“Charming Billy”

Those of us who claim exclusivity in love do so with a liar’s courage:  there are a hundred opportunities, thousands over the years, for a sense of falsehood to seep in, for all that we imagine as inevitable to become arbitrary, for our history together to reveal itself as only a matter of chance and happenstance, nothing irrepeatable, or irreplaceable, the circumstantial mingling of just one of the so many million with just one more.

Charming Billy by Alice McDermott is the tragic story of Billy Lynch, a man who chose alcohol over sobriety and yet, he never missed a day of work, was loved by many and loyal to a fault to his family, friends, his Irish community and the Catholic church.  A National Book Award Winner, Charming Billy is also the story of the family and friends of Billy Lynch who were all impacted in different ways by both the decisions they made and the decisions Billy made throughout his life.

The story begins in a bar and grill in the Bronx where 47 people have gathered after attending the funeral for Billy Lynch , who died several days before alone, drunk, and on the street.  There is Maeve, his long-suffering wife of 30 years, his two sisters, Kate and Rosemary, his cousin and best friend, Dennis and dozens of family members and close friends. They sit down and eat a dinner of roast beef, boiled potatoes, green beans, and canned fruit salad with a scoop of lime sherbet while talking about how Billy drank and debate the reasons why Billy chose to drink himself to death. Despite their differences of opinion, they all agreed “If you knew Billy at all, then you loved him. He was just that type of guy.” And, so Billy’s death was attributed to him succumbing to an illness that couldn’t be cured in time. “It wasn’t a failure of our affections, it was a triumph of a disease” said the Parish priest.

Billy Lynch was born in New York city, grew up in a close Irish neighborhood where family and friends were everything. He fought in World War II, returned home, and found a job with Con Ed, a utility company where most of his relatives and friends also worked.  But in between the time he returned from the war and his job with Con Ed, Billy and Dennis go out to Long Island to spend a week renovating the summer cottage owned by Dennis’s parents.

While at the beach house, Billy and Dennis meet two young Irish sisters, Mary who works as a nanny for a family in New York and her sister, Eva who is visiting from Ireland.  Billy falls in love with Eva and sets upon a plan to marry her despite her having to return to her family in Ireland. When Eva dies in Ireland later in the year from pneumonia, Billy is heartbroken and never quite the same.  Turning to alcohol to numb his pain, Billy becomes a drunk but a charming and sentimental drunk which endears him to everyone in his universe; they understand why he drinks, want him to quit, but continue to enable him through the years.

The story is told by Dennis’s daughter, who comes to understand that the real story is the friendship between Billy and Dennis and not the story of Billy and Eva. Cousins, best friends, co-workers, and confidants, these two men grew up and stayed  glued together throughout life. Dennis stuck to Billy but didn’t realize until after his death, and in a moment of introspection, that “Billy didn’t need someone to pour him his drinks. he needed someone to tell him that living isn’t poetry.”