A brutal truth was kept from Billy Lynch. Family and friends had decided that Billy's best interests were served in this way. Were they also patronizing, or infantilizing a grown man? Such a consideration would be an aside to them, as theirs were actions arising from a larger concern for Billy, after all.
II.
In Alice McDermott's Charming Billy, a group of mourners have gathered at the funeral of Billy Lynch. They are from the working-class New York community of Irish-Americans to which Billy belonged. Saddened as they are, none among them are particularly surprised that Billy's alcoholism had finally killed him. A gregarious, Yeats-quoting dreamer, Billy had had a long history of alcohol abuse in trying to deal with his troubles. At the end of this first chapter in the novel, McDermott then reveals that certain truth which had been kept from Billy for some time.
As a young man finding his way after the Second World War, Billy had fallen in love with Eva, an Irish visitor to New York. When she returns to Ireland, Billy works to send Eva the money to return to America so that they might continue their romance, and marry. Eva has other plans about her marriage. She weds a local man in Ireland, and invests Billy's money in a business with her new husband. It comes to Billy's cousin, Dennis, to inform Billy of Eva's actions. But since he cannot bear to tell Billy the truth, Dennis alters it. "Better he be brokenhearted then trailed all the rest of his life by a sense of his own foolishness." <1> Dennis lies to Billy, telling him that Eva had died, having succumbed to pneumonia.
Despite his misgivings, Dennis's lie endures. By the time Billy learns the truth on a trip to Ireland, thirty years have passed. Over those years, Billy's drinking turns into alcoholism. To what extent did the lie about Eva's death contribute to Billy's drinking problem? Should a person as Billy, prone to strong emotions, including - or especially - the romantic, been lied to in such a way?
There are many fine, suggestive passages as we move back and forth in time with the story. In a scene that has Billy and Eva newly together in New York, McDermott tells us of a "vast darkness beyond them and the indifferent pounding of the sea ... a sickening sense of false hope and false promise that required all of God's grace to keep at bay." A world war has caused devastating losses and deep trauma. This has led some to turn to their faith. "[A] new sense that only the daily, formal petition for mercy would get them through the rest of their lives."
Lives, and then, a mortal end. The focus on the causes and circumstances of Billy's death changes as the novel moves toward its conclusion. McDermott speaks of the passing that is coming for us all. "[T]he void that met a used-up body, a spent mind ... the abyss toward which you stumbled inevitably, part of the crowd ... eventually, one after the other, every one of you will fall."
III.
A sense of consolation builds throughout Alice McDermott's Charming Billy. It is a book grave, but also, radiant.
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<1>McDermott, Alice. Charming Billy (1998). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
