Suddenly he reached into his suit jacket and extracted a small tobacco tin. He pressed it against his tie as he pried it open, his hands pale and childish, except for a silver pinky ring, which told me there was some vanity here. There was only a thickly folded piece of paper inside the tin. He took it out and opened it up, smoothing it out on the white tablecloth before passing it across the table to me. All three of us leaned forward to see. “That’s the barracks,” he said softly, apologetically. “Not very good,” he offered.
It was a cartoon, drawn in smudged pencil. It showed the various bunks, a prisoner lying in each, looking, each one of them, bored and idle, and yet, in each, some personality was displayed. There was a prisoner with his hands behind his head, elbows raised, looking at the ceiling. Another on his side, frowning at the book before him (a single German word, Nein, upside down on its cover), one with his knees raised and his mouth opened, a trail of zzzz’s, another asleep on his stomach, his backside in the air. There was a window that showed black slashes of rain and, through them, a distant guard tower, a fence. There were scraps of paper on the wall behind the bunks—intimations of pinups and calendars and days crossed off. There were only touches of color, a wash of pale yellow from the single lamp that hung from the ceiling, hints of khaki and brown and blue in the soldier’s clothing, a dash of red that was a woman’s dress in the tiny drawing on the wall, its edges curling.
The three of us laughed softly—it seemed called for, given the Sad Sack details, the bulbous noses, and the zzzz’s, and the prisoner with his rump in the air. Tom laughed, too. “No da Vinci here,” he said, looking fondly at his own work. “But this is more or less the way it looked to me, if I squinted enough.”
“It’s very good,” I said, although it was indeed lopsided and amateurish, with strange proportions. “You could draw for the Sunday funnies.”
My mother said, “I like how you can see through the window.”
Smiling, blushing, Tom carefully folded the drawing along its well-worn creases and returned it to the tin. No, he wasn’t very good, he said. The guy who gave the lessons, a Southerner, was the real artist among them.
He then went on—he was a man who loved to talk—to describe the clever ways they had come up with to expand their little cache of Red Cross watercolors: boiling or mixing things, pollen and leaves, coal dust from the stove, a little ink when he could get it, beet juice, spitting into their palms to dilute some mud, some clay.
He looked up and smiled and laughed a little. “Funny enough,” he said softly, and then paused as if uncertain about going on. “Funny thing is,” he said, “I was doing exactly that one time, spitting into some clay”—he pantomimed, holding out one cupped palm, circling it with the index finger of the other, stirring—“when I thought about something from the Gospels, actually something that I think you said, Gabe,” I heard the caught and swallowed “Father.” “In a sermon, way back when.”
The man’s poor face gave everything away: he was embarrassed by where his own talk had led him, and yet driven—as if by some sudden inspiration—to go on with what he had to say.
“Shows you,” he said to me, “what a small world it is.” And then added, dissatisfied with the cliché, “Shows you nothing’s really arbitrary in this life.” He pulled himself up, leaned over the table a bit. “Anyway, here’s the thing.” He began the pantomime again. “I’m mixing up some paint and a little bit of clay, diluting it, and I spit into my palm, and I suddenly remember something you said, Gabe, about the blind man, in a sermon. Back when.” And he glanced at my brother somewhat warily.
I said, “Bill Corrigan.” I indicated the front window. “The guy across the street. He used to sit outside. His mother dressed him in a suit every day. He was blinded in the First World War. Or mostly blind. The kids used to have him call their games.”
“A blind umpire,” Gabe added.
“Gone now,” my mother said.
I said to Tom, “He killed himself during the war. Poor guy. Turned on the gas.” I pointed toward our own kitchen. “It shocked us all.” I was beginning to remember how Gabe had told me once that he’d tried to use Bill Corrigan in a sermon.
My mother said, “He had a devoted mother.”
But Tom looked at us both, shaking his head. “That’s a shame,” he said, polite and deferential, but also frowning, determined not to be diverted. “But I’m afraid I’m referring to something else. Not about Brooklyn, per se,” he added, somewhat nonsensically, but conveying anyway that he was attempting to be both intelligent and sincere. “A story from the gospels. Jesus picking up some clay and spitting into it. Putting it on the blind man’s eyes.” He looked to Gabe. “Do you remember what you said? We had a conversation about it, you and I, after Mass. We had a bite of lunch together.”
Gabe’s shirt collar was opened, and a deep flush had risen up from under it, up over his throat. The tips of his ears, too, had turned red.
“Nothing very original, I’m afraid,” Gabe said softly.
But Tom was shaking his head again. “No, no, no,” he said, so earnestly that my mother and I were silenced. Tom looked at us both, still smiling, although that hopeless uncertainty once again crossed his face. He was a guy at the mercy of his own impulse to keep talking. “You put it very well. Very profound.” He touched his balding dome as if to call forth the recollection. Seemed disappointed that he could not. “I’ll butcher it if I try to say it myself.” He screwed up his mouth, drew back in his chair. “You don’t remember?”
I looked to Gabe, hoping he would be kind. Surely it would take an effort of will not to be kind to this poor guy floundering in his own sincerity. Gabe reached out to touch the cup and saucer on the table before him.
“I probably mentioned the whole profession of faith idea,” Gabe said, relenting. “There’s really no one else in the New Testament who Jesus cures without being asked. Without a profession of faith. I always found that interesting.”
“The guy was just sitting there,” Tom added happily. “Am I right?”
Gabe nodded, generous in his small smile. “That’s right. John, chapter nine. Jesus and his disciples were having a discussion, it seems, about human suffering being a punishment for sin. The disciples pointed to the blind man begging. This man was born blind, they said, was it because his parents sinned? It was the belief in those days,” he added, young scholar, “that blindness or deformity was a punishment for the parents’ sins.”
“Grateful to be an orphan,” Tom said suddenly, and looked at my mother and me, smiling. “Or maybe that means I’m in more trouble than most.”
“Well, we’re all sinners,” Gabe said. “But the point is, no one was asking Jesus to cure the man, they were just using him to illustrate their question. And yet, Our Lord, out of compassion alone, it seems to me, approaches the man, picks up some dirt—“ He paused, ducking his head with a wry smile. “We all know the story.”
“Right,” Tom cried. He sat forward, even briefly lifted himself out of his chair. Then he looked at me and said, “There you go,” as if his point had been made. “That’s just what I was doing, fooling around with some paint”—once again he pantomimed the action, circling his finger on the palm of his hand—“a little dirt, a little spit.” He looked to my mother. “Beg your pardon,” he said. And then added, “Saliva,” correcting himself. He seemed utterly delighted by yet another connection being made, between that lonely time in the prison camp and this homely one here at our dining-room table, between Gabe’s words and his own. He looked into his palm. “And I thought about what you said, how the guy’s just sitting there, not asking, not wearing himself out with asking, you said, and, bingo, Jesus cures him. Just because he feels sorry for the guy. We had lunch together. We talked about it.” He looked up. “I don’t know,” he said cautiously. “It was a good thing to remember, over there. That you didn’t necessarily have to ask. Or even believe. It gave me hope.”
We were silent for a moment, and I could see ref
lected in his face the uncertainty with which the three of us had received his tale.
“And I don’t mean Bob Hope,” he said suddenly, as if this had been his hidden punch line all along.
We laughed, and he brushed his hands together, ridding them of the imagined earth and paint and saliva. “So that’s my war story,” he said with a grin.
“And how did you come to be there?” Gabe asked him. “In the camp?” He said it softly, as if he were speaking to a penitent. His own time on the army air force base in England had been, as far as my mother and I could tell, a triumph. He’d been promoted twice. A glorified paper pusher was how he put it when he returned, all modesty.
Tom shifted in the chair, glanced at me, and smiled. “Jerry caught us on a return run,” he said lightly. “Battered us but good. We had to bail.” He made a stage grimace. He might well have had some vaudeville in his blood. “That’s when I figured I was done for.”
His parachute training, he said, had been short and perfunctory, and after a few easy missions, he’d stopped even imagining himself jumping out of a plane. When the order came, the plane shuddering—like a subway car going over cobblestones, if you can imagine it, he said—he was pretty sure he couldn’t do it. He gripped the door. He seriously considered just hanging on. Going down with the ship. But then he felt a push from behind, and then he dropped into the worst nightmare anybody ever had: cloud, smoke, the thick smell of the fuel. A dream’s endless falling.
He laughed telling it, as if it were a joke and the joke was on him. Through the years, he would always tell it this way. It was the way even our children retold it.
He said he remembered only after he had pulled the parachute cord—touching his forehead in a comic gesture of despair—that he was supposed to count to ten before he pulled it. And then he counted anyway, a second too late, foolishly, all apologetic, as if he thought that if he counted with enough sincerity, the parachute wouldn’t notice he was counting too late. And then he counted again. All the way down, he kept counting to ten. He surprised himself, he said, thinking back on it. He surprised himself that he kept counting like that, going down, when what he should have been doing was saying his prayers.
And then out of the noise of the worst and loudest sound he had ever heard and hoped never to hear again he fell into dead silence. Nothing at all, he said—and held out his hands and made his eyes wide to replicate his astonishment.
So suddenly quiet that he thought his ears were blown out for good. He saw the air was now blue and there was a serene patchwork world beneath him. Even children running across a churchyard, into a field, and he thought—“I kid you not,” he said in his the-joke’s-on-me way—“Now, this isn’t so bad. I could get used to this.”
He was floating peacefully; there was some sunshine. The children with their open mouths were like a voiceless chorus beneath him. The terror had vanished, so too the bitter trembling. He thought, he said, “This might be even better than living.”
The children were the first to reach him when he fell, tumbling back to the hard earth, busting up his shoulder, breaking his wrist.
“But those kids,” he said, “that was the luck of the Irish, it turned out.” And he gave a kind of salute to my mother, as if she had arranged things.
Because, he said, the next thing he knew, a mad old Kraut was pointing a Luger at his head, so close that he could smell the hot metal, as if it had just been fired. “He was in a tizzy,” Tom said. “Mad as hell,” and he apologized to my mother again for his language. “I couldn’t understand anything he said but Kinder, waving the goddamn gun”—he apologized again—“and telling me, I guess, that he’d like to blow my brains out except for the kids who were there, all around us. He even tried to chase them away, but they were having too much fun, throwing little handfuls of mud in my direction, yelling their heads off. So much excitement. You know how kids are.” He laughed and touched his fingers to the teacup. “The crazy old Kraut had enough decency not to want to shoot me in front of them.”
My mother put her hands to her lips and said, “Glory be.”
Tom gave a self-deprecating wave of his hand. “Well,” he said, “to make a long story short, a German officer showed up—officer, hell, he looked all of eighteen, like a choirboy—and gave the old man Hail Columbia in German, and then told me in English, in so many words, to get out of the harness and follow him—mach schnell—if I wanted to live. It took me a few minutes to get it. I thought I was already dead.”
He laughed again, his face flushed under the light of the chandelier. He was enjoying our attention. He was a man who loved to talk.
“This fellow grabbed me under the arm. I was still wobbly kneed, shaking like a leaf, but he got me the hell out of there. He told me the old man was crazy, crazy with grief. He’d learned just the day before that his son, his only child, a German airman, had been killed by the Allies. So he was out for revenge. He would have put a bullet in my head if those kids hadn’t been there.”
“An eye for an eye,” Gabe said.
Tom sat forward. He shook his head. “But here’s the thing,” he said. He was smiling oddly, with less mirth than before. “Here’s the way I looked at it. And believe me, I had plenty of time to look at it. If the old guy had shot me, then and there, it wouldn’t have been the same. It wouldn’t have been equal.”
He turned to my mother, as if she alone needed an explanation. “I was an orphan, you see,” he told her. “A foundling-home kid. I had no father to grieve for me.” He looked to Gabe again. “So it wouldn’t have evened out, if he’d shot me right then and there. There would have been no counterpart, no American counterpart, so to speak, to match that poor old Kraut and his grief. There still would have been more pain on his side of it. The pain of a father losing a child. There wouldn’t have been any pain like that on my side, since I had no father. So it wouldn’t have been equal.”
Suddenly he lifted his eyes to the chandelier above the table, and I was both embarrassed and dismayed to see the light there reflect a sudden tear. I saw his throat move as he swallowed with some difficulty. There was, I thought, something unmanly about all this, not just the sudden emotion, but the stream of talk. I was used to more reticence at this table. And yet, there was also the unmistakable tug of sympathy for a guy who had been through so much.
There was an awkward silence—even with all my expertise I struggled to find a word of comfort. And then Gabe said softly, “We’re all of equal value in the eyes of God.”
Tom turned to him with some admiration. I was relieved to see that the tear in his eye hadn’t fallen. He brushed it away with his knuckle. “Well, that’s a nicer way to think of it,” he said. He said, “That’s a good point to consider,” and smiled again before he added, “But that don’t mean some of us won’t leave this world without anyone much taking notice.”
The platter at the center of the table was empty, and I stood to gather the plates. With some intention, I touched my hip to Tom’s arm as I leaned to reach his. He turned his head a bit, smiling, his ear somewhere in the vicinity of my breast and my heart. There was the unmistakable tug of sympathy for a guy who had known such loneliness.
I took a few minutes in the kitchen, rinsing the plates, refilling the kettle, resisting something I couldn’t define. I heard my mother telling him, “Only these two. But my husband used to say we’ve run the gamut, seeing how different they were. Different as night and day.”
When I returned to the table with another pot of tea, Gabe was saying, “Amadan was what she called me when she was a kid. Fool. Although the Bible has it that whoever calls his brother a fool will be subject to fiery Gehenna.”
Tom stood as I came in, held out my chair. He was laughing again. “Gehenna, no less,” he said, relishing the old family story of how I had squelched Gabe’s boyish piety with Mrs. Chehab’s leftover Irish. “You’re in for it, Marie,” he said, relishing, perhaps, my name.
My mother put her hands to the table and slowly rose.
Tom stood, moved to help her with her chair. She touched him gently on the arm, although she was never one to go about touching strangers. “I’ll leave it to you, Tom,” she said, “to stand between these two. I’m going back to bed.”
So I had my wedding in the pretty church, after all.
Squinting at myself in the narrow bathroom mirror, lovely in my makeup and my veil, I confess to recalling another time: How’s that, Mr. Hartnett, I thought, making eyes at my own reflection. Mr. Walter Hartnett.
Gabe walked me down the aisle and surprised me at the last minute by not merely kissing my cheek when we reached Tom but pulling me into a firm embrace. We all joked about it later, at the reception. “Like he was sending you off to the Foreign Legion,” Tom said. Gabe laughed quietly. Admitted, blushing, that he might have been a little overcome, there was so much to think about on such a day. “I am the fool of loss,” he said.
“You haven’t lost a sister,” Tom told him. “You’ve gained me. God help you.”
That night, Tom lifted the blanket and I closed my eyes completely, even though the light in the hotel room was already dim, only a thin shaft from along the bathroom door and the low glow of streetlight behind the thick curtains. “There’s not much to you, is there?” he said.
I was on my back, my hands folded together over my chest so that I was aware of both the new wedding ring on one and the feel of my own heartbeat beneath the other. I wore the white nightgown, satin and lace, that my mother had sewn. It was the centerpiece of my trousseau, and the provocative way my mother had worked the lovely lace into its bodice had come as some surprise to me. My mother, it seemed, knew things she had never spoken of.
“Take it or leave it,” I told Tom with a laugh. I was dizzy with the champagne we had drunk.
And Tom said, “Oh, I’ll take it. If I may.”
There was the stirring touch of alcohol on his breath. The taste of champagne and sweet cake at the back of my throat. The faint, lingering scent of bleach on the hotel’s sheets and pillowcases. And it was either an indication of some expertise I didn’t know he had, or of my mother’s skill with fabric and needle and thread, that I was out of the lovely gown without the slightest effort on my part, without even opening my eyes.
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