Someone

by Alice McDermott

  The door to the second bedroom opened and my brother appeared, his breviary in his hand. He wore the pants of the seersucker suit he’d had on this morning when he left for work, but he’d taken off his jacket and tie. His collar was unbuttoned and his hair was askew—anyone else would have thought he’d been sleeping—and there was an uncharacteristic stoop to his shoulders, as if he were prepared for some blow. “My Lord,” he said, “what is it?”

  Apparently I’d been crying all along.

  Standing in the doorway of the bedroom we once shared, he listened to the tale of my woe with his finger still marking his place in the breviary, the book held against his heart. I had not expected to find him home. His office had closed early, he told me, because of the heat.

  He stood there, motionless in the doorway, the book pressed to his chest, while I recounted some version of what it was that had broken my heart. When I paused, gulping and whimpering, he said simply, “Wash your face. I’ll get my hat.”

  In my despair, I only obeyed. Walked listlessly through the living room to the bath, my arms at my side. I threw cold water on my face. When I emerged, Gabe was waiting. He had put on his hat and his tie and his suit jacket. He said, “It is solved by walking,” and opened the door.

  He did not take my hand. Or offer his arm. We walked down the stairs together without touching, like children. He pulled open the vestibule door for me, and then the outside door. We went down the brown steps together, and on the sidewalk he slipped his hands into his pockets and nodded that we should go to the right. I went along. It was a hot day. I had forgotten how hot, because earlier, when I’d left for the restaurant, I had just bathed and splashed myself with cologne, and later when I returned, the heat was only a part of the general devastation.

  But now the asphalt was as hot as a griddle. The air had thickened with the heat. Across the street, blind Bill Corrigan’s kitchen chair had been set out, but it was empty. There were only a few children on stoops. They sat on the higher steps, close to their buildings, where there was some shade. They looked limp and malnourished. I glanced up at them and then glanced down. The sun on the brim of my hat was a weight that threatened to bow my head. The hot concrete made the soles of my new shoes pliant and sticky.

  The air was a wall. The heat was a reminder of what I had glimpsed when my father was dying, but had, without plan or even intention, managed to forget: that the ordinary days were a veil, a swath of thin cloth that distorted the eye. Brushed aside, in moments such as these, all that was brittle and terrible and unchanging was made clear. My father would not return to earth, my eyes would not heal, I would never step out of my skin or marry Walter Hartnett in the pretty church. And since this was true for me, it was true, in its own way, for everyone. My brother and I greeted the people we knew walking by, neighborhood women, shopkeepers in doorways trying to catch a breeze. Each one of them, it seemed to me now that the veil was briefly parted, hollow-eyed with disappointment or failure or some solitary grief.

  Even in this heat, there was the smell of industrial smoke in the thick air.

  My brother walked beside me. His suit jacket was buttoned and his tie was tight, but his hands were in his pockets, and this made his stride seem leisurely. He paused at the first corner and then shrugged a little, turned left across the street. Soon enough I saw that he didn’t really have a destination in mind—he paused at each corner, turned arbitrarily, put out his hand to make me wait for the traffic to pass—which was fine with me; I might as well do this, walk like this, as anything else. I’d had a brief fear, when I first saw him with his jacket on, and his tie, that he was going to take me to church.

  On the next block, a young man stopped right in front of us, pulled off his hat, and swabbed his high forehead with a white handkerchief as large as a flag. He was slipping his hat back on as we passed him. I heard him say, “Father,” and then, “Father Gabe?”

  My brother turned and greeted the man, whose friendly eyes seem to stagger for a moment, going to Gabe’s throat, and then to me. He was short, with a round, boyish face that was florid with the heat. His shirt and pale suit were stained with sweat, his wide blue tie looked as if it had been soaked in water, wrung out, and then returned to his neck. He lifted his hat again as I was introduced, and I saw that his hatband had left a red impression across his broad forehead. Tom Commeford. He said, “How are you, Father,” and my brother held up his hand.

  “Father no more,” Gabe said. He touched his tie, as if to indicate the missing Roman collar. “It wasn’t for me.”

  Now real panic crossed the young man’s eyes—he looked to me again and I found myself shrugging, the two of us united for a moment by the puzzle of Gabe’s lost vocation. It was the sensation of standing on a pier with a stranger, watching a familiar face disappear over the water’s horizon and knowing suddenly that all kinship now was determined by the fact of earth beneath your feet or only sea. For a moment I was more kin to this florid young stranger than I was to my brother, the failed priest, at my side.

  “Oh gee,” the young man said, “I’m sorry.” It was impossible to know if he was sorry for the lost vocation or for his own, awkward mistake. He looked to me again, as if I would know. “Once a priest,” he began to say, but Gabe spoke over him.

  “How’s everybody at the brewery?” he asked cheerfully. “Everybody busy?”

  “Oh, sure,” the man said. The effort he was making to recover himself was undermined by the growing flush to his skin.

  “The beer’s still dry?” Gabe asked, and the young man laughed as if this were a great joke.

  “Oh yeah,” he said.

  “Good to hear it,” Gabe said. “Give my best to the others, will you?” He held out his hand again. “Nice to see you, Tom.”

  “Nice to see you, Father,” he said, and then quickly pulled his lips together. He did not literally bite his tongue, but it was clear he wanted to.

  Gabe raised his hand, a kind of absolution. “That’s all right, Tom,” he said gently.

  As we walked on, my brother explained that the young man worked at the brewery that had been part of his first parish. He sometimes came to the noon Mass. A lot of the workers there did.

  I said, “Oh yeah?”

  “Jeepers, it’s brutal,” Gabe said. He pushed his hat back. Ran a handkerchief over his brow. The soles of my feet had begun to burn, and a blister was forming at the back of my left heel. I felt my dress clinging to my shoulder blades, felt the tickle of sweat running down my spine. Gabe touched my elbow briefly to get me to cross to the shadier side of the street, but the heat was no better there. At a corner candy store he paused and asked if I wanted to duck in for a soda. I looked up, smelled the mingling odors of coffee and newsprint and stale milk, and shook my head no.

  When we reached the park, I was surprised to discover how far we had come, although by now my legs felt swollen in my stockings and the pain of the blister on my heel was making me limp. We found a bench just inside, covered in shade, and Gabe said, “Let’s sit before we head back.” He said it with an air of defeat, as if we had formerly agreed that we would not stop at all.

  We sat together in the sun-spotted shade. Gabe crossed his legs and folded his hands in his lap. I reached down to take off my left shoe, feeling the thin flesh of the blister pull away with the leather and the silk. There was blood on my stocking. It was late afternoon by now and the park was full of people looking for relief from the heat. Some had already found a spot on a stretch of grass. Others were arriving with picnic baskets. There were kids with baseball bats and mitts hanging, forgotten, it seemed, from their hands. Mothers with carriages. Men with their jackets off. Some in sweat-stained undershirts. My brother took off his hat and put it on the bench between us. He loosened his tie, reached into his pocket for cigarettes and matches. There was something clean, even cool, about the scent of the struck match, the first exhalation of smoke. I watched him as he drew on the cigarette again and saw how handsome his face was—the sm
ooth stubble of his cheek, the amber glow of his skin and his fair hair. There was something lovely about the precision of his hairline at temple and ear, about the hinge of his jaw. His hands, too, were fine, long-fingered. They’d been wrapped in white cloth on the day of his ordination. They had placed the Communion wafer on my tongue. It had been a beautiful winter day, the day of Gabe’s ordination. My mother and I had ridden the train out to the seminary together. We’d gone straight to the hospital on our return so my mother could go up to tell my father about all we had seen.

  I opened my purse and took out my own handkerchief. I took off my glasses to wipe the perspiration from under my eyes. My parents had said, “We’re not so enamored with the clergy as some.” They had said, “A priest is a fine thing. But a family is, too.”

  Leaving the hospital that evening, my mother had told me, “Your father might have preferred to see him married.”

  With my glasses off, I looked to my brother once more, my eyes drawn, perhaps, by the movement of his arm, the cigarette to his lips, the suggestion, in my peripheral vision, of a blessing. Here he was again as I preferred him, the red gold of his hair and skin, the familiar blur of his profile seen through my distorted vision: the way I’d known him when we were young, when we had shared that single bedroom. He was not sitting close—the heat required a good space on the bench between us—but I was aware of the easy physical nearness we had known as children.

  I put the handkerchief to my eyes and then put my glasses back on. I looked up, looked out, as my brother was doing. I watched the turning silver spokes of an elegant baby carriage go by. And then a woman walking with her lanky son, a gloved finger raised in the air. “Get this,” Gabe whispered as two teenage girls I knew entered the park. They were dressed in stiff Roman collars and big red choirboy bow ties. “Sharpies” was what we called them.

  “Sacrilege,” Gabe said, amused. “And in this heat.”

  “They go to Bishop’s,” I told him.

  “They should know better, then,” he said.

  One of the girls waved at me, and when I waved back, the other did the same. And then the first girl pretended to stumble. She grabbed her friend’s arm, laughing loudly, throwing the laugh back over her shoulder, her eyes on Gabe.

  I saw the flirtation. He did not. I felt older than them all.

  We watched a young man pass by with his jacket over his shoulder, a thick book in his hand. Then a pair of policemen with swinging billy clubs. A trio of thin sailors. I watched a pigeon strut in the dirt beneath another bench. I was only vaguely aware of birdsong in the trees, barely audible above the echoing din of the traffic in the street.

  Gabe tossed his cigarette into the dirt at his feet. He lifted his hat. The space between us on the bench was wide. He leaned forward, over his knees, his hat in his hands. He spoke without turning.

  “He’s more to be pitied,” he said softly. “That bad leg. An affliction like that. It can sometimes make a person more compassionate. You’d expect it would. But more often than not, it makes them cruel.”

  I looked up at the trees, the thick landscape of them against the colorless sky. I had loved Walter Hartnett for the hitch in his walk, the built-up shoe, as much as I loved him for his clever smile and his gray eyes.

  “More often than not,” Gabe said, “it diminishes compassion. Makes people resent God. I’ve seen it. They figure, If He formed me, then why did He choose to form me this way? Why burden me with all this needless pain? It seems deliberate.” He paused.

  “Once,” he said, “we were playing ball. Walter was there, but he was just a little kid. This was long before he made himself grand commissioner of the Brooklyn street leagues.” He looked up at me to see if I laughed. I didn’t. “An ambulance came along,” he went on. “It stopped just past us, in front of the Corrigans’ house. Of course we tore over there to see what was going on. The ambulance men were halfway up the Corrigans’ steps when this nursing Sister comes running out of the house next door, waving her arms and saying, ‘She’s here, over here.’ So they turn around, back down the Corrigans’ steps and then up the steps next door. All of us right behind them. In no time at all they’re back out again with an old woman—Mrs. Cooper, it was, I don’t know if you remember her—on a stretcher. Dead, one of us says. Drunk says someone else. But the nun says, ‘Mind your own business,’ and shoos us all away.” He held the hat between his knees. He was slowly turning it in his hands.

  “So we go back to our game,” he said, “but we’re arguing about this, the way kids argue. Each one claiming more assurance than the next. Was she dead or was she dead drunk? Then we all look at Bill Corrigan, as if this is another call for him to make. But Bill’s got his fists tight on his knees and there are big tears running down his face. ‘Is it my mother?’ he says when we come closer, in a voice we hadn’t ever heard before, cracked and whispery.”

  He was slowly turning his hat in his hands. There was a bit of white satin in the crown, elegant and cool, ecclesiastical.

  “I mentioned Bill in a sermon once,” he said. “I wanted to say something about faith or second sight, but everyone laughed when I said we had a blind umpire when we were kids. So I pretty much left it at that.” He shrugged. There were more kids with baseball bats and mitts passing by even now.

  “I guess it was something about those big tears. On a grown man. How many of us had ever seen a grown man cry? I guess it—the weakness of it—brought out something cruel in us.” He paused, looking out across the paths through the park.

  “We said, ‘Yeah, Bill. It was your mother. She’s dead.’ “ He bit off the word, imitating the street kids they once were. “And then we just stood there. Bill dropped his head. His shoulders lost their shape. It was only a matter of a few seconds, but for a few seconds we saw him wrecked. His whole life, the rest of his life, however he had foreseen it, blasted. Just for a few seconds. We saw we had done this. Easily. Casually. Made him suffer.” He shook his head and narrowed his eyes, and his voice came from somewhere deep within his chest. “For a few seconds,” he said, “we savored it.”

  He shook his head. “It was Walter who finally told him, ‘Naa. We’re kidding. Not her. It was the old lady next door.’ Which got us all slapping Bill on the back and laughing at how we had him fooled. It took a while for him to get the joke.” He gazed out at the park, his hat in his hands. “Some joke,” he said.

  Even late in the afternoon of that day, even after all my tears, the habit of loving Walter Hartnett had not yet left me, and so I assumed that my brother told this story not to admit that he, too, had once been cruel but to prove that Walter had once been kind.

  “Rescue me from my enemies, my God,” Gabe said, suddenly sitting back. “Deliver me from evildoers.” He paused. “I never much liked playing ball after that. With Bill Corrigan always there. I much preferred staying inside.”

  He put his hand on the bench between them. “I’m sorry this happened to you, Marie,” he said wearily. “There’s a lot of cruelty in the world.” And then he waved his hat to indicate the paths through the park and all the people on them. “You’ll be lucky if this is your worst taste of it.”

  Turning away from him, I leaned once more to examine the stinging blister beneath my stocking. I didn’t believe him. Didn’t believe there could be a worst taste of it. I didn’t consider then that my brother, too, might have longed to step out of his skin. Might have carried in those days his own blasted vision of an impossible future.

  “Can you make it home?” I heard him say.

  I told him I’d be fine if we walked slowly.

  He raised his hat to his head, adjusted it jauntily. As he stood, I looked up at him, my right eye squinting closed against the sun. I touched his arm. Even through the fabric of his jacket sleeve, I felt him withdraw a little. Something in him, in his muscle or in his bone, withheld.

  “Who’s going to love me?” I said.

  The brim of his hat cast his eyes in shadow. Behind him, the park teemed
with strangers.

  “Someone,” he told me. “Someone will.”

  TWO

  Once, I woke to find that a black wheel, spoked with flashing silver, had settled behind my left eye. Tom had gotten up sometime before. He was quietly bustling as he did these dark winter mornings of our late middle age—passing shadowy back and forth across the foot of the bed, silhouetted by the dim light of the hallway. He was humming, as always, occasionally breaking into whispered song, his voice deep in his throat. “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms.” He was in undershirt and boxer shorts, and the room was filled with the scent of his soap and his shaving cream.

  Until I reached for my glasses, all of this was soft-edged and indistinct. All but the solid black image that had imposed itself over my vision. With my head still on the pillow, I put a cupped palm over my right eye and then the left. It was in the left. “Something’s wrong,” I said, sitting up slowly. “There’s something in my eye.”

  He was abruptly silent. He crossed to my side of the bed, sat gingerly on the edge of the mattress. He placed a crooked finger under my chin to lift my face as he leaned toward me. I looked up to the shadowed ceiling so I would not blink. I could smell the toothpaste on his breath, the soap on his fleshy shoulders, the aftershave on his warm hand.

  “I can’t tell,” he said. I told him to turn on the lamp.

  He leaned toward the bedside table, the mattress beneath me shifting with his weight. He turned back. Now the light cast across the ceiling was a spill of soft gold. He lifted my chin once again, gently, even coyly, the prelude to a kiss, and peered again at my eyes. “I can’t see anything unusual,” he said.

  It was my own fear, as well as my surprise at the shimmer of desire that touched the small of my back when he put his warm hand to my face, that made me speak to him so impatiently. “Give me my glasses.”