“Never mind spuds,” said Bullock, “where’s your auntie? She was supposed to ring me.”
Pat stared at Bullock.
“Ring you?” he said. “Is that what she said?”
Bullock nodded.
“Aye. Tuesday, she said. She said she’d ring Tuesday.”
Pat stroked his chin quizzically.
“And she never did?”
“No,” replied Bullock glumly. “I waited the whole night.”
“That’s a pity,” said Pat.
Bullock stared at a flattened sweet paper on the pavement for a moment, then raised his head.
“We were going to go to the hotel,” he said.
“Were you?” asked Pat.
“Aye. I was going to have a mate stew and she was going to have chicken curry. Did you ever hear of that?”
Pat nodded.
“Yes. She made it for me. They make it in America the whole time.”
A flicker of melancholy passed across Bullock’s eyes.
“It was all planned,” he said. “And then she never phoned.”
He broke off, then resumed.
“Maybe she hurt herself?”
Adding hopefully, “Maybe she fell and hurt her leg?”
Pat shook his head.
“No,” he replied impassively, “her leg’s fine.”
“Is it?” Bullock asked eagerly. “Then maybe you’ll tell her to ring me?”
Pat pushed out his lower lip, thought for a moment, and then said: “No—I can’t!”
There was a short pause and then he continued: “She’s gone, you see.”
The sound of Bullock swallowing was deadly audible in the early afternoon.
“Gone?” he said.
“Yes,” was Pat’s reply. “Gone back to America.”
The skin on Bullock’s forehead tightened. He moved in closer to Pat.
“But that can’t be!” he cried shrilly. “I bought her a ring!”
Pat frowned and coughed a little.
“Bought her a ring?” he said.
“Aye!” cried Bullock. “It cost me fifty pound!”
Pat considered for a moment or two and said: “I could send it to her if you like …”
Bullock’s face flushed a litde and his voice acquired an almost falsetto quality.
“Send it to her?” he cried. “You don’t send rings! Who ever heard tell of sending rings? We were supposed to be engaged, for the love of Jasus! Pat—are you trying to cod me?”
Pat shook his head vigorously.
“No, Bullock,” he assured the larger man. “She went yesterday, you see. She left a note. As a matter of fact, I think I might have it with me!”
Pat searched for some moments in the depths of his long black coat before eventually producing, among other things, a bottle cap bearing the inscription Time Ale, a chewing gum card of Ricky Nelson, a crushed packet of cigarettes, some pebbles, and then eventually a piece of rolled-up paper. “Look! Here it is!” he cried, as he unfolded the beautifully written note. The handwriting could only be described as copperplate.
Dear Pat: I am afraid I have to go home, it said.
The color drained from Bullock’s face as he devored its contents anew. There was a weariness in his voice (as though he had, all along, feared the worst). “Dear God!” he groaned mournfully. “And the crack we had!”
Pat’s smile spread right across his face as he placed his open palm on Bullock’s shoulder and remarked wistfully, “Oh indeed and I’m sure it was good now! I’ll bet not many had crack like youse, Bullock! For she’s a great girl! A great girl and no mistake!”
Bullock lowered his head sadly and took a last look at the crumpled piece of paper he held in his hand.
Pat’s first experience of this “crack,” as Bullock termed it, was arriving home with the messages to find his Auntie Babbie (the “living image of his mother,” they said in the town), who had just the very day before arrived home from America, now dancing in and out of an arrangement of chairs as Bullock McCoy stood in the corner clutching at the lapel of his Sunday blazer and winking—a tad excessively—as though afflicted with a severe nervous tic. When it was remarked that Babbie was the “living image” of Mrs. McNab (i.e., Maimie, her sister) this was to ignore the large peroxide beehive hairstyle which she possessed and the staggeringly vivid lime-green trouser (or “pant”) suit which appeared to be the most favored item in her wardrobe. “For she never seems to take it off,” thought Pat as he peered through the crack in the doorway—the dancers (for Bullock had now given himself wholeheartedly to the spirited maneuvers) throughout remaining entirely oblivious of his presence. As they proceeded now to whirl about the perimeter of the kitchen with even greater abandon, Babbie, in that curiously hybrid speech which appears common to all those who have resided for any appreciable length of time in both Brooklyn and Gullytown, cried breathlessly, “Phwee—oo! Ya wanna go round again, Bullock?” as her companion—his cheeks truly incandescent with excitement—replied, “Hell! Why not!” in what, it has to be acknowledged, was a somewhat unconvincing echo of big city chutzpah. Something which was not lost on Pat’s Auntie Babbie at all as she tweaked his cheek and teased him about it, squealing (for how else could you describe it?), “Listen to you!” before mimicking tiny mincing steps (her rear was enormous, Pat reflected, perhaps even four times the size of his mother’s) and, skipping across the room to the hi-fi, upon which she placed a long-playing record so that the entire house rang out with the shrill song she piped and encouraged her partner to emulate:
Come single belle and beau to me now pay attention
Don’t ever fall in love, ‘tis the divil’s own invention
For once I fell in love, with a maiden so bewitching
Miss Henrietta Bell, down in Captain Kelly’s kitchen.
Tooraloora loo, ri—tooraloora laddie!
Toooraloora a laddie!”
The last thing Pat could remember was the sound of his aunt’s high-pitched laughter as what appeared to be a four-legged technicolored animal lost its balance and disappeared behind the settee.
There are some things which perhaps can never be adequately explained, and surely this applies more than anything to certain aspects of human behavior. Why the mere echo of laughter ought to have elicited from Pat the reaction which it did that day—and there can be no denying that it was one which can be best described as being of an edgy, tremulous, and resentful nature—manifested most tangibly by the violence which he exacted upon the bagful of what were locally known as “messages” (in effect, unremarkable foodstuffs), raining blow after blow down upon the unfortunate cloth receptacle until all that remained was a shapeless and broken mess of eggs, citrus fruits, and sundry comestibles, from which coursed a variety of winding, intersecting rivers of thick liquid dribbling their way across the back doorstep. Aligned to this also was his disappearance to his room for a total of three days on end, throughout which he partook of no solids whatsoever, covering his ears with his hands and repeating, in the manner of an Eastern mystic applying himself to the recitation of a mantra, “I don’t hear anything! I don’t hear anything!” Something which he might well have continued to indulge himself in for a further quota of days had his aunt (in that intuitive manner Pat was to come to know extremely well in the weeks that followed—those glorious times before the “stab in the back” as he came to privately think of it) not lowered her voice and whispered in a deliciously lusty timber, “If you come out, you might get a litde surprise, Pat. You really might, you know! Oh yes!”
That Pat McNab should have found himself having the time of his life simply as a reward for vacating his room on request would probably come as a surprise to most people, considering he was at an age when most mature men would be busying themselves in their work and ensuring a good future for their children. Indeed, the very idea of a grown man laying back in the arms of a considerably ample woman who also happened to be his aunt would, in all likelihood, prove anathema to most pe
ople. But such was not the case with Pat McNab, and as he stared up into the big blue eyes of his mother’s sister (they were so like hers), it was hard for him not to utter every second when she smiled the words, “I love you, Aunt Babbie. I’m sorry I went bad for a while there.” As he knew he had, and felt thoroughly ashamed when she sniffled into her hankie, “I was only having a litde bit of fun with him, Pat, that’s all. We used to play together in the square when we were kids, you see.”
From the moment his aunt made that declaration, Pat privately took a solemn vow that he would never again upset her, and afterward rarely a day went by but she would wake up to find her favorite nephew standing at the bottom of the bed clad in his apron and removing the silver dome from a steamy plate of delicious food which he had prepared for her—a truly sumptuous repast of yummy breakfast, or “brekkie” as she and Pat came to call it later. Except not only brekkie—but brekkie American style! Yes, any amount of maple syrup-covered pancakes stacked as high as they would go and alongside them crispy rashers and eggs over easy and just about as many hash browns as you could get into your mouth. “Do you like that, Auntie?” Pat would say as he sat there admiring her from the side of the bed. As inevitably she replied, “I sure do, Patty!”
Which she sometimes called him. Patty! And oh boy did he like that! Especially when she put on her favorite record and gave him that special look, the look that said, “Wouldja like a little dance, Patty?” and off they’d go spinning around the kitchen to the sound of the very same tune that had Bullock McCoy almost tumbling the wildcat with desire on that very first day.
There are undoubtedly those who would be of the opinion that the relationship in which Pat and his aunt found themselves increasingly involved was ill-fated from the start and that, regardless of the complications which the involvement of Bullock McCoy were to eventually present, it would have been difficult, to say the least, to envisage any situation which might have ensured any alternate conclusion. Certainly, this would appear to be true from the moment Babbie—lightheartedly, it has to be said, for that was (tragically, as it transpired) how she perceived their relationship—permitted Pat to join her beneath the covers of her bed—not only that, but cradle his head on her shoulder and coo, “Go sleepies, my litde fellow. Sleepies for Auntie Babs now! Attaboy!” If the clock were indeed to be turned back and perhaps some action of an interventionist nature be taken, to avoid the inexorable, subsequent catastrophe, then this clearly would have been the precise moment.
There is something particularly tragic about the fissure which eventually opened up between Pat and his aunt—for there can be litde doubt that he adored the woman. Loved her, like Othello, beyond any reasonable expectation, a tendency which led him to place her upon a pedestal and, consequently, set in motion a train of events which would spell—for both of them, without doubt (and, in a peripheral sense, for Bullock McCoy)—tragedy destined to plunge them both into a pitch-black abyss of incalculable depth.
For what was unknown to Pat McNab was that his aunt, while outwardly an ordinary lime-green-suited mature lady returned from America, was secretly—and had been for a long time—a considerable amount more than that. It seems uncanny—almost absurd—that Pat did not note with some anxiety his aunt’s peculiar attitude to the absence of his mother (perhaps he did, but feared to admit it to himself).
Professing herself, as she did, contented with his explanation of “she’s gone to England on business,” seeming relieved—gratified, even—when, after repeated questioning sessions, for the duration of which she would grip him by the shoulders and breathlessly insist, “Where is she?” and “Are you sure?” and “Whereabouts?” she would eventually profess herself “disappointed” but disposed toward “endurance” when informed that her sister had been compelled to depart for England “on business.”
A journey which, to all who knew her—particularly her own blood kin, surely—must have defied logic, as Pat’s mother had never been to England in her life, much less involved herself in commercial transactions within its shores. What is undoubtedly tragic—duplicitous though it might seem (but what of it, if it succeeded in precluding heartache!)—is Pat’s failure to uncover earlier what might be described as “Auntie Babbie’s secret holdall,” an item which only came to light after his aunt “went away” and which contained within its remarkable interior what is best called “The Truth About Auntie Babbie.” As he clutched the videotapes in his hands, on that lachrymose day so long after all had turned to dust (they seemed to him as condensed blocks of sheer black badness), tears of regret and “what might have been” coursed down the cheeks of Pat McNab. For deep within him, he still loved his auntie and would have done anything to turn back the accursed tide of history that had made her what she was.
And not what she had been on that beautiful spring day in 1945 when she had first arrived in Ellis Island, clad in a light blue frock and swinging her cardboard suitcase as she strode along Madison Avenue, thinking to herself, “I’m Babbie Hawness! I sure am a long way from Gullytown now, guys!” already putting on an American accent to impress everyone. But Babbie Hawness was soon to discover just how difficult it could be impressing anyone in the city of New York in those dark, lacking-in-opportunity years of the forties. “Hurry up and clear those tables! Your phony Noo Yoik accent don’t impress me, Irish!” was the caustic type of response she found she could expect for her efforts. That and “Get yore ass in here and pull some beers!”
It should hardly come as any surprise that late into those New York nights she might sob herself to sleep and curse the day she ever saw fit to leave her beautiful, if impoverished, Gullytown. Where everyone looked out for you and where each evening all the neighbors gathered in the kitchen, shifted the dresser, and cheered wildly as the local fiddlers and musicians played wheeling, skirt-lifting music to the sound of:
Next Sunday being the day we were to have the flare-up I dressed myself quite gay and I frizzed and oiled my hair up As the captain had no wife, faith, he had gone out fishing So we kicked up high life down below stairs in the kitchen.
Memories of which—although it was arguable if any such incidents had ever actually occurred, for the Hawnesses had never owned a dresser—drilled into Babbie’s heart with the efficiency of a red-hot needle each and every night she left her miserable job in Sam’s Grill on 1st and 1st (or “foist on foist” as the perspiring oaf of a proprietor habitually referred to it). Added to that were the constant letters she received from her sister Maimie (How she hated her! But even more than ever now!) informing her of how she was “walking out” with a beautiful army captain who had promised to marry her soon and install her in a big old Victorian house on the edge of Gullytown where they were to make a lovely home for themselves and tentatively take the first steps toward rearing a family. How Babbie Hawness loathed those letters! How many times she had scrunched them up and spat all over them there are not enough numbers in any mathematical system to quantify! On occasion, her animosity reached such extremes that she would shove open the window of the damp and dreary hostel and call out to the cacophonous, honking parade below, “The bitch! She gets everything and I get nothing!”
Something which it would be very difficult to deny, for the sad facts are that right from the day she was born, Dodie Hawness (Pat’s maternal grandmother) had hated Babbie with a passion. “Little Miss Barbara,” she would often sneer, “with her knickers around her ankles again. Well, you needn’t think I’m pulling them up! Do it yourself, her ladyship with the snout!” Every attempt the small child that was Barbara Hawness made to elicit affection for herself would be met with a harsh rebuff. Her psychological body was bruised as if by repeated assaults of a resin-plastered boxing glove. Which may well be why eventually—inevitably, perhaps—a certain iron began to enter the soul of Babbie Hawness. It may be that, to employ the terminology current in this era of high technology and telecommunicadons, such data having been downloaded at an early age, there was a gloomy predictability about it
s appearance at a later stage. Or, as the Americans themselves might have it, reappearance and then some!
It all happened quite unexpectedly, on a grand Sunday morning in 1948, with events proceeding as per usual in the cafeteria, Sam taking absolutely no notice of people’s feelings as he flapped his white cotton cloth and barked, You do dis!” and “You do dat!”—absolutely astonished—for there is no word for it—when the girl whom he had taken to be the meekest in the diner—the most cowed, certainly—turned on her heel, suddenly rasping at him with a tongue that protruded serpentlike from her lips, “Why don’t you go and do it yourself for a change, you big fat meaty-jawed Greek bastard!”
Suffice to say that there was no employment available to her at that particular establishment thenceforward. But, in the days that followed, what dignity and sense of purpose Babbie Hawness might have expected as a dividend came close to being almost totally eroded by the hardship she was forced to endure as a consequence of her actions. There were many times when thoughts of self-destruction surfaced ominously, looming ever so logical and sweetly inviting. When, sitting on her suitcase, staring at the mass of rigging and webbed steel that swept out across the Hudson, she would bury her wet face in her fists and cry, “Oh God! How I wish I was dead!”
Which was, coincidentally, the very same sentiment she had just uttered in a small Forty-second Street cafe (“Dino’s”) precisely at the moment she found herself being joined by a man with the softest and most soothing voice she had ever heard. He, too, it transpired, had some relatives in Ireland, a McGurty from Dublin and some other acquaintances in Mayo. He was a filmmaker, he informed her, and that was how it all began, with the touch of his olive, signet-ringed hand and the words, “Would you like another milkshake, honey?”