We Are Not Ourselves
We Are Not Ourselves
Matthew Thomas
Eileen Leary wants more. Raised in a downtrodden area of new York by hard-drinking, Irish immigrant parents, she dreams of another life: a better job, a bigger house, more respectable friends, a happy family. When she meets Ed Leary, a brilliant young scientist, she thinks she’s found the perfect partner to pursue and share her American Dream with. An indefatigable love enters Eileen’s life – but so too does a pervasive darkness and a loss that will last a lifetime.
Copyright (#ulink_69ecb80a-7842-5665-90e7-6871b04e468d)
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014
First published in the United States by Simon & Schuster, Inc. in 2014
Copyright © 2014 by Matthew Thomas
Matthew Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
The Author and Publishers are committed to respecting the intellectual property rights of others and have made all reasonable efforts to trace the copyright owners of the images reproduced, and to provide appropriate acknowledgement, within this book. In the event that any untraceable copyright owners come forward after the publication of this book, the Author and Publishers will use all reasonable endeavours to rectify the position accordingly.
“Touch me.” Copyright © 1995 by Stanley Kunitz, from Passing Through: The Later Poems New and Selected by Stanley Kunitz. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Cover photographs © Kim Sohee/Getty Images (houses); Mark Owen/Arcangel Images (sky).
Cover design by Christopher Lin
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Source ISBN: 9780007548217
Ebook Edition © August 2014 ISBN: 9780007548224
Version: 2015-02-20
Dedication (#ulink_30d2a04f-fbab-5473-a35e-f3ed4cd032c5)
To Joy
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.
—Stanley Kunitz
We are not ourselves
When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind
To suffer with the body.
—King Lear
Table of Contents
Cover (#u653aeca2-81a6-52cb-96de-a4df25a0a901)
Title Page (#u9ae032c0-5878-598c-97f5-9053586e631d)
Copyright (#ue1ac114a-d059-5079-aeaf-cc1d02310827)
Dedication (#u577770d8-8ff6-5184-8db9-bcbc2884a637)
Epigraph (#u3b4c9f52-aca6-539b-9d06-d587016e88aa)
Part I: Days under Sun and Rain 1951–1982 (#ueafbca23-a5cb-5317-ad2b-4ba0706a269b)
Chapter 1 (#u2637b5ec-055e-5474-b594-a586099b0780)
Chapter 2 (#ubfb6a8bc-841a-51c7-97df-e8a0d7d99449)
Chapter 3 (#u80bb799f-f891-511c-9cc6-2027acb4edea)
Chapter 4 (#ud5c6cb1e-ccf9-5ca5-b55b-36a60cf0d751)
Chapter 5 (#ue860dc6b-81db-5eee-b46f-eeea719877a3)
Chapter 6 (#u535943ac-fe90-59b8-a159-c65be9310dcb)
Chapter 7 (#u62edb4d2-172a-59a7-8d86-dc6f790ffaab)
Chapter 8 (#ua5d0b09a-3e2c-5f98-ab45-68af19957746)
Chapter 9 (#u14efb8a9-6061-5ba6-979f-9566acbae367)
Chapter 10 (#u5636c6d2-2bab-544f-99c1-2e28968f9044)
Chapter 11 (#uea237864-6eac-5bd7-aeb9-822792e886d6)
Chapter 12 (#u066f8a87-9651-5945-aa64-ce0c4eab66da)
Chapter 13 (#u4801ab70-af41-5848-b9e4-6e7106122a56)
Part II: The Salad Days Thursday, October 23, 1986 (#u520be800-d9c9-5500-a154-1b6a381ca1f0)
Chapter 14 (#ubd4defa1-4cb5-5b25-8e34-0cb7f2e0d054)
Part III: Breathe the Rich Air 1991 (#u6cbdcd9b-2b0f-58ba-8065-f86859bc7ec2)
Chapter 15 (#u8cef7c14-82fa-5dc1-9b71-a94142dceef2)
Chapter 16 (#u4cae79b4-0c39-56dd-b719-66aeb7822fe9)
Chapter 17 (#u5b035d21-6745-5445-8ccf-3c12b8f067d7)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part IV: Level, Solid, Square and True 1991–1995 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 60 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 61 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 62 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 63 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 64 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 65 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 66 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 67 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 68 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part V: Desire Is Full of Endless Distances 1996 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 69 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 70 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 71 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 72 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 73 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 74 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 75 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 76 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 77 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 78 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 79 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 80 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 81 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 82 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 83 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 84 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 85 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 86 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 87 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 88 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 89 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part VI: The Real Estate of Edmund Leary 1997–2000 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 90 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 91 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 92 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 93 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 94 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 95 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 96 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 97 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 98 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 99 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 100 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 101 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
His father was watching the line in the water. The boy caught a frog and stuck a hook in its stomach to see what it would look like going through. Slick guts clung to the hook, and a queasy guilt grabbed him. He tried to sound innocent when he asked if you could fish with frogs. His father glanced over, flared his nostrils, and shook the teeming coffee can at him. Worms spilled out and wriggled away. He told him he’d done an evil thing and that his youth was no excuse for his cruelty. He made him remove the hook and hold the twitching creature until it died. Then he passed him the bait knife and had him dig a little grave. He spoke with a terrifying lack of familiarity, as if they were simply two people on earth now and an invisible tether between them had been severed.
When he was done burying the frog, the boy took his time patting down the dirt, to avoid looking up. His father told him to think awhile about what he’d done and walked off. The boy crouched listening to the receding footsteps as tears came on and the loamy smell of rotting leaves invaded his nose. He stood and looked at the river. Dusk stole quickly through the valley. After a while, he understood he’d been there longer than his father had intended, but he couldn’t bring himself to head to the car, because he feared that when he got there he’d see that his father no longer recognized him as his own. He couldn’t imagine anything worse than that, so he tossed rocks into the river and waited for his father to come get him. When one of his throws gave none of the splashing sound he’d gotten used to hearing, and a loud croak rose up suddenly behind him, he ran, spooked, to find his father leaning against the hood with a foot up on the fender, looking as if he would’ve waited all night for him, now adjusting his cap and opening the door to drive them home. He wasn’t lost to him yet.
Part I (#ulink_4ffde876-30b8-5370-a291-4e462e030e85)
1 (#ulink_c9131656-69a4-5efc-9a49-22adc76d57d2)
Instead of going to the priest, the men who gathered at Doherty’s Bar after work went to Eileen Tumulty’s father. Eileen was there to see it for herself, even though she was only in the fourth grade. When her father finished his delivery route, around four thirty, he picked her up at step dancing and walked her over to the bar. Practice went until six, but Eileen never minded leaving the rectory basement early. Mr. Hurley was always yelling at her to get the timing right or to keep her arms flush at her sides. Eileen was too lanky for the compact movements of a dance that evolved, according to Mr. Hurley, to disguise itself as standing still when the police passed by. She wanted to learn the jitterbug or Lindy Hop, anything she could throw her restless limbs into with abandon, but her mother signed her up for Irish dancing instead.
Her mother hadn’t let go of Ireland entirely. She wasn’t a citizen yet. Her father liked to tout that he’d applied for his citizenship on the first day he was eligible to. The framed Certificate of Citizenship, dated May 3, 1938, hung in the living room across from a watercolor painting of St. Patrick banishing the snakes, the only artwork in the apartment unless you counted the carved-wood Celtic cross in the kitchen. The little photo in the certificate bore an embossed seal, a tidy signature, and a face with an implacably fierce expression. Eileen looked into it for answers, but the tight-lipped younger version of her father never gave anything up.
When Eileen’s father filled the doorway with his body, holding his Stetson hat in front of him like a shield against small talk, Mr. Hurley stopped barking, and not just at Eileen. Men were always quieting down around her father. The recording played on and the girls finished the slip jig they were running. The fiddle music was lovely when Eileen didn’t have to worry about keeping her unruly body in line. At the end of the tune, Mr. Hurley didn’t waste time giving Eileen permission to leave. He just looked at the floor while she gathered her things. She was in such a hurry to get out of there and begin the wordless walk that she waited until she got to the street to change her shoes.
When they reached the block the bar was on, Eileen ran ahead to see if she could catch one of the men sitting on her father’s stool, which she’d never seen anyone else occupy, but all she found was them gathered in a half circle around it, as if anticipation of his presence had drawn them near.
The place was smoky and she was the only kid there, but she got to watch her father hold court. Before five, the patrons were laborers like him who drank their beers deliberately, contented in their exhaustion, well-being hanging about them like a mist. After five, the office workers drifted in, clicking their coins on the crowded bar as they waited to be served. They gulped their beers and signaled for another immediately, gripping the railing with two hands and leaning in to hurry the drink along. They watched her father as much as they did the bartender.
She sat at one of the creaky tables up front, in her pleated skirt and collared blouse, doing her homework but also training an ear on her father’s conversations. She didn’t have to strain to hear what they told him, because they felt no need to whisper, even when she was only a few feet away. There was something clarifying in her father’s authority; it absolved other men of embarrassment.
“It’s driving me nuts,” his friend Tom said, fumbling to speak. “I can’t sleep.”
“Out with it.”
“I stepped out on Sheila.”
Her father leaned in closer, his eyes pinning Tom to the barstool.
“How many times?”
“Just the once.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“The second time I was too nervous to bring it off.”
“That’s twice, then.”
“It is.”
The bartender swept past to check the level of their drinks, slapped the bar towel over his shoulder, and moved along. Her father glanced at her and she pushed her pencil harder into her workbook, breaking off the point.
“Who’s the floozy?”
“A girl at the bank.”
“You’ll tell her the idiocy is over.”
“I will, Mike.”
“Are you going to be a goddamned idiot again? Tell me now.”
“No.”
A man came through the door, and her father and Tom nodded at him. A draft followed him in, chilling her bare legs and carrying the smell of spilled beer and floor cleaner to her.
“Reach into your pocket,” her father said. “Every penny you have stashed. Buy Sheila something nice.”
“Yes, that’s the thing. That’s the thing.”
“Every last penny.”
“I won’t hold out.”
“Swear before God that that’s the end of it.”
“I swear, Mike. I solemnly swear.”
“Don’t let me hear about you gallivanting around.”
“Those days are over.”
“And don’t go and do some fool thing like tell that poor woman what you’ve done. It’s enough for her to put up with you without knowing this.”
“Yes,” Tom said. “Yes.”
“You’re a damned fool.”
“I am.”
“That’s the last we’ll speak of it. Get us a couple of drinks.”
They laughed at everything he said, unless he was being serious, and then they put on grave faces. They held forth on the topic of his virtues as though he weren’t standing right there. Half of them he’d gotten jobs for off the boat—at Schaefer, at Macy’s, behind the bar, as supers or handymen.
Everybody called him Big Mike. He was reputed to be immune to pain. He had shoulders so broad that even in shirtsleeves he looked like he was wearing a suit jacket. His fists were the size of babies’ heads, and in the trunk he resembled one of the kegs of beer he carried in the crook of each elbow. He put no effort into his physique apart from his labor, and he wasn’t muscle-bound, just country strong. If you caught him in a moment of repose, he seemed to shrink to normal proportions. If you had something to hide, he grew before your eyes.
She wasn’t too young to understand that the ones who pleased him were the rare ones who didn’t drain the frothy brew of his myth in a quick quaff, but nosed around the brine of his humanity awhile, giving it skeptical sniffs.
She was only nine, but she’d figured a few things out. She knew why her father didn’t just swing by step dancing on the way home for dinner. To do so would have meant depriving the men in suits who arrived back from Manhattan toward the end of the hour of the little time he gave them every day. They loosened their ties around him, took their jackets off, huddled close, and started talking. He would’ve had to leave the bar by five thirty instead of a quarter to six, and the extra minutes made all the difference. She understood that it wasn’t only enjoyment for him, that part of what he was doing was making himself available to his men, and that his duty to her mother was just as important.
The three of them ate dinner together every night. Her mother served the meal promptly at six after spending the day cleaning bathrooms and offices at the Bulova plant. She was never in the mood for excuses. Eileen’s father checked his watch the whole way home and picked up the pace as they neared the building. Sometimes Eileen couldn’t keep up and he carried her in the final stretch. Sometimes she walked slowly on purpose in order to be borne in his arms.
One balmy evening in June, a week before her fourth-grade year ended, Eileen and her father came home to find the plates set out and the door to the bedroom closed. Her father tapped at his watch with a betrayed look, wound it, and set it to the clock above the sink, which said six twenty. Eileen had never seen him so upset. She could tell it was about something more than being late, something between her parents that she had no insight into. She was angry at her mother for adhering so rigidly to her rule, but her father didn’t seem to share that anger. He ate slowly, silently, refilling her glass when he rose to fill his own and ladling out more carrots for her from the pot on the stovetop. Then he put his coat on and went back out. Eileen went to the door of the bedroom but didn’t open it. She listened and heard nothing. She went to Mr. Kehoe’s door, but there was silence there too. She felt a sudden terror at the thought of having been abandoned. She wanted to bang on both doors and bring them out, but she knew enough not to go near her mother just then. To calm herself, she cleaned the stovetop and counters, leaving no crumbs or smudges, no evidence that her mother had cooked in the first place. She tried to imagine what it would feel like to have always been alone. She decided that being alone to begin with would be easier than being left alone. Everything would be easier than that.
She eavesdropped on her father at the bar because he didn’t talk much at home. When he did, it was to lay out basic principles as he speared a piece of meat. “A man should never go without something he wants just because he doesn’t want to work for it.” “Everyone should have a second job.” “Money is made to be spent.” (On this last point he was firm; he had no patience for American-born people with no cash in their pocket to spring for a round.)
As for his second job, it was tending bar, at Doherty’s, at Hartnett’s, at Leitrim Castle—a night a week at each. Whenever Big Mike Tumulty was the one pulling the taps and filling the tumblers, the bar filled up to the point of hazard and made tons of money, as though he were a touring thespian giving limited-run performances. Schaefer didn’t suffer either; everyone knew he was a Schaefer man. He worked at keeping the brogue her mother worked to lose; it was professionally useful.
If Eileen scrubbed up the courage to ask about her roots, he silenced her with a wave of the hand. “I’m an American,” he said, as if it settled the question, and in a sense it did.
By the time Eileen was born, in November of 1941, some traces remained of the sylvan scenes suggested in her neighborhood’s name, but the balance of Woodside’s verdancy belonged to the cemeteries that bordered it. The natural order was inverted there, the asphalt, clapboard, and brick breathing with life and the dead holding sway over the grass.
Her father came from twelve and her mother from thirteen, but Eileen had no brothers or sisters. In a four-story building set among houses planted in close rows by the river of the elevated 7 train, the three of them slept in twin beds in a room that resembled an army barracks. The other bedroom housed a lodger, Henry Kehoe, who slept like a king in exchange for offsetting some of the monthly expenses. Mr. Kehoe ate his meals elsewhere, and when he was home he sat in his room with the door closed, playing the clarinet quietly enough that Eileen had to press an ear to the door to hear it. She only saw him when he came and went or used the bathroom. It might have been strange to suffer his spectral presence if she’d ever known anything else, but as it was, it comforted her to know he was behind that door, especially on nights her father came home after drinking whiskey.
Her father didn’t always drink. Nights he tended bar, he didn’t touch a drop, and every Lent he gave it up, to prove he could—except, of course, for St. Patrick’s Day and the days bookending it.
Nights her father tended bar, Eileen and her mother turned in early and slept soundly. Nights he didn’t, though, her mother kept her up later, the two of them giving a going-over to all the little extras—the good silver, the figurines, the chandelier crystals, the picture frames. Whatever chaos might ensue upon her father’s arrival, there prevailed beforehand a palpable excitement, as if they were throwing a party for a single guest. When there was nothing left to clean or polish, her mother sent her to bed and waited on the couch. Eileen kept the bedroom door cracked.
Her father was fine when he drank beer. He hung his hat and slid his coat down deliberately onto the hook in the wall. Then he slumped on the couch like a big bear on a leash, soft and grumbling, his pipe firmly in the grip of his teeth. She could hear her mother speaking quietly to him about household matters; he would nod and press the splayed fingers of his hands together, making a steeple and collapsing it.
Some nights he even walked in dancing and made her mother laugh despite her intention to ignore him. He lifted her up from the couch and led her around the room in a slow box step. He had a terrible charisma; she wasn’t immune to it.
When he drank whiskey, though, which was mostly on paydays, the leash came off. He slammed his coat on the vestibule table and stalked the place looking for things to throw, as if the accumulated pressure of expectations at the bar could only be driven off by physical acts. It was well known what a great quantity of whiskey her father could drink without losing his composure—she’d heard the men brag about it at Doherty’s—and one night, in response to her mother’s frank and defeated question, he explained that when he was set up with a challenge, a string of rounds, he refused to disappoint the men’s faith in him, even if he had to exhaust himself concentrating on keeping his back stiff and his words sharp and clear. Everyone needed something to believe in.
He didn’t throw anything at her mother, and he only threw what didn’t break: couch pillows, books. Her mother went silent and still until he was done. If he saw Eileen peeking at him through the sliver in the bedroom door, he stopped abruptly, like an actor who’d forgotten his line, and went into the bathroom. Her mother slid into bed. In the morning, he glowered over a cup of tea, blinking his eyes slowly like a lizard.
Sometimes Eileen could hear the Gradys or the Longs fighting. She found succor in the sound of that anger; it meant her family wasn’t the only troubled one in the building. Her parents shared moments of dark communion over it too, raising brows at each other across the kitchen table or exchanging wan smiles when the voices started up.
Once, over dinner, her father gestured toward Mr. Kehoe’s room. “We won’t have him here forever,” he said to her mother. As Eileen was struck by sadness at the thought of life without Mr. Kehoe, her father added, “Lord willing.”
No matter how often she strained to hear Mr. Kehoe through the walls, the only sounds were the squeaks of bedsprings, the low scratching of a pen when he sat at the little desk, or the quiet rasp of the clarinet.
They were at the dinner table when her mother stood and left the room in a hurry. Her father followed, pulling the bedroom door closed behind him. Their voices were hushed, but Eileen could hear the straining energy in them. She inched closer.
“I’ll get it back.”
“You’re a damned idiot.”
“I’ll make it right.”
“How? ‘Big Mike doesn’t borrow a penny from any man,’” she sneered.
“There’ll be a way.”
“How could you let it get so out of hand?”
“You think I want my wife and daughter living in this place?”
“Oh, that’s just grand. It’s our fault now, is it?”
“I’m not saying that.”
In the living room, the wind shifted the bedroom door against Eileen’s hands, making her heart beat faster.
“You love the horses and numbers,” her mother said. “Don’t make it into something it wasn’t.”
“It was in the back of my mind,” her father said. “I know you don’t want to be here.”
“I once believed you could wind up being mayor of New York,” her mother said. “But you’re satisfied being mayor of Doherty’s. Not even owner of Doherty’s. Mayor of Doherty’s.” She paused. “I should never have taken that damn thing off my finger.”
“I’ll get it back. I promise.”
“You won’t, and you know it.” Her mother had been stifling her shouts, practically hissing, but now she sounded merely sad. “You chip away and chip away. One day there won’t be anything left.”
“That’s enough now,” her father said, and in the silence that followed Eileen pictured them standing in the mysterious knowledge that passed between them, like two stone figures whose hearts she would never fathom.
The next time she was alone in the house, she went to the bureau drawer where her mother had stashed her engagement ring for safekeeping ever since the time she’d almost lost it down the drain while doing dishes. From time to time, Eileen had observed her opening the box. She’d thought her mother had been letting its facets catch the light for a spell, but now that she saw the empty space where the box had been, she realized her mother had been making sure it was still there.
A week before her tenth birthday, Eileen walked in with her father and saw that her mother wasn’t in the kitchen. She wasn’t in the bedroom either, or the bathroom, and she hadn’t left a note.
Her father heated up a can of beans, fried some bacon, and put out a few slices of bread.
Her mother came home while they were eating. “Congratulate me,” she said as she hung up her coat.
Her father waited until he finished chewing. “For what?”
Her mother slapped some papers on the table and looked at him intently in that way she sometimes did when she was trying to get a rise out of him. He bit another piece of bacon and picked the papers up as he worked the meat in his jaw. His brow furrowed as he read. Then he put them down.
“How could you do this?” he asked quietly. “How could you let it not be me?”
If Eileen didn’t know better, she would have said he sounded hurt, but nothing on earth was capable of hurting her father.
Her mother looked almost disappointed not to be yelled at. She gathered the papers and went into the bedroom. A few minutes later, her father took his hat off the hook and left.
Eileen went in and sat on her own bed. Her mother was at the window, smoking.
“What happened? I don’t understand.”
“Those are naturalization papers.” Her mother pointed to the dresser. “Go ahead, take a look.” Eileen walked over and picked them up. “As of today, I’m a citizen of the United States. Congratulate me.”
“Congratulations,” Eileen said.
Her mother produced a sad little grin between drags. “I started this months ago,” she said. “I didn’t tell your father. I was going to surprise him, bring him along. It would have meant something to him to be my sponsor at the swearing in. Then I decided to hurt him. I brought my cousin Danny Glasheen instead.”
Eileen nodded; there was Danny’s name. The papers looked like the kind that would be kept in a file for hundreds of years, for as long as civilization lasted.
“Now I wish I could take it back.” Her mother gave a rueful laugh. “Your father is a creature of great ceremony.”
Eileen wasn’t sure what her mother meant, but she thought it had to do with the way it mattered to her father to carry even little things out the right way. She’d seen it herself: the way he took the elbow of a man who’d had too much to drink and leaned him into the bar to keep him on his feet without his noticing he was being aided; the way he never knocked a beer glass over or spilled a drop of whiskey; the way he kept his hair combed neat, no strand out of place. She’d watched him carry the casket at a few funerals. He made it seem as if keeping one’s eyes forward, one’s posture straight, and one’s pace steady while bearing a dead man down the steps of a church as a bagpiper played was the most crucial task in the world. It was part of why men felt so strongly about him. It must have been part of why her mother did too.
“Don’t ever love anyone,” her mother said, picking the papers up and sliding them into the bureau drawer she’d kept her ring in. “All you’ll do is break your own heart.”
2 (#ulink_2cbbc086-397d-5c83-9b3b-bbc37c5efadc)
In the spring of 1952, Eileen’s mother made the amazing announcement that she was pregnant. Eileen had never even seen her parents hold hands. If her aunt Kitty hadn’t told her that they’d met at one of the Irish dance halls and found some renown there as a dancing pair, Eileen might have believed her parents had never touched. Here her mother was, though, pregnant as anyone. The world was full of mysteries.
Her mother quit her job at Bulova and sat on the couch knitting a blanket for the baby. When she tied off the last corner, she moved on to making a hat. A sweater followed, then a pair of bootees. Everything was stark white. She kept the miniature clothes in a drawer in the breakfront. The crafting was expert, with tight stitches and neat rows. Eileen never even knew her mother could knit. She wondered if her mother had made clothes for her family in Ireland, or to sell in a store, but she knew enough not to ask. She couldn’t even bring herself to seek permission to rub the bump on her mother’s belly. The closest she got to the baby was when she went to the drawer to examine the articles her mother had knitted, running her hands over their smoothness and putting them up to her face. One night, after her mother had gone to bed, she picked up the knitting needles, which were still warm from use. Between them swayed the bootee to complete the pair. Eileen tried to picture this baby who would help her populate the apartment and whose cheeks she would cover in kisses, but all she saw was her mother’s face in miniature, wearing that dubious expression she wore when Eileen went looking for affection. She concentrated hard until she stopped seeing her mother’s face and saw instead the smiling face of a baby beaming with light and joy. She was determined to have a relationship with this sibling that would have nothing to do with their parents.
Eileen was so excited to get a baby brother or sister that she physically felt her heart breaking when her father told her that her mother had miscarried. When a dilation and curettage didn’t stop the bleeding, the doctors gave her a hysterectomy.
After the hysterectomy, her mother developed a bladder infection that nearly killed her. She stayed in the hospital on sulfa drugs while it drained. Children weren’t encouraged to visit the sick, so Eileen saw her mother less than once a month. Her father rarely spoke of her mother during this period that stretched into a handful of months, then half a year and beyond. When he intended to bring Eileen to see her, he would say something vague like, “We’re going, get yourself ready.” Otherwise, it was as if she’d been erased from their lives.
It didn’t take long for Eileen to figure out that she wasn’t supposed to mention her mother, but one night, a couple of weeks into the new order, she brought her up a few times in quick succession anyway, just to see how her father would react. “That’s enough now,” he snapped, rising from the table, evidence of suppressed emotion on his face. “Clean up these dishes.” He left the room, as though it were too painful for him to remain where his absent wife had been invoked. And yet they spent so much time fighting. Eileen decided she would never understand the relations between men and women.
She was left to handle the cooking and cleaning. Her father set aside money for her to shop and go to the Laundromat. She rode her bike to one of the last remaining farms in the neighborhood to buy fresh vegetables, and she developed her own little repertory of dishes by replicating what she’d seen her mother make: beef stew with carrots and green beans; London broil; soda bread; lamb chops and baked potatoes. She took a cookbook out of the library and started ranging afield. She made lasagna just once, beating her fist on the countertop when it turned out soupy after all that work.
After doing her homework by the muted light of the end table lamp, she sat on the floor, building towers of playing cards, or went upstairs to the Schmidts’ to watch television and marvel over the mothers who never stopped smiling and the fathers who folded the newspaper down to talk to their children.
At school she usually had the answer worked out before the other girls put up their hands, but the last thing she wanted was to draw any kind of attention to herself. She would have chosen, of all powers, the power to be invisible.
One day, her father took her to Jackson Heights, stopping at a huge cooperative apartment complex that spanned the width of a block and most of its length. They descended into the basement apartment of the super, one of her father’s friends. From the kitchen she looked up at the ground level through a set of steel bars. There was grass out there, blindingly green grass. She asked to go outside. “Only as long as you don’t step foot on that grass,” her father’s friend said. “Not even the people who live here are allowed on it. They pay me good money to make sure it stays useless.” He and her father shared a laugh she didn’t understand.
A frame of connected buildings enclosed a massive lawn girdled by a short wrought-iron railing. Nothing would have been easier than clearing that little fence. Around the lawn and through its middle ran a handsome brick path. She walked the routes of the two smaller rectangles and the outer, larger one, wending her way through all the permutations, listening to the chirping of the birds in the trees and the rustling of the leaves in the wind. Gas lamps stood like guardians of the prosperity they would light when evening came. She felt an amazing peace. There were no cars rushing around, no people pushing shopping carts home. One old lady waved to her before disappearing inside. Eileen would have been content to live out there, looking up into the curtain-fringed windows. She didn’t need to set foot on that grass. Maybe someone would bring her upstairs and she could look down on the whole lawn at once. The lights were on in the dining room of one apartment on the second floor, and she stopped to stare into it. A grandfather clock and a beautiful wall unit gazed down benignly at a bowl on the table. She couldn’t see what was in the bowl, but she knew it was her favorite fruit.
The people who lived in this building had figured out something important about life, and she’d stumbled upon their secret. There were places, she now saw, that contained more happiness than ordinary places did. Unless you knew that such places existed, you might be content to stay where you were. She imagined more places like this, hidden behind walls or stands of trees, places where people kept their secrets to themselves.
When the soles of her shoes wore through, her father, in his infinite ignorance of all things feminine, brought home a new, manure-brown pair Eileen was sure were meant for boys. When she refused to wear them, her father confiscated her old pair so she had no choice, and when she complained the next night that the other girls had laughed at her, he said, “They cover your feet and keep you warm.” At her age, he told her, he had been grateful to get secondhand shoes, let alone new ones.
“If my mother were well,” she said bitterly, “she wouldn’t make me wear them.”
“Yes, but she’s not well. And she’s not here.”
The quaver in his throat frightened her enough that she didn’t argue. The following night, he brought home a perfectly dainty, gleaming, pearlescent pair.
“Let that be an end to it,” he said.
Mr. Kehoe came home late, but he never seemed drunk. He was unfailingly polite. Despite the fact that he’d been there since she was two years old, it always felt to Eileen as if he’d just moved in.
She took to cooking extra for him and bringing a plate to his room. He answered her knock with a smile and received the offering gratefully. Her father grumbled about charging a board fee.
Mr. Kehoe had a smear of black in a full head of otherwise gray hair. It looked as if he’d been streaked by a tar brush. When he wasn’t wearing his tweed jacket with the worn cuffs, he rolled his shirt sleeves and kept his tie a little loose.
He started battling through fitful bouts of coughing. One night, she went to his door with some tea; another, she brought him cough syrup.
“It’s just that I don’t get enough air,” Mr. Kehoe said. “I’ll take some long walks.”
Even through severe coughing fits he managed to play the clarinet. She’d stopped trying to hide her efforts to listen to it. She sat on the floor beside his door, with her back to the wall, reading her schoolbooks. In the lonely evenings she felt no need to apologize for her interest. Sometimes she even whistled along.
One night, her father sat quietly on the couch after dinner with a troubled look on his face. Eileen avoided him, occupying her usual spot by Mr. Kehoe’s door. Heat rattling through the pipes joined the clarinet in a kind of musical harmony. She looked up and was unnerved to find her father looking back at her, which he never did. She concentrated on her beautifully illustrated copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The day before, when she’d told him that Mr. Kehoe had given it to her, her father had grown upset. She’d seen him knock on Mr. Kehoe’s door a little while later and hand him some money.
She was absorbed in “The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was” when her father startled her away from the door. She barely had time to step aside before he had thrown Mr. Kehoe’s door open and told him to quit making that racket. Mr. Kehoe apologized for causing a disturbance, but Eileen knew there had been none; you could barely hear him playing from where her father had been sitting.
Her father tried to snatch the clarinet from Mr. Kehoe’s hands. Mr. Kehoe stood up, clutching it, until its pieces started coming apart and he staggered backward, coughing wildly. Her father went out to the kitchen and turned up the radio loud enough that the neighbors started banging on the ceiling.
When she came home the next day, Mr. Kehoe was gone.
For almost a week, she didn’t speak to her father. They passed each other without a word, like an old married couple. Then her father stopped her in the hall.
“He was going to have to leave,” he said. “I just made it happen sooner.”
“He didn’t have to go anywhere,” she said.
“Your mother is coming home.”
She was excited and terrified all at once. She’d started thinking her mother might never come back. She was going to have to give up control of the house. She wouldn’t have her father to herself anymore.
“What does that have to do with Mr. Kehoe?”
“You can move your things over there tonight.”
“You’re not getting another lodger?”
He shook his head. A thrilling feeling of possibility took her over.
“I’m getting my own room?”
Her father looked away. “Your mother has decided that she’s moving over there with you.”
3 (#ulink_edcf3846-4a6d-5fd3-80da-ba80eac9dd47)
On the Wednesday after Easter of 1953, eight months after she’d left, her mother came home from the hospital. The separate rooms were as close as her parents could ever come to divorce.
Her mother got a job behind the counter at Loft’s, a fancy confectioner’s on Forty-Second Street, and started coming home late, often drunk. In protest, Eileen let dirty dishes stack up in the sink and piles of clothes amass in the bedroom corners. When she got teased in the schoolyard for the wrinkles in her blouse, she saw she had no choice but to continue the homemaking alone.
Her mother began drinking at home, settling her lanky body into the depression in the couch, in one hand a glass of Scotch, in the other a cigarette whose elongated ash worm would cling to the end as if working up the nerve to leap. Eileen watched helplessly as the malevolent thing accumulated mass. Her mother held an ashtray in her lap, but sometimes the embers fell into the cushions instead and Eileen rushed to pluck them out. Her mother fell asleep on the couch many nights, but she went to work no matter her condition.
That summer, her mother bought a window air-conditioning unit from Stevens on Queens Boulevard. She had the delivery man install it in the bedroom she shared with Eileen. No one else on their floor had an air conditioner. She invited Mrs. Grady and Mrs. Long over and into the bedroom, where they stood before the unit’s indefatigable wind, staring as though at a savior child possessed of healing powers.
When both her parents were home, an uneasy truce prevailed. Her mother closed the bedroom door and sat by the window, watching night encroach on the street. Eileen brought her tea after dinner. Her father stationed himself at the kitchen table, puffing at his pipe and listening to Irish football. At least they were under the same roof.
She hated thinking of her mother riding the trains. She saw her mother’s body sprawled in dark subway tunnels as she sat at the kitchen table for hours watching the door. As soon as she heard the key shunting the dead bolt aside, she rose to put the kettle on or wash dishes. She wouldn’t give her mother the satisfaction of knowing she was worried about her.
One night, after she had cooked the dinner and washed the pots and pans, she nestled exhausted into the couch, where her mother sat smoking a cigarette and staring ahead. Tentatively, she laid her head in her mother’s lap and kept still. She watched the smoke pour through her mother’s pale lips and the ash get longer. Other than a few new wrinkles around the mouth and some blossoms of burst blood vessels on her cheeks, her mother’s skin was still smooth and full and porcelain white. She still had those dramatic lips. Only her stained teeth showed evidence of wear.
“Why don’t you give me hugs and kisses like the mothers on television?”
Eileen waited for her to say something sharp in response, but her mother just stubbed out the butt and picked up the pack to smoke another. There was a long silence.
“Don’t you think you’re a little old for this?” her mother finally asked. Eventually she moved Eileen aside and rose to pour herself a tall drink. She sat back down with it.
“I wasn’t like your father,” she said. “I couldn’t wait to escape the farm. I remember I was packing my bag, I heard my father say to my mother, ‘Deirdre, let her go. This is no place for a young person.’ I was eighteen. I came looking for Arcadia, but instead I found domestic work on Long Island. I rode the train out and back in the crepuscular hours. Cre-pus-cu-lar. You probably don’t know what that word means.”
She could tell her mother had begun one of those sodden monologues she delivered from time to time, full of edgy eloquence. Eileen just sat and listened.
“I used to daydream about living in the mansions I cleaned. I liked to do windows, everyone else’s least-favorite job. I could look out on rolling lawns. They didn’t have a single rock, those lawns. I liked to look at the tennis courts. Perfectly level, and not a twig out of place. They suggested … what?—the taming of chaos. I liked the windswept dunes, the spray of crashing waves, the sailboats tied to docks. And when I went out to run the rag over the other side, I looked in on women reclining on divans like cats that had supped from bowls of milk. I didn’t begrudge them their ease. In their place, I would have planted myself on an elbow from the moment I rose in the morning until the time came for me”—her mother made a languorous gesture with her finger that reminded Eileen of the way bony Death pointed—“to be prodded back to the silken sheets.”
“It sounds nice,” Eileen said.
“It wasn’t nice,” her mother said sharply after the few beats it took her thoughts to cohere. “It was—marvelous, is what it was.”
A few days before Christmas, her mother told her to take the train in to Loft’s a little before the end of her shift. When Eileen arrived, her mother looked so effortlessly composed that one would never know she’d become a serious drinker. Eileen walked around the store in stupefaction, gaping at the handcrafted, glazed, and filigreed confections.
When her mother was done, she gave Eileen a box of truffles to take home and walked her over to Fifth Avenue and down to Thirty-Ninth Street, to the windows of Lord & Taylor, which Eileen had seen only in pictures in the newspaper. The scenes behind the windows, with their warmly lit fireplaces and silky-looking upholstered miniature furniture, gave her the same feeling she’d had when she’d stood before that great lawn and peered up into the perfect world of the garden apartments. Gorgeous drapery framed a picture she wanted to climb into and live in. Brisk winds blew, but the air was not too cold, and the refreshing smell of winter tickled her nose. In the remnant daylight, the avenue began to take on some of the enchanted quality visible behind the windows. It thrilled her to imagine that passersby saw an ordinary mother-daughter pair enjoying a routine evening of shopping together. She checked people’s faces for evidence of what they were thinking: What a nice little family.
“Christmas gets the full treatment,” her mother said in the train on the way home. “Mind that you remember that. It doesn’t matter what else is going on. You could be at death’s door, I don’t care.”
That night, her mother tucked her in for the first time since she’d gone into the hospital. When Eileen awoke in the middle of the night and saw the other bed empty, she stumbled out to find her mother sitting on the couch. For a terrible instant, Eileen thought her mother was dead. Her head hung back, mouth open. Her hand clutched the empty tumbler. Eileen drew close and watched her chest rise and fall, then took the ashtray from her lap and the tumbler from her hand, careful not to wake her, and brought both to the kitchen sink. She took the blanket from her mother’s bed and spread it over her. She slept with the door open in order to see her from where she lay.
The package she received in the mail contained a book on how to play the clarinet and, beneath it, Mr. Kehoe’s own clarinet. A note on legal stationery said that he’d died of lung cancer and left it to her in his will. She slept beside it for several days until her mother found it one morning and told her to stop, calling it ghoulish. She tried to play it a few times but grew frustrated at the halting noises it produced. With an undiminished memory for its muffled, sensuous sound through the walls, she thought of Mr. Kehoe. She could hear whole songs when she shut her eyes and concentrated, as if the music were waiting to be extracted from her by a trained hand. She could never even string together a couple of familiar-sounding notes. Eventually she took to laying out its pieces and looking at them awhile before fitting them back into the soft pink felt that lined the case. She didn’t need to play Mr. Kehoe’s clarinet to appreciate it. Its parts were sleek and expertly wrought, their burnished metal protuberances shining with a lustrous gleam. They filled her hand with a pleasant weight. She liked to press the buttons down; they moved with ease and settled back up with a lovely firmness. The mouthpiece where Mr. Kehoe had pressed his lips came to a tapered end. She liked the feel of it against her own lips, the pressure against her teeth when she bit down.
The clarinet was the nicest thing she owned, the nicest thing anyone in her family owned. It didn’t belong in that apartment, she decided. When she was older she would live in a beautiful enough home that you wouldn’t even notice the clarinet. That was what Mr. Kehoe would have wanted. She would have to marry a man who would make it possible.
When she was thirteen, she started working at the Laundromat. The first time she got paid, after kneading the bills awhile between her thumb and forefinger, she spread them on the table before her and did some math. If she kept working and saved every dollar she could, she wouldn’t need anything at all from her parents once she was done with high school—maybe even before. The prospect excited her, though excitement gave way to sadness. She didn’t want to think of not needing anything from them. She would save her money for them.
Her mother drank harder than her father ever had, as though she were trying to make up for lost time. Eileen started tending to her needs in a prophylactic rather than merely reactive way. She made coffee, kept a constant supply of aspirin waiting for her, and lay a blanket over her when she fell asleep on the couch.
One night, Eileen came into the living room and saw that her mother’s head was bobbing in that way it did when she fought sleep to hold on to a last few moments of conscious drunkenness. Sitting with her was easiest then. She was too far gone to say something tart and withering but could still register Eileen’s presence with a tiny fluttering of the eyelid.
Eileen took a seat next to her and felt wetness under her hand. At first she thought her mother had spilled her drink.
She was terrified to change her mother’s clothes, because there was a chance her mother might realize what was going on, but she couldn’t just let her sit there in that sopping spot all night. She managed to remove her wet clothes and wrap her in a robe. Then she lay her back down on the dry part of the couch. Getting her to bed would be much harder.
Eileen sat on her haunches next to the couch and guided her mother’s head and shoulders from her lap to the floor, then dragged the rest of her down. Once she had her there, she slid her along by hooking her arms up under her mother’s armpits. Her mother was making murmuring noises. When Eileen got her to the bed, though, she couldn’t lift her up into it. Her mother had stirred to more wakefulness and was trying to stay on the floor.
“Let me get you up, Ma,” she said.
“I’ll sleep right here.”
“You can’t sleep on the floor.”
“I will,” she said, the end of the word trilling off. Her brogue came back when she was drunk or angry.
“It’s cold on the floor. Let me lift you up.”
“Leave me be.”
“I won’t do that.”
Eileen tried for a while and then gave up and lay on her mother’s bed to rest. When she awoke it was to the sound of her father coming home from tending bar. She went to the kitchen and saw him sitting at the table with a glass of water.
“Can you pick Ma up? She’s on the floor.”
He stood without a word and followed her. It occurred to her that, except on Mr. Kehoe’s last night, she’d never seen her father enter that bedroom. In the light streaming in from the kitchen, her mother looked like a pile of dirty sheets on the floor.
Eileen watched him pick her mother up with astounding ease, as if he could have done it with one hand instead of two. One of his arms was cradling her head. Her long limbs hung down; she was fast asleep. He took his time laying her in the bed. He looked at her lying there. Eileen heard him say “Bridgie” once quietly, more to himself than her mother, before he pulled the blanket over her and smoothed it across her shoulders.
“Go to bed now yourself,” he said, and shut the door behind him.
“Imagine all of Woodside filled with trees,” Sister Mary Alice was telling her eighth-grade class. “Imagine a gorgeous, sprawling, untouched estate of well over a hundred acres. That is what was here, boys and girls. What is now your neighborhood, all of it, every inch, once belonged to a single family that traces its roots back to the very beginnings of this country.”
A garbage truck in front of the school emitted a few loud coughs, and Sister paused to let it pass. The rolled-up map above the blackboard swayed slightly, and Eileen imagined it unfurling and hitting Sister in the head.
“The grandson of one of the early Puritan founders of Cambridge, Massachusetts, built a farmhouse near this spot, on a massive plot of land he’d bought.” Sister started walking around the room with a book held open to a page that contained pictures of the house. “His heirs converted that farmhouse into a manor house. This manor house”—Sister practically spat the words—“had a wide hall leading to a large front parlor. It had a back parlor with a huge fireplace, a grand kitchen, a brass knocker on the door. It had an orchard to one side.” The insistent way Sister counted off the house’s virtues made it sound as if she was building a case against it in court. “After a few generations, they sold the estate to a Manhattan-based merchant from South Carolina to use as a weekend retreat. Then, in the latter half of the last century, when the train lines expanded, a real estate developer saw an opportunity. He cleared the estate’s trees, drained its swamps, laid out the streets you walk on today, and carved it into nearly a thousand lots that he distributed by random drawing. He opened the door to the middle class, letting them pay in installments of ten dollars a month. Houses were built. The last vestige of the estate, the manor house, was razed in 1895 to make room for the church, and, eventually, the school you’re sitting in right now.”
Eileen was watching the frowning white face of the clock at the front of the room when Sister came up to her with the book. Her gaze drifted lazily to the pictures, but once she saw them she couldn’t take her eyes off them, and when Sister moved down the row, Eileen asked her to come back for a second.
“The Queensboro Bridge was completed in 1909, and then the LIRR East River tunnel the following year, and they began laying out the IRT Flushing line—the seven train to you—station by station, starting in 1915. The Irish—your grandparents, maybe your parents—began coming across the river in droves, seeking relief from the tenement slums of Manhattan. They wound up in Woodside. Imagine ten people to an apartment, twenty. Then, in 1924—providence. The City Housing Corporation began building houses and apartments to alleviate the density problem.” Sister had made it back to the front of the room. The faint outline of a smile of triumph crept onto her lips as she addressed her final arguments to the jury. “This is the way the Lord works. To those who have little, he gives. Isn’t it nice to think of all of you here instead of it just one privileged family in a mansion in the woods? Wouldn’t you agree, Miss Tumulty?”
Eileen had been daydreaming about the demolished mansion she’d just seen the picture of. Sister’s question snapped her to attention. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
But all she could think was what a shame it was they’d knocked that house down. A big, beautiful house in the country with land around it—that wasn’t a bad thing at all.
“And think of this,” Sister Mary Alice said in closing. “Not a single one of you would be here if that estate were still around. None of us would. We simply wouldn’t exist.”
Eileen looked around at her classmates and tried to conceive of a reality in which none of them had come into being. She thought of the little apartment she lived in with her parents. Would it be a loss if it had never been built?
She pictured herself on a couch in that mansion, looking out a window at a stand of trees. She saw herself sitting with her legs crossed as she flipped through the pages of a big book. Someone had to be born in a house like that; why couldn’t it have been her?
Maybe she wouldn’t have been born there, but she’d have been born somewhere, and she’d have found a way to get there, even if the others didn’t.
Some nights she went up the block to see her aunt Kitty and her cousin Pat, who was four and a half years younger than her. Her uncle Paddy, her father’s older brother, had died when Pat was two, and Pat looked up to her father like he was his own father.
Eileen had grown up reading to Pat. She’d delivered him to school an early reader, and he could write when the other kids were still learning the alphabet. He was whip-smart, but his grades didn’t show it because he never did his homework. He read constantly, as long as it wasn’t for school.
She sat him at the kitchen table and made him open his schoolbooks. She told him he had to get As, that anything less was unacceptable. She said there was no end to what he could do with her help. She told him she wanted him to be successful, and rich enough to buy a mansion. She would live in a wing of it. He just rushed through his work and read adventure stories. All he wanted to do when he grew up was drive a Schaefer truck.
Her mother’s morning powers of self-mastery, so impressive in the early days, began to dry up, until, when Eileen was a freshman in high school—she’d earned a full scholarship to St. Helena’s in the Bronx—they evaporated overnight. Her mother went in late to Loft’s one day, and then she did so again a couple of days later, and then she simply stopped going in at all. One day she passed out in the lobby and the police carried her upstairs. After the officers left—her father being who he was meant nothing would get written up—Eileen didn’t say a word or try to change her mother into clean clothes, because her mother would be embarrassed, and Eileen still feared her wrath, even when her mother was slack as a sack of wheat, because the memory of her mother taking the hanger to her when she misbehaved as a child was never far from her mind.
The next day, when they were both at the kitchen table, her mother smoking in silent languor, Eileen told her she was going to call Alcoholics Anonymous. She didn’t mention that she’d gotten the number from her aunt Kitty, that she’d been talking to others in the family about her mother’s problem.
“Do what you want,” her mother said, and then watched with surprising interest as Eileen dialed. A woman answered; Eileen told her that her mother needed help. The woman said they wanted to help her, but her mother had to ask for help herself.
Eileen’s heart sank. “She’s not going to ask for help,” she said, and she felt tears welling up. She saw her mother’s darting eyes notice the tears, and she wiped them quickly away.
“We need her to ask for assistance before we can take action,” the woman said. “I’m very sorry. Don’t give up. There are people you can talk to.”
“What are they saying?” her mother asked, pulling the belt on her robe into a tight knot.
Eileen put her hand over the receiver and explained the situation.
“Give me that goddamned phone,” her mother said, stubbing out her cigarette and rising. “I need help,” she said into it. “Did you hear the girl? Goddammit, I need help.”
A pair of men came to the apartment the following evening to meet her mother. Eileen had never been more grateful not to find her father home. She sat with them as they explained that they were going to arrange for her mother to be admitted to Knickerbocker Hospital. They would return the next evening to take her in.
That night, as soon as the men had left, her mother took the bottle of whiskey down off the shelf and sat on the couch pouring a little of it at a time into a tumbler. She drank it deliberately, as if she were taking medicine. They’d told her mother to pack enough clothing for two weeks, so Eileen filled a small duffel bag for her and slipped it under the bed. She would explain things to her father once her mother was in the hospital.
Eileen spent the school day worrying that, with so many hours left before the men returned, something would go awry. Her mother seemed okay, though, when Eileen got home. All in the apartment was still. The kettle sat shining on the small four-burner stove, the floor was swept, the blinds were pulled evenly across the windows. Eileen cooked some sausage and eggs for them to eat together. Her mother ate slowly. When the men arrived, shortly before six o’clock, both wearing suits, her mother acquiesced without denying she’d agreed to go. The strangely tender, sorrowful look she wore as she shuffled around the apartment gathering the last of the things she needed—toothbrush, wallet, a book—made Eileen’s chest ache.
Eileen rode with them to the hospital. At the end, the two men drove her back. When they reached the apartment building, the driver put the car in park and sat motionless while the man in the passenger seat came around to open her door. She stood outside the car, thinking she might like to say something to express her gratitude, but there wasn’t a way to do it. The man took his hat off. A strange, knowing silence filtered into the air around them. She was glad these men weren’t the kind that said much. He handed her a piece of paper with a phone number on it.
“Call if you need anything,” he said. “Any hour.” Then they drove off.
Her mother stayed in for nine days. When she reemerged, she attended meetings and took a job cleaning grammar schools in Bayside. She complained about being beholden to the Long Island Rail Road schedule, but Eileen figured what actually bothered her was all the time she had to herself on the train to consider how she hadn’t gotten very far in the years since she’d made similar trips.
Eileen dreamed of taking a dramatic journey of her own. When she learned about Death Valley in geography class, how it was the hottest and driest spot in North America, she decided to visit it sometime, even though she wouldn’t be able to leave her alabaster skin exposed there for long without suffering a terrible burn. A vast, desert expanse like that was the only place she could imagine not minding the absence of company.
4 (#ulink_78bc7307-4473-57b2-8b8e-e963547ee66c)
In the fall of 1956, when Eileen was a sophomore, another round of relatives started coming over from Ireland. How she loved it! Sure, at times the apartment was like a sick ward, teeming with newly landed, sniffling relations who commandeered a bit of the floor or even her own bed, but still: with all those people crowded around, her father came alive, charming them like a circus animal keeping a ball aloft on the tip of its nose, and her mother worked alongside her to keep the peace in cramped quarters.
Over a dozen people passed through their little space: her mother’s youngest sister Margie, who was only a few years older than Eileen and whom her mother had never met; her aunts Ronnie and Lily; her uncles Desi, Eddie, and Davy; her cousins Nora, Brendan, Mickey, Eamonn, Declan, Margaret, Trish, and Sean. Two or three or even four would stay with them at a time, until that group found an apartment in Rockaway or Woodlawn or Inwood and the next moved in. Nothing came close to the feeling Eileen got when they gathered at the table for meals, and when she awoke in the night and heard the gentle snoring and the shuffling sound of their rolling sleep, she was sure she’d never felt happier.
Uncle Desi, her father’s youngest brother, was the first to arrive. He moved into the room with her father. The first time her father wasn’t around, Eileen peppered Desi with questions. It wasn’t hard to get him to talk. It was as if he’d turned a faucet on and the words came pouring out.
“Your father loved Kinvara,” Uncle Desi said. “He was the happiest fellow you could imagine. A smile from ear to ear all day long. Then we were made to move to Loughrea when the Land Reform laws came. We went to better farmland, but I believe he never got over the sting of leaving those fields and that house he’d helped to build as a lad.”
The apartment and neighbors and outside noises seemed to succumb to Desi’s charms. All went hush as he rubbed his bristled chin.
“I was much younger than him, seven or so when we moved, so I had a grand time building the new house. We pulled it up out of the land. We boys and our father dug clay, dragged timbers from the bog, and harvested the thatch for the roof. I tell you, it was plumb and solid, still is. Everyone was satisfied but your father. He said that if they could take one house from you against your will, they could take another. He never settled into it. The sky was his ceiling, I suppose. One thing: he never had to be asked twice to work. Jesus, he never had to be asked once. He was always working. The stone walls he built—you would have thought they were a mile around.
“All he ever wanted was a little money to play cards. There’d be poker games that would last five days. That, and a chance to work in the fields. When I tell you he had strength enough to bend a hammer, I don’t know if you’ll believe me. The only thing he wanted it for was to pull up stubborn vegetables. Then, in 1931—your father must have been twenty-four—my eldest brother Willie, he was a beat cop in Dublin, well, he developed a cataract. He went blind in that eye and had to come back to the farm. The plot wasn’t big enough to support two men and my father, and there wasn’t a job to be found on the entire godforsaken island, not even for a man like your father.”
He raised one brow and clicked his tongue dramatically, as if to suggest that the failure to find room for his older brother spelled doom for the country he had left behind.
“The best our father could do for him was buy him a ticket over. It was Willie who’d wanted to emigrate, not your father, but that was out of the question. This country didn’t admit the infirm.
“Our father gave him three months. Your father spent the time plowing, harrowing, and sowing, barely stopping to eat or sleep. A man could be forgiven for wondering if he were trying to die in the fields. His friends threw the biggest good-bye party in memory; it lasted three days and nights. What a time! At the end, your father went directly from the revelry to the crops. People tried to get him to go in and sleep, but he wouldn’t listen. He worked through the night. Our father went out in the morning, the ticket in his hand; I followed behind. He found him ripping out weeds. I’ll never forget what he said.”
Desi paused. He stood up to act out the scene.
“‘Michael John,’ he said, handing it over.” He stretched an imaginary ticket toward her. “‘You have to go. And that’s that.’ Then he turned back to the house.” Desi faced away, took a couple of steps and looped back. “I stood there for a while with your father in perfect silence. Our mother took him to the boat.”
He sat back down and eyed his empty teacup. She got up to refill it for him.
“I remember the first letter from your father,” Desi said as he chewed some shortbread. “He said the hardest part about leaving was knowing that Willie had no idea what to do with the crops he’d planted, that he’d let them linger in the earth too long. And that’s exactly what happened. He wrote that the whole way over, he saw, in his mind, the crops moldering there, sugaring over, their rich nutrition going to waste. He said he was never planting another seed. My brother Paddy—your cousin Pat’s father, God rest his soul—was here already a couple of years. Paddy referred your father to Schaefer Beer. As soon as they got one look at him, they put him to work hauling barrels.”
She knew how much pride her father took in being able to write, since not everyone he grew up with could, and she watched with interest whenever he slipped on his reading glasses to sign his name to checks and delivery slips, but the idea of him sitting down to write a letter—especially one that revealed his thoughts and feelings—simply baffled her. The closest he got to expressing a feeling was when the foolishness, idleness, or venality of certain men moved him to indignation.
She’d always understood that her father had been young once, but she’d never really considered what that meant. Now she saw him as a young man crossing a sea to start life anew, a courageous man carrying a kernel of regret and heartache that he would feed with his silence. There was more in him than she’d grasped. She wanted to find a man who was like him, but who hadn’t formed as hard an exterior: someone fate had tested, but who had retained a little more innocence. Someone who could rise above the grievances life had put before him. If her father had a weakness, that was it. There were other ways to be strong. She wasn’t blind to them.
She wanted a man whose trunk was thick but whose bark was thin, who flowered beautifully, even if only for her.
Maybe having all those relatives around had given her father a reason to settle in, or maybe it was the power of a management salary to keep a person in line. Whatever it was, when her father was promoted from driver to manager of drivers, something extraordinary happened: he stopped going out and began to do his drinking at home, where she’d never seen him put a glass of alcohol to his lips. There was such a self-possession about the way he drank at home, such an air of leisure and forbearance, that rather than signal chaos as it had in her mother’s case, it suggested urbanity, balance, a kind of evolution.
He bought nice glasses and stacked them with ice cubes and sipped a finger of expensive whiskey once or twice a night with whichever relative was there, as if it were no more than a salubrious activity to pass the time, an efficient way to filter the sludgy residues out of the engine of his planning. He bought new furniture, a dishwasher, a handmade Oriental rug. He bought a television; in the evenings they all watched it together. The only time the spell of Eileen’s happiness was broken was when she sneaked a look at her mother’s face at a moment of great drama in the program, expecting to see her squeezed along with the rest of them in the tightening grip of a tense plot, and saw her intently focused on the drink in her husband’s hand, like a dog watching for a scrap to fall from a table.
She went to Anchors Aweigh in Sunnyside with Billy Malague. Billy was a year older. After he’d graduated from McClancy, he’d approached her father for help getting a job at Schaefer. Apparently he’d been in love with Eileen for years, or so her friends said. She wasn’t interested in him; she only went out with him to be able to say she’d given him a chance. A lot of girls would have thrown themselves at Billy. He had thick locks of blond hair that looked strong enough for a person to suspend from. He was rugged and charismatic, and well liked by other men. She could see the appeal in him, but she couldn’t be with a man who didn’t have his sights on anything higher than driving a truck for thirty years.
Anchors Aweigh was dark and a little musty. A band was playing when she and Billy first arrived, but they soon packed up their fiddles and the jukebox came on. A lively energy emanated from the crowd, which was a healthy mix of generations.
She’d never taken a drink before. She scanned the menu and ordered a zombie, figuring she might as well dive in headfirst. Billy raised the ends of his mouth in an appreciative grin.
“I remember my first day. Your father called me a narrowback. He calls anyone born in America a narrowback. I tell you, it feels like an honor coming from him.” She couldn’t avoid noticing the way Billy rattled the ice around in his tumbler, the way he wiped his mouth with the hairy back of his hand after he took a sip. “He gave me a route that went into Staten Island. That means extra zone pay. My first day, an upstart kid like me, and he’s making sure I get some money in my pocket. He said, ‘You have twelve stops. You’ll be done in six hours. You should stay out ten.’ I didn’t understand. I didn’t want him to think I was a shirker. I said, ‘If it takes six hours, sir, I’ll try to get it done in five.’ He looked at me like I was a stone-cold idiot. ‘If you get back here in less than ten hours,’ he said, ‘don’t come back.’”
He was so excited talking about her father that she wasn’t sure which of them it was he was supposed to be in love with. She surprised herself by how quickly she drained the tall glass, sucking the sugary drink up through the straw. It made her nervous to look at the empty glass and feel herself begin to lose control, her brain tingling slightly, her lips taking their time to come together when she spoke, her head a little heavier on her neck. She wondered if she’d taken the first step on the road away from her dreams. What scared her was how easy it had been to do it. All she had to do was get the contents of the glass into her stomach. To chase her agitated thoughts, she ordered another drink immediately. The chatter in her head quieted down as she sat drinking and trying to return Billy’s insistent gaze. All she could focus on were his strangely doughy cheeks and protruding ears. She imagined him a couple of feet shorter, in a T-shirt with horizontal stripes, and a bowl haircut. In the middle of a little story he was telling, she laughed to think that what was evidently a boy before her somehow struck the rest of the world as a full-grown man. The bartender, whose age wasn’t in question—he must have been a year or two shy of her father—gave her a look that Billy didn’t see, in which there seemed to be pity for the boy. The first drink had been too syrupy sweet, but she liked the second one so much that she ordered three more after it.
It was after midnight when Billy carried her in, begging her father, she later learned, to spare his life, explaining that she’d been possessed, that she’d smacked his face whenever he’d tried to get her to leave, that he hadn’t wanted to give anyone the wrong idea and get escorted out and have to leave her there with those animals.
Her father woke her early in the morning. She spent a couple of hours on the tiled floor of the bathroom, leaning her head on the rim of the bowl and sitting up straight when the urge to throw up possessed her. When she’d emptied her guts completely, her father told her to take a shower. Then he walked her to Mass at St. Sebastian’s.
“You’re no different from the rest of us,” he said. “You don’t get a special dispensation.”
The air conditioning in the new church cooled her sweat and set her to shivering. Once, she had to get up to go to the sacristy bathroom. When she fell asleep, her father elbowed her awake. When communion came, she had to choke down the host. For a terrible moment up by the altar, she feared she’d have a retching spell. She took deliberate steps and deep breaths all the way back to the pew, and she ended up missing a day of school.
That Friday night, after dinner was over and the kitchen was clean and her mother had retired to her room, her father sat her down on the couch.
“If you’re going to be fool enough to do this,” he said, “you can’t go about it half-cocked.”
He went to the liquor cabinet and brought over a couple of tumblers and set them down on the coffee table. Then he went back and returned with a number of small bottles of different types of whiskey.
“What’s this?”
“You’ll be getting a lesson.”
“I can’t,” she said.
“You will,” he said.
“I’ve learned my lesson already.”
“This is a different lesson,” he said. “We’ll start with the good stuff.”
He told her he would take her methodically through everything there was to drink and everything there was to avoid. Then he poured a couple of fingers of whiskey into her glass. What struck her more even than her revulsion at the idea of taking a drink was that her father had come up with a plan, that he’d thought ahead about all this. He seemed to have bought the bottles for the occasion, as if he’d plotted the lesson out like an actual teacher.
She took a small sip; it burned her throat. He told her to take a bigger one. It smelled like charred wood and tasted like ashes. He poured a drink from each bottle and made her drink it in turn. She could tell there was a difference in quality, but only barely. When he got to the fourth, he poured some for himself and told her to drink with him slowly. It went down easily and left no trace except a warmth in her belly that spread out and seemed to heat her body a part at a time.
He put the whiskey bottles away and brought out several small bottles of vodka. She hated every one. He didn’t drink any. He was wearing his reading glasses. There was something scholarly in it. She couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be a master class or a form of house arrest. Then he brought out several varieties of gin. He took the wrapping off each and poured a small amount in her tumbler for her. He had stopped drinking after the whiskey. She wondered if by boring her with a scientific approach he was trying to take away whatever fascination attached itself to alcohol in her mind.
He went to the refrigerator and brought back a bottle of Schaefer.
“Drink this,” he said.
“I don’t like the taste of beer.”
“Drink it down and get it over with.”
He took the cap off and handed it to her. She took a few small sips and tried to push it back toward him.
“Finish it,” he said.
When she’d finished, he told her she wasn’t to be seen drinking any other beer. Then he brought out bottles containing drinks that were fruitier and more colorful than anything she’d imagined him permitting in his house. Cointreau. Crème de menthe. Crème de cassis. Grand Marnier. He made her taste each in turn. She liked the taste of the crème de menthe and he shook his head and poured a full glass.
“Enjoy it, then,” he said.
“I don’t want to drink that much.”
“If you want to stay under this roof, you’ll finish that glass.” He took out another tumbler and filled it. “And this one when you’re finished with that.”
He came in when she was done and poured out another glass.
“What’s going on?” she asked, feeling woozy.
“Drink this.”
She woke in the morning with a headache, grateful it was Saturday.
“You will never again drink anything you can’t see through,” her father said when he saw her in the kitchen, leaning on the counter after taking an aspirin. “You will never pick up a drink again after putting it down and taking your eye off it.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Drink whiskey,” he said. “Good whiskey. Not too much. That’s the long and short of it.”
“I don’t think I’m ever drinking again.”
She thought she saw a trace of a smile cross his lips.
When New Year’s Eve came around, he raised a glass to her, and everyone else gathered did too.
“Here’s to my Eileen for making the honor roll again,” he said to a loud cheer. “God bless her, we’ll all be working for her one day.” He paused. “And let me tell you, there must be something right with her if she can stand after half a dozen zombies. She’s definitely my daughter.”
She’s definitely my daughter. She heard a lifetime of unexpressed affection in the words. She imagined she could go for years on it, like a cactus kept alive by a sprinkling of rain. Still, she was so embarrassed that she decided never to drink anything but whatever the most boring girl in any group she was in was drinking.
5 (#ulink_03db2c1d-94a6-5307-96f7-bb0511e60e09)
From the moment students entered the doors of St. Catherine’s Nursing School, on Bushwick Street in Brooklyn, until the day they graduated, the one bit of knowledge instructors seemed most concerned to impart was that they’d be thrown out for poor performance, but Eileen was used to those tactics after thirteen years of Catholic education, and she knew that even if nursing wasn’t the field she’d have chosen, she’d been training for it without meaning to from an early age. There was nothing these veterans could throw at her that life hadn’t thrown already, and they somehow knew this themselves. There were times she could feel them treating her with something like professional courtesy. She couldn’t help thinking this was what it felt like to be her father, to be praised for something you’d never had any choice about, to wonder if there was a way out of the trap of other people’s regard.
Martyrdom was never her aim, the way it was for some of the halo polishers she went to school with. They might as well have joined the nunnery for all the secret satisfaction she heard in their voices when they complained about the exhaustion and thanklessness of it all. But they wouldn’t have lasted five minutes at a nunnery. They lacked the mental fortitude.
She’d never dreamed of being a nurse. It was just what girls from her neighborhood did when they were bright enough to avoid the secretarial pool. She would’ve preferred to be a lawyer or doctor, but she saw these professions as the purview of the privileged. She didn’t know how she’d ever have gotten the money to pursue them. She thought she might have had the brains for them, but she was afraid she lacked the imagination.
After St. Catherine’s she went on scholarship to St. John’s for her bachelor’s, enrolling in the fall of 1962. Her plan was to take summer classes, finish in three years instead of four, get through grad school, and begin the path to administrator pay. She earned spending money—and savings for the nursing administration degree tuition to come—as a dress model at Bonwit Teller. Women came to look at dresses and she showed them how they could look if they lost a few inches from their waist, or were taller, or had neat divots by their clavicle, or a galvanizing shock of black hair, or smooth skin, or arrestingly heavy-lidded, owlish emerald eyes. What they had on her was money and the insolent ease that came with it. Despite herself she became the preferred girl in the showroom. She didn’t try to push dresses on potential buyers by slinging a hand at the waist and jutting an elbow out. She simply put a dress on and stood there. She didn’t smile or not smile; make eye contact or avoid it; speak to customers or remain silent; she did whatever came naturally to her. If her nose itched, she scratched it. She turned to show them the dress at all angles when they asked her to, and when they were done looking at it, she went back to the dressing room and took it off. The other girls seemed to linger more, attempting to convince themselves of what they hadn’t convinced the customers of.
She daydreamed that the next person who walked in would be a rich man looking for a dress for his girlfriend, who would see her and change his mind about the drift his life was taking. He would let her forget about nursing, fly her around the world, care for her parents’ needs. She could sleepwalk through life, never changing a dirty bedpan, never batting away an exploratory hand when she leaned over a man in his senescence, never pressing through a fog of halitosis to take an old lady’s temperature, never working another day, never thinking another thought. She would come back to this store and sit in the chair and put the girl through her paces. She’d make it seem as if she was going to leave without buying anything, that she’d wasted everyone’s time, and then she would order one of everything to remind them that they had no idea how women like her really lived. But the only people who showed up were women a little older than her, or teenaged girls with their mothers. They said how radiant she looked, but she could hear them thinking of themselves.
One afternoon in April of 1963, a girl about Eileen’s age came in looking for dresses for her bridesmaids. The girl made apparently random selections, projecting a nervous aura. She looked familiar—alarmingly so; only after Eileen had modeled a handful of dresses did she realize the girl was Virginia Towers, who’d left St. Sebastian’s in seventh grade to move to Manhasset. Eileen prayed she wouldn’t recognize her, but while Virginia was examining the seams she started patting excitedly on Eileen’s shoulder.
“Eileen?”
“Yes?”
“Eileen! Eileen Tumulty!”
Virginia’s voice was all heedless abandon. Eileen raised her brows in silent acknowledgment, perturbed to be addressed so familiarly in a place where she’d worked to keep her distance from the other girls.
“It’s me, Ginny. Ginny Towers.”
“Virginia, my goodness,” she said mutedly.
Kind, sincere Virginia had been the only kid in her class with an investment bank executive for a father. Her father was also a Protestant, though her mother was a Catholic who’d grown up in the neighborhood. No one teased Virginia, even though she’d been shy and fairly awkward; it was as though her family’s means draped a protective cloak across her shoulders.
“What are you doing here?” Virginia asked.
There was no answer that wasn’t awkward, so Eileen gave the dress a demonstrative little tug in the chest and raised her hands in amused resignation.
“Right!” Virginia said. “Dresses.” She had two in her hands and three more draped across the armoire, none promising. “Well, hell. Do you like any of these?”
If Eileen had the money to buy bridesmaids’ dresses this expensive, she would buy different ones entirely—sleeker ones, less vulgar, more versatile. She was convinced she had nicer dresses hanging in her closet than Virginia did. She owned only half a dozen, but each was perfect. She would never buy five dresses for twenty dollars each when she could snag one truly gorgeous one for a hundred. She went out infrequently enough that she never worried about being seen too often in any of them.
“I think the one I tried on a couple of dresses ago is quite nice,” Eileen said.
“The lavender one? I knew it! I liked that one too. I’ll just have them order that one then.”
Standing in the billowing dress, Eileen felt like one of those men in sandwich boards advertising lunch specials.
“Eileen Tumulty,” Virginia said, as though it were the answer to a quiz-show question. “I’m guessing this is just your day job.”
“I’m doing my bachelor’s,” she said. “I went to nursing school.”
“I figured you’d be on your way to being a doctor or something. You were always the smartest one of us.”
She felt her face redden.
“I’m finishing at Sarah Lawrence this year. And I’m getting married! But you knew that already. He’s a Penn man. Very square—he makes me giggle he’s so square. My father has set him up with interviews at Lehman Brothers. We’re going to live in Bronxville. I’m going to walk to school my last month!”
She knew of the town; it was a wealthy bedroom community in lower Westchester County. “That sounds just lovely.”
“And I know you won’t guess what I’m doing next year.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m going to law school. At Columbia.”
“You were always intelligent,” Eileen said, stifling her surprise.
“Not like you. You were a whip.”
“You’re very kind.”
“You were more of an adult than the rest of us,” Virginia said. “I often think about that day in sixth grade when you took me to Woolworth’s and made me buy a notebook for every class. Do you remember?”
She remembered, but she didn’t relish recalling what an excess of energy she’d had then for grand improving projects, as though she’d thought the moral balance of the world could be restored by a regimen of directed efforts.
“I remember you weren’t the most organized girl, but I don’t remember going to Woolworth’s, no.”
“I think you’d had enough of watching me never be able to find anything when I needed it. You made me separate my notes. That was one of the most helpful things anyone’s ever done for me.”
“I’m glad,” Eileen said, feeling a churning in her gut.
“You should come to law school with me. We could be study partners. I’d get the better end of that deal.”
It was as if Virginia was speaking to her from the outside of a circus cage, clutching a bar in one hand as she absently held a lamb chop in the other. Eileen had to get away before she said something she’d regret.
“Maybe in my next life,” she said, and the awkwardness she’d kept at bay came rushing back at once. The dress’s low cut left her feeling exposed. A new customer had arrived, and the other girl was busy with someone else, so Eileen asked Virginia if she was sure about the lavender dress and left her with the woman who arranged the accounts.
“Please look us up,” Virginia said on her way out. “Give us a couple of months to settle in. Bronxville, don’t forget. We’ll be in the phone book. Mr. and Mrs. Leland Callow. We’d absolutely love to have you over. There’s nothing so valuable in life as old friends.”
Her mother told her to save her money, to buy used if she had to have a car, but her father was the one to go with her to the showroom.
The new Pontiac Tempest was on the floor, the 1964 model.
“It’s most of what I have saved,” Eileen said.
“You’ll make more. You’ll save again.”
“It’s a bad investment.”
“It’s an investment in life,” her father said. “If this is what you want, this is what you’re getting. It beats the piss out of a beer truck, I’ll say that. Maybe I’ll get one myself. Or I could get one of those convertible types over there. What did he call that one? The GTO? I could drive your mother around in it. Do you think she’d take to it?”
For a moment, he sounded serious, and Eileen wanted to say, Daddy, I think she would, but instead she just said, “Now that is a terrible investment,” and asked him whether cherry red or navy suited her better.
She could buy used and save for the future, or she could make a statement about where she thought her life was heading, and shape the perceptions of others about that trajectory, and maybe sway the future by courting it.
“What the hell do you think I’m going to tell you?” her father said.
She went with cherry red.
She was at the table when her mother got in from work.
“Studying again?”
Eileen barely grunted in reply. In shedding herself of her effects, her mother had dropped her keys on Eileen’s splayed notebook. There were so many keys packed onto the interlocking rings; each represented a room, or several, that her mother had to clean. Eileen slid them off the notebook as if they were coated in pathogens.
“Why don’t you put those books aside for five minutes,” her mother said. “You can drive me and my friends.”
“Drive where? Which friends?”
“My meeting friends.”
Meeting friends, Eileen thought crankily. She almost makes it sound pleasant.
“Take my car,” she said, not looking up from her book.
“I’m nervous to drive it.”
Her mother had only had her license for a year, and she was shaky on the road. The Tempest was still brand-new.
“I’ve got a test.”
“We started a car pool,” her mother said. “I said I’d pick everyone up this week.”
“And how had you planned on doing this, exactly?”
“Come on,” her mother said. “It’s getting late.”
The first stop was in Jackson Heights. She was surprised to pull up outside one of the co-ops; she’d always imagined that people of means were spared some of the sadder aspects of man’s nature. As soon as her mother left the car, Eileen took out her textbook. She was planning to study at every stop, even with others in the car. There wasn’t time for the squeamish propriety of small talk; the fact that she had submitted to this depressing task was enough.
When her mother returned, there was a brightness in her voice.
“Hiram,” she said to the man getting in the backseat, “this is my daughter, Eileen.”
“So I guess you’re Charon tonight.”
“Eileen,” she said.
“Charon. The ferryman. On the river Styx.”
“Oh,” she said. “Right.”
“Shuttling the dead.”
He had bumped his hairpiece on the doorframe in getting in; instead of adjusting it with a furtive hand, he had taken it off completely and was resetting it with such nonchalance that it seemed he wore it not to disguise his baldness but to bring it out in the open.
“You’re very much alive, Hiram,” her mother said, beginning to titter. “Though I can’t say the same for that rug you’re wearing.”
“I’m supposed to give you a tip,” he said. “How about this: avoid men in borrowed hair.”
“Sound advice,” Eileen said.
“Tell it to my wife. Not that I had this when she met me. You should have seen the locks. I was Samson.”
In the rearview mirror she watched him look contemplatively out the window. He returned her gaze alertly, as if he was used to being watched.
“Beware of women bearing scissors,” he said, chuckling. He was in on some private joke that made even the heaviest things weightless. “Beware of three-drink lunches.”
“One-drink lunches,” her mother said.
“Well, if we’re going to hell, at least we’re doing it in style. This is a beaut.”
“Thank you,” Eileen said.
“You’ve got it backwards,” her mother said. “We’re leaving hell.”
“Yes, yes,” he said agreeably. “We’re in purgatory, but we’re hopeful. Or if we’re not hopeful, at least we’re not succumbing to despair. Or if we’re succumbing to despair, at least we’re in this beautiful car.”
Her mother was buoyant as she rang bells and led her meeting friends to the car, where she peppered them with chatter to put them at ease. Eileen couldn’t bring herself to open the book even when it was only Hiram in the car. She ended up having a marvelous time. In even a few minutes with some of them she could see they radiated hard-won perspective. She made three trips; then she parked up the block and watched in the mirror as her mother and the final quartet, a spectrum of widths and heights, disappeared down into the church basement.
On the way home, after they’d dropped everyone off, her mother blew smoke through the cracked window and talked with a quick and ceaseless fluency. Upbeat as her mother seemed, Eileen saw that the corners of her mouth were being pulled down, as though by a baited hook. She could tell that her mother didn’t entirely believe in her own forgiveness. Eileen wasn’t sure she believed in it herself, even though she’d been the one to grant it, through tears, after her mother had sat her down at the kitchen table and unearthed mistakes Eileen had successfully buried and said how sorry she was for them. Her mother had worked hard to kill the past, but it clung to life in Eileen’s mind, in the thought that this apparently solid form might dissolve back into the liquid that had seeped into every corner of her childhood, bringing disorder and rot. The smell of the past, that irrepressible smoke, was spoiling the air between them, where, in the absence of others to filter it, an acrid cloud now hung.
“Roll that down further, please.”
Without a word, her mother did as asked. She stared straight ahead, smoking and avoiding Eileen’s gaze as she used to at the height of her drinking days. Eileen pulled over and got out to roll down the rear windows. She stood briefly outside the car gazing at the back of her mother’s head, which for a strangely exhilarating moment looked as if it belonged to someone else. Whatever her mother was going through, Eileen would allow herself to care only so much about it. She had her own life to worry about. Life was what you made of it. Some of the houses she’d dropped these people off at would have been enough for her, so why couldn’t they be enough for them? If she lived in one of these houses, she wouldn’t need to get into another woman’s car and head to a damp lower church for a meeting. She could look at her fireplace, her leather sofa, her book-lined drawing room; she could listen to silence above her head; she could peer in on empty bedrooms lying in wait for fresh-faced visitors, pleasantly useless otherwise. It would all be enough for her to put a drink down for. And yet there these people were. The fact that they were there, that everything they owned wasn’t enough somehow, disturbed her, suggesting a bottomlessness to certain kinds of unhappiness. She shook the thought from her head like dust from an Oriental rug and decided that a house would have to be enough.
6 (#ulink_cf178eca-13b4-5b44-b869-84ecd33bb017)
She spent the entire fall of 1963 trying to convince her cousin Pat to apply to college. Then December rolled in and the application deadlines were around the corner, and many of them had already come and gone. She went to him to make one final appeal.
“I’m not college material,” Pat said, his big feet up on the coffee table in her aunt Kitty’s apartment, where Eileen sat with her knees together under the pressed pleats of her cotton skirt.
“Bull.”
“I’ve never been big on school.” He leaned over and tapped ashes into a coffee cup, stretched back again.
“You could have been a great student. You’re smarter than all those boys.”
“You need to give up on this idea of me as a Future Leader of America.”
The truth was, she already had. He was smart enough to make it to his senior year without doing a lick of homework, and he possessed an intuitive ability to make men champion his causes that reminded her of her father’s own. He was pissing away his apparently unbearable promise at underage bars, but she didn’t care about that anymore. All she wanted was to keep him safe.
“You could get As in your sleep,” she said, “if you gave it a tiny bit of effort.” She crossed her legs and played with the pack of cigarettes. She resisted blowing away the smoke that was traveling in her direction.
“I can’t sit and study. I just get restless.”
“I’ll do the applications for you.”
“I need to move. I can’t be cooped up.” He snubbed out his cigarette and folded his hands behind his head.
“You’ll have plenty of chances to move in Vietnam,” she said bitterly. “Until you’re in the ground, that is.”
He turned eighteen that February, 1964, and she tried to get him to marry the girl he was dating, but he wouldn’t do it. When he graduated in June and received the notice to report for his physical, she was terrified, because he was a perfect specimen, big and strong and almost impossibly hale, with 20/10 vision, practically, and great knees despite the family curse, so there was zero chance of his getting declared 4F. She tried to get him to enlist in the National Guard to avoid a dangerous posting, and then after the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August she was sure he’d find some college to enroll in, but instead a couple of weeks later he went to the recruiter for the Marines.
He’d been on the winning side of every fistfight he’d ever been in, so he might’ve thought he could simply stare down whatever trouble was to come. He went to Parris Island for basic, got further training as an antitank assaultman, and was assigned to Camp Lejeune, where he stayed until June of 1965, when he volunteered to go over after the first waves of the ground war had landed in South Vietnam.
He called before he left. She couldn’t picture him in a crew cut at the other end of the phone, wearing that one outfit they all seemed to wear, a polo shirt and chinos, as if they all shopped in the same store. All she could see in her mind’s eye was him standing in his St. Sebastian’s blazer, five grades behind her, shifting impatiently from foot to foot while she fixed his tie. He was the closest she’d ever had to a brother.
“You’d better stay alive,” she said.
“There are some scared-looking fellas I could hand the phone to if you want to give them a little pep talk. This is Pat you’re talking to. Pat Tumulty. I’ll see you in a while.”
“Fine.”
“Tell your father I’ll make him proud,” he said.
Her father had filled her cousin’s head with so much patriotic rhetoric that he thought he was embarking on a noble adventure.
“Don’t you even think about trying to impress him,” she said. “He’d never say so, but he’s scared to death that something’s going to happen to you.”
“He told you that?”
“He doesn’t have to say it for it to be obvious. He just wants you home in one piece. The bullshit around that man is piled so high you can’t even see him past it.”
“He’d take my place if they’d let him.”
“Even if that’s true, it doesn’t mean a goddamned thing. The only thing he’s ever been afraid of is regular life. Come home and live a regular life and impress me. Forget about my father.”
She could almost hear him straighten up.
“Tell him I’ll make him proud,” he said.
She sighed. “Tell him yourself. He’ll be where you left him, in that damned recliner. He doesn’t go anywhere. Everybody comes to him.”
“I will.”
“Good-bye, Pat,” she said, and then she thought, Good-bye, Pat, in case she was really saying it. She waited to hear him hang up.
7 (#ulink_dd3ee37f-1fa5-59de-8051-234fc4cef325)
She began to look forward to the day when she would take another man’s name. It was the thoroughgoing Irishness of Tumulty that bothered her, the redolence of peat bogs and sloppy rebel songs and an uproar in the blood, of a defeat that ran so deep it reemerged as a treacherous conviviality.
She’d grown up around so many Irish people that she’d never had to think much about the fact that she was Irish. On St. Patrick’s Day, when the city buzzed like a family reunion, she felt a tribal pride, and whenever she heard the plaintive whine of bagpipes, she was summoned to an ancient loyalty.
When she got to college, though, and saw that there was a world in which her father didn’t hold much currency, she began to grasp the crucial role the opinions of others played in the settling of one’s own prospects. “Eileen” she couldn’t get rid of, but if she could join it to something altogether different, she might be able to enjoy her Irishness again, even feel safe enough to take a defensive pride in it, the way she did now only on those rare occasions when her soul was stirred to its origins, like the day just before her nineteenth birthday when President Kennedy was elected and she wept for joy.
She wanted a name that sounded like no name at all, one of those decorous placeholders that suggested an unbroken line of WASP restraint. If the name came with a pedigree to match it, she wasn’t going to complain.
It was mid-December 1965. She was in a master’s program in nursing administration at NYU after getting college done in three years, as she’d planned. Between classes, she met her friend Ruth, who worked nearby, under the arch in Washington Square, to head to lunch together. It was an unusually mild day for December; some young men had on only a sweater and no jacket.
“Well, it’s not that he needs a date, necessarily,” Ruth was saying as they walked toward the luncheonette on Broadway. “He just doesn’t have one.”
Eileen sighed; it was happening again. Everyone always believed they’d found her man for her, but more often than not he was a blarneying, blustering playboy who’d charmed her friends and the rest of the bar and whom she couldn’t ditch fast enough.
“I’m sure one will turn up,” she said. “Tell him good things come to those who wait.”
The men that stirred her—reliable ones, predictable ones—were boring by other girls’ standards. She didn’t meet enough of these men. Maybe they couldn’t get past the guys who crowded around her at bars. If they couldn’t at least get to her, though, they weren’t for her. She’d rather be alone than end up with a man who was afraid.
“You are impossible!” Ruth said. “I am trying to look out for you here. No—you know what? Fine. That’s just fine.” Ruth fastened the buttons on her coat.
Eileen could feel Ruth burning. In front of the luncheonette, Ruth stopped her. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “Frank asked me to do this favor, and we just started, so I want to come through for him. I don’t care what you do on New Year’s. You want to miss the fun, that’s fine by me. You want to be alone the rest of your life, that’s fine too. I’ve tried. I even set you up with Tommy Delaney, and look what you did with that.”
“You think you’re safe with a West Point man,” Eileen said, as though to herself. “You think he’ll have a bit of class.” She watched a cab stop at the corner and a man with a newspaper tucked under his arm pay his fare.
“Tommy’s a fine man,” Ruth said.
“Oh, I’m sure he’s swell,” Eileen said. “I have no way of knowing. He couldn’t sit still long enough to say two words to me. He spent the whole time making sure every back in the place got slapped.”
“Tommy has a lot of friends.”
“He bought everyone a round and said I didn’t know it yet, but he was my future husband. There was a big cheer. The nerve!”
The man with the newspaper got out of the cab. He was tall and handsome, with dark cropped hair and striking eyeglasses. She imagined he was a visiting professor, Italian or Greek. She took her eyes from him before he turned in her direction.
“He liked you. He wanted to make an impression.”
“An impression!”
“Look, this one is different,” Ruth said lamely. “He won’t be trying to win you over. He doesn’t want to be there any more than you do.”
“What’s the problem with him? Is he queer?”
Eileen didn’t know why she was still resisting. She would normally have done her friend Ruth this small favor, but she wasn’t in the mood for disappointment, not on New Year’s Eve. She watched the taxi launch off from the curb, only to stop again up the block to let a young couple pile in. The sun came back out from behind a cloud. Ruth unbuttoned her coat.
“He’s a grad student at NYU. A scientist. Frank’s in an anatomy class with him. He’s obsessed with his research. He never leaves the library. Frank is worried about him. He wants to get him out.”
Eileen didn’t say anything. She was trying not to believe in the promising picture she was forming in her mind, for fear of disappointment.
“So what Frank told him is that I was nagging him to find a date for my friend for New Year’s.”
“Absolutely not!” Eileen said. “I will not pretend to be somebody’s charity case.”
“He’s a gentleman. He couldn’t resist a woman in need. It’s the only thing that would have worked.”
“Ruth!”
A pair of girls pushed past them into the luncheonette. Eileen could see the counter seats filling up and could make out only one empty booth.
“Would it help if I told you he’s handsome? Frank even said it himself. He said all the girls they know think he’s very handsome.”
“Let them have him,” she said, not meaning it. She couldn’t believe she was feeling defensive about this man.
“Just do this for me and I’ll never bother you again,” Ruth said, putting her hand on the door to open it. “You can go become an old maid after this.”
“Fine. But I’m not going to pretend to be grateful he went out with me.”
In the interval between the setup and the date, she’d convinced herself that this was nothing more than a good deed she was doing. When the bell rang at Ruth’s, though, she was seized by nerves. She ran to the bedroom and locked the door.
“Come on! I have to answer the door.”
“I’m not going. Tell him I got sick or something.”
“Come out and say hello!” Ruth whispered forcefully as the bell rang again.
She heard Ruth invite them in. She liked his voice: it was soft, but there was strength in it. She decided to open the door, but not before resolving to give him the hardest time she could. She wasn’t going to have any man thinking she needed him there, certainly not some spastic recluse she’d have to lead around the room by the sleeve.
Before she had a chance to say anything sarcastic, Ed rose to his feet. He was indeed handsome, but not too pretty; neat and lean, with clean lines everywhere, including those in his face that gave him an appealing gravity when he smiled.
He leaned in and whispered in her ear. “I realize you didn’t have to do this, and I promise to try to make it worth your time.”
Her heart kicked once like an engine turning over on a wintry afternoon.
He could dance like a dream. When he pressed her close, his substantiality surprised her. The glasses, the neatly combed hair, the chivalry on the sidewalk and at doors made an impression, but the back and shoulders let her relax. The girls at their table thought him the most polite man they’d ever met. When she first heard him speak in his articulate way that was oddly devoid of accent, she thought he was like the movie version of a professor, but without the zaniness that emasculated those characters. Still, he was refined in a way that might have raised eyebrows among the men of her set. He could discuss things they didn’t understand. He didn’t so much drink a beer as warm it in his hand as an offering to the gods of conversation. She fretted over how he’d get along with her father, and so she brought him around earlier than she would have otherwise, in case she had to cut him loose, but something in Ed’s carriage disarmed the big man. Eventually she had to feign annoyance at how well they got along. She shouldn’t have been entirely surprised. He’d been a neighborhood kid, the kind who knew how to throw a punch when a friend was in trouble and could talk everybody’s way out of it before it started—the kind men listened to because the way he spoke suggested he wasn’t telling them anything he thought they didn’t know already.
He was a natural athlete. They went to the driving range with her old friend Cindy and her husband Jack, who was into golf. Ed teed up and smacked the ball so soundly that when she saw it next it was a tiny pea at the end of its parabolic journey.
They headed out to Forest Hills one weekend to see her friends Marie and Tom Cudahy. There was a tennis court near the Cudahys’ townhouse. They borrowed tennis whites from their hosts and the four of them hit the ball around in doubles, no keeping score or serving, just volleying. Ed returned shots he shouldn’t have been able to get to in time. At the end, Tom asked him to play him solo, and Eileen turned and saw the embarrassed look on Marie’s face. They both knew what was coming. Tom had been a letterman at Fordham and had a powerful serve, and though he mostly kept his competitiveness in check during mixed doubles, he liked to throttle his counterpart for a while afterward.
The two men took their positions and Tom fired a blistering smash. The ball raced up Ed’s body off the bounce, as if it was trying to hit him more than once. The second serve came in on Ed’s hands. He flicked his wrist at the last second and deposited the ball just over the net. Tom hustled but the ball died, bouncing again before he got to it. They traded points and games. Ed’s serve was careful and reliable, his returns determined and vigorous. She liked the way he whipped his racket across his chest, dismissing offerings with sudden ferocity. He tucked the ball into corners and moved it around the court. Tom won the set, but Ed made the contest closer than anyone in their circle had.
They walked back to the Cudahys’ to shower and change. She had one hand in Ed’s, while the other held down the hem of Marie’s mod minidress. On the court she’d felt protected by all the activity, but off the court she felt almost naked in it. Ed looked terrific in Tom’s spare whites, as if he was born to wear them.
“When did you get so good at tennis?”
“I’m not that good.”
“You looked pretty good to me.”
He bounced a ball as he walked. “I cleaned up trash one summer in Prospect Park. I stuck around after work a few times and played at the Tennis House. I was always running after shots, trying to catch up to them. There was a pro who gave me some free advice. ‘Go where you think the ball’s going,’ he said. ‘Beat it there.’”
“I have a good strategy too,” she said. “I don’t move at all. I let it go past me to you.”
He laughed. “I noticed.”
“I’m flat-footed.”
The smell of honeysuckle wafted up at them from a garden. Ed put the ball in his pocket. “Well, we can’t exactly have you sweating through this white dress.” He pulled her to him and gave her hip a squeeze. “This little white dress.” They took a few stumbling steps together. “It just wouldn’t be decent.”
“The term is tennis whites, Tarzan,” she said, shoving him playfully. “And they’re very proper. So behave yourself.”
Tom was walking ahead with Marie, his racket slung at his shoulder like a foxhunter’s spent rifle. His clothes were casually disheveled, his shirttail hanging out in a way that suggested he’d never had to worry about money, but Eileen knew he was wearing a costume, trying to blend in. He worked for J. P. Morgan, but he was from Sunnyside, his father was a laborer like hers, and Fordham was Fordham, but it wasn’t Harvard, Princeton, or Yale.
When the waiter came over, Tom wrinkled his nose up and pointed at something on the wine list, and she knew it was because he didn’t want to mispronounce the name. He ordered for the table without asking what anyone wanted to eat. Ed gave her hand a little squeeze, and it felt like a pulse passed between them. For a moment she knew exactly what he was thinking, not just about Tom, but about her, and himself, and all of life, and she liked the way he saw things. She could spend her life tuning into the calming frequency of his thoughts.
He wasn’t a stiff, and he wasn’t a weakling either. What was the word for it? Sensitive was the only one that came to mind, amazing as that was to consider; he was a sensitive man. He soaked up whatever you gave him.
His name was Leary, as Irish as anything, but she decided she could marry him anyway.
8 (#ulink_8d4ff828-1951-5513-941e-eddafd5228ac)
Ed’s family had been in New York since just before the Civil War, but their sole claim to distinction was that his great-great-grandfather had had a hand in building the USS Monitor. Ed said his father liked to suggest by a looseness in his wording that his ancestor had been some sort of naval architect, but the truth was he’d punched the clock with the grunts at the Continental Iron Works in Greenpoint, where they fashioned the hull.
Ed’s mother, Cora, had a soothing voice and a velvety laugh. Friday nights, Eileen sat with her and Ed, drinking tea and eating oatmeal cookies in the kitchen Ed grew up in, in a railroad flat on Luquer Street in Carroll Gardens, near the elevated F tracks. Cora kept the window open on even the coldest days, to drive off the steam heat. Eileen liked to watch the lacy curtains kick up in the breeze. Cats stalked the adjacent lot, curling into old tires. When they hopped onto the windowsill, Cora swished them away with a dish towel. Trains rumbled by at intervals, marking the passage of time. Whenever she rose to leave, Eileen found herself pulled into Cora’s bosom for a hug. She never got over her surprise at receiving maternal affection, and she returned the hugs awkwardly, with an abstracted curiosity, though she welcomed them all the same.
Ed’s father, Hugh, had been dead for a few years. Eileen knew little about him; Ed released that information in a trickle, and Cora never brought him up. The only evidence of him in the apartment was a framed picture, on one of the end tables, of him wearing a hat, an overcoat, and a slightly furtive half smile. Eileen knew he’d played the piano to accompany silent movies; that he’d sealed up paint cans in the Sapolin factory, once earning a small bonus when he suggested they paint a giant can on the water tank on the roof; that he’d worked as a liability evaluator at Chubb; and that World War II had given him his only real feeling of purpose.
Ed seemed to feel safest talking about his father’s experience during the war years, though he had no memory of that time. It was all just stories he’d heard.
“You could get him going for hours if you asked about the war,” Ed said.
The government had urged civilians to pursue activities essential to the war effort, and Hugh landed on the docks, in Todd Shipyard, sticking bolts in steel plates in the bulkheads and hulls of damaged ships. The work itself wasn’t stimulating, save for the mild danger of hanging out over the water, but he liked toiling under the sun alongside other men, breathing in the salt air and thinking of what his labor led to—never mind the irony that after three generations in America, the Leary line was still working on ships.
Ed said his father and the other men modified ships from regular freighters into tankers, adding a second layer to the hull. They converted luxury liners to barracks for troop transport. The peak of their activity, in terms of both industry and importance, was working on the Queen Mary. They stripped her of her furniture and wood paneling, replaced her bars and restaurants with hospitals, painted her a dull gray to confuse rising submarines, and gave her smoke suppression. She could go as fast as a destroyer, reaching speeds of thirty knots where an average submarine could only go ten. At the height of the conflict, in 1943, she carried sixteen thousand men from London to Sydney without a gunboat escort.
One night, Eileen stayed late at Ed’s house. Cora had gone to sleep. They were sitting on the couch, which was worn along the seam by its skirt, some of the filling rupturing through. Eileen picked the picture of Hugh up off the end table.
“What was he like?”
“I suppose he was like a lot of fathers,” Ed said. “He went to work and stayed out late. He wasn’t around a lot.”
“What about as a man? All I see when I try to picture him is this coat and hat.”
A pair of end table lamps provided the only illumination in the room, which was like a parlor in a shabby club. Cora had installed cute statuettes in every corner, but personality only went so far in making an apartment feel like a home. Eileen had a new appreciation for how her mother had kept things neat and in working order, how her father had paid to replace the furniture whenever it got run down. Ed had grown up with less.
“He liked to laugh,” Ed said. “He told raunchy jokes. He always had a cigar dangling from his mouth. It made him look like a dog hanging its tongue out on a hot day. He was always hustling, working angles.”
“What else?” she asked, putting the photo down. She sensed he was on the verge of candor. “Tell me more.”
“He liked to drink,” Ed said. “It wasn’t pretty when he did.”
“I know a little about that,” she said, and they shared a moment of quiet understanding.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You deserved better.”
She felt her emotions catching in her throat. “You can tell me anything, you know.”
“I wouldn’t know how to say it if there were anything to say.”
“Just say what comes to mind.”
He was silent, and she worried she’d pushed him too hard. In her nervous state she had picked off the material that covered the sofa’s arm, and now she tried to fit it back into place with one hand while keeping her eyes on Ed. She should have left him alone, rather than risk angering him and making him shut down, but she didn’t want to revert to the surface-level interactions she’d had with other men. She had never wanted to talk to anyone more than she wanted to talk to Ed. She wanted to tell him things she’d never told anyone, and to learn more about him than she’d learned about anyone else. She used to think a bit of mystery was a prerequisite to her feeling attracted to a man. For the first time, her attraction didn’t diminish the more she knew, but actually grew.
“You remember Charlie McCarthy?” Ed said after a while. “Edgar Bergen’s dummy? My father used to say I looked like him.”
Eileen folded her hands in her lap and held her breath, trying not to look too eager to hear what he had to say.
“I figured out early on I could make him laugh if I did a Charlie McCarthy impression. So I practiced. I got to the point where I could do the voice pretty well. When my father got in from the bar, I’d hop up on the couch and twist up my mug for him.” Ed showed her, forming a rictus and opening his eyes wide, looking from side to side with an eerie, doll-like blankness. “Sometimes he laughed. Sometimes he told me to cut it out and said I looked nothing like that doll. I never knew which it was going to be. I remember the last time I did it. He laughed and laughed. Then he smacked me in the mouth, whack!”—Ed brought his hand down on the coffee table—“and told me to stop embarrassing myself.”
Their hands migrated toward each other on the couch. After their fingers sat intertwined for a bit, she clasped his hand in both of hers, pulled it to her, and gave it a little kiss, then shifted closer to him.
Ed said he and his mother had never discussed his father’s drinking, but it was his understanding that his father hadn’t been a drinker before the war. “If the war had gone on forever, or if he’d been a park ranger or done something outdoors, maybe things would have been different.”
When peacetime returned, Hugh went back to Chubb and sat at a desk all day. He didn’t have any hobbies. “I think the only way he knew how to drive off the anxiety in him was to go to Molloy’s,” Ed said. “Everybody raised a glass when he walked in. They laughed at his jokes. They let him buy rounds.”
By the time Ed was nine, he said, his mother was sending him by train on pay Fridays to pick up his father’s check. If he didn’t get there in time, they were stuck for the week. If he did, his father wasn’t necessarily stuck. With his beautiful singing voice, he could make twenty-five dollars, or two-thirds of his weekly salary, as the cantor at a single funeral Mass at St. Mary’s Star of the Sea. Ed only knew his father did this because he served funerals during the school day as an altar boy.
“The first time he sang,” Ed said, “I walked out of the sacristy with the cross to start the funeral and there he was, standing off to the side with this sheepish grin on. When the time came, he walked up to the lectern. He gave me a nervous look, like I’d caught him in something. Maybe one of his friends knew what kind of voice he had and set him up with the gig. I remember knowing he’d been drinking beforehand. It’s just something you can tell.”
She nodded.
“Then the organ started up, and he started singing, and it was like he was surprised by the sound of his own voice. Like he was hearing it for the first time. I couldn’t believe how good he was. He sang his heart out. There were tears on some faces in the pews.”
“My father can’t sing,” she said. “But he thinks he can.”
Ed gave her a warm smile. “He came to collect the cash afterward. I was in the rectory changing out of my alb. He put his finger to his lips. ‘Don’t tell your mother.’” Ed’s face took on an intense expression. “I already knew enough not to say anything, you know?”
She nodded again. Sometimes, she thought, life makes you grow up early. And some people never grow up at all.
“He started showing up often. I don’t know how he did it without getting fired at Chubb. It was a pretty decent round-trip on the train. He must have been gone two, three hours at a time. He did it for years. I doubt a penny of that money made it home to my mother. To think that he was a block away from her all that time. She would have loved to have lunch with him.”
Once Ed started talking, the dam broke. They went out once a week to eat in Manhattan, and the conversation turned often to their early years. She found out that in grammar school Ed was a model student, but by the time he reached high school he’d turned his back on his studies. After he was kicked out of his second school, Cora used her influence in the parish to get him admitted on probation to Power Memorial in Manhattan. The long train rides settled him down enough to get him graduated. He took a job mixing paints and dyes at the Kohnstamm factory on Columbia Street, a short walk from home. He brought his paychecks home to his mother.
At Kohnstamm’s, Ed said, he found someone to look up to—the scientist who directed the mixers. The chemical processes awoke a scholarly impulse in him that had lain dormant. He got to know the chemicals so well that soon other men began coming to him instead of checking the manuals. He moved over to Domino for a better paycheck, turning slag into sugar, paying attention to the reactions, the reagents, the products. He began taking night classes at a community college, then quit Domino to enroll full-time at St. Francis College, where his younger brother Phil was a student. Cora paid both their tuitions with the money she’d saved from what Ed brought home.
Their flat had no hallway. To get from the kitchen to the living room, you had to brush against the foot of every bed, one of which Ed shared with Phil until he was twenty-one, when his sister Fiona got married and moved to Staten Island. Until the day Hugh brought a desk home from his office, Ed and Phil studied together at the kitchen table, the only good surface to spread out on. Cora never had to call them to dinner; she only had to tell them to put their books away.
Friday nights, when his friends were out, Ed waited for the bartender’s call. He would pull up in front and honk, and Hugh would keep him waiting while he had another. Ed wouldn’t go in, because he didn’t want to watch his father drink. Once, he waited so long that he woke up slamming the brakes, thinking he’d nodded off while driving and was about to plow into the car in front of him. He started beating on the horn; a few guys came out to see what was the matter. Hugh joined them and stared as if it were somebody else’s crazy kid. Ed kept slamming on the horn. When he finally stopped, his father screamed at him. After that, Ed said, when he drove up he gave a quick toot and shut the car off.
Ed was named to the Duns Scotus Honor Society, like Phil the year before. They were the first pair of brothers in St. Francis’s history to receive the honor.
They were at Lüchow’s on Fourteenth Street, eating Wiener schnitzel and sauerkraut, when Ed told her about the day his father died.
“A few days before I graduated,” he said, “my father had a heart attack on the couch. I drove him to the hospital. I must have flown through every light. I had my arm on him to keep him from slumping forward”—Ed pressed it against her to show her—“like I did when I picked him up at the bar. I was burning through intersections. When I got there, I saw that he’d died. I slapped his face a few times. Then I threw him over my shoulder and ran him in.”
Only after Ed had heard definitively that his father was gone, while he sat weeping in the waiting room area, did he realize he’d wrenched his back. As he alternated in spasms of grief and pain, he understood that he loved all the things he’d always thought he’d hated about carrying his father’s body home all those nights: the weight of him hanging on him, pulling at the sockets of his arms; the drunken heat that came off him; the roughness of his beard against Ed’s neck; the soft sound of his voice as he mumbled; the sickly sweet smell of whiskey.
“There are things you feel that you can’t explain,” Ed said. “You know other people won’t understand them.”
“I know just what you mean.” She was thinking she was referring to how she’d felt at times about her own parents. Then she realized she was feeling something like it just then for Ed. You had to hope the love you felt would get recorded in the book of time. “You don’t have to say another word,” she said.
9 (#ulink_911dd597-01ee-5912-9d06-d4ebafa2390e)
She wanted to buy her husband-to-be a luxurious wedding gift. It happened that her father’s best friend, in addition to regularly occupying the stool next to him at Hartnett’s—where her father had shifted from Doherty’s when he’d started going back to pubs—was a vice president at Longines, which distributed LeCoultre in North America. For six hundred dollars, Eileen purchased a prototype of the next line of LeCoultre watches. It was slung with a beautiful eighteen-karat gold band and would have retailed for two thousand dollars. She paid in three installments.
She tried to think of a creative inscription that would encapsulate her feelings for him, some intimate notion to commit to posterity, but everything she came up with sounded too fanciful by half. In the end she settled on his full name, middle included, and hoped he’d hear a rough sort of poetry in the lack of embellishment and a tenderness in the identification of him as her man.
They went to Tavern on the Green a week before the wedding. They emerged from the subway and took a horse and carriage up to the entrance. She had never been to the Tavern before. She loved the banquet tables, the big picture windows, the austerity of the trees in winter.
She presented the watch to Ed after the salad course. He undid the bow, neatly removed the green foil wrapping, opened the box, and held the watch.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. Without trying it on, he put it back in the box. “I can’t take it, though. I’m not the kind of man who’s ever thought of wearing a gold watch. You should return it to the store.”
In an astonished instant she’d gone beyond words, beyond anger, to a disappointment so deep it made her stomach ache.
“It’s a prototype, Ed. I can’t.” She refolded the napkin in her lap, smoothed down the silk of her dress.
“Why not?”
“It’s unique.”
“I’m sure they’d listen—”
“It’s engraved, goddammit.”
Ed was still talking, but she didn’t hear him. Quickly, dispassionately, she ran through the mechanics of how she would exit the restaurant. She wouldn’t say a word. She would of course leave the watch on the table. She would go home and tell her parents that the wedding was off. She was disappointed that she wouldn’t get to see her father in a top hat and tails. A busboy stacked and removed the salad plates, and now another stopped to replenish their water glasses, taking his time to keep too many ice cubes from tumbling out of the pitcher. His conscientious presence was the only reason she hadn’t risen yet.
“Maybe you could have them take off this gold band and put a leather one on it for me instead, if you don’t want to take it back,” this man to whom she’d sworn her devotion was saying in lordly ignorance of how far from him she’d flown in her mind, how almost absurdly vulnerable he was to her at that moment. “I’m a regular guy. I don’t know how to wear a watch like this.”
She saw how unfathomably easy it could be for her to walk out on her own life. She was awash in sudden sympathy for Ed. Then the cloudburst passed, and she sat in a little puddle of resentment over how benighted and pinched her future husband was.
They endured a tense dinner, even managed to make it through dessert. After they’d risen to leave, a surge of spite compelled her to fish the watch out of her pocketbook and make him read the engraving on its back.
He looked at it quietly. For a moment, it occurred to her that he might be moved enough to change his mind, and she grew unaccountably nervous. Then he handed it back.
“I’ll give you love and devotion and work hard all my life,” he said. “And I appreciate your getting this for me, more than I could say. It’s the nicest thing I’ve ever gotten. But I know I’m not going to wear it. If you take it back, we can put that money in an account to send our kids to college. I’m sorry. I can’t help the way I am. I wish I could. It’d be easier sometimes to be someone else. Right now, for instance. You look so beautiful tonight. I hate that I’ve disappointed you.”
A couple of days later, her father saw Ed and asked where the watch was. When Ed told the truth—it was home in the box, he didn’t feel comfortable putting it on—her father didn’t react with the fury she’d anticipated. Ed’s answer put him in a contemplative mood.
Later that night, her father called her into his room. “There’s a reason he can’t accept nice things,” he said. “His family’s been in this country a hundred years, but they never owned a house. That’s a sin. If you’re not in a house by the time I’m dead, I’ll haunt you from my grave.”
They got married a little over a year after they met. They spent a honeymoon weekend in Niagara Falls. It wasn’t what she’d dreamed of—France, Italy, Greece—but Ed was researching a paper that would synthesize part of his dissertation work, and they couldn’t afford to go away for long.
The Maid of the Mist didn’t run in the off-season, so they had to experience the falls from the viewing areas. Large blocks of ice had gathered in sections of the falls, and the cold spray made it hard to stay long. They went to restaurants and took scenic walks.
On their final day, as she stood in the Prospect Point Park observation tower wrestling with the thought that all bodies of water were part of one larger body, Ed announced that when they returned home, there would be no time to go out while he did his research, which would take the better part of a year. She didn’t take this threat too seriously. She figured he believed he needed that kind of sequestration, but more likely he was just trying on the role of head of household—making a show of arranging his affairs with an exaggerated masculine correctness. He’d been doing the same research in the run-up to the wedding, and pretty much the whole time they were courting, and he’d managed to make himself available to her. True, they’d only seen each other on the weekends, but she’d been busy with work herself.
They got back in late March 1967 and moved from their parents’ apartments into the second floor of a three-family house on Eighty-Third Street in Jackson Heights. She was elated that part of the dream she’d conceived for her existence had been fulfilled. For years, the neighborhood had exerted a powerful pull on her imagination, and now it was the one she came home to and slept in at the end of every day. The details were familiar, but they burned with a new intensity. Flowerpots at intersections announced the birth of new life, and the smell of spring through the windows lingered in the pillowcases.
She was happy to put the turmoil of life in her parents’ apartment behind her. She wanted to be conservative, if not in politics—her father would disown her if she made that shift—then in comportment, in demeanor. She’d always behaved a little older than her age, but now she found herself making extremely prudent choices, like dumping expired milk down the drain, even when it didn’t smell, and driving more slowly on curves or in the rain. She bought Ed a beautiful new tweed jacket and made him get rid of all his old shoes, replacing them with wing tips and oxfords.
There was still a little lingering restlessness in her spirit, though. It hadn’t been her dream to live in an apartment like the one she and Ed had ended up in, sandwiched between two ends of a family. The Orlandos, the owners, lived on the first floor, and Angelo Orlando’s older sister Consolata took up the third by herself. Angelo worked for the Department of Sanitation, and Lena was a housewife. They had three children—Gary, ten; Donny, nine; and Brenda, seven. The Orlando home was full of the sort of ambient noise she associated more with apartment buildings than houses. She had convinced herself that moving into a house, even a multifamily one, meant diving into a pool of blessed silence. The Orlando boys played tirelessly in the driveway with a small army of neighborhood kids. When it rained, they roughhoused indoors for hours, crashing into walls, and Lena’s voice rang out in shrill rebukes. The insistent murmur of a radio rose at night from Brenda’s room, which was below Ed’s office. Ed wore earplugs and possessed advanced powers of concentration, so the radio didn’t faze him, but it incensed Eileen. And Angelo and Lena’s fights, though infrequent, were of the screaming, door-slamming variety. The noise came at her from both sides. Most nights, Consolata made a restless circuit of her apartment, pounding between rooms with oddly heavy steps for a woman so thin, turning the television off in one room and on in another, leaving it on until programming ended and sometimes beyond, so that the rasp of a lost signal harassed Eileen to sleep.
Three months into the marriage, Eileen was astonished to realize that she hadn’t entered a bar, restaurant, or party with her husband. She’d grown tired of making excuses to her friends; when they called and she had to say she couldn’t go, she wanted to hand the phone to Ed to have him explain. She showed up alone if she went at all when they got together at each other’s houses, and after she’d faced enough inquisitions about where Ed was, she decided it wasn’t worth it to go. She’d envisioned playing euchre with him at the Coakleys’, or watching him save Frank McGuire from grilling disasters, or seeing his entertainer side come out at the piano after everyone downed a couple of banana daiquiris at Tom Cudahy’s place. She’d envisioned her own dining room, which was finally appointed hospitably after Ed had agreed to let her spend the money on furniture, thronged with friends around the table, Jack Coakley clapping his hands and dramatically sniffing the roast chicken’s lemon-pepper aroma as she carried it proudly past him, but instead what she had for company were the dog-eared pages of novels as she sulked in the armchair. The only reason she even had that damned chair was that her mother had shamed Ed into buying it so she’d have somewhere civilized to sit when she came over. Her mother flatly refused to sit on their ratty couch, which they’d inherited when Phil left for Toronto. As long as Ed had a place to rest his head—and it could have been the floor for all he cared—he was content to go about his work as though the body’s needs were nuisances and the soul’s demands, illusions. The only thing he seemed to consider authentic was his work—not work in the abstract, because he hardly listened when she spoke about her day, but his work, his precious, important work that was going to make a contribution to science. She would pause in the doorway for a moment before she headed out for solitary walks around the neighborhood, looking at his back hunched over his infernal notebooks, his hand not even rising to give her a perfunctory wave good-bye.
She walked the path her youthful self used to tread on dates, when Jackson Heights was the neighborhood to be seen in. She’d pass Jahn’s, where she used to have a burger and a shake after the movie, and remember how whatever hopeful young man she was with would escort her up and down both sides of Thirty-Seventh Avenue before returning her home on the train. Sometimes she’d take them on detours onto side streets, not to find an alley to make out in—though she did that too—but because she liked to look at the co-ops and houses and imagine a future in which she lived in that privileged setting.
Sometimes, she would feel that sense of possibility reenter her chest, and then she’d keep walking until it had worn off and the blocks looked strangely unfamiliar. She would stop at Arturo’s and gaze in at the couples dining in neat pairs, or the families passing plates around, and wonder when things would settle down long enough for her to enjoy some of that hot bread with him, buttered to perfection, a glass of red wine warming the stomach, the two of them in no hurry to get anywhere, choosing from an inviting menu. There needed to be time for that kind of leisure, or she didn’t see the point in living.
One day, the heat was unusual for early spring, and Ed was at his desk in his underwear and T-shirt. She’d begun to resent that desk, beaten up around the legs and stained a dull brown. She knew she’d never be free of it, that it would follow her wherever she went.
Getting that desk, Ed had told her, had been one of the few happy times he’d shared with his father as an adult. His father walked in from work one day and told him to get up and come with him. They drove into the city; his father wouldn’t say what it was about. They went to the Chubb offices. “The place looked like it had been cleaned out,” Ed said. “He led me to a storage closet. There was a desk and chair in it—his desk and chair. He’d had a handyman buddy hold them for him. They were getting new furniture for the whole office the next day. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Pull out the drawers. Pretend to work.’ It was strange to have him watching me. My mother was the one who peeked over my shoulder when I worked. ‘Can you get your work done at it, or what?’ he asked. I said, ‘Who couldn’t get work done at this desk? It’s beautiful.’ My father, being my father, said, ‘Good. Now I can read the paper at the table.’ But I knew he was glad to do something nice for me.”
The story had touched her when she’d first heard it, but now the ugly desk seemed a symbol of how little her husband would ever be equipped to see beyond the limits his biography had imposed on his imagination.
She watched him work, his pasty legs sticking out absurdly from his briefs, and waited for him to swivel in his chair to face her, to be a normal man for a moment. Angry, disappointed, she walked over and turned the air conditioner on. Ed rose without a word and turned it off again, then went back to work. He didn’t even look in her direction. They went back and forth like this several times. She couldn’t believe she’d signed on to live with a man so committed to his own pointless suffering. They weren’t poverty-stricken by any means; they were even able to put aside a bit of money from every check for a down payment on their future house. But Ed thought even minimal indulgences were best lived without.
When they were courting she’d seen his eccentricities as a welcome change. There was a bit of continental flair about him. Certainly he was more charming than the doctors at work. He was as smart as any of them; he only hadn’t gone to medical school because he was too interested in research to stop doing it. There was something romantic about that, but living with him made his eccentricities curdle into pathologies. What had been charmingly independent became fussy and self-defeating.
The heat broke her. She told him she’d had enough and started walking to her parents’ apartment in Woodside. She sweated through her blouse, her resentment spurring her forward. Ed could have all the heat he wanted in that apartment by himself. She wouldn’t be cooped up for another minute with him.
When her father came to the door and saw her fuming and drenched, he knew what was up. “That’s your home now,” he said. “Work it out with him.”
In her rush to leave Ed, she had neglected to bring her purse. She asked for change for the bus.
“You walked here,” her father said. “You can walk back.”
By the time she got home, she had grown so angry at her father that she’d forgotten all about being angry at her husband. Ed didn’t say anything when he saw her, but after she showered she emerged to an apartment bathed in the cool of a churning air conditioner.
They made love for what felt like forever that night. She didn’t mind the sweat at all.
She was in Woodside visiting her parents when she saw a sign taped to the window of Doherty’s: “Big Mike Tumulty vs. Pete McNeese in a footrace. Friday, July 21, 7:00.”
She knew Pete, and she’d never much liked him. He was tall and skinny, and he always seemed to speak a little louder than came naturally, as if he were imitating another man’s voice.
“What’s this about a race?” she asked her father as she walked into the kitchen. He was sitting sideways at the table with a cup of tea, looking out the window. He wore a new white undershirt and slippers.
“He was running his mouth off about how fleet of foot he was.”
“You’re almost sixty years old.”
“So what?”
“Pete is barely thirty.” Her father put the kettle back on.
“So he’s half my age,” her father said. “He’s also half the man.”
She thought the whole thing ridiculous, but on the race’s appointed day, she couldn’t help dropping by Doherty’s on the way home from work. The bar was fuller than usual, almost visibly crackling with static energy, as if a prizefight was about to take place instead of an absurd pissing contest. Happy shouts rose over the din, and everywhere she looked, men huddled and clapped their palms to the backs of each other’s necks. Someone asked her father how he planned to beat Pete. “I’ll blind him with the tobacco juice,” he said through a cheekful of chaw, to a round of hearty laughter. Guys were taking final book. “Two dollars on Big Mike,” she heard one say proudly, and she imagined that if all the money her father’s adherents were willing to lose to support him were piled on the bar, it would be enough to buy the establishment from the owners, or do something worthwhile.
The course was set: they would start in the bar, at the back, run out to the sidewalk, circle the block once, and return to the bar. It wouldn’t be easy to watch. Pete and his horse-long legs would come around the corner upright and easy, and her father would follow with his cheeks puffed, his face carmine red, his legs churning. Everyone gathered would watch an era end.
“Give me a glass of Irish whiskey,” her father said, gently rapping his knuckles on the bar. “I’m warming up.” He took his shirt off, then his undershirt. He resembled a bare-knuckled fighter. Pete tried to smirk, but he looked unnerved. Her father put his foot up on a stool. There were packs of muscle shifting under his skin, and when he leaned over to tie his shoe, his back looked broad enough to play cards on.
“Jimmy,” he called out with mock sharpness. “Get those kids out of the street. I don’t want to run any of them down.”
Guys laughed, exchanged looks. Her father and Pete toed a line in the back of the bar. The bartender counted down from three and they headed through a crowded gauntlet on either side, reaching the door at the same time. Her father shifted his massive body laterally like a darting bull and crushed Pete in the doorframe. They never made it outside. Pete staggered, out of breath before he’d even begun.
“They broke at the gate,” her father said as he returned to his stool, heat radiating visibly off his naked skin, a slight glower to him, a hint of violence in his eyes, the pride of a clan chieftain in his heavy step. She watched his friends retrieve their money and felt their eyes on her long, lean body, which her work suit clung to in the summer evening heat. They regarded her appreciatively, with a slightly wistful longing. She was the chieftain’s daughter, and she’d married outside the clan.
They hadn’t won anything, but they hadn’t lost anything either—neither money nor their idea of Big Mike. Her father had played Pete’s game, but by his own rules. It was a Solomonic solution, and she thought sadly of the difference he would have made with his gift for inspiring men if he’d been born into another life.
10 (#ulink_bbc69f14-be70-510b-8523-4b7cdc9d6c94)
Ed was an expert on the brain. His subspecialty within the field of neuroscience was psychopharmacology, specifically the effects of psychotropic drugs on neural functioning. While doing his dissertation research, he ran an experiment in the aquaria of the Department of Animal Behavior at the American Museum of Natural History, studying the relationship between the neurotransmitter norepinephrine and learning in the black-chinned West African mouthbrooder fish, whose female laid eggs and whose male spat sperm at them and gathered them, then heated them under its tongue. Ed housed them individually in small aquaria in a greenhouse whose temperature was maintained at 26°C, and performed experimental tests in a separate room at the same temperature, injecting them with drugs that either enhanced or depressed action. The fish saw a red light, and if they didn’t jump over a barrier in five seconds, they received a shock. He was testing the effects of drugs on an organism’s ability to augment its decision-making abilities—in short, to learn.
The subject of learning fascinated him. He told Eileen it was because it had happened almost by accident in his own life. “If I hadn’t run into that chemist at Kohnstamm’s,” he said, “I don’t know what would have become of me. I think about that narrow escape.”
He experimented on the fish faithfully six days a week for almost a year, going in even when it was supremely inconvenient to do so, missing family functions and dinners with friends, leaning on colleagues for favors when she put her foot down and demanded a sliver of his time. He never slept enough, he seldom ate enough, and his back always hurt because he sat too long at his desk, but the way the work was coming together gave him so much energy that he glowed as he neared the end, so much so that she went shopping without him and put a coffee table, two couches, a pair of end tables, and some lamps on the American Express, thinking he’d be too happy to complain. Still, she was so nervous about the cost that a few weeks later, on the Saturday when the furniture was supposed to be delivered, she still hadn’t told him it was coming. She was relieved when he left early for his lab to gather data, and after the men delivered the pieces and hauled the old couch to the backyard until the Monday pickup, she sat on one of the couches, fretting over what she’d say. When the front door finally opened, she leapt to her feet, ready to spar, but Ed stepped in from the vestibule wearing that tranquil expression he wore when he was deep in his work, that made it look as if he’d just come from meditating. As he took in the room, she waited to see his face fall and readied to say she’d send it all back, but all he did was sit on the couch and say how nice and firm the pillows were compared to the lumpy ones they’d been living with. She’d never even thought he’d registered the lumps.
He was about two weeks shy of having gathered all the data he needed when the heating plant broke down and the aquaria froze, killing his specimens.
He didn’t smash equipment or hurl insults at the plant manager. He didn’t come home and make life miserable for her. He ate a quiet dinner and lay on the floor in the living room, between the glass-topped coffee table and one of the couches. She lay on the other couch reading to keep him company. She understood he didn’t want a pep talk. When it was time to turn in, she leaned over him and saw in his eyes not sadness but extreme fatigue. She knew enough not to tell him everything would be fine. She gave him a kiss on the lips, told him to come in soon, and shut the light off. He remained behind in the silent dark. He came to bed very late, and the next day he began again from the beginning, with new fish, because he needed a full set of data.
When he finished a year later, he had worked on the fish for so long that the species’ scientific name had changed twice, from Tilapia heudelotii macrocephala to Tilapia melanotheron to Sarotherodon melanotheron melanotheron.
“You never get anywhere worthwhile taking shortcuts,” he said when she asked how he’d gotten through that difficult time. She couldn’t have agreed more. Not taking shortcuts—not settling for someone inferior—was the only reason she’d been free to marry him.
They started going out again. Ed got them a membership at the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra. Once, when they were heading to the symphony, he picked a wounded fledgling off the sidewalk and carried it in his handkerchief for a few blocks, until he bowed to her protestations and deposited it in a planter. He gave her the silent treatment until they got home. When she was shutting off the light she said, “Good night, St. Francis of Assisi,” and he laughed despite himself and they made love and fell asleep.
In December of 1970 she headed to the city with Ed to see the window displays on Fifth Avenue. She was excited to see them, despite how corrosively ironic Ed had been about them the year before, when at one point in his jeremiad he’d called them “altars to consumer excess.” She wasn’t about to let his grousing spoil her enjoyment of a tradition she’d observed whenever she could since she’d first gone with her mother as an eleven-year-old.
Ed refused to pay for a parking garage. It took them half an hour to find a spot, and they ended up on Twenty-Fifth and Seventh, almost a mile from Lord & Taylor. He refused to let them take a cab, even though she was wearing heels and it was twenty degrees out, with a wind that whipped up the avenue. The sun was setting, and store gates were being pulled down as if in protest of the cold. The sidewalks of Seventh Avenue were unusually empty. She noticed that most of the cabs that passed were occupied.
As they neared the store, the sidewalks grew more crowded, the bells of the Salvation Army collectors jingling on each corner. They saw a pack gathered in front, which quickened her step and made Ed sigh and slow down.
She had been delighting in the scene of a golden retriever pulling at the corner of a wrapped gift when Ed—who had been munching his way toward the bottom of a little bag of roasted nuts—broke the spell.
“These things seem here for the purpose of entertainment,” he said, “but really they’re here to get you to come in and part with your money.” He spoke in a breezy, careless way that suggested he believed a new understanding had sprung up between them. “They’re like organisms that have evolved elaborate decorative mechanisms to lure you in. People fall for it. It’s fascinating, actually.”
“Listen to yourself.”
“The bee orchid, for instance, has flowers that look like female wasps. Males try to mate with it, and in the process they get pollen on their feet and spread it around. It’s not about the window. It’s about pulling you into the store. It’s about getting you to leave with something.”
She was attempting to concentrate on the little animatronic girl whose hand was traveling slowly to cover her mouth, which had fallen open at the sight of Santa Claus’s ebony boots disappearing up the chimney.
“It’s a stupefying, hypnotic loop. It puts you in a suggestible state.”
“Do you have to be so heady about everything? Do you have to analyze everything to death?”
“What’s amazing is that they’re exactly the same every year.”
“That’s an ignorant remark,” she spat. “They’re not the same at all. They put a lot of work into these. Months of planning.”
She wouldn’t have minded his objections so much if he hadn’t insisted on drawing her into a dialogue about them. Was it too much to ask to share a moment of joy?
She looked around at the other husbands. They didn’t look any happier to be there, but they stood back dully, hands folded behind them or scratching their noses. They couldn’t have been as cleverly cruel about it as Ed if they’d tried.
“And the battling of tourists,” he said. “Every year it gets worse. The jostling, the jockeying for position. They’re descending on the imperial city for their bread and circuses. I wish we didn’t have to do this.”
She started walking to the train. A couple passing in the other direction gave her curious looks, as though they could see the intensity of her disgust in her expression. She found herself unaccountably smiling at one man, giving him a manic sort of grin full of the slightly breathless ecstasy of being unmoored, and he returned it with a delighted blush. By the time she felt a tug on her elbow, she was at the next corner.
“Don’t be hysterical,” Ed said. “I was just making a few observations.”
“The world isn’t a lab.”
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go back and look.”
In his worn jacket with the frayed sleeve ends, he looked like a war veteran about to ask for change for the subway.
“You’ve ruined it.”
“Don’t say that. Listen, I can’t help myself sometimes. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“I do,” she said. “You didn’t have enough fun as a kid.”
He pulled her arm, but she wouldn’t budge. She watched steam rise from a manhole cover and felt in her chest the rumbling of a passing bus. She was keenly aware of the limits of the physical world. She wanted to be in one of those scenes in the windows, frozen in time, in the faultless harmony of parts working in concert, fulfilling the plan of a guiding, designing hand. It would be lovely not to have to make every decision in life, to be part of a spectacle brought out once a year, for the safest of seasons, and put to work amusing people who stared back in mute appreciation. The real world was so messy, the light imperfect, the paint chipped, the happiness only partial.
“One of these years,” she said, “we will come here and you will enjoy it and not make me feel miserable about it. I dream of that.”
“Let’s let that be this year,” he said. “Let’s go back and look at those windows. Please, honey. Let me make it up to you.”
“It’s too late,” she said.
“It’s never too late,” he said. “Don’t say that.”
She hadn’t been looking at him; now she stopped to. Streams of people flowed past in either direction, rushing toward obscure destinations. This was her life right here, petty as it seemed at the moment, and this was the man she’d chosen to spend it with. He was holding his hat in his hand as if he’d taken it off for the purpose of beseeching her, and she saw that he would always have flaws, that he would always be a little too intense in his objections, a little too unbending when it came to the decadence of the world. She thought, We can’t all wear a hair shirt all the time. But there he was, trying to pull her back to the scene he despised, and she saw that he couldn’t live in a way other than the one he thought was right, and when he saw what the right thing was, like now, he cared about it as if it were the only thing that mattered. Everyone else around seemed as insubstantial as the air they moved through, the shopping bags they carried the only things anchoring them to the ground.
“Did I tell you I love what you did with your hair?” he said, and she let herself be mollified, because she’d thought he hadn’t noticed. She took his hand. They retraced their steps, the street around them thrumming with life. She saw that there was something perfect about the imperfection of her husband—her mortal, living husband with his excessive vigilance about the effects of capitalism and his unmistakable pair of bowed legs that she watched carry him forward. She kept her eyes on his shoes hitting the pavement and let him guide her wherever he was going.
11 (#ulink_233faefd-f566-53b5-b7c2-e35a2cae1e24)
Shortly after getting his PhD, Ed came home with the news that he’d been sought out by an executive at Merck, who’d read an article of his in a journal. Eileen was in the kitchen cutting vegetables for stew.
“He said I could have my own lab, with state-of-the-art equipment, everything top of the line. I’d have a team of assistants.”
“Did he say how much you’d be paid?” She pushed the peppers into the stewpot and rinsed the knife in the sink. She could smell something fried and sickly sweet coming up from the Orlandos’ apartment below.
“He didn’t have to. More than I’m making now. Let’s just say that.”
“How much more?” She began to cut the beef into cubes. It was a thick cut with veins of fat. Ed would not have approved of how much she had spent on it.
“We’d be very comfortable.”
He didn’t appear terribly enthused to be able to make such a statement.
“Honey!” she said, hearing herself squeal as she put the knife down. “This is amazing!” She threw her arms around him.
“We’d have to move to New Jersey.”
“We could live anywhere we wanted,” she said, letting him go to take a few steps and get the motor started on her thoughts. She was already envisioning a house in Bronxville. “If not New Jersey, then Westchester County, for instance.”
“That’s too far to commute.”
“Then we’ll move to New Jersey.”
“Not me,” he said.
“How do you want to do this, then? What would make you comfortable?”
“Staying where I am,” he said.
She looked at him. He was seriously considering not taking the job. If she had to say, he had already made up his mind. She picked up the knife and cut the last slab.
“You love research. Think of the lab you’d have. I’d have to drag you home.”
“It’s not research. It’s making drugs.” Ed paced toward the living room and back.
“Drugs that help people,” she said, pushing the meat into the pot.
“Drugs that make a lot of money,” he said.
This opportunity looked like their destiny. There had to be a way to get him to listen to reason. She added salt and pepper and two cups of water and turned the burner on. “You research drugs already. What’s the difference?”
Ed stood in the arched doorway between the kitchen and living room. He stretched his hands up and flexed his muscles against the doorway. “Researching drugs and making them are not the same,” he said. “On my own I can be a watchdog. For them I’d be a lapdog. Or an attack dog.”
“What about when we have kids?” She put the caps back on the oil and the spices. “Don’t you want to be able to provide for them?”
“Of course I do. I guess it depends what you mean by providing.” He gave her a meaningful look, let down his hands, and peered through the glass lid of the stewpot. He switched the radio on and played with the antenna to relieve the static. The kitchen filled with the violins and flutes of a classical orchestra.
“I could make you do it,” she said. “But I won’t.”
“You could not.”
“I could. Women do it all the time. I could find a way. But I won’t.”
He straightened up. “You’re not like that.”
“Lucky for you, that’s true,” she said, though what she was thinking was that she was more like that than Ed understood. If her husband wasn’t going to fight to secure their future, someone had to. “I just want you to know that I know what I’m not doing here. What I’m not makingyou do.”
“Don’t forget I’m on the fast track to tenure,” he said, and she could tell it was a done deal in his mind.
Ed was an assistant professor at Bronx Community College, where he’d started teaching while in graduate school at NYU. One day soon he would be an associate professor, and then, probably soon after that, a full professor.
“There’s nothing fast about the track you’re on,” she said bitterly, looking at him in the window’s reflection in order not to have to look right into his face. “I don’t care how quickly you get there.”
Five years into their marriage, when Eileen was thirty-one, they decided to stop using birth control and try to conceive a child. At Einstein Hospital, where she worked, she had established a reputation as a head nurse and was confident she’d be able to return to the field after a short absence. She would have to go back to work eventually, something she wouldn’t have had to do if Ed had said yes to Merck.
Seven months passed with no results and she started to worry. She wasn’t too old yet by any means, but she also knew the time for rational calculations had arrived. They’d been going about it haphazardly, having sex when they felt like it and leaving it to chance. She decided to make getting pregnant a conscious project, turning her attention to managing it as she’d managed so many others. She drew up ovulation charts and held Ed to a schedule. They both went in for tests. Ed’s sperm count was normal, his motility strong. Nothing was wrong with her ovaries. Every month, she cried when her period came. Every month, Ed reassured her.
Then, finally, after another six months had passed, she got pregnant. A new lightness entered her spirit. Things that had once annoyed her hardly registered with her anymore. She laughed more easily, gave Ed more rope, and was practically a pushover with the nurses she supervised. She surprised herself with how serene she felt. She never thought she’d be one of those egregious earth mothers, but there she was, tired all the time and yet still making meals and keeping the place in order and smiling through it—laughing, even, at the comedy of being alive. She didn’t get angry at the evening news. When she got cut off on the highway, she shrugged her shoulders and shifted over a lane and hoped everybody arrived safely where they were going.
Her mother was over at her apartment, reading the newspaper. She grunted in appreciation and handed it to Eileen.
“Here,” she said. “Read this. You might learn something.”
It was an article about Rose Kennedy; one paragraph discussed how the Kennedy children used to hide the coat hangers so their mother couldn’t deploy them on their backs. Eileen seldom thought anymore about her mother using the hanger on her, both because the memory was so unpleasant and because it was woven so thoroughly into the fabric of her childhood that it barely merited conscious thought, but even this many years later, as she pictured her mother cracking her with that little metal whip, she could almost physically feel it on her body.
“See?” her mother said proudly when Eileen handed it back. “I’m not the only one. If Rose Kennedy can do it, I can too. You should do it yourself, but you won’t. You’re too soft.”
If Eileen hadn’t been pregnant, she might have said something about how all that money doesn’t necessarily buy you class, you can still act the same as a cleaning lady from Queens, because it would have cut to the quick, but she just said, “I guess it takes all styles,” and decided then and there that she would never lift a hand in anger at her child.
A few months into the pregnancy, she suffered a miscarriage. The sadness she felt was ruinous, unspeakable. Almost worse was the awakening in her of a dormant foreboding that went back, perhaps, to her mother’s own miscarriage and the effect it had had on both their lives. She’d never acknowledged it consciously, but in the blind alleys of her mind she’d feared that if she ever did manage to get pregnant, she’d have difficulty bringing the child to term.
She tried not to let Ed see how distraught she was. She needed to keep him on task trying to get her pregnant again, and she didn’t want him thinking it would be gallant to take the pressure off her for a while. Another year passed with no results. She started having an extra glass of wine at restaurants. She took to suggesting wine with nearly every home-cooked meal. She began buying cases of wines she liked and storing them in the basement to have something on hand when company came over, and because buying in bulk was cheaper. She felt she was acquiring a little more insight into the way her mother’s life had played out. She was still in control, though; she kept going to work every day, kept depositing money into her savings account.
Ed no longer made efforts to reassure her. He seemed to have resigned himself to not having children. At times she wondered if he weren’t relieved. Despite his protests to the contrary she imagined he wouldn’t terribly mind preserving for himself some of the time that fatherhood would claim. Once, when he said he was too tired on a night they were scheduled to try, she accused him of sabotaging their plans. She knew she was being hysterical, but she couldn’t help herself.
Her friends ran into no trouble having babies. Cindy Coakley had three girls in five years until she finally delivered Shane to Jack. Marie Cudahy followed up Baby Steven with the twins, Carly and Savannah. Kelly Flanagan’s Eveline was born with a cleft lip, but then Henry came out a couple of years later looking like the Gerber baby. One after another, the calls came in with the cheerful news, and the cards arrived celebrating fecundity. The only holdout among her close friends was Ruth McGuire, who had raised the last two of her seven younger siblings herself. When Ruth told her she was done raising kids, Eileen felt herself drawing even closer to her. They would greet the childlessness together.
Whenever they gathered around to watch whichever of her friends’ kids was celebrating a birthday open presents, Eileen bit her nails down to the quick. She was sure everyone could read her thoughts in her mortified grin. She always spent too much money and bought too many gifts. She felt a nervous expectancy whenever the kid began to tear the paper open. She needed to have gotten the essential gift, the inevitable gift.
Having no kids freed Ed to pursue his professional interests without the burden of nighttime feedings or diaper changes or pediatric visits. He did important work on neurotransmitters, gave talks at conferences, and was named full professor faster than his peers.
She stopped thinking of each menstruation as a referendum on her femininity. She threw herself into her work with a compensatory vigor and was promoted several times. She sensed that her bosses and coworkers saw her as one of a new breed of women—it was 1975—willing to sacrifice motherhood on the altar of career. The men deferred to her and the mothers hated her, and there was an opportunity here if she was willing to pursue it fully.
Still, the miscarriage haunted her. She had dreams of sitting on the toilet bowl and hearing an unusual plop and finding in there a tiny baby who’d open its eyes at her—she couldn’t tell its sex—and look at her angrily, blinking slowly, and she would wake with a start and shake Ed awake. She avoided looking into the bowl when she went to the bathroom. Eventually, she and Ed settled into the rhythms of a childless life, which offered undeniable compensations: they could go out with other couples without having to arrange for child care; they could indulge in the leniency reserved for aunts and uncles; and they were free to nurture their careers in the way they might have nurtured offspring. Maybe this was why she was so upset when Ed was offered the chairmanship of the department and turned it down to devote more time to teaching and research. It was as if he was telling her he didn’t love their child.
To make up for the money he’d left on the table in passing up the chairmanship, Ed started teaching night anatomy classes at NYU. He’d pop home for dinner and head into the city by train. On dissection nights, he came home smelling like a pickled corpse himself. She couldn’t stand to have him touch her after he’d been handling dead bodies, and when he teasingly ran his hands over her anyway, she squealed and squirmed out of reach.
A tenure-track position opened in NYU’s biology department. One of Ed’s advisors was on the search committee. He said Ed would be given serious consideration if he applied.
She urged him to do it. NYU would be an obvious bump up in prestige.
“They need me at BCC,” he said. “Anyone can teach at NYU. What’s important to me is having my students leave knowing they got a real education. I want to help them get into NYU. I want them prepared to meet the demands that will be placed on them when they do.” There were other reasons to stay: the city had an airtight pension plan and great health benefits; there was no guarantee of tenure at NYU; he had a pretty good lab at BCC and could do the same research there that he’d do at NYU; there were grants out there to be procured. “It’s all about having the right ambition,” he said.
In the end, he never applied. To all the people she’d excitedly told about the NYU possibility, Eileen defended Ed’s choice by saying that when the opportunity arose, which was bound to be sooner rather than later, he would be a natural choice for dean of the college. That prospect, she said, wasn’t something you just flushed. That was the sort of career experience that could be parlayed into a parallel administrative position in a more prestigious institution.
He kept teaching the night classes. Now when he came home stinking of embalming fluids, not only wouldn’t she let him near her in bed, she made him shower before she’d even hug or kiss him hello. Dinner and dishes would intercede after that, and often she could get to bed without having to touch him at all. She didn’t feel bad withholding herself from him. He had made his choice. He shouldn’t have expected to have everything he wanted, not if she had to give so much up to keep him happy.
The tall tree in the backyard, whose crown eclipsed the apex of the Orlandos’ gabled roof, blocked much of the light in their bedroom. They were into their midthirties, and hints of seniority crept into their thoughts; they held them off by making love. Sometimes the activity was tinged by anger. Neither of them was going anywhere, even if in the middle of fights that lasted for days she entertained thoughts of divorce and suspected he did, though neither raised its specter aloud. They knew they would never sever their union, and this knowledge opened a door to the basement of their psyches. They became familiar enough to each other to begin to feel like strangers in bed, which infused their love life with a new potency. She wondered whether her friends had wandered down similar alleys, but she never had the courage to ask.
When she was thirty-five, after she’d long since given up worrying about it, she conceived a child and carried the pregnancy to term, delivering at dawn a couple of days before the ides of March, 1977. She and Ed had been struggling for weeks to come up with something to call the baby if it happened to be a boy, and by morning of the second day they were no closer to an answer, to the consternation of the girl with the birth certificate paperwork. Ruth took the train in to visit and accidentally left her book behind on the hospital nightstand. When the girl came around again on the morning of the third day and said Eileen could always take a trip down to City Hall to file the documents herself, Eileen’s gaze landed on the name of the author of Ruth’s book, Mrs. Bridge, which she had never heard of. She had a distant relative named Connell, but the real reason she chose it was that it sounded more like a last name than a first name, like one of those patrician monikers the doctors she worked for often bore, and she wanted to give the boy a head start on the concerns of life.
When Connell was a couple of months old, she realized, as though she’d awoken from an extended slumber, that his coming into the world had been a matter of grave importance. She had escaped a trap without knowing she’d been in it. For a while, she pushed Ed to conceive another child, until she stopped for fear of what misbegotten creature might result if she succeeded at her age. She would build the future on the boy.
It surprised her how much she enjoyed bathing her baby. She suspected it would have surprised anyone who knew her. As soon as she put the stopper in and opened the tap to fill the sink, a remarkable calm settled over her. She held his neck and head with one hand, her inner forearm cradling his body, and cleaned him with the other, pressing the cloth into the little creases in his skin. He smiled mutely at her and she felt a terrible unburdening of pent-up emotion. A little water splashed up in his face and he coughed and resumed his uncanny placidity. When he grew bigger and could sit up in the sink, she handed him a sopping washcloth to grip and suck on while she washed him with another, and she delighted in the sound of his draining it, the sheer vital pleasure he took in pulling it in his little teeth.
When he was old enough to be bathed in the tub, she loved the sight of him leaning over its lip, standing on tiptoe as he reached for the water with his swinging hand, his little back muscles shifting in the effort. In his enthusiasm he nearly fell in headfirst. He splashed waves out of the tub with a succession of quick slaps at the water’s surface. He giggled and gurgled and pulled at his penis with exploratory joy as she rubbed shampoo into his black hair. He grabbed the rinse cup and took a long draft of the soapy water before she could seize it from him. She loved to wrap the towel around him when she was done, powder his little body, secure the diaper, and work his limbs into pajamas, sensing the calm and ease he felt when snug in the garment’s gentle pressure. Snapping the buttons gave her an unreasonable pleasure. She would breathe his baby smell and wonder how she could ever have lived without it. Her heart swelled when she bathed him, when she dressed him for bed, when she combed the last wetness out of his washed hair, when she gave him the breast, when she gave him the bottle, when she lay him down, when she went to check on him at night and felt his chest rise and fall under her hand and his heart beat through her fingertips. She thought of him as she lay awake, and though she was always exhausted, and though there were nights she imagined she’d rise in the morning and the enchantment would have worn off, the well of her affection filled up in her sleep and she plucked him from the crib and pressed him to her, kissing his soft neck. There were some things that couldn’t be communicated, and this was one—how much pleasure a woman like her could take in the fact and presence of her beautiful baby boy. She knew it wouldn’t be like this forever; soon she’d make demands on him, expect the world of him. She was going to enjoy this part. She was going to fill up her heart with it enough for years.
12 (#ulink_5c0d59b9-6130-536c-afbe-d49c5283bf29)
After Eileen’s mother got sober, sitting idly took more out of her than working long hours, so she continued to haul herself out to Bayside to clean up after grammar school kids even into her midsixties, long after Eileen’s father had taken the watch and pension and tossed the truck keys to the younger bucks. When her employer lost its contract with the schools, though, her mother didn’t look for another job. She had talked for years of putting money down on a beach home in Breezy Point, but Eileen suspected she’d realized she couldn’t make a vaulting leap forward in the time she had remaining. She started reading the Irish Echo instead of the Daily News and making trips to Ireland using the savings she’d accumulated. The line of her allegiances began to blur, as if her time in her adopted homeland had been an experiment whose hypothesis had proved unsound.
Eileen had long been able to tell her mother about the fights over Ed’s career and know that she would click her tongue and shake her head in censure of his lack of drive. Some change was occurring in her mother, though, to make her less pragmatic. She seemed less bothered by her station in life. She stopped complaining about politics, or the idiots on the subway, or the ugliness and stench of city life. She read novels and met with a group to discuss them. Eileen couldn’t help feeling a little betrayed. She figured part of this transformation was her mother trying anything to avoid taking a drink. “Negative thoughts back you into a corner,” her mother said to her, smiling, one afternoon after returning from a picnic with the baby in Flushing Meadow Park. “They multiply and surround you. Don’t think of what you don’t have. Try to focus on the simple pleasures.” It was rich, this spouting of shibboleths, this late-stage wisdom-mongering. It was the tactic of a woman who’d played her hand and lost, or worse, never played it to begin with. But her mother had picked the wrong audience for her speech. It may have gone over well with down-and-outers at AA who’d wrecked their lives and slipped into a spiral of regret, but Eileen’s problem wasn’t negative thinking, it was too little positive thinking on the part of everyone around her. She had a vision, and she wasn’t turning away from it for a second, even if her husband, and now her mother, saw some ugliness in it. At least she had her father on her side—though God bless him, he supported anything you threw your heart into. She was going to do that, no question about it. What waited ahead, if only Ed would walk the path she’d laid out for him, was a beautiful life, an American life.
“One day at a time,” her mother said, and Eileen thought, And everything all at once.
Christmas of 1980 Eileen bought Ed a VCR. They’d looked at them together, but when he’d seen what they cost—about a thousand dollars—he had decided they could live without one. Eileen hadn’t worked hard all her life to sit on her hands when she could afford to buy something. She was making decent money now that she was the nursing director at Lawrence Hospital in Bronxville. It was the perfect gift for him, considering how much he loved old movies. Starting in August, she paid for it on layaway.
When he unwrapped it, he looked horrified, as if it were a relic unearthed from a sacred burial ground that would bring a curse down upon their heads.
“How could you do this?” he asked, seething in front of the three-year-old boy. “How could you think of buying this?”
A few days later, she came in from the shower and saw him on his haunches putting a tape in the machine. She gave him a sardonic look.
“All right,” he said. “I was wrong. It’s a great gift.”
“Save it.”
“I mean it. It was thoughtful of you.” He was clutching the empty sleeve of the VHS tape to his chest. “I appreciate it.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“Look, I know I get set in my ways.”
“You’re telling me.”
“Doesn’t mean I can’t learn a thing or two.”
He wheeled the TV cart over, so that it was right next to the bed. PBS was on, the fund-raising appeal between programs. Ed patted the bed. “Get in,” he said.
“I’ve got to brush my hair out.”
“Come on,” he said. “I want to make sure I get this whole thing on tape.”
“Anyway, I’m happy you’re using it.”
“What can I say?” He threw his arms out in amused resignation. “You’re good for me. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“Really?”
“Really and truly. I’d be lost without you.”
Sometimes it felt like all the difficulty he put her through was worth it. It was a rare man who’d admit so thoroughly that he’d been wrong.
“Honey,” she said, and she dropped her towel and stood naked before him the way he was always trying to get her to do. At first she hunched a bit, and then she stood tall, her hands at her hips, feasting on his gaze and letting him drink in her body. The movie was starting, but Ed didn’t take his eyes off her. She felt herself blush. “You’d better hit record,” she said. Ed didn’t stop looking at her. She climbed on him and hit the button.
“We can watch it later,” he said, kissing her neck. “That’s the genius of this thing.” He moved his hand down her back, squeezed her butt, touched her sex.
“Anytime we want,” she said breathlessly.
She rolled off him and ripped the sheet away. He lowered the volume and yanked his underwear off. She reached across him to switch off the bedside lamp and he thrust up into her, flipped her onto her back. The tape whirred rhythmically. The television pulsed, filling the room with light and plunging it into darkness, outlining their bodies in the lovely deep of night.
In January of 1981, her mother was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus.
A nurse came to the apartment, but her father did his share of nursing too. Eileen would go over after work and find that he’d given her medicine, bathed her, changed her clothes, made her a liquid meal—she could no longer eat solid foods—and tucked her in. He’d moved into her room, and slept in the other twin bed.
The day her mother entered the hospital for good—November 23, 1981—her father mentioned some pains in his chest. They admitted him and found that he had been concealing his own cancer, which had spread throughout his chest cavity, colonizing the organs. They gave him his own room, down the hall from her mother. They rolled them out to see each other once a day.
Her parents had slept in separate rooms for thirty years, but a few days before Christmas, when the doctors rolled her mother away from her father for what would turn out to be the last time, she called to him from down the hall.
“Don’t let them take me away from you, Mike, my Mike!” she said, for all on the floor to hear.
What they didn’t hear was what she asked Eileen later that night, with the tubes in her.
The curtain was drawn. The lights were off except for the one above her bed. Eileen had filled two cups with ice water, but both were left full and the ice had long ago melted.
“Was it worth it?”
Eileen leaned in to hear her better. “Was what worth it, Ma?”
“I didn’t touch a drop for twenty-five years. Did it make a difference?”
She felt an uncomfortable grin forming on her face. She wasn’t at all happy, but she couldn’t keep this ghoulish smile away. She didn’t want to show her mother how much she was hurting. Through the open door, she heard the distant beeps of call buttons and voices in intercoms. She had worked in a hospital for twenty years, but somehow she felt she was in a place she’d never been before. Under the green glow of the fluorescent lamp, her mother looked like a wraith, her skin so thin you could count the veins.
“How can you ask that?”
“I’m asking you.” Her mother shifted her head on her pillow with great effort. Her cheeks were two smooth hollows beneath large, alert eyes. “Was it worth it?”
Eileen had thought of the time since her mother had gotten sober as the happiest of both of their lives. There had been a quiet thawing of the glacier in her mother’s heart, with occasional louder crackings-off of icebergs of emotions, until, after Connell was born, it had melted so thoroughly that all that remained in an ocean of equanimity were little islands of occasional despond. Her mother appeared almost joyful at times. But perhaps it had been a performance.
“Of course,” Eileen said, taking her hand.
“I wish I hadn’t stopped.” Her mother didn’t look at her but gazed at the folds of the curtain, her other hand palm down on the blanket.
“Think of all the things you wouldn’t have had. Think of all the lives you touched. We had some great years.”
Her mother pulled her hand back, folded it into her other one. “I would have given it all away for a drink.”
“Well, you didn’t.”
“I still would.”
Eileen took her hand again and held it with force. “It’s too late. You did all that. You can’t take it back. You had a great life.”
“Fair enough,” her mother said, and in a little while she was dead.
Her father died two weeks later. In going through the papers, Eileen learned that he had cashed in the bonds and sold the life insurance policies decades before. Maybe that was how he’d gotten her mother’s ring back from the pawnbroker. Or maybe he’d incurred bigger debts than she’d ever suspected. She knew he’d always played the horses, but it had never occurred to her that he’d had an actual gambling problem. If so, he’d been good at keeping the consequences from her. She remembered something she’d witnessed when she was ten, at her friend Nora’s apartment after school. Nora opened the door to a man in a dark suit and hat who told her to give her father the message that he should pay what he owed. Eileen was standing behind her. “You kids will pay if he doesn’t,” the man said, pointing at Nora and herself. “Tell him.” Eileen went home frightened, and when she told her father what had happened, he said, “He didn’t mean you. He thought you belonged to that girl’s father. But you don’t. You belong to me.” It was impossible to imagine any man having the courage to show up at her father’s apartment that way, not when her father counted every Irish policeman in the city as an ally, and many of the non-Irish too. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t in someone’s debt. Maybe that explained why they’d never lived in a house. And maybe it explained why he’d been so adamant that she own one herself. In any case, she had to dip into her savings to pay for her parents’ funerals.
The wakes were so close together that she worried few relatives would be able to return for her father’s, but those who’d flown in for her mother flew back, and if they hadn’t there would still have been standing room only at the parlor.
She was staring at his coffin trying to understand how he could fit into that little box when a black man about her age came over and introduced himself as Nathaniel, the son of Carl Washington, her father’s longtime driving partner. Nathaniel asked if she knew how their fathers had come to drive together. With all the stories told about her father over the last couple of days, she was amazed there was one she hadn’t heard.
“My father was the first black driver Schaefer ever hired,” Nathaniel said. “The first morning my father showed up for work, none of the other drivers were willing to be paired with him. There were rumblings of a walkout. My father wondered if he was going to have to go find another job. Your father walked into the warehouse after the others and took one look at everyone back on their heels with their arms across their chests and said, ‘Get in this truck with me, you black son of a bitch.’ Then he hopped up in the truck without another word.”
She cringed, but Nathaniel was smiling.
“His language could be rough,” she said.
“My father heard worse,” he said. “Your father wouldn’t drive with anyone but my father after that. For twenty years. I don’t know if you remember, but he used to hold a Bronx route.”
She nodded.
“Once he had my father with him, he insisted on being switched to the Upper East Side.”
“I remember when he switched.”
“‘There’s enough blacks in the Bronx,’ he told my father. ‘Let them see a black face in that neighborhood for a change.’”
She put a tissue to her eyes and handed him one as well.
“Big Mike this, Big Mike that,” Nathaniel said. “Growing up I heard your father’s name around the house more than the names of people in my own family.”
He waved his wife and children over and she greeted all of them in turn.
She was embarrassed to learn that Mr. Washington had died a few years before. She was even more embarrassed to see in Nathaniel’s face, when she said, “I wish I’d known,” that he never would have dreamed she’d show up at his father’s funeral.
13 (#ulink_8a30090d-a81f-58ab-b8e3-debabe91a165)
In February of 1982, Bronx Community College announced that the dean would be stepping down at the end of the semester. They offered Ed the job and even mentioned the possibility of his becoming president someday. She felt like a chess master who had seen several moves ahead. Taking the deanship would mean the end of Ed’s teaching career, but there was no question of his refusing: he would strap the boy and herself to his back and carry them further up the ladder of respectability.
Working at Lawrence had opened her eyes to how people lived on a higher rung of that ladder. She found herself walking or driving around Bronxville after work, to marvel at the manicured shrubbery, the gorgeous houses set back from the street, the shining plate-glass windows behind which every table looked set for Christmas dinner. From time to time her car was in the shop and she had to take the Metro-North, but it was almost a pleasure to do so, because the Bronxville station was quaintly beautiful, with no graffiti in sight and the lambent glow of the station house and cars idling amiably as they dropped people off. She waited in the strange serenity of the platform’s airy expanse, and when the train came around the bend, it bore the dignity of another era. Drowsing riders slipped past sleepy towns on the way to Grand Central Station. She began to dwell on the idea that she could finally begin to really live her life if she came home to an enchanted place like that, but they would need more money to live there. Ed’s job offer had come just in time.
She thought she’d made her feelings clear to Ed, and that he’d understood and agreed, but one day he came home and told her he’d turned the deanship down. “The classroom is too important,” he said. “I want them getting the education they’d get at elite schools, and I know that, at least in my classroom, that’s what they’re getting. I can control that much.”
This about-face infuriated her—the caprice in it, the self-indulgence. This wasn’t the sober man she’d thought she’d married. Sure, he had his arguments: his ambition had never been for fancier titles and fatter paychecks; he was after something unquantifiable, philosophical, the kind of aim never properly rewarded in earthly terms. She grew increasingly impatient with his disquisitions, but she found herself parroting them to her friends, wrapping herself in the chastening rhetoric of sacrifice and duty.
She wanted Ed’s idealism to trump her pragmatism, and for a couple of weeks it did, until one night at dinner she said that she was tired of living in their apartment, and that after fifteen years it was time for a change, time, even, to own a house. Ed made his case for the low rent the Orlandos charged and the fact that they were socking away money for Connell’s education and avoiding the expenses and headaches of ownership. Another day Eileen would have let herself be appeased, turned the temperature down on the conversation, but now she allowed her anger to boil up at Ed and his unbecoming lack of courage. She felt herself on the verge of screaming one of those unforgettable phrases that could alter the dynamic of a relationship forever, and so she told him to put the boy to bed and slammed the door on her way out the room.
After work the next day, when that regular crowd that were never in a rush to get home to their families went to a bar in the vicinity of the hospital, Eileen for once accepted the invitation to join them. She was determined to stay out until God knew what hour, even with the young boy at home, and do whatever these people did as they watched their numbers dwindle to a determined few, but she was only halfway into her first glass of wine when a memory rose up of one particularly lugubrious episode during the period when her mother went out after work. She reached for her wallet to settle up, but the others wouldn’t let her pay. As she drove home, she decided that she couldn’t just pretend to Ed that nothing had changed. She felt a timer ticking on the way they were currently arranging their lives. She was getting restless. She had thought they were walking a mutual path toward greater stakes in a shared dream, but the more he insisted on staying in their apartment, the harder it was for her to see him as a fully vested partner in her future. She needed him to be her partner, because she loved him terribly, despite the difficulty of living with him sometimes, and so she was going to save him from himself, and save their marriage if that was what it was coming to, by insisting that they leave. He had always been good at listening to her. As he got older and more fixed in his fears and habits, she had to shout a little louder to be heard, but once he heard her, if he could stomach what she was asking for, he did what she asked. She did what she could do for him as well. He needed a real home no less than she did. His mind had grown smaller as he’d bunkered himself in his ideals. He needed space for his thoughts to breathe. He needed to regroup, to see new possibilities, to think bigger than ever. If there was anything she could help him with, it was thinking big.
She’d almost reached her landing with the basket of folded clothes when she heard the doorbell ring. Ed was teaching his night class. She groaned in frustration and elbowed the door open, hustling to the front stairs to get down there before the bell rang again. The boy had always been a light sleeper, but in the months since he turned five he’d seemed to awaken at the mere suggestion of activity. This constant up and down—two flights to the laundry room, a long flight to answer the door—was driving her crazy.
When she saw Angelo standing there, she wondered if she’d forgotten to slip the rent payment under the door. She found the whole exercise so humiliating every month—stooping in subservience, struggling to slide the envelope past the stubborn insulating lip—that she might unconsciously have followed her desire to forget about it and see how long it would be until they said something.
“Is this a good time to talk?”
“Sure, come in.”
She was in a form-fitting sweat suit, which made her a little self-conscious walking up the stairs in front of him. When they got upstairs, she asked him to have a seat at the dining room table, but he chose to stand in the doorway, leaning against the doorjamb, holding the knit cap he’d taken off his head.
“Can I get you some coffee? Water?”
“No, thank you.”
She sat.
“I’ve run into a little financial trouble,” Angelo said.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, and because she didn’t want to hear the details, she began to worry the upholstering on the chairs.
He inhaled deeply, cracked his swollen knuckles. “I don’t want to burden you with the whole story. Long story short, I’ll have to sell the house.”
“All right,” she said.
“I wanted to see if you had any interest in it.”
Recently, she and Ed had begun to seriously discuss the possibility of buying a house. She’d campaigned to sway him to the virtues of home ownership by appealing to his practical side. Owning would mean an added financial burden, but they’d be building equity instead of flushing rent money, and they had already put enough aside for a down payment. The only things holding them back were his conservatism about expenses and general fear of change. She hadn’t been thinking multifamily, but the rental income would offset part of the mortgage, and it struck her that it wasn’t going to get any easier to convince Ed to buy a house than telling him she wanted to buy the one they were already in. They wouldn’t even have to get a moving truck. This was her best chance to capitalize on his recent softened stance; the longer they waited, the more time he’d have to convince himself that they shouldn’t tie their money up in a home. And when he heard that Angelo was in trouble, he would want to help him out.
It didn’t hurt that her father, who had promised to haunt her until she and Ed owned a house, would be appeased. She’d been thinking of her father’s curse more and more lately. She could make the case that she’d been in a house long before he was dead, and that it was just a matter of signing a few papers to make it officially hers. He would appreciate the neatness of such a solution.
“This is all very sudden,” she said.
“I’d sell it to you at a discount,” he said. “I’d only ask that you keep my family on at an affordable rent.”
“I’ll talk to my husband about it.”
“Please do,” he said. “I’m going to have to move quickly, one way or the other.”
Her mind was churning. She didn’t like being on an upper floor, especially after Ed’s cousin’s kid in Broad Channel, playing Superman, had climbed out onto a second-story roof, jumped, and broken an arm and a leg. And she was tired of not having a driveway of her own. She used to consider herself lucky that Angelo allowed her and Ed to park in the driveway at all, but that gratitude had worn off, and now it nettled her to have to walk around the house to get to her door, or to have to ring Angelo’s bell when she was blocked in.
“There’s one thing I would want,” she said.
“You name it.”
“I would want to switch apartments. I would want to be on the ground floor.”
“It’s your house,” he said.
“And one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I would ask you to park your car on the street,” she said. “I would want the driveway clear for our use.”
He seemed to chew on what she’d said. His mouth rose at the corners in a forlorn smile at the concessions his situation—she realized that she didn’t care to know the first thing about it, not the first thing—had forced upon him.
“No problem,” he said, regaining the momentum he’d briefly lost. “There’s plenty of parking around here. Worst case, I walk a block or two.”
“And we’d need the garage cleaned out.”
“Everything will come out of there.”
“And the cedar closets in the basement. You can have the ones we use now.”
She thought she heard him whistle. She couldn’t tell if he was taken aback or impressed by the bargain she was driving. “All of these details can be arranged,” he said. “We can work together on this.”
“I just needed to get these things out in the open.”
He picked up her keys from the bowl on the mule chest and let them twirl in his fingers. “I got you.”
“I’ll talk to Ed.”
“And you’d keep us on?”
“Yes.”
He dropped the keys and straightened up. “At affordable rents?”
“I wouldn’t charge an arm and a leg,” she said. “You folks are like family now.”
“Even if I die?”
“Angelo! My God.”
He gave her a look that suggested he saw her not as a woman but as another man. “I’m asking: even if I die?”
“Even if you die. Of course.”
“I just want to know my family is taken care of,” he said. “I’m not looking to break the bank. I just want to take care of my people.” He backed toward the stairs.
“I understand,” she said, stepping toward him.
“Why don’t we find out how much houses like this are going for, and then you can give me less than that.”
“I need to talk to my husband,” she said again. “We’d have to qualify for a mortgage.”
“Don’t worry.” He had taken a step downstairs and he turned, smiling fully now, so that he almost appeared mirthful. “People like you, with all your affairs in order—you can have anything you want in this country.”
Part II (#ulink_fbfa6ae9-81be-5a7c-93ce-520170ae42d7)
14 (#ulink_f0158fde-a7fe-530f-a83d-c7691e4ae2be)
Eileen was understaffed again, so she had to stay late filling out charts and writing notes, and when she went around to dispense a final round of meds in little paper cups, one patient crashed his fist into his mouth in that way stupid people did when trying to look cool taking pills or eating peanuts, and he missed and sent the pill skittering across the linoleum floor. Pharmacy wasn’t picking up the phone, and she was out of that medication, so she got down on all fours and searched for it. A quarter of an hour later she found it covered in dust under the far bed. She reached her arm up with it from under the bed in a gesture of mutual victory, but as she crawled out backwards on her hands and knees, she saw that he was staring idiotically at her rear end, which she’d left hovering as she focused on the task at hand. She wanted to cram the pill in his mouth and slam his jaw shut, cracking his teeth, but she wasn’t about to let a useless fool like this defeat her poise, so she just placed it back in the little cup. In her chosen profession (in fact she felt it had chosen her, in a kind of malevolent possession) even administrators weren’t spared feeling like pieces of meat.
It was almost six thirty when she hit Eastchester Road. The Hutch was moving, thank God, and the Mets were in Boston, so maybe it wouldn’t be so bad on the other side of the bridge. The traffic during the playoffs had been a nightmare: mindless, endless, pointless; very nearly proof of the randomness of the universe. Her sciatic nerve was throbbing and her feet were going numb, and she didn’t have it in her to sit there inching along.
As she approached the Whitestone and the road sloped up toward the start of the cables, she felt her mood lift. Her time on the bridge was the only part of her commute she didn’t mind. She loved the way the cables shot up in a triumphant curve as the first arch neared and then plunged down immediately afterward. Sometimes—it was happening now—the music on the radio matched the rhythm of the bridge. The cables climbed toward the second arch, and she felt herself in the uncanny presence of beauty. Nothing else in her day stirred her to the contemplation of abstract ideas. The bridge was making an argument for its own soundness as she drove over it. High above the East River, the sharp focus of ordinary life gave way to hazy impressions as the eye worked to contain the vastness it beheld. Then the cables rolled into anchor, the landscape resumed a human scale, and that hopeful notion she’d conceived for the evening at the peak of the span began to recede.
At least the traffic was flowing. She’d be home by seven at this rate. She had called at five to say she expected to be quite late and to ask Lena to feed Connell, and then she’d called again before she left and said not to feed him. Lena had assured her it was no trouble, and Eileen had heard the touch of sharpness in her own voice when she’d said she wanted to have dinner with the boy herself. She had put chicken in the fridge to defrost it, and if she didn’t cook it, it was going to go bad.
That morning, she’d decided that they were going to have a family meal, even though Ed wouldn’t be there with them. If he was forcing her to compromise on her ideal of family time by continuing to teach these night classes, then a compromise was all she could stand anymore, not the complete capitulation she’d made lately on nights he taught, when she let Lena feed the boy and took a restless bubble bath before she went up to get him. She and Connell were enough to make up a family; in fact, they were plenty. In some families, mother and child was all there was. She didn’t need Ed to be happy.
She was angry at Ed for the class that met two nights a week, and she was angry at him for staying late another night to attend to his research. If he was going to be away this much, at least he could be making good money doing it. His turning down the job at Merck still bothered her, and the fact that he’d spent these years taking on extra instruction only served to make him seem more irresponsible somehow.
At the exit for Northern off the Whitestone Expressway, she took pleasure in seeing Shea Stadium empty. Soon enough—it couldn’t come soon enough—this endless season would be over. At 114th Street, she headed over to Thirty-Fourth Avenue, because she didn’t like driving through Corona on Northern. It depressed her to live next to a neighborhood that run-down, though things closer to her end of town weren’t all that great lately either. Some of the reliable old stores were becoming junk shops, and the number of signs with Spanish in them was on the rise.
She wasn’t looking forward to fetching Connell from the Orlandos. It used to be, when he was in kindergarten or first grade, he’d come running when she appeared at the back door, but lately she’d had to fight to get him out of there. They always had the television going, that was part of it, and the place was comfortable in a way that appealed to a kid, with knickknacks everywhere and interesting clutter. Brenda’s four-year old daughter, Sharon, was usually there. The number of Orlandos present never seemed to dip below three. It reminded her of her apartment during the happy period in her teens when a new wave of relatives came over from Ireland. There were differences, of course: the Orlandos were louder, more physical, certainly more affectionate. She’d dealt with smoke as a kid, but there were more smokers in the Orlando house; everyone but Sharon seemed to have lit up at some point in Eileen’s presence. She suspected that whatever fun Connell had up there paled in comparison to the afternoons she’d enjoyed with all her cousins around, but he didn’t know the difference. Or maybe it was like when she went up to the Schmidts’ apartment to watch television as a girl. She always felt she was escaping the reality of her life. Was that how Connell felt? If so, he had no reason to. She and Ed provided a calmer home than she’d ever had. Still, these days he never wanted to come down. She had to admit that for the first few minutes after they got downstairs, until she put the kitchen radio on and started cooking, her house felt empty by comparison.
She parked and went inside, took her shoes off, and changed quickly out of her stockings. She put her slippers on and went up the back stairs. Lena answered the door in a smock and said, “Come in, come in,” with the carefree informality of a woman perfectly comfortable in her own home. Behind her, Angelo sat at the table in the dining room that had once been Eileen’s own, smoking a cigarette and flipping through the Post. He still had his Sanitation Department shirt on, unbuttoned and untucked, with an undershirt beneath it. His hands were thick, and his fingers were stained from cigarettes, but there was an elegance in the way his hair was cropped and the longer strands on top were slicked back. He gave her a warm smile and welcomed her with a small gesture of the hand. The only books in the house were a few dusty volumes in the glass case behind him, and he hadn’t finished high school, but still he gave the impression he could summon up reliable answers to almost any question put to him. She watched him luxuriously turn the pages of the newspaper, licking his finger and sliding his hand behind the page to flip it as though it were a leaf in an illuminated manuscript. Since Consolata’s death a few months back, he was less quick to yell, and he sat at the table and talked to Connell more, which the boy delighted in. The family was still paying the rent for Consolata’s apartment, presumably out of whatever small inheritance she’d left them. Lena and Angelo were planning on moving upstairs with Gary, to give Donny, Brenda, and Sharon room to breathe. The kids were grown, but it was evident they wouldn’t be striking off on their own anytime soon.
Gary and Brenda were on the couch, Sharon between them, resting her head on her mother’s lap while her uncle held her feet. Donny was in the easy chair. Connell had the smaller couch to himself. They were watching Jeopardy. Connell barely looked up when Eileen walked in. Donny waved; Gary looked embarrassed to be noticed. He was wearing corduroy pants and a T-shirt that was too tight in the gut. He wasn’t fat so much as the shirt was a shrunken relic of his youth.
The question at hand was about which president served the shortest term in office, thirty-two days. Eileen couldn’t remember the name.
“Harrison,” Gary called out, just before the contestant buzzed in with “William Henry Harrison.” Connell said “Yes!” with gusto and Donny grinned proudly at his older brother. The next question in the category asked for the name of the man who shot James Garfield at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station.
“Charles Guiteau,” Gary said quietly, and a moment later the contestant did too.
It was easier for her when Gary stayed in his room. She didn’t like to think about him. He was the oldest of the siblings, but he’d never held down a job. He had an air of resignation about him, as if he’d already given up on life. At the same time, he had a good deal of intellectual ability. She didn’t like to acknowledge that people with real ability might not arrive at comfortable stations in life. Her cousin Pat had been a bad enough disappointment; she didn’t want to consider the possibility that Connell might fall through the cracks like Gary. She certainly didn’t like to think that something similar had happened to her too, on a smaller scale. She had achieved professional status, but her existence wasn’t ideal, and hard as she tried to hack her way through the thicket of middle-class living, she couldn’t find a way out to the clearing. It would have been easier to see Gary as a savant with an overdeveloped capacity to absorb trivia, but the truth was he was a complex, intelligent individual. She’d heard him discussing issues of the day and couldn’t help agreeing with him, even being enlightened by observations she couldn’t have made herself. And yet there he was, living in the margins, talking to a television, dying half an hour at a time. A claustrophobic sensation swept over her. She needed to forget that people like Gary existed, to forget even the possibility of failure. She needed to spirit her son away or Gary would suck him into the black hole of his life.
Connell rose and slapped Donny five across the coffee table. Then he looked up at her.
“It’s time to go,” she said. “I’m making dinner.”
“Can I come down when it’s ready?”
“No,” she said sharply, then collected herself. “You’re coming down now. They’ve had enough of you up here. Let the Orlandos have their evening in peace.”
“He’s no bother,” Angelo said over his newspaper. “He can stay as long as he wants.”
“Thank you, but he’s going to help me get dinner ready.” She hadn’t had any intention to ask Connell for help, but she needed a good excuse.
“We were discussing politics before,” Angelo said. “He said you wanted him to be a politician. I asked him if he knew what a politician was.”
Eileen offered up a little embarrassed laugh. “What I mostly want is for him to get downstairs right now,” she said, loud enough for Connell to hear.
She said her good-byes and walked to the door. Connell lagged behind, standing and watching the show. Gary got another question right, and Donny and Connell broke into hysterics.
“Connell,” she said. “Come on.”
He took his time getting his schoolbag and followed her down the stairs. She got him set up chopping lettuce while she grilled the chicken. She was going to make salad for dinner, with the chicken spread over it. She’d given in to pizza too often recently, and the nights Ed cooked it was grilled cheese in a lagoon of butter, or cheeseburgers, anything with cheese. The boy was too chubby for her liking. It was true that he hadn’t hit a big growth spurt yet, but it was also true that the tendency toward physical largeness on her family’s side could edge into overweight if it wasn’t watched scrupulously. In the absence of worldly cares, Connell stuffed his face with candy and ice cream. She hadn’t had time to get fat as a kid. When she was only a few months older than he was now, she was planning meals, shopping, keeping the house—things she couldn’t imagine him doing. When she sent him to the store, she had to write a list, and he still inevitably forgot something on it.
She was going to start mapping some order onto his life. Ed wasn’t a big help in that area. He loved the boy so much, was so permissive, seemed delighted by everything he did. Connell brought home a ninety-five and Ed beamed; she was always the one forced to ask where the other five points went. She resented the way Connell walked around oblivious of how carefree his existence was, how little responsibility he had.
She put some cherry tomatoes in the salad and cooked the chicken quickly in the pan. She grabbed some dressing, tossed it all together, and told him to sit down. She served him salad and put the chicken over it.
“This is dinner?” he said.
“You need to eat more leafy greens. Some leafy greens.”
It was seven thirty. Ed was just half an hour into his class, with an hour to go. She spent a few moments of pique in wondering if she and Connell were crossing his mind at all. Connell was eating too fast, as usual. He didn’t even like salad, and yet he was rushing to eat it. There was something irrepressible in the way he ate. Maybe he was trying to speed through dinner so he could get to dessert. He knew the rules: no dessert until his plate was clean. It had been a couple of years since she’d had to stage one of those nightlong sit-ins to get him to eat his meal. She’d figured out what to avoid, and he’d stopped trying to slip it in the garbage when she wasn’t looking and just ate what he was served. Dessert held that power over him. She always kept something in the house, for herself as much as for him, but she took only a little portion, nothing like the heaps he wolfed down. He was going to have to learn restraint if he ever wanted to make a success of himself among serious people. It was unseemly to behave with that kind of abandon. She told him to slow down and he nodded at her and kept on eating at his pace. “Slow down,” she said, annoyed. “You’re going to choke.” She got up to refill her water glass. She stood at the sink drinking it and filled it again. When she turned around she saw him waving his arms, his fork on his plate, and then she saw him leap to his feet, his hands on his throat. She told him it wasn’t funny, and then she saw his face and began screaming, “Are you choking?” but she already knew he was. It had happened a few times when he was a toddler, but it had always been a mere scare, some dense foodstuff, tuna fish or peanut butter, compacted in his esophagus, and he’d been able to breathe through it, but now he wasn’t making a sound. It was time to grab him coolly and dislodge the food with one fist to his abdomen and the other shoving up, but she couldn’t do it.
She’d dealt with choking a number of times in her career. You got your hands in the midsection and gave the diaphragm a healthy shove and out the food popped. A couple of seconds and it was over. You had more time than people thought, a lot more, four full minutes until brain damage set in. But this was her son and she had no room for error.
She had him by the shoulders. She began to panic. She knew she shouldn’t panic, but she couldn’t help herself; she loved the boy so much. She was thinking Please don’t die, please don’t die and she started screaming for help, and then she was shoving him out the door and pulling him toward the back stairs. She got to the stairwell and screamed, “Angelo! Angelo! Angelo!” and ran upstairs and banged on the door and screamed, “Come down!” and then she ran back down, because she had left the boy alone. Her hands were shaking. “He’s choking!” she screamed. Connell was turning blue. She heard someone flying down the stairs, and then Donny was shoving her aside, and then he was standing behind Connell, giving him a muscular approximation of the Heimlich, and then something flew out of Connell’s mouth onto the carpet. He started coughing and wailing a terrified wail that sounded more like a cat’s than a child’s. It was a cherry tomato. He must have swallowed it whole. She picked it up and crushed it angrily in her hand. She sat him at the dining room table. Angelo, Gary, and Brenda came in. Connell kept coughing, though the wailing subsided. She went to get him a glass of water. In the kitchen she saw the plates and slammed them into the trash with their contents. She could feel the feelings rising up, getting ready to wash over her, take her over. He took the water down quickly. She would never get angry at him for eating fast again. It was Ed she was angry at, for not being there, for exposing Connell to this danger by his absence. She was grateful the Orlandos were reliably present in the evenings, and mortified that she, a nurse, hadn’t been able to save him herself.
“Are you going to slow down now?” was all she could think to say when she went back to the dining room. Then she burst into tears. Connell seemed too dazed to cry.
“If you’d been Gary,” Donny said, “I would have let you choke. What do they call that, Gary? Euthanasia?”
Connell gave a little chuckle through his coughs.
“Don’t you do that again,” Angelo said. “I don’t need another heart attack. Two is plenty.”
“You good?” Brenda asked, putting her hand on Connell’s shoulder. He nodded. “Slow down. Your food’s not going anywhere.”
“Well, my work here is done,” Donny said. “I better go find a phone booth to change in.”
“Why don’t you go pick up your dirty drawers from the bathroom floor instead,” Brenda said. “I don’t think the hamper’s made of kryptonite.”
The laughs were welcome, but she could see that Donny had been affected by the brush with disaster. He was wide-eyed and shaking his head. The whole Orlando family seemed unnerved. Connell spent the afternoons up there, but it had never occurred to Eileen that they might in some way have thought of him as being part of their family too.
“Wheel of Fortune is on,” Gary said. They made their way up the stairs. She sat at the table with Connell.
“Are you okay?”
He nodded.
“Shaken up?”
He nodded again. “I couldn’t breathe,” he said.
“I know.”
“I couldn’t talk.”
He couldn’t know how hard on her he was making this.
“Horrible,” she said. “I froze up.”
“Donny saved me.”
“I don’t know what happened. I’ve done it before. I guess it never meant as much to me.”
“Thank God they were here,” he said.
“I would have done it eventually,” she said. “My training would have kicked in. I think because I knew they were here, I didn’t have to go into lifesaving mode.”
“He saved my life,” the boy said thoughtfully.
“Let’s not go overboard,” she said. “You were going to be fine. We had time.”
He looked like he was in shock. She went to the freezer and scooped some ice cream into a bowl for him.
“Here, have this,” she said. “I don’t think you can choke on this. Maybe you’ll find a way.”
Ordinarily at this time of night she would have made him sit down with his homework, but she didn’t say anything about it. At the moment she didn’t care if he never did his homework again. Maybe this was how Ed felt all the time.
She told him he could take the ice cream to the couch—another first—and she went to get the television for him. The only set in the house was the little black-and-white one in their bedroom. They had been wheeling it out to the living room during the playoffs and the World Series. She cleaned up the pan from the chicken while he watched Entertainment Tonight, and joined him when she was done. The games usually started at eight, or before eight, but when he got up to change the channel to NBC, The Cosby Show was on. It took only a moment to understand that preempting The Cosby Show would have cost the network ad revenue. They lay on separate couches. It wasn’t easy to see the set from that far away. The girl, Vanessa, was trying to wear makeup to school, against her mother’s wishes. The boy, Theo, was attempting to organize his family to do a fire drill. It could have been Leave It to Beaver, except that everyone was black. The world was changing fast. It was hard to fit her son’s America into her memory of how the world had been ordered when she was a child. She felt like a member of an in-between generation, straddling sides in a clash of history. Her life was as remote and ancient to Connell as the stories of the pilgrim settlers had been to her when she was his age.
The Cosby Show ended and the game was about to come on. She told him she was going to the bedroom to lie down, and he gave her a stricken look.
“You’re not watching the game?”
She could tell he was disturbed by what had happened to him, that he didn’t want to be alone. “I’ll watch for a little while,” she said, relenting.
She didn’t blame him. Over and over she had been reliving in her mind the moment when she’d watched Donny pop the tomato out. She wanted to sit next to Connell, to hold him close to her, but she had no idea how to do it. She had no interest in watching another of these games she’d had to sit through so many of in the run-up to the playoffs, so after a few minutes she rose to get Lonesome Dove. She flipped through it distractedly, reading and rereading the same page several times. The Mets fell behind early, and by the end of the fifth inning they were down 4–0.
She knew she wasn’t the softest mother in the world. She worked a lot. She worked, period. Other mothers stayed home, baked cookies, talked to their kids all the time, knew everything their kids were thinking. It had never occurred to her to try to be Connell’s friend. She did her best to encourage meaningful conversations at dinner, the three of them talking as a family, and not only because it would be constructive in lubricating Connell’s future advancement among people who judged a person by how he spoke, but also because she liked to hear what he was thinking. She had worked hard to give him a comfortable life. That was as valuable as providing emotional sustenance. Life wasn’t only about expressing feelings and giving hugs. Still, she couldn’t figure out how to break through the defenses her son had put up, and it bothered her, an intellectual problem as much as an emotional one.
She placed her bookmark in the page and held the book in her hands. “I’m thinking of turning in,” she said.
“Can you stay here and read?”
So, he needed her there. He couldn’t say it in so many words, but he had more or less admitted it. She opened her book again and started in on the first page of the chapter she’d been reading.
Ed walked in before ten. They heard the door, and then they heard him hanging his coat in the vestibule, and then they heard him dropping his briefcase on his desk in the study before he came into the living room.
“Still four–nothing?” he asked when he walked in.
Connell nodded. “Gooden got smacked around.”
“They were saying on the radio his velocity is down.”
“El Sid has been great in relief. But the bats are ice cold.”
“Something happened,” she said, interjecting. “Connell choked.”
“What?” Ed turned to her, then back to him. “What happened, buddy?”
“I was trying to concentrate on not choking, and then the next thing I knew I was choking.”
He looked at her. “Really choking?”
“It was in his windpipe.”
“What was?”
“A cherry tomato.”
“You got it out?”
“Donny did.”
He pointed upstairs. “You ate with the Orlandos?”
“Donny came down,” Connell said.
“To eat with us?”
Her blood ran cold at the thought of discussing the particulars around the boy, who would see on her face how unsettled she still was.
“I’ll explain later,” she said.
“Come here,” Ed said, and he sat on the couch and put his arm around Connell, who leaned into the lapel of his father’s tweed jacket. It was so easy for Ed to connect to him. She always had to be the scold. Maybe Connell had hardened his heart to her. He leaned in further, so that his chubby belly pressed against the waistband of his sweatpants. He had his face in Ed’s flannel shirt and started sobbing. Ed kissed the top of his head and rubbed his back. Connell kept his face buried there for some minutes. Ed was looking to her for a mimed narrative of what had happened, but she kept waving him off. After a while, Connell lifted his head.
“Will you do what your mother has asked you to do a few times now, if I’m not mistaken,” Ed said in a firm but gentle voice, “and try to slow down when you eat? Can you do that for me?”
Connell nodded.
“Good.”
And then, without another word, they had transitioned out of that conversation and were watching the game. She stopped reading Lonesome Dove and directed her attention to them. It was something to behold, Ed’s physical comfort with the boy, who had his leg draped over his father’s. She’d been affectionate with Connell when he was very young, up until he was about three, but then something had interceded to make it subtly harder for her to connect to him. She knew Ed could do it, so she’d never spent much time worrying about the boy being deprived, but now she had the sensation that she was on the other side of something important. She wasn’t angry so much as hurt and darkly fascinated.
The Mets scored a run in the top of the eighth inning, and then, in the ninth, after Ray Knight grounded out and Kevin Mitchell popped out—she’d sat through so many playoff games of late that she knew the players’ names by now—Mookie Wilson doubled, and then Rafael Santana singled him in. Ed said this team had a knack for getting two-out hits. Lenny Dykstra came to the plate as the tying run, but a few pitches later he struck out swinging and the game was over. The Mets were down three games to two in the World Series. Another loss and their season, which seemed to have united New York for a while and which even someone like her, who paid little attention, knew had been an extraordinary success, would be over.
“Complete game for Hurst,” Ed said. “Impressive.”
“They couldn’t get to him,” Connell said.
Ed rose and shut the volume off but left the screen on, and they watched the Red Sox players celebrate as the credits rolled and the news came on. Then he shut the television off and pulled the plug on it to prepare to roll it back into the bedroom.
“Clemens is up next,” Connell said, foreboding in his voice.
“Yes, but they’re in New York.”
“They have to win two.”
“They’ll do it.”
“It’s Roger Clemens.”
“What did Tug McGraw say?” Ed asked Socratically.
“‘Ya gotta believe,’” Connell answered.
“Well, then.”
It was after eleven thirty, much later than Connell’s bedtime. They said quick good nights and the boy headed off. Ed wheeled the television in front of him as if he was piloting a projector cart. She got into bed, and Ed came in a few minutes later, after he’d tucked Connell in. She told him the story of how the boy had choked and how she’d responded to it, or failed to respond, and Ed nodded and said it was over now and everything was fine, and it calmed her to hear it; Ed was good at putting her at ease. He gave her a kiss and she rolled over and lay thinking about what had transpired, with a clarity of thought the clamorous broadcast hadn’t allowed. Why had she frozen? As Connell had stood there not even gasping for air, but silently motioning toward his throat, a feeling for him more intense than love and more mysterious had risen up from the depths of her mind. She felt that he was part of her own flesh again, as he’d been once, and that she was on the brink of dying along with him. Nothing would be the same if he died. She would go on, but her life would lose its meaning and purpose. This kid who annoyed and infuriated her so often was walking around with her fate in his hands. She didn’t trust him with it. She felt fragile, exposed. She was going to make him be more careful going forward.
At one thirty in the morning, she was awakened by Connell nudging her, asking if he could come into the bed. She was too sleepy to object. She moved aside and let him slide into the space between them. She couldn’t remember the last time he was in bed with them. She had policed that boundary well when he was younger, not wanting to become one of those couples whose marriages were held hostage by a child in the bed every night. Forget about sex: she just wanted to get a good night’s sleep. Eventually Connell had stopped trying to join them.
She began to groggily recall the events of earlier, and it made sense that he was there. She could hear him nudging Ed awake, the two of them talking.
“I almost died,” Connell said.
“You’re fine,” Ed said.
“I was scared. I’m still scared.”
Ed rolled over. “You are completely fine. You’re safe. You have a long life ahead of you. A long life.”
“I didn’t want to die,” Connell said.
“Well, now you have to remember that feeling. Go out there and make the most of life.”
“You really think they’re going to win?”
“The Mets? Yes.”
“Both games?”
“Both. You’ll see.”
“You’re sure?”
“Have faith,” Ed said. “They’ll pull it out. Now go to sleep.”
As she listened to them talk, she was taken back to the row of beds she slept in when Mr. Kehoe was still living in the other room. She had no memory of any conversations taking place among the three of them once the lights were out. Both her parents faced away from her. She remembered wondering what it would have been like for the two of them to sleep in the same bed. Now she wondered whether she’d have had the nerve to crawl between them and feel their heat radiating on either side of her. Maybe if they’d slept in the same bed, she would have grown up as the kind of girl who had that nerve. Maybe your imagination stopped at the boundaries that contained it. She had taken comfort in the placement of her bed between theirs. Maybe you took what you could get. She could have reached out and touched their backs. That had been enough for her. It wouldn’t be enough for her son. She was glad, on this night when she hadn’t been able to save him herself, to have one bed they slept in and to be able to give him this opportunity. She hadn’t had it as a girl, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t have it. She wondered if he’d lost some of his trust in her tonight. So much of life was the peeling away of illusions. Maybe she’d only hurried that along. Maybe that wasn’t the worst thing. He was going to have to fend for himself at some point.
She felt Connell roll away from Ed and nuzzle up to her in a way that she hadn’t anticipated him doing. His forehead was pressed against the top of her back. Within a minute, he was asleep. She couldn’t move without waking him, but she also couldn’t sleep without moving him. She decided to wait. She felt oddly touched having him there. Still, it was going to be a long night, and she’d be exhausted in the morning, so she’d eventually have to move him off her.
She lay there thinking, I almost lost him. I’m never serving goddamned cherry tomatoes again. Ed better be right about the Mets, or this kid is going to be more disappointed in his father than he is in the Mets. Then again, he has to learn that things don’t always work out the way you want them to.
She went back and forth between thinking it would be nice if Connell got the outcome he wanted and thinking it would be character-building for him not to get it. Fatigue from a long day at work and the effects of adrenaline withdrawal must have been enough to overcome her need for space, because she felt herself drifting off, even though he was still attached to her.
The kid would be thrilled, she thought. Let them win.
The next thing she knew she was waking up. Somehow in the night she had gotten herself to face the boy, who was still sleeping, and Ed behind him on his back, out cold. Connell breathed in and out softly. His lashes were long like his father’s, and in the muted sunlight peeking through the blinds his cheeks looked sweet and full. As if he could sense her looking at him, he opened his eyes and blinked a few times in that half-conscious, slightly perturbed way he used to as a toddler when he hadn’t yet fully come to. He gave her a slumber-drunk smile; then he was back asleep. She didn’t know what to do with everything she was feeling for him, even for her husband, so she got up to take a shower and left the two of them to wake up and find each other there.
Part III (#ulink_da176a98-13a0-5a57-bbd8-9fea4002848d)
15 (#ulink_098f6438-633b-55c7-bf5d-a334d4ed75cd)
After Connell turned in, Ed surprised her by not moving to the study to grade lab reports or read journal articles. He lay on the couch with the newspaper listening to Wagner. She didn’t have to know music to recognize that it was Wagner, because the swelling crescendos and singer’s deep voice gave it away. Ed often listened to Wagner when he was in a contemplative mood.
She sat on the other couch with her book, happy to share with him the beaten-back chill of a February night, which made itself known in the frost on the windows. She switched the light on in the artificial fireplace, pausing briefly to rattle the glass coals and hear them clack against each other. It pleased her that the man she’d married, in addition to possessing an erudition that impressed even worldly friends, read the sports section in its entirety. At one point he rose and went to the study, and she thought she’d lost him for the night, but he returned with a pen to do the crossword. She loved the carefree way he called on her for help when flummoxed by a clue. It suggested an abiding faith in the soundness of his intellect that he could meet head-on those swells of ignorance that might capsize another man’s confidence; they were wavelets lapping against his hull.
“I’ve done everything I can do,” he said, as he lay the quarter-folded newspaper on the coffee table. “I want to be realistic. Maybe it’s time for me to relax.”
She glanced up from her book to catch his eye, but he was looking at the ceiling.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.
“I’m turning fifty soon. I’m slowing down. I’ve earned a rest.”
“Nonsense,” she said.
“I’m going to become one of those guys who come home and call it a night. Maybe I’ll watch some TV.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it.”
“I can start right now.”
Her heart leapt a little. It was pleasant to imagine him spending more time in their bed. He had finally given up the night classes, thank God, but he still worked so hard, often coming in from the study long after she was asleep.
“I don’t know how long you could keep that up,” she said. “You’d get bored.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Well, if it makes you happy,” she said.
He’d already moved to the stereo to change the record. He plugged his headphones in and had them on before she could hear what he was listening to. He lay back down and closed his eyes.
She waited for him to acknowledge her gaze. He liked to lie like that and slip into a reverie, but he usually opened his eyes between movements to give her a little review with his raised brows. She wondered if he were sleeping, he was lying so still, but then he began tapping his foot rhythmically. When the side ended, he lay there, arms crossed across his chest, impassive. She shut off her light and stood to head into the bedroom. She called his name, but he didn’t reply. She watched for some kind of acknowledgment of her departure, but he only shifted his glasses. She went to him and stood over him. He must have imagined he could outlast her in this game, but she was starting to grow disturbed by it. She leaned in to kiss his cheek good night; before she reached it he had opened his eyes and was staring back at her in a kind of horror, as if she’d interrupted him in a reflection on something monstrous.
“I’m heading to bed,” she said.
“I’ll be right in.”
After a few bouts of fitful sleep—she never slept well without him beside her—she headed to the living room. She found the end table lamp on and Ed still wearing the headphones. A record was spinning, and he’d set up a stack to be played by the autochanger. She shut the stereo off and called his name. He put a hand up to silence her.
“I’m just going to lie here a minute,” he said.
“It’s four in the morning.” She switched off the lamp, but ambient light still filtered into the room from the coming sun. “You need good, quality sleep. You’re always saying that. Don’t lights interrupt sleep? You need REM sleep. Restful sleep. Come on inside. You have to teach in a few hours.”
“I think I’m going to cancel class,” he said. “I’m not feeling it.”
“Huh?”
He hadn’t missed a class in twenty years. They’d had fights about it. You can miss a single class, she would say when something came up. They can’t fire you for it. They can’t fire you, period.
“I think I’ve earned a day off,” he said.
“Well, either way, just come to bed. It’s late.”
She stood over him until he got up. They shuffled down the hall together. In the morning when she woke he was sitting at the foot of the bed.
“Maybe you’d better call for me,” he said.
After she’d made the call, she showered and dressed. When she headed to the kitchen, she saw him lying on the couch again, as if he hadn’t moved from the night before, the only difference being the cup of tea on the table.
“You’re taking this whole ‘taking it easy’ thing pretty seriously,” she said.
“I’m just gathering my energy,” he said. “I’ll be all right tomorrow. I’ll go in tomorrow.”
He let himself be kissed good-bye. She went to work. When she returned she was surprised to find him in the same spot, wearing the same clothes. She hadn’t really believed he’d stay home all day; it was unlike him. His record of never missing work was a matter of somber pride. Connell’s bag and jacket were slung over a chair in the dining room.
Ed’s eyes were closed. His feet beat the time. She stood over him, tapped him on the shoulder. As she spoke, he motioned to the headphones to indicate he couldn’t hear her. She mimed pulling them off her ears.
“I’m listening to music,” he said.
“Plainly.”
“How was work?”
“Work was fine,” she said. “Did you stay there all day?”
“I got up to eat.”
“So this is the new thing?”
“I’m trying it out. I’m feeling enormously refreshed.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” she said.
“I’ve been meaning to spend more time attending to my needs,” he said. “This is step one. I’ve had a cloudy head for a while. I’m trying to get back to basics.”
“What about work?”
“I’m going to need you to call in again for me tomorrow.”
In the big mirror in the other room she saw herself in the coat she’d been meaning to replace. She had once thought of thirty as a terribly old age, but now she was turning fifty at the end of the year, and thirty seemed impossibly young.
“How long do you plan to do this?”
“I hadn’t formulated a plan.”
“Shall I expect you to eat with us tonight?”
“Of course,” he said, waving her off and putting the headphones back on.
As she began to prepare dinner, she reflected on what this thing could be. It was clearly some kind of midlife crisis. Something was spooking him: getting old, probably. She was confident it wasn’t another woman. They were coconspirators in a mission of normalcy. A stronger deterrent to infidelity even than love was the desire to maintain a stable household, a stress-free life. She knew he was reliable, and not only because he wasn’t going to miss work to sleep off a drunk, or gamble his paycheck at the track, or forget their anniversary. He was, in a subtler way, reliably knowable. Some women yearned for a hint of mystery about their men; she loved Ed’s lack of mystery. It had shade, depth, texture; it was just complex enough. His heart contained too little passion for him to attempt a grand affair, and too much for him to endure a scurrilous one. He was too preoccupied with his work to love two women at once; he lacked that tolerance for superficial interaction every successful adulterer wielded.
A few days later he returned to work, but the headphones ritual persisted in the evenings. One night he returned to his study, and she felt relieved. She assumed he was grading lab reports, but when she went in to bring him a plate of cookies she found him writing in a notebook, which he took pains to block from her view. When she went back later that night to look for it, it was gone.
Their dinners began to feel strange to her. Ed looked away when she tried to meet his gaze, and he never wanted to talk about his work—or about anything, really, but Connell’s day and the happenings at school.
“And then,” Connell said, “they lifted him up to grab the rim, but they didn’t give him the ball to dunk. Somebody pulled his shorts down. And then they pulled his underwear down! He just hung up there until Mr. Cotswald ran over and got him.”
“Ha!”
Ed laughed with just a bit too much gusto. She’d expected him to condemn the boys’ behavior. It was as if he hadn’t really absorbed what Connell had said. Something in the warmth in his voice, the distraction that flickered in his eyes, made her wonder if she’d been too hasty in ruling out an affair. A listlessness had come over him lately that seemed at times like a species of dreaminess.
“Well.” Ed pushed back his chair. He gave Connell a perfunctory pat on the head and retired to the couch and the privacy of his headphones. Connell looked embarrassed, as if he’d extended a hand for a shake and been rebuffed. She knew enough not to compound it by speaking to him.
She went to bed feeling frowsy. She squeezed the deposits of fat at her hips and wondered how they had managed to sneak up on her. She knew the doctors at work still turned to look at her in the halls, but if Ed didn’t see her that way, then the interest of other men felt less a vote of confidence than a shabby habit that in its mindless lack of differentiation—she saw the way they looked at so many of the girls—called into question whether she had ever been beautiful at all.
Ed came in after midnight. He stood over her, gazing oddly. She could feel herself stiffen.
“Anything you want to tell me?”
“Not really,” he said.
“What are you listening to, anyway?”
“Wagner’s Ring Cycle. I have so many records I haven’t even cracked the plastic on. It makes me anxious to see them all sitting there. I’m working my way through them.”
She was surprised by how relieved she felt to hear this. It was sufficiently particular to actually be plausible. It was the kind of thing she imagined people did when they came to a point where the roads to the past and the future were equally muddy—retreat to the high ground of a major project.
She had long measured a meal’s success by the range of colors arrayed on the plate, but it felt hopelessly middle-class now to conceive of food in this fashion, and she looked askance at orange carrots, bright green beans, white mashed potatoes, the dark pile of meat and onions, picking at it with her fork in the way she resented in her child.
She used to love to sit at her kitchen table and watch the drapes kick up in the wind, to look through the window across the little divide and see the Palumbos gathered in their dining room, but now the house next door felt far too close. She hated its plain brick face and the shabby décor visible within. She had long tolerated this vulgarity because she felt privileged to have a house at all, but now she found it too disappointing to bear.
Lately she couldn’t stop thinking about Bronxville. When she’d left Lawrence in 1983 for the nursing director job at St. John’s Episcopal in Far Rockaway, she’d missed going to Bronxville every day. When she returned to Einstein a couple of years later to be head of nursing, she’d begun to think the timing might finally be right to move to Bronxville. The commute would be shorter for both of them, she was making good money now, Ed had gotten into a decent pay class himself, and they’d made a few good investments. They had put eight thousand dollars into oil shale stock on the advice of one of Ed’s colleagues, a geologist at NYU, and it had climbed to forty-four thousand. But then in ’85 the shale oil company went bankrupt. That year, they also lost twenty grand on a penny stock scam with First Jersey Securities. The final nail came in 1987, when her boss left for a government appointment, and the new head of the hospital fired those he could and appointed his own leadership team. Though she landed on her feet at North Central Bronx, she had to take a pay cut to do so.
She couldn’t look across at the Palumbos’ just then, with their dreadful chandelier glowing like margarine and the two of them looking all their years as they sat down to a cheerless meal, so she got up to close the drapes. Ed took her rising as a cue that the meal was over and headed for the couch.
When she and Ed moved in, the neighborhood was Irish, Italian, Greek, and Jewish, and they knew everyone on the block. Then families started to trickle out, and in their place came Colombians, Bolivians, Nicaraguans, Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis. Connell played with the new kids, but she never met the parents. When an Iranian family—they called themselves Persian, but she couldn’t bring herself to refer to them as anything but Iranian—bought her friend Irene’s place up the block after she moved to Garden City, the son, Farshid, became a classmate of Connell’s at St. Joan of Arc and started hanging around the house.
It wasn’t hard to feel the pull of the suburbs, because the neighborhood was half suburb already, arranged around mass transit but also around car travel. There were driveways next to every house, and gas stations and car dealerships at regular intervals along Northern Boulevard. LaGuardia Airport was a short drive away, and Robert Moses’s highways, and the massive parking lots at Shea, and the husk of the World’s Fair, which had left detritus like a glacier.
Most of the stores she loved were gone, replaced by trinket shops, T-shirt shops, fireworks black marketeers, exotic hair salons hidden behind heavy curtains, over-the-counter purveyors of deadly martial arts paraphernalia, comic book stores, karate schools, check-cashing places, Korean-run Optimo-branded cigar and candy stores that sold cheap knockoffs of popular Japanese toys, taxi depots, sketchy bars, fast food, wholesalers of obscure cuisines, restaurants suggestive of opium dens, bodegas stocked with products she would never consider eating. The Boulevard Theatre on the corner was now a Latin dance hall with neon lights flickering late into the night and an insistent beat that hectored the remaining old guard to leave. Cars piled up outside it and the cops were always breaking up fights. The gloomy little Irish bar was the last stand against the invasion, but she couldn’t take some specious pride in it now after avoiding it all these years.
The memory of wealth haunted the nearby garden apartment buildings. She imagined gaunt bachelors presiding over dwindling fortunes, long lines coming to a silent end. There were remnants of the way it had been, like Barricini’s Chocolates and Jahn’s, but stepping into them only reminded her how few of the old places were left.
She knew it was possible to see the changes as part of what made the city great, an image of what was to come, the necessary cycle of immigration, but only if you weren’t the one being displaced. Maybe even then you could, if you were a saint. She had no desire to be a saint, not if it meant she’d have to blunt the edge of her anger at these people. It certainly wasn’t saintliness that led her to attempt to get past her resentment at the break-in that occurred a couple of years back, while they were on a cruise in the Bahamas. Rather, it was a desire to continue living in the neighborhood without boiling over into outright vitriol whenever she stepped into the grocery store, where anyone she laid eyes on, worker or customer, unless they looked respectable, could have been one of the offenders. She had returned from that cruise to find her jewelry box rifled through and her drawers turned inside out. Luckily, she’d long ago overridden Ed and spent the money to rent a safe deposit box at Manufacturers Hanover, where she stored Ed’s LeCoultre watch and her mother’s embattled engagement ring. All the bonds were in the box as well. She took a certain satisfaction in thinking of how little the thieves had made off with; for once it seemed an advantage that Ed had never been the sort to buy necklaces and bracelets for her birthday or their anniversary. The degenerates had pinched Ed’s stereo, that was true, but he’d needed a new one for years, and this was an excuse for her to buy one for him. She was angry too at the Orlandos, who’d been home at the time. She couldn’t imagine how they hadn’t heard anything, or done anything if they’d heard. What kept her awake some nights, though, fantasizing about revenge, was the fact that they’d taken Mr. Kehoe’s clarinet from the bedroom closet. What could they possibly have wanted with a clarinet? How valuable could such a thing have been on the secondhand market? There was no way they were keeping it for themselves, because the swine wouldn’t know what to do with such a delicate instrument. She pictured them back in their sty of an apartment, surveying their loot, sniffing it, looking at the clarinet’s pieces in stupefaction and dropping them into a garbage can.
She couldn’t blame everything on the latest waves of immigration. Her immediate neighbors had been there longer than she had and both had fallen on tough times. Both houses used to look respectable, if a little dull, with dingy lace curtains in the windows and bleached paint on the trim, but now a rusted-out car sat on blocks in the Palumbos’ backyard, next to a rain-filled drum, and Gene Cooney’s house was under permanent construction, with ugly scaffolding marring the facade and a garden box full of crabgrass and construction debris. Gene stalked the perimeter all day with an edgy intensity, wearing a tool belt around his waist. Wild rumors had sprung up about him and his family, spread by newer residents. He was said to be an IRA arms smuggler lying low. There were whispers about his daughter, who wore short skirts and fishnet stockings and kept nocturnal hours. Eileen knew the truth: he’d gone off the rails after his wife had been killed on Northern Boulevard by a hit-and-run driver, and his daughter wasn’t a prostitute but a girl who had fallen victim to the fashions of the Hispanics she’d grown up around—though one could be forgiven for confusing some of them with hookers.
When she’d first moved onto the block, the garden boxes in front of the houses were lush with flowers in bloom and respectable attempts at horticulture, but many had since returned to the wild, with giant weeds poking up over their walls. She was committed to making hers an oasis against decay, although she hadn’t inherited her father’s sympathy with all manner of vegetable life. Angelo had helped her keep things alive, and she’d picked up a bit of knowledge working alongside him, but ever since his third heart attack had killed him a few years back, she was constantly buying new plants to replace the ones that wilted in the middle of the night.
She overspent on furniture. She had the rugs cleaned and the walls painted every two years. She’d found a beautiful crystal chandelier on sale on the Bowery. The house wasn’t fancy, but it had a certain luster. The one thing she couldn’t escape was the sound of the Orlandos’ footsteps above her. The fact that she owned the whole building didn’t make it any more pleasant to hear them.
Ed was seated at the table as she fixed the tea. His back was to her, possessed of that solidity that so delighted her the first time she put her arms around him. Now she wanted to pound on it. He was hunched over and rubbing his temples. She put a hand on his shoulder and he flinched at her touch. She thought, Who the hell does he think I am?
She considered flinging herself on him before he could get the headphones plugged in. She thought of ripping the plug out once he’d settled into his pillow and filling the room with sound, screaming over the music the invectives she’d held in. But she didn’t do that. She sat in the armchair and read a book until she headed to bed.
She wondered whether she was being hard on her husband. He had, after all, more than earned a rest after teaching for so many years. She hadn’t heard anything from Connell yet about it, and she expected that the boy, who was becoming a more sullen presence in the house as he slunk into adolescence, would be oblivious enough to his father’s new routines to allow her to conclude that it was all in her head.
Connell noticed, though. “So what’s with all the record listening?” he asked one night, snapping his gum in that insouciant way that usually annoyed her. Now she saw that the attitude gave him the courage to speak.
Ed looked up but didn’t respond.
“What’s up with the headphones?” he asked again, stepping closer to his father.
Given the strange way Ed had been behaving lately, she thought he might fly into a rage, but he simply took the headphones off.
“I’m listening to opera.”
“You listen to it all the time now.”
“I decided I didn’t want to die not having heard all these masterpieces. Verdi. Rossini. Puccini.”
“Who’s dying? You’ve got plenty of time.”
“There’s no time like the present,” Ed said.
“You don’t have to use those,” Connell said, pointing to the headphones.
“I don’t want to disturb anyone.”
“You don’t think you’re disturbing anyone this way?”
Another night, when she picked him up from track practice, Connell asked her in the car if his father was unhappy.
“I wouldn’t say that,” she said. “I think he’s quite happy.”
“He always says, ‘You have to decide in life. You deliberate awhile, you think of all the possibilities on both sides, and then you make a decision and stick to it.’”
She’d never heard this particular line of reasoning from Ed. This must’ve been one of those things he and the boy talked about when she wasn’t around. She could almost feel her ears pricking up.
“Like with girls. He says, ‘When you’re getting married, you make a decision and that’s it. Things aren’t always perfect, but you work at them. The important thing is that you decided.’”
Her stomach tightened.
“But what I don’t get is, if it’s such a chore, if you’re talking about having to stick to it because you decided it, why do people do it in the first place?”
“They do it because they’re in love,” she said defensively. “Your father and I were in love. Are in love.”
“I know,” he said.
It occurred to her that perhaps he didn’t know. Overt affection had always been uncomfortable for her, but in front of the boy it felt impossible. Ed used to squeeze and kiss her when Connell was a baby, but she would wriggle out of it. Certainly she didn’t reach for him herself, but he knew when they married that he’d have to take the lead. She wasn’t like the women a few years younger who wore miniskirts. What she offered instead was the negotiated submission of her fierce independence. She was different in bed with him than she was anywhere else, but this wasn’t something her son could have any idea about.
“Your father is happy,” she said. “He’s just getting older, is all. You’ll understand someday. The same exact thing will happen to you.”
It didn’t feel like the best explanation, but it must’ve been good enough, because the boy was silent for the rest of the ride.
16 (#ulink_3bd2fdc6-8631-532d-b6b0-9188f003c033)
His father was always on the couch now, but that morning he came to Connell’s room and told him he wanted to take him to the batting cages. They drove to the usual place, off the Grand Central Parkway, in back of a mini-mall.
Connell picked out the least dinged-up bat from the rack and tried to find a helmet that fit. His father came back from the concession stand with a handful of coins for the machines. Connell headed for the machine labeled Very Fast. He put the sweaty, smelly helmet on and pulled his batting glove onto his right hand. He took his position in the left-handed batter’s box and dropped the coin in. The light came on on the machine, and then nothing happened for a while, until a ball shot out and thumped against the rubber backstop. Connell watched another one pass and wondered if he was going to be able to hit any of them. They were easily over eighty miles an hour, though they weren’t the ninety miles an hour they were presented as.
The next pitch came and Connell timed his swing a little too late and the ball smacked behind him with a fearsome thwack. The next pitch he foul-tipped, and the one after that he hit a tiny grounder on, and then the next one he sent on a line drive right back at the machine. It would have been a sure out, but it was nice to hit it with authority. His father let out a cheer behind him, and Connell promptly overswung on the next pitch, caught the handle on the ball and felt a stinging, ringing sensation in his hands and hopped in place, then swung through the next pitch entirely.
“Settle down, son,” his father said. “You can hit these. Find the rhythm.”
The next pitch, which he foul-tipped, was the last, and he stopped and put the bat between his legs and adjusted his batting glove. There wasn’t a line forming behind him, so he could take his time. Balls pinged off bats in nearby cages and banged off piping or died in the nets. His father had his hands on the netting and was leaning against it.
“You ready?”
“Yeah.”
“Go get ’em.”
He put a coin in and took his stance. The first pitch buzzed past him and slammed into the backstop.
“Eye on the ball,” his father said. “Watch it into the catcher’s mitt. Watch this one. Don’t swing.”
He watched it zoom by.
“Now time it. It’s coming again just like that. Same spot. This is all timing.”
He took a big hack and fouled it off. He was getting tired quickly.
“Shorten your swing,” his father said. “Just try to make contact.”
He took another cut, a less vicious one, more controlled, and drilled it into what would have been the outfield. He did it again with the next pitch, and the one after that. The ball coming off the bat sounded like a melon getting crushed. The whole place smelled like burning rubber.
When the coins ran out, he held the bat out to his father. “You want to get in here?”
“No,” his father said. “You have fun.”
“I don’t mind.”
“I don’t think I could hit a single pitch.”
“Sure you could. You’re selling yourself short.”
“My best days are behind me,” his father said.
“Why don’t you take a few hacks? Come on, Dad. Just one coin.”
“Fine,” his father said. “But you can’t laugh at me when I look like a scarecrow in there.”
His father came into the cage and took the helmet from him. He took the bat, refused the batting glove. He was in a plaid, button-down shirt and jeans that fit him snugly, and Connell thought that he actually did look a little like a scarecrow. His glasses stuck out from the helmet like laboratory goggles. Connell stepped out of the cage and positioned himself where his father had been standing. His father dropped the coin in and took his place in the batter’s box, the lefty side, Connell’s side.
The first pitch slammed into the backstop. The next one did as well. His father had the bat on his shoulder. The next pitch came crashing in too.
“Aren’t you going to swing?”
“I’m getting the timing,” his father said.
The next pitch landed with a thud, and the following one went a little high and came at Connell. His father didn’t offer at any of them.
“You have to swing sometime,” Connell said. “Only three left.”
“I’m watching the ball into the glove,” he said. “I’m waiting for my pitch.”
“Two left.”
“Okay,” his father said.
“Dad. You can’t just stand there.”
The last pitch came and his father took a vicious cut at it. The ball shot off like cannon fire and the bat came around to rest on his father’s back in textbook form, Splendid Splinter form. The ball would have kept rising if it hadn’t been arrested by the distant net, which it sank into at an impressive depth.
“Wow!”
“Not bad,” his father said. “I think I’m going to quit while I’m ahead.”
Connell went in and took the helmet and bat from his father, who looked tired, as if he’d been swinging for half an hour. He dropped the coin in and found the spot in the batter’s box. His father’s hit must have freed his confidence up, because he made solid contact on all but one of his swings, and then he put another coin in and started attacking the ball, crushing line drives.
“Attaboy,” his father said.
He hit until he was tired, and they drove to the diner they liked to go to after the cages. Connell ordered a cheeseburger and his father ordered a tuna melt. They shared a chocolate shake. Connell drained his half and his father handed him his own to drink.
“That’s okay, Dad.”
“You drink it,” his father said.
The food came and his father didn’t really eat. Instead he seemed to be looking interestedly at Connell.
“What’s up?” Connell asked.
“I used to love to watch you eat. I still do, I guess.”
“Why?”
“When you were a baby, maybe two years old, you used to put a handful of food in your mouth and push it in with your palm. Like this.” His father put his hand up to his mouth to show him. ‘More meatballs!’ you used to say. Your face would be covered in sauce. ‘More meatballs.’ You had this determined expression, like nothing was more important in the world.” He was chuckling. “And you ate fast! And a lot. You used to ask for more. ‘All gone!’ you said. I used to love to watch you eat. I guess it was instinct. I knew you would survive if you ate. But part of it was just the pleasure you took in it. A grilled cheese sandwich cut into little squares. That was the whole world for you then. You getting it into your mouth was the only thing that mattered. You couldn’t eat it fast enough.”
His father was making him nervous watching him. He hadn’t eaten any of his sandwich.
“You going to sit there and watch me the whole time?”
“No, I’m eating.”
His father took a couple of bites. Connell called for more water and ketchup.
“I wish I could explain it to you,” his father said after a while.
“What?”
“What it’s like to have you. What it’s like to have a son.”
“You going to eat those fries?”
“They’re all yours,” his father said. Connell took some. “Eat as many as you like.” His father slid the plate toward him. “Eat up.”
17 (#ulink_a6bcb1d4-bb9d-5e39-99e2-2598312904ac)
She decided to scrap the intimate dinner they’d agreed upon for his fiftieth birthday and throw a full-scale surprise party instead. One thing it couldn’t fail to do was get him off the couch for a night, but she wanted more than that: she wanted to wake him up, set him on the course to recovering his lost enthusiasm. He’d spent so much time alone lately that it would be good for him to be forced to mix with others.
Until she was drawing up the list for the party, she’d never noticed how weighted toward her side their social group was. So many of the friends they’d lost touch with were Ed’s. When she considered her friends’ husbands, she saw the same thing—a withdrawal, a ceding of the social calendar to the wife. It was her responsibility to ensure that her husband didn’t get domesticated entirely. She would go beyond the usual crowd. She decided to track down some of the guys who were his regular buddies when they first got married and reach out to the cousins he never saw. She would remind him how much there was to look forward to.
She gave her garden box a full makeover, even though she knew the early-March chill would kill everything right after the party.
As she finished patting the soil down around a rosebush, a car zoomed past at a murderous clip bound for Northern Boulevard, salsa music pounding from its four-corner speakers. If she were a man she would have spat in disgust. She hated the driver; she hated the drug cartel he likely worked for; she hated worrying that people taking the train to the party might run into some kind of trouble. God forbid any of them got propositioned by the prostitutes that had begun to walk Roosevelt Avenue. One of them had approached Ed while Eileen and he were coming off the stairs holding hands.
She hoped that the NCB executives she’d invited wouldn’t judge her for her current situation. Her career depended on their seeing her as the kind of person who belonged in their midst. How could she ever explain to them the way Jackson Heights used to be?
She didn’t think of herself as racist. She was proud of her record of coming to the aid of black nurses who’d been unjustly targeted by superiors. She enjoyed an easy rapport with the security guards at NCB, most of whom were black.
She loved to tell the story of her father’s stepping forward to drive with Mr. Washington when no one else would. She also enjoyed recounting the tale of how, when none of the old Irish guard would shop at the Chinese grocer up the block, and the new store was on the verge of failure, her father had paid the man a visit to take his measure. Satisfied that the man, Mr. Liu, was a hard worker and an honest proprietor, her father had stood for a few evenings on the corner near the grocer with the suspect vegetables and stopped people and said, “Go spend some money at the chink son of a bitch’s place,” and they’d listened. Now the whole of Woodside was Chinese grocers. She wondered if the newer generation would do for an Irish immigrant looking to make an honest living the same thing her father had done for one of their own years before. She wondered if some of the black nurses she’d helped along the way would lift a finger for a white woman in need. She’d watched the Bronx spiral downward over the years, and she hadn’t flinched. The security guards marveled at her driving into the neighborhood alone every day. They never let her walk to her car unescorted at night.
No, she couldn’t be called racist. That didn’t mean she had to like what they were doing to her neighborhood. They were making it into a war zone.
The day of the party, her house had never seemed so small. An hour before Ed was supposed to arrive, there was barely room to pass in the halls; she had to ask her cousin Pat to carry a side table down to the basement. Still, as soon as people began assembling in the kitchen, she felt their presence as a kind of armor around her. She tended to the ham and the broccoli casserole in the stove and the separate duty of each pot on the stovetop. She had made nothing to offend anyone’s palate, and so she presented it without anxiety. When the caterer arrived with trays containing more food than could possibly get eaten, she told herself it was safe to begin to relax.
When Connell called from a pay phone and said they were ten minutes away, she was surprised to find herself seized by terror. She passed the news to the living room, which filled with that clamor particular to a crowd silencing itself. A quiet grew louder than the din that had preceded it; she could almost hear her pulse in its murky depths. She moved through the wall of people to be near enough for him to see her when he entered.
As Ed stepped into the room, Eileen closed her eyes, obeying a strange compulsion not to look at his face. A frenzied chorus rang out around her. When she opened her eyes, she saw him beaming and being passed from person to person, shouting as he encountered every new face—shouts like war whoops that could have been either exultant or lunatic. He was red with excitement, and sweat was gathering on him. As she moved close to hug him, she heard him whoop the way he had for the others, as though he hadn’t seen her in years. His whoops went on; they wouldn’t die down. He greeted each successive person with the same ecstatic disbelief.
She was afraid to leave him, afraid to stay. She saw him engulfed in friends’ arms and ducked into the kitchen to get him a drink. When she returned he was miming his own shock for them over and over. She didn’t want anyone else to notice the unconvincing mirth in his performance. She shouted to Connell to cue the stereo. Ed was ushered into the dining room. In the mirror she tried to look at other people’s reactions but was inexorably drawn back to her husband’s expressions. When he saw his brother Phil in from Toronto, he let out a howl that sounded like that of a dying animal. She reached for a tray of hors d’oeuvres to pass. The food smells were mingling successfully; no trace of dust came off any surface she touched; nothing was out of place. The only messes were the ones guests were making themselves—someone bumped into the punch bowl and sent a couple of crystal mugs crashing to the floor—and for those she had great patience.
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Matthew Thomas
Eileen Leary wants more. Raised in a downtrodden area of new York by hard-drinking, Irish immigrant parents, she dreams of another life: a better job, a bigger house, more respectable friends, a happy family. When she meets Ed Leary, a brilliant young scientist, she thinks she’s found the perfect partner to pursue and share her American Dream with. An indefatigable love enters Eileen’s life – but so too does a pervasive darkness and a loss that will last a lifetime.
Copyright (#ulink_69ecb80a-7842-5665-90e7-6871b04e468d)
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014
First published in the United States by Simon & Schuster, Inc. in 2014
Copyright © 2014 by Matthew Thomas
Matthew Thomas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
The Author and Publishers are committed to respecting the intellectual property rights of others and have made all reasonable efforts to trace the copyright owners of the images reproduced, and to provide appropriate acknowledgement, within this book. In the event that any untraceable copyright owners come forward after the publication of this book, the Author and Publishers will use all reasonable endeavours to rectify the position accordingly.
“Touch me.” Copyright © 1995 by Stanley Kunitz, from Passing Through: The Later Poems New and Selected by Stanley Kunitz. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Cover photographs © Kim Sohee/Getty Images (houses); Mark Owen/Arcangel Images (sky).
Cover design by Christopher Lin
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007548217
Ebook Edition © August 2014 ISBN: 9780007548224
Version: 2015-02-20
Dedication (#ulink_30d2a04f-fbab-5473-a35e-f3ed4cd032c5)
To Joy
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.
—Stanley Kunitz
We are not ourselves
When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind
To suffer with the body.
—King Lear
Table of Contents
Cover (#u653aeca2-81a6-52cb-96de-a4df25a0a901)
Title Page (#u9ae032c0-5878-598c-97f5-9053586e631d)
Copyright (#ue1ac114a-d059-5079-aeaf-cc1d02310827)
Dedication (#u577770d8-8ff6-5184-8db9-bcbc2884a637)
Epigraph (#u3b4c9f52-aca6-539b-9d06-d587016e88aa)
Part I: Days under Sun and Rain 1951–1982 (#ueafbca23-a5cb-5317-ad2b-4ba0706a269b)
Chapter 1 (#u2637b5ec-055e-5474-b594-a586099b0780)
Chapter 2 (#ubfb6a8bc-841a-51c7-97df-e8a0d7d99449)
Chapter 3 (#u80bb799f-f891-511c-9cc6-2027acb4edea)
Chapter 4 (#ud5c6cb1e-ccf9-5ca5-b55b-36a60cf0d751)
Chapter 5 (#ue860dc6b-81db-5eee-b46f-eeea719877a3)
Chapter 6 (#u535943ac-fe90-59b8-a159-c65be9310dcb)
Chapter 7 (#u62edb4d2-172a-59a7-8d86-dc6f790ffaab)
Chapter 8 (#ua5d0b09a-3e2c-5f98-ab45-68af19957746)
Chapter 9 (#u14efb8a9-6061-5ba6-979f-9566acbae367)
Chapter 10 (#u5636c6d2-2bab-544f-99c1-2e28968f9044)
Chapter 11 (#uea237864-6eac-5bd7-aeb9-822792e886d6)
Chapter 12 (#u066f8a87-9651-5945-aa64-ce0c4eab66da)
Chapter 13 (#u4801ab70-af41-5848-b9e4-6e7106122a56)
Part II: The Salad Days Thursday, October 23, 1986 (#u520be800-d9c9-5500-a154-1b6a381ca1f0)
Chapter 14 (#ubd4defa1-4cb5-5b25-8e34-0cb7f2e0d054)
Part III: Breathe the Rich Air 1991 (#u6cbdcd9b-2b0f-58ba-8065-f86859bc7ec2)
Chapter 15 (#u8cef7c14-82fa-5dc1-9b71-a94142dceef2)
Chapter 16 (#u4cae79b4-0c39-56dd-b719-66aeb7822fe9)
Chapter 17 (#u5b035d21-6745-5445-8ccf-3c12b8f067d7)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part IV: Level, Solid, Square and True 1991–1995 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 59 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 60 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 61 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 62 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 63 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 64 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 65 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 66 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 67 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 68 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part V: Desire Is Full of Endless Distances 1996 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 69 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 70 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 71 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 72 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 73 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 74 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 75 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 76 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 77 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 78 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 79 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 80 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 81 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 82 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 83 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 84 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 85 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 86 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 87 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 88 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 89 (#litres_trial_promo)
Part VI: The Real Estate of Edmund Leary 1997–2000 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 90 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 91 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 92 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 93 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 94 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 95 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 96 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 97 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 98 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 99 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 100 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 101 (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
His father was watching the line in the water. The boy caught a frog and stuck a hook in its stomach to see what it would look like going through. Slick guts clung to the hook, and a queasy guilt grabbed him. He tried to sound innocent when he asked if you could fish with frogs. His father glanced over, flared his nostrils, and shook the teeming coffee can at him. Worms spilled out and wriggled away. He told him he’d done an evil thing and that his youth was no excuse for his cruelty. He made him remove the hook and hold the twitching creature until it died. Then he passed him the bait knife and had him dig a little grave. He spoke with a terrifying lack of familiarity, as if they were simply two people on earth now and an invisible tether between them had been severed.
When he was done burying the frog, the boy took his time patting down the dirt, to avoid looking up. His father told him to think awhile about what he’d done and walked off. The boy crouched listening to the receding footsteps as tears came on and the loamy smell of rotting leaves invaded his nose. He stood and looked at the river. Dusk stole quickly through the valley. After a while, he understood he’d been there longer than his father had intended, but he couldn’t bring himself to head to the car, because he feared that when he got there he’d see that his father no longer recognized him as his own. He couldn’t imagine anything worse than that, so he tossed rocks into the river and waited for his father to come get him. When one of his throws gave none of the splashing sound he’d gotten used to hearing, and a loud croak rose up suddenly behind him, he ran, spooked, to find his father leaning against the hood with a foot up on the fender, looking as if he would’ve waited all night for him, now adjusting his cap and opening the door to drive them home. He wasn’t lost to him yet.
Part I (#ulink_4ffde876-30b8-5370-a291-4e462e030e85)
1 (#ulink_c9131656-69a4-5efc-9a49-22adc76d57d2)
Instead of going to the priest, the men who gathered at Doherty’s Bar after work went to Eileen Tumulty’s father. Eileen was there to see it for herself, even though she was only in the fourth grade. When her father finished his delivery route, around four thirty, he picked her up at step dancing and walked her over to the bar. Practice went until six, but Eileen never minded leaving the rectory basement early. Mr. Hurley was always yelling at her to get the timing right or to keep her arms flush at her sides. Eileen was too lanky for the compact movements of a dance that evolved, according to Mr. Hurley, to disguise itself as standing still when the police passed by. She wanted to learn the jitterbug or Lindy Hop, anything she could throw her restless limbs into with abandon, but her mother signed her up for Irish dancing instead.
Her mother hadn’t let go of Ireland entirely. She wasn’t a citizen yet. Her father liked to tout that he’d applied for his citizenship on the first day he was eligible to. The framed Certificate of Citizenship, dated May 3, 1938, hung in the living room across from a watercolor painting of St. Patrick banishing the snakes, the only artwork in the apartment unless you counted the carved-wood Celtic cross in the kitchen. The little photo in the certificate bore an embossed seal, a tidy signature, and a face with an implacably fierce expression. Eileen looked into it for answers, but the tight-lipped younger version of her father never gave anything up.
When Eileen’s father filled the doorway with his body, holding his Stetson hat in front of him like a shield against small talk, Mr. Hurley stopped barking, and not just at Eileen. Men were always quieting down around her father. The recording played on and the girls finished the slip jig they were running. The fiddle music was lovely when Eileen didn’t have to worry about keeping her unruly body in line. At the end of the tune, Mr. Hurley didn’t waste time giving Eileen permission to leave. He just looked at the floor while she gathered her things. She was in such a hurry to get out of there and begin the wordless walk that she waited until she got to the street to change her shoes.
When they reached the block the bar was on, Eileen ran ahead to see if she could catch one of the men sitting on her father’s stool, which she’d never seen anyone else occupy, but all she found was them gathered in a half circle around it, as if anticipation of his presence had drawn them near.
The place was smoky and she was the only kid there, but she got to watch her father hold court. Before five, the patrons were laborers like him who drank their beers deliberately, contented in their exhaustion, well-being hanging about them like a mist. After five, the office workers drifted in, clicking their coins on the crowded bar as they waited to be served. They gulped their beers and signaled for another immediately, gripping the railing with two hands and leaning in to hurry the drink along. They watched her father as much as they did the bartender.
She sat at one of the creaky tables up front, in her pleated skirt and collared blouse, doing her homework but also training an ear on her father’s conversations. She didn’t have to strain to hear what they told him, because they felt no need to whisper, even when she was only a few feet away. There was something clarifying in her father’s authority; it absolved other men of embarrassment.
“It’s driving me nuts,” his friend Tom said, fumbling to speak. “I can’t sleep.”
“Out with it.”
“I stepped out on Sheila.”
Her father leaned in closer, his eyes pinning Tom to the barstool.
“How many times?”
“Just the once.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“The second time I was too nervous to bring it off.”
“That’s twice, then.”
“It is.”
The bartender swept past to check the level of their drinks, slapped the bar towel over his shoulder, and moved along. Her father glanced at her and she pushed her pencil harder into her workbook, breaking off the point.
“Who’s the floozy?”
“A girl at the bank.”
“You’ll tell her the idiocy is over.”
“I will, Mike.”
“Are you going to be a goddamned idiot again? Tell me now.”
“No.”
A man came through the door, and her father and Tom nodded at him. A draft followed him in, chilling her bare legs and carrying the smell of spilled beer and floor cleaner to her.
“Reach into your pocket,” her father said. “Every penny you have stashed. Buy Sheila something nice.”
“Yes, that’s the thing. That’s the thing.”
“Every last penny.”
“I won’t hold out.”
“Swear before God that that’s the end of it.”
“I swear, Mike. I solemnly swear.”
“Don’t let me hear about you gallivanting around.”
“Those days are over.”
“And don’t go and do some fool thing like tell that poor woman what you’ve done. It’s enough for her to put up with you without knowing this.”
“Yes,” Tom said. “Yes.”
“You’re a damned fool.”
“I am.”
“That’s the last we’ll speak of it. Get us a couple of drinks.”
They laughed at everything he said, unless he was being serious, and then they put on grave faces. They held forth on the topic of his virtues as though he weren’t standing right there. Half of them he’d gotten jobs for off the boat—at Schaefer, at Macy’s, behind the bar, as supers or handymen.
Everybody called him Big Mike. He was reputed to be immune to pain. He had shoulders so broad that even in shirtsleeves he looked like he was wearing a suit jacket. His fists were the size of babies’ heads, and in the trunk he resembled one of the kegs of beer he carried in the crook of each elbow. He put no effort into his physique apart from his labor, and he wasn’t muscle-bound, just country strong. If you caught him in a moment of repose, he seemed to shrink to normal proportions. If you had something to hide, he grew before your eyes.
She wasn’t too young to understand that the ones who pleased him were the rare ones who didn’t drain the frothy brew of his myth in a quick quaff, but nosed around the brine of his humanity awhile, giving it skeptical sniffs.
She was only nine, but she’d figured a few things out. She knew why her father didn’t just swing by step dancing on the way home for dinner. To do so would have meant depriving the men in suits who arrived back from Manhattan toward the end of the hour of the little time he gave them every day. They loosened their ties around him, took their jackets off, huddled close, and started talking. He would’ve had to leave the bar by five thirty instead of a quarter to six, and the extra minutes made all the difference. She understood that it wasn’t only enjoyment for him, that part of what he was doing was making himself available to his men, and that his duty to her mother was just as important.
The three of them ate dinner together every night. Her mother served the meal promptly at six after spending the day cleaning bathrooms and offices at the Bulova plant. She was never in the mood for excuses. Eileen’s father checked his watch the whole way home and picked up the pace as they neared the building. Sometimes Eileen couldn’t keep up and he carried her in the final stretch. Sometimes she walked slowly on purpose in order to be borne in his arms.
One balmy evening in June, a week before her fourth-grade year ended, Eileen and her father came home to find the plates set out and the door to the bedroom closed. Her father tapped at his watch with a betrayed look, wound it, and set it to the clock above the sink, which said six twenty. Eileen had never seen him so upset. She could tell it was about something more than being late, something between her parents that she had no insight into. She was angry at her mother for adhering so rigidly to her rule, but her father didn’t seem to share that anger. He ate slowly, silently, refilling her glass when he rose to fill his own and ladling out more carrots for her from the pot on the stovetop. Then he put his coat on and went back out. Eileen went to the door of the bedroom but didn’t open it. She listened and heard nothing. She went to Mr. Kehoe’s door, but there was silence there too. She felt a sudden terror at the thought of having been abandoned. She wanted to bang on both doors and bring them out, but she knew enough not to go near her mother just then. To calm herself, she cleaned the stovetop and counters, leaving no crumbs or smudges, no evidence that her mother had cooked in the first place. She tried to imagine what it would feel like to have always been alone. She decided that being alone to begin with would be easier than being left alone. Everything would be easier than that.
She eavesdropped on her father at the bar because he didn’t talk much at home. When he did, it was to lay out basic principles as he speared a piece of meat. “A man should never go without something he wants just because he doesn’t want to work for it.” “Everyone should have a second job.” “Money is made to be spent.” (On this last point he was firm; he had no patience for American-born people with no cash in their pocket to spring for a round.)
As for his second job, it was tending bar, at Doherty’s, at Hartnett’s, at Leitrim Castle—a night a week at each. Whenever Big Mike Tumulty was the one pulling the taps and filling the tumblers, the bar filled up to the point of hazard and made tons of money, as though he were a touring thespian giving limited-run performances. Schaefer didn’t suffer either; everyone knew he was a Schaefer man. He worked at keeping the brogue her mother worked to lose; it was professionally useful.
If Eileen scrubbed up the courage to ask about her roots, he silenced her with a wave of the hand. “I’m an American,” he said, as if it settled the question, and in a sense it did.
By the time Eileen was born, in November of 1941, some traces remained of the sylvan scenes suggested in her neighborhood’s name, but the balance of Woodside’s verdancy belonged to the cemeteries that bordered it. The natural order was inverted there, the asphalt, clapboard, and brick breathing with life and the dead holding sway over the grass.
Her father came from twelve and her mother from thirteen, but Eileen had no brothers or sisters. In a four-story building set among houses planted in close rows by the river of the elevated 7 train, the three of them slept in twin beds in a room that resembled an army barracks. The other bedroom housed a lodger, Henry Kehoe, who slept like a king in exchange for offsetting some of the monthly expenses. Mr. Kehoe ate his meals elsewhere, and when he was home he sat in his room with the door closed, playing the clarinet quietly enough that Eileen had to press an ear to the door to hear it. She only saw him when he came and went or used the bathroom. It might have been strange to suffer his spectral presence if she’d ever known anything else, but as it was, it comforted her to know he was behind that door, especially on nights her father came home after drinking whiskey.
Her father didn’t always drink. Nights he tended bar, he didn’t touch a drop, and every Lent he gave it up, to prove he could—except, of course, for St. Patrick’s Day and the days bookending it.
Nights her father tended bar, Eileen and her mother turned in early and slept soundly. Nights he didn’t, though, her mother kept her up later, the two of them giving a going-over to all the little extras—the good silver, the figurines, the chandelier crystals, the picture frames. Whatever chaos might ensue upon her father’s arrival, there prevailed beforehand a palpable excitement, as if they were throwing a party for a single guest. When there was nothing left to clean or polish, her mother sent her to bed and waited on the couch. Eileen kept the bedroom door cracked.
Her father was fine when he drank beer. He hung his hat and slid his coat down deliberately onto the hook in the wall. Then he slumped on the couch like a big bear on a leash, soft and grumbling, his pipe firmly in the grip of his teeth. She could hear her mother speaking quietly to him about household matters; he would nod and press the splayed fingers of his hands together, making a steeple and collapsing it.
Some nights he even walked in dancing and made her mother laugh despite her intention to ignore him. He lifted her up from the couch and led her around the room in a slow box step. He had a terrible charisma; she wasn’t immune to it.
When he drank whiskey, though, which was mostly on paydays, the leash came off. He slammed his coat on the vestibule table and stalked the place looking for things to throw, as if the accumulated pressure of expectations at the bar could only be driven off by physical acts. It was well known what a great quantity of whiskey her father could drink without losing his composure—she’d heard the men brag about it at Doherty’s—and one night, in response to her mother’s frank and defeated question, he explained that when he was set up with a challenge, a string of rounds, he refused to disappoint the men’s faith in him, even if he had to exhaust himself concentrating on keeping his back stiff and his words sharp and clear. Everyone needed something to believe in.
He didn’t throw anything at her mother, and he only threw what didn’t break: couch pillows, books. Her mother went silent and still until he was done. If he saw Eileen peeking at him through the sliver in the bedroom door, he stopped abruptly, like an actor who’d forgotten his line, and went into the bathroom. Her mother slid into bed. In the morning, he glowered over a cup of tea, blinking his eyes slowly like a lizard.
Sometimes Eileen could hear the Gradys or the Longs fighting. She found succor in the sound of that anger; it meant her family wasn’t the only troubled one in the building. Her parents shared moments of dark communion over it too, raising brows at each other across the kitchen table or exchanging wan smiles when the voices started up.
Once, over dinner, her father gestured toward Mr. Kehoe’s room. “We won’t have him here forever,” he said to her mother. As Eileen was struck by sadness at the thought of life without Mr. Kehoe, her father added, “Lord willing.”
No matter how often she strained to hear Mr. Kehoe through the walls, the only sounds were the squeaks of bedsprings, the low scratching of a pen when he sat at the little desk, or the quiet rasp of the clarinet.
They were at the dinner table when her mother stood and left the room in a hurry. Her father followed, pulling the bedroom door closed behind him. Their voices were hushed, but Eileen could hear the straining energy in them. She inched closer.
“I’ll get it back.”
“You’re a damned idiot.”
“I’ll make it right.”
“How? ‘Big Mike doesn’t borrow a penny from any man,’” she sneered.
“There’ll be a way.”
“How could you let it get so out of hand?”
“You think I want my wife and daughter living in this place?”
“Oh, that’s just grand. It’s our fault now, is it?”
“I’m not saying that.”
In the living room, the wind shifted the bedroom door against Eileen’s hands, making her heart beat faster.
“You love the horses and numbers,” her mother said. “Don’t make it into something it wasn’t.”
“It was in the back of my mind,” her father said. “I know you don’t want to be here.”
“I once believed you could wind up being mayor of New York,” her mother said. “But you’re satisfied being mayor of Doherty’s. Not even owner of Doherty’s. Mayor of Doherty’s.” She paused. “I should never have taken that damn thing off my finger.”
“I’ll get it back. I promise.”
“You won’t, and you know it.” Her mother had been stifling her shouts, practically hissing, but now she sounded merely sad. “You chip away and chip away. One day there won’t be anything left.”
“That’s enough now,” her father said, and in the silence that followed Eileen pictured them standing in the mysterious knowledge that passed between them, like two stone figures whose hearts she would never fathom.
The next time she was alone in the house, she went to the bureau drawer where her mother had stashed her engagement ring for safekeeping ever since the time she’d almost lost it down the drain while doing dishes. From time to time, Eileen had observed her opening the box. She’d thought her mother had been letting its facets catch the light for a spell, but now that she saw the empty space where the box had been, she realized her mother had been making sure it was still there.
A week before her tenth birthday, Eileen walked in with her father and saw that her mother wasn’t in the kitchen. She wasn’t in the bedroom either, or the bathroom, and she hadn’t left a note.
Her father heated up a can of beans, fried some bacon, and put out a few slices of bread.
Her mother came home while they were eating. “Congratulate me,” she said as she hung up her coat.
Her father waited until he finished chewing. “For what?”
Her mother slapped some papers on the table and looked at him intently in that way she sometimes did when she was trying to get a rise out of him. He bit another piece of bacon and picked the papers up as he worked the meat in his jaw. His brow furrowed as he read. Then he put them down.
“How could you do this?” he asked quietly. “How could you let it not be me?”
If Eileen didn’t know better, she would have said he sounded hurt, but nothing on earth was capable of hurting her father.
Her mother looked almost disappointed not to be yelled at. She gathered the papers and went into the bedroom. A few minutes later, her father took his hat off the hook and left.
Eileen went in and sat on her own bed. Her mother was at the window, smoking.
“What happened? I don’t understand.”
“Those are naturalization papers.” Her mother pointed to the dresser. “Go ahead, take a look.” Eileen walked over and picked them up. “As of today, I’m a citizen of the United States. Congratulate me.”
“Congratulations,” Eileen said.
Her mother produced a sad little grin between drags. “I started this months ago,” she said. “I didn’t tell your father. I was going to surprise him, bring him along. It would have meant something to him to be my sponsor at the swearing in. Then I decided to hurt him. I brought my cousin Danny Glasheen instead.”
Eileen nodded; there was Danny’s name. The papers looked like the kind that would be kept in a file for hundreds of years, for as long as civilization lasted.
“Now I wish I could take it back.” Her mother gave a rueful laugh. “Your father is a creature of great ceremony.”
Eileen wasn’t sure what her mother meant, but she thought it had to do with the way it mattered to her father to carry even little things out the right way. She’d seen it herself: the way he took the elbow of a man who’d had too much to drink and leaned him into the bar to keep him on his feet without his noticing he was being aided; the way he never knocked a beer glass over or spilled a drop of whiskey; the way he kept his hair combed neat, no strand out of place. She’d watched him carry the casket at a few funerals. He made it seem as if keeping one’s eyes forward, one’s posture straight, and one’s pace steady while bearing a dead man down the steps of a church as a bagpiper played was the most crucial task in the world. It was part of why men felt so strongly about him. It must have been part of why her mother did too.
“Don’t ever love anyone,” her mother said, picking the papers up and sliding them into the bureau drawer she’d kept her ring in. “All you’ll do is break your own heart.”
2 (#ulink_2cbbc086-397d-5c83-9b3b-bbc37c5efadc)
In the spring of 1952, Eileen’s mother made the amazing announcement that she was pregnant. Eileen had never even seen her parents hold hands. If her aunt Kitty hadn’t told her that they’d met at one of the Irish dance halls and found some renown there as a dancing pair, Eileen might have believed her parents had never touched. Here her mother was, though, pregnant as anyone. The world was full of mysteries.
Her mother quit her job at Bulova and sat on the couch knitting a blanket for the baby. When she tied off the last corner, she moved on to making a hat. A sweater followed, then a pair of bootees. Everything was stark white. She kept the miniature clothes in a drawer in the breakfront. The crafting was expert, with tight stitches and neat rows. Eileen never even knew her mother could knit. She wondered if her mother had made clothes for her family in Ireland, or to sell in a store, but she knew enough not to ask. She couldn’t even bring herself to seek permission to rub the bump on her mother’s belly. The closest she got to the baby was when she went to the drawer to examine the articles her mother had knitted, running her hands over their smoothness and putting them up to her face. One night, after her mother had gone to bed, she picked up the knitting needles, which were still warm from use. Between them swayed the bootee to complete the pair. Eileen tried to picture this baby who would help her populate the apartment and whose cheeks she would cover in kisses, but all she saw was her mother’s face in miniature, wearing that dubious expression she wore when Eileen went looking for affection. She concentrated hard until she stopped seeing her mother’s face and saw instead the smiling face of a baby beaming with light and joy. She was determined to have a relationship with this sibling that would have nothing to do with their parents.
Eileen was so excited to get a baby brother or sister that she physically felt her heart breaking when her father told her that her mother had miscarried. When a dilation and curettage didn’t stop the bleeding, the doctors gave her a hysterectomy.
After the hysterectomy, her mother developed a bladder infection that nearly killed her. She stayed in the hospital on sulfa drugs while it drained. Children weren’t encouraged to visit the sick, so Eileen saw her mother less than once a month. Her father rarely spoke of her mother during this period that stretched into a handful of months, then half a year and beyond. When he intended to bring Eileen to see her, he would say something vague like, “We’re going, get yourself ready.” Otherwise, it was as if she’d been erased from their lives.
It didn’t take long for Eileen to figure out that she wasn’t supposed to mention her mother, but one night, a couple of weeks into the new order, she brought her up a few times in quick succession anyway, just to see how her father would react. “That’s enough now,” he snapped, rising from the table, evidence of suppressed emotion on his face. “Clean up these dishes.” He left the room, as though it were too painful for him to remain where his absent wife had been invoked. And yet they spent so much time fighting. Eileen decided she would never understand the relations between men and women.
She was left to handle the cooking and cleaning. Her father set aside money for her to shop and go to the Laundromat. She rode her bike to one of the last remaining farms in the neighborhood to buy fresh vegetables, and she developed her own little repertory of dishes by replicating what she’d seen her mother make: beef stew with carrots and green beans; London broil; soda bread; lamb chops and baked potatoes. She took a cookbook out of the library and started ranging afield. She made lasagna just once, beating her fist on the countertop when it turned out soupy after all that work.
After doing her homework by the muted light of the end table lamp, she sat on the floor, building towers of playing cards, or went upstairs to the Schmidts’ to watch television and marvel over the mothers who never stopped smiling and the fathers who folded the newspaper down to talk to their children.
At school she usually had the answer worked out before the other girls put up their hands, but the last thing she wanted was to draw any kind of attention to herself. She would have chosen, of all powers, the power to be invisible.
One day, her father took her to Jackson Heights, stopping at a huge cooperative apartment complex that spanned the width of a block and most of its length. They descended into the basement apartment of the super, one of her father’s friends. From the kitchen she looked up at the ground level through a set of steel bars. There was grass out there, blindingly green grass. She asked to go outside. “Only as long as you don’t step foot on that grass,” her father’s friend said. “Not even the people who live here are allowed on it. They pay me good money to make sure it stays useless.” He and her father shared a laugh she didn’t understand.
A frame of connected buildings enclosed a massive lawn girdled by a short wrought-iron railing. Nothing would have been easier than clearing that little fence. Around the lawn and through its middle ran a handsome brick path. She walked the routes of the two smaller rectangles and the outer, larger one, wending her way through all the permutations, listening to the chirping of the birds in the trees and the rustling of the leaves in the wind. Gas lamps stood like guardians of the prosperity they would light when evening came. She felt an amazing peace. There were no cars rushing around, no people pushing shopping carts home. One old lady waved to her before disappearing inside. Eileen would have been content to live out there, looking up into the curtain-fringed windows. She didn’t need to set foot on that grass. Maybe someone would bring her upstairs and she could look down on the whole lawn at once. The lights were on in the dining room of one apartment on the second floor, and she stopped to stare into it. A grandfather clock and a beautiful wall unit gazed down benignly at a bowl on the table. She couldn’t see what was in the bowl, but she knew it was her favorite fruit.
The people who lived in this building had figured out something important about life, and she’d stumbled upon their secret. There were places, she now saw, that contained more happiness than ordinary places did. Unless you knew that such places existed, you might be content to stay where you were. She imagined more places like this, hidden behind walls or stands of trees, places where people kept their secrets to themselves.
When the soles of her shoes wore through, her father, in his infinite ignorance of all things feminine, brought home a new, manure-brown pair Eileen was sure were meant for boys. When she refused to wear them, her father confiscated her old pair so she had no choice, and when she complained the next night that the other girls had laughed at her, he said, “They cover your feet and keep you warm.” At her age, he told her, he had been grateful to get secondhand shoes, let alone new ones.
“If my mother were well,” she said bitterly, “she wouldn’t make me wear them.”
“Yes, but she’s not well. And she’s not here.”
The quaver in his throat frightened her enough that she didn’t argue. The following night, he brought home a perfectly dainty, gleaming, pearlescent pair.
“Let that be an end to it,” he said.
Mr. Kehoe came home late, but he never seemed drunk. He was unfailingly polite. Despite the fact that he’d been there since she was two years old, it always felt to Eileen as if he’d just moved in.
She took to cooking extra for him and bringing a plate to his room. He answered her knock with a smile and received the offering gratefully. Her father grumbled about charging a board fee.
Mr. Kehoe had a smear of black in a full head of otherwise gray hair. It looked as if he’d been streaked by a tar brush. When he wasn’t wearing his tweed jacket with the worn cuffs, he rolled his shirt sleeves and kept his tie a little loose.
He started battling through fitful bouts of coughing. One night, she went to his door with some tea; another, she brought him cough syrup.
“It’s just that I don’t get enough air,” Mr. Kehoe said. “I’ll take some long walks.”
Even through severe coughing fits he managed to play the clarinet. She’d stopped trying to hide her efforts to listen to it. She sat on the floor beside his door, with her back to the wall, reading her schoolbooks. In the lonely evenings she felt no need to apologize for her interest. Sometimes she even whistled along.
One night, her father sat quietly on the couch after dinner with a troubled look on his face. Eileen avoided him, occupying her usual spot by Mr. Kehoe’s door. Heat rattling through the pipes joined the clarinet in a kind of musical harmony. She looked up and was unnerved to find her father looking back at her, which he never did. She concentrated on her beautifully illustrated copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The day before, when she’d told him that Mr. Kehoe had given it to her, her father had grown upset. She’d seen him knock on Mr. Kehoe’s door a little while later and hand him some money.
She was absorbed in “The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was” when her father startled her away from the door. She barely had time to step aside before he had thrown Mr. Kehoe’s door open and told him to quit making that racket. Mr. Kehoe apologized for causing a disturbance, but Eileen knew there had been none; you could barely hear him playing from where her father had been sitting.
Her father tried to snatch the clarinet from Mr. Kehoe’s hands. Mr. Kehoe stood up, clutching it, until its pieces started coming apart and he staggered backward, coughing wildly. Her father went out to the kitchen and turned up the radio loud enough that the neighbors started banging on the ceiling.
When she came home the next day, Mr. Kehoe was gone.
For almost a week, she didn’t speak to her father. They passed each other without a word, like an old married couple. Then her father stopped her in the hall.
“He was going to have to leave,” he said. “I just made it happen sooner.”
“He didn’t have to go anywhere,” she said.
“Your mother is coming home.”
She was excited and terrified all at once. She’d started thinking her mother might never come back. She was going to have to give up control of the house. She wouldn’t have her father to herself anymore.
“What does that have to do with Mr. Kehoe?”
“You can move your things over there tonight.”
“You’re not getting another lodger?”
He shook his head. A thrilling feeling of possibility took her over.
“I’m getting my own room?”
Her father looked away. “Your mother has decided that she’s moving over there with you.”
3 (#ulink_edcf3846-4a6d-5fd3-80da-ba80eac9dd47)
On the Wednesday after Easter of 1953, eight months after she’d left, her mother came home from the hospital. The separate rooms were as close as her parents could ever come to divorce.
Her mother got a job behind the counter at Loft’s, a fancy confectioner’s on Forty-Second Street, and started coming home late, often drunk. In protest, Eileen let dirty dishes stack up in the sink and piles of clothes amass in the bedroom corners. When she got teased in the schoolyard for the wrinkles in her blouse, she saw she had no choice but to continue the homemaking alone.
Her mother began drinking at home, settling her lanky body into the depression in the couch, in one hand a glass of Scotch, in the other a cigarette whose elongated ash worm would cling to the end as if working up the nerve to leap. Eileen watched helplessly as the malevolent thing accumulated mass. Her mother held an ashtray in her lap, but sometimes the embers fell into the cushions instead and Eileen rushed to pluck them out. Her mother fell asleep on the couch many nights, but she went to work no matter her condition.
That summer, her mother bought a window air-conditioning unit from Stevens on Queens Boulevard. She had the delivery man install it in the bedroom she shared with Eileen. No one else on their floor had an air conditioner. She invited Mrs. Grady and Mrs. Long over and into the bedroom, where they stood before the unit’s indefatigable wind, staring as though at a savior child possessed of healing powers.
When both her parents were home, an uneasy truce prevailed. Her mother closed the bedroom door and sat by the window, watching night encroach on the street. Eileen brought her tea after dinner. Her father stationed himself at the kitchen table, puffing at his pipe and listening to Irish football. At least they were under the same roof.
She hated thinking of her mother riding the trains. She saw her mother’s body sprawled in dark subway tunnels as she sat at the kitchen table for hours watching the door. As soon as she heard the key shunting the dead bolt aside, she rose to put the kettle on or wash dishes. She wouldn’t give her mother the satisfaction of knowing she was worried about her.
One night, after she had cooked the dinner and washed the pots and pans, she nestled exhausted into the couch, where her mother sat smoking a cigarette and staring ahead. Tentatively, she laid her head in her mother’s lap and kept still. She watched the smoke pour through her mother’s pale lips and the ash get longer. Other than a few new wrinkles around the mouth and some blossoms of burst blood vessels on her cheeks, her mother’s skin was still smooth and full and porcelain white. She still had those dramatic lips. Only her stained teeth showed evidence of wear.
“Why don’t you give me hugs and kisses like the mothers on television?”
Eileen waited for her to say something sharp in response, but her mother just stubbed out the butt and picked up the pack to smoke another. There was a long silence.
“Don’t you think you’re a little old for this?” her mother finally asked. Eventually she moved Eileen aside and rose to pour herself a tall drink. She sat back down with it.
“I wasn’t like your father,” she said. “I couldn’t wait to escape the farm. I remember I was packing my bag, I heard my father say to my mother, ‘Deirdre, let her go. This is no place for a young person.’ I was eighteen. I came looking for Arcadia, but instead I found domestic work on Long Island. I rode the train out and back in the crepuscular hours. Cre-pus-cu-lar. You probably don’t know what that word means.”
She could tell her mother had begun one of those sodden monologues she delivered from time to time, full of edgy eloquence. Eileen just sat and listened.
“I used to daydream about living in the mansions I cleaned. I liked to do windows, everyone else’s least-favorite job. I could look out on rolling lawns. They didn’t have a single rock, those lawns. I liked to look at the tennis courts. Perfectly level, and not a twig out of place. They suggested … what?—the taming of chaos. I liked the windswept dunes, the spray of crashing waves, the sailboats tied to docks. And when I went out to run the rag over the other side, I looked in on women reclining on divans like cats that had supped from bowls of milk. I didn’t begrudge them their ease. In their place, I would have planted myself on an elbow from the moment I rose in the morning until the time came for me”—her mother made a languorous gesture with her finger that reminded Eileen of the way bony Death pointed—“to be prodded back to the silken sheets.”
“It sounds nice,” Eileen said.
“It wasn’t nice,” her mother said sharply after the few beats it took her thoughts to cohere. “It was—marvelous, is what it was.”
A few days before Christmas, her mother told her to take the train in to Loft’s a little before the end of her shift. When Eileen arrived, her mother looked so effortlessly composed that one would never know she’d become a serious drinker. Eileen walked around the store in stupefaction, gaping at the handcrafted, glazed, and filigreed confections.
When her mother was done, she gave Eileen a box of truffles to take home and walked her over to Fifth Avenue and down to Thirty-Ninth Street, to the windows of Lord & Taylor, which Eileen had seen only in pictures in the newspaper. The scenes behind the windows, with their warmly lit fireplaces and silky-looking upholstered miniature furniture, gave her the same feeling she’d had when she’d stood before that great lawn and peered up into the perfect world of the garden apartments. Gorgeous drapery framed a picture she wanted to climb into and live in. Brisk winds blew, but the air was not too cold, and the refreshing smell of winter tickled her nose. In the remnant daylight, the avenue began to take on some of the enchanted quality visible behind the windows. It thrilled her to imagine that passersby saw an ordinary mother-daughter pair enjoying a routine evening of shopping together. She checked people’s faces for evidence of what they were thinking: What a nice little family.
“Christmas gets the full treatment,” her mother said in the train on the way home. “Mind that you remember that. It doesn’t matter what else is going on. You could be at death’s door, I don’t care.”
That night, her mother tucked her in for the first time since she’d gone into the hospital. When Eileen awoke in the middle of the night and saw the other bed empty, she stumbled out to find her mother sitting on the couch. For a terrible instant, Eileen thought her mother was dead. Her head hung back, mouth open. Her hand clutched the empty tumbler. Eileen drew close and watched her chest rise and fall, then took the ashtray from her lap and the tumbler from her hand, careful not to wake her, and brought both to the kitchen sink. She took the blanket from her mother’s bed and spread it over her. She slept with the door open in order to see her from where she lay.
The package she received in the mail contained a book on how to play the clarinet and, beneath it, Mr. Kehoe’s own clarinet. A note on legal stationery said that he’d died of lung cancer and left it to her in his will. She slept beside it for several days until her mother found it one morning and told her to stop, calling it ghoulish. She tried to play it a few times but grew frustrated at the halting noises it produced. With an undiminished memory for its muffled, sensuous sound through the walls, she thought of Mr. Kehoe. She could hear whole songs when she shut her eyes and concentrated, as if the music were waiting to be extracted from her by a trained hand. She could never even string together a couple of familiar-sounding notes. Eventually she took to laying out its pieces and looking at them awhile before fitting them back into the soft pink felt that lined the case. She didn’t need to play Mr. Kehoe’s clarinet to appreciate it. Its parts were sleek and expertly wrought, their burnished metal protuberances shining with a lustrous gleam. They filled her hand with a pleasant weight. She liked to press the buttons down; they moved with ease and settled back up with a lovely firmness. The mouthpiece where Mr. Kehoe had pressed his lips came to a tapered end. She liked the feel of it against her own lips, the pressure against her teeth when she bit down.
The clarinet was the nicest thing she owned, the nicest thing anyone in her family owned. It didn’t belong in that apartment, she decided. When she was older she would live in a beautiful enough home that you wouldn’t even notice the clarinet. That was what Mr. Kehoe would have wanted. She would have to marry a man who would make it possible.
When she was thirteen, she started working at the Laundromat. The first time she got paid, after kneading the bills awhile between her thumb and forefinger, she spread them on the table before her and did some math. If she kept working and saved every dollar she could, she wouldn’t need anything at all from her parents once she was done with high school—maybe even before. The prospect excited her, though excitement gave way to sadness. She didn’t want to think of not needing anything from them. She would save her money for them.
Her mother drank harder than her father ever had, as though she were trying to make up for lost time. Eileen started tending to her needs in a prophylactic rather than merely reactive way. She made coffee, kept a constant supply of aspirin waiting for her, and lay a blanket over her when she fell asleep on the couch.
One night, Eileen came into the living room and saw that her mother’s head was bobbing in that way it did when she fought sleep to hold on to a last few moments of conscious drunkenness. Sitting with her was easiest then. She was too far gone to say something tart and withering but could still register Eileen’s presence with a tiny fluttering of the eyelid.
Eileen took a seat next to her and felt wetness under her hand. At first she thought her mother had spilled her drink.
She was terrified to change her mother’s clothes, because there was a chance her mother might realize what was going on, but she couldn’t just let her sit there in that sopping spot all night. She managed to remove her wet clothes and wrap her in a robe. Then she lay her back down on the dry part of the couch. Getting her to bed would be much harder.
Eileen sat on her haunches next to the couch and guided her mother’s head and shoulders from her lap to the floor, then dragged the rest of her down. Once she had her there, she slid her along by hooking her arms up under her mother’s armpits. Her mother was making murmuring noises. When Eileen got her to the bed, though, she couldn’t lift her up into it. Her mother had stirred to more wakefulness and was trying to stay on the floor.
“Let me get you up, Ma,” she said.
“I’ll sleep right here.”
“You can’t sleep on the floor.”
“I will,” she said, the end of the word trilling off. Her brogue came back when she was drunk or angry.
“It’s cold on the floor. Let me lift you up.”
“Leave me be.”
“I won’t do that.”
Eileen tried for a while and then gave up and lay on her mother’s bed to rest. When she awoke it was to the sound of her father coming home from tending bar. She went to the kitchen and saw him sitting at the table with a glass of water.
“Can you pick Ma up? She’s on the floor.”
He stood without a word and followed her. It occurred to her that, except on Mr. Kehoe’s last night, she’d never seen her father enter that bedroom. In the light streaming in from the kitchen, her mother looked like a pile of dirty sheets on the floor.
Eileen watched him pick her mother up with astounding ease, as if he could have done it with one hand instead of two. One of his arms was cradling her head. Her long limbs hung down; she was fast asleep. He took his time laying her in the bed. He looked at her lying there. Eileen heard him say “Bridgie” once quietly, more to himself than her mother, before he pulled the blanket over her and smoothed it across her shoulders.
“Go to bed now yourself,” he said, and shut the door behind him.
“Imagine all of Woodside filled with trees,” Sister Mary Alice was telling her eighth-grade class. “Imagine a gorgeous, sprawling, untouched estate of well over a hundred acres. That is what was here, boys and girls. What is now your neighborhood, all of it, every inch, once belonged to a single family that traces its roots back to the very beginnings of this country.”
A garbage truck in front of the school emitted a few loud coughs, and Sister paused to let it pass. The rolled-up map above the blackboard swayed slightly, and Eileen imagined it unfurling and hitting Sister in the head.
“The grandson of one of the early Puritan founders of Cambridge, Massachusetts, built a farmhouse near this spot, on a massive plot of land he’d bought.” Sister started walking around the room with a book held open to a page that contained pictures of the house. “His heirs converted that farmhouse into a manor house. This manor house”—Sister practically spat the words—“had a wide hall leading to a large front parlor. It had a back parlor with a huge fireplace, a grand kitchen, a brass knocker on the door. It had an orchard to one side.” The insistent way Sister counted off the house’s virtues made it sound as if she was building a case against it in court. “After a few generations, they sold the estate to a Manhattan-based merchant from South Carolina to use as a weekend retreat. Then, in the latter half of the last century, when the train lines expanded, a real estate developer saw an opportunity. He cleared the estate’s trees, drained its swamps, laid out the streets you walk on today, and carved it into nearly a thousand lots that he distributed by random drawing. He opened the door to the middle class, letting them pay in installments of ten dollars a month. Houses were built. The last vestige of the estate, the manor house, was razed in 1895 to make room for the church, and, eventually, the school you’re sitting in right now.”
Eileen was watching the frowning white face of the clock at the front of the room when Sister came up to her with the book. Her gaze drifted lazily to the pictures, but once she saw them she couldn’t take her eyes off them, and when Sister moved down the row, Eileen asked her to come back for a second.
“The Queensboro Bridge was completed in 1909, and then the LIRR East River tunnel the following year, and they began laying out the IRT Flushing line—the seven train to you—station by station, starting in 1915. The Irish—your grandparents, maybe your parents—began coming across the river in droves, seeking relief from the tenement slums of Manhattan. They wound up in Woodside. Imagine ten people to an apartment, twenty. Then, in 1924—providence. The City Housing Corporation began building houses and apartments to alleviate the density problem.” Sister had made it back to the front of the room. The faint outline of a smile of triumph crept onto her lips as she addressed her final arguments to the jury. “This is the way the Lord works. To those who have little, he gives. Isn’t it nice to think of all of you here instead of it just one privileged family in a mansion in the woods? Wouldn’t you agree, Miss Tumulty?”
Eileen had been daydreaming about the demolished mansion she’d just seen the picture of. Sister’s question snapped her to attention. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
But all she could think was what a shame it was they’d knocked that house down. A big, beautiful house in the country with land around it—that wasn’t a bad thing at all.
“And think of this,” Sister Mary Alice said in closing. “Not a single one of you would be here if that estate were still around. None of us would. We simply wouldn’t exist.”
Eileen looked around at her classmates and tried to conceive of a reality in which none of them had come into being. She thought of the little apartment she lived in with her parents. Would it be a loss if it had never been built?
She pictured herself on a couch in that mansion, looking out a window at a stand of trees. She saw herself sitting with her legs crossed as she flipped through the pages of a big book. Someone had to be born in a house like that; why couldn’t it have been her?
Maybe she wouldn’t have been born there, but she’d have been born somewhere, and she’d have found a way to get there, even if the others didn’t.
Some nights she went up the block to see her aunt Kitty and her cousin Pat, who was four and a half years younger than her. Her uncle Paddy, her father’s older brother, had died when Pat was two, and Pat looked up to her father like he was his own father.
Eileen had grown up reading to Pat. She’d delivered him to school an early reader, and he could write when the other kids were still learning the alphabet. He was whip-smart, but his grades didn’t show it because he never did his homework. He read constantly, as long as it wasn’t for school.
She sat him at the kitchen table and made him open his schoolbooks. She told him he had to get As, that anything less was unacceptable. She said there was no end to what he could do with her help. She told him she wanted him to be successful, and rich enough to buy a mansion. She would live in a wing of it. He just rushed through his work and read adventure stories. All he wanted to do when he grew up was drive a Schaefer truck.
Her mother’s morning powers of self-mastery, so impressive in the early days, began to dry up, until, when Eileen was a freshman in high school—she’d earned a full scholarship to St. Helena’s in the Bronx—they evaporated overnight. Her mother went in late to Loft’s one day, and then she did so again a couple of days later, and then she simply stopped going in at all. One day she passed out in the lobby and the police carried her upstairs. After the officers left—her father being who he was meant nothing would get written up—Eileen didn’t say a word or try to change her mother into clean clothes, because her mother would be embarrassed, and Eileen still feared her wrath, even when her mother was slack as a sack of wheat, because the memory of her mother taking the hanger to her when she misbehaved as a child was never far from her mind.
The next day, when they were both at the kitchen table, her mother smoking in silent languor, Eileen told her she was going to call Alcoholics Anonymous. She didn’t mention that she’d gotten the number from her aunt Kitty, that she’d been talking to others in the family about her mother’s problem.
“Do what you want,” her mother said, and then watched with surprising interest as Eileen dialed. A woman answered; Eileen told her that her mother needed help. The woman said they wanted to help her, but her mother had to ask for help herself.
Eileen’s heart sank. “She’s not going to ask for help,” she said, and she felt tears welling up. She saw her mother’s darting eyes notice the tears, and she wiped them quickly away.
“We need her to ask for assistance before we can take action,” the woman said. “I’m very sorry. Don’t give up. There are people you can talk to.”
“What are they saying?” her mother asked, pulling the belt on her robe into a tight knot.
Eileen put her hand over the receiver and explained the situation.
“Give me that goddamned phone,” her mother said, stubbing out her cigarette and rising. “I need help,” she said into it. “Did you hear the girl? Goddammit, I need help.”
A pair of men came to the apartment the following evening to meet her mother. Eileen had never been more grateful not to find her father home. She sat with them as they explained that they were going to arrange for her mother to be admitted to Knickerbocker Hospital. They would return the next evening to take her in.
That night, as soon as the men had left, her mother took the bottle of whiskey down off the shelf and sat on the couch pouring a little of it at a time into a tumbler. She drank it deliberately, as if she were taking medicine. They’d told her mother to pack enough clothing for two weeks, so Eileen filled a small duffel bag for her and slipped it under the bed. She would explain things to her father once her mother was in the hospital.
Eileen spent the school day worrying that, with so many hours left before the men returned, something would go awry. Her mother seemed okay, though, when Eileen got home. All in the apartment was still. The kettle sat shining on the small four-burner stove, the floor was swept, the blinds were pulled evenly across the windows. Eileen cooked some sausage and eggs for them to eat together. Her mother ate slowly. When the men arrived, shortly before six o’clock, both wearing suits, her mother acquiesced without denying she’d agreed to go. The strangely tender, sorrowful look she wore as she shuffled around the apartment gathering the last of the things she needed—toothbrush, wallet, a book—made Eileen’s chest ache.
Eileen rode with them to the hospital. At the end, the two men drove her back. When they reached the apartment building, the driver put the car in park and sat motionless while the man in the passenger seat came around to open her door. She stood outside the car, thinking she might like to say something to express her gratitude, but there wasn’t a way to do it. The man took his hat off. A strange, knowing silence filtered into the air around them. She was glad these men weren’t the kind that said much. He handed her a piece of paper with a phone number on it.
“Call if you need anything,” he said. “Any hour.” Then they drove off.
Her mother stayed in for nine days. When she reemerged, she attended meetings and took a job cleaning grammar schools in Bayside. She complained about being beholden to the Long Island Rail Road schedule, but Eileen figured what actually bothered her was all the time she had to herself on the train to consider how she hadn’t gotten very far in the years since she’d made similar trips.
Eileen dreamed of taking a dramatic journey of her own. When she learned about Death Valley in geography class, how it was the hottest and driest spot in North America, she decided to visit it sometime, even though she wouldn’t be able to leave her alabaster skin exposed there for long without suffering a terrible burn. A vast, desert expanse like that was the only place she could imagine not minding the absence of company.
4 (#ulink_78bc7307-4473-57b2-8b8e-e963547ee66c)
In the fall of 1956, when Eileen was a sophomore, another round of relatives started coming over from Ireland. How she loved it! Sure, at times the apartment was like a sick ward, teeming with newly landed, sniffling relations who commandeered a bit of the floor or even her own bed, but still: with all those people crowded around, her father came alive, charming them like a circus animal keeping a ball aloft on the tip of its nose, and her mother worked alongside her to keep the peace in cramped quarters.
Over a dozen people passed through their little space: her mother’s youngest sister Margie, who was only a few years older than Eileen and whom her mother had never met; her aunts Ronnie and Lily; her uncles Desi, Eddie, and Davy; her cousins Nora, Brendan, Mickey, Eamonn, Declan, Margaret, Trish, and Sean. Two or three or even four would stay with them at a time, until that group found an apartment in Rockaway or Woodlawn or Inwood and the next moved in. Nothing came close to the feeling Eileen got when they gathered at the table for meals, and when she awoke in the night and heard the gentle snoring and the shuffling sound of their rolling sleep, she was sure she’d never felt happier.
Uncle Desi, her father’s youngest brother, was the first to arrive. He moved into the room with her father. The first time her father wasn’t around, Eileen peppered Desi with questions. It wasn’t hard to get him to talk. It was as if he’d turned a faucet on and the words came pouring out.
“Your father loved Kinvara,” Uncle Desi said. “He was the happiest fellow you could imagine. A smile from ear to ear all day long. Then we were made to move to Loughrea when the Land Reform laws came. We went to better farmland, but I believe he never got over the sting of leaving those fields and that house he’d helped to build as a lad.”
The apartment and neighbors and outside noises seemed to succumb to Desi’s charms. All went hush as he rubbed his bristled chin.
“I was much younger than him, seven or so when we moved, so I had a grand time building the new house. We pulled it up out of the land. We boys and our father dug clay, dragged timbers from the bog, and harvested the thatch for the roof. I tell you, it was plumb and solid, still is. Everyone was satisfied but your father. He said that if they could take one house from you against your will, they could take another. He never settled into it. The sky was his ceiling, I suppose. One thing: he never had to be asked twice to work. Jesus, he never had to be asked once. He was always working. The stone walls he built—you would have thought they were a mile around.
“All he ever wanted was a little money to play cards. There’d be poker games that would last five days. That, and a chance to work in the fields. When I tell you he had strength enough to bend a hammer, I don’t know if you’ll believe me. The only thing he wanted it for was to pull up stubborn vegetables. Then, in 1931—your father must have been twenty-four—my eldest brother Willie, he was a beat cop in Dublin, well, he developed a cataract. He went blind in that eye and had to come back to the farm. The plot wasn’t big enough to support two men and my father, and there wasn’t a job to be found on the entire godforsaken island, not even for a man like your father.”
He raised one brow and clicked his tongue dramatically, as if to suggest that the failure to find room for his older brother spelled doom for the country he had left behind.
“The best our father could do for him was buy him a ticket over. It was Willie who’d wanted to emigrate, not your father, but that was out of the question. This country didn’t admit the infirm.
“Our father gave him three months. Your father spent the time plowing, harrowing, and sowing, barely stopping to eat or sleep. A man could be forgiven for wondering if he were trying to die in the fields. His friends threw the biggest good-bye party in memory; it lasted three days and nights. What a time! At the end, your father went directly from the revelry to the crops. People tried to get him to go in and sleep, but he wouldn’t listen. He worked through the night. Our father went out in the morning, the ticket in his hand; I followed behind. He found him ripping out weeds. I’ll never forget what he said.”
Desi paused. He stood up to act out the scene.
“‘Michael John,’ he said, handing it over.” He stretched an imaginary ticket toward her. “‘You have to go. And that’s that.’ Then he turned back to the house.” Desi faced away, took a couple of steps and looped back. “I stood there for a while with your father in perfect silence. Our mother took him to the boat.”
He sat back down and eyed his empty teacup. She got up to refill it for him.
“I remember the first letter from your father,” Desi said as he chewed some shortbread. “He said the hardest part about leaving was knowing that Willie had no idea what to do with the crops he’d planted, that he’d let them linger in the earth too long. And that’s exactly what happened. He wrote that the whole way over, he saw, in his mind, the crops moldering there, sugaring over, their rich nutrition going to waste. He said he was never planting another seed. My brother Paddy—your cousin Pat’s father, God rest his soul—was here already a couple of years. Paddy referred your father to Schaefer Beer. As soon as they got one look at him, they put him to work hauling barrels.”
She knew how much pride her father took in being able to write, since not everyone he grew up with could, and she watched with interest whenever he slipped on his reading glasses to sign his name to checks and delivery slips, but the idea of him sitting down to write a letter—especially one that revealed his thoughts and feelings—simply baffled her. The closest he got to expressing a feeling was when the foolishness, idleness, or venality of certain men moved him to indignation.
She’d always understood that her father had been young once, but she’d never really considered what that meant. Now she saw him as a young man crossing a sea to start life anew, a courageous man carrying a kernel of regret and heartache that he would feed with his silence. There was more in him than she’d grasped. She wanted to find a man who was like him, but who hadn’t formed as hard an exterior: someone fate had tested, but who had retained a little more innocence. Someone who could rise above the grievances life had put before him. If her father had a weakness, that was it. There were other ways to be strong. She wasn’t blind to them.
She wanted a man whose trunk was thick but whose bark was thin, who flowered beautifully, even if only for her.
Maybe having all those relatives around had given her father a reason to settle in, or maybe it was the power of a management salary to keep a person in line. Whatever it was, when her father was promoted from driver to manager of drivers, something extraordinary happened: he stopped going out and began to do his drinking at home, where she’d never seen him put a glass of alcohol to his lips. There was such a self-possession about the way he drank at home, such an air of leisure and forbearance, that rather than signal chaos as it had in her mother’s case, it suggested urbanity, balance, a kind of evolution.
He bought nice glasses and stacked them with ice cubes and sipped a finger of expensive whiskey once or twice a night with whichever relative was there, as if it were no more than a salubrious activity to pass the time, an efficient way to filter the sludgy residues out of the engine of his planning. He bought new furniture, a dishwasher, a handmade Oriental rug. He bought a television; in the evenings they all watched it together. The only time the spell of Eileen’s happiness was broken was when she sneaked a look at her mother’s face at a moment of great drama in the program, expecting to see her squeezed along with the rest of them in the tightening grip of a tense plot, and saw her intently focused on the drink in her husband’s hand, like a dog watching for a scrap to fall from a table.
She went to Anchors Aweigh in Sunnyside with Billy Malague. Billy was a year older. After he’d graduated from McClancy, he’d approached her father for help getting a job at Schaefer. Apparently he’d been in love with Eileen for years, or so her friends said. She wasn’t interested in him; she only went out with him to be able to say she’d given him a chance. A lot of girls would have thrown themselves at Billy. He had thick locks of blond hair that looked strong enough for a person to suspend from. He was rugged and charismatic, and well liked by other men. She could see the appeal in him, but she couldn’t be with a man who didn’t have his sights on anything higher than driving a truck for thirty years.
Anchors Aweigh was dark and a little musty. A band was playing when she and Billy first arrived, but they soon packed up their fiddles and the jukebox came on. A lively energy emanated from the crowd, which was a healthy mix of generations.
She’d never taken a drink before. She scanned the menu and ordered a zombie, figuring she might as well dive in headfirst. Billy raised the ends of his mouth in an appreciative grin.
“I remember my first day. Your father called me a narrowback. He calls anyone born in America a narrowback. I tell you, it feels like an honor coming from him.” She couldn’t avoid noticing the way Billy rattled the ice around in his tumbler, the way he wiped his mouth with the hairy back of his hand after he took a sip. “He gave me a route that went into Staten Island. That means extra zone pay. My first day, an upstart kid like me, and he’s making sure I get some money in my pocket. He said, ‘You have twelve stops. You’ll be done in six hours. You should stay out ten.’ I didn’t understand. I didn’t want him to think I was a shirker. I said, ‘If it takes six hours, sir, I’ll try to get it done in five.’ He looked at me like I was a stone-cold idiot. ‘If you get back here in less than ten hours,’ he said, ‘don’t come back.’”
He was so excited talking about her father that she wasn’t sure which of them it was he was supposed to be in love with. She surprised herself by how quickly she drained the tall glass, sucking the sugary drink up through the straw. It made her nervous to look at the empty glass and feel herself begin to lose control, her brain tingling slightly, her lips taking their time to come together when she spoke, her head a little heavier on her neck. She wondered if she’d taken the first step on the road away from her dreams. What scared her was how easy it had been to do it. All she had to do was get the contents of the glass into her stomach. To chase her agitated thoughts, she ordered another drink immediately. The chatter in her head quieted down as she sat drinking and trying to return Billy’s insistent gaze. All she could focus on were his strangely doughy cheeks and protruding ears. She imagined him a couple of feet shorter, in a T-shirt with horizontal stripes, and a bowl haircut. In the middle of a little story he was telling, she laughed to think that what was evidently a boy before her somehow struck the rest of the world as a full-grown man. The bartender, whose age wasn’t in question—he must have been a year or two shy of her father—gave her a look that Billy didn’t see, in which there seemed to be pity for the boy. The first drink had been too syrupy sweet, but she liked the second one so much that she ordered three more after it.
It was after midnight when Billy carried her in, begging her father, she later learned, to spare his life, explaining that she’d been possessed, that she’d smacked his face whenever he’d tried to get her to leave, that he hadn’t wanted to give anyone the wrong idea and get escorted out and have to leave her there with those animals.
Her father woke her early in the morning. She spent a couple of hours on the tiled floor of the bathroom, leaning her head on the rim of the bowl and sitting up straight when the urge to throw up possessed her. When she’d emptied her guts completely, her father told her to take a shower. Then he walked her to Mass at St. Sebastian’s.
“You’re no different from the rest of us,” he said. “You don’t get a special dispensation.”
The air conditioning in the new church cooled her sweat and set her to shivering. Once, she had to get up to go to the sacristy bathroom. When she fell asleep, her father elbowed her awake. When communion came, she had to choke down the host. For a terrible moment up by the altar, she feared she’d have a retching spell. She took deliberate steps and deep breaths all the way back to the pew, and she ended up missing a day of school.
That Friday night, after dinner was over and the kitchen was clean and her mother had retired to her room, her father sat her down on the couch.
“If you’re going to be fool enough to do this,” he said, “you can’t go about it half-cocked.”
He went to the liquor cabinet and brought over a couple of tumblers and set them down on the coffee table. Then he went back and returned with a number of small bottles of different types of whiskey.
“What’s this?”
“You’ll be getting a lesson.”
“I can’t,” she said.
“You will,” he said.
“I’ve learned my lesson already.”
“This is a different lesson,” he said. “We’ll start with the good stuff.”
He told her he would take her methodically through everything there was to drink and everything there was to avoid. Then he poured a couple of fingers of whiskey into her glass. What struck her more even than her revulsion at the idea of taking a drink was that her father had come up with a plan, that he’d thought ahead about all this. He seemed to have bought the bottles for the occasion, as if he’d plotted the lesson out like an actual teacher.
She took a small sip; it burned her throat. He told her to take a bigger one. It smelled like charred wood and tasted like ashes. He poured a drink from each bottle and made her drink it in turn. She could tell there was a difference in quality, but only barely. When he got to the fourth, he poured some for himself and told her to drink with him slowly. It went down easily and left no trace except a warmth in her belly that spread out and seemed to heat her body a part at a time.
He put the whiskey bottles away and brought out several small bottles of vodka. She hated every one. He didn’t drink any. He was wearing his reading glasses. There was something scholarly in it. She couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be a master class or a form of house arrest. Then he brought out several varieties of gin. He took the wrapping off each and poured a small amount in her tumbler for her. He had stopped drinking after the whiskey. She wondered if by boring her with a scientific approach he was trying to take away whatever fascination attached itself to alcohol in her mind.
He went to the refrigerator and brought back a bottle of Schaefer.
“Drink this,” he said.
“I don’t like the taste of beer.”
“Drink it down and get it over with.”
He took the cap off and handed it to her. She took a few small sips and tried to push it back toward him.
“Finish it,” he said.
When she’d finished, he told her she wasn’t to be seen drinking any other beer. Then he brought out bottles containing drinks that were fruitier and more colorful than anything she’d imagined him permitting in his house. Cointreau. Crème de menthe. Crème de cassis. Grand Marnier. He made her taste each in turn. She liked the taste of the crème de menthe and he shook his head and poured a full glass.
“Enjoy it, then,” he said.
“I don’t want to drink that much.”
“If you want to stay under this roof, you’ll finish that glass.” He took out another tumbler and filled it. “And this one when you’re finished with that.”
He came in when she was done and poured out another glass.
“What’s going on?” she asked, feeling woozy.
“Drink this.”
She woke in the morning with a headache, grateful it was Saturday.
“You will never again drink anything you can’t see through,” her father said when he saw her in the kitchen, leaning on the counter after taking an aspirin. “You will never pick up a drink again after putting it down and taking your eye off it.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Drink whiskey,” he said. “Good whiskey. Not too much. That’s the long and short of it.”
“I don’t think I’m ever drinking again.”
She thought she saw a trace of a smile cross his lips.
When New Year’s Eve came around, he raised a glass to her, and everyone else gathered did too.
“Here’s to my Eileen for making the honor roll again,” he said to a loud cheer. “God bless her, we’ll all be working for her one day.” He paused. “And let me tell you, there must be something right with her if she can stand after half a dozen zombies. She’s definitely my daughter.”
She’s definitely my daughter. She heard a lifetime of unexpressed affection in the words. She imagined she could go for years on it, like a cactus kept alive by a sprinkling of rain. Still, she was so embarrassed that she decided never to drink anything but whatever the most boring girl in any group she was in was drinking.
5 (#ulink_03db2c1d-94a6-5307-96f7-bb0511e60e09)
From the moment students entered the doors of St. Catherine’s Nursing School, on Bushwick Street in Brooklyn, until the day they graduated, the one bit of knowledge instructors seemed most concerned to impart was that they’d be thrown out for poor performance, but Eileen was used to those tactics after thirteen years of Catholic education, and she knew that even if nursing wasn’t the field she’d have chosen, she’d been training for it without meaning to from an early age. There was nothing these veterans could throw at her that life hadn’t thrown already, and they somehow knew this themselves. There were times she could feel them treating her with something like professional courtesy. She couldn’t help thinking this was what it felt like to be her father, to be praised for something you’d never had any choice about, to wonder if there was a way out of the trap of other people’s regard.
Martyrdom was never her aim, the way it was for some of the halo polishers she went to school with. They might as well have joined the nunnery for all the secret satisfaction she heard in their voices when they complained about the exhaustion and thanklessness of it all. But they wouldn’t have lasted five minutes at a nunnery. They lacked the mental fortitude.
She’d never dreamed of being a nurse. It was just what girls from her neighborhood did when they were bright enough to avoid the secretarial pool. She would’ve preferred to be a lawyer or doctor, but she saw these professions as the purview of the privileged. She didn’t know how she’d ever have gotten the money to pursue them. She thought she might have had the brains for them, but she was afraid she lacked the imagination.
After St. Catherine’s she went on scholarship to St. John’s for her bachelor’s, enrolling in the fall of 1962. Her plan was to take summer classes, finish in three years instead of four, get through grad school, and begin the path to administrator pay. She earned spending money—and savings for the nursing administration degree tuition to come—as a dress model at Bonwit Teller. Women came to look at dresses and she showed them how they could look if they lost a few inches from their waist, or were taller, or had neat divots by their clavicle, or a galvanizing shock of black hair, or smooth skin, or arrestingly heavy-lidded, owlish emerald eyes. What they had on her was money and the insolent ease that came with it. Despite herself she became the preferred girl in the showroom. She didn’t try to push dresses on potential buyers by slinging a hand at the waist and jutting an elbow out. She simply put a dress on and stood there. She didn’t smile or not smile; make eye contact or avoid it; speak to customers or remain silent; she did whatever came naturally to her. If her nose itched, she scratched it. She turned to show them the dress at all angles when they asked her to, and when they were done looking at it, she went back to the dressing room and took it off. The other girls seemed to linger more, attempting to convince themselves of what they hadn’t convinced the customers of.
She daydreamed that the next person who walked in would be a rich man looking for a dress for his girlfriend, who would see her and change his mind about the drift his life was taking. He would let her forget about nursing, fly her around the world, care for her parents’ needs. She could sleepwalk through life, never changing a dirty bedpan, never batting away an exploratory hand when she leaned over a man in his senescence, never pressing through a fog of halitosis to take an old lady’s temperature, never working another day, never thinking another thought. She would come back to this store and sit in the chair and put the girl through her paces. She’d make it seem as if she was going to leave without buying anything, that she’d wasted everyone’s time, and then she would order one of everything to remind them that they had no idea how women like her really lived. But the only people who showed up were women a little older than her, or teenaged girls with their mothers. They said how radiant she looked, but she could hear them thinking of themselves.
One afternoon in April of 1963, a girl about Eileen’s age came in looking for dresses for her bridesmaids. The girl made apparently random selections, projecting a nervous aura. She looked familiar—alarmingly so; only after Eileen had modeled a handful of dresses did she realize the girl was Virginia Towers, who’d left St. Sebastian’s in seventh grade to move to Manhasset. Eileen prayed she wouldn’t recognize her, but while Virginia was examining the seams she started patting excitedly on Eileen’s shoulder.
“Eileen?”
“Yes?”
“Eileen! Eileen Tumulty!”
Virginia’s voice was all heedless abandon. Eileen raised her brows in silent acknowledgment, perturbed to be addressed so familiarly in a place where she’d worked to keep her distance from the other girls.
“It’s me, Ginny. Ginny Towers.”
“Virginia, my goodness,” she said mutedly.
Kind, sincere Virginia had been the only kid in her class with an investment bank executive for a father. Her father was also a Protestant, though her mother was a Catholic who’d grown up in the neighborhood. No one teased Virginia, even though she’d been shy and fairly awkward; it was as though her family’s means draped a protective cloak across her shoulders.
“What are you doing here?” Virginia asked.
There was no answer that wasn’t awkward, so Eileen gave the dress a demonstrative little tug in the chest and raised her hands in amused resignation.
“Right!” Virginia said. “Dresses.” She had two in her hands and three more draped across the armoire, none promising. “Well, hell. Do you like any of these?”
If Eileen had the money to buy bridesmaids’ dresses this expensive, she would buy different ones entirely—sleeker ones, less vulgar, more versatile. She was convinced she had nicer dresses hanging in her closet than Virginia did. She owned only half a dozen, but each was perfect. She would never buy five dresses for twenty dollars each when she could snag one truly gorgeous one for a hundred. She went out infrequently enough that she never worried about being seen too often in any of them.
“I think the one I tried on a couple of dresses ago is quite nice,” Eileen said.
“The lavender one? I knew it! I liked that one too. I’ll just have them order that one then.”
Standing in the billowing dress, Eileen felt like one of those men in sandwich boards advertising lunch specials.
“Eileen Tumulty,” Virginia said, as though it were the answer to a quiz-show question. “I’m guessing this is just your day job.”
“I’m doing my bachelor’s,” she said. “I went to nursing school.”
“I figured you’d be on your way to being a doctor or something. You were always the smartest one of us.”
She felt her face redden.
“I’m finishing at Sarah Lawrence this year. And I’m getting married! But you knew that already. He’s a Penn man. Very square—he makes me giggle he’s so square. My father has set him up with interviews at Lehman Brothers. We’re going to live in Bronxville. I’m going to walk to school my last month!”
She knew of the town; it was a wealthy bedroom community in lower Westchester County. “That sounds just lovely.”
“And I know you won’t guess what I’m doing next year.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m going to law school. At Columbia.”
“You were always intelligent,” Eileen said, stifling her surprise.
“Not like you. You were a whip.”
“You’re very kind.”
“You were more of an adult than the rest of us,” Virginia said. “I often think about that day in sixth grade when you took me to Woolworth’s and made me buy a notebook for every class. Do you remember?”
She remembered, but she didn’t relish recalling what an excess of energy she’d had then for grand improving projects, as though she’d thought the moral balance of the world could be restored by a regimen of directed efforts.
“I remember you weren’t the most organized girl, but I don’t remember going to Woolworth’s, no.”
“I think you’d had enough of watching me never be able to find anything when I needed it. You made me separate my notes. That was one of the most helpful things anyone’s ever done for me.”
“I’m glad,” Eileen said, feeling a churning in her gut.
“You should come to law school with me. We could be study partners. I’d get the better end of that deal.”
It was as if Virginia was speaking to her from the outside of a circus cage, clutching a bar in one hand as she absently held a lamb chop in the other. Eileen had to get away before she said something she’d regret.
“Maybe in my next life,” she said, and the awkwardness she’d kept at bay came rushing back at once. The dress’s low cut left her feeling exposed. A new customer had arrived, and the other girl was busy with someone else, so Eileen asked Virginia if she was sure about the lavender dress and left her with the woman who arranged the accounts.
“Please look us up,” Virginia said on her way out. “Give us a couple of months to settle in. Bronxville, don’t forget. We’ll be in the phone book. Mr. and Mrs. Leland Callow. We’d absolutely love to have you over. There’s nothing so valuable in life as old friends.”
Her mother told her to save her money, to buy used if she had to have a car, but her father was the one to go with her to the showroom.
The new Pontiac Tempest was on the floor, the 1964 model.
“It’s most of what I have saved,” Eileen said.
“You’ll make more. You’ll save again.”
“It’s a bad investment.”
“It’s an investment in life,” her father said. “If this is what you want, this is what you’re getting. It beats the piss out of a beer truck, I’ll say that. Maybe I’ll get one myself. Or I could get one of those convertible types over there. What did he call that one? The GTO? I could drive your mother around in it. Do you think she’d take to it?”
For a moment, he sounded serious, and Eileen wanted to say, Daddy, I think she would, but instead she just said, “Now that is a terrible investment,” and asked him whether cherry red or navy suited her better.
She could buy used and save for the future, or she could make a statement about where she thought her life was heading, and shape the perceptions of others about that trajectory, and maybe sway the future by courting it.
“What the hell do you think I’m going to tell you?” her father said.
She went with cherry red.
She was at the table when her mother got in from work.
“Studying again?”
Eileen barely grunted in reply. In shedding herself of her effects, her mother had dropped her keys on Eileen’s splayed notebook. There were so many keys packed onto the interlocking rings; each represented a room, or several, that her mother had to clean. Eileen slid them off the notebook as if they were coated in pathogens.
“Why don’t you put those books aside for five minutes,” her mother said. “You can drive me and my friends.”
“Drive where? Which friends?”
“My meeting friends.”
Meeting friends, Eileen thought crankily. She almost makes it sound pleasant.
“Take my car,” she said, not looking up from her book.
“I’m nervous to drive it.”
Her mother had only had her license for a year, and she was shaky on the road. The Tempest was still brand-new.
“I’ve got a test.”
“We started a car pool,” her mother said. “I said I’d pick everyone up this week.”
“And how had you planned on doing this, exactly?”
“Come on,” her mother said. “It’s getting late.”
The first stop was in Jackson Heights. She was surprised to pull up outside one of the co-ops; she’d always imagined that people of means were spared some of the sadder aspects of man’s nature. As soon as her mother left the car, Eileen took out her textbook. She was planning to study at every stop, even with others in the car. There wasn’t time for the squeamish propriety of small talk; the fact that she had submitted to this depressing task was enough.
When her mother returned, there was a brightness in her voice.
“Hiram,” she said to the man getting in the backseat, “this is my daughter, Eileen.”
“So I guess you’re Charon tonight.”
“Eileen,” she said.
“Charon. The ferryman. On the river Styx.”
“Oh,” she said. “Right.”
“Shuttling the dead.”
He had bumped his hairpiece on the doorframe in getting in; instead of adjusting it with a furtive hand, he had taken it off completely and was resetting it with such nonchalance that it seemed he wore it not to disguise his baldness but to bring it out in the open.
“You’re very much alive, Hiram,” her mother said, beginning to titter. “Though I can’t say the same for that rug you’re wearing.”
“I’m supposed to give you a tip,” he said. “How about this: avoid men in borrowed hair.”
“Sound advice,” Eileen said.
“Tell it to my wife. Not that I had this when she met me. You should have seen the locks. I was Samson.”
In the rearview mirror she watched him look contemplatively out the window. He returned her gaze alertly, as if he was used to being watched.
“Beware of women bearing scissors,” he said, chuckling. He was in on some private joke that made even the heaviest things weightless. “Beware of three-drink lunches.”
“One-drink lunches,” her mother said.
“Well, if we’re going to hell, at least we’re doing it in style. This is a beaut.”
“Thank you,” Eileen said.
“You’ve got it backwards,” her mother said. “We’re leaving hell.”
“Yes, yes,” he said agreeably. “We’re in purgatory, but we’re hopeful. Or if we’re not hopeful, at least we’re not succumbing to despair. Or if we’re succumbing to despair, at least we’re in this beautiful car.”
Her mother was buoyant as she rang bells and led her meeting friends to the car, where she peppered them with chatter to put them at ease. Eileen couldn’t bring herself to open the book even when it was only Hiram in the car. She ended up having a marvelous time. In even a few minutes with some of them she could see they radiated hard-won perspective. She made three trips; then she parked up the block and watched in the mirror as her mother and the final quartet, a spectrum of widths and heights, disappeared down into the church basement.
On the way home, after they’d dropped everyone off, her mother blew smoke through the cracked window and talked with a quick and ceaseless fluency. Upbeat as her mother seemed, Eileen saw that the corners of her mouth were being pulled down, as though by a baited hook. She could tell that her mother didn’t entirely believe in her own forgiveness. Eileen wasn’t sure she believed in it herself, even though she’d been the one to grant it, through tears, after her mother had sat her down at the kitchen table and unearthed mistakes Eileen had successfully buried and said how sorry she was for them. Her mother had worked hard to kill the past, but it clung to life in Eileen’s mind, in the thought that this apparently solid form might dissolve back into the liquid that had seeped into every corner of her childhood, bringing disorder and rot. The smell of the past, that irrepressible smoke, was spoiling the air between them, where, in the absence of others to filter it, an acrid cloud now hung.
“Roll that down further, please.”
Without a word, her mother did as asked. She stared straight ahead, smoking and avoiding Eileen’s gaze as she used to at the height of her drinking days. Eileen pulled over and got out to roll down the rear windows. She stood briefly outside the car gazing at the back of her mother’s head, which for a strangely exhilarating moment looked as if it belonged to someone else. Whatever her mother was going through, Eileen would allow herself to care only so much about it. She had her own life to worry about. Life was what you made of it. Some of the houses she’d dropped these people off at would have been enough for her, so why couldn’t they be enough for them? If she lived in one of these houses, she wouldn’t need to get into another woman’s car and head to a damp lower church for a meeting. She could look at her fireplace, her leather sofa, her book-lined drawing room; she could listen to silence above her head; she could peer in on empty bedrooms lying in wait for fresh-faced visitors, pleasantly useless otherwise. It would all be enough for her to put a drink down for. And yet there these people were. The fact that they were there, that everything they owned wasn’t enough somehow, disturbed her, suggesting a bottomlessness to certain kinds of unhappiness. She shook the thought from her head like dust from an Oriental rug and decided that a house would have to be enough.
6 (#ulink_cf178eca-13b4-5b44-b869-84ecd33bb017)
She spent the entire fall of 1963 trying to convince her cousin Pat to apply to college. Then December rolled in and the application deadlines were around the corner, and many of them had already come and gone. She went to him to make one final appeal.
“I’m not college material,” Pat said, his big feet up on the coffee table in her aunt Kitty’s apartment, where Eileen sat with her knees together under the pressed pleats of her cotton skirt.
“Bull.”
“I’ve never been big on school.” He leaned over and tapped ashes into a coffee cup, stretched back again.
“You could have been a great student. You’re smarter than all those boys.”
“You need to give up on this idea of me as a Future Leader of America.”
The truth was, she already had. He was smart enough to make it to his senior year without doing a lick of homework, and he possessed an intuitive ability to make men champion his causes that reminded her of her father’s own. He was pissing away his apparently unbearable promise at underage bars, but she didn’t care about that anymore. All she wanted was to keep him safe.
“You could get As in your sleep,” she said, “if you gave it a tiny bit of effort.” She crossed her legs and played with the pack of cigarettes. She resisted blowing away the smoke that was traveling in her direction.
“I can’t sit and study. I just get restless.”
“I’ll do the applications for you.”
“I need to move. I can’t be cooped up.” He snubbed out his cigarette and folded his hands behind his head.
“You’ll have plenty of chances to move in Vietnam,” she said bitterly. “Until you’re in the ground, that is.”
He turned eighteen that February, 1964, and she tried to get him to marry the girl he was dating, but he wouldn’t do it. When he graduated in June and received the notice to report for his physical, she was terrified, because he was a perfect specimen, big and strong and almost impossibly hale, with 20/10 vision, practically, and great knees despite the family curse, so there was zero chance of his getting declared 4F. She tried to get him to enlist in the National Guard to avoid a dangerous posting, and then after the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August she was sure he’d find some college to enroll in, but instead a couple of weeks later he went to the recruiter for the Marines.
He’d been on the winning side of every fistfight he’d ever been in, so he might’ve thought he could simply stare down whatever trouble was to come. He went to Parris Island for basic, got further training as an antitank assaultman, and was assigned to Camp Lejeune, where he stayed until June of 1965, when he volunteered to go over after the first waves of the ground war had landed in South Vietnam.
He called before he left. She couldn’t picture him in a crew cut at the other end of the phone, wearing that one outfit they all seemed to wear, a polo shirt and chinos, as if they all shopped in the same store. All she could see in her mind’s eye was him standing in his St. Sebastian’s blazer, five grades behind her, shifting impatiently from foot to foot while she fixed his tie. He was the closest she’d ever had to a brother.
“You’d better stay alive,” she said.
“There are some scared-looking fellas I could hand the phone to if you want to give them a little pep talk. This is Pat you’re talking to. Pat Tumulty. I’ll see you in a while.”
“Fine.”
“Tell your father I’ll make him proud,” he said.
Her father had filled her cousin’s head with so much patriotic rhetoric that he thought he was embarking on a noble adventure.
“Don’t you even think about trying to impress him,” she said. “He’d never say so, but he’s scared to death that something’s going to happen to you.”
“He told you that?”
“He doesn’t have to say it for it to be obvious. He just wants you home in one piece. The bullshit around that man is piled so high you can’t even see him past it.”
“He’d take my place if they’d let him.”
“Even if that’s true, it doesn’t mean a goddamned thing. The only thing he’s ever been afraid of is regular life. Come home and live a regular life and impress me. Forget about my father.”
She could almost hear him straighten up.
“Tell him I’ll make him proud,” he said.
She sighed. “Tell him yourself. He’ll be where you left him, in that damned recliner. He doesn’t go anywhere. Everybody comes to him.”
“I will.”
“Good-bye, Pat,” she said, and then she thought, Good-bye, Pat, in case she was really saying it. She waited to hear him hang up.
7 (#ulink_dd3ee37f-1fa5-59de-8051-234fc4cef325)
She began to look forward to the day when she would take another man’s name. It was the thoroughgoing Irishness of Tumulty that bothered her, the redolence of peat bogs and sloppy rebel songs and an uproar in the blood, of a defeat that ran so deep it reemerged as a treacherous conviviality.
She’d grown up around so many Irish people that she’d never had to think much about the fact that she was Irish. On St. Patrick’s Day, when the city buzzed like a family reunion, she felt a tribal pride, and whenever she heard the plaintive whine of bagpipes, she was summoned to an ancient loyalty.
When she got to college, though, and saw that there was a world in which her father didn’t hold much currency, she began to grasp the crucial role the opinions of others played in the settling of one’s own prospects. “Eileen” she couldn’t get rid of, but if she could join it to something altogether different, she might be able to enjoy her Irishness again, even feel safe enough to take a defensive pride in it, the way she did now only on those rare occasions when her soul was stirred to its origins, like the day just before her nineteenth birthday when President Kennedy was elected and she wept for joy.
She wanted a name that sounded like no name at all, one of those decorous placeholders that suggested an unbroken line of WASP restraint. If the name came with a pedigree to match it, she wasn’t going to complain.
It was mid-December 1965. She was in a master’s program in nursing administration at NYU after getting college done in three years, as she’d planned. Between classes, she met her friend Ruth, who worked nearby, under the arch in Washington Square, to head to lunch together. It was an unusually mild day for December; some young men had on only a sweater and no jacket.
“Well, it’s not that he needs a date, necessarily,” Ruth was saying as they walked toward the luncheonette on Broadway. “He just doesn’t have one.”
Eileen sighed; it was happening again. Everyone always believed they’d found her man for her, but more often than not he was a blarneying, blustering playboy who’d charmed her friends and the rest of the bar and whom she couldn’t ditch fast enough.
“I’m sure one will turn up,” she said. “Tell him good things come to those who wait.”
The men that stirred her—reliable ones, predictable ones—were boring by other girls’ standards. She didn’t meet enough of these men. Maybe they couldn’t get past the guys who crowded around her at bars. If they couldn’t at least get to her, though, they weren’t for her. She’d rather be alone than end up with a man who was afraid.
“You are impossible!” Ruth said. “I am trying to look out for you here. No—you know what? Fine. That’s just fine.” Ruth fastened the buttons on her coat.
Eileen could feel Ruth burning. In front of the luncheonette, Ruth stopped her. “Here’s the thing,” she said. “Frank asked me to do this favor, and we just started, so I want to come through for him. I don’t care what you do on New Year’s. You want to miss the fun, that’s fine by me. You want to be alone the rest of your life, that’s fine too. I’ve tried. I even set you up with Tommy Delaney, and look what you did with that.”
“You think you’re safe with a West Point man,” Eileen said, as though to herself. “You think he’ll have a bit of class.” She watched a cab stop at the corner and a man with a newspaper tucked under his arm pay his fare.
“Tommy’s a fine man,” Ruth said.
“Oh, I’m sure he’s swell,” Eileen said. “I have no way of knowing. He couldn’t sit still long enough to say two words to me. He spent the whole time making sure every back in the place got slapped.”
“Tommy has a lot of friends.”
“He bought everyone a round and said I didn’t know it yet, but he was my future husband. There was a big cheer. The nerve!”
The man with the newspaper got out of the cab. He was tall and handsome, with dark cropped hair and striking eyeglasses. She imagined he was a visiting professor, Italian or Greek. She took her eyes from him before he turned in her direction.
“He liked you. He wanted to make an impression.”
“An impression!”
“Look, this one is different,” Ruth said lamely. “He won’t be trying to win you over. He doesn’t want to be there any more than you do.”
“What’s the problem with him? Is he queer?”
Eileen didn’t know why she was still resisting. She would normally have done her friend Ruth this small favor, but she wasn’t in the mood for disappointment, not on New Year’s Eve. She watched the taxi launch off from the curb, only to stop again up the block to let a young couple pile in. The sun came back out from behind a cloud. Ruth unbuttoned her coat.
“He’s a grad student at NYU. A scientist. Frank’s in an anatomy class with him. He’s obsessed with his research. He never leaves the library. Frank is worried about him. He wants to get him out.”
Eileen didn’t say anything. She was trying not to believe in the promising picture she was forming in her mind, for fear of disappointment.
“So what Frank told him is that I was nagging him to find a date for my friend for New Year’s.”
“Absolutely not!” Eileen said. “I will not pretend to be somebody’s charity case.”
“He’s a gentleman. He couldn’t resist a woman in need. It’s the only thing that would have worked.”
“Ruth!”
A pair of girls pushed past them into the luncheonette. Eileen could see the counter seats filling up and could make out only one empty booth.
“Would it help if I told you he’s handsome? Frank even said it himself. He said all the girls they know think he’s very handsome.”
“Let them have him,” she said, not meaning it. She couldn’t believe she was feeling defensive about this man.
“Just do this for me and I’ll never bother you again,” Ruth said, putting her hand on the door to open it. “You can go become an old maid after this.”
“Fine. But I’m not going to pretend to be grateful he went out with me.”
In the interval between the setup and the date, she’d convinced herself that this was nothing more than a good deed she was doing. When the bell rang at Ruth’s, though, she was seized by nerves. She ran to the bedroom and locked the door.
“Come on! I have to answer the door.”
“I’m not going. Tell him I got sick or something.”
“Come out and say hello!” Ruth whispered forcefully as the bell rang again.
She heard Ruth invite them in. She liked his voice: it was soft, but there was strength in it. She decided to open the door, but not before resolving to give him the hardest time she could. She wasn’t going to have any man thinking she needed him there, certainly not some spastic recluse she’d have to lead around the room by the sleeve.
Before she had a chance to say anything sarcastic, Ed rose to his feet. He was indeed handsome, but not too pretty; neat and lean, with clean lines everywhere, including those in his face that gave him an appealing gravity when he smiled.
He leaned in and whispered in her ear. “I realize you didn’t have to do this, and I promise to try to make it worth your time.”
Her heart kicked once like an engine turning over on a wintry afternoon.
He could dance like a dream. When he pressed her close, his substantiality surprised her. The glasses, the neatly combed hair, the chivalry on the sidewalk and at doors made an impression, but the back and shoulders let her relax. The girls at their table thought him the most polite man they’d ever met. When she first heard him speak in his articulate way that was oddly devoid of accent, she thought he was like the movie version of a professor, but without the zaniness that emasculated those characters. Still, he was refined in a way that might have raised eyebrows among the men of her set. He could discuss things they didn’t understand. He didn’t so much drink a beer as warm it in his hand as an offering to the gods of conversation. She fretted over how he’d get along with her father, and so she brought him around earlier than she would have otherwise, in case she had to cut him loose, but something in Ed’s carriage disarmed the big man. Eventually she had to feign annoyance at how well they got along. She shouldn’t have been entirely surprised. He’d been a neighborhood kid, the kind who knew how to throw a punch when a friend was in trouble and could talk everybody’s way out of it before it started—the kind men listened to because the way he spoke suggested he wasn’t telling them anything he thought they didn’t know already.
He was a natural athlete. They went to the driving range with her old friend Cindy and her husband Jack, who was into golf. Ed teed up and smacked the ball so soundly that when she saw it next it was a tiny pea at the end of its parabolic journey.
They headed out to Forest Hills one weekend to see her friends Marie and Tom Cudahy. There was a tennis court near the Cudahys’ townhouse. They borrowed tennis whites from their hosts and the four of them hit the ball around in doubles, no keeping score or serving, just volleying. Ed returned shots he shouldn’t have been able to get to in time. At the end, Tom asked him to play him solo, and Eileen turned and saw the embarrassed look on Marie’s face. They both knew what was coming. Tom had been a letterman at Fordham and had a powerful serve, and though he mostly kept his competitiveness in check during mixed doubles, he liked to throttle his counterpart for a while afterward.
The two men took their positions and Tom fired a blistering smash. The ball raced up Ed’s body off the bounce, as if it was trying to hit him more than once. The second serve came in on Ed’s hands. He flicked his wrist at the last second and deposited the ball just over the net. Tom hustled but the ball died, bouncing again before he got to it. They traded points and games. Ed’s serve was careful and reliable, his returns determined and vigorous. She liked the way he whipped his racket across his chest, dismissing offerings with sudden ferocity. He tucked the ball into corners and moved it around the court. Tom won the set, but Ed made the contest closer than anyone in their circle had.
They walked back to the Cudahys’ to shower and change. She had one hand in Ed’s, while the other held down the hem of Marie’s mod minidress. On the court she’d felt protected by all the activity, but off the court she felt almost naked in it. Ed looked terrific in Tom’s spare whites, as if he was born to wear them.
“When did you get so good at tennis?”
“I’m not that good.”
“You looked pretty good to me.”
He bounced a ball as he walked. “I cleaned up trash one summer in Prospect Park. I stuck around after work a few times and played at the Tennis House. I was always running after shots, trying to catch up to them. There was a pro who gave me some free advice. ‘Go where you think the ball’s going,’ he said. ‘Beat it there.’”
“I have a good strategy too,” she said. “I don’t move at all. I let it go past me to you.”
He laughed. “I noticed.”
“I’m flat-footed.”
The smell of honeysuckle wafted up at them from a garden. Ed put the ball in his pocket. “Well, we can’t exactly have you sweating through this white dress.” He pulled her to him and gave her hip a squeeze. “This little white dress.” They took a few stumbling steps together. “It just wouldn’t be decent.”
“The term is tennis whites, Tarzan,” she said, shoving him playfully. “And they’re very proper. So behave yourself.”
Tom was walking ahead with Marie, his racket slung at his shoulder like a foxhunter’s spent rifle. His clothes were casually disheveled, his shirttail hanging out in a way that suggested he’d never had to worry about money, but Eileen knew he was wearing a costume, trying to blend in. He worked for J. P. Morgan, but he was from Sunnyside, his father was a laborer like hers, and Fordham was Fordham, but it wasn’t Harvard, Princeton, or Yale.
When the waiter came over, Tom wrinkled his nose up and pointed at something on the wine list, and she knew it was because he didn’t want to mispronounce the name. He ordered for the table without asking what anyone wanted to eat. Ed gave her hand a little squeeze, and it felt like a pulse passed between them. For a moment she knew exactly what he was thinking, not just about Tom, but about her, and himself, and all of life, and she liked the way he saw things. She could spend her life tuning into the calming frequency of his thoughts.
He wasn’t a stiff, and he wasn’t a weakling either. What was the word for it? Sensitive was the only one that came to mind, amazing as that was to consider; he was a sensitive man. He soaked up whatever you gave him.
His name was Leary, as Irish as anything, but she decided she could marry him anyway.
8 (#ulink_8d4ff828-1951-5513-941e-eddafd5228ac)
Ed’s family had been in New York since just before the Civil War, but their sole claim to distinction was that his great-great-grandfather had had a hand in building the USS Monitor. Ed said his father liked to suggest by a looseness in his wording that his ancestor had been some sort of naval architect, but the truth was he’d punched the clock with the grunts at the Continental Iron Works in Greenpoint, where they fashioned the hull.
Ed’s mother, Cora, had a soothing voice and a velvety laugh. Friday nights, Eileen sat with her and Ed, drinking tea and eating oatmeal cookies in the kitchen Ed grew up in, in a railroad flat on Luquer Street in Carroll Gardens, near the elevated F tracks. Cora kept the window open on even the coldest days, to drive off the steam heat. Eileen liked to watch the lacy curtains kick up in the breeze. Cats stalked the adjacent lot, curling into old tires. When they hopped onto the windowsill, Cora swished them away with a dish towel. Trains rumbled by at intervals, marking the passage of time. Whenever she rose to leave, Eileen found herself pulled into Cora’s bosom for a hug. She never got over her surprise at receiving maternal affection, and she returned the hugs awkwardly, with an abstracted curiosity, though she welcomed them all the same.
Ed’s father, Hugh, had been dead for a few years. Eileen knew little about him; Ed released that information in a trickle, and Cora never brought him up. The only evidence of him in the apartment was a framed picture, on one of the end tables, of him wearing a hat, an overcoat, and a slightly furtive half smile. Eileen knew he’d played the piano to accompany silent movies; that he’d sealed up paint cans in the Sapolin factory, once earning a small bonus when he suggested they paint a giant can on the water tank on the roof; that he’d worked as a liability evaluator at Chubb; and that World War II had given him his only real feeling of purpose.
Ed seemed to feel safest talking about his father’s experience during the war years, though he had no memory of that time. It was all just stories he’d heard.
“You could get him going for hours if you asked about the war,” Ed said.
The government had urged civilians to pursue activities essential to the war effort, and Hugh landed on the docks, in Todd Shipyard, sticking bolts in steel plates in the bulkheads and hulls of damaged ships. The work itself wasn’t stimulating, save for the mild danger of hanging out over the water, but he liked toiling under the sun alongside other men, breathing in the salt air and thinking of what his labor led to—never mind the irony that after three generations in America, the Leary line was still working on ships.
Ed said his father and the other men modified ships from regular freighters into tankers, adding a second layer to the hull. They converted luxury liners to barracks for troop transport. The peak of their activity, in terms of both industry and importance, was working on the Queen Mary. They stripped her of her furniture and wood paneling, replaced her bars and restaurants with hospitals, painted her a dull gray to confuse rising submarines, and gave her smoke suppression. She could go as fast as a destroyer, reaching speeds of thirty knots where an average submarine could only go ten. At the height of the conflict, in 1943, she carried sixteen thousand men from London to Sydney without a gunboat escort.
One night, Eileen stayed late at Ed’s house. Cora had gone to sleep. They were sitting on the couch, which was worn along the seam by its skirt, some of the filling rupturing through. Eileen picked the picture of Hugh up off the end table.
“What was he like?”
“I suppose he was like a lot of fathers,” Ed said. “He went to work and stayed out late. He wasn’t around a lot.”
“What about as a man? All I see when I try to picture him is this coat and hat.”
A pair of end table lamps provided the only illumination in the room, which was like a parlor in a shabby club. Cora had installed cute statuettes in every corner, but personality only went so far in making an apartment feel like a home. Eileen had a new appreciation for how her mother had kept things neat and in working order, how her father had paid to replace the furniture whenever it got run down. Ed had grown up with less.
“He liked to laugh,” Ed said. “He told raunchy jokes. He always had a cigar dangling from his mouth. It made him look like a dog hanging its tongue out on a hot day. He was always hustling, working angles.”
“What else?” she asked, putting the photo down. She sensed he was on the verge of candor. “Tell me more.”
“He liked to drink,” Ed said. “It wasn’t pretty when he did.”
“I know a little about that,” she said, and they shared a moment of quiet understanding.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You deserved better.”
She felt her emotions catching in her throat. “You can tell me anything, you know.”
“I wouldn’t know how to say it if there were anything to say.”
“Just say what comes to mind.”
He was silent, and she worried she’d pushed him too hard. In her nervous state she had picked off the material that covered the sofa’s arm, and now she tried to fit it back into place with one hand while keeping her eyes on Ed. She should have left him alone, rather than risk angering him and making him shut down, but she didn’t want to revert to the surface-level interactions she’d had with other men. She had never wanted to talk to anyone more than she wanted to talk to Ed. She wanted to tell him things she’d never told anyone, and to learn more about him than she’d learned about anyone else. She used to think a bit of mystery was a prerequisite to her feeling attracted to a man. For the first time, her attraction didn’t diminish the more she knew, but actually grew.
“You remember Charlie McCarthy?” Ed said after a while. “Edgar Bergen’s dummy? My father used to say I looked like him.”
Eileen folded her hands in her lap and held her breath, trying not to look too eager to hear what he had to say.
“I figured out early on I could make him laugh if I did a Charlie McCarthy impression. So I practiced. I got to the point where I could do the voice pretty well. When my father got in from the bar, I’d hop up on the couch and twist up my mug for him.” Ed showed her, forming a rictus and opening his eyes wide, looking from side to side with an eerie, doll-like blankness. “Sometimes he laughed. Sometimes he told me to cut it out and said I looked nothing like that doll. I never knew which it was going to be. I remember the last time I did it. He laughed and laughed. Then he smacked me in the mouth, whack!”—Ed brought his hand down on the coffee table—“and told me to stop embarrassing myself.”
Their hands migrated toward each other on the couch. After their fingers sat intertwined for a bit, she clasped his hand in both of hers, pulled it to her, and gave it a little kiss, then shifted closer to him.
Ed said he and his mother had never discussed his father’s drinking, but it was his understanding that his father hadn’t been a drinker before the war. “If the war had gone on forever, or if he’d been a park ranger or done something outdoors, maybe things would have been different.”
When peacetime returned, Hugh went back to Chubb and sat at a desk all day. He didn’t have any hobbies. “I think the only way he knew how to drive off the anxiety in him was to go to Molloy’s,” Ed said. “Everybody raised a glass when he walked in. They laughed at his jokes. They let him buy rounds.”
By the time Ed was nine, he said, his mother was sending him by train on pay Fridays to pick up his father’s check. If he didn’t get there in time, they were stuck for the week. If he did, his father wasn’t necessarily stuck. With his beautiful singing voice, he could make twenty-five dollars, or two-thirds of his weekly salary, as the cantor at a single funeral Mass at St. Mary’s Star of the Sea. Ed only knew his father did this because he served funerals during the school day as an altar boy.
“The first time he sang,” Ed said, “I walked out of the sacristy with the cross to start the funeral and there he was, standing off to the side with this sheepish grin on. When the time came, he walked up to the lectern. He gave me a nervous look, like I’d caught him in something. Maybe one of his friends knew what kind of voice he had and set him up with the gig. I remember knowing he’d been drinking beforehand. It’s just something you can tell.”
She nodded.
“Then the organ started up, and he started singing, and it was like he was surprised by the sound of his own voice. Like he was hearing it for the first time. I couldn’t believe how good he was. He sang his heart out. There were tears on some faces in the pews.”
“My father can’t sing,” she said. “But he thinks he can.”
Ed gave her a warm smile. “He came to collect the cash afterward. I was in the rectory changing out of my alb. He put his finger to his lips. ‘Don’t tell your mother.’” Ed’s face took on an intense expression. “I already knew enough not to say anything, you know?”
She nodded again. Sometimes, she thought, life makes you grow up early. And some people never grow up at all.
“He started showing up often. I don’t know how he did it without getting fired at Chubb. It was a pretty decent round-trip on the train. He must have been gone two, three hours at a time. He did it for years. I doubt a penny of that money made it home to my mother. To think that he was a block away from her all that time. She would have loved to have lunch with him.”
Once Ed started talking, the dam broke. They went out once a week to eat in Manhattan, and the conversation turned often to their early years. She found out that in grammar school Ed was a model student, but by the time he reached high school he’d turned his back on his studies. After he was kicked out of his second school, Cora used her influence in the parish to get him admitted on probation to Power Memorial in Manhattan. The long train rides settled him down enough to get him graduated. He took a job mixing paints and dyes at the Kohnstamm factory on Columbia Street, a short walk from home. He brought his paychecks home to his mother.
At Kohnstamm’s, Ed said, he found someone to look up to—the scientist who directed the mixers. The chemical processes awoke a scholarly impulse in him that had lain dormant. He got to know the chemicals so well that soon other men began coming to him instead of checking the manuals. He moved over to Domino for a better paycheck, turning slag into sugar, paying attention to the reactions, the reagents, the products. He began taking night classes at a community college, then quit Domino to enroll full-time at St. Francis College, where his younger brother Phil was a student. Cora paid both their tuitions with the money she’d saved from what Ed brought home.
Their flat had no hallway. To get from the kitchen to the living room, you had to brush against the foot of every bed, one of which Ed shared with Phil until he was twenty-one, when his sister Fiona got married and moved to Staten Island. Until the day Hugh brought a desk home from his office, Ed and Phil studied together at the kitchen table, the only good surface to spread out on. Cora never had to call them to dinner; she only had to tell them to put their books away.
Friday nights, when his friends were out, Ed waited for the bartender’s call. He would pull up in front and honk, and Hugh would keep him waiting while he had another. Ed wouldn’t go in, because he didn’t want to watch his father drink. Once, he waited so long that he woke up slamming the brakes, thinking he’d nodded off while driving and was about to plow into the car in front of him. He started beating on the horn; a few guys came out to see what was the matter. Hugh joined them and stared as if it were somebody else’s crazy kid. Ed kept slamming on the horn. When he finally stopped, his father screamed at him. After that, Ed said, when he drove up he gave a quick toot and shut the car off.
Ed was named to the Duns Scotus Honor Society, like Phil the year before. They were the first pair of brothers in St. Francis’s history to receive the honor.
They were at Lüchow’s on Fourteenth Street, eating Wiener schnitzel and sauerkraut, when Ed told her about the day his father died.
“A few days before I graduated,” he said, “my father had a heart attack on the couch. I drove him to the hospital. I must have flown through every light. I had my arm on him to keep him from slumping forward”—Ed pressed it against her to show her—“like I did when I picked him up at the bar. I was burning through intersections. When I got there, I saw that he’d died. I slapped his face a few times. Then I threw him over my shoulder and ran him in.”
Only after Ed had heard definitively that his father was gone, while he sat weeping in the waiting room area, did he realize he’d wrenched his back. As he alternated in spasms of grief and pain, he understood that he loved all the things he’d always thought he’d hated about carrying his father’s body home all those nights: the weight of him hanging on him, pulling at the sockets of his arms; the drunken heat that came off him; the roughness of his beard against Ed’s neck; the soft sound of his voice as he mumbled; the sickly sweet smell of whiskey.
“There are things you feel that you can’t explain,” Ed said. “You know other people won’t understand them.”
“I know just what you mean.” She was thinking she was referring to how she’d felt at times about her own parents. Then she realized she was feeling something like it just then for Ed. You had to hope the love you felt would get recorded in the book of time. “You don’t have to say another word,” she said.
9 (#ulink_911dd597-01ee-5912-9d06-d4ebafa2390e)
She wanted to buy her husband-to-be a luxurious wedding gift. It happened that her father’s best friend, in addition to regularly occupying the stool next to him at Hartnett’s—where her father had shifted from Doherty’s when he’d started going back to pubs—was a vice president at Longines, which distributed LeCoultre in North America. For six hundred dollars, Eileen purchased a prototype of the next line of LeCoultre watches. It was slung with a beautiful eighteen-karat gold band and would have retailed for two thousand dollars. She paid in three installments.
She tried to think of a creative inscription that would encapsulate her feelings for him, some intimate notion to commit to posterity, but everything she came up with sounded too fanciful by half. In the end she settled on his full name, middle included, and hoped he’d hear a rough sort of poetry in the lack of embellishment and a tenderness in the identification of him as her man.
They went to Tavern on the Green a week before the wedding. They emerged from the subway and took a horse and carriage up to the entrance. She had never been to the Tavern before. She loved the banquet tables, the big picture windows, the austerity of the trees in winter.
She presented the watch to Ed after the salad course. He undid the bow, neatly removed the green foil wrapping, opened the box, and held the watch.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. Without trying it on, he put it back in the box. “I can’t take it, though. I’m not the kind of man who’s ever thought of wearing a gold watch. You should return it to the store.”
In an astonished instant she’d gone beyond words, beyond anger, to a disappointment so deep it made her stomach ache.
“It’s a prototype, Ed. I can’t.” She refolded the napkin in her lap, smoothed down the silk of her dress.
“Why not?”
“It’s unique.”
“I’m sure they’d listen—”
“It’s engraved, goddammit.”
Ed was still talking, but she didn’t hear him. Quickly, dispassionately, she ran through the mechanics of how she would exit the restaurant. She wouldn’t say a word. She would of course leave the watch on the table. She would go home and tell her parents that the wedding was off. She was disappointed that she wouldn’t get to see her father in a top hat and tails. A busboy stacked and removed the salad plates, and now another stopped to replenish their water glasses, taking his time to keep too many ice cubes from tumbling out of the pitcher. His conscientious presence was the only reason she hadn’t risen yet.
“Maybe you could have them take off this gold band and put a leather one on it for me instead, if you don’t want to take it back,” this man to whom she’d sworn her devotion was saying in lordly ignorance of how far from him she’d flown in her mind, how almost absurdly vulnerable he was to her at that moment. “I’m a regular guy. I don’t know how to wear a watch like this.”
She saw how unfathomably easy it could be for her to walk out on her own life. She was awash in sudden sympathy for Ed. Then the cloudburst passed, and she sat in a little puddle of resentment over how benighted and pinched her future husband was.
They endured a tense dinner, even managed to make it through dessert. After they’d risen to leave, a surge of spite compelled her to fish the watch out of her pocketbook and make him read the engraving on its back.
He looked at it quietly. For a moment, it occurred to her that he might be moved enough to change his mind, and she grew unaccountably nervous. Then he handed it back.
“I’ll give you love and devotion and work hard all my life,” he said. “And I appreciate your getting this for me, more than I could say. It’s the nicest thing I’ve ever gotten. But I know I’m not going to wear it. If you take it back, we can put that money in an account to send our kids to college. I’m sorry. I can’t help the way I am. I wish I could. It’d be easier sometimes to be someone else. Right now, for instance. You look so beautiful tonight. I hate that I’ve disappointed you.”
A couple of days later, her father saw Ed and asked where the watch was. When Ed told the truth—it was home in the box, he didn’t feel comfortable putting it on—her father didn’t react with the fury she’d anticipated. Ed’s answer put him in a contemplative mood.
Later that night, her father called her into his room. “There’s a reason he can’t accept nice things,” he said. “His family’s been in this country a hundred years, but they never owned a house. That’s a sin. If you’re not in a house by the time I’m dead, I’ll haunt you from my grave.”
They got married a little over a year after they met. They spent a honeymoon weekend in Niagara Falls. It wasn’t what she’d dreamed of—France, Italy, Greece—but Ed was researching a paper that would synthesize part of his dissertation work, and they couldn’t afford to go away for long.
The Maid of the Mist didn’t run in the off-season, so they had to experience the falls from the viewing areas. Large blocks of ice had gathered in sections of the falls, and the cold spray made it hard to stay long. They went to restaurants and took scenic walks.
On their final day, as she stood in the Prospect Point Park observation tower wrestling with the thought that all bodies of water were part of one larger body, Ed announced that when they returned home, there would be no time to go out while he did his research, which would take the better part of a year. She didn’t take this threat too seriously. She figured he believed he needed that kind of sequestration, but more likely he was just trying on the role of head of household—making a show of arranging his affairs with an exaggerated masculine correctness. He’d been doing the same research in the run-up to the wedding, and pretty much the whole time they were courting, and he’d managed to make himself available to her. True, they’d only seen each other on the weekends, but she’d been busy with work herself.
They got back in late March 1967 and moved from their parents’ apartments into the second floor of a three-family house on Eighty-Third Street in Jackson Heights. She was elated that part of the dream she’d conceived for her existence had been fulfilled. For years, the neighborhood had exerted a powerful pull on her imagination, and now it was the one she came home to and slept in at the end of every day. The details were familiar, but they burned with a new intensity. Flowerpots at intersections announced the birth of new life, and the smell of spring through the windows lingered in the pillowcases.
She was happy to put the turmoil of life in her parents’ apartment behind her. She wanted to be conservative, if not in politics—her father would disown her if she made that shift—then in comportment, in demeanor. She’d always behaved a little older than her age, but now she found herself making extremely prudent choices, like dumping expired milk down the drain, even when it didn’t smell, and driving more slowly on curves or in the rain. She bought Ed a beautiful new tweed jacket and made him get rid of all his old shoes, replacing them with wing tips and oxfords.
There was still a little lingering restlessness in her spirit, though. It hadn’t been her dream to live in an apartment like the one she and Ed had ended up in, sandwiched between two ends of a family. The Orlandos, the owners, lived on the first floor, and Angelo Orlando’s older sister Consolata took up the third by herself. Angelo worked for the Department of Sanitation, and Lena was a housewife. They had three children—Gary, ten; Donny, nine; and Brenda, seven. The Orlando home was full of the sort of ambient noise she associated more with apartment buildings than houses. She had convinced herself that moving into a house, even a multifamily one, meant diving into a pool of blessed silence. The Orlando boys played tirelessly in the driveway with a small army of neighborhood kids. When it rained, they roughhoused indoors for hours, crashing into walls, and Lena’s voice rang out in shrill rebukes. The insistent murmur of a radio rose at night from Brenda’s room, which was below Ed’s office. Ed wore earplugs and possessed advanced powers of concentration, so the radio didn’t faze him, but it incensed Eileen. And Angelo and Lena’s fights, though infrequent, were of the screaming, door-slamming variety. The noise came at her from both sides. Most nights, Consolata made a restless circuit of her apartment, pounding between rooms with oddly heavy steps for a woman so thin, turning the television off in one room and on in another, leaving it on until programming ended and sometimes beyond, so that the rasp of a lost signal harassed Eileen to sleep.
Three months into the marriage, Eileen was astonished to realize that she hadn’t entered a bar, restaurant, or party with her husband. She’d grown tired of making excuses to her friends; when they called and she had to say she couldn’t go, she wanted to hand the phone to Ed to have him explain. She showed up alone if she went at all when they got together at each other’s houses, and after she’d faced enough inquisitions about where Ed was, she decided it wasn’t worth it to go. She’d envisioned playing euchre with him at the Coakleys’, or watching him save Frank McGuire from grilling disasters, or seeing his entertainer side come out at the piano after everyone downed a couple of banana daiquiris at Tom Cudahy’s place. She’d envisioned her own dining room, which was finally appointed hospitably after Ed had agreed to let her spend the money on furniture, thronged with friends around the table, Jack Coakley clapping his hands and dramatically sniffing the roast chicken’s lemon-pepper aroma as she carried it proudly past him, but instead what she had for company were the dog-eared pages of novels as she sulked in the armchair. The only reason she even had that damned chair was that her mother had shamed Ed into buying it so she’d have somewhere civilized to sit when she came over. Her mother flatly refused to sit on their ratty couch, which they’d inherited when Phil left for Toronto. As long as Ed had a place to rest his head—and it could have been the floor for all he cared—he was content to go about his work as though the body’s needs were nuisances and the soul’s demands, illusions. The only thing he seemed to consider authentic was his work—not work in the abstract, because he hardly listened when she spoke about her day, but his work, his precious, important work that was going to make a contribution to science. She would pause in the doorway for a moment before she headed out for solitary walks around the neighborhood, looking at his back hunched over his infernal notebooks, his hand not even rising to give her a perfunctory wave good-bye.
She walked the path her youthful self used to tread on dates, when Jackson Heights was the neighborhood to be seen in. She’d pass Jahn’s, where she used to have a burger and a shake after the movie, and remember how whatever hopeful young man she was with would escort her up and down both sides of Thirty-Seventh Avenue before returning her home on the train. Sometimes she’d take them on detours onto side streets, not to find an alley to make out in—though she did that too—but because she liked to look at the co-ops and houses and imagine a future in which she lived in that privileged setting.
Sometimes, she would feel that sense of possibility reenter her chest, and then she’d keep walking until it had worn off and the blocks looked strangely unfamiliar. She would stop at Arturo’s and gaze in at the couples dining in neat pairs, or the families passing plates around, and wonder when things would settle down long enough for her to enjoy some of that hot bread with him, buttered to perfection, a glass of red wine warming the stomach, the two of them in no hurry to get anywhere, choosing from an inviting menu. There needed to be time for that kind of leisure, or she didn’t see the point in living.
One day, the heat was unusual for early spring, and Ed was at his desk in his underwear and T-shirt. She’d begun to resent that desk, beaten up around the legs and stained a dull brown. She knew she’d never be free of it, that it would follow her wherever she went.
Getting that desk, Ed had told her, had been one of the few happy times he’d shared with his father as an adult. His father walked in from work one day and told him to get up and come with him. They drove into the city; his father wouldn’t say what it was about. They went to the Chubb offices. “The place looked like it had been cleaned out,” Ed said. “He led me to a storage closet. There was a desk and chair in it—his desk and chair. He’d had a handyman buddy hold them for him. They were getting new furniture for the whole office the next day. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Pull out the drawers. Pretend to work.’ It was strange to have him watching me. My mother was the one who peeked over my shoulder when I worked. ‘Can you get your work done at it, or what?’ he asked. I said, ‘Who couldn’t get work done at this desk? It’s beautiful.’ My father, being my father, said, ‘Good. Now I can read the paper at the table.’ But I knew he was glad to do something nice for me.”
The story had touched her when she’d first heard it, but now the ugly desk seemed a symbol of how little her husband would ever be equipped to see beyond the limits his biography had imposed on his imagination.
She watched him work, his pasty legs sticking out absurdly from his briefs, and waited for him to swivel in his chair to face her, to be a normal man for a moment. Angry, disappointed, she walked over and turned the air conditioner on. Ed rose without a word and turned it off again, then went back to work. He didn’t even look in her direction. They went back and forth like this several times. She couldn’t believe she’d signed on to live with a man so committed to his own pointless suffering. They weren’t poverty-stricken by any means; they were even able to put aside a bit of money from every check for a down payment on their future house. But Ed thought even minimal indulgences were best lived without.
When they were courting she’d seen his eccentricities as a welcome change. There was a bit of continental flair about him. Certainly he was more charming than the doctors at work. He was as smart as any of them; he only hadn’t gone to medical school because he was too interested in research to stop doing it. There was something romantic about that, but living with him made his eccentricities curdle into pathologies. What had been charmingly independent became fussy and self-defeating.
The heat broke her. She told him she’d had enough and started walking to her parents’ apartment in Woodside. She sweated through her blouse, her resentment spurring her forward. Ed could have all the heat he wanted in that apartment by himself. She wouldn’t be cooped up for another minute with him.
When her father came to the door and saw her fuming and drenched, he knew what was up. “That’s your home now,” he said. “Work it out with him.”
In her rush to leave Ed, she had neglected to bring her purse. She asked for change for the bus.
“You walked here,” her father said. “You can walk back.”
By the time she got home, she had grown so angry at her father that she’d forgotten all about being angry at her husband. Ed didn’t say anything when he saw her, but after she showered she emerged to an apartment bathed in the cool of a churning air conditioner.
They made love for what felt like forever that night. She didn’t mind the sweat at all.
She was in Woodside visiting her parents when she saw a sign taped to the window of Doherty’s: “Big Mike Tumulty vs. Pete McNeese in a footrace. Friday, July 21, 7:00.”
She knew Pete, and she’d never much liked him. He was tall and skinny, and he always seemed to speak a little louder than came naturally, as if he were imitating another man’s voice.
“What’s this about a race?” she asked her father as she walked into the kitchen. He was sitting sideways at the table with a cup of tea, looking out the window. He wore a new white undershirt and slippers.
“He was running his mouth off about how fleet of foot he was.”
“You’re almost sixty years old.”
“So what?”
“Pete is barely thirty.” Her father put the kettle back on.
“So he’s half my age,” her father said. “He’s also half the man.”
She thought the whole thing ridiculous, but on the race’s appointed day, she couldn’t help dropping by Doherty’s on the way home from work. The bar was fuller than usual, almost visibly crackling with static energy, as if a prizefight was about to take place instead of an absurd pissing contest. Happy shouts rose over the din, and everywhere she looked, men huddled and clapped their palms to the backs of each other’s necks. Someone asked her father how he planned to beat Pete. “I’ll blind him with the tobacco juice,” he said through a cheekful of chaw, to a round of hearty laughter. Guys were taking final book. “Two dollars on Big Mike,” she heard one say proudly, and she imagined that if all the money her father’s adherents were willing to lose to support him were piled on the bar, it would be enough to buy the establishment from the owners, or do something worthwhile.
The course was set: they would start in the bar, at the back, run out to the sidewalk, circle the block once, and return to the bar. It wouldn’t be easy to watch. Pete and his horse-long legs would come around the corner upright and easy, and her father would follow with his cheeks puffed, his face carmine red, his legs churning. Everyone gathered would watch an era end.
“Give me a glass of Irish whiskey,” her father said, gently rapping his knuckles on the bar. “I’m warming up.” He took his shirt off, then his undershirt. He resembled a bare-knuckled fighter. Pete tried to smirk, but he looked unnerved. Her father put his foot up on a stool. There were packs of muscle shifting under his skin, and when he leaned over to tie his shoe, his back looked broad enough to play cards on.
“Jimmy,” he called out with mock sharpness. “Get those kids out of the street. I don’t want to run any of them down.”
Guys laughed, exchanged looks. Her father and Pete toed a line in the back of the bar. The bartender counted down from three and they headed through a crowded gauntlet on either side, reaching the door at the same time. Her father shifted his massive body laterally like a darting bull and crushed Pete in the doorframe. They never made it outside. Pete staggered, out of breath before he’d even begun.
“They broke at the gate,” her father said as he returned to his stool, heat radiating visibly off his naked skin, a slight glower to him, a hint of violence in his eyes, the pride of a clan chieftain in his heavy step. She watched his friends retrieve their money and felt their eyes on her long, lean body, which her work suit clung to in the summer evening heat. They regarded her appreciatively, with a slightly wistful longing. She was the chieftain’s daughter, and she’d married outside the clan.
They hadn’t won anything, but they hadn’t lost anything either—neither money nor their idea of Big Mike. Her father had played Pete’s game, but by his own rules. It was a Solomonic solution, and she thought sadly of the difference he would have made with his gift for inspiring men if he’d been born into another life.
10 (#ulink_bbc69f14-be70-510b-8523-4b7cdc9d6c94)
Ed was an expert on the brain. His subspecialty within the field of neuroscience was psychopharmacology, specifically the effects of psychotropic drugs on neural functioning. While doing his dissertation research, he ran an experiment in the aquaria of the Department of Animal Behavior at the American Museum of Natural History, studying the relationship between the neurotransmitter norepinephrine and learning in the black-chinned West African mouthbrooder fish, whose female laid eggs and whose male spat sperm at them and gathered them, then heated them under its tongue. Ed housed them individually in small aquaria in a greenhouse whose temperature was maintained at 26°C, and performed experimental tests in a separate room at the same temperature, injecting them with drugs that either enhanced or depressed action. The fish saw a red light, and if they didn’t jump over a barrier in five seconds, they received a shock. He was testing the effects of drugs on an organism’s ability to augment its decision-making abilities—in short, to learn.
The subject of learning fascinated him. He told Eileen it was because it had happened almost by accident in his own life. “If I hadn’t run into that chemist at Kohnstamm’s,” he said, “I don’t know what would have become of me. I think about that narrow escape.”
He experimented on the fish faithfully six days a week for almost a year, going in even when it was supremely inconvenient to do so, missing family functions and dinners with friends, leaning on colleagues for favors when she put her foot down and demanded a sliver of his time. He never slept enough, he seldom ate enough, and his back always hurt because he sat too long at his desk, but the way the work was coming together gave him so much energy that he glowed as he neared the end, so much so that she went shopping without him and put a coffee table, two couches, a pair of end tables, and some lamps on the American Express, thinking he’d be too happy to complain. Still, she was so nervous about the cost that a few weeks later, on the Saturday when the furniture was supposed to be delivered, she still hadn’t told him it was coming. She was relieved when he left early for his lab to gather data, and after the men delivered the pieces and hauled the old couch to the backyard until the Monday pickup, she sat on one of the couches, fretting over what she’d say. When the front door finally opened, she leapt to her feet, ready to spar, but Ed stepped in from the vestibule wearing that tranquil expression he wore when he was deep in his work, that made it look as if he’d just come from meditating. As he took in the room, she waited to see his face fall and readied to say she’d send it all back, but all he did was sit on the couch and say how nice and firm the pillows were compared to the lumpy ones they’d been living with. She’d never even thought he’d registered the lumps.
He was about two weeks shy of having gathered all the data he needed when the heating plant broke down and the aquaria froze, killing his specimens.
He didn’t smash equipment or hurl insults at the plant manager. He didn’t come home and make life miserable for her. He ate a quiet dinner and lay on the floor in the living room, between the glass-topped coffee table and one of the couches. She lay on the other couch reading to keep him company. She understood he didn’t want a pep talk. When it was time to turn in, she leaned over him and saw in his eyes not sadness but extreme fatigue. She knew enough not to tell him everything would be fine. She gave him a kiss on the lips, told him to come in soon, and shut the light off. He remained behind in the silent dark. He came to bed very late, and the next day he began again from the beginning, with new fish, because he needed a full set of data.
When he finished a year later, he had worked on the fish for so long that the species’ scientific name had changed twice, from Tilapia heudelotii macrocephala to Tilapia melanotheron to Sarotherodon melanotheron melanotheron.
“You never get anywhere worthwhile taking shortcuts,” he said when she asked how he’d gotten through that difficult time. She couldn’t have agreed more. Not taking shortcuts—not settling for someone inferior—was the only reason she’d been free to marry him.
They started going out again. Ed got them a membership at the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra. Once, when they were heading to the symphony, he picked a wounded fledgling off the sidewalk and carried it in his handkerchief for a few blocks, until he bowed to her protestations and deposited it in a planter. He gave her the silent treatment until they got home. When she was shutting off the light she said, “Good night, St. Francis of Assisi,” and he laughed despite himself and they made love and fell asleep.
In December of 1970 she headed to the city with Ed to see the window displays on Fifth Avenue. She was excited to see them, despite how corrosively ironic Ed had been about them the year before, when at one point in his jeremiad he’d called them “altars to consumer excess.” She wasn’t about to let his grousing spoil her enjoyment of a tradition she’d observed whenever she could since she’d first gone with her mother as an eleven-year-old.
Ed refused to pay for a parking garage. It took them half an hour to find a spot, and they ended up on Twenty-Fifth and Seventh, almost a mile from Lord & Taylor. He refused to let them take a cab, even though she was wearing heels and it was twenty degrees out, with a wind that whipped up the avenue. The sun was setting, and store gates were being pulled down as if in protest of the cold. The sidewalks of Seventh Avenue were unusually empty. She noticed that most of the cabs that passed were occupied.
As they neared the store, the sidewalks grew more crowded, the bells of the Salvation Army collectors jingling on each corner. They saw a pack gathered in front, which quickened her step and made Ed sigh and slow down.
She had been delighting in the scene of a golden retriever pulling at the corner of a wrapped gift when Ed—who had been munching his way toward the bottom of a little bag of roasted nuts—broke the spell.
“These things seem here for the purpose of entertainment,” he said, “but really they’re here to get you to come in and part with your money.” He spoke in a breezy, careless way that suggested he believed a new understanding had sprung up between them. “They’re like organisms that have evolved elaborate decorative mechanisms to lure you in. People fall for it. It’s fascinating, actually.”
“Listen to yourself.”
“The bee orchid, for instance, has flowers that look like female wasps. Males try to mate with it, and in the process they get pollen on their feet and spread it around. It’s not about the window. It’s about pulling you into the store. It’s about getting you to leave with something.”
She was attempting to concentrate on the little animatronic girl whose hand was traveling slowly to cover her mouth, which had fallen open at the sight of Santa Claus’s ebony boots disappearing up the chimney.
“It’s a stupefying, hypnotic loop. It puts you in a suggestible state.”
“Do you have to be so heady about everything? Do you have to analyze everything to death?”
“What’s amazing is that they’re exactly the same every year.”
“That’s an ignorant remark,” she spat. “They’re not the same at all. They put a lot of work into these. Months of planning.”
She wouldn’t have minded his objections so much if he hadn’t insisted on drawing her into a dialogue about them. Was it too much to ask to share a moment of joy?
She looked around at the other husbands. They didn’t look any happier to be there, but they stood back dully, hands folded behind them or scratching their noses. They couldn’t have been as cleverly cruel about it as Ed if they’d tried.
“And the battling of tourists,” he said. “Every year it gets worse. The jostling, the jockeying for position. They’re descending on the imperial city for their bread and circuses. I wish we didn’t have to do this.”
She started walking to the train. A couple passing in the other direction gave her curious looks, as though they could see the intensity of her disgust in her expression. She found herself unaccountably smiling at one man, giving him a manic sort of grin full of the slightly breathless ecstasy of being unmoored, and he returned it with a delighted blush. By the time she felt a tug on her elbow, she was at the next corner.
“Don’t be hysterical,” Ed said. “I was just making a few observations.”
“The world isn’t a lab.”
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go back and look.”
In his worn jacket with the frayed sleeve ends, he looked like a war veteran about to ask for change for the subway.
“You’ve ruined it.”
“Don’t say that. Listen, I can’t help myself sometimes. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“I do,” she said. “You didn’t have enough fun as a kid.”
He pulled her arm, but she wouldn’t budge. She watched steam rise from a manhole cover and felt in her chest the rumbling of a passing bus. She was keenly aware of the limits of the physical world. She wanted to be in one of those scenes in the windows, frozen in time, in the faultless harmony of parts working in concert, fulfilling the plan of a guiding, designing hand. It would be lovely not to have to make every decision in life, to be part of a spectacle brought out once a year, for the safest of seasons, and put to work amusing people who stared back in mute appreciation. The real world was so messy, the light imperfect, the paint chipped, the happiness only partial.
“One of these years,” she said, “we will come here and you will enjoy it and not make me feel miserable about it. I dream of that.”
“Let’s let that be this year,” he said. “Let’s go back and look at those windows. Please, honey. Let me make it up to you.”
“It’s too late,” she said.
“It’s never too late,” he said. “Don’t say that.”
She hadn’t been looking at him; now she stopped to. Streams of people flowed past in either direction, rushing toward obscure destinations. This was her life right here, petty as it seemed at the moment, and this was the man she’d chosen to spend it with. He was holding his hat in his hand as if he’d taken it off for the purpose of beseeching her, and she saw that he would always have flaws, that he would always be a little too intense in his objections, a little too unbending when it came to the decadence of the world. She thought, We can’t all wear a hair shirt all the time. But there he was, trying to pull her back to the scene he despised, and she saw that he couldn’t live in a way other than the one he thought was right, and when he saw what the right thing was, like now, he cared about it as if it were the only thing that mattered. Everyone else around seemed as insubstantial as the air they moved through, the shopping bags they carried the only things anchoring them to the ground.
“Did I tell you I love what you did with your hair?” he said, and she let herself be mollified, because she’d thought he hadn’t noticed. She took his hand. They retraced their steps, the street around them thrumming with life. She saw that there was something perfect about the imperfection of her husband—her mortal, living husband with his excessive vigilance about the effects of capitalism and his unmistakable pair of bowed legs that she watched carry him forward. She kept her eyes on his shoes hitting the pavement and let him guide her wherever he was going.
11 (#ulink_233faefd-f566-53b5-b7c2-e35a2cae1e24)
Shortly after getting his PhD, Ed came home with the news that he’d been sought out by an executive at Merck, who’d read an article of his in a journal. Eileen was in the kitchen cutting vegetables for stew.
“He said I could have my own lab, with state-of-the-art equipment, everything top of the line. I’d have a team of assistants.”
“Did he say how much you’d be paid?” She pushed the peppers into the stewpot and rinsed the knife in the sink. She could smell something fried and sickly sweet coming up from the Orlandos’ apartment below.
“He didn’t have to. More than I’m making now. Let’s just say that.”
“How much more?” She began to cut the beef into cubes. It was a thick cut with veins of fat. Ed would not have approved of how much she had spent on it.
“We’d be very comfortable.”
He didn’t appear terribly enthused to be able to make such a statement.
“Honey!” she said, hearing herself squeal as she put the knife down. “This is amazing!” She threw her arms around him.
“We’d have to move to New Jersey.”
“We could live anywhere we wanted,” she said, letting him go to take a few steps and get the motor started on her thoughts. She was already envisioning a house in Bronxville. “If not New Jersey, then Westchester County, for instance.”
“That’s too far to commute.”
“Then we’ll move to New Jersey.”
“Not me,” he said.
“How do you want to do this, then? What would make you comfortable?”
“Staying where I am,” he said.
She looked at him. He was seriously considering not taking the job. If she had to say, he had already made up his mind. She picked up the knife and cut the last slab.
“You love research. Think of the lab you’d have. I’d have to drag you home.”
“It’s not research. It’s making drugs.” Ed paced toward the living room and back.
“Drugs that help people,” she said, pushing the meat into the pot.
“Drugs that make a lot of money,” he said.
This opportunity looked like their destiny. There had to be a way to get him to listen to reason. She added salt and pepper and two cups of water and turned the burner on. “You research drugs already. What’s the difference?”
Ed stood in the arched doorway between the kitchen and living room. He stretched his hands up and flexed his muscles against the doorway. “Researching drugs and making them are not the same,” he said. “On my own I can be a watchdog. For them I’d be a lapdog. Or an attack dog.”
“What about when we have kids?” She put the caps back on the oil and the spices. “Don’t you want to be able to provide for them?”
“Of course I do. I guess it depends what you mean by providing.” He gave her a meaningful look, let down his hands, and peered through the glass lid of the stewpot. He switched the radio on and played with the antenna to relieve the static. The kitchen filled with the violins and flutes of a classical orchestra.
“I could make you do it,” she said. “But I won’t.”
“You could not.”
“I could. Women do it all the time. I could find a way. But I won’t.”
He straightened up. “You’re not like that.”
“Lucky for you, that’s true,” she said, though what she was thinking was that she was more like that than Ed understood. If her husband wasn’t going to fight to secure their future, someone had to. “I just want you to know that I know what I’m not doing here. What I’m not makingyou do.”
“Don’t forget I’m on the fast track to tenure,” he said, and she could tell it was a done deal in his mind.
Ed was an assistant professor at Bronx Community College, where he’d started teaching while in graduate school at NYU. One day soon he would be an associate professor, and then, probably soon after that, a full professor.
“There’s nothing fast about the track you’re on,” she said bitterly, looking at him in the window’s reflection in order not to have to look right into his face. “I don’t care how quickly you get there.”
Five years into their marriage, when Eileen was thirty-one, they decided to stop using birth control and try to conceive a child. At Einstein Hospital, where she worked, she had established a reputation as a head nurse and was confident she’d be able to return to the field after a short absence. She would have to go back to work eventually, something she wouldn’t have had to do if Ed had said yes to Merck.
Seven months passed with no results and she started to worry. She wasn’t too old yet by any means, but she also knew the time for rational calculations had arrived. They’d been going about it haphazardly, having sex when they felt like it and leaving it to chance. She decided to make getting pregnant a conscious project, turning her attention to managing it as she’d managed so many others. She drew up ovulation charts and held Ed to a schedule. They both went in for tests. Ed’s sperm count was normal, his motility strong. Nothing was wrong with her ovaries. Every month, she cried when her period came. Every month, Ed reassured her.
Then, finally, after another six months had passed, she got pregnant. A new lightness entered her spirit. Things that had once annoyed her hardly registered with her anymore. She laughed more easily, gave Ed more rope, and was practically a pushover with the nurses she supervised. She surprised herself with how serene she felt. She never thought she’d be one of those egregious earth mothers, but there she was, tired all the time and yet still making meals and keeping the place in order and smiling through it—laughing, even, at the comedy of being alive. She didn’t get angry at the evening news. When she got cut off on the highway, she shrugged her shoulders and shifted over a lane and hoped everybody arrived safely where they were going.
Her mother was over at her apartment, reading the newspaper. She grunted in appreciation and handed it to Eileen.
“Here,” she said. “Read this. You might learn something.”
It was an article about Rose Kennedy; one paragraph discussed how the Kennedy children used to hide the coat hangers so their mother couldn’t deploy them on their backs. Eileen seldom thought anymore about her mother using the hanger on her, both because the memory was so unpleasant and because it was woven so thoroughly into the fabric of her childhood that it barely merited conscious thought, but even this many years later, as she pictured her mother cracking her with that little metal whip, she could almost physically feel it on her body.
“See?” her mother said proudly when Eileen handed it back. “I’m not the only one. If Rose Kennedy can do it, I can too. You should do it yourself, but you won’t. You’re too soft.”
If Eileen hadn’t been pregnant, she might have said something about how all that money doesn’t necessarily buy you class, you can still act the same as a cleaning lady from Queens, because it would have cut to the quick, but she just said, “I guess it takes all styles,” and decided then and there that she would never lift a hand in anger at her child.
A few months into the pregnancy, she suffered a miscarriage. The sadness she felt was ruinous, unspeakable. Almost worse was the awakening in her of a dormant foreboding that went back, perhaps, to her mother’s own miscarriage and the effect it had had on both their lives. She’d never acknowledged it consciously, but in the blind alleys of her mind she’d feared that if she ever did manage to get pregnant, she’d have difficulty bringing the child to term.
She tried not to let Ed see how distraught she was. She needed to keep him on task trying to get her pregnant again, and she didn’t want him thinking it would be gallant to take the pressure off her for a while. Another year passed with no results. She started having an extra glass of wine at restaurants. She took to suggesting wine with nearly every home-cooked meal. She began buying cases of wines she liked and storing them in the basement to have something on hand when company came over, and because buying in bulk was cheaper. She felt she was acquiring a little more insight into the way her mother’s life had played out. She was still in control, though; she kept going to work every day, kept depositing money into her savings account.
Ed no longer made efforts to reassure her. He seemed to have resigned himself to not having children. At times she wondered if he weren’t relieved. Despite his protests to the contrary she imagined he wouldn’t terribly mind preserving for himself some of the time that fatherhood would claim. Once, when he said he was too tired on a night they were scheduled to try, she accused him of sabotaging their plans. She knew she was being hysterical, but she couldn’t help herself.
Her friends ran into no trouble having babies. Cindy Coakley had three girls in five years until she finally delivered Shane to Jack. Marie Cudahy followed up Baby Steven with the twins, Carly and Savannah. Kelly Flanagan’s Eveline was born with a cleft lip, but then Henry came out a couple of years later looking like the Gerber baby. One after another, the calls came in with the cheerful news, and the cards arrived celebrating fecundity. The only holdout among her close friends was Ruth McGuire, who had raised the last two of her seven younger siblings herself. When Ruth told her she was done raising kids, Eileen felt herself drawing even closer to her. They would greet the childlessness together.
Whenever they gathered around to watch whichever of her friends’ kids was celebrating a birthday open presents, Eileen bit her nails down to the quick. She was sure everyone could read her thoughts in her mortified grin. She always spent too much money and bought too many gifts. She felt a nervous expectancy whenever the kid began to tear the paper open. She needed to have gotten the essential gift, the inevitable gift.
Having no kids freed Ed to pursue his professional interests without the burden of nighttime feedings or diaper changes or pediatric visits. He did important work on neurotransmitters, gave talks at conferences, and was named full professor faster than his peers.
She stopped thinking of each menstruation as a referendum on her femininity. She threw herself into her work with a compensatory vigor and was promoted several times. She sensed that her bosses and coworkers saw her as one of a new breed of women—it was 1975—willing to sacrifice motherhood on the altar of career. The men deferred to her and the mothers hated her, and there was an opportunity here if she was willing to pursue it fully.
Still, the miscarriage haunted her. She had dreams of sitting on the toilet bowl and hearing an unusual plop and finding in there a tiny baby who’d open its eyes at her—she couldn’t tell its sex—and look at her angrily, blinking slowly, and she would wake with a start and shake Ed awake. She avoided looking into the bowl when she went to the bathroom. Eventually, she and Ed settled into the rhythms of a childless life, which offered undeniable compensations: they could go out with other couples without having to arrange for child care; they could indulge in the leniency reserved for aunts and uncles; and they were free to nurture their careers in the way they might have nurtured offspring. Maybe this was why she was so upset when Ed was offered the chairmanship of the department and turned it down to devote more time to teaching and research. It was as if he was telling her he didn’t love their child.
To make up for the money he’d left on the table in passing up the chairmanship, Ed started teaching night anatomy classes at NYU. He’d pop home for dinner and head into the city by train. On dissection nights, he came home smelling like a pickled corpse himself. She couldn’t stand to have him touch her after he’d been handling dead bodies, and when he teasingly ran his hands over her anyway, she squealed and squirmed out of reach.
A tenure-track position opened in NYU’s biology department. One of Ed’s advisors was on the search committee. He said Ed would be given serious consideration if he applied.
She urged him to do it. NYU would be an obvious bump up in prestige.
“They need me at BCC,” he said. “Anyone can teach at NYU. What’s important to me is having my students leave knowing they got a real education. I want to help them get into NYU. I want them prepared to meet the demands that will be placed on them when they do.” There were other reasons to stay: the city had an airtight pension plan and great health benefits; there was no guarantee of tenure at NYU; he had a pretty good lab at BCC and could do the same research there that he’d do at NYU; there were grants out there to be procured. “It’s all about having the right ambition,” he said.
In the end, he never applied. To all the people she’d excitedly told about the NYU possibility, Eileen defended Ed’s choice by saying that when the opportunity arose, which was bound to be sooner rather than later, he would be a natural choice for dean of the college. That prospect, she said, wasn’t something you just flushed. That was the sort of career experience that could be parlayed into a parallel administrative position in a more prestigious institution.
He kept teaching the night classes. Now when he came home stinking of embalming fluids, not only wouldn’t she let him near her in bed, she made him shower before she’d even hug or kiss him hello. Dinner and dishes would intercede after that, and often she could get to bed without having to touch him at all. She didn’t feel bad withholding herself from him. He had made his choice. He shouldn’t have expected to have everything he wanted, not if she had to give so much up to keep him happy.
The tall tree in the backyard, whose crown eclipsed the apex of the Orlandos’ gabled roof, blocked much of the light in their bedroom. They were into their midthirties, and hints of seniority crept into their thoughts; they held them off by making love. Sometimes the activity was tinged by anger. Neither of them was going anywhere, even if in the middle of fights that lasted for days she entertained thoughts of divorce and suspected he did, though neither raised its specter aloud. They knew they would never sever their union, and this knowledge opened a door to the basement of their psyches. They became familiar enough to each other to begin to feel like strangers in bed, which infused their love life with a new potency. She wondered whether her friends had wandered down similar alleys, but she never had the courage to ask.
When she was thirty-five, after she’d long since given up worrying about it, she conceived a child and carried the pregnancy to term, delivering at dawn a couple of days before the ides of March, 1977. She and Ed had been struggling for weeks to come up with something to call the baby if it happened to be a boy, and by morning of the second day they were no closer to an answer, to the consternation of the girl with the birth certificate paperwork. Ruth took the train in to visit and accidentally left her book behind on the hospital nightstand. When the girl came around again on the morning of the third day and said Eileen could always take a trip down to City Hall to file the documents herself, Eileen’s gaze landed on the name of the author of Ruth’s book, Mrs. Bridge, which she had never heard of. She had a distant relative named Connell, but the real reason she chose it was that it sounded more like a last name than a first name, like one of those patrician monikers the doctors she worked for often bore, and she wanted to give the boy a head start on the concerns of life.
When Connell was a couple of months old, she realized, as though she’d awoken from an extended slumber, that his coming into the world had been a matter of grave importance. She had escaped a trap without knowing she’d been in it. For a while, she pushed Ed to conceive another child, until she stopped for fear of what misbegotten creature might result if she succeeded at her age. She would build the future on the boy.
It surprised her how much she enjoyed bathing her baby. She suspected it would have surprised anyone who knew her. As soon as she put the stopper in and opened the tap to fill the sink, a remarkable calm settled over her. She held his neck and head with one hand, her inner forearm cradling his body, and cleaned him with the other, pressing the cloth into the little creases in his skin. He smiled mutely at her and she felt a terrible unburdening of pent-up emotion. A little water splashed up in his face and he coughed and resumed his uncanny placidity. When he grew bigger and could sit up in the sink, she handed him a sopping washcloth to grip and suck on while she washed him with another, and she delighted in the sound of his draining it, the sheer vital pleasure he took in pulling it in his little teeth.
When he was old enough to be bathed in the tub, she loved the sight of him leaning over its lip, standing on tiptoe as he reached for the water with his swinging hand, his little back muscles shifting in the effort. In his enthusiasm he nearly fell in headfirst. He splashed waves out of the tub with a succession of quick slaps at the water’s surface. He giggled and gurgled and pulled at his penis with exploratory joy as she rubbed shampoo into his black hair. He grabbed the rinse cup and took a long draft of the soapy water before she could seize it from him. She loved to wrap the towel around him when she was done, powder his little body, secure the diaper, and work his limbs into pajamas, sensing the calm and ease he felt when snug in the garment’s gentle pressure. Snapping the buttons gave her an unreasonable pleasure. She would breathe his baby smell and wonder how she could ever have lived without it. Her heart swelled when she bathed him, when she dressed him for bed, when she combed the last wetness out of his washed hair, when she gave him the breast, when she gave him the bottle, when she lay him down, when she went to check on him at night and felt his chest rise and fall under her hand and his heart beat through her fingertips. She thought of him as she lay awake, and though she was always exhausted, and though there were nights she imagined she’d rise in the morning and the enchantment would have worn off, the well of her affection filled up in her sleep and she plucked him from the crib and pressed him to her, kissing his soft neck. There were some things that couldn’t be communicated, and this was one—how much pleasure a woman like her could take in the fact and presence of her beautiful baby boy. She knew it wouldn’t be like this forever; soon she’d make demands on him, expect the world of him. She was going to enjoy this part. She was going to fill up her heart with it enough for years.
12 (#ulink_5c0d59b9-6130-536c-afbe-d49c5283bf29)
After Eileen’s mother got sober, sitting idly took more out of her than working long hours, so she continued to haul herself out to Bayside to clean up after grammar school kids even into her midsixties, long after Eileen’s father had taken the watch and pension and tossed the truck keys to the younger bucks. When her employer lost its contract with the schools, though, her mother didn’t look for another job. She had talked for years of putting money down on a beach home in Breezy Point, but Eileen suspected she’d realized she couldn’t make a vaulting leap forward in the time she had remaining. She started reading the Irish Echo instead of the Daily News and making trips to Ireland using the savings she’d accumulated. The line of her allegiances began to blur, as if her time in her adopted homeland had been an experiment whose hypothesis had proved unsound.
Eileen had long been able to tell her mother about the fights over Ed’s career and know that she would click her tongue and shake her head in censure of his lack of drive. Some change was occurring in her mother, though, to make her less pragmatic. She seemed less bothered by her station in life. She stopped complaining about politics, or the idiots on the subway, or the ugliness and stench of city life. She read novels and met with a group to discuss them. Eileen couldn’t help feeling a little betrayed. She figured part of this transformation was her mother trying anything to avoid taking a drink. “Negative thoughts back you into a corner,” her mother said to her, smiling, one afternoon after returning from a picnic with the baby in Flushing Meadow Park. “They multiply and surround you. Don’t think of what you don’t have. Try to focus on the simple pleasures.” It was rich, this spouting of shibboleths, this late-stage wisdom-mongering. It was the tactic of a woman who’d played her hand and lost, or worse, never played it to begin with. But her mother had picked the wrong audience for her speech. It may have gone over well with down-and-outers at AA who’d wrecked their lives and slipped into a spiral of regret, but Eileen’s problem wasn’t negative thinking, it was too little positive thinking on the part of everyone around her. She had a vision, and she wasn’t turning away from it for a second, even if her husband, and now her mother, saw some ugliness in it. At least she had her father on her side—though God bless him, he supported anything you threw your heart into. She was going to do that, no question about it. What waited ahead, if only Ed would walk the path she’d laid out for him, was a beautiful life, an American life.
“One day at a time,” her mother said, and Eileen thought, And everything all at once.
Christmas of 1980 Eileen bought Ed a VCR. They’d looked at them together, but when he’d seen what they cost—about a thousand dollars—he had decided they could live without one. Eileen hadn’t worked hard all her life to sit on her hands when she could afford to buy something. She was making decent money now that she was the nursing director at Lawrence Hospital in Bronxville. It was the perfect gift for him, considering how much he loved old movies. Starting in August, she paid for it on layaway.
When he unwrapped it, he looked horrified, as if it were a relic unearthed from a sacred burial ground that would bring a curse down upon their heads.
“How could you do this?” he asked, seething in front of the three-year-old boy. “How could you think of buying this?”
A few days later, she came in from the shower and saw him on his haunches putting a tape in the machine. She gave him a sardonic look.
“All right,” he said. “I was wrong. It’s a great gift.”
“Save it.”
“I mean it. It was thoughtful of you.” He was clutching the empty sleeve of the VHS tape to his chest. “I appreciate it.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“Look, I know I get set in my ways.”
“You’re telling me.”
“Doesn’t mean I can’t learn a thing or two.”
He wheeled the TV cart over, so that it was right next to the bed. PBS was on, the fund-raising appeal between programs. Ed patted the bed. “Get in,” he said.
“I’ve got to brush my hair out.”
“Come on,” he said. “I want to make sure I get this whole thing on tape.”
“Anyway, I’m happy you’re using it.”
“What can I say?” He threw his arms out in amused resignation. “You’re good for me. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“Really?”
“Really and truly. I’d be lost without you.”
Sometimes it felt like all the difficulty he put her through was worth it. It was a rare man who’d admit so thoroughly that he’d been wrong.
“Honey,” she said, and she dropped her towel and stood naked before him the way he was always trying to get her to do. At first she hunched a bit, and then she stood tall, her hands at her hips, feasting on his gaze and letting him drink in her body. The movie was starting, but Ed didn’t take his eyes off her. She felt herself blush. “You’d better hit record,” she said. Ed didn’t stop looking at her. She climbed on him and hit the button.
“We can watch it later,” he said, kissing her neck. “That’s the genius of this thing.” He moved his hand down her back, squeezed her butt, touched her sex.
“Anytime we want,” she said breathlessly.
She rolled off him and ripped the sheet away. He lowered the volume and yanked his underwear off. She reached across him to switch off the bedside lamp and he thrust up into her, flipped her onto her back. The tape whirred rhythmically. The television pulsed, filling the room with light and plunging it into darkness, outlining their bodies in the lovely deep of night.
In January of 1981, her mother was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus.
A nurse came to the apartment, but her father did his share of nursing too. Eileen would go over after work and find that he’d given her medicine, bathed her, changed her clothes, made her a liquid meal—she could no longer eat solid foods—and tucked her in. He’d moved into her room, and slept in the other twin bed.
The day her mother entered the hospital for good—November 23, 1981—her father mentioned some pains in his chest. They admitted him and found that he had been concealing his own cancer, which had spread throughout his chest cavity, colonizing the organs. They gave him his own room, down the hall from her mother. They rolled them out to see each other once a day.
Her parents had slept in separate rooms for thirty years, but a few days before Christmas, when the doctors rolled her mother away from her father for what would turn out to be the last time, she called to him from down the hall.
“Don’t let them take me away from you, Mike, my Mike!” she said, for all on the floor to hear.
What they didn’t hear was what she asked Eileen later that night, with the tubes in her.
The curtain was drawn. The lights were off except for the one above her bed. Eileen had filled two cups with ice water, but both were left full and the ice had long ago melted.
“Was it worth it?”
Eileen leaned in to hear her better. “Was what worth it, Ma?”
“I didn’t touch a drop for twenty-five years. Did it make a difference?”
She felt an uncomfortable grin forming on her face. She wasn’t at all happy, but she couldn’t keep this ghoulish smile away. She didn’t want to show her mother how much she was hurting. Through the open door, she heard the distant beeps of call buttons and voices in intercoms. She had worked in a hospital for twenty years, but somehow she felt she was in a place she’d never been before. Under the green glow of the fluorescent lamp, her mother looked like a wraith, her skin so thin you could count the veins.
“How can you ask that?”
“I’m asking you.” Her mother shifted her head on her pillow with great effort. Her cheeks were two smooth hollows beneath large, alert eyes. “Was it worth it?”
Eileen had thought of the time since her mother had gotten sober as the happiest of both of their lives. There had been a quiet thawing of the glacier in her mother’s heart, with occasional louder crackings-off of icebergs of emotions, until, after Connell was born, it had melted so thoroughly that all that remained in an ocean of equanimity were little islands of occasional despond. Her mother appeared almost joyful at times. But perhaps it had been a performance.
“Of course,” Eileen said, taking her hand.
“I wish I hadn’t stopped.” Her mother didn’t look at her but gazed at the folds of the curtain, her other hand palm down on the blanket.
“Think of all the things you wouldn’t have had. Think of all the lives you touched. We had some great years.”
Her mother pulled her hand back, folded it into her other one. “I would have given it all away for a drink.”
“Well, you didn’t.”
“I still would.”
Eileen took her hand again and held it with force. “It’s too late. You did all that. You can’t take it back. You had a great life.”
“Fair enough,” her mother said, and in a little while she was dead.
Her father died two weeks later. In going through the papers, Eileen learned that he had cashed in the bonds and sold the life insurance policies decades before. Maybe that was how he’d gotten her mother’s ring back from the pawnbroker. Or maybe he’d incurred bigger debts than she’d ever suspected. She knew he’d always played the horses, but it had never occurred to her that he’d had an actual gambling problem. If so, he’d been good at keeping the consequences from her. She remembered something she’d witnessed when she was ten, at her friend Nora’s apartment after school. Nora opened the door to a man in a dark suit and hat who told her to give her father the message that he should pay what he owed. Eileen was standing behind her. “You kids will pay if he doesn’t,” the man said, pointing at Nora and herself. “Tell him.” Eileen went home frightened, and when she told her father what had happened, he said, “He didn’t mean you. He thought you belonged to that girl’s father. But you don’t. You belong to me.” It was impossible to imagine any man having the courage to show up at her father’s apartment that way, not when her father counted every Irish policeman in the city as an ally, and many of the non-Irish too. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t in someone’s debt. Maybe that explained why they’d never lived in a house. And maybe it explained why he’d been so adamant that she own one herself. In any case, she had to dip into her savings to pay for her parents’ funerals.
The wakes were so close together that she worried few relatives would be able to return for her father’s, but those who’d flown in for her mother flew back, and if they hadn’t there would still have been standing room only at the parlor.
She was staring at his coffin trying to understand how he could fit into that little box when a black man about her age came over and introduced himself as Nathaniel, the son of Carl Washington, her father’s longtime driving partner. Nathaniel asked if she knew how their fathers had come to drive together. With all the stories told about her father over the last couple of days, she was amazed there was one she hadn’t heard.
“My father was the first black driver Schaefer ever hired,” Nathaniel said. “The first morning my father showed up for work, none of the other drivers were willing to be paired with him. There were rumblings of a walkout. My father wondered if he was going to have to go find another job. Your father walked into the warehouse after the others and took one look at everyone back on their heels with their arms across their chests and said, ‘Get in this truck with me, you black son of a bitch.’ Then he hopped up in the truck without another word.”
She cringed, but Nathaniel was smiling.
“His language could be rough,” she said.
“My father heard worse,” he said. “Your father wouldn’t drive with anyone but my father after that. For twenty years. I don’t know if you remember, but he used to hold a Bronx route.”
She nodded.
“Once he had my father with him, he insisted on being switched to the Upper East Side.”
“I remember when he switched.”
“‘There’s enough blacks in the Bronx,’ he told my father. ‘Let them see a black face in that neighborhood for a change.’”
She put a tissue to her eyes and handed him one as well.
“Big Mike this, Big Mike that,” Nathaniel said. “Growing up I heard your father’s name around the house more than the names of people in my own family.”
He waved his wife and children over and she greeted all of them in turn.
She was embarrassed to learn that Mr. Washington had died a few years before. She was even more embarrassed to see in Nathaniel’s face, when she said, “I wish I’d known,” that he never would have dreamed she’d show up at his father’s funeral.
13 (#ulink_8a30090d-a81f-58ab-b8e3-debabe91a165)
In February of 1982, Bronx Community College announced that the dean would be stepping down at the end of the semester. They offered Ed the job and even mentioned the possibility of his becoming president someday. She felt like a chess master who had seen several moves ahead. Taking the deanship would mean the end of Ed’s teaching career, but there was no question of his refusing: he would strap the boy and herself to his back and carry them further up the ladder of respectability.
Working at Lawrence had opened her eyes to how people lived on a higher rung of that ladder. She found herself walking or driving around Bronxville after work, to marvel at the manicured shrubbery, the gorgeous houses set back from the street, the shining plate-glass windows behind which every table looked set for Christmas dinner. From time to time her car was in the shop and she had to take the Metro-North, but it was almost a pleasure to do so, because the Bronxville station was quaintly beautiful, with no graffiti in sight and the lambent glow of the station house and cars idling amiably as they dropped people off. She waited in the strange serenity of the platform’s airy expanse, and when the train came around the bend, it bore the dignity of another era. Drowsing riders slipped past sleepy towns on the way to Grand Central Station. She began to dwell on the idea that she could finally begin to really live her life if she came home to an enchanted place like that, but they would need more money to live there. Ed’s job offer had come just in time.
She thought she’d made her feelings clear to Ed, and that he’d understood and agreed, but one day he came home and told her he’d turned the deanship down. “The classroom is too important,” he said. “I want them getting the education they’d get at elite schools, and I know that, at least in my classroom, that’s what they’re getting. I can control that much.”
This about-face infuriated her—the caprice in it, the self-indulgence. This wasn’t the sober man she’d thought she’d married. Sure, he had his arguments: his ambition had never been for fancier titles and fatter paychecks; he was after something unquantifiable, philosophical, the kind of aim never properly rewarded in earthly terms. She grew increasingly impatient with his disquisitions, but she found herself parroting them to her friends, wrapping herself in the chastening rhetoric of sacrifice and duty.
She wanted Ed’s idealism to trump her pragmatism, and for a couple of weeks it did, until one night at dinner she said that she was tired of living in their apartment, and that after fifteen years it was time for a change, time, even, to own a house. Ed made his case for the low rent the Orlandos charged and the fact that they were socking away money for Connell’s education and avoiding the expenses and headaches of ownership. Another day Eileen would have let herself be appeased, turned the temperature down on the conversation, but now she allowed her anger to boil up at Ed and his unbecoming lack of courage. She felt herself on the verge of screaming one of those unforgettable phrases that could alter the dynamic of a relationship forever, and so she told him to put the boy to bed and slammed the door on her way out the room.
After work the next day, when that regular crowd that were never in a rush to get home to their families went to a bar in the vicinity of the hospital, Eileen for once accepted the invitation to join them. She was determined to stay out until God knew what hour, even with the young boy at home, and do whatever these people did as they watched their numbers dwindle to a determined few, but she was only halfway into her first glass of wine when a memory rose up of one particularly lugubrious episode during the period when her mother went out after work. She reached for her wallet to settle up, but the others wouldn’t let her pay. As she drove home, she decided that she couldn’t just pretend to Ed that nothing had changed. She felt a timer ticking on the way they were currently arranging their lives. She was getting restless. She had thought they were walking a mutual path toward greater stakes in a shared dream, but the more he insisted on staying in their apartment, the harder it was for her to see him as a fully vested partner in her future. She needed him to be her partner, because she loved him terribly, despite the difficulty of living with him sometimes, and so she was going to save him from himself, and save their marriage if that was what it was coming to, by insisting that they leave. He had always been good at listening to her. As he got older and more fixed in his fears and habits, she had to shout a little louder to be heard, but once he heard her, if he could stomach what she was asking for, he did what she asked. She did what she could do for him as well. He needed a real home no less than she did. His mind had grown smaller as he’d bunkered himself in his ideals. He needed space for his thoughts to breathe. He needed to regroup, to see new possibilities, to think bigger than ever. If there was anything she could help him with, it was thinking big.
She’d almost reached her landing with the basket of folded clothes when she heard the doorbell ring. Ed was teaching his night class. She groaned in frustration and elbowed the door open, hustling to the front stairs to get down there before the bell rang again. The boy had always been a light sleeper, but in the months since he turned five he’d seemed to awaken at the mere suggestion of activity. This constant up and down—two flights to the laundry room, a long flight to answer the door—was driving her crazy.
When she saw Angelo standing there, she wondered if she’d forgotten to slip the rent payment under the door. She found the whole exercise so humiliating every month—stooping in subservience, struggling to slide the envelope past the stubborn insulating lip—that she might unconsciously have followed her desire to forget about it and see how long it would be until they said something.
“Is this a good time to talk?”
“Sure, come in.”
She was in a form-fitting sweat suit, which made her a little self-conscious walking up the stairs in front of him. When they got upstairs, she asked him to have a seat at the dining room table, but he chose to stand in the doorway, leaning against the doorjamb, holding the knit cap he’d taken off his head.
“Can I get you some coffee? Water?”
“No, thank you.”
She sat.
“I’ve run into a little financial trouble,” Angelo said.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, and because she didn’t want to hear the details, she began to worry the upholstering on the chairs.
He inhaled deeply, cracked his swollen knuckles. “I don’t want to burden you with the whole story. Long story short, I’ll have to sell the house.”
“All right,” she said.
“I wanted to see if you had any interest in it.”
Recently, she and Ed had begun to seriously discuss the possibility of buying a house. She’d campaigned to sway him to the virtues of home ownership by appealing to his practical side. Owning would mean an added financial burden, but they’d be building equity instead of flushing rent money, and they had already put enough aside for a down payment. The only things holding them back were his conservatism about expenses and general fear of change. She hadn’t been thinking multifamily, but the rental income would offset part of the mortgage, and it struck her that it wasn’t going to get any easier to convince Ed to buy a house than telling him she wanted to buy the one they were already in. They wouldn’t even have to get a moving truck. This was her best chance to capitalize on his recent softened stance; the longer they waited, the more time he’d have to convince himself that they shouldn’t tie their money up in a home. And when he heard that Angelo was in trouble, he would want to help him out.
It didn’t hurt that her father, who had promised to haunt her until she and Ed owned a house, would be appeased. She’d been thinking of her father’s curse more and more lately. She could make the case that she’d been in a house long before he was dead, and that it was just a matter of signing a few papers to make it officially hers. He would appreciate the neatness of such a solution.
“This is all very sudden,” she said.
“I’d sell it to you at a discount,” he said. “I’d only ask that you keep my family on at an affordable rent.”
“I’ll talk to my husband about it.”
“Please do,” he said. “I’m going to have to move quickly, one way or the other.”
Her mind was churning. She didn’t like being on an upper floor, especially after Ed’s cousin’s kid in Broad Channel, playing Superman, had climbed out onto a second-story roof, jumped, and broken an arm and a leg. And she was tired of not having a driveway of her own. She used to consider herself lucky that Angelo allowed her and Ed to park in the driveway at all, but that gratitude had worn off, and now it nettled her to have to walk around the house to get to her door, or to have to ring Angelo’s bell when she was blocked in.
“There’s one thing I would want,” she said.
“You name it.”
“I would want to switch apartments. I would want to be on the ground floor.”
“It’s your house,” he said.
“And one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I would ask you to park your car on the street,” she said. “I would want the driveway clear for our use.”
He seemed to chew on what she’d said. His mouth rose at the corners in a forlorn smile at the concessions his situation—she realized that she didn’t care to know the first thing about it, not the first thing—had forced upon him.
“No problem,” he said, regaining the momentum he’d briefly lost. “There’s plenty of parking around here. Worst case, I walk a block or two.”
“And we’d need the garage cleaned out.”
“Everything will come out of there.”
“And the cedar closets in the basement. You can have the ones we use now.”
She thought she heard him whistle. She couldn’t tell if he was taken aback or impressed by the bargain she was driving. “All of these details can be arranged,” he said. “We can work together on this.”
“I just needed to get these things out in the open.”
He picked up her keys from the bowl on the mule chest and let them twirl in his fingers. “I got you.”
“I’ll talk to Ed.”
“And you’d keep us on?”
“Yes.”
He dropped the keys and straightened up. “At affordable rents?”
“I wouldn’t charge an arm and a leg,” she said. “You folks are like family now.”
“Even if I die?”
“Angelo! My God.”
He gave her a look that suggested he saw her not as a woman but as another man. “I’m asking: even if I die?”
“Even if you die. Of course.”
“I just want to know my family is taken care of,” he said. “I’m not looking to break the bank. I just want to take care of my people.” He backed toward the stairs.
“I understand,” she said, stepping toward him.
“Why don’t we find out how much houses like this are going for, and then you can give me less than that.”
“I need to talk to my husband,” she said again. “We’d have to qualify for a mortgage.”
“Don’t worry.” He had taken a step downstairs and he turned, smiling fully now, so that he almost appeared mirthful. “People like you, with all your affairs in order—you can have anything you want in this country.”
Part II (#ulink_fbfa6ae9-81be-5a7c-93ce-520170ae42d7)
14 (#ulink_f0158fde-a7fe-530f-a83d-c7691e4ae2be)
Eileen was understaffed again, so she had to stay late filling out charts and writing notes, and when she went around to dispense a final round of meds in little paper cups, one patient crashed his fist into his mouth in that way stupid people did when trying to look cool taking pills or eating peanuts, and he missed and sent the pill skittering across the linoleum floor. Pharmacy wasn’t picking up the phone, and she was out of that medication, so she got down on all fours and searched for it. A quarter of an hour later she found it covered in dust under the far bed. She reached her arm up with it from under the bed in a gesture of mutual victory, but as she crawled out backwards on her hands and knees, she saw that he was staring idiotically at her rear end, which she’d left hovering as she focused on the task at hand. She wanted to cram the pill in his mouth and slam his jaw shut, cracking his teeth, but she wasn’t about to let a useless fool like this defeat her poise, so she just placed it back in the little cup. In her chosen profession (in fact she felt it had chosen her, in a kind of malevolent possession) even administrators weren’t spared feeling like pieces of meat.
It was almost six thirty when she hit Eastchester Road. The Hutch was moving, thank God, and the Mets were in Boston, so maybe it wouldn’t be so bad on the other side of the bridge. The traffic during the playoffs had been a nightmare: mindless, endless, pointless; very nearly proof of the randomness of the universe. Her sciatic nerve was throbbing and her feet were going numb, and she didn’t have it in her to sit there inching along.
As she approached the Whitestone and the road sloped up toward the start of the cables, she felt her mood lift. Her time on the bridge was the only part of her commute she didn’t mind. She loved the way the cables shot up in a triumphant curve as the first arch neared and then plunged down immediately afterward. Sometimes—it was happening now—the music on the radio matched the rhythm of the bridge. The cables climbed toward the second arch, and she felt herself in the uncanny presence of beauty. Nothing else in her day stirred her to the contemplation of abstract ideas. The bridge was making an argument for its own soundness as she drove over it. High above the East River, the sharp focus of ordinary life gave way to hazy impressions as the eye worked to contain the vastness it beheld. Then the cables rolled into anchor, the landscape resumed a human scale, and that hopeful notion she’d conceived for the evening at the peak of the span began to recede.
At least the traffic was flowing. She’d be home by seven at this rate. She had called at five to say she expected to be quite late and to ask Lena to feed Connell, and then she’d called again before she left and said not to feed him. Lena had assured her it was no trouble, and Eileen had heard the touch of sharpness in her own voice when she’d said she wanted to have dinner with the boy herself. She had put chicken in the fridge to defrost it, and if she didn’t cook it, it was going to go bad.
That morning, she’d decided that they were going to have a family meal, even though Ed wouldn’t be there with them. If he was forcing her to compromise on her ideal of family time by continuing to teach these night classes, then a compromise was all she could stand anymore, not the complete capitulation she’d made lately on nights he taught, when she let Lena feed the boy and took a restless bubble bath before she went up to get him. She and Connell were enough to make up a family; in fact, they were plenty. In some families, mother and child was all there was. She didn’t need Ed to be happy.
She was angry at Ed for the class that met two nights a week, and she was angry at him for staying late another night to attend to his research. If he was going to be away this much, at least he could be making good money doing it. His turning down the job at Merck still bothered her, and the fact that he’d spent these years taking on extra instruction only served to make him seem more irresponsible somehow.
At the exit for Northern off the Whitestone Expressway, she took pleasure in seeing Shea Stadium empty. Soon enough—it couldn’t come soon enough—this endless season would be over. At 114th Street, she headed over to Thirty-Fourth Avenue, because she didn’t like driving through Corona on Northern. It depressed her to live next to a neighborhood that run-down, though things closer to her end of town weren’t all that great lately either. Some of the reliable old stores were becoming junk shops, and the number of signs with Spanish in them was on the rise.
She wasn’t looking forward to fetching Connell from the Orlandos. It used to be, when he was in kindergarten or first grade, he’d come running when she appeared at the back door, but lately she’d had to fight to get him out of there. They always had the television going, that was part of it, and the place was comfortable in a way that appealed to a kid, with knickknacks everywhere and interesting clutter. Brenda’s four-year old daughter, Sharon, was usually there. The number of Orlandos present never seemed to dip below three. It reminded her of her apartment during the happy period in her teens when a new wave of relatives came over from Ireland. There were differences, of course: the Orlandos were louder, more physical, certainly more affectionate. She’d dealt with smoke as a kid, but there were more smokers in the Orlando house; everyone but Sharon seemed to have lit up at some point in Eileen’s presence. She suspected that whatever fun Connell had up there paled in comparison to the afternoons she’d enjoyed with all her cousins around, but he didn’t know the difference. Or maybe it was like when she went up to the Schmidts’ apartment to watch television as a girl. She always felt she was escaping the reality of her life. Was that how Connell felt? If so, he had no reason to. She and Ed provided a calmer home than she’d ever had. Still, these days he never wanted to come down. She had to admit that for the first few minutes after they got downstairs, until she put the kitchen radio on and started cooking, her house felt empty by comparison.
She parked and went inside, took her shoes off, and changed quickly out of her stockings. She put her slippers on and went up the back stairs. Lena answered the door in a smock and said, “Come in, come in,” with the carefree informality of a woman perfectly comfortable in her own home. Behind her, Angelo sat at the table in the dining room that had once been Eileen’s own, smoking a cigarette and flipping through the Post. He still had his Sanitation Department shirt on, unbuttoned and untucked, with an undershirt beneath it. His hands were thick, and his fingers were stained from cigarettes, but there was an elegance in the way his hair was cropped and the longer strands on top were slicked back. He gave her a warm smile and welcomed her with a small gesture of the hand. The only books in the house were a few dusty volumes in the glass case behind him, and he hadn’t finished high school, but still he gave the impression he could summon up reliable answers to almost any question put to him. She watched him luxuriously turn the pages of the newspaper, licking his finger and sliding his hand behind the page to flip it as though it were a leaf in an illuminated manuscript. Since Consolata’s death a few months back, he was less quick to yell, and he sat at the table and talked to Connell more, which the boy delighted in. The family was still paying the rent for Consolata’s apartment, presumably out of whatever small inheritance she’d left them. Lena and Angelo were planning on moving upstairs with Gary, to give Donny, Brenda, and Sharon room to breathe. The kids were grown, but it was evident they wouldn’t be striking off on their own anytime soon.
Gary and Brenda were on the couch, Sharon between them, resting her head on her mother’s lap while her uncle held her feet. Donny was in the easy chair. Connell had the smaller couch to himself. They were watching Jeopardy. Connell barely looked up when Eileen walked in. Donny waved; Gary looked embarrassed to be noticed. He was wearing corduroy pants and a T-shirt that was too tight in the gut. He wasn’t fat so much as the shirt was a shrunken relic of his youth.
The question at hand was about which president served the shortest term in office, thirty-two days. Eileen couldn’t remember the name.
“Harrison,” Gary called out, just before the contestant buzzed in with “William Henry Harrison.” Connell said “Yes!” with gusto and Donny grinned proudly at his older brother. The next question in the category asked for the name of the man who shot James Garfield at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station.
“Charles Guiteau,” Gary said quietly, and a moment later the contestant did too.
It was easier for her when Gary stayed in his room. She didn’t like to think about him. He was the oldest of the siblings, but he’d never held down a job. He had an air of resignation about him, as if he’d already given up on life. At the same time, he had a good deal of intellectual ability. She didn’t like to acknowledge that people with real ability might not arrive at comfortable stations in life. Her cousin Pat had been a bad enough disappointment; she didn’t want to consider the possibility that Connell might fall through the cracks like Gary. She certainly didn’t like to think that something similar had happened to her too, on a smaller scale. She had achieved professional status, but her existence wasn’t ideal, and hard as she tried to hack her way through the thicket of middle-class living, she couldn’t find a way out to the clearing. It would have been easier to see Gary as a savant with an overdeveloped capacity to absorb trivia, but the truth was he was a complex, intelligent individual. She’d heard him discussing issues of the day and couldn’t help agreeing with him, even being enlightened by observations she couldn’t have made herself. And yet there he was, living in the margins, talking to a television, dying half an hour at a time. A claustrophobic sensation swept over her. She needed to forget that people like Gary existed, to forget even the possibility of failure. She needed to spirit her son away or Gary would suck him into the black hole of his life.
Connell rose and slapped Donny five across the coffee table. Then he looked up at her.
“It’s time to go,” she said. “I’m making dinner.”
“Can I come down when it’s ready?”
“No,” she said sharply, then collected herself. “You’re coming down now. They’ve had enough of you up here. Let the Orlandos have their evening in peace.”
“He’s no bother,” Angelo said over his newspaper. “He can stay as long as he wants.”
“Thank you, but he’s going to help me get dinner ready.” She hadn’t had any intention to ask Connell for help, but she needed a good excuse.
“We were discussing politics before,” Angelo said. “He said you wanted him to be a politician. I asked him if he knew what a politician was.”
Eileen offered up a little embarrassed laugh. “What I mostly want is for him to get downstairs right now,” she said, loud enough for Connell to hear.
She said her good-byes and walked to the door. Connell lagged behind, standing and watching the show. Gary got another question right, and Donny and Connell broke into hysterics.
“Connell,” she said. “Come on.”
He took his time getting his schoolbag and followed her down the stairs. She got him set up chopping lettuce while she grilled the chicken. She was going to make salad for dinner, with the chicken spread over it. She’d given in to pizza too often recently, and the nights Ed cooked it was grilled cheese in a lagoon of butter, or cheeseburgers, anything with cheese. The boy was too chubby for her liking. It was true that he hadn’t hit a big growth spurt yet, but it was also true that the tendency toward physical largeness on her family’s side could edge into overweight if it wasn’t watched scrupulously. In the absence of worldly cares, Connell stuffed his face with candy and ice cream. She hadn’t had time to get fat as a kid. When she was only a few months older than he was now, she was planning meals, shopping, keeping the house—things she couldn’t imagine him doing. When she sent him to the store, she had to write a list, and he still inevitably forgot something on it.
She was going to start mapping some order onto his life. Ed wasn’t a big help in that area. He loved the boy so much, was so permissive, seemed delighted by everything he did. Connell brought home a ninety-five and Ed beamed; she was always the one forced to ask where the other five points went. She resented the way Connell walked around oblivious of how carefree his existence was, how little responsibility he had.
She put some cherry tomatoes in the salad and cooked the chicken quickly in the pan. She grabbed some dressing, tossed it all together, and told him to sit down. She served him salad and put the chicken over it.
“This is dinner?” he said.
“You need to eat more leafy greens. Some leafy greens.”
It was seven thirty. Ed was just half an hour into his class, with an hour to go. She spent a few moments of pique in wondering if she and Connell were crossing his mind at all. Connell was eating too fast, as usual. He didn’t even like salad, and yet he was rushing to eat it. There was something irrepressible in the way he ate. Maybe he was trying to speed through dinner so he could get to dessert. He knew the rules: no dessert until his plate was clean. It had been a couple of years since she’d had to stage one of those nightlong sit-ins to get him to eat his meal. She’d figured out what to avoid, and he’d stopped trying to slip it in the garbage when she wasn’t looking and just ate what he was served. Dessert held that power over him. She always kept something in the house, for herself as much as for him, but she took only a little portion, nothing like the heaps he wolfed down. He was going to have to learn restraint if he ever wanted to make a success of himself among serious people. It was unseemly to behave with that kind of abandon. She told him to slow down and he nodded at her and kept on eating at his pace. “Slow down,” she said, annoyed. “You’re going to choke.” She got up to refill her water glass. She stood at the sink drinking it and filled it again. When she turned around she saw him waving his arms, his fork on his plate, and then she saw him leap to his feet, his hands on his throat. She told him it wasn’t funny, and then she saw his face and began screaming, “Are you choking?” but she already knew he was. It had happened a few times when he was a toddler, but it had always been a mere scare, some dense foodstuff, tuna fish or peanut butter, compacted in his esophagus, and he’d been able to breathe through it, but now he wasn’t making a sound. It was time to grab him coolly and dislodge the food with one fist to his abdomen and the other shoving up, but she couldn’t do it.
She’d dealt with choking a number of times in her career. You got your hands in the midsection and gave the diaphragm a healthy shove and out the food popped. A couple of seconds and it was over. You had more time than people thought, a lot more, four full minutes until brain damage set in. But this was her son and she had no room for error.
She had him by the shoulders. She began to panic. She knew she shouldn’t panic, but she couldn’t help herself; she loved the boy so much. She was thinking Please don’t die, please don’t die and she started screaming for help, and then she was shoving him out the door and pulling him toward the back stairs. She got to the stairwell and screamed, “Angelo! Angelo! Angelo!” and ran upstairs and banged on the door and screamed, “Come down!” and then she ran back down, because she had left the boy alone. Her hands were shaking. “He’s choking!” she screamed. Connell was turning blue. She heard someone flying down the stairs, and then Donny was shoving her aside, and then he was standing behind Connell, giving him a muscular approximation of the Heimlich, and then something flew out of Connell’s mouth onto the carpet. He started coughing and wailing a terrified wail that sounded more like a cat’s than a child’s. It was a cherry tomato. He must have swallowed it whole. She picked it up and crushed it angrily in her hand. She sat him at the dining room table. Angelo, Gary, and Brenda came in. Connell kept coughing, though the wailing subsided. She went to get him a glass of water. In the kitchen she saw the plates and slammed them into the trash with their contents. She could feel the feelings rising up, getting ready to wash over her, take her over. He took the water down quickly. She would never get angry at him for eating fast again. It was Ed she was angry at, for not being there, for exposing Connell to this danger by his absence. She was grateful the Orlandos were reliably present in the evenings, and mortified that she, a nurse, hadn’t been able to save him herself.
“Are you going to slow down now?” was all she could think to say when she went back to the dining room. Then she burst into tears. Connell seemed too dazed to cry.
“If you’d been Gary,” Donny said, “I would have let you choke. What do they call that, Gary? Euthanasia?”
Connell gave a little chuckle through his coughs.
“Don’t you do that again,” Angelo said. “I don’t need another heart attack. Two is plenty.”
“You good?” Brenda asked, putting her hand on Connell’s shoulder. He nodded. “Slow down. Your food’s not going anywhere.”
“Well, my work here is done,” Donny said. “I better go find a phone booth to change in.”
“Why don’t you go pick up your dirty drawers from the bathroom floor instead,” Brenda said. “I don’t think the hamper’s made of kryptonite.”
The laughs were welcome, but she could see that Donny had been affected by the brush with disaster. He was wide-eyed and shaking his head. The whole Orlando family seemed unnerved. Connell spent the afternoons up there, but it had never occurred to Eileen that they might in some way have thought of him as being part of their family too.
“Wheel of Fortune is on,” Gary said. They made their way up the stairs. She sat at the table with Connell.
“Are you okay?”
He nodded.
“Shaken up?”
He nodded again. “I couldn’t breathe,” he said.
“I know.”
“I couldn’t talk.”
He couldn’t know how hard on her he was making this.
“Horrible,” she said. “I froze up.”
“Donny saved me.”
“I don’t know what happened. I’ve done it before. I guess it never meant as much to me.”
“Thank God they were here,” he said.
“I would have done it eventually,” she said. “My training would have kicked in. I think because I knew they were here, I didn’t have to go into lifesaving mode.”
“He saved my life,” the boy said thoughtfully.
“Let’s not go overboard,” she said. “You were going to be fine. We had time.”
He looked like he was in shock. She went to the freezer and scooped some ice cream into a bowl for him.
“Here, have this,” she said. “I don’t think you can choke on this. Maybe you’ll find a way.”
Ordinarily at this time of night she would have made him sit down with his homework, but she didn’t say anything about it. At the moment she didn’t care if he never did his homework again. Maybe this was how Ed felt all the time.
She told him he could take the ice cream to the couch—another first—and she went to get the television for him. The only set in the house was the little black-and-white one in their bedroom. They had been wheeling it out to the living room during the playoffs and the World Series. She cleaned up the pan from the chicken while he watched Entertainment Tonight, and joined him when she was done. The games usually started at eight, or before eight, but when he got up to change the channel to NBC, The Cosby Show was on. It took only a moment to understand that preempting The Cosby Show would have cost the network ad revenue. They lay on separate couches. It wasn’t easy to see the set from that far away. The girl, Vanessa, was trying to wear makeup to school, against her mother’s wishes. The boy, Theo, was attempting to organize his family to do a fire drill. It could have been Leave It to Beaver, except that everyone was black. The world was changing fast. It was hard to fit her son’s America into her memory of how the world had been ordered when she was a child. She felt like a member of an in-between generation, straddling sides in a clash of history. Her life was as remote and ancient to Connell as the stories of the pilgrim settlers had been to her when she was his age.
The Cosby Show ended and the game was about to come on. She told him she was going to the bedroom to lie down, and he gave her a stricken look.
“You’re not watching the game?”
She could tell he was disturbed by what had happened to him, that he didn’t want to be alone. “I’ll watch for a little while,” she said, relenting.
She didn’t blame him. Over and over she had been reliving in her mind the moment when she’d watched Donny pop the tomato out. She wanted to sit next to Connell, to hold him close to her, but she had no idea how to do it. She had no interest in watching another of these games she’d had to sit through so many of in the run-up to the playoffs, so after a few minutes she rose to get Lonesome Dove. She flipped through it distractedly, reading and rereading the same page several times. The Mets fell behind early, and by the end of the fifth inning they were down 4–0.
She knew she wasn’t the softest mother in the world. She worked a lot. She worked, period. Other mothers stayed home, baked cookies, talked to their kids all the time, knew everything their kids were thinking. It had never occurred to her to try to be Connell’s friend. She did her best to encourage meaningful conversations at dinner, the three of them talking as a family, and not only because it would be constructive in lubricating Connell’s future advancement among people who judged a person by how he spoke, but also because she liked to hear what he was thinking. She had worked hard to give him a comfortable life. That was as valuable as providing emotional sustenance. Life wasn’t only about expressing feelings and giving hugs. Still, she couldn’t figure out how to break through the defenses her son had put up, and it bothered her, an intellectual problem as much as an emotional one.
She placed her bookmark in the page and held the book in her hands. “I’m thinking of turning in,” she said.
“Can you stay here and read?”
So, he needed her there. He couldn’t say it in so many words, but he had more or less admitted it. She opened her book again and started in on the first page of the chapter she’d been reading.
Ed walked in before ten. They heard the door, and then they heard him hanging his coat in the vestibule, and then they heard him dropping his briefcase on his desk in the study before he came into the living room.
“Still four–nothing?” he asked when he walked in.
Connell nodded. “Gooden got smacked around.”
“They were saying on the radio his velocity is down.”
“El Sid has been great in relief. But the bats are ice cold.”
“Something happened,” she said, interjecting. “Connell choked.”
“What?” Ed turned to her, then back to him. “What happened, buddy?”
“I was trying to concentrate on not choking, and then the next thing I knew I was choking.”
He looked at her. “Really choking?”
“It was in his windpipe.”
“What was?”
“A cherry tomato.”
“You got it out?”
“Donny did.”
He pointed upstairs. “You ate with the Orlandos?”
“Donny came down,” Connell said.
“To eat with us?”
Her blood ran cold at the thought of discussing the particulars around the boy, who would see on her face how unsettled she still was.
“I’ll explain later,” she said.
“Come here,” Ed said, and he sat on the couch and put his arm around Connell, who leaned into the lapel of his father’s tweed jacket. It was so easy for Ed to connect to him. She always had to be the scold. Maybe Connell had hardened his heart to her. He leaned in further, so that his chubby belly pressed against the waistband of his sweatpants. He had his face in Ed’s flannel shirt and started sobbing. Ed kissed the top of his head and rubbed his back. Connell kept his face buried there for some minutes. Ed was looking to her for a mimed narrative of what had happened, but she kept waving him off. After a while, Connell lifted his head.
“Will you do what your mother has asked you to do a few times now, if I’m not mistaken,” Ed said in a firm but gentle voice, “and try to slow down when you eat? Can you do that for me?”
Connell nodded.
“Good.”
And then, without another word, they had transitioned out of that conversation and were watching the game. She stopped reading Lonesome Dove and directed her attention to them. It was something to behold, Ed’s physical comfort with the boy, who had his leg draped over his father’s. She’d been affectionate with Connell when he was very young, up until he was about three, but then something had interceded to make it subtly harder for her to connect to him. She knew Ed could do it, so she’d never spent much time worrying about the boy being deprived, but now she had the sensation that she was on the other side of something important. She wasn’t angry so much as hurt and darkly fascinated.
The Mets scored a run in the top of the eighth inning, and then, in the ninth, after Ray Knight grounded out and Kevin Mitchell popped out—she’d sat through so many playoff games of late that she knew the players’ names by now—Mookie Wilson doubled, and then Rafael Santana singled him in. Ed said this team had a knack for getting two-out hits. Lenny Dykstra came to the plate as the tying run, but a few pitches later he struck out swinging and the game was over. The Mets were down three games to two in the World Series. Another loss and their season, which seemed to have united New York for a while and which even someone like her, who paid little attention, knew had been an extraordinary success, would be over.
“Complete game for Hurst,” Ed said. “Impressive.”
“They couldn’t get to him,” Connell said.
Ed rose and shut the volume off but left the screen on, and they watched the Red Sox players celebrate as the credits rolled and the news came on. Then he shut the television off and pulled the plug on it to prepare to roll it back into the bedroom.
“Clemens is up next,” Connell said, foreboding in his voice.
“Yes, but they’re in New York.”
“They have to win two.”
“They’ll do it.”
“It’s Roger Clemens.”
“What did Tug McGraw say?” Ed asked Socratically.
“‘Ya gotta believe,’” Connell answered.
“Well, then.”
It was after eleven thirty, much later than Connell’s bedtime. They said quick good nights and the boy headed off. Ed wheeled the television in front of him as if he was piloting a projector cart. She got into bed, and Ed came in a few minutes later, after he’d tucked Connell in. She told him the story of how the boy had choked and how she’d responded to it, or failed to respond, and Ed nodded and said it was over now and everything was fine, and it calmed her to hear it; Ed was good at putting her at ease. He gave her a kiss and she rolled over and lay thinking about what had transpired, with a clarity of thought the clamorous broadcast hadn’t allowed. Why had she frozen? As Connell had stood there not even gasping for air, but silently motioning toward his throat, a feeling for him more intense than love and more mysterious had risen up from the depths of her mind. She felt that he was part of her own flesh again, as he’d been once, and that she was on the brink of dying along with him. Nothing would be the same if he died. She would go on, but her life would lose its meaning and purpose. This kid who annoyed and infuriated her so often was walking around with her fate in his hands. She didn’t trust him with it. She felt fragile, exposed. She was going to make him be more careful going forward.
At one thirty in the morning, she was awakened by Connell nudging her, asking if he could come into the bed. She was too sleepy to object. She moved aside and let him slide into the space between them. She couldn’t remember the last time he was in bed with them. She had policed that boundary well when he was younger, not wanting to become one of those couples whose marriages were held hostage by a child in the bed every night. Forget about sex: she just wanted to get a good night’s sleep. Eventually Connell had stopped trying to join them.
She began to groggily recall the events of earlier, and it made sense that he was there. She could hear him nudging Ed awake, the two of them talking.
“I almost died,” Connell said.
“You’re fine,” Ed said.
“I was scared. I’m still scared.”
Ed rolled over. “You are completely fine. You’re safe. You have a long life ahead of you. A long life.”
“I didn’t want to die,” Connell said.
“Well, now you have to remember that feeling. Go out there and make the most of life.”
“You really think they’re going to win?”
“The Mets? Yes.”
“Both games?”
“Both. You’ll see.”
“You’re sure?”
“Have faith,” Ed said. “They’ll pull it out. Now go to sleep.”
As she listened to them talk, she was taken back to the row of beds she slept in when Mr. Kehoe was still living in the other room. She had no memory of any conversations taking place among the three of them once the lights were out. Both her parents faced away from her. She remembered wondering what it would have been like for the two of them to sleep in the same bed. Now she wondered whether she’d have had the nerve to crawl between them and feel their heat radiating on either side of her. Maybe if they’d slept in the same bed, she would have grown up as the kind of girl who had that nerve. Maybe your imagination stopped at the boundaries that contained it. She had taken comfort in the placement of her bed between theirs. Maybe you took what you could get. She could have reached out and touched their backs. That had been enough for her. It wouldn’t be enough for her son. She was glad, on this night when she hadn’t been able to save him herself, to have one bed they slept in and to be able to give him this opportunity. She hadn’t had it as a girl, but that didn’t mean he shouldn’t have it. She wondered if he’d lost some of his trust in her tonight. So much of life was the peeling away of illusions. Maybe she’d only hurried that along. Maybe that wasn’t the worst thing. He was going to have to fend for himself at some point.
She felt Connell roll away from Ed and nuzzle up to her in a way that she hadn’t anticipated him doing. His forehead was pressed against the top of her back. Within a minute, he was asleep. She couldn’t move without waking him, but she also couldn’t sleep without moving him. She decided to wait. She felt oddly touched having him there. Still, it was going to be a long night, and she’d be exhausted in the morning, so she’d eventually have to move him off her.
She lay there thinking, I almost lost him. I’m never serving goddamned cherry tomatoes again. Ed better be right about the Mets, or this kid is going to be more disappointed in his father than he is in the Mets. Then again, he has to learn that things don’t always work out the way you want them to.
She went back and forth between thinking it would be nice if Connell got the outcome he wanted and thinking it would be character-building for him not to get it. Fatigue from a long day at work and the effects of adrenaline withdrawal must have been enough to overcome her need for space, because she felt herself drifting off, even though he was still attached to her.
The kid would be thrilled, she thought. Let them win.
The next thing she knew she was waking up. Somehow in the night she had gotten herself to face the boy, who was still sleeping, and Ed behind him on his back, out cold. Connell breathed in and out softly. His lashes were long like his father’s, and in the muted sunlight peeking through the blinds his cheeks looked sweet and full. As if he could sense her looking at him, he opened his eyes and blinked a few times in that half-conscious, slightly perturbed way he used to as a toddler when he hadn’t yet fully come to. He gave her a slumber-drunk smile; then he was back asleep. She didn’t know what to do with everything she was feeling for him, even for her husband, so she got up to take a shower and left the two of them to wake up and find each other there.
Part III (#ulink_da176a98-13a0-5a57-bbd8-9fea4002848d)
15 (#ulink_098f6438-633b-55c7-bf5d-a334d4ed75cd)
After Connell turned in, Ed surprised her by not moving to the study to grade lab reports or read journal articles. He lay on the couch with the newspaper listening to Wagner. She didn’t have to know music to recognize that it was Wagner, because the swelling crescendos and singer’s deep voice gave it away. Ed often listened to Wagner when he was in a contemplative mood.
She sat on the other couch with her book, happy to share with him the beaten-back chill of a February night, which made itself known in the frost on the windows. She switched the light on in the artificial fireplace, pausing briefly to rattle the glass coals and hear them clack against each other. It pleased her that the man she’d married, in addition to possessing an erudition that impressed even worldly friends, read the sports section in its entirety. At one point he rose and went to the study, and she thought she’d lost him for the night, but he returned with a pen to do the crossword. She loved the carefree way he called on her for help when flummoxed by a clue. It suggested an abiding faith in the soundness of his intellect that he could meet head-on those swells of ignorance that might capsize another man’s confidence; they were wavelets lapping against his hull.
“I’ve done everything I can do,” he said, as he lay the quarter-folded newspaper on the coffee table. “I want to be realistic. Maybe it’s time for me to relax.”
She glanced up from her book to catch his eye, but he was looking at the ceiling.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said.
“I’m turning fifty soon. I’m slowing down. I’ve earned a rest.”
“Nonsense,” she said.
“I’m going to become one of those guys who come home and call it a night. Maybe I’ll watch some TV.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it.”
“I can start right now.”
Her heart leapt a little. It was pleasant to imagine him spending more time in their bed. He had finally given up the night classes, thank God, but he still worked so hard, often coming in from the study long after she was asleep.
“I don’t know how long you could keep that up,” she said. “You’d get bored.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Well, if it makes you happy,” she said.
He’d already moved to the stereo to change the record. He plugged his headphones in and had them on before she could hear what he was listening to. He lay back down and closed his eyes.
She waited for him to acknowledge her gaze. He liked to lie like that and slip into a reverie, but he usually opened his eyes between movements to give her a little review with his raised brows. She wondered if he were sleeping, he was lying so still, but then he began tapping his foot rhythmically. When the side ended, he lay there, arms crossed across his chest, impassive. She shut off her light and stood to head into the bedroom. She called his name, but he didn’t reply. She watched for some kind of acknowledgment of her departure, but he only shifted his glasses. She went to him and stood over him. He must have imagined he could outlast her in this game, but she was starting to grow disturbed by it. She leaned in to kiss his cheek good night; before she reached it he had opened his eyes and was staring back at her in a kind of horror, as if she’d interrupted him in a reflection on something monstrous.
“I’m heading to bed,” she said.
“I’ll be right in.”
After a few bouts of fitful sleep—she never slept well without him beside her—she headed to the living room. She found the end table lamp on and Ed still wearing the headphones. A record was spinning, and he’d set up a stack to be played by the autochanger. She shut the stereo off and called his name. He put a hand up to silence her.
“I’m just going to lie here a minute,” he said.
“It’s four in the morning.” She switched off the lamp, but ambient light still filtered into the room from the coming sun. “You need good, quality sleep. You’re always saying that. Don’t lights interrupt sleep? You need REM sleep. Restful sleep. Come on inside. You have to teach in a few hours.”
“I think I’m going to cancel class,” he said. “I’m not feeling it.”
“Huh?”
He hadn’t missed a class in twenty years. They’d had fights about it. You can miss a single class, she would say when something came up. They can’t fire you for it. They can’t fire you, period.
“I think I’ve earned a day off,” he said.
“Well, either way, just come to bed. It’s late.”
She stood over him until he got up. They shuffled down the hall together. In the morning when she woke he was sitting at the foot of the bed.
“Maybe you’d better call for me,” he said.
After she’d made the call, she showered and dressed. When she headed to the kitchen, she saw him lying on the couch again, as if he hadn’t moved from the night before, the only difference being the cup of tea on the table.
“You’re taking this whole ‘taking it easy’ thing pretty seriously,” she said.
“I’m just gathering my energy,” he said. “I’ll be all right tomorrow. I’ll go in tomorrow.”
He let himself be kissed good-bye. She went to work. When she returned she was surprised to find him in the same spot, wearing the same clothes. She hadn’t really believed he’d stay home all day; it was unlike him. His record of never missing work was a matter of somber pride. Connell’s bag and jacket were slung over a chair in the dining room.
Ed’s eyes were closed. His feet beat the time. She stood over him, tapped him on the shoulder. As she spoke, he motioned to the headphones to indicate he couldn’t hear her. She mimed pulling them off her ears.
“I’m listening to music,” he said.
“Plainly.”
“How was work?”
“Work was fine,” she said. “Did you stay there all day?”
“I got up to eat.”
“So this is the new thing?”
“I’m trying it out. I’m feeling enormously refreshed.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” she said.
“I’ve been meaning to spend more time attending to my needs,” he said. “This is step one. I’ve had a cloudy head for a while. I’m trying to get back to basics.”
“What about work?”
“I’m going to need you to call in again for me tomorrow.”
In the big mirror in the other room she saw herself in the coat she’d been meaning to replace. She had once thought of thirty as a terribly old age, but now she was turning fifty at the end of the year, and thirty seemed impossibly young.
“How long do you plan to do this?”
“I hadn’t formulated a plan.”
“Shall I expect you to eat with us tonight?”
“Of course,” he said, waving her off and putting the headphones back on.
As she began to prepare dinner, she reflected on what this thing could be. It was clearly some kind of midlife crisis. Something was spooking him: getting old, probably. She was confident it wasn’t another woman. They were coconspirators in a mission of normalcy. A stronger deterrent to infidelity even than love was the desire to maintain a stable household, a stress-free life. She knew he was reliable, and not only because he wasn’t going to miss work to sleep off a drunk, or gamble his paycheck at the track, or forget their anniversary. He was, in a subtler way, reliably knowable. Some women yearned for a hint of mystery about their men; she loved Ed’s lack of mystery. It had shade, depth, texture; it was just complex enough. His heart contained too little passion for him to attempt a grand affair, and too much for him to endure a scurrilous one. He was too preoccupied with his work to love two women at once; he lacked that tolerance for superficial interaction every successful adulterer wielded.
A few days later he returned to work, but the headphones ritual persisted in the evenings. One night he returned to his study, and she felt relieved. She assumed he was grading lab reports, but when she went in to bring him a plate of cookies she found him writing in a notebook, which he took pains to block from her view. When she went back later that night to look for it, it was gone.
Their dinners began to feel strange to her. Ed looked away when she tried to meet his gaze, and he never wanted to talk about his work—or about anything, really, but Connell’s day and the happenings at school.
“And then,” Connell said, “they lifted him up to grab the rim, but they didn’t give him the ball to dunk. Somebody pulled his shorts down. And then they pulled his underwear down! He just hung up there until Mr. Cotswald ran over and got him.”
“Ha!”
Ed laughed with just a bit too much gusto. She’d expected him to condemn the boys’ behavior. It was as if he hadn’t really absorbed what Connell had said. Something in the warmth in his voice, the distraction that flickered in his eyes, made her wonder if she’d been too hasty in ruling out an affair. A listlessness had come over him lately that seemed at times like a species of dreaminess.
“Well.” Ed pushed back his chair. He gave Connell a perfunctory pat on the head and retired to the couch and the privacy of his headphones. Connell looked embarrassed, as if he’d extended a hand for a shake and been rebuffed. She knew enough not to compound it by speaking to him.
She went to bed feeling frowsy. She squeezed the deposits of fat at her hips and wondered how they had managed to sneak up on her. She knew the doctors at work still turned to look at her in the halls, but if Ed didn’t see her that way, then the interest of other men felt less a vote of confidence than a shabby habit that in its mindless lack of differentiation—she saw the way they looked at so many of the girls—called into question whether she had ever been beautiful at all.
Ed came in after midnight. He stood over her, gazing oddly. She could feel herself stiffen.
“Anything you want to tell me?”
“Not really,” he said.
“What are you listening to, anyway?”
“Wagner’s Ring Cycle. I have so many records I haven’t even cracked the plastic on. It makes me anxious to see them all sitting there. I’m working my way through them.”
She was surprised by how relieved she felt to hear this. It was sufficiently particular to actually be plausible. It was the kind of thing she imagined people did when they came to a point where the roads to the past and the future were equally muddy—retreat to the high ground of a major project.
She had long measured a meal’s success by the range of colors arrayed on the plate, but it felt hopelessly middle-class now to conceive of food in this fashion, and she looked askance at orange carrots, bright green beans, white mashed potatoes, the dark pile of meat and onions, picking at it with her fork in the way she resented in her child.
She used to love to sit at her kitchen table and watch the drapes kick up in the wind, to look through the window across the little divide and see the Palumbos gathered in their dining room, but now the house next door felt far too close. She hated its plain brick face and the shabby décor visible within. She had long tolerated this vulgarity because she felt privileged to have a house at all, but now she found it too disappointing to bear.
Lately she couldn’t stop thinking about Bronxville. When she’d left Lawrence in 1983 for the nursing director job at St. John’s Episcopal in Far Rockaway, she’d missed going to Bronxville every day. When she returned to Einstein a couple of years later to be head of nursing, she’d begun to think the timing might finally be right to move to Bronxville. The commute would be shorter for both of them, she was making good money now, Ed had gotten into a decent pay class himself, and they’d made a few good investments. They had put eight thousand dollars into oil shale stock on the advice of one of Ed’s colleagues, a geologist at NYU, and it had climbed to forty-four thousand. But then in ’85 the shale oil company went bankrupt. That year, they also lost twenty grand on a penny stock scam with First Jersey Securities. The final nail came in 1987, when her boss left for a government appointment, and the new head of the hospital fired those he could and appointed his own leadership team. Though she landed on her feet at North Central Bronx, she had to take a pay cut to do so.
She couldn’t look across at the Palumbos’ just then, with their dreadful chandelier glowing like margarine and the two of them looking all their years as they sat down to a cheerless meal, so she got up to close the drapes. Ed took her rising as a cue that the meal was over and headed for the couch.
When she and Ed moved in, the neighborhood was Irish, Italian, Greek, and Jewish, and they knew everyone on the block. Then families started to trickle out, and in their place came Colombians, Bolivians, Nicaraguans, Filipinos, Koreans, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis. Connell played with the new kids, but she never met the parents. When an Iranian family—they called themselves Persian, but she couldn’t bring herself to refer to them as anything but Iranian—bought her friend Irene’s place up the block after she moved to Garden City, the son, Farshid, became a classmate of Connell’s at St. Joan of Arc and started hanging around the house.
It wasn’t hard to feel the pull of the suburbs, because the neighborhood was half suburb already, arranged around mass transit but also around car travel. There were driveways next to every house, and gas stations and car dealerships at regular intervals along Northern Boulevard. LaGuardia Airport was a short drive away, and Robert Moses’s highways, and the massive parking lots at Shea, and the husk of the World’s Fair, which had left detritus like a glacier.
Most of the stores she loved were gone, replaced by trinket shops, T-shirt shops, fireworks black marketeers, exotic hair salons hidden behind heavy curtains, over-the-counter purveyors of deadly martial arts paraphernalia, comic book stores, karate schools, check-cashing places, Korean-run Optimo-branded cigar and candy stores that sold cheap knockoffs of popular Japanese toys, taxi depots, sketchy bars, fast food, wholesalers of obscure cuisines, restaurants suggestive of opium dens, bodegas stocked with products she would never consider eating. The Boulevard Theatre on the corner was now a Latin dance hall with neon lights flickering late into the night and an insistent beat that hectored the remaining old guard to leave. Cars piled up outside it and the cops were always breaking up fights. The gloomy little Irish bar was the last stand against the invasion, but she couldn’t take some specious pride in it now after avoiding it all these years.
The memory of wealth haunted the nearby garden apartment buildings. She imagined gaunt bachelors presiding over dwindling fortunes, long lines coming to a silent end. There were remnants of the way it had been, like Barricini’s Chocolates and Jahn’s, but stepping into them only reminded her how few of the old places were left.
She knew it was possible to see the changes as part of what made the city great, an image of what was to come, the necessary cycle of immigration, but only if you weren’t the one being displaced. Maybe even then you could, if you were a saint. She had no desire to be a saint, not if it meant she’d have to blunt the edge of her anger at these people. It certainly wasn’t saintliness that led her to attempt to get past her resentment at the break-in that occurred a couple of years back, while they were on a cruise in the Bahamas. Rather, it was a desire to continue living in the neighborhood without boiling over into outright vitriol whenever she stepped into the grocery store, where anyone she laid eyes on, worker or customer, unless they looked respectable, could have been one of the offenders. She had returned from that cruise to find her jewelry box rifled through and her drawers turned inside out. Luckily, she’d long ago overridden Ed and spent the money to rent a safe deposit box at Manufacturers Hanover, where she stored Ed’s LeCoultre watch and her mother’s embattled engagement ring. All the bonds were in the box as well. She took a certain satisfaction in thinking of how little the thieves had made off with; for once it seemed an advantage that Ed had never been the sort to buy necklaces and bracelets for her birthday or their anniversary. The degenerates had pinched Ed’s stereo, that was true, but he’d needed a new one for years, and this was an excuse for her to buy one for him. She was angry too at the Orlandos, who’d been home at the time. She couldn’t imagine how they hadn’t heard anything, or done anything if they’d heard. What kept her awake some nights, though, fantasizing about revenge, was the fact that they’d taken Mr. Kehoe’s clarinet from the bedroom closet. What could they possibly have wanted with a clarinet? How valuable could such a thing have been on the secondhand market? There was no way they were keeping it for themselves, because the swine wouldn’t know what to do with such a delicate instrument. She pictured them back in their sty of an apartment, surveying their loot, sniffing it, looking at the clarinet’s pieces in stupefaction and dropping them into a garbage can.
She couldn’t blame everything on the latest waves of immigration. Her immediate neighbors had been there longer than she had and both had fallen on tough times. Both houses used to look respectable, if a little dull, with dingy lace curtains in the windows and bleached paint on the trim, but now a rusted-out car sat on blocks in the Palumbos’ backyard, next to a rain-filled drum, and Gene Cooney’s house was under permanent construction, with ugly scaffolding marring the facade and a garden box full of crabgrass and construction debris. Gene stalked the perimeter all day with an edgy intensity, wearing a tool belt around his waist. Wild rumors had sprung up about him and his family, spread by newer residents. He was said to be an IRA arms smuggler lying low. There were whispers about his daughter, who wore short skirts and fishnet stockings and kept nocturnal hours. Eileen knew the truth: he’d gone off the rails after his wife had been killed on Northern Boulevard by a hit-and-run driver, and his daughter wasn’t a prostitute but a girl who had fallen victim to the fashions of the Hispanics she’d grown up around—though one could be forgiven for confusing some of them with hookers.
When she’d first moved onto the block, the garden boxes in front of the houses were lush with flowers in bloom and respectable attempts at horticulture, but many had since returned to the wild, with giant weeds poking up over their walls. She was committed to making hers an oasis against decay, although she hadn’t inherited her father’s sympathy with all manner of vegetable life. Angelo had helped her keep things alive, and she’d picked up a bit of knowledge working alongside him, but ever since his third heart attack had killed him a few years back, she was constantly buying new plants to replace the ones that wilted in the middle of the night.
She overspent on furniture. She had the rugs cleaned and the walls painted every two years. She’d found a beautiful crystal chandelier on sale on the Bowery. The house wasn’t fancy, but it had a certain luster. The one thing she couldn’t escape was the sound of the Orlandos’ footsteps above her. The fact that she owned the whole building didn’t make it any more pleasant to hear them.
Ed was seated at the table as she fixed the tea. His back was to her, possessed of that solidity that so delighted her the first time she put her arms around him. Now she wanted to pound on it. He was hunched over and rubbing his temples. She put a hand on his shoulder and he flinched at her touch. She thought, Who the hell does he think I am?
She considered flinging herself on him before he could get the headphones plugged in. She thought of ripping the plug out once he’d settled into his pillow and filling the room with sound, screaming over the music the invectives she’d held in. But she didn’t do that. She sat in the armchair and read a book until she headed to bed.
She wondered whether she was being hard on her husband. He had, after all, more than earned a rest after teaching for so many years. She hadn’t heard anything from Connell yet about it, and she expected that the boy, who was becoming a more sullen presence in the house as he slunk into adolescence, would be oblivious enough to his father’s new routines to allow her to conclude that it was all in her head.
Connell noticed, though. “So what’s with all the record listening?” he asked one night, snapping his gum in that insouciant way that usually annoyed her. Now she saw that the attitude gave him the courage to speak.
Ed looked up but didn’t respond.
“What’s up with the headphones?” he asked again, stepping closer to his father.
Given the strange way Ed had been behaving lately, she thought he might fly into a rage, but he simply took the headphones off.
“I’m listening to opera.”
“You listen to it all the time now.”
“I decided I didn’t want to die not having heard all these masterpieces. Verdi. Rossini. Puccini.”
“Who’s dying? You’ve got plenty of time.”
“There’s no time like the present,” Ed said.
“You don’t have to use those,” Connell said, pointing to the headphones.
“I don’t want to disturb anyone.”
“You don’t think you’re disturbing anyone this way?”
Another night, when she picked him up from track practice, Connell asked her in the car if his father was unhappy.
“I wouldn’t say that,” she said. “I think he’s quite happy.”
“He always says, ‘You have to decide in life. You deliberate awhile, you think of all the possibilities on both sides, and then you make a decision and stick to it.’”
She’d never heard this particular line of reasoning from Ed. This must’ve been one of those things he and the boy talked about when she wasn’t around. She could almost feel her ears pricking up.
“Like with girls. He says, ‘When you’re getting married, you make a decision and that’s it. Things aren’t always perfect, but you work at them. The important thing is that you decided.’”
Her stomach tightened.
“But what I don’t get is, if it’s such a chore, if you’re talking about having to stick to it because you decided it, why do people do it in the first place?”
“They do it because they’re in love,” she said defensively. “Your father and I were in love. Are in love.”
“I know,” he said.
It occurred to her that perhaps he didn’t know. Overt affection had always been uncomfortable for her, but in front of the boy it felt impossible. Ed used to squeeze and kiss her when Connell was a baby, but she would wriggle out of it. Certainly she didn’t reach for him herself, but he knew when they married that he’d have to take the lead. She wasn’t like the women a few years younger who wore miniskirts. What she offered instead was the negotiated submission of her fierce independence. She was different in bed with him than she was anywhere else, but this wasn’t something her son could have any idea about.
“Your father is happy,” she said. “He’s just getting older, is all. You’ll understand someday. The same exact thing will happen to you.”
It didn’t feel like the best explanation, but it must’ve been good enough, because the boy was silent for the rest of the ride.
16 (#ulink_3bd2fdc6-8631-532d-b6b0-9188f003c033)
His father was always on the couch now, but that morning he came to Connell’s room and told him he wanted to take him to the batting cages. They drove to the usual place, off the Grand Central Parkway, in back of a mini-mall.
Connell picked out the least dinged-up bat from the rack and tried to find a helmet that fit. His father came back from the concession stand with a handful of coins for the machines. Connell headed for the machine labeled Very Fast. He put the sweaty, smelly helmet on and pulled his batting glove onto his right hand. He took his position in the left-handed batter’s box and dropped the coin in. The light came on on the machine, and then nothing happened for a while, until a ball shot out and thumped against the rubber backstop. Connell watched another one pass and wondered if he was going to be able to hit any of them. They were easily over eighty miles an hour, though they weren’t the ninety miles an hour they were presented as.
The next pitch came and Connell timed his swing a little too late and the ball smacked behind him with a fearsome thwack. The next pitch he foul-tipped, and the one after that he hit a tiny grounder on, and then the next one he sent on a line drive right back at the machine. It would have been a sure out, but it was nice to hit it with authority. His father let out a cheer behind him, and Connell promptly overswung on the next pitch, caught the handle on the ball and felt a stinging, ringing sensation in his hands and hopped in place, then swung through the next pitch entirely.
“Settle down, son,” his father said. “You can hit these. Find the rhythm.”
The next pitch, which he foul-tipped, was the last, and he stopped and put the bat between his legs and adjusted his batting glove. There wasn’t a line forming behind him, so he could take his time. Balls pinged off bats in nearby cages and banged off piping or died in the nets. His father had his hands on the netting and was leaning against it.
“You ready?”
“Yeah.”
“Go get ’em.”
He put a coin in and took his stance. The first pitch buzzed past him and slammed into the backstop.
“Eye on the ball,” his father said. “Watch it into the catcher’s mitt. Watch this one. Don’t swing.”
He watched it zoom by.
“Now time it. It’s coming again just like that. Same spot. This is all timing.”
He took a big hack and fouled it off. He was getting tired quickly.
“Shorten your swing,” his father said. “Just try to make contact.”
He took another cut, a less vicious one, more controlled, and drilled it into what would have been the outfield. He did it again with the next pitch, and the one after that. The ball coming off the bat sounded like a melon getting crushed. The whole place smelled like burning rubber.
When the coins ran out, he held the bat out to his father. “You want to get in here?”
“No,” his father said. “You have fun.”
“I don’t mind.”
“I don’t think I could hit a single pitch.”
“Sure you could. You’re selling yourself short.”
“My best days are behind me,” his father said.
“Why don’t you take a few hacks? Come on, Dad. Just one coin.”
“Fine,” his father said. “But you can’t laugh at me when I look like a scarecrow in there.”
His father came into the cage and took the helmet from him. He took the bat, refused the batting glove. He was in a plaid, button-down shirt and jeans that fit him snugly, and Connell thought that he actually did look a little like a scarecrow. His glasses stuck out from the helmet like laboratory goggles. Connell stepped out of the cage and positioned himself where his father had been standing. His father dropped the coin in and took his place in the batter’s box, the lefty side, Connell’s side.
The first pitch slammed into the backstop. The next one did as well. His father had the bat on his shoulder. The next pitch came crashing in too.
“Aren’t you going to swing?”
“I’m getting the timing,” his father said.
The next pitch landed with a thud, and the following one went a little high and came at Connell. His father didn’t offer at any of them.
“You have to swing sometime,” Connell said. “Only three left.”
“I’m watching the ball into the glove,” he said. “I’m waiting for my pitch.”
“Two left.”
“Okay,” his father said.
“Dad. You can’t just stand there.”
The last pitch came and his father took a vicious cut at it. The ball shot off like cannon fire and the bat came around to rest on his father’s back in textbook form, Splendid Splinter form. The ball would have kept rising if it hadn’t been arrested by the distant net, which it sank into at an impressive depth.
“Wow!”
“Not bad,” his father said. “I think I’m going to quit while I’m ahead.”
Connell went in and took the helmet and bat from his father, who looked tired, as if he’d been swinging for half an hour. He dropped the coin in and found the spot in the batter’s box. His father’s hit must have freed his confidence up, because he made solid contact on all but one of his swings, and then he put another coin in and started attacking the ball, crushing line drives.
“Attaboy,” his father said.
He hit until he was tired, and they drove to the diner they liked to go to after the cages. Connell ordered a cheeseburger and his father ordered a tuna melt. They shared a chocolate shake. Connell drained his half and his father handed him his own to drink.
“That’s okay, Dad.”
“You drink it,” his father said.
The food came and his father didn’t really eat. Instead he seemed to be looking interestedly at Connell.
“What’s up?” Connell asked.
“I used to love to watch you eat. I still do, I guess.”
“Why?”
“When you were a baby, maybe two years old, you used to put a handful of food in your mouth and push it in with your palm. Like this.” His father put his hand up to his mouth to show him. ‘More meatballs!’ you used to say. Your face would be covered in sauce. ‘More meatballs.’ You had this determined expression, like nothing was more important in the world.” He was chuckling. “And you ate fast! And a lot. You used to ask for more. ‘All gone!’ you said. I used to love to watch you eat. I guess it was instinct. I knew you would survive if you ate. But part of it was just the pleasure you took in it. A grilled cheese sandwich cut into little squares. That was the whole world for you then. You getting it into your mouth was the only thing that mattered. You couldn’t eat it fast enough.”
His father was making him nervous watching him. He hadn’t eaten any of his sandwich.
“You going to sit there and watch me the whole time?”
“No, I’m eating.”
His father took a couple of bites. Connell called for more water and ketchup.
“I wish I could explain it to you,” his father said after a while.
“What?”
“What it’s like to have you. What it’s like to have a son.”
“You going to eat those fries?”
“They’re all yours,” his father said. Connell took some. “Eat as many as you like.” His father slid the plate toward him. “Eat up.”
17 (#ulink_a6bcb1d4-bb9d-5e39-99e2-2598312904ac)
She decided to scrap the intimate dinner they’d agreed upon for his fiftieth birthday and throw a full-scale surprise party instead. One thing it couldn’t fail to do was get him off the couch for a night, but she wanted more than that: she wanted to wake him up, set him on the course to recovering his lost enthusiasm. He’d spent so much time alone lately that it would be good for him to be forced to mix with others.
Until she was drawing up the list for the party, she’d never noticed how weighted toward her side their social group was. So many of the friends they’d lost touch with were Ed’s. When she considered her friends’ husbands, she saw the same thing—a withdrawal, a ceding of the social calendar to the wife. It was her responsibility to ensure that her husband didn’t get domesticated entirely. She would go beyond the usual crowd. She decided to track down some of the guys who were his regular buddies when they first got married and reach out to the cousins he never saw. She would remind him how much there was to look forward to.
She gave her garden box a full makeover, even though she knew the early-March chill would kill everything right after the party.
As she finished patting the soil down around a rosebush, a car zoomed past at a murderous clip bound for Northern Boulevard, salsa music pounding from its four-corner speakers. If she were a man she would have spat in disgust. She hated the driver; she hated the drug cartel he likely worked for; she hated worrying that people taking the train to the party might run into some kind of trouble. God forbid any of them got propositioned by the prostitutes that had begun to walk Roosevelt Avenue. One of them had approached Ed while Eileen and he were coming off the stairs holding hands.
She hoped that the NCB executives she’d invited wouldn’t judge her for her current situation. Her career depended on their seeing her as the kind of person who belonged in their midst. How could she ever explain to them the way Jackson Heights used to be?
She didn’t think of herself as racist. She was proud of her record of coming to the aid of black nurses who’d been unjustly targeted by superiors. She enjoyed an easy rapport with the security guards at NCB, most of whom were black.
She loved to tell the story of her father’s stepping forward to drive with Mr. Washington when no one else would. She also enjoyed recounting the tale of how, when none of the old Irish guard would shop at the Chinese grocer up the block, and the new store was on the verge of failure, her father had paid the man a visit to take his measure. Satisfied that the man, Mr. Liu, was a hard worker and an honest proprietor, her father had stood for a few evenings on the corner near the grocer with the suspect vegetables and stopped people and said, “Go spend some money at the chink son of a bitch’s place,” and they’d listened. Now the whole of Woodside was Chinese grocers. She wondered if the newer generation would do for an Irish immigrant looking to make an honest living the same thing her father had done for one of their own years before. She wondered if some of the black nurses she’d helped along the way would lift a finger for a white woman in need. She’d watched the Bronx spiral downward over the years, and she hadn’t flinched. The security guards marveled at her driving into the neighborhood alone every day. They never let her walk to her car unescorted at night.
No, she couldn’t be called racist. That didn’t mean she had to like what they were doing to her neighborhood. They were making it into a war zone.
The day of the party, her house had never seemed so small. An hour before Ed was supposed to arrive, there was barely room to pass in the halls; she had to ask her cousin Pat to carry a side table down to the basement. Still, as soon as people began assembling in the kitchen, she felt their presence as a kind of armor around her. She tended to the ham and the broccoli casserole in the stove and the separate duty of each pot on the stovetop. She had made nothing to offend anyone’s palate, and so she presented it without anxiety. When the caterer arrived with trays containing more food than could possibly get eaten, she told herself it was safe to begin to relax.
When Connell called from a pay phone and said they were ten minutes away, she was surprised to find herself seized by terror. She passed the news to the living room, which filled with that clamor particular to a crowd silencing itself. A quiet grew louder than the din that had preceded it; she could almost hear her pulse in its murky depths. She moved through the wall of people to be near enough for him to see her when he entered.
As Ed stepped into the room, Eileen closed her eyes, obeying a strange compulsion not to look at his face. A frenzied chorus rang out around her. When she opened her eyes, she saw him beaming and being passed from person to person, shouting as he encountered every new face—shouts like war whoops that could have been either exultant or lunatic. He was red with excitement, and sweat was gathering on him. As she moved close to hug him, she heard him whoop the way he had for the others, as though he hadn’t seen her in years. His whoops went on; they wouldn’t die down. He greeted each successive person with the same ecstatic disbelief.
She was afraid to leave him, afraid to stay. She saw him engulfed in friends’ arms and ducked into the kitchen to get him a drink. When she returned he was miming his own shock for them over and over. She didn’t want anyone else to notice the unconvincing mirth in his performance. She shouted to Connell to cue the stereo. Ed was ushered into the dining room. In the mirror she tried to look at other people’s reactions but was inexorably drawn back to her husband’s expressions. When he saw his brother Phil in from Toronto, he let out a howl that sounded like that of a dying animal. She reached for a tray of hors d’oeuvres to pass. The food smells were mingling successfully; no trace of dust came off any surface she touched; nothing was out of place. The only messes were the ones guests were making themselves—someone bumped into the punch bowl and sent a couple of crystal mugs crashing to the floor—and for those she had great patience.
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Matthew Thomas
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Eileen Leary wants more. Raised in a downtrodden area of new York by hard-drinking, Irish immigrant parents, she dreams of another life: a better job, a bigger house, more respectable friends, a happy family. When she meets Ed Leary, a brilliant young scientist, she thinks she’s found the perfect partner to pursue and share her American Dream with. An indefatigable love enters Eileen’s life – but so too does a pervasive darkness and a loss that will last a lifetime.