The Books: “Charming Billy ” ( Alice McDermott)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Charming Billy: A Novel (Picador Modern Classics) by Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott writes about Irish-American life and the Irish-American experience (straddling Vatican II into now) – like nobody’s business. Charming Billy is almost creepy to me, because she just gets it all so right. It sounds right, the houses are right, the masses are right – the family stuff is right … and her writing is not flowery, or sentimental – in many ways, she reminds me of Dennis Lehane (excerpt of Mystic River here), although she doesn’t write crime books. It’s the STYLE. It’s the TYPE of person she writes about. The Irish-Americans – the folks from Southie in Boston – the third-generation people, with grandmothers and great-grandmothers who speak in brogues – you know, my peeps. McDermott doesn’t write about it in a precious way – or a fetishizing way. It’s just real.

Charming Billy won the National Book Award the year it came out, and I think that’s pretty cool – because Charming Billy doesn’t have a lot of sturm und drang – it’s not about a politically hot topic – it’s not focusing on mental illness or depression – it’s not “important” at all. But God spare us from only reading “important” books. Charming Billy is the story of a family who gathers in a bar in the Bronx – after the funeral mass of their family member Billy – he’s an uncle, a cousin, whatever – and the family sits around and talks about him, telling stories. Billy had a long life. He was a big drinker. He had a great lost love – Eva, an Irish girl. He had a new wife – Maeve – and she’s relatively new to the family (but again, with the whole Irish tendency of not accepting newbies – the family doesn’t quite know how to deal with her – she’s not really “one of them” yet) – and everyone tells stories, and sometimes the narrator (who is a member of the family – it’s a first-person book, although often it doesn’t feel that way, because she is telling the stories of Billy’s life, not her own) – anyway, sometimes the narrator will go back into the past, and share her memories of Billy, and the memories will come to life on the page. The whole thing takes place in one day, sitting around the bar in the Bronx, shooting the shit about their dearly departed Billy.

And who can say why this was such a lovely read? Having described “what happens”, I can imagine it doesn’t sound all that compelling.

But it’s what I call a “soft” read. You can just sink into it. You can lose yourself. The writing is not insistent, or clever. It’s just GOOD. It’s good story-telling. And it has the breath of reality in it. I have been to more Irish wakes than I can count. We have a big family and my childhood was punctuated by truly tragic deaths, out of the blue deaths, dear dear family members dying young, horrible. And to me, McDermott just captures the vibe at the after-gatherings of such funerals. I mean, Irish wakes are a cliche – but there’s much truth in cliches. I recognize myself in this book. I see my family. Alice McDermott has perfect pitch.

And I love the title of the book.

Billy is not always a pleasant man to get to know. He had a drinking problem. He was old-school Catholic boy. But yes. He was “charming”. That word can have snotty connotations – like it has lost its meaning. What does it mean when someone REALLY has “charm”? What is charm? Billy had it. There is much to mourn.

Lovely book. I have all of Alice McDermott’s other books, based just on my love of Charming Billy – but I have yet to read any of them. I love her writing.

Here’s an excerpt. I love love love the bit about the waiter placing the ice cream on the table. And how Alice McDermott describes it perfectly. That’s good writing.

EXCERPT FROM Charming Billy: A Novel (Picador Modern Classics) by Alice McDermott

“Well, he always drank,” Kate said. “But for a very long time it seemed he drank harmlessly. I remember him feeling no pain when he was on leave, before he went overseas, but that was understandable. I remember the night he came home and told us that Eva had passed away. He went straight to bed afterwards and I called Dennis to see if I could learn anything more and Dennis said they’d both had quite a lot to drink the night before, which was understandable, too. It was probably as hard for Dennis to tell him as it was for Billy to hear the news.”

His sister Rosemary said, “I remember he had one too many at Jill’s christening. I was worried about him riding the subway home.”

“But for years he never missed a day of work,” Kate told us. “And he was there to open the shoe store every Saturday morning from the time he started into the early sixties, when Mr. Holtzman finally sold the place to Baker’s. I don’t think Mr. Holtzman ever knew he drank. Certainly no one at Edison knew until near the end.”

But Mickey Quinn held up his hand. “They knew,” he said wisely.

“But not until fairly recently,” Kate said. “Maybe when he went into the hospital in ’73, the same year my Kevin graduated from Regis.”

But Mickey Quinn frowned and shook his head slightly apologetically, as if over something that was only slightly askew. “They knew,” he said again. “We all knew. I left Irving Place in ’68 and the fellows in the office knew Billy was a drinker even then. They covered for him, mostly in the afternoon. He’d go out on a call after lunch and not come back to the office and they’d cover for him. Everyone liked him. They were glad to do it.”

“I think Smitty might have covered for him, too,” his sister Rosemary said. “In the shoe store. Do you remember Smitty? Mr. Holtzman’s assistant – the little bald man?” He was remembered. “I went in there one Saturday, we were looking for Betty’s First Communion shoes, and Billy was just coming in from lunch. I had the feeling he’d had a few. I mean, he was fine, and the kids were always happy to see him, but I noticed Smitty did all the measuring and got out all the shoes. Billy mostly sat. Which wasn’t like him. He was sucking a peppermint.”

“When was this?” Kate asked as her wealthy husband, trained at Fordham Law, might do.

Rosemary paused to calculate. “Betty was in second grade. 1962.” Almost in apology: “He was drinking in ’62.”

Dan Lynch raised his hands. “Well, what does it mean? He was drinking before that, too. Down at Quinlan’s. Saturdays after work. Sunday evenings. Hell, I was always there, too, and my liver’s fine.”

“So when did it become a problem?” cousin Rosemary asked.

“He started AA in the late sixties,” Kate told her. “And then again around ’71 or ‘2.”

“He took the pledge on that Ireland trip. That was ’75.”

“What good did it do?”

“I thought it would stick. Maeve did, too.”

Dan Lynch was chuckling, his hand around his small glass. “I remember Billy saying that AA was a Protestant thing, when you came right down to it. Started by a bunch of Protestants. He said he didn’t like the chummy way some of them were always calling Our Lord by his first name. I drove him to the first meeting and waited to take him home, ’cause Maeve didn’t want him driving, and when he came out he said you could tell who the Catholics were because they’d all been bowing their heads every ten seconds while the Protestants bantered on about Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

(And sure enough, up and down our stretch of table, heads bobbed at the name.)

Sister Rosemary said, “He didn’t like them calling God a Higher Power, either – which I guess was the official AA term. Nondenominational, you know. He said it only proved that none of them had a sense of humor. He said you’d have to be God Himself to get higher than most of these guys had been.”

There was a bit of low laughter. “Billy had an irreverent streak,” MIckey Quinn said. “I liked that about him.”

“The way Father Joyce explained it to me,” Dan Lynch went on, “the pledge was the Catholic take on AA. He said it was like Holy Orders itself – you signed on and there was no going back. An unbreakable oath never to take another drink. Billy thought it was the real thing.”

“But he broke it.”

“There’s plenty of priests that break their Holy Orders, too,” Dan Lynch told them.

“Well, it got him over to Ireland, anyway,” cousin Rosemary said. “I tried to talk him and Maeve into going over any number of times, but I never could do it.”

“Maeve isn’t one to travel,” sister Rosemary said. “She’s a homebody. Always has been.”

Kate leaned toward us all, folding her hands on the table: a tasteful ring of diamonds, a gold bracelet, a professional manicure. “I often wondered,” she said slowly. “I never had the heart to ask him, but I wondered if Billy went to visit the town Eva came from. While he was there.”

Her sister shook her head. “Billy would have said so if he had. He wasn’t one to keep things to himself.”

Kate paused only a moment to consider this. “But he might not have wanted it to get back to Maeve, you know,” she said. “He might have thought she wouldn’t want to hear about a pilgrimage like that.”

“Who would?”

“She knew about Eva?” Bridie said, whispering too, adding, “Thank you,” as the waiter took her empty plate.

“I’m sure,” Kate said. “Thank you.” And then: “Actually, I don’t know. I’d imagine she knew something about her.”

“He must have told her something.”

“Dennis would know,” Mickey Quinn said. “They were always real close.”

But Dan Lynch objected. “I was the best man at Billy’s wedding,” he said. “We were pretty close, too.”

“Well, did he tell Maeve about the Irish girl?”

Dan waved his hand impatiently. “I’m sure he told her something. You know, it’s not the sort of thing men talk about. And I’ll say this for Billy, you never heard him mention that girl again, once he married Maeve.”

“Ask Dennis,” cousin Rosemary whispered.

The selected dessert was brought in: two scoops of vanilla ice cream in cold stainless-steel bowls. Hands in lamps to make the poor man’s job easier as he reached between their shoulders. Thank you.

“I remember watching Maeve come down the aisle,” Dan Lynch said, lifting his spoon, holding it like a scepter. “She was on her old man’s arm, but it was clear as you watched her that she was shoring him up, you know, keeping him straight. She was smiling as sweetly as any bride, but there was a determination in the way she walked, you know, the way she held her shoulder up against his, like it was a wall about to topple. She took hold of his arm when they got to the first pew, I mean a good grip, right here.” He demonstrated, taking hold of his own forearm, spoon and all. “The old man banged his foot against the kneeling bench – you could hear it all over the church – and for a minute it looked like he’d go down headfirst. But she got him in there and got him seated. She maneuvered him. By sheer force of will, I’d say. And then she gave a little nod, as if to say, Well, that’s done, and came up the steps to marry Billy.” He sipped his beer. “Ready to take him on, is what I remember thinking. She was a plain girl, but determined.”

“Very quiet,” Mickey Quinn said. “Go over there for dinner and Billy would do most of the talking.”

“He was lucky to find her,” sister Rosemary said. “My mother always siad there’s nothing more pathetic than an old bachelor who’s not a priest. That’s what she thought Billy would be, after the Irish girl. An old bachelor. No offense, Danny.”

And Dan Lynch laughed, blushed a little across his bald dome. Sipping his beer and shrugged. None taken – the story here being that Danny Lunch was such a connoisseur of beauty and behavior that no flawed wife could have pleased him and no flawless one could have been found.

“Did you ever meet her?” Bridie from the old neighborhood whispered. “The Irish girl?”

The two sisters exchanged a look across the table – the kind of look they might have exchanged had they been eyeing the last bite of a shared piece of cake. “She came to the apartment,” Kate said, scooping it up. “It was just before she went back home. Billy borrowed Mr. Holtzman’s car to go into the city to get her.”

“She was very pretty,” Rosemary added, taking a crumb. “Like Susan Hayward.”

“Oh, I didn’t think so,” Kate said. “But she had nice hair, dark auburn. And big brown eyes. She wasn’t very tall, even a little chubby. Billy brought her for Sunday dinner and then couldn’t eat a bite himself. He was so – I don’t know what – so delicate with her. The way he spoke to her, and watched her and listened to her. She did have a nice voice, you know, the poor girl” (a reminder to us all that she had died young), “with her brogue and all. My mother’s brogue got thicker just listening to her. They were good-looking together, Eva and Billy. A handsome pair. Better looking together than singly, somehow. He was lovestruck, that’s for sure. We kidded him when he got home, after he’d taken her back to the city. We put his plate out on the dining-room table when we heard him coming up. We’d saved it. He’d hardly eaten a bite. We said, ‘What was wrong with your dinner, Billy?'” She began to laugh. “We said, ‘How are you going to marry this poor girl if her mere presence takes your appetite away? Billy,’ we said, ‘she’ll be at your dinner table every day, breakfast too, when are you going to eat? You’ll starve. You’ll waste away to nothing. You’ll have to sneak over here just to calm down enough to have your dinner.’ We gave him such a hard time.”

“And do you remember what Momma said?” sister Rosemary asked. Kate swallowed her smile, looked blank. Professional makeup, too. “No.”

Well pleased, Rosemary said to my end of the table, “You know my mother thought herself a kind of psychic.” She was getting her share of the story, after all. “She read cards and had dreams. And she said after Billy left that when she touched the girl’s hand she felt four quick pulses in her own stomach, like baby kicks, which meant they’d have four children.”

“Or that your mother had indigestion,” Mickey Quinn said.

“More likely,” Kate said. “You know how my mother cooked.”

“She wasn’t a much better prophet.”

But Bridie shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “It might have been true. I mean, you could say if the girl had lived, that’s how many children they might have had.”

Dan Lynch said solemnly, “Which would have made this a different day.”

“It would have been a different life.”

Mickey Quinn shook his head and leaned back in his chair, as if to avoid all such speculation. “I’ll have that cup of coffee now, please, when you get the chance,” he said to the waiter’s back.

“A different life,” Dan Lynch repeated, and raised his beer.

The light through the window behind Maeve had begun to change now. A trace of shadow coming between the dark trunks of the trees, the clouds breaking up, perhaps.

“I don’t agree with that,” sister Rosemary said softly. “I’ve done a lot of reading in this regard, with Billy the way he was. Alcoholism isn’t a decision, it’s a disease, and Billy would have had the disease whether he married the Irish girl or Maeve, whether he’d had kids or not. It wouldn’t have been such a different life, believe me. Every alcoholic’s life is pretty much the same.”

“Now I don’t agree,” Dan Lynch said under his breath, and Kate added, “It’s not always fatal.”

“I say it’s a matter of will,” Dan Lynch said, speaking up, keeping Kate from running away with the talk once again. “I drank side by side with Billy LYnch for nearly forty years. My liver’s fine. Billy never had the will to stop.”

Sister Rosemary frowned, shaking her head. “That’s not fair. When he went to Ireland, when he took the pledge, he was truly determined. He told me so. You know what faith Billy had. And you know how seriously he took that trip. He was truly determined that time. But the disease had him in its grip.” She raised a fist, showing them.

Dan Lynch poured himself and Mickey Quinn another beer. “Well, let me tell you what he told me,” he said. “Down at Quinlan’s, maybe a year or two after the Irish girl died. He told me,” he said, lifting his glass, pointing around it, “that after year was a weight on his shoulders. Every hour was, he said.” He pointed to Kate. “Remember when you said he was like a man waiting for a bus, when he was waiting to get her back here? Well, when you said that I thought: It never changed. He was still waiting, years after she’d died. But she was waiting to go to her now. Ever since the night Dennis told him the news, he was waiting to die. I’m sure of it.”

“But there was Maeve,” Bridie from the neighborhood cried.

“That’s not fair to Maeve,” sister Rosemary said.

Dan Lynch shook his head. “I’m not saying a word against Maeve. She had a lot to handle, that’s for sure. But if you ask me, Billy had a foot in the hereafter even before he met Maeve.” He glanced up the table and then leaned forward, lowering his voice because the guests were beginning to thin out, Billy’s friends and relatives getting up to have a few more words with Maeve, to go to the bathroom, or to get another drink before departing.

“We went to Mass together once. Feast of the Assumption. August 15. We’d both stopped into Quinlan’s after work, a blazing hot day if there ever was one, hot as Hades, and both of us realized at the same time what the date was. We hightailed it over to 6:30 Mass at St. Sebastian’s and, I don’t know, I glanced at Billy, just after Communion. It struck me that it wasn’t any thought of Our Lord or the Blessed Mother that put that look on his face. It was the girl. The Irish girl. When he turned his eyes to heaven, that’s who he saw.”

“Oh, nonsense,” sister Rosemary whispered.

Mickey Quinn studied the ceiling. Down the table, a few heads turned, perhaps sensing a fight.

Dan Lynch took a sip of his beer, pursed his lips around the taste. “What’s nonsense is all this disease business,” he said. “Maybe for some people it’s a disease. But maybe for some there are things that happen in their lives that they just can’t live with. Things that take the sweetness out of everything. Maybe for some it’s a sadness they can’t get rid of or a disappointment that won’t go away. And you know what I say to those people? I say good luck to those people.” He raised his glass, raised his chin. “I say maybe they’re not as smart and sensible and accepting as every one of us,” indicating every one of us with a sweep of his beer, “but they’re loyal. They’re loyal to their own feelings. They’re loyal to the first plans they made – just like Billy was loyal to Holtzman and the job he gave him. And like he would have been loyal to her if she had lived and come back here and they’d gotten married. Just like he was loyal to Maeve. Billy never breathed another word about that girl after he married Maeve. But the girl was first, and for Billy she would always be first. That’s the kind of guy he was. Maeve couldn’t change him.”

“I think he went to her grave when he was in Ireland,” Kate said suddenly. “I just have the feeling that sometime while he was over there he went to the town she was from and visited her grave. I think it was the whole reason he made the trip.”

Rosemary shook her head, appealed to Mickey Quinn, who was intent on dissolving the sugar in his coffee. “He went with Father Ryan to take the pledge,” she said patiently. “To make the retreat. To quit drinking.”

But Kate said, “Oh, Rose, think about it. Ireland’s not the only place that has retreats for alcoholics. He could have made one over here. Maybe he thought if he went to her grave he could put something to rest, finally. Put his feelings for her to rest so then he could quit drinking.”

“But he couldn’t,” Dan Lynch said sadly, and poured another little beer.

“He couldn’t,” Kate agreed. “Which is why it didn’t stick, as determined as he was.”

But Rosemary’s mouth was set. “No,” she said firmly. “Look, there are faster and more pleasant ways of killing yourself. I tell you, I’ve read everything there is about this. Alcoholism is a disease, it’s genetic. Our own father ruined his liver as well and probably would have died the same way if he hadn’t gotten cancer. And Uncle John in Philadlephia was an alcoholic. And two of his sons – Chuck and Peter – go to AA. And Ted. And Mary Casey and Helen Lynch. And Dennis’s father was no teetotaler either.”

“Uncle Daniel died of cancer,” Dan Lynch said indignantly. “He was no drunk.” He turned to Bridie and Mickey Quinn. “He brought his six brothers and a sister over here and God knows how many other friends and relations. All on a motorman’s salary.”

“He was a saint,” Bridie from the neighborhood said, nodding. “My mother always said so.”

“Okay,” Rosemary said. “God bless Uncle Daniel, but my point is that our family has what they call a genetic predisposition to both cancer and alcoholism. Billy had it in his genes.”

“When he came back from Ireland,” Kate said softly, stroking the stem of her glass. “June of ’75 – I remember because my Daniel had just graduated from Fordham – he went straight out to Long Island. Out to the little house. Dennis was there, it wasn’t long after he’d lost Claire. Remember how he used to rent the place back from his mother’s tenant so he could spend his vacation? Well, Billy wasn’t home for more than a day when he took the train out – and he hadn’t been there in years.”

“Meaning?” Rosemary asked coolly.

“Meaning he went back to the place he first met her. Eva. He was trying to work something out.”

“Oh, honestly,” Rosemary said. “It had been nearly thirty years. What was there to work out? It was a shame that she died, but Billy had thirty years of living since then. I mean, come on, name me anything that’s going to stay with you that strongly for thirty years.”

Which seemed to silence our end of the table for a moment, as if the thing we would mention had only momentarily slipped our minds.

Cousin Rosemary poked her swizzle stick into the remaining ice in her glass. “It’s all water under the bridge,” she said, as if water from under the bridge was the very thing the tall glass contained. “What’s the point of even discussing all this now? Billy was here and now he’s gone, and I for one just can’t believe it. Despite his troubles.” Tears now. “I’ll miss him. I’ll miss his voice over the phone. I’ll miss his smiling face.”

“Hear, hear,” Mickey Quinn said.

But Dan Lynch raised his beer again. He was whispering, his voice fierce. “I just don’t think it credits a man’s life to say he was in the clutches of a disease and that’s what ruined him. Say he was too loyal. Say he was disappointed. Say he made way too much of the Irish girl and afterwards couldn’t look life square in the face. But give him some credit for feeling, for having a hand in his own fate. Don’t say it was a disease that blindsided him and wiped out everything he was.” He bit off a drink, his face flushed. “Do the man that favor, please.”