I held her a long time, even when she struggled to fall back. I realized she’d done it for a mood. She loved me. Also I think we were both frightened later when we’d hold a kiss for 35 minutes until the muscles of our lips would get cramps and it was painful to go on—but somehow we were supposed to do this, and what everybody said, the other kids, Maggie and all the others “necking” at skate and post office parties and on porches after dances had learned this was the thing—and did it in spite of how they felt about it personally—the fear of the world, the children clinging in what they think is a mature, secure kiss (challenging and grown-up)—not understanding joy and personal reverence—It’s only later you learn to lean your head in the lap of God, and rest in love. Some gigantic sexual drive was behind these futile long smooches, sometimes our teeth’d grind, our mouths burn from interchanged spittle, our lips blister, bleed, chap—We were scared.
I lay there on my side with my arm around her neck, my hand gripped on her rib, and I ate her lips and she mine. There were interesting crises. . . . No way to go further without fighting. After that we’d just sit and gab in the black of the parlor while the family slept and the radio played low. One night I heard her father come in the kitchen door—I had no idea then of the great fogs rolling over fields by the sea in Nova Scotia and the poor little cottages in lost storms, sad work, wintry work in the bottom of life, the sad men with pails who walk in fields—the new form of the sun every morning—Ah I loved my Maggie, I wanted to eat her, bring her home, hide her in the heart of my life the rest of my days. I prayed in Sainte Jeanne d’Arc church for the grace of her love; I’d almost forgotten . . .
Let me sing the beauty of my Maggie. Legs:—the knees attached to the thighs, knees shiny, thighs like milk. Arms:—the levers of my content, the serpents of my joy. Back:—the sight of that in a strange street of dreams in the middle of Heaven would make me fall sitting from glad recognition. Ribs?—she had some melted and round like a well formed apple, from her thigh bones to waist I saw the earth roll. In her neck I hid myself like a lost snow goose of Australia, seeking the perfume of her breast. . . . She didnt let me, she was a good girl. The poor big alley cat with her, though almost a year younger, had black ideas about her legs that he hid from himself, also in his prayers didnt mention . . . the dog. Across the big world darkness I’ve come, in boat, in bus, in airplane, in train standing my shadow immense traversing the fields and the redness of engine boilers behind me making me omnipotent upon the earth of the night, like God—but I have never made love with a little finger that has won me since. I gnawed her face with my eyes; she loved that; and that was bastardly I didnt know she loved me—I didnt understand.
“Jack—,” after we’d had all our conversations about the kids she fiddled with all day, while I was at school and since I’d last seen her, the gossip, things of high school kids talking about others their age, the stories, rumors, news of the dance, of marriage . . . “Jack, marry me some day.”
“Yes, yes, always—nobody else.”
“You sure there’s nobody else?”
“Well who could be?” I didnt love the girl Maggie was jealous of, Pauline, who’d found me standing in the gang of football players one night in autumn at a dance where I’d gone because there was a banquet for the players and a basketball game we wanted to see, boy stuff—I was waiting in the corner for the dance to end, the idea of dancing with a girl was impossible but I had it concealed—She picked me out of a corner like young men dream. She said, “Hey I like you!—you’re bashful, I like bashful people!” and drew me tremblingly excitingly to the floor, great eyes in mine, and pulled my body and hers and squeezed me interestingly and made me “dance” to talk, to get acquainted—the smell of her hair was killing me! In her door at home she was looking at me with the moon in her eyes, saying, “If you wont kiss me I’ll kiss you” and opened the screendoor I’d just closed and gave me a cool kiss—We had talked about kisses looking at each other’s mouths all night; we had said we werent interested in such things—“I’m a good girl, I believe in h-hmmm—kissing”—flutter—“but I mean I wouldnt allow anything beyond that to happen”—like in New England the girls—“but you’ve got bedroom eyes, hey. Did I tell ya about the guy I didnt know who put his arm around me at the Girl Officers’ Ball?” She was a Girl Officer.
“What?”
“Dont you want to know if I asked him to take his hands off me—?”
“Yeah?”
“Dont be silly, I dont talk to strangers.”
Pauline, brown hair, blue eyes, the great glistening stars in her lips—She too lived near a river, the Merrimack, but near the highway, the big bridge, the big carnival and football field—you could see the factories across the river. I spent many afternoons there conversing with her in the snow, about kisses, before meeting Maggie. All of a sudden one night she opens the damned door and kisses me—big stuff! The first night I met her all I could do was smell her hair in my bed, in my hair—told this to Lousy, I smelt her in his hair too. It interested Lousy. When I told him we’d finally kissed the night before (sitting with him on my bed with the gang G.J. Scotty Iddyboy sitting in chairs of my bedroom after supper talking about the team my mother doing the dishes my father at the radio) Lousy wanted me to kiss him like I had kissed Pauline. We did it, too; the others didnt even stop talking about the team. But now Maggie was another matter—her kisses, an expensive wine, we dont have much, nor often—hidden in the earth—limited, like Napoleon brandy—pretty soon no more. Marry, love somebody else? Impossible. “I love only you, Maggie,” I tried to say, no more success than with G.J. the little boy loves of puberty. I tried to assure her that she would never have cause for jealousy, truly. Enough of singing—I’ll sing later—the story of Maggie—the beginning of my jealousy, the things that happened.
The mortality in my heart is heavy, they’re going to throw me in a hole already eaten by the dogs of dolor like a sick Pope who’s played with too many young girls the black tears flowing from his skeleton-hole eyes.
Ah life, God—we wont find them any more the Nova Scotias of flowers! No more saved afternoons! The shadows, the ancestors, they’ve all walked in the dust of 1900 seeking the new toys of the twentieth century just as Céline says—but it’s still love has found us out, and in the stalls was nothing, eyes of drunken wolves was all. Ask the guys at the war.
8
I see her head bowed in thinking of me, by the river, her beautiful eyes searching inside for the proper famous thought of me she loved. Ah my angel—my new angel, black, follows me now—I exchanged the angel of life for the other. Before the crucifix of Jesus in the house I stood attentively, sure of many things, I was going to see the tears of God and already I saw them in that countenance elongated white in plaster that gave life—gave life bitten, finished, droop-eyed, the hands nailed, the poor feet also nailed, folded, like winter cold feet of the poor Mexican worker you see in the street waiting for the guys to come with the barrels to empty the rags the crap and keeps one foot on the other to keep warm—Ah—The head bent, like the moon, like my picture of Maggie, mine and God’s; the dolors of a Dante, at sixteen, when we dont know conscience or what we’re doing.
When I was younger, ten, I’d pray at the crucifix for the love of my Ernie Malo, a little boy in parochial school, son of a judge, who because he was like my dead brother Gerard I loved with as sublime a love—with the strangeness of childhood in it, for instance I’d pray at the picture of my brother Gerard, dead at nine when I was four, to insure the friendship, respect and grace of Ernie Malo—I wanted little Ernie to give me his hand, simply, and say to me, “Ti Jean, you you’re nice!” And—“Ti Jean, we’ll be friends always, we’ll go hunting together in Africa when we finish school ha?” I found him as beautiful as seven times the pick because his rosy cheeks and white teeth and the eyes of a woman dreaming, of an angel maybe, bit my heart; children love each other like lovers, we dont
look at their little dramas in the course of our adult days. The picture—, also at the crucifix I prayed. Every day at school it was one ruse after another to make me loved by my boy; I watched him when we all stood in line in the schoolyard, the Brother up front was delivering his speech, his prayer in the cold zero, redness of Heaven behind him, the big steam and balloon and ballturd of horses in the little alley that crossed the school property (Saint Joseph’s Parochial), the ragmen were coming at the same time we were marching to class. Dont think we werent afraid! They had greasy hats, they grinned in dirty holes on top of tenements. . . . I was crazy then, my head ran fantastic ideas from seven morning till ten night like a little Rimbaud in his racks cracked. Ah the poetry I’d written at ten—letters to Maggie—afternoons walking to school I’d imagine movie cameras turned on me, the Complete Life of a Parochial School Boy, his thoughts, way he jumps against fences.—Voila, at sixteen, Maggie—the crucifix—there, God knew I had love troubles that were big and real now with his plastic statued head just neckbroke leaned over as sad as ever, more sad than ever. “You found yourself your little darknesses?” said God to me, silently, with his statue head, before it my hands clasped waiting. “Grew up with your little gidigne?” (dingdong). At the age of seven a priest had asked me in the confessional “And you played with your little gidigne?”
“Yes mon père.”
“Well therefore, if you played with your little gidigne say a whole rosary and after that do ten Notre Pères and ten Salut Marie’s in front of the altar and after that you can go.” The Church carried me from one Saviour to another; who’s done that for me since?—why the tears?—God spoke to me from the crucifix:—“Now it is morning and the good people are talking next door and the light comes in through the shade—my child, you find yourself in the world of mystery and pain not understandable—I know, angel—it is for your good, we shall save you, because we find your soul as important as the soul of the others in the world—but you must suffer for that, in effect my child, you must die, you must die in pain, with cries, frights, despairs—the ambiguities! the terrors!—the lights, heavy, breakable, the fatigues, ah—”
I listened in the silence of my mother’s house to divine how God was going to arrange the success of my love with Maggie. Now I could see her tears too. Something there was, that was not, nothing, just the consciousness that God awaits us.
“Mixing up in the affairs of the world isnt for God,” I told myself hurrying to school, ready for another day.
9
Here was a typical day, I’d get up in the morning, seven, my mother’d call, I’d smell the breakfast of toast and gruel, the windows were frozen an inch of snowy ice the whole glass illuminated rose by the transformations of the ocean of winter outside. I’d jump out of the sheets so warm soft, I wanted to stay buried all day with Maggie and maybe also just the darkness and the death of no time; I’d jump into my incontestable clothes; inescapable cold shoes, cold socks that I threw on the oil stove to warm. Why did people stop wearing long underwear?—it’s a bitch to put on little undershirts in the morning—I’d throw my warm pajamas on the bed—My room was lit by the morning the color of a rose coal a half-hour dropped from the grate, my things all there like the Victrola, the toy pool table, the toy green desk, the linoleum all raised one side and sitting on books to make banks for the pool balls and raced track meets when I had time but I didnt any more—My tragic closet, my jacket hung in a dampness like powder from fresh plaster lost locked like adobe closets Casbah roof civilizations; the papers covered with my printed handwritings, on the floor, among shoes, bats, gloves, sorrows of pasts. . . . My cat who’d slept with me all night and was now thrown awake in the empty semi-warm bed was trying to hide himself in near the pillow and sleep a little more but smelled the bacon and hurried to begin his day, to the floor, plap, disappearing like a sound with little swift feet; sometimes he was gone when seven o’clock woke me, already out making crazy little tracks in the new snow and little yellow balls of pipi and shivering his teeth to see the birds in trees as cold as iron. “Peeteepeet!” the birds said; I look outside briefly before leaving my room, in a window hole, the roofs are pure, white, the trees frozen mad, the cold houses smoking thinly, docile-eyed in winter.
You have to put up with life.
10
In the tenement it was high, you could see downstairs the roofs of Gardner Street and the big field and the trail people used gray rose dawns five o’clock January to go flatulate in church. There were old women of the block who went to church every dawn, and late afternoon; and sometimes again evening; old, prayery, understanding of something that little children dont understand and in their tragedy so close you’d think to the tomb that you saw already their profiles sitting in rose satin the color of their rose-morns of life and expectoration but the scent of other things rising from the hearts of flowers that die at the end of autumn and we’ve thrown them on the fence. It was the women of interminable novenas, lovers of funerals, when somebody died they knew it right away and hurried to church, to the house of death and to the priest possibly; when they themselves died the other old women did the same thing, it was the cups of sugar in eternity—There’s the trail; and winter important morning opening stores and people hallo! and I go ready to go to school. It’s a mélt-mélon of morning everywhere.
11
I’d have breakfast.
My father was usually away on his out-of-town job running a linotype for some printer—Andover, near the little crew-cuts there who had no idea of the darkness inherent in the earth if they didnt see that sad big man crossing the night to go make his 40-hour week—so he was not at our kitchen table, usually just my mother, cooking, and my sister, getting ready for her job at So and So’s or The Citizen, she was a bookbinder—Grave facts of worklife were explained to me but I was too proud in purple love to listen—Ahead of me, nothing but the New York Times, Maggie, and the great world night and morning of the shrouds on twig and leaf, by lakes—“Ti Jean!” they called me—I was a big lout, ate enormous breakfasts, suppers, afternoon snacks (milk, one quart: peanut butter and crackers, 1/2 pound). “Ti Jean!”—when my father was home, “Ti Pousse!” he called me, chuckling (Little Thumb). Now oatmeal breakfasts in the rosiness—
“Well how’s your love affair with Maggie Cassidy coming along?” my sister’d ask, grinning from behind a sandwich, “or did she give you the air because of Moe Cole!”
“You mean Pauline? Why Pauline?”
“You dont know how jealous women get—that’s all they think about—You’ll see—”
“I dont see anything.”
“Tiens,” my mother’s saying, “here’s some bacon with toast I made a big batch this morning because yesterday you finished em all up and you was fightin at the end for the last time like you used to do over Kremel, never mind the jealous girls and the tennis courts, it’s gonna be awright if you just stick to your guns there like a real French Canadian boy the way I brought you up to respect decency—listen, Ti Jean, you’ll never be sorry if you always follow a clean life. You dont have to believe me, you know.” And she’d sit and we’d all eat. At the last minute I’d stand undecided in my room, looking at the little radio I just got and in which I’d just started listening to Glenn Miller and Jimmy Dorsey and romantic songs that tore my heart out . . . My Reverie, Heart and Soul, Bob Eberle, Ray Eberle, all the blue sighing America was racked up behind me in the night that was all mine and the glory of the tenderness of the trembling kiss of Maggie and all love as only teenagers know it and like perfect blue ballrooms. I wrung my hands Shakespeareanly at my closet door; crossing the bathroom to grab a towel my eyes misted from sudden romantic notions of myself sweeping Maggie off a pink dancefloor onto a pier with a moon shining, into a slick convertible, a close kiss long and sincere (just a little to the right).