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SOMEWHERE IN THE BRONX, only twenty minutes or so from the cemetery, Maeve found a small bar-and-grill in a wooded alcove set well off the street that was willing to serve the funeral party of forty-seven medium-rare roast beef and boiled potatoes and green beans amandine, with fruit salad to begin and vanilla ice cream to go with the coffee. Pitchers of beer and of iced tea would be placed along the table at intervals and the bar left openit being a regular business dayfor anyone who wanted a drink.
The place was at the end of a sloping driveway that started out as macadam but quickly diminished to dirt and gravel. There was an apron of dirt and gravel in front of the building, potholed, and on the day of the funeral filled with puddles, and the first ten cars parked there, including the black limousine Maeve had ridden in. The others parked up along the drive, first along one side, then the other, the members of the funeral party walking in their fourth procession of the day (the first had been out of the church, the second and third in and out of the graveyard), down the wet and rutted path to the little restaurant that, lacking only draught Guinness and a peat fire, might have been a pub in rural Ireland. Or, lacking dialogue by John Millington Synge, the set of a rural Irish play.
How in the world she ever found this place was a mystery, despite the question being asked again and again as Billys friends and family filed inthe women, in high heels, walking on tiptoe down the sloping path, the men holding their wives arms and umbrellas that had already been well soaked at the side of the grave. All of them, in their church clothes, giving a formal air to the gray day and the ragged border of city trees and wet weeds. All of them speculating: perhaps the undertaker had suggested the place, or someone from the cemetery. Perhaps a friend or relative on her side (few as they were) who knew something about the Bronx, or maybe Mickey Quinn, who had his territory up here. But Mickey Quinn denied it, shaking his head, if you can believe theres a bar in any of the five boroughs that he hasnt been to.
The place smelled slightly of mildew, understandable in this weather and with this thick (even in April) bower of trees, but the red-and-green tile floor was immaculate and the wooden bar gleamed under the fluorescent light. One long table draped with white tablecloths and set for forty-nine cut diagonally across the entire length of the room. One large window showed the parking lot full of cars, the other a wood that no doubt ended at a narrow side street or a row of dumpsters behind a row of stores, but seemed from in here to be dark and endlessly deep.
Maeve sat in front of this window, at the head of the table. She wore a navy-blue dress with long, slim sleeves and a round neckline, and anyone in the room who had not thought it earlier thought nowperhaps inspired by the perfect simplicity of what she worethat there was a kind of beauty in her ordinary looks, in her plainness. Or, if they didnt think to call it beauty, they said couragemore appropriate to the occasion and the daynot meaning necessarily her new-widows courage (with its attendant new-widows clichs: bearing up, holdingon, doing well), but the courage it took to look out onto life from a face as plain as butter: pale, downy skin and bland blue eyes, faded brown hair cut short as a nuns and dimmed with gray. Only a touch of powder and of lipstick, only a wedding band and a small pearl ring for adornment.
Of course, theyd thought her courageous all along (most of them, anyway, ormost likelyall but my father), living with Billy as she did; but now, seeing her at the head of the table, Billy gone (there would be time enough throughout the afternoon to say its unbelievable still), her courage, or her beauty, however they chose to refer to it, became something newwhich made something new, in turn, of what they might say about Billys life. Because if she was beautiful, then the story of his life, or the story they would begin to re-create for him this afternoon, would have to take another turn.
My father sat to her right. Although Maeve had made all the arrangements herselfhad found the place and chosen the menu and requested the fruit salad be served as soon as all the guests had arrived so there would be no long interval for speeches or toasts, only a quick blessing from one of the priests, he was the one the waitresses spoke to, and the owner of the place asked every now and then if anything was needed. He was the one who would settle the bill at the end of the afternoon and tip the waiters and the girl who took the coats and the umbrellas. He was the one who asked Maeve, after hed already poured her a glass of iced tea, if she would like a drink, and then got up to fetch it for her, nodding to the undertaker and the driver, who were having their lunch at the bar.
She said, Thank you, Dennis, when he placed the martini in front of her and then waited just a moment, her pale hand just touching the stem of the glass before she lifted it. Good luck, he said, raising his own glass of beer. She nodded.
Theres not much sense in pointing out the irony hereoreven in trying to determine if everyone was either oblivious to it or so keenly aware that it no longer bore mentioning. Billy had died an alcoholic. Last night, in his casket, his face was bloated to twice its size and his skin was dark brown. (Dennis himself, my father, when he had identified the body two days ago at the VA, had said at first, momentarily relieved from the fact that Billy was dead, But this is a colored man.)
Billy had drunk himself to death. He had, at some point, ripped apart, plowed through, as alcoholics tend to do, the great, deep, tightly woven fabric of affection that was some part of the emotional life, the life of love, of everyone in the room.
Everyone loved him. It was Mickey Quinn saying this, down at my end of the table. Mickey Quinn, who also worked for Con Ed, his territory being here in the Bronx, although hed never heard of this place before. Mickey with a beer in his hand, and the irony either lost on him or too obvious even to bear mentioning. If you knew Billy at all, he said, then you loved him. He was just that type of guy.
And if you loved him, we all knew, you pleaded with him at some point. Or you drove him to AA, waited outside the church till the meeting was over, and drove him home again. Or you advanced him whatever you could afford so he could travel to Ireland to take the pledge. If you loved him, you took his car keys away, took his incoherent phone calls after midnight. You banished him from your house until he could show up sober. You saw the bloodied scraps of flesh he coughed up into his drinks. If you loved him, then you told him at some point that he was killing himself and felt the way his indifference ripped through your affection. You left work early to identify his body at the VA, and instead of being grateful that the ordeal was at long last over, you felt a momentarysurge of joy as you turned away: This was not Billy, it was some colored man.
He had the sweetest nature, another cousin, yet another Rosemary, said at my end of the table. He found a way to like everyone, he really did. He always found something good to say, or something funny. He could always get you laughing.
