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The mandolin learned as a boy. Deep pear of its body, rich and lustrous brown. Mother-of-pearl discs set between the frets. You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon, But You’ve Done Broke Down. On the stoop in the twilight after supper, picking out songs. Clear tenor voice. Hello! Ma Baby. Elegant white piping on his vests, boaters with black silk bands, spectators. In old Brooklyn, the farms and fields. Bridget dressed like a Gibson girl the first time he saw her. Heavy and solid bosom in a starched white blouse and perfect ankles in taut black silk. His twin brother Bill the ne’er-do-well in derbies pulled low. over his right eye. Buttered his thick blond hair before he washed it. And the smell of whiskey on his breath. It’s the hair that gets the janes, kid. And a little chee-arm.
She sat on the railing at Sheepshead Bay. There is a photograph to prove that her smile still had something of love in it. Celibate at that point for the past four years. The night of Francis Caffrey’s wedding to that bucktoothed girl from Greenpoint, Agnes Kenny. He made her pregnant again and the child died. It was his fault, like an animal. Four years of smiling into cameras. Theresa dead of diphtheria, something the old bastard Drescher figured right. The judgment of God on his lust and Bridget carried out the sentence, oh Christ did she carry it out. Could she have known that Jimmy Mulvaney’s seven-teen-year-old sister made him crazy dancing with him? Softly straddling his right thigh each time they turned so that he could feel her young hot sex burning into him. Bill at the punch bowl smiling across the dancers at him. He mouthed Whoopee! Oh, Bill knew, the son of a bitch. Then pointedly danced with Bridget. The son of a bitch. Winked at him.
Had no heart for it so put the mandolin in the closet with the three sticks his father had owned, beautiful shillelaghs, blackthorn and ash, the handles rubbed smooth and almost ebony. Marie asked and asked him to play some songs until one evening he took the mandolin out and found that two of its strings had snapped.
His family Dublin Episcopalians originally from Londonderry. They thought he had married beneath him for Bridget’s people came from County Clare. That’s where the gawms live, his father had said. Bog-trotters. But he was charmed nevertheless by Bridget. Tried to stifle his sense of superiority after marriage but could not think of her family, the Caffreys and Kennys, as anything but bog-trotters. Whiskey drinkers who fought and cursed and trembled before Catholicism. And they thought of him as a Protestant unfortunate, mild, weak, a man who worked, bejayzus, in a poor bloody office. And what was the matter with the Police? She became enraged when he called them, however lightly, shanty Irish. Oh but she cut him down to size all right. That she did. He brought home the bacon and she gave him a daily allowance. Subway fare, ten cents. Pack of Camels, fifteen cents. Daily News, two cents. Lunch, thirty-five cents. The rest went into the bank. How slowly and completely they both turned into misers. Finally, taking the neighbors’ day-old newspapers off the dumbwaiter no longer embarrassed him. The Mirror, the Sun, the Journal-American. One day he looked across the room at her and saw a sloven. She was forty-eight. By God, she was shanty Irish. And was he any better? No wonder Marie married a guinea. Something to break the spell.
You need any help, kid, send me a wire, Bill said. The wedding breakfast was over and his bride had gone upstairs to change. He blushed. Her shyness drove him crazy on their wedding night. Jesus Christ. He didn’t even know how to do it. Couldn’t put it in her. Bridget wouldn’t touch him but lay stiff, her face burning. Dear little girl, dear little girl. Repeated over and over as he strained and pushed. Sweet Christ! Are they supposed to be so small? What would Bill do? He almost did it but messed all over her thighs and the sheets. Fell out, really, like some smutty joke. But Bridget was sobbing. You shouldn’t, you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t have married me. He kissed her eyes. Her mouth. Do you want to get up and wash? No. Again? John, again? She touched him with her thumb and forefinger. I’m your wife. Her voice was so soft, girlish. Angelic, was the word he thought of. And girlish, indeed. Jesus, she was more ignorant than he was. I have to wait, wait a while first, he said. You do? Girlish, my God, yes.
She used, oh God, how she used that girlish voice falsely, later when there was nothing at all but those goddamn newspapers smelling of garbage. To charm anyone, Tony especially. And of course, on the phone, not that they had a phone. Won every battle and one day he looked in the mirror and saw himself old. That night went through his dresser drawer to find himself, ha! In bits and pieces. Fragments. Of crap. Silver penknife, clay pipes from old-fashioned Irish wakes, one from that idiot, Mark Caffrey’s, shanty son of a bitch, even dead he looked drunk. And the other clays with the green satin bows on them, Erin Go Bragh, yes, and kiss my arse! The rusted knife with the point broken off that she used for paring her corns till he couldn’t stand the sight of it and hid it here. Bejesus Christ, you’d think a million dollars was lost the way she carried on. Tangles of string and cord, clam shells. Matchbooks and stirring rods from dozens of road-houses and taverns, coasters and napkins. Where in the hell did the one with the pink elephant come from? Dizzy-looking article floating amid glassy bubbles. COCKTAILS is all it said. And on the closet shelf hats and horns from New Year’s eves, a flowered pitcher and six matching glasses from the Electra and its rotten movies, tarnished watch chain and a broken old turnip in an envelope — that had been Bill’s. Inside the case was engraved Excelsior. Whatever the hell that was all about. His mandolin, the shillelaghs, a green paper derby. That had been Bill’s too, wore it the last St. Paddy’s Day he’d been alive. The luck of the Irish, kid! Come on, have a ball with me! One goddamn ball won’t hurt you! Right, Bridget? But there was no smile or girlish voice for Bill.
In the Methodist Hospital he looked up at him, eyes dull in that curiously flushed skeletal face. Bill, he said, and took his hand. I’m on my way, kiddo. I’ll give everybody your regards, especially good old Mark. He died right in the middle of his soundless laugh. Then he had to listen to Bridget tell everyone about how the whiskey will do it to you until he came as close to killing her … well, not killing her, but my God! Gave it the old girly-girly voice then, too. How he had grown to despise it. It was soon after that he began to hide a pint of Wilson’s under his shirts. Just a whisper, a hint of that phony voice and he could feel his throat begging for a swallow of that rotgut. It was intolerable precisely because it was such a perfectly monstrous imitation of the voice she’d really had. I’m your wife. Her small fingers wrapped around his penis, pulling it and squeezing it until he was ready. Again? Now, John? Sometimes, years later, he could feel her hand, feel just how it had been. Yeah? Have a cigar! What bullshit.
When did he stop singing? He hadn’t been bad at all, at all. Sweet Adeline, Genevieve, Home Sweet Home. When You Were Sweet Sixteen. Old man Kahn used to come out of the butcher shop with that one, his walrus moustache and his few little hairs swirled around on his head and plastered down with hair tonic. The old Dutchman loved that song. Mister Johnson, Turn Me Loose, Bill Bailey, Some of These Days — he did a nice thing on the break, could still do it if he wanted to, hell. What else, oh Jesus H. Christ, he knew a lot of songs. Play That Barber Shop Chord, right! Waiting for the Robert E. Lee, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, My Melancholy Baby, Ballin’ the Jack, I Ain’t Got Nobody, Pretty Baby — dozens more, dozens. All those old vaudeville songs that he got by ear. Sitting on a kitchen chair, his boater over one eye like Bill, picking away in his shirtsleeves.