Songs in Ordinary Time Read online

  His mother stood by the back door with the car keys.

  It was the cleanser of the future.

  They’d better go, she said.

  So versatile it could shampoo your hair or shampoo your carpet.

  Benjy! she was saying.

  Depending on the dilution, of course.

  Benjy smiled and couldn’t look away.

  This contained more than soap. There was nothing this product could not do.

  “Omar!” she said.

  As they got out of the car the band was playing “My Grandfather’s Clock.” The crowd clapped to the tick-tocking beat. Many of them had been camped here since early evening with their picnic hampers and lawn chairs. The sun was just sinking behind the dark mountains. Benjy looked breathlessly at the hundreds of young people walking around and around the bandstand, their feet seeming to move in perfect time to the music. Overhead, a bright pinwheel of paper lanterns had been strung from the trees to the gold-leafed weathervane on the bandstand roof. Balloon vendors worked their way through the sea of blankets. Other vendors sold Uncle Sam dolls on sticks and small American flags. A long line of customers waited in front of Joey’s popcorn stand. Amid the swirl of music and lights, the lopsided red stand with its stavelike boards looked like some fantastic, hot-air contraption that had just floated haphazardly down from the skies and landed on the edge of the park. Inside, Joey’s arms were a blur of motion, scooping popcorn from his churning glass popper and passing out the boxes with the grim intensity of one bailing out a sinking boat.

  Across the street in front of the armory, the fireworks technicians were setting up their equipment under Robert Haddad’s watchful eye. Haddad was chairman of the Chamber’s Pyrotechnic Committee. He shifted nervously from foot to foot. His heart ached. Astrid had refused to come tonight, instead had gone to a cookout with her girlfriend.

  Babies cried while others slept hammocked in their mothers’ cross-legged laps. And high in a large elm tree in the farthest corner of the park were Norm and Weeb with an arsenal of cherry bombs. Jarden Greene was going to pay tonight.

  Marie slipped Omar a dollar to buy ice cream from a boy with a silver cooler strapped to his chest. The three of them came down the path eating peel-away cones as they looked for space to spread their blanket.

  “This,” said Omar in his booming voice, “is what life is all about. This is America!”

  People nudged one another and nodded at this tall stranger, conspicuous in his limp white suit and dark shirt. Marie’s face drained as they passed the Klubocks, who sat in a close circle with three other families, all eating fried chicken and potato salad from red-white-and-blue-striped plates. “Marie!” Jessie Klubock called out and waved for her to join them, but Marie pretended not to have heard. Ahead, Howard and Jozia Menka were sitting on a bright afghan. Clutching the strings of their red balloons, they watched in astonishment as Marie and Benjy passed with Omar.

  Marie went on until she came to a section of the park where she recognized no one.

  “Lovely night…such music…excuse me…wonderful…hello, my dear…” Omar greeted those nearby as he spread their blanket with a flourish onto the damp ground.

  The band were dressed in their usual white hats and white jackets. But this night was different form the Sunday-night concerts. Tonight they all wore red ties that glistened with silver stars. And tonight their expressions over their instruments were a little less complacent. This was their biggest crowd of the summer. After each number everyone in the park whistled and clapped and cheered, and as the night shrank up in coolness, the crowd moved closer to one another on their blankets and they began to sing along with the music. The young people continued walking in their customary circle around the bandstand, the eager clumps of girls in animated conversation, not hearing a word said as their eyes darted from boy to boy.

  Beside Benjy, Omar had begun to sing softly, “Goodnight, Marie, goodnight.” Benjy saw his mother blush and turn away with the dazed, startled look of a starving woman suddenly confronted with a feast. Just then the first burst of fireworks sizzled into the sky and three umbrellas of shimmering red, white, and blue lights opened in the night, cascading one after the other as the crowd cheered.

  Next to the armory was Marco’s Pharmacy, where Robert Haddad had been standing by the delivery door. He watched Marco and his wife hurry outside to watch the fireworks display from the sidewalk. Without a moment’s hesitation, Haddad slipped inside the drugstore. He rang open the register, scooped the bills into his pockets, then slid out the side door, his prayerful litany, God helps those who help themselves, God helps those who help themselves, pounding in his ears louder than the fusillade of rockets exploding into the night.

  Sam Fermoyle sank uneasily into the leather chair beside the mahogany desk.

  A few moments later the door opened and Dr. Litchfield hurried into his unlit office. “Sorry for the delay,” he said, closing the venetian blinds before he sat down.

  “That you, Doc?” he asked, squinting.

  “It’s me.” Dr. Litchfield chuckled and turned on his lamp. He’d taken a special interest in Sam’s case and was himself conducting the therapy ordinarily handled by a team of staff psychiatrists. Litchfield seemed convinced he could save him with what he called his “pioneering practice plus treatment” program. Sam had been candid in the first few sessions, but now he knew it was the same old bullshit; and no one was better at bullshit than he was.

  Litchfield leaned back now while Sam lit a cigarette. “They’re mentholated.” Litchfield smiled. “I thought you might like those better.”

  “Look, Doc, I don’t mean to sound ungrateful,” he said, shaking out the match. “But I’ve been here two weeks today and I need to go home.”

  Litchfield smiled gently. “You think you’re ready for that, Sam? For your sister? For your ex-wife, for your children? You think you’re ready for all that guilt right now?”

  “Ready as I’m ever going to be.” He sighed, then leaned over the desk. “My kids need me, Doc. That’s the thing. I want to help my kids.”

  “Hmm. I don’t know if you want to help them, Sam, so much as you want them to help you,” Litchfield mused, toying with his glass paperweight that had a starfish embedded in it. “There’s an enormous amount of work to be done in the area of self-involvement, Sam.”

  Self-involvement. What the fuck did that mean? He ground his teeth. “Whatever you say, Doc.”

  “You’re a sensitive man, Sam.”

  “I try.”

  “But that may be the very root of your crisis. You have borne a lifetime of anxiety and guilt, Sam.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “And you have accepted these burdens much too readily and without question.”

  Sam nodded. “I know.” He didn’t know how many more of these sessions he could stand. He wanted a drink.

  Litchfield’s voice buzzed like a persistent fly in the room as he paced back and forth. Sam had stopped listening. Litchfield turned abruptly. “You have to learn how to forget the past and focus on what is real, Sam. On what is real to you!” He pointed. “Even if all the world does think it’s a lie. For isn’t much of life a lie, Sam?” He cocked his head, waiting for an answer.

  Sam gripped the arm of the chair. He’d kill right now for a drink.

  Litchfield hurried to his side and bent over him. “What I’m asking is, are you an alcoholic or…” He peered into Sam’s blinking eyes and whispered, “Is it just that you cannot drink moderately? Which is real, Sam? What others say about you or what you believe about yourself? Sam, you’ve got to search out your own reality, your very own singular meaning, and that…that will be all the peace you’ll ever need. That’s all the peace any of us need.”

  Sam glanced at Litchfield’s wristwatch. Twenty more minutes of this bullshit. He was tired. “I have no meaning, Doc,” he sighed. “And about all the reality I could handle right now is in a bottle somewhere.”

  Litchfield c
lutched his arm. “Don’t you see? You sit here before me. I touch you. You feel my touch. Right now that’s all you need of reality. It’s the beginning. You’re not real because I’m telling you I’m touching you. You’re real because you can feel my hand on your arm.”

  Sam’s stomach growled with hunger. Lunch was still an hour away. Food had become the most important event here. Last night he had awakened throbbing with desire from a dream of fat pink shrimp stuffed with buttery crumbs. Maybe Litchfield was trying to make him think he was crazy so that when his thirty days were up he’d be begging to stay here forever. Where was the money coming from for this? Why the hell was Helen paying to keep him here when she could have had him admitted to the state hospital for nothing? It made no sense. He had written her three letters asking why. She hadn’t answered any of them. Seventy dollars a day times thirty days. Twenty-one hundred dollars. Jesus Christ, what had Litchfield promised her? For that kind of money he must have guaranteed her a cure. No, he thought, for twenty-one hundred dollars he must have promised to remove him from her life forever. He stared at Litchfield, who was pacing between the window and the desk, his arms jabbing the air, his cheeks flushed with heat. His voice sputtered and hissed with such passion that he seemed unaware of the lisp that crept into his speech.

  “And so, you must not judge yourself too harshly, Samuel. As these sessions go on, your understanding of the real you will grow and you will cease being Samuel Fermoyle, the chronic alcoholic. You will become Samuel Fermoyle, a man caught in an existential vacuum, a very twentieth-thentury man thruggling from the hell of what other people tell him he ith back into the path of what he knowth he mutht become for hith own thingular being and reality.” He lifted Sam’s hand, sandwiching it between his own.

  “Thit!” Sam said and pulled his hand away.

  Litchfield flinched as if an old scab had just been gouged. He busied himself with the papers on his desk. When he looked up his face was drained, his eyes arid and clinical. “Your cruelty, Mr. Fermoyle, is just like your drinking, another form of self-destruction, that’s all.” Litchfield’s jaw trembled.

  Sam looked down at his hands and squirmed, his legs damp against the leather chair. Thirst scorched the inside of his mouth. They wouldn’t even let him keep shaving lotion in his room. Marie used to hide the vanilla extract and the cough syrup and the can openers and his money and his car keys and, on Saturday nights, his shoes. She was always trying to stay a step ahead of him, running with the ferocious tenacity of a child racing water buckets between the ocean and the forever-draining hole she had scraped in the sand.

  His mother had hidden nothing from him, not love, not money, not sorrow. She had nourished him on the catafalque of her sorrow, her disappointment in his father, in him, absolving him with tears until the morning after Alice’s birth, when she had plucked him from her life without so much as a catch in her voice. There would be no more denials, she had told him, no more excuses. And then the key had turned in the lock.

  He looked up meekly and cleared his throat. He had nipped at the hands that could release him. He apologized.

  Litchfield answered softly, gently. “We will polarize your tension and your distress, Sam. We will teach you that they can be very necessary components in an emotionally healthy life. We will take your sadness and your tears and we will learn to savor them, to find meaning for them. I will give you the will to live again. Look at me, Sam. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”

  Sam nodded. Litchfield put a box of tissues in front of him and smiled.

  “I’m very tired now, Dr. Litchfield,” he said, blowing his nose. He had to get the hell out of here. “I’d like to go back to my room and just lay there and think this all through.”

  Litchfield squatted down, disappearing behind his desk. Sam waited. He heard a drawer slide open. Litchfield’s head popped up level with the desktop. His chin rested on the edge and he smiled across at Sam. “I’ve got a little surprise here,” he teased, then ducked down again. One by one, they appeared on the desk, a cut-glass decanter of shimmering golden whiskey, a pair of shot glasses, small as thimbles. Instinctively Sam’s body drew forward. He could taste it. He could smell it. He arched back stiffly in the chair.

  Litchfield was looking in his closet now. “Here we go,” he said, returning to his chair with a plate of Ritz crackers and a pressurized can of cheese spray.

  Pursing his lips as he sprayed a dainty cheddar bud atop each cracker, he told Sam that whiskey was one of the oldest medicines known to man, and, if used properly, it could be an art form, an elegant ritual between two gentlemen. He offered Sam the crackers. “This is a closely guarded secret, my new therapy,” Litchfield said between nibbles. “I’ve applied for a grant. You see, I’m trying to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt to my skeptical peers that some men are not just alcoholics, quote unquote, but victims of opinion, victims of labels, if you will, labels pasted on their foreheads sometimes as early as birth, labels that say such ridiculous things as: ‘Your father was an alcoholic, your grandfather was an alcoholic, old Uncle Jim is an alcoholic. It runs in the family. It’s in our blood.’” Litchfield wagged his finger and deepened his voice. “‘Therefore, don’t drink, or you will be an alcoholic, too.’” He laughed lightly and popped another cracker into his mouth. “So what was the first thing you did when you got old enough?”

  His eyes bulged toward the decanter. He didn’t answer.

  Litchfield raised the decanter in both hands. “You sneaked a drink, right?” His grin rippled through the amber liquid. “Out behind the proverbial barn, right, Sam?”

  “Behind the furnace in high school after a baseball game.” Sam gulped and closed his eyes. “Can I have a drink, Doc?”

  Litchfield placed the decanter in front of him. “In just a minute, after you understand what I’m trying to do.” He hunched eagerly on his elbows. “I’m going to teach you how to taste. How to swallow. How to drink. And the key here will be control—a little bit at a time. When we’re done, Sam, you are going to be able to drink socially, like a gentleman, not guiltily, not furtively. But right out in the open—one drink, maybe two, after a lot of therapy, of course, but never, never more than that. Control, Sam. That’s the key here, control.”

  By the time the glasses were finally filled, Sam was in a cold sweat. His hand jerked across the desk, but Litchfield pushed it back. He shook his head. “No, Sam! Relax. Let it sit there a while. Close your eyes. There’s no hurry. We’re having a lovely little talk here, just you and me. It’s been a long day.” Litchfield dimmed the lamp. “Picture it now. We’re in a small café outside of town, about to have a leisurely drink before we drive home to the wife and the kiddoes….” Litchfield’s fuzzy voice droned at his ears. He ground his teeth until they ached.

  “Go ahead, now. Open your eyes. Casually place your hand around the glass, each finger closing, one by one, so you can savor the moment, the anticipation that is probably more pleasurable than the actual act. Now raise it…slowly, slowly to your lips. That’s it. There’s no hurry. No rush. It’s only—”

  “Tea!” he cried, spitting it out. “Weak tea! Christ!”

  Litchfield pounded his fist down on the desk. “I was about to tell you that, but you couldn’t wait!”

  Stunned, he watched Litchfield refill the glass, then calmly raise his own. He stood up and stalked toward the door. “I’m through playing games, you asshole!” he yelled, suddenly sickened by the desperate pitch of his own shrill voice.

  Tonight was Alice’s turn in the far end of the A+X lot, which was considered the worst station because it only got busy when the rest of the lot was full. But for Alice, its worst feature was the nearness to the bright kitchen doorway, where Anthology Carper lounged between orders, his short legs dangling from the tall metal stool, a cigarette burning between his gray teeth, his colorless eyes trailing her every move.

  It was the Monsignor’s long black Oldsmobile with Father Gannon at the wheel, and beside him,
Father Krystecki, a pale skinny priest with big ears. Father Krystecki had been at Saint Mary’s a few years ago, but Alice had only ever talked to him in the confessional. He had been a popular confessor, his most common penance the exhortation to “Be kind.”

  “Hello, Alice,” Father Gannon said, sticking his hand out the window to shake hers. “This is Father Krystecki.”

  Father Krystecki reached across Father Gannon and also shook her hand.

  “Nice to meet you,” she said, her face flaming. Why were they here? What did they want? Had something happened? Norm. He’d been in an accident. Norm with his rage, and lately all his drinking. No. Omar had the car again tonight. Maybe that was it. Maybe Omar Duvall had smashed into a tree and died. God, what a relief that would be.

  “Father Krystecki used to be at Saint Mary’s. Until he got called up to the majors,” Father Gannon added, his sudden pronged laughter jolting up her spine.

  She nodded, managing a smile.

  “I’d hardly call Saint D’s the majors,” said Father Krystecki.

  “Well, being pastor certainly is!” Again Father Gannon’s laugh seemed forced and unnatural.

  “Oh well, I don’t know about that,” Father Krystecki demurred.

  “He’s very modest, isn’t he, for the youngest pastor in the diocese?”

  “You’re really embarrassing me,” Father Krystecki said softly.

  Father Gannon smiled up at her, and her face grew redder. “Could I take your order, please?” she asked.