Strings Attached

Sixteen



Providence, Rhode Island

September 1949



I’d just started junior year of high school, but I already knew that this year would be the same as the others — a half-distracted glance at my books at night before bed, a stab at homework. If I made myself listen in class, I didn’t have to work much outside of it to pull a C average. Da didn’t talk to us about college; if we managed to graduate from high school, that was achievement enough for him. He didn’t know that Muddie went to Thayer Street on weekends, pretending to be a Pembroke girl. Pembroke was the sister school to Brown, and Muddie wore kilts and cardigans and brushed her hair until it shone, hoping some Brown freshman would ask her what courses she was taking. Then she would spend the afternoon drinking a soda with him and lying. She’d learned the names of professors and courses, and she’d groan about classes and studies until it was time to go down the hill and shop for dinner.

Da also didn’t know that Jamie had quit the basketball team and was staying late in the art room, drawing with Mr. Hulce. He didn’t know that Jamie checked out art books from the library and hid them under his bed.

As for me, I always ducked out of study hall in order to practice my dance routines in the gym. As long as we were safe, looked presentable, and were home by nine, Da left us alone.

For a long time, Da had escaped the Irish curse — the whiskey bottle was only for Saturday nights and guests. But since both Delia and Elena had gone, he’d begun to wander down to Wickenden Street in the evenings for company, and that meant drink. He’d arrive home late and have trouble taking off his shoes. We didn’t know what to do about it, so we didn’t say a word about it, even to each other. He was never mean; he was either sleepy or silly, wrapping my sweater around his head and pretending it was a turban and he was Bing Crosby, or getting sentimental and crying at dinner just from looking around the table. Once I caught him standing in the doorway of Delia’s old room, staring, weaving, and crying.

It was Jamie who had the job of fetching him on the nights he couldn’t stop. Jamie, who slung an arm around him and helped him home, took off his shoes, wiped his face with a cloth, got him strong tea in the morning. One night the phone rang and I heard Jamie speaking softly, and then the front door closing. Within the hour, he was back, and I heard him putting Da to bed. In another minute he came to my room and sat on the edge of my bed. Muddie was asleep, so he whispered his hello.

“Is Da okay?” I asked.

“He took all his clothes off in Murphy’s Bar,” Jamie said.

“All of them?” I began to laugh — I couldn’t help it— and Jamie joined in.

“He was naked as the day he was born, standing there on Wickenden. Somebody called the police, but we’re lucky, because it was Johnny Tatum who came. You know, Da plays cards with him sometimes? So Johnny says, ‘Mac, go inside and put something on.’ And so Da disappears back into the bar and comes out again — wearing somebody’s tie.”

I laughed again, imagining the scene. Jamie flopped back on the pillow, facing the ceiling. “You should have seen it, Kit. All the bar was there, laughing and clapping and whistling, and Johnny Tatum had to laugh, too.” He shook his head. “He’s lucky he wasn’t arrested.”

“What can we do? He’s bound and determined to humiliate us. At least he’s a crowd-pleaser. What would make him do such a thing, get so blind drunk like that?”

“The thing is,” Jamie said, “I heard the news earlier. Elena got married today.”



With Delia gone, we were poor again, truly poor where we had to worry about rent and food. Da brought home a salary from the American Screw factory but it wasn’t enough, so we all had after-school and weekend jobs. I found it was easier to wear my leotards to school underneath the blouses I couldn’t be bothered to iron. Sometimes I’d even borrow something of Jamie’s, or hold up my skirts with one of his ties. Girls whispered behind my back. Boys thought I was fast and asked me on dates, and I always said no. After a while they left me alone, too.

I walked home each night to save on carfare. That evening, I was coming from my voice lesson. I wanted to think about the radio show I was doing on Saturday and go over the song “It’s Magic” in my head. I had a new teacher now, and I’d learned I was a contralto. Just today she’d told me to stop imitating Doris Day and find my own style. “Listen to the words, not just the notes!” she kept saying, raising her hands from the piano keys. I thought I had been listening. I knew I wasn’t getting it.

I carried a bag with the first of the fall pears, brought home for dessert, because I’d probably missed dinner. Muddie would have kept something warm for me. She had taken over the cooking duties since we’d hit high school. She had given up on making the dishes from Elena we’d loved, and was making stews and fried potatoes and chicken. If it wasn’t as good as Elena’s cooking, at least it wasn’t as bad as Da’s.

I passed the gates of Brown and headed east. The university was expanding with the swell of new students and was knocking down buildings for dormitories, one after the other, making their way across College Hill and pressing into Fox Point. The factories were closing and moving outside the city, where land was cheap. Highways were being built, old roads widened for the cars that were being manufactured again. Squeezed from all sides, Fox Point was falling back into poverty, missing out on the postwar boom. Neighbors were moving out, going after the jobs. Da had heard talk that they might pave over the river, just so cars could cross more easily. A river turned into a highway. Da had swum in that river when he was a boy. And before him, people had fished in it. People had sailed away to Africa right from the harbor. Providence was turning its back on its heart.

I could hear the calls of the college boys as they tossed a football back and forth on the lawn of a fraternity house. That never changed — fresh crops of boys with haircuts and good shoes.

Suddenly, an object sailed into my peripheral vision and I almost dropped my bag of pears as I just managed to catch the football. Years of street games had given me good reflexes. The whoop across the street congratulated me, and I fired the ball back to one of the four boys on the lawn.

“Did you see those hands, Jack?”

“Exceptionally fine.”

“Did you know angels played football?”

“I didn’t know angels had red hair.”

To my dismay, they were now heading toward me, tossing the football easily back and forth as they walked.

I started walking quickly down the hill, but of course they followed me. I realized that it was getting late, that it was chilly, that everybody had gone in to dinner or to study. Power Street, the border of College Hill and Fox Point, was still blocks away.

“Why, oh why, doesn’t our team have such an arm? Such a face, such a walk, such a —”

“Move aside, boy. Methinks the comely coed mistakes your raillery for true wit.”

Coed? They thought I was a Pembroke girl. If only I’d been Muddie, I would’ve been pleased as anything.

“What light on yon window breaks? Is that a smile?”

“We almost had windows breaking, if she hadn’t caught your pass.”

A guffaw, a certain jockeying of position around me. One of them threw the football and another dropped it. I still hadn’t looked at their faces.

“Angels don’t smile, they glow.” This voice was lower, and closer to me — too close, in fact. I could smell grass and perspiration. “Come on, bright angel, don’t break our hearts. Speak.”

The four of them had surrounded me now, with one walking backward, facing me. They were just boys, dressed in the kinds of clothes that these kinds of boys wore, pressed chinos, loafers, crewneck sweaters with knotted ties underneath. Trying to impress me with their talk, showing off their fine educations with silly quotes from Shakespeare. I couldn’t tell one from the other, and they were in my way. I tried to walk around the one in front, but he only laughed.

I stopped. “Listen, you have a swell line, but it’s not for me. I have to get somewhere.”

“Fair damsel, Providence is a dark and frightening land.”

“Find some other distressed damsel, all right?” I gave them a quick smile as I tried to brush past, trying to be a good sport. Mistake.

“Hey, not so fast. We’re just trying to make friends.”

“Yeah, what’s the rush?” The voice was low and insinuating, and the boy made a show of looking at my legs.

No, they hadn’t mistaken me for a Pembroke girl. I knew that now. I was wearing what I usually wore to dance class, black tights and leotard under a skirt and cardigan, my bare feet in scuffed shoes. My hair was in a bun loosened from class, stray ends spilling out, waving around my face. I didn’t have the brushed perfection of a Pembroke girl.

One of the boys nudged the other one aside. “Hey, dad, the girl isn’t interested.” He took my arm. “She’s looking for real class. Come on, beautiful, why so standoffish?”

We had stopped next to an empty lot, a construction site for a new building for the university. Suddenly, they were all around me in a circle, blocking me in. For the first time, I felt afraid. Their faces blurred into one face with the same expression. I tried to push my way through, but they stood shoulder to shoulder.

“Just let me go,” I said. My voice shook a little.

“But we’re just getting acquainted. We’re just being friendly.”

“Gentlemen.”

I saw another boy appear through the gloom.

“I think this young lady is trying to go about her business,” he said. “Why don’t you do the same?”

“Who do you think you are?” One of the boys turned halfway to the new boy, then turned back in contempt.

The other boy stood easily, his hands at his sides. “I think she’d like you to go.”

Something about him was familiar. Black hair, thick and uncombed, a little longer than the other boys wore theirs. A white shirt, open at the throat, with no necktie. Dark, dark eyes… and then I knew, even though I hadn’t seen him in four years.

“Hello, Billy.”

He nodded at me briefly. I wasn’t sure if he knew who I was.

“You know this character? Billy Macaroni?”

Billy didn’t react. Instead, he smiled at me, and I smiled back. I knew he remembered me then. His gaze shifted to the boys and it turned hard. His hands hung loosely at his sides, but suddenly the atmosphere tightened, as though he’d made a fist.

“Time for a drink, boys,” one of the boys said, and they ambled away, careful not to hurry.

I let out a breath and turned back to Billy. “Thanks for that,” I said.

“You’re welcome.”

“I could have taken them, though.”

He laughed, then stood uncertainly for a moment, his hands in his pockets. “Maybe I should walk you… just in case.”

I dug into the bag and held out a pear toward him. “I didn’t know you went to Brown.”

He took it but didn’t bite into it. “I’m a sophomore. I’m on the boxing team. That’s why they took off.”

“You just made a few enemies.”

“That’s all right — they wouldn’t be my friends anyway. I’m a townie, and I’m Italian,” he said, biting into the pear. “And they know who my father is. Billy Macaroni — they don’t even bother saying it behind my back. The way they look at me — or, I mean, the way they don’t look — it’s like their glances slide off. Like I’m a mirror, and if they don’t see themselves, they don’t see anything.”

“I thought I’d be invisible, too.”

“You? That could never happen.”

To cover my embarrassment, I bent down and picked up the forgotten football. I hefted it in one hand and then hurled it, hard and straight, toward the construction site — a clear, spinning pass into the darkness.

“How about that?” he murmured. “The girl’s got an arm.”

“I can climb trees, too.”

“I remember.” He took a bite. “I remember that day I met you. I liked you because you liked my pictures. You said, ‘If I could do that, I’d do it all the time.’ Before that”—he shrugged —“you were my enemy.”

“Little old me?” I said it flirtatiously, but there was a seriousness behind his eyes. “What do you mean?”

His gaze went blank for a minute. Then he grinned. “You were a girl. Believe me, I’ve changed.”

“That wasn’t the first time we met, you know,” I said. “The first time was on the Fourth of July. I was wearing red, white, and blue. And eating ice cream. I was with my aunt and my dad.”

“I don’t remember that,” he said.

“I was nine. Skinny as a beanpole. All knees and elbows.”

“I bet you were a knockout.”

We began to walk down the hill, eating our fragrant pears and talking. All the while I was wondering how to keep walking forever, circling around College Hill, never getting to the narrowing streets and bumpy sidewalks of Fox Point.

When he touched my elbow as we crossed the street, I felt a shimmy down through every nerve. I knew I’d found it, and I didn’t even know its name. I felt it in my body, the way my bones were suddenly held together by air, not muscle. What would happen next, I didn’t know, but I knew it would have to happen. I would make it happen. I was a motherless child, and I knew that the deepest of tragedies was simple: to love, and not to be loved in return.



I knew I needed an ally, and there was really only one candidate.

A couple of days later, when I needed him most, I tried to rope him in.

Jamie lay sprawled on the couch, legs up on the arm. I sat down next to him and peered over his shoulder. “I want to make a deal.”

“Not now, pup. I’m studying.”

“Since when?”

“Easier that way.”

“Easier how?”

“People leave you alone when you’re smart. You should try it.”

I nudged him. “Hey, you might know trigonometry, but can you keep an eighth note triple count with your feet?”

“The question is, why would I want to?”

“Look, are you working on Sunday?”

“No.”

“Well, I have a date, and I need you to come along. My friend has a car. You can bring a girl.”

“I don’t have a girl.”

“Oh, for crying out loud, Jamie, help me out. So I can say a gang is going.”

“Why don’t you ask Muddie?”

“Because I don’t think I can stand her asking, ‘And how are you enjoying your studies?’ all afternoon long.”

He snorted. “And why,” he asked, “can’t you just tell Da that you have a date?”

“Because he’s in college, and Da won’t let me date a college man. And because… because he’s Billy Benedict.”

Jamie looked at me over his book. “The kid with the camera? Nate Benedict’s son?”

I nodded. “Oh, Jamie, come on — if you’d just come out with us, it won’t look like a date, it will look like we’re all friends.”

“And I’ll be a third wheel.”

“Not a third wheel! We’ll have fun. We’ll have a picnic or something. He said we’d go to Roger Williams Park. You need to get out anyway. You’re starting to study all the time, just like Muddie. He’s picking me up Sunday morning. Come on, you want to.” I smiled at him.

“Please note that smiles like that don’t work on brothers.

But all right.”



Jamie jumped into the backseat and I slid into the front. Billy looked surprised, but not annoyed. That scored a point, right there.

“I asked my brother to come,” I said. “I hope you don’t mind. It’s just that —”

“You don’t trust me. Good. I’m completely untrustworthy.” His grin lit up his face. “Hi —Jamie, right? Another one who can climb trees.”

“Right.”

“Let’s go. My mother packed a basket.” He took off and instead of heading to the park, he kept on going. He wore a blue shirt, the cuffs rolled up. I watched his hands on the steering wheel. Even his hands were beautiful.

“I thought we were going for a picnic,” Jamie said.

“It’s such a great day, how about the beach?” Billy asked.

“Sure,” I said. “We never go.”

“I have a favorite spot. We used to go there when I was a kid, before…”

“Before what?”

He shrugged. “I still go on weekends when I can.”

Probably with a girl, I thought, and my heart felt squeezed with a new emotion — jealousy. But here I was in the front seat next to him. Today, I was the girl.



We swung the hamper between us as we walked to the beach. The air was chilly but the sun was warm. The water was a deep navy frothed with white. We spread out a blanket and sat watching the waves.

Jamie settled in with a sandwich. “So, are you going to be a lawyer like your old man?”

“He thinks so.”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“Well, I know I don’t want to be in his business. What about you?” he asked Jamie.

Jamie laughed. “College is not in the plan. It’s the Irish form of advancement — you don’t dare do better than those before you. Our dad never made anything of himself. Course, he expects the same of us. Maybe I’ll join the army. Or the air force. Fly away.” He tossed a piece of bread to the gulls. “Better than factory work.”

“You sure about that? What if we go to war again?”

“That’ll never happen. We’ll just do rescue missions now, like the Berlin Airlift.”

I’d seen Jamie looking at those pictures in Life magazine, Germans looking up at the sky at the planes, waiting for the food and medicine to drop. I could see him wanting to be that pilot, looking down at upturned faces, knowing he was saving them. It was Jamie who could transform a gloomy afternoon, or end a squabble with a joke. He was always saving us, why not do the same for strangers?

Jamie dug into the hamper for a napkin and came up with a camera. “Hey, this yours? Sweet.”

“You’re still taking pictures?” I asked.

“When I can.” His hands were sure and easy as he took the camera. “I’d like to do it for a living, but my father thinks it’s crazy.” He aimed the camera out at the ocean. “But wouldn’t it be swell, traveling around taking pictures for magazines? Robert Capa, Cartier-Bresson — that’s what I’d like to do. Capture moments in time. Truth. Not what people say, not even what they do… but how they stand, and the look in their eyes they can’t hide.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I saw that he had come alive. He rose on his knees and took a few fast shots of me, then a few of Jamie. He aimed at the sea and the sky.

I looked up at him, on his knees against the blue sky, the wind whipping his hair, and it was like he was electric, a sparking wire. He sent out a charge, and I felt it vibrate inside me. All I wanted to do was touch him.



It was twilight as Billy made the turn onto Hope Street. He pulled up at the corner. We’d stayed at the shore as long as we could, until cold and hunger drove us back to the car. We’d eaten all the sandwiches and run through the surf and screamed at the shock of the cold water. We’d walked and looked for shells and tossed a football. We hadn’t talked of anything much. But none of us had wanted the day to end.

On the way home, “It’s Magic” came on the radio and I sang along. I wasn’t embarrassed. Billy looked over at me from time to time while he drove, a big, delighted grin on his face. Now I understood it. I understood magic.

Billy cut the engine and we sat at the corner of Hope and Transit. The light was almost gone and the tree branches looked black. The wind had knocked a carpet of gold leaves onto the ground.

I knew it was time to say thank you for a lovely time, but the usual phrases seemed so small compared to the day. Putting words to it would cheapen it. I knew Jamie didn’t want to speak, either.

Billy got out of the car to open my door. I stepped out as Jamie opened the back door, and the three of us stood for a moment, not moving. Suddenly, Billy flung his arms around both of us. “Mark it on your calendar,” he said. “One perfect day.”

At that moment Da appeared out of the gloaming. His expression of greeting froze, then hardened.

“Good evening to you,” he said. “Is that Billy Benedict there?”

“Hello, Mr. Corrigan. I didn’t think you’d recognize me.”

“Sure I do. You’re the image of your father. Kit, Jamie, time to come in now. Muddie will have supper on the table.” I was startled by the coolness in his tone.

“Time for me to be getting home, too,” Billy said.

I wanted the good-bye to last longer, but that was it. The song was done. Magic was over. Time to turn the record over and listen to the B side — Doris singing “Put ‘Em in a Box, Tie ‘Em with a Ribbon.”

Da stood there as Jamie and I watched Billy’s taillights disappear up Hope Street. All the air went out of the day.

“I didn’t know you two were friends with Billy Benedict,” Da said. “Since when?”

“Since today,” Jamie said.

Da’s gaze turned to me. “And you, miss?”

“What’s wrong with Billy?”

“I don’t know Billy. I know his father.”

“We just went to the beach. It’s not like you ever took us anywhere unless there was a profit in it.” I flung out the words, not knowing that I meant them until they were out.

He took a breath and stared down at the sidewalk. Then he looked up. “I’ve seen enough of beaches. I’ve probably seen every pebble of sand in four hundred miles of coastline. Nate Benedict and I drove them together back in the twenties. We were both working for Danny Walsh. I learned how to drive a getaway car at sixteen.”

I suddenly remembered that night so long ago, after the hurricane, when Nate had sat at our table. “Delia, too?”

“Once or twice, even Delia. She drove the covering car a few times — that’s what we called the second car that would block the Feds or the police from following. Good to use a woman — she would pretend to break down and block the road. Listen, in those days, you tripped over bootleggers in Rhode Island. For me and Delia, it was a job, a way to get by so that they wouldn’t catch up to us, separate us, and send us to orphanages. It was Delia who saw I needed to stop or I’d wind up in one of the Irish gangs for good. She saw the way the wind was blowing, that we’d repeal Prohibition and then I’d only have one skill, how to outrun someone who’s chasing you. The crash had happened, and she couldn’t find me work. So she brought home a girl instead. I knew Maggie would never marry a man in the rackets, so I quit. But Nate didn’t, did he? Danny Walsh disappears in thirty-three, the Italians take over, and Nate gets himself an education. Then he has to pay back what he owes, and that means working for them. Now look at him. He’s just as bad as they are.”

“He’s not a gangster,” I said.

“He’s in it up to his neck, just the same,” Da said. He looked tired. “So why should I be happy to see Nate’s son with his arms around my children?”

“But Billy isn’t in it,” I said. “He’s not his father.”

“I know, he got into the university, I heard.” But Da said this as if it didn’t matter. “Just now, walking toward you like that… it was like seeing myself and Delia and Nate when we all met. Down at Buttonwoods Cove, it was.”

Jamie and I exchanged a surprised glance. Billy had taken us there today.

“She swam out to meet the boat in the pitch-black — we never went if there was a full moon. She was fearless back then. She hauled herself up the boat, her braid over her shoulder, and she wrung it out. And Nate looked at her like she was a selkie. A creature from the sea, not quite human… well, we were in each other’s pockets for a while. And nothing good came of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“If your aunt were here, she’d say, ‘Stick to your own.'” Da looked over at the house, as if wishing Delia was on the front stoop to back him up.

But what if Billy is “my own”? I wanted to say. “That’s the Irish in you talking,” I said instead. “Things aren’t like that anymore.”

“I hope I’ve taught you one thing anyway — that saying a thing doesn’t make it so.” Da sighed. “Well, now. I’m an ignorant man, but I can see down a road. You can’t stop something that’s got to go on. I can’t stop this any more than I can stop the moon from rising.” Da looked at me, and he shook his head. I saw that something had happened without my noticing — he looked older. Gray at his temples, lines at the corners of his eyes. “I just want you to know, it will break my heart to see it. That’s all.”