Charming Billy Read Online Free PDF Page A

contained. “What’s the point of even discussing all this now? Billy was here and now he’s gone, and I for one just can’t believe it. Despite his troubles.” Tears now. “I’ll miss him. I’ll miss his voice over the phone. I’ll miss his smiling face.”
    “Hear, hear,” Mickey Quinn said.
    But Dan Lynch raised his beer again. He was whispering, his voice fierce. “I just don’t think it credits a man’s life to say he was in the clutches of a disease and that’s what ruined him. Say he was too loyal. Say he was disappointed. Say he made way too much of the Irish girl and afterwards couldn’t look life square in the face. But give him some credit for feeling, for having a hand in his own fate. Don’t say it was a disease that blindsided him and wiped out everything he was.” He bit off a drink, his face flushed. “Do the man that favor, please.”
    The clouds were indeed breaking up and a feeble bit of sunshine was striking Maeve’s hair—you couldn’t say lighting it up, but striking it and revealing it for what it was: a dull brown getting coarser with gray, and yet showing what it was so clearly that you could see a kind of appeal in it. Maybe it was just the honesty of it. A kind of beauty that was not a transformation of her simple features but an assertion of them, an insistence that they were no more than what they appeared.
    My father stood beside her, his napkin in one hand, reaching behind her to say goodbye to another cousin, Ted from
Flushing, who went to AA in order to die of cancer, not cirrhosis. Ted’s little wife was right behind him, one hand on his back.
    In the next half hour, my father would pay the bill and distribute the tips and take Maeve’s arm when she walked out to the limousine that would carry her home to Bayside. He would promise to stop in to see her later in the evening, just to make sure she was all right. He would shake hands with everyone, thanking them for coming, agreeing it was unbelievable, unbelievable still. In our car, crossing the bridge, he would listen with a slight smile when I told him about the debate that had gone on at our end of the table.
    “Well, here’s the saddest part,” he would say, finally, wearily, as if he were speaking of an old annoyance that time had nearly trivialized, but not quite: “Here’s the most pathetic part of all. Eva never died. It was a lie. Just between the two of us, Eva lived.”

 
     
    TELLING THE STORY, my father easily slipped from past to present: Billy was, Billy is, Billy drank, Billy drinks. Billy sets his heart on something.
    In the front seat of Mr. Holtzman’s car, on Seventieth Street, just off Park Avenue, my father watched Mary, Eva’s sister, worry a small handkerchief, Irish linen (naturally), embroidered in one corner with three small shamrocks. Emblematic, sure, now, looking back, but in truth the children, her charges, had sewn it for her. She had shown them how to make the stitches. They had made one for their mother and their aunt. And one for her.
    Her fingernails were round and white and always made him think that she had just come from giving all seven of them their baths, as she probably had. It was late September, late afternoon. The light the same that hung over the city now as we crossed the bridge into Queens.
    “They’re shamrocks,” she said, showing him because he had asked her. She spread out the damp fabric. Her skirt was good wool, her sweater cashmere, hand-me-downs from her employer. “The children made it for me. I showed them the stitch. They made one for their mother and one for her sister up in Riverdale. And then they made one for me. Shamrocks.”
    “I know what they are,” he said. And then added, “God, you’re a silly woman.”
    The look on her face told him she was anything but. “Don’t kill the messenger,” she whispered.
    It was Mr. Holtzman’s car, an old humpbacked Ford: the wide cloth front seat, the old rationing sticker in the corner of the