An excerpt from Charming Billy
The excerpt below made me think, immediately, of one of Big Dan’s most recent posts, which pretty much debunks the over-used phrase: “When you’ve got your health, you’ve got everything.” The excerpt he posts is deeply moving, especially written under his circumstances at the moment. Good on ya, Dan!
The excerpt from Charming Billy posted below describes the marriage of the narrator’s parents:
I suppose there’s not much sense in trying to measure the breadth and depth of your own parents’ romance, the course and tenacity of their love. Your parents’ or anybody else’s, for that matter. I know an older couple who have so convinced their grown children of the charm and enduracne of their passionate history — married young and poor, separated by war, reunited to become dedicated and hardworking young parents, loving partners in the building of a business, patient guardians of teenagers, payers of tuition, and finally (looking proudly into each other’s eyes) grateful, rich, and still passionate retirees and grandparents — that their children have had nothing but disappointment and grief in their own love lives and now, in middle age, look at their aging and still smug progenitors with envy and despair.
My parents, I have to believe, had a marriage that ran the typical course from early infatuation to serious love to affection occasionally diminished by impatience and disagreement, bolstered by interdependence, framed now and then by fondness, by humor. That they loved each other is a given, I suppose, although I suppose, too, that there were months, maybe years, when their love for one another might have disappeared altogether and their lives proceeded only out of habit or the failure to imagine any other alternative.
A good-enough, a typical kind of mid-twentieth-century marriage that suddenly blossomed into something else in the year she was dying. I hesitate to use the word about a time that was filled with so much pain, that was for me only awful, but I think it was during my mother’s illness that my parents became passionate about one another. Their meeting, their courtship, their years raising children, every ordinary day they had spent together until then all became merely the running start they had taken to vault this moment. To sail, gracefully and in tandem, across the abyss.
It made it easier that they both believed in the simplest kind of afterlife — that my father could say to her, even in those last days, joking but without irony, “You’re going to get tired of hearing from me. I’ll be asking you for this that and the other thing twenty-four hours a day. Jesus, you’ll be saying, here comes another prayer from Dennis.” And my mother would reply, her voice hoarse with pain, “Jesus might advise you to take in a movie once in a while. Give your poor wife a rest. She’s in heaven after all.”
It was a joke, but they believed it, and they believed, too, I think, that their love, their loyalty to one another, was no longer a matter of chance or happenstance but a condition of their existence no more voluntary or escapable than the pace of their blood, the influx of perception. There was, I thought, a perverse joy about their closeness in that year, as my father, for the first and only time in his life, turned his back on the scores of friends and relatives who had come to depend on him as they had once depended on his father and thought only of her. (Refusing even Billy’s calls. Putting a pillow over the phone in our upstairs hallway before he went to bed and telling me to ignore the thing should I hear it ringing in the middle of the night.) There was, in their anticipation of what was to come, a queer self-satisfaction. It was clear now that they would love each other until the last moment of her life — hadn’t that been the goal from the beginning? They would love each other even beyond the days they had lived together; was there any greater triumph?
At eighteen, I was not so sure. At eighteen, I wanted only a mother who would be there in the flesh to see me graduate and get married and have children of my own. Who could keep my father from living the rest of his life alone, nagging his dead wife with a thousand daily prayers.
I love her writing. It’s not showy, or complex. It is filled with heart, and truth. Yet it’s not “kitchen-sink” real, there’s a poetry to it.
Not to mention the fact that all of the characters in that book come to LIFE. They leap with life. Billy Lynch, Dan Lynch, Sheila Lynch … “Bridie from the old neighborhood” – Mr. Holtzman – even the cameo characters. They LIVE. I will miss all of them.
