Songs in Ordinary Time Read online

  He rose up on his elbows, clutching his chest. This pain wasn’t fear of the police, but his dread of having to move on again, a life of running and hiding, curled up to sleep on the front seat. These last few days he had been racked with hungers that food and comfort could no longer assuage. The worst deprivation would be losing Marie.

  Bernadette’s and her daughters’ giddy voices rose against the door. “We’re ready!” she cried, throwing it open. They were dressed in bright bathing suits with bright beach towels over their arms, their smiles so eager, so voracious, that he felt sick to his stomach. He hurried into the bathroom, where he splashed water on his unshaven face. As he reached for a towel he noticed the sparkle of light from the toothpaste-smeared shelf over the sink. He slipped the ring onto his pinkie finger and stepped closer to the window to examine the tiny diamond in the light.

  When he came out of the bathroom he told Bernadette that he didn’t feel up to going.

  “Tough shit,” she growled. “You promised, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “But I have this pain,” he said, wincing as he probed the tenderness in his chest.

  “I don’t care if you’re having a fucking heart attack, they think they’re going swimming, and that’s where they’re going.”

  They waited by the door with their sand pails and plastic boats, watching as hard-eyed as their mother as he buttoned his shirt. He bent to tie his shoes and pain shot down his arms to his fingertips.

  “You’re going like that?” Bernadette asked, pointing as he put on his rumpled suit jacket.

  “It’s all I have,” he said.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Noelle cried, legs crossed and squirming.

  “Then go!” Bernadette said, and Noelle ran into the bathroom.

  “I can’t!” the child cried. “I’m tied.”

  “Help her,” Bernadette ordered the older girl. “Untie her bathing suit.”

  Merry ran into the bathroom.

  “What’re you gonna do, sit on the beach in your suit all day?” she asked, setting down the bulging grocery bag. “There must be something of Kyle’s that’d fit you,” she said, hurrying into the bedroom.

  In the bathroom the little girls’ voices rose querulously. Bernadette returned with a pair of red plaid shorts. “Come on!” she called, opening the bathroom door to find Merry kicking towels through the yellow puddle on the floor. “Goddamn it,” Bernadette cried, shaking Noelle, who was patting dry her wet bathing suit and dripping legs with a washcloth. Bernadette grabbed the washcloth and wet it in the sink, then knelt to scrub the sobbing child’s plump legs. Her head shot up, and then she stood suddenly, gripping the grimy glass shelf. Her cry of loss had an oddly soothing effect on Omar. The pain was gone. He felt stronger, more confident. So here it was, another impulsive action now so imbued with plausibility that he understood, with perfect clarity and unshakable faith, its purpose.

  “You bastard, you little bastard!” she cried, shaking one child and slapping the other. “What did you do with it? What did you do with my ring, my beautiful diamond ring?”

  “Nothing! Honest, Mommy!”

  “It’s down here, isn’t it?” She clutched the chipped rim with both hands, grunting and pulling as if to tear the sink from the wall. “You dropped it down the sink! My future, my whole life!”

  “Now, Bernadette,” he said softly. “They’re children. They meant no harm.”

  It was early evening. Marie’s car was gone and her house was locked. Omar cupped his hands to his eyes and peered through the dusty windows. The television was off and the table was set for three. He came around the back of the house, wading through the tall grass. On the clothesline, which had begun to sag again, the clothes were already dry. As he unpinned them, he began to worry that she might have done something as reckless as driving to Westport for a personal confrontation with Roy Gold. Yes. She was just that impetuous and headstrong. He paused with a stiff towel bunched at his chest as he pictured those big eyes boring into Gold as she demanded her thousand dollars back. He would be so stirred by her pluck that he would get her soap sent out that day. He would fill all of Omar’s orders. One could never know good fortune’s spur. How many other times had despair turned out to be the first step, the bottom rung of joy.

  Oh God, yes. He could feel it in his chest, the familiar swelling, this profound and ennobling exuberance reminding him once again that he was no ordinary man.

  “Mr. Duvall! Mr. Duvall, I’d like a word with you,” Harvey Klubock called as he tried to hurry down his back steps. Harvey limped toward him.

  Omar set the laundry on a broken lawn chair. Harvey wanted to know about his soap order, not that he was having any second thoughts, he added; it was Jessie. “You know how women are. They think everything’s a risk.”

  Omar told of a warehouse so busy the trucks waited all day in long lines to be filled. He told of a company parking lot jam-packed with the expensive cars of loyal but exhausted employees. “It’s just too much success, too much good fortune all at once,” he said. Now as he was describing Roy Gold’s estate with its serpentine brick walls and glowing ponds, he realized that Jessie stood in the doorway above them, listening, her soft mouth parted. “Is he married?” she asked with that hesitation he found so touching in women.

  “No,” he said with a rueful smile. “All that good fortune and no one to share it with.”

  “That’s sad, isn’t it?” she sighed.

  “Not necessarily,” Harvey said with a reproving glance.

  “Well, I think it is!” she said. “Not that my opinion matters, of course.”

  “Looks like you got some sun today,” Harvey said, turning his back on his wife.

  Omar touched his neck, surprised to find the skin so prickly and hot. He’d spent the afternoon at the lake consoling Bernadette while he tried to keep an eye on Merry and Noelle. It just wasn’t fair, she’d sobbed, explaining that the ring had been bought with proceeds from the very break-in Kyle had gone to prison for, an irony that for Omar only further justified his possession of it now. When they got back from the lake he’d tried to make her feel a little better by explaining how an item with any weight to it might end up in the sink trap, which someone with the right-size wrench could open for her. She had run barefoot down the alley to use the phone in the fruit store to call Kyle’s brother Blue to come and fish her ring out of the trap. Poor thing; it pleased him to have given her that hope, even though her ring was now an insignificance so easily transportable by even the weakest stream that it was certainly gone forever.

  Jessie and Harvey’s son, Louis, opened the door and called to his mother for ice cream. His eyes fixed on Omar.

  “Do you know where Marie might be?” Omar asked Jessie.

  “I think they went for a ride, she and the boys,” she said, adding brightly, “They should be right back.”

  “I noticed the table’s still set. They haven’t had supper yet.” His stomach was growling.

  “They—” Jessie began.

  “They had a big fight,” Louis interrupted his mother. “Norm ran out and then Benjy…”

  “Louis!” she said.

  “Louis!” his father echoed.

  “…and then Mrs. Fermoyle went speeding down the street in the car.”

  “Louis, you don’t know that,” Jessie scolded. She looked at Omar. “I’m sure they’ll be right back.”

  “It’s not easy raising children alone,” Harvey said. “That woman’s got her hands full.”

  “They’re nice kids.” Jessie looked at Omar. “They really are!” she said, as if to convince him.

  “The older boy’s been difficult lately,” Omar conceded.

  “Well, let me tell you, if they were mine, they’d be toeing the mark. I’d have ’em out there right now fixing that place up.” Harvey waved his arms in disgust. “No excuse for that. None at all.”

  “Harvey! I can’t believe you’re saying this.”

  “Well, it’s
the truth. It’s so bad every neighbor on this street’s—”

  “Harvey Klubock, shut your mouth!” Jessie cried. “Just shut it right now!”

  Harvey stared at his wife in astonishment.

  “Look! There they are!” Louis called over the deafening rumble turning into the driveway.

  It was an old pea-green car that couldn’t have had a muffler. A coil of rope held one side of the front bumper in place. What at first appeared to be mud splatters were actually rust pocks. Norm drove with Marie beside him and Benjy in the back seat.

  It was almost midnight and Marie’s hands were still shaking. Last week Norm had taken fifty dollars from his savings account to buy a car, a ’49 Chevy, from a man he worked with. She hadn’t known about it until tonight, when she told him she had to borrow money from him after all. She needed it for the late loan payment as well for this month’s. Because he hadn’t dared tell her, he’d been keeping the car at Weeb’s house. Every night when she thought he was visiting Weeb, whose legs were in casts, he’d actually been driving his junk of a car around town. She’d told him that he couldn’t keep the car. He had to get the money back. That was impossible, he’d said. The car was already registered in his name. Impossible, she’d cried, almost insane with rage and panic. Nothing, nothing in this world was impossible! She’d demanded that Norm call the man and tell him he wanted his money back. He refused. He couldn’t.

  “What’s the man’s name?” She’d picked up the phone.

  “Mom! Please!”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Bob Hersey, but you can’t—”

  “Bob Hersey!” She’d known him as a kid. “Well, that idiot has another thing coming if he thinks he’s going to pawn that piece of junk off on my son!” she’d panted as she flipped frenziedly through the phone book, ripping half the pages. She’d get the money back, goddamn it! Why was she humiliating him like this? Norm had groaned as she dialed. After Hersey had gotten over his initial confusion, he said he was sorry, but he’d already spent Norm’s money to buy another car. He’d still been talking when she slammed down the phone.

  “Now you’ve done it with your selfishness! With your stupidity!” she’d screamed at Norm.

  “Jesus, Mom! I have to work with him! I could lose my job!” Norm had said in a high shaky voice.

  “Lose your job! Thanks to you we’re going to lose our home!”

  “Home!” he’d laughed, tears running down his work-grimed cheeks. “This isn’t a home, it’s a nuthouse, and I’m getting the hell out!”

  “Go! And keep on going!” she’d yelled through the front door as he stalked down the street, his head hanging, his pant legs and sneakers green with grass clippings.

  Benjy had run after Norm, begging him to come back. And then she was speeding down the street after the two of them, the car bucking as she took the corner on squealing tires, with all the neighbors at their windows watching Marie Fermoyle’s life fall apart faster and faster, like some crazy spinning top that would not stop until it had disintegrated.

  Her car had broken down on Main Street. She still had a year of payments on it. The transmission was gone and there was no money to fix it, she was explaining now to Omar. They sat on the couch, the television on, the volume barely audible for privacy. Benjy and Norm had gone to bed, and as usual Alice still wasn’t home.

  “Have faith, Marie,” Omar whispered. “Please.”

  “Faith,” she gasped, laughing. She couldn’t help it. Faith? Faith in what? Everything she’d ever tried to believe in had failed—her marriage, her kids, her house, her car; she was even doing such a lousy job at work she wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Briscoe let her go, and now the franchise was a disaster. So what was left? Did he have any ideas?

  He sighed, his face buried in his hands, the light from the television flickering over them. “I’m sorry, Marie. This is all my fault. If you hadn’t believed in me, if you hadn’t listened to me, then you wouldn’t be in this dilemma.”

  “Dilemma!” she cried, throwing her head back on the couch. “No! Disaster, Omar! This is a full-fledged, out-and-out disaster.”

  He looked at her. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”

  She knew that wasn’t fair. He’d tried to help when no one else even cared. But she was tired now, too drained for this. He was trying to explain it all again, how they’d bought into the business right at the boom, and now with such a massive glut of orders…

  “I know,” she said. “You told me. But I’m tired. I am so, so tired.” She stood up, and he reached for her hand.

  “Marie,” he said in a choked voice.

  Let them take the house, the car, she thought. Let Alice go hide in a convent if that’s what she was up to. It had to be a hell of a lot simpler life than this one. Norm could have his shitbox of a car and his beer and his brawls. And Benjy…Oh God, she had to be strong, had to…Why was Omar rubbing her finger like that? He was trying to work a ring over her knuckle. The stone glittered in the dim light. She held it close to her face. Peering at it, she asked what it was, though there could be no doubt. It was a diamond.

  “An engagement ring,” he said.

  She looked at him. “An engagement ring,” she repeated numbly.

  “Yes,” he said, nodding and smiling up at her. “That’s exactly what it is.”

  Later, as Omar sat on the edge of her bed, putting on his socks, her voice moved through the darkness, like the blades of the tillers he’d walked behind as a child, watching the sweat plaster his father’s dun-colored undershirt to his puny back, and all the time, his father’s voice dragging him along, shallow and dead like the earth he turned spring after spring, promising magnificent harvests that were in the end no more than enough bushels of beets and carrots and corn to get them through another gray winter. One morning when he was fourteen he just up and left. And all along the way, until now, he’d moved through what he felt was the fine clarity of his intuition, his imagination and great foresight. Throughout his passage he’d always emerged unscathed from misfortune. So great did he believe his promise and vision to be that after all these years he still hadn’t reconciled the disorder and the poverty of his youth with that brilliance he believed life held out to him. He sat here now, shocked by what he’d just done; the ring he’d taken to sell had become a marriage proposal, a jail sentence.

  In moments like this, futility doused his soul like a sudden powerful rain. He was getting old, his feet swelling in the heat, the strangle of phlegm rising to choke him as he slept. His eyes were rheumy and pink-lidded. He was tired. But maybe he could do this, could lie down on this thin bed night after night. He could mow the lawn and paint this house. Maybe sell soap out of the garage. After a while he might even rent space downtown and get into hardware. He’d always believed in hardware. All across this great country men were building porches, toolsheds, garages, and if not, they would soon be dreaming of building something as they picked up one of Duvall’s Miracle Ratchet wrenches—oh, he could just picture it—to hang on their workshop pegboard.

  Yes! He could do it. He could stay here and never leave.

  She switched on the light, and his eyes stung.

  “It’s beautiful,” she whispered. She held up her hand. “But I don’t know how the kids are going to take it.”

  “Just you be patient now,” he whispered, leaning back to pat her cheek. “Let’s just make sure the time’s right. Let’s wait.”

  “Wait! Wait for what?” She started to sit up.

  “Till the soap comes,” he said. “Then maybe they’ll have a little more faith in me.” He stood up and looked down at her. “And I’ll have a little more faith in me, too.”

  Renie had called someone who knew someone at the new paper goods plant, and Sam had been hired third shift. It hadn’t taken him long to hate the job. He found it demeaning. Every night as he walked to work in these dingy green coveralls and rubber-soled boots, there was a knot in his stomach. Educated men did not we
ar coveralls and boots that squeaked with every step. He had read everything F. Scott Fitzgerald had ever written. Here he was, a toilet paper loader, and there was nothing about love and life and beauty he did not know, did not contemplate here on top of this yellow loader, its wide rubber track vibrating so that his teeth clattered as it rumbled back and forth between the steel ramp and the conveyor belt that carried the enormous cartons into the warehouse, where they would be loaded onto trucks in the morning.

  He threw the loader into neutral, then paused, staring at the hundreds of cartons piled to the mesh ceiling. It would take all night. No. The way to look at it was in stages. Parts of things, fragments. The whole did not exist. There was only here, only this moment, the shifting gears, the first carton, the next carton. One wall cleared, then the other. One step at a time; one foot in front of the other. You are your own meager invention, Sam Fermoyle. He backed up, shifted, rumbled toward the nearest stack. He was thinking of Alice. Thin-faced now and resentful, when once she’d been such a sweet child. When he carried her she used to hold on by slipping her hand down the back of his shirt collar. His children would punish him now. They grew older, more powerful. They could destroy him now, could walk right out of his life when he needed them most, more than he had ever needed them before. He would have to make them understand. What? That it hadn’t been his fault. That he had been afraid. That he could never face the wholeness, because it always seemed so grim, so pointless, when failure was the only certainty, the one true wholeness of which he was capable. No, no, no, no. That was the trouble with this job. Too quiet, too much time to think. Suddenly he was afraid. His hand felt instinctively for the ignition. Turn it off if he wanted. Walk right out of here. He could find a pint or a nip somewhere. Anytime day or night he could find some, if he wanted, whatever he wanted. That was the trouble, everyone laughing. A one-hundred-percent, one-hundred-proof riot, Sam Fermoyle. All his life trying to make people laugh. Couldn’t stand sadness, even hated daylight because of the way it magnified sadness. Water splashing in the bathroom, bacon frying. The brilliant glare of noon, the harshness, the boredom. The dinner hour building, the holocaust of their scorn, their disappointment. Pass the butter, please. Eyes on the plate. The tension weakening him. And when he could not make them laugh or love him, settling for pity.'