This piece, cut from The Long Habit of Living, part of the flashbacks in time to New York City, was intended to add to the main character Owen’s crumbling life philosophy, that the one person he had always depended on, other than himself, was beginning to dismantle, to consider violence, to become prey to abnormal and psychically unfit loved ones. The stranger who was Sylvester’s wife was intended to parallel for Owen the strangers who composed his own family. The decision to execute Owen's brother Lucian had already been made by him and his other brother Thomas. The gun having been replaced in the bureau drawer turns up later on in Lucian’s possession. It is important to remember that the novel is a collection of parallels, either obverse ones or those of sacred similarity.
The next morning, my phone rang and scared me out of sleep with a hammer-hitting, heart-pounding explosion. I'd thought I was having a coronary.
"Jesus Christ!" I screamed to the fish in my aquarium. I looked for the receiver. "Jesus Christ!" I yelled at the plants on the end table. "Hello," I said, picking up.
"Get up." It was Owen. "Sylvester's outside. We're going to shoot pool."
"At seven-thirty in the morning?! It’s Sunday!?" I said.
Owen hung up the phone. I cursed and stamped my foot on the kitchen floor, and stormed back into my bedroom screeching obscenities about having to get out of bed to answer my goddam telephone on a goddam Sunday morning. Owen and Sarah had a phone in their living room and in their bedroom. Why didn't I have a phone in my bedroom? I plopped onto my bed and shook the covers. I can’t even shower. I got back out of bed and looked around the room for my pants.
"I haven't eaten breakfast," I said to the walls as I buttoned my shirt. "I haven't showered! I haven't eaten! Jesus Christ! There's never any warning!" I shook my fist at the painting of St. Paul on my bedroom wall.
I closed my apartment door tightly, listening for the click of the automatic lock, and descended the stairs to the front door. Before I turned the knob on the heavy, twisted-oak and gnarled metal-barred model of the Gates of Hell, I remembered that I left my keys in my kitchen. I kicked the wall and swore again. In a minute, after I calmed down, I was content knowing that I could use Owen's copy. Yes, that was it! He'll have a key, because I gave him one. He always has keys.
I met Sylvester and Owen standing against a maple tree, which grew opposite the front steps. Owen had his key ring on his finger and twirled it as he waited for me. He saw the look on my face and looked to Sylvester:
"What'd I tell you! I bet he slammed the phone down and swore out a couple of Fuck You's at us."
Sylvester laughed in agreement and turned his face to the tree. He came to see us dressed in his anti-Sylvester clothes, apparel which contrasted with his daily power outfit, as Owen had referred to it. The power outfit consisted of construction boots, green or blue chinos, a matching color shirt, and various contraptions attached to his belt: a pen case, a beeper, a hunting-knife in its sheaf, a key ring stuffed with every key imaginable, and a leather pouch for his nasal spray, antihistamine tablets, antacid tablets, nail clippers, pain-reliever capsules, Band-Aid strips, and his library card. One day he'd even worn a chrome change-maker, flipping out nickels and dimes quicker than a hot dog vendor at lunch time. He wore it for no reason except to make people wonder why he was wearing it.
However, the anti-Sylvester clothes had consisted simply of high-top tennis shoes, baggy camouflage pants, a cotton work-shirt, and a green army jacket. The red beret on his head was an afterthought.
"Am I right?" Owen smiled at me from within his blue Yankees jacket. "Huh? Am I right?"
"Yes," I replied. "I left my keys inside, though," I said.
"You want mine?" offered Owen.
"Yes," I said.
"Here," he said, extending them to me.
As I reached for the keys he flicked them away with his wrist and bounced them off a brick wall bordering the sidewalk. I stooped down to pick them up and, before I could touch them, Sylvester rushed to the keys, kicked them, and ran after them. Owen joined him, trying to get his own feet in the mix. I stood up and watched them play soccer with Owen's keys all the way down the street.
When I caught up to them, Sylvester mentioned a pool hall a few blocks north and to the west, a dive owned by a couple of Italian immigrants named Mike and Adriana.
"Oh no!" Owen said. "Not Mike and Adriana!"
"Why not?" asked Sylvester.
"Because she hasn't seen me in years."
"You saw them at Grandpa's funeral," Sylvester said.
"--and she's gonna want to come over and pinch my cheek and tell me how I look like my father and ask me how I'm doing and tell me what good friends of my mother they were and how they remember me as a little boy sitting at the counter in my old man's bar. To be honest with you, Sylvester, I don't want to go through all that."
"Of course you don't," Sylvester replied, as we climbed the dilapidated, paint-chipped steps to the pool hall. "Neither do I."
The hall resembled the interior of an airplane hanger: exposed steel girders suspended from the ceiling and held long, fluorescent light barges. High-placed exhaust fans rolled slightly to remove the not yet stale air of hustlers, cigar smokers, retirees, and cigarette-smoking college students. Like most pool halls, it was a haven for the disconnected.
Mike was an unshaven man of sixty. He sat in a booth with a teller's window lit up by a sign that read: "The Family That Plays Pool Together Stays Cool Together." A statue of Jesus bearing the Sacred Heart was mounted at the corner of the booth, underneath which sat Adriana.
She had graying black hair, wore a black sweater over a black dress, dark stockings on her legs and black shoes with thick soles and heels. Her smile and the puffy tenderness of her hands on Owen's face had revealed a long-lost warmth which she wasn't embarrassed to show or over-emphasize.
"You look just like your fah-tha," the old woman said, brushing Owen's shirt of invisible bread crumbs, like she may have done when he was eight years old. "You need any money, doll?" she said, as she dug her hands into her black sweater.
"No thanks, Adriana," said Owen, blushing, holding her arms gently in his hands.
Her friendship with his parents and grandparents started the moment she left a little apartment in the Via Monte Nero in Bari, Italy. Her mother and father knew Owen’s grandmother and father. After she arrived and set up house in New York City, she’d remained an admiring friend of Owen’s family, through thick and thin.
"You sure?" she asked.
"Yeah, I'm fine," he said. "Don't worry about me. I'm okay."
"Your grandfather was a wonderful man," she said. "Mi dispiace," she added, making the Sign of the Cross.
"Thank you, Adriana," he replied. "How are you feeling?"
"So long as he don't smoke in bed," she replied, pointing to Mike, “I'm fine.” Mike then replaced the unsmoked half of his unlit cigar into his mouth. "I don't wanna die in fire, you know?"
"How's your sista?" Mike asked.
"She's fine," Owen answered.
"And your brothas?" he added.
"Now, there's somebody you can worry about," Owen admitted.
"Perché? Why d'you say that, hon?" asked Adriana.
"You know," he said, "marriage, a good job, children, all the things that make a bad life," he answered.
She'd patted him on the cheek, yelling to Mike: "Hey, lover, you got a good table for this boy?"
Once we found our “good table,” Owen and Sylvester each rolled a ball on the table, bouncing it off the opposite buffer from where they stood, waiting for one ball to return the farthest length so as to decide who would break first. I gathered up the rest of the balls from underneath the table and racked them into the triangle.
"Owen," I said, tightening the rack. "The woman is wearing all black. You'd think this was a funeral parlor."
"Hey," said Sylvester. "She's been wearin' black since Pope John the 23rd died."
"Grandma did the same thing," said Owen. "Wore black up until a year before she died. Every time she turned around somebody bit the dust. First my mother, then President Kennedy, then my father, then Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson. God, it was a line-up.
"What's the game?" he asked his cousin.
He bent over the table and sized up the cue stick and the possibilities of his break. While the first shots of the game were executed, I found a plastic seat raised high on four feet of scratched metal support. I watched the game like an official at a tennis match. I sipped a cup of coffee, poised so as not to miss a move in the game or the entrance of a stranger. I was ready for commentary. It was Sylvester in whom I was interested. I wanted to know why he appeared so early on a Sunday morning in Manhattan. He'd been so busy with his restaurant that he'd barely had enough time to make a phone call let alone an entire drive across the East River. That was his life. Through the steam of my coffee, as I brought it to my lips, I asked Sylvester why we were there.
"Couldn't sleep," he replied. "I was up all freakin' night."
"You couldn't sleep so you drove to Manhattan?" asked Owen. He waited, then looked back to his cousin. "Okay, I'll bite."
"I'm serious," I said.
"So am I," Sylvester replied. "I couldn't sleep most of the night, so I showered, changed, brought the baby upstairs to my mother's house, and then waited for you two deadbeats."
"You've been here since seven?" I asked.
"Yeah, but I didn't wanna wake Sarah, so I hung around a while."
Owen looked over to me and addressed his question to his cousin: "You dropped the kid off with your mother? Where's your wife?"
"Didn't come home last night," Sylvester said.
A blood-gloom draped itself over his face, wrinkled his forehead. Owen looked to me. My return look said: I'm not going to ask the question, you do it.
"Why not?" Owen said.
"She left," he said.
"That's it?" asked Owen.
"Simple as that," Sylvester said.
His breathing became irregular as he tried to calm himself, staring at the balls on the table.
"Uncomplicated," he continued, "simple, because I'm a simple guy."
"You're hardly that," said Owen.
"Things at home," Sylvester said, "they aren't so good."
"I don't get you."
"Dorothy's pregnant," he said.
"Congratulations!"
Sylvester contemplated the table.
"You're not happy about the idea," Owen said.
"You know my wife. Would you be?"
"What d'you mean?" said Owen.
"I meant to tell you," Sylvester said. "I meant to tell you a lot of things."
"So why don't you tell us now?"
"Well, Dorothy's pregnant," Sylvester said. "But she's not gonna go through with it."
Owen glanced back at me, meaning that I should stay close to the table, not physically, he meant mentally.
"Yesterday," said Sylvester, "she went to the doctor. That's what the argument was about." He pulled a handkerchief out of his back pocket, dabbed his eyes, and blew his nose. "I couldn't sit around home," he added, "thinkin' about it. I sure as hell wasn't gonna wait around for someone to call me. I thought you'd be the logical choice."
Owen moved closer to his cousin and put his hand on his shoulder.
"You made the right choice, son," he half-laughed, as did Sylvester.
"She told me that it had nothin' to do with me," Sylvester said. "She said I wasn't responsible for anything she did. I never have been, and she could've aborted my son, too. She was serious."
"Why?" I asked. “Why did she say these things?"
Sylvester stood still, his cue stick in hand.
"She said Motherhood was becoming an imposition."
"Was this a yelling match?" I asked.
"It was more like a heated heart-to-heart talk," he replied, "which pissed me off more. She was level-headed. I was upset. I didn’t know who I was talking to."
"What else did she say?"
"She laughed at me," Sylvester said. "She said I was simple. She felt sorry for me because I'm so simple. I didn't know where all this was coming from."
"What did you say?" I asked.
"You know how I feel about that!" he said. "I wanted another kid, but she said there was gonna be only her that mattered, from now on."
"I don't understand," I said.
"She said that the us I kept talking about didn't exist."
"Did you hit her?" Owen asked.
"No," he said, miffed at the question. "Why would you think that, asshole?"
"This is an irrational situation," replied Owen. "Sometimes you act irrationally."
"I asked her if I could change her mind," said Sylvester.
"What was her reply?" Owen asked.
"What d'you think?" he said coldly. "I told her we could afford it. That she didn't have to have an abortion. I'd even get her a nanny if that would make her happy. That's when she screamed at me," he said. "’Take your Catholic piety and your Sicilian respectability and shove ‘em up your ass.’”
“Sicilian respectability? Sounds like an oxymoron to me,” Owen laughed.
“That’s what I shouted back at her. ‘I’m from Queens. What the fuck are you talking about?’ She just left the room. I guess she was packin' her things." He gulped down half of his coffee. "You know," he continued, "I went into the front hallway and unlocked the bureau drawer and took out my .357."
I long ago left my calm self out in the street and sat watching where this conversation was going, fearing the worst.
"I asked her if she wanted me to just end it for her, right then and there," Sylvester said.
Owen rubbed his hand over his face. I knew what he was thinking. We had someone here who has lost it all or seems to have lost it all. How do we proceed? At the same time, was Sylvester's bullet any different than Thomas's?
Sylvester had owned a gun because, he'd explained, he carried around with him large sums of cash. Since he usually did all the buying for his restaurant, purchasing the fish, the meat, paper goods, liquor, as well as managing off-the-books employees, he preferred to pay for most of his expenses in cash.
"She said she would save me the trouble," said Sylvester. "She picked up her purse and left for good."
He looked at us.
"She isn't crazy," he said.
"No, but you are," Owen said angrily, "showing her the gun."
Sylvester used the edge of the pool table for support. Owen walked up to him and looked him in the eyes.
"What'd you do with the gun?" he asked.
"What d'you mean?" Sylvester replied.
"The gun!"
"I put it back in the bureau drawer," his cousin replied.
"You sure?"
"Yes, I'm sure."
"You're not lying to me?" Owen asked.
"I'm not lying to you," replied Sylvester. "I just wanted to scare her. I put it away. I put it away!"
Owen looked deep into his face.
"That was pretty stupid," Owen said as he resumed their game.
"Yeah," was Sylvester's reply.
The two cousins moved in cylindrical motion about the table, cautious, removed slightly from the rest of the players in the hall. As each man chalked his cue stick, I was positive the vibrations from the blue cube against the tip of the stick could be heard echoing off the paint-injured and dust-devoured walls of Mike and Adriana's pool hall, and then back into our hearts, keeping us breathing and alive with hope.
It's been about 20 years since I first read William Maxwell. That's when I read The Folded Leaf (published in 1945). That book went straight to the heart for me, and I wished I'd read it when I was in high school. But I didn't. Time Will Darken It is a thoroughly sympathetic and engaging novel. While reading it, authors and their connections to Maxwell began to pop up. It was crazy. I began to find William Maxwell's link to another author I just finished, Mavis Gallant, whose Paris Stories I couldn't get enough of.
"...their musical selections and their behavior (especially when they grabbed up their clarinets and trumpets, shoved their chairs in a double line, and indulged in a mock sleigh-ride) were light-hearted and long remembered. The grey-haired members of the audience, guardians of a gentle Calvinistic era and with fixed ideas of what entertainment was appropriate to a day of worship, sat shocked and disapproving. The rest applauded wildly, reminded of something they had almost forgotten or known only in snatches--of how wonderful it is to be young."
