“Zagg,” said G.J. philosophically and brotherly arms around me in the roar, “remember our fights in the hall? You’d call me from outside—’Yanny!—innocently I’d come down like a normal human being but you were hiding in the dark, eyes gleaming, breathing heavily, pouncing on me—Yesterday I saw everything different, the time you twisted my arm and it cracked I shot a left hook to your body, you wavered under the impact but came back fast with a right cross to the jaw—I retaliated with a sharp left and jab to the groin and boy did you groan—weaving and dodging I came in fast for the kill—shooting four lefts and seven rights I brought you down to your knees, then faster than an eye wink I went for my iron and conked you over the head. A surprised look came over your face, you tried to clamber to your knees—which was your downfall—lifting all strength I swung my John high over my head and bringing it down hard on your dome I felled you like an ox—Ah what a life!” suddenly gloomy. “Happiness’ll disappear, bitter grouchy and dont care will come back ever in this ga’dam world. But what the krise if it makes God happy then there’s no harm in it—All our dreams, Zagg, childhood together—things like the fights in the hall—Now you’re grown up, your Ma fixed you a big birthday party, your girl’s here, your father, your friends—Yes dont kid yourself Jack, there is still some kind people left in this world—You may some day be ashamed but dont ever be ashamed of me, what we’ve known together, us, in our screwy talks and adventures—look at Lousy, good old Belgium going home to sleep—in a minute he’ll be headin up Riverside in the blizzard as a thousand times I seen him from my kitchen window and cursed that the world was black, all’s right with the world and Lousy self-satisfied and holdin himself in is going to his well-deserved rest—there you have it, Zagg.”
Scotty all combed, suited, smilefaced: “You babe if you cant be good be careful—heh heh heh! Till Saturday at 5 P.M. I’m workin now and especially Friday night till 11 P.M.—Vinny got kilt the other day when he hit a hole with Zaza’s bike his leg got scratches and four fingers and I think personally he’s puttin some on—See him? He’s gonna get a big job in Lawrence now carryin huge bundles of cloth on his shoulders from morning till night—But this summer we’ll all be together again and have a jaloppy this time and go swimmin after games—”
“I hope so, Scot.” Later, by woodstoves, we’d grimly add it all up, together a thousand miles apart.
Firmly he places his arm around me, smiles.
I close my eyes, I see little Puddinhead Bunky DeBeck in his infant wear big sunflower lace sitting in his cookiebox in Saturday night color-selection cartoons “Fagan youse is a Viper” he complains to big bedeardoed huge hunkey Chaplin Fagan with big bum’s lips replying “Why is I a Viper, Bunky!” as he climbs out the window with a mask in the sad red print—Maggie’s dancing wildly, I sit gooping—
Across the party my Ma comes running gleefully hunching her shoulders biting her tongue to throw long embraces around me, wants to show everybody how much she loves her boy, yells “Hey there Jacky what you say Mama’s gonna come and give you a big kiss!” smack!
The photographers come, everybody’s screaming instructions—sweatingly two group photos are arranged—In the first one I stand between Ma and Pa, Bloodworth Truman and Moran sit to the left representing fellow high school athletes gravely and with glints in their eyes, Jim with arms around his buddies, Jimmy Bissonette sits to the right with his wife Jeannette, hosts—Jimmy is simpering up his face into the camera about to burst goo gool gee ha ha his crashing laughter, all excited in a tightfitting French roué coat like the European coats of pornographic picture heroes performing grave feats in dreary rooms with undressed women—happy crazy nose, tittly-lips, immense pride in the occasion of the night. Behind him stands my father, arm around me, his white fingers on my shoulder are obscured by the white wallpaper, he’s glad, big vest, tight coat, all night he’s been fevering and shouting in the party and “kidding the hell out of little Maggie ha ha ha”—now in the photo, coughing seriously, he’s flushfaced, proud, holding me close so the world can see his love of his son in the newspaper, with the same simplicity and believingness that Jimmy is holding his joy-face up to the devourous worlds—My father is like a Gogol hero of old Russia in a house. “Go ahead snap that birdie there, we’ve all got our best smiles—come on Jacky, smile, he never smiles that boy of mine dammit when he was five years old I used to come home he’d be sitting by himself on the porch one time he even tied ropes around himself, gloomy little cuss, I’d say ‘What you thinkin about there sonny? What for you dont smile you worry your old folks that have given life to you and dont know just how to make up to you for what’s at best a gloomy enough world I admit—”‘
“Hold still everybody!”
“Ahem!” my father clears his throat, enormously earnest—Flup, the picture’s taken—I havent even smiled in the picture, I look like a moronic boy with a strange pinched (by sweat and camera shadows) drawn goofy peaky witless face, my arms hang down joining my hands over my fly so I look like an unnamably abnormal beast of a boy groping dully his vain dreams of glory in a livingroom with big parties around—looking like Pimple Tom of the swill piles, sadfaced, droopy, but everybody sentimentally arranged around me to protect the “LETTER ATHLETE HONORED” as the picture caption says.
Suddenly in the other photo (“Thank God!” I thought seeing it the next day in the Lowell Evening Leader) I’m a Greek athlete hero with curly black locks, ivory white face, definite clear gray newspaper eyes, noble youth neck, powerful hands locked separate like regardant lions on the hopeless lap—instead of having Maggie in my grip for the photo like laughing happy financees we sit across the table from little presents disposed thereon (radio, baseball glove, ties)—still I dont crack a smile, have a grave vain look inwardly musing on the camera to show that I have special honors reserved for me in the echoey hall and dark corridor of this infinity, this telepathic bleak, this mig, instead of bursting into big laughs like Iddyboy is doing in the back stand-up row arms around Martha Alberge and Louise Giroux—going “HEE!” in a thundering boom cry and gloat of huge Iddyboy lifeloving girlhugging fencecrashing hungry satisfaction that has the photographer’s hair leap up. Maggie, for her part, is a study of grave disrespect for the camera, wants nothing to do with it (like me) but has a stronger attitude, doubts while I pout, purses her lips while I stared wide-eyed at the world—for also my eyes grayly shine in the paper and show definite interest in the camera which at first is unnoticeable, like surprise—In Maggie there’s disgust undisguised. She wears a crucifix and primly has no further word with world in camera.
30
The party ends, rides back home are arranged, taxis called—hoots across the snow, snowballs popping in the growl of spitting snow, cars racing motors to start, vrroom—no room. “Can we pile in back?”
“Nieh? I don knowa.”
“Aint dee no room?”
“Beh sure! Come ah—”
“Bouee!”
Little teapots take their time.
“Good night Angelique—Good night—”
Calls across the snow—Moody Street a half-block down is a jostle of trucks beating chains, hoots, shovelers, the big blizzard has got men out working—“Hey I’m gonna get me some money,” the old boys say down on Middlesex Street Lowell skid row and hop over on sore alcoholic feet to the City Hall or wherever to work for the City. Iddyboy mentioned it as the party broke up.
It has been a huge success—I had nothing to do with that part of it. The buses were running grace to God so most folks go home that way, Maggie who lives three miles away across all the city and out, has to take a cab—We get one down at Marie’s all night stand across from where I live. I look up and see the dark windows of our tenement. Now that the party is over everything has the flavor of a dream well accomplished, like having a tooth pulled. Maggie: “This is one time you’re not taking me to South Lowell and walking back to Pawtucket
ville.”
“Why not?”
“Not even you could walk in this storm . . . ten inches of snow.” Such Sicilian shifts my lamb of love:—I could walk in this storm as well as Colonel North Pole Blake of the Greenland Armadas and had done so to Pine Brook out in the Dracut woods, in the night, in big blizzards, carrying a long stick and planting it down so’s not to step into streams entire, or well holes—I’d stood in the forests of night listening to the kissing of the flakes and the twigs of winter, the little sleet spitting like electric particles anticipatory and clicking, in wet gooey gum boughs—
“Yes I could walk in this storm—but I wont tonight, I havent got my overshoes except upstairs and boy am I sleepy wow—it’s three o’clock in the morning!”
“Me too. Gee what a party.”
“Did you like it?”
“Sure.”
“How’d you like my father?”
“He was funny.”
“Wasnt he? And we had a pretty good time. Gee some of the guys in there had a good time—”
“That aint the point,” said Maggie pointedly.
“What?”
“It was in honor of you. You should appreciate it.”
“I do appreciate it!”
“Nobody’ll believe you if you talk like that.”
“Well you understand. . . .”
“Yah,” said Maggie, almost sneering, “that’s because I’m just like you—” Moving her jaws in the history of our love, half tough-looking in the doorway, half-hunching over—I’m standing beside her proud, some of the boys in the Textile Lunch across the street can see I got a pip of a brunette waiting for a cab with me—I’m not old enough to chew my nails about not being able to go home with her and lay her. I’m chumpily looking at the upstairs windows of other tenements across the way, Maggie is primping her hair in her little mirror; a sad red ball light hangs in the ceiling of the Taxi tenement porch. Desolate shufflers come up Moody swallowed in the windy fell, athwarted by blazing flakes across the arc streetlamp glow. I kiss Maggie—she throws herself right up to me, loose, little, young, all I have to do is mention the word kissing and she’ll play kissing games. I was beginning to sense her sexuality now and it was too late.
Across the street came part of our party, Textile Lunch for hamburgers and coffee, they piled in, you saw a flash of the jukebox, the counterman tattooed forearms on the counter crazy-faced yelling “Oy la gagne des beaux matoux!” (Oy the gang of ga-dam tomcats!) at Pa and the older friends half drunkenly jawing into the steamy vapors of the diner, wet, tired, not hungry, gloomily surveying and sneering at everything—but exploding into laughs, big necessary hassel jovialities and shows of neighing concern and sudden good feeling tender and glad—The counterman makes a slight slur in the corner of his mouth when turning to cook the order.
Across, through vapor windows and fly snow, they could have seen Maggie and me, up, side by side, in a doorway, standing bystanders suddenly turning into kissers and again resuming bystanders for stamping taxiwaiting tendencies.
“Your party was all right, I believe they couldnt a give you a better one—”
“Yeah—not the point—I mean—were you glad to see me tonight?”
“I had to see you tonight—”
“I know that but just to see me ha ha just kiddin ya—you’ll be all right. After some sleep and you get home you’ll be fine—”
“Jacky!” She’s thrown herself, arms firm around my neck, loins into mine, but back arched as she leans back to throw her richness vision into mine—“I want to go home to a house to sleep with you and be married.”
I drooped to think about it—I had no idea what I should do—“Huh?” I pictured my mother saying Maggie was “too impatient,” others talking about it, the sweet future of it with Maggie and I getting home late at night tired from a party, and going up dark steps along rosy wallpaper to the dim velvet darkness of the rooms upstairs where we take off our coats of winter and put on pajamas and in between in the middle of both garments the nudities of bouncing bed. A bouncing baby boy with Christmas in his eyes. In the crib, in the rose dark, he with little poof pout sleeps his little thoughts away. You couldnt disturb him with rattles of talk and angels with sabers drumming up the brown moth-swarming vision of the Drape, soon enough they’d part, ascendant swimming Heaven blazing universal snow particles of the truth—Maggie’s baby in the reality—mine, my son, in the snowing world—my house of brown—Maggie’s river making muds more fragrant in the spring.
She went home in the cab, it was driven by a friend of mine whose face I’d seen in a thousand Fellaheen dusks of this village in our dirtstreet boyhood, Ned, Fred, he was a nice kid, he made some joke about something as they rolled off sadly big red taillight vaporing exhaust in grim winter conditions and flopped chains off into distance and South Lowell, source of my arrow.
31
Little paradises take their time. Little parties end.
My father was only beginning to raise hell in the diner, I went in for some tail end to my day, but only yawn a few times in the greenish light and scarfed three hamburgers with ketchup and raw onions while everybody carried on the music and the roar of a good old Saturday or Blizzard night in New England, at dawn bottles were opened, shiftings of parties took place, on Gershom Avenue at gray six o’clock when only the old ghosts of Pawtucketville walk wending their white way in black veils to church, there was heard from inside the tenements deep a sudden shrieking high laugh from some old gal in some roundtable black iron range kitchen and windows rattling black little boy cant sleep in his pillow, will be bleary for the blizzard in the morning—Me too I’ll go to sleep now and make that black angel in the pillow void open—the world is not void open—“Go ahead Jacky me boy,” my father even said rolling down off some big laugh with Ned Layne the wrestler who was part owner of the lunchcart, “go to bed if that’s what you wanta do, and all you been doing is yawning, too much excitement for the kiddos tonight”—and Ned Layne would die in the war—nobody’d wrestled in the right arena around there—my sister’s friend, the little chum of my sister’s girlhood who was going to marry him was barking up a wrong tree in the serious reality of the open world. The tree that was with root of these realities had already threaded knuckly fingers in the bleak.
“Okay Pa, I’m going to bed.”
“Did you like your party?”
“Oui.”
“Good—Dont tell anybody if they ask ya that I had a coupla drinks at the house, I dont wanta be obliged to kid laws.” Before coming home to supper every night my father used to have his two or three shots of whisky in the Club across the way, it was the great time when I could see him head from there to the barbershop straight across the street, the long spacious handling of the scene of this with him inside strawhat hung up in summers’ nights as I’m racing along on sneakers where we lived two blocks down, I was two years younger, see him unbelievingly rich in the shop with a magazine and a white barber shroud and the man knee-ing to his work as he shaves. “Good night kiddo, and if you wanta marry Maggie you’ll never pick a prettier girl, she’s Irish as the day is long and a damn good little scout as far as I can see.”
32
“It’s a warm coat I have,” says Bloodworth walking in the cold north red dusks of March in Massachusetts near the New Hampshire line, “but it’s not a warm coat tonight,” making a sour joke and sullen, and suddenly I realize he’s a great old skeptic who’s thought deeply on the weather and uses it in his speech or has such horrid findings swear with it. “Christ, pretty soon the thaw’ll be out.”
33
April came. It joined with March in forming mud in the woods, long flying streamers of flags pennoned from the circus flagpole Post-No-Bills advertisements of May. Summer’d reach into the corners of spring and mop em all dry—the essential cricket would crawl from his rock. My birthday part
y was over, I grew more fond of Maggie now as she grew less fond of me, or surer. The season had swung on some invisible pivot of its own.
Thing was—Maggie wanted me to be more firm and binding in my contractual marriages of mate and heart with her—she wanted me to stop acting like a schoolboy and get ready to be busy in the world, make headways for her and our brood, and breed. Spring rank suggested this in breezes of prim river that now I began to enjoy as the iced ruts in Maggie’s Massachusetts Street began to uncongeal, crystal, crack, and swim—“Frick frack” would wave the goodlooking hoodlum on the corner of Aiken and Moody Street and still your May’d come. “Damfool” will be the lark saying on a branch and I know that juices and syrup sops would pulse come throbbing springtime—“Never know would ye the wood was damp on the bottom” would be saying the old champions out in pine fields. I’d walk all over Lowell aweing and ooing my measures to the brain. Doves too coo. The wind like harp’ll blow blah blah over Lowell.
Now I’m going to find out how my love for Maggie fares. Not too well.
I had no “Maggie what shall I do?” to ask myself and like a schoolboy finally decided that to hell with her my Ritz crackers and peanut butter would disappear. I pouted like a big baby over the thought of losing my home and going off into unknown suicides of weddings and honeymoons—“Honey,” Maggie says, “it’s okay, just go on going to school I dont wanta stop you or interfere with your career, you know what to do better than I do. You know, maybe you wouldnt be so practical to live with.” It’s a warmish late March night; I’m through the blazing moon the March witches are racing their shrouds and brooms, whippets come after, yapping across the bleak, the leaves dont fly they’re mashed underfoot, a seething wet beast is rolling its back in the earth, you’re about to realize King Baron of the sweet mountains was not going to be coronated in this Kingdom pine sap—I saw blue birds trembling on wet black boughs, “flute!!”