The Collected Stories (22 page)

“Oh, Dolly,” says my husband. and plops his head into his hands.

“I'm going, Mother, that's libel, I'll have her sue you for libel.” dopey John starts to holler out of his tomato-red face. “I'm going and I'll ask her and I love her and I don't care what you say. Truth or lies, I don't care.”

“And if you go, Johnny.” I said, calm as a dead fish, my eyes rolling up to pray and be heeded, “this is what I must do,” and I took a kitchen knife, a bit blunt, and plunged it at least an eighth of an inch in the fat of my heart. I guess that the heart of a middle-aged lady is jammed in deeper than an eighth of an inch, for I am here to tell the tale. But some blood did come soon, to my son's staring; it touched my nightie and spread out on my bathrobe, and it was as red on my apron as a picture in an Italian church. John fell down on his knees and hid his head in my lap. He cried, “Mother, Mother, you've hurt yourself.” My husband didn't say a word to me. He kept his madness in his teeth, but he told me later, Face it: the feelings in his heart was cracked.

I met Ginny the next morning in Carlo's store. She didn't look at me. Then she did. Then she said, “It's a nice day, Mrs. Raftery.”

“Mm,” I said. (It was.) “How can you tell the kind of day it is?” (I don't know what I meant by that.)

“What's wrong, Mrs. Raftery?” she said.

“Hah! wrong?” I asked.

“Well, you know, I mean, you act mad at me, you don't seem to like me this morning.” She made a little laugh.

“I do. I like you a great deal,” I said, outwitting her. “It's you, you know, you don't like Johnny. You don't.”

“What?” she said, her head popping up to catch sight of that reply.

“Don't don't don't,” I said. “Don't don't!” I hollered, giving Ginny's arm a tug. “Let's get out of here. Ginny, you don't like John. You'd let him court you, squeeze you, and he's very good, he wouldn't press you further.”

“You ought to mind your business,” says Ginny very soft, me being the elder (but with tears).

“My son is my business.”

“No,” she says, “he's his own.”

“My son is my business. I have one son left, and he's my business.”

“No,” she says. “He's his own.”

MY SON IS MY BUSINESS. BY LOVE AND DUTY
.

“Oh no,” she says. Soft because I am the older one, but very strong. (I've noticed it. All of a sudden they look at you, and then it comes to them, young people, they are bound to outlast you, so they temper up their icy steel and stare into about an inch away from you a lot. Have you noticed it?)

At home, I said, “Jack now, the boy needs guidance. Do you want him to spend the rest of his life in bed with an orphan on welfare?”

“Oh,” said Jack. “She's an orphan, is she? It's just her mother that's dead. What has one thing to do with another? You're a pushy damn woman, Dolly. I don't know what use you are …”

What came next often happens in a family, causing sorrow at the time. Looking back, it's a speck compared to life.

For: Following this conversation, Jack didn't deal with me at all, and he broke his many years' after-supper habits and took long walks. That's what killed him, I think, for he was a habitual person.

And: Alongside him on one of these walks was seen a skinny crosstown lady, known to many people over by Tompkins Square—wears a giant Ukrainian cross in and out of the tub, to keep from going down the drain, I guess.

“In that case, the hell with you,” is what I said. “I don't care. Get yourself a cold-water flat on Avenue D.”

“Why not? I'll go. O.K.,” said Jack. I think he figured a couple of weeks' vacation with his little cuntski and her color television would cool his requirements.

“Stay off the block.” I said, “you slippery relic. I'll send your shirts by the diaper-service man.”

“Mother,” said poor John, when he noticed his dad's absence, “what's happening to you? The way you talk. To Dad. It's the wine, Mother. I know it.”

“You're a bloated beer guzzler!” I said quietly. (People that drink beer are envious against the ones in favor of wine. Though my dad was a mick in cotton socks, in his house, we had a choice.)

“No, Mother, I mean you're not clear sometimes.”

“Crazy, you mean, son. Huh? Split personality?”

“Something's wrong!” he said. “Don't you want Dad back?” He was nervous to his fingernails.

“Mind your business, he'll be back, it's happened before, Mr. Two-Weeks-Old.”

“What?” he said, horrified.

“You're blind as a bat, Mr. Just Born. Where was you three Christmases ago?”

“What! But Mother! Didn't you feel terrible? Terrible! How'd you stand for him acting that way? Dad!”

“Now quit it, John, you're a damnfool kid. Sure I don't want to look at his dumb face being pleased. That'd kill.”

“Mother, it's not right.”

“Phoo, go to work and mind your business, sonny boy.”

“It is my business,” he said, “and don't call me sonny.”

About two months later, John came home with Margaret, both of them blistered from Lake Hopatcong at ninety-four degrees. I will be fair. She was not yet ruined by Jersey air, and she was not too terrible-looking, at least to the eye of a clean-minded boy.

“This is Margaret,” he says. “She's from Monmouth, Jersey.”

“Just come over on the
Queen Mary
, dear?” I asked for the joke in it.

“I have to get her home for supper. Her father's strict.”

“Sure,” I said, “have a Coke first.”

“Oh, thank you so much,” says Margaret. “Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mrs. Raftery.”

“Has she blood in her?” hollered Jack after his shower. He had come home by then, skinny and dissatisfied. Is there satisfaction anywhere in getting old?

John didn't inquire an O.K. of his dad or me, nor answer to nobody Yes or No. He was that age that couldn't live without a wife. He had to use this Margaret.

It was his time to go forward like we all did once. And he has. Number One: She is kept plugged up with babies. Number Two: As people nowadays need a house, he has bought one and tangled it around in Latin bushes. Nobody but the principal at Holy Redeemer High knows what the little tags on the twigs say. Every evening after hard work you can find him with a hose scrubbing down his lawn. His oldest kid is now fourteen and useless. The littlest one is four, and she reminds me of me with the flashiest eyes and a little tongue sharpened to a scrappy point.

“How come you never named one for
me
, Margaret?” I asked her straight in her face.

“Oh,” she said, “there's only the two girls, Teresa, for my mother, and Cathleen, for my best sister. The very next'll be for you.”

“What? Next! Are you trying to kill my son?” I asked her. “Why he has to be working nights as it is. You don't look well, you know. You ought to see a smart Jewish doctor and get your tubes tied up.”

“Oh,” she said, “never!”

I have to tease a little to grapple any sort of a reply out of her. But mostly it doesn't work. It is something like I am a crazy construction worker in conversation with fresh cement. Can there be more in the world like her? Don't answer. Time will pass in spite of her slow wits.

In fact it has, for here we are in the present, which is happening now, and I am a famous widow babysitter for whoever thinks I am unbalanced but within reason. I am a grand storybook reader to the little ones. I read like an actress, Joan Crawford or Maureen O'Sullivan, my voice is deeper than it was. So I do make a little extra for needs, though my Johnny sees to the luxuries I must have. I won't move away to strangers. This is my family street, and I don't need to.

And of course as friendship never ends, Johnny comes twice a week for his entertainment to Ginny. Ginny and I do not talk a word, though we often pass. She knows I am right as well as victorious. She's had it unusually lovely (most people don't)—a chance to be some years with a young fellow like Blackie that gave her great rattling shivers, top to bottom, though it was all cut off before youth ended. And as for my Johnny, he now absolutely has her as originally planned and desired, and she depends on him in all things. She requires him. Her children lean on him. They climb up his knees to his shoulder. They cry out the window for him,
John, John
, if his dumb Margaret keeps him home.

It's a pity to have become so right and Jack's off stalking the innocent angels.

I wait on the stoop steps to see John on summer nights, as he hasn't enough time to visit me and Ginny both, and I need the sight of him, though I don't know why. I like the street anyway, and the hot night when the ice-cream truck brings all the dirty kids and the big nifty boys with their hunting-around eyes. I put a touch of burgundy on my strawberry ice-cream cone as my father said we could on Sunday, which drives these sozzle-headed ladies up the brown brick wall, so help me Mary.

Now, some serious questions, so far unasked:

What the devil is it all about, the noisiness and the speediness, when it's no distance at all? How come John had to put all them courtesy calls into Margaret on his lifelong trip to Ginny? Also, Jack, what was his real nature? Was he for or against? And that Anthony, what
did
he have in mind as I knuckled under again and again (and I know I was the starter)? He did not get me pregnant as in books it happens at once. How come the French priest said to me, crying tears and against his order, “Oh no, Dolly, if you are
enceinte
[meaning pregnant], he will certainly marry you, poor child, now smile, poor child, for that is the Church's promise to infants born.” To which, how come, tough and cheery as I used to be, all I could say before going off to live and die was: “No, Father, he doesn't love me.”

As for you, fellow independent thinker of the Western Bloc, if you have anything sensible to say, don't wait. Shout it out loud right this minute. In twenty years, give or take a spring, your grandchildren will be lying in sandboxes all over the world, their ears to the ground, listening for signals from long ago. In fact, kneeling now on the great plains in a snootful of gray dust, what do you hear? Pigs oinking, potatoes peeling, Indians running, winter coming?

Faith's head is under the pillow nearly any weekday midnight, asweat with dreams, and she is seasick with ocean sounds, the squealing wind stuck in its rearing tail by high tide.

That is because her grandfather, scoring the salty sea, skated for miles along the Baltic's icy beaches, with a frozen herring in his pocket. And she, all ears, was born in Coney Island.

Who are her antecedents? Mama and Papa of course. Her environment? A brother and a sister with their own sorrow to lead by the nose out of this life. All together they would make a goddamn quadruped bilingual hermaphrodite. Even so, proving their excellence, they bear her no rancor and are always anxious to see her, to see the boys, to take the poor fatherless boys to a picnic with their boys, for a walk, to an ocean, glad to say, we saw Mama in the Children of Judea, she sends love … They never say snidely, as the siblings of others might, It wouldn't hurt you to run over, Faith, it's only a subway ride …

Hope and Faith and even Charles—who comes glowering around once a year to see if Faith's capacity for survival has not been overwhelmed by her susceptibility to abuse—begged their parents to reconsider the decision to put money down and move into the Children of Judea. “Mother,” said Hope, taking off her eyeglasses, for she did not like even that little window of glass to come between their mother and herself. “Now, Mother, how will you make out with all those
yentas
? Some of them don't even speak English.” “I have spoken altogether too much English in my life,” said Mrs. Darwin. “If I really liked English that much, I would move to England.” “Why don't you go to Israel?” asked Charles. “That would at least make sense to people.” “And leave you?” she asked, tears in her eyes at the thought of them all alone, wrecking their lives on the shoals of every day, without her tearful gaze attending.