Short Story: Mcfadden's Saloon

Short Story: Mcfadden's Saloon

Sibby O’Leary stopped talking while in mid-sentence the moment the old woman entered McFadden’s Saloon. Her name was Fiona McKenna and she was known by everyone throughout The Avenue. Of course that included Sibby and the young man who had been sitting together at a table drinking glass after glass of Rolling Rock beer. Now and again they each chased the beer with a shot of whiskey.

Fiona shuffled over to a stool at the far end of the bar, swiveled her back to the soundless TV picture, and sat still as stone. McFadden placed a pitcher of beer, a Pilsner glass, and a clean ashtray before Fiona’s folded hands. He poured from the pitcher, established a glistening white collar of beer, and then in one swift, silent, fluid motion, swept his knife across the top of the glass to send a spray of beer suds flying. He wiped the area to the left and right of Fiona’s elbows, and then strode mightily to the center of the bar where his account book dangled from a piece of parcel string knotted to the broken arm of the old Burroughs cash register. McFadden entered the date on Fiona’s tab and recorded the cost of the pitcher. He then made a mental calculation of the figures on the page. He knew that it would be a full two weeks and a day until Fiona received her Social Security check, and that in those two weeks remaining she would surely double what she already owed. But he knew too that Fiona McKenna, unlike so many of The Avenue’s lonely, elderly women, was not one to take the bus trip to Atlantic City’s casinos and, cash in hand, feed it all to the slot machines. On the first of the month she would take her check to the saloon, pay her tab, and after a few days begin a new account with McFadden. Fiona did not need the casinos help in her daily struggle against loneliness; she had McFadden’s Saloon and that served her well enough.

Fiona sat impassively. Her face was wrinkled, and had grown smaller in her advancing years. She had abandoned cosmetic embellishments a long time ago. Today her gray hair was unwashed and uncombed.

“So, what about it, Sib? I mean, look, we may as well have some fun now. Since you got the appointment for Friday,” he said, nudging her with his shoulder. “’Cause after Friday, I guess, well, you know, like it’s off limits for a little while. Right?” he winked and grinned after he said this. A tight smile crossed her face, but it soon disappeared while his grin grew.

Did he even notice that my smile had disappeared? Did he know that I had nothing to smile about? Probably not, she thought. And it was just as well, for he would have taken the smile for the answer he wanted to hear, not for the answer I wanted to give, and that would have confused things all the more. And in any case, I had been half-listening to what he had said during the past half-hour. But I had heard enough to know that it was just so much circle-talk on his part.

They had been a couple for four years, though not in any formal sense. No, there had been no stated agreement between them, no declaration of undying love, no hint of a marriage ‘down the road.’ Nothing like that. The word, commitment, so popular on the soaps and sit-coms that she watched, belonged to a world that Sibby had seen only on television. The world that she lived in, the world of The Avenue, didn’t have such words. In The Avenue you simply went along with things. In The Avenue you left ‘well-enough’ alone. In The Avenue you accepted life as you found it. In The Avenue it was just day-in, day-out. Nothing more.

So they had become a couple not because of anything said to one another, and certainly not because of any romantic feelings that might have passed between them at the start, for there were none. They had become a couple simply because neither of them had had prospects for anything better at the time. They both knew that in these past four years very little had occurred in each of their lives to cause either of them to believe that anything better, or merely different, would present itself. Nothing had happened to either of them that would lead them to believe that anything had changed. Until now.

“Do you think those stories about old Fiona over there are true?” she asked him. She had turned from him as she said this, and then shifted her chair so that he would not see that tears had begun to well in her troubled green eyes.

Sibby O’Leary was thirty-three, slender, and brunette. She wore her hair stylishly close to her face and neck; her bangs were full and cut low to hide her thick eyebrows, and thus served to draw attention to her usually limpid, haunting eyes. Her hair was so neatly and evenly cut that each rich clutch of hair curved expertly inward to hug her face. Her co-workers at the Shop and Bag gossiped that she had her hair done at one of those fancy shops on Rittenhouse Square. They didn’t believe Sibby when she admitted to cutting her own hair every two weeks. They didn’t believe that she could do such a thing as cut her hair so expertly, so stylishly. They didn’t believe that she could cut her own hair using only a three-way mirror and a pair of barber scissors she had bought on sale at the Rite-Aid Pharmacy. “It’s all too perfect,” a co-worker had snickered behind her back. “Even for someone as special as Sibby O’Leary,” another added sarcastically.

Years ago her mother had said that there was nothing her Sibby could not do; she could be a movie-star if she put her mind to it. But what Sibby wanted more than anything was to go on to college. It never happened. Not Hollywood, for that was merely a transient remark made by a boastful mother. Not college, for that was not ‘practical,’ her mother concluded, an impossibility for a girl from The Avenue; she was expected to finish high school, and then bring home a paycheck. “Not more schooling, mind you,” her father had mocked from behind his newspaper. So Sibby, like the other St. Apollonia High School girls, meekly settled for the first job she had been offered. “Our Sibby works at the Shop and Bag. Why, she’s worked her way up to head cashier already,” her mother was sure to tell everyone.

“Yo, look at it this way,” he said. “It’s for the best, Sib. Like this is the last thing we need. Need this like a hole in the head,” he mumbled. He refilled his glass, and then hers before repeating the same words a second time. And then he banged his knuckles forcefully on the table-top. “And you damn-well know it, too.”

Sibby O’Leary turned from watching the old woman at the bar, and smiled weakly through her tears. Her thoughts toward the young man had grown hard and unkind over the past weeks. True, she admitted, it does ‘take two to tango,’ as they like to say in The Avenue, but in the end it had been his responsibility to take care. He had promised to take care. But that promise was a lie. He had not taken care. He had been selfish. He had lied because he wanted everything his way.

The front room of McFadden’s consisted of a scarred hardwood bar, half-dozen square tables and twice as many chairs. The chairs were from discarded kitchen sets, simple chrome frames with sun-faded vinyl seats and back cover, no two alike. A dart board had been bolted to the open brick wall by the men’s restroom. The throw-numerals were barely visible, and the cork center circle had recessed behind a ring of metal. No one played darts at McFadden’s anymore.

Behind the bar a single shelf of bottles bearing the labels of undistinguished brands of whiskey stood in circles of dust. Green cardboard shamrocks announcing a St. Patrick’s Day of years past had been taped to a discolored mirror that ran the length of the wall behind the bar.

The young man carried an empty glass pitcher to the bar. “How you doin’, Fiona?” he asked.

The old woman looked up from her beer, muttered a few words as her lips met the glass, and then slammed the glass to the bar. She reached for her cigarettes, mumbled again and then looked at him distastefully.

“What are you gabbin’ about?” he said sharply.

Fiona swiveled her stool back and forth, and then mumbled more words. This time there could be no mistaking the meanness of her expression, or the meaning behind her unintelligible words.

“Shut your gob, why don’t you,” he said with a sneer. “Give us another pitcher of Rolling Rock,” he shouted to McFadden.

Sibby O’Leary tilted her head back and ran her thin fingers along the curve of her hair. She was glad to be alone, if only for the few minutes it would take him to return from the bar. She asked herself why she agreed to meet him tonight. After all he hadn’t stopped badgering her since she had told him the news. And tonight had been more of the same. She had made the appointment with the clinic so that he would stop badgering her. That was all. She needed time to think. But how could she think what with his constant badgering? He had gone on and on because she had not kept last week’s appointment with the clinic. And now he’s starting in on me as if it’s all my fault, she thought.

He returned to the table to find Sibby cupping her chin with her hands, drumming the sides of her face with half-hidden fingers. He placed the pitcher of beer on the table between her elbows. “What’s the matter with you?”

Sibby looked at him with the hopelessness that had been born only a few weeks ago. It was as if she had peered inside his head and found there the only two ideas he possessed. Make an appointment at the clinic was one; may as well have some fun, the other. Tonight he had emptied his head of both ideas, as he had night after night since she had given him the news. She looked at him with this hopelessness, knowing he had nothing else inside his head. ‘What kind of man is that?’ she thought as she watched him fumble for a cigarette. ‘A man with only two ideas inside his head?’

Fiona took a deep drag on her cigarette. She followed this by swallowing a full glass of beer. After a pause, she exhaled a long plume of smoke above the bar and up into the grime-covered ceiling. Sibby watched and marveled at this display of ‘two vices merging,’ as Father Murray had jokingly labeled Fiona’s drinking style of swallowing both beer and smoke in a single gulp. Father had his own preferences for inhaling and swallowing and releasing the smoke. Sibby recalled how his forever red cheeks puffed out, how his nostrils flared as he pushed through two thin streaks drawn from his unfiltered cigarette. Father Murray, bless his soul. What would he think of me now she wondered?

Fiona had never married. In Moon Alley, the scuttlebutt had it that she had once been linked to Father Murray. But a far more scandalous story told of her being the object of affection of yet another priest at St. Apollonia Church. It was this priest who had declared to leave the priesthood so that he could marry her and take her away from the neighborhood. They’d start a new life in another city, he had told her. But Fiona would hear none it, the story goes, so devoted to the Church as she was. She was mortified to think that she could be the cause of any priest’s decision to leave the Church.

One day the young priest was gone from St. Apollonia Roman Catholic Church. Father Murray told the parish that the young man had requested to be transferred to somewhere in Central America so that he could work with the poor. No one believed this. ‘Hell,’ they laughed, ‘there’s surely plenty of poor to work with right here in Moon Alley.’ They believed that he had fled the priesthood, ‘his broken heart left at Fiona’s doorstep.’ This was the story Sibby had heard from her mother. It was the story that all the women in Moon Alley had heard from their mothers, and it became the story that many of the younger girls had already passed down to their own daughters. The story had passed from Moon Alley and through the entire neighborhood in no time. Sibby believed none of it, but savored the romance of it all. Nonetheless, according to the more vigorous Avenue gossipers, the day that Fiona had learned that the priest had left St. Apollonia’s, was the one same day that she walked into McFadden’s to begin her new life as an alcoholic.

The old woman had searched Sibby’s face through the clouded mirror two or three times. She had listened to the torn pieces of the conversation that had floated to her place at the bar. Fiona had heard the anger escape from the young man, had heard how it had attached itself to his lies and feeble excuses. And she had read the anguish and the sorrow that had settled over the girl’s lovely face. Fiona, no stranger to despair, saw Sibby’s own despair mount with each piercing, self-serving lie the young man advanced.

How lucky I must have been, Fiona mused, back then when privacy and decorum still mattered in The Avenue. A time when you didn’t put out your dirty wash for all The Avenue to see. When the Church still meant something to young people. Yes, she told herself over her beer, back then your doubts, even your secrets, were shared only in the confessional. Why, you went to mass, you made novenas. You attended your retreats, and you prayed that the Holy Mother would intercede and quell the fearful urges that rippled though your young body whenever a boy was near. Yes, that was then and this is now, as they say. “And this poor child sitting behind me,” Fiona said aloud, her words strung along a slur of speech, “is surely of the now, is she not then?”

“Here’s to you, Fiona,” Irish Tom answered from the middle of the bar. “What was it you said, by the way?”

Fiona ignored Irish Tom, and silently emptied the remains of the pitcher into her glass. She lifted the glass to her lips, reflecting just how thankful she was that Father Murray, bless his soul, was no longer with us to witness what had become of The Avenue. And what had become of this sad Catholic life. “A cross we bear, Father,” she said as she made the sign of the cross. Then she swallowed the full contents of her glass in one long gulp. “A cross we bear, indeed,” she said, looking up and signaling McFadden that she was ready for a fresh pitcher of beer.

“Amen,” slurred Irish Tom to no one in particular.

Here in McFadden’s Saloon Fiona could relive the ‘old days’ of The Avenue. Those memories, so easily summoned in her inebriated state, carried her through her long night of spinsterhood. A day of drinking opened the precious photo album that lay crowded against her other half-remembered ideas and thoughts. And like possessions boxed and stored in the corner of a cluttered closet, her mental jumble of the past, begged to be dusted and opened.

She opened the album to a St. Paddy’s Day of some years ago when the songs were sung, the tales were told, the green proudly worn by one and all, right here in McFadden’s. Visitors from the suburbs would venture into McFadden’s, having followed the crowds from the Ben Franklin Parkway onto the Frankford Elevated, singing and hooting. And they’d end up here, in McFadden’s, for an authentic Irish celebration. ‘They’d praise the corned beef and cabbage, believing all the while that that was what we Irish-Americans ate nightly. Personally, I can’t stand the stuff, I’d tell them. And then add with a wink, tell them that McFadden himself is a great Irish cook, to be sure, but I still can’t stand the stuff. They’d laugh, the young ones would. Yes, the young ones, the ones who had left their parents’ homes for the suburbs, they’d fill their bellies nonetheless. The young ones would join in with the songs, and listen to Mr. Boland take a turn at telling a joke, while Mrs. Boland giggled in advance of the racy punch-line she had heard dozens of times before. A lovely couple, the Bolands.

‘But now Mr. Boland had taken to wearing bedroom slippers all the day, plagued as he is with his returning case of the gout. And Mrs. Boland, bless her, miraculously still without as much as a single gray hair, poor soul, giggled no more. The poor woman barely speaks a word these days without fingering the cross that hangs ‘round her neck. A bit touched in the head, McFadden says. Bless the poor thing.’

Fiona poured from the fresh pitcher McFadden had placed before her.

Fiona held onto her thoughts of the old neighborhood, but once more took notice of Sibby O’Leary’s tearful eyes. A pretty Irish girl with tears in her eyes. Ah, that’s the new Avenue, is it not? The Bolands, the priests of St. Apollonia’s parish who quietly slipped into McFadden’s for their daily whiskey and beer chasers, the Saturday afternoon confessional, the honored penance, the Sunday mass, the intoxicating incense, the smoke from hundreds of candles, the full Latin phrases ringing down the nave of St. Apollonia’s to sting a young girl’s ears….those were the days!

And now there sits a pretty Irish girl with tears in her eyes; why, what would she know of it all?

Fiona fixed her gaze on the young couple in the mirror. She watched them so intently that she had ceased to see her own reflection, and had simply abandoned her reverie in the process. She strained to hear their hushed conversations, though she hardly needed to confirm her suspicion as to why the girl was cloud-covered in sorrow. She shuddered while thinking how easy it had become for the young girls in The Avenue to satisfy their every whim and desire, and to do both without so much as a blink of the eye. And no one, not even the Church, thought the worse of it. Help is what they get, she sighed. Help and kindness handed to them, as easy as if they had asked for donuts and coffee. Help and kindness, not the retribution and threat of ex-communication that she had found on her own doorstep. Different Church. Different Catholics. Different Avenue.

She drank and smoked and buried herself inside her twisted thoughts of what was, and what now is the way of life in the neighborhood known as The Avenue. Fiona had become too drunk to realize that perhaps, just perhaps, a twinge of envy had begun to coat her thoughts.

Sibby O’Leary walked close to the curb to avoid holding his hand or taking his arm, though he had offered neither. Abandoned store fronts, boarded windows, trash-heap litter—truck tires, cracked kitchen sinks and black garbage bags that had been sliced open by Avenue trash-pickers—lay scattered about the sidewalk. The recessed doorways leading to second and third floor apartments above the stores were made darker and dirtier by the crushed cardboard boxes that served as sleeping quarters for The Avenue’s alcoholics and drug addicts.

“Ugh, look at this dump. My God, it gets worse every day,” Sibby said. She could think of nothing else to say. Swirls of paper and discarded fast-food wrappers blew wildly from the wind that followed a passing elevated train. And then, in that precise moment of the train’s passing above them, behind the shrilled scream of the steel wheels, Sibby mouthed the words, ‘I’m sick of The Avenue. I’m sick of the filth. And I’m sick of you, a man with only two ideas in his head.’ She knew with a certainty, with a truth so clear and real, and with a feeling as deep as to be forever unchallenged or doubted, that she wanted nothing more to do with him.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she answered.

“I can’t hear with that racket. What did you say?”

He attempted to move closer to her, expecting her to repeat her words now that the elevated train had rolled away from the station. “So, what did you say? It’s about Friday, right?”

Sibby veered to his left. A carpet of broken glass, beer bottle necks and bottoms, forced her into the street. They approached the Knowlton station in silence. A wind collected beneath the iron girders and whipped its way up to the rafters of the train-platform. Papers and dust caught in the updraft raced by them. Sibby shielded her eyes as she turned her back to him.

“Like, I asked you a hundred times already. What about Friday?” he said angrily.

“What about it?”

“Hey, don’t give me any of your crap. I told you enough times. Do you want me to go or not?” he took her arm, pulled her toward him. “Them demonstrators don’t mean nothin’ to me. Is that’s what’s stoppin’ you? ‘Cause that ain’t no reason to cancel the appointment,” he said, rubbing his eyes to free them of the dust and dirt blowing at his face.

Sibby pulled away from him and took several backward steps toward the station’s entrance. “I think I’ll take the el,” she said abruptly.

“The el?” he rubbed his eyes and tilted his head away from the gusts that sent a newspaper page flying up to his knees. “Are you nuts?”

“I’m taking the el,” she repeated. She walked up several steps, turned to face him. “I’m taking the Goddamn el,” she said. She took several more steps, walking backwards, tightening her grip on the ever-damp wooden railing, looking down at him with each step.

“You crazy or somethin’. You only got one stop to go to get to your place,” he said disdainfully.

She was half-way up the first flight of steps. “Go over to the Stringband Hall,” she shouted down at him. His precious Mummers. Drunken cronies.

He stood at the foot of the first bank of steps balling up the newspaper page that had wrapped itself around his leg. “You sure?” he shouted back.

“I hear the train coming,” she lied.

“So, what about Friday?” he yelled. “You’re gonna take care of everything. Right?”

Sibby stared at him standing there on the grimy sidewalk leading to the station entrance. As she looked down from the top of the steps, she saw now that he appeared ridiculously disheveled. She saw him as if framed in a comic-book panel, complete with speech balloons, and tousled hair, as if he had emerged from a swirling fist-fight with a drunken neighbor, all scruffy and unkempt. But she blinked the image away and saw him not just as he was, but also for what he was. She saw his bloated drinker’s face. She saw the cruel, red blotches that mapped his face. The broken blood vessels that streaked his nose. The old man’s belly attached to a young man’s body. So selfish. So empty. Yes, she saw him now for what he was a man with only two ideas in his head.

But as vivid as any physical trait or condition, Sibby also saw The Avenue itself as she looked at him. The lack of aspirations. The defeat and the apathy that coursed in the bloodstream of the dying neighborhood. The fear of change. The cowardice that kills quicker than cancer. That’s who he is after all. He is The Avenue, and always will be. No more; no less, she told herself, for there was ‘no less’ in this regard.

She turned and ran up the next bank of steps, followed the curve of the stair-rail, and climbed the third flight of concrete steps two-at-a-time.

The wind pushed her hair across her face. Sibby greeted the cashier and allowed her hair to fall over her forced smile. She bit back the breath of relief that she felt as she dropped her token into the collection tray.

He called several times from the street below. She imagined him pressed against the wall of the used-furniture store, cupping his hands around his mouth, calling out to her. And then she heard him. “Don’t forget the clinic on Friday,” he yelled to her. “Ten o’clock sharp.”

Sibby slipped into the empty train before the doors had fully opened to her. She took a seat opposite the double doors that shuddered and hesitated before at last closing. The sentinels of lamp-posts that lined the platform soon receded from view. She allowed the darkness to engulf her, to warm her welcoming sense of being carried away.

Fiona McKenna inched her stool over to the far wall of McFadden’s Saloon when Maureen Larkin entered. Maureen pulled a stool closer to Fiona’s, and with a prolonged sigh, sat and said, “Another night like this and I’ll be on welfare for sure.”

The old woman nodded as Maureen, a waitress at Charlie’s Diner for as long as anyone could remember, ran down a list of complaints. She began with her diminished tips, and most nights ended with the new customers she had to serve. The in-between was saved to catalog the reasons she loathed the new owner of Charlie’s Diner, “a Greek of all things, and he who stinks of garlic as the day is long, God-Forgive-Me.

“And these new customers,” she continued, “I swear I don’t know what part of the world they come from. Why, half of them eat with their fingers—why I bother to give them a place setting is beyond me. And tips? They don’t!” she said, banging her knuckles against the bar. “Don’t get me started,” she said at her reflection in the mirror.

Fiona knew that when Maureen reached the complaint about the short-order cook, about his unreliability, about his being late for work, and about his weak excuses for wanting to leave early, she had reached her wit’s end, and then it was time for the two of them to begin their serious drinking.

“Oh, that one is a pip, he is. He’ll leave you high and dry at the drop of a hat,” Maureen said into her pocketbook. She fished out her cigarettes and added, “I’ll tell you this, be careful what you order if I’m not on duty because he burns the food a lot more often than he cooks it. And believe me when I tell you that it’s definitely possible to ruin a three egg omelet.”

.

The two women smoked their cigarettes in silence. Then Fiona slurred matter-of-factly, “Let’s just drink.”

“In fact,” Maureen answered after a moment, “let’s just get drunk.”

As the night wore on and as the drink began to take control, Fiona found herself wanting to believe that the two young people who had sat half the night at the table behind her had ended their quarrel. In the old days they would have had their spat—it was only natural after all—and then embrace amidst fervent promises made to one another. And those promises would be kept, for sure, for that was what Catholics did in the old days. They kept their promises. There was no doubting that.

She refilled her glass and lit another cigarette. She looked into the mirror and imagined the young couple behind her once more. The girl locked in sorrow. That lovely Irish face. Those eyes. Was it not always so, Fiona mumbled? An innocent, sweet Irish girl left to fend for herself. No one there to promise her anything, save disgrace.

And then she smiled, for in her mind’s eye she now saw a wedding. The young couple who had sat at the table behind her, there they were at St. Apollonia’s Church. The lovely bridesmaids, they were all so striking in their fine gowns. And the flowers! The flowers, they’re always so fragrant and wonderful to be near. Such a beautiful bride, she is. A gown so white and pure; the nun’s all aglow with pride, oh yes. And then there’d be a grand reception in the school basement, the bingo tables made festive with crepe paper and garlands and….good luck signs stuck on the walls for all to see….

…The grand old music of fiddle, and drum, and pipe, and foot-tapping. And there, at the corner table, would sit the Bolands, of course. And himself would rise from his chair and start in on a joke. And Mrs. Boland would place her hand to her mouth in a dignified manner, as if to stifle a giggle, but would allow its release at the racy part, nonetheless, just as she had always done. McFadden would lead all in a toast to the bride and groom, and then everyone would join in singing the old songs.

Maureen yawned and poured beer into her glass. She reached over and emptied the remains of the pitcher into Fiona’s glass, allowing the foam to roll down the glass and onto the already soggy beer-coaster. “McFadden,” she called down the bar, “if you please.”

“If you pour coffee the way you pour your beer, no wonder your tips are down,” he told Maureen.

The old woman saw Maureen’s mouth move in speech, watched McFadden’s do the same, yet heard nothing. She watched Maureen’s face take on a gleeful expression, but found no meaning there. Fiona leaned back against the moist, torn vinyl of her barstool, closed her eyes, and allowed the peacefulness of inebriation to claim her.

She had reopened her album to the time when The Avenue was so wonderfully Irish-Catholic. She had paged back to the time when young girls minded their parents. She allowed herself to turn back the pages now to the time when acting on one’s every whim and desire was still a fearful, mortal sin.

And back, back to the time when a beautiful Irish girl did not join her young man in a saloon to sit and drink and listen to him whisper dark secrets. Dark secrets that lay at the edge of an unspeakable evil.