Charming Billy Read Free

Holtzman’s store, didn’t he?” Dan Lynch said. “I mean, afterwards. Even when he didn’t need the extra cash anymore. He stayed on. That was Billy all over, wasn’t it? Loyal like that.”
    “Well, see,” Kate said, “the money he’d sent her wasn’t all earned. Mr. Holtzman had advanced him a good deal of it, and when Billy wrote to the girl’s parents, to extend his sympathy—can you imagine that letter?”—Bridie shivered audibly—“naturally he told them to keep the money to pay the funeral expenses and to keep a fresh wreath on her grave.”
    “Like Joe DiMaggio,” Bridie whispered.
    Kate’s eyebrows disapproved of the parallel. “For a while,” she went on, “he talked about going over himself, but we discouraged it. Even Dennis said it would be awkward, maudlin. I was afraid it would just break his heart. Thank you. But working at the store was good for him, in the long run. It filled up one or two nights a week. And Saturdays. And, like I said, Holtzman was glad to have him.”
    “Billy told great stories about that place,” Mickey Quinn said. “You know, the kids screaming and the women squeezing their toes into size fours or leaning down into his face when he was trying to fit them, nearly smothering him with their furs and their perfumes. I remember him telling me about one, some big-footed woman who said to him when he measured her, ‘Young man, I’ve always been told I’m a five and a half,’ and he says, smooth as silk, ‘That’s five if it’s halved, madam.’”
    “A woman bit him on the ear once,” Dan Lynch said. The information might have been on the tip of his tongue for twenty years.
    “No.”
    “You’re joking.”
    “Good Lord.”
    “It’s the truth!” Delighted to finally get it out. “Billy must have blushed every color of the rainbow when he was telling me, down at Quinlan’s. It seemed he was leaning over to pick up some of the shoes this woman had been trying on when she reached down, too, as if she was going to help him, and took a nip out of his ear. Can you imagine it?”
    “He was good with the children,” Bridie from the neighborhood said quickly, steering our thoughts down a more wholesome route. “He fitted all of mine, from infant shoes on. He had a way with children.”
    “And he met Maeve there,” cousin Rosemary said.
    Sister Rosemary confirmed it. “He met Maeve there. She always came in with her father. Getting him shoed, Billy said, was like fitting a mule, and no sooner would she be in to buy him a pair than they’d be back because he’d lost one of them. It didn’t take Billy long to realize he’d lost one under a barstool somewhere.”
    “But Billy managed to ask her out,” Bridie said.
    “To the movies. You could have knocked me over with a feather when he told me he was taking her out to the movies. It had been what, Kate? Four or five years since the Irish girl?”
    “Five years. It was 1950 and they were married three years later, in 1953.”
    “Thirty years, then,” Mickey Quinn said.
    Kate nodded. “It would have been thirty years in September.”
    “That’s a good long run,” said Mickey Quinn.
    And all eyes went to Maeve, who, it seemed, had not touched her food but with her hands in her lap was leaning to listen to Ted, another of Billy’s cousins, as he crouched beside her chair, speaking earnestly.
    “She never had an easy time of it,” sister Rosemary said, “especially recently. You know, toward the end.”
    “Toward the end it was a foregone conclusion,” Kate said. “I think it was worse for her at the beginning, when she had her father and her husband to keep track of.”
    “She’s doing beautifully today.”
    “Oh, she’s strong.”
    “You have to hand it to her. She’s got a lot of courage.”
    And a certain beauty, perhaps, looking up now to say something to my father, and to Father Ryan beside him, her pale hand in a fist on the white tablecloth. And if courage also meant beauty, then