Charming Billy by Alice McDermott Read Free Book Online

for Seagirt or waiting in line for two hours at the Jones Beach tolls.
    The man she had inherited it from, Holtzman, her second husband, had bought it during the Depression from another city dweller down on his luck and then with money problems of his own had all but abandoned it for nearly a decade. Toward the end of that decade, a petite redhead somewhere in her late forties began to visit his store on Jamaica Avenue, looking for size fours. With her tiny heel resting in the palm of his hand, he learned she was a widow with a son overseas. He took her phone number in order to call her when something new in her size came in. He took her to lunch, allowing her to leave her box of shoes behind the counter while his assistant ran the store. He gave her some stockings, and a handbag. He took her to dinner and, driving past the house in Jamaica that had been his childhood home, had said that he also owned another place, a little bungalow out on Long Island.
    She mentioned the house in a letter that reached my father while he was overseas. A regular laundry list, he said, of reasons why she should remarry. The house on Long Island was right up there near the top.
    He said there wasn’t anything at all about love.
    She was, according to my father, the most unsentimental woman he had ever known or even heard of. He blamed this mostly on her childhood. The only child of Scottish immigrants with delusions of grandeur, she had been raised in genteel poverty, given ballet and riding lessons, lessons in deportment and French and violin, until tuberculosis made her an orphan at twelve. She spent the next six years being passed from one already-overburdened relative to another and at eighteen had married a forty-four-year-old streetcar conductor so full of
blarney (as my father told it) and wild verse, of Tennyson and the Bard and Gilbert and Sullivan, that he’d had to import every brother and sister, cousin uncle niece and nephew from the other side simply to have enough ears in which to deposit it all. Which made him Holy Father to a tenement’s worth of Irish immigrants but kept his wife and son mostly impoverished and never—what with one wetback mick after another being reeled in from the other side and slapped down on their couch—alone in their own home.
    My mother might have been different, my father was fond of saying, if her life had been different (I was a teenager before I began to point out that this was true of us all), and I think that throughout his own life my father harbored in his heart a vision of his mother as a happy and pampered child whose bright eyes saw only the purest intentions.
    As it was, as he knew her and as I knew her, she was a Geiger counter for insincerity, phoniness, half-truths. She could dismantle a pose with a glance and deflate the most romantic notion with a single word. She had no patience for poetry, Broadway musicals, presidential politics, or the pomp of her religion—although my father, his father’s son, loved these things in direct proportion to her disdain—and she sought truth so single-mindedly that under her steady gaze exaggeration, self-delusion, bravado simply dried up and blew away, as did hope, nonsense, and any ungrounded giddiness.
    Her philosophy of life seemed to be to get to the bottom of things, the plain, unadorned, mostly concrete and colorless bottom of things, and from there to seek to swat away any passing fancy that might cloud the hard-won clarity of her vision. Because she was also intelligent and witty, and because all her cynicism was bolstered by a keen logic, she gained in her later years a reputation as a sage, but one whose advice friends
and family would seek only at the tail end of some experience when they were ready to be either reconciled to their disappointment or disabused of any vestige of hope for some unexpected change.
    When Holtzman died in 1964, she found a year-round tenant for the Long Island place, because it was at the time the