Someone

by Alice McDermott

  From above me the woman said, “You don’t live here, do ye? I saw you pass by before.” She had a voice like a man’s, deep and smoky, with a brogue—if that’s what it was—that was thicker even than the accents of the McGeevers, my father’s cousins, who spoke Irish to him when they came for their interminable Sunday visits and, through their narrow mouths, an unintelligible English to me. “I thought you were coming up then, but you went on,” the woman said. She leaned away from the banister, straightened her back somewhat wearily, as if the conversation were a task she had been putting off until now. She touched one hand to the step beside her, inviting me to sit. The other hand gripped the feathered fan. All against my own will, I continued to climb the stairs. The woman’s calves, even in the dim stairwell, were bright white, veined with gray and blue like marble pillars, the rolled stockings at her ankles as solid as stone. There was a basement odor about her, the odor of cold dirt. The apron that looped over her dark blouse and stretched across her black skirt was dim and gray, soft with wear. “I take it you’re a friend of little Gertrude Hanson,” she said, a small smile making her words seem warm. “I take it you’re coming to call for her.” A bit of light from the transom above the door might have caught her eyes as she cast them down at me on the stairs. Her short hair, carefully curled, had a goldish, grayish hue. She shook her head. “But I’m here to tell you she’s gone away. Her father took her out this morning. To his people in New Jersey. There’s nobody home upstairs.”

  Now I paused. I said, “Oh,” and the woman suddenly leaned back. I thought at first that she was trying to see me more clearly in the gloom, but then I realized that she was leaning in order to push her apron aside as she reached for the pocket underneath, in her skirt. She stretched out one of her great ivory legs as she maneuvered her free hand beneath the apron and briefly rolled her eyes to the ceiling as if to picture what it was she was searching for. There was something of Big Lucy in the rolling of her eyes. And then she produced a penny and held it out to me. “Do you know your prayers?” she said.

  I nodded, although I knew I could not recite one if asked. The woman laughed warmly as if she knew this, too. The laughter made her look younger. With the McGeevers in mind, I had expected a toothless grin, but the woman’s teeth were strong and straight.

  “Give me your right hand,” the woman said kindly, and when I struggled with the schoolbooks in my arm in order to hold out the left, she shook her head and whispered, “The right one, dearie,” full of a peculiar sympathy. She placed the fan on her knee. She reached up to take my right hand from the banister. I felt suddenly unbalanced, there on the dim stairs.

  “Get yourself down to Mary Star of the Sea,” she said. “And light a candle.” She pressed the penny into my palm. “Don’t worry if every prayer’s gone out of your head. Don’t be bothered by that. A good outcome’s enough to say. Light a candle and ask our Blessed Lady for a good outcome. It only takes the asking.” Her pale eyes went back and forth across my face. Despite the gloom of the staircase, I saw that the woman could read everything there: not only the fact that every prayer had indeed gone out of my head, or that left and right still puzzled me, but also that I had already determined that I would not go into the empty church all by myself. I had never gone into an empty church all by myself. If Gerty were here, the two of us would go together, we would make a game of it, as we sometimes did on Saturday mornings, laughing at the door and then tiptoeing together up the echoing aisle, lighting the flame and leaning into our folded hands at the kneeling rail with exaggerated piousness. But Gerty had gone to her father’s people in New Jersey and the apartment upstairs was empty.

  The woman held my wrist and pressed the penny into my palm, and knew, I could tell, that she would not be obeyed. But she asked me anyway, “Will you do that?” And I said anyway, “I will.”

  Out on the street, I walked around the block again and climbed my own steps. Mrs. Chehab was gone, but the scent of the vinegar from her window cleaning still lingered. An Easter scent, I thought, although Easter had already passed. It was the scent of the solution we made to dye our eggs, but also the odor that pricked my nose in church when they read that part of the Passion where Jesus said, I thirst, and a sponge soaked with wine and vinegar was raised to his lips. And then the angel in the empty tomb saying, “He’s not here.”

  Upstairs, Gabe was alone in the apartment, already bent over his books. He raised his head as I came in. His brown eyes with their golden lashes looked tired in the dim light. He said, “Momma’s gone out”—although I had known this as soon as I opened the door, an absence in the air—and then he watched me as I placed my own schoolbooks on the table where he was already studying. “You’re late getting home,” he said. “You shouldn’t make Momma worry. She needs you to be good.”

  I shrugged. I still held the black penny in my palm, and his gentle reprimand was only a small weight added to my own awareness that I was not being good: that I had taken the penny with no intention of going to church with it. That I had forgotten already what it was the fat woman had asked me to pray for, a good solution or an answer of some sort. I put the penny on the table between us. “I stopped to see Gerty,” I said. “She wasn’t in school today. She’s gone to New Jersey.”

  But my brother spoke over me. “Momma’s in the city,” he said. “You should be a good girl now”—he was repeating my father’s phrase—“and do your homework quietly until they get back.”

  I reached out and picked up the penny again. It was my father’s phrase, “Be a good girl now,” but when my father said it, there was a wink about the words that also said he understood what a bland and tedious thing it was to be a good girl, little pagan that I was. When my father said it, he was asking me to pretend, at least. He was saying he would admire me all the more for my pretending. But my brother meant what he said. Beside him on the table was the single glass of water he now allowed himself in the afternoon, his sustenance between breakfast and supper, some preparation for his life in the seminary come fall.

  “I have to go to church,” I told him. I said, “A lady I met at Gerty’s house asked me to light a candle for her and I promised I would. She gave me a penny.”

  I held out my palm to show him the black coin, as if he might otherwise not have seen it. He looked at the penny, and then he looked at my face. I saw that he understood there was some deception here, if only in the extravagance of my gesture. I saw a subtle disappointment, a kind of sadness, cross his eyes. He wanted me to be good.

  I closed my fist around the penny. “I won’t be long,” I said, and turned to leave again.

  “Don’t be,” he said, “for Momma’s sake.”

  Outside, the boys were well involved in their game and the girls who pretended not to watch them every afternoon were gathered on the steps just beyond the Chehabs’ house. Some of them were friends of mine from school, others were older girls who made me feel shy.

  They were all leaning over their laps as they liked to do, their arms tucked under their knees, their skirts tucked up against their thighs to keep their underwear out of view. They called to me, and with the penny in my fist and no intention of going into the church alone, I joined them. There was a stirring of bare legs, socks and shoes, and raw knees as they made room. I sat on a low step, tucking my own skirt under my lap while the other girls leaned down to ask if I had heard the news. They were breathless as they spoke, and even those who said nothing, who only leaned to listen, held their mouths carefully, as if they felt the words as an ache in their teeth and their jaws.

  On her wedding night, they whispered, Dora Ryan discovered that the man she had married wasn’t a man at all.

  Was a woman, they said. A woman dressed up like a man.

  Their astonishment was all in their mouths and their jaws. They leaned forward, their chins over their knees. Some of them had freckles, and some of them had chapped lips or pimples or sharp breath. Some were pretty, or bound to be. Someone’s teeth were chattering, as
if with the cold. But there was delight in it, too. In what they were saying, a giddy shifting in their eyes, a mad pride of sorts, pride in how strange and terrible life might prove to be. They hugged their thighs against their chests. Down the street, the boys were cheering in thin voices.

  I shook my head. I wished above all that Gerty were there to turn to.

  “How could that be?” I said. “Who would do such a thing?”

  But there wasn’t a single girl among them who was as smart as Gertrude Hanson. They shifted their feet around me. They frowned, looked to one another with shallow and delighted eyes, eyes that just skimmed over the surface of things without understanding. A mean trick was the best they could come up with: simple meanness, a mean schoolyard trick, the best explanation they could offer. A lousy mean trick to pull on poor fat Dora Ryan, a woman pretending to be a man, dressing up like a man and fooling her right through her wedding day. Standing in front of the priest like that. Kissing her on the lips. Putting her hand on Dora Ryan’s hand when they cut the wedding cake together. And then laughing, the way they figured it, laughing right in her face when they took off their clothes.

  Which led to further speculation still, about the matter of a wedding night and the shedding of clothes. A matter mysterious and complicated to us all, in those days, but now with sheer meanness added to the vague and various possibilities of what went on between women and men.

  While the girls were talking, a taxi pulled to the curb in front of my house. My mother got out first, then gave her hand to help my father, whose face was hidden by the brim of his hat, but whose legs, I could tell, were weak and watery. The girls watched silently, their attention drawn by the cab, the extravagance of it.

  There was a ditty we said, skipping rope: A rich man takes a taxi, a poor man takes the train, a hobo walks the train tracks, but gets there just the same. One of the girls behind me began to say it now, all singsong, poking me in the back as I watched my parents climb the steps together.

  “Marie’s momma must be rich,” another said.

  They felt free to tease me, I knew, because Gerty wasn’t there. Because Gerty wasn’t there, I was alone among them.

  I put my fist to my mouth, leaning across my lap. I could taste the bitter, metallic scent of the old penny in my hand. Had Gerty been there, the two of us, best friends, would have joined arms, tossed our heads, turned away. Instead, I merely, briefly, closed my eyes.

  Dinnertime was approaching and the boys in the street began to disperse, each departure marked by the hollow, melancholy echo of a broomstick hitting the pavement. Something restless stirred among the girls, some anger, some meanness that teasing me hadn’t satisfied. With the day coming to an end, a halfhearted proposal went up among them about walking around to the Ryans’ house. Walking around to Dora Ryan’s house with the hope of maybe meeting her coming home from the subway, or seeing her at a window, with the veil of a lace curtain over her shamed face.

  The older girls led the way, leaving the stoop, crossing the street. I trailed after with my penny. Two of them stopped to whisper to some of the boys just leaving the game. I heard one of the boys say, “Go on,” and knew that Dora Ryan’s catastrophe had been conveyed. Passing behind Bill Corrigan in his kitchen chair, the same two girls ran their hands over the shoulders of his suit jacket and said, “Hello there, Billy,” languidly, nearly laughing. Bill Corrigan raised his big hand, raised his chin into the air, twisting his head a bit to look at us from beneath his scarred eyelids. I could see his pale eyes searching. Then Walter Hartnett, who sat on the curb at Bill Corrigan’s feet, looked over his shoulder and said, “Get lost.” One of the girls hissed, “Gimp,” and Walter said, “Scram,” sneering, but turning away again.

  We walked on to Dora Ryan’s house. We stood across the street and studied the blank windows. The air was still damp and humid, the colorless sky felt like a dome over the neighborhood. After only a few minutes, one of the girls whispered, “She’s hiding.” We paused silently, as if waiting for some affirmation of this—a hand to a stirred curtain, a shadow behind the glass. My eyes fell to the garbage cans beside the basement door. I was hoping to see, perhaps, a torn piece of bridal veil or a white stocking waving from beneath a battered lid.

  I thought of Dora’s happy wedding, her satin shoes and the rice and the smiling wedding guests. I wondered if her happiness could have been preserved if the bride and groom had merely stayed in their clothes.

  “So now she’ll have to try to meet someone else,” one of the older girls said solemnly.

  There was a chorus of whispered, even sympathetic “Yeahs,” their cruel energies suddenly abating. I heard myself say, “My heart goes out to her,” imitating my mother. There was a brief silence, and then, reluctantly, it seemed, one by one, the girls began to agree. “Oh yeah,” someone said. “Mine, too.” “Poor thing.”

  There was nothing else to do but go home. We turned away and slowly began to disperse, so that by the time I approached my own house, I was alone again. My brother was just coming down the front steps, moving quickly, his cap on and his mouth set. He threw up his hands when he saw me. On the sidewalk, he took my elbow. “Where have you been?’ he said. “I told you to come right home.”

  Inside, climbing the stairs, he said, “Did you go to church?” and I wasn’t quick enough to think of a lie. “No,” I said.

  He paused on the landing in front of our door. He took off his cap and ran his hand over his thick hair, our father’s gesture altogether. “Was that the truth?” he said. He said it firmly. “About the lady wanting you to go light a candle?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Gabe took the penny from my palm. He put his cap back on, raising his chin as he did, looking in the dim hallway light resolved and resourceful. “What did she ask you to pray for?” he said. I shrugged. I could not call up the phrase. “Safe travels to New Jersey,” I said. “For Gerty.”

  Gabe’s eyes moved in a way that reminded me of the fat woman on the stair, reading my face. “All right,” he said, reading everything there. “Go on in. If Daddy wakes up, tell him I’ll be home in a jiff.” And he turned back down the stairs.

  I waited until the outside door had closed before I entered the apartment. There was immediately the faint odor of my father’s having been sick. I found my mother in the bathroom, leaning over the sink, throwing cold water on her face. Throughout her life, this was my mother’s second-best antidote—after prayer—for pain and suffering: go throw cold water on your face.

  I slipped behind her, sat on the narrow edge of the bathtub. My mother was still dressed in her dark suit jacket and skirt, her going-into-the-city clothes, even when she just went in to fetch my father home whenever a message came to the house, usually from Mr. Lee at the candy store or from Mr. Fagin at the funeral parlor—the two neighborhood establishments that accepted phone calls for those of us who didn’t yet have a phone—a message that said he was under the weather.

  I waited for my mother to turn off the running water. I wanted only to say to that broad back, to those sure hips, The man Dora Ryan married was not a man at all, only so my mother could say, Nonsense, as was her way, and thus restore the world. But my mother turned from the sink with the rough towel to her face and seemed surprised to see me there. “Ah, Marie,” she said, looking over it, and would later apologize that she did not have the wherewithal, at that moment, to break the news more gently. “Poor Gerty’s lost her mother. Fagin’s girl told me. She passed away this morning. In agony,” she added. “God give her peace.”

  There was only one small narrow window in this bathroom, high up in the tiled wall, and it faced only the airshaft, but the light through it caught my mother’s face nonetheless. There were no tears in her eyes, and only a few wet strands of hair at her broad forehead, plastered to her cheeks. She began to dry her hands on the towel, in her own efficient, getting-on-with-it way. “A little girl,” my mother was saying. “A sister for Gerty. They’re calling her Durna.”
<
br />   My mother said, folding the towel neatly, returning it to the bar, “It was late in her life to be having another child.” She said, “There’s a woman over on Joralemon, above the bakery. She might have helped the poor soul. If only she had asked.”

  Sitting on the cold edge of the tub, I was aware of the vertigo I’d known when I was younger, when the reflected bathwater swung me high and shook me out and rattled the teeth in my head. Suddenly I held up my arms to my mother. I heard her cluck her tongue—either at the pity of Mrs. Hanson’s death or the childishness of my pose, perhaps both—before she crossed the narrow space between us and took me into an embrace.

  I faked a stomachache to avoid Mrs. Hanson’s wake. Said I’d caught “the grippe” from my father. My fear was that when I saw Gerty again she would resemble the neglected kids at school—kids with musty hair and black fingernails, with fallen hems and caramel-colored plugs of wax in their ears. But Gerty wore a new plaid coat and a new plaid tam-o’-shanter to her mother’s funeral at Mary Star of the Sea, and when I once again climbed the stairs to knock at her door—grateful to discover that there was no fat woman in the hallway—she smiled to see me. Gerty smiled. Her teeth were still widely spaced, her freckles still vivid across her nose, her wild hair combed as neatly as it had ever been, her curls still thick and tightly woven. She put her hand to my elbow. An older woman in dark clothes stepped out of the kitchen to see who it was, but then stepped back in again.