by Colm Toibin
“That’s what she called it,” he said. “My profession.”
He grinned as though nothing as amusing had ever occurred to him in his life.
“Is she your mom?” he asked.
“I told you that my mom, as you call her, is in Ireland.”
“So you did, but that woman looked like she owned you.”
“She’s my landlady.”
“She’s a lady all right. A lady with loads of questions to ask.”
“And, incidentally, what is your full name?”
“You want what I told your mom?”
“She’s not my mom.”
“You want my real name?”
“Yes, I want your real name.”
“My real full name is Antonio Giuseppe Fiorello.”
“What name did you give my landlady when she asked you?”
“I told her my name is Tony McGrath. Because there’s a guy at work called Billo McGrath.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. And what did you tell her your profession was?”
“My real one?”
“If you don’t answer me properly—”
“I told her I’m a plumber and that’s because I am.”
“Tony?”
“Yeah?”
“In future, if I ever allow you to call again, you will come quietly to the basement door.”
“And say nothing to no one?”
“Correct.”
“Suits me.”
He took her to a diner where they had supper and then they walked together towards the dancehall. She told him about her fellow lodgers and her job at Bartocci’s. He told her, in turn, that he was the oldest of four boys and that he still lived at home in Bensonhurst with his parents.
“And my mom made me promise not to laugh too much, or make jokes,” he said. “She said Irish girls aren’t like Italian girls. They’re serious.”
“You told your mom you were meeting me?”
“No, but my brother guessed that I was meeting a girl and he told her. I think they all guessed. I think I was smiling too much. And I had to tell them it was an Irish girl in case they thought it was some family they knew.”
Eilis could not understand him. By the end of the night as he walked her home she knew only that she liked dancing close to him and that he was funny. But she would not have been surprised if everything he told her was untrue, instead just part of the joke he made out of most things or, in fact, she decided in the days that followed when she went over all he had said, out of everything.
In the house there was much discussion about her boyfriend the plumber. She told them, once Mrs. Kehoe had left the room, once Patty and Diana began to wonder why none of their friends had ever seen him before, that Tony was Italian and not Irish. She had made a point of not introducing him to any of them at the dance and now regretted, as the conversation began, that she had said anything at all about him.
“I hope that dancehall is not going to be inundated with Italians now,” Miss McAdam said.
“What do you mean?” Eilis asked.
“Now they realize what is to be had.”
The others were silent for a moment. It was after supper on the Friday night and Eilis wished that Mrs. Kehoe, who had left the room some time before, would return.
“And what is to be had?” she asked.
“That’s all they have to do, it seems.” Miss McAdam snapped her finger. “I don’t have to say the rest.”
“I think we have to be very careful about men we don’t know coming into the hall,” Sheila Heffernan said.
“Maybe if we got rid of some of the wallflowers, Sheila,” Eilis said, “with the sour look on their faces.”
Diana began to shriek with laughter as Sheila Heffernan quickly left the room.
Suddenly Mrs. Kehoe arrived back in the kitchen.
“Diana, if I hear you squeal again,” she said, “I will call the Fire Brigade to douse you with water. Did someone say something rude to Miss Heffernan?”
“We were giving Eilis here advice, that’s all,” Miss McAdam said. “Just to beware of strangers.”
“Well, I thought he was very nice, her caller,” Mrs. Kehoe said. “With nice old-fashioned Irish manners. And we will have no further comment about him in this house. Do you hear, Miss McAdam?”
“I was only saying—”
“You were only refusing to mind your own business, Miss McAdam. It’s a trait I notice in people from Northern Ireland.”
As Diana shrieked again she put her hand over her mouth in mock shame.
“I’ll have no more talk about men at this table,” Mrs. Kehoe said, “except to say to you, Diana, that the man that gets you will be nicely hoped up with you. The hard knocks that life gives you will put a sorry end to that smirk on your face.”
One by one they crept out of the kitchen, leaving Mrs. Kehoe with Dolores.
Tony asked Eilis if she would come to a movie with him some night in the middle of the week. In everything she had told him she had left out the fact that she had classes at Brooklyn College. He had not asked her what she did every evening, and she had kept it to herself almost deliberately as a way of holding him at a distance. She had enjoyed being collected by him on a Friday night at Mrs. Kehoe’s up to now, and she looked forward to his company, especially in the diner before the dance. He was bright and funny as he spoke about baseball, his brothers, his work and life in Brooklyn. He had quickly learned the names of her fellow lodgers and of her bosses at work and he managed to allude to them regularly in a way that made her laugh.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the college?” he asked her as they sat in the diner before the dance.
“You didn’t ask.”
“I don’t have anything more to tell you.” He shrugged, feigning depression.
“No secrets?”
“I could make up some, but they wouldn’t sound true.”
“Mrs. Kehoe believes that you’re Irish. And you could be a native of Tipperary for all I know and just be putting on the rest. How come I met you at an Irish dance?”
“Okay. I do have a secret.”
“I knew it. You come from Bray.”
“What? Where’s that?”
“What’s your secret?”
“You want to know why I came to an Irish dance?”
“All right. I’ll ask you: why did you come to an Irish dance?”
“Because I like Irish girls.”
“Would any one do?”
“No, I like you.”
“Yes, but if I wasn’t there? Would you just pick another?”
“No, if you weren’t there, I would walk home all sad looking at the ground.”
She explained to him then that she had been homesick, and that Father Flood had inscribed her on the course as a way of making her busy, and how studying in the evening made her feel happy, or as happy as she had been since she had left home.
“Don’t I make you feel happy?” He looked at her seriously.
“Yes, you do,” she replied.
Before he could ask her any more questions that might, she thought, lead her to say that she did not know him well enough to make any further declarations about him, she told him about her classes, about the other students, about bookkeeping and keeping accounts and about the law lecturer Mr. Rosenblum. He knitted his brow and seemed worried when she told him how difficult and complicated the lectures were. Then when she recounted what the bookseller had said on the day when she went to Manhattan to buy law books, he became completely silent. When their coffee came he still did not speak but kept stirring the sugar, nodding his head sadly. She had not seen him like this before and found that she was looking closely at his face in this light, wondering how quickly he would return to his usual self and begin smiling and laughing again. But, when he asked the waiter for the bill, he remained grave and he did not speak as they left the restaurant.
Later, when the dance music became slow and they were dancing close to each other, she looked u
p and caught his gaze. He had the same serious expression on his face, which made him appear less clownish and boyish than before. Even when he smiled at her, he did not make it seem like a joke, or a way of having fun. It was a warm smile, sincere, and it suggested to her that he was stable, almost mature and that, whatever was happening now, he meant business. She smiled back at him but then looked down and closed her eyes. She was frightened.
He arranged that evening that he would collect her the following Thursday from college and walk her home. Nothing more, he promised. He did not want to disturb her, he said, from her studies. The following week, when he asked her to come to a movie with him on the Saturday, she agreed because all of her fellow lodgers, with the exception of Dolores, and some of the girls at work were going to go to Singin’ in the Rain, which was opening. Even Mrs. Kehoe said that she intended to see the film with two of her friends and thus it became a subject of much discussion at the kitchen table.
Soon, then, a pattern developed. Every Thursday, Tony stood outside the college, or discreetly inside the hall if it were raining, and he accompanied her onto the trolley-car and then he walked her home. He was invariably cheerful, with news of the people he had worked for since he had seen her last, and the different tones they used, depending on their age or their country of origin, as they explained the problems they had with the plumbing. Some of them were, he said, so grateful for the service that they tipped him handsomely, often giving him too much; others, even those who had blocked their own drains with garbage, wanted to argue about the bill. All the managers of buildings in Brooklyn, he said, were mean, and when Italian managers discovered he was Italian too, they were even meaner. The Irish ones, he was sorry to tell her, were mean and stingy no matter what.
“They are real mean. They’re stingy as hell, those Irish,” he said, and grinned at her.
Each Saturday he took her to a movie; they often travelled on the subway into Manhattan to see something that had just opened. On the first such date, when they joined the queue for Singin’ in the Rain, she discovered that she was dreading the moment when the cinema became dark and the film began. She liked dancing with Tony, how gradually they moved close to each other in the slow dances, and she liked walking home with him, how they waited until they were near Mrs. Kehoe’s house but not too near, before he kissed her. And how he never, even once, made her feel that she should pull his hand away or draw back from him. Now, however, at their first film together, she believed that something would have to change between them. She was almost tempted to mention it as they stood in the queue, to avoid any unpleasantness inside in the dark. She wanted to say to him, as nonchalantly as she could, that she would prefer actually to see the film rather then spend two hours necking and kissing in the cinema.
Inside, having bought the tickets, he bought popcorn as well, and did not, to her surprise, usher her to the back seat of the cinema, but asked her where she wanted to sit and seemed happy to sit in the middle, where they would have the best view. Although he put his arm around her during the film and whispered to her a few times, he did nothing more. As they waited for the subway afterwards, he was in such good humour and had loved the film so much that she felt an immense tenderness for him and wondered if she would ever see a side of him that was disagreeable. Soon, as they went more regularly to movies, she saw that a sad film or a film with disturbing scenes could leave him silent and brooding afterwards, locked into some depressed dream of his own that it would take time to lift him out of. So too, if she told him anything that was sad, his face would change and he would stop making jokes and he would want to go over what she had told him. He was not like anyone else she had ever met.
She wrote to Rose about him, sending the letter to the office, but did not mention him in letters to her mother or to her brothers. She tried to describe him to Rose, how considerate he was. She added that because she was studying she did not have time to see him with his friends, or visit his family, even though he had invited her home for a meal with his parents and his brothers.
When Rose replied to her, she asked what he did for a living. Eilis had deliberately left this out of the letter because she knew that Rose would hope that she would go out with someone who had an office job, who worked in a bank or an insurance office. When she wrote back, she buried the information that he was a plumber in the middle of a paragraph, but she was aware that Rose would notice it and seize on it.
One Friday night soon afterwards, as they were coming into the dance together, both of them in good humour as the fierce cold had briefly lifted and Tony had talked about summer and how they might go to Coney Island, they were met by Father Flood, who seemed cheerful too. But there was something odd, Eilis thought, about the length of time he spoke to them and his insisting that they have a soda with him, which made her believe that Rose had written to Father Flood and that he was there to see what Tony was like for her.
Eilis was almost proud of Tony’s casual good manners, of his easy way of responding to the priest, all of it underlined by a way of being respectful, of letting the priest talk, and not saying a single word out of place. Rose, she knew, would have an idea in her head of what a plumber looked like and how he spoke. She would imagine him to be somewhat rough and awkward and use bad grammar. Eilis decided that she would write to her to say that he was not like that and that in Brooklyn it was not always as easy to guess someone’s character by their job as it was in Enniscorthy.
She watched now while Tony and Father Flood spoke about baseball and Tony forgot that he was talking to a priest as he became feverish in his enthusiasm for what he was saying and thus interrupted Father Flood in a mixture of amused friendliness and passionate disagreement about a game they had both seen and a player Tony said he would never forgive. For a while they appeared not to realize that she was even there and when they finally noticed they agreed that they would take her to a baseball game as long as she pledged in advance that she was a Dodgers fan.
Rose wrote to her, mentioning in her letter that she had heard from Father Flood that he liked Tony, who seemed very respectable and decent and polite, but she was still worried about Eilis seeing him and no one else during her first year in Brooklyn. Eilis had not even told her that she was seeing Tony three nights a week and, because of her lectures, she had time for nothing else. She never went out with her fellow lodgers, for example, and this was a huge relief to her. At the table, however, since she had seen every new movie she always had something to talk about. Once the others became used to the idea that she was dating Tony, they refrained from giving her further warnings or advice about him. She wished, having read Rose’s letter a couple of times, that Rose would do the same. She was almost sorry now that she had told Rose about Tony in the first place. In her letters to her mother she still did not mention him.
At work she noticed that some of the girls were leaving and being quietly replaced until she and a few others were the most experienced and trusted on the shop floor. She found herself taking her lunch break two or three days a week with Miss Fortini, whom she thought intelligent and interesting. When Eilis told her about Tony, Miss Fortini sighed and said that she had an Italian boyfriend also and he was nothing but trouble and he would be worse soon when the baseball season was to begin, when he would want nothing more than to drink with his friends and talk about the games with no women around. When Eilis told her that Tony had invited her to come to a game with him, Miss Fortini sighed and then laughed.
“Yes, Giovanni did that with me too, but the only time he spoke to me at the game was to demand that I go and get him and his friends some hot dogs. He nearly bit off my nose when I asked him if they wanted mustard on them. I was disturbing his concentration.”
When Eilis described Tony to Miss Fortini, she became very interested in him.
“Hold on. He doesn’t take you drinking with his friends and leave you with all the girls?”
“No.”
“He doesn’t talk about himself all the time wh
en he’s not telling you how great his mother is?”
“No.”
“Then you hold on to him, honey. There aren’t two of him. Maybe in Ireland, but not here.”
They both laughed.
“So what’s the worst thing about him?” Miss Fortini asked.
Eilis thought for a moment. “I wish he was two inches taller.”
“Anything else?”
Eilis thought again. “No.”
Once the dates for the exams were posted up Eilis arranged to have all that week free from work and began to worry about her studies. Thus, in the six weeks before the exams started, she did not see Tony on the Saturday evenings for a movie; instead, she stayed in her room and went through her notes and waded through the law books, trying to memorize the names of the most important cases in commercial law and how these judgments mattered. In return, she promised that when the exams were finished she would accompany Tony to meet his parents and his brothers, to have a meal with them in the family apartment in Seventy-second Street in Bensonhurst. Tony also told her that he hoped to get tickets for the Dodgers and planned on taking her along with his brothers.
“You know what I really want?” he asked. “I want our kids to be Dodgers fans.”
He was so pleased and excited at the idea, she thought, that he did not notice her face freezing. She could not wait to be alone, away from him, so she could contemplate what he had just said. Later, as she lay on the bed and thought about it, she realized that it fitted in with everything else, that recently he had been planning the summer and how much time they would spend together. Recently too he had begun to tell her after he kissed her that he loved her and she knew that he was waiting for a response, a response that, so far, she had not given.
Now, she realized, in his mind he was going to marry her and she was going to have children with him and they were going to be Dodgers fans. It was, she thought, too ridiculous, something that she could not tell anybody, certainly not Rose and probably not Miss Fortini. But it was not something he had begun to imagine suddenly; they had been seeing one another for almost five months and had not once had an argument or a misunderstanding, unless this, his aim to marry her, was a huge misunderstanding.
