Someone

ONE

Pegeen Chehab walked up from the subway in the evening light. Her good spring coat was powder blue; her shoes were black and covered the insteps of her long feet. Her hat was beige with something dark along the crown, a brown feather or two. There was a certain asymmetry to her shoulders. She had a loping, hunchbacked walk. She had, always, a bit of black hair along her cheek, straggling to her shoulder, her bun coming undone. She carried her purse in the lightest clasp of her fingers, down along the side of her leg, which made her seem listless and weary even as she covered the distance quickly enough, the gray sidewalk from subway to parlor floor and basement of the house next door.

I was on the stoop of my own house, waiting for my father. Pegeen paused to say hello.

She was not a pretty girl particularly; there was a narrowness to her eyes and a wideness to her jaw, crooked teeth, wild eyebrows, and a faint mustache. She had her Syrian father’s thick dark hair, but also the permanent scattered flush, just under the fair skin, of her Irish mother’s broad cheeks. She had a job in lower Manhattan in this, her first year out of Manual Training, and, she said, she didn’t like the people there. She didn’t like a single one of them. She ran a bare hand along the stone balustrade above my head. The other, which lightly held the strap of her purse, wore a dove-gray glove. She’d lost its partner somewhere, she said. And laughed with her crooked teeth. Fourth pair this month, she said.

And left the library book she was reading on the subway yesterday.

And look, tore her stocking on something.

She lifted her black shoe to the step where I sat and pulled back the long coat and the skirt. I saw the laddered run, the flesh of Pegeen’s thin and dark-haired calf pressing through between each rung. The nail of the finger Pegeen ran over its length was bitten down to nothing, but the movement of her hand along the tear was gentle and conciliatory. A kind of sympathy for her own flesh, which I imitated, brushing my own hand along the unbroken silk of Pegeen’s stocking, and then over the torn threads of the run.

“Amadan,” Pegeen said. “That’s me. That’s what I am.”

She pulled the leg away. The skirt and the blue coat fell into place again. Across the back hem and up the left side of Pegeen’s good spring coat there was a long smudge of soot that I impulsively reached out to brush away. “You’ve got some dirt,” I said.

Pegeen turned, twisted her chin around, arm and elbow raised, trying to see what she couldn’t see because it was behind her. “Where?” she said.

“Here.” I batted at the dirt until Pegeen threw back her head in elaborate frustration, pulling the coat forward, winding it around her like a cloak. “I’ll be happy,” she said, slapping at her hip, “to stop going to that filthy place.” Meaning lower Manhattan, where she worked.

She paused, put her nose to the air in mock confidence. “I’ll get a boyfriend,” she said. She batted her eyelashes and drew out a sly smile. They were great kidders, the Chehabs, and no boyfriends, it seemed, had yet called for Pegeen. “I’ll get myself married,” she said, and then licked all at once the four tall fingers of the gloveless hand and swatted them against the dirty cloth.

“Amadan,” she said again. Which, she explained, was her mother’s word for fool.

And then she released the skirt of her long coat and, dipping her shoulders, shook herself back into it again. She reminded me of a bird taking a sand bath. “I fell down,” she announced. She said it in the same fond and impatient tone she had used to describe the lost glove, the forgotten library book. “On the subway.” It was the tone a mother might use, speaking about a favorite, unruly child.

Pegeen blew some exasperated air through her pooched-out lower lip. “I don’t know what the blazes makes me fall,” she said impatiently. “I do it all the time.” She suddenly squinted and the flush just under her downy skin rose to a deep maroon. She lowered her face to mine. “Don’t you dare tell my mother,” she said.

I was seven years old. I spoke mostly to my parents. To my brother. To my teachers when I had to. I gave some whispered response to Father Quinn or to Mr. Lee at the candy store when my mother poked me in the ribs. I could not imagine having a conversation with Mrs. Chehab, who was red-haired and very tall. Still, I promised. I would say nothing.

Pegeen shook herself again, standing back and lifting her shoulders inside the pale blue coat. “But there’s always someone nice,” she said, her voice suddenly gone singsong. “Someone always helps me up.” She struck another pose, coy and haughty, as before, her chin in the air. She touched the feather in her hat. “Today a very handsome man gave me his hand. He asked if I was all right. A real Prince Charming.” She smiled again and looked around. Just a few doors down, the older boys were playing stickball in the street. There was a knot of younger ones on the curb, watching. Bill Corrigan was in his chair on the sidewalk just behind them.

Pegeen leaned forward once more. “Tomorrow,” she said breathlessly, whispering now, “I’m going to look for him again. If I see him, I’m going to get real close.” She leaned down, her hand on the banister above my head. “I’m going to pretend to fall, see? Right next to him. And he’ll catch me and say, ‘Is it you again?’”

All human eyes are beautiful, but Pegeen’s were very black and heavily lashed and gorgeous now, with the sparkle of her joke, or her plan, or, perhaps, her vision of some impossible future.

She straightened up. “We’ll see what happens then,” she said, sly and confident, her thick eyebrows raised. She swung her purse slowly, turned to move on. “That will be something to see,” she said.

At her own house, Pegeen didn’t use the basement door, as usual. She climbed the stone steps, taking them one at a time, like a small child. At the top, she paused again to swat at the back of her coat, only touching the dirt with her wrist. It was early evening. Spring. I could see Pegeen’s reflection in the oval glass of the outer door—or at least the blue heart of the reflection, which was both the reflection of her good spring coat and the evening light on her flushed face. Pegeen pulled open the door and the thin image in the glass shuddered like a flame.

I turned back to the vigil I was keeping on the stone steps. Vigil for my father, who had not yet come up from the subway.

From the far corner, the neighborhood’s men and working women were coming home. Everyone wore hats. Everyone wore trim dark shoes, which was where my eyes fell when any of them said, “Hello, Marie,” passing by.

At seven, I was a shy child, and comical-looking, with a round flat face and black slits for eyes, thick glasses, black bangs, a straight and serious mouth—a little girl cartoon.

With my heart pinned to my father’s sleeve in those days.

The boys were playing stickball down the street. Always at this time of day. Some of them friends of Gabe, my brother, although he, young scholar, remained inside at his books. The younger boys were lined at the curb, watching the game, Walter Hartnett among them. He had his cap turned backward and the leg with the built-up shoe extended before him. Blind Bill Corrigan, who had been gassed in the war, was on the sidewalk just behind Walter, sitting in the painted kitchen chair that his mother set out for him every morning when the weather was fine.

Bill Corrigan wore a business suit and polished shoes, and although there was a glitch in the skin around his eyes, a scarred shine in the satiny folds of his eyelids, although he was brought to the kitchen chair every afternoon when the weather was fine by his mother, whose arm he held the way a bride holds the arm of a groom, it was to him that the boys in the street appealed whenever a dropped ball or an untimely tag sent both teams, howling and cawing, to his side of the street. They were there now: shouting into one another’s face, throwing their caps on the ground, and begging Bill Corrigan to make the call. He raised one of his big, pale hands, and suddenly half the boys spun around, the other half cheered. Walter Hartnett rocked backward in despair, raising his good foot into the air.

I pushed my glasses back on my nose. Small city birds the color of ashes rose and fell along the rooftops. In the fading evening light, the stoop beneath my thighs, as warm as breath when I first sat down, now exhaled a shallow chill. Mr. Chehab walked by with a brown bag from the bakery in his hand. He had his white apron balled up beneath his arm, the ties trailing. There was the scent of new-baked bread as he passed. Big Lucy, a girl I feared, pushed a scooter along the opposite sidewalk. Two Sisters of Charity from the convent down the street passed by, smiling from inside their bonnets. I turned my head to watch their backs, wondering always why their long hems never caught at their heels. At the end of the block, the Sisters paused to greet a heavy woman with thick, pale legs and a dark apron under her coat. She said something to them that made them nod. Then the three turned the corner together. The game paused again, and the boys parted reluctantly as a black car drove by.

I shivered and waited, little Marie. Sole survivor, now, of that street scene. Waited for the first sighting of my father, coming up from the subway in his hat and coat, most beloved among all those ghosts.

Once, I stepped up to the glass case in the delicatessen in Rego Park, ready to call out my order. I was pregnant with my first child, hungry, a little light-headed. In a few months’ time, I would be at death’s door, last rites and all—my mother swinging her purse at the head of the priest who came to deliver them—but on this day there was only a sudden rupture behind my eyes. I fell without knowing I fell, like a sack of potatoes. And then I was faceup on the wooden floor. My legs were turned beneath me. There was an ache along the fleshy edge of my palm. Faces above me. More pain dawning, in my ankle, at the back of my skull. There was tuna salad on my hand and on my elbow and on the edge of my spring coat, where I had caught somebody’s order going down. I saw only the aproned bosom of the owner’s wife as I was lifted and led to a chair in the back room. There was sawdust on the floor and brown towers of damp cardboard boxes along one wall. A strong smell of salami. They sat me down in a metal folding chair that was the same color as the cardboard boxes, before a flimsy card table scored with tape. There was the slow reconstruction of what had happened. A policeman appeared, offered a trip to the emergency room, although the consensus among the other women crowded into the narrow doorway was that the slow sipping from a warm bottle of Coke would revive me. Which it did. And then the roast beef on rye I had been about to order, which the owner’s German wife watched me eat in the crowded back room—the meat piled thickly and as tender as butter—until the women were satisfied enough to declare, No harm done. The owner’s wife gave me a container of chicken soup and a quart of rice pudding to take home. She was a broad, solid woman with thick arms and legs. She swiped vigorously at the stain on my coat with a wad of dampened paper towel, and I remembered Pegeen then: There’s always someone nice.

My father appeared at the corner. Paused for his evening paper. Topcoat and hat to mark him as a clerk, not a laborer. I only raised my head above my knees when I saw him—although surely something, some sinewy energy, some delight, tensed and trembled itself through my thin back and shoulders as I gazed down the sloping street. The boys playing stickball parted once again for a passing car: it was the ebb and flow of their game. I turned away from them, raised a hand to the balustrade to get ready to spring. My father was a thin, slight man in a long coat. His step was quick and jaunty. He, too, wore shoes with a high shine.

I waited until he was halfway toward home. And then I flew, across the sidewalk and into the air as he lifted me—the newspaper held tightly under his arm the only impediment, it seemed, to an ascent that I saw in my own imagination as equivalent, somehow, to the caps the boys had thrown into the air when Bill Corrigan made his call. I would not have been surprised to hear them cheer.

My father smelled, always, of fresh newsprint and cigarettes, of the alcohol in his faded cologne. I caught my chin on his buttons as he lowered me to the ground. A brief, painful scrape that upset my glasses and made my eyes water. I walked the last few paces home balanced on his shoes. We climbed the steps together and into the fragrant vestibule—fragrant with the onion odor of cooked dinners and the brownstone scent of old wood—and up the narrow stairs and into the apartment, where my mother was in the kitchen and my brother at the dining-room table with his books.

The apartment we lived in was long and narrow, with windows in the front and in the back. The back caught the morning light and the front the slow, orange hours of the afternoon and evening. Even at this cool hour in late spring, it was a dusty, city light. It fell on paint-polished window seats and pink carpet roses. It stamped the looming plaster walls with shadowed crossbars, long rectangles; it fit itself through the bedroom door, crossed the living room, climbed the sturdy legs of the formidable dining-room chairs, and was laid out now on the dining-room table where the cloth—starched linen expertly decorated with my mother’s meticulous cross-stitch—had been carefully folded back along the whole length so that Gabe could place his school blotter and his books on the smooth wood.

It was the first light my poor eyes ever knew. Recalling it, I sometimes wonder if all the faith and all the fancy, all the fear, the speculation, all the wild imaginings that go into the study of heaven and hell, don’t shortchange, after all, that other, earlier uncertainty: the darkness before the slow coming to awareness of the first light.

I followed my father to the narrow closet and held the newspaper for him while he hung up his overcoat and placed his hat on the shelf. He went to the couch in the living room and I went with him, fitting myself into his side, leaning heavily against his arm—“like a barnacle,” he said—as he read the evening paper.

The slipcover, also my mother’s handiwork, was a paradise of hummingbirds and vines and deep-throated flowers, the colors, if not the images, subdued by the thick brocade. Sinking into my father’s side, slipping under his arm as he patiently lifted the open paper to accommodate me, I entered that paradise via my tracing fingertip and squinted eyes, until he said, “Marie,” patiently, and asked me to sit up a bit.

He kept a long key chain attached to his belt, and perhaps to keep my bony weight from putting his arm to sleep, he pulled the keys at the end of it out of his pocket and placed them in my hands. There were two keys, small but heavy, and the metal disks with his embossed name and number from his time in the army, as well as a small St. Joseph medal tinged with green. I turned them over as he read, traced them with my fingers, tested the weight and the jingle of them. I wondered if Bill Corrigan, who had been gassed in the war, carried something of the same in his pocket.

When my mother called to me to get up and set the table, my father put his hand to the top of my head.

Slipping out of that first darkness, into the dusty, city light of these rooms, I met the blurred faces of the parents I’d been given—given through no merit of my own—faces that even to my defective eyes, ill-formed, you might say, in the hours of that first darkness, were astonished by love.

We gathered for dinner, a piece of oilcloth spread across the table now, on an ordinary night—the last concession to my sloppy childhood, because in another few weeks, after my First Communion, we would abandon the oilcloth cover at meals and once again dine on starched linen, like civilized people, as my father put it. Mashed potatoes and slices of beef tongue and carrots boiled with sugar. Canned peaches with a tablespoon of heavy cream. Then the cloth was folded back again, and once again my brother spread his blotter and his books across the cleared end of the long table.

In the narrow kitchen, standing over the steaming sink, her hands red to the elbow, my mother was unconcerned. “Pegeen Chehab,” she said, “has big feet.” And girls that age, she said, were always tripping over themselves, looking for boys.

She handed me a wet saucer. I was not yet allowed to dry the dinner plates. The kitchen was warm and close, the one window was steamed, and the pleasant scent in the air was of soap and of the spring sunshine that had dried my mother’s apron.

For my mother, who loved romance—especially an American romance, which involved, for her, a miraculous commingling of lives across comically disparate portions of the globe—the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Chehab was a continual source of wonder and delight. She told the story again: The place where Mr. Chehab was born was called Mount Lebanon, in a country called Syria. A desert, she said. With a desperately hot sun and palm trees and dates and pineapples and sand and—she shrugged a little, her voice suddenly uncertain—a mount, apparently.

She handed me a small drinking glass and said, “Be sure you don’t put your hand inside, just the cloth.”

His own parents, she said, wrapped him in swaddling clothes and carried him away from that sunny place. They crossed over the Mediterranean Sea. They scaled Spain.

She squinted at the damp tiles above the sink as if a map were drawn there.

They climbed through France, reached Paris, which is called the City of Light, crossed the White Cliffs of Dover—there is a song—got to Liverpool, no doubt, to Dublin, found Cork, as she herself had done when she was seventeen, wearing three skirts and four blouses and carrying only a purse so her stepfather, a terrible man, would not know she was leaving home.

At the harbor, Mr. and Mrs. Chehab found a ship that brought them to Brooklyn. In Brooklyn, they put the baby into a cradle, in the cool corner of a basement bakery on Joralemon Street.

And all the while, my mother said—a trill of profound amusement rising into her voice—in County Clare, Mrs. Chehab—who was a McMahon then—was taking her own first breaths. And shivering, no doubt, in the eternal dampness of that bleak country’s bitter air.

My mother looked at me from over her shoulder, her hands still in the sink.

There’s a burned taste to the air at home, she said—not for the first time. A taste of wet ashes and doused fire. It can make you believe, she said, that you live in the permanent aftermath of some nearby sorrow. Somewhere in the vicinity, you’re always thinking, someone’s house has recently burned to the ground.

In that damp and dirty country, my mother said, Mrs. Chehab grew to be a tall girl, a girl who would have no trouble getting up the steep gangplank that led from the dock at Queens-town—a climb my mother herself had struggled with, she said, because of the rain that fell on the day she sailed, because she was alone, with no man’s arm to hold on to and none offered across the whole trip, not until my father gave her his on the steps at the Grand Army Plaza.

But Mrs. Chehab would have had no trouble keeping those long feet steady against the slick and pitching floor of the ship that carried her here. Where she stopped at the Syrian bakery one day and saw a small, dark-eyed man behind the counter.

I watched my mother move her hands through the water once more, searching for stray silverware, smiling her sly smile at the delightful oddity of it all. Then she pulled the stopper from the sink, and I closed my eyes and put my fingers in my ears to block out the terrible sound.

When I removed them and opened my eyes, my mother was swabbing the counter. “And after all that,” she said, “and after all that, along comes homely Pegeen, with her mother’s blotched skin and her father’s big nose and those great long feet, God help her.”

When the dishes were put away, my father went to the narrow closet for his hat and said, “Let’s take a stroll.”

We went down the stairs together. Shined black tips of his neat shoes and perfect fall of his trouser cuffs over the smooth laces. A lilt in the tap of his step on the uncarpeted stair, the tap of our steps. Out through the vestibule and onto the sidewalk again. We were in front of the Chehabs’ building when he dropped my hand and paused to light a cigarette, the smoke rising white from under the bowed brim of his hat. And then he threw his head back with the pleasure of that first exhalation of smoke. Made me look up as well to see the stars. A thin handsome man, forty years old.

It was one of his shanty cousins, the McGeevers, who would later say that a body so thin was nothing more than a walking invitation to misfortune.

He took my hand again. There was the sure familiarity of his grip, warm and firm, the palm broad against my small fingers. We walked to the other corner, away from the subway, although there was still the sound of it somewhere beneath our feet. There was as well the sound of a trolley on another street, the sound of someone calling to a child, someone shouting inside a building. Lights at windows were growing brighter, growing warmer, it seemed, as the air grew cold. There was the scent of metal, whiff of tar, of stone, of dog droppings left beside the wrought-iron cage that surrounded a scrawny tree. The soft gabardine of my father’s suit jacket against the back of my hand. At the corner, we turned and he tossed the glowing cigarette into the street.

“I’ll be only a minute,” he said. He put his two hands on my shoulders, as if to place me more securely on the sidewalk before another stoop, and then turned to push through a narrow iron fence that led down a dim alley. The air was black, but the lights in the buildings were warm and golden. Only a few people went by, their coats drawn around them. One man touched his hand to the brim of his hat as he passed and I dropped my chin shyly. And then rose up on my toes after he’d gone, putting my face to the streetlight as if to a warm sun. I squinted, and the light burst and stretched itself yellow and white into the darkness. I heard the squeal of the iron gate and my father was beside me again, the sharp smell of the drink he’d just had in the air about him. He held out his hand. In the center of his palm there was a white cube of sugar, sparkling in the light. I plucked it up and slipped it into my mouth. I turned it with my tongue. Watching, my father pursed his lips and shifted his jaw, as if he, too, felt the sugar on his teeth. Then he took my hand again.

We passed the Chehabs’ parlor window, where there was a lamp and a chair and the back of Mr. Chehab’s dark head and broad shoulders as he smoked a cigar and read the evening news.

In the vestibule, my father shot back his cuffs and put his warm palms to my face. He studied me seriously, smiling only a little—I was a round-faced, narrow-eyed, homely, comical little thing—until my cheeks were warm enough, he said, to pass muster with my mother. And we climbed the stairs once more.

There was tea, with a slice of plain cake, while my mother, with one of his schoolbooks in her lap, put my brother through his paces: catechism questions, Latin declensions, history’s dates and names. He answered all without hesitation, breaking off pieces of the cake only after he had finished a round. And then, with a jagged line of cake still left on his plate and half his milky tea still in his cup, he pushed back his chair and walked slowly to the far end of the table.

My father, at the opposite end, moved his own cup aside and leaned forward. I could see the reflection of his pale throat and chin in the table’s dark wood, like a face just beginning to appear in a still pool of black water. Or disappear. “What will we have tonight?” he said.

My brother ran his hands over his thick hair and then rested them both on the back of the chair that was before him. He lifted his eyes to the wall just above my father’s head. He was a handsome boy with narrow shoulders and fair hair and large brown eyes. He flushed easily. “ ‘The Seven Ages of Man,’ “ he said clearly, gripping the chair. “By William Shakespeare.”

He began. As Gabe recited, I watched my father vaguely shape his mouth around the words, unconsciously moving his lips in much the same way he had done when I turned the sugar cube on my tongue.

My mother kept her head bowed, studying her red hands in her lap while the poem wound on, looking like a woman at prayer, or hunched beside a radio.

I lowered my chin toward the table, raised my cup only briefly from its saucer. What tea was left was growing cold, but that was how I liked it. I took a small sip and then replaced the cup with more noise than was polite, which would have earned me a sharp look from my mother had the sound not coincided with the end of the poem and my parents’ gentle applause.

“Some Shelley,” my father said.

My friend Gerty Hanson was made to say the Rosary with her family every night after dinner, her mother and father and all three of her big brothers kneeling on the floor around the parents’ bed. I had joined them once or twice, a ritual no less tedious than this, although Gerty, at least, was given the chance to lead the prayer every fifth decade, the chance to speak out into an attentive silence—whereas here I was meant only to listen to my brother, who had won the elocution medal at his school for what seemed to me more years than I could number.

Gabe raised his eyes and directed his voice to the simple chandelier above our heads. It was new to my ears, his voice, both deeper and somehow less certain than it had been just days ago. I watched the protruding Adam’s apple bob in his pale throat. “ ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ “ he said. “By Percy Blithe Shelley.”

My parents might have seen the priest in him then, the way he stood at the end of the table, offered up the lovely words.

I saw only, in my mind’s eye, a picture book illustration I had found somewhere, of a cruel face in the clouds, bloated cheeks and pursed lips that blew down upon the huddled figure of a man in a great dark overcoat.

“ ‘Oh, hear!’ “ my brother said, reciting, and then hesitated for a moment before he abruptly lifted a palm to the ceiling—a gesture he might have been instructed to make, at school, perhaps, although it did not suit him or his steady voice.

Without raising my chin, I looked around. Gabe had left half the cake on his plate. I knew he would eat it in a single, triumphant bite when he returned to his chair. My father’s slice was already gone. As was my mother’s. I looked at my own plate again, knowing full well I hadn’t left a crumb, and was surprised to discover there, in its center, another white sugar cube. I looked to my father, who only shifted his eyes briefly and briefly smiled. I looked to my mother, who was still studying the ruddy hands cupped in her lap, the thin gold band of her wedding ring. I snatched up the cube of sugar and quickly dropped it into the cooling dregs of my tea. My father whispered the last words of the poem as my brother recited them, and then, once more, my parents were quietly applauding.

My brother said, “ ‘Ozymandias,’ “ as I lifted my teacup again. I felt my mother’s finger against my thigh, a quick poke to remind me to listen.

I listened, my eye on the lovely, tea-soaked dregs of sugar at the bottom of the china cup. I imagined it was the very same sweet, silver sand mentioned in the poem, desert sand, sand of Syria and Mount Lebanon. I watched with one eye squinted as the lovely stuff moved slowly across the ivory light, advanced sluggishly toward my tongue, and then, when it was too slow, the tip of my finger. I was thinking of a baby wrapped in sparkling clothes, being pushed slowly in a white carriage, slowly through the city of light, toward Brooklyn, when I felt the sting of a slap against the back of my head and then its quick echo of pain. I pulled my finger from the cup. My mother hadn’t raised her eyes from her lap.

Gabe finished the poem and returned to his place at the table to drink down the cold tea and devour whole the bit of cake, his face flushed with his triumph. Patiently, my mother turned to me to ask what would happen if a teacup shattered while my fingers were inside it.

Some neighbor or faceless relation was named, a silly girl who’d “sliced herself good” with her hand inside a glass while she was washing up. A suggested image of soapy dishwater darkened with blood following me to the bath, where I watched my mother’s blurred red hand as it tested the seamless stream of steaming water.

I deployed all my excuses in a rush: the water was too hot, the house too cold, I’d had a bath last week, I had a stomachache, I was sleepy. But my mother had a grip on my arm, and my thin legs were all obedience. They raised themselves against my will, up over the cold rim of the high tub and into the steaming water, where the pain from the heat became a chill in my spine and my thin body—bright red to my calves but pale white, nearly blue, through my chest and my arms—became no more than a scrap of cloth, a scrap of cloth caught and shaken and snapped by a sudden wind. I wanted to weep. I wanted to be sick. I saw for a terrible moment that my body was a scrap of cloth, that my bones were no more than porcelain, as were my rattling teeth and the china skull that contained them. I saw how a hoop of light, the water’s shifting reflection, swung up to the top of the tile wall, and then swung down again, carrying me with it, nauseous and full of despair. I sat. The warm water covered my arms and touched my chin. My mother let go of my forearm, although the imprint of her grip lingered.

There, she said. There now. After all your fussing. You just have to get used to it.

In those days I still slept in the crib that had been my brother’s, in a corner of the small room I shared with him. A peeling lamb painted on the headboard, a blurred line of grass and meadow flowers at the foot. Low light. Prayers. My parents’ dry lips to my forehead and some single, barely whispered word at the end of the day that told me I was cherished above all things by these indistinct and warm-breathed shadows, leaning over me at the end of the day.

Gabe came in sometime later. Another blur of darkness and light—dark clothes and fair hair—coming in to take the pajamas out from under his pillow. When he returned, he was a brighter blur because he was dressed in them. Through the bars of the crib, I watched him kneel to say his prayers and then pull down his covers and climb into bed. He slept on his back, a wrist over his eyes, like another picture book illustration I had seen, of a laborer resting in a field. The light stayed on most of the night, and this gesture, his wrist thrown over his eyes, was his silent accommodation to my fear of the dark.

I woke to find the light had been put out. There were only the soft-edged, geometric patches of streetlight on the ceiling, across one wall. I threw a leg over the side of the crib, fitting my toe into the space between the bars, and carefully—I was not an athletic child—leaned to bring the other over. I lowered myself to the cold floor and then crossed it on tiptoe. Gabe opened his blankets for me in the same way he did everything: quietly, methodically, with a good-natured but stoic acquiescence to duty. A dutiful child. Wakeful himself at that hour.

I told him I’d had a bad dream, making it up as I went along: a terrible, white-fisted giant with swollen cheeks had carried me to a high, precarious place I could not climb down from, and Gabe listened carefully, commiserating briefly, marveling appreciatively each time I whispered, “And then,” adding another horror. He said, I never dream. I never have a dream that I remember. His features were a blur, although our faces were only inches apart. And yet the handsome, high-colored, precisely featured boy who was my brother during the day, the brother I saw with my glasses on, was far less familiar to me than this one of uncertain edges and soft darkness, with a spark of wet light in his mouth or his eye when he said that if I was good and didn’t kick, I could stay. I made my promises, and he accepted them, but he moved anyway to the far side of the narrow bed, all the way up to the wall—the wall we shared with the Chehabs’ building—turning his back to me and putting his hand on the cool plaster. The soft sheets retained their odor of sunshine against the warmer, closer scent of my brother’s scalp and breath and skin. With his back turned, he told me to say a prayer to keep the nightmares away. He said if I prayed, the Blessed Mother would keep the nightmares away.

Slowly, I moved my hand under his pillow until I made warm contact with his own. He was holding his rosary. He moved his hand away until my fingertips touched only the cool beads.

He fell asleep in small starts, resisting it. As if, I imagined, the sandman had hold of his ankle and was slowly tugging him under, all against his will. As if he struggled to remain awake. I looked at the lozenges of light on the wall, one was a rectangle, one was a crucifix. I tried out a few prayers, but since the nightmare I had described was a lie, there was nothing, really, to ask protection from. I heard my brother’s knee or his hand or the ball of his foot strike the wall now and again as he was tugged under. A thump and then a thump, and then I knew he was sleeping.

In the morning, the ambulance at the curb gave up a hot breath. Children had gathered, women with coats over their shoulders, men in shirtsleeves. Across the street, curtains were drawn aside, there were faces at windows, one of them ghoulish with shaving cream. First a murmur among the crowd: women with their fingers to their lips or their hands to their hearts, men conferring softly. Then, as the minutes ticked by, the revving excitement, the pleasure of something happening that would distinguish the ordinary day: the thrill of the disrupted routine, of a dull breakfast left on the table, of schoolbooks still at the door. An excitement that sounded first in the children’s voices—a sudden laugh, a loud cry—but then infected the grownups as well—a sneeze and a cheery “God bless,” another trill of laughter—as if we had forgotten, for a minute, that some kind of crisis, some crisis at the Chehabs’, had gathered us all here on the damp sidewalk at 7:00 a.m.

And then the ambulance man backing through the basement door, and then the suddenly arrested sound of human chatter gave way at once to the collective intake of breath when those assembled on the sidewalk saw that the stretcher contained a body covered from toe to head—only a slip of Pegeen’s sloppy hair showing beneath.

From the opened door behind the second ambulance man, Mrs. Chehab’s cry was a spiraling wail. Most of the women, and many of the men in the street, blessed themselves. My mother put a rough hand to my shoulder and then pulled my face into her apron, which was still a little damp from last night’s washing up. All instinct, I shut my eyes and wrapped my arms around my mother’s waist, gripping the apron, the rough wool of her skirt, nestling into that familiar darkness and feeling the sudden warmth of my brother’s two hands as he pressed them against my ears, trying to spare me the sound of the women’s prayers and exclamations, of Mrs. Chehab’s lament, of the slam and the slam again of the ambulance’s broad doors.

All of which, nevertheless, I heard.

It was the next evening that we walked in solemn stillness up the steps of the Chehabs’ house and into the crowded living room. It was painful, the way my mother gripped my hand as we made our way through that forest of adults, all red knuckles, for me, and wedding bands and the hems of jackets, until the figures suddenly parted and there before the glass of the bay window was the gleaming box and Pegeen in its satin bed. She wore her white graduation dress, and her red confirmation rosary was threaded through her still fingers. There was a single taper beside Pegeen’s head, its light reflected in the black window in such a way that, for a moment, I believed her thin and waxy nose now bore its own flame.

I felt a pair of large hands slip themselves under my arms, warm and strong. And then I was aloft. The light grew brighter and the darkness fell away. I clutched the hard edge of the box, resisting even as I gave in, put my face to the moon-colored brightness of Pegeen’s cheeks, kissed her, and then saw my own white face briefly reflected in the dark glass of the bay window as I was returned once more to the pooled shadows of the floor.

At home, my mother unpinned her hat and my father returned his fedora and his topcoat to the closet. Mrs. Chehab, they were saying, had noticed the dirt on Pegeen’s coat and the tears in her sleeves, circles of soot on the knees of her good stockings, well before yesterday’s last tumble down the basement stair. Pegeen had always been a clumsy girl, they said, although Fagin, the undertaker, suspected something more than the fall had killed her: Some burden in the brain, he had said.

My mother turned back the good tablecloth and my brother brought out his books. On this evening, to make up for the time lost on our visit to Pegeen, we had our tea quietly as he studied among us, the only sound in the room the ringing of my father’s cup against the saucer, which I imitated with the clanging of my own. The visit to the Chehabs’ had deprived us of our evening walk to the speakeasy as well.

And then my brother closed the thick book before him and reached for another from the pile beside his chair, this one worn and leather-bound, with thin pages. He turned them, and then, with his hands tucked under his thighs, bent over the book to read. I saw my parents look to him, to the top of his bowed head. It seemed to me they were watching him slyly, as if, were he to raise his head again, their eyes would dart away.

He began to read out loud. He did not read in the same clear way he recited his poems, but softly, sitting hunched over the table, the words breaking here and there under the burden of his new, thickening voice. “ ‘Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin?’ “ he read. “ ‘Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge. Even all the hairs of your head are counted. So do not be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.’”

My mother’s head was bowed. My father’s two hands remained folded together over the china cup, arrested in that surreptitious moment of their steadying each other against the trembling that his evening constitutional usually kept at bay. Out on the street, a truck carrying bottles rattled by. One happy voice shouted to another.

Into the silence that followed I said, “Amadan.”

I said it as Pegeen had said it, ruefully, shaking my head as if speaking fondly of a troublesome child. I said it with my chin just above my own china cup and its dregs of melting sugar, with my eyes veering away from my brother’s startled face and down into that ivory light. And then, for good measure, I said it again, into the teacup itself. “Amadan.”

The pretty room tilted then—folded white tablecloth and black polished wood and the light of the simple chandelier—as my mother, with an iron grip on my upper arm, swung me out of my chair and into the tiled bathroom where the cup was filled beneath the silver stream of warm water and the soap dipped into it, once, then twice. “Again,” my mother said as I tasted the bitter water and, leaning over the porcelain, spit it out into the sink.

In the dining room, my brother—the scholar—was asking my father what it meant, amadan. My father said, “A fool. It means someone’s a fool.”

Even with the water running, the cup of soapy water at my lips, I could hear my father’s shout of laughter when my brother asked him, “Who is?”

They called me “our little pagan” after that, whenever their pride in my brother’s saintliness was in need of some deflating. Self-deflating, as was their way. When the priest from St. Francis came to say there was clearly a vocation. When the letter from the seminary arrived.

“We’re not so enamored of the priesthood as some,” my mother said, washing the dishes after the priest had come for tea, blushing with pride, but also holding her lips in such a way that made it clear she was not going to go overboard—as she would have put it—with her delight in Gabe’s success. There were just as many men in rectories, she said, who were vain or lazy or stupid as there were in the general population.

“One bishop,” my father joked, his hand to the top of my head, “and one little pagan. We’ve run the gamut in just these two.”

I climbed the staircase of Gertrude Hanson’s house, my hand on the wide banister. The carpet here was threadbare and there was the familiar odor of dust in the air. What light there was came through the transom above the entrance or filtered down in a single yellow shaft from the dirty skylight four stories up. Gertrude Hanson’s apartment was on the third floor. I knocked on the heavy door. The corridor was warm and airless. I heard Mrs. Hanson’s voice inside, laughing, and I rose up on my toes.

“Come in, Marie,” Mrs. Hanson called. “We know it’s you.”

Because this was the Saturday-morning routine, Gerty and I being even then the best of best friends. I opened the door and leaned in.

The Hansons’ front room was crowded with furniture: the great black dining-room table, eight chairs with tapestry seats, a heavy sideboard, a tea cart, a china cabinet with bowed glass—indication, in those days, of a family’s propriety and prosperity. Twice in my recollection I had arrived at Gerty’s on a Saturday morning and been startled to find the front room starkly empty, only the lamps still there, the good dishes and the tea set piled in a corner on the bare floor. “Repossessed” was the word Gerty used with an easy shrug. But on this morning it was all solidly in place, and beyond it I could see Mrs. Hanson in a wide chair just outside the kitchen entry, her bare feet on a plump hassock, her hands beckoning. “Come in, come in,” she said. “Come in and take this poor child out into the fresh air. She’s been cooking all morning.”

Mrs. Hanson had always been fleshy, with thick wrists and a broad, round face, but now with her fifth child on the way she was huge in her chair, her feet and ankles swollen, her stomach straining against the flannel of what had been her husband’s dressing gown. She had tucked a handkerchief into the collar of the robe, and the bit of lace at its edge, caught between her full breasts, made her look like a woman in an old painting. As if she were a woman in an old painting, she wore her black hair partially pinned up, partially fallen over her shoulders. There was a moist gleam to her white skin, her cheeks and her forehead and her bare arms, as if they reflected some particular light. It occurred to me as I shyly approached that Mrs. Hanson was as beautiful as a woman in a painting, what with her size and her abundance, abundance of breast and hair and damp flesh, of face and feature: big dark eyes and bright teeth and wide, laughing mouth.

“You girls run out and play,” Mrs. Hanson said. She stroked her hard belly. “Fatty Arbuckle and I will take a little snooze.”

In the small square kitchen, Gerty was drying her hands. She wore a calico apron with the strings wrapped two or three times around her tiny midriff and the hem falling well below her knees. There was the rich odor of her morning’s work, which was displayed on the windowsill and on a small table in the corner: a golden chicken that she was just now covering with a clean tea towel, a bowl of white potatoes mixed with celery and parsley, a homely pie, the tinges of the fork that had pierced its pale crust inexpertly spaced, perhaps, but showing anyway, here and there, a golden starburst of juice.

Gerty was boyish and matter-of-fact, easily the smartest girl in class, but also small like me and gap-toothed and thoroughly freckled. She merely shrugged when I whistled my astonishment. “You cooked all this?”

“She’s just learning,” Mrs. Hanson said. “But she’s got the knack. She’ll be a great little cook someday. She’ll be a great little mother while I’m away.”

Mrs. Hanson had a brogue that made her gulp air—a kind of quiet hiccup that swallowed the end of every sentence. It made her sound as if she were always on the breathless verge of astonishment, or laughter. “It’ll be like dining at the Waldorf,” she said.

Gerty took off her apron and hung it on the old gas jet by the door. A year ago, her poor head had been shaved for lice, but now her dark curls were as thick and wavy as a dried mop. She asked her mother if we could have money for a soda, considering how hard she had been working. Her mother laughed again and sent Gerty to the bedroom for her purse. Alone together for just that moment, Mrs. Hanson reached out and caught my wrist and then drew in her breath with another great gulp. Her legs on the hassock recoiled as the dark blood rose to her face and then just as suddenly drained away. “My dear,” she whispered. She tugged me closer. I leaned over the thick arm of the chair. Mrs. Hanson smelled of wholesome things, sunshine and oatmeal and yeast, her breath as she gasped was warm and sweet. “If you’ll take Gerty around the corner,” she said, “you’ll just catch Dora Ryan going off to church. Go see. Then have a soda. Keep her out, dear. Keep her out till suppertime.” She gulped another bit of breath. “Do that for me.”

I turned my head only slightly. I could feel the woman’s breath on my face, see the mottled pearl of her teeth. All unaccountably—unless, of course, you count the woman’s abundant beauty, the warmth of the small room, the good smells and the laughter and the fresh news that there was a wedding to see today—I suddenly threw my arms around Mrs. Hanson’s neck and pressed my lips to the woman’s damp and lovely cheek.

“My dear,” Mrs. Hanson said, and touched my back. “Dearie, dearie,” she said. And then Gerty returned from the bedroom with the coins in her hand and cried, “What about me?” and skipped to the other side of her mother’s chair, aiming her lips, too, toward the woman’s face. Suddenly we were both covering Mrs. Hanson with kisses, cheeks, eyebrows, nose, and the corner of her laughing mouth. She embraced us both and we leaned upon the hard belly to keep from falling into each other across her knees. “You’ll smother me,” Mrs. Hanson was saying, and we caught even her dry teeth with our lips. “You’ll have to call Fagin,” she cried, as if with her last breath. “I’ll be killed with affection.” We now had our hands tangled up in Mrs. Hanson’s thick hair. It was silky, but more substantial than silk, and we both lifted strands of it to our mouths. Laughing, Mrs. Hanson pushed us upright. “One of you in my lap is quite enough,” she said, catching her breath, the deep color rising to her face once again, “and Fatty Arbuckle here has already laid his claim.” She laughed, even as the deep flush rose from her chest to her neck and up into her cheeks. “Go,” she said, swallowing air.

We traipsed out, down the stairs, arm in arm because we were the best of best friends and there was the happiness of continuing together the sudden, elaborate affection we had showered on Mrs. Hanson. Into the cool street and around the corner, and there already the black car and the crowd of girls, some with small brothers in tow. And then, as if she had been waiting for our breathless arrival, the stirring of white in the vestibule behind the glass, the door pulled open by Dora Ryan’s stout mother in hat and gloves and a new blue suit, with a trembling orchid on her shoulder. And then Dora herself in her wedding dress and her white shoes, her old father beside her—for Dora was not a young bride, perhaps thirty or so, a third-grade teacher at a distant public school, square shouldered and broad-faced, but lovely anyway, today, in her wedding dress, satin and lace and white stockings and white shoes, with only a small veil to catch what breeze there was. Her brother followed and a sister in a pink gown. The family paused at the top of the steps while a photographer crouched before them, then all swept down to the sidewalk and into the waiting car, each of us gazing silently until Gerty called out, “Good luck, Dora!” and all the other children echoed her call. Dora Ryan waved like a queen from behind our own reflections in the car window.

It was then, as the car pulled away from the curb, that I saw Big Lucy on the other side of the street. She was mouth-breathing, holding her scooter between her red knees, the handlebar pressed harshly into her little-girl skirt. Her careening eyes fell briefly on me and I felt the bright day flatten out and grow still. Then Lucy mounted her scooter, bounced it over the curb, and took off after the wedding car, propelled by one broad white leg that seemed as solid and pale as the concrete sidewalk itself. The words she brayed were some variation of Gerty’s happy salutation, “Good luck, good luck,” but made to sound angry, even threatening, in Lucy’s harsh, beseeching voice. Some of the girls put their hands over their mouths, their eyes wide. Some laughed wickedly.

And yet just as she was about to turn the corner—about to sail out of the neighborhood forever, out of the neighborhood and into an institution, because what could her poor family do with Lucy’s suddenly outsized female body, her crude and childish mind, her fits of violence—I saw Big Lucy lift her leg behind her and let it hover there with a ballerina’s grace.

By the time we reached the church, the wedding had begun. We could hear the muffled organ notes behind the closed doors. Lucy was nowhere to be seen. We lined ourselves along the curb where the hired car sat, now cool and silent. The driver leaned against the hood, smoking cigarettes and reading the newspaper. When the church doors were opened again—the sound of the organ spilling out toward us like ocean water—we stood and brushed at the backs of our skirts. I had expected the bride and the groom to be the first to appear in the dark doorway, but instead the wedding guests came out, singly and in couples, coming down the church steps tentatively, squinting into the sun. A man in a suit approached us and, with a cigarette caught in the corner of his mouth, demonstrated how he wanted us to cup our hands: the left under the right and the right curled into a small funnel. Then he took a fat paper bag from his suit pocket and poured a small stream of rice into each curled fist. He was a smiling, joking, wine-colored young man, made the more charming for me by the unmistakable smell of drink on his breath, a lovely, masculine scent, I thought, because it was my father’s.

When the sidewalk in front of the church and the border of the church steps were filled with wedding guests, Dora and her new husband finally appeared. In the sunlight, and with the perfumed crowd all around us, it was difficult to tell if the groom was handsome. He was chubby and squarely built in his dark suit, much like Dora herself, but he raised his free arm as he and Dora came down the steps, shielding both of them from the onslaught of rice, so it was only after they had gained the safety of the hired car and he had taken his bride’s elbow to help her in that we briefly saw his face. It was a disappointment: round and smooth-cheeked, with little chin and a small mouth stretched into what was, even to our eyes, an awkward smile. He ducked into the car beside his bride and gave us only his profile, which was not promising, as the car drove away.

I turned to Gerty, and Gerty shrugged. Even without Big Lucy there, something fell away from the morning, some sparkle.

At home, my mother drew in the air between her teeth when I told her how Big Lucy had shouted after the car. She blessed herself and looked around and said, “No good can come from that,” and then repeated the gesture and the look the next morning in church when Dora Ryan appeared between her brother and her sister, the mother and father right behind her, the dark veil of her hat pulled over her broad face. Father Quinn could not have had the attention of a single woman in his congregation on that morning, for even as they genuflected, blessed themselves, bowed their heads to pray, their eyes were drawn to Dora’s gently quaking shoulders, her parents’ stiff spines. My mother said later that it was possible that the groom was a lapsed Catholic, or that he was sleeping off the night’s festivities, or that Dora had simply come home to catch Sunday-morning Mass with her parents before heading out on her wedding trip. It was possible, but the girl’s posture, her parents’ grim faces, told us otherwise. When Mass was over, the family left as they had come, the girl (who was no girl, really, well into her thirties by then, broad-bottomed, thick-ankled, and in her dark suit and hat without any of the dreamy girlishness that her wedding gown had lent her just the morning before) flanked by her parents now, her siblings trailing, but none of them pausing for the crowd outside the church, going instead—“pell-mell” was how my mother put it, discussing this strange development over breakfast at home—out of the church and across the sidewalk and around the block.

My father said the poor fellow wouldn’t be the first groom to find himself under the weather the morning after the big day, not to mention the big night, and winked at Gabe, who smiled and nodded to show he understood, but then looked at my mother and blushed solemnly.

My mother’s eyes bounced from Gabe to me to my father, and then with more speed, and more intention, to me again and back to my father. “Nonsense,” she said, and raised her chin and pinched her nostrils, once, twice, as was her way. As if somewhere in the vicinity, some scent of tragedy, as yet undefined, still lingered. “My heart went out to Dora Ryan this morning,” she said, looking over her shoulder to the kitchen that was filled with morning light. “It really did.”

On Monday, Gerty was not in school, and when I walked by her house on the way home, a large lady was sitting on the steps. She wore an apron and scuffed black shoes and her stockings were rolled down around her mottled ankles like circlets of excess flesh. She was cooling herself with a feathered fan, although the day was mild and damp. The woman fastened her eyes on me as I approached, and in shyness, I veered away, crossed the street, kept walking. I went around the corner and would have gone on home except that just as I reached my own house, I was filled with the pleasant conviction that the strange woman on the steps had gone inside and the way was now cleared. I resolved to try again. The boys in the street hadn’t started their after-school game yet, although some were already gathered around Bill Corrigan in his chair. One was swinging a broomstick, Walter Hartnett was tossing a pink Spaldeen up into the air. Mrs. Chehab was leaning out of her parlor window, rubbing the outside of the glass with a piece of newspaper. She looked over her shoulder and called, “You’ve missed your house, Mary dear. You’ve walked right past it.” There was no reason for me to lie to the woman—the poor woman, as she was still called, three years after Pegeen fell down the stairs—but I felt, nevertheless, an urgent sense to do so. “I’m just going back to school,” I said vaguely. “I forgot to remember something.” There was the smell of vinegar from the doused newspaper. “I just remembered that I forgot something.”

Mrs. Chehab laughed, with her daughter’s crooked teeth in her mouth. “Never good to forget to remember,” she said. “Always better to remember you forgot.”

I bowed my head and hurried on, walking in a suddenly clipped and urgent way that I thought would nicely match my lie.

At Gerty’s house, sure enough, the stoop was empty, and a kind of confidence in my own prescience made me take the steps two at a time. But no sooner had I gotten into the gloomy brown light of the vestibule than I saw that the fat woman was now sitting on the inside stair, halfway up, tilted over a bit to lean against the banister. There would be no getting by her without first saying, Excuse me please. But neither could I turn around, with the woman looking down at me, and dart out the door. All reluctance, I put my hand to the rail and my foot on the first step, simply because I didn’t know what else to do.

From above me the woman said, “You don’t live here, do ye? I saw you pass by before.” She had a voice like a man’s, deep and smoky, with a brogue—if that’s what it was—that was thicker even than the accents of the McGeevers, my father’s cousins, who spoke Irish to him when they came for their interminable Sunday visits and, through their narrow mouths, an unintelligible English to me. “I thought you were coming up then, but you went on,” the woman said. She leaned away from the banister, straightened her back somewhat wearily, as if the conversation were a task she had been putting off until now. She touched one hand to the step beside her, inviting me to sit. The other hand gripped the feathered fan. All against my own will, I continued to climb the stairs. The woman’s calves, even in the dim stairwell, were bright white, veined with gray and blue like marble pillars, the rolled stockings at her ankles as solid as stone. There was a basement odor about her, the odor of cold dirt. The apron that looped over her dark blouse and stretched across her black skirt was dim and gray, soft with wear. “I take it you’re a friend of little Gertrude Hanson,” she said, a small smile making her words seem warm. “I take it you’re coming to call for her.” A bit of light from the transom above the door might have caught her eyes as she cast them down at me on the stairs. Her short hair, carefully curled, had a goldish, grayish hue. She shook her head. “But I’m here to tell you she’s gone away. Her father took her out this morning. To his people in New Jersey. There’s nobody home upstairs.”

Now I paused. I said, “Oh,” and the woman suddenly leaned back. I thought at first that she was trying to see me more clearly in the gloom, but then I realized that she was leaning in order to push her apron aside as she reached for the pocket underneath, in her skirt. She stretched out one of her great ivory legs as she maneuvered her free hand beneath the apron and briefly rolled her eyes to the ceiling as if to picture what it was she was searching for. There was something of Big Lucy in the rolling of her eyes. And then she produced a penny and held it out to me. “Do you know your prayers?” she said.

I nodded, although I knew I could not recite one if asked. The woman laughed warmly as if she knew this, too. The laughter made her look younger. With the McGeevers in mind, I had expected a toothless grin, but the woman’s teeth were strong and straight.

“Give me your right hand,” the woman said kindly, and when I struggled with the schoolbooks in my arm in order to hold out the left, she shook her head and whispered, “The right one, dearie,” full of a peculiar sympathy. She placed the fan on her knee. She reached up to take my right hand from the banister. I felt suddenly unbalanced, there on the dim stairs.

“Get yourself down to Mary Star of the Sea,” she said. “And light a candle.” She pressed the penny into my palm. “Don’t worry if every prayer’s gone out of your head. Don’t be bothered by that. A good outcome’s enough to say. Light a candle and ask our Blessed Lady for a good outcome. It only takes the asking.” Her pale eyes went back and forth across my face. Despite the gloom of the staircase, I saw that the woman could read everything there: not only the fact that every prayer had indeed gone out of my head, or that left and right still puzzled me, but also that I had already determined that I would not go into the empty church all by myself. I had never gone into an empty church all by myself. If Gerty were here, the two of us would go together, we would make a game of it, as we sometimes did on Saturday mornings, laughing at the door and then tiptoeing together up the echoing aisle, lighting the flame and leaning into our folded hands at the kneeling rail with exaggerated piousness. But Gerty had gone to her father’s people in New Jersey and the apartment upstairs was empty.

The woman held my wrist and pressed the penny into my palm, and knew, I could tell, that she would not be obeyed. But she asked me anyway, “Will you do that?” And I said anyway, “I will.”

Out on the street, I walked around the block again and climbed my own steps. Mrs. Chehab was gone, but the scent of the vinegar from her window cleaning still lingered. An Easter scent, I thought, although Easter had already passed. It was the scent of the solution we made to dye our eggs, but also the odor that pricked my nose in church when they read that part of the Passion where Jesus said, I thirst, and a sponge soaked with wine and vinegar was raised to his lips. And then the angel in the empty tomb saying, “He’s not here.”

Upstairs, Gabe was alone in the apartment, already bent over his books. He raised his head as I came in. His brown eyes with their golden lashes looked tired in the dim light. He said, “Momma’s gone out”—although I had known this as soon as I opened the door, an absence in the air—and then he watched me as I placed my own schoolbooks on the table where he was already studying. “You’re late getting home,” he said. “You shouldn’t make Momma worry. She needs you to be good.”

I shrugged. I still held the black penny in my palm, and his gentle reprimand was only a small weight added to my own awareness that I was not being good: that I had taken the penny with no intention of going to church with it. That I had forgotten already what it was the fat woman had asked me to pray for, a good solution or an answer of some sort. I put the penny on the table between us. “I stopped to see Gerty,” I said. “She wasn’t in school today. She’s gone to New Jersey.”

But my brother spoke over me. “Momma’s in the city,” he said. “You should be a good girl now”—he was repeating my father’s phrase—“and do your homework quietly until they get back.”

I reached out and picked up the penny again. It was my father’s phrase, “Be a good girl now,” but when my father said it, there was a wink about the words that also said he understood what a bland and tedious thing it was to be a good girl, little pagan that I was. When my father said it, he was asking me to pretend, at least. He was saying he would admire me all the more for my pretending. But my brother meant what he said. Beside him on the table was the single glass of water he now allowed himself in the afternoon, his sustenance between breakfast and supper, some preparation for his life in the seminary come fall.

“I have to go to church,” I told him. I said, “A lady I met at Gerty’s house asked me to light a candle for her and I promised I would. She gave me a penny.”

I held out my palm to show him the black coin, as if he might otherwise not have seen it. He looked at the penny, and then he looked at my face. I saw that he understood there was some deception here, if only in the extravagance of my gesture. I saw a subtle disappointment, a kind of sadness, cross his eyes. He wanted me to be good.

I closed my fist around the penny. “I won’t be long,” I said, and turned to leave again.

“Don’t be,” he said, “for Momma’s sake.”

Outside, the boys were well involved in their game and the girls who pretended not to watch them every afternoon were gathered on the steps just beyond the Chehabs’ house. Some of them were friends of mine from school, others were older girls who made me feel shy.

They were all leaning over their laps as they liked to do, their arms tucked under their knees, their skirts tucked up against their thighs to keep their underwear out of view. They called to me, and with the penny in my fist and no intention of going into the church alone, I joined them. There was a stirring of bare legs, socks and shoes, and raw knees as they made room. I sat on a low step, tucking my own skirt under my lap while the other girls leaned down to ask if I had heard the news. They were breathless as they spoke, and even those who said nothing, who only leaned to listen, held their mouths carefully, as if they felt the words as an ache in their teeth and their jaws.

On her wedding night, they whispered, Dora Ryan discovered that the man she had married wasn’t a man at all.

Was a woman, they said. A woman dressed up like a man.

Their astonishment was all in their mouths and their jaws. They leaned forward, their chins over their knees. Some of them had freckles, and some of them had chapped lips or pimples or sharp breath. Some were pretty, or bound to be. Someone’s teeth were chattering, as if with the cold. But there was delight in it, too. In what they were saying, a giddy shifting in their eyes, a mad pride of sorts, pride in how strange and terrible life might prove to be. They hugged their thighs against their chests. Down the street, the boys were cheering in thin voices.

I shook my head. I wished above all that Gerty were there to turn to.

“How could that be?” I said. “Who would do such a thing?”

But there wasn’t a single girl among them who was as smart as Gertrude Hanson. They shifted their feet around me. They frowned, looked to one another with shallow and delighted eyes, eyes that just skimmed over the surface of things without understanding. A mean trick was the best they could come up with: simple meanness, a mean schoolyard trick, the best explanation they could offer. A lousy mean trick to pull on poor fat Dora Ryan, a woman pretending to be a man, dressing up like a man and fooling her right through her wedding day. Standing in front of the priest like that. Kissing her on the lips. Putting her hand on Dora Ryan’s hand when they cut the wedding cake together. And then laughing, the way they figured it, laughing right in her face when they took off their clothes.

Which led to further speculation still, about the matter of a wedding night and the shedding of clothes. A matter mysterious and complicated to us all, in those days, but now with sheer meanness added to the vague and various possibilities of what went on between women and men.

While the girls were talking, a taxi pulled to the curb in front of my house. My mother got out first, then gave her hand to help my father, whose face was hidden by the brim of his hat, but whose legs, I could tell, were weak and watery. The girls watched silently, their attention drawn by the cab, the extravagance of it.

There was a ditty we said, skipping rope: A rich man takes a taxi, a poor man takes the train, a hobo walks the train tracks, but gets there just the same. One of the girls behind me began to say it now, all singsong, poking me in the back as I watched my parents climb the steps together.

“Marie’s momma must be rich,” another said.

They felt free to tease me, I knew, because Gerty wasn’t there. Because Gerty wasn’t there, I was alone among them.

I put my fist to my mouth, leaning across my lap. I could taste the bitter, metallic scent of the old penny in my hand. Had Gerty been there, the two of us, best friends, would have joined arms, tossed our heads, turned away. Instead, I merely, briefly, closed my eyes.

Dinnertime was approaching and the boys in the street began to disperse, each departure marked by the hollow, melancholy echo of a broomstick hitting the pavement. Something restless stirred among the girls, some anger, some meanness that teasing me hadn’t satisfied. With the day coming to an end, a halfhearted proposal went up among them about walking around to the Ryans’ house. Walking around to Dora Ryan’s house with the hope of maybe meeting her coming home from the subway, or seeing her at a window, with the veil of a lace curtain over her shamed face.

The older girls led the way, leaving the stoop, crossing the street. I trailed after with my penny. Two of them stopped to whisper to some of the boys just leaving the game. I heard one of the boys say, “Go on,” and knew that Dora Ryan’s catastrophe had been conveyed. Passing behind Bill Corrigan in his kitchen chair, the same two girls ran their hands over the shoulders of his suit jacket and said, “Hello there, Billy,” languidly, nearly laughing. Bill Corrigan raised his big hand, raised his chin into the air, twisting his head a bit to look at us from beneath his scarred eyelids. I could see his pale eyes searching. Then Walter Hartnett, who sat on the curb at Bill Corrigan’s feet, looked over his shoulder and said, “Get lost.” One of the girls hissed, “Gimp,” and Walter said, “Scram,” sneering, but turning away again.

We walked on to Dora Ryan’s house. We stood across the street and studied the blank windows. The air was still damp and humid, the colorless sky felt like a dome over the neighborhood. After only a few minutes, one of the girls whispered, “She’s hiding.” We paused silently, as if waiting for some affirmation of this—a hand to a stirred curtain, a shadow behind the glass. My eyes fell to the garbage cans beside the basement door. I was hoping to see, perhaps, a torn piece of bridal veil or a white stocking waving from beneath a battered lid.

I thought of Dora’s happy wedding, her satin shoes and the rice and the smiling wedding guests. I wondered if her happiness could have been preserved if the bride and groom had merely stayed in their clothes.

“So now she’ll have to try to meet someone else,” one of the older girls said solemnly.

There was a chorus of whispered, even sympathetic “Yeahs,” their cruel energies suddenly abating. I heard myself say, “My heart goes out to her,” imitating my mother. There was a brief silence, and then, reluctantly, it seemed, one by one, the girls began to agree. “Oh yeah,” someone said. “Mine, too.” “Poor thing.”

There was nothing else to do but go home. We turned away and slowly began to disperse, so that by the time I approached my own house, I was alone again. My brother was just coming down the front steps, moving quickly, his cap on and his mouth set. He threw up his hands when he saw me. On the sidewalk, he took my elbow. “Where have you been?’ he said. “I told you to come right home.”

Inside, climbing the stairs, he said, “Did you go to church?” and I wasn’t quick enough to think of a lie. “No,” I said.

He paused on the landing in front of our door. He took off his cap and ran his hand over his thick hair, our father’s gesture altogether. “Was that the truth?” he said. He said it firmly. “About the lady wanting you to go light a candle?”

“Yes,” I said.

Gabe took the penny from my palm. He put his cap back on, raising his chin as he did, looking in the dim hallway light resolved and resourceful. “What did she ask you to pray for?” he said. I shrugged. I could not call up the phrase. “Safe travels to New Jersey,” I said. “For Gerty.”

Gabe’s eyes moved in a way that reminded me of the fat woman on the stair, reading my face. “All right,” he said, reading everything there. “Go on in. If Daddy wakes up, tell him I’ll be home in a jiff.” And he turned back down the stairs.

I waited until the outside door had closed before I entered the apartment. There was immediately the faint odor of my father’s having been sick. I found my mother in the bathroom, leaning over the sink, throwing cold water on her face. Throughout her life, this was my mother’s second-best antidote—after prayer—for pain and suffering: go throw cold water on your face.

I slipped behind her, sat on the narrow edge of the bathtub. My mother was still dressed in her dark suit jacket and skirt, her going-into-the-city clothes, even when she just went in to fetch my father home whenever a message came to the house, usually from Mr. Lee at the candy store or from Mr. Fagin at the funeral parlor—the two neighborhood establishments that accepted phone calls for those of us who didn’t yet have a phone—a message that said he was under the weather.

I waited for my mother to turn off the running water. I wanted only to say to that broad back, to those sure hips, The man Dora Ryan married was not a man at all, only so my mother could say, Nonsense, as was her way, and thus restore the world. But my mother turned from the sink with the rough towel to her face and seemed surprised to see me there. “Ah, Marie,” she said, looking over it, and would later apologize that she did not have the wherewithal, at that moment, to break the news more gently. “Poor Gerty’s lost her mother. Fagin’s girl told me. She passed away this morning. In agony,” she added. “God give her peace.”

There was only one small narrow window in this bathroom, high up in the tiled wall, and it faced only the airshaft, but the light through it caught my mother’s face nonetheless. There were no tears in her eyes, and only a few wet strands of hair at her broad forehead, plastered to her cheeks. She began to dry her hands on the towel, in her own efficient, getting-on-with-it way. “A little girl,” my mother was saying. “A sister for Gerty. They’re calling her Durna.”

My mother said, folding the towel neatly, returning it to the bar, “It was late in her life to be having another child.” She said, “There’s a woman over on Joralemon, above the bakery. She might have helped the poor soul. If only she had asked.”

Sitting on the cold edge of the tub, I was aware of the vertigo I’d known when I was younger, when the reflected bathwater swung me high and shook me out and rattled the teeth in my head. Suddenly I held up my arms to my mother. I heard her cluck her tongue—either at the pity of Mrs. Hanson’s death or the childishness of my pose, perhaps both—before she crossed the narrow space between us and took me into an embrace.

I faked a stomachache to avoid Mrs. Hanson’s wake. Said I’d caught “the grippe” from my father. My fear was that when I saw Gerty again she would resemble the neglected kids at school—kids with musty hair and black fingernails, with fallen hems and caramel-colored plugs of wax in their ears. But Gerty wore a new plaid coat and a new plaid tam-o’-shanter to her mother’s funeral at Mary Star of the Sea, and when I once again climbed the stairs to knock at her door—grateful to discover that there was no fat woman in the hallway—she smiled to see me. Gerty smiled. Her teeth were still widely spaced, her freckles still vivid across her nose, her wild hair combed as neatly as it had ever been, her curls still thick and tightly woven. She put her hand to my elbow. An older woman in dark clothes stepped out of the kitchen to see who it was, but then stepped back in again.

“Come see Durna,” Gerty said.

We went around the polished dining-room suite and into her parents’ bedroom, where I had been before only to say the Rosary. It was filled with a curtain-diffused light. There was a white bassinet at the foot of the bed. The wallpaper was a close and crowded design of roses and green vines, and there were embroidered roses scattered across the bedspread. There was a tall brown dresser against one wall, Mr. Hanson’s doorman’s cap on top of it and, between the two windows, a dressing table with perfume bottles and jars of cream and a silver-backed brush still threaded with Mrs. Hanson’s black hair. The windows here were opened behind the curtains, and sunlight, as well as the metallic odor of sunlit air, filled the room. There was the sound of cars, of people passing by in the street. Gerty took my hand. Together we approached the little bed and peered in. The baby was fair-haired, only a hint of gold across her crown, and red-cheeked, with plump fingers and a mouth like two tiny rose petals, lips the color of a pink rose.

The baby startled awake when I bumped the bassinet, and her eyes were deep blue, instantly serene. Lashes pale as wheat. She waved her arms. Her wrists and her little hands were fat and dimpled. And then a toothless smile, all for me, I thought, although Gerty, newly minted expert, whispered that it was only gas. There was sunlight pouring into the room. The windows were wide open, but there was no breeze, only the sounds of cars and carts and of some children in the street. When the baby began to fuss, Gerty reached into the bassinet and lifted her, the blanket trailing. She held her on her shoulder, ran her fingertips up and down her spine, as adept as any adult. And then Gerty scooted the quieted child into the crook of her arm. She put her lips to the pretty forehead.

I felt such a rush of envy then—to be Gerty, to have such a lovely baby in my own care—that I shivered with the thought, well knowing that I had walked upon my mother’s grave.

From the kitchen came the sound of a teakettle whistling and, behind it, the rattle of baby bottles clinking in a pot of boiling water. I could hear the lady in the kitchen muttering to herself, shutting the icebox, slamming the oven door. I caught the first scent of baking bread.

Mrs. Hanson would never again be found in these rooms. Or seen waiting for Gerty outside the fence at school. Or met at the grocery, or in the crowds after Mass. Her comb and brush were here, the crystal bottles of her perfume, her children and her husband were here, this lovely baby, but she had vanished forever. And although the day would come when Gerty, sitting beside me on our stoop, would suddenly bow her head to her knees and weep without sound or explanation for what seemed the better part of an hour, at that moment, in the pretty room, with the lovely baby in Gerty’s arms, I believed only that the bright, bustling world had simply closed itself up over Mrs. Hanson’s disappearance, and that this, then, was the way of all sorrow—Gerty’s and the Chehabs’ and perhaps even Dora Ryan’s, once she found someone else—closed up, forgotten, vanished in the wink of an eye.

In her own last days, my mother asked, on waking, “Am I home?” Because she didn’t want to be in Ireland, but in her last days every good bit of sleep she managed to get seemed to return her to that dreaded shore. “Am I home?” she would ask, tears standing in her rheumy eyes.

In the first days of her last illness we said, “Yes,” Gabe and I and Gabe’s friend Agnes, who was helping out—even the visiting nurses who stopped by—but when we saw how this distressed her, how she plucked at the sheet and turned her head away, we began to understand and we amended our reply. “No,” we said, to reassure her. “Not home. Here. In Brooklyn.”

Once, she said, “Show me.”

I had already drawn back the bedroom curtain and raised the shade. Now, with one knee on the window seat, I struggled to open the old window in the overpainted frame. I banged at it with the heel of my palm, cursing under my breath, until my brother, who was sitting in the dining-room chair he had drawn up to the side of the bed, looked up impatiently to ask if I’d like some help.

I pushed the window open, the sound of the street, the odor of the street, suddenly, almost visibly, slipping into the room, climbing the walls, crossing the ceiling, and drifting down across the bed. The odor of car exhaust and heated asphalt, of garbage and incinerator fires. “There,” I said. “Smells like Brooklyn.”

There was an argument going on out in the street, voices of children mostly, cursing and shouting, tinny music from a radio somewhere. “Sounds like Brooklyn, too,” I said, and saw Gabe glance at me from across our mother’s bed.

The neighborhood was in decline, the building itself much neglected. Gabe and my mother now slept with lights on in all the rooms, just to keep the roaches at bay. I had it from Agnes that when the parlor-floor apartment was broken into and ransacked—drugs were involved—one of the cops who came to the door asked my brother why he was still here, why he didn’t take my mother to a better neighborhood. To Jersey or Long Island.

Gabe explained that our mother had raised her family here. That she had come here as a young bride. She’d mourn for the place, he said, should she leave it now.

“She’ll get over it,” the cop said.

Gabe told him, “My father spent his last days in these rooms,” and the cop looked around sympathetically, but raised his eyebrows in that wry, Come on, be realistic way of New Yorkers. “I doubt he’s coming back,” he said kindly.

Later, when Gabe was held up on the street by three thin teenagers, “youngsters,” he’d called them, he asked me over the phone, “What’s happened to so harden the children’s hearts?”

I shouldn’t have, but I laughed out loud. “Look where you’re living,” I said.

“There you are,” I told my mother, standing in the hot breeze that had entered along with the rattle of traffic and the voices in the street. “Brooklyn.”

My mother turned to Gabe, who was holding her hand. “Show me,” she said again.

The strain of this vigil was evident in the shape of his shoulders and the weariness in his eyes. He glanced up at me where I stood by the window and then down at her again. “All right,” he said softly. He got up slowly, pushing back the old dining-room chair. He leaned over the bed, slipping his hands beneath her. I watched in some astonishment as he lifted her, the bedclothes trailing.

“Get the door,” he said over his shoulder as he made his way out of the room with our mother in his arms like a child. He turned to his side to fit them both through the passageway, and I overtook them in the living room. We had lined the woodwork here with boric acid, to keep the roaches at bay, and there was something of its pale dust over everything in those days. It sometimes made me recall: sand of Syria and Mount Lebanon.

I went ahead to open the door. Gabe slipped through it, our mother in his arms. I followed them down the stairs, astonished, full of objections, but unable to object. I watched him as he gently negotiated the turnings. I wondered briefly if he planned to carry her all the way to the hospital. In the vestibule, the door to the parlor-floor apartment was still patched with plywood. Gabe turned to me and nodded toward the street. My mother’s eyes were closed. In my brother’s arms she seemed as small and light as an infant. I went ahead to pull the first door open, and then slipped around them to get the outer door as well. There was a blast of heat. Gabe carried my mother into the sunlight and down the steps. There were kids on the stoop across the street, there was the tinny music from their transistor radios. They glared, open-mouthed. A pair of dark men passing by looked up as Gabe came down the stairs with my mother in his arms. They walked to the curb, glancing over their shoulders, giving him wide berth. Gabe, too, went to the curb and then turned around to look back up at the house. I rushed to scoop up the sheet and the blanket that was now brushing the sidewalk.

“You’re here, Momma,” I heard him say. “Where we’ve always lived.”

My mother raised her head. She extricated one thin hand from the winding bedclothes and raised it to her eyes against the sun. She looked down the street and then up at our building, the blue summer light reflecting in the glass of the front door, the bowed parlor window—some plywood there, too—and then up to the fourth floor, where a bit of lace curtain, her handiwork, had been drawn through the opened window.

“Not home,” I heard Gabe tell her, reassuring her. “Brooklyn.”

My mother called me into the kitchen. Gabe was at the seminary out on Long Island by then, a beautiful place that was reached at the end of a long train ride. There were tall trees there and sloping lawns, and the young men walked in and out of the shadows of the leaves with their heads bent, their prayer books held gently between their hands, like little boys with caterpillars cupped in their palms.

“It is time,” my mother said, “that you learned a few things.”

On the narrow, corrugated tin of the drain board beside the sink, there was the flour bin and a bottle of buttermilk, the pale box of baking soda, a box of raisins, a box of salt, and a tin of caraway seeds. On the small table beneath the window, a bowl and a spoon and the measuring cup. There was as well a narrow card on which she had written in her careful hand the recipe for soda bread.

It was time, my mother said, that I learned a few things about cooking.

I stood in the kitchen doorway, all reluctance. Why? I wanted to ask.

My mother tied an apron around my waist. “All right,” she said. She nodded toward the table, the bowl and the spoon and the recipe card. I looked at her. The morning sunlight through the single window lit the down on her cheeks. It showed her brown eyes had some green in them, too. And that on either side of her tall forehead her dark hair was turning gray.

“Go ahead,” my mother said. “Get started.” And when she saw me hesitate, she impatiently put her hand on my shoulder and turned me toward the table and the bowl and the spoon. “Read the recipe over and then gather your ingredients,” she said slowly. “They’re all right here. I’ll supervise.”

I looked at my mother in her housedress and her apron trimmed with green rickrack, her wide soft breasts and her pillowed belly and her strong, firm hands. A body, a physical presence, more familiar to me in those days than my own, since my own was something I had only begun to consider.

“Don’t be dense, Marie,” my mother said. “Don’t stand there gawking at me like I’m speaking Chinese. Go.” And another touch on the shoulder. “Read the recipe over once and gather your ingredients. It isn’t hard. It’s high time you learned.”

Why? was what I wanted to say, but I was certain without conscious thought that the question would get me into trouble. I turned reluctantly to the table, my feet feeling heavy in my shoes. I picked up the card. It was my mother’s routine to make her soda bread on a Saturday morning while I went out to join my friends. It had always been so.

“Read it over,” my mother said. And I nodded, pretending to. The sun through the single window was bright in my eyes.

“Now gather what you need.”

I picked up the flour bin and brought it to the table. I picked up the buttermilk and the raisins. I went back for the salt and the tin of caraway seeds and then stood before the bowl and the spoon and the measuring cup. Beyond the window, beyond the gray bars of the fire escape, the wash my mother had done this morning was waving on the line: sheets and pillow slips, my school blouses and my father’s shirts, which were hung upside down by their hems, their arms waving in a way that made me grow dizzy in sympathy.

“Haven’t you forgotten something?” my mother said behind me. I looked at the ingredients I had lined up on the small table. The sun had turned the buttermilk a kind of blue. “No,” I said.

My mother took me by the shoulders and turned me around. “Are you sleepwalking?” she said. “There’s the baking soda. You’ll have nothing at all if you don’t have that.”

I fetched the box of baking soda and then once more stood before the table. “Now what?” my mother asked.

I shrugged. Beyond the waving clothesline were the windows and fire escapes of our neighbors, the dancing laundry of a dozen more families, the tall brown poles that held the lines, electric lines and clotheslines.

“Glory be to God,” my mother said. “Now you read the recipe, Marie.”

I looked down at the little card. The ink my mother had used was brown. Her handwriting was lovely and neat, the capital S and the capital B at the top of the card were striking—perfectly shaped, perfectly proportioned. My mother had learned from Irish nuns. “Marie?” my mother said.

The sound of her voice was more familiar to me then than my own; I knew the end of my mother’s patience when I heard it.

“You tell me,” I said softly. “You tell me what to do.”

Behind me, I heard my mother cross her arms over the rickracked apron.

“There’s a recipe in front of you,” she said. “And unless I’m very much mistaken you know how to read. Read it.”

I lowered my head the way I’d seen horses do, and dogs, when they didn’t want to be led. “You tell me,” I said again.

I heard her stamp her foot. “I won’t.” Anger always stirred my mother’s brogue, like meat brought up from the bottom of a stew. “I wrote it out for you so you could read it. Now read it.”

I didn’t turn around. “Just tell me,” I said.

“A recipe is meant to be read,” my mother said.

I dipped my head again. “I’d rather you just tell me.”

In the silence that followed, I could hear, faintly, the noise from the street, where I wanted to be: cars passing and children calling. There was also the distant thump of doors closing in the apartments below, various footsteps on the stair. There was the whine of someone’s clothesline pulley. The chuckling warble of some pigeons at the window.

“Measure out your flour,” my mother said slowly, relenting. I shifted my feet a bit to accommodate my triumph: better than risking a sly smile.

I put my hand on the measuring cup. “How much?” I said.

And now, even without turning around, I knew it was my mother who was smiling. “You’ll have to read the recipe to find out,” she said. “Won’t you?”

It was a wonder, my mother said later, in every retelling of it, that we didn’t kill each other on that bright morning. Slowly, through a series of niggling concessions on both our parts—some telling, some reading, some turning away in anger, and some giving in—the ingredients were placed into the bowl and the bread was shaped and lifted into the black frying pan. When my mother brushed past me to mark the cross in its surface, her hands were trembling with anger.

“I don’t know what’s gotten into you,” my mother said, and banged the pan on the top of the stove, then banged it into the hot oven. “You are the most stubborn child.”

She put away the ingredients, slamming cabinet doors, and washed the bowl and the spoon in the sink.

She turned to me again. The sunlight caught the green in my mother’s narrowed eyes, as if she were peering into a deep green wood. “The strangest child I’ve ever heard of,” she said. “Refusing to read a simple recipe.”

She dried the bowl and put it away. She dried the spoon. She said, “Can you at least, at least, keep an eye on the clock and take this out in forty minutes? I’ve got to meet your father downtown. Can you be responsible for that much?”

I said yes, but my eyes went to the sunlight at the window.

My mother took my chin and made me turn to the clock on the stove top.

“When the big hand comes around to the twelve,” she said, “take the bread out. Use the cloth. Can you do that? When the big hand comes around to the twelve.”

“I can tell time,” I said sullenly, risking her anger once more.

Once again my mother studied my face, as if it were lost in a thicket of trees. “And you can read, too,” she said, measuring out her words. “But today it seems it’s not a question of can, is it? It’s a question of will. Will you do it is what I’m asking.”

I turned my face to the light at the window. I pulled off my glasses. I was a bold piece—I could hear my mother’s accusation even before she said it. “All right,” I said, and then collapsed into the single chair beside the table. “I will,” I said, and crossed my arms over my chest, turning my exaggerated gaze to the small clock on the stove, its old glass fogged, its numbers and its two hands mere slashes of black. “Here I am,” I said, all impertinence. “I’m watching the time.” Knowing my mother’s voice as well as I did, I could already hear her say, “Oh, you are a bold piece.” Knowing the limits of my mother’s patience, I could already feel the slap on my cheek.

But my mother merely stood beside me with her hands on her hips, studying her stubborn daughter once more, even as that daughter kept her exaggerated, myopic stare on the clock. “I suppose this is how it’s going to be,” she said softly, more to herself than to me. “You’re growing up.” And then, for a moment, she put a gentle hand to my head.

She said, “God help us both,” and left the kitchen.

I kept my eyes on the small face of the clock until my mother came back in her hat and coat, her purse held over her arm. “Thirty minutes more,” she warned, and I withdrew the question I was going to ask, “Where downtown?” in order to sigh impatiently instead. “Yes, Momma.” I heard her close the apartment door. I put my glasses back on and let my gaze wander around the solid world, to the stove top with its black burners, to the blank white enamel face of the oven door. To the sink and the drain board beside it. The tile wall and the narrow shelf above, where there was a yellow matchbox and a small statue of the Blessed Mother in her blue cloak. To the table at my elbow and a faint crescent moon of spilled baking soda that marked where the bowl had been, to the window and the light and the clothes on the line. The sunlight had already moved past fresh morning and into the steady weight of the rest of the day.

I looked around. I wanted to leave the kitchen, of course, to leave the apartment and call on my friends, which was, until this morning, my usual Saturday routine, but I resisted it. I stared at the clock once more. What I needed was a book or the newspaper, I thought. I imagined my mother coming home to find me sitting here, with the newspaper spread before me and the perfectly golden bread cooling by the window, confounding all her expectations. There would be some satisfaction in that.

I left the chair in the kitchen, rehearsing as I did the innocent look I would give my mother when she returned—convinced, of course, that the bread had burned—and discovered instead that I was sitting serenely at the table with the newspaper spread before me and the perfect loaf cooling on the windowsill.

I walked through the living room, but last night’s paper wasn’t there. I walked into my parents’ bedroom: the trick would be to convey by my own astonished look my utter disbelief that my mother had ever doubted me. My mother’s housedress and apron were thrown haphazardly across the bed. Where downtown? I wondered.

I went into my own room—my room alone now that Gabe was in the seminary. Now that Gabe was in the seminary, he slept on the couch in the living room when he came home and hung his dark clothes in the hall closet like a visitor. From my window I could see Gerty Hanson and another girl strolling arm in arm toward the part of the street where the boys were playing. I tilted my head to watch them climb the stoop four doors down, where a small knot of the usual girls were already sitting on the steps.

It would only take a minute, I knew, to run down and tell them all that my mother had me inside baking bread. That I would be with them in forty minutes’ time, at most. But when I arrived at the stoop, the girls were all bent over their knees, laughing extravagantly into their laps and their hands. Gerty had just told a story, which she repeated for me, a story her father had told about a very drunk man who was throwing tomatoes at the door of a church, during a funeral no less. “What the devil’s gotten into you, man?” her father said. And the man, wound up like a pitcher on the mound, said to her father, “To hell with the devil,” and threw the tomato anyway.

Unless you count the absurdity of good little Gerty saying “hell” in a longshoreman’s gravelly voice, I was aware even then that the story wasn’t funny enough to merit the other girls’ mad laughter. That the laughter itself was meant mostly to get the boys in the street to glance over from their game. To get the boys to cry out, “Ah, shut up,” as they were doing now that Gerty’s second telling had the girls roaring once more. “Bunch of cackling hens,” the boys said to one another in their own fathers’ voices, even as the girls shook their heads, as their mothers would do, and pretended they hadn’t heard.

When the laughter had subsided and the boys turned back to their game, I announced that my mother had me trapped. “Time I learned something about cooking,” I repeated, which led Gerty to tell another funny story about how her aunty had recently tried to hide a pot of burned parsnips in the dumbwaiter. It was well known to us all by then that Gerty’s aunty hadn’t even known how to peel a potato when she first arrived from the other side to run the household.

“She still can’t poach an egg,” Gerty said with some haughtiness. “I’ve tried to show her a hundred times, but she just can’t learn.” She held up a finger, instructing all of us. “A touch of vinegar in the water does the trick.”

“Well, I don’t want to learn,” I said. “Once you learn to do it, you’ll be expected to do it,” and was amazed at the way my own words clarified for me what had been, until then, only a vague impulse to refuse. They looked at me over their knees, this gaggle of girls: a lifetime of hours in the kitchen bearing down on us all. “I’d rather be like your aunty.”

Gerty shook her head. “My dad says she’d burn water if she could.” And the girls laughed again, stamping their feet and slapping their knees. And the boys playing ball in the street looked over their shoulders to shout, “Be quiet, can’t you?” There would be no veering from that future.

I returned home with fifteen minutes on the clock still to spare. I opened the oven door and used the towel to take out the heavy bread. It was, I knew, paler than it should have been, but I turned off the oven anyway, simply to dispatch the task. I joined the girls again just as they were gathering themselves to leave the stoop and walk slowly down the street, pretending we only wanted to get a soda.

When I came home again, my father was at the dining-room table and my mother was bringing him his tea. My mother crooked her finger and led me into the kitchen, where the loaf, sitting on the cutting board, was darker than it had been. “What time did you take this out?” she asked, one eyebrow raised.

“When you told me to,” I said vaguely.

“It was hardly cooked,” she said.

I shrugged, indicating both that I could not be blamed and that it was all of no matter to me.

My mother sliced the rebaked bread and carried it in to my father where he sat at the cloth-covered table. I followed with the butter. Gabe’s place at the table was empty now. Now, after dinner, we listened to the radio.

The tea was poured. My father spread the butter on the thick slice of bread and winked at me before he took a bite. And then chewed, and then moved his mouth as if his tongue had been burned. He swallowed and took a drink of tea. My mother said, “Too much baking soda,” and placed her barely bitten piece of bread on her plate. And then put her hands in her lap, her back straight. “You must have added it twice,” she said, sternly enough to show that she understood this was sabotage. “I don’t know how I didn’t see it.”

I had added it, in fact, four times, with my back to my mother and my mother’s impatience—Glory be to God, read the recipe, Marie, how will you ever learn—making her, on three separate occasions, turn away.

“You’ll have to learn to pay more attention, Marie,” my mother was saying. “You’ll never learn to cook if you don’t pay attention. A kitchen can be a dangerous place if you don’t pay attention.”

“Oh, she’ll learn,” my father was saying, amused. “She’ll learn in good time.”

I bowed my head and studied my hands. I would not, I knew. I would not learn. Gerty Hanson had learned, but I would not.

I raised my eyes slowly, touching my glasses back onto my nose, well pleased with myself, but careful not to give this away. The day had grown cloudy and the dining room was dim. My father had returned the piece of bread to his plate, but as if to convey his sympathy, he still held the edge of it gently between his thumb and index finger—perhaps not wanting to hurt my feelings any further by letting go of it completely. His other three fingers, held delicately aloft, were trembling. His broad hand against the white cloth and the china plate was a color I had not expected: the gray fingernails sunk too deeply into the swollen yellow flesh. His flesh was swollen, thin as he was. I looked at his smiling face. Although we were only a few feet apart, across the familiar cloth at the familiar table, I felt my eyes strain, as they sometimes did when close things seemed suddenly to contract into a great distance. In my recollection, there was something of the smell of ether in the air.

That night, I found my mother sitting on my bed when I came out of the bathroom in my slippers and my robe. She asked me, “How are you?”

Surprised by her presence, I replied, “Fine, thank you, and yourself?” which was how she always answered when asked the same question by people on the street. Now she looked a little surprised. She said she was fine, thank you, as if by instinct alone. Her hands were in her lap. Her back was straight.

“Although,” she said, conversationally, as if we were indeed neighborhood ladies meeting on the street, “I’m a bit worried about your father.” She told me then that he was going to stop by the hospital tomorrow, to see if they couldn’t fix him up.

I said, with street decorum, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

I felt no threat from this news, blithe child that I was, because my thoughts were all on the strange sight of my mother sitting, idly, it seemed to me, on the edge of my bed. She came into my room often enough in those days, but always at a bustle, there to dust the furniture or mop the floor, to place clean clothes in my dresser or to turn the mattress or to scrub the bed frame with ammonia to ward off bedbugs. She came in to pull the blankets up over my shoulders every night, to kiss my forehead and remind me to say my prayers. Her stillness now, sitting here, her hands empty, made her presence particularly peculiar.

She asked me if I would like to come along with them to the hospital. I couldn’t go upstairs to see my father settle in, you had to be over sixteen to enter the wards, but I could go as far as the lobby.

I said that would be fine.

My mother said, looking into her hands. “In sickness and in health.” Then she raised her eyes to me, cautiously, it seemed. “That’s something you must repeat when you are married. When you make your marriage vows.”

I said, “I know.”

She raised her chin and even smiled a little, with the kind of subtle admiration she usually turned on Gabe. “Do you now?” she asked me. A kind of mirth entered her eyes. “What else do you know?”

I recited the entire phrase: “For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.” Until I saw my mother impressed by my knowledge, it never had occurred to me to wonder how I knew the words, from school, from the movies, from my friends. When she asked me, I said, “From my friends.”

My mother bent her head again and said, “Your friends talk to you about marriage, then. About what goes on.” I believe she was blushing.

I turned away from her to pick up my brush from the dresser. I began to brush my hair, still damp from my bath. I could see her reflection in my dressing mirror, sitting straight-backed on the edge of my bed, her hands in her lap. “Oh sure,” I said casually.

“Then you know,” my mother said, “about what goes on.” And in the mirror I saw I still carried the flush from the hot water in the tub. “Oh sure,” I said, not certain even then what I was admitting to.

From behind me, I heard her sigh. “You’re growing up.” She said it much as she had said it that afternoon, both amused and melancholy, and not a little impatient. I heard the familiar squeak of the bedsprings as she stood. “It’s good that you know these things.” Her voice, like the sound of the springs, seemed to move upward into the room, as if relieved of some weight. “We’ll go downtown after Mass tomorrow,” she said. “Get to bed now.”

In the morning, after church, the three of us took the trolley to the hospital. My father carried a small black satchel. In the lobby, he put his hand to the top of my head and said, “Be a good girl now”—rolling his tongue the way he did, tasting the sweetness of the joke. He leaned down, and I kissed his cheek, which was smooth-shaven and smelled cleanly of bay rum. And then I nearly knocked his hat off his head as I threw my arms around his neck. He patted my back, and then placed his two hands on my shoulders as he used to do outside the speakeasy, as if to keep me there, unmoving, while he went upstairs with my mother to get settled in.

When she came down again, the two of us walked outside and crossed the street, and then looked up at the big building. She pointed. It took me some time to find the right window. And then I saw him waving to us from behind the sky’s reflection.

In the sunshine on the sidewalk in front of Mary Star of the Sea, a Sunday morning in early June when I was seventeen, Walter Hartnett said, “What’s wrong with your eye?”

Our mothers were talking, purses over their arms and hats on their heads. The sun bright off the black glass of windshields, the tin fenders, the pocketbooks of the women in that after-Mass crowd, off the white sidewalk and the road and even the fading church bells. Bright off him, too, when I looked up at him: the dark hair and that pale face, and then the gray eyes turned translucent in the sunshine.

“Nothing wrong with it,” I said. “This one just screws up on me sometimes. When the sun’s strong.”

“Well, don’t let it,” he said. “It makes your whole face look funny.”

Back home, before the tiny mirror above the narrow bathroom sink, I saw it: the way the right eye, screwed closed, pulled at the corner of my mouth so that I looked like a tough with a wad of chewing gum in my cheek. How my glasses, thick bottle bottoms, stayed steady on my nose despite the contortions of the face behind them.

I was reminded for a moment of Walter Hartnett as a boy, the way he had held his hands behind his back, placid and wise beside blind Bill Corrigan. I was reminded of the sagacity with which Walter would nod whenever Bill Corrigan made his impossible calls. As if only he and the blind man could see what the rest of them could not.

I opened up the offending eye. Smiled at the mirror and said, “How’s that?” Took my glasses off entirely and smoothed the skin under my eyes and said, “Is that better?” Walter Hartnett. Mister Hartnett. Brushed my hair back—dark and thick but, like the scrinching eye, with a mind of its own—and peered into the small mirror, which showed me now only a smear of face and hair and smiling teeth, made my eyes as large as I could make them, and said out loud, “Is that better, Mr. Walter Hartnett?”

When he called that afternoon—his voice a small and miraculous thing inside the big black receiver—he apologized if he had been rude. It was none of his business, he said, what I did with my eyes. Later, in reconstructing the conversation in what was to be the first night of my life when sleep escaped me entirely, I replied, “Not at all,” but in truth, I’d barely murmured a word. “I’m bossy sometimes,” he said. “I get it from where I work. They give me a lot of responsibilities. Do you want to go out for a soda?”

When my daughters began dating, I told them, “Here’s a good rule: If he looks over your head while you’re talking, get rid of him. Walter Hartnett …” But by then they would throw up their hands. “Jesus, Mom, no more Walter Hartnett stories.”

Walter Hartnett on the candy-store stool looked over my head every time a figure appeared in the cornered doorway behind me. It got so I felt I could see them, too, the other people coming in out of the evening sun, as if I could feel their cool shadows upon my back as they stood for a moment in silhouette and Walter looked beyond me to see who it was. “Hiya,” he would say if he knew them—I might have been in mid-sentence—“How are you?” He’d shoot a finger up beside his face to signal a hello. Or just stare—this was for entering strangers—his eyes following whoever it was into the candy store, wondering, calculating, assessing as a man alone might do—a man alone and unguarded in the brazenness of his gaze. And then his gray eyes would drop to my face once more. There would be a second of utter indifference, boredom perhaps, and then a slow dawning—Oh yeah, you—a slow warming as his attention returned to me once again—Well, I’m happy to be here with you—sometimes even as much as a smile entering those dark-lashed eyes, and then they would flick up again, over my head, to greet with a raised chin, or only to observe, whoever it was whose shadow had fallen over my back. Then his eyes would return to my face, unseeing once more, and then the slow recognition would begin again.

It could only have been second nature to him, this veering attention. He couldn’t have calculated its effect. But it was, for me, by turns, devastating and thrilling, so that by the time our sodas were finished and we slipped from our stools, I was unsteady on my feet from the dizzying turns my hopes, my heart, had been taking. My pumps caught themselves, somehow, against his built-up shoe, and in the tangle as I fell into him, he slipped his warm hand under my arm. “Not very graceful,” he said. But we both were blushing.

Out on the sidewalk again, we walked without touching, although most of the other people on the street seemed to be couples, young and old, walking arm in arm. The Sunday-evening promenade. The sun was setting with that thick orange light, but the sky to the east was still a cool Sunday-morning blue. There was only the slightest irrhythm in his gait, a nearly imperceptible hitch, not a limp. Had he turned right and walked me silently straight to my stoop, I would have followed, my head down, and said nothing more. But he turned left instead, and I went with him. He was talking about his job. That it was steady and he was lucky to have it. He named some friends who had jobs he wouldn’t wish on a dog—with the B.M.T., with the diocese, on a barge that plied the harbor. He told me to forget about lower Manhattan and head to Borough Hall when the time came to look for work. Who wanted to work in New York City? All the while his eyes following the other couples we passed, or darting to the other side of the street to see who was there.

When he stopped, I thought perhaps it was because he’d recognized someone ahead. But then he turned to me, and now, in the shadow of streetlight, his eyes reacquainted themselves with my face once again; indifference, once again, warming into deep pleasure. He pointed to the brownstone behind him.

“I’ve got to run upstairs for a minute,” he said, his voice full of a reluctance to leave me that well matched his newly recalled delight in my being there. “You want to come up or wait here?”

“This your house?” I said. And he only cocked his head to convey, Whose house do you think it is?

“I’ll come up,” I told him.

He and his mother lived on the top floor, like my mother and me. “Widows in aviaries,” he would say sometime later. He let himself in, calling, “Ma?” but there wasn’t a light on in the place, except that which came from the late dusk and the newly lit streetlight at the windows. He reached for a small lamp, pulled it on. Its amber shade and the bulb beneath it swayed a little.

“She must have gone out,” he said. “Have a seat. I won’t be a minute.”

He walked through the living room, into the adjoining dining room and then into another, the kitchen perhaps. I sat. The couch was covered in a dark blue brocade, lace doilies on the arms and across the back. There was a painting of the Holy Family over the boarded-up fireplace. The Virgin and good St. Joseph and the boy Jesus in white at the center. A small glass holding fading lilacs on the mantelpiece. Two more heavy chairs in the same midnight-blue brocade faced me. Beside one there was a sewing basket. On the small table between them, four oval photographs. I stood up and crossed to them. A wedding portrait of his parents, the father looking much like Walter might with a big mustache, a portrait of Walter as a baby, wide-eyed and propped up from behind, and then in knickers and a white collar, a huge First Communion ribbon on his arm, and then looking exactly like himself, although more thoughtful and more serious—or maybe just struggling to hold in a laugh—in his graduation gown.

I felt a twinge of envy, fool that I was in these first moments of my first foray into love’s irrational pains. Envy for the widowed mother who had known him all his life, who had heard his first words, dried his first tears—had they been for the shortened leg?—even envied the mustachioed father, now buried in Calvary, where my father, too, had gone, envied every happy moment Walter had lived that had no trace of me in it.

I heard his voice coming from the back of the apartment. He was on the phone. He seemed to be speaking seriously, repeating numbers. Was it his important job? Even now I can’t say whether or not the phone call was a ruse. I suspect he wasn’t that clever.

I returned to the couch. When he came back into the living room, he was carrying two opened bottles of beer. He offered and I refused, laughing a little at what struck me as the preposterousness of it, and he looked at the brown bottle and said, “Oh, but it’s already opened.” As if I had broken a promise. He placed the rejected beer on the radiator cover beside him and then moved to the couch. He sat next to me.

“My mother should be back soon,” he said, looking me over as if for the first time: my throat, my blouse, my belt, my hands in my lap. “She’ll want to say hello to you,” he said.

I nodded, pointed to the portraits on the small table. “Is that her wedding picture?” I asked, and he said, “Yeah.”

“She was pretty,” I said.

“I wouldn’t mind getting married,” he told me. And then took a drink of his beer. He began to talk about his job again. What a good job it was. What a great office. What an easy thing it would be for him to begin to save his money to get a nice place of his own. When he got married. He sat very close to me. Did I want to get married? he asked, and when I said, Sure I did, someday, that slow, delighted recognition in his eyes fell on me again. He leaned away as if to see me better. We might have been the only two people in all the vast universe who agreed that we would like to get married someday, he took such pleasure in my answer.

And children? he asked. Did I want to have children?

Well, sure.

Well, sure. His eyes, darker now in the dim light of the apartment, were on me alone, were all over my face, as if I, after all, was what they’d been searching for all evening.

When he leaned to kiss me, it was both my first real kiss and my first taste of beer. He held the opened bottle against my shoulder for a minute as he pressed toward me, dampening my blouse, so that there was the strong smell of beer as well as the light taste of it in my mouth. Then he lowered his arm across my lap to put the bottle on the floor and, moving up again, put his hand over my breast. Astonished and, perhaps, afraid—already I had learned the triumph and distress of his veering attentions—I made no move. Delicately—I thought at first that he was making an “okay” sign with thumb and forefinger just over my heart—he unbuttoned my shirt and then slipped his fingers inside. He pushed my bra aside. Exposed to the shadowy room, my breast seemed lit with its own light. He sighed and bowed his head. I felt the momentary terror of not knowing what he was going to do as he moved his mouth toward me and then felt it increase a hundredfold when I understood. He closed his mouth over my nipple. He pulled and tugged.

Of course, I had seen women nursing babies here and there, in closed-off rooms, and it was the recollection of this that muddled my emotions now. He breathed deeply, like an infant nursing, and I felt the warm air of his nostrils on my skin. I put a hand to his hair. Was this wrong? If I stopped him now, would he look at me again with that icy indifference, let his eyes drift away?

He put his hand to my spine and pressed me toward him. I felt his saliva turn cold on my skin, even as the room seemed to grow warmer around us. I felt his teeth on my flesh, lightly at first, but then in a stinging vise that made me pull in my breath. He clamped harder and I cried out, which only made him turn his head slightly as if to get a better grip on me with his molars. He might have drawn blood if there hadn’t been the sudden slam of the door in the downstairs vestibule. He paused, lifted his head. Slam of the interior door and maybe footsteps across the foyer. He said, “Cover up,” and then reached across my lap for the beer on the floor.

My poor pale breast was soggy and tender, the pink nipple distended, frighteningly transformed. I fumbled for my buttons. He leaned back on the couch, seemed to roll himself off it, the beer in one hand and the other hand pressed to his thigh. He walked, stooped, really limping now, toward the bottle he had left on the radiator. But then we heard the rattle of keys and another door opening on a floor below. He cursed and, with his back to me, hung his head, shaking it sorrowfully. And then without another word he limped out of the room again.

For a few minutes I sat alone under the shaded light. I felt it possible that he would not return. I felt for certain a warm trickle of blood was moving down my chest. When he came back, he seemed to have washed himself, hands and face, and combed water through his hair. He no longer had the bottle of beer, but he swung the second one off the radiator cover and carried it to the thick chair on the other side of the room. He sank into it and took a long drink. “When we get married,” he said, “you’re probably going to want to live on the parlor floor. Baby carriages and all. But I think it’s cheap. Everybody and his brother walking by your door. I think it’s better to be up high.” He finished off the bottle in two or three long gulps and put his hand to his chest and quietly belched, as if we were already married, and perhaps had been for quite some time. “I guess you’d better go,” he said amicably.

We walked down the stairs. I felt a panic at each turning—what if his mother came through the door now, or now, what would she read on our faces? But he took his time. On the street—the air was lovely, a slight breeze had kicked up and it felt like bathwater against my skin—he put his arm around my waist as we walked. We passed the church. Had it only been this morning that he looked down at me with the sunlight across his face and asked, “What’s wrong with your eye?”

“Well, at least,” he said, “we won’t have to fight over whose church we’ll get married in, yours or mine. Both our mothers will be happy. What do you have,” he asked, “one more year till graduation, right?”

I said yes.

“Get a job downtown Brooklyn,” he said. “You don’t want to go into New York City.”

We came around the other side of the block. Mr. and Mrs. Chehab were in the bay window of the parlor floor, their backs to the street and a two-headed lamp between them. He paused at our steps.

“Here you are,” he said. He put his hands in his pockets and shifted a little bit on his uneven legs. He may have been feeling the two quick bottles of beer. There was another couple walking down the other side of the street, toward the subway, and his eyes followed. This time, I turned to gaze at them, too. The woman wore a tight skirt across a wide bottom and her heels were clicking. The man’s suit jacket was long, with a belt across the back. Together Walter and I turned to face each other again, but this time he did not go through that momentary, disinterested amnesia. Rather, he raised his chin and shot a finger into the air—as he’d done all evening when he acknowledged people in the candy store and on the street—a wordless “I know you”—and then let his eyes fall, and linger, on my breast, the one he had exposed and suckled. He grinned. I know you.

In the first throes of my first foray into love’s irrational joys, I felt both the thrill of his acknowledgment and the hot black rush of shame.

“Go on in,” he said, touching my hip. “Go tell your mother you’ve got a boyfriend.”

All the thought and all the worry, all the faith and the philosophy, the paintings and the stories and the poems, all the whatnot, gone into the study of heaven or hell, and yet so little wonder applied to the sinking into sleep. Falling asleep. All the prayers I had said before bed throughout my life, all the prayers I had made my children say—Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be—the Confiteor if some transgression had taken place—missed the mark entirely. It was grace, the simple prayer before meals, that we should have been murmuring into our clasped hands at the end of the day: Bless us, oh, Lord, and this thy gift, which we are about to receive.

Driving back from Calvary Cemetery in the undertaker’s car, pressed into my mother’s side, I had sunk into the sweetest sleep I had ever known. They had put my father in the ground and my world was shattered, but the nap I had in Fagin’s car driving home was like a long draft of cool nectar—sweet and deep and fragrant, washed with an ivory light (was it the winter sun passing through the window?)—the kind of sleep that came only in the aftermath of many tears. When the car pulled to the curb in front of the restaurant where the funeral luncheon was to be held, my mother gently woke me. Only Gabe, in his Roman collar, disapproved. His own eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot; there were hollows in his pale cheeks. “You slept?” he said. He had ridden in front, beside the driver. “How could you have slept?”

Now, lying beside my mother in the bed we shared because Gabe had come home from his first parish, saying only that the priesthood was not for him, I passed my life’s first sleepless night in joy and shame and confusion. I could not put my hand to my tender breast—bruised (I had seen in the bathroom mirror as I undressed) around the nipple, marked with two rose-colored bites—in case my mother, even in the shadows, should see what I was doing. I could not tamp down the smoldering shame. I felt it coil, wire-thin, down my spine. I felt it touch or spark something that flared and flashed and made guilt and confusion feel like pleasure, like joy. I was in love. Walter Hartnett with the gray eyes loved me. Next year we would be married in Mary Star of the Sea and those eyes would never again fall on me with cold indifference. I know you.

My mother said, in the darkness, “Do you want some hot milk, Marie?”

“No,” I said.

“Can’t you sleep?”

“No,” I said.

“Can you at least try to be still?” my mother said. “It’s three a.m. I’ve got to work in the morning.”

“Sorry,” I whispered.

The ticking of the bedside clock had never before sounded so cruel. The windows were broad, uneven strokes of pale gray, hastily painted on the long black wall beyond the bed. The windows were opened to the cool night, but no particular breeze stirred. What sounds came from the street were distant, indistinguishable. Not even the scratching of a mouse behind the walls or of my brother’s cough from the next room. Everyone else on this street was still. Everyone else had fallen into the cool ivory light, fallen asleep.

“Is Walter Hartnett a nice boy?” my mother whispered.

I said, “Yes,” but could add nothing more. Already I felt the hot flush on my cheeks.

My mother rolled over, bouncing the mattress we shared, and then pulled the thin sheet up over her shoulder. “I like his mother,” she said. “Her people are from Armagh.”

By month’s end, he was riding the extra stop on the subway every night on the way home from work, walking past our house, where he would always pretend to be surprised to find me sitting on the steps, waiting for him. He would lean against the balustrade, cock the toe of his built-up shoe into the sidewalk, and talk about his work, our wedding, the guys he wouldn’t want to be, his eyes sliding, always, from my face to my breast and then rising up to my face again, his eyebrows raised as if to say, “Remember?” As if the flush that rose to my cheeks didn’t tell him I remembered.

We went to the movies together and a party once, where he drank half a bottle of whiskey and leaned heavily into my side walking home. We took a drive in a caravan of cars to a summer place owned by one Judge Sweeney, whose daughter went with a guy Walter knew. We had a picnic on a lovely lawn, but were only allowed into the house to use the john. Driving back, he said, “Maybe we should get a place like that instead.”

I put my hand through his arm when we walked together, or he put his arm around my waist. He put his arm across my shoulders in the movie theater. At the end of the night, he would kiss me gently, always standing on the sidewalk, at the foot of our steps, never at the door, because, I imagined, he did not want me to turn and watch him limp back down the wide stair.

Even now I can’t say if it was lack of opportunity or part of some plan, but the intimacy of that first Sunday evening was never repeated. And yet it was always there, in every touch that passed between us, certainly in every gesture of his pale eyes. The hours I spent on that first sleepless night imagining what I would say or do when he moved his mouth toward me again gave way to sleepless nights in which I only recollected in lovely detail everything he’d done once, teeth and tongue, his fingers on my spine. I walked beside him in a state of tremulous anticipation. I felt the pulse thrum in my veins every time we neared his block together—would this be the night he would finally say again, “Do you want to come in?” Leaving the party where he’d had too much to drink, he’d leaned heavily against my shoulder in a dark and momentarily deserted vestibule, and for a moment his head dropped onto my chest, his hair brushed my chin, and it was all I could do not to cup my breast myself, offer it to him. On the parklike lawn of Judge Sweeney’s summer house he’d stretched out on the grass beside me, propped on his elbows. He was chatting with the others, and his cheek against my forearm as he spoke and chewed and laughed, the movements of his jaw, filled me with an unbearable recollection of the dark couch and the amber lamp and the bared breast, lit as if from within.

It was the very end of summer when he called to say, “Meet me for lunch downtown, will you?”

I hardly knew what I was hoping for, but before I left, I changed from a sleeveless polished-cotton sheath with a zipper up the back to a striped shirtwaist with buttons and a patent-leather belt. I wore new shoes and new gloves and a new slip and a new hat with red trim. I got to the restaurant before he did and sat alone at a table, which I had never done before, the water glasses throwing off trembling hoops of light because of the tremor in my legs beneath the white tablecloth, beneath the striped skirt, beneath the pink slip. I saw him come in—handsome, in a suit I had not seen him wear before, tweedy linen with a pinched waist and a belt across the back—and then I took off my glasses and smiled up in his direction until the shape of him materialized across the short table. “Pretty hat,” he said, and pulled out his chair. “Isn’t this some place? Put your glasses back on, I don’t know you without them.”

I had been here three years before, for my father’s funeral luncheon, but this was not yet something I could say without my voice breaking.

I put my glasses back on and said, “Pretty suit.”

He held out his arms. “You like it?” He grinned. He was an ordinary-looking boy with brown hair and somewhat remarkable gray eyes. But handsome today in the suit, the white shirt, and pale tie. He had small straight teeth. Nice ears. “I borrowed it from a buddy of mine,” he said, “cause I’m on my way up to Judge Sweeney’s summer place for the weekend.”

I leaned my gloved hands against the table edge, pressed the buttons of my shirtwaist against them. “Whatever for?” I said.

His eyes skimmed over mine and then bounced away to follow the rise and fall of his napkin as he shook it out. “Looks like me and Rita Sweeney are getting married,” he said, and tucked the napkin onto his lap.

It was surely an image from a children’s cartoon, maybe from one I had seen in the movies, with Walter or with someone else, but in my recollection of that hour, I saw the tears flow freely from my eyes and fill up behind my glasses like water in two fishbowls. Because I knew I cried, and yet no tear fell.

It wasn’t just that Rita’s family had some money, he explained while he ate and the food he had ordered for me sat untouched on my plate. Although she was better off than the two of us, with our two widowed mothers ending up alone in their top-floor aviaries if we got married. It was simply that Rita was better-looking, really. No flaws that he could see. Not, he said, like you and me.

“Blind you,” he said. “Gimpy me.”

He said, as the lunch wore on, “Don’t kid yourself that everybody’s equal in this country. It’s the best-looking people that have the best chances.”

He said, “I’m giving my future children the best chance I can give them. What kind of father would I be if I didn’t?”

The tears rocked like the sea behind my glasses.

He said, “You’ve been swell. I wanted to give you a nice lunch.”

I walked back to the subway with the tears that were trapped under my glasses washing up over my eyes. Through them, I saw the buildings and the streetlamps and the cars with their bright windshields, even the dark slips of other people, grow buoyant. I saw them float past, clashing and bobbing, unmoored by the flood.

At home, I climbed the steps, and everything that was terrible about this house and this street, about my life thus far, washed before my eyes: Here was the turn in the stair where Fagin’s men had struggled with my father’s coffin. Here was the couch where I had found my mother one morning last year, counting the pile of wrinkled dollars in her lap, hollow-eyed and sleepless. Here was the bed that had once belonged to my parents but that now my mother and I shared because Gabe had lost his vocation.

I sat on the edge of the bed. I wanted to take my glasses off, fling them across the room. To tear the new hat from my head and fling it, too. Put my hands to my scalp and peel off the homely face. Unbutton the dress, unbuckle the belt, remove the frail slip. I wanted to reach behind my neck and unhook the flesh from the bone, open it along the zipper of my spine, step out of my skin and fling it to the floor. Back shoulder stomach and breast. Trample it. Raise a fist to God for how He had shaped me in that first darkness: unlovely and unloved.

The door to the second bedroom opened and my brother appeared, his breviary in his hand. He wore the pants of the seersucker suit he’d had on this morning when he left for work, but he’d taken off his jacket and tie. His collar was unbuttoned and his hair was askew—anyone else would have thought he’d been sleeping—and there was an uncharacteristic stoop to his shoulders, as if he were prepared for some blow. “My Lord,” he said, “what is it?”

Apparently I’d been crying all along.

Standing in the doorway of the bedroom we once shared, he listened to the tale of my woe with his finger still marking his place in the breviary, the book held against his heart. I had not expected to find him home. His office had closed early, he told me, because of the heat.

He stood there, motionless in the doorway, the book pressed to his chest, while I recounted some version of what it was that had broken my heart. When I paused, gulping and whimpering, he said simply, “Wash your face. I’ll get my hat.”

In my despair, I only obeyed. Walked listlessly through the living room to the bath, my arms at my side. I threw cold water on my face. When I emerged, Gabe was waiting. He had put on his hat and his tie and his suit jacket. He said, “It is solved by walking,” and opened the door.

He did not take my hand. Or offer his arm. We walked down the stairs together without touching, like children. He pulled open the vestibule door for me, and then the outside door. We went down the brown steps together, and on the sidewalk he slipped his hands into his pockets and nodded that we should go to the right. I went along. It was a hot day. I had forgotten how hot, because earlier, when I’d left for the restaurant, I had just bathed and splashed myself with cologne, and later when I returned, the heat was only a part of the general devastation.

But now the asphalt was as hot as a griddle. The air had thickened with the heat. Across the street, blind Bill Corrigan’s kitchen chair had been set out, but it was empty. There were only a few children on stoops. They sat on the higher steps, close to their buildings, where there was some shade. They looked limp and malnourished. I glanced up at them and then glanced down. The sun on the brim of my hat was a weight that threatened to bow my head. The hot concrete made the soles of my new shoes pliant and sticky.

The air was a wall. The heat was a reminder of what I had glimpsed when my father was dying, but had, without plan or even intention, managed to forget: that the ordinary days were a veil, a swath of thin cloth that distorted the eye. Brushed aside, in moments such as these, all that was brittle and terrible and unchanging was made clear. My father would not return to earth, my eyes would not heal, I would never step out of my skin or marry Walter Hartnett in the pretty church. And since this was true for me, it was true, in its own way, for everyone. My brother and I greeted the people we knew walking by, neighborhood women, shopkeepers in doorways trying to catch a breeze. Each one of them, it seemed to me now that the veil was briefly parted, hollow-eyed with disappointment or failure or some solitary grief.

Even in this heat, there was the smell of industrial smoke in the thick air.

My brother walked beside me. His suit jacket was buttoned and his tie was tight, but his hands were in his pockets, and this made his stride seem leisurely. He paused at the first corner and then shrugged a little, turned left across the street. Soon enough I saw that he didn’t really have a destination in mind—he paused at each corner, turned arbitrarily, put out his hand to make me wait for the traffic to pass—which was fine with me; I might as well do this, walk like this, as anything else. I’d had a brief fear, when I first saw him with his jacket on, and his tie, that he was going to take me to church.

On the next block, a young man stopped right in front of us, pulled off his hat, and swabbed his high forehead with a white handkerchief as large as a flag. He was slipping his hat back on as we passed him. I heard him say, “Father,” and then, “Father Gabe?”

My brother turned and greeted the man, whose friendly eyes seem to stagger for a moment, going to Gabe’s throat, and then to me. He was short, with a round, boyish face that was florid with the heat. His shirt and pale suit were stained with sweat, his wide blue tie looked as if it had been soaked in water, wrung out, and then returned to his neck. He lifted his hat again as I was introduced, and I saw that his hatband had left a red impression across his broad forehead. Tom Commeford. He said, “How are you, Father,” and my brother held up his hand.

“Father no more,” Gabe said. He touched his tie, as if to indicate the missing Roman collar. “It wasn’t for me.”

Now real panic crossed the young man’s eyes—he looked to me again and I found myself shrugging, the two of us united for a moment by the puzzle of Gabe’s lost vocation. It was the sensation of standing on a pier with a stranger, watching a familiar face disappear over the water’s horizon and knowing suddenly that all kinship now was determined by the fact of earth beneath your feet or only sea. For a moment I was more kin to this florid young stranger than I was to my brother, the failed priest, at my side.

“Oh gee,” the young man said, “I’m sorry.” It was impossible to know if he was sorry for the lost vocation or for his own, awkward mistake. He looked to me again, as if I would know. “Once a priest,” he began to say, but Gabe spoke over him.

“How’s everybody at the brewery?” he asked cheerfully. “Everybody busy?”

“Oh, sure,” the man said. The effort he was making to recover himself was undermined by the growing flush to his skin.

“The beer’s still dry?” Gabe asked, and the young man laughed as if this were a great joke.

“Oh yeah,” he said.

“Good to hear it,” Gabe said. “Give my best to the others, will you?” He held out his hand again. “Nice to see you, Tom.”

“Nice to see you, Father,” he said, and then quickly pulled his lips together. He did not literally bite his tongue, but it was clear he wanted to.

Gabe raised his hand, a kind of absolution. “That’s all right, Tom,” he said gently.

As we walked on, my brother explained that the young man worked at the brewery that had been part of his first parish. He sometimes came to the noon Mass. A lot of the workers there did.

I said, “Oh yeah?”

“Jeepers, it’s brutal,” Gabe said. He pushed his hat back. Ran a handkerchief over his brow. The soles of my feet had begun to burn, and a blister was forming at the back of my left heel. I felt my dress clinging to my shoulder blades, felt the tickle of sweat running down my spine. Gabe touched my elbow briefly to get me to cross to the shadier side of the street, but the heat was no better there. At a corner candy store he paused and asked if I wanted to duck in for a soda. I looked up, smelled the mingling odors of coffee and newsprint and stale milk, and shook my head no.

When we reached the park, I was surprised to discover how far we had come, although by now my legs felt swollen in my stockings and the pain of the blister on my heel was making me limp. We found a bench just inside, covered in shade, and Gabe said, “Let’s sit before we head back.” He said it with an air of defeat, as if we had formerly agreed that we would not stop at all.

We sat together in the sun-spotted shade. Gabe crossed his legs and folded his hands in his lap. I reached down to take off my left shoe, feeling the thin flesh of the blister pull away with the leather and the silk. There was blood on my stocking. It was late afternoon by now and the park was full of people looking for relief from the heat. Some had already found a spot on a stretch of grass. Others were arriving with picnic baskets. There were kids with baseball bats and mitts hanging, forgotten, it seemed, from their hands. Mothers with carriages. Men with their jackets off. Some in sweat-stained undershirts. My brother took off his hat and put it on the bench between us. He loosened his tie, reached into his pocket for cigarettes and matches. There was something clean, even cool, about the scent of the struck match, the first exhalation of smoke. I watched him as he drew on the cigarette again and saw how handsome his face was—the smooth stubble of his cheek, the amber glow of his skin and his fair hair. There was something lovely about the precision of his hairline at temple and ear, about the hinge of his jaw. His hands, too, were fine, long-fingered. They’d been wrapped in white cloth on the day of his ordination. They had placed the Communion wafer on my tongue. It had been a beautiful winter day, the day of Gabe’s ordination. My mother and I had ridden the train out to the seminary together. We’d gone straight to the hospital on our return so my mother could go up to tell my father about all we had seen.

I opened my purse and took out my own handkerchief. I took off my glasses to wipe the perspiration from under my eyes. My parents had said, “We’re not so enamored with the clergy as some.” They had said, “A priest is a fine thing. But a family is, too.”

Leaving the hospital that evening, my mother had told me, “Your father might have preferred to see him married.”

With my glasses off, I looked to my brother once more, my eyes drawn, perhaps, by the movement of his arm, the cigarette to his lips, the suggestion, in my peripheral vision, of a blessing. Here he was again as I preferred him, the red gold of his hair and skin, the familiar blur of his profile seen through my distorted vision: the way I’d known him when we were young, when we had shared that single bedroom. He was not sitting close—the heat required a good space on the bench between us—but I was aware of the easy physical nearness we had known as children.

I put the handkerchief to my eyes and then put my glasses back on. I looked up, looked out, as my brother was doing. I watched the turning silver spokes of an elegant baby carriage go by. And then a woman walking with her lanky son, a gloved finger raised in the air. “Get this,” Gabe whispered as two teenage girls I knew entered the park. They were dressed in stiff Roman collars and big red choirboy bow ties. “Sharpies” was what we called them.

“Sacrilege,” Gabe said, amused. “And in this heat.”

“They go to Bishop’s,” I told him.

“They should know better, then,” he said.

One of the girls waved at me, and when I waved back, the other did the same. And then the first girl pretended to stumble. She grabbed her friend’s arm, laughing loudly, throwing the laugh back over her shoulder, her eyes on Gabe.

I saw the flirtation. He did not. I felt older than them all.

We watched a young man pass by with his jacket over his shoulder, a thick book in his hand. Then a pair of policemen with swinging billy clubs. A trio of thin sailors. I watched a pigeon strut in the dirt beneath another bench. I was only vaguely aware of birdsong in the trees, barely audible above the echoing din of the traffic in the street.

Gabe tossed his cigarette into the dirt at his feet. He lifted his hat. The space between us on the bench was wide. He leaned forward, over his knees, his hat in his hands. He spoke without turning.

“He’s more to be pitied,” he said softly. “That bad leg. An affliction like that. It can sometimes make a person more compassionate. You’d expect it would. But more often than not, it makes them cruel.”

I looked up at the trees, the thick landscape of them against the colorless sky. I had loved Walter Hartnett for the hitch in his walk, the built-up shoe, as much as I loved him for his clever smile and his gray eyes.

“More often than not,” Gabe said, “it diminishes compassion. Makes people resent God. I’ve seen it. They figure, If He formed me, then why did He choose to form me this way? Why burden me with all this needless pain? It seems deliberate.” He paused.

“Once,” he said, “we were playing ball. Walter was there, but he was just a little kid. This was long before he made himself grand commissioner of the Brooklyn street leagues.” He looked up at me to see if I laughed. I didn’t. “An ambulance came along,” he went on. “It stopped just past us, in front of the Corrigans’ house. Of course we tore over there to see what was going on. The ambulance men were halfway up the Corrigans’ steps when this nursing Sister comes running out of the house next door, waving her arms and saying, ‘She’s here, over here.’ So they turn around, back down the Corrigans’ steps and then up the steps next door. All of us right behind them. In no time at all they’re back out again with an old woman—Mrs. Cooper, it was, I don’t know if you remember her—on a stretcher. Dead, one of us says. Drunk says someone else. But the nun says, ‘Mind your own business,’ and shoos us all away.” He held the hat between his knees. He was slowly turning it in his hands.

“So we go back to our game,” he said, “but we’re arguing about this, the way kids argue. Each one claiming more assurance than the next. Was she dead or was she dead drunk? Then we all look at Bill Corrigan, as if this is another call for him to make. But Bill’s got his fists tight on his knees and there are big tears running down his face. ‘Is it my mother?’ he says when we come closer, in a voice we hadn’t ever heard before, cracked and whispery.”

He was slowly turning his hat in his hands. There was a bit of white satin in the crown, elegant and cool, ecclesiastical.

“I mentioned Bill in a sermon once,” he said. “I wanted to say something about faith or second sight, but everyone laughed when I said we had a blind umpire when we were kids. So I pretty much left it at that.” He shrugged. There were more kids with baseball bats and mitts passing by even now.

“I guess it was something about those big tears. On a grown man. How many of us had ever seen a grown man cry? I guess it—the weakness of it—brought out something cruel in us.” He paused, looking out across the paths through the park.

“We said, ‘Yeah, Bill. It was your mother. She’s dead.’ “ He bit off the word, imitating the street kids they once were. “And then we just stood there. Bill dropped his head. His shoulders lost their shape. It was only a matter of a few seconds, but for a few seconds we saw him wrecked. His whole life, the rest of his life, however he had foreseen it, blasted. Just for a few seconds. We saw we had done this. Easily. Casually. Made him suffer.” He shook his head and narrowed his eyes, and his voice came from somewhere deep within his chest. “For a few seconds,” he said, “we savored it.”

He shook his head. “It was Walter who finally told him, ‘Naa. We’re kidding. Not her. It was the old lady next door.’ Which got us all slapping Bill on the back and laughing at how we had him fooled. It took a while for him to get the joke.” He gazed out at the park, his hat in his hands. “Some joke,” he said.

Even late in the afternoon of that day, even after all my tears, the habit of loving Walter Hartnett had not yet left me, and so I assumed that my brother told this story not to admit that he, too, had once been cruel but to prove that Walter had once been kind.

“Rescue me from my enemies, my God,” Gabe said, suddenly sitting back. “Deliver me from evildoers.” He paused. “I never much liked playing ball after that. With Bill Corrigan always there. I much preferred staying inside.”

He put his hand on the bench between them. “I’m sorry this happened to you, Marie,” he said wearily. “There’s a lot of cruelty in the world.” And then he waved his hat to indicate the paths through the park and all the people on them. “You’ll be lucky if this is your worst taste of it.”

Turning away from him, I leaned once more to examine the stinging blister beneath my stocking. I didn’t believe him. Didn’t believe there could be a worst taste of it. I didn’t consider then that my brother, too, might have longed to step out of his skin. Might have carried in those days his own blasted vision of an impossible future.

“Can you make it home?” I heard him say.

I told him I’d be fine if we walked slowly.

He raised his hat to his head, adjusted it jauntily. As he stood, I looked up at him, my right eye squinting closed against the sun. I touched his arm. Even through the fabric of his jacket sleeve, I felt him withdraw a little. Something in him, in his muscle or in his bone, withheld.

“Who’s going to love me?” I said.

The brim of his hat cast his eyes in shadow. Behind him, the park teemed with strangers.

“Someone,” he told me. “Someone will.”