Songs in Ordinary Time Page 13

  From the back door of the rectory, Howard Menka had watched Benjy Fermoyle run down the driveway and up the street. As the boy ran down Main Street, Howard shambled down the rectory steps with a step stool and a bucket of soapy water in which floated his big yellow sponge. He set everything down next to the Monsignor’s car.

  The Monsignor wanted his car clean for the high school graduation tonight. Howard dipped the fat sponge in and out of the water bucket until it was squishy with soap bubbles and then he climbed up on the stool and began to scrub the roof of the long, black Oldsmobile. The Monsignor had bought this sponge for him last year in Greece. When he had showed it to Jozia, she said she wouldn’t be proud if Mrs. LaChance gave her a mop for a present. In fact, she’d be insulted. Now even his special sponge made him sad. All day long, everything had made him sad. He averted his gaze from the Fermoyle house, where Jozia might be watching him this very moment. He came off the step stool with a groan. Last night’s fight with his sister had left him with more of an ache from his heart than from the lump on his head.

  The Menka twins had been together all their fifty-one years. They lived in a spotless but gaudy little apartment over the Holy Articles Shoppe, and they were the store’s best customers. They now possessed almost every saint’s statue the store sold, and in front of each was a red-glassed votive candle that they lit on Sundays and holy days. Jozia’s favorite was the Infant Jesus of Prague, because she could dress it in so many different outfits, linen gowns and satin robes with high stiff collars that they bought from their landlady. Howard’s favorite was Saint Joseph because people were all the time saying how simple Saint Joseph was. And that’s what people said about him, too.

  The church bells rang three times and Howard looked around, thinking he’d forgotten to bring something out. For weeks now he’d had this sense of loss. It had started that morning Jozia wouldn’t let him sit with her at Mass. Howard had always loved church: it was the only place he felt safe, and church never changed. Now everything seemed to be changing. Sunday Mass used to be his favorite time because they could get all dressed up, and after, they’d buy doughnuts on the way home. But even Sundays had gotten spoiled ever since Jozia had told him to buy doughnuts just for himself because she was watching her weight. Howard asked her who she was watching wait. And he stood there in front of the bakery looking up and down the street while Jozia rolled her eyes and said what she meant was, she didn’t want to get fat and doughnuts make you fat. So then, of course, he didn’t feel like eating doughnuts all by himself, and so Sunday hadn’t felt like Sunday. And now he wasn’t even going to enjoy washing the Monsignor’s car, because he kept thinking what she’d said about the sponge.

  He moved the step stool and began to scrub the other side of the car’s roof. Soapy bubbles rose from his fingers like glass rings. He smiled. There were still two nice times to look forward to: the Fourth of July band concert in two weeks and then his very favorite, their bus trip. Once a month he and Jozia dressed up in their Sunday clothes and took a bus to the state hospital in Waterbury to see their only living relative, a redheaded cousin named Perda.

  Almost as pleasurable as the trip was all the shopping they did beforehand at the dime store for penny candy, brightly colored pinwheels, plastic thimbles, and Howard’s favorite, wooden squeeze bars with a little tumbling man inside. These they passed among the patients in the ward, partly because they liked them, but mostly to show off their affluence and independence.

  The visits were far more important to the twins than they were to Perda, who would lie curled in her bed, her sour face to the wall. “Like a wilty old carrot,” they would giggle on the bus home, laughing and gossiping about the different patients, so that by the time they stepped back into their apartment, they would be feeling not only good about themselves, but close to each other.

  He looked up, suddenly troubled by the memory of Jozia staring out the bus window all the way back last month. When they got home she had gone straight to bed. He stood now with the sponge dripping down his side. So even the trips were changing. It was all the pigman Grondine Carson’s fault. If Jozia could only get a job somewhere else, then she wouldn’t be so handy to Carson and then she’d be just his twin sister again and things could go back to the way they used to be.

  He climbed off the step stool and went to the faucet on the side of the rectory. He unlooped the thick black hose and pulled it down the driveway. As he sprayed the soapy car, he stared up at the Fermoyle house. Last winter the paint had lifted on the gingerbread trim of the roofline. Now the peeling had spread like a blistery rash along the clapboards. He knew that the corner section of the porch floor sagged with dry rot. He looked away miserably.

  If he had stayed on as Mrs. LaChance’s handyman, maybe Jozia wouldn’t have gotten so friendly with Carson. But everything had started changing after Mrs. LaChance made him poison that poor dog. After that he couldn’t look Mr. LaChance in the eye, he felt like such a murderer, and he couldn’t stand being near Sam, who’d pester him about it every time he got drunk. All his bad dreams had started then, too, and then their rent had gone up and Mrs. LaChance refused to give him a raise. Well, one good thing had happened and that was this job for the Monsignor, who paid better than Mrs. LaChance did. But then everybody paid better than her, he had tried again last night to tell his sister.

  Jozia had been cooking while Howard told her how that rich Nora Hinds had been to the rectory for some relic the Monsignor had gotten special for her son, who was in the hospital again in Boston. Howard had explained how he was mulching the geranium bed under the study window when he heard Mrs. Hinds talking about her brother’s new business. He had just quit the family department store to open a factory that made—

  “Toilet paper,” Jozia had said, flipping the sizzling hamburg patties. “Grondine already tole me. He says it’s gonna open up the end of summer.”

  “I’ll betcha’d make ten times there what she pays you,” Howard said.

  “Like I was telling Grondine the other day, Miz LaChance and me been together so long money ain’t really the point,” she said.

  “If money ain’t the point with the little we got, I dunno what is,” Howard said, determined to ignore all mention of the pigman.

  “Feelings, that’s what.” Jozia sniffed. “And caring ’bout people.”

  “Well I guess you’re just about dumb now as you were then,” Howard said.

  “Look who’s calling dumb; you didn’t even pass haitch grade!”

  “Mebbe not, but I ain’t so dumb to make googly eyes at a pigman!” he said.

  “Shut up!”

  “You shut up!”

  “Stupid ass!”

  “Stupid ass yourself! And the next time you get all perfumied up for that Carson, ask him if it ain’t true what people say him and his pigs do, one to the other….”

  That’s when the greasy spatula hit the side of his head, so hard the lump was up before the stars were out of his eyes, and then she took off like a bat out of hell. He had staggered to the window and, to his horror, saw Carson’s garbage truck stop in front of the Holy Articles Shoppe downstairs. His chest had tightened with pain as he watched Carson jump down from the truck. Carson tucked his splashy orange shirt into his pants, creased like they’d just come off the ironing board. Never had the old pigman looked so fancy. Carson had opened the truck door and helped Jozia in, and then as he walked around to his side, he had spit on his fingers and smoothed back his white hair. When she had returned at ten o’clock she went straight to her room. Howard had brought her cocoa and kept saying how sorry he was, but she had just laid with her back to him, staring at the wall. After a while he gave up and went to bed and had the worst dream of his life: he was walking up and down the dime-store aisles, trying to pick out presents, but everything he saw was either ugly or broken. Then this terrible pain started in his chest and hadn’t let up once all day.

  Howard laid down the hose and went to turn off the water. When he came bac
k, he found the new priest rolling up his sleeves.

  “Thought I’d give you a hand,” the priest said in his funny accent. Mrs. Arkaday said he was from New York. Howard had overheard her telling Monsignor this morning that the new priest didn’t act like any priest she’d ever known.

  “I love washing cars,” Father Gannon said, taking the sponge out of the pail and sloshing suds all over the hood.

  Howard watched the priest wash the same places he had just done. New people were hard for Howard. Change confused him. Like now; his head buzzed. The priest didn’t like the job he’d done.

  “Where I come from, hardly anybody has their own car,” the priest called over the rumble of an approaching truck. He lifted the wipers and scrubbed the windshield. “The last car I washed was my old…my dad’s.” Father Gannon wrung out the sponge. “All his life he wanted his own car. So he bought this old Dodge and washed it….”

  Howard stared at the garbage truck cruising slowly down the street. He saw Carson peering over the wheel up at the Fermoyle house.

  “And the next morning it was gone.” The young priest laughed.

  Howard closed his eyes, certain the garbage truck was stopping, certain he’d see his sister fly out of the house and into Carson’s arms.

  “Howard?” the young priest said. He tapped Howard’s shoulder.

  Howard opened his eyes. The truck was at the corner and Jozia wasn’t in it.

  “Father Gannon!” barked the Monsignor from an upstairs window. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m trying to help Howard,” Father Gannon said with a wave of the dripping sponge.

  “I told you yesterday! Mrs. Arkaday doesn’t need your help. Howard doesn’t need your help. But I do!” the Monsignor said.

  Father Gannon looked at Howard and shrugged.

  “Now!” the Monsignor growled.

  The young priest ran into the rectory. Mrs. Arkaday came to the screen door and shook her head in disgust at Howard. He turned on the water, and while he rinsed off the gleaming black car, a terrible pain clutched his heart and he was sure a piece of it had just broken off and was spinning loose in his chest. Now everyone was mad at him.

  Sam Fermoyle’s head pounded. He sat on the edge of his bed with his head in his hands. What had Benjy wanted? Marie must have sent him. They never came to see him. Three kids, and they never came, unless she wanted something: the kids need school clothes; they need shoes, boots, books; they need their teeth fixed. But what about him? Nobody gave a good damn about his needs. She’d probably sent him over here to pick his pockets. Once he’d found the kid going through the box of old pictures he kept under his bed. Little thief, goddamn little thief, always after something, scrounging around. Jesus Christ, he thought, she’s ruining those kids, training them to shake down their own father. If he had any gold fillings, he’d probably wake up some morning to find one of his kids sitting on his chest with pliers in his mouth.

  He scratched his arms, then his chest and legs. It felt like he was crawling with bugs. What if the DT’s were starting; it had been over twenty-four hours since his last drink and if he didn’t get one soon, he’d be climbing the walls. Goddamn Hammelwitz calling the cops on him.

  “Goddamn Hammelwitz, chickenshitlittlefuckingjewbartender,” he muttered, cringing with the blast of sound coming down the hallway. It was Jozia’s eternal vacuum sucking the brains right out of his skull. The vacuum banged against the door, then banged again before rolling off, its tanklike drone subsiding in the distance.

  He looked wearily around this narrow room he had always lived in, except for the bittersweet eight-year limbo of his marriage. There was a mahogany bed with high carved pineapple posts, an old wooden radio he had once set for a moment on the rosewood chair brought in from the dining room and then never moved, and a tarnished brass floor lamp that didn’t work anymore. Three pictures hung on the wall over his bed. One was a photo of his mother smiling from her crib and, next to her, Alice in her First Communion veil; the second, Marie and the children in front of a Christmas tree; and the third, a smeared number painting of the Last Supper that Alice had given him one Christmas.

  He groaned. His tongue was furry and dry and his throat was raw. He felt sick to his stomach. It was this constant stink, mothballs and cedar, and in every drawer lilac bars and lavender to mask the smell of his mother’s long, diapered dying.

  He got up slowly and opened the window, squinting dizzily away from the sun that bobbled atop the cross of the steeple. In the rectory driveway the Monsignor’s long black car floated in a sea of soap bubbles. Howard Menka squatted down, scrubbing a whitewall tire.

  Sam knelt beside his bed and felt underneath as far as he could reach. Then, cursing, he got up and yanked the bed out from the wall. All that he found was a newspaper fuzzed with dust, a sweat-stiffened sock, and a pair of soiled undershorts. On Helen’s orders, Jozia was not to clean his room when he was drinking. “Some goddamn housekeeper. Takes my bottle and leaves the dirt!” he muttered as he lurched from the room toward the howl of her vacuum.

  Jozia pushed the big upright past him. He followed her into the crowded front parlor. When the table and chairs had been moved in here years ago to make space in the dining room for his mother’s crib, all the other furniture had to be pushed back against the walls, so that now, if you sat on the sofa, you couldn’t see over the dining-room table to the Morris chair on the opposite wall. But it had never mattered, because in all these years there had been few guests to sit in the parlor and none to dine at the table.

  Jozia was trying to get around the table with the vacuum, but she was running out of cord.

  “Better tell me where you put it,” he warned over the drone, poking the hump in her back to to get her attention.

  Her cord caught; she turned, staring at the door. She would speak to him only in his sister’s presence. She knew who the boss was in this house, as well as she knew the fragility of his tenancy here, and this enraged him.

  “Where’d you put it, feeb?” he snarled, jerking his fist inches from her face.

  She continued to stare past him.

  “Shit!” he cried with a savage kick at the vacuum. It fell on its side, whining and whirring, its wheels spinning like a tantrum of angry little feet. Without a word, Jozia reached down and set it upright. He kicked it again, and the bag fell off, spewing dirt onto the rug.

  “Crazy man,” she muttered as she attempted to reattach the bag. “Goddamn crazy man. I’m getting awful sick of it….”

  He stepped back, both indignant and a little sobered by the dark clutch of her voice. Her, the dimwit, calling him crazy.

  “Grondine’s right,” she was muttering, “thirty years is just too long….”

  He tiptoed over the worn carpet, wincing as the floorboards creaked. He came into the dining room, where his mother huddled in her crib, her head turned to the window. The room reeked of talcum powder and dry urine. Every morning Helen and Jozia bathed her from pitted metal bowls of tepid water and antiseptic soap, but there was still this smell. He started past her, suddenly feeling as giddy and lightheaded as a thieving boy. She turned with a feathery rustle, and her hands flew toward the wooden slats. “The yoke is broken!” she cried out.

  He darted into the kitchen and opened the door next to the stove. He knelt down and felt along the cracked linoleum for the change that sometimes fell from Renie’s pants, which hung overhead. This was his brother-in-law’s wardrobe, as well as the mop and broom closet. Renie never seemed to mind wearing clothes that reeked of onions, fried fish, boiled cabbage. For several years now Renie had slept in the small windowless room that in Sam’s youth had been the pantry. Banishment from Helen’s bedroom had been triggered by Riddles, a stray dog Renie had taken in one stormy night and the next morning would not relinquish. “I cannot bear deceit,” Helen had sniffed, convinced he had lured the dog home, though brother and sister both knew the most heinous deceit of all had been the vile commingling of her dry
chaste flesh with the coarse loins of a man who had proffered love, when her deepest desire had been satisfied with the sacrament of matrimony, that blessed and bewildering ligature to a man who snored and farted between her ironed sheets.

  Sam stood up, chuckling at the thought of Renie letting one break, ripe and warm, against Helen’s rigid back. He groped along the tacky shelves. Renie had once been easy pickings for Sam until an IRS audit a few years ago had cost him eight hundred dollars in back taxes and penalties. Now Renie distrusted everyone, particularly Helen, his own wife, who he suspected had turned him in for the reward.

  Sam stood on a chair and probed the back of the highest shelf. All it held was more of Renie’s displaced junk: dusty cigar boxes stuffed with sales slips, a framed bowling certificate for perfect attendance as a substitute, and a Good Citizen citation from the Elks. He was climbing down when his eye caught on a book of rent receipts. Opening it, he smiled at the elegant script, the blank inviting lines. He shoved it into his pocket at the sharp approach of Helen’s heels.

  She watched from the doorway. She was a small woman, her thin frame curiously contradicted by the large drooping breasts, no more than clumsy hindrances now as she tried to fold her arms.