Charming Billy by Alice McDermott Read Free Book Online Page A

economically sensible thing to do. (Swatting away any sweet recollection of summer weekends spent there with her husband and her young grandchildren since—swat—the one was dead and the others growing so quickly that such weekends wouldn’t be continuing much longer anyway, and if they were to continue, at the expense of the steady income a year-round tenant could provide, they would really be more of the same, wouldn’t they?—days at the beach and cookouts on the back-yard grill, taking strolls through the village, marshmallows to the campfire, bread heels to the duck pond, and really, when you got to the bottom of it, how many memories of pleasant summer days on Long Island does one person need? Isn’t enough as good as a feast?)
    Eventually, all mention of the house seemed to disappear and my parents began to suspect that she had quietly sold the place to her year-round tenant and found some far more practical and profitable way to store the money that had been tied up in it for so long. We had begun to spend our vacations in the Adirondacks by then, had even stopped reassuring ourselves that the mountains were far preferable to the shore. Children of a certain age are pleased to encounter nostalgia, I think, and the summer days we had spent with my father’s mother in the Long Island house moved easily into our family’s short but expanding list of things we used to do but did no more.
    And so it was with some amazement that I learned on the afternoon of her funeral in 1971 that she had left the Long Island
house to my father. My mother told me the news as we left the restaurant where her funeral luncheon had been held. I remember the greedy triumph I’d felt: a house, a piece of land, all unexpected and unsought and, most satisfying of all, unearned—the greedy and self-satisfied triumph of a lazy heir.
    But my mother’s triumph was that the inheritance was part of a package of changes my grandmother had made to her estate in the weeks before she died, a part of her deathbed conversion. The Long Island house, it turned out, was the only thing my father was getting. The rest of my grandmother’s money, which was really Holtzman’s money, was to go to the Church she had had, until then, no use for, to a number of charities whose mailings and TV solicitations she had always held up as proof positive of their misappropriation of funds, and even to her mixed-race former neighbors in Jamaica who took in foster children—for profit, she had always claimed. My mother was Catholic enough to be grinning as she told me all this, as if the satisfaction she felt in learning that my grandmother did, indeed, fear God was well worth the substantial sum of money that she had just described away. Money that otherwise would have been our family’s alone.
    My brothers and I saw it differently, of course. We saw our college tuitions dispersed. We saw her surprising change of heart not so much as a deathbed conversion but as a final-hour placing of bets, a closing-time rush (as my oldest brother, the philosophy major, put it) to get a piece of the action in Pascal’s wager. A woman as clear-sighted as my grandmother would not go to meet her maker empty-handed, sure. But, we were certain, a woman as clear-sighted as my grandmother would know, too, that what she was going to meet might just as well be the void of a spent body and a finished mind. She was merely covering her options.
    My father claimed it was an indication of the soft, even
romantic heart she had carried and hidden all along. In support of this, he described how in those last days, after she had made her sweet intentions known, she had also said one morning when the hospital chaplain left her room, “Don’t they send them to hospitals because there’s something queer in their pasts?” Still her ornery self. But she had added, too, when she told him he was to have the Long Island house, “Get Billy to visit you there. He’s avoided the place for too