He took off his hat and looked around. He had not changed much. His hair might have thinned a bit. His face might have been a bit fuller. A little heavier altogether, I thought, as he saw me in the doorway and smiled—same grin—and made his way across the vestibule. I smelled the liquor on his breath as soon as he spoke.
“Hello there, Marie,” he said, same wide-open grin and nice gray eyes, edged now in red, and suddenly, even before I had a chance to say, “Hello, Walter,” filling with tears. “May I take your hat?” I asked him. He gave me the hat, and then his eyes rose away from my face, to the room beyond me, to the women in their chairs, and then to the coffin where Bill Corrigan lay. Walter raised his chin and turned his head to where his eyes had already taken him. “This is a hell of a thing, isn’t it?” he said. And a large tear ran down his smooth cheek. “Old Bill,” he whispered. “What did he want to do that for?” and limped into the room.
Undone, I watched him from the door as he went to the coffin and knelt before it, the built-up shoe cast awkwardly behind him. He bowed his head, putting his forehead against the back of his folded hands. He remained like that, bent and still, for a good minute or two—old Mrs. Corrigan and her sister and her niece watching him respectfully—and then we all heard him gasp and saw his shoulders quake, rhythmically, it seemed, in a series of silent, roiling sobs.
At this point, the front door opened again as more visitors arrived, and I slipped off my glasses and turned my attention their way. When I looked back, the blur that was Walter was shaking hands with Mrs. Corrigan. He seemed to be speaking earnestly.
I watched him limp to the far corner of the room and throw himself into the farthest chair in the last row. He wiped his nose on his sleeve, ran his hands over his face and then through his hair, and then he reached into his suit jacket for a handkerchief, which he held to his nose for a moment and then returned to his inside pocket. I grew busy then, taking hats and coats into the cloakroom, greeting the same people I had greeted the night before. When I glanced back at Walter, he was once again reaching for the handkerchief inside his jacket, and this time I recognized the gesture for what it was, a reenactment of the problem-with-drink pantomime of the ladies upstairs. I knew if I had my glasses on I’d see it was not a handkerchief he withdrew from his pocket and raised to his face but a flask. When next I glanced at him, he had slumped a bit in the chair and his head was bowed. He seemed to be staring into his own hands, cupped in his lap.
When the Rosary was completed, ending the night, Walter Hartnett didn’t stir. Now I was fetching coats for the others. I had developed a strange system: I sniffed each coat when I first took it away: aftershave, perfume, mothballs, perspiration, smoke, and sniffed it again when it was called for—a strange, blind man’s way of identifying an owner, but even Mr. Fagin had remarked on its efficiency. My mother was there again that night, but since I was meeting a midshipman at the subway at ten, I told her to go on and walk home with Mrs. Chehab. My mother had seen Walter, of course, and she whispered to me now that I should go and give him a word of comfort, poor man. And with something of the confidence that Evening in Paris and my slim wool dress and my time at Fagin’s had lent me, I slipped my glasses on and went to sit beside him.
At the front of the newly quiet room—it was the rhythm and the ritual of every wake—Mr. Fagin was now standing with the three women, who were looking down again at rosy-cheeked Bill Corrigan in his casket, saying a quiet good night one more time, his mother, once again, crying silently.
Walter, watching them, nodded when I sat down, but only briefly touched his eyes to my face, and then to the front of my dress—for which I instantly forgave him because he had wept for Bill Corrigan and, perhaps, because the scent of alcohol on a man was a charm for me still.
His eyes were on the backs of the three women. “I never really had a father,” he said, and I knew immediately that he was very drunk. “My old man didn’t much care for me when I was a kid. Didn’t like the leg. Kind of like the judge now.” He laughed, but to himself. “He knocked my mother around when he was out of sorts, had nothing much to say to me, and then he was dead.” He gave the word two hard d’s, biting it off. “And that was that.” And then looked at me again. His gray eyes had lost their focus. “Big Bill was a friend to me,” he said. “We”—and he seemed to seek the word and then smiled to discover it—“we conferred, him and me. That’s what he’d say, ‘Let’s confer.’ He conferred with me and I conferred with him. Nobody ever conferred with me before.” His eyes were on the past. “ ‘Stay close to me,’ he’d say when I came around every day. He’d put his big old hand on my wrist. ‘We might have to confer.’ He always wanted to hear what I had to say.” He looked back to the front of the room, where Mr. Fagin had now gently turned the three women from the casket and was gently herding them toward the door. I saw him glance at me. The ladies would need their coats. I had my midshipman to meet at ten.
“And you were a good friend to him, Walter,” I said. It was my consoling angel’s voice. I could not have said myself if it was sincere.
His eyes dropped to my face once more, and then to my chest, unfocused and indifferent. “We both got a raw deal,” he said, and for a fraction of a second I thought he was talking about the two of us. I thought he was apologizing. But then he added, “Me and Bill.”
I was grateful for a moment to be compelled to say, “Excuse me.” I met the three women at the door and in the vestibule helped Mrs. Corrigan into her coat. Mr. Fagin had arranged for one of the assistants to take all them back to Greenpoint (Greenpernt, as he said it) every evening since the Corrigan apartment had been damaged slightly by the fire and more thoroughly by the fire hoses. Mr. Fagin and I both escorted her to the car waiting in the street, and when he went ahead to open the car door, I felt the full weight of her as she leaned on my arm. I recalled how she had walked her son, her boy, down the steps every morning on the way to his kitchen chair, his hand tucked in the crook of her arm the way a bride holds the arm of a groom. I thought again of the effort it must have taken her to deliver him there every morning in his pressed shirt and his brushed suit.
When the car pulled away from the curb, I turned back. Walter Harnett was at the foot of the stoop now, his hat in his hand. Mr. Fagin bid him good night, glanced over his shoulder at me, and then went inside. I said, when Walter approached, “I’m sorry, Walter,” in my professional way. He looked down at me. He seemed to have gathered himself together, there was something of the old swagger and charm, despite the red-rimmed eyes. He had taken a remembrance card. I could see the edge of it in his breast pocket. “They oughta bury him with that chair,” he said, smiling again. “Remember that chair he sat in every day?”
I nodded. “I was just thinking about it.” It might have been the first time in my life I understood what an easy bond it was, to share a neighborhood as we had done, to share a time past. “It’s still there,” I added, as if this should amaze him. “At least it was there this morning. No one’s had the heart to take it in.”
He swayed a little. “No fooling?” he said, and then “Jeez.” He surveyed the street scene above my head, but without interest. “I never come here anymore,” he said. “I moved my mother up to the Bronx, closer to us.”
And I was surprised to discover there was a knife edge to it, the “us.”
“I think I heard that,” I said, and moved closer to Fagin’s door. “I think my mother mentioned it.”
“Bronx’s much nicer.” He was slurring his words. He touched the remembrance card, or perhaps it was the flask underneath. “I wouldn’t wish this neighborhood on a dog.”
I put out my hand. I had learned something about moving people around from Mr. Fagin. “Good night, Walter,” I said. He looked at my outstretched hand, but didn’t take it. “I was 4F, you know,” he said. “The gimp.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I wanted to join up,” he said. “More than anything.”
“Sure,” I said again, and l
owered my hand.
“Marines.”
I nodded. I imagined him as some kind of aide de camp, conferring with Patton or MacArthur, his hands held behind his back. “My brother’s army air force,” I told him. “Over in England.”
Walter shifted unsteadily. The odor of cigarettes and alcohol seemed to be woven into the fabric of his suit. It was a charm to me still, alcohol on a man’s breath. “Army air force is pansies,” Walter said. “Give me the marines.”
I shrugged. I was aware of the difference between what Walter Hartnett had become in my recollection and how he seemed to me now, in the flesh, heavier than he had been, with all his sharp sophistication worn down to a sad childishness. It was a kind of madness, to be charmed by him still. “Long as he’s safe,” I said. “That’s all I care about.”
Walter peered down at me, maybe a little distrustful now. “Do you want to get a drink?” he asked. “Are you through working?” It occurred to me then that he had not been surprised to find me in Fagin’s parlor, that he had known, somehow, before he came, that I worked here. Perhaps his mother, too, had kept him informed.
I shook my head. “I’ve got to meet someone,” I told him. I saw him glance again at my chest, squinting a bit now, as if to decipher the names of the boys who had been inside my bra since his last visit. “A boyfriend?” he asked, and when I only shrugged, he swayed a bit and said, “I get it.”
Standing with him between the streetlight and the light cast by Fagin’s door, I recognized that there was an opportunity here—opportunity for recompense—pain for pain. Opportunity to say, “A midshipmen, in fact, an able-bodied seaman,” and wouldn’t that have given Walter Hartnett what for?
But Walter Hartnett had loved blind Bill Corrigan since he was a lonely little boy, conferring with him on the sidewalk beside his kitchen chair. Walter and Bill: blind you, gimpy me. It was Walter who said, “Naa, Bill, not her,” when even Gabe had failed to be kind. Walter who had come here tonight—perhaps the only one of his contemporaries left behind—come down from the Bronx to weep like a child before the world closed up over Bill Corrigan’s passing.
I held out my hand again—“It was nice seeing you, Walter”—and this time he took it. I said, “Let’s both keep poor Bill in our prayers,” because if Walter Hartnett hadn’t loved me, he had surely loved Bill Corrigan, and loving Bill Corrigan had now broken his heart.
He shook his head. “More like him praying for us,” he said. “Bill’s retired from the game.”
I saw him grope for his breast pocket again as he walked away under the streetlights, weaving a bit. But it wasn’t the flask, it was the remembrance card he was after. Just before he rounded the corner, I saw how the light caught it, cupped in the palm of his hand.
Of the fifteen or so patients in the waiting room, not one of them sat alone. I mentioned this to my daughter, who looked up from her magazine, looked around, and said, “That’s true.”
“That’s nice,” I said. It was the eye surgeon’s office. It was the morning he “did cataracts.”
“They require that you bring someone to help you home,” Susan said. “It was in the instructions he gave you.”
“I suppose you could always take a cab if you were on your own,” I whispered. Five years widowed, eight without Gabe, thirty without my mother in the world, and sixty-some-odd (sixty-six, could it be?) since my father was gone, and although I had four good grown children to depend on, I sometimes felt I negotiated this time of my life as if from a high, precarious place. For every kindness my children bestowed, every lift to the doctor’s, every errand run or holiday dinner shared, I found myself imagining how I might manage if they weren’t there, couldn’t come, were otherwise engaged.
“No,” Susan said softly. “The paper said you had to bring someone to escort you home. Another person,” she added.
I paused. “I guess you could call an escort service, if you didn’t have someone,” I said, and when my daughter impatiently dropped the magazine to her lap, I quickly added, “I’m kidding.”
Susan raised the magazine again. “Relax,” she said, kindly enough, but meaning, I knew, stop talking. Susan had had a rough morning with her children, or so she’d told me when she came to the house, and was not looking forward to going into work when my surgery was over. The whole firm was on edge, a huge case, a court date approaching. And now the doctor was running behind.
The patients around us were middle-aged and older, the middle-aged ones sitting mostly side by side with their peers—spouses or friends—the older ones, every one of them, with younger escorts. Children, no doubt, although the oldest woman in the room was with a black girl, Jamaican from the sound of her voice, a nurse or an aide. Hired. There you go, I thought. An escort. But said nothing.
The doctor came out in his pale-blue scrubs, all the little strings of his outfit, the ones that tied the cap to his head, the ones that held the mask he had dropped around his neck, the ones that swung from his drawstring pants—which I always felt were undignified for a professional man—trailing as if he were caught in a breeze. Or running, perhaps, as no doubt he was, since he was running behind and the office was filled with patient patients and their ready eyes.
He approached one of the two women sitting alone on opposite sides of the room. “Mrs. Something or other’s daughter?” I didn’t catch the name. The woman, in a blue dress and a suntan, attractive, sat up anxiously, but said, “No.” He went to the other, who was somewhat heavyset and already on the edge of her chair. “Here I am,” she said as he approached her. “Mrs. Something or other’s daughter?” he asked again. And she said, “Yes.”
“It went very well,” the doctor said. “She’s in recovery now. We’ll just monitor her a bit. Say, twenty minutes more. And then she’ll be ready for you to take her home.”
“Thank you,” the woman said.
The doctor went back through the door from which he’d come, and another door opened in the far wall and another name was called. A man this time, maybe about sixty, leaving his spouse or sister or friend behind with only a pat of the hand. Just prep right now, in fact, as the smiling nurse told him.
Not half an hour later, the doctor’s door opened again and the doctor came out, trailing his strings. He went to the attractive woman in the blue dress and asked, as if he had never seen or spoken to her before, “Mrs. So-and-so’s daughter?” and this time she said yes.
“It went very well,” the doctor said. “She’s in recovery now. We’ll just monitor her a bit. Say, twenty minutes. And then she’ll be ready for you to take home.”
He left, the nurse’s door opened again and another name was called. The old lady with the Jamaican nurse. “Just prep,” the nurse said kindly as the lady made her way through the door.
Twenty-five minutes by the clock and the doctor returned once more. “Mrs. Holybody?” or some such or other—he garbled the names—he said to the man’s wife, with only a brief, wary glance at the black girl, who was the only other person sitting alone. “Yes,” the wife said.
“It went very well. He’s in recovery now. We’ll just monitor him for a while. Say, twenty minutes. And then he’ll be ready for you to take home.”
He left. The nurse’s door opened again. By now Susan had once more dropped her magazine to her lap. I looked to her and said, “My head’s beginning to spin.” Susan said, “At least he’s consistent.”
And another daughter, whose mother was just going in (“For prep,” said the smiling nurse), looked at us both and shook her head. “It’s almost unbelievable,” she whispered.
By now the finished products, wearing plastic sun shades, were beginning to emerge from yet another door, their escorts rising to meet them with a muffled kind of joy. I was reminded of what I had observed at the airport last month, waiting for my son in the pickup lane, after my visit to Gerty in Florida: the cars would swoop into the curb and the waiting friend or relative would raise a hand from the suitcase, there would be smiles all around, an
embrace, an exuberant shaking of hands, a particular kind of elation, not, I was certain, because of the reunion alone—certainly all these New Yorkers couldn’t be so fond of one another—but because of all that had been negotiated safely: the takeoff, the landing, the coordinated meeting place, the drive to the airport, because every risk had been run, every anticipated crisis had been averted, and thus something celebratory and delightful about each ordinary reunion. Something, I thought, recalling Mr. Fagin, of the resurrection and the life all about this particular bit of LaGuardia. Even Tommy, I noticed, my oldest, who had never been very demonstrative, thumped me on the back in his large embrace before he lifted my suitcase from the curb.
“Everything went very well,” I heard the doctor saying over my shoulder. “She’s in recovery now. We’ll just monitor her a little more. Twenty minutes and she’ll be ready for you to take her home.”
And then the “just prep” nurse called my name.
When my own ordeal was over, Susan rose to meet me. Less exuberant, I thought, than some of the others had been, perhaps because she was now so late to work. But in the elevator Susan said, “He knew about your detached retina, right, from back when? You told him, didn’t you?” I said, “Of course,” but I found myself slowly putting my hand to my left cheek. I recalled now that it was the cataract in the right eye he was supposed to remove. I saw my daughter raise her chin and pinch her nostrils, once, twice, although there was nothing to smell but the carpet and the bland air of the medical tower elevator. It was precisely as my mother used to do. “ ‘Cause he didn’t say everything went very well,” Susan said. I could hear her revving up her attorney voice. “He said there was scar tissue. From a previous surgery. Like it was a big surprise. He said you’ll probably need a corneal transplant, if you don’t want to lose that eye.”
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