Free Ironweed by William Kennedy

what he did with the money as long as I got my flowers first. You did that for me, didn’t you, Fran?”
              “Sure did,” said Francis, but he could not remember buying an orchid, didn’t know what orchids looked like.
              “We were lovebirds,” Helen said to Oscar, who was smiling at the spectacle of bum love at his bar. “We had a beautiful apartment up on Hamilton Street. We had all the dishes anybody’d ever need. We had a sofa and a big bed and sheets and pillowcases. There wasn’t anything we didn’t have, isn’t that right, Fran?”
              “That’s right,” Francis said, trying to remember the place.
              “We had flowerpots full of geraniums that we kept alive all winter long. Francis loved geraniums. And we had an icebox crammed full of food. We ate so well, both of us had to go on a diet. That was such a wonderful time.”
              “When was that?” Pee Wee asked. “I didn’t know you ever stayed anyplace that long.”
              “What long?”
              “I don’t know. Months musta been if you had an apartment.”
              “I was here awhile, six weeks maybe, once.”
              “Oh we had it much longer than that,” Helen said.
              “Helen knows,” Francis said. “She remembers. I can’t call one day different from another.”
              “It was the drink,” Helen said. “Francis wouldn’t stop drinking and then we couldn’t pay the rent and we had to give up our pillowcases and our dishes. It was Haviland china, the very best you could buy. When you buy, buy the best, my father taught me. We had solid mahogany chairs and my beautiful upright piano my brother had been keeping. He didn’t want to give it up, it was so nice, but it was mine. Paderewski played on it once when he was in Albany in nineteen-oh-nine. I sang all my songs on it.”
              “She played pretty fancy piano,” Francis said. “That’s no joke. Why don’t you sing us a song, Helen?”
              “Oh I guess I will.”
              “What’s your pleasure?” Oscar asked.
              “I don’t know. ‘In the Good Old Summertime,’ maybe.”
              “Right time to sing it,” Francis said, “now that we’re freezin’ our ass out there.”
              “On second thought,” said Helen, “I want to sing one for Francis for buying me that flower. Does your friend know ‘He’s Me Pal,’ or ‘My Man’?”
              “You hear that, Joe?”
              “I hear,” said Joe the piano man, and he played a few bars of the chorus of “He’s Me Pal” as Helen smiled and stood and walked to the stage with an aplomb and grace befitting her reentry into the world of music, the world she should never have left, oh why ever did you leave it, Helen? She climbed the three steps to the platform, drawn upward by familiar chords that now seemed to her to have always evoked joy, chords not from this one song but from an era of songs, thirty, forty years of songs that celebrated the splendors of love, and loyalty, and friendship, and family, and country, and the natural world. Frivolous Sal was a wild sort of devil, but wasn’t she dead on the level too? Mary was a great pal, heaven-sent on Christmas morning, and love lingers on for her. The new-mown hay, the silvery moon, the home fires burning, these were sanctuaries of Helen’s spirit, songs whose like she had sung from her earliest days, songs that endured for her as long as the classics she had committed to memory so indelibly in her youth, for they spoke to her, not abstractly of the aesthetic peaks of the art she had once hoped to master, but directly, simply, about the everyday currency of the heart and soul. The pale moon will shine on the twining of our hearts. My heart is stolen, lover dear, so please don’t let us part. Oh