Moon Alley

By David Appleby

A fathers decision to undertake a do-it-yourself-project for his daughter is made not with love, but spite; a daughter returns to the home of her childhood not so much to attend her fathers funeral, as to carry out a long-planned revenge; once a month a professor leaves campus to look in on her senile mother, only to find herself caught in a test of will and wit, and unaware that it is a contest in which the winners always lose; a waitress who nightly pines for the one she had allowed to slip away, uncharacteristically reaches out for one intense moment of intimacy with a mysterious stranger.

Those are the stories of just a few of the people whose lives are played out in Moon Alley. David Applebys carefully crafted stories are written in what the New England Review has termed, an easy, fluid style, and that, entwined with compassion, and an acute awareness of language, provides the reader of Moon Alley with a compelling look into the lives of those who live there.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Grady Harp, Los Angeles, CA United States
David Appleby is no newcomer to the field of writing, having composed two monographs stimulated by his experience as a grant recipient in creative writing, history and literature. But none of this incidental information prepares the reader for the solidly unique voice contained in the pages of MOON ALLEY, his first novel. Appleby writes with lucidity yet at the same time requires of the reader full attention to the microweavings of his narrative, a fine, almost Joycean rambling of apparent stories that on first appearance seem to be a collection of short stories only to capture us in his ever expanding web of time and place and atmosphere and recognition into a true novel.

MOON ALLEY is a dark book, a journey into the Irish American neighborhood of Philadelphia complete with all the detritus that the passage of time and industrial changes in America wreck on once tender ethnic havens of new immigrants. Moon Alley is a dead end dirty place where sundry characters live, drink, face failure, struggle for escape from the destiny that has befallen the neighborhood. The gathering places, in Applebys gifted hands become visual, complete with the stench of old beer, dank rooms, the neighborhood bar McFaddens Saloon containing The Ladies Room approached through the back entrance where the women gather to drink away their lives and gossip like a feminine mirror of the sots in the front bar, Charlies Diner, St Apollonias parish and highschool, the el (elevated train) which carries the noisy trains along The Avenue which dims the squalor and arguments to a muffled frustration, and the apartments and homes that house the down and out folks who live here.

The characters, while similar in environmental shadows, are as varied as any fine novel: Irish Tom drinks his life away, Fiona tends the customers, Megan is a waitress in the Diner and confronts her lonely solitude in strange ways including attempting to befriend a flasher, Johnny One Ball and his thwarted dreams of having a son, Old Lady Ryan, and Soapbox Cathy Malloy and Kathleen OConnor who managed to advance to higher education only to be pulled back into the home they escaped due to a parent with senility or a father who died a strange death preburied in cement. Each character moves from a minor set decoration in one story to the focal figure in another and another, so that by the end of the novel we know all sides of these degraded people. As one character phrases the conditions of Moon Alley and The Avenue Kathleen had likened the emotionally impoverished lives lived on The Avenue to a disease - something like polio, or tuberculosis - something so severe that, if she didnt escape its gray and gloomy view of life, with its mute acceptance of poverty, and its blind obedience to St. Apollonias, that if she followed her mothers lead and contented herself wi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 28, 2006
• ISBN: 9781462804764

David Appleby

David Appleby is a Practice Representative for the Association of Pet Behaviour Counsellors, a frequent lecturer and contributes to a number of journals.

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Copyright © 2006 by David Appleby.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, events, and incidents are imaginary, and any resemblance to locations or actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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CONTENTS

FIRST SEMESTER

McFADDEN’S SALOON

DRUNK AGAIN

CATHOLIC SCHOOL GIRLS

GIVE AND TAKE

MOON ALLEY

THE KITCHEN TABLE

A CASE OF THE BUTTERFLIES

A DAY’S BIT OF WORK

THE LADIES’ ROOM

The author wishes to thank the Council for Basic Education,

The Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Pennsylvania Council on

The Arts for their support and encouragement.

FOR ERIKA

FIRST SEMESTER

Do you like Irish girls? I asked him. Do you find them pretty?

I do. He answered with a quickness that surprised me, for that was not his way. And then with a cleverness that was, added: But only if they’re poor. He paused, folded his arms across his chest, and faced me. He was setting the stage. Oh, and angry, of course. Like you.

We were sitting at the counter in Charlie’s Diner, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, our library books piled carefully on the swivel stools on either side of us. Knowing him for what he was, he’d believe that I’d believe that what he did next had come out of nowhere, that it was something so spontaneous, and so genuine, that I’d swoon on the spot. But I knew better. What he did at that moment he had planned in advance: he kissed me.

He kissed me in the manner that he had answered my question: quick, yet cleverly on target. His lips, though squarely on mine, were not puckered, not pursed, but wide and flat. His lips disappeared against my own. His invisible lips. His unkissable lips, then. I opened my eyes, pulled away from him, and fixed on his mouth: Mr. No-Lips. His fake smile, his way of holding his head to the side, as if to say, ‘I bet you liked that move, didn’t you,’ made me want to smack him. What was it Kathleen O’Conner had said about someone like him, his type… his class? ‘That type of boy should be smacked the very minute he wakes up in the morning, and then twice more as he falls asleep at night.’ Arrogant. So full of himself.

Then you won’t like me, I told him, deciding not to smack him. Or find me the least bit pretty.

Why not?

Because one day soon enough, half of what you like about ‘us Irish girls’ won’t be there anymore. It’ll be gone one day soon, believe me. And in due time, the other half as well.

Meaning? he asked.

I swiveled the stool away from him, collected my books, and stood behind the revolving seat. I cradled my books, starred at his fake smile, his false face. Now I did want to smack him. I held my books against my chest, hating him.

Ok, so whatever half is left, that’s what I’ll take, he said. He made it sound as if he was ordering something from a day-old lunch special at Charlie’s. And then his cleverness surged forward: I’d rather have half of a Liz than all of anyone else.

He reached out for my waist. With a quickness he should have envied, I back-stepped to the door, my eyes now fixed on his. I felt myself swell with rage; my clenched fist tightened on the cold, chrome door handle sending a pulse of pain up my arm. But his cleverness was no match against the iced look in my eyes. I watched the smile fall from his face.

Liz?

I turned my back to him—on him, I should say—and pushed the door open. I entered the heavy shadows thrown from the elevated train trestle, walked down the avenue, and said to myself, "Its Elizabeth! You smug jerk."

I took the short cut to my house, scrambled through a hole in the cyclone fence that enclosed a vacant lot. Vacant, not empty, for the weeds had grown to bushes, and here and there the bushes had become thick and wild-looking, and had begun to spread outward and upward like small, exotic trees from another part of the world. Some of the rubble that littered the lot—especially the glass shards and broken red bricks—were from the condemned house that had stood there for more than half a century before it finally collapsed, killing the two old people who had lived there as squatters. No one in The Avenue knew their names. I had never seen them.

The lot opened at its far end to two well-traveled places—the Conrail freight-train tracks to the left and Moon Alley to the right. Moon Alley was the short cut to my house, the one I always took, though I was never in any hurry to go home. God forbid! I took it because I didn’t want to walk past Eats, the luncheonette where the public school kids congregated. Too many of them didn’t even live in my neighborhood, and more than a few of them came in from the suburbs. The public school boys hanged out there for the drink and the drugs; the suburban boys came into the neighborhood to pick up Catholic school girls, or to buy drugs, or both. Some of them came into The Avenue for the X-rated movies that were shown at The Colonial Theater down the block. The suburban school kids try to con the old man in the ticket window into believing that they are of age. The smug jerk? He came into The Avenue for all three reasons. But I didn’t know that until much later.

In fact, that’s how we met; him venturing into our neighborhood, up to no good, no doubt. Anyway, one day after school—it was the spring of my senior year—I had forgotten to take the short cut through the vacant lot, and absentmindedly walked further along the avenue; before I knew it, I was passing by ‘Eats.’ And there he was, standing out front, a Pepsi bottle in one hand, his other ‘holding up the wall,’ as they say. He called out the title of one of the books I was carrying, (he had glimpsed the spine of the book) and that provided him with an opening to hit on me. He walked behind me just a step or two, and talked about books that he had read, telling me that I should read this one, and that one, and did I know this one, by the way? His smugness in assuming that I hadn’t read the books he had mentioned! And all of the titles he tossed my way were clearly class assignments, nothing he’d picked up on his own initiative. Just another phony from the Main Line. Haverford, he admitted matter-of-factly, offering me his bottle of Pepsi to swig. My lips on his bottle is what he wanted. A part of me wanted to grab the bottle from him, cork it with my thumb, and shake it up and squirt the soda all over his fancy shirt. But another part of me wondered what Haverford looked like. That night I guessed it looked like him: blemish-free skin, chiseled chin, Roman nose beneath his devil’s eyes, the color of cinders.

He was handsome, in a protestant sort-of-way. ‘Forbidden fruit,’ Kathleen had once referred to such boys, protestant boys, and reminding us both that after just one look our way, we pathetic daughters of Eve reached for the nearest apple.

Their voices flew at me the minute I opened the front door. They were in the kitchen and they were arguing. And this was nothing unusual, because my mother and father, more often than not, were always in the middle of one argument or another—arguments that differed only in detail, for their subject matter seldom changed. Or so I childishly believed during that first semester of college. The subject matter was me.

My mom always tried to put a good face on this by explaining to me that she and my father weren’t arguing about me. That’s just your father’s way. He’s loud and gruff, but that’s not arguing that you hear. That’s just his loudness, and my excitable personality. That’s the way we discuss things, she’d lie time after time.

I marvel, now that I’m eighteen, and at long last in my first year of college—well, first semester, actually—I marvel how my mother puts up with him. I guess others would wonder ‘why,’ rather than ‘how,’ but I know ‘why.’

The smug jerk once asked me why my mother didn’t leave my father. ‘Why doesn’t she just divorce him? She should move on, and start her own life.’

He knows nothing. He knows nothing at all, except his own silver-spooned, privilege-laden view of life.

I was in the parlor, two steps from the narrow alcove that separated the dining room from the kitchen. I heard my father’s angry voice tell my mother to hand him the can of Carnation. His back was to the kitchen door. I walked into the kitchen and made a face behind his back, hoping to make my mother laugh. But she didn’t laugh. My twisted, derisive expression was also part reflex at his presence, part defense that had begun as a child. Believe it, even as a kid, I had known that my mother needed me to stand up to him because she could not. So I stood up to him, put up with his tirade of insults and vulgarities, and mocked him secretly at first, more openly as I became older. He directed his vulgarities and threats to my mom, but I knew they were meant for me, too. He made no bones about telling me so.

You’re the damn problem in this house, he sneered at me.

No, you are, I answered back. I answered him in ways she could not; I defied him because she could not. And worse for him were the times I ignored him, because she could not. My defiance cut him in half.

But then I saw the tears in my mother’s eyes.

I walked to the kitchen door, pressed my books to my chest with one arm, and used my free hand to pull up on the hook that held the old wooden screen door locked to the jamb.

Where the hell do you think you’re going? my father asked, twisting and bending into a near half-gainer.

Sit down, I said. I’m going back to the library. Back on campus, that’s where.

He twisted back to where my mother was standing. What the hell is this? She’s at that damn college morning, noon, and night, he said, speaking to her as if I had already left. And then he lifted himself from the chair, lifted the chair from under him, and repositioned it away from the gray grooves the legs had worn into the linoleum. Don’t get uppity in this house! This is my house! I don’t need your smart-ass college mouth.

I was out the door before he shouted out his last word.

But instead of leaving our tiny back yard, I tip-toed to the dining room’s side—window. I didn’t have to wait long, for in less than a minute he started again.

What the hell am I supposed to do with her?

You promised us. You promised us that you would fix the basement. My mother’s voice was egg-shell thin. Her voice told me that she was trembling. Not shaking, since that produces an entirely different voice; her shaking came from her drinking; this was trembling that I heard as I hid in the yard. The trembling that accompanies hopelessness; the trembling attached to the ever-present emptiness that comes with living with such a man; the trembling that ultimately does give way to the shakes, to the alcoholic rhythms that now threaten to take over her life. As if on cue, I heard the beer can snap open.

And then I heard her cry.

Except for her sobs, and the pull of tissues from the kitchen counter, there was quiet.

But not for long, for he started up again.

Goddamnit, don’t start that, he said. I’m not in the goddamn mood for this.

I held my breath. My mother’s shattered voice now barely audible. In a short while, almost at his command, her crying ebbed. Another beer can was snapped open. More tissues snatched from the box.

And then I heard my mother say, "My God, Moe, imagine how she must feel? I think she heard us last night. Do you know what that must be like for her? To actually hear us like that?"

But what I hear now is my mother succumbing into a new round of tears. This time the sobbing drifts beyond me, and into the alley behind our yard. Tears fill my eyes, and then spill down my cheeks. I tongue the tears from the corners of my mouth. I struggle to suppress my crying, pressing my hands over my face so that my mother does not hear me, does not know that I had been hiding and listening by the dining room window.

I bury my chin behind my books. I hear my father say what I have heard him say ten times before tonight: Maybe I’ll ask Muldoon himself to come over and help me convert the basement into a bedroom for her.

I wanted to burst into the kitchen, confront him for the disgraceful liar that he is; I wanted to look into his glassy, blood-shot eyes, and tell him what a mean, vulgar bastard he truly is.

But I didn’t. I knew that the ‘discussion’ was about to end; it was ending in tears, the same as all the other ‘discussions’ had ended. My mother’s tears, once fully spent, then gave way to her drink. My father would put the can of Carnation in the fridge, and join her with drink of his own—free-pouring from the bottle of Four Roses whiskey he kept hidden beneath the kitchen sink.

My mother would take this, this co-mingling that resulted from their drinking together, as confirmation of his promise, and she, numbed by her cans of beer, would be mollified. The next day she would remember his words; he would not.

That was the way it was in my house.

So yes, I wanted to burst into the kitchen, and have it out with him. Better than that, I would have loved to have seen my mother do it. But she didn’t, and of course neither did I. What I did instead? I tip-toed away from their silence, and ran from the back yard. I made my way into the narrow alleyway of falling wooden fences and weed-choked rubble. Like some pathetic imitation of Alice-in-Wonderland, I stepped through the hole in the fence that led back to Moon Alley, and beyond that, to the elevated train that sped me to what I believed was my new world of intelligent people and bright ideas. A university degree was my ticket out of The Avenue, out of Moon Alley, Kathleen O’Conner had promised. And it was a one-way ticket that I wanted.

The two men sat side by side in McFadden’s Saloon. Moe Sheehan had no heart at all for this project. He had been promising his wife that he’d get started on the basement as soon as Muldoon had some free time between jobs. When he wasn’t drunk, Muldoon was as good a contractor as anyone in The Avenue, Moe Sheehan told himself. Together they could transform the basement into a small bedroom for his daughter. He promised this so many times that Elizabeth laughed in his face whenever he had brought it up. Now he would to do it just to spite her. His own daughter had laughed in his face as if he was some punk hanging out at ‘Eats.’ If he had his way, he would have kicked her out of the house the minute she turned eighteen. He was sick of her attitude, always thinking that she was better than anyone in The Avenue; better than her own father. ‘That girl is stuck in some spell that bitch Kathleen O’Conner has put on her,’ is what Muldoon offered that night at McFadden’s when Moe Sheehan had once more proposed the project. Just to spite Elizabeth, he told Muldoon, it would be worth all the trouble. And it would get her mother off my back, he added.

It’s no big deal, Muldoon said. Less than a week’s bit of work. A few bags of cement mix to finish the cellar floor, a drop-ceiling to hide the pipes and timbers and odds and ends, don’t you know.

Moe Sheehan emptied a shot of whiskey into his beer mug. I want the walls paneled, of course, he said. Walnut colored.

We’ll miter the corners, of course, Muldoon advised. He drank the two shots of whiskey that McFadden had poured for him, and followed this with several continuous gulps of beer. They lighted cigarettes from the same match, promptly signaling McFadden to refill their shot-glasses and beer mugs.

After a short while, Moe Sheehan asked Muldoon what the total cost of the project might be. Just ballpark figures, is all.

Will you be covering the cellar floor, once it’s cemented? Muldoon asked. He was of the time when basements were called cellars—dusty and dark, a place forbidden to a small girl. Cellars were there to hold coal bins, and furnaces, and tubs with washboards; later, when washers and dryers and gas heaters and water tanks had replaced their out of date predecessors, the cellar, now a ‘basement,’ was still off limits to Elizabeth. What hadn’t changed? They were still storage rooms holding Christmas decorations in cardboard boxes neatly stacked in the furthest corner. There were paint cans and worn window shades; there were the stringed towers of National Geographic magazines that, like some basement kudzu, continued to claim more and more of the floor. A dank odor of dampness still emanated from the dirt floor and crumbling plaster walls. A thick layer of dust from the old coal bin had settled over the collection of junk that littered the floor, and dust motes danced endlessly in the light that slipped in from the two small windows opening to the sidewalk.

You can get a good grade of linoleum down at Goldberg’s, Muldoon thought to mention.

What about that ‘indoor-outdoor’ carpeting that they talk so much about? Moe Sheehan slurred.

I wouldn’t touch that stuff. Not with the gas heater down there. And the hot water tank as well.

Do you mean to say that that stuff is not fire-proof? Moe Sheehan asked.

They say a lot of things down at Goldberg’s, but personally I don’t believe a word of it, Muldoon said.

They continued to talk about the project until McFadden announced ‘last call.’

Moe Sheehan and Muldoon each ordered three more shots, and three more mugs of beer. McFadden filled similar orders from the other men at the bar, and then locked the front door and pulled the strings on the neon lights that flickered in the windows.

The men drank in silence for a long while before Muldoon asked what type of furniture Moe Sheehan would put in the cellar that was to become Elizabeth’s new bedroom.

She’s got her own double-cot up there in the bedroom next to ours, he said. That’ll go down there. No problem taking that down the steps since it’s a fold-up cot, and a roll-up mattress.

Other stuff that kids have, I guess, Muldoon said. Stereo set and TV, no doubt.

She does. That kind of stuff her mother always buys her. Why, she’s playing that crap music of hers throughout the night. Her mother tells me that she worries that the kid might hear us. ‘How is she supposed to hear us,’ I tell her, ‘what with that crap music on all the night long?’ And then with her face in a book the rest of the time, he added with a greater anger.

Muldoon began to doze off. So it’s a ballpark figure you want then? he asked. But his head fell against his chest before he could answer his own question. He lifted his head slightly, and began to snore.

She can drag her books down to the basement by the damn box-load for all I care, Moe Sheehan grumbled as he tightened his grip around his beer mug.

So then it’s a ballpark figure that you want, Muldoon repeated between snores.

Ballpark figure is what I’ll tell the wife, Muldoon. And she can take it or leave it, he added as an afterthought. He downed the last of the whiskey. And that wise-ass daughter of mine… ? Why, to hell with her, I say. The hell with her and her smart-ass college mouth, he said, slamming his shot glass on the bar.

On that first day of classes—it was just months ago, though it already seems light years in the past—knowing where I was headed, I was so thrilled to be sitting on the elevated train, and then so excited to be snaking my way through the dimly lighted subway concourse to switch trains at City Hall. I had never ridden north on the Broad Street Subway. I’m sure it’s difficult for someone living outside The Avenue to believe this, to learn that an eighteen year