Free Charming Billy by Alice McDermott Page B

window and offer a ride.
    He (Matthew, you) was due to meet a friend at the lobster dock in twenty minutes, so we were spared the memory of a first conversation on the same sunny bay beach where Billy met Eva in those first weeks he was home from the war. We sat in the car instead, the broad front seat. There was the scent of stale cigarettes and old joints and the sweet smell of the beach towel I held on my lap. You were tan and wore the leather band around your right wrist. Just out of Stony Brook. Worked a charter fishing boat all summer. Wanted to own one of your own. Wanted to see the West Coast. Never went into the city, didn’t like it. Couldn’t imagine living in a place like Rosedale, going to college way up in Buffalo. A Bonacker, a real Bonacker. But your mouth was wry and your eyes dark brown. I suspected you would age into your father’s face exactly, but without the furtive brows. You ducked your head when you laughed, like someone who has flubbed his lines onstage, someone needing to correct himself.
    We agreed to go out that night. Walking back from the bay—I’d stayed longer than usual, accruing benefits, I thought—I wondered if my father would be offended. I knew what my mother would have said: a date was for her my primary social obligation and superseded all other claims. Even in her final days she insisted I go out if someone asked me. “Go,” she had said, frowning as if she could not believe my hesitation, as if to say, Haven’t I taught you anything? When she couldn’t speak, she merely waved her hand, sweeping me out: go .
    They were sitting on lawn chairs now, my father and Billy, on the sparse grass in front of the house. As I came down the road, my father was leaning forward, his forearms on his knees, his head bent, listening like a diligent priest. Billy was leaning forward, too, but with his arms folded across his chest and his back straight. They both looked up when my sandal hit the gravel driveway, but they were too lost, it seemed—in conversation? in the past? in recrimination?—to fully notice or recognize me until I was almost beside them. Or close enough to see that my father was shaking his head, ever so slightly, refusing, refusing something that Billy wanted him to take. And that Billy, holding himself carefully, speaking slowly, softly, even as he turned to smile at me, had already had quite a bit to drink.

 
     
    OF THE (LET’S FACE IT) half dozen or so basic versions of the Irish physiognomy, they had two of them: Billy thin-faced with black hair and pale blue eyes behind his rimless glasses; Dennis with broad cheeks, eternally flushed, and dark eyes and fair hair that had only begun to thin under his combat helmet, somewhere, he claimed, in northern France. One every inch the poet or the scholar, the other a perfect young cop or barman. The aesthete priest and the jolly chaplain.
    But in fact they had both gone to the RCA Institute before the war and had left steady jobs at Con Ed to enlist. In July 1945, they both had plans to return there in the fall, or as soon as the Long Island house was finished, as soon as they were ready to end this hiatus—they called it that—between their lives as they were and whatever it was their lives were to become.
    Their charge had been to make the place livable again after nearly a decade of abandonment. To update the plumbing and the electrical, chase out the mice and the wasps, repair or replace whatever parts of the floor or the ceiling, the windows or the doors needed repair or replacement. The directive had come from Holtzman, the shoe salesman, as if an afterthought, over dinner the second night Dennis was home (although it was not home to him, it was the salesman’s house, even though
he sat at his mother’s dining-room table). He offered the project as if in a burst of inspiration, even said something like “Here’s an idea for you boys …” although Dennis knew that in his kit in an upstairs bedroom (not his