Maggie Cassidy Read online

  I’d just started shaving; one night my sister had surprised me combing my hair making a little tuck in my crown for a wave—“Oh boy, look at the Romeo!” It was surprising; two months before I’d been a boy, coming home from fall football practice in iron dusks wrapped in my jacket and earmuff cap, bent, offnights I’d spot pins at the alley with twelve-year-old boys, at three cents a string—20 strings, 60 cents, usually I made that or a buck—Just a boy, I’d only recently cried because I lost my hat while playing in a WPA League basketball game won at the last second by a sensational toss by Billy Artaud almost rivaling the time at the Boys’ Club tie-score with one second to go against a Greek team tigrishly named I made a one-hand last-whistle jump shot out of the scrambling pack from about the foul line and the ball hung in the basket a horrid second for everybody to see, bagged, the game over, Zagg and his tricks—an inborn showman—everlasting hero. The hat now forgotten.

  “By Ma,” kissing my mother on the cheek, starting off for school, she herself worked part time in the shoe factory with her grave sense of life sitting grim and tireless at the skiving machine holding stubborn shoe leathers to a blade, her fingertips blackened, years on end of it from fourteen on, other girls like her up and down the machines—the whole family working, 1939 was a tail-end Depression year about to be overshadowed by events in Poland.

  I got my lunch, prepared the night before by Ma, slices of bread and butter; nothing was more delicious than these slices at noon after four hours almost interesting sunny classroom absorbed in personalities of teachers like Joe Maple with his eloquent statements in English 3 or old Mrs. McGillicuddy the astronomy (inseparable)—bread and butter and delicious, hot mashed potatoes, nothing else, at the roaring basement tables my lunch cost 10¢ a day—The pièce de résistance was my magnificent chocolate-covered ice cream stick, everyone in school 95% licked on them greedily every noon, on benches, in the huge cellar halls, on the sidewalks—recess—I’d sometimes in my grace like the grace that got me Maggie get thick ice cream almost an inch wide, by some mistake in the ice cream factory with rich unbelievable thick chocolate layer that also by mistake was larded and curled right on—by same industrial per-chance, I’d get feeble anemic sticks a half-inch, already half melted, paper-thin chocolate falling on the sidewalk of Kirk Street as we’d Harry McCarthy, Lousy, Bill Artaud and me lick our sticks ceremoniously greedy in the winter sun my mind a million miles from romance—So I’d bring my bread and butter lunch, to be stuffed quickly in my homeroom desk—kiss Mother—and take off, on foot, to stride as fast as I could, like everybody else, down Moody past the posts of Textile to the great bridge to Moody tenements and down the hill into the city, gray, prosperous, puffing in the morn. And along the way the soldiers’d fall in, G.J. off Riverside going to his business course in Lowell High where he learned typing and bookkeeping and made fantasies around the luscious girls who were going to be sexy secretaries, he’d begun wearing necktie and suit, he’d say “Zagg that Miss Gordon is going to take that expression of cool indifference off her face one of these days and let her panties slip on the floor for me, mark my words—and it’ll be in one of those empty rooms one of these afternoons”—but instead of actual sexual conquests he’d wind up at two in the afternoon with his books in the Rialto B movie—alone, faced by the reality of Franchot Tone and Bruce Cabot and Alice Faye and Don Ameche grinning smiling at Tyrone etc. and old men and old women living on relief wide-eyed in the show. Too, Lousy’d come angling to my walk from Riverside; then, incredibly, Billy Artaud’d overtake us all from the rear striding madly down from the upper outskirt hill of Moody and just as we reached the canal downtown we’d see all of us that Iddyboy was way ahead and was already leaning out of his freshman homeroom window dutifully obeying the teacher’s request to open window—“Eeediboy!” he’d yell, and disappear in, he was the most willing student in LHS and had the lowest marks and otherwise he would have been able to play football and would have killed everybody broken Maiden guards in half with one clip of his granite elbow—Open homeroom window in Lowell, rose morn and birds upon the Boott Mill canal—Later it was going to be the open window morn at Columbia University the pigeonshit on the sill of Mark Van Doren and the Shakespeare of drunken sleeps under an Avon apple tree, ah—

  Down Moody we’d sweep, primish, young, mad. Crossing us like a streamlet were the Bartlett Junior High School kids taking the riverbank route to the White Bridge and Wannalancitt Street which’d been our route for “How many years Mouse? Remember the winter it was so cold they had frostbites in the Principal’s office with doctors?—”

  “And the time we had that snowball war on Wannalancitt—”

  “The crazy guys come to school with bikes, no kiddin Louse they had more trouble going up that hill from side to side than if they’d walk—”

  “I used to walk home every noon me and Eddy Desmond wrapped in each other’s arms falling on the ground—he was the laziest guy in the world, he didnt want to go to school in the afternoon, he wanted me to throw him in the river, I had to carry him—sleepy, he was like my cat, crazy—”

  “Ah the old days!” Mouse’d pout black and brooding. “All I ask is a chance in this ga-dam world to earn a decent living and support my mother and see that all her needs are answered—”

  “Where’s Scotty workin now?”

  “Didnt you hear?—out in Chelmsford, they’re building a big war airplane base, Scotty and ail the old WPA bums go out and dig up trees and cut em down and clear the ground—he’s making a million dollars a week—he gets up at four o’clock in the morning—Fuggen Scotcho—I love Scotcho—Dont catch him going to no high school and no business school courses, Kid Faro wants his money now—”

  We came to the bridge. The winter trickle between the jagged canyons of rock below, the pools of ice formed, rosy matin on the froth of little rapids, cold—far off, the bungalows of Centreville, and the snowy hump meadow, and hints of New Hampshire forests deep in where big men in mackinaws now with axes and boots and cigarettes and laughs drove old Reos through rutted dirt strips among pinestumps, to the house, the shack, the dream of wild New England in our hearts—

  “You’re quiet, Zagg—that damn Maggie Cassidy’s got you boy, s’got you boy!”

  “Dont let no broad get you, Zagg—love aint worth it—what’s love, nothin.” G.J. was against it. Not Lousy.

  “No, love is great Mouse—something to think about—go to church and pray Zagg You Babe! Marry her! Screw her! Zeet? Have a good one for me!”

  “Zagg,” advised Gus seriously, “screw her then leave her take it from an old seadog,—women are no good, forever ‘tis written in the stars—Ah!” turning away, black—“Kick em in the pants, put em in their place—There’s enough misery in this world, laugh, cry, sing, tomorrow is nothing—Dont let her get you down, Zagguth.”

  “I wont, Mouso.”

  “Zeet! Look here comes Billy Artaud—already for another day rubbing his hands together—” Sure enough Billy Artaud who lived with his mother and every morning didnt rise from his bed but leaped out grinning came up rubbing his hands, you could hear the cold wiry sound of his zeal across the street.

  “Hey, you guys, wait up—Let the chess champion walk!”

  “You’re the chess champion? Ho Ho.”

  “What?—”

  “With my bombarding tactics I can beat you all—”

  “Zeet? Look at his books!”

  —Wrangling, goofing, we stride without physical pause to school past Saint Jean Baptiste Church ponderous Chartres Cathedral of the slums, past gas stations, tenements, Vinny Bergeracs—(“Fuggen Vinny’s still sleepin . . . they wouldnt even take him in vocational school . . . all this morning he’ll read Thrilling True Love stories and eat them Drake’s Devil Cakes with the white cream in the middle . . . he never eats food, he lives on cakes. . . . Ah ga-dammit I know we played hooky yesterday but my soul cries out for
Vinny this gray sad morning.”

  “We better be careful—two days in a row?”

  “Did you hear him yestiddy?—he said he was going to get sexmad now and stick his head in the toilet bowl!”)—past the City Hall, the library in back with already some old bums gathering smoking butts at the door of the newspaper room waiting for nine o’clock opening time—past Prince Street (“Zowie, only last summer think of the games we had there, Zagg, the homeruns, the triples, the great Scotch pitching shutouts—life is so big!”)—(“life my dear Lousy is immerelensum!”)—past the YWCA, the canal bridge, the entrance street to the great cotton mills with all up down the morning-rosy cobbles the tight serried Colonial doors of a mid-nineteenth-century housing block for textile workers celebrated in some of Dickens’ memoirs, the sad crapulous look of old redbrick sagging doorfronts and almost a century of work in the mills, gloom in the night.

  And we came then mixing into the hundreds of students milling around the high school sidewalks and lawns waiting for the first bell which would be not heard outside but announced from within in a rumbling desperate-faced flying rumor so that sometimes when I was nightmarishly late I hurried all alone across the great deserted spaces only minutes ago scene of hundredfold grabbings now mopped out clean all the principals cubby-holed inside the silent high school windows in the morning’s first classes, a mortifying great space of guilts, many times dreamed, sidewalk, grass. “I’m going back to school,” dreams the old invalid in his innocent pillow, blind of time.

  12

  The class filed into school at 7:50 A.M., generally things rammed and slammed for the last time in strange antenna’d moments when nobody was saying a word and the edge of the bench was cutting my elbow as I leaned my head on it trying to catch some sleep—in the afternoon I really slept, with great success in homeroom study after one o’clock when not spitballs but love notes were thrown around—late in the school day—Sun morning was orange fire in the un-washed windows, making way for day blue gold as birds whistled in trees, an old man leaned on the canal rail with his pipe in his mouth, and the canal flowed—All whorly and whirlpools and dense and tragic and to be seen from half a hundred windows of the north side of the high school building, the new one and the old for freshmen. Gigantic, the drownings in that canal would bloat a book, bloat a page, imaginary, dream’d in that clock hour of the rosy jongling lip of kid days in stylish sweaters. Lousy was in his class, all was right with the world. He abhorred and grinned on his end of a bench in the flaming sun atmospheres of the southwest windows, which in the winter received pale tropical flame from old northeast—the eraser’s set out, the personal face-type’s got his desk, he hangles and grows frowzy, somebody’s got to set him right, the yawning day’s just begun. Magazines, peeking at them a minute in his desk box, the lid up—“Oh there in the hall goes Mr. Nedick the English teacher with the oversized pants—Mrs. Faherty the freshman grade or 9th grade teacher of Shakespearean rhymes’ll come among us, there she is, the big important tack-tock of her biglady high heels,” Joycean imaginings fill all our minds as we sit there goofily self-enduring the morning, waiting for the grave to lean our heads in, not knowing. In the cobbles by the factory by the canal I understand future dreams. I’ll have them later on of the redbrick mills beyond vacant canals in blue morning, the loss brow-banging, done with—My birds will twitter on the branch of other things.

  Eyes of pretty brunettes, blondes and redheads of the Lowell Prime are all around me. A new day in school, everybody wide-awake looking everywhere; today 17,000 notes will be delivered from shivering hand to hand in this ecstatic mortality. I can already see Stendhalian plots forming in the frowns of pretty girls, “Today, I’ll keep that damn Beechly awful innerested in a little idee of mine”—like Date-with-Judies self-communing monologues—“bring my brother into it and then everything’ll be set.” Others not plotting, waiting, dreaming the enormous sad dream of high school deaths you die at sixteen.

  “Lissen, Jim, tell Bob I didnt mean—he knows it!”

  “Sure, I told you I would!”

  Running for vice-president of the sophomore class, pinning photos to crucial letters, rounding up a gang, trying to get something on Annie Kloos. They’re all talking anxiously their plots, across the aisles, up and down the benches; the hubbub is so fantastic uproar momentous, weird, like sudden roars of Friday Afternoon California High School Football Games over quiet bungalow roofs, like teenagers at a roller derby, the teacher even is amazed and tries to hide behind the New York Times bought on Kearney Square at the only place where you can get them. The whole class invincible, the teacher’ll get the authority at exactly the time but better not interfere before overtime starts—“Gonna by golly—” “well gee—” “Hey—” “What you say there!” “Hi!” “Dotty?—didnt I tell you that dress would look divine?”

  “You didnt miss a trick, honey, I was perfect.”

  “The girls were wild about it, all of them. You shoulda heard Freda Ann come on! Yerr!”

  “Freda Ann?” primping her hair very significantly. “Tell Freda Ann she can go along her own way I can get along without her comments—”

  “Oh along along. Down in the hall’s my brother Jimmy. He’s got that little dumb Jones kid with him?” They join and peek, lip to ear. “See Duluoz up there? He’s bringing a note from Mag-gie Cassidy.”

  “Who? Mag-gie Cassi-dy?” And they double and squeal and laugh and everybody turns to look, what are they laughing about, teacher’s about to slap for order—the girls are laughing. My ears burn. I turn my dreamy inattention on everybody, thinking about my hot date pie with whipped cream last Sunday—the girls are looking into my blue windows for romance.

  “Hmm. Isnt he dreamy?”

  “I dont know. He looks sleepy all the time.”

  “That’s the way I like—”

  “Oh get away—how do you know how you like?”

  “Wouldnt you like to know? Ask—”

  “Ask who?”

  “Ask who went with Freda Ann to the Girl Officers’ Ball last Thursday and found themselves all tangled up, with Lala Duvalle and her gang of cutthroats and fingernail scratchers and you know who and know what else? I’m—Oh, here’s the silence.”

  Blam, blam, the old teacher bangs her ruler and stands, very matronly, like an old busdriver, surveying the class for absences and then she makes a note and a few quibblings then from next room walks in Mr. Grass for some special news and everybody bends an ear as they whisper up front, a spitball sails funnily in the bright nice sun, and on comes the day. The bell. We all rush off to our first classes. Ah inconceivably lost the corridors of that long school, those long courses, the hours and semesters I missed, I played hooky two times a week on the average—Guilt. I never got over it—Classes in English . . . reading the very solid poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson: a name I never knew to reckon with Shakespeare’s. Wonderful classes in some kind of pre-science fiction astronomy, with an old lady with a long stick demonstrating moons at the blackboard. A class in physics, here we were blearily lost trying to spell the word barometer on our gray blue-lined examination paper let alone Galileo. A course in this, that, hundreds of beautiful intelligent young people hung on pursuits of pure mental interest and social jawbones, all they gotta do is get up in the morning, school takes care of the rest of their day, taxpayers support.

  Some of them preferred rides to the country in tragic rumble seats, we never saw them again, they were swallowed in reform schools and marriage.

  It being winter, I wore my football sweater letter “L”—to show off—it was huge, uncomfortable, too hot, I hung braced in its horrible corset of wool for hours on end day after day. Finally I settled to just my own blue home sweater buttoned down in front.

  13

  The second class was the Spanish one where I found the notes from Maggie, two a week. I read it right away
:

  Well I suppose you thought I would never write a note this week. Well I had a swell time in Boston Saturday with my mother and sister. My little silly sister is a little flirt. I dont know what she will be like when she grows up. Well what have you been up to since I saw you. My brother and June that are getting married in April were here last night. How is school? Roy Walters is at the Commodore Tuesday and I am going. Glenn Miller is coming later on. Did you go to the diner after you left me Sunday? Well I havent any more to say now so

  So-Long MAGGIE.

  Even if I was supposed to see her that night I still had a long way to go—after school it was track, til 6, 7 P.M. when it was my custom to walk home one mile with stiff legs. Track was in a low vast building across the street, with steel beams bare in the ceiling, great basketball floors six of them, then drill floor of the High School Regiments and sometimes several indoor football drills and some rainy day March baseball practice and big track meets with crowds sitting in bleachers around. Before going there I hung out at the empty halls, classrooms—sometimes met Pauline Cole under the clock which I’d done every day in December but now it was January. “There you are!” She gave out with a big smile, eyes big, moist, beautifully blue, full big lips over great white teeth, very affectionate—it was all I could do—“Where you been keepin yourself hey.” Liking her, liking life too, I had to stand there assuming for myself all the gloomy guilts of the soul, out the other end of which my life flowed crying emptying in the dark anyway—weeping for what had been supposed—nothing within me to right the wronged, no hope of hope, blear, all sincerity crowded out by world-crowded actual people and events and the slack watery weakness of my own mean resolution—hung—dead—low.