said Cricket. “Now bark.”
Cricket hunched his shoulders and came out with his crazy giggle. Ralph was really embarrassed. He got red. He laughed a bit.
“You really trapped me there. Heh heh.” He sat on the couch. He tried to laugh another little bit.
Cricket was in hysterics. The act had never worked so well. In fact, Cricket figured he had such a prize victim, there was no point in stopping. “You want to try another exercise?”
“I had enough for a while,” said Ralph. “Let Jim do this one.”
So Jim did it. He knew it was the Miss America act, of course. Cricket looked at Jim as if he had lost his mind. He couldn’t see any point in doing it with someone who knew the gag. But Jim insisted, so Cricket followed through with a shrug.
“Get up on your toes,” Cricket ordered. Jim got up on his toes.
“Hold your arms out full length to the side.” Jim complied.
“Focus your eyes on that corner of the ceiling.” Jim did it.
“Now take fifteen quick steps and make them as short as you can.” When Jim was coming across the floor with the ballerina steps, Cricket yelled out the punch line: “Here she comes! Miss America!”
Ralph got a big kick out of it. It took the pressure off him.
Florence came down the stairs. She beamed. Jim could see it on her face: Ralph cutting up with the boys. “Well, you three are certainly having a grand time for yourselves.”
She looked great, Jim thought. Her hair was in an upsweep, and she was cloaked with the autumn colors: chestnut hair, yellow dress, beige coat on her arm. Her eyes were alive, and the way she immediately looked across the room to Ralph and opened out in a smile, as if there were no one else there, it was obvious she was hung on him. As for Ralph, as soon as she appeared, he jumped to his feet. He put her coat on her. And with a lot of little giggling and small talk, the two of them left.
Chapter 7
By three o’clock in the morning, Florence was home from her date, had put up her hair, and was asleep. Jim was home from the movies, and was also asleep. Only Harry Meagher was still awake. He had spent four sleepless hours in bed. He got up and went downstairs. He had the doctor’s report on his mind. And the trouble at work. And Florence and the boy coming for dinner. And James.
Sure it was no wonder a man couldn’t sleep.
He poured himself a glass of milk in the kitchen and came back to the living room and sat in his chair and drank it. He looked around. There wasn’t a lace doily on a chair arm that wasn’t pinned right. What would he do when Florence was gone? She had done a grand job on the house. He got up and opened the door of the downstairs bathroom to see what kind of a job James had done to help her. There were stains still on the sink, and rings in the toilet. A half-assed job, as usual. Goddam kid, there wasn’t a thing he could be depended on to do right. Harry got a newspaper and spread it on the bathroom floor and, even though it was the middle of the night, got down on his knees and washed the toilet himself.
He avoided looking up at the tile job, which always annoyed him. The tile setter had started from the end instead of from the middle, so that the top of the last tile laid was a full inch higher than the first. Harry had a professional eye: his first job in the States had been setting tile. For almost three years he had tiled a room a day, thinking of the one in Ireland the whole while. Phyllis, tramp that she turned out to be.
He finished the job, and took up the newspaper. He went to the refrigerator and poured another glass of milk and put it in the pot to heat. It was supposed to make a person sleep, the warm milk. A lot of old horse shit: it never worked. He took the Old Overholt bottle down and poured some of that into the milk. Back in his chair, he held the milk glass in his hand and stared at it, swishing the milk so that it made shifting half moons on the sides of the glass.
Slow down, the doctor said. Sure, easy to say. The son was about to be thrown out of school, and the daughter was looking to get married, and the brother-in-law was drinking himself to death, and the two families were depending on him, and he was supposed to sit in the chair and slow down.
Cracked doctor.
And more trouble at work. Collins from personnel said there was talk the new brewery manager would be a quality-control man from Chicago. Don’t talk nonsense to me, Harry had told him. They’d never pick a man who hadn’t come up the technical side. But sure, there might be truth in the story. They’d cheat him out of the plant managership in the end, Harry thought. They didn’t want him anyway. He was too old. He gave them thirty years and they’d give him the thanks of a shoe in the ass out the door. He was almost sixty and what did he know of the new things coming along? They were talking about a line that would move a thousand cans a minute, and plastic packers, and self-opening cans, and throwaway bottles and what more? Sure, didn’t Schwartz change the labeler arm yesterday without even consulting him? The bastard, he wouldn’t try that again. Ah, but things were slipping. They’d pass him by. They’d pass him by. The last disappointment.
Suddenly a scene of his childhood came to his mind. Toppy.
“Who gets Toppy today?”
Am I drunk, thought Harry, that I’m thinking about Toppy after fifty years?
When he was a boy in Ireland, and his father had his afternoon egg, he would crack the top off and cry: who gets Toppy today? Sean would elbow Harry out of the way, and grab the top of the egg. For Sean was older and stronger. Or was then.
His mind stayed in Ireland. Phyllis elbowed her way into his memories. He was eighteen and running with her across the checkerboard fields that contoured the hills of Kerry. I’m going to go to America and I’ll come back and I’ll have the biggest hat and the whitest teeth of any Yank ever came home. Do, she cried, do. She came down to Queenstown to see him off, and she was the last he saw, standing there with the black curls blowing across her white forehead, waving, while the band played “Come Back to Erin,” and ahead the mouth of the harbor leading out to the open sea, and he gripped the upper rail and cried, his teeth drawing blood from his lower lip.
He worked for almost the three years tiling a room a day, and he finally made it home. The whole trip back on the ship he thought of her.
He had come up the hilly path and saw her riding the milk cans to the market. She saw him and stopped and paled. He ran to her.
“Phyllis! Phyllis!” he called, running.
But she hung back; she turned her face away as he approached.
He took her hand. Did she have a ring on?
“Jesus, is that a ring?”
“T’is.”
“Whose ring is that?”
“Joe Houlihan.”
“Are you married to Joe Houlihan?”
“I am.”
An eternity passed. He had no words. He wanted to give her a cuff across the face. Finally he blurted out the only thing that came to mind.
“Goddam
