Strings Attached

  He took it but didn’t bite into it. “I’m a sophomore. I’m on the boxing team. That’s why they took off.”

  “You just made a few enemies.”

  “That’s all right — they wouldn’t be my friends anyway. I’m a townie, and I’m Italian,” he said, biting into the pear. “And they know who my father is. Billy Macaroni — they don’t even bother saying it behind my back. The way they look at me — or, I mean, the way they don’t look — it’s like their glances slide off. Like I’m a mirror, and if they don’t see themselves, they don’t see anything.”

  “I thought I’d be invisible, too.”

  “You? That could never happen.”

  To cover my embarrassment, I bent down and picked up the forgotten football. I hefted it in one hand and then hurled it, hard and straight, toward the construction site — a clear, spinning pass into the darkness.

  “How about that?” he murmured. “The girl’s got an arm.”

  “I can climb trees, too.”

  “I remember.” He took a bite. “I remember that day I met you. I liked you because you liked my pictures. You said, ‘If I could do that, I’d do it all the time.’ Before that”—he shrugged —“you were my enemy.”

  “Little old me?” I said it flirtatiously, but there was a seriousness behind his eyes. “What do you mean?”

  His gaze went blank for a minute. Then he grinned. “You were a girl. Believe me, I’ve changed.”

  “That wasn’t the first time we met, you know,” I said. “The first time was on the Fourth of July. I was wearing red, white, and blue. And eating ice cream. I was with my aunt and my dad.”

  “I don’t remember that,” he said.

  “I was nine. Skinny as a beanpole. All knees and elbows.”

  “I bet you were a knockout.”

  We began to walk down the hill, eating our fragrant pears and talking. All the while I was wondering how to keep walking forever, circling around College Hill, never getting to the narrowing streets and bumpy sidewalks of Fox Point.

  When he touched my elbow as we crossed the street, I felt a shimmy down through every nerve. I knew I’d found it, and I didn’t even know its name. I felt it in my body, the way my bones were suddenly held together by air, not muscle. What would happen next, I didn’t know, but I knew it would have to happen. I would make it happen. I was a motherless child, and I knew that the deepest of tragedies was simple: to love, and not to be loved in return.

  I knew I needed an ally, and there was really only one candidate.

  A couple of days later, when I needed him most, I tried to rope him in.

  Jamie lay sprawled on the couch, legs up on the arm. I sat down next to him and peered over his shoulder. “I want to make a deal.”

  “Not now, pup. I’m studying.”

  “Since when?”

  “Easier that way.”

  “Easier how?”

  “People leave you alone when you’re smart. You should try it.”

  I nudged him. “Hey, you might know trigonometry, but can you keep an eighth note triple count with your feet?”

  “The question is, why would I want to?”

  “Look, are you working on Sunday?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I have a date, and I need you to come along. My friend has a car. You can bring a girl.”

  “I don’t have a girl.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud, Jamie, help me out. So I can say a gang is going.”

  “Why don’t you ask Muddie?”

  “Because I don’t think I can stand her asking, ‘And how are you enjoying your studies?’ all afternoon long.”

  He snorted. “And why,” he asked, “can’t you just tell Da that you have a date?”

  “Because he’s in college, and Da won’t let me date a college man. And because… because he’s Billy Benedict.”

  Jamie looked at me over his book. “The kid with the camera? Nate Benedict’s son?”

  I nodded. “Oh, Jamie, come on — if you’d just come out with us, it won’t look like a date, it will look like we’re all friends.”

  “And I’ll be a third wheel.”

  “Not a third wheel! We’ll have fun. We’ll have a picnic or something. He said we’d go to Roger Williams Park. You need to get out anyway. You’re starting to study all the time, just like Muddie. He’s picking me up Sunday morning. Come on, you want to.” I smiled at him.

  “Please note that smiles like that don’t work on brothers.

  But all right.”

  Jamie jumped into the backseat and I slid into the front. Billy looked surprised, but not annoyed. That scored a point, right there.

  “I asked my brother to come,” I said. “I hope you don’t mind. It’s just that —”

  “You don’t trust me. Good. I’m completely untrustworthy.” His grin lit up his face. “Hi —Jamie, right? Another one who can climb trees.”

  “Right.”

  “Let’s go. My mother packed a basket.” He took off and instead of heading to the park, he kept on going. He wore a blue shirt, the cuffs rolled up. I watched his hands on the steering wheel. Even his hands were beautiful.

  “I thought we were going for a picnic,” Jamie said.

  “It’s such a great day, how about the beach?” Billy asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “We never go.”

  “I have a favorite spot. We used to go there when I was a kid, before…”

  “Before what?”

  He shrugged. “I still go on weekends when I can.”

  Probably with a girl, I thought, and my heart felt squeezed with a new emotion — jealousy. But here I was in the front seat next to him. Today, I was the girl.

  We swung the hamper between us as we walked to the beach. The air was chilly but the sun was warm. The water was a deep navy frothed with white. We spread out a blanket and sat watching the waves.

  Jamie settled in with a sandwich. “So, are you going to be a lawyer like your old man?”

  “He thinks so.”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “Well, I know I don’t want to be in his business. What about you?” he asked Jamie.

  Jamie laughed. “College is not in the plan. It’s the Irish form of advancement — you don’t dare do better than those before you. Our dad never made anything of himself. Course, he expects the same of us. Maybe I’ll join the army. Or the air force. Fly away.” He tossed a piece of bread to the gulls. “Better than factory work.”

  “You sure about that? What if we go to war again?”

  “That’ll never happen. We’ll just do rescue missions now, like the Berlin Airlift.”

  I’d seen Jamie looking at those pictures in Life magazine, Germans looking up at the sky at the planes, waiting for the food and medicine to drop. I could see him wanting to be that pilot, looking down at upturned faces, knowing he was saving them. It was Jamie who could transform a gloomy afternoon, or end a squabble with a joke. He was always saving us, why not do the same for strangers?

  Jamie dug into the hamper for a napkin and came up with a camera. “Hey, this yours? Sweet.”

  “You’re still taking pictures?” I asked.

  “When I can.” His hands were sure and easy as he took the camera. “I’d like to do it for a living, but my father thinks it’s crazy.” He aimed the camera out at the ocean. “But wouldn’t it be swell, traveling around taking pictures for magazines? Robert Capa, Cartier-Bresson — that’s what I’d like to do. Capture moments in time. Truth. Not what people say, not even what they do… but how they stand, and the look in their eyes they can’t hide.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but I saw that he had come alive. He rose on his knees and took a few fast shots of me, then a few of Jamie. He aimed at the sea and the sky.

  I looked up at him, on his knees against the blue sky, the wind whipping his hair, and it was like he was electric, a sparking wire. He sent out a charge, and I felt it vibrate inside me. All I wanted to do
was touch him.

  It was twilight as Billy made the turn onto Hope Street. He pulled up at the corner. We’d stayed at the shore as long as we could, until cold and hunger drove us back to the car. We’d eaten all the sandwiches and run through the surf and screamed at the shock of the cold water. We’d walked and looked for shells and tossed a football. We hadn’t talked of anything much. But none of us had wanted the day to end.

  On the way home, “It’s Magic” came on the radio and I sang along. I wasn’t embarrassed. Billy looked over at me from time to time while he drove, a big, delighted grin on his face. Now I understood it. I understood magic.

  Billy cut the engine and we sat at the corner of Hope and Transit. The light was almost gone and the tree branches looked black. The wind had knocked a carpet of gold leaves onto the ground.

  I knew it was time to say thank you for a lovely time, but the usual phrases seemed so small compared to the day. Putting words to it would cheapen it. I knew Jamie didn’t want to speak, either.

  Billy got out of the car to open my door. I stepped out as Jamie opened the back door, and the three of us stood for a moment, not moving. Suddenly, Billy flung his arms around both of us. “Mark it on your calendar,” he said. “One perfect day.”

  At that moment Da appeared out of the gloaming. His expression of greeting froze, then hardened.

  “Good evening to you,” he said. “Is that Billy Benedict there?”

  “Hello, Mr. Corrigan. I didn’t think you’d recognize me.”

  “Sure I do. You’re the image of your father. Kit, Jamie, time to come in now. Muddie will have supper on the table.” I was startled by the coolness in his tone.

  “Time for me to be getting home, too,” Billy said.

  I wanted the good-bye to last longer, but that was it. The song was done. Magic was over. Time to turn the record over and listen to the B side — Doris singing “Put ‘Em in a Box, Tie ‘Em with a Ribbon.”

  Da stood there as Jamie and I watched Billy’s taillights disappear up Hope Street. All the air went out of the day.

  “I didn’t know you two were friends with Billy Benedict,” Da said. “Since when?”

  “Since today,” Jamie said.

  Da’s gaze turned to me. “And you, miss?”

  “What’s wrong with Billy?”

  “I don’t know Billy. I know his father.”

  “We just went to the beach. It’s not like you ever took us anywhere unless there was a profit in it.” I flung out the words, not knowing that I meant them until they were out.

  He took a breath and stared down at the sidewalk. Then he looked up. “I’ve seen enough of beaches. I’ve probably seen every pebble of sand in four hundred miles of coastline. Nate Benedict and I drove them together back in the twenties. We were both working for Danny Walsh. I learned how to drive a getaway car at sixteen.”

  I suddenly remembered that night so long ago, after the hurricane, when Nate had sat at our table. “Delia, too?”

  “Once or twice, even Delia. She drove the covering car a few times — that’s what we called the second car that would block the Feds or the police from following. Good to use a woman — she would pretend to break down and block the road. Listen, in those days, you tripped over bootleggers in Rhode Island. For me and Delia, it was a job, a way to get by so that they wouldn’t catch up to us, separate us, and send us to orphanages. It was Delia who saw I needed to stop or I’d wind up in one of the Irish gangs for good. She saw the way the wind was blowing, that we’d repeal Prohibition and then I’d only have one skill, how to outrun someone who’s chasing you. The crash had happened, and she couldn’t find me work. So she brought home a girl instead. I knew Maggie would never marry a man in the rackets, so I quit. But Nate didn’t, did he? Danny Walsh disappears in thirty-three, the Italians take over, and Nate gets himself an education. Then he has to pay back what he owes, and that means working for them. Now look at him. He’s just as bad as they are.”

  “He’s not a gangster,” I said.

  “He’s in it up to his neck, just the same,” Da said. He looked tired. “So why should I be happy to see Nate’s son with his arms around my children?”

  “But Billy isn’t in it,” I said. “He’s not his father.”

  “I know, he got into the university, I heard.” But Da said this as if it didn’t matter. “Just now, walking toward you like that… it was like seeing myself and Delia and Nate when we all met. Down at Buttonwoods Cove, it was.”

  Jamie and I exchanged a surprised glance. Billy had taken us there today.

  “She swam out to meet the boat in the pitch-black — we never went if there was a full moon. She was fearless back then. She hauled herself up the boat, her braid over her shoulder, and she wrung it out. And Nate looked at her like she was a selkie. A creature from the sea, not quite human… well, we were in each other’s pockets for a while. And nothing good came of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If your aunt were here, she’d say, ‘Stick to your own.’” Da looked over at the house, as if wishing Delia was on the front stoop to back him up.

  But what if Billy is “my own”? I wanted to say. “That’s the Irish in you talking,” I said instead. “Things aren’t like that anymore.”

  “I hope I’ve taught you one thing anyway — that saying a thing doesn’t make it so.” Da sighed. “Well, now. I’m an ignorant man, but I can see down a road. You can’t stop something that’s got to go on. I can’t stop this any more than I can stop the moon from rising.” Da looked at me, and he shook his head. I saw that something had happened without my noticing — he looked older. Gray at his temples, lines at the corners of his eyes. “I just want you to know, it will break my heart to see it. That’s all.”

  Seventeen

  New York City

  November 1950

  I was in his arms, against the kitchen wall, every inch of me against him. Billy’s hands were on my hair, my face. His mouth was soft and yielding, hard and so warm. Searching, searching for everything I had to give. Like he wanted to get to the very core of me.

  One kiss had led to another and another and we couldn’t stop. It had been too long without each other. The kettle screamed and we ignored it. Finally, I broke away and turned off the burner and we walked, still kissing, to the living room, where we fell on the couch.

  He was mine again, and he was leaving, going off to war. I’d never expected this; I had lived through a war and looked at other girls crying in train stations and bus stations and I’d only seen the romance of it, the luxury of so many tears. I hadn’t realized that inside all those girls was the terrible knowing that who they loved was going away and might not come back.

  For a minute the former tenant flashed into my mind, Bridget Warwick, waiting in a quiet apartment, believing her husband would come back, and hearing the bell ring one day and a man with a telegram on the other side of the door.

  “I just want to hold you,” he said. “I want to remember this.” He drew back and looked at my face. And then he yawned.

  I laughed, and he laughed, too.

  “Am I boring you?” I asked, and we both laughed again. Billy slid off the couch and leaned his head back against it.

  “I’m sorry, I’m just so tired…. It was a long bus ride to get here.”

  I patted the couch cushion. “Come on back up here.” We lay on the couch together, my head on his shoulder. He played with my hand. “This is nice.”

  “Nice,” I agreed.

  “It’s kind of like our dream, isn’t it?” he said.

  “It is our dream,” I said, and the stab of guilt I felt made me feel queasy. It was a dream orchestrated by his father, the web that Billy had dropped into without knowing it was a baited trap.

  I heard his breathing slow, and his hand slipped out of mine. Carefully, slowly, I drew back to look at him. His eyelashes on his cheek, his lips slightly parted, he looked peaceful and young.

  He said he was changed. And
I felt it, I felt the change. His kisses had been sweet and loving. He hadn’t pushed or pressed. Something was missing, and I could put my finger right on it. It was desperation.

  All I felt was warmth and sweetness, and I fell back against his shoulder. He stirred and rested his head on top of mine. Then I thought of Nate, and I stiffened. Billy was here, and I should call his father. That had been our agreement. But how could I, with Billy right here? I couldn’t, not yet. I needed to hold this sweetness, my spoonful of honey. For just one more day.

  I lay there stiffly now, afraid to move, afraid to wake him up, afraid to curl into him. Nate had come between us. What if Billy came to the club tonight, and his father was there? What if someone told him that Nate was there often, that Nate and I knew each other, that we’d spoken, that we’d even had a dance together? What would Billy say, how would he feel? Discovery felt so close now. I hadn’t done anything wrong, not really. I’d accepted a loan of a place to stay. Was that so wrong? I went over and over the decision. I was trying to protect Billy, that’s all.

  Obviously, I hadn’t thought this through. Had Nate?

  I looked at the clock. It was time to go, but I didn’t want to wake Billy. I slipped off the couch and hurried to dress. I put on my makeup, knowing that I wouldn’t get to the club on time. When I came back into the living room, Billy was sitting up, his face soft and sleepy. I wanted to hurl myself into his lap, but I just stopped and smiled.

  “You look so… sophisticated,” he said. “Like a movie star.”

  “Stage makeup. Look, you’re exhausted. Why don’t you go to Brooklyn, and come over tomorrow morning.”

  He stood and stretched. “No, I’ll come with you to the club. I want to see the show.”

  I hesitated. What if Nate was there? “Are you sure? You can catch it another night. There’s not much to see, anyway. I’m just another girl in the line.”

  “You’re never just another girl.” He stood and tucked in his shirt. “Come on, get your coat. I don’t want you to be late. They might blame me.”