Brooklyn

Part Three

In January, Eilis felt the fierce sharp cold in the mornings as she went to work. No matter how fast she walked, and even when she bought thick socks, her feet felt frozen by the time she arrived at Bartocci's. Everyone in the streets was covered up as though afraid to show themselves, wearing thick coats, scarves, hats, gloves and boots. She noticed that they even covered their mouths and noses with thick scarves or mufflers as they moved along. All she could see was their eyes, and the expression seemed alarmed by the cold, made desperate by the wind and the freezing temperatures. At the end of the lectures in the evening, the students huddled in the hallway of the college, putting on layer after layer of clothes as a defence against the cold night. It was, she thought, like a preparation for a strange play, with all of them trying on costumes, their gestures slow and deliberate, looks of blank determination on their faces. It appeared impossible to imagine a time when it was not cold and she could walk these streets thinking about something other than the warm hallway of Mrs. Kehoe's house, the warm kitchen and her own warm bedroom.

One evening, as she was about to go upstairs to bed, Eilis saw Mrs. Kehoe standing in the doorway of her own sitting room, hovering there in the shadows as though afraid to be seen. She beckoned to Eilis without speaking, motioned her into the room and then quietly closed the door. Even as she crossed the room and sat in the armchair by the fire, indicating to Eilis that she should sit in the armchair opposite, she said nothing. The look on her face was grave as she put her right hand out and lowered it, suggesting to Eilis that if she were to speak her voice should not be loud.

"Now," she said and looked into the fire, which was burning brightly in the grate, before placing a log and then another on the flames. "Not a word that you ever even came in here? Promise?"

Eilis nodded.

"The truth is that Miss Keegan is departing and the sooner the better as far as I'm concerned. I have her sworn not to say a word to anyone. She's very West of Ireland and they're better at saying nothing than we are. So it suits her because she doesn't have to say any farewells. She'll be gone on Monday and I want you to move into her room in the basement. It's not damp now so don't look at me like that."

"I'm not looking at you," Eilis said.

"Well, don't."

Mrs. Kehoe studied the fire for a moment and then the floor.

"It's the best room in the house, the biggest, the warmest, the quietest and the best-appointed. And I don't want any discussion about it. You are getting it and that's that. So if you pack your things on Sunday, on Monday when you're at work I'll have them moved down, and that'll be the end of it. You'll need a key for down below because you have your own entrance, which you share with Miss Montini, but of course even if you lose the key, there's still the stairs between the basement and this floor so don't look so worried."

"Will the others not mind that I'm getting the room?" Eilis asked.

"They will," Mrs. Kehoe said and smiled at her. She then looked into the fire, nodding her head in satisfaction. She raised her head and gazed bravely at Eilis. It took Eilis a moment to realize that this was a signal from Mrs. Kehoe that she should leave. She stood up quietly as Mrs. Kehoe once more stretched out her right hand to make clear that Eilis should not make a sound.

It struck Eilis, as she made her way up the stairs to her bedroom, that the basement room could, in fact, be damp and small. She had never heard anyone say before that it was the best room in the house. She wondered if all this secrecy was not merely a way of landing her there without giving her a chance to see where she was going or make any protest. She would have to wait, she realized, until she came back from her classes on Monday night.

Over the next few days she began to dread the move and resent the idea of Mrs. Kehoe moving her cases when she was out of the house and putting them into a place from which Miss Keegan emerged daily in a state that did not seem to Eilis to suggest that she had the best room in the house. She realized also that she could not appeal to Father Flood were the room dingy or dark or damp. She had used up enough of his sympathy and she knew that Mrs. Kehoe was fully aware of this.

On the Sunday, as she packed her cases and left them by the bed, finding that she had acquired more belongings than she could fit into them and having to go downstairs and quietly ask Mrs. Kehoe for some carrier bags, she felt that Mrs. Kehoe had taken advantage of her, and she found herself suffering the beginnings of the terrible homesickness she had gone through before. That night, she did not sleep.

In the morning there was a biting wind that was new to her. It seemed to blow fiercely in every direction; it carried ice with it and people moved in the streets with their heads bowed, some of them dancing up and down with the cold as they waited to cross the street. It made her almost smile at the idea that no one in Ireland knew that America was the coldest place on earth and its people on a cold morning like this the most deeply miserable. They would not believe it if she put it in a letter. All day in Bartocci's people roared at anyone who left the door open for a second longer than necessary and there was a brisk trade in heavy woollen underwear, even more than usual.

That evening as she took notes during the lectures Eilis was struggling so hard to stay awake that she put no thought into what she would find when she returned to Mrs. Kehoe's and, when walking home from the trolley-car, decided she did not care what her new room was like as long as it was warm and had a bed where she could sleep. The night was still, the wind having died down, and there was a dryness and a punishing intensity in how the icy air bit into her toes and fingers and hurt the skin on her face and made her pray that this journey by foot would end even when she knew that she was only halfway there.

As soon as she had opened the front door Mrs. Kehoe appeared in the hallway and put her fingers to her lips. She motioned for Eilis to wait, returned a moment later and, having checked that no one was coming into the hallway from the kitchen, handed Eilis a key; she then directed her back out into the night, closing the front door softly behind her. Eilis walked down the steps to the basement. By the time she had opened the door Mrs. Kehoe was already waiting for her.

"Don't make a sound," she whispered.

She opened the door that led into the front room of the basement, the room recently vacated by Miss Keegan. A standard lamp in the corner and a lamp by a bedside table were already lit, and these, with the low ceiling and the dark velvet curtains and the richly patterned bedspread and the rugs on the floor, made the room seem luxurious, like something from a painting or an old photograph. Eilis noticed a rocking chair in the corner and saw that there were logs in the fireplace and paper under them waiting to be lit. The room was twice the size of her old bedroom; it also had a desk where she could study and an easy chair on the other side of the hearth to the rocking chair. It had none of the functional, almost Spartan aura of the room she had slept in until now. She knew that all of her fellow lodgers would have wanted this room.

"If any of them ask you, just say that your own room is being decorated," Mrs. Kehoe said as she opened a large built-in closet whose wood was stained a dark reddish colour, to show Eilis where the suitcases and bags were. Because of the way Mrs. Kehoe stood watching her, her gaze proud but almost soft and sad as well, it struck Eilis that this room might have been created in the time before Mr. Kehoe left home. As she looked at the double bed she wondered if this had been their bedroom. She wondered if they had rented out the rooms on the upper floors.

"The bathroom is at the end of the corridor," Mrs. Kehoe said. She stood in the shadowy room uneasily, as though she were trying to regain her composure.

"And say nothing to anyone," she added. "You can never go wrong if you follow that policy to the letter."

"The room is lovely," Eilis said.

"And you can light a fire," Mrs. Kehoe said. "But Miss Keegan only ever did on Sundays because it eats wood. I don't know why."

"Will the others not be raging?" Eilis asked.

"It's my house so they can rage all they like, the more the merrier."

"But-"

"You are the only one of them with any manners."

Mrs. Kehoe's tone, as she tried to smile, caused, Eilis felt, a sadness to come into the room. She believed that Mrs. Kehoe was giving her too much without knowing her well enough and just now had also said too much. She did not want Mrs. Kehoe to become close to her or come to depend on her in any way. Eilis left silence for a few moments, even though she knew that this might make her seem ungrateful. She nodded almost formally at Mrs. Kehoe.

"When will the others know that I am here for good?" she asked eventually.

"In their own good time. It's none of their business anyway."

As she took in the implications of what Mrs. Kehoe had done and the trouble it was now likely to cause her with her fellow lodgers, Eilis wished she had been left alone in her old bedroom.

"I hope they won't blame me."

"Pay no attention to any of them. I don't think either of us needs to lose a night's sleep over them."

Eilis stood up straight, attempting to make herself taller, and stared coldly at Mrs. Kehoe. It was clear to her that her landlady's last remark carried with it the firm idea that she and Eilis stood apart from the other lodgers and were prepared to intimate to them that they had conspired in this. Eilis believed that this was a piece of gross presumption on Mrs. Kehoe's part but also that the decision to give her, the most recently arrived, the best room in the house not only would cause bitterness and difficulty between herself and Patty, Diana, Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan but would come to mean, in time, that Mrs. Kehoe herself would feel free to call in the favour she had done her.

She could, Eilis saw, do this if she needed something urgently, or allow it to cause a familiarity in their relationship, a sort of friendship or close connection. As they stood in the room, Eilis felt almost angry with Mrs. Kehoe, and this feeling, mixed with tiredness, seemed to give her courage.

"It's always better to be honest," she said, imitating Rose when Rose found her dignity or sense of propriety challenged in any way. "I mean with everybody," she added.

"When you've gone through the world like I have," Mrs. Kehoe replied, "you'll find that that only works some of the time."

Eilis looked at her landlady, not flinching at the wounded aggression in the way her look was returned. She was determined not to speak again, no matter what Mrs. Kehoe said. She felt the older woman's irritation directed against her as though she had betrayed her in some incalculable way, until she realized that giving her this room, the act of generosity, had released something in Mrs. Kehoe, some deep resentment against the world, that Mrs. Kehoe was now putting carefully back in its place.

"The bathroom as I said is down the corridor," she finally said. "And I'm leaving the key here."

She put the key on a side table and left the room, banging the door so that the whole house would hear her.

Eilis wondered if the others would ever believe her if she told them that she had not asked for the room. She avoided the kitchen at breakfast-time and, on meeting Diana at the bathroom door on the second morning, rushed by her without saying a word. She knew, however, that when the weekend came it would be impossible to avoid a discussion with the others. Thus on the Friday evening, when Mrs. Kehoe had left the kitchen, and Miss McAdam said that she would like to speak to her alone, Eilis was not surprised. Under Miss McAdam's watchful gaze, as though she were a prisoner on parole who might try to abscond, she lingered in the kitchen after all the others had gone.

"I suppose you heard what happened," Miss McAdam said to her.

Eilis tried to look blank.

"You had better sit down."

Miss McAdam moved over to the kettle as it began to boil and she filled the teapot before she spoke again.

"Do you know why Miss Keegan left?" she asked.

"Why should I know?"

"So you don't know? I thought so. Well, that Kehoe woman knows and all the others know."

"Where has Miss Keegan gone? Was she in trouble?"

"To Long Island. And for good reasons."

"What happened?"

"She was followed home." Miss McAdam's eyes seemed to glitter with excitement as she spoke. She poured the tea slowly.

"Followed?"

"Not one night but two, or maybe more for all I know."

"You mean followed to this house?"

"That's exactly what I mean."

Miss McAdam sipped her tea while looking at Eilis sharply all the time.

"Who followed her?"

"A man."

As Eilis put milk and sugar into her tea, she remembered something that her mother always said.

"But sure if a man ran off with Miss Keegan, he'd drop her the minute he got to the first lamp-post and he could see her clearly."

"But it wasn't an ordinary man."

"What do you mean?"

"The last time he followed her he exposed himself to her. He was that sort of man."

"Who told you this?"

"Miss Keegan spoke to Miss Heffernan and myself privately before she left. She was followed to the very door of this house. And as she walked down the steps, the man exposed himself."

"Did she call the police?"

"She certainly did, and then she packed her bags. She thinks she knows where the man lives. And he followed her before."

"Did she tell the police all of this?"

"Yes, but there is nothing they can do unless she is ready to identify him and she isn't ready to do that. So she packed her bags. And she's moved in with her brother and his wife in Long Island. And then, to make matters worse, the Kehoe woman wanted to move me down to Miss Keegan's room. She went on about it being the best room in the house. I put her in her place. And Miss Heffernan is in a terrible state. And Diana has refused to stay in the basement on her own. So she put you down there because none of the others would go."

Eilis noticed how pleased with herself Miss McAdam seemed. As she watched the older woman sipping her tea, it occurred to Eilis that this could easily be her revenge on Eilis and Mrs. Kehoe over the room. On the other hand, she reckoned, it could be true. Mrs. Kehoe could have used her, the only lodger who did not seem to know why Miss Keegan had left. But then she thought that Mrs. Kehoe could not have been sure in the days before she moved her to the basement that Eilis would not find out. The more she watched Miss McAdam, the more she was convinced that if she was not inventing the story of the man who exposed himself, then she was exaggerating it. She wondered if Miss McAdam had been encouraged to do this by the other lodgers or if she were doing it alone.

"It's a lovely room," Eilis said.

"Lovely it may be," Miss McAdam replied. "And you know we all wanted that room when Miss Keegan got it, all the better to stop that Kehoe woman snooping around you every time you came in the door. But I wouldn't want to be down there now with the light on for all to see. Maybe I shouldn't say any more."

"Say what you like."

"Well, for someone who walks home alone at night, you seem very calm."

"If anyone exposes himself to me, you'll be the first to know."

"If I am still here," Miss McAdam said. "It might be Long Island for us all."

In the days that followed, Eilis could not make her mind up about what Miss McAdam had told her. At meals in the kitchen with the rest of the lodgers she veered from believing that all of them had conspired to frighten her in revenge for her being installed in Miss Keegan's room to believing that Mrs. Kehoe had placed her there not because she favoured her but because she thought she was the least likely to protest. She studied their faces as they addressed her, but nothing became clear. She wanted to allow for the possibility that everyone's motives were good, but it was unlikely, she thought, unlikely that Mrs. Kehoe had genuinely given her the room out of pure generosity and unlikely also that Miss McAdam and the others really did not mind this and had merely wanted to warn her about the man who had followed Miss Keegan so that she would be careful. She wished she had a real friend among the lodgers whom she could consult. And she wondered then if she herself were the problem, reading malice into motives when there was none intended. If she woke in the night, or found time going slowly at work, she went over it all again, blaming Mrs. Kehoe one moment, Miss McAdam and her fellow lodgers the next, and then blaming herself, eventually coming to no conclusion except that it would be best if she stopped thinking about it altogether.

The following Sunday, Father Flood announced that the parish hall was now ready to run dances to raise funds for charities in the parish, that he had procured Pat Sullivan's Harp and Shamrock Orchestra and that he would ask the parishioners to spread the word that the first dance would be held on the last Friday of January and then every Friday night after that until further notice.

When Mrs. Kehoe came briefly into the kitchen that evening, having left her poker session, and sat at the table, the lodgers were discussing the dance.

"I hope Father Flood knows what he's doing," Mrs. Kehoe said. "They ran a dance in that selfsame parish hall after the war and they had to close it because of immorality. Some of the Italians started to come looking for Irish girls."

"Well, I don't see what's wrong with that," Diana said. "My father is Italian and I think he met my mother at a dance."

"I'm sure he is very nice," Mrs. Kehoe said, "but after the war some of the Italians were very forward."

"They're lovely-looking," Patty said.

"Be that as it may," Mrs. Kehoe said, "and I'm sure some of them are lovely and all, but from what I heard great care should be taken with many of them. But that's enough about Italians. It might be better for us all if we changed the subject."

"I hope there's not going to be Irish dancing," Patty said.

"Pat Sullivan's band are lovely," Sheila Heffernan said. "They can do everything from Irish tunes to waltzes and foxtrots and American tunes."

"That's good for them," Patty said, "as long as I can sit it out for the céilí stuff. God, it should be abolished. In this day and age!"

"If you're not lucky," Miss McAdam said, "you'll be sitting down all night, unless of course it's ladies' choice."

"That's enough about the dance," Mrs. Kehoe said. "I shouldn't have come into the kitchen at all. Just be careful. That's all I have to say. You have your whole life ahead of you."

Over the next while, as the night of the dance approached, the house broke into two factions: the first, which consisted of Patty and Diana, wanted Eilis to come with them to a restaurant where they would meet other people going to the dance, but the others-Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan-insisted that the restaurant in question was really a saloon bar and that the people who would gather there often were not sober or indeed decent. They wanted Eilis to go with them directly from Mrs. Kehoe's house to the parish hall only as a way of supporting a good cause and to leave as early as was polite.

"One of the things I don't miss about Ireland is the cattle mart on a Friday and Saturday night, and I'd be happy to stay single rather than have half-drunk fellows with terrible hair oil pushing me around."

"Where I'm from," Miss McAdam said, "we didn't go out at all and none of us were any the worse for it."

"And how did you meet fellows?" Diana asked.

"Will you look at her?" Patty interjected. "She's never met a fellow in her life."

"Well, when I do," Miss McAdam said, "it will not be in a saloon bar."

In the end Eilis waited at home with Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan and they did not set out for the parish hall until after ten o'clock. She noticed that both of them were carrying high-heeled shoes in their bags that they would change into once they arrived. Both, she saw, had backcombed their hair and were wearing make-up and lipstick. When she saw them first she was afraid that she herself would look dowdy beside them; she felt uncomfortable at spending the rest of the evening, no matter how short their stay in the parish hall, in their company. They seemed to have made so much effort, whereas she had merely tidied herself and put on the only good dress that she owned and a brand-new pair of nylon stockings. She decided, as they walked to the hall through the freezing night, that she would look carefully at what other women were wearing at the dance and make sure the next time that she did not look too plain.

As they approached she felt nothing but dread and wished she could have found an excuse to stay at home. Patty and Diana had laughed so much before they left, running up and down the stairs, forcing the others to admire them as they travelled from floor to floor of the house, even knocking on Mrs. Kehoe's door before they finally departed so that she could see them. Eilis was glad she had not gone with them, but now, in the strange tense silence that developed between Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan as they entered the hall, she felt their nervousness and was sorry for them and sorry too that she would have to stay with them for the evening and leave when they wanted to.

The hall was almost empty; once they had paid they went to the ladies' cloakroom, where Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan checked themselves in the mirrors and applied more make-up and lipstick, offering Eilis lipstick and mascara as well. As all three looked in the mirror, Eilis realized that her hair looked terrible. Even if she were never to go to a dance again, she thought, she would have to do something about it. Her dress, which Rose had helped her to buy, also looked terrible. Since she had some money saved, she thought that she should buy some new clothes, but she knew that she would never easily be able to do so alone and that her two companions would be as little use to her as Patty and Diana. The first pair were too formal and stiff in their attire and the second too modern and loud. She determined that once her exams were over in May she would spend time looking at stores and prices and trying to work out what sort of American clothes would suit her best.

When they walked out into the hall and across the bare boards to sit on benches on the opposite side, passing a number of middle-aged couples waltzing to the music, they saw Father Flood, who came and shook hands with them.

"We're expecting a crowd," he said. "But they never come when you want them."

"Oh, we know where they are," Miss McAdam said. "Getting Dutch courage."

"Ah, well, it's Friday night, I suppose."

"I hope they won't be drunk," Miss McAdam said.

"Oh, we have good men on the door. And we hope it will be a good night."

"If you opened a bar you'd make a fortune," Sheila Heffernan said.

"Don't think I haven't thought of it," Father Flood replied and rubbed his hands together, laughing as he moved away from them, crossing the dance floor towards the main entrance.

Eilis looked at the musicians. There was a man with an accordion who seemed very sad and wistful as he played the slow waltz and a younger man playing the drums and an older man at the back with a double bass. She noticed some brass instruments on stage and a microphone set up for a singer, so she presumed that when the hall filled there would be more musicians.

Sheila Heffernan fetched a lemon soda for each of them and they quietly sipped their drinks and sat on the bench as the hall filled up. There was still no sign, however, of Patty and Diana and their group.

"They probably found a better dance somewhere else," Sheila said.

"It would be too much to expect for them to support their own parish," Miss McAdam added.

"And I heard that some dances on the Manhattan side of the bridge can be very dangerous," Sheila Heffernan said.

"You know, the sooner this is over and I am at home in my own warm bed the happier I'll be," Miss McAdam said.

At first Eilis did not see Patty and Diana but spotted instead a crowd of young people who had come noisily into the hall. A few of the men were dressed in brightly coloured suits with their hair slicked back with oil. One or two were remarkably good-looking, like film stars. Eilis could imagine what they would think of her and her two companions as the new arrivals took in the hall, their gaze shiny, excited, brilliant, full of expectation. And then she saw Diana and Patty among them, both looking radiant, everything about them perfect including their warm smiles.

Eilis would have given anything now to have been with them, dressed like them, to be glamorous herself, too easily distracted by the jokes and smiles of those around her to watch anyone with the same breath-filled intensity as she was watching them. She was afraid to turn to check on Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan; she knew that they might share her feelings, but she was aware also how hard they would try to suggest that they deeply disapproved of the new arrivals. She could not bear to look at her two fellow lodgers, afraid that she would see something of her own gawking unease in their faces, her own sense of being unable to look as though she were enjoying herself.

Once the music changed, no more Irish tunes were performed. The accordion player began to play slow tunes on the saxophone, tunes that most of the dancers seemed to recognize. By now, the hall was full. The dancers moved slowly, and they appeared to Eilis, in how they responded to the music, more elegant than the dancers at home. As the rhythms grew slower, she was surprised at how close some of them danced; some of the women seemed almost wrapped around their partners. She saw Diana and Patty move with confidence and skill and noticed that Diana shut her eyes as she came close to her fellow lodgers, as though she meant to concentrate better on the music and the tall man with whom she was dancing and the pleasure she was taking in the night. Once she had passed, Miss McAdam said she thought it was time for them to go.

As they made their way across the hall to get their coats, Eilis wished they had waited until the set was over so that they might not be seen making such an early departure. As they walked home silently, she did not know how she felt. The tunes the band had played were so soft and beautiful. The way the couples who danced were dressed was to her eyes so fashionable and so right. She knew that it was something she would never be able to do.

"That Diana should be ashamed of herself," Miss McAdam said. "God only knows what time she'll come in at."

"Is that her boyfriend?" Eilis asked.

"Who knows?" Sheila Heffernan said. "She has a different one for every day of the week and two on Sundays."

"He looks lovely," Eilis said. "He was a great dancer."

Neither of her companions replied. Miss McAdam quickened her pace and forced the other two to follow. Eilis was pleased at what she had said even though it was clear that she had annoyed them. She wondered if she could think of something stronger to say so that they might not ask her to accompany them to the dance the following week. Instead, she determined that she would buy something, even just new shoes, which would make her feel more like the girls she had seen dancing. She thought for a moment that she would ask Patty and Diana for advice about clothes and make-up but reasoned that that might be going too far. As Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan barely said goodnight to her when they reached home, she decided that, no matter what, she would never go to a dance with them again.

At work on Monday, Miss Fortini was waiting for her. Eilis thought at first that she had done something wrong, as Miss Fortini asked her and Miss Delano, one of the other sales assistants, to follow her to Miss Bartocci's office. When they entered the room, Miss Bartocci seemed grave as she signalled to them to sit down opposite her.

"There is going to be a big change in the store," she said, "because there is a change going on outside the store. Coloured people are moving into Brooklyn, more and more of them."

As she looked at all of them, Eilis could not tell whether they viewed this as a good thing for business or a piece of ominous news.

"We're going to welcome coloured women into our store as shoppers. And we're starting with nylon stockings. This is going to be the first store on this street to sell Red Fox stockings at cheap prices and soon we're going to add Sepia and Coffee."

"These are colours," Miss Fortini said.

"Coloured women want Red Fox stockings and we are selling them and you two are going to be polite to anyone who comes into this store, coloured or white."

"Both of them are always very polite," Miss Fortini said, "but I'll be watching once the first notice goes in the window."

"We may lose customers," Miss Bartocci interjected, "but we're going to sell to anyone who will buy and at the best prices."

"But the Red Fox stockings will be apart, away from the other normal stockings," Miss Fortini said. "At least at first. And you two will be at that counter, Miss Lacey and Miss Delano, and your job is to pretend that it's no big deal."

"The sign is going in the window this morning," Miss Bartocci added. "And you stand there and smile. Is that agreed?"

Eilis and her companion looked at one another and nodded.

"You probably won't be busy today," Miss Bartocci said, "but we're going to hand leaflets out in the right places and by the end of the week you won't have a moment if we're lucky."

Miss Fortini then led them back to the shop floor, where to the left at a long table men were piling up new packages with nylon stockings that were almost red in colour.

"Why did they choose us?" Miss Delano asked her.

"They must think we are nice," Eilis said.

"You're Irish, that makes you different."

"And what about you?"

"I'm from Brooklyn."

"Well, maybe you are nice."

"Maybe I'm just easy to kick around. Wait until my dad hears about this."

Eilis saw that Miss Delano had perfectly plucked eyebrows. She had an image of her in front of the mirror for hours with a tweezers.

All day they stood at the counter chatting quietly, but no one approached them to look at the red-coloured nylon stockings. It was only the next day that Eilis spotted two middle-aged coloured women coming into the store and being approached by Miss Fortini and directed towards her and Miss Delano. She found herself staring at the two women and then, when she checked herself, looked around the store to find that everyone else was staring at them. The two women were, she saw when she looked at them again, beautifully dressed, both in cream-coloured woollen coats and each chatting casually to the other as though there were nothing unusual about their arrival in the store.

Miss Delano, she observed, stood back as they came close, but Eilis stayed where she was as the two women began to examine the nylon stockings, looking at different sizes. She studied their painted fingernails and then their faces; she was ready to smile at them if they looked at her. But they did not once glance up from the stockings and, even as they selected a number of pairs and handed them to her, they did not catch her eye. She saw Miss Fortini watching her across the store as she added up what they owed and showed it to them. As she was handed the money, she noticed how white the inside of the woman's hand was against the dark skin on the back of her hand. She took the money as busily as she could and put it in the container and sent it to the cash department.

As she waited for the receipt and the change to be returned, her two customers continued talking to each other as though no one else existed. Despite the fact that they were middle-aged, Eilis thought that they were glamorous and had taken great care with their appearance, their hair perfect, their clothes beautiful. She could not tell if either of them was wearing make-up; she could smell perfume but did not know what the scent was. When she handed them the change and the nylon stockings wrapped carefully in brown paper, she thanked them but they did not reply, merely took the change and the receipt and the package and moved elegantly towards the door.

As the week went on more of them came and as each one entered Eilis noticed a change in the atmosphere in the store, a stillness, a watchfulness; no one else appeared to move when these women moved in case they would get in their way; the other assistants would look down and seem busy and then glance up in the direction of the counter where the stockings in Red Fox were heaped before looking down again. Miss Fortini, however, never lifted her eyes from the scene at the counter. Each time the new customers approached, Miss Delano stood back and let Eilis serve them, but if a second set of customers came she moved forward as though it were part of some arrangement. Not once did a coloured woman come into the store alone, and most who came did not look at Eilis or address her directly.

The few who did speak to her used tones of such elaborate politeness that they made her feel awkward and shy. When the new colours of Coffee and Sepia came it was her job to point out to the customers that these were lighter colours but most of them ignored her. By the end of each of these days she felt exhausted and found her lectures in the evening almost relaxing, relieved that there was something to take her mind off the fierce tension in the store, which lay heaviest around her counter. She wished she had not been singled out to stand at this counter and wondered if, in time, she would be moved to another part of the store.

Eilis loved her room, loved putting her books at the table opposite the window when she came in at night and then getting into her pyjamas and the dressing gown she had bought in one of the sales and her warm slippers and spending an hour or more before she went to bed looking over the lecture notes and then rereading the manuals on bookkeeping and accounting she had bought. Her only problem remained the law lectures. She enjoyed watching the gestures that Mr. Rosenblum made and the way he spoke, sometimes acting out an entire case for them, the litigants vividly described even if they were a company, but neither she nor any of the other students she spoke to knew what was expected of them, how this might appear as a question in an examination paper. Since Mr. Rosenblum knew so much she wondered if he might expect all of them to have the same detailed knowledge of cases and what they meant, and precedents, and the judgments, prejudices and peculiarities of individual judges.

It worried her enough to decide to explain to him exactly what her problem was. Just as he spoke quickly in his lectures, moving from one case to another, from what a certain law could mean in theory to how it had been applied up to then, so he disappeared as soon as the lecture was over, as though he had another pressing appointment. Eilis determined to sit in the front row and approach him the very second he had finished speaking, but as it came to the time she was nervous. She hoped that he would not think that she was criticizing him; she also worried that he might begin talking in a way that she would not understand. She had never come across anyone like him before. He reminded her of waiters in some cafés near Fulton Street who had no patience, who needed her to make up her mind about everything there and then and always had a further question for her no matter what she asked for, if she wanted small or large, or if she wanted it heated or with mustard. In Bartocci's she had learned to be brave and decisive with the customers, but once she herself was a customer she knew she was too hesitant and slow.

She would have to approach Mr. Rosenblum. He seemed so clever and he knew so much that she still wondered as she walked towards the podium how he would respond to a simple request. Once she had his attention, however, she found that she had become, without too much effort or hesitation, almost poised.

"Is there a book I could buy that would help me with this part of the course?" she asked.

Mr. Rosenblum appeared puzzled and did not reply.

"Your lectures are interesting," she said, "but I'm worried about the exam."

"You like them?" He seemed younger now than he did when he was addressing all of the students on the law.

"Yes," she said, and smiled. She was surprised at herself, that she had not stammered. She did not think she was even blushing.

"Are you British?" he asked.

"No, Irish."

"All the way from Ireland." He spoke as though to himself.

"I wondered if you could recommend another textbook or a manual that I can study for the exams."

"You look worried."

"I don't know if the notes I'm taking or the books I have are enough."

"You want to read more?"

"I would like to have a book that I could study."

He looked around the lecture hall, which was emptying quickly. He seemed deep in thought, as though the question perplexed him.

"There are some good books on basic corporate law."

She presumed that he was about to give her the names of these books, but he stopped for a moment.

"Do you think I am going too fast?"

"No. I'm just not sure my notes will be enough for the exam."

He opened his briefcase and took out a notepad.

"Are you the only Irish student here?"

"I think so."

She watched him as he wrote a number of titles on a blank sheet of paper.

"There's a special law book store on West Twenty-third Street," he said. "In Manhattan. You'll have to go there to get these."

"And will they be the right books for the exam?"

"Sure. If you know the rudiments of corporate law and tort, then you will get through."

"Is that book store open every day?"

"I think so. You'll have to go and check it out, but I think so."

As she nodded and tried to smile, he appeared even more preoccupied.

"But you can follow the lectures?"

"Of course," she said. "Yes, of course."

He put the notepad into his briefcase and turned away brusquely.

"Thank you," she said, but he did not reply. Instead, he quickly left the hall. The porter was waiting to lock up when she pushed open the lecture-hall doors. She was the last to leave.

She asked Diana and Patty about West Twenty-third Street, showing them the full address. They explained to her that west meant west of Fifth Avenue and that the number she had been given signified that the store was between Sixth and Seventh avenues. They showed her a map, spreading it out on the kitchen table, amazed that Eilis had never been in Manhattan.

"It's wonderful over there," Diana said.

"Fifth Avenue is the most heavenly place," Patty said. "I'd give anything to live there. I'd love to marry a rich man with a mansion on Fifth Avenue."

"Or even a poor man," Diana said, "as long as he had a mansion."

They told her how to take the subway to West Twenty-third Street, and she decided she would go when she had her next half-day free from Bartocci's.

When the prospect of Friday night arose Eilis could not face asking Miss McAdam or Sheila Heffernan if they were going to the dance at the hall and she knew that it would be too disloyal to go with Patty and Diana, and maybe too expensive as well, since they went to a restaurant first and since she would need to buy new clothes to match the style that they were wearing.

On Friday night after work she came to supper with a handkerchief in her hand, warning the others not to come too close in case they caught the chill from her. She blew her nose loudly and sniffled as best she could several times throughout the meal. She did not care whether they believed her or not, but having a cold, she thought, would be the best excuse for her not to go to the dance. She knew as well that it would encourage Mrs. Kehoe to discuss winter ailments, which was one of the landlady's favourite subjects.

"Chilblains, now," she said, "you'd want to be very careful with the chilblains. When I was your age they were the death of me."

"I'd say in that store," Miss McAdam said to Eilis, "you could get all sorts of germs."

"You can get germs in offices as well," Mrs. Kehoe said, taking in Eilis with a glance as she spoke, making clear that she understood Miss McAdam's intention to belittle her because she worked in a store.

"But you'd never know who'd-"

"That's enough now, Miss McAdam," Mrs. Kehoe said. "And maybe it's best early bed for all of us in this cold weather."

"I was just going to say that I heard there are coloured women going into Bartocci's," Miss McAdam said.

For a moment no one spoke.

"I heard that too," Sheila Heffernan said after a while in a low voice.

Eilis looked down at her plate.

"Well, we mightn't like them but the Negro men fought in the overseas war, didn't they?" Mrs. Kehoe asked. "And they were killed just the same as our men. I always say that. No one minded them when they needed them."

"But I wouldn't like-" Miss McAdam began.

"We know what you wouldn't like," Mrs. Kehoe interrupted.

"I wouldn't like to have to serve them in a store," Miss McAdam insisted.

"God, I wouldn't either," Patty said.

"And is it their money you wouldn't like?" Mrs. Kehoe asked.

"They're very nice," Eilis said. "And some of them have beautiful clothes."

"So it's true, then?" Sheila Heffernan asked. "I thought it was a joke. Well, that's it, then. I'll pass Bartocci's, all right, but it'll be on the other side of the street."

Eilis suddenly felt brave. "I'll tell Mr. Bartocci that. He'll be very upset, Sheila. You and your friend here are famous for your style, especially for the ladders in your stockings and the fussy old cardigans you wear."

"That's enough from the whole lot of you," Mrs. Kehoe said. "I intend to eat the rest of my dinner in peace."

By the time silence had descended and Patty had stopped shrieking with laughter, Sheila Heffernan had left the room, but Miss McAdam, white-faced, was staring directly at Eilis.

Eilis could see no difference between Brooklyn and Manhattan when she went there the following Thursday afternoon except that the cold as she walked from the subway seemed more severe and dry and the wind more fierce. She was not sure what exactly she had expected, but glamour certainly, more glamorous shops and better-dressed people and a sense of things less broken-down and dismal than they seemed to her sometimes in Brooklyn.

She had been looking forward to writing to her mother and Rose about her first trip to Manhattan, but she realized now that it would have to join the arrival of coloured customers in Bartocci's or the fight with the other lodgers on the matter; it would be something that she could not mention in a letter home as she did not want to worry them or send them news that might cause them to feel that she could not look after herself. Nor did she want to write them letters that might depress them. Thus as she walked along a street that seemed interminable with dingy shops and poor-looking people, she knew that this would be no use to her when she needed news for her next letter unless, she thought, she made a joke of it, letting them believe that, since Manhattan was no better than Brooklyn, despite everything she had heard, she was missing nothing by not living there and by not planning to go there too soon again.

She found the bookshop easily and was amazed, once she was inside, at the number of law books on sale and the size and weight of some of them. She wondered if in Ireland there were as many law books and if the solicitors in Enniscorthy had immersed themselves in books like this when they were studying. It would, she knew, be a good subject to write to Rose about since Rose played golf with one of the solicitors' wives.

Eilis walked around the store first, studying titles on the shelves, aware now that some of the books were old and maybe second-hand. It was easy for her to imagine Mr. Rosenblum here, browsing, with one or two big books open in front of him, or using the ladder to get something from the higher shelves. When she had mentioned him several times in letters home, Rose replied to ask if he was married. It was hard to explain in return that he seemed to Eilis so full of knowledge and so steeped in the detail of his subject and its intricacies and so serious that it was impossible to imagine him with a wife or children. Rose in her letter had also suggested once more that if Eilis had something private to discuss, something that she did not want their mother to know about, then she could write to Rose at the office and Rose would, she said, make sure that no one else ever saw the letter.

Eilis smiled to herself at the thought that all she had to report was the first dance; and that she had felt free to write to her mother about it, mentioning it only in passing and as a joke. She had nothing private to report to Rose.

She knew, as she browsed, that she would have no hope of finding the three books on her list in the middle of all the other books, so when she was approached by an old man who had come from behind the desk she simply handed him the list and said that these were the books she had come looking for. The man, who was wearing thick glasses, had to raise them onto his forehead so that he could read. He squinted.

"Is this your handwriting?"

"No, it's my lecturer's. He recommended these books."

"Are you a law student?"

"Not really. But it's part of the course."

"What's your lecturer's name?"

"Mr. Rosenblum."

"Joshua Rosenblum?"

"I don't know his first name."

"What are you studying?"

"I'm doing a night course at Brooklyn College."

"That's Joshua Rosenblum. I'd know his writing."

He peered again at the piece of paper and the titles.

"He's clever," the man said.

"Yes, he's very good," she replied.

"Can you imagine…," the man began but turned towards the cash desk before he finished. He was agitated. She followed him slowly.

"You want these books, then?" He spoke almost aggressively.

"Yes, I do."

"Joshua Rosenblum?" the man asked. "Can you imagine a country that would want to kill him?"

Eilis stepped back but did not reply.

"Well, can you?"

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"The Germans killed everyone belonging to him, murdered every one of them, but we got him out, at least we did that, we got Joshua Rosenblum out."

"You mean in the war?"

The man did not reply. He moved across the store and found a small footstool onto which he climbed to fetch a book. As he descended he turned towards her angrily. "Can you imagine a country that would do that? It should be wiped off the face of the earth."

He looked at her bitterly.

"In the war?" she asked again.

"In the holocaust, in the churben."

"But was it in the war?"

"It was, it was in the war," the man replied, the expression on his face suddenly gentle.

As he busied himself finding the other two books, he had a resigned, almost stubborn look; by the time he returned to the counter and prepared the bill for her he had come to seem distant and forbidding. She did not ask him any questions as she handed him the money. He wrapped the books for her and gave her the change. She sensed that he wanted her to leave the shop and there was nothing she could do to make him tell her anything more.

She loved unwrapping the law books and placing them on the table beside the notebooks and her books on accountancy and bookkeeping. When she opened the first of them and looked at it she immediately found it difficult, worrying that she should have bought a dictionary as well so she could check the difficult words. She sat until suppertime going through the introduction, no wiser at the end as to what the "jurisprudence" mentioned at the beginning might be.

That evening at supper, when she had noticed that neither Miss McAdam nor Sheila Heffernan was still speaking to her, Eilis thought of asking Patty and Diana if she could go to the dance with them the following night, or meet them before it somewhere. She did not, she realized, want to go at all but she knew that Father Flood would miss her and, since it would be the second week for her not to be there, he would ask about her. There was another girl at supper that evening, Dolores Grace, who had taken Eilis's old room. She had red hair and freckles and came from Cavan, it emerged, but she was mainly silent and seemed embarrassed to be at the table with them. Eilis learned that this was her third evening among them, but she had missed her at the previous meals because she had been at her lectures.

After supper, as she was settling back down to see if she could follow one of the other two law books any better, a knock came to the door. It was Diana in the company of Miss McAdam, and Eilis thought it was strange to see the two of them together. She stood at her door and did not invite them into her room.

"We need to talk to you," Diana whispered.

"What's up now?" Eilis asked almost impatiently.

"It's that Dolores one," Miss McAdam butted in. "She's a scrubber."

Diana began to laugh and had to put her hand to her mouth.

"She cleans houses," Miss McAdam said. "And she's cleaning for the Kehoe woman here to pay part of her rent. And we don't want her at the table."

Diana let out what was close to a shriek of laughter. "She's awful. She's the limit."

"What do you want me to do?" Eilis asked.

"Refuse to eat with her when the rest of us do. And the Kehoe woman listens to you," Miss McAdam said.

"And where will she eat?"

"Out in the street for all I care," Miss McAdam said.

"We don't want her, none of us," Diana said. "If word got around-"

"That this was a house where people like her were staying-" Miss McAdam continued.

Eilis felt an urge to close the door in their faces and go back to her books.

"We're just letting you know," Diana said.

"She's a scrubber from Cavan," Miss McAdam said as Diana began to laugh again.

"I don't know what you're laughing at," Miss McAdam said, turning to her.

"Oh, God, I'm sorry. It's just awful. No decent fellow will have anything to do with us."

Eilis looked at both of them as though they were nuisance customers in Bartocci's and she was Miss Fortini. Since they both worked in offices, she wondered if they had spoken about her in the same way when she first came because she would be working in a shop. She firmly closed the door in their faces.

In the morning Mrs. Kehoe knocked on the window as Eilis reached the street from the basement. Mrs. Kehoe beckoned her to wait and then appeared at the front door.

"I was wondering if you would do me a special favour," she said.

"Of course I would, Mrs. Kehoe," Eilis said. It was something her mother had taught her to say if anyone asked her to do them a favour.

"Would you take Dolores to the dance in the hall tonight? She's dying to go."

Eilis hesitated. She wished she had guessed in advance that she was going to be asked to do this so she could have a reply prepared.

"All right." She found herself nodding.

"Well, that's great news. I'll tell her to be ready," Mrs. Kehoe said.

Eilis wished she could think of some quick excuse, some reason why she could not go, but she had used a cold the previous week and she knew that she would have to make an appearance at some stage, even if just for a short time.

"I'm not sure how long I'll be staying," she said.

"That's no problem," Mrs. Kehoe said. "No problem at all. She won't want to stay that long either."

Later, after work, when Eilis went upstairs, she found Dolores Grace alone working in the kitchen and made an arrangement to collect her at ten o'clock.

At supper, none of them spoke about the dance in the hall; Eilis presumed from the atmosphere and from the way in which Miss McAdam pursed her lips and seemed openly irritated every time Mrs. Kehoe spoke and from the fact that Dolores remained silent throughout the meal that something had been said. Eilis understood also by the way both Miss McAdam and Diana avoided her eyes that they knew she was taking Dolores to the dance. She hoped they did not believe that she had offered to do so and wondered if she could let them know that she had been press-ganged by Mrs. Kehoe.

Eilis was shocked by Dolores's appearance when she went upstairs at ten o'clock and found her. She was wearing a cheap leather jacket, like a man's, and a frilly white blouse and a white skirt and almost black stockings. The red lipstick seemed garish against her freckled face and bright hair. She struck Eilis as looking like a horse-dealer's wife in Enniscorthy on a fair day. Eilis almost fled downstairs as soon as she saw her. Instead, she had to smile as Dolores said that she would need to go upstairs and fetch her winter coat and a hat. Eilis did not know how she was going to sit beside her in the hall with Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan avoiding her on one side and Patty and Diana arriving with all their friends.

"Are there great fellas at this?" Dolores asked when they reached the street.

"I have no idea," Eilis replied coldly. "I go only because it is organized by Father Flood."

"Oh, God, does he hang around all night? It'll be just like home."

Eilis did not reply and tried to walk in a way that was dignified, as though she were going to eleven o'clock mass in the cathedral in Enniscorthy with Rose. Each time Dolores asked her a question she answered quietly and did not tell her much. It would be better, she thought, if they could walk in silence to the hall, but she could not ignore Dolores completely, although she found that, as they stood waiting for traffic lights to change, she was clenching her fists in pure irritation each time her companion spoke.

She had imagined that, when they were in the hall, Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan would sit away from them once they had left their coats in the cloakroom and found a position from which to survey the dancers. But instead their two fellow lodgers moved closer to them, all the more to emphasize that they had no intention of speaking to them or consorting with them in any way. Eilis observed how Dolores let her eyes dart around the hall, her brow knitted in watchfulness.

"God, there's no one here at all," she said.

Eilis stared straight in front of her pretending that she had not heard.

"I'd love a fella, would you?" Dolores asked and nudged her. "I wonder what the American fellas are like."

Eilis looked at her blankly.

"I'd say they're different," Dolores added.

Eilis responded by moving away from her slightly.

"They're awful bitches, those other ones," Dolores went on. "That's what the boss-woman said. Bitches. The only one of them is not a bitch is you."

Eilis looked at the band and then stole a glance at Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan. Miss McAdam held her gaze and then smiled archly, dismissively.

When Patty and Diana arrived, they came with an even larger group than before. Everyone in the hall seemed to notice them. Patty had her hair tied back in a bun and was wearing heavy black eye-liner. It made her appear very severe and dramatic. Eilis noticed that Diana pretended not to see her. It was as though the very arrival of this group was a signal to the musicians, who had been playing old waltzes with just the piano and some of the bass players, to play some tunes that Eilis knew from the girls at work were called swing tunes and were very fashionable.

As the music changed, some of Patty and Diana's group began to applaud and cheer, and when Eilis caught Patty's eye, Patty signalled to her to come towards them. It was a tiny gesture but it was unmistakable and, having made it, Patty kept staring over at her almost impatiently. Suddenly, Eilis decided she would stand up and walk over towards their group, smiling confidently at them all, as though they were old friends. She kept her back straight as she moved and tried to appear as if she were in full possession of herself.

"It's so good to see you," she said quietly to Patty.

"I think I know what you mean," Patty replied.

When Patty suggested that they go to the bathroom, Eilis nodded and followed her.

"I don't know what you looked like sitting there," she said, "but you sure didn't look happy."

She offered to show Eilis how to put on the black eye-liner and some mascara and they spent time at the mirror together, ignoring everyone who came in and out. With extra clips that she carried in her bag, Patty put Eilis's hair up for her.

"Now, you look like a ballet dancer," she said.

"No, I don't," Eilis said.

"Well, at least you don't look like you've just come in from milking the cows any more."

"Did I look like that?"

"Just a bit. Nice clean cows," Patty said.

Finally, when they went back into the body of the hall, the place was crowded and the music was fast and loud and many couples were dancing. Eilis was careful where she looked or moved. She did not know if Dolores had remained seated where she had left her. She had no intention of going back there and no intention either of catching Dolores's eye in the hall. She stood with Patty and a group of her friends, including a young man with heavily oiled hair and an American accent who tried to explain the dance steps to her above the noise of the music. He did not ask her to dance, seeming to prefer to stay with the group; he glanced at his friends regularly as he took her through the steps, showing her how to move in time to the swing tunes that were becoming faster now as the dancers on the floor responded to them.

Eilis slowly became aware of a young man looking at her. He was smiling warmly, amused at her efforts to learn the dance steps. He was not much taller than she was, but looked strong, with blond hair and clear blue eyes. He seemed to think what was happening was funny as he swayed to the music. He stood alone, and when she caught his eye, having turned away for a moment, she was surprised at the expression on his face, which was unembarrassed at the fact that he was still looking at her. She was sure that he was not part of Patty and Diana's group; his clothes were too ordinary and he was not in any way dressed up. As the band lifted the tempo once more, everyone began to cheer and the man who had been trying to teach her the steps attempted to say something to her but she could not make out the words. When she turned towards him she discovered that he was saying that maybe they could dance together later when the beat was not so fast. She nodded at him and smiled and moved towards Patty, who was still surrounded by some of her friends.

When the music stopped some couples separated, others went to the bar for sodas or remained on the dance floor. Eilis saw that the man who had been teaching her the steps was now going to dance with Patty, and it struck her that Patty must have asked him to pay attention to her and he had done so merely to be kind. As Diana brushed by her, making clear that she was not speaking to her, the young man who had been looking at her approached.

"Are you with that guy who was teaching you the steps?" he asked. She noticed his American accent and his white teeth.

"No," she said.

"So, can I dance with you?"

"I'm not sure I know the steps."

"No one does. The trick is to look as though you do."

The music started up and they moved among the dancers. Her companion's eyes, she thought, were too big for his face but then when he smiled at her he appeared too happy for that to matter. He was a good dancer but not showy in any way and did not try to impress her or do better than she did and she liked that. She studied him as closely as she could because she was sure that if she let her eyes wander she would find Dolores still sitting where she had left her, waiting for her to return.

When she had danced the first set with him and the music stopped he introduced himself as Tony and asked her if he could buy her a soda. She knew this meant that she would have to stay with him for the next dance, and since by then Dolores might have gone home or found someone of her own to dance with, she agreed. As they passed Diana and Patty, she saw both of them taking Tony in, looking him up and down. Patty made a sign as if to say that he was not quite up to her standard. Diana simply looked away.

The next dance was slow and Eilis was worried about moving too close to Tony, although it was difficult not to, as there were many dancers on the floor. For the first time she was aware of him, sensing that he too was trying not to move too near, and she wondered if he was being considerate or if this meant that he did not like her very much. At the end of this set, she thought, she would thank him and go to the cloakroom, get her coat and go home. If Dolores complained about her to Mrs. Kehoe, she could say that she did not feel well and had to leave early.

Tony was able to move easily to the music without making an exhibition of himself or of her. As they made their way around the floor to the sound of a moody show tune on the saxophone, Eilis knew that no one was paying any attention to them. She felt the heat from him, and when he tried to say something she smelled a sweetness from his breath. For a second she looked at him again. He was carefully shaved and his hair tightly cut. His skin looked soft. When he caught her looking at him he twisted his mouth in amusement and this made his eyes seem even larger than before. For the last tune in the set, which was by far, she thought, the most romantic, he moved his body closer to her. He did this tactfully and gradually; she could feel the pressure and strength of him against her as she, in turn, moved closer too, until they were wrapped around each other for the last minutes of the dance.

As they turned to applaud the band, he did not catch her eye but stood beside her as though it were inevitable, already decided, that they would stay together for the next dance. There was too much noise around them for her to hear what he said when he attempted to speak but it seemed to be just a friendly comment about something so she nodded and smiled in reply. He looked happy and she liked that. The music that began now was even slower than before and it had a beautiful melody. She closed her eyes and let him touch her cheek with his. They were hardly dancing at all, just swaying to the sound, as were most other couples on the floor.

She wondered who he was, this young man she was dancing with, and where he came from. He did not seem Irish to her; he was too clean-cut and friendly and open in his gaze. But she could not be sure. There was nothing at all of the tailored poise of Patty and Diana's friends. It was also hard to imagine what he did for a living. She did not know as they smooched together on the dance floor if she would ever get a chance to ask him.

At the end of the set the man playing the saxophone took up the microphone and, in an Irish accent, explained that the best part of the evening was ahead, in fact was about to start now, since they were going to play some céilí tunes as they had the previous weeks. They were going to ask those who knew the dance steps to take the floor first, and, he added to cheers and whistles, he hoped they would not all be from County Clare. When he gave the signal, he said, everyone else could join in; then it would be the same free-for-all that they had enjoyed the previous weeks.

"Are you from County Clare?" her companion asked her.

"No."

"I saw you the first week but you didn't stay until the end so you missed the free-for-all and you weren't here last week."

"How do you know?"

"I looked for you and didn't see you."

Suddenly a tune began; when she glanced at the stage she saw that the band had transformed itself. The two saxophone players had become a banjo player and an accordion player and there were two fiddle players as well as a woman playing an upright piano. There was also the same drummer. A number of dancers moved into the centre of the hall and now became the focus of attention as they managed a set of intricate movements with immense confidence and speed. Soon, they were joined by others, equally skilful, to the sound of whoops and cheers from the crowd. The music grew faster; all the instruments together were led by the accordion player; the dancers made a loud noise with their shoes against the wooden floor.

When the accordion player announced that they were going to do "The Siege of Ennis" more dancers took to the floor, and they began to change from ordered dancing towards the free-for-all the man had mentioned earlier. As Tony suggested they take the floor also, Eilis quickly agreed, even though she did not know how to do the steps. They found a group who were standing in two lines facing each other, with a man giving instructions through a microphone on what should happen next. A dancer from each end-a man and a woman-moved into the centre and swung around before returning to their original place. Then it was the turn of the next dancer until each had had a moment in the centre. The two lines of dancers then came forward to confront one another and, once that was done, one line put their arms in the air and let the other through, thus finding themselves opposite a new line of dancers. As the playing went on, the shouting and laughing and roaring instructions grew louder and more intense. Great energy was put into the whirling and turning in the centre and banging the floor with their shoes. By the time the last tunes were played and everyone seemed to understand the basic steps and movements, Eilis could see that Tony loved this and put as much effort as he could into getting it right while making sure also that he did not do more than she did. She felt that he was holding himself back for her.

As soon as the music stopped he asked her where she lived; when she told him he said that it was on his way home. There was something about him now, something so innocent and eager and shiny, that she almost laughed out loud as she said yes, that he could walk her home. She told him that she would meet him outside when she had fetched her coat. When she went to the cloakroom, she watched out for any sign of Dolores in the queue.

It was freezing outside; they moved slowly through the streets huddled against each other, hardly speaking at all. When they came close to Clinton Street, however, he stopped and turned and faced her.

"There's something you've got to know," he said. "I'm not Irish."

"You don't sound Irish," she said.

"I mean I'm not Irish at all."

"None of you?" She laughed.

"Not a single bit."

"So where are you from?"

"I'm from Brooklyn," he said, "but my mom and dad are from Italy."

"And what were you doing-"

"I know," he interrupted. "I heard about the Irish dance and I thought I'd go and look at it and I liked it."

"Do the Italians not have dances?"

"I knew you were going to ask me that."

"I'm sure they're wonderful."

"I could take you some night but you would have to be warned. They behave like Italians all night."

"Is that good or bad?"

"I don't know, but bad because if I had gone to an Italian dance I wouldn't be walking you home now."

They continued in silence until they reached the front of Mrs. Kehoe's house.

"Can I collect you next week? Maybe get something to eat first?"

Eilis realized that this invitation would mean that she could go to the dance without having to take the feelings of any of her fellow lodgers into account. Even for Mrs. Kehoe, she thought, it would serve as an excuse not to have to accompany Dolores.

Later, during the week, as she was making her way from Bartocci's to Brooklyn College, she forgot what she was looking forward to; sometimes she actually believed that she was looking forward to thinking about home, letting images of home roam freely in her mind, but it came to her now with a jolt that, no, the feeling she had was only about Friday night and being collected from the house by a man she had met and going to the dance with him in the hall, knowing that he would be walking her back to Mrs. Kehoe's afterwards. She had been keeping the thought of home out of her mind, letting it come to her only when she wrote or received letters or when she woke from a dream in which her mother or father or Rose or the rooms of the house on Friary Street or the streets of the town had appeared. She thought it was strange that the mere sensation of savouring the prospect of something could make her think for a while that it must be the prospect of home.

Around Mrs. Kehoe's table, Eilis's ditching of Dolores, which Patty, having fully witnessed, informed the others about before breakfast on Saturday morning, meant that they were all speaking to her again, including Dolores herself, who viewed being ditched, since it had resulted in Eilis meeting a man, as eminently reasonable. In return for this view, Dolores wanted only to know about the boyfriend himself, his name, for example, and his occupation, and when Eilis intended to see him again. All of the other lodgers had scrutinized him carefully as well; they thought him handsome, they said, although Miss McAdam might have wished him taller, and Patty did not like his shoes. All of them presumed that he was Irish, or of Irish origin, and all of them begged Eilis to tell them about him, what he had said to her that made her dance the second set with him and if she was going to the dance the following Friday night and if she expected to see him there.

The following Thursday evening, when she went downstairs to make herself a cup of tea, she met Mrs. Kehoe in the kitchen.

"There's a lot of giddiness in the house at the moment," Mrs. Kehoe said. "That Diana has a terrible voice, God help her. If she squeals once more, I'll have to get the doctor or the vet to give her something to calm her down."

"It's the dancing is doing it to them," Eilis said drily.

"Well, I'm going to ask Father Flood to preach a sermon on the evils of giddiness," Mrs. Kehoe said. "And maybe he might mention a few more things in his sermon."

Mrs. Kehoe left the room.

On Friday evening at eight thirty Tony rang on the front door bell, and, before Eilis could escape from the basement door and alert him to the impending danger, the door was answered by Mrs. Kehoe. By the time Eilis reached the front door, as Tony told her later, Mrs. Kehoe had asked him several questions, including his full name, his address and his profession.

"That's what she called it," he said. "My profession."

He grinned as though nothing as amusing had ever occurred to him in his life.

"Is she your mom?" he asked.

"I told you that my mom, as you call her, is in Ireland."

"So you did, but that woman looked like she owned you."

"She's my landlady."

"She's a lady all right. A lady with loads of questions to ask."

"And, incidentally, what is your full name?"

"You want what I told your mom?"

"She's not my mom."

"You want my real name?"

"Yes, I want your real name."

"My real full name is Antonio Giuseppe Fiorello."

"What name did you give my landlady when she asked you?"

"I told her my name is Tony McGrath. Because there's a guy at work called Billo McGrath."

"Oh, for God's sake. And what did you tell her your profession was?"

"My real one?"

"If you don't answer me properly-"

"I told her I'm a plumber and that's because I am."

"Tony?"

"Yeah?"

"In future, if I ever allow you to call again, you will come quietly to the basement door."

"And say nothing to no one?"

"Correct."

"Suits me."

He took her to a diner where they had supper and then they walked together towards the dancehall. She told him about her fellow lodgers and her job at Bartocci's. He told her, in turn, that he was the oldest of four boys and that he still lived at home in Bensonhurst with his parents.

"And my mom made me promise not to laugh too much, or make jokes," he said. "She said Irish girls aren't like Italian girls. They're serious."

"You told your mom you were meeting me?"

"No, but my brother guessed that I was meeting a girl and he told her. I think they all guessed. I think I was smiling too much. And I had to tell them it was an Irish girl in case they thought it was some family they knew."

Eilis could not understand him. By the end of the night as he walked her home she knew only that she liked dancing close to him and that he was funny. But she would not have been surprised if everything he told her was untrue, instead just part of the joke he made out of most things or, in fact, she decided in the days that followed when she went over all he had said, out of everything.

In the house there was much discussion about her boyfriend the plumber. She told them, once Mrs. Kehoe had left the room, once Patty and Diana began to wonder why none of their friends had ever seen him before, that Tony was Italian and not Irish. She had made a point of not introducing him to any of them at the dance and now regretted, as the conversation began, that she had said anything at all about him.

"I hope that dancehall is not going to be inundated with Italians now," Miss McAdam said.

"What do you mean?" Eilis asked.

"Now they realize what is to be had."

The others were silent for a moment. It was after supper on the Friday night and Eilis wished that Mrs. Kehoe, who had left the room some time before, would return.

"And what is to be had?" she asked.

"That's all they have to do, it seems." Miss McAdam snapped her finger. "I don't have to say the rest."

"I think we have to be very careful about men we don't know coming into the hall," Sheila Heffernan said.

"Maybe if we got rid of some of the wallflowers, Sheila," Eilis said, "with the sour look on their faces."

Diana began to shriek with laughter as Sheila Heffernan quickly left the room.

Suddenly Mrs. Kehoe arrived back in the kitchen.

"Diana, if I hear you squeal again," she said, "I will call the Fire Brigade to douse you with water. Did someone say something rude to Miss Heffernan?"

"We were giving Eilis here advice, that's all," Miss McAdam said. "Just to beware of strangers."

"Well, I thought he was very nice, her caller," Mrs. Kehoe said. "With nice old-fashioned Irish manners. And we will have no further comment about him in this house. Do you hear, Miss McAdam?"

"I was only saying-"

"You were only refusing to mind your own business, Miss McAdam. It's a trait I notice in people from Northern Ireland."

As Diana shrieked again she put her hand over her mouth in mock shame.

"I'll have no more talk about men at this table," Mrs. Kehoe said, "except to say to you, Diana, that the man that gets you will be nicely hoped up with you. The hard knocks that life gives you will put a sorry end to that smirk on your face."

One by one they crept out of the kitchen, leaving Mrs. Kehoe with Dolores.

Tony asked Eilis if she would come to a movie with him some night in the middle of the week. In everything she had told him she had left out the fact that she had classes at Brooklyn College. He had not asked her what she did every evening, and she had kept it to herself almost deliberately as a way of holding him at a distance. She had enjoyed being collected by him on a Friday night at Mrs. Kehoe's up to now, and she looked forward to his company, especially in the diner before the dance. He was bright and funny as he spoke about baseball, his brothers, his work and life in Brooklyn. He had quickly learned the names of her fellow lodgers and of her bosses at work and he managed to allude to them regularly in a way that made her laugh.

"Why didn't you tell me about the college?" he asked her as they sat in the diner before the dance.

"You didn't ask."

"I don't have anything more to tell you." He shrugged, feigning depression.

"No secrets?"

"I could make up some, but they wouldn't sound true."

"Mrs. Kehoe believes that you're Irish. And you could be a native of Tipperary for all I know and just be putting on the rest. How come I met you at an Irish dance?"

"Okay. I do have a secret."

"I knew it. You come from Bray."

"What? Where's that?"

"What's your secret?"

"You want to know why I came to an Irish dance?"

"All right. I'll ask you: why did you come to an Irish dance?"

"Because I like Irish girls."

"Would any one do?"

"No, I like you."

"Yes, but if I wasn't there? Would you just pick another?"

"No, if you weren't there, I would walk home all sad looking at the ground."

She explained to him then that she had been homesick, and that Father Flood had inscribed her on the course as a way of making her busy, and how studying in the evening made her feel happy, or as happy as she had been since she had left home.

"Don't I make you feel happy?" He looked at her seriously.

"Yes, you do," she replied.

Before he could ask her any more questions that might, she thought, lead her to say that she did not know him well enough to make any further declarations about him, she told him about her classes, about the other students, about bookkeeping and keeping accounts and about the law lecturer Mr. Rosenblum. He knitted his brow and seemed worried when she told him how difficult and complicated the lectures were. Then when she recounted what the bookseller had said on the day when she went to Manhattan to buy law books, he became completely silent. When their coffee came he still did not speak but kept stirring the sugar, nodding his head sadly. She had not seen him like this before and found that she was looking closely at his face in this light, wondering how quickly he would return to his usual self and begin smiling and laughing again. But, when he asked the waiter for the bill, he remained grave and he did not speak as they left the restaurant.

Later, when the dance music became slow and they were dancing close to each other, she looked up and caught his gaze. He had the same serious expression on his face, which made him appear less clownish and boyish than before. Even when he smiled at her, he did not make it seem like a joke, or a way of having fun. It was a warm smile, sincere, and it suggested to her that he was stable, almost mature and that, whatever was happening now, he meant business. She smiled back at him but then looked down and closed her eyes. She was frightened.

He arranged that evening that he would collect her the following Thursday from college and walk her home. Nothing more, he promised. He did not want to disturb her, he said, from her studies. The following week, when he asked her to come to a movie with him on the Saturday, she agreed because all of her fellow lodgers, with the exception of Dolores, and some of the girls at work were going to go to Singin' in the Rain, which was opening. Even Mrs. Kehoe said that she intended to see the film with two of her friends and thus it became a subject of much discussion at the kitchen table.

Soon, then, a pattern developed. Every Thursday, Tony stood outside the college, or discreetly inside the hall if it were raining, and he accompanied her onto the trolley-car and then he walked her home. He was invariably cheerful, with news of the people he had worked for since he had seen her last, and the different tones they used, depending on their age or their country of origin, as they explained the problems they had with the plumbing. Some of them were, he said, so grateful for the service that they tipped him handsomely, often giving him too much; others, even those who had blocked their own drains with garbage, wanted to argue about the bill. All the managers of buildings in Brooklyn, he said, were mean, and when Italian managers discovered he was Italian too, they were even meaner. The Irish ones, he was sorry to tell her, were mean and stingy no matter what.

"They are real mean. They're stingy as hell, those Irish," he said, and grinned at her.

Each Saturday he took her to a movie; they often travelled on the subway into Manhattan to see something that had just opened. On the first such date, when they joined the queue for Singin' in the Rain, she discovered that she was dreading the moment when the cinema became dark and the film began. She liked dancing with Tony, how gradually they moved close to each other in the slow dances, and she liked walking home with him, how they waited until they were near Mrs. Kehoe's house but not too near, before he kissed her. And how he never, even once, made her feel that she should pull his hand away or draw back from him. Now, however, at their first film together, she believed that something would have to change between them. She was almost tempted to mention it as they stood in the queue, to avoid any unpleasantness inside in the dark. She wanted to say to him, as nonchalantly as she could, that she would prefer actually to see the film rather then spend two hours necking and kissing in the cinema.

Inside, having bought the tickets, he bought popcorn as well, and did not, to her surprise, usher her to the back seat of the cinema, but asked her where she wanted to sit and seemed happy to sit in the middle, where they would have the best view. Although he put his arm around her during the film and whispered to her a few times, he did nothing more. As they waited for the subway afterwards, he was in such good humour and had loved the film so much that she felt an immense tenderness for him and wondered if she would ever see a side of him that was disagreeable. Soon, as they went more regularly to movies, she saw that a sad film or a film with disturbing scenes could leave him silent and brooding afterwards, locked into some depressed dream of his own that it would take time to lift him out of. So too, if she told him anything that was sad, his face would change and he would stop making jokes and he would want to go over what she had told him. He was not like anyone else she had ever met.

She wrote to Rose about him, sending the letter to the office, but did not mention him in letters to her mother or to her brothers. She tried to describe him to Rose, how considerate he was. She added that because she was studying she did not have time to see him with his friends, or visit his family, even though he had invited her home for a meal with his parents and his brothers.

When Rose replied to her, she asked what he did for a living. Eilis had deliberately left this out of the letter because she knew that Rose would hope that she would go out with someone who had an office job, who worked in a bank or an insurance office. When she wrote back, she buried the information that he was a plumber in the middle of a paragraph, but she was aware that Rose would notice it and seize on it.

One Friday night soon afterwards, as they were coming into the dance together, both of them in good humour as the fierce cold had briefly lifted and Tony had talked about summer and how they might go to Coney Island, they were met by Father Flood, who seemed cheerful too. But there was something odd, Eilis thought, about the length of time he spoke to them and his insisting that they have a soda with him, which made her believe that Rose had written to Father Flood and that he was there to see what Tony was like for her.

Eilis was almost proud of Tony's casual good manners, of his easy way of responding to the priest, all of it underlined by a way of being respectful, of letting the priest talk, and not saying a single word out of place. Rose, she knew, would have an idea in her head of what a plumber looked like and how he spoke. She would imagine him to be somewhat rough and awkward and use bad grammar. Eilis decided that she would write to her to say that he was not like that and that in Brooklyn it was not always as easy to guess someone's character by their job as it was in Enniscorthy.

She watched now while Tony and Father Flood spoke about baseball and Tony forgot that he was talking to a priest as he became feverish in his enthusiasm for what he was saying and thus interrupted Father Flood in a mixture of amused friendliness and passionate disagreement about a game they had both seen and a player Tony said he would never forgive. For a while they appeared not to realize that she was even there and when they finally noticed they agreed that they would take her to a baseball game as long as she pledged in advance that she was a Dodgers fan.

Rose wrote to her, mentioning in her letter that she had heard from Father Flood that he liked Tony, who seemed very respectable and decent and polite, but she was still worried about Eilis seeing him and no one else during her first year in Brooklyn. Eilis had not even told her that she was seeing Tony three nights a week and, because of her lectures, she had time for nothing else. She never went out with her fellow lodgers, for example, and this was a huge relief to her. At the table, however, since she had seen every new movie she always had something to talk about. Once the others became used to the idea that she was dating Tony, they refrained from giving her further warnings or advice about him. She wished, having read Rose's letter a couple of times, that Rose would do the same. She was almost sorry now that she had told Rose about Tony in the first place. In her letters to her mother she still did not mention him.

At work she noticed that some of the girls were leaving and being quietly replaced until she and a few others were the most experienced and trusted on the shop floor. She found herself taking her lunch break two or three days a week with Miss Fortini, whom she thought intelligent and interesting. When Eilis told her about Tony, Miss Fortini sighed and said that she had an Italian boyfriend also and he was nothing but trouble and he would be worse soon when the baseball season was to begin, when he would want nothing more than to drink with his friends and talk about the games with no women around. When Eilis told her that Tony had invited her to come to a game with him, Miss Fortini sighed and then laughed.

"Yes, Giovanni did that with me too, but the only time he spoke to me at the game was to demand that I go and get him and his friends some hot dogs. He nearly bit off my nose when I asked him if they wanted mustard on them. I was disturbing his concentration."

When Eilis described Tony to Miss Fortini, she became very interested in him.

"Hold on. He doesn't take you drinking with his friends and leave you with all the girls?"

"No."

"He doesn't talk about himself all the time when he's not telling you how great his mother is?"

"No."

"Then you hold on to him, honey. There aren't two of him. Maybe in Ireland, but not here."

They both laughed.

"So what's the worst thing about him?" Miss Fortini asked.

Eilis thought for a moment. "I wish he was two inches taller."

"Anything else?"

Eilis thought again. "No."

Once the dates for the exams were posted up Eilis arranged to have all that week free from work and began to worry about her studies. Thus, in the six weeks before the exams started, she did not see Tony on the Saturday evenings for a movie; instead, she stayed in her room and went through her notes and waded through the law books, trying to memorize the names of the most important cases in commercial law and how these judgments mattered. In return, she promised that when the exams were finished she would accompany Tony to meet his parents and his brothers, to have a meal with them in the family apartment in Seventy-second Street in Bensonhurst. Tony also told her that he hoped to get tickets for the Dodgers and planned on taking her along with his brothers.

"You know what I really want?" he asked. "I want our kids to be Dodgers fans."

He was so pleased and excited at the idea, she thought, that he did not notice her face freezing. She could not wait to be alone, away from him, so she could contemplate what he had just said. Later, as she lay on the bed and thought about it, she realized that it fitted in with everything else, that recently he had been planning the summer and how much time they would spend together. Recently too he had begun to tell her after he kissed her that he loved her and she knew that he was waiting for a response, a response that, so far, she had not given.

Now, she realized, in his mind he was going to marry her and she was going to have children with him and they were going to be Dodgers fans. It was, she thought, too ridiculous, something that she could not tell anybody, certainly not Rose and probably not Miss Fortini. But it was not something he had begun to imagine suddenly; they had been seeing one another for almost five months and had not once had an argument or a misunderstanding, unless this, his aim to marry her, was a huge misunderstanding.

He was considerate and interesting and good-looking. She knew that he liked her, not only because he said that he did, but by the way he responded to her and listened to her when she spoke. Everything was right, and they had the long summer when the exams were over to look forward to. A few times in the dancehall, or even on the street, she had seen a man who had appealed to her in some way, but each time it was just a fleeting thought lasting not more than a few seconds. The idea of sitting by the wall again with her fellow lodgers filled her with horror. And yet she knew that in his mind Tony was moving faster than she was, and she knew that she would have to slow him down, but she had no idea how to do so in a way that did not involve being unpleasant to him.

The following Friday night, as they huddled together on the way home from the dancehall, he whispered to her once more that he loved her. When she did not respond he began to kiss her and then he whispered it to her again. Without warning, she found herself pulling away from him. When he asked her what was wrong she did not reply. His saying that he loved her and his expecting a reply frightened her, made her feel that she would have to accept that this was the only life she was going to have, a life spent away from home. When they reached Mrs. Kehoe's house, having walked in silence, she thanked him almost formally for the night and, avoiding eye contact with him, said goodnight and went inside.

She knew that what she had done was wrong, that he would suffer now until he saw her on Thursday. She wondered if he would call around to see her on Saturday, but he did not. She could think of no good reason to tell him that she wanted to see less of him. Maybe, she thought, she should say to him that she did not want to talk about their kids when they had known each other only a short time. But then he might ask her, she believed, if she was not serious about him and she would be forced to answer, to say something. And if it was not fully encouraging she might, she knew, lose him. He was not someone who would enjoy having a girlfriend who was not sure how much she liked him. She knew him well enough to know that.

On Thursday, as she came out of her class and was walking down the stairs, she spotted him but he did not see her; there were many students milling about. She stopped for a second and realized that she still did not know what she was going to say to him. Carefully, she went back up the stairs and found that if she moved along the first landing she would be able to see him from above. Somehow, she thought, if she could look at him, take him in clearly when he was not trying to amuse her or impress her, something would come to her, some knowledge, or some ability to make a decision.

She discovered a vantage point from where, unless he looked directly upwards and to the left, he would not see her. He was, she thought, unlikely to look in her direction as he seemed absorbed by the students coming and going in the lobby. When she directed her gaze down she saw that he was not smiling; he seemed nonetheless fully at ease and curious. There was something helpless about him as he stood there; his willingness to be happy, his eagerness, she saw, made him oddly vulnerable. The word that came to her as she looked down was the word "delighted." He was delighted by things, as he was delighted by her, and he had done nothing else ever but make that clear. Yet somehow that delight seemed to come with a shadow, and she wondered as she watched him if she herself, in all her uncertainty and distance from him, was the shadow and nothing else. It occurred to her that he was as he appeared to her; there was no other side to him. Suddenly, she shivered in fear and turned, making her way down the stairs and towards him in the lobby as quickly as she could.

He told her about his work, with a story of two Jewish sisters who wanted to feed him, who had a huge meal ready for him when he had restored their hot water, even though it was only three o'clock in the afternoon. He did an imitation of their accents. Even though he spoke as if nothing had happened between them on the previous Friday night, Eilis knew that this funny fast talk of his, as story followed story while they walked to the trolley-car, was unusual for a Thursday night and was partly a way of pretending that there had been no problem then and that there was none now.

As they came close to her street she turned to him. "There's something I need to say to you."

"I know that."

"You remember when you told me that you loved me?"

He nodded. The expression on his face was sad.

"Well, I didn't really know what to say. So maybe I should say that I have thought about you and I like you, I like seeing you, I care for you and maybe I love you too. And the next time if you tell me you love me, I'll-"

She stopped.

"You'll what?"

"I'll say I love you too."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Holy shit! Sorry for my language but I thought you were telling me that you didn't want to see me again."

She stood beside him looking at him. She was shaking.

"You don't look as though you mean it," he said.

"I mean it."

"Well, why aren't you smiling?"

She hesitated and then smiled weakly. "Can I go home now?"

"No. I want to just jump up and down. Can I do that?"

"Quietly," she said, and laughed.

He jumped into the air waving his hands.

"Let's get this straight," he said when he came towards her again. "You love me?"

"Yes. But don't ask me anything else and don't mention wanting kids who are Dodgers fans."

"What? You want kids who support the Yankees? Or the Giants?"

He was laughing.

"Tony?"

"What?"

"Don't push me."

He kissed her and whispered to her, and when they reached Mrs. Kehoe's house he kissed her again until she had to tell him to stop or they would have an audience. Even though she was studying the following night and would have to miss the dance, she agreed to see him and go for a walk with him, if only around the block.

The exams were easier than she had expected; even the law paper had easy questions, requiring only the most basic knowledge. When they were over she felt relief but knew also that she would have no excuse now when Tony wanted to make plans. He began by setting a date for her visit to his parents' house for supper. This worried her, since she already believed that he had told them too much about her; she now understood that she was going to be presented to them as something more than a girlfriend.

On the evening in question when he collected her he was in a relaxed mood. It was still bright and the air was warm and children were playing on the streets as older people sat on the stoops. It was something that had seemed unimaginable in the winter and it made Eilis feel light and happy as they walked along.

"I've got to warn you about something," Tony said. "I have a kid brother called Frank. He's eight going on eighteen. He's nice and he's smart but he's been talking of all the things he's going to say to my girlfriend when he meets her. He's got a real big mouth. I tried to pay him money to go and play ball with his friends and my dad has threatened him but he says none of us are going to stop him. Once he gets it off his chest, you'll like him."

"What will he say?"

"The thing is we don't know. He could say anything."

"He sounds very exciting," she said.

"Oh, yeah, and there's one more thing."

"Don't tell me. You have an old granny who sits in the corner and she wants to talk too."

"No, she's in Italy. The thing is that all of them are Italians and they look like Italians. They are real dark, all except me."

"And how did they get you?"

"My mom's dad was like me, at least that's the rumour, but I never saw him and my dad never saw him and my mom doesn't remember him because he was killed in the First World War."

"Does your dad think…" She began to laugh.

"It drives my mom crazy but he doesn't really think it, he just says it sometimes when I do something funny that I must be from some other family. It's a joke."

His family lived on the second storey of a three-storey building. Eilis was surprised at how young Tony's parents seemed. When his three brothers appeared, she saw, as he had told her, that each of them had black hair and eyes that were deep brown. The two older ones were much taller than Tony. Frank introduced himself as the youngest one. His hair, she thought, was astonishingly dark, as were his eyes. The other two were introduced to her as Laurence and Maurice.

She realized immediately that she should not comment on the difference between Tony and the rest of the family since she imagined that every single person who entered this apartment and saw them all together for the first time had a great deal to say on the subject. She pretended it was something that she had not even noticed. She presumed at the beginning that the kitchen was just the first room and that beyond it lay a parlour and a dining room, but slowly she understood that one door led to a bedroom where the boys slept and another door led to a bathroom. There was no other room. The small table in the kitchen, she saw, was set for seven. She imagined that there was another bedroom beyond the boys' room where the parents slept, but once Frank began to talk, he explained to her that each night their parents slept in a corner of the kitchen in a bed that he showed her was on its side against the wall, discreetly covered.

"Frank, if you don't stop talking you won't be fed," Tony said.

There was a smell of food and spices. The two middle brothers were studying her carefully, silently, awkwardly. They both, she thought, looked like film stars.

"We don't like Irish people," Frank suddenly said.

"Frank!" His mother moved from the stove towards him.

"Mom, we don't. We've got to be clear about it. A big gang of them beat up Maurizio and he had to have stitches. And the cops were all Irish too, so they did nothing about it."

"Francesco, shut your mouth," his mother said.

"Ask him," Frank said to Eilis, pointing to Maurice.

"They weren't all Irish," Maurice said.

"They had red hair and big legs," Frank said.

"Don't mind him," Maurice said. "Only some of them had."

Frank's father asked him to follow him into the hallway; when they returned after a few moments Frank was, to the amusement of his brothers, suitably chastened.

As Frank sat opposite her, quiet while food was brought to the table and wine poured, Eilis felt sorry for him and noticed how much he resembled Tony just now; feeling down seemed to have affected his entire being. Over the previous weekend, Eilis had received instructions from Diana about how to eat spaghetti properly using a fork only, but what was served was not as thin and slippery as the spaghetti Diana had made for her. The sauce was just as red, but was filled with flavours that she had never sampled before. It was, she thought, almost sweet. Every time she tasted it, she had to stop and hold it in her mouth, wondering what ingredients had gone into it. She wondered if the others, so used to this food, were being careful not to look at her too closely or make any comment as she attempted to eat it using only a fork as they did.

Tony's mother, who spoke at times with a strong Italian accent, asked her about the exams and if she intended to do another year at the college. She explained that it was a two-year course, and that, when she finished, she would be a bookkeeper and could work in an office rather than on the shop floor. As Eilis and Tony's mother discussed this, none of the boys spoke or looked up from their food. When Eilis tried to catch Frank's eye so she could smile at him, he did not respond. She glanced at Tony, but he too had his head down. She realized that she would love to run out of this room and down the stairs and through the streets to the subway to her own room and close the door on the world.

The main course was a flat piece of fried meat covered in a thin coating of batter. When Eilis tasted it, she found that there was cheese and then ham inside the batter. She could not identify the meat. And the batter itself was so crisp and full of flavour that, once more, each time she took a taste, she could not work out what had been used to make it. There were no vegetables or potatoes accompanying it, but as Diana had explained that this was normal for Italians, Eilis was not surprised. She was telling Tony's mother how delicious it was, trying not to imply that it was also strange, when a knock came to the door. Tony's father answered it and returned, shaking his head and laughing.

"Antonio, you are wanted. Number eighteen has a blocked drain."

"Dad, it's dinnertime," Tony said.

"It's Mrs. Bruno. We like her," his father said.

"I don't like her," Frank said.

"Francesco, shut your mouth," his father said.

Tony stood up and pushed his chair back.

"Take your overalls and your tools," his mother said. She pronounced the words as though with difficulty.

"I won't be long," he said to Eilis, "and if he says anything at all, report him to me." He pointed at Frank, who began to laugh.

"Tony is the street plumber," said Maurice and explained that since he worked as a mechanic they called him when cars and trucks and motorbikes needed repairing, while Laurence would soon be a qualified carpenter so that if people's chairs or tables broke they could call him.

"But Frankie here is the brains of the family. He's going to college."

"Only if he learns to keep his mouth shut," Laurence said.

"Those Irish guys who beat Maurizio up," Frank said as though he had not been listening to any of their conversation, "they moved out to Long Island."

"I'm glad to hear that," Eilis replied.

"And out there, they have these big houses and you have your own room and you don't get to sleep in the same room as your brothers."

"Would you not like that?" Eilis asked.

"No," he said, "or maybe just sometimes."

As he spoke, they all looked at him, Eilis noticed, and she had the impression that they thought the same thing as she did, that Frank was the most beautiful boy she had ever seen in her life. She had to stop herself looking at him too much as she waited for Tony to come back.

They decided to go ahead with dessert in Tony's absence. It was a sort of cake, Eilis thought, filled with cream and then soaked in some sort of alcohol. And, as she watched Tony's father unscrewing a machine and putting in water and spoonfuls of coffee, she realized that she would have plenty to tell her fellow lodgers. The coffee cups were tiny, and the coffee, when it came, was thick and bitter, despite the spoonful of sugar that she added. Although she did not like it, she attempted to drink it, as the rest of them seemed to think it was nothing special.

Slowly, the conversation became easier but still she found that she was on display and every word she said was being listened to carefully. When they asked her about home she tried to say as little as possible and then worried that they might think she had something to hide. Each time she spoke now she observed Frank staring at her, taking in everything as though he would need to memorize it. When the meal was over and Tony had still not returned, Laurence and Maurice said that they would go to get him away from the clutches of Mrs. Bruno and her daughter. Tony's parents refused Eilis's offer to help them clear off the table and appeared embarrassed now about Tony's absence.

"I thought it would just take him a second," his mother said. "It must have been serious. It's hard to say no to people."

When Tony's parents were away from the table, Frank signalled to her to come close.

"Has he taken you to Coney Island yet?" he whispered.

"No," she replied in a whisper.

"He took his last girlfriend there and they went on the big wheel and she puked hot dogs all over herself and she blamed him and wouldn't go out with him again. He didn't speak for a month."

"Is that right?"

"Francesco, get up and go out," his father said. "Or go and do homework. What was he saying?"

"He was telling me that Coney Island is nice in the summer," Eilis said.

"He's right. It is," his father said. "Has Tony not brought you?"

"No."

"I hope he will," he said. "You'll like it."

She detected a smile on his face.

Frank was watching her with wonder because, she thought, she had not told his father what he had really said. When his father turned away, she made a grimacing face at him and he stared at her in astonishment before he made a face back at her and left the room just as Tony, in his overalls, was returning with his two brothers. He dropped his tools and held his hands up: they were grimy.

"I'm a saint," he said, and grinned.

When Eilis told Miss Fortini that Tony was going to take her to the beach in Coney Island some Sunday now that the weather was becoming balmy, Miss Fortini expressed alarm. "I don't think you've been watching your figure," she said.

"Yes, I know," Eilis replied. "And I have no bathing costume."

"Italian men!" Miss Fortini said. "They don't care in the winter but in the summer on the beach you have to look your best. My guy won't go on the beach unless he already has a tan."

Miss Fortini said that she had a friend who worked in another store that sold good-quality bathing suits, much better than the ones on sale in Bartocci's, and she would get some on approval so that Eilis could try them. In the meantime, she advised her to begin watching her figure. Eilis attempted to say that she did not think Tony cared that much about suntans or how she might look on the beach, but Miss Fortini interrupted her to say that every Italian man cared about how his girlfriend looked on the beach, no matter how perfect she might be in other ways.

"In Ireland no one looks," Eilis said. "It would be bad manners."

"In Italy it would be bad manners not to look."

Later in the week Miss Fortini approached Eilis in the morning to say that the bathing suits were to be delivered in the afternoon and Eilis could try them on in the fitting room after work when the store had closed. Since the store was busy towards the end of the working day, Eilis had almost forgotten about it until she found Miss Fortini hovering around her with the package. They waited until everyone had left and then Miss Fortini informed the security that they would be there for a while longer, that she herself would turn the lights off and they would leave by a side door.

The first bathing suit was black and appeared the right size for her. Eilis pulled the curtains back and moved out of the changing cubicle so that Miss Fortini could see it. Miss Fortini seemed uncertain as she studied it carefully, putting one hand over her mouth as though this would help her to concentrate better and as though to emphasize that getting this right was a most serious matter. She walked around Eilis so that she could inspect how it fitted from behind and, moving closer, put her hand under the firm elastic that held the bathing suit in place at the top of Eilis's thighs. She pulled the elastic down a fraction and then patted Eilis twice on the bottom, letting her hand linger the second time.

"My, you are going to have to work on your figure," she said as she went to the package and took out a second bathing suit, which was green.

"I think the black might be too severe," she said. "If your skin was not so white, it might be fine. Now try this."

Eilis pulled back the curtain and changed into the green bathing suit. She could hear the humming of the harsh lights overhead but otherwise was aware only of the silence and the emptiness of the store and the intensity and sharpness of Miss Fortini's gaze as she appeared in front of her once more. Without speaking, Miss Fortini knelt down in front of her and once more put her fingers under the elastic.

"You'll have to shave down here," she said. "Otherwise, you'll spend your time on the beach pulling the elastic down. Do you have a good razor?"

"Just for my legs," Eilis said.

"Well, I'll get you one that will do the trick down here too."

Remaining on her knees, she turned Eilis around until Eilis could see herself in the mirror with Miss Fortini behind her, running her fingers under the elastic, her eyes fixed on what was in front of her. She was, Eilis thought, fully aware that she could be seen in the mirror; she could feel herself blushing as Miss Fortini stood up and faced her.

"I don't think these straps are right," she said and motioned to Eilis to put her arms through them and unloose them. When she did, the entire front of the bathing suit folded down and, for a moment, until she held the suit up with her two hands, her breasts were exposed.

"Is this one not all right?" she asked.

"No, try the others," Miss Fortini said. "Come here and try this one."

She seemed to be suggesting that Eilis not go behind the curtain again but change from one bathing suit to another beside the chair as she watched. Eilis hesitated.

"Quickly now," Miss Fortini said.

As Eilis lowered the suit she put one arm over her breast and bent over as she took it off, facing towards Miss Fortini so she did not feel so exposed. She put her hand out to take the suit, but Miss Fortini had lifted it and the other one that she had not tried, holding them up for perusal.

"Maybe I should go behind the curtain," Eilis said. "If one of the security men comes in."

She took both bathing suits and brought them into the cubicle and pulled the curtain. She was aware that Miss Fortini had been watching her carefully as she moved. She hoped that this would be over quickly and they would choose one of the suits and she hoped also that Miss Fortini would not say anything else about shaving.

Having put on the next suit, which was a bright pink, she opened the curtain and appeared again. Miss Fortini seemed immensely serious, and there was in the way she stood and gazed at her something clear that Eilis knew she would never be able to tell anyone about.

She stood still with her arms by her sides as Miss Fortini discussed the colour, wondering if it were too bright, and the cut of the suit, which she thought too old-fashioned. Once more, as she walked around, she touched the elastic at the top of Eilis's thighs and let her hand move over the rise of Eilis's bottom, patting her there, allowing her hand to linger.

"Now try the other," she said and stood where the curtain was, thus preventing Eilis from closing it. Eilis removed the bathing suit as quickly as she could and, in her haste to put on the last one, began to fumble, putting her leg in the wrong place. She had to bend to lift the suit and had to use both her hands to find the right way of putting it on. No one had ever seen her naked like this; she did not know how her breasts would seem, if the size of the nipples or the dark colour around them was unusual or not. She went from feeling hot with embarrassment to feeling almost cold. She was relieved when the suit was on and she was standing up once more being inspected by Miss Fortini.

Eilis did not think there was any difference between the suits; simply, she did not want the black one or the pink one, but, since the others fitted her and their colours were not extreme in any way, she felt happy to take either of them. Thus when Miss Fortini suggested that she try each of them on again before she finally decided, Eilis refused and said that she would take either and did not mind which. Miss Fortini said that she would send all of them back with a note in the morning to her friend in the nearby store and Eilis could go herself at lunchtime and collect the one she had chosen. Her friend would make sure, Miss Fortini said, that she got a good discount. When Eilis was dressed and ready, Miss Fortini turned off all the lights in the store and they left by a side entrance.

Eilis tried to eat less but it was hard, as she could not sleep if she was hungry. In the bathroom, when she looked at herself in the mirror, she did not think she was too fat, and when she tried on the bathing suit she had selected she was much more worried about how pale her skin was.

One evening when she came home from work she found an envelope for her on the side table in the kitchen. It was an official letter from Brooklyn College to say that she had passed her first-year exams in all subjects and if she needed to know her precise grades she could contact them. They hoped, the letter said, that she would be returning the following year, which would begin in September, and they provided dates by which she should register.

It was a beautiful evening. She thought she would miss supper and walk down to the parish house and show the letter to Father Flood. Once she had left a note for Mrs. Kehoe and made her way into the street, she began to observe how beautiful everything was, the trees in leaf, the people in the street, the children playing, the light on the buildings. She had never felt like this before in Brooklyn. The letter had lifted her spirits, given her a new freedom, she realized, and it was something she had not expected. She looked forward to showing it to Father Flood if he were at home and then, when she saw him the following night as arranged, to Tony, and then to writing home with the news. In one year she would be a qualified bookkeeper and she could start looking for a better job. In a year the weather would grow hotter and unbearable and then the heat would fade and the trees would lose their leaves and then the winter would return to Brooklyn. And that too would dissolve into spring and early summer with long sunny evenings after work until she would again, she hoped, get a letter from Brooklyn College.

And in all of her dreams, as she walked along, of how this year would be she imagined Tony's smiling presence, his attention, his funny stories, his holding her against him at one of the street corners, the sweet smell of his breath as he kissed her, the sense of his golden concentration on her, his arms around her, his tongue in her mouth. She had all of that, she thought, and now, with this letter, it was much more than she had imagined she would have when she arrived in Brooklyn first. She had to stop herself smiling as she moved along in case people thought that she was mad.

Father Flood came to the door with a sheaf of papers in his hand. He ushered her into the parlour at the front of his house. As he read the letter he looked worried and even when he handed it back to her he remained serious.

"You are marvellous," he said gravely. "That is all I have to say."

She smiled.

"Most people who come to this house without notice need something or have a problem," he said. "You hardly ever get pure good news."

"I have saved some money," Eilis said, "and will be able to pay my tuition the second year and then pay you back for last year when I get a job."

"One of my parishioners paid," Father Flood said. "He needed to do something for mankind so I made him pay your tuition for last year and I'll remind him soon that he needs to cough up for this year. I told him it's a good cause and it makes him feel noble."

"Did you tell him it was for me?" she asked.

"No. I gave him no details."

"Will you thank him for me?"

"Sure. How's Tony?"

She was surprised by the question, how casual and unworried it seemed, how freely it suggested that Tony was a regular fixture rather than a problem or an interloper.

"He's great," she said.

"Has he taken you to a game yet?" the priest asked.

"No, but he threatens to all the time. I asked him if Wexford were playing but he didn't get the joke."

"Eilis, here's one piece of advice for you," Father Flood said as he opened the door to see her into the hallway. "Never make jokes about the game."

"That's what Tony said too."

"He's a solid man," Father Flood said.

As soon as she showed Tony the letter when they met the next evening he said that they would have to go to Coney Island the following Sunday to celebrate.

"Champagne?" she asked.

"Sea water," he replied. "And then a slap-up dinner in Nathan's afterwards."

She bought a beach towel at Bartocci's and a sun hat from Diana, who said that she did not want it any more. At supper, Diana and Patty produced their sunglasses for the season, which they had bought on the boardwalk at Atlantic City.

"I read somewhere," Mrs. Kehoe said, "that they could ruin your eyes."

"Oh, I don't care," Diana said. "I think they're gorgeous."

"And I read," Patty said, "that if you don't have them this year on the beach people will talk about you."

Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan fitted them on and, openly ignoring Dolores, passed them to Eilis to try.

"Well, they are very glamorous, I'll say that," Mrs. Kehoe said.

"I'll sell you that pair," Diana said to Eilis, "because I can get another pair on Sunday."

"Can you really?" Eilis asked.

When they discovered that Eilis had bought a new swimsuit, they insisted on seeing it. Eilis, when she came upstairs with it, deliberately handed it to Dolores first to hold up in front of her.

"You're lucky, Eilis, to have the figure for it," Mrs. Kehoe said.

"I can't go out in the sun at all," Dolores said. "I get all red."

Patty and Diana began to laugh.

On Sunday morning when Tony collected her he appeared surprised by the sunglasses.

"I'll have to tie a rope around you," he said. "All the guys at the beach will want to run away with you."

The subway station was packed with people going to the beach and there were cries of horror as the first two trains went through the station without stopping. The air was stifling as everyone crushed together. When finally a train stopped it seemed that there was no space for anyone and yet everyone began to crowd into the compartments, laughing and shouting and demanding that people move over and make room for them. By the time she and Tony, who was carrying a folded beach umbrella as well as a bag, found a door, there was no room at all in the train. She was amazed when Tony, holding her hand, began to push against the crowd in the compartment to make a space for both of them before the doors closed.

"How long is it going to take?" she asked.

"An hour, maybe more, it depends on how many stops it makes. But cheer up, think of the big waves."

The beach, when they finally arrived, was almost as packed as the train had been. She noticed that Tony had not lost his smile once during the journey, despite being deliberately squashed against a door by a man, encouraged by his wife. Now he seemed to feel, as he studied the crowd on the beach, where there was no place for newcomers, that they had been put there for his amusement. They moved along the boardwalk, but the only solution, Eilis saw, was to take a tiny spot that was empty and see if, by their very presence there, they could expand it so they both could unpack their belongings and lie in the sun.

Diana and Patty had warned her that no one changed on the beach in Italy. Italians had carried to America with them the custom of putting their bathing suits on under their clothes before they set out, thus avoiding the Irish habit of changing on the beach, which was, Diana said, ungraceful and undignified, to say the least. Eilis did not know if they were joking so she checked with Miss Fortini, who assured her that it was true. Miss Fortini also insisted that she should lose more weight and brought in a small pink-coloured razor for her and told her that she need not return it. Despite all this preparation, Eilis was nervous about taking off her clothes and appearing in her swimsuit in front of Tony; her efforts to pretend that it was nothing made her even more embarrassed. She wondered if he would notice that she had shaved and she felt she was too white and that her thighs and her bottom were too fat.

Tony stripped down to his bathing trunks instantly and, she was glad to see, nonchalantly looked at the crowds around them as she wriggled out of her clothes. As soon as she was ready, he wanted to go into the sea. He arranged with the family beside them that their things would be looked after and they made their way past the crowds down to the water's edge. Eilis laughed when she saw him recoiling from the cold; the water, compared to the water in the Irish Sea, seemed quite warm to her. She waded out while he struggled to follow her.

As she swam out, he stood helplessly up to his waist in the water, and when she motioned for him to follow her, shouting that he was not to be a baby, he shouted back that he could not swim. She did a gentle breaststroke in his direction and then slowly realized, by seeing what the couples around them were up to, what his plan was. He wanted, it seemed, the two of them to stand up to their necks in the water, holding each other as each wave crashed over them. When she embraced him, he held her so that she could not easily swim away from him. She could feel his erect penis hard against her, which made him smile even more than usual, and, when he wanted to put his hands on her bottom as he held her, she swam away from him. The thought had come into her mind of telling him who the last person to touch her bottom was. The idea of his reaction to this made her laugh so much that she did a vigorous backstroke, letting him presume, she hoped, that he was being too free under the water with his hands.

All day they moved between their place on the beach and the ocean. She put on her sun hat and he raised the umbrella to prevent sunburn and he also produced a picnic that his mother had prepared for him, including a thermos of ice-cold lemonade. In the water, the few times that she swam out on her own, she felt that the waves were stronger than at home, not so much in the way they broke but in the way they pulled out. She realized that she would have to be careful not to swim too far out of her depth in this unfamiliar sea. Tony, she saw, was afraid of the water, hated her swimming away from him. As soon as she returned to him each time, he made her put her arms around his neck and he lifted her from below so that her legs were wrapped around him. When he kissed her and then held her face back and looked at her, he seemed not to be embarrassed by his erection at all but proud of it. He was all boyish as he grinned at her; she, in turn, felt a great tenderness towards him and kissed him deeply as he held her. As the day waned, they were almost the last remaining in the water.

When Eilis complained of the heat at work they told her that it was only the beginning, but one day Miss Fortini told her that Mr. Bartocci was about to turn on the air-conditioning and soon the place would be crowded with shoppers seeking relief from the heat. Her job, Miss Fortini said, was to make them all buy something.

Soon, Eilis looked forward to going to work, and longed, as she woke sweating in the night, for the air-conditioning in Bartocci's. In the evening Mrs. Kehoe put chairs out in front of the house and they sat there fanning themselves even in the shade, even after dark some nights. On Eilis's half-day Tony took a half-day too and they went to Coney Island and came back late. When she asked him if they could have a go on the huge wheel or one of the other amusements, he refused, managing each time to find an excuse why they could not. He gave her no hint that he had lost his previous girlfriend because he took her on the wheel. Eilis was fascinated by this, the easy, casual way he prevented them from going there, his sweet duplicity in giving no sign of what had happened before. She was almost glad to know that he had secrets and had ways of calmly keeping them.

As the summer wore on he could talk nothing except baseball. The names he told her about-names like Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese and Preacher Roe-were the names she also heard about at work and saw mentioned in the newspapers. Even Mrs. Kehoe spoke about these players as though she knew them. She had gone the previous year to the house of her friend Miss Scanlan to watch a game on her television, and, since she was a Dodgers supporter, as she told everyone, she intended to do so again if Miss Scanlan, who was also a Dodgers supporter, would have her.

It seemed to Eilis for a while that no one spoke of anything else except the need to defeat the Giants. Tony told her with real excitement that he had secured tickets for Ebbets Field not only for himself and Eilis but for his three brothers and it was going to be the best day of their lives because they were going to get revenge for what Bobby Thomson had done to them the previous season. As he walked through the streets with her Tony was not alone in doing imitations of his favourite players and shouting about the hopes he had for them.

She tried to tell him about the Wexford hurling team and how they were beaten by Tipperary and how her brothers and her father used to sit glued to the old radiogram in the front room on summer Sundays even if Wexford were not playing. When he began to imitate the commentators, describing imaginary games of his own, she told him that Jack her brother had done the same.

"Hold on," he said. "You play baseball in Ireland?"

"No, it was hurling."

He seemed puzzled.

"So it wasn't baseball?" His face registered disappointment, then a sort of exasperation.

One night in the parish hall when the band, which had been playing swing tunes, began to play a tune that Tony seemed to recognize, he went crazy, as did many around him. "It's the Jackie Robinson song," he shouted. He began to swing an imaginary baseball bat. "They're playing 'Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?'"

As soon as Eilis returned to her classes at Brooklyn College the baseball frenzy became worse. What surprised her was that she had noticed nothing of it the previous year although it must have been going on around her with the same intensity. Now she had returned to her routine of seeing Tony on Thursday nights after class, on Friday nights in the parish hall and on Saturday for a movie, and he talked of nothing except how this would be the perfect year for him if they could be together, Eilis and himself, and if Laurence and Maurice and Frankie could be with them too and if the Dodgers could win the World Series. To her great relief, he made no further mention of having kids who would be Dodgers supporters.

She walked with the four brothers through the crowds to Ebbets Field. They had left themselves plenty of time to stop and talk to anyone at all who had news of the players, or opinions about how the game would go, or to buy hot dogs and sodas, to linger outside, part of the crush. Slowly, the differences between the brothers became more apparent to her. While Maurice smiled and seemed easygoing, he did not speak to strangers and held himself back when the others did. Tony and Frank stayed close to each other all the time, Frank eager to know what Tony's latest opinion was. Laurence seemed to know most about the game and could easily contradict some of Tony's assertions. She laughed at Frank as he looked from Tony to Laurence when they argued about the merits of Ebbets Field itself, Laurence insisting it was too small and old-fashioned and would have to be moved, Tony answering that it would never be moved. Frank's eyes darted from one brother to the other; he appeared genuinely perplexed. Maurice never got involved in the arguments but managed to move them forward in the direction of the field, warning them that they were going too slowly.

When they found their seats, they put Eilis in the middle with Tony and Maurice on either side of her, Laurence on Tony's left and Frank to the right of Maurice.

"Mom told us we weren't to leave you at the edge," Frank said to her.

Both Tony and her fellow lodgers had explained the rules of the game to Eilis and made it seem like rounders, which she had played at home with her brothers and their friends; still she did not know what to expect because rounders, she thought, was fine in its way but it had never provoked the same excitement as hurling or football. At Mrs. Kehoe's the night before Miss McAdam had insisted that it was the best game in the world but all of the others thought that it was too slow, with too many breaks. Diana and Patty agreed that the best part was going off to get hot dogs and sodas and beers and finding that nothing important had happened while you were away, despite all the shouting and cheering.

"It was stolen from us the last time, that's all I have to say," Mrs. Kehoe said. "It was a very bitter moment."

Now, with half an hour to go before the game, everyone around them was behaving as though it was just about to begin. Tony, Eilis saw, had ceased to have any interest in her at all. Normally, he was attentive, smiling at her, asking her questions, listening to her, telling her stories. Now, in the heat of this excitement, he could no longer manage the role of caring, thoughtful boyfriend. He spoke at some length to the people behind him and conveyed what they had told him to Frank, ignoring her completely as he leaned over her to be heard. He could not stay quiet, standing up and sitting back down and craning his neck to see what was going on behind. All the while Maurice, who had bought a programme, perused it and regularly offered Eilis and his three brothers nuggets of information that he had gleaned. He seemed worried.

"If we lose this game Tony will go crazy," he said to her. "And if we win he'll go even more crazy and Frankie with him."

"So which would be better," she asked, "win or lose?"

"Win," he said.

Tony and Frank went to get more hot dogs and beers and sodas.

"Keep our seats," Tony said, and grinned.

"Yeah, keep our seats," Frank repeated.

When the players finally appeared, all four brothers jumped up and vied with one another to identify them, but quite soon, when something happened that seemed to displease Tony, he sat back in his seat, despondent. For a moment he held her hand.

"They're all against us," he said.

But when the game started Tony launched into a running commentary that rose to a climax every time there was any action. Sometimes, when Tony was quiet, Frank took over and drew their attention to something, only to be told to stop by Maurice, who watched each second with slow and deliberate intensity, hardly speaking at all. He was, nonetheless, she felt, even more involved and excited than Tony, despite all the shouting, cheering, cajoling and whooping that Tony did.

She simply could not follow the game, could make no sense of how you would score, or what constituted a good hit or a bad one. Nor could she work out which player was which. And it was as slow as Patty and Diana had said it would be. She knew, however, that she should not go to the bathroom because it was possible that the very moment she announced her departure would be the moment no one wanted her to miss.

As she sat quietly watching the game, trying to understand its intricate rituals, it struck Eilis that Tony, despite his constant movements and his screaming at Frank to pay attention to some score or other, and his cheering followed by statements of pure despair, did not manage to irritate her even once. She thought it was strange, and out of the side of her eye and sometimes directly she started to watch him, noticing how funny he was, how alive, how graceful, how alert to things. She began to appreciate also how much he was enjoying himself; he was doing so even more than his brothers, more openly, with greater humour and infectious ease. She did not mind, indeed she almost enjoyed the fact that he was paying her no attention, leaving it to Maurice to explain when he could what was happening.

Tony was so wrapped up in the game that it gave her a chance to let her thoughts linger on him, float towards him, noting how different from her he was in every way. The idea that he would never see her as she felt that she saw him now came to her as an infinite relief, as a satisfactory solution to things. His excitement and the excitement of the crowd began to lift her spirits until she even pretended that she could follow what was happening. She cheered for the Dodgers as much as anyone around her; and then she followed Tony's eyes, looking at what he was pointing to, and sat back silently with him when the team seemed to be losing.

Finally, after nearly two hours everyone stood up. She and Tony and Frank arranged to meet at the queue for the hot-dog stand closest to their seats after she had been to the bathroom. Since she was thirsty now and felt, when she had found them at the head of the line, that she wanted to be as much a part of everything as she could, she ordered a beer too, her first ever, and tried to run the mustard and ketchup along the hot dog with the same flourish as Tony and Frank.

By the time they got back to their seats, the game had resumed. She asked Maurice if it was really only half over and he explained that in baseball there is no half time, the break comes after the seventh inning near to the end and it's more of a pause-a stretch they call it. It struck her that he was the only one of the four brothers who had any sense of the depth of her ignorance of the game. She sat back and smiled to herself at the thought of this, its strangeness, how little it appeared to matter to her even in those moments when she found what was happening on the field most totally bewildering. All she knew was that luck and success were once more, for one reason or another, slowly evading the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Because she spent Thanksgiving with Tony's family, his mother thought that Eilis could come for Christmas too and seemed almost offended, asking if their food was not to her taste, when she refused. She explained that she could not let Father Flood down and was going to work in the parish hall for a second year. Tony and his mother told her several times that someone else could take her turn and do her work, but she was adamant. She felt slightly guilty at their assumption that she was performing an act of selfless charity when she would also, she knew, be happier in the parish hall working than spending a long day with a supper the night before in the small apartment with Tony and his family. She loved them, each of them, and found the differences between the four brothers intriguing, but sometimes she found the pleasure of being alone after a lunch or a supper with them greater than the pleasure of the meal itself.

In the days after Christmas she saw Tony every evening. On one of these evenings he outlined to her the plans they had, how he, Maurice and Laurence had bought at a bargain price a plot of land on Long Island that they were going to develop. It would take time, he said, maybe a year or two because it was a good distance from services and it looked like nothing except bare land. But soon, they knew, the services would reach there. What was empty now, he said, would within a few years have paved roads and water and electricity. On their plot there was enough space for five houses, each with its own garden. Maurice was going to evening classes in cost engineering and Tony and Laurence would be able to do the plumbing and the carpentry.

The first house, he explained, would be for the family; his mother longed for a garden and a proper house of her own. And then, he said, they would build three houses and sell them. But Maurice and Laurence had asked him if he wanted the fifth house and he had said that he did and he was asking her now if she would like to live in Long Island. It was near the ocean, he said, and not far from where the train stopped. But he did not want to take her there yet because it was winter and it was bare and bleak with nothing but waste ground and scrubland. The house would be theirs, he said, they could plan it themselves.

She watched him carefully because she knew that this was his way not only of asking her to marry him but of suggesting that marriage had been already tacitly agreed between them. It was the details of how they would live, the life he could offer her, that he was presenting now. Eventually, he said, he and his two brothers would set up a company and they would build houses. Now they were saving money and making plans, but with their skills and the first plot in their possession it would not be long and it would mean that they could soon, all of them, have a much better life. She said nothing in reply. She was almost in tears at what he was proposing and how practical he was as he spoke and how serious and sincere. She did not want to say she would think about it because she knew how that might sound. Instead, she nodded and smiled and reached out and held his two hands and pulled him towards her.

She wrote once more to Rose, using her sister's office address, and told her how far things had gone; she attempted to describe Tony, but it was difficult without making him sound too boyish or silly or giddy. She mentioned that he never used bad language or curse words because she thought it was important for Rose to know that he was not like anyone at home, that this was a different world and in this world Tony shone despite the fact that his family lived in two rooms or that he worked with his hands. She tore the letter up a few times; she had made it sound as though she were pleading for him, instead of merely trying to explain that he was special and that she was not staying with him simply because he was the first man she had met.

In her letters to her mother, however, Eilis had never once mentioned him; even though she had described Coney Island and the baseball game, she had said only that she had gone with friends. She wished now that she had made one or two casual references to him six months ago so that it might not come as such a surprise now, but when she made an attempt to put him into her letters to her mother she found that it was not possible without writing in a full paragraph about him and where she had met him and what he was like. She found that she postponed doing this every time she tried.

When Rose replied, the letter was brief. It was clear to her that Rose had heard once more from Father Flood. Rose said that Tony seemed very nice, and, since they were both young, they would not have to make any decisions, and that the best news was that Eilis would, by the summer, be a qualified bookkeeper and could start to look for experience. Rose imagined, she wrote, that Eilis must be really looking forward to getting off the shop floor and having a job in an office, which would not only pay more money but be easier on the legs.

At Bartocci's, everyone had become more relaxed about the coloured customers and Eilis was moved to different counters a number of times. Since Miss Fortini had told the Bartoccis about her passing her exams and being in her final year, Miss Bartocci had said that if any vacancy arose as a junior bookkeeper even before she was fully qualified then they would consider her.

The second-year course was simpler because Eilis was not as afraid of what might appear on the exam paper. And because she had read the law books and taken notes on them, she was able to follow most of what Mr. Rosenblum was talking about. But she was still careful to miss no lectures and not to see Tony except for each Thursday, when he walked her home, each Friday, when they went together to the dance at the parish hall, and each Saturday, when he took her to a diner and a movie. Even when the winter began to descend on Brooklyn, she liked her room and her routine, and as the spring came she began to study on the nights when she came home from her lectures and on Sundays as well so she could be sure to get through her exams.

She found work on the shop floor boring and tiring, and often, especially in the early days of the week when they were not busy, the time went slowly. But Miss Fortini was always watching and noticed if anyone took a break they were not due or were late or seemed not ready to serve the next customer. Eilis was careful how she stood, and she watched out in case a customer needed her. She learned that time passed more slowly if she heeded the clock or if she thought about it at all, so she learned to be patient, and then, once she finished work and walked out of the store each day, she managed to put it out of her mind completely and enjoy the freedom.

One afternoon when she saw Father Flood coming into the store she thought nothing of it. Although she had not seen him there since the day when he was called by the Bartoccis, she knew that he was a friend of Mr. Bartocci and might have business with him. She noticed him speaking to Miss Fortini first and saw him glancing over at her and making as though he was going to come over towards her, but instead after some discussion with Miss Fortini they both went in the direction of the office. She served a customer and then, seeing that someone had unfolded a number of blouses, she went over and put them neatly back in their place. When she turned, Miss Fortini was coming towards her and there was something in the expression on her face that made Eilis want to retreat from her, move away quickly pretending that she had not seen her.

"I wonder if you could come to the office for a moment," Miss Fortini said.

Eilis asked herself if she had done something, if someone had accused her of something.

"What is it about?" she asked.

"I can't tell you," Miss Fortini said. "It's just best if you follow me."

In the way Miss Fortini turned and walked briskly ahead Eilis felt even more that she had done something wrong that had only now been discovered. When they moved from the shop floor and she was following Miss Fortini down a corridor, she stopped.

"I'm sorry," she said, "but you will have to tell me what this is about."

"I can't tell you," Miss Fortini said.

"Can you give me some idea?"

"It's something in your family."

"Something or someone?"

"Someone."

Immediately, Eilis thought that her mother might have had a heart attack or fallen down the stairs or that one of her brothers had had an accident in Birmingham.

"Which of them?" she asked.

Miss Fortini did not reply but walked on ahead of her again until she came to a door at the end of a corridor, which she opened. She stood back and let Eilis enter. It was a small room and Father Flood was alone sitting on a chair. He stood up hesitantly and indicated to Miss Fortini that she should leave them.

"Eilis," he said. "Eilis."

"Yes. What is it?"

"It's Rose."

"What happened to her?"

"Your mother found her dead this morning."

Eilis said nothing.

"She must have died in her sleep," Father Flood said.

"Died in her sleep?" Eilis asked, going over in her mind when she had last heard from Rose or from her mother and if there was any hint of anything wrong.

"Yes," he said. "It was sudden. She was out playing golf yesterday and in the best of form. She died in her sleep, Eilis."

"And my mother found her?"

"Yes."

"Do the others know?"

"Yes, and they're heading home on the mail-boat. She's being waked tonight."

Eilis now wondered if there was any way she could go out into the street, find a way to stop this from having happened, or stop him from having told her. In the silence she almost asked Father Flood to go and not come into the store again like this, but she realized instantly how foolish that was. He was here. She had heard what he said. She could not push back time.

"I've arranged for your mother to come up to the Manse in Enniscorthy tonight and we'll call her from the presbytery here."

"Was it one of the priests who contacted you?"

"Father Quaid," he said.

"Are they sure?" she asked and then quickly put her hand out to stop him replying. "I mean, it all happened today?"

"This morning in Ireland."

"I can't believe it," she said. "No warning."

"I spoke to Franco Bartocci by telephone earlier and he said to take you home, and I spoke to Mrs. Kehoe and if you give me Tony's address I will send him word as well and let him know."

"What will happen?" she asked.

"The funeral will be the day after tomorrow," he said.

It was the softness in his voice, the guarded way he avoided her eyes, that made her start to cry. And when he produced a large and clean white handkerchief that he clearly had in his pocket prepared for this, she became almost hysterical as she pushed him away.

"Why did I ever come over here?" she asked, but she knew that he could not understand her because she was sobbing so much. She took the handkerchief from him and blew her nose.

"Why did I ever come over here?" she asked again.

"Rose wanted a better life for you," he replied. "She only did what was good."

"I won't ever see her again now."

"She loved how well you were doing."

"I'll never see her again. Isn't that right?"

"It's very sad, Eilis. But she's in heaven now. That's what we should think about. And she'll be watching over you. And we'll all have to pray for your mother and for Rose's soul, and you know, Eilis, we have to remember that God's ways are not our ways."

"I wish I had never come over here."

As she began to cry again, she kept repeating, "I wish I had never come over here."

"I have the car parked outside and we can go to the presbytery. You know it will do you good to have a talk with your mother."

"I haven't heard her voice since I left," Eilis said. "It's just been letters. It's awful that this is the first time I am going to phone her."

"I know that, Eilis, and she'll feel that too. Father Quaid said that he would collect her and drive her up to the Manse. I'd guess she's in shock."

"What will I say to her?"

Her mother's voice was faltering at first; she sounded as though she were talking to herself and Eilis had to interrupt to tell her that she could not hear.

"Can you hear me now?" her mother asked.

"Yes, Mammy, I can. It's much better now."

"It's like she's asleep and it was the same this morning," her mother said. "I went in to call her and she was fast asleep and I said I'd leave her. But I knew as I went down the stairs. It wasn't like her to sleep in like that. I looked at the clock in the kitchen and said I'd give her ten minutes more and then when I went up and touched her she was stone cold."

"Oh, God, that's terrible."

"I whispered an act of contrition into her ear. Then I ran next door."

The silence on the line was broken only by some faint crackling noises.

"She died in the night in her sleep," her mother eventually continued. "That's what Dr. Cudigan said. She had been seeing the doctor without telling anyone and she went for tests without telling anyone. Rose knew, Eily, she knew that it could happen any time because of her heart. She had a bad heart, Dr. Cudigan said, and there was nothing could be done. She went on as normal. She knew that she had a bad heart and she decided to carry on playing golf and doing everything. The doctor said that he told her to take it easy, but, even if she had, it might have been the same. I don't know what to think, Eily. Maybe she was very brave."

"She told no one?"

"No one, Eily, no one at all. And she looks very peaceful now. I looked at her before I came out and I thought for a second she was still with us, she's so like herself. But she's gone, Eily. Rose has gone and that is the last thing in the world I thought was going to happen."

"Who's in the house now?"

"The neighbours are all there and your uncle Michael and they came down from Clonegal, all the Doyles, and they're there too. And I said when your daddy died that I shouldn't cry too much because I had you and Rose and the boys and when the boys left I said the same and when you left I had Rose, but I have no one at all now, Eily, I have no one."

Eilis knew that she could not be understood as she tried to reply because she was crying so hard. Her mother was silent for a while on the other end of the phone.

"Tomorrow I'll say goodbye to her for you," her mother said when she began to speak again. "That's what I thought I'd do. I'll say goodbye to her from me and then I'll say goodbye to her from you. And she's with your father in heaven now. We'll bury her beside him. I often thought at night how lonely he might be on his own in the graveyard but he'll have Rose now. They're up in heaven, the two of them."

"They are, Mammy."

"I don't know why she was taken away so young, that's all I have to say."

"It's a terrible shock," Eilis replied.

"She was cold this morning when I touched her, as cold as anything."

"She must have died peacefully," Eilis said.

"I wish she had told me, or let me know something was wrong. She didn't want to worry me. That's what Father Quaid and the others said. Maybe I couldn't have done much but I would have watched out for her. I don't know what to think."

Eilis could hear her mother sighing.

"I'll go back now and we'll say the rosary and I'll tell her I was talking to you."

"I'd love if you would do that."

"Goodbye now, Eily."

"Goodbye, Mammy, and will you tell the lads I was on the phone to you?"

"I will. They'll arrive in the morning."

"Goodbye, Mammy."

"Goodbye, Eily."

When she had put the phone down she began to cry. She found a chair in the corner of the room and sat down trying to control herself. Father Flood and his housekeeper came and brought her tea and tried to calm her but she could not stop herself breaking into hysterical sobbing.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Don't worry at all," the housekeeper said.

When she was calmer Father Flood drove her to Mrs. Kehoe's; Tony was already in the front room. She did not know how long he had been there and she looked at him and Mrs. Kehoe wondering what they had been talking about while they waited for her and if Mrs. Kehoe had finally found out that Tony was Italian and not Irish. Mrs. Kehoe was full of kindness and sympathy, but there was also, Eilis thought, a sense that the news and the visitors had caused excitement, distracted her pleasantly from the tedium of the day. She bustled in and out of the room addressing Tony by his first name and bringing a tray with tea and sandwiches for him and Father Flood.

"Your poor mother, that's all I have to say, your poor mother," she said.

For once, Eilis did not feel it necessary to be polite to Mrs. Kehoe. She looked away every time she spoke and did not respond to her at any point. This appeared to make Mrs. Kehoe even more solicitous, as she offered her tea at every moment or an aspirin and a glass of water, or insisted that she have something to eat. Eilis wished Tony would stop accepting further sandwiches and cakes from Mrs. Kehoe and thanking her for being so kind. She wanted him to leave and Mrs. Kehoe to stop talking and Father Flood to go as well, but she could not face her own room and the night ahead so she said nothing and soon Mrs. Kehoe and Tony and Father Flood spoke as though she were not there, going over the changes that had occurred in Brooklyn in the past few years and offering their opinions on what further changes might occur. Every so often they grew silent and asked her if she needed anything.

"The poor thing, she's in shock," Mrs. Kehoe said.

Eilis said that she needed nothing and closed her eyes as they continued to talk among themselves, Mrs. Kehoe wondering to the other two if she should buy a television for company in the evenings. She worried, she said, that it might not catch on and she'd be left with it. Both Tony and Father Flood advised her to buy a set, and this seemed only to cause further remarks about how there was no guarantee that they would go on making programmes and she did not think she would take the risk.

"When everyone gets one, I'll get one," she said.

Finally, when they had run out of subjects, it was arranged that Father Flood would say a mass for Rose at ten o'clock the following morning and that Mrs. Kehoe would attend, as would Tony and his mother. There would be the usual congregation as well, Father Flood said, and he would let them know before mass started that it was being said for the repose of the soul of someone very special and he would, before communion, say a few words about Rose and ask people to pray for her. He arranged to drive Tony home but waited tactfully in Mrs. Kehoe's front room with Mrs. Kehoe as Tony embraced Eilis in the hall.

"I'm sorry I can't talk," she said.

"I've been thinking about it," he said. "If one of my brothers had died, maybe that sounds selfish, but I was trying to imagine what you're feeling."

"I think about it," Eilis said, "and I can't bear it and then I forget about it for a minute and when it comes back it's as though I just heard the news. I can't get over it."

"I wish I could stay with you," he said.

"I'll see you in the morning, and tell your mother not to come if it's any trouble."

"She'll be there. Nothing is any trouble now," he said.

Eilis looked at the pile of letters Rose had sent her, wondering if between sending one of these and sending the next Rose had learned that she was sick. Or if she had known before Eilis had left. It changed everything Eilis thought about her time in Brooklyn, it made everything that had happened to her seem small. She looked at Rose's handwriting, its clarity and evenness, its sense of supreme self-possession and self-confidence, and she wondered whether, while writing some of these words, Rose had looked up and sighed and then, through sheer strength of will, steeled herself and carried on writing, not faltering for a single moment from her decision to let no one share her knowledge except the doctor who had told her.

It was strange, Eilis felt in the morning, how deeply she had slept and how instantaneously, on waking, she had known that she was not going to work but to a mass for Rose. Her sister, she knew, would still be in the house in Friary Street, they would take her to the cathedral later in the evening and she would be buried after mass in the morning. All of this seemed simple and clear and almost inevitable until she and Mrs. Kehoe set out together for the parish church. Walking the familiar street, passing people whom she did not know, Eilis realized that one of them could have died and not Rose, and this could be another spring morning, a hint of heat in the air, with her going to work as normal.

The idea of Rose dying in her sleep seemed unimaginable. Had she opened her eyes for a moment? Had she just lain still breathing the breath of sleep, and then, as though it were nothing, had her heart stopped and her breath? How could this happen? Had she cried out in the night and not been heard, or even murmured or whispered? Had she known something the previous evening? Something, anything, that might have given her a clue that this was her last day alive in the world?

She imagined Rose laid out now in the dark robes of the dead with candles flickering on the table. And later the coffin being closed, and the solemn faces of everyone in the hallway and outside in the street, her brothers wearing suits and black ties as they had at their father's funeral. All morning at mass and back in Father Flood's house, she went through each moment of Rose's death and her removal.

The others were surprised, almost alarmed, when she said that she wanted to go to work that afternoon. She saw Mrs. Kehoe whispering about it to Father Flood. Tony asked her if she was sure, and when she insisted he said that he would walk with her to Bartocci's and then meet her later back at Mrs. Kehoe's. Mrs. Kehoe had invited him and Father Flood to have supper with the other lodgers followed by a rosary to be said for Rose's soul.

Eilis went back to work the following day as well and was determined to go to her classes that evening. Since they could not go to a movie or a dance, she and Tony went to a diner nearby and he said he would not mind if she did not want to talk much or if she cried.

"I wish this hadn't happened," he said. "I keep wishing it hadn't happened."

"I think that too," Eilis said. "If only she'd let one of us know. Or if only nothing had happened and she was well at home. I wish I had a photograph of her so I could show you how beautiful she was."

"You are beautiful," he said.

"She was the most beautiful, everyone said that, and I can't get used to the idea of where she is now. I'll have to stop thinking about her dying and her coffin and all that and maybe start praying, but it's hard."

"I'll help you if you like," he said.

Eilis felt, despite the improving weather, that all of the colour had been washed out of her world. She was careful on the shop floor and proud that not once did she break down or have to go suddenly to the bathroom and cry. Miss Fortini told her that she was not to worry if she needed to go home earlier any day, or if she wanted to meet her outside working hours to talk about what had happened. Tony came every night to meet her after the classes and she liked how he allowed her to remain silent if she wanted. He simply held her hand, or put his arm around her and walked her home, where her fellow lodgers made clear to her one by one that if she needed anything, anything at all, she was to knock on their door or find them in the kitchen and they would do everything they could for her.

One night when she went up to the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea she saw that there was a letter for her on the side table that she had missed earlier. It was from Ireland and she recognized the handwriting as Jack's. She did not open it immediately but took it downstairs with her when the tea was made so she could read it without being disturbed.

Dear Eilis, Mammy asked me to write to you because she isn't able. I am writing this in the front parlour at the table by the window. The house was full of people but now there isn't a sound. They have all gone home. We buried Rose today and Mammy asked me to tell you that it was a fine day and the rain kept off. Father Quaid said the mass for her. We came down on the train from Dublin and arrived yesterday morning after a bad night on the mail-boat. She was still being waked in the house when we arrived. She looked beautiful, her hair and everything. Everyone said she looked peaceful, just asleep, and maybe that was true before we came but when I saw her she looked different, not like herself at all, not bad or anything but when I knelt down and touched her I didn't think it was her at all for a minute. Maybe I shouldn't say this, but I thought it was best to let you know what it was like. Mammy asked me to tell you everything that happened, about all the people who came, the whole golf club and Davis 's office shut for the morning. It wasn't like Daddy, when he died you would think he was alive one minute. Rose was like stone when I saw her, all pale like something from a picture. But she was beautiful and peaceful. I don't know what was wrong with me but I didn't think it was her at all until we had to carry the coffin, the boys and myself and Jem and Bill and Fonsey Doyle from Clonegal. It was the worst thing about it in that I couldn't believe we were doing that to her, closing her in there and burying her. I'll have to pray for her when I get back but I couldn't follow the prayers at all. Mammy asked me to say that she said a special goodbye to her from you but I couldn't stay in the room when Mammy was talking to her and I nearly couldn't carry the coffin I was crying so much. And I couldn't look at all in the graveyard. I covered my eyes for most of it. Maybe I shouldn't be telling you all this. The thing is that we have to go back to work and I don't think Mammy knows that yet. She thinks one of us might be able to stay but we can't, you know. Work beyond is not like that. I don't know what it's like over there but we have to be back and Mammy is going to be here on her own. The neighbours will all come in and the others but I think it hasn't hit her yet. I know she'd love to see you, she keeps saying that is the only thing she is hoping for but we don't know what to say about it. She didn't ask me to mention this but I'd say you'll be hearing from her when she's able to write. I think she wants you to come home. She's never slept a night on her own in the house and she keeps saying that she won't be able to. But we have to go back. She asked me if I had heard of any work in the town and I told her I'd ask around but the thing is I have to go back and so do Pat and Martin. I'm sorry for rambling on like this. The news must have come as a terrible shock to you. It did to us. We had trouble finding Martin for the whole day because he was out on a job. It's hard to think of Rose out in the graveyard, that's all I have to say. Mammy will want me to say that everyone was good and they were and she won't want me to say that she's crying all the time but she is, or most of the time anyway. I'm going to stop writing now and put this in an envelope. I'm not going to read it over because I started a few times and when I read it over I tore it up and had to start again. I'll seal the envelope and I'll post it in the morning. Martin, I think, is telling her that we have to go tomorrow. I hope this letter isn't all terrible but, as I said, I didn't know what to put into it. Mammy will be glad I sent it and I'll go and tell her now that it's written. You'll have to say a prayer for her. I'll go now. Your loving brother, Jack Eilis read the letter a few times and then she realized that she could not stay on her own now, she could hear Jack's voice in the words he wrote, she could feel him in the room with her and it was as though he had come in from a hurling match and his team had lost and he was breathless with the news. If she had been at home she could have spent time talking to Jack, listening to him, sitting with her mother and Martin and Pat, going over what had happened. She could not imagine Rose lying dead; she had thought of her as asleep and being laid out like someone who was sleeping but now she had to think of her like stone, all the life gone out of her, and her closed in the coffin, all changed and changing and gone from them. She almost wished Jack had not written but she knew that someone had to write and he was the best at writing.

She moved around the room, wondering what she should do. It struck her for a second that she could get a subway to the harbour and find the next boat going across the Atlantic and simply pay the fare and wait and get on the boat. But she realized quickly that she could not do this, they might not have an empty place and her money was in the savings bank. She thought of going upstairs, and in her mind she went through each of her fellow lodgers but none of them could be any use to her now. The only person who could be any use to her was Tony. She looked at the clock; it was ten thirty. If she could get there quickly on the subway, then she could be at his house in less than an hour, maybe a bit longer if the late trains did not come so often. She found her coat and went quickly into the corridor. She opened and closed the basement door and went up the steps trying not to make a sound.

His mother answered the door in her dressing gown and took her upstairs to the door of the apartment. It was clear that the family had retired for the night and Eilis knew that she did not seem now in a deep enough distress to justify her intruding at this hour. She saw through the door that Tony's parents' bed was already folded out and she came close to telling Tony's mother that it was fine, she was sorry for disturbing them and would go home. But that, she realized, would make no sense. Tony, his mother said, was getting dressed and he was going to go out with her; he shouted from the bedroom that they could go to the diner around the corner.

Suddenly, Frank appeared in his pyjamas. He had moved so quietly that she did not notice him until he was standing nearly in front of her. He seemed immensely curious and stealthy, almost comically so, like a figure in a movie who has just witnessed a robbery or a murder on a dark street. And then he looked at her openly and smiled at her and she had no choice but to smile in return just as Tony appeared and then Frank had to go back to his bedroom, having been told to mind his own business and leave Eilis alone.

›From Tony's appearance, she knew that he had been asleep. He checked in his pockets for his keys and then he slipped back into the kitchen, where she could not see him, and whispered something to his mother or his father and then came out again, the expression on his face grave and responsible and concerned.

As they walked down the street towards the diner Tony held her close to him. They moved slowly and did not speak. For a second, as they had made their way down the stairs of his building, she had felt that he was angry with her for calling so late, but now she understood that he was not. He had a way of snuggling in close to her when they walked together that made her know that he loved her. He was doing this now even more intensely than usual. She also knew it would matter to him that if she needed help like this she would feel secure coming to him rather than Father Flood or Mrs. Kehoe, that he would come first for her. More than anything else she had ever done, she thought, this was the most direct and emphatic way she had ever made clear to him that she would stay with him.

In the diner, once they had ordered, he read Jack's letter slowly, almost too slowly, she thought, letting his lips move with some of the words. It struck her that she should not have shown it to him and should not have come to his house like this. It would be impossible for him to read the parts about her mother wanting to see her, her mother unable to be alone, without his feeling that she might go and that this was her way of breaking the news to him. As she watched him reading, his face pale, his expression deadly serious, as he seemed to be fiercely concentrating, she guessed that he was going over those parts of the letter that seemed to suggest she was needed by her mother in Enniscorthy. She was sorry now that she had not managed to contain herself earlier, that she had not foreseen this. And she felt stupid because she knew that no matter what she said it would be impossible to convince Tony that she wasn't going to go back to Ireland.

When he handed her the letter there were tears in his eyes.

"Your brother must be a very nice man," he said. "I wish…" He hesitated for a moment and then reached across the table and held her hand. "I don't mean I wish, but it would have been right if you and me had been there at the funeral, if I could have been there with you."

"I know," she said.

"And soon your mother will write," he said, "and you must come to my house before you even open her letter."

She could not tell if he meant it when he suggested that she should not be alone when she opened her mother's letter because he should be close by to comfort her. Or if he really meant, in fact, that, since he could not read her mind or guess precisely what her intentions were, he would like to see what her mother had to say about her going or her staying.

All this was a mistake, she thought again, as she set about apologizing for having disturbed him. When she realized how cold this sounded and how it seemed to set her at a distance from him, she told him how grateful she was for him coming out with her now when she needed him. He nodded, but she knew that he was disturbed by the letter, or maybe he was just as upset by it as she had been, or maybe he was a puzzling mixture of both.

He insisted on taking her home, even though she protested that he could easily miss the very last subway back. Once more, they did not speak, but as he walked her from the subway station through the dark cold empty streets to Mrs. Kehoe's, she felt that she was being held by someone wounded, that the letter had somehow, in its tone, made clear to him what had really happened and made plain to him also that she belonged somewhere else, a place that he could never know. She thought that he was going to cry; she felt almost guilty that she had handed some of her grief to him, and then she felt close to him for his willingness to take it and hold it, in all its rawness, all its dark confusion. She was almost more upset now than she had been when she had ventured out in search of him.

When they reached the house he held her but did not kiss her. She moved as close to him as she could until she felt the warmth of him and they both began to sob. She wished that she could tell him, in a way that would make him believe her, that she would not go, but then it struck her that Tony might feel she should go, that the letter had made him see where her duty lay, that he was crying now for everything, for Rose who was dead, for her mother who was lonely, for Eilis who would have to go, and for himself who would be left. She wished she could say something clear, or even wished that she could tell what he was thinking or why he was crying now harder than she was.

She knew that she could not walk alone down the steps into the basement and turn on the light in her room and be on her own there. And she knew also that he could not turn from her and walk away. As she produced the door key from the pocket of her coat, she pointed to Mrs. Kehoe's window and put her finger to her lips. They tiptoed down the steps to the basement and she opened the door and turned on the light in the hall and closed the door without making a sound and opened the door of her room for him before turning off the light in the hall.

The room was warm and they both took off their coats. Tony's face was puffed and raw from crying. When he tried to smile she moved towards him and held him.

"Is this where you live?" he whispered.

"Yes, and if you make one sound, I'll be evicted," she said.

He kissed her gently and responded with his tongue only when she opened her mouth for him. His body was warm and seemed strangely vulnerable to her now as she pulled him against her. She ran her hands down his back and under his shirt until she was touching his skin. They moved towards the bed without speaking. As they lay beside each other, he lifted her skirt and opened his trousers enough for her to feel his penis against her. She knew that he was waiting for a sign from her, that he would do nothing more as they continued to kiss. She opened her eyes and saw that his were closed. Quietly, she moved away from him and took off her panties and by the time she lay beside him again he had pulled his trousers down further and his underwear too so that she could touch him. He tried to put his hands on her breasts but could not easily unloose her brassiere; he put his hand on her back and concentrated on kissing her fiercely.

When he moved on top of her and entered her she tried not to gasp as she began to panic. It was not only the pain and the shock but the idea that she could not control him, that his penis was pushing into her deeper than she wanted it to go. With each thrust it seemed to move further into her until she was sure it was going to injure something inside her. She felt a relief as it pulled back but only to find it worse each time as it pushed up into her. She tightened as much as she could to stop it and she wished she could call out or indicate that he should not push in so hard, that he was going to break something.

That she could not shout made her panic even greater; she put her energy into tightening her whole body with all the force she could gather. And as she did so he gasped, he made noises that she did not imagine anyone could make, a sort of muffled whining that did not let up. As he stopped moving she tightened more, hoping that he would now take his penis out, but instead he lay on top of her, gasping. It seemed to her that he was unaware of anything except his own breathing, that in these minutes as she lay with him quietly on top of her he did not know or care that she existed. She had no idea how they were going to face each other now. She did not move as she waited for him to do something.

What he did once he moved away from her surprised her. He stood up without saying anything, looked at her, smiled and took his shoes and socks off and then removed his trousers and underpants. He knelt on the bed and slowly undressed her, and when she was naked, with her arms covering her breasts, he took off his shirt so that he was naked too. He approached gently, almost shyly, and lifted the bed covers and they both moved in between the sheets and lay together for some time quietly. She realized when she touched him once more, his penis erect again, how smooth and beautiful he was, and how much stronger he seemed naked than when he was with her in the street or in the dancehall, where, compared to men who were taller or bigger, he had often appeared almost frail. When she understood that he wanted to enter her again she whispered to him that he had pushed in too far the first time.

"I thought you would go up into my neck." She laughed under her breath.

"I wish I could," he said.

She pinched him hard.

"No, you don't wish you could."

"Hey, that hurt," he whispered and kissed her, moving slowly on top of her.

This time the pain was almost worse than before, as though he were hitting against something inside her that was bruised or cut.

"Is that better?" he asked.

She tightened as much as she could.

"Hey, that's beautiful," he said. "Can you do that more?"

Once again, as he pushed in further, he seemed to become unaware that she was with him. He seemed lost to the world. And this sense of him as beyond her made her want him more than she had ever done, made her feel that this now and the memory of it later would be enough for her and had made a difference to her beyond anything she had ever imagined.

The next day he was waiting for her after work and they walked from Fulton Street to the subway station without speaking. Once there, they arranged to meet again outside the college when the classes had finished. He appeared grave, almost angry with her, as they parted. Later, when he had walked her home, she turned before going down the basement steps and saw he was still standing there. He gave her a grin that reminded her so much of his brother Frank's way of grinning, so full of mischief and innocence, that she laughed and pointed at him in mock accusation.

It was clear, once she arrived in the kitchen and was waiting for the kettle to boil, that Mrs. Kehoe, who was alone at the table, was not speaking to her. She felt a lightness that almost caused her to ask Mrs. Kehoe what the problem was, but instead she moved around the kitchen pretending that she noticed nothing strange.

It struck her then that Mrs. Kehoe, who generally, Eilis believed, heard every sound and missed nothing, had heard Tony either entering or leaving the basement or, perhaps worse indeed, heard him during the night. In all the outrages that could be committed by the lodgers, this had never even been mentioned as a possibility by the lodgers themselves or by Mrs. Kehoe. It was in the realm of the unthinkable. While Patty and Diana often talked freely about boyfriends, the idea that one of them would spend an entire night in the company of her boyfriend, or allow him access to her bedroom, was out of the question. As Eilis sat in the chilly silence created by Mrs. Kehoe, she determined to deny emphatically and brazenly that Tony had been near her room and declare that such an idea shocked her as much as it did her landlady.

She made poached eggs and toast and was relieved when Patty and Diana came in with news about a coat that Patty had seen and was going to buy if it was still there on Friday when she got paid. Mrs. Kehoe stood up without speaking and left the kitchen banging the door.

"What's biting her?" Patty asked.

"I think I know," Diana said, looking at Eilis, "but as God is my witness I heard nothing."

"Heard what?" Patty asked.

"Nothing," Diana said. "But it sounded lovely."

Eilis slept deeply and woke in the morning exhausted and sore. It was as though Rose's death had happened long ago, and her night with Tony remained with her as something powerful, still present. She wondered how she would know if she was pregnant, how early the signs would come. She touched her stomach, asking herself if at this very moment something could be happening there, some tiny connection like a small knot, or smaller even, smaller than a drop of water but with everything in it that was needed for it to grow. She wondered if there was anything she could do to stop it, if there was something she could wash herself with, but as soon as she thought of that she knew that even the idea was wrong and that she would have to go to confession and make Tony go too.

She hoped that he would not grin at her again as he had done the previous evening and that he would realize the trouble she was in if she was pregnant. But if she was not pregnant, she hoped he would understand, as she did now, that what they had done was wrong, and more wrong because it had been done when Rose was barely in her grave. Even when she went to confession, Eilis realized, and told the priest what they had done, she would never be able to tell anyone that just half an hour before they had been crying. It would seem too strange.

As soon as she saw Tony that evening she told him that they would both have to go to confession the following evening, which was Friday, and that she presumed he understood this.

"I couldn't go to Father Flood," she said, "or any priest who might recognize me. I know it shouldn't matter, but I couldn't."

Tony suggested that they should go to his local church, where most of the priests were Italians.

"Some of them don't understand a word you're saying if you speak in English," he said.

"That's not a real confession, then."

"But I think they recognize some key words."

"Don't make jokes. You are going to confession too."

"I know that," he said. "And will you promise me something?" He moved close to her. "Will you promise to be kind to me after the confession? I mean to hold my hand and talk to me and smile?"

"And will you promise me to make a good confession?"

"Yes, I will," he said, "and my mom wants you to come to lunch on Sunday. She's worried about you."

The following evening they met outside his church. Tony insisted that they go to separate priests; hers, he said, a priest called Anthony with a long Italian surname, was young and nice and spoke English. He himself, he said, was going to go to one of the older Italian ones.

"Make sure he understands what you say," she whispered.

When she told the priest she had had sexual intercourse twice with her boyfriend three nights earlier, he left silence for a long time.

"Was this the first time?" he asked when he spoke eventually.

"Yes, Father."

"Do you love one another?"

"Yes, Father."

"What will you do if you are pregnant?"

"He will want to marry me, Father."

"Do you want to marry him?"

She could not answer. After a while, he asked her again, his tone sympathetic.

"I would like to marry him," she said hesitantly, "but I am not ready to marry him now."

"But you say you love him?"

"He is a good man."

"Is that enough?"

"I love him."

"But you are not sure?"

She sighed and said nothing.

"Are you sorry for what you did with him?"

"Yes, Father."

"For your penance I want you to say just one Hail Mary, but say it slowly and think about the words, and you must promise to come back in one month. If you are pregnant, we will have to talk again, and we will help you in every way we can."

When she got back to Mrs. Kehoe's she discovered that a lock had been put on the basement gate and she had to let herself in by the main door. Mrs. Kehoe was in the kitchen with Miss McAdam, who had decided that she was not going to the dance.

"I'm going to keep the basement locked in future," Mrs. Kehoe said as though speaking to Miss McAdam alone. "You wouldn't know who would be going down there."

"You are very wise," Miss McAdam said.

As Eilis made her supper, Mrs. Kehoe and Miss McAdam treated her as though she were a ghost.

Eilis's mother wrote and mentioned how lonely she was and how long the day was and how hard the night. She said that neighbours looked in on her all the time and people called after tea but she had run out of things to say to them. Eilis wrote to her a number of times; she told her mother all the news about the summer styles in Bartocci's and other stores on Fulton Street and about preparing for her exams, which would come in May, saying she was studying hard because if she passed she would be a qualified bookkeeper.

She never mentioned Tony in any of her letters home and she wondered if, by now, her mother, in clearing out Rose's room or in receiving what was in her desk at the office, had found and read her letters to Rose. She saw Tony every day, sometimes merely meeting him outside the college and travelling with him on the trolley-car and letting him walk her as far as Mrs. Kehoe's. Since the night he had spent in her room everything was different between them. She felt that he was more relaxed, more willing to be silent and not trying to impress her so much or make jokes. And every time she saw him waiting for her, she felt that they had become closer. Every time they kissed, or even brushed against each other as they walked along the street, she was reminded of that night they had been together.

Once she discovered that she was not pregnant, she thought of the night with pleasure, especially after she had returned to the priest, who somehow managed to imply that what had happened between her and Tony was not hard to understand, despite the fact that it was wrong, and was maybe a sign from God that they should consider getting married and raising a family. He seemed so easy to talk to the second time that she was tempted to tell him the whole story and ask him what she should do about her mother, whose letters to her were increasingly sad, the handwriting at times wandering strangely across the page, almost illegible, but she left the confession box without saying anything more.

One Sunday after mass, as she was walking out of the church with Sheila Heffernan, Eilis noticed that Father Flood, who often stood in front of the church after mass greeting his parishioners, had averted his eyes and moved into the shadows when they approached and was soon speaking to a number of women with immense concentration. She waited behind only to find that the priest, having spotted her, turned his back and walked away from her quickly. It occurred to her immediately that Mrs. Kehoe had spoken to him and that she should go to see him as soon as possible before he did something unthinkable such as write to her mother about her, although she had no idea what she would say to him.

Thus after lunch with Tony and his family, she made an arrangement to see Tony later, but said that she had to go now and study. She refused to allow him to come on the subway with her. She went straight from the subway station to Father Flood's house.

It was only when she was sitting in the front parlour waiting for him that it struck her that she could not easily mention Mrs. Kehoe, she would have to wait for him to do so. If he did not raise the subject, she thought, she could talk about her mother and maybe even discuss the possibility of moving into the office at Bartocci's were a vacancy to arise after she passed her bookkeeping exams. As she heard footsteps approaching in the hallway, she knew she had a choice. She could appear humble before him and imply an abject apology even if she did not admit everything, or she could model herself on Rose, stand up now as Rose might have and speak to Father Flood as though she were entirely incapable of any wrongdoing.

Father Flood seemed uneasy when he came into the room and did not immediately catch her eye.

"I hope I am not disturbing you now, Father," she said.

"Oh, no, not at all. I was just reading the paper."

She knew that it was important to speak now before he did.

"I don't know if you've heard from my mother but I have had letters and she seems not to be well at all."

"I'm sorry to hear that," Father Flood said. "You know I did think it must be hard for her."

Whatever way he looked at her, he managed to let her know that he meant more than he said, that he was suggesting it might be hard for her mother not only losing Rose but having a daughter who would take a man home to her room for the night.

Eilis now held his gaze and left enough silence for him to know that she had understood the implications of his words but had no intention of giving them any further consideration.

"As you know, I hope to get my exams next month and this would mean that I would be a qualified bookkeeper. I have some money saved and I thought I might go home, just to see my mother, for as long as Bartocci's would let me have unpaid leave. Also, like many of the other lodgers, I have been having difficulty with Mrs. Kehoe and when I come back from Ireland I might consider changing my lodgings."

"She's very nice, Mrs. Kehoe," Father Flood said. "There aren't many Irish places like that now. In the old days there used to be more."

Eilis did not reply.

"So you want me to talk to Bartocci?" he asked. "How long would you like to go for?"

"A month," Eilis said.

"And you would come back and work on the shop floor until a job in the office came up?"

"Yes."

He nodded his head and seemed to be thinking about something.

"Would you like me to talk to Mrs. Kehoe as well?" he asked.

"I thought you already had."

"Not since Rose died," Father Flood said. "I'm not sure I have seen her since then."

Eilis studied his face but she could not tell whether it was true or not.

"Would you not make it up with her?" Father Flood asked.

"How would I do that?"

"She's very fond of you."

Eilis said nothing.

"I'll tell you what," Father Flood said. "I'll square Bartocci if you make it up with Ma Kehoe."

"How would I do that?" she repeated.

"Be nice to her."

Before she had seen Father Flood, it had not occurred to Eilis that she might go home for a brief stay. But once it had been said and did not sound ridiculous and had met with Father Flood's approval, then it became a plan, something that she was determined to do. At lunchtime the following day she went to a travel agent and found prices for liners crossing the Atlantic. She would wait until her exam results came out, but once she knew them she would go home for a month; it would take five or six days each way, so she would have two and half weeks with her mother.

Although she wrote to her mother later that week she did not mention anything about her plans to go home. When she saw Father Flood in the department store one day she knew that he was there on her behalf because he winked at her as he passed and she hoped he would have news for her soon.

On Friday, when Tony had walked her home after the dance, she found a letter from Father Flood that had been delivered by hand. Mrs. Kehoe soon arrived into the kitchen to announce that she was about to make tea and that she hoped Eilis would join her. Eilis smiled warmly at Mrs. Kehoe and said that she would love that and then went to her room and opened the letter. The Bartoccis, Father Flood said, could offer her one month's unpaid leave, the date to be arranged with Miss Fortini, and, if she passed her exams, they hoped they could offer her a job in the office over the next six months. She left the letter on the bed and went upstairs to find her tea almost poured.

"Would you feel safe if I took the lock off the basement gate?" Mrs. Kehoe asked her. "I didn't know what to do so I asked that nice Sergeant Mulhall whose wife plays poker with me and he said that he would have his officers keep a special watch on it and report on any untoward activity down there."

"Oh, that's a great idea, Mrs. Kehoe," Eilis said. "You should thank him on behalf of all of us the next time you see him."

She hoped that the law exam would be as easy as the last time. And she was happy with the work she had done in all the other subjects. As part of the final exam, however, every student would be given all the details of the annual life of a company, rent and heat and light, wages, the fact that machinery and other assets might devalue each year, debt, capital investment and tax. On the other side, there would be sales, money coming in from a number of sources, be they wholesale or retail. And all of this would have to be entered into ledgers in the correct column, it would have to be done neatly so that at an annual general meeting when the board and shareholders of a company wanted to see clearly how profit or loss had been made, they could do so from these ledgers. Anyone who failed this part of the exam, they were told, would not get a passing mark even if they did well in other papers. They would have to repeat the entire exam.

One evening close to the exams, when Tony was walking her home, Eilis told him about her plan to go home for a month once the results came. She had already written to her mother telling her the news. Tony said nothing to her, but, when they arrived at Mrs. Kehoe's, he asked her to walk with him around the block. His face was pale and he seemed serious and did not look at her directly as he spoke.

When they were away from Mrs. Kehoe's he sat on a stoop where there was no one, leaving her standing against the railings. She knew that he would be upset about her going like this but was ready to explain to him that he had family in Brooklyn and he did not know what it was like to be away from home. She was prepared to tell him that he would go home too for a visit under similar circumstances.

"Marry me before you go back," he said almost under his breath.

"What did you say?" She went to the stoop and sat beside him.

"If you go, you won't come back."

"I'm just going for a month, I told you."

"Marry me before you go back."

"You don't trust me to come back."

"I read the letter your brother wrote. I know how hard it would be for you to go home and then leave again. I know it would be hard for me. I know what a good person you are. I would live in fear of getting a letter from you explaining that your mother could not be left alone."

"I promise you I will come back."

Each time he said "marry me" he looked away from her, mumbling the words as though he were talking to himself. Now he turned and looked at her clearly.

"I don't mean in a church and I don't mean we live together as man and wife and we don't have to tell anybody. It can be just between the two of us and we can get married in a church when we decide after you come back."

"Can you get married just like that?" she asked.

"Sure you can. You have to give them notice and I'll get a list of things we need to do."

"Why do you want me to do it?"

"It will just be something between us."

"But why do you want it?"

When he spoke now he had tears in his eyes. "Because if we don't do it, I'm going to go crazy."

"And we'll tell no one?"

"No one. We'll take a half-day off work, that's all."

"And will I wear a ring?"

"You can if you want, but if you don't that's fine. All this could, if you wanted, be just something private between the two of us."

"Would a promise not be the same?"

"If you can promise, then you can easily do this," he said.

He arranged a date soon after her exams and they set about making all the preparations and filling out the forms that were required. The Sunday before the date she went as usual to his family for lunch. As she sat down she felt that Tony had told his mother, or that his mother had guessed something. There was a new tablecloth on the table, and the way his mother was dressed suggested an important occasion. Then when Tony's father came in with his three brothers she saw that they were all wearing jackets and ties, which they did not normally do. Once they sat down to eat, she noticed that Frank was unusually quiet at the beginning and then every time he tried to speak the others interrupted him before he could start.

Several times more, in the course of the meal, when he opened his mouth to say something he was stopped.

Eventually, Eilis insisted that she needed to hear what he had to say.

"When we're all in Long Island," he said, "and when you have your house there, will you make them build me a room so I can come and stay with you when they're all making me miserable?"

Tony, Eilis saw, had his head down.

"Of course, Frank. And you will be able to come any time you like."

"That's all I wanted to say."

"Grow up, Frank," Tony said.

"Grow up, Frank," Laurence repeated.

"Yeah, Frank," Maurice added.

"See?" Frank motioned to Eilis and pointed at his three brothers. "That is what I have to tolerate."

"Don't worry," Eilis said. "I'll deal with them."

At the end of the meal, as the dessert was served, Tony's father produced special glasses and opened a bottle of Prosecco. He proposed that they drink for a safe journey and a safe return for Eilis. She wondered if it was still possible that Tony had told them nothing about the wedding, just about her plans to go home for a month; it struck her as unlikely that he would have let Frank know, unless Frank had overheard. Maybe they were just having a special lunch because she was going home, she thought.

In the good cheer that followed the dessert she almost began to hope that he had told them that he and she were getting married.

He arranged the ceremony for two o'clock in the afternoon a week before she was to leave. The exams had gone well and she was almost certain that she would qualify. Because other couples to be married came with family and friends, their ceremony seemed brisk and over quickly and caused much curiosity among those waiting because they had come alone.

On their journey to Coney Island on the train that afternoon Tony raised the question for the first time of when they might marry in church and live together.

"I have money saved," he said, "so we could get an apartment and then move to the house when it's ready."

"I don't mind," she said. "I wish we were going home together now."

He touched her hand.

"So do I," he said. "And the ring looks great on your finger."

She looked down at the ring.

"I'd better remember to take it off before Mrs. Kehoe sees it."

The ocean was rough and grey and the wind blew white billowing clouds quickly across the sky. They moved slowly along the boardwalk and down the pier, where they stood watching the fishermen. As they walked back and sat eating hot dogs at Nathan's, Eilis spotted someone at the next table checking out her wedding ring. She smiled to herself.

"Will we ever tell our children that we did this?" she asked.

"When we are old maybe and have run out of other stories," Tony said. "Or maybe we'll save it up for some anniversary."

"I wonder what they'll think of it."

"The movie I'm taking you to is called The Belle of New York. They'll believe that bit. But the idea that, when the movie was over, we took the subway home and I dropped you off at Mrs. Kehoe's. They won't believe that."

When they finished eating, they walked together towards the subway and waited for the train to take them into the city.