I’d taken a cab home, an extravagance, yes, but wasn’t it better to be safe than sorry?
Gabe sat in the middle of the couch, in his bathrobe and his slippers. “I’ve made up my mind to enlist, too,” he said softly. “Better to get in early.” I felt myself sway a little, still drunk. For all the anxieties that would plague me as a mother, for all the superstitions I’d absorbed as a child, my first thought on hearing this was not for Gabe’s safety but for his room and his bed, which would be mine once again if he went into the army.
“Now I’m sitting here worrying about leaving Momma alone.”
I had the impulse to sit down next to him, to pat his hand, but the whiskey I’d been drinking made me hesitate. He had lectured me already. Have just one drink when you go out, it’s easy enough to do. A boy will respect you for it. He’ll be grateful not to have to pay for more. “If you allow yourself license in little things,” he’d told me, quoting someone or other, “little by little, you’ll be ruined.”
“Momma won’t be here alone,” I said, shifting my unsteady weight from one leg to the other. “I’m here.”
He lifted his arm, tapped on his watch. “It’s six a.m.,” he said, reasonably enough. “You haven’t been home all day. You’re just getting in.”
I looked around the narrow room to avoid his frown. “Oh come on,” I said, trying to make my tongue behave. “This was a special case. A kid going back to camp. Just buried his mother. I couldn’t leave him at the station alone. It’s not like I stay out this late every night.” Although I had another date that very evening with the florist’s boy, who was also joining up.
Gabe looked at his hands. “You run around too much,” he said. “It’s not good, Marie. I know you want to make up for what happened with Walter, you want to prove something about yourself. Your attractiveness, I suppose. But this is no way to go about it. Drinking, running around. You’ll get yourself into trouble instead.”
I knew what he meant by “get yourself into trouble,” and I was astonished to discover how furious I became—a lightning bolt of black fury running across my scalp. Furious to discover that he thought of me in this way: that his thoughts had crept in this direction, sitting here in the dark with his book, his prayer book no less, waiting for me to come home. Thinking here in the darkness that I was out somewhere in the city—where, the cold benches of the train station?—baring myself to a stranger, going as far as you could go just to prove Walter Hartnett wrong.
I drew myself up, only a little unsteadily. “Damn priest,” I said under my breath, but loud enough for him to hear. I would not have said it without the whiskey. “Holier than thou.” Nor that. “With your filthy mind,” I said, and it was the whiskey, as well as the truth in what he had said about Walter Hartnett, that tricked me into sudden tears. “I do not let anyone take liberties,” I said. “I do not. And I won’t let you think that I do.” I stamped my foot. “I will not.” I saw him glance behind me, to the room where my mother slept, and I said, again, a little more softly but no less furious, “I will not.”
I opened the purse on my arm. Inside was the empty bottle of whiskey: a memento of the evening. There was also the timetable Rory had written his address on and my handkerchief, covered with the lipstick and cinnamon sugar I had wiped from his mouth before he ran for the train. I took out the handkerchief and held it to my nose: Evening in Paris and Old Spice. It had been a lovely night.
Gabe rose from the couch and lightly, with some distance still between us, put his hands on my shoulders. More to keep me from waking our mother, I suspected, than to comfort me in my only partially righteous indignation—I had, after all, allowed some liberties. I bowed my head to avoid his earnest face. “What do you know about anything?” I asked him, defiant. “A lonely bachelor like you. What do you know? You’re not married.”
He may have laughed a little, and his amusement was suddenly more infuriating to me than his censure. I looked up at him and said, “Go get yourself married, momma’s boy. Go marry Agnes”—and said her name the way a streetwise, mocking child might say it, the kind of child I had never been—“then you can tell me what to do.”
Gabe pursed his lips and his face was suddenly regretful, as if the harsh words had been his own. He dropped his hands from my shoulders, held them out as if to show me they were empty. “Some vows can’t be broken,” he said evenly.
I had to look away. I understood how firmly he believed this, but I muttered, “Nonsense,” anyway. It was all a tangle, my brother’s faith, his vocation, his vows, his failure, and it only made me impatient to think of it, after such a lovely night. I wished he could be a simpler kind of man.
I stamped my foot again. “Apologize,” I demanded.
He stepped away. I did not look up. I could hear the dawn birds, pigeons and sparrows, at the kitchen window. There was more early sunlight still across the carpet roses. I saw how the light touched his long feet in their slippers, the pale flesh of his insteps, as white as marble.
“All right,” I heard him whisper above my head. “I’m sorry. I suppose I didn’t put it very well.” He stepped back farther still. “I’m only thinking of your welfare,” he said. “I’m here to be your guide.”
I put the fragrant handkerchief to my nose. The long-faced Rorys of the world, sweet as they might be, would have their work cut out for them, trying to hold a candle to this earnest brother of mine.
I raised my eyes, to his neat pajamas and the brown flannel robe crossed over his chest, and then to the pale flesh of his throat. I felt some sudden tenderness: instep and throat, were there any places on a body more vulnerable and sad? Had I said he was lonely?
He whispered, “None of us knows the hour, Marie. Surely you understand this by now, with all your time at Fagin’s.” And I shifted my weight again. “It’s as simple as this,” he said. “I don’t want you ever to be in a state of sin. Not for a moment. I don’t want any of us to run that risk. I want us to be together in eternity. The way we once were.” And I saw him make some gesture toward the dining-room table and its white cloth and the simple chandelier, all of it looking distant and colorless now in the early-morning light. “All of us together again, the way we used to be. Dad with us again.”
And I suddenly held up my hand: he would have me blubbering. “Stop it,” I said, so firmly he took a step back. It was as if I could hear his teeth snap closed. “You’ve said enough,” I told him.
Before he left the room, he showed me the blanket and the pillow he’d placed on what we called the lady chair in the corner. “Sleep on the couch,” he said. “You’ll surely wake Momma if you go in there now. I’ll tell her you came home,” and he looked at his watch again, raising his pale eyebrows, “much earlier.”
I nodded. But I was still angry or indignant or sorry or embarrassed enough to refuse the kindness. And the light was not so dim in his corner of the room that I failed to see how this disappointed him. “I’m sorry,” he said again. He aimed for a jollier tone. “Fools’ thoughts are in their mouths, the Bible says. A wise man keeps his words in his heart.”
I turned my back to him. I had learned at Fagin’s just how to hold myself aloof whenever someone else’s sorrow threatened to send me sprawling. “Yeah, well,” I said coolly, “not everything’s in a book.”
I heard him say, “No doubt.” He said, “Pray for me, anyway, will you?” reminding me—how quickly I had forgotten it—that he was going to enlist. I had to shift my weight once again. And then he turned to the short hallway that led back to my mother’s bedroom and, beyond it, the room we once had shared.
“Maybe you wouldn’t mind,” Mr. Fagin said early in my tenure, “every once in a while, when things are quiet here, to go up and have a word with my mother.”
The third-floor apartment was all Irish lace: lace curtains, lace tablecloths, lace doilies on the backs and arms of every chair, lace at the throat of the old lady’s dresses, and a lace handkerchief in her pale hands. She was a tiny old woman wi
th a small, pale, pretty face. The apartment was as neat as a pin, and there were always small vases of rearranged funeral flowers on the mantel and the windowsills, on the sideboard and the tea table.
I never found Mrs. Fagin alone, which was surprising, since I so seldom caught sight of her visitors coming in. But every time I climbed the stairs and knocked gently at the apartment door, I heard from behind it the energetic scuffle of another visitor. There would be tea and cake already set out, or a light lunch, or a kettle already whistling in the kitchen. An old Sister of Charity in her pioneer cap would be there, or one of the nursing sisters, the Little Sisters of the Sick Poor, often both. Other old immigrant ladies of all shapes and sizes stepping out of the kitchen, bringing in another chair. Mrs. Fagin always sat in the middle of the high-backed couch, her little feet in black shoes barely touching the floor. She always threw up her hands in delight when I entered the room and touched the space beside her and said something charming and lyrical, “You’re as welcome as the flowers in May” or “Here’s a sight for sore eyes.”
The nuns had to turn their heads to smile at me from within their caps and wimples. I often had the impression that I had just interrupted a long, whispered story one of them was telling. They always seemed to me to be just leaning back. There always seemed to me to be a silenced breath hanging on the air. “God love you,” Mrs. Fagin would say as I came into the neat room. “You’ve just brightened our day.” Although there was no denying, as I came into the lacy, sun-washed room, that their day had already been going along quite brightly.
I sat beside Mrs. Fagin on the stiff couch, or if another old woman or one of the older Sisters was already there, I’d take a single chair. “Now,” Mrs. Fagin would say when I had my cup, “what’s going on downstairs?”
I would name for her whoever was being waked that evening, or whose family had called that morning to inquire about Fagin’s services, or whose body had arrived from the morgue and was currently being prepared. The old lady would cock her head at each name. She had bright blue eyes and pure white hair. Like her son, she might once have been a redhead. “Oh yes,” she’d say if she knew them, or if the name didn’t ring a bell, she would look to the other women in the room until she found the one who could say, “Oh, sure,” and fill her in on the deceased’s pedigree. “That’s Bridget Verde’s niece’s girl,” they might say. Or, “Tommy Cute’s a friend of his,” or—this mostly from the nursing sisters, who, it seemed, at one point or other had had most of the bodies that came into Fagin’s in their care—“a slow death there,” or “a weak heart,” or “His mother, too, died the same way.” When all else failed, one of them would fetch the paper and look for an obituary.
Recollections were raised, sorted, compiled. If there was a good story attached to the life of the dead, whatever woman among them had it would be given the floor, and whatever part of the story was deemed, perhaps, too delicate for the old lady’s ears (or, more likely, mine) would be acted out with a series of gestures and nods and sudden silences that I quickly came to be able to interpret as readily as the rest. A finger held to the side of a nose indicated a deception, a pantomimed bottle raised to the mouth meant there was a problem with drink, the rubbing of thumb and forefinger meant money problems (usually because someone, most likely a spouse, was cheap), eyebrows raised and words falling off into a long nod indicated sex (“and he was coming home every night while she was still losing blood and …”)—eyebrows, nod, and all the other women would cluck their tongues in sympathy.
Sitting among them, I sometimes recalled the whispering girls on the stoops of my childhood. I sometimes felt just as lost about the tales they proposed. But there was a sense, too, in their sorting out of recollection and rumor, of gossip, anecdote, story—and even in their disappointment when a body came to the funeral parlor, a stranger or out-of-towner whom none of them could produce a single word for—of some duty on their part, Mrs. Fagin and her attendants, to weave a biography of sorts for the newly dead.
I say duty, but there was nothing heavy or morbid about these conversations; there was, rather, an eager, industrious, even entertaining, pleasantness in all of it, which is probably why the apartment always seemed to me to be full of light and the aftermath of some laughter. Or maybe it was just the cups of sweet tea that they served me. “What’s going on downstairs?” Mrs. Fagin would ask, wanting me to name the recent dead. And when I did, she and her compatriots would lean together to tell as best they could the story of the life—breathing words onto cold embers was how I sometimes thought of it, and, one way or another, getting them to glow.
This is how I came to know the fate of Big Lucy, whose mother was waked at Fagin’s in the early forties. Mrs. Meany was a huge woman, with a goiter in her neck that Fagin had powdered as heavily as he had powdered her fat cheeks. But the results were unsatisfactory. Even with the makeup, there remained something awful about the globe of purple, translucent flesh squashed beneath her chin. After the first night of the wake, Fagin had gone downstairs and come back with a broad swathe of pale green chiffon that he wrapped around her head and neck so elaborately that when the family returned the next day Mrs. Meany no longer resembled “her unfortunate self”—as Mr. Fagin put it—but a kind of mummified dowager queen, which pleased them all immensely. The Meany family was what my mother would have called shanty Irish: large and broad-faced men and women, hardly well scrubbed, with a kind of dumb shyness to them as they entered Fagin’s neat parlor and only reluctantly let me take their hats and coats. They whispered awkwardly to one another through the first hour of the wake, but then, as they grew accustomed to the place, began to sprawl and to laugh and to treat Fagin’s chairs and lamps and good rugs with a kind of proprietary pride, pointing out a painting on the wall or the quality of the drapes to various visitors as if they themselves had selected and paid for them. Which, Mr. Fagin reminded me when I mentioned this to him, they more or less had.
Mrs. Meany, I learned in Mrs. Fagin’s upstairs room, had made the trip—by subway, ferry, bus, and bus—to her daughter’s Staten Island asylum every Sunday—every Sunday, it was repeated, rain or shine, for all the years since Big Lucy had vanished from the neighborhood. Lugging, the ladies said, her considerable weight and her thick legs and a shopping bag full of the cakes she had baked (not to mention the swaying baggage—as I thought of it—of that goiter) all the way out to that godforsaken place just to sit for a few hours with the girl, now a woman, who in her derangement spoke only of the most vulgar things. The poor woman, they said, poor Mrs. Meany, cried herself home every Sunday, bus, bus, ferry, subway, unable to look at any of her fellow passengers, man or woman or child, the flesh of their hands and arms and legs, their bodies beneath their clothes, without the terrible images evoked by her daughter’s dirty words rising to her mind like bile to the throat.
Because the devil uses dirty words, Mrs. Fagin added, instructing me, her tiny finger held in the air, to make us believe that we’re only the sum and substance of ugly things.
But Mrs. Meany, see, the women went on, leaning forward, despite how her heart was broken, pulled herself together, anyway, to put on a good face for the rest of the family at home. And she went back, Sunday after Sunday, right up until the Sunday before she died. Mrs. Meany put her beautiful love—a mother’s love—against the terrible scenes that brewed like sewage in that poor girl’s troubled mind. She persevered, she baked her cakes, she hauled herself (the goiter swinging) on and off the ferry, and she sat, brokenhearted, holding her daughter’s hand, even as Lucy shouted her terrible words, proving to anyone with eyes to see that a mother’s love was a beautiful, light, relentless thing that the devil could not diminish.
Collectively, the women sat back, smiling at one another and the glowing conclusion they had wrought out of Mrs. Meany’s travail.
And I, out of a certain shyness, or the deference I always felt in the presence of nuns, or perhaps out of respect for Mrs. Fagin’s decorum and bright rooms, didn’t brin
g myself to ask them, what would happen to Lucy now that her mother was in the ground?
Here, too, I learned the true story of Redmond Hogan’s mother. Redmond was Walter Harnett’s contemporary, one of the stickball-playing boys when I was young—one of the crowd, perhaps, who had played that brief and awful trick on Bill Corrigan when the ambulance stopped at the wrong house. He was killed at Normandy, and not six months later, his mother was waked at Fagin’s. Of course, a connection was made—Mrs. Hogan had six older children, but Redmond was her youngest, and thus, it was said, the apple of her eye. She died of a broken heart, was the consensus. It was said at her wake that when the news came of Redmond’s death, Mrs. Hogan struggled to get into her hat and coat. She was determined, come hell or high water, to head for Penn Station and the train to Washington, D.C., where she was going to march straight up to the White House and give Mr. Roosevelt what for. It was Florence, her oldest daughter—a broad redheaded woman who even in middle age had skin like porcelain—who told the story at the wake, getting everyone to laugh at her mother’s determination and how skillfully Florence had talked her out of her plan. They sat down and wrote a letter to the President instead, describing Redmond and what had been lost. Fifty-two pages of it. Pretty remarkable, Florence said, considering Redmond was only twenty-five.
Florence Hogan was a big, redheaded woman with beautiful skin and large brown eyes and a cashmere coat with a wide fur collar that I had tried on in Fagin’s cloakroom after I took it from her in the vestibule. It smelled wonderfully of the cold, of cigarette smoke, and of some gorgeous, spicy perfume.
In Mrs. Fagin’s living room the women leaned together as I repeated Florence’s story about the letter, and then they passed a look, from one to another—it was eye to eye, but it was as clear to me as if it were going hand to hand—before someone said, “Wasn’t Florence the beauty, when she was a girl?” It was agreed. Mrs. Fagin said, “An Irish rose,” although I knew from the wake that there were German cousins on Mrs. Hogan’s side. “A wild Irish tose,” another old lady said, and there was some rueful laughter.
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