He reached for them—I could have done this myself—and I slipped them on. I cupped my hand over my left eye, and the room settled into its distinct edges. I looked at his face, which was clear again. I could see the blush of irritation from his razor, a pinprick of blood on his cheek. Even then he was smooth-skinned, although there were laugh lines, drawn as if with a pencil, in the corners of his eyes. His lips were thin and serious. His chin grown slack. It seemed a long time since I had looked at him this closely. I put my hand on my right eye and the black wheel was imposed over everything.
“Something’s wrong,” I said again. I put my hand out, as if to brush whatever it was away. “There’s a black thing in my left eye.” I described a circle in the air before me and then tried to pluck at it again. I was aware of how foolish I must look—like a madwoman in my thin nightgown, with my hair sleep-skewed, grabbing at nothing. “There’s flashing,” I said. “Like spokes turning. I can’t blink it away.”
I covered the left eye once more and then looked at him. I knew it was not unusual for husbands to become annoyed with sick wives. The neighborhood was filled with such tales. But Tom had tucked his chin into his throat and the lines around his eyes were suddenly deeper. There was more concern than impatience in his face, and no impatience at all in his voice. “Better call the doctor,” he said.
I heard him humming again in the kitchen as he waited for the doctor’s service to pick up, the song an insistence that he was perfectly calm, that nothing much had changed in the last few minutes, nothing disruptive or insurmountable. I heard him explaining it all to Gabe when he came downstairs for breakfast: Marie seems to have damaged her left eye, he said. Sometime in the night.
By late afternoon I was wearing a pirate patch and Tom was leading me to the admitting office of a hospital in Manhattan. Of course, churches should have been the touchstone places of our lives, a pair of Catholics such as we were. But in truth it was the tiled corridors of these old urban hospitals that marked the real occasions of our life together. The births of our four children, my mother’s death, the kids’ tonsillectomies and appendectomies over the years, his hernia, Gabe’s breakdown, and now this surgery, tomorrow, to repair my left eye. And wasn’t it a corridor much like this that would provide the backdrop for our last parting?
But Tom had his hand on my elbow now, and in the other he carried the kit bag that my ophthalmologist had told me to pack but that the admitting nurse contended I wouldn’t need. Tom finagled a private room and, once I was settled in, a dinner tray for himself, although I was only to sip water. There was the strange domesticity of the evening, the smell of food, the sound of the evening news on TV, the scrape of cutlery, and our back-and-forth conversation about ordinary things while the hospital went about its noisy business of paging doctors and delivering medicines, and nurses came in now and again to offer this pre-op information or that.
In the morning—a brown city dawn at the room’s narrow, deep-set window—Tom was there again, but he had only touched my hand and kissed my scalp by way of greeting before they came to wheel me down to surgery. They took me in the same bed I’d slept in, so that when they maneuvered it out the door and swung it around to head toward the elevator, I looked over my shoulder and waved goodbye to him as if I were a woman on a passing train. He stood alone in the now strangely empty room, not a bit of concern in his bright smile or his jaunty wave, but unabashed fear and sorrow in his eyes and across his high forehead.
What followed was ten days of blindness. They had bandaged both my eyes so that the healthy one would not go darting about, dragging along, all inadvertently, the one that had been repaired. It seemed a bit much, I told the doctor, but he assured me it was for the best—a little inconvenience now for a better outcome later. I recognized the wheedling phrase from my first labor, when, at the height of the pain, the ether was withheld. A little patience now, the eye surgeon said—after he had been reduced by my blindness to a pair of dry fingertips and the odor of whatever he had on his breath, coffee or bacon in the morning, ketchup or onion if he came in after lunch—for a well-healed eye in the future.
“My eyes,” I told him, the blindness making me raise my chin as I spoke, a bold piece, “have never been well-heeled.” But he was some kind of Eastern European and didn’t get the play on words, only touched his puffy fingertips to my chin. “Patience,” he said.
I said, “A patient patient,” and still he didn’t respond, although somewhere in the room Tom and Gabe were laughing. Tom said, “My wife, Doctor, will always have the last word.”
Somewhere in the room during those long days of bandaged darkness, my children sat, talking mostly to one another, mostly about where they had managed to park their cars and what time they had left home, what time they should head out again to avoid the traffic: tunnel or bridge, the Southern State or the L.I.E. I heard the bustle of their winter clothes, zip and unzip, buckle and snap. There was the jingle of car keys and the odor of exhaust. I listened to their familiar voices with a vague indifference. Rattle and clink. It was my first sense of their lives going on without me.
When I woke I was sitting up in the bed. I had no way to tell the hour. I listened, neither the clatter of meal trays nor the smell of the outdoors on visitors’ clothes. Perhaps the quiet of a shift change, or the still of late night or of very early morning. The sound of city traffic was hushed and sporadic enough to mean it was either late night or very early morning. The pillows were propped behind me, and my hands lay limply at my sides, outside the thermal blanket whose texture I had begun to know as a sighted person might know a familiar face. I searched for my voice, and even the tentative way I sought it reminded me of how a blind person might scuttle her hands toward something that had fallen just out of reach.
“Hello,” I said finally, weakly enough, feeling foolish to be speaking to an empty room in the middle of the night, or a good hour or two before they brought in breakfast, but adding, nevertheless, “Is anyone here?” Giving in to foolishness in order to avoid being overtaken by fear.
I had a terrible, lonely image of myself in the white bed, my nose in the air, the gauze wrapped around my eyes. I pictured the lightless hospital room, but since it had been so long since I’d seen this particular one—and had seen it only briefly, even so—I could not be sure if the details were real or imagined, the actual place or a compilation of all the hospital rooms I had ever been in. I imagined the building around me, the dull pulse of all the sleeping bodies it contained, room after room, floor upon floor, above and below. Something of Calvary Cemetery, of Gate of Heaven, about the rows of pale beds and all those strangers with their own troublesome eyes and ears unconscious now, heads thrown back, mouths open, breathing softly into this gray light between night and day.
I heard the sound of movement, some distance from the bed, it seemed—a breath and feather sound of soft movement from an unseen part of the unseen room.
“Me,” a voice said hoarsely. And then, after a shy clearing of the throat, “I’m here.”
I hesitated. I’ll admit I was afraid. I felt my useless eyes moving behind the gauze. “Who is?” I said. The days of blindness had made my voice impatient and wary.
I knew him, of course, by his laughter. “Tom,” he said. “Who else?”
Because Walter Hartnett had said, “You don’t want to go into New York City”—and hadn’t poor Pegeen Chehab called it a filthy place?—I studied the want ads in the paper every morning while my mother and Gabe got ready for work and then told them, “Nothing for me,” in the evening when they returned.
I might still be in my pajamas or a housecoat. I would be sleepy and bored, and the apartment would smell of nail polish or bath salts or the cigarettes I had taken up in my last year at Manual, hoping to look glamorous.
“There was nothing for me,” I would tell them.
My mother lifted the paper, which was always disheveled and thoroughly read, or fetched it from the garbage if I had remembered to throw it away. �
�Here.” She pointed to a notice for typists or switchboard operators. “And here,” holding the paper under my nose. “What about this?”
I would glance down disdainfully. “Yes, but that’s midtown.” Or, pretending to be surprised at my mother’s foolishness, “But that’s Wall Street. I’m not going there.”
Gabe was working for IT&T on Park Avenue. He would emerge from the kitchen with his single after-work drink in his hand, his collar unbuttoned beneath the loosened tie. “There will be no getting her out of Brooklyn,” he would say. Or, “She’s just a small-town Brooklyn girl.” Tempering my mother’s anger with a wink and a nod and a gentle hand to her shoulder, which was really just a plea for peace.
All that Gabe desired in those days, he said, was the peace and quiet in which a fellow might read.
Twice since I’d graduated he’d set up an interview for me in the typing pool at his office, and twice I refused to go. Even my mother, who had found work as a seamstress at Best and Company, had given up pestering me about a sales job there. Every evening that summer and fall we faced one another in the small living room as it caught the fading light. “Our Marie,” Gabe would pronounce, his collar open and the day’s one drink in his hand, “will not leave this sceptered isle, Momma, this Brooklyn,” charming my mother into some kind of peace, the peace in which a fellow might read. “You’d better face the fact.”
Although when the time came, when the neighborhood as we had known it had crumbled and was no more, it was Gabe who would not leave.
In late September, I came in from Mass with my mother and Gabe and lifted the Sunday paper from the couch. As the two of them put breakfast together in the kitchen, I sat at the dining-room table with it—as was my routine—and turned the pages idly enough until one of them, as I lifted it, buckled like lace. A long column had been neatly removed. I stared, puzzled for a moment. What had been cut out was part of an ad for women’s shoes and just the corner of a story continued from page 1, something about the British Prime Minister, a great hero of Gabe’s in those days. I looked underneath, to the facing page, and saw that it was the first of the society pages, weddings. And that it was from this page that the long column had been carefully excised. I closed the paper when Gabe came in with the tea and a plate of toast and asked me casually, “Anything new in the world?”
I might have said, like Joan Blondell (I had been to the movies with Gerty just the night before), What kind of fool do you take me for? except for the quick and wary way Gabe’s eyes went to the paper spread out on the table.
“Nothing interesting,” I said vaguely.
Of course, it was Gabe who had cut out the column, Walter’s wedding announcement. My mother did not read the newspaper—complained mightily about how much time her children devoted to it, in fact—but Gabe read it thoroughly in the early hours of every morning, especially with all that was going on in Europe. He must have gotten up from the couch while my mother and I were still asleep, gone into the kitchen for the shears. I might have said to him now, Hollywood-style, Do you take me for a fool? Did you think I wouldn’t put two and two together?
I knew Walter’s wedding had taken place, of course. I knew people from the neighborhood who had been invited. I had watched from my bedroom window, in fact, as Bill Corrigan and his mother got into a cab, his mother dressed for church on a Saturday morning.
But something about Gabe’s gesture, its generosity and its futility, made me simply fold the paper up and toss it to another chair.
“I can’t be bothered reading it all,” I said. “It’s so dull.”
Gabe nodded, sheepish perhaps. But pleased.
I watched him in his rolled shirtsleeves as he took the plates and the silverware from the sideboard. He, too, had gone to the movies last night with the girl he was seeing from his office. Agnes. He had come in after my mother and I were already in bed. I had followed his silhouette as he passed through our room to get to his own, heard the fall of his shoes and the faint rattle of his belt buckle as he undressed. I knew without hearing that he knelt to pray before climbing into bed. I listened for a while until I heard his steady breathing, his reluctant sleep. When I rolled over again, I saw in the street-lit darkness that my mother was awake, listening as well.
I got up from the table to help him. As if his ploy had actually succeeded, he was suddenly lighthearted. He knocked me with his hip as I reached across him with a cup and saucer, playful and brotherly, the Sunday scent of aftershave and starch still about him. He began telling me about the news, about Czechoslovakia and Germany, and the possibility of war. I nodded, barely listening. Had I seen the photo of the flawless bride, I would have studied it, of course. I would have read, suffering all the while, the details of her attendants and her dress, her fancy schools. My eyes would have lingered on the name: Walter Hartnett, son of Elizabeth Harnett and the late, mustachioed father.
Gabe had thought to spare me that. He had thought he could.
My mother carried in the platter of fried eggs and bacon. My brother was waxing eloquent now, standing at his end of the table while my mother filled the plates. The two of us looking up at him from our chairs. This was, I thought, the language of shy men, men too much alone with their reading and their ideas—politics, war, distant countries, tyrants. Men who would bury their heads in such stuff just to avert their eyes from a woman’s simple heartache.
When he finally sat down and bit into his toast, I raised my teacup and said, “Amadan.” My mother clucked her tongue disapprovingly. Gabe laughed. Of course, he thought I meant his politics. And commended me later for my insight.
Now, an evening in late October, my mother walked into the kitchen still wearing her hat and her gloves. I was peeling potatoes at the sink. At summer’s close, my mother had declared that if I wasn’t going to find myself a job, I was, at least, going to be responsible for getting dinner started for the members of the household who already had one—although with my ineptitude in the kitchen so well established by then, putting the potatoes on to boil or setting out the meat and sprinkling it with salt was the extent of the tasks my mother dared to assign me.
“Fagin,” my mother announced, still in her hat and her gloves and with her pocketbook still on her arm, “needs a girl. You have an interview with him at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”
I reached to turn off the water that was running in the sink. I looked at her from over my shoulder. “The undertaker?” I said.
My mother nodded, smiling: the cat that swallowed the canary. “I ran into him on the way home. His girl, that lovely Betty, is expecting. She’ll be leaving him as soon as he hires someone new. Wear your good suit. If he likes you, you’ll have a nice, steady position, right here in Brooklyn. Just what you wanted.” She began to take off her gloves, smiling: a job well done. “Sit yourself down, dear,” she said generously, all past strife forgiven now that she had won. “I’ll just go change and finish up dinner,” which was the regular routine but which, tonight, my mother said as if it were yet another benefit bestowed. She turned and left the kitchen, humming. Humming.
The potatoes I had peeled were piled on the drain board beside the sink, surrounded by a little puddle of their dirty rinse water. The flesh of them, newly exposed, was sickly white and still gave off an odor of dampness and cold earth. With their blind eyes and mute yellow faces, they resembled nothing more than what they were: pale, underground creatures bred without light—sustenance.
Was it any wonder I hated to cook?
“I don’t want to work for Fagin,” I said, but weakly. And knew my mother was pretending not to hear.
The funeral parlor was in a brownstone eight blocks away. Mr. Fagin, who was tall and broad-shouldered, with a small neat head, met me at the door, just letting himself in, having gone out to fetch the paper. The two of us climbed the stairs together to his office on the second floor. The parlor floor, he explained as we climbed, was for wakes, the basement was where he and his assistants prepared the bodies, and the
second floor was for business. He and his mother lived on the third.
He opened the office door and put out his arm to convey wordlessly that I should go first, and it was this gesture that made me suddenly recall him from the days of my father’s funeral, when he had been to me only a broad dark figure silently but effectively directing us: to the coffin or to the car or into the pew at church, and then in and out of the crowded cemetery. I had no recollection of his face from those terrible days, only his benevolent shadow.
And yet his face was, I thought now, sitting across from him, surprisingly pleasant. There were fleshy circles under his eyes, but his cheeks were smooth and rosy and he had a small but easy smile. He had been a redhead once. Although he was now mostly gray, there was the sense of sunny boyishness in his wavy hair, patted down with water. He looked more like a policeman or an athletic priest than an undertaker. The room he used for his office was not large, but it contained a good many things: the big dark desk, two velvet chairs before it, bookcases and a credenza, and a small table with a crystal decanter of sherry, a bottle of whiskey, and a bottle of gin. He sat with his back to the one window in the room, and it showed a lush tree, full of leaves turning yellow and gold. There were black binders on the bookcases, and piles of prayer books, a Bible and a dictionary, and the collected works of Charles Dickens bound in rich leather.
Later he would tell me that it was his intention to reclaim the name of Fagin from the bastard—a writer, he said, whom he loved and admired and despised in what he believed was the very way of brothers.
There was also on one of the shelves, among the books, the bodiless head of a china baby doll, curly-haired and beautiful, with a rosebud smile and what might have been human lashes on the edges of its closed eyes. A model, he would also tell me later, for the face of a child in restful sleep. It was the only thing about the place that made me uncomfortable.
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