Charming Billy by Alice McDermott

Author:Alice McDermott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

NO ONE GATHERED in Maeve’s living room that evening could have recalled it either, not accurately anyway: how young they had been then. How much these things had mattered.

Mac, Rosemary’s husband, who had once been as young himself (in the cramped apartment, in the childhood bed of his young bride), sat on the brocade-under-plastic-slipcovers couch, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his pant legs neatly tucked above the knee. He had assigned himself the task of cracking the walnuts that had been set out in a porcelain bowl on the coffee table and spreading the pieces of meat out on a paper napkin. He leaned over his work like a watchmaker. He had already walked down to the corner deli once for more rolls, and again for a bottle of ginger ale. He had stood on a chair to change a lightbulb in the kitchen and swept the wet walk with a broom from Billy’s garage, and now he cracked walnuts as if to keep up with a relentless demand, although the pile he had accumulated had already begun to overflow the paper napkin.

Billy’s sister Rosemary was moving back and forth from the kitchen to the living room, pausing at intervals to glance out the front windows, hoping to intercept any visitor—as she had intercepted us—who might ring the doorbell or knock on the door and disturb Maeve. There was another couple in the living room with Mac, next-door neighbors, and Kate was there, although still without her wealthy husband. Two women friends of Maeve’s from the Legion of Mary had installed themselves in the kitchen.

An Indian couple from across the street stopped by with a covered dish, but couldn’t be convinced to stay. Two men from Edison and their wives were just leaving as we walked in. Dan Lynch arrived by bus with a box of bakery cookies. He was changed out of his suit but looked that much more polished in a pressed sport shirt and tattersall pants. He took a seat in the living room as well and placed his teacup and saucer on his knee.

The narrow house was a gallery of Billy’s life that evening—how could anyone help but think it? From the curb where we parked to the three brick steps to the cool hallway, dim as a church, that led past the living room and the staircase to the kitchen and the back yard where Shortchange, Billy’s motley mutt, had begun to whine as soon as she heard my father’s voice.

How could my father keep from thinking of it: the sight of Billy’s car pulled up over the curb and the berm or left fishtailed out into the street, of the brick-edged gash above Billy’s eye, the pale soles of his shoes as he sprawled in the dim hallway, of Maeve standing over her husband in her pink chenille robe: “If you can just get him under the arms, Dennis.”

How could he help but think of her maddening calm on those nights when she went into

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