Someone

by Alice McDermott

  And all the while, my mother said—a trill of profound amusement rising into her voice—in County Clare, Mrs. Chehab—who was a McMahon then—was taking her own first breaths. And shivering, no doubt, in the eternal dampness of that bleak country’s bitter air.

  My mother looked at me from over her shoulder, her hands still in the sink.

  There’s a burned taste to the air at home, she said—not for the first time. A taste of wet ashes and doused fire. It can make you believe, she said, that you live in the permanent aftermath of some nearby sorrow. Somewhere in the vicinity, you’re always thinking, someone’s house has recently burned to the ground.

  In that damp and dirty country, my mother said, Mrs. Chehab grew to be a tall girl, a girl who would have no trouble getting up the steep gangplank that led from the dock at Queens-town—a climb my mother herself had struggled with, she said, because of the rain that fell on the day she sailed, because she was alone, with no man’s arm to hold on to and none offered across the whole trip, not until my father gave her his on the steps at the Grand Army Plaza.

  But Mrs. Chehab would have had no trouble keeping those long feet steady against the slick and pitching floor of the ship that carried her here. Where she stopped at the Syrian bakery one day and saw a small, dark-eyed man behind the counter.

  I watched my mother move her hands through the water once more, searching for stray silverware, smiling her sly smile at the delightful oddity of it all. Then she pulled the stopper from the sink, and I closed my eyes and put my fingers in my ears to block out the terrible sound.

  When I removed them and opened my eyes, my mother was swabbing the counter. “And after all that,” she said, “and after all that, along comes homely Pegeen, with her mother’s blotched skin and her father’s big nose and those great long feet, God help her.”

  When the dishes were put away, my father went to the narrow closet for his hat and said, “Let’s take a stroll.”

  We went down the stairs together. Shined black tips of his neat shoes and perfect fall of his trouser cuffs over the smooth laces. A lilt in the tap of his step on the uncarpeted stair, the tap of our steps. Out through the vestibule and onto the sidewalk again. We were in front of the Chehabs’ building when he dropped my hand and paused to light a cigarette, the smoke rising white from under the bowed brim of his hat. And then he threw his head back with the pleasure of that first exhalation of smoke. Made me look up as well to see the stars. A thin handsome man, forty years old.

  It was one of his shanty cousins, the McGeevers, who would later say that a body so thin was nothing more than a walking invitation to misfortune.

  He took my hand again. There was the sure familiarity of his grip, warm and firm, the palm broad against my small fingers. We walked to the other corner, away from the subway, although there was still the sound of it somewhere beneath our feet. There was as well the sound of a trolley on another street, the sound of someone calling to a child, someone shouting inside a building. Lights at windows were growing brighter, growing warmer, it seemed, as the air grew cold. There was the scent of metal, whiff of tar, of stone, of dog droppings left beside the wrought-iron cage that surrounded a scrawny tree. The soft gabardine of my father’s suit jacket against the back of my hand. At the corner, we turned and he tossed the glowing cigarette into the street.

  “I’ll be only a minute,” he said. He put his two hands on my shoulders, as if to place me more securely on the sidewalk before another stoop, and then turned to push through a narrow iron fence that led down a dim alley. The air was black, but the lights in the buildings were warm and golden. Only a few people went by, their coats drawn around them. One man touched his hand to the brim of his hat as he passed and I dropped my chin shyly. And then rose up on my toes after he’d gone, putting my face to the streetlight as if to a warm sun. I squinted, and the light burst and stretched itself yellow and white into the darkness. I heard the squeal of the iron gate and my father was beside me again, the sharp smell of the drink he’d just had in the air about him. He held out his hand. In the center of his palm there was a white cube of sugar, sparkling in the light. I plucked it up and slipped it into my mouth. I turned it with my tongue. Watching, my father pursed his lips and shifted his jaw, as if he, too, felt the sugar on his teeth. Then he took my hand again.

  We passed the Chehabs’ parlor window, where there was a lamp and a chair and the back of Mr. Chehab’s dark head and broad shoulders as he smoked a cigar and read the evening news.

  In the vestibule, my father shot back his cuffs and put his warm palms to my face. He studied me seriously, smiling only a little—I was a round-faced, narrow-eyed, homely, comical little thing—until my cheeks were warm enough, he said, to pass muster with my mother. And we climbed the stairs once more.

  There was tea, with a slice of plain cake, while my mother, with one of his schoolbooks in her lap, put my brother through his paces: catechism questions, Latin declensions, history’s dates and names. He answered all without hesitation, breaking off pieces of the cake only after he had finished a round. And then, with a jagged line of cake still left on his plate and half his milky tea still in his cup, he pushed back his chair and walked slowly to the far end of the table.

  My father, at the opposite end, moved his own cup aside and leaned forward. I could see the reflection of his pale throat and chin in the table’s dark wood, like a face just beginning to appear in a still pool of black water. Or disappear. “What will we have tonight?” he said.

  My brother ran his hands over his thick hair and then rested them both on the back of the chair that was before him. He lifted his eyes to the wall just above my father’s head. He was a handsome boy with narrow shoulders and fair hair and large brown eyes. He flushed easily. “ ‘The Seven Ages of Man,’ “ he said clearly, gripping the chair. “By William Shakespeare.”

  He began. As Gabe recited, I watched my father vaguely shape his mouth around the words, unconsciously moving his lips in much the same way he had done when I turned the sugar cube on my tongue.

  My mother kept her head bowed, studying her red hands in her lap while the poem wound on, looking like a woman at prayer, or hunched beside a radio.

  I lowered my chin toward the table, raised my cup only briefly from its saucer. What tea was left was growing cold, but that was how I liked it. I took a small sip and then replaced the cup with more noise than was polite, which would have earned me a sharp look from my mother had the sound not coincided with the end of the poem and my parents’ gentle applause.

  “Some Shelley,” my father said.

  My friend Gerty Hanson was made to say the Rosary with her family every night after dinner, her mother and father and all three of her big brothers kneeling on the floor around the parents’ bed. I had joined them once or twice, a ritual no less tedious than this, although Gerty, at least, was given the chance to lead the prayer every fifth decade, the chance to speak out into an attentive silence—whereas here I was meant only to listen to my brother, who had won the elocution medal at his school for what seemed to me more years than I could number.

  Gabe raised his eyes and directed his voice to the simple chandelier above our heads. It was new to my ears, his voice, both deeper and somehow less certain than it had been just days ago. I watched the protruding Adam’s apple bob in his pale throat. “ ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ “ he said. “By Percy Blithe Shelley.”

  My parents might have seen the priest in him then, the way he stood at the end of the table, offered up the lovely words.

  I saw only, in my mind’s eye, a picture book illustration I had found somewhere, of a cruel face in the clouds, bloated cheeks and pursed lips that blew down upon the huddled figure of a man in a great dark overcoat.

  “ ‘Oh, hear!’ “ my brother said, reciting, and then hesitated for a moment before he abruptly lifted a palm to the ceiling—a gesture he might have been instructed to make, at school, perhaps, although it did not suit him or his steady voice.


  Without raising my chin, I looked around. Gabe had left half the cake on his plate. I knew he would eat it in a single, triumphant bite when he returned to his chair. My father’s slice was already gone. As was my mother’s. I looked at my own plate again, knowing full well I hadn’t left a crumb, and was surprised to discover there, in its center, another white sugar cube. I looked to my father, who only shifted his eyes briefly and briefly smiled. I looked to my mother, who was still studying the ruddy hands cupped in her lap, the thin gold band of her wedding ring. I snatched up the cube of sugar and quickly dropped it into the cooling dregs of my tea. My father whispered the last words of the poem as my brother recited them, and then, once more, my parents were quietly applauding.

  My brother said, “ ‘Ozymandias,’ “ as I lifted my teacup again. I felt my mother’s finger against my thigh, a quick poke to remind me to listen.

  I listened, my eye on the lovely, tea-soaked dregs of sugar at the bottom of the china cup. I imagined it was the very same sweet, silver sand mentioned in the poem, desert sand, sand of Syria and Mount Lebanon. I watched with one eye squinted as the lovely stuff moved slowly across the ivory light, advanced sluggishly toward my tongue, and then, when it was too slow, the tip of my finger. I was thinking of a baby wrapped in sparkling clothes, being pushed slowly in a white carriage, slowly through the city of light, toward Brooklyn, when I felt the sting of a slap against the back of my head and then its quick echo of pain. I pulled my finger from the cup. My mother hadn’t raised her eyes from her lap.

  Gabe finished the poem and returned to his place at the table to drink down the cold tea and devour whole the bit of cake, his face flushed with his triumph. Patiently, my mother turned to me to ask what would happen if a teacup shattered while my fingers were inside it.

  Some neighbor or faceless relation was named, a silly girl who’d “sliced herself good” with her hand inside a glass while she was washing up. A suggested image of soapy dishwater darkened with blood following me to the bath, where I watched my mother’s blurred red hand as it tested the seamless stream of steaming water.

  I deployed all my excuses in a rush: the water was too hot, the house too cold, I’d had a bath last week, I had a stomachache, I was sleepy. But my mother had a grip on my arm, and my thin legs were all obedience. They raised themselves against my will, up over the cold rim of the high tub and into the steaming water, where the pain from the heat became a chill in my spine and my thin body—bright red to my calves but pale white, nearly blue, through my chest and my arms—became no more than a scrap of cloth, a scrap of cloth caught and shaken and snapped by a sudden wind. I wanted to weep. I wanted to be sick. I saw for a terrible moment that my body was a scrap of cloth, that my bones were no more than porcelain, as were my rattling teeth and the china skull that contained them. I saw how a hoop of light, the water’s shifting reflection, swung up to the top of the tile wall, and then swung down again, carrying me with it, nauseous and full of despair. I sat. The warm water covered my arms and touched my chin. My mother let go of my forearm, although the imprint of her grip lingered.

  There, she said. There now. After all your fussing. You just have to get used to it.

  In those days I still slept in the crib that had been my brother’s, in a corner of the small room I shared with him. A peeling lamb painted on the headboard, a blurred line of grass and meadow flowers at the foot. Low light. Prayers. My parents’ dry lips to my forehead and some single, barely whispered word at the end of the day that told me I was cherished above all things by these indistinct and warm-breathed shadows, leaning over me at the end of the day.

  Gabe came in sometime later. Another blur of darkness and light—dark clothes and fair hair—coming in to take the pajamas out from under his pillow. When he returned, he was a brighter blur because he was dressed in them. Through the bars of the crib, I watched him kneel to say his prayers and then pull down his covers and climb into bed. He slept on his back, a wrist over his eyes, like another picture book illustration I had seen, of a laborer resting in a field. The light stayed on most of the night, and this gesture, his wrist thrown over his eyes, was his silent accommodation to my fear of the dark.

  I woke to find the light had been put out. There were only the soft-edged, geometric patches of streetlight on the ceiling, across one wall. I threw a leg over the side of the crib, fitting my toe into the space between the bars, and carefully—I was not an athletic child—leaned to bring the other over. I lowered myself to the cold floor and then crossed it on tiptoe. Gabe opened his blankets for me in the same way he did everything: quietly, methodically, with a good-natured but stoic acquiescence to duty. A dutiful child. Wakeful himself at that hour.

  I told him I’d had a bad dream, making it up as I went along: a terrible, white-fisted giant with swollen cheeks had carried me to a high, precarious place I could not climb down from, and Gabe listened carefully, commiserating briefly, marveling appreciatively each time I whispered, “And then,” adding another horror. He said, I never dream. I never have a dream that I remember. His features were a blur, although our faces were only inches apart. And yet the handsome, high-colored, precisely featured boy who was my brother during the day, the brother I saw with my glasses on, was far less familiar to me than this one of uncertain edges and soft darkness, with a spark of wet light in his mouth or his eye when he said that if I was good and didn’t kick, I could stay. I made my promises, and he accepted them, but he moved anyway to the far side of the narrow bed, all the way up to the wall—the wall we shared with the Chehabs’ building—turning his back to me and putting his hand on the cool plaster. The soft sheets retained their odor of sunshine against the warmer, closer scent of my brother’s scalp and breath and skin. With his back turned, he told me to say a prayer to keep the nightmares away. He said if I prayed, the Blessed Mother would keep the nightmares away.

  Slowly, I moved my hand under his pillow until I made warm contact with his own. He was holding his rosary. He moved his hand away until my fingertips touched only the cool beads.

  He fell asleep in small starts, resisting it. As if, I imagined, the sandman had hold of his ankle and was slowly tugging him under, all against his will. As if he struggled to remain awake. I looked at the lozenges of light on the wall, one was a rectangle, one was a crucifix. I tried out a few prayers, but since the nightmare I had described was a lie, there was nothing, really, to ask protection from. I heard my brother’s knee or his hand or the ball of his foot strike the wall now and again as he was tugged under. A thump and then a thump, and then I knew he was sleeping.

  In the morning, the ambulance at the curb gave up a hot breath. Children had gathered, women with coats over their shoulders, men in shirtsleeves. Across the street, curtains were drawn aside, there were faces at windows, one of them ghoulish with shaving cream. First a murmur among the crowd: women with their fingers to their lips or their hands to their hearts, men conferring softly. Then, as the minutes ticked by, the revving excitement, the pleasure of something happening that would distinguish the ordinary day: the thrill of the disrupted routine, of a dull breakfast left on the table, of schoolbooks still at the door. An excitement that sounded first in the children’s voices—a sudden laugh, a loud cry—but then infected the grownups as well—a sneeze and a cheery “God bless,” another trill of laughter—as if we had forgotten, for a minute, that some kind of crisis, some crisis at the Chehabs’, had gathered us all here on the damp sidewalk at 7:00 a.m.

  And then the ambulance man backing through the basement door, and then the suddenly arrested sound of human chatter gave way at once to the collective intake of breath when those assembled on the sidewalk saw that the stretcher contained a body covered from toe to head—only a slip of Pegeen’s sloppy hair showing beneath.

  From the opened door behind the second ambulance man, Mrs. Chehab’s cry was a spiraling wail. Most of the women, and many of the men in the street, blessed themselves. My mother put a rough hand to my shoulder and then
pulled my face into her apron, which was still a little damp from last night’s washing up. All instinct, I shut my eyes and wrapped my arms around my mother’s waist, gripping the apron, the rough wool of her skirt, nestling into that familiar darkness and feeling the sudden warmth of my brother’s two hands as he pressed them against my ears, trying to spare me the sound of the women’s prayers and exclamations, of Mrs. Chehab’s lament, of the slam and the slam again of the ambulance’s broad doors.

  All of which, nevertheless, I heard.

  It was the next evening that we walked in solemn stillness up the steps of the Chehabs’ house and into the crowded living room. It was painful, the way my mother gripped my hand as we made our way through that forest of adults, all red knuckles, for me, and wedding bands and the hems of jackets, until the figures suddenly parted and there before the glass of the bay window was the gleaming box and Pegeen in its satin bed. She wore her white graduation dress, and her red confirmation rosary was threaded through her still fingers. There was a single taper beside Pegeen’s head, its light reflected in the black window in such a way that, for a moment, I believed her thin and waxy nose now bore its own flame.

  I felt a pair of large hands slip themselves under my arms, warm and strong. And then I was aloft. The light grew brighter and the darkness fell away. I clutched the hard edge of the box, resisting even as I gave in, put my face to the moon-colored brightness of Pegeen’s cheeks, kissed her, and then saw my own white face briefly reflected in the dark glass of the bay window as I was returned once more to the pooled shadows of the floor.

  At home, my mother unpinned her hat and my father returned his fedora and his topcoat to the closet. Mrs. Chehab, they were saying, had noticed the dirt on Pegeen’s coat and the tears in her sleeves, circles of soot on the knees of her good stockings, well before yesterday’s last tumble down the basement stair. Pegeen had always been a clumsy girl, they said, although Fagin, the undertaker, suspected something more than the fall had killed her: Some burden in the brain, he had said.