My mother turned back the good tablecloth and my brother brought out his books. On this evening, to make up for the time lost on our visit to Pegeen, we had our tea quietly as he studied among us, the only sound in the room the ringing of my father’s cup against the saucer, which I imitated with the clanging of my own. The visit to the Chehabs’ had deprived us of our evening walk to the speakeasy as well.
And then my brother closed the thick book before him and reached for another from the pile beside his chair, this one worn and leather-bound, with thin pages. He turned them, and then, with his hands tucked under his thighs, bent over the book to read. I saw my parents look to him, to the top of his bowed head. It seemed to me they were watching him slyly, as if, were he to raise his head again, their eyes would dart away.
He began to read out loud. He did not read in the same clear way he recited his poems, but softly, sitting hunched over the table, the words breaking here and there under the burden of his new, thickening voice. “ ‘Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin?’ “ he read. “ ‘Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge. Even all the hairs of your head are counted. So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.’”
My mother’s head was bowed. My father’s two hands remained folded together over the china cup, arrested in that surreptitious moment of their steadying each other against the trembling that his evening constitutional usually kept at bay. Out on the street, a truck carrying bottles rattled by. One happy voice shouted to another.
Into the silence that followed I said, “Amadan.”
I said it as Pegeen had said it, ruefully, shaking my head as if speaking fondly of a troublesome child. I said it with my chin just above my own china cup and its dregs of melting sugar, with my eyes veering away from my brother’s startled face and down into that ivory light. And then, for good measure, I said it again, into the teacup itself. “Amadan.”
The pretty room tilted then—folded white tablecloth and black polished wood and the light of the simple chandelier—as my mother, with an iron grip on my upper arm, swung me out of my chair and into the tiled bathroom where the cup was filled beneath the silver stream of warm water and the soap dipped into it, once, then twice. “Again,” my mother said as I tasted the bitter water and, leaning over the porcelain, spit it out into the sink.
In the dining room, my brother—the scholar—was asking my father what it meant, amadan. My father said, “A fool. It means someone’s a fool.”
Even with the water running, the cup of soapy water at my lips, I could hear my father’s shout of laughter when my brother asked him, “Who is?”
They called me “our little pagan” after that, whenever their pride in my brother’s saintliness was in need of some deflating. Self-deflating, as was their way. When the priest from St. Francis came to say there was clearly a vocation. When the letter from the seminary arrived.
“We’re not so enamored of the priesthood as some,” my mother said, washing the dishes after the priest had come for tea, blushing with pride, but also holding her lips in such a way that made it clear she was not going to go overboard—as she would have put it—with her delight in Gabe’s success. There were just as many men in rectories, she said, who were vain or lazy or stupid as there were in the general population.
“One bishop,” my father joked, his hand to the top of my head, “and one little pagan. We’ve run the gamut in just these two.”
I climbed the staircase of Gertrude Hanson’s house, my hand on the wide banister. The carpet here was threadbare and there was the familiar odor of dust in the air. What light there was came through the transom above the entrance or filtered down in a single yellow shaft from the dirty skylight four stories up. Gertrude Hanson’s apartment was on the third floor. I knocked on the heavy door. The corridor was warm and airless. I heard Mrs. Hanson’s voice inside, laughing, and I rose up on my toes.
“Come in, Marie,” Mrs. Hanson called. “We know it’s you.”
Because this was the Saturday-morning routine, Gerty and I being even then the best of best friends. I opened the door and leaned in.
The Hansons’ front room was crowded with furniture: the great black dining-room table, eight chairs with tapestry seats, a heavy sideboard, a tea cart, a china cabinet with bowed glass—indication, in those days, of a family’s propriety and prosperity. Twice in my recollection I had arrived at Gerty’s on a Saturday morning and been startled to find the front room starkly empty, only the lamps still there, the good dishes and the tea set piled in a corner on the bare floor. “Repossessed” was the word Gerty used with an easy shrug. But on this morning it was all solidly in place, and beyond it I could see Mrs. Hanson in a wide chair just outside the kitchen entry, her bare feet on a plump hassock, her hands beckoning. “Come in, come in,” she said. “Come in and take this poor child out into the fresh air. She’s been cooking all morning.”
Mrs. Hanson had always been fleshy, with thick wrists and a broad, round face, but now with her fifth child on the way she was huge in her chair, her feet and ankles swollen, her stomach straining against the flannel of what had been her husband’s dressing gown. She had tucked a handkerchief into the collar of the robe, and the bit of lace at its edge, caught between her full breasts, made her look like a woman in an old painting. As if she were a woman in an old painting, she wore her black hair partially pinned up, partially fallen over her shoulders. There was a moist gleam to her white skin, her cheeks and her forehead and her bare arms, as if they reflected some particular light. It occurred to me as I shyly approached that Mrs. Hanson was as beautiful as a woman in a painting, what with her size and her abundance, abundance of breast and hair and damp flesh, of face and feature: big dark eyes and bright teeth and wide, laughing mouth.
“You girls run out and play,” Mrs. Hanson said. She stroked her hard belly. “Fatty Arbuckle and I will take a little snooze.”
In the small square kitchen, Gerty was drying her hands. She wore a calico apron with the strings wrapped two or three times around her tiny midriff and the hem falling well below her knees. There was the rich odor of her morning’s work, which was displayed on the windowsill and on a small table in the corner: a golden chicken that she was just now covering with a clean tea towel, a bowl of white potatoes mixed with celery and parsley, a homely pie, the tinges of the fork that had pierced its pale crust inexpertly spaced, perhaps, but showing anyway, here and there, a golden starburst of juice.
Gerty was boyish and matter-of-fact, easily the smartest girl in class, but also small like me and gap-toothed and thoroughly freckled. She merely shrugged when I whistled my astonishment. “You cooked all this?”
“She’s just learning,” Mrs. Hanson said. “But she’s got the knack. She’ll be a great little cook someday. She’ll be a great little mother while I’m away.”
Mrs. Hanson had a brogue that made her gulp air—a kind of quiet hiccup that swallowed the end of every sentence. It made her sound as if she were always on the breathless verge of astonishment, or laughter. “It’ll be like dining at the Waldorf,” she said.
Gerty took off her apron and hung it on the old gas jet by the door. A year ago, her poor head had been shaved for lice, but now her dark curls were as thick and wavy as a dried mop. She asked her mother if we could have money for a soda, considering how hard she had been working. Her mother laughed again and sent Gerty to the bedroom for her purse. Alone together for just that moment, Mrs. Hanson reached out and caught my wrist and then drew in her breath with another great gulp. Her legs on the hassock recoiled as the dark blood rose to her face and then just as suddenly drained away. “My dear,” she whispered. She tugged me closer. I leaned over the thick arm of the chair. Mrs. Hanson smelled of wholesome things, sunshine and oatmeal and yeast, her breath as she gasped was warm and sweet. “If you’ll take Gerty around the corner,” she said, “you’ll just catch Dora Ryan going off to church. Go see. Then have a soda. Keep her out, dear. Keep her
out till suppertime.” She gulped another bit of breath. “Do that for me.”
I turned my head only slightly. I could feel the woman’s breath on my face, see the mottled pearl of her teeth. All unaccountably—unless, of course, you count the woman’s abundant beauty, the warmth of the small room, the good smells and the laughter and the fresh news that there was a wedding to see today—I suddenly threw my arms around Mrs. Hanson’s neck and pressed my lips to the woman’s damp and lovely cheek.
“My dear,” Mrs. Hanson said, and touched my back. “Dearie, dearie,” she said. And then Gerty returned from the bedroom with the coins in her hand and cried, “What about me?” and skipped to the other side of her mother’s chair, aiming her lips, too, toward the woman’s face. Suddenly we were both covering Mrs. Hanson with kisses, cheeks, eyebrows, nose, and the corner of her laughing mouth. She embraced us both and we leaned upon the hard belly to keep from falling into each other across her knees. “You’ll smother me,” Mrs. Hanson was saying, and we caught even her dry teeth with our lips. “You’ll have to call Fagin,” she cried, as if with her last breath. “I’ll be killed with affection.” We now had our hands tangled up in Mrs. Hanson’s thick hair. It was silky, but more substantial than silk, and we both lifted strands of it to our mouths. Laughing, Mrs. Hanson pushed us upright. “One of you in my lap is quite enough,” she said, catching her breath, the deep color rising to her face once again, “and Fatty Arbuckle here has already laid his claim.” She laughed, even as the deep flush rose from her chest to her neck and up into her cheeks. “Go,” she said, swallowing air.
We traipsed out, down the stairs, arm in arm because we were the best of best friends and there was the happiness of continuing together the sudden, elaborate affection we had showered on Mrs. Hanson. Into the cool street and around the corner, and there already the black car and the crowd of girls, some with small brothers in tow. And then, as if she had been waiting for our breathless arrival, the stirring of white in the vestibule behind the glass, the door pulled open by Dora Ryan’s stout mother in hat and gloves and a new blue suit, with a trembling orchid on her shoulder. And then Dora herself in her wedding dress and her white shoes, her old father beside her—for Dora was not a young bride, perhaps thirty or so, a third-grade teacher at a distant public school, square shouldered and broad-faced, but lovely anyway, today, in her wedding dress, satin and lace and white stockings and white shoes, with only a small veil to catch what breeze there was. Her brother followed and a sister in a pink gown. The family paused at the top of the steps while a photographer crouched before them, then all swept down to the sidewalk and into the waiting car, each of us gazing silently until Gerty called out, “Good luck, Dora!” and all the other children echoed her call. Dora Ryan waved like a queen from behind our own reflections in the car window.
It was then, as the car pulled away from the curb, that I saw Big Lucy on the other side of the street. She was mouth-breathing, holding her scooter between her red knees, the handlebar pressed harshly into her little-girl skirt. Her careening eyes fell briefly on me and I felt the bright day flatten out and grow still. Then Lucy mounted her scooter, bounced it over the curb, and took off after the wedding car, propelled by one broad white leg that seemed as solid and pale as the concrete sidewalk itself. The words she brayed were some variation of Gerty’s happy salutation, “Good luck, good luck,” but made to sound angry, even threatening, in Lucy’s harsh, beseeching voice. Some of the girls put their hands over their mouths, their eyes wide. Some laughed wickedly.
And yet just as she was about to turn the corner—about to sail out of the neighborhood forever, out of the neighborhood and into an institution, because what could her poor family do with Lucy’s suddenly outsized female body, her crude and childish mind, her fits of violence—I saw Big Lucy lift her leg behind her and let it hover there with a ballerina’s grace.
By the time we reached the church, the wedding had begun. We could hear the muffled organ notes behind the closed doors. Lucy was nowhere to be seen. We lined ourselves along the curb where the hired car sat, now cool and silent. The driver leaned against the hood, smoking cigarettes and reading the newspaper. When the church doors were opened again—the sound of the organ spilling out toward us like ocean water—we stood and brushed at the backs of our skirts. I had expected the bride and the groom to be the first to appear in the dark doorway, but instead the wedding guests came out, singly and in couples, coming down the church steps tentatively, squinting into the sun. A man in a suit approached us and, with a cigarette caught in the corner of his mouth, demonstrated how he wanted us to cup our hands: the left under the right and the right curled into a small funnel. Then he took a fat paper bag from his suit pocket and poured a small stream of rice into each curled fist. He was a smiling, joking, wine-colored young man, made the more charming for me by the unmistakable smell of drink on his breath, a lovely, masculine scent, I thought, because it was my father’s.
When the sidewalk in front of the church and the border of the church steps were filled with wedding guests, Dora and her new husband finally appeared. In the sunlight, and with the perfumed crowd all around us, it was difficult to tell if the groom was handsome. He was chubby and squarely built in his dark suit, much like Dora herself, but he raised his free arm as he and Dora came down the steps, shielding both of them from the onslaught of rice, so it was only after they had gained the safety of the hired car and he had taken his bride’s elbow to help her in that we briefly saw his face. It was a disappointment: round and smooth-cheeked, with little chin and a small mouth stretched into what was, even to our eyes, an awkward smile. He ducked into the car beside his bride and gave us only his profile, which was not promising, as the car drove away.
I turned to Gerty, and Gerty shrugged. Even without Big Lucy there, something fell away from the morning, some sparkle.
At home, my mother drew in the air between her teeth when I told her how Big Lucy had shouted after the car. She blessed herself and looked around and said, “No good can come from that,” and then repeated the gesture and the look the next morning in church when Dora Ryan appeared between her brother and her sister, the mother and father right behind her, the dark veil of her hat pulled over her broad face. Father Quinn could not have had the attention of a single woman in his congregation on that morning, for even as they genuflected, blessed themselves, bowed their heads to pray, their eyes were drawn to Dora’s gently quaking shoulders, her parents’ stiff spines. My mother said later that it was possible that the groom was a lapsed Catholic, or that he was sleeping off the night’s festivities, or that Dora had simply come home to catch Sunday-morning Mass with her parents before heading out on her wedding trip. It was possible, but the girl’s posture, her parents’ grim faces, told us otherwise. When Mass was over, the family left as they had come, the girl (who was no girl, really, well into her thirties by then, broad-bottomed, thick-ankled, and in her dark suit and hat without any of the dreamy girlishness that her wedding gown had lent her just the morning before) flanked by her parents now, her siblings trailing, but none of them pausing for the crowd outside the church, going instead—“pell-mell” was how my mother put it, discussing this strange development over breakfast at home—out of the church and across the sidewalk and around the block.
My father said the poor fellow wouldn’t be the first groom to find himself under the weather the morning after the big day, not to mention the big night, and winked at Gabe, who smiled and nodded to show he understood, but then looked at my mother and blushed solemnly.
My mother’s eyes bounced from Gabe to me to my father, and then with more speed, and more intention, to me again and back to my father. “Nonsense,” she said, and raised her chin and pinched her nostrils, once, twice, as was her way. As if somewhere in the vicinity, some scent of tragedy, as yet undefined, still lingered. “My heart went out to Dora Ryan this morning,” she said, looking over her shoulder to the kitchen that was filled with morning light. “It reall
y did.”
On Monday, Gerty was not in school, and when I walked by her house on the way home, a large lady was sitting on the steps. She wore an apron and scuffed black shoes and her stockings were rolled down around her mottled ankles like circlets of excess flesh. She was cooling herself with a feathered fan, although the day was mild and damp. The woman fastened her eyes on me as I approached, and in shyness, I veered away, crossed the street, kept walking. I went around the corner and would have gone on home except that just as I reached my own house, I was filled with the pleasant conviction that the strange woman on the steps had gone inside and the way was now cleared. I resolved to try again. The boys in the street hadn’t started their after-school game yet, although some were already gathered around Bill Corrigan in his chair. One was swinging a broomstick, Walter Hartnett was tossing a pink Spaldeen up into the air. Mrs. Chehab was leaning out of her parlor window, rubbing the outside of the glass with a piece of newspaper. She looked over her shoulder and called, “You’ve missed your house, Mary dear. You’ve walked right past it.” There was no reason for me to lie to the woman—the poor woman, as she was still called, three years after Pegeen fell down the stairs—but I felt, nevertheless, an urgent sense to do so. “I’m just going back to school,” I said vaguely. “I forgot to remember something.” There was the smell of vinegar from the doused newspaper. “I just remembered that I forgot something.”
Mrs. Chehab laughed, with her daughter’s crooked teeth in her mouth. “Never good to forget to remember,” she said. “Always better to remember you forgot.”
I bowed my head and hurried on, walking in a suddenly clipped and urgent way that I thought would nicely match my lie.
At Gerty’s house, sure enough, the stoop was empty, and a kind of confidence in my own prescience made me take the steps two at a time. But no sooner had I gotten into the gloomy brown light of the vestibule than I saw that the fat woman was now sitting on the inside stair, halfway up, tilted over a bit to lean against the banister. There would be no getting by her without first saying, Excuse me please. But neither could I turn around, with the woman looking down at me, and dart out the door. All reluctance, I put my hand to the rail and my foot on the first step, simply because I didn’t know what else to do.
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