Jimmy would have eventually been fired in any case
because he missed work all the time.Now
he had no place to go on in the morning, so he stayed home and got more and
more depressed.Pa said people who knew
the Beans mentioned that on weekends instead of staying home with Jimmy, his
parents would find reasons to leave the flat on Square Street.A girl I knew at work said the Mr. and Mrs.
Bean just couldn’t take the insanity.I
don’t know why I could, but I don’t know for sure what he was like while he was
at home with his parents.On a weekend
when I was off from work I’d sometimes go up to his house to see him, but I
always called first to see if he was OK to be with.
More often Jimmy stopped at my house to get me and I
seldom saw his parents.He didn’t go to
church at all any more.I would see his
mother and father at St. Francis when I attended Mass, but they avoided
me.At first I was hurt, to be honest,
but since I’d didn’t really know them, I figured they might just be people who
kept to themselves.Someday their son
would announce we were to be married and the dam would break and we’d all be
good friends.Blanche didn’t think so.
“How are Mr. and Mrs. Bean,” she asked, when I came
home from church on a Sunday morning.
“Oh, fine,” I said.
“Does Jimmy go to church with them?” she asked.
“No, Blanche, he‘s not interested,” I said, hoping
to sound disinterested myself.At age
eighteen I deserved a little privacy and I didn’t need to discuss everything
with my step mother.
”Are they busy getting ready for Thanksgiving?” she
asked.“Have they invited you?”
“What is this, Blanche, the third degree?” I asked,
losing my composure.
“Mary,” she said, “I’m just asking.I wondered how you were getting along with
the parents of the boy you evidently are … the boy you think so highly of,” she
finished.
We sat cutting out little strips of dough Blanche
would bake into cinnamon swirls for dinner later this afternoon, neither of us
speaking for a few moments.
“I thought,” I said, “if it was all right with you
and Pa, I might invite Jimmy Bean to Thanksgiving here.”
Blanche kept cutting the strips, carefully letting
her eyes follow the knife through the dough.She said nothing.
“Of course, if you don’t want him to come here
…”I said.
“It isn’t that, Mary,” she replied.“Look, can we talk about this without you flying
off the handle?”
“I’m sorry,” I said.“It’s just that …”I didn’t know
how to finish the sentence.
“I’m worried,” she said. “And he would never tell
you, but your Pa is worried, too. He thinks Jimmy won’t be good for you, won’t
be able to support a family.You know he
lost his job, don’t you?”
I did, of course, but I didn’t think Blanche and Pa
knew.
“I was hoping Pa could give him some work in the
metal business,” I said, using the term Pa always called the tinsmith work and
furnace building he did in the little shop behind our house.
“We did discuss that,” said Blanche. “I told him
frankly I thought it not a good idea.”
“Whatever for?”I cried.“He needs work,
Blanche,”
“He needs to be independent,” she said, “so he can
support you if he wants to marry you. And besides, your Pa’s work has dropped
off now that mostly everyone has switched to a furnace.”
“Blanche, you have some nerve!” I said, raising my
voice. “If Pa wants to help him--”
“I don’t, Mary,” came my father’s voice from behind
me.He had stepped up from the shop into
the kitchen.“That boy is not for
you.He’s got something screwed up in
his head.”
I ran out of the kitchen into the parlor and plopped
down on the dust cover on the couch and cried for twenty minutes.Oh Ma, I prayed, get somebody up there to
help me and Jimmy Bean.I can’t live
without him.
