“Iddyboy’s already halfway up Moody Street, he not only wants to get to his homework as soon as possible because it takes him six hours to get it—”
“—flying on fast feet he strides past the Silver Star saloon, the big tree in front the girls’ school, the statue, the—”
“—here he is”—(Lauzon and Zagg now vying to scream these informations to G.J. and all the others)—“six hours to get it done his homework but he has to eat his three hamburgers before supper and play six games of pish nut with Terry his sister—”
“—no time for any old Iddyboy to hang around and have a smoke and talk in front of high school and let Joe Maple see him and report him to the headmaster, Iddyboy the most honest hardworking never-played-hooky-in-his-life student in United States of America is leading the parade home up Moody . . . Long after him come the girls with their ga-dam bandanas and bananas. . . .”
“—Whattaguy that Iddyboy! There he goes in the snow.” G.J. had taken up and was pointing him out. “See the snow hides his ass now. . . . Eeedy-bye oo You Babe OObloo is the salt of the earth, the top of the soup, the—no shit the finest kid that ever walked this God’s green if we’re gonna be ever saved . . . A little peace before we die, dear Lord,” said G.J., concluding, making the sign of the cross, as everybody looked at him out of the corners of their eyes for the next laugh.
And the bright and merry corner was all theirs for a fifteen-minute interlude standing and talking in the youth of their hometown days. “Whattaya say there Zagg,” said G.J., suddenly and roughly he grabbed Zagg and pulled him down into a headlock and rubbed his hair and laughed. “Good old Zagg, all the time he’s standin there with a big smile on his face . . . what a good kid you are Zaggo—Scotty never had more gold in his teeth with his Kid Faro dealings than you in your cracky cock-eyed always down in the mouth eyes shine to show Zagg, that’s no kidding Zagg . . . In the interests of which, burp, brup,” lifting his leg several times in a lewd meaning, “I shall have to apply the headlock to you several vises tighter till you cry for mercy from Turko G.J. the Masked Ga-dam Marvel of Lowell decides to ease up and hand his mercy—back, gentlemen, while I bring Zaggo Dejesus Dulouz to his ga-dam knees once and mighty for all—”
“Look, six thousand little kids in Destouches’ store buying up all the licorice and caramels—chewing stones in ‘em—Comics . . . What a life when you think of it—All the little kids lined up at Boisvert’s waitin for beans on Saturday night, in the cold wind, hey Mouse take it easy,” Zagg said from the headlock below. They stood, all six, Zaza the funny furious rage of a cat; Vinny suddenly laughing and slapping Lousy and yelling in his rich throatbroken voice “Good old Belgium Kid Louso you sen-e-ve-bitch!”; Scotty thinking “You think they’ll lend me the money and sign on the dotted line so I can get that car next summer, never”; Jack Dulouz beaming, aureating the universe in his head, eyes blazing; Mouse Rigopoulos nodding final confirmation with himself that all things would end and end very sadly; and Albert Lauzon, wise, silent, amazing, spitting soundlessly a little dry snowflake of spit through his teeth to mark the general peace, with them and without them, there and not there, child, old man, the sweetest; all six standing there, silent at last, straight-backed, looking at their Square of life. Never dreaming.
5
Never dreaming, was I, poor Jack Duluoz, that the soul is dead. That from Heaven grace descends, the ministers thereof . . . No Doctor Pisspot Poorpail to tell me; no example inside my first and only skin. That love is the heritage, and cousin to death. That the only love can only be the first love, the only death the last, the only life within, and the only word . . . choked forever.
It was at the dance. The Rex Ballroom; with coat attendants in a drafty hall, a window, coatroom racks, fresh snow spilled on the boards; the rosy girls and handsome boys running in, the boys clacking heels, the girls in high heels, short dresses of the Thirties showing sexy legs. With awe we teenagers gave up our coats, got our brass disks, walked into the great sigh of the ballroom all six with fear, unknown sorrows. The band was on the stand, a young band, some seventeen-year-old musicians, tenors, trombones; an old pianist; a young leader; they struck up the sad lament of a ballad. “The smoke from my cigarette climbs through the air. . . .” The dancers met, engaged, shuffled; powder on the floor; lights playing in polkadots around the hall with its upstairs balcony where cool young sitters watched. The six boys stood at the entrance undecided, raw, foolish; turning sheepish smiles to one another for support; starting off in a halting gang, down the wall, past the wallflowers, the cold windows of winter, the seats, the other gangs of boys stiff collared and slick; the sudden group of jitterbugs with long hair and pegged pants. A bird of sadness whirled slowly around the room with the polkadots, singing love and death. . . . “The walls of my room fade away in the blue and I’m deep in a dream of you. . . .”
A jitterbug kid we knew was there. Whitey St. Claire from Cheever Street, long hair, pegged pants, bushy eyebrows, a strange serious interesting look, five feet tall, flashy dissipated rings under his eyes. “Oh Gene Krupa is the maddest drummer in the world! I saw him in Boston! He was the end! Look, you guys gotta learn to jitterbug! Watch!” With his little male partner Chummy Courval, who was even shorter and inconceivably sadder and more glamorous and with a button-down lounge lapel longer than almost his whole body, he joined hands and dug in heels in the floor and they flammed and whammed to show us.
Us, the gang: “What funny guys!”
“Amazing maniacs!”
“Did you hear what he said? Sixteen blondes fainted!”
“What a way to dance—I wish I could do it!”
“Now we’ll get to meet some girls and throw em on the couch you babe!”
“We’ll smoke them reefers and become big sex fiends you babe! Zeet?”
Whitey introduced me to Maggie. “I tried and tried to work that chick!” I saw her, standing in the crowd, forlorn, dissatisfied, dark, unpleasantly strange. Half reluctantly we were brought together and paraded to the floor arm in arm.
Maggie Cassidy—that in its time must have been Casa d’Oro—sweet, dark, rich as peaches—dim to the senses like a great sad dream—
“I suppose you’re wondering what an Irish girl can be doing at a New Year’s Eve dance unescorted,” she said to me on the dancefloor; I, dope, had before danced only once, with Pauline Cole, high school sweetheart. (“She’ll be jealous!” I enjoyed the thought.)
I didnt know what to say to Maggie, slavish I tied my tongue to the gate.
“Oh come on—say, you’re a football player Whitey said.
“Whitey?”
“Whitey that introduced us, dummy.”
It pleased me to be called a name, as though she was a younger sister—
“Do you get hurt often? my brother Roy gets hurt all the time that’s why I hate football. I suppose you like it. You’ve got a bunch of friends. They look like a nice bunch of fellas—Do you know Jimmy Noonan in Lowell High?” She was nervous, curious, gossipy, womany: at the same time suddenly she’d caress me, say, at this early beginning, the necktie, adjust it; or push back my uncombed hair; something maternal, fleet, sorry. My hands clawed into fists to think of her when I got home that night. For, just ripened, the flesh bulged and was firm from under her shiny dress belt; her mouth pouted soft, rich, red, her black curls adorned sometimes the snow-smooth brow; up from her lips came rosy auras hinting all her health and merriness, seventeen years old. She leaned on one leg with the laze of a Spanish cat, a Spanish Carmen; she turned throwing fecund hair in quick knowing sorrying glances; she herself jeweled in the mirror; I looked blankly over her head to think of other things.
“Got a girl?”
“In high school—Pauline Cole is my girl, I met her under the clock every afternoon after third bell—” Iddyboy’s rapid homeward walk now far away news in this new head of mine.
&nb
sp; “And you tell me right away you got a girl!” Her teeth at first didnt seem attractive; her chin had a little doublechin of beauty, if the men will understand . . . that unnamed dimple chin, to perfection, and Spanish—her lip curled, slightly parted teeth charmed and enhanced sensuous, drowning lips, devourous lips; so at first you saw the little pearly teeth—
“You’re probably an honest boy—You’re French Canadian aintcha? I bet all the girls go for you, I bet you’re gonna be a big success.” I was going to grow up to walk in sleet in fields; didnt know it then.
“Oh—” blushing—“not exactly—”
“But you’re only sixteen years old, you’re younger than me, I’m seventeen—” She brooded and bit her rich lips: my soul began its first sink into her, deep, heady, lost; like drowning in a witches’ brew, Keltic, sorcerous, starlike. “That makes me old enough ha ha,” and she laughed her own incomprehensible girly jokes as I put my hard arm around her soft waist and took her dancing awkward dumb steps under the balloons and crinkly pop funhats of New Year’s Eve America and the world orange and black like the Snow Hallowe’en, dumb and swallowing in my ignorance and position in time—People watching us saw the girl, timid, pretty, rather small-faced in a small hair crown but on closer inspection cameo-like in choiceness but no paleness eyes therein, the gimlet fires in the beauty showed; and the boy, me, Jacky Duluoz, kid of writeups, track teams, home and believing goodheartedness with just a touch of the Canuck half-Indian doubt and suspicion of all things non-Canuck, non-half-Indian—a lout—the order of the lout on my arm—They saw this boy well-brushed though not combed consciously, still a kid, Suddenly big as a man, awkward, etc.—with serious blue-eyed pensive countryboy countenance sitting in gray high school halls in button-down sweater no water on his hair as photographer snaps line of home roomers—Boy and girl, arms around each other, Maggie and Jack, in the sad ball floor of life, already crestfallen, corners of the mouth giving up, shoulders loosening to hang, frowns, minds forewarned—love is bitter, death is sweet.
6
The Concord River flows by her house, in July evening the ladies of Massachusetts Street are sitting on wooden doorsteps with newspapers for fans, on the river the starlight shines. The fireflies, the moths, the bugs of New England summer rattlebang on screens, the moon looms huge and brown over Mrs. McInerney’s tree. Little Buster O’Day is coming up the road with his wagon, torn knees, punching it through holes in the unpaved ground, the streetlamp dropping a brown vast halo bugswept on his little homeward figure. Still, and soft, the stars on the river run.
The Concord River, scene of sand embankments, railroad bridges, reeds, bullfrogs, dye mills—copses of birch, vales, in winter the dreaming white—but now in July midsummer the stars roll vast and shiny over its downward flow to the Merrimack. The railroad train crashes over the bridges; the children beneath, among the tar poles, are swimming naked. The engine’s fire glow is red as it goes over, flares of deep hell are thrown on the little figures. Maggie is there, the dogs are there, little fires . . .
The Cassidys live on Massachusetts Street at No. 31—it’s a wood house, seven rooms, apple tree in back; chimney; porch, with screen, and swing; no sidewalk; rickety fence against which in June tall sunflowers lean at noon for wild and tender hallucinations of little infants playing there with wagons. The father James Cassidy is an Irishman, brakeman on the Boston and Maine; soon conductor; the mother, a former O’Shaughnessy with dove’s eyes still in her long-lost face of love now face of life.
The river comes between lovely shores narrowing. Bungalows scatter the landscape. The tannery’s over to the west. Little grocery stores with wood fences and dusty paths, grass, some drying-out wood at noon, the ring ding of the little bell, kids buying Bostons or penny Bolsters at lunch noon; or milk early Saturday morning when all is so blue and sweet for the day of the play. Cherry trees drops blossoms in May. The funny gladness of the cat rubbing against the porch steps in the drowsy two o’clock when Mrs. Cassidy with her littlest daughter returns from shopping at Kresge’s downtown, gets off the bus at the junction, walks seven houses down Massachusetts Street with her bundles, the ladies see her, call out “What’d you buy Mrs. Cassidy? Is that fire sale still on at Giant store?”
“Radio says it is . . .” another greeter.
“Wasnt you on the Strand program on the sidewalk interviews?—Tom Wilson asked the silliest questions—Hee hee hee!”
Then among themselves “That little girl must have rickets the way she walks—”
“Those cakes she gave me yesterday I just had to throw them away—”
And the sun beams gladly on the woman at the gate of her house. “Now where can Maggie be? I told her a dozen times I wanted that wash hung out before I got back even if it was eleven o’clock—”
And at night the river flows, it bears pale stars on the holy water, some sink like veils, some show like fish, the great moon that once was rose now high like a blazing milk flails its white reflection vertical and deep in the dark surgey mass wall river’s grinding bed push. As in a sad dream, under the streetlamp, by pocky unpaved holes in dirt, the father James Cassidy comes home with lunchpail and lantern, limping, redfaced, and turns in for supper and sleep.
Now a door slams. The kids have rushed out for the last play, the mothers are planning and slamming in kitchens, you can hear it out in swish leaf orchards, on popcorn swings, in the million-foliaged sweet wafted night of sighs, songs, shushes. A thousand things up and down the street, deep, lovely, dangerous, aureating, breathing, throbbing like stars; a whistle, a faint yell; the flow of Lowell over rooftops beyond; the bark on the river, the wild goose of the night yakking, ducking in the sand and sparkle; the ululating lap and purl and lovely mystery on the shore, dark, always dark the river’s cunning unseen lips murmuring kisses, eating night, stealing sand, sneaky.
“Mag-gie!” the kids are calling under the railroad bridge where they’ve been swimming. The freight train still rumbles over a hundred cars long, the engine threw the flare on little white bathers, little Picasso horses of the night as dense and tragic in the gloom comes my soul looking for what was there that disappeared and left, lost, down a path—the gloom of love. Maggie, the girl I loved.
7
In winter night Massachusetts Street is dismal, the ground’s frozen cold, the ruts and pock holes have ice, thin snow slides over the jagged black cracks. The river is frozen to stolidity, waits; hung on a shore with remnant show-off boughs of June—Ice skaters, Swedes, Irish girls, yellers and singers—they throng on the white ice beneath the crinkly stars that have no altar moon, no voice, but down heavy tragic space make halyards of Heaven on in deep, to where the figures fantastic amassed by scientists cream in a cold mass; the veil of Heaven on tiaras and diadems of a great Eternity Brunette called night.
Among these skaters Maggie performed; in her sweet white skates, white muff, you see the flash of her eye in their pools of darkness all the more strikingly: the pinkness of her cheek, her hair, the crown of her eyes corona’d by God’s own bent wing—For all I knew as I toasted my skated feet at Concord River fires in the February Lowell, Maggie could have been the mother or the daughter of God—
Dirty snow piled in the gutters of Massachusetts Street, something forlorn hid in little pits of dirt, dark—the mute companions of my midnight walks from the overpowering lavish of her kisses.
She gave me a kiss upsidedown in the chair, it was a winter night not long after I’d met her, I was in the dark room with the big radio with its throbbish big brown dial that Vinny also had in his house and I’m rocking in the chair, Mrs. Cassidy her mother is in her own kitchen the way my mother three miles across town was—same old big old good old Lowell lady in her eternity wiping the dishes putting them away in the clean cupboards with that little feminate neatness and orderly ideas of how to go about things—Maggie’s on the porch goofing in the icy night a minute with Bessy Jones h
er chum from the bungalow across the street, a big fat red-haired goodnatured girl with freckles and whose inconceivably feeble little brother sometimes delivered me notes from Maggie written the night before school in some brown light of her bedroom or in the morning at pipe keen frost, to hand to him, over the crackly fence, and he in his usual round of days trudged to school two miles away or took the bus and as he rheumy-eyedly weepingly came into his Spanish class which was every morning the second and impossibly dull he handed me the note sometimes with a feeble little joke—just a little kid, for some reason they’d shoved him on to high school through red morning cold parochials where he skipped grades and missed the sixth, or fifth, or both, and here he was a little kid with a hunting rag cap with a Scottish haggle tassel and we believed him to be like our age. Maggie would plant the note in his thin freckly hand, Bessy’d be giggling from behind the open kitchen window, she’s taking advantage of the window being open and also putting the empty milk-bottles out. Little Massachusetts Street in the cold mornings of rosy snow sun in January is alive with the fragrant whip of blacksmoke from all the cottage chimneys; on the white frozen cap of the Concord River we see last night’s bonfire a charred ruinous black spot near the thin bare reddish reeds of the other shore; the whistle of the Boston and Maine engine sounds across the trees, you shudder and pull your coat tighter to hear it. Bessy Jones . . . sometimes she’d write notes to me too, giving instructions on how to win Maggie, that Maggie’d also read. I accepted everything.
“Maggie loves you,” etc., “she’s madder about you than I can ever remember her being mad about anybody else” and in effect she’d say “Maggie loves you, but dont try her patience—tell her you want to marry her or sumptin.” Young girls—giggly—on the porch—as I sit in the living-room dark waiting for Maggie to come back on the chair with me. My tired track team legs are beneath me, folded. I hear other voices on the Cassidy porch, some boys, that Art Swenson I heard about—I feel jealousy but it’s only the bare beginning of all the jealousy that came later. I’m waiting for Maggie to come and kiss me, make it official. While waiting I have ample time to review our love affair; how the first night she’d meant nothing to me when we danced, I held her, she seemed small, thin, dark, unsubstantial, not important enough—Just her strange rare sadness coming from the other side of something made me barely notice she was there: her pretty looks . . . all girls had pretty looks, even G.J. hadnt mentioned her. . . . The profundity wave of her womanhood had not yet settled over me. That was New Year’s Eve—after the dance we’d walked home in the cold night, the snow was over, just tight and soft on the implacable frozen ground, we passed long construction oil flares like avenues and parades on our way down to South Lowell and the banks of the Concord—the silent frost on the rooftops in the starlight, ten degrees above zero. “Sit on the porch awhile anyway—” There were little children-whimpering understandings between us that we would join our lips and kiss even if we had to do it outdoors—The thought of it had begun to excite me even then. But now, waiting in the chair, and why worry about time, the meaning of her kissed had become all things to me. In the variety of the tone of her words, moods, hugs, kisses, brushes of the lips, and this night the upside-down kiss over the back of the chair with her dark eyes heavy hanging and her blushing cheeks full of sweet blood and sudden tenderness brooding like a hawk over the boy over the back, holding the chair on both sides, just an instant, the startling sudden sweet fall of all her hair over my face and the soft downward brush of her lips, a moment’s penetration of sweet lip flesh, a moment’s drowned in thinking and kissing in it and praying and hoping and in the mouth of life when life is young to burn cool skin eye-blinking joy—I held her captured upside down, also for just a second, and savored the kiss which first had surprised me like blind man’s bluff so I didnt know really who was kissing me for the very first instant but now I knew and knew everything more than ever, as, grace-wise, she descended to me from the upper dark where I’d thought only cold could be and with all her heavy lips and breast in my neck and on my head and sudden fragrance of the night brought with her from the porch, of some 5 & 10 cheap perfumes of herself the little hungry scent of perspiration warm in her flesh like preciousness.