Brooklyn

by Colm Toibin

  The work was easy. Miss Fortini was interested only in time-keeping and tidiness and making sure that the slightest complaint or query was immediately conveyed to her. She was not hard to locate, Eilis discovered, as she was always watching, and if you seemed to be having the slightest difficulty with a customer and if you were not seen to be smiling, Miss Fortini would notice and begin to move towards you signalling to you, stopping only if she saw that you looked both busy and pleasant.

  Eilis learned quickly where she could have a fast lunch at a counter and then have twenty minutes to explore the other shops around Fulton Street. Diana and Patty and Mrs. Kehoe all told her that the best clothes shop near Bartocci’s was Loehmann’s on Bedford Avenue. Downstairs at Loehmann’s at lunchtime was always busier than Bartocci’s, and the clothes seemed cheaper, but the minute Eilis made her way upstairs she thought of Rose because it was the most beautiful shop floor she had ever seen, not really like a shop at all, closer to a palace, with fewer people shopping and elegantly dressed assistants. When she looked at the prices she had to convert them into pounds to make any sense of them. They appeared very low. She tried to remember some of the dresses and costumes and their prices so she could give Rose a precise description of them, but each time she went there she had only a few minutes to spare, as she did not want to return late to the shop floor at Bartocci’s. She had had no difficulties so far with Miss Fortini and she did not want to have any problems so early in her time working for her.

  One morning, when she had been there for three weeks and was on her fourth, Eilis knew that something strange had happened as soon as she reached the other side of Fulton Street and could see the windows of Bartocci’s. They were covered in huge banners saying FAMOUS NYLON SALE. She did not know that they had planned to have a sale, presuming that they would not do so until January. In the locker room she met Miss Fortini, to whom she expressed surprise.

  “Mr. Bartocci always keeps it a secret. He supervises all the work himself overnight. The whole floor is nylon, everything nylon, and most at half price. You can buy four items yourself. And this is a special bag to keep the money in because you can only accept exact change. We’ve put even prices on everything. So no dockets today. And there will be tight security. It will be the biggest scramble you’ve ever seen in your life because even the nylon stockings are half price. And there’s no lunch break, instead there will be free sandwiches and soda down here, but don’t come more than twice. I’ll be watching. We need everyone working.”

  Within half an hour of opening there were queues outside. Most women wanted stockings; they took three or four pairs before moving to the back of the store, where there were nylon sweater sets in every possible colour and in most sizes, everything at least half off the regular price. The job of the sales assistant was to follow the crowd with Bartocci carrier bags in one hand and the cash bag in the other. All the customers seemed to know that there would be no change given.

  Miss Bartocci and two of the office staff manned the doors, which had to be kept shut from ten o’clock as the crowds surged. The people who normally worked in the cash department had special uniforms and worked on the shop floor as well. A few stood outside and made sure that the queue was orderly. The shop, Eilis thought, was the hottest and busiest place she had ever seen. Mr. Bartocci walked through the crowd taking the cash bags and emptying them into a huge canvas sack that he carried.

  The morning was full of frenzy; she did not for one moment have peace to look around her. Everyone’s voice was loud, and there were times when she thought in a flash of an early evening in October walking with her mother down by the prom in Enniscorthy, the Slaney River glassy and full, and the smell of leaves burning from somewhere close by, and the daylight going slowly and gently. This scene kept coming to her as she filled the bag with notes and coins and women of all types approached her asking where certain items of clothing could be found or if they could return what they had bought in exchange for other merchandise, or simply wishing to purchase what they had in their hands.

  Although Miss Fortini was not especially tall, she appeared to be able to oversee everything, answering questions, picking things up from the floor that had fallen there, tidying and stacking goods neatly. The morning had gone by quickly, but as the afternoon wore on Eilis found herself watching the clock, discovering after a while that she was checking every five minutes in between dealing with what seemed like hundreds of customers as the supply of nylon goods began to dwindle slowly, enough for Miss Fortini to tell her to take what she needed herself, four items only, downstairs now. She could, she was told, pay for them later.

  She selected a pair of nylon stockings for herself, one she thought might suit Mrs. Kehoe, and then one each for her mother and for Rose. Having taken them downstairs and put them in her locker, she sat with one of the other assistants and drank a soda and then opened another that she sipped until she thought that Miss Fortini would notice her absence. When she went back upstairs, she discovered that it was only three o’clock and some of the nylon items that were running short were being replaced, were being almost dumped on to the display cases by men who were overseen by Mr. Bartocci. Later, when she was having her evening meal at Mrs. Kehoe’s, she discovered that both Patty and Sheila had found out about the sale and had rushed around during their lunch break, running in to get some items and running out again so that they did not have time in the middle of all the crush to see where she was and say hello.

  Mrs. Kehoe seemed pleased by the pair of stockings and offered to pay for them, but Eilis said they were a gift. That evening, during supper, they all talked about Bartocci’s Famous Nylon Sale, which always happened without warning, yet they were amazed when Eilis told them that even she who worked there had no idea the sale was going to happen.

  “Well, if you ever hear, even a rumour,” Diana said, “you’ll have to let us all know. And the nylon stockings are the best, they don’t run as easily as some of the others. They’d sell you garbage, some of those other stores.”

  “That’s enough now,” Mrs. Kehoe said. “I’m sure all the stores are doing their best.”

  With all the excitement and discussion surrounding the nylon sale, Eilis did not notice until the end of the meal that there were three letters for her. The minute she came back from work every day she had checked the side table in the kitchen where Mrs. Kehoe left letters. She could not believe that she had forgotten to check this evening. She drank a cup of tea with the others, holding the letters in her hand nervously, feeling her heart beating faster when she thought about them, waiting to go to her room and open them and read the news from home.

  The letters, she knew by the handwriting, were from her mother and Rose and Jack. She decided to read her mother’s first and leave Rose’s until the end. Her mother’s letter was short and there was no news in it, just a list of the people who were asking for her with some details of where her mother had met them and when. Jack’s letter was much the same, but with references to the crossing that she had told him about in her letter and had said very little about in her letter to her mother and Rose. Rose’s handwriting was, she saw, very beautiful and clear, as usual. She wrote about golf and work and how quiet and dull the town was and how lucky Eilis was to be in the bright lights. In a postscript, she suggested that Eilis might like sometimes to write to her separately about private matters or things that might worry their mother too much. She suggested that Eilis might use her work address for these letters.

  The letters told Eilis little; there was hardly anything personal in them and nothing that sounded like anyone’s own voice. Nonetheless, as she read them over and over, she forgot for a moment where she was and she could picture her mother in the kitchen taking her Basildon Bond notepad and her envelopes and setting out to write a proper letter with nothing crossed out. Rose, she thought, might have gone into the dining room to write on paper she had taken home from work, using a longer, more elegant white envelope than her mother had. Eilis imagin
ed that Rose when she was finished might have left hers on the hall table, and her mother would have gone with both letters in the morning to the post office, having to get special stamps for America. She could not imagine where Jack had written his letter, which was briefer than the other two, almost shy in its tone, as though he did not want to put too much in writing.

  She lay on the bed with the letters beside her. For the past few weeks, she realized, she had not really thought of home. The town had come to her in flashing pictures, such as the one that had come during the afternoon of the sale, and she had thought of course of her mother and Rose, but her own life in Enniscorthy, the life she had lost and would never have again, she had kept out of her mind. Every day she had come back to this small room in this house full of sounds and gone over everything new that had happened. Now, all that seemed like nothing compared to the picture she had of home, of her own room, the house in Friary Street, the food she had eaten there, the clothes she wore, how quiet everything was.

  All this came to her like a terrible weight and she felt for a second that she was going to cry. It was as though an ache in her chest was trying to force tears down her cheeks despite her enormous effort to keep them back. She did not give in to whatever it was. She kept thinking, attempting to work out what was causing this new feeling that was like despondency, that was like how she felt when her father died and she watched them closing the coffin, the feeling that he would never see the world again and she would never be able to talk to him again.

  She was nobody here. It was not just that she had no friends and family; it was rather that she was a ghost in this room, in the streets on the way to work, on the shop floor. Nothing meant anything. The rooms in the house on Friary Street belonged to her, she thought; when she moved in them she was really there. In the town, if she walked to the shop or to the Vocational School, the air, the light, the ground, it was all solid and part of her, even if she met no one familiar. Nothing here was part of her. It was false, empty, she thought. She closed her eyes and tried to think, as she had done so many times in her life, of something she was looking forward to, but there was nothing. Not the slightest thing. Not even Sunday. Nothing maybe except sleep, and she was not even certain she was looking forward to sleep. In any case, she could not sleep yet, since it was not yet nine o’clock. There was nothing she could do. It was as though she had been locked away.

  In the morning, she was not sure that she had slept as much as lived a set of vivid dreams, letting them linger so that she would not have to open her eyes and see the room. One of the dreams was about the courthouse at the top of Friary Hill in Enniscorthy. She remembered now how much the neighbours had dreaded the day when the court sat, not because of the cases that were reported in the papers of petty theft, or drunkenness, or disorderly behaviour, but because sometimes the court ordered children to be taken into care, put into orphanages or industrial schools or foster homes because they mitched from school or caused trouble or because of problems with their parents. Sometimes, inconsolable mothers could be found screaming, howling outside the courthouse as their children were taken away. But her dream had no screaming women, just a group of silent children, Eilis among them, standing in a line, knowing that they would soon be led away on the orders of the judge.

  What was strange for her now as she lay awake was that she had seemed to be looking forward to being led away, she had felt no fear of it. Her fear, instead, was of seeing her mother in front of the courthouse. In her dream she found a way of avoiding her mother. She was taken out of the line, and through a side door and then on a car journey that appeared to last as long as she could stay asleep.

  She got up and used the bathroom very quietly; she thought that she would have breakfast in one of the diners on Fulton Street, as she had seen people do on her way to work. Once she was dressed and ready, she tiptoed out of the house. She did not want to meet any of the others. It was only half past seven. She would, she thought, sit somewhere for an hour, having a coffee and a sandwich, and then go to work early.

  As she walked, she began to dread the day. Later, as she sat at the counter of a diner looking at a menu, snatches of another dream that she had only half remembered when she woke came to her. She was flying, as though in a balloon, over the calm sea on a calm day. Below, she could see the cliffs at Cush Gap and the soft sand at Ballyconnigar. The wind was propelling her towards Blackwater, then the Ballagh, then Monageer, then Vinegar Hill and Enniscorthy. She was lost so much in the memory of this dream that the waiter behind the counter asked her if she was all right.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “You look sad,” he replied.

  She shook her hair and tried to smile and ordered a coffee and a sandwich.

  “Cheer up,” he said in a louder voice. “Come on, cheer up. It’ll never happen. Give us a smile.”

  A few of the other customers at the counter looked at her. She knew that she would not be able to hold back the tears. She did not wait for her order to arrive but ran out of the diner before anyone could say anything else to her.

  During the day she felt that Miss Fortini was looking at her more than usual and this made her acutely conscious of how she appeared when she was not dealing directly with a customer. She tried to look towards the door and the front windows and the street, she tried to seem busy, but she found that she could, if she did not stop herself, move easily into a sort of trance, thinking over and over of the same things, about everything she had lost, and wondering how she would face going back to the evening meal with the others and the long night alone in a room that had nothing to do with her. Then she would find Miss Fortini staring at her across the shop floor and she would try once again to seem cheerful and helpful to customers as though it were a normal day at work.

  The evening meal was not as difficult as she had imagined, as both Patty and Diana had bought new shoes and Mrs. Kehoe, before she could give them her full approval, needed to see what costume or dress and other accessories they would be worn with. The kitchen before and after supper became like a fashion parade, with both Miss McAdam and Miss Keegan withholding approval each time Patty or Diana came into the room wearing the shoes and some new set of clothes with a different handbag.

  Mrs. Kehoe was not sure, once she had seen Diana’s shoes with the costume they were intended to match, that they were dressy enough.

  “They are neither fish nor fowl,” she said. “You couldn’t wear them to work and they mightn’t look great on a night out somewhere. I can’t see why you bought them unless there was a sale.”

  Diana looked crestfallen as she admitted that there had been no sale.

  “Oh, then,” Mrs. Kehoe said. “All I can say is that I hope you kept the receipt.”

  “Well, I quite like them,” Miss McAdam said.

  “So do I,” Sheila Heffernan added.

  “But when would you wear them?” Mrs. Kehoe asked.

  “I just like them,” Miss McAdam said and shrugged.

  Eilis slipped away, glad no one had noticed that she had not spoken once at the meal. She wondered if she could go out now, do anything rather than face her tomb of a bedroom and all the thoughts that would come when she lay awake and all the dreams that would come when she slept. She stood in the hall, and then turned upstairs, realizing that she was afraid too of the outside, and even if she were not she would have no idea where to go at this time of the evening. She hated this house, she thought, its smells, its noises, its colours. She was already crying as she went up the stairs. She knew that as long as the others were discussing their wardrobes in the kitchen below, she would be able to cry as loudly as she pleased without their hearing her.

  That night was the worst she had ever spent. It was only as the dawn came that she remembered something Jack had said to her on the day in Liverpool before she had caught the boat, a time that now seemed like years ago. He had said that he found being away hard at first, but he did not elaborate and she did not think of asking him what
it really had been like. His manner was so mild and good-humoured, just as her father’s had been, that he would not in any case want to complain. She considered writing to him now asking him if he too had felt like this, as though he had been shut away somewhere and was trapped in a place where there was nothing. It was like hell, she thought, because she could see no end to it, and to the feeling that came with it, but the torment was strange, it was all in her mind, it was like the arrival of night if you knew that you would never see anything in daylight again. She did not know what she was going to do. But she knew that Jack was too far away to be able to help her.

  None of them could help her. She had lost all of them. They would not find out about this; she would not put it into a letter. And because of this she understood that they would never know her now. Maybe, she thought, they had never known her, any of them, because if they had, then they would have had to realize what this would be like for her.

  She lay there as the light of day began; she did not think she would be able to manage another night like this. For a while she was quietly resigned to the prospect that nothing would change, but she did not know what the consequences would be, or what form they would take. Once more, she got up early and left the house without making a sound and walked the streets for an hour before going to have a cup of coffee. She noticed the cold in the air for the first time; it seemed to her that the weather had changed. But it hardly mattered now what the weather was like. She found a place in a diner where she could have her back to everybody, and no one could comment on the expression on her face.

  By the time she drank the coffee and had a bun and managed to get the waitress’s attention to pay the bill, she realized that she had left herself too short a time to get to work. If she did not hurry, she was going to be late for the first time. There were crowds in the streets and she could not easily get past people. She wondered at one point if people were not deliberately blocking her way. It took a long time for the traffic lights to change. Once she was on Fulton Street, it was even harder; it was as though crowds were coming out of a football game. Even moving at a normal pace was hard. She arrived at Bartocci’s with just a minute to spare. She did not know how she was going to spend the day standing on the shop floor trying to look pleasant and attentive. The minute she appeared upstairs in her work clothes she caught Miss Fortini’s gaze, which seemed disapproving as she began to move towards her, only for her then to be distracted by a customer. Once the customer had been dealt with, Eilis was careful not to look Miss Fortini’s way again. She kept her back to her for as long as she could.