Alice McDermott's "Charming Billy," An Irish Wake in the Bronx

According to James T. Keane’s Reading Culture Through Catholic Eyes [2024], present-day Catholic author Alice McDermott is the preeminent representative of a new generation of Catholic novelists who treat of religious practice and themes in the daily flow of life. This style is distinct from Catholic novelists of earlier generations where a “sinner” or “troubled soul” languishes in a disheveled state until God’s intervention brings redemption to the lost being. Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair [1951] and Caroline Gordon’s The Malefactors [1956] fall into the latter category of stumbling into grace after a long siege with the devil, or however one defines the dark night of the soul.
 
Alice McDermott’s novels drop us into “the middle of things.” In Charming Billy, we find ourselves in the Bronx, invisible guests and observers in the late 1980’s of an Irish wake and funeral for Billy Lynch. The observance of life’s passage in Irish culture is true liturgy, lasting for several days, with each attendant playing his or her assigned roles, no scripts necessary. Billy’s wife of several decades, Maeve, powered herself through the necessary arrangements, notably the selection of an appropriate family pub for the reception after the Mass—with a cash bar for hard liquor. Maeve was not particularly attractive, but she was wise. She knew her responsibilities to the guests to open herself to their outpourings of grief on the death of her charming husband.
 
And she was wise enough to maneuver herself around a hard truth: that the true love of her husband’s life was an Irish girl, Eva, whom Billy met immediately after World War II. Billy worked laboriously to make money to bring Eva and her family to the United States, only to discover that Eva died of illness in Ireland…though there is mystery about reports of her demise. The soft discussions among the guests and relatives turned to the question of “what did Maeve know of Eva and when did she know it?” Billy’s male friends, those who had stood with him at his marriage to Mauve thirty years ago, agreed that he probably told her about Eva, but one of the gang noted that “men don’t like to talk about those things.”
 
The deceased Billy bore two crosses in his life: the lost Eva and hardcore alcoholism. McDermott subtly picks up the contradictory emotions of those in attendance: that at his best Billy was charming, with children and adults alike. All the more reason, then, to feel regret and anger over Billy’s destructive addiction. At several points, a muted but lively discussion about Billy’s consumption held the floor. The old timers believed that excessive alcohol consumption was a matter of self-control. Others addressed the issue as a religious one, and in Ireland the Catholic Church was in fact actively engaged in societies, retreats, and religious pledges to uphold abstinence from alcohol. Some romantic souls traced his problem to the loss of Eve. The religious sister from the Bronx parish labored mightily to explain alcoholism as a disease, but this was not the moment for cutting-edge science. Her pastor, deeply engaged in socializing, did not partake of the alcohol [discussions, that is.]
 
Death is finality, but the lives of the widow and friends would continue. Catharsis, Irish style, was achieved and, while there is no dramatic end to this tale, the reader comes away with a settled sense that “wherever two or three are gathered in my name,” the Lord is among them, lovingly and soberly.