Albany. 1992 or so.
The caterer his cousins had hired to organize their St. Patrick's Day party was a young woman with an intellectual air, long blond curls, and very red lips, who clutched her leather diary to her chest protectively and looked worried as she counted chairs. She seemed terrified of making a mistake. Hugh kept out of her way by helping Jasper at the bar, where he'd rather have spent all his time anyway.
Hugh O'Casey was short and stocky with a large jaw and very weak eyes behind very thick glasses. He wore his dark hair watered down and combed back from his forehead and went about with his apron on out of habit and his sleeves rolled up over his biceps which showed like cannonballs whenever he wiped the bar or drew a beer. He was so much the image of the Irish bartender that customers and delivery men, told that the manager was behind the bar, routinely addressed their questions to Jasper; if they didn't ignore Hugh, they ordered from him.
As much as he could, Hugh avoided the dining room and managed the restaurant from the bar, or the kitchen, or, when his cousins stayed out of it, his office. He did not like the way Mary Rose and Bernie had remodeled the dining room. Black and white tiles, gray paint on the walls, black paint on the booths, all the maps of Ireland and the photographs of Old Albany taken down, a few museum prints in stainless steel frames put up in their place, and an awful lot of bare gray wall left behind. He'd been consulted, but his cousins owned O'Casey's after all, and technically Hugh was just an employee, although the only one with a profit sharing plan, so he hadn't felt he had a right to fight as hard as he would have liked to keep O'Casey's as it had been. Anyway, his cousins had vetoed all his suggestions. “Get with the times, Hugh,” they'd said.
Fortunately, they'd run out of money before the remodellers could get at the bar and the banquet rooms upstairs. The bar was as it had always been since way before Hugh was born: Floors of sanded wood, the bar in the middle of the room, the rough wooden timbers of the glass rack low overhead, and on the post next to the cash register a slate with the announcement "Only ___ Days Until St. Patrick's Day," and the blank filled in today with a great big green goose egg. Hugh's great-grandfather had nailed up that slate. It had been used to count up eighty-five St. Paddy's Days so far, counting this. Hugh couldn't help worrying that it wouldn't be there for one more.
Hugh's great-grandfather had opened O'Casey's in 1906, his grandfather took it over in '35. Hugh's father had chosen to go to work for the State, and the bar had passed to Hugh's uncle, Tom McCready, his father's sister's husband. The plan had been for Hugh to get the place when Tom retired so that an O'Casey would be owning O'Casey's again. Hugh was the only member of the family of his generation who really loved the place. He'd worked there since the time he was old enough to have a paper route. Tom's own kids, Mary Rose and Bernie, had spent their twenties experimenting with various careers, none of which had anything to do with running restaurants, and had never given anyone, their father least of all, any cause to suspect that they wanted into the business. But then Tom had had his stroke before anything had been settled, and Hugh's aunt, Tom's widow, had “sold” O'Casey's to Bernie and Mary Rose, thinking it would make responsible adults out of them.
His cousins knew how much Hugh dreamed of standing in their grandfather's and great-grandfather's shoes. They'd agreed to sell him a half interest in the business at terms that had yet to be worked out.
But Bernie fancied himself a chef and continually invented new menus that the West Coast magazines he subscribed to told him were causing trendoids to salivate from Telegraph Hill to Rodeo Drive but which left the regulars at O'Casey's wishing they'd gone somewhere else for a hamburger. And Mary Rose lusted for a more upscale clientele and schemed for a review in the Albany papers, even one in The New York Times, that would draw the summer crowd down from Saratoga. In chasing after fads they were running the business into the ground. O'Casey's had ended the year in the red. A lot of that was the cost of remodeling, but the new year had opened pale pink and was fast deepening to scarlet. Their hopes were riding on the success of tonight's party, and Hugh pessimistically figured that they had to pack the place to the rafters just to break even.
Outside a storm front was moving in. The wind blew trash across the street. There was a steady hissing of frozen rain against the window panes. Inside all was snug and water-tight. O'Casey's did well in bad weather. From behind the bar, pouring another beer for Noel, one of the regulars, Hugh could see down the narrow hall and across the foyer to the dining room. The girl with the very red lips had her worried eye on something going on just above the doorway. “No! Higher,” she commanded petulantly. A balloon appeared and climbed the door jamb like a green moon. Hidden behind the doorway an exasperated waiter stood on a ladder, helping with the decorations. “Don't we have any more white ones?” the girl asked, pouting her red lips as if she was being unfairly denied balloons the color she wanted. The balloons were her responsibility. Her mind was on too many things. She was as nervous and harried as if the party was beginning any minute, although the time was only just after one and she was decorating around and over the heads of the last of the lunch crowd. The girl and her red lips were obscured from his view by the entrance of a pair of customers, a young couple in identical down vests, who brought with them a blast of the cold wet air from outside. Hugh's cousin Bernie, from his post at the host's desk, started after them with a pair of menus, but they headed straight for the bar, stamping their wet and frozen feet, rubbing their hands together, running their fingers through their tousled hair to shake out the sleet. Bernie gave up pursuit and stood looking disappointedly after them, as if the bar and the dining room were competing establishments, until he noticed that the wind still held the front door open and he was freezing in the draft. He looked around for a waiter or a busboy, apparently thinking that it was beneath the owner's dignity to go out and close the door. As usual, the sound of his voice produced no one saluting smartly. He pulled the door shut himself and retreated back to his desk, rubbing his thin shoulders and making shivering sounds.
Noel, on his accustomed stool at the corner of the far end of the bar, teased Hugh about letting the beer slosh as he set it down. “Jasper—” Noel leaned over the bar as if his words needed the extra two feet in order to reach all the way to the bartender— “I miss your delicate touch down here.”
Hugh smiled amiably. The truth was he was getting a little tired of Noel. Noel, who'd been a loan officer at Marine Midland, had lost his job at the bank when yet another merger had made him redundant, four, no, five months ago now. His wife had walked out with the kids soon after that. Since then he'd come into O'Casey's every afternoon, dressed in the same pinstriped suits and power ties he had worn when he still had an office to go to and a wife and kids to support. He was forty-two, with thick curly hair gone gray as sheep's wool and an equally gray mustache. He was a great favorite at O'Casey's. The waitresses petted him. Mary Rose encouraged him to flirt with her. Jasper looked out for him. And all the other regulars were glad to listen to his stories. Hugh probably liked him best, but for some reason Noel's presence felt a little cloying these days.
Hugh saw Mary Rose crossing the dining room, her party dress for tonight on a hanger and draped in cellophane from the cleaners hooked on her finger. His cousin was a bosomy, raucous girl with a brassy laugh whom Hugh could not forget having caught naked and on all fours in the stockroom with a busboy behind her when she and Hugh were in college and they'd worked for her father waiting tables to earn their tuition money. She stopped in the middle of the dining room, inadvertently framing herself in the doorway, and turned around slowly to survey the St. Patrick's Day decorations. Her party dress was green with a short velvet skirt and sequins on the bodice, sleeveless, with spaghetti straps, all plumped out with tissue paper so that it snickered as it moved with her. She'd had to buy a strapless bra to wear with it, a fact she'd announced in front of just about the entire wait staff the other night. “A push-up number. I want six inches of cleavage.” She'd demonstrated by cupping her breasts and squeezing them together under her sweatshirt.
Mary Rose grinned and pronounced the decorations “Grand! The fairest soight this soide o' Canty Cark” in one of the worst Irish brogues this side of community theatre. The girl from the caterers wanted to call something to her attention and parted her red lips to speak, but Mary Rose was on the move again, and once his cousin was in motion it took a strong arm to rein her in, which the girl with the red lips did not have. Mary Rose went everywhere at a gallop and the girl was wearing stiletto heels with her starched blue jeans so that high speeds were dangerous to her balance. She teetered after Mary Rose as best she could.
Hugh shook his head. “What's the point of owning a restaurant if you can't plan your own parties?”
“I thought you did a lovely job New Year's Eve,” Noel offered. By you he meant O'Casey's and really Mary Rose and Bernie. Hugh had stayed out of it.
“It was all right,” Hugh said, after exchanging sidelong glances with Jasper, who knew how much they’d lost New Year's Eve. For the first time in the establishment's history they'd been open December 31st . Used to be that they closed early that night and had a small party for the staff. This year his cousins had decided to do it up big for First Night. Eighty-five dollars a couple. Hardly anyone came. Bernie and Mary Rose concluded from that failure that they needed to hire professional banquet planners and spend more money on advertising. Hugh hadn't been able to make them mind how much it was costing.
“Chivas. Two Rolling Rocks. Irish coffee.” Franny, O'Casey's best waitress, strode up to the bar, sorting through the checks in her apron. Jasper drilled his hands into the ice chest for the beers before Hugh could blink. Franny and Jasper were a pair, communing by telepathy it seemed. Through force of will and grim determination, Franny had made herself into the third star on O'Casey's rating in the guide books. She had learned to carry plates up both arms, memorized the regulars' drinks, taught herself how to mix cocktails so that when the bar was busy her tables never went thirsty. She could tell you how the Knicks had done the night before last or who the Yankees were pitching Saturday. She had a map of the city in her head. Once she'd asked Hugh, “Who's a good bookie?” and after that Hugh worried whenever he saw her in conversations with certain kinds of customers, the red-faced in town for the convention types. She was tall and pretty, with a dark ponytail, and she wore black bowties with her white oxford shirts and black chinos. She didn't smile and she didn't waste time chatting with anybody who wasn't going to give her a tip, which included the staff. Hugh admired her for her old-fashioned ambitions. Mary Rose thought she was a hoot and treated her like a pal. But Franny hated what Mary Rose and her brother were doing with the place. The girl with the red lips, as the tool of the McCreadys' trendy amateurism, suffered Franny's wrath. Somehow the caterer had found herself in Franny's way all day and had to scurry for safety whenever Franny charged through with her trays full of food.
“Noel!” Franny said, picking up her drinks, "What did the Dow close at yesterday?"
“I’m not sure.”
“But it was up, right?”
“Thirty points and change,” Noel yelled, because Franny was already on her way back to the dining room. Then he said to no one in particular, “I think. I don’t follow the Market the way I used to.”
The girl with the red lips, on her way from the dining room to the bar, flattened against the wall when she saw Franny coming. The hallway was narrow but there was more room to get by than Franny used. She forced the caterer to disappear into the coats hanging on hooks along the wall. Hugh was still chuckling when the girl climbed up on a stool and ordered a white wine, more or less speaking to him, whom she'd apparently forgotten having met.
“How's it going?” Hugh asked pleasantly. The girl ignored him. She opened her leather diary and stood it up on her knees. She wore a tweed blazer over her jeans and a blouse that was not enough like silk to justify the price she'd probably paid for it. The deep V of her collar revealed the rise of her breast when she reached for her purse and a blue vein could be seen under the pale, pale skin. The only make-up she wore was her too bright lipstick. She was not as young as she looked from a distance, closer to thirty than to the twenty-two he had first supposed. Hugh had heard enough during her original consultation with Mary Rose and Bernie to figure out that this job was not her ideal career choice; she'd come to it by accident after several false starts at other professions and regarded it as something of a last chance, which explained her anxiety, since there was nothing in the task at hand to be afraid of, in fact, you had to work at planning an unsuccessful St. Patrick's Day party. Hugh felt a little sorry for her, despite her coolness toward him. She reminded him of the heroine of his favorite opera, Lucia di Lammermoor, one of those lovelorn wretches who dies miserably, wringing her hands in mid-aria. In his young days, Hugh's father had had a fine tenor voice that used to earn him the lead roles in the Light Opera Company's musicals and he'd passed on to Hugh an appreciation for music, opera particularly, an appreciation Hugh regretted was shallow and unknowlegeable, as well as a passable talent that way for himself, enough talent to be in awe of those who could really do it well, sing opera that is. Once or twice each year he would go up to Saratoga to see a production by The New York City Opera Company who were in summer residency there. The soprano who had sung the title role in Donizetti's opera had been a white and wispy thing with red lips whose singing had pithed Hugh right through the occiput. Although her real name was Joanne—or was it Joanie? Mary Rose had rattled off the introductions too fast for him to catch.—in his head Hugh began to call the girl from the caterers Lucia.
“Got enough balloons finally?”
Lucia stared at him, forced a smile. I'm the goddamn manager, he wanted to shout at her, my name's going to be on the check that pays you! Then, of course, to make him feel worse, she'd already begun to see right through him to Jasper. Jasper was six-four, his head barely cleared the glass rack and he had to be ducking all the time to avoid taking a beer mug between the eyes, and he was so handsome he was almost beautiful. A young Harry Belafonte, said women old enough to know. Younger women just melted. Jasper had starred as a point guard at Siena in the early 80’s and had played two seasons for the Patroons in the CBA. He had hoped Phil Jackson would take him with him to the Bulls, “Just so I could say I ran the floor with Michael,” but he hadn't enough weight on him to make it in the pros. It was too trivial a triumph to take any real satisfaction in, but it never failed to make Hugh feel a little smug whenever a woman who didn't have the time of day for him broke her heart over Jasper, who was carrying a torch for a state trooper named Peter.
Hugh dried the bar and placed a napkin in front of her before setting down her wine. Lucia, her eyes touring Jasper's back as he shook a margarita, tried to hand Hugh a five.
“On the house,” he said, pushing the money back at her.
"Thank you," she said, and if the wine in her glass wasn't chilled before, that thank you put a skin of ice over it.
“Isn't this a lovely place?” Noel called to her. “It's the friendliest bar in town.” Receiving no acknowledgment, unless to take out a pocket calculator and hastily begin to tap out some calculations is the same as a polite Glad to meet you, Noel continued his remarks to the young couple in the down vests who'd sat down on his left with their backs to the windows. It was for the wife, a rosy-faced blonde, that Jasper poured out the margarita and salted the glass. Noel said, “That's going to be the most delicious margarita you've ever tasted. The man's a wizard!”
The young wife smiled and politely assumed an expression of eager anticipation. Her husband made a glum face into his beer, as if disappointed that he had asked the bartender to perform such an ordinary trick as pouring a draft.
“Isn't it good?” Noel demanded. The wife barely had it to her lips, but she could smell it at least and she nodded enthusiastically to signify that her nose was happy. “What did I tell you?” Noel looked around the bar, beaming a request for anyone to suggest a reason why he shouldn't be so pleased with himself. “Hugh, you don't pay that man enough.”
“You'll just have to leave bigger tips, Noel.”
You couldn't have called the remark mean, unless you knew that Noel was running a tab that he wouldn't be able to pay off at the end of the month. Which, of course, Hugh did. As did Jasper. And Franny, who was back with another drink order—Franny's tables worked up terrific thirsts from watching her charge about with the energy of ten waitresses—and she gave Hugh a reproving look along with her order. Lucia leaned way over to the side when Franny appeared at the bar, afraid that Franny was about to knock her off her stool.
And Noel certainly knew what he owed. He winced. “Touché,” he said and tipped his glass to Hugh. But since it was Hugh who had allowed him to run the tab, and Hugh who would allow him to carry over the balance at the month's end, Noel was inclined to be forgiving. He forgave and forgot and set to work at his only occupation these days, soliciting the life histories of other customers, to which he listened intently, as if this earned him money, as if he was overpaid for his trouble, in fact, so that it was only fair that he should return the story of his own life by way of change. He turned to the young couple and clocked in. “I'll bet you two like to ski.”
Someone else knew, not about Noel's tab, Mary Rose couldn't have cared less about that, she never looked at the books, but about her cousin and his moods, and she'd appeared over Noel's shoulder in the door to the cellar stockroom just as Hugh had spoken. She had shed her raincoat and hung up her dress someplace, probably in Hugh's office which had its own stairs down to the stockroom. She wore a t-shirt and calf-length tights, sneakers and sweat socks, as if she had just come from the gym. Hugh thought she was too big and curvaceous to run around like that, but Mary Rose never did worry about her modesty and she regarded anyone who did, Hugh foremost, as a prude. She heard the remark for what it was. “Lighten up, Hugh.”
Hugh blushed to his hairline and shivered down to his bowels. Nothing to do with her scolding him. It was the conjunction of Mary Rose and the stockroom that unsettled him. Mary Rose knew what memories she'd aroused. She winked at him as she came around the bar, pausing on her way to ruffle Noel's hair and kiss the top of his head. Noel purred, “Oooo, do it again.”
Lucia sat up very straight and alert. “Mare?”
Mary Rose, having reached the other side of the bar, hauled herself up on it and leaned way over so that her bottom was high in the air and her breasts practically in the ice chest. Hugh came running to take the soda gun from her, warned her back over the bar with a look, dashed a glass into the ice, and shot it full of 7-Up for her. His cousin laughed at him and his fussy sense of propriety, and her laugh was such that both Jasper and Hugh involuntarily glanced overhead at the glass rack to see if the glasses rattled.
Mary Rose was tall and large-boned, with a big head and a tangled mane of dark hair she liked to toss around, putting her whole neck and shoulders into the toss. She had a big chest, not even considering her breasts, big muscular thighs, and long legs. Perhaps because his cousin had spent so much of her adolescence in the company of horses, including two years at a small college near Syracuse where she'd majored in equine sciences, but more likely because he couldn't forget what he'd seen in the stockroom twelve years ago, Hugh compounded her description with that of a thoroughbred and sometimes the picture of her he had in his head was at once woman, centaur, and horse, only arched over a case of beer and not running through open fields.
She was thirty-two, two years older than Hugh, and sometimes she treated him like a pesky little brother, though Hugh had been managing O'Casey's for the last half-dozen years and had been her boss when the only times she'd showed her face in her father's restaurant was when she’d needed to make some extra money to pay for a vacation and waited tables for a few weeks here and there for tips, and sometimes she treated him in an odd way he couldn't define, except that it seemed taunting, exasperated, and expectant, as though she was getting tired of waiting for him to make up his mind about something.
Meanwhile, Lucia seemed to be waiting for him to do something else before she began to make her point with Mary Rose and Hugh began to think it was for him to leave. It wouldn't occur to Mary Rose to reintroduce them, and Hugh tried to think of a tactful way of reminding Lucia who he was and of his right to be in on any decisions affecting the restaurant. Lucia finally asked Mary Rose if they could find someplace quieter to talk, as if there were a party of chattering Noels crowding the bar, instead of the sweet-voiced one.
“Here's fine, babe.” Mary Rose stood between stools, rudely close to Lucia, and leaned with her elbow on the bar. Lucia shrank a little, put her nose in her diary, and a little breathlessly began to run down her checklist of things to do, ticking off what had been accomplished in getting the place ready for tonight. Mary Rose nodded but paid more attention to the ice in her glass, which, her soda gone, she began to chew noisily. Hugh felt he had to be responsible so he listened closely to Lucia and commented and asked questions. Lucia more or less ignored him, except to shoot puzzled sidelong glances at Mary Rose, probably wondering why Mary Rose allowed a bartender to think he had a say in managerial decisions. She had the snobbery of the newly risen and Hugh guessed that it hadn't been so long ago that she'd been waiting tables or pushing drinks herself. He was furious at Mary Rose for not setting the snooty little prig straight. Mary Rose just continued calmly grazing on her ice cubes. Fuming, Hugh snatched her glass away, dumped what was left of the old ice, and refilled the glass with soda—neat.
Mary Rose frowned at him quizzically, then shrugged her shoulders, half in apology, half in careless dismissal of whatever was bugging him. She knew he was angry at her but had no interest in finding out why. Whenever he lost patience with her, she treated his anger as beside the real point, which she was tired of him ducking.
Lucia stopped. “So what do you think?”
“Looks fine.”
Lucia's shoulders slumped. In her anxiety, anything less than perfection was utter failure.
“I think it's all gorgeous, dear.” Noel, sending his sympathy down the bar like a drink. He had sensitive radar and was always ready to trade commiserations. Hugh glared at him and almost snapped, “Mind your own business, Noel.” The scowl on his face and the thrust of his jaw were enough. Noel flushed and scratched his forehead as a way of hiding the hurt in his eyes.
Lucia soldiered on bravely, despite her deserting spirits. She suggested that it was time to start decorating the banquet rooms. She spoke with a hope that Mary Rose would be happier when she saw what was to be done upstairs. But Mary Rose was already bored with the project. Hugh wasn't surprised. She dived into enthusiasms as if into a cold surf and the first wave breaking over her head was usually enough to satisfy her. She'd come up sputtering, laughing, glowing as if from sex, but ready to get out, and too bad for anybody just beginning to get his toes wet when she ran to shore. What Mary Rose wanted was for the party to start. She'd begun to radiate hostility toward Lucia as if Lucia's reiteration of details was making the time stand still. Hugh figured it wouldn't be very long before the whole project was handed over to him to dispense with. Mary Rose asked the girl what needed to be done upstairs in a way that really said, Do we have to bother?
Lucia ducked her head into her diary, terrified that she'd offended the client, and murmured about getting the tables set up for people who wanted to sit down to eat, since the dining room was going to be turned into an annex to the bar with a band and room for dancing.
“Oh, yeah.” Mary Rose sighed. “Hugh.”
Here it comes.
“Would you see to things upstairs?”
“They're not done up there yet, are they?”
“Who? Oh, right. The fucking Pickwick Club. Are they still up there?” She turned over her wrist to look at her watch, which was new and expensive, a gift to herself she couldn't afford. “Yeah. I guess they're probably still droning on. Hugh. Do us a favor. Go upstairs and chase them out so we can get this over with.”
Lucia bent her head lower into her diary.
Hugh reminded Mary Rose that the Toastmasters Club of St. John Chrysostom had the Crystal Room until two. “And they always run over.”
“Well, don't let them. And don't forget to remind them about the increase.”
Hugh folded his arms. He knew that he wasn't really being ordered: Mary Rose was afraid to face Father Kelso herself. They'd had this argument weeks ago and he'd lost, no point in getting into it again. But if Mary Rose wanted more money from the priest and whatever vestigial Catholic schoolgirl guilt she had left made her quake at the thought of asking it from him herself, she should at least acknowledge that Hugh was about to do her a big favor. She should show Lucia that Hugh wasn't a mere employee. But the girl's face was so deep in her diary that she wouldn't have seen Mary Rose go down on her knees. Mary Rose only said that she was going to try on her dress, would Hugh like to help her with that instead?
The stairs up to the banquet room were narrow and steep. The varnish had worn off the treads. Hugh climbed the stairs with his head down, studying the worn spots, thinking about all the people long dead whose feet had gone that way ahead of him. In his nostalgic mood it almost seemed to him that he could pick out the footprints of his great-grandfather and those of his grandfather and his own father as a boy carrying trays up and down. And himself, ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty years younger.
“Pardon me.”
Hugh lifted his head. An old man, adjusting the collar of his coat, on his way down. Under his coat the old man wore a light green turtleneck and a Kelly green blazer. He looked surprised to see Hugh, as if recognizing him, or rather, as if mistaking him for someone else, someone he never thought to see again. Of course what he was seeing was the face of Hugh's grandfather as a young man and for a brief second it threw him backwards in time sixty years. It saddened him when Hugh's very different voice saying hello brought him back to the present.
In the days when the old man and Hugh's grandfather were boys and Hugh's great-grandfather, the original Hugh O'Casey, had just moved his thriving saloon around the corner from Washington Street to this building, a lot of love and much of the profits had been invested in the new dining room and The Crystal Room at O'Casey's had become one of the most fashionable restaurants in Albany. Back then, the summer people and the racing crowd did come down from Saratoga to dine at O'Casey's. The dull photographs of the period didn't show it, but the dining room had been as brilliant as clear ice under a bright sun. Diners ate in a dazzlement of electric light dancing through the crystal chandeliers, off the etched glass partitions and the bright mahogany woodwork, in the mirrors all around and the real crystal and cut glass on all the tables. When Prohibition shut down the bar, the restaurant continued to prosper. But when the Depression came, too few people could afford to dine elegantly, and the original Hugh's son, Hugh's grandfather, who now ran the place, was embarrassed to be feeding those who could while his friends and neighbors lost their jobs and went broke. So the Crystal Room was smashed, in a sense. O'Casey's became just plain O'Casey's again and was open for lunch only, with sandwiches always available at the bar. The mirrors and the cut glass, the chandeliers and the crystal were sold off to a hotel, which lost them to creditors before it had to shut its doors. The furnishings went into storage where they vanished. But somewhere there must be a record of where they'd gone, the present day namesake of the original Hugh believed, and perhaps someday they could be found and restored. Hugh and his uncle had liked to talk about reviving O'Casey's past glories. Hugh wondered why if his cousins felt they had to remodel they couldn't have brought back the chandeliers and the cut-glass, the mirrors and the crystal. He still held out hope that the larger of the two banquet rooms could be made over into a new Crystal Room. He'd even taken to calling it that, as a not very subtle hint to his cousins. Mary Rose laughed at him for it, of course.
The banquet rooms were at the top of the stairs, one to either side of the landing. The Toastmasters had the “Crystal Room” booked for every second Tuesday of the month, although Hugh felt they'd have been happier in the other room, in which, it being half the size of the Crystal Room, they wouldn't have looked so lost. There was room for twenty tables in Hugh's Crystal Room and not enough Toastmasters to fill five—on a good day.
Today was fair. Nearly thirty men around the tables arranged end to end in a square horseshoe. All the heads around the tables were white or bald, all of the men were past, some well past, retirement age, all but two were wearing the green. There were green ties, green socks, and green sweaters; green shirts and green slacks and green blazers. One wiseguy sported an orange turtleneck and one man at the head table was all in black, but he was a priest: Himself, Father Kelso.
Groups like the Toastmasters had met at O'Casey's since the days when the original Hugh had hosted the Albany Sons of Sam Tilden, a Democratic political club that had included Dan O'Connell and Erastus Corning, and, before that, Al Smith and a young state legislator from Hyde Park. Hugh was proud that his efforts to bring in the Toastmasters continued the tradition. For the last seven years, they had been meeting here at O'Casey's to make long edifying speeches and eat large lunches, the goal of the Toastmasters being self-improvement on a full and contented stomach. They ate heartily and made their speeches on subjects such as "Backyard Observations," "The Real Wild West,” "Tourist Traps I Have Loved,” "The Example of St. Francis Assisi, Businessman,” and "Should Women be Allowed to Say the Mass?" (This last brought a rebuttal at the next meeting, "Where Do We Put Our Dead Bodies They've Gone Over to Do It?"), toasted each other with one glass of sherry all around, and went home in cheerful moods, although guiltily wishing they'd passed on the second piece of cake.
The meeting was breaking up as Hugh entered the room. Franny was there, buzzing about the tables, taking up plates, hovering over laggards to encourage them to hurry up with their last forkfuls of dessert. Hugh shook his head and smiled at her affectionately, thinking that she had to be possessed of antenna that let her know when she was needed where so that none of her tables, upstairs or down, ever had to look for her twice. Hugh wanted to tell her what a good job she was doing, but he was afraid his compliments would sound forward and all that came out of him when she brought the dirty dishes over to a tray on the sideboard was that the gentleman at the second table seemed to want another cup of coffee. Franny regarded her bosses more as extra pairs of eyes than as people with any claim to order her about; she reacted to Hugh's observation as if to a voice inside her own head and didn't even glance at him, for which relegation to invisibility Hugh was grateful because he'd felt like a jerk as soon as he'd spoken. Off she went with the coffee pot—the decaf pot with the orange handle because naturally she remembered who drank leaded and who un- and whether it was taken black or with cream.
Coats on, good-byes said, the Toastmasters filed out, each one nodding or saying good day to Hugh, wishing him a Happy St. Patrick's Day and reminding him “Erin go bragh!”—Ireland Forever. Father Kelso remained in his seat to chat with Franny. The priest was a little bald cherub, somewhere close to eighty, but plump and smooth, with an almost permanent smile of beatific amusement pushing up his cheeks into great pink roses. He was the pastor emeritus at Our Lady of Lourdes, semi-retired, and lived with his widowed sister, a pretty, plumper version of himself in a white wig.
“Happy St. Paddy's Day, Father,” Hugh said, when Franny's radar had told her she was needed downstairs.
“You missed a good one, Hugh,” the priest said.
“Who spoke?”
“No, I meant a joke. Franny just told me this one about a guy jumping out of an airplane whose parachute won't open. You heard it?”
“I think so.”
“The guy jumps and when he pulls the ripcord nothing happens. So he's falling and falling and he can't figure out how to make his parachute open and suddenly he meets another guy who's falling UP! So the guy with the broken parachute calls to the guy who's falling up, Hey, buddy, you know anything about parachutes? And the guy falling up calls back, No, but do you know anything about gas grills?”
“That's a good one, Father.”
“Here for the check, Hugh?” Father Kelso smiled his great beaming baby's smile and reached into his breast pocket for his wallet to pay the Toastmasters' bill. He set the check down on the table, went back into his pocket after his reading glasses, settled them on the end of his turned up little nose, then picked up the check and studied it as if he hadn't written it himself and he had assure himself that there were no mistakes. Satisfied, he handed it to Hugh, who was dismayed to discover that it had been figured at the old prices, even though Hugh had told the priest back in January that the rates were going up. His temper heated but he persuaded himself that Father Kelso had simply forgotten.
“You had a good crowd today, Father.”
"Well, St. Patrick's Day...”
“Still. Twenty-five."
“Twenty-two.”
“I thought I counted twenty-five.”
“No. Twenty-two.” The priest's eyes twinkled craftily. Clearly he didn't expect Hugh to believe him but he was sure he'd let him get away with the lie, as if it was a game they were playing at the expense of Hugh's cousins. “But you're right. We had nearly double the crowd from three weeks ago. Seems that our ranks diminish and diminish and diminish and I get to despairing, thinking that next time there'll only be myself and the waitress, then all at once a whole pack of wives get sick of their husbands moping about the house and our numbers increase and multiply.”
“Thank God for the wives.”
“But we've got to face the fact, Hugh, there's none of us getting any younger—“ Father Kelso seemed to be including Hugh in his own generation, forgetting that Hugh was nearly fifty years shy of contemporarity, but Hugh sometimes felt that he'd been born late so he hardly noticed the priest's acceleration of his years himself— “Those funeral bells are breaking up that old gang of mine.”
Hugh took a mournful look around the room with its big front windows and two wooden fireplaces. If they ever brought back the Crystal Room, there'd be mirrors over the fireplaces and he'd have the carved mantelpieces refinished with a bright cherry varnish. It was sad to think that there might be no Toastmasters there to see it.
Father Kelso continued to beam. The motion to dissolve the Toastmasters someday too soon having been moved by Time, seconded by Mortality, and passed through the unanimity of Death didn't take the twinkle out of his eye or put a dent in his brow. If anything his smile grew broader and more beatific.
“Hugh, can I talk to you?”
“Sure, Father.”
“Sit down. Sit down.” The priest waved him to a chair as hospitably as if they were back in his office in the rectory. “Hugh?”
The way the priest spoke his name made Hugh remember high school and the kind of talking to kids would get just before one of the brothers told them they'd failed a course.
“I got a letter from your cousins,” Father Kelso said, “It was a form letter. Began ‘Dear Valued Customer.’ So I'm guessing it was sent to lots of people and not just us. It said you're raising your banquet rates ten dollars a head.”
“That's for weddings and big parties where they want an open bar. For smaller affairs we're charging six seventy-five a plate now.”
“So it wasn't meant for us?”
“Well, no.” Hugh leaned his elbow on the table and hid his mouth behind his fist while with his other hand he swept some crumbs into a line on the tablecloth. “But luncheons now cost the six seventy-five.”
“For the Toastmasters too?”
Hugh scratched the side of his nose. “I'm afraid so.”
“Would you mind looking at me when I'm talking to you?”
Raising his eyes, Hugh found that the smile was gone from Father Kelso's face. The expression replacing it was not so much a frown as a pout. “We had a deal,” the priest said.
“Well, not exactly, Father. You agreed to take the room at the usual rate. The rate's gone up a bit.”
“All on its own, I suppose.”
“We had to raise prices on our whole menu.”
“Don't you think you should have told me yourself? We've been coming here for seven years now, Hugh. You could have had the common courtesy to tell us to our face instead of sending us a form letter like we're complete strangers. A letter I noticed you didn't bother to sign.”
“I didn't know about the letter, Father.” Which was true. Which he was ashamed to admit.
“These are men on fixed incomes, Hugh. Even at five dollars a head, the price is steep for them. And let's face it, it's not like they're paying for dinner at the Ritz here, are they? Soup and sandwiches is all we're talking about, when you get right down to it.”
“It's only a dollar seventy-five more, Father. You're saying they can't come up with an extra buck seventy-five a month?” Hugh felt he had to defend the new price policy; to do otherwise would have been to admit he had no part in setting the rates.
“I'm saying that it's too much more to pay for the sorry excuse for a meal you serve us. Skimpy sandwiches—you might as well feed us the two slices of bread and let us imagine the meat for ourselves––and what's with the fancy soups? California medley? Cream of cauliflower? What's wrong with beef vegetable? You're charging us all this money for soup that's nothing more than a hot wet salad. I won't pay it!”
Strange of him to say I because Father Kelso was actually the guest of the Toastmasters; the other members took turns paying for his meal. There was more to his anger than his just standing up for the Toastmasters. Father Kelso was personally offended. He felt himself being cheated. A retired priest didn't have much of a pension to live on and Father Kelso's sister hadn't much more than her social security. Hugh had heard stories of the sister's fearful penny-pinching, how she begrudged him a dollar to buy a candy bar and kept track of the mileage on their old Plymouth Duster. Perhaps the sister had taught him her stinginess and he'd learned to extend it to all decisions, even when his own money wasn't at stake. Perhaps, too, he was scared of his sister, afraid that she wouldn't let him belong to the Toastmasters anymore if she heard how much their lunches cost—once people get to counting pennies, it doesn't matter who's doing the actual paying, the very idea of money being spent fills them with moral outrage, the way some virtuous souls are offended as much by the concept of sin as by its practice. Father Kelso was a miserly surrogate for his sister then, a fact that didn't comfort Hugh one bit, because he felt at fault anyway for not owning O'Casey's.
There was a part of Hugh that argued, Give it to them at the old price, how will Bernie or Mary Rose ever know. As manager, he ought to have been making those decisions. But another part of him feared the day when it did come out. Mary Rose wouldn't believe that he'd kept the price down to be fair or generous. She'd tell him he'd done it out of fear of the priest. She'd call him a coward. And she'd give him that look that seemed to expect so much out of him. And she'd laugh.
“It's not really that much, Father. I'm sure that if you ask the other men, they won't mind.”
“Of course they'll mind. We're thinking of meeting somewhere else as it is. Steve Corcoran's got a daughter who's the banquet manager at the Marriott and she can get us a discount.”
“What's that going to solve? Even with a discount the Marriott's still going to cost more than you'd be paying here with the increase.”
“O'Casey's just isn't the same. We don't like it here anymore. It'd be one thing if you'd keep that cousin of yours in line. She's terrible, Hugh. She's a foul-mouthed little hussy. And her brother's a sodomite!”
“Bernie? He is not!”
“I'm disappointed in you, Hugh. You don't take after your uncle at all. And you should have had the guts to discuss this to my face. Where's my coat? Find my coat, will you? Where'd they put my coat? Oh. Thank you, Franny.” Because it was indeed Franny, who'd returned to collect her tips, helping him on with his heavy black mackintosh. You could never tell from her expression what Franny had heard or not heard or what she thought of anything, but it was safest to assume that nothing got by her, so Hugh had to figure that the one person in the restaurant he wanted to admire him, because she so much seemed to be full of the spirit of his grandfather's day, had heard him called gutless by a priest.
Hugh came down the stairs slowly and by himself many minutes after Father Kelso had stormed out. Mary Rose met him at the bottom step. She was wearing her party dress and was standing there barefoot, her hands behind her back, struggling with her zipper. “Hey, Hugh, zip me up,” she demanded, even though Bernie was two feet away, doodling food arrangements on the back of the seating chart. She turned around, blocking the way, so that Hugh had no choice but to stand on the last step and comply. The zipper started very far down her back, low enough that Hugh could see she wasn't wearing any underpants. She didn't have on her push-up bra either.
“Hey watch it! It's delicate!” Mary Rose warned him as he zipped her up with a single quick yank. “What's the matter? You didn't want to take the time to count the freckles?”
She took for granted the fact that he blushed. “Ok, guys, get ready for the unveiling,” she hollered to the people in the dining room and galloped off, pulling up the straps on her dress, sticking her thumbs down her bosom to twist the bodice around straight on her breasts. When she got to the center of the dining room, she did a little model's turn and then stood with her hands up in the air. “Ta da!” Customers applauded, Lucia gushed, “Mare, it's gorgeous,” and even Franny looked impressed. Jasper, who was setting up the second bar for tonight, wolf-whistled and said that the sight was almost enough to make him convert. Mary Rose pronounced herself “Tight as a gooseberry.” Hugh turned on his heel.
“There goes Hugh!” Mary Rose laughed. She raised her voice with every step he took down the hall so that her words chased him like the snowballs she used to throw at him when they were kids. “No doubt he thinks I've been undignified. Or maybe he's just bored because he's already seen all the good stuff!”
In the bar a couple of the Toastmasters had lingered to play darts and have one or two more for the road. Another one of the regulars had come in, but earlier than usual, a young salesman who should have been out making his rounds; he'd been driven off the roads by the weather, which had turned even more foul.. Outside snow had begun to mingle with the sleet. A car trying to make the turn onto Pine Street spun its wheels then drifted down the hill, nosing sideways as it fell. Noel was still talking to the young couple, but he directed his words around the bar to include anyone else who might have wanted to listen
“I come from California and I've never been able to get used to how cold people can be in the East,” Noel was saying. “For twenty years I've lived here and I try and I try to break through but people just don't want to connect. It gets very depressing. That's why I like to come here. They won't let me nurse my moods. I come in here in a bad mood, they take me by the lapels—slap, slap! Come back to earth, Noel!”
“Jesus,” Hugh muttered but loud enough that Noel heard it. Not that Hugh cared. He even raised his voice to a low growl as he continued, “We're not a charity here. You think we're running a halfway house for the chronically miserable?”
Noel looked baffled. “I only meant that it's very cheerful here. Usually.” He winked at the young couple. Hugh felt himself redden and whatever expression flashed across his face—it came and went so quickly that he missed it himself—sat Noel back on his stool, his eyes round as pie plates, and caused the young couple to exchange embarrassed glances. Hugh snarled, “Have some self-respect, Noel.” Then he turned his back on him and walked away.
To his consternation, Lucia had brought her red lips back to the bar.
“Another white wine?” he asked brusquely, wiping out a glass with so much torque that it squealed and the muscles jumped in his upper arm. Over her shoulder he saw that Mary Rose had finished with the fashion show and was on her way down the hall followed by Franny who hugged a bundle of clothes that must have been Mary Rose's t-shirt and tights. Mary Rose stiff-armed the ladies' room door and disappeared behind it. Franny went right in after her.
Lucia addressed Hugh directly for the first time all day. “Mare said you're supposed to help me upstairs?”
Hugh lowered his head so that she couldn't see the angry tears that jumped stinging to his eyes.
“Hugh! How about another Blue Ribbon down here?” Noel warbled at him, having forgiven Hugh his little show of temper of a moment ago.
Hugh spun around. “Haven't you had enough, Noel?”
Noel went white. “Well, I—“
“What's that, your fourth, fifth?”
“I haven't been counting, to tell you the truth.”
“Well, I have, and you're cut off.”
“You're kidding?”
Hugh snatched away his glass and threw it in the wash tub.
“But—but—“ Noel began. Then he remembered his bar tab and became too ashamed to protest. “Maybe you're right. How about just some coffee?”
“Don't you got someplace to go, Noel?”
Noel goggled at him in disbelief. Hugh set his jaw and snapped the bar rag onto its rack.
“I said: Don't you got someplace to go?”
Noel's eyes begged for mercy. Hugh folded his arms. Noel looked around for Jasper, for Mary Rose, for Franny, for somebody, anybody, to plead his case. Hopeless. No defense. No appeal. And Hugh a hanging judge. Noel climbed from his stool. He made a show of taking out his wallet and withdrawing a credit card. Hugh ran it through, charging him for only three beers, and slid the slip across the bar. Clearly calculating that he was dangerously close to his credit limit, Noel took up the pen as if what he was about to put his name to was a warrant for his own arrest. But he signed it with a flourish and smiled bravely, his lips trembling only so much that you'd notice if you happened to be looking, and said cheerfully, with a quaver you wouldn't have heard if you weren't listening for it, “There's five dollars there for Jasper. Don't go pocketing it yourself, Hugh.”
The carbons were torn, the sale was rung, and Hugh was out from behind the bar before Noel was finished saying his good-byes to the young couple, whose too cheerful Nice meeting you's only underlined how embarrassed they were for him. Hugh said to Lucia, “You coming?” in such a peremptory way that she hurried to put down her wine, snatch up her diary, and totter on her high heels after him. He sent her up the stairs ahead of him while he watched Noel search through the coat rack and work his way into his belted-back camel hair topcoat, souvenir of better days, whose elegance all of a sudden weighed a ton, leaded down with reminders of how far he'd fallen in the world that he was being tossed out of bars by people he considered his friends. For a moment Noel had a hope that Hugh was waiting there because he'd had a change of heart. Then he saw that Hugh only wanted to be sure he did in fact leave. Noel's coat became an even more crushing weight on his shoulders and he could barely lug it to the door.
“Do you know when the bus comes by?” Noel asked Bernie, who was there to hold the door for him. Bernie shook his head. Hugh closed his fist around a five dollar bill in his pocket, thinking he would loan it to Noel for cabfare. He thought about it for as long as it took Noel to walk out the door, which Bernie pulled closed behind him with a bang, helped by a push from the wind. In seeing Noel out, Bernie had seen the cold in, and Hugh climbed the stairs with the draft on his back like a cross of damp and ice. Head down, he stomped upstairs as if trying to scrape up the last bit of varnish the ghosts hadn't scuffed away.
In his Crystal Room, Lucia started right in describing her plans for decorating up here, while Hugh stood in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets under his apron and frowned at the carpet. He paid no attention to what she said, but fairly soon he began to hear something odd in the way she was saying it. Her voice lilted upwards at the ends of her sentences, question marks tacked onto every full stop. “I thought we'd continue the balloon theme up here?” “What if we put the paper shamrocks up along the ceiling?” “Would it be all right if we had six chairs at each table?”
Hugh didn't know what to make of it, except to think that she was flattering him by inviting him to approve decisions she and Mary Rose had already made. Then he remembered how indifferent Mary Rose had been to Lucia and her ideas. Lucia's job depended on her pleasing them and she was turning to Hugh as her last chance. So he listened a little more closely. He hated every suggestion, from the Erin go bragh mobiles to the paper leprechaun hats, but he felt sorry for her for how attached she was to her clichés and how desperate she was for him to like them. He looked at her for the first time since they'd come upstairs and was surprised to see that she was near to tears. He realized that he was still scowling so he made an effort to smile. She seemed encouraged.
“You don't like any of this, do you?”
“I like some of it.”
“I have lots of other ideas. It's just that Mary Rose didn't seem interested.”
“Oh don't mind her. You get used to her. It may take you thirty years...”
“Have you known her long?”
“Thirty years.” Seeing that she looked confused, he added, “She's my cousin.”
“Oh?”
“I'm Hugh O'Casey.” He held out his hand.
"Joanne," she said, shaking hands with her whole arm. “Sprague. Joanne Sprague. You’re Mare’s cousin? Oh, shit. I’m sorry. I didn’t. She didn’t. Shit.” She felt ashamed of the way she'd ignored him when she hadn't known his last name and relation to Mary Rose. One more mistake to flog herself with. “You handled that very well downstairs.”
“Handled what?”
“That drunk in the bar who was annoying everybody.”
Hugh shrugged. Joanne continued, “I never know what to do in those situations.”
He didn't doubt it. It was easy to picture her as she'd been, in whatever job she'd held before this one, waiting tables, clerking in a bookstore, bullied by customers, slighted by her bosses, manipulated by the people, men especially, she meant to impress, too ashamed to assert herself, a bright and talented girl who couldn't understand how she'd ended up a flunky. Even now she was drowning. Two of a kind, Hugh thought.
With her diary open and tapping her pen on her red lips, Joanne took a turn around the room, trying to look as if she was assessing it for any missed possibilities. What she was really doing, it bemused Hugh to realize, was opening up a silence between them to see what he'd fill it with. But as she approached one of the fireplaces, she stepped off her high heel. Her left shoe turned in on her, she stumbled and had to catch her balance on the mantelpiece. Hugh made a move to help her but she waved him away. She threw her impatience out like a boomerang, fully intending for it to come back around on herself. The shoes were a mistake. Not letting Hugh save her was a mistake. Her whole day was turning into a mistake. She began to pout and her pouting kept Hugh from speaking. She pouted until she came to some of the old photographs that Hugh had rescued from Mary Rose's remodeling and moved upstairs. She pointed to a picture of the original Crystal Room.
“That's not you?”
“My grandfather.”
“Where was this taken?”
“Downstairs.”
“Look at all the people!”
“O'Casey's used to be famous.” He started to tell her about The Crystal Room and Al Smith and the race crowd and the summer swells from Saratoga but stopped himself in the middle to ask, “Have you ever been up to the Performing Arts Center?”
“Isn't it nice up there? I like to sit on a blanket on the lawn with a bottle of wine or getting stoned. I saw The Who there on their farewell tour. And Pink Floyd.” She saw that she was disappointing him in some way. She felt foolish. And he felt foolish for having brought the subject up. Two feelings of foolishness equal one mutual resentment. Joanne uncapped her pen and went back to pouting into her diary.
Hugh tried again. “I like to go up to hear the operas sometimes.” She was grateful for his tenacity.
“I don't know anything about opera,” she said, straining to sound self-deprecating and as if she'd like to learn. “I listen to the classical station on the radio, but whenever people start to sing I change the station.”
“Oh,” said Hugh.
Joanne looked desperate and lighted back on the photograph hopefully. “What happened to the Crystal Room?”
“It was all put away during the depression. I wanted to do something like it when we remodeled the dining room. But Mary Rose said it'd look like a scene from a sentimental old movie, so instead we've got a dining room that looks like the bathroom in an art deco bus station.”
“I like art deco.” She meant to be consoling. But all he thought was, You would, and she read the disgust on his face. Her red lip trembled. “But that would have been beautiful. The mirrors and all the crystal...”
She couldn't really picture his Crystal Room. But then there really wasn't any Crystal Room to see unless you believed in ghosts. If she could have caught a glimpse of it in her imagination she'd have thought it hopelessly nostalgic and out of date because she had herself trained to mimic the tastes of her clients and to like what the Mary Roses of the world liked. She looked at him helplessly. “I'm sorry you don't like any of my ideas.”
Hugh was making up his mind to stop blaming her for compromises that brought her nothing but embarrassment and stress headaches and ask her out when a commotion downstairs interrupted him—more applause and wolf-whistles.
“Christ! What's she up to now?” Hugh hurried to the door, peered down the stairs, and saw Mary Rose's green dress flouncing into the dining room. He bounded down the stairs to chase after it, ignoring Joanne's calling after him plaintively to ask what he wanted done about the table settings.
He ran right into the arms of Mary Rose, who had changed back into her t-shirt and tights. Hugh spun away from her and found himself face to face with Franny wearing Mary Rose's party dress, posing as Mary Rose had, like a model on a TV game show, her arms over her head, knee dipped a little to accentuate the curves of her thigh and hip. Franny was as tall as Mary Rose so the dress fit her in length, but she didn't have the breasts to hold it up in front and cups of her bra showed over the sequined bodice.
“Doesn't she look cute?” Mary Rose demanded.
The frown Hugh turned on Franny was as cold as if someone had opened the front door. Franny hunched her shoulders and hugged her breasts, shivering in the frost from his eye. Hugh looked her up and down and shook his head. He looked around the dining room at the balloons and the crepe paper streamers on the gray walls.
“Place looks like a basement,” he muttered.
“It looks great,” Mary Rose said.
“No. It looks tasteless and trite. And so does the dress. I don't want to see her in it. I don't want to see you in it, for that matter. I don't want to see what more you're going to do to make this place a mess and a joke. And I don't want to have any more to do with it!”
He pushed past Mary Rose and strode to the bar where the first thing he saw was Noel's absence. He turned right around, ran into Mary Rose again, who was dogging his heels, asking what the hell was wrong with him, pushed by her again, ignored the sight of Franny looking crestfallen, snagged his jacket from the hook, punched the handle on the door, kicked the door open, and charged outside.
The snow was coming down fiercely now and it was hard to see across the street let alone up to the corner where he hoped Noel was still waiting for the bus. Fat snowflakes splattered his glasses and when he took them off to wipe them snow blew in his eyes and piled in his lashes.
From the doorway Mary Rose yelled at him to get his butt inside. Up in the window of his Crystal Room Joanne–-Lucia—stood in blurry outline. She gave him a perplexed little wave. Hugh turned his back to the wind and wiped his glasses on his apron but it didn't do any good. When he put them on the world swam; when he took them off again all the world more than twenty feet away turned to smoked glass. All he could see was the door to O'Casey's and his cousins waving to him to come inside and the windows and Lucia and the sign over the door with the green and gold letters that bore his name.
Mary Rose turned away from the door. Bernie called to him one more time, then pulled the door shut. Hugh folded his arms and tucked his fists in his sleeves.
“Ah well,” he said, giving it all up.
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