Charming Billy by Alice McDermott Read Free Book Online Page B

long.”
    I knew that in life she had pretty much ignored Billy, although with no more passion or purposefulness than she had displayed in ignoring us all, and so, by way of explanation, my father told me, perhaps for the first time and in a much abbreviated form, the tale of Billy’s brief romance, and engagement, to a girl he’d met out there, right after the war. A girl who died of pneumonia before they could marry.
    Billy was for me then merely one of my father’s legion of cousins, distinguished not so much by his alcoholism (it had seemed to me that there were more alcoholics among them than there were Republicans, or even redheads) as by his wife, Maeve, who without many relations of her own relied so heavily on my father whenever Billy was giving her trouble. I suppose I made some connection, or that as my father told the story there was some connection implied, between that ancient disappointment and Billy’s current need to drink, but as I said, that side of his family was full enough of alcoholics who had as far as anyone could tell married the girls of their dreams to make such a connection compelling.
    “You think he’s been avoiding the place?” he’d said to his mother, more intrigued by the fact of this kind of conversation, at this late date, than by any observation she might make about Billy.
    “I think you know he has,” she said. “And I’m sure you know why.”
    “Revenge,” my father told us now. “Stubbornness.” So he could say, whenever he was asked out there or whenever someone else had come, “I won’t go back myself,” and wordlessly remind them all of what he had suffered, found and lost, all those years ago. He never had to say the girl’s name. He merely had to hold up a hand when he was invited and whisper a gracious No, no, in order to remind them all.
    “Get Billy to go out there again,” my father’s mother said. “Make him bring his wife.”
    “My mother understood,” he said, proving further that she had not been all she had seemed, that her cool exterior had hidden all along a warm heart. “She had Billy on her mind. Billy and Maeve, and that summer he’d spent out at the Long Island house, all those years ago. My mother had thought about him without ever seeming to. She’d thought about any number of things we never knew.”
    Of course, what he did not say then was that she, too, had been deceived. That despite her lifelong disdain for delusion and romance and teary-eyed reminiscence, she had ended her life recalling Billy’s summer idyll on Long Island and his pretty (or so the story went), much-loved girl who had died; she had sought a remedy for him, even as she went about securing her own soul.
     
    Billy did return to the Long Island house, in the summer of 1975. It was early July and my father and I met him at the train station in East Hampton. I was on a break between summer semesters at college. Having, perhaps, inherited my grandmother’s distaste for too much of a good thing, I had decided to get through college in the shortest time possible and had taken courses during every summer and winter break. I was due to finish that December, a year and a half ahead of time.
    Since my grandmother’s death, my father had spent two
weeks every summer at the Long Island house and then rented it back to Mr. West, the man he still referred to as “my mother’s tenant,” for the rest of the year. The understanding was that when my father was ready to retire in another eight or ten years, he would sell our house in Rosedale and move here permanently. The joke was that Mr. West would then return to his wife and three sons, whom he had deserted a dozen years before.
    My own mother had died of lung cancer in the spring of ’73. The solitary life my father now led could still, at times, strike my heart (my arms, my shoulders, the pit of my stomach) with an unbearable weight, but each time we were together I saw, too, that the life suited him well enough. He had