The Collected Stories (9 page)

And after that, nothing at all.

My husband gave me a broom one Christmas. This wasn't right. No one can tell me it was meant kindly.

“I don't want you not to have anything for Christmas while I'm away in the army,” he said. “Virginia, please look at it. It comes with this fancy dustpan. It hangs off a stick. Look at it, will you? Are you blind or cross-eyed?”

“Thanks, chum,” I said. I had always wanted a dustpan hooked up that way. It was a good one. My husband doesn't shop in bargain basements or January sales.

Still and all, in spite of the quality, it was a mean present to give a woman you planned on never seeing again, a person you had children with and got onto all the time, drunk or sober, even when everybody had to get up early in the morning.

I asked him if he could wait and join the army in a half hour, as I had to get the groceries. I don't like to leave kids alone in a three-room apartment full of gas and electricity. Fire may break out from a nasty remark. Or the oldest decides to get even with the youngest.

“Just this once,” he said. “But you better figure out how to get along without me.”

“You're a handicapped person mentally,” I said. “You should've been institutionalized years ago.” I slammed the door. I didn't want to see him pack his underwear and ironed shirts.

I never got farther than the front stoop, though, because there was Mrs. Raftery, wringing her hands, tears in her eyes as though she had a monopoly on all the good news.

“Mrs. Raftery!” I said, putting my arm around her. “Don't cry.” She leaned on me because I am such a horsey build. “Don't cry, Mrs. Raftery, please!” I said.

“That's like you, Virginia. Always looking at the ugly side of things. ‘Take in the wash. It's rainin'!' That's you. You're the first one knows it when the dumbwaiter breaks.”

“Oh, come on now, that's not so. It just isn't so,” I said. “I'm the exact opposite.”

“Did you see Mrs. Cullen yet?” she asked, paying no attention.

“Where?”

“Virginia!” she said, shocked. “She's passed away. The whole house knows it. They've got her in white like a bride and you never saw a beautiful creature like that. She must be eighty. Her husband's proud.”

“She was never more than an acquaintance; she didn't have any children,” I said.

“Well, I don't care about that. Now, Virginia, you do what I say now, you go downstairs and you say like this—listen to me—say, ‘I hear, Mr. Cullen, your wife's passed away. I'm sorry.' Then ask him how he is. Then you ought to go around the corner and see her. She's in Witson & Wayde. Then you ought to go over to the church when they carry her over.”

“It's not my church,” I said.

“That's no reason, Virginia. You go up like this,” she said, parting from me to do a prancy dance. “Up the big front steps, into the church you go. It's beautiful in there. You can't help kneeling only for a minute. Then round to the right. Then up the other stairway. Then you come to a great oak door that's arched above you, then,” she said, seizing a deep, deep breath, for all the good it would do her, “and then turn the knob slo-owly and open the door and see for yourself: Our Blessed Mother is in charge. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.”

I sighed in and I groaned out, so as to melt a certain pain around my heart. A steel ring like arthritis, at my age.

“You are a groaner,” Mrs. Raftery said, gawking into my mouth.

“I am not,” I said. I got a whiff of her, a terrible cheap wine lush.

My husband threw a penny at the door from the inside to take my notice from Mrs. Raftery. He rattled the glass door to make sure I looked at him. He had a fat duffel bag on each shoulder. Where did he acquire so much worldly possession? What was in them? My grandma's goose feathers from across the ocean? Or all the diaper-service diapers? To this day the truth is shrouded in mystery.

“What the hell are you doing, Virginia?” he said, dumping them at my feet. “Standing out here on your hind legs telling everybody your business? The army gives you a certain time, for godsakes, they're not kidding.” Then he said, “I beg your pardon,” to Mrs. Raftery. He took hold of me with his two arms as though in love and pressed his body hard against mine so that I could feel him for the last time and suffer my loss. Then he kissed me in a mean way to nearly split my lip. Then he winked and said, “That's all for now,” and skipped off into the future, duffel bags full of rags.

He left me in an embarrassing situation, nearly fainting, in front of that old widow, who can't even remember the half of it. “He's a crock,” said Mrs. Raftery. “Is he leaving for good or just temporarily, Virginia?”

“Oh, he's probably deserting me,” I said, and sat down on the stoop, pulling my big knees up to my chin.

“If that's the case, tell the Welfare right away,” she said. “He's a bum, leaving you just before Christmas. Tell the cops,” she said. “They'll provide the toys for the little kids gladly. And don't forget to let the grocer in on it. He won't be so hard on you expecting payment.”

She saw that sadness was stretched worldwide across my face. Mrs. Raftery isn't the worst person. She said, “Look around for comfort, dear.” With a nervous finger she pointed to the truckers eating lunch on their haunches across the street, leaning on the loading platforms. She waved her hand to include in all the men marching up and down in search of a decent luncheonette. She didn't leave out the six longshoremen loafing under the fish-market marquee. “If their lungs and stomachs ain't crushed by overwork, they disappear somewhere in the world. Don't be disappointed, Virginia. I don't know a man living'd last you a lifetime.”

Ten days later Girard asked, “Where's Daddy?”

“Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies.” I didn't want the children to know the facts. Present or past, a child should have a father.

“Where
is
Daddy?” Girard asked the week after that.

“He joined the army,” I said.

“He made my bunk bed,” said Philip.

“The truth shall make ye free,” I said.

Then I sat down with pencil and pad to get in control of my resources. The facts, when I added and subtracted them, were that my husband had left me with fourteen dollars, and the rent unpaid, in an emergency state. He'd claimed he was sorry to do this, but my opinion is, out of sight, out of mind. “The city won't let you starve,” he'd said. “After all, you're half the population. You're keeping up the good work. Without you the race would die out. Who'd pay the taxes? Who'd keep the streets clean? There wouldn't be no army. A man like me wouldn't have no place to go.”

I sent Girard right down to Mrs. Raftery with a request about the whereabouts of Welfare. She responded R.S.V.P. with an extra comment in left-handed script: “Poor Girard … he's never the boy my John was!”

Who asked her?

I called on Welfare right after the new year. In no time I discovered that they're rigged up to deal with liars, and if you're truthful it's disappointing to them. They may even refuse to handle your case if you're too truthful.

They asked sensible questions at first. They asked where my husband had enlisted. I didn't know. They put some letter writers and agents after him. “He's not in the United States Army,” they said. “Try the Brazilian Army,” I suggested.

They have no sense of kidding around. They're not the least bit lighthearted and they tried. “Oh no,” they said. “That was incorrect. He is not in the Brazilian Army.”

“No?” I said. “How strange! He must be in the Mexican Navy.”

By law, they had to hound his brothers. They wrote to his brother who has a first-class card in the Teamsters and owns an apartment house in California. They asked his two brothers in Jersey to help me. They have large families. Rightfully they laughed. Then they wrote to Thomas, the oldest, the smart one (the one they all worked so hard for years to keep him in college until his brains could pay off). He was the one who sent ten dollars immediately, saying, “What a bastard! I'll send something time to time, Ginny, but whatever you do, don't tell the authorities.” Of course I never did. Soon they began to guess they were better people than me, that I was in trouble because I deserved it, and then they liked me better.

But they never fixed my refrigerator. Every time I called I said patiently, “The milk is sour …” I said, “Corn beef went bad.” Sitting in that beer-stinking phone booth in Felan's for the sixth time (sixty cents) with the baby on my lap and Barbie tapping at the glass door with an American flag, I cried into the secretary's hardhearted ear, “I bought real butter for the holiday, and it's rancid …” They said, “You'll have to get a better bid on the repair job.”

While I waited indoors for a man to bid, Girard took to swinging back and forth on top of the bathroom door, just to soothe himself, giving me the laugh, dreamy, nibbling calcimine off the ceiling. On first sight Mrs. Raftery said, “Whack the monkey, he'd be better off on arsenic.”

But Girard is my son and I'm the judge. It means a terrible thing for the future, though I don't know what to call it.

It was from constantly thinking of my foreknowledge on this and other subjects, it was from observing when I put my lipstick on daily, how my face was just curling up to die, that John Raftery came from Jersey to rescue me.

On Thursdays, anyway, John Raftery took the tubes in to visit his mother. The whole house knew it. She was cheerful even before breakfast. She sang out loud in a girlish brogue that only came to tongue for grand occasions. Hanging out the wash, she blushed to recall what a remarkable boy her John had been. “Ask the sisters around the corner,” she said to the open kitchen windows. “They'll never forget John.”

That particular night after supper Mrs. Raftery said to her son, “John, how come you don't say hello to your old friend Virginia? She's had hard luck and she's gloomy.”

“Is that so, Mother?” he said, and immediately climbed two flights to knock at my door.

“Oh, John,” I said at the sight of him, hat in hand in a white shirt and blue-striped tie, spick-and-span, a Sunday-school man. “Hello!”

“Welcome, John!” I said. “Sit down. Come right in. How are you? You look awfully good. You do. Tell me, how've you been all this time, John?”

“How've I been?” he asked thoughtfully. To answer within reason, he described his life with Margaret, marriage, work, and children up to the present day.

I had nothing good to report. Now that he had put the subject around before my very eyes, every burnt-up day of my life smoked in shame, and I couldn't even get a clear view of the good half hours.

“Of course,” he said, “you do have lovely children. Noticeable-looking, Virginia. Good looks is always something to be thankful for.”

“Thankful?” I said. “I don't have to thank anything but my own foolishness for four children when I'm twenty-six years old, deserted, and poverty-struck, regardless of looks. A man can't help it, but I could have behaved better.”

“Don't be so cruel on yourself, Ginny,” he said. “Children come from God.”

“You're still great on holy subjects, aren't you? You know damn well where children come from.”

He did know. His red face reddened further. John Raftery has had that color coming out on him boy and man from keeping his rages so inward.

Still he made more sense in his conversation after that, and I poured fresh tea to tell him how my husband used to like me because I was a passionate person. That was until he took a look around and saw how in the long run this life only meant more of the same thing. He tried to turn away from me once he came to this understanding, and make me hate him. His face changed. He gave up his brand of cigarettes, which we had in common. He threw out the two pairs of socks I knitted by hand. “If there's anything I hate in this world, it's navy blue.” he said. Oh, I could have dyed them. I would have done anything for him, if he were only not too sorry to ask me.