Songs in Ordinary Time Read online

  “Help!” he cried, pointing at the stove. “This bounty exceeds help. It’s sustenance! It’s life-giving!”

  She could hear Norm and Alice arguing. Norm needed to use the bathroom. Somewhere in the neighborhood a lawn was being mowed. She pressed against the counter edge as the distant motor hummed closer. Omar started to get up.

  “Wait! You know I’d buy one if I could. If I had the money.”

  “Yes, I know that,” he said sadly.

  “Mom!” Norm called. “Tell her to get out!”

  She raced around the corner and banged on the bathroom door.

  “I’m late for work!” Alice called back.

  “You’ve been in there for a half hour!” Norm called over Marie’s shoulder.

  “You let your brother in there right now!”

  “God, I hate it here,” Alice said on the other side of the door.

  “You hate it here?” she panted, her face at the door.

  “Mom,” Norm said, touching her arm, cringing as she spun around.

  “Listen to her! You hate this house? Nothing’s ever good enough, is it? I wish I had a color TV like the Stoners have”—she mimicked Alice with a sickening petulance—“I wish I had nice clothes like Mary Agnes. I wish we had a shower like everybody else does. I wish, I wish, I wish, well damn it, don’t you think I wish, too?” She hit the door. “Don’t you? Don’t you? Don’t you?”

  “If wishes were riches, then beggars would be kings,” Omar whispered as he passed through the living room. The front door closed, and she buried her face in her hands. She had lost control. She had driven him away.

  Alice had left for work. Norm and Benjy were on the couch watching television. With Omar gone, the house seemed to coil up in a paroxysm of eerie energy. The spell had been broken, and now Marie knew there would never be happiness. The television tubes sputtered and fizzed. Ghostly double images jerked across the screen. There were ants climbing up the baseboard.

  “Now he knows,” she muttered as she wielded the bug spray, spraying crumb-filled corners and the dark musty recesses behind the stove and refrigerator. “Knows the trash we are.” She coughed with the oily fumes that would probably poison them all—if they were lucky. “Worthless, hopeless trash.” She laughed hoarsely. “Let him run. They all run, every one of them, useless, weak cowards, lazy no-good bastards.”

  And then he was back, his arms cradling a damp toweled bundle as he asked for Alice. Norm told him she was gone.

  “This is my belated graduation present for her,” he said as he snaked a tangle of rubber hosing and grimy couplings from the towel and now a soap-filmed chrome disk.

  “Wow,” Norm said, rolling his eyes. “She’s really gonna be happy.”

  Omar buffed the disk on his lapel while he explained that one of the roomers at the boardinghouse was a plumbing wholesaler. He had sold Omar his top model.

  “How much?” Marie asked guiltily. Just a few days ago she had lent him another ten dollars for rent.

  “Just my word,” he said as he examined the polished disk under the lamp. “My only currency in trade for this brand-new portable shower.”

  “That’s brand new?” Norm scoffed.

  “Brand new!” Omar said with a sweet smile.

  “Funny,” Norm said, pointing, “but there’s water leaking out the hose on your leg.”

  “Not so funny,” Omar said, passing the towel over his stained pant leg. “Naturally I hooked it up at the boardinghouse first to check it for leaks.”

  “Naturally,” Norm said, and it was all she could do to keep from slapping that fresh mouth of his.

  Omar looked at him. “Though it may surprise you, Normy-boy, I am not a fool. But I certainly do seem to suffer more than my share of them,” he sighed as he stepped into the bathroom.

  “Omar!” she said from the doorway. “He didn’t mean it that way!” She glared back at Norm.

  “Don’t you worry, dear lady,” Omar grunted through the rattle of pipes and running water. “Norman and I have a fine understanding of one another. In fact, I’d say we’re probably peas from the same pod, wouldn’t you say, Normy-boy?” he called out.

  “Yessuh! Yessuh! Ah’d say so, suh!” Norm called back. Benjy laughed.

  Smiling, she watched Omar press the suction-cupped shower-head to the wall high over the tub.

  He glanced back at her. “Life can be good, Marie. Take my word for it. It can!”

  The sun was hot, the sky pure blue, and Sam had never felt better. This morning there had been a note in his room from Dr. Litchfield. Good news, Sam! it said. Tell you at our session. His thirty days were almost up, and so it had to be that Litchfield was going to tell him when he could leave. With his newspaper under his arm he strolled through the gardens. His hair was slicked back from the jaunty wave he had set carefully over his brow, and he wore the dark-blue pants one of the orderlies had pressed for him and the white nylon summer shirt he’d snagged from the laundry cart.

  Yes sir, he thought, if you had to dry out, you could do a hell of a lot worse than this place. A little chill went through him, but he shrugged it off. It was that old collision of hope and fear that always came as he neared the end of his thirty days. But this time it had to work. It had to. He was getting too old for this shit.

  He hurried through the rose arbor. At ten o’clock he would see Litchfield for an hour and then at eleven-thirty return to his room to rest before lunch. After lunch there would be group therapy for an hour, then tea and cookies on the patio, followed by arts and crafts: leathercraft because he had done that before at Waterbury. Naptime was from four to five, and then he watched the evening news on television in the recreation room. Dinner was served at seven. The dining room with its chandeliers, fresh flowers, and linen-covered tables set for six had the elegance and intimacy of the fine old hotel the Bullfinch Building had once been. In an effort to avoid alliances with any of the drunks or having to babble with any of the loonies, he tried to sit at a different table each night. The mental patients usually wore their tumult in their faces; the ghostly rubble of ashes for eyes as if their very souls had been scorched. For some the madness seemed to bubble with molten brilliance from every fissure. The alcoholics were easy to spot; the red or jaundiced flesh, the spurious smiles, the elusive eyes floundering in the limbo of sobriety, and the fidgeting hands tearing at cuticles or drumming out on tabletops relentless hollow beats.

  As he stood outside Litchfield’s office now, he glanced down at his own hands, which had pleated the edge of the newspaper. He ran his thumb over his smooth, uncallused palm. Sensitive hands, his mother used to say, at one time declaring the long, tapered fingers like those of an artist or a great pianist, or—he chuckled—a lush who hadn’t worked in more years than he could remember.

  He was five minutes early, but Litchfield took him right in.

  “You got my note?” Litchfield asked, and Sam nodded as he lit his cigarette, trying not to look as eager as he felt. All the way over here he had reminded himself to keep playing the game.

  “Your ex-wife called, Sam.” Litchfield smiled. “She sounds like a very interesting woman. Down to earth. Frank. I liked what I heard.”

  He held his breath. Holy shit. Marie knew his thirty days were almost up, and she must have been trying to talk Litchfield into keeping him here.

  “Don’t be fooled, Doc, she’s a very bitter woman, believe me.”

  “Well, now, I didn’t get that impression at all, Sam. Quite the contrary. As a matter of fact, I’d say she’s quite concerned about you.”

  “Concerned,” he said, chuckling at his last memory of Marie’s hateful face and a knife in her hand, though he wouldn’t tell Litchfield this, for fear he might decide Sam would be safer here.

  “Yes, she wanted to know about visitors. She seems particularly sensitive to your state of mind right now and your—”

  “Sensitive!” he cried. “Let’s get one thing straight here, Doc, she is probably the most insensitive woman
I’ve ever known!”

  Litchfield leaned back in his chair and folded his arms while Sam tried to explain the vast disparities between them. They had come from two different worlds. The marriage had been doomed from the start, and for that he was certainly more to blame, having been twelve years older and college-educated, while she was just barely out of high school. He had tried to make it work, tried his damnedest, but she had absolutely no sense of taste or refinement. Any wreck of a car was good enough as long as it ran. Dinner was usually fried meat and pasty potatoes thrown on a chipped plate. Clothes didn’t matter. Taste, beauty, symmetry were frivolous and without meaning for a woman who never read books, just newspapers, and those only to see if someone she knew had died, who looked at a sunset just to determine the next day’s weather, who bought a cheap but pleasant print once at Woolworth’s, then hung it in a dark corner to hide a stain on the wallpaper. When it came to his future, she cared more about the paycheck than his sense of self-worth. She had never been able to get beyond the thorns to the bloom. She was without abstraction. She had denied him dignity and support. She had fed on his weakness. Because of her he had nothing.

  Now he was telling Litchfield about his last night living with his family. It had been ten years ago on Christmas Eve and he had come home late. “I’ll admit, I’d been drinking, but it was Christmas!” he said while Litchfield nodded impassively. “We had a few words. She said some things. I said some things. She hit me. I don’t know, maybe I tried to get her out of the way or some thing, but next thing I know, she’s down on the floor. She wasn’t hurt or anything, but you see, she always had a knack for pushing me too far. She always knew just how to push me right over the edge. It was like she couldn’t ever stand to see me happy. She was always so suspicious, smelling my breath when I’d come in, and calling places to see if I’d really gone in to see about a job.

  “But anyway, that night she got up and I’m standing there, thinking, Oh Christ, here we go again, but she didn’t say a word. She just went to the phone, called the cops, and when they came she told them they could take me to jail or to my mother’s house. The next day she sent the kids over to my mother’s with my clothes and all their presents for me in a red wagon they had to pull all the way through the snow.” He shook his head. “I’ve got to hand it to her, for a woman with no imagination whatsoever, it was her most ingenious scenario. There I am with a blinding headache, having to grovel through all my things under the Christmas tree while my mother’s crying and my sister just sits there shaking her head and sighing.”

  “You seem to be building some kind of a case here,” Litchfield said softly.

  “You’re damn right I am!” he said. “This isn’t all my fault, you know. I mean, I was headed toward a good life. I was!”

  Litchfield looked at him. “And what happened?”

  “Her! Marie, my wife, that’s what happened.” He lit another cigarette.

  He started with the night he had first seen her, so young and timid with her fear of the prowler who had run his hand down the screen of her bedroom window in the house she and her father rented next door. Every now and again the old man wouldn’t make it home from his rounds as a butcher who traveled the hills from farm to farm. It was on one of those lonely nights that the scratching came on the window screen, and so she ran next door in her nightclothes. Sam had been out with friends and when he came home he found her huddled in the corner of his mother’s settee, clutching the afghan to her throat as she waited for her father to return. He sat up talking with her. Her father didn’t arrive until dawn, his old eyes reddened, his gray hair tousled, his beery tongue thick with apology, and the awkward tale of a broken-down truck and the loss of an awesome cow for which he had paid his last cent.

  The week after her high school graduation they were married. She was eighteen and he was almost thirty. His mother was shocked, grief-stricken. His engagement to Nora Cushing had been the high point of her life. Her humiliation and disappointment were soon abridged by the gentle swelling in his child bride’s belly. She would have a grandchild after all, she gloated to Helen, never intending the wound that erupted and festered to this day in her sterile daughter’s heart.

  During the first few months of marriage, he had been happy enough. They took long walks at night. He brought her books from the library to read. She learned to sew and made maternity smocks he tried to admire. Her pregnancy made her look even younger, more childish. In public he felt foolish beside her. Friends kidded him. He remembered buying her a black picture hat and a pair of dangling gold earrings to make her look more sophisticated. She giggled and looked silly in them. He took her to a play once and she fell asleep. She read his poems and said they were nice, and she saved them in a shoe box she had pasted with colored ribbons and magazine pictures. She tried, but everything she did seemed cheap and childish. He took her to a party, and she was so uncomfortable with people she didn’t know, with people who were older, better educated than she was, that she burst into tears and begged him to take her home. Already a little drunk, he told her to leave if she didn’t like it. He stayed. The next morning they had their first big fight.

  During this time he had been having trouble at work. He hated every job and boss he’d ever had. A good part of the problem was his inertia, he’d admitted. He was sorry, but he just couldn’t get fired up over the nickel-dime jobs that were all a town like Atkinson had to offer. One day he ran into some old friends and never made it to work. His boss called and told Marie he was fired. Sam told her not to worry, jobs like that were a dime a dozen. He’d have another one before the week was out. As it happened, he was unemployed for months. His mother tided them over. Marie hated it. She grew querulous and suspicious of his every move. With him home all day, her father had stopped visiting, and she accused him of making the old man feel ill at ease and stupid. “He should be ill at ease, looking down his ignorant nose at me because I can’t find a job with any kind of a future.” He began to stay out late at night. There was always a party somewhere, and Sam Fermoyle was a riot, the life of every party. She threatened to kill herself because she was convinced he was seeing other women, women in slinky party dresses, women who smoked and drank and read the same books he read, women who lived in nice houses, women who had gone to college like he had, women who thought she was ignorant, which he himself had called her once when he’d been drunk.

  With the baby due in a few weeks, his mother had gotten him a job selling real estate for an old friend of the family’s. He promised not to drink. He came home every night for dinner. With a paycheck coming in every week, no matter how meager it was, Marie was happy. She painted her nails red, set her hair in bobby pins, cleaned the apartment, spent hours cooking his dinner, and took care to set the table the way he had shown her. She starched his shirts, shined his shoes, and kept lint off his suits. She was sewing little nightgowns for the baby, which she laid out on the bed at night for him to see. He sold a house to a doctor and had his first commission. He left work early to buy flowers for his mother and Marie. His mother wept with pride. She slipped ten dollars into his pocket and told him to hurry straight home to his little wife.

  He left his mother’s house, his home, and drove slowly toward the cramped apartment that his mother had told him was home, his home on the second floor of a dreary tenement whose halls reeked day and night of soiled diapers and spaghetti sauce. As he drove he imagined Marie’s girlish squealing over the flowers as she told him once again how beautiful she was going to make those three narrow rooms for him and the baby, and how they could take the door off their bedroom closet and push one end of the crib into it the way Beryl down the hall had done, and how next week when she had enough saved she would buy some muslin at the dime store and make curtains for the window over the divan. He pictured himself sitting on the musty old sofa from his mother’s attic as he waited to eat his wife’s insipid dinner while her voice pitched higher and higher with the shrill excitement of a twelve-year-old. And then, af
ter dinner, he would try to read while she listened to the damn radio, sitting in front of it by the hour, her belly bulging with the child that squirmed against his back in bed at night, the child he could not begin to imagine or want, while she stared vapidly at the wooden radio knobs as if this were enough for her, would always be enough.

  And so he had parked the car outside a small tavern. He went in for a quick one, and before he knew it, hours had passed, the place was closed, and he was leaning against a trash barrel, fumbling for his car keys, wondering why his new suit pants were wet and clinging to his legs.

  When he opened the bedroom door he saw that the bed was empty and hadn’t been slept in. She was gone, and he fell asleep, relieved there’d be no scenes. The next morning he woke up coughing and gagging as her father yanked him up by the collar. The old man was bigger than Sam and stood squarely in front of him, his thick arms trembling with rage.

  “She’s up to the hospital with a baby girl. She was bleeding all night. I sat there all night and watched her almost die with your baby, and then the priest comes and gives her last rites, and then he wants to see the husband, and I says, ‘There ain’t no husband no more.’” The old man shook him and spat the words into his face. “You hear me, Fermoyle? There ain’t gonna be no more husband. You’re dead and you’ll never hurt her again.” The old man’s stony fist smashed into Sam’s face. He lay on the floor with blood trickling from his mouth and nose, staring dazedly through the open doorway at strangers, his neighbors, who gaped in at him.

  He went straight home to his mother’s. “Why are you here?” she had said in a voice so distant it seemed to have come from behind a closed door in another room.

  “Marie had a baby girl.”

  “I know,” she said. “Mr. Luseau was just here. You have no idea how ashamed I was in front of him.”

  “He’s an ignorant old man, Mother. I’m sorry he upset you.”

  She stood up then, her unbraided white hair hanging to her waist in thin crimped strands as she leaned on the back of her chair and pointed at him. “You are the ignorant man, Samuel. I don’t want to see you again until you’ve seen your wife and child. Now get out of here!”