Songs in Ordinary Time Read online

  “She ain’t holy,” Howard muttered. “Jest cheap.”

  “Cheap!” Jozia laughed that shrieky superior laugh of hers that so rankled her twin. “Cheap don’t go buying two new doors for the church!”

  “That’s when I heard her!” Howard said. “After the man from the paper took the picture of her and Monsignor with the doors, and Monsignor said thanks, and Miz LaChance said it was least she could do. ‘Beside,’ she said, ‘better the money be going to the church than the barroom.’ And Monsignor said, ‘Acourse not,’ she could trust him. And Miz LaChance said she knew that, and Monsignor said how the church needs a new roof and the convent boiler’s not gonna make winter and the Bishop’s all outta money to help, so’s the only way to do all them repairs is bake sales and bingo, only he don’t have a church hall. And then he said how she and her mother’s house being right across the street’d be perfeck and would she ever thinka selling to the parish. Acourse he shouldna even ask, ’cause he could never pay the whole price it would cost. And Miz LaChance said she was awful shamed to say it, and how nobody knew but the Judge and now him. She said the house was her brother’s and her mother’s, and after her mother dies, it’s all Sam’s house, and not one bit hers, after all her work, all her slaving. And Monsignor said how that ain’t fair, and Miz LaChance said her mother spoiled Sam rotten, and how he was always the favorite and she was always the one to pick up the pieces, and Monsignor started saying he thought the phone was ringing, so he’d better go get it, like he does when he’s sicka talking. And Miz LaChance started crying and saying how all she ever got was leftovers her whole life, nothing but everbody’s leftovers, and if anything ever happened to her mother, she’d be out in a street. And Monsignor said, ‘Well, probably you’ll be getting your mother’s three tenement houses, Helen.’ And Miz LaChance really started bawling then, and she said no, she wouldn’t even get them. She said they’s going to Sam’s kids. Each kid’d get one.”

  Jozia blew her red nose into her kerchief. Tears streamed down her face. “Poor Miz LaChance,” she sniffed.

  “How ’bout poor you?” Howard said. “Soon’s old Missus Fermoyle’s dead, they ain’t gonna be no more job left. And then watcha gonna do?”

  “I dunno and I don’t care!”

  “You gotta care!”

  “You shut up, Howard! You jest shet your mouth!” she said, speeding ahead. “I’m so sicka you and your mean mouth!”

  “Wait fer me!” Howard cried as she hurried down the walk to the white marble church.

  Jozia paused and shouted, “You jest go by yourself. And you jest sit by yourself, too. I’m sicka you!”

  Howard bounded up the steps and reached past her for the door, just as she reared back at him with her purse, and the perfume bottle inside met his cheekbone with a stinging jolt. She ran into the church. Touching the welt, Howard tried to blink back tears before going inside. He staggered down the aisle to the front pew, their favorite one, but Jozia knelt steadfastly at the entrance and would not let him in.

  At eleven o’clock the Judge’s telephone rang.

  “I’m sorry,” May said softly, “but the Judge can’t come to the phone just now.” She glanced at the back of his head and lowered her voice. “Could I take a message?”

  “If you would,” replied a woman’s stern voice. “This is Helen LaChance calling. Helen Fermoyle LaChance. The Judge will know…. Would you tell him I’m having a…a bit of a problem here.”

  “Of course,” May said. In the background she heard a man’s drunken bellow.

  “Get back in your room,” Helen LaChance hissed away from the phone.

  “This is my house just as much as yours,” Sam Fermoyle cried. “And if I say she’s fired, she’s fired.” His voice grew louder. “You hear me, Jozia, you’re done! You’re fired! Now get the hell outta my sight, you stupid, no good…”

  “Excuse me,” Helen LaChance said into the phone, then with her hand over the mouthpiece, her muffled voice warned the obstreperous man, “I’ve got the Judge on the line….”

  “Lemme talk…Judge!”

  “Get away from me!”

  “Give me the goddamn…”

  With the dark struggle thrashing at the end of the line, May’s eyes held on the Judge as if to keep him from being toppled in the scuffle.

  “Get back…”

  “We’ll see who’s…”

  “Don’t you touch me…. Judge! Judge! I want those committal papers signed….”

  “Hey.” The drunken voice laughed, receding into the distance. “I was only kidding. You know what a kidder I am, Jozia. Jozia!”

  “Get back in your room!”

  A door slammed.

  “I’m sorry,” Helen LaChance said breathlessly. “It’s my brother. He’s trying to fire my housekeeper…. Wait! You just wait! Where do you think you’re going?” Mrs. LaChance demanded suddenly. “Excuse me,” she said desperately. “But my brother just stormed out of here. Tell the Judge I don’t want Sam to see Mother’s papers. Tell the Judge…oh…oh, I’m sorry.”

  The sun rose higher and higher and higher still, straight, straight up, until all at once, in a dizzying moment, there was heat. And from the percussion of glare and shadow, there erupted a blaze of bees on petals, a dazzling blur of colored balls, spinning spokes and racing bikes, a motionless whir of skipping ropes and schoolyard screams, and the thump and clatter of quick dark burrowings, and scamperings, and the cicadas’ hard dusty hum, and the close ear-buzz of bugs and the tender flesh-bite of gnats, and the bone-clang of shovels sparking stone beneath the giddy, bright-flapping, tattered frenzy of birdflight, spinning faster and faster, nearer and nearer the sun. All over town winter-grimed windows rattled up, and front doors creaked open.

  Omar Duvall crept from yard to yard, his white suit streaked with dirt, his straw hat shapeless in his sweaty clutch. They were still looking for him. He had spotted them twice since morning, cruising the streets slowly, slowly, with all the time and patience in the world to search until they found him.

  The early-afternoon sun poured in on the Judge, who had shifted in the chair. His chin hung farther down on his chest as his shoulders hunched closer together.

  The phone began to ring. It was Joey Seldon. From the window May could see the blind man down in the telephone booth that was across the street from his popcorn stand. He shouted to be heard over passing traffic.

  “I’m sorry,” May said. “But the Judge can’t come to the phone just now.”

  “Tell him it’s Joey,” he hollered. “He’ll come.”

  “I’m sorry, but he’s not feeling very well.”

  “He’s not sick, is he?” Joey’s voice tightened.

  “A little.” May closed her eyes.

  “Oh no!” Joey groaned. “He won’t miss the council meeting, will he? It’s tomorrow night.”

  “Um…I really don’t know,” May said, her eyes burning. There was no air to breathe.

  “Look, tell him he’s got to make it. Tell him Greene just stopped by, and tomorrow night’s the vote. Tell him Greene says he’s got enough votes this year to turn down my lease for the stand.”

  “Yes,” May muttered as if scribbling this all down. “Of course…enough votes…to turn down lease….”

  “Tell him Greene’s on the warpath again….”

  “…on warpath…”

  “And tell him this—he’ll like this. Tell him Greene says it’s the end of an era….”

  “End of an era…,” May repeated dully, her gaze settling on the Judge’s contorted hands, the fingertips just beginning to blacken.

  “Tell him it’s a matter of life and death,” Joey shouted over the rumble of Grondine Carson’s garbage truck as it accelerated up West Street.

  “A matter of life and death,” came May’s vaporous whisper. There was a click, but she stood listening to the dial tone, steadied by its urgent drone.

  A few blocks away in the School of Holy Innocents, Benjy Fermoyle glanced out the wi
ndow to see his father staggering through the schoolyard below. In the front of the room Sister Martin snapped her pointer against the green continent on the canvas map. They were supposed to know this for tomorrow’s exam; the major exports and imports of each country as well as their capitals. What she wanted them to learn was not just miles and oceans away, but worlds, lifetimes removed from Benjy, when all he could perceive of distance and other lives was the father who came looking for his younger son only when he was drunk, the father who at any moment might come bursting through that doorway.

  “The capital of Venezuela is…” Sister Martin nodded at Linda Braller’s waving hand.

  “Caracas,” Linda answered.

  “The capital of Uruguay is…” Sister Martin looked at him. Just then the bell rang, and all heads bowed with the departure prayer. Benjy stared in horror as Mr. Lee, the school’s janitor and crossing guard, came out of the building and hurried after his father. Mr. Lee grabbed his father by the arm and managed to steer him back onto the sidewalk. Just as his father stepped into the road, a car turned the corner. Benjy looked up to see Sister Martin’s lips moving with the class prayer as she stared out at the schoolyard. Her eyes widened with the squeal of brakes. A man was shouting. Benjy lowered his head.

  “Please, dear God,” he prayed, “it’s okay if he’s dead. But not here. Anyplace but here.”

  The second bell rang, and Benjy rose slowly as his classmates jostled up the aisles for the door.

  “Benjamin! Wait!” called Sister Martin with a glance toward the window.

  “Look at that guy out there,” Jack Flaherty called, pausing at the window. He pointed. “Mr. Lee’s helping him up. Look, he’s so drunk he can’t even stand up. Let’s go see!” Flaherty cried, his newly deep voice cracking with delight.

  When they were gone Sister Martin closed the door. He squirmed as she came down the aisle. The long black beads at her waist rattled against the desk as she sat in the chair next to his. She was a young nun with a deeply pocked face and bushy eyebrows that massed over the bridge of her large nose. He’d known from the first day of school that she didn’t like him. She was always singling him out, calling on him when he didn’t even have his hand raised. Try, she would urge, at least just try. Most of the time he knew the answers, but hated the silence in that terrible moment of everyone staring at him. She had finally given up. She wet her finger now and rubbed at an ink smudge on the desktop. He tried to remember if he’d done anything wrong today, but he knew he hadn’t. He never did. The classroom smelled of chalk dust and the heat of her black wool, warm brown apple cores, the limp remnants of bologna crescents and peanut butter and jelly crusts and lead pencil shavings that filled the black metal wastebasket.

  “Benjamin,” she said, then paused, her coarse face reddening. Sweat leaked from under her stiff white wimple as she stared at him. “I just want you to know…I…I want you to know that I…I understand. I know how hard it can be to have someone…to have such a situation going on in your life. But you’re not the only one, Benjamin.” She tried to smile. “Believe me when I tell you that. We all have these, these crosses to bear. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  He both nodded and shrugged, which seemed to irritate her. The shouting grew louder in the schoolyard. A horn tooted. He glanced down, relieved not to see his father.

  “Look at me! Don’t look away. Look at my eyes. See my face. Do you see? Do you know what I’m saying? I’m homely.”

  He was shocked. He stared at her.

  “It’s a fact of life. I’m a homely person, aren’t I?”

  “No,” he said, and she smiled.

  “It’s my affliction, my cross to bear, just as your father’s condition is his affliction, his cross to bear. Benjamin, I said, look at me.”

  He tried to keep his gaze on the solid furry line of her eyebrows.

  “I want to help you, that’s all. But you have to let me help you. Please, Benjamin,” she said softly. She leaned closer. “Now, I know your father has a drinking problem, and when I saw him out there…”

  “That wasn’t my father.”

  “…and how you seemed to shrink up…”

  “That wasn’t him.”

  She sighed, blinking. “Yes, it was. I know that was your father.”

  He shook his head. “No, it wasn’t.”

  She bit her lip and sniffed, and he was afraid she was going to cry. She reached across the aisle and put her hand over his.

  “It’s all right, Benjamin,” she said softly. “Whatever he is has nothing to do with what kind of person you are. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  “But that wasn’t him,” he said, grateful when her hand slipped away.

  Benjy came up the street from school, walking close to the dusty hedges. In their yards, dogs lazed in pools of sunlight, panting under their wintery coats. Cars full of teenagers cruised the streets, windows down, convertible tops peeled back, radios blasting, voices shrill and heedless. From everywhere came music and motion and young mothers wielding squeaky baby buggies past porch rails bannered with bright scatter rugs, beaten and airing now in the first lilac’s welling sweetness.

  He stopped dead. Ahead on the corner was Jack Flaherty with his hands cupped to his mouth. Flaherty stood in a circle of older boys, one of whom was Bobby Busco, sixteen years old, the same age as Norm, Benjy’s older brother, but twice Norm’s size. Busco was lighting Jack’s cigarette. “Suck it,” Busco kept saying. “That’s it, deep! Deeper!” The younger boy’s face purpled until he spit the cigarette onto the ground in a spasm of choking and coughing. The older boys roared, laughing as Busco thumped Jack’s back so viciously that he dropped to his knees, gasping for breath.

  Benjy started to walk fast. Just a few more yards and he would be around the corner.

  “Lemme try it again,” Jack begged. “I took too much!”

  “Yah…Sure, Flaherty…Go buy your own….”

  “C’mon! That ain’t fair. Gimme one!”

  “So long, creep,” one of them called as they turned to go.

  “Wait! Hey, wait, you said you’d…. Hey, see that guy?”

  Benjy’s father was coming toward him.

  “That’s Norm Fermoyle’s father.”

  “Yah, I know, and look, that’s his brother.”

  Benjy froze.

  “Benjy!” his father called. “Jesus Christ, Benjy,” his father cried, throwing his arms around him. He reeked of liquor and sweat. His eyes were raw and his cheeks were dark with stubble. “You gotta help me. I gotta go see the fucking Judge, and I don’t feel so good right now.”

  The boys watched from across the street. Someone was laughing.

  “I can’t,” Benjy said. He pulled away and his father grabbed his arm, twisting it as he jerked him back. “I can’t,” he said again, and his father slapped the side of his head.

  “What do you mean you can’t,” his father bellowed and hit him again. “I’m your father, and I need your fucking help, you fucking little weasel you…”

  But now he pulled back with all his strength and was running as fast as he could from the shameful reach of that bawling howl and the boys’ stunned laughter.

  Alice Fermoyle, Benjy’s sister, had gone straight from school to Cushing’s Department Store. She sat there now in the personnel office, picking the cuticle on her thumb as she watched Miss Curtis glance at the application she had just filled out. Alice smiled her nervous, gulping smile while Miss Curtis explained that the only summer opening left was in Cosmetics. “What we need is a girl with, well…you know, to demonstrate the makeup…we need someone who’s a little more…a little older.”

  “Alice’s thumb began to bleed. She sucked at it, then reached quickly for her books, which fell onto the floor as she stood up to go.

  “Have you tried the Taylor Shop? They always seem to need…”

  Alice nodded and backed toward the door.

  “Well then, what about Birdsee’s Sweets…. You did?…What about the li
brary? That might be more…Oh. Well, what can I say? Better luck next time,” she called after Alice, then closed the door and sighed. “But I doubt it.”

  The white-haired receptionist rolled her eyes and whispered, “I didn’t want to say anything, but that was Alice Fermoyle, you know, Sam Fermoyle’s daughter?”

  “Oh!” said Miss Curtis, looking toward the door. “And Marie, the secretary from Briscoe’s Sporting Goods, that’s her mother, right?”

  “I didn’t want to say anything,” the receptionist said, “but Lord knows, the last thing you’d want is him in here drunk, trying to see the daughter, the way he does his wife over at Briscoe’s.”

  “Or the mother on my back,” Miss Curtis added. “I see her in church, and she’s always got this look, like she’s just waiting for somebody to cross her.”

  “Well,” the receptionist said, “poor thing’s had a time of it, I guess. But then again, she asked for it, running around with a thirty-year-old man when she was still in high school.”

  “You’re kidding!” Miss Curtis said.

  “That’s the truth,” the receptionist said. “I remember. Everybody does. ’Course, no one ever says much, we all felt so bad for Mr. Cushing and our poor Nora. It was one week before the big wedding, and Sam Fermoyle runs off and marries a teenage girl.”

  Lester Stoner was waiting for Alice in front of the store. “Well?” He grinned hopefully. “Did you get it?” he asked, falling in step beside her.

  Eyes wide, she shook her head no. Her face still burned.

  “My father knows the Cushings,” Less was saying. “Maybe he could put in a word.”

  She wished he’d shut up, always acting so superior to everyone else, when he could be such a creep sometimes, always hanging around the nuns. He could make her feel so inadequate. That was it, if he said one more word she’d break up with him.

  “Come on, Alice, don’t feel bad. There’s a lot of jobs in town. You’ll see.”