He didn’t go any farther than the vestibule that separated the kitchen from the door to the garage. His breath was raggedy and hoarse and he planned to make a dash for the basement before Nora got a look at him, but when he peeked into the kitchen he saw Ace McCarthy sitting there with his boots up on a chair, drinking a Coke.
They looked at each other, startled.
“Jesus,” Ace said finally. He dropped his feet to the floor and put down his Coke. “What the hell happened to you?”
Billy didn’t answer. He never would have guessed it was Ace, even though he knew his mother had been having someone over to the house; he’d hear them whispering sometimes at night, he’d notice extra towels in the laundry basket, he’d wake suddenly, from the deepest of sleeps, with some man’s thought in his head. He didn’t know what his mother and this man were doing, but he knew they were doing something, and he knew he shouldn’t let on. If he had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night he would pee into an orange juice bottle he kept in his room.
Ace began to inspect him. “Man,” he said. “They really got you good.” Ace went to the sink and let the water run. “Come on.” He nodded to Billy. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
Billy washed his hands and face. His forehead stung. He couldn’t bring himself to look at Ace.
“Where does your mother keep the Bactine?” Ace said.
“In the hall closet,” Billy said.
“Right,” Ace said. “So does mine.”
Ace got the Bactine and some cotton balls and cleaned off the back of Billy’s neck. Billy winced and pulled away. He could not understand what his mother and Ace could possibly want from each other.
“Two against one?” Ace said.
“Three,” Billy said.
“Fucking animals,” Ace said.
“So what?” Billy said, glaring at him. “I don’t care.”
“Yeah, well, you should,” Ace said. He reached for the report card that was sticking out of Billy’s waistband and took a look at it. “You’re a mess,” he said. “Tell your mother you got rope burn on your neck during gym. And don’t even bother trying to forge this.” He handed back the report card. “What’d you do, get out early today and you didn’t even let your mother know?”
“I don’t have to tell you anything,” Billy said. “Where’s my mother?”
Ace swallowed hard. “She’s in the shower and I’m baby-sitting.”
“Oh, yeah,” Billy said.
“I hate fresh kids,” Ace told him. Billy leaned against the counter; he looked so small and defeated that Ace couldn’t stand to see it. “These three guys your friends?” Ace asked.
“Nah,” Billy said.
“You don’t have any friends,” Ace guessed.
“So what?” Billy said.
“So who’re you gonna play ball with?”
“I don’t play,” Billy said.
“What?” Ace said. “Did I hear you correctly?” He got his jacket and pulled it on. “You’re one sick kid, anyone ever tell you that before?”
“So what!” Billy cried.
They stared at each other.
“Go get a ball and a bat,” Ace said, deciding to cut his last class. When Billy didn’t move, he added, “You’ve got one, don’t you?”
Billy went to his room and brought back the ball and bat Nora had once bought him.
“Jesus,” Ace said. The bat was still in a shopping bag. He pulled it out. “Get a jacket and let’s go.”
They went through the side yard and then walked down to the high school, not saying a word. The field was frozen mud, but they went out to the diamond.
“I’ll pitch them straight at you,” Ace said. “All you have to do is hit them.”
Billy nodded and raised the bat. He missed the first five in a row. Ace walked across the diamond to him.
“I’m a great pitcher,” he said. “All you have to do is relax and get loose.”
Billy looked up at him, puzzled.
“Stop thinking,” Ace told him.
They practiced all afternoon, and by the time they were done it got so that Billy missed only two balls out of every three.
“I didn’t think I could do it,” Billy said. He was out of breath and had to run to keep up with Ace.
“Yeah, well, you can’t,” Ace said. “Not yet.”
All the way home Ace tried to figure how much the kid knew. He certainly wasn’t giving anything away. “I’ll be back tomorrow after school,” Ace said when they got to Billy’s driveway.
“You’d be here anyway,” Billy said. “Wouldn’t you?”
It did no good to lie to this kid; anyone could see that.
“Not at two forty-five I wouldn’t,” Ace said. “I’d be long gone by then.”
“You don’t have to do this,” Billy said. “I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
“Look,” Ace said. “I don’t have to do anything.”
“Yes, you do,” Billy said primly. “Everyone has to do some things.”
“Did you see anybody holding a knife to my throat out on the field?” Ace said.
Billy had to admit that he hadn’t. He swung the bat over his shoulder and watched Ace walk across the lawn. When Billy finally went into his house, Nora was already setting dinner on the table.
“Where were you?” she asked.
“Playing ball with Ace McCarthy,” Billy said. He went to the refrigerator, got himself a glass of milk, and filled James’s bottle.
“Me bab!” James cried.
“You don’t play ball,” Nora said.
She was spooning out mashed potatoes that stuck to the spoon like glue. There were pink spots on her cheeks, but other than that she didn’t look upset.
“I’ve started,” Billy said.
Nora got out the ketchup and sat down at the table. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she hadn’t bothered with makeup. “Anything you want to talk to me about?” she said casually as she cut James’s hamburger into tiny pieces.
Billy looked up at her. The cuts on his neck and forehead burned, his coat was rolled up under the bridal wreath, his report card was still in his pants, and he knew something about his mother and Ace that he wasn’t supposed to know.
“Nope,” he said.
“How’s your hamburger?” Nora asked.
She had taken a bite of the meat; it was so dry she had felt as though she might choke.
“Great,” Billy said.
Nora watched him douse his burger with ketchup and thought he was a particularly good liar, maybe even better than his father. Roger always grinned too widely when he lied; he used to make physical contact, reach out and grab and then hold on tight, as if he could bodily force you into believing him.
After the meal, Nora got out some cups of Junket she had dotted with maraschino cherries.
“You know you can ask me anything you want, right?” she said to Billy as she spooned Junket into James’s mouth. “You can tell me anything at all.”
Billy concentrated on his dessert and mumbled, “Yeah.”
“Look at me, Billy!” Nora demanded.
So he did and he picked up the word Lie from her and he knew he was a dead duck.
“I want the truth,” Nora said, praying that Ace had been dressed if Billy had found him in the house.
Billy put down his spoon and pulled out his report card and laid it on the table. Nora looked at the wrinkled report card, puzzled, then flipped it open and saw the Fs circled in red.
“Oh,” she said.
“It’s not my fault,” Billy said.
Nora got a pen and signed her name to the report card. She kissed Billy on the top of his head, and when she asked if he wanted another serving of Junket, Billy ignored the fact that he was completely full and said, “Oh, yes. Please.”
7
MERCY
NORA SILK STAYED IN BED LISTENING to the ice melt on her roof. The cat was curled up at the foot of her bed; the curtains were not completely drawn, an
d she could see a wedge of blue sky. It was the first of March, a mild, pale day, a good day for hanging laundry out on the line. A year ago today she had been in a Laundromat on Eighth Avenue, a horrible place where the clientele sat hunched over, ignoring each other while their most private underwear flew past the glass in the dryers. She always took the boys and they’d sit there, held hostage by their clothes, because the one time she’d left the laundry and taken Billy out for hot chocolate, they returned to find that someone had stolen all their clothes, which hadn’t even been dried. Someone had simply taken the whole sopping mess and left the washer door ajar. On this day a year earlier, Nora had bought Billy every kind of snack food imaginable just so he’d sit still. She kept the baby up on one washer, while she jammed their clothes into another. After she’d slipped her quarter into the washer, she looked up and saw Billy across the room, all scrunched up in one of the orange plastic chairs. He was tapping his feet and popping Milk Duds into his mouth and he had those awful bald spots and Nora’s heart had dropped into the pit of her stomach and she thought, Anything is better than this; but now, after six months on Hemlock Street, she wasn’t so sure.
She was still waiting for one of the other mothers on the block to drop off a cake or invite her for coffee or suggest that she bring the children over to play. The truth of it was they still wouldn’t talk to her when they ran head into her with their carts in the A&P. On the first Monday of every month Nora hired Rickie Shapiro so she could go to the PTA meeting in the school cafeteria, and she made certain to wear flats now instead of her stiletto heels; and still when she raised her hand to speak the board members, who sat up at the first table, refused to recognize her and conversation would stop dead after the meeting when she came up to the refreshment table with an angel cake or a pan of muffins.
Studying the other women in the cafeteria, Nora began to realize that they didn’t really talk to each other either, even the ones who saw each other nearly every day. Their mouths were going a mile a minute, but they were lying to each other, and they lied about the smallest thing, whether their children were getting good grades at school, how they felt about their mothers, what their husbands had whispered in their ears, as if any truth would be a horrible admission. Nora could always tell when they were lying because their necks would grow rosy and they’d run their tongues over their lips as if their mouths were dry. And when Nora had finished stirring sugar into her tea and stepped up next to a group and sighed “Jesus Christ, I’m tired,” after a day when she’d sold four cartons of Tupperware and fixed supper for the kids and hung out her laundry and done the food shopping and helped Billy with his homework and changed the baby’s diaper nine times and reapplied fresh lipstick three times, the other mothers would stare down at the floor, embarrassed, as if she’d made the crudest remark they’d ever heard. And once in a while one of the other women, the younger ones with three or four small children, would say “I am too” before she could stop herself and then she’d look guilty and break into a sweat and forever after avoid Nora like the plague.
On the days when Nora looked out her window and the chain-link fences looked suspiciously like prison gates or when she longed to go dancing or have Ace stay with her the whole night through, she forced herself to think about laundry drying in the fresh air, about her baby’s footprints on the grass, and cicadas and lilacs and baseball. She’d give Hemlock Street another month or two or six, two years at the most, because it was worth it for her children not to grow up as she had, isolated and so desperate for people that she fled to Manhattan as soon as she turned eighteen and said yes to the first man who asked her to marry him. She was working in the Joke Store on Lexington Avenue; she’d met Roger there when he came in to buy six exploding cigars, not for his act, but for dinner parties, where they were always a big hit. He told her afterward that what had attracted him most was how completely happy she was, there behind a counter crowded with junk and bad jokes. And why shouldn’t she be? When Roger had met her Nora thought it was heaven enough just not to be in New Jersey any longer. She’d been raised by her grandfather, Eli, twenty miles outside of Atlantic City, out beyond the marshes, in a run-down house surrounded by chicken coops. Eli was an electrician, and a good one. He could have lived anywhere, but he happened to despise, or at the very least mistrust, people. You would have thought he’d have some faith in science, would trust the mechanics of his own trade, but when he talked about wiring new buildings he always spat over his shoulder, so as not to jinx the job, and if a blackbird flew over a house he refused to go inside. When Nora was sick he wrapped her cuts in spiderwebs and gave her a mixture of rosemary, horehound, and cherry bark for her bronchitis and never once took her to a doctor’s office. He, himself, drank a mugful of his own personal elixir made out of woodruff, nettle, and thyme every day and he lived to be ninety-three, all on his own, taking only Christmas, Easter, and the Fourth of July off from work. He never touched a drop of liquor and he was convinced that cigarettes left tar on your lungs and he never raised a hand to another man in anger. He didn’t have to, he had his own ways of righting things when he was wronged, and maybe that was why he liked to live out by the marshes, where the sea grass turned silver after the moon rose and no one complained if you kept some chickens.
When Eli was stiffed on a bill or insulted by a bigger man, he never said a word. But at night he would make small figures out of beeswax and food coloring, which he’d shape with his thin whittling knife, and by morning the dispute would be righted somehow. When she was a girl, Nora begged for some of these dolls to play with and her grandfather, who would have given her the world, or his world at any rate, and who drove ten miles to buy her jelly doughnuts every Sunday, slapped her hand if she reached for the figures he was working on. Later, when she was more interested in climbing out her bedroom window and meeting her boyfriends to drive to Atlantic City, Nora began to think of her grandfather’s whittling as quaint, something like folk art or quilting.
When he died, in his own bed during a thunderstorm, Eli left Nora everything, even though he had met Roger twice and despised him, but then who, if anyone, would he have approved of? Nora was pregnant with Billy when she drove down to the house, alone, because Roger needed a good fourteen hours of sleep on days when he performed. She wept in the kitchen and took off her charm bracelet and packed up her grandfather’s clothes for Goodwill and the few personal items, his watch and his wedding ring, for herself. Before she left she dug up two orange lilies from beside the house, but they wilted as soon as she entered Manhattan and then died on her windowsill. For two years her grandfather’s house stayed on the market and then finally a chicken farmer bought the place, and the three thousand dollars Nora had left after taxes and outstanding bills went into a cigar box. She never told Roger about her inheritance, thinking she would someday surprise him, take him on a trip to Europe or buy him two new tuxedos and a gold ring, but in fact she used part of the money to pay the hospital bills when Billy and James were born, and the rest she used as her down payment for the house on Hemlock Street.
In a way, then, this was her grandfather’s house, although certainly he would have hated the neighborhood beyond words. He would have been spitting over his shoulder day and night. He would have known, long before Nora found Billy’s bloodstained coat under the bridal wreath, that something was wrong. Nora ran the coat through the wash and dried it in the basement and hung it in Billy’s closet without saying a word. She crossed her fingers and waited, she thought good thoughts and experimented with casseroles that contained olive loaf and hoped that would be enough. But it wasn’t. Stevie Hennessy just couldn’t leave Billy alone. Billy’s other tormentors had grown bored, but not Stevie, and he knew no limits. Billy’s blanket was now as small as a potholder, he could keep it in his pocket and stroke it when he was nervous, but one day he forgot it in his desk and when he remembered he saw that Stevie had already gotten it and was cutting the piece of material into bits with a pair of scissors. Billy got up to
grab it away, but the teacher asked him where he thought he was going and she ordered him to his seat. Billy had to sit back down and watch Stevie destroy his blanket; and he put his head down on his desk, embarrassed, because he was crying. It should have been a good day—Billy had batting practice with Ace to look forward to—but now Stevie Hennessy had ruined everything. Billy cried on and off all day, and at dismissal his eyes burned when he had to look at the floor as he walked past Stevie.
“Baby,” Stevie said, rubbing the last remaining scrap of the blanket between his fingers. “Snotface.”
Billy walked right past him, out into the hall.
“Why don’t you go back where you belong?” Stevie said, following him. “Sewer rat. Your mother is a whore.”
Billy turned around and he was so surprised to be facing Stevie Hennessy that he nearly tripped.
“Take it back,” Billy said, and hearing his own voice he thought he must really be crazy.
Stevie lost his balance for a moment, then regained it and came closer. He was as big as a fifth-grader; he grinned when he looked down at Billy. “What?” he said.
“You heard me,” Billy said. “Jerkface.”
Stevie pushed him and Billy pushed back, and when he did Stevie’s eyes lit up. He punched Billy hard in the face, and in spite of himself Billy let out a wail, but Stevie pushed him up against the wall and hit him again, in the mouth.
“Who’s the jerkface?” Stevie said, and he walked away and left Billy gasping for air. Billy felt dizzy and his mouth tasted like rusty iron. He stood there buttoning his coat, then walked to the front door. The VW was already there, idling in front of the buses, and Stevie was across the street, so Billy had no choice. He went to the car and got in.