where people had intelligent conversations in low, untroubled voices, where no one ever worked too hard or got too tired. She flipped the switch of my imagination, lighting up those rooms that are a refuge from the anger and miscomprehension of the adult world. She saved me from the isolated fate of the bright, undervalued child. She spared me years of bitterness. But she ruined her son's life as certainly as if she'd starved him in infancy; he would probably have been much better off if she'd abandoned him at birth.

Veronica had always lied about her age; she was eleven years older than my mother, though we never knew it till her death. She'd married at eighteen and had Billy a year later; my mother had had me at thirty-one. So although Billy and I were technically in the same generation, he was twenty-two when I was born. I thought him handsome when I was growing up; some nights he didn't come home and Veronica wrung her hands and mentioned the name Roberta. It was such a serviceable name and yet the woman cast so lurid a glow. She lived in the Village; she was a dancer; when Billy was with her he didn't come home. I had no idea what Billy and Roberta did the nights that he was with her; I had no idea that it was what they did that caused Veronica's distress; I was young enough simply to see not sleeping in one's own bed as an emblem of danger.

Billy would come home after these nights at around lunchtime; my mother and I would be sitting at Veronica's kitchen table and at the sight of him we would fall silent. He s.h.i.+mmered with the glow of s.e.x, though at the time I wouldn't have known to call it that. There was always a beat of silence when we saw him in the doorway, like the silence between merry-go-round tunes. Then he would say, ”h.e.l.lo, Mother.” Veronica would light a Herbert Tareyton cigarette and tell him to bring a chair from his room. There were only three chairs in the kitchen, a setup left over from the days when Charlie McGovern, Veronica's husband, Billy's father, who died when I was nine, was still alive.

I'd grown up on tales of Charlie McGovern's binges and disappearances, and Billy had been pointed to as an example of what can happen when a single mother spoiled a child. My father disappeared when I was two; it was handy for my mother to have so ready an example. ”Spoiled.” It is a terrible word, suggesting meat gone iridescent, but in Billy's case, it has always seemed apt. My mother explained that Veronica had never said no to Billy. Life with Charlie devastated her and she wanted to keep Billy by her side. In return for his loyalty she indulged him and convinced him that the world was too gross to value him correctly; in time, he believed it an unfit place for him to walk in as a man.

I only knew Charlie McGovern as a drunk, but in the twenties he had been a millionaire. To a child in the early fifties, the twenties were like the fall of Rome, something much too distant to think of concretely or even to believe in. Had Veronica McGovern been a flapper? Impossible to connect that sweet, wounded, muted, and above all genteel creature with the Jazz Age, but when she spoke about the early days of her marriage, it was all bathtub gin and the Black Bottom and rides in rumble seats and staying up till dawn. She mentioned that Charlie always bought her perfumed cigarettes and stockings with her name embroidered just at the top. Hearing about those stockings caused a river of electric joy to run through every nerve in my six-, seven-, eight-year-old body; it was one of those pieces of information children instantly know to be crucial, some essential clue to the incomprehensible maze of adult life, although they cannot place quite the significance of the small jewel so casually presented. I decided that at least I knew that Veronica and Charlie had once been in love, the love, perhaps, of people in the movies. But what had come of it? No two people could less suggest what my idea was of the love between men and women: Charlie so clearly embodying ruin in his bathrobe with its sash of fraying rope, Veronica devoting her physical existence to concealing any hint of s.e.x.

She clearly thought about how she looked: her impression of well-bred decay could not have been achieved by accident. I remember my shock when I realized as a quite young child that Veronica wore no bra.s.siere. I fell asleep once in her lap and awoke with my arms around her torso. She must have sat perfectly still all the time I slept. Pretending to be still half asleep, I ran my fingers up and down her back as if it were a clavichord. I kept playing her back, not knowing what it was I missed. When I realized what it was it came to me to pity her, for it was pitiable that she had nothing to show for her womanhood, nothing like my mother's fine, high bolster of a bosom I had always been so happily able to trust. She wore 4711 Cologne- an androgynous scent in an age when the s.e.xes shared almost nothing. Her shoes were a generation out-of-date: round-toed and laced and made to match some prewar dream. She was personally fastidious, but when three of her bottom teeth fell out she couldn't bring herself to see a dentist, but filled in the gap with strips of wax.

And so, of course, it was shocking when Billy came home from a night with Roberta. I can see now that Veronica must have tried to incorporate her son's girlfriend into the fabric of her frail domestic life. She would ask about Roberta in a tentative, good-humored way, and Billy would reply in vague terms, but without bad spirits. I don't know if the women ever met, but Roberta must have tried in some ways to ingratiate herself, for I remember a birthday card she sent Veronica. On the front of the card, a smiling sausage said, ”I wish you the happiest birthday ever.” On the inside of the card, the same sausage, now fatter and smilier, said, ”And that's no Baloney!”

It seemed to me then that the birthday card was a clue to what was between Billy and Roberta, for Billy was by profession a cartoonist. He drew bosomy showgirls in the laps of sailors, or forlorn s.e.x-starved schlemiels looking with longing at signs saying ”Exotic Dancers.” I don't know whether Billy made a living from cartooning before I was old enough to notice such things, but by the time I could understand, it was clear to me that he lived off his mother. She taught third grade in a public school in Harlem; she was a pa.s.sionate teacher and she loved her work. I realize now that she never talked about her students' being black; given her nature, it is possible she didn't notice. When she came home from school, Billy was often still in bed. This did distress her. When she mentioned the fact to my mother, it was the only time I ever heard anything in her voice to suggest that something in her life had gone awry.

By the time I was twelve, Roberta was off the scene for good and Billy had hit the skids in earnest. He'd lost his looks; the das.h.i.+ng, slightly wicked ladies' man had turned into a fat mick with two days' growth of beard most of the days he cared to come out of his room. I don't know how often he left his room when he and his mother were alone in the apartment, but when my mother and I arrived, he was never visible, nor could he be counted upon to appear. When he did join us, he was affable and sometimes witty, but his interest in us was limited, and he clearly longed to be back in his room.

The year I turned fifteen, I spent a week with Veronica and Billy while my mother was in the hospital for an appendectomy. I realized gradually that I'd become interesting to Billy; it was my first hint that I might in any way engage a grown-up male. And although I could see that Billy was no prize in the particularities of his condition, his members.h.i.+p in the estate of adult malehood had its potency. I flirted with him- it was dreadful of me, of course, but then who ever thought of teenage girls as anything but savage. He took me bowling and bought me a beer. I didn't like it after the first few daring sips and asked for a c.o.ke. He laughed and said I was a cheap date. I was alarmed and not a little bit insulted. I knew it was s.e.x I was playing with, and not in its nicest aspects. I didn't know that calling someone a ”cheap date” was a joke or a compliment; I was mistaken in the meaning of the words, but the unease I felt was right.

Billy and I walked out of the bowling alley, feeling the smoky blue air we'd just left behind to be the norm. Even the tainted air of the Bronx seemed too pure for Billy and me; I felt that we were seething with corruption. As we walked down the street, we ran into some of Billy's friends. They were as corpulent as he, and as ill-shaven; only it seemed they had been born to the bodies they were now inhabiting; it was clear to me that Billy had stepped down into his.

”Hey, Len, I want you to meet my girlfriend,” Billy said, putting his arm around my shoulder.

Some genius made me go along with Billy; I was outraged at his suggestion, but I wanted to protect him from his friends. Clearly, if there were sides, I belonged on Billy's.

His friend Len, who wore a short-sleeved checked s.h.i.+rt and had a tattoo of an anchor on his forearm, snorted, ”Guess you're robbing the cradle, for a change.”

”I'm only kidding, Len,” he said. ”This is my mother's best friend's kid. I used to change her diapers.”

These words angered me as his suggestion of our coupling hadn't. Both were false, but one falsehood elevated me to an honorific, if shameful position; the other simply reduced me to a child. And since I was much closer to being a child than a s.e.xual adventuress, I resented Billy's revision. I wanted to tell them that it wasn't true that Billy'd changed my diapers, that he'd never done a helpful thing in his life. But Billy hadn't moved his hand off my shoulder, and I felt the urgency of his need for my loyalty thrum through his fingers. And so I looked sullen, but didn't move away.

”I bet you'd like to change her diapers now,” Len snorted. His two friends snorted along with him, caricatures of simpleminded, fleshly hearted sidekicks.

”Knock it off, Len,” Billy said, stepping between the men and me, suddenly my gallant protector.

”Okay, Billy,” Len said. ”I didn't mean nothing by it. Just run along home to your mommy and forget it.”

Then they were gone, moving away from us in a collective s.h.i.+ft of bulk. For a moment, I was afraid Billy was going to cry.

”No one understands what it's like for me,” he said, not looking at me. ”Living with my mother. Living off her. I know I'm a mess but I can't help it. She made me a mess and the army finished the job. You know I'm on veteran's disability. You know that, don't you? I don't live off my mother. I pay my share of the rent. And don't you forget it,” he said, shaking his finger at me.

”I won't,” I said, in a frightened voice. I'd never lived with adult males; their rage was as foreign to me as s.p.a.ce talk, and as terrifying.

”Listen, I'm sorry. I'm not myself these days. You know what I used to be like. Do I seem myself to you?”

”No,” I said. I had no idea what could possibly be the right answer to that question.

”Let's go get a soda,” he said. ”I think you understand me. And by the way, don't say anything to my mother about meeting up with Len. She doesn't understand that kind of thing. You know, she was never in the army,” he said, as if he were clearing up a misapprehension.

We went into an ice-cream parlor and both ordered hot fudge sundaes. Billy told me about his disability; it was lupus; he'd contracted it in Biloxi; he'd never even been sent overseas because of it. It meant he could never go out in the sun, he said; too much sun could make him look like a monster in half an hour. He never quite explained what would happen and I hadn't the nerve to ask.

”I like talking to you,” he said. ”You know how to listen. Always remember this: there's nothing more attractive to a man than a woman who really knows how to listen to him.”

This was precisely the sort of information I most wanted; it made me willing to listen to him, to hang on through the long, self-pitying narrations to the bright, occasional sentence that would let me into the secret world of men. After a week, my mother came home from the hospital. Veronica was so grateful to me for ”getting Billy out of himself” that she bought me a volume of Christina Rossetti. I'd asked for E. E. c.u.mmings, but she said she'd wait till Christmas for that. Meanwhile, wouldn't I try Christina Rossetti, try to make a friend of her? I did as Veronica said, I read Christina Rossetti, but it was fifteen years before I could see her as anything but maudlin. Veronica kept her word, though, even after I told her I didn't like Christina Rossetti. She gave me c.u.mmings's collected poems as a Christmas gift. I explained to her that I liked c.u.mmings better because he wasn't a phony. I could have died when I saw the look on her face. Never had anybody looked so sad, so wounded, so unhopeful. And I had done it. I could never take it back. I had done what Billy must have done a thousand times, and it disturbed me to feel so much kins.h.i.+p with him.

Soon after my time at Billy and Veronica's, I got my first boyfriend. It wouldn't have occurred to me to be grateful to Billy; I couldn't have known that it was his attentions that had given me the confidence to present myself as a desirable female. And so with the perfect heartlessness of a young girl in love for the first time, I couldn't bring myself to speak to Billy. I wouldn't go with my mother to Veronica's house. If Billy phoned and asked for me, I commanded my mother to say I was in the shower, or sick or sleeping. ”Tell him I'm with my boyfriend,” I said meanly to my mother, wanting at once to punish Billy for his presumptions, and to flaunt my status before his damaged countenance. Teenagers are pack animals; instinctively they turn on the wounded member and fall upon him, then run off. Occasionally, I would answer the phone when Billy called and I'd be forced into a conversation. Realizing the perfunctoriness of my presence, Billy would try to get my attention by telling dirty jokes. How completely he misunderstood our fragile, temporary bond! It wasn't the brute facts of s.e.x I was interested in, had ever been interested in. What I'd valued in Billy's conversation was a clue to the rules of courts.h.i.+p. That courts.h.i.+p could potentially end in the kind of thing Billy told jokes about and could only outrage me. I was disgusted, and I lost what little faith I had in him as a source of information that could do me any good.

Veronica died when I was twenty; Billy, then, must have been forty-two years old. The cable between his house and ours was cruelly cut; he had no reason, really, to regularly get in touch with us. On holidays, his birthday, my mother made obligatory calls, but the news of his life was too dispiriting to encourage any but the smallest contact. For, as far as we could figure, he did nothing. He had no work, no friends. He said his mother had been right, his friends were no good. He said he felt better off just keeping to himself. We heard from neighbors of his that he'd grown obese, that he sometimes pa.s.sed out at the local bar and had to be carried home- no mean feat since he was reported to weigh two hundred seventy-five pounds. The neighbors said he'd been told he was diabetic, so he was eating and drinking himself to death.

The last time I spoke to him was the night before my wedding. He'd been invited, but he hadn't sent back the little card that said ” will attend.” We were sure that he wouldn't come; perhaps we wouldn't have invited him if we'd thought there was a chance of his coming. We only heard from him when he was drunk; he'd call and talk about his mother with a sentimental tenderness the sources of which had never been obvious while his mother had lived. His relations.h.i.+p to her had been marked by a grudging deference that could turn to rudeness like the crack of a whip. And she had curved herself into a shape that would obtrude into his life as little as possible until he needed her rea.s.surance that his failures were attributable not to his own deficiencies but to the sheer corruption of the brutish world.

Billy was the last person I wanted to speak to on the night before my wedding. I'd decided I hated my veil; I'd been hysterical for hours, and not in much mood to be polite. But I knew that this large and complicated wedding could only be paid for by my doing my bride's job of gracious-ness. Think of Veronica, my mother said, but what she meant was, think of all I've just done for you. And she had done everything, and done it well; it was surprising that she'd done it at all considering how much she disliked my fiance.

I could tell Billy was drunk the moment he started speaking.

”I'll bet you're a pretty little bride,” he said.

”All brides are pretty, Billy,” I said impatiently.

”And what's the lucky man like?”

”Handsome, smart, and madly in love with me.”

”And what's he like in bed? Oh, I forgot, you're not supposed to know that. White for a virgin. White. But what color's the groom wearing?”

”Black, Billy. The men don't matter at a wedding.”

”Just tell me one thing, honey. I just want you to tell me one thing. Did I ever have a chance?”

”A chance?”

”A chance with you. I mean, did you ever think about me?”

I felt filled up with disgust. To imagine that that gross, drunken creature thought of taking the place of my perfect, princely husband-to-be! I couldn't bear to talk to him another second.

”I've got to go, Billy. I've got a lot to do.”

”Sure, honey. I'll call you up sometime.”

”Sure, Billy, my mother has my new number.”

But of course he never called, and I would never call him. He knew of my divorce; my mother made a round of what she felt were de rigueur informing calls; it took a year, but in the end she got through everyone in her address book.